02/22/13 – Patrick Cockburn – The Scott Horton Show

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For Pacifica Radio, February 22, 2013, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
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Tonight's guest is Patrick Horton.
He is Middle Eastern correspondent for The Independent.
That's independent.co.uk.
Of course, he writes for counterpunch.org, three brand-new articles there we'll be talking about tonight.
And he's the author of the book, most recently of the book, Muqtada, Muqtada al-Sadr, The Shia Revival and the Struggle for Iraq.
And as I was mentioning, there's three new co-authors.
All of them about his recent trip back to Iraq.
Welcome back to the show, Patrick.
How are you doing?
Hi, how are you?
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us tonight.
So you took a trip to Iraq for, what, two or three weeks there?
Yeah, I went to Baghdad, in Basra, up and down the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, and in Kurdistan as well.
Okay, and so, I guess, first of all, since it is ten years, just without having to catch us up on what's happened in the last ten years, what's it like there, say, in Baghdad, ten years later?
It's pretty bad.
I mean, I was kind of shocked how bad it was.
You know, I think that maybe, I don't know what Iraqi oil revenues have been collectively over the last ten years, but let's say, you know, $500 billion.
But they're scarcely a new building.
It all looks very shabby, you know, electricity, two hours on, two hours off.
There was some rainfall the first day or two I was there, which should drain away, because a lot of money has been spent on a new sewage system, except somehow there isn't a new sewage system.
You see the great pools of water and sewage in the streets.
I mean, Iraqis find this pretty infuriating that ten years after the war they still can't live a normal life.
Yeah, I mean, even just the basics of electricity.
I remember it was sort of a matter of concern even back in 2004 and 2005 that, you know, we don't have electricity on yet, it seems like the occupation is failing.
Now you're telling me the same story in 2013.
Yeah, I mean, basically, you know, it's grand theft.
It's embezzlement.
And also a sort of dysfunctional government, you know, that even if they can produce the power, they couldn't really distribute it, or people in the electricity ministry told me.
So, you know, things are a bit better in terms of violence compared to 2006 to 2007, but then we were getting 3,000 bodies a month turning up.
Now these days, you know, there are bombings in Kirkuk, bombings in Saraswati, there are assassinations, there are kidnappings.
You know, it's still one of the more dangerous places in the world.
But I could say, you could say it's a bit better than it was five years ago.
Now in a way, I guess from a certain point of view, really the American mission, whether they realized this in the first place or not, was ultimately to put the Shiite coalition in power and then get kicked out.
And so the Sunnis basically, after getting kicked out of Baghdad back in 2006 and 2007, that was when they worked out the deal with the Americans to stop fighting for a while, but they made the deal that eventually they would be kind of subsumed within the government and given army jobs, given work, included more in the government.
And so has that happened?
It hasn't, and it's very relevant because the Sunnis are all in the streets at the moment in Ramadi and Fallujah and Mosul, in Tikrit, demanding an end to discrimination.
I mean at that time, as you rightly say, they sort of decided that they couldn't fight the Shia and the Americans at the same time, so they did a deal with the Americans.
They never stopped attacking the Shia, blowing up laborers in the markets or attacking government facilities.
But they never really got all the jobs they expected.
Now they are launching a sort of offensive of their own, and it's critical to the future of Iraq.
What happens?
Are we going to see a new sort of Syria-type situation occur in western Iraq where the Sunni are dominant?
Are we going to see an intervention by outside Sunni powers like Saudi Arabia or Qatar or Turkey?
So the crisis is getting hotter and hotter there.
There was a sort of stability between about 2008 and 2011, but the sort of consensus between Kurds and Shia and Sunni has broken down.
There's more and more animosity between the leaders.
They're not on speaking terms.
So, you know, the situation is sort of going critical at a time when I think the outside world really sort of stopped looking at what was happening in Iraq.
There are very few foreign journalists around.
There's very little reporting of what happens there.
Well, now, Maliki, it sounds like, you know, from what I read, the prime minister has done a good job from his point of view of trying to put himself in charge of all the different departments and consolidate all that kind of thing.
But just in terms of raw power, he doesn't have that much, right?
Like he's still unable to really take over, say, the Anbar provinces.
The Anbar province is able to take over Baghdad at this point, right?
So why doesn't he make some friends and work out some compromise?
Wouldn't that be to his benefit for his own power and influence and his longevity and power, et cetera, like that?
I mean, that's probably right, but it's sort of a mistake that everybody seems to make who is dominant, at least for a time, in Iraq.
I mean, Saddam Hussein thought you could run Iraq by force.
The U.S. occupation, the U.S. Army thought it could do the same thing.
They both failed.
And the reason they failed is there are too many other power centers.
You know, it's really a serious business to take on the Shia community or the Sunni community or the Kurdish community.
