09/22/14 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

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Hey.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, the Scott Horton Show.
Next up is our friend Eric Margulies.
Oh, yeah, I should have called you on Skype.
I forgot about that.
I didn't get my head organized about these things.
Welcome back to the show, Eric.
How are you doing?
Thank you, Scott.
I'm watching events unfold in confusing Yemen with considerable interest.
Yeah, me too.
Only I don't have the context to understand it, which is why I got you on the phone.
But before I ask you to explain the context, I want to explain you.
Eric Margulies, while he's a journalist, has been for many decades and covered a lot of wars.
And he wrote the books War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
And you can find his website at ericmargulies.com.
Spell it like Margolis, ericmargulies.com.
And you can find what he writes also at lourockwell.com and at unz.com, unzunz.com.
And of course, we run them in the viewpoint section all the time at antiwar.com, including, I think, today.
So anyway, now that we got all that out of the way, tell me, what's a Yemen?
What's going on in Yemen?
Well, the answer is nobody really knows.
It's what diplomats call a fluid situation, very confusing.
A capsule encapsulated a U.S. installed regime in Sana'a, the capital of this very, very remote country, southern tip of the Arabian Peninsula.
About twenty five, twenty four, twenty five million people.
Nobody knows.
They can't count them because they're moving around a very wild country.
It's northerners from who are known as Houthis.
Here's another new name for us to deal with, who are kind of Shiites, Shiite lights, have been fighting the central government in Sana'a, which is backed by the U.S.
And they have now advanced on the capital, are in the capital, have seized some of the buildings, are trying to oust the government, it seems, unless they can come to a last minute deal.
And the U.S. is involved in this because the CIA and U.S. Air Force have been regularly bombing and attacking in Yemen.
And well, and of course, they're attacking supposedly al Qaeda targets.
But who else?
Do they attack the Houthis?
Because I know that there's a lot of propaganda about how well, of course, anywhere there's a Shia, then that means that the Ayatollah Khamenei is behind it over there in Iran.
Yes, the U.S. Air Force had bombed Houthis over recent years.
They killed one of the senior Houthi leaders.
It was described as a Saudi intervention, but it was obviously U.S. Air Force probably flying out of the increasingly important U.S. secret military base in Djibouti on the other side of the Red Sea in what used to be French territory.
So the CIA is involved on the ground.
And I think almost weekly we're getting reports of drone strikes against various Houthis or other rebels because Yemen is full of rebellious tribes.
And down south in what used to be Aden, the British colony of Aden, there is another independence movement there that is also fighting the government in Sanaa.
And now this guy Hadi, he's Hillary Clinton's hand-picked successor to Saleh, who was the American sock puppet dictator before, correct?
That's correct.
And so then the prime minister, oh goodness, Basan Dawa, Basan Dawa, who has resigned, he's resigning now because of what exactly?
Because Hadi refuses to compromise with the Houthis?
Or because he's been made to?
I think probably because he's worried about his life.
He needs to get out of town.
Exactly.
Yemeni politics often involve lead poisoning.
And these are very wild and crazy people.
Yemen, when I first went to Yemen, I think it was in 1976, it was just creeping into the 8th century A.D.
And the capital, Sanaa, was surrounded by walls, gates, and at dusk, somebody would go up and blow this ram's horn, and they would close the gates for the night.
Everybody's walking around with guns and daggers.
I loved it.
It was straight out of the Old Testament.
Well, so, I mean, in other words, it's not really a state anyway, but I guess maybe it is.
That was a long time ago.
When was the last time you were there?
Oh, this must be about 1990-something.
It's quite a while.
Yeah.
It's not a place you want to rush back to.
And the only reason...
I did see an anti-war propaganda video against the drone strikes in Yemen that showed pretty modern city and kids in Western dress on their little playground and whatever.
A sophisticated and, I think, successful attempt to Westernize in place of humanize them, because human ain't good enough, of course, and Western really helps.
Well, that's right.
And what that video was showing was there was some oil that was hit in Yemen, and the Americans poured in, and a lot of money came in, much of which was stolen or skimmed off.
But some of it ended up putting up modern buildings in a more modern section in the capital.
But old Yemen still remains.
And what's important is that it is a tribal society like Afghanistan.
And while there's sort of a modicum of Westernized culture in the capital, the rest of the country is still run by tribal chiefs and feuds and fights.
And the other notable thing about Yemen is that everybody's stoned in the country from at four o'clock in the afternoon, everybody stops work and they all, the guys all get together and they chew this narcotic shrub called Qat, Q-A-T, and it gives you a mild high.
It's like a cross between pot and coke.
