Patrick Cockburn - Ten Days in Syria (2013)

Jeff Blankfort: My guest today, Patrick Coburn, was one of the more important correspondents covering the war in Iraq, about which we interviewed him at the time, and he has written several books on the country's history, including Saddam Hussein and American Obsession, co-authored with Brother Andrew, written before the war, The Occupation, War, and Resistance in Iraq, and Muqtada al-Sadr, The Shia Revival and the Struggle for Iraq. He won the Marta Gellhorn Prize in 2005, the James Cameron Prize in 2006, and the Orwell Prize for Journalism in 2009. He is also the brother of my late friend and the outstanding journalist in his own right, Alexander Coburn, whose weekly column graced the pages of the Anderson Valley Advertiser for many years, right up to his death in July. I contacted Patrick for another interview after learning that he had just spent 10 days in Syria and reading his reports of his trip in the London Independent. Welcome, Patrick Coburn, again to Takes on the World. Thank you. Uh, the last time we spoke in June was a little more than a month before Alexander's passing. And those of us who knew him and admired him have not quite got over it. Being reminded every Wednesday, like today when his column no longer appears in the pages of the Anderson Valley advertiser, perhaps you might want to say a few words about Alexander from your own perspective as his brother and part of an incredible journalistic family.

Patrick Cockburn: Well, thank you. Yeah. I mean, well, I, you know, I miss him enormously. Uh, I used to... He was ready. He'd been able for about two years. He wanted to give it a secret because he didn't want to be treated as an invalid. But I was talking to him every couple of days by Skype. And up to the end, he retained a sort of gaiety, a determination. He went on writing columns. He never sort of surrendered to the illness until the very last. The... So, yeah, I still have an intense sense of loss whenever I think of him.

Jeff Blankfort: Well, it's shared by many people who knew him, and it was a well-kept secret, especially on a day-to-day, like everything is known very quickly even before it happens. Well, you have just spent 10 days in Syria with that bloody war between the Syrian government and those trying to take it down. There's even no prospect of ending. But what you've written about it in the independences leaving Damascus presents kind of a different picture about the status of the conflict than what we read and hear in the U.S. media. Perhaps you can go into that a bit.

Patrick Cockburn: Yes, I mean, I find, you know, when I got to Damascus, it is really very different from the picture you get from the foreign media or even, you know, talking to people in Beirut. I mean, you get the sort of feeling there that the Assad government is on its last legs. It's about to collapse. The rebels are closing in on central Damascus. And when you get there, I mean, yeah, there is a lot of fighting. The government controls most of the main cities. I mean, it controls all the main cities effectively. I drove from Damascus about 100 miles north to Homs. the third biggest city in Syria, and used to be the center of the revolution. And there were a few shots fired, but really not many. When I got to Homs, there was no shooting at all. So I think that this idea that the Syrian government is about to collapse is really wishful thinking and certainly exaggerated.

Jeff Blankfort: Well, there's been, of course, from the very beginning, particularly from elements of the Israel lobby, like the Washington souvenirs policy, to get the U.S. to intervene more than it has. And the degree that it has is difficult to know in terms besides logistics, things like that. But there seems to be a kind of reluctance on the part of NATO to actually intervene. Intervene in the extent that it even did in Libya, even given the Russian threat of – well, the Russian has nothing to do with NATO, of course, but the nature of the resistance or the opposition of the government – has taken such international form, particularly with this al-Nusra Front, the so-called jihadist, that there seems to be trepidation about what's going to happen if and when Assad falls.

Patrick Cockburn: Yeah, I think that's very much the case. I mean, even up to the moment, you know, there was in Washington, London, Paris, elsewhere, there were predictions that the government was going to fall 130 countries have recognized the national coalition, which is the main opposition, as the legitimate representative of Syria. But very bizarrely, in fact, it is amazing that at the very same moment that the U.S. was recognizing this coalition as the representative of Syria, they condemned its main military arm, the al-Nusra Front, as being a terrorist organization linked to al-Qaeda. So, you know, it's not surprising that, you know, quite a number of Syrians say, hold on a minute, you know, you just recognize these guys as a legitimate government, but you also say that their military wing are a collection of terrorists. You know, there's some contradiction here.

