04/11/08 – Patrick Cockburn – The Scott Horton Show

Well, the headline today in USA Today reads, As Iraq violence swells, all eyes on al-Sadr.
And that's Muqtada al-Sadr, the leader of the Mahdi army.
And our guest today, Patrick Coburn, he's a Middle East correspondent for The Independent, has a new book out called Muqtada.
Muqtada al-Sadr, The Shia Revival and the Struggle for Iraq.
He is also the author, co-author with his brother Andrew of Out of the Ashes and Saddam Hussein, An American Obsession.
He also wrote The Occupation, War and Resistance in Iraq.
Welcome back to the show, Patrick.
Thank you.
It's very good to have you here and very interesting.
I can't wait to finish reading this book.
I only just barely had time to get started on it yesterday.
It's already fascinating, this story of the Mahdi army, the Sadr clan and their role in post-war, current occupied Iraq.
The story begins, I guess let's start the interview where the book begins.
It's four years ago, almost exactly, during the first battle of Najaf, and you were stopped at a checkpoint with your guides and associates and so forth and almost killed by some members of the Mahdi army.
Why don't you tell us a little bit about that?
Sure.
I mean, it was the sort of thing that happens to all too many Iraqis, tens of thousands of people being killed in these circumstances.
And I think I and the two Iraqis who were with me were lucky to get away with it.
I mean, as you say, it was during the first battle of Najaf in April 2004.
Maqtada al-Sadr, the background is that Maqtada al-Sadr had held up in Najaf the then American envoy, Paul Bremer, had closed down his newspaper, arrested his chief aide and threatened to arrest him, an American general threatened to kill him.
Anyway, I decided to go to Najaf, and it's a difficult journey, not just because Najaf is a sheer holy city, but the road from Baghdad goes through some very dangerous territory, mainly sunny towns and villages where there have been a lot of kidnappings and killings of foreigners.
So I made a mistake.
I put on an Arab headdress and a red and white keffiyeh, and we were okay going through the sunny towns, and then we got to a place called Kufa outside Najaf, and I was still wearing this keffiyeh, and we stopped by a checkpoint of Mahdi army people, and they're heavily armed and sort of wearing civilian clothes, but armed to the teeth with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenade launchers.
So they decided that I was, they started shouting, they wondered at me, you see, I wasn't an Arab.
They started shouting, American spy, American spy.
There was some fighting going on, so I think they were in a fairly tense mood, and they started, they dragged us out of the car.
The two Iraqi friends who were with me thought, that's it, we're dead.
But we kept trying to sort of draw things out, and eventually there was sort of some discussion among them, and one of them decided, well, let's ask the sheikh and one of their leaders.
They took us to the main mosque in Kufa.
Things got a little better after that.
These things are most dangerous in the first moments, but that certainly focused my mind on Muqtada al-Sadr and the Mahdi army in Iraq.
And, really, there's so many different directions to go from that.
I guess I'd like to focus on the thing that you brought up at the beginning, the absolute terror that you had to go through, these thugs dragging you out of the car, AK-47s and grenade launchers, and are they going to kill me or not, powerless in this situation, and that this is something that the people of Iraq, millions and millions and millions of people, have had to go through for years and years now.
Yeah, absolutely, and it's one of the reasons I was telling the story, other than that it's maybe interesting and dramatic, is that so much of the coverage you see of Iraq doesn't give the feeling that Iraqis have a continual dread.
I went recently between central Baghdad and Fallujah.
I counted 27 checkpoints.
You don't know who's going to be at these checkpoints.
It might be police, but who are the police really working for?
It might be army, same question.
Or it might be criminals, or it might be bandits, or it might be an insurgent group, or it might be the media army.
So, you know, this continual anxiety, just taking a short drive.
And then I guess the other real lesson there was the massive pilgrimage that was taking place during this battle, or kind of around this battle.
Yeah, it's a strange thing about Iraq, among the Shia, but there's been a great religious revival of it, at the center of which is Maqtada al-Sadr.
And one aspect of these great marches and pilgrimages on Shia holy days, sometimes taking place when there's fighting going on, but with enormous numbers.
These are probably the greatest religious marches and pilgrimages on earth, with maybe two or three million people taking part.
