All right y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our first guest on the show today 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, just spelled like Margolis.
You'll probably hear me mispronounce it sometimes because I forget, but just spelled like Margolis and you'll find it ericmargulies.com.
Welcome back, Eric.
How's it going?
I'm pleased to be with you, Scott, as ever.
I was just saying that I was just in snowy New York.
I managed to escape.
It was quite an adventure.
So today we're ready to talk about, what, Syria?
Yeah, Syria.
So here's my thing.
I read this piece by Dan McAdams and he was pointing us over toward this New York Times article about the so-called free Syrian army being built up in Turkey.
And Dan, I forget if he asked it rhetorically or just made the assertion, the assertion, but something like, this is war.
It's on.
And then I'll go ahead and incorporate one more thing into the setup here, which is two weeks ago, yesterday, I guess, something like that, I saw on C-SPAN, Joshua Baum, Iran, Moravchik and Douglas Feith and Abram Shulsky, the men that ran the Office of Special Plans that lied us into war with Iraq, fake Niger uranium documents and ties to Osama bin Laden and the rest.
You know, oh, we saw Iraqi intelligence give a flask full of anthrax to Mohammed Atta, say the Israelis and all that.
These are the guys who lied us into war last time.
And they're saying, you know what, our best shot at regime change in Iran is a war with Syria.
And then we'll be able to expand that.
And I mean, these guys are just absolutely shameless on my C-SPAN telling me this is what they want to do.
And I just wonder whether it looks to you like this is the path we're going down right now.
Oh, you're right, Scott.
This is our dear old fifth column in Washington, as you say, that engineered the Iraq war and are now there.
But, you know, as Israel then Prime Minister Sharon said, he said, he urged the United States, said the first attack must be against Iran, not Iraq.
He said the the road to Tehran leads through Baghdad.
And anyway, they've been beating the war drums for a long time.
Well, in fact, yeah, he also said, you know, you better not stop with Iraq.
You also better include Syria and Libya and Iran, which was, in fact, the Bush administration's policy put together by engineered by the neocons.
But after the Israel's attack on Lebanon, that was to be the opening phase.
They were supposed to defeat Hezbollah in Lebanon and attack Syria, draw the Syrians into the war.
The summer of 06 you're talking about.
That's correct.
And then march on to onto Tehran.
However, the Hezbollah wouldn't play ball and actually beat up the Israeli invasion forces and threw a monkey wrench into it.
And then it dawned on the Bush administration that, hey, if we overthrow the Syrian government, who are we going to put in there?
And somebody who knew a little something about the Middle East apparently said, well, Muslim Brotherhood is the is the way to waiting in the wings to take over.
And this gave thought to even the most ardent neocons.
So but we're seeing a repeat of this.
And this is the next wave of beating the war drums put on to war onto Tehran.
Now, I guess, you know, that that same question of who's going to replace Assad once we get rid of him has always been there.
And we've talked about this before, how part of the neocons strategy was good.
That's fine.
We'll just let Syria, you know, dissolve into warring tribes.
There won't even be a state of Syria anymore if we can get the kind of regime change we want there.
And we could see how from a certain point of view, maybe from Ariel Sharon's coma or something that seems bright.
But I mean, really what they're talking about, what it's all about is who rules Tehran.
And they figure if they can turn Syria into chaos, they can spread the war to Iran.
But here's my thing with that is they've been threatening war against Iran every day for at least since 2004 and really even back in 2003.
And I wonder whether they're even serious about this at this point.
I mean, they know that they can't march into Tehran.
They know they can't really get a regime change just by bombing the place.
It probably can't even set their nuclear program back that far, considering that there's 85 feet of granite between the Natanz centrifuges and any place where a bomb can hit.
So, you know, are they just trying to boost the price of oil and make some money and scare the hell out of us?
Or what are they doing?
I mean, they are apparently pushing this regime change in Syria as hard as they can, right?
That's right.
Well, they see an opportunity.
The foundations are falling apart in Syria.
The regime is under dire threat.
And as you were saying, we've said before in this program, the for the Israeli point of view, nothing would make them happier than a collapsed, chaotic Syria, as I said, too.
This was the plan back in the 1920s of the extreme right-wing Zionists.
