06/06/14 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

Phone records, financial and location data, PRISM, Tempora, X-Key Score, Boundless Informant.
Hey y'all, Scott Horton here for offnow.org.
Now here's the deal.
Due to the Snowden revelations, we have a great opportunity for a short period of time to get some real rollback of the national surveillance state.
Now they're already trying to tire us by introducing fake reforms in the Congress.
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We've got to do it ourselves.
How?
We nullify it at the state level.
It's still not easy, but the offnow project of the Tenth Amendment Center has gotten off to a great start.
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Here's something, something important, something that can work if we do the work.
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Go to offnow.org.
All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
Happy Friday to you.
I hope you're already off work.
Hope you don't have to work on Saturdays and Sundays.
This is my show, the Scott Horton Show.
It's libertarian foreign policy mostly.
Our next guest on the show today is our good friend Eric Margulies.
He is the author of the book War at the Top of the World, the Struggle for Afghanistan and Asia.
He's also the author of American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
He's reported on wars all around the world for generations now.
He writes at ericmargulies.com, spelled like Margolis, ericmargulies.com.
You can also find him at lourockwell.com and at unz.com.
That's U-N-Z, unz.com.
Welcome back, Eric.
Thanks for joining us today.
Good as always to be back.
All right, good deal.
Very happy to have you here.
So let's talk about what's going on in Ukraine.
I guess before we can cover any of the news, you know, maybe this may take the whole first segment, but could you give us a little bit of a thumbnail about how we got to where we are and what's going on now with the violence in eastern Ukraine?
Well, that's a tall order.
I know, but I know you're up to it.
I'll do my best.
Lloyd, this thing, Ukraine has only been an independent country with one or two little blips historically since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Crimea, part of Ukraine, Crimea was given to Ukraine by Nikita Khrushchev, who was drunk one night at a dinner party in Kiev in 1954.
So the historical background of all this is murky.
Suffice it to say that Ukraine is certainly a part of Russia, even though many Ukrainians feel they have a separate and distinct nationality.
What happened was this whole business began because the Ukraine has been a failed state since its independence, has not been able to maintain a successful government that can run the country financially properly.
It was ruled by robber barons, known as oligarchs, thugs, criminals, and all kinds of nefarious political groups of the left and the right.
Now, last year, the U.S. neocons in the State Department, led by Victoria Nuland, decided they're going to try and overthrow the existing pro-Russian Ukrainian government of Viktor Yanukovych.
So the U.S. and George Soros, the multimillionaire, poured, according to her, $5 billion into what's called building democracy in Ukraine, which meant paying for mobilizing, energizing pro-Western groups.
Eventually they overthrew the pro-Russian regime, and the western part of Ukraine has now come under a new government, apparently designed by the United States as a new president just recently.
But the eastern part of Ukraine, the lesser part, which the Russians call New Russia, wants to side and join with Russia.
So the U.S. coup attempt in Kiev, successful, really triggered this whole crisis.
There's fighting now.
Ukraine's on the verge of civil war.
There's fighting going on as we speak.
And what all this has done is to bring the world's two greatest nuclear powers, the United States and Russia, into an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation, which in my view, as I've been writing for years, is not only crazy, but must never, ever have been allowed to happen.
And now, so if you have to line up America's interests in Ukraine, in order of importance, and even, I don't know how many you'd number, one through five, one through ten, one through nothing, what are America's real interests that could possibly motivate the American government to do what you just said, embark on a course of action that has led us to some kind of very serious, I mean, maybe not Cuban Missile Crisis serious yet, but very serious confrontation between the two powers that could kill us all?
That's right, Scott.
America has no real major strategic interests, and Ukraine never did.
I'm likely to have so in the future, but this is part of America's mission creep into East Europe, where we were not supposed to go according to our agreements with Mikhail Gorbachev, and yet we have been slowly drawn into the dangerous arena of Eastern Europe and the Baltic.
