Patrick Cockburn, Middle East correspondent for The Independent, discusses the emphatically relative phrase ‘Baghdad is better,’ imminent U.S. withdraw from Iraqi cities, former Sunni insurgents — gone mainstream — that can’t go back again, the status of Kurdish post-invasion land grabs and the awarding of Iraqi oil contracts to foreign corporations.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio on Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, streaming live worldwide on the internet at chaosradioaustin.org and at antiwar.com slash radio.
And it's my pleasure to welcome back to the show, Patrick Coburn.
He's the Middle East correspondent for The Independent over there in the UK.
He's the winner of the Orwell Prize for 2009 for his journalism.
He's the author of the book, Muqtada, and you can also find him at counterpunch.org.
Welcome back to the show, Patrick.
How are you, sir?
I'm fine.
Good to be back.
Thank you for joining us today.
And I guess you're back in the UK now from a recent trip to Afghanistan and Iraq.
Is that right?
Yeah.
I got back from Baghdad yesterday.
Well, I want to start with this.
The headlines today, 41 killed, 109 wounded.
It seems like on antiwar.com, our Iraqi casualties updates have stayed pretty steady for the past few months.
It seems like it's still very violent there.
I know last time I talked with Dar Jamal, he said there are bombings all the time.
Yeah.
I mean, it's, you know, I always get kind of annoyed when people say to me, you know, is Iraq better?
Well, yeah, it is better in one sense, you know, we used to have 3000 bodies a month turning up.
So even when when we have a bombing at the weekend with 70 people killed, and other bombings and assassinations, you know, it's better, but it's still very bad.
You know, there's probably, you know, maybe Mogadishu in Somalia is worse than Baghdad, but not many other places, certainly Kabul is quieter than Baghdad.
So it's very much comparative, you know, it's still a very dangerous place.
So you say Mogadishu is even worse than Baghdad now?
I haven't been in Mogadishu, but I mean, if you're watching it on television, you know, those continual street battles, but I mean, I think that's the only contender for the most dangerous city in the world right at the moment.
Well, seven days from today, on June 30th, the US military supposedly is going to hand over sovereignty to the people of Iraq.
Now, I know that's what they told us back in 2004 this time, but I guess all your reporting has been that they really mean it this time, the US is in the process of getting out of Iraq and step one is they're really getting out of the Iraqi cities as in the deal.
Yeah, I mean, they'll leave the cities.
You don't see too many American patrols at the moment, you know, and this is an important change, you know, and this is under an agreement reached not under Obama, but under Bush, this is the State of the Forces Agreement, which is what Bush went to sign when the shoes got famously thrown at him in Baghdad last year.
So, you know, this is an important moment, and this didn't happen, you know, this wasn't sort of something voluntarily handed over when the agreement started, it was first negotiated last March, the US was looking for bases all over the place, didn't want a timeline for when the US withdrew, so this was extracted by the Iraqi government like somebody extracting teeth, but it has happened, and I think it is an important moment, yeah.
Well, I guess that's really one of the most important stories here that I think might be overlooked by a lot of people.
The story about the bases, and how the US last year was pretty blatant, they wanted 58, and it was kind of all over the press, and Maliki really stood by his guns and insisted on his version of the Status of Forces Agreement, what they call the Withdrawal Agreement, and Bush, at the very end of his term, even after the election, the end of November, basically had no choice but to sign this thing, and I guess, rather than, you know, my typical stance would be to just be cynical about it, and say, yeah, well, pieces of paper say lots of things, but if the empire wants to stay, they're going to stay, but you're saying that, no, this really is a withdrawal agreement, whether the Americans like it or not, they basically have to go.
Sure, yeah, the Iraqi government wanted them to do this, you know, I mean, that's their big ally in the country, I mean, so they couldn't really have done anything different, you know, the Iraqi security forces, 600,000 strong now, so, you know, at the end of the day, they didn't have any option but to sign up, and then you've had sort of rumors and suggestions from various generals, they might stay on and bid in Mosul, the big city in the north, and so forth, but, you know, at the end of the day, this is an agreement, they're going to be out, so, you know, then there's a period when, two years, when U.S. troops stay, but once you've given a termination date, once you've said what date you're finally leaving, then your influence immediately starts being reduced, you know, it's like in a job, if you say I'm going to resign, you know, and leave in six months' time, immediately your influence in whatever job you have is very little, because people know that you're on the skids.
And this is already happening in Iraq now.
