For Pacifica Radio, January 5th, 2020.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, you guys, welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the editorial director of Anti-War.com and the author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
You'll find my full interview archive, more than 5,000 of them now, going back to 2003, and sign up for the podcast feed at scotthorton.org.
All right, you guys, introducing Patrick Coburn from The Independent, that's independent.co.uk, the best Western war reporter in the Middle East, by far.
Recent books include Chaos and Caliphate.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm doing good.
Good to be back.
Great.
I really appreciate you joining us.
So, big news out of Iraq.
The Americans last night, using Apache helicopters, killed Qasem Soleimani, the leader of the Iranian Quds Force, and an associate of his, who is a leader of an Iraqi militia.
And so, I guess my first question for you is your immediate reaction to that and what you think the consequences will be.
It's a pretty astonishing thing to do.
I mean, this is in an independent country, Iraq, and you go and assassinate the Iranian general who's legally there, he's in the open, and pay no attention to the government of Iraq.
So, they're pretty angry at this.
What will the consequence be?
I'm not sure the Iranians will react immediately, but they don't really do that.
But I think in the longer term, they'll try and push the U.S. out of Iraq, and they'll probably succeed, because they've got much more influence in Iraq than the U.S. There's already pressure in the Iraqi parliament, and there are U.S. bases, there's the U.S. embassy.
But we saw last Tuesday that when protesters made up of these counter-military organizations marched on the U.S. embassy inside the green zone, the Iraqi security forces just stood aside.
So, obviously, any U.S. facilities in Iraq are completely vulnerable.
Right.
So, that was kind of a political statement, right?
I was talking with Peter Van Buren yesterday, who had been in the State Department during Iraq War II, and he said he recognized the gate there, that this was the visitor's gate.
It's quite a ways from anything really important there, but that what was the most important take was that the police let this happen.
They let them get this far, not further, but they were making a very important statement with that themselves.
Yeah, I think that's dead right.
Yeah.
And this is what's funny in watching the coverage, is so few people are willing to talk about how we're actually striking our allies here.
This is the government that America's put in power, and these Iranian backed Shiite militias are the Iranian government's paramilitary groups.
That we actually, the reason our soldiers are there is we're actually allied with these groups in the fight that's still going on, Iraq War three and a half, I call it, against what's left of ISIS in the west of the country, right?
Yeah, I think there's a misunderstanding with these paramilitary groups, these pro-Iranian paramilitary groups, are on the payroll of the Iraqi government.
They're headed by the National Security Advisor in the center of the Green Zone.
So, there isn't a sort of distinction between these paramilitary groups and the leader of one of them, called Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, who was killed along with Soleimani, the Iranian general.
So, it's rather bizarre that, A, the U.S. should be carrying out these operations with complete disregard to Iraqi sovereignty, and second, that kind of sort of attacking people who are part of the Iraqi government, who they're supposedly defending.
In any case, you know, the U.S. has forces in Iraq on the ground, about 5,200, but, above all, has mid-air power in Iraq, because they are meant to be combating remnants of ISIS.
They're not there to take part in the Iraqi politics.
So, clearly, there's going to be a reaction to that.
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Talking with Patrick Coburn from The Independent.
So, from what I've seen, in the initial statements put out, the Iranian Supreme Leader is vowing revenge, and the act has been denounced by Muqtada al-Sadr, the leader of Asaib al-Alhaq, I'm not sure his name, but I know that's a very powerful one of these PMU militias, and then also the Ayatollah Sistani.
I'm sorry?
He's a guy called Qais al-Qazali.
He's the head of Asaib al-Alhaq.
And Sistani, too, has denounced him.
Yeah, Iraqis feel it's impinging on their independence.
I'm treating it with contempt.
So, it's a peculiar thing, because Soleimani, although everybody's saying what a terrific general he was, or in the U.S. case, what an evil general he was, actually, he's had a big failure in the last three months.
Well, he'd been head of Al-Quds Force since, I think, 1998, and was good at this sort of mix of politics and guerrilla warfare that the Iranians go in for.
