03/13/14 – Patrick Cockburn – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And our first guest today is one of the most important journalists in the world right now.
Of course, you're all very familiar, Patrick Coburn, Middle East correspondent for The Independent.
That's independent.co.uk.
You can also find him at counterpunch.org and at unz.com.
That's unz.com, primarily writes for The Independent.
And also, I should mention, he's the author of the very important book.
And I think it still remains to be seen just how important the subject will be in the future.
It's called Muqtada, Muqtada al-Sadr, The Shia Revival and the Future of Iraq.
Welcome back to the show, Patrick.
How are you doing?
Fine.
Thank you.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you back on the show here.
And a couple of articles at issue.
Let's see, the last one before was The Nature of War Has Changed, which is bleak news for Syria's minorities.
And then the latest at The Independent is Syria's Road to Hell, a hair raising journey between Damascus and Tartus.
So I guess most of us know where Damascus is.
There's Tartus.
And tell us about your trip on the road from Damascus.
Well, this is a sort of crucial road for the control of Syria, one that the government and the rebels have been fighting over.
Damascus, the capital, then you go north to Homs, which is the third biggest city, which has been also even more fought over.
But then you go west to Tartus, which isn't so big, but it's a port on the coast.
It is very supportive of the government, its population, a large proportion of Alawites, the same Islamic sect that President Assad belongs to.
So this is a sort of the road that the government dare not lose and the opposition would love to take.
It also is sort of the same route as where the crude oil pipelines, the electricity pylons are.
So it's important for a whole range of reasons.
I see.
And then, well, and so it's funny, it doesn't sound like, you know, at least in terms of who holds what territory on the ground or anything like that, like the balance of power has changed much in the last year or so.
Is that about right?
Yeah, I'd say, you know, we're nearly almost 18 months.
It hasn't changed.
There's stalemate on the ground.
The government's making some progress.
I mean, you come out of northern, North Damascus, and there are a series of suburbs there that are completely shattered by artillery fire.
And these used to be opposition strongholds, and it used to be that you couldn't go down that road because of snipers.
And now, I mean, it looks like something like Dresden after the bombing, but you can drive down it, and we didn't get shot at.
There's quite a lot of other traffic, which means that increasingly people think that the road is safe.
But as you go north, and you have Lebanon over to your west, and there are, Jabhat al-Nusra holds various villages there, including a Christian village called Malula, where they released the nuns recently that kidnapped them.
And it's rather strange, because the enemy, from the government's point of view, is very close to that main road.
And a month or so ago, they cut it at a place called Nabak.
So I think an unofficial sort of, don't shoot at me, and I won't shoot at you, type truce at various points.
But again, the government's on the offensive there.
And one of the strange things about Syria at the moment is that you have places which have ceased fires, and in some cases the rebels, the pre-Syrian army, are still inside, still have their weapons.
Or in some cases, they've simply changed sides and joined the government militia, the National Defense Force.
Sometimes people, in some of these ordinary Syrians, are kind of a bit angry that these guys who'd come in and said, let's go, are they going to fight to the end against Assad, have quite happily just switched sides, usually getting the same salary.
Yeah, you even talk in the article about some of these checkpoints are manned by the so-called Free Syrian Army, jointly with the Damascus government.
Yeah.
It's sort of strange.
It's also kind of fragile, I think, the government's strategy is to seal off areas that the opposition rebels have taken, and essentially just starve them out, bombard them with artillery, nobody gets in or out.
And I think they do this because they don't have that number of combat troops.
They have quite a lot of people who've been drafted into the army who can man a checkpoint.
So they sort of surround these areas.
And then finally, there's some sort of deal, or that's what they hope.
And in some cases, that means that the opposition keep their weapons, at some cases, they release the prisoners.
It all depends on the local balance of power.
This is kind of new, and some of the opposition say it's a type of surrender, but actually, at least in these areas, some people can go home and people aren't getting killed.
So basically, it's positive.
It sort of seemed to me, from way over here in Texas, of course, that the Free Syrian Army itself is almost a mythological thing, or it sounded like a bunch of expats sitting on the Turkish side of the border while al-Nusra has been doing all the fighting all these years and whatever.
