Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our names, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing the great Patrick Coburn, Middle East correspondent for The Independent, that's independent.co.uk.
And of course, author of The Age of Jihad, Chaos and Caliphate, Muqtada, and a lot of other great books.
And we run essentially everything he writes in the viewpoint section there, or sometimes in the news at antiwar.com as well.
How are you doing, Patrick?
I'm doing good.
Great.
Really happy to have you back on the show here.
Very important doings going on in northeast Syria here with Turkey and all the other players involved.
Your headline latest here is Turkey's Syria invasion rapidly backfiring for Ankara.
What do you mean by that?
I think that this is one of the turning points in the Syrian war.
The Turks came across into northeast Syria, and that almost immediately led to the Kurds switching sides from being allied to the U.S. to being allied with Assad, present Assad, and the Russians.
I suspect they'd been talking about this for some time because then they very quickly, Syrian and some Russian troops, moved into the big Kurdish controlled cities.
There's a big city called Manbij, which is very important on the main road leading to the Kurdish territories and other cities.
This sort of changed the whole balance of power in northern Iraq.
It really left the Turks with nowhere to go.
They've been fighting really for two country towns, a place called Ras Al-Ain and Tal Abyad.
I've been in them both.
When you look at maps on television or in the newspapers, you'd think that these were big centers, but they're not.
They're kind of country towns.
They're still doing that 10 days after their invasion, so it's really not going anywhere.
I guess that's the good news, right, is that things already stalemated so quickly and the Kurds have already at least begun to implement their deal with inviting the Syrian army back in, so maybe the whole thing will be over by next Monday?
Not necessarily over.
I mean, I think we heard this rather weird agreement between the U.S. and Turkey on Thursday evening when the Vice President Mike Pence and Pompeo, the Secretary of State, arrived in Ankara.
They said they negotiated real hard with Erdogan, the President Erdogan of Turkey, and they finally got this wonderful agreement with the Turks, which actually just gave the Turks everything they wanted, which is a whole sort of 20-mile strip of territory along the whole on the Syrian side of the Syrian-Turkish border.
Basically, Turkey just moves its frontier south and moves it into an area, this is in theory, which is mainly inhabited by Kurds who'd certainly become refugees.
This was presented by Trump as a great success, but this was just a capitulation to what the Turks had always wanted.
Do you think that represents the Turks are really moving their border permanently 30 miles south or trying to?
Well, trying to is the thing.
I don't think they're up for it because they actually only attacked on a much smaller area, about 60 miles.
That's only about 20%.
But even then, you're saying that they mean to permanently change the shape of their international border from now on.
This isn't just an incursion over the border and back again for them.
They'd like to.
They'd like to.
They've said that they'd like to move 2 million Syrian Arab refugees in there, which don't come from that area.
They don't say that.
They mean that moves moving the Kurds out.
This is ethnic cleansing on a major scale.
Now, fortunately, they're probably not up for it.
And perhaps fortunately also that since the U.S. pulled out, it doesn't really have the strength or the influence with the Kurds to betray the Kurds a second time around.
You know, whatever Pence thought he was agreeing to, I think that this was, you know, in order so Trump could say he'd want to cease fire, that he had a big success.
And that's what was done.
And I think Erdogan agreed to it.
Why?
Because his invasion wasn't going anywhere.
The main targets had already been taken over by the Syrian government, the Russians, and in alliance with the Kurds, the Kurdish paramilitaries, the guys who had been fighting ISIS with in alliance with the U.S. have now become part of the Syrian army.
So, you know, there's a complete transformation there.
I don't think that the people who haven't been following it quite understand what a transformation this is, that Assad isn't back in control of most of Syria now, and he's in alliance with the Kurds.
So he's got most of what he wants.
And this makes it pretty difficult for the Turks to do anything because they don't want to quarrel with the Russians.
This will probably be decided next week with the Russians orchestrating things.
Right.
And for people in the audience who are lost in the weeds here, keep up.
War's been going on for quite a few years now.
Now, this is, you just mentioned there, I think, one of the most meaningful things here, that the YPG is actually being integrated into the Syrian army.
That seems like a pretty huge concession on both of their parts there.
And they just went ahead and shook hands on that, huh?
Yeah, look, the Kurds don't like Assad much, but they would prefer to have, you know, they've been persecuted by the Syrian regime in Damascus in the past.
They've been marginalized.
But when push comes to shove, they would prefer an Assad government, which might be dictatorial.
But, you know, they can stay there to the Turks taking over, which means ethnic cleansing.
They'll, you know, they become refugees.
You know, I think this is pretty generally accepted whenever I've talked to Kurds in that area.
That's what they say.
They don't like either, but they prefer Assad to the Turks.
