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I'm looking forward to that, as I guess the news will have off for the holiday, but I'll be here.
And, well, the name of the show is pretty self-explanatory, isn't it?
It's anti-war radio, and that's all we focus on here is opposition to the American empire and its wars abroad.
Our first guest on the show today is Eric Margulies.
His website is ericmargulies.com, just spelt like Margolis, M-A-R-G-O-L-I-S, ericmargulies.com.
He's the author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
Welcome to the show, Eric.
How are you doing?
Well, I'm happy to be back with you, Scott.
Well, I'm very happy to have you on the show.
I really appreciate you joining us today.
And now Yemen is in the news, a little country on the southwestern corner of the Arabian Peninsula there, as you can see, from Somalia on the east coast of Africa there.
And I guess last Christmas it was the under bomber, and now we have this so-called package plot to blow up some airliners, they say.
And all the talk is that we're going to have to intervene in Yemen.
In fact, I talked with Gary Loop earlier this week from Counterpunch, and he said he saw a Fox News poll that had 71 percent of the American people now think we need ground troops in Yemen to solve this Yemen problem once and for all.
I was wondering, maybe you could tell us a little bit of what you know about that country and how badly we do or don't need to put ground troops there.
Well, to paraphrase Fox News, we sure need to send our boys there to drain that swamp of terrorists.
The problem is that 74 or whatever percent of Americans can't find Yemen on the map.
And most of our soldiers are now busy draining swamps in Iraq and Afghanistan and are stuck there and can't get out.
But we are definitely headed towards intervention in Yemen, though in fact we've been involved there in military operations since 2005.
Well, and are you referring to the first drone strike that killed the American citizen there, or more than that?
There have been a number of drone strikes, CIA drone strikes, and there have been strikes delivered by Air Force units into Yemen that have killed, by some reports, up to 200 Yemeni tribesmen in the north.
There have been air attacks in the south, and there have been a small number so far of special forces operations inside Yemen.
It's the new hot spot for the U.S., and that's where all the special action forces want to be.
Well, now, right about a year ago, Barack Obama gave his West Point speech where he announced the now officially abandoned July 2011 timeline for the beginning of the end of the Afghan war.
But he made sure to tack on to the end of that speech, Yemen and Somalia, look out, you're next.
I'm roughly paraphrasing.
We've been covering the fact that there have been drone strikes, and they tried to say it was the Saudis, but it was the Americans, have been bombing Yemen through November and really through December, up to and including Christmas Eve, the day before the attempted attack over Detroit.
Do you think that chronology could teach us anything about cause and effect in the terror war?
Well, certainly.
What it should be teaching us is that we are blindly stumbling along, right along into the trap that Osama bin Laden set for the U.S. and other anti-American groups, and that is to draw the U.S. into a lot of little debilitating wars and bleed it dry.
And so far we're accommodating.
Afghanistan is a mess.
We are in what looks like a losing war there.
Iraq has been a huge financial and moral disaster.
We've won nothing there but trouble.
And now we're stumbling into Yemen.
And what we have to realize is that we've opened a new front along the Red Sea, a very strategic area.
Now American special forces troops, CIA, the whole kit and caboo are evolved.
We have a major new base in Djibouti, which is just across the mouth of the Red Sea from Yemen.
And it's an old French base.
We're co-sharing it with the French.
We have a key American military base there to cover the entire Red Sea, and that is operating now against Somalia, against anti-government forces in Kenya, in alliance with the Ethiopians against their rebels, and in Yemen.
So it's now what began as a minor problem in Yemen has now morphed into an entire regional sort of hotspot.
Well, what do you think is behind all this?
Is it just chasing Al-Qaeda ghosts all over the world?
Or Al-Qaeda ghosts all over the world is the price we pay for building these bases in these places.
And if that's the answer, then why do we need to colonize Djibouti?
Why do we need a base in Yemen, for example?
Well, it's our knee-jerk reaction.
We saw it in the 1960s and 50s when anybody said they were communists.
We'd go after them.
What's happening now is Al-Qaeda, as I saw myself in Afghanistan, never numbered more than 300 men.
That's back in the 1980s.
