Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, saying it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, on the line is Major Danny Sherson, still an officer in the U.S. Army, regular contributor to the American Conservative and to Antiwar.com, as well as Truthdig.com, and taught history at West Point.
And he wrote the book, Ghost Riders of Baghdad, Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge.
And he's a combat veteran from Iraq, World War II, and Afghanistan, both.
Both surges, in fact.
Welcome back to the show.
Danny, how are you doing?
I'm good, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
Really appreciate it.
You know what?
I'm just, not to be too nice to you or anything, but I feel really privileged that I have a chance to talk about this stuff with you.
Because you have such an important point of view on all of this, having been right there in the thick of the worst of what's gone on in the most important of the terror wars here.
And we have this huge story in the Wall Street Journal.
It's huge to me.
I don't know if anybody else cares but you and me.
But the Army stymied its own study of the Iraq War.
And hilariously, this is by Michael R. Gordon, who shared the byline with Judith Miller on every one of their worst tall tales lying us into war in the New York Times.
She took all the heat and he went on to be a great success at the New York Times and now at the Wall Street Journal.
But very well reported story by him, it seems like.
And then here's your piece about that.
It's called, Will Iraq Become Another Lesson Lost Like Vietnam?
The Army commissioned and then sat on a 1,300 page evaluation of Iraq War II.
It probably fell short of the truth anyway.
And so let's start with the cover up here.
Who ordered this report?
Is this really the Pentagon Papers?
Like Robert McNamara said, whatever the truth is, put it in there.
I want to know.
And this kind of deal or what?
I wish it was the Pentagon Papers.
And we'll talk more about this later.
This is a much more vapid study than the Pentagon Papers, because it unlike the Pentagon Papers, it doesn't really look at the strategic failures or the lack of grand strategy that got us into Iraq.
It's more of an analysis of once we were there, what we did wrong and why we didn't win.
So that's that's a problem I have with the report.
But just to kind of back up.
So General Odierno, who was the number two in Iraq under General Petraeus during the first half of the surge and then took over the war himself when Petraeus got bumped up to the next level, he ordered this study, I believe, in 2013.
And Odierno said that he wanted to take an honest, hard look at the mistakes the army had made, especially in the early years of Iraq War II, the early years of the occupation.
So after the invasion was successful and well, then Odierno retired and the report was completed and since then has literally just been sat on and looked at, critiqued.
And there's concern within the army, from what I've read, that this might air is too much dirty laundry of of officers that are still serving and of officers that are retired but still highly regarded within the military.
And that is one part of the story that's pretty interesting.
The fact that the army would commission this 1300 page study, go through all the effort, all the manpower and just man hours of these like really smart colonels, you know, who wrote this report and then stifle it, you know, and then it takes the Wall Street Journal doing an investigative piece to even bring this decision.
I didn't know about this report.
Okay.
I mean, unless you were one of the people who wrote it, you wouldn't even know this existed.
And now I've only read the highlights of what's been leaked.
But, you know, it's disturbing that even such a vapid report as this, and the reason I call it that is because it really only looks at tactical problems.
Oh, did we have enough troops?
Oh, did we?
Well, we'll get back to that.
Like he said, go ahead, though, on your point.
Yeah.
So, I mean, the fact that the army would stifle a study like this is just further proof that it becomes more and more apparent that secrecy is the name of the game in the DoD.
And an honest reflection on mistakes is not something that the military really wants to do.
I assume they'll release the report now, some version of it, maybe like a redacted version, because it got into the media.
But, you know, the fact that it took five years to even come out is pretty disturbing.
Well, and really I think it could maybe go to show just how bad that war was too, that even a report that's written to kind of avoid all the hardest questions is still the kind of thing that, man, they don't want the average person in the US or around the world to be able to read this thing that tells the story of what they did.
Absolutely.
They don't want to admit even simple facts like General Shinseki, who was the army chief of staff in 2003.
He goes before Congress during the hearings leading up to the vote on the war, and they ask him how many soldiers is it going to take to invade and pacify Iraq.
And he says probably a half a million.
Well, Rumsfeld basically fires him, I mean, forces him to retire because Rumsfeld said we could do with 120,000.
And so we don't even really want to learn that lesson, that if you're going to take over a country, it might take half a million or a million soldiers.
I mean, that's – I don't even agree that that would have been enough.
I think it was an impossible mission, but we're not even willing to look at the tactical failures that the army was responsible for.
And so if the army isn't willing to learn and air its dirty laundry publicly, then how can we expect the nation more generally to do so about its ongoing war on terror?
Yeah.
Well, you know, a great example of that kind of thing here is where they say, well, Peter Shoemaker, who, by the way, is the butcher of Waco and was in charge of Delta Force, killing the women and children.
There are 86 of them.
He ordered the restructuring of some brigades right at a critical time where we needed some more brigades.
These are very narrow questions where they're not even asking, do we need these brigades or was it the wrong thing for Odierno to arrest every single fighting-aged male in the Anbar province, leading to pushing more than half of them directly into armed insurgency at their first opportunity?
But no, if only we'd had more men doing that same ridiculous, horrible, counterproductive policy, then it would have worked well.
Yeah.
You know what?
I would be interested.
I haven't read the full report.
I would really be interested to see if the report took Odierno to task for his borderline war crimes in the early part of 2000, the summer and fall of 2003, when he was in charge of the 4th Infantry Division in northern Iraq.
Because he did.
He essentially held military-aged males captive and family members captive until alleged insurgents turned themselves in.
He scooped up, like you said, hundreds and thousands of military-aged males, threw them into prisons where they got radicalized and came out worse than they started, just like American prisons do.
And I would be really interested to see if they took a hard look at Odierno himself.
My guess is they didn't.
My guess is they'll sugarcoat it because he was the one that came up with the idea of the study.
And hey, colonels want to be generals.
And if you're a colonel who wants to be a general, you don't upset the boss who gave you the task.
Right.
And we did see this policy of saying the right thing inside the army sure worked for Odierno, no matter how bad his decisions were.
Now, wasn't it that exact same timeframe that Petraeus was up in Mosul and was training up what was supposed to be a Sunni security force there?
And he armed them, he gave them all these weapons, and then they all just disappeared and became the insurgency.
And then after that, he came down to Baghdad and started training up the Bata Brigade to be the Iraqi army.
So on one hand, he's building up the Sunni side of the civil war, and then his next task is building up the Shiite side to fight them.
It's exactly the same period.
So, you know, the transformational Petraeus myth is that Odierno is sort of like the villain in the story, according to the Coindenistas, you know, the army's folks who are obsessed with counterinsurgency.
