Patrick Osgood, Kurdistan Bureau Chief for IraqOilReport.com, discusses the referendum on Kurdish independence, battling ISIS in Mosul and beyond, the impact of low oil prices on Iraq’s economy, and whether Iraq can become a cohesive functioning state without a perpetual US military presence.
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All right.
Speaking of Twitter, I saw this on Twitter.
Somebody retweeted something.
I have a brand new source here, IraqOilReport, at IraqOilReport.com.
And it's Patrick Osgood.
Welcome to the show.
How are you?
I'm very well.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, good times.
Appreciate you joining me today.
So what caught my attention here, and I meant to, I thought I had a little bit more time.
I was going to do a little bit more studying, but that's okay.
You were tweeting out, you were pointing out somebody else's work, that there's a call for, just hard news story, that there's a new call for a referendum in Iraqi Kurdistan.
And your remark was something about how this is serious, and this time it's different, and everybody ought to pay attention.
And as opposed to, I think, as you were saying, all the many, many times before this that we've heard there's going to be a referendum, and ultimately a secession of Iraqi Kurdistan from at least the Shiite South.
I don't know.
The status of the Sunni East now, Sunni West now, you know what I mean?
Anyway, but so, yeah, can you please tell us, I guess, if it's okay, if it's even appropriate, could you start with Barzani and Talabani, and their two factions, and how they share power, and what their interests are, and whether in fact they really do mean it this time?
Sure, yeah, there's a lot to unpack there, right?
I mean, so Kurdistan has, you know, been a roughly 20 percent part of Iraq, there or thereabouts, in the kind of post-2003 war settlement.
And they, in the Iraqi constitution that was voted on in 2005, they won a kind of special status for the Kurdistan region of Iraq.
It's a strange kind of experiment.
It has been in a particular kind of federalism that's granted them broad autonomy, and lots of rights on paper.
Some of those rights were kind of fudged, because that was a necessary thing to do to get a constitution passed, rather than have the Kurds and sort of non-Kurdish parts of Iraq argue indefinitely over issues of territory, and oil, and gas, and things like that, and the status of security services, and things.
So the Kurds kind of muddled on with their position in Iraq under this constitutional framework, some of which has never been enacted, some of which has been sort of prorogued indefinitely, and some of which has been strained because of sort of waxing and waning relationships with Baghdad.
But the Kurds kind of feel like they never really got what they believed they should have out of that constitutional settlement 12 years ago.
And yeah, you have within that not one kind of top-down political structure in the Kurdistan region.
But in the broader sense, you have two factions, the Barzani faction, broadly speaking, which is the Kurdistan Democratic Party.
It's kind of their vehicle.
You have the kind of Talabani dynasty that was headed by the former president of Iraq, Jalal Talabani, who was incapacitated some years ago, but has never been formally replaced as the head of the party.
And his party is the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, or the PUK.
Over the years, these two parties have more or less had a duopoly in Iraqi Kurdistan.
And that's worked better in some times than in others.
The interesting thing right now in respect of some of the leadership in Kurdistan, looking at a kind of post-Mosul military situation, where they've acquired some territory, where they've built up an oil and gas industry of their own, and they can see this kind of period of flux and so on coming, that they have this window of opportunity to push the envelope of their autonomy further.
And that's going to be a very fractious process.
We can perhaps go into the weeds a bit or not.
I'm not sure how much you want to do that.
Because there are lots of these internal divisions within Kurdistan.
And there are lots and lots of complex issues about, you know, is Baghdad receptive to this?
Will there be an amicable divorce, is the phrase that the Kurds are kind of trying to use?
Is it going to be a lot messier than the Kurds want because of disputed territories, because of different ethnicities in those territories, and because of a very febrile security situation?
And then there's an overarching question about whether the Kurds in the long run can really pay for themselves and run an economy, one that's, you know, overwhelmingly reliant on oil and gas revenue.
So that's probably me going on for quite a long time.
Yeah, no, I'm into it.
So you're leading right up to exactly the follow-up questions I want to get into, which is, you know, and I think you're sort of alluding to the fact that the Kurds are landlocked there.
And if they're going to sell all that oil and gas, they've got to have a good relationship with at least one of their neighbors in one direction or another, right?
