Alright, y'all welcome back.
It's Anti-War Radio.
And I'm happy to welcome Eric Margulies back to the show.
He's the author of War at the Top of the World, an American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
Or Gigantic Smoking Imperial Collapse, I think that'll be the title on the paperback or something.
Welcome back to the show, Eric.
How are you doing?
Happy to be back with you, Scott.
Just back from Europe.
Ah, yes, I hear that.
Very good to have you here.
Everybody check out the website.
It's ericmargulies.com.
Spell it like Margolis.
Every once in a while you'll hear me slip and forget and say it wrong.ericmargulies.com.
And when I ask myself, well who knows a thing or two about Yemen, there's pretty much Eric Margulies on my list.
Unless maybe there's a McClatchy reporter there that I can't reach anyway.
So, big news.
The state in Yemen hasn't quite fallen, I guess.
But their dictator has been wounded and has fled to Saudi Arabia for surgery.
It's unclear whether he's going to try to come back or not.
What do you think, Eric?
What's going on there?
A murky situation.
My guess is that he may not come back.
He's apparently not gravely wounded, though.
You know, who can trust the news reports?
They said that he was hit with deeply embedded wooden splinters from an explosion while he was praying in a mosque.
Sounds like a very Islamic way to get booted out of office.
Anyway, we don't know.
And the problem is this, that half the capital is controlled by a general, a former henchman of his, who he hates in general honor, and the other half is controlled by the security forces run by his sons, and particularly his eldest son.
And the Americans and the Saudis are in there stirring the pot and it's really a confusing situation.
Well now, as far as the Americans stirring the pot, that means trying to keep him in power, right?
Well, either trying to keep him in power or what the U.S. is doing now in Egypt, which is having thrown Mubarak to the wolves.
They are trying to keep the same power structure that kept Mubarak in power in place, the same military oligarchy that ran Egypt, and they're doing it through bribery and coercion.
Same thing in Yemen.
They're going to try now and keep the most pro-U.S. or U.S.
-oriented groups in Yemen, mainly the army, the intelligence service, the special forces in control working with the Saudis.
Well, that sounds plausible enough.
I guess the question is whether the protesters, who after all, they've stuck with it, not winning for a much longer time than it took the people of Egypt to overthrow Mubarak, and they've really kept their spirits up over there despite being cracked over the head for months on end now.
I guess really the question then would be whether they'll be able to have a political government that will be able to exercise a modicum of restraining power on those intelligence agencies and military forces, or do you think that maybe the military and the intelligence agencies will just fall apart?
They are pretty solid.
Some of them are tribally based, and that brings up the other major problem, because you have to superimpose on this very confused scenario tribal and regional stresses that are going on inside Yemen, a very unstable country.
I've been there many times when they're shooting, they're closing the gates of Sana'a at night with armed guards on the battlements, and it's all very medieval, and it's really a wild and crazy place.
You've got different tribes who are fighting against each other and in revolt against the government.
Then in the south you have Aden, the former British colony of Aden, formerly South Yemen, wants to break away again from the north, and way up north on the Saudi border there's a tribe called Houthis who are shooting things up and have been attacked by U.S. aircraft and CIA aircraft.
Very confused situation.
Tell me this, is there such a thing as Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula?
Here, let me give the devil his due first.
You read James Bamford, and then you know the story about how, and in fact talking with Michael Scheuer too, I got his side of the story about how the NSA had the phone tap on the Yemen switchboard house where basically they were handling all Al-Qaeda's phone calls out of there.
It was the father-in-law of one of the hijackers, one of the ones that was living with the FBI friend in San Diego there.
The NSA wouldn't share the intercepts with the CIA, so the CIA built their own listening station in Madagascar, but they could still only get half the conversation, and the NSA wouldn't share the rest, and George Tenet wouldn't stick up for him.
That's the way Scheuer tells the story, that kind of thing.
The Bin Laden family is of course Yemeni in the first place.
And also they say that this guy, Anwar al-Awlaki, although I haven't seen any credible accusation that he's some kind of operational terrorist leader.
He gives inspirational speeches in favor of war against the United States.
But they say that he's a part of this Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula as well, this Yemeni branch of Al-Qaeda.
And so now that I've given the devil, aka the American Empire, its due for its argument, tell me whether and to what extent, if so, there is such a thing as Al-Qaeda in Yemen, and what needs to be done about it?
Eric Margulies?
There is.
There are a bunch of guys who are very anti-American, who want to drive American influence, and really de facto imperial influence, out of Yemen and out of the Arabian Peninsula, which was Bin Laden's goal.
And now when you say a bunch of guys, how many is a bunch of guys?
A handful.
How many is a handful?
A handful?
10, 15, maybe 20.
In the whole country?
Yeah, maybe even less.
You know, our multifarious intelligence agencies and security agencies, anybody who's anti-American, who doesn't agree with the big picture, is Al-Qaeda, are terrorists.
