All right, y'all, welcome back to Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and Pepe Escobar is back on the line from down and over in Brazil.
Welcome back, Pepe, how are you doing?
I'm fine, good to be with you again, Scott.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here and everybody you know that you could read Pepe Escobar's many writings at atimes.com, the Asia Times, and his most recent piece, well, I shouldn't say that because I never know the guy writes 10 things a day or something, but this one, anyway, we're linking to it on anti-war.com today.
It's called Obama, the King of Africa, and this is news apparently, they're talking about it in the chat room last night.
Michelle Bachmann said in the debate, Republican presidential candidate Michelle Bachmann said, Obama's taken us to Libya and now he's taking us to Africa.
And so apparently, yeah, apparently on Twitter, it's trending worldwide, Libya is in Africa.
No, no, no, no, no, Libya is not in Africa.
No, not at all.
I guess the Sahara Desert makes quite a bit of difference this way in that, doesn't it?
In fact, Michelle Bachmann is right.
She's just saying what the House of Saud is saying, that Libya now is an Arab country.
It's not an African country anymore.
Oh, there you go.
That may be where she got her talking point.
All right, well, but now what she meant was that Obama has sent, he claims, 100, I guess, JSOC, it means, they say special forces guys, and he, okay, so he sent a letter to John Boehner, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, saying, hey, just so you know, I sent troops to chase down this cult in, or this group of murderers anyway, in, guess what?
Uganda, Central African Republic, South Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
We are going to chase these guys in four countries, he said.
What in the heck, who are these guys, the Lord's Resistance Army?
Look, okay, look, this is such a complicated story.
In fact, I'm trying to put together some alternate reasons for Obama's intervention as we speak.
But anyway, let's try to start from the beginning.
Basically, the United States is getting into another ethnic war.
The Lord's Resistance Army is led by a guy called Joseph Kony.
He's a former altar boy.
He thinks that he's some kind of a prophet.
He's a mystical Christian.
In fact, I was getting emails from many people saying, no, he cannot be a Christian, because he's a killer.
The problem is he builds himself as a mystical Christian political prophet.
That's his own definition, right?
He had a ragtag army of, until two years ago, more or less, 2,000 to 3,000 fighters.
But at this moment, they have no more than 400.
They are the lowest ebb and flow for the past 15 to 20 years.
They're basically from northern Uganda.
And the government is led by Museveni, which is another crackpot tin-pot dictator.
He's Bantu.
So we have an ethnic conflict between the Luhur in northern Uganda with the Bantu in southern Uganda, which are controlling the government for the past 20 years.
In fact, Museveni is a kind of dictator for life.
He's been in power for 25 years, very much liked, of course, in the U.S. and European capitals.
He stole the elections last January in Uganda, and he's going to pull a kind of Nazarbayev in Kazakhstan saying, you know, dictator for life.
So, why now?
The problem is everything is interlinked.
Libya is interlinked with that area, the tri-border area, let's put it this way, in central Africa.
Uganda, southern Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, and the Central African Republic.
Very strategic as well.
And the Horn of Africa.
The whole thing is interlinked.
It's part of AFRICOM's push into Africa.
So, number one, part number one of the equation.
Okay, the U.S. has a base in Djibouti, but this base is not big enough as a huge military base to control the Horn of Africa.
So, the Pentagon and NATO as well, of course, because NATO considers the Mediterranean as a NATO lake, they need a base.
The base will be established in Libya.
It's still a long shot because Libya, as we know, and as we can see nowadays, it's in civil war still, and it's going to be in civil war for a long time.
So, that's the tri-border structure, the three-pronged strategy, let's put it this way.
Horn of Africa, Libya, and Central Africa.
Why Central Africa?
First of all, Uganda, for the U.S. and for the Europeans, especially for the English, it's an anglophone country, basically.
It's more or less an undisguised colony of the Anglo-American compound.
It's strategically located.
It's very close to South Sudan, very close to Congo.
There's lots of oil and minerals in the whole area, including Uganda itself.
So, what do you need over there?
You need American boots on the ground.
And this is what we have, and this is the first installment.
They're being built as advisors.
So, a remix of Vietnam in the early 60s is in order.
It started with a bunch of advisors sent to Southern Vietnam.
