06/02/10 – Eric Margolis – The Scott Horton Show

Alright, welcome back to my show, it's Anti-War Radio on the Liberty Radio Network, libertyradionetwork.com.
I'm happy to welcome to the show the great Eric Margulies from Sun National Media in Canada.
Welcome to the show, Eric.
How are you doing?
Great to be back with you, Scott.
Well it's great to talk to you and now let me remind you of something horrible.
Back in September of 2007, Michael O'Hanlon and Robert Kagan, or was it Fred Kagan, wrote an article for the New York Times that said it's time for us to start to consider whether we should have a full-scale invasion of Pakistan.
Remember that?
Yes, I do.
Okay, it's coming back to me.
Alright, well, anyway, these people are lunatics, that's your perfect neocon and your perfect neoliberal in alliance there with the most insane thing anybody ever said since let's nuke Iran, which apparently they're all saying at the same time too, but we'll get to that.
But I'm sure you saw this thing in the Washington Post, right, that said that the Pentagon is studying options for a possible strike against Iran.
I guess they're still not talking about a full-scale invasion, but maybe send the heavy bombers over in northern Waziristan there and give them the Vietnam treatment there.
Well, Scott, it's hard to know who's going to be attacked first, because the new authorization by the President and the Pentagon allows U.S. Special Operation Forces, who are the new golden boys in the Pentagon who seem to be running policy, to attack any number of countries.
Australia, Yemen, Pakistan, Iran, Syria, you name your Muslim malefactor, and it's now open season in Dodge City.
Oh, yeah, you know, and the push west into Africa is what freaks me out more than any of the rest of this.
I guess I don't want to stray too far into the covert action in Africa and Yemen and everything else quite yet.
Let's stick with Pakistan for a minute here.
Is it really possible that some kook in the Air Force is going to win an argument and they're going to start carpet bombing Waziristan?
Well, I think we're going to more likely see pinpoint so-called precision attacks, not just by these predator machines, but by Air Force units.
I suspect some have gone on for a time already.
And I also think we'll be seeing ground attacks, such as started, but then were stopped after a big uproar.
Right now, the Pakistani government is so demoralized and so corrupted by American bribery that they'll give a green light to anything, whether the army rank and file will accept it as another story.
Well, you know, I read this piece in the UPI by Arnaud de Borgrave, who I don't know exactly what point of view he's coming from all the time necessarily, but I respect his journalism.
He's written some very important stuff over the years.
I'm sure you probably know the guy going back to the days or whatever.
But he wrote this thing about how, oh yeah, they're all holed up in North Waziristan.
That's like the safe zone.
And every crazy Islamic militia you can think of basically has carte blanche.
And that's, you know, 99% chance or whatever, that's where Osama bin Zayed al-Nahiri are hanging out, et cetera, like that.
Arnaud is a good friend of mine.
I have enormous respect for him and his knowledge.
He and I are the two old Afghan hands who've been around those back parts of the woods or Rudyard Kipling style.
I didn't realize that.
Oh, yeah.
And Arnaud was right about heavy concentration of militant groups in North Waziristan.
But there are others scattered all through the tribal areas and further south into Pakistan.
But Waziristan is definitely a major target for the U.S. operations.
And remember, we Americans, I was so frustrated over our inability to crush resistance in Afghanistan and impose our will, that we're going to start lashing out further afield, just as we did.
And I remember, because I was in the U.S. Army at the time, lashing out at Cambodia because we couldn't impose our will on Vietnam.
Yeah, well, and we've talked about this for years, but might as well beat this dead horse because the could-be-worse situation hasn't happened yet, thank goodness.
And that is, to continue to follow the Vietnam-Cambodia parallel there, we saw what happened in Cambodia after endless carpet bombing by the United States there, is their princelings fell and were replaced by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, who brought hell to earth.
And that's maybe not exactly the same situation in Pakistan, but I think you've told me before, basically this country's held together by its military, sort of like America.
And you know, that's the kind of danger that we're playing with anyway, is that the Zardari puppet dictatorship and that parliament could fall, you'd have a civil war break out inside the army or who knows what, under too much pressure, right?
