All right, my friends, welcome back to Antiwar Radio on Chaos Radio, 92.7, 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
Our guest today is Eric Margolis, foreign correspondent for Sun National Media in Canada and the American Conservative magazine.
You can find much of what he writes in his archives at LouRockwell.com.
Welcome back to the show, Eric.
Oh, are you there?
Check, check.
I'm here.
Sorry.
Oh, okay.
A little technical difficulty there.
Not not too bad.
We have overcome.
All right.
Well, I'm glad to have you on here.
And now you have covered 14 wars around the world.
Is that right?
That's right.
And the book is called War at the Top of the World, which is covering the war in Kashmir between Pakistan and India, right?
As well as the war in Afghanistan.
And I also touch on Tibet.
So you really have extensive experience, decades worth of experience covering wars throughout the Middle East, Asia, Europe, everywhere.
And Africa, too.
Yes.
Africa, too.
Wow.
Oh, and I forgot to say the website is ericmargolis.com to find all your articles there.
Now, there's been what looks like a coup within a coup in Pakistan.
And the military dictator there, Pervez Musharraf, has, I guess, temporarily, at least, suspended the Supreme Court and instituted emergency powers.
I guess, can you just fill us in on the latest of what's actually happening in Pakistan?
And then maybe we can get into why.
Yeah, the military dictator has become more of a dictator.
What was happening was that the Musharraf's popularity was nosediving down to single digits.
He was wildland popular in Pakistan.
He was losing his grip on power and the Pakistan Supreme Court, which had been toothless in the past, but suddenly, over the last year has been showing signs of life and legal rectitude.
And it came out and it challenged Musharraf and it said it's a legal form.
It was legal for Musharraf to go ahead with his plans to be both military leader of the country and to be president.
It's a clear violation of Pakistan's constitution.
They were going to come out with this ruling in the next few days, and that would have completely undermined any kind of legitimacy that Musharraf claimed.
So he struck first.
He arrested most of the members of the Supreme Court, who wouldn't kowtow to him.
He then went and started rounding up at least 1,500, maybe 2,000 opposition figures in the last few days.
He shut down privately owned television.
He's put censorship and he's arrested senior politicians as well, with the exception of Benazir Bhutto.
And does he have any kind of credible pretext to do this at all, or is it simply, I didn't want the Supreme Court to rule the way they were about to?
Yeah, he has no pretext whatsoever.
However, he's using the same pretext that the neo-cons are using in the United States, and that is that I'm doing this because of the war on terror and because of the threat of Islamic extremism, and I have to do this because our country is facing a dire emergency.
Well, no one in Pakistan will believe this, even though there is rising violence and something resembling civil war in certain parts of the country.
It was not a national threat yet, but I'm afraid some people abroad may believe this argument.
Well, William Pitt once said that necessity is the argument of tyrants and the creed of slaves.
How true.
Now, all this talk about whether he's in violation of the Constitution or not, he seized power.
He was a military dictator who led a coup d'etat back in 97 or 98, right?
In 99, that's right.
Oh, was it in 99?
Okay.
Yeah.
Yes, you're quite right.
You know, it's a how is it, why should a military dictator worry about constitutional niceties?
Well, the fact is that he had, he was trying to buttress, find some legitimacy to his crumbling regime.
Washington, who counts him as it's probably one of the most important allies in the world, was pressing him to make his regime more kosher and to stop looking like a tin pot dictator.
After all, the Bush administration invaded Iraq and Afghanistan under the banner of bringing democracy to the benighted Muslims.
So looked very bad for America's key ally in the area to be wrapping himself in dictatorship at this time.
Now, back in 1999, when that coup happened, I really don't know anything about the internal workings of what happened.
But I remember Madeleine Albright's statement, the former secretary of state.
Her statement was, well, gee, you know, we sure don't look too fondly on military coup d'etats, tsk, tsk, but she sure didn't seem to mean it.
And it made me wonder then whether the CIA was in on that coup from the beginning.
And I wonder whether, you know, well, I was in Pakistan right around that time and I interviewed Musharraf shortly thereafter.
