For KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Alright, y'all, welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio here on KPFK in LA.
I'm Scott Horton.
You can find all the archives of this show and my other shows at www.antiwar.com.
And we've been covering all the bad news this week.
We've got Cheney bragging about torture, regime change in Libya, wars raging in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, all the domestic politics involved.
And, in fact, a very important story you can find in Justin Raimondo's archives at www.antiwar.com this week.
You can also read Marcy Wheeler, Empty Wheel, as she's known in the blogosphere at www.emptywheel.net on the subject of the FBI's investigation of www.antiwar.com under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and under the auspices of their counter-terrorism, counter-intelligence powers.
And you can read all about that at www.antiwar.com.
But now we go to tonight's guest.
Introducing Pepe Escobar, the intrepid, globe-trotting reporter for the Asia Times and author of the book Obama Does Globalistan.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing, Pepe?
Wonderful to be with you again, Scott.
It's very good to have you on.
Pepe's most recent article at Asia Times, that's www.atimes.com online, is called R2P is Now Right to Plunder.
Well, what did that used to mean, Pepe?
Well, in fact, this was suggested by one of my readers, actually.
I asked his permission to use right to plunder.
This is exactly what's going on with that Mut and Jeff duo, Jibril and Jalil.
Now they are already, the opening bids for the ultra-juicy contract in Libya are on.
Yesterday, they were meeting with Berlusconi in Milan.
The head of ENI, the Italian energy giant, was there as well.
So they started doing business right away, in fact.
So ENI is sending fuel to the rebels, not rebels anymore, the so-called provisional government.
And when funds are unfrozen later on, they'll get repaid in oil.
And ENI plans to start working in Libya within the next week or so.
So in Italy and France nowadays, it's absolutely outstanding.
It's a trade commercial war between both of them to see who gets the best concessions from the Libyans.
As we speak, and within the next few hours and days.
So this proves that the whole thing is about not only oil, but reconstruction companies rebuilding everything that NATO bombed.
And of course, water.
Very important.
The largest water firms in the world are French.
And there's the Great Man-Made River project in North Africa, in Libya.
Organized by Qaddafi, conceptualized by him, with the Canadian technology.
Paid with Libyan money.
It costs like $25 billion.
No IMF, no World Bank.
And it's basically a network of pipelines pumping fresh water from the desert to the Mediterranean coast.
So the French, when they look at it, what do they see?
Privatizing all this fresh water and selling fresh water to the rest of the world for a thousand years.
So you can imagine, we're not even talking about oil and gas.
That's a completely another ballgame.
But the business opportunities after the NATO bombing are immense.
And the first ones in the right to plunder stakes are Italy and France.
And the Brits and the Americans following right through.
And next week, the Emirates.
And the Emirates going to Benghazi to do business deals as well.
Well, at least you got to hand it to them.
We can kind of appreciate the fact that they're being this blatant about their goals and motivations here.
Oh yes, they're blatant.
And in fact, I'm sure everybody remembers, or at least displayed a lot in the West as well.
The famous Financial Times op-ed piece by Richard Haass from the Council of Foreign Relations.
He was calling blatantly for an intervention, an occupation, a stabilization force, you name it.
And this after the plan for this so-called stabilization force was leaked by the Brits to the Times of London.
A Rupert Murdoch newspaper, by the way.
And in this plan, what they were thinking, and probably this is what's going to happen, is 15,000 strong stabilization force organized by the Emirates, by the UAE.
And what nobody knows is what kind of people are going to be in this stabilization force.
Will they be mercenaries trained in the UAE right now by Blackwater, now XE?
In fact, a lot of people talked about it.
The Guardian released a very good article about it a while ago.
I also wrote about it.
Will they be these mercenaries trained by former Colombian death squad members, South African mercenaries, Jordanian Mokabarat, you name it.
Really, really hardcore people, some of the best trainers in the world.
Or are they going to hire those rebels who are now wreaking havoc in Tripolitania and pay them?
And the UAE is going to pay them.
They're going to pay them.
In fact, it's the only question at the moment.
Sooner or later, we're going to have this kind of stabilization force.
And I'm sure this is going to bypass the UN completely.
It's going to be a NATO-Persian Gulf monarchy operation.
So what Richard Hasselhoff is saying is, in fact, something that is already on the continent is going to happen quite soon.
