Alright 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 good ol' Eric Margulies, from ericmargulies.com, spell it like Margolis, and you'll get it right, ericmargulies.com.
He's the author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
Welcome back Eric, how are you doing?
I'm glad to be back with you Scott.
Well good, I'm happy to have you here.
So here's my thing, yesterday on the show Phil Giraldi was here, I'm sure you're familiar with him from the American Conservative and Anti-War.com, former CIA and DIA officer, and he said that he'd spent the morning on the phone with people he knows and trusts inside the government who say that they're in the position to know, and they say that this Iran plot was at least somewhat real, I mean we can tell from the indictment that all the worst parts of it were made up by the informant, but supposedly this guy had a cousin in the Quds Force in Iran, was sending him some money, and trying to get him to attack a Saudi ambassador one way or another, Phil said it was very strange, he didn't think it was the official government of Iran at all, that it must have been some weird rogue side project of somebody or something, but that it wasn't completely bogus like every other terrorism case in this country since Mosawi or whatever, what do you think?
Well Scott, I'm also with American Conservative, have been from their first issue, and the whole thing smells to high heaven to me, as a veteran observer of intelligence operations just does not compute, it's too early to say what, because we really know very little aside from the accusations that have been leveled, but you know one always has to be ultra-cautious with these FBI sting plots, we saw one recently in Boston I think it was, where they picked some idiot and kind of talked him into some absurd plot to fly model airplanes to crash into the Pentagon at the White House, you know the chap may have been mentally defective, we just don't know, but I'm very dubious about sting operations, which the KGB, which loved them dearly, used to call them provocations, but you know it just smells to me.
Well clearly the C4 and the let's blow up a restaurant and all the rest of this stuff was coming from the FBI agent, but the part that seems hard to manufacture, I mean if it's indeed true at all that $100,000 came from Iran to this American bank account, although that I'll tell you right there it wasn't the Iranian government that did it, they just deposited the money for the attack and the chase or something, come on.
It may have been a criminal action where people were getting money out of Iran, it may have been a drug case, there are many possibilities, the Iranians are very smart people and I can't believe that their senior echelons would have been involved in such a ham-handed action.
In Washington D.C. the most provocative type of action they could do falling right into the hands of all of Iran's enemies in the United States, you know I just sent out a little tweet saying, no a Facebook thing, saying that reminds me back during the Reagan administration days, there was an Israeli Mossad agent named Manachur Gorbanifar, who was an Iranian arms agent and he just died recently I think, and the Israelis got to go spreading around Washington stories about Libyan hitmen who were going after American senators in the present, there was panic and there were Muslims under our beds and it was a great kerfuffle, turned out to be absolute nonsense, but you can already see that the anti-Iranian propaganda mills in the U.S. and the U.S. media particularly have gone into high gear now churning out the story, but let's see what happens with it, I think they'll be much less there than meets the eye.
Well and you know Phil in his first answer on the show yesterday cut straight to the heart of the matter which is don't bomb Iran over this no matter what it is, that this couldn't possibly be, even if the indictment is true in every detail, it still is no indication whatsoever that this was an official covert op by the Iranian government or in any way amounts to a cost to Spelly at all, and that of course we know that the war party from the Pentagon to commentary magazine is cranked into full gear now to try to say see it's just a matter of time, we've got to get this thing done and all of that and that that needs to be our focus is pointing out that everything that the war party says about Iran this whole time is a sack of giant pile of lies and that this in no way justifies a single airstrike.
Of course not, but there are certain elements in the states who have been straining every sinew to push us into a war with Iran.
Now they could also manufacture a war much more easily by staging an incident in the Gulf with Iranian warships or aircraft or something like that rather than this kind of ham-handed plot.
Now I've met the Saudi ambassador and knew him before he was ambassador, I was on TV with him, Jubeir, and he's an innocuous inoffensive guy, he's intelligent, but he's no powerhouse like some of the former Saudi ambassadors to Washington who were really men of great influence.
He's just another ambassador.
