Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton and our next guest on the show is the great Pepe Escobar from the Asia Times online.
That's atimes.com.
Welcome back, Pepe.
How are you doing?
Wonderful, Scott.
How are you?
Great to be with you again.
Good.
Thanks.
I appreciate you joining us today.
Now, I've been, let's say, out of town.
I haven't been reading a thing.
I don't know what's going on for the last, I don't know, many weeks in a row.
So, why don't you tell me what I do know is that what's going on in Syria right now is extremely important to the future of how the history of the planet Earth unfolds from here, I think.
So, tell me.
Oh my God.
Where do I start?
Look, I could start with the bomb that exploded nearby where I am at the moment.
In fact, here in Bangkok.
By a trio of Iranian assassins, according to the Thai police.
Oh, yeah.
You know what?
I saw that headline.
I didn't even put it together that I'm going to be talking to you from there today.
Boy, am I slow.
It's going to take me a while to get back into it, it looks like.
All right.
So, pretend that was my first question.
Tell me about these bombings.
The headlines say the Israelis say the Iranians what done it.
In fact, the Israelis, of course, when the first grenade exploded under a taxi, the Israelis were already saying, yes, it's the Iranians, they want to kill our diplomats in Bangkok.
In fact, nobody knows what was the target.
In fact, the last information we had like half an hour ago from Thai police, they said, look, we don't know what target they were aiming for.
The explosion was in the house where they were staying here in Bangkok.
Then they ran away.
And one guy was caught, blew himself up, in fact.
The other one was caught at the airport.
And the third one was caught in Kuala Lumpur.
Wow, it's almost like a Ramsey Lissett story.
So this is the three stooges, the Iranian version all over again.
And the Thai police, they are certain that these are not so-called Al-Qaeda terrorists.
Any word on whether they were set up by the FBI?
Exactly.
Too far away from that, right?
The usual shit.
Or, which is what we've been speculating here a lot, this is probably a false flag operation.
These are probably passes that were paid by somebody.
And obviously they couldn't even build a proper bomb.
It was a very crude device.
Now wait a minute, though.
Be really objective for a minute here.
Is it plausible at all that the Iranians would strike in that way against Israeli assets in Thailand?
That's the perfect question, Scott.
Obviously not.
First of all, why Thailand?
Iran, they have very good relations with most Southeast Asian countries.
Thailand is a very important member of the ASEAN.
There are commercial ties between Iran and Thailand.
Lots of Iranians, they come here to do business, in fact.
They come to Thailand to buy all sorts of stuff, from jeans and T-shirts to gems, whatever.
And the flux of business is very, very strong.
So why try to attack an Israeli diplomat in Bangkok?
It's completely stupid.
Just like they have no reason to attack an Israeli diplomat in Delhi, because Delhi is negotiating with Iran how to pay for the oil that they need to import from Iran.
So it makes absolutely no sense.
But in terms of the PR war, which is now, the hysteria now is cosmic, in fact.
Anything that happens, if you have a firecracker in Montana or in Buenos Aires, it's the Iranian, all the time.
So it makes no sense.
Let me ask you something, by the way, because I don't think I ever did get a chance to ask you this.
There was a story in Foreign Policy that made a lot of news and got around, that here we thought all along, because according to Seymour Hersh and other great reporters, that America was financing, the CIA, I guess, was running Jandala against targets inside Iran, this Al-Qaeda-like terrorist group, so-called from Baluchistan, or Sistan Baluchistan, or Balochistan, or however you say it there.
But no, it turns out it was the Israelis pretending to be Americans, trying to provoke, as a false flag attack, trying to provoke the Iranians into retaliating against American targets.
And I've got to tell you, that sounds like something the Israelis would do, but the part that didn't make sense to me was that, why wouldn't the Americans be running Jandala inside Iran anyway?
It seems like they would, and the Israelis wouldn't have to go behind their back about it.
And all their denials in the article sounded, you know, not credible to me.
But I wonder what you think, or know.
In fact, they were using different networks.
Because, you know, Jandala is in fact Sunnis.
They are Sunnis.
They are based on the Pakistani side of Baluchistan.
And they attack Sistan Baluchistan province in southeast Iran.
They just crossed the border.
But most people on both sides of the border, which in fact is a huge desert over there, they are more or less cousins, just like the tribal areas in Afpak.
