07/27/16 – Patrick Cockburn – The Scott Horton Show

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Introducing our friend Patrick Coburn, a Middle East correspondent for the Independent newspaper in Great Britain.
And they reprint everything that he writes at Unz.com, the Unz Review.
And, of course, he's a very prolific author.
His latest book, and he's written, what, two on the Islamic State.
And now a compendium of pieces going back on the entire terror war is called Chaos and Caliphate.
And welcome back to the show, Patrick.
How are you, sir?
I'm great, thanks.
Good to be back.
I really appreciate you joining us.
We have very important news to talk about here, what's going on in Turkey.
It's such a multifaceted story with the attempted coup d'etat.
And you are in Istanbul now, correct?
Correct, yeah.
And I guess most important for the American audience to understand, the thing that jumped out at me the most is you say it is absolutely a widespread belief in Turkey.
I don't know among all factions or which factions, but very widespread, you say that the USA was behind this coup all along, is that right?
Yeah, it's pretty pervasive.
Because the guy who the government accuses with some reason of orchestrating this is this 75-year-old cleric, Fethullah Gulen, who lives in Pennsylvania and has been there since 1999.
So they've always been suspicious that he had some links to U.S. intelligence and just had a cozy relationship with them.
And then, so, I don't know how stark all these dividing lines are in Turkish politics, but it seems like the coups of the past are always blamed on the Kemalists, secularists, intent on keeping the secular nation of the Turkish state there.
But then the Gulenists are a somewhat separate faction.
Did they have an alliance to do this coup, is that it, you think?
Nobody quite knows.
It's a pretty amazing event.
It's not really similar to previous coups, because a lot of them were sort of the army high command as an institution deciding to take over from the civilians, either directly or telling some government to get out of power.
But it wasn't, you know, suddenly trying to, in this case, kill the president and take over various key institutions like the sort of chief of staff headquarters, intelligence headquarters.
They bombed the parliament.
You know, this was very rough stuff.
So, 246 people I think it is were killed, probably the real figures a bit higher.
So, this was a pretty sort of a shocking event for Turkey.
And particularly these days, they thought that things like that didn't happen anymore.
So, you know, this is a real tremendous explosion here.
And with one third of the generals, more than that, about 40% of the generals in the Turkish Armed Forces are under arrest at the moment.
A lot of military units are confined to their bases.
They've fired 21,000 teachers.
A presidential guard has been dissolved.
A third of the judiciary is gone.
So, it's a massive purge while they try and get rid of the goodness, as they're called.
They seem to have sort of operated as an enormous secret society, but a very sort of pervasive one.
And more and more details are coming out how they got rid of the secularists and then inserted their own guys instead.
Well, now, so many people are being purged from the government, you know, teachers up and down the line and all you say the tens of thousands of people, different descriptions.
So, I guess nobody's really saying all of them were in on the coup, right?
It's just that now this is Erdogan's chance to clean house and get rid of all of his opposition.
Is that it?
Well, we're still waiting to see that, you know.
That's a sort of suspicion.
But so far, the thing about the Gulen movement is it had a sort of public face and loads of institutions.
I mean, they closed 1,000 schools on Saturday, which was run by the Gulenists.
They ran lots of charities.
They ran trade unions.
So, there was a big sort of their newspapers, things like that.
They had a big public face.
But people who were specialized in following them have told me they also sort of operated as a secret society, a very secret society, which right from the 1980s has been seen to penetrate the army, the civil service, the judiciary, and with a fair measure of success.
And they were very cynical in their methods.
In the foreign ministry, according to the foreign minister, they'd taken over the promotions board and set the exams for new people entering the foreign ministry.
And they set these incredibly hard questions and then supplied their own candidates, sort of Gulenist sympathizers, Gulenist sleepers, with the real answers.
So, it was only Gulenists who got the job.
They just fired a couple of ambassadors, alerted diplomats, and probably fired a lot more.
In the police, police intelligence had been taken over by them.