And leave Israel as the only powerful state in a fragmented mosaic in the Middle East.
Iran actually, in spite of all threats and everything, is doing a pretty good job of wrecking its own government.
They're at each other's throats now over all kinds of obscure issues.
But, you know, there are sane, calm voices in Israel, including from its military and intelligence community that are saying, wait a minute, there's no need to start a war not so fast.
But hysteria has gripped the partisans of Israel, particularly in North America.
And all they hear every day is Holocaust, Holocaust, Holocaust, where Israel is facing obliteration, got to kill the Iranians before they kill us.
Yeah, well, I'll tell you something scarier than Holocaust.
Churchill.
I read this thing in The Washington Times that this could be Netanyahu's chance to be a Churchill.
You know, he was prime minister before and didn't really do anything notable with his leadership.
But now maybe this prisoner swap for Gilad Shalit and I think there was another one or something.
Anyway, maybe now he's clearing the deck, going ahead and getting ready for his moment of greatness where he attacks Iran.
Well, it may be a moment of greatness in their minds, but many responsible Israelis fear that it could be a disaster for Israel.
And it certainly will be for the United States.
And there is great concern in Washington.
I've heard it over and over again, that Israel's extreme right wing, that's what Israel's left wing called neo fascist, right wing is going to drag the United States into another Middle East war at its choice of timing, too.
And you know, these things often happen either Christmas, or close to American presidential elections or during the World Series when nobody's paying attention to anything else.
And so the Israelis are constantly debating whether to attack or not.
And they've got a weakened, emasculated president in Washington, who's had to bow down and grovel in front of the Israel lobby.
They feel this is the best time.
On the other hand, others say, well, wait a minute, we may get a Republican president in who will give us carte blanche and send the B-52s to help us.
Yeah, well, I can't imagine that Obama wouldn't.
I mean, once the war is on, they did all these, even Brookings Institution, Saban Center, and the Council on Foreign Relations, I think, and a couple others did war games about what would a war with Iran look like.
And what it would look like is America involved with our B-52s in the first day, because the Israelis can't handle it there.
And because once they attack Iran, Iran is going to strike American assets in the Persian Gulf.
If they don't, you know, sink the fifth fleet at Bahrain, they'll at least close the Straits of Hormuz, turn this into a war with the United States real quick.
Well, and create an oil panic around the world.
That will be very interesting, which might boomerang on Israel.
You know, the world turn around and blame the Israelis for doing this.
And they're partisans in the United States.
Okay, but now, so to what degree is the Mossad and or the CIA and JSOC and all them pushing this regime change in Syria?
Is this not?
And I mean, if they are really pushing it, doesn't that signal that the decision has been made?
They're going to go ahead and pick up where they left off in 06.
And they're going to really do it this time.
Well, I thought this had been done about three years ago.
But it's there are factions in Washington, their factions in CIA, their factions in the Pentagon, and they're fighting with each other over this.
And I don't think a decision has been made.
Well, that's my favorite thing you've said so far.
All right.
Well, hold it there, everybody.
It's Eric Margulies, ericmargulies.com is the website.
American Raj, liberation or domination is the book you can find at amazon.com.
And we'll be right back after this.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to this here deal.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's anti war radio.
Talking with the great Eric Margulies.ericmargulies.com is the website American Raj is the book and so far we're talking about Syria.
Alright, so um, now here's the deal.
Let me try to draw a comparison to Libya.
In Libya, you had this after, you know, a degree of success in Egypt and Tunisia.
Anyway, the people of Libya went outside and said, we hate you, Qaddafi, etc.
And then he bombed the hell out of them.
And they ran back inside.
And that was about the end of that, except for about 1000 fighters fighting out of Benghazi.
And they and at this point, the West basically co opted the whole thing and turn those 1000 fighters into their sock puppets and got their regime changed.
That's what it looks like to me anyway.
They certainly couldn't have done it without NATO airpower, and all of that.
And so basically, what I'm getting at is that, you know, if I was a Libyan, I'd want to overthrow the guy too.
I might even want to be one of the 1000 fighters.
But the problem is once NATO intervenes, and and all that, then all things aren't being equal anymore.
And the Libyan revolutionaries end up just being the sock puppets of foreign imperialists.
