For Pacifica Radio, Friday, November 2nd, 2012, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Alright y'all, welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
My website is scotthorton.org.
I keep all my interview archives there, more than 2,500 of them now.
Going back to 2003.
You can find my blog at scotthorton.org/stress and you can find me, of course, on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube at slash scotthorton show.
Okay, so tonight's guest is the great Eric Margulies, foreign correspondent, author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
Welcome to the show, Eric.
How are you doing?
I'm just glad to be back with you, Scott.
Well, good.
I'm very happy to have you here on the show.
There's a whole lot going on in the world and a lot to catch up on, but it seems like the headlines are hinting that they really are fixing to escalate at least the drone war, some kind of proxy war, into the Western Saharan nation of Mali.
And, well, it's not like any would-be Obama voters care or would withhold their vote over someone he killed or anything like that, but I just thought it was worthy to note on the eve of this election just what conservative, nationalist, imperialist these Democrats are.
So I was wondering, you know, if you could tell us a little bit about Mali.
How is it that, oh, al-Qaeda is running rampant there and America has to intervene?
Well, first of all, Mali is a place where nobody knows where it is from this starting point, and certainly very few people in the United States know where it is.
French know.
Many French know where it is because it used to be a French colony.
It was part of French West Africa, and Mali lies in the region called the Sahel, which is sort of a borderland which is just to the south of the Sahara Desert, very arid, very mountainous, extremely poor, and there are a lot of nomads there, particularly in the north of Mali, famous Tuareg nomads, known as the Blue Men of the Sahara, who, you know, tended their flocks for a long time, and like the Pashtuns in Afghanistan, they don't recognize any borders drawn by Western colonial powers.
So they cruise through the desert of the Sahara like ships through the sea and go where they want.
Southern Mali is on the Niger River.
It's fertile.
It has settled tribes there.
The French, you know, when they used to rule neighboring Chad, they divided Chad into two parts, Chad utile, meaning useful Chad, and Chad inutile, meaning useless Chad, and that's pretty much the case of Mali, too.
So there is a very barren northern region, a fairly fertile southern region, a very poor country altogether, with a feeble government, which just had a military coup, and of no particular importance to anyone, except now because the Islamists are getting involved, which means that the Western powers have to come charging in as well.
Well, but what Islamists?
I mean, I thought bin Laden was dead, and Zawahiri was hiding in somebody's mother's basement in Pakistan, somewhere way the hell in exile 3,000 miles to the east of Mali, or more.
That's true.
It's not your good old grandfather's Al-Qaeda from Afghanistan.
These are other anti-Western and militant religious groups that are not part of the Al-Qaeda network.
We call them linked to Al-Qaeda, but they may be, you know, minded in the same direction, but they're not organically part of these groups.
But they are anti-Western, and where the latest group of extremists in Mali has come from is from Algeria, because there was a very bloody civil war there.
In 1991, Algeria held the first free vote in the Arab world, and a pro-Islamist group that wanted to bring Islamic principles, like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, came to power.
And the army immediately arrested all of them, shut down the democratic movement, and it was the Algerian army, very brutal, torture, repression, backed by France, backed by the United States, and this horrible civil war erupted in Algeria that took over 200,000, maybe 250,000 lives, and most unspeakable tortures and beheadings were done.
And out of this maelstrom came a radical group called the Popular Front for the Preaching of Combat, that has mutated now into Al-Qaeda in the Maghreb, which means North Africa in Arabic.
It's a small group, but it's very militant, hates the West, and they've moved into Mali, and now the alert is going off in France and the United States.
Oh man, so they use that word Al-Qaeda, and really, you know, I've read a bunch of different places, here and there, where intelligence sources say, eh, these guys are really just local gangsters, and they do kidnapping for ransom and stuff like that, and they're really nothing like the Bin Ladenites, other than that they call themselves.
Although, then again, here they are trying to make not so many of a mini-state there in northern Mali.
