07/08/13 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright, I'm Scott.
Welcome back to the show.
It's the Scott Horton Show.
I'm in.
Hey, for all you people who listen to the interview podcast, you know that there's a whole show, a live show from noon to two eastern time here at scotthorton.org/listen and at noagendastream.com five days a week, right?
Oh, we're not on No Agenda on Thursdays.
Anyway, so our first guest on the show today is the great Eric Margulies, foreign correspondent.
He writes at ericmargulies.com and at the brand spanking new lourockwell.com.
And also he's the author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj.
Liberation or domination?
Welcome back to the show, Eric.
How's things?
Things are very interesting, Scott.
There's drama and news bubbling up everywhere.
Yeah, all over the place.
Well, biggest and most important, I guess, is Egypt.
So liberation or domination?
Well, in my book, American Raj, Egypt was a key focus.
And I explained in the book how America had run Egypt literally ever since Gamal Abdel Nasser, its former ruler, died, run Egypt under Anwar Sadat and then Mubarak.
And the friendly Americans are back again, it seems, this week, trying to reassert Washington's authority over this very important strategic country.
All right.
Now, here's the thing.
TV says that this is a correction because, you know, it was a funny artifact of the revolution two and a half years ago, Eric, is that the Muslim Brotherhood, even though they had been suppressed, they hadn't really been annihilated like in Syria.
And they were really, under the Mubarak dictatorship, they were the only organized power outside of the central military state that existed.
And so they had such a giant leg up on everybody else when it came to electoral politics that they sort of accidentally won.
But it would be like if Pat Robertson and his goons came to power in America.
We don't have the mandate to be our new government.
We don't like them.
Only some people do.
And so then Pat Robertson and his guys, they came to power, and then they way overdid it and tried to take over everything and excluded all their opposition from the Constitutional Convention.
And the military is loyal to the people of Egypt, and so they stepped in to protect the people of Egypt from the Muslim Brotherhood, which had hijacked and destroyed their democracies.
And Todd, I've been watching CNN all morning.
Now you tell me what you think.
Well, I was just thinking this morning as I was getting dressed, you know, one of the reasons that a lot of foreign affairs journalists take to drink is having to put up every day with the swill of hypocrisy and double talk, shameless hypocrisy.
I was watching CNN last night with people trying, you know, Joe, it wasn't a coup, it wasn't a coup.
Well, my God, how many people were shot down in Cairo today?
Probably 51 dead.
Oh, nearly 500 wounded by the army.
Brotherhood radio stations and newspapers closed down.
Hundreds arrested.
Communications blocked.
The army in the streets.
It's not a coup.
Well, it looks like a coup, and it quacks like a coup, and it's shameful that the Americans, the American media and politicians, including the Obama administration, are denying that it was a coup when we, the United States, played an important role in engineering this coup.
OK, wait, now hold that thought for just a second here, because there were so many people in the streets that that can't be the same thing as just a 1953 Tehran rent-a-mob, right?
That's true.
There were many, many in Egypt.
I just shot a film there.
I was in Tahrir Square with a lot of these disaffected people.
There are a lot of angry people in Egypt.
But remember, again, the same thing we're seeing in Turkey and in Brazil.
There are large numbers of unemployed youth, and particularly bad in Egypt, where over 50% of people are unemployed.
There are huge amounts of young people in Egypt.
I think it's only 70% of the people are under 25 years old.
There's an enormous street dynamism.
Coptic Christians were told falsely that the Muslim Brotherhood was coming to kill all the Christians and drive them out of Egypt.
There were rumors spread by the Mubarak forces, the existing ones.
There were upper-class, you know, the urban elite who hated the Muslim Brotherhood.
There were a lot of people, but really the main reason is Egypt's economy is verging on total collapse.
It's in dire straits.
Bread prices were engineered up by the military behind the scenes.
All these explosive elements combined to get millions out in the streets.