That's quite right.
Pakistan is very, very fragile.
We've bent it to our will, but a poll I just read two days ago showed that only 4% of Pakistanis supported US policies, what we're doing in Afghanistan and in Pakistan itself.
4%, meaning 96% are opposed to varying degrees of bitterness.
There's huge hostility to America and Pakistan.
That's the main machine for producing anti-American groups that we call terrorists.
And it's going to get worse because we're like a bull in a China shop, except this whole thing's going to come crashing down around our heads.
Yeah, well, and it seems like the bull has figured out too, that the more China he breaks, the more whole plates the old man brings from the back for him to break too.
Might as well go ahead and bomb the hell out of people and create a hundred terrorists for everyone that you kill.
That way you got more people to kill on indefinite item, right?
Get some planes sold or whatever.
This general massacre that we're conducting with predator drones, totally illegal, total violation of international law.
Pakistani government has no say over our killing their people on their territory.
No approval of it, but it's going on and it is, as you say, just generating more and more enemies.
And the more we get sucked into Pakistan, as I've been predicting for years, it's going to break not only Pakistan, it could end up breaking the American armed forces as well.
Yeah, well, you know, I don't know if you saw this one in the New York Times.
It was even by David Sanger saying that White House officials tell him that they're starting to think that maybe killing people in Pakistan might be counterproductive and that maybe they're putting Americans in more danger of being killed by people who ought to be their friends by, you know, using robots to slaughter their wives and daughters all the time.
And I thought, wow, David Sanger wrote that in the New York Times.
Someone in the White House told that to the New York Times.
Wow.
If only we could convince them that history began before September 11th, maybe we could call this whole thing off.
There's a remarkable ignorance in Washington.
We've said it many times.
I find it in the whole Afghan affair.
General Eikenberry, who's the former U.S. commander there, now he's the ambassador in Kabul, is one of the few people who seems to know what the hell is going on in Afghanistan or has the least understanding of the depths of the subject.
Nobody wants details.
They only want quick bottom line solutions.
Give me the Reader's Digest version of Afghanistan and let's sort it out and drain the swamp and all this other kind of neocon macho talk.
They are ignorant and arrogant people who are stumbling us deeper into war.
And what I hear now in the news all the time, pay attention for this, is they're saying the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq and now Pakistan is being added to the public is becoming acclimatized to the fact that we're fighting in Pakistan as well.
Oh, yeah.
Well, that's right.
I mean, it's one of those.
Well, it's just like Nixon bombing us in Cambodia.
It was secret and covert because it was illegal.
But everybody knew about it.
Right.
Well, now it's going to it's coming out into a general understanding as much as Americans understand anything about that region.
It's very complex.
It's very little known.
Well, you know, there was a piece in The Times and I'm sorry to always just have to cite The Times, but I guess that's the official, you know, war propaganda of record.
America, if not the world, as far as setting the agenda goes, where they were talking about how in Pakistan and in Afghanistan, I think it was actually that the people there have this conspiracy theory, you know, how those crazed, you know, ignorant middle medieval Muslims are with their conspiracy logic and whatever.
And they think that America is financing the Pakistan to the purpose of financing the Taliban against them in Afghanistan so that the Americans can stay longer.
And now we've talked about this kind of thing before.
I think you've added the point that it's not deliberate.
America's not hiring the Pakistanis to finance the Taliban and back the Taliban in Afghanistan deliberately.
But we have basically the Pakistanis, I guess, is the best way to put it, have no choice in the matter.
They can't let Hamid Karzai and his Northern Alliance group win and have a real monopoly on state power in that country for their own strategic reasons.
That's right.
You know, so we do we play the old colonial game of backing different groups, turning them against each other.
But you also have to think, too, that in this in this monstrosity known as Washington, there are all kinds of different factions and groups and interest groups that may be working at cross purposes.
For example, the Pentagon may be financing one group or the army may be financing one group.
The CIA is paying another group and so on and so forth.
It wouldn't be the first time that that's happened.
