09/30/15 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright kids, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm drinking lemonade, doing a radio show.
I got Eric Margulies on the line.
He's covered 14 wars.
He speaks, I don't know how many languages.
How many languages do you speak, Eric?
I speak, uh, pidgin English, and a smattering of tribal dialects, such as, don't shoot, I'm a journalist.
Yeah, alright, well.
And he's very modest.
He's the author of American Raj, Liberation or Domination, and War at the Top of the World, before that.
And so, here's a country he knows all about, Syria.
And here's a country I've been interviewing him about for many years, he's been writing about for many years.
I do hope you guys will all go and check out his article, archive, at ericmargulies.com.
Spell it like Margolis, ericmargulies.com.
And someone complained about me saying that all the time, but you know what?
There are other ways to spell Margulies, like Joseph Margulies, the lawyer, he spells it entirely different.
So spell it like Margolis, and you'll find it.
Thank you, Scott.
Eric Margulies.
And I said it wrong for the first four years I knew you or something, so I'm trying to make up for that.
And lourockwell.com, he also writes there, you can check him out.
Almost every article, I think, is published at lourockwell.com as well.
Okay, so, Eric, let's talk about Russian intervention in Syria now.
I'll just let you take it and tell us what you think is most important to understand what's going on right now.
Scott, it was inevitable, perfectly predictable, the result of stupid blundering by Washington.
I hate to use such strong language.
It scares me greatly.
It is clearly a step towards a possible war.
If you wonder, I'm just, I was just at Verdun in France, and if you were a million people died, and you wonder where, how wars begin, this is a perfect and lugubrious example.
All right, now, so, the one thing that I wonder, I think maybe even regular CNN, you know, viewers are beginning to catch on to here is the cognitive dissonance and the way that the American government and Barbara Starr and the rest of them tell the story that, well, of course, we're happy to see Russia bomb ISIS.
I mean, that's perfectly great, but we just don't want to see him bomb Assad's enemies, but Assad's enemies, yeah, that's ISIS.
As Putin said to Charlie Rose, hey, it's ISIS and al-Qaeda control 60% of the country.
So, that's who the opposition is, groups that your government, the UN, and everybody else calls terrorist groups.
And so, you know, it's pretty obvious.
Again, I'm not, I never was and never would call for actually having America join on the side of Assad, but it's pretty obvious, or I guess it's pretty ridiculous that they continue to try to insist that I'm supposed to be terrified and upset at Russia for doing the same thing that my government ostensibly is doing too, which is bombing the Bin Ladenites over there.
But supposedly, I'm supposed to be really mad, but they won't explain why.
Quite right, Scott.
I've been watching the news broadcast.
I just got in from Kazakhstan, so I was a bit out of the loop, but now I'm up to date.
And we're getting sheer propaganda out of the British, French, and U.S. stations.
We're not accurately informed about this ridiculous war that's been going on now for almost five years, has caused 9.4 million refugees, almost 250,000 dead, and destroyed the once beautiful country of Syria, which I've been covering for almost 40 years.
So it's terrible.
It's a train wreck happening, and nobody in Washington can seem to stop it.
All they can do is blame the awful Mr. Putin.
Well, okay, so it makes sense how politically they can align outright with Russia and Iran and Hezbollah and Syria against the Islamic State and al-Nusra.
So, you know, maybe it's just a blessing in disguise, and they can really take this cover and say, all right, fine, let Putin fight it then.
And maybe this time, America doesn't have to work with the Saudis to finance the Mujahideen against him, you know?
Well, the U.S. Air Force is busy right now bombing Syria.
It's bombing in Afghanistan now that the Taliban has routed the Afghan puppet army.
They're assisting the Saudis bombing Yemen.
It's a very stressful situation.
But the problem is that we have violence, but we don't have thought or strategy behind it.
And Washington is clearly in a trap of its own making in Syria, should never have gotten in there.
Vladimir Putin tried to give the U.S. an exit strategy a few years ago, where it was this great human cry over non-existent poison gas.
Now the U.S. is getting deeper and deeper, and I think any moment now we're going to get reports of the U.S. and Russian aircraft have clashed over Syria.
It's scary.
Well, OK, see, this is my problem, man.
I always do this.
I saw that Georgia executed some lady, and I thought, well, she must have done something.
But no, then I click on it.
No, it's her husband who did something.
She was just there.
Same thing here.
I think, well, come on, I mean, they must be talking on the red phone and saying, hey, as long as your MIGs are flying near our F-18s, let's at least, you know, trade transponder frequencies and stuff and make sure that we don't end up, you know, in an air war over Syria when we're at least sort of kind of on the same side in a way.
But then, no, I'm just making stupid assumptions about how it ought to work.
But you're telling me that, no, really, we could just as easy have a dogfight over Syria just because of Russians and Americans flying around and their political bosses not talking about it and coordinating it at the higher levels.
That's right.
There have been some attempts to set up a coordination system.
But Syria is a huge mess.
