01/22/13 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

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Welcome back to the show here.
I'm Scott.
I won't tell you the name of my website because you can't get to it anyway because dang server's down.
Actually, for most of you listening to the archive of this later, it must be up by now or you wouldn't be able to hear it.
So you already know it's ScottHorton.org.
Okay, good.
Well, you can find more than 2,500 interviews there going back to 2003.
Many of them are with our next guest, Eric Margulies, world's expert on the world.
His website is EricMargulies.com.
It always works.
EricMargulies.com.
And of course, his books are War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
His most recent piece is the Spotlight on Anti-War.com today.
It's running at LewRockwell.com.
On to Timbuk2.
Welcome back to the show, Eric.
How are you?
I'm happy to be back with you, Scott.
Just back from the Middle East and finding my footing again.
All right.
So where all have you been?
Well, I went to, I started off, I flew to the Maldive Islands, which are these exquisite, beautiful little atolls off the coast of southern India and Sri Lanka.
I then flew from there to Abu Dhabi in the Gulf.
I had meetings in Abu Dhabi, including some with the local sheikhs, was served camel at dinner, which I did not eat.
Went on to Qatar, Doha, Qatar, both fascinating places.
And again, had very interesting meetings there.
Did some broadcasting for Al Jazeera TV.
Then on to Paris, landed in the middle of Fashion Week with lots of pretty girls running around in overly expensive clothing and just arrived back here in North America last night.
So let's talk about those girls.
No, no, no.
Well, let's talk about Qatar.
Were you investigating their support for the al-Qaeda rebels in Syria?
Very definitely.
They're very reticent about it, but there's no doubt that they are still funding arms supplies and money to support the Islamist rebels there, or the jihadists, if you want, just as they did in Libya.
And they're playing for a tiny little place that has only 1.8 million people, of whom only 300,000 are native-born Qataris.
They're playing an inordinately influential role in events in the Middle East now, which includes, by the way, lending billions of dollars to the bankrupt government of Egypt.
All right.
Now, isn't it strange how they back the Libyan Islamic fighting group in Libya against Gaddafi and they back the al-Nusra Front in Syria by they, of course, I mean the American empire and its allies.
But then they use, you know, so-called al-Qaeda in Algeria as an excuse to invade Mali, to fight them.
It is very confusing and rather cynical, too.
You know, there is an argument to be made that al-Qaeda grew up, the original one, under bin Laden, grew up under American aegis.
I was there, I saw it happen.
Not that he was working for the CIA, but his organization was allowed to flower and develop under benign American watch.
Now we're using all the fighting, almost all the fighting in Syria is being done by militant jihadists, not necessarily al-Qaeda.
In fact, I think we should stop using that term, because it no longer has any meaning.
It's simply a label used by the western media for bad guys.
It's more sophisticated.
And they are, these are people who, these are the fighting Islamic groups, as they were known in North Africa, and they're useful for the time being.
When they're no longer useful, they're cut adrift.
Well, you know, I wonder about that.
Jack was pointing out before the show today, Jack Blood, I was calling the end of his show, and then he does a little promo for my show, which is very nice of him.
And he pointed me toward this article in the Independent, Terror in North Africa.
Are westerners pulling the strings?
And this article in the Independent is not alleging western intelligence services, but it sort of kind of sounds like that when they say, hey, it seems like there's some blue-eyed, blonde-haired guys running this hostage-taking operation in Algeria.
And, you know, I forwarded you that article by Jeremy Keenan, the professor who wrote all about the war in Algeria and Mali, that article from last December.
And, you know, Pepe Escobar in his piece seems to agree with Keenan that really it's the Algerian government that's behind whooping this whole thing up in the first place, because they, like the Americans, and I guess the French, could use a little more terrorism in the region.
What do you think of that?
Well, there may be an element to that, particularly done by the Algerian military intelligence services, who during the Algerian war after the year 2000, the horrible bloody Algerian civil war in which over 200,000 people died, they frequently resorted to false flag operations using groups of their commandos and soldiers dressed up as rebels to commit monstrous outrages.
They even had trucks equipped with head-chopping machines on them, where they'd go into these villages and cut everybody's heads off.
It was that brutal.