This was very useful coming to the coup.
If people reported to some intelligence organization or the police that they knew that this coup was upcoming or they'd seen something suspicious, they were actually reporting to people who were Gulenists themselves.
So, this is a country full of conspiracy theories.
There's no doubt this was an amazingly big conspiracy.
Right.
Yeah, it was interesting the way in one of your articles here that you've written recently, you even compare the Gulen movement to Opus Dei in terms of, you know, when you say… At this day, I think we're sort of, you know, we're not exactly benign, but, you know, pretty small and much less effective than the Gulen movement.
But just in terms of, when you say secret society, what you mean really is a group where they have a first loyalty, a separate loyalty, you know, that comes first before their government position or their, you know, their actual oath of office.
Yes, more than that.
They have a sort of chain of command.
Right.
You know, there you are, a colonel or a brigadier or a captain in the army or the gendarmerie or the police.
So, you know, you answer to your superiors.
But you have another chain of command, which is… That's why I use the word sort of secret society, that it's a run from the top.
It's a completely different hierarchy and you basically answer to them.
Right.
So now, back to the possible American role here.
As you say, Gulen does live in Pennsylvania.
Sort of, you know, sounds like he must be a kept pet of the CIA.
And, you know, at the time that the coup, when it first broke out, we were all watching it following developments on Twitter and on the news.
And one of the first things that happened was American officials, high-level officials, told the Daily Beast and a couple of other sources that Erdogan has given it up.
He's on his way to Germany now begging for asylum.
And then they even put out another story saying that the Germans refused him.
So now he's on his way to Britain asking them for asylum.
When, in fact, he was on his way back to the capital city.
He wasn't going to give up without a fight.
He was even risking getting shot down, flying circles in his private plane over the capital there.
But he never went to Germany.
But that came from a source somewhere on this side of the Atlantic Ocean, Patrick.
I wonder if that's very meaningful to you or maybe they were just glomming on.
Well, no, that's been very heavily publicized here in Turkey.
So, you know, I'm not saying that I believe the U.S. was behind it.
I don't know.
But an awful lot of Turks do think that.
I mean this is placed as a kind of anti-American tone anyway.
So that's been revved up a lot.
It's in high gear at the moment.
And, you know, you never know this type of organization.
At one moment the U.S. was cultivating what they deemed to be mild Islamists, you know.
These, the Gulenists, seem to have been one bunch who they got quite close to.
They were also kind of popular on Capitol Hill with both Republicans and Democrats.
You know, they put a lot of effort into that.
But they seem to have operated very much like a cult with the supreme leader, you know, seen as being sort of semi-divine, a bit like, you know, the reverend moon and so forth.
But people kind of knew that they'd been infiltrating the armed forces.
But nobody quite knew that it was this big.
I was talking to a Turkish commentator yesterday.
He said he was trying to think of an analogy for all this.
And the only analogy he could come up with was, you know, the invasion of the body snatchers.
Remember that film in 1956?
When a child is taken over by sort of a sea pod.
I can't quite remember the movie.
Do you remember this?
Yeah, yeah, sure.
And it's sort of, you know, it's not really happening.
I can't really think of anywhere else, you know, where something like, exactly like this has happened.
Yeah, that's a very special kind of coup, isn't it?
Where you just kind of, you place your people in there one at a time, very subtly.
Yeah, but people who have been cultivating it for 30 years are people who've entered school at 14 and went to staff college and you've been sort of pushing their promotion.
So they've reached the colonel or brigadier general stage.
But also, you know, some of it was closely organized and some of it was, you know, completely half-arsed.
They sent a squad of soldiers to Erdogan's Sena hotel on the Aegean, a place called Marmaris.
But, you know, but they arrived late.
Why did they arrive late?
They didn't seem to know where the hotel was.
And then he'd already left.
Now, maybe the timing of the coup may have been brought forward because they may have thought they were being detected.
So it may have started six hours before it was meant to.
Hence, they would have missed him.
