All right, y'all, welcome back to Anti-War Radio, Chaos 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
And there's a war going on that, as far as I know, wasn't started by America, and it's not really a war, but some strife taking place in the Chinese province, maybe, is that right?
Of Tibet.
I guess some would call it that.
I don't think this is a crisis I'm looking to take sides in or anything, but I do want to know what's going on.
According to the headlines today, 135 people have been killed, 500 hurt in the protests and rioting and then government backlash and so forth.
So where do you go to find out what's really going on behind the scenes in a case like this?
The answer ought to be very simple and come right to mind, and that's Eric Margolis, the foreign correspondent for Sun National Media in Canada.
He's the author of the book, War at the Top of the World, The Struggle for Afghanistan, Kashmir and Tibet.
Welcome back to the show, Eric.
It's very nice to be back with you, Scott.
It's very good to have you here, and I was very pleased to see this article on LewRockwell.com where you answer all the questions that I could have possibly come up with about what's going on here.
So why don't you help enlighten the audience maybe a little bit of the background history of Tibet and the varying states of independence and lack thereof from China they've had over the centuries and how that leads up to where we're at.
You got it done in just a few paragraphs in your article, so I'm sure that you can do the same here.
I'm a master of condensation.
First of all, I say I'm happy to see a foreign affairs mess in which the U.S. is not involved.
Is that really the case?
The CIA is not bankrolling anybody here?
Well, not really.
No, I mean, the CIA was involved, but it was in the 1950s and a long time ago.
Look, the story with Tibet is this.
Tibet was an independent region.
I can't even call it a state, because it was a series of Buddhist lamasseries that held sway over an area high up on the Tibetan Plateau.
Large elevation, 15,000 to 16,000 feet, very high, half the area that you find at sea level.
Very cold and desolate place.
It's a high-altitude desert.
In the 1300s, the Mongol Empire, which then ruled most of Central Asia and China, the Mongol emperors adopted Tibetan Buddhism as the state religion and declared that the Dalai Lama in Tibet was the spiritual leader of the Mongol Empire, while the Mongol Emperor was the temporal or political leader.
So they were almost on an equal level.
The Chinese Empire that took over from the Mongols, the Ming Empire, followed the same practice.
It's called a teacher-ruler relationship.
And in this, the Tibetan was given complete autonomy under the Dalai Lama, but the Dalai Lama recognized the overlordship or suzerainty of the Chinese Emperor, that this was in fact part of China, though it was completely autonomous.
So that's the historical background.
And so it remained until 1911, I'm sorry, 1913, when the British Empire started intriguing with the Tibetans, and it convinced the Dalai Lama to declare independence from the Dalai Lama.
So 1913, Tibet declares independence from China.
China is in chaos at the time, and remained so until the end of the 1940s, so Tibet was a completely independent state.
In 19...
All the way through World War II, you're saying?
That's right.
While China was busy with all the chaos and fighting that was going on there.
But then Mao won the Civil War.
That's right.
And immediately after winning the Civil War, turned China's armies onto its distant western provinces, that is, Tibet, and the province just to the north, Xinjiang, or as it's called now Xinjiang, which had more or less broken away from China.
Well, they had in fact broken away from China.
The Tibetans had declared independence, and the Uyghur people, a Muslim people of Turkic Mongol background, in Xinjiang, had declared the Republic of East Turkestan in 1945.
And so you have two independent states there, which China claimed, and Mao sent his armies, and they quickly first crushed independent Turkestan, which the world has completely ignored, and then they crushed independent Tibet.
So by 1950, Tibet was brought back into China, declared a Chinese province, and the Chinese began to start sending large numbers of ethnic Han Chinese settlers into Tibet to try and to change the demographic balance of the country, and that has led exactly to today's upsurge of violence.
Yeah, from what I've read, it seems like it's the locals are, really the rioting is not so much against the Chinese state as against the immigrants, is that right?
That is correct.
My last trip to Tibet was 1993, and by then, Chinese were already in the majority in the capital Lhasa.
