03/15/13 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

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For Pacifica Radio, March 15, 2013.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all, welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
My website is ScottHorton.org.
You can find all my interview archives there, more than 2,700 of them now, going back to 2003, including a bunch of great ones from my other radio show this week.
Again, that's ScottHorton.org.
Our guest tonight is Eric Margulies.
His website is EricMargulies.com, spelt like Margolis.
EricMargulies.com.
And you can also find what he writes oftentimes at LouRockwell.com.
He's the author of the books War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Eric?
I'm just fine, Scott.
Ready to talk about wars tonight.
Yeah, well, we've got a lot of them.
And speaking of which, the cause of a lot of them is a guy that we all know well, Dick Cheney.
And I just saw this thing on MSNBC about a documentary about Dick Cheney that's to air tonight, I think, on Showtime.
But anyway, they played this short clip, and I want to play it for you and get your reaction.
This is Dick Cheney when asked what he thinks now about the Iraq war that he launched ten years ago.
I don't run around thinking, gee, I wish we'd done this or I wish we'd done that.
The world is as you find it.
You've got to deal with that.
You get one shot.
You don't get do-overs.
So you don't spend a lot of time thinking about it.
He just doesn't spend a lot of time thinking about it, whether it was right or wrong or beneficial or not or any of those things.
He doesn't take the time to consider that because, geez, after all he's got fishing to do.
And so I was thinking, well, you know what, maybe he's right that the Iraq war did just take place in a vacuum and it doesn't matter, shouldn't matter least of all to him.
What do you think?
Well, it certainly matters to the Iraqis in the Middle East and to the families of the 5,000 American troops killed there and the 50-odd thousand Americans wounded and suffering from brain injury and probably 1 million Iraqis who were killed and saw their country destroyed and to the greater part of the Middle East.
And let's not forget American taxpayers who are – they and their children will be paying off the bill for this $1 trillion fiasco.
Okay.
Now, I don't want any revisionism.
I just want exactly the straight truth.
When you wrote all those articles before the Iraq war saying, I'm the Middle East expert.
Listen to me.
I'm telling you, don't do this.
What were your reasons?
Did they all pan out or only most of them?
They were – in fact, I'm just writing a column.
I just finished writing a column on it for my weekly column.
And I was – the only major item that I got wrong was the cost of the war.
I estimated it would cost $75 billion.
Boy, was I wrong because the butcher's bill was actually $1 trillion.
Other than that, my predictions that it would be a disaster, that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, no delivery systems, that the U.S. would engender great increased hatred for itself around the Middle East, kill a lot of people, and cause great, great damage and suffering were unfortunately correct.
Yeah.
Well, at least the media cleaned house and they got rid of all the bogus Middle East experts and they started paying attention to all the people who got it right before the war, right?
Wrong.
You know, one thing I've learned over the years is that one thing people will never forgive you for is being right when they were wrong.
And we have really the lurid spectacle of all the professional media propagandists who, you know, supported this war, beat the drums for the war, we've got to stop Saddam before he attacks Cleveland, and all that type of stuff, they're still sitting there.
Military experts like at the Brookings Institute are still putting out their lines about the dangers of Iran.
Now they've shifted their focus to politicians who trumpeted the war like most of the leading Republicans, but many Democrats too are, you know, still in power.
And unfortunately it was a few men in the CIA, the State Department, and journalists like myself included, who had spent a lot of time covering Iraq, who knew the region very well and warned against this war and said it was based on a pack of lies.
We were, I was certainly blacklisted by some of the national TV networks that I used to broadcast for, and for publications, and now we've become blacklisted black sheep, whereas the guys who all got it wrong, or at least who collected their money for trumpeting what they were expected to say, they're still there churning out their disinformation.
But I'll tell you one thing, Scott, that not all Americans were fooled by this, and one of the reasons for the move to alternative media, such as your fine show, to the Internet, and away from the mainstream news is because they were perceived as a pack of liars, and young people in particular moved away.
