06/20/14 – Patrick Cockburn – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
And I had to bump Ray McGovern for just a minute because I got Patrick Cockburn live on the phone from Baghdad, Middle East correspondent for The Independent at independent.co.uk.
Welcome back to the show.
Patrick, how are you doing?
Pretty good.
Good, good.
Thank you very much for joining us.
So tell us, what do you see?
What's important?
What do we need to know?
Well, it's Baghdad is sort of a sense of, people are pretty frightened after the big advances by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, ISIS, the al-Qaeda type organization that's taken Mosul and most of the north of the country, and they're sort of, just about an hour's drive to the north of Baghdad, sort of in a semi-circle.
Baghdad's a big city, about 7 million people.
Not clear.
It's mostly Shia.
The insurgents are almost entirely Sunni.
So it's not clear if they're going to attack.
But the government is sort of talking about a big offensive here.
I kind of believe it when I see it.
The government here is sort of dysfunctional in a very real sense.
I mean, we use the word dysfunctional, meaning not very efficient, but this is a government which just does not function.
I mean, it's, in the past, it sort of hasn't been able to get food to its own troops.
Troops are sent to the front line with four magazines for their guns, which they shoot off in about three minutes, and there's no more for them.
What's happened here is really a Sunni revolt.
There are about 5 or 6 million Sunni in Iraq in the northern center.
The shock troops of this revolt are the al-Qaeda type Islamic State people.
Very efficient, very fanatical, very well led, extremely violent, cruel.
They executed 1,700 Shia prisoners.
But they've been the shock troops of a sort of much wider uprising by the Sunni against Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister, who they see as the oppressor, the guy who's discriminated against them, the guy who permits them getting jobs, the guy who put their sons in jail.
There are about 100,000 people in jail here.
Many of them have never been brought to trial.
Many of them just held on suspicion.
The quickest way of getting out of prison is to pay a very large bribe, and to get a bribe is often the reason people went into prison.
ISIS in Mosul has started destroying statues of Islamic philosophers.
They don't believe in commemorating any of these people.
So they haven't quite implemented the full Sharia law yet of stopping women going out without a close relative.
But most of the minorities, Christians and others, have already fled.
So now we'll wait and see.
Will this coalition of Sunnis stay together?
Will it fall apart?
Will they attack Baghdad?
Will the U.S. or Iran come in?
So everything is on edge here, and nothing, any of these things could happen.
Well, okay, so on the question of whether they're going to take Baghdad or not, this is something that you and I have discussed for years, was really what led to the ceasefire more than anything was, you know, back in 08, I guess late 07, 08, was that the Americans had helped the Shiite militias really kick all the Sunnis out of Baghdad and make it a super majority, 85% Shiite city, and at that point the Sunni insurgency leaders basically decided they needed a ceasefire to lick their wounds and get their act back together again, and at that point convinced Petraeus to go ahead and pay them and arm them and allow them to patrol their own neighborhoods if they would stop attacking the U.S. if the U.S. would stop attacking them, as they had already lost.
So then the question was whether they can take Baghdad back, or whether they think they can, and we've talked about this numerous times since then, and I think you've said that there are indications at least that they think that they can retake Baghdad, even if it took the U.S. Army and Marine Corps to give it to the Shia, that they're the super majority, they got Saudi money, and now they've got their own kind of proto-state, and why leave well enough alone if they can get back to capital city?
So I wonder whether you think they're really going to try to attack, and then I guess also wonder whether you think that the Shia, you know, fighting-age males are going to rally to Maliki's government, or are they just going to rally to their local militias to fight?
Well, they've been sent into the army, you know, there was a PAPA from the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani on, I think, Thursday, calling for Wednesday, calling for people to join the army.
So you have a lot of volunteers going into the army, but they're often not trained, I mean, these people may have, you know, not used a gun much, except for pistols at their weddings, and also, you know, what applies to the regular army applies to them.
If the government couldn't supply the regular army with ammunition and food, is it going to be able to supply these volunteers?
So it might be an advantage to the government to have this great mass of armed men, but it's very much like a sort of armed crowd.
The, you know, could Baghdad fall?
Well, it might.
I mean, Baghdad is mostly Shia, as you said, but around the edges, on every side, it's sort of encircled by Sunni towns and Sunni areas.
And morale is kind of pretty fragile at the moment here.
So if the army broke and ran at Mosul without much fighting, it might do the same down here.
Of course, one could say they were defending their own co-religionists down here, so they might fight harder.
But I'd kind of like to see some evidence of that.
Hmm, yeah.
Well, now, so it's a seeming, from here, it seems like, you know, pretty close to a stalemate, where the Iraqi army, I guess, it remains to be seen, like you're saying, whether they can hold on to Baghdad.
But it makes more sense why they wouldn't even really try to hang on to Mosul in the face of stiff resistance, if the Iraqi army is basically just the Bata Brigade dressed up in American uniforms, right?
But it does make sense that they'd fight like hell for the territory that they have actually won for themselves.
