08/24/12 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
Next up is Eric Margulies, foreign correspondent, author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination?
Domination, obviously has nothing to do with liberation whatsoever.
Welcome back, Eric.
How are you doing?
I'm just fine as usual, but pleased to be back with you.
Well, very happy to have you here and very happy to see that you know all about the history of America's now deceased sock puppet dictator of Ethiopia, Meles Zenawi.
Tell us all about him and how now he's dead.
Well, he was a very interesting man.
He was one of Africa's certainly most intelligent and best educated, most intellectual rulers.
For the Americans, he was a statesman.
For his own critics in Ethiopia, he was a ruthless dictator.
In fact, Ethiopia is a very important country.
It's 90 million people.
We don't hear much about it in the States, but it's of great importance, strategic influence in Africa.
Its economy has been growing at 7% a year under Zenawi.
In fact, he did a good job of managing his country after overthrowing the communist regime in 1991, but he turned into a very hard, iron-fisted dictator who crushed all opposition, made human rights violations, and acted as America's policeman on the horn of Africa.
Yeah, well, he's been killing Somalis for us, as you say in your article, for the last six years.
Do you expect that to change now?
No, I don't, unless there's a radical change of government in Ethiopia.
The United States really rented the Ethiopian army, which is quite large, 131,000 men, and one of Africa's better-trained, better-equipped armies, to go in and invade Somalia twice in an attempt first to overthrow a moderate Islamic regime that they had there, because George Bush, anything that was called Islamic was anathema to him, and the second time is now, where the U.S. has got about 16,000 or 18,000 Ethiopian troops in Somalia, along with contingents from America's other protectorates in the region, Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, and now South Sudan, have also sent in troops there.
South Sudan has sent troops to Somalia under the AU?
A few.
Wow.
But the real contributors are Kenya and Uganda, who America's rented their little armies to go in and try and crush the Islamic Shabab movement in Somalia.
Now, I thought South Sudan's only existed as a sovereign state for, what, like eight months or something like that, and then don't they have a border war going on with their former capital right now?
They do.
Well, it's not going on today, but it has been percolating along in the past, and a couple of months ago, the two sides nearly went to open war, that is, Sudan and the state of South Sudan, whose independence from Sudan was more or less engineered by Washington over the last 18 months.
And South Sudan has oil, surprise of surprises, and very bad relations with the North.
So South Sudan has become another American protectorate in Africa, ruled by a dictator, and is an important base for some American operations.
All right, now, I talked to this guy, Thomas Mountain.
Do you know him?
No.
All right, well, he writes for Counterpunch and apparently a lot of places, lives in Eritrea or wherever you say that.
Anyway, and so his thing was this, that Meles Zenawi's government in Ethiopia was so dependent on him that he would be surprised if the state survived, that this guy had, in a very Stalin-esque way, brutally eliminated anyone who could have actually, you know, had the ability to even consider replacing him.
Well, I agree with that.
And then he said there's a giant rebel army coming together that's not sectarian, that's Ethiopian nationalist in nature, ready to take over, sack Addis Ababa, and set up a new state of their own there.
It will be interesting to see.
He's right in the sense that Zenawi was, you know, après-moi le déluge.
He crushed all opposition, had no senior people around him, just feeble yes-men.
Excuse me, but there are underlying problems, as I wrote in my article, Ethiopia is the last of the 19th century African empires, because only 40 percent, you know, we always think of Ethiopia, if we think about it at all, as a Christian nation.
It is one of the oldest cradles of Christianity.
But today, Ethiopia is predominantly Muslim.
It's about 50 percent of the population are Muslims, Oromos, or Somalis, and there are other minority groups there, too.
They were held together by an iron hand.
There's been the Oromos in the south have been trying to gain independence for decades from Ethiopia.
So there's a very good chance that if the center weakens in Addis Ababa, that separatist movements in Oromia and Ogadenia, the Somali area, will try and break loose.
Plus, there will be attempts by Ethiopians, Amhara-speaking Ethiopians, to try and seize power.
It's a very turbulent, very, very rough, brutal place.
Now, another thing that Mountain said was, come on, this is all about who controls the Red Sea and the and the gates to the Mediterranean and all this, because, as he put it quite bluntly, America's a second rate economic power now.
All you got left is your military.
So you're going to use that instead.
And yet it seems to me like all they got to do is park one aircraft carrier between Yemen and Somalia there, and they can guarantee the security of the gates of the Red Sea from now until eternity.
Come on, they need all of this for.
No, the American Navy is quite capable of controlling all the maritime operations in that area.
U.S. has can use bases in Yemen, and it has the there's a there's a one to recently secret American base in Djibouti.
