05/19/10 – Patrick Cockburn – The Scott Horton Show

All right, so welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio on Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
And our first guest on the show today is the great Patrick Cockburn.
He is an award-winning reporter, a Middle East correspondent for The Independent in the UK.
He's the author of the book Muqtada, Muqtada al-Sadr and the Shiite Revival in Iraq, and is the greatest of the Western reporters covering the Iraq War and a great many other important issues in the old world.
Welcome back to the show, Patrick.
How are you?
I'm fine.
Thank you very much.
Well, I really appreciate you joining us on the show today.
And you know, there's been such confusion in Iraq lately.
They had another giant purple-fingered election, which, I guess, on TV here in the States, they said, see, purple fingers, everything's fine, and they haven't mentioned the word Iraq since then.
That was a couple of months ago.
And yet, for those of us trying to keep track, it seems like a pretty complicated mess in seeing Alawi's group, the former CIA guy and former American puppet prime minister, forged an alliance with a lot of the former Sunni parties.
And his group actually got the plurality in the election.
And yet, looks to me, I guess, last I saw, it looks like the alliance is really going to be between the Dawah Party guys of Nouri al-Maliki, the current prime minister's group, in alliance with Muqtada al-Sadr, who now has the most sway over the Iraqi National Alliance.
I guess the question still remains, you know, whether that's – how well that's going to work out, or is working out, and whether Maliki is going to be able to remain the prime minister.
Do you have opinions on these things?
Yeah, I mean, generally, picking up your first point, I think, you know, the media tends to have a rather sort of simple-minded attitude to elections, which is that they're good, you know.
And you have an election that somehow things are going to be better after the election.
But, you know, an election is only sort of one element in a political situation.
And to have a successful election, usually you need agreement on what the rules of the game are.
And in Iraq, one thing that's blindingly obvious is that people don't really agree on what the rules of the game are.
So it was always sort of likely, I thought, from the beginning, that it wasn't going to have this fairytale ending, and indeed it hasn't.
Now, when you say the rules of the game, you kind of mean just in the basic sense, where in Austin, Texas, if the Republicans win the local school board or whatever, the Democrats don't set things on fire.
They just wait until next time and try again, right?
Yeah.
And also the Democrats don't sort of start arresting the Republican candidates or deciding that or taking a close look at their political background that they shouldn't have been running in the first place, and basically refusing to cede power, that, you know, initially, you could look at this election and say, you know, this is good, in that a number of people who, let's say the Sunni Arab community, about 20% of Iraqis, who were the core support of Saddam Hussein, and in the 2005 election largely boycotted it and opted for armed resistance, but this time around they've all voted.
Similarly, you could say the same about Muqtada al-Sadr, the leader, the radical leader of the Shia, a cleric, a nationalist, that in 2004-2005 he was dubious about running for having an election and had a large militia.
This time they did very well in the election.
But since the election, Maliki, the Prime Minister, has dug in his heels, is refusing to cede power, has basically tried every dirty trick in the book to stay there.
And while all this is happening, you know, the country is drifting, not just drifting, you know, there's a horrendous amount of violence, you know, we're in the middle of the Iraqi summer, incredibly hot, and there still isn't enough electricity to run the air conditioning or produce fresh water or dispose of sewage.
So you know, I get a impression, I'm afraid, of a country festering, of a political leadership, a political class, if you like, which is really failing to resolve the problems of Iraqis.
Seven years later, I just want to focus on the one thing you just said there, after seven years there's still no adequate sewage treatment, water treatment, electricity to run the air conditioners for this population?
Yeah, I mean, this is, you know, it's sort of, it's tragic, it's ludicrous, and it's unnecessary, because, you know, in Afghanistan or Pakistan, you could say, well, look, the government just doesn't have the money to do this, it doesn't have the money to put its signature on contracts to supply these things.
But Iraq has $60 billion a year in oil revenues, and those revenues are going to increase.
You know, so there's something dysfunctional about this government and the whole state apparatus.
