All right, my friends, welcome back to Antiwar Radio on Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas, streaming live worldwide on the internet, ChaosRadioAustin.org and Antiwar.com slash radio.
And it's my pleasure to welcome back to the show Eric Margolis.
He's an American foreign correspondent for Sun National Media in Canada.
He's the author of War at the Top of the World and the new one, American Raj.
Welcome back to the show, Eric.
Great to be back with you, Scott.
And I just did it again, didn't I?
I've been pronouncing your last name wrong this whole time.
It's Margolis?
It's Margolis.
But, you know, everybody has a problem with it, including myself, so don't feel badly.
But I prefer Margolis.
Margolis.
That's what my father used to use.
I'm going to do my best to say it right from now on.
Don't worry about it.
I feel like such a tool.
I've said it wrong probably a thousand times.
No problemo.
Okay.
Well, I appreciate your understanding there.
All right.
So, all hell's breaking loose in the Caucasus Mountains.
And now, I don't know this, Eric, but I bet the audience, before we went out to the break, that even though I haven't seen that he's written anything about this yet, that Eric Margolis knows all about the Caucasus Mountains, too.
Isn't that right?
Good God.
We're like an old married couple.
You know me too well.
I do, in fact, Scott.
I went through the whole area.
I've written about it.
I've written about the Chechen struggle for independence.
I was there during the Soviet days in the 1980s.
It's a fascinating area with over a hundred different nationalities.
It's beautiful.
It's filled with fiery, hot-headed people, beautiful women, and there's always stuff going on there.
I love it.
Yeah.
Now, I actually was interested and looked at, well, that's funny.
You know, I'm from Texas.
I've never traveled the world covering a million wars like you have.
I don't know all this stuff.
I went back and looked up Chechnya, and Chechnya's just there on the northern side of the Caucasus Mountains right next door to North Ossetia, right?
Yes, that's right.
Yeah.
So, that's interesting.
That's what we're talking about.
It's this little area between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea where Russia sort of has a little inland peninsula that reaches down toward Turkey, and then just south of there you have Georgia, Azerbaijan, and who am I leaving out?
Armenia.
Armenia, right.
Okay.
So, if I do really know you that well, I think I know that from what you've told me about your time in Afghanistan covering the Mujahideen in the 80s and such like that, you're no big fan of the Russians.
You're not the kind of guy who would just come on here and defend the Russians because you love them so much or anything like that, are you?
Oh, absolutely not.
I've been under Russian fire.
I've seen the Russians, you know, killing large numbers of people in Afghanistan.
I've seen the Russians committing genocide in Chechnya.
I've seen many wrongdoings and crimes committed by the Russians.
However, comma, I have also spent a lot of time in the Soviet Union and Russia.
I have great respect for Russians.
I am a Russophile when it comes to Russian culture, and they are a very intelligent people.
I've long lamented the end of the Cold War.
I said the Russians were great enemies, and our victory and our honor is measured by the strength of our enemies, and the Russians were tops.
So I have a kind of a love-hate relationship with the Russians.
I hate some of the things that they've done, but I really love the Russian people, and I feel great sorrow for Russia's tortured history.
And just let me say, the Russians are not always wrong, and in this case, there's more right on their side than there is wrong.
Well, and that's why I asked for the disclaimer, because I figured that no matter what you had to say, your explanation of your view of what's going on in the Caucasus Mountains, I was sure that it would be more complicated than the narrative being sold to us on TV.
Well, you know, as I've said before about Afghanistan, I suffer from the problem of actually having been there and knowing the area well.
That makes it much more difficult for me to take black and white solutions like our pundits do here in the States.
Indeed.
So what exactly is going on?
I know that, well, it should go without saying, at least on this show, that we know that the Russians didn't just blindly invade Georgia here, that the Georgians moved on Osetia first.
But I've got to tell you, I was reading something interesting today in, oh, where was it, Stratford.com, I think, Eric, that talked about how the Georgians must have had tacit approval from the Americans before doing this, and the Americans must have known that the Russians were ready to go right there on the other side of the mountains.
And, you know, what do you think is behind this?
Well, that's my understanding, too.
In fact, I'm just writing this as we speak in my Sunday column.
