Sorry, I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax 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 hacked.
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 us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say 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, introducing Barry Lando.
He is the author of the book Web of Deceit, the history of Western complicity in Iraq from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush.
And I am just kicking myself for not having read this whole thing.
I have done some research in it and read parts of it here and there.
He's also a former producer for 60 Minutes, and he has a piece here at Counterpunch.
Poppy, that is George Bush Senior, lit the fire.
Bush and Iraq.
Welcome back to the show, Barry.
How are you doing, sir?
Fine.
Very happy to have you here.
Usually I interview you in January when it's the anniversary of Iraq War One, or if you prefer, the anniversary, the beginning of this one big Iraq war we've been fighting ever since.
However you want to characterize that.
And I've learned so much from your great articles over the years.
And I swear, I'm definitely going to read this.
I'm actually writing a book now that will have a section on Iraq War One.
And I guess I thought maybe somehow I was going to get away with writing that section without having read your whole book.
But that's not right.
So it's definitely on the top of the pile now, sir.
And then I hope I'll be able to interview you all about it.
And I was just going through the table of contents and just paging through it.
And it just looks absolutely fantastic.
Web of deceit, y'all, that is.
I'm sure some of my listeners will beat me to it.
OK, so if you could talk a little bit about Saddam Hussein, the dictator of Iraq's position circa, I don't know, early July 1990.
It was the end of the Iran-Iraq War and the dawn of a new era for him and the U.S. too.
So what was going on there?
Well, Saddam was greatly in debt to the other Arab countries, particularly to Kuwait.
They had loaned him billions of dollars to fight like a nine-year war with Iran.
And essentially, he was saving their butts by doing that, because otherwise he was protecting them, if you will, from Iran.
That's the way they looked at it.
So they were quite happy to lend him a lot of money to go to war against Iran and to keep that war going.
And he lost, you know, hundreds of thousands of soldiers, Iranians, Iraqi soldiers died in that war.
So after the war, Saddam felt that, you know, that Kuwait should forgive the debt, should forgive his debt to them.
And because he'd fought the war for them.
But also, he had to get his economy going again.
And for that, he would rely on petroleum, getting his oil wells going again.
But at the same time, Kuwait started producing more and more petroleum, more and more oil, which caused the oil prices to fall.
So Saddam couldn't figure out what was happening.
Here, Kuwait was sort of screwing him in the international oil market.
At the same time, they were flatly refusing to forgive any of the loans that they had made to him to fight the war for him.
And Saddam became more and more aggressive towards Kuwait.
But he couldn't figure out why they were not backing down, why they were not willing to negotiate.
And he was in really deep trouble.
He was in serious economic problems.
But what was going on behind the scenes that Saddam didn't realize was that the United States was secretly telling Kuwait not to negotiate with Saddam.
To refuse to negotiate with them, don't give an inch.
And because at that time, Saddam now was becoming America's enemy, and the U.S. was now out to weaken him.
They had been allied with him in a way when he was fighting with Iran.
Very, very complex story.
Are you following me?
I'm with you so far.
I have follow-up questions, but I'm not sure if you want to wrap up for this part or keep going.
Well, so anyway, Saddam couldn't figure out what was happening.
He became more and more aggressive towards Kuwait.
He called in the American ambassador and said, look, I may actually decide to move militarily against Kuwait if they don't start talking, if they don't back down.
The American ambassador said, you know, we have no iron in this fire.
And this is when the Americans realized that Saddam was already mobilizing troops on the Kuwaiti border.
Kuwait, by the way, was also what they call slant drilling, was actually drilling into Iraq's oil pool, and in effect stealing oil from Iraq as this was all going on as well.
And so Saddam seemed to feel he was getting a green light from the United States to move.
At least no one in the United States was telling him not to.
And it wasn't just the American ambassador, April Glaspie, which that scene with her and Saddam became quite famous.
But in fact, if you take a look at the statements of major American officials for weeks leading up to the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam, several top American officials said exactly the same thing.
The United States does not have any kind of treaty commitments with Kuwait.
They're not going to defend Kuwait.
So the American ambassador wasn't the only one to say that.
And Saddam can be forgiven for perhaps thinking that the United States would do nothing if he invaded.
And in fact, it later turned out that George H.W. Bush himself was not sure what he was going to do.
He and James Baker, what they were paying attention to at that time was basically the end of the Cold War.
The Soviet Union was coming apart at the seams.
That's what was getting their attention and not Saddam Hussein.
