03/26/15 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And lucky you and me, I've got the great Eric Margulies on the line.
He's the author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
He's covered 14 wars.
He's been all around the world 100 times.
He knows everything about everything, and he's good on it, too.
Welcome back to the show, Eric.
How are you?
I'm happy to be back with you.
We're struggling with all the news today.
I forgot to write my weekly column, and there's too much news today.
Most of it's bad.
Kind of hard to narrow it down, right?
Yes.
I'm sorry.
Let me mention the website you write for, ericmargulies.com.
Spell it like Margolis, ericmargulies.com.
Also find him at lourockwell.com and at unz.com.
That's U-N-Z, unz.com.
Now, so we've got to talk about Yemen, I guess.
Well, we've been talking about Yemen for quite a while now, well, years, but even in the last few months about the Houthi Shiite takeover of the capital city of Sana'a.
And I guess I don't even really understand sort of the slow motion effect going on here.
They've announced that, oh, no, the capital has fallen to the Houthis like four different times, even though they already took the thing over months and months ago.
But I guess it's really come to a head and the American sock puppet, so-called President Hadi, had to flee the country yesterday and then, blam, war broke out.
All the headlines say, I think, that every Sunni king has now declared war on Yemen.
And there are pictures of huge explosions in the capital city and anti-aircraft fire.
And they say that even the Libyans and the Sudanese and everybody else are going to come and invade and kill these Houthis dead.
Is that right?
What in the world is going on?
Well, you know, I've been going to Yemen since the mid-1970s, and I'm always very fond of it as a wild and crazy place just creeping into the 11th century and filled with trigger-happy tribesmen who love nothing better than to shoot the place up and have little wars and pillage and run around.
And then in the afternoon, chew the favorite narcotic in the country, which is called cot.
And everybody gets stoned every afternoon.
So it's a combination of stoners and gunmen.
Well, that sounds kind of mutually exclusive.
You know, I don't know.
Usually stoners like to just sit back and hang out.
Well, these guys don't.
They like to shoot the place up.
But what's happening?
Yemen is actually, you know, this war has been going on for years.
And things are very confusing in Yemen because there's barely any government.
The U.S. set up a puppet government, as you properly noted there, first under Mr. Saleh and then Mr. Hadi.
But they're stooges.
And just like the Afghan leader who's in Washington this week, same thing.
But everything is done by tribes and clans in Yemen.
And I remember during the Yemeni civil war years ago, the royalists who were supported by the Saudis, this is back in the 60s, I think, or 70s, had surrounded the capital, Sana'a.
And they issued an appeal, surrender or die.
And the Republicans who were supported by the Egyptians looked like they were going to die.
But then by the next morning, it was the royalists who had been defeated and were on the run.
And the Republicans were triumphant.
So you never know what's going to happen in Yemen.
Yeah, it sounds like a pretty wild and crazy place.
And it used to be divided.
South Yemen was ruled by the socialists at one point.
Is that right?
That's correct.
Well, South Yemen was a British colony, Aden.
And then when the British left, the South Yemeni set up their own country.
They were very left wing and they were busy fighting to the east in the desert region, running up to Oman, the Radfan region.
And Oman is a British intelligence protectorate.
It's been run by MI6, since everybody, anybody can remember.
And the British SAS, secret commandos, were sent into Radfan to fight the Yemenis.
Oh, lots of dashing fun and games, late Victorian sort of boys fun.
North Yemen was run by a nationalist regime, but its president agreed to hold peace talks with the South Yemenis who sent a delegate.
The delegate opened his briefcase and there was a bomb in it, blew them both up.
So that's that's what you call Yemeni peace talks.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, as far as the Saudis go, I didn't think they had an army other than the U.S. army does all their fighting for them.
So what army are they going to invade Yemen with?
Well, quite right.
They used to rent parts of the Pakistani army to protect them from their own loving people.
The bombings around Sana'a today ascribed to the Saudi Air Force is probably done by the U.S. Air Force flying out of Saudi Arabia and out of Djibouti just across the Red Sea.
The other Arab air forces are inconsequential.
So but again, it's us, big brother, pretending to be Saudis.
All right.
Now, so what do you what do you make of this this, you know, grand coalition that they've announced that that's going to fight?
I think they even have a name for it.
I forgot.
But but they're they're saying that, you know, the Libyans even like they don't have their own problems.
I don't know.
The Libyan every every Sunni kingdom in the region are all invading Yemen.
Now, that's just got to be PR, right?
Oh, yeah.
It's just typical Arab baloney and bluster.
And everybody makes big promises.
We will march to Sana'a.
We will liberate them from the filthy Houthis.
Now, the Houthis, by interest, are allegedly backed by the Iranians.
But the Houthis now are not pure Shiites.
Well, they're they're an offshoot of the Shia movement.
