12/01/13 – Patrick Cockburn – The Scott Horton Show

For Pacifica Radio, December 1st, 2013.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all.
Welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton, here every Sunday morning from 830 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
And now, our guest this morning is Patrick Kober, Middle East correspondent from The Independent in the UK.
And he's the author of the book, well, quite a few books, but most recently Muqtada, Muqtada al-Sadr, The Shia Revival and the Struggle for Iraq.
And that is the subject matter of his new article at independent.co.uk.
The Near Future of Iraq is Dark.
Warning from Muqtada al-Sadr.
Welcome back to the show, Patrick.
How are you doing?
Pretty good.
Well, great.
Happy to hear it and very happy to have you back on the show.
And so now, before we get into the recent news, can you give us a bit of a background about Muqtada al-Sadr?
Maybe who was he before the Iraq invasion and who did he become due to it?
Well, Muqtada al-Sadr comes from a family which led the fight against Saddam Hussein within Iraq.
They were Shia leaders, religious leaders, and most of them paid for with their lives.
His father is called Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr, created this sort of revivalist, religious, nationalist, populist movement in the 1990s, which Saddam originally thought he could turn to his own interests, but found that it had become immensely popular and was very much opposed to him.
So he had Muqtada's father murdered with two of his sons shot dead in an ambush in 1999.
That's Muqtada's father.
His father-in-law was executed by Saddam in 1980 together with his sister.
So he comes from a family of martyrs in the eyes of the Iraqi Shia.
Then in 2000, he just escaped with his life.
He was under house arrest.
Then in 2003, the invasion and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and Muqtada came out as saying, yeah, the invasion, okay, but maybe to be tolerated, but not the occupation.
And he fought the occupation.
He fought American troops in Najaf twice in 2004.
But he's always remained a powerful political figure with a big political movement inside Iraq and usually has been a sort of trendsetter that what he wants today, the government wants tomorrow.
He's in a rather peculiar position at the moment, but he's sort of criticized the government heavily.
But his movement has six government ministers within the government, so they're kind of having it both ways at the moment.
But Muqtada makes very clear that he doesn't like the way that Iraq's being run at the moment.
Well, now, so during the days of the Iraq war, as you talk about in your article, he was often accused by the Americans of working for the Iranians.
And yet among the major power factions among the Shiites during that war, which America was certainly on the side of the Shiites, but isn't it the case that they much more favored the Supreme Islamic Council of the al-Hakim faction and weren't they really the ones who wanted what the Iranians wanted, which was to more or less break Iraq apart and just keep the south, rather than, as you just talked about, Muqtada al-Sadr fought with the Sunnis during...
The Iranian policy was they wanted to be the main force in Iraq.
I think, you know, it's a good point you make, but I think one has to go back to the dilemma that faced the U.S., and indeed faced Iran in 2003, that the U.S. wanted to overthrow Saddam Hussein, but they didn't want him to be replaced by the Shia Muslim community, which is 60% of Iraqis, because with Shia religious parties forming the government and religious parties that have close relations with Iran, this really explains an awful lot of American policy in Iraq for those years, that they wanted to get rid of Saddam, but they didn't want to benefit Iran, and they never really found an answer to this problem, except a sort of full-scale occupation of running everything themselves, but even that wasn't sustainable.
So the Iranians didn't want to break it up, but they didn't want the Americans to dominate Iraq, and they wanted to be the main influence themselves.
Well, I mean, but at that time, especially, like you mentioned, the Battle of Najaf from the spring of 2004 there, at the same time of the First Battle of Fallujah, where Saddam was sending soldiers in trucks up to Fallujah to fight with the Sunnis and was urging, even as late as 2005, he was urging a government of national unity with the Sunni Arabs against the Americans and the Iranians.
Yeah, I mean, initially, al-Qaeda wanted unity with the Shia, but, you know, what happened was, when the U.S. moved into Iraq, basically the Shia looked to Iran for support, and the Sunni looked to al-Qaeda, and al-Qaeda, of course, is wholly sectarian, wholly bigoted, so the way they acted was to actually not focus so much on American soldiers, but focus on killing Shia civilians, and this started then and has gone on to this very day.
I mean, over the last week, we probably had two or three hundred Shia killed in these bombings, and this has created deep sectarian hatred.
