All right, y'all, welcome back to the show, Sandside War Radio.
Our next guest is Eric Margulies.
His website is ericmargulies.com.
He wrote the book War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
Welcome back, Eric.
How are you?
I'm just great, Scott.
Well, good.
I'm glad to hear that and I'm happy to have you here.
So I have three articles and then a question, I think.
First article is news.antiwar.com by Jason Ditz.
U.S. pressing Yemen for more attacks on al-Qaeda.
Then from the New York Times today, no, two days ago, the 26th, Saudi border with Yemen is still inviting for al-Qaeda.
No wonder, I guess, they're pressing strikes there.
And then from Voice of America News.
Report, Western presence fuels Yemen-Somalia insecurity.
So now that's the background is that this is the these are the headlines this week for the southern, I guess, southwestern tip of the Arabian Peninsula there.
So that's the background of this.
First of all, now, tell us what you know about Yemen.
And then tell us about what's happening there.
I first went to Yemen in 1976 when it was just creeping into the eighth century A.D.
I found an absolutely magical, mesmerizing land of great antiquity.
It was like walking back into the pages of the Old Testament.
Unlike the rest of the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen is fairly fertile, and it has very high mountains with valleys and rain.
And it has a big population that has almost 23, 24 million people in a very old population.
This was the Bible's land of the Queen of Sheba, the origin of perfume that we use, and a very important trade route between the Middle East and Africa.
But it sort of stayed on the sidelines for a long time.
And it's a wild, wild place ruled by not ruled by anybody.
It's just it's a tribal country where the tribes have been feuding and fighting.
And there was a sultan in the capital, Sanaa.
And when I went there, I was enchanted to find that at dusk, guards on the city walls would blow a ram's horn and the gates of the city would close.
That's what Yemen was like.
It's changed somewhat, of course, but it's still a pretty exotic and wonderful place.
Oh, wow.
That sounds really cool.
Blown on a ram's horn straight out of some book about a long, long time ago somewhere.
That's right.
And all right.
Well, wait, tell me, when did the Brits leave?
And tell me about the war between the socialists and the Sunnis and the Shias and all this.
I know that there's some of that history there.
I just don't know what it is.
Well, it's pretty complex stuff.
The British in the 19th century came in and grabbed the very tip of what's today Yemen, which is Aden, because Aden has a very large harbor.
And Aden became one of the most important points on the so-called imperial lifeline, linking Britain to India.
But there was a lot of fighting in Yemen between the tribes.
The British tore part of Yemen away and created South Yemen as the sort of hinterland for the Aden colony.
Then, eventually, when the British pulled out of Aden, there was fighting between North and South Yemen.
And they finally, after some assassinations and bombing plots and various nefarious things, they finally reconciled, got together, united North and South Yemen.
And there you are.
And along went the Yemenis, ignored by everybody, until some oil was found off Yemen.
Then the Americans suddenly became interested, and they came in Yemen in the 1980s.
And the government in there is a military dictatorship, which is supported by the U.S., like many other places in the Middle East.
And Yemen's major value is that it's as big a population as Saudi Arabia, maybe bigger.
And it poses a threat to the potentially American colony of Saudi Arabia.
The Bin Ladins came from Yemen.
It has very revolutionary feelings in Yemen.
They're very feisty, spicy people.
And when they're not busy fighting with each other or with the central government, they then tend to fight foreigners.
And lately, they've been shooting up tribes on the northern border, shooting with the Saudis, who are very worried about infiltrators coming in from Yemen.
There's a civil war going on between the northerners and the southerners.
And there are some tribal fighting going on, too.
So it's a very confused, murky situation.
And in the middle of this, to Washington's enormous consternation, they say Al-Qaeda has implanted itself in Yemen and is popping up all over the place like corn in Iowa.
Yeah.
And, well, since that's not really a company or a government or even a gang or anything, it's mostly just an agreement among many people who haven't met each other to fight the United States.
Basically, you know, instead of their local insurgencies, it seems like flying drones over there and bombing them is, I mean, unless you're just going to bomb them with an H-bomb, bombing them with drones means you're creating more people who decide that, yeah, you know what?
We probably should kill the Americans first and then get back to killing our own governments or whatever their problem is.
You're right on target with that, Scott.
And what's happened is that there's a great deal of opposition to the government, which is very corrupt and dictatorial and all kinds of tribal intrigues going on.
And anybody who's now fighting the government, Washington has declared the current humanitarian dictatorship to be pro-American.
And an important American asset.
So anybody who fights against the government for any reason whatsoever is now considered an enemy of Washington.
And quickly becomes Al-Qaeda, even though, you know, that's a catch-all phrase for any anti-government or anti-American groups.
There may be some Al-Qaeda there.
There may be a handful of them.
But there's certainly a lot of anti-American people.
And as you say, the more we bomb, and the U.S. has been launching covert airstrikes, not just drones, but also flights.
We have a big base, secret base in Djibouti, just across the Red Sea, former French base.
