All right, my friends, welcome back to Antiwar Radio on Chaos Radio 959 in Austin, Texas.
I'm your host, Scott Horton, and I'm very pleased to introduce my first guest today, Patrick Coburn, Middle East correspondent for The Independent.
Welcome to the show, Patrick.
Thank you.
It's good to have you on here at the conclusion of this interview, and I'll have interviewed all three of the Coburn brothers.
What an achievement, huh?
Pretty good.
All right, so you've got this new report in The Independent, The Surge, a special report by Patrick Coburn, and that's really kind of a heartbreaking thing.
I guess I'd like to start with your comparison that you make in the beginning of the article of American policy to that of the French in World War I.
Yes, I mean, I was just taking that as an example, that there was a famous French general who suddenly said that he had the formula for breaking through the German lines, that after all the losses that France had suffered, finally they're going to have a magical victory.
And it just struck me, it was the very same type of rhetoric that we hear from President Bush and various other members of the administration.
And I think in both cases, the result is going to be similarly disastrous.
Well, you know, it's funny because World War I is kind of universally upheld as the perfect example of when all sides make nothing but bad decisions in war and get themselves into a mess that none of them could have imagined was lying ahead, basically.
And I guess the more I hear the Iraq situation compared to World War I, the more pessimistic I get, because that was about as bad as it gets in terms of incompetent leaders sending their masses off to die for nothing.
Yes, I think there are similarities, including the fact that the war in Iraq has now gone on longer than World War I.It's over four years now.
I think that's something that most people probably wouldn't realize, that really a whole world war, actually both world wars, right, were shorter in duration than this occupation so far.
Yes, I think, you know, over the last few years when I've been in Baghdad again and again we've had these spurious turning points, you know, the capture of Saddam Hussein, the handover of sovereignty to Iraq, the two elections in 2005, all these things were meant to be milestones on the road to a final victory, and in fact nothing has happened except things getting worse.
Well, Nir Rosen gave an interview to Democracy Now!
recently where he said, as plain as he could, there is no Iraq, OK?
Stop pretending that there's such a place as Iraq.
America has completely destroyed it.
He described it as a collection of, you know, a few dozen city-states at war, basically.
There's a good deal of truth in that, but also bear in mind that not all Iraqis would agree with that fact, the majority would not, and when you have the Iraqi Kurds that want their own state, but both the Sunni and the Shia both think there is a place called Iraq.
Now, of course, they may be wrong, but it's an important element in any nationality when you have so many people who think they do belong to the same country.
Well, I guess the question is, if that's the opinion of the population, does that really count, or is it the opinion of the people who actually have police power, military power, on the ground there?
What they think is what really counts.
In Iraq, everybody does have some power, I mean, who has a gun, and both communities have got a lot of guns.
So I think what people say does count.
I mean, on this question of Iraq, Iraqi nationalism, I've always noticed over the years that, you know, you can talk to a Sunni Iraqi who says, well, you know, actually all Iraqis are united, and you say, well, what about the, what about Muqtada al-Sadr?
Oh, he's really an Iranian.
He's not really one of us, and they sort of tend to, and the Shia are exactly the same about the Sunni.
They're saying, oh, you say, oh, really, you know, they agree with us, well, what about people in Ramadi?
Oh, they're, well, they're already paid by the Saudis, they're invited by Saudi Arabians.
So you have this sort of nationalism, but it tends to exclude an awful lot of people.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, and now, about Muqtada al-Sadr, is it the case that he is the most nationalistic of the Shia faction leaders, and that he is probably the most likely to try to form a coalition government with the, with the Sunni resistance, if America would let him?
I think we're way off that at the moment.
I mean, Muqtada has always, I mean, leads this movement, which is nationalist, it's populist, it represents really the poor Shia in Sadr City and other places, he's a religious leader, his father and his father-in-law were both martyred by Saddam.
So he carries a lot of clout in Iraq.
The problem is, it's an umbrella organization.
And while he may say nice things about the Sunni, there's also no question his militia, the Meidi army, terrify ordinary Sunni, and they hold it responsible, proper, rightly to my mind, for many of the sectarian killings, the thousands of people have been killed.
So it's very difficult for him to become part of a sort of nationalist coalition.
It might happen, but they'd have an awful lot of work to do.