We all remember that, and we all remember what happened afterward.
So, expect more people in the long run to start coming to this, probably what, they're going to establish a base, a military base in Uganda?
It's very possible.
And these guys are JSOC.
They are very well-equipped special forces.
So, it's going to be counter-insurgency, recon, all sorts of gathering intelligence, all sorts of places in this crucial area, and also laying the ground for the protection of, guess what?
Pipelines.
Once again, there are two pipelines in this story.
One pipeline in Southern Sudan, now an independent country, and it's going to become another colony of the U.S. and the Europeans.
And, crucially, a pipeline from Uganda to Kenya, because Uganda is landlocked.
They discovered, within the next, no, within the last three to four years, they discovered huge oil deposits in Uganda.
The British stated several billion barrels of oil.
Nobody has a definite estimate.
So, to export this oil, they need a pipeline to go to Kenya.
So, obviously, you need European or American boots on the ground to protect this pipeline.
And this also, it's, the big picture is the confrontation, now direct, in fact, between the Pentagon, Pentagon's African, of course, and China.
Because China, they had interest in South Sudan.
They are not directly implicated in Uganda, but they go to Congo, because Congo has lots of minerals and interest for the Chinese.
So, the whole Central African region for the Chinese is also strategic.
So, now it's direct.
It's the Chinese commercial interests with their billions of dollars of investment and no interference in the local politics in Africa, against the Pentagon African strategy, which is militarization, or sort of humanitarian imperialism, barely disguised like this interference by press release by the White House directly into Uganda.
All right, well, a lot to go over there, but I think I just want to start with the irony, I guess, that, you know, they used to have this whole Powell doctrine that said, no more Vietnams, we want to only do overwhelming force, get our mission done, declare victory and get the hell out of somewhere so that the politicians don't do this to us again, the military gods.
And now look at this, they're just looking for Vietnams to fight.
And I guess, from that point of view, this thing really is perfect.
You invade sub Saharan Africa, you can wage war there forever and ever.
What?
An armed group of guys with guns and pickup trucks, get them.
That'll keep going forever.
Pepe?
Yes.
Look, this is completely crazy, because...
Well, leave it right there.
It's completely crazy.
Now, we got to take this break.
We'll be right back with Pepe Escobar after this, everybody.
Atimes.com.
Look him up.
He's in the viewpoints at antiwar.com today.
You'll find him there, too.
All right, y'all, welcome back.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and on the line is the great Pepe Escobar from the Asia Times.
And we're talking about the American colonization of Africa.
And of course, we knew this was coming.
Once you say that you have such a thing as called Africom, we all know that what good's an Africom if you're not using it?
And that, obviously, the people there are going to find a million excuses if they can, or they'll make up a million excuses if they need to, in order to establish their own power and influence, if only in DC.
To hell with Africa.
And now, here they have their pretext, and their pretext is a group of 400 guys with pickup trucks and AK-47s, who are brutal, and according to Human Rights Watch, they have committed some absolutely heinous atrocities.
But this has got to be the thinnest pretext that American government officials have ever had for going to war.
I mean, it's just insane.
And you put in 100 JSOC now, that just means that they're going to disband and melt away, and go find more recruits and spread into countries where the JSOC doesn't have permission to go yet, and on it's going to go from there.
You can see 100 dominoes in a chain without even trying.
And basically, like, the title of this interview on antiwar.com will be, oh, it's on now.
Forget it.
Throw your hands up.
We're done.
Cooked.
They are.
And in terms of human rights violations and massacres, in fact, the Museveni government in Uganda, they're even worse than the Lord's Resistance Army, according to Human Rights Watch.
You know, this is Western observers.
So this guy's 25 years in power.
He can also kill a lot of people.
Of course, he's not an Indian, but, you know, he's getting close, and he still probably has another 25 years to go, right?
Well, and he's killing people in Somalia for us right now.
This is, John Glazer said, this looks like a little bit of tit-for-tat for that.
You kill Somalis for us, and we'll kill your enemies in your country.
It is.
Absolutely.
It is, and it's been acknowledged by a lot of people who know much more about Uganda than I do, for instance.
