08/22/14 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
We turn to the scary BBC headline.
Oh my God, Ukraine crisis.
Russia aid convoy invades Ukraine.
I'm terrified.
I got Eric Margulies on the line for many years.
He was a war reporter and wrote for Sun National Media in Canada.
He's the author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj Liberation or Domination.
And he writes at ericmargulies.com, spelt like Margolis.ericmargulies.com, also lourockwell.com and unz.com, u-n-z, unz.com.
Welcome back to the show, Eric.
How are you doing?
Hello, Scott.
Well, like you, I'm also terrified by that aid convoy that's bringing in baby milk and bottles of water.
Pretty scary stuff.
Yeah, this is the BBC here.
Which is what, like the official media of the Western world where Russian aid convoy invades.
So I guess, you know, this means war, right?
That's the scariest thing I've heard since the Gaza's terror tunnels, according to the BBC.
You know, we could be a few shots away from war in this foolish and totally unnecessary Ukraine crisis.
Thank the Western powers and particularly Washington for provoking this crisis and for bringing us to a place we should never ever be and that is in a direct confrontation with another nuclear armed power.
All right, and this is a good time for me to remind people too.
I forgot to say that you have a very recent article here from earlier this month.
What if there's a real war in Ukraine?
And I wonder if you have much of an assessment about how the war is going.
I get different reports and I admit I don't know really where to look for very good war reporting about the actual front and what all is going on.
I can't really trust RT.
I don't know if the New York Times or Washington Post are even looking right now.
Certainly couldn't trust their view of it either.
But I wonder, I guess it seems if Kiev is backed by the US then eventually they will conquer those last two remaining provinces, huh?
Oh, they will for sure.
This really isn't a war, Scott.
It's more what we used to call back when I was a young man, a police action.
And initially the government in Kiev, its armed forces were a mess and had almost no offensive capability.
But then something strange has happened.
They were refinanced by Washington.
They've received American gear, equipment, new arms and Israeli weapons, Israeli arms, foreign advisors, maybe even some special forces help from the Western powers.
And suddenly they've come to life and they're slowly grinding down the centers of anti-government resistance, namely in Luhansk today as we speak and in the Donbass coal basin.
And it looks like they will eventually crush opposition.
And they've been busy shelling and bombing these civilians.
Now, when our guys shell and bomb civilians, that is good.
When the other side does it, that is bad.
Yeah, well, if they even defend themselves and shoot military guys, that's bad, supposedly.
But so now, OK, at the time back, if we go back to 98 and the situation in Georgia, they had Russian peacekeepers there.
So that was supposed to be kind of a line that Shakashvili wouldn't dare cross because you can't attack South Ossetia without attacking Russian peacekeepers.
So stay out.
Well, he went ahead and did it anyway.
And, you know, they've been claiming the Kiev government has been lying.
I don't even understand the purpose of it.
But they've been claiming that they have wiped out this aid convoy a couple of times now.
And now they're reluctantly admitting that, no, they haven't bombed it yet.
But it just it seems to portend catastrophe if they really do attack, you know, actual Russians, not just people smeared as Russians, but, you know, really start killing actual Russians, especially on a humanitarian mission in eastern Ukraine.
I wonder how close you think Putin is to going ahead and crossing the line like they've claimed for the last more than half a year he's about to do.
Putin, President Putin, has, in my view, been extremely reserved and cautious in his reaction to this to this crisis.
Russians are a very militant, nationalistic people.
They are demanding that something be done to to rescue the Russians.
And, look, let's face it, these are Russians in eastern Ukraine.
I mean, it was only until 1991 this whole area was part of the Soviet Union.
So he's, you know, they want something to be done.
He's under great pressure to do something.
But he's been very cautious because he doesn't want a head-on clash with the Western powers.
And it's the West that's been moving, making all kinds of threats.
And the Republicans in Washington are, you know, beating the war drums.
So let's hope that President Putin keeps his cool and doesn't start a shooting war.
Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
I mean, I guess the good news is that for whatever progress the Kiev government is making there, they're now actually having to admit, which I don't know who's making them admit anything.
They do nothing but lie all day.
But anyway, they're now admitting that they can't find any Russians anywhere as far as, you know, all their accusations about Russian soldiers and Russian special forces and Russian trainers.
And apparently they have more and more run of the East there and admit they can't find any Russians.
Well, Ukraine's primary product these days seems to be baloney.
