03/15/17 – Eric Margolis on Trump’s ‘Levantine Madness’ – war escalation and deployment of US forces all over the Middle East – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, it's our good friend Eric Margulies.
He wrote War at the Top of the World and he wrote American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
And both of those books are just so great too.
I really hope that you will buy them and read them.
And so his website is ericmargulies.com but you spell it like Margolis so that you can get there. ericmargulies.com for Eric Margulies, yeah.
And you can read his articles at unz.com and at LRC and we reprint them at the Libertarian Institute from time to time I think as well.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Eric?
I'm just fine.
There's so much interesting news going on.
I don't know where to look first.
I know.
Well, that's the whole thing.
I don't either but let's start with Mosul in northwestern Iraq.
What can I tell people about your article?
More Mideast Madness as Trump Prepares to March is the latest piece.
It's at the Ron Paul Institute.
I assume Lou ran it.
It's at ericmargulies.com and we ran on antiwar.com and a few other places there.
So unz.com, did I say unz?
Okay.
So yeah, now I guess they say now eastern Mosul has been liberated from the Islamic State.
They're now working on western Mosul.
And who all's fighting and how long do they have to go and then what's going to happen?
Well, it's a big hodgepodge in my column, which by the way, is also carried by in Germany by antikrieg.com.
Oh yeah?
Yeah.
Great.
It's I said reminds me of the 30 years war in the 1600s because it's just a mad swirl of rival groups and bandits and killers.
And it's an awful thing.
What's happening now is that all these different powers are trying to take control of Mosul and of course of Iraq, which let us not forget is one of the world's great oil treasure houses.
And so you have the so-called Iraqi army, which is really about a division of men, they're called special anti-terrorism forces, entirely equipped by the United States with US weapons, US tanks, US artillery, and backed by the US and Marine Corps Air Force who are driving into Mosul.
What it means is it's the old British colonial system of white officers and native troops, because that's what you have.
The Iraqi troops are serving as cannon fodder and they're being directed by US military commanders or advisors or what you want to call them.
That's one group who are fighting the ISIS, except that ISIS is really partly supported by the United States and Saudi Arabia.
So it's very confusing as to who's fighting who.
You've got other groups.
You've got other Arab groups aligned with the so-called Free Syrian Army.
They're backed by the Turks and just to the north is the mighty Turkish army, losing its patience, ready to move in.
Mosul used to be part of the Ottoman Empire.
It's in spitting distance of the Turkish border.
And then there are the different, other different groups who are involved there.
Let's say there are British and French special forces and air forces involved.
There are some Saudi-aligned irregular groups.
There are anti-Saddam, I mean pro-Saddam Iraqi groups who are involved there.
It's not just all ISIS.
And there are countless other groups who are involved.
And the Kurds were the main fighting force for the U.S. The Kurds are very good fighters.
There are about 40,000 of them north of Mosul moving in, but they're totally under control of the U.S. We finance them, we arm them.
And also the Kurds have been secretly aligned with Israel since 1970.
So it's a confusing situation.
And the Turks are furious now because they see the possible emergence of a Kurdish state and they're warning that they will intervene bigly, as our president would say, if that happens.
That's funny.
I always thought he was saying big league, you know, like the baseball.
I'm not sure, but I love the word.
All right.
Hey, let's rewind a sec to the most controversial thing you just said about American and Saudi support for the Islamic State.
Now, I mean, I don't think it's even disputable that they tolerated the rise of the Islamic State and played down the danger of the Islamic State, even as their own internal documents warned that there's a danger that this al-Qaeda break-off group could basically absorb the lawless Sunni regions, predominantly Sunni regions of western Iraq.
And then a couple of years later, it happened.
But now it seems like we've been bombing them since then and helped the Iraqi government rouse them out of Tikrit, Fallujah, Ramadi.