But there were other, you know, weird aspects of this coup.
Maybe it was units who were meant to join it, didn't join it.
You know, they ended up by bullying the parliament, which went down really badly here.
Since they were sort of, their one public statement was that they wanted to sort of restore peace.
You know, it was a sort of chivalrous statement.
But maybe this was sort of trying to get the secularists on their side.
So it was a funny mixture of long term, careful, secretive organization.
And as I said, very sort of half-assed, sort of dislocated, disorganized approach.
Yeah, in the implementation there.
So, yeah, you know, I'm not sure if you're aware, but Phil Giraldi and Patrick Lang and Larry Johnson and the kind of former intelligence officer slash, you know, current blogger community here in America, they're all convinced that at least to a degree, and I think Giraldi wrote this up most explicitly for the American Conservative Magazine.
Oh, and also for UNS as well, that basically Erdogan knew that the coup was coming and he triggered it.
He basically tricked them, baited them into moving early so that they would be caught out.
Although that does seem to conflict with the story.
I don't believe this for a minute.
You know, he almost got killed.
I don't think it was like that.
He has quite a convincing account, but it was a bit comical that there he was, that his brother-in-law was the first person to tell him something strange was happening in Istanbul.
There were soldiers on the streets, sort of stopping traffic around one of the bridges.
Then he said he rang up, you know, the main intelligence, national intelligence organization.
The main intelligence guy there couldn't get anybody on the phone.
So he couldn't get the head of it.
Then he rang up the chief of staff, couldn't get anybody there.
Then he tried to ring up the prime minister.
And so this all took about four hours while the prime minister just couldn't get hold of anybody.
So I think the fantastic screw up is the better explanation.
Yeah.
The head of intelligence was saying, yes, he was so busy thwarting the coup.
And, you know, then Erdogan appeared sort of on a sort of on a phone held in front of a television camera, saying he was still alive and everybody should go and protest in the streets, which they did.
And that's one of the things that sabotaged the coup.
I think also that quite a large chunk of the army didn't join it.
Somebody is making the point that it was actually the sort of quite a bit of the land forces.
It was centred in the sort of gendarmerie and the paramilitary sort of police and the air force.
So quite a chunk of the land forces didn't join it.
So they were short on troops.
And then they didn't kill Erdogan and he was calling for these protests.
And when he arrived, he flew to Istanbul Airport in a light plane.
But he said that the coup people had actually taken over the control tower and they'd switched off the lights on the runway.
So in this light plane, they kept swooping down to see if they could land or if the coup, you know, vehicles on the runway to catch him, catch his or any other plane coming down.
You know, it just all kind of rings true.
I don't believe this is all a cunning plan to lure out these enemies.
I think it was very lucky to escape in one piece.
It seems strange that they didn't shoot him down.
Earlier, you know, people say, you know, will he exploit it?
This is a highly authoritarian dictatorium.
It's kind of he's kind of elected dictator at this stage or almost, you know, will they?
Any remaining obstacles, institutional or personal to his sort of complete monopoly of power?
Will it?
Will they disappear when they're exploited?
The answer is probably.
But on the other hand, most of the detentions so far are people who have some sort of link to doing this.
Now, this may be benign.
That's not being involved in the coup.
It's just, you know, you could have written some articles for a newspaper or appeared on a television channel several times.
That was run by doing this.
So I think it's a fairly broad sweep, but there hasn't been a sort of second stage yet when they just sort of detain or try to eliminate any form of dissent that might come.
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So over the past few years, Patrick, do you have much of an estimation of what the Turkish military's view has been of the war in Syria and especially after the rise of the Al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State?
Because, of course, Erdogan has pretty obviously had a motive in doing what he's doing.
But again, the military is supposedly this very secularist organization that you would think would be, well, would beware of such a thing like that, and especially when it comes to picking a fight with Russia over it and that kind of thing.
Yeah, I mean, it was said, I think rightly, that the army was, you know, had opposed it and said it just wasn't doable in Syria.
