05/27/14 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, this is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And our first guest on the show today is the great Eric Margulies.
He's the author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
His website is ericmargulies.com, spell it like Margolis.ericmargulies.com And you can also find him at lourockwell.com and at unz.com.
That's unz, unz.com.
Welcome back to the show, Eric.
Thank you very much for joining us today.
Good to be back, Scott.
Very good to have you here.
Alright, so I just saw this thing.
Usually you and I don't get to talk about good news.
This must be good news that the Prime Minister of Pakistan traveled to India in order to attend the inauguration of India's new Prime Minister.
And here are these countries that are at such odds all the time.
And as far as I know, this is unprecedented, yeah?
Well, Scott, I don't want to rain on your happy parade here.
I'm sorry.
But you know, this happens periodically.
The Prime Ministers get together.
New hopes for peace in South Asia.
And all this, and it usually trails away to nothing.
Or there's some kind of attack, and both sides are jumping up and down.
So it remains to be seen, I would say, is the most cautiously guarded thing I can say.
Now, do they usually do anything like this?
Is this pretty much par for the course, sometimes symbolic gestures of peace, but still status quo?
They do.
They do.
In fact, I was just talking the other night, back in 19, I think it was 88, when I was there, the Indians were threatening to go to war with Pakistan over Kashmir, as usual.
They had massed over 300,000 or 400,000 troops to an armor, a lot of armor, and to attack Pakistan.
They were just about to launch an attack.
It was called Operation Brass Tacks.
They were going to teach the bloody Pakistanis a lesson.
And just then, as everybody was filled with war fever, President Zia al-Haq of Pakistan, a gifted statesman, Zia jumped on an airplane, and he flew to New Delhi to attend a cricket match there.
And that upset the Indian water apple cart so much, that there wasn't a Pakistan sitting there in New Delhi cheering with the crowds, that the whole crisis just blew over.
It was a beautiful piece of political theater.
I hope we see something like that again.
Okay, now, so, well, and there's a lot to fight about here, right?
It's not just a matter of, you know, hard feelings about some ancient thing.
A major territorial dispute in Kashmir, ongoing, that never ratchets down below whatever level you call it.
That's right, Scott.
I wrote a whole book on this subject.
That's my War at the Top of the World, my first book exploring not only the history of the Kashmir dispute, which is the world's oldest current-running international dispute, but, you know, the reasons for it and why the Indians and the Pakistanis can't bury the hatchet, a lot of psychological and historical reasons.
But suffice it to say that Kashmir is the only Indian state that is majority Muslim.
It's been misruled by the Indians ever since 1948.
The majority of the population, Muslims, although there's a big Hindu and Sikh minority, the Muslims want union with that neighbor in Pakistan.
India says, over our dead bodies, and it would begin the dismemberment of the Indian Union, and we were never going to let the bloody Pakistanis get Kashmir, and so on and so forth.
It's very dangerous.
The two have fought 2.5 or 3 wars over Kashmir, and the next one could go nuclear, because India is so outnumbered and outguns Pakistan that if there's a steep thrust by Indian forces into Pakistan, it may be forced to resort to nuclear weapons.
The two sides are on a three-minute hair-trigger nuclear alert.
And do you have rough estimates of how many nukes each side holds?
Well, the best estimates I've seen is that the Indians have about 50 or 60 nuclear weapons, and the Pakistanis have about 80.
Which is still plenty.
I mean, Daniel Ellsberg keeps pointing to these studies of just how bad for the entire planet Earth, even a very limited nuclear war between India and Pakistan, would be in terms of the dust and the crop failures and the forest fires, etc.
All the refugee consequences and whatever.
It would be an absolute nightmare.
And not just limited to that area, but around the world there would be incredible consequences.
I cited in my book a RAND Corporation study, which suggested that a limited nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan would initially kill 2 million people, and eventually kill 100 million.
That it would pollute all the groundwater of the Indus and possibly the Ganges and other major rivers, and it would blow clouds of radioactive dust right around the globe.
And I remember I was doing a radio show out west somewhere, and some irate farmer stopped his pickup truck and said, why should I care about this stuff?
I said, because nuclear radiation may come showering down on your head if there's an Indian-Pakistani war.
Yeah, and on your crops.
So much for your crop-selling business, Mr. Farmer-Who-Doesn't-Care.
Well now, so how about this?
I'm the Emperor of the World Empire, and I name you to be my special envoy to, dammit, work this thing out.
Everybody compromise.
Whatever Eric says, go along with it, dammit, and we're going to bury this hatchet and we're going to all move forward in peace and freedom and trade from here.
What's the scoop?
What do you do, Mr. Holbrooke?
Well, to me, the logical solution is neither side will give it up.
It's the Solomon and the Baby question again.