But you're saying that the U.S., you think, is still playing a double game and working with the Saudis to continue to support the Islamic State, even in Iraq or in Syria or anywhere, even as we're leading this vast coalition that you just named against them?
That's right, Scott.
It's a very complicated situation.
And let me add to that, that there are Syrian insurgent groups of various names, can't keep track of them, there are too many, that are, some are supported by the U.S. State Department, some are supported by the Pentagon, and others are supported by the CIA, and some of them are fighting each other.
So you've got this crazy war between American military bureaucracies.
Yeah, well, it is amazing.
I mean, you have, and in fact, at this point, you have the so-called Free Syrian Army types embedded with the YPG Kurds and the so-called Syrian Democratic Forces, led by American special forces, and now including Marine infantry, that they've sent hundreds now into the Syrian side of this thing, to kick the Islamic State out of Raqqa.
But, so what do you think is going to happen then, after the Islamic State is no longer a state, and they are kicked out, because they're losing in Mosul, and they're going to lose Raqqa, I mean, they're surrounded and with more and more firepower all the time.
But then what?
Because, you know, it seems to me like we're proving bin Laden and them right, that you got to get rid of the Americans first, or else you're never going to have your way in the region.
And that doesn't sound like a very good message to be sending.
Washington has not been a beneficial force in the Middle East, in living memory.
But, you know, the ISIS, the Islamic State group, is not the German Wehrmacht.
It's a bunch of 20-year-old hooligans that have only light weapons.
I don't know, there's no logistics to speak of, no communications, no air cover, no central command.
It's a joke.
And the idea that the Marines could not have taken Raqqa or any of these other places very quickly, just astounds me.
As a former soldier myself, and I was a war correspondent, I covered all these areas.
I mean, most of them are a taxi drive away.
My father was in the Marine Corps.
He went all the way from New York City to Iwo Jima in less than a year, which is the time that the Americans have been sitting watching Raqqa and claiming they're going to crush the Islamic State, but they haven't done a damn thing.
It's a pipsqueak organization.
It's about 3,000 men.
New York City Police Department could clean them out very quickly.
Well, but as you said, though, I mean, in World War II, they were willing to sacrifice white men for it.
In this case, they're not.
In this case, they have JSOC hang back and tell the Pesh and the YPG and the Shiite militias what to do.
I tremble at the fact that this war is being run by a bunch of American officers from Alabama, Georgia, who are not experts on the Middle East, and who could be an expert on this situation.
It's a crazy quilt thing with all these different rival groups.
And I think what's going to happen is when the U.S. forces get close to Raqqa, that the ISIS is just going to disappear.
They're going to fold their tents and steal away into the night, bury their Kalashnikov rifles, and go somewhere else.
And then they're going to splinter.
And we'll regret that in the sense that they're much easier to fight when they're in one place than when they're scattered.
This is a guerrilla force.
They have no business holding a fixed target, particularly against the mighty U.S. Air Force, which is flying overhead with B-52 bombers and B-1 heavy bombers.
It's crazy.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, I don't know if anybody's really kept track of how many Americans and how many Europeans have gone to Syria to fight on the side of the Al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State this whole time, and how many of them very well could come back.
And I don't want to sound like paranoid, stupid, you know, Frank Gaffney nonsense or whatever.
But on the other hand, it's really not hard to be a sleeper cell.
And an attack doesn't have to be a full jumbo jet hijacking kamikaze crash to be effective, as we've seen.
Hijacking a truck here, machine gunning a concert there.
And these kinds of soft target attacks, of which there are an unlimited number of targets in Europe to hit, you know, are very effective in provoking governments and provoking populations one way or the other.
It seems like, you know, our reaction every time is only teaching them to keep it up.
You know what I mean?
I don't know.
Well, that's right.
And they've got nothing else to do.
Right.
They can't they can't be the chief of police in Raqqa anymore.
What are they going to do now?
They're going to go attack France.
Exactly.
Well, the president has said that they're going to be wiped off the globe.
