All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and our first guest on the show today is Pepe Escobar from the Asia Times Online.
That's atimes.com, and he wrote Obama Does Globalistan and all kinds of things.
Welcome back, Pepe.
How are you doing?
I'm fine.
I'm recovering from the Oscars, Scott.
Oh, yeah, I don't pay any attention to that.
Is that newsworthy, that thing?
You should, because the future of Western civilization hinges on Angelina Jolie showing major legs.
That's funny.
Yeah, I never really thought she was attractive for some reason, man.
I know everybody told me I was supposed to, but her head looks weird to me.
And she's a one-world commie.
She's horrible on everything.
She wants the U.N. to take over everything for everybody's own good all the time because she knows so much about it.
Exactly.
Maybe she should run for president, actually.
She could win, I bet you, in a minute.
Get all those non-voters to turn out, all those swing voters excited.
And I saw, actually, that you wrote an article about that, the awards, and how there was one thing that was important was a guy.
And Zoe, the sidekick here, was mentioning something about this movie.
A separation.
Some Iranian movie that won an Oscar, and that was newsworthy.
What happened there?
Absolutely, a separation.
I saw it in New York in December, in fact.
It's an absolutely outstanding movie.
I have no culture whatsoever, so don't rely on me for asking a good question here or anything.
I'm sure many of our listeners probably saw the movie.
It's been played in some places in Iran, but not everywhere.
It's not wide distribution.
It's probably the best movie of the past few years because it's a bit like Italian neorealism.
Like, say, post-neorealism.
It's about what happens in people's lives from different, from multiple points of view.
And it's non-judgmental.
It's fascinating stuff, you know?
You leave the cinema astonished, and you have to see it again.
And I'm glad that the people who work in the film industry, because everybody votes for best picture, unlike the other categories.
And they recognize that this film is so beyond everything else that you can see anywhere.
Not even in terms of American film industry, but globally.
I hope it's on the Pirate Bay soon.
It sounds interesting.
Yes, absolutely.
On YouTube, probably you can see some clips.
Not the whole thing, of course.
But I think it's still playing in the U.S. It's still playing in South America.
It played here in Asia in some countries.
It was playing in one cinema in Hong Kong, one cinema in Bangkok.
And what he said, his acceptance speech, was outstanding.
Because he said, basically, that Iran should be recognized by the people, by their glorious culture, and not by the fact that every time that you mention the name, Iran is associated with politics.
So in this movie, the setting is in Persia?
Is that it?
Yes, the film is set in Tehran.
Well, now see, that right there is absolutely groundbreaking.
Because in America, as far as TV is concerned, if there's any image to be associated with Iran, it's just the person of Ahmadinejad, or it's a bird's eye view of just a political map, and the lines on the map of the shape of the state.
But never do they show a street.
Never is there a CNN reporter saying, live from Tehran, back to you, Jim, or whatever.
There is no street-level view of Iran on American TV ever.
Absolutely.
And that's why this film is so important.
Can you imagine if this film had a distribution network like Transformers 3 or something like that?
Everybody in mid-America, or in the deep south, in the south-west, they would see it.
And they see that Iranians are extremely sophisticated people.
They would smell the streets.
They would smell inside of their houses, their apartments, how they live.
They're just like us.
But the way they have been dehumanized, especially this past year or so, just like Iraqis were dehumanized in 2002, early 2003 as well.
I remember at the time you wouldn't see scenes of Iraqi daily life in the US at all.
Same about Iran, as you mentioned.
And what he said, what the director said, was amazing, because in my view he made an extremely political film without even mentioning politics.
He talked about how big politics interferes in our everyday lives and we don't even notice.
And the film is so subtle, so intelligent, that the Iranian censors didn't notice.
Because, of course, he filmed that in Tehran.
He had to show it to the censors first, for internal matters, and especially because he was submitting the film to a foreign film festival.
So the censorship is really hardcore.
And according to him, they didn't cut a single scene or a single dialogue from the book.
And there are no explicit political references.
And that's, like, so astonishing, really.
You know, it reminds me of when I was a kid, I used to see a Bergman or Antonioni movie, that, you know, you leave the cinema and you are dazed and confused and bewildered for weeks.
And that's the effect the film had.
And I'm really glad that it was recognized by Hollywood.
Of course, there's a problem.
I was reading a while ago that the Iranian official press is saying that this is a victory for Iran.
