05/03/13 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

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For KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, May 3rd, 2013, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all, welcome to the show.
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Our guest tonight is the great Eric Margulies, Middle East correspondent and author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
Find his website at ericmargulies.com.
Spell it like Margolis.
Ericmargolis.com.
And Eric has been covering conflict and strife and dictatorships across the old world for better than a generation, and is one of the few who is really qualified to talk about all of these different wars that our government has gotten us so deeply embroiled in at this point.
Welcome back to the show, Eric.
How are you doing?
I'm fine, Scott.
As always, glad to be back with you.
Well, I appreciate you joining us tonight, and there's so much to go over here, but let's start off in Pakistan, where Musharraf has gone home, and then now what?
He's under house arrest?
What in the world is going on?
Oh, that's a very good question.
What a weird story this is.
Musharraf overthrew the Pakistani government of Nawaz Sharif in 1999, set himself up as a military dictator, soon acquired strong American backing.
At the minute, 9-11 happened, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan.
They needed Pakistan to support the U.S. war effort, so Musharraf became our latest golden-haired S.O.
B., and he ran Pakistan as a military dictatorship, but eventually his support just collapsed out from under him.
He went into exile in London, and all of a sudden, after five years' exile in London, Musharraf said, my people are calling me, which they weren't, and he flew back to Pakistan to announce he was going to run in the May 11th general election in Pakistan, and was almost immediately arrested and charged with all kinds of things, and still may be charged with treason, with the murder of Benazir Bhutto, and he is now under house arrest in Islamabad.
And then, you know, I saw a thing this morning that said the prosecutor who was going after him for murdering Bhutto himself was murdered yesterday.
Yes, it's very weird.
You know, this is real Wild West or Wild East.
It's a very complicated story.
You know, I interviewed Musharraf extensively after he came to power, and I couldn't figure him out.
I've met all of Pakistan's previous leaders for a generation, and he seemed weak, he seemed confused, he seemed dispirited when he first came to power, and he was a very odd little man.
I think he was overcome by egomania, and that induced him to fly back to Pakistan, where nobody wanted him, and there was a lynch mob waiting for him for various reasons.
Well, yeah, I mean, I can understand why to Pakistanis he's considered a traitor, being just a sock puppet stooge of the Americans, and complicit in the Americans waging war inside his country.
But, you know, I wonder, compared to Benazir Bhutto or her husband, I forget his first name...
Azif Zardari.
Azif, yeah.
Now, was Musharraf corrupt like them, or was he just a military dictator, and that's bad enough?
But I just wonder whether he was crooked, or was he some kind of patriot, or anything?
No, he was not crooked, as far as could be told.
He was a real military man.
He was a lieutenant general, I think, when he seized power.
He was never accused of massive corruption, or at least until recently, where I didn't see any evidence of it.
Unlike all the other Pakistani politicians.
Now, the only man who's running for office this month in Pakistan who is worthy of notice and support is a former cricket star, Imran Khan.
And Khan just said a few days ago, he said, you know, at least 80% of Pakistan's politicians are criminals.
And sadly, as an old friend of Pakistan, I have to agree with him.
And so, now, the background of that is, Zardari's term is up, right?
He's done.
Yes, he's... for now, yes.
And there will be great national relief in Pakistan.
There was an effort to groom the son of Benazir Bhutto and Zardari, but I was with him in London, just before Benazir returned on her ill-fated trip, and he is... he's too young.
So, he can't even sit in parliament yet.
And so, he... and he had no support.
So, he'll reappear again, but the... because he's still the front man for the People's Party.
But right now, it's a toss-up who's going to win the election.
It's between Imran Khan, who's very popular and totally opposed by Washington, because he wants to end the war in Afghanistan quickly and clean up the corruption in Pakistan, a lot of which we've fostered.
There's Nawaz Sharif, who's in the Muslim League, who is one of the better of a bad lot, but his supporters in Punjab, and then there are candidates from the People's Party, but it's pretty lackluster.
I think I read somewhere, though, that this is the first time that you had a prime minister elected a civilian government and then have its term just run out and not have it interrupted by a coup d'etat.
So, that's sort of progress.
Yeah, this is progress of sorts, certainly.
Nobody overthrew the government.
One of the major reasons the army didn't overthrow the government, though it was close at times, was that Pakistan is such an awful mess, socially, politically, economically, that the generals were too smart or not dumb enough to try and take power and inherit this huge mess.
Yeah, well, thank goodness for that, then.
Well, and now, so on the question of Benazir Bhutto's assassination, was it in fact Musharraf that was behind that?
Well, I don't know for sure, but the only thing that I'm 95% sure of, it was not the Pakistani Taliban, as was claimed at the time.