They're Zaydis.
And they believe there are only five caliphs, whereas the regular Shias believe in 12.
So there's a doctrinal difference between the two.
And it's quite significant.
And they're kind of wild.
But don't confuse the Zaydis with the Yazidis who are in Iraq, who we have been rescuing from ISIS.
Yazidis, Zaydis.
It's a mess.
Boy, it sounds like one.
And now.
So, you know, obviously, you know, TV and the neocons would have it that anybody in the Middle East who is a Shiite and has a gun is the servant of the Ayatollah.
To what degree is that true?
I mean, I guess I imagine that the Iranians would be crazy to not try to help their sort of co-religionists.
Well, Scott, I haven't seen any signs from afar of deep Iranian involvement in this.
And the Iranians are trying to play good and make nice now to the United States because they want to conclude these nuclear negotiations.
So they don't want to kick a hornet's nest in Washington.
But, you know, we've seen this before with the communists in the 60s and 70s.
Anything going wrong?
Oh, it's the commies.
It's the Reds under our beds.
Now it's the wicked Iranians coming.
And by the way, you know, as a longtime Middle East watcher, Scott, I have the uncomfortable feeling that this alleged conflict between Sunnis and Shias was largely caused by us.
That was the plan in Iraq.
That was General Petraeus's big idea, that they were going to take these two long divided but cooperating communities and attack them and bomb them and provoke them until they began killing each other.
And that's just what happened in Iraq.
And now I fear it's spreading across the Muslim world.
Yeah, they called it the El Salvador option that will hire the Bata Brigade to hunt down and kill all the leaders of the Sunni insurgency.
You know, I just read this quote last night.
I had forgotten about this man.
And I don't even remember where I was reading it anymore.
Anyway, it was the quote was from Paul Wolfowitz that any time anyone said, hey, man, you know, since the Sunni insurgency against American slash Shiite rule is growing up, maybe we should talk to these guys and try to figure out some kind of modus of anything.
He said, no, they're Nazis.
They're Nazis.
We can't side with them.
And so he continued to simply serve the Iranians and their sock puppet factions and in creating a horrible civil war that killed a million people there.
And, of course, continues to rage to this day.
And now Cypress Hill is playing.
And that means we've got to go to break.
But we'll be right back with the great Eric Margulies right after this.
Eric Margulies dot com phone records, financial and location data, prism, tempura, X key score, boundless informant.
Hey, I'll start here for off now dot org.
Now, here's the deal.
Do the Snowden revelations.
We have a great opportunity for a short period of time to get some real rollback of the national surveillance state.
Now, they're already trying to tire us by introducing fake reforms in the Congress and the courts.
They betrayed their sworn oaths to the Constitution and Bill of Rights again and again and can in no way be trusted to stop the abuses for us.
We've got to do it ourselves.
How?
We nullify it at the state level.
It's still not easy.
The off now project of the 10th Amendment Center has gotten off to a great start.
I mean it.
There's real reason to be optimistic here.
They've gotten their model legislation introduced all over the place in state after state.
I've lost count more than a dozen.
You're always wondering, yeah, but what can we do?
Here's something, something important, something that can work.
If we do the work, get started cutting off the NSA support in your state.
Go to off now dot org.
All right, you guys, we're talking about the absolute mess in Yemen with Eric Margulies.
And so we got let's let's see if we can count some factions here.
Eric, we got the Houthis who've now taken the capital.
We've got Salah, the former president.
We've got Hadi, the current president, who's on a boat somewhere right now hiding.
And we got Al Qaeda guys who their movement has grown by a million percent since Obama started drone bombing them, which is like, you know, adding water to little sea monkeys or something.
And and all these groups are fighting.
And it's funny, you know, they're they keep talking about trying to rehabilitate Al Qaeda in Syria.
The Al Nusra Front, if they could only get convince these guys to publicly renounce Zawahiri, they'll start calling them the moderates.
I wonder if they're going to.
Well, you know, since the war party, the the Israel First War Party in Washington, D.C., hates the Shiites the most, no matter what.
I wonder if they're going to go ahead and christen Al Qaeda in Yemen as moderate so that they can back the suicide bomber head choppers against the Houthis.
What do you think?
Well, I think it's pretty confusing.
And it's certainly going to stress out our poor congressmen and senators who are challenged to find Yemen or anything else on the map.
You know, and also, let's add ISIS, which will undoubtedly stick his head up in Yemen.
It already claims to have done so.
And ISIS may be fighting Al Qaeda.
We don't know.
It's awfully confusing.
And we're not even sure, in fact, of these Houthis, whether these are a tribe or whether they are a religious group that started, got riled up after the U.S. started bombing their region in North Yemen in the 1990s at the bequest of the request of the Saudis.
It's very complicated.
And I tell you, I think the U.S. is really bitten off more than it can chew in Yemen.
