11/17/14 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

Hey y'all, Scott here for Whole Food Multicomplete at WholeFoodComplete.com.
Whole Food Multicomplete is an entire supplement program in one bottle, containing 100% RDA of vitamins and minerals, plus live probiotics, digestive enzymes, antioxidant herbs, energy nutrients, and more.
It's made in America using real foods and live probiotics.
No chemical synthetics.
It's soy-free, gluten-free, and independently tested and verified.
They're so sure you'll love it, they're taking 20% off your first order with coupon code SCOTTHORTON.
Satisfaction is guaranteed at WholeFoodComplete.com.
All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And our first guest today is our good friend Eric Margulies, author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
Hint, the latter.
And he keeps a website at ericmargulies.org.
Spell it like Margolis.
Eric Margulies, or did I say org?
I meant com, ericmargulies.com.
And you can find him at lourockwell.com and at unz.com, unzunz.com.
Welcome back to the show, Eric.
How are you doing?
I'm fine, Scott.
Wrestling with all the news that's pouring out.
It's amazing and crazy, and that's what I have you on the show to talk about today, is the very craziest part of it.
First, let me tell the good people that if they go and look at antiwar.com, they'll find a link to your new one about World War I, which is great.
And, you know, it's one of quite a few, I don't know, maybe half a dozen or so that you've written this year on that subject.
And you've got great insight, and everybody, I think, knows that.
So go and read Margulies on World War I.
But I want to ask you about something that's just about as insane as World War I to me, and that is America's Syria policy.
Although I'm not so sure I could sum up what I think it is, because I don't know what the hell it is.
Eric, could you please tell me who is on whose side, and what for, and why?
Well, I'm not sure that anybody knows anymore.
It's become such a witch's brew, and it's metaphors.
There's so many cooks stirring this brew that Syria has become a madhouse.
The only comparable thing I could think of is Lebanon in the mid-70s, where you had all these different groups.
Every street corner was a different group, the Popular Front for this or that, supported by outside powers who were fighting a proxy war.
But it's really, it's become crazy in Syria, and there are too many groups in Washington all pursuing their own objectives in the Syrian war.
Right.
Now, so here's the thing about that, is I don't believe that there's such a thing as a national interest, and it's certainly not one perceived by people in D.C.
They only care about themselves and what they want, and that kind of thing.
But it seems like what we have is a pretty stark choice here between, and of course, non-intervention isn't on the table.
That's my position.
I don't mean to exclude that.
But I just mean in D.C., or I don't know, maybe there is no real choice.
But it seems to me like the choices that they're choosing from are either evil, and stupid, and counterproductive.
And that would be like Bill Clinton and George W. Bush did, and pay him to torture and kill these guys for us, and help him reestablish the state of Syria, and a monopoly on that territory under his military over Raqqa, and over the rest of it, all the way to the old Sykes-Picot line, and defeat these guys, which would be horrible, and evil, and counterproductive, but on the face of it at least makes sense.
Versus the other policy, which they claim is to build a whole new third force of rebels to fight against the rest of the rebels, which are led by Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, and at the same time, fight Assad's, what's left of his state government and army, which is backed by Hezbollah, and Iran, and Russia ultimately.
And that seems to me to be horrible, and evil, and counterproductive, and completely crazy.
Completely just...
My analogy, I don't know enough about Lebanon for your metaphor there, but my analogy is that this is like if Saddam Hussein had been in the middle of putting down an Islamist insurgency, a Bin Laden-ite insurgency, and then Bush went and knocked him off in the middle of it.
Killed Uday and Qusay in the middle of trying to stop a bunch of bearded suicide bomber radicals from taking over the damn place.
Which is what they're doing right now.
Trying to de-Baathify the Syrian government, and abolish the army, when the consequences of doing that last time are what's playing out right now to such horrible effect.
And so how in the world could it be that they're choosing option B, which is so completely insane and crazy, and evil and counterproductive, when option A is just evil and counterproductive, you know?
