09/18/15 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, and this is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Sorry, yeah, I did screw up the time zones earlier.
I'm used to talking at all times Eastern.
But Brad, he lives here in Texas near me, man.
And so he's coming on next after our good friend Eric Margulies, author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj Liberation or Domination and about 500,000 news stories and columns or so, I'm guessing, that he's written in his career.
Covered 14 wars, knows everything about every one of them and speaks all the languages, too.
Welcome back to the show, Eric.
How the hell are you, man?
I'm glad to be back with you, Scott.
There's lots to talk about these days.
And there's some last week.
Yeah, yeah.
No, there's so much we couldn't possibly cover at all.
But let's start with this.
How much should I hate Russia?
And how much should I fear them?
I'll tell you what I think.
I don't either hate them or fear them.
Russia is a huge country with a very rich and often tragic history that commands all and respect.
Russians can be frightening.
If you're in a war with them, the moral is don't fight with people who are shaped to the size of refrigerators.
And the Russians have their own interest like any other major country.
We can't decide with the Russians whether to treat them like a normal country or to treat them like some kind of devil.
They're not.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, so anyway, and obviously I was just kidding.
But the thing is, so have they ever actually, I mean, since the end of the Cold War, they've really done anything to us at all other than, you know, since the rise of Putin declare independence?
Absolutely not.
President Putin, you'll notice in our media now, he's never called President Putin anymore.
It's always Putin.
The Russia has done nothing.
The worst that Russia has done in the United States is refused to roll over and follow orders.
All right.
Now, I know this is a little bit redundant.
We've talked about this before, but it's so important.
And I know it's new people listening all the time.
And George Kennan, of course, who began to write Mr. X, who came up with the containment policy against the Soviet Union so many years ago after World War II.
He did an interview with Thomas Friedman in the New York Times in 1998.
And he said, basically warned about against NATO expansion and said how obvious it would be that what was coming, that as we expand NATO into Eastern Europe, the Russians will react.
And by the way, these are the guys who overthrew the communists for us.
We ought to worship them, basically.
Instead, we're sticking our finger in their eye.
And by moving our military, you know, NATO is not just a building with, you know, people with ribbons.
It's a military alliance.
And as we push our military alliance east, they will react.
And then all the people who are saying they won't react now will be the same people saying, see, this is why we need NATO so bad, because of all this Russian aggression and all that.
And we'll call their reaction the start of the fight.
It couldn't have been predicted or laid out any clearer.
And it's exactly what's happening, you know, at this moment.
And the reason I started off with how much should I hate him, how much should I fear him, is because this is absolutely the consensus in every bit of TV media, every bit of political conversation everywhere.
Putin and Russia are the boogeyman, maybe even as bad as it was, you know, when I was a kid in the 1980s under Reagan when they were still the commies.
And it's just unanimous.
It's sort of like listening to right-wingers talk about the nuclear deal.
None of them have ever heard anyone else actually contradict them with any facts.
So they really think they're right.
I mean, it's just a nationwide groupthink, basically.
Well, that's right.
And, you know, back in 1990, I think it was, 91 or 92, somewhere back there, I wrote.
I was writing a couple of columns saying it's great that the wall has come down, hooray for the return of Eastern Europe to free nations, but whatever, don't push NATO east.
And Gorbachev had said that many times.
There was a verbal agreement between the US and the Russians, post-Soviet Russians, not to push NATO east.
In return for Russia not allowing these East European countries to get away from the thumb of Russia.
We were very close to war in those days.
And I said that Gorbachev was the man who avoided World War III for us.
But nevertheless, we made a fatal mistake.
Greed and lust overcame sensible thinking.
And the Europeans were weak-willed, too, and showed how much they are vassals of the United States.
Because they went along with this, too.
And in the end, we pushed our borders right up to Russia.
And the perfectly expected result has happened.
That is, the Russians are pushing back.
And I'm very, very upset.
We're surrounding them, which we are.
I want to get back to Eastern Europe in a minute.
But your article about Russia today at LewRockwell.com is mostly regarding Syria here.
And I wonder, first of all, if you think that the...
First of all, if it's even true, the newly increased amount of Russian intervention on the side of Assad there.
I'm sure it's not as extensive as it's being portrayed.
But then secondly, I wonder if you think that that's a real indication of how bad Assad and the Syrian state now need Russian help.
That Hezbollah and Iran aren't cutting it.
They need the Russians.
Otherwise, they're risking losing their capital city here.
That kind of thing.
What do you think?