And I do know, I do not believe the CIA was involved.
They may have had discrete links to Musharraf and spotting him as an up-and-comer in the military, but he and one of its senior figures.
But he, I don't think the CIA engineered it.
It was purely a function of Pakistan, the rough and tumble politics.
But the U.S. was very quick to cement relations with Musharraf afterwards.
Yeah.
Well, that was why I was always suspicious about that, because their objection was deliberately muted, obviously.
Well, like Condoleezza Rice's little chirps in the last couple of days about the crackdown in Afghanistan, sort of saying, tsk, tsk, tsk, you know, we were really not happy.
And meanwhile, keeping the money flowing to Islamabad.
And now, I'm trying to remember now where it was I read this.
I know I found the link off of LouRockwell.com's blog not too long ago, but it was about how whenever Musharraf or any of his men come to the United States, they completely circumvent the State Department.
Their relationship is directly with the Vice President and his aides.
That is true.
The Vice President's office holds a commanding position in foreign policy, particularly when it deals with the Muslim world.
And the Pakistani generals and many senior officials in the Musharraf regime have long been very close to the Pentagon and to the CIA.
How usual is that to have the State Department cut out of relations with any country?
Oh, it is not unusual.
Not unusual?
It's par for the course.
In fact, for decades, I wrote a column recently about Ecuador in the 1960s, where a schoolmate of mine, the President, told the Americans to go to hell.
He was drunk and he gave a speech and the head of the Ecuadorian army called up the Pentagon and said, can we roll our tanks?
And the Pentagon gave him a green light.
Off they went.
State Department only found out about it when reading the newspapers.
And this still goes on to this day.
Yeah.
Now, Bhutto, she was the prime minister who was deposed by Musharraf or she was before that?
No, she was twice previously prime minister, and she was deposed first by the army and then by the president at the time.
And she was deposed for corruption and malfeasance and general bungling and getting too many people angry at her.
She's now returned.
She's in Pakistan.
And she's been engaged in a U.S. brokered deal with Musharraf for power sharing, whereby this is the U.S. plan, whereby Musharraf would remain control of the army, the finances, the all important intelligence services and foreign affairs.
And she would become the Democratic window dressing as prime minister.
She's quite popular in Pakistan.
Her party, the Pakistan People's Party, is the biggest political party in Afghanistan.
But she would, in my view, have had no power, really, over the main no control of the main levers of power under this arrangement.
But they have not yet come to a deal.
And now you wrote that you actually warned her personally, you know her and told her, be careful making a deal with this guy.
I did.
You know, I quoted the old saying, when you sup with the devil, be sure you use a long spoon.
And this is just her problem that she faces.
She wants to get back into power, but she risks being gravely tainted by appearing to do a backroom deal with Musharraf.
And, of course, many Pakistani feel that she and Musharraf are simply agents of the United States and too cozy with them and do not represent the best interests of their country.
Well, is that true?
It's not true in that they work for the CIA.
But it is true that both Musharraf and Benazir Bhutto derive a lot of their power from the United States and have traditionally been close to the United States, particularly Benazir Bhutto.
And they get, I'm sure, secret finance and lots of muscle from the U.S. and this is the problem they've had with Pakistanis, convincing them that they're not in bed, too much in bed with the Americans.
And now, the assassination attempt against her, what I guess two weeks ago now, I guess the general line is that Islamic terrorists did it, although I guess it would make sense that Musharraf would have his own motivation for trying to keep her out of the way.
Is there a suspicion that he's actually behind that?
Yes.
You're right about the official line.
She, Bhutto told me last week that she's convinced that the attack was staged by people close to Musharraf in the Musharraf government.
Oh, really?
Yes.
And I don't know what the real truth of the matter is.
Bhutto has lots of enemies everywhere.
But her claim was they did it to prevent her from holding big rallies, because that's really her strength, is the popular demonstrations, and also to use that attack as one of the pretexts for the military coup, or not even coup, a palace coup, if you want.