But talking to Muqtada, he thought it was getting a bit late to actually stop, to reverse sectarianism.
But he also felt, which I thought was interesting, that what's wrong in Iraq is really domination by foreign states, notably by the U.S. and Iran.
I know in America people don't think of the U.S. as dominating Iraq, but Iraqis still think it has enormous influence there.
And as a consequence, Iraqi leaders, including Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, are really the people whose main strength is they can get on with both the Americans and the Iranians.
Not that much good at developing Iraq or doing what Iraqis want.
Right.
Well, yeah, and isn't that interesting that it seemed at the time of the American withdrawal that Muqtada al-Sadr may not be the Prime Minister, but he sure is the power behind the throne, especially because Abdulaziz al-Hakim had died, right?
And so the whole Skiri fell to Sadr, and he seemed to be the ruler of the whole Shiite coalition.
And I'm sorry for burying the lead here, Patrick.
I meant to say at the beginning, to make it clear, that you have recently interviewed, not only did you write the book on Muqtada al-Sadr, you actually just sat and interviewed Muqtada al-Sadr, what, a week ago?
Yeah, about a week ago, exactly a week ago, actually.
Yeah.
Yeah, so, and again, that's in the Independent, Patrick Coburn in the independent.co.uk, The Near Future of Iraq is Dark, Warning from Muqtada al-Sadr.
And yes, as you say, he says in this interview that he's not so much the kingmaker after all, it's still the Iranian and American coalition behind the Dawa party that rules.
Yeah, I mean, I was, he doesn't, he hasn't given an interview face-to-face with a Western reporter for, I think, almost 10 years.
In fact, I can only think of one interview before.
And sometimes there are interviews which appear in papers, but are really just written questions submitted to his office.
Nobody quite knows who answers them.
So I was pretty pleased that this happened.
And his views seem to me wholly realistic.
You know, what's wrong with Iraq is a sort of deficit of nationalism, partly because Sadr was saying discredited nationalism in the eyes of a lot of Iraqis, partly because this whole idea of outside powers like the U.S. fostering nation-building.
But, you know, nationalism basically means self-determination, that you decide things yourself, not that they're going to be decided by a foreign state like the U.S. or Iran.
And, you know, there's no doubt that the domination, Iraqi, Iraq is divided enough that the communities look for foreign support.
They look to Iran, they look to Turkey, they look to Saudi Arabia.
And this is one of the things that continues to split Iraq apart.
And I thought Muqtada sees this very clearly.
So if we rewound it a few years and we were talking about, say, 2005 and 2006 when the worst of the civil war was getting started then, was that pretty much, at that point, just a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia already with our guys fighting on the side of Iran?
It did work both ways.
That, you know, Saudi Arabia didn't want a Shia-controlled Iraq, therefore private sponsors in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, the Gulf monarchies were financing Al-Qaeda at the beginning.
After a certain amount of time, actually, Al-Qaeda was sort of self-supporting within Iraq because they controlled various, at least one big oil refinery and were selling oil.
It always works this way in Iraq that militias tend to take over the gas stations if they can, sort of downstream refineries, oil production.
And if they can do that, of course, they can generate a lot of income.
And that's what Al-Qaeda were doing.
But initially, of course, they were also funded from Saudi Arabia and the fundamentalist Sunni states.
Indeed, they still are.
Again, it's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Patrick Cockburn from the independent and author of the book, Muqtada, who recently interviewed Muqtada al-Sadr, the powerful Shiite cleric in Iraq.
A minor cleric.
You don't need to worry about him, said the Republicans back when they were inventing the occupation there.
But you asked him in this interview, Patrick, about the Mahdi Army's role in the civil war and, I guess, specifically the sectarian cleansing of the Sunni Arabs almost entirely out of the capital city of Baghdad.
And what did he have to say for himself there?
He wasn't quite serving the role of the Baader Brigade, but pretty close through 06 and 07, right?
Yeah, the Mahdi Army became really a sort of sectarian cleansing force in this horrific civil war with, you know, hundreds of bodies turning up.
Muqtada's defense is that he didn't really control it by that stage.
He didn't quite say that to me.
He said, you know, it could be infiltrated by people who he didn't know who were killers and he was against them.
But there was no doubt at that stage he'd become a sort of general Shia militia in which they were in combination, let me say, with the police, were carrying out these pogroms against Sunni in Baghdad and the towns around Baghdad.