And I'm getting some very interesting emails from readers in Congo or from Uganda itself saying, yes, this is tit-for-tat for 5,000 Ugandans, at least, who have been sent by Museveni to fight a proxy war for the U.S. in Somalia.
And now the favor is returned with these 100 JSTOC guys.
But these people are also saying, look, the U.S., as long as they secure intel, and as long as they secure the oil and the protection of these pipelines, they're going to throw Museveni under the bus.
This is practically a consensus, you know.
So this could take two, three, four, five years.
But obviously, for the moment, they're using Museveni.
We don't know if Museveni asks for it, or if the White House, Pentagon, CIA, et cetera, impinged that on him.
We still don't know.
Does it matter that at least, I don't know, best I can tell, correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me like sending in American troops to anywhere is a really bad way of securing a pipeline.
Look at Iraq, look at Afghanistan, wherever they go to secure pipelines anywhere, all they do is spread chaos and war and insecurity.
Tell me about it.
You know, look at the Balkans, for instance, which is the model for all this.
The AMRO pipeline, it's very close to Camp Bonstill, which is the largest U.S. base, probably in the world and outside of the U.S., and outside of the American embassy in Baghdad, of course.
And they are over there to protect the Trans-Balkan pipeline as well.
Well, that one seems to be working, right, or not?
Exactly.
It's not guaranteed that it's going to be working.
In Afghanistan, it's even worse, because they are already there to protect a pipeline that will never be built, which is the TAP, the Trans-Afghan pipeline, the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan pipeline.
Now we're going to have this Uganda-Kenyan pipeline as well, which, you know, if the Lord's Resistance Army, if they get their act together, they can also disrupt this pipeline.
It's not going to be 100 JSOCs that are going to do the job.
So the thing is not, it goes way beyond that.
It's policing Africa from Northern Africa in Libya, the Horn of Africa, and Central Africa, against this war against China.
This is the most important thing.
So it starts with 100, so it's going to be a lot.
Because Africa, and when it was created in 2008, still during the Bush administration, was, look, what is going to be our response to China making deals with at least 20, 25 African nations, and reaping the benefit, and getting their minerals, and getting their oil and gas?
We have to do something.
So the only strategy that the Bush administration came up with was militarization.
And the Obama administration, which never paid any attention to Africa in the first two years or so, suddenly they wake up and they think, oh shit, the Chinese are taking everything away from us, the West.
So what are we going to do?
Increase war against the Chinese.
It's so narrow-minded.
It's so suicidal.
And it's once again, Washington shooting itself in the foot.
It's completely crazy.
Yeah.
Well, and look, I mean, even the most cynical Republicans with the foreigners aren't humans and it's okay to kill them and steal from them attitude, have got to realize, or they ought to realize, that it was 1776 when Adam Smith debunked the economics behind this kind of imperialism.
It's much cheaper to just buy these minerals in the marketplace than to go around occupying it.
We don't have to conquer France to drink wine.
We'll just trade lumber for their wine.
That was, you know, come on, man.
You're totally right.
And this is what the Chinese do.
What do Chinese do?
They go to these countries.
They talk at the highest level.
They say, what do you need?
You need hospitals, highways, dams, you know, infrastructure, knowledge.
Okay.
We'll build anything that you want.
So give us a fair deal for your cobalt, your copper, your gold, diamond, nickel, platinum, whatever, and your oil and gas.
And obviously they trade happily with governments like Angola or Equatorial Guinea or South Africa.
No problem.
And the Americans, they go there and they impose restrictions.
They want to interfere in the internal politics of the country they're dealing with.
Obviously it's not going to happen.
Africa, it's very complicated.
Most of these leaders, they are extremely corrupt, but they are very good at striking deals.
They're profitable, at least not for the country, at least for them and their circle.
And in the case of Gaddafi, for instance, he was courted before he became bogeyman again for the second time.
He was courted by the West, by the French, by the Italians, by the Brits.
The Italians are very clever because Libya was a former Italian colony, and he was there in the first place, and they got the better contract with Gaddafi.
That's one of the reasons for the war, in fact, because the Brits, the French, and the Americans were left out, because most of the oil exports from Libya during Gaddafi, more than 30% were going to Italy.
And very important, 10 point something percent were going to China as well.
Why?
