02/09/15 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
First up today is our friend Eric Margulies.
He's the author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
And he writes at ericmargulies.com.
Spell it like Margulies, ericmargulies.com.
And also at lewrockwell.com and at owns.com.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Eric?
I'm well.
As always, glad to be back with you, Scott.
Great.
You sound much better than the last time we spoke.
I hope you're feeling better.
Thank you.
I certainly am.
I'm finally getting over this horrible flu that I had.
Yeah, it sounded pretty bad last time.
Anyway, so yesterday I saw some news.
Well, actually, the day before.
No, yeah, yesterday.
I saw some news and I thought, oh, good, I've got to get Eric Margulies on the show tomorrow to talk about that.
And then I looked up and there was your tweet saying exactly what I was hoping you were going to say on the show today, basically.
Very well trained, Scott.
Yeah.
Great minds thinking alike and all of that, I guess, or maybe you're the ringmaster and I'm the seal.
I'll take it.
But anyway.
So, yeah.
Tell him.
Tell him the good news, Eric.
What does it all mean?
The good news about Ukraine, you mean?
Well, there are important events going on there.
I don't want to say seismic, it's too pretentious a word, but important events because now for the first time this week, Europe has become very worried of the possibility of a real shooting war.
And the U.S. announcement that it would start delivering heavy weapons to Ukraine and sending some troops in has given Europe the willy, as it well should, because if there is a war, it's going to spill over into Europe, not into Malibu, California.
And there is now, we're beginning to see splits in the United Front that the U.S. had patched together with statements by France that it favored a linguistic and political autonomy for eastern Ukraine, which Mr. Putin proposed over a year ago, and statements by the German Chancellor Merkel that, no, they did not want to get involved in a war or deliver heavy weapons.
And even the British are getting cold feet.
So we're seeing an opening position between the U.S. and Europe, which is, from the U.S. point of view, really bad news.
Yeah.
Well, and so when the Americans basically come right out against this kind of thing and scorn our allies for trying to make peace, they're just complaining about something that they really can't control?
Are they going to actually really fight it out with the French and the Germans over this and try to make them stop?
Well, the U.S. is putting a lot of pressure on Europe, and it's shown Europe in a very bad light, because what was supposed European independence now comes into question, as the U.S. is able to browbeat the Europeans into pretty much following American policy, not only on Ukraine, but for the Middle East as well.
And it's embarrassing for the Europeans, because they look like a bunch of vassal states.
The U.S. should never have gotten into this position to begin with.
It was one of the stupidest policy moves, charging at the Ukraine, that we've ever seen.
And what's it doing?
It's putting intolerable pressure on Europe, either okay, a war next door, or start distancing yourself from the U.S. and ending 60 years of American domination of Western Europe.
Yeah.
Now, it's funny, because I'm getting some mixed signals from these guys.
You know, the NATO chief said something against and then for arming the rebels.
The OSCE chief, I don't know how unified all these guys are before they make their public statements or what, necessarily.
But Obama even said to Fareed Zakaria Sunday before last, that like, well, you know, Ukraine's not a member of NATO, and there's only so much you can do.
Right now, he's on TV saying, you know, we're examining whether we should give them weapons.
So, you know, I'm trying to look at that positively, that he's hesitant to do something so, you know, completely abruptly stupid and dangerous.
And yet, at the same time, you have the State Department saying, yeah, no, we encourage the Ukrainian government to go ahead and apply to join NATO.
What?
Are they just trying to make matters worse deliberately, or what are they doing there?
What do they hope to gain by even sending some arms, as they admit in the Brookings, et cetera, et cetera, think tank report that, yeah, I mean, all we can do is prolong the war and hopefully increase the level of pain for the Russians for participating in it.
But that's basically the plan, as far as it goes.
I don't understand what they think they're doing, what you think they think they're doing.
I don't think they know.
You hear many voices, because the administration is very confused.
You have Obama's, these women who are making American strategic policies, Susan Rice, the U.N. ambassador, whatever her name is, who are absolute hopeless amateurs and chumps when it comes to any kind of national security situation.
