06/25/07 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

All right, my friends, welcome back to Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
This is Chaos Radio, 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
And now, let me bring on Eric Margolis, one of the greatest foreign policy correspondents in the whole world.
His website is ericmargolis.com.
He's a contributing foreign editor for Sun National Media in Canada, and for the American Conservative magazine.
He's the author of the book War at the Top of the World.
And you can often find his articles rerun at lurockwell.com and antiwar.com.
Welcome to the show, Eric.
It's great to be back with you.
Yes, it's good to talk to you again.
It's been a couple of years, I think.
That's right.
And now, I, you know, I was a kid at the time, and so I don't really know, but I'm under the impression that you spent the Cold War paying very, very close attention to relations between the United States of America and the Soviet Union.
And you're very schooled in these types of foreign policy matters.
Is that right?
Well, indeed, I did pay very close attention, and I spent a great deal of time in the old Soviet Union, Moscow, and out in the other Soviet republics.
And since one of my specialties is military affairs, I took particular focus on that area.
And now you've covered, what, 14 wars?
Is that right?
Yes, as a war correspondent, 14 wars.
My goodness.
I don't guess anybody can see that much war and live through it unless they're journalists, huh?
Well, I've certainly used up 12 of my nine lives, I can tell you that.
I'm showing high metal fatigue at this point.
What kind of fatigue now?
Metal fatigue.
Oh.
Well, body fatigue.
Okay.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, 12 of your nine lives.
We'll count you lucky.
We'll put you at the top of the list of lucky, I guess.
Thank you.
Okay, so we got to get into this new Cold War.
That's what everybody's calling it.
If you go to Google News right now and put in new Cold War, you'll get I don't know how many thousands and thousands of results.
Everybody's saying that relations between America and Russia are falling apart.
And, you know, gee whiz, I remember I was a kid, but not too young.
And I remember the fall of the wall.
And, you know, a year and a half or so later, the final dissolution of the Soviet Union and all the hope and promise that that came with that.
What the hell is going on that we're now in a situation that people are calling a new Cold War?
Well, that is an overreaction and a hyper response by the media.
We're not going back to the Cold War, but what we are doing is going back to the traditional balance of power.
Let me explain what I mean by that.
In the Cold War, the ethos of the Soviet Union, of the communist system, was to destroy capitalism.
Remember Khrushchev saying, in his words, we will bury you.
And that's what the Soviets really had in mind.
They didn't quite know how to do it, but they were determined on an ideological basis to destroy capitalism and its main proponent, the United States.
Today, it's different.
There is growing conflict and contention between Russia and the United States, but Russia, today's Russia, has no ideological ambitions or motivations to spread communism around the world or to overthrow capitalism.
What this is about is Russia is going back to its traditional, call it even pre-communist, strategic interests in Eastern Europe, in the Middle East, and in South Asia, and is beginning to reassert itself after being on its knees ever since the Soviet Union collapsed until Putin came to power.
Russia was a basket case.
It was funded by American dollars, dominated by the US government.
Today, Russia is going back to being traditional Russia, and that's what we're seeing.
And now, is there anything expansionist about that policy that they're taking back up?
Well, on a very high-level view, Russia is traditionally, geopolitically, an expansionist power.
That's the nature of Russia.
It tends to expand its power until it hits water, and the water being the Baltic, the North Sea, the Mediterranean, or the Indian Ocean, the Pacific.
That's Russia, just the way the United States expanded until it finally hit water and had to stop.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 91 tore apart the old Soviet empire, and now Putin and the men close to him, the KGB, which is really running Russia again, have decided that they want to reassert Russia's traditional geopolitical goals.
I don't think it's going to be a violent campaign that's going to spark wars, but really, Russia wants to reassert its influence and stop acting like a beggar and get off its knees and start acting like Russians, who are still a great power and a very important people.
How come this is a problem for America?
It seems like, with the end of the Cold War, we would be the ones who wanted to reach a handout to help them up and make them our best friends.
