Alright, y'all, welcome back to the show.
This is Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and a lot of times when I want to know things, I ask Eric Margulies about them.
He's the foreign correspondent for the West.
He writes at ericmargulies.com.
Welcome back to the show, Eric.
How the hell are you?
Thank you, Scott.
I'm just wrapped to my ears with commentary on Libya, a country that I've been to many times and know pretty well, and certainly producing news.
I hadn't heard.
Why don't you tell me what's going on in the world there?
Well, Scott, as I'm sure you have heard, a Libyan ragtag Libyan forces straight out of some kind of movie production, like Road Warrior, have managed to finally reach Tripoli, overthrow the Qaddafi regime, it seems.
The war is really being run by NATO.
And while Qaddafi is still on the lam, he hasn't been caught yet.
It looks like his days are numbered, and that we're about to welcome the new Western-backed Republic of Free and Democratic Libya.
Oh, yeah.
Well, I'm buying that.
So we brought democracy to another country.
Well, I feel really good about myself, then, somehow.
That's right.
Like a blogger at ThinkProgress.
Hooray, America.
Hooray for me.
Obama did it.
He freed the Libyans.
It's still a very murky situation, Scott, because the government, the regime, the guiding council that was cobbled together in Benghazi by the French intelligence service, the DGSC, who were being pushed by President Sarkozy of France, who act as a de facto government of Libya, is a grab bag of different elements.
And Qaddafi seems to have fallen.
He may be dead shortly, or captured.
But the big question everybody's asking is, who is going to end up running oil-rich Libya?
Yeah, well, you know, when they invaded Iraq, their chosen puppets, they had to win a whole civil war first before they could really claim a monopoly on the capital city, Baghdad.
Now it's an 85% Shiite city.
And so now the American-slash-Iranian project that is the Iraqi government can be the Iraqi government, right?
The Dala Party and Supreme Islamic Council guys.
But so, there's no disputing that this guy Qaddafi was a mad torturer and murderer and an evil tyrant guy.
Now that he's gone, do you think that there's any chance that the chosen government of the NATO powers are people that the country might support if they, you know, without having to have a further civil war wage?
Scott, two answers.
Number one, I interviewed Qaddafi.
I was with him in his headquarters above al-Haziza barracks.
Spent a whole evening together.
And I was, being a connoisseur of dictators, I always rate him at a mid-level on my scale of brutal, violent, sadistic, murderous dictators.
Because he wasn't all that murderous and violent.
And he did some good things for Libya.
His secret police were brutal.
But there are far worse regimes.
We can look at Morocco, we can look at Saudi Arabia, we can look at Iraq and Syria and so on down the line.
So call him a mid-level dictator.
He will not be missed.
But some of the people who are in this transitional council that has been cobbled together appear to be somewhat respectable figures.
Many, surprisingly, were working for Qaddafi until recently.
So what you're having is a situation, as in Egypt, where the existing structure, the leader has been kicked out, like Mubarak, but all the men who worked for him, or many of them, still remain in power.
This is the case in Libya.
There are not a lot of trained technocrats, and it's only 5 million people.
But there are also a lot of people who are in exile, as is the case with Iraq, many of whom were working for either the CIA or Britain's MI6 intelligence or France's DGSE, and will continue to do so in their new roles.
But there are a few respectable people.
There are a lot of iffy, questionable ones.
So you think that really the shell of the Libyan government, as it was, will basically remain in place, like in Egypt, and that maybe they'll incorporate more members of the eastern tribes, that kind of thing?
To an extent, but not as much as in Egypt, where really the whole structure of the government remained.
There are a lot of thrills and spills still awaiting.
In Libya, it's a very turbulent situation.
There's fighting going on.
And what could happen is, you know...
There was much less of a military state to begin with to be taken over.
That's right.
There was Qaddafi, who didn't even hold an official position.
He was the brother leader, and he would give edicts and commands, and people would sort of follow them.
But this transitional council in Benghazi, which is, by the way, a traditional bitter rival and enemy of Tripoli, the Benghazi group was really held together by their hatred of Qaddafi.
It was their only unifying principle.
Once Qaddafi is gone, they're all going to be at each other's throats, I think.
And there's so many people with disparate views and wants and needs in there, and tribal issues, political and regional issues, that it's very unlikely that things will go smoothly.
Yeah, I mean, I wonder...
Never mind peacekeepers or God knows what sort of nightmare that the NATO people have planned in store for the future here.
But just the rebel forces taking Tripoli, I mean, you know, I'm far away over here in Texas, I don't really know, but the best I've ever been able to read about these rebels, they don't impress me much, but that they have F-16s bombing their targets for them, supplied by us, and now that they've taken Tripoli, it still remains to be seen whether they can keep it, right?
Whether they've even really taken it, what's the strength of those who would resist them that remains, etc.?
Well, we don't know that yet.
I think that they are pretty much in control.
They've taken the Bab al-Azizia barracks, which was Qaddafi's headquarters.