Yeah, well, and obviously it's been under occupation this whole time, but it doesn't sound like, I mean, it doesn't sound like Maliki's been trying, or is it, what's so impossible about getting the electricity working?
I don't understand.
It's the 21st century.
I mean, there are some things, you know, I guess they could say, well, look, Iraq's got 30 years of war and external war, civil war, sanctions, so, you know, nothing's really been replaced for 30 years.
But I mean, that was an excuse at the beginning.
I'm not sure that excuse works now.
You have massive corruption, you have, you know, incompetence, people fighting for positions, you know, become a minister, you can make a lot of money.
Right.
Well, and I guess, you know, the corruption almost just goes without saying when, if you're, if we're talking about Kellogg Brown and Root building an electricity system, I don't think anybody would expect that thing to ever get done.
They just want to take the money and run.
They don't care.
But it seems like, I guess you're saying the corruption, even within Iraq and the government that America has created there is such that they can't even provide electricity for their own people.
And I mean, you know, Patrick, Patrick, if it was me, I would try to, I guess, you know, if I was a criminal Iraqi politician, I would take my cut, but I would try to get the electricity actually done, you know?
Yeah, I mean, that's a good point, but I guess there are two kinds of corruption.
I mean, there are many kinds of corruption, but there are two poles, I suppose.
One is that, you know, somebody takes 20 percent, 25 percent, but that school building still gets built, or, you know, there's a water plant producing fresh water.
And or you can have, you know, what some Iraqis call, maybe a little unfairly, you know, sort of Congolese levels of corruption, where all the money gets stolen, you know, so there is no water plant.
It's just basically the whole lot goes.
Well, yeah.
I mean, you've got variations on this, you know, let's say we have a big company, it gets a contract to build a half a dozen school, I don't know, let's say 50 schools, then it subcontracts to another, you know, to another company, and often there are five or six levels of subcontracting.
So you might start off with 500 billion, you end up with, you know, 20 million, and that goes to a company that's never built a school before.
Yeah.
By the way, for people who are just tuning in, I'm talking with Patrick Coburn.
When every reporter in Iraq was hiding behind the green zone wall, he was out there in the most dangerous parts, telling the truth about that war the whole time.
And you could never do better at understanding the Iraq war than just going through, going back over Patrick Coburn's writings there.
And you know, I want to get back to the political situation.
But for now, I want to stay focused on the humanitarian situation, because it has been more than seven years of American occupation of that country.
The troops, the contractors are far from gone.
And the refugees, where are they?
How paint us a picture other than the electricity, the air conditioning, the sewage, which is, you know, obviously extremely important, but can you give us just sort of a general picture about what life is like there compared to, say, you know, February 2003?
Sure.
I mean, I think you focused in on the refugees, and that's, you know, exactly the right thing to do.
You know, when people sort of tell me that things in Iraq are better, you know, I always think, you know, the best way of judging what life is like is to look at the refugees.
You know, you have population of Iraq is a bit under 30 million.
Nobody quite knows exactly, but we have about 5 million refugees.
We've got over 2 million refugees outside the country, mostly in Jordan and Syria.
We've got about the same number inside the country, somebody or some more often in both cases living in terrible squalor in camps and with nothing going for them.
And these people are not going back to their homes.
So this sort of underlines the lack of security at home, that these people are frightened.
And that really, I think, sort of sums up the present state of Iraq.
You know, if you go back to 2003, beginning of 2003, you know, there are winners and losers.
You know, some people are doing, the Kurds, I'd say, are certainly doing better, but they weren't.
But overall, you know, it's an extraordinary sort of lack of achievement, given the fact that there have been oil revenues flowing in during this period.
I mean, I used to climb onto the roof of my hotel in Baghdad when I'd sort of hear that there was going to be new construction.
I'd look around the skyline looking for cranes, you know, normally you don't have any construction any place in the world.
You see a few cranes around and there'd never be any cranes.
You know, it really wasn't happening.
And that's kind of still true.
You know, so you've got a, you have a sort of corrupt and dysfunctional government.
And you have an incredible number of people still living, you know, in misery.
You know, just, and no place needs building more.
You know, there's hardly been a new hospital built since the 1970s.