I have to tell you, if you'd asked me in, I don't know, 1998 or something, I would have guaranteed to you that Russia would be a member of NATO by now, helping us fight our holy jihad against the brown people of South Asia.
Well, the Russians didn't want to be part of NATO, and it really didn't make sense.
But more important, after the collapse of the Soviet system, Russia was really totally weak, it was bankrupt, it was kept alive by secret American money that was laundered through Russian businessmen and gangsters.
The U.S. assumed enormous influence in Moscow, and they propped up the whole financial system.
Russia let the U.S. do pretty well whatever we wanted around the world, gave us carte blanche in exchange, even sold to Washington and the crown jewels of Soviet military technology were sold.
You can believe that, they even allowed access into KGB files.
But this was an anomalous period.
When Putin came to power, and thanks to the war in Iraq, oil prices started going up, Russia suddenly started getting money instead of getting rich again, didn't need U.S. cash to function, kicked out the drunken Yeltsin, and the KGB, as I said, took power.
Washington got used to obedient leaders in Russia, just the way in the Middle East, all the leaders it calls moderates.
A moderate is a synonym for obedient.
And the Russians, you know, yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir.
When Putin came along, all of a sudden the obedience stopped, and Russia went back, as I said, to acting like a normal great power.
And the United States was shocked by this.
It had become too spoiled over almost two decades of getting instant obedience from Russia.
And so the official policy changed, and the tame U.S. media, which often acts as a megaphone for government policy these days, launched this jihad against Russia and all these cries about the Cold War and everything else.
Right, the new authoritarianism, Putin has Stalin, and all that propaganda.
Well, Putin is an authoritarian.
There's no doubt about it.
What modest civil liberties and media press freedom there was in Russia has been ended.
Only token opposition is allowed.
But you know...
Yeah, same here.
Well, yes, unfortunately, I've written many times that under the Bush administration that the U.S. has become sovietized.
There's an old Taoist expression saying, you become what you hate.
And in fact, I've written so often that our government and our media acts just like the Soviets did in the 1980s.
It's very disturbing.
But anyway, about 70% of Russians back Putin.
He is the most popular leader they've had since Stalin.
And he's not doing Stalinist things, and he's not a Stalin.
But the Russians want a firm leader, and they want things to get done rather than having democracy, which really affects only a tiny one or 2% of them.
Now, so what exactly is America's interest that's being frustrated here?
I mean, you point out that it's Bush's war that's made them all so rich.
That goes for Iran and Venezuela and everybody Bush wants to pick a fight with.
He's putting them all on the top of the world by driving oil prices up so high.
Well, it's ironic, isn't it?
And then he helped Iran by overthrowing its two worst enemies, Taliban and Iraq.
So one could ask, you know, who is Bush benefiting?
But no doubt these countries have all been enriched by the Iraq fiasco.
So how does this hurt America?
I guess there's a pipeline deal where America built this pipeline that cuts the Russians out of the equation.
Well, the US has been trying to engineer numerous pipeline deals that prevent the Russians from benefiting from the pipelines.
The US wants to build one through Afghanistan.
That's why our troops' primary reason American troops remain in Afghanistan is to assure the pipeline route from Central Asia, which will take the exports out of the sphere of Russian interest, also plans to put them under the pipelines under the Mediterranean.
And this is equivalent to the 19th century's conflict over strategic railroads.
The US is doing pretty well so far in trying to block Soviet pipeline deals, but there's no doubt Russia now exports a huge amount of oil right up there with Saudi Arabia.
And there's no way the US can really contain Soviet petroleum power.
A little slip of the tongue there, huh?
The Soviet petroleum power?
Oh, I'm sorry, I missed the good old days.
You see, I'm an old cold warrior, it's the good old days.
Well, I find myself saying Saddam when I mean Osama sometimes.
They just get right into our brain with that stuff.
Well, you and the American public.
Yeah, yeah, I was just covering that poll this morning.
41% think Saddam did it.
Well, you know, that's way down because I'm writing a new book called American Raj.
