All right y'all welcome back to the show It's anti-war radio And our first guest today on the show is Eric Margulies He writes a regular essay at Lou Rockwell calm one of which we're linking to today at anti-war calm eruption on the Nile confusion on the Potomac His website is Eric Margulies calm He authored the books war at the top of the world and American Raj and is a regular guest expert on The Middle East and Central Asia the Islamic world in general on this show.
Welcome back Eric.
How are you?
I'm back and ready to go with Egypt.
All right.
Good deal.
Well, you know what?
I want to start as you do in your most recent article here with Washington DC Do these people have any idea what they're doing in regards to the?
Attempted at least revolution going on in Egypt right now Scott I don't think they have any idea in Washington.
What an embarrassing and shameful display the u.s.
Government is Is is doing you know, they want to hang Julian Assange for?
Exposing the inner workings of u.s.
Foreign policy.
Well, they don't need to worry about that because they've done such a wretched job themselves that Washington is an embarrassment for the world not only Washington also Paris too, but look we have no policy we don't know what to do with people talking across purposes and Obama muttering platitudes about democracy and liberty and Hillary Clinton talking about you know, we can't allow, you know, we've got to support Mubarak Muslim Brotherhood and this and that so cross-purposes Joe Biden confused and then we've got the big power pressure groups in Washington who are really causing this fumbling Policy friends of Israel the military industrial complex the farm lobby the finance lobby They're all pushing their own agendas on the government.
The result is confusion chaos and embarrassment We'd be better off.
We just made Obama outright the Emperor At least he wouldn't have to satisfy all these democratic interests.
Well, yeah that the man Empire there His Intentions may be good President Obama, but he can't execute because he doesn't have a hold the levers of power in his hand And I mean you have looked at twin embarrassments got it.
First of all, he tells Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu no more settlements on on Illegal settlements on Arab land and Netanyahu gives him the finger and just tells him to get lost and the same thing to Biden Humiliating the American president and you to make matters worse the US Congress backs Netanyahu number two Obama says to Mubarak go comma now and Obama and Mubarak does gives him the Egyptian version the old sphinx finger and And he's staying there and what we see is that the whole of the Egyptian security apparatus led by Washington's real man in in Cairo General Suleiman is staying there and it's getting American help probably American money and It's still in power.
So You can really see That the American president has been humiliated well, and you know on on all these things on the settlements on Egypt if And never mind his motives because I don't assume they're good at all I assume they're the motives of a president and I don't like them very much but if For example, he meant what he said on any of these things.
He could follow through he could put pressure on the Congress to say no you're gonna be quiet about Israel this week because This is the policy and whatever he can put them in line Same thing with closing Guantanamo or whatever and if he doesn't control Hillary Clinton, then he ought to get rid of her Well, I I couldn't agree more Scott, but I don't think that the president is ready Has the cojones to stand up to Congress and or to Hillary Clinton or to these other power He's got enough to want to be the president But that's all that's right And he doesn't want to anger anybody and these people will have be after his throats if he's not careful He's got an election coming up.
He's wounded already But do we see a horrible situation where the u.s.
Is now?
Got the best the worst of both worlds.
It has been revealed The only people don't really understand this are Americans It's been revealed for having supported the most brutal Dictatorship in Egypt and other countries of the Arab world for 40 years or more Have been a patron of torture repression and now It's revealed as a blundering Fool that it can't decide what to do in the Middle East and everybody thinks that the u.s.
Is still supporting Dictatorship on the fly, which I suspect it may be Yeah, I mean the New York Times is reporting as you mentioned that there Right now apparently placing all their bets on this guy general Suleiman He's going to be the new dictator of Egypt if DC has their way.
Yeah, Oh Scott.
I wrote last April I wrote an all calm which is in the Rockwell calm saying already last April now saying that the explosion was coming shortly in Egypt and That Washington had already picked out general Suleiman the intelligence security chief as Mubarak's Successor so in this sense plans are moving along as Washington had predicted Because Suleiman is really the man with the power now, and it's very interesting Egyptian government workers whose number is 500,000 bureaucrats were just given a 15% pay raise and where do you think the money's coming from that?
Well, it's either coming from Saudi Arabia or for from Uncle Sam Right well, and here's the thing too.
I hate to be so pessimistic about this because I saw it I hear square yesterday hundreds of thousands of people out there the entering the third week of the protests in Egypt and you know the dissent here these people are serious and And you know peaceful in their tactics, and it's just the most beautiful thing to see this attempted revolution here but the thing is it can only be attempted for so long Eric before it's a failure and So I wonder whether you think that at the end of the day this guy Suleiman is he just going to try to wait them?out or is he gonna sick the army on them to put this revolution down or Is it possible that they could win that you know enough infantrymen would side with the protesters that?
