10/15/12 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

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Hey, everybody, Scott Horton here.
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Well, maybe you should.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
Our first guest on the show today is our good friend Eric Margulies.
He's the author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
His website is ericmargulise.com.
It's spelled like Margolis kind of thing there.
Margulise.
I don't know how you'd spell Margulise any different, but anyway.
On to Timbuktu, a new jolly little war we can't find on a map by Eric Margulise.
That's the latest at lewrockwell.com and at ericmargulise.com.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm fine.
I'm ready to get on my camel and wrap my robes around me and head off to Timbuktu.
All right.
Now, it's funny.
I didn't even realize that.
I didn't know where Timbuktu was until I heard that America's war in Libya had spread down to Mali and there was a new conflict in Timbuktu.
And then it occurred to me that, hey, wow, that's a real place.
For all I know, it's over there in Siam or something.
I have no idea.
This is a place I haven't even heard of since I was a little kid or something like that.
But no, it's a real place.
And Mali, I didn't have any idea where that was.
I guess I could have assumed it was somewhere in the Sahara Desert, but I had to look up on a map of North Africa.
Where is this Mali place anyway?
How is it that the war in Libya last year has anything to do with the new war there now?
Well, it's certainly an obscure place.
In fact, Timbuktu is a synonym for obscurity and remoteness.
It was a desert capital of northern Mali and became a great center of Islamic learning, libraries, books, many scholars during the periods from the last three or four hundred years when there were a number of West African empires before the whole area fell under French colonial rule.
But it's still a pretty obscure place, and I doubt that most people could find it on a map.
Even Mali is kind of hard to find, but just consider it's in the Sahara Desert.
It's below Algeria and Morocco in the western part of Africa, and it's of importance only because in about so many other countries, Algeria, Morocco, Mauritania, Burkina Faso, which used to be Upper Volta, et cetera, and all these places are bubbling with problems.
Yeah, well, apparently so, and now here's my thing too.
I don't really want to know about Mali.
It seems like there's a limit on how much of the world is my damn business, but it's my government has made this my business, is the thing.
I mean, otherwise, the world's lousy with conflicts.
I mean, whoever heard of the Tuaregs before?
That's a kind of ethnicity, is that right?
That's when the Tuaregs are famous.
Well, in that part of the world, desert nomads who wrap themselves in blue robes and are known as the Blue Men of the Sahara.
Very serious.
They fought the French for 100 years in these little kind of bochette combats and small French patrols fighting these romantic horsemen with their long rifles in the desert.
It was the stuff of 1930s Hollywood movies.
But there they are.
Yeah, they're an obscure people, but the problem is that our military, our military does so compact, complex, keeps looking for new things to get upset about and new problems and new little wars.
And it's not enough.
It seems that we're up to our ears now in Somalia and footsing around somewhere in the center of Uganda after the Lord's Resistance Army.
And we just broke up Sudan into two countries.
Now we're active in Mali.
I think some American special forces are there now as we speak.
More may be headed that way.
French are headed that way.
There was the colonial era.
And mark my words, I think we're going to end up getting involved in Nigeria, too.
So Africa is a hot new place.
Getting our derrieres kicked in Afghanistan and Iraq, undaunted, we're moving to fertile new fields in darkest Africa.
Man, hey, isn't the government of Nigeria, aren't they brutal enough killers that we can just outsource whatever authoritarian, you know, murderous policy to them and not have to, you know, have wars in the Mekong Delta over there?
Well, yes, that's the new American way of doing battle.
That's what we're doing in Somalia.
I mean, I'm being sarcastic.
I don't want anybody killed.
But, man, I don't want to see, you know, another American Vietnam style war in the jungle either, you know?
Well, I don't think and no, no, no country there is strong enough to give us a Vietnam style war.
But it could be a very big, expensive mess.
What we've done in Somalia is we've rented the Ugandan Ethiopian, part of the Ethiopian and the Kenyan armies to tune of about $500 or $600 million.
And we've sent them to invade Somalia, plus American special forces and American drones and American airstrikes and American guidance and logistics support behind it.
So what we've really moved into that old British colonial rule of using native troops and white officers.
And that's what we're doing in Somalia.
