Alright folks, welcome back to Anti-War Radiocast, 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott Horton, and introducing our first guest today, it's the foreign correspondent for Sun National Media in Canada, author of War at the Top of the World, Eric Margolis, one of our world's best investigative reporters.
His website is ericmargolis.com.
Welcome back to the show, Eric.
Great to be back with you, Scott.
It's great to talk with you again, sir.
You're always writing provocative things on the topics I care about most, which is helpful.
Let's start with this Syria-North Korea thing.
I know it's been a couple of weeks, but I'm actually a bit confused.
It seemed like it was pretty clear last fall that there was nothing to this, that the governments of America and Israel are run by liars, and in this case, at least bombers, if not murderers.
I'm not sure if anybody was there when they bombed it.
But anyway, that there was nothing to this so-called Syrian-North Korean nuclear program going on there in Syria.
Larissa Alexandrovna tells me she stands by all her reporting and all of her intelligence sources stand by what they told her, that this is still all bunk, and yet supposedly there's all this new evidence proving that there was, in fact, some kind of nuclear reactor there being built.
So tell me everything you know and understand about the case, please.
Well, Scott, this remains a mystery.
The problem is that everybody's not telling the truth about it.
This was clearly an operation mounted by this alliance that we have between neoconservative hawks in Washington and the Bush administration and hawks on these right-wing Israeli parties, particularly the Likud party, who are operating very closely together these days, and they determined to knock off the bomb a building in Syria in the middle of nowhere, which they claimed, after leaks to the press, was a nuclear plant that Syria was building with North Korean help.
Now, this all sounded like something out of a bad James Bond movie, but lo and behold, the neocons in Washington, after a lot of pressure, forced the CIA to come up with some photographs that they had apparently gotten from Israel's Mossad intelligence agency, showing what looked like a reactor vessel and some pictures of North Korean scientists, and they put this all together, mixed it up, and came out with a claim that the Syrians were building a nuclear weapon with North Korean help.
Very, very murky.
This was designed to do two things.
First of all, to lay the groundwork for a U.S.
-Israeli attack on Syria, which has been in the cards for over two years, and secondly, to put the kibosh on Washington's current talks with North Korea to come to some kind of nuclear freeze because the neocons oppose it.
Okay, well, three things there.
First of all, we have the truth of the matter.
Secondly, the nuclear deal with North Korea, and then third, get back to Syria and preparations for further war in the Middle East.
As far as the truth of the matter, it was readily apparent, was it not, that the videotape so-called, which was actually just a slide show basically, collection of pictures, some of these were so fake it looked like video game footage.
It wasn't even as good as Star Wars special effects at all.
You could obviously tell some guy had photoshopped the front of this building.
Well, yes.
The building didn't look anything like a nuclear reactor.
It wasn't connected to anything.
Why would the Syrians put a building out in the middle, in the open, where every spy camera in the world could photograph it?
As I said in my column, this came from the same Sid factory that concocted, remember, the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the vans of death, the mobile germ laboratories.
My God, they had pictures, they had diagrams, they had everything, but it all turned out to be absolute baloney.
And I think this is another case of baloney, too.
However, comma, what is very curious is that the Syrians, after the Israelis bombed this place and completely demolished it, the Syrians razed the site, cleaned everything up, moved all the debris away, and have just left it like that.
We've seen the photos in Aviation Week and Space Technology magazine.
Why the Syrians did this is very mysterious.
So it seems to me the Syrians were up to something there.
One theory may be that they were storing missiles, intermediate-range missiles, short-range missiles that the North Koreans had supplied, but that doesn't make much sense why they would store them in a remote location.
But they were obviously trying to hide something.
But what that was, we don't know.
And the Syrian government has not made a big fuss about this act of war against their country.
They've just played mom and downplayed the whole issue.
Well, isn't that strange?
The Syrians are sure acting like they have something to hide, and yet there's no reason to believe the accusations coming from Israel and the United States on the matter.
It's a very curious thing.