And now, what about the oil concessions?
Obama!
Look, the thing is, the Italians are ahead because any was already there.
Most of the oil exported from Libya, I think more than 35%, more or less, was already going to Italy before the war.
And Total from France and BP, they were absolutely pissed about this.
And BP wants to renegotiate everything.
They will start ahead, the European companies, and obviously the Americans as well, ExxonMobil.
The Turks, probably.
And obviously, who's going to be marginalized from all this?
It was said, what, I think three or four days ago, by one of the heads of an Eastern Libya oil company.
He said, literally, we're going to have problems with the people who did not support us from the beginning.
And he singled out the Russians, the Chinese, and the Brazilians.
And the best contracts are always going to privilege the people who support us from the beginning.
This means the European powers, NATO powers, and the US.
So it's already laid out, this is what's going to happen.
The Chinese, they're going to be very pissed about that.
Not only because of oil, but they have a lot of construction stuff, technology, and transfer.
And they have 36,000 Chinese people working there, 75 Chinese firms all over Libya.
They were evacuated.
And the Chinese probably want to go back, and they want their contracts to be fulfilled as well.
So I would advise the TNC not to pick a fight with China.
Yeah, well, what are they really going to do about it, though?
Nobody knows, Scott, because nobody knows what's going to happen tomorrow.
Can you imagine?
If this thing goes on, where we already have a resistance by the Qadhafi forces and Qadhafi loyalty.
We have total chaos in Tripoli and in most parts of western Libya as well.
We have the TNC that transferred itself to Tripoli.
But I wonder if most of the population is going to just sit down and watch the country bumpkins, as they call them, from eastern Libya rule Tripoli.
So one of the things that strikes me for the past few days is that all the images that we see from Libya, there's no population.
It's like a deserted city.
Everybody left, probably to Tunisia.
Nobody is left in town.
And so it's just a rebel army looting and rampaging all over.
It's crazy.
It's like a Mad Max scenario, in fact.
And it's void.
In fact, I was talking to a correspondent from Russia TV a while ago, and she said, yeah, there's nobody in town.
It's completely, completely void.
So we don't know what's going to happen next.
Well, now, we know that British and French special forces are there in Libya.
Are they not basically taking over the role of officers commanding the so-called rebels there, the new government there?
They are in close contact with the Qatari special forces, because the Qataris, they speak Arabic, so they are the direct connection with the rebels.
And some of the rebels were trained by Qatar, inside Qatar, for over two months.
And then they were flown back to Libya, and they were part of that brigade that went by ship from Misrata to Tripoli last Saturday.
Well, a lot of the leaders of the new government are former Qaddafi regime officials, right?
I would say all of them that we know, because as everybody has noticed, there are only two names that everybody knows about.
The Mut and Jafdu, and the Jibril and Jalil.
Everybody else is invisible, because they all have shady pasts.
They are all Qaddafi regime military defectors.
Some of them are hardcore Islamists, from Syriac itself, from Derna, from Benghazi.
All kinds of tribal opportunists, and there are also the tribal elements.
A lot of tribes, they are more or less sitting on the fence, because they don't know what's going to happen.
Like, we know that at least three or four tribes are still supporting Qaddafi, including the tribe of his wife's tribe, Balfala, which is the biggest one.
Probably almost two million people.
And they are still supporting Qaddafi, but we don't know how.
We also know that Qaddafi had access to the gold reserves that were in Tripoli, so maybe he stole some of the gold.
Actually, physically stole some of the gold.
Not stole, he would say.
No, this is part of the regime, and I am the regime.
To buy tribal allegiance as well.
So, the tribal scenario, for the moment, is very fluid.
Nobody really knows the allegiances, where they are.
And now, so what does it mean when the CIA parachutes in somebody like Khalifa Hifter?
Is there any chance that he'll end up leading the thing over there?
Look, he was, in fact, when he came back, remember, he self-proclaimed, he self-proclaimed, I am the new military commander.
And this created an enormous problem with the guy who was actually running the whole thing at the time, was the former Minister of Interior, Abdul Fattah Yunus, who was then later killed by the rebels.
You remember this story, and it happened, what, three weeks ago, more or less.
Do you think it was Hifter that killed him?
No!
I'll give you something even better.
This is something that we've been trying to confirm today.
