All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
Santi War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest on the show today is the great Eric Margulies.
His website is ericmargulies.com.
He's the, spell it like Margolis and you'll find it.
He's the author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj, Liberation or Domination.
And sorry, Eric, I just lied to you about where this interview is going to start today.
Welcome back to the show.
It's great to be back with you.
OK, well, here's where it's going to start.
We've talked about this before, but I think it's real important for people who are listening, especially first time listeners, maybe.
Can you tell us your story about Sheikh Abdul Azam bin Laden's mentor and how he threatened the United States way back in 1989?
Real quick.
Yes.
Do I have that right?
Yes, you do.
I'm impressed by your memory.
The year was 1986, I believe, or 85, I'm not sure, somewhere around there.
OK, even further back then.
Yeah.
I was in Peshawar, Pakistan.
I was covering the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
That's when the Afghans or the Pashtun tribesmen we were arming and supporting were freedom fighters and the Soviets called them terrorists.
And anyway, I met a little man who was head of the Afghan Information Service who was trying to...he was a Palestinian and he was trying to bring to the world, and particularly the Muslim world, the story of the totally one-sided struggle of the Afghan Mujahideen against the Soviets.
And his name was Abdullah Azam.
And you know, all these little documents on the table and things like that, and I didn't think too much of him at the time until later I found out that he was bin Laden's spiritual advisor and had really inculcated into bin Laden much of his philosophy.
And he left me with a message that really rocked me back on my heels, and that was, he looked at me, he said, you know, he said, when we have finished driving the Soviet imperialists out of Afghanistan, we're going to turn and drive the American imperialists out of Saudi Arabia.
And way back then, in my innocence, I'd never heard of Americans ever called imperialists.
The Soviets had, but not by anybody else.
And I was taken aback, and his words remained with me over the years, and of course his words and instruction lie at the heart of much of Muslim resistance to Western domination that we call terrorism.
And now, so help me parse then, Islamic extremism from a willingness to commit suicide attacks against the United States, because after all, these Al Qaeda guys, they are pretty Islamic extremist in their ideology.
I'm not saying necessarily every one of their hijacker volunteers, you know, were apparently they weren't, but, and obviously they had earthly reasons for doing what they did, but if you listen to much of the rhetoric or ideology of Ayman al-Zawahiri or Osama bin Laden, it would seem like the war party is right, that these guys really are some really crazy Muslim extremist types, and that's the reason that, for example, this guy Azzam would have told you way back then, that they're coming for us, because the Koran mandates that they kill us all until we're all Muslims, that kind of thing.
Well, you know, that is just not the case.
There are a small hard core of extremists who are willing to go as far as suicide, which by the way is a sin in Islam, but their numbers are tiny.
They're probably no more than, you know, could fill a basketball court.
And they are really the hard extreme.
There are a lot of militant groups who are very anti-US, and some of them say, well, you know, if we had B-52 bombers and tanks and cruise missiles, we'd use them instead of our own bodies.
But we don't.
We're poor people.
This is a poor man's war, and the only weapon we have is giving ourselves to inflict punishment on the enemy, and that's what they're doing.
All right.
Well, so is winning the war on terrorism as simple as calling it off, then?
Will you just stop meddling over there, and we'll stop having to worry about suicide attacks here?
That's quite right.
All that has happened, 9-11 and down the line, has been done by people who are angry at American policy in the Muslim world.
It has nothing to do with our values or as other people have been saying, to our way of life or any of this other phony claims that President Bush made.
It has entirely to do with the fact that we've been mucking around in the Middle East since 1945, overturning governments, bombing countries, putting despots in power, and we're getting blowback.
It's the British called it the cost of empire.
Yeah, they would never admit that that's what it's called here in America.
They hate us because we're free, all right?
They hate us because we're good.
That's it.
And we go to Sunday school.
We go to church on Sunday.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
All right.