It seems like the Tuareg Rebellion has been quickly pushed to the side, and these are the guys taking over the place, and I don't know if this is really right, I can't tell from my map, Eric, but I read in McClatchy newspapers today that northern Mali is the size of Texas.
That's big, and apparently there are, according to McClatchy, there are these three major warlords who are Al-Qaeda-linked warlords, these Al-Qaeda and the Islamic Maghreb guys, who've divided this Texas-sized piece of Mali into thirds, so far.
That's right, it's a huge, vast, empty area.
By the way, I have more confidence in McClatchy papers than most other American media.
As do I, yeah, for sure.
They are commendable, honest media.
That's the case.
These Islamists, who are a smaller number, again, have kind of pushed the Tuaregs temporarily out of the cities, and they're running around, and they've destroyed some saint's tombs in Timbuktu, which is the capital of northern Mali, and caused a great stir in the West.
People have gotten outraged about the destruction of historic sites, and people can't even find Mali on the map, but that's the case.
When mosques were being blown up in Bosnia, no one cared about that at the time.
But the point is that the appearance of these ragtag Islamists, if you want to call them that, and Jeeps with AK-47s, set off alarm bells in Paris, the old colonial ruler, and in Washington, because in Washington now, every time you say Islamist, there's a military knee-jerk reaction.
Remember, American forces are now taking a very active role in Africa, in East Africa, and now in West Africa.
I believe there are American special forces already in Mali.
One was killed in a Jeep accident there recently, so we know they're around.
The American special forces were in Libya in a much bigger way than we were told.
And now the U.S. is trying to push Algeria, which has a large, brutal army, to push Algeria to intervene with French and American money and logistics support.
The Algerians say they want American troops, and I suspect we'll see more American special forces and CIA forces deployed in Mali, chasing around the desert after these Muslimists.
It's amazing.
I forgot if I had talked with you about this before, but there was a piece a few weeks back in defensenews.com where it was one of those out-of-the-mouths-of-babes kind of thing.
It was in no way cynical.
They just said that, well, they have this major division of the army, I forget which it was, that is looking for something to do after the drawdown in Iraq, getting kicked out of Iraq, they meant to say.
And so they're looking for ways to stay globally engaged was the language of the article.
And guess what?
Africa is a really big place, and I bet you we could find one guy killing another guy all over that continent and use each and every one of those crises as an excuse to expand.
And so here they go, the dagger brigade on its way to Africa, and they will find a crisis, if not this one, the next one.
Maybe we can chase this crisis into Niger, next door, or into Mauritania.
That's quite right.
Mauritania is already a hot spot where Morocco is vying with Algeria versus the Polisario Liberation Front, which wants an independent state there.
That whole region is kind of shaky, right down to the Ivory Coast, where there was just the civil war, there was a coup in Mali which started this whole thing on.
But you know, really, so what?
That area is only important unto itself.
It doesn't affect the rest of the world.
And, you know, the U.S. can't go charging into every little backwater, unless, of course, it's looking for trouble, as you suggested.
And no doubt in the military, having not won the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to put it politely, there's a need to win a smaller war and to keep the budget gravy train going, because, you know, the military is like sharks.
The minute they stop swimming, they sink.
And the first place budgets are going to be cut is to a military that's not doing anything.
It's sitting in its barracks, polishing boots.
So Africa offers a big thrill, a big opportunity for everybody with a military career.
It's new, it's exciting, it's mysterious.
And it's also got a lot of oil and minerals.
You know, Africa now, I think, is almost as big an oil supplier as the Middle East, maybe bigger, to the U.S.
So African oil strategically has become important.
And the Chinese are moving in and nibbling away there at the margins.
So it's another reason for Washington to get involved.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Eric Margulies.
Ericmargulies.com is his website.
He's the author of War at the Top of the World, an American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
And so, yeah, domination, the continent of Africa.
We're running out of continents with enemies on them.
We've just got to run around looking for local militias to call insurgents to fight, basically, now.
