05/22/14 – Patrick Cockburn – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm at scotthorton.org and a bunch of other places.
Follow me on Twitter, at scotthortonshow.
And our next guest is the great Patrick Coburn from The Independent in England.
That's independent.co.uk.
And he's the author of Muqtada.
Oh, I should say he writes also.
You can find his articles at unz.com, unzunz.com, as well as at counterpunch.org, his late brother Alex's website, counterpunch.org.
Okay.
Welcome back to the show.
Patrick, how are you doing?
Oh, I hit the wrong button.
Try now.
Hi.
Great.
Thank you.
Oh, very good to have you here.
Sorry, I'm not used to getting my buttons right.
I never do.
Very happy to have you here.
Very grateful for your time this evening.
I know it's late there.
Libya in crisis, rival militias position themselves for civil war as country disintegrates is the headline at independent.co.uk.
There's been a coup d'etat by a general named Khalifa Hifter, who I guess has been living in Virginia or had been living in Virginia for the last 25 something years and was parachuted in around the time of the war back three years ago, which you covered on the ground there at the time.
And now he has overthrown the parliament and, well, I don't know.
You tell us the rest.
What's going on?
Well, he's trying to do that.
This attempted coup by Hifter caught everybody by surprise.
Nobody thought he had the strength to do it.
But suddenly he seems to have aircraft that are operating on his side in Benghazi, helicopters.
And the suspicion is that he could only have done this if he's acting in cooperation with one or more foreign powers, notably the U.S., perhaps Egypt or Saudi Arabia, probably a combination of all three.
He hasn't taken over yet, but a lot of generals have moved to his side, militias, fragments of Qaddafi's old army.
So Libya is polarizing between heavily armed rival factions.
Before this, everything was fragmented.
It was so fragmented that you might have sort of skirmishes, small battles here and there.
You didn't have a general confrontation, but things seem to be heading towards a general confrontation now.
In other words, all the different militias, they were there, but they were all so weak that none of them had the ability to get in any really major battles.
But now, all of a sudden, this guy Hifter seems to have the backing.
When you say foreign backing, does this seem like an American job to you?
I mean, they announced that they were moving the Marines, more Marines, to Sicily just in case, only, what, a day or two before the coup, so it sort of seemed like a pretty obvious thing, no?
Yeah, it seems to follow.
I mean, Hifter's background is that he took part with Qaddafi in overthrowing the monarchy in the 1960s.
Then he was army commander.
Then with the Libya, Qaddafi intervened in Chad.
This guy was the military commander in a pretty disastrous one.
He got captured, and the whole venture was defeated.
And then he seems to have linked up with the CIA.
This seems pretty well established, to run an anti-Qaddafi military organization, didn't get anywhere.
And then he retreated to Alexandria and other suburbs of Washington, D.C. and in Northern Virginia.
So, well, I don't know.
I guess that means he's got a pretty unlimited budget and will have more and more weapons.
Does that mean that Obama, at least, is no longer backing the Islamists in Libya?
He's now trying to correct the mistake of empowering all of these Benghazi coups, all these veterans of the Iraq war that he's empowered the last three years?
Well, you know, one suspects that they're trying to do something like that.
Whether it comes off is another question.
But it doesn't really make sense that this guy comes from nowhere and seems to have quite significant military strength.
But even on his side, he's trying to line up a coalition, which is of some of the militias, particularly from Zintan, which is west of the mountains, west of Tripoli.
Some of the militias in Benghazi are fragments of Qaddafi's old armed forces.
The commander of the air force appears to have joined him, but that's also been denied.
But air bases in Tobruk and places like that have joined him.
So this isn't a walkover and it isn't even a victory yet, but it's sort of shifting towards a confrontation and a sort of bloody fighting we really haven't seen since the fall of Qaddafi.
Yeah, well, and we saw some really bad problems after the fall of Qaddafi, not that the American media covered it or anything.
The narrative has been that this is a great example of the benevolence of American military hegemony and their ability to act fast, to save innocents.
And even with the Benghazi scandal right in the middle of the whole war narrative, it actually just, media-wise, sort of stands apart from everything else that's happened in the war.
Whose side they took against who and why and any of the rest of the consequences.
The only thing that ever happened wrong there that the Republicans have ever heard of was one day of lousy security on September 11, 2012.
Yeah, it's very bizarre.
I mean, at the time, I was in Benghazi and later in Tripoli, you know, and there was loads of American media.
And then after the death of Qaddafi, nothing, as things sort of went sour and Libya stopped exporting oil and you had this general anarchy in the country.