And so that, to me, raises the question of, you mentioned, of course, Baghdad's point of view about this, the Shiastan government there in Baghdad, but also the question of what is America, the USA, and for that matter, Exxon and our new Exxon Secretary of State, what does he think about this?
They have kind of separate oil deals with the Kurds, separate from Baghdad as it is.
And for that matter, what do the Iranians think about this?
Is this something that they would much rather see the alliance between Erbil and Baghdad stay how it is, or they don't care either way, or which do you think?
Yeah, the Kurds in Iraq have got lots of different geopolitical relationships to manage, you know, one of which is with the federal government in Baghdad, which is not really kind of a Shiastan thing.
You know, there is Sunni representation in the government, and there is Kurdish representation in the government, and there's a parliament, which is kind of more or less representative, even though it's incredibly venal and dysfunctional.
But that is a relationship that's never worked very well.
Broadly speaking, the people that the Iraqi Kurds care about and have to care about, Turkey and Iran as the most proximate ones, the US is obviously a key relationship.
None of those powers really want to see the Iraqi Kurds go and become fully politically independent for different reasons, one of which being that Turkey and Iran have their own Kurdish populations, and they don't want to see them encouraged by the creation of a separate state from Iraq.
And yeah, Kurdistan occupies this strange position, and that's mirrored in its internal politics.
Barzani's party, the KDP, much closer to Turkey, which you alluded to the oil and gas issue.
That relationship has been the key to allow the KRG as a landlocked entity to tap into an existing oil pipeline, and get oil out to Turkey in large volumes, and have support from the Turkish state to monetize that oil and pull the money back into Iraqi Kurdistan outside of the normal Iraqi federal budget process, and pay for their own salaries and whatnot, so far as they can afford to given current oil prices.
Iran doesn't really like that very much.
Iran does not want to see Kurdistan going down an oil-fueled road to independence that's dependent on Ankara.
They'd be much keener to see Iraqi Kurdistan remain within Iraq, within a sphere of influence.
The PUK, Jalal Talabani's party, much closer relationships with Iran and their neighbors.
And you do have some resurgence of Iranian influence and so on, because of the war on ISIS, particularly in areas that are close to the Iranian border, where the Iranian security apparatus was very keen to set up proxies as a firewall between what they saw as a febrile, Sunni-dominated parts of Iraq, and Iran proper.
And Iran, if anything, has gone from a defensive mindset, since the start of the war on ISIS, to a kind of aggressive expansionist one, where they are looking at different groups within Iraq as a means of developing proxy relationships to get them a kind of, you know, there's a conversation about what does Iran want.
It wants a kind of, in general terms, some kind of land bridge to Syria, and then on to Syria, to the Mediterranean.
These kind of great games going on.
So you have some militias in Iraq that have sprung up that are direct Iranian proxies.
And you have numerous other parties, big and small, that have some connection with Iran.
And I think for Iran, an assertive, strong, Turkey-backed, independent Kurdistan region, it puts a block on that route.
So they don't want that, if that makes sense.
And then, you know, for the U.S., I mean, they see Iraq as a strategic partner.
They will continue to do so after the war, and despite everything that's gone wrong in Iraq, as a partner against terrorism, as a secure source of energy supply to global markets.
And there's a latent fear that whatever the Kurds do may be disruptive geopolitically in the region, may be very disruptive to the stability, long-run political stability of Iraq.
So generally speaking, they're not keen, certainly to sponsor, or kind of sign up to the idea of Kurdish independence.
Will they necessarily continue to take the view that they have taken pre-ISIS, pre-2014, that they will actively go out and try and prevent this stuff?
It remains to be seen.
They may have a slightly more hands-off attitude to it.
But certainly, Iraqi Kurdistan does not have the benefit of any power in the region, or otherwise, saying, okay, go for it, we're behind you.
So they very much do these things on their own.
Yeah, well, you describe all these different incentives very well, but it doesn't sound like any of them are new and changing.
This sounds like the same status quo position that they've been in.
So why is it that this call for a referendum is different than at least, I don't know, five or 10 I'm familiar with over the last decade or two?
For sure.