Why anybody would want to kill him is beyond me.
And you know the thing is too is even in the official story they admit that they don't have any evidence that this is really an Iranian government plot, it's the headline writers even more than Eric Holder who come up with, you know, Iran is doing this.
When Holder's original statement made it pretty clear that they didn't have any evidence that Ahmadinejad or Khamenei were in on this thing.
You know the problem is these days that they take somebody like this, this used car salesman and they put him in front of a federal judge in Alexandria, Virginia, which are traditional hanging judges for the government, and they say look you either plead guilty or you're going to be locked up in a cell 23 hours a day for the rest of your life, or face even the death penalty.
So of course these little small fires scared, we've seen this over and over again with so-called terrorism trials or pumping full of drugs like this, this Musawi character, I'm sorry, the so-called dirty bomber.
You know I always had the highest respect for the FBI and they have a tough job but they used to follow lines.
It was the FBI, you know, that refused to participate in the torture of suspected prisoners after 9-11 and issued warnings.
I'm sorry to see the FBI getting deeply involved in these sting operations which are really political theater more than they are anti-criminal activity.
Well, and you know it's too bad that this doesn't make the giant blaring headline the way the breaking news about the so-called plot did the other day.
This one is from Roy Gutman in McClatchy Newspapers.
Saudis don't name Iran in condemnation of alleged murder plot.
They say this outrageous and heinous plot but we're still trying to determine who was behind it.
Which is a little bit contrary to the whole Iran did it meme that they're pushing on every channel here.
Exactly.
In fact I have Roy Gutman's card right here on my desk.
I was looking at it the other day.
I have a high respect for him.
He's a very credible voice that we should always listen to.
But yeah, the Saudis and the Iranians have been locked in a 20-year, 30-year, almost 30-year now fight.
They hate each other's guts.
They've been at war in Afghanistan, parts of the Middle East.
So for the Saudis, not the Ballyhoo this, as you point out Scott, it's very interesting.
It's telling.
Well you know, Hilary Mann-Levert was on CNN yesterday and she said, you know, the Iranians correctly believe that Saudi Arabia was financing Saddam Hussein's war against them along with Ronald Reagan in the 1980s for 8 years.
And they still never struck at Saudi Arabia or a Saudi target on earth one time.
That's correct.
The Saudis and the Kuwaitis paid $80 billion or something like that to finance Saddam Hussein's war against Iran.
And they still never blew up a single thing, even though it's right across the gulf.
They could shoot a missile across the gulf, you know.
All right, hold it right there.
It's Eric Margulies.
EricMargulies.com.
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 from EricMargulies.com, author of War at the Top of the World and American Rash.
And there's so much to discuss here.
I don't know if we can ever cover everything important about all these different things, but I want to change the subject to Syria now if I can, Eric.
Is America pushing a regime change there?
Is that more or less the story going on?
What is going on?
Oh, very much so, Scott.
It was during, under the Bush administration, Congress, on deprodding from the Friends of Israel, allocated many millions of dollars to overthrowing, for regime change as they called it in Syria.
This is public record.
How much, to what degree this program has continued under Obama, we don't know officially, but I hear unofficially from my sources in Washington that the administration is making a full court press to overthrow the Assad regime, and it's doing it in conjunction with Israel and with Saudi Arabia.
And it's part of the American counteroffensive, if you want to call it that, against the so-called Arab Spring, which is designed to use the unrest in the Arab world to implant new, more youthful, pro-U.S. regimes in the area.
But how do they hope to control the groups that they're supporting in overthrowing?
Can you give us some dividing lines a little bit about who's on whose side, and in what proportions?
Because I guess the last time I spoke with Pepe Escobar, he was saying that, I forget their names now, but two very important towns that are very middle-class, formerly pro-Assad towns, are now more and more joining the rebellion, and that things are really moving over there.
Well, they are, but it's a very fragmented situation, murky, very hard to discern.
