THE ROVING EYE - Lame-duck Obama's brave new world By Pepe Escobar

THE ROVING EYE Lame-duck Obama's brave new world By Pepe Escobar Fresh out of his latest Congressional election shellacking delivered by the minority who bothered to vote in the United States, the formerly most powerful leader in the world, US President Barack Obama, will star in a thriller this weekend, appearing in the same room with China's Xi Jinping, Japan's Shinzo Abe and - fasten your seat belts - Russia's Vladimir Putin. What a drag - the Bomber-In-Chief must be musing. The global economy is mostly a disaster. China, even growing at "only" 7% a year, keeps eroding his "indispensable nation" aura. Japan has decided to copy the Federal Reserve and embark on its own kamikaze version of quantitative easing. Numerous Southeast Asian nations keep freaking out about a few rocks in the South China Sea. And last but not least, Obama's nemesis, pesky Vlad "the Hammer" Putin, has just been crowned Most Powerful Leader in the world - even if for the most stupid reasons ("unpredictable" head of a "rogue state") [1] - while he, the Nobel Peace Prize leader of the exceptionalist, indispensable nation, is now nothing but a pitiful lame duck. The get-together, extended to Monday and Tuesday, will be the highlight of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Beijing - actually, outside of Beijing, so presumably unpolluted blue skies may also have a chance at the photo op. This is APEC's 25th birthday. And the 20th birthday of the Indonesian summit in Bogor - I happened to be there - which, under Bill Clinton's flowery charm, set the 21-member APEC nations a goal of "free" and open trade and investment by 2020. "Free" as in US corporations dictating the rules, of course. What the whole planet really wants to know about APEC is whether The Lame Duck with meet The Bear face to face, one on one. The White House remains mum. The Kremlin did not rule it out. Well, there's always Plan B: the Group of 20 summit on November 15-16 in Brisbane, Australia. What the whole planet already knows is that the new slimy show premiering on Capitol Hill on January 2015 has a top priority: the Republicans will do everything in their power to make the lame duck cry for mercy over and over again. So what will this mean in terms of Obama's self-styled "Don't Do Stupid Stuff" foreign policy doctrine, which that 2016 juggernaut known as "The Hillarator" has already derided as a "non-organizational principle"? Just extra layers of cosmic stupidity, or something more substantial? That old axis of evil Let's start with The Caliph, aka Islamic State (IS) leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Obama already said, after his shellacking, he is going to seek Congressional authorization for his coalition of the cowards bombing IS - aka Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or Daesh, the jiahdi outfit's Arabic acronym Now that's not a dumb move. If Republican-ruled Congress says "yes", they will be responsible for the fiasco (and it's already a fiasco). If they say "no", the fiasco can be attributed to their irresponsibility. Republicans are immersed in their own internal split - the boots-on-the-ground favored by the establishment against the non-interventionist Tea Party. So in the end, the lame duck may profit from it after all. Iran is a much dicier proposition. It all depends on a nuclear deal between Iran and the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany) being reached in a little over two weeks, on November 24. That's a taller-than-the-Himalayas order, although feasible. The Obama administration is desperate for a deal - as the leak of a "secret letter" from Obama to Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei attests. But a deal under Washington's terms, which for Tehran is unacceptable. [2] The new US Senate only takes over in January. Obama has already stressed he won't ask the Senate to ratify the deal. Once again, the problem is what deal? Obama's idea of a grand design in the Middle East is to use a "responsible" - according to US standards - Tehran to balance the Sunni-Shi'ite divide and get rid of the current proxy wars, the whole thing arbitrated by Washington. This is a pipe dream. But it's what the lame duck wants. Needless to say, Republicans - for whom Tehran never left the "axis of evil" - will try to bomb the dream, pipelines and all, for instance by passing legislation preventing the lifting of key sanctions. Sparks will fly. Tehran won't accept a nuclear deal where Washington just says "take my word for it, we will lift sanctions"; this has to be in the letter of the agreement. After all they have vast experience of dealing with gun-crazy Republicans in power. Nothing will change on Russia - even as the Obama administration needs Moscow to get a deal with Tehran. The relentless demonization of Putin and the resurgence of the same old Cold War meme, "The Russians are Coming", are guaranteed to keep propelling stupidity 24/7 to intergalactic spheres. Capitol Hill will go on overdrive. After all, Russia demonization is a bipartisan sport in Washington. The only "solution" would be regime change. Not only is Putin not going anywhere, but he's ratcheting up his defiance of the Empire of Chaos. This implies increased problems with Germany, where Chancellor Angela Merkel keeps appeasing the Americans while German businesses want increased trade with Russia and Eurasia as a whole. Another China win-win?  On trade, here's where APEC collides with the two-pronged US version of an economic NATO: the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) with Europe and the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) with Asia. What the Obama administration is fighting for is nothing less than a totally unregulated global marketplace. Imagine the "free" market - as Bill "Bubba" Clinton was already parading in Indonesia two decades ago - setting all sorts of standards on everything from working conditions to the environment. In theory, that's exactly what Republicans love. So here Obama would be right in their alley, which implies an easy Senate ratification. It's actually way more complicated. Republicans simply cannot stomach an Obama victory. That means this upcoming Senate won't give him the fast track he needs to clinch the TPP deal. That happens to be exactly what China wants. Beijing will use APEC to promote the road map for its own, anti-TPP trade deal, the Free Trade Area of the Asia-Pacific (FTAAP). TPP involves 12 APEC members - but not China. And even inside TPP there's a monster revolt; Tokyo is battling the US because they Japan is sure its auto industry and agriculture may be devoured by US corporations. So we're right into a titanic Transformer-style Battle of the Deals. In fact any deal is problematic, as China, Japan and South Korea may want, in principle, broader economic cooperation. But on trade, in so many levels, they are fiercely competing against each other - as in the auto industry and agriculture, for instance - not to mention that heavy historical baggage between Japan and China and Japan and South Korea. The Chinese charm offensive at APEC in Beijing is all about "innovative development", "building infrastructure investment" and "comprehensive connectivity". It's all a mirror image of the extremely ambitious New Silk Roads proposed by President Xi to connect Eurasia. Beijing is proposing a new "connectivity framework" into three key areas - "physical connectivity, institutional connectivity, and people-to-people connectivity". But still no one knows how this will work out in practice towards Asia integration. Washington doesn't care; it just wants a "free" unregulated mega-market for US corporations. Beijing sees Asian economic integration as APEC facilitating an FTAAP by 2025. Needless to say, the US and a few vassals aboard the TPP have been adamant that no regional deal jeopardizes TPP. Washington was betting on TPP being signed before APEC. It didn't happen. So Plan B is to boycott FTAAP until TPP is signed. And that Beijing won't allow. The lame duck will have to duck a lot on his one-on-one with Xi in Beijing. Finally, what about the Obama-Capitol Hill battle on the climate-change field? For the absolute majority of Republicans, climate change and global warming are nothing but an evil conspiracy. End of story. The lame duck and Capitol Hill at least may agree on - what else - the Global War on Terror. Pentagon supremo Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel recently said the US should get ready for endless wars, as "tyranny", "terrorism", national security challenges and - surprise! - climate change pose a substantial "threat". Since 2002, the Pentagon has been saying to anyone who was bothered to listen that Endless War is the only deal in town - or the universe, for that matter. The lame duck might even fraternize about it with his Republican nemeses over the odd round of golf. What a wonderful (lame duck) world this would be. Notes: 1. Putin Vs. Obama: The World's Most Powerful People 2014, Forbes, November 5, 2014. 2. Obama Wrote Secret Letter to Iran's Khamenei About Fighting Islamic State, Wall Street Journal Online (subscription). Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007), Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge (Nimble Books, 2007), and Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

