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All right y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's antiwar radio.
I'm Scott Horton and it's time to welcome back to the show Eric Margulies.
He knows more than I think any white man about everything in the land between Morocco and China.
He spent an entire career covering Middle East politics.
He's the author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj Liberation or Domination.
I was telling y'all earlier in the show, I go to read Eric's Libya article and it starts with, yeah, that time that me and Muammar Gaddafi were piling around.
Jeez, welcome to the show, Eric.
How are you doing?
I'm just glad to be back with you, Scott, as always.
Well, so I forget if this was on the radio or what, but I was telling somebody yesterday about how much fun the war against Libya was for me back in 1986.
I was in fourth grade and I still remember well drawing pictures of F-111 planes on the back of my worksheets and having, you know, fun drawing pictures of all the explosions and whatever.
Not that I thought Ronald Reagan was a hero or whatever, but I did really like explosions and I learned in school that Libyans aren't human, so it's okay to bomb them.
You know, if Ronald Reagan does it, it's perfectly okay, that kind of thing.
And then I look and at the time, you were there.
You're covering the story from Libya.
You're showing my age, Scott.
Well, it wasn't that long ago, really.
I'm just a very young man, that's all.
Yes, you are.
Right, right.
That's not about how old you are, that's about how young I am, that's all.
No, so yeah, you know this guy.
How much of a kook is this lunatic Muammar Gaddafi?
Well, he's not a lunatic.
He is very eccentric.
He is odd, to say the least.
He's very flamboyant.
He is sort of a megalomaniac.
I spent a lot of time with him.
We held hands.
You know, I left thinking that he's very, very odd and I can't really figure him out very well.
On the other hand, he came to power in 1969, thanks to a gentle nudge from my beloved CIA.
And the CIA helped him take power in the first place?
Yeah.
Say it ain't so.
They laid the way for the ouster of the then-king, King Idriss, who was the British puppet ruler of Libya.
And Washington decided, oh, no, no, no, the British can't have a puppet ruler there.
We're going to have a puppet ruler there.
Because at the time, there was some oil, but there was Willis Air Force Base, which was one of the biggest American strategic air command bases anywhere.
And it was packed with B-47s.
And it was important.
So out went King Idriss, and in came this young colonel from a tent in the desert.
And he may be odd, he may be eccentric, but he's held onto power for 41 years and more.
And the U.S. and Britain and Egypt and France have all tried to kill him on various occasions or revolutions there.
It hasn't worked yet, so he's crazy like a fox.
Well, you know, I saw that rant the other day from the bombed-out remains of...
Yeah, that's where I was with him, Bab al-Azizi barracks.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I guess Hosni Mubarak figured out that his days were numbered, and he went ahead and packed up as much of his stolen loot as he could, and he left.
But this guy Qaddafi doesn't seem like he's going anywhere.
No matter how many people got to die, he's going to have to die in order for him to be removed from power.
And he seems...
I don't know how eccentric he is or exactly, you know, the line between that and madness.
But, you know, especially the one hour-long rant a week or so ago, there was a couple places where he just broke down into, you know, what is the matter with you people?
You know, and just completely...
I don't know.
It didn't seem like a very rational speech for any leader in the position he was in, no matter how eccentric to get.
Unlike our rational president, George W. Bush.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, Qaddafi's got the intellect to be better on TV than Bush.
He does.
You know, when I was with Qaddafi, he led me by the hand through the ruins of that barracks that you were just referring to, and through his bedroom where Uncle Sam had dropped a 2,000-pound laser-guided bomb and killed his two-year-old daughter.
And Qaddafi looked at me very plaintively, and he said, man, he said, Eric, why are the Americans trying to kill me?
Why are they trying to kill me?
And he really did not seem to understand how much he had riled up Washington and London and Paris, and why he'd have so many enemies.
He still doesn't.
Yeah.
Well, apparently not.
Now, here's the thing, though.
What about right now?
I mean, it looks to me like, as far as I can tell from here, the rebels have taken pretty much the whole country, except for Tripoli.
But even in Tripoli, there were tens of thousands of people out protesting, if not fighting, in what's shaping up to be some sort of civil war there, it looks like.
But is time on his side or theirs?
And how much time, you think?
No, it's not on Qaddafi's side.
Time's running out for him.
But he may hang on longer than anyone expects.
You know, my reading from a distance, so I put in a caveat, is that the violence in Libya has been over-exaggerated.
The number of casualties and civilian fighting, it's not total civil war.
It's not a bloodbath.
It's a lot of disorganized running around and skirmishing.
