All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
Our first guest on the show today is the great Pepe Escobar.
He writes for the Asia Times.
But you know, I put his name in Google this morning and I remembered, I realized, I was reminded somehow that, well, with my eyes, I was reminded.
He writes for the Huffington Post and Alternet and Al Jazeera and The Nation, too.
In fact, they use what I write.
I don't particularly write for them.
Oh, no.
They just, yeah, they just copy-paste, huh?
Well, you know what's funny?
I Googled your name and Asia Times is way down at the bottom.
I was like, where the hell is this Asia Times archive?
Instead Alternet comes up first, huh?
Yeah, because, yes, but most of our readers are in the U.S. anyway, Asia Times.
Right.
Sixty percent of our readers are in the U.S.
Oh, is that so?
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
It's incredible.
I wish that was, you know, some large actual number of people in raw numbers, but how many people is that?
Our numbers are actually pretty good because we use two different servers.
We have basically 150,000, 200,000 unique hits a day.
It gets to 350,000 unique hits a day when there is a breaking story sometimes.
So the numbers are pretty good.
We are a small operation.
People think that we are this enormous Chinese multinational.
That's not the case.
Well, I guess, you know, what I really want is the population of, you know, the white part of Washington, D.C.
I want them to read it.
But, of course, all they would learn is how wrong they are about everything all day and they don't want to do that.
Oh, that's complicated because we know that the State Department reads this.
We know that a lot of people in Washington read this, but obviously they hate it.
Yeah, they're just keeping tabs on their enemies.
They're not trying to learn anything.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
We gave up on that completely.
Education?
You gave up on education?
That makes sense.
I would have to.
And in China, you know that our site is blocked in mainland China?
Really?
Yeah.
Well, I'm not surprised about that.
Yeah, it's not surprising because we are based in Hong Kong and we have some Cantonese reporters and editors working for us.
So they view this as a very suspicious, subversive outfit, you know?
Well, I have the feeling they won't ever have to block in America because they just figure, I mean, even with your hundreds of thousands of readers out of 300 million, it's just not enough Americans care enough to, you know, collect and collate the data at your website and make use of it, doing anything to change anything around here.
And I guess I'm really just, I'm so pessimistic because the wars aren't a topic in this election.
All Mitt Romney can do is try to attack Obama for not killing people enough, but he kills so many people that that's really not sticking.
And so they're just not even talking about the war at all.
It's just nobody.
And as long as they're not talking about it, it's just not a topic of politics in America.
It's unbelievable.
The Iraq war and the Afghanistan war, they totally disappeared from the discussion.
It's, you know, for the past few days, it's only rape, which is completely crazy.
You know, Americans going down the drain in all sorts of aspects, financially, economically, politically, morally, and everybody talks about rape.
It's completely nuts, you know?
Now, as long as you said completely nuts, that's a great subway into our Syria and Iran policy.
And I want to talk with you about that.
Now, here's my thing.
I suspect that a lot of what is moving America to support the rebels in Syria, this not so kind of sort of slow motion regime change via civil war that they're pushing there, it seems like that must be all about the Israel lobby, because who else in America really wants intervention in Syria?
I mean, you can get liberal interventionist internationalist types on board with bogus humanitarian arguments.
That's not a problem.
But that's not the motivation here.
So at the same time, it seems like Benjamin Netanyahu, for the most part, is keeping his government pretty quiet on the issue and trying to make it seem like they're not so sure that this is a good idea.
Then again, the president told Jeffrey Goldberg that, oh, yeah, this is all about weakening Iran.
And, of course, weakening Iran is all about Israel here in America.
So I just wonder, you know, what role do you think the Netanyahu government is playing in the regime change in Syria in terms of pressure in Washington for or against, in terms of actual intervention by way of their military and or intelligence sources, whether they really are kind of nervous or of two minds about it or whether this is just the clean break strategy, expediting the chaotic collapse and tearing the Arab world apart so that Israel can be relatively stronger?
Well, look, it's extremely complicated, Scott.
I'll try to give you the overall picture, basically.
The Bibi Barak duo, the warmongers, in fact, their strategy is greater Israel.
A country with no borders, the only nuclear power in the Middle East, eternally expanding and always strong, playing divide and rule.
As long as the Arabs are fighting among themselves, this is good for Israel.
And this is exactly what's happening as we speak, because they managed to turn the whole narrative that started as the Arab Spring became, I would say, more like an Arab winter in Libya.