The Chinese have taken over all the business, all the administrative posts, anything that's important is run by the Chinese, and this has bred great resentment among the Tibetans.
What's happened now is that Han Chinese are probably a majority in the state of Tibet through a process I call ethnic inundation, the opposite of ethnic cleansing.
This is ethnic inundation, and China did exactly the same thing in Inner Mongolia, which was people very close to the Tibetans ethnically and religiously.
Chinese now constitute the ethnic majority in Inner Mongolia.
And now, that's where the Uyghurs live that you're talking about?
The Uyghurs are to the north of Tibet in the province of Xinjiang, or Xinjiang.
It abuts the Central Asian states.
Man, I've really got to get a new map over here.
Mine just doesn't go into this detail.
Well, Scott, this is an obscure part of the world.
You were forgiven for not having a precise view on it, but if you imagine India in your eyes and you go due north from India, fly over the Himalayas, and on the top side of the Himalayas, you come to China's westernmost provinces, which then run into, I think it's Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and then to Russia.
So it's a very strategic area.
And anyway, the Chinese have moved their settlers into the Uyghur areas, too, provoking violent reactions.
And interestingly, the Uyghurs, when they fought back, they have been branded Islamic terrorists by the Bush administration, and the Chinese, of course, in a deal for the Chinese to help out against the Islamic opponents of the U.S.
As in pay for it all, or?
As in, excuse me?
As in pay for all of our war?
Well, no, no, just as a quid pro quo.
The Chinese would call Osama bin Laden and his people terrorists, and they were called Taliban terrorists.
And in exchange, the U.S. called the Uyghurs and put them on the U.S. terrorist list.
But meanwhile, so that's an unfashionable cause.
And you know, it's interesting, Michael Scheuer points out in Imperial Hubris that this is one of the complaints in Osama bin Laden's fatwas, is America's support for Chinese oppression of Muslims, which is, you know, this is the kind of thing that no one in America has ever even heard of.
But apparently, this predates 9-11.
Well, you're quite right, Scott.
Just not five minutes ago, I'm working on the final edit of my new book called American Raj, due out in October.
And I am writing precisely, this is one of the things I'm writing about, about the Uyghurs, but also about that America's double standard is one of the things that generates the most anger and hatred against America across the Muslim world, because it's so hypocritical in choosing, you know, fashion of causes it likes against those it doesn't like.
And the Uyghurs, they're on the do-do list, whereas the Tibetans are a fashionable, chic cause, and everybody's in favor of them.
Yeah, well, and in Chechnya, it's kind of split, right, where the neocons hate the Russians so much that they support the jihadists there, but other parts of the American establishment seem to be wary of that one.
Yeah, it's not easy being a neocon.
They remind me of the Marxist-Leninists, you know, when the Kremlin would take these strange twists and turns, and they'd have to follow the Kremlin, twist themselves like pretzels, ideological pretzels.
But it's true, and it's very sad in a way that we have no consistent strategy towards liberation movements.
South Africans, Nelson Mandela's people, when I was in South Africa, used to shoot off bombs in restaurants.
And this was okay, but when the Palestinians do this, this is terrorism.
So, you know, it is really a glaring double standard.
Well, what about the Uyghurs?
Are they terrorists in their tactics, at least?
You know the old line that war is the rich man's form of terrorism, and terrorism is the poor man's form of war?
And they have no other means to fight back with except for occasional bombs and shootings and assassinating a few Chinese government officials.
It's very minor stuff.
It's certainly no threat to the Chinese, but the Chinese do brand this terrorist activity, and it certainly falls under the definition of the White House, too.
Well, we haven't seen that kind of thing in Tibet, though, right?
No, we haven't.
And as you rightly commented, the anger of the Tibetans seems directed at local Chinese merchants and police and things like that, but it also, interestingly, has spread.
You know, historic Tibet was twice the size of today's modern state.
Historic Tibet included the neighboring Chinese provinces of Qinghai, Gansu, and chunks of Sichuan province.
And the Tibetans in those areas have rioted and risen up, too, presenting China with probably the most serious uprising it's had since Tiananmen Square.
