12/29/15 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Hey, man, check it out on antiwar.com today.
Dan Sanchez has this great article, Happy 20th, antiwar.com, where he says nice things about Justin and myself and antiwar.com.
It's a really nice little piece there, the great Dan Sanchez, our newest regular writer.
By the way, I should have mentioned that Sheldon Richman is now a regular columnist at antiwar.com as well, which is very important to me.
Now, on to who should have been our guest on the show yesterday before it exploded, but our first guest on the show today, our good friend Eric Margulies, writing at ericmargulies.com, bluerockwell.com, and unz.com, U-N-Z.
How are you doing, Eric?
Hello, great, Scott.
Just fine and ready to roll.
All right, good deal.
You wrote this great thing.
First, let me tell them that you wrote American Raj.
That's the most recent one.
American Raj, liberation or domination before that war at the top of the world.
This guy, you guys all know this guy.
He's covered 14 plus wars and all those stupid things, pretty much all of them, that your government did.
He was there saying, no, don't do that, and then they didn't listen, and now here we are.
That could go for any of the wars we've fought at least in the last 15 years.
The thing of it is, the thing that you're warning them about now is not just the situation with Russia, but the media and their coverage of Russia.
This is the thing that's really been bothering me more than the threat of the new Cold War even is all the lies and deceit and the ridiculous kind of nature of the narrative that's constructed by the U.S. government and their hangers-on.
We've seen a lot of BS in the last 15 years, but to me, this is second only to the way they buffaloed everybody into Iraq in 2002 and 2003 with the so-called weapons of mass destruction, where this level of unanimity about complete and total nonsense, it's really something amazing to behold, and especially when we're talking about the most important issue, not even as a matter of opinion, but as a matter of just fact.
The most important issue on the face of the earth, the relationship between the U.S. government and the Russian government, both armed to the teeth with H-bombs, still 25 years after the end of the Cold War.
This is what your article is about, is not just the Cold War and the terrible increase in tensions between the U.S. and Russia, but the New York Times narrative.
How dare they, Eric?
Well, you know, unfortunately, too many people in the U.S. get their source information from either the New York Times or the Washington Post, which is like reading the same publication, or from Fox News, and they're all beating the war drums there, and there are these civilians who have never seen a war, who have no concept of what the nuclear confrontation is like, and yet are saying, well, we're going to go and make the desert glow, and we're going to go carpet bomb them in Syria, and don't dare the Russians put up an airplane or we'll shoot them down.
This kind of bellicose nonsense, it was the same kind of stuff we heard in August, it was heard in August 1914, when crowds in Paris and Berlin yelled, you know, Paris yelled on to Berlin, and Berlin yelled on to Paris, and in fact they got a bloodbath, thank God at least nobody then had nuclear weapons.
Is this how it was in the Cold War, too, where, okay, look, there is a Soviet Union, and it's run by some horrible bastards, but hey, let's not get carried away, you know, that's kind of what this reminds me of, is growing up, what I heard about kind of the McCarthy era narrative, where instead of, eh, maybe a couple million former communists in America, there are, no, millions and millions, and they run the whole government, and they're ready to overthrow the Constitution and subjugate us all under the rule of Moscow.
Well now, so-called terrorism has replaced the terrors of communism, but we have a very loud and misinformed commentariat that's driving the news and politics these days, and listening to the Republican candidates for president is horrifying, it's hair-raising.
You know, I mention in my column about, in 1983, the U.S. had, Ronald Reagan had been fulminating against Moscow, an evil empire, and, you know, a threat to Western civilization, etc.
The Soviets listened to all this baloney, and they became convinced that the U.S. was planning to attack the Soviet Union, and then along came an ill-conceived NATO exercise called Able Archer, that was a headquarters exercise, didn't involve troops, but the Soviets misread it, and they believed that NATO was now gearing up to assault the Soviet Union.
The Soviet missile forces went on alert, and then came a report that U.S. missiles were on the way for Russia, and there was up to a couple of Soviet officers in the PVO Strani, the Soviet air defense forces, to make a decision whether to inaugurate a nuclear war, or just to dismiss the attack reports.
Thank God they had the courage and brains to stand down the alert and say, no, this is a glitch, because if they hadn't, we would have had nuclear war, and that would have been the end of our poor old planet.
Amazing.
I think back on that time, too, where I was just a little kid and thinking, wow, all this brinksmanship and all the tough guy talk and whatever, this seems pretty dangerous, and I remember my dad reassuring me that, yeah, nukes are pretty scary and all that, but nobody on either side wants war, and we got that going for us, that nobody really wants to have this confrontation, they have to coexist, and so that is how it is, but what you're saying is, right at that same time, while they didn't want war, they were so reckless, they almost killed us all.
That's right, and back then, the battle lines were very carefully drawn and delineated and there was a rule that the two power blocks must never clash directly, so they could fight little proxy wars in places like Angola or South Africa or Mozambique, but not in the Fulda Gap in northern Germany, so there was caution, particularly amongst the military men.