You know, you can see that, you know, obviously the U.S., with a big political investment here, with, you know, 35,000 dead and wounded, you know, will try to maximize its influence through other means, you know, through political means, through covert means, and so forth, but the fact of having a big land army, with a very big air force, in Iraq, obviously did maximize American influence, and as that force leaves, that influence goes down.
Well now, when Barack Obama gave his first big Iraq policy speech, he basically said, yeah, we're going to go by this status forces agreement, this withdrawal agreement, and leave the country, but he seemed to leave a lot of loopholes open, he really made no mention whatsoever of this massive embassy that's been built, he made no mention of the contractors, he seemed to leave a little kind of bushes in the counter-terrorism forces, we'll have to leave some counter-terrorism forces in there, these kinds of things.
Do you think that, basically, despite his intentions, that all those will have to go to?
What about that embassy?
Well, you know, it's sort of, it's shrunk to a sort of small, quite small part of the green zone, you know, it's surrounded by Iraqis, you know, they might want to do these things, I mean, I'm sure there are guys in the Pentagon and the CIA elsewhere who would like to do these things, but, you know, from the beginning, Iraqis, outside Kurdistan, really didn't like the occupation, so this is going to be kind of difficult to do, you know, you know, and if there's one lesson that, you know, I think the United States should have learned in Iraq, but really, nothing can be done which ignores the Iraqis, or assumes that the Iraqis won't react to something they don't like.
Well now, what about the public narrative about how we can leave now because we've won, the surge worked and everything, as you said, it's annoying to you when they say that everything in Iraq is better now, because it's only relative, but, I guess, I mean, the fact remains, if it got worse, they might lose the narrative that they did a great job, that General Petraeus figured out how to wage the war right, and now we can leave because we have a victory, do you think that if different factions in Iraq, fighting more, you know, do you think that that could serve as an excuse to, you know, double down, stay even longer, as it has been all these years?
Well, I have to say again, Scott, you know, Iraqis won't let that happen, you know, one of the reasons the U.S. pulled out, you know, is that there was big resistance from Iraqis, you know, the U.S. might like to do these things, but they just can't be done, you know, the main political factor on the map is, you know, what Iraqis think about this, and they don't want it, and they won't let it happen, so, you know, on the question of will there be more violence, I'm sure there will be more violence, but actually, you know, as we were discussing earlier, violence never stopped, you know, compared to anywhere else in the world, it's incredibly violent, I think there is a danger, though, that, you know, when you talk about the surge, and this is sold in the U.S. as a great victory, but one thing that goes on being violent, then this will be put forward by the Republicans as we had a great victory, and then we were stabbed in the back by Obama, you know, it's all propaganda, I mean, it's rubbish, but, you know, there are obviously people who believe this, and I mean, I look at sort of, you know, when I write commentary articles, and people sort of write in their comments, you know, I suddenly see these guys who are writing in saying, you know, what about our great victory of the surge, why does Koban ignore this, you know, but the thing is, basically, what happened in Iraq since 2003, we've had two wars, one is the U.S. invades, and very quickly, there's a war against the occupation, primarily by the Sunni community, then you have a war between the Sunni and the Shia, you know, and I should say also, you know, the fact that one of, you know, you always had sectarian divisions in Iraq, but what really turned it into this tremendous explosion was that one community, the Shia, kind of allied themselves, or cooperated with the U.S., and the other community fought it, but anyway, we did have this civil war, very bloody civil war between the Sunni and Shia, now, those wars have kind of ended, you know, the Sunni community really lost out to the Shia, and those who are fighting against the American occupation are now saying, you know, the Americans are leaving, so the overall basis for these two wars has gone, we might have a war between the Arabs and the Kurds, that's a slightly different thing, but I think, you know, we'll have a very high degree of violence, but will we have war break out again?
No, I'm a bit dubious about that.
Well, now, I mean, it's certainly the case, I guess, that the Shiites won the civil war, that the Sunnis basically have lost the capital city, I think Juan Cole's blog today said he thinks it's, you know, Baghdad is no more than 10 or 15% Sunni at this point, so, you know, it's pretty clear that they lost that war, but then, I wonder about the status of the whole arrangement of the Awakening Councils, the Sons of Iraq, so-called, where the former Sunni insurgents were given by the United States control over their own territories.
Is the Iraqi army now the predominant force in the Sunni-majority areas of the country, or is there still a division there of the monopoly on security forces?