The violence there is being over-exaggerated purposely by the Western media, by the U.S.
British governments, to lay the groundwork for possible military intervention in Libya.
And the reason for this, my view again, is that the Western powers see a perfect way to strike back against the tide of Arab revolutions that's coming in and reassert Western imperial rule on a key Middle East oil producer.
Well, either that or maybe they are just trying to provoke more massive suicide attacks against the people of the United States.
Because that's what it's going to bring if they spread this terror war into North Africa outright.
I mean, already the CIA has run wild.
Who knows what they're doing in all these countries as far as, you know, fighting so-called terrorists.
Right.
That's an inevitable byproduct of our meddling in the Middle East.
But what is amazing is instead of taking a hands-off approach to Libya and saying, listen, you guys, you work things out, we can't solve the world's problems, here are the U.S. and now it's a neocon ally.
Canada are getting ready, gearing up to intervene.
The French are already talking about this.
You know, the French foreign minister just resigned, this foolish woman, because she offered the just-fallen dictator of Tunisia French riot troops to try and put down the uprising, which now all the Western diplomats hypocritically laud and applaud.
Yeah.
You know, I don't know.
At what extent do you think that they're entertaining intervening in Libya?
Because, I mean, Obama, he's also not George W. Bush.
He's got to know better than wanting to, like, really put the army on the ground there.
The people of Libya are not likely to accept this, you know?
Well, I've been saying for the last 10 days that military intervention is being planned in Washington.
That's what I'm hearing.
And I think what Obama, who's not a military man and is very weak in this area, is being told is the same story about Iraq.
Oh, we just send in some special forces in there and it'll be a cakewalk.
Slam dunk.
Send in a few troops, Qaddafi will fall, we'll run him out of town, and then we'll put in a government that we like and that behaves itself.
You think they even have an idea who they'd like to put in there to replace him?
Yes, I do.
I think CIA has a collection of Libyan assets, exiles, just the way it had Afghans.
It had Hamid Karzai sitting on the shelf there waiting to be slotted in, the way it had these Iraqi exiles.
Same thing, we're now in the government.
So, yeah, the CIA has a library of exiles from all these countries just waiting.
There's so many revolutions going on.
We've got to go across the map here.
We've only got 10 more minutes, so is there anything we need to really touch on Libya before we pick up from there?
No, I think we've covered it.
Just watch the Western forces massing around Libya and watch how the Western mainstream media doesn't miss a beat in beating the war drums to invade Libya.
This is a big deal for the neocons, and they think they're striking back at the Arab uprising this way.
Yeah, well, and this is Paul Wolfowitz's big comeback, too.
He's all over TV, wrote in the Wall Street Journal, we've got to go save the Libyans, so I guess he doesn't have to die alone after all.
That's right, and the biggest joke now is that the neocons have risen from the grave and are claiming that it was thanks to Bush's invasion of Iraq that all these Arab revolutions are going on and Bush actually did something good for the Arab world.
They should be thanking George.
Well, you know, it's actually kind of true, right?
It's just that they skipped a part about how, yeah, the invasion of Iraq made the people in the Middle East hate their American-backed dictators that much more and put them all in that much more of a precarious position.
We all know that Paul Wolfowitz wanted to bring democracy to Syria and Iran, the two countries that Israel and America don't control in the region.
It wasn't a coincidence that he never was pushing for the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak.
What are we, idiots?
Saudi Arabia, countries there that we control.
Although, you know, to be fair to these neocons, though, I think some of them are crazy enough.
Remember, Richard Perle had that guy, Laurent Mirowick, come to the Pentagon and give that speech, that PowerPoint, about how Iraq is the tactical pivot, Saudi Arabia the strategic pivot, Egypt the prize, which I don't know what's the prize about Egypt, but that was what they wanted was regime change against everybody in the Middle East.
As Palace wrote all about how, you know, the neocon plan was to parcel off Iraq's oil in the smallest pieces possible, as many as possible, and to encourage mass overproduction in order to bankrupt the Saudis and drive them out of power.
Well, that's quite right, but they had better be careful what they wish for because they may get another Colonel Nasser or Qaddafi in Saudi Arabia.
Speaking of Qaddafi, you know, Qaddafi said something everybody thought was crazy.
He said, Osama bin Laden is behind the uprising in Libya.
Well, in fact, there's an element of truth in what he said, because not that Osama is pulling the strings in Libya, but Osama bin Laden's number one demand was revolution across the entire Muslim world against despots, tyrants, and monarchs.
Wasn't attacking the West or the World Trade Center or anything else.