And it's very convivial.
Everybody sits and chats and laughs and has a good time.
But they get they get stoned and nobody eats.
That's why lots of Yemenis are very skinny.
Well, it seems like they'd all be getting along if they maybe they needed to switch to weed.
But anyway, well, so now the deal is, though, is the Houthi rebellion is always well and up in the north, there's the Houthi rebellion.
But now they're in the capital city.
Was this a big, unexpected event that they were able to come and take this much territory and and force whatever change, I guess, they're attempting to force now?
It was.
And it's and it's a it's a blow for the imperial forces in Washington who are using Yemen to suppress rebels there, but also to monitor the mouth of the Red Sea.
And there was concern talk that the Houthis were somehow playing footsie with the Iranians, both being Shiites and that the Iranians were gaining influence in Yemen.
And, of course, this set off alarm bells in Washington and they had to rush more drones and more CIA agents to Yemen.
But in the end, Yemen is a largely ungovernable, ungovernable country.
It's it's very wild, very primitive, as I said, very mountainous and the only part of the Arabian Peninsula that has any rain.
So and it has a large population that's probably almost as large as Saudi Arabia, which causes great worry to Washington.
Oh, really?
I didn't realize that.
Well, that's Scott, that's the undercover worry about Yemen.
Nobody really gives a hoot about Yemen, but about there are about between two and three million Yemeni immigrants in Saudi Arabia.
In fact, one of them was the father of Osama bin Laden.
And I mean, he's dead now, but in the past they came and they're still coming across the border.
And there's concern that these these radicalized Yemenis may form the basis for some kind of attempt to overthrow or change the Saudi dynasty.
Great worry.
Oh, man, I was just about to ask you a thing.
And now the music's playing, which means we got to go out and take this break.
But hang tight, Eric.
We'll be back in a few minutes with you.
Hang tight, everybody.
We'll be back in a few minutes with Eric Margulies at Eric Margulies dot com.
We're talking about the situation in Yemen.
And then I'm going to ask him some Islamic State stuff, too.
And it's going to be very interesting.
Right after this.
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All right, so welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, Scott Horton Show.
Online with Eric Margulies from Eric Margulies dot com, talking about Yemen, where the Houthis are on the march, well, they've signed a deal, it says here, with Yemen parties to form a new government and oh, and they took it.
They occupied a bunch of buildings and said, let us into the government.
We're not really asking.
And then so apparently they they signed a deal.
Hey, that could have been worse.
I don't know exactly how many people have been killed leading up to this, but that's better than things could be.
Sometimes I wonder whether you would make the parallel, Eric, between Pakistan policy, where they let us bomb inside their country as long as we'll kill their government's enemies, along with the ones that our government's looking for in, as you mentioned, drone strikes against these Houthi rebels.
Or I guess it's maybe not quite the same thing, since, as you say, they equate the Houthis with the Iranians.
So that's at least makes it pretty easy for the Yemenis to convince them to help.
But then so I wonder if if you'd make that parallel for what it's worth.
And then I wonder whether you think that maybe that's helped lead to the so-called at least crisis such as it is right now, where they're now more powerful, strong enough to demand real participation in the government in the capital as never before.
That is a good comparison, a good analogy.
The U.S. influence in Pakistan is largely expressed through cash.
We have bought off many of the political and military leaders in Pakistan with consulting payments.
And in exchange for that, they're letting the U.S. run around and bomb their citizens in the tribal territories.
Same thing in Yemen.
U.S.'s main supplier of cash for that dirt poor country, all the generals and politicians on our on our payroll one way or another, and they do what they're told.
But there may be change because there's great unhappiness in Yemen over these drone strikes and other bombing, special for American special forces operations.
There we've again, we've kicked another hornet's nest and the hornets are getting out their stingers.
Yeah, it seems like she's I'm trying to remember, Eric, I'm sorry, my footnote, the last long form piece of journalism I read about.
Oh, I know who it was.
It was Gregory Johnson had written this really long thing for maybe the Atlantic or something about if we if we blow up your wedding, we'll pay eighty thousand dollars, something like that was in the title of it.
Real long form piece there.
And he talked about just how with every single drone strike or, you know, Tomahawk missile or whatever it is, or JSOC raid or exactly how it goes out.
Every killing by the Americans there, they just rally more and more people to Al-Qaeda's cause.
And even where you have meetings and maybe this is deliberate.
I don't know.
I don't mean to be that bad of a kook about it.
But meetings where the local tribal leaders have summoned the Al-Qaeda people to basically, you know, bend them to their will and say, listen, here's the line around here.