I think the answer is to eliminate the internal borders known as the Line of Control in Kashmir, and let Kashmir just be a joint Indian-Pakistani state with an independent status, sort of a, call it a Monaco or something like that, and let the people there do what they want and withdraw all military troops from Kashmir.
However, comma, there is a slight problem, and that is that when Kashmir was divided up, the Indians got the lion's share, the Pakistanis got the smaller third, but China, up in the north in a very remote region called Aksai Chin, also grabbed part of Kashmir.
And the Pakistanis say that the Indian-controlled Ladakh is also part of traditional Kashmir, and the Indians say that all of northern Pakistan, Baltistan, for example, where the mountain climbing expeditions go way up north, that's all part of Kashmir, too.
So there are many conflicting claims.
The best way was just to say it's an open state.
Yeah, right, an autonomous zone with a mayor or something, you know, and keep it light.
Open trade with everybody.
Swiss administrators.
Yeah, I mean, this is my whole thing.
I mean, it sounds so stupid in this context, but this is what I'm always saying about Israel and Palestine, that if they even had anything like a kind of Enlightenment monarchist state there, where the government's only job was protecting people's rights, then it wouldn't matter who was in charge of the damn thing.
It's only when the government's job is, you know, completely looting and oppressing one side against the other that it becomes very important who's running the place, you know?
Well, that's right, and mixed into the political dispute is the historical dispute.
There's the hatred of Muslims and Hindus, which is very important.
In fact, let's pick that up on the other side of this.
I'm sorry, we've got to go out and take this break, Eric.
But when we get back, we'll talk about this Muslim-Hindu split and the bad blood and the new leader of India, the BJP party, and all of that on the other side of this break.
Great Eric Margulies, ericmargulies.com.
Oh, John Kerry's Mideast peace talks have gone nowhere.
Hey, y'all, Scott Horton here for the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
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Without our unlimited support, they would have much more incentive to reach a lasting peace with their neighbors.
It's past time for us to make our government stop making matters worse.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to The Thing here, man.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
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Stop by, check out the interview archives.
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Hey, you can follow Eric Margulies at ericmargulies.
Eric Margulies there.
Spell it like Margolis on Twitter as well.
Welcome back to the show.
Welcome back from that incredibly long break.
Eric, thank you for holding there.
Cheers, Scott.
Very happy to have you.
Okay, so now we were interrupted by the break, and you were beginning to discuss some of the part of the reason for the inability of people with power to come to some kind of peaceful long-term resolution about Kashmir is because of just the racial and tribal hatreds and prejudices and resentments going way back between Muslims and Hindus.
And that brought up to me the question about this new prime minister.
Is it president or prime minister in India?
He is prime minister.
Prime minister, right.
I thought so.
Narendra Modi, and he's from the BJP party.
And I read this thing about how it was him and his party.
I don't know if he led the thing, but it was his party that had done this pogrom that had killed 2,000 Muslims back in 2001 or 2002.
And I'm reminded of what Michael Scheuer, the former chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit, pointed out about that, was that bin Laden had put out a podcast saying, you see how they are?
They never complain about anti-Muslim violence, not in China, not in Russia, not in India.
You can kill all the Muslims you want, but, oh, boy, are they crocodile tears over human rights, wherever it's in their interest to be in the interest of human rights.
And that Scheuer says that was a point that he had constantly made about American attitudes toward wars against Muslims in Chechnya, in the Uyghur province, of course, and in wherever it was in India where this had happened, anti-Muslim violence in these countries and American attitudes toward it.
And then but that it turns out that was this guy who's now the prime minister of India.
That was him and his party that had done that pogrom that Connolly's arise refused to mention.
That's right.
And Scheuer is absolutely right.
The Muslims don't count.
And there are many other examples.
For example, bin Laden also cited the destruction of Beirut in 1982 by the Israelis, where they pounded it to pieces with artillery as his role, why he wanted to see New York heavily damaged as well.
But it's true.
And this massacre that occurred in Gujarat state in India, one of the more advanced regions of India where Modi was governor and he refused to intervene in this horrible massacre may have been up to 5,000 people.
We don't know.
Many were burned alive by Hindu mobs.
And that happens frequently across China, India.
This was just the most egregious example.
But there's what the Indians call communal violence all over.
There are bombs shot off by Muslims.
There are mobs who hack and burn people to death and rape the women.
It's very brutal.
And the feeling was that Modi as governor was cheering on the Indian mobs because he is an Indian, a Hindu chauvinist nationalist, as is his party, the Bharata Janata Party, whose background is very sinister, Scott.
It was founded in the 1930s at the time of fascism in Europe as a form of Indian fascist movement.
And to this day, it's people dressing, kids and young people dressing in uniforms.
