04/24/15 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

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Hey, guys, how's it going?
Welcome back.
On the line, I got Eric Margulies from ericmargulies.com.
Spell it like Margolis, ericmargulies.com.
He wrote the books War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
You can also find what he writes at the Unz Review.
That's unz.com and at lourockwell.com.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Eric?
Oh, hello, Scott.
Happy to be back with you.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you on the show.
So, well, you know, I want to ask you mostly about Yemen and then maybe some other things.
But first of all, can we talk a little bit about your latest article, Churchill's Disaster?
This is about the centennial of this horrible battle in World War I.
And I've never heard anybody say the word out loud.
I've only read it.
So I'll let you take it from there.
Well, the today is, in fact, the commemoration in Turkey of the Battle of Gallipoli in 1915.
It's also Anzac Day, Australia and New Zealand Day when they sent troops for the first time to fight in the British colonial war, as I call it.
And it's an important day for Turkey because it was a significant victory for the dying Ottoman Empire.
And it really marked the beginning of modern Turkey.
So once in a political sense, it was a very important event.
In a military sense, it was a huge disaster.
And the man most responsible for it was first Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill.
And now, so where is Gallipoli and what happened there?
What was the big deal?
Oh, OK.
Well, take your mind to the Black Sea above Turkey and or below Turkey, above Turkey, and then go a little bit south, Istanbul, formerly Constantinople, down the small Sea of Marmara.
And then you come to this, these two long fingers of land that goes south into the Aegean.
And they are known.
That's where Gallipoli is.
It's known as the Straits, Straits of Turkey.
It's a very strategic area.
It's been fought over ever since since the Iron Age, practically, because it's the only water maritime transit from the Aegean and Mediterranean up into the Black Sea into Russia.
And so what was so difficult about the British invasion there?
Well, it was very poorly planned.
And it's, first of all, the British could have used drones that we use now.
They had a poor understanding of how difficult the topography was there.
I've walked over the entire area.
It's two long peninsulas of land there.
It's very pockmarked with ravines and gullies and very steep, very dry and hot.
And just incongenial, incongenial for fighting.
But that's what happened.
First, the French and then the British thought that a quick maritime naval strike using their Mediterranean fleets could force the Dardanelles open and allow them to steam north to Constantinople, shell the city, and not only knock Turkey out of the war, because Turkey was a principal German ally, along with Austria-Hungary, but also open a supply line to Russia, which was suffering and at the time starting to lose the war.
That was the plan.
But it didn't work out that way because the Turks put up a ferocious defense and they mined, I think it was eight Western French and British battleships, couldn't fight their way by the old forts.
And then the British and the Anzacs were landed around Sulva Bay and other areas and they became immediately bogged down in the very difficult uphill topography and the war became stalemated.
And now, so how many people died in this thing?
Well, we think about 250,000 on either side.
Once again...
That's like a couple of years worth of the Iraq War.
That's right.
We have 500,000 total dead and both sides fought very valiantly.
The Turks, because out of this, a Turkish local commander named Mustafa Kemal seized command of his weakening Turkish troops, made the famous pronouncement, I am not ordering you to fight, I'm ordering you to die.
In other words, die where you stand.
The French did it too at Verdun, by the way.
And the Turks did and the Turks went and were derided as the sick men in Europe.
And the British, with their usual typical racism, sneered at the Turks as inferior human beings, found that these were very ferocious fighters, fought the Allies to a standstill, even though the Allies had all these battleships with big guns lying off the coast.
But both sides suffered terrible privations because of logistics problems, lack of water, heat, lack of medical facilities.
It was a bloodbath.
And in the end, the Allies were defeated, forced to withdraw their troops.
And Turks proclaimed a great victory.
Turkey remained allied to Germany.
And the war was not ended in one big coup.
And Winston Churchill, whose idea was, was forced to resign as first Lord of the Admiralty.
And he, to his credit, I must say, as sort of a penance, he went and took up command of a British army regiment on the Western Front and served there pretty much toward to the end of the war.
Well, now, so I guess the lesson for me here is, wow, they'll really throw 250,000 of their own guys away on a battle that they cannot win.
