Welcome back to the show, this is Anti-War Radio, I'm Scott Horton, and first up on the show today is Pepe Escobar from the Asia Times Online, his latest piece is Syria and Turkey's Phantom War.
Welcome back Pepe, how are you doing?
Hey Scott, great to be with you again.
Good, thanks for staying up late, I know it's probably really dark wherever in the world you are right now.
No, it's 1.30am in Hong Kong, but I'm waiting for the Euros, so after the interview I'm going to a pub to watch Spain against Portugal, so we're cool.
Okay, good.
Well, thanks for not getting too drunk until later.
Alright, so, Syria and Turkey's Phantom War, why in the world were the Turks flying their F4s so close to Syria that they got one shot out of the sky in the first place, could you tell me that, you think?
Yes, I'll give it a short version, they are not dumb, obviously, it was a provocation, but it was a measured provocation, they were calculating the odds, they want, in fact, to test Syrian defenses, anti-artillery defenses, and this is what they did, in fact.
They were ready to sacrifice an old plane, these F4s, they were built in the 60s, they were very active during the Vietnam War, Israel had a bunch of these F4s, they stopped using them in 2003-2004, Turkey still has a bunch of them, they use for reconnaissance missions, so the story that Davutoglu, the Turkish foreign minister, was spreading these past few days is absolutely ridiculous, and this is what I tried to point out in my article, and a few others in global media also tried to do the same thing, he said, no, this was a solo flight, it was a recon mission, maybe we entered the airspace for a few minutes, but then we left, and when we were in international waters, our plane was shot, complete bullshit, it's not what happened, including there are witnesses that saw two F4s flying in Syrian waters, one of them only came back to Turkish territory, and this recon mission, I am absolutely sure this was coordinated between the Turks and NATO.
First of all, NATO, they have a command and control center, this is something we have already talked about, Scott, months ago, in Iskenderun, in Hatay province, in southern Turkey, near the Syrian border, this is where they are training a lot of the, let's say a few strands of the Free Syrian Army, it's a command and control center, it's a weaponizing center, there are CIA over there, this is something that my friend Sybil Edmonds has already talked about and proved months ago as well, and obviously, we are in an escalation mood for months now, it's not going to go through the UN Security Council, everybody knows that, the Turks, the Saudis, the Israelis, the Americans, and the Europeans, so what is the plan B or plan C in fact?
Some sort of provocation, a lot of people have been saying, no, this is probably a Gulf of Tonkin, not yet, this was, let's say, a pre-Gulf of Tonkin, the next one, or if you wait a little, what, a few weeks or so, or maybe the height of summer, there could be another provocation.
But the Syrians are also very much aware, they can, in fact, if they try something like this, if they have other aircraft over their territory, they have to be very, very careful, because now NATO, they are on the verge of invoking Article 5, this is when an attack on one of the NATO members is an attack on all the 27 members of NATO.
They invoked Article 4 this Tuesday when they met in Brussels, but, very, very important, the Turks said, Erdogan said on the record that now Syria is a clear and imminent danger, I'm quoting him.
And this is one step, the next step will be to invoke any sort of skirmish, in fact, in the border, they can invoke Article 5, say, oh, we were attacked by Syria, Syria attacked NATO, and you know what's going to be next, right?
It's a horror story, but the developments in the next few weeks, in the next two months could be absolutely horrendous, because now we, even Assad and his government, they already know it is civil war, and the Annan peace plan is absolutely pointless.
Everybody knows that the only thing that NATO, the US, the Saudis, and the Qataris, and even Israel, in fact, they start rumbling about it, it's regime change, nothing's going to change that.
So what's the incentive for the Assad government to sit down at a table with the NATO rebels, with the Free Syrian Army, with the Qatari mercenaries, and discuss some sort of agreement?
There is none.
So now it's war, too cool, it's horrible, and it's going to get much worse.
All right, now, a few things there, Daniel McAdams at Lew Rockwell's blog is pointing out this New York Times piece, the New York Times piece is Turkey Seeks NATO Backing in Syria Dispute, and I guess toward the end of the article, even the Americans are saying that they don't believe the Turks' story about what happened here, because of all the unanswered questions, including why Turkey was flying an unarmed reconnaissance plane so close to the Syrian border.
