05/09/13 – Patrick Cockburn – The Scott Horton Show

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And next will be Patrick Coburn, Middle East correspondent for The Independent.
That's Independent.co.uk.
You can also find what he writes at counterpunch.org.
And he's the author of the great book, the incredibly important book, Muqtada, Muqtada al-Sadr, The Shia Revival and the Future of Iraq.
And he is just back to England from Iraq where he's been reporting for at least the last couple of weeks.
Welcome back to the show, Patrick.
How are you doing?
Fine, thanks.
Well, good deal.
Very happy to have you back here.
And you've got a couple of articles here I have in front of me.
Iraqi army losing hold on north to Sunnis and Kurdish forces as troops desert and civil war in Iraq has already begun, politician claims.
I guess go ahead and give us the bad news.
I'll try to find places to follow up.
Yeah, I mean, what's striking about Iraq is that it was bloody but sort of stable the last few years.
Now, in part because of what's happening in Syria, civil war in Syria, this is destabilizing Iraq once again.
It's empowering the Sunni Arabs who are 20 percent of the Iraqi population who are the losers since Saddam Hussein was overthrown in 2003.
And you can sense that the things are falling apart.
The government is losing control of much of northern Iraq.
It doesn't control the Kurdish areas already, but now it's losing control of the Sunni Arab areas, which means pretty much everything north of Baghdad.
Politically, the ground is shaking under one's feet.
In Iraq, in Baghdad, people are getting very nervous.
They're stocking up on food.
Some people are leaving the city.
There's a fear they're going to be back to the civil war of 2006-2007.
Okay, now, is it still the case that the way I remember it as of, say, 2008, was that Baghdad itself is now an 85 percent Shiite city after the sectarian cleansing of the Sunni Arabs there?
Is that still approximately correct?
I mean, that's the case.
One of the sort of outcomes of the civil war was that the Sunni Arabs, so most of Baghdad used to be sort of mixed, were driven into enclaves surrounded by the Shia.
Most of the enclaves are in west Baghdad.
There's a few in east Baghdad, but not many.
So they were already on the losing side.
But now there's a fear that there may be sort of 100 percent ethnic cleansing, that the remaining Sunni in Baghdad will get pushed out if there's another round of the civil war.
Now, I know this is probably mostly a stupid question.
I just want to make sure that I understand.
No one thinks that the Sunnis are about to try to invade and retake Baghdad.
The question is whether the civil war that was almost complete will finally be completed.
The last one, the one that the Sunnis were on the losing end of back in 2007.
Yeah, that's a good question, and it's important to be precise about this.
No, there's no real chance of a Sunni comeback in Baghdad, just a pin on the ground.
But that doesn't mean, when you have a really sort of bloody civil war, people's fears are not really often realistic.
So you have lots of Shia in Iraq who are frightened of a counterrevolution, of the Sunni coming back, of them losing out, of becoming second-class citizens again, as they were under Saddam.
Now, that isn't exactly realistic, but that doesn't mean that people aren't frightened of it.
And likewise, you have some Sunni who maybe think they could have a counterrevolution themselves.
So, in the aftermath of a surreal mass slaughter, people's fears are only just below the surface.
And realistic or unrealistic, it doesn't take much to suddenly have them setting the political agenda.
Well, now, for a long time, it wasn't clear that the Maliki government really could be the government of Iraq without the Americans there to support them.
And then, I guess, finally, by the time they were done with their sectarian cleansing of Baghdad, he really had solidified his power, at least between Baghdad and Basra.
But then there was always a question of the degree of autonomy in, I guess, what they call the Sunni triangle in Fallujah and Mosul and those cities.
But so now, I think you're reporting that the Iraqi army, which is basically the Shiite army of the Bata Brigade of the Maliki government, that those guys are going home from the Sunni areas, that they're basically...
I mean, you have north of Baghdad, you have the Sunni Arabs, the three or four provinces they're the majority in, and north of that, you have the Kurds.
Now, the government in Baghdad, the Maliki government, hasn't controlled the Kurdish areas since 2003.
But they did.
The Sunni in the north were previously prepared to have a sort of alliance with Maliki against the Kurds in places like Kirkuk and Mosul in the north, big city.
Now, just recently, because of a big protest movement by the Sunni Arabs for the last four months, they've been having peaceful protests, peaceful until, on the 23rd of April, there was a massacre at a place called Hawija in Kirkuk province.