They're influencing Obama, who's not very good at it himself.
So he's now rightfully, at least I think he's trying to back away from his hard-line position.
But the neocons in Washington, don't forget them, because they provoke this crisis, are straining every sinew to get the U.S. to go into a real war in Ukraine, hoping, remember, their hope is that Ukraine will break free of, will set itself up as an independent state under American tutelage, or let's say American and Israeli tutelage.
And that's their dream.
We've seen it all along.
All right, now, so let me ask you this.
I don't know what to make of this.
Reports had it that German intelligence says as many as 50,000 people have died in the war in eastern Ukraine so far in the last year.
Does that sound possible to you?
All previous reports were low thousands, I thought.
No, it sounds like a wild exaggeration.
I was hoping you'd say that.
There haven't been many big battles.
I mean, there's some shelling and some shooting, but this is not a major war yet.
Right, yeah, and low thousands is a lot if you're one of them or somebody you care about.
I don't mean to play that down, but just the level of catastrophe and what that means as far as responses and counter-responses is the important part of that, of course, you know, as far as that goes.
But I guess a year ago, I think before the coup, certainly as soon as the coup took place or whatever, you were warning that in the east, this is going to be a real problem.
They're not going to want to accept this deal or the trade deal that's going to come with this new rule that's going to bankrupt all their industries, that kind of thing.
I don't imagine many people with power were paying much attention to you at the time, but certainly they reacted as much as you had predicted that they would.
But I wonder, you know, if you think that there are terms that they would come to as far as autonomy, but not complete secession.
Obviously, it seems like the Russians don't want to incorporate them into Russia, the eastern regions there in rebellion.
So, I mean, or is it just too much bad blood now?
This is going to continue on with or without western backing for the Kiev regime?
Or what do you think?
I think, Scott, that a political settlement can be reached.
In fact, it's probably within arm's reach.
If the Kiev government would agree not to join NATO, which it really doesn't need at this point, and if a decent aid package could be developed for eastern Ukraine.
Ukraine is totally bankrupt.
The eastern part, the western part.
I've been saying facetiously, the worst thing that can happen is that we win and we end up supporting Ukraine to the tune of tens of billions of dollars.
Right.
All right.
Well, music's playing.
We got to go to this break.
But when we get back, more with Eric Martelly on the Ukraine crisis and maybe some other stuff, too.
Hang tight.
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All right, y'all.
Well, right now, Merkel and Obama are on Fox News.
I'm reading the closed captions and she's pleading for diplomacy.
Hey, there's got to be a resolution to this.
Who wants to escalate this?
I mean, really, that's the thing of it is it's I guess it's the perennial kind of thing, whether we're talking about the Middle East or Russia policy or anything else is and maybe it's a false dichotomy, stupidity or the plan.
Of course, there's a lot of stupid plans that seem to be going around.
But I guess.
It does seem foreign, right?
It seems like the kind of thing where, like, thank God we have the Germans and the French to have a quiet, private conversation like, hey, we have to stop the Americans from destroying all of humanity forever with this.
Let's undercut their aggression by trying to push for implementation of the previous ceasefire and a lasting solution to this thing, because the Americans seem, Eric, to me and you know what the hell do I know about?
I don't live in Washington, D.C. or nothing, but they really seem like they're dealing with some imaginary Russia, not the one that is armed with thousands of H-bombs.
And they just seem.
It doesn't make sense for people who are so smart to, on one hand, say, yeah, Ukraine is so important to Russia.
That's why we need to take it away from them, while at the same time saying, yeah, and we'll probably get away with it easy, too, you know.
But that seems to be what's going on here.
And they do nothing but create these horrible crises.
But I just wonder, I mean, is it really just that Susan Rice is in charge?
Because I guess we can just all throw up our hands at that point, if that's the real answer.
Well, it is.
Plus the neocons who want a war.
Plus they're a faction of sort of leftover cold warriors who think that we can wreck what's left of Russia and turn it into a powerless little state that won't oppose us.