And I cite the figure that in 2003, 79% of Americans queried by the Washington Post believed that Saddam Hussein had launched the 9-11 attacks.
That was thanks to the untruth that were pumped out by the Bush administration.
Now, let's rewind a little bit.
I'm sorry if I'm kind of out of joint here, but let's talk about the 1990s a little bit more.
You have this former communist state where, you know, the empire controls everything, basically, and then it falls apart.
And I guess my understanding is that these oligarchs basically came in and former KGB guys, mostly, is that right, came in and basically cornered the market and bought up all the real resources and then just looted them.
And then I guess my understanding is that Yeltsin let everybody get away with that for all those years through the 1990s.
And then that ended with the Palace coup d'etat of New Year's Eve 1999, right?
That is correct.
You know, when I was in Moscow in the 1980s, covering it, I was one of the first Western journalists who was ever allowed into KGB headquarters at the Lubyanka prison.
And I talked to two senior KGB generals, and they told me, and other KGB officers who I got to know well, that the KGB had become completely disgusted with the Communist Party, was rotten, it was falling apart, it was going to take down Russia.
They said, we don't want to go down the drain with the communists.
The KGB decided to cut its links with the Communist Party, and its mission was to protect the Communist Party and to strike out on its own.
And it had all the smartest and brightest young men in the Soviet Union.
And when did they tell you that?
In the late 1980s.
And they said, I remember one general telling me, he said, you know, what we need here in Russia is we need a general Pinochet, referring to Chile's military leader, or to a Park Chung-hee, who was the Korean military dictator, who took Korea, a bank poor, dirt poor agricultural country and turned it into an industrial giant.
We need to make lazy Russians work at gunpoint, was what he told me.
And they got one, they got Mr. Putin, former KGB director, who was a very capable man.
And then I remember actually on the night before Y2K, and they set up, they just announced Putin has resigned.
And I remember Clinton praising the transfer of power and saying, well, we're glad it was a constitutional transfer of power there.
Like, wait a minute, a few months before the election, you put in the guy who's already the front runner to replace you?
That doesn't quite sound like a constitutional transfer of power.
Well, it didn't.
And the Clinton administration had a lot of unseemly dealings in Russia, as I said, including money laundering and funding the Yeltsin government and allowing through American banking support that a lot of these shady transactions involving tens of billions of dollars go on.
All right, now, let me ask you about all these dead journalists.
People are saying, you mentioned that, you know, dissent is barely allowed in Russia at all.
And there have been journalists who've been killed.
And the accusations, of course, are always that Putin's behind it.
What do you make of these?
Well, the fact is certainly true.
The journalists have been killed all along.
We've just only noticed this recently with the death of the crusading journalist Anna Politovskaya, in fact, who I interviewed twice.
But it's been going on, speaking out in Russia is very dangerous.
And we don't know who's doing it.
My best guess is that it's, you know, members of the old KGB, which have moved into the modern, into current security service, the FSB, the KGB replacement, or this sort of demi-monde, as they say in French, sort of half world of where crime and government sort of meets.
And you have in Russia these companies that are quasi-gangsters, quasi-former intelligence men.
They're also one of these groups suspected of having murdered the Russian FSB director, Alexander Litvinenko.
But these are these groups and they are sort of semi-legalized criminals, privateers, buccaneers, whatever you want to call them.
They operate in the shadows.
And much of business and banking in Russia uses these people for enforcement, for collection and protection.
Yeah, you know, I talked with Larissa Alexandrovna from The Raw Story, and she told me that if you look at, well, for example, the death of Litvinenko and the seeming opposite sides of Putin and his group on one side and Berezovsky and these other criminals on another side, that really this is all just one big network of former KGB gangsters that you really can't differentiate.
Maybe there's faction fights within here and there, but basically all we're talking about is, well, like you say, basically where gangsterism and government come together.
That's right.
That's right.
Well, where the ex-intelligence or current intelligence agents make use of this netherworld of gangsters, semi-official gangsters, to do their dirty work, what the KGB used to call wet affairs.