Well, look, let me encapsulate the events there, because they're murky.
In 1991, the Soviet Union broke up, and Georgia went independent.
There were two ethnic enclaves in Georgia, South Osetia, there's North Osetia in Russia, South Osetia, and Abkhazia.
There are about 70,000 people in each of these enclaves.
The Osets are an ancient people who are descended from the Alan tribes and the Scythians of early history, and speak an Iranian-based language.
The Abkhazians are another ethnic group, about half of them are Muslims, half of them are Christians.
They're on the black seat.
Absolutely beautiful country.
Both of these people hate the Georgians, it's traditional.
And they've been fighting since 1992, because both of these enclaves wanted to pull out, and the Abkhaz wanted to go independent, the Ossetians wanted to join Russia, and they've been fighting with the Georgians.
Now, in 1995, it was the then-ruler, president of Georgia, Eduard Shevardnadze, who I know he was Gorbachev's number two man, was overthrown in a U.S.
-backed coup in Georgia, and into power came Mikhail Saakashvili, a U.S.
-educated lawyer, who I believe was probably one of these famous CIA assets.
And he came into power, and he was young, and he spoke perfect English, and he became quickly the golden-haired boy of the American neocons.
Pardon me for a moment, you said 1995, you meant 2005, right?
I mean 2005.
Okay, just make it shorter, go ahead.
Thanks for the correction.
He became the golden boy of the U.S. neocons, and they poured into Georgia, put support into Georgia for two reasons.
A, it was seen as a role model of how to move into the former areas of the Soviet Union, but equally important, maybe more, Georgia offered a geographical way for oil and gas pipelines to bypass Russian control, and to bring energy from Central Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, the Central Asian Caspian Basin, out to the West via Georgia to Turkey, and then to the Mediterranean, rather than going through Russia, because Russia hitherto had a monopoly on energy pipelines going to the West.
So there was enormous bad blood between Russia and the West over this issue.
Saakashvili went out of his way to needle the Russians, he kept fighting against the Abkhaz and the Ossetians.
And the West poured more and more intelligence material, weapons, U.S. military instructors and things into Georgia, and Russia grew increasingly angry, it's as if the Russians were pouring troops and intelligence directors into Guadalajara, imagine how you guys in Texas would feel.
Well, this is how the Russians felt.
And then, curiously enough, the Israelis then began moving into Georgia, too, and according to some reports in the Israeli press, ports sold $500 million worth of military equipment to the Georgians, there were Israeli military and intelligence advisors there, so Georgia became a hotbed of intrigue, sort of like Beirut North.
You know, Jacob Hornberger on his blog today says, well, just imagine if they'd won the Cold War and the Communists were putting bases in, or even gaining influence in, say, oh, I don't know, Grenada, Chile, Nicaragua.
We know exactly what America would do in a situation like that.
Regime change.
We've seen it done.
Well, you're so right.
You know, the Deputy Prime Minister of Russia, Sergei Ivanov, very tough man, I met him, he's a former KGB foreign intelligence chap, very close to Putin, Ivanov was sneered the other day, and he called Georgia a U.S., quote, satellite, unquote.
And boy, you know, the Russians know a thing or two about satellite states when they see one.
But in fact, Georgia had become a U.S. satellite.
Now that takes us up to this week, and Saakashvili, his head swelled with U.S. support and promises of NATO membership, decided he was going to grab independent-minded or secessionist-minded South Ossetia, sent his little army in to invade South Ossetia.
A terrible blunder, incredibly stupid move, and as you were saying earlier, Scott, it's almost inconceivable that the U.S. didn't know about this, since his administration is filled with CIA guys and U.S. military advisors and U.S. satellites are looking overhead.
So he invaded, his troops were routed, Putin sent in two divisions, one into Abkhazia, one into South Ossetia, they kicked the you-know-what out of the Georgians, sent them running.
And in one quick blow, Putin changed the entire geographic situation in the region, delivered a stinging blow, humiliating setback to the U.S., made NATO look like a paper tiger, and put on warning any other countries wanting to play footsie with the U.S., like Ukraine and the Central Asian states, to beware.
Well, if we can just hypothetically, I guess, because I think it is speculation at this point, unless you know otherwise, but if we assume that Dick Cheney ordered this, this is just the biggest screw-up in the world, what was he trying to do with this?