Now things are blurred a bit because Erdogan and his people are saying, you know, they've arrested a lot of the army as Gulenists.
And even they've arrested, you probably know this, the two pilots who shot down the Russian aircraft last year, which at the time the Turkish government seemed to say that, you know, it had been done on the prime minister's orders.
They're now saying that the Gulenist pilots who wanted to stir things up, so they shot down the plane.
Not sure I entirely believe that, but, you know, there's a lot of, they want better relations with Russia.
There's an awful lot of things they can start blaming on the Gulenists.
Also the sort of, you know, the extreme repression of the Kurds and so forth.
And some of this might be true.
The Gulenists might have wanted to discredit their own government by extreme violence towards any form of dissent in order to sort of lay the, to get public opinion, you know, against Erdogan.
But it sounds a bit too elaborate.
I think they just are going to be a scapegoat for anything that went wrong here in the last few years.
So now, I mean, it sounds like, well, the role of the Gulenists kind of confuses, you know, the typical narrative as you've been talking about as far as the secularists and the Islamists.
But it's always been kind of a paradox that it takes military dictatorship to create a modern Western secular democracy.
And then they're supposed to step back and let democracy take place.
But then the conservatives and the religious types always win the elections because they're the majority.
So then they end up, they just go back and forth like this, it seems like.
And, you know, I don't know exactly, as you were saying, it's kind of hard to tell where the overlap is between these different factions at this point.
But it does seem kind of weird that the Turkish military would have gone along with Assad even this long when it comes to helping al-Nusra and if not the Islamic State itself.
Oh, that's what I meant to say.
Well, you know, maybe, what happened was that, you know, the army since Ataturk was a great sort of secular institution also kept sort of interfering in politics, usually against the left, but also against the Islamists.
There are a number of, you know, coups, some tanks in the streets like 1980s, some sort of part of the army trying to take over in 1960.
But generally, it was the army as an institution trying to do that.
Now, when Erdogan came in in 2002, he was very nervous that, you know, he was going to be won the election, there was going to be a military takeover.
Therefore, they had this alliance with the Nulanists.
And then in about 2008, for about three years, there were these show trials where Erdogan's officers were arrested for being involved in two plots.
Now, it seems these plots were a complete fabrication.
Now, it was known, you know, that they'd removed a lot of secularist officers.
What people haven't certainly in general, I think, haven't taken on board, they've been replacing these secular officers, generals, colonels, with their own guys.
So quite suddenly, you know, all these lots of jobs vacant at a senior level.
And the Nulanists were taking their own handpicked candidates and sympathizers and putting them in these jobs.
Yeah.
Which is what so many generals have now been arrested.
Sure sounds like those days are over now.
I guess so, yeah.
But this is a place, you know, the army is a big institution here.
Now it's kind of a wreck, you know.
You can't arrest a third of the generals, you know, and lots of colonels and so forth.
Everybody's going to be looking over their shoulder.
Is somebody denouncing me, you know, as disloyal to the state?
And, you know, so that's a big blow.
It's under pressure because of the war in Syria.
It's under pressure because of the rise of, you know, Islamic State, the bomb attacks here.
We had a bomb at the Istanbul airport about a month ago.
And, of course, they've been, I don't know, fomented really this renewal of war with the Kurds down in the Southeast.
Again, part of that is the degree of repression is being blamed on the Nulanists.
But so this is a place under a lot of pressure.
People don't quite know which way everyone will go, you know.
The general repression, you know, or will they, you know, just try to have a purge of the Nulanists.
Also, it's pretty isolated internationally.
There's bad relations with the U.S., with the European Union.
They don't like me.
The fact that people congratulating Erdogan for having survived the coup, it all seemed kind of late in the day and rather lip service.
And that's a sort of measure of the place being pretty isolated.
Right.
Yeah.
John Kerry's original statement was, well, you know, cough, cough.
We like stability and continuity.
