Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
And our first guest on the show today is Patrick Coburn.
He is a foreign correspondent for The Independent in England.
Independent.co.uk.
And he's the author of the book, Muqtada.
Muqtada al-Sadr and the Future of Iraq for One.
Welcome back to the show, Patrick.
How are you doing?
I'm fine, thanks.
Well, I'm very happy to have you back on the show here.
And my first question, if it's alright, is going to be about the subject of your book there, Muqtada al-Sadr and the Future of Iraq, and whether or not that includes the American occupation after the end of this year, which is the deadline for withdrawal and the status of forces agreement.
I'm sure you're aware that the Secretary of Defense and others in the administration have made it pretty clear that they want Maliki to quote-unquote invite us to stay longer.
And I just wonder, of course, you've always told me on this show that Muqtada al-Sadr is the answer to that question.
Is that still the case, and is his position still the same?
If U.S. troops remain, then this is not going to be without opposition, particularly from Muqtada, from al-Sadr.
So, up to now, the assumption has been that they would not stay.
I don't think they're quite taken on board that having some troops, it depends on how many troops, David, having troops remain or trying to remain a player in Iraq is going to create a reaction in the opposite direction.
Well, so, I mean, as far as the oversimplified math of it goes, is it still a matter of Maliki, the Prime Minister, needs Muqtada al-Sadr's support, and Sadr will not support him if he makes this compromise, and therefore he will not?
Is it that easy?
No, everything in Iraq is sort of complicated because everybody has the ability to checkmate everybody else.
I mean, Maliki got back in because ultimately the Sadrists backed him.
He got support from the U.S., and he got support from Iran.
Somebody, a man in Iraq, a leader said to me, you know, it's lucky Maliki, he's got support from the great Satan, which is what the Iranians called the U.S., and he's got support from the Axis of Evil, which is what the U.S. calls Iran.
Now, he needed Muqtada to get back, he needed various other people to get back.
He did deal.
Now, is he going to drop everybody, say, you know, now he's back in and return to what he's made him so unpopular among the other parties previously to try and sort of set up an autocracy?
We don't know.
He keeps sort of ducking and diving.
But I don't think having a continued U.S. presence isn't going to stabilize Iraq to the degree that those who would propose it imagine.
Yeah, well, in the media, of course, they say, look, five American soldiers got killed.
Maybe we need to stay longer.
Yeah, but they got killed maybe because near Sadr City, because probably the guys were hearing the U.S. was planning to stay on, you know.
So the actual reason they got killed may be a reason for not staying on.
All right, well, if I can, if it's OK to make the hypothetical to check your response here, I wonder if for whatever reason Maliki made an agreement with Obama that, yeah, you can stay.
I'll invite you to keep, I don't know, 50,000 troops in the country for, you know, however long and along with Hillary Clinton's mercenary army working for the State Department.
Would that mean that Muqtada al-Sadr would go to war?
I doubt it, but, you know, nasty things will happen.
I would have thought the one lesson the U.S. should have learned from Iraq, it's a really dangerous place, you know.
The lesson was learned up to about 2008.
Then there was an agreement with the people attacking U.S. forces.
I mean, they didn't just stop killing people in Iraq.
They did stop killing U.S. soldiers.
So things are quiet for the moment, but there's nothing written in steel saying that it's going to stay that way.
So I think that it's a bit optimistic to think that the U.S. has a sort of free pass to stick around in Iraq, nor does anybody else for that matter.
Well, I mean, when it comes down to it, Maliki allied with the great Satan and the axis of evil.
He doesn't really need the great Satan as long as he's friends with the axis of evil, right?
Well, he probably wants to balance in between.
You see, the Kurds want the U.S. to stay on because that sort of puts somebody between them and Baghdad.
But, you know, they have cards in the pack.
They get closer to Turkey as a balance to Baghdad.
The Sunni tradition, they want the Americans out because they fought against them.
On the other hand, they're frightened of the Shia.
But, you know, this is not like having American forces in a West European country where nobody much notices them.
It's not a political issue.
This will be a political issue.
All right.
