04/17/07 – Juan Cole – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton, and this is Antiwar Radio.
Antiwar Radio is the history professor from the University of Michigan who runs the Informed Comment Blog.
Professor Juan Cole, welcome to the show, sir.
Thank you so much.
Alright, yeah, so I've been dying to get you on the show here to talk about recent developments in the southern portion of Iraq, or the Shia part of Iraq, I guess.
It seems, well, the headlines this morning is that Sadr's group has quit the government again, or at least, I guess they said he left some of his guys, but took out most of them.
Last week, 500,000 Shiites protested in Najaf and Qut and other cities in the south of Iraq, and I wonder if this is the death knell for the United Iraqi Alliance, the Shiite alliance that runs the government in Iraq now.
Well, the Iraqi political coalition, the United Iraqi Alliance, which is a coalition of Shiite fundamentalist parties, does control the Iraqi government, and it has suffered now from two major defections.
One, the Islamic Virtue Party, which is based down south in Basra, had 15 seats in parliament.
That withdrew, and then now Muqtada Sadr has asked the members of his party that are in the cabinet to withdraw.
What they said is that they wouldn't boycott parliament meetings, but I don't think they can be depended on to vote for the prime minister any longer.
So, the Iraqi government certainly is a minority government and is getting weaker.
Now, you know, we often talk on this show anyway in kind of shorthand about the Shiite majority that rules this and rules that, but ultimately it's not the Shiite majority of the population of Iraq that has the power.
It's the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution, the Dawa Party, and Sadr kind of have it divided, but those are just the politicians, right?
That's right.
Well, they've been elected.
They sit in parliament.
They don't seem to be able to exercise very much hands-on power.
The bureaucracy doesn't respond very well to them since it was gutted when Saddam fell, and they don't have a proper army.
So, you know, there is a sense in which the Iraqi government is a glorified, debating society.
It doesn't have that much power to make things happen in Iraq.
Well, victory is defined as making that government the government of Iraq.
They say over at the Weekly Standard that the surge is working.
Is this an impossible task?
I don't think it's impossible, but it's very, very, very difficult, and there's no evidence yet that the surge is working.
The new security plan began in mid-February.
The rate of daily killings, according to the Iraqi government itself, in political violence actually increased 4% from mid-February through the end of March.
So, I don't know what the criterion is for working, but I wouldn't say that's promising.
And then we've had all of this political turmoil and these enormous demonstrations, which were not well covered in the United States, where their significance was not highlighted.
But, you know, it's not easy to travel in Iraq.
It's dangerous, in fact.
And to get literally hundreds of thousands of people out in the streets is a real feat, and it happened without them being bombed, so a lot of care was taken with security.
And the message that those crowds were sending was that they want a timeline for a U.S. withdrawal.
They want to know when exactly the U.S. is thinking of leaving their country.
And to be able to get this kind of response, I mean, I think this is the largest demonstration we've seen since the fall of Saddam, shows that the Shia itself is shifting.
Initially, they were very happy to have Saddam gone and were relatively complacent toward the American presence.
That's changing.
Right.
These aren't the people who have been the constituency for the Sunni insurgency.
These are the people who've basically been having patience and biding their time hoping that when we leave they'll be the ones with the power.
So they haven't been fighting us this whole time.
That's right.
And now the public opinion clearly is turning against us.
Well, I remember Iran had instructed the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution, and I'm sure you can fill me in, perhaps, that don't fight.
Be patient.
Keep your guys at home.
If the troops come to your neighborhood, it's best to fall back.
Don't cause trouble, because over the long term here, we're the big winners, guys.
Don't do anything silly.
Yeah, that was the general Shiite point of view on the surge, which is that if the Shiites stayed quiet since they were not the primary target, basically the surge would be a way of using the Marines to put down the Sunni Arabs further.
And so they just were to heap their heads down.
And that has been done.
