04/27/15 – Patrick Cockburn – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Live here on the Liberty Radio Network, noon to two eastern time, every weekday.
Our guest today is Patrick Coburn.
He's Middle East correspondent for The Independent at independent.co.uk.
And he's the author of the new book, The Rise of Islamic State, ISIS, and the New Sunni Revolution.
Welcome back to the show, Patrick.
How are you doing?
Great, thanks.
Good to be back.
Good, good.
Very happy to have you here.
Really incredible story going on here with this war.
The headline at antiwar.com this morning is Saudi warplanes pound Yemen capital.
War seen as broadening and warships attack port city of Aden.
And your headline is Yemen crisis.
This exotic war will soon become Europe's problem.
I hardly know where to begin, but I guess let's start with this.
The boatloads of refugees, as we're seeing from Libya right now, you're predicting these kinds of further consequences from this war in Yemen.
Consequences being something that the leadership in Britain and the United States never seem to take into account when they do any of these things.
Sure, yeah.
I mean, they've been backing the Saudi air campaign and the Saudi blockade of Yemen.
I mean, Yemen has 26 million people.
Even before this happened, half of them were on the edge of malnutrition, according to UN agencies.
And now a lot of them are beginning to starve.
Yemen imports 90% of its food.
That's not coming in.
There's no electricity, so they can't pump water.
There's no fuel.
So in Sanaa, the capital today, they've been appealing for private motorists who still got a little fuel to come and pick up the dead and wounded because they've got no gasoline for the ambulances.
So, you know, this is an extraordinary man-made disaster.
There's a lot of publicity today about the earthquake in Nepal.
But the actual numbers of people affected are much greater in Yemen.
You've got 12 million people who are on the edge of starvation.
And this is, you know, the earthquake for the moment is over.
But the bombing's been going on.
It's been going on today.
And is the United Nations or any other organization, any part of the GCC or a neighboring government trying to do anything to provide relief to the people there?
Well, the GCC is backing Saudi Arabia in this air campaign.
There's the Gulf Cooperation Council, the Gulf monarchies.
Not much is being done.
And, you know, in America, usually drops are putting cups on people.
This is completely cut off.
I think the rest of the world treats it as being Saudi Arabia's backyard.
So they just keep away from the problem.
But I think what's going to happen is exactly what we've seen happen in Libya, what we've seen happen in Syria, is that you have people in Yemen reduced to complete desperation.
So a proportion of them will try and run away to get to Europe.
They'll pay, you know, use their last few dollars to get that boat from Libya or Egypt heading for Italy.
You know, a lot of them will drown.
But, you know, that's where this impulse comes from, that the Europeans complain about, you know, how do we stop this great wave, is that they tolerate or provoke or do nothing to prevent these wars which reduce millions of people to complete poverty, hopelessness and desperation.
That's why they clamber onto sinking boats in order to try and make it to Sicily.
Yeah.
Well, in Yemen, I don't know how many different countries are like this, but that sounds like a pretty unique situation.
If they truly import 90 percent of their food from elsewhere, that puts them in a very vulnerable spot in this kind of crisis.
Yeah, I mean, it does.
It's, you know, I used to go to Yemen quite a bit.
You know, it's very mountainous.
It's highly populated.
Quite a lot of it is, looks big on the map, but quite a lot in the east is desert.
It has a little oil, little gas, but not much of that.
Even before this happened, the situation was pretty dire.
Now it's got a lot worse.
And now, so to rewind a little bit about how we got into this mess, how they got into this mess, I guess so we don't have to go all the way back necessarily to the Houthi takeover, the so-called Zaydi Shiite rebels from the north taking over the country.
But maybe if you could explain why that's such a big deal to the Saudis that they started this bombing campaign and why they couldn't just, as you say, the Houthis domination of the country wasn't likely to last very long or be very substantial anyway.
And so why have the Saudis been so hell bent on destroying Yemen the way they've done?
It's a good question that, I mean, one should say Yemeni politics tend to be pretty complicated.
There is tribal identity.
The Houthis belong to a certain tribe.
They come from the far north of Yemen.
They belong to the Zaydi sect, which is rather like the Shia, but is very only found in Yemen.
So Yemeni politics are very distinct, and it's very unlikely that any single faction will be able to dominate the country for very long.
Then, but what's really made it different this time around, and we've had sort of fighting in Yemen before, is that Saudi Arabia weighed in and said this was an attempted takeover by Iranian-backed Shia.
Now, there isn't much evidence that the Iranians are involved in any significant extent.
It's a kind of ludicrous claim that the Iranians were sending weapons to Yemen.
Now, the one thing Yemen is not short of is arms.
