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...with Patrick Coburn on the subject of Iraq.
He is the author of the book Muqtada and is Middle East correspondent for the London Independent.
Hi Patrick, how are you?
Fine, thank you.
Now your most recent book is Muqtada.
Muqtada al-Sadr, The Shia Revival and the Struggle for Iraq, which I read a couple of years back.
And it's been in the news just in this last week that Muqtada al-Sadr has returned to Iraq from Iran.
So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the background, who Muqtada al-Sadr is, why it is he's been in Iran, and why it matters so much that he's back in Iraq now.
Muqtada matters in Iraq because there are very few Iraqi leaders with real popular support.
And he has popular support among the Shia masses.
You could see that really from the moment that Saddam was overthrown, again when he was fighting the US in Najaf and elsewhere in 2004.
So this is a very important guy.
I mean it's also important for the US because there's lots of speculation that although all remaining American troops, 50,000 troops, are due to leave Iraq at the end of 2011, the end of this year, under a status of forces agreement, that somehow this would be blurred and American troops would stay on and there'd be bases there.
But since Muqtada is one of the main supports of the present government, indeed the reason the present government was formed, and the first thing he said when he got back to Iraq last week was that all American troops must leave, this I think really does mean that all American forces are going to be out of Iraq by the end of the year.
Right, well when Barack Obama gave his Camp Lejeune speech saying that he was going to stick by the status of forces agreement, Jim Michalczewski reported from the Pentagon for NBC News that something like, yeah right, well I'm over here at the Pentagon and the generals are all saying that we're going to be there for 15 or 20 years minimum.
Yeah, I think that tells one a lot more about the Pentagon than it does about Iraq.
You know the Pentagon has this sort of fantasy that somehow they won in Iraq.
I mean this really isn't true and this sort of exemplifies that.
There's a sort of fantasy narrative that there were a lot of people shooting at American troops, that we had the surge, we had some new tactics, and somehow we won out at the end.
Nothing like that really happened.
You know Iraq is a very divided country.
The U.S. was fighting the Sunni guerrillas who were also fighting the Shia who were 60% of the population.
Ultimately the Sunni decided they couldn't fight the U.S. and the Shia at the same time, so they made peace with the U.S. and went on attacking the Shia.
So, you know, the reason people stopped shooting American soldiers in Iraq was very special to Iraq.
It's all to do with the balance between the Kurds and the Shia and the Sunni.
And, you know, it's rather amazing and interesting and amazing that you have American generals who think, ha-ha, we can just stay another 15 years, but hold on a minute.
The Iraqis aren't going to let them do that.
And certainly the fact that Muqtada, whose main plank is his political platform, is that all American troops are going to leave, the fact that he's the main supporter of the present government really means that this is going to happen.
Well, you know, it's interesting that George Bush seemed to pick the Supreme Islamic Council rather than Muqtada al-Sadr as the Shiite force that he wanted to get behind in this war, and yet they were the ones who wanted a stronger alliance with Iran and a more federal system, whereas Bush said he wanted to hold Iraq together.
It seems like he would favor Muqtada al-Sadr, the nationalist, there.
But, of course, Sadr has always insisted that the Americans leave as well as the Iranians.
But now, that was years ago, right?
Now it's 2011.
He's been in Iran in exile for a few years now, since, what, August of 2007 or somewhere shortly after that.
He went to Iran, maybe it was even before that.
And now he's back.
So is he still just an Iraqi nationalist, just in the sense of he wants Americans out, or is he still anti-Iranian, too, like he used to be?
I think most Iraqis at the bottom don't much like foreigners, but at the same time they're so divided that often they dislike some other Iraqi community or party or group even more than they dislike foreigners.
And that was true in the past and it's true now.
The Sunni and the Shia are frightened of each other.
Both are frightened of the Kurds and the Kurds are frightened of them.
And all three of them will look to foreign allies in support against the other communities.
So that hasn't really changed that much.
And is there any indication that Sadr is willing to bend on this 2011 deadline?
As you said, Maliki's political support is dependent on Sadr's will, right?
Yeah, I think it's always been a kind of fantasy, you know, that we'll stay on.
I don't think that that was ever going to happen.
And it was based on a complete misreading of what had happened in Iraq.
And Maqtada is powerful.
A very important trend in Iraqi politics goes right back to the 70s.
I mean his power comes from a combination of religion and nationalism and family heritage.
The al-Sadr family was famous for its resistance.
