11/24/15 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright, you guys, welcome back to the show.
Well, I got Eric Margulies back on the line because, you know, big important stuff is happening over there and who better to talk about what the hell is going on and what it all means to us than him.
Hey, Eric, how are you?
I'm fine, Scott.
I'm watching these scary events in Syria and keeping my fingers crossed we're not heading into a shooting war.
Yeah, well, okay.
So the news is that for anybody who's just catching up, the news is that the Turks, a Turkish F-16 shot down a Russian, I don't know what kind of fighter bomber jet, killed two pilots, or the two pilots were killed apparently as they were parachuting down by the local FSA, CIA-backed terrorist militia there in Syria.
The Turks and the Russians, of course, differ over about what side of the line they were on and whose airspace they were flying and how many warnings they got and this kind of thing.
And now, I guess, maybe the first question should be, why do you think that they did this?
Putin said, come on, man, regardless of where the line is, it's still obvious, it's still clear to everyone that we bear no ill intention to the Turks.
They couldn't even have believed that the Russian jet was targeting Turkey.
Even if they were over the line, it was an accident.
It wasn't even a provocation.
I don't know who this serves, but it sure as hell isn't us.
And so the Turks must be reading whatever Russian plane air behavior in that same way, because clearly the Russians aren't trying to pick an air war with the Turks right now.
So why in the world do you think they did it?
Or was it a political decision or it was made much lower down on the chain, you suspect, or what?
No doubt, Scott, the Turks were trigger happy.
They're hot-blooded people, and I think they shot down a Russian plane, or at least a drone, a couple of years ago.
You're quite right.
There was no need to do this.
That was unnecessary.
These fighter planes are traveling very fast, you know, skirting the border for operations there.
An intrusion is easily understandable.
The Turks should have, you know, done the usual and worn them off and wiggled their wings and things like that, instead of firing anti-aircraft missiles at them.
It may have been a lower-down decision, but I think that the head of Turkey, President Erdogan, had given orders previously to defend the border and to punish any intruders, however insignificant they are.
You think maybe it's the fact that the Russians were bombing a bunch of terrorists and the Turks were protecting the terrorists, because that's their role in this war?
Well, you're quite right.
There are very close links between these anti-Assad groups in Syria who are being armed through connivance of the United States, France, and the Turks.
I mean, their arms and munitions are coming right across that border there.
That's probably a primary entry point where this incident happened.
It's the part of Turkey, used to be known as Alexandretta, that the Turks hold, but that is claimed by Syria, claimed the French gave it away wrongly to the Turks, so it's a very sensitive area.
All right, so now, as far as NATO and all that, another thing Putin said was, I can't believe this, then they call a meeting in NATO as though we had attacked them, when they're the ones who shot down our plane.
But, you know, there was a State Department flunky who put out a story, put out a statement, something along the lines of, yeah, well, you know, this is a matter for, between the Turkish government and the Russian one.
In other words, seemed to be backing NATO right out of the argument and saying, hey, you guys work this out, we're not going to let this escalate to a NATO-level problem.
But, you know, I wonder how certain you think that is.
Well, let's hope that's the case, Scott, because, you know, first of all, Ukraine, which brought Russia and the intrusive NATO forces, countries into almost an armed confrontation, and now this mess in Syria, it's very frightening.
We're using up our nine lives far too quickly.
This should not be a NATO concern.
Russia is not attacking Turkey, it's not invading Turkey.
But the problem is that when NATO gets involved, where NATO is really the U.S., which pulls all the strings in NATO, it's very possible that you could be another great power confrontation.
Incredible.
All right, now, as far as, well, you know, we talked about this a bit yesterday, too.
It's been a very split policy in Syria, of course, claiming to be against the terrorists while backing them against Assad all this time.
And as we talked about yesterday on the show, that goes for the French, too, and for the last four and a half years straight.
While at the same time they say, oh, no, boo-hoo, the Islamic State, they're the more obvious threat in terms of, you know, international threat.