No, it's not a victory of the regime.
It's a victory of Iranians as people and as a culture.
Well, yeah, that's the whole thing, though, is discriminating between those things.
You can't get Americans to discriminate between themselves, their country, their government, or anything else.
When it comes to foreigners, definitely not.
In fact, just last week, there was a controversy where Tucker Carlson said that, basically, all Iranians should be exterminated all at once because they're evil.
And he ended up taking it back.
Glenn Greenwald took him to task on it on the Twitter or something.
And he ended up saying, you know what, you're right.
I wasn't right when I said that.
To some degree, anyway, he retracted it.
But it's very easy when you know nothing about a country to just say, blow it up.
It's like, let's go to war with a moon of Jupiter.
Who's going to notice if it's gone or whatever?
You know what I mean?
People, it's easy.
Yeah, and these people are disgusting.
They haven't even been to Iran.
They don't even know what they're talking about, actually.
These neocons, subneocons, their shills in the media.
It's absolutely horrible.
And expect the same kind of stuff this next weekend, when we're going to have two crucial elections, Saturday in Iran and Sunday in Russia.
In fact, in Russia, all over the place, it's the cover of Time, the cover of The Economist, the cover of Newsweek, everybody mocking Putin.
But expect major fireworks when he's back as president.
Today he had an op-ed piece on most of the Russian print media.
I think the Financial Times had an excerpt.
And he's saying, you know, watch out, I'm back.
Really?
No, of course.
This is the metaphorical reading.
Forget about NATO humanitarian bombing.
Forget about intervention in Syria.
Forget about war against Iran.
And this is very explicit in what he wrote.
So no wonder Washington elites, they are furious, because now they'll have to deal with him again.
And he's not Medvedev.
Medvedev is a compromised guy.
Putin, he doesn't care.
Putin is going to be like a tank from now on.
So I expect major fireworks, the missile defense controversy, everything.
And tell us quickly about the elections in Iran.
I'm sorry?
Yes.
Elections in Iran, it's extremely complicated, because basically the Green Movement is excluded.
Like Mousavi, he's been under house arrest for one year, along with his wife.
Well, that was hardly enough time for you to tell us anything about it.
You told it right there, and we'll talk about that.
In fact, I'll even let you finish up if you have some more things to say about the Russian election and the return of Vladimir Putin, if you want, on the other side of this break.
It's Pepe Escobar, everybody, from the Asia Times, atimes.com.
We're going to talk about the Ayatollah Khomeini and some Iranian politics when we get back.
All right, y'all, welcome back.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with Pepe Escobar.
Right now, I think about Russia still.
Oh, by the way, the movie that you're talking about, that you like so much, is called The Separation.
Pepe, is that right?
It's called A Separation.
A Separation.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Okay, I'm sure people were wondering...
Wait, what was that again?
Okay, so I went to the Financial Times, because I was trying to see where it was that they had excerpts of Putin's op-ed, but instead I found Alleged Putin Assassination Plot Foiled.
And I thought, oh boy, he's sure to win now.
Yeah, this is something that broke out, I think, like two hours ago or so.
They found some guys in Odessa, in Ukraine, and apparently they're using the same method that the three stooges here in Bangkok They're trying to build a bomb, and the whole thing exploded, and the Ukrainian police found out.
Well, was it an FBI entrapment thing, or what?
It could be.
It could be the FSB.
I'm sure...
Of course not, I'm not sure.
I'm sorry.
I am almost sure this could be a false flag planted by the FSB.
Because the timing, you know, they said that they discovered this plot in early February, then these guys are interrogated for two or three weeks, today is the 27th, right?
So it's very, very fishy.
You know, five days before the election, they go public with it.
I wonder if anybody's buying it.
Seems like that whole, oh no, the government is the victim thing is wearing thin on people.
A lot of people are not buying it in Russia itself.
I was reading some of the Russian press, and not everybody's buying it, in fact.
In fact, this came out on a Russian state TV, and the independent channels, for instance, they're not buying it.
And the internet, obviously not buying it.
You know, I wonder whether the CIA and the NED and the National Republican, whatever the hell, the same people who are under arrest in Egypt right now, whether they're not really pushing regime change inside Russia, trying to do a color-coded thing there, which is not to dismiss concerns of people who are tyrannized by the so-called democracy there.
But, you know, I don't know.
What do you say about that?
Look, they won't be instrumentalized, that's for sure.