I mean, it's worth bearing in mind, for example, that the Kurds already called a referendum.
In 2004, there was a referendum by the Kurds on independence and 96% of Kurds, I don't know who the other 4% were, voted for, completely non-binding, not official, not observed by the UN or anybody else.
Nevertheless, they've done this before.
I think what's different is this is taking a few things, really.
This is taking place in an environment where post-ISIS, there's literally been a redrawing of the map in terms of territory that the Kurds have.
There's a feeling that the politics of Iraq are fundamentally different and that there's less that the federal government can do to kind of stop them.
In financial terms, the Kurds now, and this is a kind of very recent development, they are separate from the Iraqi budget system.
So they are no longer, apart from for a few small bits and bobs, they're no longer reliant on these huge disbursements of oil revenue that are produced in the south of Iraq, have to wash through the federal budget system and Kurdistan gets its share.
That dysfunctional process, which has rumbled on for years and which the Kurds have made previous promises of independence or have referendums and things to try and address and give themselves leverage in negotiations around this budget, well, that budget system doesn't really apply to the Kurds anymore and it probably never will again.
So they're in a position where they're kind of paying their own way as best as they can.
And also there's a feeling that there is this kind of limited window to do this while there is still U.S. security engagement, while the eyes of the world are still on this place.
So now would be kind of a good time to do it while things are still up in the air and before the Iraqi federal state has any kind of ability to reconstitute itself and reassert its prerogatives in these areas.
Nevertheless, the Kurds will want to and all the officials say that regardless of whether an independence referendum happens or whatever, this is a negotiated process still with Baghdad.
And for many reasons, they still need Baghdad to kind of sign off on this thing.
Otherwise, the road to independence is probably still prohibitively difficult.
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All right.
Now, it's a minor point, but hey, well, I raised it, but then you contradicted me.
So now we got to go back over it for a second.
The Baghdad government, there's Sunnis in that parliament, but what power do they have over Sunnistan?
Or what power do they have over the government to deliver for the people of Iraqi Sunnistan?
And isn't that why they were broken off and conquered by the Islamic State?
Because they were basically already outside of the protection of Baghdad, which is really the Shia-Stan government in alliance with the Kurds.
Yeah, it's a complicated picture.
That is one part of it.
However, speaking in general terms, the Sunni population of Iraq has never really coalesced around a sufficiently cohesive set of attitudes or political parties that have given them the leverage that they need as a significant minority in the country to actually engage in the political process, except that because of demographics, Shia parties will always have a narrow majority, or certainly the plurality in Iraqi politics, and do deals and try to use an unfortunate Trumpism.
But to kind of cut the deals that they need to cut in this new political reality, which is kind of a bit long in the tooth now, to make things work for them without becoming a kind of permanent underclass.
And I think this is the issue now for the Sunnis of Iraq is, do they have a kind of political future?
You look at the major cities in the majority Sunni part of Iraq, Ramadi, Fallujah, and of course Mosul.
Places like Tikrit are kind of rebuilding a bit, but not very much.
And they're kind of under the yoke of security patronage that's kind of foreign to them.
What is the Sunni future in Iraq?
And it's a very, very good question, but I kind of wouldn't I wouldn't turn Iraq into a kind of three-piece puzzle and say that Sunni alienation was like purely came down because of the Shia domination per se of the political process.
Iraq went back to having an experiment with horrible authoritarianism under the second term for former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
There's now a much more benign figure in as Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi.
He has tried to give Sunni representation in that government, including key portfolios such as the Ministry of Defense.
And primarily the issue for Baghdad is less about kind of this three-way chess game than it is really about the fact that they've never got around to the idea of the rule of law and a sufficiently kind of like dynamic and responsible political process on all parts of the political spectrum in terms of ethno-sectarian makeup.
Iraqi politics is incredibly venal and dysfunctional and corrupt and so on.
And the Shia parties don't have a monopoly on that.
The internal rivalry within Sunni parties has been pretty grotesque, and you've had a problem with rejectionism of the new political settlement and so on.
Even, for example, in places like Ramadi and Fallujah, if you have a huge emphasis there on trying to get people to go back home, on reconstituting a decent securities framework, on criminal justice, on reconstruction and things.