Nobody knows who's who in Syria.
Everybody's fighting everybody else.
And, you know, at the speeds of modern jet fighters, you could be out of Syria in three minutes or into another country.
The Israelis are getting involved.
Iran is massing troops.
It's a very complicated situation.
But let me add that you mentioned the Islamic State before.
And the Islamic State, in my view, is a pipsqueak force.
It's just a bunch of wild men running around in pickup trucks that have very little military or offensive value.
They're an excuse being used by everybody to bomb them and attack them.
You have the Americans, the French, the Canadians, the British, and now the Russians.
You have five different air force and the Saudi six and maybe the Gulf states to seven different air forces all bombing a few people in huts and pickup trucks.
It's a crazy situation.
You couldn't dream this up.
It's a good training exercise for our fighter jocks.
It's a good way to put welfare in Lockheed pockets and that kind of thing.
But regardless of whether the Islamic State has 50,000 men or 100,000 men or more than that, or whatever armor that America left behind that they've inherited now and that kind of thing from the last Iraq war and all that, you still can't win a war with air power.
Even with Johnson and Nixon, just straight carpet bombing North Vietnam, that didn't win the war and they can't do that level of carpet bombing now for political correctness reasons.
They can't just level Mosul with B-52s like that.
So they couldn't possibly achieve anything with all this bombing other than kill some people.
But even the Rand Corporation study says, oh yeah, killing people from the air isn't doing any good.
Anybody could tell you that.
And I'm sorry, now the music's playing, but I'll let you respond to that on the other side of this break.
Okay.
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Hey, I'm Scott.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Hey, hell, we hear about 9 million refugees.
How many million of those?
Probably at least a million of them are Iraqis hiding out in Syria.
Now they're kicked out of Syria.
Can't go back to Iraq.
Got nowhere to go.
Whole damn region turned upside down by American foreign policy here.
Anyway, so where we left off, you were saying you consider the Islamic State to be a very ragtag force here.
Even at the highest estimates, I think Patrick Coburn gives them a lot of credibility as actually making a state and having a couple hundred thousand fighters.
They've got conscription in three major cities and a system of taxation, this and that, except whatever revenue they have is basically just from black market oil sales to Turkey, which is in the millions of dollars.
It's nothing.
And, of course, none of the oil resources in that part of Iraq are developed.
The Baiji refinery is completely offline indefinitely, and I guess they're able to pull some oil out of the ground in Syria, but they're not able to do much with it except home-level refinement, garage-level refineries going on.
So they certainly are hemmed in, and yet air war can only accomplish what other than, you know, basically providing airstrikes to protect infantry on the ground.
What are they good for?
It seems like they could go on bombing the Islamic State from the air like this indefinitely and wouldn't lead to any change on the ground in terms of who rules Mosul, Fallujah and Ramadi.
Well, unless they kill the leadership, it's known as decapitation in the U.S. military.
But, look, I've covered a lot of wars.
I've been a soldier myself.
I look at this whole ISIS business, and two things strike me.
First of all, it's been ludicrously exaggerated.
It's a ragtag bunch of lightly armed, crazy people, thugs, stiffened by some of Saddam Hussein's ideas.
Secondly, I really believe that ISIS, the Islamic State, was created by the Saudis and is a secret tacit ally of both the Saudis and the U.S.
So what's been going on for the last couple of years?
We're pretending to fight them.
We're the greatest power on earth, and we cannot knock out a bunch of teenagers with burp guns.
We've staged battles with them, which is more theater than actual combat.
We don't want them to lose because they're fighting President Assad's government, which we want to overthrow.
And it's a crazy situation.
It is a big charade.
Oh, I don't think so.
The Jordanian army could clear up Mosul in a couple of days.
So could the Turkish police.
Never mind mighty Turkish army, 500,000 tough soldiers.
No, but we don't want to clear them up because they're helpful to us.
And I think we're trying to get the Islamic State to go and fight Taliban in Afghanistan as well.
They are a covert Western asset.
Otherwise, they would have knocked them out long ago.
All right.
Well, I mean, but by then, by that you mean they would have hired the Turks to go in there and get them?
Yes, yes, definitely.
They're not much to them, but they're useful.
And they are part of our whole policy in Syria to overthrow the government using different groups.
We're funding all these groups, by the way.
Well, let me ask you this.
I want to narrow down this point a little bit because it's obvious.
There's no doubt about it.
Hell, as we've been discussing on this show for four years straight, that's part of the advantage of just doing this show and not coming up with a better thing to do with my life.
I just keep doing this over and over again.
So I can always refer back to the years worth of coverage to the story from before the declaration of the Islamic State.
Hell, Obama told Jeffrey Goldberg, that's right, Jeffrey Goldberg, getting rid of Assad would be a great way to take Iran down a peg.
And of course, what they all mean by that is after George Bush accidentally and stupidly handed two thirds of Iraq over to Iranian backed Shia forces who kicked us right out because they don't need us.
