03/12/10 – Patrick Cockburn – The Scott Horton Show

Welcome back to the show Patrick, how are you doing?
Fine, thank you.
I really appreciate you joining us on the show today.
No, glad to be back.
Alright, so big election last weekend in Iraq, do we know anything yet?
We know a bit, that all the big parties, which are the four big coalitions, have all done reasonably well, which means there's going to be a long battle as to who holds power at the end of the day.
Okay, so what can you tell us about the re-rise of Iyad Alawi, how could it be that a former CIA agent and former Baathist could be doing so well?
Well, he always comes bouncing back, but he doesn't stay back very long.
And he's done sort of reasonably this time, but usually the sort of press coverage of his campaign creates big expectations for him that aren't pretty fulfilled, and that happened in the last election in 2005, and it seems to have happened again.
Yeah, well I guess Hirsch reported back then that Nancy Pelosi had prevented the money from being appropriated for George Bush to rig that election for Alawi, although I don't know whether it would have done any good, but he ended up getting, what, 0% of the vote back then, right?
He didn't do too good.
You know, there's also, he'd just been Prime Minister, and one thing that usually Iraqi voters were fairly clear about at that time was that they didn't like the way the country was being run, so he did pretty badly.
But he's kind of been out of power since before the worst of the civil war happened, so he's kind of free of that, in a way, right?
Yeah, you could say that, I mean, he's a Shia, he normally gets backed by the Sunni outside the country, tends to get backed by the West and by Saudi Arabia and the Sunni states.
And so he gets big backing, and he seems to have done quite well in the Sunni Arab provinces north of Baghdad and west of Baghdad.
But the Sunni are only about 18% of the population, so that's never enough in Iraqi electoral terms.
Now, I've had the most trouble keeping track of this through the years, but particularly, well, I guess I'll just say some crazy things and you straighten me out, but basically what I understand is that Maliki has split from the Iraqi National Alliance, and so left over in the United, yeah, that is the Hakeem clan, even though Abdul Aziz Hakeem is dead, his son has sort of taken over that, and an alliance with Muqtada al-Sadr, even though those two, it used to be, Patrick, if I remember right, that Dawah and Sadr got along better because they were more for nationalism than federalism, and the Hakeem faction really wanted much more of a federal structure, but now all the alliances on the Shiite side seem to have switched around.
Yeah, one shouldn't, I mean, seriously, one takes their political principles.
I mean, last time around in 2005, the Shia wanted to stick together, this was their big moment, Iraq had historically been run by the Sunni, the Shia Arabs had been marginalized, kept away from political power, so the 2005 election was, this was their big chance, so they stuck together, had this big Shia coalition, which was, they had the sort of main Shia religious leaders, notably the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, saying everybody should vote and vote for them, so that did pretty well.
Now this time around then, somewhat later, Maliki becomes Prime Minister, but he quarrels with his old backers, called, then called the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and the followers of Muqtada al-Sadr.
Maliki also controlled the government, and then politically that's really important in Iraq because the government has $60 billion a year in oil revenues, it controls a lot of jobs, a lot of patronage, you don't get a job in Iraq even as a, you know, as a village school teacher or a chief executive of the oil company without the backing of the ruling party.
But this time around Maliki is split with a lot of his old allies, they've sort of got together in their own alliance, which is basically a sort of get rid of Maliki alliance, and then you have the Alawi as well, and then you have the Kurds, you have sort of four coalitions vying for power there.
Now yesterday I interviewed Rayyad Jarrar from the blog, Rayyad in the Middle, and he's an Iraqi, and his, I forget which parent is which, but he's half Sunni and half Shia, and he really objected to any characterization of pretty much any part of the history of this war since 2003 as being fights between Shias and Sunnis.
It's always about the politics only of nationalists versus federalists and Ba'athists and this and that, but he really objected to any characterization of any of this as actually sectarian war or violence.
I think I like that, frankly I think it's a kind of self-deception, you know, you talk to a Shia and they say, oh no, I don't have a sectarian bone in my body, my cousin is a Sunni and so forth, and then you start mentioning specific Sunni leaders, and they say, oh, that guy's a Ba'athist, he should be in jail, and similarly with the Sunni, if you, they'll say I'm non-sectarian, but then you start mentioning specific Shia, and they say, oh, they're all Iranian agents.