It was overthrowing the monarchs that he said are keeping the region in chains and robbing it of its resources and imposing dictatorship and torture and tyranny on the people.
And look what's happening.
What Osama was calling for is starting to happen.
Starting.
It hasn't gone even halfway yet.
So his voice is being heard indirectly.
Well, see, that's the thing, too.
I mean, it was really their accomplishment, right, was to hit us in the face hard enough to make us go and get bogged down and recreate the Russian nightmare in Afghanistan.
And then the bonus prize, as Scheuer called it, the extra special Christmas gift to al-Qaeda was the invasion of Iraq to make it even worse.
And and then, as you say, revolution across the Middle East.
Unfortunately for Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden, if they are still, in fact, running around in Pakistan, nobody here is talking like them.
None of these revolutionaries are like them at all.
They're all 21st century.
Well, not all.
I mean, it's all, you know, different age groups and professions and whatever involved.
But there's the cutting edge of this are the youth who are connected by way of fiber optic cables to the rest of the world.
They don't want to live in Ayman al-Zawahiri's world.
They want to make their own.
They don't.
There's no move towards, you know, setting up a rigid Islamic state.
But they did destroy the American empire.
You've got to give them credit for that.
That was objective.
Number one of bin Laden and his followers was to overthrow these Western imposed despotisms on the Middle East.
All right, well, tell me about the Western imposed despotisms in Morocco and Algeria.
Well, they're very interesting cases.
Both have been more or less French neo colonies in the division of spoils in the Middle East.
That was the French sphere of influence.
Libya was Italy's.
Egypt was a U.S. sphere of influence.
And Morocco is ruled by a totally feudal, backwards, very brutal regime that tortures people.
That's where we sent people to be tortured.
One of the places.
Right.
That's where Binyam Mohamed was tortured with razor blades into accusing Jose Padilla of the dirty bomb plot.
That's quite right.
It's a brutal, backwards, totally regressive society, which is profoundly corrupt.
Very close American ally.
Algeria is even more brutal, if you can imagine.
That is ruled by a cabal of generals, fronted by a 70 something year old official named Bouteflika.
And it is run entirely a terrorist police state with the most brutal methods.
About 250,000 people there died in a civil war after the 1991 democratic election.
One of only two in the Muslim world or Arab world was was crushed by the army with American and French backing.
Two hundred and fifty thousand dead.
And a lot of what we call terrorism that has been flooding into Western Europe is a byproduct of this brutal war where it got so bad that whole villages were wiped out.
And even the army even had trucks with special head chopping machines on them.
No, come on.
That sounds like anti Saddam propaganda.
It does.
But in fact, they were they were trying to blame atrocities on the on the rebels and by massacring villages and chopping people's heads off.
Defectors have come out and said it has a ring of veracity.
And this was the war to repress the Islamists who won the election of, would you say, 93, 94, 91.
Oh, 91.
That's that is correct.
This is why Israel's the only democracy in the Middle East, because we put down any other democracies.
Quite right.
Wow.
And so, you know, what's the story with Morocco?
I saw some pictures looked like there were a lot of people there.
Then I read an article that said and looked like this thing's going anywhere.
You know, who knows?
For now, no.
There have been some demonstrations in Morocco.
That's it.
There were some demonstrations in Algeria, but they were swamped by thirty five thousand police in Algiers alone.
The junta, the military under the runs, Algeria calls itself the eradicators.
And they were one of their greatest accomplishments with the use of power drills on people's knees and genitals.
They must learn that from Donald Rumsfeld and Nouriel Malik.
They're sharing their technology with us.
So it's a horrible situation.
Algeria is a very sinister country, but it's an important oil provider for for Europe, for the French, particularly for the West.
And the French are up to their berets in supporting the Algerian junta.
All right.
I'm sorry.
I want to ask you about Bahrain and about Saudi Arabia and everything.
Could I hold you over one more segment after the top?
Because there's so much to cover, but I got to get back to like aircraft carriers steaming toward Libya right now.
What are they doing?
Are they really going to try to, you know, put a beachhead and build a base and install a puppet?
I mean, this is going to be a disaster.
Chances are look more like it every day.
Oh, man.
That's right.
Well, I don't know what to say.
No, stop.
Don't come back.
Scott, you can't stop the forces of democracy, freedom and liberation.
She's you know, this is what I was telling the judge on.
He had me on the Fox News show yesterday and I was saying, judge, we back every dictator from Morocco to Iraq.
And then but we're on the side of the people in Libya.
That's what they want us to believe here.