But in the last three months, he was the one who was orchestrating and seems to have ordered this very brutal crackdown on protesters, which began on the 1st of October, and comes in Baghdad at that time, and it was really quite a small protest in Tahrir Square in the center of Baghdad.
It's quite close to my hotel.
And the guys organizing the protests had difficulty in getting up momentum, but suddenly the Iraqi security forces and snipers from these pro-Iranian paramilitaries started shooting at the marchers who were publicly peaceful, and killed 10 of them the first night.
And then the protests grew from that, because of the brutality of the repression, which really fueled the whole protest movement, and eventually turned it into something close to a mass uprising.
And that was really Soleimani's doing, a completely evil reaction by him.
You know, he's not the first general in history to think that, you know, you can, the way to deal with peaceful demonstrators is to shoot them and the survivors will go home.
But he did this in a rather disastrous way, and that made Iran very unpopular in Iraq among the Shia, with a majority of the population, and who previously had looked to Iran as their great defender.
And so he made a pretty massive miscalculation.
But now I think that Bush has probably made a miscalculation as well.
For me, it'll be interesting to see what will these protests go on after this.
Or will some people think, well, the US is just a great threat to Iraqi independence, as the Iranians are.
Yeah, that's really interesting.
You write about that in the most recent article, I'm sorry, I meant to mention it's, Iraq's worst fears have come true.
They are now at the center of a proxy war between the US and Iran.
That's at the independent.
And here right at essentially Soleimani's worst moment when he was leading this terrible, bloody overreaction to the protest movement that had broke out.
America goes and kills him and makes a martyr out of him.
Where possibly if they had taken more of a hands off approach right now, if according to American goals, what they really want to see is more of a division between Baghdad and Tehran, they might have just waited to see how things played out.
Now, this is probably reverse that process.
Yeah, you know, we'll see, we'll see what's going to happen.
But it's very likely that that will be.
And so, you know, it's been sort of kind of peculiar over the last year, that Iran had been launching these pinprick attacks against mostly in the Gulf against US allies like the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.
They shot down a US drone over the Strait of Hormuz, and Trump didn't react.
And then in September, the Iranians were blamed, probably rightly for this drone and missile attack on Saudi oil facilities at Cairo and Karaz, which cut Saudi oil output by half for a few days.
Again, Trump didn't react.
So why did they overreact this time?
It's sort of interesting to know what happened, what the thinking was behind that, or if there was any thinking.
Maybe Trump just got used after Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the head of ISIS, was killed last October.
Maybe it sort of went to Trump's head.
He thought that went pretty well for us.
Let's do it again.
Yeah.
Well, of course, as you've documented better than anyone, since 2003, as America has installed Iran's best friends in power, especially from the Supreme Islamic Council and the Dawa Party, which all the prime ministers have been from the Dawa Party, except their most recent one has been actually from the Supreme Islamic Council.
But at the same time they've done that, they've been, as you put it in this article as well, sort of in a contest with Iran for influence over these same groups, a contest which America always loses.
America has all this money and all these weapons we can give them, but they're next door neighbors and co-religionists with the government and the country next door and have all this history together and all of this, where Shiite Islam, as you write about in your book on Muqtada al-Sadr, was born in Iraq and traveled into Persia from there, spread into Persia from there.
So this kind of kinship is something that America can never really break, but they'll never stop trying.
Yeah.
Actually, nothing much to do with America, but the links between Iraq and Iran were under pretty severe stress because of the Iranian suppressing these mass protests over government corruption and lack of jobs and lack of electricity and water in Iraq.
I wonder if those protests will go on after this, or will they be more muted?
Will they be undercut by this event?
Right.
Yeah, I'm sorry.
I just meant that there's no contest between Iran and America for influence.
No matter how angry at Tehran Baghdad gets, they're never going to really prefer the Americans.
And they don't need to because they're the majority of the country, right?
Yeah, the Shia are two-thirds of the Iraqi population.
The Iraqi population is about 40 million.
And the rest are either Sunni Arabs or Kurds.
And they've been the dominant force since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003.
Now, for quite a long time, the extremely corrupt autocratic authoritarian leadership of Iraq was, could so frighten their own followers by saying, you know, if you don't support us, the Ba'athists and Saddam Hussein will come back.