And at the sort of provincial level, and certainly below, you've actually had these purely different Sunni parties tearing each other's throats out rather than getting together to focus on these important issues after ISIS has been cleared away.
Just to be clear there, you're saying there's been a big focus on this on the part of the Shia parties, on the part of the Abadi government, to try to protect the populations of these predominantly Sunni cities that have been freed of the Islamic State, but that it's really more the Sunnis who won't get it together to bring those populations back.
It's a whole bunch of stuff.
I mean, number one, of course, the oil price collapse.
So the reconstruction money just isn't there.
I mean, just on the narrow point of what it is that Abadi would like to see, Abadi would like to see these Sunnis come home to Tikrit and Ramadi, etc.
Yeah, absolutely.
What I would say is that outside of a kind of narrow, but unfortunately, still quite powerful wing of the kind of Shia Islamist political makeup in Baghdad that cleaves very closely to former Prime Minister Maliki, there's an awareness across the political spectrum that Iraq very nearly went completely into the abyss in 2014.
And it's the majority of people who have been fighting to retake these Sunni cities, whether they're in the army, whether they're in militias, and some of them are problematic, or whatever, are Shia from the South.
And they are, as we speak, fight overwhelmingly Shia units fighting in Mosul right now, for example, and taking very heavy casualties.
There is some tiny little window here in the kind of liberation of these areas for, you know, if that sacrifice can be integrated and accommodated into some kind of new political understanding, that this kind of, like I say, this three way, irreconcilable, kind of somewhat three regionalist kind of view of Iraqi politics can be put to one side.
But of course, the issues are you have rejectionist politics in by the former Prime Minister Maliki, you have a desperate shortage of money to put these places back together.
And there will be very horrible, knotty issues of criminal justice and lingering mistrust of the Sunni population.
So I wouldn't kind of necessarily hold out sort of too much faith.
But, you know, the Iraqi security state with obviously huge amounts of coalition support has been clearing these areas and these sacrifices are being made on a cross sectarian basis.
Yeah.
Well, you know, there's this should be famous quote from the Kagan's, I forget which all Kagan's might as well have been all three of them in 2014, when they said, we got to send 25,000 troops to Iraq right now to fight the Islamic State.
And which more or less came true.
But they said right there in their initial report, initial report, they said, it is impossible to articulate a clear path to the desired end state.
So, in other words, everybody, I think, agrees with what you just said that like, hey, instead of having all this horrible sectarianism, how about everybody just, you know, get along a little bit, divide up the oil spoils somewhat evenly and try to keep it from, as you said, from getting as bad as it's gotten over, you know, especially since 2014, that it's time for a reappraisal.
But nobody can seem to figure out how this is ever supposed to happen.
I think a huge part of that, right, is that the, well, first of all, the just the level of resentment between the leaders of the former Baathist state and the leaders of the new Dawah party one that's been built up if you want to go back to Saddam or since the war in 03, or whatever it is.
But then also, the Shiites, really the the Dawah party Maliki type is especially I guess you're saying a body really is a bit better about this.
But it seems like in the war, in the last, especially during the surge and all that, the Shiite parties were deprived of their last real strong incentive to really compromise with the predominantly Sunni areas of the country, and with those tribes there.
And that was because America helped them finally kick all the last of the Sunnis out of Baghdad, except for the very southwest corner of the city.
And so this coincided with the Iranian plan, really the Supreme Islamic Council plan that Sadr had denounced all along, for example, that they wanted strong federalism, which was a nice way of saying, they wanted America to give them Baghdad, and then they wanted to basically run off with the south, and basically screw the Sunnis, right?
They got all the oil down in Basra, or up, you know, near Kurdistan.
And so, and then when once the USA did the surge for them, and help them finish off the ethnic or sectarian cleansing, in 07, 08, then why help out the Fallujans at all?
And you're right, the oil price crash and all that, but it seems like Maliki, especially, had the idea that, like, you guys can burn in the sun.
So I guess my question is, what's changed?
Other than maybe a body is a little bit nicer of a guy than Maliki, but isn't their, basically, their incentive structure the same way George W. Bush left it, with no real reason to give in to the Sunnis in any way, really, other than to keep the Islamic State out?
