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. 

Cutting through the propaganda on Chavez's funeral

 Cutting through the propaganda on Chavez funeral

The Western corporate news media has been incessant in its propagandizing the coverage of the funeral of Venezuela's late President Hugo Chavez Frias.

Some U.S.-based reporters were dropped into Caracas for funeral coverage because most media organizations are too cheap to have full-time reporters and bureaus in the Venezuelan capital. Instead, they rely on local stringers, many of them anti-Chavez sons and daughters of Venezuela's wealthy elite, or on viper capitalist propaganda-issuing entities like the Associated Press. Reuters referred to funeral mourners such as actor Sean Penn as "idealists." The Hollywood-linked Huffington Post called the gathering an assemblage of "left-wing glitterati."

The AP, CNN, and others cherry-picked the attendees at the funeral, pointing to the attendance of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko without reporting that every major Western Hemisphere nation was represented by their head of state or government except for the United States and Canada. Of course, such a headline would point to the wide chasm between the "gringo" North America, including the United States, Canada, and the mafia-infested Bahamas, and the nations of Latin America and the Caribbean.

The capitalist news media could not bring themselves to report that with only minor exceptions, every Latin American and Caribbean nation was represented by their presidents or prime ministers. Belize's Prime Minister Dean Barrow would have been in Caracas but his wife is undergoing medical treatment abroad and he is with her. He was represented by Deputy Prime Minister Gaspar Vega. Barbados's recently re-elected Prime Minister Freundel Stuart's government was being sworn in at a formal ceremony in parliament so he could not attend the funeral. Instead, Stuart signed a condolence book at the Venezuelan embassy in Barbados. Paraguay's CIA- and Obama-administration-installed clique has been expelled from most Latin American organizations. Paraguay was represented by its ousted President and good friend of Chavez, Fernando Lugo.

The corporate media was untruthful in calling the funeral gathering a collection of anti-American leaders. Among those in attendance were such conservative Latin American presidents as Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia, Sebastian Pinera of Chile, and Ricardo Martinelli of Panama.

The AP, among others, issued incomplete lists on the leaders attending Chavez's funeral. One glaring omission was that of Costa Rican President Laura Chinchilla, whose name does not appear on either the AP and Miami Herald lists of attendees. The Herald bends to the wishes of Miami's large right-wing Cuban exile (gusano) community, its largely transplanted Jewish community from New York City, and recent arrivals from Latin America claiming persecution in progressive Latin American countries. In fact, many of the latter are billionaires who have hidden their wealth from Latin American tax collectors and are now claiming "political persecution" in order to maintain their residency status in the United States.

Other than President Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, both bitter foes of Chavez, the only other Western Hemisphere government leader who failed to attend the funeral for Chavez for purely political reasons was Bahamian Prime Minister Perry Christie. Bahamian foreign policy is heavily-influenced by the Zionist circles in nearby Miami, as well as a growing number of Christian Zionists in the Bahamas. The Bahamas has also attracted a number of billionaire and millionaire tax cheats from progressive Latin American countries and right-wing political exiles, including some from Venezuela.


Belarus's Alexander Lukashenko paying respects. Front row, left to right: President Raul Castro of Cuba; Cilia Flores, wife of acting President Nicolas Maduro and Attorney General of Venezuela; Nicolas Maduro; Hugo Chavez's mother, Elena Frias; Chavez's daughters Maria Gabriela and Rosa Virginia Chavez. Second row, left to right: Prince Philip of Spain, President Rafel Correa of Ecuador; President Sebastian Pinera of Chile; and President Evo Morales of Bolivia. Third row, left to right: President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil; President Otto Perez Molina of Guatemala; ; President Mauricio Funes of El Salvador; President Laura Chinchilla of Costa Rica; and President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia. Fourth row, left to right: President of Peru Ollanta Humala; President Enrique Pena Nieto of Mexico; President Ricardo Martinelli of Panama. Also in back, left side, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega with mustache; Uruguayan President Jose "Pepe" Mujica, in sun glasses without tie; and Surinamese President Desi Bouterse, in sun glasses with tie.

The Israel Lobby-influenced corporate media ran their stories on the funeral with the meme that it was a "strange collection" of anti-American leaders from around the world. Ahmadinejad was present and had the words of the Spanish-language Roman Catholic mass translated to him by his own personal interpreter. Ahmadinejad later said that Chavez would one day be "resurrected" alongside Jesus Christ  and a as-yet-unknown "imam" who would appear to usher in world peace. Ahmadinejad's reference to Jesus Christ appeared to only incite the Israel Lobby-dominated media in the United States, Canada, Israel, and Europe.

The corporate media also lambasted acting President Nicolas Maduro, calling him a bus driver who became foreign minister and vice president. In what represents more lousy journalism, entities like Reuters failed to mention that Maduro was the head of the Caracas Metro workers' union and a congressman before becoming foreign minister under Chavez. Imagine if Reuters, in describing Vice President Joseph Biden upon his succeeding to the presidency, stated that Biden was a small-time Wilmington lawyer and New Castle County councilman before becoming Vice President. One does not require Journalism 101 to note that is just shoddy journalism at its core.

The U.S. and European Union-backed candidate for president, Henrique Capriles Radonski, who is of Jewish descent, has called Maduro a "boy," in keeping with the privileged upbringing of Venezuela's Jewish community and those with strong bloodlines to it.

While President Obama could not bring himself to send condolences to the family of Chavez and the people of Venezuela on the death of the Chavez -- expressing a desire for a "new start" in relations doesn't count and Obama should have apologized for his predecessor's failed attempt to oust Chavez in a coup -- the Prime Minister of tiny Sint Maarten, Sarah Wescott-Williams, was able to express her condolences and that of the people of Sint Maarten during a Council of Ministers meeting. It's pretty bad when half of a Caribbean island can muster up more respect for the late Venezuelan champion of the poor than the pampered President of the United States.

http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/articles/20130309

El comandante has left the building By Pepe Escobar

THE ROVING EYE

El comandante has left the building

By Pepe Escobar 

Now that would be some movie; the story of a man of the people who rises against all odds to become the political Elvis of Latin America. Bigger than Elvis, actually; a president who won 13 out of 14 national democratic elections. No chance you will ever see such a movie winning an Oscar - much less produced in Hollywood. Unless, of course, Oliver Stone convinces HBO about a cable/DVD special. 

