All right, y'all, welcome back.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Wharton, and our first guest on the show today is Pepe Escobar, on the phone from the other side of the planet from here.
Welcome back, Pepe, how's it going?
Hey, man, always a pleasure to be with you.
Indeed, very happy to have you here.
You all know Pepe, he's the author of Obama Does Globalist Stand, and he writes for the Asia Times, The Roving Eye.
All right, so let's talk about the Cold War, which did not end 20 years ago like it was supposed to, and apparently is still on.
And as you've been writing for some time, it's all about this pipeline of Stan, who gets to sit their soda straws in the Caspian Basin, and which direction all that oil is going to go.
So from here, we can talk about the Friendship Pipeline, which is supposed to go through Afghanistan, Pakistan, India to China, or we can talk about all the soda straws that are supposed to somehow get to Europe without going through Russia, or maybe Russia's point of view on the other way around that.
And then, I don't know, I guess I should have a map right in front of me, Pepe.
I don't know whether the Cold War, the proxy war in Syria right now between America and Russia has anything to do with all this pipeline of Stan nonsense or not, but that's enough for you to chew over and explain to us.
Can you get me five hours today?
Yeah, no, actually, I can't, but I could keep you for an hour.
Look, well, not exactly by accident.
I had a brief stop in two of the BRICs last week, in Moscow and then in Beijing.
And of course, the conversation was always about pipelines as well, right?
I was coming back from Europe, from Spain, where I was watching the disaster that the Troika, the IMF, the European Central Bank, and the European Commission are unleashing on Spain.
It's fantastic when you do this.
When you come from Europe, you have a stop in Russian China, then you land in Southeast Asia, and you see the whole thing moving.
And at the same time, you see, where the hell are we going?
I always have grumps in my mind.
The old order disappeared, collapsed, or it's practically collapsed, but there's no new order in place.
So we have this overall mess virtually all over the world.
In fact, one of the few places in the world where we don't have a mess at the moment is South America.
Incredibly, as it may seem, I never thought I would be saying these words, you know, when I was younger.
But anyway, so the pipeline thing, the big story for the past few weeks, and it will still be a big story for the next few months, is that pipeline war in Southwest Asia and South Asia, the TAPI against the IP, which used to be the IAPI, the IPI, sorry.
So just to remind our listeners, TAPI is the Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India pipeline, which is going to cost a fortune if they ever built it.
It's going to cross Afghanistan on Western Afghanistan, going through Kandahar province of all places, and then through Balochistan to get to India.
It's nobody in his right mind, if you're an oil analyst, or even if you're a geopolitician, obviously nobody will ever build this pipeline.
This pipeline has been in the works since the Clinton administration, 1996.
It's not going to happen, but India needs it.
Pakistan needs it.
So what's the alternative?
The alternative is the IP, which used to be IPI, India, Pakistan, Iran.
So it's an umbilical cord uniting India, Pakistan, and Iran.
So in geopolitical terms, in terms of Asian integration, it's extremely important.
And this is exactly what America does not want.
Exactly, Scott, that's the point.
See, this is the part that really actually makes me very angry, because I'm thinking what I want is rich businessmen in Pakistan and India to get along, because they're passing so much money back and forth all the time.
Yeah, exactly.
And look, if you talk to the Indian ruling class, they will tell you, look, we need this pipeline, but we couldn't do it because of American pressure.
If they're part of the government, they're going to tell you, no, maybe this is not a good idea.
We cannot trust Pakistan.
And after all, the Americans offer civilian nuclear technology, and we also need that as well.
So depending on your interlocutor in India, he's going to spin pro-US or he's going to spin, I'm over the wall on this.
Well, and I'm sorry, because I got to interrupt you to point out that here we beat Iran over the head all day.
We, the US government, the Western governments, beat Iran over the head all day long with the nonproliferation treaty that they are not in violation of.
And meanwhile, we're willing to break it ourselves, quite obviously in the form of Condoleezza Rice's deal with the Indians, that no, you don't have to sign the NPT.
And you could just sit there with all your nuclear weapons, branching them and threatening Pakistan all the time.
And we'll help you develop your nuclear technology further if you will only not do this pipeline deal that could lead to peace in the region.
Absolutely.
So this is, you know, you just outlined in 30 seconds the double standard.
And always with Washington invoking the will of the international community.
There is no international community, as we all know.
