05/06/13 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
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And our next guest on the show today is the great Eric Margulies.
Welcome back to the show, Eric.
How are you doing?
I'm fine, Scott.
Good.
Thanks for joining us.
Everybody, here's what you need to know about Eric Margulies.
He's covered wars and revolutions and dictatorships and strife and conflict and famines and things from all four corners of the globe for generations.
And he, well, he's about the expert on just about everything.
And he's the author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
And you can find his website at EricMargulies.com, spelt like Margolis.
Not too hard there, EricMargulies.com.
And you can oftentimes read him at LewRockwell.com and a lot of other places as well.
Okay, so now that we got that out of the way, I thought it was funny.
I had you on the KPFK show on Friday.
For people listening later, this is Monday, the 6th of May.
And Friday, we recorded this interview to play on KPFK.
And right around the time the interview was over, Israel started bombing Syria.
So there goes the obsolescence of our entire Friday interview.
Eric, maybe we better try again.
Israel's bombing Syria.
What do you make of that?
Chairman Mao said to be a successful prophet, predict often.
Yeah.
Eventually, you'll get it right.
Well, what began with a sort of a limited bombing was a very substantial raid over the past two days.
Today, that is Monday, the attacks were delivered by Israeli warplanes against the major Syrian military bases around Damascus and also in the north.
There were large numbers of civilian casualties and a lot of military men killed.
We don't know how many yet.
But it was a full scale.
It was a big attack, certainly an act of war.
And the question everybody's asking now is what does it mean and what's next?
Right.
Well, and now not to skip too far ahead, but a caller in the first segment made the great point that doesn't this just go to show the falsity of the Israeli narrative that they're a poor little helpless besieged Israel when they can just bomb Syria and Syria can cry, hey, that's an act of war.
And yet they still have complete impunity to just, I guess, bomb Syria if they feel like it and then go home.
And so far received no retaliation for it.
That's quite right.
Scott, Israel has long done this sort of David and Goliath thing.
In fact, it's the Goliath militarily.
There's a famous story about Ariel Sharon, General Sharon, former Israeli PM, who was in a training course at French Staff College and somebody made some disparaging remark about Israel's military to him.
And he mapped out a plan overnight how Israel could conquer the entire Middle East within a couple of days.
And it's absolutely true because compared to Israel, the Arabs and Iran are absolute military pipsqueaks.
The only Arab country that has any real fighting capability is Egypt.
But Egypt can't fight because it's American supplied weapons are not as good as the Israeli ones.
And we restrict the amount of ammo that these Egyptians and spare parts that they have.
So we keep them on a tight leash.
So to answer the question, Israel could defeat all the Arab countries with one arm tied behind its back while watching daytime TV.
Oh, man.
Well, and the way the way you put it, it really sounds like that has a lot to do with how crappy everybody else's military is rather than the real greatness of the mythologized IDF and Israeli intelligence services.
No, I think it's a combination of both.
The Arabs have lousy, miserable armed forces, particularly when it comes to air fighting.
And they're disorganized and hopeless in logistics.
And they don't have their heart in it very much.
But the Israelis are very efficient militarily.
They have top line American equipment courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer.
You know, while while we're cutting payments to to cancer victims and schools and cutting money for bridges and things, Congress still finds the money to give the Israelis three point one billion dollars a year officially and more unofficially.
But the other point I want to make is that Israel's army is a is a citizen army in the truest sense.
And all men and many women serve in it.
And they get the most intelligent people.
It's an intelligent country.
They get the creme de la creme.
And they and one of the other great things is that all these units come from the same town and village so that everybody knows everybody else in the military units.
And anybody who does not perform properly is disgraced when they go home.
So it is probably it is the world's best citizen army.
Very, very effective.
I've been with it in the field on a number of occasions.
I've seen how capable it is.
Yeah.
But what about Hezbollah in the summer of 2006 told them go home?
That's exactly right.
And the Israelis greatly underestimated Hezbollah.
But that was in a very limited action within a very small area of Shia villages in the south where Hezbollah dug in and trained very well and acquired effective anti-tank weapons.
