10/23/14 – Patrick Cockburn – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
Tomorrow on the show, Peter Hart will be here to talk about the heroic Gary Webb and the continued media assassination of him and his work, and Robert A. Pape will be back on the show to talk about the true causes of suicide terrorism.
So that should be a lot of fun.
Oh, and then I think it's Friday we'll have John Whitehead from the Rutherford Institute to talk about some judicial tyranny that you'll be very interested in.
Now we go, again, to Patrick Coburn from the London Independent.
That's independent.co.uk, and they reprint all his stuff at unz.com, that's unz.com, and he's the author of, and I did not think to have it right in front of me, he's the author of the book about the Islamic State and its rise, which is over there somewhere in the pile.
I'm sorry.
Patrick, welcome back to the show.
What's the exact title of your book again?
The Jihadi...
It's called The Jihadi's Return, ISIS and the New Sunni Uprising.
The Jihadi's Return, and everybody, you can find it at orbooks.com.
It won't be on Amazon until January, I believe, but it is on orbooks.com, and Patrick, I in fact, sorry for the clumsy intro there, but the last time we spoke that night I sat down and read the whole thing, and I've been telling everybody all about it, and that they could get it read in one sitting too if they would just go and get The Jihadi War.
It's a very important book, and to help support your great work, of course.
So that's, again, orbooks.com, and really great work.
Now, the latest article I have from you here, Patrick, is ISIS in Kobani, U.S. resupplies Kurdish fighters by plane, and so, oh, and then Turkey allows reinforcements through the border.
That's another whole part of the article there.
So you're catching us up on the war for Kobani, did I just say it wrong?
The war for Kobani right there on Syria's border with Turkey.
The Kurds are, as far as I know, still holding out against the attacking Islamic State, and as you say, the U.S. is now more involved than before.
Can you get us updated here?
Yeah, I mean, this is a big moment in the war in Syria, and a big moment for the U.S. and the Middle East.
I think what happened was that the Islamic State, ISIS, had been attacking Kobani, which is this Syrian Kurdish enclave that had about half a million people in it on the border with Turkey.
The Kurds had been fighting very heroically to defend themselves, but the Islamic State was winning.
And eventually, Washington and the White House decided that they just couldn't afford the humiliation of another Islamic State victory.
I mean, the Islamic State in the last four months has beaten the Iraqi army, the Syrian army, the Syrian rebels, the Iraqi Kurds, and after what Obama had said about degrading and destroying the Islamic State, I think it would have been just too damaging for them to capture Kobani, despite U.S. airstrikes.
That's why they switched policy, decided to drop weapons, ammunition, food, and decided to twist the Turks' arm to get them to allow Iraqi Kurdish fighters to reinforce Kobani.
All right, now let's get back to the Peshmerga part here in just a second.
As far as the delay, what was behind the delay?
Other than obviously the difficulty of hitting moving targets and stuff, they needed laser pointers on the ground and that kind of thing, but they do have drones, and it seemed like the Americans had sort of adopted the Turkish policy of, let's sit back and watch ISIS fight the PKK for a while, who cares, rather than run into, or I know it's a different acronym, the YPG, I guess it is in Syria, but a break off of the Kurdistan Workers' Party, right?
And so, what was behind the delay there before they finally, I understand it was the humiliation of another ISIS victory that finally, especially with Panetta talking bad about Obama, politically they had to step it up.
But why not step it up in the first place?
They already started bombing in Syria and hitting ISIS targets back weeks ago.
Well, you know, the US has this coalition, meant to be 60 countries, but the most important part of it is Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchies and Turkey, but it's kind of a weird coalition because most of these countries don't really want to fight the Islamic State because they were involved in originally creating the jihadi movement that set up the Islamic State.
And particularly Turkey, the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said several times that he considers the defenders of Kobani, and you're quite right, they're called the YPG, as being exactly just as much terrorists as the ISIS, as the Islamic State.
In practice, actually, he seems to prefer the Islamic State to the Kurds.
Now, the reason for this is that Turkey, the Turkish government has been battling its own Kurds, about 15 million of them, for the last 30 years.
They've been fighting a very effective guerrilla organization called the PKK, the Kurdistan Workers' Party.
Which also controls these cantons, there are about 2.5 million Syrian Kurds in cantons, they call them, or enclaves just south of the border.
What Turkey didn't want to see was suddenly quasi-independent Kurdish states being set up in Syria that would affect the Kurdish population in Turkey.
I think that's why they want to see the Kurds go down at Kobani, why they want to see the Islamic State win, of course they never put it quite like that.
But then, so what's the American incentive for going along with that, instead of loudly denouncing it and going ahead and bombing on the Syrian side of the border anyway, with or without the Turks allowing the Peshmerga to cross to help, etc.?