Well, now, if we start to get into Libya here, I wonder whether you can confirm that the fighting men, as reported in, I guess, the Telegraph, that America and NATO are backing in Libya, that their leadership or basically their credibility comes from being veterans of the Iraq war when they were part of Al-Qaeda in Iraq?
Well, you have a few guys around, you know.
One thing is Libya, one of the good things about Libya, is that, you know, I was in Najdabiya, south of Benghazi, where the fighting was.
And, you know, journalists were sort of critical of sort of these local sort of lads and the militias who were in their pickup trucks rushing backwards and forwards.
You know, you'd see them sort of, you know, a few shots would be fired, and they'd go racing backwards, you know, and then they go racing forwards again.
And this is often reported seriously as advance by anti-Qadhafi forces or retreat by anti-Qadhafi forces, but actually it's sort of kids in pickups.
It really doesn't amount to much.
I mean, one point one guy said to me, well, you know, people who are fighting the Americans in Afghanistan, do they have any military experience here?
The point I was making is that most people don't, so there are probably a few of them around.
Right.
But, you know, I doubt there isn't around Misrata there's quite sort of serious fighting, and there they were sort of fighting for their city.
But on the other, certainly sort of south of Benghazi, it's all kind of, it's not too serious or it's not as serious as it would sometimes appear from watching, you know, if you watch reports of it on television.
Well, and, you know, the reason I focus on this isn't because I'm afraid that Al-Qaeda is going to take over Libya or anything like that.
But what I'm afraid of is that if NATO does successfully kill Qadhafi, somehow the Qadhafi government falls and American NATO-backed forces take Tripoli and try to set up a new state, that if there really are Al-Qaeda and Iraq veterans and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan veterans of these wars against Americans among those who win, then that will be, of course, the justification for staying, that we just helped Al-Qaeda win, so now we have to stay to make sure they're not the ones who take over.
You know, one thing that strikes me about all this sort of endless analysis and reports on Al-Qaeda in the U.S. media and to a degree in the European media, whether we're talking about Libya or Yemen or Pakistan or Iraq, is that Al-Qaeda in Libya has always been a bit player.
You know, there are many more powerful forces around.
In Yemen, people go on, every article I read about Yemen mentions Al-Qaeda, but Yemen's a country of 24 million people.
I mean, the estimate of Al-Qaeda members there is about 300 to 400.
You know, it's a very tiny drop in a quite big pool.
So I think that the impact is more maybe on U.S. opinion, but they're not a significant military force on the ground.
Yeah.
Okay, well, yeah, I mean, of course, sifting the truth from the propaganda is the most important thing, but what I'm worried about is that they'll have the excuse there.
Now, I'm sorry, we've got to take this break.
We'll be right back, everybody, with the great Patrick Coburn from the U.K. Independent.
The book is Muqtada.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
We've got Patrick Coburn on the line from the London Independent, and now, Patrick, I guess, you know, basically I'm just doing a thought experiment about what happens after Qaddafi goes, and I'm afraid that NATO's going to want to do purple-fingered elections and train up an army that'll stand up when we stand down in the rest of this madness we've seen over the last decade in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Yeah, I mean, I see exactly what you mean, and I think that is a danger.
But I think one of the reasons it's been increasing, and people aren't quite noticing this outside, that, you know, it's not just mission creep, it's mission transformation.
I mean, certainly a transformation of the way it was originally described, that initially NATO was meant to be there to, when Qaddafi's forces were advancing on Benghazi on a purely humanitarian mission to safeguard civilians.
Then, as we all know, it basically changes to regime change and killing Qaddafi.
But it's all proved much more difficult, I think, than they originally imagined.
I think that the NATO forces originally, certainly in Paris and London, leaders thought Qaddafi's about to go, we're betting on a winner here, and Qaddafi's still there.
So they keep on having to up the ante, and they keep on pretending to recognize the traditional National Council in Benghazi as the legitimate representative of the Libyan people.
Well, I mean, how on earth do we know that, you know?
Sure, Qaddafi wasn't democratically elected, but certainly these guys weren't either.
So we're really getting involved in a civil war, and when we're getting involved, we're sort of the main military player against Qaddafi.
It's not a rebel force with NATO air powers as an auxiliary assistant.
It's really the Libyan rebels have become a sort of auxiliary to NATO.
