All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio here on chaosradioaustin.org and the Liberty Radio Network.
And our first guest on the show today is Eric Margulies.
His website is ericmargulies.com spelled like Margolis, ericmargulies.com.
He's the author of the books, War at the Top of the World and American Raj.
And he knows as much about the old world and the Middle East as I guess any white man in North America.
Welcome to the show, Eric.
How are you doing, Scott?
Happy to be back with you as usual.
I'm very happy to have you here.
So I want to ask you, well, so is this the end of the Mubarak regime?
But then I worry that when this podcast goes out later on, the archive goes out and most people actually end up hearing it that way from anti-war.com.
By then, he'll have already been run out of town.
What do you think?
Well, I think he's on the way out for sure.
And the army, they're refusing to shoot down demonstrators in the street, I think, has sealed Mubarak's fate.
It's just a matter of days or weeks.
Certainly, the U.S. behind the scenes and Israel are pushing very hard to keep him in power.
He's Israel's most important ally.
And Washington has used him as the overseer of Egypt for 30 years.
But he's finished.
Of course, the big question is what next?
Right.
Well, politically speaking, isn't it at some point doesn't Obama have to go ahead and say, call the CIA and say, all right, what's plan B and what's plan C?
Because they're not going to be able to keep Mubarak.
I mean, they must know that by now.
Right.
They do.
Scott, there is a plan B.
In fact, I wrote a column on my website last April saying that the U.S. and particularly the Pentagon, which is very influential in Egypt, had already picked out Mubarak's successor.
And that's General Suleiman, the intelligence chief.
Oh, really?
And you already wrote that last April.
So if me and my small way could figure that out, I'm sure somebody in Washington knew it, too.
But Suleiman was the U.S. candidate.
He was the man who was in charge.
He was the chief torturer of Egypt.
He ran the secret police for a decade.
He was very intelligent, skillful man, but also notorious for his secret police and the torture and repression in Egypt.
He was a key ally of the CIA.
So that is Suleiman was the man.
But the problem is now that Egyptians don't want that either.
So what happens next?
Well, my prediction.
Well, wait, wait, wait.
We need to add there that this is the guy Suleiman is the guy that Mubarak, when he dismissed the entire government except himself and named a new cabinet.
He named this guy to be the new vice president, which he'd never done before, named a vice president.
Right.
And everybody thought he was trying to put his son, Gamal, in power.
That's right.
So here he is when he made this guy vice president.
He's basically saying soon enough, I'll go and this will be your new dictator.
I think so.
Mubarak is 82 years old.
He has cancer, reportedly.
I mean, he he knows that his days are numbered.
So he's trying to perpetuate his own regime.
Remember that it's not just Mubarak.
There's a whole oligarchy around Mubarak, a very rich Egyptian businessman who and high government officials who've grown rich under his rule and his family.
And he's trying to protect them once he's gone.
Well, now, but you're saying, you know, the million people out there in Tahrir Square is how it's pronounced.
Yes.
The million people or more that are assembled there today and out in the streets of not just Cairo, but Alexandria and the rest of the major cities there.
As you say, they don't want this guy.
They're not going to put up with this.
So what are they going to put up with?
You know, the neocons are saying that, oh, no, this is just like Iran 79.
And if we don't back our military dictator, he's going to get replaced by some ayatollahs or something.
And then they'll never do what we say again.
Well, that's that's quite right.
Israel has been particularly beating the drums on this issue and its lobby in the U.S.
Netanyahu just said it yesterday.
It's not the case.
This is a false alarm, a red herring.
There are very few similarities between Egypt and Iran of 1979, and the Egyptians so far are calling for democratic middle of the road government.
There's no religious element in there.
There is the Muslim Brotherhood, which has taken a very, very low key role and which is often been accused of being stodgy and conservative and of no interest in politics and a bunch of old fogies.
So these are not firebrands, as the Shiites are.
These are mainstream Sunnis.
So forget the comparisons being made by the neocons.
Of course, they're trying to support dictatorship, but it's not going to work.
Well, now about the Muslim Brotherhood, I don't know.
Just tell us everything you know about them or something, because the neocons certainly want us to believe that this might as well be Amin al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden.
They're going to win over there.
That's right.