Okay, now pardon me, because I'm sure this question is going to come out kind of convoluted, but I'm sure you'll know what I'm talking about.
The accusations from the American government in a basically unending drumbeat for the last six or seven months is that the Iranians are backing Shiite militias, always very vague accusations in Iraq.
And my best understanding, that in the split between the barter corps of the Supreme Council and the Mahdi army of Muqtada al-Sadr and his guys, that it's the barter corps and the Supreme Islamic Council, they're the ones who are backed by Iran, and they're our friends, they're the American government's friends in Iraq.
And so if it's Iranian bombs killing our guys, then that wouldn't really make any sense, since they're arming the same people as us, and Sadr is the nationalist who's not backed by Iran.
Am I close to reality here?
What's going on here?
Yeah, I mean, like we used to say in Belfast, if you don't find the situation confusing, you don't understand it.
And it is confusing.
I mean, historically, Muqtada al-Sadr comes from an Arab family.
They've always been somewhat hostile to the Iranians and hostile to those members of the Shia hierarchy who are from Iran or backed by Iran.
They've always attacked what used to be called the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq as being Iranian pawns.
Now, there's been something of a change over the last few years, because when they're accused of being the enemies of the U.S. and the pawns of Iran, of course they think, well, the enemy of our enemy is our friend, so therefore they go to the Iranians.
But I've always felt that the allegations from Washington that the insurgency is somehow backed by Iran really has more to do with American politics than Iraqi politics.
Yeah, no doubt about that.
In fact, just in the last few days, I've started to see references to the Shiite insurgency.
You know, all of a sudden we're at war against East Asia when my whole life it's been Eurasia and they just switch it in one day and I'm not supposed to notice, I guess.
Yeah, it's pretty extraordinary.
I mean, for instance, this emphasis on some bombs coming from Iraq, shape charges coming from Iran.
First of all, shape charges have been around for about half a century, they're not exactly new technology.
Secondly, you know, it's perfectly, the main insurgency is Sunni, who they hate, the Iranians.
And secondly, who is the main supporter of this, where do, for instance, do the suicide bombers come from?
Saudi Arabia.
As big as we have, but about half of them come from Saudi Arabia.
So when it comes, what's not new in Iraq is not actually the bomb, but that we have the use of suicide bombers on an industrial scale for the first time.
And this is really something that is to do with the Saudis and not the Iranians.
I can't remember a single Iranian suicide bomber being detected, either alive or dead.
So I think there's this fantasy picture of the insurgency in Iraq, which the administration has produced, which has all to do, as I said, with American politics and nothing to do with reality on the ground in Iraq.
Well, now, in the headlines this morning, they're talking about Sadr's announcement yesterday that he means to, and as you indicate in your article here on the Independent.co.uk, the special report on the surge, he has basically stood down since the surge began and told his Mahdi army to cool it, and now he's coming out even stronger and saying, we are withdrawing our guys, we don't even want to use arms in any situation.
It seems like he's been getting good advice from somebody that, listen, the Americans are trying to tar you as the Iranian faction because your guys are resisting the Americans and killing some of them, and they're trying to call you the Iranians and use that as an excuse for war with Iran, so you've got to cool it.
So now if he does go by what he said today, how's America going to blame Iran for the insurgency that doesn't exist at all on the Shia side, if the Mahdi army aren't even fighting at all, and we know the Baader Corps is nothing but the Iraqi army, then how are they going to blame Iran?
Yeah, it's going to be difficult, I'm sure it can be done.
I think that, for instance, it'll be interesting to see whether there are a lot of raids on the Mahdi army over the next few weeks, which would probably end their ceasefire.
It's really the West picking this fight.
There already has been some arrests.
It's the Americans picking this fight with the Sadrs, trying to get them to fight us so that we can call them the Iranians, is that what's going on here?
I think that it's also a very confused policy, because I'm not sure the policy of the administration is entirely the policy of the U.S. armed forces in Baghdad, but they can see that this is not the world's greatest idea, that you're already involved in a war with the Sunni insurgency, and the Sunni are 20% of the Iraqi population, about 5 million people, and suddenly you're gearing up to take on the Shia as well, who are 60% of the Iraqi population.