That's right.
I think the Syrian government is stretched very thin.
It can't recruit any new soldiers.
It's fighting on so many fronts.
It's in a very dangerous situation.
And I think the bigger danger is not so much the anti-Assad forces pushing towards Damascus.
But of a coup from within the current Syrian government military forces.
To oust Assad and put in somebody harder line there.
Because he's a pretty soft guy.
He's not the monster that the Western propaganda machine portrays him to be.
But they are being pushed very hard.
And he's an important Russian ally.
And I'm afraid that we are going to force Russia to intervene to some degree.
And now, you know, what's funny about all this is just how funny it all is.
I mean, the whole thing is obviously a massive tragedy.
But the funny part is how no one in American media or politics can talk straight about this at all.
Just the word Russian is supposed to be unsettling enough that you don't really follow the chain of logic of who's fighting on whose side here.
I mean, what's happening here is, as Pat Buchanan writes at AntiWar.com today, Putin is basically acting as a surrogate of, if not the American empire, of the American people.
He's going to kill our enemies for us.
Al-Qaeda.
And the Islamic State.
And the Americans, the American government and the political establishment and the media would have us boohooing about that?
Crying about the fact that Russia wants to go and do what our government, not necessarily should have been doing, but the opposite of what our government has been doing, which is backing our enemies in Syria for the last four years straight?
Well, it's true.
You know, Putin pulled our chestnuts out of the fire when Obama was going to blunder into attacking Syria over that phony poison gas issue.
And then, now Putin has, President Putin has offered very sensible, direct talks on the military situation with Washington, scorned by the Obama administration.
We've got to stop demonizing our rivals and our opponents.
Otherwise, we can't conduct any sensible, mature policy.
Yeah.
And by the way, everybody, you should know that possibly preceded by one story in The Guardian, I forget the guy's name who wrote about Prince Bandar sending Mujahideen to Syria already, that was in, I'm pretty sure, June or July of 2011.
I think you were second in an article that ran at lewrockwell.com that wasn't just, hey, this is what it looks like to me.
It was, hey, I just got back from France and my sources in French intelligence and the military have told me that the French, i.e.
NATO, America, and France is just one of our satellites, they are on the ground right now in Syria helping organize this thing.
So you're, at the very least, second place, maybe even first place on American and allied GCC and NATO intervention in Syria back four years ago, more than four years ago now.
So everybody check out Eric and his archive at ericmargulise.com and we'll be right back in just a sec with more.
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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, I'm talking with Eric Margulise, author of American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
Ericmargulise.com, spell it like Margolis.
Ericmargulise.com, and read him today at luerockwall.com.
The Russians are coming to help Hezbollah and Assad kill al-Qaeda guys.
And you were saying they're maybe even head off a coup from within the Ba'ath Party.
And it's interesting you mention that because two just hugely important stories this week that got very little coverage with the debate and all this other crap.
But first of all, Russia says Syria's Assad is ready to share power.
And of course, if Russia says so, you know, it goes, basically, I guess.
Like when Israel says something, America does it, that kind of thing.
And so they're willing to negotiate that.
Of course, the American standard has been, no, he must agree to step aside before any negotiations can begin, which is, of course, an offer they can't possibly accept.
An obvious poison pill, Rambouillet Accord-style thing there.
But then secondly is this one, Eric.
West ignored Russian offer in 2012 to have Syria's Assad step aside.
And not just 2012, Eric.
February 2012.
Russia tried to make a deal where they get rid of Assad and work out some kind of a deal.
And the American empire completely ignored it and refused to go along with it whatsoever.
What do you make of that?
Well, that's right, Scott.
It did happen.
And there are a number of reasons.
First of all, the U.S. doesn't want to bring, lower itself to negotiate with a minor power like Russia, as some leading American recently called it.
Equally important, it was very hard for anyone there to find reasonable people to negotiate with in Syria.
The so-called Syrian moderates have almost vanished into the woodwork.
They're the ones being financed by the U.S. and Turkey and France and Israel.
And now really the people who are calling the shots there are different kinds of wild men jihadists who are being supported by the Saudis and Gulf states and armed by the U.S.
And they are very, very angry people and divided amongst themselves.
So very hard to find a negotiating partner.
One wasn't found.
Eventually one may emerge, but not yet.
Well, you know, it makes sense, though, that the Americans, you know, I mean, obviously it's more complicated than the deal that the Russians pulled off after the Sarin false flag attack by the Turks and al-Nusra that you mentioned earlier there in 2013.