Well, the Muslim Brotherhood was started in 1924 to bring a more religious knowledge and awareness in Egypt, rather along the same lines as your Christian Democratic parties, which were Democrats, but they wanted with Christian values.
This is these are Democrats with Muslim values of social justice.
And the party has gone through many different transmutations and changes.
It's been outlawed frequently under Mubarak.
It's been outlawed for decades.
It is.
Well, they were pals with the Nazis back during the biggest war, right?
Not really, pal.
No, I think there were anybody in the Arab world who was rooting for the Germans was doing so, hoping that the Germans would throw out the British who were ruling the whole Middle East at the time.
There was no attraction to Nazi philosophy.
It was just get the Brits out of here.
But the Muslim Brotherhood in recent decades has been apolitical.
Its leaders have said repeatedly they don't want to get involved in politics.
They're focused on social issues, on education.
Well, wait a minute.
Rewind a little bit.
Let's somewhere between World War Two and right now when they're more apolitical.
And I want to let you get back to that.
But I remember reading in Bob Drive's book, Devil's Game, that the Brits and the Americans, the intelligence agencies use the Muslim Brotherhood and promoted the Muslim Brotherhood.
They were worried about the Egyptian and Arab nationalism of Nasser.
And rather than, you know, basically, I guess the choices then were either the Soviets, Arab nationalism, i.e.independence from the West and the Russians, or let's see if we can support these right wing religious types and they can undermine the nationalists and the leftists.
So that's quite right.
And the communists, they were they were seen as a bulwark and were discreetly supported by the CIA to various degrees.
And British also.
But the Muslim Brotherhood has proved a big disappointment for many Egyptians because in recent years, they're not firebrands anymore, as they were some firebrands in the ranks in the 1940s and 50s.
And I believe one of their members tried to assassinate President Nasser.
But in recent years, they, as I said, they were concentrating very much on social and educational issues, staying out of politics.
They're run by a bunch of old men who are constantly accused of being too timid and they have no real political platform.
However, they are still the largest, best organized opposition movement in Egypt, all the others having been crushed and the Muslim Brotherhood was driven underground.
So they may have some people in their ranks that are going to surprise us.
We don't know yet.
But best estimates were if there were a free and open election tomorrow in Egypt, they would garner somewhere between 25 and 30 percent of the vote.
So they're not an overwhelming force, but they are well organized.
Well, and that's because real democratic organization by others in that society has basically been outlawed up until this point, outlawed and crushed and destroyed.
And this is common all the way from Morocco to Iraq, that the dictatorships that rule these countries have destroyed the moderate, centrist, any kind of opposition, leaving only underground radicals, not all of them are radical, but certainly underground movements.
And this has been done with the full knowledge, consent and support of the United States and Britain and France.
Well, so are you optimistic about this?
I mean, right now, it looks like my hero, the former head of the IAEA, who stopped, could have stopped the war with Iraq, if anybody listened to him, certainly deserves great credit for preventing America from bombing Iran over the last few years.
It looks like he's going to be the head of the new caretaker government or something.
Do you think they'll be able to throw together fair elections soon enough that they're really legit and, and I guess, with enough window of time that other people have a chance to get organized, I guess, give me a real quick yes, no.
I don't think Baradai is the man.
I don't think he's strong enough.
I don't think he has enough support.
Soon as this breaks out, we're coming back with Eric Margulies on the revolution in Egypt.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Eric Margulies.
He wrote the book American Raj, and we're talking about the future of the revolution over there in Egypt.
Eric Margulies.com is the website.
He's got a piece actually in the viewpoint section today on Anti-War.com, the Mideast Burns.
Now, when the music so rudely interrupted us, we had to go out and take that break.
Eric, you were talking about how Mohammed ElBaradei ain't the one.
I don't think so.
He's a nice, congenial man, but he doesn't seem to have any grassroots support.
And even though the Muslim Brotherhood said that they would let him negotiate and represent them, probably in part to assuage American fears that they're not dealing with some turban bulla, but with a bureaucrat, nevertheless, I think chances are high that there's going to be a lot of ongoing political confusion, and this runs the risk of eventually leading to a military coup.
And my guess would be about 60% that a young general is going to emerge out of the ranks, a major general or a brigadier general, and organize a coup to seize power.
What will happen then, whether they will become ruling officers or open the way towards democratic elections, I don't know.
