08/19/13 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, I'm Scott.
This is the Scott Horton Show.
Appreciate y'all tuning in.
Check out the new website at scotthorton.org and all my interview archives, more than, well, almost 3,000.
Let's say that.
Almost 3,000 going back to 2003 for you there.
And a whole bunch of them with the great Eric Margulies.
He's the author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj, foreign correspondent in the old world for many, many years.
Joining us again on the phone from, what, Toronto, right, Eric?
That's right, Scott.
Welcome back to the show, sir.
How are you?
I am just fine, thank you.
I'm basking in the perfect summer weather here in Toronto.
I wish I could bottle it and export it to Saudi Arabia.
Yeah, or maybe to Texas.
We could use a little bit of relief here.
That's right.
I didn't realize I was quite directly on the equator, but apparently I am.
Are you?
Yeah.
No, don't look at the map, but just the feeling of the sun in the skies.
Get out your phone.
Apparently, I'm at the exact same latitude as Kenya.
Really?
No.
Well.
Okay.
Talk to me about, instead of the terrible weather here in Texas as compared to the wonderful weather there in Canada, which you just wait until next winter.
We'll see how it is.
But talk to me about the storm on the Nile.
This thing is horrible, what's going on.
Scott, we see a classic military coup sort of harks back to the 1950s when military juntas in Latin America used to overthrow governments on instructions from Washington, and these be-middled generals would crush all opposition.
Same thing just happened in Egypt, though the Obama administration is rather embarrassingly and even shamefully refusing to call it what it was, which was a military coup, and it's putting a footing around the whole issue.
All right, now, what's the U.S. role?
Because Patrick Coburn, I'm sorry, I wasn't trying to get you in a fight with anybody, but Patrick Coburn is on, and one other person was on, too.
I don't think it was Adam Morrow.
Maybe it was Adam Morrow, too.
No, it wasn't Adam Morrow.
It was somebody else, and I asked him about what you had said about, hey, the Egyptian military is just part of the U.S. Army, you might as well think of it that way, kind of thing.
And they said, eh, you know, the Egyptian military, they've been kind of pushing back and have a little bit more independence nowadays than they used to, and I wouldn't be surprised if the Americans would have asked them not to do this, and that they would have done it anyway.
I don't agree with that view, and the Egyptian army, the last time it was more independent was when it was being supplied by the Soviets.
So, in other words, back before I was born.
Well, ever since Anwar Sadat took the biggest bribe in history and aligned the, throughout the Soviets, aligned the U.S. with, or aligned Egypt with the U.S., and signed the 1979 Camp David Accord, which is a hugely one-sided, lopsided pact that was very beneficial for Israel, Egypt has been under America's thumb.
These other commentators that you mentioned, Coburn was a very good, decisive thinker.
I don't think they understand the depth and degree to which the Egyptian military depends on the U.S. for things like ammo and spare parts and missiles and the communications gear and intelligence.
Well, but then again, dependence breeds resentment, and we bribe the Israelis all day, and they still do whatever the hell they want, sell our cruise missiles to the Chinese.
Well, that's different, because they have a unique spot in the American political firmament.
Ah, touche.
Well, they do indeed.
Okay, so now there are reports, plausible deniability, that our Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, was on the phone with the coup leaders there in Egypt, at least asking them to not masquer all the protesters.
Do you think that that's even true?
I do think that's true, and it's credible, and it's, Washington does not want to be seen.
I underline the word seen to be associating openly with this brutal regime and its kind of neo-fascist supporters inside of Egypt.
Because remember, there are a lot of Mubarakists who ran the police and the judiciary and the civil service and things like that, who did very well under Mubarak and are hoping he'll come back.
But Washington is under pressure from Israel.
This Egyptian-Israeli peace deal is a vital benefit to Israel, and so Israel is now pushing all the buttons in the United States to get its supporters to come out and say, well, we should really be friends.
It was necessary to stop this, the terrorists we're going to take over.
The U.S. is happy to see the military back in charge, but it's waiting for the military to put up a fairly legitimate-looking civilian government.
Did you see last Sunday in the New York Times, or no, I guess it was reported in the Times that last Sunday, sorry, that Ehud Barak, and this was before the massacre, but still, long after the coup, that Ehud Barak, the defense minister of Israel, had said, I think the whole world should stand with General Sissi.
Well, of course.
