Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America and by God we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, listen up you people.
I got Eric Margulies on the line, ericmargulies.com.
That's his website and you can read his articles at unz.com and at LRC, I think probably, and some other places.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Eric?
I'm just fine.
I'm trying to cope with a flood of news coming in from all over the place.
Usually it's a slow time, this time of year, but not now.
Well, that's what you're doing here is helping me cope with it.
I hope you're ready.
Now, here's the thing.
You wrote two books.
One of them is called War at the Top of the World, which is all about Afghanistan and Tibet and China and India and Pakistan and all these very interesting places far away from here where lots of tensions.
Then American Raj, Liberation or Domination, which is just God is so excellent, man.
I do hope everyone will read it.
It's about everything, the whole Middle East and Afghanistan too, and all this really great stuff.
I got a few different things I want to talk with you about today.
First and foremost, I want to talk about Palestine.
Here's the deal, Eric Margulies.
You are a US Army veteran of the Vietnam era, I believe.
That's right.
You are a self-described conservative Republican New Yorker, which when you say that, I get the idea that you have your own separate kind of New York patriotism like us Texans have to.
Very proud American, red, white, and blue kind of a guy you are.
How come you don't despise all Palestinians and how come you're not obsessed with making everyone else hate them too?
Because that's what conservatism in America means.
You must be the only one who disagrees.
What's your beef?
Well, my beef is this, that first of all, I know a lot about the area.
I've been there for 50 years.
My mother was a journalist, was the first female reporter to extensively cover the Middle East and to discover the Palestinians who were living in tents and tin shacks.
Nobody knew they were there or that they even existed.
She began writing about the Palestinians until finally her voice was silenced after the newspapers who were sponsoring her dropped her column because of advertisers' threats.
They were going to pull their advertising.
I remember as a boy in New York, people coming in the middle of the night, banging on our door and yelling threats that were going to kill me and throw acid in my face because of what she had written.
She didn't write anything inflammatory.
It was simply, she was stating the fact that there were at least 750,000 people who had been evicted from their homes, living in squalor and in precarious conditions, and that people would eventually blame it on the United States.
She said, Scott, to me something remarkable.
50 years ago, she said to me, Eric, she said in 50 years, the United States is going to be hit by serious attacks because of the policy on the Palestinians.
Sure enough, this is what happened on 9-11.
You know, you're really kind of, well, you're only hinting at it in a way.
You're not stating it explicitly, but the implication, what you're saying is the fact of the Nakba, the fact that there were three quarters of a million, at least, as you said, Palestinians living in what we now call Israel proper, who were massacred and killed and force-marched out of their homes and out of their villages.
That was the secret.
There was a real, huge lie that this was a land without people.
And so, how convenient.
And they really did push that.
It's only, in my time, since I've started studying this issue in the last, say, 20 years or whatever, I guess.
Well, of course, everybody kind of knows that, and Israeli historians have written about it now, and this and that kind of thing.
I guess we still hear the mythology, but anybody who looks at the details, it's not a secret anymore.
But back then, it really was.
So, when your mother was writing about this, this was like a huge, groundbreaking thing, and no wonder she was censored for it.
That's right.
And our lives threatened.
You know, since then, I've spent five decades traveling in the Middle East.
I met the Palestinian leaders from Yasser Arafat to George Habash.
I've followed this whole thing very closely and with a bleeding heart.
The Palestinians are very nice, decent people.
They were a nation of shopkeepers and small traders.
And how they somehow were transformed by propaganda into terrorists is, well, it's partly their fault, but it's really a sad commentary on our media.
Yeah.
All right.
So, well, go back, because it's so hard, you know, to presume how much people understand about the situation.
But I'll go ahead and put it like this to you, Eric.
Back when I had nothing but a TV news education on this, and I think this would go for anybody who's just kind of learning from TV news about what's been going on these past few weeks.
Palestine is the country next door, and they're constantly sending these terrorists who try to invade Israel and kill the Israelis and extort them out of their land.
And so, what's poor Israel supposed to do about that?
That's what Americans who haven't read about it think is going on.
Every U.S. congressman and TV commentator is trained like a talking parrot to say, quote, Israel is the right to defend itself, unquote.
Yes, it's the evil Palestinians who are totally inept militarily, who are attacking Israel.