From this base in Djibouti, where we're beefing up our presence in planes and special forces troops, we've been launching attacks against Yemen.
And of course, this has just made the Yemenis as angry as hornets.
Yeah, well, you know, in Barack Obama's West Point speech, he announced the phony July 2011 for the beginning of the end of the Afghan war deadline thing.
At the end of that speech, he had to make sure and tack on something tough there.
So he said, by the way, Yemen, Somalia, you're next.
We're coming for you.
But the truth was, as anybody who was reading news.antiwar.com knew, as Jason Ditz had been cataloging there from press around the world, America had been bombing Yemen for a couple of weeks, maybe longer than that, and certainly on and off longer than that.
You know, George Bush had a drone strike back in the day there, what, in 2003, I guess.
But this bombing continued through right around Christmastime, when then Yemen was supposedly the source or the origin of the attempted attack on Detroit by the underbomber, Abdulmutallab.
And, you know, think about that.
I was eating my Christmas dinner when I heard the news.
And, you know, imagine if that had actually worked.
Plane explodes over Detroit lands and kills all these people, whatever, if that attack had actually been successful.
Eric, think of how the world would have changed right then.
And there's just no question about the chronology and the cause and effect here.
And, of course, Amnesty International went and showed, look here, the pieces of the cluster bombs, which, of course, they're still duds, cluster bomb units laying around, waiting to go off and kill some kid.
And this is how this is the surgical strike to, you know, better than Donald Rumsfeld's broadsword.
This is how we're taking care of business there.
Well, before that underwear bomber, I'm not told I'm sound old-fashioned saying underwear.
It's supposed to be undergarments or something.
Underwear bomber.
The U.S. had launched airstrikes that had killed up to 200 Yemenis, tribesmen, and they claimed it was the Saudi Air Force that was doing this, but it wasn't.
It was the U.S. Air Force.
All right.
Hold it there.
We'll be back, y'all, with Eric Margulies, author of American Raj on Antiwar Radio after this.
Antiwar.com/donate.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
We're talking with Eric Margulies, author of American Raj.
His website is ericmargulies.com.
Turns out you can also find him on Twitter.
All right.
So we're talking about the U.S. government killing people in Yemen.
Why would they do this?
I mean, they got to know that they're only making things worse by dropping bombs from the sky there.
Eric, what's the game?
I don't think they really do understand that.
I think that the military machine that we've developed is just programmed now like some robot to go and say, you know, Al-Qaeda kill.
As I say, we confuse everybody.
Everybody slap with the name of Al-Qaeda these days.
So, of course, you have endless numbers of targets.
But what the U.S. is really scared about is that anti-American groups and anti-Saudi groups will use Yemen or are using it as a base to operate against Saudi Arabia, which is of enormous importance to the U.S. for its oil, and that radicals will start infiltrating.
And there are already probably at least two to three million Yemeni workers, maybe more, in Saudi Arabia.
There have been some reports I've seen suggesting that Yemenis may equal the number of Saudis in Saudi Arabia.
But there's great fear that the Yemeni diaspora in Saudi Arabia is going to be made more radical and more angry at the U.S.
Yeah, well, but I mean, what are they frightened of, really?
Like Al-Qaeda is going to overthrow the Saudi kingdom or something like that?
You look at Somalia, too.
Oh, no, the Islamic Courts Union is in power.
The Washington Post version had it back Christmas 2006 that there are three men who are suspects wanted for questioning by the FBI in Somalia.
Get them!
And they killed tens of thousands of people, man.
Well, the Somalia is a whole different story.
And that, you know, we are getting, we Americans are getting deeper and deeper involved in Somalia, which is an absolute madhouse of clans fighting each other.
And the only one that nearly stabilized Somalia and brought a stable government was the Islamic Courts Union.
You just mentioned it.
Military youth wing called Shabab, who are the latest villains in our pantheon of Islamic devils.
And these people are now being put on the target list.
We've been attacking Somalia now since 1996.
We engineered and financed the Ethiopians to invade.
And they got roughly handled and finally pulled out.
And we're now paying the Ugandans.
We bought a whole bunch of probably eight or 9,000 Ugandan military mercenaries to go and intervene.
They're called peacekeepers in Somalia.
But we're mucking around there because of the strategic presence of Somalia.
And meanwhile, we're just making things work and breeding more enemies on that side of the Red Sea.
Well, which is all to the good if you're in the Air Force, I guess.
It is.
It is, I suppose.
And for all the enemies of America, we'll be rubbing their hands and chuckling.
And not only this, but Obama's announced also that U.S. Special Forces are getting more active in West Africa, too.
We have a special West African command now.
And they're worrying about the Sahel, you know, the sub-Saharan area or Chad, Mali, Mauritania, Algeria, that whole area where there's the Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.
Another bunch of anti-Western group, anti-colonialists, if you want, who are angry at the French and the Americans.
And they picked up the Al-Qaeda name.
So our targets, it's an increasingly target-rich environment.