I know my business contacts there, who are even much better informed than intelligence contacts, are telling me that it's, and these are Jordanians and Syrians, that they can't figure out who's who in this messy situation.
We can draw some broad strokes and say that you've got the long-repressed Sunni, most of, many of the Sunnis, not all, but many, who, particularly the Sunni business class, who think that they'd like to see a change.
You've got the Christians there who have relied on the regime for protection, 10% of the population, and are very afraid of any kind of regime change.
You've got the Kurds, who are a wild card, who nobody can control.
You've got the minority supporters of the regime, who are quite isolated.
It's a very complicated mess, and now you've got armed groups coming in from Lebanon, armed by the U.S. and the Saudis, to try and stage incidents and attacks.
But the key thing to remember is that the security forces, the 17 intelligence agencies and the army, are still remaining loyal to the regime.
All right.
Now, I have here this piece from 1996, I believe, by David Wilmser, called Coping with Crumbling States, a Western and Israeli Balance of Power Strategy for the Levant.
And in here he talks about, let's see, the issue is not whether Syria in its Ba'athist form will survive or prevail in the long run.
Like communism, Ba'athism's days are numbered.
The issue here is whether the West and Israel can construct a strategy for limiting and expediting the chaotic collapse that will ensue in the Middle East.
And he says, in order to move on to the task of creating a better circumstance.
Yeah, he means a better circumstance for Israel.
Like many of Israel's partisans in the government, he's trying to confuse U.S. objectives with Israel's objectives, not always the same.
Right, and this is actually written for an Israeli think tank.
And of course, David Wilmser, for people who aren't familiar, was a third-level guy, but very important at the State Department in the first Bush Jr. term, and then moved up to the Vice President's office, where he was Dick Cheney's Middle East advisor for the second term.
That's right, he was part of the fifth column in the State Department-Pentagon complex.
The important thing, what he's doing is echoing, parroting the original philosophy of the Zionist, militant, far-right-winger Vladimir Jabotinsky in the 1920s.
Israel's left calls him a Jewish fascist.
And these fascists, because they are pretty close to traditional Mussolini-style fascism, kept saying, and Jabotinsky's credo was, the whole Arab world is a fragile mosaic, and all it needs is a couple of sharp raps and knocks on it, it's going to fall to pieces, it's going to leave Israel as the dominant power in the Middle East, and also take Middle Eastern oil as a result.
And that's pretty much the credo of Israel's Likud party, they won't talk about it publicly, it sounds too aggressive, but that's the thinking.
And Wilmser is right, because you look at these Arab countries, and they're made up of nothing but brutal power and fear and intimidation.
Hit them hard enough and they will crumble.
So then the preference is to just have a bunch of warring tribes and no real states at all?
Except for Israel.
Except for Israel.
That's right.
The Zionist idea was to take the Arab world.
But is this the policy that Barack Obama is helping to implement in Syria right now?
That I can't answer, Scott, but certainly some of his advisors seem to think so, and it's certainly playing a big role in the strategic thinking, no doubt.
I mean, as ridiculous as it is, you can kind of imagine that maybe Hillary Clinton believes somewhere she's going to create a democracy there or something like that, but I don't even think Hillary Clinton could make herself believe that in this case, right?
If the Assad regime falls, then that means there's going to be a civil war there.
Well, you know, I saw Hillary Clinton on TV yesterday along with Vice President Biden denouncing attempted murder in Washington, state-sponsored murder, how awful this was.
Well, U.S. drones are flying around killing people all over the Muslim world.
Take it with a grain of salt.
I think Hillary's objectives have more to do with her plans to take over the Democratic Party after Obama falls than with bringing democracy in the Muslim world.
Yeah, well, I'm sure there's quite a bit of that in her strategery.
Well, so, but what's going to happen?
Are they going to get this?
It can't be too hard.
As you say, you hit them and they'll fall over.
You have somewhere near, at least, half the population of Syria would very much like to see Assad gone.
Are they simply playing into the hands of their enemies, the Israelis and the Americans?
Well, to an extent, yes.
