11/13/08 – Patrick Cockburn – The Scott Horton Show

All right, welcome back to Anti-War Radio, it's Chaos 92.7 in Austin, Texas.
We're here every day from 11 to 1 Texas time, streaming live worldwide at chaosradioaustin.org and at antiwar.com slash radio.
Introducing our first guest today, it's the best western reporter in Iraq, Patrick Coburn.
He's the Middle East correspondent for the London Independent, and he's the author of the book Muqtada, Muqtada al-Sadr, The Shia Revival and the Struggle for Iraq.
Welcome back to the show, Patrick.
Thank you.
Very glad to have you on here.
How are you doing today?
Not too bad.
Well, that's good to know.
So I appreciate you joining us on the show today.
You have this very interesting article here in the Independent.
The U.S. can quit Iraq or it can stay, but it can't do both.
And this is sort of along the lines of kind of what Obama needs to know as he takes office and kind of what his options are.
But you start out with a lawsuit by Ahmed Chalabi, John McCain's handler of all people, has a lawsuit suing to find out who pays the bankroll for Iraq's secret police force.
Tell us about that.
Yeah, it's a tiny bit different, but according to the Iraqi press, the Iraqi intelligence service, the secret police, it's called the Iraqi National Intelligence Service, is suing Ahmed Chalabi and his spokesman for suggesting that they are asking where they get their funds from.
Oh, right.
That's a libel case.in the past, that the intelligence service didn't appear in the Iraqi budget.
And Iraqis generally imagine that it was directly funded by the CIA.
And Chalabi had asked him quite a lot of questions about this.
So they'd been at least threatening to sue him.
There is a notice in the latest Iraqi budget.
They do have a mention, but there's always been great suspicion as to who actually controls the official intelligence service.
Well, yeah, and you point out in your article that it seems like a pretty small number for the budget of this agency, which, after all, runs its own death squads and everything else.
Yeah, it's always been a bit mysterious.
The guy in charge, General Sharwani, was sort of working for the U.S. in the 1990s.
The U.S. involved in an attempted coup against Saddam, which failed catastrophically.
And Iraqi government ministers have complained that they don't control their own intelligence service.
So when this was a couple of years back, it may have changed slightly now, but Iraqis are still very suspicious of this.
And now, you know, you say in here, too, that the purpose of this mostly is to keep tabs on pro-Iranian factions inside of Iraq.
And yet, I thought, at least years back, that the secret police were the ones who basically were running the brigade and different factions of the Badr Corps that were going around sticking drills in Sunni's heads and that kind of thing, that they were really the pro-Iran factions, not putting a check on them.
That's confusing.
That could be the interior ministry.
You know, different chunks of the Iraqi government were taken over by different parties and different factions.
And a large part of the interior ministry was taken over by the Badr Brigade.
And yes, the Iranians did have influence over that.
But the official Iraqi intelligence service was really taken over by people associated with the U.S. and for a long time, and to this day is very much a Sunni rather than Shia outfit.
And the fact is that the Iraqi prime minister couldn't even go into their headquarters.
Iraqis tend to see it as something answering basically to the U.S.
This guy, Shawani, who had led a failed coup against Hussein, I guess that means he was a high-ranking Ba'athist.
Yeah, he was a high-ranking intelligence officer.
He was in Amman.
It's kind of a sort of tragic, horrific story that in 1996, there was an attempted coup that he had fled.
There were three of his sons were still in Baghdad and had senior positions in elite formations in Iraqi security.
And they were meant to be leading this coup.
But in fact, it seems to have been penetrated by Saddam's intelligence from early on.
And all three sons were killed.
So, but the father was out of the country, orchestrating the coup, survived and came back in 2003.
And what year was that, when this happened?
1996.
Oh, 1996.
Was this part of the...
Well, I'm trying to remember back because I know that there was sort of one attempt at least at regime change, I guess is what you're referring to, but there was Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress were involved in some way in the thing I'm thinking of, I think.
Yeah, that was a different thing.
I mean, there were various attempts to overthrow Saddam, none of them even really got very far.
Saddam showed that he could, that he'd penetrated most of these organizations trying to overthrow him, that the regime was too ferocious to be overthrown like that.
So attempted coups by Sherwani or by Ahmed Chalabi never really got very far, nor by anybody else for that matter.
Yeah, until the 3rd Infantry Division came in.
So let me ask you about the Status of Forces Agreement.
Of course, you broke the story this spring, earlier this year, about the 58 bases that were in there.
And of course, this thing has been through draft after draft after draft.
I guess, first of all, does it look like they actually are going to get the Status of Forces Agreement approved by the Iraqi Parliament and Cabinet and whoever else needs to approve it?
And then secondly, how different is the Status of Forces Agreement now from when you broke the story on it back in the spring?
It's possible it might get through, but I must say most of the betting in Baghdad is against it, really because it's considered political suicide by a lot of Iraqi politicians to sign up to it.
I mean, that's really connected with your second question, which is the U.S. and whether it's the White House or the State Department or whoever, made a very gross error earlier in the year that the first draft of this agreement just sort of continued the occupation as it had been before.