At least 44 people were killed, and others were killed later.
Since then, the Sunni Arabs are changing.
They're more and more against Maliki.
So Maliki is more and more isolated.
It's a sort of Shia block in Baghdad in the south.
So the country...
I mean, all this is kind of complicated and difficult for people to follow, I think.
But the bottom line is that Iraq is breaking up.
You know, it may not break up like, you know, somebody announcing the end of Iraq, like the end of the Soviet Union.
But just de facto, on the ground, the place is disintegrating.
And at this point, would you say it's virtually impossible for the Maliki government to...if he wanted to, to incorporate the Sunni Arabs and the Kurds into the government in a way to extend the government's force out in such a way as to prevent that?
Or this is just a done deal now?
Well, you know, you've still got Kurds who are members of the government.
I think they'll probably stay that way.
But they have increasingly sort of distant relations with Baghdad and Maliki.
They don't like Maliki.
They don't trust him.
They think that whenever he has an opportunity, he'll do them down.
Now, he used to sort of try and unite the Arabs against the Kurds and play the Shia against the Sunni.
But I'm not sure he can do that anymore.
He's done it too often in the past.
There's a mood of general hostility against Maliki.
And this is against the background of a government, despite having $100 billion in oil revenues every year, has done nothing with it.
There just isn't electricity most of the time in Baghdad.
The drainage and sewers don't work.
There isn't fresh water.
This is kind of a kleptomaniac government.
I mean, that's not just my phrase, but it's the phrase you find used by senior ministers who've just left the government.
It's really a government of thieves, in their words.
So that adds to the sense of crisis and makes it difficult for eroding the support of the government.
Well, now, I know there's a lot of violence.
It's sort of unfair that the summer of 2007 is the benchmark when that was the very worst of it.
But it sort of seems like, as you've been describing the situation, the lines are already basically drawn.
As intermixed as the Sunni and Shia Arabs used to be, they're not so much anymore.
And whatever degree, I guess, it's destined to get worse, it is still sort of finishing the civil war that's already been fought.
You're saying that the Shiite government doesn't really have the ability to conquer the Sunni triangle anymore than the Sunni triangle has the ability to retake Baghdad, and the Kurds are going to at least stay out of that one.
How bad of a civil war are we really on the brink of if everybody's already seceded from the Union?
All these sort of areas that are in different conflicts in the Middle East are sort of affecting each other.
Everything's kind of interdependent.
So as the civil war in Syria goes on, it affects Iraq.
It means the Sunni think, wow, we're a majority in the region, we can fight again.
And the Shia think, well, we're a majority in Iraq, and we can get backing from Iran, so we can fight.
But everything, there's a sort of feeling among both Shia and Sunni that a sort of sectarian civil war across the Middle East is coming.
So people are getting more and more edgy, more and more frightened.
And that in itself sort of destabilizes the situation.
In western Iraq, there isn't really a border between Iraq and Syria anymore.
It's kind of people can move backwards and forwards.
Al-Qaeda in Syria can move into Iraq and vice versa.
Well, and some of the rebels in Syria have talked about, I guess, maybe on a down day, said, well, maybe we'll have to just settle for seceding and creating an alliance with the Sunni part of Iraq, even if we can't take Damascus.
I don't think that's really on.
People often talk about this, about Syria, about Assad and his people going to the sort of Alawite tribal hinterland.
But maybe 50 or 100 years ago, you could do that.
But these days, most people live in big cities.
Alawites live in streets in Damascus.
And if you lose the big cities, the countryside isn't so heavily populated.
So I think that that sort of geographical carve-up doesn't really work.
I think it's much more the sort of outside academics who think that looks neat and nice, but it really won't happen.
In Iraq, one Iraqi politician was saying to me, there's no such thing as a soft partition in Iraq, that it's going to be more like India and Pakistan splitting apart with hundreds of thousands of refugees on the roads and tens of thousands of people killed in Iraq.
So I think that's probably true.
That that's still coming?
That's still coming, yeah.
Because if not, I mean, it's partly partitioned in Baghdad and other areas, sort of minorities have moved out.
But it's still a certain sort of intermingling, you know, that you have a Shia town here and a Sunni town down the road.
You know, we have another round of civil war that's going to stop happening, that one's going to wipe the other out.