And then, you know, if there are any group that's been called the moderates by the Western press that I can see always end up to be cannibals or something worse, right, turn around and start beheading people and declare their loyalty to Zarqawi over there in Pakistan, right, like the Islamic Front.
They said, oh, here are the new moderates, the Islamic Front.
And then that guy declared, their leader declared loyalty to Zawahiri the next day, this kind of thing.
What is the FSA?
How many members does it have, if any?
Well, nobody really knows, you know, because there's had to be, I mean, U.S. intelligence at one point said there are 1,200 different rebel groups in Syria, and some would be a sort of, you know, a couple of families, and some would be thousands of men, so nobody quite knows.
And nobody, you know, a lot of these units are probably getting money from abroad for, you know, let's say 5,000 men, but maybe they only have sort of 1,500, so, you know, you couldn't pocket the remainder, so nobody quite knows.
I think one important point to make is, which I think outsiders get wrong a lot, is to imagine, you know, that Jabhat al-Nusra is the official al-Qaida affiliate.
When you have the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which was associated with al-Qaida, doesn't seem to be anymore, but actually the Islamic Front, all these jihadis are pretty well the same, you know.
I mean, I was told that a friend of mine was talking to various Syrian fighters on the Turkish side of the border, you know, having cups of tea with them, and the subject of 9-11 came up, you know, and my friend said, you know, the one thing you noticed about all these guys, they all thought 9-11 was a really good idea, you know, so these jihadis, you know, you read learned articles in different American or British papers about how these guys differ, but actually when it comes to ideology, they're very much the same.
And you know, I don't know, it's funny the way people, it's sort of been the red herring all along, although it's sort of part of it, but they always pretend that Islamic extremism is somehow, you know, the very deepest motivation going on here, rather than, you know, earthly politics and all that kind of thing.
So they define, you know, these groups supposedly by the degree of their belief in Muhammad or something like that, but that's hardly the question when, for example, John McCain was posing with the Northern Storm Brigade, the same guys who were already on camera telling Time Magazine reporters that, yeah, we're veterans of the Iraq War, where we went and fought the Americans, right?
So who cares if they had the exact same religious beliefs as Zarqawi?
If they're veterans, they're battle-hardened veterans of the war against the Americans in Iraq, and these are the guys that John McCain is palling around with.
Yeah, I think it's a general question, you know, I think it's McCain, but also, you know, you make me think of Christopher Stevens, the American ambassador in Benghazi in Libya, who was sort of, you know, clearly underestimated the kind of threat that you had from jihadis because these guys didn't have a Salah bin Laden written on their hat.
You know, they made it and weren't under operational control from somebody in Pakistan, but their actual ideology, you know, they want an Islamic state, they want Sharia, they want secondary status for women, you know, they want really a return to the practices of the time 1,400 years ago when the Prophet Muhammad was alive.
So, you know, there isn't much difference, and I think it's a sort of big mistake of American and British, all the policies, to imagine that there's a great gap between these different jihadi groups.
They all believe pretty well the same thing.
All right, now, we've talked before about how in the Western capitals, they thought this was going to be easy, oh, Assad, step aside, and this kind of thing, and it turned out not to be so much, and it seemed from the outside, you know, I'm just an amateur criminologist here, Patrick, but it sort of seemed like they decided better than to really help these rebels win, whichever sect of rebels they are exactly, and that maybe if they don't want to outright switch back to Assad or to him, maybe they don't want to really help them win so much.
But then, so my question is around the recent reports of Prince Bandar being, having the portfolio taken away from him, or however they say, where he's been called off the Syrian case by his overlords in Saudi Arabia, and that maybe their government has taken a different policy as well in terms of backing down in their attempted regime change in Syria.
What do you think of that?
Does that sound right?
Yeah, I think it is very important, and it's still not exactly clear what the new Saudi policy came to be, but it's meant to be more against these jihadis and al-Qaeda-type organizations that King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has decreed that, you know, any Saudi who goes and fights in Syria would face 20 to 30 years in jail when they get home, that other restraints on people going to Syria, but it's not quite clear if that's really happening, because there isn't much restraint on Saudi preachers and appearing on satellite TV, having people who have millions of followers, still seem to be encouraging people to go to Syria to fight in jihad.