They were the higher ranks of the clergy, famous for their resistance to Sadr.
His father in the 90s built up a mass movement based on nationalism and religion and was finally murdered along with two of his sons in 1999 because Sadr got too powerful and too popular.
And Maqtada's father-in-law, Muhammad Bakr al-Sadr, was executed by Saddam in 1980.
So I mean this family really has provided more martyrs to the Iraqi opposition or to the Iraqi people than pretty well anybody else.
I mean I thought it was always, it's a curious thing about U.S. policy that they've always had this fear and suspicion of Maqtada.
Well actually the background of his movement has been nationalist and anti-U.S. but suspicious of Iran and other foreign countries as well.
In many ways they would have been much better conciliating him.
Instead they got into bed with either people who just basically had to make a lot of money or the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq was a very weird alliance because these people were at least partly under control of Iranian intelligence.
So what's happened now, I think Maqtada coming back has shown, which is what I always believe, that he had a solid base of support within Iraq.
And not just an electoral support, but he does have the support of a large chunk of the Shia poor, and most Shia are poor, who see him not just as a political leader, but as having almost semi-divine powers.
So I think to have whipped him off at any stage was a mistake.
Well, is there any reason to believe, it seems like just the default would be to guess, that now that he's spent years in Iran that he's closer to the Iranian government than he was before, no?
No, I don't think so.
I mean, usually people who are forced into political exile and have to stay in a country, you know, leave that country with a deep feeling of detestation for their former hosts who sort of humiliated them and patronized them.
Remember, Ayatollah Khomeini was in Najaf for years and years when he went to exile from the Shia, but when he left Iraq, his complete detestation for Saddam would be in effect putting him up for so long.
Well now, do you think that the form of the so-called constitutional government of Iraq, its current parliamentary system, etc., is going to survive the end of the American occupation, or will Muqtada al-Sadr just one day be the Ayatollah of the Islamic Republic of Iraq?
I don't see why it shouldn't.
You know, we've had a very bloody war, a bloody civil war in Iraq, and there are winners and losers, and the Shia and the Kurds have already come out as winners, and the Sunnis as losers.
Why should they start fighting again?
So, you know, what are the U.S., are the U.S. troops keeping them in power at the moment?
You know, not really.
They're not central to that at all.
So I don't see why the country should be any worse off after U.S. troops have left than it was before.
So, in other words, the people leading the majority Shia that the Americans fought for this whole time have really solidified their power.
But I wonder, does the authority of the Iraqi government under Nouri al-Maliki, do they control the, you know, Fallujah and the Anbar province and all the places where the worst battles of the Sunni insurgency in the past took place?
Or is that area basically, you know, autonomous from the Baghdad government?
That's a good question.
I mean, there are army troops there and there are police there, but often they're Sunni, they're not Shia, that's not always so.
But it's there all the time, you know.
Would they, could they take over that area, Anbar, I mean, with the locals?
Well, probably they could, but they're all Sunni and they don't have their arms and so forth.
Will that actually happen?
You know, we'll wait and see.
But there isn't just a particular reason for thinking it would, you know.
I mean, you have to, Iraq has always been divided by sectarian differences and ethnic differences, and those are worse now than ever because of the sort of slaughter we had in 2006 and 7.
But will it break out again?
Well, it might, but, you know, probably not, because the Shia have kind of won.
And if the Sunni try and do that, I'm not sure, you know, I don't think they could really stage another uprising.
I mean, Anbar, they could maybe if things got really bad, but there would be an uprising.
But I don't think it's by any means inevitable.
So with the Sunni-based insurgents having lost the civil war, they're not in any position to try to retake Baghdad, at least for a long time.
No, not now, not ever.
But the government would be overplaying their hand to try to thoroughly conquer the provinces where they're based.
Yeah, I mean, if they couldn't take over Baghdad, because it's 85% Shia these days, you know, it's really a Shia city.
But could the government go into sort of the smaller towns of Anbar, all sort of where they're Sunni, where they're armed, where they're tribal?
You know, if they got really upset, if they felt the army was launching raids, picking up their sons and putting them in bags of trucks, taking them away, torturing and killing them, then they'll fight out of desperation.
And probably they could take over Anbar.
Well, now, what's the status of Kirkuk these days?
It seems like there's forever about to be a referendum on whether Kirkuk is a city as part of Kurdistan or as part of Iraq.
Which isn't Kurdistan part of Iraq anyway, so how redundant is that?
