All right, y'all, welcome back to Antiwar Radio.
It's chaos in Austin, Texas, streaming live worldwide on the Internet at chaosradioaustin.org and at antiwar.com slash radio.
And I want to point you guys to a couple of, two or three articles here.
Total Defeat for US in Iraq at counterpunch.org.
Also each shoe was worth a thousand words and also the latest one for the independent in the United Kingdom, Keep Out, a message for foreign leaders.
It's Patrick Coburn.
He's the best Western reporter covering the Iraq war this entire time.
He's the author of the book, Muqtada.
Welcome back to the show, Patrick.
I'm very happy to have you here.
Now let's get right to this Total Defeat for the US in Iraq.
I have to tell you, I've been watching the news lately, reading the news and seeing Ray Odierno, for example, saying that, ah, whatever the SOFA, Status of Forces Agreement says, we're going to do whatever we want.
And if it says we have to leave the Iraqi cities by a certain date, eh, we don't have to.
And if they say we have to be out of the country by 2011, well, don't worry, that's a long time from now.
We can renegotiate and so forth like that.
And yet it seems your take in this article, which admittedly is from the 11th, so I don't know what your opinion is today.
But as of this writing, you seem to think that this Status of Forces Agreement really spells the end of the American occupation of Iraq.
Sure.
Yeah.
I mean, I think there's no question of this.
The Iraqis read it that way.
I remember one very significant thing about this agreement, that the Iranians went along with it.
It wouldn't have passed without Iranian agreement.
Right.
Now, the Iranians, above all, are keen to get the U.S. out of Iraq.
If they thought the U.S. was going to stay, they wouldn't have backed this agreement.
Now, how keen are they on getting rid of us?
Because of course, this is something we've talked about over the last couple of years, at least with you, and really this whole time, is the question of America installing the Dawa Party and Supreme Islamic Council, which are backed by Iran, but otherwise have seemed to be very weak.
And so, when Bush says, you know, as they stand up, we'll stand down, that kind of thing, they've needed us.
Our guys can't stand down because the Maliki government would fall, or at least it seemed that way for much of this time.
Well, I mean, that was true in the past.
I think Maliki probably now thinks he can survive, or at least his government can survive.
He could also see, you see, with the elections come up, the provincial elections come up in January, and we have parliamentary elections later in the year, and one of the crucial things that happened when this agreement was being negotiated, so far the States of Forces Agreement between Iraq and the U.S., was that none of the parties, political parties, dared do anything except demand the U.S. get out, because they knew they were facing election.
If they had nothing else, they wouldn't, they'd lose a lot of votes.
So that was a sort of continual pressure, and it's going to go on being a pressure.
One thing that astonishes me is that this agreement hasn't had, attracted more attention in the rest of the world.
After all, this is, the war in Iraq has been, you know, shaped the political landscape of our time.
But this agreement seems to have been buried, I guess, because it was agreed, you know, just at the time that the Obama administration was being formed, when we have the financial crisis, so people didn't really notice it.
But this is, you know, a critical event in the politics of our age.
And so, I'm trying to get a handle on this, really.
I guess the bottom line is that if the, if the Maliki government, which is really made up of most of the leadership of the biggest Shiite parties, if they insist we leave, we really have to leave, I'm sorry to use we so liberally here, if the U.S. government, if the Shiites say, get out, that's it, we can't start the war over again against the Shiites.
Yeah, I mean, the U.S. had trouble enough fighting the, you know, the Sunni Arabs, who are only 20% of the population.
They can't stay if they're opposed by the Shia as well, and that's always been true, and is true today.
Also, there's a, you know, Iraqi armed forces are pretty big these days.
You know, will they, how far will they cooperate with the U.S.?
There's been this talk of, you know, the Iraqi armed forces are not, are not completely trained, but at the moment, they're not really in the business of fighting anybody.
The Shia militias were stood down by the Iranians earlier this year, the militias of Maqdad al-Sadr, and the Mehdi army, and the Sunni have allied themselves with the U.S. at the moment.