And you're right, we'll do it in West Africa, too.
We'll get the Algerians and the Nigerians and whoever else wants to cooperate with us.
That's how Vietnam started, too, right?
We're just sending in our advisors to help train them.
Well, that's right.
But I think we're more cautious this time around.
Maybe, maybe not.
We'll see.
But there's nobody in West Africa who can fight the way the Vietnamese did.
Right.
Well, yeah, I mean, they had support from China and Russia.
Great.
All right.
Well, so now back to the Tuaregs for a minute.
So basically, here's the thing.
A year ago, some giant number, I don't know, you tell me how many of these guys worked for Gaddafi in his kind of private Gestapo.
I think it was you that taught me that Libya didn't really have much of an army because that could be a threat to Gaddafi.
So he just had kind of his own little personal hired guard and the army was mostly weak, which was why it was beaten so easily, I guess, as well.
But then after he lost, these Tuaregs apparently worked for him.
They took all their weapons and went home to northern Mali.
And they basically Mali, I guess the French drew the border in the first place.
Right.
And so instead of ever having Tuareg stand or whatever the hell over there, they had this kind of autonomous zone in northern Mali.
And then when these Tuaregs got home from Libya with all these new weapons, they decided, you know, autonomy is nice, but secession is better.
And that's what, you know, started the current mess.
Is that basically right?
Well, no, we have to go back a little further.
That's got the Tuareg, who are nomadic people, never recognized any fixed borders.
They just moved around.
They're like the in Afghanistan, like the Pashtun.
They just move wherever they wanted.
And they, you know, they moved to Morocco and into Libya and into the Sahara.
But they wanted their own homeland.
And they started agitating from home 20, 30, 40 years ago.
It's called Azawad.
And that's your lexicon of obscure places.
And they have been fighting fitfully on and off for Azawad.
Not a big deal.
There were only about 2000 of these Tuareg mercenaries in Libya.
But of course, when we use mercenaries, we call them private contractors.
Gaddafi used them.
They're called mercenaries.
But anyway, they loved Gaddafi because Gaddafi did a lot of good for the Sahara region.
And he spent a great deal of money there doing good.
Anyway, they went back.
They went back to Mali.
Let's create our own country.
They ran out the rest of the Malian troops who were there, feeble.
The Malian army in the capital, Bamako, which is way in the south of Mali, overthrew the government.
They were so angry and demanded that something be done.
But they weren't going to do it themselves.
And so they picked up the phone and they called Paris, the old colonial master.
And the French immediately got very upset, even though it's a socialist government.
They said, my God, we've got to do something.
Islamic danger coming from the deepest Sahara.
Tremble in our boots.
Pentagon got wind of this crisis and they started beating the war drums.
And well, of course, all these politicians are trying to distract the public from grave economic problems.
So break out the Islamists.
And so that's the story.
But just to complicate it, one more factor.
No sooner had the Tuareg settled in and declared independent Azawad, then a bunch of militant Islamists came out of the woodwork and they ran the Tuareg out of the area.
And now they're proclaiming an Islamic caliphate there.
They're not Al-Qaeda, but everybody's screaming Al-Qaeda.
And this is set off alarm bells.
Well, yeah, I mean, this is the thing, too, right, is after the administration was done lying for what, a week and a half or whatever, and pretending that it wasn't organized, planned attack on the embassy in Benghazi, they decided when they finally would admit that, OK, it wasn't a riot over a YouTube video.
It was something else.
They decided they would pin it on Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, which supposedly is this small group based in Algeria.
And then, you know, it's pretty clear why, right?
Because they want to say, oh, yeah, that's our problem in Mali now is that Al-Qaeda from Algeria has gone there and caused trouble.
Not Hillary and Obama fought a war for Al-Qaeda in Libya last year.
And that resulted in the Tuaregs going home and a coup and a war and the invention of whatever Islamic group is cutting people's hands off there now.
I refer to these groups as anti-American groups or anti-Western groups who are fighting Western presence in that part of the world.
We use the label Al-Qaeda because it's an easy label to slap on and you don't have to explain to the folks in Oshkosh the different subtleties between these resistance groups or guerrilla groups or whatever you want to call them.