Well now, a big part of this, and you know, for me this sounds like it must be really the bottom line, is topography.
This is the high ground overlooking India, basically, and the Chinese will never give it up at this point.
Well that's true.
I've focused on this over in past years, and I wrote about it in my book, The War at the Top of the World, because it's such an important strategic element here.
The Chinese, 20-odd Chinese military and missile bases on the Tibetan plateau literally look down on North India.
You can see all over the North Indian plain, as far as Delhi, practically, from Tibet.
It just hangs over.
The Indians are nervous, extremely nervous, about the Chinese up there.
You know, they fought a war in 1963 in the Himalayas.
My thesis is that they will fight another war at some point in the future over the Himalayas.
The Indians would very much like to evict the Chinese from Tibet, and as I said in my column that if Tibet, if unrest gets worse, if there's really serious armed resistance in Tibet, India may be very much tempted to intervene.
Now overall, how expansionist is China?
Are they expansionist?
Do they just mean to hold on to what they already got, or, you know, there's a lot of scaremongering about China here.
It sort of seems like they're building them up to be the next threat after Osama bin Laden finally dies of old age, or whatever.
That's exactly right.
Especially amongst the neocons, the neocons are constantly beating the war drums about China, and in fact, the conservative wing of the Republican Party has since the 1940s.
My view is that there is no expansionist desire in China whatsoever.
China has now reclaimed, well, with the exception of Taiwan.
Once China reabsorbs Taiwan in some fashion, China will have reached all the borders that it wants.
It has a very large territory.
It has no territorial claims.
It's settled.
The only major territorial claims it has was with Russia.
Those were settled recently, and the only other major flashpoint is the Himalayas that I mentioned with India, where there are large chunks of territory in dispute, and that could be a problem one day, but China is not an aggressive power seeking to expand its territory in any way.
The Chinese have never been like that.
They like to rule by being powerful in their own country, and having all their neighbors know who the boss is, and kowtow to them.
Yeah, well, I'm trying to figure out how difficult it must be to sit on a Politburo attempting to rule over a billion people.
It seems like their hands are already pretty full.
Well they are, and the Chinese Communist Party is a very, very conservative, if not reactionary organization.
You know, things are running pretty well in China, and they don't want to change anything, and China does not have much offensive military power, since they've concentrated on economic development.
They have a sizeable armed forces, about 2.3 million men, way down from what it used to be, but it's not offensively configured.
They can defend the territory, but they're not about to go charging into Russia or into South Asia, or anything like that.
Their Navy is still a coastal defense force, and China's Air Force remains weak.
Well, that's good to know.
That's the kind of thing that I wish more people would write about and focus on, because I know that there's an entire segment of the military-industrial complex, and the think tank groups, and that kind of thing in Washington, D.C., who would just love to have some form of Cold War, and hopefully not a hot one with China.
Oh, and how.
And, you know, there are worrying signs, because China is developing the military capability not to conquer San Diego, but to keep the American Navy off the China, away from the China's coast, including Taiwan.
And I know the Navy is extremely worried about this, but, you know, you have to stop and think, wait a minute, the American fleet is cruising off the coast to China.
How would we react if a Chinese fleet suddenly appeared off Miami?
You know, so I can understand why the Chinese are low in patience with the status quo.
Yeah.
Well, now, I promise I'm going to try to figure out a way to steer this conversation back toward Tibet, but you brought up Taiwan, and I guess there were recent parliamentary elections there, is that right?
Yes.
Did the friendly guys win, or did the people who want to provoke confrontation win?
No, the non-confrontationists, who happen, interestingly enough, to be the old Chinese Kuomintang party of Chiang Kai-shek, which used to be the darling of the Republicans, the Kuomintang swept back into power, its new leader, Mr. Ma, has pronounced that he's going to take a very amiable, amicable policy towards China, drop all kinds of restrictions, and stop the policy of the previous government and opposition party, which kept making noises about independence, which sent the Chinese absolutely crazy.
You can expect now a very rapid improvement in relations between Taiwan and China, and a big drop in tensions in the area.