It's the same thing.
And most of them are Baluch, and there are some Pashtuns as well.
But in that area, most of them are Sunnis.
And even in Sistan Baluchistan, there is a significant Sunni population as well.
So it's very complicated for Tehran to control the province of Sistan Baluchistan, which is in fact a huge province, basically desert.
And very poor.
There's nothing over there.
The last time I tried to go there, they vetoed me in Tehran.
They don't give visas for journalists to go to that province.
And usually the attacks by Jundula are on police checkpoints, police stations.
There are not many targets, as Donald Rumsfeld would say over there.
So the Americans have been there, according to the Iranians, since at least 2005-2006.
Probably the Israelis were operating with another Jundula faction, because Jundula has many different factions, like all these separatist movements.
They have different factions as well.
So it makes total sense.
And they were passing as Americans because the Baluchis are used to having Americans in their midst for the past five or six years.
Yeah, I get it.
All right, so yeah, that sounds about right to me.
Like both parts are true, none of the denials are true, but all the positive parts of it are true.
The CIA is backing them, and the Israelis are backing them.
And pretending to be CIA while they do it, I like that part.
There's a Christopher Ketchum article from years ago in Counterpunch that begins, scratch an American intelligence officer and he will start telling you how much he hates Israel, or start complaining about Israeli intelligence policy.
Any fact in that region, Scott, if you say that you're Israeli, people are going to go, what, what is this, where is it?
They have no clue, you know.
If you say you're from America, at least you're identifiable.
All right, well, so in the short time we have for the rest of this segment, can you start describing a little bit of the broad strokes about who's fighting who, and what's the, well, I don't know, what the hell.
Tell us something about Syria a minute or two before we go on to this break.
Essentially, the civil war is on.
Remember, we talked about this a few months ago, and at the time, if I'm not mistaken, I said, look, maybe the next step is going to be civil war.
I think we're already there.
Considering, very important, there was a meeting at the Arab League in Cairo on Sunday.
And they had another resolution, an internal Arab League resolution, pushed by Qatar and Saudi Arabia.
And essentially, they said, let me see if I can get a quote, a direct quote from them here.
In fact, all kinds of support, including weapons in the future, I'm quoting.
This is what Qatar and Saudi Arabia want to do with Syria.
They are already arming parts of Syria, their own infiltrators, Sunni mercenaries, that are working side by side with some people in the so-called Free Syrian Army.
So now, they are saying it outright, we're going to give all the weapons in the world for these people.
So can you imagine what it's going to be in terms of, it's going to be a war.
But Pepe, is it true that Ayman al-Zawahiri said, is it true that Ayman al-Zawahiri of Al-Qaeda urged Sunni fighters everywhere to go to Syria to fight for Hillary Clinton?
Oh yes, totally.
In fact, I did a story about this, I think, yesterday or the day before yesterday.
It's been all over, even in the U.S., it's been all over the news.
It was an official communique, an eight-minute video, and it specifically said, our Muslim brothers from, he named the countries, Turkey, Iraq, Syria itself, Lebanon, Jordan.
So, you know, everybody in the region, so if you are a Sunni hardcore, if you are a Salafi jihadist, if you have some sort of Al-Qaeda connection, or if you're just disgruntled, go to Syria and bring the regime down.
What a huge empire, but who's Zuma Nu on this whole thing?
The Americans never have any idea.
We'll be right back with Pepe Escobar after this, y'all.
Hang on.
All right, longest top-of-the-hour break in the business.
Anti-war radio here on Liberty Radio Network.
Thank you, Pepe Escobar, for hanging on through that massive break to talk with us about what is going on in Syria.
And you say what it is, it's the Saudis and the Qataris running an operation basically to foment, and they're succeeding in fomenting a civil war in Syria.
But is that just a long way of saying the Americans?
Is it the Saudis putting the Americans up to helping them with this, or the other way around?
In other words, is Zawahiri working for Hillary Clinton, or is Hillary Clinton working for Zawahiri?
Look, everybody wants the same thing.
In fact, NATO, GCC, and Al-Qaeda are on the same side.
The U.S., the major Europeans involved, Britain and France basically, and the six Persian Gulf monarchies, and Al-Qaeda, they all want the same thing, regime change.
