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Taking out Saddam Hussein turned out to be a pretty good deal.
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So we can go and play with our toys in the sand, go and play with our toys in the sand.
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All right, you guys.
Introducing our good friend, Joe Lauria.
Back to give us an update about independence in Kurdistan from his big interview and all the big events there in Iraqi Kurdistan.
He's on the line from Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan today.
Welcome back to the show, Joe, how are you?
I'm fine, except I'm now in Cairo.
Oh, now you're in Cairo.
Yeah, I flew out last Wednesday morning anticipating a shutdown of Iraqi airspace and a closing of the airport to international flights.
And that indeed happened on Friday.
They were given, Kurds were three days to cancel the referendum and they refused.
So on Friday at 6 p.m. local time, it was the last flight in or out of the two airports in Iraqi Kurdistan, Erbil and Suleimani.
And right now I can't get back to Erbil, but I did not wanna get stuck there either.
So I'm here for the time being.
Man, so I guess in other words, I don't know anything about the news ever since the referendum.
I know it passed, but I didn't know anything about the shutting down of the airspace and the ratcheting up of threats and all the reactions.
So go ahead, man, tell us everything.
Well, just to recap, last Monday, a week ago today, the Iraqi Kurds held the referendum on independence from Iraq, despite enormous pressure from the United States, Turkey, Iran, United Nations, the Arab League, and certainly Baghdad.
All kinds of threats were made if they held the referendum.
And the U.S. said that they wouldn't back talks with Baghdad, the U.N. wouldn't back talks with Baghdad.
Turkey, Iran, Baghdad have all threatened military action.
The vote went ahead, 93% voted, unsurprisingly, for independence from Iraq.
The key thing to understand though is that the Kurdish leadership made clear that they would not declare independence right afterward.
In fact, Massoud Barzani, the longtime leader of the Kurdish region in Iraq, said clearly several times, many times, that he expected a one to two year negotiation leading to independence with Baghdad.
But just today, the prime minister of Haider al-Abadi, the prime minister of Iraq, said that there will be no talks until they cancel the referendum.
Yesterday, the Kurdish parliament met, which is like the third time it's met in the last two years, only because of this referendum.
They said there was no way they were gonna cancel this referendum, so we're at an impasse here.
There's no idea how long the flights will stop.
Turkey has canceled, all airlines have obeyed the Baghdad government's request to stop flying into the airport.
Iran was the first to close its airspace.
The airport is losing $300,000 a day, and they claim that the Civil Aviation Authority of Iraq was already overseeing it, but they will allow five or six Iraq officials to come to the airport.
But that's not satisfying Baghdad.
Now, the key thing to understand, in my view, is once you understand that this referendum was not gonna be followed by a declaration of independence, and that negotiations are needed with Baghdad, which Baghdad is refusing, and also taking into account no country in the world except Israel supported this referendum and has said they would recognize a Kurdish state, the fact remains that nothing has changed in terms of Kurds' semi-autonomous status, which they've enjoyed really from 1991 when the U.S. set up a no-fly zone and became more formalized after the 2003 invasion by the U.S.
So, in effect, nothing has changed.
No one's gonna recognize them.
They cannot survive as a nation.
They have not declared that they are gonna become a nation.
It's a talks.
So, my view is that there's an overreaction by Baghdad, by Turkey, by Iran.
And it's interesting because yesterday we saw in Catalonia certainly an overreaction by the Spanish government.
Within six days, we've had two referendum on independence.
And in both cases, the central governments have vastly overreacted.
Now, I understand the Kurds' aspirations for independence.
Anyone who understands their history and how they've suffered being double-crossed by the British and French after the First World War ended in which they were initially in the Treaty of Sèvres, they were promised a state.
And then there was a state that was declared a kingdom that the British bombed into non-existence.
And then in 1923, in the Treaty of Lausanne, that promise of an independent state was withdrawn.