Jeff Blankfort: Is this an al-Nusra front? Are they Syrians or are they a mixture of Middle East countries who experienced fighters like the Sunnis who were fighting in the U.S. and Iraq? Is this a Syrian-based organization or is it like an international force?

Patrick Cockburn: It's Syrian-based, but its most effective fighters seem to come from Iraq or Syrians who've been in Iraq. That's why it's kind of more effective, it's also better disciplined, and it also has more financial resources from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. So it can afford to buy more equipment and pay its men more.

Jeff Blankfort: Well, as soon as he mentioned the Gulf, because Qatar, the owner of Al Jazeera, beginning with the Libyan situation, kind of decided to put its heavy hand into the reporting and then became very pro-rebels in Libya. We're describing them as the Democrats are on the march, so to speak.

Patrick Cockburn: Sure, again, it's, you know, it's another bizarre aspect of this, that this supposedly democratic revolution, it certainly started off that way in Syria, you know, a genuine uprising of the people against the regime. But suddenly the main backers are the main, you know, one of the few absolute monarchies left on Earth, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, places where there is absolutely no democracy, where there's no freedom of expression. So, you know, it's full of, this is a, a revolution and an uprising full of contradictory elements. I mean, in some ways it's a genuine revolution, but in other ways, you know, it's a sectarian attack.

Jeff Blankfort: Is there a sense, as you got in Damascus, that the peaceful uprising or peaceful protest, which is the way it began in Syria, might have had a chance if it didn't quickly turn into an insurrection?

Patrick Cockburn: It might. On the other hand, the government reacted, you know, very violently towards it. It did want it to be, you know, people who demonstrated were shot, people who were tortured, etc. You know, there was a genuine element in this. But these days, you know, when I was in Damascus, one thing that everybody was talking about was that on YouTube, you know, there was a very grisly scene of two government... officers being beheaded, one of them by a nine-year-old, ten-year-old boy. Not surprisingly, this really frightens people who might be deemed to be on the government side.

Jeff Blankfort: Well, this also is a situation in which the non-Sunnis in Syria, the various Alawites and Christian, various religious sects who were more or less protected or privileged before the uprising began, are very concerned, seem very concerned about what might happen should the rebels win.

Patrick Cockburn: Yeah, the rebels, you know, are 70% of the population of Sunni, Muslim. If they win, you know, what's going to happen to the other 30%? There's also, you know, another aspect of this, which is this was very much a sort of movement originally of the villagers and the rural poor against the cities. So, you know, a place like Aleppo, when the rebels come in, they looted everything, government offices, schools. shops, you know, it's sort of a sense of almost revenge by people coming from the villages. It reminded me a lot of Baghdad in 2003, when Semele, the poor from Sadr City, poured into the center and really stripped it like locusts. So, not surprisingly, people in Aleppo, you know, now wonder, they may not like the government Malvasat much, but they wonder if the alternative is going to be even worse.

Jeff Blankfort: From what I gather, and not being there, although I saw Lebanon before the civil war and at the end of it, that the rebel that came out of town into Aleppo attacked government positions, knowing that the government would then retaliate against the people of Aleppo. It was like no government, whatever the base is going to tolerate an insurrection, whether it's a so-called democracy or a dictatorship. Except, of course, the Syrian experiences, there was no gray zones. Syrian government's history is not one of being able to handle peaceful demonstrations. But is there a sense that you've got in Damascus that the rebels have kind of used or abused the situation in order to bring retaliation and essentially destroy some of the oldest marvelous cities of the world?

Patrick Cockburn: Yeah, I mean, there are a number of forms of destruction. When the rebels came into Aleppo, it appears, I mean, everybody seems to say this, including the because the rebels who set fire to the souks, you know, these ancient souks.

Jeff Blankfort: Markets, yes.

