04/21/17 – Eric Margolis on Trump’s foreign policy for Afghanistan and North Korea – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright, it's our good friend Eric Margulies.
He is the author of a couple of incredible books.
I mean, they're really great.
War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
And I do confess I haven't read all the different parts of all of them, but I've definitely read all the Afghanistan stuff in both of them.
That's why my new Afghanistan book is mostly just plagiarized Eric Margulies.
Welcome back to the show, sir.
How are you?
I hope you don't mind me copying and pasting your book into my book.
The greatest form of flattery and admiration that there is.
I'm reading slowly.
I'm very busy, though, with Korea and other things.
I haven't had a chance to read as much as I would have liked.
But what I've seen so far, I like a lot.
Great.
Well, that's exactly what I wanted to hear.
I sent the book out to a lot of friends of the show, but for you, Patrick Coburn, and Anand Gopal, there's kind of a mandate here.
I need a thumbs up that it's okay to go ahead with this, that I ain't wrong.
Because after all, I've never been to Afghanistan, Eric.
The hell do I know about it?
I wasn't a soldier there or a journalist.
My only thing is I know a lot of journalists.
You do?
Well, you've done enough shows on the topic to be well informed.
Yeah.
Well, geez, now it looks like we're starting the show about Afghanistan.
So let's talk about how I read a thing the other day.
Well, we know from the news over the last few weeks and months that the general in charge of the war, Nicholson, has asked for approximately 5,000 troops.
We know that James Mattis, the Secretary of Defense, is somewhere right in the middle of finishing up a report with an ask for the President of the United States for the next escalation there.
And very timely, I'm afraid, I don't know, maybe it doesn't mean anything, Eric, but I read a thing in the Daily Caller where they quoted Stephen Biddle from the Council on Foreign Relations, who was very influential in the Iraq War surge and the Afghan War surge, was an advisor to McChrystal in 2009 as they were putting together the big ask for the 85,000 then.
And he was saying that, look, it's just clear.
We need to re-escalate back up to 100,000 troops.
We need a renewed commitment to the counterinsurgency doctrine, which, after all, General Mattis helped Petraeus rewrite.
And the only problem with Obama's surge is it was not quite enough troops, but the real problem was that they announced that it was going to end.
And what we need is an indefinite commitment to a 100,000-man counterinsurgency operation, and then we can finally win the Afghan War, Eric.
And so, I guess, a couple of questions.
Does that make any sense at all, that they could finally win?
Maybe they do, just need to put in half a million men, I don't know.
And then, I guess, secondly, do you think that's what Mattis is going to do, ask for 100,000?
Or are they just going to go for the minimum amount to protect Saigon from falling kind of deal?
I think it's the latter, Scott.
In penny packets of troops, which violates all good military thinking, you go big or you don't go at all, and they'll temporize.
These are military bureaucrats and armchair neocon war leaders, like in the Council on Foreign Relations.
And they really don't understand Afghanistan.
Most of them have never been there.
If they have been there, they've been to the Bagram Air Base, and that's it.
They've never walked the mountains of Afghanistan.
It's very sad watching these guys who hold the fate of this poor, devastated country in their hands.
I'll send another 100,000 troops.
Is anybody thinking how much it's going to cost?
The cost of sending one gallon of gasoline into Afghanistan, I don't remember the figure right now, but I think it's $400 or something.
We've spent almost a trillion dollars on Afghanistan since the war began, America's longest.
And we're nowhere now, and the Afghans are still fighting and enjoying it.
Yeah, some of them anyway.
Okay, this is going to sound crazy, but I got the idea in my head right now.
It just makes perfect sense to me.
I've seen Giraldi pull it off before.
You need to submit an essay to the New York Times and say, look, man, I'm the author of these two books.
I am the boss on this subject, and let me tell you something.
You better not.
I bet you could get it published.
I just got a feeling right now that you could get it in there.
I thought I was on their doodoo list.
Well, I'm sure you are, but it's right at this inflection point.
They're about to do this big ask.
Nobody cares about Afghanistan at all except on very special occasions, and I think that we're right at the start of that window here.
It's going to last another few weeks until the Brad Pitt movie comes out.
Did you know there's a Brad Pitt movie where he plays McChrystal?