They are putting massive baloney coming out of the Kiev government that really is setting new frontiers in falsification.
The Russians are much more to be believed than the Ukrainians.
But, you know, we're also getting in this propaganda war.
You've just mentioned the BBC, for example, which is taking the point in the ISIS story.
BBC, when I grew up, BBC was a reputable news organization.
You believed it.
Most of what they said was true.
Today, thanks to Tony Blair and the 2003 Iraq war, BBC was shackled, its top men were fired, it was purged, and it was told to become a mouse piece for the British government, which it has become, sadly.
All right, now, you know, if we go back, I forget if it was before or after the coup, but either way, you're still way ahead of the game, of course, Eric, and you warned that if we do this coup, or now that we've done this coup, we can expect a serious reaction from the East, because, for very simple economic reasons, that's the heart of Ukrainian industry, but they can't compete with the Germans on a EU tariff-free kind of basis, and so they have a lot to lose immediately economically.
So now I wonder, it's really just the two provinces that are the breakaway provinces.
Is that where all the industry is, in those two provinces?
Because there's a lot more of Ukraine that could be considered the East, I think, right?
That's where a lot of the heavy industry is concentrated.
Namely, Ukraine's coal mines, its steel mills, both of which are very inefficient, and a lot of its chemical plants are located there.
It was all part of the Soviet industrial system.
But Ukraine's other agricultural product is located in the West.
I see.
All right, well, we've got to take this break.
I'm sorry, I keep cutting the live audience out of half of these interviews, recording through the commercials.
I shouldn't do it.
Hang on right there, Eric.
We'll be right back, everybody, with the great Eric Margulies.ericmargulies.com lourockwell.com owns.com Man, you need some new stickers for the back of your truck.
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Alright, you guys.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I don't mean to brag, but I got Eric Margulies on the line.
Oh, and I don't mean to brag, but my website is banned by the Pentagon.
Hell yeah.
That means I'm awesome.
Go check it out.
I'm gonna blog it here at Stress when I have a chance, but you can find it on my Twitter feed right now.
Twitter.com slash Scott Horton Show.
I've got the picture that somebody in the Air Force that I know sent me a little while ago of his computer's warning that that is a restricted site and you cannot look at it.
So, good for me.
Alright, anyway.
Talking with Eric Margulies about the situation in Ukraine.
You know, Eric, I don't know.
This is kind of a silly line of questioning maybe, but I was talking with John Mueller, pardon me, a different Chicago, University of Chicago guy, John Mearsheimer.
Yesterday was on the show and he's written this thing, I don't know if you saw it, for Foreign Affairs about how all the liberal interventionist types are wrong about expanding the EU and expanding NATO as a good in itself and all this and how they were just too dim to realize that the Russians would object and this kind of thing.
And so, I was asking him, you know, I understand that you're the guy, you're the realist, and so that makes them either the neocons or the liberal interventionists or whatever that makes them, but aren't there interests at stake rather than just academic policy prescriptions?
And don't interests have to do with all this NATO expansion?
Like, for example, even if there's no threat from Russia that they have to contain, does that really make a difference?
Maybe they just hate Russia and they want to get rid of it.
And he even quotes in his article the guy from, I have it right here, Carl Gershman, that was what I couldn't think of, Carl Gershman from the National Endowment for Democracy says, yeah, maybe Putin is going to find his own failure inside Russia too.
In context, he's talking about maybe we'll have a regime change, some kind of color-coded revolution and he's dismissed that and said, no, it's just the naivety of American foreign policy basically being made by, I don't know, a bunch of little kids who think that their foreign policy table they sit at, whatever clique they're a part of, that that view just must prevail and so that is what it is and that's basically the only thing that drives their policy.
And so I'm sure you'll have something smart to say about that.
I've been asked it often, are they just downright stupid in Washington making some of these policies or is there some malign plan to expand America's power?
One thing I'm absolutely convinced of is that the U.S. has been trying to overthrow the governments in Russia for some time.
That's why with this National Endowment for Democracy and all this phony democracy and liberal voting stuff that we've become very good at using social media is designed to overthrow the government.
It worked in Ukraine the first time around with the Orange Revolution.
It worked in Georgia.
It failed in Iran and it sort of failed in Syria, but I don't think that Washington has given up its hope of overturning the current Soviet government and breaking up the Russian Federation.
