03/01/11 – Eric Garris – The Scott Horton Show

Hey everybody, I'm Scott.
It's fundraising time again at antiwar.com.
We need your help and here's how you can help.
Stop by antiwar.com/donate or call Angela Keaton, our development director, at 323-512-7095.
That's 323-512-7095 or you can shoot her an email over to akeaton at antiwar.com.
Thank you very much for your support.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio and our next guest on the show is the boss, Eric Gares, founder and managing director of antiwar.com.
Welcome to the show, Eric.
Thank you for having me.
Well, thanks very much for joining us today.
So, the world, huh?
The world, yes.
It's crazy, man.
So, top story here is something we were discussing with Eric Margulies a little bit earlier in the show and that is the threat that the Democrats are actually going to try to, you know, militarily intervene to one degree or another in Libya.
You're always really smart about these kinds of things.
Place your bets.
Well, I don't know.
It depends on how long it takes the Libyan people to get rid of Qaddafi because the U.S. is probably not going to move in in the next week, but if it takes, if it starts taking longer than a week or so, I think we're going to see a lot of calls on the part of the people who think that government not only can do everything but should do everything, that we have to go and stake our claim in Libya.
Yeah, you know, I was thinking maybe it's not too late for Barack Obama to live up to the hype of being the next FDR after all.
He could just get us in a complete war of civilizations with the billion Muslims on the planet and conscript 16 million Americans and bring down the unemployment rate and, you know, call himself a hero.
A brand new deal for the American people and the whole world wide.
Exactly.
I don't know what else to say about that.
All right.
Well, so let's talk a little bit about antiwar.com.
Eric, we'll get back to some more Saudi Arabia and Bahrain and things like that in a minute, because I do want to know what you're hearing, because I know that you know pretty much more than anybody.
Well, just to continue, just one of the things that's really clear to me about what's happening in Libya and the Middle East is this does not feel like a lot of the other things that that we've seen over the last 10, 20 years in terms of revolution.
This is a across an entire region.
And I think that what we're seeing here is the same sort of sea change that we saw with the fall of the Iron Curtain.
And I think that this is going to be something that's very, very difficult to predict.
And it's certainly going to be very difficult for the U.S. to keep up with it in terms of what's going to be coming next and what they are going to try to do about it.
But I think we have we are going to see some major, major changes over the next year or so.
Well, you know, going with that parallel, you know, put the Democrats and Republicans up there in the Politburo as the deciders here, Obama as Gorbachev or what have you.
It doesn't seem like, you know, any more than they're going to be able to keep up with this thing.
Are they going to be able politically to let it all go the way Gorbachev said?
Whatever.
Go ahead.
That's true.
The U.S. is the the world, but in ski and they and wants to be the world policeman and they're going to try to do everything that they can to get out in front of these revolutions and and try to direct it and take credit for it and not allow the peoples in these countries to make their own determination.
Well, no, one of the problems here is the whole kind of humanitarian, you know, facade of all of this spreading democracy and human rights and whatever, when everyone knows and especially it's really just brought to the forefront, even in the mainstream media.
When it comes to these revolutions, it just can't be ignored.
The fact that these are our government's puppets over there, that we're on the side of the bad guys here.
I mean, that truth is getting through, isn't it?
I think it's not not enough.
I mean, people still see us as not part.
You know, they certainly know that we're that we've contributed in some places, like in Egypt, that we that we have a lot that we've given to to the Egyptian military and to to Mubarak.
But for example, what you pointed out on the Napolitano show last night about the U.S. helping to facilitate getting arms to Qaddafi, most Americans don't know about that and would be very shocked.
Right.
Well, yeah, that's what's funny instead of just seeing it as well, just par for the course, you know.
But yeah, you know, on the larger theme of, hey, this is some world historical holy crap, a whole section of the textbook 50 years from now kind of history going down here.
It seems like, you know, to my eyes, it's like, you know, Ron Paul's warnings all coming true all at the same time is what exactly what he's been saying is going to happen for years.
You can spend so much money on the empire that you destroy the value of the money and that's going to cause the end of your empire.
And now here we are.
People in the Middle East can't afford to buy the grain coming in because the dollars that they were making to a day, the two a day is now only worth one and they can't put food on their family.
And so up they rise.
That's right.
And and and we the United States government is really doesn't know what to do at this point.
But if just just as they do in domestic issues, they're flailing around saying this is something must be done.
This is something therefore we must do it.
Yes, Prime Minister.
That's right.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, the thing is, I mean, the idea that they could get away with even the judge's question and, you know, he was setting me up to, you know, hit a home run or whatever.
But even the judge's question was basically the common theme in the media.
Are we to just abandon these people to be killed?
Shouldn't we?
