07/30/12 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, scotthorton.org is the website, scotthorton.org/stress for the blog and slash donate for the donation page.
I'm no longer with antiwar.com and I need sponsors and I need donations.
So stop by if you'd like scotthorton.org Okay, our first guest on the show today is Eric Margulies, the great Eric Margulies, author of War at the Top of the World and also American Raj, Liberation or Domination and an extensive archive of articles at ericmargulies.com and of course at lourockwell.com as well.
Welcome back to the show.
Eric, how are you doing?
As always, very pleased to be back with you, Scott.
Well good.
I'm very happy to have you here.
Let me turn up your level a little bit.
All right, so this piece is called Has the U.S. Given Israel a Green Light to Attack Syria?
Boy, what a loaded question.
I want to know the answer to that, but I'll go ahead and set it up a little bit more, which is I got an email from a guy saying that when I was talking with Pepe Escobar that neither of us get it, that the whole point here is not regime change because you can't have one and the rebels aren't going to be able to defeat Assad and everybody knows that, but they got to weaken him and get him ready and softened up for the coming Israeli assault on the Bekaa Valley and Lebanon and Syria in preparation.
They got to, I guess, weaken Syria as much as they possibly can before they attack Iran.
That way, because they can't fight all three at once, they want to take out the first two and this civil war, I guess he's saying, is just a way of softening up the Syrian regime for the coming assault.
I wonder if that's the same assault you think you're talking about in this headline here.
Well, the assault, I said that the Israelis are seething with a desire for revenge against Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Lebanese resistance movement, which the Israelis call terrorist, and it has been a close ally of both Syria and Iran.
The Israelis got beaten by Hezbollah embarrassingly in 2006, and within the Israeli military establishment, they're just itching to have another go at Hezbollah.
So we have to include this as part of the Syrian scenario, because Hezbollah draws all its arms and supplies from Syria.
I don't think what's going on in Syria now is just an effort to soften up Syria.
I think it's part of a very well-concerted plan by the US, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey, and Israel in the background, to try and tear down the Assad regime as a way of getting at Syria, at Iran rather, and you know, the road to Tehran runs through Damascus.
Now I guess with the case of Libya, we sort of knew all along that eventually this is going to work.
I mean, we are bombing the hell out of them, and at some point the regime in Tripoli is going to fall, and whoever the rebels are, not that it's going to work perfectly or whatever, but eventually whoever the rebels are will win with all this air support and special forces support and all that.
Is that the same situation here in Syria, that sooner or later the rebels will be able to go ahead and sack Damascus and drive this guy out of power, maybe rise up from the streets of Damascus?
Scott, it looks that way, and if this rebel movement that is really a creation of Western intelligence agencies, as were the Libyan rebels, if it can't succeed, then I think the West will explore the option of invading Syria directly, but right now, I have to come back to the point of Libya, because back in the 80s, Libya fought a war with France over the Aouzou Strip in Chad, on the border, and the Libyans were driven out of this strip that was supposed to have uranium, and I saw personally it was done by French foreign legionnaires disguised as Chadian tribesmen.
This is the same scenario that was used in Libya.
A lot of these so-called Libyan rebels were Western special forces, particularly French, and we're seeing the same thing now in Syria.
Well, it really is.
That's the Rumsfeld strategy, right?
You just send in the special forces and the spies, and with their laser designators, they direct the planes' bombs to where they need to go, and you stay light and fast, and you get the hell out quick.
Scott, you can go to any country from across the third world and always find large groups of disaffected people who will come over to your side and form a core of rebellion in these countries.
They're all very fragile, they're all powder kegs, and this is war on the cheap, but in the case of Syria, the Obama administration doesn't want to be seen as getting America into yet another war, so it's using its proxies in Saudi Arabia and in Qatar, and to a large degree in Turkey, to front for this war, as they did with the war in Libya.
I talked with Roy Gutman from McClatchy Newspapers the other day, and I've spoken with him a few times about Iraqi politics and other things, and sometimes I wonder, I don't know, I read you in a different article about Bosnia praising his work there, but he was on the show saying that he has been around, and he doesn't see any evidence whatsoever that the CIA is really doing much of anything to have anything to do with this rebellion at all, including working with the Qataris and the Saudis and the Turks on coordinating whatever, nobody's seen any Americans anywhere, he said, and he said the same thing for the Al-Qaeda jihadist terrorist types, that there's virtually none of them have anything to do with the rebellion whatsoever, that both of these things, CIA involvement, United States involvement, and Al-Qaeda involvement in the rebellion is all basically just made up, he said, and in fact he even said that he thinks that Al-Qaeda in Iraq worked for Syria all along, which one of the guys in the comments section pointed out that actually Assad gets along pretty well with Maliki and the Ayatollahs in Iran, and it was really the Saudis who were, and some Syrians, I mean, yeah, some Syrians, but it was the Saudis who were financing the Sunni-based insurgency against the American occupation in Iraq all those years, not the Syrians, right?