How enlightening to watch world leaders' reactions to the death of Venezuela's El Comandante Hugo Chavez. Uruguay's President Jose Mujica - a man who actually shuns 90% of his salary because he insists he covers his basic necessities with much less - once again reminded everyone how he qualified Chavez as "the most generous leader I ever met", while praising the "fortress of democracy" of which Chavez was a great builder. 

Compare it with US President Barack Obama - in what sounds like a dormant cut and paste by some White House intern - reaffirming US support for "the Venezuelan people". Would that be "the people" who have been electing and re-electing Chavez non-stop since the late 1990s? Or would that be "the people" who trade Martinis in Miami demonizing him as an evil communist? 

El Comandante may have left the building - his body defeated by cancer - but the post-mortem demonization will go on forever. One key reason stands out. Venezuela holds the largest oil reserves in the world. Washington and that crumbling Kafkaesque citadel also known as the European Union sing All You Need is Love non-stop to those ghastly, feudal Persian Gulf petro-monarchs (but not to "the people") in return for their oil. By contrast, in Venezuela El Comandante came up with the subversive idea of using oil wealth to at least alleviate the problems of most of his people. Western turbo-capitalism, as is well known, does not do redistribution of wealth and empowerment of communitarian values. 

I hate you, cabron
According to the Foreign Ministry, Vice-President Nicolas Maduro - and not the leader of the National Assembly, Diosdado Cabello, very close to top military leaders - will be temporarily in power before new elections to be held within the next 30 days. Maduro is bound to win them handily; the Venezuelan political opposition is a fragmented joke. This spells out Chavismo without Chavez - much to the chagrin of the immense pan-American and pan-European Chavez-hating cottage industry 

It's not an accident that El Comandante became immensely popular among "the people" of not only vast swathes of Latin America but also all across the Global South. These "people" - not in the Barack Obama sense - clearly saw the direct correlation between neoliberalism and the expansion of poverty (now millions of Europeans are also tasting it). Especially in South America, it was popular reaction against neoliberalism that led - via democratic elections - to a wave of leftist governments in the past decade, from Venezuela to Bolivia, Ecuador and Uruguay. 

The Bush administration - to say the least - abhorred it. They could not do anything about Lula in Brazil - a clever operator who adopted neoliberal clothes (Wall Street loved him) but remained a progressive at heart. Washington - incapable of getting rid of the coup after coup reflexes of the 1960s and 1970s - thought that Chavez was a weak link. Thus came the April 2002 coup led by a military faction, with power given to a wealthy entrepreneur. The US-backed coup lasted less than 48 hours; Chavez was duly restored to power, supported by "the people" (the real thing) and most of the army. 

So there's nothing unexpected in the announcement by Maduro, a few hours before El Comandante's death, that two US embassy employees would be expelled in 24 hours; Air Attache David Delmonaco, and assistant Air Attache Devlin Costal. Delmonaco was accused of fomenting - what else - a coup with some factions of the Venezuelan military. Those gringos never learn. 

Immense suspicion among Chavistas that El Comandante may have been poisoned - a convoluted replay of what happened to Yasser Arafat in 2004 - is also predictable. It could have been highly radioactive polonium-210, as in Arafat's case. The Hollywood-friendly CIA may have some ideas about that. 

All shook up
The verdict is now open on what exact brand of revolutionary was Chavez. He always praised everyone from Mao to Che in the revolutionary pantheon. He certainly was a very skillful popular leader with a fine geopolitical eye to identify centuries-old patterns of subjugation of Latin America. Thus his constant reference to the Hispanic revolutionary tradition from Bolivar to Marti. 

Chavez's mantra was that the only way out for Latin America would be better integration; thus his impulsion of myriad mechanisms, from ALBA (the Bolivarian Alliance) to Petrocaribe, from the Banco del Sur (the Bank of the South) to UNASUR (the Union of South American countries). 

As for his "socialism of the 21st century", beyond all ideological straitjackets he did more to explore the true spirit of common values - as an antidote to the putrefaction of turbo-charged, financial capitalism - than tons of neo-Marxist academic analyses. 

No wonder the Goldman Sachs gang and cohorts saw him as worse than the Black Plague. Venezuela bought Sukhoi fighter jets; entered strategic relationships with BRICS members Russia and China - not to mention other Global South actors; maintains over 30,000 Cuban doctors practicing preventive medicine living in poor communities - what led to a boom of young Venezuelans studying medicine. 

Stark numbers tell most of the story that needs to be known. Venezuelan public deficit is a mere 7,4% of GDP. Public debt is 51,3% of GDP - much less than the European Union average. The public sector - defying apocalyptic "communist" accusations - accounts for only 18,4% of the economy; less than state-oriented France and even the whole of Scandinavia. In terms of geopolitics of oil, quotas are established by OPEC; so the fact that Venezuela is exporting less to the US means it's diversifying its customers (and exporting more and more to strategic partner China). 

And here's the clincher; poverty accounted for 71% of Venezuelan citizens in 1996. In 2010, the percentage had been reduced to 21%. For a serious analysis of the Venezuelan economy in the Chavez era, see here. 

Years ago, it took a superb novelist like Garcia Marquez to reveal El Comandante's secret as The Great Communicator; he was one of them (his "people", in the not-Barack Obama sense), from the physical appearance to the mannerisms, convivial attitude and language (the same applied to Lula in relation to most Brazilians).

So while Oliver Stone surveys the film market, one will be waiting for a Garcia Marquez to elevate Chavez to novelistic Walhalla. One thing is sure; in terms of a Global South narrative, history will record that El Comandante may have left the building; but then, after him the building was never the same again. 

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. 