These protests, you know, there was a human chain against Putin, 50,000 people.
These people are very well informed.
The Google generation in Moscow, and even in St. Petersburg as well, they're very well informed.
They don't want to be instrumentalized.
They want a Russian solution.
They want a Russian democracy.
They don't want foreign intervention.
And they don't want a destabilization of the regime, Libya-style.
Definitely not.
And this cannot happen in Russia, because, you know, the FSP, which is the remixed KGB, they will never allow this to happen.
And they are very well informed.
And the GRU, the military intelligence in Russia, they are also very well informed.
And this is very much controlled by the Kremlin.
So forget about a Kola revolution in Russia.
What is going to happen?
Well, but the West does spend, like, jillions of dollars on NGOs inside Russia to push for this kind of stuff, though, huh?
Yes.
Is that overstating it?
I mean, jillions is a lot.
Yeah, it's not, it's, let's say, tens, even if it's tens of millions of dollars, it's not enough.
You know, they will never have, for instance, a national coherent movement.
Putin is very, very popular in the provinces.
Just like Ahmadinejad in Iran, you know.
Well, there's no kind of political force in Russia that can oppose him, foreign-backed or otherwise.
Am I right?
No, I don't see that happening.
And the indigenous...
I mean, you look at how he made, he stepped down from president to be prime minister for a little while, and then just so that he can fulfill the technicality and come right back into the...
And this is...
You know, that's why the intellectuals in the big cities in Russia and liberal professionals, people who travel, people who have very close contact with Europe, these people are totally pissed because they saw what was happening.
It was a revolving door between Putin and Medvedev.
And Medvedev is going to disappear after that war.
He's going to be prime minister.
Nobody is going to even listen to them, because everybody knows that Putin decides, you know.
But...
And the other candidate, the so-called more democratic candidate in Russia, they have like 1%, 2%, 3% of the vote.
Gennady Zhuganov from the Communist Party, he has like 20% approval, which is a lot.
This proves that the communists are very much alive in Russia, everywhere in Russia.
Especially people who like Putin think that...
Okay, the methods are different, but they still think that the fall of the Soviet Union was the greatest catastrophe that could have happened to Russia.
And millions of Russians still think like that.
They don't agree with Putin's method, of course.
In fact, they would like an old-style communist government all over again, of course, with some fringe benefits, like, okay, if I make some money, I can buy an Audi instead of a Skoda.
That's the only difference, basically.
Alright, so let's get back to Khomeini here, and the time we've got.
This great article is called What is Iran's Supreme Leader's Game?
And a little bit of inside Iranian politics.
I don't know how you know so much about so many things, but here you go.
Tell us the most important, what can be gleaned from this article here.
I wanted to do a story listening to both sides, the Iranian diaspora in L.A., in Paris, in London, and Iranian intellectuals inside Iran.
So I tried to be more or less balanced in the story.
I got a lot of flack from Iranians saying that I'm listening too much to the Iranian diaspora, but they are, even if they are not there, we have to listen to what they are saying, because what they say influences a lot of people who are still there.
After all, the family ties are very, very strong, right?
But what's going on with these elections, essentially is that the Green Movement is out, it's totally marginalized, Mousavi is under house arrest, Karoubi is the same thing, Khatami, he cannot say anything, except on their website.
That's the former president, Khatami.
Yes, Khatami, the former president, the guy who, by the way, launched the Dialogue of Civilizations, I'm sure a lot of people in the U.S. remember that, that was absolutely crushed by the Bush administration.
Khatami went to the U.S. talking about the Dialogue of Civilizations at Harvard, he talked at the U.N., and nobody paid attention, because these were the Bush years.
So I imagine if Khatami was president now, for instance, and he started the Dialogue of Civilizations, the Obama administration immediately would welcome it.
But this was five, six years ago, sorry, this was in the early 2000s, so it was absolutely impossible.
So basically, the regime is saying that the election, this Saturday, they're expecting, in their own words, another epic event.
And they describe that as a turnout of more than 60%.
So how are they going to get a turnout of 60%?
They're buying votes all over the place, especially in the provinces.
They cannot do this in Tehran, in Isfahan, or Shiraz, in the big cities, because in the big cities, the regime is hated by urban professionals.
So, like I was telling you a while ago, the supreme leader and the Ahmadinejad administration in the provinces, they are still very much respected, and because the handouts are still going, while the new sanctions don't bite by June, people can have loans to buy houses, or when they get married, that kind of stuff, so it still works in the countryside.