Well, now, so speaking of mucking around over there, it seems like, and we've talked about this before, the situation in Pakistan, in its broad outlines anyway, really is reminiscent of Vietnam, where if it wasn't for that safe haven on the other side of the border and the Ho Chi Minh Trail and all that, we wouldn't be losing our war in Vietnam or in Afghanistan.
So we need our drone strikes.
We need our B-52 bombings on the other side of the line.
We'll bribe the Pakistani, Cambodian, and Laotian princes to allow us to bomb their countries without end in the name of winning our war in the other country over the hill there.
And what ended up happening in Southeast Asia was the Khmer Rouge came to power and instituted the worst nightmare ever imagined by mankind, actually carried it out, at least on their scale anyway, until the Vietnamese stopped them, actually.
The communist Vietnamese stopped them, finally, over Ronald Reagan's wishes.
But so I wonder, you know, after watching the debate last night and watching Michelle Bachmann and Rick Perry and all these people in the Republican presidential nomination process trying to grapple with Pakistani issues, it seemed to me that basically their conclusion was this country is at risk of falling apart, Pakistan, and that's why we need to bomb it more.
And I was wondering whether you thought that the bombing of Pakistan is, I mean, I guess I could see on the surface a plausible case, right?
The more extremists you kill, the less of them there are, the less danger the government is in, basically seemed to be the Bachmann math on the situation.
Can you please analyze the situation for us?
Well, it's painful watching these people who are supposed to represent the Republican Party coming out with such foolishness and ignorance.
It's really frightening.
You know, I have to think, people who live abroad, Americans, we don't seem to bother us that our designated leaders are nincompoops.
And dangerous ones, too.
But abroad, people looking at the debates and listening to the statements made by these crackpot Republicans like Newt Gingrich and this awful Bachmann woman are appalled.
My God, these are people who may end up holding the destiny of the world in their hands.
And they're know-nothings, they're ignorant, and they're angry.
So it's a very great concern.
And of course, as we've been saying before, the only two people, the only two Republican, leading Republican candidates who speak any sense and have any knowledge of the issues are Ron Paul and John Huntsman.
And they are given short shrift by the media and on the TV debates.
Well, Dr. Paul actually got a lot of chance to respond in the debate last night.
I don't know if he saw it, but he did not get to answer about Afghanistan and Pakistan, unfortunately.
Except at the very end, he worked in a thing about saying, stop misunderstanding what Taliban means.
Taliban doesn't mean people who want to come here and kill us.
It means people who want to kill us over there because we're over there occupying their country the same as we would shoot at them if they were here.
I'm very happy to say that Dr. Paul listed my book, my new book, American Raj, as one of the three top reading materials.
Oh, great.
Yeah.
I'm very happy to hear that because I know that you got this story really straight after all these years.
And, you know, people don't really know.
Maybe you can tell them in a real quick minute before we have to go out to this break.
Of course, we'll talk about Pakistan and hopefully Syria on the other side of this thing.
But maybe you can tell people briefly about your experience covering these foreign wars.
I think they just heard that you were in Afghanistan in the 1980s during the great Reagan-backed jihad against the USSR.
What else you know about the Middle East, Eric?
Well, I've covered the Middle East for over 50 years.
I'm leaving for Cairo and Istanbul tomorrow night.
I've lived in Cairo.
I've covered a whole bunch of Mideast wars.
I've been to every Mideast Arab country.
I've covered wars in Africa, all over the place, in Asia.
I've been with the Mujahideen.
I've been with the Taliban, with the intelligence agencies there up in Kashmir, fighting in the mountains, the Siachen Glacier, you name it.
I've been there.
I'm showing high metal fatigue right now.
And I've used up 12 of my 9 lives.
All right, hold it right there.
Yeah, threatened with death by Saddam Hussein's minions at one point even, I read.
All right, hold it right there.
EricMargulise.com, everybody.
All right, kiddos, welcome back to The Thing here.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my radio show, Anti-War Radio.
And once again, surprise, surprise, I'm talking with the great Eric Margulise, EricMargulise.com, about American foreign policy.
But tell me real quick, I'm sorry, because we got interrupted by the break there.
