03/08/16 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
On the line, I got Eric Margulies.
The great Eric Margulies, author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination, and regular writer for UNZ.com.
That's U-N-Z, UNZ.com, as well as LewRockwell.com.
Hillary, haunted by Libya.
Welcome back, Eric.
How are you?
I'm glad to be back with you, Scott.
Lots of news.
I forgot to say, Margulies, EricMargulies.com.
Spell it like Margolis.
EricMargulies.com.
You can find all his stuff going way, way back there.
Yes, so much to discuss today, but you know what I just don't understand?
Why would Hillary be haunted by Libya?
I thought that was smart power at its best.
Well, that was the party line that was put forward, brilliant liberation of the long-suffering Libyan people.
In fact, the truth of the matter is just the opposite, that Libya was affected.
Large parts of it were destroyed.
Many of its people were killed.
This more rather progressive Arab country that had free education and free health care and free retirement and everything else was wrecked.
Gaddafi himself was hunted down and assassinated, and today Libya is a great big huge mess, but of course Hillary Clinton, who engineered this disaster, can't admit it.
All right, so now the New York Times came out with this huge two-part piece here about this, and surprisingly, I think, really going through Hillary's ownership of the policy and really explaining in her own aides' words about how this is really all you're doing, Hillary.
Congratulations, and all this, and all the credit she was happy to take for it before it turned into the thing it turned into.
Marco Rubio is having the same problem over there on the other side.
Oh, we didn't overthrow Gaddafi, the people of Libya did.
I don't know what you're talking about, he said.
But anyway, so I guess, was there anything really important or special that you learned in that article or that they highlighted that you wish people had paid attention to you trying to warn them the same thing back then?
Because it was pretty something else for a New York Times piece, I thought.
Yes, Scott, I found it interesting that the New York Times would go after Hillary Clinton and take a negative viewpoint on her, since I think they were backing Hillary for the presidency.
There must be some kind of personal arrangement there that went wrong.
But whatever the case, it's just emblematic of the entire American media watched the Libya operation, repeated every one of the fibs that Washington put forward, and then completely failed to report what was going on in Libya, which was not a popular revolution, but US, French, British special forces and their air forces destroying the Gaddafi regime and shooting up the whole country.
Yeah, you know, what's fun about this in a horrifying, terribly tragic and ironic kind of way is that you and I talked about this in 2011.
We talked about it all the way through the war.
Same with Patrick Coburn reporting from the front, saying, you know, yeah, I just got back from the front and there are a lot more reporters than there are Libyan rebels.
What Libyan rebels?
It's, you know, special forces and reporters and maybe a handful of guys in pickup trucks.
And then most of those love Osama.
They're veterans of the Iraq war, the second Iraq war, where they've been working with Gaddafi fighting against our guys.
Well, ironically, Gaddafi was an on and off Western ally.
Did I say Gaddafi?
I meant to say Zarqawi.
Oh, Zarqawi.
They had just gotten back from fighting with Zarqawi.
I do that sometimes, I say one word in front instead of the other.
Sorry about that.
That's all right.
But the point is that the Western media reports from Libya were completely cockeyed.
And they, yes, they showed all these guys running around pickup trucks with 50 caliber machine guns on the back.
But they failed.
I did not see one TV report of Western special forces operating in Libya.
And they were obviously ordered not to show it.
And it was outrageous that this is the site after the Iraq disaster, where the media completely misreported and rolled over for the government that it would do the same thing again in Libya.
All right.
Now, so part two of that New York Times piece goes into the attempts, you know, with and without American help to various degrees of the people that they fought for.
This guy, Jabril, who was, I guess, the Libyan Chalabi, who sold this war to Hillary in their meeting at the hotel that they keep talking about.
And these others, you know, they put together a parliament as she insisted in the debate the other day.
Hey, they held an election, an election like that's just the end in itself.
And and yet, as the story describes, all the militias.
Well, I don't know if anybody ever really called for them to all come to go to all come together to to form one kind of monopoly force or anything like that.
Instead, whatever amounted to the new government that they created just kept bribing all the different various militias separately from each other and built them all up to be much stronger than any force the parliament had and only strong enough to want to fight with each other over the future of the power.
It almost reads like sabotage.
But what do you think really happened there?
They have no hope in the first place or what?
I interviewed Gaddafi in 1987.
I spent a whole evening with him in his tent.
And I remember Gaddafi saying to me that he said, if I'm overthrown, he said Libya is going to splinter.
It's going to be go back to its pre-colonial days and a breakup, at least two major parts around Tripoli in the West and Benghazi in the East.
And and all the other tribes are going to rise and it'll it'll be pandemonium.
