03/27/09 – Pepe Escobar – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Our first guest today is Pepe Escobar.
He is roving correspondent for the Asia Times and analyst for the Real News.
His books are Globalistan and the brand new one, Obama Does Globalistan.
His recent article at TomDispatch.com is called Welcome to Pipelinestan.
Well, welcome to Antiwar Radio.
Pepe, how are you doing?
I'm fine.
Thanks for having me, Scott.
Well, thank you very much for joining me on the show today.
Now, this is just a great article.
I recommend everybody go over to TomDispatch.com.
Welcome to Pipelinestan.
It's called the liquid war.
Okay, so, lots to talk about here.
Basically, I believe the story, kind of in a nutshell, as you get across here, is America is trying mightily, our government is trying mightily, to create an empire in Central Asia and keep it, to control pipeline routes surrounding the Caspian Basin, under our control and cutting out countries that we don't want to work with, out of the deal and that kind of thing.
And at the same time that the whole thing is a big joke and a losing proposition and it's not working at all.
Is that about, kind of in a nutshell, is that about right?
You're right, Scott.
In a nutshell, that's it.
But it gets much more complicated than that.
It's a question of following the money, following the flows, following the business and following something that is never mentioned in U.S. mainstream media or in global mainstream media for that matter.
We only hear war on terror and now Obama's new O.C.
O.or terrorists that want to do us harm or whatever new acronym the Pentagon is coming up with.
And we never hear about the energy war.
And that's the real thing.
What the U.S., Russia, China and the mid-level players like the Central Asian states, Iran, are doing.
Because this is what's going to, you know, the future of our oil and gas driven civilization hangs in the balance for the next few years and decades before we go on to alternative forms of energy, which is not happening at the moment.
So the big game at the moment, the new great game, a replay of what the Brits and the Russians did in the late 19th and early 20th century, is the new great game for energy.
And from a U.S. perspective, this has been going on since the Clinton administration.
So the Asians, and when I say Asians, I mean the Russians, the Chinese, I mean everything east of Istanbul, they see this as the U.S. encroaching on Asia as a whole.
So they have a more globalist perspective than a lot of us in the western hemisphere have.
Well, and as we declare benevolent global hegemony and move in to take over all these places, we actually push them together, right?
We have the old Sino-Soviet split is healed, and not that the Soviet Union exists anymore, but you have basically all our so-called rivals.
Their motivation to work together against us is driven by reaction to our overreach.
You're totally right.
It was reaction.
So I'll give you a key example, which is in the Tom Dispatch article.
When the Chinese saw the war in Yugoslavia in 1999, they were absolutely horrified.
They said, look, this is going to be a progression east, and soon they're going to be at our borders in one of these stands.
So they came up with this idea of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, SCO, which you never hear about it in the U.S.
It's crazy.
It's never mentioned.
They are having a key, crucial meeting today in Moscow, as we speak, before next week's meeting in The Hague on Afghanistan.
Today they are having their own meeting on Afghanistan.
And why?
Because Afghanistan borders all of them.
It's Russia, China, and the stands for the moment.
And Iran is an observer, as well as India and Pakistan and Mongolia.
But the Chinese, since 1999 and in 2001, when they established the SCO, they said, look, we need to have a regional mechanism which will be more or less opposed to NATO, not clashing against NATO, but to defend ourselves.
What if NATO decides to come to our borders?
And that's exactly what happened a few years later, when NATO took over from the ISAF in Afghanistan, and now the U.S. and NATO are inside, implanted in Afghanistan.
And can you imagine if you go to Moscow and Beijing and you talk to their strategic experts, the first thing they say, look, we have to find an Asian, a local, regional solution to the Afghan problem.
And we cannot expect that the Americans and Europeans are going to come here and teach us how to deal with our own backyard.
Well, and that really is the case, too, that pretty much everybody understands then that America is not going to stay in Afghanistan forever.
That, frankly, it's just too far away.
It is somebody else's backyard.
And ultimately the great game will be won by Asian powers, not American ones.
Or Western ones, even.
