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Hey everybody, Scott Horton here.
Ever think maybe your group should hire me to give a speech?
Well, maybe you should.
I've got a few good ones to choose from, including How to End the War on Terror, The Case Against War with Iran, Central Banking and War, Uncle Sam and the Arab Spring, The Ongoing War on Civil Liberties, and of course, Why Everything in the World is Woodrow Wilson's Fault.
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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show here.
I'm Scott Horton, and next up, first up, our only guest on the show today, it's Pepe Escobar from the Asia Times, the roving eye.
Welcome back to the show, Pepe, how the hell are you, man?
Hey, man, fantastic to be with you again.
Greetings from South America this time.
Well, good, I'm very happy to have you back on this side of the planet.
Well, on that side, but sort of this side too.
You know what I mean.
You can divide hemispheres this way, longitude or latitude, you know.
I should tell you, the guys in the chat room, they love you.
They love you.
They're chanting, Pepe, Pepe, when the hell is Pepe going to be on?
Hurry up and start interviewing Pepe, would you?
That's what they say.
So I just thought you should know.
Hey, listen, for some reason, I just cannot really care about this, but something tells me it's kind of important.
I don't know.
Would you please explain to me why the Americans hate Hugo Chavez so much?
He's in the news because he just got reelected.
He's stood for election over and over again and keeps winning and winning.
And I know the Americans hate his guts, and I guess Greg Palast told me that, you know, years ago when he first came to power, he took $20 billion out of the Federal Reserve and started undercutting the IMF and the World Bank and making low-interest loans to other nations in South America, that kind of thing.
So, you know, maybe he's not that pliable.
But then again, doesn't he have a pretty good relationship with the boys in Houston?
And what is the damn big deal about Hugo Chavez anyway, Pepe Escobar?
Please.
Well, look, it's the usual post-Cold War mindset in Washington.
If you're not a client state, if you're not a sacrifice, if you're not pliable, you are one of our enemies.
This happened with Mosaddegh in Iran in 1953.
This has been happening with the Iranians for the past 30 years just because they have a theocratic system.
This has been happening with Chavez especially because he sits on the largest oil, proven oil reserve in the world, bigger than Saudi Arabia.
And he's independent.
Basically, to be a pliable client state like it was until 14, 13 years ago.
Okay, but now here's the thing.
Okay, I dig that.
However, he's not really that hard to get along with either, though, right?
I mean, to me it seems like it's all just PR.
On the surface, he goes around calling Bush the devil and this and that.
But he sells Houston all the oil they want to buy all day long with no hiccups ever.
Exactly, Scott.
In terms of understanding the psychology of Chavez, what happened in 2002, 10 years ago, was very important.
This was that attempted coup that lasted three days.
It was backed by the U.S.
In fact, it was partially organized via the U.S. Embassy in Caracas, uniting the usual suspects, you know, foundations in the U.S., the CIA, the local comprador classes in Venezuela.
They prefer to live in Miami, sleeping martinis.
They're naturally trying to care for Venezuelans' problems.
So the internal class struggle in all these South American countries plays in favor of U.S. interests.
It's the same mechanism you find in Argentina or even in Brazil.
It's the same thing.
The upper middle classes and the wealthy, they are Washington aligned.
They are Wall Street and international financial system aligned.
And these candidates who actually represent real people in these countries, such as Chavez in Venezuela, Lula, for the eight years he was president of Brazil, Pepe Mujica in Uruguay, here, our neighbor, Evo in Bolivia, Rafael Correa in Ecuador.
These are people who actually represent the real majorities in all these countries.
And they want to be fiercely independent.
Of course, they want to keep good relations with the U.S. and Europe, with the Atlanticist axis in general.
But they want to forge their own path internally, in terms of not being slaves on neoliberalism, and in terms of foreign policy, being independent.
So I'll give an extra example.
Before the elections, last week, before the elections in Venezuela, there was a meeting in Lima.
Most of the South American and Central American countries and most of the Arab League countries.
So they were trying to forge a dialogue between South America and the Arab countries.
And, in fact, the Arab countries could learn a lot about participatory democracy from what happened in South America for the past 10, 12 years, starting with the first election of Chávez.
So this is very important in the near future.
And the election of Chávez in the near future will also be very important because it reinforces this path of South American integration.
Most of the governments in South America are progressive nowadays.
It reinforces their economic union, because Venezuela is part of the Mercosur, the South American common market.
So it's very important in terms of...
They're trying to do two very important things.
Inside their own country, try to create a more equal society after 450 years, at least, of exploitation by Spanish colonialism and then these local comprador classes, right?
And in terms of foreign policy, being really, truly independent.
And that's why South American specialists, they are respected all over the developing world nowadays, forging their own path in terms of foreign policy.
And with Chávez, it's the same thing.
This demonization of Chávez, especially in the U.S., in most of Western Europe, like if you read the Spanish papers or the French papers, it's cartoonish, in fact.
And in the rest of the world, he's hailed as a true developing world leader because he is fiercely independent.
Well, it seems like there could be some pushback in some places, but for the most part, it seems like there's no going back from this, either.
Because the days of old colonialism, where if you're brown, we can just kill you all, it doesn't matter at all, at least in this hemisphere, I don't think that will play quite as well anymore.
And especially now that there's no Soviet Union, right?
That was the excuse for butchering women and children in El Salvador, was, hey, it's either this or the Reds.
But without the Soviet Union as the excuse, and with the American empire so focused on the Middle East this whole century so far, and so many different countries in Latin America gaining their independence, holding free elections and electing leaders who, it's not like they're militarizing or arming up to repel an invasion or anything.