They very seldom get reported, because people, you know, reporters, television, newspapers, are more interested in writing about the bang-bang and fighting.
But actually these are politically very significant, because particularly as Maqtada al-Sadr is frequently the person who's called them.
And they show the degree of political and religious support that he has.
You characterize him as the center of the Shiite revival.
In Iraq, TV tells me that he's a firebrand, a rogue cleric.
Yeah, it's sort of, you know, you have these sort of descriptions of him, you know, renegade, a firebrand.
Well, I mean, these don't mean much.
Renegade implies somebody's changed their opinion, changed their party.
He's never done that.
He's always been against the American occupation.
But he's always been against the American occupation.
In fact, the reason that, you know, when Maqtada suddenly sprang into view in April 2003 on the death of Sadr al-Said, it came as a surprise to everybody outside Iraq, and a fair number of people inside, but there was a very good reason for it.
That he really, the al-Sadr family were the most sort of famous opponents, clerical, religious Shiite opponents of Sadr al-Hussein in the country.
Maqtada comes from a family of martyrs.
His father, Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr, was assassinated by Sadr's gunman in Najaf in 1999 together with two of his sons.
He'd started a great sort of religious movement.
And Maqtada's father-in-law, Mohammed Bakr al-Sadr, had been executed along with his sister by Sadr in 1980.
So Iraqis feel this family had really fought and died for its faith.
And that also was supported by a political movement.
So that's how Sadr suddenly seemed, how Maqtada suddenly seemed to appear out of the ground.
He hadn't really, he'd really taken over the tradition of his father and his father-in-law.
You talk about in the book how these two men are considered almost divine, that this martyrdom is, well, I guess the way American Christians would see the early Christians who were persecuted by the Romans or something.
These are almost religious figures themselves.
Yeah, I mean, this is the case.
It's one of the reasons why returning exiles who came in after the overthrow of Saddam by the U.S. have some difficulty in establishing their credibility with the Shia masses of Iraq.
They say, look, these people have been cavorting in five-star hotels in Europe.
This is often unfair and not true, but this is what's believed.
While people like Maqtada's family were being assassinated or being tortured or sitting in prison.
And that's one of the reasons that his authority was established from day one.
And he was very, he was clever in that, oh, he was a young man, but on the posters he always used to, and to some extent does, appear together with a picture of his father with a long white beard, who was known as the White Lion, and his father-in-law with an Iraqi flag at the background.
So it's a mixture of religion and nationalism.
So he has inherited a lot of legitimacy here.
Sure, yes.
I think that's what always, you know, makes me blanch a little when I, you know, Jerry Bremer, when he was in Iraq, used to talk about getting rid of this guy.
This is some sort of Hitler, this is some sort of village preacher.
You know, he hadn't bothered to find out what every Iraqi knew, that this guy came from, you know, pretty well the most famous family in Iraq, and one famous for its opposition to Saddam.
And we had the same thing with, I was in Baghdad three weeks ago when Senator McCain was there.
And, first of all, he seemed to say, oh, Muqtada al-Sadda here, he's on the wane, and he's denied that and says that Muqtada should be eliminated.
But I don't think he's considered for a moment, you know, that he's attacking perhaps the most popular figure among the Shia of Iraq, and one who's regarded as semi-divine by millions of Iraqis.
So, just by saying that, you know, he's taking the first small step to a much bigger war.
You know, I forget where I read this, but there was an anecdote about Paul Bremer asking an aide, who's this guy, Ali al-Sistani?
And the aide said, oh, he's a minor cleric.
And it turns out that Ali al-Sistani is the highest-ranking religious authority among the Shia in the world.
You know, Iraqi Shia are pretty sort of religious people.
It was quite amazing how little the income people like Bremer and the people around him knew about this.
These people had never read a history of Iraq.
They'd never really asked Iraqis.
If they'd met Iraqis, they'd met them in New York or Washington, but not ones who really knew what made Iraqi society tick.
On the lines of how much of a rogue or a firebrand or so-called type thing, how sophisticated is this guy, really?
You say in the book that his personality really is a mystery.
You suggest, perhaps even to himself, that he relies so heavily on the identity of his father and father-in-law, the martyrs, that nobody really knows too much about this guy or what he really thinks.