And other bank attendees are saying, you know, this whole thing has been worked out in advance in Washington.
Washington knew it was coming, and it's part of the political theater to keep Musharraf on as a dictator.
Wow.
Now, you're not that cynical, are you?
I could be.
Yeah, I was just thinking I probably could be, too.
Now, how exactly would, I mean, this is a hypothetical in speculation and so forth, but how could the Musharraf government deploy suicide bombers?
It has contacts in extremist elements within Pakistan.
It plays both sides of the street.
It could have told somebody to go and plant a bomb that was a fake and turned out to be a real one.
I mean, there were a lot of ways they could engineer a bombing.
To what degree are the actual terrorists, so-called, really a threat?
Because, you know, I'm pretty certain Musharraf's line has really been this whole time that, hey, it's either me or Osama in charge here, basically, so you have to support me no matter what, and yet I've also read that there's actually a pretty small number of people in Pakistan who actually would support a radical Islamist viewpoint anyway.
That is correct.
The Islamist parties that are close to that sort of radical Islamist way of thinking have never gained more than 12% of the popular vote in parties.
That was in the past.
And most Pakistanis want a more centrist approach.
Many were happy with military rule, but, for example, under President Zia-ul-Haq, who I knew quite well, they were happy with it because he was a capable, competent leader who was clearly working for Pakistan's national interests.
But there's displeasure of Musharraf because, besides being a competent ruler for domestic affairs, he's seen as not representing Pakistan's interests to those of Washington.
So what's happening is by his crackdowns and by bowing to pressure from Washington to use Pakistan's military and intelligence service against pro-Taliban elements in the tribal areas of Pakistan and Balochistan, in other words, waging war against his own people.
Musharraf has thrown gas onto the fire and has encouraged violence in the country and extremist groups, and this is going to continue and grow worse, in my view.
And now, see, I guess he's really stuck in a dilemma there because the only way that he could really get rid of the al-Qaeda guys that the United States failed to stop at Tora Bora and who successfully went to Pakistan, he would have to do a full-scale invasion of Waziristan and wage a real war there, not just martial law on the streets, you know, in that sense, a war against the people of Pakistan, but a real war against the Waziristan area in order to root out.
Well, and the local tribes who, in the first place, it's a violation of Pakistan's constitutional understanding to send troops into the area, which is guaranteed autonomy when it joined Pakistan in 1947.
But secondly, the Pakistanis know that they don't want to get involved in a guerrilla war against these very tough Pashtun tribesmen, which would be like the war in Afghanistan.
And in fact, the Pakistani troops, 200 Pakistani troops who were sent there to fight just surrendered and are now being repatriated back to Pakistan, this great opposition in the armed forces to fighting and bombing and killing Pakistani tribesmen.
They don't like it.
It's a disgrace.
It's shameful.
And a lot of people in Pakistan are saying, fight India, not your own people.
And so where does this leave American policy when Dick Cheney has backed this guy to the hilt as long as he promises to wage the war on terror for us within his country, and he basically can't do that.
What's to happen now?
Yeah, and let's call the war on terror, so-called war on terror by its right name, which is really American military and intelligence operations against anti-American Islamists who are trying to overthrow Western backed governments.
I put in parenthetically that the main reason for what we call Islamic terrorism or violence is that these people are fighting against their own dictatorial governments that were imposed and are sustained by Washington.
Attacks against the West are very secondary.
But to come back to your point about Cheney, Cheney is going to have to get them to fight more and more against anti-Western forces in Pakistan as well as Afghanistan, and the worsening crisis in Pakistan is going to leave U.S. and other NATO forces in Afghanistan with a major problem in their rear supply areas.
Yeah, well, some people like former CIA analyst Michael Schoyer has said that the war in Afghanistan is already lost.
It might as well leave.
Or I guess he would rather have us invade Waziristan and find Osama and kill him and then go ahead and forget the rest of it.
Well, Schoyer is one of these, I have great admiration for his book, but he tends to be a bloodthirsty sofa samurai.
I don't see him leading forces into Waziristan.