So you do have an Iraqi nationalism with a sort of Shia flavor and an Iraqi nationalism with a Sunni flavor, but they're very different.
A lot of Iraqis say it isn't sectarian, when you actually get to the guts of Iraqi politics, it's all to do with which community you belong to.
So let me ask you this, this is something else that I talked about with him, he said that really in the so-called awakening movement, really no one switched sides at all.
What happened was different groups of Sunnis made a deal with Petraeus and perhaps fought against the resistance and tried to prevent attacks against Americans or something, but that it wasn't that anyone who'd actually been part of the resistance had made the deal.
Which may just be, you know, from my technical understanding of history here, I'm not sure if there's a point to it.
Oh yeah, I mean, the guys who had been shooting Americans then allied themselves with Americans, you know, I sort of know some of these people, you know, not all of them, but an awful lot of them, you know.
But there were also differences, you know, in Ambar province and the western provinces between Al-Qaeda, you know, wholly fanatical, authoritarian, very cruel, trying to sort of take over the whole shop, drive the tribal leaders out of power, overplaying their hand.
And what also happened was, you know, with this Sunni-Shia split is that the Sunni were being sort of driven out of Baghdad, you know, most of these, there were too many Iraqi refugees in Syria and Jordan, and Jordan certainly, possibly in Syria, they're predominantly Sunni.
So, you know, sectarianism does play a big role in Iraqi politics.
All right, now, let me ask you about Ahmed Chalabi, and one of your pieces here for Counterpunch or The Independent, I forget which, you talk about how it was really Chalabi who was the dealmaker that brought the Supreme Islamic Council together with the Sadrists?
That's right, yeah, I mean, this happened in, I think, May last year, that both, for their different reasons, were out with Maliki.
Muqtada had been in Iraq, in Iran for several years.
They both wanted to come back.
They couldn't, probably weren't strong enough to come back individually.
So, Chalabi put together a deal, backed by the Iranians.
Now, at one time, they were saying to Maliki, join us, so we'll have a sort of Shia coalition together, but Maliki wanted to be guaranteed that he was going to stay Prime Minister, and they wouldn't, since the whole point of this coalition was to get rid of him, they wouldn't guarantee that, which is one reason he wasn't a member of it.
Now, one thing that's been clear all along is that the Iraqi people want us out, but as we've talked about over the past year, especially, you've said that now all the politics is dependent on anyone who wants power.
Their power is dependent on them swearing that they're kicking us out, that the, I guess the American footprint there is not the heaviest one anymore.
I wouldn't say all Iraqis are like that.
I'd say, you know, for instance, the Kurds want the Americans to stay.
First of all, Kurdistan hasn't just been occupied, and they're sort of, you know, think they're allied to the Americans.
The Sunni are kind of divided on it.
In theory, they want the Americans out, but they're frightened of the Shia.
The Shia, having gained power, in some ways, they sort of try and manipulate the Americans, but overall, they don't want to share power with them.
Now, how distinct are these different groups, well, the Kurds aside for the moment, but between the Sunni and the Shia Arabs, how mixed were they, were their populations across the country, say, before and after?
I mean, I guess, obviously, there'd be predominantly Shia majorities in Najaf and Basra, and there'd be more Sunnis in Anbar, but what about Baghdad?
How mixed was it back then, and how mixed is it now?
Baghdad, you said, had a Shia majority, particularly a lot of the Shia are in this great sort of slum sort of city.
Saddam tried to keep the Shia numbers down there, but, you know, maybe they were 65, 70 percent, 65 percent, let's say, before 2006.
Then you had this very bloody sectarian civil war with, for you to want that, it's worth 3,000 people a month being killed, often with sort of savagely tortured, and you had a big sort of flight of people out of the city.
The Shia tend to flee within Iraq.
Sunni tend to leave the country, but there's no safe place to go.
These days, I'd say Baghdad is about 85 percent Shia.
This is a big demographic change, and it's changed the politics of Iraq.
You've told me before that you think that the war is pretty much over and is probably going to stay over because the Sunnis lost.
They certainly lost Baghdad.
Does the Iraqi army, does Maliki's Iraqi army have a total monopoly of force in Anbar, for example?