Well, I mean, there's this great dispute over Kirkuk, you know, claimed by the Kurds, but there are Turkmen there and there are Arabs there.
You know, is this going to be resolved?
No, it isn't, because the different parties have totally different positions.
It's sort of controlled by the Kurds at the moment.
Probably it'll go on de facto being controlled by the Kurds in future.
But is there going to be an agreement over it?
No, because, you know, the parties are all too far apart.
And you have other foreign groups, I mean, parties also involved, notably Turkey.
So I think that, you know, there isn't going to be one of these problems that there isn't going to be an agreement.
A certain amount of violence is still going to go on, but it isn't necessarily going to explode.
I mean, the journalistic cliche about Kirkuk is powder keg.
And, you know, it's kind of true, but it doesn't mean that it's going to detonate.
Well, now, part of the dream of the American imperialists has been the building of this massive embassy in the heart of Baghdad.
Hillary Clinton is assembling her own, I guess, mercenary army, working for the State Department to protect that.
Do you think that after the end of this year and the expiration of the Status of Forces Agreement, that that embassy will remain, or the Iraqis are going to close it down, too?
Well, they're closing it down.
You know, they've got a lot of troops there.
They're not going to take anything from a bunch of mercenaries.
They're going to shoot their heads off.
I think one can be sort of over-paranoid about this.
You know, there may be people on the left, so to speak, who fear that this is going to happen.
There may be people on the right who think, you know, with some macho mercenaries we could really show those guys.
If they step out of line, they'll just shoot them.
The Iraqis will shoot the Americans, you mean?
If they shoot mercenaries, yeah.
I don't think you'll get many security companies who are going to stay on in those circumstances.
I mean, there are lots of defendants in the American embassy, but most of the American embassy's compound is empty these days.
They're just going to turn that thing into the Museum of American Atrocities, I guess.
I think that, you know, they put up all these buildings, but, you know, you feel it's kind of like an abandoned housing complex, most of it.
This is Anti-War Radio on KPFK in Los Angeles.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with Patrick Coburn, Middle East correspondent for the London Independent.
Now, Patrick, I know you've been writing about this thing for decades, and, you know, WikiLeaks just re-released, it was already out, but WikiLeaks re-released the Glaspie Memo from July 25, 1990, where described therein is the wonderful relationship, mostly, between America and Saddam Hussein's Iraq, and he's really trying to play nice with us and ask us to ask the Kuwaitis to not overproduce out of their shared wealth so much and so forth, but Glaspie seems to pretty much give them the green light, dangle the bait in front of them that we don't really care what you do about your border dispute with Kuwait, and I just wonder why you think America abandoned a policy that had such a loyal kind of nationalist, fascist dictator working for us, and turned against him, and they've caused such grave consequences to America and to the world by using Iraq as this whipping boy for the last 20 years, when they had a perfectly pliable general in charge there.
No, I wouldn't agree with that interpretation.
First of all, the Glaspie thing, I mean, you know, a lot has been made out of the fact that she says that they don't have a position on the border dispute, but this was a very specific thing over two islands, Babyan and Wabah, which Iraq claimed, and the U.S. was saying it didn't have a position on that.
That doesn't mean that she was saying go ahead and giving a green light to invade Kuwait.
Oh, she sure wasn't saying you better not, either.
I think that, you know, she said it should be resolved peaceably.
I think, you know, everybody was caught on the hop, because nobody thought Saddam would do that.
But Saddam had done it before, in 1980, when he invaded Iran, which was a truly stupid thing to do, since the Iranian population is three or four times that of Iraq, and it was a disastrous thing to do.
Half a million Iraqis were killed, wounded, or prisoners as a result of the war.
Now, when, you know, the U.S. supported Iraq during that war, it supported Iraq even when it was using poison gas on a mass scale.
It supported Iraq even when it massacred 180,000 Kurds, men, women, and children.
And they sort of built up Saddam to being the great power of the Gulf.
Now, Saddam was no idiot, but he sort of knew about Iraqi politics.
He knew very little about the outside world.
He'd very seldom been there.
He tended to get it wrong, so invading Kuwait was very much like invading Iran.
It was just he had an exaggerated idea of his own strength.
You know, but I think what was wrong with American policy, it's a mistake to get involved in these conspiracy theories that somehow the U.S. lured Saddam into invading Kuwait in 1990.
I think they just didn't know he was going to do it.