That's exactly what happened.
Poor old Muammar was right.
And the West facilitated this disaster stupidly because Gaddafi was the cork that was holding me, the Islamist genie in the bottle.
And he was actually combating these Islamic militants.
As soon as he was removed, killed, then they ran rampant and began spreading into the Sahara and into West Africa.
Well, now, and that's the whole thing of it is, hey, all things being equal, if if the Libyan people of Benghazi in the East want to declare independence from Tripoli, what the hell do I care about that?
It's just that that's not what this is.
This is Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and the U.S. Air Force and JSOC, as you said, are European allies going in there.
And they have all kind of agendas that have very little to do with loving the people of eastern Libya so much that they want to help them declare independence from the West.
None whatsoever.
People want Libya's oil, that it's fine, very high grade oil.
You know, the Italians are talking about sending troops to Libya.
Well, my God, the Italians were there in the 1920s and 30s colonizing Libya.
So we're in a phase of neocolonialism right now, disguised as anti-terrorism, liberation, all that kind of stuff.
Well, and they're on their way back.
We have Jason Ditz here at news.antiwar.com.
Experts say that the U.S. is planning the next war in Libya based on faulty intelligence.
They've overblown the number of ISIS fighters into five or six thousand when local sources say there may be a couple of hundred of them.
And we have Kasich on the Republican side and Clinton on the Democrat side saying there's only one obvious solution.
We must invade and occupy Libya forever.
As Clinton said, we're still in Korea.
We're still in Germany since World War II.
Right back with more.
The great Eric Margulies right after this.
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Hey y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, the Scott Horton Show.
On the line, I've got the great Eric Margulies.
We're talking about the wars in Libya, the last one and the next one.
And, you know, confession time.
I fess up.
I screwed up.
I said that once Qaddafi's overthrown, I asked Eric, will the state survive him or they'll have to start over from scratch?
And Eric said, oh, yeah, no, they'll have to start over from scratch.
Qaddafi is the state, what exists of one in Libya.
So then I says, well, that's it.
So we're going to have a full scale occupation with army soldiers and purple fingered elections.
And we're going to help them build a democracy and train up an army or and then if they don't want to or try not to, as soon as the first truck bombs start going off, then they will.
And I was just wrong that it took so long.
I mean, it's amazing to me and I guess I consider the world lucky that it took this long for Obama to catch up with the consequences from his last intervention there.
You know, four and a half years now they went without the full scale American invasion.
But apparently here it comes.
They're going to have to at least send in the Rangers, you know, the second tier special forces to try to train up an army and, you know, probably oversee new elections and this kind of puppet government sort of thing.
But this, on the other hand, Eric, I mean, I think everybody except Crystal learned at least some of the so-called lessons of Iraq, which anyone could have told you in the first place.
Right.
But that, hey, man, maybe we don't want to do these massive nation building projects.
It doesn't work.
It's it's biting off more than we can chew.
We want to do Rumsfeld Hillary style light and fast, hit them hard regime, change them and then leave the aftermath to somebody else.
So how are they going to how are they going to come together to figure out how to screw Libya over next, Eric?
Well, Scott, standard operating procedure is to get a bunch of puppets, most of whom were living in northern Virginia, speak flawless English, wear well-tailored suits and living in the States for 20 years or so.
They're off the shelf at CIA and they're sent back to Libya to to create a democratic government.
We've done the same thing in Iraq.
We've done it in Somalia.
Well, but isn't that what just didn't work?
I mean, that's right.
But they'll do it again.
So so you don't think they'll have to send in the 3rd Infantry Division to carve out a spot and build up a new army and really try to give them a government in a box and all of that crap like before?
Libya is a very small country.
It's it's really wasn't even a country until Gaddafi came along.
Its military forces have always been hopelessly feeble.
So you there will be a low grade guerrilla war.
Interesting piece of news today, Scott.
In the 1930s, when the Italians were trying to crush a Libyan nationalist movement, they built a fence along the Tunisian-Libyan border.
And it was designed to stop infiltrators coming across to help the Libyan independence fighters from the Italians.
And I just read today that the Libyans, I don't know who it is in the government, are going to or Tunisia, at least will be building a fence in the very same place to stop so-called Islamic terrorists from crossing from Libya into Tunisia.
Tunisia, the place where the Arab Spring had the least amount of American intervention in it and where it's worked the best.
That's right.
But even there, an Islamist government that was elected was kind of edged out of power.
And a Western French dominated so-called democratic government has put into power.
So there's rising turbulence in Libya because of the neo-colonial forces.
Tell me more about this oil and more about the interest here.