Yeah, that's true.
But bear in mind a couple of things.
First of all, this guy grew up under Saddam.
He was a political operative for his father in the 1990s against Saddam.
I mean, this would really make you keep your own counsel, keep your mouth shut.
Secondly, religious figures in Iraq and any other country don't tend to sort of say the first thing comes into their head, which reduces their authority.
And particularly in Iraq, there's a tradition of religious leaders sort of retiring for contemplation for months on end.
People like Sistani and the other senior leaders often don't leave their houses for years.
I mean, people come and see them.
They don't go out.
So Muqtada is a mysterious character, but it's not sort of too surprising that he's so secretive.
I mean, this is somebody who has a lot of enemies, has always had a lot of enemies.
Well, what's his relationship with Sistani?
Did they get along well?
Not particularly, no.
I mean, there's two trends in Shi'ism.
One was very important.
The one that Sistani follows is what the side followers of Muqtada and his father call quietists, i.e. that religious leaders should not actively participate in politics.
They should keep their distance.
Because involvement in politics is ultimately corrupting.
There's another view taken by the side followers of Muqtada, that Islam means getting out into the world to try to right injustices, that you participate in politics, you participate in social affairs.
So these are two sort of very different trends.
And on those, Muqtada's people would imply that Sistani and his supporters, that under Saddam Hussein, and then again, they hadn't really done anything, so they were sort of covert collaborators.
They might not have liked Saddam, but they didn't say so.
And again, the same with the occupation.
What makes Muqtada different from the rest of the clergy is he's been against the occupation from the beginning and said so, while they have either sort of covertly supported it or not said anything.
So this is a big difference between the two parts of Shiaism.
But actually it is in most religions, you know, should people be active or should they be passive and contemplative.
Yeah, well, I'm trying to remember back during the battles of Najaf, it was Sistani that brokered the deals that ended those battles, right?
Yeah, I mean, at that time, the Shia tried to hang together and certainly Sistani may not have liked Muqtada much, but he thought they wanted to sort of stick together.
You know, going back a bit, what happened really was this.
As soon as the U.S. decided to overthrow Saddam, two things were always going to happen.
One, the Shia in Iraq, who were 60% of the population, were going to take power.
Saddam's regime was based on the 20% Sunni Arab community in Iraq.
That was going to happen, and because the Iranians were the great enemies of Saddam and also were co-religionists to the Iraqi Shia, they were going to gain him power.
Ever since, the U.S. has been trying to prevent that conclusion to Saddam being overthrown actually becoming a reality, but they've always failed so far.
I think it's just inevitably going to happen.
They really believed that they would have anti-Iranian Shiite Iraqis in charge.
Yeah, I mean, you could find them, but there weren't too many of them, you know.
You know, Muqtada's accused of being an Iranian pawn.
Actually, his family was always anti-Iranian.
They've always been Iraqi nationalists, such as the Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, and his main supporters have always been closer to Iran.
But of course, at the same time, once Muqtada came under pressure from the U.S., you know, it became sort of the old cliche, clicked in, you know, the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
So Muqtada began to move towards the Iranians, and recently has been living in the Iranian holy city of Behroum in northern Iran.
Yeah, it seems like that's a really bad move on his part when the American government always uses that as the accusation against him, that, you know, any violence taking place in Shia parts of Iraq are Muqtada al-Sadr's fault, or at least the rogue special groups of his Mahdi army or something like that.
It seems like he would do everything he could to avoid getting in bed with the Iranians.
But, you know, remember, just surviving in Iraq is pretty difficult.
I mean, this very day that we're talking, Muqtada's chief aide in Najaf has been assassinated coming out of Friday prayers.
You know, so probably it gives a priority to staying in one piece.
Yeah, so really it's been a lie for a long time now that Sadr is, you know, the instrument of Iran and the instrument of everything that's going wrong for America in Iraq, but now it's becoming true.
Yeah, it's sort of self-fulfilling on the U.S. part.
They put a lot of pressure on him.
He looks to the Iranians the same as all the other Shia parties.
If they didn't, then, you know, the Iraqi Shia are very different from Iran.
Well, so tell me about these special groups, then.
Gareth Porter from IPS News seems to think that there's no such thing, really.