So when this war ends, you know, who's going to be the main player?
Who's going to be the king of the castle?
The answer is really going to be NATO.
Right, and at some point, then, all their promises and UN resolutions notwithstanding, that means they're going to have to put troops on the ground there.
They can't decapitate a state and then not attempt to control the outcome.
Yeah, but have they thought that through?
I mean, they'll control a bit of it, but how much authority do the guys they can support?
How much authority are they going to have?
Are they going to call for...
Purple-fingered elections, then.
That's their only solution.
Yeah, you see, but it sort of, you know, does that decide anything?
You know, one of these elections is always attractive to the media.
The media always thinks that sort of elections are going to resolve things.
I remember in 2005 when we had elections in Iraq, come in 2004, 2005, they didn't, actually.
They made things worse.
Yeah, all it accomplished was defying the signs of the civil war.
In Iraq, there were a lot of people who didn't like Saddam, and there were a lot of people who really hated the incoming government.
Well...
You see, you can make a case for saying, you know, probably Gaddafi after 42 years of personality cult is pretty unpopular among the majority of Libyans.
But then, but it's a pretense, and it's a dangerous pretense to suggest that his opponents sitting in Benghazi are popular guys who will have the legitimacy and power to replace him.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's an interesting question about whether they thought this through or not.
And it seems like, you know, it was so easy to tell just, you know, from sitting here that, well, look, if you say your mandate is to protect civilians, that means Gaddafi cannot win.
You know, right there.
Otherwise, you failed to protect the civilians from him.
They already said if Gaddafi wins, he'll kill every man, woman, and child he can find.
So they can't back down from that.
So, of course, that means regime change.
And then, who are you left with?
Well, then that means we're going to have to build a democracy to find out who's legitimate and whatever.
And, of course, well, and I'm interested, too, in what you think about the real motive for this thing.
I mean, as you say in your article, supposedly they went to go protect civilians.
But, of course, all three major countries involved in this, France, Britain, and the United States, have oil interests there.
And all the oil is in the east of the country, right?
I mean, it seems like, you know, they know that they're blundering into a long-term thing, but that's how they do things.
They blunder into long-term things.
They haven't won a war since World War II.
They don't care.
They just want to make some money.
Yeah, I think there are two things about oil.
It applies to Libya, and I think it applies to Iraq.
I mean, first of all, the fact that there's oil in Libya, the fact that there's oil in Iraq, it makes these countries significant on the sort of political, commercial, economic world chessboard.
You know, everybody sort of instinctively knows that if, you know, the main export of Iraq was sort of, you know, cabbages or carrots, that the interest in Washington, London, and Paris would be considerably less.
At the same time, I think it's an oversimplification to think the oil companies, you know, just want to grab that concession.
The truth is, whoever controls these countries are going to have to sell their oil, and the oil companies are there.
But once you start moving into a country, then all the other players want to get a part of the action.
They're frightened of being cut out.
Therefore, you know, it's been revealed, the WikiLeaks revelations showed that the big companies like British Petroleum, BP, were in Iraq, but 2002 they were going to the foreign office and saying, look, you know, if the U.S. leads this invasion of Iraq, we've got to be on the ground, because otherwise all the contracts will go to American companies.
I don't know if that would have been true or not, but that's what worried them, and it's competition between imperial powers as well, drags them in, as well as the long-term knowledge that that's where the oil is.
Well, and now back to how much of a joke this fighting force is that we've taken, this auxiliary force to NATO's war, as you call it.
I read in the New Yorker magazine, their guy over there said there's a thousand fighting men.
In your articles you describe so-called battles between a few hundred people, where there's even more reporters at the battle than fighting men on even both sides.
What in the world is going on?
Yeah, I mean, south of Benghazi, you know, I mean, it's one of the rather deceptive things that journalists do, they do not report the presence of other journalists, you know.
So, around sort of Ashdod and areas like that, there were genuinely more sort of journalists and camera crews and so forth than soldiers at various, than militiamen at various points.
So these guys don't even amount to the Northern Alliance of Afghanistan 2001 by a long shot?
No, because those were all sort of pretty hardened soldiers.