Even if you've got a powerful army, the other side is probably going to fight a good deal harder than you do, and your own forces may dissolve.
So for the moment, the government seems to be underestimating what's happening in Anbar province, seems to think that, you know, they can wait it out, they can buy off some tribal leaders, they can make a few concessions, and then nothing much will change.
They might be right, but I doubt it.
I think things really are changing because the Sunni feel emboldened because of Syria and other regional changes.
And also they're just fed up.
They're fed up because they feel discriminated against.
They're fed up because all the Iraqis are basically fed up because they wonder where all this money is going and why, you know, summer is coming on, it's real hot in Iraq, and they won't have any electricity for the air conditioners.
So, you know, they're real angry and they're real disillusioned, and that applies to Shia as much as well as Sunni.
And now it's interesting what you say about they kind of feel, you know, the wind blowing in their direction in a way, you write, in Counterpunch, because of the war in Syria, as you just mentioned, that the rebels in Syria, I guess they're not necessarily winning, but they have made some big gains, and that's kind of put the fight back in the Sunni-based insurgency in Iraq, basically.
Yeah, because a lot of those fighting in Syria actually came from Iraq, although they may have originally come from Syria.
That's probably where the most experienced fighters come from, and also it's a big common border.
You know, there are tribes, there are people who cross that border who live on the border.
They don't feel there's much difference on which side of the border they're fighting.
So, you know, I don't think this thing is going to go away, whatever the government in Baghdad thinks.
And maybe there won't be an immediate crisis, but all the time the sort of center of gravity is going up in the government, and, you know, it's very vulnerable to any sudden shock.
It doesn't have too many friends around.
It's very unpopular.
Well, now, it's interesting that you say that.
I remember an article from probably last summer where a rebel in Syria, one of the al-Nusra Front guys, I guess, was explaining that he sort of was conceding, I think, that maybe we won't be able to take Damascus.
We might have to settle for basically just trying to break a piece of Syria off.
And he was saying, paraphrasing that, we'll just create a new Sunnistan with former Sunni Iraq, and we'll just make a new country there.
Who needs Maliki and who needs Damascus?
We'll just make our own new country right here in the middle.
I think like Maliki may be underestimating the Sunni, the Sunni may be underestimating the Shia.
I think if they try for regime change, if they try to reverse what was really the sort of verdict of the fighting after 2003, the civil war, then the Shia will fight real hard, and there are a lot more of them in Iraq than there are Sunni, about three to one.
So I think if the Sunni kind of overplayed their hand at that time, they might overdo it again.
If they're more cautious, if they look for allies in Iraq, if they demand reform rather than revolution, if they don't frighten the Shia and the Kurds too much, then they might go a long way.
But if the Shia feel that this is a counter-revolution, then they'll line up with Maliki and fight real hard.
And they're the backbone of the army these days, so there's a lot they can do.
I don't think they can long-term hold the whole Sunni areas, but if they feel under threat, then they're going to fight, as I said, very hard.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm talking with Patrick Coburn from The Independent.
And it's interesting, too, that the Americans, it seems like, and correct me if I'm oversimplifying too much here, but America seems to be backing the Sunni-based insurgency from Iraq in Syria right now, and they're mad at Maliki, their former friend, who they put in power in Iraq for helping the Iranians arm Bashar al-Assad, who they're working on regime-changing.
Yeah, I mean, they're doing that.
But on the other hand, they don't want Maliki to go down.
So, you know, they're involved in a very complicated situation.
I mean, they also obviously wonder, you know, who's going to replace Assad, supposing their guys win.
Is it, in fact, their guys, or is it the al-Nusra Front?
Is it the same al-Qaeda that was supposedly fighting the U.S. Army in western Iraq that suddenly are going to be among the big new players in Damascus?
That isn't great news for them.
So I think they sort of don't really know what to do.
They could arm the rebels, but which rebels are they going to arm?
You know, who's going to replace Assad?
And what's the effect going to be on Iraq?
They don't really know the answer to these questions.
Yeah, I mean, that's kind of the discussion on the Sunday morning news shows or whatever, where these pretend smart people say, you know, well, if we arms the moderates, then they'll be the ones who win, and then we can be happy with that.
But it doesn't seem like anyone intelligent or with the actual power, it doesn't seem like Obama really believes that, and yet they just keep financing them anyway.
It doesn't seem like they're giving them all the weapons they could be giving them, but they're certainly helping the rebellion in Syria this whole time, right?
Yeah, and, I mean, they're helping, but their guys, so to speak, are maybe making some advances, but they're not winning, you know.
So, you know, we'll see what happens.
I think that they're tempted to sort of to arm them to go for a military victory, and, you know, it's noticeable that the rebels just don't want to talk, that they think that ultimately the U.S. and the Europeans and Saudi Arabia will back them for a military victory.
