06/11/14 – Patrick Cockburn – The Scott Horton Show

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That old onion clip from the days of the last Iraq war on the eve of the next one, I think.
I fear.
All right, on the line, we've got the great Patrick Coburn.
He's the best Western reporter in the Middle East and he writes for the Independent.
That's independent.co.uk.
You can also find an archive.
They just reprint it all at unz.com.
That's unz.com as well as you can find a lot of it at counterpunch.org as well.
And he's the author of the book, Muqtada.
Muqtada al-Sadr, The Shia Revival and the Future of Iraq and a great many books on Iraq and America's wars in the Middle East before that too.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing Patrick?
Pretty good.
Thank you.
Good.
Good.
Thank you very much for joining us today.
And wow, what a series of articles you've written here and what a lot of bad news at once.
I guess before we get to your most current piece, which is a more of a specific issue.
I guess.
Can you just give us a roundup of the past few days?
It seems like Isis this group of so-called rebels fighting in Syria has decided to take a turn back to the East and they've accomplished quite a lot in Iraq in just the last few days here.
Yeah, I mean Isis, which is the Islamic state of Iraq and the Levant of Sham basically means Iraq and Syria.
This is an Al-Qaeda type group.
It was formerly Al-Qaeda in Iraq.
It is you can kind of get the idea of what it's about by the fact it was expelled for excessive violence among other things from Al-Qaeda, but has exactly the same ideology and methods of extreme sectarian bigotry, kills Shia, kills Christians, pretty well anybody else, in favor of Sharia law, the subjugation of women, second-class citizens, but not really citizens at all.
The very primitive religious formulation.
Now from about in 2010, this group was thought to be marginalized in Iraq.
At that time, their leaders in April 2010 were killed.
A new leader called Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was appointed, but since then it has developed with extraordinary speed to being perhaps the most effective jihadi organization in the world.
It's formed far more powerful than the original Al-Qaeda of Osama bin Laden.
It now controls a great area in northern Iraq and northern Syria.
Then of course it's taken Mosul.
It's very fanatical.
It's militarily very well run.
People suspect that officers from Saddam's old army and security forces are involved there because of the military expertise.
But even so, the events of this week have been truly astonishing.
I'd always thought that the Iraqi army is meant to be 900,000 strong, was pretty dysfunctional and basically a patronage machine jobs for the boys.
But I didn't think that it would just break up and abandon Mosul.
Today it abandoned Tikrit, Saddam's old hometown.
People, soldiers, tore off their uniforms, put on civilian clothes, often left their weapons.
And it's disintegrating.
So people in Baghdad are getting really worried.
They're stocking up with food and fuel.
They don't know where this disaster is going to end.
All right.
Now, so already there's a lot there.
First of all, let me backtrack about a year ago.
I think it was last summer, right?
That you reported and then came on the show and discussed how you had witnessed Iraqi army guys backing down.
I don't know.
I don't think it was to ISIS.
It was to local Sunni militiamen.
But I don't remember in what city or in what circumstances anymore.
Can you refresh us on that?
I can't quite recall that.
But, you know, it became apparent over the last year that the army wasn't really fighting.
I mean, the most crucial failure was in January this year.
ISIS captured Fallujah, the town about 40 miles west of Baghdad, which U.S. Marines captured in 2004 after a big, bloody, well-publicized battle.
ISIS takes it over and somehow the Iraqi army doesn't take it back.
And there have been other accounts of the army not fighting and so forth.
But I don't think anybody in Iraq expected this sort of complete collapse.
Well, you know, we've talked all this time about, well, say, for example, since the end of the war about how Maliki and his army never really did have enough might, enough real power to enforce a monopoly state on the Sunni regions.
They successfully took Baghdad and then it was basically the Hakeem plan, the strong, the Iran plan, strong federalism took hold and Maliki has basically just completely frozen the Sunnis out and hasn't even really tried to include them in the Iraqi government or even the Iraqi state this whole time.