So there's an awful lot of violence in Iraq, but the Iraqi army isn't going to have to fight a great big war.
So when the American generals are making these statements that, yeah, yeah, yeah, we had to sign a piece of paper so we could stay, but it doesn't matter what the details are, etc., they're basically just fooling themselves.
They're in a position, whether they realize it or not, where they really do have to get out by 2011, period.
Yeah, you can see this.
I mean, another point, Scott, is, you know, look at the reaction in Iraq, look at the reaction in the Muslim world to the shoe throwing at President Bush earlier this week.
Indeed, let's talk about that.
I have a headline here that says that the Turkish maker of the shoe has, this is the most popular shoe in the Muslim world now, apparently, the company that makes this particular model of shoe that was thrown.
Yeah, no, I mean, it's, you can imagine the expression on the face of the maker when he heard what use his shoe has been put to, and I guess they've been trying them out ever since.
But this, you know, the reaction in Iraq of suddenly you have demonstrations in favor of this young Shia journalist, not just in Shia areas of Iraq, but, you know, in Sunni strongholds like Fallujah and Tikrit and Mosul.
It's rather amazing that you have a cross the board support for this young guy.
And that sort of shows the general attitude towards the U.S. President, the U.S. occupation of Iraq.
Somehow, the Odjano doesn't, you know, and the others don't seem to be able to take this on board.
I get the impression that, you know, with Petraeus, a fairly acute, general Petraeus, fairly acute sense of Iraqi politics, I don't think the successors have, are smart about this.
But there's no doubt, you know, in my mind, that what it says in this agreement is going to happen, that U.S. forces are going to be out of the cities and towns and villages by next, by summer 2009, and the U.S. forces are going to be out of Iraq in 2011.
And if they aren't, there'll be a tremendous row.
This isn't something that can be blurred.
Right.
Well, I sure hope you're right.
I've wanted an end to this war since before it began, and I certainly would love to see it.
Although, I have to admit, I'm pessimistic when, I mean, I do understand your point that if the Dawa party, the Mahdi army, the Supreme Islamic Council, and all these Shiite factions are agreed that it's time to kick America out, that that may be a force that really cannot be dealt with by the American army, such as it's constituted in Iraq at that point.
And yet, it seems like the establishment here in America is determined to hold on to this country, to keep some permanent bases, to stay forever, no matter what, hell or high water.
I dare say they might even be willing to risk a massive, widespread Shia uprising and restarting the war in order to stay.
Yeah, but you see, they also have to deal with the Iraqi army and police these days.
You know, it's very difficult to operate without their cooperation.
And it's dubious if they'd get it.
You know, it's also always been true in Iraq that if Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani said the occupation is going to end, then the occupation is going to end.
I mean, this is somebody whose instructions are followed by, you know, not just laborers in the markets, but generals commanding the army.
So you know, whatever happens, I think that there's no way of avoiding an end to the occupation.
So I think that this idea, you know, there's an idea on the far right that somehow doesn't much matter what these guys in Iraq say, though you would have thought one of the lessons of the whole Iraqi occupation, of the whole last six years, is that it really does matter what Iraqis think and what Iraqis do.
And then I think there's a fear on the left and among opponents of the war that somehow this is one more calm, that this is one more spurious turning point and nothing much is going to really happen.
But I think that's wrong.
I think that's over-cynical.
I think that this is really going to happen now.
Well, I'm not sure.
I guess I'm thinking of like the lies, the different lies that they've used, the various turning points.
But you know, the theme is that everything now is basically the eye of the storm.
And of course, we've talked before about, boy, you know, you call the surge working, there's still millions of refugees who are afraid to come home.
There's still widespread violence that makes Iraq one of the most, if not the most violent place on earth right now.
The surge only worked compared to the absolute slaughter of 2006 and 7.
And yet, you know, when the lie then, the spin then, was that we can't leave now in the middle of this terrible crisis.
We have to see this through until things are okay.
Now they say things are okay, but we can't leave because then everything might fall apart.
And in a sense, that seems kind of right, doesn't it?