And those are the marching orders in the military.
But as you point out, Scott, it's much more convenient to have them all in downtown, lovely downtown Raqqa and Mosul than it is scattered all over the place.
And yes, some of them will come back to the states and some of them will just outgrow Al Qaeda or ISIS.
You know, they're more mature men.
But it is a problem.
Much better.
They should you should make a deal with them and just say, OK, you run Mosul, Raqqa, and we'll leave you alone.
Pay you some money.
Stay there.
Just don't bother anybody.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, but of course, the wrinkle in that is the YPG isn't going to have it.
But then the wrinkle in that is the Turks ain't going to have the YPG.
So really angry, too.
All right.
But now.
So the Russians have cut this deal with Assad where they they made a deal and with the Kurds where they put Assad's Syrian Arab army troops between the Turks and the YPG to keep that battle line from from breaking out into a problem.
But it seems like.
No matter which direction we go from here, it's just only going to get worse and worse.
In fact, when the Syrian war broke out, the first thing that Patrick Coburn said was, oh, I'm afraid that this is going to be like the Lebanese civil war and last for 15 years or more.
There's just so many different factions.
No one's in a position to win.
Everybody has allies on the outside and enemies on the outside as well.
And just what a effing wreck this is going to be.
This is just as it's getting started.
There is no good answer to how this ends at all.
Scott, I covered the Lebanese civil war.
And in fact, when the Syrian war broke out, I wrote exactly the same thing as the excellent Patrick Coburn.
It reminded me entirely of the Lebanese civil war, complete with the crazy alliances, lunatics running around, hopped up on drugs and complete savagery and no sense of what was going on at all.
So in other words, yeah, even after whoever the Syrian army and the YPG take rocket, then we still are just buying another set of problem.
Same thing when the Shiites take Mosul.
Now we have a whole new set of problems.
Well, thank George Bush for having, you know, unlocked this box full of demons that have come out.
And I don't see any clear way to settle this.
They're going to miss, I said after Saddam was overthrown, one day they're going to miss him a lot.
And I think that's happening already.
Yeah.
Well, for quite a while now, and especially compared to the counterfactual, which is that after September 11th, especially, Bush could have just said to Saddam, look, we're going to go back to the Reagan years where you work for us again, but you're going to do what you're told and then we won't kill you.
Okay, deal?
And he would have said, yes, sir.
Watch me shave my chin and wear my beret and worship only myself.
And it would have been, what a great deal, right?
We'd have Uday and Qusay keeping Zarqawi down right now.
But the problem is, of course, that the neocons who infested the Bush administration wanted no part of that.
Their objective was to see Iraq destroyed completely.
So it would never pose a military counterforce to Israel.
And that's what happened.
Yeah, well, and boy, sure got never right, because they're never going to be in Iraq again at all now.
No.
Well, and I guess they're going to call it Iraq, but what they mean is Iraqi Shia-stan, the land from Baghdad to Iran and down to Kuwait.
You could think General Petraeus, in part, the so-called genius of Mesopotamia, for using the Shia-Sunni divisions, for inflaming them and starting these death squads and really trying to tear apart Islam.
Well, as the Romans said, divide and conquer.
And that's exactly what has happened.
And now this evil antagonism between Shia and Sunni, which was never that big in the past, has now become a major factor and is polluting the entire Muslim world.
Yeah, you know, and it seems like that was never really bin Laden's agenda.
That really all came with Zarqawi and his people that bin Laden, you know, I guess maybe he would have had a sectarian war one day or would have wanted to one day or something like that.
But his thing was much more, seemingly to me, Arab nationalist and just Muslim nationalist in a sense, that just get off a Muslim land.
We'll worry about these other things or details later.
But I don't think he saw, it doesn't seem from reading all this stuff or whatever, that he really saw the Shiites as these horrible heretics worthy of death and all this crazy stuff like Baghdadi and the Zarqawiites in Iraq.