So you'd have to still know what to ensure Prince Bandar has been marginalized, and that looks pretty significant, because he was leading the pack on getting rid of Assad and supporting al-Qaeda-type organizations or jihadi organizations, and that's changed.
Okay, we'll have to stop right here and take a quick break, we'll be right back with more from Patrick Coburn from The Independent, that's independent.co.uk as well as counterpunch.org.
All right, I'm Scott, this is my show, The Scott Horton Show, thanks for having me.
Thanks everybody for listening, I'm talking with Patrick Coburn about the crisis in Syria, the permanent crisis there, quite a few years old now, and there's so many different directions to go here, I guess as long as we're talking, Patrick, about Saudi influence in this botched half-regime change effort here in Syria, let me ask you about the context, I guess then for Maliki's accusations against Saudi Arabia, claiming that they're backing the Sunni-based insurgency there in Iraq, too, and I have a feeling that you're going to say, yeah, exactly, that's what we're talking about here, has been going on, but then my real question would be, going back in the days of the Iraq war, when the prime enemy of the American occupation there, when the prime enemy of the Sunni-based insurgency was the Americans, was the Saudi royal family backing the Sunni insurgency back that whole time, too?
Yeah, I think they probably supported it, you know, the royal family itself doesn't have to do much, it just has to allow private donors and supporters to do their thing, and you go to the 9-11 commission report, it says the main support for Al-Qaeda was private donors in Saudi Arabia and, to a lesser extent, the Gulf.
You know, about eight years later, Hillary Clinton was sending a cable which WikiLeaks revealed, saying Saudi Arabia is the main financier for a jihadi movement, I think she says a terrorist movement, throughout the world, whether it's in Pakistan or Iraq or anywhere else.
But she didn't just mean...
No, it shifted a bit more to Kuwait, but it's really the Gulf monarchies.
But it's always, you know, when you come to Syria and Saudi Arabia, it's always, I think, absurd to imagine that Saudi Arabia, which is one of the other Gulf monarchies, which are the last sort of absolutist, theocratic monarchies in the world, would be interested in spreading secular democracy to Syria or Iraq or anywhere else.
You know, there's always a contradiction there.
Sure.
I'm sorry, just to clarify one point there about Hillary Clinton and that document, they weren't referring to Saudi Arabia as a place where, you know, money comes out of that country.
She was referring to Saudi Arabia, the state apparatus itself, the princes, the people in charge.
They were deliberately, as a matter of policy, funding these groups, correct?
Not quite.
No, it's more just donations, you know.
It doesn't have to be a government check.
All they have to do is not try to prevent donations being made.
You know, money is difficult to prevent money being transferred anyway.
But I think she was referring primarily to private donations, which, of course, might come from princes and so forth.
But I doubt that if it could actually, you know, come out of the Saudi finance ministry, because that could be too obvious.
Yeah, but with their connivance, in other words, though, this can't be going on...
Sure, yeah.
Generally, I mean, you know, there are different ways of doing this.
Right.
But they were doing that.
I think another point, Scott, that people don't quite take on board is that, you know, the Iraq-Syrian border doesn't really exist anymore.
Right.
Now, when the Saudi Arabia, the Gulf, the United States, Turkey, when they support rebels in Syria, then that support also goes to rebels in Iraq.
You know, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which means Greater Syria, covers both countries.
You know, there's been a big surge in Iraq of suicide bombers over the last year.
It's pretty well been one a day at the moment.
And where do these bombers come from?
Well, you know, they're coming into Syria.
A lot of these foreigners think they're going to be fighting in Syria, but they end up in Baghdad driving a truck full of explosives into a local share marketplace.
So this war, you know, is now in both countries.
So when the U.S. and the others support the rebels in Syria, they're also destabilizing the Iraqi government and giving, like, basically ensuring that there's support for the rebels in Iraq.
But somehow that hasn't sort of, that message, although it's pretty obvious, and it's sort of admitted by administration officials in sort of small meetings, it hasn't, I think, got across to the general public yet.
Yeah, I've even seen where in, you know, one news story about one interaction between State Department flunkies and the Maliki government, they on one hand pledge more support for his fight against the Sunni insurgents in Iraq at the very same meeting.
They're chastising him for helping Iran ship weapons and personnel and material and whatever to Assad for the very same fight.
