12/18/12 – Patrick Cockburn – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
Our next guest is Patrick Coburn, Middle East correspondent for The Independent in England, independent.co.uk.
And he is just back in the British Isles from Syria.
Welcome back to the show, Patrick.
How are you doing?
Not so bad.
I'm glad to hear that.
I'm glad you didn't get kidnapped and have to escape while you were there.
No, no, I was lucky.
Yeah, well, that's the news is that Richard Engel is safe, and they're saying he escaped.
I haven't read the story yet.
Anyway, so welcome back to the show.
The piece at The Independent is called Syria, the descent into holy war.
The world decided to back the rebels last week, but this is no fight between goodies and baddies.
Well, first of all, they've been backing the rebels for a while there, haven't they?
Yeah, I mean, the really from the beginning with more so now with 130 countries recognizing the rebels coalition as being representative of the Syrian people.
And then I thought it was kind of funny.
I mean, it seems like the politics of this is that the Americans have been called out by you and others so many times now for backing some really extreme holy warrior suicide bomber types, and they're trying to distance themselves from that by it's seemingly, if I understand it right, they're sort of endorsing this group of exiles and expats and that kind of thing.
Chalabi's.
But then, according to McClatchy newspapers, their expats immediately endorsed the suicide bomber guys because they desperately need the credibility of being alive with them.
Is that really right?
Do I understand that right?
Sure.
Yeah, I'd see.
I mean, it's pretty bizarre.
On the one hand, the national coalition gets of the Syrian opposition gets recognized as representing Syria at the same time on the Al-Nusra Front, which is the main fighting force of the coalition inside Syria, is denounced by the U.S. as being a terrorist organization similar to Al-Qaeda.
And then the national coalition denounces the U.S. for saying it's a terrorist organization, and there are demonstrations in northern Syria with people shouting, we are all Al-Nusra.
But there's no question that this is a, you know, a hard line, holy war, fundamentalist, Islamic organization, you know, good at fighting, but somewhat similar to Al-Qaeda.
So it's a pretty bizarre situation.
Yeah, well, so first of all, tell us what you can about these rebels.
I mean, I don't want to oversimplify because I have been reading things over the last year, year and a half about how there are a lot of people who really hate this dictator Assad, and they sure would like to see him overthrown.
And yet we do read about suicide bombers.
And of course, your article begins with some horrible war crimes being committed by these rebels.
What can you tell us about who is really the anti-government side of this war?
The Syrian revolution was originally a genuine revolution.
It was an uprising of the mass of the people, particularly from the poorer parts of the country, against a police state and against a dictator.
The problem is in Syria, unlike Egypt or Tunisia, the regime remained intact.
I mean, nobody really defected to the other side.
And it quite rapidly turned into an armed insurrection.
Now, in Syria, I mean, it's basically run by a minority, the Alawites, who are a type of Shia.
The 70% of the country's population is Sunni.
So somebody can be quite a genuine Democrat, demanding democratic rule and rule by the majority.
But this has enormous impact on the distribution of power between different sects of Syrians, between those Alawites who are Christians, who are Druze.
So any change was really going to be a revolutionary change in who holds power there.
And, you know, we've now had this war that's been going on 20 months and is very effectively destroying the country.
And now we also have been hearing for a long, long time that the regime is on its last legs, and yet it sure doesn't seem to be.
How long do you think this can go on?
I mean, again, it's peculiar.
You know, I remember at the end of 2011, having sort of a meeting with a Middle East leader who said, oh, it may be only a matter of weeks before Assad goes.
You know, it hasn't happened.
It isn't happening.
You hear this pretty well every day.
It doesn't—you know, there's a balance of power there.
I mean, I find it—what I find pretty amazing is people announce this, that the regime is about to go, but if you're in Syria, you can look at a map of Syria, the government still holds the main cities and the main towns.
You know, the occasional baseball, the rebels make some progress, but most population centers are still in the hands of the government.
So I think this is really a sort of—an attempt to frighten them.
The government into destabilizing them or splitting them or something like that.