And so I wonder about the same sort of dynamic in Syria.
I know that you've told us before about how the Baathists are basically the tiny minority Alawite sect, and they rule over all these different factions.
And they have support from these factions and opposition from those factions.
And a lot of it is, you know, ethnic or religious ethnic type divisions.
A lot of it is also social class, and probably just geography, who lives in what city, town and country, these kinds of things.
And I just wonder, to what degree is this revolution in Syria real?
To what degree has it been co opted?
And and and are these Syrians now attempting to overthrow their government at this point, merely the sock puppets of their enemies, the Israelis and the Americans?
Well, that's a very good question, Scott, step back for a moment to Libya, we will learn the facts will start coming out soon, that the overthrow of the Qaddafi regime's fighting forces was done not only by NATO airpower and attack helicopter gunships.
But now Qatar has just come out and announced that their troops were active in the fighting.
Well, that's sort of a joke, because the Qataris couldn't fight their way out of a falafel bag.
The real forces, as I've been saying all along, were British and French special forces is dolled up as as Libyans.
And they did the bulk of the ground fighting and the targeting for NATO airstrikes question.
Okay, now let's turn to Syria.
Could the same scenario be repeated in Syria?
Well, we know that the United States Congress 2006 under the Bush administration allocated money to overthrow the Syrian government.
We have had steady reports Saudi Arabia, Israel in the United States role, financing opposition forces to the Syrian government, a lot of this is being funneled through Lebanon, where the Lebanese right wing phalanges Christians, some of them anyway, have been allied with anti Assad forces since day one, and are in fact, cat sports for the Israelis.
So it's a very complicated, murky situation.
Syria is not ready for the kind of on the ground military intervention that that feeble Libya was, I think we still have to wait for a few more weeks to see what happens.
All right, now, can you teach us a little bit more about the Alawites and the Sunnis and the, the, you know, I guess, Pepe Escobar said, we'll know that this thing is really on its way if the people of Damascus and of Aleppo join in and really rise up at that point.
This is the last bastion of support that the Baathists have, and they lose Aleppo, for example, and it's on that kind of thing.
Well, Pepe is right about that.
The Alawites or Alawis are a sect, an offshoot of Islam, they're they're Shiite Muslims of sorts, but it's a sort of a idiosyncratic sect that lives been living in the mountains in Syria near the coast near Latakia, and they are regarded as heretics by many of Sunni mainstream Muslims.
They're kind of like the other sects that there are in Lebanon, Druze, for example, and there are also Alawis or Alevis, as they're called in Turkey, but they've been a downtrodden minority.
They had, they were at the bottom of the economic pile, they all, to get work, they were enlisted in the military, it was the only work they could find.
One day, an Alawi Air Force general named Hafez al-Assad used his fellow Alawis in the military to seize power, and they've ruled Syria ever since the 1980s.
So today, the Alawis still form the bedrock of the regime.
They're very strong in the 17 intelligence agencies and in the military and other security forces.
However, Lebanon and Syria's 10% Christians, who tend to be quite wealthy and in business, the bizarre merchant class, have also strongly supported Assad in the hopes of stability.
He's protected the Christians.
They see what happened in Iraq, where America overthrew Saddam Hussein, who protected the Christians of Iraq, and opened the door to all kinds of anti-Christian fanatics.
The Syrians are deathly afraid of this.
And the merchant class wants to do business, and all this ruckus is very, very bad for business.
And everybody's afraid that the real fanatical hardline Muslim fundamentalists, not moderates, but fundamentalists, will gain power and change everything around.
Well, now, so when you read in the New York Times that the Turks are letting the so-called Free Syrian Army, you know, base their operations on the Turkish side of the line there, does that automatically mean that this is the British and the Americans are working with the Turks on this?
Sounds like it, right?
I don't know.
I've been scratching my head about this, Scott.
Who is the Free Syrian Army?
Is that the Muslim Brotherhood?
No, no, no.
They're a bunch of renegades, deserters from the Syrian Army, and they're probably no more than 20 or 30 people.
But they've gotten a lot of publicity, and the Turks have allowed them to set up shop in Turkey.
Now, as I think, I don't understand- 20 or 30 people?
That's right.
There's no army there, by any means, but they're hoping to attract more and more deserters from the Syrian military.
