08/02/13 – Patrick Cockburn – The Scott Horton Show

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All right.
So first up today on the show is the great Patrick Cockburn, Middle East correspondent for The Independent.
That's independent.co.uk and of course, intrepid war reporter, author of the book Muqtada, Muqtada al-Sadr, The Shia Revival and the Future of Iraq.
Welcome back to the show, Patrick.
How are you doing?
Good to be here.
Could you sum up for us real quick your travels over the summer so far?
Well, I've just got back from Sicily, but that's a little separate from other travels.
I was in Syria.
Before that, I was in Kurdistan.
Before that, Iraq.
Before that, I can't remember.
Okay.
So certainly, well, we've got to definitely...
Yeah, I think we've got to finish.
Yeah, we'll have to do that.
Yeah, we'll have to definitely touch on Kurdistan.
So can we start with Muqtada al-Sadr?
You're the author of the book on Muqtada al-Sadr and I guess he's widely seen as the sort of behind the scenes kingmaker of the Shiite alliance that rules Baghdad.
What's the news with him these days?
Well, you know, they're in a strong position in Iraq.
Iraq is in a rather strange place at the moment.
It's kind of dysfunctional.
It's kind of getting more violent.
You know, in the last month, we've had a thousand people killed in mostly in bombing attacks.
You know, in most countries, that'd be considered pretty close to civil war.
It's the worst that we've had since 2008 in terms of civilian casualties.
But people don't pay much attention, I guess, because they associate Iraq with extreme violence.
So they think nothing new.
And probably people like me have been saying Iraq is on the verge of civil war for a long time.
We're right.
But, you know, the place hasn't entirely disintegrated.
My feeling is, you know, why is that?
Relations between Sunni and Shia are pretty bad.
Why hasn't it finally disintegrated?
Well, everybody feeds off the same oil revenue.
That's one reason.
And another reason is, although Iraq has been destabilized by Syria, and a lot of people have commented on this, it also means that the U.S. and Iran don't want to see another crisis in Iraq while the crisis in Syria is going on.
So both Tehran and Washington have an interest in patting things down to prevent them moving from being a crisis to a catastrophe.
Well, would you say, is it fair to say that, in a sense, the civil war from, you know, 2005 through 8 there or 9, that it sort of was called off short of a real resolution and that this is kind of the finishing of the battle and the finishing of the different factions being pushed to the opposite sides of the lines and that kind of thing?
Well, I think that, you know, maybe that's one reason.
There may be other reasons that one should take into account.
But, you know, the civil war was really won by the Shia.
If you go to Baghdad now, it used to be a lot of mixed areas between Sunni and Shia.
There aren't many of them around anymore.
These days, the city is dominated by the Shia.
Arabs, you know, it's a city of 5 or 6 million people.
And it's probably 80% Shia.
The Sunni areas are mostly sort of enclaves on the west bank of the Tigris, a few on the east.
And they're very much surrounded.
So it seemed, you know, come 2008 that the Sunni were in a really sort of weak position.
But that's changed, rather, with the uprising in Syria.
Syria, the majority of the population is Sunni.
The eastern side of the country is controlled by Sunni insurgents.
They're in touch and in contact with the Sunni of western Iraq.
So there's been a bit of a change in the balance of power.
And I think the Sunni in Iraq, who previously thought, well, we've got the losing end of this, but there's nothing much we can do about it, now are emboldened by what they see happening in Syria.
Right.
Well, but they don't really have the chance of taking Baghdad back, do they?
We've talked about this before.
Well, some talk about it, but I don't think so.
But they do, you know, have a chance of taking over power in most of their areas of provinces that are Sunni majority.
Kicking the Shiite army out, in other words.
Yeah, or making life very difficult for them, you know, in Anbar province, west Iraq.
This is where the U.S. lost hundreds and hundreds of soldiers dead and wounded.
The Sunni tribes of Anbar, it's entirely Sunni, and it's a very big area.
It's about a quarter or a third of Iraq, mostly desert, of course.
And then other provinces around Mosul, Nineveh province, and around to Crete and sort of north and central Iraq.
But government control has sort of been decreasing this year, and Sunni protests are going on.
All right.
Now, the Kurds are kind of stuck between these two wars or this one war in the north of Iraq.
They're just buying their time and waiting to see how it shakes out?
Well, I think they're a bit more proactive than that.
You know, the Kurds have been falling for them recently.
There they were for the first time.
You have what is almost the first Kurdish state in northern Iraq.
It's called an autonomous region, but, you know, it has a government which has more power, more money, more soldiers than many members of the U.N.