Well, you know, what's funny to me about this is if you just think, like, if the Soviet Union had survived another 20, 30 years here and it was still around, it would be so obvious that this is all just a KGB plot to destroy America by overextending it all over the world and bankrupting us.
Somehow the Republicans and the Democrats must have been taken over by the KGB.
Maybe that's what those Soviet sleeper, Russian sleeper agents were doing there.
I don't know.
But, you know, bin Laden identified this in the 1990s.
He said that America can only be driven out of the Muslim world by dragging it into all kinds of small wars.
And bleeding it like a gulliver in Lilliputians with razor blades.
And America, I can't believe, is just stumbling right along on the bin Laden plan and has now discovered all these Al-Qaeda around the Red Sea.
Well, wait a minute.
We are keeping 120,000 troops in Afghanistan, and God knows how many people covertly in Pakistan, under the rationale of fighting Al-Qaeda.
Because if we don't fight them there and keep them there, they'll spread.
Well, my God, they have spread.
They're in Yemen.
They're in Somalia.
They're in West Africa.
What's next?
Milwaukee?
Well, you know, let me try this one on you, because I've noticed that when Jussie Romano is a guest on Judge Napolitano's show, and he attacks that very premise that, well, if they're there, we have to fight them there.
Then when he imagines where it could go next, instead of listing the nations you just talked about, like further into the Arabian Peninsula and all that, he tends to think more due west from Afghanistan, north of Iran, and Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan, and like that movie, War Ink, Turakistan, every little stand they could.
They could always call anybody in any of those countries Al-Qaeda.
Do you think they really want to fight, or do you think they could possibly entertain the idea of fighting more wars, more occupations right there on Russia's southern border?
I think so.
I think it looks like the Republicans are going to win big next week, and the Republicans that are likely to take over, particularly in the foreign policy area, or have more influence, they're all super hawks and super likudniks, and they all want to kill them Arabs.
Fight harder with more weapons, or as I asked Bush's eminence Greece, Karl Rove, I said, how are you ever going to win this war in Afghanistan?
He looked at me with his eyes twinkling, and he said, more predators, more drones, like that.
Well, when did that happen?
Oh, this was about two years ago.
Man, yeah, I could just see the twinkle in his eye when you said that too.
And how's that working out?
It's killing a lot of people.
It's getting a lot of people P.O.'d at the U.S., but so far, according to the Pakistani media that I'm reading, it hasn't put any dent in the anti-American forces.
You know, I saw this lady, Eric, on Democracy Now, and she said that the Americans deliberately breached the banks of one of the dikes holding back the flooding river in Pakistan and flooded out a million people or better or worse in order to protect a drone base.
Do you know anything about that?
Can you tell me if that's really true?
Yes, I do.
And I hope it's not true, but I suspect strongly that it is.
This is what was reported by the Pakistani media and by Pakistani reporters who were right there on the spot.
Well, this lady on Democracy Now apparently was there as well.
Well, apparently the story is that we ordered, Washington ordered the Pakistani government to breach that dike to prevent the American air base from being flooded.
Hey, there are no American air bases in Pakistan.
They're allied air bases.
But anyway, what you were saying about Central Asia, there are militant resistance groups in every one of those Central Asian countries.
They're increasingly active, particularly so in Uzbekistan, but Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan.
And we're all calling them Al-Qaeda too, but they're local rebels who are fighting the red dictators, the red sultans who I call were in power from the Soviets.
Well, and who are now all buddies with the United States, right?
Exactly.
So we don't need to really, I guess we could help the local government put down their insurrection there and make matters worse that way, but we won't be having war against any of those states anytime soon, unless Russia does a coup there.
We're helping the dictator of Uzbekistan who boils people alive, one of his more charming cousins, and we're helping him fight Islamic terrorism.
Yeah, well, that's why we're friends with Muammar Gaddafi in Libya again.
That's right.
It pays to have oil.
Man, wow.
Yeah, talking about the American empire with you is a lot of fun.
I wish I could think of that awesome question I was going to ask you a minute ago, but I forgot it.
I should have written it down.
That's why I wrote my book, American Raj.
Raj means empire in Hindi, and what is called the British Empire, the British Raj and the American Raj, because we do have a Raj.
The only people who don't really understand this are Americans.
Right.
We're just helping out these poor people there.
As the British used to say during the Victorian era, our soldiers are going to the edges of the earth to bring Christianity and to help the benighted heathens.
Yeah, and people really do believe that kind of thing.
That's why I think it's so important to beat everybody over the head with the term empire all the time, because I think everybody knows, not just from Star Wars, but even just from American history, the little bit that they know is that the British were an empire and the good guys in American history declared independence from that because we're against that kind of thing or something.
Right?
A little bit.
That's right, Scott.
All right.
Thanks, Eric.
Okay.
Cheers.
All right, everybody.
That's Anti-War Radio for the day.
That's Eric Margulies.ericmargulies.com, amazon.com, American Raj.
We're at the top of the world.
See you tomorrow.