The international community is Washington, Paris, London, and the Persian Gulf monarchy.
Two of them, in fact, because only two really count, the House of Saud and Qatar.
So to go back to Iran, Iran, they need to export more gas, obviously.
Pakistan badly needs the energy like yesterday.
So if they build, if they build now, they're already building the IP.
The Iranian part is already built.
Iran has already offered $250 million to help the Pakistanis to build the Pakistani side of IP.
There's a German engineering company involved in the Pakistani side.
So it's going to be built probably by 2014.
And then the gas starts flowing by the end of 2014.
This is what the Pakistanis, not only they want, they need it badly, you know.
And they told the Americans many times, you know, even if you pressure us, this is not going to derail the project because this is in our national interest.
And Hillary Clinton months ago told the Pakistanis in their faces like, look, if you go on with IP, we're going to sanction to death.
And the Pakistani foreign minister said, look, maybe you will because we're going to build it.
And that's a done deal.
In 2014, this thing is a goal.
So they managed, Washington managed, starting with the Bush administration, and then with the Obama administration, they managed to derail India from IP, but they did not derail Pakistan.
So this umbilical cord between Iran and Pakistan is a goal in two years.
In geopolitical and energy terms, it's an extremely important development.
And it also proves that Iran, once again, this is something that we discussed a few months ago.
Iran is not isolated internationally.
Iran has many contacts with the non-alliance group, which is more than 120 countries.
Iran has very good relationship with the BRICS.
Well, and it sounds like, you know, the inverse of what you're saying there is American influence in Pakistan is really waning as well.
Oh yeah, and this is another sterling example.
It's no wonder that you don't read stories about the IP on US mainstream media, especially.
Europeans, they don't even care because they only worry about their own pipelines that are not going to be built like that Verdi-Opera pipeline, the Nabucco, which is dead.
For all practical purposes now, it's dead, you know.
So coming back to IP, very important development that we should follow in the next few months or in the next year.
It could become eventually IPC.
And C stands for our dear friends in Beijing.
Why?
Because they know, look, if this thing is going through Southern Iran, Southern Pakistan and stops at the key port of Gwadar in the Arabian Sea.
So if you have this thing starting in 2014 and there's lots of gas flowing and Pakistan is not going to buy all this gas, they already agreed on pricing, by the way.
The Chinese can say, look, we can have the extra gas for ourselves.
And for this, we'll build a pipeline ourselves from the Arabian Sea.
I'm sorry, I gotta put you on hold here as we go out to this break.
Okay.
But yeah, we're talking about a pipeline from Iran to China and so in peace in this way, except America won't let it.
It's Pepe Escobar from the Asia Times.
We'll be right back after this.
All right, so welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and I'm talking with Pepe Escobar from the Asia Times.
That's atimes.com.
And we're talking about the American Cold War against Russia and China, which continues.
We've got to get back to Russia in a minute.
But we're talking about the pipeline headed east now.
The one that they want to build anyway, from Iran through Pakistan.
It was supposed to include India, but they've backed out at least as of now.
But then that doesn't matter because they can still go to China anyway.
And that's where we left off at the break was that the Chinese are saying, hey, let's do this thing.
Why not?
And the Pakistanis are saying, hey, it's not like we care what the Americans say.
So maybe we should.
Yeah, a quick word, Scott, on the financing side, which is very important.
The sanctions package launched by Obama, then followed by the European pull those, you know, the ICBC, which is the largest Chinese bank and the largest lender in the world.
Of course, they got a little bit scared about the sanctions.
So they backed off from financing part of the IP.
But they're still renegotiating with the Pakistanis, according to the foreign ministry and the Ministry of Commerce in Islamabad.
So maybe they'll still be part of the package.
They're trying to figure out how to dodge the sanction.
But still, there's a plan B.
There could be lending from the Chinese government directly to the Pakistani government, a state to state deal to do the pipeline, to finish the pipeline.
And probably with further Chinese participation, which would be an extension of the pipeline from Gwadar along the Karakoram Highway, which the Chinese built alongside the Pakistanis anyway.
So they could build another pipeline and go to Xinjiang in Western China.
So another source for the Chinese, everything is profitable in terms of increasing sources of suppliers of energy, gas or oil, right?
So we could see maybe, okay, we'll have to wait a few months, maybe one year to see if IP is going to become IPC.
IP is already a done deal.