He wasn't there, by the way.
That just happened a couple of hours ago.
And they hold all the nerve centers in the major cities and airports and refineries in Libya.
So those are the cards.
But what they do with them is another thing.
And by the way, it wasn't really the Libyan popular revolution, all these gunmen we've seen pictures of running around like in the old Mel Gibson movie, Road Warriors.
They didn't do very much of anything.
They were just extras in this drama.
The real fighting was done by NATO, and the way that happened was that NATO sent in Special Forces units, British SAS, French Marine Commandos, probably some American Special Forces.
And what they would do is they acted as ground controllers for the fighters, U.S. and NATO fighters, and British attack helicopters.
And the minute this ragtag arm mob met any kind of resistance, they would call in the airpower, and they would blow to smithereens anybody in their way, and they'd continue advancing down the road.
And that's how the fighting really happened.
And I think you'll find in subsequent weeks that the role of foreign Special Forces and advisors played a much larger role than we've heard so far.
Sure, yeah, it's all about that laser designator.
Bomb that thing.
Now bomb that thing for me from the air, from miles away.
Works very well, particularly in flat-open country like Libya.
And I'm sure a lot more civilians were killed by NATO than were killed by Qaddafi.
Remember, this NATO intervention was to stop civilian casualties.
I mean, how are these rebels supposed to even be an effective death squad, Eric?
Once the new ruling council or whatever that's been recognized by the Western powers supposedly takes over, how are these guys supposed to be able to...
They don't sound nearly as powerful as Qaddafi's guys were just a few months back.
How are they going to hold it together?
They don't.
I expect what's typical in these cases, I've watched a lot of revolutions in my time, is that there will be a power struggle from behind the scenes and eventually one or more people will emerge as strongmen and take over.
Yeah.
And then I guess the question for when we get back is what are the odds that that person will be chosen by Langley, Virginia, which just got earthquaked, I hear.
All right, hang tight, everybody.
It's Eric Margulies.
We're talking Libya.
All right.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
We're talking Libya with Eric Margulies.
And now one of the things I want to know is what you think is the reason for all this.
Why would NATO get involved in this revolution in Libya anyway, Eric?
Scott, the ultimate aphrodisiac is oil.
And first of all, because Libya is a treasure trove, it's a Klondike of oil and gas riches under the ground.
It's probably the world's highest-grade low-sulfur oil.
And Libya's oil provides almost 60% of Italy's oil needs.
It supplies Germany and France as well.
So it's very important for Europe.
And it's a great treasure to come and grab Libya just across the Mediterranean.
Secondly, there's a residual anger against Gaddafi over these questions of the downing of two airliners in the 1980s, a Pan Am one over Lockerbie and a French UTA airliner over Chad in the Sahara.
That has never been resolved.
Hopefully it will be if revolutionary or Western sources get access to Libya's intelligence files.
Finally, they hated Gaddafi because Gaddafi, for a while at least, refused to obey orders from the West.
He was part of the Arabs' rejectionist front.
And the West never forgave Gaddafi, particularly the U.S., for having raised oil prices.
He was the one who called the Arab Gulf, the oil emirs of Arabia, a bunch of cowards and traitors who were giving away their oil to the West in exchange for arms.
He shamed them in the early 1970s into raising their prices.
And he also signed his death warrant by doing so.
Yeah, but you know, I think it was Gary Hart, former senator and presidential candidate.
Gary Hart wrote a piece in the New York Times Magazine that, if I remember it right, said that in 1996 somebody approached him, a Gaddafi agent approached him in Athens, Greece, and said, hey, listen, we really want to, you know, come clean, come in from the cold, be friends, and do whatever is required of us to be welcomed back into normal relations with the West.
Please help us out.
That Gaddafi had basically been begging to come in from the cold for years and years.
And then after the Iraq War in 2003, the Bush team decided, for PR reasons, that they would go ahead and let him do it, and they would pretend that it was the Iraq War that scared him into it so they could say that they had accomplished one thing in that horrible invasion, creating five million refugees and a million dead bodies, etc., like they did.
But they said, you know, hey, look, Gaddafi decided to give up his garage sale junk that he bought from AQ Khan that was just sitting there in pieces and boxes and warehouses, and all this, because of the Iraq War, so good for us.
So I thought, naively, Eric, that that meant, and especially when they sent Lindsey Graham and John McCain over there to sell him armored personnel carriers and transport aircraft and helicopters and so forth, that that meant that Gaddafi was our friend again.
So why would they go ahead and bomb him?
Well, he was our friend.
First of all, he was our enemy.
Well, no, first of all, he was our friend, because as Longman said, the CIA helped engineer Gaddafi into power.
And we elbowed the British out of Libya.
It used to be their colony.
Before that, it was an Italian colony.
And these old imperialists, along with the French, are back in North Africa again.
Anyway, we elbowed out the Brits.
And then Gaddafi raised this issue of oil.
We turned against Gaddafi.
We tried to kill him, assassinate him, overthrow him.