Scott, I long had a suspicion that Zarqawi, who's the alleged founder of ISIS, may have been an American agent.
A false flag agent planted there, committing horrible acts to blacken the name of the Iraqi resistance to American occupation.
In fact, we know that bin Laden was writing Zarqawi letters saying, you know, stop, you're tarnishing the name of Islam.
Well, that's, I guess it's certainly possible.
I mean, he seemed like a horrible bastard one way or another.
I don't know if anybody could have really controlled him.
But I will tell you this, I know, and this has been, it turns out when I went back that this is far better reported than I had even thought.
It's, I think, started with Jim Miklaszewski at NBC News, but then this was really elaborated on by quite a few different journalists about how the military had begged George W. Bush for permission to attack Zarqawi and his Ansar al-Islam camp up there in Iraqi Kurdistan, which was basically American protected autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan in the era between the first Gulf War and the second.
And that the military repeatedly asked Bush for permission because, look, once we topple Baghdad and this guy's on the loose, we're going to have a problem.
So we would rather go ahead and murder him now before we roll in.
And Bush wouldn't let him do it.
And if anything, I mean, the best excuse is that they needed him to lie.
They needed him as a talking point to pretend that he was an ally of Saddam and an ally of Osama, the link between the two, as Colin Powell put it in the UN speech.
But the worst interpretation is the one that you just made, that really he was already on the CIA payroll, that they needed him to play that role.
And they thought of it that way from that early in the game.
Who knows?
That's what the Russians think.
And it's a whole scenario of deceits.
You really don't know who to believe and how many.
You know, the U.S. always needs straw boogeymen to advance its political position.
So every few years there's some deranged maniac, another Hitler on the Nile, as they used to call Nasser, and even Gaddafi in Iran, Mosaddegh, et cetera, et cetera.
That's how they focus American hostility on the Middle East, by drumming up these devilish characters who were then knocked down like straw men.
Yeah.
Well, speaking of which, what about Libya?
Because here's a place that's been, I don't know exactly how riven by violence, but seems like it's been pretty bad.
And with an Islamic state claiming beachhead there as well, at least supposedly, in Sirte, the country of Libya no longer exists.
It's at least three or four pieces now.
I know you have some experience there.
Tell us what you think's next for the Libyans, or for JSOC in Libya, maybe, is the better way to focus the question.
That's a good way of saying it.
Gaddafi told me in 1987 that if he were removed or killed, that Libya would splinter into its different colonial portions.
This is exactly what happens.
And it's another huge mess that we've created.
Think what?
We've destroyed Iraq.
We've destroyed Syria.
We're in the process of destroying poor little wretched Yemen.
We've torn apart Sudan to create this ghastly abortion of a country called South Sudan, where the people, the two main tribes, they're all slaughtering each other, and people are starving.
We've ravaged Somalia.
We've wrecked Libya.
You know, tremble, whoever is next for this kind of treatment.
But Libya is broken into its component tribal and regional parts.
There are forces supported by the Egyptians and the Americans.
There's General Haftar, who's trying to grab the oil fields.
There are other tribal forces.
There are still pro-Gaddafi forces.
There are the North African influences there from Algeria, for example.
And then the whole situation by overthrowing Gaddafi, we pulled the cork out of the bottle.
And now we've got the refugee crisis from Africa, which Gaddafi was blocking.
Now the refugees are flooding into Libya and across the Mediterranean towards Italy and drowning by the thousands.
And it's a horrible situation.
And I don't see any outcome in Libya unless the Russians take it over.
There are reports that there may be some Russian troops there.
That's undetermined as of now.
But this is another Humpty Dumpty that's going to be very hard to put together again.
Well, so, I mean, the key to all this, of course, unspoken in the background of this whole conversation is Trump.
And for that matter, Mattis and McMaster and Dunford and what they tell this guy to do.