And it's another victory in terms of Southwest Asia and South Asia integrating themselves.
And as we mentioned before- But I don't understand.
This is not what Washington wants, period.
Why bother occupying Afghanistan if the pipeline can just go right around you to the south?
Exactly.
Because these two conflicting pipelines, this pipeline, in fact, the idea came up years after everybody analyzing the situation in Afghanistan came to the conclusion that TAPI probably will never be built.
Because there won't be pacification of Afghanistan unless the Taliban are part of the government or the government.
And we should not forget that the bone of contention between the Clinton administration and then the Bush administration with the Taliban was transit rights.
The Taliban at the time, in mid-2001, they wanted 50 million bucks for transit rights, which is pocket money.
But the Americans are still haggling about it, you know.
And don't forget what Armitage told the Taliban before 9-11.
If you don't build a pipeline that we want, you know, we're going to throw a carpet of bombs over you.
And this was even before 9-11.
Right.
And, you know, Margulies, Eric Margulies, says that it was actually bin Laden that convinced the Taliban to cancel the deal with UNICAL in order that Bridas, the Argentine company, would actually do the building of the thing.
And that that was part of the bone of contention as well.
The thing is, Bridas was there before UNICAL.
But then there were some convoluted financial operations.
By the way, for people who don't know, Pepe Escobar wrote an article in August of 2001 saying, look out, bin Laden's about to attack you.
Yes, and a few years later, I wrote an article about the Taliban visiting Houston, which is something that was...
I learned when I was in Houston, as people told me the details of the Taliban visit to Houston, and this was better than any surrealist manifesto, you know, you could find anywhere.
And in fact, when they went to Houston in 97, discussing with the Clinton administration...
Well, this is the book that was produced, that came out at the beginning of 02 or something, right?
The Forbidden Truth by a French intelligence analyst and journalist writing together.
And it, you know, it was spun in the news, it's just don't pay attention to it because it's crazy or something.
But all it was is that American businessmen in the state were trying to cut a deal with the Taliban.
It wasn't working out and they were getting really pissed off.
And part of the reason it wasn't working out was because of Bin Laden's influence on the Taliban, which was saying, no, don't deal with them, deal with these other guys instead.
Deal with these other guys from Argentina, which were there in the beginning.
In fact, they had already a plan for the pipeline.
They had already talked to the Turkmen to secure the gas.
At the time it was Niyazov was the president and Niyazov said more than okay.
And after the bombing of Afghanistan in December, in December, 2001, early January, 2002, there was this famous meeting between Musharraf, Niyazov and Hamid Karzai, which was the new president at the time.
And they wrote the agreement for the pipeline.
They thought that now, no problem.
The country's sort of pacified.
We can build this pipeline in two years.
And look what happened afterwards.
Nobody was thinking about the Taliban staging a comeback, right?
So everybody knows that TAP is not going to work.
It's not going to be built.
So it's IP or IPC in the future.
Who does not exactly win in this situation?
We could say maybe the Russians are losing, but not totally because the Russians are very clever.
They have their eyes on both pipelines as well, Gazprom.
If there is a possibility of building TAP, Gazprom already said, okay, we're in, we'll finance, we can even build part of it.
And with IP, IPC, they can say, okay, this is okay because it goes to China, but it does not involve directly our sphere of influence, which are the Central Asian stand.
The Russians are very much worried about Turkmenistan.
They don't want Turkmenistan to sell their gas to Europe bypassing Russia.
So this is the other angle of the pipelines by chessboard.
The Russians, they more or less, they are accommodated to the notion that the Chinese are going to get their gas or their oil from South Asia, Persian Gulf, Central Asia, wherever, any way they can independently from Russia or sometimes in accord with Russia.
Like with those two Siberian pipelines, oil and gas going from Siberia to Western China.
But what the Russians are really, really thinking is, okay, let's strengthen our domination of Europe.
And for that, they need to control, especially Turkmenistan.
And that explains why Nabucco is not going to work because for Nabucco to work, they need gas either from Turkmenistan or from Iran.
We know it's not going to happen from Iran because of the US sanction.
And it's not going to happen from Turkmenistan because they're under pressure by the Russians.
So the Russians can consolidate the nightmare.
If you talk to those stupid bureaucrats in Brussels, they always tell you the same story.
Ah, we wish Gazprom wouldn't monopolize our gas supplies.