UN estimated there are between 40 and 60 million weapons in the country.
That should make anybody in the NRA feel a glow.
I mean, there are plenty of weapons there.
So the Saudis then, why have they done it?
Well, I think they want to show that they're going to oppose Iran, oppose the Shia.
They haven't been doing very well in Iraq and Syria.
So they've claimed that the same sort of thing is happening in Yemen, which is easier for them to intervene because it's landlocked.
It's not landlocked, I'm sorry.
It's surrounded by Saudi Arabia on much of its frontier.
It's easier for the Saudis to do.
Now, there may be something to do with Saudi politics here.
There's a new king, King Salman, who's only been there a few months.
The minister of defense is his favorite son, Mohammed, who's also chief of the royal court.
It may be that they want to have a cheap, successful little war to establish the new king in place, to appeal to Saudi patriotism, to describe all opponents as traitors.
So that may have something to do with solidifying the regime in Saudi Arabia.
Otherwise, it's difficult to work out what their long-term plan is because it may be that the Houthis weren't pro-Iranian to begin with, but after they've been pounded by Saudi Arabia for long enough, they'll certainly end up that way.
Of course, the U.S. is also pretty upset because for years, the administration in Washington has been claiming success in its drone attacks on al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which is based in Yemen, and claims to have killed its leadership.
But because of this war, suddenly al-Qaeda is presenting itself as the shock troops of the Sunni community.
It's taken over a whole province in the south.
It's taken over an airport in Hadhramaut province, Hadhramaut area in Yemen.
So, you know, this is kind of bad news for the U.S. as well.
Yeah, even though we're helping coordinate the whole dang war from offshore and in the air.
All right, hold it right there.
We'll be right back, everybody, with Patrick Coburn from The Independent, an author of The Rise of Islamic State, right after this.
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All right, you guys, welcome back.
It's The Scott Horton Show.
I'm him.
Talking with Patrick Coburn from TheIndependent.co.uk.
Quite a few very important Yemen articles for you to read here.
We're talking about the humanitarian crisis there, the politics behind the war, and the irony of flying as al-Qaeda's air force here, America and the Saudis.
I was going to say, geez, it seems like you can't win a regime change from the air.
This whole thing is pointless.
They're going to have to call it off.
But then you made the very important point that they're really serving as cover for al-Qaeda as the shock troops on the ground.
And, you know, maybe al-Qaeda, as much, I guess, if you could please describe what gains they've made so far for us, Patrick, and whether you think that maybe they'll take sauna as long as they have America and Saudi Arabia in the air backing them up.
Well, yeah, I think it's, you see, I don't think the Saudis had a thought-through plan.
I don't think they intended this to benefit al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which is, after all, against the Saudi monarchy.
But they've ended up by doing that very thing, by emphasizing sectarianism, by claiming the Houthis are Iranian-backed Shia.
It's sort of a self-fulfilling description.
About two-thirds of Yemenis are Sunni, and about one-third are this variant of Shiaism called Zaidism.
So, you know, Yemenis, when you talk to them, say, oh, we're not sectarian, it's not like Iraq or Syria here.
You know, but I've heard that sort of thing before in both Iraq and Syria.
You know, sectarian hatred and fear is only sort of one massacre away.
And then people really do begin to notice what religion their neighbor belongs to.
So al-Qaeda benefits from any militarization of the situation, because you then have the Sunni under pressure from the Houthis, who are pretty well organized and very experienced.
They sustained six offensives launched by the central government between 2004 and 2010, I mean, very ferocious warfare.
So they're pretty experienced soldiers.
Then if they end up fighting the Sunni, then the Sunni will look, as they looked in Iraq and they looked in Syria, at who are the toughest guys, who are the most militarily experienced guys around.
And the answer is very simple.
It's al-Qaeda.
So they benefit from this sort of thing.
Then the U.S. is in this peculiar situation of backing up this Saudi attack and partly organizing it when the main beneficiary on the ground is their declared enemy, al-Qaeda.
It's kind of, you know, this kind of contradictory policy is why, you know, since 2003, since 9-11, we've had the Great War on terror, billions, trillions of dollars spent.
And al-Qaeda and variants on al-Qaeda are stronger than ever.
Yeah, well, of course, the hijackers were all from our allied states.
That's why they attacked us, because they hated the empire's relationship with the dictatorships in Saudi and Egypt primarily, right?
And so here, it's been even during the Iraq War, wasn't it the Saudis who were financing the Sunni-based insurgency against the American pro-Iranian occupation the whole time that we've considered the Iranians to be the enemy and the Shiites the enemy?
We're fighting for them in Iraq, while our allies, the Saudis, have been fighting against us all along.