But other than that, bare minimum, right?
What am I missing?
It's, it's one of the, it's one of the key points.
Can, is Iraq able to kind of bear the costs of victory?
And, you know, is it able to operate in an environment where the Americans aren't there, kind of, anymore, providing a political subsidy and a military subsidy?
I mean, everyone's kind of been on their best behavior, because of the amount of American military support, which, as you alluded to, has been escalating to a level of, kind of, just general application pervasiveness that Obama completely foreswore when this first came out.
You know, there was no way that he was going to be sending special operators right to the front lines and have, you know, Apaches circling over Iraqi cities again, but that's, that's what it's taking now to get Mosul done.
So what happens when the Americans go away?
I think there are two things to, to look at.
You have provincial elections in Iraq coming up in September.
It's unclear whether those will take place throughout the entire country, but they'll be the first reckoning, formalized reckoning, politically, that Iraq will have with itself in a post-Mosul world.
Now, what happens in Sunni areas?
What happens in Iraq's disputed territories in Nineveh province, in North Diyala, North Salahuddin, and Kirkuk province?
And what happens in the Shia South?
Do we see a conversion of this military legitimacy, this popular legitimacy and so on, for these Shia militia, but mostly Shia militia groupings, the Badr organization, Kataib Hezbollah, Saeb al-Haq, three kind of firmly Iranian, Iranian axis groups.
Are they able to take a larger stake in Shia political life directly?
You know, and if they, if they do, then that seems like a very negative thing.
And it would seem that Iraq isn't learning and is, is spiraling into further sectarianism.
You know, will Abadi survive the year after when there's a general election in, around this time next year?
Or do we see a return to some kind of strongman kind of figure like Maliki was?
It's not clear to me how any of these things will turn out.
I think it's a bit of a fool's game to, to be predicting big things about Iraq because it always kind of confounds you.
But it does have the capacity to constantly limp on, you know, or maybe it's even that it's just, it's always constantly falling down a flight of stairs, but it's kind of like a, it's an up escalator at the same time.
So they just keep falling and sort of staying in place and they never really quite fall on their face at the bottom.
There's, so, you know, there is a very, very difficult, very, very important period for Iraq to go through.
I think it has much more to do with basic attitudes of representation, political responsibility and respect for the rule of law, maybe even than it does for broad issues of sectarianism.
And, you know, going back to our original kind of topic, it would be interesting to see whether what Kurdistan does with referendums, with perhaps negotiating some kind of co-equal sovereign confederated identity within the country, whether that stabilizes things or makes things worse.
And then the other thing with Iraq, which is also always a significant issue is what do the powers that surround the country want out of Iraq in a post-Mosul situation?
How assertive are they willing to be?
How assertive is the U.S. willing to remain after the military stuff happens, given you have this capricious Trump administration in the U.S. now?
It's not clear to me at all, I mean, what the Trump attitude to Iraq is beyond, you know, bombing the hell out of ISIS or whatever it might be.
So if there's sustained U.S. engagement and so on, it would be a very different thing from if the U.S. kind of packs up and leaves after the Hadbar minaret in central Mosul has a Iraqi flag flying on it again.
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Well now, so how important is the issue of Kirkuk to whether there's a war or a peace between Erbil and Baghdad?
Because it seems like, you know, the Kurds say they want it, that's where all the oil is, and they exercise some degree of sovereignty over it.
But then again, it's way out there on the desert plain, and there's a lot of Arabs still live there, even after 10 years of cleansing now.
So what do you think?
There it is, yeah.
And, you know, the interesting thing, south Kirkuk, this district called Hawija, it's in the southwest of Kirkuk province, is still under ISIS control.
There are still areas of Iraq that will remain under ISIS control and still need to be cleared after Mosul is done.
One of those is southwest Kirkuk, majority Sunni Arab, and was a hotbed of protest and rejectionism and violence also in kind of the years leading up to the kind of ISIS blitzkrieg in 2014.
Kirkuk remains like extremely important.
I don't think that the usual lens of looking at it in terms of just like a powder keg, ethno-sectarian powder keg, and so on, are quite the same.