But certainly it's very misleading.
Of course, people get away with it because there's so few direct eyewitnesses, journalists in Damascus.
So almost anything you say about Syria is unprovable, although if you're actually walking around Damascus, it may be obvious a lot of these things just aren't true.
Okay, now, during the war in Libya, I think the assumption was, even though it took eight or nine months, it sort of was clear that as long as NATO is backing the one side over the other, eventually Tripoli's going to fall, kind of a thing.
But you're saying in this case it's not that way.
No, I mean, for the reason you just stated, you know, the rebels there, I don't think would have lasted a few days without air support, you know, from the whole of NATO, with the U.S. in the background.
So you have this massive air force overhead.
And it's sort of surprising that Qaddafi's people lasted so long.
They have a lot more fighters in Syria, don't they, than they did in Libya?
They, well, I mean, yeah, it's a more populous country, but there are more fighters.
But it has, essentially, it hasn't, you know, they don't have the foreign support, which was essential in Libya.
I think that's one thing they're bidding for, and therefore you get this, you know, exaggerated claims that they're on the edge of victory.
And I think their assumption is that Europeans and others would like to come out on the winning side.
But if you're actually in Damascus, you know, a lot of this stuff, you know, is pretty exaggerated.
I mean, I drove from Damascus, the capital, up north for about 160 kilometers, 120, 130 miles to Homs, you know, without an escort and so forth, without trouble.
In Homs itself, I didn't hear, which is the third biggest city.
And I've seen a lot of fighting at the beginning of the year.
I didn't see or hear a shot fired.
So, you know, some areas, yes, a lot of heavy fighting, or fairly heavy fighting.
But most of them, most of the country, most of Damascus, not at all.
So, I guess, you know, I was going to ask you about, you know, what's going to happen if the Ba'athist government does fall apart, then it'd be even worse, and this and that kind of thing.
But it doesn't sound like you think there's any chance that's going to happen at all.
Well, it doesn't seem likely at the moment.
You know, the government really belongs to the Alawite sect.
You know, as I was writing a piece last weekend about a video that every single person I met in Damascus had seen, which is of two Alawite officers, I think one of them had been identified as a general, who'd been captured by the rebels, you know, being beheaded, like al-Qaeda used to do in Iraq, in the street.
You know, the first beheading is carried out by an 11 or 12-year-old boy.
At the end of it, they sort of hold up the heads as trophies.
Now, if you're an Alawite or you're a Christian, or you're just associated with the government in the civilian or military part of the government, that sort of thing, you know, really frightens people.
And it's one of the reasons, you know, that they're unlikely to get in.
Right.
Yeah, it just hardens the opposition's resolve for sure there.
And now, so we're reading about terrible deprivation in the country, too, people starving and freezing to death in refugee camps and this kind of thing.
Can you talk about that?
Well, yeah.
I mean, you have that in Turkey, you know, it's getting cold there.
People were sleeping under the bridges and freezing.
I don't see them now.
Most of the people are in with relatives.
They've rented houses in Damascus, you know, five or six families to a small house.
Some people go to Lebanon, but that's quite expensive, and they come back.
The government's been sort of, you know, let's say the rebels seize some district, the government opens fire with artillery, the civilian population moves out and moves to other districts.
So some districts are completely jam packed.
And you can find this just also in the streets of this, you know, tremendous gridlock of traffic, which is largely, I think, the population of Damascus that's sore as refugees come into the city.
You see big bread lines outside bakeries, too, again.
I think it's maybe not that they're not, that they're producing less bread.
It's simply there are an awful lot more mouths to feed.
And then I guess the last I heard, there were, what, two and a half million Iraqis hiding out in Syria waiting to come home because Iraq's still a horrible bloodbath every day, too.
No, I think that they've mostly gone.
I mean, they were seeping out.
And then when this happened, you know, a lot of them thought, well, it's even more dangerous to stay in Syria than to be in Baghdad.
OK, so mostly they left at the start of this war.
Yeah, I mean, they have been, you know, it's been a gradual process, but it became evident that, you know, Syria is becoming very violent.