Same thing, true school buildings.
Well, it does kind of go back to the politics too, because it's not just a question of how miserable conditions are in Iraq.
If you're an Iraqi refugee hiding out in Jordan or Syria, waiting for, you know, an opportunity to go home, it's not just the humanitarian crisis, it's the political crisis, right?
The surge didn't work.
The benchmarks aren't met.
The, as you said, the players in the political game there still are not agreed on the rules at all.
And so there's, I guess, a lot of uncertainty in the mind of any refugees as to whether if they go home to their old neighborhood, whether they'll have even the most basic security.
Yeah, no, that's true.
You know, it's what people say, is Iraq better?
And you know, it is better, but in the sense that, you know, we used to have 3,000 dead bodies a month turning up in Baghdad, greater Baghdad, you know, now it's down to a 300.
But this still makes it one of the most dangerous places in the world.
You know, maybe there's somewhere that's worse, maybe Mogadishu in Somalia, you know, but I've been in Kabul, and actually Kabul still isn't as bad as Baghdad, despite all the violence there.
And so, you know, it's still, you know, the surge was all, I always thought, grossly oversold.
You know, violence went down, but not really, I mean, for many other reasons as well, indeed it started going down beforehand, mainly because the Shia community had defeated the Sunni, in other words, the winners and losers in Baghdad.
But presently, you know, refugees are told by the government, come back, you know, some of them do occasionally come back, and then they find there's no electricity, they find it's still dangerous, they see enormous bombs exploding in the center of Baghdad, so, you know, they often go back to where they came from.
Well now, in terms of the former civil war there, does it, I mean, I know there are bombings and violence a lot, but it doesn't seem like, at least so far, the insurgency is going back in full swing, and I think you and I had talked before about how, hey look, well, like you just said, there are winners and losers, the Sunnis basically lost the civil war for Baghdad, and that they're not in any position to try to take it back now, maybe if there is a war it would be over who's going to have the monopoly on power in the Anbar province or something like that, but basically the Saudis and the Bata brigades and so forth, they won Baghdad, and that part's over for now.
Yeah, I'd say that, so, I mean, you know, this is a Sunni-Shia government, you know, and it's going to stay that way, but, you know, I think what's sort of depressing at the moment is that the kind of a political class that came in after 2003, particularly all these exiles who, you know, make up a lot of the present government, I'm living inside the Kurds at the moment, they're kind of different, that a lot of these people just have shown that they can't put together a government that can reconstruct the kind of a country, you know, they seem to be wholly egocentric, they seem to be, whatever they claim, wholly sectarian, Sunni and Shia, and wholly incapable of just conducting the business of reconstructing Iraq.
Has Muqtada al-Sadr inherited this thing?
Well, I mean, I think one of the most interesting things is that the followers of Muqtada, who are sort of populist, but also Shia, but above all they sort of come from within Iraq.
These people weren't living abroad, you know, in the 90s and before the, this was the movement was started by Muqtada's father, who was assassinated with his two of his sons in 1999 by Saddam.
So they are sort of indigenous, so they have strength because of that.
And it may be that the future of Iraq really belongs with them, because I think that the present ruling elite, they have some power, they have money, to some degree they have the security forces, but it's really not working, they have a temporary feel about them.
Well now, after the election, Sadr from Tehran, I think, said, you know, I think it'd be nice to have a referendum, an internal, kind of a primary election, like we have here in the States, within the Iraqi National Alliance, to see who it is that you guys prefer.
And I guess he snapped his fingers, and from what I could tell, Patrick, in two days they held a referendum across the south of Iraq.
I mean, that guy is extremely powerful and influential, if he can pull off something like that, with just a word like that.
And then they picked, in the little primary there, they said, we prefer Ibrahim Jafari, a Dala Party guy, but from the more pro-Rand faction than Nouri al-Maliki, right?
Yeah, I mean, I think overall, you know, this holding of a referendum, what the sort of Muqtada wants to say was, look, you know, we're not, to try to avoid the overwhelming cynicism of ordinary Iraqis towards politicians, that they're purely, wholly involved in games to feather their own nests, and wanted also to demonstrate his democratic credentials.