But a lot of them like to claim the franchise for their own, right?
And say, we're not just the local terrorists.
We're Al-Qaeda in this or that area.
That's right.
Or claim the name Taliban, too.
But the Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Maghreb is, well, is North Africa in Arabic.
Right, because it's a different ethnicity.
They're not Arabs anymore once you get West of Libya, right?
Well, it's mixed.
The majority is still Arabs, but a big minority are Berbers and who are a Hamidic, a non-Semitic, non-Arab people.
And that's going to be a big problem in the future.
We'll be talking about that a few years from now.
Chef boy, am I ignorant over here?
I don't know.
The horrible, horrible uprising in Algeria that started in 1990-91, in which at least 250,000 people were slaughtered by the military, US and French backed military regime there.
An offshoot of that war, one of the guerrilla groups who was fighting the military junta there were these armed, it was called the armed Islamic groups.
And when they were defeated, crushed by tense government repression, they moved into Saharan Africa.
And that is the source of the Islamic movement, the Al-Qaeda in Maghreb.
Nothing to do with Afghanistan.
Right.
And then so the killing of the ambassador in Libya gives them a great excuse to go ahead and further intervene in Mali.
But now here's the thing.
I talked with Stephen Zunis, and he wrote a whole book about Mali.
And he said they don't have any oil, so they ought to be safe.
So it's not like Hillary Clinton really cares if somebody is using a sword to cut somebody's hands off, like in all the propaganda right now.
They still use the very same propaganda from World War I.
You notice that?
But she's perfectly fine with the princes in Saudi Arabia.
So don't give me that claptrap.
So what do they even care about Mali?
The Belgian babies being spiked on German bayonets.
I remember it vividly.
Mali has no importance unless we've decided that sand is a strategic commodity.
But Mali, as I said, Mali is in an important area because right next door is Mauritania.
And this is even a more obscure topic.
In recent years, Mauritania became the first Arab country to have a democratic election.
And we, I'm sorry to say, the American government engineered a coup there and overthrew the democratically elected president and put in a general who would be friendly with Israel and American interests in the region, since Mauritania is considered so strategic.
It's on the Atlantic Ocean.
So the leader of Mauritania was just shot yesterday and wounded in a still obscure incident.
We don't know whether his convoy was ambushed or his bodyguards did that.
He was immediately flown to Paris.
But Mauritania is simmering.
The Ivory Coast further south has had a rebellion of fighting going on for years.
Nigeria is steaming, and Nigeria is important because it's a major oil supplier.
So the new American Africa command is looking very intently at these areas.
Yeah, you know, earlier in the show, you were kind of going down the litany Somalia, Sudan, Uganda, Mali, Libya, Nigeria.
And, you know, I actually don't have the map in front of me now, but I got one in my mind's eye.
And you're kind of drawing a circle of, you know, bases around the entire continent is really what it sounds like there.
And I guess you left off Rhodesia for now.
But basically, we're going back to those days.
It sounds like.
We are.
I call it colonialism, too.
We are restoring an age of Western colonialism in Asia and Africa.
It's very interesting.
Fascinating development as Western troops are going into well, in the 19th century, it was to bring the light of Christian civilization to these benighted places.
Now it's to bring the light of democracy and good government to these benighted places and to fight the scourge of Islamism.
But it is happening.
And the French have been bitten by this bug now, too, as we see.
And there are Western intervention all over Africa.
It seems almost like an obsessive compulsive disorder or something where they just can't leave anything alone anywhere, you know?
Well, it's true, Scott.
They're big bureaucracies, their military bureaucracies and government bureaucracies, intelligence bureaucracies.
They're always looking for new clients and new.
Oh, you know what, man?
I just read this thing, Eric.
I should have sent it to you.
I'll find it and send you the link.
If I remember here, let me write a note down where they talk about Operation or no, the Dagger Brigade.
OK, and this is a group of infantry, U.S.
Army.
And I forgot the exact words the way it's written, but basically it's sort of one of those out of the mouths of babes things.
And they just say, well, now that, you know, the war in Iraq is over and the war in Afghanistan is going to be winding down.
This group of, you know, Army soldiers, they're looking for something to do.
They're looking for a way to stay globally engaged.