In the sense that like the former Sunni insurgency that they now call the sons of Iraq are at peace because they're being paid to be at peace and to bide their time and rearm and prepare for the next battle of Baghdad, I guess, right?
I don't think so, no.
I think, you know, the Sunni were pretty heavily defeated.
There may be some who think that way, but I doubt if it's going to happen unless if you begin to have sectarian violence, let's say you have a really big bomb in some Shia shrine or marketplaces, you start having thousands of people killed again, then you have tit for tat killings by the Shia on the Sunni that you have government troops, you know, slaughtering people and so forth, then it might all start over again.
But it hasn't happened yet.
I mean, it's pretty violent, but it's not it's not at the sort of butchery that we had before.
Also, bear in mind, there is quite sort of one of the strange things about Iraq is the communities, the Kurds, Shia, Sunni often hate each other.
But at the same time, there's quite strong Iraqi nationalism.
They kind of really do want the U.S. out.
And so things may just continue as they are on the present level of fairly high violence, but not a complete explosion.
So you think that there's a chance that the, for example, the Daba party and the leaders of the sons of Iraq can come basically to a gentleman's agreement that, listen, you provide security in your area, we'll provide security in ours and not fight?
Yeah, I mean, it could happen or that way.
It depends how smart the government is.
They come into Sunni areas.
You know, people were saying to me, you know, one area that the government come in, came in some interior ministry troops.
They arrested 24 people.
They released half of them.
But the half who were released had all been beaten up, had broken limbs and so forth.
If there's a lot of that, then there's going to be a Sunni reaction.
But that hasn't happened everywhere since.
Well, well, I guess back to the story of the famous shoe thrower who will go down in the history of the world from now on.
It's one of those events.
And we have seen a few of these different ones from when Joe Biden passed his his bill in the Senate saying we ought to divide Iraq in three after the Blackwater massacre around the same time.
We've seen these kind of outbursts here and there, at least of Iraqis coming together with this kind of nationalist, you know, occupier out sort of thing, maybe remembering from time to time that their differences with us are much more than their differences with each other.
Yeah, I mean, you know, the the two things, I think, go together.
I think, you know, U.S. leverage in Iraq is going down.
You know, it's as the time as the troops withdraw, it'll go down further.
It's still a very, you know, it's still a very dangerous place.
So when I. And also a pretty miserable place, I keep on being told it's better, you know, but usually I find I sometimes appear on radio programs and there's some somebody in the Green Zone saying how great it is and restaurants are open and ice cream parlors are open.
And these guys never leave the Green Zone.
Or if they do, it's always with, you know, a couple of dozen heavily armed bodyguards.
Wait, wait, wait.
Pardon me.
The stories where they're saying restaurants are again open.
Even that is still when they're trying to make that comparison.
You know, these restaurants were closed before an hour.
They're still talking within the Green Zone.
Oh, sure.
Yeah.
These guys that often, you know, you see television of somebody walking down the street, the correspondent going down the street.
But generally, you know, there are a couple of armed guards with the cameraman that you don't see.
But these other guys who are talking about, you know, the restaurants being open generally, they're within the Green Zone.
They don't go there.
I do go to restaurants, you know, I mean, not many, but I'm very careful.
And it's not exactly the what everybody's doing in Baghdad.
You know, there's a little bit more life around.
But there are some areas that restaurants are open, but other areas, the whole West of Baghdad, the people, things really start closing up at seven in the evening.
When was the last time you were there?
I was there just over a month ago.
Just over a month ago.
And and when you go there and I think this is a measure of the violence, how many other journalists are willing to get in the back of a car and ride around Iraq to the most dangerous places as you know, there are people who do it.
I mean, I think it works this way.
I think that there are good print journalists, you know, for instance, McClatchy, what used to be Knight Gritter.
They're very good.
There are other people, good print journalists, very brave, go out and do things.
Television, there are good journalists, but basically it doesn't very little makes it onto onto the onto the air, according to what they tell me.
I mean, you see television over there.
Do you see much about Iraq at the moment or over the last six months?
Oh, certainly not.
Everything is, you know, just electoral politics and gossip and nonsense on TV.
