Hi my friends, welcome to Anti-War Radio Chaos 92.7 FM.
In Austin, Texas, I'm your host, Scott Horton.
Please check out the website Anti-War.com.
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We're going to get right to it today with our first guest.
It's, well, the best Western reporter, if not the best reporter in Iraq.
The Middle East correspondent for the London Independent, Patrick Coburn.
Welcome back to the show, Patrick.
Thank you.
It's very good to have you on the show today.
And I want to mention also to the audience, Patrick is the author of the new book, Muqtada, Muqtada al-Sadr, The Shia Revival and the Struggle for Iraq.
And he broke two very important stories last week for the Independent.
Last Thursday, the 5th of June, and Friday, the 6th of June, 2008 here.
The first one is called, Revealed, Secret Plan to Keep Iraq Under U.S. Control.
And the follow-up, U.S. Issues Threat to Iraq's $50 Billion Foreign Reserves in Military Deal.
And, Patrick, I guess the first thing I notice here is a lot of people in the Iraqi government are coming to you and trying to get this story out, huh?
Yes, I mean, there were a lot of Iraqis, a number of Iraqis, who thought the only way that this could be stopped or modified would be to reveal what was happening.
Otherwise, the U.S. negotiators were very keen to keep it secret.
And now, we've known that they have this thing they call the Strategic Alliance or something that they're trying to work, but what you've revealed here are the actual terms of the deal.
Sure, yeah.
I mean, I should explain, it's just called the Strategic Alliance or the Status of Forces Agreement, primarily not to call it a treaty between Iraq and the U.S.
That's exactly what it is.
It will determine the relations between the two countries for the future.
The reason that they don't want, the administration doesn't want to do this is pretty clearly that they don't want to have to submit it to Congress.
They don't want to put it before the Senate.
Right, they'd need two-thirds, a super majority in the Senate if it's a treaty, but only 50%, or maybe not even that, I guess they can just do it by executive fiat.
They could do it by executive fiat, though in reality, this is really one of the most important treaties ever signed by the United States.
And now, the brass tacks here, it's funny, we talked for years about plans for 14 permanent military bases, they're telling you 50.
The figure is 58, in fact, it's emerging from other reporters, and by the time I wrote that piece, other reporters in Baghdad have got the exact figure.
It's 58 U.S. bases.
Unbelievable.
Well, there are about 30 really big U.S. bases in Iraq, so it's more than that.
It includes various so-called forward operating bases, small combat bases.
In other words, they don't plan on closing a single one ever.
Yeah, I mean, basically, you know, with the 30 big bases, it's very simple, the U.S. dominates Iraq.
It wouldn't even need that number.
It may be that they said 58, maybe they were prepared to, they are prepared to make some cosmetic compromises.
So, you know, they couldn't say, well, we'll reduce it to 24 or 30.
It wouldn't make much difference to the degree of U.S. authority, but it might allow the Iraqi government to say, ah-ha, we've extracted concessions, then push to sign the treaty.
Sounds like perhaps why they made it such a high number in the first place, just so they could come down a little bit for PR purposes later.
Could well be, yeah.
And now, the other conditions that you cite in your article of this treaty, well, yeah, let's call it what it is, this treaty, is that the American military will still be able to conduct military operations inside Iraq at will, arrest Iraqis and retain immunity for any criminal actions they may commit, and that includes the contractors too, huh?
There's some suggestion in the last 24 hours that they might not demand immunity for the contractors, but that's almost impossible to do, but you have to realize how dependent the U.S. Army in Iraq is on these contractors these days, both as sort of highly heavily armed, what are effectively mercenary troops, but also as a humble support staff, I mean, the people who, you know, do the cooking and clean up latrines and so forth, so it would be very difficult for the U.S. forces there to have immunity for people who are officially in the army and no immunity for those who are unofficially in the army, so to speak.