It's like a whole bunch of deceivers collaborating with each other to perpetuate a lie that seems convenient to all concerned.
Well, I remember right after this happened, I talked with Joe Cirincione.
He said they have the most rudimentary nuclear program in Syria.
The idea that they would have something so advanced as the kind of reactor that could produce weapons-grade plutonium or something is just so far-fetched.
These guys have what amounts to the kind of little research reactors we have here at UT in Austin.
Nothing like you could make a bomb with.
Well, that's right.
And what the hell would the Syrians do with a nuclear bomb?
The only use would be to drop it on Israel, which is right next door.
It would blow right back on top of them.
So that absolutely makes no sense.
And for years, Israeli and U.S. intelligence have said that Syria has no interest in nuclear weapons.
This whole thing has become a big neocon or the latest neocon fantasy and is obviously in preparation for something, either trying to sabotage the nuclear deal with North Korea or else to get ready for war against the Arab states and Hezbollah.
Yeah, maybe a little bit of both.
Well, let's focus on the North Korean angle there.
George Bush did say in, well, I don't know the exact words, but basically the reason we're releasing this now is an attempt to screw up the nuclear deal with North Korea.
And I remember Ray McGovern saying, you know, he wasn't exactly sure, but it looked like maybe Connelisa Rice and her State Department munchkin in charge of negotiations with North Korea, perhaps that they had cornered George Bush at 5 o'clock in the afternoon on a Friday or something and got permission to go and begin these real negotiations with the North Koreans.
And apparently the war party's been doing everything they can to undo that ever since.
And you mentioned in your article how Connelisa Rice has now run for cover and left her little munchkin twisting in the wind, that the deal with North Korea looks like it might all fall through now based on these accusations.
Is that it?
Well, that's exactly right.
The Bush administration is working at cross-purposes.
There's long been opposition within it.
In fact, some years ago, the neocons led by John Bolton, who was the UN ambassador and one of the standard bearers of the neocon crazies, actually sabotaged a deal that was in the works with North Korea.
The North Koreans were furious.
This has happened now once again.
And just now the North Koreans are producing thousands of pages of documents about their former plutonium program, though not about their uranium program, I add.
But Connelisa Rice squeaked and peeped and stuck her neck out, and there was thunder from the far right.
She ran away, as you said.
And the North Koreans now are probably going to act very angrily because they've been screwed once again by Washington.
Well, and you know, the New York Times, I think, said that the administration is still concerned about outstanding questions about their secret uranium enrichment program.
As you said, they haven't come clean about any of that because obviously there's nothing to come clean about.
That's just been a lie on the part of the United States all along.
That's how they broke the deal back in 2002, was accusing the North Koreans of having a secret uranium enrichment program, which there's still not one atom of evidence of on the face of the earth.
And yet until they admit to that, we know they're lying and we know they're not fessing up as they promised to do in the deal.
You're right on target there.
You know, we have this policy of forcing rogue states, as we call them, Iran being another example, of proving a negative.
We did it with Saddam.
We're doing it with North Korea now, with Iran, to prove that you don't have nuclear weapons.
Well, you can't prove a negative, so they're stuck.
Right, yeah, and as long as you haven't proven it, then that means you're still hiding it.
You're guilty.
Oh, man.
All right, so now back to the Middle East, then.
Preparations for war with Syria.
Here's something that drives me nuts.
We have the Kadima party, which is made up mostly of former Likudniks, right, people who left Likud with Sharon, to create this a little bit, sort of, kind of, centrist party.
And I read, you know, with one eyeball, that the Israelis are negotiating with the Syrians, ready to give back the Golan Heights and make long-term peace with the Syrians.
And then my other eyeball is reading a different article, which says we're all getting ready to bomb the hell out of everyone around there.
Southern Lebanon, Syria, Iran, and, you know, everywhere between China and the Mediterranean, I guess.
Well, you know, this is the Levant.
We remember the term Levantine for being tricky and devious, and that's what's going on.
