03/29/13 – Pepe Escobar – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's the Scott Horton Show.
And next up is the great Pepe Escobar from the Asia Times.
That's atimes.com.
And, of course, he's the author of Obama Does Globalistan and other great books.
Welcome back, Pepe.
How the hell are you?
Wonderful.
Great to be with you.
Always, Scott.
Okay, great.
Well, I'm very happy that you're joining us.
And I think you said you're in Thailand where it's the middle of the night, right?
Yes, it's half past midnight now.
Okay.
It's early, actually.
For Thai standards, it's early.
There you go.
Well, so I owe you extra thanks for staying up late for us to do the show.
Yeah, no problem.
I appreciate it.
Okay, so you wrote a bunch of real smart stuff that I want to ask you about.
Lots and lots of different stuff.
First of all, you do such a great job.
And I really hope people will read what you write, because it's as fun to read what you write as it is to hear you talk to.
You're all the fans' favorite.
You wrote this thing about Iraq, what America did to Iraq, search and destroy the rape of Iraq.
Ten years on, looking back, what happened?
And you just hit on so many important points about the occupation.
Well, first, the invasion, the occupation, and the results of the thing.
I was just kind of hoping we got about, you know, almost half an hour.
I was hoping you could sort of give the audience the outline version of this article about what you see when you look back at this catastrophe.
Well, first of all, Scott, a lot of sadness and anger.
I was trying to relieve my emotions when I left Iraq in the spring of 2007.
I went there for the search.
I was there for the beginning of the search.
And when I left, it was one of the saddest days of my life, because, you know, I was there for a month.
I couldn't travel.
I couldn't go anywhere.
In the beginning, I could hop on a cab, for instance, in Baghdad and say, okay, take me to the Sunni triangle.
We stop in Gila, and then we have lunch in Fallujah.
And then we see what happens, and we come back, we stop in Ramadi, and we're back in Baghdad at the end of the night.
No way.
Even to go from one neighborhood to another in Baghdad was a war operation.
I was very fortunate to have two Shiite fixers with me.
One was a guy who knew everybody in the Madi army, in Sadr City, Muqtada's people.
And another one, an extraordinary woman, she was a Shiite journalist.
And I was glad to hear, you know, like a few days ago, that she's safe and sound.
She's associated with almost Ansari University now.
But at the time, she was fearing for her own life.
And she was driving me around Baghdad for me to meet virtually everybody at the time, at the ministries in Sadr City, staying in Sadr City, sleeping in Sadr City, hearing their stories, trying to go from Adhamia to downtown Baghdad, for instance, crossing from a Sunni neighborhood to a Shiite neighborhood, it was an absolute mess.
We were shot at, we were arrested, everything happened.
And when I left, my last image was horrible, because I was stranded at the airport for hours waiting for an Iraqi Airways flight, which at the time was a suicidal proposition.
And I was looking at the contractors coming and going, their private flights from Kuwait, from the Emirates and all that.
And I was there just like a stranded idiot from another planet in the lobby for hours waiting for a flight that maybe would never come.
And then when we left, the last thing I saw was an American commando going for a night patrol.
And I knew exactly where they were going.
Oh, these guys are going to Sadr City, there's no question.
Because in Sadr City, they would say, oh, they usually come here at 4 in the morning, 5 in the morning, you know, they go around houses, they strip our women, they kick our children, you name it.
And everywhere I went in Sadr City, which is a city of 3 million, in fact, next to Baghdad, everybody was telling me the same stories.
But they were also telling me, look, at least now we are masters of our own destiny.
That's the only good thing out of the destruction of Iraq.
But if you talk to the Sunnis in the same city, in another neighborhood, walled to death, they were saying, look, this is worse than what the Mongols did to us in the 13th century.
It's the total destruction of the country.
And if we're talking to professors at al-Mustafari University, they will tell you, look, this is even worse because it's the cultural destruction of Iraq as well.
In the beginning, nobody ever talked about Sunni and Shiite division.
Nobody would show you a religious card before starting any conversation.
There were mixed marriages all over Baghdad and even parts of central Iraq as well.
And then, because of the divide and rule official American policy, the only thing, the only way for the Americans to control two insurgencies at the same time.
First, the Sunni insurgency that started roughly nine, ten days after the fall of Baghdad in late April.
And the second insurgency, the Shiite insurgency commanded by Muqtada al-Sadr.
And there was that famous face-to-face in Najaf in 2004 when Ayatollah Sistani intervened.
And in fact, he stared down the Pentagon.
