08/11/08 – Patrick Cockburn – The Scott Horton Show

Alright folks, our guest today on anti-war radio is Patrick Coburn.
He's a Middle East correspondent for The Independent.
You can also find what he writes at counterpunch.org.
He's the author of Muqtada, Muqtada al-Sadr, The Shia Revival and the Struggle for Iraq.
Welcome back to the show, Patrick.
Thank you.
It's very good to have you back on the show here.
A very interesting series of articles lately for your brother Alexander's Counterpunch about the current situation in Iraq.
And you've often said that there are three different wars being fought in Iraq.
America is not necessarily at the center of any of them.
So I thought maybe we could just kind of go through and talk about those.
Starting with Nouri al-Maliki, who is from the Dawah party and is the prime minister of the Iraqi government.
And he has apparently refused to go along with this status of forces agreement and wants America to leave within a couple of years rather than stay on with the 58 permanent bases.
Is that right?
Or it only seems that way?
It's a peculiar thing to happen this year.
As the government has got more confident, they've realized there's an awful lot for them to wave the nationalist flag.
And I think a few months ago they were still pretty nervous about what would happen to the government or people inside the green zone if the U.S. left.
They're probably a little less nervous now.
But they've also seen that if they went along with the kind of agreement which George Bush wanted a couple of months ago between Iraq and the U.S., that this would be politically very damaging for them.
Right.
Now, I think the last time we spoke you said it looked to you like no matter what, the Badr Corps, the so-called Iraqi army, Maliki and the Dawah party, the Supreme Islamic Council, they still need us.
That Iranian backing is not enough to keep them in power.
That he might have to pretend like he's opposed to this kind of thing in public, but eventually he'll go ahead and acquiesce.
You think that he no longer believes that?
I think that there's a division within the Iraqi government between those who think they can't survive without U.S. backing and those who think that actually being seen as being puppets of the U.S. is politically very dangerous for them.
Maliki seems to be hanging tough.
And certainly when I was talking to people in Baghdad, they thought that the more pro-Western elements in his government were trying to say, look, this is all spin, it's all for the elections.
But actually they thought Maliki would probably be much tougher than Washington expected.
You know, all these divisions are kind of where people were in exile.
I understand what you're saying.
Maliki was in Damascus, a very anti-U.S. place.
Others who were in New York or London tend to be much more pro-Western.
It also depends what language they speak.
Maliki doesn't speak English, the others do.
I see.
And of course, part of his coalition spent that time, at least in the 1980s, in Iran.
Sure, yeah.
I mean, the bigger part, this is one of the sort of strange things about this government, which I don't think people outside Iraq have totally taken on board, which is that here you have a government of Iraq, which is basically a Shia Kurdish government.
Saddam was Sunni.
His regime was predominantly Sunni.
Now this government of Nouri al-Maliki has two main supporters.
One is the United States, and the other is Iran.
For the Iranians, they don't like American influence over this government, but it's filled with people who spent decades in Iran, whose families are still in Iran, from the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq.
People like President Talabani, a Kurd, for years were supported, decades were supported by the Iranians.
So these are people they know very well.
So for them, this is about as good as it's going to get.
So they want influence over this government, but they don't want to destroy it.
On the contrary, they want to build it up, and they want to limit U.S. influence over it.
Well, and I think that's kind of been the argument, was that if America left, that, I don't know whose argument, I guess mine, that if America left, the people of southern Iraq would basically send the Supreme Islamic Council and the Dawa Party back to Syria and Iran, and that Muqtada al-Sadr would be much more likely to inherit the power among the Shia.
But it looks as though his power has been marginalized.
How effective has been the marginalization of Sadr, do you think?
Well, nobody quite knows the answer to that question.
I mean, I think a few months ago, the government itself could see that happening.
That earlier in the year, I was told that U.S. military intelligence thought that Sadrists would win about 60% of the vote.
Of course, the government could see that happening, had every incentive to eliminate the Sadrists before that happened.
Now, have they succeeded?
They've taken over these areas dominated by the Sadrists, the followers of Muqtada al-Sadr.
But can they make that stick?
The army is there in the old Sadrist bastions in Baghdad and in Basra and Amara.
But it's not at all clear what would happen if Muqtada called his people back onto the streets.
So, it's one of the peculiar things about Baghdad at the moment, but nobody quite knows who is in control.