Yeah.
And American privates and specialists and sergeants are getting their legs blown off over there patrolling around in aluminum Humvees, just like we're talking about Iraq three years ago.
And throw in all these private contractor companies who are running their own little war there.
Absolutely.
All right, everybody, we're talking with Eric Margulies and we'll be right back here.
Antiwar Radio on the Liberty Radio Network.
All right, y'all, Antiwar Radio.
Keep wanting to say chaos, it's the Liberty Radio Network, Liberty Radio Network dot com.
And let's see, all week long, we're doing the third hour of the chaos show here on the Liberty Radio Network as we transition into the full show, five days, three hours a day starting next week for the chaos fans.
We're going to try to figure out a live stream for you guys with the good music instead of commercial spots in the middle and have our cake and eat it, too, if we can.
I am spoiled rotten.
Part of that is because I have access to all the best journalists, you know, just Romano.
He gets to write all his awesome articles and whatever.
But I get to talk to all these guys and ask them whatever questions I want.
In this case, it's the great Eric Margulies from Sun National Media in Canada, author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj, an expert on everything that's important.
So let's talk, Eric, about what happened, not to go into too much detail with the Gaza flotilla, but just basically I'm more interested in your perspective on what the Israeli attack on the Gaza flotilla is going to mean for America's relationship with Israel, Israel's relationship with Turkey, etc.
Like that, Scott, it's a fascinating and also deeply disturbing drama.
The Israelis shot themselves in both feet by taking a very brutal and poorly thought out response to this peace activist armada that was heading for embattled Gaza to bring relief supplies to Gaza, where people are being literally kept almost on near starvation level by a blockade imposed by a three year blockade imposed by Israel and aided by Egypt and also by the United States in an effort to bring down, to crush the Hamas government, which by the way, you know, we're always told that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East.
Well, the Hamas government in Gaza was also democratically elected and is the other democracy in the Middle East, and we in the West are determined to destroy it.
So that was the background to the armada thing.
The Israeli attack is being denounced around the world.
It's a clear violation of international law.
Israeli lawyers are taking their government to court on a violation of international law.
Israel is, I think most people think it was very much in the wrong, even though the Israelis have mounted a huge international publicity campaign to justify their acts.
But I think to sum it up, I quote the great French diplomat Talleyrand, who said about the murder of the Duke Dungan, he said, worse than a crime, it was a mistake.
Yeah, well, you know, I wonder, I always thought that Benjamin Netanyahu was a madman.
But I always thought of him more as a sociopath than a psychopath, you know, where he would at least be rational and intelligent about the way that he did his evil things that he does.
But this doesn't seem like a very good move on his part, unless the goal is to just say, yeah, it is us versus the world.
What?
We do have 600 nukes, we can do whatever we want.
Well, that's true.
That's what the Israeli one of the Haaretz, one of the Israeli papers, the best one, in my view, said is a bunker mentality that they have.
And the whole world's wrong.
We're right from the Holocaust.
And that gives us carte blanche to do anything.
What's interesting is that Israel has now infuriated the Turks, who were its best friend in the region.
I'm headed for Istanbul tomorrow.
The Turks are absolutely furious.
And Turkey, which was a villain across the Arab world, has now become a hero.
So that's one big dynamic change.
Secondly, the United States has been shown in the poorest possible light, because the Washington could not even summon up the cojones to criticize Israel, or to condemn the attack.
And it thwarted a UN Security Council declaration on the subject.
Everyone is mad at the US, Osama is being, I mean, Obama is being accused of cowardice and timidity, which I think are, are just accusations.
Even Britain's Prime Minister, conservative Prime Minister, who was always a big friend of Israel, just denounced the Israelis and said it was completely unacceptable, the attack.
And he demanded that Israel lift the blockade of Gaza, which violates the UN resolution 1860.
So it's, it violates international law, and it's just an outrage in any event.
So, but Israel is dug in, and it knows that as long as it has carte blanche from the United States, it can, as you say, do whatever it wants.
Yeah, well, and that's the whole point that Americans need to internalize here is this is ends up being all our responsibility.