So it doesn't seem like much of a surprise that the Sunnis would go back to war.
Maybe the surprise is just that ISIS is this far out front in it all compared to the former leaders of the Sunni insurgency from, you know, 2004 through 08 or 09.
Yeah, but I think that it still is surprising.
And what changed in the balance of power in Iraq, what sort of, I hate that phrase, game changer, but it might be appropriate in this case, is that in 2011 you have this uprising, which in Syria, which is initially a sort of popular uprising against dictatorship, but very rapidly became an uprising of the Sunni, particularly and increasingly the extreme Sunni against the minorities, against secular people, etc.
And so suddenly when this happened, this explosion in Syria created the crisis in, or reignited the crisis, if you like, in Iraq, the Iraqi Sunni, who are about 20% of the population, maybe 5 or 6 million people, suddenly thought, well, you know, we can do the same thing.
And initially, from about 2012, they had peaceful protests and lots of marches and that sort of thing, but it didn't get them anywhere.
The Iraqi government didn't want to make concessions.
It also felt the Sunni were trying basically for a revolution to go back to the time Saddam Hussein, when they were the dominant community.
And, you know, this is a kind of, Iraq itself is a, if you're a Sunni there, a Sunni young man, you're always in danger of being arrested.
If you're arrested, you're in danger of being tortured.
Maybe when you're tortured you sign a confession, then you're tried, you could be executed.
Or you could be found completely innocent, but you stay in prison because you have to pay somebody off, sometimes a lot of money, $80,000, for just get an officer to sign that piece of paper to allow you out of prison, although you've been found innocent of all charges.
So not surprisingly, you know, for a lot of Sunni young men and they think they may not particularly like ISIS, they might have reservations about it, but they're kind of on their side.
And they're more frightened of the government than they are of the Sunni extremist fundamentalists.
Right.
And now, of course, part of this, and I'm sorry, we're about to have to take this break, so we don't really have too much time to address it.
But part of this, as we've spoken about in the past here, is the extreme dissonance in the narrative here, where we're really backing these guys, at least de facto, you know, by way of Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
And really with a lot of CIA coordination supporting these same guys to to push regime change against Assad in Syria.
At the same time, they're the world's worst boogeyman from the last decade in Iraq.
Zarqawi's guys who killed so many American soldiers in the during the Iraq occupation there.
So we're going to have to grapple with that and the new equipment and the fight for Baghdad that's coming and the rest with Patrick Coburn.
Just a second.
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All right, you guys.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
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At Scott Horton Show on Twitter.
I'm talking with Patrick Coburn of the Independent in the UK.
And we're talking about ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Sham or the Levant or Syria or whatever you call it.
Zarqawi's old group and their major gains on both sides of the former border.
I guess the Sykes-Picot line between Syria and Iraq is pretty much gone forever now.
And it's the rise of new jihadi stand there.
The Islamic State.
It was the name of a group.
Now it's actually a place, the Islamic State of Iraq, at least for the time being.
I guess we'll see what happens.
But so there's there's a couple of things I wanted to get back to here was.
Well, I wanted to ask you about what all loot they got.
Apparently, helicopters and tanks and all kinds of things, which that seems important.
A bunch of money from seizing the central bank in in Mosul, I read.
But also, I wanted to get back to what you're saying, Patrick, about Baghdad and how, you know, really, as you've explained on this show over the years, really the American war from especially, say, 05 through 08 was really the war for the Shiite militias against the Sunni population of Baghdad.
And and the sectarian cleansing of that city and handing it over not just to a Shiite government, but to the Shiite population, basically.
I guess last I saw it was about an 85 percent Shiite Arab city.
So I wonder if in your calculation that means it'll be, you know, quite a bit harder for ISIS to be able to take Baghdad.
Or if he's really if they're really just up against the paper tiger of Maliki's army, will they perhaps actually be able to sack the capital city, do you think?
I don't think so.
