This free program is paid for by the listener members of KPFK.
If you're not already a member, consider joining with us and keep free speech alive.
All right, y'all.
Welcome to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, assistant editor at Antiwar.com and host of Antiwar Radio for them, for the Liberty Radio Network, Chaos Radio in Austin, and every Friday night from 6.30 to 7 here in Los Angeles on Pacifica, 90.7 in LA, 98.7 in Santa Barbara, 93.7 in San Diego, and 99.5 in Ridgecrest and China Lake.
Of course, streaming live worldwide at kpfk.org.
Now we turn to Eric Margulies.
He has covered more conflict and more territory in the land between Morocco and China than probably any man.
He's the author of the books War at the Top of the World and American Raj.
He keeps a website at ericmargulies.com, spelt like Margolis, ericmargulies.com, and also writes for lourockwell.com.
Welcome to the show, Eric.
How are you doing?
I'm very happy to be with you today.
Thank you very much for joining us.
Let's start with Libya.
You warned us on the show not long ago, I guess just two weeks ago, three weeks ago, at the very start of the uprising in Libya.
Once you guarantee somehow, or with words, promise to guarantee to protect the lives of civilians in Libya, you've bought yourself a regime change.
You can't let them win if you mean to protect those civilian lives, and so now it looks like we've got ourselves a full-scale war on our hands there.
We certainly do, Scott.
The big question is, is the government bungling along sort of keystone cops, or is there a much subtler hidden agenda to all this information starting to come in and suspicions are starting to grow that we could be looking at a very strong counterrevolution against the revolutions that are sweeping the Arab world?
In Libya, where the counterrevolutionary forces led by the United States and Saudi Arabia saw a chance to strike down someone who they really didn't like, but also to use an iron fist to get control of a very important oil country, also we're looking at Syria now, where I'm starting to get growing suspicions that the uprising in Syria may have been engineered by the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and Israel as part of a long-running campaign that began in Iran to mobilize certain key segments of the population using social media and try and overthrow governments considered inimical to Washington.
Well, one of the things about this Arab Spring is that it includes pretty much every country from Morocco to Pakistan, and that of course includes Syria and Iran, two countries that we don't control, and so it's pretty easy to see how, from Hillary Clinton's point of view, America can intervene and for public relations reasons look like the good guy on the side of the revolutionaries and in fact just carry on that Bush agenda of pushing that wink-wink democracy in the nations we don't control and have a dictator in yet, whereas at the same time, as you point out, we're in it with the Saudis, pushing down the revolution in Bahrain and in northeastern Saudi Arabia at this time while we're co-opting the revolution in Libya.
That's right, and we're using techniques that have been gradually and successfully developed since they were first deployed in Ukraine in the Orange Revolution there, in Georgia in the Caucasus where the Shevardnadze government was overthrown, and then they were used in Iran where they didn't quite work but certainly made a lot of problems for the Iranian government, and now we're seeing them used in other countries.
You know, what's going on in Libya is sort of a faux revolution in the sense that people who've been in touch for a long time with the CIA and with Britain's MI6, Foreign Intelligence Service, were riled up there and armed and given a certain amount of organization and are being directed against Gaddafi.
It's hardly what I'd call a spontaneous uprising.
Well, you know, it started out, it seemed to start out, with a pretty huge protest movement all across the country, and including in Tripoli there were at least tens if not more than 100,000 people out protesting in the streets, and it's just the rebellion got really small once the bombs started dropping.
Well, there were a lot of protesters, no doubt about it, and with good reasons to protest against the Gaddafi regime.
I mean, that part of it seemed natural enough to me, but I guess I could be wrong.
Well, yes, but within the protest was a core of pre-planned militants who decided they were going to take up arms.
You know, flag-waving, sign-waving protesters was one thing, as we saw in Tunisia, for example, a completely peaceful protest, but fighting started pretty early in Libya, and I'm not sure, I don't think it was all fault of the Gaddafi government.