And I don't even know if it's worth adding and what he's willing to go along with, because, I mean, doesn't it seem to you like his orders to them are you guys go and do what you feel like?
I think so.
No, it's, I don't know where Trump is getting his news from.
One suspects it's from Fox TV, which is a truly terrifying thought.
But he has some real fanatics in the administration.
One of the reasons that I did not join that administration was because there were so many crazies in it and with such hostility to the Muslim world.
Wait, did they offer you a job?
Well, we discussed it.
But I couldn't go ahead with it.
And the problem is that these good generals that we have there, like Mattis and Dunford, they're good men, they're good officers, but they don't have the sophistication of understanding the Middle East.
They should have been there for 20 years.
That's how the British ran the British rush.
Their generals were very skilled, very seasoned men.
I remember that Lord Kitchener, when he was still a major in North Africa and Egypt, he used to do reconnaissance.
He used to dress himself up as a native.
He spoke Arabic and he'd go out on a horse and he'd reconnoiter all the enemy positions and come back.
Now that's the kind of officer we need in the United States, not these guys who've been sitting in Florida playing war games.
I gotta say, I'm sure it would have been horrible, but I really wish you'd have done it.
If there's even really a solid chance that you could have made Mattis or McMaster listen to you for a minute and a half, we'd have been 100% better off.
But you know, I couldn't be in an administration that had this policy about banning Muslims.
Oh, yeah.
Well, no, I mean, they're complete freak asses, all of them.
And I can see especially that you would feel that way with Flynn up there, who's just Michael Ledeen's lick spittle.
Right.
And torturing prisoners.
Torture is great.
And bombing civilians and killing families of people accused of- No, I understand.
You're right.
I wouldn't want you to do that either and have that as to be part of that.
I thought it would offend my own personal honor and sense of decency, and I just couldn't do it.
Well, maybe we can find another way to exploit that possible bit of influence there without actually getting your hands bloody.
Well, it would- I'll have to think about that.
I'm pulling on the hairs on my chin trying to think right now.
Nobody in that administration really wants to listen to me, at least as far as I can think.
Well, apparently one person does, whoever it is.
We're going to have to focus on them.
Okay.
Anyway.
All right.
So now let me ask you about Afghanistan.
Poor old Afghanistan.
So listen, I'm writing this book.
I'm almost done with it.
I started to write a book about the whole terror war, but then I got bogged down in the Afghan quagmire and obviously hardy har har.
So now it's a 300-page book.
It's just about Afghanistan.
And it sure looks like- I don't know what it looks like.
What do you think it looks like in terms of the decision point or whatever inflection point we are now in the change of administrations from Obama to Trump in the coming next chapter of the Afghan occupation there?
I fear, Scott, that the Obama administration, for all its foolishness and wrongheadedness, was justifiably wary of getting more deeply involved in Afghanistan.
The new administration with Trump, oh, charge up the hill.
We'll show them who's boss.
So now this pressure general, our overall general, just asked for more troops for Afghanistan.
And here we go again in the graveyard of empires.
We have learned nothing from Afghanistan.
We're still doing the same thing.
We're still using the scum of Afghan society as our allies.
We're still hand-in-glove with the drug dealers in Afghanistan who are the real power there.
We are using the air- if it weren't for the Air Force, we would have been driven out a long time ago.
We're using the Air Force to bomb and terrorize civilians.
There's no loyalty to the corrupt government that we put in power there.
There's no loyalty in the military.
And the two main forces there are still the old communists and the Taliban.
So we're nowhere.
And I just hope we don't drive deeper into Afghanistan because we will not win the war.
Hey, you know, something I'm curious about is that ever since America got there, and I know they brought a lot of money with them, but ever since they got there, they were able to basically hold the whole Northern Alliance together without Masood.
They just put Karzai in Masood's place and the aforementioned stacks of dollars.