I just heard about this one in your recent article at the American Conservative Magazine about how right you were before the Iraq war about why not to do the Iraq war and exactly what would happen as a result.
And you talked about how funny it was that people were calling you pro-Saddam when in fact his, what, Mubarak had threatened to hang you?
Yes, you know, I was one of the few journalists who was in Baghdad, this was before the first Gulf War in 1990, who was there trying at least to be balanced in my reporting and report what was going on with India on the Iraqi side and what they were thinking.
And for my pains and for snooping around, you know, I found a bunch of hostages who Saddam was holding there and got them to do a special photo feature in the Iraq.
And then I was finding out about Iraq, some of their secret germ weapons programs that we had given them, we and the British, the U.S. and Britain set up germ warfare program in Iraq.
Which we spoke about on the show last week.
Yeah, to be designed to be dumped on the Iranians.
Well, anyway, to make a long story short, the Iraqi secret police threatened to hang me as a spy and as an Israeli spy as well.
And were you an Israeli spy?
No, I was not an Israeli spy.
So the Israelis were also angry at me, accusing me of being pro-Saddam, which I certainly was not.
I mean, anybody who spent time in Saddam's Iraq could hardly be pro-Saddam.
But I am pro-truth, and I keep at it.
Yeah, indeed.
Well, and people really should not miss that great article in the American Conservative Magazine at their newsstand and on the website there about who won the Iraq war, looking back now.
You called it way in advance, and there's actually a Pat Buchanan article that someone sent me the other day from October 2002, where just like you, he called every single bad thing that's going to happen as the result of this, basically.
Well, both of us were called traitors.
And I remember being...
Unpatriotic conservatives, according to David Frum.
Unpatriotic, that's right.
Unpatriotic by the people who were pumping for a war run on American money and American blood that would benefit a foreign country.
Yeah.
Well, I don't know if you saw this, but Matt Barganier blogged it at Antiwar.com this week about David Frum saying, no, we shouldn't have gone in because we thought Saddam had nuclear weapons and that's why we went.
Yeah, right.
But now that we know that he didn't, no, we, in retrospect, we shouldn't have done it.
But for the Iraqi people, there's no price too high for them to pay to be rid of Saddam.
He's decided for them.
It's ironic that both Saddam and Gaddafi most likely were two Arab rulers who did the most for their countries in terms of bettering the population and education and women's rights.
They ran dictatorships, but they'd made a lot of social progress.
Contrast this to some of our American allies in the region who have absolutely not done that.
Mm-hmm.
Well, which brings us to our current intervention in Syria, apparently with the Qataris, the Saudis and the Turks, and must be the Israelis working together to overthrow Bashar al-Assad, the last Middle Eastern country, or at least last Arab country in the Middle East where you can get a drink.
They're determined to overthrow his secular dictatorship and replace it with I don't know what.
Well, I call Libya, the Gaddafi and Syria, for sure, what I call a disobedient Arab country.
They were the last two Arab countries that did not tow the party line from Washington.
Rogue states, remember?
And they're on the way out, for sure, because there is a coalition of forces against the Assad regime in Syria.
It's a very brutal regime.
It's time that it's long overdue that it pack up and leave.
It's done the country not much good, but at least it's kept the peace.
It's protected minorities.
It's encouraged economic development, and countries like that, as long as you don't get involved in politics or trying to overthrow the government, things are pretty good.
But it's time has now come to an end, and everybody's against it.
Well, yeah, and it's inside and out, and TV basically makes it seem like just a bunch of peaceful protesters being mowed down, and yet there's report after report about foreign intervention going on.
It's not just a natural thing, their time has come.
It's being forced from the outside, no?
That's correct.
It's being forced from the outside.
The plan was developed by the U.S., Israel, and Saudi Arabia working together.
There are armed groups that are being brought in from Lebanon that are allied to the Lebanese extreme right-wing phalangist groups who are Israeli allies.
And this plan has been in the works ever since the Bush administration, and now it's gone into high gear, because what was worried before was that the U.S. was going to overthrow the Syrian regime, but then they didn't know who to replace it with.
