01/21/13 – Patrick Cockburn – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, full archives are at scotthorton.org.
Our first guest on the show today is Patrick Coburn, Middle East correspondent for The Independent and author of Muqtada, Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shiite revival and the future of Iraq.
And he's got two very important pieces here for discussion at counterpunch, counterpunch.org.
That's the Mali trap and the war against the Shia.
I guess, first of all, most importantly, we should start with the Mali trap here.
Welcome back to the show, Patrick.
How are you?
Great.
Good to be back.
Well, good.
It's great to have you back on the show.
So the French have invaded and they're just sending more and more troops.
And I don't know, CNN this morning anyway, said they got the bad guys on the run.
What do you think?
It really makes me laugh hearing people saying we got the bad guys on the run.
You know, that's what guerrillas are meant to do.
You know, a large force advances, you retreat.
Then you sort of watch CNN or you read the newspaper, you say, and you hear that these guys fled.
I mean, that's the business they're in.
They retreat.
So, you know, it's always it always happens this way.
You know, it's the Taliban fled from in 2001, you know, the various insurgents in Iraq flee, you know, that's the business they're in.
But they stick around, you know, in Afghanistan, they stuck around for a decade, you know, probably the same will happen in Mali.
Yeah.
You know, just what, three weeks ago or something, four weeks ago, there were all the headlines victory in Somalia.
Al-Shabaab flees Kismayo as the African Union troops march in.
Yeah, it's childish, really.
I mean, it's kind of puerile on the part of the media to, you know, report this as great victories, as if this was a sort of Battle of Waterloo or the Battle of the Bulge or something, you know, it's it's absurd.
And I think also, you know, looking at, you know, the siege of the gas plant in southeast Algeria, the killing of the hostages, this sort of, you know, it's interesting.
I mean, it's appalling to see the French along the French president, so that David Cameron, the prime minister in Britain, all these others saying we and various Americans will pursue these people to the ends of the earth and so forth.
But, you know, this plays right into Al-Qaeda's hands.
You have a few sort of a couple of hundred gunmen take over this place, you know, really as a massive publicity stunt.
And suddenly they're portrayed as, you know, an existential threat to Britain, was Cameron's words.
You know, they are.
These people haven't launched any attack in Europe or France for the last 10 years.
But once they start saying that it's so fulfilling, but immediately these guys will be able to raise money and get plenty of recruits.
But, you know, exactly the same is happening as after 9-11.
Well, you know, some reports have been that the White House agrees with you about that, that it's the Pentagon that's pushing for more intervention here.
But there are plenty of people at the White House who will even admit that they can see right through this, that, jeez, you know, we're going to turn a bunch of local militias, which the world is lousy with local militias, you know, but we're going to turn them into enemies of us.
And why?
Yeah, and also, you know, it's very likely maybe because the U.S. actually has some experience of this.
Now, I remember in 2003, every time there was an attack on American forces, the U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, I think I recall was called Kemet, would announce it was an attack by al-Qaida, the al-Qaida remnants and so forth.
And this, of course, he thought this was a real smart thing to do because this would demonize the opposition in Iraq in the eyes of the world.
But in fact, it did.
Well, he acted as a continual recruiting sergeant for al-Qaida.
You know, that's how they want to get so many guys, because there was this American general denouncing them every day as being behind every attack.
They weren't.
They were behind by one in ten, you know.
But they're the guys who got the publicity and therefore they could recruit a lot of suicide bombers.
They could raise a lot of money in the Gulf.
Yeah, right.
Exactly.
They wanted to portray Zarqawi as being behind every single attack because he made such a great boogeyman because he was so ruthless and was such a murderer.
But even he didn't declare himself loyal to bin Laden and al-Qaida until the very end of December 2004.
So it had been, you know, almost two years before he even called himself al-Qaida.
Al-Qaida were sort of franchisees.
Originally, he was in opposition to al-Qaida.
You know, he had a camp up in, you know, Iraqi Kurdistan, you know, that away from American territory controlled by Saddam.
So I think we're sort of seeing the same thing, that you're having, you know, the whole picture of what's happening in Mali.
I mean, al-Qaida in Maghreb, the sort of local franchise is originally Algerian.
It comes down, it came down about 10 years ago to northern Mali.
Now, what happened then was that, you know, there's very strong evidence that it then had a relationship with the government in Bamako, the central government, which took a share.