So Odierno is like conducting old school counter guerrilla warfare.
And according to the myth, he's like making things worse.
Now, he is making things worse.
But the myth is that Petraeus was completely successful in Mosul.
But what you described is more accurate.
So he has limited short-term success and long-term failure in Mosul.
But he was such an impressive speaker.
He was so savvy with the press, such a great self-promoter, that he convinces Time magazine and a whole bunch of other people both inside and outside the army that he was some sort of transformational figure who got it when everybody else didn't get it.
But the problem is he takes that myth and he tries to apply it writ large in Baghdad and across the whole country.
And, of course, he does the exact same thing.
He arms a Sunni militia out in Anbar.
And sure, in the short term, violence went down.
But in the long term, those guys got alienated from the Baghdad Bader Brigade government and took their guns and took their fighters and eventually joined ISIS, where many of them fought and eventually died.
So the myth of the surge, which I wrote a book about, is problematic to the nth degree.
I'm afraid this report is going to be just one big self-aggrandizing pat on the back that says, hey, we fucked up in the beginning, but we figured it out in the surge.
And I just think that's a total misunderstanding of Iraq War II.
Yeah.
You know what I'm curious about?
So, I mean, I was just lucky, I guess, at the time I was reading Juan Cole and Robert Dreyfus and all these guys who really knew the history of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution and the Dawa party and how when Jimmy Carter had hired Saddam to invade Iran in 1980, these guys had fled to Iran and how they'd been there hiding all along until Bush came in 2003, Bush Jr., and they came in on his heels to do all of this.
So I understood all the context.
And Juan Cole, actually, as much of a warmonger as he is, he really understood a lot of the dynamics about, you know, for example, why the Sunnis were so determined to fight to try to hang on to power in Baghdad, because they were so outnumbered and they don't have the oil resources.
So if they don't control the national government, they're basically left out in the desert to burn.
And he was saying that from 2003 and for on, you know, about the dynamics there.
My question is, though, did the generals even talk about this in that sense at all?
I mean, they must have known.
I don't want to, like, presume a doe-eyed innocence on their part or whatever, but all the propaganda was so thick about how, yeah, it's us and the Iraqi people versus the terrorists, that I wondered, did they even really recognize that it's us and the Supreme Islamic Council and the United Iraqi Alliance that rules Shiastan versus the Baathists and the Sunni tribal leaders and so forth?
And that was really their goal, to go ahead and cleanse Baghdad of the Sunnis and consolidate this new Shiastan?
Or did they really have no idea what the hell they were doing?
So my opinion on this is that in the beginning, the first few generals in charge of the invasion and the occupation just didn't get it.
They, along with the president, had very little understanding of even the difference between Sunni and Shia and Sunni, Shia and Kurd.
Petraeus, though, this is – I think Petraeus is a very cynical figure.
I think that that's how we should remember him, OK, is not as some sort of transformational idealist but rather as a savvy cynic.
So Petraeus is smart enough that he knows exactly what he's doing when he props up the Baatha Brigade government in Baghdad and when he arms the Sunnis in Anbar.
He knows that he's creating a monster in Baghdad that is eventually just going to alienate those Sunnis and restart the civil war once he leaves.
But Petraeus is a self-promoter, and what he wants, what he requires in 2007 is for violence, the metrics of violence to go down just enough that he could declare victory and leave and get himself a job at the CIA or run for president someday.
So I do see Petraeus as a very cynical figure because I think he got it.
I think he knew exactly what he's doing.
I don't think he ever really cared about the Iraqi people or really cared about the long-term success of that project.
I think he knew that that project was impossible, quite frankly, but he was willing to do anything to bring violence down so he could go in front of Congress and tell them, look what I did.
I'm a hero.
Well, and so right at the time that their firearms fell at the end of 2006 and they bring in Robert Gates and they launch the surge and the anti-Iran propaganda campaign right there in January of 2007.
I guess the way Gareth Porter put it, I think back at the time, was that this was – or no, this was later, I guess, in hindsight.
Petraeus' real victory was over George Bush.
He met with Bush and said, look, the previous policy of defeating the Sunni insurgency is off and we're not going to defeat them.
We can't defeat them, so what we're going to do instead is we're going to bribe the bulk of them to turn against the very worst al-Qaeda-ish edge of them and then try to use that to kind of pressure against the Shiite coalition that we put in power to try to limit Iran's influence, which of course didn't really work.
So I guess my question then is about the timeline of the sectarian cleansing campaign and – because it was still – the Shiites were still kicking all the Sunni Arabs out of Baghdad through like the first half of 2007 at the same time that America was bribing the Sunni insurgency to stop fighting us, the Americans, if not exactly the Shiites at the same time, but mostly to turn on the al-Qaeda guys that they'd already turned on anyway, of course.
So help me adjust my timeline here about when Petraeus is taking power and how far into the cleansing campaign they already were at that point before they started attacking the Shiites.
STEPHAN KINSELLA.
This is an important point and something I work on a lot in the book.
He takes lessons learned from Vietnam and applies them in counterinsurgency in Baghdad and Anbar, and so what he does is he halts the civil war through the infusion of more American soldiers and lots and lots of concrete walling off neighborhoods and that he himself goes and talks to the tribal leaders and brokers this grand bargain that they will turn on al-Qaeda and they will support the government in Baghdad.
That's the myth.
And the army believes this myth so deeply.
It is so important to our collective identity to believe that we actually won in Iraq and it was the politicians who lost it, specifically Barack Obama.
That myth is so powerful.
It's so, so deeply ingrained in our identity.
Now, in answer to your question, the reality is this, twofold.
Number one, the Sunnis had turned on al-Qaeda of their own accord and they did seek support from the Americans in the way of guns and money, but all of that happened in the summer of 2006 before Petraeus ever landed on the ground.
That had already been worked out.
That deal, that deal that was brokered was actually brokered by a brigade commander, a full bird colonel who's now a three-star general out in Anbar province.
And Petraeus had nothing to do with it.
His name was McFarland, Sean McFarland.
Well, and of course – I mean I have all the news reports in my book actually where the tribal leaders have been turning on the al-Qaeda guys since January 2006.
So even this guy McFarland is showing up to the front of a parade that's already marching.
Oh yeah, you're absolutely right.
So McFarland just kind of jumps on it.
They come to him and he sort of exploits the opportunity.
But Petraeus would have you believe he did it himself.
Which at least he did that, right?
Right.