The Israelis, for about four or five years now, have been flirting with Syria, saying, well, you know, we might give you back the Golan Heights, which Israel seized in the 1967 war.
We might give you back the Golan Heights if you break your alliance with Iran and if you ditch Hezbollah and stop allowing them to get arms through Syria.
And the Syrians have been attracted by this because they want to get back the Golan Heights, but they don't trust the Israelis.
The Israelis are trying to, once the Syrians break their alliance with Iran, then they know the Syrians will be completely naked and the Israelis will probably pound them and jump on them and maybe find a reason for not giving back the Golan Heights.
Anyway, that's what's been going on.
Meanwhile, the Syrians are petrified that the Israelis are going to come down on them like a ton of bricks.
Their military is totally obsolete.
It can't defend itself at all against the Israelis, or barely.
And they're scared that they might be attacked from Iraq by American forces as well.
So the Syrians are really walking on eggs right now, or eggshells.
Well, and it seems like, I think you mentioned in your article that in Israel the Likudniks have been attacking Olmert for even trying to make peace like this.
Is it the case that the American neocons are allied with Likud and are, in essence, to the right of the actual government of Israel?
That they're working with the Likud party against those who are actually elected to power there?
That's correct.
The American Likud party, or the neoconservatives, are very closely aligned, really, to Bibi Netanyahu.
They always have been, since the PNAC days and the Wolfowitz and Douglas Faith and all those people.
They're really an extension of Netanyahu and the Likud party and further right parties in Israel.
Olmert, as you said, has tried to move a little bit towards the center.
He's ended up being extremely unpopular.
Nobody trusts him.
And the neocons are hoping that the Likud will come back into power soon.
Well, is there anybody really standing between Netanyahu and the prime ministership again?
There are other candidates for it.
There are other politicians who are hungering for it.
But right now, it looks like he's fairly firmly in power.
I wish that Ariel Sharon would rise from his comatose state and take over, because he was much more capable of dealing with the situation in the Middle East than Olmert is, who turned out to be a complete zero as a political leader.
Well, I'm really not looking forward to having Netanyahu be the prime minister again, particularly if McCain wins.
Those two together as the dynamic duo, I could see setting quite a few things on fire.
Sure, sure.
Throw Joseph Lieberman in there, Senator Lieberman, and you have the three horsemen of the next Mideast apocalypse.
Yeah.
Wow.
All right.
So, in the last couple of weeks, well, no, actually, before I get to the Iran plans, I want to know more about the negotiation between Israel and Syria, assuming that it's in good faith.
This is presumably what they've been talking about, according to the Turkish press, as you said, giving the Golan Heights back to Syria in exchange for Syria ceasing support for Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, and I guess Hamas in Gaza as well, and separation from Iran in their policy.
It sounds like a pretty good deal.
It sounds like the kind of thing that actually could guarantee long-term security for Israel, from their point of view, from the Syrians, right?
Syria really offers no military threat whatsoever to Israel.
As I just said, it's quite the opposite.
Syria's military is 1960s Soviet technology.
They don't have any weapons to seriously threaten Israel.
Their air force would be wiped out on the first day of any war.
And you have to remember, in the open Mideast terrain, air power is everything, and any force that does not have air control is going to be wiped out very quickly, as we've seen in past Arab-Israeli wars.
So the Syrians don't have many cards to play.
The Assad regime knows that the U.S. is gunning for it, particularly over Lebanon.
Washington's accusing Syria of allowing fighters to move across its border into Iraq.
And the neocons are beating the war drums against Syria.
It's one of their favorite, their bête noires.
So the Syrians now have to flirt with everybody, with Washington and the West, to keep themselves going and try and avoid regime change, which has clearly been scheduled.
Well, I don't know about that.
Clearly been scheduled.
Kenya, how the hell are you going to get regime change in Syria?
And if the regime change in Iraq did nothing but put the Supreme Islamic Council in power, who's going to replace the Baathists in Syria, other than, I don't know, the Muslim Brotherhood or something?
