03/24/14 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show here.
I'm Scott Horton.
The website is scotthorton.org.
You can tweet me at Scott Horton Show if you like tweeting things.
All right, our first guest on the show today is our good friend Eric Margulies, author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
And of course, he writes at his own website, ericmargulies.com.
Spell it like Margulies.
And also at lourockwell.com and at unz.com.
Unz.com.
Welcome back to the show, Eric.
How are you doing?
Thank you, Scott.
I'm elated to be back with you as always.
All right, good times.
Well, there's a bunch of horrible things going on in the world.
And I wonder what you think about them.
First of all, apparently the military junta in charge of Egypt right now, again, has apparently sentenced 528 accused, I don't know, convicted supporters of Mohammed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood to death.
Are they all guilty of treason?
What's the big deal?
What's going to happen?
Well, what we're seeing in Egypt is an absolutely disgusting and hideous example of a military junta fascism, but with an Egyptian, brutal, sadistic Egyptian twist that is completely out of character with a normally easygoing Egyptians.
Having lived in Egypt and covered the Middle East for decades, I'm appalled at what I see.
These people are charged with treason and sedition and murder.
After a one day trial, just one day, I expect many of the cases will be reduced sentences.
They won't all be shot.
But it's a sign of the vindictiveness and the efforts by the military junta, which receives our aid money to terrorize the Egyptian population into quiescence and to stamp the life out of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is, after all, a non-violent nationalist political movement.
Hey, does it hurt your side from laughing when you hear the current government blame America for being behind the Muslim Brotherhood and all their attempts to maintain any power?
A lot of Egyptians believe that, particularly we're talking the right wing in Egypt, the well-to-do urban elite, Egypt's Christians, who've taken a very wrong-headed approach to this project, to this problem.
They somehow, because the U.S. sought properly to maintain links or open links to the Muslim Brotherhood, so it would have some influence, after all, they were the first democratically elected government in Egyptian history.
They're now blaming the U.S. for having done this.
And that's wrong, just as wrong the supreme leader of Al-Azhar University, which is almost like the Vatican of the Muslim world, actually came out and backed the death sentence against these 528 or 529 people of the Muslim Brotherhood he's been fulminating against, and to another government, yes, man.
But then, contrarily, I believe, as you told me before, at least your perspective was that Mohamed Morsi and the, I mean, pardon me, al-Sisi, the new military dictator and his entire military dictatorship, the former government of Mubarak, that they worked with the Americans in coming back to power in the very first place.
So it's really, they're just, you know, projecting and accusing the Muslim Brotherhood of being the treasonous sock puppets of the Americans, when really it's them, just like it always has been, the Mubarakists.
How ironic, how ironic.
The al-Sisi military junta, which Secretary of State John Kerry described as a democratic government, led by this little pin-pop, poppin' J field marshal, no less, al-Sisi, who's a desk general, never fired a shot in anger in his life, except at his own people.
They are receiving, still receiving, I think it's $1.2 million, a billion dollars a year in U.S. aid.
We cut back on some military aid for a bit because al-Sisi's repression became too extreme, even for Washington's hawks.
But it will shortly be restored, and we are going to become one of the primary supporters of Egypt, certainly after Saudi Arabia, that other enlightened democracy.
Yeah.
Well, you said that they won't all be shot, this 528, but what percentage of them will be, and what percentage of them will be tortured and then set free to become the next generation Zawahiri?
Well, I think they'll probably all be pardoned.
Or not pardoned, but they'll have their sentences reduced to a mere 20 years breaking rocks in the desert or something.
This is to warn the rest of the Muslim Brotherhood, which was, after all, Egypt's most popular party, to get lost or else.
I don't even think this little dictator al-Sisi has the chutzpah to go and execute all these people.
It would put Washington in a very embarrassing spot.
Well, was there any intelligence behind his decision to do it this way, or he's just got excited and now he's going to have to climb down?
No, this is a kind of a 1930s Stalinist purge that's going on in Egypt.
Anybody associated with the Muslim Brotherhood, any independents in politics, any religious figures, journalists, you know, there are a whole bunch of journalists from Al-Jazeera who are in prison in Egypt, and they're going to be tried as, God knows what, spies or traitors or something like that.
So it's just mass intimidation.
It's really state-sponsored terrorism.
Well, now, and so what about the consequences of this for the future?
Because I can't help but think of, well, first of all, you know, like I mentioned Zawahiri there, his story was that he knew a guy who knew a guy who was involved in the assassination of Anwar Sadat, so he got tortured, and that was what turned him from Zawahiri the Surgeon into Zawahiri the Mad Bomber, and how, you know, that's the kind of thing that seems to play out over and over again.