I mean, it was kidnapping a lot of people because running drugs, that the government took a share of the profits from the kidnapping and drug running.
So now the French are going in as basically an ally of not exactly the same government, but pretty similar, the same people against their former allies.
Why did the government want to do that?
Well, first of all, it wanted to make some money.
And secondly, it wanted to use al-Qaida against the Turkic, northern Mali.
You have full of them, well not full, but there are a lot of impoverished Turkic speaking their own language, marginalized.
There have been continual uprisings over the last 50 years, the first in 1963.
The latest overthrow of the central government in northern Mali was the Turks, not al-Qaida.
By the way, on that point about the drug running there, I wonder if you can tell us how much you know about that and how you know, because I know a couple of journalists who have written about that and cited UN numbers.
But then I also know another journalist who says that's crazy.
I never heard of that.
I think all their money is coming from the Saudis, not from running drugs.
No, I don't agree with that.
I think, I mean, as regards drugs, you know, it's in the nature of things.
It's difficult to pinpoint, but certainly as regards kidnapping, mass kidnapping, not just in Mali, but in Niger to the south and in Mauritania to the west.
You know, all the evidence is that they were doing this big time and they were getting paid big time.
The Saudis in general, you know, I mean, there are two sorts, a number of sorts of Saudi money.
One is they pay for mosques, they pay for preachers, and what these people are preaching is fundamentalist Islam, Wahhabi Islam, which is very similar in ideology to al-Qaida.
It's a literal interpretation of the Koran.
It's extraordinarily regressive about women and almost everything else.
Secondly, you have a different type of money that comes, which is mostly sort of private, but maybe winked at, which goes to fundamentalist jihadi organizations, people waging holy war.
And, you know, that's true of Iraq.
That's true of Syria.
And I think it's probably true of in Mali.
I mean, we're talking here of a couple of hundred guys, probably, you know, under five hundred.
They had a lot of money coming in, enough money coming in.
But even, you know, that number of people, you don't actually need that amount of money.
Right.
Well now, so what kind of trouble have the French gotten themselves into if it's just a few hundred guys?
I guess ultimately they're going to be taking on the Tuaregs again, right?
Well, you know, they come in.
Now, you know, the fundamentalists in northern Mali, this is not a fundamentalist place.
You know, they've been banning music, a place famous for its music.
They've been destroying Sufi shrines in Timbuktu.
They're not too popular.
They're not too popular in the rest of Mali, which is ethnically different.
So let's say they go in.
But now they talk about taking over the whole of northern Mali.
Now, who are they?
Who are they allied to?
I mean, it's rather like Afghanistan in that way.
The U.S. allies went in and you could make a case, strong case against the Taliban.
But the other question to ask was, you know, who are you allied to?
And the answer was that the U.S. and company were allied to one of the most corrupt governments in the world.
You know, it really didn't have a local partner.
The same to my mind is true of Mali.
They don't have a local partner.
It's completely dysfunctional government.
It's incredibly corrupt.
And it was had a close relationship with al Qaeda in the past.
Yeah.
One of the headlines today, I think it's well, I shouldn't say I guess I think it's Human Rights Watch was saying that they have real problems with this post coup government there in the south.
The one that the West is fighting for, that they're using child soldiers, that they're torturing civilian captives.
Yeah, I mean, there was I mean, you know, it seems pretty well established a few days ago, they said al Qaeda had taken a town just north of Bamako.
And then it appears that one of the reasons that this town being captured, that 17 Muslim preachers have been taken off a bus and executed.
So this was a local revenge.
So, you know, this is the French sort of allied to these people.
Secondly, you know, you have to look at French policy in West Africa.
The French nominally gave up their colonies there under de Gaulle.
But they always like to retain ultimate control.
They've intervened, I think it's 60 times since 19 but since the early 1960s to establish friendly governments.
And, you know, so then they intervene.
I think they were intervening in Libya in 2011 to save.
They said to save the people of Benghazi.
But a few months earlier, when the first Arab Spring started in Tunisia, Sarkozy's first act was to offer help to the to the Tunisian government against the the protesters, saying that French intelligence, you know, had it had savoir faire in dealing with these people.
So, you know, I think it's the tradition of self-interested French intervention in North Africa, which really has nothing to do with the human rights or humanitarian intervention and everything to do with establishing or maintaining a sort of French suzerainty over the area.