And the Oscar goes to... the CIA By Pepe Escobar

THE ROVING EYE And the Oscar goes to... the CIA By Pepe Escobar  Even in his wild, stoned to death, easy rider cuckoo times, Jack Nicholson would never have imagined he would one day tag team with the First Lady of the United States to present an Oscar for Best Picture.  This is more Hunter S Thompson than Academy territory - and hardly presidential. But it did - beautifully - make the point about the marriage between Washington and Hollywood. If George Clooney marries Sudan (but not Palestine), why not Jack schmoozing with Michelle? What next? Obama sharing intel with Jessica Chastain?  The marriage that really counts - for the future - may be at the heart of the military-industrial-security-Hollywood complex, as in Zero Dark Thirty and endless variations of the Marvel ethos (see Zero Dark Oscar, Asia Times Online, February 22, 2013). But for now, in terms of poetic justice, nothing makes more sense than Best Picture going to the Ben Affleck-directed (and Clooney co-produced) Argo.  Those 6,000-plus Academy voters simply could not resist a plot loosely based in facts in which a patriotic and resourceful Hollywood saves the CIA. And with a certified Hollywood ending as a bonus. Thus, predictably, this was Hollywood awarding an Oscar to itself, to hyper-nationalism, to American heroes and of course to good (Americans) over evil (Iranians).  And how poetically towering this justice becomes when a movie about a fake movie that fooled revolutionary Iranians during the 444-day hostage crisis is crowned Best Picture just two days before the US and other members of the UN Security Council, plus Germany, go back to the table to discuss whether Iran is now fooling them - and going for a nuclear weapon.  Argo strives to prove the point that Iran hates the American Satan but Iranians love Hollywood. Over three decades later, Iranians are not so gullible; they are even going to shoot their counter-Argo. And the absolute majority of the population - even under harsh US and European Union sanctions - supports a civilian nuclear program. In parallel, it will be fun to watch how Argo plays from Karachi to Caracas.  Back in Hollywood, as Orson Welles taught us all, it's all fake. Even former president Jimmy Carter admitted on CNN that the Argo plot itself was Canadian - mostly concocted by then ambassador to Iran Ken Taylor. Everybody knows this in Canada. But obviously not in the US.  Ask Christoph Shultz What really matters at the Oscars is the red carpet - with its immortal inbuilt phrase "What are you wearing". In a festival of wardrobe malfunctions worthy of an FBI investigation at least there was Charlize Theron in Dior, Naomi Watts in Armani Prive and Anne Hathaway in Prada to soothe weary eyes. This is what will be doing the rounds digitally all over the planet - as most of the winners are already forgotten by now.  There were no surprises. If Daniel Day-Lewis playing the American God, aka Lincoln, didn't get his (third) Oscar, that would be blamed on a Chinese cyber attack. Actually, there was a surprise; Hollywood's Zeus, Steven Spielberg, was spurned to the benefit of Life of Pi director Ang Lee. Cynics immediately volunteered this has a lot to do with Hollywood's pivoting towards the lucrative Asian market.  Quentin Tarantino said this was the year of the writers at the Oscars. It was certainly his year. It makes total sense that his revenge classic Django Unchained won for Best Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor (the Viennese master, Christoph Waltz).  For Tarantino, only a humongous body count can lead us to Justice. One may occasionally be fed up with his perennial over-the-top antics. But the fact is that his prescription for America - when evil stares into your face you go out all guns blazing - is believable because his characters are so splendidly written. No wonder the gun lobby and assorted National Rifle Association fanatics are using Django as prime PR among African Americans. Were they to follow Django ("the D is silent") to the letter, post-apocalyptic US would probably look like this Django Uncrossed spoof.  The Academy may in fact have redeemed itself a bit for its love story with the CIA when Best Screenplay went to Tarantino instead of Tony Kushner for the totemic Lincoln. Arguably Kushner - and Spielberg - built their anti-slavery epic without so much as a glance towards Frederick Douglass or W E B DuBois's Black Reconstruction in America - where it's clear that "it was the fugitive slaves who forced the slaveholders to face the alternative of surrendering to the North or surrendering to the Negro."  Without at least 200,000 black people in the Army and another 200,000 working in supporting roles, the North would have lost the war. Or, at best, the white supremacist South would have remained as it was - slavery and all. None of this is addressed in Lincoln.  What Django's two Oscars prove once again is that Hollywood is a sucker for revenge. Even when it comes in the form of a warped, cripto-psychedelic spaghetti-western that would make John Ford puke. Well, it's still a Wild West. Wilder than Jack Nicholson's wildest dreams.  Tarantino may now be the best-qualified screenwriter to decode Barack Obama, the new Lincoln. What about a gourmet western showing the passage from GWOT (global war on terror) to invisible, shadow war, while internally the new Lincoln goes for gun control mixed with drone surveillance.  What about Christoph Waltz playing the devious John Brennan - a confidante to then CIA director George Tenet fully updated on "the intelligence and facts being fixed around the policy" to justify the war on Iraq, and later setting the parameters on torture and seeking Justice Department approval for it.  Picture a scene with Waltz, with his trademark delivery, testifying to the Senate Intelligence Committee - as Brennan did early this month - that "the regimes in Tehran and Pyongyang remain bent on pursuing nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missile delivery systems."  Argo is for pussies. The time has come for Obomber Unchained.  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.

