10/19/15 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, Scott Horton Show.
Next up, it's our friend Eric Margulies.
He's got a website, ericmargulies.com, spell it like Margolis, ericmargulies.com.
Also, he writes for lourockwell.com, l-e-w-rockwell, lourockwell.com, and unz.com, that's u-n-z, unz.com.
The latest there, it's running today on antiwar.com as well.
Turkey, success story turns to disaster.
Welcome back.
How are you doing?
I'm glad to be back with you.
Great, Scott.
Very happy to have you here.
I told you I was going to interview you about your Turkey article when it came out, so here we are.
Well, first of all, let's start with the success story of Turkey.
What was going so right that's now going so wrong?
Scott, up to 1991, Turkey was a huge, dangerous, seething mess.
It was bankrupt.
It was having constant financial crises.
Armies of armed left-wingers, extreme left-wingers, extreme right-wing neo-fascists were battling it out in the streets.
The government was in chaos, and the country was just stumbling, stumbling around, always under threats of war with the Greeks.
That all changed when Recep Erdogan won election, when his Islamic Party, the AK Party, won the first election, ousted the semi-fascist military rulers and their civilian allies, known as secularists in Turkey, and brought order to Turkey.
He brought the middle class.
He enlarged the middle class greatly.
He brought in people from central Anatolia.
He made religious principles respectable again, and he managed to organize and regularize Turkey's economic situation.
Fast forward a decade or more, Turkey is now in an astounding period of growth, moderate social stability, and democracy because Erdogan's great achievements was forcing the army out of politics and back into the barracks.
Well, what kind of commie or progressive or liberal are you to blame all this on George W. Bush and this article the way you do?
Oh, that's me.
George Bush is one of the progenitors of many of our major problems today, and it was Bush's starting of invading Iraq and deciding he was going to go to war with the Muslim world and carry on his crusade by attacking Syria and Iran and Hezbollah and Pakistan, as he told Tony Blair, that let all these terrible genies out of the bottle in the Middle East.
That's why the French bitterly opposed this foolish war, and the result is that Bush's war has inflamed the entire Middle East, entire, and it has now provoked events that are undermining all the progress that Turkey's made in the last 10 years.
All right, so now the Turks, they had this policy.
It was the, what did they call it, the no problems with our neighbors policy, something like that.
Whatever happened to that?
Now they have problems with all their neighbors.
It was blundered by the Turkish government, sometimes under pressure from the U.S., sometimes under their own foolish volition.
Turkey had nearly made a deal with the Kurds, who make up almost 20% of the population, to bring them into the social progress, to make Kurds part of modern Turkey.
It was great because I was with the Turkish army when it was off in Anatolia fighting Kurdish rebels, a war that cost 40,000 dead in 1991, and it was tearing Turkey apart.
Erdogan settled the Kurdish problem, it seemed, but now the problem is because of the U.S. involvement in Syria and Iraq that has re-inflamed the whole Kurdish issue, and the U.S. is now using Kurds as its sort of gendarmes and bully boys in the region, and this has, of course, inflamed Turkey, and the Turkish-Kurdish entente is now broken.
Mm-hmm.
Well, so is it just the pipeline, or why is it that you think the Turks are so hell-bent on getting rid of Assad, especially after all this time?
I don't understand it, and I follow Turkish affairs closely.
In fact, I write on occasion for Turkish newspapers.
I really don't understand it.
The best I can guess is that there's a personal animosity that grew up between Prime Minister, now President, Erdogan, and Bashar al-Assad, the leader of Syria, and Bashar wouldn't go along with what Erdogan told him, and Erdogan got really piqued about this and decided, well, if you won't cooperate, I'll kick him out.
All right, and so, well, what about that pipeline?
Do you think that has, you know, much to do with it?
They say, and I really should have had this subject mastered by now, but they say there's basically the Shia pipeline plot from Iran through Shia-controlled Iraq, somehow magically through Iraqi Sunnistan, and then to Shia-controlled or allied Syria, and then the other one was from, supposed to be from Saudi Arabia through Jordan and into, I guess, the Sunni-controlled part of Syria.
Now we call it Western Islamic State.
But, you know, that doesn't seem like any good way to build a pipeline anyway, total and complete, you know, warfare and insecurity everywhere.
You can't build a pipeline through Suicide Bomber Alley.
So, yeah, I don't know.
Do you think that it really has much to do with that?
Well, it's certainly an element.
Pipelines play an important geopolitical role, not only in the Levant, which we were just talking about, but also in the Caucasus and down through Azerbaijan and Armenia and that whole area, Chechnya, and through Turkey, and there is a big pipeline game.
