12/08/09 – Patrick Cockburn – The Scott Horton Show

All right, you guys, welcome to the show, it's Antiwar Radio on Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
I'm Scott Horton.
We're streaming live, of course, at ChaosRadioAustin.org and at Antiwar.com slash radio and we're going to go ahead and get the first show of the week started here with Patrick Coburn.
He's the award-winning Middle East correspondent for The Independent, that's independent.co.uk and he's the author of the book Muqtada.
Welcome back to the show, Patrick.
How are you doing?
Fine, thank you.
Well, I sure appreciate you joining us on the show today.
No, thank you.
All right, so let's see here.
I guess we got to start with Iraq, although I mostly want to ask about Afghanistan today.
The top headline at Antiwar.com right now is that 127 people have been killed in a series of bombings around Baghdad today.
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs condemned the bombing but insisted that it proved the nation was moving in the right direction and that the attackers are threatened by that.
So what do you think about that, 127 killed in multiple bombings, a sign of progress?
Well, you know, it's sort of pressing when people say things like that.
You know, I remember the very first bombs in Baghdad in 2003 when the U.S. military spokesman and his civilian counterpart were saying this is the very last kick of the remnants of the supporters of Saddam and anti-Iraq forces.
I mean, it's kind of nonsense then and it's nonsense now.
Well, so what does it mean?
I guess, would you say that this is the so-called Islamic State of Iraq that's probably behind these and what exactly is that?
That's the front, which is really Al-Qaeda in Iraq, which doesn't really have much to do with Osama Bin Laden, it's kind of their own group.
And I assume it's them, they've done a series of bombings like this.
We used to have bombings on an industrial scale in Baghdad.
Now we have, they've refined their tactics.
The target is still the same, it's mostly sort of poor Iraqi civilians, but their tactic is to have five or six big bombs that are lit off within an hour in the center of the city, usually outside ministries or landmark buildings, also in crowded areas so they kill and wound a lot of people.
And the aim is to say to the government, which has been boasting about how security has improved, that no it hasn't, you know, we can hit you whenever we want to.
Well, and I guess there's sort of a lesson here about terrorism.
If I understand how this works right, then basically the theory behind something like the series of attacks today, obviously a coordinated series of attacks today, would be to try to get, what, the Shiite government, obviously mostly Shiite government, to overreact and crack down, and then that's supposed to help recruit more people to the resistance, right?
Sure, yeah, and I think you've got it in one.
That's the way terrorism really works, which is you tempt the government to overreact.
You know, I mean, that was, the Al-Qaeda was, I think, in their own leaflet said this about 9-11, but it wouldn't have worked from their point of view unless they could have got the Bush administration to overreact and invade Afghanistan and Iraq.
That's where their victory was.
You need a government to dance to your tune, which of course Bush did.
And it's still an open question as to how far that happens in Iraq.
Maliki, the prime minister, is obviously embarrassed by this, having made these rather unwisely these boasts about security being better, and the Shiite government, so do they start sort of sending their troops into Sunni areas and arresting all the young men, which in Iraq usually means everybody gets tortured pretty badly, and then you've got a mass reaction, so Al-Qaeda may be hoping that that's what happens.
Having said that, you know, there's a lot of criticism for, you know, not stopping these bombs and suicide bombers, and people saying that the security forces must have been implicated, and that's not necessarily true.
I mean, unfortunately, this kind of bomb in a city that's really crowded like Baghdad, packed full of vehicles, sidewalks packed full of people, it's quite, you know, it's possible to get a bomb through, and when it does go off, it kills an awful lot of people.
So what about, I guess the news said the other day that they finally worked out a deal on the election to have it in January, after all, although there have been all kinds of disputes where, I guess, the Kurdish vice presidents kept vetoing the law that the parliament passed, they finally got that through, do you think, you know, we're still on track to have what we're supposed to be down to only 50,000 troops by this August?
So it looks like that's still the timeline?
It's, yeah, March 6th is the date for the election, but you know, it's never been, somehow it's got a lot of publicity, but it's really not the case that the US was, you know, if the election was delayed a bit, the US is going to delay it a lot, but it's two different processes.
