03/14/16 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

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Hey, guys, welcome back.
Yeah, we got the greats on the show today, man.
Next up is our friend Eric Margulies.
He's the author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination?
And he writes at ericmargulies.com.
Spell it like Margolis, ericmargulies.com.
And, of course, he writes at lourockwell.com and at unz.com.
And that's the one I want to talk about is this.
Look Before You Leap in North Korea, a very important article by Eric Margulies at unz.com.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Eric?
I'm fine.
Glad to be back with you, as always.
Very happy to have you here.
Big news.
Not just blah, blah, same old bluster, but military exercises going on in South Korea.
Please tell us all about it.
Well, right now there are 15,000, maybe 20,000 U.S. troops, most of whom are based in South Korea, and 300,000 South Korean Army and Air Force personnel, Navy personnel, staging war games.
But these war games are right on the border, right next to North Korea.
There are amphibious landings, air assaults, all kinds of stuff.
All clearly aimed at mimicking a U.S.-South Korean invasion of North Korea.
This happens every year.
The U.S. media plays it up as innocent military training programs, but these are very war-like procedure, and as always, it drives the North Koreans crazy.
All right.
Now, assuming the premise of the policy, that, well, we've got to keep our troops there and they've got to be prepared for this, is there anything wrong with them training?
I mean, don't they have to?
Well, this is a very militant form of training.
It's training right next to North Korea.
And all at once, everybody all together now kind of thing, huh?
With the U.S.
7th Fleet offshore and U.S. units in Okinawa and Japan at high readiness, it's clearly, it appears to be war preparation.
I have to remember that in 1973, when the Egyptian army managed to cross the Suez Canal and drive through Israeli fortifications defending the Sinai, they did it because they kept doing these military maneuvers, and they'd bring the troops right up to the border, and then the Egyptians would withdraw.
And they did it so many times that the Israelis said, ah, it's just another exercise.
Well, one day it wasn't.
It was an actual invasion that caught the Israelis flat-footed.
So in other words, certainly from the North Korean point of view, this is not just another, you know, something.
They are getting ready.
I remember reading, I guess it would have been Woodward's book, The Commanders, about the First Gulf War and the Panama War, where he talked about that too, where it was they changed the exercises, and then, and guess what?
I mean, they changed them to the exact maneuvers they would be doing in a couple of months when they invade the country they're based in.
That's right, and the North Koreans have, there's been so much vitiperation against them, so many attacks, regime change calls, all this kind of stuff, and the Republicans fulminating that Kim, baby Kim, Kim Jong-un, has got to feel increasingly nervous.
He's surrounded by hostile military forces.
There are, at any time, a good 20 plots going on to overthrow his government, most of them staged by the South Koreans and the U.S.
China has gotten increasingly irritated with Kim, and Kim is under, you know, domestic pressures to keep his people under control and also to prevent a palace coup, so there's a lot of tension.
He must be very nervous.
Yeah, so you say the CIA's got operations, or who's trying to overthrow him with American backing inside the North?
The CIA, but I think...
I mean, 20 at any given time.
I immediately thought, well, you mean inside the military, the Communist Party, but you're talking about people working for the U.S. or the South?
That's right.
That's right.
Most of his activity is done by the South Korean intelligence agency, which is very, very hard line, very right wing, and is way ahead of the rest of South Korea in its animosity towards North Korea.
So, I mean, 20 plots going on, spies, agencies, defectors, this kind of thing, always plant pressure.
Well, so now...
Oh, man, I just had a great question and it completely escaped my brain there.
Well, I guess, so let's talk about their nukes until I think of what my great question was going to be.
They got some.
They keep testing them.
They claim that they can miniaturize them at this point, meaning, I guess, plutonium implosion bombs that they could put on the tip of a missile.
How good are their missiles?
Not very good.
Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't.
Like their nukes.
Like their nukes.
Ours in the U.S. are no great shakes either.
They sometimes misfire.
But by and large, North Korea's missile force is primitive.
They're all sort of jumped up, scud missiles.
Many are liquid fuel, hence very vulnerable.
They have to be fueled on the launching pads.
And the North Koreans would be very, very reluctant to fire any number of these missiles, even with nuclear warheads, because it may not work.
And they will certainly invite the vaporization of North Korea by U.S. forces.
You know, I realized why I forgot my question before.
It's because it wasn't a great one.
It was completely stupid.
I was going to say, yeah, but haven't you ever heard of Munich?
These people only understand one thing, force.
And so what are you suggesting we do?
You coward, negotiate?
Well, that's the standard neocon response.
But the point of the matter is that North Korea has for decades sought recognition by the United States.
It sought a non-aggression pact.
Please stop trying to overthrow us.