We've seen Saddam Hussein crush various uprisings.
In the 1970s, we saw Israel, Iran, under the Shah and the United States support the Kurdish Peshmerga, which were trained and developed pretty much by Israel.
And overnight, in an agreement between the Shah and Saddam, who was vice president at the time in 1975, to settle their differences, the Kurds were just cut loose and they were slaughtered by the Iraqi government.
That repression continued until the Halabja massacre in 1988, where up to 10,000 people may have been killed with poison gas by the Iraqi government.
So one can understand the suffering of the Kurds.
They are not without fault.
They were accused in the 1930s or in the 20s of taking part in massacres of Armenians.
And more recently, they have, according to Amnesty International, taking territory that the Arabs had lived in and that they fled from in the 2003 U.S. invasion that they took over these houses, destroyed them.
So they are expanding, probably beyond the territory that they should have.
And then, of course, there's Kirkuk, which is the disputed city, very oil-rich city, which the Turkmen and the Arabs and Kurds all claim as their own.
It was originally a Turkmen city.
And then in the 70s and 80s and the 90s, Saddam Hussein began a program of Arabization of that city that kicked out a lot of Kurdish families.
When the Islamic State threatened to take over that city, Kirkuk, in 2014, they, Peshmerga, occupied the city when the Iraqi army fled, as they did in Mosul.
So they have had, they claim control over that city.
By Barzani extending this referendum to Kirkuk and other disputed areas, that really incensed Baghdad.
So my point is that the Kurds, one can understand from their point of view, as best as possible without being a Kurd, that their aspirations, however, pragmatically, and this goes way beyond any kind of pragmatic stance, this was some kind of dangerous romanticism on their part, because there's no way this is gonna stand as they will ever become a UN member or even a UN observer state or have a team in the Olympics or get even IMF loans.
The IMF insists on any money going to them must pass through the Iraqi government in Baghdad.
So they did this as an expression of their political will, and that's all that it is.
And had Baghdad and Ankara and Tehran taken the position that, well, have your referendum, we don't care, because it means nothing, because without talks in Baghdad, you're not gonna become independent, and those talks are not gonna happen, it could have just died of its own accord, this referendum, as one they had in 2005, I believe, that also passed overwhelmingly and led to nothing.
But now it's become a major issue with huge tensions, and there are joint maneuvers of the Turkish and the Iraqi army on Turkish territory about one kilometer inside Turkish territory from the Kurdish-Iraqi border.
Now the United, sorry, Iran and Baghdad are also holding similar joint maneuvers with their militaries on the Iranian side of the border, close to the Kurdish-Iraqi border they happen to be using American weapons from.
So the Iranians are participating in a joint maneuvers with American weapons that the Iraqis have.
So whether there will be military intervention or not, I think it's highly unlikely for a number of reasons.
One of them is Turkey has something, a lot to lose with this, which is becoming a blockade.
If a full economic blockade takes place, that would crush, that includes the oil, that would really crush the Kurdish economy.
They would collapse within weeks, perhaps.
I've seen when oil prices rose and when ISIS was threatening Erbil and other parts of the Kurdish region, that the government workers in the Kurdish region went months without being paid.
So if oil was shut off, that would be the end.
Oil is a very key part of this story, of course.
The oil, according to Baghdad, should be sold only to the central government.
But the Kurds are selling their oil illegally, according to Baghdad, directly to Turkey, which is, many reports say, benefiting Barzani and his family, as well as Erdogan and his family.
So there's also about $8 billion a year in trade, mostly coming from Turkey to the Iraqi region, sorry, the Kurdish Iraqi region.
The Kurds import much of their food from Turkey and from Iran, but mostly about 70% of that from Turkey.
Even though they can be self-sufficient, have very fertile land, they have not.
They've decided they wanted to import the food instead.
So if there were an economic blockade, that would really be the end of the Kurds.
But it would hurt Turkey, $8 billion in business.