Well, you know, like you're saying, though, with all the chaos we're spreading around, they we because the U.S. government is in on it as well.
It always brings up the perennial question of whether it's all stupidity or the plan, because, you know, us critics all the time accuse them of spreading their crises from country to country and chasing the consequences of their last intervention.
It seems like there's at least a possibility that they recognize that.
And that's how they like it.
And really, what's better than chaos?
I mean, never mind even instituting a new regime there.
How about let's just have a low level war in northwest Africa forever?
You know, why not?
You know, I think, you know, I think we want to be more precise about it.
You know what politician in the world, in Washington, London, Paris, you know, what's the downside of standing tall against Al-Qaeda, you know, and demonic dark forces that supposedly, you know, menace us all.
No politician is going to lose out on that.
No political elites going to lose out on that.
Then you come, you know, to security, to armies, to intelligence services, you know, all this sort of menace, all this demonization and exaggeration of an enemy and exaggeration of its powers does nothing but good to their budgets, you know.
So, you know, what's the downside for them, too?
And also, you know, you can kind of establish a quasi control of these areas, some of them important areas.
You know, you could have take Afghanistan and Iraq.
You know, most Iraqis are pretty glad to see the end of Saddam Hussein by the time he went, you know, that he'd be more in the country effectively.
What Iraqis didn't want to be was to be occupied, which is what happened.
The same thing ultimately happened in Afghanistan.
The Taliban weren't at all popular.
But, you know, after it ended up with a fairly overt occupation, which is resisted by much of the population, you know, so it's such a strong sort of, you know, the what's in the window, the justifications for intervention, you know, are always intertwined with so much self-interest that, you know, that which is why these foreign interventions become so unpopular and so often and disastrously.
Well, and it seems like and maybe this is true for the Middle East as well, but it certainly seems like in Africa, the name of the game is keeping China out.
And even if that means keeping oil off the market instead of developing it.
Yeah, that's, you know, that's that's one motive, you know, the Chinese are in all these countries around Mali, you know, in a commercial role, you know, that's one strong motive.
So it ends up as sort of, you know, these sort of strange sort of supposedly humanitarian interventions that go on and on.
And end up looking really like very whatever the original motivation or the original explanation as to why the US or Britain or the French or whoever it is are there.
It always ends up, to my mind, looking very much like an old style sort of colonial imperial occupation.
Well, which brings us to the redirection and the war against the Shia and all that you've got this great piece.
It's called the war against the Shia here at counterpunch.org.
And you talk about how in Iraq, we fought a war pretty much directly on behalf of the Shia, even though I guess the US and British governments regretting it the whole time that it was working out the way it was, but they didn't really have a choice at that point once they overthrew Saddam.
And they indirectly benefited al Qaeda, as you say, by, you know, trumpeting them and blaming them for all the resistance and and all of that.
And they ended up really creating a gigantic al Qaeda academy for years and years there during especially during the civil war and all of that.
But so as you also say, you point to this Seymour Hersh piece from 2007, where I guess somebody on the National Security Council finally won a real argument and said, listen, we've been backing the Iranians in Iraq the whole time.
It's time we fess up to that and then redirect toward the Saudis and toward the Sunnis against the minority Shiite population.
And that's we're not talking about Sunni versus Shia as though every Arab or Persian picks those sides against each other.
But the political leadership on both sides are very much opposed to each other.
And America's been helping both sides, really, it seems like.
Yeah, I think it's sort of, you know, in the intervention in Iraq in 2003, they thought, you know, the reason they didn't do it in 91 was that they're at the end of the Gulf War.
They thought, you know, if we overthrow Saddam, you know, the Iranians will benefit because you have a democratic election in Iraq, the Shia are going to win it.
They're the majority.
So they didn't do that.
So the poor Iraqis had the worst of all possible worlds.
They were an Iraqi saint to me at the time.
You know, we've got the worst things have happened in us.
We've been defeated and we have sanctions.
We still have Saddam Hussein.
You know, we've got this is very bad.
Then when 2003, when Saddam went, they sort of wanted to get rid of Saddam.
I think there was a strange myth among the neocons that somehow that there was all these pro-American Iraqis who'd take over.
And, you know, there were a very small number of them who took over who most had been sitting in Los Angeles or New York or Chicago or somewhere.
But otherwise it became incredibly unpopular.
But they wanted to keep the Iranians out of it.
