10/06/13 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

For Pacifica Radio, October 6, 2013.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Alright, y'all.
Welcome to the show.
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Alright, our guest is the great Eric Margulies.
His website is ericmargulies.com.
And he's the author of the books War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
Welcome to the show.
Eric, how are you doing?
I'm just fine, Scott.
Well, very good.
I appreciate you joining us on the show today.
And I really enjoyed reading your last few articles here.
Iran's peace offensive.
Whatever is America going to do?
Can we maintain the sanctions and our endless threats of war and regime change in the face of this onslaught of peace offerings?
Well, those sneaky peacemongers.
Fight fair, you Iranians.
Please stop doing that and go back to setting yourself up as a big target for retribution.
Undermining our policy here.
It's just not fair.
They're not playing ball.
Alright, well, so for people who've been living under a rock or off on vacation or whatever, what is the big deal anyway?
And do you think it amounts to, well, what do you make of the American response as well?
Is there anything to it or are things going to more or less remain the same?
Well, the deal is that the U.S. has been demanding that Iran open itself up to even more inspections than it's undergoing now.
And that it answers some outstanding questions that remain about its nuclear program, of which Iran insists is absolutely peaceful, and which the U.N. says is peaceful, and which U.S. intelligence says is peaceful.
But Washington wants more.
Now, the Iranians, who are very proud and stubborn people, have refused to give up all this information.
But all of a sudden, with the advent of the new democratically elected president of Iran, Hassan Rouhani, Iran has done a complete change in our policy and said, okay, we'll play ball.
We're going to open up substantial talks.
We're going to stop giving Jewish people a hard time by questioning the Holocaust.
We're going to ease tensions with the West and try and reach a peaceful settlement of this whole nuclear issue.
And then, so what about the Democrats?
I mean, Barack Obama, he was supposed to have a meeting with Rouhani at the United Nations, which he ended up not doing.
But then he made the phone call when he was on his way to the airport to head back to Iran.
Obama called him, and that's unprecedented since 1979, right?
John Kerry has been meeting, had at least a few meetings, right, with the Iranian foreign minister.
Well, Kerry's been a disappointment in the sense that, you know, you thought a Vietnam vet who was a man who speaks French and with an international viewpoint and everything wouldn't just slip right into the mold of the war party in the States.
But he seemed to be doing that.
But now he's changing his tune.
Don't forget, he's looking at presidential elections, the next round of elections where he'll probably run for candidate.
He'll be positioned against Hillary Clinton, who's also breathing fire and brimstone against the Iranians and the Arabs and all this.
She's got her domestic audiences she's playing to.
So there's a lot of politicking going on.
But what is clear is that Iran has exceeded the many wanted requests, wrongfooted the White House, which was pushing very hard for war in Syria.
This is the Nobel Peace Prize winning president.
And Iran has taken the wind out of the sails of the U.S.
It's given Russia a major diplomatic victory.
And maybe U.S. around the world are pretty foolish and petty minded.
Well, you know, I thought that it was kind of lucky that the whole controversy over whether or not to bomb Syria, even though it worked out for the best for now anyway, that didn't seem to undermine the possibility of, well, the slightest move toward reproachment with Iran.
I don't mean to overstate it, but it didn't seem like the controversy over Syria had undermined as badly as I had feared it would.
And they do seem to be moving forward.
They're going to have more nuclear talks.
Well, Iran has been under siege since 1979.
The U.S. has made umpteen attempts to undermine, destabilize, overthrow, subvert and crush the Iranian government.
It's waged economic warfare against Iran.
We got Saddam Hussein's Iraq to invade Iran in 1980, causing the loss of 500,000 Iranian soldiers and civilians killed, some of them by poison gas that was supplied by the West.
We've stirred up ethnic minorities like Avaris and Arabs in Iran.
We have tried to sabotage their nuclear plants.
And we've, I think we may have been involved in the attempted, in the assassinations of Iranian scientists.
We've encouraged uprisings in Iran among students.
So, you know, we've, it's been war and we have crushing sanctions that are really hurting Iran now.
We're trying to block their ability to sell oil around the world.
So the Iranians have finally, and I think wisely, come to the point where they said, you know, enough, okay, we'll play ball, ouch, uncle, but without giving up some of Iran's basic rights.
Well, now I'm actually following the president of Iran on Twitter these days.
It's funny living in the future like this.
And he put out a tweet, I think yesterday or the day before, saying that, geez, the American position seems to keep changing.
He seemed a little bit frustrated.
President Rouhani is right in that sense because, first of all, the U.S. government doesn't speak with one voice.
There's the State Department, there's the CIA, there's the White House.
And most important of all, there's the Pentagon.