Yeah, it seems like the more billions each side has invested in the other, the less likely they'll break out into warfare, want to steal each other's resources, rather than just trade for them.
Blessed are the investors.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, I don't really know this, but I just have in my imagination that when the spy plane was shot down, or crashed into the jet in early 2001, that the reason that the Warhawks weren't able to make a big deal out of it, and Colin Powell was able to defuse the thing, just because some group of billionaires on Wall Street made some phone calls and said, listen, do not escalate this, and that's an order.
Because I can't figure out what else would have stopped them.
Well, the Chinese are holding, are the biggest holders now of American debt.
They hold all, you know, they and the Japanese hold all our IOUs.
And you know, there are reds under our beds, or there are reds under our banks.
It's hard for the United States to pick a war with a country that owes it so, you know, that is financing the U.S., and certainly financing U.S. military operations in the Middle East.
Yeah.
All right, well, I'm going to ask you about a nefarious, just completely speculative, you know, conspiracy type idea.
Do you think that, you know, people, they always talk about how, in Asian culture, how they play very long term games of chess.
Do you think that there are forces in China who've decided it's probably a good idea to loan us all this money in order to encourage us to overextend our empire in the hopes that they'll break it and get us out of the way?
You mean- That's what I would do if I was, you know, KGB or Chinese intelligence, whatever.
I would try to encourage the Americans to destroy themselves the only way they can, which is overextend and collapse.
Well, I'm going to put you on the list for the next Chinese, Dr. Fu Manchu.
Ah, there you go.
I'm stroking my goatee right now.
I don't think that there's that much of a plan.
I think they're lending America all this money because it's part of an agreement with Washington to allow open access to the U.S. market for Chinese goods in exchange for the Chinese buying all America's IUs and financing its debt.
I see.
Yeah.
Well, I guess the simpler explanation holds up.
It sounds like.
Okay, now, so what's to be done about Tibet?
Because nobody wants to have a war here and, you know, there's got to be some kind of solution.
You actually come up with a pretty solid one in your article, some pretty solid recommendations.
Almost seems as though you're speaking directly to the Chinese government and the Dalai Lama as well.
Well, in my own small way, I tried to add my voice to the argument because I have great sympathy for the Tibetan people and their struggle for freedom.
I have understanding of China's problems and demands on China.
I've seen that while China has invaded and is threatening to destroy Tibetan culture to a certain extent, that it has also uplifted Tibet from the direst poverty.
It got rid of feudalism and serfdom in Tibet, built roads, hospitals, trains, electricity.
I mean, this can't be downplayed.
It's an important contribution to the Tibetan people.
But my solution is this, that it's a return to the 14th century teacher-ruler relationship that I mentioned, where China again goes back to putting the Dalai Lama back into Lhasa, recognizing him as the spiritual ruler, an autonomous ruler of an autonomous Tibet, which still keeps Chinese military bases and other Chinese installations, but is otherwise allowed to be independent or autonomous, and that China stops this ethnic inundation of Han settlers and maintains at least the current demographic status quo.
That to my mind is the answer to this problem that's face-to-face with China, saves the Tibetan culture, but it also demands that the Western powers and India don't start stirring the pot in Tibet.
I guess I'm trying to see how that saves space for China.
It seems like quite a bit of concession on their side.
It is.
But if China right now doesn't want to be seen to be stomping on Tibet, crushing Tibetan resistance, China's international image is suddenly very important, because it's such a global financial and trading power that the Chinese are very, very, very concerned about this.
They asked for trouble when they held this Olympics.
They should have known this was coming.
It couldn't be at a worse time for them, because the whole world's paying attention out to Tibet again.
So for the Chinese, rather than to have constant unrest in Tibet, if they would just back off a bit on their draconian policies, it would be the easiest way for them out of this situation.
Now, I'm sorry, because I forget if you said specifically earlier, but do you know what are the percentages of the ethnic Han Chinese who've been exported by the state to go and inundate Tibet, compared to the...
We don't have any reliable figures on Tibetan population, and I've studied this long and hard.
