Yay!
It's time for Eric Margulies.
You all know this guy, regular guest on the show.
For decades and decades he wrote for Sun National Media in Canada.
And he wrote the books War at the Top of the World and American Raj Liberation or Domination.
He's got a tremendous archive at LukeRockwell.com, which I am scanning through the columnist's page, looking for the link to click right now on it.
But anyway, welcome to the show, Eric.
How are you doing?
I'm happy to be back with you as usual.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
Lots going on in the world, so much I'm not even really sure where to begin.
But I guess geographically speaking we should start in Libya.
But then I've got to figure out what exactly is the best question for me to ask you about Libya.
I guess I'll start with maybe just the bigger one.
Is it inevitable that European and or American ground forces are going to invade and conquer Tripoli?
Or somehow could the rebels work this out with just air power and maybe advisors, some special agents on the ground?
Or is it politically possible that the West could just say, well, I guess we screwed up and we're not going to double down, we're just going to call it off.
Because apparently, as things stand right now, the guys we're backing are on the run perpetually there.
I don't know how long they'll be on the run, because the British are sending, quote, advisors, unquote, military advisors, that is.
And there's talk in the European Union about sending some kind of military force to, quote, protect civilians, unquote.
The whole thing stinks to high heaven.
It's absolute errant hypocrisy.
But right now things are in a mess in Libya, and the Western leaders who stuck their heads into this hornet's nest, Cameron in Britain, Sarkozy in France, and our own beloved president, are not going to be able to say we made a mistake.
And they're going to pull out, because their political opponents will savage them.
So they're stuck with this, what one French minister called a crusade.
And yes, this is Mission Creek, pure Vietnam style.
And yes, it's almost certain Western troops' boots will be on the ground in Libya.
Otherwise, if we leave, our credibility as a world power will be at stake, and all that.
Yeah, all that is right.
We'll be laughingstocks.
More important than that, you know, the West, in my view, has begun a counteroffensive in the Arab world to try and squash the rebellions that are spreading there now.
This action in Libya is certainly part of that.
And they're also worried about Iraq and Afghanistan, because if the West is seen to be failing Libya, it's going to certainly reverberate in those countries.
Yeah, well, right, because nobody has witnessed America fail in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last eight and ten years.
Well, they're still there, though.
You know, unfortunately, being a former member of the U.S. Armed Forces, and a proud one, myself a veteran, I'm not happy seeing America exalting its military power by attacking small countries that can't defend themselves.
And, for example, like Iraq and like Afghanistan and now Libya, you don't see the U.S. going after real people who can fight back, like the North Koreans or the Chinese.
No, they go after these little countries and stomp them and beat their breasts with military exaltation.
It's not our proudest moment, and it's certainly not doing our credibility or reputation good around the world.
Yeah, well, and it also kind of reveals, you know, for Americans who don't really know geography that well and whatever, that if you narrow it down and you really think about the different land masses in the world and the different nation states and regional groupings that exist and so forth, America has no enemies at all.
We have no enemies.
There's Europe and there's Russia and there's China and there's us.
Those are the powers in the world, and none of them are threatening each other.
It's just wars against helpless little states in the southern hemisphere, basically.
Well, we do have enemies, if you ask the Republicans.
There are the Muslims everywhere who are planning to turn America into one giant mosque and a caliphate, and there are the liberal Democrats, who are even worse, who are lurking there in the shadows waiting to do in the Republic.
Yeah, waiting to hand the Republic over to the conservative Muslims.
That's right.
That's exactly right.
But you're quite right, Scott.
America has no enemies.
America spends 50% of total world military spending is spent by the United States.
If you add in America's rich allies like the EU and Japan, you're up to 70% of world military spending is spent by the Western powers.
And here we are like a spinster with a mouse standing on a chair screaming about tiny little pipsqueak threats.
You know, if 9-11 hadn't happened, I don't know what they'd be doing right now.
But beating the drums about terrorism, terrorism, 9-11, is keeping the arms industry chugging along and keeping us spending like drunken sailors to the tune of nearly $1 trillion per year on what we call defense, which is wrong in my opinion.
It should be called military spending, not defense, because nobody's attacking us right now.
And here we are, up to our ears in trillions of dollars of debt, struggling to cut government spending, and no one dares touch the sacred cow of military spending.
Yeah, well, that's certainly true.
Although, Ron Paul's argument is starting to carry a lot more weight on TV, it seems like to me.
I exclude Ron Paul from the other bunch of people in Washington.
He's an admirable and unique person.
Yeah, indeed.