And later they said, if you don't support us, ISIS will take over and kill a lot of you.
And it's really been, as ISIS has retreated over the last three years, the Shia masses have felt confident enough that they aren't facing an existential threat.
So they could start protesting about the lack of all the famous facilities and jobs and everything else in a country that is one of the world's biggest oil exporters.
Yeah, they really, this government really has exploited that, you know, conflict to protect themselves from their own populations, discontent all the time, scapegoating the enemy, when as you told me before, the government in Baghdad is so busy, the members of it are so busy stealing, they hardly have time for anything else at all, not even really police state repression.
They're just thieves.
Sure.
Yeah.
So hell of a way to run a country.
No, so now we'll see what happens.
But you know, but Iraqis are frightened of the fears that they will become a permanent arena for this proxy war between the US and Iraq.
Iraqis are pretty quick to pick up on these things.
I mean, three months ago in Baghdad, the place was pretty quiet.
And I was saying to a friend of mine, how do you view the future?
And she said, well, all my friends are pretty gloomy because we think that if there is going to be a war or a proxy war between the US and Iraq, it'll be in Iraq.
So she said a lot of her friends were sort of taking what money they had and buying houses or getting apartments in Turkey.
I must say at the time, I thought this was a bit exaggerated, but she turned out to be precisely right.
Although, you know, as we were discussing, we just have a few thousand troops there to fight with these same groups against what's left of the Islamic State there.
And our military is really in no position to fight any kind of war against the Shiite militias, much less the Iraqi military, which is really a Shiite militia.
And also the militias are for the US, is in there to support the Iraqi government.
But you know, the biggest party in the parliament is Muqtada al-Assad's party.
The next biggest party is the party of the paramilitary groups, including a group, whose leader, al-Muhandis, was killed this morning.
So, you know, these are the groups that have the majority in the Iraqi parliament who will choose the next government.
So it's this peculiar US relationship of sort of attacking the guys who they, in theory, are meant to be in Iraq to support.
Yeah, that's funny.
It was always Muqtada al-Assad was the more nationalist who opposed, at least at times, opposed Iranian influence as well as America's influence.
And America always preferred the pro-Iran parties.
But so now if we're turning the pro-Iran parties against us, they're going to join up with Sadr.
That'll be the majority of the parliament right there.
Yeah, I mean, you know, it's going to be very difficult for the US to stay on after this.
There is a theory, of course, that if Trump did pull out, it's probably easier to do this after announcing that they've killed Soleimani.
The problem in this area is that you have Trump's policy, which is pretty incoherent.
And then you have a sort of separate policy from the Pentagon and the State Department who basically want to stay in these places.
So in Syria, I think it was the last time we spoke, where you had Trump announcing that he's pulling out, then he goes back in again.
So before he made his announcement, we had a stalemate, which wasn't very satisfactory, but it was kind of stable.
And now we have another stalemate, which is very unstable.
So you have this extreme incoherence in American policy.
And it's always on the edge of war with Iran or with somebody else.
There's always a danger of things going wrong, going pretty seriously wrong.
Yeah, it seems like he can at least imagine, not that he ever falls through, but he at least talks about ending the war against the Bin Ladenites.
But then the hawks always say to him, yeah, but Iran.
And so even though we're, again, supposedly our troops are deployed in Iraq to fight ISIS, according to the president, they're there to keep an eye on Iran.
And so, you know, one thing about the Bin Ladenites is they really are just foot soldiers with rifles compared to Iran, which actually is a nation state and has airplanes that Richard Nixon gave them and stuff like that.
So in Trump's imagination, they can be a real threat and something that something has to be done about, it seems like.
Yeah, I mean, I assume that, you know, Trump previously, that's what I think caught people by surprise, that previously Trump seemed to be doing his best to avoid war with Iran.
Suddenly, they've started ratcheting things up over the last week.
I mean, this all began, remember, with last Friday.
I mean, only a week ago, last Friday, there was a rocket attack on various U.S. bases and one U.S. contractor and some Iraqis were killed by a rocket in Kirkuk.
Then on Sunday, there's a massive reaction by the U.S. and they attack Qatar Hezbollah bases in Iraq and Syria.
