07/13/15 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton, it's my show, the Scott Horton Show.
Eric Margulies has a brand new one out at unz.com, that's U-N-Z, unz.com.
It'll be the spotlight on antiwar.com tomorrow.
Destroying Syria to Make it Safe for American Values.
Well put.
Welcome back to the show, how you doing, Eric?
Hello, Scott, happy birthday, I'm just fine.
Thanks very much, I appreciate it.
Hey, I like it when you write things.
You wrote this great article, it's called Destroying Syria to Make it Safe for American Values.
And you know, I was thinking, I should give you a much more Rockwellian introduction, like you really deserve.
As Lew says whenever he interviews you for his podcast, he says, everybody listen up to this guy, he's been around the world a million times, he speaks the languages, he's covered 14 wars, he's the author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
And when it comes to whichever horrifying battle zone, from Morocco to Indonesia or anywhere in between there, he's been there, he knows the principles, he's got sources in French intelligence, all over the damn place.
And when I ask him questions, he knows the answers to them.
And so, yeah, you deserve an introduction like that, at least every once in a while.
American Raj, Liberation or Domination is the book.
And so, now in this article about Syria, you tell the story here.
You explain not just the American intervention since 11, but really what led up to it, even going back decades.
How it is that the Alawis came to power to rule Syria the way it is and etc.
And so, please, sir, go right ahead, you still got quite a few minutes before the first break.
Scott, American mucking around in Syria goes back to the 1940s.
In fact, in his delightful book called The Game of Nations, a former CIA officer describes how the U.S. first overthrew the Syrian government, organized the overthrow of the Syrian government in 1948.
And the U.S. has been involved in Syria ever since.
Now, what's really horrified me, because I know Syria quite well, it's a beautiful country, is that the U.S. determined in 2010, 2011 to overthrow the current Syrian government, which is more or less a U.S. ally, in order to get at Iran, because Syria was supported and allied with Iran.
They're both Shia-ruled powers, and the U.S. was going to tear down Iran's allies, first in Syria, then Hezbollah in Lebanon.
And that's what happened.
They've been trying by infiltrating guerrillas and lunatics from different extremist factions.
They've been trying to tear down Syria.
And you're saying they were more or less an ally of the United States?
Now, I know you're not saying Assad was basically just another Mubarak-level sock puppet, right?
Or are you?
No, no.
But Syria generally in the recent decades has cooperated with the U.S. in whatever it wanted to do, whether it was evading Iraq or fighting so-called terrorists and making nice to Israel, not giving them a hard time.
So Syria was generally cooperative.
But it was all for naught, because somebody in Washington and in Israel decided that the Assad regime had to go.
And that's what we're watching now.
And the result has been the creation of 11 million refugees in Syria.
Half of the population have either fled the country for their lives or are internal refugees driven out of their homes.
It's horrible.
Yeah, that's worse in raw numbers if those numbers are accurate than even in Bush's Iraq War II.
That's correct.
The U.N. refugee chief just said that this is the worst refugee catastrophe in the last 25 years.
And guess who's responsible for it?
We are.
Well, and I guess a lot of those refugees are probably the Iraqi refugees, too, who now got to get the hell out of Syria and try to find somewhere else to go.
Double refugees, not to mention the poor Palestinians who were stuck in Syria and under attack by everybody.
Yeah, and exactly under attack by everybody, apparently.
Which, well, it's kind of a diversion, but it's an important point.
Why is it that it's such a big deal for Nusra, ISIS, and Assad that they dominate the Yarmouk refugee camp where the Palestinians live?
I don't understand it.
I can't give you a clear answer.
I think it's just that they hear that there are anti-regime elements that have infiltrated the camp and they have to fight.
But there are all kinds of murky politics between the Palestinian refugees and the Syrian government.
They've never been very friendly.
Yeah.
Oh, what a disaster.
Oh, give them a few generations.
They'll forget.
It'll be fine.
Don't worry about it, Palestinians.
That was a joke and a paraphrase of Israeli foreign policy.
OK, so now we had this conversation ten years ago.