That's just on the other side of the Red Sea of the Bab el-Mandeb, the opening southern opening to the Red Sea that was a French colony in Djibouti.
It still is.
But the French now let the U.S. use the port in French Foreign Legion base there.
So the U.S. has base access on both sides of the mouth of the Red Sea.
And on top of it, there are these little islands off the mouth of the Red Sea called Socotra, where the U.S. also has a secret base, thanks to many connections from which it may be flying a predator aircraft as well as flying predators from Ethiopia.
Right, so but what's the point, though, if well, I mean, I guess is it just the obvious that the Chinese might want to spend money investing there and we don't want them to invest.
And so we put our soldiers on the ground.
I mean, it seems I don't think that's kind of wasteful.
The U.S. has got so much to worry about right now.
I think the Taiwan Strait is going to take precedence over the mouth of the Red Sea and the Baba Mondeb.
But, you know, imperial habits die hard.
And it is very strategic territory, even though, mind you, Ethiopia does not have access anymore to the Red Sea.
The the secession, the independence of Eritrea has cut off the Ethiopians from the sea.
And I this is an unresolved issue that's going to be resolved either through diplomacy and negotiation or through war.
So but the U.S. is using Ethiopia to as a gendarme to monitor East Africa as well.
That is, it's the little Uganda, South Sudan, et cetera.
And to look over Zaire to the south or Congo, whatever they call it this week.
And it's it's still a very powerful country.
And so Washington doesn't want to lose its grip on Ethiopia.
All right, now you mentioned the Oromo population there.
Now, yes, I had read about them years ago now.
I don't know, four or five years ago, I guess, about Zinawi or everybody calls him by his first name.
So his last, I guess that's a customary thing.
Melis, America's dictator there that he had waged a brutal war that some accused him of genocide for his internal war against this tribe or ethnicity or whatever the hell it is, a self-identified group of people there.
How is that continuing?
Has it been continuing as of very recently?
And is something going to change about that now or what do you think?
Scott, it's been an on and off conflict, sort of like Turkey with the Kurds.
And it's the Oromo, they used to be called Gala improperly.
If you call them a Gala, they will cut your head off.
They were very fierce tribesmen in the boiling hot area, desert area.
And they hate the highlands, Amhara speaking Ethiopians.
The Ethiopians have been fighting them and massacring them for decades.
It happened under Haile Selassie, who was a very close American ally.
It happened under the communist regime of Mengistu, Haile Marya Mengistu, this communist lunatic who ruled Ethiopia for decades.
And he committed genocide.
If anybody did, the genocide word applies to him because he followed Stalin's lead and starved at least a million Ethiopian farmers to death by cutting off their food, just as Stalin did with the Ukrainians in an effort to collectivize Ethiopian farmers.
So that's why I said it's a very brutal country with a very brutal record.
And there has been fighting with the Oromo.
Things have been fairly quiet with them for the moment, but I would say after the death of Meles Zenawi, that that conflict may heat up again.
Now, do you think that the Americans believe their own BS enough about Somalia that they're going to really be hell bent on controlling the future of Ethiopia here?
I mean, is it purely just up to Langley who's next or what's going to happen, you think?
Well, the U.S. has been trying for the last from since 2006 to to fabricate a kind of a compliant government in Somalia.
And how's that been working out?
It has been a total failure.
There's been only one really popular, legitimate government that was called the Islamic Courts Union, and it was overthrown in 2006 by George Bush using the Ethiopian army and the CIA.
So after that arose the Shabab movement, we had a moderate, we overthrew the moderates.
We then got the extremists of Shabab who are can't take over southern Somalia, but they can certainly make life difficult for occupying powers.
And we've been trying to to craft a government.
There's another effort going on as we speak, where they have a prime minister and a parliament and all this stuff.
But it's baloney mainly, and it's run by dollars.
And it's just it's become a very difficult task.
It's like trying to keep a form of government in Afghanistan, same type of thing.
So the U.S. eventually is going to be forced to send more troops in there and keep bailing them out with hundreds of millions of dollars or else write off Somalia.
But the U.S. military certainly doesn't want to now because it's a matter of pride.
Yeah, well, now I read that the Nigerian government is negotiating with Boko Haram, and I thought Hillary Clinton must be angry because they were looking like they wanted an excuse to intervene there with American military or at least drones or something.
Although I couldn't figure out why.
I mean, OK, I understand imperial habits die hard and there's a whole continent to conquer.
So why not conquer it?
And hell, yes.
General Ham, he'll tell you that Al-Shabaab, which is, you know, a direct result of American intervention, as you just explained, is the excuse to begin intervening over there right now.
Why not?
And Boko Haram, a bunch of bark eating crazies from the backwoods of Nigeria that never harmed anybody more than 10 miles away from their home.