Please stop your crushing economic embargo of North Korea and your attempts to destabilize and subvert the country.
This is what North Korea is asking for.
The U.S. will not give this and keeps turning the screws on North Korea.
And the South Koreans are divided.
Half of the South Koreans who are primary South Korean Christians are very, very anti-North Korean.
They don't want any deals with them.
The other half, the more Buddhist South Koreans, favor some kind of reunification with North Korea and an ending of these tensions.
I mean, you know, when I go to Korea, the panic and the animosity is a much lower level than it is in the United States where Fox News is beating the war drums.
Yeah, well, it's interesting because you can see how, okay, well, the Navy and the Air Force and the Army, for that matter, these guys like being useful.
They like having a mission and they don't want it to go away.
And yet now that George W. Bush successfully pushed North Korea out of the nonproliferation treaty and their safeguards agreement and they've gone ahead and made nuclear weapons, for America to continue this posture like we're India and Pakistan at this point where now they can lord vision over us too or at least over our South Korean allies.
And Seoul is right there near the DMZ, by the way, everybody who doesn't have a map in front of them or know about it.
Seoul, I mean, maybe they'd have to drive their nuke there in a flatbed truck, but they might be able to get it there.
It ain't too far.
And so it just seems crazy that they would continue the old brinksmanship when now it's the new mutually assured destruction era.
You know what I mean?
But nothing seems to have changed on this side.
Well, no, because keeping the demons in North Korea front and center, very important for U.S. foreign policy because what justifies the formidable American military presence in South Korea, 28,000 troops and air bases, naval bases in the region, American forces in Okinawa and in Guam and American bases and forces in Japan, all areas occupied at the end of World War II.
So how does America justify keeping them there?
Right.
All right.
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All right, you guys.
Welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with the great Eric Margulies.
That's funny.
Right now, Eric, on CNN, they got a reporter in with the moderate rebels, and yet she's dressed, you know, not quite in a burqa, but she sure is dressed like she's under the rule of the Islamic State.
I didn't think it was like that in Damascus right now, but apparently in moderate rebel-held Syria, ISIS dress rules apply for the women.
Anyway, a little off topic.
At the break there, you were explaining, because I was saying it doesn't make sense, man, when they got nukes now, because it's all George W. Bush's fault, that, hey, okay, so we got to back off a little bit, and we got to recognize the reality that, you know, tough talk is tough talk, but fission is fission.
And so, come on, let's be adults about this.
And you're saying no, because the empire needs an excuse to exist in the Pacific.
And so, I mean, China is a pretty good boogeyman, but North Korea is a great one, too, and especially for the bogus missile defense.
You didn't say that, but I'm calling it bogus.
You mentioned the missile defense in here.
That's a huge interest in terms of money stolen out of the treasury every year, etc., like that.
And there's just too much vested interest in keeping the North Koreans as an official enemy on the, I guess, western coast of America's lake, the Pacific Ocean.
Is that right?
That's right, Scott.
We, the U.S., we're running out of enemies, and, I mean, big enemies.
We need some sizable ones to justify our increases in military spending.
And, you know, rushing new military systems into North Asia is great because the Chinese are going to scream like crazy, and we can always cite the threat of North Korea that justifies sending in more weapons.
And the latest American proposal to put in the THAAD, T-H-A-A-D, high-altitude anti-missile system, into South Korea is really full of water because this system is designed to intercept intercontinental ballistic missiles.
And so, supposedly, to protect South Korea, but North Korea is only 30, 40 miles away.
They don't need long-range missiles to attack South Korea.
And the missile system implanted in South Korea with its radars is too close to North Korea.
Anyway, what it's really designed for is to begin building a system against the Chinese.
The Chinese know this very well and are in high dungeon over this.
Right.
Well, and there's a couple of very important things there.
First of all, it doesn't work.
It ain't never going to work.
The only test where they've ever pretended it worked was when they were pretending, and the missiles met at predetermined coordinates, et cetera, et cetera.
The whole thing is a ridiculous fraud.
Unless you know better than that, I'd be happy to hear it.
But then the other thing is that, you know, you call it missile defense, and it sounds pretty good, but it's a bit different when you put it in the context of wearing armor to a fistfight.
It makes it easier to start a war if you think you have first-strike capability, and that even with their few dozen operational nukes that the Chinese have on ready, that they won't be able to hit back because we'll be able to shoot down anything they try to hit back with.
That makes Donald Trump feel, you know, even better about himself than he already did, you know, kind of thing.
Well, the really vulnerable country in all of this is not the United States.
The North Koreans really don't have the capability of seriously attacking.
Oh, I was talking about China.
Yeah, I know that.
