Welcome back to the show, everybody.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm your guest host, Zoe Greif, and I have an unexpected treat for both you and me.
I've got Eric Margulies on the other line.
I didn't even think that that would happen, but boy, it happened, and am I glad it did.
Eric Margulies is an award-winning, internationally syndicated columnist.
His articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Times of London.
He's been on TV everywhere.
He's written all these books.
I mean, I could spend 10 minutes reading this guy's bio, but trust me, he's been there.
He speaks the language.
He knows that, and I am pleased as punch to talk with Eric Margulies.
Welcome to the show, Eric.
Thank you.
Happy as ever to be back with you.
All right.
Well, I'm not Scott, but I'm going to do my best to ask you some good questions and learn some things and elicit some insight for the listeners.
Now, you've got a bunch of articles that are really cool, and we could spend all kind of time talking about them.
Your latest one at ericmargulies.com is, U.S. trains its guns on China, and boy, I really want to hear about that, but even before we get to that, your second most recent article is, Egypt headed for an explosion, and you're talking about the upcoming elections that are this week, I believe, and if I understand correctly, there has somehow, through chicanery or manipulation, the field has been reduced to two different candidates, one a Mubarak stooge, remnant of the former regime, basically, and the other an Islamicist of some degree or stripe, and you write that if the wrong guy wins, Egypt could burn.
Please fill in the details there, Eric, for me and the audience.
Well, we are looking at a very exciting development this weekend.
As you know, Egypt has been, since January of a year ago, January, Egypt has been in a state of tumult and kind of slow motion revolution, and parliamentary elections were held, which were fair, the first in Egypt's history, they were really fair.
The Islamists took two-thirds of the vote, that is, the mainstream, more moderate Muslim Brotherhood, which is mainly, its leadership are mainly professionals, engineers, doctors, lawyers, and the more radical Salafists, who took about a quarter of the vote, and who want to return to a state run entirely under Islamic principles.
Okay, they took two-thirds of the vote, that's the parliamentary election.
Now, you have the first round of the presidential election.
You have to bear with me on this, because it's a bit confusing, and out of a whole bunch of candidates, many were disqualified by the electoral commission, which was in fact run by the Egyptian army, which holds the real power in the country, and has been ruling Egypt now for 40 years.
The army's electoral commission disqualified some of the most popular candidates, including those of the Islamic groups.
Left there, an election was held, first round, and lo and behold, two people came out almost neck and neck, and that is a Muslim Brotherhood candidate, but a number two or three choice, a lackluster man named Morsi, and a former Air Force general named Shafiq, who is very closely aligned, was a member of the old regime, a former prime minister, a law and order man, a Mubarak man.
Now, how could a former Mubarak man come out equal with a Muslim Brotherhood man, when the Islamists took two-thirds of the vote in the parliamentary election?
I'm not a mathematician, Eric, but that doesn't add up.
Rigging.
Clearly, rigging, manipulation, money spread around.
Now, this weekend, we're facing round two of the Egyptian election, which is going to determine who is going to be the new president of Egypt.
I'll tell you, if there's more rigging, General Shafiq looks very likely to come on top.
If he wins, you'll know the election has been manipulated and rigged.
What do you think the reaction of the Egyptian people would be?
It sounds to me like they're not fooled by any of this manipulation, any more than you are.
They're not.
The only people who have been fooled is the Western media, which keeps talking to the wrong people and has no idea, really, what's going on in Egypt, because they only talk to people who say things they want to hear.
Egyptians know that this whole process has been rigged.
They know that the army still is in power, and that the police and the army are doing all kinds of nefarious things.
One of the worst, by the way, which I saw myself when I was in Egypt, was the fact that they've pulled the police off the streets.
Oh, no.
Encouraging lawlessness and violence?
Is that what you're getting at?
Exactly.
In one of the worlds, what used to be one of the world's safest cities, in spite of its poverty, there's a crime wave hitting Cairo, and people are calling for law and order.
We've got to have law and order.
And that, of course, is helping the military candidate, General Shafik, who's saying, I'll crush them to pieces, these law breakers.
It's very cynical.
That reminds me of Richard Nixon a little bit.
I'm not even old enough to remember Richard Nixon, but it reminds me a little bit.
What's going on in Egypt is much more blatant.
Egyptians are among the world's easiest going, most amiable people.
They don't get riled up easily.
But I see pressure building up in Egypt.
And if the Muslim Brotherhood does not win the election, there will, I think, as I wrote, be a major explosion.
Well, okay, two questions.
One is, when is the election and when will we know the results?
That's easy enough.
And then, please follow up.
You use the scary word explode.
What do you mean by that, Eric?
Well, the second round of the election is due this weekend.
How long it's going to take to count the vote, I'm not sure, because last time it took, I think, 10 days or something like that, because of the fragmented nature of Egypt's voting patterns and districts.