I doubt he's ever been there.
But the point is that any U.S. invasion of Waziristan would be akin to the U.S. invasion of Cambodia during the Vietnam War, where the U.S. couldn't win the war in Vietnam and blamed, oh, the VC and the North Vietnamese are getting their supplies to Cambodia, so let's invade Cambodia.
Well, they did invade Cambodia, and they just spread a no-win war.
I believe the U.S. is going to be defeated in Afghanistan eventually.
The day after 9-11, when the U.S. was invading Afghanistan, I wrote, I was the only person in North America to warn against an invasion of Afghanistan.
I said, once you get in there, you're not going to be able to get out, and you're never going to win a war against the Pashtun tribal people, which is what would happen.
We've got ourselves in a tribal war, and we're not going to win it.
Well, I warned them too, but I had a smaller platform.
Excuse me, I should have said written.
Yeah, there you go.
See, I didn't write it.
It was pirate radio.
So, Pakistan after Musharraf, one way or another, this guy is going to go, whether it's a year from now or six years from now.
Are we to expect that basically the British parliamentary, law-based system of government will be able to last in Pakistan?
Is there any reason to fear that the terrorists will get ahold of the nuclear weapons, that kind of thing?
Well, there was never really true functioning democracy in Pakistan.
There was the facade of it with the parliament and courts, but the real power has always been held by the army and by big landowners who buy and sell politicians like bags of rice.
They're a feudal system of landowners.
That's Benazir Bhutto's power base, for example.
And corruption engulfed everything.
Everything was for sale in Afghanistan.
So, if Musharraf is blown up or running out of the country, he's already picked a successor in the military, General Kiani, who's been vetted and approved by Washington as if the whole senior military ranks of the Pakistani army have been approved by Washington.
And they will take over.
And there will be another tough general to run things, in fact, as an overseer for Western interests.
But that is provided the army doesn't split.
And there may be younger officers who are ashamed of the fact that they have been rented out in effect to a foreign power, that they're like sepoys, the native soldiers in the British Indian armies of the British Raj, and that they may split.
Pakistan's nuclear weapons are firmly under the control of the army and the intelligence service, ISI, and they are safe even if there are a lot of crises, unless the army splits.
And if the army splits, well, then it's anyone's guess.
But you would say, just on average day, flipping a coin or whatever, if a suicide bomber successfully killed Musharraf, basically you'd have the next mustache in line and nothing real would change there, especially in terms of who's holding the nukes.
Yeah, I think that's the most likely outcome.
I don't see any other strong political trend.
Lesbenezir Bhutto can somehow seize control of the political process and bring in what she claims to be real democracy in Pakistan.
The problem is that we're relying on individual figures to bring democracy.
There are none of the institutions of democracy in Pakistan that are functioning and realistic.
And now, what about the conflict between India and Pakistan over Kashmir?
I guess I read some about six months ago that said that trade between the two countries was really increasing a lot, and that it was really helping to spread peace.
I was just in India in the spring, and I'll tell you, the Indians are cock-a-hoop.
They think they're winning in Kashmir.
They think they've got the Pakistanis on the run.
I think they're right.
The US pressure on Musharraf forced him to really cut back on 90% on Pakistan's efforts to gain control of Kashmir, which, by the way, most of whose people are Muslims and want to join Pakistan.
But the Indians have a firm control.
They see that Musharraf was forced to give up his support of the Kashmiri independence fighters and to back down, and every time he's tried to make peace arrangements with India, the Indians keep moving the goalposts forward, making more and more demands.
They know they've got the Pakistanis on the run, as I was told by a senior Indian official, and so they really don't have to make any compromise.
The danger is, right now, not that they'll go to war over Kashmir, but if the crisis engulfs Pakistan and Pakistan starts to break up because it's a very fragile country, there's a chance that India might intervene as it did in East Pakistan in 1970-71, which would later then, thanks to the Indian invasion, would later become the independent nation of Bangladesh.