Not quite, because, I mean, even Saddam never had a monopoly of force, because, you know, most Iraqis are armed, you know.
So, you know, potentially, you know, let's say if the army carried out a massacre tomorrow in Anbar, then, you know, all the young men would go and get their guns, you know, and they would go out and fight and fight, would fight very hard.
But, I mean, that hasn't happened yet.
But there's always that potential in Iraq.
The militias have sort of lost power for the moment.
You know, militias were powerful because when, just after the invasion, the army had been dissolved.
People wanted militias to defend their area.
But now the army and police are much bigger, so the militias don't play the same role.
Well, now, so if, I mean, it is a parliamentary system, so nobody's just going to win here.
It's all a contest for who can put together a government.
If it's Maliki, or if it's Alawi, or if you have other examples of who has a possibility of actually becoming prime minister, are they still each in the position where all their support depends on kicking America out?
Because, you understand, it's my only hope for America actually having to leave that place, is that they will, all the politicians there are in a position where they cannot stand for it at all.
Well, it depends which politicians, but the most powerful politicians, you know, there's an agreement, you know, there's the stages of forces agreement, which is, you know, works very much like a treaty, you know, which the U.S. gets out by the end of 2011.
And Obama wants, you know, combat troops to be out by August, and it looks as though that's going to happen.
You know, you have this rather weird thing at the moment of this sort of think tanks in Washington saying, and people writing op-eds in the New York Times saying, we should stay longer.
You know, but this is as if this was something just being sort of decided in Washington, but it isn't, you know.
There's a treaty, a treaty not just signed by Obama, but an agreement not just signed by Obama, but by Bush, saying, you know, when they're going to be out.
This was fought over very hard.
Yeah.
And, you know, I'm absolutely certain that's going to happen.
It's kind of baloney, this idea that somehow the U.S. can sort of suddenly, unilaterally leave more troops, or find it easy to get the Iraqi government to agree to leave more American troops.
And if they did leave them, you know, this would, remember, you know, the first insurgency of the Sunni was to throw, get the Americans out, get them withdrawn.
The insurgency of Muqtada al-Sadr was to calling for American withdrawal.
So, you know, the idea that you can just not do that, despite a treaty, and there won't be any reaction is just completely cuckoo.
Yeah, well, it's obviously a very important point, because you're right.
I mean, it's not just the editorial page of the New York Times, which that's Thomas Ricks, who speaks for the Pentagon.
He is, you know, basically a PR flak for General Petraeus, as it is.
And, of course, there are leaks all over the place.
They're calling it, General Odierno is calling it Plan B.
If anybody blows anything up in Iraq, we might just have to call off everything and start all over again, or stay forever and ever now.
And it seems pretty apparent that, you know, when the generals sit around in their meetings at the Pentagon, that their view is that they stole this country fair and square, and they're keeping it, and they're determined to have bases there.
So whatever political will on the part of the Iraqi politicians to force us out has to be total for it to happen, it seems like.
I think it's going to happen anyway.
And also, you know, it's kind of, it's also kind of crazy about this.
You know, American trip casualties are down pretty well to nil.
But if they, that's primarily because they're pulling out, decide not to pull out, then casualties will start happening again.
Yeah, the Americans don't care about that.
The Iranians support the present Iraqi government.
They sort of support it conditionally on the grounds that the Americans are going.
Again, you can't just ignore them.
You know, there's a 900-mile common frontier between Iran and Iraq.
Well, you know, there are some who say that the Iranians would probably prefer to keep us there at least for a little while longer, if only to use our troops as a trump card so that we don't attack them, because our troops are right within retaliation range, even though our country is not.
Yeah, I think, I think part of the time the Iranians think that, mostly, I think they don't want a U.S. land army in Iraq threatening them there.
They want the U.S. forces out of Iraq.
And from their point of view, that's probably sensible.
All right, now, if it's okay with you, I'd like to ask you a little bit about the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Sure, yeah.
George Will, the somewhat neoconservative, I guess more than half just regular conservative political commentator there from ABC News and Newsweek, he came out against the war in Afghanistan, and he basically said what's happening here is we're going to have an escalation, but the escalation does not measure up to the stated coin doctrine requirements for the number of troops required to carry out the strategy.
So what are we doing?
We're escalating into a war that can't be won by its own measurements.
Is that what's happening in your eyes?