I was telling the people earlier on the show, you could go back to 2005, and there's me interviewing Eric Margulies and saying, But I don't understand why it is that the Americans, or even right-wing crazy Israeli lunatics, think that they prefer whatever the alternative is to the Assad regime.
Because if they get rid of the Assad regime and you have a super-majority Sunni population, then that means the Muslim Brotherhood probably would be the only organized force prepared to inherit the power in a power vacuum, right?
And then you would say, yeah, right, if they're lucky, right?
It could be a lot worse than the Muslim Brotherhood, but along those same lines.
And so now here we are, exactly living out that policy.
But the question remains, how in the world could even a Likudnik lunatic prefer these bad guys to those bad guys, in the words of Michael Oren?
It just is crazy.
Well, for the Israelis, chaos in Syria and all kinds of wild men running around is actually a benefit.
First of all, the only Arab force that has stood up to Israel has been the Syrian military.
That is being slowly destroyed.
Secondly, Israel has annexed the Golan Heights, which it conquered in 1967, Syria's strategic Golan Heights, which bring a lot of water to Israel.
We fulminate against Russia, supposedly for annexing Crimea, which used to be part of Russia.
But we close our eyes to the fact the Israelis have grabbed Golan and chaos in Syria reinforces their hold on the Golan Heights.
Okay, and that's where we'll pick it up on the other side of this break with the great Eric Margulies at UNZ.com.
UNZ.com, destroying Syria to make it safe for American values.
One second.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Eric Margulies, author of American Raj and this piece at UNZ.com, destroying Syria to make it safe for American values.
And by American values, of course, we mean Israeli foreign policy.
And now, so, yeah, the Golan Heights strategic thing, that's why they call them Heights and all that.
That makes sense.
But then again, Eric, it doesn't seem like the Ba'athist regime in Damascus was even threatening to ever do a thing about really trying to take back the Golan Heights or anything like that.
And, of course, if you read all the American neoconservative lacunics here, like David Wumser, in A Clean Break and Coping with Crumbling States, it's all about – well, it seems to be all about Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.
And Israel supports Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, and they want the Litani River in southern Lebanon.
And so that's why – even according to A Clean Break, that's why we've got to get rid of Saddam.
Because if we get rid of Saddam, then the road runs through there, runs to Damascus, and then that road leads to Hezbollah.
Like, crying out loud, why not just bomb Hezbollah, these guys?
But anyway.
Well, it's going to happen.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, and I guess it's happening now because you see – and this is almost unbelievable to me, the public relations push here, how cartoonish it is that you even have the cover story in Foreign Affairs saying, hey, it's time to rehabilitate al-Qaeda and rebrand them as our guys because at least they're not the Islamic State and they're valuable fighters against Assad.
And I guess – dot, dot, dot – because that's what Israel wants.
He's still the target here.
Even a year after the declaration of the caliphate, the Islamic State's worst enemy in Syria remains the target.
The President Obama just called again for him to step aside, said peace can't come to Syria until Assad leaves power just last week.
That's crazy.
It's such a convoluted, crazy policy that has too many cooks with narrow interests stirring the Syrian pot.
It's a disaster.
And that was the point of my article.
Our blundering around and our witchcraft, statescraft that we've been trying to exercise in the Middle East, which I call the American Raj, has been disastrous.
We've destroyed Iraq.
We've destroyed Afghanistan.
We're destroying Somalia.
We're destroying beautiful Syria.
Lebanon is going to be in for a pounding next.
And who knows who's next in line.
This is a stark lesson not to violate the dictate of the American Raj.
Well, and then what happens when Damascus falls and the government is de-Baathified and the army is abolished?
It'll be crazy.
It'll be like Iraq is now.
Syria will break up into lots of little communes and cantons with warlords and obscured groups fighting each other.
Iraq's Christians will be driven out.
I'm sorry, Syria's Christians who support the Assad regime wholeheartedly will be driven out just the way Iraq's ancient Christian communities that were defended by Saddam Hussein were destroyed.
And by groups who have been created by the Saudis.
ISIS is a Saudi creation.
And it's backed by the Americans because the American grand strategy in the Middle East is to whip up conflict between Sunnis and Shias, divide and rule.
