All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
On the line from Athens, Greece, is Patrick Coburn, the best-informed Western reporter on Middle East and Central Asian issues that there is, if you ask me.
Welcome back, Patrick.
How are you?
I'm fine.
Thank you very much.
Very happy to have you here.
Everyone, if you have not read Muqtada, Muqtada al-Sadr, The Shia Revival and the Future of Iraq, I highly recommend it.
It's available at all your book-buying websites.
All right, now, Patrick, this morning the news is that Muammar Gaddafi has been killed, and footage released in the last half hour or so on MSNBC seems to show him taken alive, and apparently they're saying he was shot in the back of the head, I guess, on the side of the road.
What do you think?
That seems to be what happened.
I mean, there's quite a lot of gruesome film around this.
He does seem to be alive at first, and, you know, was he wounded, a bit unclear, and later shot in the head and taken to Misrata.
So it seems to be the bits of the story seem to be coming together.
Well, and so is this mission accomplished, and the last of the dead-enders will give up now, and everything's going to be fine?
We'll have a government in a box and all that?
I doubt it.
You know, I don't think it's going to be that simple, because, yes, Gaddafi, if he'd lived, maybe, would he be in a focus for opposition to the new regime in Libya?
Maybe, on the other hand, Gaddafi alive was also a focus for the rebels who were made up of very disparate different types of people from different parts of Libya.
On the one hand, you have human rights lawyers from Benghazi, but you also have jihadi types, fundamentalists, and many in between, and fighting Gaddafi was a focus for them.
So will that have an effect?
There have already been signs of division.
Will those divisions now grow?
So, you know, you can look at it two ways.
One, it's obviously a victory for the rebels that the great dictator's gone.
On the other hand, he sort of kept them together as well.
Well, and I guess with the premises of the NATO forces and their goals here, they must really create a state where, best I could tell, Gaddafi didn't really have much of one for them to take over.
They're going to have to build something from the bottom up, or not?
Yeah, I mean, that was one of the peculiar things about Libya, was that it was kind of a personal regime.
Gaddafi, from the 1970s, had insisted that he was building the Jumeirah, that somehow this was the people's regime.
And so you didn't have the normal institutions of the state, which means there isn't an awful lot to take over.
On the other hand, you know, Libya did function before.
And one of the things that makes life difficult in Libya at the moment is that whenever I've been in Libya, and this has brought out to me the last time I was there, that most of the manual work, a lot of the work full stop, was done by foreigners.
You know, you had perhaps a million illegal migrants there.
Who are all now accused of being mercenaries.
Yeah, that's one of the really dangerous things in this sort of...
It was always rather a racist country.
But Libyans, you know, normally have air-conditioned offices, and, you know, all the work was being done by people from Chad and Nigeria and Central and West Africa.
And also you had other nationalities, you know, you had 20 or 30,000 Turkish construction workers.
You had many others.
And one of the things things don't work too good in Tripoli at the moment is because they're gone.
The people who actually run the place aren't there anymore, you know, too frightened to put their heads outside the door.
Well, now, so when you see news that they finally caught Gaddafi and he just suffered this summary execution this way, do you think that that pretends anything in particular about the future of the government to take shape there?
Or, you know, maybe it doesn't have to.
It could go either way.
You know, it's still not quite clear who's going to be ruling Libya in future, what the relationship is going to be with NATO.
You know, this is a military victory sort of won not just with NATO's help but really by NATO and by themselves.
The rebels, you know, as they pretty well admit themselves, wouldn't have lasted a few hours without NATO air support.
And then that turned out to be not to be enough, so then there was a training of troops and I think much of the planning was done with help by NATO or by NATO itself.
They sort of transferred troops from the east through Tunisia to the mountains south and west of Tripoli, and that's where the final offensive was.
But, I mean, this wasn't just the rebels with a bit of air support.
This was very much a NATO operation, I think.
Which is not to say the rebels didn't have widespread support.
It's not to say that Qaddafi wasn't unpopular.
But I think that one has to bear in mind the degree to which the rebels were wholly dependent on NATO.
Yeah, I mean, it seemed to me a wonder, if basically all they had was NATO air power, how this ragtag group of fighters could have made any of the gains that they've made this whole time.
I remember you saying on the show just probably a couple of months back that a lot of times reporters outnumbered fighters at the front.
Yeah, I mean, outside Benghazi, south of Benghazi, it was a pretty sort of sad collection of fighters who were always sort of racing forward and then coming racing back.