The Dalai Lama told me that there were about 7 million ethnic Tibetans, but this is over a very large area, over the three Chinese provinces I mentioned.
In Tibet, there's somewhere between two and a half to three million Tibetans, but by now there's certainly two and a half million Han Chinese as well.
And ironically, you know, the Chinese have always been condemning Israel for colonizing the West Bank, but the Chinese have been doing exactly the same thing in Tibet, creating facts on the ground.
Well, forgive me for my rose-colored glasses, but what the hell does it matter where somebody's from?
I mean, I don't care what my neighbor looks like, so why does it matter that all the Han Chinese are coming in?
Is it that they're getting all the government jobs and bossing around all the locals?
Yes, exactly.
And first crack at the resources, and they run the businesses, and the Tibetans remain extremely, you know, dirt poor, whereas the Han Chinese have a certain, a much higher economic level.
And look, they speak a completely different language, they're ethnically, they're very, very different, culturally totally different.
The Han Chinese look down on the Tibetans as unclean and backwards and primitives, and the Tibetans look on the Han Chinese as bossy and aggressive and assertive and loudmouthed, et cetera, et cetera.
All these stereotypes, the two just do not get along well.
Yeah, well, and there's no real way to reverse it, I mean, even if you could get the Chinese to agree that they're going to try to curb the immigration there, what are they going to do, you know, make them all come home?
Well, you know, China has the power to do whatever it wants to do in Tibet, and you know, it may take two or three generations for people to get homogenized, or somewhat more homogenized in Tibet.
But the Chinese have been very heavy-handed in their dealings with the Tibetans, and arrogant in many ways.
After denouncing Western imperialists for being arrogant, they've been pretty arrogant themselves.
So, and the Chinese have often appointed their hardest-line party bosses to rule Tibet like Gauleiters with a very iron hand.
China needs to change that.
All right, now, let's switch gears a little bit here, and let me ask you about Iraq.
It's been five years, 4,000 dead, the bill's looking at somewhere between three and five trillion dollars, and John McCain says, I don't care what anybody says, we're succeeding in Iraq.
So I figure, Eric Margolis, you're anybody, what do you say?
Well, as one who's actually been to Iraq for a long, since 1975, I have a longer perspective.
The United States is not winning in Iraq, as John McCain says, in fact, it worries me that a man whose judgment is so distorted, and who thinks that Iran is allied with Al-Qaeda, as he said, I think it was last week, the chance that he might become president is really unnerving.
The United States is not winning in Iraq, contrary to all the propaganda that's coming out of Washington and is being propagated by the mainstream media.
First of all, this war is costing us three, three and a half billion dollars a week just for Iraq, and this doesn't include equipment worn out, and pensions, and caring for wounded veterans.
Yes, we've had 4,000 killed, but we probably have 35,000 to 38,000 wounded.
This is a big number of casualties in anybody's book.
Secondly, there are 2 million external Iraqi refugees, 2 million internal.
The country has been ethnically cleansed, that's why the violence has dropped in Baghdad.
U.S. has assisted ethnic cleansing.
Walls have been built, these little Berlin walls have been built all over Baghdad and other cities, and in effect what we have done is we have contributed to the partition of Iraq into three areas, Shiite, Sunni, and Kurdish, and I don't think Iraq is ever going to be put back together, and we are now the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike.
If and when we pull our troops out, there's going to be a flood of violence.
If we stay there, we're going to have more soldiers killed and more expense, more hatred for us in the Muslim world, and the point is that we've achieved nothing in Iraq.
You don't fight wars for military victory, as Mr. McCain thinks.
You fight wars for political objectives, and our objective was to create a pliant pro-American oil protectorate in Iraq to replace Saudi Arabia as our chief supplier of oil, with the U.S.
-installed government, and right now there is no government in Iraq, except for the little puppet show behind the Green Zone in Baghdad.
Iraq is pretty much in chaos.
There's no political solution on the horizon, and so the American army is going to be stuck there ad infinitum, if certainly Mr. McCain has his way.
And I guess that's really the point, right?