If it came to a full-scale war between India and Pakistan, I've read, again, I can't remember where, years and years ago, I guess, I read that the Chinese would never let India defeat Pakistan outright in a nuclear war, that they would intervene on the side of Pakistan.
Is that your understanding?
No.
There's no doubt that China is Pakistan's closest ally and of enormous importance to China because it sits on India's western flank and causes India great problems.
But the trouble is, in a conventional war, it's very difficult for India to come to military assistance of Pakistan.
The geography is just against it.
There's only one road, the Karakoram Highway, that links Pakistan with China across a 15,000-foot mountain pass that's open only three-quarters of the time anyway and could easily be knocked out.
The only other way that China could help Pakistan in a war, a conventional war, would be to attack from the Tibetan Plateau south into India, or else to go nuclear.
But I can't think that China would go nuclear to defend Pakistan in a conventional war.
Well, I remember thinking the insanity.
I saw an interview of a Pakistani general.
I guess this was in 1998 when they were testing their nukes, right?
Yeah.
And it was a Pakistani general being interviewed and referring to the Indians.
He said, you tell them that we're not scared of them and they're little atom bombs.
We have them too.
We're not.
Bring it on.
And I was just thinking, does this guy really know what he's talking about?
Is the policy in these two countries in terms of the deployment of nuclear weapons against each other in the hands of people who really have that little understanding of what they're dealing with?
No, that's not my view.
You get a lot of bluster on both sides, but I think the military establishments on both sides are very level-headed.
They understand the risks fully, and they've played a leading role in trying to prevent any kind of accidental or intemperate use of nuclear weapons.
The real danger is this, that these neighboring countries have generally three minutes warning time of an attack.
It's just as if between Canada and the U.S., all of a sudden Canadian radar sees missiles coming up from Michigan, and they've got three minutes to call Ottawa and say, you know, quick, what do we do?
And then the command authority in this case would be Pakistan has to make a decision within three minutes whether this is indeed a surprise attack, whether it's a nuclear attack that's supposed to decapitate Pakistan's leadership and nuclear forces, and you have to either use them or lose them within three minutes.
This is the danger.
Both sides have this same very scary warning time.
They're at hair-trigger alert, and the real danger is a false alarm, a missile test gone off, of course a flock of birds, and anything, false readings, could easily trigger a nuclear exchange.
Well, and I'd like to apologize in advance to you for when America attacks Canada.
It won't be long now.
Well, Canada has water and oil, you know, it's a tempting target.
Yeah, exactly, and not far away, not at all.
It'll only take you two or three minutes to kill you all and take your stuff.
Okay, and now one more thing on Pakistan here real quick before I start asking you about Kurdistan.
I just got an email from David Beto at the University of Alabama.
He said, take a gander at freerepublic.com, and you'll find, isn't that ironic too, at freerepublic.com, you'll find plenty of conservative applause of Musharraf's coup.
A lot of them love the idea that he is arresting lawyers.
Well, I must say, even I had a certain tingling of pleasure watching lawyers being beaten, but in this case, it's a very grave thing because these lawyers represent one of the few voices of legality and democratic process and Western values in Pakistan.
And, you know, conservatives and neoconservatives who really know nothing about this part of the world, all you have to tell them is terrorism, Muslims, these two buzzwords, and anybody who bashes Muslims, you know, who are protesting against injustice in the area.
They think that's good, but it's this kind of thinking that caused 9-11.
Right, and yet, you know, I'd really rather see mobs beating lawyers rather than the state itself, and of course, these are all probably defense attorneys and so forth rather than prosecutors, the ones who really deserve it.
That's right.
All right, now, let me ask you about Kurdistan.
Well, specifically, I guess I want to start with this because this is the thing I haven't been able to figure out really with any kind of certainty at all.
You have the two major factions of Kurdish political power, is my understanding, the Barzani faction and the Talabani faction, right?
And they have their Peshmerga, their private militias, basically.
And now, what is their involvement with the PKK?
Are they allies with the PKK, the Marxist separatists, or are, you know, their third power in Kurdistan, or how does that work?
They're not organically linked.