Because they struck the best deals.
And Gaddafi said, these deals are cool, let's go for it.
And without pressure from the Anglo-Americans and the French as well.
So in Africa, it's the same thing.
If you want to do deals in Sudan, the same thing.
The Chinese dealt with Khartoum directly, but they often have a very good deal, actually.
Very, very good, which the Americans would never do.
And that's why they got these contracts to exploit oil from Sudan.
So that leads us to, okay, what is the Western strategy?
Okay, let's balkanize Sudan.
Because, well, the oil is in the South, and South Sudan is going to be one of our satrapies or protectorates from now on.
And the Chinese, they see it in Beijing, how it works.
Now they know they are fighting the Pentagon on many fronts inside Africa, but they will keep finding ways around it.
Because the direct relationship between Beijing and most of these governments, if not all of them, is at the highest level.
They have a special, you know, they know each other, and they know how to do business with each other.
And the fact that they are not being interfered with in their internal policies is very important for all these African regimes or dictatorships.
How long before there's American troops in Nigeria?
Hillary Clinton was threatening Boko Haram a couple weeks ago.
Okay, the threat is already there.
So we could expect another press release soon.
Yeah, well, we're going to liberate those people.
Exactly.
There's the whole of Africa to be liberated, you know.
Well, you know, I mean, I don't know if there's one silver lining on this.
It's the transparency of the pretext, right?
I mean, this is simply colonialism.
America is Europe now.
And, or I guess you could flip it the other way, you know, we're reversing our old slave trade history.
Now we're just going to conquer them and enslave them in their own land.
And, you know, I don't know, maybe that'll make it a little harder to get away with the fact that it's just so blatant and cynical and exploitative, but maybe not.
I don't know.
I'm very curious about what's going to be the Chinese response to all this.
I'm sure they have, you know, they usually, in China, they work with the five-year plans and they have plans up to 2040, 2050.
I'm sure they already analyzed the contingencies.
Okay, the Americans are going to try to encircle us out of our strategic point in Africa.
What are they going to do?
We still don't know.
It's too early to tell.
But for instance, in Angola, they're very secure.
Angola is one of their top oil suppliers.
We don't know what they're going to do in Sudan now.
In Sudan, they are on the spot.
And Libya was not very important in the first place.
So, you know, I'm very curious about the Chinese response.
It's going to take a few months for us to see this strategy, especially if they're going to alter their commercial strategy in China, or if they are going to start pressing for more sources of energy in Central Asia.
The thing is the minerals.
They need the minerals in Africa.
And they cannot find them anywhere else.
For instance, lithium, they could find in Bolivia.
But in Bolivia, the South Koreans got in Bolivia before the Chinese.
So they already struck deals with Morales for exploiting lithium in a fantastic Salar region in southern Bolivia.
So we should be watching what the Chinese are going to do if they feel that they are encircled.
Hey, why don't you stay on for one more segment here?
Yes, why not?
Okay, great.
So hold on, everybody.
That's Pepe Escobar.
That's the end of the chaos show for the day.
If you want to hear more of him, and also Anthony Gregory in the third hour, we'll be over at lrn.fm.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
Got Pepe Escobar hanging on the phone over time here.
Before I ask him any more things, I want to read you a little bit out of this article.
It's worth it.
Now I got to find where I was.
Uganda and nearby eastern Congo happens to hold fabulous quantities of, among others, diamonds, gold, platinum, copper, cobalt, tin, phosphates, tantalite, magnetite, uranium, iron ore, gypsum, beryllium, bismuth, chromium, lead, lithium, niobium.
The hell is that?
And nickel.
Many among these are ultra-precious rare earth minerals of which China exercises a virtual monopoly.
There you see the mission of AFRICOM as opposed to humanitarian liberation.
Here, even in the official story, they're intervening not just against this so-called death cult, which maybe it is one, but on behalf of the Ugandan dictatorship in order to do so.
But now you wanted to tell us more about the oil in, was it in Uganda, Pepe?
Yes, this is a very important story.
In fact, I'm writing about it as we speak.
It concerns heritage oil.
I'm sure a lot of people in America heard about them because they were in Iraq after 2003 already.
These guys, they were clinching deals with Iraqi Kurdistan on the back of the government in Baghdad.