I think the Israelis, you know, in a bigger war would completely wipe out Hezbollah.
They would take casualties doing so.
Ironically, Hezbollah has been the most effective Arab force that stood up to the Israelis.
And yet it's not even a real army.
Yeah.
Which is probably why Nasrallah is the most popular leader in the Middle East even though he's a Shiite and they're outnumbered, what, 10 to 1 or something?
The Shiites in Lebanon are the majority of the population.
No, but I meant in the Middle East, right?
Oh, in the Middle East.
He has great poll numbers on the peninsula and everything.
You're absolutely right.
And Hezbollah, which is the fighting wing, I mean the Hezbollah forces, are really in effect the army of Lebanon.
The official Lebanese army is another bunch of car jockeys and doormen.
The real fighting force is Hezbollah.
All right.
Now, speaking of Hezbollah, that's the excuse for this that the Israelis have cited is that the Baathists were about to transfer a bunch of long range missiles, or I don't know how long range, but long enough for the region's size anyway, to Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and Israel had to preempt that.
What do you make of that?
Well, there may be some truth in this claim.
In 2006, when Hezbollah and Israel got in a fight, Hezbollah showered northern Israel with thousands of artillery rockets.
These are sort of a little bigger than Roman candles and some longer range, more powerful missiles.
It caused 500,000 Israelis to flee their homes and go into bunkers, killed about 140 Israelis.
The Israelis in turn killed about 1,400 Lebanese and caused billions of dollars of damage in Lebanon.
But the Israelis are worried about this.
And what they're really worried about, their most sensitive point are their airports, their airfields, military airfields and Tel Aviv airports.
These airports may now be in the range of some of the longer ranged rockets that Hezbollah has acquired from Iran.
So the Israelis are very sensitive.
They tried to block these deliveries of these missiles on numerous occasions, once going as far as the coast of Sudan.
But there's much more to it.
This is just one issue.
Yeah.
Now, but it does seem to be, well I don't know how many different bombs they dropped and how many different targets they attacked.
But it doesn't seem like they're saying, you know, all in, Israel's now on the side of the rebels and we're now your air cover.
And we're going to help you overthrow the government or anything.
They just went in there to hit these targets and now they're done.
Is that right?
Well, we don't know.
That's the big question.
Is Israel simply trying to further destabilize Syria, hoping that it'll crumble and break up into all kinds of little pieces, which has been a long-term policy of the right-wing Likud government.
And if Syria falls apart, that would cement Israel's hold on the Golan Heights, which it annexed, which it grabbed from Syria illegally in the 1967 war and has since annexed.
It would be a very strategic area.
So it would be trying to destabilize here.
Or Israel may be entering the fray now as the virtual air force of the Syrian rebels, most of whom are Islamic jihadists, ironically.
Or this may be the opening rounds of an Israeli attack on Iran.
What is very interesting is, according to reports from Washington, the U.S. knew nothing about these Israeli air attacks.
Which were done with American equipment in violation, probably, of American law.
And this suggests that Israel is saying, look, we can do it to Syria.
We can also do it to Iran.
Oh, man.
Well, and that's really what this is all about, right?
You talk about how ironic it is that America and Israel, in this case, are on the side of the jihadis there.
But that's kind of really been the case, right, since at least, what, 2007, 2008?
And that famous Seymour Hersh piece, the redirection, where they said, oops, we've been fighting for Iran for five years.
And we created the giant Shiite crescent that we were so afraid of, of Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon there.
And so now we've got to redirect back toward what the Saudis want, and back toward even jihadis, Jandala in Iran, Fatah al-Islam in Lebanon.
And now it looks like al-Nusra Front in Syria, in order to weaken the Iranians.
And so if that means backing, apparently, any level of extremist, of Sunni warrior, then that's all fine.
Even though those are our only actual enemies in the world, are the acolytes of Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Well, you know, in the Middle East, the enemy of my enemy is my friend the scorpion crossing the river on the turtle, and that all kind of thing.
It does appear that the Western powers have encouraged one group in the Middle East.
Once it becomes too powerful, then they knock it down, and they go to support another group.
We did that with Saddam Hussein, who used to be our bosom buddy, key ally, our S.O.B. in Baghdad.
