01/14/15 – Patrick Cockburn – The Scott Horton Show

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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.
First up today is the heroic Patrick Cockburn, Middle East correspondent for The Independent.
That's independent.co.uk.
And of course, he's also the author of Muqtada and the latest book, The Jihadi's Return.
Welcome back to the show, Patrick.
How are you?
Hi, Scott.
Very happy to have you back on the show here.
Very happy that you're writing and very happy to have the opportunity to run your articles where people can see them.
First of all, could we please talk about this piece, Paris Attacks, Don't Blame These Atrocities on Security Failures.
First of all, just on the headline there, seems like the security failures were pretty bad.
If everybody knew for years and years, for 10 years, these two brothers' sympathies with the Zarqaliites, right?
No, I don't think so.
Because, I mean, when people like that actually do something, it jumps out at you from the page if you're reading it or the screen if you're watching it.
But, you know, there are thousands, tens of thousands of people like that in Europe.
They can't all be arrested.
I think the problem is rather different, and hence the headline, which is, you know, there are now six, maybe seven wars raging from the Pakistan border to Tunisia and from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and Northeast Nigeria.
And each of these wars are really civil wars in which al-Qaeda-type organizations are either very powerful, as in Iraq or Syria, or fairly powerful, as in Yemen, or a growing strength in Libya and Mali and Northeast Nigeria.
So, people from Europe can, jihadis from Europe can expect sanctuary there, they can expect sympathy there, or maybe they just want to emulate what they're doing.
So, when you have six states, six or seven states in a state of civil war, where European jihadis from France or Britain or wherever can seek refuge, then it's pretty well impossible to eliminate them or stop them all coming backwards and forwards.
I mean, what it's really like, Scott, I think, is, you know, what I'd compare these countries to, it's like, you know, if they were, we had six malarial swamps on our doorstep, and with malarial mosquitoes buzzing around, you know, we could stop some of those mosquitoes coming into our house, we could swat others and eliminate them, but we won't be able to eliminate them all.
You know, there's going to be a consequence in Europe of this tremendous violence throughout the region, which has engulfed so many countries.
Yeah, I think it'd be unfair to omit the fact that you warned us, I mean, you and I've been talking about this on this show for quite a few years in a row now, that, well, let me put it in the form of a question to you.
Obama, never mind the original sin of the Iraq invasion, which just turned the whole region upside down, Obama came in to end all this.
And he seemed to be kind of trying in the sense where when he talked about ISIS as junior varsity, what he was trying to do, he was even saying he wanted to repeal the authorization to use military force.
And he was saying, let's not buy into the trap that every time an angry Sunni has a rifle and calls himself al Qaeda somewhere that we have to go running, right?
Like he's wising up to how this strategy on the part of our enemies works, and he doesn't want to fall for it anymore.
But then so my question is, if he had just gotten out of Iraq and winded it all down, instead of escalating in Afghanistan and Pakistan, instead of escalating in Yemen and Somalia, and instead of fighting outright on the side of the jihadis in Libya and Syria, might that strategy have actually worked even post eight years of Bush?
Might Obama have been able to ramp this whole thing down?
How much of this is actually his legacy rather than Bush's is sort of what I'm getting at, if you understand.
Yeah, it's a very good question.
And I'm not sure there's a definitive answer.
I think that Obama, but also the Europeans, the West Europeans, France, Britain, and the Arab monarchy, Saudi Arabia, and the Sunni monarchies, the Gulf, all got it wrong, in a sense.
They, well, let's say maybe the monarchies didn't, that they, in Syria, backing the opposition meant that it was a way of getting rid of Assad.
And Washington and the Europeans thought that he'd go down just like Gaddafi went down in Libya.
It never happened.
It simply spread anarchy.
And by 2012, Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra, the Al Qaeda affiliate, were taking advantage of this, and have gradually become the dominant forces in the rebel-held parts of Syria.
And these, of course, are now open to European jihadis.
I think this was a big mistake by Obama.
Libya also, not just Obama, but Sarkozy of France and Cameron Britain, all backed NATO in supporting the rebels in Libya.
But in fact, I mean, I covered that war.
The rebels wouldn't have lasted long without NATO support.
They were really a mopping up force.
It was really a NATO victory over Gaddafi.
And look at the state of Libya now.
You know, it's been reduced to rule by militias, fighting for money, fighting for oil, continual assassinations throughout the country.
The country has really broken up.
Again, this is very fertile soil for Al Qaeda organizations.
They've taken over a whole city down in eastern Libya.
So I think that these were tremendous mistakes made by Obama and the Europeans.
Maybe the Saudis and others quite wanted to, quite liked the idea of Sunni fundamentalists taking over some of these countries, or did at the time.