And it's really part, there are a group of neocons in Washington, it was started, but led by Dick Cheney, who want to bring down the Russian Federation, and anything they can do to damage Russia and wreck it as any potential rival to the United States, they're doing, and the best way, the most effective way, is to detach Ukraine from Russia, make sure it never rejoins Russia, and keep undermining Moscow, kicking sand into its face, and we're seeing this happening right now.
Okay, so then, now the Cheneyite doctrine of permanent unipolar hegemony over the planet and all that aside, if we had, I don't know, some kind of pre-Cheneyite, semi-decent, regular sort of, I don't know, a little bit national-interested government, rational national-interested government officials here, would they have an argument about how important it is that those pipelines that run through Ukraine, that they go this way instead of that way, and maybe the Russians have too much influence over our European friends by way of their pipelines, so we need to find ways to get that oil out of the Caspian Basin.
In other words, is there anything that's even, you know, the shadow of legitimacy going on here, or is it simply, no, just to beat the Russians over the head and try to destroy even what's left of their empire?
You're quite right, Scott.
There's certainly, within the power establishment in Washington, there's certainly a concern that Russia be kept relatively weak, and that it not be allowed to rebuild its strength, and these pipeline issues are important because they make Europe dependent of up to about 40% for its energy on Russian sources.
These pipelines have become like railroads were in the 19th century.
They've become these strategic corridors.
They've become targets of rivalry.
They're very important, but they're not absolutely decisive.
And, you know, the counter to this argument is to let people trade.
I was just in Europe and France, and I'm delighted to see Russians there shopping instead of revving up their tank engines like they used to do with 40,000 tanks pointed at Western Europe.
Things have changed, and Russia should be integrated and brought into the West European economy and not isolated like some demon country.
Yeah, you better watch it, or Lockheed's going to come after you, talk like that.
So, anyway, yeah, I mean, I don't even think there's a thing legitimate about American foreign policy anywhere, but I was just trying to tease out of you whether it really could possibly be.
You know, you could argue from an amoral pro-government point of view that it is important, never mind exactly what to do about it, but it is important that we are able to continue importing oil from Nigeria, at least for the short term, because we get so much of our daily supply of oil from Nigeria.
You don't have to be a madman Richard Perle-ite or David Addington-ite or something to call that a national interest, never mind the prescriptions for intervention or anything, but just to call that something.
Whereas it sounds like, you know, like Pat Buchanan said on this show, hey, come on, Ukraine is east of what we ever used to call Eastern Europe, okay?
This is just way too far from us to be anything like a legitimate national interest.
And whether the pipelines go here or there may matter in war, but we don't mean to get in a war with Russia anyway, so it doesn't matter at all, that kind of thing.
We can stumble into a war with Russia.
This reminds me of 1914 all over again.
And look at the – I wrote a column on this survey taken by the Ivy League professors where they found that hardly anyone, they questioned, could find any place in Ukraine on the map.
And yet we're beating the war drums and we're going to fight to our last round of ammo for a country that nobody knows about.
It is absolutely crazy.
It's worthy of 1984.
All right.
Now, well, I know that you're one of these blame-America-first hippie types, Eric.
And so I've got to try to come up with the war party's counter-argument here.
That was a joke, of course.
The war party says, no, man, here's what you're overlooking.
Putin, totalitarian, fascist, Mussolini monster at best, maybe Stalin, and he means to recreate the Soviet empire, and you just want to roll over for him.
Well, I've been writing for the last – since the collapse of the Soviet Union that it would eventually be reconstituted, if not in whole, at least in part.
Putin has said that the collapse of the USSR was the greatest tragedy of the 20th century.
He's very clear on this, and he wants to recreate it.
But that's natural behavior for the Russians.
If I were a Russian, I would want to do the same thing, too.
I would like to see Russia great, powerful again as it was, not down on its knees, begging like it was on the Yeltsin.
We have to live with this.
But we can still cooperate with a greater, more powerful Russia.
In fact, I think that our behavior, our American behavior, has not been exemplary since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
And the fact that we see in retrospect that the Soviet Union had a kind of restraining effect on our behavior, which is now completely lacking.