But, you know, the Turks, until now, they had a policy.
The very smart foreign minister, Davutoglu, had a policy called Zero Problems Policy.
Let's be friends with all our neighbors.
And in the past, under American, when Turkey was under the rule of the military and under American influence, it was very hostile with Syria and Iran.
This was changed by the new AK government in Turkey, the Erdogan government.
But now we- and very successfully.
Turkey, business is booming.
Turkey had no political problems in the region.
But now this thing over Syria has shattered formerly good Syrian-Turkish relations.
The Turks increasingly are angry at the Syrians.
They're calling on Assad to resign or bring in some elections.
This so-called Syrian army is the first step in possibly Turkey hosting anti-regime forces inside Turkey.
There's even talk of intervention by Turkish Armed Forces now into Syria.
Well, and so if it breaks out into a war with Syria, between Turkey and Syria, Turkey's our NATO ally.
That means we'll be involved in a war in Syria then?
Maybe.
We'd like to be.
But what the U.S. would like to do is- see, the Turks go in.
Turks used to do this.
They used to be our local gendarmes in the region.
They would like the Turks to go in and overthrow the Assad regime.
But I don't know why the Turks would want to do this, because they really will profit nothing from it.
And they'll stick their heads into the Syrian hornet's nest at a time when Turkey's booming.
This could wreck Turkey's economy, undermine its rise to regional importance, hurt Turkey very badly.
It has enough trouble with its own Kurds without getting involved in a fracas in Syria.
And Iraq's Kurds too.
That's right.
But the U.S. is pushing Turkey very hard on this issue.
And I don't know- in my view, the Turks are not making the right decision.
In fact, they're being quite reckless.
And this is not like the cautious policy of the Erdogan government.
Now, TV- I'm sorry to switch subject back to Libya for a second here, but TV is saying today that, well, the NATO war there is over.
That's it.
We got a regime change and everything's fine and mission accomplished and what have you.
But I'm a terribly cynical, jaded person at this point, Eric, and I just can't believe it.
I predicted, and I'm still sticking with it so far, that America's going to be involved in Libya for another generation or so, at least.
But what do you think?
Well, it wants to be.
It's got oil.
It's got business there.
Carpetbaggers are pulling- But is a puppet dictatorship going to be good enough or they're going to have to put troops there?
They'll probably have some troops.
We'll be invited to come for training missions.
Oh, there you go.
That'll be fine then.
Well, now that brings up a rag, doesn't it?
All right.
We'll be back with Eric Margulies after this, everybody.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm on the line with Eric Margulies.
Good thing, too, because he knows the answers to my questions.
All right.
A little bit more Libya here.
When we left off, we were talking about the future of American intervention there, and you were kind of joking, reference to Iraq.
Well, we'll just leave some trainers there.
And I got this theory, and I've had this theory since the moment Hillary Clinton and them started pushing for this so-called no-fly zone regime change United Nations mission in Libya.
And that is that at some point there will be American forces there.
Let's take your suggestion, trainers, maybe some of Hillary's mercenaries from Blackwater and associated groups, Triple Canopy and whatever, running around there in Tripoli.
And then at some point, somebody is going to suicide bomb them, Eric.
And then we're going to have a war on al-Qaeda, a war on terrorism.
We'll spread the thing a thousand miles to the west.
Oh, you know, you can't keep a good al-Qaeda down.
They're popping up all over the place.
We thought they were wiped out.
Leon Panetta said there were only 25 to 50 left in Afghanistan.
And now they're all over Yemen and Saudi Arabia and Sudan and Somalia, Shabab everywhere, North Africa, Mauritania, Uganda, you name it, they're everywhere.
Well, you know, we're seeing mirages of al-Qaeda, or we're using it to justify it for intervention.
I have been saying for the last month that the new regime installed by the U.S. and France, let's remember the French concocted this transitional government and signed, it gave France tremendous oil contracts, just as the fighting began.
I've said they will invite troops from the west to come in there, as I said, for training and security missions to protect the oil fields.
And let's also remember that America's largest foreign air base used to be in Libya, Wheeler's Field.
It used to be a B-47 bomber base in the 1950s and 60s.