But one thing is certain, that a lot of Egyptians, they want to purge the upper ranks of the military, secret police and government.
This hasn't been done yet.
Now, how much do you think that the average people in Egypt care about their government's relationship with the United States and Israel?
And is that, you know, in their top five reasons they want this government overthrown?
Or that's just the reason America and Israel are involved?
Well, the neocons, for our own purposes, the neocons will poo-poo it and say that it's not a thing at all.
But in fact it is, because there's been bitter and violent opposition to the Mubarak clique, and before him, Sadat, who was a long-time US ally and asset, because of the policy of Egypt.
And the exact same thing happened in Iran.
We are forcing the governments of these, the dictatorships of these countries to follow policies that are hated by the common people.
And the chief policy is support for Israel and abandonment of the Palestinian people.
That issue counts very much in Egypt.
And thanks now to the internet, to Al Jazeera TV, Egyptians and people across the Muslim world see the suffering and the torment of the Palestinian people every night on television.
And it horrifies and saddens them, but it also shames them, because Egypt used to be the leader of the Arab world.
And the defender of Arab rights, and today Egypt has become, under Mubarak, has become a big fat nothing.
Well, and that's not to say, is it, that the people of Egypt would rather have a war with Israel, just that they don't want to be supplicants like this?
They don't want to be supplicants.
Excellent choice of words, Scott, I commend you on your vocabulary.
And also, they don't want to be seen as being the co-jailers of the Palestinians in Gaza with the Israelis, and they want to return Egypt, not to go to war with Israel, but to say, listen, you've got to make peace with the Palestinians.
If you want peace with us, you've got to make Palestinian peace.
And that's what the whole Arab world should be saying, but it's not.
Right now, the dictators that run it are dancing to Washington's tune.
Well, you know, there's a very important story last week that got buried under all this other coverage about some leaks out of the Palestinian Authority of decades' worth of their negotiations with the Israelis.
Can you give us a thumbnail on what those Palestine papers said, and what effect they have on opinions, say, for example, in the West Bank, where the Palestinian Authority is the authority?
A bombshell.
The transcripts of meetings between the Israelis and the Palestinians were leaked to Al Jazeera, and what it revealed was that the so-called the Palestinian Authority, that's Mahmoud Abbas and his people...
What we used to call the PLO, right?
The PLO, yeah.
The people who took over after Yasser Arafat died or was murdered, because a lot of Palestinians believe he was poisoned to get him out of the way, the people who replaced them were a bunch of quislings.
They're stooges of the Israelis and the Americans.
That's what the transcripts, not my words, that the transcripts reveal.
And that they are complete collaborators with the Israeli occupation, and also they even urge the Israelis to go and attack Gaza and try to overthrow Hamas.
These are the most disgraceful people.
The rest of the Palestinians are calling them traitors, and it's a well-chosen word.
And we see the Israelis treating these people with contempt.
And these so-called peace negotiations that have been droning on forever are just a complete charade, as I've been saying.
And they're a charade between puppets and the Israelis who really couldn't care less.
They just keep them going to placate Washington and its Arab allies.
It's a disgraceful and sordid story in the extreme.
But it never has really placated the people of the West Bank.
It's not a surprise to them that Mahmoud Abbas is a puppet of the West?
No, the only people who don't know this are the Americans.
You think there will be much effect on the ground in the West Bank or not?
I think so.
I think there should be a lot of erosion for the so-called PLO, Palestinian Authority.
And Hamas is revealed as the only authentic Palestinian movement, however radical.
At least they're not bought and sold like the PLO people.
Right.
Well, you know, which is funny because you think about how the PLO are supposedly the moderates now compared to Hamas.
But it was the Israelis playing that devil's game, supporting the religious right wing that really created Hamas in the first place, right?
That's correct.
The Israeli Internal Security Service created Hamas and funded it and opened the way for it as a way of splitting the PLO.
It created its own golem and this thing backfired.
By the way, Hamas in Gaza is an offshoot of the Egyptian Brotherhood in Egypt.
But it's not a terrorist group.
It's a group, as the Israelis claim, it's a group determined to fight for the restoration of Palestinian rights.
Well, and since this is the Holy Grail for some reason, they're the democratically elected government of the Gaza Strip, really of all of Palestine, right?
In 1996, an entirely free...
2006.
2006, I'm sorry.