It depends where, I think in Baghdad, you know, it's very much dominated by the Iraqi government, by the security forces, by Shia security forces, and as you say, the Sunni-only minority there, but you go to Anbar province, which is the 98% Sunni, then, you know, they've got, you know, they're much more powerful on the ground, a little of the al-Sahwa, and that's the, this Anbar province, you know, is somewhere between a quarter and a third of the whole country, so, and that's pretty big, you know, that you could, it might have a basis for, if the Sunni got really frightened of a renewed war there, but in Baghdad, you know, it might happen, there might be more fighting, but the Sunni are very vulnerable, I doubt if they'll go back to war, and also these al-Sahwa guys, they used to be insurgents, but now they've all been photographed, fingerprinted, you know, their irises, or their eyes recorded, you know, once you've lost any degree of secrecy, it's kind of difficult to relaunch a guerrilla war.
Right, well, if Maliki and his, I think he said 600,000 strong army and police forces, if they try to come in there and say, listen, we're the monopoly on security everywhere in this country, and take the power from those awakening groups, without hiring them to be those, the Iraqi government security forces, then, you know, what's going to happen?
They're going to at least resist, if not try to take back Baghdad, they're at least going to try to resist and maintain control over Fallujah, or what have you, right?
Sure, yeah, they'll fight for their own territory, you know.
So there's really not a state at all at this point?
Oh, yeah, there is a state, it's a powerful state, you know, but, you know, it depends if it, you know, they could overplay their hands, you know, if they try and sort of arrest all the young men in Fallujah, then there'll be an explosion, you know, there's going to be a balance between the two communities.
And now, can you tell us a little bit more about what you mentioned there, a possible conflict brewing between the Arabs and the Kurds up in the north?
I thought it was important you pointed out in your article that Kirkuk is actually not in Kurdistan, but after the war, the Kurds kind of made a break for it and tried to take Kirkuk, and now they're sort of standing there saying, now what, as the Americans leave?
Sure, you know, I mean, what happened was, the basis for this sort of conflict is that the Kurds had sort of three provinces where they're, you know, they're 100% of the population.
Then 2003 war, originally the U.S. was going to invade from the north with the help of the Turks, so they thought the Turkish parliament turned them down.
So when the Americans didn't evade from the north, but they sent in special forces there and the air force, and that big ally up there was the Kurds.
Now, the Kurds advanced quite far outside their own territories, into areas they hadn't previously controlled, which had a majority of Kurds, but also into areas they hadn't previously controlled that had a majority of Arabs.
They took the big northern city of Mosul, which has over a million people in it.
They also took the city of Kirkuk and the great oil fields in the north.
And these areas have a lot of Arabs in them.
So you have a sort of 300-mile sort of fuzzy border in Iraq between Arabs and Kurds, in which the Kurds don't want to retreat.
Now, these days, the central government is stronger in Baghdad, the Americans are leaving, the Arabs, local Arabs are sort of coming back in force.
They won the provincial elections in Nineveh, that's where Mosul is.
And so, both sides are shaping up for a fight.
I mean, I'm not sure they really want it, but they can't see quite how to avoid it.
You know, for instance, there's an Arab governor of Mosul these days, he wanted to go and visit another part of his province, but he goes down one road and there's a Kurdish checkpoint.
They said, you know, walk any further and we'll kill you, we have orders to shoot to kill.
So the governor has to retreat, but suppose they'd shot him?
Then there would have been massacres between Kurds and Arabs immediately, so it's a pretty sort of fraught situation.
Well, and importantly, the Shiite government of Maliki and all of his group there has been this whole time based on an alliance with the Kurds against the old rulers, the Sunni minority under Saddam Hussein.
Sure, yeah, I mean, that's the traditional alliance, but a lot of anti-Kurdish feeling among the Arabs, both Sunni and Shia at the moment.
One politician was saying to me, you know, that you could win an election here in Iraq if you ran on an anti-Kurdish platform, but you know, one thing about Iraq, all these communities are big and they'll fight.
Each of them can destabilize Iraq.
You know, look at the trouble the U.S. was in, and they were fighting only 20% of the Iraqi population.
So, you know, all these communities are pretty tough.
So, you know, will there be an agreement?
I don't know, it's in their own interest that this should happen.
But I think one thing that's really difficult to convey to people outside Iraq is, you know, it's not just the present security situation that influences people, it's the memory of how many people have been killed since 2003 and before 2003 over the last 30 years, you know.
And that makes it very difficult for people to trust each other, that makes it very difficult for people to trust the U.S.