Well, you know, that's always been one of the problems.
You know, we had this big offensive recently in Marjah, you know, which was elevated as if this was a sort of D-Day, you know, and I must say it was rather depressing the way the media and newspapers and television went along with this, although this is really so very manufactured.
What made this offensive different from the others was that it was loaded down with television cameras and reporters.
That's what made the difference and was very much a sort of put-up job.
That was Marjah Hubbard's list of the city, you know, this was kind of inventing a campaign and an issue, rather like WMD was invented in 2002-3.
Yeah, I'm sorry to stop you, but just on this minor point, Gareth Porter wrote a story that said that the 80,000 residents was just a goof, and that, you know, I went and looked at it on Google Maps and it looked like, you know, stone walls with no roofs.
Do you know, have you ever been to Marjah?
Can you tell us what the population really is there?
You know, one Afghan town village looks very much like the next.
You know, you have these big sort of mud wall compounds, you don't really know what's behind them.
But, you know, but I was pretty amazed that suddenly there was this city of, you know, I've been over that sort of province, but suddenly there was the great city of Marjah, which previously, I must say, I hadn't spent much time thinking about.
You know, I thought, hold on a minute, I've been in those sort of cities around there, it's funny I haven't been in this place, you know.
And, but the media reporting made it sound as if, you know, this was sort of, this was sort of, you know, a substantial place and a great sort of, some of them talked about it as sort of, it being a fortress and a bastion of the Taliban, you know.
Very much going along with the official line.
I think it was really some idea of embedded journalism.
Yeah, it's very interesting because it really does seem to be the biggest story about that Marjah offensive is that it was a big hoax and that the target of the offensive was not the poor people that got killed, it was the American people.
And they were trying to convince us, I guess, that we got to stay a little bit longer.
But still, I want to know whether you think they're pursuing the strategy of kind of that permanent 50-year coin doctrine, clear hold, build a society sort of doctrine, or whether they're just going to kill some people for a while on the way out the door, or what is going on?
Well, I think, you know, this whole clear hold, you know, it's kind of a cliche, but you see, I mean, in guerrilla war it's always been, what do guerrilla commanders do?
They wait for, you know, you don't attack strength, you attack weakness.
So when the enemy goes and clears holes and stays in one place, you've got to attack them somewhere else.
You know, just like you were citing George Willis saying they don't have enough troops, when they concentrate troops in Marjah, they don't have troops elsewhere.
And that's, of course, where the Taliban attacks.
And, you know, you could do this in Iraq, but essentially the other side had decided not to fight for reasons not much to do with the famous surge.
I've always felt that the battle for Marjah and the surge, that, you know, at the center of the main, one of the most serious components of these strategies is a PR strategy directed at the, directed back home, to give the impression that this war is winnable, worth winning, and we are winning it.
That's funny, because all I see is headlines about dead kids.
Some fantastic attention to avoiding civilian casualties, which you don't normally see in such a campaign.
Yeah, well, that's the thing.
That's one thing about having the cameras there.
So what about this upcoming offensive they've announced long in advance, again, against the people of Kandahar?
Well, you know, they can do that, you know, and we'll see, you know, and at the time it always looks good, because guerrillas always retreat, you know, they retreat into the local population or they retreat across the border into Pakistan.
You know, I don't think that much is really changing.
What may have changed to the advantage of the U.S. is that the Pakistani government seems to be acting against the Taliban leadership within Pakistan.
That's quite serious for the Taliban, but it's a bit unclear whether Pakistan has really changed its stance there.
That sort of really does count.
But I think these offensives in Kandahar and Marjah, yeah, they have some effect.
There are more American troops there, but they're mostly PR offensives.
How likely is it, do you think, that the Pakistanis are actually giving up on supporting the Taliban?
I don't think they give up completely, but maybe because of trouble with the Pakistani Taliban, because of other pressures, they might change somewhat.
The ease with which they picked up Taliban leaders shows how easy it was for Taliban leaders to move around previously.
Yeah, well, don't make that your headline.
We don't want to discuss that.
And the thing is, though, that the Karzai government that America has installed in Afghanistan is really friendly with the Indians, and I know at least the Bush administration did their best to encourage that.
But from the Pakistani government's point of view, they have to support the Taliban in order to prevent the Indians from having control over the country to their back.