Zero Dark Oscar By Pepe Escobar

THE ROVING EYE Zero Dark Oscar By Pepe Escobar  The buzz in Los Angeles is that Argo will win this year’s Oscar for Best Picture.  The Ben Affleck-directed CIA thriller has already won Best Picture at the Golden Globes, the Directors Guild of America, the Screen Actors Guild and the Producers Guild. Only in Hollywood you can win Best Picture without the guy who put it all together being nominated for Best Director (that will most certainly be Hollywood’s Zeus, Steven Spielberg, for his Civil War epic Lincoln).  Are we talking politics and movies? You betcha. It’s impossible to understand Washington without spending time in Hollywood. I had a ball doing it – from the late 1980s to the early 1990s. Never bothered to join the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) though; just a bunch of twats in awe of the star system whose only purpose in life is to be wined and dined before voting for the Golden Globes.  And still I went to all the junkets, all the screenings in the studios, all the parties, met a galaxy of stars and lesser "stars", saw how deals were cut, enrolled in the annual pilgrimage Hollywood-Cannes (for the film festival). I even held an Oscar in my hands once; in 1993, from Emma Thompson, in the press room, while she was composing herself to call then-husband "Kenneth" [Branagh]. Oscar is not heavy, and not particularly handsome. But yes, it's the Holy Grail, like being a tenant in the White House. If you nail how the industry works in Hollywood, you nail Washington politics virtually from A to Z.  So let's talk about this year's key political contenders; Spielberg's Lincoln, Affleck's Argo and Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty (ZD30).  ET come home In the Hollywood ethos, nothing is political; everything must be subordinated to an intoxicating haze of bipartisan hyper-nationalist myth. For Hollywood, wars and history must always be subordinated to ideology (and that explains why Coppola's Apocalypse Now - an ideology strip-tease - "is" the real Vietnam war).  No wonder Argo is being defined in Hollywood by the innocent cliche of a "liberally Hollywood-ized chronicle", when it's in fact a hard-hitting CIA promo about an agent coming up with a scheme to extract a few diplomats caught inside the American embassy during the 1979 Iran hostage crisis; the plan is to disguise them as a - what else - Hollywood film crew.  Affleck is embraced in Hollywood as a "liberal", much as George "Free Sudan" Clooney. Long gone is his Nespresso poster-boy gig; Clooney - quintessential Hollywood royalty - is an Argo co-producer, alongside Affleck and Grant Heslov.  In a neat juxtaposition, Argo is the story of a rescue while ZD30 is the chronicle of a hit foretold (as is Lincoln, incidentally). Where Argo meets ZD30 is that both are CIA eulogies. Thus, inevitably the Iranians depicted by "liberal" Affleck are nothing but a hysterical, fanatical mob, as much as the Arabs and Pakistanis depicted by Bigelow are either to be tortured, or merely qualify as nuisance in the backdrop.  Argo displays its claims of historical credibility with a cartoonish five-minute initial presentation supplying minimal background for audiences to understand the complex forces at play in the Iranian revolution. From then on, it's the CIA in the saddle. Forget about context - not to mention an attempt at dramatization of at least a single Iranian character; just wave after wave of that screaming, irrational mob.  Not a word that Iran's democracy was assassinated by - who else - the CIA in 1953. Not a word that the Shah's secret police, the Savak, had "disappeared", tortured and assassinated at will, trained by - who else - the CIA.  It's enlightening to remember that immediately after the Iranian revolution, throughout the 1980s Afghan jihad, the CIA channeled loads of money and weapons to Salafi-jihadis, including one Osama bin Laden, and alongside Saudi funds, propped up a Frankenstein - the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence. Nowadays, the CIA supports Salafi-jihadis from Libya to Syria - a remix of 1980s Afghanistan.  These CIA exploits cannot but be contrasted with the (not exactly subliminal) message peddled by "liberal" - as in "progressive" - Affleck; all over Argo, Iranians are depicted as terrorists who hate "our values".  Lincoln is just as "liberal" as Argo. But Spielberg is a cinematic master, way more effective in manipulating emotions. If Baudrillard was alive he would have deconstructed Lincoln as a sterling example of history as simulacrum.  Spielberg's Lincoln is a larger than life icon, an ahistorical totem in front of which audiences should ritually prostrate themselves, part of a perpetual sacrifice in the altar of politics as the supreme affirmation of the US political system. He is the perfect representation of the American dream and American values. Lincoln is on screen to be adored. Lincoln is, not surprisingly, ET. Suspension of disbelief? Oh yes, we shall all remain in awe.  Hit me with your rhythm stick Kathryn Bigelow is a very good filmmaker. Her Strange Days (1995) is arguably one of the best cult movies of the swingin' 90s supervised by William "Bubba" Clinton. It's a matter of no debate in Los Angeles that Bigelow is the female version of the late Tony Scott.  With ZD30, the point is not whether Bigelow has turned into the American Leni Riefenstahl (sorry, Leni). The point is - and you don't have to ask Godard at his apex in the 1960s - it's all in the editing (even when it was not in the screenplay to begin with).  ZD30 opens with a black screen and an audio mix of terrified phone calls on 9/11. Cut to the torture of "Ammar" in a CIA black site, the prelude for upcoming soft waterboarding. That sets the tone; ZD30, as it is edited, is an awesome commercial for the Bush-Cheney GWOT (global war on terror).  In this filthy Oz, the CIA only tortures certified evil terra-rists; the US government never kills innocent civilians; and all torturers, analysts and high-tech killers are unimpeachable selfless heroes.  Gotta love this CIA who relentlessly lied to get a war on Iraq; who engaged on a torture fest in endless black sites after endless extraordinary renditions; and who now has switched to a Drone War - HUMINT takes too long and is too costly - to improve its killing performance, frequently adorned with collateral damage.  A digital tsunami has been devoted to torture as depicted in ZD30. Bigelow has essentially defended the torture scenes as "depiction", not "endorsement". Well, once again it starts with the screenplay - written by Mark Boal, a former hack who was briefly embedded in Iraq. He based the screenplay on exclusive, privileged, "firsthand" access to CIA torturers and assorted CIA sources. Boal and Bigelow have stressed for months that ZD30 is a documentary-style "factual" narrative of the Osama bin Laden hunt and then the hit. They say it's factual. But they also say it's just a movie.  Here's the most articulate Bigelow has been in defending ZD30. She insists she was not "interested in portraying this military action as free of moral consequences". She insists ZD30 is "rigorous" - as in stressing its "documentary" side. She also insists she is a "lifelong pacifist".  Bigelow did shoot ZD30 - aesthetically - almost as a documentary. She depicts torture not graphically, but in a carefully sanitized way. Torture, in ZD30's terms, feels entirely justified. Thus entirely normalized. Thus entirely endorsable; after all the torturers themselves are so human - just like the hostages in Argo. Sartre to the rescue: hell is indeed other people, especially if they are Muslims.  Boal and Bigelow have also insisted they worked in a "journalistic" way. That's - literally - the killer; it proves ZD30 is the ultimate product of GWOT, embedded journalism. Once upon a time, the blues had a baby, and they named it rock'n roll. In post-modern America, the Pentagon created embedded journalism; and the CIA had its baby, embedded moviemaking.  ZD30 should be seen as the ultimate cinematic product of the Obama era. The record shows how the ""Yes we can" icon with silky rhetorical skills (wake up Spielberg, here's your new Lincoln) has trampled everything from ethics to the rule of law - not closing Guantanamo yet effortlessly pivoting from GWOT to shadow war and an exclusive kill list (no, "we don't torture", as he says in a TV interview in the background of a scene in ZD30). In the meantime, major sponsors - as in the CIA - merrily bask in the glow of cinematic myth.  The beauty of it is that Hollywood, the way it works, does not even need the CIA - or the Pentagon - as sponsors. Hollywood does His Master's Voice by default. And it already starts with a winning hand, technically - because nobody, save the odd European or Asian epic, can fight its unrivalled production values and period recreation know-how.  Still, Hollywood prides itself as "liberal". Argo may get Best Picture and Spielberg may get Best Director. But make no mistake; as the supreme representative of the post-modern military-industrial-security-Hollywood complex, nothing beats ZD30.  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.