I didn't.
I mean, it's as horrible as it'll be to see McChrystal's reputation rehabilitated there, at least to get people paying attention to the fact that we're still fighting in Afghanistan.
Isn't it 2017?
I hit my head or something.
It's described as counterterrorism operations, and those can go on forever, as we know.
It's scary.
Wait till the commander-in-chief himself, who just showed himself last week to be a brilliant naval strategist, having lost his little attack group, decides to use his magic on Afghanistan and produce a solution there.
Then we'll really be in a mess.
You know, I am going to be interested to see how this goes, because the dynamic really is different from Obama taking over from Bush, because Obama really ran on the Iraq war was dumb, and the proof of that is that the Afghan war is the good war, and we've got to escalate it and win it.
That was kind of his standard all along.
At the time, that was a great sales pitch for Washington, D.C., because they had always felt that Afghanistan had been neglected, and that they should always have tried harder and escalated more and built more and done more.
But now that already didn't work.
Now you have Trump, who is a hawk on everything.
I wouldn't give him the benefit of the doubt on anything.
And yet, yeah, I mean, I guess, well, if I have to go back to that original question of whether they're going to try coin again or a minimal thing, I hate to say this because I'm going to jinx it or something, but I guess I agree with you that it doesn't make sense that they would ask him really to do coin again, or that he would say yes to that.
Another hundred grand and try all over again.
I shouldn't say grand.
Another hundred thousand.
All over again.
2010, 11, and 12.
All over again.
And the Army and the Marine Corps can't want that, right?
I mean, I don't know.
Well, they do.
I mean, these wars are good for promotions in the officer class.
So generally, the wars are well thought of, and the military-industrial complex will make more maverick missiles.
And low risk compared to a big infantry war with North Korea, for example, right?
Exactly.
Exactly.
This is really a small peanuts war.
But it just goes on.
They can't win.
I've noticed an interesting phenomena in the last couple of weeks, Scott.
Suddenly, thanks to the Americans, ISIS has appeared in Afghanistan.
Remember we dropped that monster 20,000 pound MOAB bomb on the Tora Bora tunnel complex, saying we killed up to 97 ISIS.
Now we're fighting ISIS in Afghanistan.
Taliban has vanished from the American lexicon.
We did this, too, in the past.
So Taliban was never referred to again in the past once that al-Qaeda came in.
And now we're fighting al-Qaeda.
Everybody hates al-Qaeda.
There's nothing good to be said about them.
But now we are fighting ISIS, which had no place in Afghanistan.
It's complete nonsense.
ISIS is much more hated than Taliban and will justify a greater American effort to wipe them out.
Yeah, I mean, the thing of that is really obvious, right?
The discrepancy there.
When al-Qaeda was in Afghanistan, they actually really were humans and were actual people with histories and stuff.
They came from Egypt and Saudi Arabia and other places like that for the most part.
You know, over there on the other side of Persia from Afghanistan.
But when they talk about ISIS in Nangarhar province, they're really just talking about one little faction of local tribal Pashtun fighters who supposedly, I never saw the original source here, I just hear tell that they say they're ISIS now.
But so even if we take that for granted, that they decided it would be good PR for recruitment in their neighborhood if they claim loyalty to Baghdadi instead of the new Taliban leader whose name I can't pronounce, then even if that's true, that doesn't make them a transnational terrorist threat to the United States on the order of what ISIS especially is about to become once they're finally rousted out of Raqqa here, as we're going to see.
They're still just local Pashtun fighters is all they are, regular guys from the neighborhood.
Nobody's even pretending that they're really secret Iraqi agents who've come to set up a new caliphate in eastern Afghanistan.
Give them time, they will.
Yeah, I shouldn't be giving them too many ideas on how to refine their propaganda.
The Pentagon has also trotted out the old Khorasan group.
Right.
They dropped that Moab bomb claiming that these ISIS people were also Khorasan people.
This is a group we've never heard of, doesn't exist, but has been used to justify its bombing in Mesopotamia.
Yeah, well, they even admitted at one point, sort of like with Fancy Bear, that like, oh, well, we just kind of made that up about them.
Yeah, no one ever called themselves the Khorasan group.
