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Welcome back to Antiwar Radio, Chaos 92.7 FM in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott.
We're streaming live worldwide on the Internet.
ChaosRadioAustin.org and Antiwar.com slash radio.
And it's my pleasure to introduce a man who, I guess, is becoming a regular guest, I think we can safely say, on this show.
Regular expert guest.
It's Eric Margulies.
He's covered 14 wars.
He's the author of the books War at the Top of the World and the very soon forthcoming American Raj.
His website is EricMargulies.com.
You can often find his articles at LewRockwell.com and at Antiwar.com.
First of all, welcome to the show, live from Paris, over the telephone here.
Scott, it's great to be back with you.
It's good to talk to you again, sir.
First thing is first.
I think Pat Buchanan said this, and I'm not sure why I didn't think of it in these terms before, but this is, I think, the simple truth that there is nothing actually in the whole world more important than the relationship between America and Russia.
And yet everything is just crumbling.
Last time I talked to you was not long after Georgia invaded South Ossetia and then Russia invaded Georgia and kicked them out of South Ossetia and all this.
And I remember thinking at the time that, well, at least somewhere some cooler heads are going to prevail and they'll talk some smack for a few days, but then this is going to calm down, right?
Nobody really wants a conflict with Russia, right?
And yet it seems like our side, and I guess even the Russians too, seem to be taking every opportunity to say, I don't know about real specific actions, I know the U.S. isn't doing unilateral sanctions against Russia or anything like that, but the rhetoric just has stayed heated.
More than a month later, we have the Russians talking about, yeah, well, maybe we'll target our intercontinental ballistic missiles on your anti-missile missiles in Poland.
And Dick Cheney's going to Georgia and saying, oh, yeah, well, maybe we'll build some more pipelines siphoning the oil out of the Caspian Bays.
What the hell?
What are these people doing, Eric?
Well, you know, this whole conflict is worthy of junior high school or maybe even lower down.
It's nationalism that's mixed up with politics and chest-thumping, and we see mankind in one of its worst lights.
You know, I wrote also, as Pat Buchanan said at the time, that the most important American foreign policy issue is maintaining normal, mature, grown-up relations with Russia because Russia has 6,500 strategic nuclear weapons pointed at North America.
You know, they talk about Israel, it claims it has the right to attack, it may go to war with Iran because Iran has nuclear weapons.
Well, my God, we've lived since the 1960s with this threat hanging over our head.
So we've got to be extremely cautious in our dealing with Russia, but instead we see just the opposite.
We see this childish behavior coming from Washington, and Washington is showing its frustration because it tried to pull a fast one on the Russians.
I mean, we provoked this crisis by trying to insert American influence into the Caucasus, which was Russia's traditional backyard and sphere of influence.
We encouraged this foolish, headstrong president of Georgia, Pakashvili, to attack the Russian-backed South Ossetians, and when the Georgians got smacked around by the Russians, as anybody with any brain should have known would happen, now we're stamping our feet and crying and shaking our fists at the Russians and making empty threats, like Mr. Cheney who went to Georgia earlier this week and making all kinds of blood-curdling threats because they know that they can't back up.
It is a pathetic performance, and it's one that we should be ashamed of, and it's absolutely the wrong way to deal with the Russians.
Are you certain that the Americans told Sakashvili to do this?
I mean, there seem to be lots of indications from where I sit, but I guess I haven't seen the final report on that.
No, I wasn't there when they told him, but one can deduce it simply from the fact that there were American military advisors at battalion level in the Georgian army, battalion being the main operational maneuver unit of the army.
So there were American advisors all over the place.
There were Israeli military advisors at battalion level, and both American and military all the way up the chain right to Sakashvili's office.
The CIA and Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, maintained big, big operations in Georgia.
The Israeli businessmen were there, arms dealers were there.
The Americans were financing the Georgian government.
The Israelis were supplying a lot of their arms.
Now, they had to know that something was going to happen because they really had their fingers on the pulse of the military.
And the Georgian attack came while the Olympics were going on.
When Putin was in Beijing, clearly designed, they hoped they could make this little attack and that the Russians would be caught flat-footed and wouldn't respond, and Sakashvili could claim the big victory.
And this was the latest foolish military misadventure of the Bush administration.
And now you can see the Americans, we're making all kinds of threatening gestures, sending warships into the Black Sea, American military aircraft delivering aid, humanitarian, we say, to the Georgians.
We just offered them a billion dollars in money when some Americans can't get medical attention.
And what for?
Well, this is all shaking our fists because we know and the Russians know that we can't do a damn thing about it except fulminate.
And all that we have achieved is make ourselves look foolish.
We brought into question the whole competence of NATO and this question that I've been saying for a long time that NATO has expanded too far, certainly beyond its capabilities.
And finally, we have encouraged the most militant anti-Western groups in Russia who have seized upon this spat in the Caucasus to advance all kinds of anti-American and extreme nationalist positions.
So we've shot ourselves in the foot, left ourselves with a mess, an expensive one with nothing to show for it.
Yeah, well, there is one thing to show for it, I think, which is, of course, part of the disaster, but I like it.
And that is what Arnaud de Borgrave wrote in the UPI, that the Israelis had bases there and they were prepared to use Georgia as a launching pad for attacks on Iran, a lot shorter distance than across Jordan and Iraq, I guess.