But there were just as many millions, if not more, demonstrating for Morsi, who won the vote a year ago with 51%.
Right.
And now, you know, three, four weeks back I was talking with Adam Morrow from Interpress Service.
And, you know, he's stationed there in Cairo, and I've been talking with him ever since Arab Spring first began.
And his thing was there are a hell of a lot of protesters, but his feeling of it anyway, I guess, I don't know if this was science or what, he said he thought if they just held elections that the Muslim Brotherhood would win again.
I'm almost certain that it would.
It was very popular.
And one thing that's never mentioned on our media is one of the reasons the Muslim Brotherhood is popular, not only in Egypt, but in Gaza and in Jordan and Syria, et cetera, is that it promotes honesty.
It promotes justice.
There's real courts, not these rigged things where you buy justice.
And it's honest.
Its members are relatively honest, whereas the rest of Egypt is a deep cesspool of corruption.
That's the main reason people like it.
All right.
So then the U.S. role, this was just ever since the Muslim Brotherhood came to power, the Democrats decided they were going to undo it, huh?
The military has been on the verge of staging a coup for the last year, ever since the Brotherhood came to power.
The real problem for the Brotherhood was this, that it assumed the trappings of power, but it was not able to grasp the levers of power.
Just think about this.
Morsi was president, but the military was against him.
The security police and the regular street police were bitterly against him.
The Coptic Christians were against him.
The huge state bureaucracy of Egypt was against him.
The media was against him.
Academia and the courts were against him.
So really, he was paralyzed from day one.
And the fact that Morsi was even there was a testimony of how this deep government of Mubarak forces really hogtied the Brotherhood.
That's a bad expression, but tied the hands of the Brotherhood, because Morsi was the third choice of the Brotherhood for president, and the two other ones, who were much better, more capable men than he, were disallowed by these sort of neo-fascist Mubarak courts.
So they were left with this boot Morsi, who was not ready for the role, and it was inevitable that his government would founder.
Well, you know, one of the things that you touched on there, the opposition of the local police, that's something that Adam Morrow touched on as well, that basically they all just stayed at the station for the last two and a half years, and let crime go completely out of control, because they don't take the heat.
Morsi ends up taking the heat.
He's not doing anything about security.
And so just regular street-level crime that affects people in their day-to-day life was totally skyrocketing, and I guess, like you're saying, the state as it already existed was completely, not my president, refusing to cooperate whatsoever with carrying out even their basic police functions at all.
Exactly.
They couldn't run a democratic government, because everybody inside the government, the bureaucracy, I think the entire bureaucracy that was created under the Egyptian dictatorship of 40 years, talk about entrenched, was against Morsi.
And because the Islamists kept saying, we're going to cut government spending, we're going to cut the bureaucracy, we're going to cut down the size of the military, and started diverting some of this social, desperately needed social spending in Egypt, which always teeters on the verge of starvation.
So, of course, their pita bread was being threatened, and with the police, you're quite right to go, what happened?
I was there, I saw it.
Also, there were just no police on the streets.
And Cairo, which was a very safe city, suddenly became crime-ridden, because there were no cops.
And this was done purposely to create chaos and to undermine the government.
Yeah, well, and the economy, which really undermines the government, which is presumed to be responsible for the economy in every way at all times, of course.
Well, tourism, which accounts for about 17% of national income, or some amount like that, died completely.
When I was up the Nile, the whole side of the Nile was lined with empty Nile steamers.
Tourists have almost vanished.
So people are pulling their money out of Egypt.
They're scared.
And the gold reserves are way down, probably cut in half over the last year.
The key question, Scott, is that Egypt can't feed its 90 million people, who are jammed into an arable land the size of the state of Maryland.
Think about that.
So Egypt has to survive on food aid, wheat, subsidized wheat, coming from, or has been for the last 30, 40 years, from the United States.
And all the U.S. has to do is throttle back on deliveries of low-cost wheat, and there'll be crisis in Egypt.