You know, it is as if it was, you know, taking place on the other side of the moon.
It really didn't get reported much.
And yeah, you're right, Benghazi was sort of the one episode that the Republicans focused on and which is sort of extracted from everything else happening in Libya and the Middle East to produce this sort of strange fantasy picture of what was happening in Benghazi at the time.
Yeah, now, can you update us?
There's been so little coverage about, well, since maybe, you know, early 2012 or so, there's been very little coverage of the anti-black pogroms that took place.
And I guess especially in CERT.
And, you know, I spoke with David Enders and he had just left the refugee camp where these women were being raped nightly by the by, you know, marauding bands of militia goons, basically.
And apparently things got really bad there.
But as you well know, you're about 50 percent of all the Western reporting that's come out of Libya firsthand since this whole war happened, Patrick.
Yeah, I mean, you could see this happening at the beginning that Qaddafi was seen by the opposition as being on the side of black Libyans and also of black emigrants coming from Mali, coming from Chad, coming from all over West Africa.
Much of the work before 2011, before the Qaddafi fell, much of the work in Libya was done not by Libyans, but by poor people from who often trekked across the Sahara, great danger to themselves, to get jobs in Libya.
They made up much of the workforce and much of the workforce that did the most difficult jobs.
You also have indigenous black Libyans.
And after the fall at the time of the fall of Qaddafi, one of their main towns south of Misrata was completely gutted, destroyed.
I mean, it looks like something out of the Battle of Stalingrad.
These people disappeared to were sent to camps where they're completely vulnerable.
They're arrested.
They're tortured.
The women are raped.
You know, this is an appalling situation and not a secret.
I mean, you can just look up, you know, Human Rights Watch and other human rights organizations.
This is, you know, something which is very well supported by witnesses, but nothing much has nothing has been done about it.
So, you know, it's a pretty toxic situation all around.
Yeah, sure seems like I mean, I never heard any happy ending to that.
I don't know if I guess a lot of it died down or just the victims were all dead.
So there's no way left to kill or what really happened.
You know, I mean, a lot of them are still there.
A lot of them are still in jail.
A lot of them are in these dreadful camps, you know.
So it's an ongoing situation.
All right.
Now there's a reporter named Eli Lake and he's got kind of a reputation, but he's also got some pretty good sources, too.
And he was reporting a thing the other day about how this former American training base, I think near Tripoli, which would have been, you know, over in the western part, not in Benghazi where Ansar al-Sharia has more sway or anything like that.
But I believe he was reporting near Tripoli has basically become an al-Qaeda training base.
The Americans, basically all their loot had gotten robbed one night and they decided that it was no longer a secure base.
And so they split and quit training the new Libyan army there.
And now it's an al-Qaeda training base.
And I wonder, well, and, you know, the term al-Qaeda can be pretty slippery.
But then again, some of these guys really are, you know, formerly loyal to Zarqawi, maybe now currently loyal to Zawahiri and at least claim to be the local branch.
What do you make of all of that?
Yeah, I mean, that's sort of, you know, that's pretty typical.
I think that one of the mistakes that's been made is made by the media.
It's made by the government that is to only see threatening al-Qaeda type organizations that somehow are under the control of what's called al-Qaeda, somewhere in northern Pakistan, northwest Pakistan.
But actually, you know, these are al-Qaeda is really an ideology and a way of operating.
So these people are exactly the same as al-Qaeda.
And sure, they've been filling the power vacuum there.
And if it comes to a war, you know, groups of militias and groups of fighters who are wholly fanatical and prepared to die really begin to count.
You don't need that number of them.
But if you have a few thousand of them on the battlefield, you know, they're a very potent force.
Yeah, a few suicide bombings can get a lot of work done, as they proved in Iraq.
Yeah, I mean, the and also, of course, you will have people coming back from Iraq and back from Syria who have a lot of military experience, much more than anybody in Libya.
So they can also draw on us on a sort of capital of very experienced fighters.
Right.
All right.
Now we've got to take this break real quick.
We'll be right back, everybody, with Patrick Coburn from The Independent, independent.co.uk about the Libyan civil war.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, Scott Horton Show.
And I'm a lucky dog.
I got Patrick Coburn on the line here.
He's the best Western reporter in the Mideast that we got.
And he writes for The Independent.
That's independent.co.uk for UNS.com, for counterpunch.org.
And read the book, Muqtada, Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia revival and the future of Iraq.
If you want to know about the aftermath of that thing and the future to a very important book, Muqtada.
All right.
So we're talking about the Libyan civil war here.