But I think we'll get some kind of inkling fairly early.
And what could happen is that, well, I remember when Black Friday 1952, I believe it was, when the Egyptians rose up against their British rulers and burned parts of Cairo, certainly British property in Cairo.
So you're just talking about rioting and burning and looting and madness?
That's right.
Oh, man, I hope you're not.
I hope not.
But the way you describe it sounds like if they push their luck with this vote rigging, that does seem like it's almost inevitable, right?
Well, so it seems to me.
What is so dismaying about this is that, first of all, Egypt has no constitution yet.
So the new powers that be, whatever it is, are supposed to write a constitution.
Will it favor civilian government?
Will it favor the military?
I'd be willing to bet it'll favor the military.
That's a good bet.
In fact, the secret police, the military police have just been given new powers.
They're increasingly brutal.
People are being arrested all over the place.
The media is being intimidated.
But you know, behind all that, who's paying for the military government?
Well, it's $2 billion a year of aid from Washington that is the main contributor.
The Western nations that are always orating about the needs for democracy are in fact the U.S., Britain, France, Saudi Arabia are secretly funding the Egyptian military junta and trying their best to keep it in power.
So the Western NATO powers, I'm guessing, are backing the Mubarak guy to the hilt.
We're using every bit of bribery and chicanery that they have perfected over the years.
Is that kind of the thing?
That's quite right.
The same way that the Western powers supported Mubarak, who ran a very, very ugly dictatorship, brutal dictatorship for 30 years.
But aside from me and a few other rogue journalists, the only people who ever referred to it as a dictatorship were Arab opponents.
Other than that, I mean, you never heard any American denunciation of Mubarak's dictatorship because, of course, he was our Patsy there.
He was our willing ally.
Yeah, we're coming up on the break, talking with Eric Margulies.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Mubarak had a state of emergency for 30 years and it became a national joke, is my understanding.
Like, where's the emergency on a sunny day in Egypt?
Anyway, I'm not trying to ask you a question before the break.
When we come back, we'll try to talk about Eric's latest article, U.S. Trains Its Guns on China.
Eric Margulies, Antiwar Radio, stand by for more.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm your guest host, Zoe Greif, and I just can't tell you how happy I am to be speaking with Eric Margulies, accomplished author, journalist, international.
He calls himself a rogue journalist.
I think that's a really good description.
And just to provide a little closure on the Egypt thing, Eric, I hope that Egypt doesn't explode.
I really do.
Well, I hope not either.
You know, it's a country of 81 million people where people are packed in like sardines into arable land the size of the state of Maryland.
It's a powder keg.
It's amazing it hasn't exploded before.
And of course, Egypt contains one out of every three Arabs in the Arab world.
It's an Egyptian.
So what happens in Egypt is of paramount importance.
And that's why Washington has for so long made Egypt a client state.
It has been of great strategic importance, diplomatic importance.
And under the Mubarak and before that Sadat regime, it's been 100 percent obedient.
I think as we go forward, this situation is going to change.
Well, gosh, I don't know what to say.
I'm not a praying type of guy much, but I just really hope that the worst doesn't happen like it looks like it's poised to maybe happen.
Switching gears to more bad news.
Your latest article, U.S. trains its guns on China.
I'm reading here in the middle of the article.
You say you write that a French admiral told you that the U.S. Navy's budget exceeds France's total defense budget, including all those NATO planes and all that shenanigans in Libya and all that.
Is that really true, Eric?
It is true.
The only thing I could say is that the food is better in the French military.
He was citing that the French admiral to give me an idea of the size of America's military established.
You know, we, the Pentagon, our military budget, which is close to when you add in all the odds and ends of it is close to one trillion dollars, is equivalent to just about 50 percent of total world spending on the military.
We spend half.
If you add in our rich allies like Western Europe and Japan and Taiwan, Korea, etc., we spend close to 80 percent of world military spending.
And yet you still keep hearing all these scarce stories about how the Chinese are going to swamp us and they're going to be in San Diego before we know it.
It's ridiculous.
It is ridiculous.
And every week there's a new military scare and Al Qaeda is everywhere and they're under our mattresses.
So it's an absolutely absurd amount.
The point is that we can no longer afford to spend like drunken sailors or drunken admirals.
As you write in the article, the aircraft and warships of the Navy are aging rapidly and they're not designed.
They're designed to fight World War Two still.
And nobody's going to fight World War Two anymore.
You're saying they're vulnerable to newer, you know, cheaper technology missiles.
And please explain.
I'm not getting it right.
Please explain it right.
What I'm trying to get at.
Speaking of World War Two, if I had to go into modern naval combat in the Pacific against a foe armed with missiles, I'd rather be in a World War Two battleship.
At least they had armor and they could withstand punishment.