So that's not necessarily gonna happen either.
So we could be looking at a very long standoff where there is no flights, but not a full economic blockade, no talks, and no change.
And one wonders why their referendum was even held.
I think we could be looking at something like what's going on with the Gulf Cooperation Council and Qatar.
If you recall, it's been going on now about four or five months.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
Let's get back to that in a minute.
There's too many follow-up questions in a row I gotta get to here, man.
First of all, I like what you say about how, hey, no offense against the Kurds.
This terribly repressed and oppressed population.
Everybody remembers when Saddam used the Mujaheddin-y cult, communist terrorist cult, to murder them when they...
The Shia get all the headlines, but it was the Kurdish and Shia uprising that George Bush Sr. encouraged, the Great Bay of Pigs Betrayal Massacre in 1991 after the first Gulf War.
Right.
Yeah, no, so I always, whenever I cover this, it's always about the danger of independence, but it's nothing personal.
I know you love the Kurds, you're friends of the Kurds, you live in Kurdistan, have been living there.
It's only the question is just politics.
Like, jeez, what's Iraq and Syria and Iran and Turkey and, for that matter, Armenia and Azerbaijan gonna do?
If, you know what I mean, what's gonna happen when this population that is pentasected, or worse, tries to declare independence and all the different factions, all the different power relationships between all the different sides change?
It could be bloody.
You know, it's nothing personal at all.
It's just, well, this exact kind of thing is just what we talked about, right, is this ridiculous overreaction where, as you put it, makes it sound like every state around there, or many of them at least, are going into a panic about this, which sounds, it sounds kind of silly in a way.
Like, do they, is their intelligence that bad that, or I guess just they have to look strong even though they know just as well as you do that this doesn't really mean that they're declaring independence, just that they voted that they wanted to, you know?
They're not declaring independence.
They've made it clear they're not declaring independence.
Right.
And they wouldn't for until two years, up to two years of negotiations.
It's just domestic politics, but in Iran, in Iraq, in Turkey, they have their own reasons for making a big deal about this, but that's making it worse, is that it?
Yeah, it's making it much worse, and unnecessarily.
Some people have a hard time getting this, to understand that my position, that I think the referendum was a mistake, despite what I said about the Kurds and their aspirations.
I think politically it was a mistake, but I also think that the reaction is a mistake.
There are two mistakes here.
And just as I don't really have a position on the Catalonian referendum, I don't know enough about that, but I do think obviously no one could fail to see that the reaction by central government in Spain was a huge mistake yesterday in the violence that we saw.
So in both cases, there's overreaction by the central government, whereas the difference in Catalonia, though, I must say, is that they are very likely impending to declare independence.
They have 48 hours from yesterday, from Sunday, for the parliament to declare independence, and the government in Catalonia sent a statement formally to the parliament asking them to do that.
So that's different.
They do want to declare independence.
Now, will anybody recognize Catalonia?
That's another issue.
The EU has not been clear about that.
Juncker, one of the council of Europe, whatever it is, said at first that they would talk.
Then he backtracked from that.
So nobody might recognize Catalonia either, and one has to wonder about that.
And that's a very different situation because they're the richest part of Spain, and Spain would lose quite a lot, whereas the Kurdish region of Iraq is quite rich in oil, but most of it's around Kirkuk, which is why that's so fraught with tension, where if there is violence, it would take place there.
Because Abadi said he would send the Iraqi army to Kirkuk, which is controlled by the Peshmerga.
That hasn't happened yet, but if he does, there could very well be clashes there.
But the Kurdish region is not, aside from that oil, but their own oil is certainly an important part, would be an important part of Iraq's national income if they didn't sell it illegally at a discount to the Turks.
But it's not the same economic thing as in Catalonia.
But the big difference of the two is the declaration of independence.
So when the Kurds said they would not declare right away, this is a referendum for political will, which everybody knew anyway what their political will was.
So what has happened here?
