All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our first guest on the show today is the great Eric Margulies.
His website is ericmargulies.com.
Of course, he writes for lewrockwell.com, and he's the author of the books American Raj, Liberation, or Domination Before That War at the Top of the World.
Welcome back to the show, Eric.
How's things?
Oh, things are very interesting these days.
We are indeed living in interesting times, Scott.
Yeah, afraid so.
Well, the headline of your article today at lewrockwell.com reads, Shock, awe, and deja vu in Libya.
But what's the plan, Mr. President?
Which cuts right to the heart of my whole beef here, which is that you can't say, use all necessary measures to protect civilians and talk chitchat about a little no-fly zone without actually just taking one side in the Civil War.
And now the mandate is clearly that they can't let Qaddafi win, which means no drive zone, no sail zone, no walk zone.
They're already attacking infantry, you know, men on foot on the ground with AKs.
And now it's America and, what, France's war against Qaddafi.
Simple as that, right?
Well, it boils down to that.
And it's been a, you know, a hastily assembled force.
Well, as Vladimir Putin described it, a medieval crusade, which I think is an apt description.
And they're rushing off to fight the wicked Saracens.
We don't know if our Saracens in Benghazi are any better than the wicked Qaddafi Saracens in Tripoli.
But what we've done is we've charged into the middle of a tribal civil war.
We don't know any of the players except a little bit about Qaddafi.
And we're going to end up stuck, I think, in the sands of Libya much longer than we'd planned.
All right.
Well, so if anybody knows anything about the different tribes and factions and what have you in Libya, it's you.
Do you know enough to tell us maybe whose side Joe Lieberman and Barack Obama have decided to choose here?
Well, we know Joe Lieberman is on the side of Israel's right-wing government.
Yeah.
And he is the point man for the neocons in the United States, whose giddiest desire is to see the United States fighting the entire Arab world, if not the entire Muslim world.
I mean, that has been the long-term goal of the neocons.
They're well on the way to achieving it with this latest operation in the Muslim world.
President Obama, I don't know.
He has stumbled badly in foreign affairs repeatedly.
And this is the latest example of an unseemly judgment that he's made, perhaps on bad political advice from the Chicago advisers.
As an American, I do not like seeing the president once again getting the U.S. into a war without the approval of Congress.
And for once, I agree with the Republicans in Congress that Obama had no right to get us into a shooting war without the advice and consent of Congress.
All right.
Well, but so now what about these people in eastern Libya and Benghazi, the side that Obama is apparently taking, or at least, you know, the U.N. mandate is to protect, when they say protect civilians, they mean protect the rebels.
Do you know who these guys are and whether they can be our new puppet government and they're going to turn out to be another Nouri al-Maliki?
Well, they are, excuse me, they are.
Libya traditionally was divided into three parts, and the two main parts was the west, that is Tripoli, the east, Benghazi, totally different tribes who warred against each other.
In fact, what Gaddafi did since he came to power in 1969 was to impose a certain amount of unity in Libya and to build a modern or somewhat modern country, 20th century country, out of Libya and to unify its government and its educational system and that type of thing.
But unfortunately, these ethnic divisions have resurfaced and are going full force.
So this is a tribal rebellion.
It's a regional rebellion.
We don't know who these people are.
They're just an assembly of notables and fighters from the Benghazi region.
What I'm hoping, Scott, is that the traditional rulers of this region, that is the Senussi, who were led by the Grand Senussi, who was one of the most important figures of the 19th and 18th century Islamic revivals, will resurface.
They are around.
They're a very sensible lot of people.
And I think they'll probably end up assuming command of this eastern rebellion.
Well, now, do I basically have it right that now that the West has intervened there, they cannot let Gaddafi win, that they'll have to at least divide the country in half, if not guarantee a regime change in Tripoli?
Well, I think we're going to see the country divided.
Now, we are the great divider.
We've divided Afghanistan.
Into Pashtun and non-Pashtun parts, and it will probably stay that way forever.
We've divided up Iraq irreparably.
The Iraqi Humpty Dumpty is unlikely to be put back together again.
And now we're probably in the process of dividing Libya.
No, well, particularly French President Sarkozy has stuck his neck out rashly, in my view, and can't tolerate seeing Gaddafi win.
If he does, his reason for getting into this war, which was to sort of try and stop the movement of the far right in France, which has actually pulled ahead of him for next year's election, to his shock and awe and dismay, the far right of the Front National will crucify Sarkozy and make him a laughingstock.
If Gaddafi doesn't fall, Obama will face similar charges from the Republicans who will start screaming, Who lost Libya?
Even though two-by-nothing Libya is of zero strategic interest to the United States.
Well, now, you said that the Brits had had, well, I guess last time on the show, you talked about the Brits had intelligence ties with the people in the East over the long term.
You think they at least have, you know, settled on who they want to back there?
Oh, yeah, I'm sure, because there's quite a coterie of Libyan exiles in London who are all sophisticated people.