They prefer to have their own state, but that's not going to happen.
Can you describe the status quo, say 2010, about, you know, the role of the Syrian army in Kurdistan and the degree of autonomy or oppression they had there?
Erdogan's attitude toward the border at that time?
Sorry, Assad's attitude towards the border or Turkey's?
Both.
Well, Assad, you know, they tried to sort of Arabize the border.
They called all the Kurdish towns by Arabic names.
It's kind of confusing.
Most of these places have two names.
They had, you know, education was in Arabic.
On the other side of the border, you know, oppression was in so many ways greater and has got worse since.
You know, the Kurdish cities in Turkey have all been, you know, they've been bombed and shelled.
The outside world pays absolutely no attention to this, but, you know, this happened in over the last four or five or six years.
The Turks have been crushing all dissent among the Kurds in southeast Turkey, you know, blowing up, using heavy artillery on their districts and cities and so forth.
You know, tremendous attention to anything that any atrocities committed in Syria, complete absence of interest to anything that's happening in Turkey.
And of course, the Kurds in Syria get the message that that's going to happen to them if the Turkish army moves in.
I'm sorry, I'm not very clear a lot of the time, Patrick, but what I was interested in there was about in 2010 before this whole thing broke out.
I mean, I know that the Kurds and the Syrian Arab army had not fought during the war that essentially the SAA just withdrew from their area because they had more immediate concerns.
And already it was becoming clear to the Kurds that the sort of jihadis, the Syrian armed opposition was deeply anti-Kurdish.
And this was true even before ISIS, before Daesh developed, you know, the al-Taida type groups were, you know, were attacking the Kurds.
And so Assad pulled his forces out of the north to economize on, you know, on troops, but also because there was a sort of understanding with the Kurds.
I mean, I've been in the Kurdish capital commercially, de facto capital, and you're walking along there, but you suddenly find there are Syrian army roadblocks.
This is before the present agreement because the Syrian army and the government still controlled the airport and part of the center of town.
So there was sort of an understanding there from quite an early stage.
Hey guys, Scott here for Liberty Under Attack Publications.
Looking for a Liberty-focused publisher?
Liberty Under Attack publishes books and strategy guides for individuals looking to increase their personal freedom.
They assist authors through the entire publishing process, proofreading, editing, cover designs, paperback and Kindle formatting, and full audio book narration and post-production.
Tell them Scott sent you and get 20% off a full service deal.
To get some one-of-a-kind books or for more information, visit LibertyUnderAttack.com.
Hey guys, check out Listen & Think audiobooks.
They're at ListenAndThink.com and of course on Audible.com.
And they feature my book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, as well as brand new Out Inside Syria by our friend Reese Ehrlich and a lot of other great books, mostly by libertarians there.
Reese might be one exception, but essentially they're all libertarian audiobooks.
And here's how you can get a lifetime subscription to Listen & Think audiobooks.
Just donate $100 to The Scott Horton Show at scotthorton.org.
So it does make sense, right, that they would bring the SAA in there as the best of some bad options.
They're not going to get to have full independence for Rojava there, but that was never really in the cards.
But I guess, you know, recently the YPG has been overextended in occupying Raqqa and places outside of their own traditional area anyway.
I guess they must have, I'm assuming they've withdrawn from those areas and come back home in the current crisis, no?
Yeah, I mean, you know, it's quite early days yet.
I mean, it's only a couple of days since the Syrian army moved into Raqqa.
You know, we talk about the Kurdish controlled areas, but about half the people there are Arabs.
Mostly in the north it's Kurds up along the Turkish border.
Go a bit further south and you're in the Euphrates Valley.
The SDF forces then you're talking about?
Yeah, the SDF.
But the Euphrates Valley is mostly Arab and almost entirely Arab.
We had the SDF, you know, this is sort of alphabet soup, which was put together partly on American insistence.
Now the core fighters there are the Kurds, the Popular Mobilization, People's Mobilization Units, the YPG.
And then they recruited a lot of Arabs.
People joined for money because they didn't like ISIS or because their tribe, tribal reasons.
And that was probably half of the Syrian Democratic Forces.
It was about sort of 55,000 strong.
But the core fighting units were Kurds and led by Kurds who were very experienced, been fighting a long time.
Yeah.
Now, you mentioned the presence of the Russians too.
As soon as this deal was struck between Assad and the Kurds, the Russians swooped right into Manbij and started patrolling around and using them as human shields, using themselves as human shields really against the Turks, right?
Yeah, I think that they figured, I'm sure they figured that the Turks were not going to take on the Russians and the Syrian army.
After all, first of all, they're allied to the Russians.
That's Erdogan's big, Putin is his big ally.