And Baghdad, as you said, it just still bears the marks of this.
It used to be a mixed city.
Now it's very largely a Shia city with some Sunni enclaves.
Well, in fairness to him, at that point the Americans had chased him into Iran under the accusation that he was an Iranian agent and they kind of made that true in a way or at least he was far enough away that he has an excuse that he wasn't able to tell the guys on the ground what to do anymore.
Yeah, and the problem about Iraq is that, you know, once things get that tough, Muqtada and indeed his father always had pretty sour relations with Iran, but comes a point that his militia is going to fight U.S. troops.
Then, of course, they need weapons, they need ammunition, they need training.
So he goes to the Iranians.
Once the war is over, then he has rather less need for the Iranians.
So, yeah, this was the accusation made by the U.S., but it was kind of a situation that they'd created themselves.
Yeah, well, and then it came with that whole propaganda campaign not to just rehash the whole Iraq war here, but the campaign of 07 to blame every roadside bomb all of a sudden must have come from Iran, even though, in fact, you, Patrick, were the first one, I believe, who reported on the discovery of a factory in Iraq where they were making bombs with copper cores, the new improved EFP bombs, and there were dozens and dozens of other reports along those same lines showing that those bombs were, in fact, being made in Iraq at least in vast percentages.
But you're saying the Iranians were helping arm and fund the Saudis at that point?
Sure, yeah.
I mean, what was the priority for the Iranians?
Well, when the U.S. invaded Iraq, then you had all these people in Washington saying, you know, Baghdad today, Damascus and Tehran tomorrow.
So that's a really dangerous, very stupid, dangerous thing to say.
The guys who are saying it may not have meant 100%, but you're sitting in Tehran, you take that very seriously and you think, we are going to act before they are, you know, an Arab saying, you know, let's have them for lunch before they have us for dinner, you know.
So they sort of struck back first and they looked for allies inside Iraq.
The Syrians did the same thing.
But to think that all this was primarily generated in Iran, it just isn't true.
I mean, you had the strong opposition, both Sunni and Shia to the occupation and these, they looked for allies outside.
But it wasn't a situation created by the Iranians.
Well, and once Astani had demanded one man, one vote and called off the so-called caucus system that they tried to set up there, it was pretty much from there a strong conclusion that the Americans were fighting as auxiliaries of the Iranians, at least of the Iranians' goals in Iraq.
Not just getting rid of Saddam Hussein, but again providing the real cover for the sectarian cleansing of the capital city.
Yeah, I mean, this is one of those many weird things about the occupation was that, you know, there you'd have the U.S. denouncing the Iranians as supporting Muqtada al-Sadr for being behind bombs.
At the same time, they had this covert collaboration with Iran.
You know, why do we have Nouri al-Maliki as prime minister?
Well, he was acceptable to the U.S. ambassador who was chosen by Zomay Khozad, the U.S. ambassador of the day, and he was acceptable to the Iranians.
Therefore, he became prime minister instead of prime minister.
He's extremely incompetent in many ways, good at holding on to power.
But that's, you know, certainly Muqtada al-Sadr's objection to him that his various opponents within Iraq have tried to get rid of him.
What's kept him there is Washington and Tehran.
I think it's never really quite so penetrated in the U.S. or outside Iraq that, you know, if you look at the papers today, they say until, you know, last weekend deal on nuclear program, there was no cooperation between the U.S. and Iran.
It just is baloney.
In Iraq, there was a very strong degree of cooperation and a strong element of confrontation simultaneously.
So it was a very sort of bizarre political situation.
Well, and I think part of that just goes to the stupidity of the neoconservatives ultimately doing the bidding of Ahmed Chalabi, the Iranian spy, right?
They thought they were going to have America do this war because it would be good for Israel and it turned out it would be good for Iran.
And that was why Chalabi told them it would be good for Israel.
I wouldn't agree with you there.
I think what Chalabi did, actually what all the opposition did in the 1990s, they, you know, how did they get rid of Saddam?
They tried uprisings by the Shia and the Kurds.
They'd been crushed, bloodily crushed.
They tried military coups from within.
They hadn't worked.
So they had to get somebody to overthrow Saddam.
Maybe what they did was the U.S.
So they tried different means.
