10/14/09 – Patrick Cockburn – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
I'm happy to welcome Patrick Cockburn back to the show.
He, of course, is Middle East correspondent for the London Independent and the author of the book Muqtada.
Welcome back to the show, Patrick.
How are you doing?
Hi, I'm Patrick.
I'm very happy to have you here on the show again, and I was hoping that we could catch up on what's going on in Iraq.
It's not just the TV news, but I plead guilty to.
The coverage of the Iraq war has definitely fallen off, and I want to catch back up and know what's really going on there.
I guess my first real question is, what is the state of the Iraqi government as created by the United States in terms of Nouri al-Maliki and his coalition, the parliament, the army, and their control of the country?
Are they really the Iraqi state now?
It was said for a long time, I guess, that as soon as the Americans left, the entire green zone would be overthrown and there would be a brand new system in its place.
What do you think about that?
Well, I'll just go a little bit further back.
I think, as you said at the beginning, one of the interesting but really rather extraordinary things that has happened is that the news coverage of Iraq hasn't just sort of fallen off.
It's fallen off a cliff.
It's kind of surprising.
There are over 100,000 American troops there, and suddenly Iraq is getting mentioned a few more times than Mauritius or New Zealand, but not an awful lot.
So that's pretty astonishing.
Why has it happened?
Well, I think because all the coverage is now about Afghanistan, because the main television and newspaper coverage in the States is all by people who are very short of money at the moment, and also because, remember, last year and the year before, suddenly the Pentagon and the White House were announcing that the surge had succeeded and things were going great in Iraq.
So people got the impression that somehow it was over, despite continuing horrendous casualties.
In August we had a couple of bombs in Baghdad, outside the foreign ministry and the finance ministry, with 600 people dead and wounded.
But it somehow doesn't have the impact on the outside world that a much smaller episode in Afghanistan has these days.
Well, it seems like the biggest part of that is the narrative that the surge worked.
I mean, it certainly did work in terms of replacing the narrative that this war is a disaster that should have never been fought and we need to get out of there, which was pretty much the dominant narrative before that one.
And they certainly have succeeded.
I think, as you say, it doesn't really even matter how many truck bombings there are, how many people are dying, or even what's going on there.
It just doesn't get coverage anymore.
The surge worked.
Yeah, so I think it does have an effect on Afghanistan, of course, because people always believe their own propaganda.
So the idea that somehow we could have a second surge in Afghanistan, that worked too, I think has become current, but without people realizing that what happened in Iraq was not at all what they imagined it to be.
Well, and we can go back and talk about that.
I'd really like to, because if there's any real purpose to this show, it's revising those narratives toward the truth, away from the way the TV frames it.
But back to my sort of first question there, about the actual power of the Iraqi state and their ability to continue to exist without the U.S. backing them up and so forth.
Well, you know, the state is getting more powerful.
It's becoming more dictatorial.
We're getting back, in some ways, it resembles the old state of Saddam.
It's extraordinarily brutal.
Somebody who works for another newspaper was telling me the other day how one of their staff was picked up, savagely tortured over five days, for no particular reason, just the sort of macabre act of saying, what goes on in this newspaper office?
The use of savage tortures for routine questioning, which was part of the course under Saddam, and never went away.
And now we're not talking about...
It's going to happen again.
Well, we're not talking about some kind of independent militia or something.
We're talking about Iraqi government forces torturing these people.
Iraqi government, the state, you know.
It's a more and more dictatorial state.
Why is this happening?
It's happening, I think, because that's the tradition of the Iraqi government, and that's the only way they can really succeed to deal with their problems.
One of the problems, the difficulties about Iraq at the moment is that it's been told abroad that things are somehow okay, that Iraq came good.
Now, it's true to say Iraq is better than it was two or three years ago, but it's better than the bloodbath we had.
We used to have 3,000 bodies every month turning up in and around Baghdad.
That isn't happening anymore, but we're still getting hundreds of people killed.
Baghdad, I've been in Baghdad and Kabul in recent months, and Baghdad is still much worse than Kabul.
Maybe Mogadishu is worse than Baghdad, but that's probably the only other candidate.
So the government is sort of asserting its authority through very brutal means.
There's some sort of public acceptance, anything to get back to normality, anything for greater security, but it's a pretty country that anybody would like to live in.
Iraq is right towards the bottom of the list.
Well, now, you may remember that right before, I mean minutes before, Barack Obama gave his big speech at Camp Lejeune in February, announcing the future of Iraq policy and so forth.