I mean, I think, you know, one of the outcomes of this is that the militias will reappear, including the Shia militia.
You know, basically local guys with their guns who will really fight.
So I think when ISIS gets towards Shia areas, they will be facing people who won't retreat.
But of course, this will reignite or could reignite a sectarian war between Sunni and Shia.
You know, a regular army which contained both Sunni and Shia was meant to stand above this.
But if it's not going to work, if it can't stop the most extreme Sunni organization, then we're back to militias.
Taht al-Sadr was calling today for a sort of freedom brigades.
I mean, he does.
Al-Sadr is very conscious of what happened last time that his Mehdi army became sectarian killers.
And once it kept under control and full of warnings against sectarianism.
But I'm not sure that's going to matter.
I think that as the Shia majority get really frightened of what's happening, and they realize the government isn't going to defend them, then they'll get their guns.
And all Iraqis do have guns.
Yeah.
Well, and I think, you know, when the war in Syria was, you know, first breaking out even back in 2011, certainly by 2012, we had discussed this, the fact that, you know, they really don't have the ability to take Baghdad back.
It took the American army to give it to the Shiites in the first place.
It's going to take a hell of a lot more than some al-Qaeda suicide bombers to take it back for the Sunni.
But to, you know, misquote you, but roughly, you know, paraphrase you, what you said was basically, Well, don't tell al-Qaeda that because as far as they're concerned, hey, they're backed by the Saudis.
They're the super majority in the region, the Sunni Arabs rather than the Shia Arabs.
And so why in the world should they have to settle for losing Baghdad?
And they might be willing to start this war all over again, even if they don't realistically have a mathematical chance of winning it at this point.
They still might try because they're so heady with all their successes in Syria and in the Sunni provinces of Iraq.
Yeah, they might, you know, that even if they can't take Baghdad, they're at Fallujah.
They had a military parade in Abu Ghraib about a month ago with captured government Humvees.
And the prison, the notorious prison, had to be quickly evacuated.
But Abu Ghraib is about sort of 12 miles from the very center of Baghdad.
So the government is, you know, it's kind of weird, the Iraqi government, that it didn't react to these initial al-Qaeda or ISIS successes.
I don't know quite why.
I mean, I guess the government's all in the green zone.
They don't sort of feel the same fears as other people.
And Maliki, the prime minister, it said, you know, generals didn't dare give him the bad news from anywhere.
So, but even so, I mean, having been for a long time extremely cynical about the capacity of the government and the army, you know, which absolutely riddled with corruption, you know, if you want to be a general, you know, you might have to pay a couple of divisional commander a couple of million dollars, and you get the money back from the checkpoints that extort money from drivers and goods vehicles and maybe $50,000 a month.
Eventually you make a profit.
But so it was kind of a commercial enterprise.
So I thought everybody had told me it was pretty bad, but I didn't really expect to be completely useless.
All right, now, it's sort of to change the subject to politics in a way.
I wonder if you think that the narrative that, well, got to back the rebels against Assad, got to back the rebels against Assad, the hawks criticizing the president for not backing the rebels against Assad quite enough.
Give them more weapons, give them more training, because, you know, to check Hezbollah, because that's what Israel wants, that kind of thing, to weaken Iran's position in the region, the Shiite crescent's position in the region, because that's what Israel wants.
I wonder if you think that that narrative is going to be able to withstand these gains on the part of those exact same Syrian rebels when it comes to the Iraqi side of this equation, where they're still supposedly the bad guys, fighting against the Maliki government that America is still selling F-16s to.
Or, I mean, in other words, are we going to war now?
We're going to have another Iraq war.
It's going to, we're going to, I don't see another way around going to war against the new Jihadistan, if that's really what it is.
Well, you know, well, Turkey act, or, you know, what others, it's all very explosive, and it's difficult to know, you know, which way it's going to go.
Yeah, I'd say, you know, what happened in Syria infected Iraq.
