07/10/13 – Pepe Escobar – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
It's the Scott Horton Show.
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All right.
First guest up today is the great Pepe Escobar from the Asia Times.
That's atimes.com.
His latest piece is Cutter's love affair with Syria.
Welcome back to the show, Pepe.
How the hell are you?
Hey, man.
How are you doing?
Greetings from Hong Kong.
In Hong Kong again.
Okay, very good.
Good to talk to you.
I hope everything's good there.
Yes.
I got a guest here.
His name is Edward.
Oh, y'all been hanging out, huh?
Exactly.
We're hitting the nightlife in one try.
All right, so let's talk about the war in Syria before we get to Cutter, and who all's back and who and all this deep politics stuff.
First of all, let's just talk about the state of the war as it exists now.
Two years ago, well, maybe one year ago, we had a conversation that was along the lines of, yeah, but the government already took back Homs, and so haven't the rebels already lost?
And then I guess the rebels took Homs back from the government since then, but now the government has taken Homs back again.
Is that right?
Yes, absolutely.
And they are going towards Aleppo.
This is a battle of Aleppo that has been brewing for a while now.
It's going to take a while, because these are two or three suburbs of Aleppo.
But since what happened in Qusayr, when they took Qusayr back from the rebels about three weeks ago, almost four weeks ago, it's been steady.
We don't know what's going to happen on the ground from now on, because you have to see what's going on in Qatar at the moment.
It's completely crazy.
Virtually from one day to another, they are losing on all fronts.
We know what's happening in Egypt, right?
The emir, he wrote, like, $12 billion or $13 billion in checks to the Egyptians for the past year or so for nothing.
They lost the Muslim Brotherhood in power in Egypt.
Their betting on the Muslim Brotherhood taking power in Syria is shaky, to say the least, at the moment.
We have the new boy emir, which, depending on who you talk to in the Middle East, people will tell you, look, you know what really happened?
There was so much pressure from the House of Saud that the emir had to resign.
And the boy emir, who's very close to some very important intelligence figures in the House of Saud, now is in charge.
So this means that Saudi Arabia is taking over everything all over again, not to mention, in terms of media, that al-Jazeera is going down the drain fast.
So we already have 90% of Arab media controlled by the Saudis.
Soon we're going to have the whole thing, as it was until al-Jazeera was founded, right?
So when you translate this on the ground in Syria, most of the weaponizing of these different strands of the unfree Syria army, gang, mercenary, racket, whatever, Friends of Hillary, Friends of Obama, whatever you want to call them, went through Qatar.
The money came from Qatar.
They had special, they still have, I still assume they are still on the ground, special forces on the ground training some of these militias.
What's going to happen now?
Is the boy emir going to back down and concentrate on what's going on inside Qatar, some sort of, you know, Gulf-style liberalizing in the long run, more investment, in fact, more investment in Europe, because the former prime minister, the guy who has the Qatar investment authority, is going to live in London from now on, and he'll keep on buying half of Europe, as they were been doing for the past few, three or four years, right?
So maybe if we have Qatar pulling back a little from Syria, who is going to be on the forefront once again?
Saudi Arabia.
In Saudi Arabia, they are arming the Salafists, which are even more hardcore than some of the militias of the Free Syrian Army.
And of course, the Salafists have a very good connection with our jihadi friends, the Al-Nusra Front.
So this is what's going to be playing out in the next few weeks, roughly, Scott.
So I think we are in a transition phase at the moment.
All right.
So now here's the thing, just to kind of recap and make sure I understand it.
You're saying that, well, I guess where the Saudis have been backing the Al-Nusra guys, the Qataris have been backing the Muslim Brotherhood, just like they've been backing them in Egypt.
But this was pissing off the Saudis so much that they decided, they put so much pressure on Qatar that Al-Thani, the despot, I don't know if he called himself a sultan or emir or king or what, he had to step down.
Emir.