That's American officials talking to the New York Times there.
Yeah, it's true.
So maybe they didn't coordinate it with NATO, and the State Department guys aren't even bright enough to keep their mouths shut about this.
They actually even say, on the political level, we're taking the Turks at their word.
Yeah, but Scott, there are different levels of NATO.
When you go to their headquarters in Mons near Brussels, you know, the people who really rule the whole thing, of course, they are in D.C.
But then you have sub-commanders, local commanders, NATO commanders in NATO bases, like in southern Italy, and these guys who are in southern Turkey, in Iskenderun, and the command of Incirlik base in Turkey, which is the huge NATO base in Turkey, it's one of the largest military bases in the world, in fact.
It's very possible that this plane came from Incirlik, and it's also very possible that this decision was made in Incirlik.
Okay, let's try to find out about Syrian anti-terror capabilities.
It could be that this leaked to the New York Times, this statement is just them trying to give themselves plausible deniability.
Exactly, exactly.
Anyway, I just like the fact that they are referring to the obvious untruth of the story.
But as you said, to get to the real heart of this thing, what you said there about Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 of the NATO agreement, Chapter 4 says if something happens, we have to hold a meeting.
Chapter 5 says if something happens, everybody else is obligated to go to war on our behalf, like America invoked Article 5 after September 11.
You're totally right, and we are at the stage between 4 and 5, as we speak.
They just want another spark so they can invoke 5, because all the players know this is not going to go through the UN.
So they need to find some kind of excuse to mount an operation bypassing the UN, so it's going to be yet another NATO war.
But there are a lot of people inside NATO, especially the Europeans, in fact, and a lot of Americans, I agree as well, they think this is absolute fallacy, because the unintended consequences must be horrendous.
Well, you know what, when I read that there were attacks in Damascus on some of the higher level military people and that kind of thing...
Yeah, I was reading about that five minutes ago, absolutely, yeah, yeah.
Now, does that mean that JSOC and the CIA are running this thing at the front like they did in Libya right now, already?
No, no, once again they are leading from behind.
Alright, well, I'm sorry, hang on, we've got to take this stupid commercial break, we'll be right back with Pepe Escobar from the Asia Times, everybody.
Okay, thank you.
Alright, y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio, I'm Scott Horton and I'm talking with Pepe Escobar.
He's the author of Globalistan.
And Obama does Globalistan.
That slut.
Asiatimes.com, Syria and Turkey's phantom war.
And so, there's so much stuff to go over here in the short amount of time that we have.
First of all, it seems to me like, aside from the specifics of this particular war, they're really working hard on the precedent, just like in the case of Kosovo, not just like, somewhat like in the case of Kosovo, or in Libya, where they have said, any civil war, once a conflict in a country, probably the way Hillary would say it, you could probably find a quote like this, when it rises to the level of a civil war, that's how you know it's okay for us to intervene, as the globalocrats and whatever, the American empire, in democrat days they have to have a baby blue fig leaf, right?
Or at least a NATO one, a multilateral one.
But if something is a civil war, then that itself is the costus belli.
So if she can have the CIA arm up some rebels, any rebels, enough to the point where they actually can blow something up near the capital somewhere, then, blam, then it's on.
That's all they need.
Any more?
Exactly.
And on top of it, Scott, this has been institutionalized by NATO itself.
When they had their summit in Lisbon in late 2010, this is what they're going to do for the next 10 years, until 2020.
And it's part of the NATO charter, they're going to intervene in everything, not only civil wars, but if there's something related to climate change, sooner or later we're going to have NATO troops on the ground.
In fact, if you go to the NATO website, you can read parts of this NATO 2020 program.
It's absolutely crazy.
It's post Orwell, in fact, and it's been implemented all over.
Sometimes with direct intervention, sometimes in the case of the US, where they don't need NATO or when NATO is not available, like in South America, look at the recent coup in Paraguay.