It's analogous to the railroad building competition in the Balkans and Eastern Europe that preceded World War I. There's strategic corridors.
They're very important.
But I don't think, right at this moment, that anybody's going to invest billions and billions of dollars in building a pipeline through that area that you rightfully describe as Suicide Alley.
Yeah.
Same kind of thing with Afghanistan too, right?
I mean, I've heard it even argued that the policy isn't so much to build the Cheney pipeline across it or whatever.
It's to make sure that nobody else can.
Make sure to keep any peace pipeline from breaking out between Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India.
We got to keep these forces opposed to each other, not, you know, keep them investing billions of dollars in each other.
Well, that's right, because one of the principal pillars of America's empire, the world power, is its control of the Middle East, its imperial control, its little satrapies of countries that it runs, because he who controls, he who produces oil is very powerful.
And we can shut off the oil whenever we want from the Middle East, as we've been showing with Iran.
So, yes, that's important.
But I think the Afghanistan story, there's more to it than that, because the U.S. is digging into Afghanistan.
It's America's longest war.
Also, because it, A, can't bear listening to Taliban crow that it defeated the greatest military power on Earth.
And secondly, it's worried that China will start moving into Afghanistan, or India may.
The U.S. wants to keep its presence, its rook on that particular square.
Yeah, and it's funny about that, because it costs so much money to stay there.
They couldn't possibly be looking at it from the point of view of the national interest and the bottom line here.
If they're willing to just continue to hemorrhage billions of dollars and at least thousands of lives in order to just keep losing a war forever, but never call it quits.
It's really amazing, really.
In fact, let's talk more about Afghanistan when we get back.
And then we talk more about Turkey, too, because Eric Margulies, he's got this great new article.
It's at UNZ.com.
You can find it in the viewpoints today at Antiwar.com.
Turkey, success story turns to disaster.
And check out Eric Margulies.com and his book, American Raj.
And we'll be right back after this.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Eric Margulies from EricMargulies.com.
That's how you spell it.
EricMargulies.com.
And yeah, he writes for UNZ.com and LewRockwell.com.
And he wrote the book, American Raj, which you ought to read.
And now, so yeah, we're talking about Turkey and now breaking into Afghanistan.
We'll get back to Turkey here in a minute.
But so here's my thing.
You know me.
I'm kind of an alarmist some of the time.
And I wonder whether 10,000 American GIs, some drone pilots and ground crews and however many thousand mercs, are they enough to guarantee their own safety?
Is that number of American soldiers enough to be their own force protection?
Or are they really risking a fall of Saigon type moment here where the Taliban walk right into Kabul the same way they basically took Kunduz just in the last couple of weeks?
I guess they gave Kunduz back.
But anyway, seems like they're a lot more powerful than General Westmoreland has been saying.
Well, that's an excellent question, Scott.
I think the Americans have made the calculation that there are 10,000 troops who will be defensively based in four main bases, two of which are airports, Bagram and in the east, a major airport, two other big cities.
That will be enough to keep the lid on Afghanistan and prevent its government from being overthrown and kicked out by Taliban, which is the major embarrassment that would happen.
It would be like another Saigon.
There will be enough American troops there.
Don't forget the key military elements in Afghanistan, not so much the number of troops as the presence of the U.S. Air Force.
The Air Force has been running at titanic expense 24-7 air cover over Afghanistan.
And whenever an American or government troops get into trouble, they call the U.S. Air Force.
And within minutes, they're there bombing and strafing on these fearsome AC-130 gunships that just blew apart amidst Sandstorpe Frontier Hospital.
So it's air power.
Without air power, the Americans would be run out of Afghanistan.
They could not hold their positions.
The same thing happens three or more times to the British.
But so wait, is the reverse true there, where as long as we got the air power, those C-130s, they sure can put fire onto human beings.
No doubt about that.
As long as we got that, they can stay basically forever and refuse to ever call it a loss.
That's quite right.
But the expense is tremendous.
Well, if the entire Afghan puppet army, that's our army, who are being paid to fight, or who come from minorities like the Tajiks and Uzbeks, who hate the majority Pashtuns and therefore allied themselves first with the Soviets and then with us, and third, who run all the opium business in Afghanistan, or most of it, as long as they can just sort of hang on.
But one day, if they fall apart, it's going to be difficult, but not impossible, for the Americans to hold on together.
I remind you, in the 1920s and 30s, the British ruled, the British Empire ruled Iraq exactly the same way.
They had a small number of British troops, they had an Iraqi puppet army, and they had the RAF based out of Habibania Air Base.
And whenever anybody acted up in Iraq, the RAF would come and bomb them and use poison gas against them to quiet them down.