Right, and you know one thing about, well that is definitely a nice silver lining to the whole fiasco at least, you're right, it created new alternatives to, new avenues for people to collect their information from.
But you know one of the most important points about that whole run up to the war, about journalists like yourself getting it right on, you know, regional expertise, and then people like Jonathan Landay and Warren Strobel at Knight Ridder, who were exposing the Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon and the manufactured intelligence leading us to war, back in the summer of 2002, you know, eight months before the war even broke out, and the debunking of the aluminum tubes, and good congressmen like Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich, who said, we're opposed to this war, and let us count the ways.
Right, people like Dan Ellsberg going on Washington Journal, and just completely mopping the floor with Bill Kristol, who didn't know the first thing about the Middle East.
I mean that proves that even though it was ten years ago now, it doesn't mean it had to be that way.
We didn't have to go to war with Iraq at all.
You know, things a long time ago, they sort of seem inevitable.
Like, well, that's just the page of history turning, and that kind of thing.
But no, this was a premeditated murder plot, and they were allowed to get away with it.
Well, absolutely, and none of our officials were ever held accountable for this.
You know, it's troubling watching African leaders from little countries being hauled before the International Court of Justice in The Hague, and charged with war crimes, and starting wars in Liberia, and Congo, and places like that, when the big war instigators get away completely, and we see people like the most egregious of all, one of the most egregious of all, Tony Blair, swanning around the world, growing rich on pocketing money for schmoozing and influence peddling, and yet he was a primary backer of that war, and yet he's profited while the Iraqis still continue to suffer.
All right, now, one of the couple of ironies from the Iraq war is that they really fought the war for people who much prefer the Iranians to the Americans, and for the most part, it seemed like, kicked the Americans out after we handed them all the land, at least from Baghdad to Basra, if not the entire country, and then we sort of set up all the Sunni regions as a sort of free-for-all, and created an environment where the so-called Islamic State of Iraq, or Al-Qaeda in Iraq, still has free reign, if not power, they still can go where they want.
And here we are now, backing them and their friends in the revolution in Syria against the Baathists there, against, but they're Shiite Baathists in Syria, and while at the same time, our friends Maliki and his friends in Baghdad are allied with Iran and with Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
And then, two days ago, three days ago, Military.com reports that the CIA is expanding their role in Iraq to again help Maliki clamp down on these Al-Qaeda warriors, a.k.a. our friends in Syria.
What in the world is going on?
It is crazy, I agree with you.
Our friend's friend is no longer our friend, it's our semi-enemy.
The confusion is rampant, but that's because we've been backing so many, riding so many horses in the Middle East.
First of all, the U.S., the reason that we were able to suppress resistance in Iraq was because we divided the country into three parts.
The Kurdish region was detached and separated.
We ignited a civil war between the Sunnis and the Shia.
We supported and trained and armed Shia death squads, based on our experience in Guatemala.
And we just broke down the Sunni resistance through bribery in that direction.
But unfortunately, we ended up with, of course, as you just said, with strong Iranian influence amongst the Shia and strong radical Islamic Sunni jihadist influence among Iraq's Sunnis.
And now we see that Syria, where we're playing footsie with the jihadists again, it's an incoherent and a self-contradictory policy.
What we're doing is we're going for tactical expediency and forgetting completely about the overall strategic situation.
And now, as far as the American presence there, how many people are there?
Is it just all Army divisions are out, right?
And it's simply CIA and State Department and mercenary guys?
Or who else is left, do you know?
Well, that's a good question.
We're gone, but we're still there.
In the sense of there, yeah, the U.S. withdrew all of its combat troops.
But it left, first of all, the American embassy in Baghdad, along with the embassy in Kabul, one of the world's two biggest embassies.
It's almost the size of Monaco, I think.
16,000 employees.
It's got its own little 10,000-man private army of CIA-run mercenaries.
The CIA is still actively funding mercenary groups inside Iraq.
It had, before the complete American troop pullout, it had up to 100,000 American-paid mercenaries in Iraq.
