Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
Okay, so it's Eric Margulies, ericmargulies.com, War at the Top of the World, American Raj, those are the books.
He's got a million essays there at ericmargulies.com, and he knows all about the Middle East.
He's reported from there for decades.
So now, who's backing what, and where are they at?
What the hell, I'm asking really broad questions, because I want to know what you think is most important for us to know about what's going on in Syria now.
The American public deserves to know what's going on in Syria, and it's not being told the truth.
The American media is presenting propaganda, U.S. government propaganda, regarding Syria, as is the BBC, I'm sad to say, and a lot of European media.
What's happening is this.
There's been simmering revolt against the Assad regime for decades.
It's been going on since the 1970s, when the Assad family has been ruling Syria all that time.
And a small uprising was started by armed groups being sent into Syria from Lebanon and Jordan.
These groups were armed and organized by Western intelligence services, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, probably Israel.
And their idea was to overthrow the Syrian government.
They have been backed now by the full power of the United States, France, the former colonial power, which wants to get its hooks back in there, and Britain.
And they are churning, stirring the pot in Syria, encouraging fighting a revolution.
Now, militant Islamist groups from the Muslim Brotherhood have entered the fray, fighting the government, particularly in the city of Homs and Hama.
In Hama in 1982, 10,000 people were killed by the government, the Assad government, who rose up.
So you've got these groups, but you also have many groups supporting the Assad regime.
Syria's Christians, who account for 10% of the population.
A lot of businessmen, middle class people in Aleppo and Damascus, the two main cities.
And the military and security services.
Syria is an ethnic mosaic, so one treads on it very, very carefully, because it could splinter and create an even worse mess.
Is that then what the Americans are going for, the splintering?
Well, initially, no.
Under Bush and Cheney, reliably informed, there was a plan to get the Israelis to invade Syria and overthrow the Syrian government.
It had a lot to do with the war that Israel was waging in Lebanon.
But finally, somebody with some brains in the administration said, well, wait a minute, if we overthrow Assad, who's going to take power?
And some expert came out and said, well, the Muslim Brotherhood, the word Muslim in the Bush White House, was a kiss of death.
So the plan was aborted.
Hillary Clinton is much more cosmopolitan than those old right-wing hicks in the Bush regime.
That's right, and she's looking for certain special interest votes for her presidential ambitions.
But what's happening now is that the rightful reticence over overthrowing Syria and creating a maelstrom in the heart of the Levant has now been overcome, those fears, by a blinding desire to damage Iran, because the Syrian government is a very close ally of Iran.
And Iran now has overridden hysteria over Iran and the United States and a war fever has overridden prudence and understanding in Syria.
So let's go and smash up Syria, tear down the Assad regime, and this will be a major blow to the Iranian government and could be step one of a two-part campaign to also overthrow the Iranian regime.
And I guess it would be way too much to wish for the American policymakers to think twice for a second about finding themselves again on the same side as Ayman al-Zawahiri and our enemies in Al-Qaeda.
I don't think it's really influencing anyone very much as a hue and cry.
As I said, there's hysteria, it's an election year, there's tremendous warmongering going on in the United States.
Does that make me a fringe element that I'm concerned about that?
We're going ahead and doing what Al-Qaeda wants again.
Dangerous fringe element for concern that we're going over yet another cliff in the Middle East.
Once again, you have ignorance and arrogance in Washington.
People don't understand Syria, they don't understand what's at stake.
Few people in Washington who do understand are not listened to, and so we're entering a very dangerous era.
We are moving towards intervention.
Now, the Bush administration authorized money to overthrow the Syrian government.
It's in the congressional record.
How much more we've been pouring into anti-government groups and propaganda, we don't know.
But the Western media has become an arm of the Western powers in trying to overthrow the Syrian government by delusion us with these heart-rending propaganda stories and all these very biased reporting.
You don't ever hear a Syrian spokesman side.
So we are definitely heading in the direction of war.
What's going to come out of it, we don't know, because the whole region is being relentlessly drawn into the Syrian cauldron.
Well, and this one just came out.
Hamas abandons Assad, backs Syrian rebels.
Ismail Haniyeh, or however you say it, has staked out his own claim today.
Jason Ditz reports at news.antiwar.com.
That's correct.