So they've been fairly cautious of what they're doing, and I don't think they like this idea of war with Iran at all, or war with the Iraqi Shia.
I think one of the great misconceptions of Middle East politics is to see the Shia in Iraq or the Shia in Lebanon as capsicles of Iran.
Of course, if you put pressure on them, they'll look to whoever will support them.
But overall, these are very highly independent movements.
Now, are you including the Supreme Islamic Council and Dawah in that, in saying they're not being cast positively?
No, they play this game of being the Supreme Council was set up in Iran, effectively, by the Iranians in 1982, it was set up during the Iraq-Iran-Iraq war, and the scary was then fighting on the Iranian side, something that's resented by a lot of Iraqis to this day.
Then in the 90s, they began to, probably on Iranian instructions, started cultivating better relations with the U.S. and became a main part of the opposition to Saddam.
Exactly what their connection to Iran is, at the moment, is a little bit uncertain.
Certainly, the way the Iranians have normally played things is that they like to have a lot of money on everybody, so they have a strong connection with the Supreme Council.
They probably give some support to Mactada or Sadr, but at the end of the day, none of these organizations are taking instructions from Tehran.
They're very independent.
When the Iranians tried to invade Iraq in 1982, when Saddam first attacked Iran in 1980, a lot of the Shia, a lot of the Iraqi army simply surrendered.
When the Iranians started invading Iraq, the Iraqis fought very hard.
It's a very difficult country to take over, and obviously the U.S. has found this to its cost, but I think the Iranians would find the same thing.
The very simple idea that the U.S. pulls out, the Shia take over in Baghdad, and somehow that means that the Iranians are in control, I think is very simple-minded and untrue.
I guess the administration tries to say Al-Qaeda will take over the place, but then when they switch off, they say Iran will and try to make us ignore the fact that it's their fault for invading in the first place, that Iran has so much influence in Iraq now.
Basically, in other words, what you're saying is that the DAW party and the Supreme Islamic Council, while they control the Green Zone and have somewhat identifiable loyalties to Iran, that where America to go, the Arab Shia in Iraq would not accept domination by Iran any more than they've accepted domination by the United States.
No, absolutely.
Okay, now, just for folks tuning in, I'm Scott Horton and I'm talking with one of the world's great investigative, unembedded reporters, Patrick Coburn, Middle East correspondent for the London Independent, and I'd like to get back to tactics and strategy and plans and all this kind of stuff, but really, right now I'd like to ask you more about the humanitarian condition on the ground there.
What is the situation like for the Iraqi people?
We've heard numbers as high as 4 million people displaced, 2 million who have, I guess, been able to flee the country, another 2 million displaced internally, the basically obliteration of many minority religious and ethnic sects, electricity still doesn't work, poverty rates through the roof, economy non-existent, but then again, this is all the horror stories from the liberal media who never tell us the good news, so I just wonder, someone who's been there and who actually knows the situation on the ground, please fill us in on what it's like day to day for the average Iraqi.
Actually, there just isn't much good news, you know, there used to be some right wing websites that used to, maybe they still exist, who used to give the real good news from Iraq, they didn't have much to report, I really wish they did, I don't think this war was a great idea, but I wish things weren't so bad and they weren't getting worse, just before we started talking, I was looking at reports of a cholera epidemic that's broken out in Sulaymaniyah in northern Iraq, 5,000 people have got cholera because the water's dirty, because there's sewage in the streets, and this is the most peaceful part of Iraq, there's no fighting there.
The latest reports are that, we have all this talk of benchmarks of showing progress in Baghdad, and one that amazingly Congress did not put in is how many Iraqis are fleeing their homes.
Now this is really a pretty good measure of the degree of security in any country, if people are fleeing their homes it is not good, if they're going back to their homes perhaps it's getting better.
Now the latest figures from the UN High Commission for Refugees says that the number of fleeing their homes has gone up, it was 50,000, and in the last few days it's gone up to 60,000.
People are fleeing because of insecurity, they're fleeing because of the breakdown of health facilities, no electricity, no water, you know Iraq is one of the hottest places on earth, and there's no electricity, it's also very, outside Kurdistan is very flat, you need to pump everything, you need to pump water, you need to pump sewage, no electricity you can't pump it.
