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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, and our guest today on the show, it's Pepe Escobar, the globetrotting adventurer reporter for the Asia Times at atimes.com.
Welcome back, Pepe.
How the hell are you?
Wonderful.
Great to be here.
Great to be with you, all of you, and live from London today.
I was going to say, what hemisphere are you in right now?
Although, I dialed the numbers.
In fact, we're relaxing a little bit before the real start of the year, in fact.
All right.
So, hey, listen.
I saw this morning that Benjamin Netanyahu wants to build a security fence, which we know is Hebrew for gigantic concrete wall, like they have in the West Bank, all along the border with Syria.
Now, I'm not sure which border they're talking about.
I guess Golan Heights is done deal now.
But it reminded me, Pepe, of something that Michael Shoyer said back in 2004, I think, when he first left the CIA and spoke publicly.
And he said, you dummies, you shouldn't have overthrown Saddam, because he was a giant block holding all the al-Qaeda kooks way east, even stuck on the far side of Iran, in no man's land, on the ass end of the whole world.
And if you overthrow Saddam, or now that you've overthrown Saddam, you've given al-Qaeda direct access to the Levant.
And Syria is coming, whether it's an American operation or not.
That was years ago.
That was nine years ago.
Nine years ago, and now it's happening.
And now in droves.
Yesterday, until yesterday, literally, was a trickle.
Now it's in droves, because these people who were in Iraq, then they relocated to Libya, then they relocated back to Iraq, and now they're crossing the border between Iraq and Syria.
There's no border, in fact.
I remember this road.
Nine years ago, it's basically desert on both sides, and an absolutely ridiculous checkpoint on the Syrian-Iraqi border, which nowadays probably doesn't even exist anymore, because Assad's forces, they are not manning that checkpoint anymore.
And if there is a checkpoint, it's controlled by the jihadists themselves.
So there is a direct road coming from the western desert in Iraq that goes practically to the suburbs of Damascus, where some of these people actually are nowadays.
But coming back to the wall you were mentioning, I wish Roger Waters would do another wall special over there, so he could bring Al Jazeera, the BBC, CNN, NBC, and broadcast a wall concert in homage of the new Netanyahu wall, which is one of the most ridiculous inventions I could conceive.
But he has to come up with something.
There are elections in a few days in Israel that he's going to win, of course.
He's freaking out because of the nomination of Chuck Hagel, and also John Kerry as well.
He didn't want any of these two.
The Israeli lobby is losing force in the U.S. because of these nominations, like Ray McGovern is ready to write about this.
So the thing may be changing in D.C.
We still don't know where it's going.
And, of course, in the background, this is something I've been hearing from the Russians, in fact.
It's very interesting.
There's a sort of lull from now to Easter.
The Russians are expecting that something from the part of the Assad forces, in fact, drastic, could happen between now and Easter, and they can more or less subdue most of these three Syrian army gangs.
So everybody's more or less waiting for the next three, three and a half months.
If the situation in Easter is still as muddled as it is now, then this agreement in the background that the Russians and the Americans are being more or less organizing for the past month or so, then we're going to see some progress in this agreement.
In fact, the main stumbling block in the negotiations between the Russians and the Americans at the moment is that the opposition wants the Muslim Brotherhood as the top partner, the opposition part, in terms of negotiating with the government.
And this is a no-no for Assad.
And then we have to come back to what Assad said after six or seven months.
He finally spoke, and it was absolutely ridiculous.
Nobody even noticed what he said.
He said, I'm not going to negotiate with terrorists.
We've heard this one before from Qaddafi, from Saddam, from, you know, you name it.
But it's not leading anywhere.
And the rebels have said all along that they won't deal with him.
That's step number one.
I mean, they sound like they're Republicans.
One is, you have to leave power, and then we'll negotiate.
You have to leave first, and then we start negotiations.
So, you know, just like the Brahimi kabuki theater at the moment, it's the same stupidity that Kofi Annan was doing eight months ago.
And in fact, eight months ago, Kofi Annan was, whenever he was speaking in public, he was more or less confessing his total impotence in trying to forge a way out in Syria.
So eight months later, the situation is even worse, because, you know, both sides are calcified in their positions.
The problem is the Frisian army gangs and this new coalition with this Mouaz al-Khatib as leader, in fact, this thing was broken by the Americans and the Qataris.
It's also not going anywhere, because they are bickering among themselves nonstop.
And still, the only people who are actually doing the heavy fighting on the ground, which is these Salafi jihadis or jihadis, too cool, al-Qaeda-linked or not, who were in Iraq and then went to Libya and then back to Syria and all that, these are the people who are actually fighting.
They want to establish a bloody emirate in Syria.