Well, Patrick, it sounds to me like this basically is just another piece of paper enshrining the exact situation we have now.
It doesn't sound like this changes anything for the long-term future.
Yeah, I mean, it prolongs it basically as a continuation of the U.S. military occupation of Iraq, whichever way the government, the Iraqi government, will want to describe it as something different, and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Baghdad, sort of denounced my article by name, saying it's not a permanent basis.
But this is really just a PR.
They might, in theory, be tenants of the Iraqi government, i.e. they pay them a few hundred dollars for the base, or there might be a string of boudoir outside a base with thousands of U.S. soldiers inside, a string of boudoir with a few Iraqi policemen in sentry box, and then they'd say, well, the Iraqis are in charge of security, so it's not a U.S. base.
But this is a flim-flam.
Basically, the bases would be totally U.S.
-controlled, and these bases would totally control Iraq.
It seems pretty shocking to see Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister of Iraq, coming right out and denouncing this, basically, right there on the front page.
What's up with that?
Isn't he our guy?
They know this is very unpopular, what's happening.
And they're very keen, the U.S. is very keen not to have a referendum in Iraq on this treaty.
Maliki, I think, wants to, doesn't much like it, but doesn't believe he can survive without U.S. support.
Therefore, he needs to be seen to be opposing the treaty.
Then he will announce that, aha, we've removed the worst parts of this, and now I'll sign.
We've fought a heroic battle for Iraq against the U.S. to remove, to bring bases under Iraqi control, and then they'll sign.
But I don't, at the end of the day, I think the degree of U.S. control could well be what they're demanding.
And there's no doubt that President Bush wants this done by 31st of July.
He's putting on a lot of personal pressure.
Now, we've talked before about the relationship between the Supreme Islamic Council and the Dawa Party with Iran, and, of course, their dependence on the United States as well.
Are they simply the cat's paws of the Tehran regime, or is Maliki and Abdulaziz al-Hakim, and are these guys just basically stuck between the United States and Iran here?
They're sort of stuck, maybe.
I mean, they're obviously primarily dependent on the U.S. because, you know, their army is dependent on the U.S. forces there.
I mean, they say this publicly.
Political origin of these people is mostly in Iran.
I mean, the Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution in Iraq, they've changed that to a slightly different name recently, but was founded not only in Iran in 1982, but really by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards.
At that time, they thought they might defeat Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq War, and they needed to put an Iraqi face on their occupation.
So this was an Iranian creation.
But exactly what their links are to Iran now is a bit unclear.
What is noticeable is that some of the Iraqi politicians who've been most against this treaty within the governing parties tend to belong to a badder organization.
The Supreme Council's paramilitary wing tend to be those with quite close relations with Iran.
Mm-hmm.
And you do say that Abdulaziz al-Hakim has basically seemingly conceded to this.
Is that right?
Yeah, I mean, it looks that way.
I mean, again, the presence of the Iraqi coalition ruling in Baghdad seems convinced that it couldn't survive without United States backing.
Mm-hmm.
And probably they're right.
They don't want to test this.
They don't want a referendum on this constitution.
And they're also facing elections at the end of this year and next year, which, unless they can fix them, they'll probably do badly in.
So they're looking at those elections, too.
Now, Rafsanjani, who's known as, I guess, a moderate in Iran, has denounced this, right?
Yeah, he denounced it, said, you know, that the treaty basically would make Iraq a slave state of the U.S., a client state of the U.S.
It's kind of telling that all the Iranian sort of senior leaders, including those considered moderate, have been fiercely denouncing this treaty.
It's clearly taken very seriously and Tehran is establishing, if it goes through, Iraq as a sort of long-term platform for a war against Iran.
So they're very keen to modify it.
And, you know, there's some talk of contacts between the U.S. and Iran over this, but I don't know how serious those are.
In the event of an American war with Iran, do you think that the Badr Corps would rise up against the American military?
Well, you know, you'd have a lot of people who are sympathetic to Iran or work for Iran, you know.