Yeah, I mean, it's this sort of weird situation that they, this weird situation whereby the Saudis, the money for terrorism, quote unquote, according to a whole series of reports, official reports from Washington, comes from private donors in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf.
And now if you talk to politicians in Baghdad or in Kurdistan, they believe exactly the same thing is happening in Islamic State.
Lots of people deny this, but Islamic State seems to have a lot of money.
And it's kind of difficult to believe that with so many sympathizers in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, that money isn't still flowing from there.
So I think that Yemen is, you know, is one more occasion when this is happening.
And we now have seven, if you go from Pakistan over to right across to northeast Nigeria, there are seven wars going on in Muslim countries.
In all of these, al-Qaeda is either strong or is getting stronger.
It used to have no presence in Libya.
Now it's been murdering Egyptians and cutting off the heads of Ethiopian migrants.
It's becoming a force on the ground.
So very few wars have failed so decisively as the war on terror.
Yeah.
Well, and I wonder if we fight it any better.
And I read a couple of articles by you where you seem to recommend that there's a good way to go about this.
But I just can't imagine the government's ever, you know, being that smart about it.
It seems like if we ally with the strongest factions that we have to ally with against the Islamic State, that would be the Iranians and Assad.
And if we do that, then that just plays into their hands and makes their narrative about us right, that it's us and the Israelis and the Shiites against them and just push even more people to their cause.
Maybe even reunite Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, who are now separate.
Yeah, I mean, I think that it's, you know, Al-Qaeda and Islamic State, the jihadis, they've never been that different, you know, they fight each other, but their ideology is very much the same.
The way they behave, the way they treat women, the way they treat minorities, be they Christian or Shia, is really pretty similar.
There's an attempt at the moment to take some of the jihadis in Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra, which is the Al-Qaeda affiliate there, and pretend that it's very different from Islamic State.
It's a kind of gentler sort of Al-Qaeda.
I mean, this is kind of rubbish, really.
Yeah, there is a way of combating this.
If you give priority, let's say, to fighting the Islamic State, then you have to have a relationship with the main people who are doing the fighting on the ground.
Now, to some extent, the U.S. has done that.
They used to regard the Syrian Kurds, their organization, as terrorists.
Now they're supplying airstrikes.
This is what saved the city of Kobani.
In Iraq, they've tried to sort of support the Iraqi army and not the Shia militias.
But the Iraqi army only has about 5,000 combat troops who really fight.
Other than that, it has sort of tens of thousands of guys who sort of sit at checkpoints but run away any time the Islamic State turns up.
So it's not really feasible.
If that's your strategy, then Islamic State wins.
I think what they've got to do is really look at who their allies in practice are going to be on the ground, which in Iraq may be the Shia militias.
And it's reasonable for them to ask for these people to pay a price, you know, to allow to allow Sunni back into areas where the Islamic State has been expelled.
And in Syria above all, what happens if Islamic State is fighting the Syrian army, which is the main military force opposing them?
If that goes down, then the jihadis are going to head for Damascus.
You're going to have a really big state controlled by these very crazy guys.
And that's a decision that Washington has put off taking.
Yeah, well, you know, I couldn't recommend intervening in Syria on behalf of Assad or even imagine the Americans doing that unless it came down to really the fall of Damascus, which, hey, the Yarmouk camp is just right there, pretty much right.
But backing the jihadis this whole time, as you've been reporting since 2011 and 2012, and backing the revolution against Assad is outright madness, especially now when we're almost a year out from the declaration of the caliphate here.
For them to still have the policy that Assad's got to go seems pretty far out.
And yet it seems to still be the policy, right?
Yeah, they kind of don't have a policy.
I mean, you know, it is that Assad should go.
But of course, they'd be really horrified if he did go.
You know, they don't have to marry him.
All they have to do is attack Islamic State when it's attacking the Syrian army, which is rather different from supporting Assad.
At the moment, they say, oh, the enemy of our enemy is not necessarily our friend.
But actually, you know, if the Islamic State is fighting the Syrian army or either, and you stop bombing the Islamic, you don't bomb the Islamic State or you don't do anything about it, then you're effectively letting them win.
So long as that situation goes on, then Islamic State is going to be there.
You know, it's not going down.
You see a lot of optimistic stuff in the papers.
The Pentagon released a map claiming the Islamic State lost a quarter of its territory.
I mean, first of all, it just hasn't.
And secondly, it's a rather interesting map because they've cut off the western end of the Islamic State, where it's actually been expanding around Damascus.
That bit of the map isn't there, you know.
So it's a graphically explains what the Pentagon would like to be happening, but actually isn't happening.