That is to say, several hundred local commanders of the Mahdi Army have been arrested, which ordinarily would have been a big provocation.
But there was no response in East Baghdad to those arrests.
The Shiites there have been quiet, and Muqtada Sir clearly ordered them not to respond in kind.
Now, help me with my understanding of this.
I know that basically Muqtada al-Sadr and his whole clan are sort of a different faction among Iraqis from the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution types.
I think Robert Dreyfuss called it Badr versus Sadr, the Hakim clan versus the Sadr clan.
And the Hakim clan lived in Iran all during the Iran-Iraq war, and basically waiting for one day when America would come and overthrow Saddam for them, whereas the Sadr clan stayed in Iraq all along.
And my understanding was, and perhaps this was ignorant all along, that Sadr was actually not very tied with the Iranian government.
You could say that the Dawa party and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution were basically the Iran-backed factions, but Sadr was a nationalist and was willing to form a unity government with the Sunni Arabs and that sort of thing.
Is that right?
That's correct.
Is it still right, I guess?
Well, it's a murky situation, and there have been allegations, mainly from U.S. military intelligence, that some fighters in the Mahdi army loyal to Muqtada al-Sadr have gotten some training in Iran.
And I have no way of knowing if that's true or not.
Is it plausible?
Yes, that some did, maybe.
But on the whole and by and large, the Muqtada al-Sadr movement is based in the Shiite slums of East Baghdad, of Amara and Qud, the southern Shiite cities, not so much in Basra, where the movement is weak.
And it is very nativist.
It's for Iraqis.
They've been very critical of Iranian influence and Iraqi Shi'ism.
They're not as enthusiastic about Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the spiritual leader of Iraq's Shiites, as most other Shiites, because he is from Iran and was quiet in the Saddam period.
So they're militant, they're poor, they're Iraqi nativists.
And so the typical thing you see in the U.S. press often is that Muqtada al-Sadr is particularly close to Iran and so forth, and that's simply not true.
He's been there a couple times in both instances.
I think the Iranian leadership told him he's went behind the years and he should sit down and be quiet and let Sistani run the show.
I see.
Well, I have a couple of things there.
One, to just add, I guess, that our government keeps accusing Iran of being behind the new, more sophisticated roadside bombs, the EFPs, they're called.
And yet, Reuters reported last Saturday, quoting Lieutenant Colonel Scott Beicher, that they had found an EFP factory in Diwaniya, 100 miles or so south of Baghdad.
And so that's one strike against them, but then, as you say, they've also been accusing Sadr's guys of training in Iran, and I basically just dismissed this because of who the source of the accusation was, but then I've seen this, and I'm sure you saw this from the 15th, April 15, 2007, in The Independent.
Iran trains thousands of Iraqi insurgents, and supposedly at least the sources here are the insurgents themselves.
And it's about the Mahdi army going to train near Tehran.
Well, as I said, that wouldn't be impossible.
I'm unaware of good evidence for it.
I mean, you have to be careful with these Western news reports about these kinds of things, because a lot of allegations are made that are difficult to prove based on hearsay, basically.
For instance, if you say thousands have gone for training, how did they go?
The roads aren't safe.
The border is often closed.
The U.S. recently arrested the son of Abdulaziz Al-Hakim for coming across that border at an unmarked checkpoint.
So the U.S. is watching thousands of these guys go over there for training and doing nothing about it.
You see, that doesn't make any sense to me.
Right.
Yeah, you're right, it really doesn't.
And it also brings the idea, too, that if it is happening, it's been this long.
It's taken this long for Sadr to fall into the Iranian fold, when he's been so nationalistic all this time.
Yeah, I just don't find it plausible.
I don't think he's in Iran.
I don't think he's close to the Iranian leadership.
I think they see him as a loose cannon, and he sees them as foreign to Iraq's national interests.
And there can be, nevertheless, elements of operational cooperation at a very basic level.