At the beginning of the day, you know, Iran is another Islamic state.
It's the long-term neighbor.
It's not only Islamic, but it's the other big Shia state.
A lot of Iraqis, not just Badr, are going to be very uncomfortable with the idea of being allied with the Islamic Shia state, Shia Muslim state.
So there are ways that Iraq and Iran can directly cause trouble.
You know, they have many options, really, because they're enormously influential within Iraq.
You know, yesterday, or maybe it was two days ago, some Iraqi government officials who I have to, I guess, assume are Dawa Party Supreme Islamic Council types testified before the House of Representatives.
And Dr. Ron Paul asked about how the Iraqis feel about a long-term presence.
And one of these Iraqi lawmakers responded, If you maintain a reasonable-sized embassy in Iraq, it would be good for relations.
The military bases are a different story.
Even the Ayatollah Sistani has agreed that no agreement or treaty should allow the presence of military bases.
Although, as you indicated, he may be kind of rocking a hard place there.
Ron Paul responded, Some people would be less tolerant of military bases than some embassy.
I mean, the argument would be that, indeed, we need to address the subject of military bases because it is an affront to the Iraqi people.
Is that correct?
And the Iraqi lawmaker responded, Yes, there's definitely some resentment for the presence of military bases, not toward diplomatic presence.
So there's even the Iraqi government on Capitol Hill.
Sure, I mean, there's no doubt it's right.
Every opinion poll since 2003 has shown that Iraqis, by and large, maybe excluding the Kurds, are against the occupation.
And some are fiercely against.
Some are more fondly against.
But it is deeply unpopular.
So if we have an agreement which, in effect, prolongs the occupation and, indeed, you can't see an end to it, then this is going to create resistance, probably armed resistance.
And it's also going to divide Iraqis.
You know, it's going to delegitimize the government.
A lot of Iraqis, maybe not all, but a very large number, will see the government as a pawn, a puppet of the U.S.
They will think that it's sold out Iraqi sovereignty.
And there'll be resistance to this.
Now, the British did exactly the same thing after they conquered Iraq in 1917.
But in 1930, they signed a treaty with Iraq.
It made Iraq nominally independent.
Iraq joined the League of Nations.
But it bitterly divided Iraqis because the British retained two large bases.
They had a very strong influence over Iraqi politics.
So the Iraqi government at the time was, as now, delegitimized by this deal, considered as traitors by many other Iraqis.
And one of the legacies of this is the extreme violence of Iraqi politics ever since.
And that's something that you talk a lot about in the historical context for all this.
And of course, you know, Americans, especially Texans, history began in 1979 when these terrible evil people kidnapped our guys for no good reason.
And they've been at war with us ever since.
And they're the terror masters, like Michael Ledeen says.
And there's the Shiite revolution that's going to take over if we don't stop them.
And yet, there's an entire history of Anglo-American domination of this place that many people still remember good and well in a context that they apply to this situation that completely escapes most of us.
Sure, yeah.
Iraqis often say that to me, that the U.S. thinks that history began in Iraq yesterday.
You know, there's no place where history doesn't have a greater influence than Iraq.
But, you know, Iraq's a very complicated place.
But one thing is very simple.
Occupation is resented pretty well everywhere.
People are interested and like being ruled from London, you know.
Who likes this?
It's none too surprising what has happened and what is happening.
Well, speaking of who likes it, I mean, please forgive me because I'm an amateur imperialist at best here, but I guess it seems like if you're going to be an occupying power or a colonial power in someone else's country, the tactic is to prop up the minority, either the Baathists among the Sunni But I guess what you seem to be saying with all this historical context here is that in a place like Iraq that might not be good enough.
They might decide to just go ahead and throw you out anyway.
That's what happened to the British.
Yeah, it's a good point.
I mean, I think an imperial power occupying a country almost automatically deepens sectarian and ethnic divisions.