One, you have the election, and it isn't much to do with US troops, US troops are outside the cities now, and the US withdrawal is under a status of forces agreement, which was signed by Bush just at the end of last year, I mean, you remember the famous incident when Bush was in Baghdad, and he had the two shoes thrown at him, and the reason he was in Baghdad was to sign this agreement withdrawing American forces, and that isn't going to be affected by, you know, Iraqi elections, in fact, they're going to be on March the 6th anyway, so there is a date for them.
And so, basically you're saying that even if they didn't have the election, if they hadn't been able to settle on that agreement for that election, then the Maliki government is still in a position, either way, to insist that America stick to the status of forces agreement.
Yeah, I mean, these guys have got a great big army, the US forces are outside the cities, they don't, it just doesn't really do them much good, and also the US, after all, Obama wants those troops for Afghanistan, so the US doesn't necessarily want to keep them around.
Is there, has there been any move toward the resolution of the status of Kirkuk, or have they just kicked that can down the road for now?
They kicked it down the road, I mean, it's sort of, there are different things that might happen, but basically nobody's going to agree, you know, it's too big an issue, it's not just the city of Kirkuk, it's the oil fields near Kirkuk, you know, who owns those, and what happens to the province of Kirkuk, you know, this is a place that's very divided between different ethnicities and religions, so that's been kicked down the road, and, you know, it seems to be one of those big problems in the world which is kind of insoluble.
Well, and speaking of insoluble, and American occupations here, we have the Afghanistan War, and you referred to this a minute ago when we were talking about the strategy behind using terrorist tactics and provoking a reaction, you have a quote in your recent article here at the London Independent, US surge will only prolong Afghan war, and the quote is of Ayman Zawahiri, saying that the purpose of the 9-11 attack was to get American ground troops in the Muslim world in, quote, a clear-cut jihad, or to create a situation where they can have a clear-cut jihad against the infidels, they thought, this is what Michael Sawyer has said for years and years, the way that Zawahiri always framed it was that America had been at war with them all along through their governments, and so now they wanted to get our troops on the ground within rifle range, basically, try to keep them there as long as it takes to, I guess, bankrupt the American empire and force us completely out of the region, is that about right?
Yeah, that's dead on, I think, you know, and Bush played right into their hands, you know, previously in the 1990s they'd been sort of making attacks on governments which they saw as being dependent on the US, but these were sort of indigenous governments, you know, in Egypt and other countries, they really wanted to fight it out toe-to-toe with the US in Muslim countries, and so nobody was more delighted than they were when suddenly there were American armies in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Yeah, you know, I think Sawyer says the whole purpose was to get us bogged down in Afghanistan, they thought they'd learned the lesson from the Russian war, that if they just fought hard enough and believed in God enough that they could bring down any superpower, and they wanted to replicate that, but that the Iraq war was the hoped-for but unexpected gift.
Saddam, this was Osama Bin Laden's Christmas present from George Bush.
Oh yeah, very much so, you know, I think that's the mechanics of terrorism also, always, you know, that the success is not some terrorist act, it's provoking an exaggerated counter-reaction, which you turn to your advantage.
I mean, you need kind of a pretty dumb government on the other side to, as I said, dance to your tune to that degree, but...
We got that!
You know, they should have got just what they wanted.
Yeah, yeah, well, we'll never...
You know, governments like the idea of having a successful small war.
You know, governments, you can build your authority like that, you know, not just in the United States, but in Russia.
Why is Putin there?
He's the man who sprang from obscurity, he's the man who fought and won the war in Chechnya.
So it's always tempting, I think, throughout history for governments to think, aha, here we have a small successful war which we can increase our own authority, win elections, we can...
If we don't have elections, you know, it'll keep us in power for a long time.
That's the temptation for a lot of governments.
Yeah, no point in getting in a war with a major power that can fight back, but if we can just occupy people indefinitely, it's sort of the West Bank model.
Yeah, you see some sort of, you know, failed state like Iraq or Afghanistan or Somalia or Lebanon, and they look complete pushovers, you know.
In fact, you know, these are some of the most dangerous places on the planet.
But these guys aren't too smart, and they're thinking about staying in power themselves.
You know, they're not exactly experts on these places.
So again and again, they fall into these traps.
Well, you know, in Barack Obama's speech where he announced the Afghanistan escalation, at the end he said, you know, we'll follow al-Qaeda wherever they go, and that includes Somalia and Yemen, he said, at the end.
What might...