And, well, it sure looks like it's could shape up to be one.
It's a it's a fight for power, as Patrick was saying.
Nobody seems to really have the armament to turn it into a real civil war at this point.
But it sure does look like a CIA backed coup by this guy, Hifter, trying to seize power in Tripoli and at the expense of the Islamists who are now fighting back.
And it's an open question as to, you know, whether anybody has the upper hand here or or will at any time soon.
And then I guess, you know, the question for me, Patrick, here would be whether it's even reasonable to assume that something named Libya will survive this at all.
I mean, Gaddafi apparently had, you know, just enough power to hold the thing together.
But it sure does look like you're going to end up with Benghazi, Stan and Tripoli, however they used to pronounce it back when it was three different countries.
And then there's a whole other southern sort of pseudo state there.
What do you think?
Does it seem like they're going to have anything like modern Libya when we're done with this?
It seems to be sort of splitting up.
Maybe it won't happen formally in Benghazi.
You've got federalists who consider that Benghazi and Saronica, that's the eastern part of Libya, didn't get a fair deal under Gaddafi that they were discriminated against.
So they want more money from the central budget.
And a lot of the oil fields are down there in the east, a lot of pipelines and a lot of the oil ports, too, that the federalists recently closed.
So they were just reopening when this happened.
And now Libya is exporting very little oil again.
So, yeah, this is true.
And you have sort of, you know, you have opposition militias in which may be based in one area or they may have a particular ideology.
But, you know, there are hundreds of these different groups.
And the bizarre thing about the main militias, but those not just for the parliament, but those who've recently mutinied, is that they're all paid from the central budget, that it's a good job being a militiaman.
And so it's a complex situation.
But you're quite right in thinking it's difficult to see a single winner emerging from this.
And it's easy to see increasing violence of a sort and a degree that we haven't seen since 2011.
Well, you know, I've heard it said, too, that, you know, Libyans, I believe, saying as well as Tunisians that, hey, we're not Saudis and we don't want to be like the Saudis.
And, you know, I don't know exactly who exactly speaking and who they're speaking for.
But it does sort of seem like it's a much smaller percentage of the people fighting in Libya.
And maybe this is just because of the lack of coverage to really examine.
But it seems to me as though maybe the ideological component here may be a bit less than, say, for example, in Iraq.
And that really it's much more just tribal differences.
Like you're saying, the number, the vast number of different groups.
Nobody quite knows.
And also when wars start, then the way things work changes.
I mean, that might be true of the majority of the population now.
But once a war starts, the people who are really prepared to fight to the last bullet may not be very large in numbers, but they are really important to the outcome of that war.
At the moment, lots of Libyans are pretty disillusioned about what's happened in the last three years.
They want some sort of order restored.
And they see Heftar as representing a return to some sort of order.
I don't think it'll work out that way.
But there is a big constituency that just want things to settle down.
They want the militias off the streets.
They want a normal life.
That's true of Libya.
But it's also probably was true of Syria.
But it didn't do them much good.
Right.
Well, and so you mentioned the oil there.
Is it right that most of the oil is in the east and so therefore out of the control of Tripoli a lot of the time?
Yeah, that's true.
And the big sort of oil port terminals are sort of in the east, east central part of the country.
And the government lost control of them some time ago.
But most of the oil fields generally are in the east or sort of in the center of the country.
So, you know, it's like in some ways Iraq that, yeah, there are enormous forces for splitting up Iraq.
But there are a few things that keep it together, such as all different parts of the country want to have access to the oil revenues.
So that may deter people in the west from splitting from the east or allowing the east to split from them.
If they have leaders that are willing to deal and make compromises about such things, right?
Yeah, but I mean, first of all, you know, one of the obvious and disastrous aspects of the whole sort of Arab Spring movement, uprising against authoritarian regimes, is that the people leading it or the people involved in it had no experience of politics.
They were really bad at making deals with each other.
They didn't realize if they split or that the old regime was likely to come back or they were opening the doors to counter-revolution.
And, you know, we've seen that in spades in Egypt.
And to a degree we're seeing the same thing in Libya.
Right.
Yeah, they're going to end up with a military dictator because they weren't willing to compromise before.
Yeah, it's a sad story what's happened in Egypt there.
Which, I don't know, I guess we don't really have time to go too far into that.
Let me ask you about the future of Libya, because I think when we talked back, when you were covering the Libya war from Libya in 2011 or when you, you know, just gotten back from there or something, we talked about how in the future it's going to be so chaotic that there's going to be a lot of pressure for the old Pottery Barn rule and the you broke it, you own it.