We don't know.
The public was never told that not only were there 750,000 to a million Palestinians who were, as you said, driven from their homes at gunpoint and their villages razed by bulldozers, but when Israel seized Jerusalem in the old city in 1967, that another half million or so Palestinian refugees were created and driven out of the area into Jordan.
And then there were Syrian refugees too.
But look, there's Palestinians all over.
By now, at the passage of time, there are almost five million Palestinian refugees living in refugee camps who are sand in the eye of the Middle East, as I've often said.
Yeah, there's some quote from, I forget which, Israeli Prime Minister Begin or one of them, saying, well, as time goes by, they'll forget, but they sure haven't forgotten.
But so, let me ask you this as a hypothetical.
You mentioned 67 and the new wave of refugees that were created then, which I guess I didn't really know about that, but that makes sense.
That was in 67 when Israel, they fought a war against the neighboring states, but they ended up seizing East Jerusalem.
They already control West Jerusalem since 48, but they seized the East and they seized the rest of the West Bank, as well as the Gaza Strip.
And they've occupied that entire population this whole time, which is now approximately 6 million people or something like that, 5 million and something at least here, who have no, well, the ones inside Israel have some civil rights, but they're at least second or third class citizens.
But the ones in Gaza and the West Bank living under Israeli military occupation have basically no civil rights whatsoever.
The foreign soldiers come and abduct their children from their beds in the middle of the night, like some nightmare out of the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany or something.
It happens on a daily basis there.
But so, I have kind of a counterfactual, which is that, what if the Israelis had been made by Ronald Reagan to live up to the Camp David Accord, where they promised they would create a Palestinian state?
Never mind Oslo, it should have already been done a decade before Oslo.
And if Ronald Reagan had said, hey, you signed the thing, get the hell out of there and let there be an independent Palestine, and let the refugees come back to the West Bank and Gaza, if they can't come back to their old homes in Jaffa and the other villages where there are trees growing now, where their village used to be and all these things, if they can't have the right of return, at least what if they had been able to return to an independent Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza and East Jerusalem in my lifetime, through the 80s, 90s, and into the 2000s here?
Wouldn't that be a sustainable venture at that point?
Not that it would make the Nakba okay, and refusing the right of return the most moral option, but wouldn't that be a hell of a lot more sustainable as an outcome than the current situation with this perpetual occupation, which is really cover for annexation, right?
And the Israeli takeover of the West Bank, regardless of the fact that there's millions of people who live on it.
Which is run, the West Bank is run as a police stake.
No doubt about it.
And Gaza is just a giant open air prison or garbage dump into which the Israelis force a lot of Palestinians as a sort of a model for what was going to happen.
But you're right, a Palestinian state should have been created.
Israel's left wing has been harping on this point for years.
The great Uri Avnery, probably the finest thinker in Israel, just wrote recently, he said, you know, the Israelis should have set up this Palestinian state in 1967.
Instead, they went triumphalist.
And you have to remember that Israel's right wing, and it's very far to the right, has never accepted Israel's borders with Syria and Lebanon.
And I believe that it has a very strong expansionist wing, which not only does not want a Palestinian state, but is intent on enlarging Israel into Lebanon and Syria.
And the Syrian civil war is a perfect opportunity for this to make a greater Israel.
It seems like, well, there's like this rock and a hard place situation, right?
Where they're supposed to be a Jewish democracy.
And yet there's this permanent kind of untenable occupation going on.
But as Netanyahu said, hey, from the river to the sea, it's all us and sort of just kick the can down the road.
We're going to figure out what to do with these Palestinians later.
They can't just kill them all.
But do you think that they're just biding their time to just force Marcham, Trail of Tears style, or Nakba style into the Jordan River, and learn how to swim, and just go ahead and push them out?
Because it doesn't seem like, even from the Likud party's point of view, from the Netanyahu cabinet's point of view, that they can keep this up for, what, another 30, 50, 70 years into the future?
They're going to have this permanent apartheid situation over the Palestinian people.
It doesn't seem like that's going to work, right?
I'm not sure about that, Scott.
I think that Israel certainly controls the situation now, and thinks it can continue doing that.
The Palestinians are in disarray.