Well, if you ask Big Brzezinski, Brent Scowcroft, and the Cheney gang, they tell you, no, we are going to win it.
And that's what they've been doing since 1995.
It started with the Clinton administration, when Big Brzezinski went to Baku in Azerbaijan, and he sold the idea of a pipeline bypassing Russia and Iran.
So can you imagine?
Azerbaijan was a former Soviet republic.
Can you imagine the Americans coming to Baku and saying, look, now, can you imagine the Russians' reaction?
Now we're going to have a pipeline from one of your ex-republicans going to sell oil and gas to us in the West.
And we're not consulting you.
And you have no say on the matter.
And that's exactly what happened.
Well, you know, Pat Buchanan actually made that analogy one time about what if the Cold War had been the other way around and we'd gone bankrupt and the Russians came in and started siphoning, making pipelines to take all the oil out of Canada and Mexico and Venezuela and make sure that it all goes to Asia instead of here.
You know, even occupying the Gulf Coast, the Gulf of Mexico, and taking that oil and not letting us get it.
That's basically what we're doing.
We're coming to the Caspian Basin, the southern border of Russia, and sticking our straw under there and taking all the oil out through routes that don't have to go through Russia.
That's what it's all about, right?
Absolutely.
Pat Buchanan was absolutely right.
So you can imagine this amplified by a few megawatts.
That was the reaction in Beijing, in Moscow, and in Tehran as well.
Iran, it's very important that we mention Iran.
They have a huge problem.
They have no money.
They need $200 billion to develop their oil and gas infrastructure.
We have to remember two numbers, very important.
Russia and Iran have 20% of global oil reserves, and together they have 50% of gas reserves.
The problem is Russia has Gazprom, which is one of the second largest corporations in the world nowadays.
And Iran, they have the National Iranian Oil Company.
You know, it's very poor.
I went to their headquarters in Tehran a few times to interview officials and analysts, and it's a third world thing, you know.
You still have typewriters.
The women in Shador, you know, they have the notebooks.
They write in longhand some stuff.
And they need money.
They need investments.
The Europeans are there.
The Chinese are there.
The Russians are trying to strike a strategic relationship to exploit their reserves, especially the huge gas field that they have, South Park, the largest gas field in the world.
But they also need the Americans and also more Europeans.
But with the American sanctions on Iran, it's impossible.
So the Europeans, they had been trying to argue with the Bush administration, look, let's try to find a compromise with Iran so our companies can go there and develop their oil and gas fields because we need them.
We don't want to be totally dependent from Russia.
This kind of dialogue was impossible during the Bush administration.
So we hope that Obama will understand this.
He's very smart.
He will understand it immediately.
I'm sorry to interrupt you there.
No problem.
It's a very interesting topic to me, the relationship with Iran there.
If I remember correctly, actually I'm sure I do because I've checked it, Dick Cheney back in the 1990s in the Clinton administration, who was the CEO of Halliburton, used to complain about the sanctions.
He used to, of all sins, unpardonable sins, he used to go overseas to complain about the American government and give speeches in Iranian states saying, hey, the Persians are reasonable people.
We can do business with them and we need to lift these sanctions.
So why is it that when he was vice president, rather than carrying on that same sort of idea, he took the exact opposite approach, as you said, made it absolutely impossible for companies to kind of make these deals?
Is it just because of the Israel lobby or is there another explanation?
Exactly.
That's one of the explanations.
And the other one, I wish I could extract, or maybe a Washington Post or a New York Times correspondent in Washington, when they could extract it from Dick Cheney himself.
When he was CEO of Halliburton, of course, because Halliburton was very much interested in exploiting oil and building refineries in Iran.
When he got to the Bush administration in early 2001, he commanded the energy review.
Then he changed his mind and he said, no, now it's going to be the big Brazilians' conquest of Eurasia.
So you're right.
Part of it was pressure from the Israel lobby.
In fact, the Israel lobby was instrumental in that BTC pipeline from Baku, Tbilisi in Georgia, and Tehran in Turkey.
That's big Brazilians sold to the Azerbaijani.
They wanted to reward Turkey because Israel and Turkey were getting very, very close during the 90s.