This is just a term made up by the American military so that they don't have to blame Sadr every time Sadr's guys do some fighting.
Yeah, I mean, you know, the special groups exist, and I did some research on this, but they aren't that big, you know.
It's become a sort of excuse to attack the Mehdi army.
You know, there's something very poisonous, which has always been in the Middle East, that, you know, under Saddam, Iraq had a sectarian regime basically run by the Sunni, although the Shia were the majority.
And any time there was Shia dissent, there was a great uprising in 1991 after the Gulf War, maybe 100,000 people were killed.
But Saddam and the Sunni and Saddam's regime would always say, no, no, it's not the Iraqi Shia, it's the Iranians, it's Iranian Revolutionary Guards, it's Iraqis who are paid for and are pawns of Iran.
But it was never really true.
I mean, the Iranians have some involvement, they might have some units, but the reality is that the Iraqi Shia community, a large part of it follows Muqtada, and Muqtada's against the occupation.
So pretending that they're all Iranian pawns is really completely misleading.
It's kind of poisonous because it makes, you know, I often talk to Sunnis, oh, I'm not sectarian, you know, my sister's married to a Shia, they go on like this.
But you say, what about al-Sistani, what about Muqtada, and you mention some other Shia politicians.
Well, as they said, well, they're all really Iranians and so forth.
So this, I think that the administration in Washington is actually, if you take what they're saying about the special groups and Muqtada and the Shia being pawns of Iran, you know, you could interchange that with what Saddam used to say, and there really isn't much difference in the rhetoric.
And as you pointed out before, the Sadr guys stayed in Iraq during the Iran-Iraq war, and it was the guys who are now in power, the Dawa Party and the Supreme Islamic Council, they're the ones who were in Iran.
Yeah, you see, you know, it's pretty amazing, people don't realize, there are two governments in the world that support the present Iraqi government.
One is the United States, the other is Iran.
For the Iranians, you know, this is a Shia government.
It also seems to be kind of run by guys who were originally in their pocket.
You know, the main party in power in Baghdad, the Supreme Council of Iraq, was founded by the Iranians in 1982.
Their main militia, Badr, used to be headed by an Iranian officer.
And I think maybe one of the reasons that the Iranians are so confident, that, you know, they've bet on all the horses in the race, if you like.
I mean, they give some support to Muqtada, although they don't trust him.
But at the same time, they have very strong influence over the Iraqi government, the Shia in the Iraqi government, although these are supposedly allied to the U.S.
Now, let me ask you about the surge and how well it's working.
I guess my understanding is that basically the reason that casualty rates have fallen is not so much because of the buildup of troops and the clear and hold strategy and all that, so much as the fact that the Saudis were basically already successful in driving almost all their Sunni Arabs out of Baghdad.
Yeah, I mean, this is true.
I mean, at one point I would like to make, you know, one can get lost in the morass of detail of Iraq.
You know, for over four years, five years now, the U.S. has been basically fighting the Sunni community in Iraq, a community of about five or six million people.
But now the fighting is increasingly with the Shia inside the city in Basra.
So, you know, instead of the U.S. fighting just one war in Iraq and the first war isn't over, they're now fighting two wars.
You know, this is really a quite serious escalation.
They're not only fighting in Baghdad and central Iraq, as they were, but now, because of the British withdrawal, they're fighting in Basra as well.
So the U.S. is fighting two wars, and it's fighting over a greater area.
I don't think this has really sunk home in the U.S. or the world outside Iraq yet.
Well, it would at least make some kind of sense, I think, right, for the American army to back the minority Sunni.
That's who we backed there all along, and that's who we back in Egypt and Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Middle East.
It seems like we have the exact reverse of American Middle East policy inside Iraq.
You know, that's so.
It's always been a problem for them, for the U.S. forces there.
But I think there's another problem, you know, over Maqtada, is this, you know, when I read these things of, you know, Senator McCain, and many others saying, well, you know, we're going to eliminate him, get rid of him.
But this guy, I was talking earlier this week to a former Iraqi minister who was saying, look, the majority is not a sympathizer, actually, with Maqtada.
He was saying the majority of Iraqis are Shia, and the majority of the Shia follow Maqtada.