Yeah, I mean, there's a degree of that, but it's not as though the Indian army was going to launch a great offensive based in Afghanistan.
It could make it difficult, though, for the Pakistanis to have that as their strategic retreating ground in the event of war with India.
Yeah, but they wouldn't be retreating into Afghanistan.
Well, mountains and deserts there, you know, it may not look like that on the map when you actually look at it more closely.
They wouldn't be retreating.
Obviously, they don't want Afghanistan held by a hostile power friendly to the Indians, but that doesn't look likely to happen at the moment.
Why do they support the Taliban?
Kashmir and things like that.
Why do they support the Taliban, then?
Well, I mean, as you say, you know, this fear of wanting to have an Afghanistan which is at least partly controlled by Pakistan that is not controlled by India.
Sure, that's a motive there.
How, you know, whether there's a real chance of the Indians doing much there is another question.
There's also the question of, you know, this is one of the things, there's a bad effect of that in some ways, but kind of what makes sort of Pakistan sort of important in the eyes of the world is that they're a key player in Afghanistan.
This is one of the reasons why they get, you know, all this money from the U.S.
And it gives them leverage also when it comes to questions like, you know, what happens if it's got this eternal dispute over Kashmir with India.
Again, it gives them some leverage there.
It's kind of what makes Washington take seriously what's happening in Pakistan.
Now, Patrick, I guess it usually just sort of goes without saying that we're all just, we kind of accept that Ayman al-Zawahiri, if not still Osama bin Laden, are hiding somewhere in Pakistan.
Do you believe that to be true?
I think it's most likely, yes.
You know, a very big place.
I mean, it's quite interesting that, you know, those Taliban leaders that were always, Afghan Taliban that were always described as being up on the border and northwest frontier, but where the most important one gets arrested is a house in Karachi, you know, a city of 19 million people.
So it wasn't just the border areas, it's really the whole of Pakistan, which was their sort of rear area.
Or maybe put it another way, the sort of Pashtun areas of Pakistan.
Well, I don't mean to say that this is the motive for the whole thing, but it does seem that at least politically, on that level, they can't ever end the war as long as Ayman al-Zawahiri is still putting out podcasts, right?
I guess so, yeah.
You know, we'll see what happens in the war in Afghanistan.
Is the U.S. really going to start withdrawing next year?
You know, it seems to me pretty unlikely.
Also, what will be the reaction to extra U.S. troops?
Previously, Afghans were always saying to me, you know, more foreign troops, you know, more violence.
It doesn't mean they support the Taliban, they just think there'll be more fighting to no particular end.
Yeah.
Well, do you think that there's any kind of rhyme or reason, either said or unsaid, why we're doing this, or it really is for no reason?
Oh, you know, why did the U.S. go in originally, post-9-11?
You know, to show power, to show strength, I think.
And also the thought, was it because there would be easy wars, you know?
Afghanistan seemed easy in 2001, then, you know, Iraq next stop.
They didn't realize that the war in Afghanistan wasn't over.
And when Saddam was overthrown, they didn't realize the war wasn't over there either.
And I think since then, you know, a prime motive has been not to be seen to lose.
You know, who exactly has the U.S. been fighting there?
In, you know, Afghanistan, they're fighting some Taliban, you know, maybe a few tens of thousands, but not that number, you know, who come from the Pashtun community, who are 40% of Afghans.
But not all the Pashtun community, it's kind of a minority of a minority.
Same thing in Iraq, they were fighting the Sunni there, 20% of the population.
So it doesn't look good not to come out a winner.
But I think it's all, you know, a lot of it's being fought at the level of perceptions.
That in Iraq, the surge and so forth convinced a lot of people in the U.S. that somehow they'd won.
It wasn't true, but it was much easier then to withdraw on the backs of an apparent victory, or a spurious victory.
And I think Afghanistan, same sort of thing, that it's being built up to.
The Taliban threat was built up, and the sense that, you know, we're getting on top of it's being built up.
All right, Patrick, thank you very much for your time on the show today.
I really appreciate it.
Not at all, thank you.
All right, everybody, that's Patrick Coburn from The Independent and from counterpunch.org.
His book is Muqtada, Muqtada al-Sadr and the Future of the Shiite Revival in Iraq.