I mean, the Israelis are delighted to see chaos in Syria for two reasons.
Number one, because Syria had some, could put some kind of military opposition to Israel, even though its armed forces are totally obsolescent.
And secondly, that Israel wants to hold on to the Golan Heights, which are Syrian territory, in hopes that Syria goes to chaos, the issue will disappear.
The Golan Heights dominate Israel's main water sources, the Sea of Galilee.
So this is a key Israeli strategy, and they're pushing very hard in the United, the road to Damascus for the Israelis leads through Washington.
The Syrians are very shaky.
I tell you, the Alawi or Alawite minority, from which the Assad family comes, have ruled Syria now for 30 years, and Sunnis are fed up with this, but they're just as scared of what will happen afterwards as the Muslim Brotherhood, which is probably the most influential force.
The economy is shrinking day by day.
People are getting desperate there.
They're in a tremendous economic siege.
So something eventually is going to give.
Well, you know, it's too bad that it's not all other things being equal, and the people of Syria can just have a regime change and try to get some semblance of self-government instead of a fascist dictatorship there.
But all other things aren't equal, and you have all these intelligence agencies running around.
Although if one thing is going for the Syrians, I guess it would be that the Israelis think they're benefiting from this.
Because just look at the Iraq War, for example, where Ahmed Chalabi says, oh yeah, we're going to give you a Hashemite king like in Jordan, and we'll build an oil and water pipeline to Haifa for you, and we'll be best friends with Ariel Sharon's government and all these things.
And they bought that, and look at what happened instead in Iraq.
It seems like every time the Likud party gets what they want, all they accomplish is the exact opposite of what they're trying to gain.
So if they think they're going to get an extra river this way, they'll probably lose and be at a net loss of one river by the end of it.
Well, that's what Israel's center and left says, but the messianic ambitions of the Likud party are not easily curbed.
Hey, you know what?
Could you stay on for one more segment after the top of the hour break here?
You, Scott, I'd hold my hand in the fire.
Awesome.
Well, good, because I want to ask about AFPAC, as the Democrats call our war over there in Central Asia.
It's Eric Margulies.
Put the phone down.
We'll be back at 6 after.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I got Eric Margulies on the line.
You can find what he writes at ericmargulies.com and at amazon.com and the rest of those kind of websites where you buy books.
War at the top of the world and American Raj, liberation or domination.
A couple of recent pieces you can find at ericmargulies.com are playing chicken with nuclear powers and 10 years of aimless war.
Now, so that's the one I want to ask you about is the 10 years of aimless war, but specifically the Pakistan side of the Afghan war there.
I guess it was last week before all my technical problems kicked in, Eric, that these stories came out.
India to train Afghan forces.
Pakistan warns Afghanistan after deal with India sparks fears of encirclement by New Delhi.
And Pakistan pulls closer to a reluctant China.
What in the heck is going on?
Well, more of chapter 4 of the great game in the area.
The United States is losing the war in Afghanistan in frustration.
Washington is first threatening Pakistan in all kinds of different ways, but it needs Pakistan so it can't threaten it too violently.
On the other hand, the Bush administration's idea has been to build up India as a counterweight to China and also to invite India into Afghanistan.
The Bush administration tried to get the Indians to send troops.
The Indians were too smart to do that.
But India is moving into Afghanistan in a big way.
It doesn't need it, but it's doing it to bedevil its old foe, Pakistan.
And right now India has invested over a billion dollars in a country where people are starving and living in the streets.
India has a billion dollars to invest in Afghanistan.
It's flooded the area with intelligence agents.
It's now to train Afghan forces, supposedly, which is an excuse for sending in Indian paramilitary troops.
And it is also deploying, it's building roads and it's sending in paramilitary troops from the Indo-Tibetan border force to protect these roads.
So the anti is up in Afghanistan.
And you say that the Indians have no real interest in this other than poking Pakistan in the eye?
That's right.