Now they're suddenly talking about, you know, dis-marginalizing, maybe not allowing to vote in the next election, a group of Iraqis that are about 10 million strong, about 30, 40 percent of the Iraqi population.
They're really not going to like this.
So they're laying the groundwork of a prolonged war with part of the Iraqi Shia, not all, but a large part of the Iraqi Shia, just like after the fall of Saddam Hussein by dismissing the army and so forth, they laid the groundwork for a war with the Iraqi Sunni.
Oh, well, good.
I guess that'll be the excuse to stay another five years, right?
At least.
Well, you know, they keep on, you know, the surge.
You asked about the surge, and I sort of went backwards a little and talked about the Shia.
The surge, there were significant changes that, above all, that a lot of the Sunni guerrillas who've been fighting the U.S. felt squeezed on one side by al-Qaeda, on the other by the fact that the Shia were pushing them out of Baghdad, and they felt they had too many enemies.
I mean, recently I was in, I went to Fallujah, and I'm not embedded, but I went with them, people I knew, and I was talking first to the leader of al-Sahwa, a guy called Abu Maroof, just outside Fallujah, between Baghdad and Fallujah, a man who commanded 13,000 men, former guerrilla who had been fighting the Americans, and he and his men had switched sides, and he was saying to me, yeah, you know, we decided that, you know, we couldn't fight so many people, but it doesn't mean they like the Americans.
It means they detest the Iraqi government.
And inside Fallujah, the same thing.
The chief of police was formally fighting the Americans until a year ago.
He's the brother of the commander al-Sahwa outside.
Again, has no loyalty to the Iraqi government.
Now, these guys at the moment are on the American side, but they could change again.
I mean, Petraeus said quite openly the situation is very fragile, and I think people thought, you know, honest guy and being cautious, but it is fragile, and even more fragile than he admitted.
Well, and a lot of these concerned local citizens, the former Sunni insurgency, sons of Iraq, whatever they call them now, a lot of them have told reporters from around the world that, oh, we're just waiting until the next battle for Baghdad when we kill all the Shia and take the city back.
Yeah, but a lot of them think like that and say that, you know.
And also I think there's a kind of misunderstanding.
So a lot of these people, you know, are anti-Al Qaeda.
A lot of them are former Al Qaeda, and quite a lot are present Al Qaeda who think it's a lot safer to, you know, have a uniform and hold a gun legally and get paid by the U.S. than be on the run.
So, you know, certainly in Baghdad, al-Sahwa, people I was in contact with, were saying, you know, Al Qaeda, one of them was saying to me, no officer in this new supposedly pro-American tribal units of al-Sahwa, the Awaiting Council, he said no officer goes home at night to his home unless he has some sort of relationship with Al Qaeda.
So, you know, the idea that people will be given new names by the American military command, the sons of Iraq, concerned local citizens, and so forth.
But they're not quite the squeaky clean guys that they're sometimes portrayed.
So these aren't just the guys who, you know, used to tolerate Al Qaeda's presence to help them fight the American occupation.
These are actually Al Qaeda and Iraq guys themselves.
They are Al Qaeda, you know.
People said to me, you know, I knew Sassone's cousin was Al Qaeda.
I was amazed, you know, as I was driving along, and I suddenly saw him carrying a machine gun beside the road, dressed in a uniform, chatting to an American officer.
Yeah.
So when they say we got Al Qaeda on the run, what they mean is we got Al Qaeda on the payroll.
Yeah, exactly.
Very nice.
Well, and again, this is just the setup.
Right now this is the eye of the storm.
We, the U.S. military, presided over the ethnic cleansing of the Sunni Arabs from Baghdad, and now we're waiting for the battle to start over again as they try to take it back.
They might try.
I doubt that they'll succeed because, you know, they were always a minority in Baghdad.
They're more of a minority now.
The government is controlled by the Shia and somewhat by the Kurds as well.
So is the army, so is the police.
I just don't think it will be done.
I think that they're kidding themselves.
The Sunni are kidding themselves they could do.
There are also demographic changes.
You know, one thing about the surge, you know, sometimes I have these debates on radio and television where people say the surge is going great, but, you know, it's not just what I say or what I've seen in Baghdad, but there are 3.2 million Iraqi refugees in Syria and Jordan and inside Iraq.