Patrick Cockburn: Markets have been there for, you know, 600, 700 years. In other areas, they've taken the government, sort of launches a sporadic artillery fire and some aerial bombing. So people flee. So they become sort of ghost towns. And you see that around Damascus. You see that in Aleppo. So, you know, this doesn't excuse what the government is doing. But often, you know, people in these areas plead with the rebels not to come in, but they say, look, you know, we're the ones who's going to bear the brunt of this, and you can't defend us or anything like that. But the rebels seem to, that seems to be their tactic, to come in. And then you have a stalemate, you're a standoff. The government, rebels aren't strong enough to take Damascus or the other cities, but the government isn't strong enough to push them out. So you have these divisions in all these cities. It reminds me of Beirut during the civil war.

Jeff Blankfort: Well, of course, as far as I recall, these were purely Lebanese factions, and the international repercussions, although there were fears upon the United States, had some concerns, but in terms of the international implications of the outcome of that civil war in Lebanon, were nothing like what we see in Syria, where Syria seems to be right in the center of so many situations that whatever happens here is going to have an impact on every other country in the neighborhood.

Patrick Cockburn: Yeah, and those countries know it. So they fund different groups. They have their proxies. They'll get support from Turkey or they'll get support from Saudi Arabia or somebody in Kuwait or something like that. And when you have just so many cooks involved in this, you know, it gets very difficult to stop because they all have their motivations. They all begin to have their paymasters outside the country. And in the meantime, the country's been sort of torn apart. You know, it's full of internal refugees. People, you know, have moved out of their neighborhood, but it's a big shell. They've moved into schools or something nearby. You have people who are very frightened. There are death squads there. wondering about, you know, both government and rebel. So increasingly you have a society which is sort of very deeply divided, which reminds me more and more of Iraq.

Jeff Blankfort: Do the people you spoke with in Damascus and there in Syria, do they see this as part of a regional, apart from what the United States or Britain or France think, or even Israel, as part of a Sunni-Shia war that was exacerbated by the Shia taking over a century-old Sunni domination of Mesopotamia or Iraq?

Patrick Cockburn: They see it that way, but it's a combination of different conflicts, each making the other worse. There's a sense, you know, there's a genuine revolution of the people against the regime. You have also the poor against the rich, you know, the people who didn't benefit from the Assad government out in the villages. And you also have just pure sectarianism, which is getting worse and worse, with the Alawites who so dominate the government. We're kind of sheer... feeling, you know, that they've got nowhere to run to, so they might as well fight to the finish. And they need thinking more and more along sectarian lines, thinking, you know, why do we need these minorities?

Jeff Blankfort: So is there any sense with the various threats? Recently, there was an article in the papers here about how the Israelis using satellites had detected the Syrian military mixing what they claimed to be sarin mixing chemical weapons to be used in 500-pound bombs, and that the U.S. or Russia or whatever leaned on a war in the Syrian government not to do that, and supposedly they pulled back on that. Is there much concern and discussion about the possibility of chemical weapons? Not a lot.

Patrick Cockburn: It's more outside the country than in. Sometimes when I hear all this about chemical weapons, you'd think that conventional bombs and shells, you know, didn't, were harmless. You don't actually have to use these poison gas if you want to kill a lot of people. You just, you know, you use conventional weapons, you know, just as, will kill people just as surely as sarin gas. I don't really know what to make of that story. It was obviously being hyped abroad, you know, did have substance with the government trying to keep poison gas away from the rebels, where they sort of, maybe saying to people, well, we'll fight to the finish, we'll do anything, I don't know. But it had a sort of strong whiff of propaganda about it, you know, and obviously reminded lots of people all over the world of what was said in 2003 about Saddam's non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

Jeff Blankfort: Well, then the excuse of the neocons was that Saddam had shipped all his chemical weapons to Syria, I remember.

Patrick Cockburn: Yeah, you know, it's not that difficult to make some of these things, you know. It's sort of something that hits a button. But I think it's exploited for some propaganda reasons.

Jeff Blankfort: How do you see Russia's position in this?

