All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our next guest on the show is Eric Margulies.
EricMargulies.com is the website.
You can also read him quite often at lourockwell.com.
He's the author of the books War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination, just back from Turkey and Egypt.
How's it going, Eric?
It's going great, Scott.
I've had a fascinating trip, learned a lot.
Well, what's going on in the world, Superman?
Well, two big issues, of course, that I was covering were Syria and Egypt.
The situation in Syria remains incredibly murky and complex and opaque, as when we last discussed it.
There's great worry in the area that Syria is going to collapse, but there's also surprise that the Assad regime has held up this far, even though businesses and the economy is hurting terribly and there's increased fighting.
He's still holding on by his fingernails.
Egypt, we'll talk about, because I was right there during the elections.
Right.
Okay.
Yeah, definitely Syria for at least the first segment here.
So, who's behind what?
You know, from here, it's really hard to tell how much actual popular uprising is happening in Syria.
I mean, in Libya, there were a lot of protests until Qaddafi started shooting at people.
They went inside and then the fighters, the revolutionaries, were numbered at, you know, a thousand guys led by the special forces of Europe and protected by NATO planes the whole time.
Is that the same kind of thing going on in Syria, or is it really like half the population is determined to get rid of their dictator or what?
Well, it's more complex than that.
Yes, there are outside forces.
There are armed groups.
Some of them are Salafist, Islamic hardliners.
Some of them are just mercenaries.
Some of them are Lebanese fascists from the Falange party coming in from Lebanon, being financed and armed by the U.S. and Israel and Saudi Arabia in an attempt to promote civil war and overthrow the government.
That's one side of the thing.
Then there are a lot of fundamentalist Muslims, Sunni Muslims, who have harbored this great grudge against the minority Alawi governments in Damascus for 30 years, and the center of that area is Homs, where the Syrian army is currently fighting.
So there's opposition there.
There are just a lot of people who are fed up with Ba'ath party dictatorship for a long time.
But having said that, there are also a lot of people, and I would guess at least half, maybe more in Syria, who support the government.
Syrian Christians, Syrian Kurds, minority groups, Armenians, and the business community, and people in the big cities who want stability and calm rather than a revolution that nobody knows where it might lead to.
Well, you know, it's kind of a difficult thing because in any of these color-coded revolutions, for example, there's always a disputed election.
Sometimes it's trumped up, perhaps, but most of the times it seems like it's not.
But then in comes the foreign intelligence agencies to drum up all the, hey, we won our election on stolen kind of a thing going on and force a bloodless coup, basically.
And so, you know, it's a matter of shades of gray and degrees, right?
To what extent is the revolution in Syria an American, NATO, Israeli, Turkish project, a Saudi Arabian project?
To what extent is it a determined part of actual Syrian society taking this up?
Scott, that's the problem.
It's very hard to tell.
I was not in Syria, but I was next door in Turkey, and I couldn't tell from there.
And I know people who've been in Syria and they can't tell either who's what in this very confusing situation.
And there's concern among Syria's neighbors about what's going to happen if Syria collapses, too.
Nobody loves the Assad government, but people are worried about that because once the status quo is changed, what's going to happen in Syria will implode, and that will affect all of its neighbors will get sucked into this vacuum in Syria.
The U.S. is playing with fire there.
There's no doubt about it.
But since the days of the Bush administration, the U.S. Congress has been funding subversion in Syria to overthrow the government.
And now that movement has accelerated because before there was caution, you know, wait a minute, who's going to take over?
It's the Muslim Brotherhood's going to take over if we overthrow the government.
No, we don't care.
It's just a way to get the Iranians.
Let's bomb, bomb, bomb those Iranians.
Well, speaking of which, last week, Philip Giraldi broke the story for the American conservative and antiwar.com that Obama has signed two new findings since the bogus Iranian plot against the Saudi ambassador, authorizing stepped-up covert action against Iran and Syria as well.
And now in your piece, Syrian Time Bomb, you say the CIA is in Turkey.
As a matter of fact, can you explain exactly how it is that you know that, that they're running something or other on the other side of the border there?
Oh, well, my intelligence sources in the U.S. and also broad in Europe have been telling me that Turkish sources as well.
There's a large CIA station in Turkey.
The question is how far they're going to go with this program and how much they're cooperating with the Turks.
That I'm uncertain about, and I don't understand why the Turks are doing what they did.
Is that they were very friendly with Syria, and now they've turned strongly against Syria.
And there are all kinds of rumors that Turkey might even send troops into Syria.
So the plot thickens even more.
Well, now, I guess I forget now if I asked you about this, but Pepe Escobar told me that as long as Aleppo and Damascus are still majority in Assad's camp, that government isn't going anywhere.
Is it the case that Aleppo and Damascus?
Well, I would say that is one factor for sure.