Now they don't care.
There's such a lust, and such a mania to overthrow the Syrian regime, not so much per se, but as a way of getting at Iran.
There's anti-Iranian hysteria going on, Get Iran is sort of a lynch mob forming, let's get those Iranian swine.
And the way they do it, their Achilles heel is Syria.
So that blow is absolutely happening now, and it is being fueled by a number of countries in the region.
It's dangerous stuff, so they're playing with fire.
Well when we read about this so-called free Syrian army in Turkey, does that mean that the Israelis and the Turks are friends again?
No, I don't think so.
I'm going to be in Turkey tomorrow.
I just don't understand the thinking of the Turkish government on this issue, besides the fact that they're just angry at the Assad regime, which seems to have misled the current AK government in Turkey.
Well yesterday, I believe it was, the Prime Minister, or the President, I guess it's the Prime Minister of Turkey, called for Assad to quit, went that far.
That's right.
Erdogan, you know, said you're going the same way as Hitler and Mussolini and Gaddafi, and they're unusually strong words.
I mean, Prime Minister Erdogan is noted for being outspoken, but this went beyond the bounds of anything that I've heard.
President of Turkey, who's in England, said something similar, a little diplomatic.
So the Turks are beating the war drums.
I don't know why, because they've had very good relations with Syria over the last eight, nine years.
They do a lot of trade with Syria, there are water issues, there are all kinds of things.
But the Turks obviously have determined that the Assad regime is finished, and they are positioning themselves, as they did reluctantly in Libya too, to be on the winning side of the battle.
And this puts them in the same camp as the Americans and the Israelis.
There may be a little cooperation, but I don't think there's a lot yet.
So, but, I guess they're shrugging and figuring they'd be more or less comfortable with whatever, I guess, armed Sunni radicals, the Saudis and Stalin power there?
That's correct.
And the bedrock of opposition in Syria is, of course, the Muslim Brotherhood, which is very conservative, in some cases extreme resistance group.
But once these groups come out of the underground and into the daylight, they may change.
If you watch, you'll see most of the demonstrations in Syria occur on Friday afternoon, after mosque prayers.
And if you look at the people who are demonstrating, many of them are bearded zealots shaking their fists and, yes, this is, the Assad regime really is facing a major conservative Muslim insurrection.
Well, which I guess is sort of better than a radical one, although it's kind of hard to parse those things.
And I guess they're radicals while they're fighting in their conservatives once they gain power.
So it is how it works, huh?
Usually.
But you never know.
We may get some very extreme people who come into power.
Actually, you know, under the Assad, Syria has always adopted a very cautious foreign policy and not tried to make trouble in the region.
It was constantly threatened by attack by Israel.
But I don't think this will continue.
I think you're going to get a much more militant government in there.
But again, you know, Syria is a weak country economically, militarily.
Its armed forces look large on paper, but they're 1960s vintage and completely dilapidated.
Their air forces are useless.
So Syria does not have much inherent power.
And does this mean just sort of ipso facto war with Iran if there is a regime change in Syria?
It will certainly bring it a step much closer.
That raises the question, Scott, would Iran intervene in Syria and send in troops to try and protect the regime against an uprising?
That would be a really interesting scenario.
Will the Israelis intervene?
We don't know.
And now there's talking about the Turks setting up a no-fly zone, sort of a security area.
Will the Turks get embroiled in this messy situation?
This could be a nightmare for the entire Middle East.
I hope it doesn't happen.
All right.
Well, as soon as you get back, or maybe even if you can get to a phone with a good line on it while you're over there, please let us know.
I'd love to interview you and find out what you're finding out while you're there.
I'd like to collect a call from a phone booth in Cairo.
Okay.
Good deal.
All right.
Thank you so much, Eric.
Appreciate it.
Bye-bye.
Everybody, that's the heroic Eric Margulies.
EricMargulies.com.
War at the top of the world and American Raj, liberation or domination are the books.