Or I don't know, you say things now.
Scott, I have the greatest respect for Roy Goodman, he's one of the best and bravest journalists we have in the United States.
The stuff coming out of Bahrain by him was, you know, exactly what you would think the regime would not want, that's for sure.
He seems to be a pretty independent thinker, even if what he's saying isn't quite right.
Well, the McClatchy newspaper chain was the only chain during the invasion of Iraq that had any guts to stand up and try and print the truth.
But I don't agree with Goodman on this particular point.
I think that the CIA and British intelligence and French intelligence are working through the intelligence agencies of Bahrain and of the Saudis with a very big intelligence operation, and particularly so through Turkish intelligence.
There are bases set up in Turkey that are being run by the Turkish military intelligence, and we are just getting reports in of a new combined operations center that's set up in Adana, Turkey, which is right at the U.S. Incirlik Air Force Air Base, that is coordinating and running the war.
And we have, I think, pretty reliable reports of CIA officers channeling funds into Syria.
But the Western intelligence services are being very careful, as they were in Libya, to keep in the shadows.
Well, and you know, they actually have PR that says, well, we're trying very hard to make sure that any bad guys on our side don't get the weapons, that only good Democrats get the weapons, and not anybody who would do a suicide bombing with the money we give them.
Well, of course, Washington is petrified that it's going to end up with another Afghanistan on its hands, and that all these angry jihadis are going to turn against it.
And that is a possibility.
You know, one problem, Scott, is that we Americans can't seem to juggle more than two or three names, foreign names, in our mind at the same time.
So everything, every resistance group in Iraq was gradually became Al Qaeda.
And in Syria, the same thing is happening in Syria.
Now, there were 10 different resistance groups in Iraq.
They were not Al Qaeda.
Hey, they were calling them all Al Qaeda before Zarqawi even declared his allegiance to the group at the end of 2004.
It had already been two full years of calling them all Al Qaeda by that point.
Alright, I'm sorry.
We've got to hold it right there.
It's Eric Margulies, ericmargulies.com.
We're talking about the war in Syria, America's war in Syria.
Alright, y'all, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton, scotthorton.org.
That's where I keep all the interview archives, more than 2,500 of them, going back to 2003 now.
Quite a few of those with our current guest, Eric Margulies, ericmargulies.com for his site.
And check out his book, War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
And we're talking about the civil war and foreign war, foreign meddling, full civil war in Syria, maybe I could say.
I don't know.
Going on.
And then, so you were making the point that, yeah, yeah, whoever the media wants to call Al Qaeda is Al Qaeda.
You know, meanwhile, Zawahiri's still stuck on the third floor of somebody's house somewhere in Pakistan or something.
And that's about all of old Al Qaeda that really exists anymore.
But now, usually when the media's calling whoever they want Al Qaeda, it's Al Shabaab in Somalia, or it's some group of crazies in Mali, or maybe in Nigeria.
Boko Haram, for example, they want to associate with Al Qaeda.
And that means an excuse for America to go and intervene more and make matters worse.
In this case, it looks like America's on the same side as Al Qaeda, at least as far as, you know, if YouTube is to be believed about what Ayman al Zawahiri wants anyway.
Only for the jihadist movements of different factions across the Muslim world, one of their key ideas, as expounded by Osama bin Laden, is to overthrow Western-installed tyrants in the Mideast who run their countries for personal enrichment or at the orders of the West, Saudi Arabia being a prime example.
But they hated Qaddafi, and they hated the Assad family in Syria, and they hated Mubarak in Egypt.
And so they're united on this goal.
But what we've been doing in the States is that every new group that comes up, or anybody with the bad guys, a synonym for them now is Al Qaeda.
That saves explaining that the popular front for the liberation of Iraq really is different from the Islamic State of Iraq, etc.
People, don't confuse us with details.
They're just the bad guys.
And the problem with this is, this one single-brain approach, is that we see Al Qaeda popping up everywhere.
Because everybody who is not, who is anti-American, who is against the local regime supported by the U.S., is Al Qaeda.
