Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
Oh no, and you know what?
I really screwed up.
I'm in trouble now.
I was supposed to interview Ali Gharib right now, but somehow I got it in my head I was supposed to interview Pepe Escobar right now.
Which means I may have screwed myself out of both of these interviews, but I hope not.
I'm gonna roll the dice right now.
Pepe, are you on the phone here?
Hello?
Hey, are you there?
Uh, yeah.
Hey man, I'm sorry.
I hope I didn't inconvenience you too bad.
I think I called you an hour early.
Uh, that's not a problem, Scott.
It's cool.
Okay, well, I screwed it up.
Thanks for rolling with it.
No, it's okay.
I'm working at home, so it's no problem.
Alright, well, right on.
Hey listen, basically I told them yesterday, but they wouldn't listen to me.
And then you wrote pretty much everything that I said yesterday and posted it up at the Asia Times.
And it's also running at alternet.org.
It's called, If the U.S. doesn't pull every soldier from Iraq at midnight December 31st, 2011, expect serious trouble.
So, let them have it, Pepe.
Tell us about the end of the American occupation of Iraq.
Well, we wish this would be the end, man.
Uh, in what, seven months from now?
I wonder if the largest U.S. embassy in the world will be void starting from December 31st.
All the trillion dollars in Pentagon investment in all those years in Iraq will suddenly vanish.
So, this is basically wishful thinking.
But if you turn the whole thing to what the Iraqis are saying, they're stressing, and they want to do, that's a completely different story.
So, this is a frontal clash now between the Pentagon and the al-Maliki government.
You cannot alter the sofa without talking to the Texas de-Iraqis.
The problem is the Pentagon interprets the de-Iraqis as the al-Maliki government.
And the Iraqi parliament says, no, the Iraqis are us.
If you want to alter the sofa, it has to go through parliament, and then we'll discuss it.
Probably it won't be approved.
And Sunnis, the Iraqi party, for instance, they are saying, no, it has to go through a popular referendum, actually.
And the original sofa should have been submitted to a popular referendum, and it was not.
So, you know, the clash is set.
So, expect, I would say, weekly missions from the Pentagon going to Baghdad to try to force the al-Maliki government to basically commit suicide.
It's not only Muqtada al-Said, it's not only the Sadrists who will, you know, raise major hell if this sofa is amended.
The Sunnis will also do it.
The green zone will become red if that thing is altered.
So, I wonder who's going to prevail.
Well, here's the thing about all this.
If we go back to 2008, the spring of 2008, Patrick Coburn came out.
I forget if it was in the Independent or at Counterpunch, but he said, hey, guess what, everybody, the Americans are trying to demand 56 permanent bases.
Or was it 58?
I never can remember.
But either way, what happened was Maliki and I interviewed Patrick Coburn over and over through that whole summer and fall and everything.
And what happened was, over and over and over again, Maliki said, nope.
And Bush said, okay, well, how about this many?
And he said, no.
And Bush said, well, how about this many?
And he said, no.
And then he just ran out the clock.
Maliki just ran out the clock.
And it was November 2008.
Bush was on his way out.
He had the sign.
He basically got on bended knee and signed Maliki's thing that said, you know, everybody to their bases by August of 2009, out of the cities and closed down the checkpoints and all that and to their bases.
And then one more year down to 50,000.
And then a year and a half from there down to everybody out.
And as you're saying, without Muqtada al-Sadr, Nouri al-Maliki isn't the prime minister.
So if he wants to stay the prime minister, is it not the case that he's much more reliant on the will of Muqtada al-Sadr than that of Barack Obama in Baghdad?
You're totally right.
If it was not for Muqtada, Yad Alawi would be the head of the current government.
And it's very funny because every time I go to Washington, I bump into Alawi.
He's going to buy a cigar in Georgetown on one of those fancy restaurants.
He's never in Baghdad.
I never saw him in Baghdad in my life.
Well, anyway, so and even the Iraqis are saying, look, no, this has to go through parliament.
And Patrick's story is absolutely correct.
He already knew that two years ago.
The thing is, don't forget something that I didn't mention in my story.
Grand Ayatollah Sistani, he never said anything.
He hasn't said anything about this so far yet.
But if this gets into the Pentagon directly interfering and pressuring Maliki to, you know, a turning point, Grand Ayatollah Sistani will intervene.