And part of the consequence of this was the Russians came and wrecked their bases there and I guess they didn't stay that far into Georgia, but at least it seems like that ought to be, if not a decisive, at least a serious blow against any Israeli plan to attack Iran from there.
Scott, Arnaud de Borgrave is a friend of mine and I have the greatest respect for him.
And I read that same report.
I think Arnaud is absolutely right about it.
His sources are impeccable.
And it fits completely with the Israeli plans and the use by Israel of Georgia.
I mean, it was called America's Israel in the Caucasus.
It would have been a very good place from which to attack Russia.
Israel can still attack Iran, but loss of the Georgian bases is important.
And the significant loss of Russian aircraft and armor in the operation is believed to advance Israeli weapons supplied to the Georgians.
Oh, I can see that.
Maybe one little silver lining from their point of view.
Overall, this really seems to have been an incredibly stupid gamble.
Like you said, they must have thought the Russians just wouldn't do anything.
What are they going to do about it?
But do you think they even entertained the notion of, well, what if this doesn't work?
What all do we stand to lose in this?
I don't think so.
I mean, this is from the people who brought you Iraq and Afghanistan and Somalia.
I guess they just weren't thinking it.
Or they just gave carte blanche to Saakashvili, who's a fool, an immature man, and allowed this little ruler to drag the U.S. into a near-confrontation with Russia.
And this thing has now opened the whole Pandora's box of problems in the Black Sea, with Ukraine being the biggest problem.
You know, everybody's now worried about Ukraine, never mind Georgia, a country of 44 million people.
What happens to Ukraine that has, I think it's 14 or 18 million Russian citizens in it?
Are we looking at a lot worse situation?
Well, and as you said, whatever right-wingers are inside the Russian government saying, we have got to draw a line at Ukraine, we will never allow Ukraine into NATO, whoever those guys are, and they must exist up there in the Kremlin, their position has just been bolstered by however many giant degrees by Dick Cheney and George Bush's action here.
Well, this is a Parthian shaft of the Bush administration.
I hope that this is the last crazy thing that they inflict upon us and leave us with, unless they attack Iran over the next couple of weeks.
But it is so serious because the whole question of the eastern borders of NATO has never been resolved.
We, the United States, have violated our agreements with the Gorbachev government, when he was Soviet leader, not to advance NATO beyond its points in 1991, and instead we violated the Clinton administration to an extent, but particularly the Bush administration violated our agreements and understandings with Russia, moved NATO's borders all the way to Russia's borders.
We are now trying to pry Ukraine away and the Caucasus and footsieing around in Central Asia.
My God, you know, American military in Georgia, imagine how we Americans would react if the Russian military suddenly appeared tomorrow outside of Montreal.
Yeah, well, you know, what do you think of Henry Kissinger?
I was talking with Greg Palast, and he was explaining how Kissinger actually helped with the BTC plan way back in the day, and how this was kind of his thing.
And yet I've seen him on TV and read a couple of op-eds by him saying, in fact there was a report at the Republican convention that he was sort of scolding the Republicans and saying, you know, back in my day when we dealt with Russia, our greatest triumph was detente, and cooling off our problems with them rather than escalating them, something you might want to think about.
And in fact he was on this thing on PBS with the rest of the so-called wise men, former secretaries of state basically, and was even proposing that we divvy up Afghanistan and bring in the Chinese and the Russians and give them part of Afghanistan in sort of a mutual agreement to basically share the country and suppress the local population there, that kind of thing.
What do you think is going on with him?
Well, that's an intriguing thought.
I mean, Kissinger is the man who felled up Vietnam in many ways too, so I don't put too much stock in some of his ideas, but he's certainly right about, you know, maintaining good relations and establishing a better method of conduct for the Russians.
And I think he represents, his statement represents the concern of the East Coast traditional foreign policy establishment that the Bush administration's foreign policy in many ways seems to be run by the Reverend Hagee from the Christian television rather than from thoughtful traditional East Coast people.
You'll see Richard Haass, for example, the Council on Foreign Relations is a level-headed fellow coming out and issuing a warning saying, look, we're picking a war with the Russians.
And what really horrifies me in the recent week is suddenly I start hearing everywhere the use of the term free world.
No, no.
We in the free world, well, my God, I thought this had been buried with the end of the Cold War, the stupid line, but no, it's been trotted out again.
And it's amazing, the minute the spat began with the Russians, which was really a tempest in a teapot, all the Republicans started using immediate Cold War terminology.
It boosted McCain's standing very, very well.
I mean, it was clearly designed in part to do that.
And it left the Democrats in the dust sort of mouthing platitudes and looking sort of limp-wristed.
So it was a, this is, as I said, this had a very strong political dimension to it that served the hardliners in both North America and Mother Russia.
Well, I got to tell you, well, unlike Saukashvili, I'm trying to be, and unlike Dick Cheney, I'm trying to be very level-headed and mature about this.
I don't want to be an alarmist about conflict with Russia where there's no cause for alarm.
And to be honest, you know, when I was a kid, hey, there may or there may not be a nuclear war and whatever, but I didn't really know all this stuff.