Well, you summed it up pretty well, Scott.
It's a crazy policy, and it's being run by ignorant people who don't know what they're doing, they don't know about Syria, and they're trying to bomb away their mistakes.
And it's going to get worse, because just on the horizon, now you have a thundering herd of warlike Republicans who just can't wait to get more militarily involved in Syria and Iraq.
Crazy situation.
And let me add another dimension, too.
And that is that the Saudis are involved in this, up to their turbans.
And their kufiyas.
They are playing a very vile game there.
You know, ISIS, these people who committed these awful atrocities, are really a spawn of the Saudis, of Saudi Wahhabism, this kind of weird desert faith that sees all other Muslims as apostates, heretics.
It was the Saudis who formed this, they paid for ISIS, and now they're getting their Frankenstein creation, is running amok across the Mideast.
Well, yeah, it sure seems like that.
And now, so, and this is something we've been over before, and it's all very difficult, and maybe I need to really sit down and just Google my ass off, and try to remind myself of every article I've ever read about this, all the best ones, and figure out just what all I can, you know, claim to know or think I know about this.
But I want your best perspective on just how complicit the Obama regime has been in this.
Because, of course, they sponsored the Mujahideen's revolution against Qaddafi in 2011, and according to Seymour Hersh and others, and it was pretty obvious even at the time, that they turned right around and started funneling fighters and guns off to Syria.
Now, according to Hersh, they backed off at least that part of the rat line after what happened to the ambassador in September 11, 2012, but the Benghazi crisis there.
But, of course, it's America's allies, the Turks and the Saudis, as you say, who've been backing Nusra and ISIS and al-Sham and these other Islamist groups in the region.
And so, for me, you know me, I oversimplify everything.
Well, these are America's sock puppet states.
They do what they're told, and if Turkey's backing ISIS, then, hell, that's pretty much like America's doing it, right?
Because we're all bosom buddies here.
But then, you know, like one of my favorite reporters recently is Mitchell Prothero reporting for McClatchy, and he just says, nah, man, these guys do what they want.
They don't give a damn what Obama says anymore, and he hasn't wanted to overthrow Assad in a long time now.
And yet, they just go on ahead on their own anyway.
Well, there is no logic or sense in the United States overthrowing the Assad regime, which has been powerful for 40 years.
Which may or may not have anything to do with it, though, as we've been discussing since, you know?
It's crazy.
It's just that Washington, after using Assad as a cooperative semi-ally in the Middle East for a long time, suddenly decided to put an ultimatum to Syria and said, you either turn against your ally, Iran, and start cooperating with us in attempts to overthrow the Iranian government, or we're going to punish you.
And Assad stood up to the U.S. and said he would not abandon Iran and said, do your worst.
And so the United States has been trying to overthrow Assad essentially for disobedience, not for being awful, not for being a terrorist or anything like that.
He's an old ally, but just sheer disobedience.
Same thing with Saddam Hussein.
And in doing so, and in arming all these jihadist, wild-men groups like that, it was the Obama administration and the British who played a key role in doing this.
And when these groups ran amok, they're now trying to cover their tracks and backtrack and find some other less frightful jihadists to use.
Yeah, it's funny, you know, I guarantee one day when Google gets fancy enough where they can search MP3s for text, words, basically, they're going to find conversations between you and me ten years ago where I say, hey, Eric, if they do overthrow Assad like the neocons want so bad, what's going to replace him?
It seems like the Muslim Brotherhood, if they're lucky, is going to be the most moderate Sunni-majority replacement government for Assad.
And yet look what's happened.
As far as I understand, the Muslim Brotherhood are the least of this thing because they are the moderates compared to Nusra and ISIS at this point.
That's exactly right.
And we're looking at a generational question here too, Scott.
These old Arab nationalists are elderly.
We're looking at 20-year-old fanatics right now.
Right.
Okay, well, we're going to have to pick the conversation up right there on the other side of this dang break.