The illusory state of the Empire By Pepe Escobar

THE ROVING EYE The illusory state of the Empire By Pepe Escobar  Barack Obama would never be so crass as to use a State of the Union (SOTU) address to announce an "axis of evil". No. Double O Bama, equipped with his exclusive license to kill (list), is way slicker. As much as he self-confidently pitched a blueprint for a "smart" - not bigger - US government, he kept his foreign policy cards very close to his chest. Few eyebrows were raised on the promise that "by the end of next year our war in Afghanistan will be over"; it won't be, of course, because Washington will fight to the finish to keep sizeable counterinsurgency boots on the ground - ostensibly to fight, in Obama's words, those evil "remnants of al-Qaeda". Obama promised to "help" Libya, Yemen and Somalia, not to mention Mali. He promised to "engage" Russia. He promised to seduce Asia with the Trans-Pacific Partnership - essentially a collection of corporate-friendly free-trade agreements. On the Middle East, he promised to "stand" with those who want freedom; that presumably does not include people from Bahrain. As this was Capitol Hill, he could not help but include the token "preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons"; putting more "pressure" on Syria - whose "regime kills its own people"; and to remain "steadfast" with Israel. North Korea was mentioned. Always knowing what to expect from the horse's mouth, the foreign ministry in Pyongyang even issued a preemptive attack, stressing that this week's nuclear test was just a "first response" to US threats; "second and third measures of greater intensity" would be unleashed if Washington continued to be hostile. Obama didn't even bother to answer criticism of his shadow wars, the Drone Empire and the legal justification for unleashing target practice on US citizens; he mentioned, in passing, that all these operations would be conducted in a "transparent" way. Is that all there is? Oh no, there's way more. Double O's game Since 9/11, Washington's strategy during the George W Bush years - penned by the neo-cons - read like a modified return to land war. But then, after the Iraq quagmire, came a late strategic adjustment, which could be defined as the Petraeus vs Rumsfeld match. The Petraeus "victory" myth, based on his Mesopotamian surge, in fact provided Obama with an opening for leaving Iraq with the illusion of a relative success (a myth comprehensively bought and sold by US corporate media). Then came the Lisbon summit in late 2010, which was set up to turn the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) into a clone of the UN Security Council in a purely Western format, capable of deploying autonomous military interventions - preemption included - all over the world. This was nothing less than classic Bush-Obama continuum. NATO's Lisbon summit seemed to have enthroned a Neoliberal Paradise vision of the complex relations between war and the economy; between the military and police operations; and between perennial military hardware upgrading and the political design of preemptive global intervention. Everything, once again, under Obama's supervision. The war in Afghanistan, for its part, was quite useful to promote NATO as much as NATO was useful to promote the war in Afghanistan - even if NATO did not succeed in becoming the Security Council of the global American Empire, always bent on dominating, or circumventing, the UN. Whatever mission NATO is involved in, command and control is always Washington's. Only the Pentagon is able to come up with the logistics for a transcontinental, global military operation. Libya 2011 is another prime example. At the start, the French and the Brits were coordinating with the Americans. But then Stuttgart-based AFRICOM took over the command and control of Libyan skies. Everything NATO did afterwards in Libya, the virtual commander in chief was Barack Obama. So Obama owns Libya. As much as Obama owns the Benghazi blowback in Libya. Libya seemed to announce the arrival of NATO as a coalition assembly line on a global scale, capable of organizing wars all across the world by creating the appearance of a political and military consensus, unified by an all-American doctrine of global order pompously titled "NATO's strategic concept". Libya may have been "won" by the NATO-AFRICOM combo. But then came the Syria red line, duly imposed by Russia and China. And in Mali - which is blowback from Libya - NATO is not even part of the picture; the French may believe they will secure all the gold and uranium they need in the Sahel - but it's AFRICOM who stands to benefit in the long term, boosting its military surge against Chinese interests in Africa. What is certain is that throughout this convoluted process Obama has been totally embedded in the logic of what sterling French geopolitical analyst Alain Joxe described as "war neoliberalism", inherited from the Bush years; one may see it as a champagne definition of the Pentagon's long, or infinite, war. Double O's legacy  Obama's legacy may be in the process of being forged. We might call it Shadow War Forever - coupled with the noxious permanence of Guantanamo. The Pentagon for its part will never abandon its "full spectrum" dream of military hegemony, ideally controlling the future of the world in all those shades of grey zones between Russia and China, the lands of Islam and India, and Africa and Asia. Were lessons learned? Of course not. Double O Bama may have hardly read Nick Turse's exceptional book Kill Anything that Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, where he painstakingly documents how the Pentagon produced "a veritable system of suffering". Similar analysis of the long war on Iraq might only be published by 2040. Obama can afford to be self-confident because the Drone Empire is safe. [1] Most Americans seem to absent-mindedly endorse it - as long as "the terrorists" are alien, not US citizens. And in the minor netherworlds of the global war on terror (GWOT), myriad profiteers gleefully dwell. A former Navy SEAL and a former Green Beret have published a book this week, Benghazi: the Definitive Report, where they actually admit Benghazi was blowback for the shadow war conducted by John Brennan, later rewarded by Obama as the new head of the CIA. The book claims that Petraeus was done in by an internal CIA coup, with senior officers forcing the FBI to launch an investigation of his affair with foxy biographer Paula Broadwell. The motive: these CIA insiders were furious because Petraeus turned the agency into a paramilitary force. Yet that's exactly what Brennan will keep on doing: Drone Empire, shadow wars, kill list, it's all there. Petraeus-Brennan is also classic continuum. Then there's Esquire milking for all it's worth the story of an anonymous former SEAL Team 6 member, the man who shot Geronimo, aka Osama bin Laden. [2] This is familiar territory, the hagiography of a Great American Killer, whose "three shots changed history", now abandoned by a couldn't-care-less government machinery but certainly not by those who can get profitable kicks from his saga way beyond the technically proficient torture-enabling flick - and Oscar contender - Zero Dark Thirty. Meanwhile, this is what's happening in the real world. China has surpassed the US and is now the biggest trading nation in the world - and counting. [3] This is just the first step towards the establishment of the yuan as a globally traded currency; then will come the yuan as the new global reserve currency, connected to the end of the primacy of the petrodollar... Well, we all know the drill. So that would lead us to reflect on the real political role of the US in the Obama era. Defeated (by Iraqi nationalism) - and in retreat - in Iraq. Defeated (by Pashtun nationalism) - and in retreat - in Afghanistan. Forever cozy with the medieval House of Saud - "secret" drone bases included (something that was widely known as early as July 2011). [4] "Pivoting" to the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, and pivoting to a whole bunch of African latitudes; all that to try to "contain" China. Thus the question Obama would never dare to ask in a SOTU address (much less in a SOTE - State of the Empire - address). Does the US remain a global imperial power? Or are the Pentagon's - and the shadow CIA's - armies nothing more than mercenaries of a global neoliberal system the US still entertains the illusion of controlling? Notes: 1. Poll: 45% approve of Obama's handling of the economy, CBS News, February 12, 2013. 2. The Man Who Killed Osama bin Laden... Is Screwed, Esquire, February 11, 2013.  3. China Eclipses U.S. as Biggest Trading Nation, Bloomberg News, February 10, 2013.  4. Secret drone bases mark latest shift in US attacks on al-Qaeda, The Times, July 26, 2011.  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.  (Copyright 2013 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)