Okay, afterwards it's another story, because they are completely different agendas.
But they're going to get their war, there's no question.
Because now it is an armed insurrection against the government.
Can you imagine if this was in a Western country?
Can you imagine if this was inside the United States, the response of the government?
So the problem is, now Assad has his back against the wall.
It is a police state, it is a very heavy police state.
It's unbearable for people who want to live with a modicum of freedom.
I agree.
The problem is how they're going to respond to an armed insurrection.
They have to crush the insurrections.
They cannot, for instance, abandon Homs and leave the center, downtown Homs, controlled by insurgents.
Can you imagine if this was happening inside the U.S.?
Obviously not, you know.
So they have to try to crush the centers of dissent, basically Homs and Hama.
They more or less control the suburbs of Damascus, at least for the moment.
So the only possibility would be if people actually vote in this referendum that Assad proposed, a referendum on a new constitution that will open the way for a multi-party system and free and fair elections in the near or not so near future.
But the U.S. already said, on the record, this is laughable, I'm quoting.
So, you know, nobody wants concessions and nobody wants compromise.
All these players, NATO, GCC, al-Qaeda, they want regime change.
So now it depends on how resilient is Bashar al-Assad's regime.
At the moment it is very resilient, because the army, there are no defections on the army, basically.
The business classes in Aleppo and Damascus are still with the regime.
All the Christians, the Kurds, and the Druze, they are with the regime as well, because they fear that the next regime is going to be Sunni-dominated, and it's going to be a hardcore Muslim brotherhood with a lot of Salafi jihadist infiltrators.
So you can imagine what that means to minorities.
So how long can Assad hang on?
That's the question for the next few months, in fact.
If he manages to crush the dissent, the protest, and the armed insurrection in these places, near the border with Turkey, in Homs, in Hama, in the suburbs of Damascus, they might get out of it.
But it's considering that the insurrection is going to be now heavily armed and directly by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, with lots of weapons and lots of money, and, of course, intel from the CIA on the ground, intel from MI6 on the ground, intel from that NATO command and control center in southern Turkey, near the border with Syria.
Look, it's going to be really, really hardcore.
And nobody has a clue about the repercussions.
You know, European diplomats, in fact, they are appalled, because they don't know what to do, they fear a regional war, they see no way out, they want regime change as well, but they would like a regime change without violence.
Typical European, you know, it's absolutely impossible.
All right, now, you know, okay, so there are a lot of different forces aligned on the outside of Syria, pushing for their agenda.
But I guess, you know, at the start of the real uprising here, you and I spoke, and you talked about, well, you would need the town of Aleppo, basically, to decide to abandon Assad, and probably a good part of what, you know, passed for the middle class around Damascus as well.
Is this just a revolt in Homs, or is this really half the country supports this rebellion?
Or, like in the Monitor report that I read, I did, this is one thing that I read, while I've not been paying too much attention, was the report of the Middle East Monitors Group, I'm not sure of the exact title, where they talked about, well, there's this armed group that they don't really identify, and they keep making matters worse, and provoking worse attacks, back and forth, tit for tat, strategy on the ground there, and they're making things much more difficult for everyone.
Is that, are these groups supported by, you know, half the masses of Syria, or something like that?
Is it a geographical split, it's just a Sunni split, versus everyone else on the other side?
Who are these armed guys?
Are they just American intelligence units, dressed up as Arabs, or what the hell is going on there?
Basically, the opposition, the armed opposition, they are overwhelmingly Sunni, they are concentrated in Northwest Syria, basically, and in some working class suburbs of Damascus as well.
Aleppo is not part of this whole thing, in fact, there was the bombing last Friday in Aleppo, was an Al-Qaeda style bombing, actually.
And this was, you know, it was sort of condemned by the US and Europe, but it was crazy, because it proved, it was a mass bombing like the ones we had in Iraq, during 2004, 2005, 2006, before the third, you know.
If this was in Iraq, you can imagine the American response, what it would be.
It was, you know, the exact same modus operandi in Aleppo, with almost 30 dead, and it was an Al-Qaeda style thing.
So this proves that the Salafi jihadists are already attacking the government, with the same tactics that they used in Iraq before the surge.
So, the thing is, Aleppo apparently is not going to switch to the other side, at least in the short term or medium term.
