06/26/14 – Patrick Cockburn – The Scott Horton Show

Oh, John Kerry's Mideast peace talks have gone nowhere.
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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'm on Liberty Radio Network and at scotthorton.org.
Next up is our friend Patrick Coburn, Middle East correspondent for the London Independent, that's independent.co.uk, and author of the book Muqtada, who is going to be a part of this conversation, guarantee that.
Welcome back to the show, Patrick, how are you?
Pretty good, Scott.
Pretty good.
Good, good.
Happy to know you're safe and sound over there in the war zone, or soon to be again.
I guess, first of all, let's talk about, I believe your latest piece here is about Maliki and the prospect of government, of unity, national salvation, something or another.
I think he's agreed to one but refused the other.
Is there a difference?
What's happening with that?
I think it's kind of irrelevant, in a way, or at least it's not as big a deal as people say.
But one thing that's very obvious when you're in Baghdad, this country's already split apart.
You have the Kurdish north, which has just expanded, taken Kirkuk and other places.
That's defended by the Peshmerga, the Kurdish soldiers.
Then you have the sunny part, which is the Kurdish soldiers.
Then you have the sunny part, which is run by ISIS, these mad fanatics who want to kill all Shia and Christians, which is about 60% of Iraqis.
Then you have the Shia in Baghdad.
These countries, places have actually had war with each other.
To talk about unity and a unity government, it doesn't mean much, Scott.
It might have meant something five years ago, 10 years ago, but it's kind of irrelevant now.
Yeah, well, when they say what they're talking about mostly, I don't know, they tend to leave the Kurds out of most of these arguments, I guess, because they figure the Kurds are all right, so we'll worry about them later or something.
They seem mostly to focus on, well, we'll bring some Sunnis into the government.
But this was the benchmark of 2007 that never was met, this unity government.
Is it really that way?
There were Sunnis in the government, but the Sunni sort of political politicians got a share in the government and they got a share in the plunder.
I don't think they passed much of it on to their own people.
But at the moment, we just had, for instance, the British Foreign Secretary, William Hague, here today, we had John Kerry before.
They keep going on and saying we need an inclusive government.
But that's something which doesn't mean much when the Sunni part of the country is run by people who are planning to kill every Shia, they're not planning to negotiate with them, and they've done a lot of that already.
So who are you going to include in this government?
A lot of basically washed out Sunni politicians who have very little support within their own community.
The leaders in Mosul had to run for their lives.
They're in Kurdistan.
The rest of them don't dare go back.
So these guys are going to be given part of an inclusive government and supposedly the 5 million Sunni community is going to say, oh, that's great.
Well, you know, government can come back in.
This isn't realistic and it isn't going to happen.
So they're kind of doing the things now that might have worked five or six years ago, but are now kind of ancient history.
Yeah, I just read a piece.
I think it was the AP about the guys in Washington, D.C. saying, well, it's going to be a little more difficult this time, but we're going to have to start back up the awakening movement and get the local Sunnis to turn on Al Qaeda again.
Yeah, it's pathetic, really.
You know, the surge was a bit exaggerated at the time.
You know, the Sunni had decided they couldn't really fight the Shia and fight the Americans at the same time.
So they did a deal with the Americans.
They never stopped killing Shia, by the way.
The mark of success was, God, look how few American soldiers are getting killed now.
It's going right down.
But there was much less attention for the fact an awful lot of Shia were still getting killed.
So now the idea is that's going to happen, that somehow the tribal leaders, the other Sunni leaders are going to use the Islamic State, which is always called Daesh here, acronymically, in Arabic, that they're going to use these people as sort of shock troops to take over their area and then get rid of them afterwards.
But, you know, you're dealing with guys who are kind of Islamic Camarouge, you know, and they can see this punch coming.
And, you know, they're not going to roll over easily.
And what one does know that these are some of the most ferocious people on the planet.
So I think it's a bit naive to see things written here and there, saying it's just going to be like the great victories of 2007 and the Islamic State and its fighters are just going to disappear.
Okay.
Now, it seems like, well, and I'm sorry to just, you know, ask you about the future, but it seems like the ISIS guys in Syria have been more focused on, you know, locking down Raqqa and the parts in the countryside in the east of the country where they already have control rather than, you know, bashing their skulls up against the Assad regime, at least, you know, lately.
So I wonder whether you think they're at this point going to try to conserve their gains or whether they want to really try to retake Baghdad and die trying?