I'm absolutely sure about this.
And he'll say, look, this is what we've been saying since 2004, occupation out.
And Muqtada al-Sadr, now that he's reconciliated with Sistani, at least for the past two or three years, he's standing in Qom.
He has the support of the Sistani, I would say, Marjahiya, you know, the top Shiite scholars in Iraq which are respected as the real sources of influence and religion.
So it's the absolute majority of the population.
If you think in terms of the Shiites being now, let's say, between 60 and 70 percent of the population of Iraq, consider that most Sunnis that were affiliated with Abbas or that escaped the civil war, they flew either to Jordan or to Syria, could be as many as 4 million.
So now we're talking about not only the Shiite majority, plus the Sunnis who feel they are marginalized from Iraqi political life, and also once the end of the occupation.
The only people supporting it, like I said before, are the Kurdish military in northern Kurdistan, because they feel that in the battle for Kirkuk, then the military from Baghdad will overpower them.
But this is a major issue, and we don't even know what's going to happen to Kirkuk if that famous referendum will ever take place, in fact.
All right.
Well, now, so for people who aren't familiar with Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, he really is the highest-ranking religious cleric in Shiite Islam, right?
Absolutely he is.
And the major difference between the supreme leader Khamenei in Iran and Ayatollah Sistani, which, by the way, is Iranian.
He was born in the southeast of Iran in the Sistan-Balochistan province, which is basically an enormous desert.
Anyway, the major difference is that Sistani is against the theological system in Iran, which is the ruling of the jurisprudence, what they called velayat-e faqih.
That was invented by Khamenei, in fact, to legitimize a theologian ruling what was a republic.
Well, theoretically still a republic.
And Sistani, basically he keeps away from politics.
He only enters politics.
You probably remember, all the listeners may remember, the famous siege of Najaf in 2004.
Right.
At the same time, the first strike on Fallujah, right?
Absolutely.
So he intervened at the time, and he found a way out that basically saved faith for Muqtada al-Sadr and for the Americans at the same time.
He brokered the compromise.
Of course, not himself directly.
The people around Ayatollah Sistani, under his orders.
And on top of it, in terms of religious power, he is the supreme Shiite religious power.
He's the one who insisted on one-man-one-vote elections.
He said, hey, if you believe in God, go outside and demand one-man-one-vote.
And at that point, the Bremer plan was thrown in the garbage, and I guess the military decided they didn't want to start the war all over again.
They wanted to fight the war on Sistani's side rather than against him.
And so they helped install the Dawah Party and the Supreme Islamic Council and the Sadrists in power in Baghdad and helped them win their civil war.
And so now the question is whether they want to start the war all over again, because apparently the people we've installed in power don't need us that bad and want us out like in the deal.
Exactly.
And it's back to the question of fighting a war in Iraq on two fronts.
You remember in 2004 they were fighting the Sunni guerrillas, which were very well entrenched already in Ramadi and Fallujah, and also fighting the Sadrists.
They were fighting Sunnis and Shiites.
So they were fighting the bulk of Iraqi, you know, average Iraqi workers who are unemployed for that matter.
If they try to do the same thing again in the next eight months, expect for 2012, American electoral year, the Pentagon fighting two fronts, the war all over again eight years later in Iraq against not only the Sadrists but most of the Shiites, I would say at least 90 percent, the Sunni insurgency and Sunni politicians as well.
Nobody wants the West to stay, because they know that the Iraqi ethnic cauldron, let's put it this way, will have to be solved by them.
They don't want a partition of the country.
They want to work with the Kurds, but it's very complicated, because the Kurds want a partition and not Iraqi Kurdistan.
There's the problem of is the Sunni, as the West calls it, insurgency, but it's in fact the guerrilla.
Will it come back after the Americans are gone?
I don't think so, because they don't have enough firepower and no political power for that matter.
Unless, unless those crazy billionaires from the Gulf, which are hardcore Sunni Wahhabis, start financing them all over again.
This is a major if.
We don't know.
But it will have to be solved by Iraqis.
And the U.S. at the same time, they're desperate, because they don't know what's really going on inside Iraq.
And at the same time, they're afraid of what Saudi Arabia may come up with next.
Saudi Arabia already came up with major repression in Bahrain.
They want to take over the Persian Gulf, which they call the Arabian Gulf.