But the idea that Sadr is Iran's man in Iraq, that just doesn't make any sense to me.
Well, it's kind of funny, then, isn't it?
If really Abdulaziz Al-Hakim and the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution types are much closer to that description, Iran's man in Iraq, why is it that all these accusations fly toward Muqtada al-Sadr, who's trying to hold Iraq together, and not at the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution, which, in my understanding, they could give or take sovereign Iraq and just assume have autonomy and an alliance with Iran?
Yeah, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, or SCIRI, headed by Abdulaziz Al-Hakim, was formed among Iraqi expatriates in Tehran at the instance of Ayatollah Khomeini.
And it has been, for 20 years, very close to the Iranian regime, almost certainly is heavily funded by it.
It's been alleged that they get weapons from Iran, and that seems plausible to me.
But the other thing is that they are the main U.S. ally in Iraq.
Iran and the U.S. are backing the same factions.
You have to make your accusations hollow.
Well, I see the accusations as a jealous girlfriend story.
The Americans want the Supreme Council all for themselves.
They don't have to share with their affections with Iran.
But, I mean, on the whole, I mean, Scott, what I would say is that I think the U.S., the Bush administration has it in for Iran.
They would like to buffet Iran with accusations to find ways of increasing economic pressure on Iran.
They would like to see that regime gone one way or another.
If they had the wherewithal, they might well attack it militarily.
I don't think that they're in a position to do that.
So these allegations that are being made about Iran are part of a political strategy, and I think it's shameful, absolutely shameful that the U.S. officer corps is going along with it.
General Caldwell just refused to read those communiques because they give a false impression of what's going on.
I mean, the major problem in Iraq is Sunni Arab guerrillas.
And we had five of our guys killed yesterday by the Sunni Arab guerrillas.
And when you have a general coming in and giving a press conference about Iran being the source of all the problems, when we know it's the Sunni Arab guerrillas and their economic backers in the Gulf and so forth that's actually killing our guys, then that's taking your eye off the ball.
That's not good public policy, and it's dangerous.
Yeah, well, there is kind of an unreality to this whole situation.
I remember, geez, back in the spring of 2005, maybe it was even 2004, you and I talked, and I guess this is probably an oversimplification, but we basically decided that since the Kurdish Peshmerga and the Supreme Council's border corps had offered to go and put down the Sunni insurgency themselves, and America said, no, no, no, no, don't worry, we'll take care of it, thanks, but no thanks, that basically our guys were being put in the position of protecting the Sunni insurgency they're fighting from the majority that they put in power.
Yes, the Americans are just trying to play umpire and they're getting shot while they're playing it.
It really is, I hate to just rip off Justin Raimondo, but it is like Bizarro World where none of this stuff really makes sense.
If you saw, and we're going to be talking about this later in the show, the op-ed in the Washington Post yesterday by the guy who turned down the job of war czar, who said, there is no connection between the long-term position of Iraq and that region and what it means, and the actual policy on the ground.
Nobody has connected those two things, and wow, they really are as disconnected as their propaganda seems, apparently, on the inside.
Yeah, nobody seems to be in control of policy in a positive sense.
Everybody in the administration who's powerful seems to have some kind of veto, so Cheney keeps shooting plans down, but doesn't seem to have any positive thing to put in place, and I think that's why Bush was so enthusiastic about Fred Kagan's idea of a surge, was that it was something they could do.
I mean, it was visible and it had an edge of reality to it and so forth, but even it doesn't actually make much sense because, you know, 21,500 extra troops in Baghdad and Al-Anbar province are not going to solve this thing.
Well, certainly not.
In fact, it seems to me, I was reading Andrew Coburn's book about Donald Rumsfeld, and he makes the point in there that if they had gone in with 500,000, things may be that much worse.
After all, this insurgency is fighting against foreign occupation.
Given more occupation, you're just going to get more fighting against it.
Well, yes, I mean, that's a controversial allegation.