It's really Syria is the, and the bankruptcy of Western, American, British, European, Saudi foreign policy in Syria.
2011, they thought Assad was going to go down.
They kept announcing that, beating their breasts, and this is great, it's going to be a blow to Iran, blow to Hezbollah.
It was never quite likely to happen like that.
I mean, it's, Assad holds 13 out of 14 provincial capitals in Syria.
The, so he's never going to go down easily, or go down at all.
It didn't happen, and they'd never really thought of a foreign policy since.
Now they keep saying, and you may have seen Ambassador, it was Ambassador Ford, who was, used to be in Damascus, in the New York Times this morning, saying that, give support to the Syrian moderates, rebels, but there aren't any Syrian moderates.
Patrick, I'm sorry to interrupt, can I hold you one more segment here, please?
Sure.
Thank you very much, I appreciate it.
We'll be right back, everybody, with the great Patrick Cockburn from the independent.co.uk in just a second, moment, thing.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, this is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I've got Patrick Cockburn on for one more segment here.
Thanks very much, Patrick, for staying on with us here.
Everyone, check out Patrick's archive at independent.co.uk.
He's a Middle East correspondent there.
It's all also reprinted at unz.com.
And here are the last handful of articles here.
In the war on terrorism, only Al-Qaeda thrives.
Battle to establish Islamic State across Iraq and Syria.
Anarchy in Iraq.
And Mosul emergency.
Who is Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi?
And so I think that's where I want to go right here is that question.
Who is al-Baghdadi, Patrick?
Well, he's the leader of ISIS.
Actually, that's what I made him my man of the year at the beginning of this year, because it seemed to me ISIS was sort of coming from nowhere and suddenly was extremely important in shaping what was happening, not just in Iraq, but also Syria.
He was born in 1971.
He comes from a town called Samara, which is mostly Sunni, but has a big Shia shrine north of Baghdad.
He seems to have got degrees in Islamic Studies at the Islamic University in Baghdad.
Now, he may have been a sort of Islamic militant on the stamp, but unclear.
But he certainly early on was a member of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, 2003 to 5.
And then he was captured by US forces and imprisoned in Kambaka in South Iraq.
Got out in 2009.
And then he took over ISIS when it was in pretty low water.
People were beginning to write it off.
And things went with him, as I said.
The Syrian Sunni revolt started.
The Baghdad government marginalized the Sunni community, got more and more arrested.
But either this guy, I mean, who's also called Abu Dhuwa, he has a number of so-called non-daguerre, seems to be a very good organizer.
It's always difficult with leaderships of insurgent groups that are completely secretive to know who does what, who are the really effective people.
But certainly since he took over, it's extremely well organized.
It seems to have a lot of military expertise.
It sort of makes ferocious videos showing Shia and other people being executed by its people.
It is very terrifying and very effective.
Where this guy is, nobody's quite sure.
When prisoners are taken from ISIS, most of them say they've never met him.
Those who have met him say he wears a mask when they meet him, so they don't know what he looks like.
There are various pictures of him taken from when he was an American prisoner.
But what he looks like now, I think people are probably unclear.
There were some photographs earlier in the year, but I don't quite know how authentic they were.
All right, now, it seems like, and I'm going to oversimplify this.
If you could help straighten me out, I sure would appreciate it.
But it sort of seems like the Jabhat al-Nusra group, those are basically the Syrian veterans of al-Qaeda in Iraq, and ISIS are more predominantly the Iraqi veterans of al-Qaeda in Iraq, and maybe now including more of the foreigners from Jordan, Saudi, Libya, and other places who have gone to Iraq to fight now.
But then it also seems like, probably again an oversimplification, it seems like the fight between Nusra and ISIS really came down to just the local leadership in Syria would rather have a partnership than allow the ISIS guys to really boss them around.
So that's what they broke out fighting over.
And then Zawahiri, I guess, from Pakistan had tried to order ISIS to go back to Iraq, and they decided they would ignore him because what's he going to do about it?