We just labeled them that, meaning some Al-Qaeda guys who maybe had been to the Khorasan region in the past before or something.
Oh, okay.
Doesn't sound like much of a group necessarily.
Well, you know what?
I got a question for you.
So the Pashtun population of the country, they do have, I mean, it's not fair to say representation, but in theory they have representation in parliament, a lot of it.
And yet the idea, I guess, mostly thesis of my book is that the Pashtuns who have power under the American-backed government there that we foisted on those people are all just the worst kind of child rapists and warlords and drug dealers and thugs, and they don't represent the people of Pashtunistan, I guess, in south and east Afghanistan really at all, and hence the insurgency and support for the Taliban.
But so that's not really any different when it comes to the Hazaras, the Uzbeks and the Tajiks and the Turkmen and whoever else we've installed in power in the north either, right?
General Dostum, I know he's a bastard to Pashtuns.
Is he good to his own people?
How come there's not the same kind of insurgency in the north against those people who, yeah, supposedly they have representation, but again, they're nothing but the worst child rapists and murderers and warlords and criminals and drug dealers, just the same as it is with the Pashtuns?
Well, Scott, there's no doubt in my mind that we in the U.S. have, we are in league with the scum of Afghan society, with the worst war criminals, drug dealers, and malfactors.
They are in the so-called phony parliaments.
They occupy important positions, but we have the best part of Afghan society has run away from us, and we're left with the dregs who are very much in bed not only with Dostum, this war criminal and big drug dealer, but the Russian intelligence services are still very active in Afghanistan, particularly with the Northern Alliance.
So we've got a rum bunch of people there.
Well, but so what about, how come there doesn't really seem to be, I mean, I guess there's a Pashtun insurgency against Dostum up in Kunduz and that kind of thing.
I read a Human Rights Watch report where they were saying that, yeah, the more Dostum acts like Dostum, the more Pashtuns are pushed into the arms of the Islamists, meaning the Taliban insurgents, I guess.
So that makes sense, but what about the Tajik, Uzbek, and Hazara populations?
They don't seem to be in open rebellion, even though I can't imagine that their leadership is really any less corrupt than those who rule over the Pashtuns, who seem to not take this sitting down for one day.
They are small minorities, Scott, and they have had a rough time in the past.
The Taliban really went after the Hazaras, who were Shiite Muslims, and right now they're happy to be sheltered under the American security umbrella.
They're collaborating with the Americans and they're helping them out, but they're not going to determine the future of Afghanistan.
The two big ethnic groups are the Pashtun, or Pashtuns, and in the north, the Tajiks.
They are the Tajiks right now, are allied with the Americans, working for the Americans, as they worked before for the Soviets.
You mentioned Russia there, and their support for Dostum, of course he's, as you write in your book, a former general in the communist Afghan army, back during the 1980s war, but I'm sure you may have seen that recently there have been accusations that the Russians are backing the Taliban, and no one's ever really tried to offer any proof of this.
It would seem to go against their recent history, but then again, if America can change sides in the war, maybe they can too.
Are the Russians now backing the Taliban insurgency against the United States and its government in Afghanistan, Eric?
Scott, I've read those reports.
I don't know if they're true.
It wouldn't surprise me that Moscow is playing both sides of the street.
They're very clever in these things, and why not?
And whoever it turns out to be the ruling faction in Afghanistan is worthy of being friends with.
So maybe the Soviets or the Russians have decided that the war is completely lost for the Americans, that Taliban will emerge as the dominant force, and it's time to make nice to them.
But again, I've seen no proof, and I haven't heard anything that convinces me.
Well, they held some peace talks that the Americans boycotted, but apparently everybody else showed up at last week to talk about trying to figure out how to negotiate with the Taliban.
I don't know how much progress they made.
I wondered whether the rumors being put out there were basically trying to disrupt that peace conference and those efforts sort of thing.
Well, I'm sure the Russians have back-channeled contacts with Taliban now and have for a long time.
Right now, well, I guess it's funny because as recently as last year, the Americans were having the Indians buy helicopters from the Russians to give to the Afghan National Army because we've got sanctions on the Russians.
We can't buy their helicopters, but we wanted to give some of their helicopters to the ANA, so we had the Indians do it for us.
