Pepe Escobar

Iran jails its conscience

Pepe Escobar — 2007-10-24T10:05:00Z

"That Baghi's work can so irk the upper echelons of the Islamic Republic speaks volumes about a system that thrives on internal fear. It also spells out how much the Iran is in dire need of a new public relations strategy. Just when it may soon be on the receiving end of a devastating, preemptive war, and badly in need of international support, sending your best-known human rights activist to jail is not exactly a brilliant move."

Baghdad up close and personal

Pepe Escobar — 2007-05-01T19:44:00Z

ATol's "Roving Eye", Pepe Escobar, is back in Iraq and in the Red Zone - that is, outside "Fortress USA", the Green Zone. This is the first of his unembedded, non-Kevlar-protected, bodyguardless reports.

Having dodged a bullet but not arrest by the Mehdi Army militia, Escobar witnesses the grand-scale mayhem and the minutiae of misery of Baghdad. In the deadly daily embrace of the Red Zone, the surreal overlaps Hollywood-style special effects while ethnic cleansing proceeds neighborhood by neighborhood and the bereaved are advised to visit the market to try to match the missing limbs of their dead.

There must be some way to get out of here

Said the joker to the thief

There's too much confusion

I can't get no relief

- Bob Dylan, All Along the Watchtower

BAGHDAD - It's noon on Sunday right in front of the Adhamiyah wall - the now infamous symbol of the Pentagon-devised Baghdad gulag. On Muhamad al-Kasem highway, a few battered cars and vans stop, their occupants curious to examine this prime stretch of "ghettoization".

Behind lies Adhamiyah, one the key arteries of the Red Zone and privileged heartland of Sunni Arab guerrillas. The streets are littered with all sorts of debris, some blocked by tanks, some blocked by the usual blast wall slalom. The road to Abu Hanifa Mosque - where the Sunni Arab resistance was born on April 8, 2003, a little over a week after the "liberation" of Baghdad - is also blocked. It was in Abu Hanifa that a 3,000-strong demonstration assembled last week to protest against the wall. Adhamiyah is virtually encircled by US forces, but their checkpoints are always mobile. (...)

- / Asia Times

An ill wind in Iran

Pepe Escobar — 2007-03-05T06:45:00Z

As the dogs of war ominously circle the Persian Gulf, regime change in Iran could become a distinct possibility - but not exactly according to the desires of US Vice President Dick "all options are on the table" Cheney, whose supreme obsessions are oil, war and their mutual intersection.

A leading Western energy consultant, who prefers to remain anonymous, went to Tehran in early February and personally met with President Mahmud Ahmadinejad. He tells Asia Times Online

that according to his assessment, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei "has a couple of months at most - prostate cancer".

On this extremely sensitive matter, he is contradicted by a Western-educated political analyst in Tehran, who for security reasons also prefers to remain anonymous: "There is no consistent proof that Khamenei's cancer is serious and he is dying." In Iranian state media, this topic is taboo. (...)

- / Asia Times

Iran knocks Europe out

Pepe Escobar — 2005-09-07T03:10:00Z

TEHRAN - In the high-stakes nuclear poker game between Iran and the EU-3 (Britain, France and Germany), Tehran has decided to call the EU's bluff and turn the game around.

On top of it Ali Larijani, the new head of the Supreme National Security Council - appointed by President Mahmud Ahmadinejad - and now Iran's top nuclear negotiator, stressed on Iranian TV that the criticism expressed in Saturday's report by International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) head Mohammad ElBaradei was "neither legal nor technical" and distorted by political motives. ("The nuclear issue is a national issue. They [a reference to the EU-3, not the IAEA] should not talk to Iranian people with bullying language.") (...)

- / Asia Times

Blowback

Pepe Escobar — 2005-07-11T21:00:00Z

BRUSSELS - It's blowback time. There had to be a day when Baghdad, Fallujah, Najafa and Jenin reached London, and the "collateral damage" was on "our side". If one of the concentric circles in the al-Qaeda nebula really did perpetrate the synchronized London bombings, this spells a failure in the "war on terror".