They did better at Misrata and in the mountains, but I think there was also substantial training of these forces, particularly by the French and the British.
And when I was in Tripoli, I went to see Bell Hatch, the military commander, and I was just sort of getting through the gate and suddenly I saw a Libyan militiaman running towards me covered in weapons with a big smile.
It turned out to be a driver from Benghazi who joined the militia, had been flown to Djerba in southern Tunisia and then taken to the mountains, and his brigade sort of attacked from there.
So there was a wholesale move of troops by foreign aircraft and well-coordinated plans.
So I think that one has to...
This doesn't quite come across, I think, in a lot of the coverage that we had from Libya.
Now, there are some who say that this whole Arab Spring is really a cynical, color-coded revolution type of thing, that the old dictatorships were getting old and they needed to have an excuse to intervene even more and have even more regime changes, even against their friends, by kind of stirring this thing up in the first place.
I wonder whether you think that perhaps that's true.
No, I think that that sort of conspiracy theory run wild.
I just don't think that's true.
And once it started happening, of course, everybody wanted to get on the bandwagon, they wanted to get on the winning side.
All these people who are now jumping up and down for joy that Gaddafi's dead.
A couple of years ago, or even a year ago, Sarkozy and the British government and the Italian government were all going through very humiliating processes of cultivating Gaddafi in order to get investment and take part in projects in Libya.
So I think that Gaddafi had become very isolated.
I'm sorry, we have to take this break, Patrick, but we'll pick that up on the other side, the West's relationship with Gaddafi in the years leading up to this regime change, and then a little bit more about the future, I hope.
Patrick Cockburn from the London Independent, author of Muqtada.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all, welcome back.
This is Anti-War Radio.
We're talking with Patrick Cockburn from the London Independent about the war in Libya, and where we left off, you were talking about how Gaddafi had been brought back in from the cold, but he really was kind of at the edge of America and our NATO alliance's patience, and was expendable, really, when it came this spring morning.
Yeah, I mean, you were saying, was there, you know, was the Arab awakening all a cynical maneuver?
No, I don't think so.
I think that this is a great sort of historic event.
I think that these police states in North Africa, elsewhere, eventually, a sort of coalition formed against them, notably in Egypt and Tunisia.
To some extent, you see that in Libya.
And it had human rights lawyers.
It had people who were extremely secular.
It had Islamic fundamentalists, all sort of drawn together against the leader.
You see that in Egypt.
Also, socially, that it was sort of people who were members of the upper middle class who were against it, but also people in the textile mills of the Nile Delta also were at the forefront of the campaign to get rid of Mubarak.
So I think it's very real.
And I don't think it speaks to you.
What happened then was, of course, as I said, people want to be on the winning side.
The U.S. did.
Everybody else did.
Well, now, there was kind of State Department and NED money going to pro-democracy groups in Egypt, that kind of thing.
But I guess I had figured, too, that this isn't what they bargained for and not necessarily what they wanted out of it.
Sure, yeah.
I don't remember, you know, big states like to put money on all the horses, you know.
That may be a good thing from the point of view of Washington if Mubarak stayed in business.
But if he didn't, then you want to have close links with the opposite camp in so far as you can.
But, I mean, this was the fall of Mubarak, and Ben Ali was certainly a blow to the U.S.
This was not a happy event, but one that they didn't want to oppose when they thought it was inevitable.
You can see how different it is when it comes to countries like Bahrain where you had a very similar pro-democracy uprising by the majority in Bahrain who are Shia.
But the U.S. and foreign powers all backed the government.
It was supported by Saudi Arabia.
You know, all this rhetoric about the spread of democracy suddenly stops as soon as you get to strategically important monarchies in the Gulf.
But, you know, was it a conspiracy?
No, I don't think it was.
Well, at this point, it's at least a plan, one kind or another, to have somebody oversee the creation of the new Libya, right?
They're not just going to leave this to the Libyans.
They're going to have the Qataris in there, and then, I don't know, I guess I'm the worst, and I'm just predicting the worst, that we're going to end up probably, within the next few years at least, with American army forces on the ground there building up a new democracy and protecting it and giving everybody purple fingers and whatever.
I don't know.
I mean, it's sort of, you know, we'll see.
I mean, as I said, NATO played a much greater role in the overthrow of Gaddafi than I think is generally appreciated.
Now, will, first of all, you know, NATO will have an interest in seeing that people who are friendly to it get power and stay in power.
It's also a question of how far the main NATO states will stay together after all.