But certainly this was a big mistake by the Western powers.
And now I know that this isn't exactly your specialty, but you must have some kind of idea of whether if Obama had told the Saudis, the Qataris, the Turks that, no, I know you want your pipeline and no, I know you hate Assad, but no, you may not back the rebellion in Syria because these are the bin Laden nights who knocked down our towers and we are not going to have it.
And so you better back off.
Would they have backed off or they would have told Uncle Sam, forget you, we can do whatever we want.
I think it was a bit late in the day.
You know, I think the pass was sold, you know, under the Bush administration after 9-11 when, you know, as we've often discussed and is well known that 15 out of the 19 hijackers were Saudis, that US inquiries found that the money came from private Saudi donors that bin Laden himself, of course, came from the Saudi elite by backing off Saudi Arabia as a source.
I don't mean the government, I mean of Saudi Arabia, but I mean people within Saudi Arabia were the source of 9-11.
At the same time, backing off a confrontation with Pakistan, it was really crucial to the creation of the Taliban.
The Bush administration created a situation in which Al-Qaeda was never eliminated and always had the potential to grow.
And look at the situation now, you have these vast resources put by the US and the Western powers into their security agencies.
They've gone in for rendition and torture and mistreatment.
You know, they've limited civil liberties.
But 9-11, you know, Al-Qaeda was not a big organization.
It was in, you know, a part of Afghanistan and a part of Pakistan.
And now it's an enormous organization.
So, if a war ever failed, the war on terror certainly did.
All right.
Well, we got to hold it right there.
We'll be right back, everybody, with the greatest journalist in the world, Patrick Kober.
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Okay, guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Patrick Kober.
All about the France attack and the blowback and etc.
And by the way, Patrick, I have to say, I mean, it sure seems like everybody and their dog in France knew who these guys were, including the sociologists down at the local college and a handful of journalists and everything else.
He's on the no fly list and all this.
So it doesn't seem like too much mystery about who these guys are.
But then again, some of this stuff sounds a little too perfect.
Well, they went to Syria and they went to Yemen.
And by the way, it was Anwar al-Awlaki, the American citizen that Obama murdered him and his son, who financed his trip to Yemen, too.
And it all sounds maybe a little bit too perfect.
I wonder whether all that just sounds right to you.
Do you have your own intelligence sources who who you trust who are confirming this or that aspect of just who these guys were who did this attack and why?
No, I think it's kind of what it looks like.
But I mean, one point I would make is, you know, there's quite a the media has made quite a meal of suggesting these guys were trained, you know, maybe they got a little bit of training in Yemen, you know, on how to use a gun, you know, how to pull a trigger.
But, you know, bear in mind, you know, it doesn't require much training to murder a bunch of cartoonists or a couple of unexpected, you know, policemen who don't expect anybody to shoot at them.
It doesn't take training, you know, to murder four people in a shop.
So, you know, somehow this I think it comes from the movies, you know, this idea of a highly trained assassins, you know, from abroad.
That's a stereotype from the movies.
But these guys, you know, they they I don't know if it's confirmed that one of them left his ID in the car that they'd stolen, you know, so it's pretty easy to identify him that way.
And they didn't even know whether Charlie Hebdo office was, they had to ask people.
Yet today, you have some Al Qaeda person in Yemen, say, yeah, we organized all this, you know, they organized it, they couldn't even look up where the address of the target was, you know.
So I don't I take all this with a big pinch of salt, you know, these guys, you know, it's one of the lethal aspects of these Al Qaeda type operations, that targeting very soft targets that have no way of defending themselves, and it doesn't require much organization.
It requires a couple of guns, in this case, maybe some money, although they robbed a gas station, so maybe they don't have any.
I think all that's exaggerated.
Yeah, now, I mean, I don't think there's any way to argue other than we've been in the entire West extremely lucky at how little blowback we've suffered from these interventions, when it is that easy for someone to just take a rifle and go to a ball game or any kind of place where there's a crowd of people, whatever it is, I mean, hijack a gasoline truck and crash it into something at full speed, or you know, anything easy like that, that any one person could do by themselves, accomplished with a handgun or a knife.
So that just goes to show to get killed.
I mean, you know, what's the really potent part of this is people who are prepared to get killed, and all three of the murderers in this case in Paris seem to, while they didn't, well, they weren't like suicide bombers, but they didn't have made any elaborate plans to escape, and they seem to have expected to die.
So I mean, that's what makes them lethal, is the willingness to get killed themselves.
And it's very difficult, obviously, to combat that.
I think that in Paris, you know, one of the, we've yet to see what the real fallout is, will the French overreact to the degree that they further marginalize or alienate people in this 5 million strong Muslim community in France, mostly Algerians, often living in slum housing projects around the cities, you know, it wouldn't take much to do this.