We don't know how many of those remain, but I assume there's a lot.
Add to this, the U.S. withdrew troops from Iraq, but not very far.
They just brought them down the road to our little satellite called Kuwait.
And they're now sitting, probably about 20,000 to 22,000 U.S. combat troops are sitting in Kuwait base there.
And that's just a couple hours' drive from Baghdad up the road, so they can go back when they want.
And the U.S. still controls Iraqi airspace, which is very important, from our multiple air and naval bases in the Gulf area.
So we're gone, but we're not really.
And then there will be training, so-called training missions.
And there's talk right now in Washington about sending more troops, special forces troops into Iraq to fight against, quote, terrorism, unquote.
Well, and when it comes to that, there's so many different things to follow up on here.
But when it comes to chasing terrorists around, are they just trying to chase them into Syria and then use them there against Assad?
Because, well, and I'm oversimplifying it, so you go ahead and strike me out with the real details here.
But it seems to me like when the administration, well, there were all these leaks that Hillary Clinton and David Petraeus and Leon Panetta and everybody tried to get the president to arm al-Qaeda in Syria, or at least to arm the moderates so that al-Qaeda in Syria wouldn't win out the revolution, even though obviously moderates don't do fighting.
It's the hardcore guys who are doing the rebellion there in the first place, and all the guns end up going to them anyway.
But all the leaks are they keep trying to convince Obama to do this, and he keeps refusing, and yet for two years in a row now, we've known.
It's been common knowledge, public source information, that the Saudis and the Qataris, the Turks, the Jordanians, all coordinated by the American CIA, are arming up the rebels in Syria who are fighting this war.
And then at the same time, the administration says, hey, the rebels in Syria are actually what we used to call al-Qaeda in Iraq, and we refuse to recognize them, and we accuse them of being terrorists, and no, no, no, we only wish to back the moderates there.
I mean, is that even really true?
Do they really mean to just go ahead and back the suicide bombers?
Are they really trying to isolate some moderates to arm, and is that making any sense to you whatsoever?
Well, I think, starting from the president on down, that there is a cautious desire to back so-called moderates and not to arm radical groups.
However, it's very hard to tell who's who in that, and as you point out, most of the guys who are doing the real fighting in Syria are the militants.
The so-called moderates are all sitting off behind the lines somewhere in Turkey or in Jordan and drinking tea.
But we have to understand, too, that we overuse this word al-Qaeda.
This is a particular concern for mine.
Everything is al-Qaeda, but these people in Syria are not al-Qaeda of the Osama bin Laden al-Qaeda.
Well, it seems fair to me, Eric, because they do suicide bombings, and they have little kids cutting people's heads off, and they put it on YouTube and brag about it, and they seem pretty al-Qaeda-ish to me.
Well, it's true that it's part of al-Qaeda's violent behavior, but they are...
And aren't many of them veterans of the Iraq war, for example?
Yes, they are, and of the Afghan war, too.
There's a whole bunch of floating jihadists around.
I call them anti-American, anti-Western groups who are determined to get rid of what they call Western-supported dictators, of whom, ironically, Syria's Assad is one of the chief figures.
Now that Mubarak is gone, they turn their fire on Assad, saying they're going to get rid of him.
So the U.S. now finds itself in the position that it and Israel, who more or less played footsie with Assad for a long time, are now trying to overthrow him while the militant Islamists of the jihadists are trying to bring him down.
It's a very confusing situation, and it is poorly understood at best in Washington.
All right.
Well, I'm Scott Horton.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm talking with Eric Margulies, ericmargulies.com, lourockwell.com, for his great writings.
And I guess following the story westward on the map here, over to Libya, there's another war where we back the jihadists.
And I'm not sure if you saw the news breaking, and in fact, this might not be completely confirmed, but they say that somebody, Reuters, I think, was saying they've arrested a suspect, another one, in the Benghazi attack of September 11th of last year on the makeshift consulate there that killed the ambassador, and that he's a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which someone sent me a tweet and said, well, wait a minute, I thought those were the guys that we fought the war for there in Libya.