And then it wasn't until the coup was clearly failing that they said that they supported the democratically elected government.
That was pretty ham-handed timing wise.
Yeah, there are a lot of Turks, you know, who hate this government.
They say, yeah, it's elected.
But it was, you know, it's not exactly democratically elected because a lot of, you know, they've taken over all the media, independent media or most of it.
You know, they were using all the state media 24 hours a day as propaganda.
You know, they're making it very difficult for the other side to campaign.
So it wasn't exactly a level playing field.
But, you know, you know, Erdogan also got a lot of votes, you know.
This isn't a sort of minority regime.
So it is kind of an elected dictatorship in many ways.
So, you know, now we see what happens.
But, you know, the place is still rocking from this really completely unexpected coup.
And the discovery that he was Turks, the Turks were always taught, you know, the army was the great institution in more than most countries.
You know, this was the backbone of the state.
And then they find the whole, is it infested with these conspirators, you know, who've been kicking out other officers, taking the jobs, you know.
And this is true of the whole government.
You know, in the foreign ministry, there are people who because they're doing this got in, but somehow couldn't speak any foreign languages.
But they were sent to Berlin.
They couldn't talk to anybody who didn't know the English.
And so people are still sort of rather open-minded about that.
Now, you mentioned his renewed war against the Kurds, and we hear really very little about that.
How bad is that as far as the...
Pretty bad.
They've been sort of wrecking cities down in the southeast, you know, Diyarbakir, Jisrae.
Hasn't been much reported.
I mean, they put quite a lot of effort into making sure it wasn't much reported.
There were people who go down there.
They arrested a few people.
And also, I think, you know, the war, Islamic State and the war in Iraq and Syria was sort of the absorbing lots, most of the media.
So it didn't get much coverage.
I was trying to encourage people to write more about it.
But it was there.
You know, you infer the information there if you dug for it.
But somehow the war remains sort of obscure and off the international agenda.
Well, now, so America and Russia are both backing the Syrian Kurds and the YPG, which are just the cross-border cousins of the PKK that Turkey is attacking now.
So what do you think that says about the future of so-called Rojava and the Syrian Kurds once their war with Islamic State is over?
They're doing pretty well, you know, at the moment.
But they're doing well, but they've got a big backing from the U.S., you know, the U.S. Air Force.
So they can call in airstrikes.
But what worries them a bit, you know, is that they're also attacking a place, a town called Manbij, which is very important because it's just west of the Euphrates.
And it's an Islamic State's last exit point, Turkey, in the outside world.
So if they lose that area, then they're completely sealed off.
And the Kurds, and they have some Arab proxies for the Syrian Democratic Forces, have taken most of that town.
So that's quite important.
What worries them is that, you know, the international community, the U.S., loves them at the moment because they're fighting Islamic State.
But what if Islamic State goes down?
You know, they'll be overextended and maybe they won't have any friends.
So that worries them a bit.
On the other hand, this whole business in Turkey means that the U.S., you know, maybe they have this base at Incirlik, which they were using to bomb Islamic State.
But then during the coup, the government switched off the electricity there.
They said, you know, they did that with all the bases to stop the coup people using it.
And they've arrested the Turkish commander, the commander of the Turkish side of the base.
So that's looking increasingly rocky from the U.S. point of view.
So they may want to try and have bases in Rojava instead, or maybe in Iraqi Kurdistan.
All right, well, Patrick, I've kept you half an hour.
I've got a million more questions, but I guess I'll have to wait until next time.
I really appreciate you coming on the show, as you do.
Thank you so much.
All right, Shaul, that is the heroic Patrick Coburn.
The book is Chaos and Caliphate.
I mean, come on, this is literally the best reporter there is in the Western world on the Near East that exists.
It's the independent.co.uk for all his articles, also UNZ.com.
And again, the book is Chaos and Caliphate.
The latest at UNZ is called Erdogan Shuts Down Huge Swath of Gulenist Institutions.
All right, Shaul, and that's the Scott Horton Show.
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