And in Bahrain as well, because the Arab Spring in Bahrain was not even allowed to happen.
And now with Syria, the narrative now is Sunnis against Shiites.
And this was basically sold to the U.S. and to international public opinion, at least people who want to buy it, by the Israeli government, of course, aided by the GCC government, the Petro monarchies, and especially Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
Saudi Arabia and Qatar, they have very different agendas, but they converge with Israel in, okay, let's try to eliminate Shiite Iran from the regional geopolitical picture, which is absolutely impossible, because there are sizable Shiite minorities in most of these countries.
There is a majority, for instance, in Bahrain itself.
There is a majority in Iraq itself.
We can say that there is a majority in Lebanon, because almost 60 percent of the Lebanese population nowadays is Shiite as well.
So it is a power play between what many people define as the axis of resistance.
I don't particularly buy that.
But anyway, let's go for it.
Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Hezbollah.
In fact, it's a different axis with a different geopolitical center, which is independent foreign policies, independent from the West and from, especially from the U.S. and from the Europeans, more or less aligned with Russia and China.
So this is a different, let's put it this way, Southwest Asia, Middle East, Eurasia front, compared to the Western front, which is the usual suspect, as we know, the GCC, the six Petro-monarchies, and Turkey especially.
The problem is Syria is such a complicated story that the unintended consequences of all this are going all over the place.
Just a detail.
Qatar wants a Muslim Brotherhood government in Syria, just like the government that they got.
In fact, that was a gift to Qatar in Egypt.
This explains, among other reasons, why Morsi now feels so empowered in Egypt.
Because he has the backing of Qatar, which is like a mini superpower nowadays.
Because, you know, they are very small.
They are extremely wealthy.
In terms of proselytizing, they are very, very strong.
And their official foreign policy is we support the Muslim Brotherhood all over the place.
So what they want is a sort of string of Muslim Brotherhood governments all over the Middle East, like Syria, Egypt, Jordan is next, sooner or later.
Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, they want Salafis.
They want hardcore Wahhabis.
People that are totally intolerant and preach and live according to Islam in the 7th century, basically.
This is what they want.
Something that replicates their own system.
Or they want secular leaders like Mubarak that have a very good relationship with them.
Or they like Turkey because Turkey, they have a very good trade relationship with Saudi Arabia.
And the Saudis invest a lot of money in Turkey as well.
The U.S. Now comes the real thing.
What does the Obama administration really want?
They don't know.
At first, they wanted, okay, you remember when the Tahrir Square started.
Hillary Clinton wanted a continuation of the same regime with another head of the snake.
Omar Suleiman, who died a few weeks ago, in fact.
So they were resigned of, okay, there is an Arab Spring in Egypt.
As long as Camp David Accords are still there, we're okay with it.
The problem is, the Pentagon has always had a very good relationship with the Egyptian military.
So with the Egyptian military in power for the Pentagon, and even for the State Department, that would be a good thing.
Now, with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Obama administration from the beginning said, okay, let's work with the Muslim Brotherhood.
But they were never expecting what happened, especially these past few days, in fact.
They were expecting SCAF, the military junta, to be in control for the next few years, so they could work with SCAF.
And they would have a Muslim Brotherhood inefficient or not empowered enough a president.
Nothing would change in the regional context, and especially nothing would change vis-a-vis Israel.
Now we have an Egyptian president that is fully empowered, that is going to Iran next week.
Which is something that in Washington they are absolutely terrified about.
Because this could be the beginning of something that never happened in the Middle East for the past 30 years.
Which is a very close relationship between Egypt and Iran.
Can you imagine if that happened?
Then the whole game changes.
We're going to have a Sunni power, which is the most important Arab power, has always been culturally, historically, politically aligned with Iran.
Which, according to the Washington narrative, is totally isolated.
But we know that is not true, because they are supported by Russia and China.
How likely is it, Pepe, that the Egyptians would make that big of a break with the Americans toward Iran right now?
No, no, it's not a break, Scott.
This is the beginning of a long friendship, maybe, between Egypt and Iran.
We still don't know the terms.
Because, obviously, the Iranians, which are gunning for it big time, they're going to have to offer something for Morsi.
Morsi needs food and cash.
Iranians, at the moment, they don't have a lot of food to sell.
They might have a little bit of cash to help prop Morsi, just like the Emir of Qatar.
They started with the $2 billion.