I can't really feel the context about how alarmed I should be here.
But I'll tell you this.
These are the headlines I'm looking at.
The Department of Defense is sending an assessment team to Tbilisi later this week to help us begin to consider carefully Georgia's legitimate needs and our response.
After assessments of these needs, we will review how the United States will be able to support reconstruction of Georgia's economy, infrastructure, and armed forces, said Undersecretary of Defense Eric Edelman.
Then Russia threatens to target U.S. missile shield sites.
As I mentioned earlier, Poland.
This General Nikolai something or other said, yeah, we'll target you with our ICBMs, he said.
Then we have Russia is sending nuclear warships to the Caribbean to do war games with Venezuela.
And I guess they're saying that this was planned for a long time, but they're sending their most awesome battleships that they have.
Some of the biggest, baddest battleships in the whole world are being sent from Russia now into the Caribbean in what is obviously a show of force and, you know, reversing our policy in the Black Sea kind of thing there.
Okay, so now you tell me how alarmed I'm supposed to be about this, Eric.
Well, on one hand, you know, I'm an old Cold Warrior, and I used to have an old Russian girlfriend of mine who used to say to me, Eric, she said, you miss Cold War.
And I'd say, you're absolutely right.
I said, I miss the Cold War every day.
It was so much fun, and the Russians were wonderful adversaries.
I may be facetious, but this is real Cold War stuff on the surface, and it is fun on one side.
It's kind of comical.
But on the other hand, as we were saying, this could turn very dangerous.
You know, all you need is one clash between Russian and American warships in the Black Sea or off Cuba.
The Russians are certainly going to start doing things in the Western Hemisphere that's going to drive the Americans wild.
The anti-missile system in Poland that is implanted 184 kilometers from the Russian border is absolute madness.
That is the most provocative gesture that I can think of it's like.
As I said, a Russian anti-missile system with radars and things located in Quebec on the Vermont border or in Guadalajara, Mexico, okay, it would drive the U.S. absolutely batty.
And while this U.S. ABM system really offers no immediate threat to Russia, it's a slap in the face to the Russians.
It challenges them.
It violates the understandings of Gorbachev.
And it's firing up all the anti-Russian sentiments in Eastern Europe, and it is planting the seeds for future conflict.
And the Russian chief of staff said just a week ago, he said, we are now adopting the same strategic strategies proposed by President Bush that is preemptive attack with nuclear forces if we see a threat developing.
We reserve the right to do the same thing as the Americans.
So look, I said to you last week that this is August 1914.
This is September 1939.
If you go back to these periods, you see the same kind of irrationality, the same kind of runaway rhetoric, the same chest-thumping over trivial issues that shouldn't even be in conflict.
You see nationalism run amok, and you see incompetent politicians stirring up a storm.
Well, let's hope that, I don't know, some kind of cooler head prevails.
In fact, you know, it's funny.
I saw this thing where, I forget if it was Putin or one of his ministers said, you know, what we really should do is just work together on the anti-ballistic missile system.
You say this is for the rogue states.
Let's just have one anti-ballistic missile system for the North, to protect against North Korea, Iran, and whatever make-believe boogeymen you say are the problem here, and we'll just all cooperate on it.
And, you know, I don't really like that idea either of convergence between our two militaries, but I guess that's better than having them shoot at each other.
Well, of course, the Russians offered a big anti-ballistic missile radar in Azerbaijan that they have leased, which covers the whole area, and the U.S. said, no, no, no, no, it's yours, we want ours.
The same kind of silly thing.
It's very depressing, and as I said, it's totally unnecessary.
It's laying the basis for another arms race, and it's leaving the new administration with a big problem.
This Ukraine issue is now a time bomb ticking, ready to go off.
If we hadn't had this crisis in Georgia and all this saber-rattling, that problem could have been finessed and kept under control.
Right now we're losing the grip on the Ukraine situation, and we could be facing another major crisis.
All right, well, speaking of major crises, what's going on in Pakistan?
I guess this guy, Zardari, was sworn in as president today, right?
That's a step toward democracy, Mr. Ten Percent back in power?
Well, it's part of Pakistan's quasi-democracy.
Zardari, the widower of Benazir Bhutto, was elected, I guess, more or less for fair and square by parliament.
His party is the most popular, has won the most votes in Pakistan, but Zardari himself commands no more than about 26% support in Pakistan.
Nevertheless, he was shoehorned into power, and mostly with U.S. backing.
It was U.S. money.
The U.S. has made Zardari, formerly known as Mr. Ten Percent for corruption, shoehorned him in as president.
He's going to be the new Musharraf.
He's going to be Washington's boy in Islamabad, and we'll see what develops.
But it's interesting that Pakistan is on the edge of bankruptcy.
It's got a virtual civil war going on.
It's in all kinds of crises.
But the first thing that he says is he's going to wage a war on terrorism, meaning attack his own tribal groups up in the northwest frontier.
These words are designed to please Washington.
They're designed to keep the billions coming from Washington to sustain Musharraf, who now sustains Zardari and his party.
But it's ominous, because he's merely inheriting Musharraf's problems and perpetuating them, and offers no solution to Pakistan's growing internal unrest, or the ongoing war in Afghanistan, which appears to be spreading into Pakistan.