They are practically at an undeclared hot war against Iran, the House of South.
They think that Iran wants to destabilize the whole region.
So the Americans staying is a very, very bad idea, as much as the Americans leaving.
So it all depends, I would say, on what Saudi Arabia will do within the next eight months and beginning of next year.
All right, well, now I want to get back to Kurdistan, because that's so important.
But on the question of Saudi Arabia, well, you know, it's in the WikiLeaks that the king complained, I guess shortly after the invasion, I'm sure he did his complaining before the invasion as well.
But this one quote is from shortly after the invasion.
He says, I don't understand.
You and me and Saddam Hussein, we were all allies in the policy of at all costs contain the Iranian revolution.
And now you've given Iraq to Iran on a golden platter, not even a silver one, but a golden platter.
And so this was, you know, the king's frustration is that Junior had undone Ronald Reagan and his father's policy and helped the Iranians gain power and influence in Iraq and, you know, in spades.
And so now they're in a situation where they have, you know, the beginnings of uprisings and protests in the Shiite parts of Saudi Arabia, which is where all the oil is, incidentally.
And they're helping the Sunni minority king of Bahrain put down the insurrection there.
And as you said, you know, they're making this all about Iran.
The Americans really caused a big problem for the Saudis in terms of Iran.
I wonder what you think that means for the future of Iraq here.
I mean, it seems like right at the time they're kicking us out and they don't need us to maintain their power, at least between Baghdad and Basra.
They have more and more reason to ally with the Iranians against the Saudis.
This could break out into another major kind of proxy war.
Yes.
The proxy war is already on, in fact.
Bahrain, it's the classic case.
These protests have been going on in Bahrain for years, in fact.
There was, if I'm not mistaken, in 1990 there was a major insurrection against the Al-Khalifas.
If you go to Bahrain, you see it for yourself.
You just need an afternoon in Bahrain to see how the local Bahrainis, mostly Shiites, are treated like third-class citizens.
Same as those expat workers from South Asia working in the other emirates, like in Dubai or Abu Dhabi.
It's the same thing.
It is a pre-Islam medieval society, basically.
If you are allied with the Al-Khalifas, if you are part of a small Sunni business minority, or if you are a high-valued expat working in the financial industry, it's okay.
The rest of the people are, you know, less than zero.
Anyway, the thing between Iran and Saudi Arabia is Iran doesn't have expansion in its mind.
Iran wants to be recognized as basically the great regional power.
The problem is they are totally isolated from the Sunni countries, because the Sunnis, they always come back to their same rationalization.
There is a Shiite crescent on the move.
This is completely ridiculous.
In fact, the Saudis would like to drive a wedge between Tehran, Damascus, and Beirut.
This is part of their, there is a Saudi hand in destabilization of Syria, as much as we know that Syria is a hardcore police state.
But there is foreign interference, and this foreign interference is coming from Saudi Arabia.
So in the mind of the House of Saud, if we try to think as the House of Saud nowadays, what do they want to do?
They want to drive this wedge between Tehran, Damascus, and Beirut, which they think would fragilize Hezbollah.
That's not the case, because Hezbollah, they are independent, and they have their own sources apart from Syria.
They can, you know, bring anything they want directly from Iran.
They don't need Syria as a middleman.
And they have to, the House of Saud, they have to resuscitate the myth of the Shiite crescent so they can spook the Europeans and the Americans especially.
But, for instance, they don't spook Turkey.
Why?
Because Turkey, they have, you know, a growing alliance with Iran, and they are not spooked by Saudi Arabia rhetoric.
And the relationships between Turkey and Saudi Arabia, they are not as good as they were, let's say, five, six, ten years ago.
So the whole thing is being rearranged by what's been going on in the great Arab revolt, by the supreme paranoia that has contaminated all the princes in the House of Saud, including King Abdullah, but especially the interior minister who has been there for 40 years, the Hashemites in Jordan, which are also scared of the so-called Shiite crescent.
They were big proponents of Shiite crescent years ago.
And the fact that sooner or later what they repressed in Bahrain will come back.
It's a Freudian thing, you know, return of the repressed.
It will come back in the eastern part of Saudi Arabia, and it will come back in Bahrain sooner or later.
And now that they repressed the protest movement this way, maybe now some people in Bahrain will ask for Iranian help directly, which never happened these past three months.