Well, you know, I don't know if you saw, but there was this piece by John Lee Anderson in the New Yorker magazine, it's on their website, where he describes the rebellion, the armed rebellion, as being no more than 1,000 men.
Is that the force?
This is like bombing a regime-changing Iraq to install Ahmed Chalabi in the Iraqi National Congress or something.
Some CIA front men and 1,000 armed fighters?
You're right on target, as usual, Scott.
That's exactly what it is.
This is a comic operation.
It looks like, remember the Mel Gibson movie, Road Warriors?
All these people, mutants, running around in pickup trucks, and the Australian outback, well, that's what this thing looks like.
There sure have been a lot of scenes on Al Jazeera and even on CNN that look a lot like the Road Warrior, actually.
They do, and I'm not sure if that was the name of the movie, but that's what they were called.
And you're right, it's a very small number of people.
I identified already two weeks ago the general who would take it over, General Yunus.
Now he was put in charge tonight.
And it's a few guys shooting, and largely for the benefit of the foreign media, and a lot of noise.
And where are all these mountains of bodies of civilians?
We haven't seen too many caused by the Qaddafi forces, that's for sure, though they certainly have killed some civilians.
But now we're starting to get reports of civilians being killed by NATO forces to prevent civilians being killed.
So, it's interesting here.
You have, basically, beginning in Tunisia, this sort of grassroots, bottom-up revolution against tyranny and high food prices and torture, and basically push for basic human rights in all of these countries.
And then you have Barack Obama and his CIA sitting up there, rubbing their hands together, figuring out how to move their chess pieces.
And basically what you're telling me is that, at least in some of these cases, they've decided, especially in Syria, here in Libya, they've decided to go with Operation Color-Coded Revolution, like in Georgia and Ukraine, and I guess, throwing Tajikistan and whatever from a few years back, while at the same time, they're supporting the Saudis and the other kingdoms in Jordan, in Bahrain, for example, in putting down their revolutions.
That's right.
And Syria is a very tempting target for the US and Israel, because, of course, if you can overthrow the regime in Syria, it breaks its relations with Iran and cuts support for Hezbollah and Palestinian resistance groups as well.
So it kills three birds with one stone.
Well, in fact, let's put off Syria for a minute.
I want to get back to that.
It seems like we're really playing with fire there.
But I wanted to stay on Libya for the moment, because that's the one where we do have the US Navy and Air Force bombing everybody.
And, of course, the politicians are saying they're going to turn this over to NATO.
Do you think that the French, the British, or whatever else NATO might mean, other than the US military, do you think that they're even capable of carrying on this fight?
Or is that just, we can just throw that out, and then the next question would be, how long until the Marines march into Tripoli?
If, as you say, the counter-revolutionary forces are winning, certainly in Saudi Arabia, they seem to be doing pretty good in Libya too.
Well, I think that Secretary Gates pointed out today that they don't need the US high-tech capability to wage this little comic opera war.
The British and the French are quite capable of shooting up anything that moves in Libya.
Their base is right in Sicily.
They're extremely close, 15 minutes flying time.
They can do the French have an aircraft carrier there, which they're finally using now.
But what's really needed are troops on the ground, and those are being supplied by the British SAS and SBS, Special Boat Service, Special Air Service.
Very tough individuals.
They've been there for a long time.
I've been reporting that the SAS has been there for over eight weeks.
That was before the revolutions began.
And the Americans, I'm sure, have some special forces in there too.
But that's all that's really needed.
I mean, the Libyan army is a joke.
It's a completely ragtag, useless thing.
All the Western powers need is to cobble together a few so-called Libyan resistance army people or whatever, and get them to drive down that road without running back the other way.
It won't take much to overthrow Gaddafi.
Well, so do you think that he'll negotiate?
And, I mean, I saw where this British, I think the British foreign minister announced, well, if we ever catch him, we're going to put him on trial for war crimes and whatever they seem to be saying, you know, unconditional surrender, fight to the death there, rather than giving him an out.