So if they're playing both sides of the street, they're playing the USA pretty good too.
That's right.
What an absurd story with those helicopters.
I've written about that in the past too.
We were previously buying helicopters from the Russians to give to the Afghans.
It's such a clumsy policy.
We're stumbling in every direction.
All right, let's talk about something really scary.
War with North Korea.
Now me, I got a feeling that we're not going to have a war with North Korea.
But on the other hand, we could have one anyway and I could be wrong about stuff.
So I want to talk with you a little bit about your recent article.
What would Korean War II look like?
We hear a little bit about artillery this and nuclear that, but I don't know if anybody really knows, but you've got a pretty good idea apparently of what sort of military assets would be put into play by either side and maybe even in what order and what we could expect to see from a war breaking out on the Korean Peninsula.
I've spent a lot of time on the military aspect of Korea.
I've been repeatedly up on the DMZ and under the DMZ in the tunnels bored by the nefarious North Koreans.
I've been with the South Korean 2nd ROK Division.
It's a very interesting subject for me.
In fact, I'm fascinated by the whole North Asia area.
That is Northeast China, the Russian Pacific provinces, and Korea.
They're all in the same geographical area.
But the one thing I know is that the North Koreans have been preparing for 20 years for an invasion to be attacked by the U.S.
They've dug in as much as they can.
Little Iwo Jimas everywhere along the region.
It's a very difficult terrain.
You really don't want to fight a war there.
As we found out during the 1950s Korean War, every hill is a little fortress and there are hills that never end.
Well, so I read a thing going, you know what, everybody's all scared of North Korea's nukes, but they can't miniaturize one.
They can't deliver one.
How are they going to get it to Seoul?
I think maybe you and I joked years before about putting it on the back of a flatbed truck and trying to drive it on down there or something.
Yo, FedEx.
Put in a big catapult.
FedEx.
Do you kind of agree with that then?
Yeah, okay, they got a lot of artillery, but their nuclear threat is, maybe they could smuggle one on a ship somewhere, sneak it into a port or something, but they don't really have the ability to deploy it militarily.
I'm not so sure about that, Scott.
They've been working assiduously.
They're smart, the North Koreans.
They've got the same gray matter in their heads as the industrious South Koreans, and they or they bought the technology.
But, you know, this is technology from the 1940s, not the miniaturized warhead, but they still have, you know, 20, 30 years to work on that.
And even that's 1950s technology, so yeah.
That's right, but when it goes off, it's still very effective.
And I think they probably do have some nuclear delivery capability.
The U.S. military estimates think that they have 10 to 15 or even 20 missiles with nuclear warheads.
They can be fired at South Korea and at Japan.
And really we have to remember that it's Japan that's being held hostage in this crisis.
Right.
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Which, for that matter, means the whole world, too.
I mean, if Japan gets a nuke, just think about what that means for every global market and the future of global trade for every continent for years.
I mean, the reverberations of that, never mind the weather and all the tragedy of the immediate dead and all of that, but just the nuking of Japan, for decades and decades we'd be feeling the effects of that.
It's an unthinkable catastrophe, but it's very possible.
If the U.S. attacks North Korea, I think it's highly likely that North Korea will repost by launching a couple of nuclear-armed missiles at Japan.
So this is unthinkable, and so they won't do it, right?
Because Mattis and McMaster must be saying to old Dum-Dum that, look, we can't really do this because the costs are just too high.
Right?
Well, who knows in this strange administration that I just read a report this morning that the commander-in-chief had said that Korea used to be part of China, which it is not, or it wasn't.
So who knows?
Well, and so speaking of that, I mean, Donald Trump, he had always said, well, we'll just get China to take care of it for us, and got some vague idea of a carrot and a stick to try to make the Chinese obey, and then he met with the Chinese leader over some beautiful chocolate cake and strikes on Syria, and then he said later that, yeah, you know, the president of China there, he told me that it is complicated.
And so now that he talked to me for ten minutes about it, now I understand that, hmm, that is complicated.
After all, I wonder what anybody's going to do about it.
So I guess that's the question for you is, what could be done about it?
What could America do to influence the Chinese to do whatever it is you think that they could do about it?
I don't know.