Then lots of oil has been discovered in the north, so big oil companies, particularly American oil companies, but from all over have been pouring in, so it's kind of boomtown in Kurdistan, northern Iraq.
It's one of the few sort of boomtowns on the planet at the moment.
You know, you can see all these fancy hotels shooting up, and all their rooms are full.
So they're doing pretty well.
And then, of course, in Syria, the Kurds are about 2 million to 3 million Kurds along in northern Syria.
The population of Syria is about 23 million.
And they previously were very much under control of the government, but now they're beginning to have taken over their old areas along the Turkish border and in the northwest of Syria, north of Aleppo.
And they're well organized.
They're better organized than other rebel groups.
They have good relations with Assad.
Not good relations, but sort of understanding.
And the longer the war in Syria goes on, the more autonomous they get.
So the Kurds are sort of in that, you know, they're one of the biggest groups.
I think they are the biggest group of people who are ethnically distinct and have their own language but don't have their own state.
They're getting very close to that.
That's one of the big changes in the last two or three years.
Well, and that's going to continue to have all kinds of consequences and reverberations, right or wrong.
If you look at a map of where Kurdistan is in comparison to all these borders, Kurdistan, the region, in comparison to all the borders of the nation states around there, that's big trouble for the Iranians and up even into Armenia and Azerbaijan and all that too, right?
Yeah, particularly in Turkey.
You know, what's really absorbed the Turkish government for the last 30 years since the 1980s is dealing with the Kurdish community, okay, you know, which is nobody quite knows how big it is.
It's quite a big chunk of the Turkish population.
We've had guerrilla war.
We've had protests.
You know, it hasn't gone away.
Now, will the Turkish government do a deal?
In some ways, it's in its interests, you know.
If it can do a deal with the Kurds in Turkey, then it can do a deal with the Iraqi Kurds maybe in Syria.
And the Kurds become an ally of the Turkish state, but maybe not.
Maybe they've got a lot of Kurds in jail, Kurdish mayors, Kurdish journalists.
Are they really going to do it?
You know, it's kind of easy to see what's in their interest, but it's a bit less difficult to know really what they're going to do.
Well, they may not be able to make friends out of them, but certainly the Turkish intervention in Syria has complicated their Kurdish problem by a lot, right, because Assad hit back and said, okay, well, I'll just let the Kurds operate freely in the part of Syria I can control so that they can attack you across the border.
Yeah, there are a lot of cards that can be played here, you know, and it's a dangerous game.
Turkey's got bad relations with Iran at the moment.
Now, you know, somebody said to me, you know, the Iranians have got us a PhD in unconventional warfare, you know, there.
If the Turkish Kurds get angry enough, then they can probably look to Iran for some support.
They can look to Damascus for some support.
So, you know, there's a lot of potential for violence there.
But there are so many players, it's so confusing.
You can't at this stage predict how this is going to play out.
Yeah.
Hey, back to Baghdad for a second here.
What about Nouri al-Maliki?
When's the next time he's supposed to stand for election?
I forget now.
Is he popularly elected or only by the parliament?
You know, he always has what's going for him is that nobody can think for a replacement.
He has lots of people who don't like him, but on the other hand, they don't like each other.
The Kurds don't like him.
The Americans don't like him.
The Iranians sort of can live with him.
The other Shia parties don't like him.
The Sunni hate him.
But, you know, they can't think they don't like each other, and they can't think of a replacement.
So maybe he's going to stay.
Secondly, he's kind of a Shia leader, and he can always frighten the Shia come election day by saying, you know, I'm the guy who prevents, you know, the Ba'ath Party, the old supporters of Saddam Hussein, the Sunni, who are going to murder your families, coming back.
And beat the drum of Shia paranoia and get them to the polling booths.
Maybe he can't always do that, but he's been able to do that so far.
Well, now, back when they settled on the Dawa Party was when Condoleezza Rice at least thought she was calling the shots, I guess.
But it was, I guess, the Iranians came in, right, and brokered the deal between the Saudis and the Hakeem family, each of which faction had their own army, right, that they would compromise and put in a Dawa Party guy because they kind of don't have their own army, and then they would all sort of consolidate.
But then the old man died, and Saudi rules the whole thing now, right?
Well, no, he doesn't quite rule.
Nobody really rules Iraq.
Everybody's got to kind of share.
Well, I guess I meant the United Iraqi Alliance.
That's what he rules now is the party.
Well, they're influential there.
I mean, nobody quite – in Iraq, everybody sort of has some power, and nobody so has supreme power.
It's one of the problems.
I was talking to a Saudi official earlier in the year.