The second entirely free democratic vote that was held in the Arab world brought Hamas a victory and ousted the PLO.
And the Israelis and the Americans immediately shut down the vote, locked them up in Gaza and annulled the result.
Same happened in 1991 in Algeria, when Islamists won the vote and the France and the US and the Algerian army crushed, annulled the election results and threw all the victors in jail.
Which brings us to the situation in Lebanon, where our closely allied state there is being replaced.
The government there is being replaced by a coalition led by Hezbollah.
What's going to happen there?
Well, more squabbling and nothing serious unless the Israelis decide to invade Lebanon, which they might do at any time.
They're making noises in this direction.
Hezbollah is really the legitimate government of Lebanon.
Nobody wants to admit it.
The Hezbollah fighters are the Lebanese army, because what passes for the Lebanese army is just a joke.
Yeah, they stayed in their barracks in the summer of 2006.
They're just totally...
In fact, the Christian, Maronite Christian defense minister in Lebanon was caught on tape telling the Israelis, asking the Israelis to attack his fellow Lebanese, giving them target locations.
So, the only thing is this ongoing investigation of who killed Rafiq Hariri could upset the apple cart, the falafel cart in Lebanon and lead to more internal chaos and possible war.
We don't know.
Yeah, that's always, I guess, the tinderbox, they say, in Lebanon.
Could go one way or another at pretty much any given time.
That's right.
But the U.S. is raising hysterical alarms about Hezbollah.
Hezbollah is an enemy really only to Israel, but the Israelis are making a lot of noise about this and are claiming they're under grave threat from Hezbollah rockets.
It's another dangerous situation.
And now, Eric, this all started in Tunisia and the Tunisians set an example on TV and the people in Egypt said, hey, you can just go outside and make your government go away.
Let's do it.
And they did it.
And now it looks more and more like this is going to be a successful thing that Mubarak's days, perhaps hours in Egypt are numbered.
And I wonder what example this is setting for the people of Yemen, the people of Jordan.
I see a headline here, Jordan's king sacks cabinet in wake of protests.
So not too much coverage of those in the media, but apparently some pretty heavy stuff going down in Jordan.
Give us kind of a run through the Middle East of what we can expect to happen now that, as you said, everybody's watching Al Jazeera every night and they're seeing every bit of this.
Scott, from Morocco to Iraq, most Arab governments rule by fear.
They terrorize their inhabitants.
They're kept in power by armies which never fought outside their borders.
They just they're designed to to keep the people under subjugation and and ferocious secret police who use torture and all kinds of executions and taking hostages and things like that.
So it's a very, very brutal situation.
And local mafias who are supporting the president, the rulers of these countries, suck up all the economic wealth that there is.
Tunisia, suddenly a fruit vendor who burned himself alive, allowed the galvanized Tunisians into stepping beyond the fear that they lived under for so long, 30 years in the case of its dictator, General Ali.
And saying, the emperor has no clothes.
And listen, where are the people we're going to overthrow them?
I'm just writing a tweet right now, in fact, that, you know, Scott, this revolution did not begin in Tunisia, as it seems.
It began in Turkey in the last couple of years, where the moderate Islamist AK Party, led by Prime Minister Erdogan in Turkey, finally managed after 40 or 50 years to oust the Turkish military from politics.
Before that, Turkey had been a disguised military dictatorship with a facade of parliamentary policy.
But the real power was held by the mighty Turkish army, which was very closely allied to the Pentagon.
And the AK Party of Erdogan broke the power of the Turkish military, forced it back into its barracks, and has established for the first time in modern Turkish history, a really thriving democracy.
And Turkey is booming economically as a result.
This was the first blow.
Now we have Tunisia.
Next, Egypt.
We don't know what's going to happen there.
Unrest in Jordan and Yemen.
I suspect Morocco will be high on the list.
We could also see events in Libya, even Syria.
And this is sending a fear to all the ruling elites and oligarchies across the Middle East.
Isn't it fun that now we can count Libya as another American-backed military dictatorship?
Colonel Qaddafi is another one of our new barracks.
He is indeed.
And he's been in power longer since 1969.
So he's really a survivor.
But his days have got to be numbered at some point.
I don't know.
I interviewed him in 1987.
And I found him a very strange man.
And I'm amazed that he stayed in power that long.