Because, I mean, obviously America is the empire, not Italy.
So is it, you know, they get James Baker to host the meeting and they divvy it up?
Or what's going to happen with that, you think?
I think the trend is to let the European powers have their own little sub-colonial zones of interest.
The Italians will have Libya.
French will have the rest of North Africa.
The Brits are getting their fingers back into Mesopotamia.
So these are subcontractors to Big Brother in Washington who wants to, as President Obama said, lead from behind.
All right.
Now, so the war back in 2012 and 2013 spread down into Mali.
And you had the Al-Qaeda and the Islamic Maghreb types kind of hijack the Houthi rebellion there.
And then the French came in, what, late 2013, right, to put a stop to that.
We haven't heard too much out of Mali since then, other than, I think his name is Jeremy Green.
I might have that wrong.
But I talked with this Brit who was really great on Mali who said that, yeah, unfortunately, it really is true that Boko Haram did hook up with the AQIM guys in Mali.
And it really did.
They armed them up and gave them a Saudi preacher or two or whatever and made them that much worse.
And now we've got the drone war, supposedly at least, against Boko Haram, Eric, spreading into Niger, Chad and Cameroon and that entire kind of just south of the Sahara region there.
Under President Obama, the U.S. has become, every week, more deeply involved across Africa, East Africa, West Africa, major fighting in Somalia these recent days, U.S. forces in Niger, in Burkina Faso.
I mean, who would think, what is the American Army or Special Forces doing in Burkina Faso?
This is the new hot thing for the military.
They all want to go to Africa and be rambos.
It's a sure sign that the U.S. is going to get stuck in Africa and have trouble extricating itself.
Well, and of course, they just make more enemies everywhere they go, and that's fine.
In fact, we have the quotes here somewhere.
There's one from Defense News and one from the New York Times where they speak of the Army invasion of Africa in simple and honest terms as a make-work program for the Army, because they don't have anything to do after withdrawing from Iraq and mostly from Afghanistan.
And if the Navy and the Air Force get to pivot to Asia, well, that's not fair.
We get a pivot too, says the Army, and so they go to Africa.
There's a lot to that view.
However childish it sounds, unfortunately, it's true.
And remember, the military is now the fourth branch of government, and it has a lot of influence in Washington above and beyond what it's supposed to have.
Yeah, it sure seems that way.
Well, all right, so let me ask you this.
What do you think of incoming President Donald Trump's relationship with the military, and how do you think that's supposed to lead?
He's been saying some interesting things, but I wonder what you think he means by them all.
Well, I think President Obama has been cowed and intimidated by the military.
He's left his military planning to three women who know nothing about military planning.
Susan Rice, that woman in the UN, Susan whatever her name is.
Samantha Power.
I mean, Samantha Powers and Hillary Clinton, the three ladies of the apocalypse, and that's ridiculous.
And that's one of the reasons they've gotten in so many jams.
I think Trump will slap down the military and is just the person to force them back into their barracks and not be intimidated by the military.
He's a tough New Yorker, like me, and he has a lot of tough advisors.
All right, well, so going way, way back when the military and its industrial complex were virtually nothing compared to what they are now, Ike Eisenhower said, well, I'm Ike freaking Eisenhower, and it's everything I can do to keep these guys reined in, and God help us.
For, you know, when the next presidents are not the guy that won World War II, how the hell are they going to be able to stand up to the national security state I've created?
He said something like that.
So, and that was forever ago, Eric.
I mean, this is, as you just said, they're the fourth branch of the government.
I would even argue the rest of the government is basically ceremonial so that they can keep being them, the Pentagon.
So I wonder, you know, you really think even Donald Trump is going to be able to tell the generals and the admirals and the CIA that, listen, you guys are going to have to get real jobs because this is over?
Well, with difficulty, short of taking out people and shooting them, to make an example, which is not our American way, fortunately, Trump will have trouble, but at least he has the force of personality to fight back with the military and to curb the ambitions of the military, as you just said.
I mean, this whole business in Africa chasing people through the jungle, whose names they can't even pronounce, is a make work program.
It's a WPA for the army, and it will continue unless somebody puts his foot down and stops it.
Well, like we started out with the war in Libya here, he sure has all the ammo he needs to take Hillary out on his way to D.C.
So she solved that problem for him.
Well, if only Americans understood what happened in Libya.
Well, wait until he starts explaining it once it's the general race, it's going to be on.
Thanks very much, Eric.
Appreciate it.
You're welcome, Scott.
All right, so that is the great Eric Margulies, writing at unz.com, unzunz.com and ericmargulies.com.
This one is called Hillary Haunted by Libya.
Right back in a second.
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