It had no dates for the departure of U.S. troops, or there seemed to be a U.S. decision.
This reminded Iraqis of unequal treaties in the past with the British that had purportedly made Iraq independent, but in reality it kept real power in the hands of the British colonial authorities.
Now, ever since then, this has been eroded and changed.
Bush eventually agreed to a timeline for U.S. withdrawal, which he previously said he would never do.
So at the moment the agreement is wholly different from what it was back in March, but unfortunately from the point of view of the U.S. negotiators, the whole agreement has got such a bad smell to it in Iraq that it's difficult for any politician to sign up to it.
Just any agreement.
You know, any agreement with the occupier, people think, aha, this just means the occupation is going to continue.
The U.S. is going to be the hidden hand behind everything.
And of course, Obama's won the election, so it must be quite reasonable for the Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, to think, you know, why am I signing an agreement with a lame-duck government?
Right.
Well, but the rub, legal-wise, is that if they don't sign this status of forces agreement by New Year's, then the U.N. mandate expires and all the troops have to go back to their bases and stop working to properly...
Well, people say that, but I mean, the mandate will probably be extended, you know.
I don't think it's quite so catastrophic.
I mean, the U.S. generals in Baghdad have been saying, you know, trying to frighten the Iraqi government, saying we'd go back to our bases, we'd stop supplying the Iraqi army with fuel, we'd stop doing this, we'd stop doing that.
I don't think that people really believe it.
I think it will continue somewhat as before.
Well, yeah, and it's pretty apparent, isn't it, that the United Nations will give a new mandate.
I saw an article, I guess a week or two ago, where the Russian foreign minister said, oh yeah, we'll be happy to extend the mandate for America.
Yeah, I think that, you know, they've been saying that all along.
I think a lot of the stuff of, you know, there'll be a catastrophe unless it's signed by the end of the year, was really an attempt by the Bush administration and the U.S. and the Iraqi parties who favored the agreement to try and force it through.
But I don't think it ever really convinced anybody.
Now, which are the Iraqi parties that support it, the Dawa and the Supremes on the council?
No, I mean, the biggest backers have been the Kurds, who, you know, want to really, you know, want a U.S. presence to continue, because they're worried about in the future, are they going to be squeezed by the 80% of Iraqis who are not Kurds, but are Arabs, whether they're Sunni or Shia, who will keep the Turks off their back.
But so they've been the backers of it, Massoud Barzani, the Kurdish president, has supported it, and the president of the Kurdish region, and the president of Iraq is also a Kurd, Talabani, same thing.
The Kurds, when I've talked to them, have been nervous that they were being, that it looked as though this was a Kurdish deal with the U.S., and they were attracting a lot of flak inside Iraq for being the main supporters of this deal.
The other parties were sort of divided on it, really, I mean, the Supreme Council was divided, it depends somewhat on the U.S., but also on Iran, Darwa, their central committee divided, the prime minister changing his mind.
I mean, this really reflects the knowledge of all these politicians that, you know, in the eyes of a lot of Iraqis, this, signing this agreement would be like, you know, signing the Chamberlain, signing the Munich agreement with Hitler.
You know, this may be unfair, may not be true now in the present draft of the agreement, but that's the way a lot of Iraqis look at it.
So a lot of Americans and Kurds and others were saying to me, oh, these guys, they talk to us in private and say they're all in favor of the treaty, the agreement, and then in public they denounce it.
But of course that reveals a political fact, which is that, you know, the people who might support it know just how unpopular it is.
Well, you know, it's interesting, because I guess we've known all along, the polls have said all along that supermajorities of, well, I guess if we exclude Kurdistan, I'm not sure exactly how that taints the numbers, but among the Arab populations of Iraq, supermajorities have wanted us to leave from the very beginning.
I mean, they gave us a window of, okay, you know, we're going to believe you that you mean well for about three or four months, and then after that it was, you know, get out.
And it's been, I'm not sure if this is something that you've said before, but it's certainly been kind of a common refrain that the government that we've created there is the government of the green zone, that they're not really the government of Iraq at all, and that if we left, that they would be thrown out, that the Supreme Council and the Dawa Party would probably have to go back to Iran, that the Saudis would certainly have the upper hand among the Shiites, and they certainly want America out.
Sure, I mean, these parties, you know, have support.
I like Dawa and the Supreme Council, but they, you know, one of the problems is that any government in the green zone, because it's dependent on the U.S., a number of, a couple of things happen to it, and these parties win votes in elections, but, which is one for a lot of Iraqis, that proves that they're sort of pawns of the U.S.
That damages them.
It doesn't, not necessarily fatally, but it, and secondly, they get, they find it difficult to take decisions, they find it difficult to do without the U.S., and do things which they probably could do if the U.S. wasn't there.
Some Iraqi politicians argue that the government's just been babysat too long.
So, you know, yeah, does it strengthen the government in some ways, having 150,000 American troops there?
Yes.
But does it weaken it politically?
Yes, as well.
Right.
And, you know, this is why they got rid of Rumsfeld, right, is because he said, in his patronizing way, of course, that it's time to take the training wheels off, that we've done our part here, we're, they're like on welfare or something.