They have two governments, both of which are feeble, and one of which, the PLO, is pretty much run by Israeli intelligence.
And the U.S. will do whatever Israel tells them to do.
So why can't Israel do that?
They may eventually follow the late General Sharon's idea of herding everybody into the desert, or pushing most of the Palestinians into the desert.
Look, we see it going on in Burma, where the Burmese military is pushing all the Burmese Muslims out of the country.
Israel could do the same.
And I guess that's really all they need, is Washington, D.C., which has apparently never been more in their back pocket.
Never more.
Washington has become a wholly owned subsidiary of the Likud Party.
We just see today that Secretary of State Pompeo, a flaming neocon, announces that if Iran does anything, the U.S. will respond violently.
And really what's happened is that this wing of the Republican Party has become a wing of the Likud Party in Israel.
They both have expansionist aims.
Yeah, it really does seem more and more like Netanyahu is the American prime minister.
Our presidency is more of a ceremonial role.
That's right.
And that's why Netanyahu is smirking away every time you see him, because he knows he really pulls the string in Washington and in Congress and in the media.
All right.
So it seems to me, well, yeah, I know it's true.
I mean, Gareth Porter in his book Manufactured Crisis really nails this down to brass tacks and footnotes that this Israeli strategy is constantly to demonize Iran, to distract from what's going on in Palestine.
Iran poses no threat to Israel whatsoever.
In fact, there's that interview that Jeffrey Goldberg did with Ehud Barak when he was still the defense minister, and Netanyahu himself a few years ago, where they both admitted that even if they had nukes, no, we don't think they'd use them on us.
What are they, stupid?
It's just that we think it might limit our freedom of action against Hezbollah.
So that's why we can't let ...
And it might cause a brain drain as gifted young Jews move to America to go and seek their future and fortune there in safety instead of in Israel.
But that's what counts as an existential threat, as far as that goes.
But it seems like the greatest purpose of the Ayatollah is just so that Netanyahu has somebody to point at while the IDF is shooting kids in the head.
That's right.
And to raise money from North America, beating the war drums about the Iranian threat.
There is no Iranian threat.
Interestingly, though, Iran is the last major Middle East country that is still supporting the Palestinians and calling for their return home and defending them.
And Israel wants to knock out ...
It was Iraq before that, but Iraq was destroyed by the US due to pressure from pro-Israel groups.
Now we're going to see the same thing happen with Iran.
And once Iran is squashed, there'll be nobody calling for a Palestinian state.either a QR code commodity disc or a lifetime subscription, not only for $100, not two, a lifetime subscription to Listen & Think audiobooks, Libertarian audiobooks, listenandthink.com.
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All right, thanks.
Well, so what about this now?
And I'll admit, if this is a criticism, I guess I'll have to level it.
Philip Weiss is a bit of an optimist over there at the Mondo Weiss blog, the great Philip Weiss.
And he's saying, you know what, there's a real shift going on here.
A lot of people aren't noticing it.
But Trump is making Israel such a partisan issue, particularly by pulling out of the Iran deal, which is Obama's signature achievement.
And he's doing it in such a way to really alienate, I guess, parts of the pro-Israel community in America, this kind of thing, on the left side.
While at the same time, you have more and more Democrats and progressives and liberal and Democratic voters who are getting better and better on this issue all along.
Now, those that run the Democratic Party are certainly about as Zionist as they could possibly be.
But it looks like we're near a point where maybe they're going to be up against a voting majority or plurality that's powerful enough that it really will be able to at least cause a major fight and help to turn Israel into an actual partisan issue in this country, where pro-Israel forces flee the Democratic Party for the Republicans, as the Democratic Party gets less and less open to them, and helping to accelerate that process.
Obviously, that's huge.
That's the key, right?
It's bipartisan control by the lobby this whole time.
But if there was an actual partisan fight about it, then that could imply that people would actually have to talk about what's going on and who's occupying who, and just what the actual problem is here.
And that would be a huge change from where we've been.
If we're dealing just with Jewish Americans, you're right, because particularly amongst the more thoughtful Jewish Americans, there's a discomfort and unease over Israel's far right policy.
Israel's left wingers call the far right fascists.
There is a discomfort over this.
But you have to also bring in all the evangelical Christians in the US, out in your part of the world, who are taught a Sunday school version of current events in history.
