04/21/16 – Patrick Cockburn – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, Scott Horton Show.
I'm him.
Check out the archives, 4,000 interviews at scotthorton.org.
Going back to 2003, sign up for the podcast feed there.
And introducing Patrick Coburn, the great Middle East correspondent for The Independent.
That's independent.co.uk.
He's got a brand new book out, Chaos and Caliphate, Jihadis and the West in the Struggle for the Middle East.
If you take a look at his archive at independent.co.uk, you can see that over the past few days, they've been rerunning some of these articles from the outbreak of the war in Afghanistan and Libya and other places.
Really great stuff.
I can't wait to read it.
It's in the mail on its way to me right now.
Welcome back to the show, Patrick.
How are you, sir?
Thank you.
Very happy to have you back here on the show.
And there's so much to talk about.
If it's okay, I'd like to start with the, well, Iraqi Shia-stan.
It's what's known as Iraq and the Iraqi government in Baghdad and the trials and tribulations of a body, the prime minister there and the role of Muqtada al-Sadr and the parliament and the new cabinet insisting on a technocratic cabinet and all these different things.
Could you kind of straighten out who's who and what's going on there?
Well, not really, because nobody can straighten it out.
It's a sort of stalemate.
Iraq has this, I mean, the government in Baghdad and Iraq outside the areas controlled by the Kurds and the Islamic State are in a state of fairly permanent political crisis.
But the crisis never seems to reach a final explosive point.
You know, that's recently the Muqtada al-Sadr, the sort of populist nationalist leader has lost support among the Shia population, was demanding that a new technocratic cabinet should take power under the same prime minister, al-Abadi, and should wage war on corruption.
And there were big, enormous demonstrations in Baghdad, sort of hundreds of thousands, they claim a million.
Then Muqtada himself invaded the green zone, partly to stop his followers doing the same thing, and the government introduced the names of a technocratic cabinet.
But this couldn't get through Parliament, so we're really sort of back in the same old situation.
Why is it like this?
Well, parties that have had power now since 2003 have no intention of giving it up.
People have made an awful lot of money, tens of billions of dollars.
One member of Parliament was believed to have abstracted $6 billion from the state revenues.
So we have this sort of continuing stalemate, sort of semi-crisis.
But at the end of the day, nothing done.
Okay, and now, so, in other words, it looks like Abadi is, basically there's nobody to replace him, and the status quo is going to hold as far as the current power structure in Baghdad?
For the moment, yeah.
I mean, why?
Because the U.S. wants him there, Iran sort of wants him there.
It's not clear who could or would replace him.
It would just be another political crisis.
I'm not sure if he did go, would it make any difference?
The problem is that Iraq has sort of got itself, you know, somebody put it to me, there are about 25,000 guys who run the Iraqi government.
They do pretty well out of it.
They vary between, you know, just sort of bureaucrats to guys who are pretty well mafiosi.
You're not going to get these guys to give up their grip on the administration.
And while they're there, you know, corruption will remain, you know, you'll still have hundreds of millions of dollars spent on bridges that never get built, on housing developments, you know, which just remain a hole in the sand.
So I'm not too optimistic about anything really changing.
Well, and that goes for the army that you've always described for years now as basically a ghost army, where the officers get to collect all the money for all the soldiers that they don't really employ and that kind of thing.
So where does that leave their war against the Islamic State?
There's perpetual rumors of an attack on Mosul upcoming, and I know you've written about passing a massive convoy on the way down to Baghdad, headed the other way up to, I guess, to Kurdistan to get ready for an assault on the, I guess, the Iraqi capital of Islamic State there.
What do you think?
Well, actually, it's interesting that convoy, as you mentioned, I was in Iraq about a month ago and I was on the road north from Baghdad and a sort of armored division passed me.
Not heavy tanks, but, you know, lots of APCs and stuff.
Then they took up position.
They were meant to be preparing or part of an attack on Mosul.
And they did take a few villages.
But then when the other side came back at them, a lot of them ran away and hid.
So I don't think that's going to happen.
Well, you know, they've had a few advances as a city called Ramadi they recaptured.
But that was really sort of Iraqi special forces backed up by the US and other air forces.