Oh, yeah.
They're an international Al-Qaeda franchise.
We've got to fight to why in the world?
Is it just a madness or is there really something to to worry about in Nigeria?
I mean, they own the government.
They're lock, stock and barrel.
Right.
What's the dispute?
Well, Nigeria has oil and we have we Americans have an insatiable lust for oil.
If you look in East Africa, you'll see that South Sudan has oil.
Uganda thinks they're going to have oil.
Kenya may find some oil in West Africa.
Angola has become one of America's most important suppliers of oil.
So then the problem is it's Dutch Royal Shell and not Exxon or what?
Well, Exxon is in there, too, and they will be to a bigger extent.
I mean, Africa is now seen as the new oil source as well as minerals for the United States.
We have a big power lust for Africa has been rekindled, but it's also what we used to call back in Vietnam days a mission creep.
As you said, they're Al-Qaeda popping up everywhere.
Anybody who shoots off a firecracker is a link to Al-Qaeda, as the media always tells us.
And the military is you know, they're getting their their butts kicked in Afghanistan and Iraq.
They want a new little war that they can win.
And, you know, promotions come from these little wars and bigger commands.
There's now the American Africa Command, for God's sakes, that is getting involved in sub Sahel, sub Saharan Africa.
In Mali is going to be one of the new hot spots.
American special forces are there already.
And as you said, this Boko Haram business is just ludicrous.
But it's again, it's being used as an excuse to generate more U.S. intervention in the dark continent.
Yeah.
You know, I remember back in early 07, Sebastian Younger did a piece for Vanity Fair all about this group of guys.
And I don't think they were Muslim at all.
They had some kind of animist, pagan religion or something.
And they would draw little white circles on their skin and that would make them bulletproof.
So they were fearless in battle.
And they had a whole bunch of really awesome East European fully automatic rifles and basically they were the victims of Shell stealing all their oil with permission from the Nigerian national government, of course, poisoning all their fishing ground and paying them nothing.
And so they would kidnap executives from Shell right off the oil platform.
And then they bring them back two weeks later, unharmed, preaching the case of the poor natives who are getting screwed here.
And so I don't know exactly whatever happened to them, whether the Nigerian government finally just hunted them all down and killed them or whether they gave up or whether somebody finally paid them off or what.
But what I'm really trying to get to is that somewhere in that article, there were some Pentagon guys talking about, yeah, maybe we need to do something about this.
And they sure seem like they wanted to.
And so I've always thought, you know, it's the same thing with the South Sudan thing.
I was worried that George Bush was going to take the humanitarian excuse provided by George Clooney in the Soros set about Darfur in Western Sudan as an excuse to call it whatever you want.
We need to get our foot in the door in that country, you know, on the ground one way or the other.
They ended up just waiting and going ahead straight to South Sudan.
Well, that's exactly right.
And you have the case of the some of these so-called human rights groups are working for governments.
Really, many of them are not to be trusted.
They have or they have their own agenda.
I think Oxfam is certainly one of them for years has been the Christian charity from Britain has been involved trying to stir up civil war in South Sudan.
And it's a secessionist movement against the North because the Northerners and Muslims and the Southerners are half of the Southerners are Christians.
So one has to be careful with these things and you're getting always claims of genocide, genocide from these different groups, which are usually exaggerated.
But there are and nobody has any other information on Africa.
So people make a lot of noise, tend to be believed.
Yeah, that's the thing, man, Rodel and good intentions and all that, you know, I was talking with a friend yesterday and I was denouncing Samantha Power because, you know, as it says in that Rolling Stone piece, she was tired of doing do good or rinky dink stuff and she wanted to improve her position in the White House.
And that's why she lobbied so hard for the war in Libya.
And then so my buddy said that I really sound almost like Rush Limbaugh going ahead all the way as far as denouncing the intentions and the goodness of the personhood of this person who very possibly could have meant well or something like that.
And then my argument, of course, is just the consequences are bad enough that it doesn't really matter whether she meant well.
Maybe that makes it worse if, you know, it's just the road to hell paved with good intentions and then the good intentions that you couldn't really attribute to Cheney.
Right.
But you could attribute to a do good or like her.
They become the excuse for letting her just do more of it.
And here all we have is the exact same naked Cheney imperialism that we had before.
Only now it's all just dressed up in a Democratic feminist pantsuit and a humanitarian excuse.
I mean, if Samantha Power and Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton won a war, then it must be for the good of the little girls of Libya.
That's right.
It is the new battle standard battle standard for foreign intervention.
It's humanitarian, but no doubt about it.
We saw it in Libya.
Now we're seeing it in in Syria and I'm sure we'll see it in other places.
Iran could be another place, but it's popular.
It sells wars.