Now, I don't know if you know much about this subject, but I had an interview last week with Dr. Gordon Prather about the Nunn-Lugar-Domenici bill and the attempt that was made by actual reasonable people in the American Senate to secure excess fissile material from the Soviet Union when it fell apart, that basically when they took apart their offensive weapons that they moved out of Europe, pulled out of Europe and moved back into Russia, that they took those offensive weapons apart and so they had all these fissile cores laying around everywhere and the Americans were trying to buy them up.
Seems to me like the best policy would have been to offer to buy every nuke that the Russians had, you know, leave them a dozen or something to keep us out, but other than that, you know, there are people all over the world now who say that the biggest danger really is that somebody's going to buy a former Russian nuclear bomb, a former Soviet nuclear bomb on a black market somewhere and it's going to end up going off in North America or something.
Well, this has been a fear, you're right, for a long time and the late Russian General Alexander Lebed, who was the presidential candidate, one of the more upstanding figures in the Soviet political arena, said in an interview that, before he was murdered, that there were a hundred suitcase bombs, nuclear weapons missing unaccounted for.
There certainly is a lot of Soviet fissile material missing and the US was right to be very deeply concerned about this and this was before 9-11.
Most of the pressure then came from friends of Israel and Congress who were worried that the Arabs might somehow get hold of a nuclear weapon to use against Israel.
Now there's worry, of course, as you say, it might be used against the US, but let me tell you, I had to go for a medical test where I was injected with a tiny amount of radioactive thorium or some kind of a radioactive isotope, which they use for x-ray imaging or medical imaging.
And three days later, I was going down to New York from Toronto and lights went off at US immigration and sirens went off and armed guards came running and I had to get doctors' statements saying that I'd been injected with a tiny thing of radiation three days later.
So we are, we are, I'm in America, we are looking for radioactive threats for sure.
It doesn't mean one couldn't be smuggled across the border.
It's not that easy.
They have to, you know, they have to be shielded, they're heavy and everybody's looking.
Right.
And well, I guess a couple of things here.
One, I'm glad to know the radiation detectors work.
Sounds like they're up and too sensitive.
But also, you know, Gordon Prather says there's no such thing as a suitcase nuke.
He says the closest thing you could get to the suitcase nuke would be like, say, the trunk of a Lincoln town car nuke.
Well, no, I don't agree with him.
I have seen pictures, at least, of the Soviet nuclear devices and they are in a large suitcase, metal suitcase, a big suitcase, and it's a heavy one.
It's not your overnight bag, but it is in a very small area.
Wow.
And do you know what kind of bombs those are?
Hydrogen bombs or?
I don't.
Yeah.
Wow, interesting.
I would suspect they're probably an atomic weapon.
The U.S. had similar weapons, nuclear demolition charges, which were also quite small and which were used to block mountain passes or blow up bridges, a man-portable weapon.
In fact, while it's been years since I've read about this, but I'm sure you probably know all about it one way or another, reports that during the Cold War, that Soviet agents had stashed weapons, not necessarily nuclear weapons, but had stashed weapons all around the United States of America in case of an eventual war.
Do you know anything about that?
Well, I've read reports about that over the years, and it's wonderful stuff of spy novels, but to my knowledge, none of these weapons have been uncovered.
Ironically, the U.S. and its allies in NATO were doing exactly that.
They had a secret program called GLADIO.
Stay behind.
And the Stay Behind Forces, under which large amounts of caches of arms and explosives were buried all over Western Europe.
Some of them fell into the hands of terrorist organizations.
But I can tell you one thing.
North of Edmonton in Alberta, in the 1950s, a Ukrainian immigrant came from Russia, settled in Canada, had been sent by KGB as a deep penetration mole.
A bomb was made available to him in a trunk, and he had kept it in his basement.
And his orders from KGB were when he got a coded phone message that he was to take this bomb, put it in his pickup truck, and drive it to the main oil pumping station north of Edmonton and blow it up.