You know, if Libya being main production was sort of dates or cauliflowers, people wouldn't be so interested.
So it's a question of what happens to the oil concessions.
Will there be big changes there?
The rebels have been fairly careful.
I mean, in one sense, they're reliant on NATO.
On another sense, they're rather desperate to show that they are independent.
Now, will they remain reliant on NATO in future?
To some extent, yes.
But it's quite important to what extent.
But I think the idea that they'll be sort of doling out oil concessions to anybody but who helped them in the past is pretty naive.
I think they probably do have a strong idea that the one thing that they'll have to take control of is their own oil revenues.
Well, you know, I talked with David Enders who had written a piece for McClatchy newspapers about the mass rapes going on at one of the refugee camps there.
And we've heard, as we discussed earlier, about the mass roundup of black Africans, most of whom are just migrant laborers, legal or illegal, and are being accused of being mercenaries for Gaddafi, that kind of thing.
And I wonder whether, just from a Western politics point of view, whether the NATO countries are going to be able to, you know, politically withstand being behind people who are perpetrating such atrocities.
Or if it comes down to whether, you know, you have more Western-leaning Democratic types vying for power with Bill Hodge and the veterans of the Iraq War where they fought against America on the other side, you know, won't they have to intervene?
Aren't there, you know, a hundred reasons coming down the road where they're going to have to step up further in order to prevent the consequences from the action that they've already done?
Might happen that way.
I think it's a bit early to say.
I mean, it's sort of, oh my God, you know, black Africans there.
You know, I don't think it's been that highly publicized yet where people sort of realize the extent to, you know, just the sheer number of people from black Africa in Libya.
I mean, they provided so much of the labor force.
All Libyans who are themselves black.
There was a report out by one of the human rights organizations the other day about the use of torture against black African prisoners and so forth.
Very much the sort of thing we had under Gaddafi of mass use of torture and internment without trial.
But I didn't see it getting much publicity in any of the international media.
Right, yeah, it did come out.
It was one of those that came and went in a day, wasn't it?
That story about the torture.
Yeah, it's just people just didn't pick it up, you know, or see it as significant.
And that's really been the pattern, I think, from the beginning in Libya.
But stories like, you know, the mass use as a weapon of war against the rebels ordered by Gaddafi, troops spurred on with given special packets of Viagra and so forth, kind of unlikely tales.
Now, you know, it's one thing that strikes me as a journalist that these have generally been unmasked, not by the media, not by journalists, which might have happened a few years ago, but by human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
I think that's probably a measure of perhaps a weakening of the press because there are less good newspapers around.
I think it's also a measure of the degree to which the media backed one side, the anti-Gaddafi side, from the beginning and tended not to report anything negative about the rebels.
You know, it'll be interesting to see how far that goes on in the future.
Right, I mean, the narrative is not just that NATO is the good guys here, the rebels are the good guys, that this is a humanitarian war, this entire thing was fought to protect lives.
So anything about, you know, actual mass rapes going on, only it's the rebels that are doing it, just don't fit that narrative and there's just not time for that on Andrea Mitchell's show, you know?
Sure, yeah, and I think that Al Jazeera, which in some ways played an enormously important role in starting the Arab Spring in Libya, not only played a major role, but was practically the propaganda arm of the rebels.
It began to, certainly in my eyes, lose credibility.
Obviously they had enormous access there, and they really were sort of part of the rebels' machine.
But it's also noticeable that other people just didn't, you know, would run the mass rape story by Gaddafi, who was a Libyan psychiatrist who claimed to have carried out a survey of women distributing 70,000 questionnaires, but 60,000 were returned.
No, she couldn't give a copy of this questionnaire to anybody.
And this was the main evidence for the mass rape.
I saw her getting a very respectful interview by CNN.
But when these stories fall apart, then nobody, you know, really said so.
And that was sort of a very noticeable feature.
And also, you know, many other stories at once.
Quite early on in the, after the uprising, the rebels discovered, I think, eight or ten bodies of Gaddafi soldiers who'd been shot.
The rebels said these had been shot because they refused to fire protesters.
Later, Amnesty found some video showing that these Gaddafi soldiers had been taken prisoner or very much alive when they were in the hands of the rebels.
And they must have been shot by the rebels.
But I mean, these are quite good stories, quite juicy stories for journalists, but they just never seem to get picked up.
So I think there was a sort of degree of bias in reporting of the war, which was sort of really dwarfed anything that I've seen since I was a journalist.
