02/20/15 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

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Darren'scoffee.com All right, you guys, welcome back.
Oh, headphones.
All right, you guys, welcome back.
It's my show, the Scott Horton Show.
I got Eric Margulies on the line.
Hey, Eric, how are you?
I'm just fine, Scott.
Bursting full of news.
Yeah, yeah, there's a ton going on.
First, let me tell them who you are.
He's a reporter.
He's a journalist.
Spent decades and decades reporting on war after war after war.
Fourteen of them, right?
That's right.
Fourteen wars.
He wrote War at the Top of the World about Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Kashmir problems and all that area there.
And then American Raj, Liberation or Domination about the American World Empire.
But, of course, folks on the Middle East mostly.
And his website is ericmargulies.com.
Spell it like Margolis, ericmargulies.com.
You can find all his articles there.
He also writes at lourockwell.com and for unz.com, that's unzunz.com.
All right.
So, yes, lots and lots of news.
I think we should start with Ukraine, unless you know something that's even more important than that.
No, there's nothing that's more important than Ukraine right now, because if this foolish and unnecessary conflict gets out of hand, we could be facing a direct clash with Russia that could lead to a nuclear exchange.
So let's start with that.
All right.
Well, that's too horrible to imagine.
So it must be impossible.
Well, you know, we're we're going through the hundredth anniversary of World War One, where we saw ostensibly bright, intelligent, responsible people just tumbling into a war that was not necessary either.
They all thought for the best of reasons.
But as we look back now, it's incredible stupidity.
And as we look at events in Ukraine, we think it's it's reckless behavior by the Western powers, by NATO, particularly by the neocon cabal in Washington.
All right.
So take us back then, as long as you're going to make such sweeping statements.
Rewind a couple of years or however long you think you need to to to give people the good context for the current crisis or.
Well, your last article I should mention here is the most optimistic thing I've read by you in quite some time.
It's it's celebratory on behalf of the new peace deal.
Well, yes, I may have been premature with that.
I don't know.
Time will tell.
I was very happy to see the ceasefire in Ukraine, which I've been advocating.
And I've been beating the war drums now for over a year on the dangers of war in Ukraine.
I don't think people really understand what kind of trouble they were getting into.
Look, two years ago.
Well, in 1991, Ukraine, which had been part of the Soviet Union for hundreds of years, broke away, declared its independence as the Soviet Union was collapsing.
And the West rushed in to provide aid to Ukraine on the premise that the best way to undermine Soviet slash Russian power is to chop away its contingent parts.
The biggest and most important one being Ukraine, because it had heavy industry, seaports and nuclear weapons.
Thank God the nuclear weapons were eventually handed over to the West.
Otherwise, we'd have today the Ukrainians and the Russians rattling their nuclear sabers at each other.
Boy, got that right.
All right.
But then so fast forward to some Bush and Obama years for us.
And, you know, explain what the current crisis is.
So Ukraine has emerged as a completely failed state.
It was its businesses, its economy run by gangsters and oligarchs, total criminal society.
Everything was done with bribes and intimidation.
It was a mess.
But as I said, the West saw an opportunity there which it couldn't turn away from to boost up Ukraine as an independent country.
So Western aid poured into Ukraine, a secret American help allowed a leader to be elected, Yushchenko, who was very pro-Western, then Yulia Tymoshenko and so on.
The point was that they couldn't establish a stable government in Kiev.
An election was held.
A pro-Russian candidate was elected in a completely fair vote.
He was a big turkey, too, corrupt and self-enriching, Yanukovych.
But he had the backing of the Russians and he was about to sign an important trade deal with the Russians when agitation in Western Ukraine, the Western Ukrainians wanted to be part of Europe and NATO and align with the United States.
The Eastern Ukrainians who speak Russian wanted to align themselves with Russia.
So here you have the basis of a civil war.
And just to come to the end of this rapidly, the US and some of its NATO allies, but particularly the US poured tens of millions of dollars into staging a coup in Kiev against the unpopular pro-Russian government.
It was killing and fighting was just a year ago.
And they finally the the pro-Russian leader fled to Russia unlamented and a pro-European government took over, which the Russians immediately accused of being dominated by by Nazi elements.
So they weren't Nazis, but they were extreme hardline right wingers who hated the Russians.
So here you have the recipe where Europe's real interest, which gives me was pushing NATO bases into Ukraine, i.e. right next door to Russia, and getting control of the Crimea with its hugely strategic naval base of Sevastopol.