He turned himself into the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
This is a fact, and it's the sole example I know of potential sabotage.
And he had been waiting, by the way, for over 25 years when he turned himself in.
Or 20 years.
So, if there was this one guy, there must be others.
Wow.
And now, that wasn't an atomic weapon.
No, it was just a conventional explosive which was designed for sabotage.
That's funny.
I like that.
25 years later, he goes ahead and turns himself in.
The New Onion has a headline, which is, Al-Qaeda sleep or so, can't get off its lazy ass.
I'm just waiting until the season finale of Grey's Anatomy or where.
But then I'm going to go carry out my terrorist attack.
This is a picture of a big fat terrorist sitting on the couch eating a bag of potato chips.
Well, even terrorists get lazy.
There could be something to it.
Or discouraged.
Or suddenly they may not just be in the mood to face death on that particular day.
Right, yeah.
Yeah, life in America really ain't that bad.
And, you know, The Onion, of course, is the satire newspaper there.
That wasn't a joke.
Okay, so, well, let's talk about NATO expansion.
The former Warsaw Pact nations between Germany and Russia, how many of them have now been brought into NATO?
Well, the entire Warsaw Pact that starts with Czechoslovakia and Hungary being the two probably most important members.
Poland, very important.
Romania, Bulgaria, five, plus the Baltic states, which were not independent at the time.
Have I forgotten anybody?
I hope not.
But those are the five big European states that were in the Warsaw Pact.
And everybody wondered.
And in those days, in the 80s and the 70s, if the balloon went up and the war became NATO, and the Warsaw Pact went to war, whether these guys would fight on the side of the Soviets or immediately turn their guns on the Soviets and defect over to NATO.
We didn't know.
But now NATO has moved right up to Russia's western borders.
And what's the point of that?
Just to threaten them?
First of all, the nations involved believe, as I believe, that Russia's post-communist collapse weakness was temporary, and that one day the Russians would be back full force, the Russian bear would be out there, and that the Russians would again start exerting their influence into Eastern Europe.
And the Eastern European states were scared, and with good reason.
They were desperate to shelter behind NATO's shield.
So for them, this was a great thing, particularly the Baltic states, too.
But primarily Poland and Hungary, who had suffered so much from the Soviets, so they were anxious.
And the U.S. just couldn't say no.
I personally think it was a major mistake.
I think a demilitarized zone should have been created through Middle Europe and Eastern Europe.
And I think some of the states in Eastern Europe who are coming into NATO or even the European Union have no business being there or certainly unready to be members.
But nevertheless, it was done rashly, I think.
And I say rashly because NATO suddenly assumed a defense of territory which it could not or at least had not the capability of defending.
And it was a major provocation to the Russians who are historically and famously very sensitive about their borders and who already thought that they were being surrounded and isolated by U.S. power.
And it seems like there must be a big level of corruption involved, too, in terms of like they say every every country that joins NATO gets a giant delivery of American planes and so forth.
Well, arms deals figure prominently in this equation because it meant that all these new members of NATO, NATO would go out and buy American buy American equipment with American taxpayer dollars in part and not only equipment, but training programs and industrial equipment.
Cars and the whole kit and caboodle.
But I come back to the point again that militarily being in the Baltic states or in Romania and Bulgaria really don't give any military advantage to NATO.
Their liability, because NATO, while having acquired these territories, has not put military bases in them and has not increased its armed forces and made supply depots in these areas ready to defend these areas in the event of a war.
So it's really, in effect, created a liability for itself.
Well, yeah, I'm not sure if that's good news or bad news.
I guess we shouldn't be taking on responsibilities that we can't live up to.
But that's, I guess, in a way, it's good that we're not putting bases in there and stuff.
That's a responsibility I don't want to live up to.
Well, it's good and it's bad.
You're right.
Right.
Right.
Now, so we've got to get to this missile defense thing.
George Bush claims that he wants to put defensive missiles in Eastern Europe to protect from Iran.
Well, this is a bit, this is, you know, this White House comes out with some of the most remarkable and weirdest theories and statements.