THE ROVING EYE - A Caliph in a wilderness of mirrors By Pepe Escobar

THE ROVING EYE A Caliph in a wilderness of mirrors By Pepe Escobar I'm aiming at you, lover Cause killing you is killing myself  - Orson Welles (director), The Lady from Shanghai,1947 He's invincible. He beheads. He smuggles. He conquers. He's the ultimate jack-of-all-trades. No Tomahawk or Hellfire can touch him. He always gets what he wants; in Kobani; in Anbar province; with the House of Saud (which he wants to replace) trying to make Putin (who he wants to behead) suffer because of low oil prices. If this was a remake of Orson Welles's noir classic The Lady from Shanghai, in the mirror sequence the lawyer (American?) and the femme fatale (Shi'ite?) would also get killed; but The Caliph of Islamic State would survive as a larger than life Welles, free to roam, plunder and "give my love to the sunrise" - as in a Brave Caliphate World shining in "Syraq" over the ashes of the Sykes-Picot agreement. He's winning big in Iraq's Anbar province. The Caliph's goons are now closing in on - of all places - Abu Ghraib; Dubya, Dick and Rummy's former Torture Central. They are at a mere 12 kilometers away from Baghdad International. A shoulder-launched surface-to-air missile (or MANPAD) away from downing a passenger jet. Certainly not an Emirates flight - after all these are trusted sponsors. Hit, in Anbar province, is now Caliph territory. The police forces and the province's operational command have lost almost complete control of Ramadi. The Caliph now controls the crucial axis formed by Hit, Ramadi, Fallujah; Highway 1 between Baghdad and the Jordanian border; and Highway 12 between Baghdad and the Syrian border. The Caliph's goons are no less than taking over the whole, notorious Baghdad belt, the previous "triangle of death" in those hardcore days of American occupation circa 2004. Message to Donald Rumsfeld: remember your "remnants"? They're back. And they're in charge. Both Ramadi and Fallujah have been reduced to an accumulation of bombed-out schools, hospitals, homes, mosques and bridges. Residential streets are virtually deserted. According to the United Nations, there are a least 360,803 internally displaced persons in Anbar, as well as 115,000 others in areas under The Caliph's control. At least 63% of the 1.6 million people living in the province are classified as "in need" - with hair-raising minimal access to water, food and health care, and receiving little to absolutely zero humanitarian support from that fiction, the "international community." US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power is not screaming her lungs out for R2P ("responsibility to protect"). How could the Pentagon's spectacular Full Spectrum Dominance possibly not see any of this happening? Of course they see it. But they don't give a damn. The Pentagon occasionally uses AH-64 Apache helicopters to attack some of The Caliph's goons in Ramadi and Hit. But Apaches can be easily hit with MANPADS. They are stationed at Baghdad International and their only mission is to protect the airport. Who cares about local, civilian "collateral damage"? Married to the Mob In Kobani, the former third-biggest town in Syrian Kurdistan, in the far northeast, The Caliph also wins big. Another biblical exodus has reached 300,000 refugees - and counting, with over 180,000 headed to Turkey. The Caliph counts on indirect help from The Sultan (or alternate Caliph), aka Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan. Tehran is - rightfully - furious, as it sees the "West" - and Turkey - betraying the Kurds all over again. It's no secret Sultan Erdogan is doing nothing because he wants to screw the guerrillas of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and the Syrian-Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD); let them die instead of repelling The Caliph and then be strong enough to threaten Turkish domination of those huge, essentially Kurdish patches of Anatolia. Thus the only thing Sultan Erdogan does support is aimless bombing by the Pentagon cum coalition of the clueless-cowards. Anybody who believes the US Central Command's spin that House of Saud and United Arab Emirates fighter jets conduct "bombing raids" on the outskirts of Kobani gets a one-way ticket to Oz. Imagine these clowns being able to deploy precision-guided bombs or trained laser spotters. To start with, the Pentagon has zero local intel - as in zero operatives able to paint lasers on targets. Thus the "coalition" can barely hit the odd tank (out of 25 around Kobani) or Humvee out of 2,000 crammed in a valley for almost two weeks now. But the "coalition" certainly is able - miraculously! - to hit Syrian state infrastructure, as in energy installations. In June, the official Pentagon excuse was, "We don't have any drone assets in Iraq." Now there's no excuse for drones which can read a "Smoking Kills!" warning in a packet of Marlboros not hitting The Caliph's assets in Kobani - or in Anbar province for that matter. So it's down to a mix of incompetence and neglect. It was so much easier to hit Pashtun wedding parties in the Waziristans. Especially because no one was paying attention. Erdogan's own goons, meanwhile, have instituted a curfew on all major towns and cities in southeast Anatolia, and are even gunning down peaceful Kurdish