And they used those kind of operations to discredit the people who were rebelling against the government, who were trying to overthrow the brutal military dictatorship in Algeria.
And they succeeded very well, because these groups were finally discredited in the media everywhere as brutal mad dog terrorists, and Algeria's military junta was applauded for fighting terrorism.
I think we may be seeing some of that in Mali and Algeria, but there are many other factors too in this complicated business.
Well, you know, I haven't even really gotten started trying to memorize the names of all these guys, but they're saying that, you know, their best Goldstein that they had, I think, you know, the imaginary permanent enemy out there, he even looks like Mullah Omar with the one bad eye and all of that, but they say he died in this thing.
So maybe that's what kind of false flag it was, was to really crack down on these guys.
Mokhtar Belmokhtar, proclaimed the new great Satan by the French.
I don't know if he's dead or alive.
I think he's still alive.
But a picture appeared of him yesterday in Paris, sitting in front of an Islamic banner with his Kalashnikov and a turban, looking very much like, oh, you know who?
And he may become the bin Laden of the Sahara.
He probably would like to be.
He's a very tough character.
And interestingly, this leader of one faction of anti-Western Saharan jihadists served in Algeria, I'm sorry, in Afghanistan, and fought the Soviets in Afghanistan, lost an eye in the process, and is regarded as what they call a man of honor in the Middle East for having fought in this war, which is widely admired.
Now he's back trying to do the same thing or trying to oust Western influence from his region.
Hmm.
But now, on that kind of larger thesis that maybe the Americans and the Algerians are really supporting these guys, I mean, you had a, and we've been covering this the whole time on the show and talking with you about it, the Tuareg rebellion and all that, that maybe the Westerners and the Algerians decided that they would support these Islamist groups in order to marginalize the Tuaregs who have legitimate beef, right?
And then they would, you know, supplant them with these guys who, their beef can never be legitimate because it's Islamist in nature, and that would be the excuse for further intervention, something like that, or too much?
I think that's an overly Byzantine interpretation of events.
As I see them, you have Tuaregs who've been fighting for their own homeland and to expel foreign control for over a century.
Remember the Beaugeeste, the wonderful novel, Victorian novel, and Fort Tindouf, and the legionnaires are fighting off these Arab attackers.
Well, they're Tuaregs, and these, known as the Blue Man of the Desert, they say that much of the Sahara belongs to them, which it probably does.
But the, now you've got the separate factor in the Algerian fighting groups.
They are the leftover of the groups known as armed Islamic groups that fought the brutal Algerian government.
You have to understand this to go back to 1991.
Algeria, for some unknown reason, allowed a free election.
The Islamists won the election, fair and square.
The army, the Algerian army, immediately backed by the French and the US, crushed the democratic movement, jailed all of its leaders, tortured many of them, killed the rest, and a rebellion against the government exploded.
And this thing went on for a decade until it was finally crushed.
But the scattered remnants of the rebels in Algeria have now spread over other parts of North Africa, the Sahel, the sub-Saharan region, and into West Africa.
That's one factor, and these rebels who attacked the gas plant come from that group.
Then there's the effect of Gaddafi.
By overthrowing Gaddafi, the West pulled the cork out of the jihadist bottle, and out came a lot of these jihadist groups, including the Tuaregs, who are now making mischief across the region.
Well now, so is it really right that the Tuaregs have been marginalized by these Algerian groups and these Islamist groups, or are they kind of already half-Islamist anyway, or how does that work?
The Tuaregs are not notoriously Islamist, but we should probably say Wahhabis.
They are simply desert nomads, whose traditional pasture and grazing land have encroached sedentary settlers.
I call them, they're like the Kurds of the Sahara.
They're all over the place, they spread over three or four different countries, but they have no homeland themselves, and they're migratory.
And they're not a lot of them, but they're fierce, and they love to fight.
So the Islamists, on the other hand, that have popped up in Algeria and now in Mali is a very small number, and in my view, they probably were inspired by Saudi missionary groups.
These are Wahhabi fundamentalists who are very narrow-minded and can be quite cruel in their application of Sharia law, and who love to break idols, as they've done in Timbuktu.
To great cries of anguish in the West, they demolished the tombs of some saints, which are regarded as non-kosher by Orthodox Muslims.