And secondly, they're sort of not up to it.
You know, they don't have enough troops there.
People talk about the Turks having the second, the biggest army in NATO, 600,000 men.
But actually their fighting strength is much less.
And their, you know, their invasion wasn't, you know, they had about 6,000 guys immediately sort of north of the border.
Then about the same number of irregulars.
These are sort of Arab militias, very dangerous guys, often former ISIS, Al Qaeda, very sectarian.
They've been committing a lot of the atrocities.
A woman who was a Kurdish politician, her car was stopped and these irregulars, these Arab militiamen dragged her out and shot her.
So there've been quite a lot of atrocities going on there.
Moderate rebels, her executioners.
Well, the moderate rebels, yeah.
And the Turkish army hasn't been doing too great either.
I mean, they seem to have been using white phosphorus on civilian areas.
There's a particularly unpleasant thing that if it lands on the skin, it sort of absorbs the water and becomes, you know, gets even hotter and sort of burns into the body.
I'm sorry, I missed the first part of that.
Who was using white phosphorus there?
The Turkish air force was dropping bombs, which according to local witnesses, not Kurds, but people I know there, it's banned by most international organizations.
It burns into the skin where there's moisture and it gets hotter and hotter.
It sort of basically burns people to death slowly.
It's a very nasty weapon, but they've been sort of dropping bombs with white phosphorus on Kurdish civilian areas.
So pretty bad stuff.
Now, you know, where are the U.S. in this?
Well, they pulled out.
Then I think, you know, these recent negotiations, peace negotiations, I think this is all really a stunt to show, you know, we, Trump can say, you know, they've been accused of starting the war and letting the Turks in, but, you know, can say I brought a peace, you know, but actually, you know, this was I think this happened because the Turks aren't getting anywhere on the battlefront.
You know, they're still fighting on the frontier.
And Erdogan is a bit like Trump himself.
He wants, you know, when he when he's when things are not going well, he wants to announce a famous victory and say tremendous success and hope somebody notices that he hasn't achieved any of his objectives.
Yeah.
And so kind of they both had a motive to both Turkey and the U.S. had a motive to, you know, to get each other off the hook.
Right.
But the essential thing has changed, which is that Assad has taken and the Russians have taken over that part of Syria and the Turks aren't going to fight them.
So they're going nowhere.
So they might as well.
Poor war.
And when we talk about the SAA and even the Russians deploying, then is that, you know, further east from Manbij and Kobani all the way to the Iraqi border?
It's in Raqqa, it's in a place called Hasakah, Qamishli, which is the capital.
The only two places they aren't, I think, is in Ras Al-Ain and Tal Abyad.
These are the two towns that the Turks attacked.
But they seem to be everywhere else.
They're kind of caught on sanitaire.
I don't know how many Syrian army guys there are, but if they're there with the Russians, it makes it very difficult for the Turks to do anything against them.
And to attack these cities.
I know about 18 months ago, the Turks did this before in a place called Afrin up on the northeast.
And, you know, this was a wholly Kurdish area.
Beginning of last year, they moved in, they ethnically cleansed it.
Half the Kurds or more were turned into refugees.
Lots of atrocities.
And, you know, these were on video and so forth, but nobody paid any attention.
This time around, you know, there's lots of attention.
There's lots of international focus on this.
Why?
Because I think the way it happened, the way Trump gave the green light and so forth, it's much more difficult for the Turks to do.
So they've been kind of losing the information battle and they've been losing the diplomatic battle and they've been telling their own people that they're winning terrific victories on the battlefield.
And, you know, that works in Turkey, mainly because there's no opposition media anymore or very little of it.
So they can keep sort of beating the patriotic drum.
But it's not really true.
They haven't really got anywhere on the battlefield.
So I think for the moment, it's very convenient for them to have a ceasefire, which they're calling a pause.
They won't call it a ceasefire.
But so Erdogan and the others, they're talking big, but actually they haven't achieved much.
Yeah.
Now, it seems like, you know, it is a fair criticism, right, of Trump that essentially he could have told the Turks, hold your horses.
I'm going to work out a deal to bring the Syrian government in here.
I'm going to encourage the Kurds to invite the Syrian army back in here.
And maybe we'll even, you know, get Putin to shake hands on it too.
And probably could have avoided all of this.
And yet, on the other hand, politically speaking, I guess he wouldn't have gotten into any more trouble than he got in for doing it this way.
But almost seems like he had to try to surprise them or else the narrative would have been, sure, Trump's in the employ of Putin and here he is handing the Kurds over to Assad, the same way they accused him of handing them over to Erdogan.
Yeah, I think that this is true.