Boy, I, you know, the neocons get mesmerized by mythology, and they still have this mythology that they occupied Afghanistan, all it took was one little push and there we were, a quick swift operation.
Same thing with Iraq, you remember, it was going to be a cakewalk.
And I think they thought this idea, by using a proxy force with some U.S. military advisors, that they could swiftly deliver a blow that would make Saakashvili look like the cock of the walk in the region and enhance American influence.
But it's crazy, I cannot think of a rational argument to support why Saakashvili should have done that.
They should have known what the Russian response would be, and that Putin is too smart to miss a chance to really stick his finger in the eye of Washington and Georgia.
Okay, now, the actual neocon crazies, like Bill Kristol over at the Weekly Standard and that kind of thing notwithstanding, there's really, tell me, there's no chance that a right-wing nationalist like Cheney, as imbalanced as he may be at times, is really going to do anything to escalate this.
Although, I mean, sending in the so-called humanitarian aid is sort of a provocation, but they're not really going to try to escalate this thing, are they?
I don't think so.
I mean, we'll just imagine how the whole Bush administration has lost enormous face.
This area is too remote and complicated for most Americans to understand, or to know where it is, but it will eventually dawn on people that Washington has suffered a humiliating reverse there.
And it's, you know, it's one out of, it's the latest fiasco of the Bush administration.
And what concerns me is the violent response that it's making, a verbal response that's using Cold War terminology.
Yes, as you mentioned, Bush is sending in, quote, humanitarian, unquote, U.S. military aid.
He's talking about sending warships into the Black Sea to stand off the coast of Georgia.
It's anger, but it's a kind of a childish response, table-pounding, making fists.
But the U.S. does not have the military capability to do anything serious in Georgia, nor should it be doing it.
That, you know, as I write at the end of my column, I'm scooping myself, I said, you know, the most important U.S. foreign policy objective is keeping good relations with Russia.
It has thousands of nuclear warheads pointed at the United States.
The last thing we should be ever doing is picking a fight with Russia.
Let me ask you.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry, Eric, because I know you're the one who just said it.
But let me ask you, what in the world could possibly be more important than being friends with the Russians at this point?
Well, not even friends, just maintaining normal, you know, decent relations with them and not being in conflict with Russia over something that has no real strategic group value to American interests.
It's a tempest in a teapot.
And, you know, it's these oil-crazed neocons who think they've got to get their hands on every source and conduit of oil known to mankind are willing to provoke Russia for the sake of Georgia.
It's inconceivable.
It shows how far they've drifted from the shores of reality.
And their angry response is threatening to plunge us into a period of tension with Russia.
So that's really what this is all about, is that pipeline from hell?
The pipeline, we're in pre-election time, and the Republicans have been humiliated.
McCain has seized upon this to talk tough.
You know, here's another outrageous point.
You know who McCain's chief foreign policy advisor is, this little-known-but-very-influential man named Randy Scheinemann, who is an ardent neoconservative.
He's very tied in with Israel's right-wing parties.
But more important than that, he's a registered or has been a registered lobbyist for Georgia.
And here's McCain making all kinds of threats against Russia, and his speeches are being written by his chief lobbyist, paid lobbyist for Georgia.
I mean, it's absolutely preposterous.
Yeah, well, and it's a clue, too, that his chief foreign policy guy is this guy Scheinemann, who was one of the guys who, I don't know if he was Chalabi's handler or Chalabi was his handler, but this is one of the core group of men who lied us into war in Iraq, Eric.
Well, he is a leader among the Fifth Columnists, as I call it, who lied us into war.
Yeah.
Yeah, so, well, and speaking of John McCain's tough talk, how tough is his talk?
What is he proposing be done about this?
Well, he's threatening that we put Russia in the diplomatic doghouse by, you know, kicking it out of the Group of Eight and breaking trade agreements and more or less diplomatically isolating Russia, maybe not going to the next games that are being held in the Caucasus, sports games, just putting in a sort of a Cold War cold shoulder to Russia.
And none of this is going to change anything on the ground, but the hope is that Washington makes enough ruckus that it will intimidate Putin into changing his policies there, but I don't think so.