Yeah, I mean, one of the networks there that has an operation that I'm told is an annual budget of twenty million dollars.
And the guys there were complaining they hadn't been on air for 50 consecutive days.
So, you know, it's kind of disappeared from television.
I think you still, you know, if you go to the Internet and you pick out the best journalists, you can find people who go out and begin to get a picture of Iraq.
I think, you know, I mean, let's talk generally for a moment about the coverage of Iraq.
I think the correspondents there have often done quite a good job.
You know, where it really falls down is when you have the talking heads in Washington, you know, saying what's happening and retired generals and so forth.
And then you get this undiluted propaganda mixed with almost total ignorance.
People from the think tanks who are introduced as experts, former military officers presented as if they were neutral observers.
I think that that's really been the one of the major failings of the media over the last six years.
Yeah, well, and especially, you know, over the last two, it's been the silence.
It's been the lie by omission where they simply say, well, everybody know that the surge is working or everybody knows that the surge has worked.
And so it's over.
You know, Mara Liason, who is supposedly this liberal news person from NPR News, but who also does Fox News Sunday morning and so forth, commented the other day that the Iraq war is pretty much won.
And George Bush is handing Barack Obama a very stable and wonderful Iraq.
And everything's great now that George Bush.
In fact, as people look back, they will be very forgiving of his Iraq war policy because after all, it worked out just fine.
Yeah, it's kind of self-deception and helped, as you say, by the fact, you know, that it sort of disappeared from the airwaves.
I mean, one of the sort of curious things is that the people who say this to me and, you know, I live in a hotel which is outside the Green Zone and I sometimes say to them, well, come, come on over, come and see me.
And I'm not actually that far from the Green Zone, you know, and either they say they won't turn up or they turn up with lots of armed bodyguards.
You know, so has it changed a little?
Yeah, but, you know, not by that much.
You know, again, that there are things which aren't, I think, make very little news, like, you know, that this new States of the Forces Agreement, as I just mentioned, which is presented, if it's presented as a great military victory, how come, you know, the main support for it is the Iranian government, perhaps not that friendly to the U.S.?
The decisive moment in this agreement being passed was the ministers that belong to the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, which is the largest Shia party, got a telephone call from their leader saying, OK, guys, we now support this new agreement.
And the leader was in Tehran.
He'd just been told what the line was.
That's Abdulaziz al-Hakim?
Yeah.
And he was in Tehran at the time he made the phone call?
He was in Tehran, yeah.
Well, let me ask you this.
Is there any kind of negotiation or was there any negotiation about this agreement between somebody like Adirno and Petraeus or Petraeus and the Iranians?
The I mean, the agreement they kept on Maliki sort of discovered earlier this year that the more nationalist line he took saying he wanted the U.S. out of it.
Originally in March, this seemed to be just to continue when this negotiation started, it seemed that the on the States, the forces agreement, the U.S. side seemed to simply want the occupation to be continued as it had been under the U.N.
United Nations mandate, with no real change.
Sure.
58 bases and all that.
At that stage for any withdrawal, that was wholly against U.S. policy.
This was rejected, strongly rejected by the Iraqi side.
And Maliki continually refused to sign.
Then eventually the U.S. agreed to a timescale for withdrawal.
Originally, this was made of a conditional on security.
But eventually they signed wasn't conditional at all that they're going to be out by certain dates.
And only then that it only that was when it got through the Iraqi parliament.
But it's, you know, it's a complete transformation from what the U.S. wanted nine months ago.
Well, you know, the aspect of the Iraq war that I think gets the least coverage of all is the situation up in Kurdistan.
And it, I guess, mostly just sort of goes understood that, oh, everything's fine up there and they love us up there and etc.
Like that.
There really is a lot of violence up there in Kurdistan.
I've had various expert guests on the show over the years describe especially the city of Kirkuk as a powder keg or a pile of oily rags or, you know, a tinderbox or something that's about to catch on fire, you know, this whole time.
I wonder if you can kind of update us on what it's like up there now.
You know, one of the problems about Iraq is that people just could be, you know, events happen, violence happens.