Emir.
There you go.
What a great name for a despot.
Call me Emir.
Anyway, so, and then, well, or sultan.
I think that's probably the coolest one.
I'd want to be a sultan as long as I'm lording it over people with a big curved sword.
Oh, you want to be an Erdogan character, Scott.
I'd have a really funny hat too.
Anyway, so now, so the Saudis get rid of him because they don't want the Muslim Brotherhood.
They want the al-Nusra guys.
And so now that their son is in charge, it doesn't sound like you're saying it's really going to be probably a decrease in support, just a change in who gets supported.
Now it's going to be the worst of the worst, even more than before.
But if I understood right, the Muslim Brotherhood wasn't getting much done in the Syrian war anyway.
It's been the al-Nusra guys mostly the whole time.
Absolutely.
First of all, because the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, they don't have fighting forces.
The fighting forces are like, we talked about this a lot, these Iraqi commanders that were back and forth in the desert with battle experience against the Americans, of course, mercenaries from all over.
Yeah, yeah, sure.
And this enormous collection of mercenaries from, apparently they come from 60 different countries, this collection of Islamists, Allah, Afghan jihad in the 1980s.
But the numbers, we still don't have a precise number.
A lot of people talk about 5,000 to 6,000.
Other sources tell us, look, it's probably around 10,000.
It's still not much compared to the standard Syrian Arab army, Bashar al-Assad's forces.
They may have on the ground at the moment at least 100,000, 120,000 heavily armed tanks, you know, aircraft, you name it.
So obviously this small band of mercenaries, guerrillas, whatever, they will never win that war in Syria, especially because that's something we talked about a lot as well.
They don't have the support of the big cities.
I'm not even talking about Damascus and Aleppo where they don't have support, but even intermediate cities, mid-sized cities in Syria, they saw what these guys were doing, especially in Aleppo when they took over parts of Aleppo, and they don't want that.
Of course, nowadays it's crazy.
Everybody in Syria, especially the working middle class, they know they are caught in a crossfire.
They are absolutely fed up and horrified by the war.
They want this thing to end.
They want a political solution.
They know that the outside actors don't want that, America, Britain, France, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar.
They started to support even more the Russian position because it's incredible.
But Putin's the only one that's been talking, let's sit down and work out a political solution.
And now they're starting to be afraid of what the Saudis, which now are let loose and very emboldened by their success in Egypt, where they practically bought a new government for Egypt.
And what are they going to do with their lots of money going to Egypt?
Lots of money will go probably to fighting forces in Syria from now on, especially from the Saudis.
And now that, you know, the friends of Hillary, friends of Obama, Syria National Council, and all that, you know that now they had the third guy in three or four months that resigned as a leader.
You know, as soon as they get appointed, they stay there for, I don't know, two or three weeks and then they resign because it's absolutely impossible.
They're not leading anything.
They are leading a motley crew of opportunists, people who are there for the money because they're being, obviously, they're getting paid by the Qataris, they're getting paid by the Saudis, even by the Turks.
So and this does not translate in anything viable.
Politically forget it.
And even militarily, especially after the past, what, six, seven weeks with the government offensive.
And just to finish this point, Scott, I was reading something extraordinary.
What Putin told the leaders at the G8 in Northern Ireland, this was not reported in US at all, but a diplomat starts circulating the full speech by Putin on the table, addressing each of the participants directly, Obama, David Cameron, Hollande, and all that.
And he scolded them and said, you, are you absolutely crazy, talking to Obama directly?
You went to Afghanistan to fight al-Qaida and now you're fighting with al-Qaida in Syria.
You want these people to take over the government against Assad?
And then he talked directly to Cameron and Hollande.
And the best thing, the clinch is, at the end, Angela Merkel corroborated every single word that Putin said.
She said, there's no fucking way we're going to have this weaponizing of the so-called rebels in Syria.
Germany is going to fight against it to the last minute.