Link to al-Qaeda.
Right, which is easy enough to link.
And, you know, I've got to think about this, too.
And, you know, I don't know, call me out and call me a hypocrite if you want to.
But it seems to me like the guys in Mali who are cutting off people's hands and defacing all the Sufi shrines, and the guys, for that matter, that we fought to give them Misrata, the United States government fought on the side of these guys in Libya in the regime change against Gaddafi there, and, for that matter, the guys that the empires are backing, our satellites are backing in Syria right now, they are al-Qaeda linked.
And they're not maybe al-Qaeda linked, in my view, enough to justify intervening against them further somehow, but they're al-Qaeda linked enough that it's a horrible blame that Obama should be tried, should be impeached and removed and prosecuted for capital T treason right now, when he's fighting a war in Libya directly on behalf of veterans of al-Qaeda in Iraq, who fought the war against our guys in Iraq in the last decade, and fighting and backing them in Libya and in Syria right now.
Never mind, I don't think he meant for the consequences in Mali.
That's, I don't know how impeachable that is, it's horrible.
But it's unintended consequences.
The government was directly backing veterans of al-Qaeda in Iraq, in Libya, and are currently doing so, I guess they reaped the whirlwind in Libya for it, and are currently doing so in Libya, I mean in Syria, and that is just absolutely amazing.
Well, Scott, I don't think the president was responsible for that, but certainly some of his underlings down there, particularly in this very pro-war group of national security advisors he has in the White House and in the CIA, thought it was a great idea.
And they started using these groups, not because they're al-Qaeda, but because they were handy and they were armed and they wanted to go fight the Syrian government or fight the Libyan government.
And at the time they were described as freedom fighters again, and now we're beginning to understand that they were linked to al-Qaeda.
It's going to be a big embarrassment for the White House.
And speaking of embarrassment, let me just add that in Libya, the U.S. role there was much bigger than was admitted from day one.
I and we were saying that American covert forces were really waging the war against Gaddafi.
And now we're frowning with that whole Benghazi incident that, you know, why didn't anybody take action?
They didn't because they didn't want to admit that there were so many CIA and Army special forces there in Libya at the time.
Right.
Well, the thing is, though, Obama can't plead ignorance.
I don't know if he reads antiwar.com, which I guess I'm pretty sure that he does not.
But it was right there in the telegraph that, yeah, me and my guys, we are veterans of al-Qaeda in Iraq where we fought against the Americans.
But you know what?
We don't hold it against them.
And they're helping us with our war against Gaddafi now, so we like them all right and whatever.
You know, he can't claim ignorance of that.
It was in the frigging telegraph.
And Pepe Escobar wrote in the Asia Times.
I don't think anybody cares about it at this point in the United States.
But it may come a blow up in our faces.
Well, and it already looks like it has with this thing on September 11th.
It was some kind of, again, al-Qaeda-linked group that was behind that attack.
Are you talking September 11th in 2001?
No, no, no.
I mean the attack in Benghazi again that killed the ambassador.
Oh, Benghazi.
So it seems.
But, you know, nobody wanted to see at the time that these people were part of the jihadist movement.
Though, in Libya, its source was in Benghazi.
And the first move against Gaddafi came from the Benghazi jihadists.
So, you know, it's the old Middle East saying, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, and that guy, Abdul Hakim al-Belhaj, you know, for being linked to al-Qaeda, he sure seems to be a nice guy.
He's suing the British for helping the CIA and Gaddafi torture him.
But, you know, that's a pretty civilized way to go about getting his revenge.
He's suing them in their own court over it.
I guess he's not even trying in America because he knows there's no such thing as the law here, not even the shadow of it.
But he's basically given statements many times saying that, you know, again, yes, I'm a veteran of al-Qaeda in Iraq, etc.
But let's let bygones be bygones.
I want to get along with the United States.
So I don't know if he and Hillary Clinton have shaken hands yet or what.
Well, al-Qaeda or jihadists can reform.
They can side with the United States.