Well, but so would you concede then that NATO expansion has kept Russia out of anywhere west of Belarus then?
No, I wrote about this extensively when it was happening in the early 90s, and I said that it would be dead wrong for NATO to expand further eastward.
So I cited Frederick the Great's dictum, he who defends everything defends nothing, that NATO would never have the military power to defend all the areas, the Baltic, for example, Romania, Bulgaria, Georgia, for God's sake, Azerbaijan, into which it was pushing its influence, couldn't defend them.
So what it was doing was creating an area of dangerous instability that had enough influence to create a crisis with Russia, but not enough to protect these areas against a Russian attack.
And we were provoking Russia.
I said the answer we needed was a sort of a big DMZ, a demilitarized zone, a neutral zone that all the areas in Eastern Europe should have been put into a neutral zone, made them military free, and let the U.S. and Russia agree both to keep their hands off.
All right, well now, so ever since, well, I guess there's been a new government since February, the Putsch government there in Kiev, and now they've had an election, and the Chocolate King has won, and I'm sorry that I missed and did not keep close enough track as to whether he's exactly been sworn in yet or what, but anyways, one of these oligarchs.
And so I don't know if this is still the last regime or the new one incoming, but the government in Kiev, its military, has been attacking the East and seemingly exaggerating their casualty, you know, their body counts that they had achieved, but still apparently only killed innocent people and including with airstrikes, and it sort of seemed like a big escalation, but to what end?
They don't seem to really have the military might to really enforce their monopoly power on the East.
It's sort of like a civil war where nobody's really even got an army to march anywhere, but everybody is just, you know, well, it seems more like it's Kiev and their guys are the aggressors.
They just seem to keep picking the fight and making it worse and worse, but to what end?
Well, it's extremely dangerous.
The Kievian military forces were weak.
They're being beefed up by the U.S. and its allies.
Who do you think is paying for them?
Ukraine was bankrupt, totally deadbeat bankrupt.
The U.S. is lending through its World Bank, IMF, lending Kiev billions of dollars, which we'll never see back, and it is sending in military equipment, military supplies.
The Poles are involved behind the scenes training Ukrainian military forces.
So there is a quiet but very real movement to beef it up, and when the Ukrainian Air Force attacks eastern, you know, near the Russian border, the Russians know that NATO is paying and the U.S. are paying for these flights and these attacks, and it's dangerous, and I just wonder how long President Putin's patience is going to hold out.
You know, he's being demanded that he declare a no-fly zone over eastern Ukraine and let the Red Air Force defend the skies there.
It's a very real possibility.
Well, you know, and everybody, please take Eric Margulies seriously.
He's the first one that I heard, other than my own brain, saying, yeah, but then what?
For example, what are the eastern Ukrainians going to do if America is successful in overthrowing the government in Kiev?
You know, like this is before the coup of the 22nd even happened, was, hey, you know, it's a pretty divided country, and the people in the east, they're not liable to just sit still for this, and so now here we are with them not sitting still for this, and on we go, and on warns Eric Margulies of the possible consequences.
And you know what?
I mean, I don't know.
When anybody says, hey, this reminds me of the setup right before World War I, eh, I don't know if anything quite reminds me of the setup of World War I.
I don't know if I'd take anybody seriously when they say that, except when you say it, Eric.
And then I think, wait a minute, go over that again for me about how, because of course that, for people not that versed, or even, you know, if they're government school educated, that's the one that everyone agrees was the gigantic stupid thing that all the major powers blundered into that they never meant to turn into the horrible thing that it turned into, and if they could have all taken it back, they would have, or just went to Germany, etc.
One of the stupidest things in all of man's history, I have a Swiss university degree in the diplomatic lead up to the war.
World War I.
So it makes my hair stand on end when I see the stupidity and the ignorance of what we're doing now, most of which is for domestic political consumption.
I assure you these war hawks on the Republican far right couldn't find Ukraine on a map either if their lives depended on it.
All right, now let's talk about H-bombs.