But then also there's the idea that he's been pushing, really, that's his whole criticism all along for years and years of the Muslim Brotherhood, is that you guys are suckers playing into the Western game and trying to run for office and participate in democracy and all this crap, like Mubarak is ever going to really let you participate in the government there.
If you ever did win, they'd cancel your election results anyway, and all of that.
And it seems like, you know, it's almost like Frank Gaffney and them are right, that Obama's some Islamist just trying to prove these al-Qaeda guys right about us, because they just follow his script no matter what.
Well, it's not what President Obama's doing.
It's what the junta in Egypt is doing, and in Saudi Arabia and in Jordan.
We're seeing ferocious repression going on in the Middle East.
You know, Egypt always used to be, in the last 30 years, used to be a brutal dictatorship.
But we Americans didn't want to see it because it was a very important ally.
Instead, we'd read women's fashion magazines gushing about Mrs. Mubarak's wife and stuff like that.
But it was a brutal place, as I saw.
People were tortured.
Men who stepped out of line were gang-raped in the prisons.
People were hanged and tortured with electricity.
Now it's gotten even worse.
Just when we thought nothing could get worse or more brutal in Egypt, backed by billions of dollars of U.S. tax money, it has now happened.
What's going to happen next?
There's got to be a spreading popular armed uprising against the military junta.
It's unlikely that it's just going to go on the way it is, intimidating people.
And the U.S. will come back and support it.
The mujahideen or the dictators?
I can't seem to decide.
It's hard because we have our own rent of mujahideens now that we are sending to Syria.
And some of these guys are Egyptians.
And we don't know who we're supporting in this weird sort of house of mirrors in the Middle East.
Well, I think we talked about before how the people on the outs here, the Muslim Brotherhood, and especially their younger, angrier allies in Egypt, how they don't really have that much access to weapons.
It's not like Iraq, where every house already had an AK.
And then plus, all of Saddam's arms depots were left wide open for three or four years by Donald Rumsfeld to be looted for every last bit of explosives and everything to be used in the insurgency.
So there's always kind of a question about what ability they might have to wage an insurgency there.
But then I guess it's sort of obvious, isn't it?
That's where the question of Muammar Gaddafi's old weapons stores comes into play.
And whether you think it's possible that a real insurgency could be waged in Egypt, maybe with some of Gaddafi's arms.
And defectors from the Egyptian army.
The army itself is not monolithic, particularly in the lower ranks.
It comes from the people.
And as the repression gets worse and worse, I would think that certainly there will be units or individuals in the army who will break away.
There is a lot of...
There's some fighting going on in the Sinai Desert, which nobody really understands what's behind it.
But there have been attacks on Egyptian troop units and police.
The Sinai Bedouin fighters are getting to be a bigger problem.
The Egyptians who are now in cahoots with the Israelis to try and stamp them out.
And now, is it presumed that these guys are Bin Ladenite Salafists, or there's some other sect?
We don't really know.
They're just a bunch of angry guys who've got some weapons.
Yeah, plenty to be angry about, no matter who you are living in the Sinai, I guess.
Yeah, you know, and this is superimposed on top of Egypt's grave everyday problems that have nothing to do with politics.
They can't feed themselves in Egypt.
There's hideous overcrowding in a country of 80 million people, which is really...
It's got room for about 5 million.
There's no education.
There's sewage everywhere.
People are sick.
It's just an awful situation.
Cairo is an urban nightmare.
So, and the problem with Egypt, their basic problem is that Egypt can't feed itself.
It has to import food.
And most of that food was wheat coming from the United States, authorized by the U.S. Congress.
And if the Egyptians ever looked the wrong way at the Israelis, the Israelis would call up Congress and say, put the squeeze on the Egyptians, threaten to cut off their aid, and there'll be no food for Egypt tomorrow.
So Egypt inadvertently, because of the Camp David Accords, the Egypt fell under the thumb of the Israelis to a large extent, which explains why Egypt, even today, is selling gas, natural gas, below market cost to the Israelis.
Yeah, while their own people are going hungry.
Now, is there precedent for the threat of interrupting the wheat supply?
Or everybody just knows that they could?
Oh, they know that they could.
I don't think it's been overtly stated yet.
Yeah, but you didn't make that up either.
I mean, this is something that people have talked about.
Oh, I've been writing about that for years.
It's in my book, American Raj, one of the main points that I make.