Well, is there any indication that maybe he's just saying that to the Americans to get the money, but that actually he's going to try to calm things down?
I mean, there's been bombings all over the place and a lot of political violence in Pakistan in the last few weeks, right?
Scott, yeah, absolutely, and I hope so.
He's a wily fellow, and he's dancing to Washington's tune, obviously, to keep the money coming.
But it was interesting that his inauguration was attended by only one foreign leader, Hamid Karzai from Afghanistan, who also runs on American money.
But what is worrying is that the U.S. has really got a lot of influence now in the senior echelons in Pakistan.
And you're in a kind of vicious cycle there, where what happens is the U.S. is paying the Pakistani military to attack pro-Taliban Pakistani tribesmen on the northwest frontier, bomb them and attack them.
120,000 Pakistani troops have been rented by us to do this fight.
The tribesmen, after they get bombed by the Pakistanis and the Americans, then go and shoot off bombs inside Pakistan in revenge.
In revenge for these bombings, the Pakistani army attacks them even more.
So you've got this self-sustaining vicious cycle that's going on in Pakistan.
And now you've got the really dangerous element of U.S. troops increasingly entering Pakistan, the tribal territory known as FATA, Federally Administered Tribal Agencies.
And I'm just seeing now, as I watch the news, a new barrage of propaganda coming from Washington to support growing U.S. intervention in Pakistan.
It's called cross-border operations.
And it's very dangerous, because we are not only getting involved in a new conflict, but we're biting off more than we can chew.
Well, and there's been scores of civilians killed.
I don't know whether they got any of the so-called bad guys, but they've been killing civilians in Pakistan.
Right on the eve of this guy taking power.
Seems like probably not very good PR for the new guy.
Well, so, all right.
If somehow, I know this is asking the impossible for someone on, I don't know, say, the National Security Council or in the Department of Defense or something like that.
But just hypothetically speaking, if we could somehow separate out, in the thinking of the Americans, the difference between the Pashtun tribal clans and the actual, quote-unquote, foreign fighters, the Arab Afghans, the remnants of Osama bin Laden's former group there, what's left of it or what's rebuilt of it or whatever in Waziristan, is it absolutely impossible for the Pakistani government to make a deal with these people to just give us the Arabs that you're hiding and we'll leave you alone?
Well, that's not the main issue, as I see it.
That's what's happening.
The U.S. military commanders keep talking about Arabs and Chechens and Uzbeks, all foreigners, all those foreigners coming and stirring up trouble.
But it's not.
It's indigenous local boys who are doing it.
And what it is, we're not fighting terrorism, as the government keeps lying to us.
We are fighting the Pashtun tribal people, biggest tribal people in the world.
There are 15 million or 20 million in Pakistan, and there are another 15 or 16 million across the border in Afghanistan.
It's the biggest ethnic group in Afghanistan.
We've cut them out of power.
They used to be our boys.
They were the freedom fighters of the 1980s.
I was with them in the field.
They were heroes.
Now we are attacking the very same people like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani, who were our freedom fighter allies in the 1980s fighting Soviet occupation.
Now they're fighting American occupation, and they're terrorists.
But we're not fighting terrorists.
We're fighting tribesmen, and we're involved in a war against a whole people.
And killing a few so-called terrorists is not going to make any difference.
Al Qaeda is not an issue anymore.
Most of its 300 original members have dissipated, disappeared, been killed.
So we've got a spreading resistance to the American occupation of Afghanistan by the Afghan people and their first cousins across the border in Pakistan.
That's the real issue.
But here's the thing, though.
It's going to continue that way indefinitely until complete bankruptcy on this end, or, I don't know, they start dropping nukes or something, or somebody finally cuts Ayman al-Zawahiri's throat, man.
I mean, that's the problem here, as long as Zawahiri and bin Laden are podcasting from the Hindu Kush mountains, our government has carte blanche to continue warring against anybody they want.
Well, that is their raison d'etre for staying in Afghanistan.
We know, or we should know, that the U.S. troops are not in Afghanistan to go after al-Qaeda, which is just a convenient reason, which has long ago disappeared.
I mean, for God's sake, if we haven't found them in seven years, where are we going to find them?
Our troops are there as a pipeline protection force, because, in fact, the government in Kabul, the U.S. and Seoul government in Kabul, just signed a pipeline deal for the long-awaited pipeline to bring Central Asian energy south through Afghanistan to Pakistan.
That's what this war is about.
That's what the Georgia conflict is about.
It's pipeline politics again.
And we should be understanding that American troops there are a pipeline protection police, not liberators or freedom bringers, as we call them.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
I'm talking with Eric Margulies.
He's from Sun National Media in Canada.
He's on the phone live from Paris, France.
And the pipeline deal, you know, there was a book that came out, written by a French intelligence agent and a French reporter, called Forbidden Truth.
And it came out right after September 11th.
It had been written before September 11th.
And I think it was dismissed as some kind of conspiracy theory book or something like that, when, in fact, it really wasn't.
What it said, Eric, was that, well, basically, you guys are trying to do business with the Taliban and get this pipeline deal done because you're Republicans and that's what you do.