Yeah, but the surge worked, the surge worked, the surge worked.
I saw it on TV, and they said that they were going to secure...
Yeah, but the surge, you know, it had some things going for it, but it was really, I think, basically designed for American television audiences, you know, or maybe American television editors in New York.
You know, American correspondents on the ground in Baghdad, I remember shaking their head in 2008 saying, you know, they couldn't get on air in the U.S. because they were being told by their editors the surge had worked and the door was open over, and they were saying on the phone, you know, you're crazy, you're still being killed, it just hasn't happened that way.
But, you know, I think the great effect of the surge before the 2008 election was really to give the impression that somehow the U.S. had won at the last moment, and it really wasn't the case.
Well, at least it gave them the political cover to leave.
It was a very effective, most effective general I've ever come across in any country at dealing with the media and manipulating the media.
Well, you know, I mean, I guess at the time it was they extended the occupation, really, by the surge.
The Baker Commission wanted to leave by 2008, right, and the surge ended up allowing them to stay longer, but at the same time, maybe they could have never left without being able to call it a victory.
Well, maybe we can accept their lie and just be grateful that the Army really did, and the Marine Corps really did pull out of there.
Sure, I think that, you know, I think it's rather like what was it, 1972 in Vietnam, you know, that there was a sort of treaty.
It sort of left a decent interval.
You know, I don't think any U.S. president can sort of admit to a defeat, but there was something there that they could sort of claim a victory.
At a famous point, Senator McClain sort of was walking through parts of Baghdad, you know, as if it was all sort of reconquered territory, you know, and the bit you couldn't see off camera was, you know, there was a whole company of U.S. troops surrounding him.
So I think that, you know, I think it was always exaggerated.
Yeah, helicopters and snipers and everything else.
Oh, yeah.
That was a fun one.
All right, now, so let me ask you this, because this comes up from time to time, and I may be saying it wrong, the Yanan plan, and I don't know whether there's any relation whatsoever to that and the Biden plan, but certainly the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joe Biden, currently the vice president, all along, from 2002 even, or certainly from 2003, promoted the breakup of Iraq into three and said, you need a horrible minority dictator like Saddam to hold it together otherwise, so go ahead and break it up.
And then, of course, the Yanan plan's spin on that is that what Ariel Sharon wanted and what the Israeli right wing wanted was to see Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and every other Arab country broken into little pieces so that they could never even think of challenging them again.
Yeah, I think they probably did want that.
I think in Iraq, you know, I don't think it's quite, you know, I don't think there was never an inevitability about it.
I think choosing Maliki as prime minister was probably, so retrospectively, the U.S. and Britain and everybody else thinks it was a real disaster.
Actually, it was Zalmay Khalilzad, the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad, who did the choosing in 2006.
And Maliki kind of has the mentality of a security man, rather like Saddam in that way.
He thinks of everything in terms of security.
He thinks of any form of dissent is sort of the beginning of treachery, that, you know, if somebody dissents today, they'll try and kill you tomorrow.
And he reacts accordingly.
So I think that, you know, there are things that would have been going for Iraq under a different leadership, but a completely corrupt and dysfunctional government, plus a government which is basically sectarian in all its attitudes.
It has never really tried to conciliate the Sunni.
It's confronted the Kurds.
You know, there could have been a balance of power between these communities, but the government that has been in Baghdad has never really tried to do that.
Right, and that was the thing that the surge was supposed to accomplish, right, was to create the security space where you could have even these terribly opposed factions meet together in the democratic process and work these things out in a way that will at least stop the killing, and that's exactly what did not happen, those benchmarks were never met.
Yeah, I mean, it never happened.
It sort of, the government sort of took it as, you know, the surge had sort of finally defeated the Sunni.
It didn't much like the sort of the awakening movement and so forth, which had taken over the al-Qaeda and was kind of waiting for the Americans to leave to finally sort of enforce a complete victory over the Sunni.
I think that, you know, the surge, it's curious, I mean, it's so interesting, I guess people will write PhDs about this in the future, how this sort of adulteration in sort of military tactics that al-Qaeda had sort of become more powerful than it should have done because it was never that popular in Iraq.
The U.S. could take advantage of this, but it was completely oversold, and I think the media are very credulous in thinking that there's been a complete transformation.
Yeah.