Yeah, I mean which is better than Petraeus can say because Petraeus just jumped on a moving train and called it victory.
The second thing to keep in mind is that by the time Petraeus really gets his 30,000 troops on the ground, which it takes until mid-2007 before we get all the surge brigades in – I was there the whole time.
I was there before the surge and I was there through the first half of the surge.
Here's what really happened.
The Shia won a civil war in Baghdad.
They won.
They outright won.
They cleansed the city between February 2006 with the mosque bombing and probably the spring of 2007 when Petraeus starts declaring victory and gets the surge brigades in place.
The civil war had already been won.
It had already been fought.
At least in Baghdad it was over.
The Shia won.
There were more Shia people.
There were more Shia militia fighters, and they cleansed Baghdad, almost every single neighborhood with two or three exceptions.
And those exceptions, they basically walled those places off and put them under siege.
So for the most part, they had already won the civil war.
So Petraeus comes in and says, look, violence is going down.
But the thing is, the reason violence is going down is not necessarily because there's more American soldiers on the ground.
Violence is decreasing because the war is over.
See, there's nothing to fight about in Baghdad anymore.
For the most part, we've already created Shia blocs and Sunni blocs, and they're separated into their own camps.
And so they're no longer mixed together because they're no longer mixed together in an integrated society.
There's less killing to be done because it had already mostly been accomplished.
All right.
Now I know none of this was funny to you guys there at the time.
But here it really was a measure of hilarity, the way the surge became simply a public relations slogan that didn't mean a thing.
Where we went from, we're going to have this escalation of troops in Baghdad to secure these benchmarks, namely, especially creating peace and security in the capital city.
So that the leaders of the different factions can meet in the parliament and hammer out their differences democratically and come to some compromises and end all the fighting.
And that was supposed to be what it was all about.
But then they just dropped the benchmarks.
It was like surge, benchmarks, surge, benchmarks.
And then it was just the surge worked.
The surge is working.
The surge is working.
The surge has worked.
But never mind what any of its goals were ever supposed to be in the first place.
And then that worked.
They went from the surge is working to the surge worked and people repeated it like it was God bless America.
And that was the end of that.
Well, you're absolutely right.
And it's – the level of absurdity involved in this is sort of shocking.
So I mean it was almost farcical for me even being in Baghdad and losing soldiers during that period.
It was still farcical.
I almost had a laugh, a very dark laugh.
So the surge, like you said, wasn't an end in and of itself in the beginning.
We were told – we were sold a bill of goods that the surge is a temporary measure in order to, like you said, create the space for the Iraqi government to form like a strong coalition and integrate all the factions and create political solutions.
Once it was clear that was never going to happen, which was very clear very early on, then the surge became an end in itself.
We were surging so that we could surge.
Instead of saying we're surging so we got a political settlement, after a while it became, oh, no, no, we're surging so we can surge so we can show the surge worked and so we can show you that violence is down.
And so it just became all about itself and so then the surge lost all meaning.
In fact, the term has lost all meaning.
I wrote in my book – I was sort of joking but it's true.
The myth of the surge was so powerful that the very term entered the military lexicon in a way that you can hardly imagine.
Any successful push, any doubling down and hard work got called a surge.
So we would say things like if we had to stay late on the staff and work on PowerPoint briefings until 2 in the morning to please the colonel, we would say, all right, we're surging tonight, guys.
We're surging.
But like dead serious.
It became part of the lexicon.
And I was like – I watched this happen and I wrote about it in my book.
It starts out as kind of a joke but then it becomes not a joke.
It's just the new – and the military really is heavy on new speak, right?
Acronyms and new terms for everything.
Absolutely.
We live by our euphemisms.
Absolutely.
All right.
So now part of this too was – so right as you're saying, I guess, the sectarian cleansing campaign is done in the very first couple of few months of the surge, right?
March, April, May, right there in 2007.
And then that opens up the opportunity to now – and I know we've talked about this before but it's so huge and important and key and yet not key at the same time.
They turn on the least Iranian-tied faction of the three major Shiite factions in the Shiite alliance in order to attempt to limit the influence of Iran in Iraq.
And that meant you and your guys fighting against Muqtad al-Sadr and his forces.
And now – so – but I guess maybe I'm begging the question there and assuming too much.
I mean there was a Shiite insurgency too and there were groups that I guess the bottom brigade had mostly all become the army.
So it was Sadrist groups and factional split-offs and Asaib al-Haq and these other guys were attacking American soldiers.
But that really was though, wasn't it, because the US had targeted them first.
They blamed Iran for Sadr who refused to go along with them even though it was really Dawah and Skiri who were the Iranians' cat's paws, far more than Sadr at the time.
Yeah, and that was one of the more disturbing things about my time in Baghdad.
I was mostly in east Baghdad, which meant I fought Muqtad al-Sadr primarily.
Most of the deaths and wounds in my platoon were at the hands of Muqtad al-Sadr's Mahdi army or Jaysh al-Mahdi as we called him.
You're absolutely right.
The United States turned on him very early in the war, shut down his newspaper in 2003, sort of unleashed a rebellion in 2004 in Sadr city when the reality is that Sadr for all his flaws – and he's a piece of shit in a million ways – but for all his flaws, Sadr is a nationalist.
He is not an Iranian stooge then or now, and if anything, we pushed him into the arms of the Iranians when we declared war on him and his militia.
What I mean by that is Sadr does not want to and did not want to go along with the Iranians.
He wanted to form a new Iraqi Shia nationalist sort of movement not tied to Iran, not tied to Tehran, but once we're at war with him, he'll take weapons wherever he can get them.
So it was at that point that he started to take Iranian technology, Iranian training.
He even fled to Iran because it was the only place to not get dead.
Yeah, otherwise we would have killed him.
We would have done a targeted assassination, another newspeak, or a targeted killing.
So we don't ever say the word assassination.
We can't say that.
But yeah, it's really interesting.
You could have neutralized him.
Yeah, neutralized, right, neutralized.
It's really disturbing, and most Americans don't know this story that you and I are talking about right now.
They are fed the myth of the surge, and then they're fed apathy where we just stopped talking about Iraq altogether, which is where we are now, and they don't know this story.
And really it's only going to be the historians who accurately report it in the future.
Yeah, I mean if we're lucky, right?
And I just know this from just doing the same job this whole time, that there are so few people even asking the right questions.
You know, the great Michael Hastings, the late great Michael Hastings, he was a great Iraq War II reporter before he made his name in Afghanistan, and I used to talk with him all the time.
He was one of the few guys that I could rely on to know the damn difference between Skiri and Dawa and what matters over there, and ask those right questions.