It's a system that worked well for the British and has been working for the Americans.
All right, well, so now back to Turkey for a minute here.
And I'm sorry, because there's a lot more I want to ask you about Afghanistan, but I want to get back to the Turkey thing.
My understanding, and it's a very generic and oversimplified one, you'll forgive me, I know, because you're a nice guy.
It seems from here, they got this seeming paradox from an American point of view, that the liberals there, meaning the urban, educated, more secularist types, they prefer military dictatorship, just like in Egypt, because if they have democracy, the conservatives will win.
And that's the problem they're dealing with is, Erdogan is a conservative, but as long as they have free and fair elections, and the military is, as you put it in your article, kept in their barracks, then the conservatives are always going to win.
And so we see, you know, the Americans always see everything through the secularists eyes, because they're from the big city, and that's who the American media types are talking to, and that kind of thing.
But they kind of sell them the rest of, you know, who supports the government, what's really going on there short.
But then you also say in your article, that the military is getting sick of sitting in their barracks, and they're getting sick and tired of Erdogan.
So I wonder if you can, you know, explain how all that works and incorporate the military, maybe Erdogan's relationship with the American empire, as opposed to the military's relationship with the American empire, and just how well they're getting along here and how much danger there is of a return to a military dictatorship.
The first thing we should note, Scott, is that using American political labels for anybody in Turkey is wrong and misleading.
Liberals, conservatives, the moderate majority of people in Turkey who believe in Islamic principles of government, which are primarily welfare, social welfare, helping the poor, helping other afflicted Muslims, not lying around cutting off people's heads, as Fox News would tell us, they are in the majority.
And yes, the city dwellers, if you want to call them the urban elite, has ruled Turkey since the 1930s, since the days of the Atatürk dictatorship.
And they rule it because they control the army, they control the universities, they control the law courts, and they can control a big hunk of the media.
And they have had their own self-perpetuating, clannish, incestuous group of oligarchy, where these oligarchs control all the major business, or used to in Turkey, and they enrich themselves, and they put their men in.
Meanwhile, there's the army, 500,000 men, very tough army, biggest army in Europe.
And the Turkish generals were made like co-conspirators with the anti-Muslim urban elite.
And they consider themselves defenders of the sanctity of the Turkish Republic, blah, blah, blah.
In fact, they were a pampered elite, like the Pakistani army, the same thing, and they want to have their say in politics.
And Erdogan pushed them out of politics.
They're very unhappy, they're grumbling, they're resentful, they're closely allied to the Pentagon.
And the Pentagon doesn't like Mr. Erdogan, the U.S. media doesn't like him because he's considered not pro-Israeli.
And so there's a lot of grumbling and restive generals there.
There could be an explosion anytime.
Okay, and now, we're gonna end up running just a little bit into the break here, because I gotta go back to his relationship now with the PKK.
And what had been peace has now, you know, because of all the intervention in Syria, etc., has completely blown up.
But now, so the YPG and the PKK, the YPG, I guess, or am I saying it right?
I might have the letters in the wrong order.
The group in Syria, they're allies with, are they one in the same with the PKK?
And I know they have, you know, quite a different political structure and set of goals than, say, the Talabani and Barzani factions in Iraq.
But, you know, I guess, well, I don't know, what the hell, what do you make of, I'll try to ask it in as broad a way as I can, what do you make of the, at least, short-term, medium-term future of Turkey's relationship with Kurdistan, Turkish and Syrian Kurdistan, I guess?
It's bad and it's gonna get worse because of the wars in Syria and Iraq.
And the fact is, things were heading towards in the positive direction until we, the U.S., started arming, heavily arming the Kurds in Iraq and Syria.
And these Kurds are the first cousins of the Kurds in Turkey and their relations are, so far, pretty good and close.
And there's been an exchange of arms and strategy between the two.
And the rising of the Kurds in Iraq and Syria has obviously infected the Kurds in Turkey.
And once again, the specter is in front of their eyes, or the hope that there will be a new transnational Kurdish state created in the heart of the Mideast.
All right.
Well, with that, I'll let you go.
Thanks again, as always, for coming on the show, Eric.
I sure appreciate it.
My pleasure.
All right, Sheldon.
That is the great Eric Margulies.
He wrote the book, American Raj, Liberation or Domination?
Yeah, pretty obvious.
At least attempted domination there.
UNS.com, that's where he writes.
LewRockwell.com and UNS.com.
And you can find this one in the viewpoint section today at Antiwar.com.
Turkey, success story turns to disaster.
And we'll be right back with Keegan Stephan right after this.
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