Yeah, that's what they really want is a new Cold War.
I was thinking of, yesterday we were talking about some of this, and for some reason it occurred to me, Robert Gates' speech recently to the Air Force where he told them to quit screwing around with F-22s and F-35s to fight some future war against some major power that's not going to happen.
Right now we need to focus on warring against little brown people in the countries that we occupy, low-level warfare from the ground, that kind of thing.
And I guess this is a good way to turn that right around.
Here's a reason to sell more F-22s, we've got some MiGs to counter, and we'll go right back, re-release Top Gun in the theaters, and go right back to where we were in 1985.
Scott, this is a whole topic for another show, I'm going to do a column on it too about how the U.S. military is being reconfigured to fight colonial warfare.
And there's a lot of opposition to it in the Pentagon, and it's caused a lot of ruckus.
Geez, well, I mean, I guess if I get to choose, I'd rather fight defenseless people than the Russians.
Sorry!
That's exactly right, but one day we may blunder into a war with the Russians.
Look at this Caucasus thing, and my point is, for God's sake, suppose they had actually been crazy enough to admit Georgia into NATO, and then Georgia had attacked into North Ossetia, had gotten into a war with the Russians, are we going to, are we ready to sacrifice New York and Washington, D.C., and Dallas for Tbilisi, and risk a nuclear war for these crazy hotheads in the Caucasus?
That's how dangerous it is.
But the message is also worthy of Ukraine, and even the Baltic states, that I, you know, respect very much, but what we have done is we've embraced defending many bridges too far, and we can't defend all the area that NATO has now taken in Eastern Europe.
It's a very grave problem, and Putin has just shown that in this sense, in its eastern reaches, NATO is a paper tiger.
Now, forget Dallas, what about Austin?
Austin, well, I didn't want to mention that.
No, no, I love people in Dallas too, I was just kidding.
Yeah, and here's the thing, let's be abundantly clear about this, NATO membership means you have a war guarantee.
That's what that means.
You know, Pat Buchanan was on this show a couple of weeks ago talking about his new book, and he, we talked about the current context and how America's acting like Britain and handing out war guarantees that we can't really back up, and he asked rhetorically, let's say that a right-wing militarist regime, or whatever wing, militarist regime took over, in Moscow, and decided that they were going to retake the Baltic states, what would we do about it, really?
And what would NATO do about it?
The French, the Germans, the British, are we all willing to lose all of our capital cities and all the rest of them too, over states that we honestly cannot field armies in, that we cannot protect, but we give war guarantees to them anyway.
Welcome back to 1939, this is exactly what the British and French did with Poland, and then sat back while they watched the Germans run over Poland.
So it is very dangerous indeed.
And you know, you see, I watched Bush denouncing, and Cheney, denouncing Russia for invading a sovereign country, and you know, I thought, my God, these are the men who ordered the invasion of three countries, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Somalia, and these kettles are calling the Russian pot black, and I watched Putin lamenting the fate of the poor civilians in South Ossetia, and he had to send his army in to rescue them, while Russia applauded the massacre of Muslims by the Serbs, and also massacred about almost half the population of Chechnya.
So the hypocrisy on both sides is flying thicker than the shell fire.
Yeah, yeah, it's always funny to hear leaders of major powers denouncing the taking of civilian life, and who knows what they're talking about.
And by the way, thank you for not leaving the regime change in Somalia off the list there, Eric.
That makes three of us, you, me, and Chris Floyd, I guess.
And we're the only people who know about it.
Well, Justin wrote about it a couple of years ago, but it's been a while.
And that is, you know, an absolute horrible humanitarian catastrophe there.
I don't know how many tens of thousands killed, I know hundreds of thousands of refugees, more than half a million refugees from Mogadishu.
It's a horrible story.
But you know, you asked, I think the Republicans are going to use this, somehow twist this into a positive asset for them.
They're going to say, look, here, we're tough on foreign policy affairs, and this is the three o'clock in the morning call that John McCain is answering, and then where's Barack Obama?
I don't know, he's fishing in Hawaii, or playing golf, or something like that.
So the Republicans have emerged ahead on this, I think, at home.