At the same time, it doesn't seem like the Sunnis are going to be able to advance into Baghdad or much further south or east than that.
So I wonder whether, you know, they're already kind of at stalemate, and whether maybe both sides could begin to recognize that instead of having a worse and worse and worse.
Yeah, I think we're a bit off.
It may turn out like that, but I think we haven't reached that.
First of all, the Sunnis, ISIS, the Atlantic State, feel that this, you know, they've won these terrific victories, that this is God-given, so God is on their side, so they may keep going.
They may not want the other side to draw breath.
Secondly, they're pretty well-organized, I think, by former senior officers and officers in Saddam's Special Republican Guard and security forces.
What they tend to do is sort of take a town, and then they don't leave their best fighters there.
They sort of leave a sort of local Sunni gunman to hold the place, and they sort of, they want to keep their sort of strike force together so they can launch these sort of blitzkrieg attacks.
So yeah, in any, when you calculate it, they shouldn't be able to take Baghdad, but it's mostly Sunni because of the big army, because there's loads of militia.
But as I said, you know, the joker in the pack here is the Iraqi government, you know, which is, shows itself sort of reaching new heights of incapacity every week.
And it's sort of more like a large sort of racket than a government.
You know, it really was pretty extraordinary ten days ago that the senior commanders of this very large army simply changed into civilian clothes and flee, you know.
And what was behind that, by the way, Patrick?
Because it sure seems like a million-to-one kind of a ratio, or what, a thousand-to-one ratio, literally, of soldiers.
Well, you know, it comes down to the nature of the Iraqi army.
You know, it's just kind of a money-making machine for the officers.
What would happen, I was talking to our attached general about this, he was saying to what happened, I said, you know, why did it fall apart?
And he said, look, just corruption, corruption, corruption.
And all the, if you were a captain or had any officer, you bought your job.
And what you would do, for instance, actually this was the Americans slightly responsible for this, but they outsourced supplies of food for the army.
So commercial companies were supplying it.
But, you know, an Iraqi battalion is meant to be 600 men, but in fact they usually may be about 200 men.
So the officer in command will be pocketing 400, food for 400 men over the year, which is a lot of money.
So because you can make a lot of money out of these jobs, then people bid for them.
So it'd be $10,000 to become a captain, then it'd be $20,000, then it'd be $50,000, then it'd be a colonel, maybe a couple of hundred thousand dollars.
And then they'd make it back once they'd taken their jobs.
So they weren't actually in the army to fight, it was more of an investment for them.
So, you know, I don't think there'll be many armies like this.
You know, you had ghost battalions, you know, I've heard of that sort of thing in the old South Vietnamese army.
But a lot of the Iraqi army was just made up of these ghost battalions, but there may be men whose names were down on the roster being part of the battalion, but maybe they'd never existed.
And the commanders were taking their pay and their food and everything else.
Or you could do another thing was you join the army, and then you got a private soldier, and then you kick back half your salary to the officer above you.
And then you never go near the barracks, so you never actually put on a uniform, although you're still drawing half your military salary or drawing the whole thing, but you kick back half of it.
So that's the way it works.
So as you can imagine, this does not produce a very effective fighting machine.
Right.
Well, now, so you reported and I believe the way that you wrote it here in the Independent Patrick is that you have sources there in Iraq that have informed you that Obama has insisted that Maliki must go in order for the Iraqi government to get the help.
Is that right?
Because Wall Street Journal was reporting that same thing from the American side over here.
Yeah, I think the two stories seem to coincide.
I'm very certain on this, that they were telling senior people here, look, you know, this is we're not going to go in and say, be the saviors of a sectarian government.
And, you know, a guy we regard as a sectarian, Shia prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, you know, the kind of that kind of happened before.
So if we're going to give aid, there has to be a sort of national reconciliation government, which brings in important Sunni and so forth.
But it isn't just basically a Shia government.
And Maliki is the sort of symbol of that.
So there's no way they're going to do that while Maliki's there.
It's actually a pretty reasonable attitude.
Otherwise, you know, they come in and there's some airstrikes and Maliki survives.
And then the situation gets worse.
Well, you know, Maliki is kind of a hate figure for the Sunni.
And, you know, you have some very different people who are following the sort of ISIS, the al-Qaeda types, the shock troops, basically because they're so alienated by the government down here.
Right.
Well, I mean, the thing is to watch Obama talk about it and say, hey, listen, you know, the Iraqi government, they're going to have to start compromising and including the Sunnis in the government.
And he's basically talking like Petraeus in 2007.
These are the benchmarks that the surge never did accomplish the compromises in politics that never did happen.
And now that the suicide bombers are in the lead and the entire West is declaring independence and may invade the capital city.
Now he's saying, well, you know, you better compromise.
You better start appointing some Sunnis to some of your top cabinet positions.
And if not, Maliki, somebody else needs to come in here and start meeting these benchmarks.
And I'm just pointing at the calendar and saying that this ship sailed a long time ago back when they failed in the first place.