And then when they're drunk after two bottles of Bordeaux, they tell you, oh, if we only could do business with Iran.
Of course, if they had an independent foreign policy, they could.
But that would mean a break with Washington, right?
We know this is not going to happen.
All right, so now hold on, because I got to dummy back down to my level here, junior high school level on this issue here, Pepe.
What you're telling me basically is the Europeans are overly dependent from their own point of view on Russian oil and gas.
They would like very much to have all these pipelines.
There's two or three different ones, maybe four or five, I don't know, that could be running out of the Caspian Basin westward into Europe.
But instead, they can't do it because all of those would have to have something to do with Iran.
And the United States insists that the Europeans don't make any new deals anyway, as far as building these pipelines that would have to, you know, at some point, either originate in Iran or transit through Iran.
That's it in a nutshell, Scott, because look, the rationale for that famous BTC pipeline, which was the cornerstone of the US pipeline strategy, they built the BTC from Azerbaijan, crossing Georgia, getting to Turkey to bypass Iran.
It cost an absolutely bloody fortune, almost $5 billion.
If they had a pipeline coming directly from Iran to Turkey, at the time, it would cost like $700 million, $800 million.
Peanut.
You know, so it's not a question of money.
They would spend a fortune just to bypass Iran.
But nowadays, it's different because Europeans know that the only way that they can break their dependency of supplies of gas by Gazprom, which soon is going to be 30% of European...
All right, hold it right there.
Pepe, I got to keep you at least one more segment here.
Can you stay?
Okay, okay.
Okay, hang on, everybody.
We're going to be right back with Pepe Escobar from atimes.com, the Asia Times.
Russia rules Pipelinestan.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
We're talking about Pipelinestan with Pepe Escobar.
So here's the thing.
It seems like as far as America's cold war with Russia, if that is what this is, it doesn't seem to be going very well.
It seems to be pretty counterproductive because like you're talking about, we're just driving the...
With our anti-Iran policy, we're just driving the Europeans more into the Russians' arms.
So, you know, they really hate Iran more than Russia?
I don't even think the neocons hate Iran more than Russia.
What the hell?
Well, in terms of...
The whole thing is so counterproductive, and to compound all this catalogue of horrors, in Europe, there's no political will, unified political.
They are specialists in shooting their own feet all the time, especially in terms of their energy policy.
There are papers in Brussels for years that I remembered, okay, let's unify our energy policy.
Let's send missions to Central Asia and convince the Central Asians to sell their energy to us.
They have been doing this for the past few years and nothing happens.
When they go to...
Like when they send an European mission to talk to the Turkmen, it's seen as a joke because they don't know who they're dealing with and they don't know what the Europeans really want.
They don't know how they're going to be paid by their energy.
They don't know who's going to finance these pipelines.
It's an absolute mess.
And the Russians, it's an extraordinary experience when you enter that Gazprom room that they have in Moscow where they have the Star Wars in colour Dolby map of their pipelines.
So can you imagine a room with 180 kilometres of pipelines in all colours?
It's fantastic.
It's like if you are in a space station and they control the whole thing and then there's a separate planning for the pipelines who are being built or who will be built in the future.
So from this room, Gazprom controls Eurasia as a whole.
It's a way of seeing more or less how Russia is so powerful in the whole of Eurasia, not only on the Asian side but also on the European side as well.
They have two new pipelines going to Europe.
The North Stream, negotiated by Putin and Gerhard Schroeder, which is a member of the consortium, by the way, and the South Stream, which was negotiated by Putin and Berlusconi, including some orgies, negotiation orgies, literally.
And then Europeans say, look, it's crazy how we do not escape from Gazprom because even European governments know the best solution for their problems is with Gazprom because Gazprom is reliable.
They control the whole system from exploitation to distribution.
They're very tough to negotiate with and the Europeans don't know how to negotiate with Gazprom.
In the end, they succumb, basically.
And the alternative, which would be Iran, they know it's out of bounds and will always be because of the sanction.
If the European Union was really independent, they would already have solved this problem and we know they will never do it, never.
Well, now, I guess the Americans don't really care then so much if the Europeans become that much more dependent on the Russians.
I'm thinking back in Dick Cheney, before he was the vice president, after he was the secretary of defense, when he was running Halliburton in 98, he went to Australia, which is high treason to go to another country to criticize your own government.