And in fact, some of these people are saying that the liberated areas, like a suburb, they control more or less one third of Aleppo at the moment, and suburbs, very far away from Aleppo city center.
They're already talking about establishing an emirate over there.
This is completely crazy.
So we're going to have the, you know, ten years after the Taliban, twelve years after the Taliban, we're going to have a Taliban emirate in parts of Syria.
And this is being supported by the U.S., Britain, France, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey.
You know, it makes you want to give up completely and start listening to the Sex Pistols again.
No future for you.
All right.
Well, listen.
All right.
First of all, well, let's talk about that.
The new Sunni stand.
Right.
We always talk on the show about how the American invasion of Iraq ten years ago led to handing the country over to Iran.
But really, that's handing all of the country from Baghdad to Basra over to Iran's good friends there.
But then what they used to call the Anbar triangle, the triangle of death and all of that stuff in the in the Sunni dominated provinces, they almost have some kind of autonomy at this point.
Right.
The Iraqi army doesn't and police out of Baghdad.
They don't rule all of Anbar province and whatever.
It's still the sons of Iraq running around over there.
Right.
Yes, you're totally right.
In fact, they are worried about trying to contain, let's say, a sort of Sunni insurgency in Baghdad itself.
So Anbar province for them is too far away.
And they know that Sunni Iraq, Anbar province is 90 what, 98, 99 percent Sunni Iraqi.
So there's no chance.
Yeah, now it is.
There's no chance that Maliki's guns are going to rule over Anbar on top of it.
So this is you can just call this, you know, Sunni Iraqistan is sort of this new country that's now, you know, they're as the rebels in Syria have talked about like, hey, you know what?
Even if we can't take Damascus, maybe we'll just break off and join and make a new country with the Iraqis.
Exactly.
And, you know, I can't imagine this would be the Taliban we were talking about a few minutes ago, expanding and actually uniting parts of the desert on both sides in Iraq and Syria.
On top of it, Scott, we have the problem up north with the Kurds, which is getting more and more intractable because of these oil negotiations.
In fact, where the Kurds want to bypass Baghdad completely, but they cannot because, you know, basically their bills, administration bills, management bills are paid by Baghdad.
And whatever deal they cut with ExxonMobil, Chevron or whatever, most of the cut goes to the central government and not to the regional Kurdish government.
And they are trying to break this thing by all means.
And now it's a total mess.
For the next few months, we still don't know how this is going to play out, especially because, you know, the status of Kirkuk was not decided.
They are cutting deals directly with the Turks.
So the enmity between Ankara and Baghdad grows by the day, in fact.
So it's, you know, the possibility for everything going wrong at the same time in 2013 is huge, you know.
So, you know, can you imagine a split, an Iraqi split in Anbar province, another Iraqi split in Kurdistan?
And then we have the Kurds in northern Iraq uniting with the Kurds in what they call Western Kurdistan, which is Syria, Kurdistan, where they are practically autonomous.
Right, because Assad… Because of that deal that they cut last year.
Right.
In fact, they are running most towns in Syria, Kurdistan, you know, by themselves for the first time in decades, in fact.
So can you imagine, it's the dream scenario, this balkanization in progress, let's put it this way, it's the dream scenario of those people, those ultra-hardcore neocons in 2002, 11 years ago, when they run up towards the invasion and decimation of Iraq, let's put it this way.
It's now happening.
It's already happening, in fact.
It's the most probable scenario if this thing goes on, if the… Of course, the civil war in Syria will go on, because there's no possibility of a resolution, a 100 percent resolution.
There's no win-lose situation.
It's lose-lose any way you see it.
And lose-lose means a Lebanon-style civil war going on for years, in fact.
Part of this, though, is the Americans always at least think they know what they're doing, right?
And they've been sending money openly, right?
It's in the New York Times.
Yeah, we're announcing another pallet of cash to the rebels.
It's our allies in Qatar and Saudi Arabia who are doing the arming, just cutouts, right?
Like Israel to Iran during the Iran-Contra deal, that kind of thing.
It's an American project here.
They seem to know and they have known good and well for more than a year that really the guys doing the fighting, we would call Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
If they were in Iraq, only they're in Syria, so we'd call them something else.
But that's what's going on here.
We have that clip of Hillary Clinton from, what, nine months ago, telling CBS, Well, geez, the Wahharis are on the same side.
Maybe we need to look out what we're doing here.
But then they keep backing them anyway.
Now, of course, they do admit that, you know, Pepe, you're right.
There are crazy jihadists running around in Syria.
Maybe that's why we need to intervene, something like that.
But I wonder, you know, if are they just afraid or why hasn't the carpet bombing started yet?
What's so hard about dropping in some CIA guys with some laser designators and beginning to blast the hell out of the Syrian army and getting that regime change if that's what they want so bad?