But maybe things are not as clear-cut as they seem. (...)

- / Asia Times

Pipelineistan's biggest game begins

Pepe Escobar — 2005-05-26T03:38:32Z

History may judge it as one of the capital moves of the 21st century's New Great Game: May 25, the day high-quality Caspian light crude started flowing through the Caucasus toward the Mediterranean in Turkey. The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline (BTC) - conceived by the US as the ultimate Western escape route from dependence on oil from the Persian Gulf - is finally in business.

This is what Pipelineistan is all about: a supreme law unto itself - untouchable by national sovereignty, serious environmental concerns (expressed both in the Caucasus and in Europe), labor legislation, protests against the World Bank, not to mention mountains 2,700 meters high and 1,500 small rivers. BTC took 10 years of hard work and at least US$4 billion - $3 billion of which is in bank loans. BTC is not merely a pipeline: it is a sovereign state. (...)

- / Asia Times

The US and its 'special' dictator

Pepe Escobar — 2005-05-16T05:00:00Z

"I am delighted to be back in Uzbekistan. I've just had a long and very interesting and helpful discussion with the president ... Uzbekistan is a key member of the coalition's global war on terror. And I brought the president the good wishes of President Bush and our appreciation for their stalwart support in the war on terror ... Our relationship is strong and has been growing stronger."

— US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in Tashkent, February 2004

Uzbekistan dictator Islam Karimov's army, which last Friday opened fire on thousands of unarmed protesters in Andijan, in the Ferghana Valley, has been showered by Washington in the past few years with hundreds of millions of dollars (US$200 million in 2002 alone) - all on behalf of the "war on terror".

So you won't see the White House, or Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, hammering Karimov. You won't hear many in Washington calling for free elections in Uzbekistan. The former strongmen of color-coded, "revolutionary" Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan were monsters who had to be removed for "freedom and democracy" to prevail. So is the dictator of Belarus. Not Karimov. He's "our" dictator: the Saddam Hussein of Central Asia is George W Bush's man. (...)

- / Asia Times

IRA and Sinn Fein in Iraq

Pepe Escobar — 2005-03-11T02:55:00Z

Is this the MPLA?

Is this the UDA?

Is this the IRA?

I thought it was the UK

Or just another country

— The Sex Pistols, Anarchy in the UK, 1977

Sunni guerrilla attacks in Iraq remain as devastating as ever, while 40-odd days after the elections the country remains adrift, in chaos, without a government, with more than 60% of the workforce "liberated" from any hope of finding any jobs. (...)

- / Asia Times

The Shi'ites' Faustian pact

Pepe Escobar — 2005-02-12T04:16:00Z

In Najaf, the holy Shi'ite city, the grand ayatollahs are busy advancing a religious agenda: Ali al-Sistani, Mohammad Ishaq al-Fayad, Bashir al-Najafi and Mohammad Said Hakim compose the al-marja' iyyah (source of infallible authority on all religious matters). They are unanimous: the Shi'ite religious parties, the big winners in the elections, must implement Sharia (Islamic) law - and in fact this is one of the parties' top priorities. This does not mean that Sistani wants - or needs - to control an Iraqi theocracy: it means that the Shi'ite religious parties themselves - led by secular people - will give birth to an Iraqi Islamic republic. (...)

- / Asia Times

Why the US will not leave Iraq

Pepe Escobar — 2005-02-01T05:13:00Z

Iraq's elections will see Shi'ites taking power in the Arab world for the first time in 14 centuries. The Shi'ites' premier electoral promise - later reneged on - was to negotiate a total US withdrawal, so the Americans will be in no hurry for a pullout. But as long as they stay, the resistance will become even bloodier.

[Feb 1, 2005]

- / Asia Times