We want a political solution just like the Russians want.
Otherwise, we're going to have jihadists at our doors inside the European Union in no time.
It's absolutely obvious, right?
But try explaining this to the Obama administration.
Well, you know what?
Let me, let me ask you about that.
I think this is such an important point and it's, you know, I just don't know what to make of it, Pepe.
I'm going to leave it to you.
I read a thing by Henry Kissinger saying, stay out of this stupid war.
This is horrible and crazy and stupid.
And the American policymakers who want to do this, I'm, I'm very roughly paraphrasing Kissinger, not very, I'm roughly paraphrasing.
This is his argument.
He's saying what Kissinger is saying is that the Americans are quite mistaken in their belief that this is the regime versus the people.
And what this really is, is a sectarian war between different religious factions and you know, well, sectarian faction, not that they're fighting over beliefs, but they're fighting over who's who anyway, right?
And and so, gee, America, you should, you should stop making your policy around your mistaken assumptions.
And I'm going, wait a minute, does Kissinger really believe that Obama really believes his own BS about what war they're even intervening in?
And if so, is Kissinger right that Obama really is, is basing a policy, at least on the PR, that this is the people versus the government rather than this is some Sunnis versus everybody else?
Look, very good point, Scott.
And in fact, Obama, because he doesn't know much about the Middle East, let's face it, he's no Kissinger.
Kissinger may be a Nogger, he may be a Medusa, he may be whatever you want to call him, but at least he knows how the Middle East works.
Obama has no clue.
So he depends on his advisers and his advisers depend on who, the Israeli lobby and the Saudi lobby in DC.
So that's what the Saudis have been telling these advisers for over two years now.
It is a dictator against its people, and we are supporting the people.
If you look at what Saudi Arabia did in terms of international relations this past few years, if you trust them, you're an absolute idiot, right?
But the decision makers in DC are buying this bullshit.
This is what is so worrying.
They in fact not only bought this from the Saudis directly, as they started to incite a Sunni-Shiite divide all across the Middle East, and now it's all over the place.
It started in Syria, but the cancer spread all over the Middle East, in fact.
Now we are having a Sunni-Shiite war in all parts of the Middle East.
It's not happening, I would say, hopefully, it's not happening in Afghanistan, Pakistan.
So it's still basically localized in the Middle East.
Even in Turkey, it's also happening in Turkey.
It's not happening in Iran for obvious reasons.
Iran is 85, 90% Shiite, right?
In Iraq, it's already all over the place.
In Lebanon, like, you know, what, 48 hours ago, we had this bomb, a car bomb in southern Beirut, exploded in southern Beirut.
This was obviously planted by one of these hardcore, unfree Syrian army gangs.
There's no question.
That's the only thing that they know how to do nowadays, because they cannot, with a single battle, they are resorting to those al-Qaeda in Iraq tactics, which is what?
Car bombs and suicide bombers, essentially.
And now, true, it has already spread out to Beirut.
It's horrible.
I'm sure we're going to have more of this, unfortunately.
But it's completely crazy.
It is a self-fulfilling, lethal prophecy, this Sunni-Shiite divide.
It started in Syria.
It's all over the place.
The Saudis and the Qataris, they were inciting this thing from day one.
The Obama administration, they bought this bullshit.
And now, you know, it's unraveling all over, and nobody can control it anymore.
Yeah, well, and you know, we should stick to substantive points here, but I guess this is one's kind of, which is, I saw George Bush on TV the other day, and he's just perfectly happy-go-lucky about all this.
He has no idea.
No one has ever, you know, waterboarded him, tied him down like clockwork orange, and made him witness that this is what you did, dude.
You destabilized every single country in the region.
And when little children are dying, screaming for their mothers, burning, it's because of you, jerk.
Nobody ever, ever, ever has held him to even a minute's account.