I remember Maliki was an American creation.
He was an American appointee by Carl Zudd.
I wouldn't ambassador here.
By the way, your brother Andrew has a great piece about him at Harper's dot org this week.
About how he picked.
Yeah, that's great.
Andrew told me about it.
And, you know, so he's an American appointee and eventually so kind of became under the influence of Iran.
But it was kind of Iran and the U.S. who were responsible for this guy.
He was a guy who sort of got on with both of them.
And 2010, he did badly in the election and a lot of sort of wrangling.
But eventually the U.S. and Iran both ended up by supporting his reelection.
And, you know, which has been pretty disastrous.
And so, you know, it's all pretty late in the day.
Of course, what changed all the calculations here was the the uprising in Syria.
And, you know, I don't think people have quite thought ahead yet.
But I mean, this kind of extraordinary situation that the U.S. will be supporting the opposition in Syria, which effectively is dominated and even more dominated by ISIS was threatening to bomb ISIS in Iraq.
So it's really by supporting the rebellion in Syria that they destabilized Iraq.
It should have been pretty obvious that they were doing this.
But I think they believe a lot of our own propaganda.
Maybe they didn't care that somehow the opposition in Syria was very different from the opposition in Iraq.
But actually, they're kind of the same kind of guys.
Well, now, I guess regime change might be too far.
But then again, regime change seems too far in Syria, too.
Is it possible that the policy is not stupid, that the policy is simply to take Maliki and the United Iraqi Alliance or whatever they call it now, down a peg the same way they're working on taking Assad down a peg?
They don't ever give the opposition enough firepower to really overthrow him, but enough to keep him bogged down.
And after all, fighting a war for Iran in Iraq for eight years was a big dumb mistake.
Right.
So they got to start trying to reverse it somehow at some point.
It might be that or it might be just sort of, you know, they kind of lost it.
You know, they sort of, I don't think they really, I don't think Washington wants to get back or Obama wants to get back into Iraq.
And that's kind of a sensible thing to do.
Yeah, but I mean, resent Iranian influence in Iraq and try to degrade that by propping up some ISIS crazies for a while.
Why not?
I doubt it, because there's so many negatives.
I mean, remember, these are incredibly dangerous guys who will, you know, you know, these guys are quite capable of staging attacks anywhere in the U.S. or any other places, and they're extremely effective.
So I think it's sort of more a sort of fantastic miscalculation, rather like the original invasion of Iraq.
You know, one could go with various conspiracy theories, but I don't really go down that route.
I think it's just a massive miscalculation in Syria, destabilized Iraq again, which should have been fairly obvious, but it wasn't obvious to Washington, it wasn't obvious to London or Paris or these other places.
So when Obama says he's sending the special forces to go and lead missions, they're not going to fight, but they're going to help fight, whatever that means.
I mean, he even said part of the policy is we have to deny them safe havens.
So that sounds to me like if he's not going to send in the Marines, it must mean fleets of drones or something, right?
Well, they might, yeah.
I mean, it's sort of, I think they probably also want to just find, want to find what's going on here, you know.
They discovered the sort of information they were getting on the army here, you know, was completely inaccurate.
It's very difficult to know here because it's such a state of chaos, you know.
And so I think they probably want to know the real situation.
The crucial thing is, I suppose here, that can they genuinely cooperate with the Iranians?
And will that be part of a general new arrangement with the Iranians?
If they can't do that, then it's going to be very difficult because they'll still be sort of competing with the Iranians here.
So I think that, you know, I think that they're caught by this sort of disastrous consequences of their policy in Syria and that in sort of infecting, reinfecting Iraq.
So what was seen to be settled three or four years ago turns out not to be settled.
But I think that was the, I think it was miscalculation, not conspiracy.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, so now if they were able to convince Maliki to step aside, who's there?
I mean, I saw their meeting with Ahmed Chalabi, but that just can't be that they would even try that.
So, so let's put that off, at least for the moment.
What about Iyad Alawi, who, you know, he has done?
I think Maliki, if he can't keep the job himself, will try and keep it sort of in his own party or try and sort of be like Putin used to be with his Prime Minister Medvedev and the power behind the throne.
But I don't think anybody's buying that.
But he sort of, he'll try and do that.
There's a guy called Tariq Najim who was his chief of staff.
The other thing about Maliki, if you remember, it's kind of, it's sort of his extended family.
It's a bit like Saddam, who held power and held all the, made all the decisions.
So if he's finally sort of driven out, what he'll want is a kind of guarantee that he doesn't get pursued, you know, that his, all the money that he's got isn't taken away from him.
It's a bit of a, cast your mind back to Yeltsin in Russia, you know, that there was kind of a deal that when he finally left power that he and his family wouldn't be pursued and the, you know, the millions that they'd stolen wouldn't be taken back.
All right, that's Patrick Coburn, everybody, from the Independent, that's independent.co.uk and they reprint it all at unz.com as well.
You can find it there.
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