Yeah, unique is the real point.
Everybody is always looking for more Ron Pauls.
I say there ain't none, there never has been before, and there aren't going to be in the future either.
He's just the one good congressman in American history, that's my view.
But, so back to Libya here now.
Who are we fighting for?
Is it really just Al-Qaeda and a bunch of coyote human traffickers and genocidal maniacs who like to kill black Africans for fun and all the stuff like I'm reading in the papers here?
That's all war propaganda.
I would suggest that, you know, nobody knows how many civilians were killed in Libya.
Well, wait, whose war propaganda is that?
Qaddafi's or the West?
Western war propaganda about having to go in to prevent genocide.
Well, but I mean, these are the good guys they say that they're fighting for.
That's right, but these good guys, we are a ragtag bunch of people.
Some of them are Islamic fundamentalists.
Some of them are modernizing Libyans.
We just don't really know, but they're in a mess.
They're all arguing with each other, and they have to send in British officers to straighten them out.
But the humanitarian claims for this war that we're intervening to protect the massacre is absolutely preposterous.
You take the number of people who have been killed, the civilians killed in the Ivory Coast, or the number of civilians that we are killing in Afghanistan and Iraq, and it seems perfectly hypocritical to be sending troops in to protect Libyan civilians about whom we never gave a damn before.
Yeah, I mean, the whole idea that this is some kind of long-term change in policy, that Obama now has decided to stop backing the dictators and really support democracy in the Middle East or something.
I mean, I hear people with degrees repeating things like that, but it just doesn't seem to make sense to me, especially when every day the people in Bahrain and the people in Yemen are shot.
The people in Iraq are shot by the governments that we support there.
Or protesting.
We are not supporting democracy in the Middle East.
That was one of the key points in my book, American Raj, was that we should be really building and encouraging democracy long-term in the Arab world.
We're doing just the opposite.
Look, Egypt, 848 civilians were killed in Egypt during these demonstrations.
Who killed them?
Well, they were killed by the Egyptian army and Egyptian security forces who were financed and armed by the United States.
And here we are sending troops in to protect Libyans against the wicked Colonel Gaddafi who, until before December, was a favorite ally of the United States.
So, really, Americans need to be told the truth about what's going on.
They're not getting it yet.
All right, well, what I want to know, too, is about Syria.
And I'm going to ask you all about it when we get back from this break.
Washington Post says CIA is running around there.
No surprise you heard it here first.
Eric Margulies was on this show a couple of weeks back.
All right, Santi War Radio.
Check out ericmargulies.com, lourockwell.com.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
Santi War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with Eric Margulies from ericmargulies.com, author of American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
And, you know what, before I ask you about Syria, which I've got to ask you all about Syria, but here's the thing, too.
I want to get back to this Libya thing, man, where we started here, which is that the British, the French, and the American governments here have completely painted themselves into this corner where they have to have a regime change in Tripoli, and yet they can't get a regime change in Tripoli, short of either defining regime change in a Clintonian fashion that will just blockade and bomb them and starve a million of them to death over a ten-year period, and then, you know, some other president will invade someday like Iraq kind of model, or they're just going to have to send in the freaking Marines.
And what am I missing?
Tell me that I'm wrong on this somewhere.
How long is it going to be before they just throw up their hands and say, okay, fine, we lied, we're sending in ground troops, we have no choice?
Well, it's headed in that direction, Scott, as we were saying, and unless a lucky cruise missile shot or airstrike kills Qaddafi, which is obviously what they're hoping for in Washington, they probably will end up doing this, or there's a coup in Tripoli that overthrows him, and there's some kind of let's make a deal.
Not all Libyans are going to be happy to be taken over by Western powers and be re-colonized.
And it's interesting because the last colonial ruler was Britain, and it's the British troops who are starting to land.
Yeah.
Well, I'm sure that they don't remember any previous history in dealing with the Europeans over there in North Africa, right?
That's not part of anything that they teach their kids over there, probably.
Well, so, and here's the other thing, too, they're successful either by insanely lucky Hollywood-style laser designators shot on Muammar Qaddafi's head, or work out some kind of coup with their sons, like military intelligence was trying to get the newspapers to tell the world last week, or something like that, or even when the Marines take Tripoli again, like when Thomas Jefferson sent them back in the days, only he had a congressional resolution authorizing it under Article I, Section 8, Clause 11.
Anyway, once that happens, then, oops, we just helped install at least some people who were members of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, the 2% of the Sunni insurgency that fought against us a few years back, and so we can't let them come out on top, and so now we're going to have to stay and make sure that they elect good men, like Wilson in Mexico, and just on like that, right?