Same with Damascus, and in fact, the business classes in Damascus, they are furious, because, I wrote about that a few days ago, in fact, as well.
They see, almost in block, the armed opposition, and most of the opposition, as a bunch of country bumpkins, who have no clue about human rights, democracy, civil society, and they want to establish an Islamic state.
This is what Abazari, in the old city in Damascus, a place that Westerners love to go to buy trinkets, or carpets, or nargilehs, whatever, you know.
And lots of them are Christian.
And they tell you right away, look, they want an Al-Qaeda style emirate here in Syria, and we're going to fight against it.
And the upper middle class and the established middle class in Aleppo and Damascus, the big cities, they agree with that.
Even some Sunnis agree with that as well.
And the Sunnis, they are saying, look, we are also businessmen, entrepreneurs, we don't want an Islamic state.
We would like some more political freedom.
We don't want foreign intervention.
And, obviously, we don't want a civil war in our country, because we know what happened in Lebanon in the 70s, and we don't want this replicated here.
But now, I think we're getting to a Lebanese scenario, in fact.
If you ask Patrick Coburn, I think he's going to tell you the same thing, for instance.
Well, you know, I was going to ask Patrick Coburn some things, hopefully later in the week, to see what he said about it.
But, yeah, that's the title.
I haven't even gotten a chance to read it yet.
But he says, nobody wants to admit it, but this is a sectarian civil war.
It's absolutely correct.
And, really, it's the invasion of Iraq that really set all of this off.
This chain of consequences is going to go on for decades and decades.
For decades, exactly.
It's all because, for the first time in a thousand years, or maybe ever, whatever it is, the Shiites ruled Baghdad.
Exactly.
And Iraq, they already said, we are not going to apply sanctions against Syria.
It's not that they approve what the Assad government is doing, but they are totally against foreign interference, including, or especially, interference by the Arab League, which now is not covert anymore.
Hey, can I keep you one more segment here, Pepe?
Yes, yes, sure.
Hold it right there.
We'll be right back with Pepe Escobar, atimes.com.
All right, y'all, welcome back to This Here Thing.
It's my radio show, anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
Did I already say that?
I'm talking with Pepe Escobar.
He's on the line from Thailand.
And we're talking about what's going on in Syria, who's who in Syria.
And, you know, I kind of hate to sound like I favor either side on this thing.
I have to condemn everybody all around so much.
Except, I get peaceful protesters who just want to be free, but even they can just be useful dupes sometimes.
And it just seems like this is how you live.
If you live in a small little country in a world run by giant empires, then it's never really up to you.
And so even if you're doing a revolt for your own sake, you might just be Ayman al-Zawahiri or Hillary al-Rodham Clinton's sock puppet, basically.
So here are a lot of people who want to be free of the tyranny of the Ba'ath brigade and whatever up there.
And yet there are a lot of people who say, hey, these are the only ones who let us be whatever minority sect we are and protect our right to be so, and we want to keep them.
And then they're surrounded on all sides by foreigners, including North Americans from across, way, way far away, trying to determine their destiny.
And so I guess my only job here is to try to figure out at least what's the balance of power, just what's the truth as best we can understand it from here is all.
Absolutely.
And in fact, if you follow the coverage, Russian, Chinese, North American, European, Asian, nobody talks about the Syrian people, that entity anymore.
It's all about the power play.
What they wanted in the first place was totally hijacked by this Al-Qaeda game, NATO, GCCs, Qataris, Saudis, Salafi jihadists.
So, you know, they know.
And the younger generation, even in Damascus, I remember talking to these guys even a few years ago when they were telling me, look, it's impossible to have a kind of a mini revolution over here because it's a heavy police state.
We are disorganized.
We don't have a political organization, all that.
And look, it happened.
Just like in Iran.
They were telling me a few years ago the same thing.
It's not going to happen.
Look at what happened in 2009.
They had millions of people in the streets in Tehran, you know.
And look at what happened in Bahrain.
In fact, this is something that really pisses me off tremendously.
The absolute majority of the population of Bahrain, 70 percent of the population is Shiite.
When they started their pro-democracy movement one year ago, February 14th, at the Pearl Roundabout in Manama, they were, in the beginning they were like hundreds, basically students, you know, young professionals, people that were connected.
They were not crazy Shiites or fanatics and all that.