Secondly, Obama, you know, who blows in the wind one way or the other, he's not a strong personality.
He's come under tremendous pressure now that there's a chance of improved relations with Iran, which are, by the way, very important for America's own interests in the Middle East.
Now Obama's under tremendous domestic pressure from groups who don't want to see any peace with Iran, who want to get the U.S. to destroy Iran just the way it destroyed Iraq.
And some of America's allies as well.
Israel has put tremendous pressure on Obama.
So obviously he's wavering.
And then there's Congress, which is completely supporting the Israeli line, as usual, and is also putting pressure on the president.
So he's going to have a very tough go with this.
There are a lot of people who still want war.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
I'm talking with Eric Margulies, ericmargulies.com.
And, yeah, it's interesting.
You know, the headlines can really say 75% support talks.
And then you and I can still have a conversation where, with a straight face, you're describing all of the domestic political pressures against Obama moving forward with this.
And 75% of the American people don't really have much say.
It's not really about us at all.
That's true.
And there's a very strong current of anti-Iranian sentiment in the American media, as we know.
Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu is out ranting and raving and fulminating against Iran and warning everyone, don't trust those tricky Iranians.
So there's a lot of discord going on.
But I think beyond all this, there seems to be a clear movement towards a rapprochement between or thawing of the ice age between Washington and Tehran, unless, of course, there's some kind of really ugly incident that sabotages this.
Well, it's funny that you'd mention that.
I'm sure you saw this Reuters report that an IRGC general has been shot.
Although in this case, the Iranian government seems to be playing it down and saying, yes, a terrible thing happened, but they're not making accusations about Israel or the United States here.
But I wonder whether you think that Netanyahu would be so bold to right now hire the Jandala terrorists to kill some Iranians to try to blow up this deal.
Oh, I think it's very likely.
But it may not be just Jandala.
It may be the Mujahideen, that is, the people's Mujahideen, who were Iranian Marxists who fought against the Islamic government, became sort of outcasts.
They committed a lot of terrorist acts.
They were on America's terrorist list.
But they've been co-opted by the Israelis and have become an arm almost of Israel's intelligence service.
And they are deep in Iran.
And they have been responsible for a lot of the assassinations and sabotage.
So I think they're definitely at work.
It's Israel's interest to sabotage any improvement in U.S.-Iranian relations.
We're watching them do it now.
But nobody dares criticize Israel openly or be branded an enemy of Israel.
And so people have to be very circumspect.
You know, the irony is that Iran is probably, in terms of nuclear things, probably the most inspected country in the world.
It has U.N. inspectors and cameras in all its major nuclear facilities except one or two areas.
It has constantly watched by satellites overhead U.S., Israeli, Russian.
And it has spies galore.
And I remember back in the days of Iraq when the U.N. was inspecting Iraq's so-called nuclear infrastructure, it came out that half these U.N. inspectors were working for either U.S. or Israeli intelligence.
So you have a lot of intelligence inspectors in the U.N. as well.
It would be difficult for Iran to really produce any sizable nuclear weapons, not to mention the point of having delivery systems, which Iran really has not mastered yet.
Right.
Yeah, that's a real important point.
You know, in Seymour Hersh's article, Iran and the Bomb, from I guess three years ago now, he says it's not just that the CIA and the military have no evidence of an Iranian bomb.
They have a lot of evidence that they are not making one.
It's not that they're blind on the issue.
They're very well informed on the issue and they're very confident about what is not happening there.
And he talks about, you know, sensors in the roads and, you know, radiation detectors hidden in the street signs and Joint Special Operations Command guys and CIA guys running around all over Iran verifying what the inspectors are verifying in their white lab coats, which is that all the nuclear material is accounted for and there are no special or military projects going on here, there, or anywhere else.
Netanyahu and his right-wing liquid party have been proclaiming that Iran is six months away from having nuclear weapons since the mid-1990s.
And yet there's not a shred of evidence.
But, you know, even the Israelis, when you talk to them or read the Israeli media, will admit that, yeah, we know that the Iranians don't have any nuclear weapons.
But what worries them is, well, they have the potential.
They have the know-how to do it.
And that's the breakout theory, that if they did decide to build nuclear weapons, they could, and if they had delivery systems, they could do it within six months.
Well, yeah, that's possible.
You know, Japan is estimated to be able to build a nuclear weapon in three months.
It has all the pieces.
It's just got to put them together.
So Israel has embarked, its solution to this is to kill as many of the Iranian nuclear scientists as possible.
So that's why we started seeing these assassinations in Tehran.
And we saw my sources in Iraq tell me that some 200 Iraqi nuclear technicians have been murdered since 2003 by parties unknown.