And they've been able to- I think I'm oversimplifying because I don't know anything because I'm just from Texas and I've never been to Afghanistan.
But the best I understand, it seems like they basically, you know, bribed all of these factions into- and really had them scared into alliance in the face of the continued Taliban-based insurgency against them and the Pashtun-based insurgency against them.
But I guess at this many years into it, I'm surprised that you don't have more infighting between the various Tajik, Hazara, and Uzbek factions, especially, you know, I've read about Dostum's militia going around and just committing war crimes against Pashtun civilians.
But why is it?
Or is it not the case, but it's just uncovered and I don't understand enough about it or what, that all these different Northern factions seem to still be getting along, at least, you know, since America's been there.
And then I wonder if you think that without that money, all that would change and it would go back to the kind of 1990s style civil war of all against all and Hekmatyar and all that.
That's right.
It's the Yankee dollars is the glue that holds together these different Afghan factions, including most likely my old friend Hekmatyar, who's a backstabber supreme.
And he's now made some kind of fishy deal with the government in exchange for money.
But we have to remember that Afghanistan is a dirt poor country where a lot of people starve and there is no business there except for opium production.
So, and the Americans and we came into this medieval country with plain loads of crisp hundred dollar bills on pallets and gave it out to all and sundry.
And we are encouraging the narcotics trade.
Who do you think exports all this opium and morphine base from Afghanistan?
It's our allies.
We know what's going on.
And so that's what's happening for the moment.
If that inflow of money is reduced, I think you will see, as you rightly suggested, more hostility between the different factions.
Okay.
Crazy conspiracy theory time.
I wonder whether you think maybe Hekmatyar is playing a Trojan horse game right now.
Part of his deal that he made that you referred to there is he gets 20,000 of his fighters to come home from the camps in Pakistan where they've been living.
And I guess the Hezbi Islami types already have some representation in the parliament, but now he's bringing his fighters with him right back into the heart of Kabul.
And I just wonder whether we're now just seeing chapter one of him setting up for his coming coup d'etat and outbreak of a civil war there.
You should be in the State Department.
Yes, exactly.
He's a very tricky, slippery character.
I like him, but he's not to be trusted.
And that's exactly what he's doing.
He's trying to set himself up as an alternate candidate to rule Afghanistan.
You know, Massoud with the Northern Alliance, the Tajik leader, did the same thing.
He was using the Soviets to try and set himself up as the ruler of all Afghanistan until he was killed.
And Hikmachar is trying to do the same.
But I don't think he'll succeed because too many people hate him.
Yeah, well, at least we got that going for us.
Yeah, he seems like, you know, I'm not really sure how to, is there a plan for when he and his militiamen start throwing acid at women's faces on the side of the street in Kabul?
Because the women of Kabul are not so used to living under his thumb these last 16 years.
They'll blame it on the Taliban.
Yeah, I guess so.
All right.
Yeah, boy, that looks ugly.
All right.
Which wars am I leaving out?
Well, you know what?
You mentioned Somalia there real quick.
And I don't necessarily want to force you to talk about everything you know about it or whatever necessarily.
But at least I think it's kind of worth bringing up, isn't it, that Somalia and Yemen, the two of those, you also only briefly mentioned Yemen.
And I could let you go back to that if you want.
There's a massive famine going on in both countries right now.
And at least in the mainstream narrative, you know, I don't know how much truth gets through about the situation in Yemen at all.
But at least there's more of a context that there is a war there, even if their TV isn't honest about which side America's on.
But in Somalia, they portray it as just, yeah, that mean old weather, starving them Somalis again.
And of course, that's true.
And yet the context that they leave out is that America, like in Yemen, has been picking on Somalia, which these two are like the twins for the poorest, weakest societies on the planet Earth.
And we've been beating the living crap out of them.
For, you know, in Somalia now, it's the 10th anniversary.
Jeez, I missed it.
This Christmas 2006 was Bush's invasion with Ethiopia there.