And, in fact, it's more or less confirmed.
And I haven't seen anything written about that in the U.S. press so far.
Maybe we'll, you know, over this weekend, Hurricane Apart, somebody's going to write about it.
But the French have already wrote about it.
I'm going to do a piece for Monday as well about this.
The guy who controlled the offensive from the southwest, southwestern mountains, southwest of Tripoli, where the Berbers are, you know, those desert people, warrior-like and all that, disgruntled with the Qaddafi regime.
The guy who organized their push towards Tripoli is an ex-Al Qaeda guy, Abdel Hakim Balhaj.
And this is an amazing story, in fact, because it's the direct connection between Al Qaeda and NATO, and the eastern Libyans.
The guy is from eastern Libya.
He was from a small radical Libyan group.
It's called Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, LIFG.
He was trained in Afghanistan before 9-11.
He was in a camp north of Kabul.
He linked with, obviously, he linked with Al Qaeda very, very closely.
Then after 9-11, he was tracked by the CIA.
He was arrested in Malaysia in 2003.
Then he was sent, typical extraordinary rendition stuff, he was sent to Bangkok where he was tortured.
And then the CIA gave him to the Libyans and said, do anything you want to do with him.
So he was in jail from 2004 to 2010.
And in 2010, Saif al-Islam came up with an idea of, okay, let's try to reform all these former Al Qaeda people and terrorists.
We're going to release them, we're going to educate them, and they're going to work for us.
And that's exactly what happened.
I was reading about this before you called me.
And this was one of those terrorist experts, Gunaratna, from the University of Singapore.
He actually went there, invited by Saif al-Islam.
He talked to three or four of these terrorists, including Balhaj.
They all said, look, we'll reform and not Al Qaeda anymore.
We're going to work for the regime, blah, blah, blah, blah.
This was in March last year.
And now this guy, he's not aligned with the Qadhafi regime anymore.
A few months ago, he went to the southwestern mountains.
He allied with the Berbers.
He had been working in close contact with the people in eastern Libya.
And he was the military commander of this push towards Tripoli a week ago.
And now, as far as I could understand it, he's the de facto military commander of Tripoli, as we speak.
Can you believe a story like this?
Yeah, I can, unfortunately.
But everyone, let me remind you, in case you're just tuning in or something you need to know.
I'm talking with Pepe Escobar from the Asia Times online here on Antiwar Radio.
And you're telling me this guy's name is Abdel Hakim Balhaj?
Abdel Hakim Balhaj.
B-A-L-H-A-J.
So if you do a Google search on this guy, nothing much will show up.
You're going to see something in French about him, but practically nothing in England.
Now, I read something in the Telegraph back, what, a month and a half or two ago, about a guy named Abdel Hakim al-Hasidi, who said that he was a veteran of the Afghan and Iraq wars, fighting against the United States.
Is this one of his buddies?
No, no, no.
There are a bunch of them, actually, Scott.
In fact, the leadership of the LIGF, three guys, Balhaj was one of them.
And there were others as well.
And before that, there was a guy called al-Libi as well, which was one of the most important al-Qaeda military commanders for years.
Well, Qaddafi even murdered a guy named al-Libi for us.
Exactly.
After he'd been tortured into pointing the finger at Saddam Hussein working with al-Qaeda.
They got rid of him for us, back when Qaddafi was our friend two years ago.
Exactly.
This proved that Libya was always sending a stream of really, really hardcore operatives to be trained in Afghanistan.
They're all al-Qaeda linked, and some of them were working inside the al-Qaeda organization itself and became military commanders, including this guy al-Libi we were talking about.
Can you confirm to me the story about the British Special Forces trying to work with these al-Qaeda guys to overthrow Qaddafi back in 1999-2000?
Look, I cannot say anything about that now.
I'll have to do some research about that in 1999.
I remember that story, I don't know if I can nail it down, but it just seems funny how they just can't decide what to do with this Qaddafi guy, whether they're on his side against al-Qaeda or on al-Qaeda's side against him.
And I guess now they've come down firmly on the side of al-Qaeda, which just means the next domino to fall, obviously, is, you know, really back where this conversation started, permanent NATO occupation.
Because otherwise, we just fought a war for al-Qaeda, we can't have them take over.
Exactly, exactly.