Ayatollah Sistani himself.
And the Pentagon knew, look, if we go after Muqtada's people inside the Iman Ali shrine in Najaf, we're going to have five million, ten million Shiites against us the same day.
So when you put all of this together in the same perspective, my impression was I was devastated.
It was one of the saddest experiences in my professional life.
Let me ask you something.
I'm sorry to interrupt you here, but let me ask you something.
I've talked at length about this with a lot of different guests.
It's kind of hard to figure out.
And I'm sure the truth is somewhere in the middle and this and that kind of thing.
Do you think, you sort of write in the article like, well, it was always the Biden plan and some others to just go ahead and break Iraq up.
And maybe that was really what the Israelis were anticipating in the Clean Break paper in the first place, is that they would just destroy Iraq, never mind who rules it.
Then on the other hand, it sort of seems like, you know, if they thought they were going to have their chalabi and they thought they were going to have their ruling councils and this and that, but then what really happened was Ayatollah Sistani and Muqtada al-Sadr together, basically, and maybe with the Supreme Islamic Council to a degree, right?
The Hakeem said, look, you don't want to start this war all over again against us.
And they were the ones who sat back and said, thanks for getting rid of Saddam for us.
But then they were going to be damned if they're going to let the Americans decide the shape of their new government.
And so they demanded one man, one vote.
They demanded that Shiite ruling, Shiite ruled groups became the ones in power.
And so at that point, the sectarian civil war was just in the cards.
The Americans didn't even really have a choice but to back the bottom brigades in that thing at that point, right?
Or just leave.
It's true, because the problem is that the Shiites as a whole, they got what they wanted from day one.
The problem is there were at least five very powerful Shiite factions fighting among themselves.
And in the end, the most powerful was the one who got in control of the whole repression and the death squads, which was the Badr Organization.
They were inside the Minister of Interior.
They were controlling everything.
And the Americans were the guys pepping.
And now, 10 years later, we start learning what, at the time, we already knew that the CIA was there helping them on the spot.
Everybody knew that in 2005, 2006.
Well, now, the Badr Corps, explain the Badr Corps.
Who were those guys the day before the invasion?
Exactly.
I remember an interview.
I don't know exactly.
I was talking to what would be the future head of the Supreme Islamic Council of Iraq.
But this was a few months after.
If I remember correctly, it was around August or September 2003.
And he told me that, no, there's no problem.
We have an armed wing, which is the Badr Organization, but we're not interested in controlling Iraq.
This is for defensive, persuasive purposes, because we know that the Sunnis are going to come after us.
And he was already talking about the triangle of death, Fallujah and Ramadi, especially in Anbar province.
So we need to fight them.
But this was in the beginning.
This was in 2003.
Later on, after the attack against the Samaritans, trying, the whole thing changed.
Because they interpreted this as, you know, Al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Sunni resistance, they are both allied against us.
Which is not true, because the agendas are completely different.
One was a nationalist agenda, the Sunni-Iraqi resistance.
And Al-Qaeda in Iraq, as we all know, especially commanded by Zarqawi, was that pan-Islamic caliphate driven by beheading people, basically.
Completely crazy.
But the way the Supreme Islamic Council of Iraq interpreted it, is that we have to fight them all, Sunnis in bulk.
This is when the ethnic cleansing in slow motion, especially in Baghdad, started.
That was mid-2006.
So when the surge started in the spring of 2007, it was already slow motion ethnic cleansing all over the place.
And by the end of 2007, the composition of Baghdad itself was completely altered.
It used to be roughly 60% Sunni.
And by that time it was 65-70% Shiite.
The Sunnis were expelled from Baghdad.
They had to go to the Sunni triangle.
Some had to go to Syria, in fact.
And it was absolutely crazy.
When I was in the Damascus waiting to get a visa to cross to Iraq, I used to go to the Iraqi embassy practically every day.
And there were dozens of thousands of people that were Sunni refugees.
They all had the same story.
They had been expelled from Baghdad and the surroundings.
And they knew they couldn't stay in Syria.
They were trying to get a visa to go to Sweden or to Canada.
So when the surge started in 2007, when the trails arrived, the slow motion ethnic cleansing was already practically finished.
So he only had to give a few extra suitcases full of cash to the Sunnis, especially in Anbar province, because the Sunnis had already realized that they had lost that battle.
So they were guarding themselves for the next battle, which would be to fight the Maliki government in Baghdad.
And this is what's happening now, with help from these Sunni Iraqi commanders that they do the back and forth between Iraq and Syria.