We're creating, in a sense, our own enemies.
Right.
Well, but so what about our friends in Syria?
The rebellion there, is that just a scare story?
Is Roy Gutman right about that?
That this is all trumped up, just like, in his view, the American interventionist?
I think a lot of the news reports about Syria that are coming from the Western media are trumped up, disinformational lies concocted, terrible, terrible reporting.
Well, it seems to all slant toward the rebels, though, obviously, not against them.
That's correct.
And the American and British and French media have become cheerleaders for the rebels.
So we're getting Soviet-style reporting, rather than what's going on.
But you know Syria, I've covered Syria for 35 years.
Syria was a country waiting to explode The Sunni majority there that had been ruled over by this Alawite minority of the Assads had tried to rebel a number of times in the 50s and the 70s.
I was there in Hama when at least 10,000 people were killed by Assad's forces.
But Assad was one of our boys.
We got along very well with him.
Washington used to send people over to Syria to be tortured not so long ago.
So it was okay, but now because of the Iran factor, Syria has to go.
A revolution is going on there, no doubt about it, a legitimate revolution, but it's being fanned and spurred by outside forces, particularly the Western powers.
Okay, now, so back to where we started here.
Do you think the Israelis are going to invade Syria at some point?
Are they going to invade southern Lebanon?
Well, I think they're debating it right now.
Southern Lebanon, yes, absolutely.
It's just a question of timing and pretext.
Just in the last few days, the Israeli Defense Minister Barak and Netanyahu both said that they might have to invade Syria to seize its chemical weapons.
As you wrote in this article, the Syrian spokesman said, yeah, we do have some chemical weapons.
Dope!
Absolute dope.
He didn't have any smart spin on it, right?
The Arabs have the most pathetic understanding of Western public relations.
And here he is, yeah, we do have chemical weapons, but we won't use them domestically.
Well, he could have said, for example, that Syria got chemical weapons to try and counter Israel's nuclear arsenal, but no word of this.
And they just set up another good reason for invading Syria.
Now the U.S. is talking about special forces grabbing the chemical weapons.
Well, now, see, this, to me, is a reason to not invade.
This is one of the reasons we knew that Iraq didn't have weapons, is because they wouldn't really go rolling the 3rd Infantry straight into a bunch of sarin gas if that's what they thought was going to happen on the way into that country.
Well, that's right.
In fact, the American troops that suffered from chemical weapons in Iraq was when we blew up stockpiles of them and let the smoke go all over the place.
Right, yeah, you're talking about back in 1991.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Back then and later in 2003.
So it was a red herring, these chemical weapons.
But there will be, you know, and Hillary Clinton has been rumbling about humanitarian corridors and the Turks have taken up this line and we are the old no-fly zone has come back again.
So there are ample reasons to intervene in Syria.
And, you know, the new cause of the belly is humanitarian rescues.
We never gave a damn about Syria or Syrians, but now we're going to go and race to their rescue.
Well, oh yeah, I'm buying it because you can tell how much Hillary Clinton cares about everyone.
It's touching.
I read one thing, I don't know if this is really true, maybe you can verify this, that the Pakistanis, like the people or the media or whatever, I guess they call her anti-Hillary.
I haven't seen that.
Isn't that what the United States is in the eyes of the world?
Mean old anti-Hillary coming over, threatening with missiles.
And she looks pretty scary these days.
So that is, and that's not diplomacy.
You know, diplomacy is the use of tact and persuasion to get people to do things.
Well now, so they can only go on like this for so long.
Are they just waiting until the election's over and then they're going to have to, you know, when you say humanitarian corridor, I say war.
I mean, what are you talking about?
There ain't no such thing as that.
Well, that's exactly right.
But it sounds great to the American public, who really doesn't understand what on earth is going on over there.
And, you know, the Americans were deterred from overthrowing Assad in the past, the Assad regime, because they quite rightfully feared that who's going to replace them?
And maybe somebody who's quite anti-American and inimical to our regional interests.
And I think we're on the way to this happening, but Washington is so mesmerized by the thought of getting, overthrowing Iran, that it's forgetting about its own interests in the rest of the Arab world.
All right.
Well, thanks very much for your time on the show, Eric.
It's always great to talk to you.
Bad news always, but at least we're hearing it from you with some good context, you know.
Anyway, thanks very much.
I'm switching to high fashion soon, Scott.
I'm tired of bad news too.
Talk to you soon.
All right.
EricMartinLees.com, everybody.
We'll be right back after this with Stephen Salisbury.