Look, the other option is, which I think for the moment, if you see what's happening on the ground at the moment, if you analyze the tribal situation, a very strong possibility is that we're going to have two guerrillas soon.
Practically merging into one, or a hydra with two heads.
First is going to be the Qaddafi regime, loyalists and remnants, whatever you want to call them, against a weak Hamid Karzai-style government in Tripoli, the TNC government, and the Salafi jihadists from eastern Libya.
When they're going to see that they will be out of the government, assuming the TNC tips them out, they're going to start their own guerrilla against the government as well, because Balhaj himself, and I managed to find a quote from him a few days ago, from Tuesday, three days ago only, when they thought that they had already won the war in Tripoli, he said, we won the war like rats, it was very easy, but we want Sharia law in Libya.
So, you know, if they don't get their Sharia law, if they don't get their Sharia law, guess what, they're going to go the Taliban way.
That's what their constitution already says, right?
Exactly.
Exactly.
We don't know what kind of transitional government TNC is going to be.
Is it going to be secular?
Is it going to be a mix of secular Islamists?
Is it going to be controlled by Islamists?
We still don't know.
What I can tell you is that people in Washington are already very, very worried about it.
I think they're trying to distance themselves from the rebels.
Like when you see Reuters reports telling stories about massacres on both sides, front pages of American papers, that's where the stabilization force comes in.
And that's why you're seeing Financial Times up at pieces by Richard Haass.
They're already preparing the terrain.
What I think is happening now is it's another psyops.
They're preparing the terrain.
Sooner or later, we need a Western stabilizing force because if we leave these people together, it's going to be a mess and it's going to be another Taliban, Talibanistan in Northern Africa.
So, you know, the ground is already set for it.
Well, now, for the long term, tell me about, you know, what's left at this point of al-Qaeda's point of view.
This has got to be the best thing that they could imagine.
Here, they just killed Osama bin Laden.
According to Leon Panetta and to David Petraeus, we're down to a couple of dozen maybe al-Qaeda guys in the whole world.
I doubt if there were ever that many more than that in the first place.
And now we just brought them a brand new theater of operations, a brand new insurgency to fight.
Exactly, because remember that the war on terror, according to official Pentagon terminologies, the long war, you simply cannot go for only 10 years.
You know, it was not enough.
Major strategic blunder, so let's open another theater.
And it's perfect, you know.
If they manage to contain, let's put it this way, the whole thing with an army of mercenaries trained by Blackwater XE, so much the better.
But I wonder if 10,000 people will be enough, you know.
Well, you know, in Afghanistan, in Afghanistan you have the Arabs who were already there, but unless you have the Saudi government cooperating like back in the 80s, there's not going to be, there haven't been over the last 10 years, you know, a steady stream of thousands of Arabs coming to Afghanistan to fight, like back during the Russians.
But here, this is another Arab, another Sunni Arab country.
Now we've just moved the front of the terror war another few hundred miles to the west.
Exactly.
And very important, the role of the House of Saud.
What do they expect from Libya?
Basically, they expect a friendly emirate.
They hate secular republics, like Syria, like Libya under Gaddafi.
They want a friendly emirate.
They would love to have the son of King Idris back on the throne, of course.
The next best option for them is to have a hardcore Sunni government in Tripoli.
Instead of a so-called socialist, of course, what's fake socialist, secular government like Gaddafi.
So I wonder what kind of game they're playing.
They could even be, what we know for sure is that they were helping with weapons and cash, the Benghazi provisional government.
There's no question about it.
But how much are they willing to support these more extreme Salafi jihadists, we still don't know.
But certainly, when they look at the map of Libya, now Libya for us is like Kuwait, the UAE or Bahrain.
It's friendly, it's one of us, it's part of the club.
And in fact, that's why the Arab League this week immediately recognized the TNC, because the Arab League, they don't do anything without Saudi Arabia saying so.
They immediately recognized it, and they hoped, of course, that this would be a friendly emirate.
So if it's not an emirate, at least a hardcore government, dominated by hardcore Sunnis.
So I wonder what the Obama administration is going to say about this.
Not to mention the Europeans, because now they see that they have an al-Qaeda friendly base already configured as such.
On the other side of the Mediterranean.
This is completely nuts.
It's really too bad.