Patrick Cockburn: Actually, I think, you know, Russia's position is actually much more sensible. It gets credit for their saying, look, this needs to be ended by negotiation, that you can't have the rebels saying, well, a precondition is that Assad should go. But hold on a minute. Assad controls the largest armed force in the country by far. He controls most of the cities and most of the population. So why should he go before negotiations? Why should he agree to leave? You know, a lot of the reporting gives the impression he's clinging on by his fingertips, but he obviously isn't. In the very long term, maybe his chances aren't so great. But for the moment, you know, if we're talking about what happens in 2013, you know, there's good reason to think he'll be there at the end of it. And I'm sure he thinks that.

Jeff Blankfort: Well, one of the problems seems to be that both sides, the so-called national coalition, which is actually forced together, I mean forced to come together by its supporters on the outside, and the Assad government have both preconditions that kind of prohibit any kind of dialogue.

Patrick Cockburn: That's right, and the longer this goes on, you know, you've got what in Northern Ireland we used to call the politics of the last atrocity, you know. There are so many atrocities that nobody wants to really talk to each other. was, you know, they've just been subjected to massacre. You know, so you just kind of, you know, you think, could this balance of power change? You know, what would change it? Well, obviously it'd be changed if you had NATO coming in like Libya and, you know, becoming the air force of the rebels, but that doesn't look very likely. The rebels are making some advances, but not very, not that significant for the moment. And the government, they haven't been really any defections from the core of the regime. So it looks pretty stable at a very high level of bloodshed.

Jeff Blankfort: Well, actually, given some of the atrocities committed by the rebels, defectors would be taking their life in their hands. I mean, even if they pretended or they decided that they wanted to oppose the regime. The interjection of the Patriot missiles in Turkey to defend against the likelihood of a Syrian air attack, it seems kind of remote and ridiculous.

Patrick Cockburn: Yeah, I think it's pretty sort of symbolic or silly, I think, because... The Turks have a very big, one of the biggest, the biggest army in the region, I think. And so it's very unlikely the Syrians are going to attack them, particularly in their present condition. So it's, you know, I suppose that's a symbol of support or an attempt to give the impression that Syria is, you know, a mighty power which is about to invade its neighbors, which it obviously isn't.

Jeff Blankfort: What do they think of in terms of the likelihood of Israel doing anything? Israel's now beefing up its military positions on the Golan. But how do they see, if any, Israel's involvement in this?

Patrick Cockburn: I don't really know. I mean, you know, there may be some political involvement. I'm not sure. It isn't necessarily, they say, they're not going to be glad when Assad goes. But if there's a takeover by the Muslim Brotherhood, They said they're hostile to Israel. Is there anything greater than that of Assad? So I don't think that that's going to change things much. I think that there is a genuine fear, you know, not just in Israel, but in Washington and London and so forth, that somehow they're backing the rebels. They recognize them as the legitimate government of Syria. At the same time, it's evident that the cutting edge of the rebels, their military force, is very close to al-Qaeda. And if it takes over Syria, that will also destabilize Iraq. So I think they're very nervous about what's happening. They're less enthusiastic about getting rid of Assad, less enthusiastic than they were a year ago.

Jeff Blankfort: Now, you went to Damascus from Beirut.

Patrick Cockburn: Yeah, I drove through. It's difficult to get visas to go to Damascus. I did get a visa. One of the problems is that most of the international media is not in Damascus and their sources tend to be rebel sources and so forth. So I don't think the picture you get Most of the newspapers and on television is pretty skewed. It's pretty suspect. You did drive through the mountains. It wasn't tight, but I think I counted eight checkpoints between the border and Damascus, which isn't a very long road. It used to take about two hours, two and a half hours, to get from Beirut to Damascus. I think it took me five hours. Damascus itself, people, big traffic jams. You can hear the shelling in the distance. There's an echo. Sound echoes off the mountains near the city. Big traffic jams, lots of checkpoints. People worried, but life sort of going on still.

Jeff Blankfort: It doesn't seem like a city under siege from your perspective.

Patrick Cockburn: Yeah, it's not under siege. You know, it's under pressure, but not under siege. You know, you can go south to the Jordanian border. You can go to Beirut. You can go north. There are other roads that were blocked. You know, it's sort of other things. When I was there, you know, I'd sort of see on television battles rage on the airport road, you know. You know, there were some snipers on the airport road, you know, pretty good reason for not going down that road. The actual airport itself at that moment, you know, didn't have a pane of glass broken. So because the media isn't there, you get a sort of exaggerated impression of the severity of the fighting in areas like that.