Yeah.
Well, now, when George Bush fought a war for Iran in Iraq, that was because of stupid, right?
I mean, they thought that or at least Paul Wolfowitz sold the president the idea that, well, you know, the Iraqi Shia, they're a totally different animal than the Iranians.
We're not going to have to worry about that.
If anything, there's going to be all this new pressure on the Iranians to reform and be more like Iraq now.
But then it turned out that, you know, basically they had chosen the side.
And I don't know why.
Maybe it was as simple as, you know, just deliberate or maybe they didn't have really anyone else to go with.
But they chose the bottom brigade, the Dawa Party and the Supreme Islamic Council and the most Iranian backed Shiite militias to back and political parties to back and put in power there.
And, you know, the whole surge and everything else from 03 to 09, 010 was basically fighting with America as Iran's proxy there.
And so I know they didn't do that on purpose, right?
That was just the situation they got themselves into.
Now they're trying to fix that.
But at the same time, we're talking about the day of.
It looks like the Iran nuclear deal is done.
I mean, the Iranian president just celebrated it and then deleted it.
Oops, because he jumped the gun there.
But they got the nuclear deal.
America is trying to normalize relations with Iran right now.
At the same time that we're willing to even we the U.S. state is willing to even back Al-Qaeda to continue to fight Iran's allies in Syria and in Lebanon.
It's a self-defeating, self-contradictory policy.
It was created by fools in Washington.
The Paul Wolfowitz, whose only information on the region comes from the New York from the Wall Street Journal, which is edited by the most fanatical pro-Israeli people you can imagine.
And they're idiots.
They knew nothing.
Paul Bremmer's in Baghdad.
It was pathetic.
I mean, the British imperialists would never have made this mistake because they generally sent out people who understood and knew the region.
We didn't.
And we in the media still is filled with fools, again, to who were advocating the war on nuclear weapons in Iraq.
We've got to overthrow Saddam.
They were largely responsible for this mess.
But they're still writing in the New York Times and on CNN, et cetera.
They're not on the Scott Horton show, I'm happy to say.
So it's funny, isn't it, kind of in a way, just how opposite America and Israel's policies on their face at least ought to be.
And I always talk about this clip of Michael Oren being interviewed by Jeffrey Goldberg.
And he also did an interview with the Jerusalem Post, made it clear that Israel, which has been caught red-handed, given medical attention and supplies to al-Nusra fighters in Syria, that they prefer these bad guys to those bad guys.
And even when these bad guys means al-Qaeda and al-Nusra, not the mythical moderates, but it means al-Qaeda and even the Islamic State, we prefer these bad guys to those, meaning Assad and Hezbollah, because they're backed by Iran.
But Iran and Hezbollah didn't do the 9-11 attack.
It's just incredible that America's supposed to take the side of Israel's interests when it's so blatantly, directly, 100 percent opposed to what they would have to sell the American people if they had to tell us the truth about it at all.
Israel and its backers have bought the U.S. Congress lock, stock and barrel.
And so there's a complete divergence of interest.
But for Israel, Israel's doing very well.
They've cut their defense budget because there's no more Arab military opposition.
And they are looking at some of the Likud parties and the further right extremists in Israel are looking at expanding into Syria.
Israel has refused to define its border with Syria.
Ben-Gurion said, in fact, the former prime minister, the late prime minister, that our generation has no right to define the border with Syria, meaning that they're looking possibly at further expansion.
Well, I didn't realize that.
I've read times about how they don't have defined, you know, settled permanent borders.
And I always just read that to mean the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and their, you know, permanent purgatory status and that kind of thing.
But I didn't realize that they don't even have a set declared border with Syria either.
Huh?
Wow.
The ceasefire line, as far as I understand.
And so it's all been good to Israel's benefit.
The Arab world is collapsing.
You know, in the 1920s, there was a Zionist theoretician named Jabotinsky.
And his theory was the whole Arab world is nothing but a fragile mosaic.
Give it a few hard raps, it's going to fall apart.
Israel will pick up the pieces.
That's exactly what's happening now.
And Israel is interested in oil now in the region and gas.