Yes, the army is there, the police is there, but who exactly are they loyal to?
Well, it's interesting that Sadr would be so marginalized so quickly.
We had the Battle of Basra where basically the Americans came in and helped the Iraqi army win the thing.
But now he's in exile.
Is he in exile in Iran or he's over there just getting a higher religious rank?
He went to Iran last year to, he said, pursue religious studies.
But I mean, in a sense, it is a form of exile.
He has gone back a number of times.
I doubt if the Sadrists have been eliminated or even close to that.
This is a very large mass movement.
They have a lot of support.
What he doesn't want to do is to have a direct confrontation with the U.S. or with his Shia rivals when they're backed by U.S. forces.
Well, now, I remember back, I guess, the end of 2006, they started talking about a government of national salvation where Sadr would make an alliance with nationalist Sunni and nationalist Kurds, even, and that they would all come together to try to form a new government with the major point of agreement being to have a policy to limit American influence and Iranian influence in the country.
That's long dead, huh?
It's difficult to do, you see.
Really, from about the middle of 2005 to the middle of 2007, there was a really ferocious civil war in Iraq between Sunni and Shia.
You know, with 3,000 people a month being slaughtered.
And this has left a legacy of hatred and fear.
Now, that hatred, that's no longer happening.
I mean, but it's still important to realize that the Iraqi Interior Ministry says that 950 Iraqis were killed last month in July.
Now, that's a lot better than the 3,000 who were being killed every month a year or more ago.
But, I mean, just imagine what this would be like, you know, in any country.
950 is an awful lot of people to get killed.
It's one thing I found very frustrating as a journalist.
People keep saying to me, you know, are things better in Iraq?
And I keep on saying, yeah, sure, they're better.
They're better than the blood bath we had two years ago.
The fact that they're better doesn't mean they're good.
It doesn't mean that they're normal.
Right, they're about back where they were.
In fact, they're completely divided up by these walls.
An awful lot of people are still getting killed.
Yeah, the violence levels are about where they were in 2005 when it was completely unacceptable.
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, I think it's almost become sort of conventional wisdom that things are somehow beginning to go right in Iraq when you have this enormously high levels of violence.
I mean, almost 1,000 people known to be murdered every month.
Then you have 4.7 million Iraqi refugees.
That's about one in six of the population who are refugees either in Jordan and Syria.
About over 2 million of them are there, and the rest are refugees within Iraq.
Often these people are living in miserable conditions.
You know, I've been to places that, you know, you could smell the places they were living in, like rubbish dumps.
But they just don't dare go home.
And so these people would go home if they thought they could go back to their own houses or live somewhere in Baghdad without fear of them or their families being murdered.
But they don't feel that.
But somehow, as I said, this general belief that somehow things are beginning to be okay in Iraq has gained currency, and really contrary to common sense.
And, you know, what do the statistics, the figures for dead and refugees that the government announces?
Well, I mean, obviously whether the refugees are coming back or not should be the measure of how successful and peaceful things are there.
You're absolutely right.
But let me ask you, if the Sunni insurgency has basically been bought off and renamed the Sons of Iraq and the Concerned Local Citizens, and if the Mahdi Army has basically stood down, they've already won the ethnic cleansing war and took Baghdad last year, the Kurds, obviously, they have their troubles up there in Kirkuk and all that kind of thing, but what's responsible for these still high levels of violence?
If the Saudi faction isn't fighting, the Sunnis aren't...
The battles are over for the moment, you know, but this doesn't mean there isn't tremendous friction with the people getting killed.
You know, the Shia kind of won the battle for Baghdad, but, you know, Shia and Sunni don't dare to go into each other's districts in Baghdad these days any more than they did before.
You know, sometimes you'll find Sunni going to markets where the Shia are in control, which we didn't have before, but there are still tremendous divisions and there are no signs of these being bridged.
Also, when people want to get their houses back that they've lost to the other side, then you often have killings.
You know, when I was there recently, there was a family, a husband and wife, went to try and get their house back in South Baghdad, an area called Dora, which is predominantly...
They were Shia, it was a predominantly Sunni area, and they were immediately killed and their driver was beheaded just for driving them into that area.
So this is...
The fear is just beneath the surface.
You know, I have a driver myself who lost his house.
He's a Sunni.
It's a Shia area.
And I said...
It's difficult for him to get his house back, but I said, look, maybe I can get you some compensation or something.