Arabs bad, Jews good, all going to heaven if we support Israel.
These kinds of dangerous simplicities are widely believed in the US.
I know from my reader mail, you have to really fight against them.
But it's hard to, as Mark Twain said, to convince somebody of a rational argument when he's arrived at his beliefs through irrational thinking.
Yeah, you know, it's funny, because we talk about the role of the Christian right in supporting Israel so much.
But, you know, it was somebody on Twitter that really helped crystallize this for me a bit.
And I was reminded of Ricky Ware, the famous, well, in Texas anyway, the famous AM radio show host out of San Antonio for generations down there, and who is a proud member of the Cornerstone Church with John Hagee in them.
And so I guess I always remembered, it was kind of symbolic to me, this one quote, I remember him on the radio arguing with a caller and saying, no, I'm sorry, sir.
It says in the Bible, support Israel.
And that was just, he couldn't think of it any other way than that.
But the part of it that I had forgotten that the guy on Twitter reminded me was that America, the American government must support Israel in every way, or else God will not protect the United States.
God will abandon America if we do not subordinate American policy goals to whoever's running Israel right now.
And that that's really the psyop beyond just, it says in the Bible, you're supposed to like Israel a lot or go along with Israel.
It's that God will take your protection away, and then will come the earthquakes and the hurricanes, I guess.
And so that's really, I don't really think in those kind of religious terms at all.
So it's hard for me to imagine that grown human adults would even think that way at all for a minute.
But that was what, that was actually the real quote that Ricky Ware had said that I was thinking of, only I had only, I was only remembering about half of it.
And then, but the guy on Twitter was saying, this is a huge psyop, right?
Like, this is a huge operation.
And he, I think, accused the Israeli government, I don't know if they have anything to do with it at all or not, or the Israel lobby itself.
But it amounts, I'm sure they do in some cases, but it amounts to a huge, you know, psyop against the American people using their religion against them.
I'm sorry, one more thing about this.
I'm reminded of what Jim Loeb says about Irving Kristol, Bill Kristol's father, and one of the major founders of the neoconservative movement, that in 1980, very early 80s, very late 70s, he helped arrange a bunch of money to buy Jerry Falwell a jumbo jet, so he could go flying around America.
And this made a lot of American liberal Jews very uneasy, that like, hey, you know, this guy Falwell is basically, he's with us on Israel, but he's against us on every other issue in this country where we live, you know, I don't know.
And then they said, you know, according to this guy's religion, Jesus is going to come back and kill all us Jews.
So, you know, are you sure that this is really a good idea to be supporting this?
And Irving Kristol said, well, it's their theology.
It's our Israel.
And there's a case of overt support, and by Irving Kristol himself helping to arrange a jumbo jet for Jerry Falwell, and that was way back when.
So, I don't know.
I would resent the hell out of that.
That's the thing I hate about Israel more than anything else, is the lies all day long, the bully pretending to be the victim.
And if they're really using America's most sincere belief in Jesus to scare the hell out of them into supporting the Likud, then that's really unfair, you know?
Well, Israelis are very tough people and pragmatic, and they found this brilliant way to generate support.
You know, I was in Lebanon covering the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
I was with the Israeli army in southern Lebanon, and I came across these two Christian evangelists who were setting up radio stations in southern Lebanon to broadcast the gospel.
Now, who the hell is going to listen to this stuff in Lebanon?
I couldn't believe it.
But now fast forward to our time, these guys have been beedling and burrowing away, and the success was not with the Lebanese, but it was with the Bible Belt Christians in the United States, who were sold this bill of goods, never liked Muslims to begin with, and are now tremendously successful.
The Congress, the Republican Party, has become a theocratic party.
It's made up of born-again Christians, largely.
Nothing to do with my old New York Republican party, Nelson Rockefeller.
These are guys down south who believe in Adam and Eve and Noah and all this kind of stuff.
It's been very effective.
Well, Nelson Rockefeller was a bastard too, but I hear you.
And hey, I'm sure you noticed that at the dedication of the embassy opening in Jerusalem the other day, that John Hagee and this other guy, Jeffress, I know less about him, but I know about Hagee.