We know America's been intervening in Somalia for the past few years, but Yemen, that sounds to me like he's talking about combat forces actually operating, not just having a base, but actually fighting on the Arabian Peninsula.
How many towers might that get knocked down?
Well, also just Yemen is not a place to fight.
You know, it's another place where, you know, there isn't a strong central state.
But, you know, every village is, you know, going to fight it out.
You know, you really don't want to be there.
In the same way as Somalia, you know, much of the time people there spend fighting each other, but the one thing that will turn them around is to, you know, if there's a foreign invasion, or something that they think of as a foreign invasion.
Well, are there people in Yemen who are a threat to America?
Not at present, but there sure would be if all Americans turn up, you know.
Well, you know, when Osama Bin Laden declared war back in 1996, the title of the thing was Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places.
And apparently, best I can tell from his rhetoric, he doesn't really say the kingdom of Saudi Arabia or anything, it's the Arabian Peninsula.
All those British drawn borders, notwithstanding, that's the land of Mecca and Medina.
And no white Christian army troops are welcomed there.
Basically, right?
Sure, yeah.
I mean, actually Bin Laden, I think his family is part Yemeni, but I think of these sort of, these things that seem so easy, you know, at the time.
Let's go into Somalia, let's go into Afghanistan, Iraq, you know, Lebanon, you know, I don't remember the Marines getting blown up.
It's funny, there's no sort of memory in Washington or indeed in London that, you know, these much despised failed states are incredibly difficult to conquer.
You know, there's nobody on the other side to run up the white flag.
Just a lot of very dangerous people.
Right, right.
Instead of, you know, the model of World War II or something where, well, I guess, you know, Berlin was completely occupied, but the Japanese, they met on a boat, on, I forgot the USS something or other, and they signed a surrender and the Emperor said, okay, we gave up and the war is over.
There wasn't guerrilla resistance in Japan when MacArthur, you know, took over the administration or whatever.
The war was over.
And yet, as you're saying, we're going into regime change, the people who could possibly sign a surrender.
There's nobody to sign a surrender.
So what, the oldest guy in each village?
Yeah, I mean, you know, it's noticeable everybody, you know, who's citing who was in favor of the war in Afghanistan and Iraq cites, you know, why wasn't it like Japan or Germany?
One place they never mentioned is Italy, you know, with the U.S. forces occupied Italy, you know, which is a much more, a country which has much weaker central government.
You know, a lot of what happened in Naples was kind of what happened in Baghdad.
Well, that's maybe history that they teach students in the United Kingdom, but that's nothing I've ever learned about World War II.
What happened in Naples?
What happened in Naples?
Well, the U.S. general in command, one of his, one of his main advisors was, had been shipped over from New York, had jolly good contacts because he was a leading member of the, there was corruption everywhere.
It was, you know, very much like Baghdad was half a century later.
Yeah, it's hard to occupy unorganized people.
I forgot who it was.
It may have even been you on this show who explained that it's really hard to take over Africa because they don't have any central governments to co-opt or not very powerful ones.
And so without the instrumentation of control already set up to co-opt, it's almost impossible to occupy what amounts to a bunch of wild land and decentralized power.
No, that's exactly so.
You know, if you're going into the invasion business, you want to invade Denmark.
You don't want to invade places like Afghanistan or somewhere in Central Africa.
All right.
Well, so let's talk a little bit about the details of what's going on in Afghanistan here.
Barack Obama's speech was so full of contradictions where we're going to escalate and right about the time the last soldier gets off the plane, we're going to start withdrawing them again.
And we're going to, and then of course, Gates and Hillary Clinton both came out and contradicted him and said, 2011, forget any of that.
We're staying forever kind of thing.
We're fighting Al Qaeda.
We're fighting the Taliban, whatever that is.
We're fighting on the side of the Karzai government, which just stole 1.3 million votes and never had any legitimacy in the first place.
You know, what's going on here?
Is there any hope for even what maybe the American administration would define as success here?
I sort of doubt it.
I mean, you know, it depends how much effort they want to put into it.
You know, the United States wants to apply all its energies, all its money to getting control of Afghanistan for a few years.
Maybe they're able to do that for a short time.
I don't think they'll be able to do it in the long term.
But it's a rather sort of astonishing thing to try to do.
You know, one of the poorest countries in the world, one of the most violent countries in the world, you know, why are they doing that?