Jeff Blankfort: You had a funny line in, even though this is not a funny situation, your article in the Independent of December 30th where the reliance on the rebels for the stories, you say the willingness of the international media based often in Beirut but also in London and New York to regurgitate with so little skepticism was essentially good quality propaganda. It's as if prior to the U.S. presidential election in November, foreign journalists had been unable to obtain visas to enter the U.S. and had instead decided to rely on Republican Party militants for their information on the campaign. Moreover, Republican activists based in Mexico and Canada. I thought that was a great lie. Great paragraph.

Patrick Cockburn: I think it's, you know, it's all too true, I'm afraid. Yes. You know, it's kind of ludicrous. You know, there is a good reason why courts... don't like hearsay evidence. They kind of want witnesses to have seen things with their own eyes, otherwise they don't want to hear what they say. It's pretty amazing that journalists, and journalists are well-known publications, repeat third-hand information of things they haven't seen themselves, and actually might have very little knowledge of, and coming from biased sources. And, I don't know, it somehow seems to me the reporting of Syria... is actually worse than that of Iraq, the Iraq War or the Afghanistan War. I'm not quite sure why it is, but standards have got a lot lower than they used to be.

Jeff Blankfort: My guest is Patrick Coburn. We're speaking about Syria. If you have any questions or comments, the number here, of course, is 895-2448, 895-2448. What about the stability of Lebanon? Is that at all in jeopardy by the uprising?

Patrick Cockburn: To a degree it is. On the other hand, Lebanese have been through so much. There's kind of a balance of power between the different sects. You know, the Hezbollah, the Shia, you know, very reliant on Syria. So I... But I'm not sure it's... You know, there's fighting in Tripoli in the north between Alawites and Sunni sniping, you know, people being killed. That's a bit ominous. But on the other hand, hopefully... Lebanese have suffered so much that they'll hesitate quite a lot before they go down that road again.

Jeff Blankfort: We do have a caller. Let's see. Hello, you're on the air.

Patrick Cockburn: Hi, I'd like to ask Patrick a question about whether he can take seriously Hillary Clinton's desire for a rebel coalition that does not include al-Nusri and how in the world Would she be able to convince the Qataris and the Saudis to stop supporting these people? Yeah, I mean, good question. I mean, the answer is she can't, you know. I mean, it's kind of the U.S. and its allies kind of want to have that cake and eat it. They want to support the... They want to support the... the rebels, but somehow not. They remain military wings. So, you know, this is kind of fantasy land, really.

Jeff Blankfort: Well, that was... Hillary, of course, has ideas for the 2016 election. Hopefully, the Syrian civil war, it seems even... even something beyond a civil war, something kind of unprecedented with the presence of outsiders, but the damage being done to Syria because the weapons being used are so much more powerful than those that were used among the factions in Lebanon. If that war in Syria would go on as long as the Lebanese civil war went on, there'd be nothing left.

Patrick Cockburn: Yeah, it is already. It's done enormous damage, you know, and It also, the hatreds are created, you know, and they're just not going to go away. You know, there's material damage. Aleppo was a great sort of commercial center for Syria. Now, you know, many of the factories are burnt out. The owners and the managers and a lot of the workers fled. You know, it's going to take time to recover from that. But also, you know, when you have any civil war, it creates hatreds, but this sort of, when you have massacres, big and small. You know, people don't really forgive. People don't... It's also very difficult for people to live beside each other. You know, we've put a very... horrible and recent example of that in Iraq.

Jeff Blankfort: It's interesting that it's not well publicized here, but the Iraqi government, al-Maliki, is at least quietly cooperating and supporting the Syrian government. And the U.S., I know, has protested Iran overflights to Damascus, but they have not done that very loudly because it would simply show the U.S. failed in Iraq to do what it probably intended to do.