So, you know, the problem is that nobody quite – nobody's, again, on the ropes, feels they have to compromise.
Everybody's got some power, and consequently, you know, you can have these confrontations going on and on.
Iraq's an incredibly badly run country, and it has all this money coming in, but the degree of corruption is unbelievable.
So, you know, and the degree of violence is still very high.
You know, people think about violence, you know, you think about moms being killed, being assassinated, but there are other types of violence which Iraqis worry about, you know, just kidnapping and paying protection money.
You know, a lot of people, you get a phone call, you know, just threatening kidnaps and so forth.
A lot of people, you know, cities like Mosul, Baghdad, pay protection money.
You know, you're a doctor in the hospital, and the patient dies.
The family may turn up saying, you killed him, you know, pay us money.
So it's a very sort of violent and dysfunctional place, and for the moment, unfortunately, there's no sign of that ending.
And then, so, I guess back to the larger kind of, I hate the word geopolitics, but whatever, is this whole thing sort of kind of just a proxy war between the Saudis and the Iranians?
Well, that's one aspect of it.
I mean, in Iraq, yeah, in Syria, you see, you have a whole maybe four or five conflicts rolled into one, or they're all going on simultaneously, like the one you just mentioned, of Iran and Saudi Arabia.
Then, related to that, but not quite the same, you know, then it's not just the Saudis and the Iranians, it's the U.S., it's Israel as well, the Iran.
Then, slightly different, you have the Sunni, the Shia, which is Saudi Arabia again, the Gulf monarchies, Egypt, Turkey, against Iran, Iraq, the Shia in Lebanon, and their allies that are supported by the U.S., by Russia.
And then you, sorry, I could go on and on about this, but you obviously, well, you originally had a popular uprising in Syria against dictatorial government, to a degree that still goes on.
So, you have Alawite against Sunni.
So, you have all these conflicts that have all turned into one conflict that is very difficult to end, but there are so many players involved now.
Earlier this year, it seemed a little bit of hope that the Russians and the Americans were going to organize a peace conference in Geneva, but then the Russians were saying, well, the Iranians should be there because they're a big player in this, which is perfectly reasonable.
But the U.S., you know, has sanctions against Iran and doesn't want to recognize Iran as a regional power, so it doesn't want the Iranians there.
So, there are all these complications.
You have people like the British and the French saying, give more arms to the rebels, the opposition.
This will even up the balance with the government, and then the government will go and negotiate.
I think this is kind of nonsense.
Give more arms to the opposition, you'll just get more fighting.
Yeah, well, once you flood the area with Mujahideen, how do you call them off?
Well, yeah, you know, there may be 1,200 different militias in Syria.
Who exactly is going to call them off?
I think the U.S. earlier in the year thought that it could deliver the opposition to a peace conference, but it found it couldn't.
You know, the Syrian opposition, the Syrian coalition, it keeps changing its leaders.
You know, the opposition, the civilian or the military and the civilian command outside Syria doesn't have much influence on the groups inside Syria.
So, they're not really into agreeing anything at all, certainly not going to peace negotiations.
Yeah, well, and now the Americans this whole time, they haven't been willing to give the rebels the kind of weaponry they would need to actually win.
I don't know what it would take, you know, maybe a giant armored division or something for them to actually take.
Well, you know, Scott, you know, all armies think that if they had one more magic weapon, they'd win terrific victories.
And, you know, often when they fail to do so, they say, well, if we'd had this, we would have won.
You know, it's usually kind of nonsense.
There are other things involved like organization and command and control and so forth.
I don't think, you know, the opposition had some better weapons.
Would it make much difference?
It would make some difference, but would they be able to win?
I doubt it very much.
You know, there are 14 Syrian provincial capitals.
The rebels currently hold one, and it's not a very big one out in the east of the country.
So, they're a long way from being victorious.
Well, so then why are the Americans arming them to the degree they're arming them to, just to keep it going on a low scale, or are they really pushing regime change, you think?
I think they haven't really made up their mind what they want.
At one time, you see a lot of states thought, including, I think, the U.S., certainly that's true of Turkey and others, that they thought in 2011 that Bashar al-Assad was going to go down like Muammar Gaddafi in Libya.
And, you know, governments like to bet on winners.
And they went on thinking this for rather a surprising amount of time, although evidently it wasn't happening.
Now they're sort of seeing that they made a mistake, but they don't really know how to get out of it.
They also kind of worry that if they don't supply arms, that the Islamic fundamentalists will get stronger.
You know, it's not entirely against their interest, this war going on.
You know, it divides up Syria, it's a blow to Iran.
