E-mail a friendJohn Burns
original airdate January 8, 2007
Foreign correspondent John Burns heads The New York Times Baghdad Bureau and has written extensively on the war in Iraq. During his career, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner headed several Times' foreign bureaus, including Moscow, Sarajevo, Beijing, Kabul and Belgrade. Born in the U.K., Burns grew up in Canada and studied Russian at Harvard and Chinese at Cambridge. He also wrote for the Toronto Globe and Mail, where he covered local stories and served as a China correspondent.
John Burns
Tavis: Tonight, though, we bring you our first conversation from inside Baghdad, of the year, with John Burns, Baghdad bureau chief for “The New York Times. He’s a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who’s been reporting on and off from Iraq since before the war began.
He joins us tonight from Baghdad. John Burns, nice to have you back on the program, sir, and Happy New Year to you.
John Burns: And the same to you, Tavis, it’s a pleasure.
Tavis: Let me start with the news of the day. I'm so glad to have you on today, because we all recall, of course, during the holiday season, you couldn’t miss it. Still great debate, great conversation about the hanging of Saddam Hussein. We’ll come back to that in a moment. But first, as we all know, when he was put to death, he was on trial in a couple of different cases. That second trial, post-Saddam’s life, resumed today. So what happened inside Baghdad today in the courtroom, obviously absent Saddam Hussein?
Burns: Well, Tavis, Saddam Hussein has towered like a colossus over this country, and I felt as a reporter that his execution, the aftermath, the rush to the execution, the controversy over that was probably going to reduce him to size. And so when the trial began today, the courtroom seemed somehow smaller, a somehow lesser place.
He had completely dominated it for 14 months, and there when the curtains came up was the empty chair for Saddam, and the six remaining defendants in the trial for the massacre of the Kurds in the late 1980s, 180,000 people killed in chemical weapons trials, well, nobody could have imagined what ensued. The prosecutors played a trump card.
It became the most astonishing day yet in the trial, and made Saddam, from the grave, the dominant figure today. How did they do that? They played audio recordings; they didn’t tell us how they got them, audio recordings of Saddam Hussein discussing with his top henchmen, including some of those on trial in the courtroom, telling them to conduct chemical weapons attacks against the Kurds.
Discussing in detail the kind of effects the chemical weapons attacks would have, describing how people would choke to death, how they would have to abandon their villages, how they could neither eat nor sleep, how it would kill thousands of them, and how, he says proudly at one point to his deputy, is that Ibrahim Al-Douri – the man who’s now leading the insurgency, by the way, somewhere out there in the Sunni hinterland.
He says to Douri, by the way, Izzat, he said, do you know that none of these chemical weapons attacks can be conducted without my personal, express approval? In other words, it conclusively closes the chapter on that. We now know, from Saddam’s own words, that he was responsible for all of that. So he, tonight, at least, once again, is that dark, towering shadow over Iraq.
Tavis: That breaking news, John Burns, that you’ve just shared raises for me at least two questions, in no particular order. Question number one, I would assume, then, that those other defendants on trial must certainly now be concerned about meeting their own death by hanging, given this news released today, number one.
And number two – your thoughts on that. And then secondly, given all the conversation, all the controversy, there’s a better word. Given all the controversy about the hanging of Saddam Hussein, do you think that these revelations today will make the terrain a little less difficult to navigate going forward for Mr. Maliqi and others inside of Iraq who rushed that hanging on Mr. Hussein?
Burns: Yeah, yeah. To your first question, Tavis, the reaction of the defendants. I have never seen men look so stunned as they were by these recordings. They had no idea, we certainly had no idea, that the court had them. They were provided, obviously, by the Americans. Whether it was by some kind of intelligence operation during Saddam’s years, by bugging his office, or because they, Saddam, like Richard Nixon, if you will, in a different context, so valued his place in history that he wanted to record everything he said, I don't know.
But the looks on the faces of Chemical Ali, for example, the guy who was directly in charge of that chemical weapons campaign against the Kurds told it all. They were completely shattered. The judges, prosecutors had tears in their eyes, and it took 20, 30 minutes before the other defendants, who realized that this put the noose around their necks as tightly as it could possibly be, found the way to even begin to plead, rather, I must say, ineffectively, their innocence.
As for the aftermath of all of this on the Maliqi government, there’s no doubt that the rush to execution and the really vehement opposition of American military commanders, to a lesser extent American diplomats, to that whole process, the ghastly scenes that we saw unfold at the gallows have been a severe blow to the prestige of the government.
A severe blow to American support for the government. And what we saw today in the court, in a sense, was, if you will, a kind of rear guard fight back. I don't think it was planned that way. Today was always gonna be the day when they began to introduce documentary evidence, including recordings, although we didn’t know that.