And so every five minutes the opposition say, we won't talk to Bashar al-Assad, we'll talk to somebody else.
But why should Assad sort of give up when he still holds all the cities of Syria?
The opposition haven't been able to take a single city yet.
I mean, they've made some inroads, but they haven't captured a single city.
And there hasn't been a sort of mass defection from the regime.
You know, there have been individuals that have gone over, but there haven't been battalions that have changed sides or senior generals who've changed sides with their troops.
So it's, the regime is showing some signs of coherence.
So, you know, that's the ingredients for a stalemate at the moment.
That might change, but that's the present situation.
Yeah, the Americans are afraid to help them really win, but they do say, they basically agree with the rebels, right, the Obama administration, that, oh, we certainly don't insist that you talk to Assad.
You shouldn't talk to Assad.
Assad's days are numbered and finished and all these kinds of things.
So the rebels have reason to hold out for American full-fledged help, whether it's really common or not, right?
Yeah, I mean, Hillary Clinton and people were saying things like that, you know, and John McCain and so forth.
But as soon as you say we aren't talking to Assad, then you're not talking because there's nobody else to talk to.
You know, they say we'll talk to moderates in the regime.
Who are these moderates, you know?
Assad is the boss there.
And he, you know, as I said, things maybe got a little bit worse for him, but he's by no means losing yet.
And he may well think that he can last this out.
So basically he's got to, you know, he doesn't want to compromise and there's nobody to compromise with.
All right, now back to Iraq.
There are parliamentary elections, right, nationwide elections coming up in April.
Do you expect much of a change in coalition power?
There will be local elections in April and parliamentary ones next year.
It's difficult to know.
It's kind of interesting.
I mean, I was all over southern Iraq.
Last time around we had these, the government was, Maliki was having an offensive against the Sadrists who were kind of on the run.
So in areas that they're powerful, they didn't have that number of representatives.
This time they'll do better.
How will Maliki do?
You know, he's pretty unpopular amongst the political class and the political leadership of the Kurds, the religious leadership of the Shia.
But maybe the Shia as a whole, the voters will feel they're under pressure from the Sunni and they should rally behind that boy.
So we'll see how that goes.
I mean, that's quite interesting.
Then we have parliamentary elections sort of next year.
And, you know, at the moment Maliki's in a funny position because in some way he's deeply destabilized by what's happening in Syria because that's emboldened the Iraqi Sunni to be tougher to protest.
But at the same time, one of his main backers is Iran, and Iran doesn't want him to have another crisis in Iraq at the moment when they've got a crisis in Syria and a crisis in relations over sanctions and nuclear weapons, nuclear enrichment and so forth.
So they'll back Maliki.
They're telling people they'll back Maliki for the moment, but will they back him beyond this year?
Will they back him beyond the parliamentary elections?
And that seems to be up in the air.
It's not clear yet.
For the moment, though, they want to support him, but they don't want to see him go down at this moment and produce another crisis in Iraq.
Well, does he have enough actual authority on a day-to-day level where he could cancel election results and just make himself Saddam for life?
No, it couldn't be done.
There are too many enemies.
And, you know, it's sort of there is an electoral system.
It doesn't work very well and so forth, but he just doesn't really have the strength to do that.
He might have a go, but I doubt it.
He sort of behaves, you take the last election, the parliamentary election in 2010.
Now, in his coalition, he got about 24% of the vote.
He got about just under 3 million votes, and there are about 19 million registered voters in Iraq.
It isn't that high a proportion of the population.
But he sort of ruled as if he had a tremendous mandate from the voters, but it just isn't there.
And he needed kind of to maintain a consensus, and he's done the opposite.
But I doubt if he has the strength to try to go for a dictatorship and just stop having elections at all.
And now, so do you think that in the near future you'll have a reorientation where maybe the Saudis will ally with the Sunnis and really make an Iraqi nationalist coalition and freeze out the Donald Party guys?
I think there will be some parallel attacks on Maliki.
I mean, that's just kind of his strength, that he has lots of enemies, but the enemies pull.
And they don't like him, but they don't like each other much.
They're suspicious of him.
Muqtada has been saying good things about the Sunni.
He's attacked Maliki for giving the impression that the Shia want to dominate everybody else.
But for a lot of Sunni, they're still very suspicious of him, seeing him as Muqtada, the sort of Sunni killer of the Mehdi army, playing the most prominent role in the civil war in 2006 and 2007.
So all these people are pretty suspicious of each other.
And there's blood between them, there's blood between the Sunni and the Kurds and between the Sunni and the Shia.
It's difficult for this to be forgotten.
And Maliki can exploit this.
He also has a lot of money.