And just, and over what period of time did this take place?
Two years.
Well, yeah, so there you go.
I guess that is, that's like total casualties from the Iraq war for about two years worth of time period there.
So yeah, that's, although that's only one small part of the entire First World War that we're talking about here.
One battle.
Most of the fighting was in 1915 in one year.
You know, I may have, I made a, I've made a mistake here, Scott.
I can't remember now where the 250,000 were dead or dead and wounded.
Oh, I guess you say dead or were wounded in the article here.
Okay, well then that's the right answer.
That's still a freaking catastrophe.
And there were other, you mentioned some of the other battles there where they just, where the officers and the politicians behind them, just perfectly happy to throw piles of lives on top of machine gun nests to no good end whatsoever.
Right, Scott, the next year later, the Battle of the Somme, I think was in 16, the British lost 24,000 dead on one day of the battle.
So lives were worth nothing in those days.
But, okay, so now all this reminds me of the thing going on with Russia right now, because as bad as America's policy in the Middle East is, it mostly only hurts them.
And sometimes some office workers here in America, but the war all pretty much takes place over there.
But when we're talking about screwing around with the Russians in Ukraine and all that, that's the kind of blowback that can hit home in an intercontinental ballistic missile kind of a way.
And it's stories like this that make me wonder, you know, I guess I want to believe that somebody up there, even if it's Dr. Strangelove or somebody, he's got a plan, he at least thinks he knows what he's doing.
But then when I read articles like this about Gallipoli, and especially all of World War I, it really makes me think that you could actually just grab the staff of the local Sonic Burger and put them in charge of the National Security Council, and they'd be just about as qualified, maybe even better qualified to make these decisions than the people who are making them, who seem to have no trouble picking a fight far beyond the kind of fight that they ought to be picking, like when we're talking about screwing around in Ukraine, when we got a ceasefire, and then we send in a bunch of troops to train theirs and arm them up and take them back to war.
And now I talked all the way to the damn break.
But that's where we're going to pick up this conversation on the other side, is the boobery and incompetence, question mark, on the National Security Council, back then, a hundred years ago, and today.
And then we're going to talk about Yemen, too.
It's the great Eric Margulies, author of American Raj, Liberation or Domination, ericmargulies.com.
Hey, Al Scott here.
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Okay, guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, Scott Horton show.
Talking with Eric Margulies about his latest piece, Churchill's disaster, Gallipoli.
And then so the question is about, you know, just how dangerous are our current leaders?
Are they willing to get us into World War One level, you know, crises, or has a lesson been learned after all is 100 years ago.
And if anybody ever learned a lesson of anything, it was that they didn't want to do another World War One kind of thing, right?
I don't know.
But then we have.
And I guess, well, I was trying to get to my question to the idea that they do know what they're doing, maybe in that, hey, Putin, you know, we're just trying to sell some weapons and make some money and whatever, we don't really mean any harm, we're not really going to put Ukraine and NATO, we're just screwing around and making some money.
And you can tolerate that, right?
Or, or maybe it's not that organized.
And maybe they really could get us into a war with Russia right now.
I don't know.
What do you think, Eric?
I refer, I refer your listeners to the wonderful book called The Sleepwalkers by Professor Clark from Britain.
It is the most detailed and thorough analysis of how World War One started.
And it is fascinating because it shows that the war was started by small numbers of militant minded officials, for example, in France, who hated the Germans because of the loss of Alsace-Lorraine in the 1870 war, and the British, some British officials who were fearful of Germany's economic might and jealous of its growing power.
So and idiots in the Austro-Hungarian establishment who thought that they could just go to war with Serbia, etc.
Anyway, he gives a very funny what the takeaway from the book is that the war wasn't started by a broad consensus, but by bloody, a couple of bloody minded people who managed to sway government policy and direct it so that the war eventually did come to be.
This is what we're having happening now here too.
All right now, but so here's the thing, though, I mean, we do have the mutually assured destruction thing, which everybody understands.
And I know that there's a push to try to make our forces so superior that we can do the successful first strike and all of that kind of thing.