I mean, these are some crazy, literally, dictionary definition of the word anti-Semitic people here, and anti-Catholic and anti-Mormon and anti-everybody who's not exactly like them.
I mean, they're the worst kind of Baptist, the Cornerstone Church.
The majority of Texans are Methodists and are not nearly so right-wing like that, but they featured these kooks talking about how to bring Jesus back is by opening this embassy here today.
And I wondered, what did the Israeli Jews and what did the American Zionist community in the Northeast think of that?
John Hagee is christening this thing?
They sneer at this kind of primitivism, and they think these guys are crazy, but they're useful idiots, as the Soviets used to call them.
And they are bringing in votes, and they do keep Congress in check.
And look at Pompeo, who came out of the Tea Party, far right-wing Republican, Bible Belt, Muslim-hating Tea Party ranks.
The crazy thing is that these Hagee and this other guy, a generation ago, their forebearers were lynching Jews in the South.
And now suddenly they're useful tools to Israel.
But I've always said, one of these days, let me come back to my mother.
She predicted, she said 50 years ago, she said America is going to turn against Muslims and turn against the Jews.
And sure enough, we've seen the beginning of hatred towards Muslims being spread across the country.
And now the Jews may be next.
They have to be very careful.
I can tell you, as a New Yorker, that we guys up in the Northeast are very uncomfortable with all these Bible-beating, redneck preachers themselves.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I do think, I don't know what the numbers are.
I'm sure there are probably real studies of this beyond SPLC nonsense.
But it seems to me like the post-World War II taboo against antisemitism is wearing off.
And, you know, that's partly because of the abuse of power of the neoconservative movement and the Israel lobby in this country.
But that's not all.
You know, I'm not just blaming the ones who are being anti-ed, but it does seem like those things are changing.
And, you know, I mean, that is kind of the joke, right?
Is that all of this, is all the strife in America, of all different descriptions, is all caused by this state of permanent war that we don't even need to be in at all.
I mean, do you remember?
I know you do remember.
You were doing the journalism then.
At the fall of the Soviet Union, they were saying, hmm, I wonder if Germany and Japan are going to be the enemy again.
Like, who's going to be the enemy?
But the answer is, we didn't have to have any enemies at all.
We didn't have to attack Iraq for 30 years straight.
We didn't have to do any of this stuff.
We could have a world, you know, not at utopia, but a world at increasing trade and freedom and prosperity without any of these terror wars or any of this NATO buildup in East Europe or any of this military industrial complex imperialism at all.
You know, there might be some wars somewhere, but nothing like this kind of thing.
And it's all completely unnecessary.
And that's what's driving all of this strife, you know, economic and otherwise.
You go to the Pentagon, which I've been many times, and you will see that the military has become America's biggest and most vibrant industry.
It's our big business.
We're not making cars and machinery.
We're making wars.
I'm just reading the Lockheed Martin's annual report yesterday.
I happen to be a shareholder in a small way.
And that's our business, baby.
And we are very good at it.
And we have to keep this machine going.
Otherwise, there won't be money.
A report just came out how the US has spent over two trillion dollars on this absurd war on terrorism.
It's hard to find terrorists now.
Now, Hollywood is shifting to terrorists from space because running out of terrorists from the Middle East.
Yeah.
And back to Russia spy movies, too.
We can't run out of those.
That's true.
It seems pretty hard.
I forgot who it was that pointed out that they put the, it's not the Kremlin, but everybody always thinks it's the Kremlin.
It's the whichever cathedral right there with the Orthodox tops and crosses on the roof.
You know what I'm talking about, right next to Red Square.
What's it called?
The, oh, I just in my mind, not the Nevsky Cathedral, the St. Basil's Cathedral.
Yes, exactly.
See, I was actually even thinking maybe say that, but then I thought I better not.
But yeah, so, but this is what everybody always thinks is the Kremlin.
That's the picture they always use for the Kremlin.
But I forgot who it was that pointed out that whenever they put on the front of the magazine, they always have to cut off all the crosses on top because they don't want Americans going, oh, meh.
So they're mostly like us, you know, heaven forbid.
Instead, they're like, look at what a strange alien colorful Capitol building they have.
Doesn't that make you suspicious or something like that is the better interpretation, I guess.
Well, that's right.
And it's interesting.