You divide it in three, and then you make it where you can't leave, because or else there won't be a finger in the dike, and that's your excuse to stay forever.
That's exactly right, and what will happen is that beside American casualties going up, our army that stays in Iraq will become a degenerate army.
You put any troops, even the finest troops in the world like ours, on this colonial duty of repressing a popular rebellion, the troops will become brutalized, they'll take drugs, they'll really ruin our army.
We don't want our soldiers to be there forever, but this is what's going to happen, and I'm not even sure that if Hillary Clinton comes in, if she's going to withdraw the troops, there will be a lot of institutional pressure on her, as there will be on Obama, to keep the troops there forever.
There will be a new excuse.
You know, you brought up the political solution, it reminded me of the reporting of Robert Dreyfus from the end of 2006, and I guess about a year ago he followed up too, that there was a political solution.
The Mahdi army, the religious militia of Muqtada al-Sadr, and the Sunni nationalists, the now concerned local citizens, sons of Iraq, the former Sunni insurgency that America is now funding now that they've all been kicked out of Baghdad, that these guys were actually working on an alliance, what they call the Government of National Salvation, that was going to be a nationalist Arab alliance for Iraq against Iranian influence in the country, and for a strong central government, and now obviously there would have been some fighting over who exactly is going to run the thing, but they were going to compromise, but the only thing is, what they agreed about was kicking the occupation out, and so that was not allowed to happen, and I'm trying to think back on the timeline here, it really was like right around then that it seemed the American policy that Juan Cole described on the show the other day, where the Americans told the Mahdi army, you lay down your weapons and whatever, and we will disarm all the Sunnis for you, and let you cleanse them out of Baghdad, I guess was the, I don't know if that was the outright agreement, but that's in effect what happened, was the Shiites were allowed to completely kick the Sunnis out of Baghdad, which completely undermined the idea that they would ever be able to put together this nationalist alliance to hold the country together and kick the U.S. out.
Well, that's exactly right, and then arming certain Sunni groups against the Shiites, which is what we've done, you know, we planted all the drag in the seeds for a future civil war in Iraq, and to make it really impossible that a unified state can be achieved, and meanwhile, the Iranians are nibbling away beneath the foundations, the Iranians virtually control the other main Shiite party, and it's Baader Brigade's militias, and you can see the first Middle Eastern leader to visit Iran, I mean, Iraq, was Iran's leader, Ahmadinejad, and he was rapturously received in Baghdad, whereas Bush and Cheney and Tony Blair, when they came there, they had to sneak in under cover of night, stay on their military bases, didn't dare appear in public, and here are the Iranians taking cheers in downtown Baghdad, it tells you how much influence Iran now has in the Sunni portion of Iraq.
Well, and that brings us to the other thing, is that there were some rockets fired into the Green Zone, I guess yesterday, and General Petraeus is saying, oh, well, these rockets certainly definitely must have come from Iran, and in spite of almost a year and a half of propaganda now about anytime an American dies in Iraq, the weapons that did it must have come from Iran, still no evidence of that, and as you said, the people who are the government of Iraq, they're the ones who are the closest to Iran, they have no reason to be attacking the United States, they're the body brigades, they're the government of the country.
That's right, in fact, they've been in cahoots with the U.S. ever since the invasion, so it's a very murky situation, but to call Iraq a success, or to say we're winning the war against a nebulous, almost invisible foe, is preposterous.
I'd like to hear Senator McCain go and describe what he describes as military victory, or political victory in Iraq.
This has never been laid out, and of course they don't have any answers.
Right, yeah, they always just say that the goal is victory, which just is redundancy, they never even define what they're talking about, and of course, if it was me, the question is, so you mean victory as in installing the Iranians in power completely, is that what you're talking about?
I mean, I don't know.
And here's the other thing, too, and this is something that Juan Cole brought up, and I've been trying to tell people this for the past year on the show, the Sunnis are not going to just sit back from here on out and say, okay, well, I guess we just lost Baghdad and that's part of Shiastan now.