If you want to move from Austin to Washington, you seem to be more on the ball on this than anybody in the capital.
Well, yeah, it takes real genius to think, well, if we do replace the Baathists, who are we going to replace them with?
That's really thinking ahead.
Well, that is exactly the problem, because Washington was about to launch the overthrow of the Assad regime until somebody said to them, wait a minute, who's going to replace them?
And the who happens to be the Muslim Brotherhood, which represents Syria's Sunni majority.
You know, Syria is ruled by this very secretive Alawi sect, which are an offshoot of the Shiites.
And about 11% of the population, the whole military is dominated by them, the Assad, their Alawis.
And if they go, the Sunnis, who have been battling the Alawis for years, are going to take over.
They're very militant, very underground.
They're more militant than the Iraqi militants.
So Washington said, wait a minute, the devil we know certainly sounds better than the one we don't.
So it's also caught in a dilemma.
This is funny.
I guess this is the story with all of these policies, though, is that none of them make any sense at all.
Here they want to have a regime change in Iran, and yet no one, and I hear this from everyone, no one is actually contemplating putting ground forces in Iran.
The whole plot is airstrikes.
And yet, how the hell are you supposed to get a regime change from airstrikes?
It didn't work at Doha farms.
Well, the latest round of stupidity in Washington is the same one that motivated the Israelis to launch an air blitz against Lebanon in the summer of 2006.
The Israeli Air Force commander went to the Prime Minister Olmert, who knew zip about military affairs, and said, listen, we are going to crush Hezbollah from the air, and we're going to bomb the Lebanese so badly that they're going to turn against Hezbollah and their rafts, drive them out, and break their organization.
So it's the same Israeli plan.
You know, Washington seems to get so many of its ideas from its liquid allies that it now is proposing the same thing in Iran.
Nobody's talking about sending ground troops because, of course, we don't have any.
But the idea is to bomb Iran so badly that there will be an uprising against the current government, and that will allow either these Marxists called the People's Mujahideen, who we've been supporting, to come into power, or they'll put the baby Shah, Reza Pahlavi, back in power.
Now, this is beyond preposterous.
This is even more ludicrous than the claims that our troops will be greeted with flowers in Baghdad when they invade it.
It isn't going to happen.
Any American attack on Iran is going to produce a hornet's nest and arouse the fiercest possible nationalist reaction.
It's going to strengthen the government rather than weaken it.
Well, see, I don't know, I guess just my instinct is to believe that somehow reason will prevail, and the fact that this is the stupidest idea in the world will mean that it's one that is not acted upon.
How could anybody, particularly how could a president with the lowest approval rating since Truman, or even lower than Truman, how could he start another war, and particularly one which every idiot pirate radio host in America knows is only going to backfire and blow up in our faces?
Well, the French have an expression that's called fleeing forward, fleeing in a fuite en avance, which means that when you've screwed up things so badly, you go and do even more screw-ups to get away from your last screw-ups, and I think this is part of the mentality.
Secondly, the Bush and his people know that they're running out of time, and it's very possible that Democrats are going to come in, and hopefully won't be as reckless and stupid as the Republicans have been, and they better do what they can now in their fleeting days in office, and the neocons are pulling out all the stops to get an attack launched against Hezbollah and Iran and Syria before the November elections.
So there's great pressure, and the military forces are concentrating now for such an attack.
Well, and it does kind of go without saying, doesn't it, that any attack on Iran will also be an attack on Syria, southern Lebanon, the whole works?
I would think so.
The plan, as I understand it, the Cheney plan in 2006 was for Israel to go after Hezbollah, and that would then spread into fighting with Syrian troops, and the U.S. would then pound Syria.
They'd first knock off Syria and Hezbollah, and then they would go after Iran.
That may be the same strategy this time.
Yeah, it's funny because that time, from what I understand, the Israelis said, forget it, we're not going to pick a fight with the Syrians, and called off the operation, basically.
