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It's Pepe Escobar from the Asia Times, one of my favorites and probably one of y'all's too.
Welcome to the show, Pepe.
How are you doing?
Thanks for having me.
It's always a pleasure.
Oh, you sound like you're very far away, Pepe.
Where are you?
I'm in Brazil at the moment, but it's crazy because I should have been in Cairo, but this time I covered...
Yeah, we're all Egyptians tonight.
...political...
I'm in Sao Paulo in Brazil.
So it's what's crazy because these last 18 days, I was living in Al Jazeera time, actually.
I was in Cairo all the time.
Right.
And the way I saw it, this was a mix of 1789, the French Revolution applied to the Middle East, and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
It's correcting a historical mistake, or it's the beginning of a correction of a historic mistake.
You remember when the West promised the Arab nation that the Arab nation would be a goal in the early 20th century, and then France and England, they divided the Middle East in small countries, like drawing the borders of Transjordan or the previous greater Syria or Iraq, like practically in napkins.
And they have been living with this trauma for almost 100 years.
And then, obviously we know what happened after the Second World War was decolonization, but in fact the Arab world was recolonized all over again.
And I'm trying to talk from the point of view of the Arab streets, from what I learned in Egypt, in Jordan, in Syria, and in Iraq especially.
And nowadays, maybe this is the first day of the correction of this historical mistake.
From now on, they can be proud of themselves and they finally can reclaim their dignity, especially in Egypt, which is not only, as we know, one of the cradles of civilization, but the heart of the Arab nation.
So, when you look at those images from Cairo, if you know a little bit about the Middle East, this is what they are feeling.
It's unbelievable.
Well, and the parallels with the Eastern Bloc seem pretty strong as well.
When you say, Pepe, as far as these people aren't just suffering under dictatorships across this region, but they are suffering under dictatorships backed by the foreign superpower that supports them.
And so, you know, you mentioned 1989, it seems the parallel here is just way too close for anyone to ignore.
The precedents set, the dominoes are falling.
You know, and the key point that many, many Egyptian journalists, bloggers, lawyers, and liberal professionals are making is that we have been following the foreign policy of the white man.
And sometimes they put you like this, straight, it's the white man.
You know, it's us in the West.
It's not what Egypt would have in terms of an independent foreign policy.
It would be something completely different.
It would be integrating the Arab world.
It would be really democratic.
Now, the conversation with Israel would be on an equal footing, not as a slave talking to a master.
So we were going to see that if, if no, when Egypt is going to have a really democratic government, maybe in one year's time, if we follow this more or less roadmap in terms of having a mixed military, civilian transitional government for the next few months, revising the constitution, submitting a new constitution to a popular referendum, and then parliamentary elections and presidential elections.
And obviously, that's the end of that absolutely stupid clash of civilization, end of history, male Hegelian bullshit of the Fulayamas of this world.
This is over.
This is gone.
Yeah, well, it seems like the precedent has been set, Pepe.
The precedents really, it started in Tunisia.
The people of Egypt looked at the revolution, the fleeing of Ben Ali, the dictator there, and said, hey, we can do that.
And yet now with Egypt setting the standard, if the Egyptians can overthrow that most powerful puppet state in the region, we've already seen the lesson being played out in Jordan, in Syria, in Iran, in Saudi Arabia, in Yemen.
Not all of these American-backed torture dictatorships, I guess, a couple of exceptions.
But there have been protests spreading all across the Middle East.
But, you know, what I especially wanted to ask you about, with your expertise on this matter, is the stance.
Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan up there, the countries that they seem all important for some reason, and yet they go mostly uncovered.
How do you think that those dictatorships are going to be able to stand up to the newly informed spirit of their people, that they can actually do this?
That's a fabulous question, because we don't know how deep is the connection between what's going on in the Arab world and what's going on in the Central Asian steppes.
As much as there are a lot of Islamic trends and Islamic networks, some of them underground, in terms of culture, what happened, for instance, in Cairo and Damascus, or even in Yemen or Northern Africa as a whole.
For someone who lives in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan, or the steppes of Kazakhstan, or the cotton fields of Uzbekistan, or the oil fields of Turkmenistan, it's too remote.
So I'm very curious to see how this is going to play out in the next few months.
Yeah, everybody's got Al Jazeera, Pepe.
Everybody's got Al Jazeera.
Exactly.
Yes, everybody's got Al Jazeera.
But look, everybody's got Al Jazeera in English.
Very few of them speak Arabic.
Very few.
It's a minority population in Central Asia that speaks Arabic.
The minority population is linked to groups like, I'll give an example, the Islamic movement of Uzbekistan, affiliated with the Taliban.
Some of them speak Arabic, but not all of them.
And they're not going to watch Al Jazeera English.
And obviously the local networks, they won't be 24 hours a day showing what was happening in Cairo.
So it's too early to tell.
But one thing we can tell already from the point of view of American foreign policy, it's going to be much, much harder now, for instance, for the White House, State Department, to defend someone like Islam Karimov in Uzbekistan.
Right.
Or for that matter, the Kings Abdullah in Jordan and Saudi Arabia, right?
Not exactly.
We were talking about Central Asia, you're right.
But if we go back...
Right, I was disagreeing and saying, yeah, for that matter.
How can you defend the House of Saud?
Yes, it will continue to be defended because the two pillars of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East still stand.
Egypt, because of oil and because of 1979 Camp David Accords, and Saudi Arabia because of the strategic oil agreement with the U.S.
But we cannot discard the possibility that the young people, connected people in Riyadh and Jeddah, who were watching Al Jazeera and I got a lot of reports that everybody now is going on Facebook in Saudi Arabia and Twitter because of what happened in Cairo.
Sooner or later, or maybe in one year or two years, there's going to be a street revolution also in the streets of the House of Saud.
You know, the appropriated Arabian land in the name of one family.
Yeah, well, there already have been some protests in Saudi Arabia and, of course, Yemen, Jordan and Iraq this week.
It's going to continue to spread, I think, with the glorious precedent set by the people of Egypt tonight.
I'm sorry we're all out of time.
We're going to have to leave it there.
But I want to thank you very much for your time and your insight on the show.
It's always great to talk to you, Pepe.
Thanks, Scott.
This is a day that we'll remember forever.
You're right about that, no doubt.
All right, y'all, that is Pepe Escobar, writer for The Asia Times.
He's the author of the books Globalistan and Obama Does Globalistan.
Very insightful stuff always from him.
I want to thank all of y'all for listening to the show tonight.
This has been Antiwar Radio.
It airs every Friday from 630 to 7.
And all the archives of all my interviews from all my shows are at Antiwar.com/radio.