Yeah.
And now so when when Putin said, hey, I'm taking Crimea because I'm not even going to chance the Americans and NATO turning Sevastopol into a NATO base.
Was that a legitimate concern of his that America really meant to bring Ukraine not just into the EU, but into NATO and meant to take over that base and kick the Russians right out of it?
I have every reason to believe so.
It would be the equivalent of the Red Chinese coming and taking Houston.
Or Long Beach, California or something.
Or Long Beach or something like that.
I mean, Americans don't understand Sevastopol, but it's one of the gateways from Russia to the rest of the world, to the Middle East, to the Mediterranean.
It was a hero city of the Soviet Union during World War Two.
Hundreds of thousands of people died fighting to defend Sevastopol from the Germans and to retake it.
So along with Leningrad, it was one of the major hero cities.
And it means that when I was there a couple of years ago, it was mostly Russian anyway.
The Russian fleet was there.
Most of the people there were Russians or many of them.
By the way, you know, the parliament asked the Russians to reabsorb them there.
They held a little plebiscite.
Was that whole thing a sham, like in the new republic?
Or was that pretty much legit?
Like you're saying, it's pretty much a Russian place anyway.
No, I think it was pretty much legit.
I mistrust Russian plebiscites and things, but in fact, it reflected the wishes of the people.
And the Russian ones, by the way, are no worse than the American run votes in Afghanistan and Egypt and places like that.
As far as even illegal aggressive invasions go, not a shot fired.
I think two shots fired in the air, warning shots, no one killed in the takeover of Crimea.
That's pretty good for evil Russian aggression that must be checked before it overwhelms us all, you know.
Well, the funny thing was that there were there were thousands of Russian troops based there before the independence or the union with Russia because they were there to defend the base.
And so this reports of Russian troops pouring into Crimea is not correct because troops were there in the beginning.
Right.
OK, now we're at the music playing and got to take this break.
But when we get back, we'll talk more about the Ukraine crisis with Eric Margulies.
We'll cover now.
We're really on a roll here.
I want to cover the last year of the war and what's really happened between the east and the west, inside Ukraine and outside and the current peace deal and probable futures and things like that.
Stay tuned.
It's the heroic Eric Margulies, author of War at the Top of the World and American Rush.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
It's my show, the Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Eric Margulies, author of American Raj, Liberation or Domination, and about 10 million articles.
The latest is Putin Heads Off a U.S.-Russia War.
About the ceasefire now.
So we're talking about the history of American intervention over there in Ukraine, leading up to this crisis.
And we're leaving off at the break there with Russia in a, oh, no, you don't.
Outright seizing Crimea in order to keep it out of the hands of the Kiev coup d'etat junta that America put in power there.
And so then what happened?
That was a year ago.
The coup was February 21st, 22nd of 2014.
So not quite, almost a year ago.
What's led to such a crisis over the last year?
I mean, obviously there's a coup, but why does that have to lead to a civil war?
The Ukrainian, pro-Western Ukrainian government that was put into power by the U.S. and by neocons in the State Department, and we have it all on tape, were tended to be people of the right wing in Ukraine, to be naturally very anti-Russian and to be wanting to get away from Russia as fast as possible.
But they, in fact, were backed by some very unpleasant far right groups.
Russians call them fascists or Nazis, who are determined, who actually hurt back to the 1940s, and there was a terrible bitterness between the Ukrainians and the Russians.
We have to remember that Stalin murdered over 6 million Ukrainians in the 1930s.
And, of course, we can understand why Ukrainians distrust and don't like the Russians to say the least.
Anyway, you have this government in power, and they found a candy manufacturer named Poroshenko, who was made president, and they have a prime minister who is also pretty well Washington's man there.
So they're moving along, trying to move Ukraine into the Western orbits.
And then what?
I mean, why the fighting?
And then in the Eastern Ukraine, pro-Russian groups, militias, volunteers, started resisting.
Their fighting began.
First of all, the government in Kyiv announced it was going to crush the rebellion.
It was too big for its bridges.
It thought that its poorly organized army could actually crush the rebellion.
It didn't.
It got itself involved in a much larger war.
The Russians began sending help across the border, not much, in small amounts, volunteers, very subtly.
But the net result of this was that the Ukrainians, the pro-Western Ukrainians, were being defeated.
And as we just saw in the last few days, this certainly was the case.