And Qaddafi kicked the U.S. Air Force out of Libya, and I guess they never forgotten they're going to be back.
Well, you know, I remember Michael Shoyer doing CNN and had this hilarious confrontation with the hairdo ladies asking him their ridiculous questions.
And what he was saying was, oh, yeah, I'm sure the CIA and SAS are running around all over the place over there.
But the real hardcore jihadists, the real true believer types who would just as soon blow themselves up if they could kill some Americans, they're not going to be talking to the CIA guys.
They're going to be hanging back and letting whoever wants to talk with them talk with them.
But then we're going to see them come to the forefront.
And that was what happened, really.
Right.
Right around the time that Tripoli fell, all of a sudden, Abdul Hakim al-Belhaj is, you know, former CIA tortured dungeon victim is now the guy who's in charge of the military forces over there from the Libyan Islamic fighting group.
And it seems like there are going to be some people, whether the the sock puppets in Tripoli invite us to stay or not, they're going to be some people who are willing to blow themselves up there.
I mean, these are a lot of these guys are veterans of the Iraq war where they went and joined that two percent of the Sunni based insurgency called Al-Qaeda in Iraq back in the worst days of that arranging, if not participating in suicide attacks against American forces there.
And some of them are survivors, as you said, of people who had been sent by the U.S. to Libya to be tortured.
Right.
And they can't be particularly pro-American right now after that.
But there are all kinds of scenarios for things going wrong in Libya.
Maybe things will go right to business for American companies.
Everything I'm expecting the worst after 10 years of this.
Forget things might work out.
There's no such thing as that.
There's a lot.
But but, you know, what we have to look at every time the U.S. makes a major intervention in these in the Muslim world, it's end up wrecking the countries and dividing them.
Iraq is divided and demolished.
It's no longer really a functioning country.
The same for Afghanistan.
Yemen is being pulled apart.
Somalia is in a mess.
Sudan has just been torn apart by the United States, is broken apart and broken into North and South Sudan.
So the same thing may happen to Libya because it was look, it was only a united country since 1951 and the Tripoli people hate the Benghazi people and so on and so forth.
So there are a lot of spills and thrills before we know really what's happening in Libya.
Well, now I'm going to have to try to keep you another segment to talk about Pakistan, because now you just brought up Iraq and there's so much important news.
And the big question to me is, is there about to be another full scale civil war there?
Saddam's home province declares regional autonomy in Iraq, reads McClatchy newspapers.
And then one of these is Basra is considering seceding from the union.
And I just wonder whether you know what you think Maliki is going to do about this.
Is there a parliamentary solution to this problem?
Did we did Petraeus ever meet those benchmarks or what?
You better go out and buy a big supply of Excedrin because he's in for many headaches.
Yeah, well, I mean, and there's the whole, you know, decision left to be made about the permanent status of Kirkuk as well.
Well, Iraq is a mess.
It's held together by American bayonets, literally.
And Maliki is CIA's boy in Baghdad, who was put in there.
And some of his other rivals are also CIA men.
The point is that if US troops ever withdraw, and you know, as I've been also saying for a long time, this US so called US withdrawals is merely driving down the six lane highway from Baghdad to Kuwait.
And US forces are US is beeping of its permanent garrison in Kuwait, which is a US protectorate, and they're ready to intervene in Iraq.
What we should be looking for a key item is air, air control air rights who controls Iraq's airspace.
Washington may withdraw its ground troops, but we'll see if it relinquishes relinquishes control of Iraq's airspace.
I suspect they may not.
And US fighters will still play some role in the air over Iraq or patrol it for what they call security reasons.
But no doubt once US power begins to lessen a little bit in Iraq, it's going to start coming apart at the seams even more than it has already.
We know with as little influence as the Americans have had there for the last couple of years.
Anyway, I'm kind of surprised to see, you know, how how bad it's breaking apart just on the news that the last of the soldiers are going.
I mean, I guess, you know, the Iraqis are fully cognizant of the fact that Hillary's building her own so called private army there of mercenaries.
Not that that's a complete withdrawal.
And of course, the airpower question, as you said, but I guess I had thought that, you know, they really had trained up the Iraqi army to the degree that, you know, the Anbar province wasn't trying to secede from the Union.
