02/18/13 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
My website is scotthorton.org.
Keep all my interview archives for you there, more than 2,700 of them going back to 2003.
And our first guest on the show today is the great Eric Margulies, ericmargulies.com, spell it like Margolis, you know, to get the spelling right there.
There's a few different ways to spell Margulies, it turns out.
He's the author of the books War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination, and spent decades reporting across the Middle East and Asia and Africa and everywhere else.
And he's got this one here at the American Conservative Magazine.
That's theamericanconservative.com, from Sarajevo to the Senkakus, if I said that right, which I probably didn't.
Welcome back to the show.
Eric, how are you?
I am happy to be back with you, Scott, as usual.
Well, good, I'm very happy to have you here.
So, man, is it really right, because this article scared me, it made me think that you think that there's some kind of percentage likelihood, I don't know if you want to quantify it for us, that there could be a world war starting over some crappy little islands, a dispute between Japan and China over some crappy little islands that no American, including me, could even find on a map.
Well, yes, that is the risk.
It's not an overwhelming risk by any means, but it's there.
And I wrote about it to try and bring Americans' attention to the fact that they could get themselves into an ugly and dangerous dispute there in the Pacific, over a place no one knows about, as you said, which is very much almost the words of, I think it was Lord Gray, the British foreign minister, when the murder of Archduke Ferdinand took place in Sarajevo in August 1914, the event that triggered World War I.
Nobody could find Sarajevo on a map, nobody knew where Bazaar Herzegovina was, but it set this awful machine into motion that nobody could stop.
So what we're seeing here is a confrontation between Japan and China over these little bits of rock in the East China Sea.
That may trigger off a war if people aren't careful.
Okay, now, I'd like for you to explain, you know, who owns the islands now and how long they have and who's got the proper claim to them and all that kind of thing, but what about, first of all, what about just the idea that, hey, China has H-bombs, therefore work it out, guys, and how in the hell could anybody on either side think that they're going to resolve this with force?
Even for a minute.
Well, people get irrational nationalist forces like sex, anesthetize the brain, and we're not looking at a pre-planned war, but we're looking at a series of escalating military events that could force the two sides into war over these little barren bits of rock that are uninhabited except for a few goats that are off the coast of China, but have been ruled by Japan since, if my memory is correct, 1894, when it defeated China in war.
It was the first Russo-Chino-Japanese war.
Japan defeated China to everyone's surprise, and as one of the fruits of victory, Japan took Korea and, as well, the Senkaku Islands.
So, I mean, I guess that's not very long ago, particularly to the Chinese way of looking at things, and so it makes sense why there would be a dispute here, but it just seems like a lot of tough talk from especially the Japanese who can't back it up, other than getting you and I into a war to back them up.
Well, the danger here is that, yes, you're quite right, nuclear-armed China could browbeat Japan probably out of the islands.
The islands are fairly close to China, and they're relatively far from Japan, so militarily it's a very difficult situation for Japan, and the Japanese armed forces, they're known officially as the self-defense forces, because Japan's constitution says Japan is not allowed to have armed forces, so they get around it by calling themselves defense forces, but these forces were designed and configured and equipped to fight a Soviet amphibious invasion of Japan during the Cold War.
They're not particularly well-equipped to fight at long range from the coast of Japan, and they weren't supposed to ever do this again after World War II, but they're faced with it, and the real danger here, Scott, is that, according to the U.S.
-Japan Mutual Defense Treaty, the keystone of American geopolitical architecture in that part of the world, that the United States has accepted officially that the Senkakus are part of Japan, and has said under the treaty that it will defend these islands against any attack, and there's the danger, because if gunfire erupts, and it almost did some weeks ago, the U.S. is likely to get dragged into the crisis.
Well, now, I'd like to think that some ships could shoot at each other without their governments completely flipping out and escalating the thing.
There were skirmishes between American and Soviet boats and or planes from time to time, right?
Or am I just thinking a top gun?
There were some American intruding aircraft that were shot down over the Soviet Union, but the Soviets and the Americans worked out a quite elaborate procedure for heading off crises, and hotlines, and rules of engagement, things like that, so that we fortunately didn't see too many really dangerous clashes at sea or at the area.
They weren't allowed to get out of hand.