And Iraqis felt particularly vulnerable that they didn't have any protection, vulnerable to kidnappers and to criminals.
So that was another reason they left.
Well, now there's a big problem, right, when politically Western politicians, especially the Americans and maybe especially the Democrats, after talking tough, they have a real hard time backing down, right, and saying, OK, never mind, go ahead and stay in power.
After I said a year ago, you have to go.
And so does that mean, do you think that we're just on a path towards more and more intervention until eventually the airstrikes do begin because they have to, you know, live up to their threat?
It might happen that way.
I mean, you know, it seems to me that they've made a mistake in committing themselves to the total victory of the rebels.
You know, in the present circumstances, you know, that's committing yourself to supporting one side in a civil war, you know, and pretending that the other side has no support whatsoever, which is kind of a mistake the U.S. made in Iraq, you know, to demonize Saddam so much and the Ba'ath Party, they sort of had convinced themselves that they could just roll over these guys and there'd be, you know, that there'd be no response.
But of course, you know, there were people associated with the government, you know, suddenly were clearly being economically marginalized.
They fought back.
That's why you had a war there.
And then there is a lot of news out of Iraq about, you know, killings all over the place.
Who's fighting who?
Is that still just the same old battle?
It's the same as Sunni, Shia, and it's sort of, you know, it's sort of, it's remained stable at quite a high level of, quite a high level of violence.
But to get back to Syria, if I may, you know, I think one of the problems with Syria is there are very few foreign journalists there.
You also notice, you know, the effect on the American media in particular of just the sheer number of, the sheer number of American newspapers have gone out of business.
So, you know, there are far fewer reporters around.
You know, not all of them were good, but quite a lot of them were good.
Television covers it less intensely.
Now, they can't really get into Damascus and Syria, and therefore they take a lot of what the opposition says as face value.
And, you know, this has a pretty, I think, disastrous effect on coverage, you know, which is, I'm sitting in Damascus reading this stuff in American or European papers, or on the wires, or watching television.
You know, quite a lot of it is fantasy, or it's exaggerated, or it's not quite true.
So, I think this war has actually been worse reported than Iraq, or Libya, or Afghanistan.
Right, yeah, this article is actually, and I wasn't sure if it was just my fault for being so busy lately that I hadn't been reading enough, or whether it was really a blackout.
But you talk in your article here about how the Western media won't cover these, the beheading videos.
I mean, we do hear about the suicide bombings, although I don't think they usually make a direct connection between, this is the side we're on here, and this is the side we're on here.
But the beheadings, I haven't even heard that really discussed, other than in your piece here.
Yeah, it hasn't sort of, I mean, it's extraordinary, you know, everybody in Damascus is talking about it, and they've seen these things.
And now, you know, it's sort of, there's not really a mention of the foreign press.
I think so much of what they get is dependent on, you know, getting things out, and, you know, the government won't let them give them visas to go to Damascus, and partly because they're short on resources, or maybe a bit slow-through.
But, you know, we've had this, you know, I was saying, my feeling is it's just rather as if we in Britain were trying to report an American presidential election, but we don't.
You know, we've had this, you know, I was saying, my feeling is it's just rather as if we in Britain were trying to report an American presidential election, but we couldn't get visas to go to the U.S.
So we relied entirely on Republican Party militants for our information about what was going on.
And even a lot of those militants, let's say, you know, if we're making comparison with the Syrian ones, you know, not in the U.S., but in Mexico or in Canada, that's really the parallel.
You know, would one then have a narrative, an account of the American presidential election that was anywhere near the truth?
The answer is not.
But, you know, that's pretty obvious.
But in Syria, people go right ahead and basically get their reporting from an exiled opposition, and they repeat it as fact.
And especially on TV, that's what matters the most is, you know, just the narrative.
And that's what fills in the gap of the information.
And, of course, so as it's reported by the anchors, everybody's on the side of the poor, downtrodden, good guy, underdog rebels against the bad, bad government there.
All media executives, all TV media executives in America know that and their anchors do too.