They weren't really the paid off sons of Iraq anymore because the Pentagon quit paying them.
But it seems like now in the news that the Americans are withdrawing, all of a sudden you've got, you know, provinces talking about breaking away from the central authority of Maliki's government.
I wonder if that's the CIA paying people off to make threats like that in order to get Maliki to invite us to stay longer.
Is that too conspiratorial?
In Iraq, anything is possible.
We just saw Congress admitted it's a congressional report.
It said that the that the U.S. intelligence community has a black budget of $54 billion.
And a lot of this money is going to pay local people around the third world.
And the U.S. has bribed the Sunnis and Anbar to stop fighting and tried to do the same thing in Afghanistan.
But the Afghans were too proud to take the money.
But the minute that money starts lessening, there's going to be revolts in Iraq.
But remember one thing, though.
The U.S. has a secure area in Iraq, and that is Kurdistan, Iraqi Kurdistan.
That's become sort of a U.S.
-Israeli protectorate.
Because remember, the Israelis have been funding the Kurds and arming them for decades.
And that area is the base that the U.S. needs in Iraq.
Well, you know, Bill Clinton's wife, when she was running for president before she was the Secretary of State, was saying, yeah, well, you know what, no matter what, we'll keep bases in Kurdistan, air bases in Kurdistan.
Never really withdraw.
Well, Clinton is right, because the U.S. plans to do that.
There's talk of a pipeline somehow from the Iraqi oil fields to Israel.
There's a lot of intrigue going on there in the mountains.
And he knows the rest of Iraq goes to hell in a handbasket.
The U.S. will still have a strong influence in Kurdistan.
American Raj, indeed.
I guess I'd have to go back and read the history of the British one.
I guess they just killed everybody, so they didn't have to deal with all this kind of nonsense.
But all right.
Well, hold it right there, everybody.
Eric, can I keep you one more?
OK, one more.
OK, because we've got to talk about Pakistan.
OK.
All right.
Hang on just a sec.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm terribly abusing my friendship with Eric Margulies here, keeping him on for the whole hour without really asking.
Thanks very much for doing this.
I owe you one.
Come to Austin, I'll buy you whatever beer flavor you like best.
It's always an intellectual pleasure to be with you.
OK, great.
So I was thinking that Islam must be running rampant in Pakistan or something, because I read this thing about how the people of that country hate our guts.
And that's the only explanation for anyone ever hating America is because their Islam made them, right?
Well, I could tell you, as a columnist for Pakistani newspapers for a long time, you know, Pakistanis loved Americans.
They really, this love affair ended when really, this love affair ended when the United...
When they adopted Islam recently, right?
Nothing to do with Islam, everything to do with Afghanistan.
When the U.S. went into, invaded Afghanistan, put a gun to Pakistan's head and said, virtually demanded the U.S. occupation of Pakistan for military purposes, which happened, a use of Pakistani troops and intelligence agents, air bases, ports, etc.
The former President Musharraf told me in person that, you know, America was going to bomb us back to the Stone Age if we didn't cooperate.
So here you have, you know, America's arm twister threatened Pakistan to do things that are totally against Pakistan's interests and are totally detested by the Pakistani population.
So it's no wonder, and the more we pursue the war in Afghanistan, the more we're turning Pakistan against us, and there is going to be a blow-up.
All right, well, here's news.antiwar.com, Jason Ditt's massive rally in Lahore.
Imran Khan leads calls for Pakistan to end U.S. alliance, and this guy apparently is a famous former cricket star, and he held a rally where 100,000 people came out to protest the United States and its alliance with the Zardari government.
I'm surprised that more of that hasn't happened.
Imran Khan is, you know, a famous cricket player, and he's one of the few, he doesn't have much of a support base in Pakistan, though he's run for president a number of times, but he's respected because he's considered an honest person who's not been bought by the Americans, like the people in the Zardari government.
So he has respect, and there's going to be more of it.
You know, polls show in the Pakistani media that at least 93% of people now hate the United States.
It's terrible.
It hurts me to hear somebody saying they hate the United States, but as an American, it hurts me to hear this, but they hate us, and more importantly, consider now the United States to be Pakistan's number one enemy, even more so than old enemy India.
The United States is occupied by Pakistan, so Pakistan is not an ally.