Hamas has been in the Lebanese nationalist movement.
Israelis call it terrorist movement, resistance movement.
It has been edging away from Assad.
It was based in Damascus, and it's talking about moving to Cairo.
It's caught in a very difficult situation, because its main support supplies and arms and money came through Syria.
So it's caught on a hot plate.
The Israelis are tickled pink by this, because Hamas is one of their, Hezbollah, sorry, is one of their, Hezbollah and Hamas are their two main targets.
Well, apparently the people in this crowd were chanting, no Hezbollah, no Iran.
The Syrian revolution is an Arab revolution.
According to, what am I clicking on here?
Reuters, anyway.
That's what the Hamas crowd was chanting.
Well, it's a very complicated situation.
There are all different kinds of factions within Hamas, within Hezbollah.
Hamas itself is trying to figure out what to do, whether to get back with the other Palestinians from the PLO or to stay apart.
Everything now is like a game of pick-up sticks.
Everything has just been thrown down on the table.
People are trying to figure out what to pick up.
Well, alright, so, if the Assad regime did fall and the Muslim Brotherhood came to power, does that mean, from now on, horrible oppression of everybody who's been backing Assad so far?
Oh, I think revenge indeed.
The Assad family has ruled now for 40 years.
And 70, 30, yes, 40 years.
It's been extremely brutal.
I mean, I've dodged the Syrian secret police myself enough times to know what a ruthless place that is.
The real police, they have 17 different overlapping police forces, secret police.
And a lot of people are angry and they want revenge.
It's going to be a bloodbath if the Sunni majority takes power.
Alright, we'll have to hold it right there as we go out to this break.
It's Eric Margulies, a long-time reporter from the Middle East, and on the phone from Canada.
We'll be back after this.
Alright, y'all, welcome back.
It's Anti-War Radio.
And, like always, we're on the phone with Eric Margulies.
This time talking about Syria.
And, you know, we kind of get stuck in a bind being individualists at a time like this, Eric, at least the way it seems to me.
I'm always in favor of anyone overthrowing their government because I regard all governments as illegitimate and I want to see secession down to the last man on Earth.
It'll probably be 20 billion of us by then or something, as long as it'll take to get there.
So I'll always favor anybody revolting, and yet not all revolutions go smoothly, and a lot of times they make things much, much worse, just as far as that goes.
And then the other thing is I don't want my own government to exist, and I sure as hell don't want it over there arming Lord knows who to go and drum up a civil war.
And, I mean, I don't know if you saw the headline on AntiWar.com today, the way Jason Ditz wrote it anyway, was Clinton, Syria rebels will find arms one way or the other.
And that's pretty much what she said.
Like, don't worry, there's covert action going on right now.
We're going to make sure that the Alawites die or whatever, she might as well have said.
And so, you know, how to be on the side of a revolutionary but against everyone who's helping them.
Well, I'm revolted too.
You know, I was in Tahrir, in Egypt, in Tahrir, Cairo's Tahrir Square recently, waving a revolutionary banner with the revolutionary crowds there.
I'm a revolutionary at heart like you too.
But I look at Syria, and I have complete sympathy with Syrians who are rising up against the brutal Assad regime.
They're sophisticated people with a noble history, and they deserve some kind of decent government, whether democracy or more benign government, at least than the brutal Assad regime.
But on the other hand, when I see the Western powers, the U.S., Britain, and France in particular, and the Saudis cynically using and arming and stirring up these uprisings to reimpose their control over Syria.
That's what this is all about.
In Libya, it was all about oil.
In Syria, Syria was a rogue state.
Remember, it wouldn't bow to U.S. demands, and the U.S. is determined to eradicate any kind of resistance and to teach Syria a lesson just the way that Iraq was taught a lesson.
This is 19th century colonialism at its best, and what we're seeing is a resurrection, a recrudescence, Steve, is a nice word, of the old imperial era.
All right, so we really have a situation where America backed all the dictatorships of the Middle East other than Syria and Iran and Iraq anymore, right?
Iran anymore.
I don't know how much influence America ever had in Syria, say, since World War II or whatever.
They just kind of barely brought in Gaddafi from the cold.
He wasn't really a reliable Hashemite king or something like that, right?