Daniel Ellsberg likes to point out that, see, if you're going to kill somebody with a H-bomb, what you've got to do is you've got to use a Nagasaki-type plutonium implosion atom bomb as the percussion cap to set it off.
You have to make it as hot as the sun in order to be able to fuse those hydrogen atoms together and really kill an entire Houston-sized area worth of people all at once.
Does that sound about right to you, the kind of danger that we're messing around with?
World War I, nothing.
Bunch of foot soldiers with bayonets, little bit of chlorine gas.
Well, I remember when we used to hide under our school desks in the 1950s to protect ourselves against Russian nuclear attack.
I never thought we'd be back to that kind of idiocy, but here we are.
I mean, it really is the kind of thing, not exaggeration, where an H-bomb at a few tens of megatons could kill, say, all of Los Angeles.
Halfway to the Inland Empire or something, right?
I think, I fear we will live to see something like that happen.
I don't know where or when, but the very fact that these weapons have been around for 50 years and menacing us, it's a miracle nobody's used one yet.
Yeah, well, and it makes sense that there's a great incentive on all the warlords of the world to sit tight with those because they could die too, and they don't like dying in war anymore, these leaders.
It used to be an honorable thing to them, but not so much anymore, I don't think.
So as long as they have to save their own skin, it's mutually assured peace for the rest of us kind of thing.
However, I remember seeing a mathematician one time on TV say, Hey, listen, I'm a mathematician, and I'm telling you that it is a mathematical certainty that as long as more than one of these things exists in the world, or as long as even one of them exists, it or they will be used at some point.
You know, it's just going to happen.
It might be time to start dismantling these things.
And you know, it's funny because I think everybody knows that this is a real problem, but it's sort of like the Afghan war, the least popular war in American history, still nobody seems to care.
And so, yeah, we'll get around to getting rid of the H-bombs at some point, even though the Cold War with the Soviet Union has been over for a generation.
The Cold War with China has been over for two generations now, and yet still we're armed to the teeth with thousands of these things.
And it seems like a priority, especially at times like this, when you have the kind of situation we're talking about, where America has a border dispute with Russia about, what, 4,000 miles east of Maine.
Well, that's right.
But I've been saying on your program a number of times, Scott, that my likeliest scenario for a nuclear exchange would be between India and Pakistan, and that that might be triggered by a false alarm with their three-minute early warning system.
So it could happen.
We could have radiation showering down on our heads.
That might stimulate or prompt some action.
Even a number of senior officers at the Air Force and the Pentagon have called for getting rid of nuclear weapons.
Well, yeah, even George Shultz and Henry Kissinger and some of these guys who, you know, don't have anything to lose anymore, whatever, are coming out against it, trying to.
.
.
I'm surprised that they care at all, but anyway.
Yeah, it seems like a big deal.
And I have to admit that somewhere in me is a minarchist who, you know, acknowledges the existence of the U.S. government, I guess.
But if anything, it should only exist for missions like sending Eric Margulies over there as the special envoy to host.
.
.
I don't care how many years it takes worth of talks, where you don't promise America will do anything, but you get the Indians and the Pakistanis to see eye to eye on Kashmir and on nuclear disarmament, and you have an unlimited budget, Mr. Special Envoy, to get this thing done.
Thanks, Scott.
Thanks.
I would love to spend the rest of my life in Kashmir.
Yeah, see, there you go.
And everybody can get, you know, you picked the very nicest spot over the lake or whatever it is, where, you know, get everybody working on this thing.
That's a role for America and the world that I would like to see, where it's just, where diplomats are actually doing diplomacy and trying to create peace.
I would very much like to see that.
I'm 100% with you on that.
Unfortunately, we haven't been doing it, and the WikiLeaks leaks show that we've been just mixing up in local disputes rather than trying to solve them on a macro level.
Yeah, you know, I have this old clip of William Jennings Bryan, and he's, you know, being mostly genuine about this.
It's a little bit dishonest, but he's really mocking the rest of the powers of the earth for being so weighted down with their armaments and breaking their budgets and breaking the wealth and freedom of their societies, whereas our government, the role we play, we just go around holding peace conferences.