So in the long run, you know, it's a volcano, it's a Krakatoa proportion ready to explode.
That's the answer here.
Well, and then now back to Kurdistan, because, you know, like Hillary Clinton was saying back when she was running for president, well, at least we'll be able to keep some air bases in Kurdistan.
Of course, if anybody in Iraq, you know, wants the Americans to stay, for their benefit it would be the leaders of the, I forget, the PUK and whatever they're called up there, Barzani and Talabani, those guys.
Yeah, the Talabani-Barzani gang, basically.
Well, and now, you know, I'm thinking of that movie V for Vendetta, where the TV news in the background is saying, yeah, America's war in Kurdistan continues to rage.
Is that how this war is going to break out, with America fighting on the side of Kurdistan against Iraq, and there's the upcoming civil war?
No, this would be completely crazy.
No, it's absolutely, and not even the most gung-ho of neocons surviving inside the Pentagon machine would like that, because you would be at war with most of the Shiites in Baghdad, and obviously Iran would interfere in this case.
That's absolutely out of the question.
Kurdistan, the only solution, I would say a pro-Western solution in Kurdistan, if there was some kind of referendum, and the majority of the population would opt for Kurdistan to be a separate country.
Nobody wants that in the region.
Syria doesn't want it.
They have a lot of Kurds.
Turkey doesn't want it.
They have a lot of Kurds.
And Iran doesn't want it, because northwest Iran is a Kurdish area as well.
So, you know, this should have been resolved, as we should always remember, in the 1920s.
It was not.
So the cancer will be there forever.
There's no possibility of partitioning of Kurdistan.
And most Arabs don't want it.
Only this, I would say, and it's not even the majority of the Talabani, Barzani condominium, I would say at least half want it, and the other half, they don't, because they say, let's keep the way it is.
We deal directly with Turkey, for instance.
We are semi-independent.
We don't pay attention to what Baghdad is doing.
And we live our lives, you know, here in the mountains, very far away from the desert down there, and there's very, very few interactions.
So this status quo will probably prevail in Iraqi Kurdistan.
Well, I guess my worry is just that if Kurdistan is the last place where there's American bases and war breaks out, say, over who rules Kirkuk, for example, then, you know, just by the fact that we're on the Kurdistan side of the line and no longer in Arab Iraq, you know, would seem to be problematic.
And especially with Arab Iraq more and more in the orbit of Iran and working against the interests of our friends the Saudis and so forth, like we're talking about.
Yeah, but Iraq is not in the orbit.
The relations are very good, and there's some trade relations as well.
There are religious relations.
Don't forget those 4 or 5 million Iranian pilgrims who go to Najaf, Karbala, and Baghdad every year.
So trade, you know, the Iranian companies are rebuilding parts of the southern Shiite areas of Iraq.
So this goes way beyond being a satrapy of Iran.
That's not the case.
It's interconnected.
You know, it goes back to at least 3,000 years at the time of Mesopotamia.
It goes back to the time of the Persian Empire, all that.
You cannot erase that with a Western intervention that failed on top of it.
Well, yeah, I'm trying to remember where I learned this.
Maybe from Juan Cole that the Shiites have never ruled Baghdad for 1,000 years.
This is the first time.
True.
Yes, it's true.
Exactly.
In fact, the last time they ruled Baghdad was in the 7th, yeah, before the 7th century.
Oh, it was Patrick Cockburn's book, Muqtada.
Yeah, Patrick Cockburn, exactly.
And it's great because my fixer in Baghdad, she was instrumental in organizing Patrick's book.
I'm very happy about that.
She's this extraordinary Shiite woman who works in Baghdad, who always in touch.
And there was a time when she was probably could be killed in the next checkpoint to give an idea of what was happening to her around 2007.
And she told me a lot about that.
The first time the Shiites had a sense of what it means to be ruling the country where they are the majority, where they have been the majority for so long.
And they say, look, apart from the politicians, apart from Sadrists, apart from Ayatollahs, there is a certain esprit de corps between all Shiites that, look, this is our time now, and we will not relinquish power no matter what.
And this is a very accurate assessment, I would say.
Well, you know what, as long as I'm keeping you over, let me ask you more about Saudi Arabia.
Okay.
There's been, I think, more protests in the Shiite parts of Saudi Arabia in the northeast there.