You probably remember this story, I'm sure, antiwar.com.
Was this the company that Peter Galbraith was involved in there and made all that money?
Yes, absolutely.
And I just found a quote from their CEO, Tony Buckingham, which, by the way, is a former mercenary.
So this is an oil company, Mercenary Private Army, based in London.
Perfect place for it because in London there are lots of SAS mercenaries who start their own companies afterwards, lots of risk consultancy firms as well.
In fact, my wife's son works for one of these risk consultancy firms, so he always feeds me fantastic information.
So I found this quote by Tony Buckingham.
This is how it describes heritage oil's modus operandi.
He says that we employ a quote, a first mover strategy of entering regions with vast hydrocarbon wealth where we have a strategic advantage.
Translation, they were in Iraqi Kurdistan in 2003-2004.
Guess where they were a few months ago?
Libya.
They struck a deal buying a company, let me get the name of the company, Sahara Oil Services, controlling 51% stake in this company, which means they can bid and operate oil and gas licenses in Libya.
And guess where they have been for the past four or five years?
Uganda.
Where else?
And Congo.
They discovered some of the largest oil fields in Africa that were found in 2008 or 2009, if I'm not mistaken.
Several billion barrels of oil.
And this was a very convoluted negotiation with the Ugandan government and included the Congolese as well.
And apparently there was, on behalf of a heritage and probably conducted by a heritage, a massacre of people of Congolese because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, exactly where these oil fields were going to be prospected.
And then they dodged $4 million in capital gains tax.
And in fact, they swindled the Ugandan government because heritage transferred the rights that they had to another company, which is basically owned by the same guy, Tony Buckingham.
And now, these past few days, the Ugandan parliament null and void the whole thing.
So let's see what's going to happen after that.
But the point is...
Wait a minute, when in the timeline did they null and void the whole thing compared to when Obama announced he was sending troops there?
This was way before, way before.
In fact, the parliament, this was in the last few days.
Look, I don't have the exact date here.
Just a second.
I'm just checking this as we speak.
No problem.
It's PepeEscobar, atimes.com.
The article we're discussing is Obama, the king of Africa.
It's in the viewpoint section today at antiwar.com.
Look, this is fantastic.
Look, there it is.
It was only a few days ago that they nullified this transfer from a heritage oil to, it's called too low oil as well, which basically a spinoff of heritage with the same people in charge.
And they got away with a lot of money out of this.
Half a billion dollars.
The information I get is that they got half, they swindled half a billion dollars out of the Ugandan government.
And then the Ugandan MPs, they discovered this was a swindle, you know.
And it's interesting, this happened only a few, I would say a few weeks before Obama decides by press release to send the 100 guys over there.
So this explains a lot of stuff of what's going on, right?
And once again, we have the same oil company, which was present in Iraqi Kurdistan.
It is present in Libya, and it's at the heart of the oil deals in the Uganda-Congo border.
So it's amazing, isn't it?
And it's practically in your face.
So if you have access to information, you can understand the timeline and understand why in the oil energy angle, these JSOC guys are going to Central Africa.
All right, now, if it's okay, well, geez, there's so many different directions.
I want to ask you about Sudan and Nigeria at the same time, but I'll have to pick one.
I'm all for secession down to the last man.
I want 7 billion nation states in the world, if that's what we got to call them.
So all things being equal, there's no reason anybody doesn't want to be ruled by the politicians in Khartoum should have to be.
On the other hand, this entire secession of southern Sudan was really just one big CIA plot.
Am I right?
Yes, totally.
Especially because, let's say, it's part of the bigger picture of the US and major European powers staking their ground in Central Africa in a crucial area where they can use an Islamic threat or Islamic terrorist in power, like they used to characterize the Khartoum government, to start balkanizing countries like they did in Sudan.
The fact that the balkanization of Sudan constitutes a huge problem for China because most of the oil in Sudan is in the south and Sudan is a very important oil supplier to China.
Now they're amplifying their range because now this includes South Sudan, Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, and even Burundi as well, which is not far away as well.
I'm sure all these JSOCs are going to all these five countries.