Well, now, isn't Muqtada al-Sadr, I know that he is of some, you know, religious rank inside the Shiite religion there, but he's also been a nationalist, and at least in the beginning of the American war, consistently, for a few years anyway, denounced the Hakeem faction and the Badr Khor faction, the Supreme Islamic Council, for being for this sort of federation, and he said, no, we should have nationalism, we're all Iraqis, and it doesn't matter, you know, which sect you're from and that kind of thing, and even as late as, I think it would be late fall, say early December, late November 2006, I think, he was proposing something called a government of national salvation, where it would be an alliance of all Iraqi nationalists against the American and Iranian-backed Supreme Islamic Council, and he's still the most powerful guy behind the scenes in the Shiite political factions, right?
So is there any hope that he could head off the war, maybe?
The thing is that, you know, it's kind of Iraqi who's supporting the Sunni dissidents and so forth.
One of the problems is that Maliki as prime minister kind of plays the sectarian card.
He sort of, you know, makes sure that the Shia in general feel under threat from the Sunni, under threat from counter-revolution.
So the worst things get, and according to many critics in Iraq, because of him, in a way it strengthens his political position because his core support in the Shia community feel more frightened, and therefore they tend to vote for him.
So he sort of benefits from a crisis of his own creation.
Yeah.
Well, he must have studied under the Americans.
Yeah, I mean all governments kind of like to sort of have crises which they can then claim to resolve, but sort of particularly the present government in Iraq, what it does really is sort of create crises with different groups.
And it used to be, you know, they tend to get worse and worse, and there's not much sign of this turning around.
But above all, you know, Syria, the civil war in Syria is sort of crossing over into Iraq.
I don't think people have quite sort of grasped this.
So there isn't much media coverage of it.
But, you know, the war is just like Syria was partly originally, you know, you had people from al-Qaeda moving into Syria.
Now you have people sort of moving the other way, but the two crises in Syria and Iraq are turning into one crisis.
Well, now, this never got any coverage on American TV or maybe not even in American papers.
I've read it in European papers for sure.
And that is about the peaceful protests by the Sunnis.
And they really have created this massive, I don't know, Honestly, I've never read any real good description of it, but it seems like many reports of gigantic peaceful protests for the last couple of years.
You know, it's hundreds of thousands of people on the streets having, you know, it's kind of modeled on what happened in Egypt in 2011.
It was what they called the Sunni Spring.
And it was peaceful until the army, the Iraqi army, decided to break up a sit-in in a place called Hawija in Kirkuk province on the 23rd of April.
And they sort of went in with tanks to sort of against a peaceful protest, killed 44 people, I think eight of them were children.
You know, they basically shot the place up.
But actually, it was worse than that.
I mean, there's quite some credible pictures and video of protesters with their hands tied and feet tied or handcuffed.
And later these same people were found with a bullet in the head in the square.
So the assumption is, among many Iraqis, particularly in the Sunni community, that a lot of these people were executed.
So, you know, you can imagine the effect that's having on feeling in the country.
Yeah, well, man, it's just too bad.
I don't know.
So, geez, I don't know, maybe this is silly, but what about the counterfactual?
If the Americans had just left Saddam in power and said, listen, just help us fight against the Mujahideen and we'll let bygones be bygones.
We don't even have to be as close as under the Reagan years.
I think there's something about, you know, maybe I mentioned this to you before, that people sort of run two things together.
One, there was an American-British invasion to get rid of Saddam, you know, but Saddam, bad guy, a lot of Iraqis tried to get rid of him.
But there was never, you know, then the occupation, which was a catastrophe for Iraq, you know, and that really raised the political temperature and all the disaster that followed really came from the occupation.
So, in other words, you're saying...
In other words, you're saying...
Well, basically to stop the Iranians benefiting from getting rid of Saddam.
So, you're saying that if they hadn't done the occupation, pulled it off as poorly as they pulled it off, that it really didn't have to be this way at all, even if you assume the regime change?
Yeah, I mean, the occupation, they moved in, they, you know, they dissolved the army, the Ba'ath party, so basically they reduced the Sunni, who had been running Iraq, to second and third class citizens.
But, Patrick, didn't they have to do that?
I mean, didn't it come down to the Ayatollah Sistani saying, you don't want to start this war all over again against us, do you, pal?
I don't think...
There was some of that in the background, but I think that, you know, they were there to introduce democracy, they said, but they didn't actually want to hold an election.