So of course you see terrorists everywhere, but in fact, what's left of the Al-Qaeda, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula was never an organic part of Al-Qaeda based out of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
It is a group of militants who simply adopted the name, as happened with Al-Qaeda in Iraq, and Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, that is in North Africa, and took the name.
They're really a boogeyman.
And there's this Iwaki guy, he's a big mouth, he's a loud mouth who loves attention, but aside from that, the U.S., by trying to attack anybody it deems to be an enemy, is creating more enemies than it's eliminating.
Yeah, well that certainly seems to be the case.
You know, I can't get out of my head, out of the whole 7,000 word thing it was, in this New York Times Weekend Magazine article that came out, I guess last summer or something, where he talks, basically, you've got to get to the end of the thing before you really get to the point that there's hardly such a thing, and the more we fight it, the more we make it, and probably staying out of Yemen would be a good idea, and if there was ever such a thing as a hornet's nest full of humans, this is it, and we ought to back off.
But he also says in there that he talked to this villager, and said, you know, so what do you think about, I don't know, reaper drone strikes in Yemen or something, and the guy said, what's Yemen?
He'd never heard of Yemen in whatever language you tell it.
He said, all I know is I pay money to my local warlord, and his name is Davis or whatever, and I pray to Allah up in the sky.
I've never heard of Yemen before.
This is the land that we've got to invade to protect ourselves from, in some sort of preemptive, at least, reaper drone, CIA, JSOC teams on the ground, I'm sure.
Well, they are.
Yeah, they are there.
We have been operating for quite a while in Yemen, which I know from my personal experiences is a mystifying country.
Very few people understand it.
And you know, there's no real, it's like in Pakistan, there's a government in the capital, Sanaa, but the government doesn't really control very much, and everything's left up to local tribes and warlords and bandits and this type of thing.
So trying to impose any kind of government is very difficult.
But on the other hand, these Yemenis, like the Pakistanis, are not stupid.
They say, oh, tell the Americans that they're terrorists just around behind the next building, and the money will fall from the sky.
Sure.
It sure does.
Yeah, along with the cluster bombs.
All right, well, we'll be right back with Eric Margulies.
EricMargulies.com is the website.
You can also read him at lourockwell.com.
The book is American Raj.
That's your Amazon.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with Eric Margulies once again.
His website is ericmargulies.com.
Also writes at lourockwell.com.
And we're talking about Yemen.
And where we left off, Eric, you said you'd been there a bunch of times, and the way it works, and you'd already described, you've got the more socialist-type secessionists in the south, and you've got the Houthi Shia sect in the north, have their own little Nation of Islam thing going on up there.
And they've been fighting on and off for a long time.
Of course, it used to be Yemen and South Yemen and all that.
It seems like you say the president really only controlled Sana'a and basically amounted to the tribal leader of that city, and everything else is up to tribal leaders everywhere else.
It seems like these people protesting over all this time have been very concerned over who's the mayor of Sana'a, if that's really what his job was.
And I guess he still had, well, he was the one waging the war against the secessionist-type movements in the north and south, but also he was the one in charge of the torture police that everybody else in the country was subject to.
I guess I'm really kind of interested in trying to get my head around the idea of how much of a Karzai-type figure is he, and how much of a real dictator of the whole country is he, and how does that power work, that kind of thing.
Well, Karzai is sort of an amiable figurehead ruler, a general running Yemen who's been there, for God knows, 36 years.
Saleh is a very tough man.
You're right, his police are brutal, they torture people.
He's been backed to the hilt by the U.S.
And the Yemenis are protesting because of massive corruption that always is brought when the U.S. takes over these countries, because the U.S. expresses its power primarily through money.
So money infuses and corrupts everybody and buys whatever they want in Washington.
But people are angry at corruption, but they're also angry at feeling that they're being ordered around by Washington, that their government is more interested in taking orders in Washington than it is about doing something for Yemen, which has plunged into economic despair and is now the poorest country in the Arab world.
It was always poor, but it's even poorer now because most of the money, what little money it had has been stolen and mismanaged.
Its oil is running out.
Its trade is non-operative.
It is a government that has only cared for keeping itself and its relatives in power.
Now let me ask you a little bit about Bahrain.
Have you been to Bahrain?
Yes.
A little island nation in the Persian Gulf there.
I don't know if you've been following Roy Gutman's work in McClatchy newspapers lately.
I haven't, but I have great respect for him.
I was just thinking about him this morning, in fact.
I'm not sure if he's still there or not.
Last I read, it was about a week ago or so, but he's done, I don't know, at least 10 good articles in a row about the protest movement being abducted and tortured, their mosques being bulldozed, and that whole Pearl Square movement thing has been crushed in Bahrain.
I was just wondering if you could help fill in the people that could understand a little bit better about how things work there.
Well, of course, Bahrain has long been regarded as a Saudi protectorate.
In fact, it's an island off Saudi Arabia, and the Saudis even built a causeway to connecting Saudi with Bahrain, in part so that Saudis could drive over there to drink and gamble and hoop it up on the weekends, but also so that their troops could move in.