But I guess I've read a few reports about protests in Riyadh and Jeddah, small ones.
And I wonder whether you think that the population of Saudi Arabia in general, mostly Sunni Arab, I guess, will be taking part in this Arab Spring more and more, or whether revolution is just dead on arrival in Saudi Arabia right now, or what?
Unfortunately, at the moment it's DOA, because the repression machine, the interior ministry, and that horrible committee to prevent, advise, and promote virtue that the Taliban replicated in the 1990s in Afghanistan, they are extremely effective.
There is a ban, you know, a state of emergency going on forever, in fact, that you cannot have any kind of demonstrations in Saudi Arabia.
And the listeners probably remember how King Abdullah himself, what, four or five weeks ago, he released a statement saying that we'll cut off the finger, his own word, of any kind of demonstrators anywhere in the kingdom.
So the repression machine, not only inside major cities, starting with Riyadh, especially in the eastern part where the oil fields are, and, of course, in Bahrain as well, because they are coordinating with the al-Khalifa, whose security services are all foreigners for that matter.
There are Jordanians, there are Syrians, there are Pakistanis, and the Saudi Arabians are also now directly involved.
So it's total repression.
It reminds me of the Latin American military dictatorships in the 70s, which I had a very close experience.
You know, it's exactly the same thing.
You have to talk by code on the phone, in fact.
People who have been blogging, Twittering, or sending Facebook messages, the people in Bahrain are telling me everyone is being rounded up.
Some of these bloggers disappeared from the net altogether.
We don't know what happened to them.
So it's absolutely, it's major repression.
It cannot last for years, of course, but for the moment, all the progressive forces, and there are progressive forces, of course, inside Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, they are laying low and say, look, we have to articulate something in the long run.
In this aspect, it's very similar to the reorganization of the Green Movement inside Iran.
People are laying low and waiting for the next opening, because you cannot underestimate the repression machine in this Gulf Sheikhdoms and monarchies.
It's absolutely disgusting.
And unfortunately, you never read one line about it in U.S. corporate media, mainstream press in the U.S., or in Europe, for that matter.
Yeah, I think it was Michael Moore's movie where he shows Americans believe that Saudi Arabia is a nice progressive democracy and whatever.
Saddam Hussein had the only dictatorship in the Middle East or something like that.
Exactly, Scott.
You never see a true story about Saudi Arabia in the New York Times or the Washington Post or in the networks or on CNN.
It's out of the question.
Hey, Pepe, can you teach me about Morocco and Algeria?
Because those are two American-backed dictatorships where really all I know about Morocco is that that's where Binyam Mohamed was tortured into pointing the finger at Jose Padilla.
And really Algeria, I know that America helped the military cancel democratic elections back in 1992 or something like that.
Other than that, I don't know the first thing.
Well, look, Bouteflika in Algeria is a very complex character.
He poses as a reformer, as a democrat, and he's a, once again, repression machine.
It's absolutely, it's ultra-hardcore.
These protests, we have been seeing protests in Algeria.
They never feature in headline news, never.
But there have been protests for at least for the past two months on and off.
They come and go, ebb and flow, but it is still there.
And the Algerians who live in France, for instance, most of them are pro-democracy, they are very progressive, they are secular, it's nothing about Islam, it's nothing about al-Qaeda in the Maghreb.
They have excellent sources of information in small places in Algeria that say, look, people are bursting.
They have caught the Tunisian virus.
They want the end of repression, end of corruption, re-democratic elections, the same platform that the people in Tahrir Square in Egypt were fighting for.
But the Bouteflika repression machine is still there.
So this will go on for a long time.
And the concessions that they made so far, even in Morocco, the son of King Hassan I, King Mohammed, made even more concessions, because Morocco is a very curious case.
It's a sort of club met for the French and Italians, basically.
So they depend heavily on tourism.
They depend heavily on projecting this image of being a progressive country, Northern Africa, like, you know, the perfect place for your family, come here and spend the summer with us.
So they made some concessions.
Still not enough, but, you know, always provoked by the Tunisian virus.
And it's crazy, because these regimes, basically, they follow the same pattern, Northern Africa and the Middle East.
They are autocracies, monarchies, repressive.
They treat their workers like they are living in a slave camp.
It's the same thing everywhere.