I mean, you know, my own feeling is that, you know, why did Bush invade Afghanistan and Iraq in the first place?
Well, you know, many reasons, but was to show that the U.S. was the one superpower in the world.
So, you know, you eventually had in Afghanistan, you had a war which got too big to fail, you know, because the same reason that they put money into AIG or various banks, that whatever the war was for, they couldn't be seen to lose it because the loss of prestige would be too great.
Right.
Yeah.
Only recently, I guess, heard a phone conversation where Lyndon Johnson is explaining that I will not be the first American president to lose a war.
And, of course, millions of Vietnamese and tens of thousands of Americans died after that.
And that was the only thing.
In fact, the rest of the audio he's explained to the senators about how this is a no good, no win situation.
We shouldn't even escalate in Vietnam at all.
But, geez, I'd hate for Barry Goldwater to make fun of me on the campaign trail.
So millions of people died.
And this was the decision making process, apparently.
Yeah, I think that, you know, I think half the wars in history are like that.
People think we're going to look real bad if I lose this one.
And maybe, you know, we send another 10,000 men, you know, it's all going to come right, you know, and then dribble, dribble.
You put more and more resources in and then it gets even more difficult to pull out because, you know, you have too many dead.
And people were going to say, how come?
You know, we've got so many people killed.
So, you know, you get sucked into it more and more, you know, but it's very bizarre Obama's speech.
I mean, obviously, everybody's pointing out, you know, going in announcing when you're going to pull out.
That's kind of strange.
The announcing, the key thing is, you know, to get Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan when Al-Qaeda isn't in Afghanistan so far as it exists anymore.
It's in Pakistan.
I think one of the more sort of threatening things is not what Obama said, but what Robert Gates said, the defense secretary, of saying, well, it doesn't really matter if it's Taliban or Al-Qaeda, that they're both kind of the same thing.
First of all, I think there's just a crew.
Taliban's interests are in Afghanistan.
They aren't really in the rest of the world.
But if you announce that basically they're the same as Al-Qaeda and anybody who's friendly with them is the same as Al-Qaeda, of course, that gives a tremendous boost to Al-Qaeda type organizations.
But I think that, you know, otherwise it's also pretty strange, as you pointed out, you know, announcing support for, conditional support for Karzai, the president of Afghanistan.
But what happens if he just says drop dead or just doesn't do anything when you say remove this corrupt governor?
He doesn't do that.
You do one of two things.
Either there's nothing, you do nothing, but you don't do no replacement for Karzai, or you start appointing your own governor.
Of course, if the U.S. starts appointing their own governors, that's called occupation.
And, of course, they will say, oh, it's not occupation.
But a lot of Afghans will say it sure is.
And that will create a backlash.
There are some things that could be done, you know, which they probably won't do.
For instance, this is a fantastically poor country, you know, it's not very big, to about 25, 26 million people.
About half of them are on the edge of starvation, you know, if they use these enormous sums of money to just buy people bread, give people jobs, you know, a lot of Afghans would feel better about it.
But I somehow think they're not going to do that.
Well, you know, I want to ask you about Al Qaeda and what's going on in the border region and all that.
But, you know, I figure as long as Gates is conflating, you know, anyone who resists together, we ought to try to do our best to parse them all as best we can.
You know, we hear talk about the Taliban, the Pakistani Taliban versus the Afghan Taliban and how they're not really the same thing.
And then, you know, on the other hand, the way that word is used in the media, you might think Taliban means anyone who resists.
But then I guess that begs the question, is it only Pashtuns who dare resist the occupation, everybody else what sees us on their side in it, or at least for now or something?
And so anybody who resists is a Pashtun and therefore they're a Taliban?
Or how does that work anyway?
I don't know.
The Taliban are basically Pashtun, you know.
I think one thing that strikes me about Afghanistan is that, you know, the military was sort of playing, the U.S. military, the British military were playing it up as if this was, you know, Hitler's panzers on the channel, you know, next thing they'll be in Dover, you know.
But playing up the war as being of gigantic significance, and secondly, we're losing it.
You know, in Afghanistan, it's very much, you know, an insurgency of the Pashtun community.
There's 42% of the Afghans and not a majority.
And the U.S. and Britain and the others are really intervening in an Afghan civil war.
They're intervening against the same people who fought the Soviets.