Eric?
Well, again, confusion.
The, Gaddafi was overthrown by NATO, but on the ground, they used Salafists and jihadist forces, mainly from Benghazi.
These people had been cultivated by the British intelligence for over 20 years, trying to constantly stir up trouble against Gaddafi.
But on the other hand, Gaddafi was a very useful western ally, because he kept locking up all the militants he could get his hands on, and jailing them.
We sent people to Libya to be tortured by Gaddafi's secret police.
And now we understand that Gaddafi was another of these corks in the bottle, the way Saddam was in Iraq, that kind of held the genie of Islamist jihadist militancy and kept them in the bottle.
Now that he's gone, they've popped up, and we saw the results of what was happening in Mali, and soon I think will be happening in Niger as well, that these people are running around shooting, and the West is supporting both sides against the other.
It's a very contradictory policy.
Yeah.
Alright, now, so, speaking of that, I guess, could you give us the very shortest version you could of any way that you know of that the Libya war might have led to the situation in Mali?
Because it can't really go without saying, but then I really want to get to what the hell is going on there, too.
Gaddafi cultivated, trained, and paid a large force of Tuareg nomads.
These are people who live traditionally in the Sahara and go with caravans and raiders.
They fought the French, they fought the Spanish.
They're great fighters, and these people wanted their independence in northern Mali.
It happened for a long time.
Gaddafi backed them, and they provided troops for Gaddafi.
They were good fighters, some of his best.
They were heavily armed, and when Gaddafi was overthrown and murdered, these Tuaregs, a lot of them left Libya.
They were driven out and attacked, and they went right across the border into, or close across the border into Mali, where they started agitating for an independent Tuareg state called Azawad.
That was really the genesis of the current problem that led to French neocolonial intervention, something straight out of pages of the old novel, Bogeste.
All right.
Now, I think when we talked a few weeks ago about Mali, you said that there never were enough, even if you combine the Tuaregs with the Algerians and others who came down and joined, and sort of kind of took over their revolution there, that it's just not enough people to resist very long, and yet there's still fighting going on.
How long do you think it will go on?
And I guess I read in McClatchy newspapers, Boswell.
I take him semi-seriously anyway.
I've interviewed him before, and he was saying, at least he was hearing rumors, I guess, that the Tuaregs were already cutting a deal with the French, that just get rid of the foreigners who came and hijacked our thing, and we'll go along with you guys.
Do you think that's right?
There have been talks, I have heard, too, between the French and the Tuaregs, and the Tuaregs themselves are split into some factions, but I would suspect that there will be sputtering fighting going on in the northern mountains of Mali.
The French are certainly preparing for it.
They got much more resistance than they expected, but once again, as you say, the very small numbers of Tuareg resistors and the so-called Islamist jihadists, they're also a tiny number.
They tend to be lighter-skinned from the north and not part of the black majority that you find around the Niger River, so there are important ethnic differences there, but there will be trouble.
And by the way, one understands that there are now 100 American special forces troops in neighboring Niger, as it's called, which is France's primary source of uranium for its nuclear industry.
Yeah, they're building a drone base there.
That's right.
So that's our new Africa command at work.
So welcome to the sands of the Sahara.
And then as they also import Chadian fighters to help round up the last of the jihadists that are supposed to be on the run here, they seem to be turning up the jihadists that are on the run, at least according to some reports, in Darfur, in western Sudan, in pickup trucks that were bought originally for the Malian army of the south by the USA.
That's right.
The U.S. put a lot of time and money into trying to build up the Malian army, which turned out to be completely useless, and it overthrew the somewhat democratic government in Mali before all this trouble began.
But the jihadists have scattered.
Chad is a very interesting story.
It's a desert place in the middle of nowhere, close to Mali, that really is a French protectorate, almost a French colony ever since it got its independence in the 60s.
It's been run by the French.