They may have some longer term interest in Afghan mineral resources, and Afghanistan is a very strategic country, but there's no immediate interest in Afghanistan for India, except, as I said, for a way of getting at old enemy Pakistan.
And the Pakistanis are reacting, they're going crazy over the idea of the Indians implanting themselves in Afghanistan, which the Pakistanis see as their strategic backyard.
And the Indians have now allied themselves fully with the Tajik and Uzbek minorities of the old Afghan Communist Party, and are also raising trouble for Pakistan in Pakistan's Balochistan province, where the Indians are funding and arming rebel groups, and also on the northwest frontier where some of these Afghan or Pakistani Taliban may be in the pay of the Indian Intelligence Service, RAW.
And so is this the Pentagon's decision that, yeah, we need the Indians for this or that reason, or we want to help them poke Pakistan in the eye for this or that reason, or this is actually the decision of the Northern Alliance that we've put in power there, that the Indians are their friends?
Well, both.
The U.S. has opened the door to the Indians, given them a green light.
All right, so what does the Pentagon want with the Indians there, in Afghanistan?
The Pentagon wants the Indians to fight the Taliban and to impose martial law.
Yeah, but that's what robots are for.
Well, and it also wants the Indians to try and block any eventual increased Chinese presence in Afghanistan, which worries the Pentagon.
As U.S.
-Chinese confrontation grows, so the U.S. is now looking at Afghanistan and worrying about what China's going to do there.
How many years do you think it'll be before America is 100% realigned with the Haqqani Network and the Pashtun tribesmen against the Russians and the Chinese and the Indians, for that matter?
Another 10 years or so.
Things move in decade cycles in that country.
All right, well, so, but to be specific here, now the Pentagon really thinks that they need the Indians?
I mean, they've got to see the whole counter, to some degree.
I know that they speak in your ridiculous fifth-grade PowerPoint presentations and whatever, but still, they've got to somewhat perceive this whole problem of the provocation of their friends, the Pakistanis, who support their enemies in Afghanistan.
It's pretty complicated stuff.
Look, my last book is called American Raj, and I chose that there.
Raj means imperial rule, like the British Raj in India, the empire, because the American empire is using the same tactics as the British Raj, and that is getting local potentates to do the bulk of the military heavy lifting.
You know, Britain ruled India when it had, I don't know, close to 300 million people with no more than 80,000 troops, and the reason is they got all these local forces and local native troops called sepoys under white officers, which is what the U.S. has been trying to do.
It's called training in Afghanistan.
And the Indians have a huge army.
They have over a million men, 1.1 million men in the Indian army, and about half a million men in the paramilitary units.
So it's, America would love to see the Indians come in and join the fighting, but the Indians are clever, and they're cautious, and they're not sure they want to get involved in a shooting war in Afghanistan.
And India's left wing, which still has a voice, is against it.
So then, but what about the Pakistani blowback?
The Pentagon guys just figure that they're balancing these things just the way they want it, or they're not guessing that in the future there could be consequences of the things that they do, or what?
No, I don't think anybody in Washington thinks more than a month in advance.
This is ad hoc stuff, bull in a china shop behavior being made up as they go along.
You know, Bush's nuclear deal with India, which suddenly made India's nuclear power kosher, was the beginning of this whole process.
It lit the fuse of an incredibly stupid and ill-considered action, and it has now set India and Pakistan on a, possibly on a nuclear collision course.
Pakistan is building more nuclear weapons.
There's talk the US is going to go after Pakistan's nuclear arsenal.
We have, we've ejected ourselves.
The reason I use the term playing nuclear chicken in the area is because we, the United States, have ejected ourselves now in a confrontation between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan, with nuclear-armed Russia just to the north.
The Israelis are now involved in Afghanistan and India.
It's turning into a big, bad, dangerous mess.
Tell me more about the Israelis in Afghanistan.
Well, two years ago, Israel's far-right-wing foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, announced in Washington that Pakistan's nuclear arsenal was a primary threat to Israel.
It didn't get much publicity, but amongst neocons, it set off all the usual alarm bells and set things spinning.