Because what's happening now is just a stalemate.
Patrick Coburn was on the show.
He said, look, the rebels aren't going away.
Assad can't defeat them.
All they've got to do is just melt away, right?
But the fight is on and it's not going to stop.
But then again, Assad still controls every city in Syria, and that's not changing either.
Absolutely.
And Patrick was there, in fact, and he's 110 percent correct.
In fact, this stalemate will go on for years.
The only way to break the stalemate would be shadow war, but really hardcore shadow war.
So now I am particularly interested in this nomination of John Brennan for head of the CIA.
It's probably today, not now, in the next few hours.
So if this is OK, expect major shadow war in Syria, which is something that's still not happening.
And I mean shadow war CIA-style, drones, targeted assassinations, you name it.
The thing is, the problem is the CIA doesn't have very good intelligence in Syria, just like they don't have very good intelligence in Afpak, in north and south of Syria.
They triangulate cell phones and then they start killing people.
So probably they're going to start doing the same thing in Damascus.
I'm not sure this is going to happen.
And the Israelis, Mossad, they always brag that they know everything that's going on in Damascus.
They don't have a clue either.
But I would expect some sort of CIA hardcore shadow war starting within the next few weeks, in case our friend Brennan now is going to run the show.
So, wow.
And collateral damage is going to be huge as well, because all these centers in Syria, they are in civilian areas or in business areas.
Wow.
Man, I'm thinking of relocating to Damascus and go out in flames, you know.
Well, go ahead, dude, but I'm not going.
Well, they're not giving visas.
I talked to some people that I know in consulates, and they said, no, forget it.
If you apply as a tourist, maybe they will give you a visa.
As a journalist, forget it.
If you apply as a tourist, they will probably give you because you've been there before.
And that's it, you know.
And nobody will be there to check the facts.
So people are going to start turning on YouTube, of course, where the Syria Observatory of Human Rights, which, by the way, is based here.
The issue of their press releases here in London.
One man, one man show, they're going to be saying, look, 500,000 children were killed today by an aerial attack by Assad forces.
Everybody, you know, all over the world, they're saying Reuters, AP.
And there's no way to check that out.
Right.
Well, now, you know, I wonder about that.
It seems like Assad would actually be smart to go ahead and let reporters in at this point.
Exactly.
Because, I mean, look at who, I mean, they were trying to do this thing.
Maybe, I don't know the exact details.
It seemed like it didn't pan out, but they were trying to say, the Syrian government was trying to say, Zawahiri's brother, we captured him trying to, you know, be an al-Qaeda guy running around and whatever.
But, you know what, there are enough real al-Qaeda guys running around that if you just let in more Coburns and more David Enderses, they'll tell us.
Exactly.
But that's, you know, the inbuilt contradiction of a police state, right?
Syria is run like a police state.
When I went to that border in Dara a few years ago, that was four or five years ago, when I got there, they practically expelled me.
I had an authorization from Damascus.
I went there with a Syrian.
So I went to Dara to try to talk to somebody, and Dara has always been a jihadist base.
And the minders, the official minders, they were freaking out completely because a foreigner was not even American, you know, which is always a plus when you go to these areas.
If you don't carry an American passport, they treat you much better.
And still they were freaking out.
They sent me back.
I couldn't talk to anybody.
So now it's even worse.
You know, they should make, okay, if they want to give visas to a CNN crew, let's put it this way, why don't they give a visa to an Al Jazeera crew, for instance?
And then you're going to have this all over the Middle East, the real situation on the ground, or to RT, Russia Today, or even to CCTV in China.
You know, you don't want to give visas to Western reporters.
Okay, fine.
But not reporters from anywhere, from Venezuela, Cuba, whatever.
Go there and report facts on the ground, honestly, like Patrick does all the time, you know.
Right, yeah, I mean, he's not taking sides.
He's just a journalist saying, hey, here's what I found.
Hey, tell me this.
What's your understanding of the extent of Israeli involvement in this?
It's not much, Scott.
Like I told you, they don't have good intelligence on what goes on in Damascus.
Remember when there was, what was it, five or six months ago, that major explosion in Damascus?
Hang on, hang on, though.
The Americans, you said, they don't have very good intelligence either, but that's not stopping them from giving the zillions of dollars worth of guns to the suicide bombers.
So the Israelis were spinning everything.
I was reading Debco practically every day at that time, and it was just spin.
And, you know, sometimes, oh, this was a Sunni infiltrated commando.
Oh, no, this was one Sunni general who was already there, and he had been cultivating this plan for a month.
They had no clue at all, you know.
And, in fact, this was an internal, that bombing was an internal thing.
And it was not solved, and still not solved, the mystery of that bombing.