So it was very, very important, the pressure of the Israel lobby, okay, let's build this pipeline because we reward Turkey in one hand and on the other hand we also bypass Iran.
And Dick Cheney, since the beginning of the Bush presidency, he went Eurasia all out, let's conquer it.
And he stopped traveling to Central Asia all the time.
He used to go, I would say what, five or six times a year at least to Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Azerbaijan.
He was very close to the leaders.
And how come?
Well, tell me this.
What do you think about the split then between the so-called realists and the neocons?
It seems like, you know, in Greg Palast's book, he says, here's the neocon cabal and here's the James Baker cabal, but at the head of both of them is Dick Cheney.
And so it does seem like Zbigniew Brzezinski and others like him criticized the Bush administration for going after Iraq when they thought it was kind of a distraction from the great game that you're describing in Central Asia.
Yes, and it was a total distraction.
But then I think it goes back to Cheney as well.
Cheney, he understood that the key to the game is to control the source.
So if you go to the second largest oil reserves in the world and you control the source in Iraq, you are extremely well positioned to negotiate with everybody else and to prevent your competitors.
In this case, I was thinking mainly about Europe and China to get Iraq oil.
So this was the strategic mindset of Cheney and his advisors at the time.
Obviously, they didn't study the situation regionally.
They didn't know the power play between Iran and Iraq, between Shiites and Sunnis.
They didn't know history.
They didn't study their history.
They didn't listen to the Brits.
The Brits have fabulous analysts at the foreign office that could have given them a 15-minute lecture on why Western empires won't succeed in the Middle East, especially in Iran and Iraq.
So that's what happened.
And at the same time, he was paying attention to the Caspian.
But the Caspian is not as important as Iraq.
The Caspian has maybe 9% of the world's reserves of oil.
It's more important to forge a relationship with Iran instead of antagonizing because they have the second largest reserves of gas.
And gas is much cheaper to extract and commercialize if you do liquefied natural gas than oil.
And they took their eye off the ball, in fact.
And Cheney was always legitimizing it as, okay, we have to protect American sources of energy.
Totally wrong.
So they've empowered Iran, and then as you write in the article, Russia proved last summer that they can put their army within binocular distance from the BTC pipeline.
Absolutely.
And also you say they're making a deal with Azerbaijan to pay a higher rate for their gas, which could bankrupt the whole project right there.
And I guess that goes back to the question of the futility of all this.
I mean, can America really be the dominant force all across Russia's southern border over the long term?
And for what?
I mean, what's the point of all this anyway when you can buy oil on the market?
It's just to make sure which companies get to pump it out of the ground and take the cut, or what?
It's true.
You can sit down with Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, and if you stop antagonizing him, he'll sell you all the gas you want.
Absolutely no problem.
You can buy gas from Algeria, as the Europeans do.
I think they buy like 40% of their gas comes from Algeria.
So you don't have to go to the other side of the world and build enormously expensive pipelines.
And we'll come to this in my next postcard.
We're going to talk about something that is never mentioned anywhere, the pipeline through Afghanistan, which is the basis of everything that's been happening in Afghanistan at least since the mid-'90s.
Because you remember that UNOCAO was negotiating with the Taliban to build a pipeline in Afghanistan.
This pipeline comes from eastern Turkmenistan.
It's a gas pipeline, basically.
It crosses Afghanistan to the east of Iraq in western Afghanistan through Helmand province, where the poppy fields are, crosses Pakistan, goes to a Pakistani port, and then there will be an expansion to India.
So can you imagine building something like this in what is a war zone for 30 years now?
It's absolutely impossible.
The feasibility cost is $7.6 billion and counting.
But the U.S. still wants this pipeline.
As late as two or three months ago, during the end of the Bush administration, they still wanted it.
They were pressuring.
There was another meeting last year between Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan.
They signed another agreement, and they want to build a pipeline.
But no investor in his right mind is going to invest in a pipeline in a war zone.
Right, no matter how many Marines are in the country.
They're not going to be able to protect it.
So we go back to Obama's search that he announced this morning.