They're not going to fight.
If we're doing all their fighting for them, we've got to turn over the responsibilities to them and get out.
And then, that's why they got rid of Rumsfeld.
Well, that was one of the reasons, yeah.
I mean, it was never clear, you know, the U.S. never really had a policy there.
You know, they used to complain, Iraqi politicians, you know, change day by day.
Well, at least there was a policy, a U.S. policy, but it was really determined, I think, by U.S. domestic politics, you know.
I remember, you know, 2004, before the election then, supposedly, sovereignty would be handed over to an Iraqi government, you know, then run by the Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi.
This guy later said, you know, he couldn't do anything without asking the Americans telling him.
So, ultimately, they got the same guy to appear before Congress and say, you know, there's very limited violence in Iraq.
It's all being exaggerated.
It's only taking place in four out of 18 provinces.
Of course, nobody ever volunteered, either from the Iraqi government or the White House, to go and walk in these 14 other peaceful provinces.
So, you know, year after year, month after month in Iraq, one of the, you know, you can see the degree to which the political agenda in Iraq was really set by the domestic political agenda in the U.S.
Right.
It really has been an ad hoc thing.
When you talk about, well, 2004, for example, they put off the purple-fingered election until January of 2005, because I guess somebody figured out that the Supreme Council types were going to win, and that could look bad.
So they put off the election for like a year, which caused all kinds of problems within Iraqi politics.
And it was only because of the November election.
This has always been happening.
For instance, you know, in Iraq in 2006, 2007, we had this really very bloody civil war between Sunni and Shia, which really created the present political landscape in Iraq.
But people like, you know, George W. Bush in the States and Tony Blair in the U.K. would happily deny that there was any civil war going on in Iraq, although they could say it was one of the bloodiest civil wars anybody's seen.
So I think there's need.
I always used to say to people, it never really goes on about, you know, Bush said there was WMD in Iraq, and there weren't.
You know, as this was the last untruthful thing said, but pretty well everything they said about what was happening in Iraq from 2003 until the present was untrue.
They kept on inventing these sort of spurious milestones to pretend that progress was taking place when it wasn't.
Right, yeah, just six more months.
This will be a real critical six months.
You could see this during the presidential election.
I mean, I remember when McCain came over, was relaunching his campaign last year.
He went to the Green Zone and he was telling, this came out of a town meeting of U.S. diplomats afterwards, that American diplomats at the embassy were told, were asked by McCain staffers not to appear beside McCain wearing helmets and body armor, because when McCain was spouting about how safe Baghdad had become, it wouldn't look too good if all these people were wrapped up in their body armor and crouching under their helmets.
Well, so let me ask you this, does it, I guess, you know, a defender of the administration would probably make the case something to the effect of Bush snapped out of it, and at some point in 2006 he appointed Stephen Hadley, and this is what Woodward is saying now, is that he just outsourced all this to the National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley, and that Hadley and I guess the guys at AEI came up with this brilliant plan for what they called the surge, and they would escalate the number of American soldiers in Baghdad.
That would be enough to intimidate Sauter into stop fighting.
It would be enough to intimidate or at least help convince the Sunni insurgency to turn against Al-Qaeda and cease fire with the Americans.
Are those things attributable to the surge?
Did the surge in fact work?
No, I mean, the surge, you know, had some effect, but I mean, there are key constituent parts which they don't mention, and they give them, all the reporting of it tends to give the impression that A, it was the surge, and B, that it was the U.S. controlled the political weather.
In fact, there were two other critical things that happened, I mean, which are really more important than the surge.
You had, as I mentioned, the civil war between Sunni and Shia in 2006-2007, and this really had a winner.
The Shia won it.
Remember, the insurgency against the U.S. was the Sunni community.
Now, the Sunni community was really on the ropes, not really because of U.S. military activity, but because of this, you know, they were fighting the Shia, the Shia controlled the government, they had death squads, they were 60% of the population, and so there wasn't much point in the Sunni going on fighting the Americans.
That's really what tamped down the Sunni insurgency, not American troop reinforcements.
Secondly, the other big political military force against the Iraqi government in the U.S. was the Mehdi Army and the followers, the Shia followers of Muqtada al-Thadda, their leader, and were very powerful.
But what brought about their ceasefire was really Iranian pressure.
Remember, the Iraqi government was supported by Iran as well as the U.S.
So these people who say it's all a surge, as if this was proof that America controlled what was happening in Iraq, this is a deception, or at least self-deception, that it's what was happening on the ground in Iraq, the outcome of a civil war, and the Iranian involvement were absolutely crucial to the reduction in violence.
Well, you know, I'll tell you one thing, though.
I don't know how much time you ever spend in the States, Patrick, but the surge did work.
The surge, as best I can tell, was for the American people, for our TV sets.
And it worked.
The exit polls said that in the presidential election, that one in ten people brought Iraq with them into the voting booth as their top issue.
Now, they broke 60-40 toward Obama, who's the ostensible peace candidate.
It was 10th place.
It was 10% of the people who brought Iraq in.
I don't know if it was 10th place.
I forgot what the others were.
It clearly convinced a lot of people that somehow Iraq was on the road to solution.