So although they keep saying, particularly in London and Paris, you know, we want to end this war, give some more weapons to the rebels and the government will come to peace negotiations.
In fact, there's no evidence that that would happen.
I think it's just, you know, these wars often end, but people just get exhausted.
And it puts off the day that that happens.
So while they're claiming that they want to end the war, actually they're providing the ingredients for continuing it.
Right, yeah, every action they take comes with an equal and opposite reaction, right?
They send in a few more crates of weapons and Hezbollah sends a few more fighters and back and forth and whatever.
You know, they made a mistake of saying, you know, Damascus today and this will really be one in the eye to the Iranians and to Hezbollah.
But now, of course, you know, that kind of tough guys in Beirut and Tehran, they think, right, you're coming for us.
We won't wait around for you to knock out our ally in Syria.
We'll make, you know, we'll fight today.
We'll fight to keep the government in power.
You know, you up the ante, we'll do the same.
So when they were talking about more intervention earlier in the year, Hezbollah suddenly intervened in Syria.
And you had the battle for Khuzair, which was really won by Hezbollah.
And, you know, it's been, the government's been stronger ever since.
So I think that you really have a situation in which the government, although the government's the world, don't know what they're going to do.
And it's all sort of developed in a way they didn't expect, in that Assad is still in power.
And I think it's quite likely he'll stay in power.
It's very difficult for me to see who's going to knock him out of there.
Well, you know, I read this thing in Foreign Affairs, which may mean it's not credible at all.
I'm not sure.
But they were saying that there's this extremely influential Egyptian cleric in Qatar.
I believe his name was, I don't know his name, Qatari, maybe.
But anyway, that this guy was extremely influential and that he went even beyond, I forget exactly the jargon, but he went even beyond what the Ayatollahs, or pardon me, the Sunni imams had said during the Mujahideen war against the Russians in Afghanistan in the 80s, saying more or less it is every young, capable Muslim male's duty to go to Syria to fight in the holy war.
And that, according to the authors of this Foreign Affairs piece, this means a serious escalation in young pilgrims taking off to go and do their jihad in the near future.
Guys taking, you know, that's happening in Saudi Arabia, guys based in Qatar, you know, it's happening in the UAE, you know, it's happening in Libya, you know.
You know, the whole business of the American ambassador being murdered in Benghazi, you know, why the same groups that were doing that are also groups that are supplying men to the rebellion in Syria, you know, so all these things are connected.
But I think that the fundamentalists within the opposition are getting stronger.
They're better disciplined, more people gravitate towards them, so I think that's going to be a continuing trend.
Obviously, it makes the Europeans and the Americans and the Saudis pretty nervous, but again, they don't know what to do.
So I think one's kind of looking at Assad staying in power.
What's uncertain, of course, is how much of Syria he controls.
Will Syria break up?
Has Syria already broken up?
You know, we'll see.
Now, Patrick, when you mention that about Benghazi there, I just want to be clear about what it is exactly that you can report to us about what was going on there in terms of gun running and Mujahideen, this and that, versus analysis of the news that you've been reading, too, etc., like that.
What exactly can you tell us about Benghazi?
Well, you know, I think I always took a rather different stance on Libya than others.
From the beginning, you know, the militias that got very good publicity on all the international media in 2011 were always more sort of more violent, more fundamentalist, I think, than was reported.
And, you know, the reason Gaddafi fell was really NATO intervention was not all these sort of bands of gunmen.
What happened in Libya is what happens in a lot of countries, that you have a community militia that may be quite good guys to begin with.
But once they get off their own turf, if nobody's paying on them, you know, they very rapidly turn into basically bandits.
A lot of these people were going to Syria.
You know, there's also the question of, you know, just getting publicity in the last few days as to quite why there were so many CIA in Benghazi when the consulate was attacked.
You know, there are reports, rumors in the Arab world that, in fact, they were trying to vet fundamentalists who were going to fight in Syria.
It's pretty well impossible to check these things out.
But although this became a partisan issue in the U.S. between Republicans and Democrats, there certainly are questions which still should be answered about what happened in Benghazi that haven't been answered.
Well, there was at least one report in the Sunday Times about a ship that had come from Libya full of guns for the rebels, and then the Muslim Brotherhood and the al-Nusra guys got into a tangle over who was going to get the guns.
So whatever that was, that ship really existed, and something happened there, you know?
Yeah, I mean, these things...
You know, in Iraq, you know, one of the cities that provided, and it's not really even a city, it's a big town, the most sort of al-Qaeda volunteers and suicide bombers and so forth was Daraa in eastern Libya.