But we're here to tell you these guys are dangerous, and especially the al-Qaeda guys that are hanging out with them are dangerous, and they're planning horrific attacks against you, and you're basically ignoring the danger because you're trying to do business with the Taliban.
And, basically, you need to get your head out of your rear, America, and realize what you're doing here.
And this was a book that was written, I guess, was ready to be published at the end of the summer of 2001.
That's right.
I'm familiar with it.
In fact, I'm going to be on French national television tomorrow night on this very subject.
So many French believe that the U.S. government was behind 9-11, as do, by the way, I've seen some polls showing a third of Americans also believe it.
I don't, personally, and I'm going to be on TV tonight saying that.
Tomorrow night saying that I have yet to see any evidence that convinced me that it was other than what happened.
But I do know about the Taliban connection, that the U.S. government was giving millions of dollars to Taliban when it was in power in Kabul up until four months before 9-11.
And the reason for this was twofold.
Yes, as you say, it was a pipeline deal.
And there was another reason, too.
This was a dirty little secret that has never yet come out, and that was that the CIA was planning on using Taliban as a weapon against the Central Asian Communist-run state, like Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, if necessary, and also as a weapon against China in the event of a war with China, because the Taliban would go and stir up the Muslim Chinese of Xinjiang province in western China, who are currently in a state of low-level revolt against China.
So, yeah, we were using them.
I mean, these were our allies from the Afghan war against the Soviets.
We knew them.
They were our friends.
We were financing them.
And all of a sudden, after 9-11, this whole thing had to be covered up, and all the connections severed.
Yeah, you know, I think part of that book said that, or maybe I read this somewhere else, actually, that bin Laden convinced the Taliban to not do the deal with, I guess it was UNICAL, but instead to make a deal with a South American company to build the pipeline.
That's right.
Yeah, you may have read it in my book.
Oh, yeah, one of your articles.
Yeah, the Argentine consortium called BRIDAS.
Bin Laden did advise them not to do it.
And from that point on, Taliban was then put on Washington's do-do terrorist list.
Yeah, they said, we'll bring you a carpet of gold or a carpet of bombs.
You get to choose.
That's unusually poetic for Republicans, but that's exactly what was said.
And, well, you can see why the kooks would say, come on, you know, this on its face means that the whole 9-11 attack was a hoax.
I agree with you that it wasn't.
Well, especially that book, Forbidden Truth, really tells the story.
It is, hey, you stupid Republicans are turning a blind eye where you shouldn't, and it wasn't a deliberate one because they wanted to be attacked.
It was a deliberate one because they were trying to do business with the Taliban, because they're idiots.
Well, there's another way of looking at it, and that is that Taliban has been blamed.
It continues to be blamed.
That's why it's called a terrorist group.
They're involved in 9-11.
Most Americans, 99% of Americans believe Taliban, terrorists, 9-11, all the same thing.
But Taliban knew nothing about 9-11.
Now, Taliban had very, very arm's length with dealing with bin Laden.
He was in there.
He was given shelter only because he was a great hero of the war against the Soviets.
He'd been wounded six times in combat.
He had done great things for the Afghan resistance, and he was a guest.
And in the Afghan code of honor, you must defend a guest to your life, even ahead of your own children and family.
And when the 9-11 occurred, the U.S. said hand over bin Laden.
The leadership of Taliban said not until you give us a proper extradition agreement or show us proof, at least, that he was involved.
And the Washington Fed would issue a white paper.
Colin Powell said this was never done.
Washington has never issued a dossier of proof showing that bin Laden was behind the 9-11 attacks or al-Qaeda was behind 9-11 attacks.
I think it was.
I think there's a lot of circumstantial evidence.
But we would like to see a proper indictment made, and it hasn't been done.
And certainly Taliban should not be tarred with the same brush.
In fact, I think I remember reading an article in The Independent, and I don't know whether this was ever verified, that one of the Taliban representatives came to warn that there was an attack coming and was rebuffed.
I don't know about that, but I know Taliban was very unhappy with bin Laden, particularly after the attacks against the American embassies in East Africa.
And they said to the al-Qaeda people that, you know, if you're involved in this, you have to get out of Afghanistan.
But unfortunately al-Qaeda said, no, no, no, we weren't involved.
And, you know, it's interesting, bin Laden has denied all along that he was involved in 9-11.
He approved them, certainly.
So this is a mystery.
He may have been, we just don't know.
I would certainly like to know.
Yeah, well, he seemed to take credit in the October 04 speech, certainly.
That's right.
And as far as the white paper thing goes, first of all, I'd just like to say, thank goodness for Lawrence Wright, because there's your Osama did it.
I wouldn't rely on a prosecutor to tell a story, but there are good journalists out there.
James Bamford, as well, has done a great job on it.
And many others, Terry McDermott and Peter Bergen and all those guys.
But also, this is something that came up in a speech by Jesse Ventura the other day, that this is somehow proof that bin Laden must have not done it, or else why didn't they indict him?
And the easy answer to that is because Dick Cheney and David Addington decided that afternoon that this wasn't a criminal act, it was an act of war, and that the plenary powers of the president had just kicked in and all this stuff, and they completely threw the rule of law out the window in favor of a torture regime instead.
That's why they didn't indict him.
They didn't want to apply the law in any of this.
Very good point.
I'm with you on that.