They don't have any reason to really fear one.
They know that the American empire can't really invade them.
We can try to do coups, but they're getting better and better at avoiding those, right?
Like Chavez survived his coup 10 years ago.
It seems like basically it's a done deal almost.
This is not as prominent, but this is the Latin American spring.
It's been going on for 12 years, 15 years.
Absolutely.
It started with Chavez.
Lula was very instrumental as well.
Lula and Chavez, they always got along very well, although their platforms and their programs differ a lot.
The path towards creating a more equal society in Venezuela, if you analyze it from a political analysis point of view, he defines it as socialism for the 21st century.
He has some hallmarks of socialism, but it's not, because neoliberalism is still strong in Venezuela.
In Brazil, it's a mix of a more egalitarian platform, and also neoliberalism as well.
Lula played both sides of the story very well.
No wonder Lula in Wall Street was always hailed as a hero as well, and by successive American administrations, the Bush and Obama administrations.
But still, he managed to get 30 to 40 million Brazilians out of poverty, and now they are at least lower middle class.
So this is something that never happened in Latin America before.
It's the first time, because now there was a wave these past 10 years of progressive governments everywhere.
There was a front page yesterday, one of the top Argentinian papers, a fantastic photo.
Everybody clutching their hands.
Chavez, Evo from Bolivia, Dilma from Brazil, Rafael Correa from Ecuador, Mujica from Uruguay, and Cristina Kirchner from Argentina.
That's the front page.
And this sums it all up, what happened for the past 10 years.
And we'll keep going with the re-election of Chavez.
Of course.
Well now, hey, when they say they're complaining more and more publicly about the American imposed war on drugs, is that...
I don't know.
I mean, whenever I hear anybody say the war on drugs ought to end, I don't get my hopes up.
I don't see the end of my lifetime, man.
Maybe that's just because I've heard it so many times, but that doesn't mean that the last time I heard it, really it was worthless.
And I see all these Latin American leaders complaining about it to the United Nations and complaining about it to the U.S.
Is that really a measure of this newfound independence, that there's a real push to end the drug war?
Because actually, as everybody can tell, it's much more destructive down there where the supply comes from at the hands of various military and paramilitary forces backed by the United States, or at least...
Yeah, it's even worse down there for them than it is for the American people and the horrible effects of the drug war that they have to suffer and all the imprisonment and everything else.
Look, Scott, in a nutshell, the war on drugs in Colombia is a war against poor Colombian peasants.
Period.
This is the story.
It's been sold as a war on drugs.
It could have been...
If it was really war on drugs, they could have destroyed all these cartels and sub-cartels.
The whole thing splintered after they killed Pablo Escobar, in fact.
But...
I always wondered if that guy was your cousin or something.
No, he was the real deal.
He had the most powerful cocaine cartel in the world, and at the same time, he was redistributing wealth.
He was a kind of Robin Hood in Colombia.
It's a fantastic story.
In fact, if you read the story written by his brother, he wrote the story of Pablo Escobar and their empire from the inside.
It's fantastic.
It has been published in the U.S.
It's easy to find in a pocketbook in the U.S., anywhere.
Really?
That does sound interesting.
Yes, it is.
And the narrative of the war on drugs since the Clinton administration is that, in fact, they were fighting the FARC, and poor Colombian peasants who were being relocated by basically corporate interests in Colombia, they were appropriating their land.
Some of the FARC leaders were involved in narco-trafficking, but not all of them.
Yeah, I mean, their right-wing enemies were too, and those were the ones we were backing, right?
There's another story in Brazil when they were demonizing the landless peasant movement in Brazil, which is the largest landless peasant movement in the whole world.
Can you imagine if they had something similar in China or in India?
It would turn China and India upside down.
And in Brazil, corporate interests and agricultural interests, they have been demonizing these people forever because what they're fighting for is very basic.
A minimal agrarian reform, which is something that should happen all over Latin America.
And in terms of going towards a more egalitarian society, this is the path to go.
Lula more or less started the whole thing, but this is a long-term process.
Chavez in Venezuela, this is much more advanced.
In Bolivia as well, the indigenous population, which is the absolute majority in Bolivia, they are taking care of their own land, and the corporate interests are restrained to the eastern part of Bolivia.
So this is a very long process, and it started roughly 10 years ago.
It's in its infancy.
And it involves more political integration.
And political integration is like mechanisms like the UNASUR, the Union of South American Countries, which is a very new mechanism, which is much more progressive and relevant than the Organization of American States, the OAS, which is still basically controlled by the US.
Yeah, I worry about that.
To me, I think that's too bad, that they all have to kind of create a United States of South America just to try to keep their independence from the United States up here in North America, you know?
Yes, but really representative of South America, in fact, because the OAS was not representative at all.
I went to some of the OAS.
Yeah, the OAS is just America's gun to their head, right?
True.
And it sits in Washington, and it has a Washington-centric mentality.
So obviously, you can have Colombia supporting you.
You can have maybe Mexico with a right-wing government supporting you.
But most of the Latin American governments nowadays, they know that the OAS is useless.
So at least UNASUR is making progress.
They have still another mechanism, which is the ALBA, the Bolivarian Alliance, which has Ecuador, Venezuela, Nicaragua.
So at least the political landscape is moving, and in terms of economic integration as well.
To give you an idea, there's some basic stuff in South America, like telecommunications are rerouted through the US.
So it's crazy.