And the Israelis are very worried about Afghanistan, because they see it as a source of Islamic militancy.
They're worried just as it's part of the whole Pakistan equation.
The Israelis would very much like to see Pakistan defanged.
But what are they doing about it?
Well, they are, well, they're certainly supporting the Indians very strongly.
India's second-largest arms supplier is now Israel.
Some of India's nuclear weapons technology has come from Israel.
The Israelis are very active in Kashmir, fighting the insurgency there, using weapons and advisers.
And there are reports, unconfirmed, that the Israelis are starting to get active in Balochistan or in the northwest frontier, possibly in cahoots with India's intelligence service.
We're not sure.
It's all under the covers.
It's murky, but it points the way to further confusion.
All right, well, now we're almost out of time for this segment.
Can I keep you for one more?
Okay, one more.
Okay, one more, and then I'll let you go, because I'm sure you've got other things to write.
But I want to ask you one more question, at least, about Afghanistan.
And then, of course, you know, we've got a whole giant war in North Africa, and in Eastern Africa, and Southern Africa, soon in Nigeria, over there in Western Africa.
Maybe we'll find an excuse to invade South Africa, and everybody can meet in the middle.
I don't know.
Anyway, it's Eric Margulies.
We'll be right back after this, y'all.
All right, y'all, welcome back.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with Eric Margulies, ericmargulies.com.
And I'm sorry for keeping you on for so long, but it's your own fault, because you know so much about everything.
And there's a lot of questions that I have about things, so it works, you know.
You see the mesh there.
So few well-informed people in the media that it's an unusual pleasure to be on with you.
Okay, well, I sure appreciate that.
Check's in the mail.
Okay, so it's hard to decide which war to ask you about.
Now, I want to stick with Afghanistan for a second.
I do say that none of these people think more than a month in advance.
And obviously there are a lot of, you know, anybody can read Ludwig von Mises about the interests of bureaucrats and all that, and the Peter Principle of people rise to their level of incompetence and all of those things.
But somebody's got to figure.
You know, someone in charge of the military or intelligence agents somewhere must know that.
All right, look, there's no such thing as you win your war against the Afghan tribesmen, the Pashtun tribesmen, short of just dropping hydrogen bombs on them, and I don't know if that would even work in those mountains, really.
And so that's it.
We cannot win that war.
So what are they even going for, just stirring up chaos from now on?
Or do they really think, gee, if we only, you know, take Khe Sanh, that'll turn the whole war in our favor?
Or what the hell is going on over there?
You know, war has become institutionalized after 10 years.
It's part of our American way of life.
The, you know, $600 billion war creates jobs in the defense industry.
It's allowing decrepit defense manufacturers to suddenly come back to life, making all kinds of weird whiz-bang high-tech stuff to track Afghan tribesmen.
It has these untold numbers of so-called consultants who are working for the Pentagon or the CIA, as them work, and the defense industries in the southern states, where all the war supporters are, particularly, and in California, too.
And also, all the politicians who've hung their hats on this war are not going to risk their political careers by saying, well, geez, we were wrong, and I was wrong, and we sent American boys to their deaths for no good reason.
So the war is institutionalized.
I was in Washington, invited by Ron Paul to talk to a group of Republican congressmen on the war, and they told me, you know, I told them that this war was lost and that it's time to get the hell out and cut our losses.
And they said to me, we agree with you entirely, but we dare not say this in public because our political opponents will crucify us.
That's the bottom line.
Yeah, but see, I don't know.
I mean, I guess nobody ever accused a bunch of congressmen of having a bunch of courage, but it's just like if that guy John Kerry had really wanted to win in 2004, all he had to say was no, no, no, all of this is wrong, A, B, C, D, E, and lead a little bit, and he'd have won that election by a landslide, instead of, you know, cowering on every position.
All these people are such spineless weasels, you know?
And, you know, Kerry, I'm sure, he's got to be one hell of a sociopath to be that powerful.