Well, and I think you said something about here about how they already have done that.
And this is something where, rewind two and a half years, you told me Egypt isn't going anywhere out of America's orbit, Muslim Brotherhood or not, because they're dependent on all of our wheat to survive.
And Lord knows the empire will starve your population into submission if they feel like it.
And so I remember you teaching me this a long time ago.
But you say in your article here today, it's at LewRockwell.com, this vital aid has tapered off already since Morsi took power.
That's right.
So Obama, now is that Obama and Hillary Clinton and Robert Gates, whatever, they sat around and they decided, hey, let's throttle back our wheat aid to Egypt in order to drum up dissent against Morsi and destroy democracy.
That was their plan the whole time?
Scott, I don't know.
It wasn't in the room.
But another theory holds that the military has engineered this by withholding supplies of wheat from the market, meaning the price goes up.
And back in 1952, a slight increase, a few pennies in the cost of a loaf of bread in Egypt, produced the worst riots that I've ever seen.
Well, but wait.
So, I mean, is it American policy that less wheat is going to Egypt, or it's the general's policy that maybe they're just storing it up in warehouses?
You're not certain?
I'm not certain.
Okay.
Because, yeah, I didn't mean so much like Obama and Hillary personally, but just if it's an American policy, it would have to come from them, right?
A very high-level thing.
Right?
It would, or somebody high up in the National Security Council or State Department, or maybe the Pentagon.
I'll tell you, the people who know more about what's going on in Egypt than anybody is the Pentagon.
Because the Egyptian army is joined at the hip, literally, with the Pentagon.
We supply the money to finance the Egyptian military, 1.5 billion a year officially, but unofficially it's probably closer to 2 billion when you count secret payments.
We supply all the arms for the Egyptian army, aircraft, missiles, radars, spare parts, and munitions.
And as I said in my article, the trick is, over the years, is that the 450,000-man Egyptian armed forces have been created to control Egypt, not to defend Egypt against foreign aggression.
Right.
You know, Rand Paul and all them try to make a big deal about sending F-16s to Egypt.
The Muslim Brotherhood might use those against Israel.
No, no, no.
They give them the F-16s to use against their own people so that they'll keep being nice to Israel.
Well, yeah, because the army needs its weapons, its toys, and it wants to be proud, and it doesn't want to have third-hand junk that it's given, like some South American country.
But the point is that the military has kept the supplies of spare parts and munitions to such a low level in Egypt that my estimate, anyway, is that they couldn't fight a real war, say, with Israel for more than a day or two before running low on war stocks.
And that's a reign we have on Egypt to hold it back.
Right.
All right, now, so as far as politics goes inside Egypt, I mean, on one hand, I could see where America's the 800-ton gorilla and gets whatever it wants.
But on the other hand, Morsi really did seem to make some bad decisions, and I don't know whether it would have been possible for him to ally with the other more liberal factions that participated in the Arab Spring at the beginning of 2011.
But it seems like he left them to ally with the former regimeists.
And so when it came down to the breaks, they were on the other side of the barricades, and they're the first ones to go to Tahrir Square, too, and put it on TV and make a big thing.
So he really, like, just made a bad play there.
I don't know if he could have compromised with them, or was there he chose different factions to ally with instead of them?
I think Morsi was a bumbler.
And, you know, the Muslim Brotherhood was not really ready for politics.
In fact, for a while, it didn't want to go into politics.
It said, no, no, no, we're not going to run a candidate for the election.
This is, you know, contrary to all the alarms that you hear coming from the Wall Street Journal, the Brotherhood is a very stodgy, conservative organization, mostly professionals.
Morsi, for example, himself is an engineer.
And it's very, very cautious, very timid, and no experience in coalition work.
You say Egyptian liberals, but they're really very few.
And you look at two of the leading figures, allegedly, who lead Egypt's liberal political movement, Mohamed ElBaradei, who was just, I don't know, turned down now for prime minister, and Amr Moussa, former foreign minister and Arab League head.