It's hard to tell this.
Yeah, I wrote a piece about Al Jazeera.
They haven't published yet because they're very slow at Al Jazeera, so should come out the next few days.
I make a comparison between Paraguay and Egypt, in fact, what people in Egypt can learn from Paraguay.
Basically, that's if they want real democracy, they're going to have to wait 10 years, 15, 20 or even more.
And this coup in Paraguay was basically organized directly with the US embassy in Asuncion.
It's proved.
And there is a WikiLeaks cable from 2009 that was sent to Washington saying, look, they are already plotting sooner or later the conditions are not good at the moment or sooner or later they will be.
Well, three years later, what do we got?
A coup in Paraguay.
So you know, the whole thing is about controlling in terms of the Arab Spring, controlling the direction of the Arab Spring in terms of South America, trying to restrain some of these progressive governments, at least in the smaller countries.
Don't forget there was an attempted coup in Ecuador against Korea two years ago.
It didn't work.
Now this one in Paraguay apparently is working, even though everybody, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Venezuela, they say we're not going to recognize this piece of shit government.
But you know, anyway, the coup is already a fair complete.
So it is a global picture.
Even when NATO is not present, like in the case of South America, the agenda is the same.
We have to maintain the empire as it is.
If there is some rumblings in the Arab world, for instance, we can contain the rumblings in Egypt.
But most of all, we will contain the rumblings in the Persian Gulf, because these are our bastards over there, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, etc.
Hey man, can you tell me about the relationship between the real American government, the national security state, and the Muslim Brotherhood halfway through 2012 here, because I got some historical stuff from Robert Dreyfus' book, for example, but I want to know about right now.
Yeah, yeah.
In Juan Cole's book, there are a few pages in Juan Cole's book, Engaging the Muslim World, the one he talks about it, and I strongly recommend it.
Okay, I have that book around here, actually, somewhere.
Yeah.
If you want to go deeper, you have to read the Arab press and, sorry, Arab authors.
And the best pieces are not translated into English, unfortunately.
So I would recommend for a lot of our listeners, go to Al-Akbar English.
That's an independent website based in Beirut, and they're doing fantastic stuff, and they are translating some longer pieces directly from Arabic to English, and they are getting deeper into the historical transformation of the Muslim Brotherhood as well.
In my view nowadays, the most important thing is that Muslim Brotherhood became an extension of Qatari foreign policy.
In fact, Qatari foreign policy nowadays means supporting the Muslim Brotherhood everywhere.
So they had a major victory in Egypt.
Now an Islamist is the president of the most important Arab nation.
So the mood in Doha is exuberant, of course.
But they won't stop there.
They want the same thing, guess where, in Syria.
They want an equal government in Syria.
That's why they're weaponizing these rebels.
And in Libya, these people, Libya nowadays, as we know, is a mega, is a beyond failed state nowadays, after the NATO war.
The Muslim Brotherhood is also sprinkled in power between Tripoli and Benghazi.
Qatar is the new superpower.
I was in Doha two weeks ago, Scott, and it was crazy.
I was trying to find somebody to talk face-to-face, off the record, about the weaponizing of the rebels in Syria.
I couldn't find nobody to talk to me about it, nobody, absolutely nobody.
I only had conversations with diplomats over beers watching football games, you know, and they'll say, yeah, yeah, yeah, but you cannot confirm this.
Nobody will talk to you on the record about this, although everybody knows, everybody knows in the Middle East, and everybody knows it in the US as well.
So yes, Qatar is the new superpower, and they're using the Muslim Brotherhood all over the place, from North Africa to the Middle East.
This is the craziest thing, in fact.
We know Dan McAdams, over at Lew Rockwell's blog again, he reminded me of this article by Seymour Hersh a few years back, where I think this is where he first wrote about American support for Jandala, which turned out to really be Mossad support for Jandala, I guess, if that's not exactly the same thing.
Anyway, the redirection, and I think more or less the story went, they realized that they really screwed up with the Iraq war, and given Iraq to the Shiites, to the Dawa Party, Supreme Islamic Council types, and so in order to try to correct that mistake, they were going to realign back again with Saudi Arabia and their agenda.