And he said, please, don't mention it to anybody.
If people in that area think I'm trying to get my house back, they'll come and kill me.
So there's a very high level of fear still in Baghdad.
And, you know, at the moment, we're in the middle of this, you know, very torrid Iraqi summer.
Temperature's up 120 Fahrenheit or more, and there's very little electricity, so there's no air conditioning.
Difficult to get clean water.
All these very simple things, which should have got better, are still worse than they were generally in 2003.
So I think, you know, I feel almost despairing in trying to convey to people outside Iraq that, yeah, things have improved.
Less American soldiers are being killed.
Yes, it's better than it was 18 months ago when we had this sectarian civil war in central Iraq, but the place is still in many ways a nightmare, and that's why the refugees are not coming back.
All right, now, what about these concerned local citizens?
How bought off are they really, do you think?
Well, they're bought, yeah.
I mean, there are a couple of factors.
This is, you know, one of the great...
As soon as the U.S. overthrew Saddam Hussein, then the Shia were going to take over.
They're 60% of the population.
I think that the awakening group, the insurgents who changed sides used to be fighting the Americans, why did they do it?
Well, obviously, they feared and disliked al-Qaeda.
Second, but perhaps above all, they could see that even however their guerrilla war was going against the U.S. occupation, that they were losing out to the Shia, that the Sunni are only 20% of the population, there are three Shia to every one Sunni, and really they couldn't fight the Americans and fight the Shia at the same time.
And that was the main reason for them to change sides.
But there's something else as well.
You know, probably about 60% of Iraqis are unemployed or underemployed.
You know, they might just have some little booth in the market to try and make a little bit of money.
So it's very easy to raise armies there.
It's very easy to...
The one thing most Iraqi men know how to do is use a gun.
So Iraq is full of guns for hire.
A lot of these awakening groups are guns for hire.
Now, you know, American officers might say, look, these guns for hire previously might be working for al-Qaeda, now they're working for us.
This is an advance.
But they're not quite the concerned local citizens, which is one of the titles that U.S. military tried to give them as if they were, you know, sort of householders suddenly whose tolerance had finally stopped and they'd gone to get their guns.
I mean, these are large criminal elements, very dangerous people.
Well, now, the American media would have us believe that any Sunnis who are still fighting us are al-Qaeda in Iraq.
Is that accurate?
No, you see, it's...
I mean, there are particularly...
The army's had an offensive in Mosul, which is the third biggest city, is the biggest Sunni city.
But it's not really dominated by al-Qaeda.
It's dominated by former army officers.
It's dominated by Ba'athists.
It's dominated by nationalist groups.
So the idea that the insurgency was purely al-Qaeda, I think, was always pretty naive.
Well, I mean, clearly they were lying when they tried to pretend that the entire insurgency was always al-Qaeda.
But even now there are still some Sunnis who are fighting against us, and they portray it as though the mainstream Sunni insurgency, which, oops, sorry for lying and telling you that they were al-Qaeda this whole time, no, they were just the mainstream Sunni insurgency, and they're now the sons of Iraq, and whoever's left fighting is al-Qaeda, is what they say.
Sure, yeah, I mean, it's...
You know, they did a sort of backflip over this.
But I think the one thing to bear in mind in Iraq is a very simple thing, and Iraq is so complicated, but there's one very simple thing, which is the occupation has always been unpopular in Iraq, outside Kurdistan, which isn't occupied, among both Sunni and Shia.
You know, and that's really created the climate in which the Sunni insurgency started.
That's, you know, what the Sadrists are saying, yeah, that they'll disarm once there's an agreement on when the U.S. will withdraw.
The Iraqi government is more and more nationalist.
But there is a deep feeling against the insurgency.
Now, people who are pro-war say, aha, but, you know, are you in favor of Saddam Hussein?
But actually, for a lot of Iraqis, they were glad to see the back of Saddam Hussein, but he's been a catastrophic leader.
But they, you know, they never wanted an occupation, and this is pervasive through Iraq.
Even the foreign minister, Hashir Zabari, who's normally portrayed as being fairly pro-American, said that the occupation was the decision to occupy was the mother of all mistakes.
And I think that Washington keeps on running up against this.
This is one of the reasons why they felt things were going better, because they've got al-Qaeda on the run, so they believed.
But then they find that the Iraqi government won't sign up a new agreement.
So I think it's very important to bear in mind just the perfectly understandable animosity of Iraqis towards the occupation.