Well, Scott, my mantra on this that I've been saying for a long time is that we have a simple diplomatic solution to this that could end this whole nuclear craziness.
And that is to end the Korean War, the 1953 Korean War, and to sign a peace treaty with North Korea, recognize the government of North Korea.
We don't have to love governments that we recognize.
We can hold our noses and still open diplomatic relations.
We can end the trade embargo of North Korea that we've had for decades, and we could bury the hatchet with them and negotiate in exchange for opening up relations and ending American attempts to overthrow the North Korean government, i.e. these military maneuvers that they stage every year that drives the North Koreans crazy.
They would then give up their nuclear weapons because the only reason the North Koreans are dirt poor or investing all this money in these weapons is to protect the regime.
They said, you know, if Gaddafi in Sudan had had nuclear weapons, they would still be in office today.
And baby Kim is wise enough to realize this.
This is the crux of the problem.
We want to overthrow the North Korean regime, and we want all of Korea to be ours, and we don't have to do this.
It's not a necessity of American security.
Yeah, so that's the whole thing, is you challenge too many premises of their policy at the same time.
They want to keep everything the same except make the North give up their nukes.
That's the thing that they can't have.
That's right.
Well, the North would be ill-advised to give up their nuclear weapons because there would immediately spark attempts by the Americans to overthrow the Pyongyang regime.
Look, these annual military exercises involve 380,000 U.S. and South Korean troops, and God knows how many aircraft, warships, and things like that.
It really mimics an invasion that would happen of North Korea.
Yeah.
So, you know, I'm seeing reports that—well, I heard one report.
I heard of one report that the Chinese were moving troops toward the border, and there's one this morning, which who knows?
I don't believe any story about Russia these days, but one in The Hill this morning said that the Russians— well, that they were referring to reports that the Russians were moving troops toward their border with North Korea, and that, you know, I forgot who it was that they said was responding to that.
So that made me wonder whether, wow, I wonder if they really are going to do something, and the Chinese and the Russian governments are getting really prepared here to have their military forces be able to stem the refugee flows.
Well, it's possible, you know, and the American dream is to get the Red Chinese Army go and overthrow the Kim regime.
Could happen.
But that'd be crazy too, right?
Because then they'd just have the Chinese rule the north and share the DMZ with the south, and the same problem again, right?
I mean, I guess we get along a bit better with Beijing than Pyongyang, but still, we don't control them and own them like we do the south.
Well, the Chinese are more dependable.
They aren't as volatile as the north.
At least their threats aren't as bad.
But I know from when I've been in South Korea that, you know, it's interesting.
Nobody talks about South Korea in this thing.
Yeah, because it's not up to them.
They're just stuck in the middle, like our 35,000 army troops stationed there.
Well, it's a vassal state of the United States.
They don't even have a president right now.
The president was just impeached.
They have elections coming up.
But essentially the South Korean response to these things has been blasé.
And, oh, the North Koreans, there they go again.
They're the crazy relative in the attic that nobody talks about.
And I have been told repeatedly in South Korea that they don't fear attack or invasion from the north.
What they fear is what they call unexpected reunification, meaning that the north collapses and 24.5 million starving refugees go pouring into China and into South Korea across the DMZ and even across the water to Japan.
That's what they're scared of.
And South Korea can't afford to undertake the feeding and care and rebuilding of North Korea the way Germany did with East Germany.
Right.
Well, now, you know, before when I asked you what to do and you said, well, just give them a security guarantee and treat them with respect and work things out, everything will work out fine.
That's what I think, too.
But it sounds like such an extreme position since everyone knows.
I mean, look at the situation we're in.
Look at the consensus in Washington, D.C. and New York City among all the brilliant think tank people who know what to do, except for Doug Bandow and Ted Carpenter.
And they don't really count.
They're Cato guys.
Everybody else on this, you know, all of these things that we're talking about today in terms of the containment policy and these, you know, from the weapon sales and the exercises and the control over the South Korean policy on this issue and all of these other things.
All this seems to go without saying to the point where when you say, look, let's just do like Jack Kennedy said to Castro and just promise we're not going to invade, OK?
It's going to be fine.
And then we can quit with the brinksmanship.
We can ratchet down from here instead of up.
There's nothing magical about that.
That's not utopianism.