The Curtis LeMay crowd of bomb maniacs had been retired, there was a sober realization of the dangers, but today, we listen to our Republican candidates beating the war drums and making outrageous statements, and we don't think how the rest of the world is seeing this.
People are really worried that the United States is going deep into some kind of militarist extreme right-wing trend, and that whoever takes wins as Republican, if he becomes president, we could be looking really at the worst threat of war we've seen since the Abel Archer incident.
You know, again, back to Iraq in 2002 and 2003, half the population of America knew better, right?
It was about 50-50 a month or so before the invasion, but virtually none of that 50% that knew better lived in Washington, D.C.
There, every genius idiot told each other that, yeah, of course, we all know this is true, we all agree about this, and we all agree about the necessity of this, and we all agree about what the facts are, and even though none of them knew a damn thing that would really say that, yes, they have weapons of mass destruction there, everybody was just kind of going along with what everybody else thinks, and it's kind of impossible that all these people are that wrong.
They all thought to themselves, and I'm talking about the cast of MSNBC and every other cable news channel and all the major newspapers and all the, you know, most influential Sunday morning news program hosts and all these kind of people, all completely bought in to the ridiculous consensus that was so easy for just regular lay hippies or anyone else to debunk at the time, and that's the same thing it seems like here with Russia, where, hey, all the cool kids, all the jocks and cheerleaders all know that it's demonized Russia time, and nobody's even interested in what the facts are.
They're only interested in racing to be part of the group that's pushing the fake narrative and making their money and their fame in the process.
And now we've got to take a break.
One second, y'all.
More with the great Eric Margulies right after this.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back.
It's my show, Scott Horton Show.
See how I timed that there?
Pretty bad, huh?
Okay.
Yeah, I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with the great Eric Margulies, and I'm sorry for talking so much, Eric, but I think I'm kind of on to something there with my idea that nobody in D.C. really knows a damn thing about Russia other than what they think they're supposed to believe about them.
And I got to say, at least on Space, sounds right that Vladimir Putin is a strong man.
And what he would like to do is be even stronger.
And so, therefore, what America must do is contain him.
And so my question for you is just how strong of a man is Vladimir Putin?
Well, he is no doubt he's a very strong man.
He's brought up in the KGB in their first chief directorate, which is foreign intelligence.
He wasn't a thug.
He was a sophisticated counterintelligence officer.
He's a very hard man.
But he has a flair for politics.
He's widely admired in Europe by the right, no doubt about it.
If Americans knew more, he'd be more admired in the United States, too.
But he really thinks he's defending Russia from being torn apart by the United States and its allies in Europe.
And Putin's popularity is well over 82 percent in the polls.
That's why in my writing, I mentioned some idiotic female professor in Columbia who claimed that he's picking a fight with the West to enhance his popularity rating.
He doesn't have to.
Putin is probably the most popular leader in the Western world.
All right.
Well, so what's with all the propaganda?
I mean, is he well, for example, obviously, we all know the history.
I don't want to be like patronizing the audience.
They all know about NATO expansion.
They know about the coup in Ukraine in 2014 and all that.
But the American spin on that is, yeah, but we have to do that.
Otherwise, Putin would conquer the Baltics.
He'd conquer Ukraine.
He'd march in through the Folded Gap and kill us all.
Well, that's right.
And President Putin, we don't call him president anymore in the U.S.
That's we just call him by his last name, derogatory.
Yeah, even even our president calls him Putin.
I know it's almost like they're going to spit after saying and citing the name of the devil.
It's absurd.
But there is a pro-war party in the U.S.
There are a number of pro-war factions that now see Russia as the main threat to American global domination.
And certainly Russia is Russia is a resistor.
So is China.
And Russia is supporting some small countries like Iran and Syria that won't roll over and play dead when Washington says so.
Yes, Russia is is considered a threat.
But really, I don't think in the top echelons of Washington, anyone believes that Russia is about to reinvade Western Europe or even Eastern Europe.
Right.
I mean, that's the thing is, you know, to what degree do they know their line or does it even matter that they even care what's true when you know, and this goes back to the Abel Archer thing.
I would have thought that someone in the Reagan administration would have, you know, elbowed and whispered to a Russian official at some point that, like, you know, we're just bullshitting here, selling weapons and making money for our friends and scaring the hell out of people to enhance our own power.
And we're not really going to have a nuclear war.
Guys, we're just playing the game.
Right.
But geez, they didn't have that kind of understanding.
Huh.
They were just hoping that the Russians understood.
It seems like that's kind of what they're doing now is, you know, the priority is selling Lockheed products to the Pentagon, which makes sense if you're a Lockheed product salesman or if you're a Pentagon Lockheed product procurer.
But what about the rest of us and the danger that they're putting us in?
Nobody seems to be serving as a check on that.
No, and worse, there are there are idiots in Washington like Kenneth Pollack, who's I just saw on TV the other night sending war, great alarms about all the Russians are coming, the Russians are coming.
He was the same fool who was out there in 2003 beating the drums about Iraqi nuclear weapons, threatening our lives and your little children are going to be vaporized.
So and yet this idiot and similar ones are now dominant in the media.
Critics of the war said this is crazy.