Yeah, it's all about the right to torture people, or the power to torture people.
There's no such thing as a right to do that, but anyway.
Yeah, okay, so it's Eric Margulies.
He's on the phone from Paris, France.
Can I keep you on the phone here?
Yeah, sure.
May we?
Oh, good.
Sorry, I can't really answer you in French.
I don't know anything about it.
Okay, so here's my problem.
Tomorrow, I'm going to Texas A&M on September 11, and I'm going to be debating tomorrow evening a, well, Fox News terrorism expert type, and we're going to be debating all kinds of things about the war on terrorism, and my only problem is I know I'm right about all this stuff, and yet this guy's a professor and has written 10 books and has probably been in 10,000 debates before, so it's at least an equal match even though I know that I'm right and he must be wrong about all this stuff, but basically I know here's going to be his premise.
His premise, Eric, is going to be that our war is against radical Islamic extremism and that whether it's Hamas or whether it's Hezbollah, whether it's Al-Qaeda or the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade or the Muslim Brotherhood or Jandala or MEK, oh no, those guys work for us.
Never mind those last two, but anyway, that all these groups are Islamic extremists, and that's what they have in common, that's why they're terrorists, and that if we can only identify our enemy as radical Islamic extremism rather than terrorism, which is way too general.
I'm sure he agrees with you and I on that.
Terrorism's way too general.
It's radical Islamic extremism.
That's the enemy.
What do I say to that tomorrow in the debate, Eric?
Gee, Scott, I wish I had a copy of my book to give you, my new book, American Raj, because it's all about this subject.
You will have a copy shortly, probably within a week or so.
Great, just a little too late.
Thanks a lot.
I'm sorry.
My answer is this.
The Republicans or the White House has tried to develop this theory that all our opponents are Islamic fascists, this Islamofascism idea, which is the idea that there's somehow Nazis in turbans.
This is completely against the reality of the Muslim world.
The primary cause for violent anti-American movements, I refuse to use the word terrorism, but violent anti-American movements, is their resistance to dictatorships in the Muslim world imposed and sustained by the United States.
Primary reason for what we call terrorism.
The people who attacked on 9-11 made a point, and their supporters made a point of mentioning that this was because we're supporting the dictator in Egypt, and dictators in Pakistan, and dictators in Saudi Arabia, and Jordan, etc.
So they are fighting against corruption and dictatorship in the Muslim world, which are our Western allies.
There is no unified resistance movement in the Muslim world.
Everyone is local.
Everyone is different.
And the only way that you can bring political change in the Muslim world, because it's run by secret police and generals, is by violent action.
All the so-called moderates, the middle ground in the Muslim world, of any political opposition, have been arrested and tortured and thrown in jail and killed with our encouragement.
So we are now reaping the whirlwind that we have sown.
And no matter how much these neocons at Fox try and twist the truth and tell you that the major cause of this anti-American feeling is a million different reasons, starting from Islamic fascism, the primary and overriding reason is because of Palestine.
That is what started this whole issue going and turned America from a friend and hero to the Arabs to a bitter enemy, and it continues to be Palestine.
There are other issues, but they don't want to mention this issue, that as long as Palestine festers, that the Arab world will be enraged and is going to take out its rage on the United States.
That's my short answer.
You know, in that book, Terry McDermott, I mentioned, he wrote the book Perfect Soldiers about the hijackers, not the muscle guys from Saudi Arabia, but the Egyptian graduate student types who were part of the Hamburg cell, who were the hijackers of the planes.
And when they weren't at the mosque, they were sitting around the house complaining about how they wanted to kill Americans because of what Israel had done that day.
That's what they sat around and talked about.
Those Americans have to pay as they're watching the news about Palestine.
Well, this is the great truth, but it's the truth that's been buried alive because the neocons in particular do not want Americans to understand that the issue of Israel is what lies at the heart of all this.
And if we could solve this terrible problem of Palestine and stop the violence there, then we would lance the boil and we would begin a process of ending this, what we call, terrorist era.
But they won't do it.
And this is going to continue, this problem, until we make a change.
And I don't see any American government that has the courage, guts, to tackle this problem head-on.
Yeah, even to appear the slightest bit even-handed at all, for that matter.
That's right.
Well, we need only see Obama's behavior in Washington a couple of months ago where he was hauled in front of the pro-Israel lobby and kowtowed and, you know, scraped and bowed and made all kinds of preposterous statements which were really regrettable.
It's not the even-handed peacemaker role that we had hoped to see in a new administration.
Tell me a little bit about the old days when America used to be loved and considered heroic by the people of the Arab world.
How's that?
Well, back in the 50s, I know because my mother was a journalist and she traveled.
She was one of the first female journalists to go all by herself through the Middle East.
And she was with Nasser and King Hussein and Sadat.
And she came back with an amazing...
I was a child, but she told me, you know, she said America's loved from one end of the Middle East to the other.
America was regarded as a liberator.
President Roosevelt had come and promised freedom for the Arab world from European colonial rule.
And President Eisenhower had actually come and ordered the British and French colonialists and the Israelis out of Egypt and out of Sinai.
And this was the apogee of America, the respect for the United States.
I mean, America represented everything the Arabs thought was good.
We were rich.
