10/30/15 – Patrick Cockburn – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, y'all, Scott Horton here for Liberty.me, the great libertarian social network.
They've got all the social media bells and whistles, plus you get your own publishing site and there are classes, shows, books, and resources of all kinds.
And I host two shows on Liberty.me, Eye on the Empire with Liberty.me's Chief Liberty Officer Jeffrey Tucker every other Tuesday, and The Future of Freedom with FFF founder and president Jacob Hornberger every Thursday night, both at 8 Eastern.
When you sign up, add me as a friend on there, ScottHorton.
Liberty.me.
Be free.
Liberty.me.
All right, y'all, introducing the great Patrick Coburn, Middle East correspondent for The Independent, independent.co.uk, and author of a great many books on the Middle East, the latest being The Rise of Islamic State.
Welcome back to the show, Patrick.
How are you doing?
Great.
Thanks.
Very happy to have you here, sir.
Couple of, well, everything you write is pretty much very important here.
The last couple I want to focus on here, Turkey election.
Could bitterly divided nation be only a few steps away from dictatorship?
And then the other, Russia in Syria, airstrikes pose twin threat to Turkey by keeping Assad in power and strengthening the Kurdish threat.
And to the end of that headline, we could add Obama is announcing today that they're putting special forces, I don't know if they're already there or not, I assume they already were, but they're putting special forces on the ground in Syria and Kurdistan for use against the Islamic State as well.
So very interesting, very complicated subject matter here.
But we got a leader of Turkey who's got parliamentary elections on November the 1st, right?
Please explain what all is riding on those elections.
These elections will decide whether the president of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who's been the leader of Turkey since 2002, gets back his majority in parliament, which he lost because the Kurdish party did well in the last election in June.
This had very serious effects here because this was the first time that Erdogan had not had a majority for 13 years.
And he reacted to it by basically moving against the Kurds, starting a war against the Kurds again in the southeast by accusing the Kurdish party of being secretly in league with guerrillas and so forth.
So there's been an atmosphere of crisis in Turkey for the last five months since the last election.
And then we see on Sunday how this plays out.
And you're saying that if he wins a large enough majority that he may as well may go ahead and create himself a dictatorship, name himself president for life?
Well, he's taken over most centers of power here.
You know, this week, you know, they simply moved into a company that owned a couple of newspapers and a couple of television stations that were hostile to the government.
The state television is sort of permanently focused on Erdogan as leader and his party.
The other parties practically get no coverage.
He's taken and controls the judiciary.
He has a strong measure of control over the army, the security forces, the media, everything else.
So it's more and more of an authoritarian state here.
And now, am I right that there was a time where even a so-called moderate Islamist like him could never get away with this without being overthrown by the military?
And is that no longer the case?
Yeah, this was a tradition for a long time in Turkey that the military would intervene supposedly to defend the secular state.
So but that's not going to happen anymore.
But I think, you know, this is kind of complicated stuff.
But I think the thing to sort of keep in mind is, one, that Turkey is a very polarized society between secular and religious, between Kurds and Turks, between different types of Muslims here and between haves and have nots.
And so already it was you had a lot of tensions inside Turkey.
On top of that, you have an ever growing crisis to the south of Turkey in Syria, where the Syrian Kurds have taken over most of the border, half the border area with Turkey.
Turkey was trying to get rid of President Assad of Syria.
They failed to do that.
That's looking more and more of a long shot since the Russians moved in.
So you have these kind of two crises, one outside the country, one affecting Turkey and one inside.
And they've sort of grown together.
And that's really what's destabilizing this country.
And then you say that now that the Russians have intervened in Syria in a serious way against the Islamic State and in essence for I don't know if directly or not, but at least indirectly for the Kurds, that that makes the Erdogan government that much more worried about their so-called Kurdish problem inside Turkey.
Yeah, I mean, they have this sort of Kuwaiti Kurdish state, but there are a couple of million plus Kurds in Turkey.
When the border between Turkey and Syria was first laid down, it just runs along the old railway track between Aleppo and Mosul and the Kurds caught on the southern side inside Syria.
They're no different from the Kurds in Turkey.
They were marginalized under Assad.
They were discriminated against.