People keep on saying to me, you know, aren't things better in Iraq?
And in a certain sense, that's true.
Things are better.
They're better than the bloodbath we had two or three years ago.
But often people take better as meaning good, or that the situation is returning to normal, and this is completely untrue.
And this is very easy to prove.
This is what astonishes me in the U.S. and elsewhere.
You know, if things were going right in Iraq, the 4.7 million Iraqi refugees, one in six in the population, who fled their homes, either inside Iraq or fled to Jordan and Syria, would go back.
They're not going back.
I mean, there are a few, but not that number, although they'd love to, but it's still too dangerous to go back.
You know, then I sort of read things about, you know, how restaurants are opening at night and ice cream parlors are opening.
But you know, this is trivial.
You know, there's a few restaurants.
You know, when I, three weeks ago, I was in Baghdad, I climbed onto the roof of my hotel, I was looking across the skyline, looking to see if I could see any cranes.
You know, cranes are pretty good evidence if there's any economic activity going on in the place.
There are no cranes in Baghdad.
You see cranes on the skyline of pretty well every city in the world.
There are none there.
Well, what are the...
The situation is still pretty dire.
As you can see, you know, Monday this week, there's a bomb in the center of Baghdad, blows up a bus full of schoolgirls, 32 killed.
You know, anywhere else in the world, this would create a great, you know, attract a great deal of attention.
But when it happens in Iraq, nobody really notices it happens now in the outside world.
Yeah, right.
Might as well be Somalia for all the attention that's paid to it now.
Well, I think actually Somalia gets a bit more attention, but it's new.
You know, this is partly boredom, of course, after this five and a half years of war.
It's because of the economic crisis that's distracted people.
It's because of the presidential election.
But it's also a belief that somehow things are going right in Iraq.
And you do, you know, even Iraqis are affected by this.
A bunch of people come back to Baghdad from Oman and Damascus, you know, and they hear things are better.
And then they discover they go into their house, they switch on the light, nothing happens.
This is only four hours electricity.
You know, then they think about, you know, how would they send their children to school?
They discover that's dangerous.
So as I said, they discover things are a little bit better, but Baghdad's still the most dangerous place in the world.
You know, I read a story that, you know, it's just kind of an anecdotal thing about, I think it was a Sunni family that came back from Jordan and they came to their house and got their stuff and left because it's a Shiite neighborhood now.
And in fact, I guess it was already it had always been sort of a predominantly Shiite neighborhood.
And this guy, it was all his same neighbors still, but it was no longer for him feasible to live there.
He did come back to Iraq, but then he made his way to a different place to live somehow.
Yeah, I mean, I talked to somebody last night, a young man, a young Iraqi, Shia, well connected.
I mean, a pretty smart guy.
And he was saying that he kind of disagreed with me, thought the things were a little bit better.
He said, not in Baghdad, but outside, he'd been down to Najaf and he hadn't had bodyguards with him.
And so I mentioned that we were talking about something else.
And then I said, how was your journey?
He said it was fine.
He said, you know, I had a permit for my gun.
So although he was saying things were better, you know, he always had a pistol in his belt the whole time.
This is a very sub-Pacific guy who considered it utterly normal that he should permanently have his hand on his pistol when going through some of the more peaceful parts of Iraq.
Yeah.
And, you know, here in Texas, we're allowed to have a concealed weapon, but most of us don't carry one around because we don't feel like we need one all the time.
You know, a big difference between living in security and not.
You know, in the government, which has been trying to, a lot of the doctors have fled Iraq, particularly all the better doctors.
It's difficult to get medical attention there.
The government's trying to attract them back by increasing salaries and other benefits.
And one of the things it announced was that all doctors could carry guns in future.
Guns would be provided, you know, so you'd have a stethoscope in one pocket and a gun in the other.
And for some reason, doctors didn't find this too appealing.
You know, I don't want to go over the top.
A few things are, you know, things are a bit better, but they're still, as I said, you know, bad enough to make Iraq more dangerous than anywhere else in the world.
Maybe there's somewhere that's as bad, maybe in the central of Mogadishu, the Somali capital, maybe somewhere in the Eastern Congo, it's as bad.
But I mean, that's what we're talking about, you know, a place of extreme danger.
And somehow this got faded, faded out.
I think that if you follow the best of the U.S. correspondents on the web, you know, you can know what's happening there.
I don't think you can do it from U.S. television, I mean, you know this better than me, but I get the impression that on the main networks, it just isn't really being recorded anymore.
No, no, it's really not.
It's just not a subject of discussion.
I wonder, because I know you've been here covering this entire war.
Could you compare the levels of violence now to, say, 2004 or 5 or late 2003 to try to give us a good...
You know, it's about that level, about 2003.
But you see various sort of changes have taken place.
Some you mentioned, you know, there aren't many mixed areas left in Baghdad.
People sometimes come back, but they can't go back to their old houses if it's been taken over by somebody else.
Now, that's...
Often people will be in those houses quite a long time.
You know, Mosul in the north, there's still a lot of fighting going on.
Security got a bit better from about the middle of...