You know, that's something that somebody was saying to me in Baghdad, you know, how can the Americans, the British are always telling their leaders to agree, but Iraqis in the street don't really dare, I mean, Sunni and Shia don't really dare live in the same street these days, so it's difficult to reach an agreement.
It's Patrick Coburn, Middle East correspondent for the London Independent, his most recent article is Iraq, The Final Countdown, and, you know, in this article you really talk about how shell-shocked you are, even as you go around Baghdad, everything is connected to a memory of something horrible and bloody that happened somewhere, and how, you know, that kind of attitude, I think you say, your first instinct is that maybe it hampers your journalism, but then actually, you know, really you're more able to convey what it's like to actually be in Iraqi, much better than some, you know, chipper blonde Fox News bimbo brought in to talk about how well everything's going, you're far more plugged in to what it's really like to be there, because that's, that is what it's like to be there, everywhere you go, you remember that time that your friend got killed there.
Yeah, there are places, you know, not to be overdramatic, it's kind of bathed in blood, you know, and somebody who arrives fresh doesn't realize this, doesn't, you know, won't take on board the way Iraqis think, and it's very understandable, you know, it's not just Iraqis think that way.
So, you know, I was trying to convey in this piece, you know, that I go, you know, security is a little bit better, you know, as I go to restaurants sometimes, you know, but I remember who was shot in that restaurant, who blew up that restaurant, you know, I have a hotel, they were very nice to me there, you know, but I remember one receptionist was, his son was killed in the end of 2005 when the hotel was hit by two very big suicide, vehicle-borne suicide bombs, they never found the body, another receptionist, he had a little job which was collecting money from companies that, he offered them a deal on phone scratch cards, so he was known to carry quite a lot of cash, some guys grabbed him one day, they took the cash, then they said, well, we'll let you go, why don't you ring up your father to pick you up from a certain square, his father, this other receptionist who I knew, went to pick him up, he saw his son get out of the car, he took a few steps forward, and then the gunman shot him in the back, killed him, you know, so it's full of stories and worse stories than that, you know, people tortured, and those stories don't, you know, leave people's minds, and that would be true anywhere, and it's certainly true in Iraq.
Well, and it's been like this for 30 years or something, my whole lifetime, this country has been at war either with itself or with Iran next door, or with the United States invading from Saudi or blockading them or invading again.
Yeah, it has, I mean, and it hasn't, you know, the consequences of that are still there, I mean, one thing I was writing about, one thing that the U.S. is, troops are pulling out of the city on the 30th, but something else happens on the 29th and 30th, which is that new contracts are going to be awarded to international oil companies to become involved in the sort of center of the Iraqi oil industry for the first time since the oil was nationalized in 1972.
One of the reasons is the government is broke, price of oil is down, all these great big super giant oil fields haven't been maintained, haven't no investment, so they need the money and they need the expertise, so they're inviting these guys back, so that is a sort of a measure of a kind of desperation in the government at the moment.
Well, and I guess you say in your article, too, the oil is really the only thing that these people have going for them at this point, that if they're going to be able to rebuild their country, you know, at least, thank goodness they have oil wealth there, but I'm kind of confused about the situation, is it, is the oil still to be nationally owned, at least, you know, quote-unquote?
I mean, you're confused, the Iraqis are a bit confused, those are complicated contracts whereby, yeah, there's a fee paid for the oil, it's sort of owned by Iraqis, but it's, the fee is going to be paid in crude oil, I think this contract goes on for 20 years, so if they're buied by the contract, how far is, you know, how far do they really only control their own oil fields?
Well, that control is going to be less, you know, maybe somebody could argue, well, you know, we've got no choice, we need the expertise, we need the investments and so forth, but there isn't any question that that control is going to be less, although the oil ministry and the government say, well, it's still our oil, but it's rather less their oil than it, after the 30th, than it was before.
But it'll still be an agreement between the national government and the oil companies and they'll basically play their part in OPEC, rather than, you know, having a bunch of private wildcatters doing whatever they want.
Oh yeah, that won't happen, but, you know, but that was never really going to happen, you know.
You're only in the dreams of the Heritage Foundation, guys.
Well so, is it going to be a bunch of Houston connected Republican oil company types who get to come in and develop it all, or is it going to be Russians and Chinese and French and...
It'll be the big oil, you know, they sort of, you know, the usual names, you know, Royal Dutch Shell, you know, Exxon, you know, Luke Oil, I think it's, you know, it's kind of the big, you know, they used to be called the Seven Sisters, I can't remember how many sisters there are these days, you know, but there's a finite number of big oil companies and those are the guys who are coming in.
