And hello, this is KPFK Interim Program Director Alan Minsky and Ian Masters, host of the Daily Briefing is under the weather today and so today we are going to have an installment, a live installment right here in studio of Antiwar Radio with host Scott Horton.
Those of you who are fans of Ian Masters' Daily Briefing are going to definitely want to stay tuned because Scott Horton, the host of the radio show on Antiwar.com is truly one of the best informed radio hosts in the country, in fact in the world when it comes to matters of U.S. foreign policy.
So Scott Horton, take it away.
Thank you very much, Alan.
I really appreciate it.
Hi everybody, Scott Horton here from Antiwar.com and we're going to go ahead and get right to our first interview today.
It's the great Eric Margulies.
He is a foreign correspondent for Sun National Media in Canada.
He's the author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
You can find his website at ericmargulies.com, spell it like Margolis and it'll come right up for you there.
Welcome to the show, Eric.
How are you doing?
Well, I'm just fine, Scott.
Good to hear from you.
All right.
Thank you for joining us on the show today.
I'm not sure if you had a chance to see Barack Obama's speech today.
Oh, yes, I did.
Yes, he announced that the buck stops with him and in response to the Detroit attempted bombing on Christmas there, I guess bombing over Detroit it was.
And basically the problem, he says, with America's terrorist threat is the cops weren't working hard enough.
And so we need more and better cops and maybe more and better procedures for those cops and perhaps more bombings in the Middle East to solve our terrorism problems.
That sound about right to you?
I think that sums it up pretty well.
And what do you think of that?
Make a lot of sense?
Well, certainly the first two items about more efficient cop or better cops, more efficient bureaucracy makes sense.
What we saw with the Detroit episode, it seems, is a miniature replay of the fiasco of 9-11 and what's interesting is that the Republicans are screaming at the Obama administration saying, oh, you've subjected us to terrorism.
The minute we went off duty, we were attacked.
And just the other day I read a piece by Dick Morris saying the terrorists are attacking us because we've cut back on using torture.
We forget that the Republicans had eight long years after 9-11, or almost eight, to correct all these things.
Well, the problems are still there.
The Obama administration has only had a year and obviously the corrections that were needed weren't done and these big bureaucracies, muscle-bound bureaucracies, are still failing to properly communicate with each other.
Well, and it seems like they don't really like each other.
The CIA, they say, had all the information in the world that they needed that this guy was a threat, that he was in Yemen, they put him on one list but not the other and apparently they didn't really communicate with the other federal agencies about this is something we actually need to keep an eye on here.
Well, Scott, that's true.
I mean, it's well-known in Washington that the blood enemy of CIA is not Al-Qaeda or you see the KGB, it's the FBI and, you know, these bureaucracies are very jealous.
They don't like each other and it's not just in the United States, it's in all major countries the bureaucracies are, you know, unresponsive, non-cooperative, jealous, secretive, MI6 in Britain doesn't share information with MI5.
It's a classical problem and it's something that cannot be easily solved.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm filling in for Ian Masters today on The Daily Briefing and I'm talking with Eric Margulies from Sun National Media in Canada and, well now, so what about the question of more bombings over there in the Middle East?
You might remember that back in November when Obama gave his speech at West Point announcing the escalation, the further escalation, I should say, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, he also made sure to tack on at the end of his speech there that Yemen and Somalia better look out because they're next on the list as well.
Well, Somalia has been regularly bombed by U.S. warplanes operating out of the new secret American base in Djibouti.
It's a former French Foreign Legion base on the coast of East Africa on the Red Sea.
Yemen's certainly on the new target list for predator attacks, probably special forces operational raids.
The problem is finding targets.
The anti-American groups are spread out all over.
We don't really know who they are.
We don't have good actionable intelligence, but the American public is demanding something be done.
So I think Obama will organize raids.
The problem, as we're seeing in Pakistan on a daily basis, is that these predator raids and other airstrikes kill, for every one anti-American militant they kill, they kill 100 civilians.
And it's causing, the bombing of Pakistan is causing intense anti-American rage right now.
Well, you know, it's interesting the way the Detroit bomber story was such a big story.
It overshadowed the few weeks, at least three weeks, maybe four, in the news that preceded it that America was already bombing Yemen.
We were helping the Saudis bomb Yemen, and there are apparently some Joint Special Operations Command guys there, never mind the old missile strike from years ago.