If you call from the eastern part of Brazil to Bolivia, you are paying a rate going through a US satellite, which is completely absurd.
So now they're improving their telecommunications directly.
If you want to go from eastern Brazil to the Pacific, there are no roads and no railways.
So they're still building the South American equivalent of the New Silk Road, from eastern Brazil to the Pacific in Bolivia.
So you can unite South America.
This never happened before, because the ruling classes in all these countries, they never bothered to.
So the 1% in South America is as aggressive as the 1% in the US.
I want to ask you about Mexico, because in Mexico the drug wars killed tens of thousands of people, and I guess the last guy that came in was an American stooge even more so than Vincente Fox, is that right?
And he came in saying, I'm going to win this drug war once and for all by militarizing the hell out of it.
And this gets to, I think, what you said about, they could crush the cartels if they wanted.
I don't think they can.
They just end up creating new ones, right?
Like kill Pablo Escobar, you just get 100 new Escobars.
The key thing is demand.
The demand from the American market, it's always there and it's always growing.
Is it true that the CIA has just picked sides and backed the Sinaloas against the Gulf and the Zeta cartels?
Of course, because the CIA, they always have their own route, just like they still have their own route for trafficking heroin and opium from Afghanistan via Central Asian countries.
It goes to Dushanbe in Tajikistan, and then to Turkey, and then to the rest of Europe.
Of course, the CIA, they always had their, since Laos in the 60s, they always kept their drug lines open from Southeast Asia to Central Asia and to South and Central America.
I don't get it, though, because don't they have all the free money in the whole wide world they could possibly need that they can just print in secret?
They probably have their own printing machines, you know, the CIA.
The hell do they care?
Why do they need to even sell opium or heroin anyway?
Maybe we should go to Washington to ask that question in person.
I mean, like in the 80s, I can see where, you know, there was the Boland Amendment, and so, you know, they were trying to find a real off-the-books, covert way of raising some funds for the Contras, that kind of thing.
But that's an exception.
I mean, otherwise, they have all the money in the world.
They have these black budgets where Congress doesn't even know what the price tag is.
It's a blank check.
But I would say this is still a reflect of the Cold War that never ended.
Mitt Romney, a few months ago, was talking about the Soviet Union.
He's still thinking Cold War term.
Yeah, well, and you know what?
I saw Colin Powell was saying, wow, I don't know what you're talking about, but the truth is, uh-huh, and actually all that Romney did was say the truth there, that from the point of view of the American empire, in fact, Vladimir Putin referred to this the other day when he was smacking down John McCain.
I don't know if you saw the clip, but he said, look, they're afraid of us because we're independent and we have all these nuclear weapons, so that means they can't do anything about our independence, and so it drives them crazy because they want to conquer the whole world and they're pissed off because they can't conquer us.
By the way, Scott, now that you mentioned, if you analyze what has filtered from Mitt Romney's foreign policy, we are all doomed, in fact, because it's basically war against Iran next year.
Total interference in Syria, maybe including a NATO war in 2013, damn the Palestinians, confront the Soviet Union, a.k.a.
Russia, and give hell to the Chinese.
Ah, and don't forget trying to destabilize Chavez as well.
Right, and it's just like everybody said in the media.
Glenn Greenwald was making fun of this too.
Everybody said that this proves two things.
This is the worst foreign policy that we've ever been threatened with, and it's no different at all from Barack Obama's.
Exactly.
In terms of the shadow wars, there is no difference.
There is a difference in terms of amplifying the shadow wars that the Obama administration is already fighting, including the South American angle and expanding interference in Syria, because Obama, for the moment, obviously cannot even think about not leaving from behind in terms of Syria.
And now, Turkey is providing the perfect pretext, because this thing that is happening now in the Turkish-Syrian border, it smells like a false flag.
In fact, these mortars that are landing in the Turkish territory from Syria, these mortars are probably sold or trans-shipped from Saudi Arabia.
Just like the BBC two or three days ago, they actually saw a crate of weapons from Saudi Arabia in northern Syria.
And these are now landing in Turkish territory, providing the perfect pretext for a Turkish intervention.
And considering that the Erdogan government nowadays, they are completely nuts, and their foreign policy doesn't exist anymore, they are probably sitting on this to try to do something within the next few weeks, and perhaps immediately after the election.
And go to NATO again, and NATO, considering that Rasmussen, Secretary General of NATO, is another absolute idiot.
They are already laying the ground for it.
And by the way, I think a few days ago there was a special U.S. test in Jordan.
Very, very high level.
I think they are laying the ground for something to happen from Jordan to Syria.
Soon, you know.
Right.
Well, let's see.
That's what they're saying.
I had that story here somewhere.
I'm sorry, I guess I lost it.
Oh yeah, here.
U.S. military planners sent to Jordan with eye on Syrian war.
150-man task force discusses invasion to establish buffer zone.
That's Jason Ditz at news.antiwar.com.
It was the New York Times piece originally, though.
Well, but man.
Okay, I'm in a real desperate place here, Pepe, where I have to hold out hope that the generals are going to stop it.
The generals don't want an American actual army invasion or anything.
What, they want to do an air war?
Yeah.
But this could be done, a modified scenario compared to Libya.
A sort of limited NATO intervention.
They can always come up with it.
And outside of the U.N. Security Council framework, using this pretext, now we're being attacked by Syria, we have to retaliate.
So instead of talking about Chapter 4 of NATO, they're going to Chapter 5 directly.
And I'm sure some of those crazy NATO governments like Cameron in the U.K. and Hollande in France, they will be in favor of it.