And you write about this in your article as well, what role do you think oil really played in the overall war?
I mean, here we are, if the British and the Americans are going to be the companies that get to come in and make all the money off the oil, maybe that's what the war was about all along, huh?
I never really thought that, I thought that, you know, why did Bush do it?
Well, you know, my own feeling was they did it because they wanted another war post 9-11, you know, to...
I think they also forethought war and a permanent state of emergency allowed them to apply their own agenda in the political agenda in the U.S. and win elections in the U.S.
You know, it's rather amazing, the Republicans won in 2004 saying the war was going fine, and if we're in Iraq, you know, it was going real bad, you know.
But, you know, I was struck, and American officials, you know, to whom I talk to, everybody was struck by how the priority of the administration in 2004 was they didn't really care what was happening on the ground, they only cared how it was presented to the U.S. voter.
And it was presented as, you know, we have things under control.
Well, they certainly caused...
The television stations are a great deal to answer for during that period.
Well, and they even deliberately put off the elections until after Bush was re-elected in November, they put them off until January of 2005, which certainly caused more violence because they were originally going to have them in the spring of 2004 or something, right?
Yeah, I mean, basically everything they did, they wanted at that time, and then Bush, I think Bremer says in his memoirs, you know, that Bush had said to him, you know, we want an Iraqi prime minister who will stand in front of the American people and Congress on TV and say, thank you, you know, you did the right thing.
And that's what they wanted from a prime minister.
They got one.
Yadlawi did just that, though afterwards he said he had absolutely no power at all within Iraq.
So, you know, they wanted guys who were their puppets, and they wanted them to say a certain thing.
Now, you know, but to go back to what we were saying earlier, you know, why did they do it?
I think things like oil, did it matter?
Sure it mattered, you know, but that's what made Iraq something that people wanted to get their hands on.
You know, that's what makes the Gulf important, that area, that makes it the most strategic area in the world.
You know, that's important.
You know, what was the neocons, everything else.
But I don't think oil was the first reason they wanted to go in.
And actually it's been a very long time when they couldn't exploit the oil at all.
And partly they're moving in now just by mistakes made by the Iraqi government.
They spent too much money, they didn't get their act together.
That's why they have to look to these oil companies at the moment.
With all the inflation coming, at least nominally the price of gas will be skyrocketing.
I don't know how well that will really help them.
Yeah, I mean, it's sort of, there's a need for, you know, one of the things about oil that these probably, you know, they're meant to be the third biggest oil fields in the world.
But, oil reserves in the world, but they may be the biggest, because nobody really knows what's under the desert in the south, outside Basra.
There hasn't been, you know, exploration.
Certainly the biggest supergiant fields are in a quite small, confined area in southeast Iraq.
Well, and there are some who say that, like Greg Pallas says, that the whole motive here is keeping that oil off the market to keep the price artificially high.
But, I guess that's a whole other thing.
Let me ask you about this before I let you go here, Patrick.
What about Muqtada al-Sadr, the subject of your book?
Where's he been?
What's going on with him?
He's in Iran.
He's sort of studying there.
He's sort of expected to come back either before or after the general, or the election, parliamentary elections next January.
He remains sort of influential, because the Sadrists remain, I mean, they still have committed followers, you know, people.
And, you know, will they be powerful in future?
Yeah, I think so, but in a different way than before.
Muqtada dissolved his militia, because he'd been saying for a long time that, you know, at one end of it was being controlled by the Iranians and the others by gangsters.
I mean, so he wants to have a more disciplined force, so it'll be much more political in future.
But, you know, what divided Muqtada from Maliki and the government was that he wanted an American withdrawal, and a timeline for an American withdrawal, and now that's happened.
So actually there's no particular reason that he shouldn't resume his alliance with them.
But I think it'll be, I think the era of that sort of militia that he used to run in Iraq has probably ended.
And Muqtada was never that keen on it either.
He always saw himself as a sort of religious, political leader.
Alright, well, I guess we'll leave it there.
I'm sorry I've already kept you over time.
I really appreciate your time on the show today.
Thank you.
Alright, that's Patrick Coburn from London Independent.
It's independent.co.uk.
It's most recent article is Iraq, the final countdown.
And the book, again, is Muqtada, Muqtada al-Sadr and the Shiite revival in Iraq.
We'll be right back.