I mean, they may have been called militiamen, but these are guys who've been fighting for years, they've been commanded by commanders, they've been fighting for years.
So, you know, this was a small but serious force.
You can't say the same about the rebels in Libya.
All right, well, so, I guess, could you give us your prediction of the most likely consequence of all this, where we're headed from here?
How long it's going to take for something to change, and what do you think's going to happen?
I think Gaddafi will ultimately go down, just as the U.S. and the U.K. and France and slightly more enthusiastically the U.S. are sort of committed to him going down, and then other people are sort of betting on winners like the Russians or Turkey.
Nobody wants to be cut out of the action after this, and they've all decided he's going to go down.
You know, it's rather remarkable to see, to imagine a great moral crusade to help the Libyan people, which is led by people like, you know, like Silvio Berlusconi or Nicolas Sarkozy.
Or Hillary Clinton.
People who were, you know, fantastically parley with Gaddafi before.
You know, these are not people who really look after interests other than their own.
So I think Gaddafi will go down.
I think it's going to be a sort of free-for-all.
You may have a sort of local government, which is the new democratic Libya, but how free is the new democratic Libya going to be?
Isn't it going to be dependent on foreign powers?
You know, it seems to me more than likely.
Well, and here's the thing about this, too, is in the broader sense, I appreciate what you say about how al-Qaeda in Libya, for example, doesn't amount to anything, but it seems like if anything could make it amount to something, it's all this Western intervention.
Here's another Sunni Arab country that we're invading and occupying, probably, and, you know, here come the suicide attacks, right?
We can see it years out.
Yeah, I mean, all that sort of, you know, it's always been part of the, I think generally admitted by specialists on this, it's part of the game plan, if you like, for al-Qaeda was to suck in the U.S. and Western powers to land wars, land conflicts in the region.
Right, and this is the exact game we're still playing.
Afghanistan and Iraq, and in a different way, they may end up doing the same thing in Libya.
Right.
All right, well, we have to hold it right here and take this break, and we'll be right back.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm on the line with Patrick Coburn, Middle East correspondent for the London Independent, and he's been traveling around the Middle East doing his investigative and war reporting thing.
And before we got interrupted by the break, Patrick, you were saying that it's pretty well agreed upon now, maybe finally, that what Osama bin Laden and his cohorts were trying to do with the September 11th attack, and I guess the other attacks before that, was to trick us, to get us to overreact and lure us into waging ground wars in the Middle East.
Now, why would they want to do that?
Some of the literature says this, that Zahiri, the guy who's meant to have succeeded bin Laden, was always an advocate of this, saying that you carry out attacks against the far enemy, i.e. the U.S., to provoke land wars and immediate engagement, doesn't it?
And they seem to have succeeded in this beyond their wildest dreams.
Now, I guess it's hard for people to understand that, although I think Michael Scheuer probably explained it the clearest, that the line that Zahiri was pushing was that the United States already was at war with them, but it was always by proxy through the tyrannies that he supported.
The local rulers were in fact proxies, and what you wanted to do was instead of fighting the proxy, or the pawn, you wanted to fight the people who controlled the pawn.
Well, it seems like not only have we fallen into their trap, but it's had exactly the effect they wanted.
We created a police state here, the choking life bin Laden referred to, they bankrupted us, bleed us to bankruptcy right out of the 2004 speech there, and they've radicalized the entire Middle East, not because of just the war in their midst this whole time, but also because of the devaluing of the money to pay for all this imperialism has made it impossible for them to feed their families.
Yeah, I agree.
I think the point that never comes across is, you know, terrorism is such a misused word, or overused word, but it only really succeeds with the cooperation of the target government, because governments are very tempted to go after some small, usually I mean bombs or whatever is carried out by very tiny groups.
They're not really a threat.
Governments really like to boost their power, boost their longevity in office, by saying we are the people who defend the little home in the prairie or the house in London against this tremendous threat.
I mean, it isn't a trap that all governments have to fall into.
You know, I remember here in the 1970s in London, when the IRA used to let off bombs in London, they initially, for about 10 years, could always drive the British government into overreacting, arresting innocent people and so forth, and this ended up by boosting support for the IRA.