But it was a sort of internal purge in the, you know, top ranks of Syrian military intelligence.
This is the best, you know, the best interpretation that we have six months later.
So the Israelis, what they don't want is anything changing in the Golan Heights, and it won't, because there's no one there practically in the Golan Heights on the Syrian side, because Assad's forces, they have to see what's going on in the suburbs of Damascus.
You know, it's much more important, or in Aleppo.
As long as the situation over there doesn't change, it's good.
And from a long-term Israeli strategic point of view, as long as the Syrian army is bogged down in a civil war, that's the best scenario for them, because they are bogged down.
They are in a swamp.
They are in a major quagmire for years, so they won't start having any ideas about Israel.
Even if they had, by the way, they are a lousy army in terms of facing the Israeli army.
You know, they wouldn't stand a chance.
So as long as, for Israel in the long run, it's fine like it is.
Major chaos leading to possible balkanization.
Well, and as Jeffrey Goldberg and President Obama discussed, this is really good for weakening Iran.
And in fact, that's what it's all about.
Here we go again.
Well, my favorite part of that is if people go and look at that, where Jeffrey Goldberg interviews Barack Obama, neither of them pretend for a minute that this has anything to do with how much they love the poor downtrodden people of Syria, which is what I've got to watch on CNN all day.
But when it comes down to Obama talking with Goldberg, they skip all of the BS and go right to, look, this is what Netanyahu would want, right?
So, okay.
Yeah, it's true.
Absolutely.
And the people, remember when Hillary months ago was always talking about the people of Syria and the Free Syrian Army, they were defending the people of Syria from the evil dictator.
And then one day she said, oh, my God, they are not defending anything.
They are beheading people, and they are killing people and civilians in Aleppo itself.
Maybe we should try to change this so-called Free Syrian Army.
Let's bring another guy.
So, you know, they thought, okay, we should bring a Kurd or a Christian.
There were no Kurds or no Christians.
In the end, they settled again with the Sunni.
The guy's a former imam.
He thinks that Facebook is an American-Israeli conspiracy.
He's a nut, a total nutcase.
He worked in the oil business in Syria before, so there's some oil, very interesting oil angle, subterranean oil angle in this whole thing.
And still, the gangs cannot get together and try to organize a serious opposition.
So one of the reasons why Bashar al-Assad yesterday in his speech said, I have nobody to negotiate with, you know, in fact, it's partially true.
The real representatives of Syrian civilians, they are totally marginalized by this new National Council, completely.
You know, the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood, the hardcore Muslim Brotherhood, and some Salafi jihadists, these are the people who are represented in this new so-called coalition.
In fact, the coalition of the unwilling, which are the majority of Syrian civil society, these are the people who will be representing most Syrians, in fact.
But they are not represented in this institutionalized opposition at the moment.
And they were not represented in the past as well.
This thing that Hillary Clinton put together immediately turned around.
I mean, the whole point was that unlike the Free Syrian Army or whatever, Syrian National Council, these new guys won't be so close to the jihadists or whatever.
They immediately turn around and endorse the jihadists because it's the only chance they have a legitimacy whatsoever.
If they're going to be grafted on top of the civil war, the only thing they can do is try to endorse what the fighters are already doing out there.
But so here's the thing that I wondered too, though.
Because I'm reading all these articles about how some of these fighters have even come from Afghanistan.
I guess they figure they'd rather fight for the U.S. Army in Syria than against it in Afghanistan.
A little easier, right?
And then some of them are Iraqi.
And then I read one thing where the guy was French, although it wasn't clear whether he was Special Forces or not.
I guess apparently he wasn't.
Apparently he was just a young Muslim living in Paris who decided he wanted to go and join the Holy War in Syria, just like young men like to go and do in the Middle East, like in the 80s in Afghanistan or whatever.
But I wonder, do these guys, I know that they're the ones doing the fighting.
And so Hillary's sock puppets have to endorse them for any legitimacy.
But do they have real legitimacy among the Syrian people?
Because I guess the way I understand it is, and from you mostly, right, is that it's what a bare majority of the people of Syria are working class and poorer Sunni Muslim Arabs.
And then it's the coalition of everybody else basically supports the Ba'athists.
But so the kooks who are doing the beheadings and the suicide bombings and all that, that can't be what the bare majority Sunni population wants, right?
That's like the Taliban to the Pashtuns.
Not necessarily who they want, but who they're stuck with.
You're totally right.
And in fact, there was a very good informal poll in Aleppo.
And people who live in the center of Aleppo and not in these suburbs, which are practically in the countryside, they were complaining all the time about these, even not the hardcore jihadists, but even the Salafi jihadists who were encouraging the jihadists to behead people.