And then U.S. lured him in to attack in Kuwait, or certainly allowed him to attack into Kuwait, and then cut him down to size.
The U.S. is doing this.
I think this whole business about the Shiite Crescent has been overemphasized.
It's not as big as that, but the overall policy is divide and conquer, and keep the whole region weak, and make sure that one dominant power does not emerge.
Yeah, that way America is the only dominant power, just like in all regions, everywhere.
Correct.
Yeah.
I said, you know what's funny about that?
What if the Chinese did a full-scale invasion of outer Mongolia or something?
Is America going to intervene in that one?
I mean, there's got to be a limit to this somewhere, right?
No.
One could ask about Taiwan, or even better, suppose war breaks out between China and Japan.
And is America ready to defend Japan?
Does it have enough forces?
Can it afford another war?
In my writing, I keep making the analogy, in 1914, the British Expeditionary Force that was sent to the continent was massacred.
And the reason it was, it was trained and armed and equipped to fight Zulu warriors and various backwards tribespeople on the northwest frontier.
It had never faced German regulars.
And when it did, it was a horrendous shock for the British.
Well, same for the Americans.
Our whole military now, or a lot of it, has been reconfigured over the last 10 years to fight what the Pentagon calls expeditionary warfare.
I call it plain old colonial warfare in the third world.
And all our equipment and training and the dominance of the special forces and delta force and all this stuff shows that.
But if we have to fight a real war against a real enemy, which we have not done since the days of Vietnam, then we're going to be in big trouble, in my view.
Well, and you know, which Democrats or Republicans do you trust in the event of a major power war like a conflict with China to keep the thing, you know, even if it goes hot, small enough that we're not just all giving up the cities that we live in to nuclear fire?
I mean, they've got at least, what, a couple of dozen, a deterrent level quantity of hydrogen bombs, the Chinese.
That's right.
And the means to deliver them, because Bill Clinton helped give them the means to deliver them.
Well, and the Japanese, too.
But it's, you know, are we going to give up Chicago for, I don't know, Yokohama or something like that?
Well, that's the question that everybody in Japan asks in Korea as well and in Taiwan, because we're treaty-bound with Japan and Korea to come to their aid in the event of a war.
And the question is, how far will it go?
I mean, everybody's now screaming about Syria, but meanwhile, this issue with the Senkaku Islands, where the Japanese and Chinese are feuding, is extremely dangerous.
And both are playing with fire there, and it could go critical.
We're not mentally ready to deal with these problems.
Well, you know what?
I want to get back to Syria, but go ahead and tell us more about that dispute.
And, I mean, you don't have to get all into the details about, you know, who owned which islands for how long and the Russians' role in the great Japanese-Russo War of 17-whatever-the-hell.
But just, I guess, if you could tell us about the American government's role in that.
And, you know, it sounds to me like somewhere in the world, there's got to be somebody reasonable in some foreign policy department, somebody's government, who is winning the argument and saying, come on, guys, we're not going to get too out of control over some silly little islands, right?
Right, cooler heads are prevailing, right?
Or not?
Or what's going on?
Well, they're not, unfortunately.
And, you know, it distresses me as a great admirer of both the Chinese and the Japanese.
And I like to think of them as wiser, more stable, more balanced people with more historical understanding than we in the West.
Well, they're behaving like a bunch of enraged ninnies right now.
And just as badly as we do, in fact, they're waving flags and the Chinese are over what little specks of rock that were uninhabited in the South China Sea that used to be nobody knows who they belong to in the past.
They were just uninhabited.
Nobody cared.
Japan acquired them.
Yes, 1905 at the end of the Russo-Japanese War, one of my favorite wars.
And China has also now started saying, oh, they're ours, they're ours.
There may be oil and China is laying claim to vast tracts of the South China Sea to which it clearly has no historical rights, but is just used being muscular about it the way we in the United States claim Arctic waters.
So the Japanese now, we, the United States is treaty bound.
The U.S.
-Japan Defense Treaty mandates that we must defend Japan in the event it's attacked, including the Senkaku Islands.