So it's just a question of picking their man off the show, finding their, as you said, their own Hamid Karzai or Ali Maliki, and saying, okay, you're the new chief.
Now, we are getting more reports coming in from London that there are, that the British SAS Special Forces have been there, as I've been saying, for over eight weeks, and you're going to find more and more boots on the ground, even though the West is denying that they're there.
Are they going to turn this thing into an Iraq war, where they got to, you know, put down the insurgency in Tripoli like Fallujah or something?
Well, the hope is that a cruise missile is going to kill Gaddafi, or that one of his generals or supporters will gun him down.
If that doesn't happen, Gaddafi has enough supporters so that he can dig into the Tripoli area in the West.
Now, the rebels in Benghazi have no credible fighting power at all.
They're just a bunch of ragtag people running around, shooting guns in the air and posing for TV cameras.
To get them to move forward and actually do anything effective, they will need stiffening from Western Special Forces, maybe dressed up as Libyans.
The French did that.
For example, I saw when the Libyans and French were fighting in Chad, the French Foreign Legion was sent there dressed up as Chadian tribesmen, and they kicked the Libyans out in no time.
So I think it's inevitable that the West will get drawn into this war and will be stuck in this morass of Libyan tribal politics.
So, well, I mean, even then, that kind of reminds me of like the neocons idea that, oh, well, in 96, you know, we'll do this coup in Iraq and we'll send in 5,000 troops and have them set up a base in Kurdistan and another in the South, and then they'll work on regime change from there, that kind of thing.
Seems to me like the Pentagon would rather say, no, sir, we're just going to have to put 200,000 troops on the ground and do this thing right.
And once they get started, how do they back down?
Because, you know, nuts to all that best case scenario stuff where somebody shoots Qaddafi in the back of the head from the inside here.
You know, assume he's not going to stop fighting.
What choice do they have from their point of view?
They can't just leave and let him turn around and win the same war all over again.
Well, I think America's first reaction, I mean, we're out of troops.
And unless they start sending school guards from the New York public school system there, I don't know where they're going to get any more troops to send into this mess.
So that's a limiting factor.
All right.
Well, and now here's the thing, Eric.
I got this.
Here's my theory for why it is that America's intervening in Libya.
I think that it's purely a wag the dog public relations stunt because beginning with Tunisia, but then especially with Egypt, the narrative was becoming more and more clear, even to the endlessly lied to American people, that the USA is the bad guy in every one of these revolutions.
We back the dictators that torture these people to death.
And what these revolutions represent is a rebellion against at least, you know, who we choose to administer our empire, if not our empire in general.
And so they decided we got to get ahead of this thing.
We got to pretend like we're the good guy in one of these revolutions.
Gaddafi is the least American backed of all of them.
You know, they only brought him in from the cold in 2003.
So they said, OK, well, we'll just turn on him and pretend like we're on the side of the people in that one.
Of course, his particularly ruthless crackdown gave them a handy excuse.
And so now they're able to change the entire narrative from look all across the Middle East, from, you know, even from Pakistan and Morocco, basically, including, of course, Yemen and Bahrain and these other very important protest movements going on.
The Middle East is in rebellion against our Raj, as you call it.
Well, Scott, I think there's a lot of substance to what you say there.
But this is something that may play well in the U.S. and to the American media and public.
But, you know, in the in the Muslim world, certainly, particularly the Middle East, it's not playing well at all because there is growing fury over the double standard of, you know, U.S.
-backed governments in Yemen and Bahrain, shooting down civilians of scores and scores of civilians killed in Afghanistan by U.S. aircraft and in Pakistan by this latest murder.
Photos of this latest murder ring of thuggish American army soldiers displaying their victims.
And there's there's anger at this.
And there's not much support for America.
In fact, we see the members of the Arab League, even though they hate Gaddafi's guts, they are backpedaling as fast as they can from their so-called agreement to endorse the Western American led attack on Libya.
Well, yeah, I mean, that was such a transparent, you know, deal made by the West.
We need to get the Arab League to ask us to do this.
But the Arab League, that just means King Abdullah, right?
That's right.
And a few American backed emirs and things.
And they got the I hear I was just in Washington.
The the head of the Arab League, Amr Moussa, is running for president of Egypt.
And so he pressure was put on him.
And they said, listen, Moussa, if you if you want to become president of Egypt, you better back this resolution.
Otherwise, we're going to be against you.
Well, and, you know, Craig Murray on his website and Charles Featherstone, actually, on this show said he had a source in the Middle East told him that the deal that they made was will, you know, look the other way or, you know, help probably with the invasion of Bahrain to put down that rebellion.
If you the Saudis will go ahead and pretend to be the pressure from below asking us to intervene in Libya.
Well, I'm sure that's the case.
I mean, these are all just clients of the United States.
So to a certain degree, they're going to do what the U.S. says.
