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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott, and our next guest on the show is Eric Margulies.
He's the author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
His website is EricMargulies.com.
And, of course, he also writes regularly for LewRockwell.com.
And if you go there today, you'll find his article, Egypt's Foe Revolution, Bait and Switch on the Nile.
Aw, man, come on, Eric Margulies.
I don't want to hear this.
I'm sorry to take a cynical view.
I'm not like Hillary Clinton extolling the virtues of the new democracy in Egypt.
Boy, she got on board for that late.
She sure did.
Well, a few weeks ago, she was kissing the derriere of General Mubarak.
But, you know, with the Clintons, they're very flexible.
Yeah, exactly.
That's a pretty good way to put it.
All right, so tell me this horrible story.
Well, as I have been writing for some time now, the military coup, that's really what it was.
The military has sort of taken over.
But the military was at the top of the power pyramid of the police state that's been running Egypt anyway.
And Mubarak was shoved to the side.
And a junta assumed full power.
And it's a junta of old-time generals.
One of them is, I don't know, 70 or 75 years old, Field Marshal Tantawi.
And other generals whose main preoccupation, as with the Pakistani army, has been running shopping centers and hotels and tourist venues and telecom and stuff like that, rather than preparing to fight to the death to defend the borders.
All right, well, now, at antiwar.com, we've got a piece, Egypt promises quick constitutional referendum.
And I guess this would be the only hope, really, for a new, much more democratic state to take hold, would be if the military was so professional and honor-bound that they wanted nothing to do with politics.
But as you're saying, they already are the politicians.
Mubarak really was just a pinstripe suit face.
He was just a military dictator himself.
That's what the whole regime is.
All they did was get rid of the pinstripe suit, even the pretension of civilian control.
Now all they have is martial law.
That's correct.
Of course, Egypt has been under martial law for the last 30 years, since the assassination of Anwar Sadat.
The other, the last U.S.
-installed military man.
So I hope I'm wrong.
I hope that the military will conclave with whoever the opposition is.
We're not quite sure.
And somehow they will hammer out a real democratic constitution that will take hold in Egypt.
But my sense is that with all these generals, they have so much interest in the status quo.
Their families, their cronies, the business establishment that set off Mubarak and his corrupt regime, that they will be very loathe to make any real changes.
And they're just hoping that the Egyptians will settle back down and go back to their passive ways.
I'm not sure it will happen.
Well, yeah, that's what I want to hear because, you know, come on.
Everybody gets tired or something.
Every movement kind of dissolves sooner or later.
But, you know, that was Mubarak's strategy.
He played him out and it didn't work for him.
And millions of people came and overthrew him.
And that was something that they couldn't do this whole time.
And for some reason, you know, they were able to get their act together and defy this most powerful state, you know, compared to their power and win.
So they're not going to back down now.
And if they don't, they'll continue to win, right?
That's correct.
And we're now in a sort of a revolutionary lull.
The first wave of the revolution has swashed over us or Egypt, rather, and it's gone.
Now there's going to be a calmer period, I would think.
But as the deadline comes closer to September when allegedly elections are going to be held and as the constitutional process supposedly begins, you're going to get a lot of people angry whose expectations have been built up and are not seeing it even amongst the army.
Well, so now where?
Well, first of all, tell me about who's this guy, Tantawi.
Do you know all about him?
Well, Tantawi is an old time military man, an old crony of Mubarak.
He's fought in, I think, every war since 1967.
And just by being there, rose to the rank of field marshal.
I never displayed any particular military talents, but he's obviously a survivor and he's a military bureaucrat.
And he was promoted to the now defense minister because of his loyalty to Mubarak.
And he became de facto the chief man of the regime.
Alongside of him is an army minister, the head of the Air Force, the head of the Egyptian Navy, and the chief of staff of the army.
And they're also important figures.
Most of them are closely linked to the Pentagon and are closely linked.
And then there's the secret police apparatus, which is still completely intact and run by the shadowy General Suleiman.
Right, which that was my next question.
Where is he now?
Just running the secret police, biding his time?
He's in Cairo.
Has he been usurped by this Tantawi guy?
No, I don't think so.
No.
I mean, you've got circles of power in Egypt now.
The pyramid has turned into a big blob for the moment.
But being the minister of the interior in any country or the head of the secret police has one great advantage, and that is you have the files.
You've got the files on everybody.
And therefore, you can blackmail people.
That's one of the ways that Sarkozy in France rose to power so quickly, because as interior minister, he had everybody's files, all the shenanigans, their mistresses, their tax evasion, et cetera.
It put a lot of pressure on people.
But right now, you know, we're looking at a situation where you look like eight or ten men fighting under a blanket.
We don't really know who's on top now.
Well, let's hope that the people can stay on top.
I noticed that the press coverage in America basically has it that the whole thing is over, but on Al Jazeera they said there were still thousands of people.