Hillary Clinton is up there saying, oh, no, a couple of thousand people killed.
Well, we must do a U.N.
Security Council resolution and we must put up a no fly zone.
And now we got ships headed that way.
I mean, here's the thing about this, too, though.
After 10 years of terror war, is anybody buying this?
I mean, is Obama and Hillary like I mean, in terms like overseas perceptions, is anybody looking, you know, buying the fig leaf of the baby blue flag and humanitarian intervention here?
This is just naked Nazi imperialism for seven billion on the planet to see right in front of their eyes.
Well, a lot of Americans are buying this use of this story.
Unfortunately, the American media is starting to beat the war drums on it.
The New York Times is pontificating on Tripoli, on the Benghazi.
Yeah, unfortunately, in our controlled news environment, a little news bubble in North America, people do believe this baloney.
Man, well, I guess, you know, if you're a lacuna, you could figure out like, hey, we could just turn this into the war of civilizations one way or the other.
We get a good beachhead going in Libya and start getting, you know, jihadists traveling to Libya to fight us.
We can escalate that hell.
We could conscript 14 million people, call it World War three and bring the unemployment rate down, get Obama reelected.
This could be you never want to let a crisis go to waste, you know, and no more talk about West Bank settlement.
Right.
No more of that.
It could be a whole new world order.
All right.
We'll be right back with Eric Margulies after the news, y'all.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
On the line is Eric Margulies.
He's got a new piece at LouRockwell.com today, the Libyan Fox at Bay.
Also, check out his latest book, American Rush.
That thing out in paperback yet?
Yes, it is now out in paperback.
American Raj, liberation or domination?
Pretty obvious answer to that question there.
So, geez, I forgot which which revolution were we on?
We're still talking about Morocco, Algeria.
No, we're on North Africa or the Maghreb, as it's found in Arabic.
But we were starting to head east direction, Bahrain.
Yeah, well, there's Bahrain and there's Yemen.
And then I see also protests are starting in Kuwait, finally, and in Oman.
Yes, that's right.
You know, Oman is a very interesting place because for a long time, Oman was a fief, a personal little possession of British, Britain's MI6, foreign intelligence service.
MI6 picked the sultans and it ran the country.
And there was a wonderful relic of Queen Victoria's days.
Now it's not quite as prominent there, but it's still very influential.
And yet there was a revolution, there was up, you know, demonstrations there, which is almost unheard of.
But I'm keeping my eyes on Yemen because Yemen looks like the regime of General Ali there, another of our heroic and democracy-loving allies.
It looks like it's crumbling quickly.
Yeah, well, I mean, that is, in fact, the case of the headlines over the weekend.
A million people came out.
I posted this one on my Facebook page was Yemen state media saying a million people come out in protest in support of the president's initiative.
And that was the best that they could come up with was that this was a pro-government protest.
But he's been backing down on powers and, I guess, beginning to fire some people.
And they're saying, no, we will not settle for anything less than the resignation and the ouster of this dictator.
So lay there.
And, you know, you've taught us before in the past on this show about the Shiite uprising in the north and the sort of Sunni socialist-based uprising in the south and, I guess, kind of the east of the country.
That's right, in Aden.
And then now, so you have all the young people who, you know, I don't know, for all I know, they're from the middle and they don't want the government anymore, either.
You know, it is amazing that on the average, about 46 to 47 percent of the entire population of the Arab world and Iran is under 25 years old.
A bunch of hoodlums, juvenile delinquents.
How do you deal with these people?
Osama bin Laden gave them a bunch of LSD, too.
Now they're on a rampage.
Well, that's right.
And, you know, as I wrote on, I think, the second to last paragraph of my latest book, American Raj, and this came out over a year ago, I said the biggest problem is not Islamic fundamentalism or terrorism or anything else.
It's an onrushing wave of young men and women under 25 for whom there's no housing, no water, no jobs, no schools, no nothing.
All right.
So now, you know, we talked about kind of the naked imperialism in regards to Libya, but, you know, at least they're trying to dress it up as taking the side of the poor people there and what have you.
But if there's a revolution in Saudi Arabia, there's not going to be any pretense whatsoever.
How could they dress that up any other way than we are invading and occupying these oil fields because they're ours and we'll kill you?
Well, simply, the human cry is going to go up from Fox News in the States that the Saudi oil is too precious to be left to the Arabs and we've got to go in and stabilize it and protect it as a democratic mission.
And, you know, the contingency plans are well established.
There are 100,000 Americans right now who live in Saudi Arabia.
It's a lot of people in a country that size.