Pakistan is an American-occupied country with a U.S.
-installed government that does not represent its own people.
All right, now about the Haqqani network, it's all very complicated politics there on, you know, with the Duran line separating the Pashtuns and both these pretended nation-states on either side of it, both of them, as you say, puppets of the United States, although the Pakistani military establishment certainly has their own interests, which are quite different than ours, as you say, but I'm kind of interested in what you think about Hillary Clinton's recent, can I call them overtures or something, attempts to persuade the Pakistani government to help us broker a deal with the Haqqanis so that they'll stop fighting us in Afghanistan.
Well, they've been trying that for a long time, and the U.S. has been trying to bribe the Haqqani network, bribe and threaten the Pakistanis.
Well, and they're negotiating from a position of weakness now.
If they wanted to deal with Haqqani, they should have done it in December of 2001.
Well, that's right, but you know, too much emphasis has been put on Haqqani.
Now everyone's blaming Haqqani, and then it's the Pakistanis, and then there's going to be sunspots, but the real point is the U.S. is getting its backside kicked in Afghanistan.
It is losing the war to a bunch of very ferocious mountain tribesmen, and the U.S. can't accept this.
It has to blame somebody for this, and so the latest is the Haqqanis.
The Haqqanis are one-third of the Taliban coalition, the other being the group led by Gulbadin Hitmachar.
I know both of these people, Gulbadin and Hitmachar, from the 1980s, and then there's the hardcore Taliban as well.
The U.S. has been trying to detach elements of the Taliban through so-called peace talks, a bribery hasn't worked, so now it's putting pressure on the Haqqani group and trying to blame them for everything that's going wrong in Afghanistan.
But Haqqani, let's remember, used to be a very close American ally, and Haqqani was financed and armed by the United States to fight the Soviets.
And Anand Gopal showed how Haqqani and a bunch of these other guys, Hitmachar and others that were fighting now, they all offered to make a deal and work with us back in 2001, early 2002, and were told to go to hell.
They're running, we don't have to deal with anybody.
That's right.
Hitmachar, who I knew very well, was one of, was the most effective fighting force against the Soviets, his bi-Islami group.
And they were in our pockets, so to speak.
We could have made a very good agreement with them, but we didn't.
We cast them adrift.
Now that we've invaded their country, they're fighting us as they fought the Soviets, and we just can't accept this fact.
All right, now I was reading something, it was at the tiny revolution, Jonathan Schwartzblatt had a thing, I think it was an interview with Nicholas Kristoff or something, saying the conspiracy theory in Pakistan is that the Americans want to invade and take their nukes.
And Schwartz was laughing and saying, oh, maybe they read the New York Times where Robert Kagan and Michael O'Hanlon proposed exactly that back in October 2007, or was it September 2007?
But, you know, I wonder whether you think that the American intervention over there is actually doing enough of a job of tearing Pakistan apart that it could be a situation that serves as an excuse for a Robert Kagan type to insist that we must go in there now, or else the radicals will seize the nukes or something like that.
This is definitely, in my view, an American plan to seize Pakistan's nuclear weapons.
Everybody in Pakistan believes that, the Pakistani military believes that these weapons are heavily dispersed and heavily guarded, but they all believe it.
But our special operations forces are practicing attacks on Pakistani nuclear sites.
So the question is, what kind of craziness is this?
We're going to seize their nuclear weapons in the midst of, right next door to nuclear-armed India, where the two sides have nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alerts with a three-minute warning.
They either have to use them or lose them.
We're going to send the same Delta Force that did the Waco raid to pull this off, right, to grab all the different nukes at all their different locations in one night or something.
It's absolutely dangerous, and this is being, Israel's foreign minister, as I think I said on our last program, Lieberman, warned a few years ago that Pakistan's nuclear weapons were a threat to Israel.
And this has set off a neocon hysteria in the United States, and we see the results.
All right, well, thank you very much for your time, especially for staying over the whole hour with us, Eric.
Always a pleasure.
I learned a lot.
Always do.
All right, everybody, that's the heroic Eric Margulies.
His website is ericmargulies.com.
Spell it like Margolis.
Check out his books, War at the Top of the World and American Raj.
We'll be right back with Charles Goyette after this.