By the 1980s, the British government had become much smarter, and they stopped overreacting, even when they were quite serious bombs, like the one trying to kill Thatcher in Brighton in the early 1980s.
Well, I wonder, I don't mean to just insult people gratuitously or what have you, but when General Stanley McChrystal, back when he was still running the Afghanistan war, said, for every one we kill, we create 10 more, is he really so dense that that's still his strategy anyway?
But he thinks he can win that way, or what he's trying to do is create 10 more?
Oh, who, the Roman patrolists, you mean?
Or any of these guys.
It's always amazing to me to think that these people really think these things through less than the average conversation on this show, you know?
Yeah, but usually armies, you know, first of all, armies are in the business of fighting, they're not really in the business of political solutions, you know.
A long war is never really bad for armies unless they, you know, comprehensively lose it.
But if you're also fighting a war which you don't win, you don't lose, you know, you have big budgets all along the way, you know, you're an important, you know, your position in the national leadership is exalted.
So, you know, most armies throughout history have always said, you know, give us a couple more years and give us another 50,000 men and we're going to win this war.
It takes a quite tough political leadership to say, no, you're not, you know.
All right, well now, so let's see if we can change gears here and talk about the Arabian Peninsula, which intents and purposes includes the tiny island nation of Bahrain, and there's been really severe repression.
I think you told me before the show you haven't, they won't let foreign journalists such as yourself into the country to tell us what's going on, but I don't know if Roy Gutman is still there, but McClatchy ran a great series of pieces by Roy Gutman from Bahrain about some of the tortures and abuses going on there.
I'm more interested really rather than the details because I think people can read about that if they try, at least in the foreign press and at McClatchy papers.
I'm interested in, you know, kind of your greater wisdom about what it all means for the Saudis, for Iran, for the region, what's going on in Bahrain right now.
Sure, and one point I'd make about Gutman, I read his pieces, they're very good, but I think the Bahraini government noticed that too, so they did give him a visa again, but when he turned up at Bahrain airport, so I'm told, they said, no way we're letting you back in, so they kicked him out.
Oh, really?
How long ago was that?
Three weeks, three or four weeks.
Ah, jeez.
All right.
That's a sad update.
Yeah, they don't come in.
They've been keeping journalists.
The Reuters correspondent had been there for several years.
Occasionally they let somebody in, I think, but not often, and I think AP was at least reporting it from Dubai, so they've been pretty rigorous at excluding the foreign media.
I think, by the way, it's maybe an important point worth making, that the secret police in Macabarat and all these Middle East states where the Arab awakening has threatened the regime, I think line one, page one of how to quash what they're uprising is to kick out the foreign press, keep them out, and control the local media by throwing them in jail.
Yeah, well, and to read Gutman's reports out of there when he was still there, the clampdown was a serious thing.
People being tortured, especially journalists, I guess, and leaders of the opposition.
It's pretty amazing, you know, that the federal didn't have to do this.
They were in control anyway.
But, you know, they've gone after doctors and nurses, the 47 doctors and nurses who are going on trial.
I think, well, what's meant to be today, I don't know if it's actually just started today.
Most of these people have terrible stories of mistreatment and torture while they were in jail.
And what they're trying to get them to confess is that, no, they weren't.
These were doctors and nurses who were treating protesters who had been hit by rubber bullets or real bullets or with broken arms.
And, you know, they were behaving as doctors and nurses.
And the government has now retaliated by putting them in jail, by torturing them.
You know, it's pretty disgusting and it's pretty horrifying.
But I should go on to say, you know, they've targeted every other group, too.
They've targeted, I mean, one case I was following was a young 20-year-old trainee teacher who was also quite a good poet.
And she read out one of her poems, critical of the monarchy.
She had a meeting in February, then at the end of March she was arrested.
She was put in a tiny cell with freezing temperatures, two air conditioners, for nine days, not given food.
She was whipped with electric cable.
She was forced to clean out the toilets with her bare hands.
So there was an extraordinary, there was a degree of sort of irrational sadism in the repression in Bahrain.
Now, would you include the use of Saudi troops in that?
Was that necessary?
Did the Bahraini government, the king, did he need the Saudi help?
Or was that an overreaction in the same sense there as torture?