You know, I'm an oil and gas journalist, and on the oil and gas side, there have been compromises about how to manage Kirkuk's oil, especially in a post-ISIS environment.
And those have generally trended towards favoring the Kurds more and giving them more control, giving them some Kirkuk oil, giving them some responsibilities over monetizing it, and so on.
And for now, at least, these are all handshake agreements, essentially.
But they are allowing the KRG and federal Iraq to kind of share Kirkuk a bit and kind of take some of the heat out of the oil issue.
So the oil thing is the central kind of trigger.
There's also an acceptance.
We'll see if this finalizes itself.
But there was also an acceptance between the federal government and the KRG about basically new KRG lines of control that were in place before the Mosul offensive began.
And that includes Kurdish security control of Kirkuk.
So I can't see that changing.
I don't see, unlike under the kind of Maliki years, that you would have mobilizations in these areas that would trigger other mobilizations, and then you'd have the Iraqi army and the Kurdish Peshmerga facing off again.
I don't think that dynamic is going to happen.
Nevertheless, I mean, it does have to be, it sucks in Turkey, the sensitivities there, it sucks in Iran, and there is still a sizable natural resource base.
So there will have to be some compromises over Kirkuk and how it's handled within the referendum thing.
But the other thing, you know, again, going back to sort of putting my keeping my oil hat on for a minute.
Kirkuk isn't worth what it was.
It certainly isn't producing the kind of oil that it was years ago because of neglect and so on.
And so it's no longer this terrible free brawl kind of thing.
The danger comes from really, we've had the Kurds raise Kurdish flags officially over Kirkuk province because it's majority Kurdish now.
And there's a Kurdish governor and a Kurdish dominated provincial council.
If the Kurds really overstep in those kind of ways and continue to do that as part of trying to ensure that Kirkuk is integrated into whatever future Kurdistan and whatever that looks like, then you could see some political ramifications from that.
But it's not quite the issue that it was.
And, you know, some kind of negotiated thing can be worked out there, I think.
So are you hearing that there's any kind of real plan for the future government of Fallujah, Ramadi, Mosul in the post Islamic State and post war against them era?
I mean, I know Ramadi and Fallujah and Tikrit have already been liberated and all that.
But are they just going to go back to awakening junior and try to find whoever's left to the old tribal leaders and try to put them back in charge again?
Or they have they're going to just deploy?
I guess you were alluding to this earlier.
Well, what are the Shiite militias going to do?
No, I mean, so there are, I mean, so the Sunni provinces of Iraq have provincial councils and so on is in the same way as the others do.
Tribal things are what they are, but they exist in parallel to the official government structures.
And tribes in Iraq, you know, it's been a decade, obviously, since the Sawa, the awakening program reached its peak in Iraq.
And over that 10 years, I think there has been a kind of degradation and kind of debauchment of some of these tribal structures.
And some of the figureheads have changed, with often negative effects, the torch has been passed down to a younger generation of sheikhs and so on.
So I don't think that there is the same.
And they've gone through this terrible cataclysm of ISIS and everything.
The Sawa was also, you know, grossly distortive to balance the tribal power.
At that time, you had nothing tribes suddenly elevated by the Americans to taking control and dominating, you know, police structures locally and provincially and so on.
That created a lot of resentment, which created a lot of outsiders, which created a lot of people who joined ISIS when ISIS came in.
So those kind of like trying to pick winners on a tribal level in those areas isn't very sensible.
The issue is, is that you've got these provincial councils that are very fractious, and that lack the kind of funds that they need to, to redevelop.
Also, on a security basis, you have lingering Hashid, these mainly Shia militias or whatever, in some of these areas.
In some areas, they're fine.
In some areas, they're really not.
But they're kind of letting the local population know that they're in charge.
You know, but so the Sunni body politic generally just isn't in shape to embark on any kind of, you know, Kurdistan, like regionalist, more autonomy kind of process.
And like you, like you said earlier, it needs it needs to be integrated in the federal budget system, and so on.
So the challenge there is to ensure that the try and get the political class to become relevant in Baghdad in some way.
And to stop kind of like squabbling horribly, and to make the use of what funds there are from reconstruction there, whether it's from the UN kind of development program or whoever else.