Of course, they did in Afghanistan for a while.
The problem is the U.S. gets so overtaken by the desire to overthrow Gaddafi.
You know, it was really a gold, a nest of golden eggs sitting there.
Everybody wanted to put the grabbers on Libya and get back at Gaddafi.
And when revolution broke out there, no, there was very little thought to who we were using to overthrow Gaddafi.
And I'm sure we'll do it again.
You know, if we think about it long enough, we'll see other parts of the world where we've used dubious or nefarious groups.
Take Central America, for example, and live to regret it.
Right.
Now, the big story that everybody's talking about as far as Libya right now is this piece in The Wall Street Journal that you're referring to there where they're admitting finally they're catching up with you, saying that actually the CIA was in Libya in a major presence from the very beginning.
But somewhere in there, it's kind of the lead to me buried in the in the piece.
It's not the point of the piece at all, really.
But he just kind of mentions there that the uprising overturned what had been a tight relationship between the Gaddafi regime and the Americans.
In other words, the American cooptation of the protest movement in Libya and the turning of it into a war for Benghazi against Tripoli, that cut off the CIA's cooperation.
They were getting along just fine with Muammar Gaddafi's guys the day before that.
And they just immediately switched sides without a break.
Well, remember Henry Kissinger once said the only thing more dangerous than being America's enemy is being its ally.
Right.
Which I guess Bashar al-Assad, who tortures people for us, too, is finding out right now as well.
That's right.
Look, you know, a man just died, Edwin Wilson, a very mysterious man, a former CIA agent who was thrown into prison for 22 years, buried alive in jail.
And he was running the American program of cooperating with Gaddafi.
At some point in Washington, it was determined that the Gaddafi bad were going to cut relations with him.
And Wilson was lured back to the United States, sentenced to a long prison term on trumped-up charges, which even the U.S. courts later admitted were lies.
And he was framed and he was thrown in jail.
So this is the second time that we see a complete turnaround in American policy towards Libya.
And, you know, the Europeans did it, too.
The French and the British were also playing footsie with Gaddafi, but saw the opportunity to suddenly turn against them.
It's part of what I sort of call the return to kind of a neocolonial era, part two.
In fact, my second book, American Raj, is exactly about that, how America rules the Middle East.
And it's very interesting to see how Hillary Clinton, for example, has managed to make us heroes in this.
To say, oh, we're against dictatorship, we're fighting for democracy in all these countries, when in fact we were the bad guy.
Or at least in the sense of keeping the status quo, we were a reactionary force, like the old Austro-Hungarian Empire was in the 19th century, and keeping all these potentates and people in power.
Gaddafi was a good sacrificial lamb, but he was also a man who knew too much.
Remember, his son, Saif, injudiciously said that he was going to reveal how they had financed, the Gaddafis had financed Nicolas Sarkozy's last election campaign.
Interestingly enough, he was killed soon after.
Gaddafi was killed soon after.
But the other point is that Libya is a treasure trove.
There's few people, lots of oil, very important in that respect for Europe.
And the Chinese were starting to get lousy-lousy with Gaddafi.
So once again, you have a number of different elements that were driving American policy.
Now, I don't know if you saw this, but there was an op-ed in the New York Times about how America better figure out, Obama, I guess, better figure out how to put Nouri al-Maliki, our loyal sock-puppet dictator in Iraq, in line, because he's not so loyal at all.
In fact, apparently he's been helping the Iranians funnel weapons to Syria to fight on the side of the dictator against al-Qaeda.
And the guys are, we're back.
And they're very perturbed about this and want to see something done.
And I was just wondering what's behind that.
If America fought this war for years and years to install Nouri al-Maliki in power, how can he be so ungrateful?
Well, there is not much thanks in politics.
I wrote a column, I think it was last year, called Bad Puppet, Bad Puppet, in which I wrote about, in Afghanistan, the so-called president, and about Nouri al-Maliki in Baghdad.