Of course, this comes from the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq crowd who formulated these bizarre ideas.
And the latest thing, this idea about Iranian missiles, first of all, Iran has no nuclear weapons.
Second, Iran has no missiles to carry them.
It has some short-range missiles that go a couple hundred miles.
It has one missile that may go up to 1,500 miles.
And that's it.
And Iran has no way of threatening the United States any more than Iraq did.
But this huge hue and cry has gone up and evangelical Christian preachers are beating their pulpits, warning about the threat from Iran.
And you hear all kinds of nonsense from it.
And the Bush administration has now roiled and hurt relations with Russia by advancing this cockamamie plan to put anti-ballistic missile radars in Poland or the Czech Republic and anti-missile missiles designed to shoot down the Iranian missiles that don't exist.
And you bring up this crazy brand of Christianity led by Pastor John Hagee and others like him.
Part of their whole narrative is Iran and Russia versus Israel, right?
That's correct.
It all fits their loopy view of the end of days and Armageddon and the world's about to be destroyed.
It's a dangerous cult.
And it's a cult that forms a core electoral group for the Republican Party, unfortunately.
I say this as a Republican.
And it has enormous influence on U.S. foreign policy.
And people who believe this and are forcing this kind of policy and, you know, we've got to have greater Israel so that the biblical prophecy can come to be and the world can be destroyed, these people are as extreme as some of the followers of Osama bin Laden.
I think it's very scary.
Yeah, you know, Bill Moyers said that a major change in his lifetime is the delusional is no longer marginal.
Or it was, you know, realists of different opinions arguing about the proper balance of power or what have you, what have you.
But now we have people who live in a total fantasy world where the earth is only a couple of few thousand years old and we must have a nuclear war with Russia and Iran in order to force Jesus to come back.
And these people, as you say, make up a substantial core of the support of the Republican Party in this country now.
There may be 40 million U.S. citizens who believe these kind of grotesque fantasies and it is scary.
And one of the reasons that there's a lot of anti-Americanism abroad, particularly in Europe, is that Europeans are very alarmed by seeing the mighty United States being dominated or guided, certainly heavily influenced, by people whom the Europeans, who are very religious, regard as religious fanatics.
Yeah, well, and it makes good sense.
I mean, we're talking about a three trillion dollar a year empire here.
That's a lot of power to be in the hands of some kooks.
I mean, at least Dick Cheney, as psychopathic as he might be, or at least as willing to murder innocent people as he might be, seems to basically be tied to the actual reality that exists on earth, you know, even though his opinions on it are often quite skewed.
He's still, I guess, you know, a safer bet than people who think that you have to start a nuclear war to get Jesus to come back faster.
Well, it's a pretty scary choice between one or the other.
But we have these groups are unhooked from reality.
They drifted off somewhere.
And the problem is that so many Americans, particularly in the heartland of the U.S., are completely isolated from the outside world.
And you know, a large portion of these evangelical Christians get all their news on the outside world from Christian TV, Pat Robertson, that kind of rubbish that that's put out.
And it is very frightening.
But the Republican Party, unfortunately, has been taken over by these people and by a southern bloc of, you know, deeply fundamentalist religious people.
And that's one of the reasons that we're in the mess.
We are now broadened, one of the reasons the Republicans are going to be thrashed in the next elections.
It almost feels like we've adopted Israel's foreign policy that, well, rather than say following your advice and saying, hey, let's demilitarize Eastern Europe and make sure we don't have this problem in the future, that we're basically taking the Israeli strategy that if we just lord it over everybody all the time and just, you know, hover our giant jackboot over their head that they'll cower and not oppose us, which of course doesn't work.
It only makes matters worse for everybody.
Well, it is now impossible to tell whether Israel, who's making the policy, whether it's made in Washington or Jerusalem, but there's no doubt that to the combination of pro-Israel neoconservatives who engineered the Iraq War and the Christian, fundamental Christian Zionists as they're called, a Jerry Falwell haggy group of people who are fulminating for greater Israel so that Jesus can come back or have dominated, taken over American foreign policy in the Middle East.