More important, the Russians believe this and they're behaving accordingly.
See, because I can kind of see even if not a pathological hatred of Russia or just an inability somehow to turn off the institutional Cold War against them even after it's ended, that kind of thing I can also see I won't call them benign, but I can see motives that are kind of beside the point anyway, like selling airplanes and there's that great article I link to as often as I possibly can by Richard Cummings Lockheed stock and two smoking barrels and he talks about how each and every one of the Bush administration neocons was tied to Lockheed.
Even Hadley was a lawyer for the firm that represented him and the rest of them had worked directly for them in one way or the other and how before that and the Iraq War, before that how Bruce Jackson, their executive vice president had set up the committee to come up with excuses for NATO expansion and that's basically all it was the committee to come up with excuses to sell planes.
Not that they ever necessarily mean to use them in any kind of nuclear war with the Russians or anything but it's just a matter of getting rid of airplanes but I guess it once that's the policy then it comes with all kinds of baked in justifications go along like this is necessary and stuff like that Well it's irresistible for some of these people to try and get rid of the only major power if you don't put China aside for a second, the major power standing in the way of total American control of the globe so yeah they want to get there the, a lot of fundamentalist religious people certainly in the Republican party who see Russia as the Antichrist and want to get rid of it.
There are some friends of Israel who regard Russia as an enemy of Israel even though there are a million Russians living in Israel right now, they would like to see it overthrown.
So there's institutional bias there's special interests but the military industrial complex about which General Eisenhower warned us President Eisenhower had better be careful because if they do get rid of Russia who's going to buy their weapons?
Well they'll only have China left as a threat better two threats than one Yeah well and the thing is too is if they regime change Putin they're not necessarily going to get what they want and they may not see the disillusion of Russia.
I mean that country's got it's problems but it sure has a strong enough security force to hold the state together in the face of a foreign enemy short of full out warfare H-bombs and such.
Yeah they did the US came pretty close under Yeltsin of having a lot of influence in Russia particularly financial but not under Putin and Putin has made very clear that the US is trying to overthrow the current Russian government and be careful what you wish for because as you say you might get in a bunch of crazies Putin is a very middle of the road kind of guy from the middle of the road KGB Russia has lots of nutcases just like we do Yeah you know I admit I haven't read it yet but I have here to review for antiwar.com Putin's right flank in the American conservative magazine about a guy named Igor Strelkov and I know there are a lot of people to Putin's right calling him an Obama level wimp all day long for not doing enough about this that and everything else too That's right That should get a lot more coverage they try to paint him as as right wing as you can get but if they would just mention you know he's actually you know pretty Bob Dole Republican compared to some of these other guys we might settle for him a little bit with a little more context We're lucky to have him in Moscow because a lesser man might have started a war over Ukraine which is one of the stupidest things I can think of in fact thinking all along that whoever ends up with Ukraine is going to be the loser because the Ukrainian finance minister estimated that it will take 60 billion dollars just to put Ukraine's nose above the water and to rebuild it it's a tar baby it's an economic disaster case Putin is rightfully reluctant to take it over because of all of its internal problems Well what if he just seized the two eastern provinces in revolt I mean really welcomed them in and drew a line around them and tried to stare down Kiev from there think that's a possibility?
It is a possibility I suspect that Putin is thinking that it's not really worth risking a war with NATO over that NATO should be thinking the same thing who the hell cares about Lugansk Lansk a place nobody's ever heard of and nobody could find on a map they're going to start a nuclear war over this nowhere place President Putin originally suggested at the beginning of this crisis that they hold a referendum and allow each portion each part of Ukraine to decide what it would want to do and how much autonomy it would want in a Ukrainian federal system and this was the obvious and sensible solution to this problem but it was the US and its NATO satraps gradually rejected this idea and pushed for a revolution yep and so here we are still stuck in this mess alright well thanks very much Eric I sure appreciate your time on the show as always Cheers Scott look forward to the next time alright good me too and I know the audience does too because that's what they say in their emails and that's it for the show see you on Sunday morning on KPFK So you're a libertarian and you don't believe the propaganda about government awesomeness you were subjected to in 4th grade you want real history and economics well learn in your car from professors you can trust with Tom Woods' Liberty Classroom and if you join through the Liberty Classroom link at scotthorton.org we'll make a donation to support the Scott Horton Show The Liberty Classroom the history and economics they didn't teach you