The Saudis share a border there, so you think it must be likely, right, that with American AWACS and ships offshore coordinating the thing, that the Saudis, you know, should be able to march on the capital and have their way there, right?
Well, the Saudis, the Saudi military forces are pathetic and they don't trust their own army.
They don't want to give ammo to their army because they're afraid the army is going to turn around and overthrow the Saudi dynasty.
The exact same thing happened in 1958 in Iraq.
I hope my dates are right.
In Iraq, where the British puppet ruler, King Faisal, and his advisor, Nuri al-Said, ran a dictatorship there for the British, such as we have in Afghanistan today.
And the soldiers said, listen, nobody's ever fired a bullet in the army.
Please give us bullets so we can go and liberate Palestine.
Well, so they gave each soldier six bullets.
They marched out of town, came back in, overthrew the king, hanged him from a lamppost, or Nuri al-Said was hanged from a lamppost too, and took over under the leadership of crazy Colonel Qasim.
So this shocked the hell out of the Saudis.
And ever since, they've never given serious ammo to their army.
And they keep a parallel military force called the White Army in Saudi Arabia, made up of loyal Bedouin tribes, advised by American security advisors from different military corporations.
But they're really just kind of an internal Gestapo for keeping the kingdom safe rather than being able to take on any outside force.
That's right.
I'd be very surprised.
It's a major logistics operation to mount an invasion of Yemen.
Yemen is a very mountainous, rugged country with lousy roads.
Well, the Saudis might get as far as Sana'a, the capital, or Ta'if, but how are they going to supply them?
The Americans would have to be deeply involved in this operation.
Meaning American ground forces?
Well, certainly American, we don't have ground forces anymore.
We only have advisors and counterterrorism forces.
And yeah, they would be, maybe the Pakistanis will be bribed to, you know, send some troops and advisors.
They have a crack army.
Very efficient.
They are named as one of the members of the coalition here, the Pakistanis.
Yes, along with freedom, heroic Sudanese and the Moroccans.
And what a joke this is.
I love our American-built coalitions.
There's one giant, us, and a whole bunch of little pygmies running around as fate so that we can call it a coalition.
And it's faithfully echoed by our media, coalition forces today, etc.
Yeah.
Well then, so there's just, there's no faction that could possibly be loyal enough and strong enough to be bought off to serve America and its interests in this, it sounds like you're saying.
Well, I'm sure they'll find, I'm sure Washington will find some Yemenis who want to work for the Yankee dollar.
They did with this Hadi president and his bunch of people.
Right.
But will any of them be able to get the work done rather than just cashing the checks?
That's, that's a very good question.
The Egyptians may get involved too.
You know, Egypt is offering itself, which has a 450,000 man army, offering itself to the, both the Saudis or its new paymaster and to the U.S. to take on dirty jobs that the U.S. doesn't want to do.
So we can't exclude Egypt by an intervene.
As I mentioned earlier, it did under Gamal Abdel Nasser, who sent troops in there to support the royalists.
I'm sorry, the Republican forces in Yemen who were being attacked by Saudi backed groups.
That's a long story.
It goes way back to the 60s.
Yeah.
And now, as far as American intervention in Yemen so far in the last, you know, few years, Jeremy Scahill had a great report in The Nation.
And let's see, blowback.
That one was blowback in Somalia.
I'm trying to remember the name of the thing.
But he really had a great one about Yemen, about how all of the weapons that they had given to the Saleh government for use against al Qaeda ended up being turned against the Houthis.
And whatever other domestic enemies that the Saleh government had.
And then the whole thing turned out to be counterproductive.
All it ended up doing was making everybody he opposed more powerful.
The same old equation since 2002 or whatever.
Every time you kill one of these guys, you create 10 more.
And, you know, it just seems like that's the same kind of policy they're continuing to follow here.
They don't know what else to do other than continue to pour weapons.
In fact, they're saying they've lost half a billion dollars worth of guns and tanks and trucks and God knows what to God knows which enemies over there, too.
That's right.
That's simply astounding.
You know, it's a court martial offense.
It's incredibly stupid.
We've lost hundreds of billions of dollars in Iraq that were stolen.
Big, you know, plane loads full of hundred dollar bills that just vanished.
And now we have all these weapons who eventually will be used against our troops or our local stooges.
No doubt.
All right.
Well, there's music.
We're out of time again already.
But thank you very much for your time, Eric.
I sure appreciate you talking about this with us.
Pleasure as always, Scott.
All right.
Enjoy the rest of your vacation, sir.
Thank you.
All right, y'all.
That is the heroic Eric Margulies.
Eric Margulies dot com spelled like Margolis.
Also, he's at Luke Rockwell dot com and owns dot com.
You and the owns dot com will be right back with Will Grigg in just a sec.
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