He criticized Bill Clinton for the sanctions on Iran because he was the head of Halliburton at the time and he said, hey, the Ayatollah is a reasonable guy.
We can do business with these people.
So it seemed like even if you look at it from a strategery interest kind of point of view there, then, you know, why not make a deal with the Iranians in order to hurt the Russians?
Why is hurting Iran the bigger priority?
From a business point of view, Scott, it doesn't make sense, these sanctions against Iran.
Like big oil and big gas in the West as a whole, America and Europe.
But even from an imperial point of view, even from a strategy point of view, a rebuilding America's defenses point of view.
No, I agree with you.
I'm just talking about the business sense of it because the most in terms of international corporations.
That too, that's what I'm saying.
None of it makes sense at all, unless you're Netanyahu, I guess.
Exactly.
So like, you know, a few years ago, what, four years ago, I was in an energy conference in Tehran and their technicians told me, look, we need $200 billion to develop our energy infrastructure, which is outdated.
It's basically 70-ish, you know.
$200 billion, if you count the major energy operators in the West, in Europe, it's peanuts for them.
In two or three years, if they invested that kind of money, they could have access to the second largest gas reserves in the world and the third largest, fourth largest oil reserves in the world.
You know, so strategically, geopolitically, from a business point of view, it makes absolutely no sense.
So we always come back to the same point.
Why?
The wall of mistrust, now 32 years.
Why?
Because it's still the same thing.
We lost our gendarme of the Gulf, the Shah of Iran, when we wish to have something back.
And we want Iran integrated into the international financial club, which they are not.
So what, over the past few years, especially, this has thrown Iran into the arms of BRIC members, Russia and China.
And that's why for both of them, Russia's more ambiguous, of course, but especially for China.
Iran is a matter of national security.
For China, it is, because it's one of their top providers of both oil and gas.
Plus they have two mega deals with Iran of two monster pipelines for oil and gas.
It's a mega deal worth $100 billion for the next 30 years.
So for China, Iran is untouchable.
For Russia, Iran is a competitor with Russia in terms of selling oil and gas.
But Russia could also profit from investing in the Iranian energy industry via Gazprom and also profits from all this.
And they have a sort of strategic partnership as well in terms of the Russians building the Bushehr nuclear plant, for instance, the Russians selling armaments to Iran as well.
And all these countries, including the buyers of energy, like Turkey as buyer and transit country, Pakistan as a buyer, India as a buyer.
The key thing for all of them is we need to integrate this region.
Persian Gulf, Southwest Asia, South Asia, Central Asia, and the intersection of Central Asia, South Asia.
We need to integrate this whole place in terms of energy security.
We have most of the top reserves in the world, most of the top producers, top buyers as well.
So it's a win-win game for everybody.
And this is what Chinese diplomats are always saying.
We want to do win-win deal.
From an American point of view, it's different because America is an interloper in Eurasia.
So we have to go back to Dr. Big Brzezinski, who codified how America would be a powerful player in Eurasia.
And it's very funny because two months ago, I was reading Brzezinski's latest book, Strategic Vision, and now he's more or less admitting that his 1997 strategy, the Grand Chessboard, didn't work at all.
It was an absolute failure.
So now, you know what Brzezinski is preaching nowadays?
Let's integrate Turkey and Russia into the West.
What the hell does that mean nowadays?
Russia wants to do business with the West, and they want to integrate with Asia, especially with China, in terms of selling their wealth of energy to China.
And Turkey, they want to be a bridge between East and West.
They don't want to be an appendix or annex to the West.
So, you know, even the best strategic minds in the U.S., they are totally lost about what's happened this past 15 years.
Pepe, I got to keep you one more segment because I want to ask you about Georgia, and I want to ask you about Syria.
Okay.
All right, can we do it?
Yes, let's do it.
All right, hold on.
We'll be right back in three or four minutes or something like that with Pepe Escobar from theasiatimes.com.
Surrender now, or we'll bomb you later.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
Scott Wharton.
I'm talking with Pepe Escobar from the Asia Times.
He's on the phone from Thailand.
So, thanks again for staying up late with us tonight, Pepe.
No problem.
I appreciate it.
So, man, you got so many great articles up here.
We can't keep up with them all.
I don't know, but a good way to start talking about Syria, I think, is the fact that Nouri al-Malawi is the president of the United Arab Emirates.