Assad never threatened the West in any way.
They claim that that's just a responsibility to protect the mission there, but they claim to be defending Western civilization from attack when it comes to the Islamic State, which at least, you know, may have been behind the attack in Paris.
Cut some Americans' throats who were actually on their territory, though.
I don't know.
Anyway, they can't seem to really decide what their policy is, or they seem to pursue both in a very half-assed way.
And even when they say, no, that's it, we're going to have to get over the get-rid-of-Assad thing and prioritize on getting rid of the Islamic State first, they always take two steps back and turn right around and do something to, you know, solidify the older position against Assad and that, you know, regime change is still priority one there.
So I guess I just wonder what you suspect is going to come of this, or maybe which argument inside the government do you think is winning out now about what to do?
We have seen what appears to be a slight shift in thinking in Washington that, well, maybe Assad isn't such a bad guy, or we can put up with him a little longer, the old butcher of Damascus, while we address more urgent things like ISIS.
I think there's a collective understanding growing in Washington that they made a really stupid mistake and the Obama administration and its female warrior advisors, who I keep mentioning, Susan Powers at the U.N.
I thought you were going to say Lindsey Graham.
Touché.
He's the third horse person of the apocalypse, are making military strategy, and they shouldn't be.
They don't know anything about it.
But Obama wants to be a—he's caught in the middle.
He doesn't know what to do, and he doesn't want to tarnish his legacy by starting a bigger war.
But sure enough, other outside forces are sucking the U.S. and its allies into a war.
The Israelis are getting more deeply involved.
The British are saying now they're going to get more involved.
It's a hue and a cry, but it's not thought out.
The first thing we should have done, pick up a telephone, get Erdogan on the phone and says, get your troops the hell out of the border or your air force.
Don't irritate the Russians anymore, because that could be the spark that sets off a major war.
Yeah.
Well, now, and this goes to something that Gareth was saying on the show yesterday, which was that it's still a mystery to him why Obama is so loyal to the Saudi cause, even when in a situation like in Yemen or like in Syria, maybe if you were a stupid idiot, you might have gone along with them for a little while.
But, geez, it's getting near the end of 2015 now, and Gareth was saying it's still a mystery to him how the Saudis have so much sway.
I mean, it's not like we're going to stop being their allies, but let them dictate our Syria policy to this degree, when it's so counterproductive to American interests.
Anyway, I'm going to ask you what you think the answer to that is when we get back from this break.
It's the heroic Eric Margulies, y'all.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
Once again, talking Syria with the great Eric Margulies.
He's the author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
Find his website at ericmargulies.com.
Spell it like Margolis.
And also he writes for lourockwell.com and unz.com.
Now, yeah, at the break there, I was wondering out loud Gareth's question from yesterday, sort of a rhetorical one, a puzzle he's determined to solve.
Why is America so damn deep in bed with the Saudis?
This is beyond parody of ridiculousness now, where they're allowed to get away with, where America is willing to aid in a bet what they're doing when it is obviously so contrary to American interests.
I mean, even when they thought it was for their interest.
Yeah, let's take Iran down a peg or whatever.
Now we're at the point where it's already blown back up in our face.
And yet America persists.
Why do you think that is?
I see a couple of reasons, Scott.
First of all, the Saudis have invested, I don't know, way over $100 billion in the United States.
They own all kinds of things.
Not only that, they own congressmen and senators.
They've taken a lead from the book of the Israel lobby and used money to advance their political agenda.
The Saudis are very big in industrial investment in the United States, particularly in the arms industry.
And they're in cahoots with all these southern senators and congressmen.
So the Saudis have been very clever at playing that card in the United States.
Secondly, Saudi Arabia is a key element in the U.S. control of the Middle East.
American air bases there, Saudi money.
It is the primary reactionary force.
And look how it bailed out Field Marshal al-Sisi in Egypt, a little tinpot dictator, and kept him in power by lending him, I think it was $100 million or something like that.