I think that a lot of the criticism, I mean, you know, I think that Trump did betray the Kurds in the way he did this.
I don't think they were too surprised.
I don't think they saw this coming.
That's why they flipped sides immediately.
You know, I'm sure there was a lot of preplanning there.
But I think that people say, well, he shouldn't have done this.
He should have just stayed and there should be an American presence.
And that would have been a leverage on Assad, basically saying, let's continue with the war in Syria.
That's pretty hypocritical.
It wasn't going anywhere.
And also, you know, it's kind of obvious that there should have been an agreement with Damascus, between the Kurds and Damascus.
And the U.S. shouldn't have been vetoing that.
And I think people like Brett McGurk, the U.S. envoy, was pushing for that.
But it politically wasn't possible for Trump to do that.
But I think like a lot of things to do with Trump, you know, in some ways his political instinct is right and is very different from establishment opinion in Washington.
But when he gets down to doing it, you know, the whole thing is sort of shambolic, a terrific mess.
Yeah.
Every time.
So, the great Dan McAdams over there at the Ron Paul Institute, he was saying, you know, you want to look on the bright side of this thing, it really is a win, win, win, win all the way around here, where the Kurds are going to get essentially their autonomy, but not quite full independence, but they'll be protected from Turkish aggression.
The Turks get their border safe zone, kind of third party interference there on the border through the SAA.
The Americans, the American people at least, get to withdraw our forces from one theater of conflict.
And, you know, essentially, I guess, whatever the Russians' interests here aren't affected negatively anyway.
And so, really, the only people who are complaining are the people who still want to see Assad overthrown and won't just admit that Syria isn't just a place, it's a sovereign nation.
And, of course, it makes sense that ultimately his army is going to come back to the northeast where they used to be.
Yeah.
And they weren't really people who said that, you know, they'd ever actually explain what, you know, how he was going to be overthrown.
So, in practice, they were advocating, we're just continuing endless war against Assad, which wasn't overthrowing Assad, but it made things, you know, completely miserable for the Syrian people.
So, I think there's tremendous of hypocrisy there.
Now, yeah, you know, it's not great for the Kurds who, you know, 200 people have been killed, 160,000 people have been turned into refugees.
You know, that's not great for them.
No.
But things seem to be happening like that.
You know, will the Kurds get autonomy?
Yeah, they'll get something because, you know, they still have a powerful army in being, you know, maybe 25,000, 30,000 men.
That's probably the best army in Syria.
So, they'll get something out of this.
You know, Assad and his people, you know, there's a dictatorship, you know, they don't like sharing power, but probably they'll have to.
So, you know, there are pluses as well as minuses in this, and maybe more pluses at the end of the day than minuses, that it's sort of broken the logjam.
Well, you know, you don't have to look very far in the different reporting and opinion pieces and stuff about this to see that at least for some involved in this debate, the Kurds are really just a red herring that they're hiding behind in what amounts to a bait and switch and not even to fight ISIS.
They're hiding behind that too.
Their real worry, as they sometimes admit, is the increased power and influence of Iran and Hezbollah inside Syria, where they came to help the state fend off these CIA backed terrorists all these years.
And so that's really why they say we have to stay.
And as a big part of the worry, articulating quite a number of pieces saying that, well, geez, if Trump pulls out of Syrian Kurdistan, maybe that portends a pull out from the southeast as well.
And again, that's their supposed check on Iran, and that's what they're really worried about.
It's kind of a nonsense.
They sort of live in a fantasy world.
First of all, Iranian presence and influence on Syria largely depends on how much the Syrian government thinks it's under pressure from the U.S. or Saudi Arabia or Qatar or some other or Turkey.
The less pressure they're under, the less the Syrian government needs Iran.
In fact, it's the exact opposite of what people say.
So, Iranian influence was much higher before the Russians came in.
There's also this sort of, I think, kind of weird argument saying this will open up a corridor between Iran and Lebanon.
Now, this is the modern world.
They're not going to be chariots coming from Iran to Lebanon.
If they want to send fighters to Lebanon, Lebanon is full of fighters, so I don't know why they would want to do that.
They can fly the same thing with weapons.
You don't have to drive them across.
There are plenty of roads.
So it's not that you suddenly have a sort of corridor.
I think it's a kind of propaganda invention.
So, I think the one thing where actually Trump is sort of correct is that having a sort of pocket of a few U.S. troops down in the Southeast or something, what does that get you?
These guys are just a target.
They don't do much.
Better to get out.
Yeah, real questions about whether they have enough force to protect themselves there.
Just enough to get killed.
They call it the U.S. Air Force, or maybe they can, but this sort of keeps the war going.
It really doesn't get them anywhere.