Well, and you know, there's also just, I think more than anything, just a mass ignoring of the war in Libya.
I mean, this whole headline about they captured Gaddafi today is the first real coverage of anything about the Libya war I've seen on, for example, I leave cable TV news on mute out of the corner of my eye during the show.
And they just don't talk about it at all.
Yeah, I mean, that's another sort of worrying phenomenon.
You know, it sort of, that it sort of happened in Libya.
It sort of happened in Iraq, too, really from about 2008, so people imagining the war was over there.
Well, and that really pretends bad news for the future, too.
If we had no real debate about the facts at all about what's really going on there, then our politicians will only find it easier to keep choosing wrong and to keep making matters worse.
Yeah, I mean, partly it's the weakening of the media fund's financial reasons, but also this is, you know, the other things that played into this, like, oh, you know, the embedding of journalists.
So that becomes, you know, particularly in Afghanistan, I think this is that very negative effect that just so much of the sort of journalistic coverage is done through embedding, and embedding basically gives the army control of the journalists.
They give them control of access, but they can turn people down.
And, of course, people empathize with the soldiers, and they sort of get their information from the soldiers, and they get their bias from one-sided coverage.
And I think cumulatively this has also had a very negative effect on media coverage of the Iraq War, the Afghan War, and a slightly different way, the Libyan War, because so much of it was just going along with the rebels and reporting the latest firefighting.
Okay, now, I'm sorry to keep asking you to predict the future on the show today, Patrick, and I've already kept you a little bit over time, but I was hoping to work in this.
One more question about what you see as maybe the medium-term future of the recent announced intervention by the American Special Forces in Uganda, Central African Republic, Congo, and South Sudan.
Well, I think, you know, it's repeating a pattern we saw in the 90s and over the last decade.
You know, some of these things work okay.
They work okay until suddenly they don't work okay, you know.
You know, it's like the intervention in Somalia in the early 90s, that suddenly, you know, it seemed real easy, and suddenly they found, the U.S. found it was involved in a very dangerous war.
All the other places have the potential to do exactly the same thing.
Well, and this goes back to the constant question of stupidity or the plan, and I don't mean in the conspiracy sense of the entire Arab Spring being a color-coded revolution or whatever, but just in the larger sense, the way every intervention turns into a major blunder, but that's kind of okay for the government.
They just have more excuse to expand even further.
In fact, when I interviewed your brother Andrew the other day, he talked about how the high-tech war against the improvised explosive device has been a massive failure.
It's wire clippers and brawn that, you know, take those things down, but that's okay, because the people who invest in that technology, they just assume, continue to making money off the Pentagon doing all this high-tech research and whatever from now until the end of time.
The more IEDs, the better for them, and I wonder whether you think that, you know, like in this case, they figured, start with 100 advisors, special forces guys, and we can turn this thing into a Vietnam and have a war forever in sub-Saharan Africa.
You know, is that what they're going for here?
Is it a big failure and an expansion?
Well, I think it, you know, I'm not sure it happens exactly like that, but I think what does happen is that, you know, endlessly trying to find military solutions for political problems, you know, that the army doesn't see any problem in that.
You know, and I don't think there's a lack of consciousness also, you know, how extraordinary it is that the U.S. and, to a small degree, Britain, have managed to expend such gigantic sums of money in Iraq.
You know, who were they fighting in Iraq?
Well, you know, on the Sunni side, they're probably fighting 4,000 or 5,000 guys.
You know, how many Taliban are there in full-time Taliban in Afghanistan?
You know, 20,000.
That's probably pushing it, you know.
These enormous military machines, which are justified by really the sort of fighting or really sort of very sort of small, insignificant opposition, which shows that these military machines are sort of dysfunctional, but somehow they have a political clout that this never is never really appreciated at home.
Yeah, in this case, they're going after, as Pivy Escobar was saying on the show, this death cult that they're supposedly chasing around Central Africa here used to have a few thousand guys anyway, but now they're down to just a couple of hundred people anyway.
That's the excuse for this intervention, to get it started, is a couple of hundred people that are members of some, I guess, highly accomplished Manson-type family down there.
Yeah, and also, you know, the factor in all these wars is that a major factor is just the degree to which any people resist occupation, you know, and any military occupation is usually a jolly good reason to resist it.
All right, well, I've already kept you over time.
Thank you so much for your time, Patrick.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
Everybody, that's the great Patrick Coburn from the London Independent, author of the book Muqtada, on the phone from Athens.
And we'll be right back in no time at all.
