"Bets are off on which is the great story of 2011. Is it the Arab Spring(s)? Is it the Arab counter-revolution, unleashed by the House of Saud? Is it the "birth pangs" of the Greater Middle East remixed as serial regime changes? Is it R2P ("responsibility to protect") legitimizing "humanitarian" bombing? Is it the freeze out of the "reset" between the US and Russia? Is it the death of al-Qaeda? Is it the euro disaster? Is it the US announcing a Pacific century cum New Cold War against China? Is it the build up towards an attack on Iran? (well, this one started with Dubya, Dick and Rummy ages ago ...) "
So begins "Playing Chess in Eurasia," Pepe Escobar's latest dispatch at Asia Times,, where he's a regular contributor.
Escobar isn't a cartoon character -- far from it. As an analyst and writer, he's the real deal. This piece, for example, makes one realize how unrelentingly juvenile the official narrative among the cognoscenti is in the (dis-)United States. We orbit in a figure 8 pattern between pure evil, represented by distant resource-rich states that don't follow orders, on the one hand, and the unfailingly good and generous spirit of the American people, who yield to no one in their pursuit of exceptionalism -- regardless of the cost (so long as it's borne by the taxpayers, and not the oligarchs who so richly benefit from their subjects' sacrifices on their behalf).
Anyway, you owe it to yourself to Google Escobar and Asia Times, which will take you straight to his "best of " page. Feel liberated from stupidity and the insipid truisms of mass-production intellect suction.
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