Nothing, in my opinion.
And I don't fully understand all the motivations there, except that they won't let this stand, and they're punishing the Kurds.
Right now, only the flights really is the only punishment, but it could get worse if they had an embargo.
And again, I don't think there'll be violence in terms of a military intervention, but there will be violence in Kirkuk if the Iraqi army goes there.
All right, hang on just one second.
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Well, and so this is one of the things I wanted to ask you, too, was, well, we'll get back to Kirkuk in a second, but are not the Peshmerga and the Iraqi army embedded with each other in, or at least fighting side by side with each other against the Islamic State right now in Tal Afar and other places?
And haven't they been fighting next to each other, with each other for the last couple of years against the Islamic State?
Have they not forged a little bit kind of tighter relationship and better understanding between the two sides during this time?
And then isn't that a problem if their armed forces are adjacent to each other in this tension-filled time?
I don't think they actually went on any kind of joint operations together in Mosul, for example, or anywhere else.
They really kept it that separate the whole time, huh?
Well, the U.S. did forge, as you say, some cooperation between them.
But if you looked at the Mosul operation, the Peshmerga only operated in the villages to the east of Mosul, in other words, closer to their capital, Erbil, which is only 50 miles away.
And those were very important operations at the very beginning of the attempt to take over Mosul.
They had to take that.
But the Iraqi army and the police, the national police, even more than the army, did the fighting inside Mosul with American bombardments that killed up to 40,000, as we discussed last time we spoke, and that took over Mosul.
And Shia militia were fighting to the west of Mosul, from my understanding.
Now, I don't know.
There may have been some joint maneuvers and operations.
I can't say for sure, not.
But mostly they had separate objectives and they acted in separate theaters.
Now, Tal Afar has fallen, and that was to the Iraqi army, and the Iraqi army is pursuing other places where ISIS is now.
I'm not aware of the Kurds being involved in any of those operations.
So there was cooperation and there was fear.
I think we talked about this in one interview before the Mosul operation began, or just as it was getting underway, that there could be clashes once Mosul fell.
I think the way they solved that was to not have them, both either Shia militia or Peshmerga, together inside Mosul with the Iraqi army.
Only the Iraqi army and police that went into Mosul.
Now, about Kirkuk, I don't know how many times I've repeated myself about this.
So sorry, audience, but I still like it.
And sorry to you, Joe.
I probably said this to you too.
But if you remember that movie, V for Vendetta, from, I don't know, 10 years ago or so, there's a scene there where Queen Amidala, what's her name, is getting ready to go out for the night, brushing her hair and stuff.
And the TV news is on in the background.
And the movie takes place in the near future, right?
And the TV's on in the background and the TV announces that America's war in Kurdistan continues to rage today as blah-da-blah-da-blah were killed.
And they go on and show American GIs fighting on the side of a road somewhere.
And so just taking the current Iraq situation to its next step conclusion.
Well, what about Kurdistan and the conflict there?
But that could really happen, right?
Because as you say now, ever since 2003, they've re-Kurdicized that town.
They ethnically cleansed a lot of Arabs, kidnapped them and just deported a lot of them, and drove them out of town during Iraq War II under the cover of the rest of the Sunni-Shia violence that the American occupation had engendered.
And so now it's a majority Kurdish city again.
I think you said it's, if I remember right, you say it's under Kurdish control now, but it's still got a substantial minority of Arabs.
And you have a government in Baghdad that will fight before they just outright allow the secession of, and maybe this is why they don't want the secession of Kurdistan is because Kirkuk would be lost as well.
And that's the real, that's what they really care about.
Am I right?
There really could be another war here.
Yeah, first of all, there hasn't been a census in Kirkuk since 1957.
So nobody really knows the demographic makeup of the city.
The governor of the province of Kirkuk, which includes the city of Kirkuk, is a Kurd.
And the Iraqi parliament fired him, I think the day after the referendum.