Saudi recruitment pipeline for "Al Qaeda" running at full capacity

 

Saudi recruitment pipeline for "Al Qaeda" running at fullcapacity

The Saudi government's support for "Al Qaeda" and its spin-offs is, once again, running at full capacity. In a little-publicized report from the Middle East, the Saudi government has been emptying its prisons of death row inmates, some jailed for drug smuggling and rape in the kingdom and destined for a beheading in Riyadh's infamous "Chop Chop Square," in return for their joining the "Jihad" in Syria. The Saudis held the families of the prisoners as hostages to ensure the released prisoners went to Syria to fight Assad. 

According to a report by the Assyrian International News Agency (AINA), the Saudi Interior Ministry commuted the death sentences of several inmates in return for their going to Syria to fight against the government of President Bashar al-Assad. The CIA and Britain's MI-6 has been providing intelligence, weapons, and training to Jihadists, who have also been supplemented by Jihadists from Libya, armed by the CIA in the overthrow of Muammar Qaddafi. Shortly before his suspicious death in Scotland in 2005, former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook wrote in The Guardian that "Al Qaeda" was a CIA database of mercenaries, financiers, and interlocutors used by the CIA to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan: "Throughout the 80s he [Osama bin Laden] was armed by the CIA and funded by the Saudis to wage jihad against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan. Al-Qaida, literally 'the database,' was originally the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA to defeat the Russians."

It now appears that Al Qaeda and its spin-off Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) have been revived to target not the Soviet Union, which ceased to exist in 1991, but former Soviet-supported Arab socialist governments throughout the Middle East: Iraq, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, South Yemen, Syria, and lastly, Algeria. In her testimony before Congress, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, for the first time, admitted that the attack on the BP-Statoil-Sonatrach natural gas facility in Algeria involved Jihadists from Libya. These same Jihadists were involved in the September 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi, in which four Americans, including U.S. ambassador Christopher Stevens, were killed. The recent attack on the Algerian facility killed three Americans. A total of seven Americans, as well as foreigners and tens of thousands of Syrians and Libyans, have been killed as a result of the CIA and MI-6 operation to revitalize "Al Qaeda" as an effective fighting force in the Middle East. The CIA's support for Saudi Arabia's program to breathe new life into Al Qaeda goes a long way into explaining the secrecy surrounding the attack on the Benghazi compound and the gas plant in Algeria. Rather than pound Mrs. Clinton with questions about Benghazi, skeptical congressmen should hold their fire for incoming CIA chief John O. Brennan, President Obama's national security confidante and clandestine services veteran of the CIA. What did Brennan know about the Saudi program to supplement Al Qaeda forces in Syria and Libya and when did he know it?

The Al Qaeda presence in North Africa is being used to justify a massive buildup of U.S. military forces from Mauritania to Somalia.

The prisoners released from Saudi jails to fight in Syria against Assad, as well as to Libya to fight Qaddafi and Iraq to fight the Sh'ia government of Nouri al-Maliki, included Saudi nationals, as well as Iraqis, Yemenis, Palestinians, Sudanese, Jordanians, Afghanis, Syrians, Egyptians, Kuwaitis, Pakistanis, and Somalis.

This is not the first time that the Saudi Interior Ministry has been directly linked to Al Qaeda. On April 21, 2006, WMR reported: "Saudi informers have revealed that Al Qaeda members routinely traveled through Riyadh on their way to Pakistan and then to Taliban Afghanistan. These insiders report that Salman's [Governor of Riyadh Province Prince Salman] office arranged for cash payments, hotels, and air fares for the Al Qaeda members." Salman is now the Crown Prince, heir to the Saudi throne and Minister of Defense.

The authenticity of the Top Secret Saudi document [below] has been verified unofficially by the Saudi government and also by the governments of Yemen and Russia.