You know, all they should have done is just send John McCain back over there, to sell him some C-130s and some armored personnel carriers for his death squads, and bribe him into doing what we want.
Exactly.
But the thing is, you cannot exactly bribe them, because if they lay their hands on the $168 billion of frozen funds, they're flush.
They can do anything they want, in fact.
It's a lot of money.
Only the Libyan investment authority, I think they have almost $100 billion in their fund.
They can start rebuilding the country themselves tomorrow, but obviously, because these people are very greedy, and the Europeans want a piece of the action, there's going to be a lot of Western interference.
But in theory, it wouldn't be necessary, because they're self-sufficient, unlike Egypt, which is drowning in debt, and they need handouts from Saudi Arabia or from the IMF.
Libya, you know, they are self-sustainable.
Well now, I want to ask you a little bit about the politics of this thing.
Here in the United States, this is being portrayed as a great victory for Obama.
Everything worked out, and I guess his mission accomplished, over and done, just like he said it would.
Exactly.
And in France, if you read the French press, it's fantastic, because it's Sarkozy's war, all over the place.
Le Monde, Libération, you name it.
And in fact, this is more of Sarkozy's war than Obama's.
Sarkozy started the whole thing.
Obama came later.
Even David Cameron came later.
But the Brits are, of course, much more skeptical.
They have a tradition of healthy skepticism and critical thinking, and the British papers are already warning, look, this is going to be another quagmire.
But the French, no.
The French is a typical neo-Napoleonic triumphalist stuff, you know.
Sarkozy was the guy who, in the beginning, conceptualized the war.
He was the first to attack.
He sent a nouveau philosopher, Bernard-Henri Lévy, to Benghazi, and then Bernard-Henri called back Sarkozy and said, look, we have to do something.
These people are going to be smashed and all that.
So, you know, it's typical left-bank café de fleur stuff, you know.
They still think they're living under Sartre in the 60s, where intellectuals started movement, you know, for the third world.
And Sarkozy went into it because, you know, perfect.
You know, he's slumping.
He has less than 20% popularity.
He could start a war, pose as the great liberator of Northern Africa, and clinch all these juicy deals that he couldn't clinch because Gaddafi, OK, let's renegotiate.
And while he was at it, he got to help the President of the United States set further precedent about how much war he can declare and manage on his own.
Exactly.
That's why the Obama administration always said it was a kinetic operation or some bullshit alternative.
I mean, you remember how this thing started.
They said, well, it's just going to be a no-fly zone to protect the civilians, and it's going to be a matter of days, not even weeks, before the rebels go ahead and finish off Gaddafi force.
That was almost six months ago.
And now the no-fly zone became a no-fly zone because they are bombing Sirte, which is basically a civilian town.
And isn't that amazing that nobody questions the fact that NATO is bombing a civilian city, and nothing's happening to the civilians living in Sirte.
So they only have smart bombs, and they only bomb, you know, bombs and they only bomb Gaddafi Military Depot.
It defies belief.
Well, I mean, the truth is it's so chaotic there that we don't even have any kind of real estimates from the Red Cross or anything, right?
Nothing, nothing, nothing.
And because from the beginning, well, congratulations to Patton Boggs, who's coordinating the PR for the rebels in D.C., right?
They were hired, what, two months ago, more or less.
So if you go to CNN, Fox, New York Times, Washington Post, Le Monde, La Repubblica, Times of London, all that, you only see one side of the story.
That's it.
It's the same press release.
It's like a Pentagon press release that, you know, Reuters and AP keep spewing out over and over again.
It's the same stuff.
So they're doing a very good job in terms of PR.
In English, of course.
That's why I wrote a few weeks ago that you want to start a war, do it in English and hire somebody from K Street.
You win.
Yeah, exactly.
That was Saddam Hussein's problem is the Iraqi National Congress had a lockdown.
Hill and Knowlton, man, they'll get you every time.
Hey, thanks a lot for your time on the show today, Pepe.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks very much, Scott.
Always a pleasure.
Everybody, that's the great Pepe Escobar from the Asia Times.
The site is atimes.com.
His most recent piece, and there's a lot of new ones up there concerning Libya.
It's called R2P is now right to plunder at the Asia Times online.
And that'll be it for anti-war radio tonight.
Thanks very much, everybody, for listening.
We're here every Friday night from 630 to 7 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
Thank you.