So the Chinese now are at the point where they're flying planes over there and frigates and Coast Guard vessels.
The latest clever Chinese ploy is to send boatloads of tourists, because they know the Japanese will never dare open fire on them, to kind of cruise around and establish a Chinese claim to the area.
But there are a lot of military forces buzzing around there and it's dangerous.
So one collision, ramming or something like that, false radar reading could begin fighting into which the U.S. Pacific forces could be quickly drawn.
Oh man, well, people believe in religions, pray to your religions that that doesn't happen.
Because again, you're talking about people with atomic weapons and the means to deliver them.
And these kind of things can get out of hand, you know, like you're saying with your comparison of World War I and that kind of thing.
It's that black swan that comes to bite you in the ass and you didn't even really realize that, oh, there are militarists in China, Japan and America who would be perfectly happy to get into a nuclear war if let off their leashes.
And here they go, because apparently they've been let off their leashes.
I mean, that kind of thing can really happen, huh?
The wall-steaders of the world.
I mean, most wars, in my view, begin by mistaken assumptions or accidents or errors.
Everybody thinks they can win a war when they start them.
Both sides are right and wrong at the same time.
But, you know, the other factor here is that all this Sturm und Drang, as the Germans call it, is making Japan suddenly feel very naked and vulnerable.
It's sheltered all these years under the U.S. defense umbrella and nuclear umbrella.
The North Koreans are threatening to lob nuclear weapons at Japan's cities that would wipe Japan off completely.
And a lot of Japanese are beginning to ask, maybe we need nuclear weapons.
Japan can produce a nuclear weapon, it's estimated, in only 90 days.
They have the technology right in their back pocket.
And South Korea, same thing.
South Korea started to produce a bomb in the 70s, but we stopped it.
But it could happen again.
It's a big nationalist issue.
Every country should have nuclear weapons if it wants to feel safe from other countries with nuclear weapons.
That's the problem.
Everybody saw what happened in Libya and Iraq.
And Japan particularly, I think, will eventually decide to get nuclear weapons.
Well, you know, that's really the thing about it, isn't it?
The crux of the last couple of eras in a row now, that nukes seem to really work for keeping the peace, at least between major powers.
Sorry, Vietnamese, for your inability to fight back against our capital and keep us at bay.
But when it comes to messing around with the Russians, the Chinese, or in fact, I mean, just think about the absolutely ridiculous, if you think about it in historical terms, friendships that have broken out all across Europe where these guys have all just decided we can't go to war against each other anymore, as much fun as that was, sending our poor off to kill each other and hack each other to death and whatever.
But now we could lose our capitals to atomic bombs.
And so now everybody's got to be friends.
But it's the ultimate gun to humanity's head.
You know, it works real well.
But Jesus, this is the only way.
Can't we have mutually assured not destruction or something like that instead?
Mutually assured comprehension.
Yeah, well, or even short of that, how about mutually assured we suffer some damage, but it wouldn't be a threat to the entire future of humanity, that kind of thing, you know?
I don't know.
It's the radiation that scares me the most, more than the bang.
It's a great irony, a really great irony.
By the way, speaking of radiation, if the U.S. and Israel ever attack Iran's nuclear facilities, if this is not discussed at all in the North American media, what are they going to do about the radiation release?
You know, I wondered about that, too, and this is something that has not come up as much as we've talked about the Iranian nuclear program on this show.
This is not something that has come up very often anyway, a few times.
I guess, well, Boucher is now up and running, right?
I think that was, they always said, I think they always told me that if they bombed, and I don't know who they is, but if they bombed the Natanz facility where they enriched their uranium or if they bombed the Ischafan facility where they make the uranium hexafluoride gas to introduce into the centrifuges, that that wouldn't be as big of a deal.
But if they bombed Boucher, the running reactor, well, then that's the kind of thing that could get a lot of people killed, and obviously I'm not the authoritative source on that, but I guess that's my impression.
And I think the last time I heard that, though, Eric, it was back before Boucher was up and running, but now it is up and running, correct?
It is, but the Iranians and the U.N. Atomic Agency all insist that Boucher has no military applications at all.
Generally, it's only electric power, and it is under very tight U.N. supervision.