So I think that there was never, you know, why was the Taliban able to take most of the country before 2001?
Well, because they got direct assistance from the Pakistan military intelligence and they got money from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf.
The Taliban takeover of Afghanistan has much more to do with warlords changing sides as they just got a whopping large suitcase full of money rather than any military victories.
So I don't think that the chance of the Taliban taking over the whole country were that high this year or last year.
I think it's all been rather souped up by the military to justify the intervention, to justify the military being basically militarizing foreign policy, that they're going to be in charge of this.
And I think that, in fact, you know, they've to some extent manufactured the crisis in Afghanistan.
Yeah, the Taliban are quite powerful, but they're not that powerful.
It's mainly because our government is so weak.
Well, let me ask you this, because, you know, they talk so much about the surge and how they're going to copy the model from the success of Iraq.
But, of course, as we've discussed on this show numerous times, basically the reason that the violence decreased the degree that it did in Iraq was because the Sunnis lost the civil war and America finally accepted their offer to stop fighting our army.
And if we would just let them, you know, police their own communities and pay them a little bit of money.
And it seems like they're talking about the same surge and replicating the wonderful success in Afghanistan.
But that would mean, wouldn't it, bribing the Taliban.
It would mean not supporting the civil war against the Pashtuns.
It would mean, you know, buying up all the local Taliban leaders and calling them the Afghan Awakening and using them to, I guess, fight any Arabs left over or something like that.
Right?
And they're not even talking about doing that.
It means, you know, I think that the great success of the surge was really PR and really propaganda.
You know, the arrival of a small 28,000 extra American troops actually was at the end of this sort of civil war when the Shias, as you mentioned, had beaten the Sunni.
And it really was, you know, perhaps the least important element in it.
There's actually quite a good study of this just came out on the auspices of Columbia University, giving sort of facts and figures to this thesis saying, you know, that the proportion of Iraqis who are Sunni is now about 12 percent.
It used to be 20 percent.
But the, you know, most of the refugees who fled to Syria and Jordan are Sunni.
At the height of the killings there, they said they got some figures from the Baghdad morgue I hadn't seen before that 3,000 people were being killed every month.
But three quarters of them were Sunni.
Sort of focusing on this civil war within Iraq, the outcome of which really determined the end to the insurgency against American troops and not anything that was ordered from Washington.
Right.
And as we see from the news today, it's the war against the or at least the resistance against the American-installed Iraqi government has not stopped.
No, but I think that, you know, how far is this installed by the Americans?
Well, you know, the Shia were always going to win.
But I think there was also, you know, this is a strange government, which is partly sort of dances between the raindrops getting support from the U.S. and from the Iranians.
But I think that the idea, getting back to, you know, could the surge be replicated in Afghanistan, something that's usually said by people who haven't a clue what the surge was in Iraq.
Well, one, the surge was different from what they imagined in Iraq.
And secondly, you couldn't do the same thing in Afghanistan.
I think that Petraeus is a pretty careful politician.
I think he's sort of he has a sense of politics, which is probably greater than his military skills.
And it's noticeable what he's been saying that the two are very different and not quite being up front of saying like what I did in Iraq, I can do in Afghanistan.
Well, he is running for president, General Petraeus.
Sure, yes.
That's to be expected.
So I think that, you know, they've kind of partly manufactured this crisis or heavily publicized it.
There are various things they can do, you know, open some roads and so forth.
Would it work in the long term?
We'll see.
But it's rather amazing that, you know, the enormous, enormous expensive American army should be devoting itself to pursuing guys around the mountains of Afghanistan.
Well, you know, I wonder about that, too.
If Gates didn't have the Taliban there to conflate with al-Qaeda, you know, how much of a real al-Qaeda is left?
In fact, I guess more importantly, do you believe that Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri are somewhere inside the mountainous Waziristan or northwestern federally administered tribal areas of Pakistan?
Is that where their podcasts are coming from, those guys?
I haven't a clue where they are, you know.
The thing is they've kind of succeeded and they've kind of disappeared, too, you know.
There never was a great big al-Qaeda.
You know, it was kind of small cells around the place and most of these attacks we've had were kind of self-generated of people who kind of took the franchise.
Well, if you try to define it really broadly and say, well, any Saudis or Egyptians hiding out in those mountains, that counts as Ayman al-Zawahiri's friends or something, how many people are we talking about, do you think?
