11/13/12 – Pepe Escobar – The Scott Horton Show

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Our guest today is Pepe Escobar.
You can find quite a few interviews of him at their website, ScottHorton.org.
I can guarantee you that.
You can find all his rights at AidTimes.com.
AidTimes.com, that's the site, the Asia Times newspaper website.
Welcome back, Pepe.
How are you?
Wonderful to be with you, Scott.
Great pleasure, as usual.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
It sounds like we've got our telephone connection ironed out, and thank goodness for that.
First of all, I want to ask you about the Gaza Strip.
I was hoping that maybe you could sort of give your, in a nutshell, kind of summary of what is basically the situation in the Gaza Strip as far as the siege going on there and the Hamas government and all of that.
And then, of course, if you could update us on what you know about what's been going on the last few days, how many people have been killed and what you expect to happen next and that kind of stuff.
I know a lot of people, I was telling the audience earlier, I get a lot of e-mails from people saying, you know, I just really don't know anything about this kind of thing.
So I was hoping maybe you could sort of start with just what is the situation of the Gaza Strip sort of in general first, you know what I mean?
Well, Scott, I had to catch up.
I'm being very frank with you.
I had to catch up for the past 24 hours because I spent the last four weeks in the U.S. itself.
That's okay.
You still know a thousand percent more than all the rest of us.
So, you know, after 6,000 miles in six states in the southwest and election night, so three days later we get the David Petraeus, Paula Broadwell spy fall scandal.
So you can imagine.
And now having to catch up with the Middle East all over again.
Well, look, very important.
I think this whole thing is about timing at the moment.
Don't forget that there is a void of power in Washington at the moment.
So guess what Bibi Netanyahu is doing at the moment.
He's cleaning up Gaza still further.
Nobody is talking about it.
In fact, Chomsky was there a while ago.
He wrote a very good article about it.
I think it was on Al Jazeera the other day.
And nobody is talking about it.
It's furthering the same agenda of hardcore colonization, trying to, you know, according to Likud, inflict another death blow to Hamas, which they won't, because Hamas now is flush with cash.
And the cash came from whom?
The emir of Qatar last month.
We all remember that.
So don't forget that for the emir of Qatar, Hamas in Gaza is part of the Muslim Brotherhood ascendancy all over the Middle East.
So Netanyahu now is also picking a very, very hard beef with Qatar.
They happen to be allied in Syria.
Different motives, different reasons, different agendas.
But now in Gaza, they are directly opposed.
And especially the fact that nobody is talking about it, and the Middle East in general, now they are geared towards this new Syrian transitional council, which has a name that nobody doesn't even know what it's all about.
It's unpronounceable.
It's the Syrian Transitional National Council for Revolutionary Forces, something like this.
They set it up in Doha, in Qatar once again.
Why?
Because the emir of Qatar wants a Muslim Brotherhood-controlled Syria as soon as possible.
They're going to meet again in an EU Arab League meeting in Cairo over the next few days, this weekend, in fact.
There is a conference of donors set to be in London on Friday to discuss how they're going to, in fact, prolong the civil war in Syria, and how they're going to establish, you know, that holy grail of holy grails, the no-fly zone that would allow an intervention against the Assad regime.
So what are the liquid nicks doing in Israel at the moment?
Okay, let's, you know, inflict a little more of pain to the Gazans.
And nobody is going to talk about it, and nobody is, in fact, talking about it.
This is absolutely disgusting.
And even in the Arab media, I was scouring the Arab press this morning.
Nobody is talking about Gaza.
They only talk about this new Syrian transitional council.
And they are talking about Turkey.
Nobody is talking about Gaza.
All right, so you talk about Gaza.
What can we say?
Look, nobody knows, actually, because there are very few independent reporting on the ground.
The Arab media is not talking about it.
The Israeli media is not talking about it, in fact.
In the U.S. press, the only thing you read about is the Paula Petrel scandal.
And the timing, like we said before, the timing is absolutely perfect to do another advanced ethnic cleansing operation, killing women.
And we already know that there are a lot of civilian casualties.
At the same time, Israel is involved with tanks firing against Syrian positions in the Golan Heights as well.
This is completely crazy.
What we're mainly looking at is an expansion of the conflict all over the Middle East.