For the bad thing.
Look, I was coming to the point, the vulnerable country is Japan.
Japan is completely naked to threats of attack by nuclear missiles, nuclear-armed missiles, and the Japanese have got to do something to put up a workable missile defense system.
It doesn't have to be Star Wars, but it's something closer to what the Israelis have developed, and their system appears so far to work well, though we haven't seen it tried against intermediate-range ballistic missiles.
Japan needs something.
Right now, it has to rely entirely on the United States for limited missile defense.
Yeah.
Well, and, yeah, extremely limited for the price anyway.
I don't know.
All right.
Now, so I guess I want to ask you also about what you said about the North Koreans' willingness to negotiate, and just from a devil's advocate position, I want to make sure that I heard you right, that it isn't just that you think that, come on, man, they'll negotiate.
We have all this power, and they don't, and they sure could use an opening and some recognition here.
It's not that.
You're saying you know for a fact that, no, really, historically, they have been very willing to officially end the Korean War, and they've said all they want is, well, like Kennedy gave the Cubans, a promise to not overthrow them.
Yeah, they want respect, and they want this non-aggression pact.
So this isn't a supposition of yours.
This is the real history.
This is real history, and, you know, we were, as you mentioned, somewhat close to this goal during the Bush administration when serious talks got underway.
But what happened was that the neocons who infested the whole Bush government thwarted the North Korean talks and antagonized the North Koreans to the point where they started having a tantrum again.
And they were afraid that North Korean missile technology would somehow get to the Arabs and threaten Israel.
So this became a major issue.
And, oh, you're talking at the end after they changed back to trying to deal?
Or are you talking in the first place?
In both places.
The deal started, and then they backed off on it.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, it was, I guess, John Bolton and his hawks at the State Department that really did it.
Exactly.
Botched everything there in 02.
Yep.
And I think any telling of that story, even if one presumes the existence of the uranium enrichment program, which I don't think there's any evidence that they had anything like that up and going at that point.
They had bought some junk from AQ Com, but that doesn't mean that they had had it up and running at that point.
But even if they had, they still could have negotiated.
I mean, the Bush administration, and you may be right that it got out of his control and Rice's control or whoever, but they really forced the North Koreans out of the deal that the Clinton administration had made, like a kick to the chest.
I mean, they just did not have to do it.
And it only made sense if they knew for a fact that they were going to go ahead and go to war against North Korea next year anyway or something like that.
But that wasn't a safe bet.
So all they did was basically hand them a dozen nukes.
Eric?
Well, they probably could have stopped it, but they didn't.
And they know that the North Koreans are never going to use these nukes, except in extremis.
That's if we, in the event of an American or South Korean attack on North Korea, that the North Koreans might, as a last resort, start using their nukes.
Other than that, they're not about to start firing nukes at North America, as some silly American generals have claimed, because two or three nukes, big deal.
They may manage to wipe out San Diego, but at the same time, North Korea is going to be wiped off the map by American nuclear retaliation.
That's American military math.
You know what?
We might lose San Diego, but other than that, it'll be fine.
It must be fun to think that way.
I've seen Dr. Strangelove.
In fact, I just read a thing the other day where they said that a lot of the craziest phrases in there, that Kubrick had taken that stuff out of Albert Wolstetter and the other nuclear warfare theorists, and he didn't even need to write the humorous lines.
He just had to have them say this stuff word for word in deadpan, you know?
That's right.
You know, and interestingly, we never got the same kind of rabid craziness from the Soviets.
I don't recall any Soviet theorists or writers who were, you know, happily contemplating nuclear warfare at different levels.
The Soviets were horrified by this, but we in the United States entertain this view, and this kind of strategic craziness continues to our day.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I guess my guess is that the average American must think it's kind of a mystery why, I mean, if they'd know, and I think probably most people have heard, right, or many people have heard that we don't have a real end to the Korean War, that we're still technically at war with a mere ceasefire agreement here, and I guess because we're the Americans, the assumption's got to be it's because of the North Koreans and whatever their problem is, but I think that would be, you know, the real bottom line of this interview, as you're explaining, is it really doesn't have to be this way at all.
Any president, Republican, Democrat, whoever, could go right over there and get this worked out in pretty much a moment's notice.
Is that what you're saying, Eric?
Yes, I am.
I think the North Koreans would be thrilled to be finally made kosher and whole and invited to Washington and, you know, let's bury the hatchet.
Yeah, but ask Gaddafi.
You know what comes next, the stab in the back.
You're better off our enemy, or else we're going to get you.
Good point.
All right.
That's the heroic Eric Margulies, everybody.
EricMargulies.com and UNZ.com.
Thanks, Eric.
Cheers, Scott.
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