In other words, men who could have been hired by the Iranian government.
Or who could have gone forward one day to make a nuclear weapon for Iraq, for a rebuilt Iraq.
Well, that know-how has been eliminated.
The Israelis, they're using the nuclear issue of Iran to create hysteria, to generate pro-Israeli support in North America.
They're talking about a second Holocaust.
They know perfectly well that Iran does not have the capability to attack Israel.
And even if it did, it wouldn't because Israel has an indestructible nuclear triad of ground, air, and sea-launched nuclear missiles.
Missiles, bombs, cruise missiles that would wipe all of Iran off the map.
Vaporize it in minutes.
So the Iranians are not suicidal.
So why would they ever consider launching a missile against Israel, particularly being afraid it might not work or hit its target?
Well, the Israeli answer to that on the right wing in Israel is, well, they're mad mullahs.
You know, the old Victorian British mad mullahs being trotted out again.
They're mad mullahs.
They're insane.
They're like Shiite crazy suicide bombers.
They want to destroy the world just to be able to destroy Israel.
Well, that's the best argument.
But it may scare people in Peoria or Miami, but in the Middle East where people are much more sophisticated, not so many buy this story.
All right.
Now, I'm pretty sure it was in 1998, 97, maybe, Fareed Zakaria wrote in Newsweek that if Saddam Hussein did not exist in the Middle East, we would have to invent him because he's the linchpin of our policy.
We have to have somebody that we're in the middle of beating over the head all day.
And so, well, now we're done with Saddam, beat him all the way to death.
So now we got the Iranians.
But I just wonder, could we have a Middle East centric policy without a major enemy over there?
What if we had a friendly government in Iraq and Saudi Arabia and Iran all at the same time?
Who would really lose from that?
In my book, American Raj, because I write about this going back all to the days of Gamal Abdel Nasser, America has always had a Middle Eastern boogeyman.
The last, you know, there was Nasser, there was Arafat, there was Gaddafi, the bad dog of the Middle East, and so on.
Then there was finally, there was Bashir in Sudan, Assad, Papa in Syria.
There was Ahmadinejad who was wonderful in that role.
And anyway, right up to now, now that we don't have Ahmadinejad to kick around anymore, they'll find somebody new to come in and be the latest devil.
But that's been a part of Western policy towards the Middle East since British imperial days.
It's always having that mad mullah, who I was just referring to, who justifies sending in the Queen's army to restore civilized order and to fight these dangerous Islamic fanatics.
That justifies ongoing invasion and occupation.
So we'll see more of it.
Yeah, the West does need foreign devils in the Middle East.
Well, I guess the problem there is my false premise, right, where I'm trying to look at this from the point of view of at least that 75% of the American people that wants peace talks here.
From this point of view of the national interest, instead of looking at it from the point of view of certain Navy admirals who want more decorations for their jacket or whatever.
But really that's what it comes down to is very specific minorities pushing, you know, squeaky wheel gets the grease kind of thing, pushing so that they can have their policy.
Because otherwise, I mean, even if we're talking about the point of view of the oil companies, Eric, it seems like Houston would want to have a deal with every country in the Middle East.
Why exclude anyone, you know?
That's right.
And my own experiences in the Pentagon have shown me that the military is not so anxious for these wars as are members of Congress.
The military understands what's involved.
They know that America's military forces are seriously run down and degraded and have been renewed and upgraded, and we can't afford more wars.
And there are just a lot of good, sensible-thinking Americans who think the policy is absolutely wrong and it's not being driven by America's best interest.
But it goes on.
That's politics, and we'll see a lot more of it.
All right, now you have a great article.
It's at ericmargulise.com and I think it ran at lourockwell.com as well about Vladimir Putin saving Obama's bacon, as you put it in the piece there, from having a war in Syria.
And it sure seemed like he was saving our country, never mind the dope in charge up there.
But he sure threw us a lifeline.
But I actually wanted to at least start this part of the conversation with a narrow point that you make there, an assertion that rings so true to me, that this idea originated at the Kremlin.
And that, you don't quite say it this way, but you're at least implying that when John Kerry went out there and made this off-the-cuff flub, that, well, yeah, sure, I guess if he got rid of all his chemical weapons, that would be okay, and then we wouldn't bomb him.
That that was planned, and he went out there and flubbed that so that the Russians could take him up on the offer.
That was my intuition in the first place there.
I guess it didn't necessarily occur to me that it was the Russians' idea in the first place, but certainly that they had already talked about it before this happened on camera.
But anyway, could you please explain what's going on there?
Yes.
My understanding from my sources in Russia is simply that the Russians had brought up this idea.
It came up somewhere in talks.
During the G20 meeting?