Are we mandated to intervene on behalf of the people of Libya when, in fact, we're selling them military helicopters and using the British to do it, to get around the law in order to do so?
That's right.
You know, it's for one thing.
I think that the Obama administration is being as vocal about it as they are to cover up for what they've done in the past.
Right.
But secondly, they don't like these sorts of things taking off without their control.
You know, that's why you have the U.S. often directing multiple sides in a situation.
But in this case, they don't know who to back.
They don't know what's going to happen from any people that they do back.
And there at this point, they're just flailing around.
Right.
And they cannot accept irrelevancy.
They can't even.
You know, I wonder if there's a debate in the White House at all or on the National Security Council, or any one voice they're saying, well, let's just sit back and wait like three weeks and then see or something, anything, you know.
Right.
And probably not.
Probably not.
Something must be done.
Everybody knows that coming into the room.
And if there is such a person that said that, they just got their pink slip.
Yeah, exactly.
Oh, man.
Well, geez, I don't know.
So, you know, what's the latest from Bahrain and Oman and all these much lesser reported revolutions going on over there?
Are they getting traction, you think?
Well, they are.
You know, Oman is definitely taking off.
And Bahrain, you know, people were reporting, oh, this is now turned a corner.
But that's not the case.
The demonstrations are getting stronger and there's a lot more talk about further crackdowns.
I think you're going to see that this is just going to go from day to day with different countries.
And, you know, one of the most interesting is Iraq, because, you know, over the weekend, 29 Iraqis were killed by security forces trying to put down protests.
And this sort of thing spreading to Iraq is a disaster for the U.S. They don't know what to do.
Right.
Well, and as Jason Dixon was reporting there at news.antiwar.com, we're talking from Mosul to Basra.
The entire country went up.
And Maliki, I guess the second day's news was he was going around arresting people with reading glasses and stuff like Pol Pot for being able to write against him.
That's right.
I think that, you know, Maliki is while he has been kind of stayed in his responses in the past.
I think you're going to start seeing some real heavy crackdowns because he needs to keep his political power.
It's so tenuous and anything that that like this is a major threat to him.
Yeah.
Well, you know, we talked with the guys from Human Rights Watch on the show a couple of weeks ago about his secret torture prisons there.
You know, the ones that Saddam passed on to Don Rumsfeld and Robert Gates that they passed on now to Maliki, not to leave Bush and Cheney out.
And, you know, as Justin pointed out, the two countries where this doesn't seem to really be taken off is Iran and Syria, the two countries we don't control because they can easily pretend, at least claim, perhaps rightly, that all their opposition is controlled by us.
Whereas in all the rest of these countries, everybody knows it's the governments that are controlled by us.
And that just won't wash.
All right.
Hang tight, everybody.
It's Eric Gares, founder of antiwar.com.
It's the old logical fallacy.
All cats have four legs.
My dog has four legs.
Therefore, my dog is a cat.
He's suffering from politicians logic.
Something must be done.
This is something.
Therefore, we must do it.
But doing the wrong thing is worse than doing nothing.
Doing anything is worse than doing nothing.
All right, welcome to the show.
It's antiwar radio.
That's a clip from Eric Gares' favorite TV show.
Yes, Prime Minister.
All right, welcome back, Eric.
We're talking about, oh, everybody, Eric Gares.
He's the guy that made antiwar.com exist.
You wonder how the libertarians got the URL antiwar.com back in 1995.
It was Eric Gares that got it and turned it into the most important website in the history of the universe.
He's the guy that arranges it all and does the majority of the workload, too.
So now, yeah, we're talking about world history being written right in front of our eyes here, especially if you're streaming Al Jazeera, keeping up with antiwar.com and all the news going on there, what it all means.
You know, Gares, you're talking about how the State Department, you know, they don't know what the hell to do over here, right?
You know, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and all their minions up there, they're kind of flailing about, but they are like, yes, Prime Minister, they've got to do something.
But I worry that if they do, you know, I guess the obvious thing, start building bases in Libya, something like that, that they could turn the entire terror war for the worst really bad, you know, spreading it into North Africa like that.
You think they're really that mad?
Could they be?
You know who they remind me of is Michael Scott from The Office.
They cannot let anything go down around them without them controlling it and taking credit for it.
Right.
Yeah, like Peggy Hill.
They just, they don't, they can't conceive of how something like this could happen and history be written where they are not at the center of it.
Yeah.
Well, you know, there was a great, I was just laughing my head off watching the guy from The Young Turks filling in for Dylan Rattigan on MSNBC.
In the whole show, no matter who we interviewed, the only answer he would accept from any of them was that Barack Obama is the world's hero because Barack Obama rose up and overthrew Hosni Mubarak.