I'm absolutely sure.
I don't know, man.
It seems like there's a reluctance.
I don't know.
What do you do if you're an American imperialist, and especially if you're a Democrat or a Republican, that means that Benjamin Netanyahu's whims are your marching orders.
So what do you do if you know better, and yet you're just compelled to continue intervening and turning Syria upside down?
Because, you know, anybody, any dumbass, anyone could tell you, hey, guess what, what's coming next in Syria, assuming you're actually able to get rid of this regime, is going to be really bad and for a long time.
It's going to be like Iraq was.
Absolutely.
And worse than the Lebanon war that lasted, what, 15 years or so.
Right, and then what's next for Lebanon?
It's going to spill over into Lebanon.
It's spilling over into Lebanon.
Exactly, and Syria is much bigger, and the ethnic makeup is even more complex than in Lebanon.
All the major local powers are involved, not to mention far away Russia and China, because they have very, very close interests.
You know that for China, Syria is very, in the New Silk Road, the Chinese version, Syria is absolutely essential for them as well, because of trade, commerce, and also because of gas as well.
And then there's the story that we didn't even talk about, which is the Arab pipeline and the interest behind them, what Qatar wants, which is not exactly what Turkey wants, what the Syrians want with the Jordanians, which is not exactly what Turkey wants.
You know, the ramifications are so huge.
Obviously, these people behind Romney, which are the basic neocons that we already know from eight years of Bush, they have absolutely no clue about the ramifications, just like they didn't have about Iraq.
They haven't even been to Iraq before they launched the war in 2003.
Well, you know, that's fine though, right, because their plan B is always, if we can't make it how we want, we'll just make it chaos.
Exactly.
You know, in terms of the big picture analysis of this, one of my favorite guys is a social scientist and political analyst in France, Alain Jacques.
Unfortunately, he's never translated into English.
But, you know, he has been analyzing this empire of chaos.
This is his own expression for 10 years now.
It's the best analysis you can find it anywhere.
Unfortunately, you have to read it in French or maybe in a Spanish translation.
But it's the best analysis anywhere.
It's an empire that specializes itself in creating chaos, and then it cannot extricate itself from the chaos it has created.
Right, which is so much the better, because they can always just print the money and keep it going, and every general gets a new ribbon, and people read what Elliott Abrams writes, and he gets to keep having a career, and it's great for everyone.
And when the whole thing collapses, Scott, we all move to a cabin in Patagonia.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
No, what we're all going to do, 300 million Americans, we're all going to flee to New Zealand, because we all saw the Lord of the Rings and it looked real lush and nice there.
And I'm sure that they'll let us all in.
Yes.
Amazing.
Now, so, I don't know.
I want to ask you more questions about Syria here.
In the short term, you think this, the border thing, and I agree that it looks, let me know if you know anywhere specifically, we can read facts about this, but it certainly looks to me, too, like the rebels are shelling Turkey, trying to give the Turks an excuse to go ahead and invade, but do you think that they're going to go with that?
I mean, I forgot if you mentioned it or not, but I'm sure you know the people of Turkey sure as hell don't want an invasion of Syria.
Is that what they're getting here?
Yes.
Turkish public opinion, they don't want an invasion.
The Turkish military, they simply cannot organize an invasion because their leaders are all in jail, because they were the leaders of a failed coup against Erdogan.
So you have an army with no command, very disorganized.
In fact, they are more worried about the Kurds than about Syria.
They're worried about the Kurds in northern Syria, and they're worried about the Kurds in Anatolia at the same time.
How could they create a third front with, let's say, a mini-invasion of northern Syria?
It's completely absurd, and they know there will be backlash.
Well, did they have the planes where they could just try to...
Well, this doesn't work.
I mean, you saw it took nine months or something in Libya, but I know that politicians have this fantasy that the Lockheed commercial that they saw is real and that they can get a decapitation strike with a well-placed air campaign.
Do you think that they'll fall for that crap?
Look, NATO, first of all, NATO, they cannot do the same thing that they did in Libya.
The softening up of Qaddafi's army was done by those Tomahawk cruise missiles launched in the first two days of the war.
So this was the African part of the Libyan war.
Over there in Syria, this is not going to happen.
First of all, because most of the Syrian heavy tanks, the artillery and aircraft, they are concentrated in urban centers.
Can you imagine if you're bombing a huge urban center?
Collateral damage in the first day of the war would be bad in terms of collateral damage.
There's nowhere they can bomb in Syria where there are no civilians.
Nowhere.
The Syrians are not stupid enough to have columns of tanks sleeping in the desert, for instance, just like in Libya.
So there will have to be some sort of land invasion in northern Syria.
NATO is not going to go for it.
Not under these economic conditions.
No way.
If we have Rome in early 2013, I think all bets are off, of course.
But for the moment, no.
And there's another element that is very important.
Apparently the rebels, the Syrian rebels near the border, they are running out of ammunition.
This was something I was trying to confirm with some of my Lebanese sources.
They are usually very well informed.
They are not absolutely sure, but look, compared to a few weeks ago, they have less ammunition because the Saudis are sending less stuff.
Because apparently they were pressured by the U.S., in fact.
Because these weapons are ending up in the hands of who?
For instance, Ansar al-Din, which is an al-Qaeda affiliate in northern Syria.
These are the guys who bombed a military installation near Damascus, I think, two days ago or so.
So these are the guys who are actually getting the heavy weapons.
And obviously the myth that the CIA is screening who are the good terrorists and who are the bad terrorists is an absolute myth, of course.