And in fact, most of the uprisings have been in the smaller cities and towns along the Lebanese border, except for the uprising in Homs, which is traditional anti-Assad territory.
But there's another factor, and that is the security forces, the army and the 17 intelligence agencies, the secret police, the Bukhabarat.
As long as they stay with the government, the government will stay in power.
And so far, they have stayed with the government because they're concerned about the alternative.
And there is no...
The Western powers are trying to cobble together an opposition abroad like they did with these fake Libyan transitional council and things like that.
But so far, none of them seem to have any weight or gravity.
And so nothing to draw the security forces away from the current government.
Well, and I don't know how it was that they were able to get Russia and China to vote for the Libyan thing on the UN Security Council.
But in this case, they would certainly have to just go the Bill Clinton route with the Kosovo bombing.
And for that matter, the George Bush with the Afghan war of just going through NATO if they wanted to start providing air cover, which I guess they would have to if they're going to send in Turkish troops.
Well, we're hearing exactly the same vocabulary about safe corridors for Syrian refugees.
Well, there aren't very many, but there's talk coming out of NATO and certainly out of Washington that set up the security corridors to allow free movement of Syrian refugees.
These would be policed by Turkish troops.
And it's the same story with Iraq with the no fly zones.
And, you know, these are important because when you establish an air powers of decisive elements in the entire Middle East military element, once you set up a no fly zone, you're effectively invading the third dimension of that country.
Yeah, well, and then as you say, you know, all this is really done with Iran in mind, is that because they just figure if they can get the Assad regime to fall and Syria to come apart, that it'll provoke enough of a reaction out of the Iranians that they could finally, you know, maneuver them into firing the first shot, supposedly in the next war.
There's that.
There's the idea that Iran will be seriously weakened by the loss of Syria, the most important ally.
Hezbollah will be cut off.
The Israelis will be delighted.
The Palestinians will be left without Syrian support or a Syrian base.
So it required be seen as a big victory by Washington.
I wanted to ask you, Eric, about the parallels between the 1980 CIA backed war of the Mujahideen against the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan and the aftermath of that, where all these veterans of that war really didn't have anything to do except be crazy killer guys for a living for somebody.
So they went off to Chechnya.
They went off to Bosnia.
They went back to Saudi Arabia.
Some of them lived in Sudan for a little while till Bill Clinton had them kicked out and sent to Afghanistan.
And they turned out to be a real problem.
Now we've had a whole other decade of war, thousands and thousands of, you know, somewhat religiously motivated so-called pilgrim types traveling to Iraq to be the so-called foreign fighters, the small percentage of the Sunni-based insurgency through those years that was known as al-Qaeda in Iraq.
And now where have all these guys gone?
Some of them just fought a war for us in Libya.
And Pepe Escobar had word that they're now sending, I think, 600 of them, I guess, to get them out of the national, the transitional council's way, sending them off to Syria.
And apparently, at least that thing we're talking about a few weeks back, and The Guardian was saying that Prince Bandar and the royal family in Saudi Arabia have the same problem.
They got to get rid of the more radical and AK-47-inclined young men that they can.
And this is their next target.
They're going to go overthrow Assad and get rid of the last Baathist regime in the Middle East.
And then what, though?
I mean, look at the backlash from the 1980s.
What are we going to face down the road after Syria is torn apart by this whole new generation of, you know, suicide bomb and lunatics?
Well, Scott, having been in Afghanistan during the 80s and in the field with the Mujahideen, known many of them and followed their careers, as I've written in my books, I could tell you, first of all, most of them are now men in later age, and they're not running around anywhere.
They're sitting at home with aches and pains.
You know, this was almost 30, 40 years ago, 35 years ago.
You have a younger group of jihadists who's come up for sure.
And as you point out, they're floating around the Middle East.
But there was also a group, you know, the veterans of Afghanistan were known in Arabic and in that region as men of honor, and they were considered heroes.
And they had fought to sow the communists.
And they spread out in the Middle East and said, we are going to liberate our countries, whether it was Algeria or Egypt or Libya, we're going to liberate them or Saudi Arabia from Western imperial control, just the way that we liberated Afghanistan from Soviet imperialism.
In fact, I'm using the exact words that were told to me by the teacher, the spiritual guide of Osama bin Laden, Sheikh Azam.
So that was the mood.
And most of these jihadists failed, by the way, certainly did in Algeria and Morocco, etc.
The Western powers managed to crush them.
These younger people are around, they're a factor, but they're not a decisive factor.
But they certainly will continue to be a nuisance factor.
Well, yeah, I remember a report in the Christian Science Monitor from 2005 that had the Israelis and the Saudis both did studies at the same time about the new jihadis, the especially Syrians, Libyans and Saudis who were traveling to Iraq to fight the Americans, and how they were all young guys.
And the only role that the Afghan veterans of the 80s war played was in logistics and, you know, making arrangements and contacts and this kind of thing.