Not only Mubarak, but his government would have to leave town Scott that's the riddle of the Sphinx right now we That the revolution will probably run out of steam and under economic pressure and police pressure And Suleiman is hoping to to hang on to power and his American and Israeli Patrons because remember Suleiman is Israel's man in Cairo just as Mubarak was they're holding on and hoping That things will stabilize our favorite word however I think there's also a very good chance that that the Egyptian army will eventually act if particularly if chaos continues The question is it's going to be a coterie of senior generals who will back the existing order or will be a group of younger?generals of Nasserite generals who do what Kabbalah Abdel Nasser did back in 1952 and kick out the old generals and take over as a nationalist party that's dedicated to Egypt's welfare rather than one That takes orders from Washington You know what I wonder how come the Israelis can't hire some PR people it seems like you know when it comes to influencing What Americans think about Israel?
It's all PR all the time like they must spend billions of American tax dollars on convincing Americans to send them billions of tax Dollars over there and yet when it comes to revolution in Egypt they outright say we're gonna have to build up our military Oh my god What if we lose our puppet torturer guy that is has been so loyal to us all hell could break loose I mean Guilty conscience much guys it seems like the PR experts would be telling Netanyahu to play it cool and not sit there with their hair On fire oh my god if the people of Egypt have their way They might no longer do whatever we say like help us imprison the people of Gaza Well, that's that's very true of course Israel's got Fox News.
They've got the New York Times I've got the Wall Street Journal to do their PR work for them, but the most Americans I read how rats I'm embarrassed for them.
I'm like guys come on You can't just outright be on the side of evil here You know well let a lot of Israelis have been very outspoken and supporting the revolution in Egypt I find this extremely hard heartening and admirable I applaud the Israelis who had the the courage and the lips about to come out say you know we're with the Egyptians There is a peace movement in Israel.
We keep forgetting it, but look in the States Americans have so Pavlovian Islamic terrorism the Iranians are at the gates sword-waving mullahs The Egyptians are going to take over Egypt the Muslim Brotherhood is coming to attack Akron, Ohio and so forth And that's all Americans are hearing right yeah, all right well hold it right there I got a bunch more, and I know you do.
It's Eric Margulies Lou Rockwell calm Eric Margulies calm All right y'all welcome back to the show It's anti-war radio I'm Scott Horton, and I'm on the line with Eric Margulies Spell it like Margolis For the website Eric Margulies calm also Lou Rockwell calm With new one that's linked from anti-war calm today eruption on the Nile confusion on the Potomac and We're talking about the Empire's failure in Egypt here And I'm not sure which direction to go with this I guess I want to get back to the possibility of this thing you know I talked with that former CIA guy Bob bear the other day and He was saying while emphasizing The extent to which the state is the society in that country And I guess that means that they could be so top-heavy that they completely obliterate themselves in a Soviet Union type fashion But then again it also means that short of that They're very entrenched and if the entire government is the military and most of the economy is the military then Really is you know it doesn't matter how many of the top guys you get rid of in a row if you get rid of Musharraf and all of his cabinet It's still the exact same dictatorship left over in the end and so this thing really isn't going to go anywhere at least for a while I mean that the precedents been said that it must happen, but Then again the army of Egypt didn't go anywhere not this time well that That's what you're quite right the top generals of the army all the business owners The media the courts the police the security apparatus, etc.
Are all part of this huge government Dead weight sitting on the country it will to get rid of it will require a violent revolution I suspect or a much broader revolution and that will really demand the army and parts of the army now Egyptians have been humiliated for decades by by their subservience They don't like it.
There's a lot of anger.
That's built up there in a very passive placid people, but it's It's a building building so the danger is this Scott that if we if we repress the legitimate demands for democracy and open government now in Egypt And I say we because we're working hand in glove with the with the Cairo regime If we repress it we will then be guaranteed to fight back We will then be guaranteed to fulfill our warnings about radical dangerous Wildmen in Egypt because we will force the opposition underground and it will then mutate from a democratic open group into a very violent extreme Not only Islamic, but also perhaps communist Marxist you name it Revolutionary so we will be creating our own revolution in Egypt not the one that we want right?
I mean you look at the tactics of the protesters now just trying to Show with peaceful sheer numbers on the streets, and they have defended themselves from attacks by the secret police at times or whatever but pretty much this is a Gandhi Martin Luther King kind of moment over there.
They've got the moral high ground for sure now, but you're right I mean I guess if The way it looks is that uncle Sam is going to win here.