Of course, it's counterfactual, so we don't know.
But the argument for having had more troops is based on analogy to the Balkans.
And, you know, the Balkans didn't fall apart after the US and NATO intervention.
Well, it's taking until now.
I mean, it's a long slog in the Balkans and things are still not all that great, but it's not Iraq.
And the point was that the kind of troop ratio you had to the civilian population is similar to the 500,000 number it would be for Iraq.
So it's only, you know, these things have a natural history, insurgencies, and the argument is that if you had prevented the looting, if you put in law and order as soon as you took over and sort of played on those instincts the Iraqis had developed under the Ba'ath of being afraid of government and being orderly, that you could have prevented the insurgency from starting up in the first place.
I mean, you know, you couldn't have prevented some guerrillas from blowing things up or from attacking troops.
But the question is, does the general public support this kind of thing?
And the argument is that since the US wasn't able to provide security, and since these guys were around them, they were dangerous, they were committed, they gradually pulled the local population in on their side.
Right.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
I'm talking with Juan Cole, Professor of History at the University of Michigan.
His blog is Informed Comment.
You can find it at juancole.com.
And now when you look, Professor Cole, at the half a million Shiites protesting in the streets peacefully, albeit last week, do you think that this heralds the beginning of multi-religious, multi-ethnic insurgency, basically all Iraqi Arabs against American occupation, regardless of what Abdulaziz Hakim wants?
Well, certainly there were some Sunni clergymen who came up from Basra and participated in the Najaf demonstration alongside the Shiites.
I mean, to any extent that you develop a powerful Shiite faction like that of the Sudras, that wants the US to set a timetable for withdrawal, obviously that particular plank of their platform is in accord with the plank of the Sunni Arab political forces, so there is room for cooperation on that issue across the board, both in civil society and in parliament.
I mean, the cooperation is difficult and may ultimately become impossible because of death squad activity towards one another by Sunnis and Shiites on each side.
So the same Mahdi army that helped to provide security to the Najaf demonstration is perfectly capable of, and indeed I think guilty of, going out at night in Baghdad to Sunni neighborhoods and pulling out Sunnis and killing them.
Right, and now these are the guys that we're training.
In fact, I believe it's tonight on PBS as part of the American at the Crossroads series that they're doing.
They're going to be playing a front line by Martin Smith, who I interviewed here on this show, who did a report about how, when we talk about training the Iraqi army, all we're talking about is training the Mahdi army and the Badr corps.
Well, Scott, that's not my information.
As I understand it, it's the special police commandos of the interior ministry that are heavily infiltrated with Badr and Mahdi elements, and they probably have gotten some U.S. training as well.
But my understanding, and I was told this by Ambassador Peter Galbraith, who was over there last summer, is that the new Iraqi army is not heavily infiltrated by Badr and Mahdi.
It's cleaner than the other security forces.
But I'll be interested to see what your interviewee has to say on television.
Yeah, well, it was a very interesting interview, and I know it could be, as you say, kind of anecdotal here and there rather than widespread, but he has footage where he went around and they found the weapons cache, and the Iraqi soldiers that he's with, one of them is telling the other one, this isn't the real weapons cache, there's a much, much bigger one somewhere else, and they didn't realize this until they got it back and were editing it, and their translator told them, hey, do you know what these guys are talking about right here?
They're joking about how they're pretending to find the weapons, but really they're not, etc.
Yeah, yeah, but those were presumably Sunni troops.
I don't know, we'll have to see.
The Sunnis that have the weapons caches.
Right, well, yeah, and I guess if that is the case, then that brings up, because I believe he was talking about these were Mahdi Army or Badr Corps guys, so maybe there's more working relationship between those factions than we imagine sometimes.
Well, Badr and Mahdi have cooperated in some ways, and as I said, in the special police commandos, which is kind of, I guess, like their FBI or something, that both Mahdi and Badr elements are there, and they have cooperated on certain kinds of issues, and they have been accused of death squad activity as well.