You know, Israel was also a primary supporter of Turkey's generals a decade ago, and they did all kinds of secret arms deals and kickbacks flowed, and they all hated the Arabs and the Muslims in general, and it was all very beneficial for the Israelis.
But the Turkey's generals are gone.
I think that's one of the things that influenced General Sissi in Egypt and his generals, seeing Turkish generals and admirals recently on trial in Turkey for plotting coups.
They're scared.
They're relying a lot on the Israelis.
After all, Mubarak was Israel's closest ally in the Middle East, did a great deal of good for Israel.
In fact, even sold Israel Egyptian gas at below market price.
You can't get more chummier than that.
And the deal was that he would make nice to Israel, and Israel's partisans on Capitol Hill and the media would keep the U.S. off Egypt's back on the issue of human rights.
We'll see this happen again.
Well, did you see that they're talking about maybe releasing him?
They've acquitted Mubarak on a corruption charge, and maybe they're not even going to try him on the massacre charges from the Arab Spring.
Oh, I expect him out of jail this week to a triumphal return as sort of an elder statesman.
That's no surprise at all.
But the army has reacted brutally and stupidly.
Which one would expect from generals with no political experience?
These are guys with no military experience either.
They're uniform bureaucrats.
And so what the U.S. is waiting for, as I was alluding to before, is for Egypt to produce what the U.S. likes to see, and that is a, quote, democratic, unquote, government.
It has all the appearance of a government with a parliament and Supreme Court and all this stuff, which follows orders, is compliance with U.S. policy, and doesn't look too brutal on the surface, but hides its brutalities behind the scenes.
Yeah, more of an extraordinary rendition type of a situation, disappearing one at a time rather than massacres in the streets every day.
It is amazing.
During 30 years of the Mubarak rule, Egypt was an extremely brutal police state, extremely brutal.
I remember being followed in the streets when I was making a film there by secret police, regular police.
They would take notes on everybody as they came out of their house in the morning.
People were tortured, sodomized, executed, disappeared.
Anyway, the population lived in terror of the security police.
This never made it into the American media, not at all, but this was the convenient arrangement that Mubarak kept a lid on Egypt in return, did what Washington wanted, and Washington protected his flanks.
Well, I don't know, I hate to pick on him now.
I feel so bad for him in a way, but the liberals who decided that they would choose the military over the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood got to be kicking themselves now when they see them talking about releasing Mubarak and all of this.
All they've been is the useful idiots of the military state here.
And, of course, the Muslim Brotherhood, they really blew it too.
They should have been trying their very best to make alliances with every faction in the country that was not the military as best they possibly could, right?
And they completely blew that.
That's right, Scott.
You know, they were ballyhooed in the United States as the looming menace of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Next thing you know, they're going to be in Potomac, Maryland with their scimitars and make us all Muslims and it's a huge threat.
But, in fact, they turned out to be a bunch of bungling boops and never been in power.
It was really an underground organization and mainly a very conservative people, engineers, doctors, lawyers.
And they didn't even want to go into politics after the first Egyptian revolution.
So the Brotherhood was incompetent, incapable, bungling.
And remember, its best leaders had been knocked out of the electoral race by the Mubarak-dominated courts.
So for their leader, they had this Morsi who was kind of a stolid apparatchik, an engineer, who really was colorless and generated no emotion.
But now, well, I don't know, the people who all came out to Tiger Square, I mean, I'm trying to look at it and I know it's a poor analogy, but I'm trying to look at it through American political terms here, basically.
What you had was like the Pat Robertson religious right wing of the Republican Party types took power and the Democrats sided with the Pentagon and had the Pentagon overthrow the Republicans for them because they hate the Republicans so much.
And now they've gotten themselves a military dictatorship again.
Well, that was inevitable.
But there was – we saw this in Turkey earlier this year.
There were elements called secularist elements, sort of Western-oriented elites who were trying to provoke chaos, to provoke a military intervention.
They were trying to get the Turkish army to overthrow the Erdogan regime in a government in Turkey, a democratic government.
And that was part of the plan in Egypt.
But people – I know I've had readers that say, well, why were there so many people in the streets demonstrating against Morsi?
Very simple.
First of all, the government had withdrawn the police from the streets for over a year.
There was no police, almost no police presence in the streets.
So there was a huge crime wave in Egypt, which had been a very safe country.
People were terrified.
There was rapes, robberies, burglaries, things like that.
Secondly, the Mubarakist forces caused the price of food to go up, particularly lentils and wheat and sugar, staples the Egyptians live on, 10 to 11 percent increase.