The doctors have mostly fled Baghdad, I mean often I've called from friends who have gone to Damascus, gone to Jordan, and they've fled often because of just sheer terror and insecurity and danger to their families, and also because anything more, any even minor operations, you can't get done in Baghdad anymore, you have to go to hospitals in Amman or Damascus.
So there's this almost complete breakdown of society, and it's not getting better, and that of course is one thing which has fueled the enormous resentment of Iraqis against the foreign occupation, one of the reasons they were against Saddam, not just Kurds and Shia but actually most Sunni and we're glad to see the back of him, but they expected things to get better, they think we sit on all this oil, why don't we, instead of having the standard of living of Kuwait, we have the standard of living of Mali or somewhere in the South African state in the Sahara, so I think that has fueled tremendous resentment and hatred among Iraqis.
Now is there an economy to speak of at all, I mean are people able to trade food and goods and services to any degree?
Well, you know, the majority of Iraqis are dependent on a state ration when it arrives, which is infrequent, and one of the extraordinary things about Iraq is that there's money there, because there are still big oil revenues, much of it doesn't get spent, a lot of it gets stolen, a lot of it just sits there, you know, you see these big contracts awarded for schools, and they used to be awarded to American companies, and they'd have an Iraqi subcontractor, maybe a Kuwaiti subcontractor, another Iraqi subcontractor, to be subcontracted down to begin maybe with $800 million to build schools and hospitals and so forth, but the guy who was actually meant to put one brick on top of another maybe only got $20 million, and then you can't move anything around in places like Anbar and where the insurgents are strong, you know, if something that should cost $20,000 is probably going to cost you $120,000 because they are going to want to get a cut of the money, you want to move anything on the road, they'll want that cut, so these things tend to fuel the insurgency as well.
Okay, Patrick Coburn, Middle East correspondent from The Independent, in this article, your special report on the surge, you write, the hidden history of the past four years is that the U.S. wants to defeat the Sunni insurgents, but does not want the Shia Kurdish government to win a total victory.
It props up the Iraqi state with one hand and keeps it weak with the other.
And I'm reminded of an article that came out I guess about almost two and a half years ago now that I believe it was the beginning of 2005, where Hakeem from the Supreme Islamic Council, and I forget whether it was Talabani, I believe, the Kurdish leader, came out and said, listen, we offer our Badr brigades and our Peshmergas to go finally put an end to this Sunni insurgency once and for all.
And the American general said, whoa, thanks, but no thanks, we'll handle this, because I guess the fear was that the Peshmergas and the Badr Corps would finish the job all right, but, you know, so basically the Americans were left in the position of standing in between the Sunnis they're fighting, and the Badr Corps and the Peshmergas wanted to basically, you know, wipe out their resistance capability completely.
Is that basically right?
Well, I think I can't remember the exact details of that, but I think you put your finger on a problem that, you know, was there from the beginning.
It's just a macro problem.
We had the first Gulf War under the first President Bush, which threw Saddam out of Kuwait, but didn't go on to Baghdad.
Now what they didn't want, they wanted to defeat Saddam, but they didn't want, they thought, if we go to Baghdad, overthrow Saddam, we'll have to have elections.
These will be won by the Shia, who are friends of the Iranians.
We don't want that to happen, therefore they didn't go on to Baghdad.
The second time around, under the new President Bush in 2003, they faced the same dilemma.
They wouldn't accept the fact that the beneficiaries of the fall of Saddam were going to be the Shia and, to some degree, the Iranians.
So what did they do?
They thought, well, we pushed the Sunni out of power.
They sort of took power themselves, and they've never really accepted the consequence of having overthrown Saddam.
But this has left them in a very difficult position, that the Sunni are very angry to have lost power, and the Shia are pretty angry that they haven't gained power.
And this is a dilemma which has gone on, you know, really the last fifteen or more years.
Now is there any kind of deliberate strategy here, or just, well, oops, this is the situation we're in, we'll try to make the best of it, and I guess American troops are going to stand between these factions in their permanent bases forever?
Well, yeah, but I mean, that very phrase you used, stand between, well, you know, I remember two or three years ago, one of the arguments for not withdrawing was to say if we do, there'll be a civil war.
Since then, we've had months from which 3,000 civilians have been killed, bodies left beside the road in Baghdad.
We still have an enormous number killed.