And now these people of the Al-Nusra Front, by the way, which are, you know, very close with all these people of the new leadership, opposition leadership, people who live in the big cities, especially in Aleppo, they repudiate them completely.
Like, I read stories in the Arab press saying that they invaded houses in Aleppo.
They, you know, they transformed houses into bunkers.
They were using civilians as shields.
And, you know, in fact, after two or three months, there was a measure of sympathy towards people who were actually risking their lives fighting against the regime.
And then it turned completely 180 degrees when they actually saw these people in their real lives and what they were doing to Aleppo, not to mention what they did to parts of central Aleppo, the Umayyad Mosque in Aleppo itself, which was partially destroyed, and the souk in Aleppo, which was 80 percent destroyed.
It was set on fire by these Free Syrian Army gangs, including the Al-Nusra Salafi jihadists, because they were fleeing government forces, and they set fire to the souk.
So, you know, so when you set fire to the center of probably one of the practically the oldest settlement, urban settlement in the world, Aleppo and Damascus have been fighting over this for, you know, millennia.
In fact, how can the local population sympathize with your fight?
It's absolutely impossible, you know.
So they lost the big cities.
In the countryside, it's different, because in the countryside, most of these people, they are unemployed, illiterate.
They are peasants.
They have no clue about anything.
The only thing that they know is that they are Sunnis, and they profess their Sunni Islam, you know, very, I would say, hardcore Catholic way, you know, no deviation.
And if these guys tell themselves, like, we are fighting a secular, infidel government, obviously these peasants follow them, you know.
So that's the number one explanation why they have refuge in the Sunni countryside.
But this will never lead them to convince the urban population, especially in Damascus and Aleppo, that they are a credible fighting force or that they are a credible opposition.
They never proposed anything.
The only thing that they say is down with the, you know, down with the dictator, and later we're going to see.
And in fact, some of them started to, you know, urged by their own imams, they start saying that they want, in fact, an Islamic caliphate over there, or some sort of emirate, whatever it's possible to establish, suburb of Aleppo, you know, desert, western desert, you name it.
So it's crazy.
It's crazy.
We are watching a Taliban situation in Syria 11 years after the fall of the Taliban in Afpak, you know.
So this is tailor-made for Syria.
I think John Brennan is going to have a field day in Syria.
You know, it's funny to me, kind of, because it's high treason.
And now I know that, you know, over at WorldNetDaily or something, this is probably all because Barack Obama is a secret Muslim agent of Osama or whatever like that.
And it's clearly not that, right?
And, of course, the Democrats would love that interpretation of the accusation as well.
They're like, oh, yeah, you're completely crazy if you think that Obama is, you know, really cares for Zawahiri and Zawahiri's goals or whatever.
No, it's just that he's working hand in hand with Zawahiri on accomplishing those goals.
And so who cares what his motivation is?
If he thinks that he's accomplishing for the American empire something that's going to benefit us, that doesn't take away from the fact that he is directly aligning with America's actual enemies, right, in order to undermine a country, Iran, that's not even really an enemy of ours at all, other than the Israelis don't like him.
That's it.
You put it in a nutshell, this is it, Scott.
So how do you turn this thing around?
So, you know, all of us are in a very wishful, thinkish way, are expecting that John Kerry is going to introduce a measure of, you know, sound thinking.
Now, where's that coming from?
Where is that coming from?
I think it's coming from for our collective wishful think, our collective desire to, can we see some minimum light at the end of this Sunni Shiite Middle East total disaster tunnel?
Count me out.
I have no faith in John Kerry whatsoever.
Obviously nothing is going to change.
Still, we have the Russians and the Chinese in the background, and they have very close diplomatic, military, and energy relationship with Iran.
So still we have NATO GCC on one side and Syria, Iran, Hezbollah on the other.
This is not going to change.
So what we're going to have is the Americans over and over again playing up this Sunni-Shiite divide, which is one of the oldest tricks in the book.
They learned from the Brits, you know.
They're still going to apply it, and they think it works.
It may work for the galleries, but in real life this is not the problem.
The problem is to find an overall solution for the situation inside Syria, for the nuclear dossier, and stop listening to what the House of Saud and the Qataris are always talking about.
Look, these people, they are crazy.
These ayatollahs, they're going to invade us tomorrow.
They are building a bomb to control the whole Middle East.
And it's all bullshit.
And basically this is Arab propaganda, Saudi Arabian propaganda, Emirati propaganda, and Qatari propaganda.
The problem is Washington will never stop listening to these people.
Maybe we'll have to wait until 2020 when the U.S. is going to be self-sufficient in energy.
Then things are going to change, because then the West won't need the Gulf War or anything.
The Chinese will take over.
The Chinese will import all the oil from Saudi Arabia or from the Emirates.