It's, you know, different borders, at least two different borders in Syria, Israel-Palestine.
In the Kurdish areas in Syria, the Kurds are conquering town after town.
In fact, this past few days, they conquered another three towns in the northeast of Syria.
And everybody is expecting something to come out of this new Syrian opposition, which supposedly will organize all the opposition, and then the West could intervene and save Syria from itself, which is beyond wishful thinking.
It's totally stupid, right?
Yeah.
Well, and you know, the thing is, too, is, well, we can talk about all that now if you want.
This new Syrian exile council, it's funny the way it got started.
It seemed like it wasn't going to happen, and Hillary Clinton insisted there had to be this many women on the thing, and then they hired some communist to be the head of it, which I guess America, now that there's no Soviet Union, in this case they're trying to prefer the communists to the suicide bomber jihadists that they've been backing so far.
Except, you know, if they create, like you're saying, stupid, they create some government in exile in Qatar, what the hell does that have to do with who's doing what in Syria in real life?
Nothing, you know?
And if it's suicide bombers who are getting the war won for Hillary Clinton, it's suicide bombers who are going to inherit the power, right?
Well, I mean, not the dead ones, but the guys that put them up to it.
Do you remember when Hillary Clinton was trying to organize the Syrian National Council, only until, what, two months ago?
Now it's completely crazy.
Now the U.S. is trying to reorganize a new expanded opposition to substitute the previous opposition, which didn't work.
And now they're saying that the Syrians themselves are in charge.
No, they're not.
Who's in charge still?
The U.S. leading from behind?
Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar.
And obviously, from the point of view of Israel, they don't care.
In fact, considering that they lost this, at least for the moment, the battleground to try to inflict to the U.S. and to the rest of the world the bombing of Iran, this is on hold at least for the moment.
They came back to the, you know, the previous position, which, OK, let's try to consolidate the total subjugation of Gaza once and for all while nobody's paying attention, which is exactly their modus operandi.
Remember that famous bombing of Gaza in late 2008 when nobody was paying attention, it was between Christmas and New Year's Eve.
And now it's exactly the same modus operandi, you know.
Well, although it's, I mean, it's just total subjugation of Gaza just means what?
Just every once in a while mass murder a few of them and then call it a retaliation for some rockets or whatever?
Because they don't subjugate anything.
I mean, Hamas is still in charge of the place, as much power as they actually have to, you know, toss around or, you know, throw around, I don't know.
And it's a perpetual state of siege.
So when they sense that the siege is more or less being relaxed because Gazans are basically, some of them at least, are managing to go to Egypt and back, and some of them manage to travel, they go over there and, you know, they turn the screws a little bit more.
It's a perpetual stage of siege that is being ironed and, you know, the iron curtain gets closer and closer every two years or every three years, in fact.
And there's absolutely no possibility of this ever ending, unless, of course, if we have on Obama 2.0 some sort of initiative by the Obama administration to try to go for real negotiations between the Israeli and Palestinian communities.
For the moment we are all given the benefit of the doubt, of course.
I'm sure after January and by February we will see that nothing will happen and things will remain the same.
Yeah, it's just terrible.
And then, you know, this is actually a couple of days out of date, but it's the best I know about it, was that seven Palestinians have been killed, five of them civilians, three of whom were children, up to 52 others, including six women and 12 children, have been wounded.
That's John Glazer writing at news.no, at antiwar.com/blog two days ago.
And he goes back and, you know, it's not very difficult.
It has to do a little bit of revisionist history on who started it this time.
Of course, according to Israel, everything that they do is retaliation.
But according to, you know, actual chronology of things that happen in time and space, that's never true.
And just like this time, they started it and then any resistance to their aggression is deemed aggression.
It's just like America, really.
I don't know who's copying who in the policy there, maybe a little of both.
It's true, because, you know, they control a bit.
Their PR is in English to start with.
Everything that the Palestinians say basically is in Arabic and it's lost in translation.
So the Israelis can sell to the U.S. public opinion and to European public opinion as well.
They're a version of events all the time.
And they have the support of the individual very powerful lobbies in each of these countries, in Britain, in France, even in the Club Med countries, not to mention the U.S.
So it's very easy for them.