I'm not sure Iran has a spare $2 billion at the moment, with the sanctions and all that.
But anyway, still they're going to offer something.
More barter, for instance, increased trade, Iranian companies investing in Egypt, something like that.
We still don't know.
But the simple fact that now they are talking, and at the highest level, and the president of Egypt himself is going to Tehran, and obviously he will talk to the leadership while he is in Tehran for the Non-Aligned Summit.
The importance cannot be overstated.
Is your point, then, really that the American government has a lot more interest in this just than doing what Netanyahu wants?
Yes.
But there are qualifications to what you just said.
The Obama administration, they have what they consider their preferred strategy vis-à-vis Iran, which they think it's working.
I'm not so sure it's working.
It's working against the Iranian population, but not against the regime.
Everybody knows that.
Yeah, their cancer patients are having a lot harder time getting their chemotherapy now, so that's really something.
Exactly.
It reminds me of Iraq in the early 90s.
Let's not go off on the tangent, though, but answer my great question.
What is your great question?
My great question was about Israel's motive in this, or the degree of Israeli influence in D.C. responsible for America's policy supporting the rebels in Syria right now.
I understand what you're saying, that you kind of have this central and allied powers breakdown in the region, and if we can weaken Syria, then that weakens Iran and strengthens our friends the Saudis and Qataris and that kind of thing.
Okay, I'll buy that.
But usually D.C. doesn't have a Middle East policy other than the one that's written up at AIPAC in the first place.
I agree with you.
Then again, when I use my imagination and I ask myself, well, what would I do if I was Benjamin Netanyahu, I would leave well enough alone and I would be happy with Abbasis.
He must be insane if he thinks he's going to do better with a permanent civil war there after the fall of the regime.
Look, I agree with what you said, but try to see the whole situation from the point of view of a wacko like Bibi, and a wacko number two like Barack.
Then kill them all!
USA, Israel, or whatever.
Exactly.
So look, in their analysis, if they have a weakened Syria with an overstretched military, and by definition a weak military because they are fighting an insurgency even in the big cities, Damascus and Aleppo, if there is an attack on Iran, they won't be able to help Iran.
And on top of it, Hezbollah is fragilized for the moment because of that corridor of sending weapons or logistical help from Iran via Syria to Hezbollah.
This is how they see it.
So they don't want a regime change, they just want a low-level conflict there and for Assad to be desperate for a long time.
Exactly.
What they want is a policy, they want basically a Lebanonization of Syria.
Lebanon in the 70s applied to Syria now in the 2010s.
This is what they want.
We can also call it a Somalization policy, in fact.
They want Syria as an enormous Somalia.
It's a lot of dead people.
It's more or less what it is.
In fact, Syria at the moment is more or less already Balkanized in three different regions.
We have the Kurds in the Northeast which are now practically autonomous with the consent of the Assad regime because they gave the Kurds the go-ahead, as long as you don't attack us, Damascus, the government, you can do anything you want in your part of the mountains.
Northeast Syria is very remote compared to the rest of Syria.
So this is one of the Balkanized regions.
The big cities, as we are seeing right now, they are not falling for the so-called rebels, which they see, in my opinion, rightly, as a bunch of gangs, basically, murderous gangs.
You see merchants in Aleppo and Damascus now saying it openly.
And some of them are even Sunnis.
We're not talking only about Alawites or Shiites or Christians or Kurds.
Even Sunnis are saying, these people, they come from the countryside, low-level, uneducated, all with guns, and they come in here, and they start to destroy our city.
So in terms of a guerrilla force, you know, basic guerrilla one-on-one, you know, if you don't have the support of the local populations, you are totally fucked.
And this is what happened with the FSA, the Free Syrian Army.
So what they can do is to retreat to the patches of the Sunni countryside, stay there and fight a low-level guerrilla with the Damascus forces.
This is exactly what is happening right now, and could go on for years, in fact.
So this situation suits Israel.
The problem is, the Israeli military intelligence and the super-cabinet in Israel, which is eight people, five of them are against an attack on Iran, because they know it will be a disaster.
All the previous heads of the Mossad are against it, except one of them, in fact.
And even people who...
The best analysts in Israel that are not bought by the government, and they are a lot of independents, they are against it as well, because they know the basic facts that obviously will be a mark on not telling everybody.
First of all, Israel cannot do this technically, on a military level.
They don't have enough bunker-buster bombs, the latest generation.