And he's refused to step down.
So he's still in charge.
It's the military issue that the Peshmerga are the ones patrolling the city.
And the Assaj, they have their own kind of militarized police as well, paramilitaries, they're in the city as well.
When ISIS, if you remember the day the Mosul operation began the very day there was an attack in Kirkuk by ISIS.
And there was fierce fighting in the city for a day or two.
And it was this Assaj, this paramilitary force that put down that ISIS rebellion or attack inside Kirkuk.
So what the makeup is, how many Arabs there are or Kurds is not clear, but it's the military that controls.
There are still Iraqi national flags flying there and the Kurds fly their flag next to it.
Sometimes they fight over which flag will be in a building.
But that was before the referendum.
Now, there were also Shia militia who have said they would go there and fight if it became part of Kurdistan, but there's not gonna be a Kurdistan.
This is why I find this all unnecessarily fraught and full of tension, but they will have a symbolic vote in the end of the day.
As long as Baghdad doesn't agree to negotiate towards referendum, it's symbolic.
Even if the Kurds change their mind and say, oh, we're declaring independence, there's Israels, that's it, the only country that will recognize them.
And while they may have the legal rights under international law to declare self-determination, the Montevideo Convention, 1933, they are not gonna be recognized and they won't survive as a nation.
So, nothing changes with this referendum except the enormous tensions that are occurring right now.
I think it's gonna die down.
Did I get it right that it's the Peshmerga that control Kirkuk rather than the Iraqi army?
Yes, yes, that's right.
It only happened in 2014 when the Iraqi army left as they did in Mosul.
So, they have themselves to blame for that, but the city is disputed, belongs to Baghdad, according to them, and the Arabs live in there.
Most of the Turkmen live in there, too, which is one reason Turkey might wanna be involved, too, in Kirkuk because of the Turkmen who live there, many of whom were sent there to live by the Ottoman Empire in 1915, around 1920, to try to beef up their presence there as the Ottoman Empire was collapsing.
I forget if it was Barzani or Talabani had one time said that Kirkuk is our Jerusalem, and obviously that's completely overwrought, but I wonder how overwrought that is.
I mean, do they have that bad, like if someone tried to take San Antonio from us Texans, imagine what would happen.
I wonder, is that how strong the feeling is about Kurdish ownership over Kirkuk, ultimately?
Apparently, apparently it is, yes.
They do look upon.
That's not good.
No, no, it's not good.
And they were forced expulsions from Kirkuk by Saddam, and they're still pissed off about that.
That was in the 90s.
So yeah, that's the real flashpoint here, and let's hope it doesn't lead to that, but I think we're gonna enter a period of a stalemate.
I brought up that GCC Qatar issue because that's what's happened there as well.
There were fears of a Saudi military intervention into Qatar at the beginning.
That has died down.
There's still a flight ban on Qatar, except the Iranians opened their airspace.
So all flights from Qatar Airways and all other international flights out of Doha have to go through Iranian airspace to get out.
So that's just settled into a long-term economic blockade, an air blockade, but they have found ways.
Turkey, funny enough, has been flying lots of food into Doha, and the Iranians have been selling more.
So one of the reasons for that GCC blockade was because they felt Qatar was too close to Iran, the great enemy of the Saudis and the Emiratis.
And in fact, they've driven Qatar closer to Iran because of this.
It backfired in that way.
Hey, check this out.
Oh, go ahead.
No, no, I'm sorry, go ahead.
No, I was just saying that I think same kind of stalemate's gonna happen in the Kurdish region.
I just think this is interesting.
I don't know if you know this guy, Joel Wing, the Iraq analyst.
Well, you should follow him on Twitter.
He's Joel Wing Two, and he just- Joel Wing Two.
Joel Wing, yeah.
And he just is a really great independent analyst.
I think he's a high school teacher in Washington State, somewhere, something like that.