Jim Michalczewski at NBC News reported, he's their long-time Pentagon correspondent there, of course, and he reported that, hey, word around here in the Pentagon is that we're staying forever, and whatever Barack Obama says about it, be damned, they're preparing for 50 years and onward from there.
It's staying in Iraq?
Yes.
I mean, that just isn't going to happen because, you know, one of the things that happened without anybody really noticing, I think, outside Iraq, was that George Bush, you know, was pulling out.
That was the agreement they signed last year.
That was the reason that George Bush was in Baghdad when he had the shoes thrown at him.
And the Iraqi government has been very tough on the U.S. in fulfilling the exact timescale as to when troops are pulled out.
You know, so you don't see the American troops are not in the cities anymore.
They're in the camps outside, and they have difficulties coming into the city.
So I think, you know, there's a sort of strange sort of fantasy that was around earlier this year and at the end of last year that somehow this stages a forces agreement, which George Bush was forced to sign.
Originally they wanted an agreement which would have kept the U.S. Army there for the 50 years you mentioned.
But they've signed this agreement, and I think it's going to happen.
It is happening.
So right now the American forces, as per the SOFA, really have pulled completely out of their bases.
Are they not doing checkpoints, search-and-destroy missions, anything like this anymore?
No, they're doing some in the north, in Mosul, but not elsewhere.
They're dismantling bases in Anbar to the west.
So they're less and less and becoming more and more invisible.
You've told me before on the show that Maliki's power really depends in great measure on a coalition which includes Muqtada al-Sadr's forces, and that that support would evaporate immediately if he went back on the status of forces agreement, what they call the withdrawal agreement.
If he started renegotiating to the benefit of the Pentagon, he would lose his own domestic powers.
Is that still the equation there?
Maliki's stance is to say, I'm the nationalist leader.
I'm the guy who fights al-Qaeda on one front, but I'm getting the Americans out on the other.
So he can't go soft on that.
And also, these guys want power for themselves.
They don't want to share it with the Americans.
They needed a deal, an alliance with the Americans, when they didn't think they were strong enough to hold it themselves.
Now they think they're strong enough to hold it themselves.
So they want the Americans out.
Maybe they want to be backstopped to some degree, and obviously what they say in public about the Americans is different from what they say to the Americans in private.
But at the end of the day, they can't really renege on this agreement.
I can't see the American army staying there.
And also, it's not going to happen, because it was very noticeable that Obama at the beginning kept on referring to this at the stage of the Forces Agreement.
Not very much noticed in the rest of the world, but the reason he was presumably doing that was to emphasize that he was fulfilling an agreement already reached by George Bush, which would make it much more difficult for Republicans to accuse him of having cut and run.
Right.
I mean, John McCain during the election was sort of behaving as if this agreement had never been signed.
It sort of disappeared into a world of fantasy.
But it has been, and it sort of represents the balance of power within Iraq.
Well now, what about that embassy in the middle of Baghdad?
Is that just going to become the Museum of American Atrocities?
It's a great big thing, but more than they can use.
Also, what are the officials in there going to do?
More and more of the Green Zone is being taken over by the Iraqi army.
So will that just end up being an Iraqi government building and not the American embassy at all?
I guess it will be the American embassy, but much bigger than anything they need.
And also, it's a peculiar position, because we always talk about Iraq being better.
The diplomats there don't go out without loads of bodyguards.
I got very fed up over the last year.
Sometimes I've been on the radio in Europe or elsewhere, and you have some senior American diplomat saying, Oh, Iraq is much better.
People go out to restaurants.
And I know these guys never set foot in a restaurant like that, and they never leave their own buildings without a couple of dozen soldiers with them.
Even those who want to go out aren't allowed to.
Britain's just been sending back some Iraqi asylum seekers, saying Iraq is better.
But if you look at the foreign travel advisory from the Foreign Office, they just say, Keep out of the place.
It's incredibly dangerous.
The advances have all been comparative with what we had before.
Right, which was a full-scale civil war.
I guess this kind of goes to what we brought up earlier about the surge didn't really work.
The surge coincided with some other things, primarily the end of the civil war that really American policy had caused in the first place.
But I wanted to ask you also about, and please feel free to address the surge narrative however you like, but I also wanted to ask you, who's setting off the bombs that are going off now?
I mean, there are still headlines of people killed.
This is sort of called Al-Qaeda, but it's kind of the Iraqi franchise of Al-Qaeda.
Iraq remains very much divided between Sunni and Shia.
