Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like, say our names, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing the great Patrick Coburn.
He really is the most important Western reporter in the Middle East, covering all the wars for us.
And of course, writes for The Independent, independent.co.uk.
He wrote Age of Jihad and Chaos and Caliphate and Muqtada, the book on Muqtada al-Sadr.
And of course, again, independent.co.uk.
And the most recent here is the Saudi Arabia drone attacks have changed global warfare on the line from Baghdad, Iraq today.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Patrick?
I'm doing good.
Thanks for having me.
Very happy to have you back on the show here.
So I guess, well, I'm not sure I want to talk about Iraq so bad, but or ask you about Iraq so bad, I mean.
But let's start with this article about Saudi Arabia and the Houthis and the drone and missile attack on Saudi oil facilities there last week.
What do you think?
Well, this is a big change in the Middle East.
Previously, the assumption was that the U.S., Saudi Arabia could use their air power on other countries, on movements.
And there was no real comeback from the other side.
But with the drone attacks on these two Saudi oil facilities, Abqaiq and Quraiz, suddenly that's all changed.
That guys who have some drones that probably maybe cost you a couple hundred thousand dollars can suddenly cut the world's oil supply from Saudi Arabia.
By half, they weren't able to defend these places.
So suddenly it's a much more equal playing field in the Middle East.
Yeah.
Well, now, so there's a reporter that I talk to pretty regularly out of Yemen named Nasser Arabi.
And he was saying that the Houthis, not only have they taken credit, but they specified that they had help from Saudi Shia who launched the attack from their territories, how they were able to launch that successful attack there.
What do you think of that?
Yeah, well, that's very interesting.
I mean, I had sort of speculated a bit about that at the time.
About 15 percent of the population of Saudi Arabia is Shia, a lot of them in this area called Eastern Province where the oil facilities are.
And they've always been discriminated against.
But under Crown Prince Samad bin Salman, this has got a lot worse.
Earlier in the year, there was mass execution of Shia protesters.
Guys who've been protesting in the street, a lot of whom were sort of teenagers when they were protesting.
They were put in jail, they were tortured.
And then earlier this year, they were executed.
So there'll be a lot of bitterness, a lot of anger there.
So I think if the Houthis, there'll be a lot of anger and a lot of hatred there.
And now, I guess you're talking about in your article here, too, that whether Iran was directly involved or not, really, even if it was just the Houthis and their local Saudi Shia friends that did this attack, that still drives home a very important lesson for a potential war with Iran.
That asymmetric warfare can be extremely powerful when you have the home field advantage there like that.
Yeah, I mean, previously, the U.S. and Saudi Arabia might have calculated that they could go in, they could blow up the Iranian oil refineries and oil industry, and there was no real comeback from Iran.
But what we saw with this attack was that the Iranians are saying, you do it to us, we'll do it to you.
You've stopped us exporting oil through U.S. sanctions.
Well, we'll make it pretty difficult for you to export oil as well.
So they have a comeback.
Why there'd be no U.S. or Saudi retaliation for these attacks, whether they're blaming the Iranians, which seems a bit dubious, but they are blaming Iran, but also saying we're not going to do anything about it, which is pretty amazing given the amount of money that these two countries spend on arms.
You know, the U.S. defense budget, I think, is around $750 billion a year.
The Saudis spent around $68 billion in the last year buying weapons.
But they can't do anything because they can't really face that retaliation.
Not just against oil industry, but there are things like desalination plants, which Saudi Arabia is very dependent on for fresh water, that are very vulnerable to a drone or an attack by a small missile.
They're very compact and you could destroy them pretty easily.
Well, thank goodness that they accept the reality of that.
And there have been times where we've been really worried that the American government was just in denial about the vulnerability of especially American forces in Kuwait, in Iraq, where they're embedded with the Shiites.
We're about to talk about that some more in a minute, where we got Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, and of course, in Qatar and Bahrain, these huge bases all vulnerable to Iranian retaliation.
So, seeing the Americans, as you said, announcing that they're not going to do anything about it is a real relief that they know they really can't.
Thank God they really know that.
Well, I think that's kind of the lesson that the Iranians are trying to drive home, not just with the attack on these two oil facilities on the 14th of September.