Even if it doesn't want to, it happens.
The reason you just mentioned that a minority feels it's got its back to the wall and an ally can find, you know, if it's a foreign occupier, it looks to that occupier, but of course it makes that minority look treacherous in the eyes of the majority and usually there's a price to pay there.
It's like the Tutsis and the Hutus in Rwanda after the Belgians left, right, in the 90s?
Sure, I think it happens everywhere, you know, Catholics and Protestants in Ireland, Hindus and Muslims in India.
I think the occupying power might do this tactically, but it doesn't have to.
It happens almost automatically.
Now, let me ask you about Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi army these days.
It seemed like when Maliki launched the big attack the Mahdi army held their own, but since then they've melted back into Sadr City and made an agreement and allowed Iraqi army troops in there.
Is the surge working in Sadr City, Patrick?
No, there's a different reason for this.
You know, Muqtada al-Sadr leads this enormous movement.
It's not a mass movement in Iraqi politics.
It's really a movement of the Shia poor.
And the majority, 60% of Iraqis are Shia.
And the majority of those are poor.
So this is a very big movement.
He's always not wanted to confront the US army directly or his Shia rivals when backed by the US army because that's the one scenario in which he thinks he would lose.
He also doesn't want to have, you know, Sadr City and its enormous slum with 2.5 million people in it.
It would be battered to pieces, you know, by rockets and attacks from the air.
So I think that he wants a direct confrontation.
Instead, what he's been doing is calling big demonstrations against the occupation and against this treaty that we've just been talking about.
Do you know of any truth to the government's claims that Muqtada al-Sadr is being armed by the Iranians in order to fight Americans in Iraq?
There's probably weaponry coming across, especially with outsiders in Iraq, that, you know, is somebody being armed by the Iranians or the Syrians.
The one thing it's not difficult to do in Iraq is get weapons.
What you need is money and they do have money.
And also the weapons aren't that sophisticated.
You know, these IEDs and so forth are discussed as if they were highly technical pieces of equipment.
You know, they're pretty easy to make, you know.
And people can make money making them.
In fact, That's so great.
I'm on the phone with Patrick Coburn himself.
It was you who reported in November of 2006 that you had been around in Iraq when, I don't know who it was, the Iraqi Army or the American Army, had found a factory where they were making not just IED, roadside bombs, but actual EFPs with the molten copper core and so forth, right?
Sure, yeah.
They discovered one of those and they kept quiet about it, but they wanted to blame all this on the Iranians.
At one point, the British in Basra discovered that the Yas and stuff was coming in from Iran, but it was coming in, the importers were actually the Iraqi police in Basra.
And the reason they were doing it was money.
You know, these guys would sell it to anybody.
Right, there's no economy, right?
So it was just a sort of freelance operation.
So I think there's sort of an obsession with the idea that, you know, if the Iranians stop supplying these, the border will shut, but Iraq will become quiet.
It's quite ludicrous.
Your brother Andrew in his piece for Counterpunch a few weeks back about the secret finding authorizing more covert support for operations covert terrorist operations inside Iran, at the end of that article he said that he had spoken with someone, I believe an intelligence official who was recently back from Iraq and familiar with the numbers who said that well over two-thirds of the attacks against American soldiers are still coming from the Sunni insurgency, whether we call them the concerned citizens or not.
Not the Saudis.
It's happening somewhat less but it's still happening a lot.
Iraq is so fragmented, you know, you had a movement against Al-Qaeda in Anbar province, then the US military forces were trying to replicate that in the rest of Iraq, but in parts of West Baghdad, I know, that are Sunni you know, it's not actually against Al-Qaeda the awakening councils are Al-Qaeda you know, and they have, you know, they're supported by the US army but they are deeply hostile to the Iraqi government, so it's a very fragmented place.
Could you please elaborate on your statement that the awakening, the concerned local citizens, sons of Iraq, that they are Al-Qaeda?
