01/19/16 – Barry Lando – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, Scott Horton Show.
First up today is Barry Landau.
Huh?
Lando, like Calrissian.
Barry Lando.
I don't know how I mispronounced Lando.
I'm looking right at the word right in front of my face.
Jesus.
Our first guest today is Barry Lando.
He is a former producer with 60 Minutes and is the author of what must be a great book that I hold in my hand here, Web of Deceit, the History of Western Complicity in Iraq from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush, which unfortunately I have not read yet, but I have read quite a few articles and seen some documentaries on YouTube and things by Barry on the real history of the first Gulf War.
Obviously, this book goes much further than that.
Welcome back to the show, Barry.
How are you doing?
I'm fine.
Thank you.
Barry, it's very good to have you back on the show and I'll tell you what, I have not read this book yet, but this year I'm finally going to write my own book and so that necessarily means that I will be devouring this thing and I promise not to plagiarize, but to give you all the credit you deserve when I cite you in my anti-terror war book that I'm beginning to work on now, but anyway, so yeah, you are the best guy I know on the first Gulf War when it comes to reminding people the real history of what happened there, how we got into this mess.
I think it's not even an opinion, but a scientific fact, as David Stockman puts it, that George Bush Sr.'s invasion of Iraq in 1991 was the original sin that just ruined everything for the Middle East and for the United States in the 21st century at the end of the Cold War.
And as your book says, America had been mucking around in Iraq for a long, long time, but at the end of the Cold War, we could have just called the empire off, been a normal country in a normal time, said to hell with the King of Kuwait and who cares about that and whatever, and we'd have never had our terror war, we could have had our peace dividend and live in a limited constitutional republic instead of this corrupt world empire and police state that we have now.
And it's unfortunate because 1991, to a great part of our population, is now ancient history.
No one really remembers anything except how proud they were of the yellow ribbons and American flags and the USA chants and our easy victory over so damn insane the villain of Iraq in 1990-91.
So sorry to say all that, but just to remind people why this is important that we talk about this, could you please, Barry, explain, first of all, how it was that Saddam Hussein really went from being, if not an outright, you know, Mubarak type loyal sock puppet, at least being a friendly Middle Eastern dictator to being America's enemy number one?
Well, he was nothing like Mubarak and he was much more brutal, violent, kind of a killer than Mubarak ever was.
But he was America's sort of ally during the eight or nine year war that he fought against Iran during the 80s that resulted in the deaths of a million people and the US actually gave him intelligence help during that time.
They had a DIA intelligence expert stationed with the Iranians giving them satellite information on the Iraqis, giving them satellite information on where the Iranian troops were, etc.
And the US was also very interested in trading with Iraq.
George Bush was interested in doing that even before the war broke out.
So they had kind of on-again, off-again relations with Saddam.
They saw him as a possible ally, a possible trading partner.
But then when the war with Iran ended, they wanted to kind of undermine Saddam.
He had felt he'd been kind of their ally, as I'd said, but the US at that point started encouraging Saddam's enemies in the area to stand up to him.
And they sent a lot of mixed signals to Saddam, which is really the reason that I think he actually invaded Kuwait.
The reason he did, it was due to bad signaling and for the failure of the United States really to draw a red line and say, you invade Kuwait, we're going to have to react.
The Americans never really did that and despite the fact that Saddam was making some menacing gestures and statements about Kuwait, which he had a legitimate beef with Kuwait and the United States was telling Kuwait, look, don't negotiate with this guy, we've got your back, unbeknownst to Saddam.
So he couldn't figure out why the Kuwaitis were refusing to negotiate with him over things like oil and repaying debts, etc.
And he got madder and madder and he kept signaling that he was going to move militarily and the U.S. kept refusing to say, look, don't do it.
And then Saddam did and at that point, even when he did, George H.W. Bush still wasn't sure how he was going to react.
It wasn't at all clear that he would move troops to defend Kuwait and attack Saddam.
That was something that he decided upon after the fact.
So the whole thing was a very, very poor exercise in U.S. foreign policy and partially responsible for the whole tragedy itself.
Yeah, and I think we've discussed this before, where if you wanted to really oversimplify it, you can make it seem like a real trap that they were telling the Kuwaitis, don't negotiate, continue to give him the stiff arm and all of this, while at the same time he's saying to them, man, he's saying to the Americans, I really want to do something about this.
And the Americans, not just April Glaspie, but also I forget what's his name, the State Department weenie testimony before Congress.
I'm sorry.
Yeah, a number of top American officials, top State Department officials, including George Bush himself, were very waffling about about signaling Saddam.
As a matter of fact, you seem very certain, though, Barry, that this is really just a matter of typical bureaucratic blundering.
They weren't exactly sure what their policy was or what kind of message they were trying to send.