That's what it was.
And so they've decided, hey, you know, why not kill Malians?
Well, you're right.
And look, the the whole national security establishment in Washington is facing this fiscal cliff and it's scared the hell out of everybody.
All the defense contractors don't know what to do and the military doesn't know what to do.
They don't know what to buy, where they're going to be able to fight their next wars.
So there's confusion and chaos.
And the Pentagon and the CIA and all these people have to find a raison d'etre for maintaining themselves in this fever pitch of military readiness.
And this is the way to do it.
You know, if things wind down in Iraq, we still have troops in Iraq, by the way, but they're undercover and they're mercenaries.
But as things wind down in Afghanistan and there, if they do, we will need a new mission.
We need a new crusade to justify all this stuff.
Chinese aren't cooperating.
They're not being aggressive enough.
The Russians are lying low, can't find any al Qaeda anymore.
They're just a little nitpicking at us.
So, you know, you've got to find new wars.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, that's the thing, right?
They ran out of continents where there's any group of countries that they could pretend it's a regional power they have to confront or anything.
They're just we're friends with the Russians.
We're friends with the Chinese.
We're friends with all the Europeans.
And most of them are suck puppets inside our NATO military alliance there.
And there's no other power in the world worth a crap at all.
India and Brazil are, you know, I guess if they began to devote their economies toward militarism, then within the realm of somebody's imagination, they could be a threat to their neighbors or something, but certainly not to us.
And then that's it.
We're out of continents.
There are no powers in Africa at all.
You're quite right.
So I might add to your very wise comment that India will one day be a threat to the United States one day soon, because India, under cover of their space program, India has been building two very heavy launcher satellite missiles, rather, that one of which can deliver a thermonuclear warhead to North America.
India is building up a large, will be building up an ICBM arsenal.
And ironically, while we're screaming and yelling about Iran, which has no long range missiles, we are almost helping the Indians develop their plus submarine launched Indian nuclear missiles and drones.
I mean, and cruise missiles, sorry, that will or could threaten the United States.
It's quite ironic.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, even though that's like the Dick Cheney use of the word threaten, right?
They could maintain their independence from us with weapons like that.
Well, they're good old North Koreans, too.
Yeah.
Last week, there were reports that the North Koreans, yes, they are developing.
Well, even the North Koreans said that to bluffing saying that they could hit North America with missiles.
Yeah, well, whistling in the dark.
Yeah, they try real hard.
And then sometimes they have some really nice looking missiles for their parade that are made out of cardboard or some rumors that make it all the way to David Sanger piece on the front page of the New York Times about, you know, their their awesome missile capabilities.
But I'll believe it when I see one launch and not blow up on the way out of the launch pad there.
Quite right.
Quite right.
But seriously, the you know, the U.S. is the only other recourse for the U.S. right now, except for these little colonial wars, what the British used to call little wars that is going down to these obscure places, picking a fight there, mowing down the natives with high technology weapons is kicking the Russians and the Chinese to get them irritated by, you know, moving ever closer to Russia's borders and, you know, threatening China over Taiwan or issues like that.
They're the only levers that we seem to have left right now.
All right now, I wonder about like in the balance of priorities here, how much does keeping China out of Africa and away from any oil resources there does this have to do with?
Or is that really just kind of an excuse?
Because is there even that much oil for them to have access to?
It's not like it's that easy to get either.
Right.
The eastern or pardon me, the western border of Uganda, man, you got to build a hell of a pipeline to get that to see.
Yeah, but if anybody can do it, it's the Chinese.
I saw them putting up condominium buildings in northern China.
They get a month that would take us two years.
They work like beavers day and night.
No, China is Africa has become an important source of oil for China now, both east and west Africa, Sudan or South Sudan and Angola.
And the Chinese are prospecting.
So their position is significant in Africa.
It's like it's like a chess game or, you know, the oriental game of go where you put down your little pieces and try and block the opponent.
We've got to be in our bonnet about the Chinese.
In fact, while we've been borrowing money from the Chinese to defend to pay for Bush's idiotic wars that he started, Chinese have been using that money, the interest on that money to buy friends and influence across Africa and Asia.
And they're doing it quite successfully.