Yes, the Israelis were wise in doing it, though there were militarist elements in Israel who wanted to go after the Syrians, but after their dismal performance against a few thousand Hezbollah fighters, that really took the wind out of Israel's sails, and they wisely refrained from launching a bigger attack against Syria.
Yeah, well, we'll see if any wisdom remains.
It looks like from all the news stories coming out, CBS and the London Times in the last couple of weeks have reported on new attack plans, and Phil Giraldi reported on the American Conservative website, on their blog, that apparently he's heard...
I read the article, yeah.
Yeah, he's hearing rumors that they have a brand new plan, it's just waiting for the signature of the President, that Robert Gates is the only one saying no, that everybody else is on board at this point, and that, I guess we can expect strikes against Quds Force targets in Iran any time now.
Well, you know, his position, I don't agree with it, even though I write for the American Conservative, too.
I don't agree.
There's great opposition in the Pentagon and the CIA and State Department to an attack against Iran.
There was almost open revolt recently over the firing of Admiral Fallon, as you remember.
Well, I guess he's talking about, on the principles level, the lack of dissent, I think.
And at senior level, certainly, but the guys who are going to execute the attack are really opposed to it, and particularly the Air Force, because my sources, when I've been in Washington, have told me because the Air Force is so overstretched now that the last thing it can handle is another major war at long distance.
But the American Conservative article suggested that there was going to be an attack only on one target, or a small number of targets, outside of Tehran.
And I don't know what this would be intended to achieve, other than making the neocons feel good.
It would be just kicking a hornet's nest and daring the Iranians to attack the Americans.
It's a stupid military strategy.
Right.
Well, I think you just nailed it.
That's the purpose of it, right, is to get them to fight back.
And then we can say, hey, look, they fought back.
How dare they?
They started it.
And then we can escalate the war against nuclear targets and whatever else.
That's right.
And the plan developed, as I understand it, by the Pentagon, calls for attacks on over 3,000 targets in Iran, starting from nuclear facilities, but going all the way down to radio towers and TV stations and petroleum hubs and naval bases and air bases, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
So you're looking at a big air war that's intended.
Well, now, how do you think the Iranians might fight back?
Because obviously the people are not going to rise up and overthrow the Ayatollahs and install the Mujahideen al-Khalq for us or anything.
You know, can we expect them to sit there and take it, which is apparently the plan from the American point of view, is they will know better than to fight back against us.
The misconceptions in Washington are really breathless.
They have obviously learned nothing from Iraq.
Iran is a big country, you know, and it's pretty well united behind the government.
The dangers are as follows.
First of all, the Iranians would launch, I believe, a lot of attacks against American forces in Iran, using both their Shia allies there and their special forces.
In Iraq?
I'm sorry, in Iraq.
The president of Iran, Ahmadinejad, was a commander of the Iranian special forces operating behind Iraqi lines during the Iran-Iraq war.
There's been a great deal of talk amongst the veterans of the war of attacking the Americans in Iraq.
It's possible, even, that the Iranians could threaten to cut off American supply lines for forces in Iraq that come from Kuwait.
There would certainly be attacks on Kuwait, missile attacks, commando attacks, perhaps larger infantry attacks.
American bases in Central Asia, and particularly three American bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan, would all be expected to come under Iranian commando attack.
In Pakistan?
In Pakistan, too.
We have three secret bases that we're using in Pakistan, maybe four if you count a CIA operation where drones, predator drones are being used there.
We are using three Pakistani bases secretly to launch airstrikes into Afghanistan and along the tribal territory as supply routes.
They play a key role in the war, but it's not well known.
These would be very vulnerable.
Then you're looking at the possibility of mining the Gulf, shutting off oil exports.
The reason that the European powers are going along with America's pressure on Iran is not because they're so much worried about Iran's nuclear program, but they're worried about the threat of an American war against Iran, what it would do in cutting off oil and sending the world economy into a tailspin.
So basically they're trying to convince the Iranians that, listen, just do whatever they say because we don't want this trouble.
Don't pee off the crazy Americans because they're going to create a nuclear and a financial holocaust there if you're not careful.