So you know, they'd done well in the elections, probably they will do well in future.
But you can't, it's very difficult to tell, you know, for the reason that you mentioned in the beginning, that Iraq is still a very unstable place, you know, it's very fluid.
It's, you know, you can't, if there's one place that's really able to make predictions, it's Iraq, because, you know, things might go any way, you know, strange political alliances.
And there's another aspect of Iraqi politics that really destabilizes it, which is, Iraq is full of ethnic, the main ethnic sectarian groups, the Sunni, the Shia, the Kurds, the different factions within these groups, often look to outside deporters, often they hate some other group of Iraqis, more than they hate some potential foreign backer, whether it's the Saudis, or the Iranians, or the Turks, or the Syrians, or the Americans, or whoever.
And that sort of injects an extra dose of instability into the situation, but it's not, we're trying not just to meet the needs and demands of Iraqi political parties, but the needs of their various foreign allies as well.
Well, and I guess that's part of Iraq's legacy as a sort of phony state created by the British after World War One, right?
All they needed was a nudge and they fall apart.
Yeah, I mean, it was kind of, the British put it together, and you know, it keeps on falling apart.
There are some things that hold it together, you know, above all, oil revenues, you know.
The Kurds want the highest degree of autonomy, close to independence, but they get 17% of Iraq's oil revenues, and it's like that to go on, particularly if these oil revenues increase.
And that is one thing that makes Iraq different from Afghanistan, which is that there is money coming in.
There are these oil revenues.
There are oil revenues to provide state rations, to give a lot of people jobs, in a way that just doesn't happen in Kabul, where they're completely dependent on foreign aid.
Right.
Now, I'm under the impression, I've been under the impression, that the Iraqi people, particularly the Arabs, I guess I don't know as much about the Kurds, but that particularly the Arabs, they actually are very nationalistic.
After all, the British created this phony state way back after World War One.
It's been generations and generations, and they have their kind of Iraqi nationalism, but it seems like the people with the power don't.
The people with the power would rather be in bed with the Iranians, or the Saudis, or the Syrians, or somebody.
Well, you know, Iraq's a bit like Lebanon in one sense.
You have all these different communities.
Now, I mean, you have this rather peculiar situation that most Iraqis, certainly Iraqis, would think of themselves as being nationalists, you know, and they'd say, look, you know, I'm a Sunni, I have nothing against the Shia, but then when you start examining a little bit more closely and mention various Shia leaders, they'll say, oh, no, they're not really Iraqis, they're Iranian spies, and similarly, if you talk to a Shia about Sunni, they'll claim, you know, I've really got no sectarian feelings, my sister's married to a Sunni, etc., and you say, well, how about X, Y, and Z?
Oh, they're just former Baathists, you know, we should throw them in jail.
So each community has its, maybe nationalistic, but it has its own definition of Iraqi nationalism.
Yeah.
Well, and I guess that's always part of the problem of having monopoly state power for people to fight over.
It sort of goes back to the Republicans and the Democrats fighting over the school board.
They really can't stand it when the other side is in charge of them, instead of in charge of themselves.
One thing that makes it sort of worse than other places, you know, that Iraq has a lot of oil and oil revenues, but, you know, oil states or states that depend on oil, that this is kind of a poison chalice, if you like, because it may mean that the government has money.
It has this oil revenue, and this always increases its tendency towards dictatorship, towards authoritarianism.
You know, because most states, people, the government has to raise taxes, has to raise money from its own people, so you can't really sort of piss them off too much.
But in the case of the oil states, the government, you know, whether it's Saddam Hussein in the past, or the Saudi monarchy, or the present Iraqi government, they can kind of do what they want.
They don't really have to ask the people.
And also, of course, they can take a lot of it themselves, or arrange that a lot of the oil revenues end up in their pockets.
So it's a sort of double-edged sword.
In some ways, it makes things better than, as I said, Afghanistan.
In some ways, it means that there's a continual tendency towards dictatorship.