The PKK is a curious organization that was in Turkish Kurdistan.
By the way, I covered the wars there in the 1990s.
PKK, that is the Kurdistan Workers' Party, is a very militant Marxist-oriented group that's quite close to Peru's Shining Path guerrillas, where it idolizes a leader.
You might say they're close to the Tamil Tigers.
They combine militancy with Marxism, whereas the mainstream Kurdish groups in Iraqi Kurdistan, the KDP and the PUK, are traditional tribal groups with their tribal leaders, the Barzanis and the Talabanis, who are not ideologically Marxist and were not linked in any way with the Turkish Kurdish rebels.
But they had sympathy for them.
They both disliked the Turks, they both wanted Kurdish homeland in the area, and so the Iraqi Kurds certainly allowed the Turkish Kurds to have bases inside of Iraq, have protected them, sheltered them, and given them arms and aid.
There's been a bit of controversy, I don't know if you saw Justin Raimondo's article about this on Antiwar.com a couple of weeks ago, and I spoke with Phil Dural, the former CIA officer on the show last week, and they're both talking about the Americans actually backing the PKK for use against the Iranians, and saying that even though America is a staunch ally of the Turks, well basically this is blowback, they're funding both sides.
Well, my view is somewhat different.
I do not believe the US is supporting the PKK, or ever has, but the US is indeed supporting another organization, which is an Iraqi-based Kurdish movement for the liberation of Kurdish Iran.
Okay, so it's not part of the PKK, but it is another Kurdish rebel movement that has been launching quite serious and effective cross-border raids from inside northern Iraq into Iran.
My understanding is the US has been supporting and arming this group, just as the US has been supporting Sunni extremist groups in Pakistan, in the province of Balochistan, who have been launching raids across the border into Iran.
So, and this is just another example of the US double standard, which is so detested around the world, and that is that they call the PKK who attacked Turks terrorists, but the PKK who attacked Iran are, I don't know what they call them, freedom fighters.
Certainly they haven't denounced them.
Right, and now what's the name of that group now?
I cannot tell you off the tip of my tongue the official name, but it's the something like the Iran front for the liberation of Turkish, I'm sorry, of Iranian Kurdistan.
Okay, well I'll look into that.
That would disconnect that support from any blowback against the Turks that's happening now.
That's right.
Okay, and now this is something that we never hear about.
I only remember hearing Noam Chomsky talk about it, actually, back in the 1990s, and there's very little coverage anywhere else.
I guess for the most of us, I was not paying that close of attention, I guess, but you apparently spent a good portion of the 1990s covering the Turkish war against the Kurds in Turkey that Bill Clinton and Lockheed and the American taxpayer supported.
That's correct.
The official US government view was that the Kurds were Marxist terrorists, and there was zero sympathy for Kurdish aspirations in Washington.
Since the US invasion of Iraq, however, the Kurds have become America's leading ally in the Muslim world, really, or one of its leading allies.
Certainly, the only people who are friendly to the United States inside Iraq, the US relies considerably on Turkish Peshmerga fighting units to maintain order in northern Iraq and even in parts of Baghdad.
So there are allies, so the US has to take a very delicate position vis-à-vis the Kurds and the Turks, and it's now increasing involvement with the Kurds, by the way, who are also being strongly supported by Israel, which wants to see an independent Kurdish state in the breakup of Iraq.
This has put Washington on an inevitable collision course with Turkey, which sees the Kurds as a mortal enemy.
And doesn't Israel have a strong relationship with Turkey as well?
Yes, Israel has been arming the Kurds since 1975.
Oh, I mean the Turks, though, don't the Israelis cooperate with the Turks?
Yes, Israel has a very long and close relationship, not with the Turkish government, but with the Turkish army, which is a government within the government.
Turkish generals are extremely right-wing, if not outright neo-fascist, and they're very anti-Islamist, they hate Arabs, they hate Muslims, they hate Kurds, and they hate their own government.