I think it was panic when they saw the regimes in Tunisia and Niger going down.
I think they thought, we're going to be next.
So that may have been one reason.
That certainly stiffened their resolve.
I think one of the...
Well, I'm sorry, Patrick.
I questioned you right up into the break here.
We'll be right back.
We have one more segment, thankfully, with Patrick Coburn from the London Independent, author of the book Muqtada and the Future of Iraq.
Correspond for the London Independent.
That's independent.co.uk.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
Talking with Patrick Coburn from the Independent in England.
He's been reporting from the Middle East.
I want to recommend a few articles to you here.
Most of them are independent.co.uk.
Hopes for democracy fade as civil wars grip the Arab world.
Crumbling power base will struggle to survive this crisis.
That one's about Yemen.
Only winners from brutal repression of Shia majority will be Saudi Arabia.
About Bahrain there.
Doctors and nurses tortured in Bahrain.
That one's a counterpunch.
Detained poet beaten across face with electric cable.
And how NATO's blunders have prolonged Libya's suffering.
And now on Bahrain, let's talk about this Saudi Arabia piece and how they're the ones benefiting from the brutal repression of the Shia majority in Bahrain.
Yes.
I mean, that's what makes it actually rather peculiar, because Bahrain is run by the monarchy, the Al-Khalifa dynasty.
They are Sunni.
The majority of Shia, of Bahrainis, are Shia.
By repressing the Shia so hard, by claiming that they're all Iranian agents, and by mass use of torture, they've alienated the majority of their own people.
So that leaves them really only with two choices.
One, they can try and change the demography of Bahrain, and that's one of the allegations against them by the Shia, that they were bringing in people from Pakistan, from Iraq, from Jordan, giving them citizenship, giving Sunni citizenship to change the demography.
Or they can, and as well, they will become wholly reliant on Saudi Arabia.
They'll become a sort of Saudi protectorate.
Well, and they're already, I mean, if it came down to it, wouldn't the Americans walk over from their base at 5th Fleet Headquarters there, some Navy guys, and save the monarchy from the majority, if it came down to it?
Well, you know, they might, but I mean, I just sort of went a long way off that.
I mean, most of the Shia were not demanding that the monarchy go.
They were demanding elections, a very constitutional monarchy.
And, you know, the demands were not that radical.
So, you know, what's striking is the, you know, the savage retaliation by the government against those who were demanding minimal reforms.
An attempt to portray them as sort of instruments of Iraq.
In fact, I mean, the Bahraini Shia, you know, they're Arabs.
They've been religious, and they've always looked to the religious leadership in Najaf, in Iraq.
They're not really threatening.
But, and this, I think, you know, the mass use of torture is in part to extract confessions that they had revolutionary intentions, and they had links with Iran.
Well, you know, it's interesting.
There's a narrative here.
I guess it's one or the other Washington Post, New York Times version of things, is that Obama's trying to stop all the brutal repression by supporting the son-in-law, or whoever this guy is.
And he's the same guy in your article who you say is behind all this.
Yeah, I mean, you know, the guy who sort of is thought to really run Bahrain as the king's uncle, Sheikh bin Salman al-Khalifa, who's been there for even prime minister, believe it or not, for 42 years.
He came in in 1971.
He also owns big chunks of Bahrain.
And this, he seems to be the center of the hard core.
Now, there are some Bahrainis who tell you that, well, actually, it's the king and the crown prince, you know, put on a happy face and present themselves as the moderates, but they're all in it together.
But another interpretation is that the prime minister has the real power, and he's the one who vetoed any reform, because part of that reform would necessarily mean that, you know, he wouldn't, he'd spend 42, that he wouldn't have another year in office.
But, you know, 40 years, you know, that's close to Qaddafi with 42.
Well, and that reduces the New York Times, Washington Post narrative to hilarity at that point, because the way they put it is all of Obama's efforts to rein in the king and make him be nice and stop torturing people so much is by supporting this guy against him in the power split inside the government there.
Yeah, I mean, I guess, you know, there isn't much sign of it yet.