Karzai and Maliki were actually starting to show independence after having been installed and supported and financed by the U.S.
And what that showed was that even for these sock-puppets, that the U.S. is losing influence and power rapidly in their region, and they see long-term which way things are going, writing on the wall, and they're starting to distance themselves from Washington and act more like nationalists and less like puppets and support more the popular feeling in their own country.
So this is what is happening.
Washington is not happy about it at all, and you're going to start seeing lots of nasty articles about Maliki as well as Karzai.
Well, you know, one thing that's always very surprising to me is how dumb the liars are, and how often it seems like, oh, what a cynical lie to me, but then on further inspection, the liar actually believed it when he said so.
And it seems like a big part of American foreign policy right now is that everyone with power, you know, the people who matter, they all really believe this thing, like Barack Obama himself said, that the surge worked like a dream, even.
That David Petraeus and his strategy to win the Iraq war, it won the Iraq war, we don't have to feel bad about it after all, etc. like that.
They all really believe that line of garbage, and so they can't admit to themselves that actually they fought a war on behalf of Iran's closest allies in the region now.
The United Iraqi Alliance, made up of the Dawah Party and the Supreme Islamic Council, Maktad al-Sadr, and not that they're Persians, they're still Arabs and they're still Iraqis, but they're very close allies with the Iranians because of the American policy of overthrowing not just the Baathists, but even the Sunni minority of Iraq, and running them out of Baghdad, and giving all the land at least from Baghdad to Basra to these guys.
They just can't admit it, even to themselves, and so they can't even adjust their policy to reflect the fact that like, oh yeah, that Shiite crescent, we just added the biggest piece to it.
And so now what we're dealing with is the Middle East post our big mess-up, you know what I mean?
They won't ever even look at it like that to themselves, as they're planning for what's next.
God, we've been making a mess in the Middle East since the end of World War II, and it's just getting worse.
You know, we were involved in overthrowing every Syrian government until the Assad's came to power.
Yes, we've been like a bull in a China shop, and the problem is very few people understand it.
Those who do understand it are denounced as Arabists by special interests in the States, and they lose their jobs.
And the politicians, you know, and the generals have done the worst possible thing.
It's very human, but they've done it, and that is that you believe your own propaganda.
That's the feeling now in Washington, and all these people, oh well, we really won, look at all the great things we did.
Nobody wants to admit yet that disasters have occurred, both military, economic, and political, in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I don't know when it's going to be admitted.
I guess my guess would be never, right?
Even after the dollar breaks and the empire just comes home, and I guess the guy's got to hitchhike home.
I don't know how they're going to get back, but even then they won't admit it.
They just won't have an empire anymore.
They'll probably blame it all on you or something.
Yeah, they'll blame it on me, or it'll be like Vietnam, where eventually there was a consensus, however understated, that we had made a huge blunder there, and that we are operating on the wrong principles and the wrong understanding of the situation there.
My God, I was in the army then.
If I had known that China and Russia were almost ready to go to war, I and my other fellow GIs, we would have said, the hell with this war, this is crazy.
We're there to prevent a Russian-Chinese takeover of the world, and meanwhile these two red perils are actually almost ready to go to war with each other.
It's crazy.
Well, it's lucky for us that you didn't die in that thing, man.
Well, my orders were changed six days before I was shipping out to Vietnam, and I ended up stateside.
I don't know whether I'm happy about it or not.
You're happy about it.
Yeah.
Gotta be.
All right, everybody, that is the great Eric Margulies.
EricMargulies.com.
You can also read him all the time at LewRockwell.com.
And read his books, War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
Thanks so much for your time.
Appreciate it as always.
Cheers, Scott.
And that's it for the show tonight.
Thanks, everybody, for listening.
I'm Scott Horton.
This has been Anti-War Radio.
My website is ScottHorton.org.
All my archives are there.
More than 2,500 interviews going back to 2003.
And you can find me on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube at slashScottHortonShow.
See you back here next week from 630 to 7 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