Well, let me ask you about, regardless of how good of an argument it is on their part, is it even really true that there's a highway that runs from Tehran to Baghdad and then through Western Iraq and Southeastern Syria on to Beirut?
Yeah, there's a road network like anywhere else, and you could.
But that's not the only way.
There are lots of other roads.
Remember how ISIS used to move its stuff around, although it was under heavy air attack the whole time.
They're always moving between Mosul and Raqqa and so forth.
Yeah, there is a road that runs from Tehran.
Lots of roads from Tehran to Baghdad to Damascus to Amman and Jordan to a load of other places.
Sorry, yeah.
I'm sorry.
Well, so what about the security situation in Western Iraq?
Is that it's perfectly fine for Iranian supplies?
Do they ship them through there at all?
Missiles, yeah, stuff like this.
An awful lot of this in the Middle East you can just buy in places like Yemen.
People are always saying the Iranians are supplying them.
But this is one of the world's biggest arm markets.
If you've got the money, if you or I were there and we had a suitcase with a million dollars, we could buy heavy weapons.
We could buy tanks.
Yeah, they're still exporting weapons, the Yemenis, in the middle of a war.
Yeah, but that's kind of the big business there and big traders in weapons.
So, it's the weaponry.
One time, I don't know now, but a few years ago, a Yemeni was explaining to me, yeah, there was some money coming from Iran or at least oil.
Oil products that they gave to the Houthis.
They then sold it.
This is outside Yemen.
Then they had the money.
They brought the money back to Yemen and just bought it from the arms traders.
And that's how they keep going with ammunition because they use a lot of ammunition.
So, I think that it's kind of absurd.
Now, there is a certain reality there, but it's different.
If you take the northern tier of the Middle East from Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, these are either Shia majority or a Shia control.
Essentially, the Alawites are Shia in Syria or they're a plurality in Lebanon.
This is kind of Shia territory.
So, it's always been difficult for any opponent.
And it's also Shia and Kurds in those areas.
So, that has always made it difficult for any Sunni outside power like Turkey or Saudi Arabia.
It's the transcripts of all 38 interviews I've done with the heroic Dr. Paul.
And then some.
Central Banking, the terror war, Iran, Korea, the police state and its whistleblowers.
It's America's greatest hero at its best.
I know you'll love it.
The great Ron Paul.
Get it at libertarianinstitute.org and amazon.com.
And now, can we talk a little bit about the Idlib province where there's a little Islamic state right there.
They got their own little mini al-Nusra caliphate, right?
Yeah, they've got, you know, this is armed opposition.
They're very anti-Assad.
You know, as elsewhere, the jihadis, you know, the guys who keep changing their name, but basically are al-Nusra.
They say they've dropped their links with al-Qaeda, but they're sort of the same, you know, are in charge.
Why?
Because they're the best organized and they're the best fighters, you know.
But what will happen there?
If Turkey wants sort of some sort of understanding with Assad and the Russians, then it can't back up these guys in Idlib.
You know, it won't be able to sort of support them militarily if it wants to get some deal from Assad and the Russians.
So, I think that's going to go down at some point.
I mean, bad news for them.
But that's still the one corner of Syria that Assad doesn't, the Russians don't control.
And that's a big concern of the Americans, something that they regret that his new alliance with the Kurds is going to allow him to retake control over those resources.
Yeah, but it never died.
I mean, I've been outside Manbij and this city that the Turks wanted to get hold of and didn't.
It's a big trading city about 80 miles east of Aleppo.
And you look on the main road, it's called the M4.
It's kind of the spinal cord of the Kurdish areas.
And it was full of trucks carrying crude oil from the Kurdish controlled oil fields in the east over to an oil refinery at a place called Homs, which is controlled by Assad.
And then the oil product would go back.
So, there was always plenty of cooperation there beforehand.
But obviously, it's good news for Assad if he's got control of the oil and gas fields there again.
So, I mean, you know, so the bad news is quite a lot of people have been killed.
You know, the people have been turned into refugees.
The border with Syria isn't going to settle down soon.
But, you know, I don't think the Turks are going anywhere fast.
I don't think they'll be able to, they might take over a little bit of the border, but they won't be able to take over much.
The good thing is that the war in Syria seems to be ebbing.
This was the last really big issue unresolved was between the Kurds and the Turks.
So, that seems to be ebbing.
What about all the threats that, oh, no, ISIS is going to come back now that America is not there to work with the Kurds?
I, you know, it's a bit easier for them, you know, because they're not facing a sort of U.S.-Kurdish coalition, you know, U.S. air power and so forth.
But I just, I doubt it, you know, because, you know, ISIS comes out of the Sunni Arab community and they've taken a terrible battering, you know, part of half Mosul, their big city in Iraq is destroyed, much more of Iraq, their biggest, you know, big city in Syria is destroyed.