Now, there have been reports in the last couple of weeks that the Turks have been bombing Kurdistan again, supposedly trying to bomb the PKK, but we actually talked to a young lady who was there, who said that, well, they were bombing more than just the PKK.
And then there were other reports that the Iranians were bombing Kurdistan, Iraqi Kurdistan.
I don't know if they had Petraeus's permission to do that, or what, but...
No, they...
No, what happened is this.
You have in the mountains of Kurdistan, these are very remote areas along the Iraqi side of the Kurdish border and similarly with Iran, high in the mountains, you have, you know, originally they were Turkish Kurd guerrillas, and occasionally the Turkish Air Force comes and bombs them.
And then you have the same group, but they're sort of the Iranian wing, sort of making forays into Iran, and the Iranians sort of fire back.
I mean, in the mountains there, in these deep ravines, you know, it's more of a, it's more symbolic, I don't think, of a Turkish bombing or the Iranian shelling affects people very much.
I suppose it sort of, it means that a lot of ordinary villagers sort of keep out of the mountains because of that, and it's a very sort of remote, very beautiful, but very remote area, and it, but it's sort of separate from the rest of Iraqi politics.
Do you think over the long term that Kurdistan will be independent, or is it, are the...
I think, you know, the Kurds, you know, in some ways it has a degree of autonomy, which is not far from independence.
You know, if you take the Kurdistan Regional Government, you know, it has effectively its own army, whatever it's called.
It has, you know, its own police forces, its own security forces, its own budget.
So as a state, you know, when you look at the state machinery, its revenues, and its security forces, it's actually more powerful than most members of the United Nations.
Now, would it become an independent state?
Well, not, I think, for the foreseeable future.
I mean, this is what the Iraqi Kurds say.
As soon as they do that, they start making, you know, they become vulnerable to neighbors with Kurdish minorities, above all, Turkey, but also Iran and Syria.
They come under, you know, attack from the Arabs in Baghdad.
So it's much in their interest, I think, for the moment, not to do that, but to stick with the very high degree of autonomy they have within the Iraqi state, and offer all ways that both apply to the president and the foreign minister and other various ministers in Baghdad.
Right.
Well, that's at least good, because I guess it's pretty easy to see how if Kurdistan declared real independence, that with the Kurdish minorities in Syria, Turkey, and Iran, that that could quickly lead to a regional war right there.
So I'm glad to hear that that's not going to happen any time real soon.
I guess one last question here, and I'm sorry, I'm keeping you over just a second.
But in Baghdad, is Maliki going to hang on to power?
Is Sadr going to let Maliki stay prime minister?
And are they going to stick with the deadline, supposed deadline anyway, of kicking all of the Americans out by the end of 2011?
I think the Americans are going to go, because, among other things, the Americans want to go, and most Iraqis want them out.
You know, will Maliki stay on?
That's the question they're asking in Baghdad.
You know, if the Sadrists want him out and won't do a deal with him in, then he's going to have to go.
You know, if the Sadrists seem to have slightly modified their position, and maybe they'll sort of let him stay, but take more sort of power themselves.
So I mean, that sort of still remains uncertain.
And it could go either way.
If people had a much more pessimistic view about what the Pentagon and the American establishment want, would you say that you think that the political stars aligned in Iraq still mandate an American withdrawal, whether the Americans want out or not?
Sure, I think so.
So, you know, the government in Maliki, you know, one of their main achievements is to reach an agreement for the Americans to leave the most sort of active, you know, the people who did best in the, who are coming forward in the last election are the Sadrists, the followers of Maqtada al-Sadr, and they're sort of, the element of their program that they emphasize most is, you know, ending the occupation, ending the American presence there.
So they're going to be a key part of any government.
So I don't see that changing.
All right.
Well, thank you very much for your time on the show today, Patrick.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you for having me.
All right, everybody, that's the great Patrick Coburn.
You can find him, find all his archives at the independent.co.uk.
He's Middle East correspondent for The Independent there.
And you want to know about the future of Iraq, read his book, Maqtada.
We'll be right back with Gareth Porter after this.