Even after he'd done it, you know, if he'd pulled out immediately, this would have, you know, created a lot of problems for the U.S.
But the fact he invaded Kuwait, looted the place, stayed there, made things very easy for those who were going to kick him out.
And he obviously wasn't going to be able to stay.
But I think what people should criticize about U.S. and foreign policy was the way in which the West and the Soviet Union, and practically everybody else, supported Iraq against Iran in the 1980s, despite the fact, you know, that there was absolutely incontrovertible evidence of atrocities of really of the Hitlerite proportions.
You know, 180,000 Kurds dead in one year, many more killed in other years.
But that's where the real crime is, not what happened within this interview.
Well, but, you know, in the 1990s, they just kept on from the time of the Gulf War all the way through the Bush years, basically saying, well, this guy's Hitler and he cannot be dealt with.
And the endless blockade and the no-fly zone bombings and all this, now invasion.
It seems like at some point, if not in the Clinton years, even in the Bush senior years, they could have said, all right, well, we've had our war and now, you know, brought him back in the fold.
They let Qaddafi back into the fold, right?
Yeah, but you see, I think the way policy was even more hypocritical than that, that they quite liked a weak Saddam there.
They didn't want Saddam to go because they thought, well, who's going to benefit from that?
There's probably the Shia that are going to take over within Iraq, and the Shia and the Kurds are going to take over, and this will benefit the Iranians.
So they're quite happy to keep a weak Saddam there.
And it was very noticeable in 1991 when you had the uprisings of the Kurds and the Shia that the U.S. didn't support them, that it didn't allow Saddam to use his helicopters, that it would be very easy to overthrow Saddam at that time.
They really didn't want to do it, and they didn't want to do it because at that time, Bush senior and his people thought, well, you know, we don't want the Iranians and the Shia to benefit from this.
In 2003, of course, that's exactly what happened, and that's one of the reasons why the U.S. occupation took place, that they didn't want their overthrowing Saddam.
But who's going to replace him?
Well, these guys who basically are who we consider our enemies.
So we've got to stay in Iraq and run the place and try and appoint people who are loyal to us.
But unfortunately, those people had no support.
Well, so then why did they settle on the policy of regime change?
Because it seems like, you know, as brutal as it was, at least the Bush senior Clinton policy made sense.
Why did they do it?
Because they were dumb, you know.
I think that, you know, they lived in something of a fantasy world.
There were the various exiles who'd come to Washington and kind of persuaded them that there were going to be, you know, a bunch of sort of Iraqi neocons who were going to run the country.
They hadn't really thought it through.
You know, they were at that time, remember, in 2001, it seemed to them they'd overthrown the Taliban very easily in Afghanistan, but that was mission accomplished.
You know, they didn't realize it nine years later, you know, there'd be 100,000 U.S. troops there.
So they were in a very arrogant mood.
So they thought they could do what they liked in Iraq.
So I mean, I think it was why did they act like that?
I think, as I said, because they were stupid.
They really didn't know what they were doing.
Yeah, well, that's a plausible enough answer for me.
All right, so now one of the things that you write about in your book, Muqtada, is that during that era of the sanctions, that people were really radicalized.
They were reduced to such desperation.
They had really nothing to turn to but religion.
And this most Western, if I could say so, about Iraq, Arab state, it devolved during that time.
Yeah, I mean, Iraq collapsed.
You know, the currency collapsed.
People had the banks became worthless.
You know, you had mass impoverishment.
People had, you know, quite little jobs in the government.
Suddenly there was no money to pay them.
You know, you'd see people standing in street markets and burning heat of the sun trying to sell a bit of their furniture, you know, to feed their families.
So you had mass impoverishment.
You had the economy destroyed.
And it really has never recovered from that.
But you also had the growth of religious feeling combined with nationalism, which Saddam was always trying to control.
And one of his instruments was Muqtada's father.
They thought, you know, we get a guy who's an Arab.
He comes from an important religious family.
He's not like us very much, but he doesn't like the Americans.
He doesn't like the Iranians either.
But then when this movement grew very strong, they suddenly discovered that he really was against the regime.
He wouldn't, you know, when he led prayers, wouldn't offer people to praise Saddam.
The regime was desperate for that, but he'd never do it.
That's why they killed him.
You're right that Muqtada al-Assad is certainly going to force this issue, and the Americans are definitely going to be kicked out a year from now.
What is that going to mean for the future of American intervention in the Gulf region in general, you think?