They are helping the hardcore Syrians against Bashar in Syria, but sooner or later they will be back to Iraq because they are going to fight the Maliki government in Baghdad.
The thing is, they really lost Baghdad, and they would need a whole new backing from somewhere to try to take it back from the now Iranian-backed and even still American-backed, according to some of the headlines, right?
CIA, at least, is still helping fight Al-Qaeda in Iraq, chasing them to Syria, where they're working for us.
Exactly.
Depending on where you are in the Middle East, they work for us or not.
They are freedom fighters or terrorists.
It would be hard as hell for them to take back Baghdad, wouldn't it?
I would say it's practically impossible.
By the way, the Green Zone nowadays is the Shiite-dominated Green Zone.
The Americans may leave, or even if they leave 5,000 behind, the Green Zone stays.
The barricades stay, the protection stays.
And it's controlled by Maliki's government, basically.
And the Sunnis, they don't even have influence in the highest levels of power anymore.
It's basically a few Kurds, and even the Kurds don't have that much influence because Talabani is ill, right?
So it's total Balkanization, in fact, when you look at it.
And on top of it, the big headline in Iraqi Kurdistan in the past few days is that they clinched a deal to sell their oil directly to Turkey, bypassing Baghdad.
And this is going to be a civil war between Erbil and Baghdad from now on.
Because they don't have a hydrocarbon law yet in Iraq.
The negotiations are very, very complicated.
And on top of it, we have a fact on the ground, which is this pipeline.
The Kurds are selling their oil directly to Turkey.
They are doing this equilibrium game of trying not to antagonize the Baghdadis at the same time.
It's impossible.
If you're dealing with Iraqi Kurdistan directly, it's a declaration of war against Maliki.
Yeah, well, and why are they doing that?
Because that's a pretty bad move.
Which Kurds' interest is it in to start a war with Baghdad?
They think that the Maliki government is on its last legs, So they think they can just win without a fight.
Yeah, but their evaluation is wrong.
It's not a question that Maliki is a scourge of Iran.
On the contrary, they have very, very good relations with Iran.
No matter who's in power in Iran.
Even after Ahmadinejad.
So the Iranians, if they see that there's problems for Al-Maliki, they're going to be even more influential in Baghdad.
And I mean also from a military point of view.
Just like they have been supporting militarily Bashar in Syria, they will support Maliki militarily.
If that's the case.
If there's some kind of a Sunni offensive or the Sunnis, the hardcore Sunnis in Iraq trying to replicate the situation in Syria, in Iraq.
Which is not out of the question.
Let's say for next year, for instance.
So are the Americans...
The Kurds think that if they sell their oil directly, they can be economically independent and de facto not even more a province of Iraq.
Practically an autonomous entity.
Practically a state.
This is really...
Once again, it's...
In fact, the Kurds always tell...
I have some Kurd friends.
I have some Kurd friends.
They're always telling me, look, we're very good at planning stuff and then shooting ourselves in the foot later on.
They should consider this more.
First establish a hydrocarbons law and then they can...
They share the spoils.
Because still, Baghdad, they get from these oil sales...
The Kurds cannot get 100%.
Baghdad still gets most of it.
And the Kurds...
According to the current law, they get less than 20%.
Is it Exxon making the deal with the Kurds here?
The separate deal?
Oh yeah, absolutely.
Is that just American foreign policy?
Is this...
The State Department's too clever by half?
The State Department was actually built on top of Standard Oil of New Jersey in the first place, right?
It is Exxon.
Oh yeah, of course, Scott.
They are directly involved.
They think that this is a way of undermining the centralized power of Baghdad.
But don't underestimate Maliki and don't underestimate his relations with the Iranians.
Definitely.
You mentioned in your article, at least, I forget if you just said it, but in your article you talk about how Muqtada al-Sadr, he doesn't really like Nouri al-Maliki that much, but he still supports him.
It was the Iranians that made that deal in the first place, right?
Exactly.
And the Sadrists are still very powerful.
And Muqtada is looking long term.
He knows he's the power broker.
In any election in Iraq, the power broker is Muqtada.
So he's counting on numbers.
He's looking long term.
No wonder, you know, his apprenticeship to his studying years in coma.
Very interesting.
He's starting to get a more long-term perspective compared to his earliest years in 2003-2004 when he was emerging, when he was deemed too impulsive, even by Shiites themselves in Iraq.
So Muqtada is very clever.
He's playing the long game completely.
And he knows that sooner or later he's going to have the Sadrists in power in Baghdad.