I wonder, you know, will they be able to catch him?
That's a pretty big sand-covered country there, isn't it?
It is, but it's easy to find people in the open desert.
You know, we've made a practice.
We've tacked these little countries that have no self-defense capability and no top cover, no trees.
So it's like shooting fish in a barrel.
It happened in Iraq, and that's what's going to happen in Afghanistan, because what's happening now in Libya.
Gaddafi may or may not get away.
He might make a deal that reports that there are senior Libyan officials negotiating with the British in London tonight.
There may be lies put out by the British disinformation to unsettle the Gaddafi regime.
I thought it was particularly interesting yesterday that the Libyan foreign minister, former top intelligence official for up to 15 years named Moussa Koussa, great name, had defected with the help of Britain's MI6 to London.
And I said immediately popped up in my mind the defection of Hitler's top aide, Rudolf Hess, to England during World War II.
That's still a mysterious story.
Nothing's ever come out of it.
We don't know whether Moussa Koussa really defected or whether he went there to negotiate some kind of deal.
It's hard to tell.
One thing is for sure that the British and the Americans are now getting nervous over their new Benghazi allies in Libya, because they're turning out to be not the saintly Democrats that they had thought, but to be a very complex bunch of royalists and Islamists and just haters of Western Libya.
Well, okay, so if we can try to compare and contrast the battle plan here more or less with recent history in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, sounds like you're saying this is much more the Afghanistan model of use air power and laser designators to target that air power and back the local forces on the ground to get the regime change.
But then, of course, we're still fighting the Afghanistan war nine and a half years later right now.
And I wonder what could Democrats in power possibly do after achieving a regime change in Tripoli other than creating a democracy and training up troops to support it and basically the same nation building mess that we have in Iraq and Afghanistan both to this day.
I think that's a fair assessment.
I don't think Libya will ever be completely turbulence free.
There's great antipathy between Tripoli region and Benghazi region in the east.
I'm thinking the most likely scenario is a return of the Senussis to power.
They used to be the ruling dynasty in Libya up until the British crushed them in 1915 and 1916.
And the Senussis were a huge movement in North Africa, very much respected.
I've met some of them in Libya.
And they are, to my thinking, the best placed people to run it.
But I don't know who the CIA has chosen.
I know that they've got a couple of Libyans on the shelf that they've had for some time, and one of them in Virginia, and just like they did with the Iraqi exiles and the Afghans as well.
So they may have their own men that they want to put in power.
Whatever the case, it's going to be unstable, and it's going to cost a lot of money, and it's going to be another major distraction.
And it doesn't gain us anything because we got just as much buying oil from Gaddafi.
It was much cheaper to buy his oil than to invade his country and occupy it and try and rule it and get oil from there.
Well, you know, you mentioned that the Americans are getting worried about who they found are their friends there in Libya.
And I wonder, that more powerful older family that used to be in power that you just mentioned there, are they tight with all these guys who, according to legend anyway, it was much of the young population, young male population of Benghazi and towns in that region, went to go fight in the war in Afghanistan and especially in Iraq on the side of the Sunni insurgency.
Remember, we used to talk to al-Qaeda in Iraq, the 2% of the Sunni insurgency that somehow took all the credit and got all the blame for the insurgency against the occupation in Iraq.
Apparently a lot of those guys were Libyans.
I wonder, I mean, I'm just looking at a couple of weeks in the future.
So Gaddafi falls, these guys take power.
Well, now Obama's got to make sure that the al-Qaeda type dudes don't come to power there.
And we got to train up an army to make sure that the guy that did that suicide bombing yesterday never gets away with it again and whatever.
And now, I mean, we're going to be there for 20 years, right?
Tell me I'm wrong, please.
I want to know I'm wrong.
You're not wrong.