I'm sorry, a billion dollars, a couple billion even.
So the Saudis are very influential that way.
Also, the Americans believe they need them in the Middle East.
It's a power base for the U.S. there.
And finally, the Saudis are in line with thinking of conservative factions in the U.S. and with pro-Israel factions.
They have a tacit alliance.
They want the same thing.
So the Saudis do have great influence.
No matter how ugly they appear, cutting off people's heads, crucifying people, things like that, as the old saying goes, they're our S.O.B.
Well, and I guess that's the whole thing is these terrorists who have been attacking us have been doing so because we are allies of their despotisms.
So they're all from our friendly states.
So we're going to just keep being allies with our enemies.
If anything, Iraq War II is the aberration where they tripped and fell and stupidly fought a war for Iran for a minute before switching back to Saudi again.
Well, that's right.
The stupidity of the Bush administration is still only now being fully discovered what disasters they created and how many stupid or illegal things that they did.
Remember, most of the hijackers, the 9-11 hijackers, were Saudis.
And they were fighting against.
Two of their points in staging these murderous attacks was, number one, to free Saudi Arabia from American occupation.
Secondly, to take a position on Palestine, to punish Israel for that.
Final point on this.
The Saudis are supporting all of America's allies in the Middle East financially.
And control of Saudi oil is one of the pillars of American world domination.
He who controls the country that controls the oil is the big power.
And the U.S. still dominates the economies of Europe and Japan and parts of Asia because of its control of Saudi oil.
Well, now, so the story goes, I guess, that after America's, at Israel's behest partially, and Iranian behest as well, invaded Iraq and empowered Iran, that that drove the Israelis and the Saudis closer together.
You mentioned the Saudi lobby here in the United States and how they kind of emulated the Israeli lobby.
I wonder how closely they work together now that their governments are such tight allies.
I wonder about how well the Saudi lobby, is it just a.k.a.
Houston or does it have another name?
The Saudi lobby and the Israeli lobby, they really kind of work together as an alliance in D.C. as well?
Well, it's been open knowledge for a long time that foreign nations wanted to exert some influence in Washington or get favors from the U.S. would go through the Israel lobby.
The Israel lobby has become very cleverly the gatekeeper for foreign affairs issues.
And if you get on the wrong side of the Israelis, forget about getting anything done in Washington.
On the other hand, many countries use the Israelis almost as their unofficial lobbies.
There are the Saudis, Singaporeans, for example, but the Saudis in particular, they have been running on the same parallel with Israel, let's say, similar thinking forever.
The Saudis used to fulminate against Israel, but that was simply for show and for the Arab street, as it was called.
In the last few years, yes, they've cast aside this charade of being enemies and are cooperating very closely.
There are all kinds of secret business deals between the Saudis and the Israelis, and I think you'll see more of them in the near future.
Well, and I don't know if you saw this, but Sherry Markson, a journalist from News Corp, was covering Israeli treatment of Mujahideen in their hospitals for the Australian.
And then apparently she's a very naive reporter who's, well, what's the big deal?
They got really upset at her because she was writing down all these details.
And I think they stole her notes, took her notes away from her, whatever, and censored her.
But so the point being, she didn't even really get it, I guess.
Oh, well, I was just talking with these rebels who were at war with Assad and Daesh.
Yeah, she means al-Qaeda.
They were from the al-Nusra Front.
Israel is still providing medical care to the al-Nusra Front, even after they promised to stop when the local Israeli Druze ambushed and shot up that ambulance full of Mujahideen in response to al-Nusra massacring a bunch of Druze for refusing to convert a couple of weeks before in Syria.
And yet they persist.
And I don't even understand why they do this.
I mean, there's enough Mujahideen there.
Is it worth the PR hit for the Israelis to keep getting caught red-handed giving medical care to al-Qaeda, Eric?
Well, apparently so.
