All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
Santi War Radio.
And our next guest is Patrick Coburn, Middle East correspondent for The Independent, Independent.co.uk.
He's also the author of the book, Muqtada, Muqtada al-Sadr, The Shia Revival and the Struggle for Iraq.
Welcome back to the show, Patrick.
How are you doing?
Fine, thank you.
Appreciate you joining us today.
And let's go ahead and start with that.
Muqtada al-Sadr.
You have a new piece at the independent.co.uk.
Iraq cleric says his forces could attack US troops.
So, I guess if you could please maybe, well, I guess people mostly, I hope know who Muqtada al-Sadr is, the powerful Shiite cleric, who's part of the coalition that supports the current prime minister.
And, and hopefully everybody knows that the deal that George Bush signed said that all American forces would be out by the end of this year.
And so now I guess al-Sadr is saying that he means to enforce that deadline with violence if it comes down to it.
Is that right?
Yeah, that's what he, that's what he's saying.
If one takes it at face value and it's probably correct.
And I mean, this has been his position really since 2003, right?
Yeah.
I mean, he's on the Shia side.
He's been wholly against the US presence from the beginning.
He wholly opposed the occupation and still does.
And he really hasn't moved from that position at all.
Well, you know, the Obama team, I guess, because of domestic politics, their only real criticism is from the pro-war right.
And so they're not shy at all about bragging about how they're trying to stay in Iraq.
They're doing everything they can to twist the arms of the Maliki government and of the parliament to get them to invite us to stay.
Because, of course, the UN resolution is expired.
The status of forces agreement will be expired at the end of the year.
So they need a quote unquote invitation and they are demanding one, right?
Sure.
But it's, you know, even so, it's down to 10,000 troops.
You know, this is not a big force compared to what there was previously.
Will that number stay?
I don't really know.
You know, Iraqi politics are so complicated and so many players these days, it's very difficult to predict the outcome.
Now, so you say he's always been against the American occupation and that makes him among the Shiite leadership very different from the the groups that the Americans were meaning to fight for there, right?
They've ended up empowering this guy who wants them out, who they consider always have considered the enemy.
But they were trying to fight for the groups that were more tied to Iran and less nationalistic than Sadr.
Am I right?
Yeah.
I mean, you know, from the very beginning, there was a contradiction in what the Bush administration, this Bush administration was trying to do in Iraq.
But on the one hand, they wanted to get rid of Sadr Hussein.
On the other hand, they didn't want his main enemies, which were the Kurds and the Shia, who together 80 percent of Iraqis to take over, particularly not the Shia.
So at first they didn't hold any elections.
I mean, now they say that, you know, they wanted to hold elections.
But I remember at the time they said, we'll have to wait for a census.
There hasn't been a census.
So if the initial coalition provisional authority, the U.S. occupation authority had remained, there would have been no election.
So ultimately, you know, the Shia are the main power in Baghdad and they sort of balance malarkey balances between Iran and the U.S., sometimes going with one, sometimes going with the other, all the time trying to accumulate more power in his own hands.
OK, so in early 2008, you were the one who broke the story that the negotiations on for the status of forces agreement after the expiration of the U.N. mandate at the end of 2008 began, the American side began their negotiating position was we want 56 permanent bases.
And then throughout the rest of the year, that was, I guess, in the spring, early spring of 2008, throughout the rest of the year, Maliki, the way I understand it, the way I remember it, Patrick, was Maliki said, OK, OK, I'm going to try to get you as many bases as I can.
And he basically pretended to try the whole time, but always reluctantly reporting back that I'm sorry, I just can't get the rest of the government to go along with it.
So you're going to end up having no permanent bases at all.
And I was wondering if you think it's possible that that's what's going on here now with the invitation for a few thousand or ten thousand troops to stay.
Sure.
Yeah, I don't really see why, but he he doesn't really need us anymore anyway, does he?
Well, to some extent, he'll want U.S. support, you know, to balance against the Iranians.
You know, I wonder, you know, whether it's ten thousand or three thousand or four thousand, you know that McCain and two other Republican senators went to Baghdad recently and said it would be a disaster if there's only a small number of troops or, you know, but it doesn't really, I think, make that much difference at the end of the day.
You know, with a number of hundred and sixty thousand in Iraq, you got a fair measure of control with three or four, three thousand or five thousand.
You really may be only providing a target.
General Adiano, who's now commander of the U.S.
Army, used to be in Iraq, said he thought it was kind of a bad idea to have U.S. troops there beyond the absolute minimum, because all you do would would be to give the appearance that the U.S. still occupied Iraq and you wouldn't have much military military strength in return for it.
Actually, that sounds much more sensible to know what McCain and company would say.
Yeah, I mean, if they had to fight their way to Kuwait, they might not make it.
Yeah, I mean, I don't think that's going to happen.
You know, it's sort of the unfortunate thing about Iraq is that it's kind of stabilized at a very sort of bloody and corrupt level.