That's one in nine Iraqis have had to flee their homes.
These people are not having a great time.
They're often living in misery without enough food, but they don't go back because despite all these claims for the surge, they know it's too dangerous for them to go back to their homes.
They'd get killed.
So I think that's the real verdict.
Unfortunately, the refugees believe that the security situation is pretty well as bad as it was before.
Now let me ask you about the government of national salvation.
At least in the past, Muqtada al-Sadr has talked about creating a coalition with what used to be the Sunni insurgency, now the concerned citizens and so forth, in order to basically have a nationalist, Arab, non-religious, sectarian coalition-type government against the Iranians and against al-Qaeda and against the Americans.
Is that still even a possibility, or has that time passed?
It might be down the road.
But at the moment, you have to consider how bad things are in Iraq.
For a long time, the civil war phrase was banned by the American embassy that Iraqi politicians would say, if this isn't a civil war, I don't know what is.
You know, we all have probably 3,000 civilians a month killed.
And the American embassy or the British embassy would ring up and say, you don't know, don't you say civil war, because that will give the impression to people that things are really bad, as if people didn't really know.
But we did have a civil war, and people are, you know, Sunni and Shia are still really terrified of each other.
You know, I find it, I have a couple of Sunni drivers, I can't use them in Shia areas.
You know, I have Shia Sunni and Shia friends who are always declaring how non-sectarian they are.
But if I have them in the same room, people will start whispering, you know, just don't tell that guy where I live.
You know, this fear and hatred is very deep.
And, you know, the surge is partly based on the fact that after the mass killings of 2006 and 2007, an awful lot of Sunni and Shia hated and feared each other even more than they hated and feared the Americans.
So, such success as the surge had was based on the enormous division among Iraqis.
Then afterwards, the United States said, well, let's have political progress, reconciliation.
But if there had been reconciliation, there wouldn't have been military progress.
The two things were completely contradictory.
And now, well, at least in terms of political objectives, the Saudis do share with the Sunnis the rejection of the idea of federalism, don't they?
Every time I see Abdulaziz al-Hakim say, yeah, we ought to have a strong federal system, then a Shia stand in alliance with Iran, Muqtada comes out and denounces him.
Yeah, I mean, you know, this is having a big Shia canton in southern Iraq.
I'm not sure how realistic it is, because so much power in Iraq depends on who controls Baghdad.
And it's currently, it's the Shia who control most of the city.
You know, then now they're attacking Sadr City, which sometimes is described as a district of Baghdad.
But actually, it's a twin city.
There are 2.5 million to 2.5 million people there.
And I don't, you know, maybe they can get in there.
But it will be, if the government gets in, the government army gets in, it'll be because it's backed by the Americans, backed by tanks, backed by helicopters, backed by strike aircraft and drones.
And then they'll be, you know, under continual guerrilla attack.
You know, the pretense is that, you know, this is the Iraqi government doing it.
But the Iraqi government tried to do this in Basra three weeks ago, and it really didn't work.
You know, the Iraqi, Muriel Maliki, the Iraqi prime minister, said that militia men must hand over their weapons in 72 hours.
And, you know, within that time, Iraqi television viewers were suddenly watching pictures of Iraqi military units handing over their weapons to the Mehdi army.
By the thousands?
By the thousands.
I don't know how many it was, you know, but it was very demoralizing.
Then, you know, the attacks are now picking up, but it's much more of an American attack now.
And just as you say in the book, this is all about legitimacy and loyalty.
Obviously, the Iraqi army is equipped by the Americans.
They have technology on their side, but apparently loyalty to al-Sadr and to Kalashnikov is enough.
Yeah, I mean, even the guys who almost killed me four years ago, I got talking to them afterwards, you know, these were pious, simple, dangerous young men who were prepared to get killed, didn't want to get killed, but they were prepared to get killed.
They didn't even come from the place I was picked up at Cooper.
They came from Minnesota City.
And these people, you know, they had very little money.
They had to borrow money from relatives to get on a bus to come and get to the front where they thought they might die.
But these people, they're not well-trained soldiers or anything like that, but they will fight.
You know, in that same chapter, actually, you talked about their insistence that we're not a militia.