I don't know if they were counting them in the tens or not, but still thousands of people outside protesting.
And I guess, you know, some of them were specific about they want higher wages, but then again, you know, I don't know who was speaking for them.
Well, we do see the unions coming out taking a very active voice.
They have been dormant under the last government.
Well, they've been ordered now to go home officially.
Yes, but whether they will or not remains to be seen.
But I've been saying this, Scott.
You know, they're saying, oh, well, you know, how can Egypt have a democracy?
It doesn't have any of the organs of democracy or the structure or anything else like that.
Well, it does.
It has a parliament.
It has courts.
It has the civil service.
It has a media.
It has unions.
It has all these building blocks of a democratic, stable social system, political system.
It's just that they're shadows.
They're Potemkin villages.
If they can be fleshed out, filled with real people and given some real power, Egypt can pull itself together, I think, relatively quickly.
Yeah, well, I guess, you know, a major part of, you know, what led to the feelings against Mubarak and, you know, his eventual departure there was the corruption.
And it seems like that's the worst thing facing the people of Egypt is the combination between the means of production, what little they have, and the state power there.
It's got to get separated one way or another.
But I guess, actually, you can say whatever you want about that, but also would you address the political parties in Egypt such as they exist?
Are they going to have time to get their act together before September?
Is there any real leadership among the opposition?
There is.
The Muslim Brotherhood has a long and well-established party establishment and system, and it has leadership.
It commands probably up to a third of the vote if one were held tomorrow.
But it's old.
It's dodgy.
It's sclerotic.
It's your grandfather's political party.
And it harks back to Egypt of 50 years ago or 60 years ago.
It's only Islamist light in spite of all the neocon propaganda that's been going around.
Aside from them, there really isn't anything of substance yet.
All right.
Well, hold it right there, everybody.
It's Eric Margulies.
His website is ericmargulies.com.
He's the author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj.
And he writes for lewrockwell.com, too.
And we'll be right back after this.
All right, Sha.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Eric Margulies, ericmargulies.com.
American Raj, Liberation or Domination is the name of the book.
He's got a piece at lewrockwell.com today, Egypt's Foe Revolution, Bait and Switch on the Nile, the uphill battle facing the protesters who did just successfully drive Hosni Mubarak from power after a 30-year U.S.
-backed tortured dictatorship there.
So, you know, I like to believe that the people power can continue to win here.
Eric, I wonder if you can continue to address for us here.
The break interrupted us.
We were talking about the opposition, what organization they have, what power their political parties can possibly have in the near future, that kind of thing.
Yes.
Scott, I was saying that the Muslim Brotherhood, we heard a tempest of false alarms about them in the States, a very stodgy, ultra-conservative group that wants to focus primarily on introducing Islamic, moderate Islamic values into religion and society and education.
They're nothing to do with the extreme Shia people in Iran.
And the Brotherhood has been banned on and off now since it was created in the 1920s.
It had a period where it had a violent tendency or some violent members, but, you know, it took a long time and it's now settled down into being a stodgy party, which is not going to produce any fireworks at this point unless there are changes of leadership.
However, it's still the best organized and structured political party.
Aside from the Brotherhood, there's the old Wafaaq's party.
Well, actually, hold it right there about the Muslim Brotherhood, because, I mean, obviously the first point is worth emphasizing that these are conservatives, not radicals.
You know, this is why Zawahiri hates them, is because they're more or less content with the status quo.
They certainly aren't, you know, bottom-up Leninist revolutionaries like the Al-Qaeda types are.
But then the other thing is it seems like, at least so far, they were playing their card pretty smart and saying, I don't know if just for public relations purposes or if their K-Street lobbyists, you know, recommended it or what, but they said, hey, what if we got Mohammed ElBaradei to kind of be our guy to support and negotiate for us and that kind of thing, because, of course, he may not be acceptable to, you know, the anti-Iran hardliners in America.
You know, their bad feelings over the past few years when he was the director of the IAEA.
But other than that, you know, he's a worldly kind of guy and part of the U.N. establishment, acceptable to the so-called international community.
And, you know, I wonder if they're going to continue to play it like that.
And I wonder whether you think that, other than them, whether Mohammed ElBaradei will amount to anything.
I really like him just because all those times that he reported that the agency has continued to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran to any military or other special purpose, which is the all-important truth in debunking the claim that they're making nuclear weapons over there and that we've got to have a war against them.
Well, he's an honest man and he has integrity.
I don't know how far he's going to get in politics with those qualities.
But he's not popular in Egypt.
Most people don't even know him.
But the Muslim Brotherhood was very smart in getting behind him and saying he'll represent us.
And they've made a point of saying that they have no major political ambition to take over the government at this point.
As you say, Scott, this is clearly one of their intentions is not to alarm Washington, which might intervene more heavily to support Mubarak if they had said that.