Right.
Because they thought it would be won by Shia religious parties, as it ultimately was, that had close relations with Iran, so they were sort of...
It's very much like an old style sort of imperial occupation.
You know, I remember them telling me at the time, in 2003, we'll have an election after a census.
You know, we must absolutely essentially have a census first.
So there hasn't been a census to this day, so, you know, if their original policies had stuck, they'd still be there, there wouldn't have been an election.
But eventually, sort of Sistani and the others, you know, fighting with Sunni, they couldn't afford to fight the Shia as well.
So, you know, things began to fall apart really quite fast.
I think it's one of the sort of downsides of U.S. and other foreign media coverage in Iraq, that they were actually always sort of about two years behind events.
It was pretty evident, you know, by the end of...
It was actually quite soon, the end of 2003, that the whole U.S. position was falling apart.
It alienated the Sunni and the Shia.
I would say by the summer of 2003...
I would say by the summer of 2003, it was already falling apart.
There was that window where they were saying, OK, you said you just came to do us a favor, but you're still here, aren't you going to leave?
And I think that they already started getting mad in the early summer of 2003.
It was pretty apparent that they realized that you're not leaving, that you're going to try to stay, you know?
Yeah, and they were going to try and stay.
You know, I think one of the...
The initial invasion seemed so easy that, you know, a lot of U.S. officials, not just neocons, thought, you know, we can kind of do what we want in Iraq.
You know, there'll be no price to pay.
You know, while the Iraqis thought, well, we didn't fight the invasion, we can certainly fight now.
The other, of course, great mistake was to think, to start, you know, this extraordinary arrogance of power to say, aha, Baghdad today, Tehran and Damascus tomorrow.
Now, you start saying that to people, the people in Baghdad and Damascus think, well, right, we're much better fighting Baghdad than fighting our home territory, so we'll come to you before you come to us, you know?
It was going to be bad, but I think that sort of imperial arrogance and ignorance turned what would have been a failure into a catastrophe.
Yeah.
Well, especially when the Iranians were saying, oh, you guys want to invade Iraq, huh?
Let us help with logistics and things.
And instead of outright working with them, we worked kind of in conflict with them, but ultimately fought for them and their friends the whole time anyway, and we ended up with a Dawa Party government anyway.
Yeah, I mean, it's a peculiar period.
I was talking last week to an Iraqi politician, and he was saying, he said, I named, you know, the period 2003 to 2013, he called the American-Iranian period in Iraqi history, when the country, Iraq, was dominated by two sort of foreign powers.
But it was dominated by two foreign powers who kind of fought each other, you know, trying to basically fight each other.
And consequently, you know, Iraq paid a price for this, you know, that only leaders who would get on with both powers could sort of form governments.
And these were all from peculiar people, very corrupt people.
So I think, you know, it's sort of a part of U.S. policy in Iraq was sort of somehow to be openly confrontational to Iran, but to secretly try and reach some arrangement, but never quite, you know, trying to keep it as secret as possible.
Right.
And I'm sorry for jumping around so much, but if I can ask you one last one, it would be, are the Syrian rebels any closer to actually winning against the Baath Party in Damascus, the government there, than the last time we spoke?
No, it's just gone the other way, you know.
I mean, it's always been the case, I mean, it's the case now, it was the case a year ago, that the rebels, you know, they've conquered, taken one not very big provincial capital, you know.
They haven't taken any other cities.
There hasn't been any really big defections of whole units or really important generals.
And the last sort of one or two months, certainly the last month, things are going against them, you know.
You can drive now from Damascus up to Homs, and then you can north of Damascus, and then you can drive to the coast.
So the rebels, if anything, have been losing territory.
So it's going that way.
I mean, the standoff, neither side is winning.
Maybe neither side is capable of winning.
So I think that, if anything, the Assad government has got that a little bit more powerful over the last couple of months.
All right.
Well, thanks very much for coming on the show again, Patrick.
I sure appreciate it.
No, any time.
All right, everybody.
That is the great Patrick Cockburn, Middle East correspondent for The Independent in England.
That's independent.co.uk.
And a couple of recent ones are the civil war in Iraq has already begun and Iraqi army losing hold on north to Sunni and Kurdish forces as troops desert.
And also check out his great book, Muqtada, Muqtada al-Sadr, The Shia Revival and the Future of Iraq.
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