I'm the big boss around here, not you.
And here's how it's going to be.
And then America comes by and drones the three of them.
Right.
Including the tribal chief who is putting Al-Qaeda in check and this kind of thing.
And they've just created a huge problem where before it was just the switchboard house, you know, the father in law of the 9-11 hijacker guy that lived there and his 10 friends.
Now it's a real movement, apparently.
Well, it's true.
We've seen exactly the same thing in Afghanistan.
Even President Karzai there, the outgoing president, said that these drone attacks are doing mainly killing civilians.
And for every one killed, 10 people are joining Taliban in Afghanistan.
Same thing in Yemen.
There's great fury over this.
We don't understand how much these societies are ruled by the desire and the need for revenge.
So clearly we're by the so-called war on terror is really almost a war against the United States ourselves because we are generating more anti-American forces than even we can deal with.
Well, which brings me to exactly what I wanted to ask you about, really, which is the threat to the American people here.
It's kind of a funny spectacle where I'm the paranoid and I have a former CIA officer, Phil Giraldi, on the line.
A couple of segments back.
And I'm saying, oh, no, I think these terrorists are going to get us.
And Giraldi saying, no, don't worry about it.
It's all a big hyped up threat.
And obviously there is a big hyped up threat because they're trying to scare us into letting them go back to full scale war here and all that.
No question about that.
And and, you know, as we're sitting here talking about radicalizing al-Qaeda members in Yemen, we got to acknowledge Yemen is a long way from here.
And, you know, sending some printer cartridges full of non-functioning explosives in the belly of a plane is not an existential threat.
It doesn't seem like you know what I mean.
They haven't been able to launch or manage any kind of real attack against us.
I guess the underpants bomber was close.
But so there is that.
But then on the other hand, we're talking about raw numbers and they only got to get lucky once and all those kind of cliches.
So I wonder, what do you think is the real threat to the United States, not just to our so-called interests over there, but to the American people from all the enemies our government's been creating over all this time?
I absolutely think that the biggest threat to the United States is from its own hawkish warlike factions in Washington who are cutting back on civil liberties and who have created this monstrous espionage apparatus and moving us rabidly to 1984, back to 1984, all under the guise of national security.
I shudder every time I hear this expression.
Look, there is no great threat to the United States and the Middle East.
That is absolutely absurd.
The claims that are being made are childish and hysterical, like ISIS sneaking over the border from Mexico disguised as cantaloupes, something like that.
You know, we become hysterical.
We're a nation of over 300 million people.
We can absorb any attacks that come.
We can't allow ourselves to live in terror and fear and hype.
But turn on the TV these days and all you get is intense fearmongering.
And unfortunately, the average American is not sufficiently educated or wise to the ways of the world to understand that this is all just propaganda.
Yeah, now, see, I'm kind of in an unfortunate position propaganda wise, because my real thing is, yeah, I'm paranoid, but I think the best solution is to stop intervening, which makes it sound like, oh, I think America should back down to the danger or whatever.
But the point is, hell, even on Fox News, they talk about, gee, even the Republican senators say, are we just poking a hornet's nest with no plan to actually take care of the hornets?
And of course, the Republicans by that mean sending the ground troops, that'll get rid of them.
But we already know better than that.
But, you know, that seems to be the frame of it.
And I just wonder how many hornets nest you can bash open with a bat without expecting for for things to happen.
And I'm more concerned than, of course, about, you know, how Americans react to any attacks, you know, giving even more blank checks to our government to do even greater damage over there.
It just seems like, you know, they've succeeded in creating the terrorist threat that they always pretended existed out there.
You know, I don't know.
Well, exactly.
I don't know our government.
I've never seen such a blunder in government.
It makes even the Bush administration look look somewhat competent.
The policy is going all different ways.
It's being made by amateurs in the White House and National Security Council don't know anything about world affairs or military affairs for that matter.
And yes, we're sticking our nose everywhere.
And of course, we're going to get stung.
In fact, I wrote in my book, American Raj, I had a quote from one of my columns that was a week before 9-11 saying it's only a matter of any day now.
The United States is going to be struck.
And it's obvious where we're creating enemies everywhere we go.
And not only are we lowering our profile here, we almost got in a war with Russia over Ukraine and nuclear armed powers.
Our troops are now spreading out all over Africa.
There's a recipe for more problems.
And now Obama, Nobel Peace Prize winner, is talking about expanding the war into Iraq, which could go into Iran.
And Afghanistan is a mess.
And Pakistan is a mess.
And of course, don't forget the pivot to Asia.
Whatever happened to that, I don't know.