The Iranians can do a lot of damage in the Middle East.
They can get Hezbollah to launch rocket attacks against the Israelis again, which is more of a nuisance than an existential threat to Israel, but it's still significant.
But the most important thing, this is going to pit a country of 70 million people irrevocably against the United States, and all wars are unpredictable.
It's going to suck us into some kind of new conflict in the Middle East whose outcome we really can't predict.
Yeah, we think they hate us for 26 years of the Shah Pahlavi.
After a war, then what are we going to have to deal with?
Wait till we try to bomb them back into the Stone Age.
Well, all right, so let me pretend I'm a member of the war party here.
Eric Margolis, there's a giant Shiite crescent taking shape, and okay, it is all Dick Cheney's fault for toppling the Baathists in Iraq and making it so, but you know what?
That doesn't matter.
What's past is past, like John McCain says.
Now we're there, and we can't leave because the Iranians will create this massive Shiite crescent and dominate the whole region, and then we'll all be screwed.
This is the maximalist position.
This little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike, if I leave, everything will collapse.
But in fact, you know, there isn't a giant Shiite crescent.
There's Iran, which is disliked, if not thoroughly detested, by most Sunni Muslims.
It's certainly not trusted by the Arabs.
It's hated by the Afghans.
It's detested by the Pakistanis.
And there's the Hezbollah, which is 6,000 armed fighting men only.
And that's it.
This idea of a Shiite crescent has been wildly exaggerated.
I should have added the Shiites in Iraq, too.
It's been wildly exaggerated.
The Sunni Arabs are never going to get totally in bed with the Iranians.
Remember Shiites are massacring Sunnis in Iraq as we speak.
This is a boogeyman, another boogeyman, that's been built up by so-called neocon experts at Fox News to scare us into a war.
It's not the case.
And the Iranians are very clever people.
They're amenable to negotiation and diplomacy, and they respond to that much better than threats.
We can always offer them inducements to be more cooperative with American policy.
Now, see, I think that's such an important point, and it's one that nobody ever really makes.
I did a little bit of research about Dick Cheney's statements that I remembered from the 1990s, where he denounced the sanctions and wanted to open trade with Iran.
And then on a little bit further research, I found an article from 2005 where Halliburton was setting up offshore companies so that they could get around the sanctions and do business with Iran.
And this is while Dick Cheney's the vice president of the world, basically, and has this policy that the Iranians are crazy and they're evil and we won't negotiate with them until they accede to every one of our demands, while his old company is willing to find the loopholes in the law to go ahead and sit down at the table and shake hands and do business with them, you know, in real time, in 2005.
That's true.
It's crazy and contradictory.
You know, Cheney, this is the same man who went with Donald Rumsfeld to Baghdad to offer an American alliance with Saddam Hussein against Iran.
And it's the same man who went to Tehran when the Shah was in power to discuss selling 20 American nuclear reactors to Iran.
So, you know, Vice President Cheney has his schizophrenic moments, too.
Yeah, I like that.
There's no possible reason that Iran could want nuclear power except to make a weapon.
And yet, in the 1970s, it was American policy to help them develop technology for electrical purposes so they could sell their oil, which is what they claim they're doing now.
That's right.
You know, I'm just finishing up dotting the eyes on my new book, American Raj.
And I vividly just think I was working on the part this morning where, you know, Iran's view, the leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, said that the West is trying to keep the whole Muslim world technologically backwards so that it'll keep us under its heel and also so it can use us as markets.
It can keep selling us arms and equipment and power generating and all this kind of stuff.
And this Iran's nuclear program is not just about self-defense for Iran, but it's about trying to break the West's sort of technological embargo on the Muslim world and making a giant leap forward for the Muslim countries so that they can become technologically advanced.
And we don't often think about this.
Oh, yeah, that's interesting.
I guess, like the big ticket items, right?
The nuclear power plants and factories and those kinds of things.
We put sanctions on them where they can't really get any of that stuff except from us.