And although they recaptured Ramadi from Islamic State, about 70 or 80 percent of Ramadi is just a heap of rubble.
You know, so they're not going to attack Mosul.
I think they'll sort of attack a few other places.
But Islamic State is pulling back.
They're not fighting to the last bullet.
And so it's fair to assume that they're keeping their fighters for other battles for guerrilla warfare.
They're not going to sort of throw them into fixed position fighting where they can be hit from the air.
So I mean, in that sense, it seems like maybe it would be relatively easy for the Iraqi government to attack the Islamic State, say, in Fallujah and run them out of there the way they ran them out of Ramadi, as long as they still have somewhere to run to like Mosul.
Is there a priority there between those two cities?
Well, I think Islamic State will fight for Mosul very hard.
For Fallujah, they might do the same.
They still want to sort of run them out of anywhere.
They kind of decide whether they're going to fight to the last or not.
The actual sort of combat strength of the Iraqi army is pretty small.
I mean, that's true of the whole region, you know, Iraq and Syria.
That's why it's kind of important to be an eyewitness to this stuff and not get it all off the social media.
You know, you read about in Iraq and Syria about, you know, rebel units of 5,000 or 3,000 or armies of the Kurds or somebody.
If you actually go and look at them, you know, where they're meant to be, sort of 5,000 guys, you sort of...
I was up south of Kirkuk not so long ago.
Then you look at the guys, you know, a lot of sort of old men who used to be in the old Iraqi army of Saddam Hussein who got jobs because they used to be officers and they probably know a little bit about the military, not that Saddam's army was up to much.
And then you have sort of very young boys.
You don't...
They're very short on combat troops and the reason is, you know, that they all exaggerate their strength because they all want to get the salaries of the guys who don't turn up.
You know, that's true, not just the Baghdad army, but it's the Syrian army, you know, the famous rebels in Syria, the moderates, you know, either 5,000 here, 10,000 there.
You actually go and see these people.
You know, there seems to be nothing like these numbers.
Probably they're being paid for high numbers.
You know, I know the Iraqi army, there was sort of an Iraqi National Security Council and last year they're getting short of money so the army turned up and demanded money for the salaries of so many troops and they were told, you know, you're not getting another D-9 until you bring the numbers down.
Next week they turned up and there were 36,000 guys less in the Iraqi army, just sort of vanished, you know, like a piece of ghost.
All right, so now if we can switch to the western front of the same war here against the Islamic State in Syria, there's of course the Wall Street Journal story that said that they're ready for plan B where the CIA is going to double down or I guess they are already doubling down on rearming the so-called moderate rebels, I guess, which means at least Ahrar al-Sham and friends of al-Nusra in order to continue to fight the Bashar al-Assad regime while at the same time I guess the military is focusing on helping the Kurds to fight the Islamic State.
Is that really the news out of Syria?
It seems like after the ceasefire and negotiations breaking out with the Russians and even talk of writing a new constitution and all that, that that would pretty much make any efforts to back the rebels against Assad pretty moot at this point, right?
Yeah, but as soon as you announce a plan B, as soon as people announce a plan B, you immediately discredit plan A, particularly if people who, let's say you're in a rebel organization, you don't much, you'd much prefer to get to fight, you know, than to negotiate and if you hear the CIA is going to supply lots of goodies, you know, then you have every incentive not to do any talking.
So you immediately shift to plan B if there is such a plan B.
It seems to me a pretty terrible idea.
And, you know, there is this sort of bizarre thing in Syria of different, you know, different American security agencies backing different factions.
Right.
And even where we have Iraqi factions like the Bata Brigade that America backs in Iraq fighting with Hezbollah and with Assad's regime against the CIA backed factions in Syria.
So it's not just the Kurds versus the jihadists, it's the Bata Brigade versus the jihadists too.
America is on three sides, at least to this thing.
Yeah, I mean, you know, it's a tremendous mess.
That doesn't seem, you know, it's sort of true of the Obama administration that when you hear what Obama sort of says, you know, in these interviews that were published in the Atlantic, you know, he seems to have a grip on the situation.
But in reality, it's as if, you know, there were two Obamas, one who has these perceptions of what's going on, the other one who's actually sort of in charge.