If they launch any sort of repressive operation or with large collateral damage, let's put it this way, which is the case now.
Maybe this is just at the beginning, but the collateral damage is already huge.
They can sell it out.
We were being attacked.
In fact, I read one of these declarations this morning.
I don't remember who said it.
Once again, it's the same unnamed Israeli official saying, we're going to prevent our citizens, our children to be attacked by rockets from Gaza.
It's the same thing.
It's the same thing.
And they can get away with it.
There's no counterpressure.
And don't expect this to come from the Arab world, because the Arab world, they are convulsed by ramifications of the Arab Spring.
I'm sure you have seen that the screws are tightened in all the GCC countries, by the way.
There's a new law in the United Arab Emirates.
If you criticize Sheikh Nayef on the whole line, you can go to jail and rot in jail forever.
The GCC and Turkey, they clinched a military deal two or three days ago, in fact.
So, their military collaboration against any ramifications of the Arab Spring, not to mention their military collaboration against Syria.
Now, it's even tightened.
They had an agreement before.
Wait, wait, wait.
Hold on.
Hold on now, Pepe.
You need to explain.
GCC, that means America's sock puppet dictatorships of the Arabian Peninsula, basically, correct?
Yes.
This is what I call the Gulf Counter-Revolutionary Club, also known as GCC, Gulf Cooperation Council.
These are the Persian Gulf monarchies.
All of them are supported by the West, and especially by the U.S.
The U.S. has bases in most of these petromonarchies.
The West buys oil from them.
And it's very interesting.
When you compare this situation nowadays with that latest International Energy Agency report that came out three days ago, more or less, saying that in ten years, the U.S. is going to be self-sufficient in energy if the U.S. goes green, of course.
So the immediate consequence of if this really happens, the U.S. will have all the elements in place to get rid, for good, of the House of Saud and the Gulf Petromonarchy.
So, you know, probably China is going to take over and buy all the oil and gas that the Chinese can from these countries.
But for the U.S., it's over.
You know, Persian Gulf, forget it.
The only reason, economic reason, and it's not even an economic reason anymore for the U.S. to be in the Persian Gulf is because of the oil, much more than the gas, in fact.
In ten years, they should be gone.
So, you know, the U.S. is not only self-sufficient, but it could be buying the surplus that it needs from Canada or even from Venezuela or from Brazil.
So what's the point in ten years to be in the Persian Gulf?
You should start now the retreat, the U.S. retreat from the Persian Gulf and to have deals with these absolutely nasty governments, which one day or another will fall because of their own populations like we've been seeing in Bahrain for two years now.
And it's going to happen in Saudi Arabia sooner or later with insurrection in the eastern provinces.
And it will happen in the United Arab Emirates eventually as well.
So, you know, leave them to their own devices and to their own autocratic barbarism, in fact, you know.
Right.
Well, you know, it's interesting that just today, this morning on CNN International, they had some global oil billionaire, you know, CEO guy on there explaining when they were talking about just this, about, you know, American self-sufficiency in oil.
And, you know, we got Venezuela and West Africa to pick up any slack and whatever and how we don't even need them.
And he was explaining.
And with no irony whatsoever, he was just, you know, saying, well, this is what it's all about is access.
That's it.
It's about the oil arteries of the world.
And America needs to control them because, as he put it, and it was interesting the way he put it, because China doesn't have the ability to.
And these other countries, you know, India and the European countries that rely on Gulf oil.
Well, they don't have the ability to secure all the sea lanes the way America does.
So America needs to do it for them.
So, in other words, even though, you know, the the imperial military strategy is dominate all these oil arteries so that in a pinch we can cut the Chinese off, that kind of thing, and dominate the world's, you know, full spectrum, this and that.
In the meantime, what are we doing?
We're spending all our money securing oil resources for China.
That's all.
Instead of making them pay their own damn way in the world.
Exactly.
And even if the imperial strategy is to try to prevent Asian powers, especially China and India, access to these sources of energy in the Middle East and in Central Asia, it's not working.
We just need to look at the record.
China has been doing deals with the Central Asian countries directly, which is something that didn't even happen in the beginning, in the Bush administration number one, in fact, 10 years, over 10 years ago.