I just hope you're keeping up with your Arabic lessons because we're sinking deeper and deeper into the sands of the Mideast.
Oh my God, look how long we've been in Korea since the Korean War, and in Japan since World War II.
Why wouldn't we be in the Middle East forever as well?
However, you know, back to what you were saying, I don't think the Libyans played a prominent role in Iraq or in Afghanistan.
That I know for sure.
The Libyans were not the most efficient people.
They were not well regarded.
Kind of sort of bumblers from the outback.
I don't know if there's a hard core of Islamists even that are dangerous in Libya.
Certainly the much touted al-Qaeda in the Maghreb is a tiny organization.
It's long on word but short on people.
Long on word's all they need though because it's long on word in D.C. that makes the excuse.
It doesn't matter whether it's true or not.
They can't fight a war that benefits anyone who has the slightest inkling of anything to do with al-Qaeda without that turning into an excuse to intervene more to prevent the guys that they just helped win from winning.
Well, and it sells the war in Peoria too.
It's going to sell the war in Saudi Arabia for the other side too it would seem like to me.
And this is what Osama Bin Laden has been trying to tell everybody in the Middle East forever was that America will use any excuse to invade and occupy a Muslim nation that they can.
Well, that's correct and in fact there's one school of thought that holds that the U.S. has already long ago invaded and occupied Saudi Arabia.
There are 100,000 Americans in Saudi Arabia today not counting military forces.
The U.S. has also occupied Pakistan in the view of many Pakistanis.
It's a kind of a soft occupation.
It's hard to see and not to go too far afield but the attack on the U.N. today in northern Afghanistan was done because the U.N. has become an adjunct, an auxiliary of the U.S. occupation forces.
And they occupy, they bring in the U.N. to do the work so the U.N. has become part of the whole U.N. structure there.
But I think we are going to be a long time in Libya.
We have just bought ourselves a new country.
All right, well, I really wish we had time to talk all about Algeria, Morocco and Yemen but I want to get back to Syria here in the last few minutes with you.
By the way, everybody, it's Eric Margulies.
He keeps a website, ericmargulies.com, writes for lourockwell.com and wrote the book, American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
So Syria, here's one where the Americans compose a Superman on the side of the little guy against the evil tyrant because he's not our evil tyrant, Bashar Assad Jr. there over there.
So I wonder if you can get back to what you were saying about this looks like maybe a manufactured revolution against him.
I guess it started in the south of Syria and it seems like the government, the cabinet was sacked and there are major changes afoot already there.
What else do you know?
Scott, I'm struggling to understand the situation.
It's very complex.
There are different currents going.
There is great resentment against the regime in Syria.
Syria is ruled by a religious minority called the Alawi or Alawites who make up about 13% of the population, and they've ruled Syria through the army and the secret police since the 1960s.
They've killed very large numbers of Sunni Muslims in a series of uprisings.
So there's great hatred and lust for revenge against the Assad-Alawi government and the Sunni majority of Syria, which makes up about 80%.
So there is discontent.
There is a great chance for very serious bloodshed there in Syria if the lid is blown off the pot.
The problem with the government is they may want to make some reforms, but they don't know how to do it without seeing everything explode.
But on the other hand, we see the weakening of the regime, as I was saying earlier.
We see the beginnings of a plan by the U.S. to destabilize and overthrow the regime and to stir up popular discontent and to try and harness it to the purposes that are favored by the U.S. and Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Wow.
So what's the danger, do you think?
Well, I don't know.
To what degree do you think they would go?
How far would they go in pushing for regime change in Syria?
I mean, obviously over at Commentary magazine they're saying, now's our chance, or whatever, at Joe Lieberman's office.
But do you think the Obama administration would really go, I don't know, say as far as what they're doing in Libya, drop some bombs and really try to push for one side to win out over the Assad regime there?
Not yet, because the situation is too fluid right now to be able to support or oppose anyone.
But they're going to try through covert and subversive means to destabilize and overthrow the Syrian government.