I think there's a JAR report out today, or a draft JAR report, saying that the violence to civilians is not going down, so whatever else the U.S. Army is doing in Iraq, it's not standing between factions and preventing them from killing each other.
So I think that the U.S. presence, you know, does it prevent a total explosion, well maybe, we don't know the answer to that, but does it prevent mass slaughter?
It certainly doesn't.
Right.
Well, and we know over the past few years, it was really American policy that drove us to this in the first place, with the Sunni insurgency, the terrorists and the dead-enders supposedly who are now our friends in this new redirection, because Rumsfeld couldn't get the good intelligence from them, they went with this El Salvador option where they hired the Shiite death squads to go and fight the insurgency for them, and then you had tit-for-tat, and that's really how we got the civil war in the first place, isn't it?
That was a major contributory reason, yes.
Leading to the Samarimas bombing.
Iraq is very very complicated, but there are some things that are very simple about it, and true not just of Iraq, of other countries, which, you know, occupations are not popular.
In how many countries has an occupation been popular?
Not many.
And so the occupation was never popular in Iraq.
Secondly, occupations tend to exacerbate existing ethnic or religious differences if one community, in this case the Sunni, was fighting the occupation, and another one, the Shia, was not.
Because suddenly a Sunni says to a Shia, you're not only a different religion from me, but you're also a traitor to your country.
So I think that that exacerbates the existing divisions within a country.
Well another major division in Iraq, and I guess the one that gets the least amount of attention, is the Kurdish population up there in the north.
As you said, this is the most peaceful part of Iraq, they don't have the sectarian civil war going on up there and that kind of thing, at least not to the same degree as it is in other parts of Iraq, but the problem with the Kurdish situation is that somebody has to be stabbed in the back here, in terms of American policy.
It's either going to be our allies for 50 years in NATO, the Turks, or it's going to be the Kurds, our allies for the last 15 years or so.
Somebody's got to get the knife in the back here, right?
Yeah, I think that that's well put, and of course they want to put off the moment of decision because they need both of them, they particularly need the Iraqi Kurds at the moment.
I remember at the very beginning of this, in 2003, that the US was, notably Wolfowitz, was keen for a northern front for the Turks to come in with the US army, 40,000 Turkish troops were going to invade Iraqi Kurdistan, to the horror of the Kurds.
Fortunately for the Kurds, the Turkish parliament decided otherwise.
But I think that the Kurds are very worried about this, and things are getting worse in the area because at the end of the year there's meant to be a referendum which will decide areas that are disputed between Arab and Kurd, like Kirkuk, will decide which way they want to go.
Do they want to join this semi-independent Kurdish entity, or do they want to remain part of Iraq proper?
And that is exacerbating feelings there, and you may have seen recently this horrific bomb attacking another minority of the Yazidis, who have a special religion, but to be Kurdish, was probably part of the rising tension in that area, that these bombs kill 500 people.
So all over Iraq, we have more than one war going on, we have lots of different conflicts.
And how bad is it in Kirkuk, in terms of the Arabs that Saddam Hussein had relocated up there being pushed back out again, and so forth?
It's pretty bad for everybody there, I mean, it's such a city that's so close to the oil fields, you know, it's miserably poor.
The main street, you know, you see people hawking sort of pathetic little plastic goods.
There are Kurds who come back saying they want to live in Kirkuk, but they're living in the old football stadium, you know, you can sort of smell it about 500 yards away before you get to it, because there's no sewage disposal there, you know, people are sick.
Why is it so bad in Kurdistan?
They've had basically more or less good security, compared to the rest of the country at least, over these past few years?
Well, it depends which part of it.
Kirkuk is not currently part of Kurdistan.
Oh, I see, it's right on that border.
Yeah, it's still part of Iraq.
I don't know why, I mean, basically the whole sort of government structure is breaking down, you know, it's breaking down at every level because of corruption, because doctors have fled, you know, it's very difficult to have a quite simple operation in Iraq now, as I was saying, and that's true of Kirkuk, as it is Baghdad.
Now if, barring war with Iran, with war with Iran to the side for the moment, if Ron Paul was president and did like he promised, we just marched in, we can just march out, and he tells those commanders to pack up and get out of there as fast as they possibly can in a safe manner, what are your predictions, and you can go a few different ways if you like on what may happen, but what do you think the situation in Iraq would be like if American troops were to withdraw, say, tomorrow?