Like, make him admit that, okay, yes, it is my war in Iraq, my personal, individual decision to invade Iraq that ruined everything.
And in fact, all of these people should be in Guantanamo.
Are they?
Or worse?
They should be under- Dick Cheney should be, you know, people should be force-feeding Dick Cheney every day in Guantanamo, twice a day, you know, and that would not be enough.
Everybody, everybody.
Obviously, they had no clue at the time.
It was still, oh, no, my dad had a problem with that.
He could never finish the job in Iraq, so it was up to me to finish it.
And others were at the Israeli lobby, we have to save Israel because Saddam has weapons of mass destruction.
You know, everybody had this motive.
Or Paul Wolfowitz, of course.
The war will be itself, and we're going to be the new OPEC.
Guess who's buying most of Iraq's oil nowadays?
China.
Everybody knows.
Even the New York Times was forced to put it on the front page a few weeks ago.
And our, you know, what we, the rest of the world, get from all this is this enormous volcano over there, and it's exploding in all directions, and nobody, and obviously Putin is extremely, Putin, he's never terrified of anything, but he's very, he's choosing his words very carefully because he knows how dangerous this thing is.
The Russians are always looking at the map and they say, these guys from Aleppo, from northern Syria, soon they're going to be here in the Caucasus.
It's 800 to 900 kilometers.
It's very, very close.
We don't have, mentally, we cannot understand this.
But for the Russians, this is happening near their borders, in fact.
And they simply don't want any jihadists with jihadist ideas in the Caucasus.
Again, they think that they more or less control the jihad in the Caucasus.
So what happened at this group of eight meeting, that was three weeks ago, in fact, it's completely crazy because you have to rely on a diplomat to leak what actually happened inside.
And you have one guy telling the truth to the others, and at least Merkel, well, she's not a fool.
She knows what the consequences will be, if not immediately, but starting next year or the next two or three years.
All these jihadists, when the job is done in Syria, they will spread out and soon they will be attacking the West again, if they have the chance, right?
It's so obvious.
I'll say a fourth grader will get that.
OK, now, well, so this goes back to Kissinger's point about how stupid Barack Obama is.
I just had a guest on yesterday or two days ago, Ben Swan, a local TV news reporter who asked Obama to his face, hey, how come you're backing Al-Qaeda in Syria so much, jerk?
And Obama, I'm paraphrasing, and Obama stuttered and stumbled for about 45 seconds, basically saying, and Hillary Clinton said the same thing a year ago last March.
So what, 15 months ago now or whatever?
And they've talked like this all along.
And McCain now, in fact, concedes this, too, that there are wrong hands among the rebels.
And we're afraid to give real effective weapons to people who are, after all, at least allied with suicide bombers and prisoner beheaders, right?
Look, if we take them at their word that they want to marginalize al-Nusra and arm up more moderate rebel factions or whatever, they're still afraid that al-Nusra is getting all the best money and weapons anyway.
And what could be, what could happen?
So they're not completely ignorant about what it is that they're doing.
But they just keep doing it anyway.
They keep doing it anyway.
And when you have this channeling of weapons in a war, that's what it is in Syria.
It's not a clean cut operation.
So you have, let's say, the Qataris buy something from Croatia.
They have a cargo landing in a strip somewhere in the middle of the desert.
So the CIA say, oh, these are the good rebels.
They can get the weapon.
Soon, three or four days later, these weapons will be in the hands of the guys who know how to use these weapons.
And the guys who know are, of course, the hardcore Salafi jihad.
Everybody knows that.
Everybody knows that.
So they will end up with the weapons.
It's not, it's much extremely different from the Afghan jihad in the 80s, where most of the Mujahideen were a more or less cohesive force.
There were six or seven different Mujahideen groups in Afghanistan in the 80s.
But they were all doing the same thing and they all had the same combat experience.
And OK, some were getting more weapons than others, but it was more or less homogeneous.
In Syria, it's an absolute mess.