David Enders and Patrick Coburn and, you know, there are some notables who really did great work.
Even some of the mainstream guys would do some great work where they could differentiate some important things.
But the narrative never stuck, that here's who is on whose side.
And this was, you know, one of the most frustrating things for me was seeing, for example, the war against Sadr when he's a major part of the ruling coalition that we're installing in power here.
And like you're saying, your guys are getting blown up in this fight in very real life, you know, to you.
Not some ridiculous Kagan theoretical thing about here's how we should maybe approach this, but brass tacks in the worst way.
And, of course, the collateral murder video leaked by Chelsea Manning and published by WikiLeaks shows the slaughter of Reuters reporters who were in East Baghdad.
I believe it was.
Could have been in Najaf.
I'm pretty sure it was in East Baghdad fighting against or, you know, among this theater of operation against Sadr.
And then when that video came out, Robert Gates, the secretary of defense, said, well, look, when you're seeing that, you don't really understand.
You're just looking at war through a soda straw without the context.
Right.
And so you're seeing, OK, these people are getting killed and that's unfortunate, but somewhere out there is a context that makes this understandable.
And yet, no, when you zoom out, the context is they're fighting against their ally and these innocents got caught up in it.
So how the hell do you justify that?
Absolutely.
Well, look, the military and the media and.
And, you know, not even Assange or anyone else even framed it that way because no one understood.
No one understood what's the United Iraqi Alliance.
They never explained on TV one time what the hell that meant.
So no one.
I mean, Gates was really right.
It was like me and Gareth Porter and a few other people who were really looking at it from exactly this light and asking exactly these questions.
We understood.
But even in that book and we've talked about this before, but I don't care anyway.
Even in that book, The Good Soldiers, which is all about surge army troops under Colonel Kozlarek there in East Baghdad, that Colonel Kozlarek once kind of wonders aloud, huh?
Isn't it kind of ironic that we're fighting against a Shiite faction in this thing right now when they're kind of.
And then there's one part in the book where David Finkel from The Washington Post wonders himself.
Yeah, it is kind of strange, isn't it?
But none of them really get it.
And none of the guys out there doing the fighting get it at all.
They don't even know enough to ask.
They don't.
And the thing is, I was never really able to explain it to my soldiers.
And they didn't even really want to know.
I mean, they're so stuck in the fight.
I don't blame them.
But how how could I explain the context to the soldiers?
I mean, that context was hidden from the American people very, very purposefully.
OK, there's a reason, you know, Gates said that that video lacked context.
But the truth is, he never wanted to provide us that context, because if he did, he would have shown the exact circular logic and counterproductivity of the entire mission that you so aptly described.
So, you know, he says it's through a soda straw, but that was by design.
The White House, the executive branch, the military, they never first of all, they barely understood it.
Second of all, what they understood, they didn't want you to know.
You know, they didn't want the American people to understand how circular the entire logic of the insurgency was, how we were feeding it through our own actions, how it was becoming an end within itself.
They didn't want you to know that the surge was a big lie because that would have destroyed their whole narrative of victory.
That's why we were able to declare victory and go home temporarily until ISIS forms, you know, which we're directly complicit in.
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Well, and then there's that whole myth that leaving Iraq is what created ISIS, which ignores the fact that it was the U.S. and our allies actively participating on the side of the Sunni-based insurgency in Syria and, in fact, virtually directly supporting the al-Nusra Front, which is just al-Qaeda in Iraq and Syria, that led to the rise of the Islamic State.
Everybody likes to pretend that we don't all already know that from this very covert foreign policy in Syria from 2011 on, but it's right there.
In fact, I'm sorry if I'm being redundant with earlier interviews, Danny, I can't remember what we talked about or not, but Donald Trump got this right in the campaign.
Donald Trump said, Obama created ISIS.
And everybody went, oh, boo, what are you talking about?
You're crazy.
And he said, yeah, he supported al-Qaeda in Libya and especially in Syria, and he pulled the troops out of Iraq.
So when they came from Syria into Iraq, there was no one there to stop them.
And it was like, you know what?
He nailed it.
He got it 100% right with the proper context.
But then later, of course, he dropped the first two parts about Obama took the side, him and Brennan took the side of al-Qaeda, and Petraeus, who was head of CIA in 2011 at the beginning of all this, that they took the side of al-Qaeda in Libya and Syria.
And that's truly what led to the rise of the Islamic State.
That then, yes, is true.
Bush's foreign policy, including Obama's foreign policy, meant that Western, predominantly Sunni Iraq, was just wide open, lawless, ungoverned territory.
You want to hoist a black flag, there's no one around to stop you.
And so they rolled right in.
Yeah, I mean, the seeds of ISIS was planted the minute that we crossed the berm in March of 2003.
ISIS basically forms its ideology in our prisons, which become terrorist training camps.
But even then, I don't buy that because you know what?
Like they didn't rule Iraqi Sunnistan from the time of 2006, as we talked about, when the Sunni tribal leaders virtually eliminated them, until the CIA started spending a billion dollars a year on their effort in Syria, which brought them back from virtual extinction in Iraq.
Well, you're absolutely right about that.
Sunnistan at that time was ruled by the tribal chiefs and the former Baathists, not the jihadists.
No, you're right.
And it's only in response to our backing of like a chauvinist Shia government under Maliki that alienates those Sunnis.
You're right.
It's only at that point that they re-ally themselves with the Islamists who they had abhorred earlier.
You know, one of the interesting things is, you know, I read in reports that a lot of the leaders in ISIS actually, the military leaders, OK, not the spiritual leaders, but the military leaders, a lot of them are like former Baathists who are secular.
They don't even believe in this bullshit.
They just allied themselves with ISIS because they saw them as the best protector of the Sunni community against Baader Brigade Baghdad.
Right.
You know what, man?
I forget the guy's name now.
But we published a couple of articles for him and from him at Antiwar.com.
I'm thinking it must have been in 2014, right after the declaration of the state by Baghdadi and all of that, where he really wrote this great thing about Sunni power in Iraqi Sunnistan, basically being this three legged stool of the Baathists, the tribal leaders and the jihadists and how the alliance was the former two.
And then it became the latter two kind of thing, you know, for a while there.
And now it's back to the tribal leaders again, you know, after Iraq war three.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Nobody even talks about that.
Iraq war three.
Nobody even remember that time we had a third Iraq war from 2014 through 17 and killed thousands of people.
Oh, yeah.
Just like leveled Mosul, you know, destroyed the city.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, Mosul's the number two city.