And Algeria and Morocco have been forced by what happened in Tunisia and Egypt to start making a few concessions.
That's why in the U.S. they fall under the category of the U.S. outreach gang, like, you know, the regimes that, okay, we have to encourage the progressive reforms, and not in the regime alteration bracket, which is basically nowadays Libya, is the first candidate, and soon Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
Yeah.
Well, geez, man, there's so much to ask you about.
I'm not sure which way to go.
I guess I want to stick with Morocco and Algeria for a minute here.
Do the people there, you think, have the taste of victory now?
Because it seems like once they start making concessions, people maybe can realize, especially looking around in the region at Tunisia and Egypt, for example, how powerful that they can really be.
Exactly.
And, you know, the solution for Algeria would be a really democratic regime instead of this farcical democracy that they have.
And in Morocco would be a parliamentary democracy.
I don't think any of these two will happen in the short run.
It depends a lot on what happens in Tunisia and Egypt.
If we have a transition in both to a really representative democracy, a really sovereign democracy, you know, not under the interference of the West or the U.S., then I'm sure people in Algeria and Morocco will be emboldened.
So I would say we'd have to wait for the next eight months, beginning of 2012, to see where this is going.
It will depend a lot also on what happens in Libya.
If we see the new footprint of Western colonialism, especially European colonialism, installed in Libya, and in the end they win, they have a NATO base, they have an African base, you know, they have preferential oil contracts, you name it, this could also send a message to Morocco and Algeria and say, look, we don't want Western interference.
We want to do it ourselves.
So, you know, it can go any way, just like the beginning of the Libyan war.
Remember when everybody was thinking that the Gaddafi government would fall in three or four days under NATO bombs?
Look where we are now.
Total stalemate.
NATO is lost in space.
The French and the British don't know what to do.
The U.S., I would say wisely, now is in the background, this has nothing to do with us.
And this could go on for months, if not years.
Yeah, well, and it could be, as you say, a major effect of this thing in Libya would just be to short-circuit the rest of the revolutions and turn them all hollow.
Exactly, because the original intent of the, especially the Franco-British original intent was to, okay, we, the white man's burden, we are going to take care of this thing, especially in northern Africa, since we cannot intervene in the Persian Gulf, because they know that the Persian Gulf, Saudi Arabia calls the shots.
And, of course, the U.S. from a military point of view.
But in northern Africa, the Brits and the French especially say, no, we have a chance, this is our opening.
And also an opening for NATO to establish their dream scenario, which is the Mediterranean as a NATO lake.
And Libya was not part of this thing.
So we don't know how the defense, even inside the European Union and inside NATO, will play out.
The Germans, for instance, they want nothing to do with this.
In fact, they are working with Turkey to get a peace plan for Libya.
The Italians are absolutely horrified with the French, because they say, no, the French invaded our deals with Gaddafi, especially any Italian energy giant.
They invested $50 billion in Libya.
They had excellent relations with Libya.
Most of the exported oil from Libya goes to Italy, I would say at least 30 percent to 35 percent, and very few goes to France, comparatively.
So this turned into a Sarkozy-Berlusconi war inside the European Union.
A German minister, I think two days ago, Guido Westerwelle, the foreign minister, German foreign minister, he was saying that we have to reconsider the idea of the European Union, in fact.
So it's an absolute mess in Brussels at the moment.
Because of what?
Because of an Anglo-French neo-colonial white man's burdened import, without an endgame.
So I would say the Americans, the way they played this was very, very clever in the end, the Obama administration at least.
The White House didn't want this war.
They were pushed into this war by the Amazon queens, with Susan Rice, Samantha Power, Hillary Clinton, et cetera.
They found their opening to leave once they established Africa in the beginning, via the Tomahawks.
And now the Europeans have to sort out this mess, and they have no clue how to do it.
The meeting today in Doha, Qatar, what I'm told it was an absolute mess.
They couldn't agree on anything.
The only thing they could agree on was that, okay, Turkey has a plan, let's see if Turkey convinces Qaddafi to step down.
But Turkey doesn't want Qaddafi to step down.
They want to cease fire first, and then everybody sits down and starts discussing.
You see the potential for even further mess there.
Yeah, well, it seems to me pretty obvious that Obama can either say, look, I'm the biggest wimp to be the president since Jimmy Carter, or worse, or he can send in the Marines.