They're Mubarak's men.
They kissed the feet of Mubarak and served in his administration.
And now they're both Washington's men.
So, very difficult to find people to cooperate with.
On the other side, the real hard-bitten Islamists, the guys in sandals and beards who want to go back to the days of the Prophecy al-Nur movement, they're now talking about bringing them in the government.
It's stabbed the Muslim Brotherhood in the back, and says it's now ready to cooperate with the army.
Well, great, good work.
We have now managed to replace a moderate Islamist light regime with a bunch of real Islamist wild men, the kind who are running around the badlands of Syria.
Yeah.
Fundamentalists we've replaced, though, conservatives with radicals.
That's right.
And proven that there ain't no point in being a conservative if you're an Islamist, because it won't get you anywhere.
Apparently, Zawahiri was right to denounce the Muslim Brotherhood all along for being so stupid, as to think that even if they did participate in the evil, satanic sin of Western democratic elections, that the Americans would let them rule for more than a year anyway.
He has a point.
Look, this is the third democratic election in the Arab world.
The first was in 1991 in Algeria, where for some reason the military junta ran out of ideas and allowed a free election for parliament.
And the Islamists won hands down, and started to form a government.
Immediately, the French and the Americans got behind the Algerian junta, a very bloodthirsty group, and crushed the Islamist forces, threw them all in jail.
No more elections.
Military dictatorship from now on.
Number two, the election of Hamas in Gaza.
Completely free, well-run election.
The minute Hamas won, the Western powers put them under siege, locked them up in Gaza, cut off food supplies, in the hope that they'd be overthrown.
The third example we've just seen now is Egypt.
So, the record of democracy, remember George Bush already pontificating for, let's build real democracy in the Middle East, and the Wall Street Journal cheering him on?
This is Aaron Baloney of the worst kind.
And we see now what's really happening.
When Washington says democracy, it means cooperative democracy.
It means a government that looks democratic, but does what Washington wants.
If it goes any other way, it gets squashed.
Yep, for sure.
Alright now, so, I want to ask you about Turkey, but first, what's up with Mohamed ElBaradei?
I like that guy.
He debunked lies about Iran's nuclear program a thousand times in a row.
He's the source of all of my best quotes.
Like, not only is there no evidence, but there is no indication that you could ever find any evidence of any secret nuclear weapons program in Iran, because there ain't one, says Mohamed ElBaradei.
What a great guy!
But now, boy, it sure seems like he's number one CIA stooge in charge of Egypt right now, huh?
Or trying to be.
Well, it does.
Scott, I've been thinking about that myself.
I don't understand his transition.
He was courageous.
He had real cojones in those days, during Iraq in 2003, before that.
And now he's gone over to the dark side in the sense that he's sort of considered to be an American asset, and he's working with the military, even though he's a Pulitzer Prize winner.
Well, so is President Obama, too.
It's a strange change.
I don't know what has engineered his thinking.
All right.
Now, so we've got about six minutes for you to talk to us about what's going on in Turkey.
Yes.
We see, you know, we're going through a phase of youthful rebellion.
Back in the day, when I was in university, it used to be called Panty Raid Time.
And all the young guys are all full of hormones and rushing around doing water fights and burning cars and stealing girls' panties.
Well, this is a function of this.
So I think we see it in Brazil.
We see it in Turkey.
We probably see it in some of our own United States soon.
But in different places around the world, youth is rebellious.
Youth is unemployed.
I mean, the recession has played a major role in this.
Social media has encouraged it, no doubt about it.
But these are kids mainly.
Look at the people who are demonstrating.
Who the hell has time to go and sit in a tent in Taksim Square in Istanbul for four or five weeks?
Watching hippies.
Well, yeah, they were.
But, well, they're modern-day hippies.
I don't know what we call them anymore.
Erdogan was right.
A lot of them were hippies.