protesters. Fifteen million Kurds in Anatolia cannot be wrong; Erdogan wants Kobani to fall. Ankara remains for all practical purposes the top logistical hub for The Caliph's goons. The Sultan is using The Caliph as a proxy army to smash the Kurds. Terminal evidence has been offered by the leader of the Kurdish PYD, Salih Muslim, meeting Turkish military intel and asking for help. Conditions: abandon any hope of self-determination for Syrian Kurds; give up all your self-governing towns and regions; and watch as we install a Turkish "buffer"/no-fly zone inside Syrian territory. Don't expect the Obama "Don't Do Stupid Stuff/We Have No Strategy" administration to sentence, "Erdogan must go". Besides, the pathetic club of National Security Advisor Susan Rice and her deputy Ben Rhodes has no clue about what's goin' on. To the Green Zone! Tehran, for its part, has clearly identified Erdogan's nasty game. The Sultan knows monster B1-B bombers flying over Kobani are absolutely useless - while The Caliph's goons deploy massive car bombs and keep advancing. "Boots on the ground" will be needed. Enter NATO asset Turkey. But with one condition: regime change in Damascus, or at least a prelude, via that "buffer"/no-fly zone over Syria. The Big Picture remains the same. Sultan Erdogan and the House of Saud want regime change in Damascus (Erdogan dreams of a Sunni puppet as a vassal of Ankara; the Saudis want their own Wahhabi schemer). Israel merrily agrees. And if that comes with a bonus - attacking the new Iraqi government, still supported by Iran, in the American-made Green Zone - even better. The lowdown: "Don't Do Stupid Stuff" translates as the Gulf Cooperation Council, Turkey and Israel using Washington to advance their quite explicit agenda. Sultan Erdogan, as a Mob boss, does seem to heave learned a thing or two from watching Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas. He's extracting the maximum pound of flesh from the bewildered "Don't do Stupid Stuff" team. The Sultan is boldly aiming at Turkish boots on the ground gloriously invading Syria in NATO "humanitarian intervention" mode. And all this sold as NATO offering "protection" to a member-nation. NATO's new secretary-general, former Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg, has just been to Ankara. Saudi Arabia has already "voted" out loud for the "buffer"/no-fly zone. Same for General Francois Hollande, that pitiful excuse for President of France. Once again, it's Tehran to the rescue. The Foreign Ministry has duly announced Iran is ready to liberate Kobani from The Caliph's goons (and they can do it) if Bashar Al-Assad says the word. Now that's how you work the chessboard; NATO is left with zero excuses to mount an invasion of Syria, whatever Mob Boss Erdogan comes up with. Operation Hands Off My Toyota The Caliph also wins big in the "bleeding the Pentagon" department. A single US "strike" against his goons - involving F-15s, F-16s or F-22s - costs up to US$500,000. The Pentagon has just revealed it has spent no less than $1.1 billion against The Caliph since June. What for? Virtually all the assets being destroyed by American bombing are made in the USA, deployed to the Iraqi army and then duly captured during The Caliph's offensive. So here we have the Empire of Chaos spending a fortune from the US Treasury to smash tanks, Humvees and other gear already paid for by American taxpayers. No wonder taxpayers are fuming. Thus Operation Hands off My Toyota. Additionally, the Pentagon does not have a clue on how to build its Obama-designed proxy "rebel" force to fight The Caliph (with no US soldiers or marines; only fanatic Wahhabis and assorted mercenaries). To start with, they have no clue who the hell qualifies as a "moderate rebel". The rabble must be "vetted" - and then sent to, of all places, Saudi Arabia for training. There the guy in charge will be - who else - a Special Ops honcho, Major General Michael Nagata. Even under the most optimistic scenario, the Pentagon won't have its proxy "moderate rebel" army on the ground in Syria before the summer of 2015. Hefty bottles of Chateau Margaux can be bet that all this prime US weaponized know how will ultimately end up captured by The Caliph's goons. Same applies to reliable "rebel" intel on the ground. But the real Dadaist masterpiece is that first these "rebels" will be politely asked by the Pentagon to forget about getting rid of Assad to fight The Caliph. At least for a while. Re-enter Stoltenberg, the new NATO head: "Next year, at the ministerial meeting, we will take decisions regarding the so-called spearhead but, even before it is established, NATO has a strong army after all. We can deploy it wherever we want to." OK, tough guy; why not "Syraq"? If this all sounds like a plot straight out of hit series Blacklist, that's because it is. Why not get Red (James Spader) to fight The Caliph? And then again, what if Red is The Caliph? He pretends to fight himself - and he wins, handsomely. Back to Welles' The Lady from Shanghai: "Killing you is killing myself". Yet nobody could possibly want The Caliph dead when he's such a smashing, undisputed box-office success. Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007), Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge (Nimble Books, 2007), and Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