Anywhere else in the world, this would be, you know, get a lot of coverage.
But, you know, just outside Kirkuk, there was a bomb in a restaurant, you know, last week that killed, I think, around 40 plus people.
You know, it hardly gets noticed outside Iraq.
Somehow this no longer makes news.
You have the dividing line between the Kurds and the Arabs in Iraq, which goes through Kirkuk, which the Kurds claim, but is also in Mosul, which is the third biggest city in Iraq.
And right down to the border, a place called Kanaqin, you know, there's been continual fighting.
Kirkuk itself, which is a terrible dump compared to, I mean, even compared to other parts of Iraq, there's no settlement there.
And there's been sort of continual, continual fighting.
Mosul itself, most of the Kurds have fled from one part of the city, remains extremely violent.
In some senses in Iraq, the divisions, the austerity between the Shia and Sunni Arabs has gone down, but the austerity between the Arabs in general and the Kurds has gone up.
And that is extremely important for the future of the entire region, right?
The relationship between, well, the kind of difference between Iraqi nationalism holding these groups together, you know, like we see during the shoe throwing and all that versus Kurdish nationalism, which, of course, you know, I'm value neutral on it, whose side to take or whatever.
But it seems like if there ever really is an independent Kurdistan, which is one option here, then that means pieces of Syria and Turkey and Iran are in play and much further, you know, chances for for major conflict down the road from here.
It could happen that way.
But if the Kurds are smart in northern Iraq, they'll kind of play that down because they don't want to take on, you know, they don't want to frighten the governments of neighboring countries that have got Kurdish minorities to the point that they're prepared to fight a war.
You know, for the first time, the Kurds are on the verge of having something pretty close to an independent country.
I mean, they're an autonomous region in Iraq, but it's very close to an independent country.
That's the first time the Kurds have had it.
So the smart thing from their point of view is to try and consolidate that and not to really rally Turks or the Syrians or the Iranians.
But there's still a lot of a lot of friction in that area.
Well, in recent months, the Turks have bombed the mountains there.
I don't know if they've actually been effective at getting any of their enemies.
But has that ceased over the past few months?
Yeah, they keep on doing that.
It's one of those types of violence that somehow gets accepted by people.
You know, it runs on the Reuters and APY, but nobody really pays much attention.
Right.
Two of America's allies are at war against each other.
Sure.
I said, yeah.
Two of America's allies at war against each other.
And it gets a little headline when they're attacking up in the mountains or along the Iranian border or along the border with Turkey.
You know, this is very rugged terrain, deep canyons.
Not quite sure what they're hitting.
I mean, there aren't too many people living there.
And with the bombing, there are even less, you know, people moving, particularly stuff.
Yeah, people trying to move down to the cities because of the the snow.
I mean, it's an area I used to know quite well.
Not sure I'm too keen on visiting it at the moment because the Turks are mainly hitting the roads and there aren't too many of them.
They're mainly tracks.
But this has somehow become a sort of accepted part of the local theme that every so often accepted that's in Baghdad, not by local people, but mostly the herdsmen and shepherds that Turkish aircraft come over and bomb the hell out of the place.
All right, now, before I let you go, is there any good question I should ask you?
There's something you'd like to address that I might not have thought of.
I mean, I think that somehow.
You know, it's a very sort of strange thing about Iraq that before the US invaded, I don't think there was much knowledge of what was happening in Iraq.
And now the US is departing.
I think somehow there isn't much knowledge of what's happening here.
I mean, there's this strange belief that the surge succeeded, which, you know, just is demonstrably not so.
I mean, what happened was really to do with other factors of the Sunni being defeated by the Shia of Iranian support for the present government.
And also a belief that somehow Iraq is at peace, despite the fact this is contradicted not just by me, but by, you know, just APY, you know, just explaining, recounting what the daily death toll is, the amount of violence that's still going on, which is, you know, it's extraordinarily high level.
So I don't think people have much of a picture, but maybe it makes it easier to carry out a withdrawal if people have a sense that, you know, somehow they haven't been defeated.