Bahrain is the base for the U.S. Fifth Fleet, which controls the whole Gulf area and the oil supply routes.
So it's a big American air base there, so it's very important, and it's ruled by Sunni minority rulers over a restive Shia population.
And Roy Goodman's reports and other reports coming from there are very vivid, that people are being shot, they're being tortured, government people are going into hospitals and shooting doctors and patients and dragging them out.
It's an abominable situation, and this is being done by U.S. and Saudi finance forces.
The Saudis sent in troops from their National Guard there.
There are probably U.S. mercenaries involved in there, too.
We don't really know.
But it is a situation of dreadful repression, which stands in remarkable contrast to Libya, where the West is pounding the hell out of Qaddafi's forces, supposedly to save civilians from being killed, while civilians are being gunned down in Bahrain, in Yemen, and now on the Golan Heights and in Palestine by U.S.
-backed governments.
Yeah, well, you know, Admiral Mullen was actually asked on one of the Sunday morning news shows, what's the difference between Libya and Bahrain?
And he answered simply, Bahrain is our ally.
Well, that's right.
There are SOBs, as the old line goes about Somoza, from way back when.
But, you know, this doesn't bother us.
Americans don't really care about these places.
They don't know where they are, most of us.
But the problem is that this double standard enrages people across the Muslim world.
I've been watching it for years.
It's in both of my books on this subject.
One of the reasons they hate us is not because of our values or because of our music.
It's because of our errant hypocrisy and double standard on such things as Palestine and now the Arab revolutions that are going on.
But what's going on in Bahrain is really shameful, and it's tempting Iran to become more deeply involved, to come and rescue the oppressed Shias of Bahrain from repressive Western-backed rule.
Well, to paraphrase Bill Hicks, that was my hoot of the week last week, or the week before, I forget, where Barack Obama accused the Iranians of hypocrisy in supporting the protest movement in Bahrain when they put down their own protest movement.
And I thought, wow, really?
This is Mr. Three-Dimensional Chess so smart that he's going to get everything done and whatever?
And he can't even just see one checkers move ahead in that argument?
That who's the hypocrite, Mr. Democracy, supporting the monarchy, acting just like the Iranians, putting down their protesters?
Come on, man!
Not all of us are Rush Limbaugh blind over here, you know?
I don't know what it is about the White House.
Maybe it's something in the water that makes a man who appears honest and upright come into office.
Or even lukewarm intelligent, come on!
Yeah, telling this kind of errant nonsense and really shameful hypocrisy.
I don't mind if Hillary Clinton's nose grows a foot longer, but I don't like to see our president have the same condition.
Yeah, I mean, he should just keep his mouth shut while he's killing people, and then that way it won't be so offensive to our ears, you know?
That's right.
All right, well, so talk to me about the Golan Heights.
You know, there's a great blog entry on Antiwar.com today by John Glaser about just the New York Times coverage of Syria as compared to the Golan Heights and Israel, and how the terrible Syrian government massacres the innocent children in the streets, and how when it comes to Israel, the Syrians sent these people to divert attention away from their own protesters to attack us, and yet they're mowing down unarmed civilian protesters, right?
That's because they may be children and youngsters, but they're terrorist children, they're terrorist youngsters, and they're potential...
They did look brown in the pictures.
That's right, and they're terrorist activists.
You know, the New York Times was out with that agitprop story just as quickly as the Israeli government could say it, so you wonder how closely they're working together, but it is shameful.
You know, this reminds us of a fact that has almost gone down the memory hole, and that is that the Golan Heights was occupied by Israel in 1967 after many provocative Israeli attacks on the heights, according to the late Moshe Dayan, and Israel grabbed the Golan Heights, which contains the main headwaters for the Israeli water system.
It puts Damascus in range of Israeli artillery, and it has absolutely commanding strategic value.
It occupies it illegally.
It drove out between 100,000 and 250,000 Arab and Druze residents.
It took the capital.
I've been there.
I've been over every inch of the Golan Heights.
The capital was bulldozed by Israeli bulldozers, completely destroyed.
It's 150,000 to 250,000 refugees, ethnically cleansed from the Golan Heights.
Israeli settlers moved in.
Israel is virtually annexed Golan.
There's no way it's going to give it up.
It doesn't even want to hear about the Golan Heights, and that's why it's so annoyed that these demonstrators came on the border and suddenly reminded the world that Israel is holding this area in violation of U.N. mandates.
Yeah, well, and annoyed enough to hold their fully automatic triggers down, too, it sounds like.
Well, that's good.
Those are bad Arabs, and they have to be shot for the sake of security and stability.
However, then there are good Arabs who are demonstrating against people we don't like, and if they get shot— Right, those same people, when they are facing the other direction, protesting against Assad.
Well, it's a very tricky situation.
That's why one has to be diplomatic about it.
All right.
All right, great.
Great place to leave it.
Thanks very much for your time, Eric, as always.
Really appreciate it.
All right, everybody.
That's the great Eric Margulies.
EricMargulies.com.
That's the show for today.
See you tomorrow.
Anti-war radio.