Because they can still put special forces on the ground, they can still drop laser designators to the YPG, right?
Well, yeah, I think with Turkey, they've got a big army, 600,000 men, they were allied to Turkey, I think that they didn't want to have a confrontation with the Turks, but I think eventually their patience ran out for the reasons we were just talking about.
They couldn't afford, and after all, you've got your congressional elections coming up shortly, and with Obama being accused of weakness, you know, Kobani going down a few days before the election obviously wasn't going to play too well.
So that's why I think it was such a desperate effort.
Before that, Karian people were trying to play down the significance of Kobani being captured by the Islamic State, but it obviously just wasn't going to work.
Well now, without the American airstrikes, is it a matter of fact that ISIS would be able to take Kobani?
Because it seems like those Kurdish fighters, they have their backs to the wall, the wall being the Turkish border.
You know, they have everything to lose, unlike, say, the Iraqi army that fled from Mosul back in June, something like that, and they seem like, you know, the terror of the suicide attacks of ISIS don't seem to impress them nearly as much, you know, they stand and fight anyway.
These are very committed people, you know, they're Kurdish nationalists, they belong to this very tightly organized party, they're the one people who can sort of match the Islamic State fighters in terms of fanaticism and fighting to the last bullet.
So I think that, but you know, they also, you know, you need weapons, you need ammunition.
I think they're running low on ammunition, ISIS captured a lot of tanks and artillery in Mosul from the Iraqi army and Syrian army, and the Kurds didn't have anti-tank weapons or heavier weapons.
So I think that that mattered a lot to them.
I think they might easily have lost without those.
And now, Patrick, so you're talking about the Americans really twisted Erdogan's arm finally and said, let the Peshmerga from Iraq, which that's not the Kurdistan Workers Party, right, that's Barzani's guys, are going to come to the rescue, is that it?
Yeah, that's right, because that's, Turkey gets on a bit better with them, gets on fine with them, in fact, compared to the Syrian Kurds.
So it's a bit less humiliating for them to invite, have the Iraqi Kurds cross their territory.
But I think that they had their arms twisted seriously to do that, because previously, as you said, they'd sealed the border, they weren't allowing arms and ammunition across.
So effectively, they were assisting the Islamic State.
I think that they may have seen that they were sort of, Turkey was increasingly being regarded as a sort of secret ally of ISIS, of the Islamic State, and that wasn't going to do Turkey any good in the long term.
All right, well, so now, but have they permanently alienated and ended their, alienated the PKK and ended their kind of truce that they've had going on with the PKK for the last few years?
And by the way, how much influence does the PKK have, and the Kurdistan Workers Party have inside Turkish Kurdistan?
I mean, they rule all, like they're the the Barzanian Taliban of Turkey?
No, no, they don't.
But I mean, they have, they win elections, but the Turkish government tends to annul them, you know.
Yeah.
But there's no doubt they have massive popular support there.
They're not the only Kurdish party.
But they've been fighting since 1984, they're a truce at the moment.
And Kurds generally feel that they haven't got much out of this ceasefire arrangement.
Of course, the prestige of the PKK has shot up because of being able to fight the Islamic State, unlike the Iraqi Kurds who got beaten pretty fast.
So so far, at the moment, the thing to bear in mind is that the Syrian Kurds are the first group of people who've actually been able to fight the Islamic State and come out ahead.
So again, it was sort of ridiculous for the US to keep on saying, we need partners on the ground.
And then when you have a real partner on the ground, you ignore them, and in fact, set them up to being defeated.
So I don't think that they I think that this sort of contradiction became too blatant, which is why they started dropping arms to them and supporting them with airstrikes.
Yeah.
Of course, there's another reason for the airstrikes.
Most of the time, you can't find the Islamic State.
Most of these, there have been about 969, I think, missions to mostly by US aircraft in Iraq and Syria, and the two months after the first attacks started on August the 8th.
But only 90, only 10% of those actually involved attacks.
The rest of the aircraft came back because they couldn't find anything, any targets.
Now it's an enormous advantage when you have the Islamic State concentrating its forces at Kobani that you can bomb them, and you also have somebody watching them on the ground.
You know, the stuff about drones is a bit exaggerated, but we suffer from a lot of the same advantage of looking anything at it from an aircraft that there's a good chance you won't see it if it's camouflaged, but people from the ground can see things.
So again, it was an ideal circumstances in which to use airstrikes.
And now, it's interesting that it was just yesterday I interviewed your brother, Andrew, about the war inside the Air Force over the A-10 and how they're bombing with these B-2s that can't possibly hit, basically, when they've done as much as they can to marginalize the A-10 that could actually be useful in circumstances like this.
