08/14/14 – Patrick Cockburn – The Scott Horton Show

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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.
And I'm very happy to welcome Patrick Coburn back to the show.
Boy, I hope I didn't screw up the time.
No, I think I got it right.
Hey there, Patrick.
How are you?
Fine.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
I really appreciate you joining us on the show again.
Thank you.
Patrick Coburn, as many of you well know, is the best Western reporter in the Middle East.
He's Middle East correspondent for The Independent.
That's independent.co.uk.
He also writes oftentimes for counterpunch.org and unz.com, reprints all his independent stuff.
And he's the author of the book Muqtada, Muqtada al-Sadr, The Shia Revival and the Future of Iraq, and a lot of other things.
And he's been getting everything right for a long, long, long time over there.
So, OK, great.
Now, can we talk a little bit about what's going on with the American war, such as it is in Kurdistan, the red lines that the president has drawn around Erbil and I guess the rest of Kurdistan and even around Baghdad and Shia stand in the south and his statement that he will prevent a safe haven from being established.
Never mind a caliphate, but even a safe haven for bin Laden night type terrorists in the Sunni triangle.
What do you think all that means, Patrick?
I think it means they're making it up as they go along, Scott, because, you know, as you implied, it doesn't really make sense that Obama was talking about preventing a caliphate being set up or a safe haven.
But, you know, that happened on the 29th of June.
The caliphate was set up and the caliphate, you know, is an area which is, you know, I think about greater, bigger than Great Britain.
You know, the state of Michigan or a pretty big area.
And it's getting bigger by the minute.
All the focus has been on events in Kurdistan, Iraqi Kurdistan, with the Yazidis being driven out of their towns in Sinjar into the Sinjar mountain and then escaping to Syria and to the rest of Iraqi Kurdistan.
Almost no attention to the fact that the Islamic State, what I call ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant has attacked just west of, just east of Aleppo, a very big city in Syria, and is taking towns there and is advancing north of Aleppo, which is very important because, you know, they don't have to go that much further to reach the Mediterranean.
Right.
So, you know, very, well, you tell me, have you seen much of that on the U.S. media?
Oh, no, not at all.
No, no, no.
Aleppo is one of the biggest cities in the Middle East.
It's much bigger than, it used to be much bigger than Mosul.
So, you know, it's expanding all the time.
It's also sort of encircling Baghdad.
Now, you know, it does have an impact, just a few airstrikes probably.
The Kurds are pretty demoralized.
I don't think there were that number of ISIS fighters attacking them, but they probably, they were very demoralized after their defeat last week.
So that probably have some effect.
I mean, all this talk of sort of arming the Kurds and doing all these other things, it's all kind of late in the day and it's all, you know, done with very little understanding what's going on in Iraq or Syria and still a belief that somehow that what happens in Iraq is not affected by Syrian events and vice versa.
Right.
Yeah, when it's fair to say that, you know, I guess you can still call it Syria, but it's a rump state.
Like you're saying, the Islamic State, at least for now, really exists.
And when they say that border's not there, they can prove it that, you know, this is a brand new situation, a Humpty Dumpty and he's not coming back together again.
Doesn't look like anytime soon.
Well, there's so many things to talk about there.
I guess a full frontal assault on Baghdad would be very, very difficult.
And obviously with American drones and F-18s and others bombing up around Kurdistan, it makes a lot of sense that they would just turn around and go ahead and fight in Western Caliphate land, whatever you call it, and try to take Aleppo back.
And now you've been reporting for The Independent on this show for many years now, actually, well, two, three years now, that, well, you know, the rebels try as they might, they're not making that much progress against Assad.
They have, I guess, controlled Aleppo at times and then lost it again.
But so you think they're going to take it back now?
And then what exactly repercussions do you expect from that, if so?
Well, the situation in Aleppo is that the government has been advancing the whole west of the city.
The east of the city is held by the sort of remnants of the non-ISIS Syrian opposition.
But they've been sort of losing ground.
And now they're under attack from two areas.
They're under attack from the Syrian army, from Assad's forces, and they're under attack from ISIS.
So, you know, they're rapidly disappearing.
But I think one point that's worth making is that the U.S. and the West has contradictory, different and contradictory policies in Syria and Iraq.
In Syria, they are trying to weaken the government, which is the only real opposition to ISIS.
In Iraq, they're trying to strengthen the government, which is the main opposition to ISIS.
And this simply doesn't work.
You know, ISIS is going to get stronger and stronger if it can sort of move where it wants in Syria.
It already controls a third of the country.
It controls most of the oil wells.
And in Iraq, it's strong in Sunni areas, but it also shows it can fight in non-Sunni areas where it advanced into Sinjar.
But bear in mind that in Iraq, the Sunni are about a fifth of the population.