You know, the 15th of August, I think 63 people were killed in 17 bombings up and down the country by this local franchise of Al-Qaeda with all the publicity about 9-11.
I didn't notice anybody have a word to say about the fact that 63 Iraqis had just been killed by Al-Qaeda.
Yeah, well, they have a separate narrative there, which is the surge worked and we don't want to hear another word about.
Sure.
Yeah, I mean, it's sort of, you know, what was the surge?
They stopped killing Americans and not just the guys who split from Al-Qaeda.
Al-Qaeda stopped killing Americans.
You know, this is kind of a general deal with the Saudi of Iraq, whether Al-Qaeda or not, but they certainly went on killing Shia and other enemies of theirs.
So I think that you're dead right that one of the reasons this isn't brought up is that it's sort of, you know, McCain himself, I think, declared victory a few a few years ago.
So, you know, there have been op-eds in The New York Times about it.
So anything that sort of punctures that somehow doesn't get that much publicity.
Now, I was kind of surprised, at least, to read in your piece the about Saudis militia groups, that the evidence in the past has been that they are in practice controlled, trained, armed and paid for by Iran.
That's certainly been John McCain's spin this whole time.
Now, what happens is that there are some, you have the lady army, which is quite substantial.
Then you always had some special groups which come from the Shia side of the fence, which were kind of taken over by Iran.
Muqtada and so forth opposed this, but it was kind of difficult to do.
But then it's always been, you know, it's always been the official U.S. take that somehow Iran is trying to destabilize Iraq.
Now, of course, not really.
I mean, they didn't like the Americans there, but from the beginning, the Iranians were real pleased to see a Shia regime, the Shia co-religionists, take power in Baghdad.
So they were never really trying to destabilize the government.
They wanted it under their influence rather than the Americans.
So there are some special groups there that belong to, paid by the Iranians.
But, you know, I guess I'll give it to the Americans.
Well, let's leave this up on the other side of the break, Patrick, because I want to ask you some more about Muqtada al-Sadr's relationship with Iran and, you know, the narrative and the truth.
And then I got to ask you about Libya.
You've been reporting from Libya for weeks and months.
Sure, I am.
And, you know, we definitely got to talk about that, too.
So everybody hang tight.
It's the heroic Patrick Coburn from the London Independent.
We'll be back after this.
All right, Shell, welcome back to the show, it's anti-war radio, I'm Scott Horton.
I'm lucky enough I can get Patrick Coburn on this show.
He's the best reporter in the world as far as I'm concerned.
He writes at the independent.co.uk.
And I'm going to try to wrap up this Iraq conversation here real quick so we can move on to the war in Libya.
The latest reports are Fox confirms U.S. boots on the ground there.
But on Muqtada al-Sadr and the complicated relationship with Iran and the Mahdi army and the special groups and all this.
Pardon me for oversimplifying, but I'd like to kind of give you my best what I thought.
And maybe then you can correct me and help me fill in the gaps here.
My understanding really was that from the time of the surge, when they made peace, as you said, with the Sunni based insurgency, they had to have somebody to fight basically.
And they wanted to try to limit Sadr's influence since they had installed the Shia in power.
And so they waged this war in East Baghdad at the same time they were helping cleanse the city of Sunni Arabs for him.
But anyway, they they fought against him this whole time.
And they had this whole narrative that anybody over there fighting us are these special groups, which are parts of the Mahdi army that are out of Muqtada al-Sadr's control.
And I think Gareth Porter had concluded and it made sense to me that really that was just a line from the Pentagon that Petraeus had made up because he was trying to rhetorically separate Sadr from the people under Sadr's command who were fighting the American troops because he knew that he couldn't just outright make him a complete enemy.
And so, you know, now we see, for example, you know, this weekend here, Sadr saying, you better get out by the end of the year.
We're going to war.
They want to then use this special groups thing to to include in the Iranian influence against our guys.
When, of course, you were saying the Iranians can just buy their time at this point.
They win anyway.
Yeah, I mean, look, the Iranians always had some influence there over the special groups.
You know, they didn't do the fighting was never that intense.
There was a tendency on the US side, really, whether it's Petraeus or Bush or Cheney or any of the others to claim somehow they are fighting Iran in Iraq, because Iran want to overthrow the government.
Tony Blair makes keep saying that.
But it was always nonsense.
I mean, the Iranians were kind of rather main enemy was Saddam Hussein.
They were pretty pleased he was over.
He was very pleased he was overthrown.
They were seeing a government get into power.
They kind of wanted to increase their influence over that government as all foreign powers do.
And they also wanted to make sure the US wants to pay went on paying a price for being in Iraq.
One of the problems about Iraq is that, you know, after all this warfare, there's so much suspicion between the three main communities, Kurds, Sunni and Shia, that often they look for foreign sponsors before they try and have any form of partnership or coalition with fellow Iraqis.