But basically, the people on the National Security Council, they are aware that the Russians have H-bombs and that we can only push things so far.
Right.
But I mean, I guess it's just a calculated risk and don't worry about it or what.
I'm trying to understand the thinking of the people who would get us into this level of crisis over a country as far away as Ukraine.
You know, it's influenced by arrogance, primarily hubris, just as the British sneered at the Turks as third world Muslims who couldn't fight the people of the American security structure.
Yeah, of course, they know the Soviets couldn't retaliate.
But and they have a very strong nuclear force, too.
But they think that we're the greatest, we're the exceptional nation.
They know that we're the 800 pound gorilla and they're going to back down.
We're just going to bully them out of these positions.
They can't afford to stand up to us.
Well, it's a stupid position.
It's one that has no understanding of history.
And it puts nitwits like Condoleezza Rice and the Bush administration dangerously, George, a policy with their fingers on the nuclear trigger.
Man.
So do you think at this point the policy is with the new equipment and the training going on over there that, I mean, is it even as well thought out as, yes, we do mean to help the Ukrainian military build itself up to enough strength that they can reconquer John Yatsken Luhansk?
How are you pronouncing correctly there?
Well, it's they should be relabeled as no interest to America.
It's really shocking that we're involved in a sideshow in Ukraine that could lead to a nuclear clash in an area where which we know nothing, where we have no interest and never will.
It's it's bloody mindedness that's doing it.
And the the idea that we can stick our finger in Russia's eye, maybe this is the first step to the dismantling of the Russian Federation, as the neocons are calling.
All in all, it's a it's a very perilous equation.
Training a few Ukrainian troops is not going to do the trick.
A nasty person might say, well, look, the Americans, they've done so well in the Vietnam War and in Iraq.
These are the same guys who are teaching their military skills to the Ukrainians.
Maybe they would better go with another teacher like the Germans or something like that.
You may be facetious, but no, what this is, it's a political gesture, but it's it's it's sufficiently provocative to risk the advent of a war.
And Britain and Canada have also sent troops, small penny packets of troops.
Yeah, it's amazing, just enough to make the point they think, um, like the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Right.
This is all or at least in the movie of it, this is all language, you know, having a quarantine instead of a blockade and having the the ships, you know, cut their path off, but not drop depth charges or whatever this kind of thing.
This is all the diplomatic language of actually moving forces around.
And and for politics sake, like you say, but it's provocative enough that it really could do the trick.
And they're basically screwing around in order to keep John McCain quiet or something.
I guess they're willing to go this far.
Well, you know, we have to understand that the president is under tremendous pressure from the fire breathing Republicans who never met a war they didn't like and are ready to fight to the last mercenary in the U.S. Army just as long as their sons don't have to go to war.
They're not scared of wars.
We haven't seen one since the Civil War.
So it's easy.
But I remember, unfortunately, I'm old enough to remember when we sent our first advisors to Vietnam.
That's how it all started.
And then the advisors needed troops to protect them.
And they couldn't rely on the Vietnamese troops.
And then so we decided to send more troops.
But then the more troops needed yet more troops.
And well, hence the term from Vietnam mission creep.
And I'll predict that the same thing will happen in Ukraine.
Crazy.
Well, and again, back to the obvious ending of that, if nobody puts a halt to it is nuclear fusion and temperatures to make the sun seem cool and that kind of thing.
So we definitely don't need that.
If anybody can do anything about it, go ahead, please.
Let me let me switch to Yemen here.
So they they said that there is a convoy of Iranian ships heading to Yemen and they've turned around and they were accused of having weapons.
But apparently nobody ever showed that.
I don't know.
But then so the New York Times had two different stories and maybe they were a day apart.
But one was America's urging the Saudis to stop bombing Yemen.
And then the next day, I guess it was Obama urges Saudi Arabia to continue bombing, announcing the job is not done.
Does that mean that Obama thinks that the Saudis can get a regime change from the air and that the war ought to continue until then?
I think so.
Or maybe troops will be introduced.
The Saudis tried to get to rent Pakistani army, which is a very good army, very crack soldiers.