What they're going to do remains to be seen.
There are many different factions within the Muslim Brotherhood so far.
The very conservative factions are dominant.
And the Brotherhood very much resembles Turkey's AK Party, ruling AK Party of Prime Minister Erdogan in being a very moderate central Democrat party, sort of like Europe's Christian Democrats, that wants to bring in Islamic values, meaning social welfare, better education, help for the poor, all this kind of thing, sharing more of the wealth rather than cutting off people's heads and building a caliphate in northern Virginia as American conservatives have been panicked into thinking.
Well, now, the other thing, too, about the Muslim Brotherhood is there's only, what, a couple of 10,000 of them or something in a country of millions of people, and this revolution was really led by the youth who are secularist types who don't want anything to do, I don't think, with religious fundamentalism, radical or conservative.
Well, that's quite right, but, you know, this is partly our fault in the U.S. because we allowed, encouraged, and financed Mubarak and all our other Arab dictators to crush all opposition.
There was a party started by one man named Eman Nour who actually had the temerity to run against Mubarak in one of his rigged elections.
He got beaten up and thrown into jail, and his few supporters were beaten up, too, and got in serious trouble with the government.
So there's really nothing in the center, and what worries me so much in these countries is we are creating a self-fulfilling prophecy and saying that, you know, we've got to, we can't deal with anybody who has the word Muslim in their name because there's so much anti-Muslim hysteria in the United States.
Egypt's a Muslim country.
It's like the Egyptians saying to us, hey, we won't deal with anybody who's a Christian in your country.
It's crazy, but what we're doing, if we don't allow the moderate center to come forth, then we're going to get the underground forces that we really worry about and who may be very extreme.
Shades of back in the day when the CIA was providing Saddam Hussein with the lists of people with glasses to kill like it was Pol Pot and, you know, back in the Reagan days, we were in on his game.
If I were looking for an executive headhunter for recruiting executives, I would not turn to the CIA.
They've had a deplorable record going all, I mean, when you think of Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, think of how many other Arab dictators and other dictators around the world who they've picked, not good choices.
All right, well, speaking of which, the CIA was attempting to install Benazir Bhutto after General Musharraf was forced out in Pakistan, and then she got bombed, and they said it was al Qaeda, and then the footage came out and she got shot before she got bombed, and then, you know, there are different reports blaming it on, you know, who knows, Taliban, whatever.
Now there's apparently been a warrant issued for former General Musharraf's arrest, although apparently he's safe in London.
I bet you they extradited Assange before him, but I wonder whether you think, well, what do you think?
Well, this has great personal, emotional impact on me because I knew Benazir Bhutto very well.
I was in constant contact with her, and in fact I was talking to her just six days before she was killed, telling her to be extra careful.
And I never believed for a moment that it was the Pashtuns or somebody else who killed her.
Obviously there was some kind of government plot.
But now what Musharraf is being charged with is not complicity in trying to kill her.
He's being charged by a Pakistani court where Pakistan has a totally rotten justice system of failing, having failed to provide her adequate security, and this may in fact be the case.
It could be part of a plot against her.
I don't think anything is going to come of this charge, but it's also designed to keep him out of Pakistan because he's been threatening to come back and run for office.
So I think his popularity as an Indian candidate would probably fare better in Pakistan than old Mush right now.
Well, but do you think there's anything to it that he would be in on the plot against Benazir Bhutto?
You know, I don't think so.
My gut just tells me that Musharraf would not have done that.
She told me, Benazir told me on the six days before she died, that if she was killed, that she said the people who would do it were a very prominent family called the Chowdhrys in Punjab province in Pakistan, one of the big sort of economic fat cats there, who were major supporters of Musharraf.
Take your guess.
I don't know.
You know, I'm still trying to figure out who assassinated my old friend Zia ul Haq, the president of Pakistan.
And that was in the late 1980s, and we still don't have any answers.
So I don't know if we'll get anything on Benazir Bhutto either.
Well, so what about her husband?
I mean, it's funny the way I see in the press that the parliamentary system there and all the politicians that are part of it have virtually no support among the people, and yet they still seem to have one.
Is it just a fake front for the military, like, say, for example, Mubarak's pinstripes in Egypt a few weeks ago?
Yeah, Pakistan's parliament's a pocket-jabber house.
And if you – any big landowner gets to be in parliament.
So in parliament, they're just bought and sold.
It's meaningless.
It's just a facade to keep the Americans happy.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, I'm sorry that we're all out of time, as always.
We end before I'm done asking you questions, but that's the way it is.
I appreciate your time on the show.
We'll talk to you again soon, Eric.
Cheers, Scott.
Everybody, that's Eric Margulies.
He's the author of American Raj.
He writes for LewRockwell.com, and his own website is ericmargulies.com.
At LRC today, Egypt's faux revolution, bait and switch on the Nile.