They're probably going to build another three or four Dubai's over there, Hong Kong's, Hong Kong Dubai's, you name it.
And that's it.
But furthermore, for the next eight years at least, it's going to be the same situation, the same thing that we've seen these past four or five is going to be replicated over and over again.
Nothing was learned from the invasion of Iraq.
They tried to justify it, a posteriori, by all means, all crazy ideas and concoctions, and everybody knew what was from the beginning.
Now we have the blowback.
Now we have al-Qaeda-linked outfits all over this area, from northern Africa to the heart of the Middle East, not to mention some remnants over there in Afpak.
It's total chaos.
It's still the best analysis that I saw of all this, even before the fact, was a guy in France, a political scientist.
He's very well respected in France, but nobody reads him in the U.S., unfortunately.
His name is Alain Jacques.
And Jacques was saying in 2001, early 2002, that this is the empire of chaos.
And that's it.
The U.S. basically is the empire of chaos.
What we don't know is if this empire is run by financial interests way back, you know, very, very disguised, or not so disguised, the Goldman Sachs crowd, or if the empire in itself acts like this.
So we, our only, the only problem is to identify the real leadership.
Is it the market, or is it the military-industrial complex?
Or is it both, in fact, which is more probable?
But the empire of chaos will keep on droning and droning and droning and droning and droning.
Right.
More and more, I'm with Gareth Porter on this.
Gareth says it's all about the Pentagon, Pepe.
He says when it comes down to it, these generals, they want their ribbons and they want their promotions, and they are the, you know, the lead weight in the dirty snowball.
Yeah, true, true as well.
Exactly.
This is the institutionalized side of the empire.
Absolutely.
Careers have to be made.
People need decorations.
Exactly.
Promotions are in store.
Exactly.
Firms need to bag huge contracts in developing world countries, and especially hardcore dictatorships like the ones in the Gulf.
Yes, it's a mix of administrative proceedings and lots of profit to be made, of course.
Empires work on profit, basically.
Yeah, for some at the expense of the rest.
I mean, and that's the joke, right?
Because after World War II, the State Department was built on the Standard Oil business network.
I mean, they already had, the Rockefellers already had their own State Department across the entire planet Earth.
So when the empire needed one, the Rockefellers were like, here, we're ready to go.
We've got your State Department offices already here.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, that's how, this is what caused the revolution or the seizing of the hostages and the riots that led to the seizing of the hostages, right, was that David Rockefeller intervened with Zbigniew Brzezinski and Jimmy Carter to convince them to allow the Shah to come in because that was his old friend.
And what's he going to do, leave his old friend hanging?
And why was the Shah the dictator of Iran?
Because that was what the Rockefellers wanted, you know, this whole time.
And that was what led to the seizing of the hostages at the end of the whole game, you know?
And the craziest thing is that 33 years after the fact, people in Washington still can't get over it.
It's fantastic.
This is absolutely fantastic.
They're probably going for another 10, 15, 20 years as well.
Well, they hate us, you know?
Exactly.
They hate us because they hate us because they hate us.
We lost our gendarme of the Gulf, as they call the Shah, and now all Iranians hate us.
And when Ben Kingsley does a movie about the whole thing, ooh, this is fantastic, this is the best movie we've seen since, I don't know, The Right Stuff, probably.
And the film is a fucking lie.
The way it depicts Iranians, in fact, it's an absolute lie.
It's a Hollywood lie, in fact.
It's technically very well made, Argo.
But it's not a truthful movie at all.
And it's incredibly so.
Ben Kingsley is viewed as a liberal in the U.S., as a progressive.
This is something completely unbelievable, you know?
Hey, let me ask you something else about Untrue Things.
Everything's great in Libya now, right?
Oh, yes.
Look, oh, yes, true.
I heard that Madonna's going to play Tripoli soon, so.
Are you kidding?
Dude, would they have to dig her up from somewhere?
Well, now, so wait a minute.
I mean, you know, here's my thing about that war in Libya.
As soon as it ended, the sacking of Tripoli and all that, that was pretty much the last time it was mentioned on CNN.
And, of course, I'm a reader, and so I try to keep up.
And we've talked with, especially McClatchy Newspapers has done some pretty good news there.
And, of course, there's the Benghazi thing.
But the only lesson of that is, well, why was there so little security?
And which politicians can get fingers pointed at them over it?
But nobody is pointing out that, well, that's what happens when you fight a war for your enemies, and then you have your embassy, right, you know, surrounded by them.
They never question the larger portrait of the war against Gaddafi and what it actually accomplished and for who.
But, you know, you're the guy that broke the story that this guy, Bill Hodge, was the military commander, that he was a veteran of the Afghan and Iraq wars where he fought against Americans there.