There's a lot of footsie being played between Israel and ISIS and some of these other rebel groups.
It just doesn't make it in our media because it's often blanked out.
But the friend of my friend, the friend of my enemy is my friend, you know, that old story.
The Israelis are active not only in medical care, but they're supplying arms.
They are supplying aerial recon that constantly overflies Syria and they are providing intelligence.
Israel has a very clear policy.
In fact, just this week, the Israelis asked President Obama to recognize the Israeli annexation of Syria's Golan Heights, which were grabbed by Israel in the 1967 war and never returned.
Very strategic territory for Israel.
It has water, it has high ground overlooking Galilee.
And now the Israelis think they may have some oil there, too.
Clearly, the Israeli strategy is to destabilize Syria as much as possible.
And the more that happens, the stronger its hold on the Golan Heights.
In fact, I've not heard the Syrian government issue a peep about that in years.
And this is like a foreign country coming in and seizing a large hunk of New Jersey.
So, in other words, everything on the Golan Heights was already completely in Israel's favor, but they decided to push it.
And they're willing to support the al-Qaeda guys against Assad just so they could consolidate their hold on territory they already have?
That's right.
And a weakened Syria.
You know, Syria was the principal Arab state that was confronting Israel militarily, even though its forces were totally obsolete.
Syria was still, you know, at forefront of the resistance to Israel.
And now Israel is—sorry, Syria has been largely destroyed.
It's unlikely it'll ever be able to rebuild its military to any significant factor that could oppose the Israelis.
So Israel got the U.S. to destroy Iraq.
It has seen Syria destroyed.
Egypt has been bought out of confrontation long ago under Sadat and now under al-Sisi.
So there's no Arab state that's really opposing Israel anymore.
And it has won a major strategic victory.
Yeah.
And, you know, it's funny.
They're so, you know, perfectly happy to brag about it in The New York Times.
And they even—I think it was Michael Oren, the former Israeli ambassador, is quoted saying, yeah, this is a nice salve for our feelings after the Iran deal.
Are you kidding me?
These people hear themselves talk.
I think it was Dan Sanchez says, have you ever heard of such a diva empire before?
You know, it's aggressive warfare state that does nothing but, oh, they call it crying and shooting all day long, you know.
Poor us.
First, we were afraid of a safeguarded civilian nuclear program.
And then America made a deal so that now it's a double extras super safeguarded beyond all reason or historical precedent civilian nuclear program.
And so in order to make us feel better, we're going to go ahead and steal some more Syrian territory.
So long as we got you back in al-Qaeda for us to keep Assad and his military on the ropes and out of our way.
It's just incredible.
I don't know.
Well, the next act, Scott, is going to be Israel.
One of these days is going to invade Lebanon again and try and crush Hezbollah, the Shia Muslim resistance group there, and wipe it out and grab perhaps a bit of northern Lebanon, which is important water sources.
Yeah, well, and when they do that, that's when they're going to regret giving Hezbollah so many years worth of battle experience, fighting for Assad against the Mujahideen in Syria.
Because, you know, if they thought they had a hard time with Hezbollah in 2006, how about after they come home from this thing?
Good point.
Good point.
But Israeli defense forces are very tough, and eventually they will beat any foe that they come up against.
Do you think that they just withdrew for choice, but not because they had to in 06?
From Lebanon?
Yeah.
Well, they did it because first they weren't winning the war.
It was a stalemate, and they were losing steady casualties, and there was a great uproar inside Israel.
People thought the war was stupid and unnecessary, and they were fed up.
But as we're seeing with this parachuting thing, all it takes is a couple of bloody incidents to make everybody start jumping up and down and yelling for war.
Yeah.
All right, well, listen, I've already kept you over.
I'll let you go, but I sure appreciate it when you come on my show, Eric.
My pleasure, Scott.
Thanks again.
That is the great Eric Margulies, y'all.
He wrote War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
Find him at unz.com, U-N-Z, unz.com.
We'll be right back.
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