Russia is doing deals with the Central Asia, with China directly, and it's closing in on Europe more and more, even with all those alternative visionary American-backed pipelines and gas pipelines that will never be built, like Nabucco, for instance, or like the TAPI pipeline in Afghanistan.
Everybody knows that they are not politically or economically feasible because they are either in war zones or because the Russians are always better opportunities, better targeting, better management, in fact, in trying to deal with government by government, like Putin dealing directly with Berlusconi, for instance, for one of those pipelines to Europe.
So instead of bypassing Russia and bypassing Iran, which has been the official U.S. policy since the first Clinton administration, in fact, the U.S. has been losing terrain all over, in the Middle East and in Central Asia.
The Chinese, they are already doing their deals directly with the Gulf Petro-monarchies.
Soon they're going to have a string of refineries in the Persian Gulf, starting with the Emirates as well.
They're building their own refinery in Saudi Arabia as well.
So, okay, let the Chinese have all the oil and gas from the Middle East that they have.
The U.S. won't need it soon.
If it goes green, if it goes shale gas, if it starts buying more from the Americas, like in Canada, Venezuela, or Brazil instead of the Middle East, so the dependency of the U.S. on Middle Eastern oil, it's over.
In a few years it will be completely over, so the geopolitical map could be completely realigned.
And, in fact, in terms of internal growth for the U.S., this is a much better deal, not to mention the money that's going to be saved in terms of military deployments in the Middle East.
The Chinese also know this, so they're playing the long game here.
They know, okay, sooner or later we're going to have more access to the Middle Eastern oil because the Americas, sooner or later they will realize that it's not a good deal for them anymore.
The problem is, what is the military-industrial establishment going to do about this in Washington?
This is the wild card.
We really don't know.
Anyway, so let's talk more about what's going on in Syria, and particularly I'm very interested in Israel's position, Israel meaning Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet, their position on Syria, because it seems to me like their long-term strategy, the Likud strategy, I thought was, hey, regime change in Syria.
But then again, they would have to be absolutely crazy to think that they would prefer the guys who are fighting the civil war on the rebel side now being empowered to the status quo.
They would have to be crazy.
But then again, maybe they are crazy.
But then again, they sure don't seem to be making much hay about, oh yeah, we just can't wait to see Assad fall, although there's been a little bit of that.
But then again, if the Israelis weren't for it, would Obama and the United States really be pushing so hard for regime change?
They must be to some degree, but I don't know.
You tell me.
Look, nobody knows because they are not saying.
And they themselves don't, the Likud mix, they don't know what they want for Syria.
What they want, basically, I think we discussed this before, is the status quo, an extremely weak Syrian central government convulsed by a civil war that is now engulfing at least half of the country and even on and off reaching the big cities.
Well, it already reached most of Aleppo, in fact.
It's being kept out of Damascus, at least for the moment.
So this means that Syrians cannot do anything in military terms or even in political terms.
So it's good for Israel in terms of preserving the status quo.
And they can even use these skirmishes that are near the border in the Golan Heights to start re-bombing the other side of the border where they have Syrian positions.
So for Israel, for the moment, the status quo is perfect.
The players who really want a change, a regime change, apart from the U.S., Britain, and France, are Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey.
All of them for different reasons.
This is something that I think all of your guests, as well as myself, we have been talking about this for over a year now.
A Muslim Brotherhood-dominated government in the case of Qatar, a really hardcore Sunni Wahhabi-style government in the case of Saudi Arabia, and some sort of moderated regime from the point of view of Turkey, so Turkey can export to the rest of the Arab world.
Look, Syria is also buying our political model.
Look, they are copying us.
So you should all copy our model.
We are the political model for the future of the Middle East.
So three completely different agendas.
And the Israeli agenda, they are not even thinking in terms of regime change because they don't know what could happen next.
They don't like any of these possibilities.
Except perhaps a Turkey-style relatively moderate government, which is not going to happen.
In fact, this new Syrian council, which I finally found the official name of this guy.
It's called Syrian National Coalition for Opposition and Revolutionary Forces.
That's the new official name of the new Syrian opposition.
They are trying to project an image of being moderate.
In fact, they elected a guy called Moaz al-Khatib as the new leader.
It's very interesting.
This guy was the former imam of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus.
That was one of the seats of Islam for centuries, apart from being one of the most beautiful mosques in the world.