Yeah, it just seems like what they have is a leadership vacuum of anybody able to replace us, basically.
Yeah, I mean, there are many divisions in Iraq, but one division is those within the green zone and those outside, you know, the government and those who aren't in the government.
And, you know, they can see politically in the government it may be in their interest to get rid of the U.S., but I think they just feel real worried that what would happen, you know, if there's nobody manning the entrances to the green zone.
Of course, the Georgian troops that were there are just leaving these days.
But there's just a nervousness in the government of could they survive without American help.
I mean, this is one of the bizarre things about being in Baghdad at the moment, you know, when I go to talk to officials and so forth, and they say to me, you know, Patrick, you know, you exaggerate, you underestimate the strength of the government, things are going pretty well, et cetera.
Then, often rather mischievously, I say, well, you know, come and visit me in my hotel outside the green zone.
And they always look a bit gray and say, well, I'll have to consult with my security and so forth.
And they pretty well never turn up.
Oh, that's funny.
And then they probably turn around and continue to repeat that you're exaggerating and things are really not that bad, right?
They've been saying that from the beginning, you know, from 2003.
You know, and things still go up and down.
You know, there is an improvement in the last 18 months.
But, you know, it's kind of actually portrays, the departing American commander says this, you know, that it's all fragile and reversible.
But actually his claims are far less than a lot of the proponents of the surge claim.
I think he bears in mind that he'd been through this before in Mosul in 2004.
I remember talking to him when he was leaving Mosul.
He'd been commander of the 101st Division.
And eight months later, the insurgents took the entire city, 30 police stations, $40 million worth of arms.
The police and the army all deserted.
You know, Iraq is that kind of country.
You say you talked to him when he was, to General Petraeus, when he was leaving the command in Mosul?
Sure, yeah.
Oh, that's interesting.
I'll have to go back and find that, the interview.
Yeah, he was commander of the 101st.
And was considered to have done a good job there.
But Petraeus is sensitive to Iraqi politics and just how far can you go.
He kind of, I think, tried pretty overtly to sabotage what Bremer and company were doing in Baghdad to preventing sacking all former Ba'athists and so forth.
But Petraeus could see that this was a really bad idea.
He was basically trying to do an awakening-type situation up there in Mosul back in 2005, is that what you're saying?
Sure, yeah, 2003, in the first year.
The problem is that these awakening groups, you know, they don't love America or they certainly don't love the Iraqi government.
You know, it's really they're making a choice of enemies.
Right, I mean, that's all I'm talking about.
I mean, I was talking to the awakening leaders just between Fallujah and Abu Ghraib, just west of Baghdad.
And I was talking to somebody called Abu Maroof, who in fact was commanding 13,000 men.
And, you know, they were paid by the Americans.
They didn't think they were being paid enough.
And when I mentioned the Iraqi government, they said this is the worst government in the world.
Well, and that was the whole point of the surge, was that they were, even Petraeus himself said, that there is no military solution to this problem.
There's not a final day where we defeat the enemy.
What we need here is a political solution.
That's what they talked about a year ago, was all these benchmarks, where basically they were supposed to re-Ba'athify the government and find a way to, I guess, bring the concerned local citizens into the Iraqi army and create a unified state.
They haven't done that at all.
No.
You know, it's still full of divisions.
The Shia government, at the end of the day, doesn't want to share power with America.
But, you know, the reality of power, I think, in Baghdad is rather different than what people imagine.
You know, for a long time, the Iraqi intelligence service, I think, unless this has changed recently, does not appear in the Iraqi budget.
The reason is it's funded directly by the CIA.
Then the Iraqi army, the appointment of officers, partly is done by the Iraqi government, partly done by the U.S.
The Iraqi government wants to have that wholly in its own hands.
So, you know, I think we're going to see over the next couple of years a sort of struggle for the reality of, to control the reality of power there.
Well, you know, Darjah Mail reported for IBS News last week that, and I think this may have been one of the operations that you were referring to earlier in the show, where the Iraqi army went after some so-called Al-Qaeda in Iraq last week, and in Darjah Mail's report he said that, and we talked to him on the show here, that some of the Sunnis, I guess a few thousand of the members of the concerned local citizens, actually got paid and went and joined up the Iraqi army.
Does that seem like something that could continue?
Yeah, it can.