So they do have that tradition, and except now the guys go to Syria.
So, you know, all this was always pretty murky, and I think was very much played down by the media in 2011 when you had the war in Syria and finally the defeat of Qaddafi.
All right, now I'm really interested in what you think of the coup in Egypt.
Well, the coup, it wasn't a coup, you know?
And today we have Kerry saying, you know, there were these millions of people out in the streets in Egypt, you know, that somehow this counts against election.
First of all, who counted these people?
People say 22 million people on the streets?
I don't believe this for a moment.
David said 30 million.
You couldn't get a million people in there.
Who says this, you know?
It's a very dangerous thing.
You know, the way we normally ought to calculate popular support for parties of government should people go into the ballot box and voting.
It's very dangerous to say, oh, there were 20 million on the streets when nobody's counted them.
You know, I don't believe this for a moment.
Maybe, you know, there were a lot of Egyptians, but was it a million?
We don't know.
So, you know, that's actually where we abolish elections and just have lots of meetings and the numbers to be counted by biased television stations, you know, all the media, sort of anti-Morsi in Egypt.
So I think this is ridiculous.
What of America's role?
Well, you know, America's accused of backing the Muslim Brotherhood.
I think they kind of want to bet on a winner, you know?
I don't think it was, you know, lots of Egyptians sort of thought Morsi, you know, you'd hear around the Middle East, oh, the Brotherhood, you know, they are the butt for the Americans now.
It's kind of conspiracy theories, which I don't believe in.
Eric Margolies' point of view on the show, Patrick, is that the Egyptian military is just part of the U.S. Army and they do what they're told by the Americans.
Well, I really don't know, you know.
I just sort of doubt it.
I think generally, you know, people have proxies, but do they completely control them?
You know, they have their own interests.
They have vast economic interests and so forth.
They have political interests.
So I don't think they're totally controlled.
Did they get a sort of green light for this?
Well, probably to a degree they did, though Morsi sort of kind of played into their hands, the hands of the army, and seems to have sort of completely exaggerated his own power.
And, you know, if there was a mistake to make, he was out there making it.
But even so, it's kind of depressing, I think, in Egypt to find, you know, all the intelligence here saying, no, it is not a coup.
You know, it obviously was a coup.
No, everybody hates the Muslim Brotherhood.
Hold on, these guys won the election.
You know, you can't just invent a lot of mass rallies and say that sort of somehow is more important than the election, although Kerry seems to be saying the same thing.
You know, I think what's going to happen now, you know, well, pretty well impossible to say, I think, is are we just going to go back to the Mubarak era, that the Egyptian deep state, and not just the deep state, you know, but the state you can see in front of you, is just going to come back and remain a sort of parasite in Egypt, you know, misrouting the country as it's been doing for, you know, literally hundreds of years.
So it's a pretty depressing prospect, I think.
Well, now, it seems like you've got a lot of people on both sides, and the lines are all hardening, and people are calling each other enemy instead of fellow countrymen who I politely disagree with, and that kind of thing.
And yet, on the other hand, can you tell us, compared to, say, with Iraq, for example, the Egyptians, they're not all armed, right?
The Muslim Brotherhood can't snap their fingers and form a militia, no matter how many men they have, because they just don't have the rifles.
Am I right about that?
Yeah, I mean, the Egyptians are not armed to the degree to which Iraqis and, to a lesser degree, Syrians are armed.
So I don't think people draw the analogy with Algeria, where the army intervened after the Islamists had won the election in the 90s, and there was a tremendous, very bloody and incredibly cruel civil war followed.
But there isn't quite the tradition of violence in Egypt as you had in Algeria, which, after all, fought this ferocious war against the French control.
So maybe it won't quite happen that way, but, again, you could have some people, and I'm sure you will have some people, who think, we're not going to let them get away with this.
There will be bombs, there will be killings.
Also, Egypt, economically, is in a very bad way.
It has been for a long time.
It still is.
A lot of the population is living on the edge of starvation.
This is going to make things worse.
Maybe it will take a long time to play out, but it's very difficult to see, at this stage, how any sort of coalition of interest can come together in Egypt and rule the country properly and develop the economy and bring it back from the lip of disaster.
Patrick, I can't tell you how much I appreciate you joining us on the show again.
No, not at all.
Good to be there.
Thank you.
Everybody, that is the great Patrick Coburn, the heroic Patrick Coburn, reporter for The Independent.
That's independent.co.uk.
You can also find him at counterpunch.org, of course.
The book is Muqtada.
The most recent book is Muqtada.
Muqtada al-Sadr, The Shia Revival and the Future of Iraq.
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