Will the Syrian community, Sunni community support them?
No, I don't think it will, you know, it'll be difficult for them to get recruits.
You don't see so many suicide bombings as before, you know, that probably means they can't get recruits as they once did.
They can come back a bit, but I think that there are limits to what they can achieve.
Now, what's the eastern limit of the Syrian army?
I know at this point they're expanding in the east up in the north in Kurdistan, but that's really the natural replacement for American power in eastern Syria is the Syrian government, right?
Yeah, I mean, they're over towards Deir ez-Zor, not that popular over there, but a bit early to say exactly what will happen there because the Syrian government and the Russians have been concentrating on the cities sort of in the north, northern part of Syria, you know, facing the Turks.
But in other words, I mean, if the SAA is as far as Deir ez-Zor out there, then there's not much room for the Islamic State, you know, leftovers to run around in anyway, right?
I think it'd be difficult to do, you know, because they'd be facing a stronger Syrian central government, you know, they would, the Kurds would be now one element of the Syrian army, they're a pretty autonomous one.
At the end of the day, you know, the US foreign powers, I think, will sort of look for almost anybody to keep ISIS under control.
That said, you know, people who are occupied, Syrian army, the Iraqi army in Iraq, you know, this creates a lot of resentment, you know, that might go to ISIS.
But, you know, people have been experienced ISIS rule, you know, an awful lot of them don't want that to happen again, you know, they've sort of seen people being lashed to death and having their heads chopped off.
You know, they don't want these guys back in business, however much they might dislike the Kurds or Assad.
All right, now, I've already kept you half an hour, but is it okay if I ask you about Iraq, or do you have to go?
No, sure, ask.
Great.
So I know you were recently there, I just talked to you, I guess, right before the worst of the chaos broke out with this protest movement there.
And I'm sure you've heard, it was rumored, I guess, before it broke out, that perhaps there was going to be an American-backed military coup, and that maybe this prominent general was demoted for that reason to preempt the coup against the Supreme Islamic Council government of al-Mahdi there.
But anyway, you were there, so I was just wondering, I know Muqtada al-Sadr even endorsed the protests and stuff.
You know, this is in the context of greater tension between the U.S. and Iran.
More than that, you had this al-Saidi, the general who got dismissed, that was one sign of this sort of tension.
There had been some attacks in Baghdad by Israeli drones, some of this was admitted by Israel, saying that they were hitting Iranian missiles which were being transported through Iraq from Iran to Syria and Lebanon.
That had upped the tension.
But the main thing in Iraq is that because people don't feel under threat from ISIS anymore, you know, then they look around and they find, you know, this country that has enormous oil wealth and big oil revenues, you know, that there's no education, health, or jobs, or holes in the road.
So there's fantastic anger over that because this money has been taken over by the sort of kleptocracy that runs Iraq.
Now, when I was there, you know, initially things were pretty quiet, and then one Tuesday evening I was planning to leave Baghdad to do something in the country.
And I knew there was going to be a protest quite near my hotel in a place called Tahrir Square.
And these guys, when they sort of, they had a sort of march over a bridge in the direction of the Green Zone, but it wasn't that big.
But then the riot police and the others started shooting at them and killing people.
And this was all in the social media.
And then the following day, you know, things erupted.
And they shot even more people.
Then they introduced a curfew.
Then they shut down the internet.
So a general overreaction.
It may have been that Iran and the sort of paramilitary sympathetic to Iran thought there was going to be a velvet revolution.
You know, protests and gradually sort of, you know, the government would fall.
So there was sort of overreaction.
A lot of people got killed.
It was said to be 100 dead.
But I talked to people in the hospitals, and, you know, they said there were just more people being killed.
But they've been told not to say one hospital, which wasn't that close to the protests that had 41 dead.
So I think it was a lot of overreaction by the government and the paramilitaries.
Were they afraid of this general that was dismissed?
Is that why he was dismissed?
Well, he may have done, but, you know, again, you know, Iraqi politics is a real can of worms.
He was running something called the Counterterrorism Service.
He led the final assault on Mosul against ISIS and was pretty successful and was pretty popular because of that.
At the same time, there's corruption within the Counterterrorism Service, although, you know, they're meant to be pretty good soldiers.
And there were factions within that who wanted to get rid of him, but he'd started investigating this corruption.
And, you know, so there were guys who make a lot of money out of that who wanted to get rid of him.
Now, of course, they may have been promoting this idea that maybe this guy will lead a coup or something like that.
But I doubt it, you know, just because in Iraq, it's just very difficult to do because you've got big paramilitary forces there against it.