Well, that's a million dollar question here.
And, you know, I'm sitting in Baghdad, they haven't tried yet.
They might.
I would have thought that chances go down a little as time goes on.
You know, one thing, Scott, is that maybe their tremendous successes over the last two weeks, it only has been a couple of weeks since they took Mosul, they took the north of the country, last weekend they took the whole west of the country, that they're too spread out, that they're having difficulty in sort of refocusing their forces and deciding what they're going to do next.
After all, there aren't that many of them.
On the other hand, they certainly have cells in Baghdad.
They could activate those.
There are big, sunny enclaves in Baghdad.
They could probably take those over if they wanted.
They haven't done it yet.
It's probably because they don't quite want to play at the moment.
But that's kind of what we're waiting for, is the moment that they either decide to go for Baghdad or they decide to disrupt Baghdad, or maybe they're just going to wait.
But, you know, we'll probably know soon enough.
Yeah, well, and I guess it just depends whether they think it's in their interest, one, to try to take the city or two, to provoke, you know, pushback from the Shia, who basically they've just held their ground, right?
Like the Mahdi army is still sitting there, Sadr's group.
They're waiting.
Yeah, I mean, Muqtada said, you know, they could be used to defend the shrines, which I guess means also the Shia areas, but they couldn't be an offensive force.
And he's obviously frightened they'll turn into a sort of murder gang once again.
So we got these militia here, and you see them in the streets, the Sunni in Baghdad are pretty frightened.
Everybody's pretty frightened, actually.
But nobody, you know, is really sure what's going to happen next.
The idea that there can be an inclusive government, you know, and just going to offer the Sunni something, you know, the idea would be essentially offering them power sharing.
But hold on a minute, the guys that you're offering to share power with have already taken power in a quarter of the country.
They're the only power in those Sunni areas now.
The government has fled.
The Sunni have taken over.
So why do they want to share power in Baghdad?
Well, there are reasons, the oil revenues that come from, the oil comes from the south.
But for the moment, I don't think there's really any chance of having an inclusive government.
All right, well now, so what about the Jordanian border?
I saw that they've taken at least one checkpoint there.
And I wonder how long you think that border has to exist as an actual border anymore.
Well, it's right out there in the desert.
You know, it's sort of, I've spent a lot of time in that border post.
It's been taken over.
And the guys who were running it are still running it.
But it's sort of been taken over by ISIS.
There aren't many trucks going through there.
This used to be a sort of place that was sort of bustling night and day with trucks going past.
By the way, you know, just gives an idea of how this country's broken up.
Here I am in Baghdad, and the capital of Kurdistan is Erbil, which is about 200 miles to the north.
Now, after a few weeks ago, he wanted to, you know, send a big truck, you know, big goods carrying, vehicle carrying goods from Erbil to Baghdad.
It costs you about $500.
Current rate, I was talking to a guy who runs a company, there's a $10,000 to do those 200 miles.
So it tells you what the kind of perception of danger is here.
And, you know, the chances that people think that is in a, you know, even a truck getting through.
Well, all right.
So is there any kind of solution to this if you were to, I don't know, if one were to advise Maliki, should he just let the West go?
And then that way, there's no fight.
He's not in a position to do anything else at the moment.
You know, he needs to defend Baghdad.
You know, this guy has just presided over one of the biggest military disasters in history, and political disasters.
So conceivably, he's not the man to lead Iraq forward.
I mean, Kerry and the others say, oh, we're not trying to press him to go.
But of course, they say that so often, you know, the message comes across, get out.
But I'm not sure how much good he's going to do them.
You know, we talked about this before.
I think the Sunni are sort of facing a disaster, actually, I think, you know, they had reasons for revolt.
But by sort of handing over the leadership of this revolt to ISIS by using these sort of mad fanatics as their shock troops, they've ensured that they sort of enormous reaction from the Shia, their areas are going to be isolated, what's going to happen to the Sunni in Baghdad?
You know, long term, this is bad news for them.
It isolates them a lot.
You know, what should be done about ISIS in general?
Well, I think, you know, this is, to a degree, this is the outcome of the very toxic and disastrous Western-U.S.-European policy in Syria, that they fostered a Syrian opposition to Assad, which they claimed was moderate.
And that became evident that it was dominated by jihadis, by ISIS, by Jabhat al-Nusra, which is the official al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda franchise, if you like, and other jihadi groups.