You know, I used to think that they would do like the Hollywood types wanted and they'd invade western Sudan in the name of the battle going on between the nomads and farmers there in the Darfur region, and then they would use that as the backdoor into southern Sudan where the oil and the Chinese are.
But apparently they found a better route.
They found a better route as well, absolutely.
Also, we haven't even talked about the Kenyan invasion of Somalia, which is ongoing, ongoing.
All right, well, I'm already going to have to keep you for one more segment to talk about that.
Let me see if I can get a quick answer here about Nigeria, because you want to talk about Somalia, let's talk about Somalia.
But real quick on Nigeria here now, you know what?
African geography is not my specialty here, but if I understand right, the so-called the Boko Haram, so-called Al-Qaeda-tied Islamic terrorist guys, they're not really where the oil is.
They're in the other part of Nigeria from where the oil is.
The guys who are the rebel fighters where the oil is aren't Muslims.
They have some weird mystical religion based on who knows what, but it's not an Islamic tradition, my best information.
But that's what they really want there, and they're headed that way, aren't they?
Yes, but the oil in Nigeria is basically secure.
There's no need for any foreign intervention in Nigeria to protect oil shipments.
Well, it's been a few years, I guess, since I've read about it, but was that insurgency put down then?
Yes, totally, absolutely.
Totally and absolutely.
I want to pick that up on the other side of this break, and then we'll talk about Somalia.
It's PepeEscobar.
Atimes.com is the website.
The article is Obama, the King of Africa.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with PepeEscobar from the Asia Times.
Atimes.com, talking about Obama, the King of Africa, and where we left off, we were talking about the former, I guess now, rebels in the Niger Delta, and it was January 2007, I interviewed Sebastian Younger about his Vanity Fair article, Blood Oil, and it's about this group calling themselves the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, and they were basically the locals, and their government had sold them out and given all their oil away to Shell Oil, and of course, they were polluting all their natural fishing grounds and everything, not just stealing all their property, but destroying what they had left too, and so they started kidnapping people, not hurting them, but kidnapping them, giving them a little bit of that Stockholm Syndrome that, hey, we're people too, and you guys are stealing our stuff, and then sending them home with a pat on the head to, you know, try to convince the rest of the executives that what they were doing was wrong, and they had been in some battles, and they had this magical belief system that said if they paint little white circles on their skin, that'll make them bulletproof, and they had a bunch of brand new Eastern European fully automatic rifles, and seemed like there was going to be something there, but then when we went out to break, Pepe, you were saying, this insurgency has been put down in Nigeria completely.
Yes, basically, so let's say this is, and for another intervention, for Western intervention in Nigeria, it's too complicated, because the oil is more or less assigned, and it's being exported to the clients already there.
The most important part of the overall strategy of the Americans, and also the Europeans in Africa, is that the future discovered, the recent discoveries, the future discoveries, and future contracts.
That's why this area, Uganda, South Sudan, Central African Republic, and Democratic Republic of Congress, so important, because of all those minerals that are still there, and the contracts do not apply yet, and because of these new oil discoveries, these several billion barrels of oil.
They want to make sure, basically, that China won't have access to any, to a single drop of these several billion barrels of oil, which is not only in Uganda, it's Uganda near Congo as well, and the Congolese are saying, look, in fact, this new American intervention is against us, it's not against Uganda, which is true.
Uganda, let's say, it's a giant forward operation base for the Americans now.
It starts with 100, it's going to be much more, but Uganda is an anglophone country, and the connections between Museveni and Washington and London are very close.
That's a very important question, isn't it?
When Obama announced that, yeah, I'm sending troops to these four countries, he didn't really say, yes, we have explicit permission from the national governments of these four countries to do this.
Of course not, because it doesn't, but that's the whole point.
So you're saying in the Congo, they don't want this?
No, of course not, of course not.
And it's great, I got some fabulous email from readers in Congo, I didn't even know that we had readers in Congo, and they were saying exactly the same thing.
Nobody told anyone else about this thing.
This is a deal between Washington and Kampala, but they never talked about it with us, or with the Central African Republic.
South Sudan is different, because South Sudan now is a Western protectorate.
It's a new Kosovo in the center of Africa, it's different.
But I wonder what the Congolese are going to do about it.
Yeah, well, me too.
I guess, you know what, it doesn't matter.