They're still in business, and they can penetrate right to the center of Baghdad.
The Foreign Ministry is right beside the Green Zone.
They didn't have much difficulty getting there.
There are also signs of quite sophisticated bombings.
There was one last week in Ramadi, which is an Anbar province.
One bomb went off when the provincial council was meeting.
Then there was a second bomb to catch people who might have gathered afterwards or survivors.
And then there was a third bomb outside the hospital to catch the survivors who were wounded when they went to the hospital.
This is real, you know, I was going to say sophisticated.
I mean, it's real mean, but it takes a certain amount of organization.
In Baghdad, you still receive a lot of assassinations, so obviously we'll have a lot of information.
The atmosphere in Baghdad is always, you know, it's a bit, it's kind of what I always call the politics of the last atrocity.
You know, people are either feeding up and down, depending on just how long you are from the last really big bomb to go off.
But, you know, it remains pretty bad.
There never was a suicide bombing in the entire history of Iraq before the American invasion in 2003, was there, Patrick?
I never heard of one.
You know, so it's this level of violence.
Even Iraqis will say, oh, things are better.
But, you know, when you really talk to them, you find that, yeah, it's better than before, but, you know, it's still pretty terrible.
So the place remains a tremendous mess.
Well, now, you talk about how the Sunni and Shia communities are very divided, and I think you mean politically and geographically as well.
Now, there was a whole big part of a policy that coincided with the surge, was basically accepting the Sunni, many of the Sunni leaders offered that they had made throughout the war, that if you'll just pay us and not attack us, we will fight the al-Qaeda type extremists for you, and be the patrols in our own communities there.
They called it the Awakening, the Sons of Iraq, the Concerned Local Citizens.
And now this is a policy that Maliki has basically abandoned.
And I wonder if that's, you know, for the long-term future of Iraq, does that portend a future, you know, real conflict between these former insurgents who gave the fight up?
You know, and I'll add one thing more here, too, is I talked to Rayyad Jarrar from the Rayyad in the Middle blog, I guess a couple of months back or something, and he said that everyone is agreed that the Concerned Local Citizens should not be allowed into the army.
Sunni or Shia has nothing to do with it.
These guys are just thugs and criminals and what have you, and they should be completely marginalized if not just arrested and thrown in prison.
Well, there's something in that.
On the other hand, I wouldn't say that thugs and criminals have been wholly excluded from the Iraqi army otherwise.
These guys often, you know, first of all, Iraq is full of guns for hire, because, you know, whatever it is, a high percentage of the male labor force is unemployed.
These guys will do anything.
Probably the only skill they have is, you know, how to use a gun.
So you can always hire people.
And it reflects that.
It's also sort of former insurgent groups, but they probably can't go.
When I was talking to them, you know, they say unless we get paid, you know, we'll go back to war.
But it's difficult for them to do that because their identities are known now.
It's, you know, known where their houses are.
That's kind of difficult.
But on the other hand, there could be a sort of renewed split between the Sunni and the Shia.
These guys did a deal with the Americans.
They didn't do a deal with the Iraqi government.
So it's always been contradictory.
You know, you talk to them, and they say, what do you want?
And they say, well, we want jobs back in the security forces that we used to have, good jobs.
I used to be a major, and I want that job back.
And you say, well, what do you think of the Iraqi government?
Oh, God, they're all criminals.
They're all Iranian spies.
You say, hold on a minute.
You know, you want a job, serious jobs with guys who don't trust you and have every reason not to trust you and whom you despise?
So that never made sense.
Can you address the situation with the refugees and perhaps with maybe an emphasis on some of the religious ethnic minority groups that have been basically obliterated out of Iraqi society by this war?
I mean, there are all kinds of little sects and tribes that most Americans have never even heard of and I guess never will now that they don't exist anymore.
Yeah, I mean, one of the nice things about Iraq used to be its diversity, that you had sort of Christian sects that had been there, you know, for almost 2,000 years.
You know, they've been obliterated, they've fled.
It's partly if you're a small Christian sect, you don't have any protection.
Christians are deemed to have money, you know.
You don't have your own militia.
So they've suffered badly from the violence.
They've fled abroad.
Then up in places like Mosul, around in the big northern city of a province called Nineveh, which is kind of something that's called the Lebanon of Iraq, full of strange religious groupings, the Yazidis who speak Kurdish, but their religion is drawn from a whole host of sources, including Zoroastrianism, which is again being squeezed by the violence, attacked as Kurds but also attacked maybe because they're not Kurdish enough.