And we can't just let this vast space become Jihadistan over there.
We're going to have to train them up.
And then when they stand up, we'll stand down and all that.
Maybe hold some purple-fingered elections and this kind of thing.
And, of course, Obama is much more reluctant to go full scale the way George W. Bush did with an invasion and occupation.
But it does sort of seem like, you know, with the assumptions of empire about the responsibility of America to always continue making more problems in the name of cleaning up the last mess they made, it seems sort of unavoidable and that maybe that's the path they're heading on now.
But I wonder what you think of that.
Yeah, I think there's truth in that.
There's also, you know, a standing example of what happened in Iraq and Afghanistan.
You could see last year in Syria when, first of all, the British government was going to support a military attack in August, September last year, that they just couldn't get it through Parliament.
And similarly with Obama.
I mean, to fight a war, you do need some degree of popular support.
If there's general popular disillusionment, this can rapidly turn into a political disaster.
So I think that the enthusiasm around foreign powers to get directly involved is pretty low.
But this doesn't, of course, apply to covert operations or funding coups or supplying organization and so forth.
Well, and that's the game that that's the model they really want to follow as much as they can.
Right.
It's just arming up local proxies to do as much of the tyranny as they can get away with there.
Yeah, that seems to be certainly what we've seen elsewhere.
And it may work.
On the other hand, you know, it may not.
It's difficult to see how there can be a peaceful resolution of this in Libya when everybody is armed to the teeth, when they're polarizing.
And we haven't seen, as I said, any really big battles since 2011.
But that might happen quite soon.
Or again, it's a it's a it's a fruit of the fragmentation of everything that things might sort of settle down for a bit.
And you have this sort of division with some units supporting Parliament and some militia supporting Parliament and others against.
But they don't actually confront each other for a bit.
I think that's less likely.
Yeah.
Well, for all the consequences as they've spread on down to Mali and to Nigeria and elsewhere around and around still in Libya, I guess we can if there's one thing we can count on, it'll be more negative consequences to come from here.
I think so.
Yeah.
I mean, you can you know that the you have this enormous country.
The Europeans are worried because their oil supplies are threatened.
And also you've got this enormous coastline, thousands of hundreds of miles long and over a thousand miles long.
And of course, there are immigrants from all over Africa getting on board boats heading for Europe or from these boats sink.
You know, there are dreadful casualties, but that can only get worse.
As the state collapses in Libya, there's nobody to prevent these people taking off.
Yeah.
You know, I mean, I hate to sound like one of the right wing paranoids and excuse mongers for intervention or anything like that.
But it seems like we have the same problem in Syria now, too, where, you know, I don't know exactly who controls what neighborhoods everywhere in Syria, but there seems to at least be a very real potential of a bunch of Zawahiri lovers having direct access to the Mediterranean Sea.
And then that could mean very well could mean access to Europe.
Right.
Yeah, I know they've already got that.
I mean, you can see that videos of them, you know, bathing in the Mediterranean in northwest Syria.
That's sort of already happened.
Yeah.
I mean, never mind, you know, right wing xenophobia, not wanting African immigrants to come just for, you know, whatever economic or racial reasons or whatever.
But what about the very real security risk of some of these Mujahideen that the Americans have been empowering over?
And the European, their European allies have been empowering over all this time.
Could be a real problem.
It's pretty amazing.
I mean, you take northern Iraq and western Iraq and northern and eastern Syria.
There's a vast area there about the size of Great Britain, which is controlled by al Qaeda type jihadis.
Much of the Euphrates Valley.
This is something that's never happened before.
And, you know, this is a very serious threat.
These are hundreds of people, thousands of people, very fanatical.
And a friend of mine was talking to some of them in southeast Turkey and from different groups.
And she told me that the one thing that when the subject of 9-11 came up, that all these people thought it was a very good idea.
And wanted the same thing to happen in Europe.
So this is a mounting threat with nothing much being done about it or even it being recognized.
Yeah.
And nothing hindsight 2020 about this either.
I mean, of all people, Patrick Coburn, you're the one who's been saying so all along that this is the results of what our policy has wrought in Iraq and throughout the Middle East.
You know, the historians won't be able to say they weren't warned because they're just saying so.
And with that, I'm sorry, we got to cut it off and go to our next guest.
We're way over time.
But thank you so much for your time again on the show, Patrick.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you.
Great talking to you as always.
That's the great Patrick Coburn, everybody.
Independent.co.uk.
Libya in crisis.
And please buy and read his book, Muqtada.
Oh, John Kerry's Mideast peace talks have gone nowhere.
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