That doesn't mean that the U.S. or Israel might not bomb it, even so.
But I suppose the Israelis are thinking, well, the prevailing winds in that area are blowing in an easterly direction, so that any explosions would carry it over Pakistan and Iran, of course, and Afghanistan.
And so screw them, right?
As long as the winds go east, who cares?
That's right.
Yeah, and that's the funny thing about it, too.
I like to think that, and maybe I'm wrong about this, but it seems like Iran has really already achieved their nuclear deterrent in their pseudo, almost breakout capability that they've achieved, and all the real sober Western assessments are that even if we bombed them, it would only set them back a little bit, and then they'd be that much more likely to begin to try to really seek nuclear weapons, so it makes it a really bad idea.
But they've, in a way, already achieved their nuclear deterrent, I hope.
Well, in a sense, but I don't think that what Iran has today, which is they don't have any nuclear weapons, they are heading towards that red line, to use an overused word, where once they reach it, they can then decide they can make a weapon if they want, but they don't have the delivery systems, they don't have the miniaturized warheads yet.
They really don't have very much.
The Israelis are perfectly aware of that.
They have a big spy network in Iran, and every inch of Iran is photographed by Western and Israeli satellites.
So there's not a complete deterrent, and that would not deter, for example, an Israeli nuclear attack on Iran, or nothing to stop the Israelis from dropping some tactical nuclear weapons on Natanz or Isfahan, blowing the area up and saying, well, we had to defend ourselves, they were threatening us with another holocaust.
Right.
Well, and then that was the news last week, right, was that the Americans demonstrated for the Israelis their newest, improvest, biggest bunker buster yet, that they claim will even be able to destroy Fordo.
Sort of like how you mentioned the Americans told the South Koreans, don't make nukes.
We've got your nukes for you.
We've got that covered for you.
That's what Obama's doing here.
He's telling the Israelis, don't bomb Iran.
We will bomb Iran if anybody needs to bomb Iran, and look at the neat new bombs that we've made to do it with, in order to reassure them to not start the war and drag us in, is what that looks like to me.
We've come a long, long way from 1956, when President Eisenhower told Israel, which had invaded, trumped up an invasion of Egypt, invaded, grabbed the Sinai Peninsula, and told Israel, get out within 72 hours or else.
And the Israelis got.
Of course, the Israelis then decided they would never allow this to happen again, so they built a support network in the United States that would hopefully try and thwart any U.S. president from giving orders to Israel.
You look at Obama now, half a century later, pussyfooting around and not really daring to do anything too strong.
Maybe we should.
We ought to.
Wait.
We'll take care of it.
It's called prevarication.
Yeah.
Alright, and now, you mentioned Libya there, and the lesson, I don't know if everybody remembers 2003 very well, about how George Bush needed something to point to, to say that the Iraq war had a single positive effect anywhere on the planet Earth, and he said, see, it scared Qaddafi into bowing down and kissing my imperial ring, and becoming a nice guy and giving up his nuclear weapons program.
Isn't that just about how it happened?
No, not quite.
That's how it was spun in the U.S. media, and they showed pictures of some nuclear junk that they had acquired from Libya.
Qaddafi did something very clever.
Yes, he was frightened of being invaded, no doubt about it.
And what he did was he went and bought some nuclear components from this underground con network out of Pakistan, shipped them to Libya, and stored them there, and then told the Americans, finally, we're giving up our nuclear program.
And Washington just was head over heels with excitement and joy over this, so they could make the claim, yes, we made the evil Qaddafi give up his nuclear program.
In fact, he just gave up some junk, and got paid certain millions of dollars for it.
And it was a very clever move, and he took all the American pressure off him completely.
If Saddam Hussein had been smarter, he would have done the same thing.
Well, and then they shot him in the back of the head on the side of the road.
Yes.
Having interviewed him extensively, it caused me great pain to see this.
And so, I mean, the lesson, it's pretty obvious there.
You follow the North Korean route, get yourself a nuke or two, and then what are the Americans going to do?
It's amazing, really, that the Iranians have kept their hands up, rather than following the North Korean model, which is, I mean, because come on.