So it was okay to hijack the Arab Spring by getting rid of expendable old Gaddafi and pretending like, oh, look, at least to the American people, the U.S. government is on the side of the underdog rather than backing every monarch and potentate in the entire region other than just these couple.
And then now they're taking the show on the road to Syria, and they're basically hijacking this entire Arab Spring and making really the rebels of Tahrir Square and the rest of them all just suckers, helping just, you know, their extras in another set of color-coded revolutions for the American empire.
Am I overstating it too badly or what?
No, we are watching a counter-revolution led by the former Western colonial or existing Western colonial powers to reestablish Western control over the oil-producing Middle East.
There's no doubt about it.
But the American public is barraged with so much propaganda from the state-controlled media that they think we're actually liberating.
You hear these unbelievably hypocritical statements from Hillary Clinton about how we're promoting democracy, yet in the 30 years of the Mubarak dictatorship, which is one of the most brutal dictatorships that I've seen, and I'm an expert at dictatorships, the U.S. supported it, pumped money into it.
The U.S. is still financing and backing the Egyptian army and secret police who are still running the country.
The Saudis are doing it too.
They don't want revolution because a real Arab Spring revolution would have broken America's neo-colonial hold on the Middle East, what I call the American Raj.
And so the U.S. is fighting back, but behind a cloud of obfuscation and all kinds of double-talk.
Well, you know, there are some who say, well, just look at the NED on the ground before a year ago.
The entire Arab Spring was really engineered as a CIA plot.
I guess they were implicit in that would be the idea that maybe Mubarak's so old he's going to have to go sooner or later anyway, so let's just go ahead and we'll do the entire region in one big color-coded thing because all these loyal monarchs aren't quite good enough.
We'll break them down even lower.
Scott, you're right.
There was deep concern that the monarchs are getting old.
Mubarak had cancer.
The king of Saudi Arabia is on his last legs.
So do you think the Egyptian revolt was really all kind of hatched in Langley, sort of?
No, that's way beyond the capabilities of the U.S.
It was a genuine revolution.
People in Egypt, as I just saw, are seething with fury.
They have been for years.
But the police state run by Mubarak and his U.S. advisers, shades of the Shah back in the 1970s, was as ferocious and it suppressed everything.
But all of a sudden, one day things just got out of hand and there was a wide-scale explosion in Egypt, as there would be in other Arab countries.
It's not just about politics.
It's about economics.
It's about too many young people and no opportunities.
But there are tremendous pressures in these Arab countries and there's intense hatred for the United States, which is viewed as the overarching colonial power who's keeping its control over the region.
You know, Osama bin Laden kept saying his number one target wasn't the World Trade Center or the United States, his number one target were Arab despots.
Yeah.
Well, you know, during this whole time I've thought of, especially your article when reviewing Michael Sawyer's brand new book when he was still anonymous, the author of Imperial Hubris, where it's, yes, see, this is what I'm trying to tell you, by Eric Margulies, I think was the exact title or something like that.
Speaking of Zawahiri taking advantage and getting in on the revolution in Syria, this is his whole plan, is to bankrupt the United States, bog us down, drive us out eventually, and radicalize the whole population.
And the economic part is just the thrown-in kind of bonus part of the reaction because the empire had to debase the dollar and everybody else's dollars because they always inflate to keep up with us in order to keep the trade balances and all that kind of thing, right?
They had to inflate to wage, for example, the bonus war, the unexpected gift to bin Laden in Iraq.
And the guys who are now, Al-Qaeda in Iraq, which didn't exist then but does now and is on its way to Syria now, this is exactly what Al-Qaeda wanted.
Dick Cheney worked for them all along.
Little did the conspiracy theorists know.
I wish we'd stop, in fact, using even the term Al-Qaeda.
It barely exists.
Zawahiri has become a very marginal character.
What these are is anti-American groups, and we're seeing anti-Americanism from one end of the Arab world to the other.
It's not terrorism.
It's a genuine hatred and opposition to American influence.
Yeah, and that's what Sawyer called it actually back then, right, was this is an Islamist insurgency.
It's not a terrorist campaign.
It's an insurgency.
But for it to be an insurgency, you have to already be the foreign power there for them to insurge against, right?
Or else, I mean, the term has reaction built into the term.
I don't know the original Latin.
Maybe you do.