The French have three military bases in Chad from which they have attacked Libya, but which they also used whenever one of their – I'm trying to think of a nice word – client rulers in West Africa was overthrown or threatened, the French Foreign Legion would come in from Chad and shoot up the place to make sure he stayed in power or overthrow him, as the case would be.
So Chad is a very, very compliant colony and very useful for the French.
Well, you know it in a twisted way.
That's kind of good news.
That sort of speaks against the possibility that the war is just going to spread to Chad now, you think?
I don't think it will spread to Chad, though.
There are simmering tribal rivalries in Chad, again, between the North and the South Chadians.
Trouble could be, but the French have a very strong dictator there, and they look like they've got troops so that they can put down any rebellions that may occur.
Well, that's horrible, but I guess it's better than a civil war.
But then again, it's all foreign intervention that causes these situations.
Who knows how it would be without the intervention, and who would be able to peacefully secede or work out new deals for autonomy between different groups?
I mean, that seems to be what a lot of this is about.
Well, you know, West Africa has traditionally been accepted by the U.S. and Britain as a French sphere of influence.
It's old French colonies.
They just changed the names around and put some puppet rulers in power.
And this area has been run by the French.
There are 60,000 Frenchmen who live in West Africa and run everything there, from the power company to the telephone company to the airlines, etc., etc., backed by French foreign legionnaires.
It's a nice arrangement, very quiet.
Nobody knows anything about it outside of France, and the U.S. accepted it.
But part of this revolution in Mali has to do exactly with that.
There's resistance and uprising to ongoing French, I'm going to call it neocolonial rule, and France is very worried about it because it's its last sphere of influence outside of metropolitan France.
Well, you know, one piece of good news that I saw out of the Mali war was that the one-armed guy, Belmokhtar or something, I'll let you pronounce his name, but I read where Robert Fiske...
Yeah, Belmokhtar.
Belmokhtar, there you go.
I read where Robert Fiske said, yeah, no, I mean, this guy does really exist at least.
He's not just, you know, some papier-mâché CIA creation or something like that.
But in this case, instead of letting him go like bin Laden for 10 years, they went ahead and killed him already, or at least they say they did.
So maybe that speaks to the possibility of a shorter rather than longer war?
We are uncertain.
Belmokhtar, who's been called the Robin Hood of the Sahara, is dead or not.
The Chadians working for the French claim they did, but the French even are saying, well, they're not so sure, but they did kill another important jihadist leader, Abu Zaid there.
I've seen pictures of his body.
It looks like him.
He was killed, obviously, by an airstrike.
You've got to understand with these rebels, who are small in number and very open desert area and rocks and mountains, that they're going to dissolve into the countryside.
They're not going to stand up and fight French aircraft, warplanes.
But they're around.
They're just lying low now like good gorillas.
And when the time is right, they'll come back and resume the fighting.
It's not the end of the world.
These are really pinpricks.
But what the French and the Americans are really scared about is that this kind of revolutionary zeal has got to spread to the rest of West Africa.
And all eyes, of course, are on Nigeria, which is the most corrupt and mismanaged country probably on Earth.
Oh, no.
Yeah.
And they have an Islamist insurgency with a catchy name.
I don't know if they have funny hats, too.
Boko Haram.
And they're a major oil supplier to the United States.
So eyes on Nigeria.
So the U.S. backs the Mujahideen.
Wait, we fight them in Iraq.
We back them in Syria.
We fight them in Mali.
But we back them in Libya.
And now soon we fight them in Nigeria.
Great.
Thanks very much for your time, Eric.
It's always great to talk to you.
Cheers, Scott.
All right, y'all.
That's Eric Margulies.
His website is ericmargulies.com.
Spell it like Margolis.
You can also find him at lourockwell.com.
And check out his great books, War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
And that's it for the show tonight.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
Thanks very much for listening.
My website is scotthorton.org.
I keep all my interview archives there.
And I'll be back here next week and every Friday from 630 to 7 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
Hey, y'all.
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