And it was an anti-communist organization primarily.
It was not even an anti-Western organization.
But today there are hardly any.
Even Leon Panetta, our CIA chief, said there are no more than 50 in Afghanistan.
There are 110,000 U.S. troops at a cost of a million dollars a year per soldier.
They're chasing who knows what in the mountains of Afghanistan when there are only a handful of Al-Qaeda there.
Well, every anti-American group, and I refuse to use the word terrorist in my writings or broadcasting.
I'm calling them anti-American groups, which they are.
And anybody who doesn't like the Americans, who is angry at the United States for supporting some nasty dictatorship in their country, as we are doing in Yemen with the Saleh government, anybody who opposes that, any anti-American group, is now calling themselves Al-Qaeda.
Or if they don't, we are.
And so what we're doing is we're creating ghosts for us to chase all over the world.
Well, yeah, you talked about how bin Laden's plan was to get us bogged down in these small wars all over the place to bleed the empire to bankruptcy.
But that really goes to show he's got a great convergence of interests with the guys in the Pentagon, which they call it the long war, and that's exactly what they want to do, is fight counterinsurgency forever throughout Eurasia, right?
Well, suppose this so-called faux war on terrorism stops.
Who is the arms maker going to sell weapons to?
I'm not one of these merchants of death theorists who believe the arms merchants create wars, but they're certainly doing a hell of a booming business on selling weapons and new weapons systems, and now we have anti-insurgent weapons systems.
So forth to go, and they have a tremendous support in Congress, because remember, the U.S. defense companies and military companies have put plants in practically every country, every state of the United States.
So if you try and close a plant or cut back on military contracts, you have a national uproar.
It's big politics.
It's big money.
Wall Street is behind it because they're making huge money off these wars, too.
So there is a built-in lobby for these wars, and they keep going.
They've got to find enemies, and the current enemies are al-Qaeda.
There'll be somebody else tomorrow.
Well, you know, I wonder if there's any correlation there between, say, General Electric and MSNBC acting in the most hysterical fashion over this failed, after all, package bomb plot.
If we ignore the obvious suspicions and the fact that it was a former Guantanamo detainee who came up with the package tracking numbers on all this and handed it right over to Saudi intelligence and what all that really means, here was an attack that, say, for example, like in the myth, Anwar al-Awlaki did it or something, outside of American or any intelligence agency's control.
It didn't even work, and yet all over TV for at least three or four days, you'd have thought that Pearl Harbor had been successfully snuck attack there.
That's quite right, Scott.
The major American media has been reacting hysterically to all these little pin-trick attacks like the underwear bomber, and we're told that his bum could have blown up a plane, which a lot of experts doubt.
But this is also part of the plan by the anti-American groups abroad to, as I call it, give America a national nervous breakdown.
We're really, really fanning the flames here, and now this hysteria in airports.
You know, America's enemies are sitting back far away watching CNN International and just laughing and laughing with delight, watching the Americans act like a bunch of silly minis running around and now goosing each other at the airports and causing an uproar.
It is undignified.
It's undignified for President Obama to immediately respond to this underwear bomber last December and come out and make pronouncements.
We're supposed to be a little more cool and nonchalant about this, but we're not.
We're reacting like hysterics.
Yeah, I mean, you would think that a failed letter bomb heralded the imminent arrival of the Sharia law takeover of America and gays in the Marine Corps and Armageddon.
And don't forget the caliphate coming, too.
Yes, so we've worked ourselves into a frenzy.
And there's a big lobby in the States with the Christian fundamentalist right, which is filling the cyberspace with all kinds of hysterical warnings and alarmist material on this.
And it also, the government, you know, is helping.
It's trying to show it's doing its job by making Americans even more frightened than they are.
All right, now, so back to Yemen in particular here.
I guess, you know, to read the Wall Street Journal, they're talking about maybe they're going to put the Joint Special Operations Command under the CIA.
I would have thought that JSOC could get away with more than the CIA can, but what do I know about it?
But it doesn't look like anybody in the military is really stupid enough to do, you know, beachhead there or anything like that.
So I wonder, what do you think is the future of the war in Yemen?