It's the great Eric Margulies, author of American Raj, writer at lourockwell.com and ericmargulies.com, and we'll return in just a second.
Hey, check out his article on World War I today at antiwar.com.
All right, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with the great Eric Margulies about the war in Syria and America's policy there.
Now, so there's this article today.
I swear I don't think any of you guys listening could read this thing without laughing out loud and just shaking your head, you know, maybe getting a pain in your neck from shaking your head so hard reading this thing.
Is Obama done playing footsie with Assad?
And it's written, it's at the Daily Beast.
Is this from the point of view of, I guess, every man in D.C. or the Israel lobby, or is that the same thing?
Saying, well, this doesn't make any sense at all, that we are backing this new army, but we're not backing them against Assad.
We're only backing them in trying to get them to fight their allies, the rebels.
And so what he's saying is, so we should finally quit screwing around with being friends with Assad at all, and we should back them and help them destroy Assad at the same time as the rebels, and then that way to get rid of the contradiction here.
It's unbelievable, and yet I think that's a pretty fair paraphrase.
I don't know if you saw the thing.
And then according to CNN three days ago, Eric, this is the conversation going on in the Oval Office.
The road to Richmond is through D.C.
We can't defeat the Confederacy unless we defeat the North first.
Well, look, as I mentioned earlier, there are different cooks stirring this broth, and one of them from the neocon point of view, which is very influential and will be more so when the Republicans take power next year probably, is that Israel wants Syria destroyed.
It wants the Assad government destroyed because Syria was the last Arab country standing up to the Israelis, and it had a pretty good army, though a rotten air force.
This is now being destroyed by the rebellion in Syria.
The U.S. is going to come in with its air force and smash up whatever is left of Syria.
Egypt has been bought off and is now under a really fascist military dictatorship, which is taking orders from the Saudis who are financing it.
Syria has been smashed.
Iraq has been demolished.
There are no other Arab powers confronting Israel, and the Israelis are suddenly looking up and seeing that their border there with Syria is wide open.
Syria is a vacuum, and this offers all kinds of possibilities to the expansionist right in Israel.
So the thing about that is it's pretty crazy.
If they end up with Caliph Ibrahim ruling all the land all the way to the Mediterranean Sea and all the way to their border, they might wish they had Assad back, and I wonder what did he ever do to stand up to them?
He never really tried to take back the Golan Heights or even complain about it that I ever heard.
What the hell did he ever do to them?
Nothing.
He was always as good as gold with the Israelis.
He was just independent.
Independent, but they had deals going on.
Each agreed to leave the other alone, and he would keep the Palestinians off the Israelis' backs, and he was very good at fighting all kinds of militant Islamist groups, but he was no longer useful, so he has to go.
But as you said earlier in the program, Scott, the most vexing problem for Washington is who are they going to replace in Damascus?
Who will be the new U.S. government?
Unfortunately, we Americans are great at war and wonderful people, but we ain't very good in installing public governments.
Everywhere we go, they turn out to be a mess.
Now, in this same article, this guy, it's Michael Tomaski at the Daily Beast, he says, yeah, Aleppo is about to fall, meaning to the government of Syria that they're about to force the rebels out and take it back, and so here's where you certainly have an outright alignment between any factions that the Americans favor, which must be tiny at this point what's left of them, but where Nusra and ISIS and them certainly all agree, versus Assad, it seems like at that point, you know, who rules Aleppo, it really is kind of a black-and-white question where you can't be on all sides or both sides of that thing.
Are the Americans going to have to choose, and is it possible they would choose to back Assad, or are they really going to commit to this phony brand-new army that's supposed to take on all sides?
Well, I think likely is that the U.S. will quietly stop trying to overthrow Assad, but continue its war of words against him so that they can have both their cake and eat, too.
At least that would make sense, a little bit.
What horrifies me, Scott, and it horrifies me when the various Iraq wars already, is suddenly we have a country that's filled with experts on the Middle East.
Everybody's an expert.