I talked to Benazir Bhutto the day before she died on the telephone, and she said to me that if she were killed, that the perpetrators would be allies of General Musharraf, a very prominent family from Punjab, prominent industrialists who were closely backing Musharraf.
Okay, so now, when Musharraf went to court, they revoked his bail.
You said in your article he had an arranged deal where he would be granted bail beforehand, sort of thing, before he even went back.
But then they revoked that, and he fled, and now he's more or less under house arrest at his villa, is that it?
That's correct.
He's still outside of Islamabad with bodyguards, and they're charging him with other things.
You know, the court system in Pakistan is not famous for jurisprudence.
You remember when Musharraf was in power, he ordered all the higher justices of the courts in Islamabad to be arrested, and some of them to be beaten up and put under house arrest.
So they are now getting tit-for-tat against Musharraf.
All right, now, before we get to any of the other wars that America's waging around the world, and there is one in Pakistan, across the border in Afghanistan, pretty much everything depends on the situation in Pakistan, right?
Because it's sort of, as we've talked about for years, a Vietnam-Cambodia type of situation, where the guys who are fighting in Afghanistan always have refuge on the Pakistani side of the border.
Then we've got kind of whole other departments and whole other agencies waging the covert war, supposedly against those safe havens in Pakistan.
But I just wonder, as we're coming up on 2014, whether the war is really changing.
It doesn't seem like the escalation, the counterinsurgency surge in Afghanistan really accomplished anything, yet they're withdrawing soldiers as though they have accomplished something.
And I just wonder, you know, whether there's something that's changed in Pakistan or something that's changed in Afghanistan that I've missed that makes it safe to leave just a few thousand troops in Afghanistan, which seems to me like they're just sitting ducks.
No, I think the big change, Scott, was in the United States, where public opinion turned strongly against the Afghan war, in spite of all the propaganda that has been pumped out to sustain it.
People just got fed up with America's longest war that showed no signs of being won.
And President Obama rightfully, I think, is intended to declare victory and get out, which is obviously the intelligent, logical thing to do in Afghanistan, since the war can't be won and since it's costing hundreds of billions of dollars a year.
It's to cut and run, to use the words of George Bush.
The war hasn't changed too much right now because Taliban is biding its time, and Afghans are beginning to desert in droves, and Taliban is focusing its fire on the Afghan government police and troops, who, if they were working for the Soviets, we would call puppet troops.
But since they're working for us, they are democratic forces.
But there is change, and everybody knows in Afghanistan that the Americans are going to abandon town eventually, even though the Pentagon wants to leave 14,000 or 15,000 troops there.
They are going to be at real risk if there are so few.
Yeah, well, I mean, Obama signed a deal to stay until 2024, so what does he even mean by that?
I mean, how are you going to draw down to not enough troops to even defend themselves, right?
It sounds like a story with a sad ending.
Well, the Pentagon is very unhappy with it, and we've had the unprecedented spectacle of Pentagon generals, one after another, coming out criticizing the president, for which they should have been fired on the spot, and for the White House to be announcing it's going to pull out, largely for domestic political reasons.
The two are in complete contradiction with each other, and we haven't seen the end of Pentagon efforts to keep the war going, to keep much more troops in Afghanistan, primarily to prop up whatever government the U.S. has put in power, but also to prevent the Taliban from overrunning Kabul, because everybody's worst nightmare is the fall of Saigon, and nobody wants to see that repeated.
All right, Joe, this is Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Eric Margulies, author of War at the Top of the World, and American Raj, Liberation or Domination?
Of course, we all know the answer to that.
And speaking of which, I was hoping I could ask you to comment on the stories coming out of Iraq this week, and particularly if you've seen what Patrick Coburn has written for The Independent about Iraqi army, which is basically the Bata Brigade of the Supreme Islamic Council, the Shiite coalition, has been abandoning their posts all over Kurdistan and the Sunni-dominated areas of Iraq, and it looks like Joe Biden's getting his wish, and Iraq is finally breaking up.
And of course, that doesn't mean that the government is going to give up so easily.
I don't know.
What do you think is going to happen there?
Well, Iraq is indeed breaking up.
It's a Humpty Dumpty.
It was inevitable the minute we invaded Iraq.
It was an unstable country from the time the British created it in the 1920s, and it's become more unstable because of the war and the subsequent events.
And the genie of Kurdish nationalism has finally got out of its bottle, and you have virtually an independent Kurdistan, which has become an American protectorate, which is having very little to do with the central government in Baghdad.
And you have Sunni areas in Iraq, which are almost in armed secession from the country.
So this process of disintegration has accelerated, and this is bringing on closer and closer to the specter of all-out civil war.
Yeah.