What's also interesting is to see the split in NATO that this has caused with Germany and Turkey, the two most important military members of NATO saying, no, we don't want any part of this, at least not so far.
And seeing the French falling all over themselves to attack Libya, which I believe, as I said, they're going to regret.
And the other members of NATO sort of stumbling along in what I think an Israeli writer named Yitzhak Laon aptly termed a bout of colonial theology.
Yeah, well, there's a lot of the rhetoric of the old white man's burden here where we just have to go and save these people from themselves.
And, you know, you even have people, you know, real experts like Jonathan Landay and Juan Cole both on this show talking about, well, you know, we could do this limited thing where we give them, you know, humanitarian aid or we could do, you know, this, that as though it's 2002.
And yeah, all we'll do is get Saddam and then leave and it'll be great, even though, you know, people especially like Landay knew that that wasn't the plan.
You know what I mean?
You can't the first consequence of a war, I guess the first casualty, they say is the truth.
But then the first consequence is that the plan never survives the first engagement.
There's no limited, you know, help it.
We'll just do this, that they immediately by intervening must guarantee the success of the rebellion one way or the other.
Basically, they can't back down from that.
That's the goal.
Now, this was very poorly thought out.
It was a rush to judgment.
And of course, it was in unpredictable events with these rebellions breaking out.
But nobody wants to see Gaddafi stay.
But even his European so-called friends like Berlusconi have apparently turned against him.
But on the other hand, you know, Gaddafi ran Libya to the benefit of the West for a long time.
He was called by the White House our ally in the war on terrorism.
So they may find that these new guys in Benghazi, whoever they are, are not as colorful and nasty as Gaddafi, but maybe even more problematical.
And in fact, this is opening the doors now to Al-Qaeda in the Maghreb, which Gaddafi successfully kept out of Libya.
Well, of course, I mean, this is the giant elephant in the room that nobody's talking about.
It's what about the terrorism blowback from this?
It's another Sunni Arab country we're invading.
From the point of view of the average guy in the Middle East, this has to just look like an expansion of the Iraq war.
It's the same old thing.
Well, it does.
And a lot of people in the Middle East, from my sources, are telling me, are interpreting this as the empire strikes back against the Arab revolutions.
And it's striking back now using huge military power to put the Arab states on record that Gaddafi was a good target because everybody hated him, and he brought it down on himself, and he was a big mouth.
But our military power can now be used against another Arab state that doesn't go our way.
And I think there's a very important message to the Gulf states, and to Egypt, and even to Yemen.
Well, hey, there are some people who work at AFRICOM in the Pentagon who need their jobs and their pensions and everything, so we have to keep them employed doing something.
Seems like Libya would be a great place to build a new lily pad so we can launch further wars from there.
Well, Africa is definitely, as you say, a growth area for the Pentagon.
This new African command, this is their first major operation, and they've got to be tickled pink.
And it suggests that the U.S. is getting more and more covertly involved in West Africa and Saharan Africa.
Now Libya, who knows what's next?
Maybe Algeria, maybe Morocco, maybe Mauritania.
The sky's the limit.
Yeah, well, or, you know, the dollar is the limit at some point.
Oh, that!
That's the position we're in, right?
We have to hope that bankruptcy will come before, you know, our government gets us nuked somehow with all this madness.
Well, how long are the Chinese going to go on financing this wonderful Kipling-esque imperial mania that we're involved in?
The Chinese government is supplying 40% of the government budget now.
Those are the latest figures that I saw.
You know, all that Beijing has to do is say, no, no, no, no more little imperial wars, Washington.
Start paying us back, and we'll see.
Yeah, well, maybe that's how we need to sell peace to the Republicans, is that all this empire is just a commie plot to get us to overextend ourselves and, you know, commit imperial suicide like we got them to do back in the 80s.
Well, it doesn't seem to be happening, and we're heading in that direction.
And, of course, guess who predicted all this and suggested that this was the only way to bring down the mighty United States?
It was Osama bin Laden, who, after all, we have to remember with Al-Qaeda, his primary target was not the West, not the United States.
It was the dictatorial, secular Arab governments of the Arab world.
So far, I'd say the person who's benefited the most from all these convulsions is probably Osama bin Laden, wherever he is.
Yeah, well, and now with this American intervention in Libya, I think it's just going to make matters so much worse.
The unknown unknowns here, as Don Rumsfeld would have said, are just going to be splashing and rippling all around for, in who knows what directions, for a while.
This is, they're trying to pretend like, oh, we're just going to help these people for a little while or something, but I think they've got us into a real mess here.
That's what they said in Korea in 1950.
Yeah.
There we still are.
Oh, man.
All right, everybody, that's the great Eric Margulies.
You can read what he writes at ericmargulies.com and at lourockwell.com.
Shock, awe, and deja vu in Libya is the piece up there today.
Thanks very much for your time, Eric.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, y'all, we'll be back.