And after that blunder, then, yeah, gee, now we really need to check Iranian power.
So let's peel off Assad from them.
And of course, there's the 2012 DIA memo where they say, hey, you know, there's a real risk of the creation of an Islamic State here.
And that seems to be what the allies want.
I don't know exactly in that paragraph whether they're referring to the U.S., but they're certainly referring to Turkey, Qatar and Saudi and saying that's what they want is an Islamic Emirate there.
Now, I don't know if that's exactly the same in that document, at least as saying they want the Islamic State, the one they got with Baghdadi.
I mean, are you saying you think Baghdadi just outright works for Saudi intelligence or this is the natural result of what they're doing?
And even after the declaration of the caliphate, they still don't give a damn and they're still willing to support him anyway.
Or how do you clarify that?
State doesn't work directly, but they are allies for them.
You know, going back to Vietnam, which you mentioned, I remember very vividly.
And by the way, in Vietnam, Scott, it wasn't just to make arms that we were in that war.
We were scared, really scared that China and the Soviet Union together were about to take over Southeast Asia.
Even I believe that at the time it was wrong.
But anyway, back to the front.
The Islamic State is too useful.
It's a great boogeyman to scare these people.
And the Saudis have learned to use such groups like this for years to advance their own goals.
Yeah.
All right.
So, yeah, I mean, it sure seems like it, although how easy is it?
How easy would it be for Obama to tell Erdogan, all right, that's enough.
I want you to send your cops in there to arrest these guys who send your army in there to beat him in one weekend.
Would Erdogan just jump if Obama said jump or he has his own plans and America can go to hell?
Or there's just no doubt that Obama and the entire national security state are down with the Saudi Turkish policy here, 100 percent?
The Turks are too clever and wily to act as regional policemen for the U.S. And Erdogan is too smart to get involved up to his ears in the Syrian mess and the Iraqi mess, which are getting bigger and bigger.
The U.S. cannot understand this whole situation.
It's way beyond us.
And these nitwits in Congress who are trying to make policy for an area they can't find on a map.
So the best thing that we can do is get the hell out of the Middle East, let it go its own way rather than trying to micromanage an area of possible complexity.
All right.
So what do you think is and let's assume, well, with or without American intervention here, what do you think Putin's plan is here?
He's just going to bolster the Syrian army and Hezbollah as much as he can and just start marching east or what?
No, I think Putin is very, very clever and very stern.
What he's done initially up to now, he's been calling for diplomatic settlements that will be to somewhat to Russia's advantage or at least to stabilize the situation, head off war.
He's been doing this over Ukraine.
Washington won't listen.
He's now again called for a diplomatic solution to Syria that will leave President Assad there in power, perhaps, perhaps not.
But certainly the Russians are being very cautious, as they always are, and they don't want to have a direct clash with the United States, even though they are suffering very heavy provocations.
Let's hope that Mr. Putin's nerves hold out and that he keeps cool calm and collected.
I read a funny thing by Michael Sawyer.
He said, as our enemies would say, God is great for giving us this opportunity to get the hell out of there and just leave it all on Russia.
If they got to give them their own Vietnam again or whatever, it's better than giving ourselves another one again.
But anyway, let me ask you this.
What are you doing in Kazakhstan?
What's going on in Kazakhstan?
I was invited to consult with some senior officials in Kazakhstan, and it was a interesting opportunity.
It's a long way away, but I was out there.
I was in the mountains.
I was in the deserts of Kazakhstan.
I was in the capital Astana, Almaty.
It's a very interesting company, country and very charming people.
I'd only briefly been to Kazakhstan before.
I know the other stands quite well.
Now I have a good feel for Kazakhstan, too.
It's an important country.
That's funny.
Right before I brought you on, I was ranting about the cops and I was saying, what the hell is this, Kazakhstan?
Because I was trying to pick some very, very old world nation very far from here where John Locke never tread or whatever.
And that was the one I picked.
And then as soon as I brought you on the air, you were saying, I just got back from Kazakhstan.
And I thought, wow, what a coincidence of all the countries I picked off the top of my head.
And next time, better use Uzbekistan.
Uzbekistan.
Duly noted.
Yeah.
Where the fun-loving leaders who are U.S. allies like to boil their political opponents alive.
Oh, man.
Yeah.
Forgive me.
I had spaced that one out.
Was it Nakhayev?
Is that how you say it?
No, Islam Karimov.
Oh, Karimov.
The Kazakh leader is Nursultan Nazarbayev, who I've been following since the 1980s when I was covering Moscow.
And he was certainly the smartest of the Central Asian leaders, a very close ally of Gorbachev.
And people thought for a while that he might become the next leader of what was the Soviet Union.
He would have made a great leader.
Very interesting.
I hope you do write about your trip there, if not your meeting there, which doesn't sound like article material.
Soon as I get over my jet lag, Scott.
All right.
Well, welcome back to the West.
Good to talk to you again, as always, Eric.
Cheerio.
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