Patrick Cockburn: Yeah, and this is, you know, you talk to Iraqis, you know, Shia Iraqis and so forth, you know, they're all very nervous. They sort of think, you know, if Syria gets taken over by the Sun, it will be next. It will reignite the civil war in Iraq. I'm not sure how true that might be, but, you know, there's a good chance they're right. They've got a lot to be frightened of.

Jeff Blankfort: I also want to bring up the Kurdish situation because Turkey has been having a long-time war with its own Kurds. There's a Kurdistan essentially in northern Iraq, and we have Kurds, Syrian Kurds, were kind of caught in between in this situation. I think there's been some divisions, but how do people see the Kurdish situation working out? Any thoughts?

Patrick Cockburn: It's an important question because you've got about two and a half million Kurds mostly in the north along the Kurdish border. They basically take it over their area and are now sort of semi-independent, de facto independent. It's like what happened to the Iraqi Kurds after the war in 1991. And the longer the present conflict goes on, the more the Syrian Kurds will sort of create their own sort of... autonomous state linked to the Kurds elsewhere. So this is, you know, one sign of Syria fragmenting. And it's another source of sort of tension and stress within the country.

Jeff Blankfort: There was some talk early on of Assad taking the government or removing himself and his leadership and family and so on to an Alawite conclave. Is that being discussed at all?

Patrick Cockburn: Well, it's being discussed. I just don't quite buy that. One, they don't have to do that. They're a long way from that. They still control Damascus. Why should they set it off there? Secondly, you know, these guys have been in power in Damascus for a long time. You know, they're not going to, you know, they're not going to return to their mountains. One, they wouldn't be safe there. And secondly, you know, what would they do there? So I think that, you know, they're more likely, you know, they're ultimately defeated to flee to, you know, to anywhere, whether it's Iraq or to Iran or maybe, you know, maybe to Paris or London. But, you know, they're quite a long way off that. But this idea of sort of A little, yeah, the Alawi, you know, who are about two and a half, three million in Syria, somehow having a lot of last stand in the mountains. I don't really buy this. These guys have come from the mountains a long time ago. They're not going to return there.

Jeff Blankfort: I haven't seen so much in the papers lately of Shabia, the so-called paramilitaries, pro-government paramilitaries who were accused of certain atrocities. What's happened with them?

Patrick Cockburn: I think they're around. I mean, you know, the Alawite militia or pro-government militia, you know, acting as death squads and so forth. That's sort of, you know, they're a big ingredient poisoning the atmosphere. and they commit atrocities, you know, and they're counter-atrocities, and then they counter them and so forth. That's the sort of atmosphere you have. It's getting worse.

Jeff Blankfort: And meanwhile, the noncombatants either flee across the border or find it almost impossible or harder to survive. It seems the headlines in the papers today about the problem with aid agencies trying to take care of people in need.

Patrick Cockburn: Yeah, I mean, you know, the weather's getting worse. It's getting cold. The Turks don't want to receive that number of people. A big riot in a refugee camp with 50,000 people in it in Jordan. What are these people going to do? So, you know, all that situation is boiling up. And again, there's no reason it should get any better.

Jeff Blankfort: Well, finally, you were pessimistic in the conclusion of your article, but how would you sum up for our listeners what you see the prospects are for Syria's future?

Patrick Cockburn: I think that the prospects are for war and more war. I can't see the government going down, imploding like in Libya, without something very dramatic outside the country happening. The only thing could end it would be negotiations, but you can't have a precondition that Assad should go because he says he's too powerful. The rebels, you know, would basically, what they wanted at the beginning was a sort of Libyan solution, that they got massive backing from abroad, then they were going to win. I don't think they've quite, they still think they might win a military victory. It's only when both sides realize they're not going to win a military victory that you will actually have serious negotiations. maybe the conflict could be brought to an end, but there isn't really much sign of that yet.

Jeff Blankfort: Well, Patrick Coburn, thank you so much for bringing us up to date on Syria, and may you have another very productive new year. Again, we look forward to speaking with you again on Takes on the World. Thanks for being our guest today.

Patrick Cockburn: Thank you so much. Take care.