And not the Dawa party anymore.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's so ironic about that that Muqtada al-Sadr was among Shiite leaders.
He was the one most determined to limit the influence of the Iranians, sock puppets in the Supreme Islamic Council, who really wanted this more federal system.
He was the nationalist, as you said, when you referred to his uprising in the spring of 2004.
It was in conjunction with and in alliance with and they were sharing pickup trucks full of fighters for the tandem revolution going on in Fallujah.
And he wanted to make a nationalist deal, but he wanted to kick the Americans out too.
So they made him enemy number one and ended up accusing him of being the Iranian stooge when he was the least of them and chased him into Iran, where, as you say, he got this higher religious rank and more authority and more clarity about politics in the future and all of this stuff.
And now he's the most powerful guy.
He's more powerful than Sistani now, right?
You just spelled it all out in the last minute.
This is exactly what the Americans did.
They transformed Muqtada al-Sadr into the most important political religious figure in Iraq.
Period.
Well, anyway.
God dang.
Well, this is just kind of a footnote here about the Iraq war.
You cite I only ever had two footnotes Julian Borger and the spies who pushed for war in The Guardian and Robert Dreyfus, agents of influence in the nation.
But you cite a third source about the Israelis manufacturing intelligence and piping it through the Office of Special Plans and into the Vice President's office in the run-up to the Iraq war.
It was a study by an Israeli Go ahead.
What?
Do you know it?
Off the top of your head?
Oh my God.
Was this in the Iraq story?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I'm clicking on all the wrong things here, Pepe, as I'm bringing this up.
Crisis?
What crisis?
Okay, let's suggest to our listeners to read the Iraqi stories.
They should be there.
No, no, no.
This is so important.
I gotta say this in MP3 form.
I've been with the Iran, the Eurozone and all that shit in my mind so...
And on top of it, I'm reading a gigantic book on the history of the Islamic Revolution in Iran so my mind is drifting.
Is it?
This is the wrong Iraq article.
It's the one that begins with Netanyahu's op-ed, The Case for Toppling Saddam, which thanks for that link, too.
But hang on.
I'm gonna find this darn thing here because this is important.
I've only ever had two and really, Karen Katowski, she's like half a foot note here.
She can testify to the presence of Israeli military officers in the Pentagon going to Feith's office, but not who was passing papers to who necessarily.
But you named this guy who did this study Shlomo Brahm.
His study, An Intelligence Failure published by the Jaffe Center for Strategic Studies of Tel Aviv University, November 2003.
You know that I got this reference by an Israeli friend, in fact.
A progressive Israeli friend.
He sent me that connection.
I can't wait to read that.
Exactly.
It's always better to have resources if you...
You cannot read that online.
Oh, it is not online.
Yeah, I just Googled it.
If I remember well, it's a paper but it's not online.
That's the problem.
Yep, I can only actually find other people referencing it, but apparently it is not.
Exactly.
That's why I couldn't give you the...
I couldn't give the readers the link, you know.
Well, I wonder if Mr. Brahm has an email address.
Exactly.
Because I bet he typed it on a computer before he printed it out.
Alright.
Good news, man.
No, that's important.
Hey, that's very important.
And by the way, again, that was Borger, the Spies Who Push for War, and Dreyfus Agents of Influence, for people interested in that.
And Katowski, or Dreyfus, The Lie Factory, about Katowski seeing the Israelis in the Pentagon at Infight's office, etc.
But now, could you talk to us a bit about what you learned, and I'm sorry because I know it's really a Jonathan Cooke's thing that you reference here, but about the... finally because Obama was coming to town, they finally got their act together and created a new Netanyahu government coalition there and it has... it portends very important things.
Could you explain who it was it got allied with and what you think it means?
Look, Jonathan Cooke's article by the way, it's fantastic, was the best article I read at the time about the trip to Palestine.
But, very important, a development that started to surface a few hours, a few days afterwards.
It was the famous phone call that Obama made to Erdogan, and he put Erdogan on the phone with Netanyahu, and it was that formal apology.
You know what this means in the long run, right?
It means that Turkey and Israel are united in totally destabilizing Syria.
This I think is very, very crucial from now on.
And don't forget, Turkey is the eastern arm of NATO.
This means that this whole charade that we're seeing, a new seat in the Arab League for the Syrian opposition, the new guy was invented by Washington and Doha.
He resigns, but the next day he goes to the Arab League and speaks on behalf of the opposition.