Well, and it seems like, as Dar Jamal and I guess Patrick Coburn both put it, too, that the insurgency, the Sunni-based insurgency led by the al-Nusra Front in Syria, has sort of attracted Iraqi jihadis and then also energized some who have stayed behind and decided to kind of pick the war right back up again.
So it's all kind of a perfect storm.
It's a very confused situation.
Add to this something that I've been saying for a long time, is that the Ba'ath Party, that Saddam's Ba'ath Party, would reemerge from the ruins of Iraq.
And sure enough, this is happening now.
And the one leader that I've been following is Izzat Ibrahim.
And now, he's not a household name here, but Izzat Ibrahim or Izzat Ibrahim al-Duri, to give him his full name, was one of Saddam Hussein's chief lieutenants.
And, in fact, he was the only senior one in that famous deck of cards who was never found.
And he is now leading the main Sunni resistance movement in Iraq.
Washington calls them all terrorists.
They're trying to brand anyone in the Iraqi resistance as al-Qaeda.
But this is simply not true.
You have the nationalist Ba'athist people slowly taking over the Sunni resistance again and resuming it.
And that's why Saddam Hussein predicted—everybody laughed at him at the time, but he predicted that he said, if the Americans invade, it will be the mother of all battles.
And that's what it's turned out to be, because this battle is still going on and is going to intensify.
The Sunnis in Iraq are now getting more and more tied up with the Sunnis in Syria, as you note, but they don't have identical goals.
Well, what are the differences in their goals?
Well, the Sunnis in Iraq are interested in carving out their own autonomous, if not independent, area and to throw out the force of the Shia forces of the Baghdad government.
The Sunnis in Syria, of course, are trying to overthrow the Assad regime, but they are quite divided amongst themselves.
And there's going to be a struggle between the militant Islamists led by this al-Nusra Front and by the more bourgeois, middle-of-the-road Sunni merchant class who don't want a religious state.
It's very complicated.
Well, the latter group there, they've basically stayed out so far, right?
You're saying if the jihadists win, then they're going to have an intra-Sunni fight.
Yes, I believe they will.
Syria is very complicated, but to simplify it down, to distill it down to its basic problem, half of the Syrians don't want a religious state.
They want a secular state, like Syria was under the Assad.
However brutal it was as a dictatorship, well, it was brutal if you stepped into politics and tried to oppose the Assad family.
As long as you stayed out of politics, it was okay.
Iraq was the same way under Saddam Hussein.
It was probably the leading Arab country, leading in women's rights and health care, education.
It was the vanguard of Arab development, even though it was a brutal dictatorship.
Same for Syria.
So half the Syrians want a secular state, and then half the Syrians want some kind of religious-oriented state.
The same problem is going on now in Egypt and Syria and Libya as well.
This is a long fight.
It's not going to be quickly resolved.
Well, it seems like mostly the half in Syria that want a secular state, they're backing the dictatorship, because the rebels are telling them that the dictatorship is the only thing standing in the way of them, and a good beheading.
That's correct.
Syria is sort of a mosaic of religions and cultures and peoples.
It's a very interesting country.
Mainly the 10% to 15% of the population who are Christians, who are very strong in the business community and wealthy and the bizarre merchant class, are 100% behind Assad because they don't want any change.
They certainly don't want a religious government, which will be dominated by possibly fundamentalist Muslims.
And on top of that, they saw what happened to the Christian community in Iraq, which has been destroyed thanks to the U.S. invasion, which unleashed all kinds of fanaticism in the country.
And the Christians had been protected by Saddam Hussein.
Now they're fleeing for their lives from Iraq, and we're seeing the same phenomena starting to happen in Syria and in Egypt, where 10% of the population are Coptic Christians.
Right.
Okay, now I want to hope to get to Egypt and Libya here in a second.
But first, I want to ask you about something you said there when you were referring to the Sunni-based insurgency in Iraq that still lives on, but it's the very same one the Americans fought for all those years there.
I think it was always the case, and you've said this on my different shows for years and years, as well as every other honest expert on this, that what was called al-Qaeda in Iraq was really only two or maybe, if you're generous, 5% of the Sunni-based insurgency against the Americans and the government we were installing there.
They did the worst kind of marketplace attacks and that sort of thing that got the most attention.
But then also it served America's interest to say all Iraqis love being invaded by us, except the terrorists, and they're just terrorists because they're terrorists, because they hate goodness and whatever, and that's the only reason anyone in Iraq would resist us.
So it was good propaganda for them, too, to pretend that Zarqawi and his suicide bombers were really behind the entire rebellion.
And I say all that just to say that David Enders, who did a great job covering that war for various papers, who's now writing for the McClatchy chain and has been covering Syria lately, I've been asking him about how do you compare that?