The dictator of Iraq.
That American stalled there after a bloody eight-year war.
He's taken the side of Iran and the dictator of Syria against the United States on this one.
Surprisingly to, I don't know, everybody in North America for some reason.
So, maybe that's a segue into that topic, or maybe it's just something I wanted to bring up.
But what I really want to know is about America and Russia's Cold War in Syria.
Why does Russia care if America regime changes Syria or Iran for that matter?
Do they?
I mean, I know they're selling arms to Assad and there's money in that, but what else do they care?
The most important point is their naval base at Tartus Port.
They have docking rights.
The Black Sea Fleet goes to Tartus every winter.
In fact, they were there, I think, two months ago, month and a half ago, for naval exercises.
It's Russia's window to the Mediterranean.
And for NATO, this is anathema.
They want to get rid of this base by all means necessary.
And the Russians know this is important.
They see it as trying to keep a balance of forces as well.
For NATO, if they get rid of this base, they probably will achieve 95% of their dream of having the Mediterranean as a NATO lake, in fact, because now they have Libya in the back.
Soon we're going to have the Eastern Emirate of Libya controlled by a Wahhabi-friendly emir, right?
Probably we're going to have an African base set up in Libya within the next few months or a year or so.
Syria, if they can get rid of the Russian base in Syria, it's perfect.
And the last country would be Lebanon, which sooner or later, they'll find a way to destabilize, you know, get Hezbollah out of the government.
And if they have a Sunni, pro-American, pro-House of South government in Lebanon, they can have their base in Lebanon.
And that's it.
Mediterranean as a NATO lake.
And this is what they, in their last meeting in December 2010 in Portugal, over a year ago, this is in their charter.
This is what they want for the next few years until 2020.
It's an absolute must.
And this is the integration as well, in case of Libya, between NATO and AFRICOM.
AFRICOM started their first war in Libya.
Now they are branching out in Congo, Uganda, Central African Republic, that zone full of metals, minerals, rare earth, you name it.
So, you know, it's a reconquest of Africa.
It's a reconquest or a definitive conquest of the Mediterranean.
And the Russians, they see this straight away, just like the Chinese see that the war against Libya was against their interests, although they were not as phenomenal as they are in other parts of the world, especially Iran.
And they see the American war against Syria and Iran as a war against two of the BRICS, Russia and China.
And this is why the strategic entente, let's put it this way, between both is tighter and tighter.
We can see it practically on a monthly basis, you know.
And the fact that twice they prevented a vote at UN Security Council against Syria proves that they are extremely serious now because they knew what would happen in Libya at the time they abstained alongside with Brazil, India, and Germany.
Very important because Germany also saw the writing on the wall.
But now R2P as applied to Syria, totally red line.
And with Iran, nobody really knows.
China, if there is this much talked about attack on Iran, probably 2013, right?
If we have, for instance, hedge fund manipulator, warmonger Mitt Romney as president, God forbid, and the Buddha forbid, obviously there will be an attack on Iran.
And China, we don't know how the Chinese are going to react because for them, this is an attack on their national security in terms of a provider of energy.
And Russia, even though the relationship between Russia and Iran is very ambiguous because they are competitors as they are partners as well.
Don't forget, there are a lot of Russian technicians in Bushehr.
There are always a lot of Russian advisors in Iranian soil.
There is a collaboration between Russians and Iranians, nuclear collaboration, nuclear technology collaboration as well.
So we don't know how the Russian reaction is going to be.
So when we even start thinking about the possible ramifications, it's sometimes too horrifying to contemplate now, but they're all there.
But as you mentioned a while ago, for Bibi Netanyahu, Dilley Kudnick, and, you know, former Moldova bouncer, foreign minister Lieberman, for the Israeli lobby in the U.S., for AIPAC, for the AIPAC-bought U.S. Congress, and for parts of the industrial military complex in the U.S., they don't give a damn.
Yeah, there's no war too tough for the American people to fight.
Exactly.
And of course, who's going to fight this war?
It's not going to be Israel.
It's going to be the U.S. once again.
Well, now it sounds like two things here.
First of all, Syria is really hard.
They can't get a regime change in Syria any more than they can get a regime change in Iran without some kind of full-scale war.
For one year, Scott, exactly.
But then also it sounds like you're saying nobody's listening to Zbigniew Brzezinski anymore if he's saying now it's finally time to ally with Russia.