THE ROVING EYE - Pure War in Tehran By Pepe Escobar

THE ROVING EYE Pure War in Tehran By Pepe Escobar I've just spent a frantic week in Tehran. Before departure, I had made a conscious decision; only one book in the backpack. Maximum concentration. I ended up choosing Pure War, the 2008 reprint by Semiotext(e) in LA of the 1983 Paul Virilio classic I had picked up at the revamped Foyles in London a few days back. For a roving correspondent, going to Iran is always extra-special. Getting a press visa approved usually takes ages. This was my sixth trip - and I had no visa. Just a number, tied to a visa at the airport. Until the last minute, I thought I'd be deported from Imam Khomeini International - back to Abu Dhabi, which is now pretending to bomb The Caliph. Then, a small miracle; a VIP room, a visa in 10 minutes and the next I know I'm zooming into an eerily deserted Tehran at sunrise on a Friday, past the psychedelic space station decked in green that is Imam Khomeini's shrine. Why Virilio? Because he was the first to conceptualize that with the explosion of asymmetrical warfare, Total War had become local - on a global scale. I expanded on the theme in my 2007 book Globalistan and in my writings. Washington and Tel Aviv had been threatening to bomb Iran for years. Virilio was the first to assert that "peace" merely extends war by other means. May 1968 as a theatre of the mind - a theatre of the imagination. When society could be an artwork, a performance, with the crowds in the street as the chorus. The last creative reaction against consumerism. "Power to the imagination".  A beautiful sunny morning in front of the Foreign Ministry compound. An exhibition/installation about the "imposed" - as it's widely known - Iran-Iraq war. A reconstructed minefield; a map of nations weaponizing Saddam; pictures of young fighters/martyrs who wouldn't have been older than 14. A theatre of painful remembrance. In late 1978, Tehran also had its crowds in the streets as chorus - against the shah. Khomeini was a reaction against consumerism; but was he "power to the imagination"? And then, all was engulfed in a theatre of cruelty - the tragedy of the "imposed" war. War in the journalistic sense is national delinquency elevated to the scale of an extremely important conflict - It's the equivalent of the "tumults", as ancient societies called them. We can no longer even speak of wars, they are interstate delinquencies. It's State terrorism.  In Tehran, my immensely gracious hosts were the organizers of New Horizon: the International Conference of Independent Thinkers. After plenty of twists and turns, the Foreign Ministry ended up also being involved. The conference issued a important resolution condemning ISIS/ISIL/The Caliph; Zionism; Islamophobia; sectarianism; and Washington's blind support for anything Israel unleashes over Palestine: Israel's national delinquency, or State terrorism. The conference also called for cooperation and understanding between the West and Islam: that implies a struggle against interstate delinquencies. The best defense is to attack; and to attack you must have some ideas; right now there aren't any ideas. Imagination today is in the image, and the image is in power. There's no imagination for anything but the image. I have to leave a fabulous open-air traditional Persian dinner to go to Press TV studios for a debate with notorious neo-con Daniel Pipes about ISIS/ISIL/Daesh. We surprisingly agree more than I would normally expect. Well, not hard considering the Obama administration's non-strategy "strategy"; an image (bombs and Tomahawks) fighting an image (The Caliph's carefully edited beheading show). Meanwhile, President Hassan Rouhani's speech at the United Nations kept making waves; "Extremists threaten our neighbors, resort to violence and shed blood." It's "the people in the region who can deliver" in the fight against The Caliph. Rouhani was not exactly referring to the made in USA jets allegedly deployed by the Gulf Cooperation Council coalition of the clueless/cowards; the House of Saud, UAE, Bahrain and associate member Jordan. In all my conversations, a consensus emerges; the power vacuum of post-2013 Shock and Awe and occupation led to the rise of al-Qaeda in Iraq and eventually ISIS/ISIL/Daesh. But even as Tehran and Washington may have flirted about a joint move against The Caliph, Washington then denied it wanted help and Tehran rejected it outright. Still, what Rouhani said in New York kept echoing day after day everywhere in Tehran; weaponizing the "new" Free Syrian Army in Saudi Arabia, of all places, amounts "to train another group of terrorists and send them to Syria to fight". And Washington's "strategy" is further enabling hardcore Sunni dictators who've made their careers demonizing Shi'ites. And then that other "unofficial" Caliph, neo-Ottoman Recep Tayyip Erdogan, stepped in; there would be no use of Turkish "territory" or "military bases" by the "coalition" if "the objective does not also include ousting the Bashar al-Assad regime". Who needs Caliph Erdogan to fight Caliph Ibrahim? Major General Qassem Suleimani, head of the Iranian Quds Force, can do it; his picture, side by side with Kurdish peshmergas, made a splash all over Iran when published by IRINN. The cinema shows us what our consciousness is. Our consciousness is an effect of montage - It's a collage. There is only collage, cutting and splicing. This explains fairly well what Jean-Francois Lyotard calls the disappearance of the great narratives. Classless society, social justice - no one believes in them anymore. We're in the age of micro-narratives, the art of the fragment.  The joy of Laleh park - a Persian park crisscrossed by stray Persian cats as well as accomplished volleyball and badminton players and pram-pushing families. That's where Arash Darya-Bandari, medievalist extraordinaire with many years spent in the Bay Area, gives me a crash course on the finer points of one of the great surviving narratives; Shi'ism and Khomeini's concept ofvelayat-e-faqih. In Pure Non-War terms, this was always supposed to be about social justice. And that's why it's unintelligible to turbo-capitalism. The park as Agora; a garden of intellectual delights. Nearly all my top conversations took place walking across or around Laleh park. And then one night, I went for a solitary walk, just to find a revolutionary movie/performance on a makeshift stage, complete with a trench and mortars. An audience of a few solitary men and some scattered families. The cinema keeping the consciousness of the Iran-Iraq war alive. The end of deterrence corresponds to the beginning of the information war, a conflict where the superiority of information is more important than the capability to inflict damage.  