And the West erupted in anguish, not knowing where Timbuktu was, or who these saints were, what it was all about, but it was just danger, Islamists, we've got to do something.
Yeah, well, it's just like the Taliban blowing up the Buddhas, right?
Something to, you know, the liberals, they don't really care about people, but they care about ancient stone things.
Hey man, so, but then, you know, the Prime Minister of Britain is saying, you know, this is our generational fight, you know?
Oh no, what?
These guys know that they're marching straight into another Iraq, but they're doing it anyway, huh?
Well, I think the major motivation for this is, yesterday in Paris, I saw that President François Hollande's popularity ratings, which have been down in the low 30 percentile, were suddenly up at 76 percent.
So, by waving the French flag and sending in some troops on to Timbuktu, death to the evil Muslims, French love that kind of stuff, as do Americans and Britons, and he, so he'd scored a major political coup for himself, and he diverted the national debate away from taxes and budget cuts and unemployment to whipping the evil Saracens.
Hmm.
Well now, so how bad are you predicting this thing is going to go?
Am I overstating it when I say they're marching into another Iraq or Afghanistan here?
Oh no, I don't, Scott, I don't think it'll reach that, that level.
I could be wrong, but very small numbers of people are involved, the distances are very great, and the Islamists there and the jihadists and the Tuaregs don't have the firepower to really put up a fight.
It's open terrain, so that air power can really control issues.
So, I think it could sputter on for a long time and turn into a very expensive imbroglio.
I suppose one of the risks, of course, is that Hollande made a big issue about the danger of Islamists in Mali, and it would be a joke if it weren't so serious, because nobody can find Mali on the map.
But by proclaiming a war against the Islamists, what he's doing is attracting Islamists from all over the place.
Most of them are busy now in Syria fighting the government, but they will start moving into the region.
What he should have said is, oh, well, I'm sending French troops in to protect the ancient historic shrines in Timbuktu under the auspices of the United Nations.
But they didn't.
They've decided to make a big fight.
And just a last point on your question.
As long as it stays localized in Mali, it's not going to be a big deal.
But there are problems seething around the region, in Niger, in Central African Republic, in Chad, and Ivory Coast is in turmoil.
And most important, a whole rebellion is spreading in Nigeria that could turn very, very dangerous.
Yeah, well, and it seems like that's what they're after anyway, right?
Is trying to find a way, like General Ham was saying in his speech, what, six months ago or whatever, that he heard somewhere that somebody once from AQIM had a buddy who was in the Boko Haram who knew a guy who had once been to Somalia, whose brother had seen a dude go on a boat over to Yemen to train on the monkey bars.
And so it's all one big al-Qaeda that controls everything.
Well, that is the standard American response.
And it's understandable because this situation is very, very complex.
I struggle to understand it, to explain it, anyway.
But the problem is, you know, for the American public, these wars and military interventions are marketed to them under one brand, and that brand is al-Qaeda.
If they start talking about all these different groups, al-Qaeda and the Islamic Maghreb, Boko Haram, et cetera, et cetera, people's eyes will get bleary and nobody will get really upset about it.
Don't bother us with all these details.
But this is exactly what's happening.
So they slap the al-Qaeda brand on all these people, even though the so-called, even the so-called al-Qaeda and the Islamic Maghreb has absolutely nothing to do with the original al-Qaeda in Iraq, I mean in Afghanistan.
You know, I don't know.
What do you think the world would be like if the Americans meant what they said about just, you know, wanting to spread free markets and democracy, little d democracy, to the world?
And it wasn't all just a cynical plot to steal everybody's stuff or keep the Chinese out or whatever it is.
And it just seems to me like these kind of groups, I mean, they're going to be naturally everywhere as the world keeps turning.
You're going to have right-wing reactionary guys with rifles trying to keep it from, you know, and keep it the old way or whatever, keep it from changing.
But it just seems like we keep creating a circumstance where those people have more and more people's ear for their argument, because we make everything that they say about us true, really.
That all the change that's coming is all cynical and mean and comes with high explosives, you know?
Well, there is certainly an imperial impulse among certain circles in Washington.
Gee, I sound, when I say that, I sound like old Radio Moscow talking about imperialist ruling circles.