A regular army, I think, is a little cleaner in this regard, but of course, the thing is, if you're recruiting troops, who knows how to fire a gun?
Who knows how to handle themselves?
Who would make a good soldier is the Badr Corps.
So a certain number of them may have gone into the army.
Okay, now, if I can keep you just a couple of few more minutes here, I wanted to ask you real quickly about one of the most neglected topics in terms of this Iraq war, and that is the tension between the Kurds and the Turks.
And there were reports last week that the Turks had had it, and they were ready to go ahead and invade Kurdistan.
And presumably, they would like to control Kirkuk over the long term and the oil wealth and so forth, but there are also Kurdish terrorist groups that have been operating from Kurdistan and then crossing into Turkey and that kind of thing.
What do you foresee for the future of that relationship?
Well, I think what General Buyuk Annette was suggesting was more on the lines of hot pursuit.
Eastern Anatolia, eastern part of Turkey is heavily Kurdish.
There has been a Kurdish insurgency in that area, led by the PKK, originally a radical Marxist peasant-based movement.
There are 5,000 PKK fighters who have taken refuge in Iraqi Kurdistan over the border in Iraq, and they have slipped over and blown things up inside Turkey.
They've undertaken operations and then slipped back over into Iraqi Kurdistan where they're safe.
And what the General was saying, I think, is that from Ankara's point of view, it cannot be allowed to go on and that, if necessary, Turkey will pursue these known terrorists over the Iraqi border and come after them regardless of what country they're in.
And that, of course, set off a firestorm of protest from the Kurds and even former President Clinton came out and said it would be a disaster if Turkey did that.
Buyuk Annette's comments come in part in response to inflammatory statements of Kurdistan President Masoud Barzani who was asked what would happen if the Turks interfered with the Kurdish annexation of Kirkuk and he said, well, then they'd have problems in Diyarbakir.
That is to say, he seemed to suggest that the Iraqi Kurds would use the PKK to blow something up in the Turkish city of Diyarbakir if the Turks interfered in Iraqi Kurdistan too much.
Well, all of this is war talk.
I mean, this is a very dangerous kind of situation.
Pilot dry matchsticks just laying there ready to go up, it sounds like.
Yeah.
I think the whole northern part of Iraq, which has so far been quieter than the south, is a tinderbox and it's the kind of set of issues that could easily draw the US military in.
Turkey is a NATO ally, the PKK is a terrorist group, it's disturbing that the US allies in Iraqi Kurdistan are more or less collaborating with the PKK and so that is a situation that not only could blow up, but it could draw US troops up there.
And now, lastly, there were reports in the last few weeks about the Saudi Arabians talking with the Syrians, talking with the Iranians and it made me wonder whether a much more hands-off approach by the United States to the Middle East would allow these different powers and factions to work these problems out themselves rather than, you know, the whole country will go up in smoke if America leaves and maybe these things can be worked out by the locals without our help.
Well, the country is going up in smoke with us there.
Yeah, I think the United States' presence in Iraq is counterproductive now.
I think it paralyzes the neighbors from taking action to quiet things down, as they ordinarily would, because the United States is the 800-pound gorilla in the room and nothing can be done without its acquiescence and people tend then just to back off.
But, of course, there's also the sense in which the US is playing a zero-sum game.
Its policy in Iraq is to ensconce the fundamentalist Shiites and the Kurds in power and to put down the Sunni Arabs.
And the Sunni Arabs are resisting being put down and I think it's become an extremely dangerous policy.
And so between our paralysis of the neighbors and our zero-sum game inside, we're producing a ratcheting, ever-increasing war.
Alright, my friends.
This has been Juan Cole.
He's a professor of history at the University of Michigan.
His excellent blog is called Informed Comment.
You can find it at juancole.com.
Thank you so much for your time this morning, sir.
I appreciate it.
You're very welcome, Scott.
Take care.