So, you know, the one in charge sort of, you know, is following this old sort of policy of the CIA and others backing the opposition, you know.
So, you know, that's what we've had in Syria, you know, the early last year, the Saudis and the Turks sort of pushed one way, they armed and supplied a sort of new opposition alliance, which made some gains in Idlib province and Latakia.
Then the Russians and the Iranians pushed back in September.
And now maybe we have a pushback from them.
But, you know, it just means the war goes on.
Nobody's the winner.
Well, now, I mean, and as you say, though, the regime with Russian support has really made a lot of gains and reversed a lot of the gains of the Islamic State and the Al-Nusra Front and others.
Do they still have that momentum?
Does it look like there will be, for example, an invasion of Raqqa by the Assad regime anytime soon?
Could be.
I mean, there was a lot of heavy fighting around Palmyra.
The Russians seem to have brought in their special forces, you know, but the Syrian army did win.
You know, will they now advance on Raqqa?
Will the Kurds advance on Raqqa?
They'd like to do so.
But, you know, Islamic State has taken over part of the Yarmouk Palestinian camp.
Most people are out of there.
But what's called a camp, you know, it's very close to the center of Damascus.
So it's not all one way.
You know, I'm sorry.
I know you don't like to be too cynical about these things, and I don't mean to ask you to be.
But there seems to be quite a bit of analysis.
This is especially when you compare to Russian efforts here.
It seems like America and our coalition partners here are really pulling their punches when it comes to fighting the Islamic State.
They like to talk about fighting the Islamic State, but they still seem to have other priorities, like we talked about, still working on backing these groups against Assad, for example.
Well, I think, Scott, you know, we've talked about this often in the past.
It really goes back to 9-11.
You know, there's all this tub-thumping about going after the terrorists and so forth.
But they didn't.
They pursued, they stuck with their traditional allies, even Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and Turkey, even when they were complicit with terrorist organizations like al-Nusra and Al-Qaeda and Islamic State.
And that's really, you know, been what's happened since 9-11, you know, which is seems to be getting a little bit more publicity now with people more talking about, you know, the famous 28 pages in the official inquiry into 9-11, which is about Saudi involvement, which has never been published.
There seems to be a bit more hostility to the Saudis, but it's still basically the same of the U.S. sticking with its old allies of Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
And if they do that, then they can't, this prevents them making a full effort against Islamic State.
And that's why Islamic State is still in business now.
And Islamic State, you know, very likely to be in business a year from now.
Remember, you know, in 2014, when they first appeared in Mosul, people were saying, oh, it won't last.
You know, would they last through, you know, 2015?
They're there.
2016, they're there.
This is becoming a fact on the map.
Yeah.
Well, and we talked about then, after years and years of supporting these guys, now having it blown up in their face where they outright declare a caliphate with the divine imprimatur and all this kind of thing.
How long is it going to take them to turn the ship of state back around against the Sunni jihadists on this?
And they still haven't.
After two years, they still haven't really turned around.
But, you know, it makes me curious about, and I guess I didn't start interviewing you until maybe the end of 06, something like that.
And I don't know if I knew enough then or thought enough then to have asked you, were the Saudis supporting the Sunni based insurgency against the entire American occupation there in Iraq this whole time, too?
Oh, yeah.
I mean, all through Iraq, too?
Oh, yeah.
There was money going in that direction.
I mean, it wouldn't necessarily be state money, it'd be private money.
But, you know, lots of Saudi princes who behave as if they were rulers of an independent state, it wouldn't be.
They were certainly providing money.
Mind you, the US occupation of Iraq was unpopular everywhere in the Middle East, actually everywhere in the world, but then certainly among the Sunni states.
They were anti-American from Saudi Arabia.
They were also anti-Shia.
Perhaps their biggest objection was that suddenly you had a Shia-run state, of course, with a Shia majority.
And what they couldn't forgive America for was sort of being involved in establishing a Sunni state rather than a Shia state for the first time in the Middle East, you know, since the time of Saladin.
And they were opposed to that and something that took measures to make sure it didn't last.
Yeah, that's in the WikiLeaks where they say, it used to be the Saudi kingdom, the prince or whatever says, it used to be us, the United States and Saddam Hussein against Iran.