Yeah, well, it's something that you taught me right after the Arab Spring, that's for sure.
All right, hold it right there, everybody.
It's Eric Margulies, ericmargulies.com, lourockwell.com, unz.com.
We'll be right back after this.
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All right, you guys, welcome back.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm him.
You can see why I just call that.
All right.
Talking with Eric Margulies, author of American Raj, Liberation or Domination, and a whole hell of a lot of essays, too, at ericmargulies.com, loubrockwell.com, unz.com.
And so I guess if we could, Eric, I'd like to talk to you now about this article, the latest one for loubrockwell.com.
Will Israel join the war in Syria?
Oh, man, I guess I'll just turn it over to you.
Will Israel join the war in Syria, Eric?
Kind of almost a rhetorical question, Scott, because Israel has been quietly supporting this war, and it's gotten its American supporters to be pushing very hard to the U.S. to attack Syria and to sustain this effort to overthrow the Assad regime in Syria.
Israel has its own reasons for doing this, not necessarily the same as America's.
But now the Israelis, one of the points was that beside this covert backing of the war in Syria, Israel is now increasingly intervening militarily.
And there's a possibility that now that the Assad forces are winning and the U.S.-backed forces are being beaten, the key factor here is Assad's armor and air force.
And the Israelis may intervene to destroy them.
Just America was planning to do with this phony business over the chemical weapons.
Israel may now do it because Israel has decided, after much internal debate, that they would like to overthrow Assad.
Well, they must be crazy, I guess.
Well, and they bombed Syria last week, whatever.
But OK, now, I don't know.
I'm sorry, because I'm always trying to put myself in these other people's shoes.
And I know that it's a false premise to approach these things rationally or from a national interest point of view, when really it's an individual public choice theory type of point of view about how all these policies are made and everything.
However, Eric, there's got to be people in the Israeli government, in their military, in their intelligence services, maybe on their cabinet, in the prime minister's office somewhere, somebody saying, guys, without Assad, Al-Qaeda win, suicide bomber, crazy, talk, fiery madmen win.
And OK, so maybe they won't be able to maintain a military force as powerful as Assad has maintained on their northern border.
But still, is that actually going to be an improvement over the current situation?
What Israeli strategist, thinking even more than two weeks out, could possibly, before this, could possibly prefer chaos and not just David Wumser's imagination in 1996 about what it might look like or something, but post-Iraq war ideas of what it will look like when all of Syria is just the Anbar province for the next six years or whatever it is.
They've got to be crazy.
I don't understand it.
I'm sorry for going on.
I just don't.
I don't get it.
Israel has very, has had a policy of very successfully destroying all military threats from the Arab states.
Egypt has been gelded under al-Sisi.
Its army is only used for internal suppression.
Libya is kaput.
Iraq, the other main danger, has been crushed into rubble.
Syria is the last Arab state that has any credible military challenge to Israel, even though its military is 1960s vintage.
But if Assad is overthrown, this will mark the end of any organized military threat from Syria.
But equally important, it will end any challenge to Israel's ongoing annexation of the Golan Heights, Syria's Golan Heights, which Israel seized in 1967, which is a very important water source to Israel.
You know, Washington's screaming about the Russian annexation of Crimea.
No, what about Israeli annexation of the Golan Heights?
We don't have a peep from Washington or Congress about that.
But they already own the Golan Heights, right?
Well, it was annexed in the 80s.
And so and they have settlers there, very important military bases, extremely important.
Israeli artillery on the Golan Heights can actually hit Damascus.
That's how close it is.
Well, I mean, but this is my point, though, is that Assad and listen, I'm not the world's greatest expert on Levantine politics, but I was always under the impression that he was as quiet as a mouse about the Golan Heights.
He might as well have been working for Assad.
He was so polite up there on their northern border.
He was he was hand in glove with the Israelis, like many of the Arab leaders, not as much as Jordan.
But certainly he was very correct, as the Germans would say, with with Israel.
We not a sock puppet, but not a problem.
No, he made no trouble.
The border between Israel and Syria was totally quiet.
Assad worked with the West.
He tortured people for us.
He kept a lid on things.
He kept a lid on the all the Arab wild men, jihadists.
We should really be allied with Assad.
That's the crazy thing and not allied with the people who are opposing it.
But anyway, but the Israelis have been torn by this.
Even under Dick Cheney and Bush, there was talk.
There were the Israelis were talking about invading Syria and Lebanon and wiping out Hezbollah and overthrowing the Assad regime.
The Israelis know it'll be chaos.
And they've been through the Lebanese experience with 15 years of civil war.