So it's sort of this funny mixture of sort of extreme self-interest that usually predominates.
And so now when you look at Syria, I wonder, well, I mean, obviously it's a coalition effort going on there, but the king of Saudi Arabia, him and his princes, they sure have a very strong motivation for intervening there.
They want to turn that whole place into where they want to break it up into little emirates, they call them, right?
Well, yeah, I mean, the Saudis, you know, to them, for the whole sort of Sunni You know, to them, for the whole sort of Sunni world, particularly the monarchies of the Gulf, you know, that the Shia taking over Baghdad was a sort of tremendous historic defeat.
They want to reverse that.
They want to have a Sunni regime in Syria.
And it's one of the reasons why, you know, you have this growth of sectarianism.
The opposition also, sort of financed from the Gulf monarchies, hasn't, you know, it hasn't taken the line against sectarianism, you know, it doesn't seem to have any known views other than getting rid of Assad.
And its main fighting force is the Al-Nusra Front, which is the local chapter of Al-Qaeda.
So, you know, I was in Damascus last month and, you know, what people were watching on television, on YouTube was, you know, pictures of a government, two government officials being, having their heads hacked off, you know, one of them by a sort of 10 year old boy.
They imagine the effect that has on Syrians who are not Sunni or Syrians who are Sunni, but are members of the government or people who just don't want to live in a country where people get their heads chopped off.
You know, this immediately increases sectarianism.
Well, I guess they feel they have to put that stuff out because it makes them look really tough, that don't give up on them.
They're determined to win this thing.
Watch, they'll even have a kid cut a guy's head off.
But then it's also, it solidifies the support of their enemies, too.
Yeah, I'm sort of proud of it, you know.
It shows, you know, they're appealing to people who agree with that sort of thing.
And, you know, in Syria, it's often said that population 70% are Sunni.
It's not, it's a close up.
That includes the Kurds.
So it's really a bit under 60%.
But so the 40% of the population feels, you know, very frightened.
It's not surprising, you know, that they are in no mood to put down their arms or reach a compromise.
You know, one could also blame Assad for some of this, you know, that he and his regime wanted to have things along sectarian lines.
They didn't want a popular revolution, which united all sects against an authoritarian government.
But, you know, the situation we have now is a deepened, you know, sectarian hatred.
And those are getting deeper by the minute.
Hmm.
Well, now the Americans, I mean, Obama and Hillary Clinton both specifically have been crying reluctant this whole time.
But in your experience, how much American intervention is there on behalf of the revolution in Syria?
Well, it's, you know, those overall political backing, you know, this rather weird thing of creating this sort of national co-political national coalition of the opposition and recognizing it as the legitimate government of Syria, of getting 134 other countries to do the same thing.
But this group, its main fighting force, as I was saying earlier, al-Nusra, you know, which is battling in Aleppo and elsewhere, is simultaneously denounced by the U.S. as a terrorist organization.
But they don't care because they're carrying American-bought weapons.
So Obama can say whatever he wants, right?
Yeah, I mean, they just don't, you know, weapons coming, you know, there isn't neither side is looking like a winner in Syria.
This goes on and on.
You know, the country becomes more and more unlivable.
There are more and more refugees inside and outside the country.
People who stay there, you know, are more and more ruined.
You know, it's sort of, it's very difficult to escape from this sort of thing.
You know, the answer is there should be negotiations.
It's ridiculous for the opposition to say that there should be, Assad should go before negotiations because Assad holds most of the cities and most of the population of Syria.
Why should he go anywhere?
You know, he's not on his last legs by any means.
But have negotiations and then, you know, there is some chance that, you know, you'd have an agreement at the end of which Assad might go.
But, you know, the opposition, what the opposition was hoping for originally was a kind of Libyan type NATO intervention, which basically NATO would do the fighting and they'd have air cover and everything else.
That hasn't happened and they haven't really thought of a new idea since, except sort of increasingly embedded sectarian tension.
Well, so if it goes on like this, do they have any chance of taking Damascus, like eventually, or it's really just going to stay a stalemate for the long term, France and Germany and World War One kind of thing?
I still don't see it when you're in Damascus, you know, that there are suburbs, the rebels move into a suburb, open to the horror of the locals, but they know what's going to happen next.
The government opens fire with artillery, the local population flees.
Then you sort of read stuff in the papers, usually written by or on television, usually from correspondents who aren't actually in Damascus, saying, you know, the rebels have taken this area.