You know, they can join the army, but, you know, do they join the intelligence, the other security services, you know, who the officer corps is mostly Shia these days?
I think that these divisions still remain very deep.
And you can see also that the division between Arab and Kurd is getting more and more dangerous, with the Kurds very worried that the Arabs are going to unite against them on the Kirkuk issue.
Right, yeah, actually that was going to be the next thing I wanted to ask you about was Kirkuk.
Basically the Kurds are claiming it as a Kurdish city, and the Arabs don't want to leave the Turkmen either.
And is this just a big fight waiting to explode, or is it going to stay kind of a low-level conflict like it has been?
It's going to explode for a long time, and it hasn't, you know.
On the other hand, it hasn't been resolved.
In Mosul, there's been a lot of fighting between Kurds and Arabs in West Mosul, for instance, which is a city of, I think, about 1.7 million people.
About 110,000 Kurds have fled to the province of East, to the north, to Dohuk.
The divisions between Kurds and Arabs remains very great.
In Kirkuk, one of the things that, it was sort of agreed that elections in Kirkuk would be postponed, but they'd be too divisive.
And it was a question of who would run the council, should it be just divided one-third, one-third, one-third between Kurd, Arab, and Turkmen.
And there was some agreement on that.
But then there was another demand from Baghdad that the Iraqi army units, and this is really dangerous from the center and south of the country, in other words, Arab units, should replace the present Iraqi army units in Kirkuk, which are predominantly Kurdish.
Whatever the future of Kirkuk, it's currently controlled by the Kurds, because it's Iraqi army units that are Kurdish.
What was suggested was that it should be Arab units that take over.
The Kurds just aren't going to wear that.
So it is one of these crises that might go on rumbling.
But, you know, there's the potential for things to explode, just like we've seen in South Ossetia and Georgia, you know, these ethnic disputes in which everybody hates each other, where there's no solution.
And just when nobody expects it, there's a tremendous explosion.
This is definitely true of Kirkuk.
Well, you know, I saw in the last few weeks that the Turks have been bombing the mountains there in northern Kurdistan, targeting PKK members.
That looks like another problem that's not going to go away any time soon.
Yeah, I mean, they're doing that, you know, the mountains are big.
I think, you know, the bombs don't, you know, this is an area that there aren't too many people living.
But of course, once people got rather used to this rather strange situation, where the Turkish air force is bombing part of a neighboring sovereign country several times a week.
Now, Kurds have said to me, well, it's who cares.
They're just bombing the mountainside.
It just will show to the Turks that this kind of military intervention doesn't get them anywhere.
On the other hand, it's rather dangerous, because at some point the Turks may send their planes to other areas.
They can send them over Kirkuk, they can send them anywhere.
So there's another source of potential violence there.
Now, do the mainstream Kurdish political parties, Barzani and Talabani's factions, do they support the PKK or tolerate them, or what's the relationship?
Well, the Turks claim they tolerate them.
I mean, they don't.
Barzani, the president of the Kurdistan Regional Government, says, no, we don't.
There's not much we can do about them.
And they make the point, say, hold on a minute, you know, most of the PKK are in the mountains of southeastern Turkey.
If the Turks can't get at the PKK on their own territory, then how come they expect us to expel them with a much smaller military force from ours?
Which is a good point.
There have been talks recently between the Kurds, the KRG, the Prime Minister, Nechivan Barzani, the nephew of Massoud Barzani, the president, in Baghdad.
Previously, the Turks had this rather peculiar attitude that they were refusing to talk to the Kurdish government of northern Iraq, but going to Baghdad, which has very limited influence there, to demand the PKK be expelled.
So it's, again, one of these sort of rumbling crises that never hasn't truly exploded for a long time.
But it remains unresolved, and there's always the potential that at some moment it will finally explode.
Well, now, your brother Andrew wrote a groundbreaking story for Counterpunch about the findings signed by President Bush and financed by the Democrats in Congress, $400 million for covert activity inside Iran.
And I don't believe that he mentioned PJAK specifically in the article, but it's been reported in the past that perhaps one of the terrorist groups that America is supporting against Iran is this group PJAK, which to my understanding is a party for free life in Kurdistan, or something like that, an offshoot of the PKK.
Is that right, that America is supporting PJAK at the same time?
Yeah, absolutely.
It's part of the PKK that is active against Iran.
I mean, I have met the ones I met who are in fact all Turks, Turkish Kurds.