But Israel doesn't have to occupy Syria.
All it needs to do is what it's doing now.
Just sit across the border, hold the Golan Heights, watch the Syrians shoot each other, keep that war going and laugh.
Yeah, well, I mean, don't get me wrong.
I can totally see the whole clean break, you know, unplanned type strategy, like you're saying.
Just make sure that there is no actual modern nation state in the Middle East.
I mean, other than Egypt and Jordan, I guess, as long as they're compliant enough.
But like you're saying, things can be done about that, too.
But it still seems to me, though, that after the experience of the Iraq war and after the experience the last few years of looking at who's doing the killing of who up there in Syria, that well, like you're saying, from the point of view of national interest goes and all that, all things being equal, we ought to be friends with Assad and not with the jihadists.
I mean, that is a real isn't it a real security threat to Israel much more than Assad could ever be to Israel for the future.
I mean, I saw where Michael Oren said, well, listen, Hezbollah is backed by Iran.
And so forget it.
We always will prefer al Qaeda to them.
But really, because it seems to me like al Qaeda can be reasoned with like Nasrallah can be reasoned with.
You know, that's a it's a very minor pipsqueak threat.
Even Hezbollah, with all its alleged rockets and certainly Hamas and al Qaeda and all that pinprick threats to the Israelis are so strong.
The Israelis could take over the entire Middle East in about two weeks if they wanted to.
Then they'd really be in trouble holding territory.
But Israel has itself hermetically sealed from the rest of the Arab world of minefields and wires and electronic stuff and anti-aircraft, anti-missile missiles.
And it's it's very well protected.
It doesn't have to worry very much.
It can survive any kind of pinprick attacks that can be delivered against it.
All right.
Well, that makes sense.
I mean, hell, even with September 11th, it's not like that was an actual threat.
America in a real military threat sense, you know, not like if the EU brought their Navy together against us or some kind of thing, you know.
That's right.
All right.
And now so I'm sorry.
In just the last couple of minutes here, they're going back to Uganda and hunting for Kony 2012 over there.
What?
What a weird story is that?
I mean, you buying that?
What is this?
Are they really going after this guy, Kony, or it's all just cover for keeping the Chinese out or what?
Yeah, Kony, this guy is something called the Lord's Army.
He's some kind of Bush fanatic and who's went from stealing chickens to stealing kids.
And he's in the bush in the middle of nowhere.
Uganda has become an American protectorate.
Its dictatorial ruler, Mussolini, is one of Washington's key men in East Africa.
In fact, Ugandan troops just entered action into South Sudan to support American interests.
We use the Ugandan troops.
Mercenary troops are used in Somalia to fight Shabab.
So it's a very useful base for us.
And I don't know this Lord's Army business is weird.
We're sending four aircraft and 250 American troops to supplement another 150 American rangers who are special forces who are supposed to be there running around the bush and possibly going into other neighboring countries.
It is certainly a clear sign of the growing American involvement in East Africa, an area that is supposed to have considerable oil.
Where there's oil, there are Americans.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, it just seems like and I'm completely just imagining this, but they're really there to establish a base, right?
It's got nothing to do with that Coney guy.
The longer he's on the run, the better from their point of view, right?
It's like Uganda sending troops to America to allegedly to run over and arrest Reverend, I don't know, Jerry Falwell or somebody like that.
Robertson.
It's weird.
More important is that beside Uganda, we have now South Sudan, which we engineered the breakaway from the state of Sudan.
And we're trying to we've set up a public government in Somalia and this whole area is becoming a new major interest of the US strategy.
Yeah, boy, and people are dying terribly, too.
I mean, I don't know what's the latest from South Sudan, but I know that the two South Sudanese tribes, once they got their independence, they turn on each other.
And that's another mess we'll have to cover.
Thanks very much for your time as always, Eric.
Appreciate it.
Cheers, Scott.
Eric Margulies dot com, everybody.
Lou Rockwell dot com for Eric Margulies.
The book is American Raj.
We'll be right back.
On March 7th at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., the Council for the National Interest is co-hosting the first ever national summit to reassess the US-Israel special relationship.
Confirmed speakers include Walt Scheuer, Giraldi, McGovern, Katowski, Porter, McConnell, Weiss, Raimondo, USS Liberty survivor Ernie Gallo, as well as co-sponsors Alison Ware of If Americans Knew and the great Grant Smith of the Institute for Research Middle East Policy.
That's the national summit to reassess the US-Israel special relationship.
Friday, March the 7th, all day at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.
NatSummit dot org.
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