And now you're giving Iraq to Iran on a golden platter, not even a silver one, a golden one.
And then I love this quote, too.
Might as well mention it from the Financial Times where Prince Saud al-Faisal, the foreign minister, told John Kerry, Daesh, that is the Islamic State, Daesh is our response to your support for the Dawa, meaning Abadi, who we talked about before, the American and Iranian-backed ruler of Iraq.
Well, that's the way they, you know, it was pretty evident that's the way they felt.
I'm sort of surprised that in the U.S. there hadn't been more objections to this sort of complicity with the places that gave birth to Al-Qaeda, you know, what Al-Qaeda believes is not much different from Saudi Wahhabism.
But, you know, even now, you know, the situation hasn't really changed in terms of the alliance with Saudi Arabia.
As you could see with Obama's visit there, you know, there's lots of verbal sniping, but not much else has changed.
Right.
Well, and as you point out in this other article, in Yemen, our intervention has given Al-Qaeda the upper hand.
This is a war that is America's war, you kind of have to say, as much as Saudi's, because they can't do it without us, right?
All their air powers.
Yeah, veteranry, you know, apparently targeting, advice and so forth.
And mid-air refueling on these missions, too.
I mean, that's...
Oh, yeah.
And, you know, what's happened?
Well, first of all, the Saudis haven't won.
They thought they'd take the capital, their local proxies would take the capital.
Sanaa, that hasn't happened.
You know, they've killed a lot of people.
There's a new country, you know, which has been reduced to chaos.
Remember the book I've just written, it's called Chaos and Caliphate.
And, you know, the reason for the title is that you have these states across the Middle East and North Africa reduced to chaos by wars often provoked or undermined by outside intervention, foreign intervention.
And Al-Qaeda, Taliban, Islamic State have been the beneficiaries.
And there was a time just a few years ago, right, where what at least they call AQAP there, the Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, was what?
Just a couple of few hundred guys.
And now it's a piece of territory, like the Islamic State is now a place.
Yeah, it's a big piece of territory.
You know, it's all along the south coast of Yemen.
You know, it's all sort of right up to the port of Aden.
You know, this is a big area, you know, in Britain.
That's the distance from 340, 350 miles.
That's about the distance from London to Edinburgh.
You know, it's a whole lot of territory.
Now they're trying to get out of this just to counterattack those forces from the United Arab Emirates there.
But there's no doubt that, you know, it's a pretty major event that in 2014, Islamic State, ISIS, managed to establish its own state in western Europe and eastern Syria.
Al-Qaeda has never had a state, you know, a big piece of territory that can't be controlled.
Now it does.
You know, that's a pretty amazing and disastrous development.
Yeah.
And again, for them, one for them to start a year and a half after the creation of the caliphate, you'd have thought they could have at least learned the lesson that, OK, we got to stop supporting the Sunni militias around the region for now or something, but they just can't stop.
And then, as you say, now, after a year of the war, now they want to back the United Arab Emirates in attacking Al-Qaeda at the same time Al-Qaeda is attacking the Sunni militias that were helping the Saudis bomb.
Sure.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, the guys who carried out the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris, you know, the cartoonists who were massacred in Paris just over a year ago, these guys, you know, their connection wasn't with Islamic State.
It was with Al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula.
They've got a connection with Yemen.
You know, and remember all the coverage of the media coverage, 40 world leaders went to Paris to march through the streets to show solidarity against terrorism.
You know, and what do they do?
They do nothing.
In fact, they, and they allow the people who supported that attack to establish their own state.
You know, this is a sort of real sign of their ineffectiveness.
And I sort of wish people were a bit more angry about this, you know, because it, the same thing happens again and again.
You know, it happened after 9-11, it happened, you know, it's happening in Yemen, in Afghanistan.
It's pretty obvious, you know, because famously who supported the Taliban depended on Pakistan, and there was the U.S. and Britain to a degree fighting the, pretending to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan.
They were fighting the Taliban, a lot of people were getting killed, but the crucial thing was they never dared confront Saudi Arabia, which was the main supporter of Taliban.