David Cameron and Francois Hollande, they're trying to convince all the other NATO members that they should bypass not only NATO, not only the United Nations Security Council, but NATO itself, and go their own way to weaponize the so-called rebels, who are even trying to impose a no-fly zone over Syria.
And who's going to be supporting all these people?
Turkey and Israel.
And now they're working together again.
I think this is the thing to watch for the next few weeks and months.
What the hell they think is going to happen after the Baathist government there falls?
The people who've been fighting the thing...
But that's exactly the point.
Just like in 2003 they thought that they would have a coalition provisional authority and after the cakewalk they would spend only $60 billion and Iraq will be resurgent as a super-democracy in the Middle East.
They have no clue what's going to happen after Syria.
What everybody really knows is that it's not going to be a Western-style democracy.
It will dominate it, not by moderate Sunnis, but by the most extreme factions of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood which is much more radical than the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.
And on top of it you're going to have fully weaponized Salafi jihadists roaming everywhere inside Syria.
So how can someone with an IQ of 25 in the State Department and the CIA and the Pentagon cannot see what's brewing?
Because the plan, in my opinion, the only possible rational explanation for all this is that the plan is to leave things as they are.
This means the slow-motion destruction of Syria.
Could be for another year, could be for another two, but meanwhile Syria as a country and the social fabric of the country is completely destroyed just like it was in Iraq 10 years ago, which is good for Israel, it's good for Turkey later on because they can pick up the pieces and even some parts of Syrian territory don't forget that they have huge border disputes still Turkey and Syria and Qatar of course, they can keep on feeding all the strands of the Muslim Brotherhood and sooner or later they could have an Islamic Emirate of Syriastan financed by the Emir of Qatar in person.
That's the only possible explanation for all this.
It makes sense why I guess the Saudis and the Qataris they want to expand their influence well they have a gigantic Iraq to serve as a buffer zone between them and the blowback from this thing too, geographically speaking but I don't understand, ok I can understand why David Wilmser would write the Clean Break and he would hand it to Benjamin Netanyahu and he would say, listen, if we take out Saddam Hussein and if we take out the Assad regime, the Baathists in Syria too and that will help weaken Hezbollah and then we can all have a picnic and everything will be fine but then, there's been a lot of reality since they started implementing this damn thing and at this point you're dealing with the actual Syria not just the shape on the map in David Wilmser's imagination but the situation as they're dealing with it right now how can they look at that and think more of the same is a benefit to Israel's security I mean to whatever degree it weakens Hezbollah Hezbollah is just fine without Syria anyway, Hezbollah has support in southern Lebanon among the people there Exactly!
You just need to go to southern Lebanon to see Hezbollah support.
Well they were the only ones who defended Lebanon when Israel invaded in 06 But you know, to answer your question Scott, in fact it's because it's all of the same all the time, when you think about it look at their relations with Russia Washington's relations with Russia Cold War.
So when Putin said that they're still thinking Cold War it's because they still do Look at their reaction to the BRIC summit this week in South Africa The only thing that came out of Washington is this is a bunch of upstarts they want to start their own bank they want a seat at the table with us and the masters of the universe but they can't at the moment so they're starting their own thing it's not going to work, it's not going to last it's still the Atlantic the Atlanticist mentality against the global south it's still Cold War in terms of Russia, it's still looking at China in antagonistic terms and it's still trying to replicate all the mistakes that they made in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq all over again, applied to Libya applied to Syria and obviously the all cowards go to Tehran syndrome so if we eliminate Syria from the picture we're halfway to landing Tehran How stupid can you get?
Right?
Well it's three times the size of Iraq four times the population and it's all mountains instead of flat desert, seems doable Exactly with only a small force of 10,000 maybe Yeah, yeah, exactly they have no support over there was parachuted like 5,000 guys in with Ahmed Chalabi and they'll just change the regime right away That was actually a plan that was actually what the neocons floated This IT guy from Texas for Syria Yeah, yeah, exactly Oh man, well he's a computer programmer he really knows his stuff Okay, thanks I love talking with you Pepe, I appreciate your time on the show as always Always a pleasure, Scott Let's do it soon again Alright, see you around Alright, that's Pepe Escobar everybody, Globetrotting reporter for the Asia Times at atimes.com find the best of Pepe Escobar at atimes.com and that's it for the show see y'all tonight on KPFK 637 KPFK in LA 90.7 FM and or Monday back here Hey everybody, Scott Horton here You ought to consider advertising on the show Here's how it'll work You give me money, and then I'll tell everybody how great your stuff is They'll buy it and we'll all be rich as Republicans Sound pretty good?
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