You're a U.S. Army vet and a conservative, self-described Ike Eisenhower type, not some rube.
This isn't being silly to say, I don't know, let's negotiate.
And yet that's how far off of reason we are now in this country, empire, When you say that, you're so far outside of the three-by-five card of allowable conventional opinion, as Tom Woods says, that it's basically unheard of, except for here on this show.
The war party is now dominant in Washington and dominates the president.
And just think, if we made a deal with North Korea, that would imply that why are a full division of American troops and two wings of fighter-bombers needed to stay in Korea?
Why don't they bring them home?
What are they doing there?
And South Korea is no longer a base for U.S. military and naval operations.
So, yeah, this would change our whole strategic posture.
Why are American troops in Okinawa?
They're supposedly protecting against the wicked North Koreans.
And if they're not wicked anymore, we've got a problem.
The whole military-industrial complex is going to be upset because South Korea could be a very important market for the American manufacturers.
Yeah.
Well, ain't that always the way?
Speaking of Ike Eisenhower, the guy who built and then warned against the military-industrial complex, he couldn't do anything about it.
He was a five-star general-turned-president, had the reputation of single-handedly defeating Adolf Hitler in Europe somehow, and he couldn't tame them.
All he could do was basically try to grab on to the reins and hold on for dear life, and there never was any accountability ever since then.
And so here we still are.
Too much money involved, Scott.
The war he never quite ended back then.
You're right.
You're right.
All right, so I don't know if you saw this thing by Tim Shorrock in The Nation, but he was saying the same thing that you were saying, that the South Koreans really don't take all this that seriously.
They've heard all this a million times, and they know that there's a lot of arms sales that are required over on the American side and all of that, so they're cynical enough about it to not be worried about it.
And, you know, his focus in this article, as you mentioned, is these upcoming elections.
The, I presume, very American-favored president has just been impeached and removed from office, and then so now, and Ted Carpenter was talking about this on the show the other day too, oh, and John Pfeffer.
Lots of Korea interviews recently.
It's between the liberal and the progressive, basically, at this point, and the right-winger is sure to lose this upcoming election.
So then my question for you is how much hope do you have that these guys will be able to have an independent policy, maybe try to go back to a real sunshine policy and really, you know, preempt the Trump administration with peaceful maneuvers of their own that might make a difference?
Well, Scott, it would help, certainly.
The current South Korean government, whose president has just been ousted as Park Kyung-hee, she represented the hard right in Korea, which is primarily Christian, and this is a very important thing that's not talked about much.
The Koreans Christians are very pro-U.S., very right-wing.
They formed the foundation of the Syngman Rhee dictatorship that ran Korea during the Korean War, and they're militantly anti-communist, anti-North Korea.
Buddhist Koreans, who are majority, have a much more easygoing attitude and are in favor of reconciliation and talks.
So we've got this religious element.
The Christian-backed factions have now lost, and we'll see the new expected president, whose name is Moon, made a very interesting comment the other day, which got no notice whatsoever.
He said, America has got to ask our permission to attack North Korea.
Can't just do it unilaterally.
That is intriguing, because maybe the South Koreans will be more forthright, saying, wait a minute, this is our crisis, not yours, and we'll handle it our usual way.
Yeah.
You know, I always thought that Obama could have solved this issue, but I guess I prefer him sitting around to Donald Trump saying, time is running out, something must be done, we can't let things continue the way they are, strategic patience is over.
So now he's sort of talked us into a corner that, jeez, if these South Koreans don't figure out some way to solve this problem peacefully, the Americans are going to solve it the hard way.
And by solve, I mean make it worse.
Well, it's amateur hour.
That's why the Trump administration has no sophisticated foreign policy.
They ought to bring back Jim Baker or somebody like that, or Brett Scowcroft or an adult to guide this policy, because right now it's like giving a kid six guns and they're threatening everybody.
Yeah.
With the Iranians being later, since Trump didn't bring the North Koreans to their knees last week, this week, now it's the threats are coming against Iran.
Yeah, you know, I guess that was one relief.
I never really thought about during the Obama years as much, but I can see it now in the contrast that at least he was deliberately lying all day, every day about all the horrible things he was doing, rather than really being a damn fool who thought it was the right thing to do.