In the big city, which is interesting, coming back to the movie we were talking about in the beginning, if you see the movie, you see how is life in Tehran nowadays.
You know, people doing everything to survive.
You never hear the word sanctions, but you see that life for most people is very, very hard.
It shouldn't be in a country as rich in natural resources as Iran.
But the dissatisfaction with Khamenei in the big cities is coming to the point where now they're asking, what they started to ask in 2009.
They wanted the downfall of the Agha, as they call him, you know, the old guy, the super cleric.
And the Green Movement, because of the Green Movement, now the leaders are out of the picture.
This is going on, I would say, from a mouse-to-mouse pace.
In the universities, for instance, the word in Iran is that nobody in the university is going to vote on Saturday.
So this is a big problem, because there are too many universities, with millions of students in Iran, and if they don't vote, they will never get this 60%.
You know, only with the blue collars in the countryside and the peasants, they're not going to get 60% of turnout.
So this is a referendum on Khamenei.
We still don't know what's going to happen next.
What we do know is that the conservatives will continue to dominate the majlis, the parliament, and the factions will be fighting among themselves.
I've got to keep you one more segment.
Can I keep you one more segment here?
Yes, yeah, yeah, sure.
All right, but Thailand is really far away, so I'm going to call you back in five minutes for this long break.
Okay.
We'll be right back with Pepe Escobar after this, y'all.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
We're back on the line with Pepe Escobar from the Asia Times.
That's atimes.com.
And we've got a few things to get through here, Pepe.
First of all, is it your opinion that—and don't answer this yet, because I've got a second and third of all and a bunch more, too.
Is it your opinion that Russia will absolutely prevent, not just with vetoes on the Security Council, but really will stand in the way of American-slash-Israeli wars against Syria and or Iran?
Also, please, you have to, and I think you're starting to, address the upcoming Iranian elections and all the people who are going to be boycotting it and what effect this may have on the reign of the Ayatollah, because it's his favored people who are up for re-election, basically, I guess.
And then also, in your recent piece about the Ayatollah Khomeini, I believe you're breaking this story, that last October they offered another basically complete deal.
We will abide by the additional protocol to the safeguards agreement, which I believe would mean freezing their uranium enrichment and allowing much broader inspections of, say, for example, non-nuclear facilities, perhaps even their missile facilities, centrifuge manufacturing facilities, things like that, as long as you just lift the sanctions.
They made that offer, which sounds at least like the beginning of something to negotiate about, back last October.
And as you report here, the Obama administration's response was to come up with this bogus plot where the used car salesmen and the DEA-slash-Mexican drug cartel were supposed to blow up a restaurant in D.C. to kill the Saudi ambassador, as a way of scotching this, it sounds like, is what you're saying.
And one last thing, I hope you're taking notes and ask me if you forget, Hillary Clinton has said, well, we can't really send arms to the rebels in Syria because they might end up in the hands of al-Qaeda, because I'm an al-Zawahiri.
And I don't know if she's just talking off the top of her head, kind of off-script, thinking out loud, and, you know, wasn't thinking about the import of saying that or what, because I thought that was pretty clearly the agenda here, but she seems to be precluding the exact intervention that seems like she's been pursuing so far.
Now, address a bunch of stuff for us.
Genius, expert, globe-trotting, intrepid reporter Pepe Escobar for the Asia Times at atimes.com.
Okay, Scott, let's start with the offer, the Iranian offer to the Americans.
We learned this through an Iranian ambassador.
And this Iranian ambassador, one of the negotiators from Iran's atomic energy organization, he told them what Iran was offering the U.S. in October, like three months ago, October 2011.
It was basically a blank check.
You can do anything you want, as long as you lift the sanctions.
We open anything you want to do, even the things that we don't have to open, the installation, for any kind of inspection.
And the American response was, we know what happened afterwards, fast and furious, oil embargo, and all that.
This proves, once again, it doesn't matter if it's the Bush administration, the Obama administration, they don't want a dialogue, they don't want the CIA to have 100% trustful dialogue with Iran and vice versa.
Well, as we spoke about with Gareth Porter on the show yesterday, they abide by the additional protocol back 2002 to 2005 or so, during so-called good-faith negotiations with the Europeans until that broke down.
Exactly.