You know, what is the relationship between them and the U.S.?
Difficult to know exactly.
It seems likely that they would certainly be looking for support.
They probably wouldn't come directly.
It's often these connections between the U.S. and these groups.
Most of the Iranian government is often through contractors, through sort of private companies, in order to retain deniability.
But none of them are particularly effective.
I mean, all of them are pretty greedy.
So I'm sure their eyes must have lit up when they heard that there was $4.8 billion at the offing.
Some of them, for instance, in southeastern Iran, Baluchis, I mean, some of these groups used to be financed by Saddam Hussein against Iran.
The same is true in Arabistan, down in southwestern Iran.
There were Arab groups that used to be sustained by Saddam.
And, of course, there's the Mojahedin-e-Khalq in east of Baghdad, which were also a card that Saddam used against Iran.
So all these people are likely recipients of money.
But how much good it's going to do the U.S. I think is very doubtful, because most of these groups I think are heavily infiltrated by the Iranians.
They have dubious influence within Iran.
It certainly annoys the Iranians and increases their level of paranoia.
Okay, now back on Kurdistan for a minute.
I'm wondering kind of about the long term.
Ultimately, you can't really have independent Kurdistan without having war, outright war with Turkey and Syria and Iran, basically, right?
You have Kurdish populations in all those neighboring countries.
This is a conflict that's been brewing for I don't know how many centuries.
Has Kurdistan ever been independent?
Is there a way that this can be resolved?
No, it hasn't.
But, I mean, I think that the Kurds of northern Iraq at the moment are very close to independence.
But they won't go for independence because, you know, it's much in their interest to remain a very important influence within the government in Baghdad.
If there's a conflict between the Iraqi Kurds and Turkey, between the little enclave in the north, they're going to lose.
But if they're partly in control of the government in Baghdad, they're in a much better bargaining position.
Of course, they worry as well, you know, that they sort of became allies of the U.S. almost by accident because the Turks refused to allow American forces to invade Iraq from the north.
So suddenly the U.S. had to rely on the Kurds.
But they worry how long in the future this is going to last.
And they think that if the U.S. ever has to choose between the Iraqi Kurds and the Turkey, it'll choose Turkey.
Well, now, one thing is, too, that, I mean, I guess if they declared outright independence, that would mean war with the, probably the Sunni and Shiite Arabs of Iraq, right?
Yeah, I mean, I don't think they'll declare independence.
But, I mean, the issues that are likely to provoke conflict are Kirkuk and Mosul, Mosul province, Nineveh province, which is kind of like a sort of mini-Lebanon in northern Iraq in the sense that it's all divided up into different communities.
Arabs and Kurds, but also the Kurds, are divided into different religious groups.
There's one called the Yazidis, there's another called the Shabak.
They're not, some of them are Muslim, some are not.
The Arabs, predominantly Sunni, but you also have Turkmens in Tal Afar, and you don't have that many Shia in the north.
But you have a continuing high level of violence there, and the potential for a real explosion.
Well, I guess if there's any kind of silver lining, perhaps the dispute over Kirkuk could help the Sunni and Shia Arab factions iron over some of their differences.
Yes, they do.
I mean, but it's sort of, I think that the people outside Iraq don't get a sort of clear picture.
I mean, in some ways the government is much stronger than it was.
It has very high oil revenues at the moment.
The Iraqi state is in some ways coming back together.
But it's still an immensely corrupt government.
It has money, but it doesn't have a conduit of getting that money to the people.
Some people benefit.
People like teachers or people who are on the government payroll are being paid more.
But if you aren't on the government payroll, then you may be out of a job, and, you know, your family can be near starvation.
So it's a very complicated mosaic.
I think people are misinformed and also maybe bored and fed up.
This war has now gone on longer than the First World War.
You know, we're now in our fifth year of war there.
People would desperately want this to go away, but they want to believe it's getting better.
So I think that all the things that are still wrong there, and Iraq is still an appalling state, is no longer really being reported, even to the degree it was a few couple of years ago.
Right, well, yeah, the media's abandonment of this story is a whole other topic, but we're all out of time.
I really thank you for your time today, everybody.
That's Patrick Coburn.
He is the London Independence Middle East correspondent.
He's the author of Muqtada, Muqtada al-Sadr, The Shia Revival and the Struggle for Iraq.
Thank you very much for your time today, Patrick.
Thank you.