And it wasn't so much a perfect trap for Saddam as much as just a bunch of stupidity.
And then they took advantage of it.
Yeah, stupidity.
And they were paying attention to, of course, the end of the Cold War.
That was really the big thing that was happening in the world as far as they were concerned.
You know, the Berlin Wall was was coming down.
Russia was the Soviet Union was coming apart.
That was the big story as far as they were concerned.
And this stuff that was happening between, you know, Iraq and Kuwait was kind of a backwater squabble that they weren't paying much attention to until it was too late.
Right now.
I'm sorry.
This is just kind of a side point.
But it just occurred to me that if anybody knows the answer, the answer to this, it very well could be you.
I can't find this footnote anywhere, but I know that I read it from a credible source.
And that was that Lloyd Benson, the former Texas Democratic senator, had warned George H.W. Bush, don't put the soldiers, don't put ground forces in Saudi Arabia because it will drive the crazies crazy.
And I know I couldn't have made that up.
Lloyd Benson is totally out of left field.
But I know I read that somewhere.
Are you familiar with that by any chance?
I'm not familiar with that specific quote, but there were lots of people who warned at the time when they were thinking of sending troops, don't do it.
And as a matter of fact, hearing that they might possibly send troops.
Bin Laden went to the king of Saudi Arabia and said, look, don't accept American troops into our country.
Don't accept the infidels in here, because if they if they come, you know, we'll be obliged to react.
It would be a terrible thing for you to do.
Despite that, the Saudis decided to let in the American troops.
And that really that sent Bin Laden that really lit his candle, if you want.
And that's when he turned against the United States.
And it was after that that he began attacking American facilities in the Gulf and Africa.
And that really led directly to 9-11.
All right.
Now, we're going to take this break.
We'll be right back with Barry Lando, author of Web of Deceit.
Right after this.
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All right.
So welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Barry Lando about the first goal for Operation Desert Storm to kick Saddam and the Iraqi army out of Kuwait after their invasion of August 1990.
And then, as Lando was saying, is that occupation of the Arabian Peninsula, which I have the soundbite here, but I won't waste our time with it.
But it's Cheney admitting that he promised the king of Saudi Arabia will leave as soon as we're done, which they didn't do.
And how Osama wanted to kick Saddam out of Kuwait, but the king gave the job to George Bush instead.
And how this is a huge part of what led to the terror war.
Of course, Al-Qaeda cited combat forces on the Arabian Peninsula all throughout the 1990s and their war in the run up to 9-11, of course.
But so to go back to, I guess, the run up to the war, there was Operation Desert Shield began in August 1990 and lasted through the beginning of the war.
And in January, January 16th of 1991.
But I wonder, Barry, if you could remind us about the status of negotiations through that time, because Saddam must have taken George Bush, Sr. seriously.
That he would unleash America's Cold War military against, you know, built up to fight the Soviet Union against little Iraq if they didn't do what the hell they were told to do, which was get out.
And yet, for some reason, Saddam refused and said, mother of all battles.
And yet, I suspect there was more to it than that.
Well, there was.
I mean, as soon as he realized was just took a couple of few days when he realized that that Bush was really adamant and that they really were going to look like they were going to send troops or that they were at least they were going to be major reprisals.
Saddam immediately said, well, hold it, you know, we're not going any further.
Let's talk.
Let's negotiate.
Meanwhile, the story had been put out by Cheney originally that the the Saddam was intent on invading Saudi Arabia, going right through Kuwait and going into Saudi Arabia.
That's how he convinced the Saudis to accept the American troops, really the threat of an invasion by Saddam into their country.
And there's there's now and afterwards there's no real evidence that that Saddam had that in mind at all.
But it was used as kind of a false flag by the Bush administration to to move those troops into Saudi Arabia.
And as you know, to keep them there.
And, yeah, there were lots of attempts to negotiate, particularly by the by Saddam during the fall.
As time went on, he offered all kinds of possibilities of pulling Iraqi troops out.
And as it was clear, though, that once Bush had decided to act, he wasn't going to let Saddam out of the trap.
Yeah.
Well, that was even obvious to me as a ninth grader at the time was once you start building up your military to do a war, it's pretty much on in a situation like that.
But now can you be more specific about, you know, what exact kind of peace feelers that he put out through the Swiss, through whoever, to what it was he was willing to do was.
And on the American side was the argument simply, we already told you, get your army out of Kuwait, period, or we'll kill you.
And that's the only negotiation.
Or how was it that they, you know, for months refused to negotiate when they could have?
Yeah, that was basically the U.S. position was get your troops out.
But it wasn't get your troops out, you know, withdraw them.
It was we want them out with him when Saddam said, OK, we'll get him out.