Because the Salafi jihadis and the hardcores are really getting the weapons.
But still there are less weapons flowing.
So we're going to see within the next few weeks if that is true.
Then probably these mortars landed in Turkey, they will cease for good.
Let me ask you this.
Does this even count as a civil war or a rebellion at all?
Or is this entire thing simply just a foreign mercenary terrorist army?
Is there any legitimacy to this rebellion?
I mean, clearly Assad runs an authoritarian police state, so you can see why the average Sunni Arab might want to rise up and overthrow him.
This whole thing seems like just a giant, I'm trying not to cuss on the air, but I can't think of another way to describe it.
Scott, you're basically right, because it's morphing from a civil war toward a foreign mercenary army infiltration.
I mean, the protests were legit in the first place, but then, sorry, the CIA came and stole your protest movement.
Absolutely.
It happens.
In a much wider scale than in Libya as well.
In Libya, you always had historic grievances, especially from the eastern part of Libya, tribal grievances against Tripoli.
Not only economic, but also religious.
In Syria, you see most of the Sunni business classes in Syria, they are part of the government or they are allied with the Assad regime and the Assad clan, let's put it this way.
So life was good for them.
They were not trying to change it.
They were trying, okay, let's liberalize the economy a little bit more, but basically the whole thing stays the same.
Right.
This is what you told me more than a year ago when this whole thing started, was that if the upper middle class business, political class Sunnis, Sunni Arabs in Aleppo and Damascus, if they join the rebellion against the regime, then it's over for the regime.
If they don't, it's over for the rebels.
And they never did.
And they never did.
And now, Aleppo is being practically destroyed.
In fact, when they set fire to most of the souk in Aleppo, which, by the way, is the most fantastic souk in the Middle East.
It's one of my favorite places in the world, in fact.
Of course, you have to grieve about the loss of people, but also grieve about loss of… This is something that it's the spirit of the Silk Road, of centuries ago still preserved in this souk.
And a major employer for, what, almost half of the population of Aleppo, which has families or has commercial ties linked to the souk.
And the destruction of the souk started basically provoked by these Salafi jihadi crazies who took refuge in the souk.
They set fire to some of the shops to flee the Syrian army, and then the whole thing caught fire.
So it's their fault in the end, you know.
It's absolutely horrible.
And the city itself, I was looking at some pictures from Aleppo one or two days ago.
Even the downtown where the souk is very close to the citadel in Aleppo, it's very close to… It's downtown Aleppo, basically.
It's practically destroyed, not to mention some surrounding neighborhoods.
And this is probably the oldest city in the world.
In fact, they are always competing, Aleppo and Damascus, to see which one is the oldest in the world.
And it's been totally destroyed, especially these past four or five months, because the rebels decided to merge into some neighborhoods in Aleppo because they thought they had protection.
And now the people in Aleppo themselves, they are saying, no, they come here, they occupy our houses, they don't leave, and they destroy our neighborhoods.
So there is no popular support at all.
The support that they have is in the Sunni country side, which is in the fucking middle of nowhere.
It's the desert.
There's nothing over there.
This is the same thing that they did in Iraq, too.
Ultra-Islamic, extremely conservative, and Wahhabism is very strong, the border with Jordan and the border with Syria.
So this is the so-called popular support that the rebels have at the moment.
Yeah, well, I mean, that's the thing about these guys, is that they're crazy killers, which is why, on one hand, they become the forefront of the actual rebellion.
But, of course, as you're saying, they have such a slash-and-burn policy, and they're such jerks, basically, that the population gets thoroughly sick of them.
And, of course, at Antiwar.com, we were covering the beginning of the real movement in Iraq of the leaders of the Sunni Arab-based insurgency against the al-Qaeda guys, well before Petraeus finally convinced Bush to let him buy them off and arm them in order to fight these guys.
Very early, 06, right around the time that they killed Zarqawi, you had leaders of the Sunni insurgency, who were actually the Iraqis, saying, you know, we'll kill al-Qaeda if you'll just stop killing us, and starting to push that kind of thing.
So I can see what you're saying.
The al-Qaeda guys, they are absolutely horrible.
Same thing happened in Saudi Arabia.
They had a huge amount of public support in Saudi Arabia, so they started setting off a bunch of bombs in Saudi Arabia in, what, 2006?
And then there's a 95% disapproval rating for al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia now, because they went there and killed innocent people.
People go, wow, you guys just bomb marketplaces full of women and children?
What the hell?
Well, look, this means that Saudi Arabia basically is winning.
They win with money, they win with weaponizing, they win in terms of religious ethics or fatwas against anybody that is not Wahhabi, and they win in terms of, if they don't win via their official channels, they can always count on al-Qaeda, because al-Qaeda is doing exactly what they want, which is try to turn Syria into an emirate, a failed, a giant failed emirate, just like Eastern Libya.
Eastern Libya nowadays, for all practical purposes, is practically a separate emirate from Western Libya.
This is the Saudi Arabian agenda for Syria, basically.
At least Qatar, they are slightly more measured.
They are counting on, well, this government one day will collapse, and the next government is going to be politically elected, just like in Egypt, a Muslim Brotherhood majority government.
This is the Qatari strategy.
It's not as lethal as the Saudi Arabian strategy, but for the moment, the upper hand is with the Saudis.
Well, you know, it's funny, I remember reading, I forgot who wrote the thing, but it was in the Guardian maybe a year ago now, it said Prince Bandar is running this whole thing, right?
Yeah.