And they've staged four coups since the 1960s, and we threatened one just recently, so the Turkish generals are very in cahoots with the Israelis in, A, fighting what they see as Islamic fundamentalism or any enemies of Israel, but also they're doing all kinds of arms deals together from which the Turkish generals get considerable dividends.
And now at the same time, as you say, the Israelis, and this has been reported by Seymour Hersh, and the BBC actually ran video of Israelis training with the Kurds, and Seymour Hersh reported that they had hundreds of intelligence agents and army intelligence officers all throughout Kurdistan.
That's correct.
As you say, in an attempt to really break Iraq up, in that sense, if they had a real independent Kurdistan, that would also break up Syria and Turkey and Iran as well.
It would have a seismic effect on the whole region, there's no doubt about it.
And there's talk in Israel of eventually, if they break up Syria, of running a pipeline from Kurdistan, Iraqi Kurdistan, directly to Haifa in northern Israel.
They're still talking about this pipeline to Haifa this whole time.
It's been revived, it's an old dream, but it's come alive again as it's what seemed like a silly dream before it suddenly becomes and gets an air of possibility.
Now, is the Israeli policy trying to split up Iraq, contrary to America's policy at all?
I mean, the Bush administration at least puts on a face that they're trying to keep Iraq together and have a multi-ethnic government so far.
That's correct.
That's the official American policy, but Israeli policy has managed to imprint itself on Washington to the extent that it's hard to tell the difference between US and Israeli policy anymore.
And the Israelis pushed hard, that's why they supported the original war against Iraq, and they want Iraq broken into three pieces.
And the US government, in my view, has come to accept this idea that it will really be three separate parts papered over by some kind of a powerless government.
In terms of Israel's cooperation with the Kurds, which Kurds?
All of them?
The PKK included, or the Barzani Talabani?
No, the Barzani Talabani group.
But the Israelis aren't helping the PKK fight the Turks at this point?
No, no, not that I'm aware of at all.
They wouldn't because they know it would outrage their friends in the Turkish military.
Were the government claims ignorance on accidentally installing the Supreme Islamic Council, basically the Iranian proxies in power in Iraq, and they're basically playing dumb and saying, oops, now, you know, it's a bad thing that Iran has all this power and so forth.
They could have been supporting Sadr, who is a nationalist this whole time, they instead supported the Supreme Islamic Council that all along, really, has openly declared that they want federalism, they want an independent southern Shia stand in alliance with Iran, right?
That's correct, and it just underlines the point that the US really, while talking unity, was ready to prepare to accept the fragmentation.
And now, so then, I guess the recent redirection in arming and financing the former Sunni insurgency in Anbar province and so forth, I guess is just a further part of that?
Basically just helping prepare them to be better able to resist the domination of the Maliki government?
It's a tactical response to buying, renting local loyalty to get them to stopping attacking American forces, rather than part of, I think, a major strategic plan.
Now, in the long term, I guess victory means that the conflict is kept on a low enough scale that the American government can move the troops to bases on the outskirts of towns around Iraq and basically just try to keep them there and out of the low-level permanent state of war?
That's correct.
That's how the British ruled Iraq in the 1920s and 30s.
They used the RAF mainly from big air bases to bomb any tribal troublemakers.
In fact, in 1922, Winston Churchill authorized the use of poison gas against Kurdish tribesmen by the RAF.
And they'd only use British troops in real emergencies to protect the US-installed puppet government.
That's the US plan for Iraq, very clearly operate from three to five really major bases, intervene only when necessary, use local puppet troops, sepoys, as you would call them, to do the routine dirty work.
And I might add that Iraq split into three pieces.
It's much easier for the US to deal with its oil of three weak little countries than one bigger, more solid one.
I guess the debate about whether to stay or leave doesn't usually have too much relationship to the actual goals and motivations of the war party.
But the argument really usually comes down to, well, things will be worse if we go, it will be disruptive if America own invades Iraq.
And I wonder whether you think there's any truth to that or whether you think it matters?
Well, if there's truth to it, yes.
After US troops withdraw, there will be a wild and bloody struggle for power and the civil war there will intensify.