Exactly.
Look, the U.S. and NATO have been trying to unseat the Syrian government for one year now.
In Libya, it was very easy.
It's a huge country with lots of desert, with lots of enemy tribes on the eastern part of the country against Qaddafi.
It was much, much easier.
And obviously Qaddafi's army was a joke.
In Syria, it's different.
Even though they lost all the wars they took part in since 1967.
But it's a well-trained army.
They have 5,000 tanks.
They occupy the whole country.
Everywhere you go in Syria, you see Syrian tanks and Syrian army.
So they control the whole thing.
They are very well organized.
Even they may be, let's say, somewhat incompetent as a fighting force.
But they are well organized and entrenched.
And OK, so what's going on nowadays is what we discussed this, I think, months ago.
It is a civil war.
And now it is a de facto civil war.
And that's the problem with the Kofi Annan plan, which is not the Kofi Annan plan, by the way.
This is what Kofi Annan took from the Russian plan and the Chinese plan.
And then he starts spinning that it was his own peace plan.
This is what the Russians and the Chinese have been saying for months.
Same thing.
The problem is to disarm, to have a ceasefire and disarm both sides.
How can you disarm the so-called opposition when you have Qatari special forces advising them on the ground, speaking fluent Arabic and disguised as locals?
And when you have British and French special forces on the ground for months as well, not to mention that control and command center in southern Turkey, which has been training and advising people for over six months now.
It's not going to happen.
And you have two permanent members of the Security Council, which are implicated directly in the civil war on the part of the rebel.
Obviously, this thing is not going to work.
You know, so what we have been reading for the past three or four days in Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, whatever that is, it's in fact, they are trying to destroy something that was already destroyed in the first place.
I'm sorry.
They're trying to destroy something that's already destroyed.
The plan, the so-called Kofi Annan plan.
Oh, I see what you're saying.
It wasn't going to work in the first place.
Uh-huh.
Which was designed to fail because they knew that the opposition would never respect the ceasefire.
And now the opposition is saying out loud in public, we are not going to disarm.
Well, and look, the state isn't going to disarm either.
What are they going to do?
Put down their weapons, too?
That's not going to happen.
I mean, so is this thing just a long term civil war with a proxy war, really?
Yes, it is.
And this was the plan a few months ago when they established this training center in southern Turkey, when Qatar start training these people, when the Libyan Islamic fighting group rebels sent a contingent.
Yeah, but I mean, come on, at the same time, though, the guys at the Pentagon, they're jerks, but they're not stupid.
They know that they're licked here.
They know that they can't do this without a real war.
Exactly, exactly.
The only way for regime change would be a real war.
We know this is not going to happen this year, at least in an electoral year in the US.
So just keep it at a low level, well, relatively low level for the long term instead.
Exactly, exactly.
And if it is a relatively low level guerrilla, this could go on for a year, in fact, with no resolution, because there's no defection from the military, because the business classes, like we've been saying for months in Damascus and Aleppo, they are still aligned with the regime because the regime is supported by Iran and also by Iraq and also by Hezbollah in Lebanon.
And there's another thing, Scott, which is very interesting.
I hope I can write a story about this within the next few weeks.
Last year, there's the pipeline stun angle in Syria that nobody talked about until now.
Last year, Iran, Iraq and Syria signed a $10 billion agreement to build a huge gas pipeline from Iran crossing Iraq and crossing Syria as well, and probably to finish in Lebanon, in the Mediterranean, so they can export most of this gas to, where to?
Europe.
So now we have this pipeline stun angle.
Nobody's going to build a pipeline during a civil war, right?
So now we have big international companies, multinationals, eyeing the possibility of being part of this fantastic pie in the future if there is a regime change in Syria.
Or, yeah, keeping the war going and keeping it from happening to benefit someone else.
All right, I'm sorry.
We got to go.
We got a good hour out of you.
Thanks very much, Pepe.
Really appreciate it.
We'll be back.
Yes, you will.
We'll talk to you again soon.
Thanks very much.
Thanks, Scott.
Take care, my man.
Bye bye.
Cheers.
All right, everybody.
That's the great Pepe.
Escobar from ATimes.com.
The Asia Times.
We want war and we want it now.
Also, surrender now, we'll bomb you later.
Russia rules pipeline-a-stan and why Putin is driving Washington nuts.