You've got the Shia hierarchy there against it, you know.
So somebody might have used that, but I doubt if that was the—it certainly wasn't the only reason and probably not the main reason.
Well, we've got to mention the irony here, the inescapable irony of the fact that the current prime minister, al-Mahdi, is from the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq.
As you said, very close to the bottom brigade of the, you know, speaking of those Shiite militias.
And this is the group above even the Da'wah party, really, right, that the Bush administration promoted and put in power in Iraq War II.
And they happen to be Iran's best friends in Iraq, Da'wah and Skerri.
Yeah, but these guys, you know, that's—at the end of the day or the beginning of the day, maybe I should say, you know, these guys have a lot of difference with Iran.
Iraqi Shia are a bit different from Iranian Shia, but, you know, at the end of the day, they belong—they're all Shia there.
The Iraqi Shia do not want to see Iran go down because that would leave them isolated and vulnerable.
I mean, one Shia leader said to me, you know, Iran gives us—who doesn't much like Iran—Iran gives us sort of religious sort of strength in depth.
So, you know, Iraq is always going to be in one respect inclined towards Iran.
On the other hand, they don't want to be dominated by Iran.
And the Iranians are pretty good at Iraqi political gains.
You know, they have sort of—they have sort of supporters, guys they promoted.
I remember in 2003, a friend of mine who was a Shia sort of leader went on a tour of southern Iraq.
And he came back to me, and I said, how are things?
He was rather anti—he was an anti-Iranian.
And he said it pretty bad.
He said all the pro-Iranian groups are under the control of Iran.
And all the anti-Iranian groups are also under the control of Iran.
You know, the Iranians are sort of—sort of know how to do those things.
And Iraq is kind of essential to them.
Doesn't necessarily mean they're that popular, but—and they're very nervous of anything that they think might threaten their position there.
Right.
That's in your book about Muqtada al-Sadr.
He was the most independent of the Shiite leaders, and yet still was pretty dependent on them anyway.
Right.
Well, yeah.
If you have to fight the Americans, you know, you need money.
You need weapons.
You need ammunition.
You've got to go somewhere.
That's the kind of history of Iraq, you know.
Yeah.
And no question, it was the Americans that put him in that position.
The leader of the Sadrists.
And he said, yeah.
He said that great problem with Iraq is, you know, that you sort of—that you have sort of communities and factions within the country who then sort of look to outside countries to support them outside.
And the two fuse together.
And that's what prevents—you know, that's what, you know, produces the civil wars within the country.
And he had this sort of thing, analogy.
He said, look, the problem with Iraq is, you know, it's like a guy who has a—who, you know, he's got a house and there are mice.
He gets a cat, you know, and the cat gets rid of the mice.
But then he's got the cat, you know, so he gets a dog to get rid of the cat and so forth.
So, you know, the point is that the Iraqis are always introducing some outside force to get rid of something that they don't like.
And this allows foreign powers to increase their influence.
Yeah.
I don't guess these groups have ever really been the puppets of the Iranians as much as— the context is that it's sort of a contest between the U.S. and Iran for who has more influence over these groups.
And it's always Iran because, as you say, they're the co-religionists.
And after all, these scary guys lived in Iran for 30 years before 2003.
So, you know, but you've got to, you know—Iraq is an interesting place, which is why I go to a lot of it.
But it's kind of the Wild West of the sort of the Arab world, if I'm going to use that analogy.
You know, it's—each of these groups has its own interests.
You know, you have the tribes that are important.
But, you know, they'll go with who provides them with jobs or money or, you know, for the defense of their community.
But they never stay permanently loyal to anybody.
Yeah.
And then now, what influence does America have in Iraq anymore?
I guess we still sell them weapons, and so they need that.
But do we have any other leverage at all at this point?
Well, yeah.
I mean, you know, they can—the Air Force—you know, Iraqis are still frightened of ISIS.
They don't want to—they can see they might need the U.S. for that and U.S. air power.
You know, Iraqis may not like the U.S., but also quite a lot of people think it's a balance to Iran.
They don't want Iran to—you know, if we're going to have Iranian influence, then we need a bit of American influence.
But things like, for instance, these drone strikes—not very many of them Israeli drone strikes.
But I was talking to sort of political leaders.
They said, well, Israel wouldn't have done that without an okay from America.
So why are the Americans doing this to us?
You know, so then Parliament starts passing bills.
You know, the Americans should be removed from the country and so forth.
So it depends how much Trump ups the—ups the pressure on Iran.
I think this ought to be sort of dying down now because, you know, after American—after Trump is pulled out of Syria, after everything that's happened there, it'll be really difficult for him to sustain his sort of policy of maximum pressure on Iran.