They killed 25 Qatar Hezbollah militants.
Then there's this march on the U.S. embassy in the Green Zone, which is obviously to say, look, we can, you know, their intention, they didn't go that far in, but they wanted to show that the Iraqi security forces weren't going to stop them.
That seemed to be resolved by Wednesday.
And then we have this attack this morning.
So quite why the U.S. and Trump are escalating at this at the moment is a bit of a mystery.
You can hear the Scott Horton show on anti-war radio on Pacifica, 90.7 FM, KPFK in LA, kpfk.org, APS radio at apsradio.com, the Libertarian Institute at libertarianinstitute.org.
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And thanks.
Anti-war radio, Scott Horton here talking with Patrick Coburn from The Independent.
You know, a big part of all the propaganda on TV about this is that, well, of course, everybody knows that this guy, Soleimani, he killed 600 Americans in Iraq War II.
What do you say about that?
Well, you know, it's sort of, it's this sort of demonization, you know, the Iranians and Soleimani himself were always sort of saying, you know, what terrific things they did and so forth.
But if there had been no Soleimani, would these guys still be alive?
I doubt it, you know.
The U.S. was always going to be squeezed in Iraq by the Iranians.
You know, they really didn't have any allies.
But it's, you know, where did this figure 600 come from?
You know, this is kind of spin and propaganda.
What it really is, I think, at the time when Petraeus was targeting Muqtada al-Sadr, they were essentially claiming that any death of an American at the hands of a Shiite or by, especially by an EFP bomb, that all of those are directly attributable to Iran by the transitive property of they say so.
Yeah, there used to be things saying that, you know, there's a special Iranian type of bomb and so forth.
And doing an investigation into this, you know, there were guys in Iran, yeah, they were selling it, but they were selling it commercially, I think, to the government.
You know, Iraq is the one country in the world you can buy any weapon you want if you got the money.
And the media is, you know, it's either misleading or naive about this.
Well, if I remember right, was 13 years ago, but I'm pretty sure the first time I interviewed you was in 2006, where you had been there with American GIs who had discovered an EFP copper core bomb factory in Shiastan, in I think, eastern Baghdad or Najaf or someplace like that.
Sounds quite likely.
I remember talking to US bomb disposal people about that sort of thing.
Yeah.
But yeah, to see...
My memory is probably less good than yours.
Well, you know, you write it all down.
So but it is amazing to see the way that whole complicated story gets all reduced down to Iran killed five or 600 Americans in Iraq, and nobody contradicts it because, you know, especially on TV, nobody knows better.
And the hawks claim it and but nobody else can really contradict them in any substantive way.
So it does seem you're saying you were saying Patrick about how it seems kind of surprising that they're doing this.
I'd have to agree with that.
It does feel like there's no momentum.
There's nothing really to fight about with Iran, other than we have this maximum pressure campaign against them with sort of, you know, amorphous ends in mind.
And they don't comply with, you know, kind of unreasonable and sometimes unstated demands.
But otherwise, they're not really doing anything.
They shot a rocket at a base and killed a contractor.
I mean, would you even chalk that up to Iranian authority at all?
Or by that argument?
No, I think there's another aspect of this one has to look at the US government always.
And the White House has always liked this idea of assassinating foreign leaders through drones and missiles, because it looks really so conclusive.
I remember in 2003, the start of the US invasion was actually brought forward, because they thought they knew where Saddam Hussein was, and they fired a lot of missiles at where he was meant to be.
He wasn't, so it had no effect.
You know, in 2006, they had the founder of ISIS, Abu Musa al-Baghdadi, was killed in a US attack, didn't make any difference.
Then before al-Baghdadi, ISIS were killed, the daughter of al-Baghdadi.
You know, I think it's because this sells well at home, but it's pretty simple to say on television elsewhere, we have killed the leader, we've cut off the head of the snake, and that looks like decisive and effective action by Washington, and particularly by the White House.
Look at the way Trump was sort of grandstanding over the killing of al-Baghdadi.
But the same with Obama and the Silicon Valley, it never makes much difference.