And as they were being defeated, now the U.S. was secretly funding the Ukrainians, and it was promised by April, which is just around the corner, that a battalion of U.S. troops would come into Ukraine, Eastern Ukraine, to train, supposedly, Ukrainian troops, and to get more involved in the war, and also to deliver heavy weapons.
The Republicans are beating the war drums for this.
They don't want to miss a war.
And the net result is that with U.S. troops coming into Ukraine, it would be like Russian troops going into Montreal.
Imagine that.
The Russians are not going to sit back and take this.
And this is regarded in Moscow as an egregious violation of accords between Russia and the U.S. and a warranted intrusion of Western and U.S. forces into what's essentially a Ukrainian civil war.
And now, so even though, as you said, the rebels have held their own, and it's not like they've sacked Odessa and Kiev, but they've sure kept Kiev and their conscript forces out of the east, and they have their status quo, basically.
Now they have this peace deal that was hammered out between Putin, Poroshenko, Holland, and Merkel there.
And now Merkel had come to the United States first and made sure to get a big public TV blessing from Barack Obama to go and do so.
But I wonder, does it matter that the Americans were not part of the deal, and do you think that they're trying to undermine the deal?
Because, of course, it was just a week before the peace deal.
You had, I don't know, 70 percent or more of Washington, D.C., come out in favor of this Brookings report saying it's time to arm up the Ukrainian military, not so they can win, but just so they can make matters worse.
Well, unfortunately, we are as ignorant of events and geography in Ukraine as you possibly can be.
And I challenge more than two or three congressmen to find Luhansk, Ukraine, on a map.
But, you know, we're irresponsible about wars in the States because they don't happen in our backyard.
So it's very easy to say, I will send arms to our boys over there.
And, you know, because of Obama, he's weak.
This is another Munich and all this baloney that we hear.
Obama, at least, has been trying to be cautious.
The American establishment is not.
By supplying arms and then combat troops into Ukraine, by expanding American naval operations into the Black Sea, which is Russia's underbelly, and flights over that area, we are, as we tried in Georgia a couple of years ago, we are absolutely challenging and provoking Russia.
Doesn't want a war, but we are.
And the Russians see this rightly or wrongly as our attempt to split up what's left of the Russian Federation into little feeble pieces.
So it sounds like this ceasefire is just a ceasefire.
It's not a peace deal.
And you think it'll be undermined sooner or later here?
I hope it will hold up.
It's the only sensible solution.
Over a year ago, President Putin proposed, he said, the solution to the problem is federalism in Ukraine.
Let the eastern provinces vote.
Let them have a certain amount of autonomy, linguistic autonomy, some political autonomy.
And let's keep Ukraine together.
Well, the West rejected this very what I think was a sensible solution.
And now Putin has stood up to the West in his backyard and his wing, but the very far right-wing Ukrainian national, ultranationalist groups are doing their best to sabotage the ceasefire.
The Republicans in Washington don't really want it because we're in the midst of an anti-Putin hysteria, can't do anything normal with the Russians now.
And a lot of American money is pouring into Ukraine, which is totally bankrupt.
As a fact, there's a deficit of about $40 billion.
So a lot of Ukrainians are happy.
As long as this crisis goes on, the greenbacks will keep coming.
Yeah, for the people close enough to the regime.
So, in other words, we're kind of relying on the firmness of Angela Merkel's stand that, listen, we have to knock this off, right, but she doesn't talk that way to Barack Obama, and he doesn't really talk that way to the national security state.
No, but, you know, Europe has been very cautious from the beginning, and rightfully so, because if a war occurs, it's going to be on their territory, not ours.
It's the same reason that Europe was so opposed to George Bush's attack on Iraq.
They said, you're going to open a Pandora's box, and who knows what's going to come flooding out, but it won't be good.
Well, the same thing is happening now with Ukraine.
And I would add to this, as I wrote a couple of weeks ago, wait a minute, Washington, D.C., you're going to open up a direct head-on conflict with the Russians, the micronuclear, at a time when you're expanding war across the Middle East and are sure to get sucked into an endless conflict there, and, number three, as you are pivoting to Asia, and this is not just rhetoric.
The Pentagon is getting ready to fight a war against China, a big war, and so the U.S. is waging like a three-front conflict at the same time.
It is beyond foolish.
It is absolutely unimaginable.
All right, Shell, that's the great Eric Margulies.
EricMargulies.com, spell it like Margolis.
EricMargulies.com, thanks so much for your time again.
Thank you, Scott.
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