But, you know, what's the consequence going to be this?
Well, you know, Iran is going to becoming a regional power because the US, you know, rather to the amazement of the Iranians, managed to knock off their two main enemies, Saddam Hussein and the Taliban on each side of Iran.
So Iran has become a regional power.
And Iraq is going to go on being dominated by the Shia religious parties, who've always been linked to Iran.
You know, is there going to be an explosion in Iraq?
I sort of doubt it.
I mean, you may have you have seen that there has been some arrests in Baghdad at the moment, the struggle for power at the top.
But this may not turn into any real fighting for a few years at the moment.
I think things might stabilize, but at a very high, horrific level of violence, which is too much for the five million refugees to go home.
Yeah, the five million refugees that are completely or almost entirely undiscussed anywhere in mass media, even the European media.
I try to read very little coverage of the fact that there are still five million people who can't come home.
But I guess, well, as you say, if there's any kind of benefit to this myth that the surge work, maybe it's that the American people can finally somehow force our government to end this war and they can save face by calling it a victory, whether they empower the Iranians or not.
If they can leave Iraq somewhat stable, call it call it a win and call it a day.
Yeah, I mean, the only downside of that, Scott, is that it means that nobody much learns anything from what happened in Iraq.
So maybe they'll do the same thing in Afghanistan and Pakistan, you know.
So, you know, there isn't much that's been learned from there.
So the idea that you simply send more troops to Afghanistan and somehow things have come right are not contradicted by experience in Iraq, which is that, you know, occupation troops.
Yeah, sure.
Maybe they might secure a few roads.
But the one thing that happens everywhere is that local people don't like it.
The reaction against the occupation.
Right.
And of course, Afghanistan is more like fighting in Colorado than fighting out in a flat desert somewhere.
Yeah, I mean, all these places are pretty, but it's a complicated sort of messy place, particularly if you rely on air power, you know, with lots of civilian casualties.
You know, these drones are being used in parts of Pakistan without asking Pakistani permission.
That creates, I guess, being in Pakistan, a big reaction locally against the U.S. This is one more sort of messy situation.
You know, overall, you know, when you read stuff from the Washington think tanks describing Pakistan as a failed state or Afghanistan as a failed state, you know, there's one lesson of the last sort of 20 or more years that I think Washington should accept is that failed states are real dangerous places.
They may not have regular armies, but they've got to, you know, these are societies who will fight for what they think of their own interests, you know, if they're ever going to be a devastated place, you know, but these guys, these guys still fight.
Well, and if they're ever going to be a non-failed state, their government is going to have to have the legitimacy that comes from being supported by the from the ground up, not from being installed by the United States from across the world.
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah, you know, just watching this week, you know, as I said, I've just been in Pakistan, but Condoleezza Rice turned up to see the president and was at a press conference with him.
And then Senator McCain turned up, was pictured with him.
And then Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, did.
Now, I guess these guys all think that this increases his power and influence, but, you know, to Pakistanis watching it, they think, hold on a minute, this guy is a foreign puppet.
We only see him when he's with foreign leaders.
Yeah, well, and of course, there's a massive protest in Pakistan yesterday about the American trucks going from Karachi and then up through the Khyber Pass in Afghanistan, which have been attacked lately, apparently to such a degree that we've had to ask the Russians to let us use some of their old supply lines into Afghanistan.
Sure, you know, that's pretty amazing.
And it wasn't just rockets.
This was two or three hundred armed guys in Peshawar, quite a large city, simply thrashed the depots where these trucks were, which is the main U.S. and NATO supply line, Peshawar is the Khyber Pass going up to Kabul.
They simply took over these depots and shot the guards so that they couldn't run away and set fire to all the Humvees.
You know, this is a pretty amazing event.
Right.
Well, all we got to do is surge into Afghanistan.
Everything, I'm sure, will work out.
No, it's not.
I really want to thank you very much for your time on the show today, Patrick.
It's been great.
Thank you.
Everybody, that's Patrick Coburn, Middle East correspondent for the London Independent.
You can also find what he writes at counterpunch.org.