It got considerably better from the middle of 2007 to the middle of 2008, then it got rather more dangerous again.
You know, I really want to emphasize, you know, Monday we have 32 people blown up in one bomb.
Yesterday we had 23.
We have a couple of American soldiers shot by an Iraqi soldier or policeman.
We have all this, you know, quite well-publicized violence, but somehow people manage to see it out of their minds and imagine that Iraq is sort of peaceful, you know.
I find that rather amazing that I keep on having to say, just don't listen to me, just, you know, read what Reuters and AP are saying.
Right.
The difference is...
These facts are concealed.
The difference is, Patrick, is that you tell the story where they say this is what happened and that is what happened.
It's still up to us to kind of piece it together and draw our own narrative, where you'll write the article and say, well, look, let's examine these facts in some kind of context and see where we really are.
Yeah.
It's...
You know, I mean, the atmosphere in Baghdad is, you know, it's still...
People are still pretty nervous.
You know, it's...
I mean, there are certain things you could do now, you know, people do go to work, but in some of the universities you find students coming back, you know, from...
But some...
You know, in one Sunni area, while I was there, a Shia family tried to come back, reclaim their house.
They found the house being trashed, you know, everything had gone, the furniture, not just the furniture, but the electrical fittings, the water pipes, so they...
Which is quite common in Iraq at this time of year or a month or so ago, they sleep on the roof.
While they were sleeping on the roof, a group of Sunni militiamen jumped onto it and grabbed the husband, chopped his head off, threw it off the roof, and then said to his wife and the children, you know, this is what's going to happen to any Shia who come back to this neighborhood.
So, you know, this is...
Well...
That sort of thing is still going on.
Well, Patrick, you know, Iraq is actually famous for being very mixed between Sunni and Shia before the war, and it was clear, it's been clear all along that when it comes to fighting factions, that basically they've been divided along those kind of religious lines, you know, the Mahdi army isn't full of Sunnis, that kind of thing, and yet, is it really at the point where the people of Iraq, the regular Arab population of Iraq, that the splits between their religion has become that pronounced due to all this fighting?
Well, there's a very sort of simple human thing, excuse me, that has happened, which is an awful lot of people are dead, you know, a lot of people have had their relatives killed.
Now, when you have that sort of killing, you know, people just don't forget, you know, they feel visceral fear, visceral hatred, you know.
One woman is a friend of mine who is a Shia, very secular, very highly educated, she said she just felt nervous when she was in the room with Sunni, you know.
When you think of it, 3,000 people killed every month, you know, often tortured to death with grills and acid and so forth, you know, this creates extraordinary, this takes generations to disappear.
Yeah, the damage has really begun.
You know, look at the American Civil War, look at, you know, any civil war, how long it takes for the wounds to heal up, and how long it takes for the wounds to disappear.
Well, you know, you talked about how the Shiites really won that civil war, that battle for Baghdad primarily, and they call it cleansed, I guess, the Sunni Arabs out, and then the Sunni Arabs decided that they would go ahead, and I guess they had already been turning against the so-called Islamic State of Iraq, the Al-Qaeda guys, before the surge even happened, but basically, they worked out an agreement with Petraeus that we would call them the sons of Iraq instead of the Sunni insurgency, that they would fight Al-Qaeda but not fight the U.S., because they'd lost, basically, but so, here's my question, when's the next battle for Baghdad, or is it the case that these Sunni militias, these sons of Iraq have just given it up for now?
Well, it's a good question, I think it's one they've been asking themselves.
I don't think they've got anywhere much to go, I mean, these are the guys who are formally fighting the U.S. Now, are they going to fight the U.S. again?
Well, no, because they, you know, look for the U.S. to defend them against the Shia.
Are they going to fight the Iraqi government, which is predominantly Shia?
Well, not really, I think, because they'd lose, you know, the balance of forces is really against them, so they might, you know, if they felt that the Shia were coming to their areas that the government was moving in, they might sort of move to defend themselves, but I don't think they're in a position to launch another uprising against the government.
What if America left?
Would they be in any better position to start that war up?
Some of them might think of doing that, but I mean, first of all, it would be a real bad idea, because I think they'd just lose, they're outnumbered.
At some point, the U.S. is going to leave, and there has to be an understanding about them, but, you know, I don't think that, it's not exactly, the U.S. isn't really in a position to stop it anyway.
You know, we had this sort of civil war while the U.S. had 140,000 troops in the country.
Yeah, and they were basically fighting on the side of the Shiites in that, weren't they?
Well, yeah, not doing anything much at all, but I think it's probably not going to happen.
I think that this whole civil war has sort of had an outcome, and the Shia sort of won, and the Sunni kind of know that, and they control the government.
There's also growing animosity between the Arabs and the Shia, and the Sunni Arabs and the Kurds, so that, again, may give them a sort of common enemy.
You know, it depends on when the U.S. leaves, how the U.S. leaves, you know, will Obama talk to the Iranians, the other neighbors of Iraq?