I mean, hell, if I was an Iranian politician, I would say, listen, staying within the Non-Proliferation Treaty and our safeguards agreement with the IAEA is never going to be good enough for the West on this.
We might as well just make an atom bomb, then.
Well, I agree with you, Scott, and I've often, I've pondered for years why the Iranians have been so slow to develop nuclear capability.
You know, back in the days of the Shah, before 1979, Israel and Iran were holding advanced talks.
Israel was going to, Iran was going to supply Israel with oil in exchange for Israeli nuclear warheads and Israeli missiles, medium range or short range missiles, Jericho missiles.
These talks ended when the Shah was overthrown.
But I mean, that's a long time ago.
It's over 30 years ago.
And the Iranians were not stupid people.
They're just sort of patching along and not developing things.
So my only explanation is that the Iranian government is ideologically divided on the issue of nuclear weapons.
And it is not a uniform totalitarian dictatorial state as is often portrayed in the West.
It has many centers of power.
There's been fierce debate in the Islamic government.
And finally, the leader, Imam Ayatollah Khamenei, came out and issued a fatwa, which is a ruling, like a papal bull, saying no nuclear weapons.
They're sinful.
We must not have them.
So here the Iranians are arguing over this situation.
And it's ironic.
While all the West is threatening to attack them, they're saying their nuclear weapons are evil.
All right.
Now, also on Libya, I've got to tell you, and I'm sorry I'm keeping you so long here, but this will be the last little bit, if it's all right.
No reporters have been to Libya in two years, apparently.
I can't get any news out of Libya.
I don't even know what to read to figure out what the hell is happening in Libya.
But the last I heard, Obama overthrew Qaddafi, shot him in the back of the head on the side of the road, and then turned the place over to basically the Libyan Ku Klux Klan, who then went on anti-black rampages of apparently real mass rapes, not like the kind they accused Qaddafi of to get us into the war, but ones that the women themselves told David Enders all about what happened to them in the refugee camps when the marauders came at night and that kind of thing.
But that's been, what, a year and a half, two years ago?
Well, a year and a half ago, and there's hardly any news coming out of there at all.
And I was just wondering if you have any insight into what's going on in Libya in the aftermath of America's regime change there.
Of course, there's the Benghazi caper, but that seems to me to be such a narrow, focused question that it must not be where it's really at.
No, it's a chaotic situation where nobody, as I see it, is really in charge there.
The country on a broader scale has sort of broken up into its traditional two parts, the east and west, the Benghazi-focused area and the Tripoli-focused area, which it was even under Greek rule along thousands and thousands of years ago.
There are armed gangs everywhere.
The Islamists, the jihadists who were used by the British, French, and Americans to spearhead the fight against Gaddafi.
And Gaddafi had been fighting the jihadists and Islamists in Benghazi for a decade, more than a decade.
The British had been in cahoots with the jihadists for, oh, since the late 1980s.
So these were the striking force.
Now there's a puppet government that is imposed by the Western powers in what I call our return to colonialism days.
These are CIA assets, sort of versions of Karzai in Afghanistan who are sitting on the shelf in Pittsburgh or someplace or Philadelphia, and they're shipped over to Libya.
We're doing the same thing in Iraq.
We've got all these exiles who have been in Milwaukee forever, and now they're being sent back as voices of the Syrian people.
Same thing.
They're there in Tripoli, but they don't really have much authority.
There's no real national army.
There's all these people running, these rambos running around with guns.
And there's unrest in the southern part of Libya in the desert with a lot of radical groups there, Tuaregs, that type of thing.
So it's a big mess, but nobody really cares in the West because the important part is that the big oil terminals, like in Rastanoura and other places, are pumping away happily, exporting high-grade Libyan low-sulfur oil to Europe.
And they're being run by foreigners, and they're being guarded by Western mercenaries.
And to hell with the rest of Libya.
Nobody wants it.
It's sand anyway.
Yeah.
Well, and then do I have it right that the oil is basically all located in the far east of the country where it's really isolated from everybody else, and they really can just let the rest of the country go to hell?
That's right.