Translation of Saudi memo:

This is a document issued by
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia  Ministry of Interior  Follow-up	LOGO	Number: 71466/J/H  Attachments:  Date: 25/5/1433 H. [April /17/2012 AD]
	(Top Secret)
His Excellency General Suood Al-Thnayyan  The Classified [Secret] Office at the Ministry of Interior		May Allah protect him
Peace be upon you and Allah's mercy and blessings
In reference to the Royal Court telegram No. 112, dated on 04/19/1433 H [March 3, 2012], referring to those held in the Kingdom jails accused with crimes to which Islamic Sharia law of execution by sword [decapitation] applies, we inform you that we are in dialogue with the accused criminals who have been convicted with smuggling drugs, murder, rape, from the following nationalities: 110 Yemenis, 21 Palestinians, 212 Saudis, 96 Sudanese, 254 Syrians, 82 Jordanians, 68 Somalis, 32 Afghanis, 94 Egyptians, 203 Pakistanis, 23 Iraqis, and 44 Kuwaitis.  We have reached an agreement with them that they will be exempted from the death sentence and given a monthly salary to their families and loved ones, who will be prevented from traveling outside Saudi Arabia in return for rehabilitation of the accused and their training in order to send them to Jihad in Syria.  Please accept my greetings.  [Signed]  Director of follow up in Ministry of Interior  Abdullah bin Ali al-Rmezan  CC:  Authority of enforcement of the common good and prevention of forbidden  Copy for general intelligence

This is not the first time a classified document has pointed to the Saudi Interior Ministry as covering for drug dealers. When a Saudi Prince named Nayif was caught trafficking in cocaine in 1999, the Saudi Interior Ministry informed Paris in 2000 that if France brought criminal charges against Nayif, a lucrative $7 billion radar defense contract, Project SBGDP (Garde Frontiere), with the French firm Thales would be canceled. The details are found in the confidential French diplomatic cable obtained by WMR [below]. The cocaine trafficked by Nayif was being used to fund Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and the cash paid to terrorist recruits passing through Riyadh was paid by the Interior Ministry from the drug proceeds coffers. The CIA was aware of and encouraged the off-the-books payments to the Al Qaeda recruits, just as it is doing today with the Al Qaeda recruits being emptied from Saudi prisons and paid by Saudi government interlocutors.

Obama’s inauguration, Rhetoric versus Reality. “I The People Still Believe in War”

 

Obama’s inauguration, Rhetoric versus Reality. “I The People Still Believe in War”

What does this new 'liberal vision' actually mean?

By Richard Becker

Global Research, January 23, 2013

Region: USA

President Obama’s second Inaugural Address, Jan. 21, Washington, D.C.

President Barack Obama’s second Inaugural Address has been greeted by much of the corporate media and his supporters as a new “liberal vision,” in the words of a New York Times headline.

But while much of the president’s rhetoric was progressive-sounding and strongly delivered, there was little actual content, and most of that was decidedly unprogressive and/or dishonest.

“A decade of war is now ending,” Obama stated. In fact, U.S. military attacks and interventions are continuing in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and other countries. Every Tuesday, there is a gathering in the White House where the president signs-off on the assassination-by- drone-missile of targeted individuals—and anyone who has the misfortune of being near them at the time of the strike—in a number of countries, none of which is actually at war with the U.S. .

While declaring that “We, the people, still believe that enduring security and lasting peace do not require perpetual war,” Obama boasted that “America will remain the anchor of strong alliances in every corner of the globe.” The Pentagon continues to maintain 900+ bases on every continent. The U.S. military budget is larger than all other countries in the world combined! These are, in fact, the essential elements of perpetual war and empire.

In his speech, the president referenced “Seneca Falls and Selma and Stonewall,” seeking to present himself as a continuator of the historic movements for women’s, African American and LGBT equal rights. The advances of these movements have been the results of determined mass movements over decades and centuries.

Despite the reality that more immigrants have been deported during his administration than any other in history, Obama called for “bright young students and engineers” to be “enlisted in our workforce rather than expelled from our country.”

Some passages of the speech seemed to come from a parallel universe. “We know that America thrives when every person can find independence and pride in their work, when the wages of honest labor will liberate families from the brink of hardship.”

In the real world United States of 2013, more than 23 million people are unemployed or severely underemployed. More than 146 million—or 48 percent of the population—is classified as low-income or living in poverty, a record. Real wages have been relentlessly driven down over the past three decades. When adjusted for inflation, the minimum wage now is worth 45 percent less than it was in 1968.

Yet, the word “poverty” was only mentioned twice in the speech, once in the past tense, “when twilight years were spent in poverty …” as if millions of elderly people are not today among the poor.

The other reference to poverty: “We are true to our creed when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else because she is an American, she is free, and she is equal ….” That may sound noble, but why not put forward a plan to end the “bleakest poverty” in this, the richest country in history?

Consistent with his first term record, the president advanced no proposals for how to address growing impoverishment, hunger and homelessness. None.

A strikingly deceptive paragraph in the speech read: “We, the people, still believe that every citizen deserves a basic measure of security and dignity. We must make the hard choices to reduce the cost of health care and the size of our deficit.”

Translation: We believe everyone deserves security and dignity, so we will be cutting your health care benefits very soon to meet the demands of the big banks.

Barack Obama’s election to the presidency in 2008 was an historic occasion in the history of a country blighted by extreme racism. It broke a 220-year streak of only white, northern European-descended males, nearly all wealthy, being allowed to occupy the highest elective office.

But regardless of who is elected, the job of U.S. president comes with a job description: CEO of the imperialist empire and protector of Corporate America.

Syria: A Jihadi Paradise by Pepe Escobar

So Bashar al-Assad hath martially spoken -- for the first time in seven months -- predictably blaming the Syrian civil war on "terrorists" and "Western puppets."  

Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, he of the former "zero problems with our neighbors" policy, commented that Assad only reads the reports of his secret services. C'mon, Ahmet; Bashar may be no Stephen Hawking, but he's certainly getting his black holes right.  

Assad, moreover, has a plan: a national dialogue leading to a national charter -- to be submitted to a referendum -- and then an enlarged government and a general amnesty. The problem is who is going to share all this bottled happiness because Assad totally dismisses the new Syria opposition coalition as well as the Free Syrian Army (FSA), describing them as foreign-recruited gangs taking orders from foreign powers to implement one supreme agenda: the partition of Syria.   

Still, Assad's got a plan. First stage: all foreign powers financing the "terrorists" -- as in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization-Gulf Cooperation Council compound -- must stop doing so. That's already a major no-no. Only in a second stage would the Syrian Army cease all its operations, but still reserve the right to respond to any -- inevitable -- "provocation."  

Assad's plan does not mention what happens to Assad himself. The only thing the multiple strands of the opposition agree on is that "the dictator must go" before any negotiations take place. Yet he wants to be a candidate to his own succession in 2014.  

As if this was not a humongous "detail" torpedoing the whole construct of current UN mediator Lakhdar Brahimi, there's still the crucial nagging point of Brahimi insisting on including the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) in a Syrian transitional government. Brahimi should know better. It's as if the UN was praying for a Hail Mary pass -- that is, Assad's voluntary abdication.  