But, I mean, like these congressmen that you're meeting, these House members that you're meeting that most of us have never heard of before and whatever, all they need is a tiny little bit of courage to do the right thing, and they'd be fine.
People would respect them for it.
Look, Ron Paul, speaking of courage and most courageous politician in Washington, certainly the most honest, stepped forward out of the mob, looked at the debates, and he came and he told Americans the truth.
But most of our fellow Americans do not want to hear the truth, and he's been ignored totally by the media.
Look at them during the debates.
They practically hardly had the camera on him.
He's described as a fringe candidate and radical.
So it is about the nature of American politics produces nonentities and banality.
We've become like the Soviet Union, you know, where the most bland politician rises to the top.
We have our own little Leonid Brezhnev.
And that's why it's a very good point about Kerry suddenly becoming gilded when he rose to a high position in the establishment, didn't want to endanger it by breaking the party line.
Yeah, even when he had ultimate power at his fingertips, if he'd only done the right thing a tiny bit, you know, blew it completely.
All these guys have battalions of advisors.
Remember in politics, you know, that the most important thing is not to get people angry at you, not to do the right thing or support America's interests, not to get people angry.
So you have to cater to all these different special interest groups and don't say anything contentious or you'll be in trouble.
I know this as a journalist.
You know, if you don't follow the party line and keep your head down, it's going to get cut off.
Well, you know, I've seen it's at the maybe last days of the empire here.
I hope it's all becoming so obvious even to anyone.
I think like if you look at the coverage of the rise and fall of Rick Perry, all the coverage is that, you know, the select group of plutocratic billionaires on welfare who decide they've changed their mind about him and they're switching back to Mitt Romney, that kind of thing.
And there's a hundred articles like that.
It has nothing to do with whether the people like him at all.
It's whether the billionaires believe in him anymore and they don't.
Well, that's the nature of politics.
You know, the Italian philosopher Vilfredo Pareto coined this iron law of oligarchy and it applies in every country and every age that powerful people with the money and influence shape the politics and determine them.
And right now they don't want a Ron Paul rocking the boat, shutting down the Fed and ending foreign wars.
They want more of the same, but we know that there can't be more of the same and it's becoming dimly aware even to the majority of Americans.
What do you make of all these reports of America's national terrorist something?
Somebody gave him a funny name on my Facebook page.
I forgot it now.
The Al-Qaeda guys that we've helped put in power in Tripoli, apparently they're just rounding up black people, putting them in prison, a lot of times shooting them on the side of the road, torturing people according to Amnesty International.
Is that regime change to help the poor people against their evil dictator over there or what?
You look at Libya and even as a seasoned foreign affairs veteran like me gets sick in my stomach when I watch the hypocrisy there.
We see the French who formed the current Libyan government pouring in there with businessmen.
Sarkozy just arrived there with a plane full of businessmen.
So did Canada's right-wing Prime Minister Harper with a plane load of businessmen and the Italians and the British.
It's carpetbaggers.
Aren't they getting a little bit ahead of themselves?
I mean, Sirte hasn't even fallen yet, right?
Well, Gaddafi's pretty well.
No, it hasn't fallen and they're bombing the hell out of it.
NATO's bombing the hell out of Sirte and killing tons of civilians, lots of civilians, to ostensibly to stop civilians being killed.
That was the reason for this phony humanitarian intervention.
This is crass 19th century colonialism at its worst.
Call it colonialism point two.
And we're seeing the takeover of a country that was ideal, unpopular, leader-hated, demonized, etc., etc.
It happened to be Africa's wealthiest country, but never mind.
So this is going on and we'll see who's going to be next for the liberation treatment.
What percentage chance do you give them of being able to even create a new monopoly state inside those old borders?
It looks pretty good.
We manned up with an Islamist in power there, our new best friends.
Oh, there you go.
Well, they'll be very effective, I'm sure.
All right, thanks very much, Eric.
Appreciate you staying on, especially over long like this.
Cheers, Scott.
Eric Margulies, everybody.ericmargulies.com