And he was saying in Syria it's really all this Jabhat al-Nusra, which is fair to say they're al-Qaeda in the sense that they share the same goals, they declare loyalty to Zawahiri, they cut off people's heads, they do suicide bombings of schools and marketplaces and those same kind of tactics as the al-Qaeda and Iraqis, but that in Syria they're virtually the entire insurgency.
It belongs to them.
It's their war.
And that's why the White House is having so much trouble trying to figure out how to find a brigade of moderates to arm to somehow be the new government there.
What do you think of that?
Yeah, quite right.
Well, in Iraq, the U.S. propaganda plan, information plan, if you like, was to portray every member of the Iraqi resistance to U.S. occupation as an al-Qaeda terrorist.
And the U.S. media went totally along with this campaign, and gradually there was no more reference to any of the 8 to 12 Iraqi national resistance groups anymore.
It was all al-Qaeda.
There's a school of thought that says that Zarqawi, the most flamboyant al-Qaeda leader in Iraq, may have been supported by the Saudis or by some other Arab faction.
He certainly blackened the name totally of the Iraqi resistance.
Now what's happening in Syria is that I would say probably a good 80 percent of the fighting units on the ground inside Syria or fighting the Syrian government are Wahhabists, that is, militant Saudi-linked angry Muslim rambos, who are, while the so-called moderates that Washington is looking for, are all sitting in McLean, Virginia, and Istanbul, and Paris.
And they are indeed moderates, but they have no influence whatsoever inside Syria.
We've been trying to cultivate a variety of Syrian generals for a long time as our next S.O.
B. dictator for Damascus, but we have not been successful so far.
Am I just cynical if I say that all this talk about arming the moderates, etc., is really just not very plausible deniability for the fact that the American government, working with the Saudis, the Qataris, the Turks, the Jordanians, have really been sending guns to the suicide bomber types all along.
I mean, they're the ones who get the guns.
It's not like the CIA doesn't know that, despite their quote-unquote best efforts.
I mean, isn't that just a thin ruse?
And don't they know who are their shock troops?
Well, not entirely, because it is a confusing situation.
But the U.S. is increased supplying arms to the Syrians via different cutouts, whether it's the Greeks or the Cypriots or the Qataris.
And a lot goes through Jordan, which is playing an increasingly prominent role, where there are now, I think, 200 to 300 U.S. troops in Jordan monitoring and observing.
What's dangerous is that the higher level of arms is coming in.
The U.S. is definitely supplying anti-man, shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles.
Just today, Scott, two missiles barely missed a Russian airliner with, I think, 158 people on board, bringing thunderous denunciations from Moscow.
So the danger is the more the Washington gets involved in Syria, the more it risks a confrontation with Russia, which it may be scoffed at in Washington, but to me is a very serious and must-avoid situation.
Okay, now, I'm sorry we're so short on time, but I got to ask you, on behalf of all the people driving in their cars out there listening to this, what interest does America have in a regime change in Syria?
I mean, they don't even have oil.
No, it is not an American strategic interest.
And, in fact, we're kicking an unnecessary hornet's nest.
But the objective, Washington's objective, along with the French and the British, is to overthrow a disobedient regime.
The Assad regime is not considered fully obedient to our Western policies.
And more important, it's the first step in the attack on Iran.
And Syria is being punished for refusing to join the anti-Iran coalition that the U.S. is facing.
And it's an object lesson to the Middle East.
We're going to destroy Syria the way we destroyed Iraq, and then Iran is next.
And, you know, like in The Clean Break, what does it say?
It's all about weakening Syria so they'll stop backing Hezbollah, which is a defensive nuisance on Israel's northern border, right?
That's quite right.
The Israelis are pushing very hard through their U.S. supporters to crumble the Syrian government to stop support for Hezbollah, who is the bet noir of the Israelis who want to reestablish their domination over Lebanon.
A complicated area in this.
But the Israelis, who know the area better than we do, have been hesitant.
They're torn, because on one hand they say, let's destroy the Syrian government, let's destroy Syrian armed forces, let's isolate Hezbollah in a rich land so we can crush it.
But on the other hand, what's going to happen in Syria?
If we tear down Assad, who have been fairly palsy-welsy with the Israelis, who's going to take office?
The devil we don't know may be a lot worse.
Indeed.
Thank you very much for your time.
I sure appreciate it.
You're welcome.
Cheers.
Good to talk to you again.
Everybody, that is the great Eric Margulies.
His website is ericmargulies.com.
He's got a ton of great articles on there, very recent ones, including a really good one on India's nuclear weapons program and their missile campaign and all of that.
Chechnya, Syria, it's all there for you.
Afghanistan, ericmargulies.com.
The books are War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
That's it for Anti-War Radio for this evening.
Thanks everybody for listening.
We're here every Friday from 6.30 to 7 on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
Check out the full interview archives at scotthorton.org.
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