There are no weapons of mass destruction or have now been sidelined or marginalized.
I speak myself to from some of the big network TV, and it's the same old story.
You know, I was reading the other day that Putin was promising to help prop up the government in Kabul in the face of the Taliban.
And I wondered if maybe American Saudi are going to start our thought of what you had said on the show previously.
It looks like Saudi sending ISIS to marginalize to fight the Taliban and obviously eventually the coalition government in Kabul as well.
And I wonder if it's really that something we're going straight back to the 1980s where Obama's Ronald Reagan starts back in Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan against the Russians again.
Well, you know, I think the I was there in the 80s and with the Mujahideen fighting against the Soviets and the CIA provided the money and some of the transportation and logistics.
But it was the Pakistani intelligence service, ISI, that really ran that war.
And it should not be compared to what's going on today with ISIS.
There is no doubt, as you say, Scott, a temptation to use ISIS or ISIL, whatever they would call them, against the against the Taliban, because fighting fire with fire, they say.
The Afghan puppet government in Kabul that we're backing, like the puppet government in Baghdad, is completely useless.
And it's armed forces have no loyalty to the government or they're just mercenaries trying to avoid getting shot, live long enough to get paid.
So, yes, there is a temptation to use ISIS.
And it fits neatly into this point that we've been dealing with ISIS with kid gloves.
And most of the attacks against them have been political theater designed to impress foreigners.
Hey, by the way, I doubt you heard the interview, but did you read Seymour Hersh's new one about the Pentagon sort of secretly helping Assad all this time?
I did with the greatest of interest.
You know, I have great respect for Hersh.
He's the most credible journalist and one that we should all look up to.
And he can't be bought off or intimidated off.
Official Washington lives in terror of Seymour Hersh.
But his point was right that the high ranking elements of the Pentagon have been passing intelligence information via allies, Germany, Israel, Jord Jord Jord to Syrian government because they want they don't think that the government should be overthrown in Syria.
They think the Assad regime is the natural ally of the United States.
And God help us if it's overthrown because with our help, because Syria will turn into a massive bloodbath.
Yeah, well, you know, it's funny the way that he says in there, though, that, well, no, the administration didn't have to know about it.
And that's kind of how it works.
These bureaucracies really kind of do their own thing.
In this case, I think, you know, any sane man would side with the Pentagon.
I don't know really about working with Assad, but certainly opposing the effort to overthrow him to the benefit of Al-Nusra and or the Islamic State, for crying out loud.
But, you know, I wonder about the infighting inside the administration over that.
How did you know how does the civilian part of the government respond to insubordination when it's insubordination against treason?
You know, what a funny episode.
That's the good question of the German officers who wanted to overthrow Hitler, but they'd sworn a vow to uphold the government.
And that is the problem.
But, you know, there is the Pentagon.
We have to think the Pentagon is really the fourth branch of government.
It's become that way.
And in many ways, it conducts its own foreign policy and its own foreign aid program.
And arms programs and its own intelligence programs to the Defense Intelligence Agency.
So it's it's very independent, just the way the Navy was always quite independent, got its own way.
And so the Pentagon is doing is right.
It's disgusted with the Obama White House.
And they're not trying to start a war.
They're trying to avoid one.
And they're put in a very difficult position.
They shouldn't be doing it.
But on the other hand, it's perhaps a good thing they are.
Yeah, it's it's always like to highlight the irony here, not, you know, in support of the Pentagon, but just to show how often it really seems to be that it's the generals who tell the politicians, no, we cannot do this.
Right.
Like when it comes to bombing Iran, it was Admiral Fallon in 2007 that said over my dead body.
Are we doing this?
No way.
And and, you know, Syria, 2013, when Obama almost bombed Assad, then it was the Pentagon.
It was the chairman.
Joint Chiefs of Staff came out through the president right under the bus.
And I don't know why we got to do this now on TV.
And so, oh, there goes support from the military publicly, you know.
And and of course, they they steamroll them into the Afghan surge.
So I don't want to, like, spend too too much on their behalf.
But but when it's the civilians going way off and it's the standing army that's holding them back, I mean, that's really something else.
Well, it is.
And I've got great admiration for a lot of our senior officers in the Pentagon.
They did the right thing as as American patriots, American soldiers.
And you have to understand the thinking of the generals there.
They are disgusted by these these liberal warrior, liberal women like Susan Powers at the U.N. and Rice in the White House who are formulating this policy about which they know and understand nothing.
And they're throwing the lives away of the professional soldiers who have to go and fight in these messes that these airy headed civilian advisors have created.
We saw the same thing back in Vietnam with Robert McNamara and his whiz kids.
It's a curse that we have to live with.
Yeah, absolutely.
All right.
Well, at least we've got you to read.
So we know what the truth is in the face of the onslaught of propaganda.
Y'all make sure and bookmark UNZ.com, the great Eric Margulies and our next guest, Patrick Coburn, writes there as well.
UNZ.com, U-N-Z, UNZ.com for the great Eric Margulies.
This one is called Retro Cold War Guff from The New York Times.
Really appreciate it, as always.
Cheers, Scott.
Hey, all Scott here.
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