They still say that, you know, we support the moderate opposition.
But actually, the opposition to Assad in Syria is completely dominated by these jihadis.
If you supply anything to the moderate groups, any weapon, you know, I've been told by Iraqi security, when they question prisoners, you know, ISIS says, Oh, that's great.
So, you know, any weapons applied to these fellows ends up in our armory, you know, a couple of weeks later.
So they pretended that there was a Syrian moderate opposition support, and now they're trying to pretend that there's a Sunni moderate opposition that is different from ISIS in Iraq.
I mean, there may be, but it's not doing anything.
So, you know, if you're against these guys, then they should persuade people like the Free Syrian Army to ally themselves with Assad.
And fight ISIS.
Here, if they want to get rid of ISIS, they need to talk to the Iranians, who are the only people who can really do something here, assuming there's not going to be another American invasion, to fight ISIS.
I mean, these guys are sort of, you know, what one commentator called holy fascists, you know.
He's like sort of dealing with the Nazis.
But they're still held up.
I mean, the U.N., Washington and London and Paris and all the others, by this pretense that there's a sort of third way that there's a moderate Syrian opposition, a moderate Sunni community in Iraq, which is why their policies aren't getting anywhere.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it seems like when America sides with Assad, then it's like George W. Bush paying him to torture these guys to death, which that just leads to its own blowback.
What if we just say everybody else except us work it out?
Just butt out completely.
You could do that.
But, you know, it's kind of not going to happen.
But in a way, it has happened.
I suppose another way of looking, you know, you have John Kerry sort of fluttering around the Middle East, you know, looking sincere and, you know, sort of jaw set.
But, you know, it's pretty obvious they don't have a policy.
They don't know what they're going to do.
They get very edgy about the thought of, you know, maybe somehow collaborating openly with the Iranians, which is actually what they've been doing for years anyway.
You know, why is Maliki prime minister of Iraq?
Because America and Iran agreed that he would be.
There's no way the Americans would really push somebody who the Iranians couldn't get along with.
But they don't dare do this publicly.
So I think, you know, they sort of footlol along.
And, you know, what the big contrast here is between how quick ISIS is to make military gains on the ground and against this background of sort of grindingly slow diplomacy and a pretense that a new government in Baghdad is going to make much difference.
Yeah.
Well, what did you think when you saw that Assad, and of course, he only just killed a bunch of civilians, but Assad attacked supposedly ISIS targets inside Iraq and Maliki said thanks.
Yeah.
So there's something peculiar about those Maliki sort of said thanks.
And then they sort of suddenly said they haven't said thanks.
I don't know.
I think maybe they thought they'd upset the Americans or maybe it wasn't true.
I mean, I think it's going to be kind of difficult, I would have thought, for the U.S. to say everything must be done to stop ISIS, but the Syrians are not allowed to attack them in Iraq, although ISIS doesn't recognize that border anyway.
You know, are they saying that ISIS should have a safe haven in Iraq and Assad shouldn't attack them?
Of course, their other thing is to say, well, somehow ISIS was created by Assad and he never fights them.
But then when he is fighting them, are they really going to object?
You know, so I think they've got themselves into a tremendous muddle.
Yeah, it's completely ridiculous.
Well, except for it's a tragedy, too.
And yeah, I mean, it is worth pointing out that all things being equal with the rise of ISIS and Nusra and the rest of this, if there's such a thing as a moderate in power over there, it's Assad.
And I mean, he's a dictator, but he's an elected dictator, which is a pretty good way to be a dictator, I guess.
You know, he's got his brutal secret police and all that, but he's a secularist.
And so by that standard, that makes him the most moderate leader in the region, right?
Yeah, I mean, you know, like a lot of Syrians say, Assad pretty bad, but the alternative even worse.
It may turn out, you know, the Sunni in Iraq, the same thing, you know, that Maliki pretty bad, but the alternative may turn out to be worse.
You know, I wouldn't like to be a moderate, I wouldn't like to be a woman in Mosul at the moment.
You can't get out of the house, you know.
So, you know, they might have, by allowing, you know, they had every reason to revolt by allowing this revolt to be led by ISIS.
I think this is going to have a disastrous effect for them in the future.
Yeah, well, and of course, when you say that America and Iran agreed on Maliki, it was the Iranians, if I remember right, they preferred someone from the Supreme Islamic Council, and so Maliki, or really, Jafari before him, and then Maliki, they were kind of the compromise, since they were from the Dawa party, which they were Iraqi expats in Iran, just like the Skiri, except they didn't have their own army.