So there are all these people who have mistaken notions about Russia.
The biggest mistaken notion that there is is people have no sense of history.
They don't know.
All they know about World War II is propaganda.
And, you know, the Russians, as I wrote in my most recent column, the Russians lost hundreds of thousands of dead soldiers retaking or defending the Crimea.
Do we really think that putting sanctions on, you know, frozen food imports is going to deter these people?
The Russians are very tough.
They're very determined.
Often they're disorganized in the beginning.
But in the end, they often win.
Yeah.
Well, and that's the thing of it is kind of the unreality I heard.
Sorry, audience, to repeat myself discussing this with different guests.
But it's important, I think.
The former ambassador to the EU, Ivo Daldler, I guess is his name, who is the first name on the Brookings Institution, et cetera, report that came out there recommending arming the rebels.
He was interviewed by the pushover Robert Siegel on NPR.
He said, well, you know, I don't know.
What if it doesn't work on the Russians?
Call our bluff.
And his answer was, I don't know, I guess, you know, that'll make the war worse.
And then that'll, in a nutshell, what he's trying to say was increase political pressure on Putin inside Russia to call the whole thing off, right?
Without even the slightest possibility that they might rally around their leader like Americans around George Bush, you know, to deliver us from this American aggression on our doorstep.
That's not even a possibility.
What we'll do is we'll call more.
We'll cause more Russians to die, and that will cause debate to go up.
He said that was a quote that will cause debate to go up in Moscow, which fill in the blank, I guess will be to our benefit.
And that was it.
That was their plan.
It's it's pathetic.
It really is.
It's amateurish.
But and it's frightening that these, you know, we've never we haven't had a war in the United States since the Civil War.
And the Europeans had it most recently in World War Two.
They know what war is like.
That's why, you know, the the French and the Germans bitterly opposed Bush's plan to invade Iraq.
They weren't.
It's going to open up Pandora's box of horrors if you invade Iraq.
And sure enough, that's exactly what happened.
Think of ISIS and all these other crazy groups.
But the spillover from this would be in Western Europe, not in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
So the Americans are being very cavalier about this.
They send their boys from small towns to fight and get killed.
Doesn't matter to anyone.
And they can't afford it because they print little green pieces of paper.
And they're now having the nerve to call the Europeans isolationists or appeasers.
Unreal.
Yeah.
While they're fighting over what's just most recently been termed the blood lands between Germany and Russia, where too many wars have been fought for all of history is just.
It's a good book.
I read it and I agree pretty much with the author.
His most interesting point from that book was that most of the majority of Jews who were killed by the Nazis were not killed in the so-called infamous death camps, the Auschwitz, but were shot down in mass graves across this area of Eastern Europe.
Yeah.
Machine gun to death.
Which that's funny, that always reminds me of Ralph Rako on Hiroshima.
Sorry to go off topic, but he said, hey, if we just rounded up all the men, women and children of Hiroshima and machine gun them to death like the Gestapo, would that have been all right in order to save the lives of all those troops?
Yes.
Allowing me to go off topic for a second, dropping the Hellfire missiles and firing them and fuel explosive bombs, which blow people's lungs out, tear their eyes out is fine when we do it.
It's a part of an air war.
When the ISIL makes a horrible, burns to death this poor Jordanian pilots, that is the most monumental outrage.
I'll tell you, if you look at the bodies of both cases after the attacks, they look pretty much the same.
Charred cinders.
Yeah.
Once all the flesh is burned off and it's just a skeleton down there of a former homo sapien sapien.
Yeah, all right.
It seems like a pretty elementary point, but it bears repeating.
It bears repeating.
All right.
And now, so the war is going like hell over there.
That's why it's still going on, because the Ukrainians can't win against.
And I don't know to what degree the Russians are really backing the rebels over there.
I guess to some degree, Putin's pretty much said, we won't let you win outright over the people here.
The Ukrainians are now there are reports of massive draft resistance as people even from the west of Ukraine are fleeing into Russia to avoid conscription into this war.
And the whole thing is just falling apart, Eric.