Well, you know, the truth is they're not going to withdraw tomorrow, you know.
Should there be withdrawal?
Certainly, there should be a negotiated withdrawal.
The Sunni insurgency was against the American occupation.
This is what sort of alienated the whole Sunni community, five million people.
And their demand is that there should be a timetable for withdrawal.
So I think that once that happens, then it becomes possible to bring them into government in a way that it isn't at the moment.
You can bring people into government, particularly if they're looking for some serious money, but you can't really bring the effective people in.
The main demand of the Muqtada al-Sadr's people, which is one of the biggest Shia parties, is again an American withdrawal.
So one can't just ignore the fact that so many of the majority of the population wants the U.S. to leave.
I think that once that starts happening, then you can bring peace back to Iraq.
I mean, that would be the beginning of a process, but so long as the U.S. is there, it won't happen.
Too many of the Sunni are going to fight it.
Too many of the Shia are not going to accept it.
Too many of the neighboring countries don't want the U.S. there.
It's not just Iran, you know, it's not just Syria.
I remember four years ago, Hasha Zebari, the Iraqi foreign minister, saying to me, and he's gone on saying this to me, remember that none of the countries surrounding Iraq like the idea of an American occupation.
They don't like what's happened.
And one way or the other, they'd like it to end.
Of course, they don't like each other either.
So it's not just the Iranians and the Syrians, it's the Saudis, it's the Turks, it's pretty well everybody.
I guess you're saying that if America was gone, it would be a new government, it wouldn't be under this constitution that's been created under American auspices and so forth, right?
Well, some of it would still be there, some not.
It was American auspices, but also the Kurds and the Shia voted for it.
I mean, this is one of the many peculiarities of Iraq, that having put a great effort into having elections and having a constitution passed by a referendum, almost immediately the US reversed course and said, we want to change the constitution, implying they want to change it without putting it to a referendum.
This was meant to be a way of conciliating the Sunni.
I don't think it'll get very far, because basically what the Sunni don't like is that they're 20% of the population they used to hold power, they don't anymore.
But I think that there are all these sudden reversals.
Now we're backing the Sunnis, and it seems like they're claiming, as you write in your article, they're claiming success on the local Sunni Iraqis finally getting sick and tired of Al Qaeda and fighting them, and they're claiming that as a success as they're arming and financing the guys who have been the Sunni resistance all this time, and that seems like two steps back if they're trying to get the Sunnis to join the government.
Yeah, you see, is this a success in terms of fighting Al Qaeda?
Yeah, they could say that.
But suddenly the US is arming tribal militias who are also opposed to the Iraqi government, so this weakens the Iraqi government.
So it's not all a plus.
I think, again, this is one of these spurious turning points that suddenly get heavy coverage in the US media as being really significant.
And sometimes they are of importance, but they're not of critical importance.
They don't really change the nature of the game, and in the game the players are pretty well the same.
We have Al Qaeda, we have the different Shia, we have the Kurds, we have the Kurds, and we now have the Sunni tribes as well.
But nobody is going to go out of business.
It just complicates the situation further, and it doesn't mean the US is any closer to victory.
And now, with all this talk about replacing Maliki with Alawi and stuff, are we looking at a real redirection back toward the Baathists and a war against Iran and the Shiites in Iraq and basically start this war over again to undo what we've done all this time?
Or is that just one more little...
You know, my view is we're looking at nothing, really.
I mean, I think we're just looking at a blur.
If you're in Baghdad, you know, you win one outside Iraq and you talk about the Iraqi government and Maliki, and it sounds as if it's the government of any other country, you know, of Germany, of Egypt, or somewhere else.
But if you're in Baghdad, then you realize that none of these guys can leave the green zone without getting shot immediately.
You know, maybe they can, you know, Maliki can get in a helicopter with all his guards and turn up in some other city, briefly, but they're really kind of besieged.
If we had a new Prime Minister, would he be any stronger?
No, probably not.
Probably weaker.
He'd be subject to the same pressures as Maliki is, and as Jaffrey was before.
I think it's always been naive to think, you know, that some guy is so stupid or so incompetent or so corrupt that if we only get rid of him, things are going to get better.