But he's just a really great historian and cataloger of all of Iraq War Two and ever since Iraq War Two.
And one of the things he does is he tweets out this day in Iraq War history kind of thing.
And here's what he just tweeted out.
October 3rd, actually, he's a day ahead here.
October 3rd, 2005, President Talabani accused the United Iraqi Alliance, that's the Hakeem faction, the Supreme Islamic Council and the Dawah Party, of not giving Kurds enough government positions, neglecting Kurdish ministries, and not dealing with the Kirkuk issue.
That's from 2005.
That was the big fight they were having there two and a half years into the occupation, or year and a half into the occupation.
Yeah, well, Talabani became president, as you know, as a Kurd.
But yeah, I'm looking at his tweets now.
Thank you for telling me about him.
Yeah, no, he's really great.
We're not aware of this.
Yeah, not aware at all of him before.
In fact, he's the guy, I quote him in my book because he's where I learned, he had the specific quotes where he tells the story of why the Bush senior administration changed their mind when they had encouraged the Shia and Kurdish uprising against Saddam after the war, after Iraq War I.
And it was because the Bata Brigade showed up and they realized, uh-oh, we're about to undo the entire Reagan era effort to support Saddam's war against Iran and import the Iranian revolution into Iraq.
Let's not do that.
So they changed their mind.
But he had it specifically, there was intelligence about the Bata Brigade coming back into Iraq from Iran where they'd been living since 1980.
That's interesting.
I didn't know that.
That makes sense.
Yeah, well, they completely screwed the Kurds that time too by telling them to rise up and not helping them.
However, they did institute the no-fly zone in the Kurdish north and in the Shia south.
And that allowed this beginnings of this autonomy that the Kurds have really quite enjoyed.
I mean, they've got not only their own flag and their own army, they were issuing visas to foreigners that stopped because of this air blockade.
And they have this incredibly tight economic relationship with Turkey.
And now they're putting all that at risk with this referendum and the overreaction that they should have seen coming.
They know.
They heard the threats.
This is not a surprise, the reaction of the region.
I think the US now may actually be playing a constructive role.
It's rare that I agree with the State Department on many things, but in this case, they've called for calm and they have reversed their threat, which made it hollow.
They threatened to not support talks, but now they are saying they're willing to support these talks, which are not gonna happen unless the Kurds cancel the referendum.
But they have apparently calmed everybody down to some extent, unless this was all a bluff to begin with about a military intervention.
Yet these war games right on the Kurdish border continue.
So anything could happen, but I don't suspect we'll see that.
And I think this might be the last interview you do with me on this, hopefully.
I think this is gonna die down and just return to the status quo, aren't they?
Which is pretty good for the Kurds.
They didn't need this, except their history and their fierce belief in their independence.
And then it goes back a long time, but it wasn't a smart move.
I think anybody could see that.
All right, well listen, thank you very much for coming back on the show, and I hope you're feeling better.
Get you some Benadryl or something there, bud.
No, I'm okay, I'm just need some water.
Thank you, Scott.
All right, good to talk to you again, Joe.
Appreciate it very much.
All the best.
All right, you guys, that is the great Joe Lauria.
He writes at consortiumnews.com and formerly was the UN reporter for the Wall Street Journal and a lot of other great publications.
The Sunday Times in London, et cetera.
But now you can find him at consortiumnews.com.
And I'm Scott Horton, that's the show.
Check out the full archives and sign up for the RSS feeds and everything at scotthorton.org.
I got 4,500 interviews for you there in the archives, all for free at scotthorton.org.
And check out my institute.
It's the Libertarian Institute at libertarianinstitute.org.
Me and Sheldon Richman and a lot of great writers over there at the Libertarian Institute.
Oh yeah, my book.
I wrote a book.
I published the book, finally.
Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
You can find out all about it and read all the great blurbs from Dan Ellsberg and Ron Paul and everybody else at foolserrand.us.
And follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
Thanks.