How careful are they?
Because the way these all these Al Qaeda type operations really work, and I'm not saying that the media perpetrators may know this, but the effect only, their success only becomes apparent later, when we can see if the victims or the country from which the victims come, grossly overreacts, as happened after 9-11, and actually fall into a trap, do exactly what Al Qaeda wants them to do, which is what Bush and the others did by invading Iraq and eventually sending troops to Afghanistan, that this was very much what Al Qaeda and bin Laden wanted, and had said so.
So, but it's tempting to governments, because all governments want to walk tall, they want to show they're in charge, they talk about waging war and so forth.
It's a very tempting trap for governments.
Right.
Now, so to that point, you know, I know, well, they say anyway, that Baghdadi walks around with a suicide belt on and all this, implying that he doesn't care, he's ready to die, he's happy to die tomorrow, that comes to that, he's not a typical politician out for himself, in that kind of way, a true believer, and happy to see this war play out over, you know, decades after he's gone, I guess is really kind of the message there.
But so then I wonder, does that mean do you think they really want a full scale George W. Bush sized invasion, even if that means a short term or medium term end of the Islamic State, just so that America would be that much more bankrupt, and they could be that much more victorious later on, somehow?
It's difficult, I simply don't know, because the Islamic State's policy is a peculiar mixture of careful calculation, and sort of feckless violence.
You know, I mean, they're pretty astute in the first half of last year, first three quarters of last year, in the way they prepared and concealed their attack on Mosul, then they attacked into us, expanded in Syria, so that military strategy was pretty effective, I think even more effective than they imagined.
But then from August on, they attack the Kurds, that in both Iraq and Syria, that eventually brings in American airstrikes.
Did they want this, that they would be the chief opponent of America?
It's possible, but it's also, I think, you're dealing with a very crazy organization, which believes it's divinely inspired.
And it may just take on enemies, because they think that with God's help, they're always going to win.
So there's that sort of manic element to it.
Yeah.
Well, and now, you know, I spoke with Reese Ehrlich the other day, and he had just gotten back from Kurdistan.
And I was asking him, just how dangerous is this organization?
Because some say, yeah, come on, ISIS, they're just another militia, and they got nothing.
And then, obviously, you take them much more seriously than that.
But so Ehrlich was saying, well, he thinks they're an extreme danger, and they're very powerful, but only in the short term, and that over the medium of the long term, they're guaranteed to burn themselves out, to self-destruct, to make themselves completely unwelcome where they attempt to rule.
And so therefore, we could really take as much of a hands-off approach as possible.
And that would be the best way to get rid of them, would be to just let them burn themselves out and make enemies of all those they would try to rule.
What do you think of that?
A lot of people have argued that.
But, you know, hold on a minute.
Yeah, they make themselves really unpopular with a lot of people in Mosul and the areas they've taken, about five or six million people probably living there in Iraq and Syria.
But, you know, the people they make themselves unpopular with, there's not much they can do about it, because these are very dangerous, very violent people.
You know, I've talked to people from Mosul, but, you know, who really don't like the Islamic State.
They think it's a disaster.
But their response to this is to try and escape from Mosul and move to Kurdish territory or to move to Turkey or Baghdad.
Not easy to do, by the way, because if you have a house there in Mosul and the Islamic State think that you've left and have permanently fled their area, they give you 10 days to come back.
Otherwise, they confiscate your house without compensation.
Now, that sort of prevents a lot of people moving and got some of them moving back.
So, these are quite astute people.
So, I don't think that they'll necessarily implode, because they've got a structure, they've got their own macabre security forces, they've got their recruiting, they're conscripting more soldiers.
They're fighting on multiple fronts in Iraq and Syria.
That shows how many guys they've got.
So, I don't think that's necessarily going to happen at all.
In Syria, the Iraqi, the Syrian government and this army has kind of fought out.
So, if it was a really big Islamic State offensive against the Syrian army, would it hold out?
It's not entirely clear that that would happen.
What would the US then do?
Would it stand back and let the Islamic State hammer the Syrian army and become the dominant power in Syria?
Or would it act alongside the Syrian army?
It's had with the Syrian Kurds.
That's an important political decision that Obama hasn't taken.
Right.
Yeah, that was what Hegel said when he resigned was the confusion over the Syria policy.
There is no Syria policy that he could even comprehend.
And that was what the fight was about, apparently.
So, they're just going to kick that can down the road, I guess.
But anyway, we're out of time.
But thank you so much for your time, Patrick.
Great one again.
Thank you.
All right, y'all.
That's Patrick Coburn from The Independent, author of The Jihadi's Return.
We'll be right back.
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