The New Horizon conference could not but be about information war. The overall theme was the fight against the Zionist lobby. Everyone knows what the lobby means and how it operates, especially in the US. And yet, in my short interventions, at the Foreign Ministry and at the conference, I preferred to focus on its global financial/economic reach. Follow the money. That's the only way to pierce the lobby's seemingly invincible armory. Another face of information war. Everywhere I went, I had the pleasure to see how Gareth Porter's book - Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iranian Nuclear Scare - was received as a blessing. The book was translated into Farsi by the Fars News Agency, in only two months, with meticulous care, and launched in a simple ceremony. It's bound to become a best seller - as it conclusively proves, for instance, how the Iranian "plot" to equip missiles with nuclear warheads was entirely fabricated by the terrorist outfit Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK) and then handed over to the International Atomic Energy Agency by the Mossad. Contrast the respect shown to Gareth in Tehran to the wall of silence of its US reception - just another reflection of the 35-year-old "wilderness of mirrors" opposing Washington to Tehran. Predictably, the usual illiterate morons in the US dubbed the conference as an "anti-Semite hate fest". Gareth was described as "an anti-Israel journalist" and myself as "a Brazilian anti-Israel journalist". Obviously the moronic inferno is not familiar with the concept of "foreign policy". Space is no longer in geography - it's in electronics. Unity is in the terminals. It's in the instantaneous time of command posts, multinational headquarters, control towers, etc. Politics is less in physical space than in the time systems administered by various technologies. ? There is a movement from geo- to chronopolitics: the distribution of territory becomes the distribution of time. The distribution of territory is outmoded, minimal. Time to go to the bazaar - the ultimate urban distribution of territory. At the main entrance, a gaggle brandishing calculators and pieces of paper is involved in an incredible racket. With Roberto Quaglia - author of a wicked debunking of the 9/11 saga - we joke this looks like a slaves market. Not really. This is nothing less than a futures market on the course of the rial. With the national currency fluctuating so much because of the sanctions - it lost three quarters of its value in the past few years - the chance to make a bundle is irresistible. We meet the beautiful Zahra - she sells handmade towels but is essentially a killer fashion photographer. And then the ritual I've loved since forever; haggling for the perfect tribal rug. In this case, a Zaghol from the 1930s, never to be reproduced because the local nomads are becoming sedentary and there are no new weavers. A case of distribution of territory becoming the distribution of (lost) time. The Pharaohs, the Romans, the Greeks were surveyors. That was geopolitics. We're no longer there, we're in chronopolitics. Organization, prohibitions, interruptions, orders, powers, structurings, subjections are now in the realm of temporality. And that's also where resistance should be.  Which lead us, once again, to sanctions. Much had been made of what Rouhani told Austrian President Hans Fisher at the UN - about Iran being ready to deliver gas to the European Union. That's not happening tomorrow; the last figure I had, in Tehran, years ago, is that the country would need at least US$200 billion in investments to upgrade its energy infrastructure. Rouhani wasforced to clarify it. And Tehran won't sell itself to the EU on the cheap. The end of sanctions is all about chronopolitics. We have entered an age of large-scale terrorism. Just as we speak of petty delinquency and major delinquency, I think the same should be said of petty and major terrorism. ... The military-industrial and scientific complexes continue to function on their own momentum. It's a crazy engine that won't stop.  Tehran thinks about the crazy engine all the time. I'm sort of "kidnapped" from a meeting and end up in a small think tank with a fabulous map on the wall detailing the US command centers. All the students are eager to know what the Empire is really up to with Iran. A visit to the "nest of spies" - the former US embassy - is also inevitable. An apotheosis of 1970s technology - immaculately preserved like nowhere else in the world; radio equipment, proto-computers, telephones, telexes, rolodexes, a "forgery room" for fake passports. No wonder Washington could never recover from the loss of this sterling listening post of the whole Middle East. Will this building ever be a "normal" US embassy again? Someone should ask the hick Hamlet who almost turned into a mad bomber. This is why the airport today has become the new city. ? People are no longer citizens, they're passengers in transit. No longer a nomad society, in the sense of the great nomadic drifts, but one concentrated on the vector of transportation. The new capital is ... a city at the intersection of practicabilities of time, in other words, of speed.  The last day had to contain an epiphany. I waited for it all day long - amid myriad interviews and a fabulous Indian lunch in North Tehran with Gareth and Dr Marandi of the Faculty of World Studies, University of Tehran; the ideal Platonic banquet of conviviality and intellect. Then, at night, a mad dash across town to the Rey shrine; working-class neighborhood, foundation stone of Tehran, one of the top pilgrimage sites in Iran alongside Qom and Mashhad. Aesthetic illumination meets sensorial overload meets spiritual pull - with an extra kick because you're arguably the only Westerner in sight. Tens of thousands of pilgrims honor the death of Imam Ali's son-in-law. What's that thing about the death of grand narratives? Not in deep Iran. And then it's all over, as in a Coleridge dream; did I dream this fleeting Persian interlude, or did Tehran dreamed a little dream of me? I'm back to my default mode - the essential passenger in transit; a nomad carpet, a backpack and a boarding pass. Next stop; a faceless city in an intersection of speed. Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007), Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge (Nimble Books, 2007), and Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.