In fact, these guys have kind of all behaved rather similarly.
Yeah, it's just like in America.
That's what they say about George Bush.
That's just because of how dumb he is when we all know that that's not really the case.
Now, well, that's strange.
So all this talk about Alois basically seems to you as just hype.
Yeah, it is, because Alois, Iraqi politicians, he's kind of obsessed with the idea of becoming Prime Minister again.
But he was Prime Minister before, and it didn't work too well that time.
No, it didn't.
And he got, what, 0.2% of the vote in January?
No, he got a little bit more, but he's not a popular man.
He appeals to a secular vote, but there isn't much of a secular vote.
It does seem strange that at the same time they're talking about, look, we're doing this surge, we're strengthening the government so that they can succeed the benchmarks and this and that.
At the same time, they're talking about weakening and overthrowing the Prime Minister?
That doesn't seem like a way to strengthen the government.
It's extraordinary.
You know, if one's going to have, you know, the US is supposedly trying to create a democratic Iraqi government.
Let's leave aside whether this is true or not, but that's their position.
And it's true this government was elected in proper elections.
But then, quite happily, Washington is saying, you know, they got rid of one elected Prime Minister, Jafari, by saying basically he's not acceptable to the US.
No mention of the Iraqi voters, and now they're going to do it again.
So of course this discredits the Iraqi government in the eyes of ordinary Iraqis.
And wasn't Maliki just Jafari's deputy at the Dawa Party anyway?
Sure, yeah.
I mean, that was, you know, they wanted somebody else to come in, but, you know, the compromise was that you had Maliki come in.
And I think all you did at the end of the day was have a rather weaker government.
When you say Almaty, the guy that they, pardon me, I probably didn't get it right, the guy's name you just mentioned, he was from the Supreme Council, not Dawa, right?
That's right, yeah.
Okay, now, this one's a two-parter about war with Iran, one, whether you see indications that it's coming soon, and two, I was wondering if I could get you to address what I think is the most sensational prediction of what fate might befall American soldiers in the event of war with Iran, that the Iraqi army will basically turn on them, that Sadr and Abdulaziz Hakeem have both promised that if America bombs Iran, that they will, to quote the guy from Skiri, we will do our duty, and they will rise up and kill our soldiers in Iraq, and not 40-something hostages, but 160,000 of them.
And on one hand, it sounds, you know, too horrible to be possible, but then again, we're talking about Dick Cheney in power, and I wonder if you think that's a real risk, and whether you think that there's more coming.
Well, it wouldn't happen just bang like that, you know, that they'd massacre the more, but you know, would the Iraqi armed forces, already deeply unreliable from the U.S. point of view, would they be more or less reliable?
They'd be even less reliable, you know, would any American commander want to have some Iraqi forces, you know, surrounding his camp or close to his camp, you know, clearly he would not.
So, of course, it's a disastrous idea, but again, of course, you're quite right that the fact it's disastrous, and rather obviously disastrous, doesn't mean that it won't happen.
You know, I think when, you know, we were talking about many things which are, you know, positions that are being put forward, which are propaganda, I think one of the most menacing things over the last few years is the degree to which the administration believes its own propaganda.
As a journalist to be in Iraq, you'd see just before the last presidential election in 2004, I think standing with George Bush before Congress and saying, oh, the insurgency, it's just four provinces, you know, every rest of Iraq is peaceful, you know, and there I was with other journalists sitting in Baghdad, and we knew that if we tried to go to any of the so-called 14 peaceful provinces, with the exception of the three in Kurdistan, you know, we wouldn't come back.
We'd have our heads chopped off.
Oh, I can't tell you how many times I heard that talking point repeated.
None of the others who actually put forward this argument ever volunteered personally to back up their argument by going into any of these peaceful places, but maybe they didn't, didn't come back, so we can hear them.
Yeah, sure.
I mean, I've heard that talking point a million times, that the insurgency is isolated to here, here, and here, and that kind of thing.
It's amazing.
Yeah, I mean, I heard one of the few British neo-cons declare that much of Iraq was peaceful, and when he was asked, you know, how did he know, and he said, well, he'd just come from Basra to Baghdad, and he said, well, how did you come?