That's all we're about here.
And, of course, I'm not paraphrasing him exactly, but that's basically his point.
And, of course, this was pre-World War I, William Jennings Bryan, before everything changed and all of that.
But it seems reasonable enough when you have crises like you're talking about where even just a false alarm, you never know it, that certainly would be, I don't think anybody would disagree with you, is the most likely place for a nuclear confrontation on earth, at least all things being equal, maybe not in the middle of an America-Russia crisis like this, but maybe even still during an America-Russia crisis like this.
That's the most likely place for this kind of thing to happen.
As Dan Ellsberg likes to point out, and as we've talked about on the show before, that's enough to cause major problems with harvests around the world for a long time, and collateral damage almost unimaginable since the Second World War, just from that limited of a nuclear war between India and Pakistan on the far side of the planet from here.
That nobody can find on the map, too.
Yeah, exactly.
Just think of this.
President Obama, a sensible, rational man, well-educated, is having dinner with another sensible, very well-educated man, Vladimir Putin.
I mean, they're in Paris at the same time yesterday, I think it was, and Obama would not have dinner with Vladimir Putin.
I mean, this to me is childish and it's crazy because here we are, the closest to a nuclear confrontation with the Russians since, as you mentioned, the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and yet the president can't talk to President Putin to sit down and say, listen, let's calm this thing down over a bottle of good burgundy and let's move away from the track that we're heading, which could lead to a war.
You know, I saw a tweet this morning that said that they did talk, so I'm hoping that the conversation went something like, Vladimir, I'm so sorry that I wasn't allowed to eat dinner with you, but really, let's work this out.
I mean, Obama, he backs down whenever he said he was going to do the right thing, so maybe he could back down on this, too, you know?
Maybe poor President Hollande, who's on a diet after being called a little fat man by his rival, Sarkozy, who has been dieting, but poor Hollande had to eat two dinners.
So first with Obama and then with Putin, it's silly, it's infantile, it's unworthy of great political leaders.
Yeah, well, and like you're saying, incredibly dangerous at a time like this.
All right, so I'm already keeping you over, but that's good.
So tell me about a little bit what you think about the future here.
I mean, basically, nobody has anywhere to go except sit down at a table and compromise, right?
That is the logical progression.
Oh, my mistake, yeah.
If left alone, there's a question of money, too.
The U.S. and the West are funding this whole Ukrainian operation.
The minute they cut back on the money, which most of them don't have, by the way, this whole Ukrainian independence thing will evaporate.
You're saying from the beginning of the crisis that the answer is partition of Ukraine.
Let Eastern Ukraine decide its future if it wants to join Russia or go independent.
Western Ukraine is obviously inclined towards Europe.
Split the country.
There's no reason for it to exist.
There's no communality of thought in Ukraine.
There never has been.
It's never really been a real country.
Don't get us involved in a nuclear war over this failed state, which really is not loved by any of its inhabitants.
All right.
Thank you so much for your time, Eric.
I sure appreciate it.
Cheers, Scott.
Bye-bye.
That's the great Eric Margulies.
Ericmargulies.com.
The books are War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
The military industrial complex, the disastrous rise of misplaced power.
Hey, all.
Scott Horton here.
I'd like for you to read this book, The War State, by Michael Swanson.
America's always gone to war a lot, though in older times it would disarm for a bit between each one.
But in World War II, the U.S. built a military and intelligence apparatus so large it ended up reducing the former constitutional government to an almost ceremonial role and converting our economy into an engine of destruction.
In The War State, Michael Swanson does a great job telling the sordid history of the rise of this national security state, relying on important first-hand source material, but writing for you and me.
Find out how Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy all alternately empowered and fought to control this imperial beast and how the USA has gotten to where it is today, corrupt, bankrupt, soaked in blood, despised by the world.
The War State, by Michael Swanson.
Available at Amazon.com and at Audible.com.
Or just click the logo in the right-hand margin at ScottHorton.org.
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