I think that's right, and I think that, well, it's unfortunate that we weren't able to really get the meme out there that John McCain wants to pick a fight with Russia ahead of this, so that now they can make it look like everything is a response to what Russia has done here.
And you know, I already made the bumper sticker, pick a fight with Russia, McCain 08.
But too late now, this has taken that message over.
You're right.
Well, he said months ago, in an interview, that he wanted to confront Russia, those were his words.
Well, he's got his golden opportunity.
Yeah.
Boy, well, you know, I talked to a guy one time, and I don't know exactly what his expertise are, I guess I should ask Gordon Prather about this, but this is actually one of the guys that wrote the book, Year of the Rat, about Bill Clinton and the missile technology transfers to China back in the 1990s.
And he described how a hydrogen bomb would basically erase half of Austin, from the river down to Slaughter Lane, is about how much territory could be destroyed by one hydrogen bomb.
And the Russians have how many thousands of these left?
Oh, you know, I don't remember the figure offhand.
I think it's around two and a half or 3,000, maybe.
They've cut way back, I think they used to be up to 14,000.
But they've still got more than enough to blast the U.S. off the face of the map two or three times.
And ditto for the U.S.
We have thousands of nuclear warheads as well, and in fact, we're renewing and updating many of them.
Even though the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty calls for all nuclear states to get rid of their nuclear weapons, we have not, nor has anybody else.
We're making them usable.
That's what we're doing.
That's what we're doing.
Making them small enough.
And modernizing them, yes.
Uh-huh.
And, you know, they have the technique, too, where they figured out if you detonate them in the air, it makes for a lot less fallout.
So they can argue to each other that this makes them usable.
It's no different than just a really big bomb.
The fact of the fission is sort of beside the point.
We could make a conventional bomb this big if only we had a spruce goose to deploy it with.
Right.
Yeah.
No big deal.
Never mind the whole taboo on using nuclear weapons, never again kind of thing.
Also, you know, John McCain stated yesterday in his statement, I think it was yesterday, maybe it was the day before, where he said, we're all Georgians today.
Part of what he explained to that audience was, now I know that you don't know where Georgia is or care, and couldn't find it on a map if I gave you 15 minutes and one with, you know, lines and capitals named on it.
But anyway, this is very important, this small little thing happening here.
Let me remind you, oftentimes, big wars start in small places, and basically what he's doing is he's saying he wants to emulate what the Germans and the Russians, the French and the British did in World War I, and take some tiny little thing and turn it into something big.
Well, it's scary, and I see the White House doing exactly the same thing, and I've been saying it right for some time, I really question the maturity and the stability of these kind of leaders who are so quick to pick a fight and have so little understanding of what's going to be entailed with it.
You know, Americans buy this stuff because they don't know what's going on abroad.
It's very frightening.
It sells at home.
Unfortunately, the rest of the world, we look like we're warmongers, you know, what the old Soviets used to call us, warmongering circles in Washington.
Curiously enough, they may have been right.
Yeah, well, and you know, the unfortunate thing here, at least the excuse, is that they're trying to westernize the world, basically, and teach them about democracy and liberty and all these things.
But of course, the way to do that is to trade with people and send them emails with links to the writings of, you know, Murray Rothbard and Thomas Jefferson and stuff.
You don't bomb them, you don't occupy them and prop up their dictatorships and act like an empire to teach people about liberty and Christianity.
Don't forget that, too.
Because behind a lot of the U.S. invasions in Afghanistan and Iraq, for example, commissionaries, 44% of voters of the Republican Party are born-again evangelicals, and these people want to see the word of Christianity spread into the dark regions of Africa and Asia, particularly the former communist region.
So there's a lot of western pressure behind this.
Yeah, well, and you know, for people who are really sincere in their Christian beliefs, is that what you really want, is to have your religion mixed with American military power in the minds of the people around the world?
I actually saw on Fox News, he was a guy, I don't know his name, a Christian missionary, who was a regular guest on Fox News.
He was one of the boys, and they were happy to have him back on the show.
And he said, listen, I just got back from around the world, and everywhere I bring up the name Jesus Christ, people tell me, that's the religion of the people who invaded Iraq.
Get out of my face.
And he wanted, and he was speaking strictly from a missionary point of view.
We've got to knock this off.