So they weren't, they didn't have, I guess, or I don't know exactly what the discrepancy was, why I was going to say they would be less independent.
But anyway, for whatever reason, they didn't want, I'm trying to remember the name of the guy from Hakeem's group, Al-Mahdi, I think, that they wanted, the Iranians wanted to put in power, and so they compromised and put in this guy.
So if they got rid of Maliki, if it's not ISIS taking power, it could be guys who are much more Iranian than Maliki, and much worse from the Sunnis point of view than Maliki has been for them.
Yeah, I mean, you know, the thing is, first of all, the whole political class here is, is basically criminalized.
You know, one of the reasons for the Sunni revolt, one of the reasons for Shia discontent is, you know, in a country with really quite a lot of hundred billion dollars a year in oil revenues, you know, there is mass poverty, people are malnourished, people, you know, there are no facilities, it's difficult to get electricity or clean water.
All these things are wrong.
So you're dealing with this kind of criminalized political class, and that's what makes it so difficult for me.
So tweaking it and putting in a new leader here and there, is it going to make much difference?
You know, I doubt it.
There are some people who wouldn't be too bad, but, you know, the real difficulty in dealing with a system which has been kind of run by racketeers, for racketeers, for the last, you know, certainly since about 2007 or 8, in fact, earlier.
All right.
And now, real quick at the end here, to get back to what you were saying about Kurdistan at the beginning, is this really the end of the Shia Kurdish alliance formed in 03 with the American invasion?
And do the Peshmerga have the ability to really guarantee independence and protection from ISIS, from the Shia armies, from whoever?
And is this that time now?
I think they probably do, yeah, militarily.
You know, they've taken the oil fields of Kirkuk, so potentially they don't actually have the money in their pocket now.
They're doing pretty well.
They're getting on with the Turks.
It used to be the Turks said, you know, the Kurds took Kirkuk, they didn't invade.
Now the Turks don't really care what they plan to ally.
They have allied themselves with the Iraqi Kurds.
So, you know, this is the Kurds' moment.
And of course, whatever's wrong in Kurdistan, it looks an awful lot better than what's happening in the rest of the country.
Yeah, I was reading a thing by a writer, anyway, I don't know how you characterize him, but he was talking about how all of the different Yazidis and Turkmen and Chaldean Christians and all kinds of refugees are hiding in the foothills up there in Kurdistan.
And that that's, you know, the ISIS guys are just below and would love to cut them all into little pieces if they could.
And I guess it's all up to the Peshmerga to draw that line and keep them out.
Yeah, I mean, the, you know, it's all actually a disaster here, you know, that it's a, you know, ethnic cleansing, you know, sectarian cleansing.
You know, people are running, people are being massacred.
Usually they run before they're being massacred.
But you know, how many Shia are going to be left in this Sunni enclave?
Not too many.
Of course, what would happen if they did attack Baghdad and the enclaves, the Sunni enclaves are about 20% of the city right now.
Then you would see some real massacres and you could see this Sunni pushed out of Baghdad, but you could see, you know, millions of people on the roads again.
So, you know, things are pretty bad, but they could get an awful lot worse.
Right.
Yeah.
There's still a lot of Shia in the predominantly Sunni areas as well.
And there've been, you know, they never got as much coverage when they were cleansed from the Sunni areas.
But there was a lot of that during the war too.
So that could all happen again as well.
Yeah, there are sort of mixed areas.
You know, people used to have long time been talking about the partition of Iraq, but, you know, a friend of mine who used to say, you know, Iraqi used to say, well, yeah, it's still going to be a partition of Iraq, like a partition of India in 1947, you know, when Hindus and Muslims were butchering each other, you know, and you end up with a million dead.
So you could do it.
Right.
Partition with a lot of people on the wrong sides of the lines.
Yeah.
And a lot of dead people on the wrong side of the line.
So there's a potential for that here as well.
All right.
Well, it sounds like as impossible as it seems, this is the calm before the coming storm here.
So Patrick Coburn bravely reporting from Baghdad, as always in a crisis like this.
Thank you, Patrick.
Thank you, Scott.
Patrick Coburn, he's at independent dot CEO dot UK.
And the book is Muqtada, the military industrial complex, the disastrous rise of misplaced.
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