But there's been intervention in Yemen, and according at least to the official statement that was put out, that was supposedly al-Qaeda taking credit for the attack, they said, this is revenge.
They weren't starting it.
We started it.
Well, they did say that, and we've been launching attacks against Yemen for many years now.
They just haven't caught on in the American media, largely because most people didn't know where Yemen was.
It was like the dark side of the moon.
But it's now in the news front and center, and it may be revenge.
It may be a desire to drive the United States out of the Middle East, which is certainly one of the goals of Osama bin Laden and the people who follow him or emulate him.
But we've been kicking that hornet's nest for a long time, and it should be no surprise to anyone that we were stung, and we'll be stung again.
Well, you know, like the old joke about history beginning on September 11th, I guess in this case history begins on December 25th.
And as far as we know, these crazies in Yemen just picked a fight with us.
This is a brand new justification, regardless of what happened before.
Well, it's going to be hard for Washington to know which way to turn now.
I mean, you've got the Yemenis up in arms.
You've got trouble.
You know, we're fighting the Shabab movement in Somalia and northern Kenya.
You've got Sudan in dire straits.
I think Washington is going to break Sudan into two pieces.
North and south or east and west?
North and south, because there's oil in the south, by coincidence, of course.
And you know, Pakistan now, it's Washington that's really strained and is being pulled in many directions.
But the response is always military.
U.S. Special Forces are now operating in West Africa, in more places nobody's ever heard of, like Niger and Mali, home of Timbuktu, and in North Africa, in Algeria.
So wherever there's oil, U.S. Special Forces are there.
And in the Philippines, who knows that we're fighting in the southern Philippines and Mindanao?
So it's people who are everywhere.
And he, as Frederick the Great said, he who defends everything defends nothing.
Well, you know, after the Afghan war against the Soviets that you covered back in the 1980s, all these guys kind of went back to where they were from, and there were sort of little jihads all over the place.
And, you know, apparently the genius of Osama bin Laden was kind of bringing everybody together in a coalition against the United States, saying that if we can bankrupt the United States and force them out, then we'll have a chance at our local jihads.
But it seems like that was actually a pretty neat trick for him to be able to pull off.
And there's no real reason to believe that these different groups from all over the Middle East, after all, would not just go back to fighting their local jihads, rather than keeping their focus on the United States, if we weren't in there doing a September 11th against them every other week or so.
Well, Scott, I was just writing my Sunday column, and I'm recalling how in 1986, apropos of what you're saying, I was in Pakistan, and I was taken to meet a little inconsequential-looking man named Abdullah Azzam, who was running the Afghan Information Center.
And he was, it turned out, he was the teacher of Osama bin Laden.
And he said to me something that really stunned me at the time, he said, you know, when we have driven the Soviet imperialists out of Afghanistan, we are going to turn and drive the American imperialists out of Arabia and the rest of the Middle East.
And I was astounded and appalled.
I'd never, ever heard anybody call my country an imperialist country, except for the Soviets.
But nobody believed what they said in those days, and the Cold War was still on.
But in fact, this is exactly what happened.
Obama learned from Azzam, who was assassinated in 1989 by Western intelligence, and used the context that he had made with what were known in the Muslim world as men of honor who had fought in Afghanistan to go and carry on his idea of really launching almost a one-man jihad against the entire might of the United States and its allies.
I'm Scott Horton filling in for Ian Masters on The Daily Briefing today, and I'm talking with Eric Margulies from Sun National Media in Canada.
And you know, really, the question, it seems to me, all hinges around, you know, when people try to figure out how is it that our former friends from the Afghan war against the Russians became our enemies, it really all hinges on Iraq policy, doesn't it?
Because in 1996, when Osama bin Laden put out his first declaration of war against the United States, it was titled, Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places, and of course, the Air Force and the Army were in Saudi Arabia containing Saddam Hussein, bombing the no-fly zones and enforcing the blockade.
That's right.
I think you can trace a lot of these troubles back to the first Bush administration, George Bush Sr., so anxious to wage war against Iraq, that lit the fuse of all these subsequent problems.
And some of them would have happened without the anti-Iraq war, but a lot of them did happen.
You know, he toppled over the apple cart in the region, and the Afghans, who thought of America as their friend and ally at the time, were mortified that the U.S. not only abandoned them after making all kinds of promises, but then tried to kill some of their leaders or marginalize them, because they were seen as too Islamic.