But now to really defeat them, to drive them out of power in Raqqa and in Mosul and turn them back into a fairly small insurgency, you know, and something that's not a threat to arise immediately again without an occupation, what would it take?
The Turkish and the Iranian armies, the American Marine Corps to go in there and flush them out of there?
Who has the power, the ability to do it?
And I don't think the Turks or the Iranians have the willingness to go that far, right?
No, but I think that, you know, at the moment, I think the you need to bring the Shia militias more under government control in Baghdad, but effectively regard them as the main fighting force of the Baghdad regime.main fighting force of the Baghdad government, because that's the real situation.
And kind of the US is kind of supporting them with airstrike.
I mean, this prevents at least the Islamic State getting any stronger, and that will turn the military balance against them.
I think in Syria, yeah, I think they should attack the Islamic State in the West where it's fighting the Syrian army.
And I think they should say to demand from Assad that there's a ceasefire.
And, you know, you can't share power in Damascus in the government because they hate each other too much.
But you could share power geographically on the ground.
Islamic State benefits from and the jihadis benefit from the militarization of the situation because they're basically fighting machines.
But so does Assad.
You know, Assad benefits from a lot of people in Damascus, from the minorities, the Alawites, the Christians, the Druze, but also a lot of Sunni who work for the government think we don't much like Assad, but we've got no alternative with these crazies at the gate.
Now, if you can have a ceasefire in a lot of Syria, in provinces that are being fought over at the moment, you can't have it with the Islamic State because they're not into ceasefires, then that's good for Syrians.
You need to try and get the refugees back and have a more normal situation.
Probably a lot of these cities is, you know, on the one side you have the Syrian army, then you have an area that they're bombarding.
Inside that you have fighters and you have the fighters family and you have people who are too poor to move.
You need to try and normalize the situation, get these millions and millions of refugees back.
But at the moment, there's really no attempt to do that.
Yeah, well, and it seems like the government, as you say, they can't rule the whole country and there's too much bad blood there, but there's really no one to rule Syrian Sunnistan other than al-Nusra and ISIS at this point, right?
I mean, this was Hillary's excuse for not doing more to back the rebels back in 2012 was we don't really see anyone on the ground to work with there.
So it's kind of just what do you do?
The whole place is going to be ruled by al-Qaeda A or al-Qaeda B.
Well, you know, the first thing to do is to prevent them winning.
You know, these guys are not losing at the moment.
I'm one of the you know, I read this book, The Rise of Islamic State in the first half of 2014 before they'd taken Mosul.
At that time, I sort of wrote it.
I was kind of frustrated that it seemed to me pretty obvious these guys were getting stronger and stronger in a very big area.
You know, the size of Great Britain for stretching right from the Iranian border almost to the Mediterranean.
And you could see that they'd taken a big city like Fallujah.
The Iraqi army couldn't get it back.
Nobody seemed to pay much attention.
And I have slightly the same feeling now that I keep reading sort of optimistic stuff in the papers, you know, put out by the Pentagon, put out by the Baghdad government.
But it's kind of wishful thinking.
I wish it wasn't, but it really is.
The Iraqi army isn't coming together.
They only have a very few units that will actually do any fighting.
The Islamic State is recruiting in the area, which it controls.
There are about six million people there.
An awful lot of young men that you can constrict into there, you know, as fighters.
And in Syria, they're expanding their area around Damascus.
They've taken Yarmouk camp, which is about three or four miles from the center of Damascus.
So I think that there's a sort of they don't know what to do and they kind of want to just pretend that the situation isn't as serious as it really is.
Well, now, so are they a real threat to what's left of the Syrian army?
What is left of the Syrian army?
I mean, they can hold the capital or not.
It's a bit thought out.
One of the problems is it's fighting the Islamic State, then it's fighting these other jihadis backed by Turkey and Saudi Arabia up in the northwest in Idlib province.
It's taken the Idlib city there, the provincial capital, and it's fighting south of Damascus.
So it's fighting really these two different wars.
And particularly the new king of Saudi Arabia, King Salman, and his defense ministers, Mohammed, seem to have launched a more aggressive Saudi policy.
They have greater willingness to involve Saudi Arabia in these battles.
Previously, Saudi Arabia used its influence, it used its money, but they were kind of cautious.
They operated through proxies mostly.
But now we're seeing both in Syria and Yemen, the Saudis taking a much more aggressive stance.
And this further destabilizes the situation.
All right.
Well, I've already kept you way over time here.
Thank you very much for your time, Patrick.
Appreciate it.
Thank you so much.
Bye bye.
All right.
So that's the great Patrick Coburn reporting for The Independent.
That's independent.co.uk.
And the book is The Rise of Islamic State, ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution.
We'll be right back.
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