He is going to get to keep his torture dictatorship and That's exactly what's going to happen is we're gonna turn Egypt into a civil war Well, that's what I fear and you know Washington is taking pretty much It's marching orders on this issue from Egypt because much of what's going on in Egypt is seen in Washington through the lens of Israel it's it's commentators it's strategists friends of the United States and and But you know this isn't good for Israel either Israel it will not want to live next to a revolutionary Violent Egypt the old order of Mubarak cannot go on forever And you know if Israel would only make peace with the Palestinians that would do much to alleviate this whole situation But it doesn't want to Washington doesn't know the way I understand it, but it doesn't want to do anything about it Yeah, well and so we just continue on here's the thing though that I wonder about and maybe you could like compare and contrast a Little bit with the revolution in Iran in 79 And maybe there's nothing to contrast But it sort of seems like maybe the narrative is getting through it's sort of unavoidable.
Isn't it that?
America backs this dictatorship that are the bad guys in this story as Glenn Greenwald was pointing out There always has to be a good guy bad guy narrative on TV and clearly these protesters are the good guys And so what does that make us you know?
I mean it can that lesson finally sink through and why wasn't that part of the narrative or was it at all part of the Narrative in 79 that like hey this guy.
You know Pahlavi was really hard on these people and he was our guy Well, he was our SOB.
We've been we've been going down that road now for as long as I can remember I mean the way I learned about the Iranian revolution was them crazy Islams rose up and did their Islam thing and took hostages and the terrible things that Islamic people do or what you know it wasn't it wasn't ever described as blowback from the previous dictatorship You know we're doing the same thing we did after 9-eleven in nine after the 9-eleven attack the The hijack the people hijacked the planes and drove them into the buildings made very clear They were doing that to punish the United States over Palestine over its support or repression of the Palestinian people Yet that act was quickly transformed into a diabolical act of Islamic fanaticism They weren't doing it for Allah.
They were doing it because they were mad at the United States now.
We're seeing the same phenomena Legitimate revolution in Egypt is now being described across the United States by the Agitprop media as Islamic fundamentalism Muslim Brotherhood Those scimitar people are after us again We won't admit that we have played a shameful role for 40 years in Egypt We put these people in power and kept them there we trained their secret police We did the same thing in Latin America But there's never any sense of shame in the United States Maybe on the on the on the on the left in the United States and liberals in my native New York are concerned about this But for the rest of the United States public the United States is always blameless and Simon pure in these things And we and that's so we've never learned the lesson that what this is what we've done is coming back to haunt us Well, I sure hope Ron Paul runs for president again Because I think you know when he first tried to make this point about look We were bombing Iraq from Saudi Arabia for 10 years leading up to the 9-11 attack Then we invaded Iraq which had nothing to do with it What are people in DC and the TV media, you know, New York DC corridor or whatever up there?
This is all very shocking to them read Robert Pape They don't and so this was you know, it was they kind of characterized him as a clown for that or whatever But I think now they at least understand the point and that it's not an insane point to make that No, really we were intervening over there before the terrorism started here And it seems like maybe this could be a Real good way to illustrate the point again if he especially if he runs This is the you know The nature of the war on terrorism is always a big part of what he has to say And of course, it's always with the bludgeon that they want to hit him with if he says hey We need to disengage from the world.
They say well, what about terrorism?
You know, this is really gets to the heart of the matter, right the 30-year dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak they're the secret police that tortured Ayman al-Zawahiri and to becoming the head of Egyptian Islamic Jihad and Eventually best friends with Osama bin Laden Well Scott what I say in my book American Raj which is all about this very subject about how we have supported all these terror these Dictatorships across the Muslim world and how what we call terrorism is really blowback for our actions in the Muslim world And the major thing is to fight against the people in the Muslim world against their own Despotic governments where the u.s.
Is simply a secondary Target sort of kind of collateral damage.
I was very honored to learn that Ron Paul was Put my book American Raj is one of the three books on his current reading list So I'm glad somebody is listening.
I pray that he runs for president He's the only politician I know in Washington who has the guts to speak the truth well, you know That's the thing about the presidential run is that's what people regular folks don't pay attention to politics except when it's a presidential election That's when these kinds of topics are really discussed not just among people who are especially interested in this kind of thing But among everybody and that really to me is the central lesson of the whole thing If we get at least understand that we picked the fight then maybe we could have a real argument about what to do now You know I wonder because this thing in Egypt has produced another wave of anti Muslim hysteria across the United States and you see Idiots like Glenn Beck Claiming that this is part of a communist Islamic red-chinese Conspiracy and the Farah Palin's of the world and the Newt Gingrich's who are feeding off this and and broadcasting prejudice and vile Anti-islamism I called the anti-semitism of our era And that is what's going to affect Americans more than clear thinking Yeah, I'm afraid that's true and their parallels Between you know this kind of stick and anti-jewish conspiracy theories of Europe You know 60 years ago, or just eerie to me You know I believe in demagoguery, but I only demagogue up guess what y'all It's the people with the power that are the ones doing this to us not the weak and far away for crying out loud You know but anyway alright.
Thanks very much Eric.
I always learn a lot great to be with you Scott Cheers