You think that is my influence, the Americans to get their act together a little bit tighter here and maybe work on some kind of neutral zone type policy?
You know, if we had men of the quality of George Kennan involved in our foreign affairs, I might say yes, but we don't.
We have we have paper pushers.
And then we have these awful women in there, you know, doing national security.
And they have no comprehension.
They don't understand Ukraine.
I would say that 80 percent of congressmen couldn't find Ukraine on a map either if their lives depended on it.
And they have no understanding of the history of the region that is so important.
The idea of northern Silesia, Bessarabia, Bukovina and the Banat, these areas are still major problems today.
And they're opening up another can of worms in the region.
It won't just be Ukraine.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think it's really important, like you mentioned in that previous article about how I think it's your direct comparison to these battle sites in Crimea like their Alamo that, you know, the Russians just as soon let the Americans have Crimea as the Americans would let the Russians have Houston or San Antonio.
No, we will fight you to the death over that no matter what happens in 500 years of future history from now, the Russians ain't taking Houston.
And, you know, come on, how hard is that to understand?
Seriously.
I picked Houston because not only the oil and gas industry and the patriotic fervor involved with it, but also Houston and the other Gulf ports are America's entry into the Caribbean and Latin America, just the way that Crimea with Sevastopol, a great naval base, is you is Russia's doorway into the Mediterranean and the Middle East.
It is not going to see it slammed shut by a bunch of right wing Ukrainians in Kiev.
Right.
And by the way, just as a footnote, I dislike this Putin personally, and I hate all politicians, Eric, but Larissa, the wife, she says that he murdered Anna Politskaya, whose name I can't pronounce, who I know was also a friend of yours.
And I wonder if you could verify that reason for my personal hatred for this guy, regardless of what the different foreign policies are here.
Scott, I don't know.
I don't have a shred of evidence that Putin was involved with her murder, but it was it was a terrible crime.
She was exposing massive Russian crimes in the caucus against the Chechen and English people, something that we didn't care about in the States.
And she and Putin has a lot to answer for.
We could segue into this whole murder story in London with the murdered Russian agent.
It was a vile crime.
It was Russia's 9-11.
And Putin is involved.
And I hold very much against Putin's slaughtering of the Chechen people.
But so did Yeltsin, and we paid for it.
Yeah.
And I should mention there that she's not officially reporting that that is a fact.
I think I probably overstated her position on that, just that she believes that that's what happened to her friend Anna is all.
Oh, she may be right.
I mean, she's a reporter, so I shouldn't I shouldn't conflate what she reports versus what she believes, you know, because people tend to think it's so easy to just think, well, for whatever reason, you're lining up on the side of this foreign power that our team is up against here.
And so I like to mention that, you know, hey, there's a personal reason killed a friend of my wife's.
You know, there's a very personal reason for me to not like this guy.
You know, I basically trust her judgment on that, I guess, based on whoever she's talked to, whatever she's knows about it.
But so and I know you don't have any, you know, pro-Russian, anti-American kind of point of view.
I just like pointing out to kind of deflate that straw man argument that I know people like glomming on to when they can.
Well, I I've been warning constantly about the the personification of complex foreign policy questions we in the U.S. other countries, but we have a very bad habit of taking an area that's complicated and we don't understand.
We don't know where the hell it is and demonizing one character.
So it's Saddam Hussein, it's Gaddafi, it's Khomeini, it's even right down the line to Arafat and Bashar al-Assad.
And we use it as a marker, a placeholder for very complicated situations.
Well, we could just get rid of this guy.
Everything would be hunky dory.
Well, it's not true.
Right.
That's fine.
I just got a tweet.
Explain to me why you support Putin.
Yeah, exactly.
That's funny.
All right.
You're a wise man.
Thank you, Eric, for your time on the show, as always.
I really appreciate it.
Pleasure, Scott.
Great to be with you.
All right, y'all.
That's the great Eric Margulies.
War at the top of the world.
An American Raj.
Liberation or domination.
Eric Margulies dot com.
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Unz dot com.
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