Third, the rumors were spread, totally unfounded, that the Morsi government, Muslim Brotherhood, was going to persecute and or expel Egypt's Christians, who were 10 million of the population.
So the Christian pope of the Coptic Church in Egypt was sitting on the platform with the other ringleaders of the coup when it was announced.
A very bad mistake.
So you have the Christians at it, and you have all the people who worked for the Mubarak regime, the secret police and the bureaucracy and the courts and the media, and all those people had joined in.
So yes, there were a lot of people who were against the Morsi government because it was threatening their privileges.
I don't know, but the liberals had joined up with the Muslim Brotherhood to overthrow the Mubarakists in the first place back two and a half years ago.
So this is ultimately, I mean, they're not getting their privileges, right?
No, not at all.
A few of them may be given government positions, but I don't know what the liberals...
And as you were saying, the threat against the cops was overblown in the first place.
So what have they gained, really?
That's right.
Well, they've gained permanent hostility from the majority of Egyptians, which is really unfortunate because there was no reason for it.
It shouldn't have happened.
A very ancient Christian community is now being threatened.
You know, unfortunately, we Americans have played a role in this because look what happened.
The ancient Christian community of Iraq was destroyed after the American invasion.
It had been protected by Saddam Hussein.
In Syria, Syria's Christians, who are mostly aligned with the Assad government, are now under siege by all these Islamist fanatics who are being imported by the U.S. and its allies.
So we've damaged Christianity greatly in the Middle East.
Christians are taking their goods and leaving.
It's like that time Harry Truman nuked all the Christians in Japan at Nagasaki.
Good point.
Kind of a slower motion.
That's what we call spreading democracy and Western values around the world.
Anyway, so hey, listen.
Let's talk about the casualties and the massacres going on over the last week here.
There's somewhere right around 1,000 killed is the best I can tell from the headlines.
That kind of thing.
So what's the future of this?
Because obviously every line is being hardened now.
Scott, I don't trust the casualty figures out of Egypt.
They're being produced by the Egyptian government and inherently unreliable.
The Muslim Brotherhood says many thousands have been killed.
The true figure is probably somewhere in the low 2,000 range.
At least, well, we know well beyond 5,000 have been seriously wounded in this fighting.
So it's pretty bloody business.
And the Egyptian army is using live ammo.
What's also disturbing to me as an American taxpayer is that the Egyptian army is using American-supplied armored personnel carriers and M60 tanks, thank you, American taxpayers, to crush the street protests.
Now, we have a law in the states, which is decades old, which says that any country that uses American military equipment against civilians, that aid must be cut off.
Well, that's exactly what's happening.
And yet there's been not a peep about this violation of the American law or the violation of a newer law which calls for aid to be cut off to any country whose military overthrows a democratically elected government.
So you have two American laws that are being violated by the administration and certainly by Congress, which is getting strong messages to support the Egyptian government or else.
Well, we let them get away with it last year in Mali, right, where they went ahead and they pretended to cut off aid after the coup there, but nah, go ahead, and there's the Joint Special Operations Command running around, arming people and paying them off.
That's right.
The same thing is going to happen again.
After an interval, I was going to say decent, but it's really indecent interval, the American aid will resume to Egypt, or the Americans will funnel it through Saudi Arabia, which has just gave $12 billion to Egypt.
So the Saudis and the Kuwaitis and the United Arab Emirates have taken over the finance of Egypt, which can't feed itself, so it must rely on foreign donors, and they are supplanting the U.S. in a sense in this area.
So can you tell us about the grudge between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Saudis, and apparently the Qataris were backing them, but now the old man is gone and his son is going to take the Saudi line, they say.
What's all that about?
Well, there's a very basic difference.
Both are Sunni Muslims and very religious, pious countries, but the Muslim Brotherhood, for all its stodginess and conservatism, is revolutionary in the sense that it espouses government run by Islamic principles, and the most important of these principles is sharing wealth and helping the poor and social welfare programs and rooting out corruption in the country.
These are the tenets of Islamic government, and imposing honest courts may be brutal, but at least they're fair and they're not bought.
Saudi Arabia is the antithesis of this.
It's run by a feudal medieval monarchy that keeps the country totally repressed, steals the wealth of Arabia, refuses to share it with fellow Muslims in need, which is a tenet of the Koran, and lives in horror that such revolutionary ideas of spreading the money and helping poor and social welfare should go.