And the Pakistanis wisely turn them down and want to get involved.
But just so the rise of the Egyptians and Egypt's bloody minded dictator, U.S. supported dictator Al-Sisi has offered troops for Yemen.
So it's possible and soon that we could see convoys of Egyptian ships bringing troops down and going into combat in Yemen, which will be the first time since the Egyptian army was in action in Yemen in the early 1960s.
Wow.
And now, so I'm sure you saw this thing by Mark Perry in Al Jazeera about the American generals saying that this is crazy.
Why are we flying as Al-Qaeda's Air Force when these guys aren't even backed by Iran?
And who cares if they were anyway?
Kind of a thing.
But it seems like Obama's position isn't even reluctant.
He's actually pushing this thing to go further when it seemed like the Saudis were willing to back down.
Well, it's very hard to tell.
You know, there was an interesting article again, talking about the New York Times, and it wasn't yesterday, it was the day before, about the late Richard Holbrooke, who was U.S. ambassador to the Balkans and a Kissinger man.
And Holbrooke said in his memoirs that the president, that we have a weak president who's unusually pushed around by the military complex.
And I think this is true.
The president of the White House is under all kinds of differing pressures.
It's being besieged by the Israel lobby.
It's got the Pentagon after them.
It's got big business which wants more weapons contracts.
It's got financial problems.
The Democrats are screaming that, you know, you've got to do something, otherwise the Republicans are going to be here at the next election.
So they're confused and stumbling and there's incoherence on foreign and military policy at present.
All right.
Now, at the Moon of Alabama blog, they found a story about, it's amazing, about, well, I guess not that surprising, but it's about the Saudis flying in weapons straight to the Al-Qaeda forces in Yemen and having them rename themselves.
Let me see if I have it here.
They're popular committees now.
And this one is now called the Hadramout Brigade or whatever, but the Sons of Hadramout.
And all it is, is Al-Qaeda.
They just renamed themselves so that now they can get Saudi weapons.
The Moon of Alabama guy's joking that, he actually was joking that, oh, now that Al-Qaeda has taken this airport, now the Saudis can fly in a bunch of guns.
And then it came true a couple of days later.
Well, it's situation in Yemen is extremely confusing.
It's hard to know who's who there and who's supporting who.
And, you know, my, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
And I wouldn't be surprised if the Saudis were arming radical groups.
But, you know, we put all these labels on these people, which confused everyone, but primarily ourselves.
Now there are Al-Qaeda everywhere in Yemen.
It's mostly tribal fighting.
It's not ideological.
It's not, nothing to do with foreign attacks or anything like that.
I've been in Yemen since the 60s and they're all shooting at each other and the tribes switch sides after a few days or some bakshish payments under the table.
So it's hard to know.
And the situation with the diplomats are called very fluid.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, we can see that right now where everyone seems to agree that the former dictator is now behind his former enemies, the Houthis, who I used to interview you back a couple of years ago about his war against them.
And now he's their guy or they're his and in war against, I guess, the socialists, who I saw a documentary where these guys say, everybody says we're Al-Qaeda.
Why don't you ask us?
We're for Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.
Viva revolution.
That would clarify matters, except the former president, Al-Hadi, who we installed him in Yemen.
We were running Yemen.
The US was running Yemen as a little colony.
And we installed this two by nothing Hadi there because we got tired of the former president who we were just talking about, Mr. Saleh.
Al-Hadi is a little drip and was not respected by anyone and eventually run out of the country.
And he's also a Saudi puppet.
So the Saudis are not trying to put him back in power.
But Saleh is reasserting himself.
And it's a big mess.
Yeah, sure.
So it's all right.
Well, I kept you over time, so I'll let you go about your day.
But thank you again for your time on the show, Eric.
I sure appreciate it.
Cheers, Scott.
All right.
So that's the great Eric Margulies.
His website is ericmargulies.com, spelled like Margolis, ericmargulies.com.
Also, you can find him at lourockwell.com and at unz.com, U-N-Z, unz.com.
The books are American Raj, Liberation or Domination and War at the Top of the World.
And we'll be right back in a second.
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