Did you see the words oil and gas mentioned in Obama's speech?
Oh no, you're just cynical and must be a communist or something if you think that any private group of interest might have influence over the government or its policy.
Yeah, exactly.
Let me ask you this.
Even if you put 300,000 Marines and special forces in Afghanistan, you won't be able to control them.
It's impossible.
Afghanistan is not a state with a strong central government.
It's not part of their culture, their tradition, their history.
It's a collection of tribes in perpetual war against themselves.
And you won't be able to solve it.
No Westerns will solve it.
And in fact, no Asians will solve it.
This is a matter between Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras, the major ethnic groups.
They will have to solve it, and they won't.
They'll keep fighting forever.
Hey, let me ask you this.
And by the way, everybody, it's Pepe Escobar from the Asia Times, and he knows of which he speaks.
He's traveled all around the world.
The books are Globalistan, and Obama does Globalistan.
It's the new one.
Please help clear up for me the story of Iran's nuclear deal.
I don't even remember where I read it anymore.
I need a new footnote.
You're it.
I want to understand the mechanics behind it.
There was some kind of pipeline deal that India was going to make, and Colonel Ezra Rice ran over there and made this basically nonproliferation regime-destroying deal with the Indians as their bribe to not do the deal they were going to do.
Can you fill in what I don't understand about that?
Okay.
Look, we were talking about the Afghan pipeline, right?
Right.
The direct competitor to this Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan pipeline is the so-called peace pipeline.
That's another one.
It's the IPI, Iran-Pakistan-India, the IPI pipeline.
It's much cheaper than the trans-African pipeline.
The route is much shorter, and it provides an extra bonus because it's a link between Iran, Pakistan, and India.
This means that they won't be antagonizing each other anymore.
It's a very important means of getting India and Pakistan closer.
You start with energy, you go to diplomacy, and then you finally reach the political level.
And on top of it, both need badly Iran gas.
So you can imagine the reaction in U.S. neocom circles, like Heritage Institute types or American Enterprise Institute types.
Bombarding U.S. media for years, saying it's impossible.
We cannot allow India and Pakistan to buy gas from Iran.
It's crazy.
It's a terrorist regime and all that.
So that's the key point.
The Indians already signed an agreement with the Iranians, so they want this pipeline.
An Asian development bank is going to put some money into it.
They need financing from the World Bank as well.
So it's a question of putting up the money.
As it's more than half, less than the trans-African pipeline, it's much easier.
So they're probably going to start building it next year.
So obviously the American pressure is, look, if you do this pipeline, you're going to have problems with your nuclear program.
That's what they told the Indians.
And the Indians said, look, it's a regional matter.
We need these sources of energy.
This has nothing to do with the fact that we have a nuclear program or if you want to build our nuclear program, we respect the NPT as well, as well as the Iranians.
So there was an impasse.
And meanwhile, they will build a pipeline.
That's the key.
And meanwhile, the Indians are going to do the pipeline anyway, you're saying?
Yes, they are going to do the pipeline anyway.
They decided last year, like I told you, I think they need another 30% of the total investment.
They're going to get it probably in the next few months.
So this pipeline is a goal.
And obviously the Bush administration, they were absolutely aghast.
Well, and the story of just what effect that Indian nuclear deal had on the rest of the IAEA NPT nonproliferation regime, we'll have to wait for another interview.
That's kind of a side issue, but it has been dealt with at length elsewhere, the kind of reverberations from that.
Let me ask you about Camp Bonsteel in Kosovo, the legacy of the war.
It's the 10th anniversary this week of the war against Serbia.
And now I asked Nebojsa Malek about the pipeline, and he said, yeah, well, the whole thing is a myth.
It never happened.
And I googled the thing up on Wikipedia there, and they said, well, it's a proposed pipeline.
But this is basically, or tell me, I guess I want to just state it categorically, is this the whole reason for the intervention in Yugoslavia?
Because you say in your article this is certainly the way China and Russia viewed it, that the reason America did that war was to build this base for a pipeline that still to this day doesn't exist.
Yes, it's one of the reasons.
It's a very complex set of reasons.