And Chalabi was one of them who did it.
But he was just a bit more effective than the others.
But then, you know, when the U.S. invaded, they found that actually Chalabi was an Iraqi nationalist.
So, you know, he would use the U.S. when he could.
He had good relations with the Iranians.
So I don't think, I think it's a bit unfair to sort of demonize him.
Then, of course, he was demonized by the U.S. administration and so forth because they sort of thought he was their guy.
It turned out he wasn't their guy.
Well, from my point of view, it's sort of grudging respect for the Ayatollah.
I mean, INC headquarters, the Iraqi National Congress, they were based in Tehran.
It shouldn't have been that easy to fool Richard Perle, but Richard Perle apparently is easy enough to manipulate if you're the Ayatollah Khamenei.
You know?
Yeah, I think, you know, Iraqis spend quite a lot of time thinking how do we get the Americans to do what we want.
And certainly the Shia spend a lot of time thinking about this.
And ultimately they did get what they wanted.
But these days, of course, you know, it's commonly seen that the U.S. doesn't have any influence in Iraq.
That really isn't true.
It has quite strong influence.
Not as strong as it once was, not dominant, but still is quite powerful within Iraq.
But, you know, this isn't necessarily good news for the Iraqis that what they need is a government of their own which takes its own decisions and whose leaders, you know, get elected or don't get elected because they're competent in running the country but their relations are with foreign capital so far as intelligence services.
Now, what exactly is the extent of American power there?
Is it correct that all American military bases are gone?
Are we just talking CIA?
No, they're all gone.
Iraq has been trying to buy some weapons.
It's a pretty dysfunctional state, you know, still a very high proportion of the oil revenues.
And the oil revenues are pretty big.
A hundred billion gets stolen.
And the government still looks for foreign support.
And they've been getting it.
One of the reasons is that the death, the al-Qaeda has come right back.
You know, a thousand people are being killed every month.
You know, is the place disintegrating?
Well, in one sense it is, but what keeps it together is, again, there's a certain interest, common interest between Iran and America that neither of them wanted another political crisis in Iraq when they had a big political crisis in Syria.
Earlier this year, you know, you could see that, the way the Iranians were trying to sort of pacify relations between the Kurds and the Iraqi government.
You know, and their motive was clear.
They really didn't, they wanted to preserve the status quo in which Iraq is run by Bashir and the Kurds, even if it's a deeply unsatisfactory government.
And they didn't want what was happening in Syria to spread to Iraq.
It is spreading, but they wanted to slow it down as much as they could.
Yeah, as you've said on my show before, it's sort of spreading from Iraq to Syria and back again, and re-energizing the entire Sunni-based insurgency in Iraq.
Yeah, we have this great area, you know, really in western Iraq, eastern Syria, where al-Qaeda is roaming around as the dominant force.
The thing about al-Qaeda to realize, I think, is you have sort of two forms of al-Qaeda.
That al-Qaeda mostly, in Iraq and Syria, spends its time trying to kill Shia Muslims.
That its priority is targeting the Shia.
It's only small elements of it, previously under Osama, that actually gives priority to killing Americans.
Of course, the people who are killing Shia might change their minds and start to target Americans instead.
At the moment, you know, you have this sectarian civil war.
I mean, you may have seen recently in Aleppo, there was actually an apology from al-Qaeda, can you believe it?
Saying they chopped off the head of a guy who'd come into hospital and they thought he was calling upon a wounded guy, a fighter, on Shia religious figures.
And so they cut off his head.
They subsequently discovered they'd cut off the head of one of their own fighters.
So, you know, it's difficult to exaggerate the degree of bigotry that these organizations espouse.
Right.
And isn't it the case that all of the aid that the Americans and the Saudis and the Turks and the Qataris have been sending to the rebels over the past few years in that war in Syria, that all that ultimately goes to the jihadists because they're the ones who are the real frontline fighters.
And so, you know, all the people that we're trying to make into sock puppets, they just kind of hang out in the background and don't really get the job done.
And so then ultimately, we're backing the Sunni insurgency, the al-Qaeda-led Sunni insurgency in Syria that we're still backing Maliki against in Iraq at the very same time, right?
Yeah, it still has this sort of very bizarre thing of supporting, you know, the rebels.