You look at them.
But this is another example of Western-leaning forces trying to overthrow elected governments when they were not able to do it with the ballot box.
They're trying now to stage enough street demonstrations to do it.
What happened in Turkey was these westernized Kemalist elite and leftists, a lot of Marxists, different kind of leftists, were trying to provoke an army coup.
It failed in Turkey.
It worked in Egypt.
But this is the new model.
Now, so here's the thing.
This sounds confusing and paradoxical to people and what have you, right?
That the young, more secular-leaning types would be anti-democracy and pro-military coup.
But that's because it's a secular, very secular military going back to the founding of the country.
And democracy means the election of conservative Islamists.
So all of a sudden the kind of people who you would associate with being a bunch of Hillary Clintonites, they are.
But that means they're pro-dictatorship, not pro-vote at all.
Well, that's exactly right.
And I wrote years ago that if free elections were held in any Arab country, the Islamists would win.
I don't know if this happens today, but it certainly was true yesterday.
Now, wait a minute.
Isn't there anybody smart at the Council on Foreign Relations to say, you know what?
We ought to be happy to get some conservative rather than radical Islamists in some of these countries.
We can't control every dictatorship over there forever.
And Erdogan ain't so bad and Morsi ain't so bad.
Why do they have to make Syria out of everything?
Because they view everything in the world, as does the American media, for what's good for the United States.
What advances U.S. world domination, if you want to call it, or hegemon, imperialism, choose your term.
And that's the yardstick that they measure by, and it's invariably very short term.
Nobody's thinking like the Chinese, you know, 5, 10, 15 years down the line.
It's just today.
And we have, and I've seen this so many times in Washington, that the institutions there have a collective memory of anywhere between two and five years.
And nothing, anything that happened before that might as well have been during the days of the pharaohs or Sir Galahad.
It's ancient history, and nobody draws the lessons.
Yeah, well, and we can even see this most blatantly with the case of the Iraq war, which, you know, there's a bomb going off right now in Baghdad.
People are dying right now in George Bush's wars still, as it's spread to Syria and spread to Libya and spread all over the damn place.
And as far as the American people are concerned, and apparently as far as the media and the Washington, D.C. political establishment are concerned, the political party establishments are concerned, that was back before the Korean war, even, or something.
That was back in the days of black and white, and all those people would have died of natural causes one way or the other by now anyway, and so forget it.
Who even cares?
Iraq war, who even heard of that?
Well, that's right.
The old Romans saying, you know, victory is a thousand fathers, defeat is an orphan.
Yeah.
And people just brush it under the carpet, or like they're saying now about the NSA scandal, everybody does it, you know.
It's not really important, but it is important, but that's the attitude.
Yeah, well, and it's amazing, and I guess we're out of time to talk about Syria, but next up is Ben Swan, who actually asked Obama about Syria and arming the rebels there, and got a great little weasel word response out of him about it.
I was going to talk with him about that, but it sure is a hell of a mess.
I sure am glad I have you around to tell me about what you think about it, so I can understand.
Thank you, Scott.
It is a hell of a mess, a mess on the Nile, a mother of all messes.
Yeah.
Well, and I guess the military clampdown is just going to get hardcore here.
Now, has the CIA run this whole show, basically, you think?
No, I think the military, which is very closely tied to the Pentagon, is running the show, with the CIA and the NSA sitting somewhere on the sidelines.
I see.
But, so, at a certain point, it's hard to tell the difference between the U.S. Army and the Egyptian Army.
Just before the army took power, General Dempsey went to Cairo to talk.
I missed it, and no wonder I didn't know the coup was coming the next day.
All right.
Hey, thanks very much.
I appreciate it, Eric.
Cheers, Scott.
Good talking to you.
That's the great Eric Margulies.
He's at lewrockwell.com today, as well as ericmargulies.com.
War at the Top of the World and American Raj are the books, and we'll be right back with Ben Swan after this.
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