Well, that's right.
And we discourage them from developing their own industries.
I mean, look, the British did the same thing in the British Empire.
They take India where they stopped, they thwarted all manufacturing there because they wanted the Indians to import manufactured goods from the British Midlands.
Yeah, war as improvement of the investment landscape by other means, I guess.
Correct.
Yeah, there you go.
All right.
Well, let's talk about Iraq for a minute here and possible consequences of American withdrawal.
Forgive me for insulting your intelligence.
I'm really only passing this on, Eric.
By the way, everybody, it's Eric Margolis from Sun National Media in Canada.
Glenn Reynolds has a review of Ron Paul's book over there at Pajamas Media.
And in the book, he's attacking Paul's foreign policy and saying Ron Paul is naive because he wants more commercial and cultural engagement with the Middle East, but not military engagement.
And Glenn Reynolds writes that if experience is any guide, then these things, cultural engagement and commercial exchange, are as likely to anger Islamic fundamentalists and other varieties of terrorists and tyrants as is the establishment of foreign bases.
Now, he doesn't exactly say what experience he's referring to, but it's basically that your understanding of the Muslim world, Eric Margolis, that trading with them pisses them off just as much as stationing combat forces on their holy land?
No, absolutely not.
This is another of these canards put forward by the neocons, that they hate us for who we are and our culture.
This is not so.
I've spent a lot of time in the Muslim world and with Muslim militants of the most extreme variety, and I have never heard one of them fulminating against American exports of refrigerators or cars.
What they are angry about is movies, television shows that promote sex, premarital sex, and promote exposed women and that thing.
Yes, that upsets them.
But other than that, what they're really upset about is American bases, and not just American bases, but more so than that, the American domination of government throughout the Middle East and the Muslim world.
This is the primary cause of what we call terrorism.
Terrorism's primary focus is against these non-democratic regimes that rule much of the Muslim world that we support.
This is what they're angry against.
The idea of American trading angering them is absolute nonsense.
Look, one of the most fundamentalist regimes you can find is Saudi Arabia, and we've been shoveling goods down their throats for years, and they love it.
Yeah, well, now when it comes to TV and they hate all the sleaze and so forth on American television, well, that makes them, I guess, the same as the conservative American war party that's at war against them.
But is that enough motivation?
I mean, I guess it makes sense that it pisses off conservatives in the Muslim world, but is that enough to motivate them for suicide attacks and so forth?
Oh, absolutely not.
That's ridiculous.
Suicide attacks are motivated by revenge for having seen their families and friends killed, for having their land been taken away.
This is what motivates people to get so angry, to kill themselves.
The biggest lie to come out of 9-11 is the lie advanced that they're attacking us because of our beliefs and that we're fighting evil.
It's simply not true.
They're attacking us for what we're doing and what we've done in the Muslim world and trying to take the resources and trying to run their governments and generally monkeying around in that area in a time-honored imperial fashion.
The idea that this is some kind of culture war has been raised simply as a red herring to divert attention from the fact that they're reacting against what we're doing.
You will never hear anybody come in Washington and say, we were attacked because of waging war against Arab countries or overthrowing Arab and Iranian governments since the 1950s.
Well, now, you know, John McCain said the other day that, while we're fighting an existential battle against the terrorists who are an implacable enemy, who are simply our exact opposites in every way, and that's why we must fight against them.
And it occurred to me that, well, you know, I thought it was the Soviet atheists, godless communists who are our exact opposite in every way, and that was why we were allies with the right-wing Muslims, conservative Muslims, during the Cold War.
And, obviously, the major mission that comes to mind is the Afghan war where America supported the Afghans and Arabs to go to Afghanistan to fight against the Russians in the 1980s.
And you were there, right?
I was there, and I was in the field with them and getting shot at by the Soviets.
And in those days, these militant Islamists were freedom fighters.
They were our boys.
And now, who was the opposite of who in the 1980s, Eric?