Now, the story of Sudan, that's one that probably went by a lot of people.
If they hear anything about Sudan, it's the years ago wars going on in Darfur, which I always thought they would use as an excuse to get down to the south.
But that's where the oil is, is in the south.
And they've had a civil pardon me, a ceasefire and kind of an autonomy, I guess, like the Tuaregs had in the north of Mali, right down in the in the black Christian and animist part of of southern Sudan there.
But their ceasefire lasted years and years.
But that wasn't good enough, I guess, for the CIA.
And so Barack Obama sent the CIA to break South Sudan off.
And now they're having the war started back up again.
Correct?
Oh, that's right.
That process of dismembering Sudan, which is one of Africa's biggest countries, was underway for the last two years.
I used to go to Washington and see the South Sudanese.
I could spot them.
They're very tall, very, very dark, Dinka tribesmen.
And they said, what the hell?
What are all these guys doing in Washington?
Well, what they were doing was planning for the South Sudanese army to fight the Sudanese army and for South Sudan to break away, which has all the oil, however, comma, the pipelines to export the oil have to go north through Sudan to port Sudan.
So Sudan, while fighting on and off of South Sudan, has still control of the oil pipelines.
But there's now a plan afoot to build a new pipeline to take the oil to the coast in, I think it is, Kenya.
So we stole the south, but we still need a regime change in the north.
That's correct.
But we really don't like Sudan at all and haven't for a long time.
This is one way to get at them is by breaking up the country, which actually in the long run may be due to a favor to Sudan because they were fighting the southerners for 40 years.
But the Darfur was being used as a propaganda weapon to justify breaking up Sudan.
But now that it's been broken up and things moved along fast, you don't hear much about all the alleged violations of human rights things that are going on in Darfur.
Yeah, I mean, that really bummed me out, too, especially during Bush years when you have such horrible, you know, imperial occupations going on all over.
And what do the liberals decide is their pet issue?
The good war that we should be fighting to prevent this genocide when really both sides were Arab and Sunni Muslims.
It was all just nomads and farmers at war over your camels and my tomato patch.
And what the hell does that have to do with genocide?
Nothing.
But that was what they came up with for instead of get out of Iraq.
Now it was get into Sudan, too.
That's quite right.
Meanwhile, a lot of Christian fundamentalist groups and some of the British charities like Oxfam things for years have been supporting the South Sudanese independence movement by money, weapons, things like that.
So there was and some of this went to Darfur, too, but it didn't work out.
But the bar Darfur thing lasted for a while, but then kind of faded away.
Yeah, I mean, it's been years since the real mass killings and high level warfare in the West, right?
That's right.
And I don't really it's such a confused situation.
It's hard to know who's doing what to whom there in Sudan has been in chaos.
And anybody who studied the history of Sudan knows that that's what's been going on since day one in Sudan's tribal fighting, raiding each other.
South Sudan, the Christian and animist South Sudanese who were so lauded in the West by the funded by the churches and things like that.
They're busy killing each other now, raiding for cattle and women.
So, you know, this is Africa in the raw.
Yeah.
Now, by the way, I want to mention here, I'm all for secession down to the last seven billionth person.
You know, I'm all for that.
I'm just against the CIA coming in and breaking apart other people's countries and creating new excuses for further intervention later.
You know, like that war in Libya last year that's leading to the war in Mali right now.
Well, that's right.
But but this is this is, you know, colonial policy 101.
The British perfected it beautifully in that you pick up.
There's always some group in one of these countries is disaffected.
You latch on to them.
You give them arms.
You give them support.
You come in and put them into power with your superior technology.
You give jobs to all their friends and relatives like that.
You create a permanent ruling class that's supporting you.
And if necessary, you send in some white troops to back them up.
And this is what's happened all the way from the Middle East to Sri Lanka to India, this whole thing.
So it's it's really nefarious.
I'm just reading, in fact, parenthetically, an excellent book on the destruction of Smyrna in Turkey in 1922, the Greek city of Smyrna during the Greco-Turkish wars.
And here we find out the British under Lloyd George secretly offered the Greek government in 1914, 15, the whole coast of Turkey if they would enter the war against Germany.
So this is and that's precipitated the Greek-Turkish wars.