But President George W. Bush proclaimed that Gaddafi was now an important ally, a valuable ally in the war against terror.
Those were his words.
And so, yes, he was rehabilitated, brought in from the cold.
Libya paid $1.5 billion in reparations to the families of these two airliner victims, though Libya never admitted responsibility.
It just said it was paying them off.
But it bought its way out of a crushing oil embargo.
And then the West flocked to Libya to kiss the derriere of Gaddafi.
All the Western leaders smooched and held hands with him in his preposterous comic opera outfits.
And Libya invested money in Europe.
They bought oil.
They sold arms to Libya.
There's pictures of Gaddafi shaking hands with Barack Obama right in your Google image results there.
That's right.
So he was kosher for a while.
But when the revolt broke out of Benghazi, by the way, which British intelligence had been trying to stir up for a decade, when it finally broke out, the decision was made that he was vulnerable, and it was time to grab Libya.
Well, look, the same decision was made over Mubarak and over Mobutu before him in the Congo.
The minute Mubarak got sick and looked like he was on his last legs, the decision was made to abandon him, throw him to the wolves, deal with the new regime in Egypt.
I think the same thing is happening in Libya.
Yeah, and they just assumed that he really was that weak and that he would fall that quick, which, I mean, there were huge protests against him, even in Tripoli at the very beginning, but then he bombed them, and the peace protesters went inside.
Well, yeah, the peace protesters weren't so peaceful, either.
A lot of them were armed, and it was like a sort of a general uprising, not to be confused with Bahrain, where there was a peaceful uprising against the Saudi-dominated regime, which was crushed by military force, backed by the U.S. and Britain.
Right.
Well, now, so when you say that the British have been trying to stir up a revolt in the East for the last 10 years, that means that when Bush did bring them in from the cold, that didn't change the British policy?
They were only maybe trying to get rid of some planes and some armored personnel carriers, but they still always planned on a regime change against him anyway?
Yeah, the Brits were determined to, or at least some elements of the British establishment were determined to get revenge on Gaddafi.
Remember, he'd been funding the ISIS.
In 2002, Ariel Sharon had declared America at war with him after September 11th.
Yes, that's right.
He was a prime neocon target.
But, you know, he had been financing the IRA against the Brits.
The Brits were really burning angry about this.
And, again, Britain was ousted from Libya.
Blame Gaddafi for it.
And I believe these former colonial powers have their interests in renewing some kind of modern form of colonial domination, and Libya was going to be the place.
So NATO or UN peacekeepers coming up next chapter, huh?
That's right.
In fact, I just heard a report this morning that the Prime Minister of Britain, David Cameron, was considering possibly the dispatch of troops.
Of course, the way it will happen is that this NATO-installed Libyan government, so-called government in Benghazi, will plead for Western troops to come in to stop terrorism and stabilize.
You think they'll build a giant Camp Bonsteel-type presence there permanently?
Yes, it could very well happen.
Very well happen.
More likely the Brits and the French than the Americans, or just as likely as you think?
Well, we're going back to the 19th century in many ways with this, of colonialism, but also with spheres of influence.
And the Americans, I think, have agreed that this is going to be a European sphere of influence.
It's one of the prizes that France and Britain and Germany get to stay on side with the U.S.
So really, I mean, this amounts mostly to just a couple of percentage points on the price of the oil coming out of the ground, or what?
Well, I would say it's not so much a matter of money.
It's the control of oil is the most important of all geostrategic assets.
And that's the source of America, one of the pillars.
In other words, keeping the Chinese out.
That's exactly right.
And the Chinese are making such inroads in Africa that it was essential for the U.S. to keep the Chinese out and to prevent any kind of radical regime from grabbing hold.
Because they were afraid.
Because Gaddafi is 69 or 70 years old.
And after him, they were afraid that some real radicals would grab power.
And they were worried about the Islamists in Benghazi.
By the way, before Gaddafi...
The people who just fought the war for.
Correct.
But just before Gaddafi became a valued American ally in the war against terror, the so-called terrorists were in Benghazi.
And they were, according to the U.S., they were all members of Al-Qaeda in North Africa.
Apparently some of them admit, and it was in the British Telegraph anyway, that, yeah, we're veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars where we fought against the Americans.
There are some Al-Qaeda there.
There are some Afghan war veterans who fought against the Soviets, for sure.
So now we definitely have to be in charge to make sure that the guys we just fought the war for don't win.
But they're our allies now.
So talk about the shifting alliances.
But mind you, I agree with that.
I think foreign policy should be waged on benefit rather than principles.
Old classical great power maneuvering.
How's that for a principle, maybe?
There has to be some benefit to it to get started.
There's no principles.
All right.
Well, listen, we're all out of time.
But thank you very much.
I really appreciate yours on the show today, Eric.
Great to be back.
Cheerio.
Eric Margulies, everybody.
War at the top of the world.
An American Raj.
Liberation or domination are the books.
See you all tomorrow.