And in Syria, they're probably about 60% of the population.
So it's easier for, it should be easier for ISIS to expand in Syria than it is in Iraq.
Right.
And then I guess their capital is still in Syria, right?
Their base is out of Raqqa.
Is that right?
In Raqqa, but I think it's becoming Mosul.
It's becoming, their capital is just a bigger city.
It's a city of two million people.
Raqqa's kind of, you know, kind of a rundown place, always has been.
So, but, you know, now they control the whole part of the Euphrates Valley in Syria, much of this Euphrates Valley in Iraq.
They control a lot of the main dam on the Tigris River and therefore can control the electricity supplies.
So I think that, yeah, if they could try and come straight down the road into Arbil, the Kurdish capital of the Baghdad, then I think US air attacks, you know, are likely to be effective.
But they do it any more subtle way.
They move through urban housing or they don't just sort of drive down the road.
Then it's much more difficult to do just by attacking from the air.
Right.
Although an assault like that would be a lot easier for the Peshmerga to defend against.
But I guess they could infiltrate pretty deep into Kurdistan if they just walk in instead of driving fleets of Toyotas.
Yeah.
I mean, the attack on Kurdistan, I mean, that area, one thing that it has exposed is that the Peshmerga, the Kurdish soldiers, that they're much weaker and less effective than people imagined.
I always rather thought this was so.
But when I've seen them in action in the last time they fought anybody was in 2003, when they were supported by US air power.
But the Iraqi army, Saddam's army, wasn't really fighting them.
You know, there weren't many of them and they were pretty ineffective.
They haven't really fought anybody for about 25 years.
They have a very high military reputation, which is based on fighting Saddam Hussein.
But in the 1980s and the decades before that.
So they really don't have much experience.
And they've, you know, they turned out that they ran away from ISIS almost as fast as the Iraqi army did in Mosul.
OK, great.
So it's Patrick Coburn.
He's at independent.co.uk.
We're talking about the caliphate and its consequences.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Patrick Coburn from the independent independent.co.uk.
And, you know, they got a paywall there.
You can find all this stuff at unz.com, unz, unz.com as well.
And we're talking about the rise of the caliphate and what the hell all is going on there.
And the nation's formerly known as Iraq and Syria.
And now you mentioned the incoherence of the policy of supporting the Sunni based insurgency in Syria, broadly defined and and opposing the one in Iraq.
And yet you also wrote a piece recently about how this is the Saudi policy and and the Americans have been going along with it.
Obama even explained to Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic back two years ago that, yeah, we'll see.
Sure.
Taking Assad down a peg helps, or especially if we could get a change of government in Damascus, that would really help take Iran down a peg.
And so I wonder whether it's too far of of a speculation.
Would you go as far as the Americans even supported the Saudis, knowing full well that this was going to, as you put it years ago back on the show here, re-energize the Sunni based insurgency in Iraq and could even lead to a full scale assault by the Islamic State and attempted even attempted or successful takeover of northwestern Iraq.
And whether maybe that was just all the plan to bring Maliki down a peg, because even though America put him there, he's just as much an Iranian stooge as Assad and Hezbollah.
No, I don't agree, Scott.
I think it's, to be honest, I think it's all that's all too conspiratorial.
And I think that what happened was, sure, the Saudis always hated the Shia, hated the Shia government that had taken Baghdad.
It sort of, in general terms, supported the Sunni opposition.
It supported some of the jihadis, as was done privately.
I don't think that private donations, probably the government winked at it.
They kind of opposed Al-Qaeda organizations within Saudi Arabia, but didn't mind them if they encouraged them, if they were attacking Shia outside Saudi Arabia and furthering Saudi foreign policy.
I don't think that you can then extend that to saying, you know, they supported ISIS.
They didn't.
I think they're horrified by what they've created.
I think it was a tremendous miscalculation.
I think that they sort of, they did various things that they thought they could sort of have jihadis who were acting as their pawns or they had some control over them.
And then they found that there were guys who really believed all this stuff and really hated them just as much as they hated the Shia or they hated the Americans or hated everybody else.
So I think it's a real, you know, it's a kind of a cliche to compare anything, something to Frankenstein, you know, the monster that somebody's created, but then is completely out of control.
But I think ISIS is like that.
It is a Frankenstein that the Saudis, the Turks, the others contributed to making.
And the U.S. in a way contributed, but by opposing Assad, believing somehow that there was a third force of Syrian moderates that could fight Assad and fight the jihadis.
It never really existed.
And things they did to support that third force, like allowing the Turks to keep their whole 500-mile border with Syria open, did nothing but help ISIS in the early days.
But things have changed.
New things have developed.
And ISIS may have needed money, may have needed access through Turkey in the past, but these guys now controlled oil wells in Syria.