They're coming back, there's a whole other war when the Sunnis attempt to take Baghdad back sometime in the not-too-distant future from now.
And we've been arming them, so we've created a new Sunni army.
You know, I think it's really a longing to have Saddam Hussein back.
I predicted this before the war in 2002, that one day the U.S. would produce another son of Saddam, if you want, another iron-fisted general who would try and hold the country together, because there's no other solution for that.
The only people who are happy about this mess are the Israelis, because they always wanted to see Iraq broken up into three parts and essentially emasculated as a military power, which has happened.
And the Israelis now are deeply in cahoots with the mostly independent Kurdish state in Iraq, and their agents are all over the place.
And there's even talk of running a pipeline from Kurdistan to Israel, I'm not sure how, but that's very good from the Israeli point of view.
They've broken up Iraq.
Well, but they have turned the south over to the Iranians.
That's got to be a drawback on the ledger, right?
Well, not necessarily.
You know, in spite of all the fulminations between the Israelis and the Iranians, they've also played footsie together when necessary.
Remember, the Israelis sold Iran $5 billion of American weapons and spare parts during the Iran-Iraq war.
And that may be the price that the Israelis, you know, okay, to the Iranians, give them tacit understanding to extend your influence into eastern Iraq, and we'll dominate Kurdistan.
Wow.
So let's see.
The Israelis win, the Iranians win, the jihadists win, and the Americans and the Iraqis lose.
Is that about it?
That's it, except that also the Americans get stuck with the bill.
And the Bush administration has managed to destroy the two worst enemies of Iran, the Taliban and Saddam Hussein.
So, you know, Iran owes the U.S. big time.
What's your interpretation of the recent hawkish statements?
You know, they got rid of Admiral Fallon, and wise heads of people that I trust, like Gareth Porter, Philip Giraldi, Stephen Clemens, were saying, well, now, don't just assume that they fired him so that they can start a war.
They really fired him because he was speaking publicly and making fools out of them, and so they had to get rid of him.
And I guess it makes it easier for them to have a war, but, you know, don't panic.
This doesn't necessarily mean that's what's happening.
And yet, since then, we have Dick Cheney and George Bush clearly have agreed that they're to now make the most ridiculous public statements they can in pointing accusatory fingers at Iran.
They've got the St. Petraeus beyond reproach in Iraq, repeating the same talking points while providing no evidence for it.
Are they gearing up for war against Iran in the final year of the Bush administration, Eric?
It is very conceivable.
I've been reporting for the last, well, for the last couple of years that there's intense opposition to a war against Iran in the Pentagon, in the CIA, and in the State Department.
Really intense.
At some point, I thought it was close to a mutiny by some senior officers.
Yeah, we've heard a lot of reporting along those lines.
I think it's totally against America's interest to launch a war against Iran.
And there's even talk of, you know, neocon fifth columnists driving us into war.
It's pretty scary stuff.
Fallon's dismissal was, you know, as the French say, pour encourager les autres, to scare the hell out of any other senior military men who were thinking of opposing the president's policy, war policy.
That, I think, was the main intent.
But I think it's entirely possible, given Cheney's just his current visit to the Middle East, where he said all kinds of bellicose things with Senator Lieberman whispering lines into his ear that some kind of military operations are planned, either provoking a clash with Iran or else having Israel finally launch its long-awaited attack against Hezbollah and Syria.
Some kind of, either one of these things, shortly before elections, would be of immense help to John McCain and would get all the flag-wavers energized in the states.
Well, and that would, I guess, could be seen as at least an attempt to reverse the mistake of helping to empower Iran in Iraq.
Seems like that's got to worry some people.
So, I guess it doesn't matter.
If you think you can bomb a regime change from the air and somehow get pro-Israeli people in charge, pro-American people in charge of Iran, then it doesn't matter that you've given them the south of Iraq at all.
Now you've got Kurdistan and the south, too.
Well, that's exactly right.
They call it real politic when you really screw up badly in international affairs.
You call it real politic and you call Henry Kissinger.
Go ahead and start another war.
That'll fix it.
That's right.