And it was this whole new generation that was going to fight.
But, you know, when you talk about, you know, the local jihads failing, that was the whole argument of Ayman al-Zawahiri and bin Laden, right, was we have to attack the far enemy, we have to lure the Americans into our sand trap, bleed them to death, bankrupt them, force them out, and then we can wage our successful jihad.
And it seems like didn't take too much time after the beginning of the end of the war in Iraq before that exact kind of thing started happening all across the Middle East.
Look at who's winning in Egypt.
The US certainly fell into bin Laden's trap in that respect, like a bull in a china shop and went charging in, bankrupted itself in the sands of the Middle East.
Well, I've been writing for years.
I wrote in my book, American Raj, I said, whenever there are free elections held in any of the countries in the Middle East, Islamists will win.
And I don't mean scimitar waving fanatics like we're always shown on US TV.
But I mean, moderate Islamists who want Islamic social developments in their societies, Islamic welfare, Islamic principles of family and jurisprudence.
These people will win.
And that's exactly what's happened in Egypt.
60% of the vote has gone to parties who call themselves Islamists, 40% to the moderate Muslim Brotherhood and 20% to the more hardline Salafists called the Al-Nur party.
It speaks for itself.
Democracy is spoken.
And this is what we get.
We have simply by encouraging the Egyptian police state and police states and other Arab countries, we have prevented this democratic process from happening until now.
Yeah, well, and just made things inevitably worse, you know, just like economic intervention or anything else.
I remember reading before 9-11 happened, reading in Newsweek about Al-Qaeda terrorism and how the tradition in Saudi Arabia has been if you say anything, they'll cut your head off.
The only place where it's safe to dissent against the status quo is inside the mosques or like the Freemason lodges of Germany back in the in the late 1700s, right?
It's the only place where men are free to speak to each other.
So then it all gets conflated together.
The only people who ever organize a bull session based on what's really going on around here are the religious fanatics in the mosque rather than any other part of what could be civil society.
Well, the mosque was the only what they what the Islamists called their only sort of liberated ground, where they could get together and talk even tentatively, though the Muslim organizations were pretty well controlled in certain countries like Egypt, India and Turkey before the AK revolution.
But certainly Islam was the only place that gave an expression to people wanted to change the the order.
And and this is exactly what's happening now.
So, but we're being told we're beginning a completely distorted view by the Western media, which is screaming bloody murder about the Muslim Brotherhood and the dangers of this.
And in fact, it is a very moderate, it's a moderate movement.
There may be fanatics within its ranks, but it is a moderate movement.
In the Egyptian context.
It's a movement of older people prefer they're all mostly professionals, doctors, lawyers, engineers, it's called your grandfather's political party, and they are focused on social issues, not revolution.
Well, but what matters to the United States, and of course, to Israel is the status of their peace treaty with Israel.
And apparently, there's already some trouble balloons going on about we want to revisit that the Muslim Brotherhood is saying, yes, quite right.
And it's totally reflecting Egyptian public opinion, which feels humiliated and enraged by the one sided, so called peace deal that was foisted on Egypt.
It was what I call it history's biggest bribe, almost over well over $2 million a year to Egypt to $2 billion a year to adhere to this peace treaty.
And the what's happening now is Egypt will want to revoke, revoke it or change parts of it.
But there's no desire in Egypt right now to go to war with Israel.
What will happen is that Egypt will start speaking more and more on behalf of the Palestinians.
And the Israelis don't like that because they're trying to hide the whole Palestinian issue behind screaming about nuclear weapons in Iran, Egypt may reorient the discussion and start putting pressure on Israel to actually make a peace treaty with the Palestinians and Israel's current right wing leadership doesn't want that.
Is the empire just going to use wheat as a weapon in that case?
Certainly, it's one of the pressure points.
So we supply over half of Egypt's food, Egypt can't feed itself.
It's over 80, 81, 84, nobody knows 85 million people.
97% of the people live on like 3% of the land in Egypt.
Egypt has not been able to feed itself for the last 50 years.
So it has been relying up now on us wheat imports, which were given in fact, to Egypt, allocated by Congress, which gives the US Congress a very powerful weapon, a grip on Egypt's juggler vein, because if the US cuts off the aid that provides food to Egypt, which is the world's largest wheat importer, Egyptians will starve or they'll have to find somebody else who's going to feed them.
That's going to be very difficult.
So Egypt is very vulnerable in this sense to American pressure.
Bottom line, though, is you would say that the Muslim Brotherhood is not to be feared, they can be dealt with, no problem.
They can be dealt with and they should be we should deal with this reasonable group.
Because if we don't, we're going to get the real extremists if we if we muck this one up.
All right.
Well, I'm sorry, we're all out of time.
We're gonna have to revisit this later on.
But thank you so much for your time.
Welcome back.
Eric Margulies everybody ericmargulies.com American Raj is the book