Even if it came up that like, yeah, you know, there's been some beheadings where it's not going to push them off track from the story that they're selling ultimately, which is that once we intervene, we'll stop the violence.
Security is pretty terrible, you know.
And even Al Jazeera, which is very much sort of anti the government, but even that feels necessary at times to have really quite damning reports from the north about the rebels.
I saw, you know, a couple in the last few days on Al Jazeera, one from Aleppo with people in the streets saying, look, we didn't like Assad when he was here, but the new lot are 100 times worse.
And also, you know, I saw one about a Shia village near Idlib, which had been sort of taken over by this Al Qaeda group, Al Nostra, who had just simply driven everybody out.
So, you know, it's rather amazing that even Al Jazeera, which is very committed to the rebel side, does produce these documentaries while US television and British television is largely silent on this.
It's amazing that those Sunni fighters didn't learn from their experience in the Iraq war how counterproductive it was to alienate their potential base so badly when they're fighting against their enemies, you know?
Yeah, it's sort of to show they're merciless, to show they're tough, to show, you know, don't mess with us, you know.
Of course, you create a lot of enemies, but it also frightens a lot of people if you want to frighten.
If I remember right, when the real fighting broke out, I think I had assembled some sort of consensus here on the show between you and Pepe Escobar that really, you know, if you saw the business class of Sunni Arabs in Aleppo, you know, defect and join the side and really support the rebellion, then it might have stood a chance.
But it was already clear almost a year ago that that wasn't going to happen, right?
Yeah, that there was sort of great divisions and so forth, and the government wasn't fooling.
You know, some of this is in the nature of Syria, sectarian divisions within Syria, but quite a lot can be blamed on the U.S. and the West Europeans, notably Britain, of, you know, backing the rebels as a winner.
I think what you've got to do is damp things down, look for a transitional government, and also I think you've got to, you know, defuse this as a sort of Shia-Sunni confrontation or as an attempt to weaken Iran, which it quite certainly is.
Otherwise they're a pretty peculiar thing to have a campaign led by the U.S. for democracy in Syria, but the big ally is Saudi Arabia and Qatar that are two of the few remaining completely absolute monarchies in the world whose interest in democracy for anybody is presumably pretty slight.
So, you know, there's lots of contending agendas in here.
And I think it's, you know, the reporting has been very simple-minded.
Right.
Well, you know, I wonder whether the National Security Council guys actually just sort of see it that way and thought maybe it would be a good idea to encourage the rebels by saying Assad must step down, which is another way of saying the rebels must win at least eventually, so don't negotiate.
But maybe they like it right where they've got it.
Whereas you describe Assad's not really going to fall, but he sure does have this sort of unending armed insurgency to fight, which sure is crippling, you know, any other thing he'd be up to, which I don't know what they'd be worried about.
I think that, you know, it's been sort of a bit bizarre from the beginning, you know, that you hear from all over accounts of how Assad should step down using his last legs.
But as I said, why the hell should he do that when he controls most of the population centers of Syria still?
And a large army, certainly a larger army than the one on the other side.
Right, but it encourages the rebels to never negotiate in their first...
Yeah, but if you could get, let's say you could get, you know, air cover from NATO or active military intervention, then of course you'd be on a winner.
So there'd be no, there's no reason to compromise.
But that I think is really what's so negative about certainly American and European policy, that by tempting the rebels with the idea that we might come and aid you militarily, that you give them an incentive to absolutely not negotiate.
I mean, I don't want to turn to sort of, by pointing out the weaknesses of the rebels, I don't want to give the impression that the government are a much maligned bunch of good guys.
They aren't.
You know, this was a cruel and greedy police state.
But to think of it as just sort of black hats and white hats, I think is a simple minded and very deceptive.
Now, when some of these rebel fighters are going around doing suicide bombings and cutting off people's heads, is that also another way of saying they are never going to give up either?
This thing could go on for a long, long time.
Well, people who are committed like that generally don't give up, which is why they make pretty good soldiers, you know.