Well, you know, there are three big powers in the Gulf.
I mean, indigenous powers are Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia.
And suddenly we're going to have two of them that are going to be hostile, basically be hostile to the U.S.
Iran, very hostile.
Iraq, basically answering to going along with the Iranians, probably.
But probably not 100%.
They'll go 70% along.
So, in other words, it could be a real problem for the American empire.
I think that, yeah, I mean, it just hasn't, whatever they thought they were doing, they haven't done in Iraq.
And I think that one of the peculiarities of the present situation that sometime around 2008, General Petraeus persuaded the U.S. media, persuaded the U.S. that somehow they'd won in Iraq, and then started withdrawing.
It was always kind of a deception.
And now there's sort of a plexity as to why, you know, why the Iranians are so powerful and so forth.
And somehow, you know, we're just going to do some car trick and the U.S. troops are going to be able to stay.
But this is a misunderstanding of the way Iraqi politics work.
Well, and, you know, I read this book by David Finkel.
I actually interviewed him about it, too.
It's called The Good Soldiers.
And he spent about a year in mostly 2007 with the soldiers surging into eastern Baghdad and fighting against the Saudis forces.
And there's quite a bit in there about Lieutenant Colonel Kozlarich, who was in charge of the group and all that, you know, sending the guys out on the missions, giving them their instructions.
So it didn't seem like he had any idea that he was basically fighting for a political party, the Iraqi National Alliance, which his so-called enemy, Muqtada al-Sadr and his forces, were a major part of.
And here he was fighting for his enemy and fighting against him at the same time and didn't seem to have any better idea about what was going on than Connoliza Rice or the average specialist out there in the Humvee.
Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, at that time, you know, what worked at that time?
Well, defending the Sunni against the Shia.
That worked because there was no doubt, you know, one-fifth the Iraqi population.
They were being driven out of Baghdad.
They had their backs to the wall.
So they needed defenders.
So, yeah, they do that with the U.S., but, you know, you can't try and repeat the same policy with Afghanistan where people are not, you know, don't have their backs to the wall in the same way.
So we fought on the side of Muqtada al-Sadr and the Baata Brigades and them in the civil war against the Sunnis and they were finally defeated.
And then we fought a war against the Sadrists to defend the Sunnis that we just helped defeat.
Yeah, I mean, it was always sort of complicated and contradictory.
You know, the bizarre thing is, which actually I think most people don't realize, is that the U.S. and Iran both supported the Iraqi government at that time, but both wanted to exclude the other as a main source of influence over the Iraqi government.
You know, as soon as they decided, the U.S. had decided to overthrow Saddam, Iran was going to benefit, the Shia were going to benefit.
And it's probably not accepting that fact that led to all the fighting that we've had over the last, since 2003.
Well, you know, speaking of that, Johns Hopkins and Lancet did studies in 2004 and 2006 that said one or 200,000 in 2004 and 655,000 killed by 2006.
And there was an opinion business research study done that decided in the fall of 2007 and then again in the spring of 2008 that a million people had lost their lives in this conflict since 2003.
And that was, you know, the rate of death beyond the death rate before during the blockade.
So it wasn't, you know, just counting up combat casualties one at a time, but it's taking into account, I guess, you know, all the people who couldn't get to the hospital because of the roadblocks or curfews or, you know, whatever.
The long-term consequences, basically, a million more had died than would have if the status quo from the 90s had been maintained.
What do you think of those numbers?
Does that sound right to you?
Well, you know, I don't really know what the numbers are.
I think they're very high because I don't know any Iraqi family that doesn't have one or more members who was murdered.
I think there's a danger, you know, sometimes people say there's a million and then somebody says, oh, there was only 150,000.
As if the death of 150,000 people was somehow kind of normal or something like that.
Whatever figure one chooses, you know, an enormous number of people were killed, an enormous number of people were wounded.
And what's actually easier to demonstrate is the number of people who fled.
You've still got 2 million people in Jordan and Syria.
And, you know, the people don't leave their homes for nothing.
And those people are still there.
You know, that's always seemed to me one of the best barometers, what really goes on in Iraq, is the fact that these refugees don't come back.
And I can see why not, you know, that a few come back and then leave again.
So I think that all this sort of controversy over figures, you know, there's something rather disgusting about people saying, oh, we only killed 150,000, you know.
But this is an awful lot of people to die.
Indeed.
All right, thank you very much for your time on the show tonight, Patrick.
Thank you.