And every bit of that credit goes to him.
And you deny it.
You deny that Obama said you have to go.
And then after that is when he went.
And then, I mean, that's really the narrative that they're pushing there.
Nevermind the million people in the street.
Nevermind that Mubarak was Barack's best friend before that.
It's crazy.
I mean, they just, they are in such fantasy.
Hey, man, I want to tell you something.
Before he ever gave me a job and I worked there or anything, Antiwar.com is the most important thing as far as finding out what the hell is going on in the world to me, reading Raimondo and reading all the links you all collect up there.
And of course, that's the radio show.
Almost from the beginning was centered around interviewing the people who write for you and the information that you guys were running.
And the reason that not only was I right about opposing the Iraq war, which any idiot could have been right about that, but the reason I was able to debunk line by line every lie that they told on chaos radio in 2002 was because I had access to Antiwar.com.
And when the Washington Post ran the story in late September, I guess, 2002, that no one inside the Department of Energy or the State Department believes that these aluminum tubes are for centrifuges, they say, no, they're all for rockets.
And there are a lot of people in the CIA who think so too, etc.
That ran on page 34 or something in the Post.
It ran as the top headline on Antiwar.com.
And then, you know, and of course, I was reinforced on that knowledge in outrage as they continued to use the aluminum tubes propaganda after that for months until they actually got us into the war.
But, you know, I'm with Chalmers Johnson on saying that Antiwar.com is the most valuable website.
It is absolutely indispensable to me.
And that goes for, you know, everyone that's involved in it, except me, you know, I'm saying it from that point of view, not taking credit for myself.
But, you know, this is a hell of a thing.
And I guess the numbers prove that a lot of people agree with me, don't they?
That's right.
We have a pretty big website.
You know, we have between 60 and 100,000 people visiting the site every day.
And we are trying to update as around the clock as we can with our dozen employees.
You know, we have Jason, Jeremy, yourself, Angela, Wendy, Michael Austin, Michael Evans, Alexia Gilmore, Margaret, Matt, my brother Malcolm, Tom Knapp, and of course, Justin.
Hey, that was pretty good.
Yeah.
You didn't write that whole list down or all those people are working, you know, every day for Antiwar.com.
And that's what makes Antiwar.com.
It's not just a little website people write in saying, you know, why does it cost you so much to run a website?
Well, you know, we have a lot of people that spend a lot of time working on it.
And most of our people work a lot more than 40 hour weeks.
Yeah, well, and it's not that much money when you compare it to other institutions.
You know, it's funny, I've actually had quite a few people say to me over the years, like, well, this guy Randolph Bourne must have left you all a lot of money.
What is the Randolph Bourne Foundation?
The Randolph Bourne Institute is our parent think tank.
But essentially, the main project is running Antiwar.com.
Randolph Bourne was a famous antiwar activist in the early part of the 20th century.
Yeah, and died penniless of the flu.
That's right.
And didn't leave us a giant trust fund.
No, not at all.
You know, it sounds like a rich guy's name, you know, it could be.
So yeah, no, there is no Soros.
There is no Bourne.
There is no Rupert Murdoch.
Offering us millions of dollars to buy the site.
Well, we're not quite done with this fundraiser yet.
So why don't you give them the pitch?
Well, we in order to keep going, we've got to raise some, you know, $100,000 every quarter to pay for our staff to pay for our writers to pay for the servers and, and everything else.
And it is not that much money.
I've been involved in politics now, for 45 years.
And antiwar.com is by far the most cost effective and energy effective thing I've ever been involved in.
Yeah, I mean, there's no giant office tower that we're all sharing here or anything.
No, we don't even have a building.
All of our people work out of their homes from around the country.
Yeah.
And I know that you guys run a very tight ship up there.
Because I'm one of the deck mates, you know, I get to see.
So yeah, nobody should think that their pennies would be wasted.
And by the way, whatever you donate to antiwar.com people out there, isn't it true, Eric, that they can not give that money to the war machine?
Exactly.
If you're a resident of the United States or pay us income taxes, you can write off any and all of your contributions from your tax.
Right.
So basically, the same deal is if you want to donate to Israeli settlers in the West Bank or directly to the IDF, you could donate to antiwar.com.
That's right.
Actually, you taught me that you really can do that, right?
Donate, you can be an American citizen and donate to the IDF and write it off on your taxes.
Yeah, it is interesting, because if you donate money to any other country, any other country's army, it would be against the law.
But if you donate to the IDF, it's tax deductible.
All right, everybody, well, check out headquarters of the antiwar party, antiwar.com, our fearless leader, Eric Garrison, especially antiwar.com/donate this week helped put us over the top.
Thanks very much, Eric.
Thank you.