And Israel is feeling its oats.
And the Arab world is falling apart.
We're seeing it.
We're helping make that happen.
Yeah, you know, it's funny.
There's the Oded Yanan plan from the early 1980s that's saying basically the same thing.
You know, how easy it is and how it should be Israeli policy to shatter the entire Middle East into warring tribal factions and all that.
But the entire context of it is the triumph of world communism and the ultimate doom of humanity and all this kind of Malthusian entropy and all of this.
It's the last darkest days of humanity in 1980.
And so this is the only choice that we're left with.
When, in fact, it's so obvious that Israel could be at peace with their neighbors.
They've got a peace with Jordan and a peace with Egypt.
They could just as easy give up the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, try to be good neighbors in the region.
Hey, we're new around here.
Sorry for all the mass killings, but let's try to get along.
But now that Latani River, you know, we could drink out of that.
So let's just go ahead and leave that border unsettled.
That's right.
And now tell us about is it the Latani River?
Is that, you know, a stated policy of the Likudniks that is that, you know, much to do with the Israeli occupation of Lebanon back in the 80s and 90s?
Yes, very much so.
I was with the Israeli army when it invaded Lebanon.
I saw the whole thing take place.
And, yeah, Israeli water is the most important thing, more important than oil.
So the Israelis have long had their eye on the Latani River, the last major water source that they haven't grabbed.
They control Mount Hermon, which produces a lot of water.
They produce the Sea of Galilee.
They have most of the water sources, and that's driving their policy.
And I am convinced that the Israelis are going to go after Hezbollah under the banner of fighting terrorism, but actually they're going to try and crush the Hezbollah resistance movement and grab the water in the area.
And, you know, here I'm worried, too, that once they have anything like a normalization of relations with Iran, that they're going to double down on their support for Iran's factions in Iraq.
And we've already seen the sectarian cleansing of Tikrit.
Looks like the Shiites are going to try to keep it and keep all the Sunni Arabs that, you know, left during the battle and before the battle to try to keep them from returning.
And I don't guess that they really imagine that they can rule all of Sunnistan and kick all the Sunnis out of Mosul, Fallujah, whatever.
But it does portend a real problem if that's the force that's fighting the Islamic State in former Iraqi Sunnistan, and it's the Iranians on the ground with the Americans in the air backing them.
Might as well be directly on the side of the Islamic State at that point, because it's going to, even if it drives them out of Mosul, which is hard to imagine, it's going to make them that much more powerful in their narrative that they're the last stand against the American-Israeli-Shiite alliance, against the true believers and all that crap.
You know what I mean?
What a mess.
So the next stage of blowback from that could be an absolute nightmare.
What a mess.
We're making a deal with Iran because we need Iran to help us to fight the Sunni extremist movements like ISIL and ISIS.
It's crazy.
People who made this policy should be sent to a farm somewhere and taken away from politics.
You know, I did see an interview with Michael Shoyer, who, as you know, can be really hawkish about kill them all, the actual enemies of the Americans as he defines them in a way, even though he encourages overall non-interventionist policy to stop making these new enemies.
So I saw him, and I believe it was Lou Dobbs, and he was explaining how insane it is that we're backing the jihadists against Assad.
And so Dobbs was like, well, geez, I guess that's the first time I ever heard that, but that makes sense.
So then he says, well, so should we be backing Assad against them?
And you could tell he almost wants to say, yeah, kill them all.
But then he went, no, because actually that just makes their narrative about us seem true, and we're actually just playing into their hands by backing the Alawites against them.
We sure as hell shouldn't be backing the jihadists against the Alawites, but we should really just stay out at this point.
And then he said something horrible about let them all kill each other instead of let them work it out.
Yeah, he wanted to do it with Luke Mecca too.
Yeah, I mean, he says some crazy stuff sometimes.
But at least at that point he was putting on his thinking cap and saying, should we ally with ISIS's enemies against them?
And he's saying no, because the secondary consequences of that are just going to blow up in your face worse.
So just call it quits, you know?
Scott, I've got to run.
Okay, thanks for doing the show.
Sorry for keeping you over.
Great being with you.
Cheerio.
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