Commentary: Returning to the ZOG by Wayne Madsen

Commentary: Returning to the ZOG

After the Israeli and Jewish media in the United States launched a vicious attack on the speakers invited to speak at the New Horizons conference in Tehran, many of the foreign speakers discussed what sort of reception they would receive when they returned to their home countries. The American speakers, including this editor, were attacked for disloyalty in a press release issued by Senator Mark Kirk (R-IL). Kirk stated that "the conference’s participants promoted anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, and Holocaust denial." The Washington Free Beacon, a website connected to neocon William Kristol, raised "concerns about how these citizens were permitted to travel to and from the unfriendly country."

In fact, the Iranian Interests Section of the Pakistani embassy, located on Wisconsin Avenue, does a brisk business in issuing visas for Americans to travel to Iran, a nation that lacks diplomatic relations with the United States. As for "unfriendly," Iran is anything but and it extended a warm welcome to every American who was invited to speak at the Tehran conference that covered issues from Palestine to ISIL.

Upon the editor's return to the United States from Iran on a flight from Dubai to Boston Logan, the anticipated "reception" by the Israeli-infused Department of Homeland Security and its component Customs and Border Patrol (CPB) and Transportation Security Administration (TSA) divisions was the sum of all fears. When I handed my passport and customs declaration to the first agent, she asked about the purpose of my trip to Iran. After I told her that I was invited to speak at an international conference in Tehran and that I was a journalist, she barked into her radio, "Escort needed on 10." I was in line ten. After collecting my luggage, I was sent by a few red-faced agents bearing their unmistakable bar room "tans" common among the middle-aged male population of Boston to an agent who bore an amazing resemblance to "Cliff," the postal letter carrier who was always planted on a bar stool and swilling beer in "Cheers."

"Cliff," we'll call him, then subjected me to a battery of intrusive questions that I have not experienced upon returning to the United States in 40 years of foreign travel. At first, Cliff was the "good cop," inquiring as to how many books I had written, but the questioning then widened to include the names of the other Americans in Tehran. Of course, all of the names had appeared in a press release by the always-defamatory executive director of the Anti-Defamation League Abe Foxman along with a barrage of polemics by Foxman calling the Americans in attendance "anti-Israeli activists, anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists, and holocaust deniers." Journalist Gareth Porter was even singled out as a "Cambodian genocide denier," which was news to this editor who has long been familiar with the work of the one-time Vietnam War correspondent.