I mean, Mosul's like the Chicago or the L.A. of Iraq, you know, if Baghdad is New York.
And we just leveled an entire city.
Yeah, it was a massive war.
We just did it differently this time.
We did it with a smaller number of ground troops and a massive outpouring of air power and allying ourselves with various factions on the ground.
I mean, it was a brutal war.
It just looked different because there weren't soldiers and, you know, in American uniforms dying every day like there were when I was there in Iraq war two.
Right.
Yeah.
Instead, it was the Iranian backed Shiite militias that we hate the most, acting as the foot soldiers on the ground.
And just like in Iraq war two, who's zooming who, right?
Who's fighting for who at this point?
They're at our service or we're at theirs again.
You know, but.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
All right.
Hey, listen, so here's one thing, too, before we get back to Iraq war two, because I do want to get back to your story here, which is, you know, the detail of this report that we're talking about stuff, because we do know some things about it here, assuming you can believe anything Michael Gordon says at all.
But one important point about the surge is, as you were talking about what a successful brand name it became and all of that.
And it became the basis for the surge in Afghanistan.
So without telling the whole story of the surge in Afghanistan, we know how it ended.
It didn't work.
We know tens of thousands of people were killed.
But thinking back on it, wasn't it just, you know, right around, say, nine years ago that the CNAS crowd, the Obama Democrats and all those people came in and I guess 10 years ago, came in pushing that we have to take the surge and expand it on to Afghanistan.
Because as we all know, because John McCain said it six times fast and out loud, the surge worked.
And so what do we know about that?
We know that surges work.
And so how are you going to have a crisis and not do a surge, man?
You have to.
And so they did, and they escalated up to 100,000 men over there.
Yeah.
And I was lucky enough or unlucky enough, of course, to serve in that surge, which was just really ironic because I didn't believe in the first one.
And then I get my ass sent to the second one.
You're right.
I mean, it became an article of faith.
The word surge stopped having any logical basis and started to become a religious theological statement of faith.
So if you said it enough, the surge worked, the surge worked, the surge worked, and you clicked your heels 10 times and spun around three times in front of the mirror, then the surge would work.
But the problem is, why is there a surge in Afghanistan?
Well, there's a surge in Afghanistan because Obama is too weak to take his own stand on foreign policy.
So he basically extends the Bush doctrine and then says he's not, but he does.
And Hillary Clinton is right on board with all that.
And the reality is it's all the same players.
It's like the same movie.
It's like Rocky 2.
You know what I mean?
It's all the same characters.
So you have Petraeus.
OK, where is he?
Well, he used to be in charge of the Iraq war, but now he's been bumped up a level to the commander of CENTCOM. So now he oversees both the Iraq and the Afghan war.
OK, so when it comes time to create a new strategy, quote unquote, in Afghanistan, he only has one pitch.
OK, it's a fastball down the middle every time.
It's what are we going to do?
We're going to surge.
So who gets put in charge?
Well, we fired General David McEarnin because he wasn't part of Petraeus' clique.
And instead we take General Stanley McChrystal.
We put him in charge of Afghanistan.
Oh, who was Stanley McChrystal?
OK, he used to run JSOC in Iraq.
He was the guy snatching people up at night and killing folks in the middle of the night on raids.
So he's on the Petraeus team.
So it's the same characters from Iraq surge, surge 1.0, that are then put in place and all the players are there and they only got one pitch.
So it's surge 2.0 in Afghanistan, which was a total misunderstanding of the fact that the surge did not work and that it was unapplicable to a place like Afghanistan that was so different from Iraq.
Yep.
Which, and by the way, just for the record, and just because I'm old now and been doing this the whole time, we all had every expert in the world on to explain why it was not going to work in real time before they did it.
When Obama was still a candidate and first started talking about Afghanistan as the good war in 2007, everybody in the world on to explain why escalating would just make matters worse.
Any idiot could have told you that if they weren't in on it, if they didn't have some ridiculous professional or social reason for pretending to believe that this was even possible at all.
So yeah, that's not to pat myself on the back.
That's just to say how obvious it was that they were perpetrating a fraud.
They also knew that, yeah, this is a country that's landlocked in the center of Asia.
It's got no coast anywhere, right?
It's the size of Texas.
It's got mountains like Colorado and deserts like California.
And need I go on or are we already done?
Right, right.
I mean, absolutely.
So what you're saying is that alternative media, people in your position, understood full well that this was never going to work.
But the problem is most Americans watch Fox, CNN, or MSNBC, period.
And none of those networks ever reported on just the perfidity of the entire notion of the surge, the whole – just the vacuousness of the strategy.
None of that was ever mentioned.
No one ever sat on – the analysts they bring on to CNN are all war hawks.
They're all generals that already played this losing hand to the fullest before they retired and took a great pension and a revolving door job in the military industrial complex.
They don't bring on people who actually question the foundations of the surge narrative.
They didn't even dare do that.
So yeah, so Scott Horton knows, which is really, really impressive, but it doesn't affect the American people who lack all context and don't even realize what's being done in their name.
Yeah.
Well, and my whole point is about how not impressive it is, right?
That this is run-of-the-mill common sense up against a bunch of people with interests.
That's all it is.
In other words, if I got it right, then anyone coulda, shoulda, and no one has any excuse otherwise.
In fact, there's a lot of revisionism in the way people remember this, but when Iraq War II was about to break out, when it was like a month away, the polls had the country split 50-50.
In other words, 150 million Americans were against attacking Iraq.
150 million people knew better than that.
Oh, yeah.
Well, everybody thought at the time of what a menace Saddam Hussein was.
No, that's not true.
150 million people thought the menace was in the White House, and they were the ones who obviously were correct.
Yeah, and one of the things that's interesting about Iraq War II is that it's one of the only instances in world history that I can think of where there was actually a global anti-war movement before a war started.
So there was a global anti-war movement.
It wasn't just 150 million Americans.
It was also in England and across Europe.
It was.
It was millions of people in Japan, all across Asia and everywhere.
Before the invasion even started, and that's actually a pretty profound and rare thing.
I mean, I can't think of very many examples of an anti-war movement that was reacting to a war that had not yet begun.
And it's too bad that we just couldn't hold it together.
I mean, everybody just went home after that.
It was like, well, so begins our long national global nightmare here and shrug and the argument that, okay, see, no weapons, pull out now, turn around before it's too late to make it worse and whatever kind of thing.
The voice was lost.
It was gone.
Everybody was defeated, frankly, and realistically.
And I don't know if it would even change anything.