But it did have the effect of kind of steadying the ship. Indeed, the prosecutor, who was the one who, in the gallows 10 days ago, you could hear him shouting on that cell phone video to people to end their taunts, a man is under execution here, he said. The same man, back in the court, prosecuting, playing the tapes. He then said, he hoped that honorable people who have criticized the execution would listen to these tapes and perhaps, he said, fall into silence. And I suspect many will.
Tavis: The Bush administration, as you well know, is changing military leadership where this war campaign is concerned. Is it your judgment that that’s too little, too late?
Burns: Very hard to say, Tavis. If you start from the assumption that I think many of us do here that there is no exit, at least no easy exit, given the catastrophic consequences that would follow on it, I think the Nancy Pelosi, if she’ll forgive me, Harry Reid line, I'm just reading from afar, but it just doesn’t seem to me to be realistic.
America is in this place, and it’s got to find some kind of honorable exit that doesn’t lead to catastrophe. So the new American military commanders, one of whom has already arrived, who are taking a tougher line, who are going to support President Bush in this surge of bringing in more troops, think that they can, if things go their way, stabilize the situation in Baghdad.
That will be something. It will be a very large something. Because after that, then they could perhaps go on to try and stabilize things elsewhere. I think it’s too late to write this off completely, but it certainly is five minutes to midnight.
Tavis: There are a lot of people, John Burns, who believe that this so-called troop surge of 20 or 30,000 troops, we’ll hear specifically what the president has to say on Wednesday night, but there are a lot of folk who believe, in Washington, that that’s really not enough to get the job done. You have any information or what do your sources tell you about that?
Burns: I'm sure that’s what John McCain thinks, and I think that American military commanders would probably wish for 100,000 more troops to get the job done. Because the Iraqi army really hasn’t come forward in all of this. They don't appear - they don't take up the commitments that Mr. Maliqi makes on their behalf. And that’s a sorry story all of its own.
Of course they would want more troops, and of course they can’t say so publicly, because they know there aren’t any more troops. They have to make do with what they’ve got. But there is a major sea change going on here. George Casey, the present commander, and Peter Corelli, General Corelli, the operational commander who left last month, were both very, very reluctant to see this troop surge.
Because they believed that it would mean nothing unless it was matched by a new determination on the part of the Maliqi government to begin governing in a way that unified the people instead of dividing them. In other words, the Maliqi government has to put sectarianism behind it and start governing for Sunnis and Kurds, as well as for Shi’ites.
Those two generals, General Casey and General Corelli, clearly believe that they haven’t seen that yet. Whether President Bush is able, through his new commanders and through his new ambassador to, if you will, put the hammer down and make sure that Mr. Maliqi straightens up and flies right on this, that remains to be seen. But without a real partner in the Iraqi government to try and create a civil society here, no number of troops is gonna make any difference.
Tavis: To your latter point, let me offer this, then, John Burns, as an exit question, and get you out of the cold there in Baghdad, the exit question would simply be this. To your point, no matter what President Bush does militarily, no matter what he says on Wednesday night, without the cooperation of the Maliqi government, it’s sounding brass and tinkling cymbal, to put it one way. What, then, becomes the unit of measurement for whether or not he is the right guy at this critical time? How do we ascertain that at this point?
Burns: We see what he actually does, instead of what he says. He said yesterday he’s gonna do something about the militias. That’s to say the militias that have spawned death squads that are killing thousands of Sunnis. The path of this equation’s very clear. There’s a Sunni insurgency, a large part of it Al-Qaeda, and the United States military are deeply engaged in combating that.
The other side of it is the revenge killings in reaction to those Sunni attacks, many of them bombings of Shi’ite gatherings, Shi’ites in public places. The revenge attacks committed by Shi’ite militias. The largest militia, the Mahdi Army, headed by Muqtada Al-Sadr, a Shi’ite cleric, who is a major supporter of Mr. Maliqi’s in the parliament.
He has found endless ways in the last eight months to avoid dealing with Sadr, the Mahdi army, and the death squads. Will he actually do it now? If he doesn’t, I think the war is lost. I think that American public support, dwindling rapidly as it is, will disappear altogether. This will be the last surge; it’ll be the last option. And then we really are faced with the ghastly alternative, I would suppose, of an American withdrawal.
Probably a hasty withdrawal, sometime over the next 18 months to two years, which is going to expose this country truly to an all-out civil war. That will no longer be just a phrase that gets bandied about in reporters’ essays from Baghdad. It will be a reality.
Tavis: He is the Baghdad bureau chief for the “New York Times,” joining us tonight live from Baghdad. He is John Burns. Mr. Burns, thanks for staying up late in the cold to talk to us, I appreciate it, sir. Have a great year.
Burns: I always enjoy talking to you, Tavis. Thank you very much.
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