Well, you know, it was Robespierre, during the French Revolution, who made a wonderful line, he said, all the world hates armed missionaries.
And he was so right.
Yeah, well, and I guess he didn't include himself, if his mission is, you know, secularism.
That's right.
The same methods.
But anyway, none of these people can ever see themselves in their descriptions of others, can they?
No, no.
No, never.
Okay, so let's talk about Pakistan, because I have to tell you, and again, I know barely more about this region of the world than I know about the Caucasus Mountains, to tell you the truth, but I have to imagine that if World War III really breaks out, it won't be in Georgia, it'll probably start somewhere between Pakistan and India, or Pakistan and who knows who.
Well, if there's nuclear war, as I've been writing since 1999, the most likely scenario for nuclear war is between Pakistan and India over Kashmir, the divided state of Kashmir, which they've been feuding over since 1949.
And in fact, this week, there's been considerable fighting along the border between the Indian and Pakistani forces, and there's been a lot of deaths and rioting inside of Kashmir, which is India's only Muslim-majority state, as Muslims are protesting against the continued Indian rule.
So it's a very tense situation.
Well, now, one time I met an Indian in a Pakistan, and we have lots of high-tech here in Austin, and a lot of foreign workers who come in to do these jobs, and I met an Indian and a Pakistani at the same time and asked them, is this about religion at all, or is this simply about people trying to grab land?
And they both, in unison, said, this is simply about land.
Well, you know, I don't entirely agree with that view.
In fact, in my book, War at the Top of the World, I went into this, I devoted a whole chapter called The Hatred of Brothers on why the Indians and Pakistanis hate each other so much.
And certainly it's over land, but there is great antipathy and animosity between Hindus and Muslims.
Everything one of each does is detested by the other.
And that's why you have these tremendous communal riots in India, where people are burned alive and chopped up and everything.
There's a lot of religious hatred.
We saw it when India was partitioned in 1947, where millions, over a million, maybe two million Hindus and Muslims were slaughtered.
So one can't discount the religious factor.
Well now, what about all the bombings and all the turmoil within Pakistan now?
That's not India-related, that's more the secularist versus jihadist types, no?
Well, the Indian Intelligence Service, R-A-W, Research and Analysis Wing, or RAW for short, is active in Pakistan.
It's been doing its share of shooting off bombings and stirring up ethnic violence, but it's not India that's causing all of that, it's just stirring the pot.
And by the way, RAW is very active in Afghanistan, trying to eject Pakistani influence.
Pakistan is in convulsions of turmoil right now.
The government is hanging on by its fingernails.
They're trying to impeach the former dictator Musharraf, our dictator, I should say, Pervez Musharraf.
The army is standing aside for the minute.
The provinces along the Afghan border are in a state of insurrection.
There's insurrection going on in Balochistan.
The army is sort of half-heartedly fighting these Taliban-type rebels.
There's chaos and confusion in Pakistan, a country of 165 million, which is believed to have about 40 nuclear weapons.
And now, I read an article, I think it was that new paper, The National, from the United Arab Emirates or something, where the guy wrote that the Pakistanis, the reason that they still put so much support into the Taliban is because the Karzai government is very friendly with the Indians.
You were just mentioning Indian influence in Afghanistan.
For the Pakistanis, not for religious reasons, but for simply real politic reasons, they cannot afford to have that much Indian influence on their other border.
And so that is the reason for their continued support for the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Well, Scott, it's one of the reasons, and a very important one.
Pakistan has a strategic interest in Afghanistan.
It was always known as its strategic hinterland.
Pakistan is a very narrow country.
In the event of war with India, Pakistani forces plan to retreat into Afghanistan to continue the war before they're sliced up by superior Indian forces.
But equally important is that the Pashtun tribes, there are about 30 million of these Pashtun tribes, and they're the biggest tribe in the world.
They straddled the Pak-Afghan border, and so they were artificially divided by the British.
And that's why you find Taliban, which is really a Pashtun-Afghan movement, being supported inside Pakistan, because they're their first cousins.
And the Pakistani military and intelligence services are filled with Pashtuns.
Anybody named Khan, K-H-A-N, is a Pashtun.
There's great sympathy and tribal loyalty, which trumps all other loyalties.