I guess that's what people figured.
It didn't stop the war.
How's it going to end it quicker?
And then plus partisanship means that it all got turned into just support for the Democrats in 06 and then it was over for the anti-war movement then.
And the Democrats in 06, they win that big blue wave election and then they just folded.
They just folded under the pressure of a really impressive general with shiny medals who stood in front of Congress and they were scared shitless to question his narrative because they were afraid they would look like pussies.
They were afraid they'd look like peace doves and that they would look like hippies and they would be un-American.
So they just folded before this real just absolute just mirage of a general, which is the best way I could describe David Petraeus.
He's a really smart guy with nothing inside of him.
He's a guy who can paint anything beautifully for the public, but there is an emptiness inside that man.
There was nothing to his argument.
There was no substance to his entire narrative, but the Democrats, true to form, just folded before him.
Yeah.
You know, it was hilarious.
I thought how he passed out at that meeting where he was perjuring himself before John McCain.
And I remember this was reporting on the supposed success of the Afghan surges after a few months of him being in charge from taking it over from McChrystal.
And he's like, yeah, McCain, everything's going great.
Oh, blam.
He slams his head on the table and everything.
Well, perjury is exhausting, especially if you don't take enough sips of water.
Exactly.
He was under pressure there.
He's like, you can see him like Homer Simpson pulling his collar away from his neck.
I don't know.
Hey, let's pick this report apart from what we know about a little bit more and in detail, because I really hate everything that they say in here as completely missing the forest for the trees and asking all the wrong questions and doing it in all the wrong way.
And I know that you feel the same way about it.
So some of the bullet points from the Wall Street Journal article, as you have them again in your piece at TAC, will Iraq become another lesson lost like Vietnam?
The part about more troops were needed to occupy the country and fight an expansive insurgency.
Again, this assumes a lot of things.
Never even mind assuming the invasion in the first place, but it assumes the right to create a new government and to fight to vanquish any who would oppose its institution, which is a whole bunch of presumptions right there.
Before you even get started about how many troops that's going to take after you've debautified the whole government and disbanded the entire army and now have to create a new one and all of these things.
Yeah, I mean it fails to question whether social engineering at the point of the bayonet is even possible or moral.
I think the war is unwinnable from the start.
I think the very idea of the invasion, I think we lost the day we decided to invade before we even did it.
But this narrative that if we just had more troops, I mean it ignores all that stuff.
It ignores the fact that creating a liberal democracy on the banks of the Tigris River at the point of an American bayonet, an American Christian foreign occupying bayonet, is somehow going to be plausible.
It's just of course it's a fallacy.
Yeah.
All right.
So now what about the second point here, the failure to deter Iran and Syria, which gave sanctuary and support to Shia and Sunni militants respectively.
What do you say about that?
Yeah, so okay.
How would we have stopped that?
Tell me how we should have deterred them.
Short of an actual invasion, short of strategy that is up to and including war, how do you stop Iran and Syria from having a role in Iraq?
They've always had a role in Iraq.
They're neighbors with Iraq.
That's like saying that the United States wouldn't have some role in Mexico if a country from halfway around the world like China somehow invaded it.
Like that's our neighborhood.
The Caribbean is our sea, right?
And the reality is Iraq has always been a playground for the Syrians and the Iranians and others.
So this idea that we could have stopped it is – to me it's laughable.
Well, and of course here's one thing you could have done was not give them huge incentives to intervene, like have Ariel Sharon and John Bolton and Richard Perle and Michael Ledeen saying, faster please.
We have to turn the whole region into a boiling cauldron.
We have to immediately move on to Syria and Iran and Hezbollah and whoever.
Well, yeah.
They had that – there was that anonymous report that's just been reported many, many times and I believe it where like one of the – like some British observer to the American government at the time who was like on duty over here says something that like everyone wants to go to Baghdad now.
Real men talk about going to Tehran.
OK.
When that gets reported, when you're using that kind of language inside the neoconservative like fantasy land that was the Bush administration, like you think Iran is not going to defend itself?
You think Iran is not going to take like preemptive action in order to protect itself from the next regime change?
I mean give me a break.
Yeah, they have C-SPAN.
You know what I mean?
They're watching the same AEI black coffee meetings in the run-up to the war that the rest of us were watching and even more appalled probably.
So yeah.
And so well, don't get me started on the bait and switch between who's terror masters here with – well, let's talk about that.
To the Israelis, Iran and the Shia are the problem.
To the American people, our government seems to agree with Israel.
But to the American people, it seems like if anybody is the enemy, it would be the al-Qaeda guys who are the enemies of Iran, who are the ones who knocked our towers down and hit our Pentagon and who were allied with and were part of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq that killed 4,000 out of the 4,500 Americans who died in Iraq War II.
But I don't know.
What do you think?
So an Iranian hasn't committed an attack on the homeland in recorded history, right?
But yet somehow we allowed them to be painted as our nemesis and they make it into the axis of evil.
Right.
Well, don't forget the phony baloney Corpus Christi car salesman plot against the Saudi ambassador, which it's worth bringing up if only to debunk.
At the time, within two or three days, we had a list of six retired CIA officers who were on the record with their names saying that they didn't believe it for a second.
And here's why.
And I'm sure there were many more, but there were holes all through that story and there were a lot of people who were happy to say so.
But anyway, so now the coalition thing, but it's got this thing just sounds it really does.
And this goes back to one of my original questions at the beginning of the interview about just how dumb these people are in charge of this policy, where they even think that this matters more as anything other than just soaking up airwaves, talking about nothing on CNN or something about having a good coalition to help us.
Like if only we had had more Swedes, then that would have meant a damn thing on the ground pro or con in any way.
If only the Japanese had sent more peacekeepers to this neighborhood.
Is that even really a question?
And what kind of army idiot thinks that that's actually a question of how diverse the damned coalition is in the occupation?
Danny?
The coalition was always – this whole notion of a successful coalition, like a broad-based international consensus, it was always about politics and optics, not about the reality of how to find Iraq.
What's even going on at the office where they wrote that part of this report?
I just don't get it.
I'll tell you what's going on.
Because that's not about PR.
That's all 10 years ago now.
Coalition warfare and joint warfare are two terms that are similar to surge.
They've just become buzzwords in the military.
So we've just been trained to think that the answer to every military political question is, oh, you just need a broader coalition.
Oh, you need more international legitimacy.
I mean this – that's why they think it.
They've been taught.
They've been programmed to think this way.
They're just throwing buzzwords out there, and it's all PR.