And little babies are starving to death.
And this is the thing I wanted to get back to, because you were really making this point, and then I got off on Syria or Libya or something.
But this is where you were really going, was that what we're doing here is so wrong.
And people just, the contrast between what people think of as America, which is basically, you know, Christopher Reeve's Superman, and the actual reality of, you know, this is Hitler level kind of stuff going on here, man, or at least British level evil that we are inflicting on the weakest people in the whole world.
It seems unbelievable.
And yet tell America I ain't wrong, right?
No, you're not wrong.
You know, I grew up in an America that did good around the world and was respected as a result of that.
Today we see the imperialists in Washington.
That's what I have to call them.
I don't want to sound like an East German, but an imperial faction that wants to control the entire Red Sea.
And to do that, you want to control Yemen and one mouth, the side of the mouth, and Somalia on the other.
And we've taken, the Somalis are very fierce people.
And what they really love is independence.
They want to be their own bosses.
And they've been fighting, and they were one of the most ferocious fighters against British imperialism, too.
Americans don't even know where Somalia is on the map.
They don't know where Yemen is.
I'm not sure the president does either.
And so the military has carte blanche to go and crush these little disobedient countries.
In fact, we only seem to pick on little disobedient countries.
Let's see us go after North Korea with a million-man army or, you know, China.
No, we go with these little countries.
We stomp them into the ground.
And it's really tragic because we were very close.
There was a legitimate government in Somalia until, as you point out, Scott, that George Bush, the father of all mayhem, organized, launched a U.S.-Ethiopian invasion, overthrew the legitimate government of Somalia, which is called the Islamic Courts Union, and imposed the kind of an Ethiopian protectorate which the Somalis have been fighting ever since.
Yeah.
Man, yeah, it's a hell of a thing.
And then they really have had bad weather, really bad weather.
This is the second real drought.
I mean, they sort of semi-recovered a little bit in 2014, 13, and 14 and stuff.
And now here it's happened again.
Only, of course, we know that, you know, even in wartime, even in the aftermath of war, in capitalist societies, we don't have famine.
Because if you have, you know, really any kind of market system, food will get there for the price.
Somebody will feed somebody and make a nickel.
And yet, when you have this level of disruption that America's war has brought to this, you know, just barely burgeoning market economy that they ever had in the first place, and we just basically took that and burned it to the ground.
So now, even if somebody can plant their crops, they're probably not going to be around to, you know, reap them in the fall.
And they're not going to be, if they can do that, they're not going to be able to get it to market.
And if they can get it to market, there's nobody there.
Nobody has any money.
Everything's shut down.
All the systems of distribution are shut down.
So there's no way to compensate for the bad weather, you know?
Not only that, but all the poor animals, goats, cows, sheep have died from lack of water, lack of food.
They're starved to death.
And this is something we never think about.
But the people there live on these animals.
When the animals go and suffer terribly, then the people go too.
And this is what happens to these nomadic peoples in this semi-Saharan type environment.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, you know, I guess we could talk about who the American government is killing all day and all night, Eric, but I'll let you go.
You've already given us a generous portion of your morning here, and I really appreciate it.
Thank you for writing all the great stuff that you write and coming on my show again.
Thank you, Scott.
And best of Afghan luck with your new book.
Thank you very much.
Appreciate it.
You're welcome.
All right, y'all.
That's the great Eric Margulies.
Find him at ericmargulies.com, spelt like Margolis, ericmargulies.com.
You can find him at lourockwell.com and at unz.com, unz.com.
And, oh, here he is also at the Ron Paul Institute.
More Mideast madness as Trump prepares to march.
And I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show.
Check out the archives at scotthorton.org, 4,000 something interviews going back to 2003.
And also at libertarianinstitute.org slash scotthortonshow.
All the latest stuff goes there first.
And follow me on Twitter at scotthortonshow.
Thanks, guys.
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