And so in that case, that means, you know, I guess, you can see why they prefer to use, or why they don't mind using jihadis to try to overthrow the government in Syria or Libya, but they had a good thing going with Mubarak there, other than he was really old, and it seems like they really screwed that up, as far as from the American point of view, no?
Or is the Muslim Brotherhood really just going to go right along anyway?
No, but the thing is, the US didn't want the Muslim Brotherhood, but the minute the Obama administration told Mubarak to go, they already knew, or at least, you know, the sinking minds in Washington already knew, that inevitably, the Muslim Brotherhood would become the most important political force in Egypt, when they made that decision early on.
And you remember that they didn't make that decision early on.
Like Obama and Hillary, until the last minute, they wanted Omar Sheik, or torture Suleiman, to succeed Mubarak.
Only when there was a fait accompli in Tahrir Square, the official American position suddenly changed.
And this was after Erdogan, obviously, for two or three weeks had been saying, no, that's it, Mubarak is gone, and the street is going to win.
So the Americans, in fact, there is no concerted Obama administration policy vis-à-vis the Arab Spring, apart from two things.
Number one, whatever happens, keep Israel intact, protect Israel.
Number two, keep the oil flowing.
We don't care about anything else.
That's the only thing they care, in fact.
But the problem is, in terms of political realignments, I'm sure people in Washington, the decision-makers in Washington, look at Muslim Brotherhood and Skaffan, and say, shit, our candidate, which was Shafik, the military candidate, we bet on the wrong horse, he lost.
So now we have to live with this Hamas-style president.
And he's not.
He's been an obscure cadre until yesterday, you know.
The real candidate couldn't run.
Hey, can you give me another ten-minute segment here?
The Muslim Brotherhood, he'll be controlled by the people who really rule the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.
And it's a very complicated thing, because there are at least five different strands of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt.
Which one is going to control Morsi?
Nobody knows for sure.
It's too early to tell.
One thing we do know is Qatar is going to be running Egypt's foreign policy, sort of, from now on.
This is something we already know.
And you know, if they could, they could buy half of Egypt, and in fact they could feed half of the Egyptian population who lives under the poverty line, you know.
When you go to Qatar, I went to Qatar from Europe, from Paris and from London.
They bought half of central Paris already.
They are buying half of central London, parts of the city as well.
So in terms of a superpower nowadays, Qatar controls everybody with money, with weapons, and with ideology as well, in terms of the Middle East.
And the Saudis are starting to see the writing on the wall, because Saudi Arabia is losing localized battles.
So the big localized battle for Saudi Arabia is still, let's smash Iran.
But there are not many people who are on board on this, apart from the U.S.
Nobody wants to smash Iran.
People may want regime change in Iran, but they want Iran as a player, first of all because of those huge oil and gas reserves.
So multinational interests want to go there, exploit, and profit from these oil and gas reserves, no matter, doesn't matter which regime is in place.
But Saudi Arabia, no, they want to smash Iran as the regional power.
It's absolutely impossible.
Qatar, no.
Qatar is a neighbor of Iran, and they say, look, we have to coexist with them at least.
And if there are Islamists in power in the Middle East that are aligned with Qatar, the relationship between Qatar and Iran becomes easier, in fact.
And that's why Morsi said in the beginning, I want the relationship between Tehran and Cairo to go back to normal.
This is the Muslim Brotherhood, Qatar, speaking.
Immediately afterwards, I think a few hours later, there was a denial, which was probably organized by who?
The military.
SCAF.
That is, the American allies, our bastards over there.
No, no, no, no, no.
We don't want to normalize relations yet.
This is a very complicated thing.
So it's totally crazy.
There is a battle now between Saudi Arabia and Qatar over there.
There is a battle between some NATO interests and some American interests vis-a-vis local interests, which is the Turks, because the Turks want to win this war in Syria, which is a completely suicidal mission, as I see it, because if they think they're going to have a Sunni moderate regime in Syria, just like the one that they have in Turkey, they're completely mistaken.