So if Prince Bandar can just load up, what, trucks or planes full of jihadist types and send them to Syria, where else can he send them?
I mean, I don't know.
It just seems strange to me.
Isn't that the guy they call Bandar Bush?
Yes, instead of sending them to Afsak, that was so 1980s, 1990s, right?
You send them to Syria.
And the guys who are already in Iraq, they just crossed the desert border.
Very easy.
As long as they are not raising hell inside Saudi Arabia, which is the utmost fear of the House of Saud, it's fine if they're raising hell elsewhere in the Middle East, of course, in the Central Arab Republic, of course.
Don't try to raise hell in another Petro-monarchy.
Well, was he helping to arrange Saudis to go and travel to Iraq to fight against the Americans there?
Because, I mean, that really was that whole civil war was sort of a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran, wasn't it?
With America on the side of Iran in that one.
Gulf money, especially from Saudi Arabia, they are helping hardcore Sunni jihadists from Iraq to transfer to Syria, to go cross-border all the time.
Most of the free Syrian army commanders, they are Iraqi Sunnis.
They are not Syrians at all.
This has been established for at least three or four months now.
It's so funny.
We fight a war for our enemies while our friends are fighting a war against us.
Same thing's happening in Afghanistan, too.
Look, the Brits invented divide and rule, and it still works.
Yeah, well, I don't know.
It doesn't seem to work very well.
Well, I guess it depends, right, who's interested.
Hey, I'm going to ask you this, because I just thought of it, and I've been meaning to, and I think I've asked you this before.
It seems like, for the most part, Benjamin Netanyahu and his government don't say very much about what's going on in Syria, or at least whatever it is that they are saying doesn't get very much coverage.
And so I wonder whether they have a policy of just let the Americans and the Saudis and the Qataris do whatever insane thing they're doing and wait and see what happens.
I don't expect Netanyahu to be yelping like a little dog if he was against what they're doing.
But then again, I can't imagine that he would really let a war like this go by without participating in it somehow either.
And I just wonder what you can tell me about the Likud point of view on what's happening in Syria right now and any participation that the Israeli government is doing in furtherance of the so-called revolution there.
Look, in fact, the Likud and the coalition supporting Netanyahu, they are so concentrated on demonizing Iran, they have forgotten about the rest of the Middle East, in fact.
Egypt and Israel-Palestine as well.
So the whole thing for the past few months, especially in the U.S., is this relentless demonizing of Iran campaign.
They still don't know how to relate what's going on in Syria.
As you said correctly, they are letting the Turks, the Saudis, the Qataris, and the Americans leading from behind to actually try to do something, to change the dynamics.
At the same time, they are not unhappy with a Syria that is totally paralyzed.
The army is basically inefficient because they are caught inside a civil war or a war against a foreign intervention.
So they are not going to threat Israel by any means.
They never did, in fact.
So as long as Syria is bogged down in this horrible situation, it suits the Israelis.
What they don't know is, of course, if the Assad regime collapses, what's going to happen next.
They know that politically, number one possibility is the Muslim Brotherhood majority government, which obviously will be antagonistic towards Israel.
But this is a very long shot in the distant future.
For the moment, they are happy with chaos on the other side because it's an internal chaos that does not threat Israel.
So they keep on re-concentrating on the demonizing Iran campaign.
And now, I'm sure they are analyzing that now Mitt Romney seems to have a shot now, after what Obama did last week.
So if they have Romney in power, then from the point of view of Netanyahu and Likud, all their problems are solved.
Because there will be intervention probably in both Iran and Syria, to the benefit of Israel, of course.
Well, I mean, that's the whole thing.
What interest does America have in regime change in Syria other than that's what Israel wants?
In fact, Obama even told Jeffrey Goldberg, yeah, this would be a great way to weaken Iran's position, would be by having regime change in Syria.
He didn't even pretend there was any other reason for it at all.
Yeah, they never mentioned the Pipeline-Istan angle, which is also important.
So they can control most of the Pipeline-Istan routes going through Syria, to Turkey, to the benefit of Turkey, if Qatar wants to do something across Syria to the benefit of Qatar as well.
As long as it doesn't benefit Syria itself, or as long as it's not a pipeline connected to Iran, it's fine with them.
So that's really the American interest there in what the Israelis want.
Because I would have just thought that this is a way for Obama, really, to try to please the Israel lobby without bombing Iran.
You know what I mean?
Well, what if I just support some al-Qaeda terrorists in Syria for you?
Would you settle for that?
No, they are crazy because from the beginning, they say that they are in Washington.
They are in control of who gets the weapons.
From the beginning, it's absurd.
They never had control over anything.
They knew what the Saudis and the Qataris were doing, the Obama administration.
They let it run, and suddenly they are confronted with an inundation of weapons in Washington, Syria that they have no control of.
And they don't know what's going to happen next.
Once again, we're going to have probably another Afghan scenario in the 1980s.
You remember what happened when the Soviet Union left.
All those weapons over there, they ended up in the hands of Hekmatyar, Massoud, Dostum in Uzbekistan.
So it was a major civil war for at least four years.
And what emerged out of it?
The Taliban.
So we could have a similar scenario in Syria as well.
You know, it's not far-fetched at all.
Obviously, this leading from behind motto, it's meaningless.
It means leading from nowhere, in fact.
The actual drivers in Syria are Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar.
That's it.
The U.S. is practically nowhere to be seen.
Now, with the staff force in Jordan, maybe things will start to change.
More proactive, you know.
But until now, there's no leading at all.
In fact, once again, it comes back to our argument of the empire of chaos.