As long as it's something horrible, then it's perfect.
As long as your job is selling, I don't know, whatever brand of batteries the JSOC use in their backpacks there, you know?
And look, one more thing about Congo, Scott.
There has been a non-stop civil war and horrendous massacres in Congo for, I don't know what, 20 years at least.
Right, so they can just flip a coin and pick a side.
They can just flip a coin and pick a side and call it humanitarianism.
We've got to stop the terrible fighting in the Congo.
See how much we care?
It's not even for our interests.
See how much the West cares about Congo?
Never, over these past two decades, nobody tried to do anything about Congo.
You remember how Bill Clinton, he couldn't sleep at night because of Rwanda.
What happened in Congo was much worse than what happened in Rwanda.
In terms of numbers, it's not 1 million, it's 4 million dead over the past two decades.
It was, if I remember right, it was Susan Rice, the current ambassador to the United Nations, back when she was working for Bill Clinton, that after the fascist puppet dictator Mobutu Sese Seko died, supported, I forget his name now, but the guy that ended up coming to power and was a brutal dictator and just carried on civil war.
Exactly.
What's his name again?
Kabila.
Right.
Lawrence Kabila.
Right.
And is he still the guy running things there?
Look, I have to go back to my Congo research, because I stopped following this region for a while, and now I have to go back to it again.
Well, that's a lot of imperial satellites to try to keep track of.
You know, there's 192 countries in the world.
I think the Russians and the Chinese are the only ones with any real independence at this point.
I will recommend your listeners to check a website called allafrica.com.
If you want to keep up with at least with what's going on in most African countries on a daily basis, this is a very good source.
Of course, getting side information is another story, but at least to keep it up, because there's more than 50 countries and there's so much happening in all of them at the same time.
You know what, I screwed up and I forgot.
We got to talk about Somalia real quick, Pepe.
Tell us about the Kenyan invasion of Somalia.
This is an American thing, isn't it?
Okay, Somalia, the point I wanted to make is that the U.S. tried a first proxy war against Somalia via Ethiopia.
It was a total disaster.
Now they are trying a second.
In fact, they tried a second one with Uganda, which is ongoing, and now they are trying a third one via Kenya.
It's crazy.
So they're going to order all the anglophone-speaking countries in Africa to invade Somalia and try to subdue a country that is ungovernable, basically, because it's tribal, and there is a conflict even inside Muslims, inside the Muslim community.
The Al-Shabaab, they are hardcore, but most of Somali Muslims, I would say I could even compare them to the Indonesians in Southeast Asia.
They want a peaceful Islam.
They are not Wahhabi-style driven.
You know, it's completely different.
If the West, especially the West, they have left the Somalis to solve their own problems by themselves, this is what they were doing when they had those Islamic courts in Mogadishu.
It was working very well, and in fact, it was not controlled by the hardcore jihadists.
It was controlled by moderate Muslims.
But the U.S. said, no, the Al-Qaeda in power in Mogadishu, we have to go there and do something about it.
It's ridiculous.
Well, listen, I have to say, I have to say here that for everyone in the audience, anyone who wants to know about the war in Somalia, the single best piece of journalism on this story is Jeremy Scahill on The Nation, Blow Back in Somalia.
It's just from a couple of weeks ago, and that is the story of American intervention and the responsibility that America bears for the current famine in that country.
Hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children dying of starvation.
You know, that is something that's so important and needs to be made clear to the American people.
Isn't it crazy that if it's not for Jeremy, would you have the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the American network, or CNN going there and investigating this?
Of course not.
No, no, all we ever got out of that was independent journalism for that kind of stuff.
That's right.
All we ever got out of Somalia was bits and pieces.
Exactly.
Exactly.
All right, well, listen, I can't tell you how much I appreciate your time.
You're another one of those incredibly valuable globe-trotting journalists, and I really appreciate your time on the show, as I always do, Pepe.
Always a pleasure to be with you guys.
I wish I could supply more info.
Okay, let's wait for a few weeks.
Yeah, well, this war is going to last forever, so we have plenty of time to catch up.
It's the long war, remember.
Very long.
All right, thanks.
Until the dollar breaks.
Thanks, Scott.
Thanks very much.