Well, yeah, and we'll probably have to maintain troops there to maintain a puppet government.
Train up an army.
When they stand up, then we'll stand up.
But never mind the costs of that.
The U.S. is bankrupt, but never mind, because they'll trot the awful Paul Wolfowitz out of some back closet where he's hiding, and he'll explain to us that how invading Libya, just like invading Iraq, would pay for itself because we're going to plunder their oil and put a 50% markup on what we sell, and that way the invasion will pay for itself very quickly.
Yeah, well, I'm buying that, because recent experience shows that that's exactly how it works, right?
Exactly.
All right, well, so let's talk about expediting the chaotic chaos, to paraphrase David Wunzer, oh wait, to directly quote David Wunzer, in Syria.
There's an Alawite minority, as we've talked about on the show, that rules the Ba'ath Party and rules Syria with an iron fist over there.
There's a massive protest movement, and the Washington Post says that the CIA is to some degree or another behind this revolution, the Syrian version of this revolution going on right now, and I wonder to what degree you think that the West is in control of the revolution over there, and whether they can expect to win, or whatever you think is important to let us know about Syria, really.
Scott, there's mounting evidence, not just from the WikiLeaks story that the Washington Post ran, which, by the way, the New York Times buried as deep as they could, but there's also other sources of evidence.
I'm hearing from congressional sources in Washington that in fact the U.S. is much more deeply involved in stirring and trying to undermine the Assad government in Syria.
In conjunction, we're working in conjunction with the Saudis, that wonderful democratic force, and with the Israelis, and the operations being mounted out of Lebanon and supported by right-wing forces in Lebanon who were paid by the United States.
So who do they expect to take over the place after the Alawites are gone then?
Well, that was the fear for a long time.
Bush was going to march into Syria and overthrow it after Iraq, but suddenly a little bird said to him, the only people who are going to take over are the Muslim Brotherhood.
The mere mention of the word Muslim sent everybody to willies in Washington.
And it's true.
There is a very strong conservative right-wing Muslim Brotherhood presence in Syria.
It's the only other force beside the Assads, and it's starting to come out of the underground now.
But I'm sure that Washington and Israel and the Saudis have got some Syrians in their holding tank, just as we're seeing with Libya where these Libyans suddenly appear.
And Libya has been living in Fairfax, Virginia for the last 30 years.
Well, there will be tame Syrians who will also appear and will claim to be the new government of Syria.
But there's the U.S. efforts to overthrow Syria, part of this electronic revolution with Google and with Twitter and all that kind of stuff, social networking that the U.S. has used in Eastern Europe and in Georgia and would try to use successfully in Iran, is now stirring the pot in Syria.
But there's also genuine protest against the Syrian government that's happening, and the U.S. is trying to profit from it.
Sure.
Well, yeah, I mean, it can't be that the majority likes being ruled by the Ba'athists there.
But, you know, I wonder, I was kind of just off the top of my head, decided to throw in that reference to David Wilmser and all that.
But that's, I forget exactly the strategic institute of blowing things up or whatever the hell it is where they wrote, Wilmser and Pearl and others wrote A Clean Break, a new strategy for securing the realm for Benjamin Netanyahu back in 1996.
And then there was this other one that was by David Wilmser for the same think tank there in Israel.
This is where the phrase, expedite the chaotic collapse, comes from.
And it seems like their policy, the way Wilmser was describing it in there, was really what they prefer would be a failed state, to use Hillary Clinton's term or whatever.
They really want to see the Arab world divided into warring tribal and ethnic factions none of whom are, you know, the old Nasserite nationalism or even Saddam Hussein style nationalism in the Middle East.
But just, you know, let's pit the Alawites versus the Muslim Brotherhood versus the whoever.
Bring them all down to a low level against each other.
That way we can keep dominating strategically without spending every last dime we got on doing so.
That's right, Scott.
These people, I call them, they represent the neo-fascist wing of Israeli politics and Israeli and American politics.
The Richard Perle, the Wilmsers of the world, the people who pushed us into the Iraq war.
But look, they're harking back to their philosophy that came down to the Likud party and the Irgun.
It dates back to the 1920s when the chief of the far right wing sort of fascist Zionist thinker Vladimir Jabotinsky enunciated the philosophy that the far right in Israel used ever since.
I thought he was a commie, no?
He was a communist, but then he became a Zionist, but he ended up on the far right of the political spectrum.
A neocon.
A neocon, exactly.
Well, bravo, touche.