But it does seem like, I mean, and obviously, yeah, you can't negotiate with Golani, you know, the leader of al-Nusra, who's still loyal to Ayman al-Zawahiri and murders people for being Druze and refusing to renounce it and convert and that kind of thing.
But what you could do, I mean, assuming that the Americans were negotiating in good faith here, whatsoever, is they could negotiate with the Russians that if you guys will support some kind of transition of, you know, Assad leaving, but short of debauthifying the government and abolishing the army, then we will do our part to tell the Turks and the Israelis and the Saudis and the Qataris that before we were obviously lying when we said so.
But now we actually really mean it.
Stop bankrolling the Islamic State.
And there are satellites, push comes to shove, Qatar's going to do what the hell they're told, no?
Yes, they will if we put enough pressure on them.
So the Islamic State, we don't have to deal with them and we don't have to deal with Al-Qaeda, but we can make everyone stop paying them and we can make the Turks close the damned border and stop buying black market oil from them and this kind of thing, at least.
And then, you know, it's not a matter of allying with Assad, but hell, let the Russians ally with Assad and let him recreate his old monopoly, you know, to the Sykes-Picot line.
Well, yes, that's right, Scott.
But the problem here is that ISIS, Islamic State, whatever you want to call them, is a helpmate of the United States.
It's doing, it's working for us, it's beneficial to the U.S.
That's why over recent months we've seen the phony bombing of Kobani on the Turkish border and we've seen this half-hearted, half-assed air campaign against the Islamic State.
We're probably alerted when the planes are coming.
We have the recent embarrassing revelations in Congress that the so-called U.S. trained moderate Syrians spent $500 million training these guys.
There are only four to six of them left and they're running away as fast as they can.
So we are really half-hearted about fighting ISIS.
We need it.
It's useful.
It's our ally in Iraq, in Syria and Iraq.
Okay, and so now obviously it's useful for the Turks and the Saudis and the Qataris and the Israelis' interest in getting rid of Assad or limiting Iranian influence in Syria, if you want to put it that way.
But what does it do, how does that benefit America at all?
I mean the empire, obviously, I don't mean the American people.
We have no say in this whatsoever.
But I just mean, how is that even good for the empire?
The only reason that we're doing this and that we have destroyed Syria and created over 9 million refugees and 250,000 dead is that we're trying to get at Iran still and overthrowing, it is believed in Washington on Israeli advice, that overthrowing Assad will really undermine Iran and overturn its most important ally.
This is true, but is it worth creating all this havoc and misery and these floods of refugees coming out?
I don't think so.
I never understood why we're after Assad at all.
He seems to me like he's a natural American ally.
Yeah, well, and again, it's because of our allies and their interests more than anything.
And yeah, I mean, I just don't think that, I've never heard of any other explanation than that.
And that's, of course, Obama's explanation himself.
In the interview with Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic as President of the United States, I do not bluff.
If you read in there, Goldberg says, hey, don't you think regime change against Assad is a great way to help take Iran down a peg?
And Obama says, yeah, that's exactly what we're doing.
And then he even makes a joke along the lines of, I'd tell you more, but then I'd have to kill you kind of thing.
It's classified.
I can't tell you everything that we're doing, but that's what we're doing and that's why we're doing it.
We're doing the same thing that we did in Libya.
We're sparking some so-called public protests that are engineered by us.
We are then sending in covert special forces to attack the government troops.
And then we're creating so much trouble that we're intervening militarily.
I've said since 2000 and what, 2011, that there are French special forces operating inside of Syria.
And probably some British and American special forces too.
You see these knocked out Syrian tanks, even T-72 modern tanks.
They're knocked out with powerful anti-tank missiles that really only our Western special forces operate.
So we're up to our ears in this fight.
But the question is, why overthrow Assad?
Because when he's gone, we are definitely going to miss him.
Yeah, that's right.
People think they've got a humanitarian crisis now.
Just wait until the de-Baathification comes and there's a death mark on the head of every last Druze and Shia and Christian and most of the Sunnis in Syrian society too, man.
Just getting started.
Hey, tune in to the show after this.
You're going to want to hear this next interview.
Thanks.
It's Eric Margulies, everybody.
EricMargulies.com LewRockwell.com Hey, I'll check out the audiobook of Lew Rockwell's Fascism vs.
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From medieval history to the Ron Paul revolution, Rockwell blasts our statist enemies, profiles our greatest libertarian heroes, and prescribes the path forward in the battle against Leviathan.
Fascism vs.
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