And they're the sort of effective fighting force, you know.
But they've been fighting up in Aleppo at one base there, I think, which is mostly full and about 2,000 men attacking about 350 soldiers who basically have nothing much to eat, but are all fighting to the last bullet, you know, because they think they don't have any alternative.
So I think, you know, it might be at one point the rebels by whim, but I would have thought it would be in the long term.
I don't think there would be much of Syria left by that time.
Yeah, and then that's like where the real nightmare begins, right, is when everything just kind of, you know, like when Iraq fell, it wasn't like the Shiites inherited Saddam's government, right?
They completely replaced it, and they had to start over from scratch.
Well, America replaced it, but dissolved the Ba'ath party who weren't allowed to have a job in the state if you had been in the Ba'ath party.
And then to, you know, to their amazement, they discovered that these guys were really angry, you know.
A little until the Iraqi army thought they hadn't fought the invasion.
Whether there was a sort of varché understanding with the U.S., they didn't fight.
You know, it's still the Iraqi army afterwards, not Saddam, but the Iraqi army.
Then they find, you know, I remember just meeting, you know, majors in special forces who were selling their furniture to feed their children.
You know, when people are reduced to that area of desperation, you know, they'll fight pretty hard.
If they're particularly well-experienced, well-trained soldiers, you know, they'll do a lot of damage.
All right.
Well, tell me this.
What other reporters working on Syria do you respect, and would you recommend that people read?
Liz Sly, S-L-Y.
She's a Washington Post correspondent in Beirut, and I think she's pretty good.
I don't think, frankly, that the New York Times' quality of its coverage has recovered from the death of An-Nish Hadid earlier this year.
You may recall that he died getting into Syria from an asthma attack.
I think he did have a pretty balanced and intelligent idea of what was going on.
Other than that, there isn't a great deal.
There are some websites, Joshua Landis, for instance, who's an expert at Oklahoma University.
I've always found that pretty good.
And he sort of draws together all the best of the writings on Syria, and I think his judgment is pretty good.
And some of this is in pretty obscure places.
So, I mean, there is stuff that comes out.
What one really wants here, which is really simple, Scott, as you know yourself, is you want people who've actually been in Syria, been in Damascus, who can say, you know, I saw this, I saw that.
You want eyewitness testimony.
What you don't want is sort of people in Beirut or Washington or London or somewhere else reporting second- or third-hand, opposition sources that are obviously partisan.
This really gives an extraordinarily skewed picture of what goes on there.
Yeah, well, David Enders has done some brave work, and he keeps getting out alive and uncaptured as well.
I'm a bit surprised by that.
Yeah, I know he is extremely brave, and there are other good people around.
I mean, there always are a few.
And that's true of Syria, you know, as it was of Iraq.
And apparently Boral Austin Tice is still being held there, right?
Yes.
You know, it's a dangerous place.
It's dangerous from both the government and rebel side, and it's dangerous because of criminality.
And, again, there's a parallel with Iraq here.
People notice it when correspondents get kidnapped.
They don't notice that, you know, there's a whole kidnap industry there.
When last Sunday I was up in a Christian village called Malula, and he had about 3,000 people in it, but, you know, they'd had four kidnaps recently.
One guy had resisted where they had a pistol, and a local businessman had been shot three times, you know, pretty badly.
So, you know, I remember in Iraq, long before foreigners got kidnapped, Iraqis have been kidnapped everywhere.
It just didn't get reported much.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, I'm sorry we're all out of time, but I thank you so much for your time, as always.
I really appreciate it, Patrick.
No, thank you.
I enjoyed it.
Everybody, that's the great Patrick Coburn, Middle East correspondent for the London Independent.
That's independent.co.uk.
The recent article here, most recent, Syria, the descent into holy war about the beheadings and suicide bombings of the Western and Saudi and Qatari-backed rebels there.
And, also, he's the author of the book Muqtada, Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shiite revival and the future of Iraq, which is so important.
I really suggest that you take a look at that thing.
It's an incredible piece of work.
We'll be right back here in just a little while.
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