The Saudis are throwing their money on the roulette tables in Cannes while their fellow Muslims in Bangladesh are starving.
So that's the difference between the two outlooks.
Well, now, Ahmad al-Zawahiri, you could have written a line for him.
It's as obvious as that, right?
He put out a podcast right on time saying, see, I told you that trying to participate in the Westphalia system of nation states and democratic elections was for idiots, and that they would never let you actually win and hold on to power.
You should have been with me all along.
Well, a lot of people think that way across the Muslim world.
There have been three honest elections in the Muslim world since 1990, the first in Algeria, 1992.
Islamist government was elected and was immediately crushed by the military, backed by the U.S. and France.
Second case, Hamas in Palestine was democratically elected.
It was immediately walled up inside Gaza and put under siege in an attempt to starve it into submission.
And third case, Egypt here now, which is the most important Arab country, has one-third of all the Arab people.
It had its election, and that was crushed by the army with Western backing.
So, yeah, what Zawahiri says is unfortunately true.
It shouldn't be that way.
My last book, American Raj, was all about this point that the U.S. should start supporting real democratic parties and institutions.
Well, you know, we could also just back off, too.
It would maybe not be doing it exactly the way you or I would have it, but being always on the side of what's going wrong over there has got to be getting pretty tired, and especially, you know, Zawahiri's point, at all these groups that now run around calling themselves al-Qaeda this, al-Qaeda that, or that America calls al-Qaeda this and al-Qaeda that.
What made al-Qaeda unique in the first place, right, was Zawahiri's idea that what we've got to do is attack the Americans, because as long as the Americans are the giant empire from across the ocean that's over here backing all of our local dictators, we can't overthrow them.
The Americans will put them right back again, right?
This is exactly what's happening.
So he was saying attack the Americans, get them to get over here and personally waste all their trillions of dollars fighting us here on our turf, and then we'll kick their asses once they're finally bankrupt and their empire falls like the Soviets, and we can kick them out of the region, and then we can have our local revolution.
So in the short term what that means is probably more terrorist attacks against the United States, right?
Yes, I think so, or against American interests abroad.
But, you know, we're lucky that we're fighting these people in the Middle East.
They're pretty inept terrorists.
9-11 aside, there hasn't been really one very significant attack since then.
Some bloody attacks, but not enough to shake us and our resolve to hold on to our Middle Eastern empire.
But certainly that is the point that al-Qaeda originally made.
It wants to drive the U.S. and its Western allies out of the Middle East.
But what we see now, as I've written anyway, is a period of re-colonization.
We see the Western powers now using the cover of the so-called Arab Spring, which really has turned into Arab Winter, using it to reassert their former colonial influence in the Middle East.
The U.S. and Egypt, the overthrow of Gaddafi in Libya, the attempted overthrow of the Assad regime in Syria, the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, and installation of public governments there.
It looks like it's a giant leap to the past.
Yeah, it's really too bad too, because you think back about how it originally started with the revolutions in Tunisia and in Egypt.
And then just the revolutionary spirit spread around, like, hey, you really can't throw off your dictator if you really try hard, and you don't even have to be violent about it.
You could just insist, really bad, and win, kind of thing.
And then America's...
The U.S. came and co-opted the war in Libya within, what, a month and a half?
Two months of the thing?
It was the beginning, I think.
And then worked to cancel the revolution in Egypt all along, trying to stick with Mubarak, trying to put in Omar Suleiman, and then once the Muslim Brotherhood got in, apparently plotting this whole time to get rid of them and go straight back to the military.
That's right.
The U.S. has become, in many senses, like the Austro-Hungarian Empire around 1900, the supreme force of reactionary politics, trying to stamp down every revolution, trying to protect the status quo.
That's not, in my view, what America's about.
We should be a revolutionary country, like we used to be, but promoting a revolution of freedom or liberty for peoples abroad and better living conditions and things, and getting rid of dictatorship and corruption.
Unfortunately, we're not doing that anymore.
Not at all.
All right, well, listen, thank you very much for your time, Eric.
I sure appreciate it, as always.
My pleasure.
Cheers.
All right, everybody, that is the great Eric Margulies.
His website is ericmargulies.com.
Spell it like Margolis.ericmargulies.com Even if you spell it wrong, Google will help you find it.
And also you can find him at lourockwell.com.
The books are War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination, and we'll be back after this.
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