But in 2012, the Syrian army withdrew.
They kind of set up their own quasi state, their powerful army, their ally to the US.
They get airstrikes.
So suddenly this really worries the Turks who can see this affecting their own Kurdish population, which is about 15 to 20 percent of the population here.
So you have these things going together.
And that's kind of one of the things that makes the crisis so big here.
And when we hear about Turkish airstrikes against Kurdish positions, is that that's mostly the PKK in Iraq that they're attacking?
The PKK in Iraq and and Southeast Turkey, I'm not sure how much good it does them.
You know, the PKK is dug into the Kandil Mountains, big gorges, steep valleys, caves.
They're very experienced.
I don't think they lose too much.
Probably the same in Turkey.
You know, these airstrikes, US or Turkish, they kind of don't work too well.
You know, when they announce, you know, we are attacking headquarters of some guerrilla force, you know, it's a bit like Vietnam or something, you know, guerrillas don't really have headquarters, you know, so it's not that effective.
What is kind of effective is if it's done in partnership with an effective army on the ground like the Syrian Kurds.
And now, of course, the Russians have moved into Syria and they're cooperating with the Syrian army is giving them about 400, 800 coordinates a day.
They don't bomb quite that number, but they had earlier in the week, over a couple of days, they had about 118 airstrikes.
The US-led coalition had exactly one over the same period.
So you can see the balance of power changing in this part of the world.
All right.
Now, so when they're announcing, I mean, the way I understand it, Obama was going to announce it instead.
They just sent out the press secretary.
I don't know what that really symbolizes, if anything.
Amateur Kremlin.
I think, you know, I think, Scott, you know, whenever I hear that special forces are being sent somewhere or other, I always think this is a bit of a smokescreen.
It's governments in this case, the US government wanting to show to its own people, its own voters that it's doing something and, you know, special forces, everybody's seen movies about these, you know, magically effective groups.
So it kind of looks like action, but it usually happens when governments can't think what to do.
And using some special forces, you know, the worst, you might lose some people.
But it's not it's not going to war in any big sense.
Mostly it's a bit of a political smokescreen.
Give them the ability to claim some small victories, like a prison rescue or something like that.
So that makes sense.
Small victories, you suffer a small defeat.
It's not too bad, but it shows action.
You know, it's like drones, you know.
OK, but so now it's in Yemen or, you know, Pakistan that they've hit the assistant deputy commander of some Taliban group.
You know, it sounds sort of significant, but, you know, usually it's he's replaced by his younger brother or something who's even tougher than he is, you know.
So it's all kind of meaningless really to my mind.
All right.
Now, here's the thing that, you know, obviously is the most worrisome thing, not in the sense that it's the most likely problem, maybe, but in the sense that it could be the problem with the most severe consequences.
And that is the Americans and the Russians getting tangled up, hating each other, but fighting some of the same targets, attacking some of the same targets on the ground there, fighting for and against some of the same factions and some not.
And it seems like a real not.
And I wonder if you think that there's a danger that we're going to have American and Russian planes ending up in dogfights over Syria or maybe, you know, if there's a likelihood of accidental or deliberate Russian attack that costs the lives of American soldiers that could end up turning this ridiculous, horrible war into something much worse.
I suppose there always is a chance that something like that will happen, you know, when you think back over the Cold War, you know, suddenly somebody shoots down a Korean airliner, which is the Russian Soviet shot down a Korean airliner because it was where they thought some American spy plane was and the Korean airliner sort of got its navigation screwed up and so forth.
But some accidents like that are always likely to happen, the same thing as a Malaysian airliner was shot down over eastern Ukraine.
So all that's possible.
And, you know, it's a very sort of messy situation that there you have the Russians attacking mostly the non-ISIS, but jihadi al-Qaeda type Syrian opposition, the US attacking ISIS.
But in some ways they've got interests in common, but they're also rivals.
You never quite know which way it's going to go.
You never quite know also, you know, within the US, you know, just the State Department have one policy and the Pentagon another, intelligence agency a third policy.
When you have messy situations like this, you also have governments, sort of government institutions that face all ways.
Well, isn't it ironic, do you find it as puzzling as me that even a year and a half after the declaration of the Islamic State, that America continues to arm and back and support at least some of these rebel factions against the Assad government, which ultimately is only to the benefit of Baghdadi and his friends?