Editor receives award from New Horizons conference. At left is the thoroughly-charming and witty Islamic eschatology expert Shaikh Imran Hosein, who is originally from Trinidad and Tobago and who formerly presided over a mosque in Brooklyn. After 9/11, he asked for his congregation to pray unanimously for the perpetrators of 9/11 to be brought to justice. He then issued a call for Brooklyn's rabbis to follow suit with their own congregations. They refused. Hosein said the Prophet Mohammed foresaw a future alliance between Islam and "Rome" (in those days, the Muslims called the Church in Byzantium "Rome") that would fight to liberate Constantinople from the hordes of evil. It was the Ottomans who changed the name of Constantinople to Istanbul. Hosein says that if the Prophet called the city Constantinople, it was heresy for the Ottomans to change the name. Hosein said that the Koran predicts an Islamo-Christian alliance that will seize back the city from the Turks, the heirs of the Ottomans and restore the Eastern Christian Pope to his rightful place in the Hagia Sophia Cathedral, turned into a mosque by the Ottoman Sultan. The shaikh's interpretation of the Koran fit in nicely with this editor's explanation about the Turkish crypto-Jewish Sabbateans (or Donmeh) and the Wahhabists and Saud adherents being in the service of Talmudists, British Foreign Office agents, and later, Zionists. The discussion in Tehran had direct bearing on the Turkish, Israeli, Saudi, and CIA support for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) today. It's only too bad that the State Department didn't send some attendees to receive an important education about Middle Eastern history without the Zionist and neocon imprimatur.
The Americans' participation in the conference was even the subject of an October 2 exchange at the State Department between a reporter and department spokesperson Jen Psaki:

QUESTION: But have you seen this conference that the Iranians are putting on right now which is all about how Israel and the CIA conspired to – for 9/11 and all this --

MS. PSAKI: I have not seen reports of this conference. Where is the conference?

QUESTION: It’s in Tehran, I think. But there’s --

MS. PSAKI: Okay.

QUESTION: I’m just wondering if you guys had any --

MS. PSAKI: We will look into that.

QUESTION: -- thoughts about this. I mean, it’s sponsored by the government, clearly, so it – the Iranian Government. So it’s --

Cliff wanted to know the name of the travel agency that the New Horizons Iranian NGO used to book the flights. Lacking a piece of paper with the name, I showed him the itinerary in an email on my iPhone. He jotted it down. After telling me to wait, Cliff disappeared behind a locked door only to emerge again. Cliff asked,"Gee, my eyesight in so poor, I don't think I got the phone number of the travel agency right." I offered him a pen to write it down again since he said he left his in the office. He said, "let me just borrow your phone to take it back to the office to write down the number." Cliff was gone for about 15 minutes. It was clear that the contents of the phone were being uploaded to some government data vacuuming device. The only time something like that occurred with a computer in my possession was in 2002 at Ben Gurion Airport when an Israeli screener took my laptop away long enough to capture its hard drive content.

After more "small talk" from Cliff, I was permitted to repack my bags which Cliff had been kind enough to unpack, while leaving the contents all over an inspection table. However, some nicely-wrapped gifts I received from Iranian media organizations remained unwrapped by Cliff. As he escorted me to the exit, I asked him, "I still need my passport." He replied, "Didn't I give it back to you?" I said, "No." He went back into the locked office and emerged in a a few minutes with the passport. That was no accident and there was a clear message that passports and the right to travel abroad can be imposed by the government on its citizenry at any time.


TSA's calling card: ripped opened and damaged gifts. Ever wonder what American Gestapo agents would look like? In Boston, they are right off the set of "Cheers."

After remaining in Boston over night, I checked my bag into the Jet Blue counter at Logan. After opening the bag upon returning home, every gift had been opened with the TSA placing a tape bearing "Transportation Security Administration" on one of the gift packages. A few plastic boxes containing dried fruits and dates had been smashed by TSA. It was a reminder of the framed photograph of President Kennedy and Indonesian President Sukarno that I brought back to America in 2011. Someone with TSA at Chicago O'Hare Airport decided it would be nice to gouge out Kennedy's right temple with a knife. Kennedy was in a limousine after meeting Sukarno at Andrew Air Force Base. The president was in the same exact spot where he was sitting when he was assassinated in a carefully-contrived right-wing and Zionist coup d'etat on November 22, 1963.

Which brings us to the "ZOG." When I first heard the term, which means "Zionist Occupation Government," in 1999, I thought it was a silly polemic more in the domain of skin heads and KKK types. Based on what I experienced at Logan, the full court press for which Israelis at Ben Gurion and their contractors at Amsterdam's Schiphol have become infamous, I can no longer dismiss the idea that America has fallen under the control of a ZOG. To be harassed at the airport after a concerted campaign of the ADL and Israel and their mouthpieces, including the Jerusalem Post, Washington Free Beacon, Times of Israel, Algemeiner, and other Zionist propaganda outlets, including BuzzFeed.com, which couldn't even get the story about the Tehran conference correct. The website falsely reported that British historian Alison Weir, Franch-Cameroonian comedian Dieudonne M'Bala M'Bala, and former Representative Mark Siljander (R-MI) were in attendance when they were not. Hopefully, BuzzFeed has learned its lesson from republishing press releases from the defamatory Anti-Defamation League of the infamous Jewish supremacist Abe Foxman.