He has a lot of jobs, about 3 million jobs.
There aren't many jobs in Iraq.
He has a lot of things going for him.
It's not enough to run the country by force, but it's enough to fight a battle, a political battle.
One of the leading Sadrists made a point to me that all the factions are strong.
They all have reasons for strength, the Sunni, Maliki, the Kurds, the Shia, the Sadrists.
So nobody has a pressing reason for compromise.
And that's why this crisis might go on for a long time.
Yeah, it sounds like the country really is de facto split apart, like Joe Biden wanted all along, right?
It is, but the background to all this is deep dissatisfaction over the fact that the place is so impoverished.
You get down in Basra, and this is Basra, in the center of about 70% of Iraqi oil production, some of the greatest oil fields in the world.
But you drive around the poorer parts of Basra, and you see heaps of uncollected garbage and herds of goats sort of eating, living on the garbage.
You see sort of pools of sewage.
You know what happens to all the money is, whatever Iraqis ask.
This is a very sort of dysfunctional government, massive corruption, embezzlement, government thwarting any attempts to monitor or suppress this.
So people are really angry about this.
The whole country is full of young men who don't have jobs.
I was talking to one professor at a college in Baghdad, and he was saying, you know, come to my class and ask people what they want to do, and 95% will say they want to leave Iraq.
He said, but if they could get jobs, only about 2% of them would want to leave Iraq.
You know, it's really simple.
You have a very bad government stealing a lot of money, and people are suffering a lot.
Well, and now you also said you went up to Kurdistan, and you write in Counterpunch that things look a lot better in Kirkuk than they did 10 years ago.
That was for sure.
Yeah, I mean, things are better up there.
You know, there's an oil boom.
You have a single government authority.
Security is better.
I don't know.
I mean, I'm sort of, it's got a boomtown atmosphere.
At the same time, you know, what I was thinking when I was there was it reminds me a lot of Ireland about before the crash of 2008, you know, when the Celtic tiger was bounding along, when people were saying good things about the Irish economy.
The Irish felt that, you know, finally, you know, they'd achieved economic prosperity forever.
And then, whoops, the whole thing sort of blew up.
You know, it all turned out to be, you know, not just a boom but a bubble.
And despite the same atmosphere in Kurdistan, it's a very vulnerable place, you know.
You can be in Erbil in a sort of fancy hotel, but a few miles away in Mosul, you know, at the same time as I was there, you know, they assassinated the head of one of the general in charge of intelligence.
You know, there were bombs down in Kirkuk, another few not very far away.
And the whole, you know, Iraq and Kurdistan is pretty corrupt, too.
But it does have a sort of single government in charge, and security is quite good, and things like electricity work much better than Baghdad.
But it's not.
They try to present themselves as the other Iraq, completely different from Baghdad, but actually an awful lot of things are bad in Baghdad and bad in Kurdistan as well.
Yeah.
Well, they've been mostly spared in the last two wars, although I guess there's kind of been a low-level war, especially for Kirkuk, going on, especially the last ten years, yeah?
Yeah, there's lots of tension.
I mean, again, this is getting worse, you know.
It's sort of rather bizarre that the Kurds are part of the government, but at the same time, they, you know, last year, the government was amassing troops, you know, threatening to invade areas disputed with the Kurds.
The Kurds were doing the same thing with their army, and, you know, they were practically at war.
So, you know, there's strong reasons for keeping together, but there are strong reasons for confrontation as well.
And how significant is it that Talabani, the seeming, I guess, one of the two major Kurdish leaders, has now had a stroke and seemingly on his way out of power?
Is that going to hurt things very much?
It makes a difference, because he was president, but he was also, you know, leader of one of the Kurdish movements, you know, which he had, in a sense, his own private army.
This made him pretty powerful, so he's difficult to replace.
Secondly, he played a sort of mediating role of creating a consensus, and there's nobody really who can replace him there.
So Maliki, as sort of the vice president, as one of Maliki's people, has sort of taken over that source of authority for what it's worth.
So it doesn't look likely that Talabani will be back.
You know, he's been in hospital.
As far as I know, he can't speak.
Other Kurdish leaders who went there weren't allowed to see him, but the doctors said he had to be allowed to recover.
So, yeah, that does make a difference.
All right, Patrick.
Well, it's great to talk to you again.
Thank you very much for your time on the show tonight.
Thank you.
Everybody, that's Patrick Coburn from the London Independent.
That's independent.co.uk, and he's got three new ones at counterpunch.org about his recent trip to all parts of Iraq, and he's, of course, get his book, Muqtada, Muqtada al-Sadr, The Shia Revival and the Struggle for Iraq.
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That's it for the show tonight.
Antiwar Radio will be back here next Friday from 630 to 7 on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
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See you then.
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