There are a lot of people longing for war in Washington still, though I must say when I was down doing a consulting job at the Pentagon in the spring, I met people who definitely told me that there was going to be no attack against Iran.
Yeah, we've heard really a lot of reporting from all different directions.
You mentioned the possibility of Israel going ahead and starting the war against Syria, if not against Iran itself.
Apparently, well, and this was confirmed after Steve Clemons broke the story, Joe Klein at Time Magazine, and then the New York Times confirmed the story that Dick Cheney had sent David Wombser around to promote the idea that they couldn't trust, that is, the guys in the Vice President's office could not trust George Bush to make the right decision and start a war.
So they were working on a plan to end-run the President of the United States and get Israel to go ahead and start the war for him.
Well, I often refer to Mr. Cheney as President Cheney, and to Bush as Vice President Bush.
It has a ring of veracity to it.
It really does.
And you know, we kind of knew that it was Wombser that they were talking about, and then when the Times came out and named him, it was like, oh no, these guys are dangerous.
And then, of course, last August, I believe it was, Nancy Youssef at McClatchy Newspapers reported about Dick Cheney also promoting strikes against Quds Force targets in Iran in the name of their training the bottom brigades, aka the Iraqi Army, and we can't tolerate that.
That's right.
You know, I've often wondered what Mr. Cheney's motivations are.
Me too.
I know his wife is a very strong, very great admirer of Israel's Likud Party, but Cheney sounds so extreme and so relentless in his views.
I recall General Brent Scowcroft's very telling remark that, I used to know Cheney, and the Cheney today is not the man I used to know.
Something's happened to Cheney.
He used to be a very capable Pentagon administrator, and somehow he's gone off the ideological deep end.
He will be gone.
The question is how much damage he can do before he goes, and how many of his clones he's going to leave implanted all over the new administration.
Right.
That's the other thing.
It's not the neocons you know.
It's the neocons you've never heard of who are the deputy assistant to the deputy assistant secretary of killing people or whatever.
Exactly.
Those guys, and there's probably hundreds and hundreds of them.
Who even knows?
That's what he's famous for, right?
Being a master Washington operator and installing his allies in all the right places.
That's right, Scott.
That's what he did after 9-11, too.
He just opened the floodgates and brought all his people in.
Yeah, well.
Motivation.
I can't imagine that Dick Cheney cares really about anybody other than maybe his own family.
He certainly, I just can't imagine that he really cares about quote-unquote the Jews and what happens to the future of Israel from a position of his heart.
The only thing I can come up with is absolute power corrupts absolutely, Eric.
Well, I too question his motivations.
I know he's, I think he's what in past times we would have called him an imperialist in the school of Winston Churchill.
Probably sees himself as such.
Wants America to dominate the world militarily, economically, to remove all challenges to the United States.
Thinks we are the city on the hill.
This is an old-fashioned imperialist, but he also is quite religious, I understand, and he may have, well, he may have slipped into these kind of Christian Zionism that is so important.
We don't see much of it in our part of the world, but...
Well, I live in Texas.
Speak for yourself.
Oh, I'm sorry.
Yes, you do.
So I take it back.
So I would say we on the East Coast don't see much of it, but you know, up to 40% of the voters in the Republican Party are reported to be evangelical Christians who are Christian Zionists who are very much wired into Israel's Likud Party.
Well, I mean, I know that's a very important faction in the Republican Party.
That's an entire block of votes that they absolutely need and so forth, but I didn't, I had never heard that Dick Cheney was a believer in this kind of...
I'm only speculating.
I'm only speculating.
All we know is that he's a dedicated Methodist.
Yeah, well, yeah, that can mean a lot of things.
Yeah, many things.
I mean, all right.
Well, great.
I love it when you come on the show.
You always have so much background knowledge.
You know, I can't think of another reporter who's just going to sit here and rattle off the correct pronunciations of all these little Chinese provinces and so forth.
You really know your stuff, and I really appreciate you coming on the show today to share your insight with us, Eric.
Thank you very much, Scott.
It's been a pleasure, as always, to be with you.