However, there don't seem to be any of these structures between China and Japan, nor are there between India and Pakistan, for that matter, too.
And the Chinese military is sealing its oaths.
You've just had a change of leadership in China.
Another danger here is that the new Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, has formed a committee, an action group, to deal with the Senkaku issue, and he sits on top of that group.
So this means that anything, you know, any collision of ships or some shooting or something like that, is going to go right to the top and put him on the spot to do something.
Whereas if he wasn't in the direct line of command for this issue, he could then downplay any issue and say, well, it was a fortunate accident, it was a rogue commander, it was this or it was that.
Now the buck stops, or the UN stops on his desk, and escalates anything into a major crisis.
Well, at least the idealistic and peace-loving Americans are playing a role in tamping this whole thing down, right?
Well, the Chinese, some Chinese sources are claiming that the US is behind Japan in fueling this issue as a way of destabilizing China and throwing it on the defensive and as part of America's overall so-called famous pivot to Asia.
In other words, confronting China, increasingly confronting China in the South China Sea area.
You know, as a historian, I've got to tell you, this has eerie, eerie reminiscences of the pre-World War I era, where Germany and Britain were locked in an increasingly tense commercial and military confrontation, also taking place in maritime areas.
Yeah.
Well, and you know, the thing of it is, and here's what flipped me out about this, because I've been hearing about this dispute for a while now and reading a little bit here and there and talked to a guest or two about it.
In your article, it just really rang true to me that this really could break out into a war, if only just for the irony of having American armies marching through the deserts of the Middle East and all of the people who believe in prophecies predicting that this is theirs coming true finally now and all this, you know, Christian Zionist apocalyptic stuff.
And then, but meanwhile, the nuclear war breaks out over some stupid islands between Japan and China, something like that.
It just sounds like the way humanity could go out to me, you know?
Well, you know, I've studied and covered a lot of wars and I've seen countries stumble, blunder into wars, things get out of hand.
Now, the Chinese are playing with fire too, because what I, in my view, what they're trying to do is they're trying to humble the Japanese.
This is a well-known Chinese procedure.
The Emperor, the Red Emperor in Beijing, you know, thunders and you come, you vassal states come and kowtow to the Emperor and grovel and look subservient.
And the Chinese are really trying to make the Japanese lose face.
There's a lot of simmering hostility from World War II between these two countries that's still there.
And China is showing spasms of very dangerous nationalism, you know, and this whole idea how it was raped and plundered by the Western powers, which it certainly was, is constantly being revived.
The most recent raper and pillager was Japan.
And the Chinese are really, I think, intent on making Asians see who's the big dog on the block and making the Japanese get down and kowtow.
It's a dangerous stuff, but it is certainly happening and it's provoking right-wing nationalist sentiment and response in Japan.
Okay, now, so this guy, Justin Logan at Cato, wrote a thing about America's policy and criticizing it and saying, well, listen, if we have to work so hard to contain the rise of China, if their newfound wealth and power is such a threat, then how come we trade with them?
That's kind of one or the other sort of a thing here.
It's American trade more than anything else is what's helping to make China rich.
And so guess what?
Now they can afford some new battleships.
So now you're going to cry about their battleships.
But it's our government's policy and it seems at odds with itself.
Well, commercial greed has certainly taken precedence over military prudence in the sense that it was inevitable that China would regain its paramount power that it had up until the 1800s.
It's simply coming back.
The idea of containing China or keeping it militarily weak just is not applicable anymore, particularly because China can make all its own military equipment now, so it doesn't need anybody.
The idea that the United States is going to somehow contain China inside of China is not eventually going to work, because China, I've been writing this for years, I said the most important American foreign policy issue in that area is how to gracefully retreat from the shores of Asia and allow China to become a dominant regional power in its own sphere of influence.
I'm a great 19th century believer in spheres of influence, and China is too big a power to try and bottle up, particularly because what China does is right on its own front doorstep.
Any action America has to take is across the entire breadth of the Pacific Ocean.
Just not going to work, and we can't afford it on top of that.
Well, you know, Andrew Bacevich, former Colonel Bacevich, and obvious, I think most people are familiar, critic of American empire, fellow writer for the American Conservative, when I asked him one time about, well, what about a Ron Paulian foreign policy that just says pack up all the bases and bring them all home?