Basically, I would say this is 30%, 40% of the whole thing.
We need a pipeline in the Balkans, and we need a very important military base to protect it from bandits, from international terrorists, from al-Qaeda types, whatever.
And the other one was we need NATO to go to the Balkans.
That was the main reason, in my opinion.
They needed to expand NATO.
And obviously with Milosevic, that would be absolutely impossible.
And in fact, Milosevic, very important story that I'm sure you had already interviewed people about it, but if you didn't, you should.
Richard Holbrooke's role in all this, because Milosevic told Holbrooke, look, what you're proposing to me here at the Rambouillet meetings in France before NATO starts bombing Yugoslavia.
Milosevic told Holbrooke, look, what you're proposing to me is basically a rendition.
You want NATO to occupy Yugoslavia.
This is absolutely impossible.
I cannot do it.
And this was the dialogue between Holbrooke and Milosevic.
He basically handed an ultimatum to Milosevic.
It was impossible.
There was no possible discussion.
And at the time, you probably remember, they were selling the Rambouillet meeting as discussions between the West and Yugoslavia to find a solution.
There was no discussion at all.
And Holbrooke was directly involved.
Yeah, they called it a peace accord, and oh, see, the Serbs didn't even show up for it.
What it said was NATO gets to occupy all of whatever they want, including, I guess, the Parliament building, the Capitol building in Belgrade, and the Prime Minister's office.
Exactly.
It was an offer that he couldn't possibly accept.
An excuse for a tripwire for war was all it was.
And it was obvious at the time, Madeleine Albright was no good at Buffalo and anybody into believing in this thing, really.
Absolutely.
So this was all about NATO taking over the Balkans.
So NATO taking over the Balkans, pipelines that would feed European needs, basically, and a huge U.S. military base to protect the whole setup.
So let's say the whole setup was like this.
And obviously the way the Chinese and the Russians saw it was, well, NATO is not transatlantic anymore.
They want to take over Asia, or at least to come to our borders.
That was the beginning of the whole thing.
So basically there's a real lesson here about blowback, I guess, right?
Oh, yes.
The Anglo-American Empire is going to take over the whole world, and we end up pushing the rest of the world into these separate power blocks just to oppose us.
It seems like that's the real shape of the New World Order, is whatever you call it, is separate power getting stronger further and further from America's orbit rather than closer.
Well, this is what started to happen at the latest stages of the Clinton administration, and what's been happening for the past eight years with the Bush administration.
Let's see what's going to happen.
It's too early to tell.
With 65, 66 days of Obama presidency, it's impossible to tell.
What I'm very afraid, and a lot of other people I talk to are also afraid, is that Obama will, in the end, be a hostage of this mindset, of the cold warriors in the Pentagon, of this Big Brzezinski style, not as brilliant as Big is.
He is brilliant in terms of conceptualizing it, but the more warmonger, mean-ish Big Brzezinski's in Washington, that no, we should keep expanding, we should keep our empire of military bases, we should antagonize Russia and Iran, we should bypass them, we should try to stay in Iraq as long as we can, which is what the Pentagon long war generals want.
So, we can be extremely worried that Obama will finally succumb to this mindset.
When you think about it, in terms of American politics, the Brzezinskis and Scowcrofts and Bakers of the world are presumed to be the moderates.
They're the realists, not the coots.
So, you've got the worst imperialists in the world, and then you've got coots to either side of them that are even worse.
Yeah, but look, realists, but, you know, have you read, I'm sure a lot of your listeners read Big Brzezinski's Scowcroft book of interviews with David Ignatius, published last year.
If you read that carefully, it's all there.
It's still Brzezinski's grand chess board, 1997.
American leadership, and we have to fight compatible partners in Eurasia, but we lead, we decide, we control.
Of course, it's put in a much more subtle and elegant language, but, you know, the gist of it is the same.
All right, everybody, that's Pepe Escobar.
He's from the Asia Times.
He's got a new one at Tom Dispatch called Welcome to Pipelinestan.
The new book is called Obama Does Globalistan.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today.
Thanks very much, Scott.
Thanks for having me.