It's ironic because an important force in Putin's new Russia is Christian Orthodox revivalism.
Putin's constantly carrying on about the glories of Russia's past and that the church is the way forward.
And we have to bring Christianity back to the Middle East.
This is very important.
So it's their Orthodox people against our fundamentalists.
And now, so here's the other thing, though, beyond all this tribal politics and whatever, is that a lot of American Christians really aren't hypocrites about this kind of thing at all.
And they really do care about the underdog, the sick, the poor, the weak, the powerless, the oppressed, because that's the religion says that they're supposed to, and they take it very seriously.
And of course, there are major denominations like the Presbyterians who are really activist on the issue of Israel-Palestine, for one thing.
So that really is kind of a big part of it, right?
And it seems like that's something that maybe could be emphasized more to the Christian right, that whatever Hagee says, the middle part of North America's foreign policy is supposed to be in the Bible.
What about the Sermon on the Mount?
What about basically this?
And this is the part I can't ever get over.
The majority of the population of the Gaza Strip are minors.
So they're not minors, actually.
They're majors, but they're the under 18.
And they're being collectively punished because 12 years ago, somebody else voted for Hamas in an election that, for intents and purposes at least, Israel rigged for Hamas by withholding all the tax money from the PLA so they couldn't provide their services and buy up their votes before the election that America and Israel insisted they hold.
So, yeah, I don't know.
What about that?
So tell us about life in the Gaza Strip for these people, Eric.
I know you know about it.
It's a nightmare.
Americans don't know that this is a giant open-air prison.
They have water only a couple of hours a day.
The Israelis have banned water purification chemicals.
We did this with Iraq, too.
That's one of the major reasons that 500,000 Iraqi children died during our boycott siege of Iraq.
Now, the same thing is being done with the Gaza Strip.
Medicines are being blocked from being delivered.
The Israelis have said openly that they're giving the two million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip only enough food to keep them alive.
But they're constantly hungry.
They're in a semi-starvation condition.
They can't get out.
Their hospitals have been attacked.
They have no equipment and no supplies, no electricity.
It's a horrible situation.
It's like being in some kind of Mexican jail.
But there, at least, prisoners get to eat.
And at least there, they're accused of something, if not duly convicted, right?
That's right.
In this case, these are people who were just born with the wrong religion.
That's the only reason they're locked up in there.
Well, they're people who lost their homes or the children of people who lost their homes.
All their belongings have been taken away.
They're called terrorists.
And they're regularly attacked by the Israeli Air Force, helicopters, jet fighters.
And it's a ghastly, ugly, ugly area.
It's probably one of the worst in the world.
In fact, we've been working on a project trying to get animals out of the Gaza Zoo because it's so terrible there.
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And now, so in regards to the recent march, the Landay to Nakba Day march, which I don't know if it's over now.
I guess it was scheduled to end after Nakba Day.
I'm afraid I'm a day or two behind on that, unfortunately.
I know more than 100 people were killed.
Could you talk about ...
I know you have so much experience in all these wars over these decades.
Do you have any direct comparisons, maybe only to other Israeli maskers?
But I saw all these international human rights lawyers, most of whom are American Jewish liberals, saying, oh yeah, nope, that's against the law.
You're not allowed to just shoot civilians because you feel like it and call them Hamas after they fall dead, even if it's a 14-year-old girl or whatever it is.
But so just how double is this standard compared to what's going on in other places?
Or what other lawless places would you ... or lawful places would you compare this to if you had to?
It's completely outrageous.
The only place where it's permitted to shoot civilians are in American high schools, it seems.
But other than that, I'm just jesting.
But there are other situations.
I mentioned Burma.
There was the attempt by the Serbs to drive out the entire Albanian population of Kosovo into the woods in winter so they would freeze to death.
There was a dire repression of the Chechen people in southern Russia and the Caucasus who were seeking independence.
There were secessionist movements in India's eastern provinces.
I can go on and on.
There are many, but there are few that are treated with such efficient ruthlessness as the Palestinians.
And nobody calls Russia in Chechnya a pure democracy defending itself from ... well, I guess they did, at least consider all the Chechens terrorists.
But nobody painted Russia as that good of guys during that one.
No.
In fact, the Clinton administration financed Russia's war in Chechnya.