Yeah, it's sort of, you know, it's just a policy full of contradictions because, you know, there's a pretense that, you know, somehow there used to be a pretense that there were moderate opposition factions against both Assad and ISIS.
Then they sort of had to admit, you know, what was it, four guys there.
So then there was a tempt really by the backers of these groups, Jabhat al-Nusra, Jabhat al-Nusra, which is the official representative of Al-Qaeda, and Arar al-Sham, which comes out of Muslim Brotherhood, but is also related to Al-Qaeda, that somehow to relabel them, rebrand them as moderates.
And the Qataris and the Saudis and the Turks were trying to do that.
I'm not sure how successful they've been, but, you know, they're trying to distinguish them from ISIS, from Islamic State, but actually they're all the same kind of guys.
You know, it seems like, you know, people spin this as though Assad is just an ally of the Islamic State somehow because they make the insurgency look bad or something, but they don't really seem to mostly focus on fighting Assad.
And they do, of course, you know, at some times, and have obviously, you know, massacred Syrian army prisoners and that kind of thing.
So obviously they're not allies at all, but they sort of seem to focus on holding the ground they've got.
And from here, I don't know, what do I know, Patrick?
But from Texas, it looks to me like the Islamic State basically uses Arar al-Sham and whatever so-called FSA groups and al-Nusra as their useful idiots who go and do the fighting and dying and taking the territory for them.
And then they come in and consolidate and expand their territory slowly but surely, while these other guys are, you know, making the ultimate sacrifice on their behalf.
But I don't know if, you know, what exactly is the relationship between these groups.
The Islamic State, where has it been fighting?
It hasn't been doing much fighting in Iraq recently.
It's been doing some fighting.
It took Palmyra, then it moved quite close to the main road, north-south road, north of Damascus up to Aleppo.
It's taken some positions just south of Aleppo, kind of sealing off Aleppo.
These are quite important moves.
Probably Islamic State, you know, in all this fighting, Islamic State usually turns out to be much tougher and more effective than people think.
You know, that happened at Mosul, but it keeps on happening.
They keep on underestimating.
You know, there's no doubt, you know, the focus has been on the Russian intervention, you know, started on the 30th of September.
But what hasn't had much focus on it is that the US-led air campaign, which started, when was it, August last year in Iraq and September in Syria, simply hasn't worked.
There have been 7000 airstrikes, mostly by the US, but Islamic State is still there and hasn't really been contained.
You know, you get these sort of Central Command, CENTCOM, produced this famous map showing that ISIS was falling back on lost territory.
You know, but it was kind of greeted with derision by anybody who knew the situation there.
So the failure of that air campaign, I think, hasn't really penetrated people's minds yet.
But it is one of the big facts and that it kind of created a vacuum, which is why the Russians were able to move in.
Well, OK, so what if a hawk argued that, well, America just doesn't have reliable enough partners on the ground in Iraq because the Iraqi army is, you know, hardly exists and they can't directly work with the Shiite militias that are under Iranian control and the Kurds can kind of only go so far.
But maybe the Russians are in a position, if they're backing the Syrian army with air power, that they actually could roll the jihadists back.
Not that I'm saying I'd be for that, but do you think that's within the realm of possibility?
Russia's air war?
The peculiarity of U.S. policy, you know, it's been the same weakness, not just this year, last year, since Islamic State appeared on the horizon, but really going right back to 9-11.
You know, the U.S. wants to maintain good relations with these powerful Sunni states like Saudi Arabia.
You know, after 9-11, you know, I remember 15 out of 19 hijackers were Saudis, bin Laden was a Saudi.
The U.S. official in the Senate inquiry showed that the money for 9-11 came from private donors in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf.
But, you know, the U.S. goes and attacks Iraq.
You know, it doesn't blame or even whisper criticism at Saudi Arabia.
So similarly in Afghanistan, you know, they went after the Taliban in Afghanistan, but the Taliban were really the creation of Pakistan, now the big Sunni state.
But the U.S. never confronted them.
Now, the same thing is really happening now that they know, you know, the main backers of Jabhat al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham and all these jihadis is really the neighboring Sunni states.