You know, there are a few things that have happened, but the government tried to ban the main opposition party, al-Wefaq, but then, you know, David Cameron, the prime minister of Britain, and Obama were claiming that a dialogue had started with Bahrain, so they couldn't, I think they did sort of ask that that party not be at least allowed to exist, so this pretense that there was dialogue going on would have some credibility.
All right, well, I guess I'm not going to have a chance to ask you about Egypt, unfortunately, but I wanted to get your take on Yemen.
The dictator there has been injured and is in Saudi Arabia recovering, and to read your article, I guess my shorthand interpretation of your article is that that doesn't mean his dictatorship is over, that the government that he ran is gone.
No, and one of the things that's a little surprising is that Ali Abdullah Saleh, who's been there for 30 years, I mean, all these terrible old guys have really been around a long time, that, you know, it was thought that if he was out of the country, then, you know, maybe his regime would collapse, but in fact, you know, his son is a commander of the Republican Guard, an elite unit.
He's moved into the presidential palace.
Other relatives control other key military units, and they have checkpoints all over Sanaa, the capital.
So it's really not happening.
Increasingly, the people in the street protesters are sort of marginalized, and if Saleh goes, it'll be because of people in the army, people in the tribes, and the sort of democratic flavor is getting less and less.
Since the beginning of June, end of May, things have looked gloomier and gloomier.
I mean, we've talked about different countries.
In Libya, NATO has become the main player rather than the rebels.
In Syria, there's sort of mass slaughter.
In Bahrain, repression is going on.
In Yemen, there's no sign of Saleh, the president, being finally going down.
So, you know, the Arab Spring, the Arab awakening really is turning into something of a nightmare.
Yeah, well, you know, I talked to Robert Baer, the former CIA guy, a few months back, and he was really pessimistic about the whole thing in the short term and said, you know, it's not all going to go down like in Egypt where the army took the side of the people against the government that quickly, or at least against the president that quickly.
And a lot of these cases, these dictators are going to fight back and they're going to win, but over the long term, can't help but be optimistic because, you know, a lot of these people have the taste of liberty on their lips now.
They've been able to defy a tyrant in the town square at least for a time, and, you know, that's not going away.
That'll be part of their history from now on.
It seems like change is still coming.
Yeah, but I mean, how long, you know?
I mean, unfortunately, repression works, you know.
Indeed.
And these guys aren't giving any ground.
You have places like Egypt where there's a regime and the state are a bit different, but the army may take a different line than Mubarak and effectively got rid of him.
But in these other places, the army is sort of absolutely controlled by the regime, so there isn't going to be a split in the oppressive forces.
Well, and now, as long as I'm keeping you for one more minute into the break here, what about the posture of the Obama administration in all this?
Is there any indication that they want anything but to save every one of these puppet dictatorships of theirs?
I can't help but notice they love picking on Syria, and, you know, they weren't that tight with Gaddafi.
They'd been warming up with him for a little while, but he was no Hosni Mubarak.
He's easy to sacrifice to look like the good guy.
But it seems like when it comes to Bahrain and Yemen, they don't make any secret, really, that they support the dictator because the dictator's loyal to us.
Well, I think solidly they'd like to get rid of him in Yemen.
The Yemen isn't essential to U.S. or foreign interests.
I think they'd like him to go.
But in Bahrain, well, you know, that's really serious stuff.
I mean, this is Bahrain.
It's in the Gulf.
It's where the Fifth Fleet is based.
Saudi Arabia wants to crush democratic protest and also democratic protest by the Shia majority in Bahrain.
So that's one place they don't want the status quo to change.
Elsewhere, you know, I think it's like we used to have in Iraq.
They were in favor of democracy so long as they were faced with somebody who they felt would go along with their interests.
And that's one of the many weaknesses of democracy supposedly imposed or supposed democracy imposed by outside powers.
That's the way democracy works in the United States, too.
All right.
Thanks very much for your time, Patrick.
I'm sorry we have to leave it there.
I thank you so much for giving us this whole hour of your time today.
Not at all.
All right, everybody.
That's the heroic Patrick Coburn, Middle East reporter for The London Independent.
That's independent.co.uk and the book Muqtada about Muqtada al-Sadr and the future of Iraq, which I could not recommend highly enough for you.
And we'll be right back after this.