It's it sells better than weapons of mass destruction because nobody ever found any.
So they have to come up with another excuse.
By the way, just when my memory comes back, I think the people we were talking about in Nigeria were the Ogonis and and I think they're still down there making trouble for the oil companies in the in the mouth of the Niger Delta.
Well, good for them.
I mean, I hope they don't bring the weight of the entire empire down on their own heads.
But at least the way they were portrayed in that younger piece.
And I talked to him about at the time actually was they were really hell bent on good PR.
Someone had taught them public relations.
You know what we're going to do?
We're going to kidnap people and then we're going to bring them back completely fed and unharmed and telling our story for us.
We're going to make we're going to kill them with kindness.
And what a way to fight a rebellion.
It is they had a couple of Western educated.
There's one guy named Ken Sorrow.
We will who my memory is still working, who work use clever Western PR techniques.
Unlike ninety nine point nine percent of these third world revolutionaries or troublemakers who don't have the slightest clue about public relations, look at the Syrians, for example, and they keep shooting themselves in the foot rather than taking clever tactics.
All right.
Now, let me ask you about Syria since you brought it up when Obama said the other day, well, he didn't really outright threaten military action, but he sort of kind of threatened military action and said his red line is if Assad uses chemical weapons on his own people, which Assad has already said he's not going to do.
And so the moon of Alabama blog said that actually this is Obama giving up and deciding to kind of change his mind and not really seek regime change.
And this is him giving Assad permission to go ahead and kill him all if you want.
Just don't use chemicals on him.
I don't read it that way at all.
I think this is another tentative step towards possible Western intervention.
I just don't think they've made up their minds yet in Washington.
So they'll just claim mustard gas in this neighborhood and then that'll be it.
You know, they're not going to use chemical weapons and there was not understanding PR.
Here's a perfect example of the Syrian press spokesman raising this issue of chemical weapons.
We're not going to use them.
Well, everybody in the West and Israel jumped on this statement to start screaming about the danger of Syrian chemical weapons.
Right.
When he shouldn't have said anything at all, kept his mouth shut.
How incredibly stupid.
So but these I don't see the intervention is still waiting for the government to collapse and fall.
The Russians, meanwhile, behind the scenes are trying to negotiate a some kind of peace settlement.
But the rebels, the anti-government forces don't want to hear of it.
That's the real problem.
The ones that we've been supporting were worried me so much when Obama said threatening Syria and Russia immediately came and warned the United States and the other West and France and Britain to not intervene militarily in Syria.
Well, this gave me the willies, Scott, because we're doing the one thing we should never do, and that is confront or being a confrontation with a nuclear armed power.
And, you know, we don't care if we get the Libyans mad at us, but the Russians have thousands of nuclear weapons pointed at us and we were running the risk of a nuclear war here.
We could see very easily how we could intervene militarily in Syria and the Russians could send in forces to oppose us.
And voila, you have a war.
Well, but they'd be crazy to confront us, a nuclear power, too, right?
Wouldn't they just write off Syria for now?
Because after all, just wait a minute, the Americans are killing themselves anyway.
Not necessarily.
You know, egos are involved.
The credibilities of governments are involved.
Oh, no.
And, you know, Syria is as close to Russia as northern Mexico is to the United States.
Just imagine if a Russian army landed in Monterrey, Mexico.
People would be jumping through hoops in the States.
So this is a similar thing.
We have to be careful.
I'm not saying the Russians would go to war.
I would say they tend to think they wouldn't.
But there's always the risk.
This is how wars begin, you know.
Well, so Obama's decided really what he wants to do is split the difference.
Right.
And have the CIA and the JSOC help with the organization and some of the financing and the arming and just wait.
Right.
And who cares how long it takes?
But, you know, I wonder at this point whether they think that this rebel army could ever really win or whether they're just trying to exhaust Assad as much as they can, even though they know he's going to stay in power without good carpet bombing.
Well, it could be a process of attrition, but Washington is clear and being pushed now by the French who want to get their hands back on the Levant, on Lebanon and Syria, which they used to rule.
They are hoping that there will be a coup against Assad and he'll be ousted and somehow more pliant.
Army general will come into power.
I don't see I don't see any easy outcome for Syria.
They've stirred up hornet's nest there.
And I don't know how they're going to settle down this war.
But I guess for now, Washington really doesn't.
It's not there's not any time schedule for it to intervene.
It can go through this for another year if necessary.
All right.
All right, everybody.
That's the great Eric Margulies.
The latest at LewRockwell.com is the U.S. loses another policeman in Africa on the death of Meles Zenawi.
And also check out his great website, EricMargulies.com and his books, War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
Thanks very much for your time, Eric.
Appreciate it.
Cheers, Scott.