It's as if the Obama administration was betting, okay, chaos all over, nobody knows what's going on, not even us, in fact.
But as long as it stays like this, simmering chaos, it's fine.
Well, now, I was talking with Con Hallinan yesterday, and he was mentioning the weakening of the King of Jordan's position, King Abdullah.
Can you tell us more about that?
Because that's kind of all-important.
That's Israel's number one sock puppet in the region right there.
Absolutely.
Well, so how precarious is his position now?
Exactly.
I'm waiting for a piece from one of our new contributors.
She was at this huge demonstration, and she had some good contacts inside.
And I asked her to do a piece for Asia Times explaining all the current, who is going against each other, who is actually organizing the resistance against the monarchy, basically, which now is a wide array of forces, not only the Muslim Brotherhood, but some Bedouin chiefs as well.
So this is very important.
It used to be linked with the monarchy forever, and now they're changing sides as well.
And yet, it is a very, very wobbly monarchy.
It's practically about to fall because of their internal contradictions, because of those 60% of Palestinian refugees, now the Syrian refugees, the Bedouin tribes who want more participation, Muslim Brotherhood who know that they have a shot at capturing power.
Obviously, because the king is a very close ally of Galilee, basically.
So they are more worried, in fact, about Jordan nowadays than they are with Syria.
Because actually, Jordan could collapse before Syria.
There's an 80% chance, in fact, within the next two months.
So that's the whole thing here.
He has another prime minister.
They're calling for a theoretical, of course, it's going to be sham elections once again.
They're not going to be free, fair elections like they were in Egypt, for instance.
Jordan, it's as much a police state as Syria is, in fact.
The thing is, we never talked about it in the West because they are one of our bastards.
There's not much difference.
And in terms of exporting their intelligence and repression know-how, they export it to the Gulf monarchies as well.
It's one of the reasons why the GCC wants Jordan to be part of the GCC.
Because, you know, in terms of repression techniques, they are very good.
Yeah, well, that's how they got the job, being the sock puppets of the American empire, right?
So now, it seems to me, it's sort of like you were saying, America is nowhere to be seen in this.
This is all the consequence of the Iraq war is, you know, first of all, the entire, you know, region, just everybody is radicalized as hell against their local dictators, even more for being the sock puppets of the Americans who did that Iraq invasion.
And then, of course, all the inflation from the American central bank to pay for the war has caused price inflation all around the world because everybody has to, you know, match to keep their trade balances from being thrown off or whatever.
So you have all these, you know, economic pressures on the very poorest people, you know, and along with all this radicalization, you have really this Arab Spring is still going on in full force.
It's not going to stop.
And when you say things like, you know, the Jordanian regime could collapse before the Syrian one, yeah, damn right, that's the whole thing.
Yeah, that's the whole thing.
Same thing could happen in any one of those stands where we got bases in Central Asia or whatever.
This is the era of the Black Swan event.
Nobody can know exactly how it's going to be, but expect to be surprised, you know.
It's true.
The difference with Central Asia is that in terms of internal repression, it can and it is much worse than in the Middle East.
Especially Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, these are absolutely horrifying places if you want to have a political stand or if you're even considering starting a political movement or even considering criticizing those autocrats over there.
And they are shielded because they are shielded by Russia and China as well.
They are shielded by the West because the West wants their energy, although they're not getting it.
They are totally landlocked, so, you know, they live in an alternative universe.
Right, yeah, that's what I was just going to say.
To the average American, they might as well be on another planet, you know.
Yeah, exactly.
And everybody wants to grab their resources, especially Turkmenistan.
Turkmenistan in terms of repression, Syria compared to Turkmenistan, Syria is like Switzerland, you know.
But Turkmenistan, they have those gas, it's a gas republic.
Everybody wants it.
The Russians for transit their gas.
The Chinese have built a pipeline to get their gas.
The Americans go, they used to go there almost every month trying to cajole them to sell gas to Europe via a pipeline still to be built and probably will never be built.
So they can get away with virtually anything.
So the oil gas angle in all this is absolutely crucial, crucial.
We still don't have the whole history of everything that's been happening since the mid-1990s, during the Clinton administration and when the whole pipeline in Afghanistan thing started, until today where there are the ramifications in the Arab pipelines that exist and that they will be built.
It's still the new great game on oil and gas and that thing that I call pipeline is done for years now.
But we still don't have all the pieces of the puzzle.
But it all points to the same thing.
The U.S. is still trying to control the flow of oil and gas basically to Western allies and basically to profit their Persian Gulf allies.
But there are other very powerful interests, Asian interests, Russia, China, Iran, and that's consumer markets, Pakistan as well, or the Northeast Asian countries, South Korea and Japan.
They have a completely different interest.
They want a free flow but they will deal with anybody.
They will pay whatever price because they want to guarantee their supply.
That's why these sanctions, the U.S., the EU sanctions, they are not working.
Not at all.
China is importing even more barrels a day from Iran now than they were six months ago.
It's over 500,000 a day.
The sanctions are hurting regular people.
They're just not hurting the regime at all.
If you read the Iranian press, and I receive a lot of stuff from Iranians, they said it in English.
And it's great to see because people, just like the sanctions in Iraq, it's something that I saw for myself for years.
The Iraqi people were paying the price for those 10-year U.N.
-U.S. sanctions.
And now, the Iranian population, and even especially the poor, who, by the way, support the regime in the first place.
If you leave the big cities in Iran and you travel to the countryside, most of them, they support Ayatollah Khamenei, and they used to be Ahmadinejad supporters until recently.