You know, most of the violence in Iraq was generated within Iraq, but also, you know, when Bush came in and was saying openly or implying privately that, you know, today we'll overthrow the government in Baghdad, tomorrow Tehran and Damascus, of course, the Iranians and the Syrians thought, right, we'd much prefer to give the U.S. a bad time in Iraq, make sure they never stabilize Iraq, let them, things settle down, and then come into Iran and Syria.
You know, both countries had an incentive to keep things bubbling in Iraq.
Now, if Obama talks to the Syrians, I mean, they kind of have been talking to the Syrians and to the Iranians, then that would take one of the sources of instability out of the situation.
Well, now, I saw this thing in Reuters that said that a lot of Sunni militia guys, the sons of Iraq, former Sunni insurgents, that they actually have been lining up and cashing paychecks from the Shiite government.
Is there any chance that, well, and I guess you brought up the dispute with the Kurds over Kirkuk, that with a common enemy, the Kurds, that these guys will actually be able to just say, like, okay, Sunnis, you're responsible for patrolling your own areas, even though you're on the payroll of the central government?
I mean, that's all a simple effect.
You know, they might do some of that in, like, the toughest sort of Sunni areas in Anbar province in the west.
But, you know, the guys who control the government at the moment, the Shia and the Kurds, you know, they fought long and hard to assert themselves against the Sunni.
They're not going to hand out power to the Sunni.
You know, jobs, yes, money, yes, but handing over real power over big chunks of Iraq, they'll never do that.
They'll fight rather than do that, I think.
Well, you talked about how the Sunnis don't really have the ability to retake Baghdad.
Do the Shiite militias, aka the Iraqi army, do they have the ability to really take over the predominantly Sunni areas of the country, like Anbar, Fallujah, that kind of?
They could, Baghdad, they probably could.
Fallujah and Anbar are more difficult, because these are really sort of solid Sunni areas, the upper Euphrates Valley.
I think they'd have difficulty doing that.
And also, you know, there are Sunni in the present-day Iraqi army.
They'd probably mutiny as well.
So they are going to basically have to recognize some kind of Sunni power, if not put it on the payroll and work with it.
Yeah, I mean, it's a question...
There's a difference between recognizing somebody's power and sort of handing over control of chunks of the country to them.
I think they'll recognize, if they have any sense, they'll recognize they have power, but they won't, you know, they won't sort of...
They don't want to let happen what's happening in Kurdistan, those areas of the country that basically the central government has no authority over.
Well, yeah, I mean, that's kind of interesting.
I guess they want to call it that they have authority, even though they really don't have any authority that they can actually exercise?
Yeah, but they can.
You know, do they control the roads?
Can you control who's appointed police chief in various areas?
You know, there are various...
These are what governments like to do.
I mean, there is an additional problem that's come up in the last few weeks, which is, I mean, as you've seen, the price of oil is going down.
Now, the Iraqi government was pretty confident earlier in the year, this year, you know, that it might have its problems, but it had a whole load of money.
And, you know, this played a role in the presidential campaign that Obama was saying, well, why don't the Iraqis use their money?
The problem is that the Iraqi budget supposed that the price of oil would be $80.
When they drew it up, it was well over $100, but now it's down to $55 or thereabouts.
So they're a bit short on money.
They doubled the salaries of a lot of government employees earlier in the year.
I think they kind of wish they hadn't done that now.
Now, of course, the central government has a real problem.
It doesn't have the money to pay for a lot of things.
You know, one of the problems about Iraq is just, you know, just various things don't happen that people in most countries expect their government to make happen.
Like, you know, electricity.
Modern cities don't really work without electricity, like a car doesn't work without gasoline.
And there isn't enough electricity in Baghdad.
And people blame the government.
You know, there isn't enough clean water.
And there's an outbreak of cholera.
Now, you know, imagine what it's like.
You've got small children, you know, very vulnerable to this.
And you just have dirty water that's coming out of the canals and the river.
So people try to boil their water.
They try and get bottled water, which is very expensive.
They don't have the money for that in poor areas.
These are the sort of things that disillusion people with the government.
If I can keep you just another couple of minutes, I'd like to ask you, if you could, to please address the situation in Kirkuk, where I guess it's an ethnic battle for who's going to control that city in the north of Iraq and its oil resources.
Yeah, I mean, this has been going on for half a century, longer.
The Kurds control it.
There are Arabs there.
There are Turkomans there.
But nothing is really decided who should control it in the long term.
And sort of animosity and hostility between the Kurds and the Arabs has been getting stronger in the big northern cities, Mosul, Kirkuk.
Still a lot of fighting there.
Difficult to see how that's going to be ended.
And the Kurds have a long...
They've been fighting for their rights.
They've suffered appalling losses over the last half century.
They're not going to give up.
The central government, I think, also sort of figures that politically it's got a lot going for it to present itself to...
The 80% of Iraqis were Arabs.
As the defender of the Arabs, the people who put the Kurds...
Showed the Kurds that they were overplaying their hand.
Well, the violence has stayed pretty low level this whole time.
Is there a real danger of, you know, real battles going on?
I mean, as you said...
Well, in Kirkuk, you know, a lot of people killed.
I'm always hearing about these areas of Baghdad where there's been low level of violence.
But it could be anywhere else.
People say there's a very high level of violence.