You know, al-Qaeda had its biggest successes after the death of Osama bin Laden.
But it's great, it's great policy, sells well at home.
I think that's what really drives it, is the, you know, it's always a political plus at home when you do that.
Otherwise, foreign policy, it's kind of murky, it's contradictory, you know, what are we doing?
But that sort of looks decisive and important, even though, you know, there's plenty of evidence that does the U.S. or anybody else look at it at all.
Well, you also talk in your article about how the Israelis and the Americans have been doing these airstrikes, I don't know, drone or missile strikes against these Shiite militia bases in Iraq since the summertime, and how you had even investigated a bit of that when you were there last fall.
And that was really- Yeah, I don't think there was much of it.
I mean, but I think it did increase the sort of paranoia of these Shia paramilitary groups.
There was an attack on August, on a drone attack, which I was told the paramilitary leaders claimed was Israeli or American.
And I went to the base that had been blown up, you know, they'd already had a bit of- I think they said 50 tons of ammunition had gone up, and you could see places of wrecked sheds and pieces of burnt equipment and so forth, so it'd be a very big bang.
Now, it wasn't that much, but it made them pretty paranoid.
I think that may be one of the reasons why the Iranians of Soleimani overreacted to the protests, that they were in a pretty paranoid mood.
These are kind of guys who see conspiracies all over the place, so they may have been in a mood to think that the Americans are coming at us, and so they interpreted these perfectly justifiable protests against the government as all being part of an American stroke Israeli plot.
Well, then, is it oversimplifying too much to say that this was kind of part of a tit-for-tat thing with these strikes on their militia bases, and then the rocket attack on the American base that killed the contractor?
There's an element of sort of tit-for-tat there, but, you know, it still doesn't explain why the U.S. suddenly escalated over the last week.
Well, of course, I mean, in the American narrative, history began with the Iraqi militia firing the rocket at us, and whether there was any explanation for that is really more the question, I guess.
Yeah, I guess so.
The thing is, I think, you know, when you look now at what's going to happen, it's not really in the interest of Iran to fight a full-scale war, but it is quite in their interest to have a sort of continuing sort of pinprick attacks and so forth, and it's in their interest for this to happen in Iraq, where they're more influential, much more influential than the U.S., so they'd like to win out, but probably not to escalate dramatically, but also not to do nothing.
So I'd be a bit surprised if they do something dramatic.
But on the other hand, maybe they don't necessarily entirely control the situation in Baghdad.
You know, this militia group, Qadhai-Ghazbal, it's pretty close to the Iranians.
They just have their leaders killed.
You know, they must be thinking, let's have another go at the U.S. embassy.
So, you know, that could happen.
So we'll see.
Yeah, the wind is going to be in the sail of all the hawks in Iran, too, with the death of their great heroic general the way they see it, right?
Yeah, I think so.
This guy seemed to be sort of grooming himself for Iranian leadership.
There have been complaints in Iraq, you know, a couple of years ago, some documents were, Iranian documents were leaked by the Intercept, and they were also in the New York Times.
They weren't that interesting, but they did quote Iranian officials saying that it's probably a bad idea for Soleimani to take such a high profile in Iraq, and that's causing a resentment among Iraqis.
Yeah, again, that resentment that America just completely counteracted by making a martyr out of him.
But all right, well, listen, I'll let you go, Patrick, but I sure appreciate you coming back on the show to talk about this stuff with us, as always.
No, no, very interesting.
Thanks so much.
All right, you guys, that is the great Patrick Coburn from The Independent.
That's independent.co.uk.
Read his books, Chaos and Caliphate, Age of Jihad.
Before that, The Rise of Islamic State and Muqtada, great biography of Muqtada al-Sadr, and find this article at The Independent.
It's called Iraq's Worst Fears Have Come True.
They Are Now at the Center of a Proxy War Between the U.S. and Iran.
All right, y'all, and that is Antiwar Radio for this morning.
Thanks very much for listening.
I'm your host, Scott Horton, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com and author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
Again, find my full interview archive and sign up for the podcast feed.
There's more than 5,000 of them for you there at scotthorton.org.
I'm here every Sunday morning from 830 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
See you next week.