So there are blood relations here.
And, you know, we, the Bush administration, put a gun to Pakistan's head, as even President Musharraf admitted, and told Pakistan after 2001, either you cooperate with us and use your army and intelligence service, let us direct them and use them for American purposes, or we're going to bomb and destroy Pakistan.
That's what Musharraf said.
I've heard the same thing, too.
We put a gun to their head, we're using carrot and stick by threatening war against Pakistan and bribing them with billions of dollars.
We've rented the Pakistani army and intelligence service.
And they're doing things that 90 percent of Pakistani people hate.
They hate the war in Afghanistan, they support Taliban, they don't think the Americans should be there, they don't think Pakistani troops should be fighting their own people.
So we're forcing these people to do unnatural things that they feel is deeply wrong.
How can we be surprised that they're playing a double game, or being half-hearted, or they're meeting secret opposition?
And you know what?
Never mind the whole phony war on terrorism.
America's Afghanistan policy has a lot to do with its Georgia policy, doesn't it, encircling Russia.
They couldn't never decide, I don't think, whether it was a pink or yellow revolution there in Kyrgyzstan.
Well, it's about oil, of course.
Georgia is about the oil pipeline we were talking about that goes from Azerbaijan, from Baku to the Turkish coast, and they're talking about building more there.
And Afghanistan is about the other egress for the energy of the Caspian Basin and the principal planned route, and that is south from Uzbekistan through Afghanistan, right through the heart of Taliban Pashtun tribal territory, down to the Pakistani coast, where it could be taken out by tankers.
And it's just interesting that most American troops are based along this potential pipeline route.
The deal was just signed in Kabul by the Karzai government for the pipeline, which will also be extended to India.
So it's a major point, and Kevin Phillips, who I admire very much, a very deep-thinking writer, said recently, he said, American troops abroad are being essentially become pipeline protection troops.
Right.
Well, what about Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan and all the rest of these Central Asian countries?
I sort of get the idea that the American War Party, they call this Injun country.
They mean to just take Central Asia for North America.
Well, that's right.
You know, that's Mr. Saakashvili in Georgia, the much-heralded, quote, Democrat, unquote, is a perfect example.
He was to be the role model for imposing U.S. control over the Central Asian states.
You get a young, fluent English-speaking guy, you rig elections, you give him tons of money so he can buy off enemies or rent loyalty, and he will become Washington's local energy overseer in the area.
It's a cookie-cutter policy, and it's worked very well in the Middle East, and they're trying to expand that now into former parts of the Soviet Union.
And now, this has really been the complaint of the Obama foreign policy faction all along, even before Obama came around, right, was that you weren't supposed to invade Iraq, dummy.
You were supposed to take over all of Central Asia.
Well, I'm concerned by Obama's strategic perceptions.
I think they're addled and confused.
I don't think he understands Afghanistan, and I really don't think he understands the basic policy that we don't need to own the countries where energy is produced, we just need to buy the energy.
You must know something about economics or something.
Geez, why don't we invade France if we need wine?
We better assure that we control wine-producing regions.
We can't be dependent on foreign imports.
Right.
And this is exactly what I've been trying to tell him, especially when you're dealing with oil, which is literally a liquid, and which is a global market already.
It doesn't matter who owns it.
I just saw a thing the other day about Osama bin Laden, and this goes back to all of his fatwas and interviews of the 1990s, where he said outright, we can't drink it.
That was his ironic, you know, using an American kind of colloquialism or way of speaking.
We can't drink it.
Of course we'll sell it to you.
We just will sell it to you at the market price, rather than 5,000 percent below it.
And bin Laden said, he said a fair price for oil, he said this back in the, at the end of the 90s, was $144 a barrel, and everybody, oh, goddamn Muslim maniac, how, that's ridiculous.
But we went ahead and got it done for him.
That's right.
Ah, geez.
All right, everybody.
That's Eric Margulies.
Did I say it right?
That's right.
Eric Margulies.
He's the foreign correspondent for Sun National Media in Canada.
He's the author of War at the Top of the World, and American Raj is coming out any day now, right?
Yes, in September.
In September.
End of September.
All right.
Hey, thanks again very much for your insight today, Eric.
Great to be back with you, Scott.