Yeah, in parts of West Baghdad somebody was saying to me who belonged to them, he said I don't think that any Al-Sahwa that's the name for the awakening councils in West Baghdad without having a relationship with Al-Qaeda because it's just too dangerous you know, then there wasn't the distinction between Al-Qaeda and the other insurgent groups was pretty woolly so, you know, it varies and then in other parts, south of Baghdad you have areas where there were guys who were guns for hire, you know Iraq is short on jobs, they worked for Al-Qaeda when they were paid by Al-Qaeda, they worked for the US when they were paid by the US somehow when this is reported on television in the US, it looks as though you know, everybody you have Al-Qaeda in that corner, you have other insurgents in another corner you have good guys who belong to Al-Qaeda concerned citizens, they're called this is a name invented by the US the awakening council in another corner, but actually they're much more mixed up than is normally reported so, when the American media says Al-Qaeda in Iraq we would be too particular to think that what they mean is you know, this group of religiously motivated probably foreign pilgrims from Saudi Arabia or Egypt or that any Iraqis who would be members of that would be under them and their authority, would that even be a correct assumption at all?
Well, this was always exaggerated Al-Qaeda in Iraq was kind of always had a limited connection to Osama Bin Laden and it's mostly homegrown, it got foreign money it had some foreign volunteers above all the suicide bombers it's pretty difficult for a non-Iraqi to operate in Iraq you know, let's say he doesn't speak the right kind of Arabic, he doesn't have connections there, so yeah, there is, there are links with outside particularly with Saudi Arabia and so forth, where a lot of the suicide bombers come from, it's mostly a homegrown organization You know, I think overall one could talk about all the details you know, these different elements in Iraq, but I always keep in mind something that actually a British military intelligence officer had been in Basra, spoke fluent Arabic, and he was saying to me, he said, you know, when we came in we used to be kind of pretty patronizing to the Americans and say, well, you know we know about counter-insurgency because of Northern Ireland and Malaya he said, you know, but in fact, he said Basra is 100% different from those because, he said, we've got no allies locally, we've got no real friends he said, in Northern Ireland, you know, we were essentially fighting the Catholics, we were supported by the Protestants, the Malaya there was an insurgency, it was mostly Chinese the Malays mostly supported the British but he said, Basra you know, we've got no allies, we've got no friends, that's the main political fact, and it's sort of true for the U.S. and Baghdad, too He's including the barter corps in that Sure, yeah, none of these people really like foreign occupation and you can tell the attitude, you know, if you're in a room, Americans or British are there with Iraqis, even Iraqis in the green zone as soon as the Americans or British are left, the conversation really changes they start criticizing them and so forth I'd say there's a little devil in Kurdistan where the Kurds look to the Americans as a sort of guarantee of their semi-independence but Kurdistan is not occupied everybody will know American troops up there Well, if I had an I Dream of Jeannie here and I could make her get all the American troops out of Iraq by yesterday what do you think would happen?
Well, I think, you know, this is the only road to peace, ultimately you know, the American presence there, people, when it first happened, I said to people, look, I think the American occupation is basically what generates the violence here people say, well, you buttoned Americans and some Iraqis there'll be an explosion, you know, there'll be sectarian civil wars, but American state essentially had that, we had tens of thousands of people slaughtered there's some you know, you could say, do they have any positive role, you know, in policing?
Well unlimited, but it's also, you know, that's one of the, the American presence is one of the main factors generating violence as long as it's there, it'll be resisted, some stage you know, Senator McCain was saying that the U.S. will simply win a victory this is not a macabre, this is a recipe for more violence for more insurgency, for more resistance, from all the Iraqi Arab communities You mentioned the tens of thousands who were slaughtered in the civil war and for those of us on the outside we see all these different numbers, ranging from a few tens of thousands of Iraqis killed this whole time, to 100,000 from 700,000 to over a million which of these studies seems to ring true to you, Patrick?