Or do you think there's any truth to this war against al-Qaeda in Pakistan at all?
I don't know.
There isn't much sign of it.
I mean, I think that it's curious.
It's pretty strange about al-Qaeda.
I mean, that is the reason that not just only Obama but Gordon Brown in Britain justifies the war, sending British troops there, and it's a very unpopular war in Britain, by saying, you know, I'm defending the streets of every British town and city and village, by sending troops to Afghanistan.
But people say, hold on a minute, you know, nobody imagines that al-Qaeda is actually there.
And it also seems to me, no question, that it increases the danger of attacks in Britain and elsewhere, but it increases the general animosity towards the U.S.
I think the most dangerous moment for al-Qaeda and similar organizations came at the end of last year, when it, you know, it appeared that, I can't say it appeared that way to me, but it's to a lot of people in the Middle East that maybe they had a more sympathetic U.S. regime.
You know, but since then we've seen over Palestine, over Iraq, over Afghanistan, there's a growing consensus that, you know, it's really the same policy as before.
If the first had been true, if there had been a real change, that would have undermined anything that al-Qaeda wanted to do, which really, al-Qaeda is kind of small, but it floats on a great huge sea of animosity towards the U.S. across the Muslim world.
Well, you know, we talked about, before, about how, well, I guess one major motivation for the American policy there is just to make an example and prove, you know, America's the big toughest guy on the block and nobody can mess with us without having to pay the price and that kind of thing.
And, of course, also how our domination of that part of the world is the reason why we get attacked in the first place.
But do you think that's the bottom line?
Is that the real reason that we're there, is just to continue beating people up until a certain amount of time has gone by and we prove we're the toughest guy on the block?
I mean, some people say, well, it's all about pipeline politics or it's all about, you know, checking the power of Russia and China, it's all about Caspian oil, it's all about surrounding Iran, it's all about Israel wants us to secure Pakistan's nukes, because that's what they're most scared of, and everybody's got a million theories about what's going on here.
My friend Gareth Porter, the great reporter, says, no, they're just fighting anyone who resists them, and that's as smart as it gets.
That's as much actual strategy as there is, is that there are people who are resisting us, so we have to fight them, and that there's actually no real reason behind it at all.
Why are we doing this?
Because initially the U.S. went in there to show, you know, we have a big superpower or hyperpower, you know, we don't need allies, we can take over these countries to hell with everybody else.
Then to their horror, they found not only were they not winning, but actually the reverse was happening, it was becoming a demonstration of weakness.
So then they were saying, well, we can't be seen, you know, that we've been seen off by, you know, this kind of small, sunny community in Iraq and a bunch of Pashtun tribesmen in Afghanistan, so they have to put enormous resources into winning these, you know, which actually were originally quite small wars.
I think that these other things may feed into it of people who wanted to have interests in oil and gas, but I don't think that that was the original motive at all.
I think it was small wars that went wrong.
Yeah, well, and of course that's the best kind of small war, right, is one that you can sort of, it keeps great and worse consequences, like say, I don't know, a few million refugees inside Pakistan.
That'll, you know, as Pakistan unravels, that'll be the excuse to expand the war next door, but we're still not talking about, you know, coming to blows with China or something terrible like that.
We're still sort of, you know, failed states can do a lot of damage.
You know, most people, everybody who starts a war thinks they're going to win it, you know, and, you know, the opposition in Afghanistan look pretty puny, but it turned out that wasn't so.
But if this turns out into, you know, a growing confrontation with Pakistan, you know, there are a lot of people in Pakistan, you know, there are nuclear weapons.
Suddenly these things get real serious, and, you know, it always seems easy at the beginning.
But, you know, you look at the last, you know, since 1980, you know, some of the worst moments for U.S. foreign policy.
You know, I was in Beirut in 19, whenever it was, 82, 84, you know, when the Marines got blown up.
Then there was Somalia in the 1990s, then we had Iraq, now we've got Afghanistan.
You know, there's a whole litany of things that look real easy the first time around and turn into real disasters.
All right, everybody, that's Patrick Coburn.
He's Middle East correspondent at The Independent.
That's independent.co.uk.
Go to Amazon.com and get the book Muqtada.
It's Muqtada al-Sadr and the Shiite revival in Iraq.
Thanks very much for your time on the show today.
Thank you.