Sooner or later this thing's going to escalate, because they have to have a regime change, or else they have to abandon all the civilians of Libya to Qaddafi's tender mercies, which they've promised never to do.
I don't see any way out of it, you know, according to the way that they've set up the argument.
But you see that they've got their backtracking.
Hillary Clinton now is talking about a ceasefire.
Can you believe it?
She dropped the talk about regime change at least since yesterday, as far as I know, and now she's talking about ceasefire, because they know regime change is absolutely impossible, unless they go to the U.N. and try to pass another resolution, which won't happen, because this time the BRIC countries and Germany, by the way, the BRIC countries tomorrow in China, they'll be discussing, among other things, their reaction to Libya.
In fact, we know their official reaction, because they abstained from voting U.N. Resolution 1973.
But tomorrow they'll be talking about how they support Turkey and Germany in, okay, ceasefire, humanitarian corridor, protection of civilians, everybody included, locals, foreigners, sub-Saharan Africans, you name it, and then everybody sits at the same table and we finally get a peace agreement.
Yeah.
We're talking with Pepe Escobar from the Asia Times and the Real News, and at this point in the interview we're talking about Libya, and I guess to paraphrase Richard Perle about how the road to hell runs through Tripoli, and it looks like Obama and Nicolas Sarkozy have got us on a path toward just more and more intervention in Libya, and I guess I want to let you wrap up your thoughts on Libya and switch over to Syria here in a minute, because there's actually a hell of a lot to discuss there.
Yeah.
The thing is, this is very, very important for American listeners and who follow foreign policy.
This is not an American war.
This is a French war, which is absolutely extraordinary.
This war was invented in France last year, in October 2010, when Gaddafi's chief of protocol, Nouri Mesmari, he exiled himself in France.
He was approached by French intelligence.
He laid down the law about how the regime works.
The French saw an opening to organize something.
Mesmari had an excellent contact, a colonel in Benghazi, who was feeding him on-the-ground information, and between October, November, December 2010, they hatched a plan for what essentially was a military coup against the Gaddafi regime.
At the same time, yes, there are legitimate youth protesters in the Benghazi area, in Syria and Iraq, in eastern Libya, the February 17 Youth Movement.
They were very active on The Nation, on Twitter.
They more or less started part of the street protests in Benghazi, but then the whole thing was totally hijacked.
By who?
These opportunists, Gaddafi defectors, the famous exiles, most of them living in the U.S., including that guy who lived near the CIA in Vienna, Virginia, for 20 years, and he came back to be self-proclaimed the military leader of the rebels.
These kinds of people, you know, weapons contractors, business opportunists, you name it.
So the element of a legitimate protest movement was completely sidelined and hijacked by these people.
And the French and the British, they took the initiative from the beginning for many reasons.
The French, because Gaddafi had canceled contracts, very, very juicy contracts, buying Rafale jet fighters from France.
They are made by Dassault.
The head of Dassault is very friendly with Sarkozy.
Sarkozy was pissed about the whole thing.
And the possibility of building some nuclear power stations in Libya.
And Gaddafi saw it over and said, no, I'm not going to do this.
So they had the perfect excuse.
They had the local contacts.
Okay, let's launch our revolution.
And the Americans were not even thinking about it.
And in the end, they were dragged into it because this doctrine of humanitarian imperialism was resurrected by liberal hawks inside the administration or collateral to the administration.
And suddenly Obama was with this highway to hell in his hand.
Yeah, well, I mean, here's the thing.
The French can't invade Tripoli, but the Americans can.
We've got a Marine Corps that can do it, and that's the mandate now.
I mean, you say Hillary Clinton is backing off regime change.
I don't see how they can back off unless they really believe that they can get Gaddafi to give up the entire eastern half of the country or something like that, which he's not going to do.
You're right, which he'll never do.
But that comes back to the way the whole narrative was framed from the beginning upon, you know, weird assertions, dodgy assertions, not real facts on the ground, a lot of wishful thinking.
You know, this narrative once again reminding us of Iraq, of an evil dictator killing his own people.
We never knew exactly how many air raids were against eastern Libya, how many people were killed.
How did that work?
The only thing to find out would have been to send a UN fact-finding mission.
And this is exactly what the BRIC countries and Germany were arguing when the Brits and the French were drafting the UN resolution, said, look, let's send a mission first.