And I think you can see that the, see the results from one end of it to the other, it is the worst mess I've ever seen in the last 50 years and it's going to get worse before it gets better.
Yeah.
I mean, we don't even have time to get into what's going on in Gaza and Lebanon, the whole damn region's falling apart right now.
And yet, and we're taking the same policy basically to the Russians, to the guys who have what, still 20 or 30,000 nuclear weapons.
And you know, I heard an analogy about the missile defense where they said, you know, hey, a missile defense system, assuming that it worked and it was anything but a welfare program for people who are already billionaires, I mean, assuming it was even plausible, sounds like a good enough idea to have a missile defense system.
What's wrong with that?
That what it represents to the Russians is a nuclear armed bully who's now wearing armor.
And so it's not just a defensive thing, it's, and I think this is what Putin said in his press conference a couple of weeks back, that this missile defense, supposedly, whatever you want to call it, this welfare for billionaires, is inextricably linked as part of America's nuclear policy all the way around.
It's not separate from the offensive weapons really.
What it amounts to is, you know, you and me were a fair fight, but now I'm wearing armor.
Well, anti-missile systems, you're quite right, are in effect an offensive system because they allow an attack to be made knowing that you can ride out the inevitable counterattack that will come.
They are, you know, I remind that General Eisenhower, President Eisenhower, who I consider the greatest American modern president, warned about the military industrial complex's growing influence, and that was back in the 1950s, and he advocated worldwide nuclear disarmament, something that was never carried through, unfortunately.
And now something that I think you bring this up in your most recent article that was run on LewRockwell.com, it was about pushing our rivals, I won't call them enemies because they're not my enemies, but pushing our country's rivals together, basically healing the Sino-Soviet split by the way of, you know, pushing them together to oppose us.
And it seems like, in fact I talked with Chalmers Johnson, who talked about, hell, you can go ahead and count Berlin and Paris in with that Moscow-Beijing axis, too.
We're pushing, in the name of preventing any near-peer competitors growing up against us in the world, we're pushing all the people who could possibly oppose us together into a power block.
Well, this is a truism of international relations.
When one power gets too strong, other powers will amass against us.
This happened in Europe, for example, under Napoleon.
It happened with Hitler, the same thing, and I'm not comparing us to Hitler, but I'm saying that when power gets too strong, others will coalesce against us.
And we've done it.
We missed, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, in my view, Washington missed a great opportunity to really lay the foundations for better international cooperation.
And instead it adopted this hegemonistic policy.
And the author of which, by the way, was Paul Wolfowitz, the disgraced head of the World Bank, who was one of the engineers of the Iraq war.
And Wolfowitz, back right after the collapse of the Soviet Union, wrote these very important memos saying that we must dominate the whole world militarily and economically, and no power must ever again be allowed to challenge the United States.
I mean, this is the neocon power plan.
And the result is, I mean, it's typical bloody-minded, stupid university professors who don't know anything about the real world.
And in fact, what happened is that it resulted in this outpouring of anti-Americanism around the world.
Yeah, it absolutely has.
And you know, the polls that I've looked at, there was one that came out, I guess just a month or two ago, where populations all over the world, even, well, you know, my dad did a lot of business in Asia when I was a kid and talked about how the hard feelings from the World War and from the Korean and Vietnam wars, they were basically healing over, if not all the way healed over, that, you know, in most of those countries, especially like Japan, they're Buddhists, you know, they don't want to hold a grudge for three generations or something, and that a lot of that anti-American sentiment left over from World War II and the Cold War was basically healing over, and yet now we've completely destroyed that too.
Iraq isn't anywhere near Asia, and yet, well, you know what I mean, East Asia, the average Joe there is looking at what's going on in Iraq and saying, oh my God, these people are insane.
Well, I travel around the world constantly, and I must say that in my entire life, I'm in my 60s now, in my entire life, I have never seen such a fury lent to anti-Americanism all over the world.