And could you maybe, you know, spend a couple of minutes explaining about the government, as it's called, of Ali Saleh, and he's already fighting two insurgencies of his own besides this very minor al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula problem he has, right?
That's correct.
Yemen was never really a fully united country.
There is, as you say, two civil wars, north and south, going on, and there's constant tribal intrigue and infighting going on there.
The way his government rules from the capital, Sanaa, is by playing off the tribes.
One against the other and bribing them and doing backstabbing and skullduggery.
So it's a constant chaotic situation in Yemen.
Nobody really knows what's going on there, and it is very, very profound tribal politics and regional politics.
And in the middle of this are a few people running around calling themselves al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, just a handful, but they're making enough noise and banging pots and garbage cans and things to draw the United States into this.
And we are reacting very, very foolishly.
We've got the CIA now, as you say.
We've got the special operations forces who are a law unto themselves, CIA a law unto themselves.
We've got a whole bunch of national security groups in Washington getting involved.
And Yemen is the new front.
It's a new Klondike for intelligence and special operations work.
There are people who want to get in there.
There's a growing majority in Washington, a lobby in Washington, that wants to send our troops in there, not a D-Day invasion, but certainly special forces and the CIA killer teams and drones.
But we are getting sucked in there, but we're doing it to ourselves.
So it really is looking bad.
This is just going to keep escalating.
There is no voice of reason in D.C. that's going to say, hey, what if we just stopped killing people in Yemen?
Maybe we wouldn't have a problem with the people in Yemen.
No, and nobody understands Yemen.
You know, before we invaded Iraq, I was sitting with a group, I think I told you the story before, of very senior Republicans close to the president, and they said, Eric, explain to us, what's the bottom line?
Tell us about Iraq.
And I started talking about Kurds and Shias and Sunnis and the 14 different types of Shias and the Sunni tribes, and their eyes glazed over after about three minutes, and one of them said, Eric, just give us the bottom line.
And I said, there is no bottom line in this country.
Yeah, bottom line, stay out.
You don't know what you're doing.
Exactly, and I say stay out twice in Yemen, because even the Yemenis don't understand what's going on in their convoluted country.
What we are really scared about is that there are a couple of million Yemeni migrant workers in Saudi Arabia who form a revolutionary sort of lumpenproletariat, and they're worried that Yemen moves to overthrow the Saudi royal family, which is a key part of the American control mechanism over the Middle East, which I call American Raj, that's what I call my book, that could come from Yemen and overthrow the Saudis.
So this is really a very, very sensitive nerve for the Americans.
Well, if we go with the McChrystal Ratio, for every one of these guys we kill, we create ten more, because, of course, every time we kill one of them, we kill a bunch of people around him too, then it seems like it's just a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If we really want to turn Yemen into the kind of place that is so packed with people who are not just willing to be militant fighters, but organized as one group under this anti-American Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and someday pose a threat to Saudi Arabia, this is exactly how to accomplish that, bombing them all the time and making the Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula guys, who are now the very smallest faction, seem like the prescient ones.
Exactly, you're right on.
And let's not forget Somalia, because we're getting more and more deeply involved in chaotic Somalia.
In fact, you know, in 2005, we financed Ethiopia to invade Somalia, and the Ethiopians eventually pulled out after a lot of heavy casualties.
But we are now staging airstrikes there, we're sending in special forces teams in there, we have assassination squads active, so we're getting sucked into that area and northern Kenya as well.
And let me add the last part, that we are actively working on breaking up Sudan, which is just to the north.
And by next year, we're going to break up Africa's largest country geographically, and we're going to create a new country called South Sudan, that is being done by Washington very forcefully, and now we're going to be up to our ears in yet another very complicated and murky regional conflict.
Yeah, I saw that the UN is proposing putting more peacekeepers in there before the big vote, and I hope that can be the subject of another interview, and I hope it's soon, Eric, but we've got to move on now, but I appreciate your time on the show very much.
My pleasure as always, Scott.
Everybody, that's Eric Margulies.
He's the author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj.
His website is ericmargulies.com, you can find all of his work there, as well as at lourockwell.com.