It has nothing to do with the reality of trying to craft liberal democracy in an external Middle Eastern country.
Right.
Yeah, and then the detainee policy here, I mean that's where we started with Odierno's mass sweeps of fighting-age Sunni males and the creation of the insurgency there.
And you already talked about specifically Baghdadi being turned from whatever he was into the leader of the Islamic State, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, essentially, after his time in the Kambuka prison, as well as Abu Ghraib.
As Jonathan Schwartz of the internet went and compared all the serial numbers and everything, and the army admitted that they had him at Abu Ghraib at the time that those torture pictures were taken from the scandal there.
So it's fair to assume the worst happened to him during that.
Detainee policy at the macro level, from the minute they decided to open Guantanamo, from the way – the moment they decided that we were going to treat, quote, terrorists, anyone who dare fight against the Americans on their own home turf.
The minute we decided that they weren't going to be considered combatants, the minute we decided they were going to be unlawful combatants, we lost the detainee battle.
And also we lost the PR battle in the greater Middle East because it's not an accident that when they behead American journalists that they capture, how do they dress them?
They dress them in orange jumpsuits just like it's Guantanamo.
That message is lost on most Americans.
It is not lost on people in the Arab world.
Hey, was that really confusing for your guys that on one hand we love these people so much?
We're doing this all at our own expense for them and creating this new democratic, wonderful society.
And yet at the same time, they're all a bunch of terrorists.
They're the hajis.
They're the ragheads.
They're the enemy.
They're trying to kill me, and I'm trying to kill them.
When you can't differentiate between who's supposed to be a good guy and a bad guy and they won't even tell you who's on whose side in terms of the names of the different sectarian factions or anything, it seems like you'd be just lost over there shooting at whoever they tell you to shoot at but not ever knowing why.
My soldiers were so confused, but for the most part they – most of them didn't have the intellectual curiosity to care.
And I don't mean that as a knock at them.
They were so busy trying to live.
They were so busy trying to make sure our Humvees worked and they had enough armor and that their weapons were trained effectively.
Well, but I never even mind because I'm sorry because I kind of got diverted off onto this sectarian thing.
But even just the we hate these people and we're loving them all to death at the same time too.
They're all our enemies and they're all our friends seems to be more or less the life y'all were living over there.
100 percent.
Most of my soldiers, they just hated all Iraqis quite frankly.
They never believed in the whole like bringing peace and democracy to the Middle East.
They thought every Iraqi was the enemy.
I mean I tried to break them of that but like at the same time I understood why they felt that way.
I mean the government of the United States, like you said, had this strange binary of like good Iraqi and bad Iraqi.
So we're scared of them and they're all bad terrorists but we also are here to make them better because we love them.
And it's like we never ever figured out like how at odds those two notions were.
Yeah.
And so then it's the last bullet point.
I really should have reread this article this morning before getting you on.
I read it yesterday and I already forgot.
But no, it's this last bullet point goes right to what we're talking about there with the sectarianism and the ignorance.
Not just of your guys on the ground there fighting but up the chain of command.
Who knows how high and throughout the media and everything.
We talk about in their report anyway they say that the military commanders I guess believe their own propaganda.
That the 2005 Iraqi elections would have a calming effect.
When of course what happened there was that the Shiites won outright so badly that it immediately kicked off the next stage really.
I mean the sectarian war kind of already started but it was a major factor in the sectarian war especially for Baghdad there.
Those 2005 elections.
And how in the world could they have thought.
You know the blogger Bill Mahn.
I like giving this guy credit.
I have no idea who he is.
But way back then I remember January 2005 he had a blog entry after that election called Ayatollah Yusof.
And it was all about how the Shiites have now won big time which means that the Sunnis are full scale going to war to cling to what they have left.
Because if they lose their control over the national government in the capital city then they've lost everything.
And everybody is not an idiot knows that.
And so here comes the worst of it.
Everybody as Jon Stewart is celebrating purple fingered elections.
And this kind of surface public relations image.
This was the worst thing they could have done at that time.
Was to give everything over to Skiri and Dawa.
And that's exactly what.
And the Bata Brigade.
And that's exactly what they were doing.
Yeah.
I mean American political and military leaders were utterly obtuse and uninformed to a certain extent.
I mean some of them were cynical and knew better.
But a lot of them didn't.
I mean the fact of the matter is that the minute you invade Iraq with the liberation theology that we used.
If you attempt to put a real popular democracy in Baghdad.
That meant by definition that the Shiites would become paramount.
And like you said the Sunnis who were sitting on a losing hand.
Why?
Because most of their land is desert without any oil.
The Kurds have oil in Kirkuk and up there.
The Shia have oil out the a** down south.
Who's sitting on a losing hand?
Well the 20 to 25 percent of the Iraqis that are Sunni who are sitting on an arid desert.
Okay.
If they don't control the national government they control nothing.
So you're right.
As soon as we gave majoritarian democracy over to the Shia Bata Brigades.
We were guaranteeing a civil war which is of course exactly what happened.
Well and of course what you just said too is also why Iraq war three and a half is going to last for decades.
As it is you know such as it is right now.
The Islamic State vanquished but the Sunni based insurgency will continue to thrive throughout Iraqi Sunnistan.
They'll continue to fling suicide bombers at Baghdad and whatever Shiite populations they can get at.
And this thing will never be over now.
Yeah.
We still haven't solved.
You know it's funny.
Remember remember what we said.
The surge was supposed to create the political space.
I mean the security space for a political realignment right for a political coalition.
That never happened.
It still hasn't happened that we were told back in 2007 that that's what that's why we were surging.
Well it's 11 years later and the essential problems of the artificial Iraqi state have not been solved.
Okay.
It is still three different regions that are sort of at war with each other with the Sunni majoritarian democracy in charge of Baghdad.
That problem has yet to be solved.
And that's why like you said this war could go on forever.
Yeah.
You meant to say Shia there.
But anyway yeah we get right.
Right.
Right.
Exactly.
And well yeah.
And so I mean and that is the thing is that I mean Maliki is gone.
So I guess it's conceivable right that you could have a Shiite government that really recognizes what we're talking about.
The new powerlessness and resentfulness of the Sunni dominated or predominantly Sunni areas of the country there.
And that you know what we have to be good sports and be magnanimous enough to bring them back into the fold enough that we can all be countrymen again.
But that pretty much sounds like magic compared to what we have now which is I guess the new prime minister is from the Supreme Islamic Council not Dawa.
In fact it's the guy Al-Mahdi was the guy that remember the Hirsch article from I guess it would have been 2004 when they were trying to rig the election for the scary guy.