All these minorities have been losing out, and many of them have been fleeing abroad.
But Iraq is sort of becoming...
I mean, they've suffered from the dangers that everybody else suffers from, but they're less able to defend themselves.
Well, you know, I'd like to say here, add in, just for my own little editorialization here, that my concern is not really for groups and tribes and things like that.
It's just that all of those designations means people, individual human beings.
If there's no Yazidis left in Iraq, then that means whatever happened to them.
They're individual people whose lives have been destroyed.
That's the point that I'd like to get to.
And of course it's, you know what, four or five million people have fled Iraq, at least half of them externally and half of them have been forced out of their homes and had to move inside the state.
Yeah, I mean, obviously it's people who die and people who disappear, but it's also, you know, Iraq had quite a rich culture which is being sort of stamped out, and these different minority groups represented that culture as well.
And I'd be sad to see that sort of extirpated.
Otherwise, the refugee situation internally, externally, not that number of people.
Some people have come back, but some people have gone again.
It's difficult to move back.
People keep on telling me, oh, it's not, the sectarian situation isn't quite so bad in Baghdad, but people don't like to move into areas where they were forced out of, where they were a minority.
And we're getting more refugees now because one of the things that's happened is that the Euphrates is drying up.
There's been a tremendous drought in Iraq, but while everybody, people like you and me, have been focusing on the fighting, that more and more dams have been built in Turkey and Syria.
So we've, over the recent weeks, got 100,000 extra refugees.
People who used to be farmers along the Euphrates are now in a fleet of the cities.
So, you know, you still, it's not just old problems, but new problems are rising.
Yeah, well, that's actually a very interesting point.
I know that you've written an article about the Marsh Arabs and how, for most of the war, at least they'd kind of been protected, but now their marshes are being destroyed because of that very same drought.
And again, you say it's an artificial drought caused by the cutting off of the Tigris and Euphrates further upstream in Syria?
No, it's the whole Euphrates and parts of the Tigris as well.
I mean, that's what Iraq is all about.
It's Mesopotamia.
It's the land between the two, the land of the two rivers.
Without those two rivers, there's really not much there.
The cradle of civilization.
Yeah, that's why it was the cradle.
And the waters are drying up.
But it's being taken by other countries because there hasn't been much rain, but mainly because it's being taken by Turkey and mostly Turkey and Syria and a bit in Iran.
And while Iraq and the U.S. have been wholly absorbed by what's happening inside Iraq, people have been quietly building dams.
So suddenly there's no water.
I was standing in the middle of Baghdad a couple of months ago, a few months ago, and looking down on the Tigris and lots of sandy islands have suddenly appeared in the middle of the river.
I was looking at a child playing.
I thought, you know, he's kind of swimming far out, you know, a small boy.
And suddenly he stood up and the water only came up to his midriff, you know.
So I realized just how shallow the river is.
You know, it sounds a little less dramatic than when one's talking about, you know, thousands of people being slaughtered.
But this, again, is, you know, one sign of the sort of death of a culture, death of a country.
Well, now, what is the status of Kirkuk?
Well, it remains, you know, it's sort of when it started everybody said Kirkuk is a powder keg.
It still is a powder keg.
You know, the Kurds claim it.
The Arabs aren't going to give it up.
Basically it's a standoff.
I can't see that ending.
There's a lot of sort of edginess between the Kurds and the Arabs along a whole what's called a trigger line between the Arabs and the Kurds that sort of cuts slants across Iraq.
It's called a trigger line because everybody's finger is on the trigger and everybody is watching everybody else's military movements.
The Kurds claim a large area, either where Kurds live or where Kurds used to live, but were driven out by Saddam.
The Arabs say they've advanced too far.
But it's always on the edge of some explosion.
And you have, it's not just Arabs and Kurds, but it's often Arabs and Kurds within the Iraqi army, both wearing military uniforms, the same army, who are pointing guns at each other.
Well, now the deal is, as far as I understand anyway, is that the Kurds believe they have, at least their political leadership, have a claim on Kirkuk, but Saddam Hussein had relocated I guess tens of thousands, maybe more, Arabs to Kirkuk back in his day to make sure that it was an Arab-majority city.
And it's not officially within Kurdistan.
The Kurds want to extend their border to go around Kirkuk.
And this could, this is, you know, what, bazillions of dollars into the future.
Who controls that city controls that oil.
And this is the kind of thing that people are going to end up shooting each other over, aren't they?
Yeah, it's sort of, you know, along the oil fields, which run basically to the north-west of Kirkuk city.