I've always noted, as a sometime naval analyst, that our modern warships are built for peace.
They're not built for war.
They're very fragile.
They're packed with electronic gear.
Many of them have a very, very strong radar and infrared signature, and they have no power to take punishment.
Look what happened to the U.S. destroyer Stark, a little motorboat with some explosives almost sank it.
These ships have no staying power.
They're good at intimidating the natives around the world, but they're not good at taking punishment.
And they don't have any guns, or they have one five-inch pop gun, and that's it.
Or else the other choice is to fire $500,000 to $1 million missiles at land targets.
We can't afford to build enough ships.
We are in a position of what's called technological self-disarmament.
Our ships are becoming so expensive, like they look at our current aircraft.
Ships are so expensive that we have to build less and less and less of them.
So we're going to be ultra high-tech, but we just aren't going to have the ships.
And as you write in your article, it seems like the Pentagon and the Navy know that, and their strategy is just to park their aging fleet in the middle of nowhere and send the Air Force to go bomb everybody, right?
That's what they're thinking they can do?
The Air Force is the premier arm of American foreign policy.
And has been since World War I, as you write.
Yes.
And in fact, I came across the interesting fact that no American soldier has been attacked, has been a subject of attack from the air since 1952 in Korea, when some MiGs strafed their position.
Wow, that's total air dominance of the globe, right?
That's correct.
That's correct.
And, you know, in Afghanistan, for example, we have maintained our position there only because we have constant overhead air cover at vast expense.
If you didn't have that, our troops will be driven out of Afghanistan or surrounded and destroyed very quickly.
So air power is the essence.
But, you know, the huge distances of the Pacific also need important air power.
And you see air assets, air bases being revitalized, for example, where we'll probably enter into a new defense agreement with the Philippines and with Japan, too, and South Korea.
So imagine this, the South Korean military, which is close to 500,000 men strong.
In the event of war, it goes under the command of an American four-star general.
Really?
Yeah.
I did not know that.
That's another thing I learned today.
Until a year ago, the South Korean army was commanded by an American four-star general in peacetime.
Wow.
So, you know, we're still very dominant in that part of the world.
But as I said in my article, to get there, we have to fly, you know, 6,000 miles to cross this huge, the world's biggest ocean to get over to Asia, there to confront the Chinese who are waging their war from home.
And that leads me to my next question, which is, what is the point of shifting, redeploying the forces from the Atlantic to the Pacific?
Why put that, you know, military base in Australia?
Why train your guns on China?
What is the U.S. thinking?
I mean, why do they want to contain China?
Do they think China is trying to take over the place or what?
Well, there is deep concern in Washington that America's domination of the Asian periphery, the coastal regions, and the islands off China, for example, as I cited from Singapore, going all the way north up to Korea, and Japan, the China Sea, where the Chinese are being making sort of making a lot of noise and being aggressive.
These are areas of great concern to the American military.
It sees its next war, for sure, is going to be in that region.
The Arabs and the Al Qaeda and all this stuff is kind of fizzled and led us down and being inept adversaries.
It's not sexy enough anymore, is it?
It's not sexy.
You can't even find them.
Because they're not there anymore, because they all got blowed up or locked up or whatever, right?
Most of them.
You know, half the military wants to go and fight in Africa now, special operations forces, but we're seeing a return of the conventional military with ships and planes and artillery and tanks, and they want to gear up for the next war against China.
They have to plan in advance, no doubt about it.
You have to pick your war and buy the equipment and train the troops to fight it.
That's the very hard part.
China is the obvious threat, except the Chinese are not playing bold.
They're making no threatening moves, and it's the U.S. effect which has adopted a rather aggressive stance.
Well, I'm not a military strategist, but it just occurs to me that murdering a bunch of Africans would be a lot easier for the U.S. military to accomplish than murdering a bunch of Chinese, who most certainly can fight back a lot better than Africa can.
What are they thinking?
Why a war with China?
We should be friends and just trade and shake hands and eat egg rolls or whatever.
That's what I think.
I'm in favor of the egg roll policy, too, but we are the great world power, the imperial power, and we don't like to use the imperial word, but we are an imperial power.
We're the heir to the British Empire, and our dominance is being challenged by the up-and-coming China in trade and in geopolitics, politics, military, just as much as Germany challenged the British Empire around 1900.
The status quo power doesn't want to brook any challenge, and so we are reacting, and not, in my view, in a very clever way by sending marines to Australia and sticking our head into the conflict over the South China Sea.
We don't have the strength right now to back up our ambitions.
Well, there's the music.
We're out of time.
I could talk to you for hours, Eric.
Wow, thanks for that interview.
That was really great.
It's Eric Margulies.
He's a rogue journalist.
That's the way I like to put it.
Thank you so much for your time, Eric.
EricMargulies.com.
Cheerio.