Stop calling us a militia.
We're an army, and the real importance there is that word army.
The real connotation there is their legitimacy comes from Allah.
These are guys who take what they're doing extremely seriously.
Yeah, they take it all very seriously.
You know, they're kind of simple.
You know, during the Battle of Najaf, some of them would say, oh, I survived because, you know, an angel from God came and, you know, stopped the American tanks or made sure the bombs didn't explode near me.
And you sort of look at them thinking, is this guy serious?
And then you see it is.
You know, these guys really believe it.
Well, this is the thing that, well, if I'm having as much trouble as I'm having wrapping my head around it, I'm sure that this is something that has not really gotten across to the American people, that for many of these Iraqis, we might as well be talking about, you know, biblical days right now.
This is the kind of thing you'd write a holy book about, the time the Americans came and killed everybody.
Yeah, I mean, you know, Iraq is so complicated, as you just said, and there are various simple things which are pretty obvious, which is occupiers in any country are very seldom popular.
You know, the British Army was not popular in America for most of the time in the 18th century.
The, you know, occupying armies are usually much disliked by local inhabitants, and that happens in Iraq.
The government, our government, which is an Iraqi government which only is there because of American arms, again, is often seen as a front, as pawns of the U.S. by a whole bunch of Iraqis, so it tends to be discredited.
Again, that's pretty simple.
You know, no one can disappear into these intricacies of Iraqi politics of what the Kurds and the Shia and the Sunni think, but some elements of the Iraqi situation are extremely simple.
Well, now, the War Party says we can't leave.
We couldn't leave a year ago because everything was so bad.
We can't leave now because things are, you know, better at least in terms of, you know, how many people are dying.
We don't have 3,000 a month being killed like we did then.
But we can't leave now because it'll turn back into that if we do.
Are they right?
No, of course they're not right.
You know, I've been hearing this from the beginning.
You know, in 2003 we can't go because there might be, you know, fighting, you know.
But, you know, we had a civil war anyway.
You know, that didn't stop anything.
Now, you know, we have a similar situation.
You know, the surge is meant to have made everything much better, but somehow the same number of troops isn't needed after the surge as before the surge.
If things had improved, you might imagine the number of American troops necessary to maintain order would go down.
It's not happening.
So these are really sort of PR tricks.
You know, some of them have substance to them, sometimes not.
I want to drop a list of sort of turning points in Iraq, as announced by the U.S. government and often picked up by the media.
You know, sovereignty was returned to Iraq in 2004, except some other Iraqis didn't control their own army.
You know, the Iraqi Intelligence Service doesn't appear in the Iraqi budget.
There's a very simple reason for that.
It's paid by the CIA.
This is quite open.
You know, until the Iraqi army is substantially controlled by the U.S.
So all these turning points really haven't been turning points, and often they've only been manufactured at convenient moments depending on the U.S. electoral cycle.
You know, lots of optimism in the middle of 2004 before the presidential election.
And now, you know, a year ago the Americans wanted to, you know, were very hostile to Maliki.
But earlier this year Iraqi politicians were telling me that, you know, the Americans were saying to them, you know, we're going to stick with Maliki certainly until after the next U.S. presidential election.
You know, we want things to get calm.
Things aren't getting calm.
But, you know, so much that happens in Iraq is done with one eye on what's happening in the next American election.
Well, that's certainly true, right?
The delay in the big election of 2005, they had to wait until they – Stani, if I remember right, wanted to go ahead and have the election early in 2004, but Bush had to get reelected first.
They put it off a whole other year, and then that just set up all kinds of more complications to be dealt with.
That's right.
There's the precedent for that.
So, well, so the policy still is to back Maliki and the Dawa Party.
At the same time, we're arming and financing the concerned local citizens and so forth.
Is this just a completely ad hoc policy?
It seems to be sort of made up on the day, really.
You know, but the Sunni and Shia communities are split.
In both cases, the U.S. is supporting one part of those communities.
You know, so that gives them some allies, but it also gives them a lot of enemies.
So, you know, and you look at, after all the hype over the surge at the end of last year, American casualties are really returning to the level they were previously.
If you look at this month, Iraqi casualties, you said 3,000 were killed a year ago.