I think it's cool that it's at least a regional democratic revolution going on, at least somewhat a populist one anyway, in counter-reaction against the American empire rather than some Bush-inspired neocon thing.
And all the neocons, of course, are against it.
Democracy?
But what if they choose people who don't like Israel?
Well, it's true.
I mean, that's where all their claims for democracy were crocodile claims.
As an American, I am very, very elated to see a wave of real democracy, what we believe in, the values of our nation sweeping across the Middle East.
In my book, American Raj, my book is all about this subject.
It's about how America could bring and help the Arab world really attain a real functioning democracy and its institutions and revitalize the whole area.
I hope this will happen.
We don't know yet.
But at last, American values are breaking out all over, like corn in Iowa and Washington and its allies in Israel and some in Europe, too.
We really don't like this.
Yeah, well, you know, I hate to make predictions because usually they don't work out, so I don't want to jinx anything or anything.
But this sort of seems to me like it's 1988, 89, and this is the beginning of the end of the American Soviet.
And we're going to have velvet revolutions all over the place.
Why should the militaries in any of these countries come out against their people any more than the Egyptian army is doing?
Well, Scott, I've often, I covered the Soviet Union in the 1980s, and I've often made the comparison between today's United States and the old Soviet Union as imperial powers, as fading imperial powers.
And I saw a great line, Scott.
Somebody wrote, I wish I could remember who, I love America, I hate the American empire.
And that's pretty much my feeling.
I don't think America should be an imperial power.
So it's to America's benefit for America to stop being an oppressive power around the world.
Otherwise, you're going to get the whole world against us.
American tanks, American tear gas, American F-16 fighters and attack helicopters repressing the Egyptian public in Iraq and Afghanistan, etc.
This is not what the United States should be about.
So anything that changes this tide is, I think, beneficial for everyone.
Well, I kind of wonder about dominoes falling down, though.
I mean, the way the imperialists see it, they have to control Saudi Arabia.
If the government of Saudi Arabia were to fall, then that would mean invasion, right?
Well, the neocons and the powers that be in Washington have maintained the status quo of dictatorship across the Middle East for two reasons.
Number one, yes, to protect America's oil interests.
And number two, for the sake of Israel.
And this is an unsustainable, or looks like an unsustainable policy.
And you know, even if the Saudi government were to change overnight, they would still sell oil.
And by the way, the United States only imports about 13% or 14% of its oil from Saudi Arabia.
So the U.S. doesn't need Saudi Arabia.
Most of our oil now comes from Africa and Latin America, or General Chavez in Venezuela, etc.
But what gives it one of the pillars of American power is controlling the countries that produce oil, because that gives America a huge influence over Europe and over Asia and China and Japan, in particular, which do import a lot of Middle East oil.
But this is old thinking.
We need some glasnost, a perestroika.
We need a Gorbachev to come along and say, listen, America, forget this 19th century imperialism.
Let's go into a modern age of cooperation.
You don't need to rule foreign countries for oil.
All you have to do is buy it from them.
Right, and that's such an important point, because I think a lot of Americans think, yeah, but come on, we've got to get that oil.
And they just accept the unproven premise that you have to have an occupation and a tortured dictatorship in order to get that oil, when really what you're saying is that, no, we need a tortured dictatorship and occupation to keep that oil out of the hands of other states and things like that.
If we ever have a war with China, we get to cut off their supplies.
This is all state power mongering, not our state looking out for us and making sure that we have plenty of oil to drink.
Power games, George Orwellian power games, that don't bear much of that in relation to reality.
On another point, Egypt is completely dependent on the United States, not for oil, but for wheat.
And we supply, for decades, we supply half of Egypt's wheat for bread, the basic staple of the country.
We practically give it away to Egypt.
Congress allocates that.
That's why Egypt has remained such a close ally to Israel, because every time Egypt says something that Israel doesn't like, Congress suddenly jumps on Egypt's threat to cut off its food.
Well, now, they haven't cut it off, right?
The prices are going up for other reasons, inflationary reasons.
That's right.
But watch, it could yet happen.
That's something to not look forward to there, grain wars.
Well, thank you so much for your time and your insight, Eric.
I always appreciate it.
Thank you, Doug.
That's the great Eric Margulies, ericmargulies.com.
The book is American Raj, and he's got a new one on LRC right now.