It's going to be something really, really hardcore, and it's going to be more or less aligned with Qatar, which is financing.
You know, they are giving their money to the hardcore Muslim Brotherhood, and even some Salafi jihad is in the mix as well.
So it's not going to be what Turkey believes, you know, or tries to be, their wishful thinking for a sort of puppet state in Syria.
And on top of it, that would help them to solve the Kurdish problem.
So you're right, you know, when we start to see the possible ramifications, it's absolutely nuts.
But there's no going back now, no?
Well, but see, that's the whole thing, is how well is going forward working?
Because, well, and this is where we left off at that first commercial break back there, was, who's running this war and do they have a prayer?
You know, I'd say if we went back a year, you were telling me that, hey, look, as long as the middle class, the merchant class, Sunni Arabs in Syria are still Assad supporters, and they still remain in the coalition with all the different Christians and Druze and Kurds and everyone else who supports the Shiites and the Alawites in power there, and, you know, the Assad dictator's coalition of minority groups there, then it's as simple as that.
He's still going to remain in power.
That's enough.
But then, obviously, there are, NATO is arming, and Qatar and Saudi Arabia and everybody else is arming up these rebels, whoever all they are, and they're pushing hard for regime change.
So how long is it going to take for them to get it?
Because I agree with you that there's no going back, and Lord knows there's enough stores of weapons in North America for us to transfer over there that eventually we can burn that whole country down.
But how long is it going to take?
And then, once Assad actually falls, and the government in Damascus actually falls, then is there hope for anything but a long-term civil war, you know, civilian-on-civilian war in that country for years as the power rebalances, or what?
Exactly.
If the regime falls, I see a Lebanon in the 70s scenario.
It could be a long, drawn-out, very bloody civil war involving all the communities, because then it will be the Sunnis against everybody else.
The Kurds will want something out of it, probably an autonomy in Syrian Kurdistan, which the Kurds in Turkey will love it, of course, and they will support them.
But I mean, are we seeing a lot of people switch sides?
Is the balance of the war turning at all, or is this thing going to take... how long do you think?
This is going to be long and drawn-out and bloody, Scott.
Before the regime even falls out of the bottle, there's no Kofi Annan cabinet in the UN solution.
Forget it.
Forget it.
By the way, I saw Kofi Annan speak a month ago in Sweden.
He was speaking about his plan, and it was pathetic to listen to him, you know, face-to-face.
He was trying to disguise his helplessness, but even putting the most positive spin you can imagine, you could see how tragic it was, and absolutely at that end.
And on top of it, he evaded our questions, you know.
We had to send our questions in advance.
In the end, he refused to answer any questions, so it's pathetic.
Well, now, is there any kind of reluctance?
It seems like maybe there's got to be some reluctance on the part of the Americans to really escalate this thing much further, where they're going to have to take much more responsibility for it.
Is it possible they learned something from Iraq or something up there?
Exactly.
At the end of my piece, I said, who's wagging the dog here?
I think Turkey, because Turkey is now so deeply involved, and there's no turning back for them, because the president, Gul, Erdogan, over and over again, every day, they have been calling for regime change.
And as far as they're concerned, Assad is already gone.
So for them, there's no turning back.
NATO is still there, okay.
We still don't know what we're going to do yet, because this is going to be a different war.
There are air defenses over there.
Our planes could be shot down.
This is not going to be a walk in the park, just like Iraq and Libya.
And the Americans, they are in the middle of a presidential campaign, absolute folly to start a war.
And most Americans would say, what the hell are we doing in Syria?
It's absolutely pointless.
You were telling us until yesterday that Iran is the bogeyman, so now it's Syria.
You know, it doesn't make sense.
And you know, I was watching the numbers the other day.
Most Americans don't even care about foreign policy this year.
They want the economy.
The debate in the U.S. is about economy.
Nobody wants another war.
Nobody wants to discuss foreign policy this year.
So obviously, there is relevance in Washington.
The problem is Turkey.
Because Turkey is a member of NATO, they will try to drag NATO into this war.