None of these people really be in business unless the Turkish border was at least partly over.
But they don't want to break relations with these Sunni states.
So that's kind of the bedrock of U.S. power in the Middle East.
It really doesn't want to alienate these states, but not alienating them means it can't really go after Islamic State.
Well, now, it doesn't it doesn't dare go, you know, when the Syrian army was fighting Islamic State, it wouldn't attack Islamic State because that might be seen as keeping Assad in power.
And that wouldn't go down badly in Ankara and in Riyadh and Saudi Arabia.
So that's one of the reasons they didn't really have partners on the ground.
All right.
Although, on the other hand, though, you know, that kind of makes it sound like there really is a possibility for the success of talks here if America insisted that its allies take this seriously.
I mean, they are, after all, have invited even Iran, no Syrians, but they are sitting down and having at least preliminary type talks, including even the Iranians and the Russians.
And it seems like if if America could get its allies to cut off the Islamic State, it'll wither pretty quickly.
They're landlocked.
If they can't sell their oil to the Turks and they can't get their men across the border from the Turks and they're surrounded by enemies, they're at least a lot more vulnerable that way if if if somehow the Saudi government would actually stop bankrolling them.
No.
Yeah, I mean, they're vulnerable to that, you know, to supplies not getting through, you know, will that happen?
I sort of doubt it, you know, because I don't think they'll want to Washington want to put that kind of pressure on its Sunni allies in the region.
It certainly hasn't done so before.
But, you know, there is movement.
I mean, I I felt when the Russians intervened that, you know, in some ways it complicated the situation.
I mean, intervene with airstrikes, but, you know, it had a positive side that I thought that would sort of motivate the US to get negotiations going again because they couldn't really sort of just stand back and let the Russians take all the initiatives in Syria.
And that's happening.
But does that bring us any closer to a de-escalation of the peace?
Well, to say, yeah, I don't know.
Yeah.
And that same that same need to spin cuts both ways, too.
In fact, the guy on CNN earlier was saying that the reason they got to send the special forces, as you said, it's a symbol for something.
In this case, he said, because we can't let the Russians suck up all the anti ISIS energy or whatever it was.
We have to have our presence there no matter what.
If they do.
Oh, yes.
True.
That's kind of subtle stuff.
But CNN, I think that that's that's kind of true.
Really not a very good enough argument, if you ask me.
All right.
Well, listen, I really appreciate you giving me another great interview, Patrick.
Not at all.
Great to talk to you, Scott.
All right, so that is the great Patrick Coburn, his Middle East correspondent for The Independent, that's independent.co.uk, and his archives also run at UNZ.com.
That's UNZ.com.
His latest book is Rise of Islamic State.
Don't you get sick of the Israel lobby trying to get us into more wars in the Middle East or always abusing Palestinians with your tax dollars?
It once seemed like the lobby would always have full spectrum dominance on the foreign policy discussion in D.C.
But those days are over.
The Council for the National Interest is the America lobby standing up and pushing back against the Israel lobby's undue influence on Capitol Hill.
Go show some support at Council for the National Interest dot org.
That's Council for the National Interest dot org.
Hey, all.
Scott here for Samurai Tech Academy at MasterSamuraiTech.com.
Modern appliance repair requires true technicians who can troubleshoot their high tech electronics.
If you're young and looking to make some real money or you've been at it a while and just need to keep your skills up to date, Samurai Tech Academy teaches it all.
And they'll also show you the business, how to own and run your own.
Take a free sample course to see how easily you can learn appliance repair from MasterSamuraiTech.com.
Use coupon code Scott Horton for 10 percent off any course or set of courses at MasterSamuraiTech.com.
Hey, all.
Scott Horton here.
It's always safe to say that one should keep at least some of your savings and precious metals as a hedge against inflation.
If this economy ever does heat back up and the banks start expanding credit, rising prices could make metals a very profitable bet.
Since 1977, Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Inc.has been helping people buy and sell gold, silver, platinum and palladium, and they do it well.
They're fast, reliable and trusted for more than 35 years.
And they take Bitcoin.
Call Roberts and Roberts at 1-800-874-9760 or stop by rrbi.co.