But actually, they've taken over a ghost town, you know, and the people who are there, they're living in schools, they're living in government buildings.
The government doesn't have the strength to drive them out, the opposition doesn't have the strength to advance further.
I mean, I saw one quite interesting thing in Aleppo, which is that a report I think run by Reuters, quoting a rebel commander, a rebel commander is saying 70% of the people in Aleppo support Assad.
That was his assessment, you know.
So, you know, this is not to see, I mean, to see Assad in a very bright light, but there is, you know, when I look for a lot of Syrians looking at, when they look at Assad and when they look at the opposition, they think, you know, the opposition is even worse.
Well, and back before it was worse, when it was still a protest movement, or mostly, and it was made up of more regular people rather than those who are willing to die out there in a lost cause kind of thing, then that was when the Americans intervened and said, yeah, Assad must go.
The rebels are right that they should never have to negotiate with him.
And so if there was a chance, I mean, we can't go back in time, but if there was a chance for them to actually work something out, it was a year ago or something before the West botched it.
Yeah, I mean, they kind of overplayed their hands wholly, I mean, at every level.
And, and also played into Assad's hands, but seek to give, you know, if you're an Alawite, the sort of community for which he comes from, which is 10% of the population, or you came from one of the minorities, as I said, ethnically and religious, there's about 40% of the population.
You know, you've got nowhere, they had nothing to do with fight.
Nobody was offering them anything.
This is partly sort of country against the city.
So if you lived in a city, you know, you don't see any prospect except to flee or to fight.
So, so it's difficult to see the opposition actually winning, you know, making some gains around Aleppo.
But this is real slow, you know, they have the benefit of the open Turkish border there, further south in Damascus and towards the Jordanian border, not doing so well.
So I suppose, you know, they might eventually take Damascus, but, you know, it's at a very slow pace.
They also might not.
And, you know, the end result seems to be general ruin of any area that they take over.
All right.
Now, if I can change the subject back to Iraq for just a minute, I was wondering if you could update us a little bit on the politics of the Maliki regime there and, and how soon before he has to stand for any real competition and election?
And what does Muqtada al-Sadr think of him these days now that he rules the Supreme Islamic Council and these kinds of interesting things?
Well, I think, you know, the question is Maliki's been centralizing power in himself, increasingly a dictatorship, you know, a lot of these ministers he just takes over the ministries is acting minister of this, acting minister of that.
You know, I think last year I may have got the number, may not be exact, but I think there are 14 divisions in the Iraqi army, which had acting divisional commanders, you know, everybody's an acting minister, an acting divisional commander appointed by Maliki.
Can that go on?
Well, it can go on for a bit, but, you know, the increasing sort of tensions and sectarianism remains where it was between Shia and Sunni.
They're increasingly a confrontation between the Kurds and the Arabs.
Now the opposition to Maliki, including the Sadrists, claim that he's actually exacerbating this.
They say that, you know, both with regard to the Sunni and Anbar province in the West, and the Kurds, that the government is sort of increasing the tension in order to get the sort of mass of Shia behind them to keep their own folk suitably frightened, you know, that there's going to be a counter-revolution in order to win at the polls.
But Tata came out and actually supported the Sunni demonstrators in Anbar province, rather to everybody's amazement.
He said that, you know, they shouldn't be waving pictures of Saddam.
They shouldn't be holding up the old Iraqi flag.
But either way, everything else, he supported them against the government.
This is kind of important, because previously Muqtada was almost the sort of considered the guy whose face almost was a sort of symbol of the killing of the slaughter of Sunni in 2006-7.
So, you know, things are rockier than they were, partly because of what's happening in Syria, and partly despite all this big oil revenue that the country is such a low economic and social level.
All right.
Well, we'll have to leave it there.
But I want to thank you very much for your time.
It's great to talk to you as always, Patrick.
Okay.
Anytime.
All right, everybody.
That's the great Patrick Kober, Middle East correspondent for The Independent.
That's independent.co.uk.
And of course, you can also find much of what he writes at counterpunch.org.
The War Against the Shia and the Mali Trap are his two most recent there.
You can find it at Counterpunch.
And seriously, you want to know about Iraq and what's going on there?
Well, and just like in the title, The Future of Iraq, read Muqtada by Patrick Kober, and we'll be right back after this.
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