And so that's how they got kind of kicked out of al-Qaeda.
But I just wonder if you could help me like understand exactly what are the differences in all of this?
Is it just a matter of personalities between competing commanders?
They both vie for power, you know.
In terms of ideology, they're no different.
They have the same bigotry.
They both execute Shia, members of minorities, Alawites, Christians, and so forth.
They have the same beliefs about women.
They both use suicide bombers and suicide beings as a great expression of faith.
So they're both al-Qaeda type movements without much difference.
And they sort of—then it's why do they fight?
Well, they're fighting for spoils, fighting for power.
But they fight with incredible ferocity.
I think that one of the things that has happened is that, you know, it's this peculiarity of Western and outside interference that they keep speaking of supporting the moderate armed opposition in Syria.
And they'll never quite say where this group of people hangs out, because they don't really hang out.
I was talking to an Iraqi security official who said that, you know, according to prisoners they've taken from ISIS, ISIS is pleased when it hears there's a delivery of arms to the Free Syrian Army because they can immediately either buy it because they've got a lot of money or threaten the guys who've got it that they'll kill them unless they hand the weapons over.
So those weapons are handed over.
And they may be used in Syria or they may be used in Iraq.
It's probably one of the reasons why ISIS is so well-armed in this present attack in Mosul and in northern Iraq is that a proportion of the weaponry will have been paid for by Saudi Arabia and Qatar and delivered to the so-called moderate opposition in Syria.
Well, yeah, you know, I think Flint Leverett was on the show, and he was basically agreeing with my kind of construction of it, was that this is not plausible deniability.
It's not plausible at all.
That really if Saudi and Qatar are giving all this money and weapons and the CIA is, you know, helping at least to coordinate the whole thing and the U.S. is not telling them to stop it, and obviously they're working with Jordan and Turkey on all this too, that this is an American operation, just as simple as that.
Barack Obama is as responsible for the behavior of the king of Saudi Arabia as the king of Saudi Arabia is because Obama is really the leader here, and if he told the king to knock it off, it'd be the end of that.
So this really has been an American operation to back their own enemies this whole time.
It's very weird, you know.
It's like everything since 9-11 has been a bit like this, you know.
We may have discussed this before.
9-11, 15 out of 19 hijackers are Saudis.
American reports say the money came from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf.
Bin Laden is part of the Saudi elite, and yet Saudis are never really queried about this, you know.
Bush went for Iraq.
Similarly in Afghanistan, you know, who are the main supporters of the Taliban is Pakistan, but the U.S. maintained good relations with Pakistan.
So it's very weird, this sort of way of going to war against people who in the same time are kind of supporting the very people you're supposed to be fighting.
Yeah, David Enders on the show, another brave reporter like yourself who's gone to Syria and reported all this, said that, you know, really it was Bush and Wolfowitz and their idiocy that was the aberration in all of this.
The policy has always been to back the Saudis and the Mujahideen.
It's just for a short while after 9-11 they backed Iran and the Shiites for a minute, but then, you know, like Seymour Hersh put it, they did the redirection back toward the Mujahideen and back toward Saudi interests, because after all, what were they fighting for Iran for?
So, you know, at least it's horrible, but at least it's sort of consistent if you consider the Iraq policy to be the aberration in the long term.
I guess so, yeah.
I think that, you know, this whole war on terrorists, but like the war on drugs, you know, it's sort of, there's a sort of objective there, but, you know, maybe the purpose is to increase the institutional power of government, you know, to get big budgets and so forth, and they sort of end up by not really considering that actually, you know, in terms of al-Qaeda, there's a real enemy out there.
Yep.
All right, well, thank you so much for your time, especially for staying overtime with us here, Patrick.
Appreciate it.
Cheers, Scott.
Great to talk to you.
That's the great Patrick Coburn, everybody.
He's the author of Muqtada.
And check him out at theindependent.co.uk.
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