Yeah, well, the future, but the future is bleak there.
I mean, I think there's a real, there's a real chance that Iraq Sunnis remain kind of cast to the four winds.
You know, you've got three over 3 million people displaced in Iraq, overwhelmingly, they are Sunnis.
And so as a percentage of the Sunni population, that's enormous.
And there is a real chance that they remain this permanent underclass that seeds again, and that becomes a fertile ground for some new kind of insurgency, whether they're jihadists wearing black, again, or whatever these guys are going to call themselves.
You can't leave people in those circumstances for that long without hope.
And with the kind of neighbors that Iraq has, the kind of ideologies that circle around there, without seeing something like ISIS coming back.
Well, you know, it's such an important point you made about the distortions during the awakening in 07, within the Sunni tribes that were bribed to be the concern local citizens and all that.
So I, I really I'm only repeating what you said there to try to really make sure I remember you said that for later on.
But then it's interesting, right?
Because I mean, a lot of people's, you know, when ISIS came up, it was like, well, we need to do the search again.
And it's funny, you mentioned the Kagan's and so on.
And they had a recent paper come out for the institute study of war, saying we need this, we don't just need a sour, we need to explicitly have a Sunni army in the Anbar desert on the border with Syria, going around and knocking heads together as a kind of transnational kind of Sunni army, which is just crazy talk more, more sectarian than Iraq itself.
So there are people who kind of learned the wrong lessons from the Sauer program, or think that those things can be repeated, and they just can't, you know, Iraq's very different country.
Sure.
Well, of course, for people who are paying attention, then the tribal leaders started turning on the al Qaeda guys a year before Petraeus ever got there with his bride.
Absolutely.
So whole thing is a joke.
But so here's one more thing.
I'm sorry, I'm keeping you so long.
But this is just such a fascinating discussion here.
So Coburn, this is why I'm so good on everything.
Well, Gareth Porter, but also Patrick Coburn, I read everything you write.
So I interview him at least every few weeks or so, and have for I don't know, a decade straight or something.
And he's gonna be right now.
Yeah, yeah, he's writing for Mosul.
Yeah.
So well, you know, East Side.
But anyway, so here's the thing about it is the reason I was so paranoid and so way ahead of the curve on calling the rise of the Islamic State after watching him break apart from Al Nusra in 2013.
Was it right at the same time that Baghdadi was telling Jolani to go and Zawahiri to go to hell?
Coburn was reporting that the Shia Stan Iraqi army had withdrawn from Mosul.
And the reason why was because they were way the hell out on Fort Apache out in the middle of nowhere, basically in a foreign country occupying it.
And yet, they didn't feel like they had the support.
And they wanted to retreat back safe behind Shiite lines, which might as well been national borders, basically.
And they were saying, you know, get me the hell out of here because in other words, they were leaving Mosul wide open.
And I guess you know, they did eventually send some reinforcements back and all of that.
But that just meant that here's this group breaking off from Al Qaeda.
Here's this guy saying he wants to be the Islamic State and build a caliphate now not wait for the ghost to bin Laden or whatever to tell him it's finally time to like Jolani and Zawahiri are saying.
And he's got all of Sunni Stan is basically wide open because the Shia Stan army had basically withdrawn from it.
They weren't they didn't feel safe out there just having four guys, you know, patrolling that much territory, whatever the equation was, right.
And so many of them were ghost soldiers.
Anyway, they didn't even exist to be battalions out there.
So now I'm getting to my point, which is, you know, next after ISIS is gone.
And as you say, after the Sunnis are still left the odd men out and the next version of ISIS comes.
Is there any real reason to believe that the Baghdad army is really going to be able to clear hold and build that territory and, and keep it and make it Iraq again?
Or is this already over?
No, I mean, so there are significant challenges with Iraq's armed forces post Mosul.
They've obviously enjoyed the benefit of an enormous subsidy in terms of military strength from the coalition, particularly in the form of airstrikes, which have been the pervasive and decisive factor in every major conflict that the Iraqi armed forces have been engaged in since they started to fight back for territory in 2015.
So it's unknown exactly how strong they are, how much they can do.