And then a few days ago, I was trying to find some kind of confirmation for this, and a few days ago comes this report by the International Crisis Group in Brussels.
And they're saying more or less the same thing, of course, without mentioning the specifics of the Iranian offering, and saying that the only way for the U.S. and Iran is to sit down and do like the Turkish and the Brazilians did in 2010, which is try to broker a deal based on mutual trust.
But it comes back to the same point.
It's not about a nuclear dossier.
It's about regime change.
Everybody knows that.
Everybody that's dealing with this knows this by now, especially Russia.
And that's why when Putin will be back next week as president, he already said that, look, if there's going to be a negotiation, we want to be part of it, but it has to be based on mutual trust, and forget about threatening a war against Iran.
He's more or less saying that a war against Iran is going to be a war against Russia, which is something that he was saying in the background for the past few years.
Now as president, he really means it.
And the Chinese, 5,000 years of silent diplomacy, or as Deng Xiaoping would say, crossing the river by feeling the stones.
They're feeling the stones.
They're not saying anything, but between them, the Russians and the Chinese, they are coordinating the response.
So what NATO and the GCC, the GCC in fact Saudi Arabia and Qatar want to do in Syria as a way to get to Iran, to weaken Iran, it's not going to happen.
They're going to start arming the rebels more than they are already doing it.
We all know that.
We've been discussing this for months now.
Saudi Arabia's foreign minister said this weekend that it's a very good idea.
And the Qataris said today that it's also a very good idea.
This means that they are already doing it.
And now they're going to, I don't know, you cannot probably have a major landing of cargo planes filled with tanks in northern Syria, and we're going to have the next best thing, which is like in Pakistan, Afghanistan in the early 80s, you know, light weapons all over the place and lots of missiles, of course.
So expect this civil war in Syria to go on for quite a while.
The regime is digging in.
Still, they have Damascus and Aleppo with them and the top of the army.
So it's a total polarization.
And they are trying to find an excuse with this humanitarian corridor, which means if they get this humanitarian corridor, which Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Britain and France are pressing for at the moment, and of course the State Department via Hillary, then this could be the beginning of a remixed Libya.
Yeah, of course.
That's the line right there.
Exactly.
What happened in Libya was they said, you know, we have to have this no-fly zone because without it, people aren't secure.
But they're saying as long as he's in power, they're not secure.
So he's got to be removed.
It's just the next step of thinking right there.
Exactly.
And the humanitarian corridor, the only thing that is missing actually is a few blue helmets, in fact, because there is already a corridor between southern Turkey and northern Syria from that NATO command and control center in Hatay province near the border to the towns near the border and all the way to Homs and Hama.
This is one of the corridors that it's already on, smuggling light weapons and all that.
The other corridor is via Lebanon, from Lebanon, and then goes all the way to the suburbs of Damascus.
So if they have this humanitarian corridor, then the stage is set for an intervention.
And Russia vocally and China silently, they know that.
So expect a major conflagration.
What do you make of the Secretary of State saying if we give them weapons, we might, which I thought I already knew that they're already giving them weapons, but if we do that, they could very well end up in the hands of people that Ayman al-Zawahiri would want them to end up in the hands of.
It proves once again, remember the, you know, Osama Bin Laden working with Muslim Bosnians in the 90s?
It's exactly the same thing.
Remember the beginning?
Yeah, Hillary's old friends, the Mujahideen.
Exactly, it's exactly the same thing.
And of course, working with the Al-Qaeda-linked people from the Libyan-Islamic fighting groups in Libya last year.
So why would she slip and say that?
She seems to be very seriously recommending against her own policy here.
No, they don't even care anymore, Scott.
In my opinion, now it's open.
After Libya, and now that the stakes are so high with the interlinked Syria-Iran offensive, they don't even care to disguise it anymore.
And, you know, they can always say, look, we're being supported by the Arabs themselves.
Arabs is not the 22-member Arab League.
Arabs is the House of Saud and the Emir of Qatar.
And that's it.
You know, supported by al-Jazeera, don't forget that.
And the House of Saud, supported by Al-Rabiya and everybody else.
All right, we're going to leave it there.
Thanks very much for your time as always, Pepe.
Appreciate it.
Thanks very much, Scott.
Talk to you soon.
Talk to you soon.
Bye-bye.
Cheers.
All right, everybody, that was a great Pepe.
That's where atimes.com.
Read what he writes there.