But earlier, you'll recall, they shot down a U.S. very high-flying, highly technical drone, which apparently the U.S. Air Force thought the Iranians couldn't hit with a missile, didn't have a missile capable of hitting.
So, they learned different.
And then there was this rather peculiar attack on some Japanese tankers, which kind of looks as though there was a limpet mine in place on them, but not enough to sink them, just to blow a hole above the waterline to say, look, this is one, two, three.
We can take these things if we wanted to by just putting a bigger mine here, but we're just showing you what we're up to, what we're capable of.
So, I think that these are all messages being sent saying, do it to us, we'll do it to you, and we've got to come back if you attack us.
Hang on just one second.
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Okay, now, so you talked about how you're in Baghdad, Iraq today.
What story are you covering there now?
Well, it relates to the story we've just been talking about, which is what worries Iraqis when I talk to them in Baghdad is, you know, is Iraq going to be the battlefield between the U.S. and Iran?
If there's a confrontation, that confrontation turns into crisis or maybe a war.
But you see quite a lot of that already here.
Baghdad's an awful lot better than it was the last two years since the capture of Mosul, the ISIS Daesh capital.
In 2017, things are a lot better in Baghdad.
You see, they don't have all these horrible cement walls they used to have everywhere, which are anti-blast walls, which made you feel as if you were in prison the whole time.
They've opened up the green zone, so there's more roads and bridges, so you're not stuck in a traffic jam the whole time.
You know, you can see lights, a lot of people around late at night.
You didn't see that previously.
So a lot of people think they got better the last two years, but now they're all sort of telling me, you know, they're worried that the future's, you know, as they would say, going to be darker because there's the prospect of yet another war here.
Don't know if it will happen, but, you know, it's just on the horizon between the U.S. and Iran.
You know, probably that's right, because if there's another occasion in which something happens that is blamed on the Iranians and Trump sort of blames everything on the Iranians that happens in the Middle East, then, you know, it may be that the next time around, it'll be too humiliating not to retaliate against Iran to do something.
So I think the risk is growing that that will happen.
As I said, it was pretty extraordinary, despite these incredible sums spent on weapons, that they were completely caught by surprise by this attack on this enormous oil facility, Abqaiq, in Saudi Arabia.
Now, so here's the thing about, I mean, American forces still stationed in Iraq number in at least the low thousands, I guess, maybe, you know, better special operations forces and spies, and they're still embedded with the Iraqi army fighting, I guess, Iraq war three and a half in western Iraq against what's left of ISIS or al-Qaeda in Iraq, right?
Yeah, there isn't much of it left, you know, but what there's another war sort of beginning here and what sort of energizes here in Israel has been launching some drone attacks here, one of them in Baghdad.
The reason for this is that they say they're hitting Iranian supplied missiles, supplied what's to what's called the Hashallah al-Shaabi, which is a sort of coalition of paramilitary, Shia paramilitary groups.
They're also important in Parliament, but there are about 130,000, 150,000 of them.
The US sees them as being sort of pro-Iranian, sometimes says this, Iranian proxies and so forth.
But the fact the Israelis have got involved has sort of raised the political temperature here and in Parliament, there's a bill going through demanding that US troops leave and so forth.
So, there's a more edgy atmosphere here than there was a few months ago.
And now, these, as the media calls them, Iran-backed Shiite militias, are they mostly still just referring to the Badr Brigade under its different names?
Those are a little, there are about 30, 30 of them.
The Badr Brigade is one of the biggest ones.
I saw the leader of one called Al-Shahada this morning, he was saying, quite interesting, a guy called Abu Ala, he was saying that they were working away, making drones.
And they had a camp outside Baghdad, which on the 12th of August was attacked by Israeli drones.
And Israel has claimed this, so there isn't any question about that that's what happened.
He says that these drones were launched from a, well, there was a Iraqi government report commissioned into what happened that found on looking at the radar that these drones had come from a US base in northeast Syria.
So, you know, it's all kind of weird, but you know, you can feel that the temperature is going up here.
Well, the constant theme of all of this stuff, of course, is the regime change of 2003, not just against Saddam Hussein, but in favor of those Shiite groups that have taken power and have taken the capital city.
And then the reaction to that and the attempted cleanup or attempt to limit Iranian power and influence after doing so much to increase it.