You know what I mean?
Whereas this is really more like George W. Bush years where these guys really don't know anything.
You know, James Mattis thinks Iran is in it with ISIS.
And, you know, well, this is a little out of context.
Mitt Romney thinks that Syria is Iran's path to the sea.
You know, this is the level of strategery that goes into the thinking of these Republicans.
They've never even really spun a globe around before.
They don't really know about anything except their own interests.
And so they're really stupid and dangerous compared to, you know, for example, you.
You know, not just you're bright, but you are interested and you have experience and you know about these things and you ask questions about this stuff and, you know, these travel around and get to know it.
But you have people who are really making the life and death decisions for the world empire who don't have a 20th the knowledge that you have, or even just kind of the overall wisdom and understanding of the context of American policy in the Middle East over the last few generations.
They just couldn't touch it.
They don't even know where to begin asking the questions.
And these are the men in charge.
They really don't know.
They're from a hole in the ground.
Well, unfortunately, I tend to agree with you, Scott.
Last night I watched the French presidential debate and 11 candidates who were running for the first election they held on Sunday.
And I was struck by how well educated the candidates were.
And even though some of them were a bit wacky and off the wall, nevertheless, they knew where Syria was.
They knew where Palestine was.
They're in France.
Of course, they're much closer to things that are happening.
They don't have this gap of knowledge that one sees so often in the upper echelons here in the United States, particularly in the business community, where people really don't know anything about anything.
We have a lousy education system, and people here don't read books, and they don't take an interest in history or culture.
Our president gets his news not just from Fox, but Fox and Friends in the morning.
I mean, my God, man.
Can you imagine if what you thought was dependent on what you learned from Brian Kilmeade?
Well, I don't watch Fox ever, but this very thought frightens me.
Yes, we have a president who has the world knowledge of a chipmunk, and he's likely to plunge us into war.
There are a lot of dangerous fanatics in the Trump administration that have not become too obvious yet, except for Bannon, but he has a very hard line, Muslim-hating, war-loving people who I don't know what they're doing there, the extreme right-wingers, Frank Gaffney-type things that are very disturbing.
Yeah, I mean, that's how we know we're in real trouble, when the best that we have is a broken clock like Bannon, who, because he hates Muslims so much and so determined that the West is stuck in this civilizational battle with them, that means that he's smart enough to know that you shouldn't back al-Qaeda in Syria, dummy, right?
But you shouldn't have to be as bad as him to know that, but that's the only reason he is good on Syria, is because he's so bad on anything called Muslim anything.
So, Ba'ath Party, definitely prefer that to Arar al-Sham or Jabhat al-Nusra, no question, but on the other hand, war against ISIS, war against Jabhat al-Nusra and Arar al-Sham and the Taliban and whoever else you got, absolutely he's for that, he's just not for overthrowing these secular dictators anymore, which we got to admit, compared to the last couple of governments we've had here, that that's a pretty big improvement, if we're not going to see the overthrow of Assad or any more Libya's or Iraq's as far as that goes, but endless war against the consequences from those wars is not much of an improvement, really.
No, it isn't, but it's worrisome, we're moving all the chess pieces around on the globe and the people who are doing it are people who don't know anything about the region, so they have the most shallowest knowledge, they listen to mountabanks in Washington who feed them all kinds of ludicrous stories, where they're urged by the Council on Foreign Relations, which has its own agenda to push, which is not necessarily favorable to the United States.
We're profoundly shallow, and that's the greatest power on earth, it's very sad to see.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I just saw on my Twitter feed this morning that David Rockefeller left the Council on Foreign Relations $25 million in his will, the former chairman there, so we'll have plenty more enemies to be created by and fought by the United States in the years in the future here.
That's right.
Good times.
All right, thanks very much for coming back on the show, Eric, I appreciate it.
Scott, it's been a treat.
See you again soon.
Talk to you.
Okay, bye-bye.
All right, y'all, that's the great Eric Margulies, War at the Top of the World and American Raj, that's the most recent, American Raj, Liberation or Domination, read all he writes at ericmargulies.com and at unz.com, unz, unz.com.
Oh, yeah, spell Margulies like Margolis.
And, yeah, check out his great books on Amazon.
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