We were honest.
We were decent people.
We were friendly.
We weren't like the untrustworthy British or the haughty French.
And we were bringing a new kind of wealth and a new kind of democratic living.
We were the role model for much of the Muslim world.
We had declared independence from Britain.
We had declared independence from Britain first.
Well, that's right.
That's right.
And so we had enormous standing in the Muslim world.
And this only was eventually tarnished and turned negative by the ongoing Palestinian dispute.
But it didn't happen, as I say in American Raj, until the Muslim world got the Internet and got satellite TV and it got Al Jazeera.
And it got other European stations where people could actually learn the truth rather than all the censored propaganda they were getting from their own governments.
When the Muslim world saw what was going on in Palestine, they turned their rage against their own governments for being impotent and corrupt.
And against the protectors of these governments, the United States.
Have you ever read Robert Dreyfuss' book, Devil's Game?
No.
Okay, well, I'm going to recommend it to you, and I'd like to know what you think about it.
But I'll tell you this, and you already know, you know, plenty to know whether you're going to agree with this or not.
Basically his thesis is, well, the subtitle is How America Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam.
And basically the story is, it was the British's idea, and then we picked it up from them to always support the religious, you know, whether they're conservatives or radicals or whatever, but the religious right in the Middle East against the nationalists and or anybody who lean toward the Soviet Union.
And that goes for Egypt and Iraq and for even the Ayatollah's group in Iran, obviously in Pakistan and Afghanistan, that basically this entire kind of religious resurgence of the right in the Middle East was an American operation gone wrong over the decades.
That's an exaggeration in my view.
And let's say if anybody's going to be blamed for it, it's the Saudis more than the Americans, because the Saudi royal family exported radicalism.
They financed a lot of these extremist movements.
Simply saying, be extreme somewhere else.
Don't be extreme in Saudi Arabia.
You leave us alone and you cause trouble to the Iranians and everybody else.
It was the Saudis, actually, who financed the war in Afghanistan.
I was in Afghanistan.
I was with the Mujahideen in the field.
I was with the spiritual leader, teacher of Osama bin Laden, Abdullah Aziz.
I understand these people's thinking.
I remember Aziz said to me, it was 1986, he said, when we are finished liberating Afghanistan from Soviet imperialism, from Soviet colonialism, we're going to return and go and drive the American colonialists out of the Middle East.
I'm flabbergasted.
I've never heard anybody speak this way.
But this isn't something that we created.
And this is not a primary religious movement.
This is a political movement designed to fight American and other Western domination of the Muslim world.
And we used it.
We certainly woke up the genie by using it against the Soviets.
But it's a wild exaggeration to say that we summoned this up.
And it's all because we've exported, supported extremists.
Not the case.
Yeah.
Well, of course, I'm terrible at paraphrasing other people.
And Robert Driver, he's a very careful reporter.
He doesn't talk like me at all.
And his book is, I'm sure you'd love it, actually.
I will make a point of reading it, Scott.
Okay.
So sorry about that, Bob, for the record, too.
I vastly oversimplified his point.
But anyway, I mean, and even then, though, the Saudi thing, I mean, this is Franklin Roosevelt's deal with the Saud family, right?
You get to be the dictators.
We promise to protect you forever.
Make a deal with the religious types.
And everybody stays paid.
And, you know, all that.
Apart from Palestine, it's also the American troop presence in Saudi Arabia.
So in a sense of, you know, on one hand, we back them.
On the other hand, we provoke them, you know?
Well, that's true.
And we cooperated, as I was saying, in eliminating any kind of moderate political elements.
You know, we gave it to the Saudis.
Here are your extreme, your hard-line religious elements who rule the country.
And anybody who sticks his head up and complains is arrested.
And we never defend the Democrats.
And I just point to a recent example in Pakistan where our dictator, Musharraf, purged the entire Supreme Court of Pakistan, over 60 justices.
And Washington, which claims to be fighting a war in Afghanistan to bring democracy, we supported Musharraf in destroying Pakistan's judiciary.
Terrible anti-democratic act.
Just the latest example of how we never really practice what we preach.
You know, one thing I thought was ironic, and this is the kind of thing that, well, I guess I should be happy it made the AFP.
But I would doubt that it made, you know, the NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams.
But Ayman al-Zawahiri put out a new podcast announcing the Iranians for their cooperation with America, their alliance with America in Iraq.
And he says, Afghanistan, I don't know too much about that.
Maybe you can help enlighten us on that.
But obviously the overall point being that al-Qaeda hates the mullahs and the ayatollahs that run Iran.
They're not Islamofascism against us.
They hate each other at least as much as they hate us.
Yeah, that's very true, Scott.
I saw the same broadcast by al-Zawahiri.
It sounded intriguing and fascinating because the Sunni, the hardline Sunnis and certainly al-Qaeda and their allies have long denounced Iran as secretly cooperating with the United States and the Israelis, which is true in certain occasions.
During the war in Afghanistan against the Soviets, the Iranians kept stabbing the U.S.
-backed mujahideen in the back and advancing its own interests and certainly never supporting the mainstream Sunnis.
So this Sunni-Shia conflict cannot be underestimated and continues.
And Iran has played a major role in trying to thwart al-Qaeda and secretly cooperating with the U.S. on this.