I think it's hundreds of thousands.
I don't really know any Iraqi family that hasn't lost somebody lost somebody, you know because they were kidnapped, lost somebody because they were caught in a firefight, lost somebody because a sniper shot them, or a bomb went off, or they were, you know a helicopter attacked their car I think it's in the hundreds of thousands, how many hundreds of thousands I'm not sure, but those who surveys which only sort of mention those when the casualties have been reported in the newspapers this is a great underestimate and we can see that in the way that every so often pits are found with 30, 50 bodies in them dumped there a few months or 12 months earlier and nobody knew they were there so the casualties are very high Could you comment on the proportion, I don't expect an exact percentage, but roughly ballpark estimate of the proportion of Iraqis who have been killed by American soldiers doing their house to house searches and their counter insurgency versus the sectarian war between the Mahdi army and Al-Qaeda in Iraq from a couple years back especially I don't know the exact figure, I don't even know an approximate figure, but you know you can see by the terror that's created there's still over 2 million Iraqis who've fled to Jordan Syria, these people are not having a happy time if they thought all this sort of propaganda we've had about the success of the search, these people would love to come home if they thought they could preserve their lives but the real verdict of what's happening is that these people are staying all from bankrupt families crowded together in one single room in Damascus girls forced into prostitution to feed their families that's the real verdict in what's been happening and the overall lack of success, otherwise these people wouldn't stay abroad, they'd come home Patrick Coburn, Middle East correspondent for the London Independent I can't tell you how much I appreciate you coming on the show today, I also want to tell you what a great time I had hanging out with your brother Alex at the Future Freedom conference this last weekend, he's a really great guy thank you if it's possible I'd like to ask if you could just comment briefly on the situation in the Gaza Strip what Americans might need to know about that just in brief well you know I was in a military festival in England two or three weeks ago we had a briefing from President Jimmy Carter who'd just come from Gaza and he said as far as he was concerned one of the great human rights crimes on the face of the planet at the moment was the siege of Gaza what was happening to the people there this is kind of awful, like any siege people just don't suffer they die, and who suffers, who dies first it's small baby, it's old people and they die obscurely people expiring in the middle of the street so this is a tremendous crime which is happening and which is ignored by the rest of the world Tony Blair has a role there as a sort of mediator he never goes to Gaza this is ignored and it is basically just a total blockade on all trade in and out of the Gaza Strip is that right?yeah most of the trade is stopped almost everything is stopped you know it's people are on the edge of starvation maybe over the edge of starvation this is a crime and it's a crime for which we pay the failure of America to do anything about it, the failure of Europe to do anything about it, the failure of the Arab states to do anything about it this does not make you friends on the streets of the Middle East and certainly not on the streets of Gaza something that we always need to take into account the obvious consequences and the unforeseen consequences that no one will be able to predict everybody forgets now sanctions on Iraq this destroyed the Iraqi economy it's destroyed Iraqi society you know the currency became worthless population was generally unemployed it created you know it destroyed the country and it laid the basis for the present violence, that's really where the the media army came from as well from these deprived slums, and it's difficult to convey that to outsiders yesterday in Washington I said you know you have to imagine it's like the US, if the US depression in 1929 had A been much deeper and almost everybody had become unemployed and secondly had gone on until about 1947, 1948 you get some conception of the destruction of the Iraqi economy and the Iraqi society by those sanctions alone leaving aside the terrible toll that the war has also inflicted on Iraqis you know you have to need really to focus on the tragedy, the disaster the catastrophe that has happened to this country and the people of this country alright everybody, that's Patrick Coburn he's the Middle East correspondent for the London Independent two very important articles from last week the 5th and the 6th of June revealed secret plan to keep Iraq under US control and US issues threat to Iraq's 50 billion dollar foreign reserves in military deal the book is Muqtada Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shia revival and the struggle for Iraq thank you so much for your time today