And now he's still a big mucky muck there in Libya, isn't he?
And then also if you could please update us on, if you know, about the racial pogroms, because there was at least one majority black city in Libya that was pretty much wiped off the map by, you know, massive pogroms of women raped in refugee camps and crazy.
Tell us what the hell is going on over there.
Absolutely.
And black South Africans, sorry, black Sub-Saharan Africans from all the Sub-Saharan African countries who were actually residents of Libya, they all left.
And when they come back, for instance, to Mali, to Niger, if you look at the African, the pan-African press closely, virtually every week there's a horror story usually told by one of these refugees back to their home countries.
Because, look, there is a pogrom against black Africans in Libya all over, especially in eastern Libya.
And it's impossible for us, even if we are fully documented, even if we are residents, even if we were living in Libya for the past ten years or so, it's impossible for us to remain there.
It's true, because these hardcore extreme Islamists who are running eastern Libya and they are part of the government in Tripoli nowadays, they always view the Sub-Saharan Africans with racial prejudice.
And on top of it, all of them as lackeys of the Jamrariya, the Qaddafi regime.
Because Qaddafi protected the minorities.
He protected, exactly.
And the thing with the two ARAGs is even more complicated.
I'm thinking of trying to do an inside story of what's going on in Mali.
It's very complicated.
I'm still in the middle of it.
But basically, a lot of these two ARAGs who were fighting alongside Qaddafi or some were even part of Qaddafi militias, they came back to, when they came back to Mali, immediately they started thinking, okay, maybe it's our time to build an independent two ARAG state in northern Mali.
So when they were practically accomplishing this, the Islamists that were also fighting in Libya also intervened, helped by the Algerian secret services, which have a weird relationship with Islamists as well.
It's a very complicated story.
But basically, this is something that we were, in the beginning of the Libya war, were imagining the consequences in the neighboring countries.
And the destabilization of Mali, which now it's in layers, in fact.
It's extremely complex.
It's a direct result of what happened in Libya.
We can say more or less that the two ARAGs, they had legitimate concerns and a legitimate case.
But the Islamists appropriated the whole thing to try to install, in fact, an Islamic emirate inside Mali as well.
So this is something that could happen in Nigeria sooner or later as well.
Not to mention in Algeria, with Algeria, it's a total basket case as well.
So all this derived from the Western intervention in Libya.
So imagine this scenario applied to Syria, if things keep going like this.
You know, what's happening now in Northern Africa, when you imagine what could happen in Syria, in Iraq, in Kurdistan, in the borders with Iranian Kurdistan as well, ramifications towards the Gulf, and Egypt and Jordan as well, where Muslim Brotherhood sooner or later is going to be in power in Jordan as well.
What a mess.
Well, hey, I'm glad that you said so many things there that I want to ask you about.
First of all, how, well, the opportunity is there already, I think.
How hard are they pushing the American imperialists to use Boko Haram, which is this local bark-eating insurgency of lunatics there off in the woods in Nigeria, how hard are they pushing to internationalize that conflict and intervene there with drones or boots or mercs or what?
Look, this particular situation, Scott, I'm not following.
I'm trying to follow what's going on in Congo as well, which is more or less related to it.
Because in Congo there has been practically a nonstop civil war for the past, what, 20 years or so, and huge oil and mineral, Western oil and mineral interests, especially European interests, involved in this whole thing.
I'm very curious what's going to happen in Congo, because then there's a possibility of a shadow CIA war amplifying in Congo as well, much more than in Nigeria.
But I prefer to talk about this later on.
They still have too many pieces in the puzzle, you know.
Well, I mean, because it's not just that there's news that, oh, Boko Haram got in a fight with the government of Nigeria, but it's Hillary Clinton thought it was her business.
You know, that's come up from time to time.
And I just wonder, you know, how hard they mean to push for that.
This is all going to be Afrikaans' mission, in fact.
Yeah, just to get involved in every single thing they can.
Not only the Horn of Africa and Libya, now it's Central Africa.
And Central Africa is all of these places we're talking about.
Right, that's the thing, is the Mali conflict, which came from Libya, that's the bridge down to Nigeria.
In fact, that was what General Ham was saying back, let's see, maybe like half a year ago or something, was that, yeah, you know, all of a sudden there are these Islamist groups that we have to deal with.
And this is really, I think, before the Mali thing really kicked in.
But he was saying, or maybe it was right when it first started, and he was saying, yeah, we have, no, it was before Mali.
He was saying we have al-Shabaab in Somalia and we have al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.
And that was a little vague.
He was talking about the people he had just fought a war for in Libya, right?
And then he said in Boko Haram in Nigeria.
And it seemed to me like he was kind of drawing the map, General Ham, that's the head of AFRICOM.