It was like, no, you've got to get him out within three or four days or within one week.
I forget what the exact the exact time limit was, but there was no way that he could move fast enough to satisfy the U.S. deadline.
Also, Saddam, his own political neck was was in the news, if you will, because the Iraqi army now would if he if he pulled out like that, the Iraqi army would would be after him and he might be overthrown.
So he was trying to negotiate a way out that would allow him to leave, avoid the bloodshed, but also allow him to remain in power.
And Bush wasn't going to give him that way out.
The a lot of the neighbors, the Jordanians particularly, were attempting to negotiate to say, hold it, wait a minute.
Let's we can deal with this guy.
And the U.S. wasn't going to do it.
And the Egyptians also the U.S. pressured them to back off and undermine any attempts at negotiation.
OK, now, well, I mean, I hate to just skip the war.
I guess I want to get to the Great Bay of Pigs or the desert and all the consequences of the the the urging of the uprising against Saddam and the betrayal of it after the war.
But I don't want to skip the war entirely here.
How many Iraqis were killed in the thing?
Do you know?
I don't think anyone, you know, anyone knows what the final total was.
They did not succeed in destroying the bulk, though, of Saddam's forces.
I mean, his the presidential guard, his strongest forces managed a lot of them managed to get out and were not destroyed.
But, you know, tens of thousands of people were of soldiers were other soldiers were killed and their attempts to evacuate.
They were this long string of trucks and tanks trying to make it out through the dunes back to Iraq, were bombed and strafed endlessly by, you know, American planes.
And there was kind of like an inferno all along the way.
So but a lot did make it back out and they were the ones who were able to put down the the uprising that the George Bush had called for in Iraq.
And now I don't want to bog down the interview with it too much.
But in the top of the hour break, I'm going to go ahead and play my collection of Gulf War one soundbites that will, you know, inform a lot of this and describe what you're saying.
But we do have that clip.
In fact, this one is short enough, I guess, a Bush senior here.
There's another way for the bloodshed to stop, and that is for the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands, to force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside.
And then this was played on Voice of America and put on quotes, put on leaflets and whatever.
And this was a real effort by the Americans to encourage, especially the Shia and I guess the Kurds in the north as well, to rise up against Saddam.
And then what happened?
Someone went to a college and got a briefing somewhere and came back and said, hey, if we do that, we're going to turn the south of the country over to Iran.
And so we better not.
And they changed their mind or what?
Exactly.
Well, they did change their mind once when the uprising took place and spread.
And it looked like Saddam's army, thinking they were, you know, the uprising was going to be successful, that Saddam's army was going to go over or a lot of them were going to go over to the rebels at that point.
Yeah.
Some people within the Bush administration got scared, probably George H.W. himself, James Baker.
And they said, gee, we we we can't allow this to be successful, because if it is that it will allow Iran through the through the Iraqi Shiites, Iran then will be able to greatly increase its power in Iraq, which is exactly what we don't want.
And it will upset our Saudi allies.
It's exactly the same kind of story you're getting today.
It will upset our Saudi allies.
So we we're not going to help them.
And so I actually spoke with U.S. soldiers who just were just a few miles away.
They could watch the the the uprising being put down in a very bloody way by Saddam's military helicopters, which the U.S. had allowed to keep on flying.
They were watching and they could do nothing about it.
They were at orders just to stay.
Stay pat.
At best, they treated some of the wounded, some of the civilians who were fleeing, but they couldn't help the rebels.
And the rebellion finally was put down.
But with huge losses, I mean, hundreds of thousands of people were killed.
And then this became the basis for the entire U.N. blockade regime and the no fly zones and the permanent criminalization and delegitimization of the Iraqi regime for the under the U.S. and for the U.N. to to be whipping boys of these institutions.
Basically, it was decided that, well, as as Secretary of State Madeleine Albright announced in the Clinton years, the blockade, the sanctions will never be lifted as long as Saddam Hussein remains in power.
And they just basically turn the whole country into a prison.
But they did, as a matter of fact, in one of her interviews with it was was was 60 minutes when she was asked, because it was then estimated that the embargo, that sanctions that were put on Iraq after after after after that battle, after the U.S. attack caused the death of at least 500000 Iraqi children.
And she was asked, 500000 Iraqi children, was that worth it, Mrs. Albright?
And she said, yes, it's worth it.
Right.
And so there you have it.
On the 25th anniversary of Gulf War one fact, here's one more quote I have to to let you go with here, Barry, for you.
This will not be another Vietnam.
Yeah, no, it'll take a lot longer than that.
Barry, I really appreciate your time on the show and your great work.
That's Barry Lando, everyone.
The book is Web of Deceit.
We'll be right back.
All right.
And then here for the recording later, I'll go ahead and lay down some of my best tracks for you from the first Gulf War.