Yeah, I mean, it sort of, you know, when the U.S. and the others decided to back the rebels militarily in Syria, at that instant, you know, they destabilized Iraq.
They sent, and they don't seem to have realized what they were doing.
But it seems to me one of the many blunders of U.S. administrations in Iraq and Syria, but one that people haven't really picked up on yet.
Right, well, and now speaking of which, as far as the Iraq crisis goes, let's see, they have parliamentary elections coming up at some point here soon, right?
Yeah, it's in April, but, you know, things are deteriorating, you know, the way that eight and a half thousand civilians killed last year.
There's a suicide bombing attack every day.
I wonder whether you think the Sunnis will even participate in the elections, or they're just completely frozen out of the system now?
Well, increasingly, you're dead right.
I mean, if you take Anbar province, which is an enormous province, which contains Fallujah and Ramadi, you know, Fallujah is held by al-Qaeda at the moment.
They hold a lot of the rest of the province.
Now, the population of Anbar is where most of the fighting with the U.S. was, is about 1.6 million, and about half a million have fled because the government is shelling the towns and villages.
So, you know, taking part in an election is not exactly the first thing on these people's minds.
They're trying to stay alive and get enough to eat.
Right, not that winning would do them any good anyway, right?
I mean, why bother?
Yeah, I mean, it's basically, you know, they're marginalized, and I think, you know, there was a protest movement from the end of 2012, sort of Iraqi Arab Spring, and they had lots of demonstrations, but they sort of decided it wasn't getting them anywhere.
One peace camp at a place called Hawija was attacked by the army, and about 50 people killed.
So, you know, what we're seeing at the moment is sort of peaceful opposition and demonstrations sort of mutating into armed opposition, and that effectively means support for al-Qaeda.
Well, you know, as I know you know, the nation-state was only invented in the 1600-somethings.
I mean, there have been sort of kind of nations in the past, but this particular system for the Middle East is really just a stamp, right?
A thing placed upon them by the former European imperial powers, and I wonder whether you think that the state system, you know, when we're talking about, for example, the border between Syria and Iraq ceasing to exist, how many more of these borders are going to cease to exist as the states in the region just seem to crumble as the right-wing forces of reaction, and primarily along ethnic lines, seem to be taking predominance in people's minds over there?
Yeah, I think, you know, there's no doubt that the nation-states are getting weaker, you know.
There's no doubt in my mind also, you know, that this is a bad thing.
You know, if you have a nation-state and people within the state, you know, have a degree of common loyalty to each other, that they accept the result of elections without seeing each other's throats.
But if you don't have a loyalty, some form of national loyalty, you know, what loyalty will people look to?
Whether it'll be tribal, it'll be ethnic, it'll be religious.
And that means that these places, you know, become involved in a sort of multi-layered civil war.
Right.
I mean, well, for this one, the original sin here is the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Not that, you know, World War I wasn't also full of consequences for the region and this kind of thing, but it seems like if we could only take back that Iraq invasion, so much of this would not be a problem right now.
And that's not a call for supporting dictatorships, but certainly we don't want to be the ones supporting Al-Qaeda and overthrowing them either.
No, you know, and also, you know, look at Libya, you know, which has been presented by Obama and Cameron, Britain, Sarkozy, and France, you know, as the exemplar of successful foreign intervention.
You know, they were grandstanding in Benghazi and Tripoli.
Well, they sure aren't doing that now, because they'd be dead if they tried.
You know, the Prime Minister of Libya fled this week.
An oil tanker has picked up crude oil from the east of the country.
The government said they'd stop it, they'd sink it, they weren't able to, so the country's breaking up.
There's fighting all over.
So, you know, this is kind of an example of how all these interventions really over the last ten years have invariably gone sour and generally produced a worse result for the people of Libya and Syria and Iraq than what they had before.
You know, you could argue, but...
All right, well, thank you very much for your time, as always.
It's great to talk to you, Patrick.
All right, bye-bye.
All right, everybody, that is the great Patrick Cockburn, the heroic Patrick Cockburn, at The Independent.
That's independent.co.uk.
You can also find him at counterpunch.org and at unz.com.
That's unz, unz.com.
And we'll be right back after this with Scott McCom.
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