The overfly rights, it's an enormous problem.
They don't have the refueling planes to do all this.
And they don't even know where the crucial installations really are and how deep are they.
So they don't have the technical law.
The only power in the world who will be able to pull that off is obviously the U.S.
And the Pentagon generals, if we listen to General Martin Dempsey, he just laid down the line, in my opinion.
No, this cannot be done.
It could only be done if we did it.
And we're not going to do it.
So that for me was a pretty clear message from the Pentagon, because they don't want a bloody land war in the Middle East, now.
Or even later, after the November election.
You know, they know this would be beyond suicidal.
Look at what's happening in Iraq and Afghanistan.
This thing could drag for over 10 years, 20 years, in fact.
And the Iranians are very good in terms of resilience.
Remember, they fought a very vicious war against Iraq for eight years, and they would be going for another eight easily if there wasn't.
Remember that incident where a civilian jet was downed in 1988, and Khomeini was forced to more or less abdicate from the war.
So unless there is, I would say, unless there is a nuclear bomb over Tehran, they could go on fighting for years, decades, in fact.
So nobody wants a land war.
What basically the American position boils down to, we want a weakened Iran, of course.
So maybe in the long run, when we decide to strike, they'll be weak enough not to retaliate, a la Libya or Iraq.
This is not going to happen.
Forget it.
This is plain wishful thinking.
Regime change is not going to happen from the outside.
If you look at Iranian history, it's going to happen from the inside.
A repeat of what they did in 1953, the CIA against Mossadegh, is not going to happen.
So, you know, the options are, there are not many options for the U.S. and Israel.
The only option for Bibi and Barak is a militaristic one, because they are desperate.
They know that the status quo, if it is prolonged like this, doesn't suit them, because soon they're going to have a string of Muslim Brotherhood governments around them.
It's going to be much worse for them in terms of dealing with the devils they already know, like the Assad family, for instance, which in terms of a military threat to Israel is non-existent.
So Israel can live with that.
And of course, it's very easy for the Israel lobby to manipulate anything in Washington.
We all know that.
The thing is that even inside the lobby now, we have the rabid militaristic wing, but we even have some people who are talking sense and say, no, this is folly, you know.
But nobody's talking diplomacy.
That's the problem.
If the Israel lobby one day would suggest in Washington, okay, let's sit down and work out a deal with Iran, the next day we would have Obama in Tehran doing his Nixonian moment.
But this is not going to happen.
We also know that, right?
Right.
Well, and again, because of the power of Israel in Washington, D.C., and over our political process, it's incredible.
This whole thing, well, anyway, back on Syria for a second.
I want to ask you, they have resisted negotiating the nuclear program as well as they've resisted any kind of real negotiation over Syria.
They let the rebels dictate the terms, which are any negotiation must begin with Assad leaving power, and they will not settle for anything less than that.
And now apparently under pressure from the Russians, the, I guess, prime minister of Syria said, you know what, we are open to discussion on all issues.
I don't know if he specifically said including Assad leaving power, but he was certainly implying that.
But we have to have the meetings first, and really it seems like it's up to the Americans whether they're going to go ahead and let that even happen.
But then Obama came out, and I guess it was in response to a question.
I don't know if this was his plan or what, but anyway, set policy, really, when he came out and said the chemical weapons are the red line.
If they use the chemical weapons, then we'll intervene.
And so the obvious interpretation of that is, you know, whether Assad even uses the chemical weapons or not, Assad, they could just say that he did and then have their pretext for war and go ahead and intervene worse.
But I read one blog that said, oh no, this is Obama's message to Assad that go ahead and win.
We're not going to escalate.
We're not going to intervene further.
We're calling it quits.
You know, we're going to leave bad enough alone or whatever.
I also read that blog.
It's Moon of Alabama, which is a very good blog, by the way.
I read them almost every day.
I agree with that interpretation, in fact, because this is Obama for the first time laying down what is the ultimate red line in Syria.
Nobody knew that until two days ago.
So the red line is, and very important the way he phrased it, we don't want these weapons falling into the hands of the wrong people.
Yeah, meaning the people he's been supporting thus far.
Exactly, which implies that at the moment they are at the hand of people that can be trusted.
Because everybody knows that the Assad government will never use chemical weapons against Syrians, because they know the reaction will be immediate, especially from the U.S.
They know that, and they already said that on the record many times.