But it's like a fever going up before it breaks.
This is inevitable.
If America is ever going to withdraw from Iraq, it has to be ready to face this.
Iraq will go through it, but eventually the Iraqis will settle down and make some motive to end the amongst themselves.
Just the way the same thing will happen in Afghanistan once the Western powers get out of there too.
The fact of the Sunni civil war has been overplayed, it will settle down.
And America cannot use this as an excuse for saying, oh, we can't leave our colonial occupation because there will be unrest afterwards.
This war and the flight of 2 million Iraqis from Iraq and the exile of the refugee status of another 2 million are entirely the result of US intervention, one of the blackest marks on our history in a long time.
And the US must start ending this process by pulling out.
I guess we can stay safely in the assumption that we'll be there at least through January of 2009.
What do you see happening in the Kurdistan conflict?
We have America and Israel on both sides of this to one degree or another.
Is Rice's advice to the Turks to stay out going to be enough to keep them out?
Are the PKK going to be able to provoke them into an invasion?
The PKK has been provocative.
The current Turkish democratic government doesn't want to get involved in Iraq and knows it will be a quagmire.
The generals are beating the war drums and public opinion in Turkey is wildly inflamed and wants to punish the PKK.
After all, 35,000 people have been killed in this war between the PKK and the Turks.
It's been going on since the 1980s.
This isn't something that just came up and they're fed up and they have the mistaken notion that an invasion of Iraq will end the whole problem.
It won't.
Guerrilla wars are not ended this way.
The Peshmerga will simply fade up into the mountains.
Washington is trying to calm everybody down and offer inducements not to attack.
I think there will be substantial Turkish raids across the border.
The Turkish government is wise.
It will not send its whole 100,000 troops in there to occupy the region.
Unless the Turks are damned and determined to occupy northern Iraq for good and grab its oil, which used to be part of the Ottoman Empire, and suddenly get some oil for Turkey.
Oh, right.
Yeah, never forget that sand with oil beneath it up there near Kurdistan.
Correct.
And it's not going away.
No.
I see pictures of Turks in the streets in Istanbul, I guess, protesting the United States and blaming the U.S. for PKK attacks.
What do you make of that?
I don't think it's accurate, but certainly Turks are angry at the U.S. because they're seeing that the Iraqi government, which is a creature of the United States, is protecting the PKK and its operating bases in northern Iraq.
So it's not much of a jump of imagination to claim that, well, the U.S. is secretly aiding them.
It's not, but it's closing its eyes to what the PKK is doing.
The U.S. commander in Iraq said the U.S. forces had no intention of going after the PKK, even though it's branded a terrorist organization by Washington.
The Turks have a right to be angry.
Their American ally has not been doing them any good.
Yeah.
Now, when it comes to the PKK, and I guess also in terms of Barzani and Talibanist groups, how much autonomy are they really pushing for?
Do they really want an independent state or do they recognize that would cause a war?
Well, they're playing a game, a very subtle and dangerous game, and that is they are quietly developing complete autonomy and they can go independent now at practically any time.
They've got their own flag, they've got their own borders, they've got their own oil, they've got their own military forces, their own flag.
They have all the elements of an independent state and they're waiting for the right moment to declare independence.
And they know now is not the right time.
They have to convince Washington to support this kind of declaration of independence.
And Washington can't make up its mind on what to do.
It's a very difficult problem.
At the end of the day, they have to just stab the Kurds in the back rather than the Turks, right?
The Turks don't have oil.
The Kurds do, so it makes the decision difficult.
All right, yeah, well, that's what you get for being an ally of the United States, I guess, is a knife in the back, huh?
Well, Henry Kissinger once said, you know, he said, the only thing more dangerous than being an enemy of the U.S. is being its ally.
Yeah, we're coming for you next, Canada.
That's right.
All right, hey, thanks a lot for your time today, everybody.
Eric Margolis from Sun National Media in Canada and the American Conservative Magazine and LouRockwell.com.
Really appreciate your time today.
It's been a great pleasure.
Cheerio.