But in fact there is.
There are so-called national security, military-industrial complex is very much behind all these foreign interventions.
And you could see all the neocons in the last few days have been literally wetting their pants over the idea of going and attacking Islamists and killing more Al-Qaeda people in North Africa.
That's music to their ears.
The problem is that, of course, imperial overreach and mission creep.
General Ham, who was the commander of the newly formed America-Africa Command, was beating the drums, we've got to get more men in there, we've got to take them out, we've got special forces drones, the usual mixture.
But the problem is that America's bankrupt, the military can't afford any more money, and yet they're getting sucked into an area, first, that they've done nothing about, and secondly, that's spread over a vast area, and so it promises to be a real snake pit of tribes and groups and competing forces and ideologies and things like that, that really is not a core area of concern for the United States.
And can you give us about five minutes about what you think about what's going on with the Israeli elections?
Oh, I think the message from Israel is very clear.
The Israeli electorate, political system, has moved now so far to the right, the extreme right, that Bibi Netanyahu, who was formerly regarded as one of the most right, most figures in Israel, now looks almost like a moderate.
And these new groups that have come in, the new personalities, Lieberman, who represents the Russians who came in, and the new guy, Bennett, who's come, who represents a party who forward to the right of Netanyahu's Likud party, means simply that there is going to be no peace in the Middle East.
These people have no intention of ever allowing a Palestinian, viable Palestinian state.
Some of them are ethnic cleansers.
Israel's left wing, which has gotten really weak and feeble, calls these groups neo-fascists.
That's their term, not mine.
And so they're just thumbing their nose at the United States and saying, we're going to keep building and to hell with you.
And the big question is that on the far right of the Likud or these more extreme groups is the question of where are our eventual borders?
Well, as Moshe Dayan said, it's not in our current generations to make this decision.
And this means, of course, that Israel may want to have its eye on further enlargement of its territories.
We don't know, but this is certainly not a step towards a lasting peace.
I don't understand how it could possibly be that the Israeli population, is it just, well, what the hell is going on over there that Netanyahu is now the liberal?
Because he hasn't changed.
He's gotten worse.
He's moved to the right this whole election.
He was saying the other day, 67 lines.
Let me tell you about 67 lines, all right?
Never.
You know what I mean?
So it's not like he's moved to the left, but these parties to the right, the Russian party, and then this new Israeli home, is that what it's called?
Who are these kooks?
I mean, how bad are they?
They're just outright saying, steal all the West Bank.
And what about the people who live there?
What in the hell is going on?
They said they will have to leave.
You know, I've been to Hebron.
I've talked to a lot of these people.
Their standard answer is, let them go elsewhere.
They have the whole Arab world that they can move to.
Their point that they keep making, in fact, Gilles Charon used to make this years ago, was that there is a Palestinian state, and that's called Jordan.
And this is not so crazy as it sounds, because Jordan is about 60 to 65 percent Palestinian today.
And so we'll just shove the rest of these people across the border and be done with them.
Well, it looks like that's really what they're doing, right?
Not even in, well, maybe slow motion, not super slow.
I think, well, long term, the policy of the Israeli right wing has been to make life so miserable and uncomfortable for the Palestinians on the West Bank that they will move, you know, the checkpoints, the humiliations, tearing up trees, denying the water, taking away their land.
This whole process of harassment was designed to do just that, let them go elsewhere.
Seems to be working.
And the world community has been squawking about it.
We just saw a vote in the General Assembly of the United Nations calling for a Palestinian state.
But the Israelis are just thumbing their nose at them and saying we can do what we want because, you know, we've got the United States behind us, or certainly we've got the Congress behind us, and we are immune to any other kind of pressure.
Indeed.
All right.
Well, I'm sorry we got to go, but thanks very much for your time on the show as always, Eric.
I really appreciate it.
My pleasure, Scott.
Everybody, that's the great Eric Margulies.
EricMargulies.com, spelt like Margolis, because, you know, Margulies could be spelled all different ways with E's and U's and stuff, but spelt like Margolis.
EricMargolis.com.
His books are War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
Again, his piece on Mali is the spotlight today on Antiwar.com.
You can find it there.
We'll be right back after this.
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