So it's this kind of colonial imperial behavior that usually is behind these things.
And it works.
Right.
Yeah.
Again, it was just like housing and urban development or anything else.
Right.
All government programs, they all just fail upwards.
And the more they screw everything up, the more jobs they have to do.
And they're the only ones that you can go to for the job.
And so there you go.
They're just making work everywhere they go.
That's right.
In North Africa, we can blame it more on the French.
The British weren't there too much.
And but the French were much more clever colonial rulers than the than the British.
They were they managed to garner much more popular support.
They didn't show as much contempt for the natives as the British did.
And we've also forgotten that the Spaniards were important colonial rulers in North Africa, too, down to southern Morocco.
And the basis of today of the whole West African Saharan conflict between Morocco and Mauritania is based on what the Spanish colonialists did, too.
So to understand these problems, you have to go back 100 or 200 years.
Yeah, man, or just stay out of these problems.
And then you don't even have to know about them.
That's my policy.
But as long as our government's involved, I got to know.
And so now here's what I need to know.
Is France going to send their infantry now to Mali?
Or who's going to do the killing in Mali?
Well, the French are trying to do this kind of fig leaf coalition type thing.
They're trying to get this group called ECOWAS, which is the some it's the local region economic group, but it has no army and no troops or anything.
So it'll just be fig leaf.
And behind it, there will be some black troops.
But the French will send in the Foreign Legion for sure.
That's what they've done for the last 60 years.
And they will do the necessary fighting under cover of darkness and kick out or shoot or kill whoever's necessarily and bring in their own obedient guys and say they've restored democracy.
That's how it's always worked in West Africa.
Well, that sure does sound pretty effective of a policy.
It seems like I don't know why the Americans can't ever do it like that.
All they ever do is screw everything up.
You know, I read.
Oh, it was a link in just Romano's article about, well, what were we supposed to do?
Force Maliki to let us stay.
And then force was a link to Kennedy ordering the hit on DM.
And it's the and it's the conversation between the two Kennedy brothers.
And he's saying, hey, look, this isn't going to be easy like over there in the Iraq.
Well, right.
There can be blowback here.
We can we could have problems and stuff.
But you seem to think that the French are going to, like, pull this off.
Yeah, they succeed, apparently, you know, often.
I've been watching them do it for a good four decades now.
What the French Foreign Legion stationed in the Central African Republic and Chad.
And whenever something needs doing, they fly these guys.
And I've talked to legionnaires who even told me they did this.
You know, Transel transports arrive at night in the airbase and wherever you need to be.
Let's say Bamako, Mali.
And the ramps come down and out come the jeeps with foreign legionnaires in them.
And the French intelligence services already assassinated key figures who they want to get rid of.
And then the legionnaires come in and they blow the hell out of the local town, terrorize everybody, kill a lot of people, roar back in the planes.
The planes take off before dawn and it's done.
And they put their own local puppets in power.
Well, this is how the French have ruled West in the supposedly independent West Africa since giving it independence in the early 1960s.
Well, perfect.
See, that's how we'll end the empire, but call it a victory instead of a defeat.
We'll just give it back to the Europeans that we inherited it from at the end of World War II.
Let them rule the freaking world if that's what their thing is.
The French are defter doing this.
They're not as ham-handed as us sometimes or even the British.
We should take lessons from the French on how to rule a colonial empire with making it look easy.
All right.
I better let you go.
I've kept you already 10 minutes more than I asked you for.
So thank you very much, Eric.
Appreciate it.
Cheers, Scott.
All right, everybody.
That's the great Eric Margulies.ericmargulies.com is his website.
They also run pretty much all of them, I think, at lourockwell.com.
I'll look for his author archive there, his latest piece.
On to Timbuktu.
Hey, ladies.
Scott Horton here.
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So you're a libertarian and you don't believe the propaganda about government awesomeness you were subjected to in fourth 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.
Liberty Classroom, the history and economics they didn't teach you.
Hey, y'all.
Scott Horton here.
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In an empire where Congress knows nothing, the ubiquitous DC think tank is all.
And the Israel lobby and their neocon allies most own a dozen.
Well, Americans have a lobby in Washington, too.
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