You know, bombs that kill 30 or 40 people.
You know, assassinations.
Killings all over the place.
The same in Mosul.
You know, Mosul, you've got hundreds of thousands of people who have fled as refugees.
Most recently the Christians, but also other people.
You know, all these places are pretty bad.
And the Shiites have a very tight alliance with the Kurds, right?
Well, they have a historic alliance, but they sort of...
They had an alliance against Saddam.
They had an alliance against the Sunni.
They're the people who were sort of dispossessed from power under Saddam.
Now they have power, but they've got a lot of differences between them as well.
And what of Muqtada al-Sadr?
He's hiding out in Iran, getting a higher religious rank, last I heard, right?
Yeah, I mean, the...
Well, one Iraqi political leader I spoke to yesterday was saying to me that he thought the Sadrists had played it pretty cleverly, that they really hadn't made any mistakes over the last year.
That they could have...
They were doing pretty well militarily earlier this year against the central government, but they would have lost in the end, fighting the central government, the U.S. forces, and the Iranians were against them, and the traditional religious hierarchy.
That the smart thing to do was not to fight, and they decided not to fight.
You know, we'll see what happens in the election next year.
Well, and that's been as characteristic all the time, is strategic retreat.
But the Mahdi army hasn't ceased to exist, has it?
No, these militias don't really cease to exist.
Really, they're kind of local guys with their guns at home, you know.
You can get up in the morning and say, I dissolve this militia, which means everybody goes home.
In the evening you can get up and say, I reform this militia, which means everybody comes out in the street with their guns.
Yeah.
So it's not, you know, it's not like a sort of 101st Airborne Division in the U.S., or, you know, the Brigade of Guards in Britain.
You know, this is a much more casual organization.
Well, has Sauder lost status being in Iran this whole time and not taking part in Iraqi politics very much for the last year?
They've lost status with some from being there.
On the other hand, a lot of the Mahdi army didn't really control.
They were getting a lot of ill feeling against them because of Mahdi army being involved in criminal activities.
Now that the Iraqi army has moved in, you know, and somebody else has taken over the local rackets, the level of prestige of the organization goes up, of Muqtada's organization goes up.
Because they can't participate in the kinds of criminal activities that they were using to finance their actions before.
Yeah, almost anybody who's in control of any area in Iraq becomes pretty unpopular because they're involved in rackets, because they can't provide utilities.
You know, for good reasons and bad, you get pretty unpopular.
The Kurdish leaders are pretty unpopular in Kurdistan at the moment because, you know, prices are very high and people blame them for everything.
So, in some ways, there are advantages in not being the people who everybody points to as being responsible for whatever's going wrong in your district.
Wow.
Well, so I think what I've learned in the last 45 minutes or so here, Patrick, is that what a complicated mess.
It doesn't sound to me on its face as though, even if they made you the national security advisor, that you would know what to do, what pressure to apply, and which places for just the right thing.
Really, the answer is to just drop everything and leave immediately.
Is that basically what your position is?
Well, you know, there should be an orderly withdrawal, and the U.S. has become part of the political architecture of the country.
It's reasonable for them to, you know, the Iraqis to say, well, you know, it should be an orderly withdrawal, you know, an orderly handover.
But, you know, what's really sort of torpedoed all this is a sense among Iraqis, and a suspicion, a reasonable suspicion, that all this sort of dragging it out by the Bush administration is really to secretly keep control of Iraq.
That if Iraqis were conscious, yeah, the U.S. is going, it's not going to be in control, then everything becomes much easier.
You know, we mentioned earlier, you know, who controls the intelligence service?
You know, people, what is the U.S. influence over that?
The Iraqis are very, in the government, are suspicious that, hold on a minute, who's been training the Iraqi army?
Are we going to end up like one of those Latin American states in the 1960s and beyond, where you would have the officer corps of the army trained in the U.S. and had greater loyalty to their trainers than they did to their own country?
I'm not saying that this has necessarily happened, but this is the way Iraqis talk.
I think once they're clear the U.S. is going, the U.S. is not going to control, then all these things become easier.
And then it has to be, you know, this has to be real, you know.
You know, remember about three or four weeks ago, suddenly we had this raid by U.S. special forces from Iraq into Syria in pursuit of somebody, they said, from al-Qaeda.
Now, you know, Iraqis will say, hold on a minute, this came from Anbar province, this raid, and we were told that control, you know, military control had been handed over to Iraqi forces.
But how come the U.S. is still unilaterally carrying out raids without telling us?
You know, to some guy it probably looks a smart move, you know, the sort of thing you see on the movies of special forces going in their helicopters across the border.
But actually it's pretty disastrous, because Iraqis think, all right, all this business of turning over authority to us in different provinces doesn't mean anything.
The U.S. will go on doing exactly what it wants in Iraq.
Well, if we assume that they're right, the most suspicious Iraqis, you see all this as simply just pretext to stay forever, you know, we stole it fair and square and we're keeping it kind of thing.
If we assume that's true, because I don't think it's that far-fetched at all, at least from where I sit, do you think that that's actually a tenable situation, that America could sort of keep this, keep Iraq as a colony, or are we going to be forced out, you know, hell or high water?