So they are bitter enemies and they will continue to be so.
Yeah, well, I guess, you know, it's funny.
It almost seems like Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri are writing the script for the American War Party.
We just seem to do every single thing they want.
They want us to invade Afghanistan so they can replicate, you know, bleeding us dry the way they did the Russians.
So we do that for them.
Then we go the extra mile and invade Iraq for them.
We spread the jihad to Africa if we can, you know, in Somalia, as we talked about.
And here, both sides, al-Qaeda and America, pushing for regime change in Iran.
I mean, who's zooming who here?
It is absolutely crazy.
You know, I've been a lifelong Republican, but when I hear that term Republican, I immediately think of dumb and dumber.
I don't know what's happened to the party of General Eisenhower, but it certainly hasn't gotten any smarter.
What's happened is that the Bush administration and the Clinton administration, to an extent, before it, has fallen into the trap set by Osama bin Laden, whose strategy is to drive the U.S. out of the Muslim world by a death of a thousand cuts and getting it involved in all kinds of small but punishing and draining, debilitating conflicts, starting with Afghanistan, into Iraq, where Bush just fell right into the trap, and into Somalia, which the U.S. has invaded, though nobody's noticed that in the United States, and now number four is the growing U.S. involvement in Pakistan.
We're headed into a war in Pakistan.
This is what Osama bin Laden said years ago.
He said the ultimate battle against the United States is going to occur in Pakistan, and the power of the United States is going to be broken there.
So, so far, the Bush administration has been just following bin Laden's script, and we'll see what happens with the next administration.
I fear that we are so institutionally committed to these policies that it's going to be very hard to change them.
That's funny.
Remember back last October, Michael O'Hanlon and Robert Kagan wrote that thing in the New York Times, we talked about it on the show at the time, about how we ought to invade Pakistan.
Does that mean I can safely say that Robert Kagan is objectively pro-terrorist?
These guys are objective.
We don't know what they're talking about, and it's particularly irritating to see them still being quoted everywhere in the media with these deep, serious voices like that, urging war on places.
It is pathetic.
It really is, but it shows the intellectual level to which we have sunken.
All right.
Well, this is something that I've considered, and I think that this is probably somewhere in the back of the minds of the American people.
I'm reminded of the Thomas Jefferson quote where he's talking about slavery.
Well, we have the wolf by the ears.
We can neither safely hold him nor let him go, and that's, I think, part of the problem among the American population is we kind of recognize that, boy, we've killed a lot of Arabs and a lot of Muslims, and we've been pretty aggressive over there.
We've made a lot of enemies.
We know the old saying in Arab culture, you know, oh, wow, you killed that guy and got your revenge after 40 years?
What was your hurry?
And that kind of thing.
So now, uh-oh, we've created a real big crisis and many, many more enemies than we had before.
We have to keep killing them now, right?
What are we supposed to do?
How can we disengage from this thing safely?
I call it the Pac-Man effect.
Well, it's true.to turn people who once treated us with adulation, regarded us that way, into an awful lot of enemies.
It hurts me as an American.
I'm just horrified to see this.
In my new book, I found these very interesting polls that were taken by one that I think was Gallup or one of the leading polling groups, Pew, I think it was Pew, where they found that the huge majority in four of the leading Muslim countries, Egypt, Pakistan, Indonesia, I think it was Morocco or something, believed that the primary goal of American foreign policy is to undermine and destroy Islam.
That's horrifying.
These are countries that are American allies, and yet the people think this.
We know it's not true.
At least I hope it's not true.
But for these people to think that, for, in Pakistan, over 90% of people oppose the U.S. war in Afghanistan.
In the high 80s, think that Osama bin Laden is a hero, and that about 10% support Bush.
We have absolutely alienated the people in the Muslim world.
The neocons in the United States, that is their political agenda, is to permanently alienate America from the Muslim world and to provoke this kind of aggressive behavior.
Ah, not stupidity, but this is really the plan.
They say it's a war against radical Islamic extremism.
That's what they're trying to do, is just turn Islam extreme by bombing it over and over again.
And then there's nothing to do except keep bombing them.
War or total war, that's what Michael Sawyer said.
We keep this up.
We're going to have to kill all of them.
That's what the neocons want.
Well, it is true.
This is the culmination of a 40-year policy to turn the U.S. against the Muslim world.
It's worked very well.
It's tragic.
It's totally unnecessary.
And I don't know how we're going to unwind that.
I spent a whole long chapter in my new book trying to work out, explain some patient steps that we can take, but it's going to be extremely difficult.
We've become institutionally committed now to war against the Muslim world.
For the Christian conservatives, Islam is the new Soviet Union.
It's the new communism.
It's the new great Satan.
So you have this confluence of ideologies coming that sustain this antagonism between the West and the Muslim world.
Very dangerous.
All right, everybody, that's Eric Margulies.
He is the foreign correspondent for Sun National Media in Canada, on the phone from Paris, France today.
The new book is just coming out, what, in a couple of weeks?
It's American Raj, right?
That's right, Scott.
All right, I can't wait to read it.
Great.
You'll have a copy soon.
All right, thanks very much for your time and insight on the show today, Eric.
Cheers.