Their contingency plans for Pakistan and Jordan to fly troops in at a moment's notice in the event of a revolution.
And probably American troops from Iraq and Kuwait as well.
So everybody's on the watch for a revolution.
And on top of which, the Saudi army's not given any ammo because they're afraid it might overthrow the monarchs, but...
We sell them all that.
We sell them, what, hundreds of billions of dollars, at least tens of billions of dollars of equipment.
Endlessly, we quote-unquote sell the Saudis' military supplies.
You're saying we don't give them bullets?
Yeah, we don't give them the keys to start their tanks or aircraft, practically.
We don't.
We keep them at will.
It's the same with the Egyptian army.
The Egyptian army has about two days' worth of ammo so that they can't fight the Israelis.
It's a crazy situation.
But there's also a bedouin, what they call the White Army in Saudi Arabia, which is a bedouin force of about 60,000 or 80,000 tribals who are there to protect the monarchy as well.
And I believe still there's probably about 15,000 Pakistani mercenary troops stationed there.
So the regime is well-protected.
Its real danger is when the king dies, there could be a split within the regime.
There are big fissures we can see already.
And that could lead to some kind of internal conflict, which could then get out of control.
Well, you know, the piece I read yesterday or the day before about Saudi Arabia had the protesters saying they want a constitutional monarchy.
So they're not trying to overthrow the Al Saud family, but they're saying, we want to rule the law, we want equal rights, et cetera, et cetera, like this.
And so they weren't really, didn't seem as revolutionary as reformist, although these would be huge steps forward if they were put in practice to any real effect.
Do you think that the centers, the average folks who would like life to be better in Saudi Arabia have a prayer of actually influencing the regime that way?
And so far, they're just trying to bribe everybody, right?
Well, they are.
Same thing in Kuwait, too, and Bahrain.
But I think there is a chance for some kind of significant reform if the royal family is sufficiently scared.
But it's not happening yet.
But down the line, if the dominoes start falling, the Jordanian, the Hashemite dynasty falls in Jordan.
There's more chaos in Iraq.
It's possible they may try and do something.
They certainly won't get any help from Colonel Gaddafi, who keeps calling the Saudi king a fat old woman in a dress.
Yeah, well, I mean, look who's talking as far as wearing dresses.
That guy Gaddafi and his getup.
I saw his whole purple thing the other day.
Anyway.
Yeah.
OK.
So who's next?
Jordan?
We hadn't heard from Jordan a little while, but King Abdullah there, he was frightened.
He immediately sacked his entire government at the sign of the first protest.
So what's going to happen after that?
Nothing.
Well, Jordan is a very interesting story because Jordan is is predominantly Palestinian state.
It's about 60, 65 percent of its citizens are Palestinian, and they hate the Hashemite dynasty.
And we're trying to overthrow it for as long as I can remember.
And every time they really get serious about it, the British or the Americans send in troops to stop their beloved Hashemites being overthrown.
But there are deep tremors going on now in Jordan.
And what's so interesting is it's not amongst the Palestinians, so much as it is amongst the Bedouin tribes who are the mainstay of the king there.
And they're complaining about his Palestinian wife and the expenditures of the royal family.
And the fact that the Jordanians are the biggest backstabbers to the Palestinian cause of practically anybody except for Mubarak.
And people are fed up with this kind of policy.
Well, what about the people of the West Bank who've had a very, very difficult time?
What about the people of the West Bank who've had this guy Mahmoud Abbas foisted on them by the Mossad and the CIA?
Well, that's just sickening.
The WikiLeaks really stripped these guys naked and showed them Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Fayyad to be, as you say, Mossad agents.
They're sock puppets for the Israelis and the Americans.
And they should be swept away.
And I think we can expect an uprising against them in the West Bank in spite of their very heavy U.S. finance security apparatus.
You know, it's interesting to me that, you know, all these dictators, less Assad in Syria and Khamenei in Iran, are American-backed dictators.
And yet it doesn't seem to have much to do with the message of the people doing the revolting.
And I wonder why that is.
Not yet.
It's a very good question.
It's because I think it will come out in the future.
They just haven't gotten around to it yet because these revolts are just in their beginning stages.
They're going to figure out why they're so angry shortly.
Yeah.
Well, and then we could expect those policies to change once these revolutions are successful.
There will be more anti-Americanism by the month.
All right.
EricMargolis.com is the website.
Thanks so much for your time, Eric.
Appreciate it.
OK.
Bye-bye.
Spell it just like Margolis, y'all.
And now out in paperback, American Raj.
And LewRockwell.com too.