Yes, somewhere, or behind the scenes.
You know, intelligence agencies talking to each other.
Whatever.
It was a very sensible solution.
And it's good that the Russians got behind it, because they saved the president, President Obama, from blundering into a war that was starting off as a joke, where the president and the secretary of state couldn't agree on figures and how many babies were killed by the wicked Assad, and this business about a light bombing, an incredibly small attack.
Whoever heard of a war starting that way?
It was pathetic, and it was clear that the White House had no strategy.
You know, what do we do next?
And there was the fear that the facts might come out about this gas that it was done by the rebels, not by the Assad forces.
So it was really turning into a disaster for the Americans.
And Putin did pull Obama's bacon out of the fire.
And what's interesting is that Vlad Putin, there's a growing swell, not in the U.S., but around the world, who think a great deal of Putin.
And everything, he's really the leading world leader.
And this is a guy who thinks right, he's got the right morals, he's doing the right thing.
Putin's our boy.
Who would have thought after he was vilified by the American media, without relent, that he would turn up so popular abroad?
Well, he sure did work out a perfect score on this one, where they're getting rid of, you know, the, even no, never mind a limited strike, a full-scale carpet bombing campaign with napalm wouldn't have gotten rid of all the chemical weapons.
And here they're going to get rid of all the chemical weapons and without a war.
I mean, they're going to keep backing the Mujahideen on the ground, I guess.
Well, the chemical weapons in Syria were like the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
They were, as Paul Wolfowitz, the architect of that war, admitted afterwards, he said, we needed a cause's belly.
We needed a pretext for war.
And we all sat around the table and we decided that the best, most marketable one would be weapons of mass destruction.
That's something the American public would buy.
And this is the same thing.
In my view, America was intervening because it's the rebels that it was supporting were losing.
And Assad forces were kicking their butts.
And America was being humiliated because its boys were on the retreat.
And America's real plan in this war was to get at Iran and destroy a major ally of Iran and destroy Hezbollah.
This wasn't happening.
So the U.S. was going to either go into a bigger war or back out of this.
Fortunately, we had the latter.
Well, and now, does this deal really mean that since we're erasing the possibility of the so-called red line, the pretext for war with the chemical weapons there, that the Americans are basically conceding to the Russians that they're going to let Assad stay?
I mean, it doesn't look like they really made a we promise never to invade Cuba again promise, but sort of between the lines, have they?
I think so.
I think so.
And in fact, there's a very good point made by Robert Fisk, one of our best observers of the of the region.
Fisk has just come back from Syria, and he's saying that, you know, the parts of the Free Syrian Army, that is, the Syrian army deserters who have been armed, financed and backed by the U.S. and the Saudis, that a large part of them are talking about going back and joining the government, the Assad government again, because they're so horrified by all these Islamist extremists who have poured in.
And so they may make a deal with Assad.
And that says to me that the U.S. may end up making a deal with Assad, because once again, as the Al Qaeda people get stronger and stronger in Syria and the and the rebels collapse, that the U.S. will see that its best interests are represented by supporting Assad, not his enemies.
Yeah, or at least backing off.
I mean, they don't have to be like George W. Bush and pay him to torture people for us.
Just stop backing either side.
What's so hard about that, you know?
That's right.
No torture for free.
You don't even have to pay them like the Moroccans or the Jordanians.
Yes, you're quite right.
Anyway, there's complete confusion in Washington.
Nobody knows what they're doing.
The situation in Syria is so opaque.
Very few people understand it.
Those who do understand it are not being listened to, as we said very often on this program.
And they've got bombastic fools like John McCain and Lindsey Graham who are still beating the war drums.
They don't even know who they're going to attack.
Yeah.
Well, I think, as always, the best we can do is have hope for Barack Obama's cowardice, that he's just going to be too afraid to do something tough like Jeb Bush would do or something and go ahead and double down.
I mean, he did back down on this after all, and maybe he'll just keep continuing to back down.
Wouldn't that be nice?
Yes.
The Lord preserve us from decisive presidents in office, i.e.
George Bush.
Yeah, courageous leadership.
Yeah, who are so consumed by ignorance that they could make decisions on very complicated things.
At least the President Obama has the wisdom and the intelligence to be cautious.
All right.
Thank you very much, Eric.
You're welcome, Scott.
Appreciate it.
All right, everybody, that is the great Eric Margulies.
His website is ericmargulies.com, spelled like Margolis, ericmargulies.com.
And check out his great books, War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
Again, his website is ericmargulies.com.
Hi, I'm Scott Horton.
This has been Anti-War Radio for this week.
Thanks very much for listening.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 3,000 interviews now, at scotthorton.org.
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