The thing is, can we imagine if one of these wackos, pre-Syrian, over 100 different pre-Syrian gang, pre-Syrian army gangs, pre-Syrian gang we can call them in fact, Sunnis, and you have some kind of general which has access to the chemical weapons and distributes these weapons to one of these gangs, what could happen?
This is a possibility.
So the way I saw it, Obama's message is directed to Turkey and to the Free Syrian Army.
To the Free Syrian Army is, look, NATO is not going to launch a war over there.
First of all because NATO doesn't want it, and second because the Europeans are broke.
We, the Pentagon, we don't want a war in Syria.
Especially now I, Obama, don't want it because I'm in the middle of an election.
I have an election to win here.
And to Turkey, they're telling Turkey, look, if you go and invade the north in Syria, especially the northeast Syria, Kurdistan, to deal with what you say are Kurdish terrorists, you are on your own.
NATO is not going to help you.
And we are not going to help you.
This is the way I saw it as well.
So this means that Assad now and his forces, they have like a window of a few weeks to repel the Free Syrian Army gangs, I would say, for good.
Especially from Damascus and Aleppo.
And then they're going to fight this low-level guerrilla war in the Sunni countryside for how long, nobody knows.
But still, from the point of view of the U.S. and the point of view of Israel, this is good in terms of a weakened Syria, a Balkanized Syria, a Somalized Syria, and a Syria that does not pose a threat to Israel.
So we can say for the moment that the Israeli strategy is more or less winning.
And the American strategy, which is this leading from behind, it's good in terms of if you have a Balkanized Middle East and Sunnis fighting against Shiites, it's good for the U.S., it's the good old British dividing rule strategy.
Once again.
Yeah.
A.K.A. stability.
A.K.A. stability, exactly.
So you notice this thing at the Council on Foreign Relations website, the same thing I did.
In fact, I guess it was the Moon of Alabama blog is where I found this too.
Maybe that's where you found it as well.
This guy, Ed Hussein, talking about, and he's being ironic and tongue-in-cheek a little bit the way he's writing and saying, look, I mean, he's not being that tongue-in-cheek about it.
He's saying, look, our best allies in Syria right now are the al-Qaeda fighters.
They're the ones who are ruthless enough to get things done and kill this Assad guy for us and maybe sodomize him and shoot him in the back of the head on the side of the road like Qaddafi kind of thing, which is what we're going for.
That'd be great.
But really it seemed like what he's trying to do is just get out ahead of the argument that, I warned you that al-Qaeda was going to benefit if we fought a war for al-Qaeda in Syria, and so we have to have a new policy to intervene even more under the excuse that now there's a bunch of al-Qaeda fighters.
I'm waiting for them to pull the same stunt in Libya and go ahead and send in the Marines there.
Look, but what people like Ed Hussein simply cannot admit in public, it's not tongue-in-cheek at all.
I think he really meant what he wrote.
It's that whenever there is a conflict against a secular republic or a so-called progressive government anywhere in the world, the U.S. aligns with hardcore Islamist movements.
Just look at history.
It's all there.
Afghanistan, Kosovo, Libya, and now Syria.
It's always the same thing.
So Afghanistan, the jihad in Afghanistan in the 1980s, now it's the jihad, the NATO-U.S. jihad in Syria in 2012.
It's exactly the same thing.
And that's why if they keep on arming, especially if they keep on weaponizing, passing intelligence to these people, the blowback afterwards, we still don't know what's going to happen in Syria.
Let's assume that the Assad government falls in two, three, four years.
What's going to happen to these gangs, especially from Sunni Iraqis who cross the border?
By the way, these Sunni Iraqis, most of them are the commanders of these Free Syrian Army gangs.
They have battle experience, in fact.
The former Sunni-based insurgency known as the terrorists in the Bush years, the bad guys in Iraq.
You're totally right.
The insurgency in Syria formerly known as terrorists in Iraq.
That's exactly it.
Well, they're the concerned local citizens now, pal.
Where have you been?
They're the sons of Iraq, now the sons of Syria.
They're good guys.
We renamed them.
Exactly.
Now, the New York Times went and ran a piece quoting these guys, saying, oh yeah, what we're going to do is we're going to create a new Sunni-Islamo-fascist caliphate between here and Baghdad, which is the Sunni part of Iraq that the Baghdad government that America and Iran installed there hardly controls at all, right?
And so my question is, is that possible?
Could they really do that at the same time that you have Syrian Kurdistan splitting off?