Soon, the majority of the population in Manama, plus coming from the provinces, they were in the streets, and they wanted basically, okay, give us some more democratic, give us some democratic rights, at least.
And the repression, as we now know, was ruthless, and not only the internal repression conducted by mercenaries, because most of the riot policemen, they are Pakistanis, in fact.
There was an invasion from Saudi Arabia, you know, with some Emirate troops as well.
And look what happened one year later.
The Fifth Fleet is over there.
The United States is selling more weapons to Bahrain, now in small trenches of $1 million each, you know, so they can go under the radar.
The tear gas that they are using in the streets, just like they used yesterday in Manama, against protesters, is made in the US.
And nobody says anything about the Bahraini people, just like they sometimes talk about the Syrian people, you know.
So the hypocrisy is horrendous, horrendous.
And these people, they have been totally betrayed by the Arabs themselves, in fact, in the first place, and by the Arabs who live in their region, in the Persian Gulf, just because they are Shiites, and they say, ah, these people, they are a bunch of idiots, and they are controlled by Tehran.
So their pro-democracy yearning is not valid, only in Syria, because they are Sunnis, you know.
This is completely crazy.
And obviously you won't read anything about that, especially in those wacko op-ed pages at the Wall Street Journal or the Washington Post, for that matter, right?
Right, yeah, no, certainly not.
Or they would just gloss over it and talk about what a great ally we have there and ignore.
Exactly.
The only thing that matters is that, okay.
And I still maintain, and maybe I don't mean to waste time on your interview, but I still maintain that the reason that they launched the war in Libya was just to try to confuse the narrative a little bit, from America is on the side of the bad guy dictator, king, sultan, emir, quote-unquote president, and otherwise illegitimate potentate from Morocco to the Philippines, or at least Pakistan.
And so they had to say, look, in this one, we're on the side of the little guy against the evil dictator, because he was the most expendable sock puppet dictator in the region, Gaddafi.
And they get to pretend the same thing in Syria, too, as big bad Assad.
And we're Superman on the side of the civilians.
Yeah, but this only applies if it's an Arab republic, not an emirate or a monarchy, and if they are not allied with the U.S.
Otherwise, you can do anything.
You can kill your own people on live television, and nothing's going to happen to you.
Just look at Bahrain.
And in the case of Saudi Arabia, it's even worse, because they kill and we don't know about it.
In fact, it's very hard to know what's really going on in the eastern province, where most of the oil is, including the area near Bahrain.
Well, yeah, there were some riots there at the very start of the Arab Spring, but we never heard another thing after that.
We never heard, exactly.
It's very complicated.
Sometimes you have a crazy guy sending some tweets, and the tweets disappear, and that's it.
And obviously, if you read the Gulf press, absolutely nothing.
Sometimes you have some independent journalists that say, look, we heard something, or somebody called and said that they were killing people in Qatif.
It's an important Shiite town in eastern Saudi Arabia.
This happens almost on a weekly basis.
You know, this really pisses me off.
All right, so give us the very shortest version of, I don't know, the short-term future in Syria, you think.
Scott, look, crystal ball, no way.
It's impossible.
Can you even go there or not?
No.
In fact, when I go to these places, I use my Brazilian passport, which opens me many doors.
But the problem is, the Syrians know me.
I've been there many times.
They have my files, and they are not allowing foreign journalists.
Are you talking to sources inside Syria, telling you to go down there?
Yes, I have a very good source in Homs.
He keeps me updated on what's going on in Homs.
Hey, what about the casualty numbers?
Because the casualty numbers, what they say, even my source in Homs says, of this 5,400 last count by the UN, at least 2,200 were Syrian policemen killed by the armed insurrection.
So we can more or less split as 50 percent on each side the casualties, you know.
And most are civilians caught in a crossfire.
So what we have here is the government against the armed insurrection.
And in the middle, we have that entity, the Syrian people, Syrian civilians who are caught in a crossfire.
These are the eminent victims of the simmering civil war going on, in fact.
All right.
Well, we'll keep talking with you, and we'll keep up to date.
Thanks very much for your time, Pepe.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks.
Always a pleasure, Scott.
Take care.
Thank you.
All right.
You're welcome.
And thank you, too, again.
Everybody, that's the great Pepe Escobar, atimes.com for the Asia Times.
We'll be right back.