What do you think about that?
He said, well, okay, I'm for bringing them home from Europe and the Middle East, where it doesn't make sense, but I think we've got to keep them in Korea and Japan and whatever to tamp down tension between China and Japan.
Now, without us there, I guess, you know, tripling Japan's power or whatever, serving as their nuclear auxiliary, then things would be worse.
There is validity to that argument.
Korea has really been a stabilizing force in North Asia, but one also has to ask, well, how long is this going to go on?
I mean, the Korean War ended in what, 1953, and American troops have been there ever since.
They've become Imperial Roman Legions, camped on the Rhine, and there is a school of thought in South Korea and in Germany that both of these countries really remain occupied by the United States military power, as long as it maintains troops and bases there, and that these governments pretty well must kowtow or go along with U.S. foreign policy, which they always do, and particularly so in Japan, which still really strongly has the mentality of a defeated nation.
If the U.S. withdrew its troops, it might cause a problem in Japan, because Japan will then be naked, facing two enemies who hate the Japanese, China and Korea, and maybe a united Korea down the line.
I've written for a long time that Japan will eventually be forced to adopt nuclear weapons.
It can't be there without any kind of defense, and my understanding is that Japan could produce a nuclear weapon in 90 days, it has all the technology and components there, and South Korea could probably do it in six months.
These countries will have to go nuclear, and it will heighten tensions if the U.S. withdraws.
Now, you talked about the possibility of figuring out a way to withdraw gracefully.
Can you imagine a grand bargain where we could really work out a thing where not only do we withdraw, but we really do our very best to reduce tensions all the way around on our way out?
Well, yes, it can be done.
It's going to require very deft diplomacy.
It will require, certainly in Korea, the U.S. to issue a non-aggression statement or make a treaty with North Korea, so that the North Koreans don't think they're about to be invaded and stop building nuclear weapons to protect themselves.
For China, we're going to have to make a sphere of influence deal with China.
In other words, look, the U.S. will still be the main power in Japan, but you guys can get Burma, and you can dominate the whole China Sea, and so on and so forth.
That's quite an achievable program.
Too bad we don't have a Bismarck in the State Department, but we can still hope that creative diplomacy will be able to handle this issue.
Wait, who should we give Burma to?
Well, in making a sphere of influence agreement with China, you would agree that Burma would fall under, into the orbit of China.
We did this with the Soviet Union before.
We'd have to give the Chinese influence.
The Chinese don't want to occupy these countries, at least that's not historic Chinese policy, but what they want is subservient countries around its border who pretty follow orders coming from Beijing.
You know, this is the way the U.S. has acted in Central America and in Latin America for many years.
You know, you guys behave or else.
And it's not the end of the world if this happens, but we've got to make some kind of deal with China eventually, because America's economy is going downhill, it runs on money borrowed from China and Japan in equal measures, and the Chinese are taking all the interest they earn and the money they make shipping goods to Walmart to go up and buy industries and resources around the world, while we are pouring our money, borrowed money, down the black holes called military spending and Afghanistan.
And I can tell you that there's soon going to be other little Afghanistans happening because nobody can control the Pentagon budget.
Yeah.
Well, and I want to get to that in just one second, well, I don't know if we'll have time to talk about AFRICOM.
I want to ask a little bit about AFRICOM, but first I was hoping that you could comment on the terrorist attacks against the Hazaras in Pakistan.
Who are the Hazaras?
I only know them as part of the American-backed alliance in Kabul.
Quite right.
The Hazaras are a minority people found in western Afghanistan and in Pakistan.
They are of Central Asian origin.
They are a people of Mongol blood.
They have very distinctive Asian features, high cheekbones, narrow eyes.
And they were herders and nomads.
They are Shia Muslims, and as such, during the long war in Afghanistan, they were used by Iran to advance its interests in the region, earning them the hatred of the Sunni Afghan Pashtun Mujahideen.
In Pakistan, they're also regarded as an alien force, and Sunnis, particularly fanatical Sunnis, consider the Shia to be dangerous heretics, and there have been these awful attacks against Shias that have killed, I don't know, 200 have been killed just recently, a very destabilizing element, but the government of Pakistan and the government in Afghanistan is powerless to stop it.
Jeez, what do you expect is going to happen?