He was kind of drawing the map of where he wanted to go, and just geographically speaking, you could chase a conflict from Libya down into Mali and then on to Nigeria if you want to.
And all you have to do is say, listen, we have intelligence that says that this guy met with that guy one time.
Just like al-Shabaab.
I heard al-Shabaab one time went to Yemen and got training on the monkey bars.
So now they're al-Qaeda too.
So yesterday they were terrorists.
Today they become freedom fighters.
You use them.
They are your allies.
And then when a localized conflict ends, they revert to being terrorists because you have to go after them wherever they are.
And now it's a whole continent, in fact.
It's the Horn of Africa, it's the Maghreb, it's Western Africa, and it's Central Africa.
It's completely crazy.
So for AFRICOM, it's absolutely perfect.
And for the people who were very instrumental into making sure AFRICOM fought its first real war in Libya, don't forget that at the beginning of the Libya war, those missiles came from AFRICOM, not from NATO.
Then three or four days later, there was this so-called official transition from AFRICOM to NATO that persecuted the rest of the war.
So AFRICOM now, for all practical purposes, is battle-ready.
So General Ham, in fact, now, oh man, he is the man.
He's going to take over Africa sooner or later.
Yeah, well, and you know, in Defense News, they had the thing about the Dagger Brigade that they were creating, which is such a great name, right?
That's a pretty defensive weapon, right, a dagger.
But anyway, they said at DefenseNews.com that, well, with the winding down of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army's 3rd Infantry Division is looking for ways to stay globally engaged.
And so, in other words, they're looking for work.
And they found some.
Hey, here's a continent with no one to stop us.
Look, no wonder nobody in Africa wanted to be the headquarters of AFRICOM.
The headquarters had to be in Stuttgart in Germany.
No wonder.
They already knew, even before the Libyan war, that this is exactly what it would be.
The militarization of conflicts all over Africa, irrespective of, you know, if it was a relatively peaceful area, region, all that, as long as there are oil, gas, and mineral interests at play, and as long as the Chinese are over there doing deals, which is exactly what they started doing in the beginning of the 2000s, when the Bush administration was thinking, was totally occupied with a global war on terror.
The Chinese went in full force, and they made hardcore deals with at least 20 to 25 African countries.
The response, obviously, years later, protracted, you know, much later than sooner, is, okay, let's militarize the whole thing.
Let's create problems for the Chinese in Sudan, in South Sudan, in Central Africa, if they want to make mineral deals over there.
Okay, okay, Northern Africa is different.
Northern Africa is for interests, basically, of Brit, French, American corporations, especially in energy.
But even in places where there's no direct interest, Mali, for instance, you know, there's no direct interest for the Europeans.
So why not spread it out?
Africa has a mission, a long-ended, open-ended mission in all corners of Africa nowadays.
You know, it was expected, you know.
This was bound to happen.
This was bound to happen, especially because there's nothing they can do in South America, which would be normally the first candidate for militarization.
They cannot do it anymore with all those, you know, center-left or center or relatively progressive governments, you know.
So Africa, once again, to be spoiled and re-spoiled and re-spoiled.
All right, Pepe, thank you very much for your time.
It's great to talk to you, as always.
Always a pleasure, Scott.
I hope this was not too rambling, especially because these past few days I've been trying to relax and keep away a little bit.
So now I'm plunging back into the horror, all the doom and gloom.
Yeah, no, you know what?
I like it, and that's why I bring you on the show.
And I imagine that the people in the audience tune in because they want to hear you more than anything.
No, I hope it's helpful.
At least 1% may be helpful to some people, you know.
In fact, this is what we do.
I always keep asking myself, okay, why do we keep doing this?
Because there's a nugget here and there that some people reading it or listening to it, they say, ah, okay, so this is the connection.
So, you know, it's still...
Then our mission as writers and communicators is complete, in fact.
Right, I mean, that's the thing.
People have to have a place to go if they want the truth.
Now, most people don't want it.
But if they want to start trolling around, are they going to be able to find something worthwhile or not, you know?
Yeah.
You've got to give it to them.
You've got to try.
Absolutely.
So now everybody turn to Al Jazeera America, former Al Gore station.
Well, now, wait a minute.
Isn't that owned by the government that's fighting the jihad in Syria for us?
Exactly.
So what kind of improvement is that?
You named it.
Yeah, all right.
Well, everybody, yeah, watch Al Jazeera with a gigantic grain of salt in your hand.
It all depends which conflict they're covering, what they say, you know, just like the Americans, just like everybody else.
Absolutely.
Okay, my man.
All right, thanks, Pepe.
All the best to you.
See you.
That's the great Pepe Escobar, everybody, atimes.com.
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