You know, it's exactly, it matters a lot.
When you first look at the map or look at the positions, you think, well, does it matter that so-and-so holds this hill and somebody else holds that hill?
Well, it matters a lot, because it matters if you're looking down on some oil field, you know.
So there's continual sort of minor crises as each side tries to sort of grab a little bit more territory.
Not exactly because of what's on the surface of the land, but because of what's underneath it.
Yeah.
Which is a whole lot of oil.
Yeah.
I wanted to ask you about something you said about how the concerned local citizens, the leaders of the former Sunni insurgency who made the deal with the Americans to stop fighting after they lost the civil war and all that, how they want to join the army and yet it's such a contradiction because they believe that the Iraqi government, which presumably controls that army, are a bunch of Iranian spies.
And then I wonder, well, wait a minute, are they a bunch of Iranian spies?
Who is the Iraqi government and how close are they to the Ayatollahs in Iran?
Well, you know, they have a relationship.
Iran is powerful in Iraq.
This is always going to happen.
You know, when George Bush decided to overthrow Saddam Hussein, one thing was absolutely inevitable, which was Iranian influence was going to increase in Iraq.
And it was going to increase because Saddam was their big enemy and also because the Shia weren't going to take power over the Sunni because the Iranians are all Shia.
So, you know, this was kind of an inevitable process.
But I don't think the Iraqi government are Iranian pawns.
They're influenced by them.
There are many things wrong with them, but that's not the main one.
The main one is that you have a government which is very increasingly authoritarian and also a kleptocracy.
That Iraq, you know, Iraq is not like Afghanistan in one important respect, that there is oil revenue.
That was $62 billion last year.
But you look out across Baghdad and you try and spot one crane.
You know, I keep on seeing this stuff about reconstruction and no place needs reconstruction more than Baghdad.
And you don't see a single crane.
Nothing is being built.
You know, where did all the money go?
It disappears.
So, you know, this isn't corruption.
You know, to my mind corruption is, you know, somebody takes 10%, 15%.
You know, there are payoffs.
And then you have the current situation in Iraq, which all the money goes.
Nothing is built.
That's a kleptocracy.
And that's what we have.
That's what's wrong with the government.
It's not that it's in the pockets of the Iranians necessarily or anybody else.
Well, when Abdulaziz al-Hakim died, the former leader of the Supreme Islamic Council, did that weaken the Iranian influence?
I guess the way I remember it was that Maliki's faction of the Dawa Party was, to whatever percentage, whatever degree, however you measure it, less close to Iran than the Supreme Islamic Council.
The Dawa were founded in Iran.
They were originally controlled by the Iranians.
They're still considered, you know, heavily financed by the Iranians, supported by the Iranians.
But the Iranians tend to bet on lots of other people as well.
So whoever loses out, they'll have some influence.
But I think the idea that, you know, the Iraqi government is purely an Iranian pawn, which is kind of what the Sunnis say and has always been exaggerated.
That really shows the depth of sectarianism in Iraq that people say things like that.
And I don't think it's ever quite true, has ever been quite true.
Well, and now what of Muqtada al-Sadr?
We sure don't hear too much from him lately, but it used to be that the Supreme Islamic Council types wanted a more Federalist-type system, and Sadr opposed them because he was much more nationalistic.
And I guess they, you know, all these different Shiite leaders have their own relationship with Iran and that kind of deal, but he's really lying low right now.
I guess this is really, you talk about in your book, Muqtada, how he's very strategic when to fight, when not to fight, when to fade into the background, and when to step back forward again.
Yeah, so keeping in the background, people are waiting for the American troops to leave.
They're waiting also for the election at the end of January.
And nobody's very sure, you know, what's going to happen.
You know, is it going to be like sort of the Afghan election, where everybody's going to think it's being fixed?
Unfortunately, I don't think that any of these things are going to be resolved, that Iraq is very divided.
I don't think it'll necessarily get much worse, but it's not going to get, there's probably no sign of it getting much better.
And the present situation is pretty bad.
I think it'll go on festering, with the outside world not paying much attention these days.
Well, that may be to their benefit.
I don't know.
It might as well be.
I guess we'll see.
I can't tell you how much I continue to appreciate your addition to the show and all I learned from you, Patrick.
It's really great, and I really appreciate it a lot.
Thanks very much.
All right, everybody, that's Patrick Coburn.
Again, you can find him at The Independent, where he's Middle East correspondent.
That's independent.co.uk, and, of course, at counterpunch.org.