This was him Al-Mahdi right then.
But now so for the first time it's not Dawa it's scary.
I don't know if that makes much of a difference.
But you have I guess it's ISCI now the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq is the new prime minister.
But they would have to just be selfless in their willingness to forgive and forget that whole ISIS thing and let's all be brothers again.
And here's let me break off a giant chunk of whatever oil wealth we got here.
And that just sounds to me like it's not going to happen.
In fact I was just talking with Patrick Coburn on the show a few weeks ago about the level of corruption in Iraqi Shia stand where all the people with the power just steal everything.
And that's it.
Nothing is invested in the public infrastructure or the providing any services whatsoever.
It's one of the world's worst kleptocracies and it's going nowhere.
So those guys are going to be the ones to heal the rift with the Sunni minority that's now completely lost and on the outs.
No.
And so there's nothing but bad times ahead here man.
I don't know how else to measure it.
All we've done is transfer a Sunni kleptocracy under Saddam Hussein for a Shia kleptocracy under ISCRI or whatever they're called now.
I mean that's all we've that's all we've done.
You know we just substituted one at least the old kleptocracy was mostly stable.
You know what I mean.
I mean I don't like Saddam Hussein but at least his system like was less of a threat to the United States less of a threat to the region less you know you know unbalancing of the entire region.
Right.
All we've done is is create this conditions for an ongoing civil war.
You know what's funny man.
The level of brainwashing back then was so thick.
And you know there are young people listening here who just have no idea this is all ancient history to them I guess or whatever.
But the level of brainwashing was so thick that I remember and me me the first time I heard Michael Shoyer on TV the former chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit say just completely offhand like of course like yes America should have allied with Saddam Hussein after September 11th.
He should have brought him back in from the cold immediately.
I don't know if he said but he should have.
Donald Rumsfeld should have been sent over there to shake hands once again and tell him as long as you keep Al-Qaeda down and quit with the mass war crimes then you know on your own population then you know we can do something.
And there were no active war crimes going on at that point anyway.
And that they have.
I remember being kind of shocked that like wow.
I mean not that of course my my idea is never back any government anywhere ever total non-intervention in all cases.
But just hearing him say that we should have allied with Saddam rather than attacked him was like the most dissonant thing.
Like it was like he was shattering some kind of force field or something to even possibly broach that.
And I remember the interviewers too being pretty taken aback by that.
Like wow how could you say that.
And he's going you know essentially the guy wears a beret and shaves his chin every morning.
What more do you want from him man.
Right.
You know.
Well the reason that everyone was so shocked is because what he was doing there was slaughtering an American sacred cow you know.
And and Americans were just never going to accept that.
You know we're never going to accept what he's right by the way.
Right.
The guy was right.
We shared enemies with Saddam Hussein when it came to Al-Qaeda.
Yeah.
Well absolutely.
And we know hey might as well end with this then.
And you may know something about this yourself.
That the major talking point one of the well there are a couple two major talking points I guess I'll say against Al-Qaeda in Colin Powell's U.N. speech justifying the war supposedly were the lies of Sheikh Ibn Al-Libi who was tortured by the CIA and the Egyptians into pointing the finger at Saddam.
There's a brand new excellent piece about that that's going to be the spotlight on antiwar.com tomorrow by the way.
He was codenamed Cuckoo Bird and they were torturing him the lying about Saddam.
So that was one thing the CIA there.
And then the other one was Zarqawi.
Zarqawi.
Zarqawi.
Zarqawi.
He's in Iraq.
Well that's a little vague.
He was in American protected autonomous Kurdistan.
Right.
And they said and this was Chalabi and his group's lies that Saddam that he had been wounded in Afghanistan and that Saddam had given him shelter at an Iraqi hospital and had surgeons operate on him and give him a fake peg leg.
And so Saddam and Zarqawi were friends.
And then also Zarqawi was al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden's servant when in fact the only connection between Zarqawi and Saddam was that Saddam wanted him arrested.
And the only connection between Zarqawi and Osama was that he had told Osama no I don't want to join al-Qaeda.
I want to kill the King of Jordan not the Americans.
So leave me alone.
Right.
And went off to Iraq.
So he was not the connection to either one of them.
And he was safe up in American protected autonomous Kurdistan and the military.
And it's amazing actually how many different great sources there are in journalism on this question.
I think it started I may be wrong about this.
I think it started with Jim Michalczewski at NBC News.
But then there were like I don't know man I swear like at least half a dozen very well done stories about how the military begged the Bush government to let them kill Zarqawi in American protected autonomous Kurdistan before the war against Saddam began so that they would not have to deal with him.
And Bush wouldn't let him do it.
Wouldn't let him do it because he needed his talking point.
He needed his fake lie excuse to start the war.
And then as we know Zarqawi came and he only became he only declared loyalty to al-Qaeda a year and a half into the war in the fall of 2004.
But in the meantime and after that too he led the very worst part of the Sunni based insurgency doing suicide attacks against Shiite pilgrims and God knows what all of that stuff in the sectarian war there.
Yeah I mean it's a great place to end.
The reality is it speaks to the perfidity and just the vacuousness of the Bush agenda and how cynical it was.
We needed an enemy and we created one.
We made Zarqawi into an international name.
He was nothing.
Like you said he could have been wiped out without touching Saddam.
Saddam might have helped us if we really asked him.
Okay.
The reality is we created the monster that then we had to spend three years trying to slay.
And then who was the precursor to Baghdadi and all the rest of this too.
Man oh man.
History is such a pain isn't it?
It is.
It really gets in the way of a good story doesn't it?
It really gets in the way of a good propagandist narrative.
Yeah.
Well on to Niger I guess.
I don't know.
Chad.
Right.
Right.
All right thanks Danny.
Thanks a lot Scott.
Let me know when you throw this up so I can push it through social media.
Sure thing.
It will probably be tomorrow or the next day.
Okay.
Great man.
Good talking to you as always.
Thanks.
Appreciate it.
Bye.
All right you guys.
That is Danny Sherston.
He writes for us at antiwar.com.
He is a U.S. Army officer major in the U.S. Army right now for a little while longer anyway until he gets out.
You can also find him at the American Conservative Magazine and at truthdig.org.
And his book which I'm going to get to here.
I have to.
I got to.
Oh man.
I should have read a long time ago.
Ghost Riders of Baghdad, Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge.
All right y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at libertarianinstitute.org, at scotthorton.org, antiwar.com, and reddit.com slash scotthortonshow.
Oh yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at foolserrand.us.