Well, you know, sort of, it's not feasible, and it never was, and this has created so much of the violence, you know, because suddenly you try and change the balance of power in an area, you know, which is in the Gulf, you immediately, the Iranians get frightened, the Syrians, all the neighbors get frightened.
I mean, I remember the current Iraqi foreign minister, Hosheh Zobari, saying to me, you know, four years ago, four or five years ago, just after the invasion, you know, saying, look, Patrick, you know, none of our neighbors are happy with what's happened, none of them like the U.S. presence here.
You know, this was true of the Saudis and the others as well.
So the idea that you could have a permanent U.S. garrison in Iraq, you know, was always truly dumb and always going to provoke a major counter-reaction.
You know, there's something, I mean, we're getting to the end of it, there's something, I think, a very simple thing that people don't quite take on board with.
Iraqis in general are quite glad to see the back of Saddam Hussein.
He was a catastrophic ruler.
But from the very beginning, polls in Iraq showed that the majority of Iraqis, as you yourself pointed out, were against an occupation.
They don't like it.
You know, so the U.S. has an army there, but it's always had very few real friends in Iraq.
And that was true in 2003, and it's true today.
So I think that, yeah, the occupation has to end, and the occupation will end, you know.
But in an orderly manner, and that's doable.
But it becomes much more doable when Iraqis have a sense that there isn't this covert, there isn't going to be a covert attempt to still control their government.
And that's what, you know, you talk to ordinary Iraqis, that's what they think on the street, you know.
A lot of them think, oh, the government's already controlled by the Americans.
This isn't quite true.
It was true one time.
It isn't true at the moment.
But they're still very cynical about it.
Well, and that really is an interesting thing to behold, too, that it seems like they really have created a government that's independent enough to tell them no on some pretty important issues here.
Yeah, they should be sort of pleased about this in some ways, you know.
You can't have it both ways.
You know, for a long time there was an attempt to have an Iraqi government that was really tough towards anti-American insurgents, but otherwise it was as soft as butter and did everything the Americans told them to do.
You know, because only about 18 months ago, maybe a little more, two years ago, you know, when a senior Iraqi officer, if he obeyed, and this happened in one case, I know this to be true, if he obeyed an instruction from the Iraqi prime minister and did something and the U.S. command wanted something else to happen, that guy could end up getting arrested.
You know, so there has now this year been a real shift of power, and in many ways the U.S. should be pleased about this.
There is sort of a central government.
It's not the world's best government.
There is a sort of government there now, capable of taking decisions.
Yeah, well, with all the hype about the decreased violence, too, it seems like a perfect time to declare victory and get the hell out of there.
Sure, yeah.
I mean, this is all, I think this is all doable, maybe even more doable than people imagine.
You know, I mean, this argument about, oh, we need to train the Iraqi forces.
Well, of course, the need for trained forces depends on how many enemies you've got.
Right.
If they've managed to, if there's political solutions within Iraq, the U.S. is going, then you actually don't need this enormous army into which they're building up.
In fact, you want a rather smaller one, because that's rather ominous for the future in Iraq.
But, you know, you just have to think about it.
What happens in most countries when you have a civil government that can't deliver the means of life to its population?
That is extremely unpopular, and you have a powerful and growing military, you know.
But many Iraqis think, you know, four or five years down the road there's going to be a military coup.
I'm not saying there will be, but that's what people talk about.
Yeah.
Well, and it's hardly out of the question.
It seems like, well, it's never really, that land's never really known liberty, has it?
Well, no, but I mean, they want it, and they deserve it.
You know, the Iraqis really deserve much better from what they got from the Bush administration.
You know, they always try and mask this.
I mean, the same is true of Tony Blair saying we want to overthrow Saddam.
But, actually, what they did, they could have got away with that, but what they did was then impose really a traditional colonial control of Iraq.
And, of course, people Iraqis didn't like it.
That's really what the war was about.
Well, and they proved, too, that the mightiest military on the face of the planet is not capable of remaking the world to the whims of the politicians.
They can only break things, not put them back together again.
Yes, I mean, it's, you know, they weren't fighting that number of people.
It just didn't work.
And, as I said, one of the reasons was they didn't have any real friends, you know.
The people they brought back, they brought in themselves, you know.
Iraqi Americans from, you know, Chicago, elsewhere, you know, had very little support.
You know, so it's going to end now, as it could have ended five years ago.
You know, it's not Iraq.
Is Iraq going to remain violent?
Sure, but, you know, things will settle down as the U.S. departs.
And, you know, it's been a pretty bad war.
But also, when I think of it, and I've been there most of the time, a really unnecessary war.
Yeah, well, no doubt about that.
I sure hope you're right that it ends sooner than later.
Yep.
All right, everybody, that's Patrick Cockburn, without a doubt the best Western reporter in Iraq.
He writes for The Independent.
He's a Middle East correspondent for The Independent.
That's independent.co.uk.
And his book is Muqtada.
Muqtada al-Sadr, The Shia Revival and the Struggle for Iraq.
Thanks very much for your time today, sir.
Thank you.
Santi War Radio.
We'll be right back.