It's burning, it's incandescent, it horrifies me, you know, when American travelers start wearing little Canadian maple leaf pins to pretend that they're not Americans, it is gassy.
All the polls, the Pew Research Organization has done some excellent polling in this area, and the results are just horrifying, I mean, that Mr. Osama bin Laden is far more popular than George Bush is a telling indictment, and that most people in the Muslim countries feel now in recent polls that America is determined to destroy Islam, which is not the case, but that is the image that has been projected, and we are generating more enemies than we can possibly ever deal with.
The good news is that, well, that's the bad news, the good news is that a lot of the hatred against the United States is actually focused on the persona of George Bush and his government, Cheney, and perhaps when they are gone from office, some anti-American feelings will begin to subside.
Well, let's hope that's true, although looking at the likely candidates to replace him, I'm not too confident, but you bring up a very important point that I think used to be maybe the founding premise of the conservative philosophy, which was that actions have consequences.
Imagine that, actions having consequences, you can't just do what you want without engendering hatred.
Well, I'm an old-style conservative Republican, an Eisenhower Republican, let me call it that, and I believe that, as President Eisenhower and our founding fathers said, that we have no business going mucking around in other parts of the world.
Once in a blue moon, as in case of World War II, you may have to do it, and we did a brilliant job of rebuilding Japan and Western Europe afterwards and withdrew with honor and glory, but aside from that, there's constant involvement around the world.
Our troops are now operating in sub-Saharan Africa and in Somalia.
We've got over 110 military bases around the world.
This is the kind of interventionism that is not consonant with conservative principles.
It calls for keeping a low profile and staying out of many of the world's problems.
Absolutely, and especially when you look at Russia and China.
There are two rising powers, I mean, Russia has nowhere to go but up, basically, from where they are.
China is this incredible new rising power on earth, and yet somehow our policymakers want to take the approach of pointing our finger in their chest and picking on them and pissing them off.
It makes no sense at all when we could have, as you say, the founding fathers' foreign policy, friends in trade with all, entangling alliances with none.
Well said, again, I don't want to sound like a conspiracy theorist, I'm not, but the military industrial complex, everything we used to accuse the Soviets of was true, and everything the Soviets used to accuse us of was true, too.
There are warmongering circles in the Pentagon and Washington, but we now call them neo-conservatives, who want a confrontation with China.
They want to do it to beef up the U.S. military and sell more arms, but they really think that the military response and containment of China is the proper foreign policy solution and that one day we'll have to fight China and we might as well do it sooner than later, etc.
It's a daft policy, the United States can never win a war against China, except for a nuclear war, and it misreads China's intentions completely, I've spent a lot of time in China over the last few years, and it's provoking, as you say, it's provoking the Chinese unnecessarily to dangerous and ill-considered policy.
Yeah, well, I'll have to have you back on the show sometime real soon to tell me all about China, I'm very interested in what you have to say about that.
I will look forward to it.
But we are all out of time now, everybody, Eric Margolis, he's a contributing foreign editor for Sun National Media in Canada, and for the American Conservative magazine, his book is War at the Top of the World, you can look up everything he writes at ericmargolis.com.
Thank you so much for your time today, sir.
My pleasure.
We don't have to take a shit.
There's an army of 200 million marching down the river Euphrates coming toward the Persian Gulf.
If there's going to be the meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world, then there's going to be an invasion that is unplanned for on the charts of all of the dictators of the earth.
It's not an invasion from the north or the south or the east or the west.
It's an invasion from heaven and he will establish his kingdom and of his kingdom, there shall be no end.
I am telling you that makes this message one of the most thrilling prophetic messages you've ever heard in your life.
You could get raptured out of this building before I get through finished preaching.
We are that close.
John the Revelator says in Revelation the 19th, and I John saw the heavens open and he that sat upon a white horse was called faithful and true and in righteousness doth he judge and make war and out of his mouth shall go a two-edged sword with which he shall smite the nations of the earth.