It was horrible.
They helped back the rebellion there too, to some degree, didn't they?
Well, I don't think so.
My understanding is that the Chechens were completely on their own.
They had a little help from the Saudis.
But the Americans, we gave Russia, the Soviets, the technology to hunt down and crush the Chechen rebels and to murder the Chechen leader Dzhokhar Dudayev.
It was a very ignoble moment in American history.
Was that the first or second Chechen war, or both?
A second Chechen war.
Yeah.
So this is Bill Clinton making Vladimir Putin's ... helping him earn all his credentials to be the new president, incoming president of Russia, taken over for Yeltsin there in the upcoming push.
I mean, that was ...
I mean, I even remember it at the time.
The rise of this guy, Putin, he's in charge of the war in Chechnya.
He's doing a great job.
Putin hates Muslims and fears them.
So does Trump.
So does Netanyahu.
You can see who are the persecuted people of the earth, the Burmese Muslims, Palestinians.
It's very tragic.
But they don't even mind the Al-Nusra Front, America and Israel.
It seems like what they really hate is Muslims who are independent from their rule.
They get along just fine with the King of Jordan.
Who aren't rich.
Yeah.
That's the distinction, huh?
Well, like the Saudis.
Yeah.
Well, you want to talk about ...
I still got a few minutes.
If you do, you want to talk about Yemen for a minute?
Sure.
I don't know what the hell it takes to get people to care about Yemen.
I mean, on the other hand, some people do in spite of the media blackout on this issue.
And total lack of explanation of what's going on in this war by TV news to the American people here.
There's still, you know, whatever peace groups we have left have really done hard work on this.
So I don't want to sell that short.
But on the other hand, the American society, by and large, is completely tuned out.
They don't even know that we have a war going on in Yemen at all.
It's been three years.
At least tens and tens of thousands of people have been killed there.
And there's no end in sight.
You know, I got this great reporter who lives in Sana'a named Nasser Arabi, who I interview every few weeks or so.
And he's saying, look, the battle lines aren't changing here.
The Saudis aren't any closer to their goals.
The UAE aren't any closer to their goals.
It's a stalemate.
Everybody's dying, but nothing's changing.
And it's just been going on like this.
So I don't know, man.
I'm not sure what my question is for you.
What the hell do you think's going to happen?
Or what does it take to get, you know, some kind of recognition of the level of crisis here and a need for something to be done to negotiate some kind of conclusion between Saudi and the Houthis?
God, it's a man-made disaster.
Most Americans don't know where Yemen is or care about it.
I've been there since 1975.
It was then, it was just creeping into the ninth century A.D.
It's very backwards, but beautiful and wild countries right out of the Bible.
But the problem is this.
The Saudis have a powerful air force that's flown by mercenary pilots.
Many of them are Americans.
It's maintained and armed by American mercenary technicians.
The planning for the air war that it's waging is done by the Americans from Al Udaid Air Base in Qatar.
We are up to our ears in the war.
The only thing the Saudis are doing is paying for it.
The British are also very culpable.
British technicians and mercenary pilots are flying their planes.
The Saudis are hopeless.
They can't, they couldn't operate a school bus, nevermind an F-15 fighter.
So they're doing it.
Now they're bringing in Pakistanis to fight.
But the Saudis have no ground troops that they can rely on because they're scared to death that if they send the small army in, the army will turn and try and overthrow the medieval royal government.
That's happened in Iraq in 1958.
So there are no ground troops.
But without ground troops, it's very hard to make any kind of military resolution.
So all they can do is utter threats and keep bombing inaccurately and causing huge casualties and destroying this beautiful medieval country.
And as you say, for no good reason.
Ditto for the Emiratis who are much too big for their turbans.
Yeah.
Now, so here, I'll raise something.
A guy on Twitter says, you know, here's the thing you hadn't thought of.
What if the Saudis let the Houthis get away with owning Sana'a and being the new national government of the country and getting away with that major gain?
Then that means all the Shiite parties on Arabia's east coast, uh, so to speak, I guess, you know, northeast coast there, particularly in the oil lands where everybody are Shia, um, that they would all feel like a bunch of cucks basically if the Houthis got to be independent, but they didn't.