So then we're going to have to question the decision makers in the Pentagon, much more than the decision makers in Brussels, because they will have the last word.
They have the equipment, they have the intelligence, and they have the military capability to do a lightning strike against Syria.
But nobody wants to do that.
That's the problem.
Yeah, well, it seems like what they're really headed towards is another Bay of Pigs type thing, you know, or another like the Great Betrayal in the Desert after Desert Storm in 1991, where they promise a bunch of people to, you know, here, same thing really for back in the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, right?
They promise the Hmong tribesmen or whoever it is that they're promising, you know, everything that they'll need, and then leave them high and dry, because ultimately, we're not really willing to commit to you like we said we were going to.
This is what they promised to Massoud in Afghanistan in 2001.
When I talked to Massoud before the 9-11 thing, he said that, look, the Americans have been promising us equipment, intelligence, weapons for years, and there's nothing.
And the Taliban, they took over everything, and I'm left with 5% of the country here fighting with my old Russian tanks and my old Russian helicopters.
How long can I last?
Well, he lasted another two weeks.
He lasted another two weeks, then he was killed, you know.
Yeah, and these are the people that were promising, well, look, these are the people who eventually we have to leave them high and dry, and there's going to be hell to pay for them.
They ought to start buying their plane tickets now if they're smart.
But yeah, same thing, same thing all over the place, and it looks like the same thing with the rebels, because what are they going to do, march the army in there?
I guess we are talking about, you know, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama here.
They're pretty bloodthirsty, those two, and they don't possess much wisdom between them, I don't think, either.
No, they don't, and on top of it, they don't know anything about war.
They don't know what war entails, they don't know the suffering related to war.
They have no clue.
They really have no clue.
You know, if they read close of it, maybe that was it when they were in college.
But that's it, you know.
Well, now, back to the war on the ground in Syria.
You said before, like I was mentioning there, you know, if Aleppo and Damascus still support the government, then it will stand, do they?
And the all-important, you know, upper-class Sunnis, are they still in the government coalition, or are they now on the side of the rebellion?
Is that all too broad to say?
That's a very good question, Scott, because until, I would say, two months ago, more or less, they were still-there was sort of a monolithic support for the-if not for the regime, at least for the status quo.
But now, with the weaponizing of the rebels, and the fact that the rebels nowadays infested with mercenaries, and also infested with Salafi jihadis mounting car bombings in the suburbs of Damascus, or now in Damascus itself, Assad is right when he says it is a civil war.
And the civil war, which was-apparently would be contained in northern Syria, in that corridor from the Turkish-Syrian border to Hula and Homs, now it's spread to Damascus as well.
And with all these funds coming from Saudi Arabia and Qatar, different funds, different routes, but still going to more or less the same people, and the fact that they are bold enough to mount attacks in Damascus itself, the people like-and I'll give an example.
The bazaaris in the old city in Damascus, or the people who do trade with China and Russia, with all the parts of the Middle East, the middle bourgeoisie or the upper bourgeoisie, let's put it this way, they said, look, what do we want now?
We cannot trust this regime to defend us anymore.
And now it's war.
Who are we going to support?
If we support these so-called rebels, tomorrow we're going to be another Libya.
They look at Libya and they say, look, maybe our future is going to be Libya 2, 2.0.
So now that-I wouldn't say that they are defecting or that they are abandoning the regime.
Now they are puzzled, because they didn't expect this thing to escalate so quickly, like it did, especially over the past two months.
Yeah, well, and you know, I really feel sorry for the Syrians.
It's not fair to them that they can't have a revolution without, you know, being the sock puppets of the Americans on this issue.
You know what I mean?
They're actually, if they're doing, you know, what's right in their own circumstance, overthrowing a police state, never mind necessarily for the Sega argument, exactly what would come next otherwise.
But there are all these different foreign powers competing for what's going to happen in their country.
And whatever it is that they do, they're favoring some of their enemies.
There's nothing they can do about that.
And in fact, you know, Syrian civilians, millions of Syrian civilians, now they're caught in a crossfire.