One of these though, it's the picture today, the picture story on antiwar.com is demonstration against Israel in Pakistan.
And the picture is they're burning an American flag.
Well, it's beginning, it's becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between the two countries.
The view in the across the entire Muslim world, I can tell you firsthand, is that Israel is pulling all the strings in American policy in that part of the world is indistinguishable.
So the only question is, is which, who's the dog and who's the tail?
In this case, is it the US using Israel as its as its weapon?
Or is Israel using the US?
Either way, if you wonder why 9-11 happened, well, here's a perfect example of the fact that US is getting blamed for things that Israel is doing.
Yeah, well, and you know, to stick with that parallel for a minute there.
I've seen where people have commented, look at these, you know, the Saudis, and the in Iraq, and these people in Pakistan, protesting what Israel is doing in Gaza has nothing to do with them when don't they have their own problems and this kind of thing.
And I'm thinking, yeah, exactly.
Just like the time when New York got attacked, and the whole, you know, everybody in the Midwest and Texas and California just yawned, it didn't care, right?
What does that have to do with us?
Oh, no, wait, we're still killing people to this day, based on that excuse.
Quite true, Scott.
And a cardinal tenant of Islam is charity, and that you have to help fellow Muslims who are in financial distress anywhere in the world.
And the second is that where Muslims are being attacked, your co religion is, you have got to aid them.
So this is a religious duty as well as a political and people are angry at the United States.
They see every night they see these tragedy of Palestine on TV.
So I've written in my my recent book, American Raj, I'm trying to explain why the Muslim world is so anti American.
And that's why they see this, it's humiliating, it's infuriating for them.
And it's tragic, they weep for what's going on in Palestine, we in the States don't care because our mass, our mass mainstream media is so self centered, censored on the subject, that we don't get the full picture.
But in the rest of the world, they do see including Europe.
Yeah, well, and that's really the amazing thing.
And it is to watch TV news coverage in America about this.
It's, as Glenn Greenwald put it to Elliot Spitzer, somehow he squeezed his way onto their show, and denounced him and just said, Look, you had, you know, you're working on, you know, 20 minutes in a row of pure Israeli propaganda with Netanyahu's aides up here.
You know, why don't you stop and let somebody say something to the contrary for one minute.
And, you know, that's one minute out of not the not the 15 preceding it, but 24 hours 24 seven on all the channels, you know, Glenn's dissent was the best to get through by far and will be.
Well, it's sad.
And that's one of the trouble that America's in so much trouble with the Muslim world is the fact that it's not getting the right story on what's going on.
And it has a very sort of cartoonish comic book understanding.
Yeah, I mean, really, where, you know, these poor IDF angels were assaulted by these terrible human rights workers and were forced to defend themselves by killing 16 of them.
That's right.
Waterborne, Al Qaeda terrorists, and the Turkish charity that supported them as a front for Al Qaeda.
Well, you know, Israel's Israel's propaganda organs are very effective, just as way as America's are totally ineffective.
You know, the Israelis have to think that that is effective.
I mean, boy, that means our whole world is a comic book.
If Americans are going to climb on board for yet was Al Qaeda on those relief boats.
It's true.
But a lot of people believe it, particularly in more remote parts of the country.
And Canada, too, I must add, has aligned itself entirely with Israel's policy.
So a lot of people believe it.
I mean, there's still a great deal of sympathy for Israel, but Israel has shot itself in the foot because it's alienated so many Europeans that were German parliamentarians on board those ships.
They were friends of Israel.
As I said, the Turks who protected the Jewish people for centuries are just mad as hornets.
And one thing you know, the Israelis were stupid, too, because you don't drop it in the middle of the night on ships.
They're filled with Turks and pick a fight with them and not expect that there's going to be violence.
Turks don't cut and run.
Yeah.
All right.
We're out of time.
Thanks very much for yours, Eric.
Pleasure, Scott.
Cheerio, everybody.
That's the great Eric Margulies, or at the top of the world, American Raj, Sun National Media, Eric Margulies dot com.
See you tomorrow.