It sort of pretenses less these days, or at least it's sort of falling apart, those moderate rebels and they're the majority and then you have these really bad guys who are in a minority in al-Qaeda and the al-Nusra Front.
I think people are beginning to figure out, and there's more about it in the press, that actually the guys who are the cutting edge of the fighting are all al-Qaeda.
You know, when they make any military advances recently in the north, it's almost invariably their attack is led by suicide bombers.
And these are, of course, al-Qaeda types.
You know, could anything be done about it?
Yeah, I think it could, but until recently, the Turks have left the whole northern border open to jihadis moving backwards and forwards.
So, yeah, you know, it's sort of ridiculous this pursuing al-Qaeda in Yemen and the northwest frontier in Pakistan and ending up by basically giving aid which ultimately reaches these people in Iraq and Syria.
So when you talk about the re-energization of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq, I think it was maybe half a year ago, maybe a little more now, that you reported that the Iraqi army, i.e. the Bata Brigade, the Shiites that America put in power, that they had withdrawn from the Anbar province.
It wasn't worth it to try to hold that ground to them anymore.
Is that still the state of things there?
Well, we've got some camps there, but not a lot of it's fallen under the control of al-Qaeda.
So at this point, I mean, there really isn't an Iraqi state north of Baghdad, is that correct?
North and west of Baghdad?
There are troops around, but there's less and less of it.
In Kurdistan, Baghdad doesn't have any control at all.
And not just Kurdistan, but the areas where the Kurds are dominant, which is much of the basically the northern third of Iraq.
Then in Sunni areas, you know, they have control in some towns, they have some garrisons, but it's more and more limited control.
And it's amazing, you know, it's more and more tentative.
Well, you know, Patrick, again, everybody, it's Patrick Coburn from the Independent Middle East Correspondent there, and you've been telling me for years, I've been privileged to have this kind of access to you, to interview you on my radio shows all the time now.
And you've talked about all the hard feelings in Iraq, and how that civil war was just so brutal.
And it's the kind of thing that is going to take a long time for people to get over.
And in your recent interview here with Muqtada al-Sadr, he really hits that same note and says that, correct me if I'm wrong, I believe he tells you that the more he denounces sectarianism, the less popular he gets.
And that is not what his people want to hear.
People are really doubling down on all their old hatreds.
And I just wonder whether anything can be done about it?
Is he really willing to try to create some kind of new understanding with the Sunni Arabs of Iraq that they can live together?
Or are those days over?
What do you think?
Well, no, he tries to do that, but you've got that amount of people being killed in the past, but also being killed every day.
I was in the main shrine, Najaf is a city which has a shrine of Imam Ali in the middle of it.
And I was looking at the shrine and suddenly people were carrying coffins in and people whispered to me that these were the coffins of people who had been killed in the bombing.
So, you know, with the whole Shia community coming under a sustained attack by al-Qaeda, the bombs going off, people being stopped at checkpoints and killed, it's not surprising that hostility is getting greater and greater.
So they don't amass them, probably they don't really much like Muqtada saying they should be patient, that they shouldn't retaliate, that they should see the bombers as not representing only Sunni, but the only part, but basically only representing themselves.
But that's not exactly what people want to hear.
Can anything be done?
It's very difficult to do until the security situation is a bit better.
It's what we normally used to call the politics the last atrocity takes over.
There are so many atrocities that people can't, you know, there's no question of bringing Sunni and Shia together in these circumstances.
In a way, the government in Baghdad, you know, its failure to give real security to Iraqis works in its favor because this means that, you know, angry though they are at the lack of social service, it is a water of electricity, and angry though they are about government corruption, that if they get frightened enough about Sunni they'll still support Maliki.
The sectarian issue will be the only one that matters.
Alright, we're all out of time.
Thank you so much for your time again on the show today, Patrick.
No, not at all, anytime.
Alright everybody, that is the heroic Patrick Cockburn.
He is the author of The Occupation and Muqtada.
Muqtada al-Sadr, The Shia Revival and the Struggle for Iraq.
It's such a great book, you ought to read it.
Of course, he's Middle East correspondent at The Independent.
That's independent.co.uk.
And that's it for Anti-War Radio for this morning.
Thank you everybody for tuning in.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'll be back here next Sunday from 8.30 to 9 on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
Please stop by scotthorton.org for all my radio archives.
Thanks again, see you next week.