Now they're blaming.
Okay, the mismanagement of the Ahmadinejad administration is true because they don't know anything about economics, but they're also blaming the U.S. and the Europeans because they're squeezing them even more.
The whole fall of the Riyadh story, which is both sides, the internal side and the sanctions, everybody's to blame.
And obviously, the population now is regimented against the West.
So the Obama administration, they thought they had a constituency in Iran in terms of trying to capture the hearts and minds of the Iranian population.
Forget it.
Not with these sanctions and not with what they are suffering in terms of unemployment, inflation, the price of wheat, you name it.
All right, now, when you talk about all this fighting over all those pipelines, and it's been a while since I saw a map.
There are maps that show every pipeline and proposed pipeline all over Eurasia, and it's really something else to behold.
And obviously, as you're talking about it, it's the province of states because, hey, you're talking about very long pipelines that cross international borders all the time.
There's nothing like any sort of free market here.
Every bit of this is state interest.
But I wonder how, like in your view of the world and how this all works, who's Zoom and who, who's in chart?
Like, for example, maybe someone just chanting no blood for oil would just assume that this is all just what Houston wants and that the oil companies are the ones in chart running the policy that has the American empire working so hard to control every soda straw sticking under every great lake in Eurasia and trying to suck all that oil out from under there.
But I wonder if that's really the way you see it.
Maybe it is.
I'm not necessarily saying I don't think it is that way, but is it just a matter of strategy?
And back to Mitt Romney and John McCain and their view of Russia, and it's really just about, you know, different defense establishments trying to one up each other, still fighting the Cold War.
Or, you know, what's so damn important about which way the pipelines flow?
Because after all, it's a world market and it's literally a liquid commodity.
So there's one price.
I mean, yeah, in Venezuela they'll give you a big subsidy or whatever.
But for that, you know, otherwise, in general, it's one price for oil on the planet.
So who cares?
That's the problem.
It's very short-sighted because we always come back to that Cold War mindset.
In fact, the American energy policy in Eurasia, it's still the same thing.
We have to isolate Russia, we have to bypass Iran, and we have to keep China away from the top sources.
Obviously, this thing has failed monumentally for the past 15 years because, you know, it started with building the BTC pipeline, you remember.
Baku, Tbilisi, Tehran started with the Clinton administration.
Zbigniew Brzezinski went to Baku to negotiate the whole thing.
They built a pipeline that cost 1,000% more than if they built it through Iran because they wanted to bypass Iran in the first place.
So, you know, through Azerbaijan, through Georgia, and in Turkey.
It didn't solve all the problems because there was not enough gas for the Europeans with only one pipeline.
They needed other pipelines.
And they cannot build three or four BTCs.
No investor is crazy enough to invest $4 or $5 billion in very dangerous pipelines without knowing where the gas is going to come from.
And most of the gas that could solve all these problems in terms of supplying the Europeans, it could be in Turkmenistan, it could be in Iran, it could be in Qatar.
In Qatar, they don't have the pipelines to deliver to Europe.
That's why, that's something that we were discussing last time we talked, the threat of the Emir of Qatar to invade Syria.
Because, basically, the Qataris would like to build their own pipeline and Syria is on the way.
So they, Qataris, could sell their gas directly to Europe.
Turkmenistan, they play everybody against each other.
It's fantastic because they play the Russians against the Chinese, the Chinese against the Americans, you name it.
Because they like to get the best possible terms to export most of their gas to Europe.
And for the moment, they're exporting to China.
Because China went there, they said, what do you want?
Anything you want.
So let us build a pipeline and you sell us gas for 30 years.
They build a pipeline so they're getting Turkmen gas for 30 years.
So the U.S. is losing again to Turkmenistan.
And China, they have their strategy all over Eurasia.
Dealing with the Central Asian states and dealing with Russia as well.
The Russians are building two Siberian pipelines to China as well.
So big oil, Western big oil, they don't count in these.
In most of Eurasia, they don't count.
They count in the Persian Gulf.
But the Persian Gulf, when you think about gas, most of the gas is in Iran, in fact, more than Qatar.
And Europe, they need gas badly because they don't want to be dependent on Russia.
So if they're not dependent on Gazprom, they'll have to get their gas from Iran.
They can't because the West forbids them.
So, you know, you see, when you look at all the interests, Western big oil is losing in 80% of the cases, if you analyze it on a case-by-case basis.
So it's counterproductive.
So if you talk to an energy expert, they'll say it is counterproductive, and Europeans acknowledge it off the record.
There's nothing they can do about it.
And nobody could change the minds of the Clinton, Bush 1 and 2, and Obama 1 administration.
Let's try to rearrange the West's foreign policy in terms of energy.
Let the Europeans try to use whatever they want, and even us, because they were going to get the cheap gas from Eurasia as well, for our allies and for ourselves in the West.
But it's impossible.
They still think with a Cold War mentality.
They are not going to isolate Russia, Iran, and China at the same time.
Forget it.
Forget it.
That was the question.
All right.
We've got to leave it there because we could keep going on, but somebody's got to draw a line somewhere.
Thank you so much, Pepe.
I'll talk to you again soon.
Thank you so much, Scott.
Always a pleasure.
It's great to have you on.
Okay.
Thank you.
Cheers.
All right, everybody.
That's the great Pepe Escobar from the Asia Times.
That's atimes.com.
Just look for the best of Pepe Escobar.
That's all of it right there in the left-hand margin.
And that's it for the show today.
Thanks, everybody, for listening.
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