Are they going to have to run to Hazara-protected parts of Afghanistan, or are they going to fight it out?
Probably.
It certainly invites Iranian intervention to protect their fellow Shia Muslims.
It's a simmering danger.
It's just happening, these bombings in Balochistan, which is another very explosive region of Pakistan.
We've already talked about it in the past.
I don't think it's the most important issue confronting the area, but it's just a sign of growing instability, and it shows how little of this region is controlled by the governments in either Kabul or Islamabad.
Or D.C.
Or D.C.
All right, now, so, well, by the way, as long as we're sort of kind of talking about it, the Afghan war, when they say they're leaving by the end of 2014, but they also kind of mean that they're leaving by the end of 2024, what's Texan to make of all that?
The powers that be in Washington, the military, industrial, the imperial powers that want to be, what the Soviets used to call the capitalist ruling circles, whatever you want to call them, they are, they don't want out of Afghanistan.
And they're doing it reluctantly, and Obama is kind of pretending he's leaving or trying to force him.
I don't know what the exact story is.
But the bottom line is that the U.S. military complex is determined not to fully withdraw and to leave about maybe 24,000 to 40,000 troops in Afghanistan.
It's going to be very difficult because there are no American bases nearby, unless they get more in Pakistan, that will be able to support this war easily.
But they're not going to give up, and they're trying desperately to cobble together some kind of puppet army with no more success, I might add, than the Soviets had.
And they want to keep their grips on it.
All this thing you hear about training missions is really our modern talk, code talk, for native troops led by white officers, who used to be known as the British Empire.
And that's what they're doing.
The military-industrial complex doesn't want to leave Afghanistan.
And who can blame them?
The greatest military power in the history of the earth suddenly has been beaten, whipped by a bunch of hillbillies from the mountains of Afghanistan with only small arms and lots of courage.
And I've been with them in the field fighting.
I know these people.
They're fierce warriors, and they have defeated the United States.
And admitting defeat is one of the most difficult political maneuvers known to man.
Well, basically, as long as they want to stay, it doesn't seem like, as far as I know, there could be a big disaster, you know, offensive or something like that.
But it seems like as long as they want to keep 10 or 20 or 40,000 troops there, whatever, they could keep them there indefinitely until the dollar breaks and the Taliban isn't going to be able to breach their ring of fire.
You know, Lord knows they got plenty of helicopters and howitzers and whatever the hell.
But on the other hand, it seems like the day after they leave, Karzai's goose is cooked, Kabul's going to fall, or at least, you know, within a year or whatever, that'll be the end of the Northern Alliance and the Taliban will rule the whole place again, no?
Not as you said, not so quickly, because the U.S. will be able to defend Kabul, it will leave a garrison there, the way the British did during the Afghan wars in the 1800s.
And the U.S. airpower will still operate from Bagram Air Base and maybe some in Central Asia.
So the Taliban will consolidate its hold on the countryside, but the cities will be besieged and the roads will be completely controlled by Taliban and the night will belong to Taliban.
And Karzai's government will probably fall, maybe not as quickly as people think.
He's repositioning himself as a nationalist rather than as one of the CIA's boys who was parachuted in there.
And I wouldn't write him off entirely, just the way after the Soviets withdrew in 1989, everybody thought the Najibullah government, Soviet-run government, was going to fall immediately, and it didn't.
It took about three years, as I recall, for that government to fall.
So there's a lot of confusion still ahead, but we're not going to see, as in the case in Iraq, where the U.S. has put a responsive government, shall we call it, a power in Baghdad, a Shia government in power, and then it withdrew its troops.
But it just took them down the road to Kuwait, where they're maintaining about 25,000 troops in Kuwait and lots of military bases up and down the Gulf.
So if they have to reintervene in Iraq at any point to support the Maliki government, it could do so easily.
It's going to be much more difficult in Afghanistan, because there aren't any American forces or bases close by.
All right.
Well, I'm sorry we've got to leave it at that.
I've got a hundred more questions for you, but I've got to go.
Thanks so much for your time, as always, Eric.
Cheers, Scott.
Everybody, that's the great Eric Margulies.
His website is ericmargulies.com, and his books are War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
You can find what he writes at lourockwell.com.
And this one is at theamericanconservative.com.
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