And yet all of that seems to backfire when you're talking about, say, for example, the regime change against Iran's friend Assad in Syria, which ended up creating the Islamic State and required us aligning with the Shiite in Iraq again, for example.
Or giving Iran credit for everything the Houthis do in this losing war in Yemen, so that now essentially the narrative has so much truth to it that Iranian power and influence has expanded in Iraq, Syria and Yemen.
And so now they must be confronted.
The Americans are more desperate than ever to want to try to do something about the consequences of all that they have wrought.
No, that's really true.
By 2003, the Iranians had the Taliban, who they hated on one side of Afghanistan, Saddam Hussein, who they hated on the other side.
In 2001, I should have said.
On the other side, both have gone, thanks to the U.S., so Iranian influence expanded.
Then within Yemen, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran has relations with local militias, which the U.S. denounces as proxies like the Houthis and Hezbollah.
But actually, they're not really proxies.
They come from indigenous Shia communities.
That's what holds them together.
They get support from Iran, all from going back decades.
So they're close to the Iranians, but Iranians don't really have command and control of these outfits.
They're pretty autonomous.
In Iraq, it's a little difficult.
It depends which organization I'm talking about.
Some seem to be very close to Iran, others further distance from Iran.
But if they come under pressure from the U.S., then that will become self-fulfilling.
They'll rely on the Iranians to back them up.
Right.
Well, the Americans, I guess, ever since Sistani called for one man, one vote in 2004, the Americans kind of made peace with the idea that, well, I guess it's going to be scary in Dawa, but we got to compete with Iran for influence with them.
And so even though they really lost that fight back in 2008, they're still fighting it.
They're still hoping that American money and weaponry can outweigh the Baghdad government's previous and obviously pretty permanent relationship with Iran.
Yeah, I think that there is, you know, that's the same mistake that they still made again and again.
It's a very simple thing about Iraq and Iran.
You know, Iran is run by a Shia Muslim government.
And so is Baghdad.
You know, it's a majority Shia country here.
So a guy was saying to me last night, who was a leader of one of the Shia parties, he said, you know, in religious terms, you know, our relationship with Iran gives us strategic depth.
You know, we need another big Shia country.
There's a guy who actually doesn't like the Iranians very much.
But the fact that they both belong to this religion means at the end of the day, they're always going to sort of go for the Iranian side.
And the fact that Iran is, you know, down the road from here with this enormous common border.
Now, let me ask you this.
When you talk about how Baghdad itself, the capital city there, is doing so much better now.
Have many Sunnis been allowed to come back or is it still a 85, 90 percent Shiite city now?
I don't know what the percentages are.
I guess some have come back.
It's kind of difficult to know that unless you sort of wander around and talk to estate agents, which I sometimes do.
But, you know, the Sunni have kind of lost out here from up to under Saddam, but also under the British rule and under the Ottomans.
The Sunni Arabs were the dominant community here.
They're about 20 percent of the population.
And then the Kurds are about 17 percent and the rest are Shia.
And since 2003, the Shia have been sort of running things here.
So the Sunni, particularly, you know, during the ISIS period, you know, ISIS took Fallujah, the Sunni town down the road to Jordan here.
You know, it was recaptured.
A lot of these cities were hammered with artillery and fire and bombardment from the air.
Mosul was very badly damaged, particularly the old city and an awful lot of people killed.
So that community has been really sort of battered.
So they sort of aren't going anywhere.
They don't have an effective political leadership.
You know, some people would say it was to a degree their fault that they opted for al-Qaeda and ISIS as their sort of vehicle for opposing the Baghdad government.
But they did, you know, so they've been truly hammered here.
The Kurds also got the bad idea of having a referendum a couple of years ago looking for independence.
And it was never going to happen.
And the Iraqi army retook Kirkuk.
So this is very much a sort of Shia state at the moment.
But it's still, as I said, it's a lot better than it was.
But the bar is fairly low.
This place has been a victim of war, civil war, sanctions, more war for 40 years.
So it'll take a long time to recover.
So in the early part of this decade, you and I talked about how the Sunnis had been essentially cut loose.
They weren't really being dominated by the Iraqi Shiite government as much as just sort of spun out into a stateless sort of situation out there.