They, you know, they have no, absolutely no say on what's going on.
This is not an Arab Spring.
This is, this is different kinds of foreign intervention and weaponized foreign intervention in parts of their own country.
Their president says it's civil war.
You can also say it's multiple foreign, simultaneous foreign interventions as well.
So the spoils, who's going to have the spoils?
Will it be Turkey?
Will it be Saudi Arabia?
Will it be Qatar?
Will it be the three of them?
Will it be the Europeans?
Will it be the Americans leading from behind?
Nobody knows.
But it won't be the Syrians.
And when you see this, I was reading the other declaration, which was, I think it was Hillary Clinton's two days ago, once again, defending the interests of the Syrian people.
Give me a fucking break.
Nobody's thinking about the Syrian people nowadays.
They're only thinking about, okay, are we going to take over that country and prevent the Russians from having a naval military base in the Mediterranean?
I mean, you could draw a cartoon of one of her aides poking her in the ribs and reminding her to say that, because most of the time they don't even pretend, as Barack Obama told Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic, oh yeah, this would be a great way to weaken Iran.
No mention of the plight of Syrian civilians whatsoever when he's talking with Jeffrey Goldberg, the prison guard.
Of course not.
And Syrian civilians, Iranian civilians, and by the way, Paraguayan civilians who elected to duly elected Democratic, the deposed president last week, nobody cared.
But this is something that I would like to develop later on in a longer piece for the next few weeks.
It's the compact between this advanced militarization, Robocop style of the whole planet led by NATO and the militarized way that the financial system is basically breaking up countries all over the world as well.
And these things are totally interconnected.
And it's absolutely horrible, because in terms of civil society as we know it and Western parliamentary democracy as we know it and the sovereign state as we know it, these, you know, these players are gone, smashed.
You know, we, all of us as civilians, we're totally fucked, to put it bluntly, you know.
And I don't see a way out.
And in fact, in this way I disagree a little bit with my friend Zizek, you know, at least.
He's always coming back to Marx and Hegel and his wonderful metaphors to explain it all.
But he's still an optimist.
I am not.
You know, if you look at what's going on around it, and even now with this renewed offensive in Latin America, like there was an idea of turning Latin America into a laboratory for different kinds of coups that are not exactly traditional military coups, but they are so-called democratic coups, or what a Brazilian political scientist, turning countries into democracies, you know, democracies, dictatorships, which is what they're trying to do in Paraguay nowadays.
This is a lab thing.
This is an experiment that they will try to apply again in Ecuador.
They will try it in Venezuela.
They cannot do it in Brazil, because Brazil is too big, and now it's too powerful and it's sitting at the G20.
But for the smaller countries, this is what they're going to try to do as well.
And in the Middle East, okay, if we bet on the wrong horse, which is the case of Shafiq in Egypt, even if an Islamist is elected, but, you know, the military will be in the background.
They'll be ruling everything.
They can alter the constitution.
They can, in fact, promote a military coup even before a presidential election, and nobody says anything.
All right, Pepe.
We're over time, man.
I want to thank you very much for your time, and you know what, I want to ask you more, not just about, you know...
I'm sorry to be so pessimistic, Scott.
Oh, no, that's okay, man.
I'm right there on your wavelength, your very same wavelength on that.
But I want to ask you, probably by email, to recommend me a bunch of great places where I ought to be reading about the empire's policy in Latin America, because I don't know the first thing about it, and I can't just interview you, you know, twice a week or three times a week every week.
I've got to diversify.
But I sure would like to know what you're reading in terms of, you know, if you have any suggestions of English language, Latin American press for me.
I do.
The problem is most of these sites are in Spanish, but you can find a lot of good stuff in English as well.
All right, good.
Well, we're going to talk about that, and, well, anyway, I'm going to keep interviewing you about what you write for the Asia Times.
So there you go.
Thanks very much for your time on the show, as always.
It's great to talk to you.
Thanks very much, Scott.
Always a great pleasure.
Take care.
All right, you too.
All right, everybody, that's Pepe Escobar.
We'll be right back after this.