Look, he said the Arab world is so fragile that you deliver it some very hard blows and the whole thing is going to fall apart and splinter back into its tribal components, and that will leave Israel ruling the whole Middle East.
And that is exactly what is happening and what's happening in Syria.
So the neocons want to smash Syria and turn it into a tribal mess, but there are more responsible voices in Israel who are saying, wait a minute, the devil we know is better than the one we don't, and better not throw because we can get along with Assad in Syria, but if the Muslim Brotherhood comes in, who knows what will happen.
Yeah, well, you know, Lew Rockwell has pointed out, yeah, they claim they love freedom and democracy and all of this stuff in here.
Top on their list of countries for regime change is the last country in the Middle East where you can get a drink, you know?
The last secularist government.
That's right.
And really, in fact, as long as we're at that, could you compare and contrast and be realistic here?
There's no argument one way or the other that I prefer, really.
I just want the truth about comparing and contrasting the situation in Iraq before and after Saddam Hussein, because, of course, it's still the consensus, never mind that the surge worked, but just the Iraqi people are way better off now than they were then, and I just wonder whether you believe that that's true.
No, I don't believe that for a minute, and I don't because I spent a lot of time in Iraq in the 70s and the 80s, and I saw Iraq under Saddam Hussein.
It was a terrible, frightening dictatorship where they threatened to hang me as a spy, threatening secret police everywhere, but Iraq was very well off.
It was peaceful.
It was making great social progress, great women's rights, industrial success.
The only thing that was bad was on politics, and today's Iraq is an absolute mess and a horror show, far worse than it was under the days of Saddam Hussein.
Yeah, well, you know, I think about that book, Devil's Game by Robert Dreyfus, where he talks about how the British and the Americans always backed the right-wing religious factions against the socialists who were more inclined to be friendly with the Soviet Union and against the nationalists as well, the Nasserites and all that, and at least to read the history the way Dreyfus tells it in that book, it seems painfully obvious that for the CIA guys at the time, that if they really wanted to oppose the Soviet Union in the Middle East, they would have tried their best to make friends with Nasser and make friends with the nationalist forces there because they're much more like what the Americans want, not too religious, out of control, but right-wing types, and, of course, you know, you can always make a deal, buy them some F-15s and whatever, they'll do what you want.
They proved that they'd gotten away with that for decades and whatever, and instead they supported the religious kooks, especially the Muslim Brotherhood and, you know, later the Mujahideen and all these different, you know, religious forces in order to undermine the nationalists and the socialists both.
And now, really, you know, people talk about, oh, the Arab world is mired in previous centuries and whatever, but we're the ones who put them there, it seems like to me.
Well, we did a lot to keep the Arab world backwards and to keep it under the thumb of dictators, and what amazes me is there's no sense of shame in the United States over the fact that we have been supporting some of the ugliest, the most brutal dictatorships in the world.
No shame whatsoever.
Would you think that that's more or less right, that, you know, if you were a policy analyst type in the government back in, you know, the 1960s and 70s and whatever, that you would say, no, no, no, the more secularist nationalist types, as bad as they are, are preferable to the religious right over there?
Well, sure, and we know historically that the people that the Soviets hated the most were the socialists and other leftists who weren't under their thumb.
So we often did the wrong thing, but we're making the same mistake now because you just replaced the word communist with Muslim, and every time we hear the word Muslim, everybody goes into hysteria and starts jerking their knees and beating the war drums.
We did the same thing in the 1950s.
We don't learn.
Yeah, well, and then the more we react, the more we radicalize everybody, and I wonder sometimes about stupidity or the plan, especially when you look at Somalia, which, you know, you and I have been talking about Somalia on this show for years and years, you know, the American force, not just sponsored, but forced Ethiopian invasion of 2006, and, you know, there are reports we can read now that say, oh, my God, there's this al-Shabaab movement that's really dangerous and radicalized and wants to blow things up a lot and whatever, without any context to the fact that there was this moderate, old-men-run Islamic Courts Union in Somalia before America smashed it and radicalized everybody and created this basically Al-Qaeda in Somalia-type movement that never existed before 2006.
Thank George Bush and his neocons for doing that.
That was pure ignorance and arrogance to guiding forces in our foreign policy.
Yeah, it's all too bad.
All right, well, we're over time, but I really appreciate your time on the show, as always.
Eric, talk to you soon.
Always a pleasure, Scott.
Cheers.
Thanks very much.
All right, everybody, that's the great Eric Margulies, ericmargulies.com, lourockwell.com, and the books are American Raj and War at the Top of the World, and we'll be right back.