They do calisthenics and military drills.
And they're extremely right-wing.
We would call them fascists if they were in Europe.
It's a uniquely Indian phenomena in that part of the world.
But the BJP has a section called the RSS, sort of a subsection, which is extremely militant, extremely violent.
We don't know if Modi, who has been very extreme in the past, is going to stay extreme or he's going to hew to the center.
Well, is it even true that the so-called international community cares that now that he's one of their peers as a world leader that there will be pressure on him?
They'll let him know that they're looking at him real closely?
Not like they're going to do anything about it, really.
It's different being a party leader on a local level and being an international leader tied for the most populous state on the planet.
Well, the U.S. government at least did something right once and it banned Modi.
It wouldn't give him a visa because he was implicated in this mass murder, this pogrom.
But I'm sure now things will change that he's head of India.
And India offers huge business opportunities to the United States.
So we're going to close our eyes to a lot of wrongdoings there.
And now these are the guys, the BJP, that killed Gandhi, right?
That's correct, yes.
Not the BJ party, but its predecessors, its core groups, the RSS, the Shiv Sena in Bombay.
These were the Hindu extremists.
All right.
And so, well, all right, so all the minorities and the communists and the different people who had lost the election, are they scared to death of these new guys coming to power?
I mean, is this really Mussolini in the brown shirts?
Or it's less bad than that?
I don't think so.
India has its own internal inertia.
And a great flood of water is breaking on the Indian continent.
But give it a few months, and most of it will trickle into the ground and disappear.
India is such a huge and complex country.
There are all kinds of regional parties that hold a great deal of power in India, so that no prime minister is as all-powerful as we think he is.
And the BJP will come under attack very soon.
Nevertheless, many Indians are welcoming it, because the Congress Party, its rival, has been around too long.
It's too corrupt.
It's grown stale and tired.
It's clearly time for a change.
I saw on CNN International they were talking about how, hey, all right, free market economics, come to India, and all this.
And I was thinking, wait, aren't these guys the nationalists?
That's not quite libertarianism, I don't think, y'all.
Well, that's true, but Modi, at least as governor of Gujarat, has been very business-friendly and has promoted business.
Which is not the same thing as free market at all.
That's a nice point.
Thank you.
We all know how and why CNN likes to conflate those things, but we won't let them get away with that here.
That's right.
All right, well, so, well, dang.
Tell me about Nawaz Sharif.
He's the other character in the play that was acted out this morning, going to visit over there.
How's he doing?
Mr. formerly most corrupt in Pakistan, now again?
Well, that's a mouthful, most corrupt in Pakistan.
I've met and interviewed Nawaz Sharif when he was previously prime minister before Musharraf kicked him out.
Nawaz is not the most brilliant, fiery statesman.
He's kind of low-key and not a good talker.
But he's a conservative businessman from Punjab.
He and his brother, Shahbaz, appear to be on top of the political spectrum.
The Bhutos completely disgraced themselves just the way the Gandhis did in India.
He's a moderate Muslim.
He's sort of close to the Americans.
He's cautious, I should say.
He's not the man, I think, who's going to make big changes in Pakistan.
Well, you know, I guess the status quo is still short of nukes going off, but I did read a thing about how, well, like you were saying earlier, about how they may feel forced into the position of having to use nukes, that at least some reports were being re-reported here, hearsay style, that they had actually moved some of these smaller tactical nukes to the battlefield and relinquished command to the battlefield commanders, because there's no use to you in a warehouse.
They've got to be available, and that's where they need them is at the frontier.
Well, I sure hope not, Scott, because, as I said, their primitive early warning systems give three, maybe five minutes of advanced warning.
Now, in that part of the world, a lot of things don't work right.
Phones, trains, planes, electricity, you name it.
And, you know, a report comes in in India that a radar site has picked up incoming missiles, which are presumed to be nuclear-tipped.
Well, the government in Delhi, if they can find them, has three to five minutes to respond, or else they lose their nuclear arsenal.
That's a horrible situation.
It shouldn't be allowed to happen, but it does.
Well, America and Russia have almost come to nuclear war based on mistakes.
Estimates are between a dozen or two dozen times now.
That's right.
Just good hunches by officers who refused to do what they were supposed to do in such situations.
Thank God.
Thank God.
Yeah, no doubt about what a real danger they're playing with there.
The answer is if they have to have nukes, at least to keep them disassembled so they're not ready to fire on a moment's notice.
Yeah, which tell the liberals in D.C. to pipe down about going in there and seizing them, because that just makes them more reluctant to keep them in pieces like that.
Exactly.
All right, we're all out of time.
Thank you so much for your time.
Thanks, Eric.
Cheers, Scott.
Always a pleasure.
Hey, all.
Scott here.
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