Depending on what the mission finds, then we go back here and we vote a resolution and we authorize a no-fly zone.
But they did it backwards.
They start balding.
And they didn't start thinking about sending a UN fact-finding mission.
And what you said is absolutely true.
The French and the Brits, they don't know how to conduct a war, and they don't know how to get an endgame.
And they don't have really the territory power to do it or the technological know-how, although NATO is technologically advanced, but NATO is not the Pentagon as controlled from the U.S.
It's a sideshow.
So you're right.
Only the Americans could finish this war, heavily, in 10 minutes.
But, you know, the international community will say absolutely out of the question.
Well, look, even if you had somebody there who was, you know, some battle Los Angeles movie star who could get the laser designator right on the sweet spot and assassinate Gaddafi tomorrow afternoon and the rebels could just roll right into Tripoli after that somehow, then still we've got to guarantee purple-finger elections and train up a new army so that another Look, Al-Qaeda, whoops, we accidentally fought on behalf of Al-Qaeda.
Now we've got to stay and make sure that they don't win the elections that we hold and whatever.
I mean, this thing is on.
Exactly.
Can you imagine the U.S. on a third front involving nation-building as we stand in the middle of a recession?
Out of the question.
So in my view, Obama thought this over very carefully.
Okay, I'm going to satisfy some impulses from my European allies and from some people inside the administration.
Then we are.
And then it's over.
And there's nothing else we can possibly do.
And if the U.S. tries to go further, it will be another quagmire, because suppose Gaddafi is deposed.
Everybody who's allied with Gaddafi, plus most of his military, which would fear the fate of the Iraqi military if they're going to be disbanded by a Libyan Paul Bremer, it will become a guerrilla, obviously.
And still, before going to war, the English and the French, they didn't analyze the tribal rivalries, the historic opposition between the Syrian-Iraqi eastern part of Libya with the Tripolitania, the West.
This has been going on for centuries, in fact.
It's a tribal war mixed with a military coup, basically.
That's what it is.
So it's something that can only be solved by Libyans themselves.
Oh, man.
Well, what a fine mess.
And how easy it was to get into.
You know, that's the part that's just amazing to me.
You get Dennis Ross to come out and claim that 100,000 people would have died if we didn't intervene, based on nothing but his own assertion, which, you know, I don't know if Netanyahu wrote the lines for him or not in this case.
Usually that's the way it works, I think, with that guy.
But, you know, I don't know.
The degree to which it's horrible is in the direct, perfect proportion to the ease with which they just did it.
Hell, Obama didn't even give a speech until a week later, saying, oh, yeah, by the way, here's why I've done this.
Absolutely.
It was crazy, Scott, because I was in Brazil when the war was launched.
It was crazy.
Obama had lunch with the Brazilian president, and then after lunch, he was in Brazil at the time, he ordered the first Tomahawks to be fired.
The next day he set up a war room in a hotel in Rio near the beach, and he conducted the first 48 hours of the war here in Brazilian soil, which is a very pacifist country, where he's extremely popular, by the way.
But, you know, Brazilian progressives and South American progressives as a whole, they were stunned.
How could he launch a war from our part of the world?
And without even saying it is a war.
Kinetic military action, you know.
Yeah, well, that's just for Americans to consume on TV.
I think that's what the whole days, not weeks thing meant, was that's how long you're going to get to see any coverage of this on TV.
Oh, no.
And that'll be the end of that.
Oh, my God, yeah.
And, you know, wherever I am, I usually follow it on CNN and Fox.
And it's like they're showing a rerun of Star Wars somewhere, you know.
It has nothing to do with reality.
Oh, man, yeah, but good lessons, though, too.
All right, well, listen, I'm sorry we've got to cut it off here.
Maybe I can have you on tomorrow or the next day to talk about Syria?
Yes, Scott, no problem.
Always a pleasure.
Okay, great.
Well, I really appreciate your time on the show today.
Okay, thanks very much.
All right, thank you.
Everybody, that's the great Pepe Escobar from the Asia Times and also, of course, from the Real News.
He's got a piece reprinted also at Alternet called If the U.S. Doesn't Pull Every Soldier from Iraq at Midnight December 31, 2011, Expect Serious Trouble.
I think that it's a great article, and it will help inform your opinion.