Every month, you know, I think the casualties in March, the number of dead is around 2,000.
So, you know, people say to me, is it better in Iraq?
And I often say, yeah, because the number of dead civilians, I'll tell you, up beside the road, has dropped from 3,000 a month to 2,000 a month.
Yeah, the surge is working.
Yeah, all right, well, so let me ask you this.
If, well, I had my way and the American soldiers just started throwing their stuff on trucks and headed toward Kuwait and, you know, began an immediate withdrawal from that country, do you think that it's much more likely that the various Arab factions would be able to compromise, perhaps send the Supreme Islamic Council back to Iran and maybe work out a coalition government?
Nobody should be sent anywhere.
Everybody has a constituency, you know.
Are there Iraqis?
The U.S. is going to do that and just jump on the trucks and get out.
It won't.
You know, for peace, what you need is that everybody who has real power, including Muqtada al-Sadr and the Sadrists, enormously powerful, you can't just wish them away or even shoot them away.
The Iranians have had an influence on what happens in Iraq.
I mean, they have this enormous common border.
They have the same religion.
In most cases, they've had this common interest for the last 5,000 years.
That's not going to change.
So I think ultimately this conflict will end with an agreement between Iran and the U.S.
It might be in the best interest of the Iraqis, but I think that's quite likely in the long term.
But this pretense that there can be a victory won, this hasn't been true since the fall of Saddam.
But somehow in the White House there's still this refusal to recognize that.
Well, and by victory you mean exactly what?
A government in Baghdad which is sort of controlled by the U.S., that Iran has no influence, the people that the U.S. don't like, like Muqtada al-Sadr, are eliminated or wholly marginalized.
The U.S. holding power in Iraq, although there might be a nominally independent Iraqi government.
But now, there's still a big question of legitimacy in terms of the Supreme Islamic Council.
Do they actually have a constituency in Iraq besides America?
They have one, yeah, within the sort of, they have a lot of money.
They're within the middle classes, the business classes, the established clergy.
If you were desperate for jobs, you've got money there.
You control local government.
You control jobs.
You know, it's like the old Irish-American political machines.
People don't have to love you, but if you can give them jobs, if you can give them money, you can get a lot of votes.
But generally it's assumed that one of the reasons, I think one of the reasons why we have this fighting in Basra was that the government and their main support, the Supreme Council, face an election in November and they think they'll lose to the Sadrists.
Therefore, they want to eliminate them before Iraqis go to the polls.
And I think these guys figure if they control cities like Basra, you have enough armed men in the streets, you can probably control the outcome of the election.
Although that just simply backfired.
They probably just bought them another few thousand votes at least.
Well, you couldn't do that.
You know, Maliki, no question, overextended himself, exaggerated his strength.
But, you know, he now wants to have another round.
And there probably will be another round, but whatever he said, this is going to be much more an American offensive.
So from the point of view of America, it's almost as if a second war was beginning.
A second front, really.
Well, and that's always what's been promised us in the event of war with Iran.
Muqtada al-Sadr has said he would fight.
Abdulaziz al-Hakim has also said we would do our duty, that is kill Americans in the event of war with Iran.
So maybe this is all just preparation for that.
We know we're going to have to fight these guys full scale.
I'm not so sure.
It might be that.
It might turn out that way.
But I think it's sort of jumping on a horse, sort of backing one Shia faction against another.
You know, Muqtada's had ceasefires since last August.
He renewed it in February.
I think it's a crazy idea.
And just also thinking that Iran has only one channel of influence in Iraq through Muqtada, that's not true.
It has many channels, including most members of the present government.
Right, right.
Oh, well, yeah, that's what I was saying.
Hakim, Abdulaziz al-Hakim from Skyri has also said that he would fight our allies.
Yeah, I mean, that's something exactly who they answer to has always been a bit of a mystery.
All right, well, I really appreciate your insight today.
I can't wait to get the rest of this book read.
I'm sorry I didn't have time to read the whole thing before this interview, It's Muqtada, Muqtada al-Sadr, The Shia Revival and the Struggle for Iraq by Patrick Coburn.
He is Middle East correspondent for The Independent in London.
Thank you very much for your time today, Patrick.
Thank you.