Well, and, you know, whatever happened to the border dispute between ISIS and Jordan that broke out back a couple of few weeks ago, Eric, what happens when ISIS sacks the King's Castle there and the Israelis cross the river?
Then you got ISIS and Iran on the same side at that point, right?
That's right.
The situation is hopelessly confused.
The people in Washington making policy are too ignorant of Middle East affairs to to manage them.
It really it's we're pulling strings.
We don't know what's happening there.
And the Israelis, as you say, are considering entering the fray, which also mean attacking Lebanon.
What's going to happen with the Turks?
We don't know.
But we have created one unholy mess there.
And nobody knows how to get us out of it.
Do you think there's any actual danger to the Jordanian army from ISIS?
They seem pretty successful with their suicide bombing tactics and whatever.
They take city after city.
Nuisance value.
ISIS's capability has been wildly exaggerated.
A bunch of guys pick up trucks.
But what about the Jordanian army and their actual capabilities?
It's very good.
Oh, yeah.
It's a very crack army.
What used to be known was known as the Arab Legion years ago was the best army in the Arab world.
British trained, used to be British officers.
And it can take care of itself very well.
But Jordan is an American protector.
If they can't, the Americans and the British will send in troops as they always do.
It's part of our American Raj for ruling the Mideast.
Right.
I wonder if it's within the Likud party's plan, though, for the Israeli Raj.
Go ahead.
And we're coming for you, Euphrates River someday kind of thing.
But for now, at least just create, you know, the occupied territory of the East Bank, the Jordan River and work on that for a while.
Well, Israel has had a two track policy there for years.
They've been saying that really Jordan is the Palestinian state and they should kick out all, expel all their Palestinians, shove them into the Jordanian desert.
Already 60 percent of the Jordanian population are Palestinians.
And the other thing is now the new initiatives come out of the Israelis.
There's talk about building a new Palestinian state around the Gaza open air prison.
And the Israelis have asked the dictator in Egypt, General Field Marshal El-Sisi, to give them some desert scrub land around sunlight to create a new Palestinian state that would allow the Israelis to ethnically cleanse the rest of the Palestinians with less opprobrium from abroad.
Yeah.
Well, here's their other option.
They can just go ahead and push all the Israeli, I mean, push all the Palestinians out of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, maybe into the river, across the bridge into the trans Jordan, into Jordan, and then call that the two state solution and go ahead and take Judea and Samaria.
I don't know if they really, you know, would do that.
But then again, with the Americans, stop them.
And isn't that really the only question of what they can get away with or not?
Well, the recent shelling of Gaza were over two thousand one hundred Palestinians.
Seventy percent of the civilians were killed by the Israelis using American weapons.
I mostly American weapons was a graphic message to us that nobody's going to stop the Israelis, that the United States' hands are tied.
Congress will do whatever Israel tells it to do.
The president doesn't have the strength, particularly not this one, to stop the Israelis.
The election, American elections are coming up and they'll always be American elections coming up.
Politicians are scared to antagonize friends of Israel.
So the Israelis are now feeling their their oats.
They've seen all their enemies collapse.
They practically run Egypt now.
The last country that opposed Israel, Syria, that's gone.
There's only Iran way off in the distance.
So the very Israel is emerging as the eight hundred pound gorilla in the Mideast.
And its territorial designs may not have been fully fulfilled yet.
God dang.
Well, I kind of think we shouldn't go down this line of questioning anymore.
I don't want to encourage them at all.
Man, those guys are really right.
We can get away with anything.
They can.
Because, I mean, really, you know, joking about the Euphrates River and all of that.
That's anything that's in the plan for greater Israel someday.
Hey, why not sooner than later?
Well, that was a great time for them to do it, to be the only Israelis control Congress, a lot of the American media.
And they have a president who is scared of his own shadow at this point.
And of course, they've got Hillary Clinton coming down the pike.
So everything's looking good for the Israelis.
Yeah.
And pretty good pretext in ISIS in western Iraq, too.
So that's right.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, I've already kept you way over longer than I meant to here.
But thanks very much for your time, Eric.
I really appreciate it.
Always a pleasure, Scott.
Thanks a lot.
That's Eric Margulies, everybody.
He's at Eric Margulies dot com.
And I got to start asking people permission.
Can I keep you a third segment instead of just going on and on?
Because people got errands to run, but then they don't want to be rude and say, hey, cut me loose here.
And then, you know, I don't.
Anyway, the great Eric Margulies, everybody.
American Raj, liberation or domination and war at the top of the world.
That one's all about Afghanistan, Pakistan and Kashmir and India and all that conflict over there and all that.
Yeah.
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