First, here is Dick Cheney describing to Bill Kristol Saddam Hussein's legitimate gripes back in 1990.
Saddam had been throwing his weight around.
The Iran Iraq war had ended.
Economically, he was in some difficulty.
He had accused the Kuwaitis, for example, of undercutting the oil price.
And that hurt him because he was almost totally dependent on oil revenues for his government.
And he'd actually moved troops to the down to the Kuwaiti border.
Right.
And the advice we got from our friends in the area was don't do anything to upset him.
This is just a show of force.
He's trying to negotiate a better deal on oil prices and so forth.
And he'll never invade.
And that's what we got from the region.
At one point, the United Arab Emirates had run up to the actual invasion.
They were concerned and they called and wanted.
All right.
And then here's Cheney explaining to Kristol also about basically how he not Baker, he, the secretary of defense, led the negotiation with the Saudis to begin to occupy the Arabian Peninsula and the build up to the war.
And then the king turned back to me after a couple of minutes and he said, OK, we'll do it.
But he had two conditions.
One, let you bring enough force to do it right and you get it done.
And secondly, that you'll leave when it's over with.
And I committed, gave him my word on that basis.
I knew that's what the president wanted to do anyway.
The president had already, in effect, authorized you to had said I was there to close the deal.
There you go.
And then here's a little bit of favored war propaganda for you from 1990.
While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns.
They took the babies out of incubators.
To incubators and left the children to die on the cold floor, which was a pure lie.
She was not a Kuwaiti nurse at all.
She was the daughter of the ambassador.
And she was given a script by the Hill and Knowlton PR firm on payroll to come up with this completely fabricated war propaganda, which the president at the time happily repeated.
They had kids in incubators and they were thrown out of the incubators so that Kuwait could be systematically dismantled.
Oh, he cares so much about the little Belgian babies on the bayonets there.
And then I hope I'm not going too bad out of order here.
Yes, here's some.
Well, I play the Bush senior urging the Shia and Kurds to rise up.
There's another way for the bloodshed to stop.
And that is for the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands, to force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside.
And then here's Dick Cheney interviewed in 1994 at the American Enterprise Institute, defending himself from the neocon accusation that we should have gone all the way to Baghdad.
And why didn't you go all the way to Baghdad?
It's just like when CBS is confronting Hillary Clinton.
Why aren't you doing enough against Assad?
And then so she admits the truth.
Well, we don't want to accidentally back Al Qaeda, do we?
Kind of thing.
Well, here's Cheney under the gun.
Why didn't you do enough against Saddam?
And so he's explaining why that would have been a bad idea from 1994.
Do you think the US or UN forces should have moved into Baghdad?
No.
Why not?
Because if we'd gone to Baghdad, we would have been all alone.
There would have been anybody else with us.
It would have been a US occupation of Iraq.
None of the Arab forces that were willing to fight with us in Kuwait were willing to invade Iraq.
Once you got to Iraq and took it over and took down Saddam Hussein's government, then what are you going to put in its place?
That's a very volatile part of the world.
And if you take down the central government in Iraq, you can easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off.
Part of it, the Syrians would like to have to the west.
Part of eastern Iraq, the Iranians would like to claim fought over for eight years.
In the north, you've got the Kurds and the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey.
Then you've threatened the territorial integrity of Turkey.
It's a it's a quagmire if you go that far and try to take Iraq.
The other thing was casualties.
Everyone was impressed with the fact that we were able to do our job with as few casualties as we had.
But for the hundred and forty six Americans killed in action and for their families, it wasn't a cheap war.
And the question for the president, in terms of whether or not we went on to Baghdad and took additional casualties in an effort to get Saddam Hussein, was how many additional dead Americans is Saddam worth?
And our judgment was not very many.
And I think we got it right.
There you go.
And so this is the exact same reason why they betrayed the Shia and Kurd uprising, as we talked about, as they realized that would be the consequences, just as he put it.
And and then that led to the Clinton regime of just permanent, endless, you can't even call it low level war, full scale blockade on a global level.
Again, you know, read Andrew Coburn and or Anthony Gregory's reviews of Joy Gordon's book.
Anyway, just type in Andrew Coburn, Joy Gordon or Anthony Gregory, Joy Gordon and Invisible War, Invisible War.
I was thinking silent war, but that Invisible War by Joy Gordon about the 90s regime of blockade and frankly, genocide against the people of Iraq.
And here is that famous quote of Madeleine Albright that our guest referred to there.
We have heard that a half a million children have died.
I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima.
And, you know, is the price worth it?
I think this is a very hard choice, but the price we think the price is worth it.
And so there you go.
That's chapter one and chapter one point five of America's 25 year war against Iraq right there.
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