And I remember, of course, in the spring of 2013, you talked about how the Iraqi army was actually AWOL from Mosul.
And that all of Western Iraq was really ripe for the taking by the, at that time, the want to be Islamic state, which then came to do exactly that.
But so that seems to be like the question for now, right?
Is whether the Shiite government is doing anything to reintegrate the populations of Western Iraq into their system at all, or whether they're just as alienated out there, you know?
Well, I think there is a lot of alienation out there, but they're also, you know, kind of defeated.
I mean, the last few years of under ISIS, living under ISIS rule was pretty bad for them.
So, you know, so they're still sort of rebuilding war damage, you know.
There's still a lot of bitterness and hatred, but as a result of ISIS, who cooperated with ISIS, who killed who, and so forth.
I was talking to one tribe up the, further up the Euphrates, who ISIS massacred.
They lost about 1,200 people, you know.
So when you have sort of bloodletting like that, it takes a long time for people to forget.
And so I think that they're, the Sunni are pretty, pretty crushed at the moment.
Yeah.
It seems like that just means we're setting the stage right now for the next war, right?
Because they can't just be completely, you know, abandoned out there with no revenue and no protection, no law and order and no anything at all, which is, it sounds like the situation they're in.
Yeah, it's not good from their point of view, but I'm not sure there's going to be a reaction down the road, but not quite yet, you know.
It's, I know a lot of them in sort of refugee camps, you know, pushed out of cities.
They can't go home.
They lost their lab.
They lost their property, you know.
If you're a refugee and, you know, you're pushed out of some town, you don't come back for five years.
When you do, you'll really like to find somebody who's taken out of your house, and there's no plans to give it up again, you know.
So it's, things begin to gel.
It's very still to put things back like the way they were.
Right.
I've read a few reports of the Iraqi military forces taking severe retribution against people who are accused of working with ISIS.
I mean, not just in the courts where people are given the death penalty routinely all day long, but also in the refugee camps and people just being tortured straight eye for an eye.
No, no attempt at reconciliation.
More like, yeah, we're going to humiliate you all over again for what you've done kind of attitude.
Yeah.
I mean, you'll find that.
I mean, ISIS sort of, you know, conducted these massacres of Shia, Yazidis, and others.
You know, they put them online in order to terrify people, you know.
So there's, you know, that lives with people.
People will still be looking for vengeance.
You find some places like, I was just down in a Shrine city of Karbala.
There was actually a bomb attack there last weekend.
Twelve people were killed.
A guy got on a bus and left a parcel under his seat.
He got off it and the bomb blew up, killed twelve people.
Now, he came from a town which used to be Sunni.
It was an ISIS and Al-Qaeda sort of stronghold.
In 2014, the Shia militias moved in, defeated ISIS, and then drove the Civilian Population Act.
You know, maybe 50,000 people lost their homes.
You know, they demand them back, but they haven't got them back.
They're not ready to get them back.
That's a pretty severe, extreme example, but you find that all over the place.
Yeah, well, that's what the future is going to look like from now on, essentially, right?
The Sunni kings of Arabia, they can't take back Baghdad for the Sunnis, but they can fling suicide bombers at it from now on.
And so, why would they stop, right?
Well, there's that.
You know, you also got young guys.
I mean, there were three guys in an ISIS cell, apparently.
You ought to be a bit careful with anything, but you know, the government says they've arrested people.
You know, you ought to be a bit careful of have they really done it, or have they just tortured guys into making confession, and so forth.
Pretty much everybody gets tortured here, gets accused of that sort of thing.
But anyway, what interested me was that these three guys came from this town, a place called Jafr al-Sakr, from which the Sunni had all been driven out and not allowed back.
So, on the one hand, you could say, you know, that's a big pool of recruits for Daesh.
On the other hand, you know, it's not just a living local community that can give them support.
It's refugees living in shacks or, you know, one-room apartments with whole families crammed into them.
All right.
Well, thank you so much for coming back on the show, Patrick.
It's great to talk to you again.
Really appreciate it.
All the best.
Patrick Coburn, he's at The Independent, independent.co.uk.
And of course, The Age of Jihad and Chaos and Caliphate and Muqtada al-Sadr, and a great many books.
He's the author of those, too.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh, yeah, and read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan, at foolserrand.us.