You know, they can't sell it easily, but you can get some money from it.
And they have an area, you know, with maybe six million people living in it.
You can tax them.
You've got vehicles going through it.
You know, you can tax every big truck that goes through and raise a lot of money.
So I think that ISIS is now very much an independent force.
I think it all shows a chaotic policy rather than a conspiratorial policy on the part of the U.S., the Saudi Arabia, and the others.
Well, you know, Jonathan Landay said he was in northern Jordan and saw the quote-unquote vetted CIA and military-trained Free Syrian Army types.
And he said, well, you know, they do exist.
They're not just make-believe, but they are basically just the border guards keeping the Mujahideen from coming into Jordan and getting too close to Israel, basically.
But that's as much of a force as they've been able to create this whole time, is they've, like you just said, with their policies, have prevented Assad from holding a monopoly on force in those areas.
And so they've had to train up the FSA just to try to keep ISIS back from crossing the lines into Jordan.
Not much of a third force.
No, it's really rather pathetic.
But it's kind of an excuse for not having a policy.
You know, what should that policy be?
Well, if they really want to squeeze ISIS, then they have to stop trying to weaken Assad.
They may not like Assad, but actually eventually they have to support Assad because he's the main opponent of ISIS in Syria.
Well, you talk about the Mujahideen in America, there's something that they'll never admit ever, that Assad is actually the opposite of the Mujahideen in Syria, if you want to keep this simple.
They will never say that.
Yeah, you can have one or the other, you know.
And, but so pretending that there's a third force avoids having to admit a tremendous policy mistake.
And that's kind of, you know, the media went along with this.
But there's another aspect for this.
The only other people who are effectively fighting ISIS because the other opposition, including Jabhat al-Nusra, which is the official Al-Qaeda affiliate there, and Arar al-Sham, which is another Al-Qaeda type organization, they're all crumbling, they're all running, or they're joining ISIS at the moment.
The only people who are really effectively fighting ISIS are the Syrian Kurds, who are about 10% of the population, I mean, aside from the Syrian government.
And, but their main military organization, which is effectively run by the PKK, which is still the State Department has down as a terrorist organization.
So does the EU, so does NATO.
But these are the Kurds who actually really do fight ISIS, while the Peshmerga over in Iraqi Kurdistan turn out to be pretty ineffective.
Well, and speaking of which, you know, the story's coming out now by way of CNN that the special forces went to Mount Sinjar and talked to the Yazidis and they said, no, we don't need rescue and we don't want rescue and this is our home.
And apparently some of them have fled and it was the PKK who helped them get out of there and took the long way around to the north of Mosul to get to Iraqi Kurdistan.
But from what it seems from the reporting from CNN, it sounds like there never were 40,000 and there never was an emergency that they needed to rescue all these people from the mountain.
They have plenty of food and water and they want to stay.
What's that about?
Yeah, it's strange.
I mean, you know, I tend to accept that or I think it's quite likely.
The thing is that the Kurds in general, very keen to lure the US into supporting them, you know, because they just discovered their own armed forces are, you know, pretty ineffective.
Is that just babies and incubators again?
Yep.
You haven't won, Scott.
That's why I like your show.
You come with a healthy skepticism and it was a historic memory of how many times, you know, that the world has been suckered by fake humanitarian atrocity stories.
Oh, man.
In fact, I have no idea, but I'd be willing to bet.
Were you there in Kosovo after the war in 99?
And can you talk about whether there were 100,000 people killed that justified that intervention like Bill Clinton claimed as long as we're talking about this stuff?
No, I wasn't there at that time.
But it's sort of, you know, it's the...
Worth a shot.
Libya was the same, you know, you remember the story of mass rape ordered by the Qaddafi government that this story went around the world and Amnesty, Human Rights Watch, eventually UN Commission investigated it and discovered there's absolutely no evidence for it.
The woman who claimed she'd done a survey distributed 70,000 questionnaires in Eastern Libya in the middle of a war, 60,000 come back.
This is her evidence, you know, they then Amnesty asked her to see one of these questionnaires.
She doesn't have any.
Could they see any of the women she interviewed?
She's lost touch with them, you know, it's just propaganda, you know, but the thing is that you can do that sort of propaganda scoop if, you know, all you have to do is get away with it for a few days.
And when it takes longer like than that to refute.
Right.
So definitively refute a story like that.
Wow.
So here it is again.
Not just do they lie us into war all the time, but they've lied us into war three times in a row with Iraq.
Babies in incubators and imminent invasion of Saudi Arabia back in 1990, weapons of mass destruction back in 2002 and three and and now this with the Yazidis and the humanitarian mission and red lines of protection and safe havens for minorities is a blank check for a whole other war.
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