This ain't Tora Bora

If you want to know what's really going in Syria, look no further than Hezbollah secretary-general Sheikh Nasrallah. He does tell it like it is.  

Then there's what Ammar al-Musawi, Hezbollah's number 3 -- as in their de facto foreign minister -- told my Italian colleaguem Ugo Tramballi. The most probable post-Assad scenario, if there is one, will be "not a unitary state, but a series of emirates near the Turkish border, and somebody proclaiming an Islamic state." Hezbollah's intelligence -- the best available on Syria -- is adamant: "one third of the combatants in the opposition are religious extremists, and two-thirds of the weapons are under their control." The bottom line -- this is a Western proxy war, with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) acting as a "vanguard" for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.  

Asia Times Online readers have already known this for eons, as much as they know about the tectonic-plates-on-the-move fallacy of GCC autocracies promoting "democracy" in Syria. While the geologically blessed House of Saud has bribed every grain of sand in sight to be immunized against any whiff of Arab Spring, at least in Kuwait the winds of change are forcing the Al-Sabah family to accept a prime minister who is not an emir's puppet. Yes, petromonarchs; sooner or later you're all going down.  

As for those who ignore Musawi, they do it at their own peril; blowback is and will remain inevitable, "like in Afghanistan." Musawi adds, "Syria is not Tora Bora; it's on the Mediterranean coast, close to Europe." Syria in the 2010s is the 1980s Afghan remix -- with exponential in-built blowback.  

And for those who blindly follow the blind in repeating that Hezbollah is a "terrorist" organization, Hezbollah is closely cooperating with the UN -- on the ground with over 10,000 blue helmets, under the command of Italian General Paolo Serra -- to keep southern Lebanon free from Syrian civil war contamination.  

The dictator has fallen -- again

Not surprisingly, that motley crew branded as the "Syrian opposition" rejected Assad en bloc. For the Muslim Brotherhood -- the self-styled power in waiting -- he is a "war criminal" who should go on trial. For Georges Sabra, the vice-president of that American-Qatari concoction, the National Coalition, Assad's words were a "declaration of war against the Syrian people."  

Predictably, the US State Department -- not yet under John Kerry -- said Assad was "detached from reality." London said it was all hypocrisy and immediately launched yet another "secret" two-day conference this week at Wilton Park in West Sussex mingling coalition members with the usual gaggle of "experts," academics, GCC officials and "multilateral agencies." The spectacularly pathetic UK Foreign Secretary William Hague twitted -- for the umpteenth time -- that "Assad's departure from power is inevitable."  

Facts on the ground though spell that Assad is not going anywhere anytime soon.  

As for British claims that "the international community can provide support to a future transitional authority," that doesn't cut much slack among war-weary informed Syrians -- who know this civil war has been funded, supplied and amply coordinated by the West, as in the NATO component of the NATOGCC compound.  

They smell a -- Western -- rat in the obsessive characterization of everything in Syria as a sectarian war, as they see how loads of influent Sunnis have remained loyal to the government.  

They smell a -- Western -- rat when they look back and see this whole thing started just as the US$10 billion Iran-Iraq-Syria gas pipeline (crucially bypassing NATO member Turkey) had a chance to be implemented. This would represent a major economic boost to an independent Syria, an absolute no-no as far as Western interests are concerned.  

The Obama 2.0 administration -- and Israel -- would be more than comfortable with the MB in power in Syria, following the Egyptian modus operandi. The Brotherhood promotes the idea of a "civil state"; one just has to check the few "liberated areas" across Syria to detect rebel civility inbuilt in hardcore Sharia law and assorted beheadings.  

Yet what the NATOGCC compound and Israel really want is a Yemeni model for Syria; a military dictatorship without the dictator. What they're getting instead, for the foreseeable future, is Jihadi Paradise.  

Off with their heads   
Almost a year ago, al-Qaeda number one Ayman al-Zawahiri called on every Sunni hardcore faithful from Iraq and Jordan to Lebanon, Turkey and beyond to take a trip to Syria and merrily crush Assad.  

So they've kept coming, including -- just like in Afghanistan -- Chechens and Uyghurs and Southeast Asians, joining everything from the FSA to Jabhat al-Nusra, the number one killing militia, now with over 5,000 jihadis.  

A report published this week by the London-based counterterrorism outfit Quilliam Foundation confirms Al-Nusra's role. The lead author of the report, Noman Benotman, happens to be a former Libyan jihadi very cozy with al-Zawahiri and the late "Geronimo," aka Osama bin Laden.  

Al-Nusra is in fact the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), the terrorist brand of late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, also known as Islamic State of Iraq after Zarqawi was incinerated by a US missile in 2006. Even the State Department knows that AQI emir Abu Du'a runs both AQI and al-Nusra, whose own emir is Abu Muhammad al-Jawlani.  

It's AQI that facilitates the back-and-forth of Iraqi commanders -- with plenty of fighting experience on the ground against the Americans -- to sensitive areas in Syria, while the Syrians, Iraqis and Jordanians at al-Nusra also work the phones to extract funding from Gulf sources. Al-Nusra wants -- what else -- an Islamic State not only in Syria but all over the Levant. Favorite tactic: car and truck suicide bombings as well as remote-controlled car bombs. For the moment, they keep a tense collaboration/competition regime with the FSA. 

What happens next? The new Syrian National Coalition is a joke. Those GCC bastions of democracy are now totally spooked by the jihadi tsunami. Russia drew the red line and NATO won't dare to bomb; Russians and Americans are now discussing details. And sooner or later Ankara will see the writing on the wall -- and revert to a policy of at least minimizing trouble with the neighbors.
 
Assad saw The Big Picture -- clearly, thus his "confident" speech. It's now Assad against the jihadis. Unless, or until, the new CIA under Terminator John Brennan drones itself into the (shadow war) picture with a vengeance. 

Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for Asia Times. His regular column, "The Roving Eye," is widely read. He is an analyst for the online news channel Real News. He argues that the world has become fragmented into "stans" -- we are now living an intestinal war, an undeclared global civil war. He has published three books on geopolitics, including the spectacularly-titled “Globalistan: How the Globalised World Is Dissolving Into Liquid War”. 
His latest book is "Obama Does Globalistan."