The outcry from the Zionists and neocons over the Americans' appearance in Tehran was reminiscent of the pressure put on Public Broadcasting System travelogue host Rick Steves when he visited Iran in 2011 to film an episode of his widely-acclaimed program. Steves, who, like Mark Twain, advocates travel as the best education one can receive, was harassed after visiting Iran by the same deep-pocketed Zionist pressure groups who belched forth their trademark polemics over the New Horizons conference.

So, if you don't believe you live in a ZOG dictatorship, this is the first thing I saw after stepping off the passenger tram at Tampa International Airport:



When are we, together, going to defeat these occupying vermin and seize back our country, once and for all?

Real liars go to Tehran By Pepe Escobar

THE ROVING EYE

Real liars go to Tehran

By Pepe Escobar 

Uncle Marx never thought about this one: history repeating itself as double tragedy after already being a farce in the first place. Let's examine the case in hand. First of all, take a close look at this Wall Street Journal op-ed from September 2002, in the hysterical run-up towards the invasion of Iraq. 

Title: The Case for Toppling Saddam. Author: Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu - then out of the Israeli government. 

It's all here: a "dictator who is rapidly expanding his arsenal of biological and chemical weapons" and "who is feverishly trying to acquire nuclear weapons"; the Saddam equals Hitler parallel; the portrayal of (de facto nuclear power) Israel as helpless victims of Palestinian "terror"; the claim that Saddam could produce nuclear fuel "in centrifuges the size of washing machines that can be hidden throughout the country - and Iraq is a very big country"; the cheerleading of a unilateral pre-emptive strike; and the inevitable conclusion that "nothing less than dismantling his regime will do''. 

Fast-forward over 10 years to this week in Israel. The scene: press conference of Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu and visiting US President Barack Obama. Anyone watching it live on al-Jazeera, from the Middle East to East Asia, must have thought they were watching a geopolitical Back to the Future - and frankly, Michael J Fox at least oozed charm. 

No charm here; this was more like an eerie, suit-and-tie Return of the Living Dead. Bibi and Obama were at pains to stress the US-Israel bond was "eternal". Actually Bibi preferred to stress that Iran's (non-existent) nuclear weapons posed an existential threat to Israel. He repeated, over and over again, that Obama was adamant; Israel was entitled to do anything to defend itself, and its security would not be anyone's responsibility, even Washington's. 

Obama, for his part, once again stressed that Washington's official policy towards Iran was not containment - but to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon. He stressed the "window of opportunity" was getting narrower; and, of course, that all options were on the table. 

The thought that the president of the United States (POTUS) willfully ignores the verdict of his own alphabet soup of intel agencies on Iran might raise eyebrows in a rational world. But this is not reality; more like a trashy reality show. 

Dream, dream, wet settler dream
The powers that be in Israel - neocon-infested US corporate media avalanche of denials notwithstanding - were absolutely essential in the whole Iraq War cheerleading operation; Ariel Sharon, at the time, boasted that the strategic coordination between Israel and the US had reached "unprecedented dimensions''. 

Bibi was just a cog in the wheel then - as Jim Lobe details here - quoting Bibi's pearls of wisdom dispensed to a misinformed-to-oblivion US Congress in 2002. 

Every usual "Israeli official" suspect at the time was breathlessly spinning that Saddam was only months away from a nuclear weapon. The bulk of WMD "intelligence" presented to Congress and faithfully parroted by corporate media was filtered if not entirely fabricated by Israeli intelligence - something duly detailed, among others, by Shlomo Brom in his study An Intelligence Failure, published by the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies of Tel Aviv University in November 2003. 

Of course it didn't matter that UN inspectors found no nuclear weapon program evidence on site. Of course it didn't matter that Saddam son-in-law Hussein Kamel, who had defected to Jordan in 1995, had told UN inspectors in detail there had been no WMDs whatsoever since 1991. 

Now it's double tragedy, and double farce, all over again. Yet even Nepalis building glitzy towers in Dubai know that the ''Bomb Iran'' hysteria is Tel Aviv's tactic to change the subject from the relentless land confiscation/ethnic cleansing in slow motion in Palestine and consequently the de facto total impossibility of a two-state solution. 

Here, Jonathan Cook succinctly details the frankly scary political configuration in Israel after the recent elections. The Israeli website Ynet has reported that Israeli settlers can't stop hailing their brand new "wet dream" cabinet. Translation: the ultimate nail in the coffin of the already dead and buried "peace process". 

So here's a modern geopolitical parable that would puzzle Aesop. Bibi publicly insults POTUS. He unabashedly supports Mitt Romney (who?) in the US presidential elections. He hits the "peace process" with a barrage of Hellfire "facts on the ground" (with loads of Palestine "collateral damage"). He sticks to his one and only message; Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb Bomb Iran. And then POTUS, in theory the mighty Double O Bama with a license to kill (list) but actually behaving like an accidental tourist, lands in Israel with his kill list between his legs, to bask in Bibi's glory. 

No wonder the rabid American neo-con/Israeli firster/Bomb Iran crowd is gloating. Over 10 years ago their mantra was "Real Men go to Tehran". The question now is whether POTUS will be able to grow a set of proper cojones and stare them down. 

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His new book, just out, is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). 

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com.