Well, now, and but Sauter's position, even though I guess he lives in Iran most of the time now, it's mostly because we we the US government chased him there.
He was always the one who denounced the Supreme Islamic Council and the Dawa Party types for favoring a more federalist structure and an alliance with Iran.
And he, at least back in, I don't know, oh, five or something, wanted to create this government of reconciliation in a coalition with the Kurds and the Sunni Arabs to limit the influence of America and Iran at the same time.
Yeah, no, no, no attempts to do that.
The problem is that it's difficult to do with so many foreign countries, the US, Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, everybody else playing a role in Iraqi politics.
It's left, you know, it's left the country very weak.
It's left it very disunited.
It's left people very conscious of what their ethnic and sectarian background is, and it's left them very suspicious of each other.
So, you know, I'm afraid the future is that foreign powers are going to be manipulating Iraqi players for the foreseeable future.
Can you tell us what you think is the most important thing for us to know about the rebels in Libya who have now, with American and NATO help, driven Muammar Qaddafi from power in Tripoli?
Well, I think that you kind of said it, you know, they wouldn't be where they are if they didn't have support from NATO.
You know, what unites them was to focus on getting rid of Qaddafi.
Without Qaddafi, will they be able to do that?
These are kind of crucial days.
This one will see what they're really made of.
Qaddafi went down, but primarily because of foreign intervention.
I don't mean that he was popular in Libya.
He wasn't, but then nobody quite knows what his opponents consist of.
You know, the militiamen got control of Tripoli pretty fast, you know, you had checkpoints every few hundred yards, but then it's taken a long time from the transitional government to make it from Benghazi.
It's not clear what they control, and it's not clear what the shape of the new government in Libya will be like.
These are very sort of different and disunited groups.
At the same time, I think Qaddafi was quite a good opponent to have because he made mistakes all along the line.
And I think that it's fairly easy for them to win at the end of the day.
Well, now, is it true?
Portia Walker, one of your colleagues in the London Independent today, says that there is evidence of the rebels torturing people, institutionalized brutality, she calls it.
And you've reported also about the rounding up of black Africans all across Libya.
Can you elaborate about that?
Are these rebels getting battered off your worse?
Yeah, it's sort of worse than it sounds, I mean, because, first of all, you have to realize one thing that, you know, in Libya, it's not a very big population, about 6 million people, but 1 million people, you have this illegal labor force of 1 million people who did most of the work, most of it from Central or West Africa.
So the whole country is full of black Africans without papers, or they have papers, they've, you know, bought them or fabricated them, who did most of the work.
Now, because, you know, there were some mercenaries from Central Africa, but mostly, this was propaganda, the idea that all Qaddafi's armies consisted of Central and West Africans was simply untrue.
But it was ended up by being believed by a lot of Libyans.
So now when they see a black African, they, you know, chase them and throw them in jail.
You know, this is, often these people don't have papers, I mean, I interviewed one in the police station, and, you know, they said, why do you have a Libyan identity card, if you claim he's this guy who came from Senegal?
And if you weren't, why would Qaddafi have given you an identity card unless you were fighting for him?
And of course, there was an explanation, this guy said, you know, he'd walked through the desert with other people looking for work about three years earlier, and he'd ended up as a tyler laying tiles in Tripoli, and he'd got this ID card because he'd paid the police for it.
So you have all these people with sort of dodgy papers, now being picked up and thrown in jail, simply because of their color, and accused of mercenaries being mercenaries, because that was the sort of propaganda line throughout the war.
Is there any chance that this government, you know, we talked about, you know, they needed America and NATO's help to get the victory that they got in overthrowing Qaddafi, is there any chance they will be able to actually maintain a monopoly on power, that they'll have a central government, a regime change soon, or is this going to be, you know, training their new army?
Good question.
I don't know the answer to that.
If they have elections, you know, if they're fair elections, but then I'm not sure how that works when you don't have political parties, and...
Well, the Islamists and the former Qaddafi regimists and all these different factions are just as prepared to fight it out with violence in a further civil war at this point, right?
Well, that's what we're going to see in the next few weeks, you know.
I mean, first of all, there's going to be a battle for who gets the top job, and there's an awful lot of money involved.
You know, control of its oil revenues.
This is very large.
If you've got the right to sign checks, you've just got a lot of money.
You know, how much of the old regime is still going to be there, after quite a lot of it deserted Qaddafi and joined the other side?
You know, the head of the rebels is the former Minister of Justice.
The head of their army was the former head of special services, until they murdered him.
There are various other people in senior positions who previously worked for Qaddafi, so exactly what's going to come out of this mix is still uncertain.
But I think that it's sort of...
During the war, there was very little media coverage of what the rebels were actually like.
Most of it was just sort of demonizing Qaddafi, or accounts of sort of fighting in the desert.
I think it was a pretty lowly level.
You can find a lot of articles there.
And the book is Muqtada, Muqtada al-Sadr, The Shia Revival and the Future of Iraq.