People who have never been there before in their lives are experts on the region.
I have people I debate against who get all their information from that morning's New York Times, and that makes them an expert.
A guy talking about Aleppo, I'm sure he's never been to Aleppo, doesn't know where it is, but it's frightening that we are moving, we're reshaping the world and reshaping the Middle East based on this half-based punditry of these people in Washington, New York.
Yeah, and almost always when the discussions on TV, for example, the generals and all the experts that they have paraded on Fox News all day, it's always in the unstated assumption, right?
I mean, they never go back and analyze and question any of the kind of very funny premises of their stance.
It's just, we have to go there, we have to do this, and none of it's really questionable at all, it seems like, at least judging from the anchors' responses.
Yes, General, that makes perfect sense.
We should be backing the Mujahideen still, even now, still in Syria, while we're backing the Iranians and their militias on the other side of the war in the east, in Iraq.
Obviously, that makes perfect sense.
If you say so, General, let's just go on ahead then.
We're reminded of Clemenceau's famous line, the war is too important to be left to the generals.
Yeah, or the civilians.
I mean, I don't know.
Now, I'm almost out of time for this, but I was wondering, I read one thing at IPS News and another one, I can't remember what was the other one, oh, at Salon.com, the only thing worth reading at Salon.com is this guy, Patrick L. Smith.
He's very interesting.
And both of them writing about the oil war and how Kerry and Saudi, America and Saudi are conspiring to drop the price of oil real low to hurt the Russians, to hurt the Iranians, to hurt the Syrians, and in effect, hurt the Americans too, with all the fracking business and shale oil and all that, that depends on a very high price in order to be profitable.
But I wonder what you think about all that.
Oh, I've been saying it for a long time that this drop in oil price is a conspiracy by the Saudis, particularly to keep, to over pump and to drive down the price of oil.
As you said, it hurts, it hurts Russia badly, hurts Iran.
And for the Saudis, it's great because they don't like fracking and they want to see the frackers run out of business.
The American government, to whatever there is left of it in Washington, seems to think that pleasing foreign affairs issues are more important than the American domestic.
Well, yeah, you know, Garrett said foreign policy rules all, but boy, even domestic oil lobby politics, wow, that's impressive.
And, of course, now we've got to go.
We're going to interview Adam Moore about that fascist dictatorship in Egypt.
Thanks very much for your time again, Eric.
Cheers, Scott.
That's the great Eric Margulies, everybody.
You hate government?
One of them libertarian types?
Maybe you just can't stand the president, gun grabbers or warmongers.
Me too.
That's why I invented libertystickers.com.
Well, Rick owns it now and I didn't make up all of them, but still.
If you're driving around and want to tell everyone else how wrong their politics are, there's only one place to go.
Libertystickers.com has got your bumper covered.
Left, right, libertarian, empire, police, state, founders, quote, central banking.
Yes, bumper stickers about central banking.
Lots of them.
And, well, everything that matters.
Libertystickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
Hey, Al Scott Horton here.
It's always safe to say that one should keep at least some of your savings in precious metals as a hedge against inflation.
And if this economy ever does heat back up and the banks start expanding credit, rising prices could make metals a very profitable bet.
Since 1977, Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Inc. has been helping people buy and sell gold, silver, platinum and palladium.
And they do it well.
They're fast, reliable and trusted for more than 35 years.
And they take bitcoin.
Call Roberts and Roberts at 1-800-874-9760 or stop by rrbi.co.
Hey, Al Scott Horton here to tell you about this great new book by Michael Swanson, The War State.
In The War State, Swanson examines how Presidents Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy both expanded and fought to limit the rise of the new national security state after World War II.
If this nation is ever to live up to its creed of liberty and prosperity for everyone, we are going to have to abolish the empire.
Know your enemy.
Get The War State by Michael Swanson.
It's available at your local bookstore or at Amazon.com in Kindle or in paperback.
Just click the book in the right margin at scotthorton.org or thewarstate.com.