The communists in Kabul, the Russians who were in the Soviets who were there, were calling the Mujahideen Islamic terrorists and claiming they had invaded Afghanistan to liberate its women and bring education and modern democracy to the poor, benighted Afghans and to fight the evils of Islamic terrorism.
And now the U.S. has taken over the same script and is doing the same thing.
Frankly, I find the behavior of both the Americans and the Soviets to be remarkably similar, at least in Afghanistan.
Yeah, don't you love that, everybody?
America now has the Reds.
When back then, these guys were just like us.
They made Rambo III about how heroic these guys were.
Well, you know, in 1986, I was in Peshawar, Pakistan, and I met a man named Sheikh Abdullah Azam, who was the spiritual guide of Osama bin Laden.
I spent a lot of time with Azam because he was really the mentor for the whole modern, current, militant Islamic movement.
And Azam said something that absolutely startled me.
He said, you know, when we have finished driving the Soviet imperialists out of Afghanistan, we are going to turn and drive the American imperialists out of Saudi Arabia.
And he said that he went back in 1986?
And I was flabbergasted.
I'd never heard anybody refer to Americans as imperialists, except for the Soviets.
And the idea that we were occupying Saudi Arabia the same way the Soviets were occupying Afghanistan seemed inconceivable to me.
But over the years, his words seemed to resonate more and more.
Yeah.
All right, now, I'm sorry because we're almost out of time here, but I wanted to ask you real quick about your trip to Europe.
If you weren't Canadian, would you have to pretend you were Canadian when you were there?
Well, actually, I'm an American, but even though I live in Canada, I'm an émigré American.
Oh, I see.
Not émigré by choice, just out of work.
Yeah, yeah, I understand.
Okay, so, but when you're over there, do you pretend you're a Canadian?
Oh, absolutely not.
I'm very proud to be an American, even if they're shooting at me.
Done it all my life.
Served in the U.S. military.
Not about to start now pretending to be a Canadian, though some Americans do.
But I've got to tell you, there's much less anti-American feeling now in Europe.
And even the French are being friendly, which I found very disorienting.
Disorienting, huh?
Lifelong, that's a new one, huh?
People were polite to me.
Somebody even gave me a seat on the metro.
Taxi drivers opened doors.
Everybody wants to speak English in France.
It's not the old France I used to know.
Wow.
Yeah, that's pretty strange.
All right, now, let me ask you one more question along those lines.
You did bring this up toward the end of one of your recent articles there about the debate.
And this is something that's been going on at least, you know, to my ears for about ten years or so.
And that is the future of, well, more than that, I guess 15 or so, the future of the relationship between the EU and NATO.
And I guess I remember there was a time when Don Rumsfeld was denouncing France and Germany as old Europe.
And there was a pretty obvious policy to surround the old Europe countries with new NATO members in order to kind of keep the Atlantic alliance together in the face of talk about creating an EU standing army that would basically make NATO irrelevant.
And you wrote in your article, they're still talking about this.
This is something that actually, I think you said Sarkozy, the neocon, is moving the other way against America and toward the EU armies.
Is that it?
Well, Sarkozy's moving two different directions at once, which is a neat trick.
On one hand, he's reintegrating France fully into NATO and wants a bigger role for France and NATO and wants to make nice to Washington and be lovey-dovey with the Bush administration.
On the other hand, he's saying we have to build up European independence and the Western European Union, which eventually will be the European combined military force.
Well, you can't have both.
Europe has limited military resources because it hasn't been spending much on the military, and it doesn't have enough troops to maintain two different military forces.
So it's a contradiction in terms.
Europe has argued about this a lot, but it's still as confused as it was years ago.
All right, and with that, we're going to have to cut it short.
Well, not really short, actually a little bit long.
Thank you very much for your time today.
As always, it's great talking with you.
Everybody, Eric Margolis, he's the foreign correspondent for Sun National Media.
He's the author of War at the Top of the World and the new one coming out, American Raj.
His website is ericmargolis.com.
Thanks again, Eric.
My pleasure.