There's no control over these militias.
People don't even know which militia is fighting where, how many people they have, where do they get their money and their weapons.
So this overlapping on the ground, you know, the attack dogs in the end, they will prevail.
And it's going to be, of course, the al-Nusra style people who are going to get these weapons anyway.
And can you imagine if they start doing this, if they're going to start attacking the civilian population, obviously, especially Damascus and Aleppo, which would be the only way to to to attack these militias that they would like.
But the collateral of them will be enormous.
But isn't it a little too late now, though, anyway, because, you know, like we started off the interview, they're already taking back homes.
They're going to Aleppo next.
This is the as you put it, two and a half years ago or two years ago, you said to me, hey, listen, if we start seeing a whole lot of high level defections from the military and we start seeing a lot of, you know, business class, Sunni Arabs switching sides to the rebellion, then the Baathists could lose.
But that hasn't happened this whole time.
And they're clearly not on their way marching to Damascus.
They've had you know, there have been battles in Damascus, but they're not they've never been anywhere close to really sacking Damascus and cutting Assad's head off or anything like that.
And so now Obama's panicking because Hezbollah got involved and helped the rebels.
I mean, help the government take back Qusayr, however you say that town.
But then but that was only Qusayr was a localized operation.
Right.
OK, so Obama panicked and said, now let's give him more guns, let's get more guns where.
But that's only going to be enough to keep him keep him going.
Not enough to help him win still.
Right.
Yes, absolutely.
And they're saying they're not even sending the guns that the guns are being held up even by Congress.
But I don't know if that's really true.
Well, this is this is what Congress is telling the U.S. media.
But you cannot trust neither Congress or U.S. corporate media.
So we really don't know on this one.
Yeah, I thought that's suspicious.
The Congress acting as a rain and a check on the president.
Of course, it's suspicious.
So, you know, I prefer to to wait for August.
Don't forget that they are.
Well, some people in the U.S. and some people in Saudi, some people in the Middle East, they were advertising this big push on Damascus in August.
So we have, what, three or four weeks before this thing starts.
Then we're going to see if a lot of weapons actually came via Turkey, especially with Qatari or Saudi money, who got these weapons and how they're going to use this.
But I don't think there's going to be any difference on the ground.
And by the way, does anybody still remember that there is a peace conference scheduled to happen?
What's supposed to be in June?
Now it's not going to be in July, maybe in August.
Kerry and Lavrov were organizing.
Nobody talks about the peace conference anymore.
Geneva 2.
I thought Geneva 2 is doomed.
Yeah, it's doomed as well.
And after the NSA scandal, I think Geneva 2 is absolutely doomed because it's so interconnected.
It depends a lot on what the Russians are going to do with Snowden.
This is the piece that I wrote, my last piece for Asia Times.
In fact, yesterday was about that.
I would say that the ball now is in Russia's court because the Venezuela offer was made officially.
Snowden already accepted.
So how is he going to arrive in Caracas?
The only way would be if the Russians organize it or at least facilitate it.
And Putin is trying to find a way, in my view at the moment, how to do this without angering the Americans even more.
This is a really, really complicated thing because he wants to keep the high ground because he already told Obama in his face, you're wrong in Syria and you're going down if you're going this route.
My way is the highway.
Yeah, political agreement.
But if he starts helping Snowden, then he complicates the whole scenario.
Well, and look, I mean, Assad has nothing to negotiate other than, yeah, you guys lay down and the rebels have nothing to negotiate because Obama's already promised them that Assad has to leave power.
And so there weren't maybe America and Russia might meet, but their their decisions aren't binding anyway.
That's the key to imagine the president of the United States telling another leader of a sovereign nation, you must go and then you don't back it up.
Yeah.
Yeah.
He's such a loser.
Obama.
I'm sorry.
We got to go, Pepe.
I love you.
Thanks for doing the show again.
Got to go ask for a time dot com.
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