Well, I came in a plane, he flew over 10,000, 10,000 feet, and somehow couldn't see any sort of signs of violence on the ground.
Alright, well, I guess in closing, can I ask you to give us short-term predictions, long-term predictions for where you think we're headed here?
Well, I think, first of all, you know, I think there's been rather dangerously over the summer a sort of, some political, particularly over the last few weeks, political and media suggestions that things are getting better, maybe the U.S. could win a victory, there was a famous op-ed in the New York Times saying, you know, maybe victory is possible, I mean, this really is nonsense.
I don't know of any Iraqi politician who believes a word of this.
I think all this has to do with American politics, nothing to do with Iraq.
Things, I think, are going to remain largely the same and probably get a bit worse, and we can see this, but I mean, you know, the real indicators, not the rather spurious indicators or benchmarks that we put forward, but things like, are people leaving their homes, and they are still, and the answer is yes, they are, and in larger numbers, these are the real indications of things getting worse.
In the medium term, at some point, the U.S. is going to leave.
At some point, there's going to be a peace.
At some point, what's going to happen is what was always going to happen, which is the Shia, who are 60% of the population, are going to basically run Iraq outside Kurdistan, and Iranian influence is going to increase, but they're not going to take over Iraq, and they're not up to it, and they'd be in real trouble if they tried.
And then, ultimately, we'll have peace.
But what's so tragic is that this peace could really have come now, or it could have come a few years ago, and it didn't, and you know, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people could still be alive.
I think that what I find so criminal about the administration in Washington is that for its own political ends, it's prolonged the agony in Iraq, and eventually we'll have the sort of peace in two years that we could have had two years ago.
Now, forgive me, because I know that this is a stupid question, but it must be addressed, so would you add to your prediction there that al-Qaeda in Iraq would cease to exist over, you know, as you say, the Shia will take over the non-Kurdish sections and whatever?
The president says that al-Qaeda is going to use Iraq as a base and create a caliphate from Spain to Indonesia.
Which is it?
Oh, are you nervous?
So al-Qaeda had no strength in Iraq, wasn't present in Iraq, before 2003.
Well no, that's not quite true, they had one base, which was mentioned by Colin Powell before the UN, but it was in part of Iraq, Kurdistan, which was not controlled by Saddam.
For the first time, they had a constituency in western Iraq that they could, because they were opposed to the occupation, they had a constituency that they never had in Afghanistan.
I was in Afghanistan, they were detested in Afghanistan, some of the propaganda videos that you see of al-Qaeda in Iraq were in fact, because they could only make them by hiring local tribesmen, by paying so many dollars a day, because they didn't have enough men themselves to make them.
In Iraq, for the first time, they have a base, this won't entirely disappear, but when the U.S. has gone, when there's no longer the occupation, I think already, you know, we have seen how Iraqis are fighting al-Qaeda.
The one card they have in their hands is, we are here to fight the foreign invader.
No foreign invader, they don't have any card left in their hands.
So I think it's very difficult for them to remain there.
But having once established a base, it's also going to be difficult to get them out.
And now, when you say no foreign occupier, and that begins to get rid of their motivation, would the local Sunnis continue an alliance with al-Qaeda in any sense to resist domination by the Shia?
Some might, but others not, it depends what pressure they come under.
The bad things created by the war are not going to disappear overnight.
Yeah, there would be those who would say, yeah, we need fighters, we need guns, we need money.
So I was talking to a friend of mine who comes from one of those Sunnis from West Baghdad, and he was saying, you know, wow, we don't like al-Qaeda in the area because they can crowd force our young men to fight with them, you know, they're very dangerous.
On the other hand, he said, you know, a few nights ago, they attacked a police commando base.
The police commando, the Shia, generally regarded as death squads by the Sunni, and killed 11 of them.
People in my area were pretty pleased about that.
So you have an ambivalence there.
But overall, I think once the occupation goes, then the basic reason that al-Qaeda was able to have a lodging in Iraq would disappear, and they would be on their way out.
Well, it has been my honor to have you on the show today, everybody.
Patrick Coburn, he's the Middle Eastern correspondent for The Independent, top of the list of unembedded investigative reporters in the world.
And I beg you all, please go and read The Surge, a special report by Patrick Coburn at independent.co.uk.
Thanks so much for your time today, sir.
Thank you.