But then, so, I guess it brings up the question of who is doing the pointing with the laser designators there?
Is it the YPG, or do we have JSOC special forces on the ground there directing the airstrikes?
I don't know the answer, you know, probably the U.S. wants to sort of blur the situation, you know.
How would you do that?
Maybe, you know, you'd put somebody under contract who is, you know, you don't need that many people, but you do need a few.
They sort of hint and say they're indirectly in touch with the Kurds, but I mean, I don't think it really matters much.
I mean, the truth is that they're getting very precise information as to where the Islamic state fighters are and, you know, which buildings and which hilltops, and they're using it.
So they've ended up cooperating with people who, you know, who they've designated, they've labeled previously as terrorists.
That's the absurd thing about this coalition is that it included all the people who, like Saudi Arabia and the others, who didn't really want to fight the Islamic state and excluded those who were fighting the Islamic state, like the Syrian Kurds, like the Syrian army, like the Iraqi militia in Iraq, Shia militia.
You know, this was never going to work.
And the same contradiction will come up.
What will happen if the Islamic state attacks the Syrian army?
Is the U.S. going to just let them win another victory?
You know, when it comes to push comes to shove, I think they'll do exactly the same thing again.
They'll establish links with the Syrian army so they can get equipment or somehow identify where the Islamic state is and then use their air power.
So I think that the sort of the kind of the policy that Obama originally devised is coming apart.
Yeah.
So in other words, though, it sounds like what you're saying is the kind of serving as air power for local militias on the ground who actually have a reason and a will to fight the Islamic state could work, you know, all morality aside or even bigger strategy aside.
But just tactically speaking, it sounds like you're saying that, well, like in this case with these Kurds, it can work to fight the Islamic state.
It's just that Obama's allied himself with all the wrong characters in the region in order to get that done.
Yeah, that's basically the situation.
I mean, you've got to be, you know, the civil war in Syria, the civil war in Iraq and the U.S. has kind of plugged itself into those civil wars.
You know, you support, let's say you support the Iraqi Shia militias against the Islamic state.
But these guys are very sectarian, you know, they enter Sunni areas, you know, they murder the men, they rape the women, you know, they throw everybody else in jail.
That it's probably reasonable enough to defend Kobani or other areas, but you don't want to be sucked into being a sort of patsy for one of these sectarian militias, which will, you know, it's not going to advance, the Shia militia isn't going to advance into a Sunni village and everybody's going to cheer, you know, everybody's going to either fight or run.
Most of them will run.
Right.
So, in other words, we can help, again, utilitarian speaking, morality aside, interventionism principle aside, we could help the Kurds, the Shia hold the line on their own territory.
But if we help them, you know, to attempt to dislodge the Islamic state from the predominantly Sunni areas, that's just going to blow up right in our face because of the sectarianism and because of the bloody record of these torture, killer militias.
Sure, yeah, exactly.
That they're not going to use American airstrikes, you know, to establish concord with their Sunni neighbors.
They're going to use them to either drive them out or kill them.
Right.
And the Sunni know that.
You know, in these areas, the Islamic state rules.
I know people in Mosul, you know, really hate them and, you know, lost their jobs and everything else.
But they're also terrified of the Iraqi government and the Shia militias.
And you know, at least with the Islamic state, with their Sunni, they're probably still alive.
The Iraqi government or the Shia militias come in, they might very soon be dead.
All right.
Now, so I have a theory and this is principle first and conclusion later, maybe.
But I believe, Patrick, that the utilitarian answer for how best to destroy the Islamic state is the same as my principled one.
And that's for the United States to do absolutely nothing because the Islamic state is surrounded by enemies and they really have no capability of establishing a real state.
And they got the worst part of Iraq to rule as far as the natural oil wealth.
They have no trading partners.
Everyone around hates them.
And anything we could do, like you're talking about, is going to, you know, to advance against them to help others advance against them is going to backfire in a negative way.
And we can see that going in.
And so but on the other hand, if we do nothing, since they're landlocked and since no none of their enemies that surround them really have the wherewithal to attack without American air cover, for example, then it would just be up to the local Sunnis that they're trying to voice their totalitarian rule on.
And then those people, as we've seen before, back in 2006 and seven, as you covered at the time, are perfectly happy to turn right around and shoot al-Qaeda in Iraq right in the head for attempting to rule them when their typical traditional system is a tribal system.
And they'd rather listen to their local imams rather than a bunch of lunatic suicide bomber types.
So do you think that maybe if we really do nothing, I think you do it now because these guys are very well organized.
They're very tough.
I'm not kidding anybody, you know, who they think is going to resist them.