There was a lot of American money thrown into reconstituting divisions of the Iraqi army, which have performed really thoroughly with complete mediocrity, and have kind of been sidelined.
And you've seen this reliance on a fairly small number of very battle hardened, very well trained forces, such as the counterterrorism, special, special operations forces, and elite Ministry of Interior units, like the emergency response battalions.
So when you see, for example, with the Mosul campaign, on the one hand, people saying, well, there's, there might be 5,000 ISIS in the city, and a raid against them are a force of 100,000, made up of X, Y, and Z. Simply not true, that it's all about the guys at the tip of the spear, and they're a very small amount of forces which have been taking very high amount of casualties.
Will those units who have been fighting ISIS for years now, and have all seen friends die, are all exhausted, are all PTSD'd up to the gills and whatnot, despite, you know, their good training and things.
But nobody's fought a group like this as long as these guys have anywhere in the world.
Nobody's fought these kind of battles constantly for years and years.
That's particularly like the counterterrorism service.
So can they get a break after Mosul?
Can they be reconstituted and expanded?
And will they be able to go out and play whack-a-mole in the desert and whatever, and to secure the border with Syria, and to meet these other challenges?
Who knows?
But there have been some lessons learned, I think, and have been learned as well by the Americans, who really ignored and looked the other way when Maliki was hollowing out the Iraqi army through the most kind of grotesque corruption, some of which you mentioned, the ghost soldiers on the payroll, commanders just stealing massive amounts of fuel and selling it that's supposed to go to people, soldiers having to buy their own, you know, rice and beans instead of getting their army rations when they were being deployed.
And so just, you know, so that the army was a papier-mâché army at the time.
I think the other thing that they've learned, though, which is very, very difficult to be instituted universally, and you have problems like Shia militias don't seem to care very much about this.
But one of the reasons why, of course, Mosul was so open, I mean, you did have the third federal police division there.
But they were headed by a sectarian and incompetent and malicious commander.
And they did a terrible job when they were sort of rounding up tens of thousands of young men, and people were going missing into Iraq's terrible criminal justice system or whatever.
Just, you couldn't find a more efficient way of stoking up revolutionary sentiment and the willingness to engage with any group that would come in and say, we're going to kick these guys out from the south and you're going to be able to run your own affairs.
So I think some lessons have been learned.
I think that the issue with some of the issues with the Iraqi forces were directly related to the nature of the Maliki administration, particularly the second one, and, you know, wouldn't necessarily be repeated.
And there are also, like, contingents within some of these forces that are local to the areas where they are.
The issue is, is that some of them are kind of flip-flop armies.
You have a, you know, kind of Sunni tribal fighter contingent, much lauded by the US.
But these are mostly guys with, as I say, kind of flip-flops hanging around smoking cigarettes on plastic chairs and with swiveling AK-47s around their fingers.
And are they, is this a, just because they're local, is this a good enough local force to genuinely provide security, to maintain intelligence relationships with other part of the Iraqi security state, and to interact with some level of confidence and competence with the criminal justice system in Iraq?
So when people are caught, they seem to be dealt with in a kind of fair way.
And this horrible industry of bribes and so on does not persist.
Unfortunately, I think it is kind of persisting in Mosul.
We have some reports of that.
So, you know, it's a complicated framework, and it's very much not just about the army.
You know, from the American perspective, they'd be very well served to, you know, not simply look at the Iraqi conventional army land forces as a means of guaranteeing security, because that didn't work last time, and it was an incredibly wasteful thing to do.
Do we see the emergence of a competent, large Iraqi kind of special forces base that goes around and keeps the lid on jihadism in the country at the same time as we see effective local policing?
I don't know.
It's a very tall order.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, listen, thank you very much for your time on the show.
I really appreciate it.
Oh, it's great to be here, Scott.
Thank you for having me.
All right.
So that is Patrick Osgood from Iraq Oil Report.
And check this out, too.
They have a blog there called Inside Mosul with updates from everything updated daily there.
So that's definitely in my new pile of bookmarks here.
IraqOilReport.com.
And that's Scott Horton Show.
Thanks, you guys.
Check out all the archives at ScottHorton.org and LibertarianInstitute.org slash Scott Horton Show.
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