So there's this funny sort of contradictory policy in all these places where they sort of say they're fighting Islamic State, but they'll never do so at the cost of disrupting their traditional alliances with Sunni powers and oil states like Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchy, monarchy and Turkey and Pakistan.
Yeah, well, and yeah, that's the whole thing of it, right, is that all the hijackers came from our allied states.
That's why they hated us so much is because we were allies with their governments that they hated so much.
And but so that didn't amount to a cost us belly against our allies because of people from those countries, not the official governments doing it.
Although, as you mentioned, with Saudi, it's a bit more complicated than that.
But so instead, they just use the attack as an excuse to go after their enemy states, Iran, Iraq and Syria that had absolutely nothing to do with it.
Yeah, and the situation hasn't changed, you know, the sort of, you know, the the Al-Nusra, the Al-Qaeda branch in Syria and Islamic State, you know, always depended to a substantial extent to having their supply lines running through Turkey and they haven't been caught yet.
They still haven't even after all this time, huh?
No, they still haven't.
They're a bit more constricted than they were, but they're still there.
And, you know, because they.
Just somehow this incentive to stick with the traditional allies always sort of dominates even, you know, even when they're pretty crazy, you know, I mean, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the president of Turkey, you know, is really pretty crazy these days.
You know, he's pursuing a German cartoonist.
Who said bad things about him, you know, they've thrown 140 journalists into jail.
They've closed down all the main newspapers and taken over the main newspapers and television stations that were in any way critical of the government.
You know, one time Turkey had a pretty, you know, very active journalistic, media, intellectual community.
And this is now all being crushed.
We have an authoritarian state.
And again, you know, there is such an incentive in the U.S. and Western Europe to just stick with these traditional allies.
Yeah, well, and of course, all that has gotten that much worse because of this war, which Obama, if he'd really tried, probably could have nipped in the bud and just made the Turks and the Saudis and the Qataris and the Israelis well aware that we know you hate Assad, but we hate al Qaeda more.
And so you're not going to do this.
But instead, he led the parade.
Yeah, very much so.
And, you know, you can see that, you know, when the Islamic State captured Palmyra last year, you know, it's not a question of allying with Assad.
It's just a question of when do you hit Islamic State?
They didn't bomb Islamic State when Islamic State was doing this.
Which means in a sort of way, they prepared Islamic State to the Syrian army, you know, but no Syrian army.
Then Islamic State's going to take over the rest of Syria.
And they've never.
Bush comes to shove.
They you know, they don't they aren't prepared to really attack Islamic State.
You know, it's not you know, it's quite strong.
It's not that strong, but what really keeps it going is the sort of weakness and division of its enemies.
All right.
Well, listen, I won't keep you any longer, but I sure do appreciate you coming back on the show as always, Patrick.
No, thank you so much.
Oh, and I wanted to say, too, I'm sorry, real quick.
I'm really looking forward to reading this book, especially because, as I mentioned earlier, I didn't really start reading you regularly until about 2006, a few years into Iraq War II there.
So I'm really anxious to look at this anthology.
I know it includes from some of the articles that have been published on the independent site and so forth that it really includes stuff going back to the beginning of the terror war in 01, right?
Yeah, it begins with it's a mix of sort of straight reporting, as I did, it was doing at the time and beginning with the war in Iraq in 2001 and or in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan.
And and but mixed with chapters written more recently trying to analyze what was happening, what were the general themes of these wars where, you know, states collapsed, fell apart and Islamic State and Taliban and Al Qaeda got stronger and stronger.
So it's a mix of sort of eyewitness reporting and analysis.
Great.
Well, I love all your work.
Of course, I love the book on Muqtada al-Sadr and the rise of the Islamic State.
And I really appreciate all the time that you've made available to come on the show and explain your work here, too.
Thanks so much, Scott.
Great stuff.
All right, Shaul, that is the great Patrick Coburn.
He's at independent.co.uk.
And you can also find all his articles at UNZ.com, UNZ, UNZ.com.
And the brand new book is at ORbooks.com, Chaos and Caliphate, Jihadis and the West in the Struggle for the Middle East.
Everybody sign up for the podcast feed at scotthorton.org.
Check out the archives.
There are more than 4000 of them going back to 2003.
And follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
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