You know, when the French ruled Chad, which really remains to this day just the south of Libya, when they ruled Chad, it was – and it remains a French colony to this day, a disguised colony.
The French used to call Chad utile, which means useful, and Chad inutile, which means useless.
And they gave all their attention to the productive part of Chad, to the devil with the rest.
We've just done exactly the same thing with Libya.
Yeah, the oil installation's very remote.
They're in the desert.
Pipelines take them to the coast, to these heavily defended export terminals, and off they go to Europe.
So what happens to the rest of Libya really is of very little importance.
And Libya's a small country, remember.
It's 5, 6 million people.
It used to be, until Gaddafi's day, it used to be a gas station stop on the road from Alexandria to Tunis.
Well, now, tell me this, because I've got my own theory, but I sort of – I'd like to hear you debunk it if you can.
It seems like you might have better answers.
But my own theory for why they even bothered doing the war in Libya, because after all, they did bring him back in from the cold in 2003.
He's still maybe, you know, the wacky colonel and not always the easiest to get along with.
He wasn't quite the most loyal sock puppet of all, but he was in from the cold, right?
But then they turned on him.
So my theory about why they turned on him is that because after the regime changed by the people of Egypt against the American-backed sock puppet, Hosni Mubarak, and for that matter, Ben Ali in Tunisia before that, at the dawn of the Arab Spring, that America looked really bad, and that even the American people were starting to get the idea that, hey, wait a minute, Uncle Sam is on the side of all the dictators against all the people?
Whatever happened to democracy and all that crap you guys talk about all day?
And so they needed Libya basically as a PR stunt, and they figured Gaddafi was expendable, and they could put images on TV, not that anyone else in the world was buying it, but for the American people that, look, we're on the side of the poor protesters in the street, we're on the side of people power, we're on the side of the revolution, we're on the side of democracy, we're on the side of the good guys in the Arab Spring.
But it was really just to confuse the issue so they could continue with their policy of backing the king of Morocco and Algeria and the dictator of Yemen and the king of Bahrain and Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and Jordan, etc., etc., etc., like that.
What do you think?
Scott, that's a good theory.
It has a lot of validity to it.
Another one is that the Western powers panicking over Algeria, a big gas and oil exporter to Europe, and Morocco, another Western protectorate, decide they're going to make a stand.
The revolution is spreading.
Egypt, Tunisia, Libya is probably next.
We've got to make a stand, and the best way to do it is to overthrow Gaddafi and put in some stronger, more reliable puppets in there, as part of the growing counter-revolution that I maintain is going on, the Western counter-revolution in the Arab world, the latest example being the attack on Syria.
So that could be, too.
I'm really not sure.
I haven't figured out entirely what the reason was.
Another reason which I think played a role was France.
France is very active in the region, and Gaddafi's son, Saif al-Islam, had come out publicly and claimed that Gaddafi secretly financed Sarkozy's last campaign in Europe.
And the minute he did that, he was marked for death.
Now, was he messing around and angering the Houston guys, selling oil the wrong direction?
No.
No, Gaddafi was perfectly cooperative.
He wasn't threatening to raise prices.
And in fact, the U.S.
-led oil embargo on Libya, which ended once Gaddafi gave all his nuclear junk to Washington, the Western oil firms, Canadian, British, American, all poured back into Libya and were happily pumping away.
Well, they're back even stronger now.
And another theory is, well, maybe it was done to stop the Chinese from moving in there, because they were getting fairly high profile there.
That's been cut back.
All right.
Well, with that, I will let you go.
Thanks for doing the show and especially for staying over time with us here.
Most welcome, Scott.
Cheerio.
Appreciate it.
Everybody, that is the great Eric Margulies.
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War at the top of the world, an American Raj, liberation or domination.
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Hey, y'all.
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Oh, man, I'm late.
Sure hope I can make my flight.
Stand there.
Me?
I am standing here.
Come here.
Okay.
Hands up.
Turn around.
Whoa, easy.
Into the scanner.
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Hey, slow down.
It's just my...
Hold it right there.
Your wallet has tripped the metal detector.
What's this?
The Bill of Rights?
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Got a plane to catch.
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Thank you.