I think what I want to be done is, you know, ISIS, you know, how is, you know, that kind of Islamic Cameroon, you know, they combine fanaticism with military expertise.
I think what you've got to do is sort of de-escalate the war in Syria.
You want to get Assad and you want to get the opponents of Assad apart from the Islamic State and get them to agree a truce.
Including al-Nusra?
No, probably not, because I mean, that's just one more jihadi movement.
You know, it's the affiliate of al-Qaeda.
You know, it's also very murderous against it.
You know, you will say it's better than the Islamic State.
That's not saying a lot.
You know, it's still if you're a non-Sunni Muslim and they come into town, they're very likely to chop your head off.
Well, and these two groups together are the Syrian rebellion, though, right?
I mean, what's left after that?
Well, there are some others, but I think that they dominated.
But I think that you need you need to be offering the Sunni population peace.
You know, you've got to try and demilitarize the situation.
I see.
Rather than backing a new rebel on US policy is to raise a group of moderates.
And these moderates are going to fight the Islamic State and the Syrian army at the same time.
You know, this is a great way of ending up dead.
But it's sort of and it's a pretty stupid policy.
But, you know, they have to really decide who they're going to back in Syria.
Otherwise, what they're doing is a recipe for continuous war.
And I think they probably they were fairly cynical about this because they didn't realize that this continuous war was going to produce an organization like ISIS, like the Islamic State.
Well, yeah.
And domestic politics just absolutely preclude working with Assad or I don't know, maybe they really have turned back toward them, I guess, as you reported.
I think that they have.
They obviously do have a relationship, you know, while denying it the whole time.
But they obviously do.
And they'd have it through other intelligence services.
You know, it's quite easy to do this.
You don't you're you know, you go to somebody else, you tell something, some other intelligence services, tell it to the Syrian army, you know, so that's quite easily done.
I'm sure they're doing that.
So.
But what they they need to all these groups in Syria and Iran, certainly in Syria and to a degree in Iraq, depend on outside backers for money and support.
You would need to go to the outside backers, the Russians, the Iranians, the Saudis.
And at that level, you can maybe you can pick something else up to have a truce.
The ceasefire, people hate each other too much to agree to any solutions at this stage, but maybe we could have a truce.
Yeah.
And now, so what about the eastern frontier of the Islamic State at this point?
I've seen quite a bit of debate about whether ISIS could take.
Well, it doesn't seem like too many serious people think they could just invade Baghdad.
But some say that they could lay siege to it.
They could completely surround it and cut it off from the other southern cities that Najaf and Karbala and other and Basra, even the predominantly Shiite south, that they are at risk to the Islamic State.
Can you judge the relative power of what's left of the Iraqi army and the Shiite militias and their ability to hold that territory compared to the the power and the armament of the Islamic State to try to take it?
Do you think they'll even try to take it?
I think that they could invade Baghdad.
Baghdad is a city of seven million people.
The majority are Shia, but there are big Sunni enclaves.
And in this month, the Islamic State has taken most of Anbar province to the west.
This is an enormous area.
And I think they may want to invade Baghdad.
I don't think they could take the whole of it, but I think they could take Sunni areas.
I think they could start a panic.
The Iraqi army was pretty bad, you know, when it lost Mosul four months ago.
It's still pretty bad.
You know, it's managed to lose everything since.
It hasn't been able to put in a single decent counterattack.
You know, its troops complain that they don't get ammunition, weapons, food or even get their pay.
So I think things are still pretty bad.
And I think that ISIS might attack Baghdad and take over these enclaves.
Sunni enclaves.
But why would they do it?
Well, I think it would sort of they want to assert themselves as a state and taking part of Baghdad, where the caliphate, the caliph used to rule, would be one way of doing that.
That would mean that all the Sunni population was under their rule.
Was there a million or two Sunni in Baghdad?
So I think that that could easily happen.
They could also, as you said, they could cut it off.
Maybe not every road, but most roads to the north and the south.
But of course, the Shia militias are driving out Sunni from these areas.
So it's a war that's getting worse.
We've still got a long way to go.
All right.
Well, thanks very much for your time again, Patrick.
I sure appreciate it.
Sure thing.
Thank you.
Bye bye.
All right.
So that's a great Patrick Coburn.
The book is The Jihadi's Return, ISIS and the New Sunni Uprising.
It's really great.
You sit down, read it one sitting.
It's at ORBooks.com.
He writes, of course, at The Independent.
That's independent.co.uk.
The latest is ISIS in Kobani.
U.S. resupplies Kurdish fighters by plane.
And there's a brand new one coming out.
I happen to know.
Just keep your eye on The Independent on UNS.com and Antiwar.com for that.
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