Well, that's right.
In my book, American Raj, it's entirely about this subject, about how tracing this long insurgency in the Muslim world against foreign occupation and colonial domination in the 19th century against Europe, in the 20th century against the United States.
Well, and wasn't it the same thing in Vietnam, too, where they said, look, this was never about Karl Marx or Lenin, dummy.
This is about kicking you white people off of our little strip of land here where you don't get to tell us what to do anymore.
Well, not to go off target on this, but I was in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War.
I remember quite vividly, Scott, that we really believed at the time in the domino theory and that Vietnam was only the first step of total communist takeover of Southeast Asia.
We didn't know that the Russians and Chinese were split and that it was all a bunch of baloney, but we really believed it.
So some of what was done in Vietnam was done out of mistaken belief, not out of any kind of imperial master plan.
But to the Vietnamese you were fighting, it was all the same.
Quite right.
We were the outsiders.
We were ferocious, ruthless, dropping poison on their country and cluster bombs.
I love my country, America, but I keep being horrified by how quite ruthless we are in our foreign wars, Afghanistan being the latest.
All right, now, real quick, I guess one more thing on Syria here.
Can you give us some kind of crystal ball about what we're looking at in the short to medium term here, whether Hillary will get her wish and get her full-scale civil war?
Does that necessarily lead to war with Iran or not?
Well, this phony Friends of Syria that was cobbled together by intelligence agencies is clearly a first step towards intervention.
I think that's been decided on, whether the so-called humanitarian corridors.
Well, they've been backing this Free Syrian Army all this time anyway, right?
Didn't you say the CIA's been helping them in Turkey this whole time, like a couple of weeks ago, a few months ago even?
It was created by the Western intelligence services, but it's kind of fizzled and hasn't done enough yet.
So there will be some kind of intervention.
I'm concerned the Turks may be really stupid and decide to get mixed up in Syria, which would be an awful mistake for Turkey, but they're under great U.S. pressure.
So there's going to be some kind of growing intervention, and the U.S. will fuel and fund arms, as you were saying earlier, which is going to make the situation worse, and if the units, Sunni groups from Iraq are now coming into Syria to fight.
And I don't think Iran is going to sit by very long and watch the West undermine its most important Arab ally.
And don't forget Russia.
Yeah, well, that's where I'm going.
I wonder, I'm not sure how to phrase the question right.
I'm not trying to sound arrogant like, oh, we're number one and they would never mess with us.
But Russia, even if, you know, Barack Obama did the worst, craziest thing and went to full-scale war with Syria and Iran at the same time, Russia, China, they'd stay out of it at least as long as they could, right?
Or would they get in there?
No, China would stay out, but there's a chance, a small chance, that Russia could get involved.
This is only a few hundred miles from Russia's southern border.
It's like something happening in Mexico for us.
So the Russians are nervous.
They're irritated.
They're concerned that the U.S. is going to start moving into southern Russia as well with the same technique of stirring up trouble and then coming in as a humanitarian rescue.
So it's not inconceivable that Russia could move some troops or aircraft into Syria and say to the U.S., you know, challenging them, you know, dare you to attack us.
I don't think it's going to happen, but never underestimate the chances for stupidity or dangerous acts.
Yeah, well, that's the whole thing about all this cause and effect.
Most of it, even, is unintended consequences.
I don't see that the Middle East in 2012 is what the empire was going for 10 years ago when they started this.
Scott, there is a solution to this.
The best solution is what Russia has been advocating, and that is that all sides stop arming these different groups.
Now, the West has got to stop arming these revolutionary groups.
That will then allow the Syrian army to draw its troops back.
Russia then needs a real serious U.N. mediation from reliable sources in the U.N., not cat's paws of the Western powers, to try and find a face-saving way for the Assad regime out of this mess.
That's the way to do it, diplomacy.
But, unfortunately, our country is going in exactly the opposite direction.
All right, well, I know you've got to go, and we do, too, already way over time, and I think already back into the next segment again.
Okay, cheerio.
Thanks so much, Eric.
Appreciate it.
Everybody, that's the great Eric Margulies from, well, he used to be the Sun or the Star, I forget which, but ericmargulies.com.
You can also find him at lourockwell.com, and he's the author of War at the Top of the World and American Raj.