You know, he'll need allies.
You've got to have a lot of allies to enforce it and so forth.
Before that, we had the Iranian Houthi attack on Saudi oil facilities.
So the Saudis are feeling pretty vulnerable.
So I think that the big Trump-Iran confrontation may be, you know, becoming less significant.
Yeah, it seems like the worst of it is over for now, at least.
Yeah, and it hasn't worked, you know.
You suddenly have the Saudis making some friendly remarks about—about Iran.
You know, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman saying reasonably sort of nice things about Iran, or at least not hostile.
While, you know, Yair Togo, he was giving interviews saying, you know, I want to fight in the heart of Iran and so forth.
Very aggressive stuff.
You don't hear that.
Yeah, UAE's been talking with them as well, right?
And pulling out of Yemen.
And, you know, the Kuwaitis don't want to damp things down.
The same is true of Oman.
You know, so it's really just Saudi Arabia.
And they're not as enthusiastic as they were before.
And also Saudi power is less, you know.
Almost everything has gone wrong for them since Yemen.
It's funny because we never really hear about the Kuwaitis.
But they would have a lot to lose in the event of a war with Iran, wouldn't they?
Yeah, yeah.
And they sort of—so that's true.
But, you know, the Saudis are less, you know, also obviously damaged by the, you know, the murder of Jabal Khashoggi.
And then their oil facilities are attacked.
So I think that the steam is coming out of the whole Trump idea of sort of really squeezing Iran.
You know, one of the things is to say Iranian influence must be reduced in countries like Syria.
But, you know, if the U.S. is pulled out, you know, obviously Iranian influence in some ways increases.
So the point I made was that the central government in Syria gets stronger the less they need Iran.
Right.
Yeah, America—they did this in the first place, they said, to weaken Iranian influence.
And they ended up turning Syria into a dependent on Iran where before they were just friends.
And so— Yeah, no, exactly.
And, you know, the same was true in the occupation of Iraq, you know, that people have been pretty anti-Iranian.
Like Muqtada al-Sadr, you know, suddenly they have to—they want to offend off the U.S.
They need allies.
They look to Iran.
So, again, that sort of trying to reduce Iranian influence ended up by increasing it.
Yep.
Well, the last major theater of America's anti-Iranian policy backfiring in the region right now, then, is in Yemen.
You mentioned the UAE pulled at least their official army out.
They're still supporting a lot of mercs there, I think.
And the war is continuing.
But there has been some noise about—especially after that Houthi attack that you mentioned on the oil refinery—that maybe find a way to wind that thing down, too?
Yeah.
I mean, you know, there are more noises from Saudi Arabia about winding it down.
You know, it's also—somehow the last year, I think since about the time of the Khashoggi murder, suddenly—well, you could tell me if this is true.
I get the impression in the U.S. and elsewhere that the Yemen War and the Saudi role in the Yemen War is getting a lot more negative publicity than it did.
Yeah.
You know, for really quite a long time, they were sort of able to keep it off the international agenda.
But the last year, that really isn't true anymore.
Right.
I think that's right.
Yeah.
Well, they even passed War Powers Act resolutions, but Trump vetoed it, and then they failed to override his veto, and then that was kind of it for now.
Yeah.
So generally, you can—you know, the wheels seem to be coming off the Trump foreign policy in the Middle East, you know, the center of it being the alliance with Saudi Arabia and Israel and squeezing Iran.
But Saudi has turned out to be much weaker than anybody thought.
And I think that, you know, Iran has shown that it's very difficult to squeeze.
You know, at one point, you know, lots of talk of regime change, not just by John Bolton but lots of others.
You know, that was almost the official policy at one time.
Now it's sort of demanding a meeting with the Iranian—Rouhani, the Iranian leader and so forth.
So I think that that's sort of—you know, you can feel that that whole issue is getting less and less.
Yeah.
I just hope they can figure out a way out of it other than turning around and escalating some other way because it's pretty hard to just admit that the whole policy has come to nothing and come crawling back to the JCPOA or something.
They're going to have to come up with something.
Oh, I'm sure they'll come up with something.
You know, they sort of declare a famous victory of one sort or another.
Yeah.
Which would be fine with me.
They can call it whatever they want as long as they quit with the killing, you know?
Sure.
All right.
Well, thank you very much for coming back on the show, Patrick.
Great to talk to you again.
Great to talk to you.
Bye for now.
Okay, guys.
That is the great Patrick Cockburn.
He is at The Independent, independent.co.uk, and his books are The Age of Jihad, Chaos and Caliphate, The Rise of Islamic State, Muqtada, and on like that.
You can also find what he writes at UNZ.com.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan, at foolserrand.us.