And it is a maximum priority for the supporters of Israel, for the neocons, for the Joe Lieberman people to do that.
Not that they care so much about Syria, but they really want to break Syria away from Iran and reduce Iran's ability to influence events in the region.
So it's very important.
So there's a full court press going on for stronger United States action to Syria, but the time is not yet ripe.
Well, that's good, Elise.
I don't know if having bought time means anybody can stop them or anything, but it seems like there's a real danger there.
As you say, the purpose would obviously be to weaken the Iranian position there, especially along with Hamas in Gaza, I guess, and Hezbollah in Lebanon.
But it seems like you would be really risking starting a war with Iran if you got into, say, Libya-level violence in Syria.
I don't think Iran is going to go to war with the United States.
There's much too much to lose.
It knows it would be defeated very quickly.
It knows that Israel would be absolutely delighted.
This is the Israeli objective.
I think the Iranians are too smart to get in a head-on clash, but they might do it through subversive activities, special forces, that type of thing.
I guess I'm thinking more about the neocons.
Once they get their foot in the door in Syria, they'll find a way, the war party will find a way, to expand it into Iran.
Then we'll have Michael Addin's World War IV after all.
Well, exactly.
I mean, the neocons have been trying for 40 years to get the United States into a generalized war with the entire Arab world and Iran.
And they have done brilliantly.
Here we go now with Libya, the newest war.
We've got Libya.
We've got Yemen.
We've got Somalia.
We've got Iraq.
We've got Afghanistan.
Where else can we think of?
There will be something new by next week.
So that's the point.
But there's also great concern that the U.S. and its reactionary allies in Saudi Arabia have to launch a counterattack somewhere to stop what's going on in Bahrain.
And most important, stop their rising tide of protest against the Saudi government, which is the real prize, of course, in the region.
Well, now, when it comes to that, it seems like from the news coverage, all the protest movement in Saudi Arabia has come from the northeast, where the Shiites live and where the oil is.
But I guess there was a little bit of reporting about protests, about the response to some flooding and some other things.
I wonder if the angst about the Saudi regime extends to most of the population of Riyadh, for example.
I don't think so.
But I think there are pockets of anti-regime feelings in Saudi Arabia.
There's one thing that we're not seeing yet, but it is there.
It's sort of a subterranean protest or danger movement for the Saudis, and that is that there are millions of Yemeni laborers in Saudi Arabia.
Nobody knows how many there are, but they're very large numbers.
They could be 3 million, they could be 5 million.
It's hard to tell.
They represent a lumpenproletariat of ignored, hard-done-by workers there in Saudi Arabia who are treated like dirt.
And coming from Yemen, they're infected with revolutionary tendencies, Bin Laden's ideals, since he was a Yemeni family.
And the Saudis and the Americans are definitely worried that they may lead to some kind of explosion in Saudi Arabia.
And beneath this is the fear, behind this is the fear, that Saudi Arabia is like one of these Gulf sheikdoms writ large.
There aren't that many Saudis.
They've been lying for years about the amount of people they have in Saudi Arabia.
Nobody really knows how many Saudis there are.
My guess is that there are maybe only 75% of the number that they claim to be.
We just don't know at this point.
But foreigners may make up a substantial portion of Saudi Arabia, just as is the case in Bahrain.
All right, well, we're going to have to leave it there.
We're all out of time.
If you want to hear more of me talking with Eric Morgalese, there's tons and tons at www.antiwar.com, including quite a few from just the past few weeks there.
And please take a look at his great essays at www.ericmorgalese.com, as well as www.lourockwell.com.
Also, could not recommend War at the Top of the World and American Raj highly enough for you all.
It's Eric Morgalese.
Thanks very much for your time.
Cheers.
And thanks to all you all for listening.
We'll be back next Friday, 630 to 7, here on 90.7 in L.A.
Copyright © 2020, New Thinking Allowed Foundation