And that could start a lot of real kind of disruptive and destabilizing secessionist tribalist type movements inside the Arabian peninsula.
And if you think that the Saudi royal family is bad, let me tell you, things could be worse there.
So what do you think of that?
Well, there are, there are some merits of that argument, but the, the whole Eastern portion of Saudi Arabia has been up in arms for 30 years and it's continuing.
And there's, there's unrest in Bahrain, which is a Saudi satrapy colony.
So you have to understand that the Saudis, we don't know how many Saudis there are.
The Saudis have a big figure, but there may not be more than six or 7 million of them.
And Yemenis constitute a very important minority in Saudi Arabia.
Look, Osama bin Laden's father was an immigrant from, from, from Yemen.
And so the Saudis are worried about this.
They don't want the Yemeni nationalism to inflame their ethnic Yemenis.
And they're hanging on, they're scared to death that they're going to be overthrown.
Gaddafi predicted me one day in Libya that he said, the Saudis are like a bunch of rich people cowering behind the high walls of their house.
And one of these days they're going to be overthrown.
Yeah.
And then, well, what do you think that'll look like?
Who, who do you think is the next most powerful faction after them?
Hard to say.
I'm not that attuned that I can tell you about factional politics in Saudi Arabia.
The normal fear is that the army or a military man, some general somewhere will proclaim himself the new leader of Saudi Arabia.
It could be a cleric too though, right?
It could be, it could be.
See, I like to brag that if you go back to 2004, you can hear me and Eric Margulies talking about, yeah, but if they overthrew Assad, who's prepared to take his place other than the Muslim brotherhood?
And then you said, yeah, the Muslim brotherhood, if we're lucky could be worse than that.
And this is, you know, anyway, I figured we better get, get it on the record right now.
Good show, Scott.
I'll be like back in 2018, me and Eric Margulies talked all about this.
The youthful us were right.
Yeah, always.
Well, I mean, it was such an obvious question, expedite the chaotic collapse.
That sounds risky, you know, create a boiling cauldron in the region, really a boiling cauldron.
French were also in there propping up the reactionary monarch forces in the Gulf and in Saudi Arabia.
You know, the French actually have a military base in Qatar.
They're being small time colonialists, but the West has a lot of them.
They make so much money.
They're billions and billions of dollars of arms, which the Saudis can't use.
They just warehouse them.
It's a form of protection money that they get, that they pay to the West to, to keep the, the revolutionary forces out away.
Hey, by the way, you know, I'm sorry, I forget the guy's name, but I interviewed a guy recently who had written, he was like a real military expert, like a Jane's Defense Weekly professor type of a guy.
And his, you know, I think his expertise was air power.
And he'd written this thing all about the war in Yemen.
And he challenged that characterization.
I asked him about that.
And he said, those days are over and that the Americans and whoever else have been training up, you know, a pretty sophisticated army of a hundred thousand something people there in Saudi Arabia.
And they, they are capable, they're flying their own planes and, and they do have an infantry now that they've been building.
And that, you know, I don't know exactly what, what is the implication was.
I don't think he was saying, and they're, you know, preparing for war with Iran with it necessarily or anything like that.
But he was saying that they have made a change there to go ahead and build up that army, which I don't know what happened to allay their fears of a coup, if anything, but.
That's right.
That's the primary danger to Saudi Arabia.
Well, I do know that they are renting or hiring one or two brigades of the Pakistani army as they used to do years ago, there used to be 15,000 Pakistani troops around Riyadh to protect the royal government from its own loving people.
And I guess they'll do the same thing too, but.
That seems pretty risky too, you know, but anyway, yeah, I'm sorry.
I think we both got to go, but thank you so much for coming back on the show, Eric.
I really appreciate it.
You're the best man.
Always a delight.
All right, you guys, that is the great Eric Margulies.
He's at unzones.com and of course, ericmargulies.com.
Spell it like Margolis, ericmargulies.com.
The books are American Raj and War at the Top of the World.
All right, so you guys know the deal, foolsaron.us for the book, scotthorton.org and youtube.com slash scotthortonshow for all the interviews, 4,500 of them now going back to 2003 for you there.
Read what I want you to read at antiwar.com and at libertarianinstitute.org and follow me on Twitter at scotthortonshow.
Thanks.