And that translation of too Islamic means non-cooperative and possibly a danger to regimes the U.S. had decided to favor instead.
And so, you know, I remember, I forget his name, John something from CNN, who was with Peter Bergen, I think, when they interviewed Osama bin Laden in 1996.
Oh, I think this was the ABC News guy, John Miller or something.
Oh, yeah, right.
Yes.
Good memory.
Yeah.
And Osama bin Laden said, yeah, we're declaring war against the United States.
How do you like that?
And he said he at least thought to himself at the time that, yeah, you and what army?
I mean, what are we talking about here?
A man in a cave versus a superpower?
How could this be?
The way it could be really was you could have a bunch of grad students in Germany who, while watching the news in the evening, found themselves agreeing with Osama rather than us.
Right.
That's quite right.
When he, well, bin Laden first promulgated his jihad against the West, I laughed at it too.
I said, here's a Don Quixote in a turban.
He's a madman with the French call an enrager.
He runs around the street.
He yells at in the air.
But in fact, his policy was very, very clever, very subtle.
And he caught the spirit of the moment, certainly in the Muslim world, because Muslims everywhere were outraged over Palestine and over what they saw as Western high handedness and exploitation, American-supported dictators throughout the region, and the fecklessness and the corruption and dishonesty and slavishness of their own rulers, starting with President Mubarak in Egypt and down the line, and that Obama said what everyone was feeling in their hearts, but none of their leaders ever dared even whisper.
Well, and, you know, Robert A. Pape, the author of Dying to Win, pointed out that I think it was shortly before the Khobar Towers attack against the Marine Corps barracks there in Saudi Arabia, and I think it was Marine Corps barracks in 1998 that killed 19.
They had done a poll, which obviously only men were asked in Saudi Arabia, right?
But the poll was, what do you think about American forces stationed here?
And 91% said, we want them out.
Just like if, for example, the Saudi government had a military base in Southern California.
Well, of course, because most of the people in Saudi Arabia said Saudi Arabia is under American military occupation.
It doesn't take many troops to rule these countries.
They're useless militarily in the Middle East.
Pakistanis today are saying, screaming, our country has been taken over and we're being occupied by the United States.
They've imposed a puppet government, a corrupt puppet government on us.
They've taken over our armed forces.
We're no longer an independent country.
So it's unfortunate, because the mistake that we Americans or our governments keep making over and over and over again is we don't want cooperative allies abroad with whom we can talk and sometimes agree and disagree, but we want obedience.
One of the reasons the French are hated so much in conservative and far-right-wing circles is the French are insubordinate.
They just, they don't always, you know, bark and bow wow when Washington tells them what to do, like the Germans or the Japanese.
So we do this in the Muslim world and we have all our, you know, major domos ready to enforce our wishes there, but they don't represent the wishes of their people, and that's why we're facing turbulence across the region.
Well, if we had our combat forces out of there, but we still supported our dictators, you think it would be quite as bad?
It would be better, certainly, but I think it's so far gone now, and now that bin Laden's message has become an international movement, an ideology, I don't think it's going to stop even if we pull our troops out of the region, though I doubt that we ever will, because our troops don't remember.
So the only solution, then, is to just end the empire entirely.
We have to stop backing the dictators, too, or else Americans are going to continue being the target of terrorist attacks.
Yes, I believe so, and we can retreat slowly from this.
We don't have to drop everything and run tomorrow, but certainly it would seem wise to start encouraging democratic regimes and democratic institutions in these countries, so that when we lessen our presence there, we leave something solid behind, and chaos, just the way we did in Afghanistan, and we will do in Iraq.
Well, do you think that in Iraq something democratic is going to be left behind?
No.
I think Iraq is just a mess.
It's kind of gelled a little bit right now, but underneath the so-called Placid Service is a horrible situation.
There are between four and five million refugees in Iraq as a result of ethnic cleansing.
You know, we intervened in the Balkans to stop it, yet we supervised it in Iraq.
Doctors, two and a half thousand doctors murdered in Baghdad area alone.
Horrible things.
And this drama is just only halfway through.
All right, everybody.
That's Eric Margulies from Sun National Media in Canada.
His website is ericmargulies.com, and he's the author of War at the Top of the World, an American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today, Eric.
Cheers, Scott.
I really appreciate it.
All right, everybody.
I'm Scott Horton from antiwar.com, filling in for Ian Masters on the Daily Briefing today, and we'll be right back with Juan Cole.