It's relatively moderate when you compare it to Al-Azhar in Cairo.
It's relatively moderate.
This guy was the imam until a while ago.
He was in prison.
He left Syria in July.
So he was elected because he is projecting the idea that he is a Syrian who was in Syria, and he was there from the beginning of the uprising, so he knows the situation inside.
He is a moderate.
He is religious, but he has an outreach to all the different ethnic components of Syria, so he could be the ideal interlocutor between the opposition and the West.
This is what we're going to see in this donors conference Friday in London.
The idea is that the U.S., Britain, and France, they found out that doing business with that Syrian National Council, which was a bunch of opportunists and exiles and basically crooks, in fact, had been in Paris for a year.
All right, y'all, welcome back.
I got Pepe on the phone.
I wish you guys at the National Security Agency would back off.
My man is talking about your corrupt al-Qaeda suicide bomber sock puppets in Syria.
Oh, and their exile council of people, very caring people working for the free future of Syria.
Let's go ahead there.
Scott, the line is absolutely horrible, so I assume you are telling me to just finish what I was talking about Benghazi.
Is that right?
That's right!
Go ahead!
Okay, look, so what it looks like increasingly, what was going on really in Benghazi, this was not a consulate.
This was not under the jurisdiction of the State Department.
This was a CIA safe house, black ops house, in fact.
This was under direct control of our friend David Skyfall, James Bond portrayals, in fact.
What were they doing in Benghazi?
First of all, there was the possibility that has to be fully reported and investigated that Stevens was more or less involved in the running of or smuggling of weapons and fighters from Libya to Syria.
This still has to be investigated, but it's a very strong possibility.
On top of it, in this safe house, a black ops house, some Libyan prisoners were being held, perhaps not directed by the CIA because they are not authorized anymore to do that kind of stuff, but by contractors who are sort of interrogating Dick Cheney style two or three, perhaps three Libyan fighters that were apprehended after the attack on the consulate.
It's absolutely crazy because last month, October 26, at the University of Denver, Paula Broadwell said that to her audience, straight away, casually, in fact.
So a lot of people were assuming that she had inside information that she got directly from portrayals.
But apparently, the same day or the day before, there was a Fox News report that was saying exactly the same thing.
There were actually three Libyan prisoners at the consulate, and this could have been a reason for the attack on the consulate.
Certainly, we all know by now that this had nothing to do with the Prophet Muhammad video, which was, by the way, what the CIA was telling the White House at the moment.
That's why Susan Rice repeatedly said that it was the Prophet Muhammad video.
So now we are learning more and more about the case.
It gets murkier by the minute, and the only way would be for David Petro to go to Congress and explain to Congress and to world public opinion what really happened.
I'm not sure this is going to happen, at least for the moment.
It's very unlikely.
Hey, Pepe, on that one point, I read one thing, and I didn't go back and watch the whole speech myself, but I read one thing that said that she referred to that Fox piece earlier in the speech.
So it seemed like the Fox piece was the origin of her information that that happened.
So still, what we have is just a Fox News said something, not like, you know, I don't know.
And actually, I know somebody who knows somebody who says that, no, really, there weren't CIA prisoners there.
But, you know, I don't know.
That's all I can say about that.
Exactly.
So it would be great to know where did Fox News get this info?
Directly from somebody in Benghazi?
Directly via a CIA contact who wasn't in contact with the CIA guys in Benghazi?
It's possible.
Or they were probably fabricating this.
We don't know.
We cannot trust Fox News, right?
Yeah, exactly.
And in fact, I saw a thing.
I thought they were confirming her, right?
They had another piece saying, well, Fox News has a source that says this.
And so it seemed like they were confirming her, but then it turned out that they were her source in the first place.
Or at least most likely they were her source in the first place.
So typical Republican nonsense, maybe.
I don't know.
Maybe not.
I didn't hear the last part.
I'm sorry.
Man, this sucks.
I'm calling you back again because I'm not through with you yet.
Apparently you are in Somalia and I am in the South Pacific, so there's no communication.
I'm not giving up, man, because Winston Churchill said never give up.
So hang on.
Ben Franklin said those who are willing to sacrifice essential liberty for a little temporary safety deserve neither.
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