Oh, man.
No, in fact, they can, because this is a bunch of fighters.
But remember what happened with just a bunch of fighters when the Afghan war was over in the mid-1990s and the Taliban got to power.
They spread out all over the world with their vision of a caliphate as well.
They thought that there would be a caliphate from Afghanistan and Pakistan all the way to Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Middle East.
And these people, now they're doing it in reverse.
We start in Syria.
Well, like you're saying, though, Syria could be breaking up here, and I wonder whether you think those borders are in jeopardy now.
Syria is already breaking up.
And that's why, like we were talking a while ago, for the U.S. and Israel, it suits their strategy.
Balkanization in the Middle East is perfect.
And, in fact, nobody in Washington will admit it outright, but they would love a greater Kurdistan, because this would balkanize four countries in a row.
This would be the ultimate balkanization, because unfinished business for over a century ago.
Remember when the Kurds were promised their own homeland.
In fact, the Jews, another two decades later, the Jews got their own homeland and the Kurds got absolutely nothing.
And that was Wilson's 14 points, had Kurdistan in there, right?
Yes, absolutely.
Absolutely.
And, in fact, now we have already two Kurdish regions.
They are practically autonomous for all practical purposes, Iraqi Kurdistan and now Syria Kurdistan.
There are a few rumblings in Iranian Kurdistan, but at the moment, considering that the country is under sanctions and under pressure, they don't want to pose as traitors of the Iranian nation.
But the rumbling is already there.
But the most important thing is that the 17 million Turkish Kurds, they are looking at their neighbors and say, wow, maybe this is our opening.
And every day I'm getting a lot of stuff from Kurds.
In fact, they start writing to me directly, which is great.
There are attacks against the Turkish troops, like every day, and huge stuff in Anatolia.
It's not noticed, it's not reported in the Turkish media, basically.
But these people, they send details, what happened.
Yesterday there was an amazing story.
A group of Turkish MPs, they were driving in Anatolia.
They were stopped by a Kurdish checkpoint.
They were PKK guerrillas, in fact.
They left the car, they stepped out of the car, and they started hugging the PKK guerrillas.
And people in Ankara started saying, fuck, these are our MPs.
They are congregating with terrorists.
You know, that kind of stuff.
It's fascinating, because now Ankara, they are getting the unintended consequences.
They are getting blowback now, in fact, from their radical change of their foreign policy, which until a few weeks, a few months ago, sorry, was known as zero problem with our neighbors.
And they created this huge problem with the Syrian neighbor, and now they don't know what to do, in fact.
They are baffled, they are puzzled, and they are terrified, because now they see this safe haven, as they call it in Syria, Kurdistan, harboring PKK guerrillas.
The PKK is coordinating very well with the PKK.
They are still inside Turkish Anatolia.
And sooner or later, you're going to see these attacks against Turkish soldiers becoming an everyday feature, in fact.
And Ankara knows it.
And they know now, from Obama, from the lion's mouth directly, that if they try to invade Syria, and in fact, invading northeast Syria is invading Syria.
Assad is going to take this as an invasion of Syria, and then we're going to have the Syrian army against the depleted Turkish army.
Most of the best generals, in fact, by the way, very important, they are in jail because of a plot that didn't work against the Erdogan government.
So who the hell is going to lead the Turkish army at the moment?
Which, by the way, is composed by lots of Kurds as well.
And there are Alevis, which are the cousins of the Alawites in Syria as well.
These people are not going to fight against the Kurds.
Forget it.
So they are in extremely, extremely big trouble, the Turks.
Listen, I think this is a perfect place to leave it, because actually our next guest has a piece at Foreign Policy and Focus about just that, and all the different groups inside Turkey, and all the blowback and the effects on their internal policies because of the war in Syria.
In fact, I'd like to know what you think of it too.
It's Giorgio Caffiero over at Foreign Policy and Focus.
I'm going to read his stuff.
He's really smart.
It's good stuff.
He's coming on here in just a few minutes.
All right, listen, I better let you go because a cell phone call to Hong Kong is ridiculous, man, and we've got to go.
Oh my God, I'm sorry.
No, don't be sorry.
I appreciate it.
But now we've got to go.
Okay, my man.
All right.
Always a pleasure, Scott.
Thanks very much, Pepe.
I appreciate it.
And good luck with the new show.
The great Pepe Escobar, everybody, at asiatimes.com.