So anyway, Saddam Hussein orders his troops to roll into Kuwait thinking that the United States is not going to react.
And in fact, it takes the United States totally by surprise when he does.
They hadn't really expected him to do it.
And George H.W. Bush himself did not know what he was going to do.
It took him a couple of days to figure it out that he was going to react to Saddam's invasion and react in a very, very tough way.
And when he did, what actually in fact then happened was that Saddam was like caught in a trap.
He was once in to Kuwait with his troops and he realized what the United States, the United States really was up in arms about this and they were going to react.
At that point, Saddam immediately started trying to backpedal and started saying, hey, look, it's OK.
I'm going to get back out of here.
I don't have any intentions of invading Saudi Arabia.
We're going to leave as soon as we can.
Bush at that time said basically and said no way.
And the Americans essentially slammed the door shut, even though Saddam would probably have negotiated his way out.
Bush was not going to let him do it.
He had decided that he was going to take down Saddam Hussein.
And by doing that, in doing that, he sent about 150,000 American troops into Saudi Arabia.
And those 150,000 troops are really what touched off al-Qaeda.
It was the presence of those American troops in Saudi Arabia that got al-Qaeda started and that led, if you want to look at history down the road, it led to an offload of the problems that we're facing today throughout Central Asia and the Middle East.
So, well, so that is a complicated story.
Yeah, not too bad.
But so let's go back over a little bit of that when it comes to the setup.
I guess I mean that just literally, but I wonder if figuratively that that actually does apply.
I mean, you talk about Norman Schwarzkopf and then also the CIA.
He was the head of Central Command at the time.
And then also the head of the or not the head, but CIA telling the Kuwaitis to take a hard line.
Are you certain that that was not a coordinated policy that they were deliberately baiting him in?
On one hand, having the CIA and the military tell the Kuwaitis to take a hard line.
And on the other hand, having the State Department tell Saddam that, yeah, what do we care if you do something about it?
Sounds maybe like they were setting up the Kuwaitis.
And then, but as you say, though, I mean, certainly part of the narrative of the story is that they didn't actually expect him to do it or they expect him to take just the northern oil fields and not the whole country.
But then even then, I think, as you say, it took them a few days before they decided they were really going to do something about it.
That's correct.
So what about the idea that they had, that CIA, DOD and state had coordinated this and have actually deliberately provoked the crisis?
Because that almost even though supposedly that would be like a wild conspiracy, that actually would be like the Occam's razor explanation in a way when you look at the way it played out, at least before the invasion.
Well, I think the Occam's razor is the idea, the principle there is you take the the most obvious answer is it.
And in this case, the most obvious answer seems to be they were just totally confused.
They were not keeping the eye on the ball, the State Department, the CIA.
They didn't really realize what all their different moves were going to add up to.
I don't think they were that brilliant or that Machiavellian in setting this whole thing up.
No, I don't see that.
I think it was just huge blunders, huge mistakes, which have led to a tragedy, which is with us to this day.
I mean, April Glaspie did tell the New York Times, well, nobody thought he was going to take the whole country.
We didn't think he would.
So in other words, pretty clearly, we did think he might at least invade and occupy the oil fields.
And in fact, the way Greg Palast, the investigative journalist has put it, was that to James Baker, this was sort of West Texas rules.
If you're overproducing from shared oil wells beneath our property, that both our property above ground abuts, but it has shared oil below it, that there's a quota.
And if you break the quota and overproduce from the shared well, then I get to break your knees.
And that's the deal, West Texas rules.
And so as far as James Baker was concerned, Saddam was well within his rights to kneecap the Kuwaitis, since they were, you know, basically, as you were saying, slant drilling or overproducing from those shared oil wells under the border region there.
So, yeah, I mean, that does.
I agree with you, by the way.
I think it's still a fair question.
But I agree with you that it does seem more like they blundered into it, that Baker particularly was perfectly happy to see Saddam invade Kuwait.
Not that he didn't think it was going to happen, but that he didn't mind that it was going to.
Yeah, I think also what history has forgotten is that the uprising that occurred in Iraq after the U.S. moved its troops into Kuwait and pushed Saddam out of Kuwait, there was this huge uprising that occurred in Iraq.
Wait, wait, you're fast forwarding too far in the story.
We're doing the follow up questions now.
So hold on with me there, Barry.
So I wanted to ask you, actually, do you happen to remember off the top of your head at what point, you know, what part of the month it was when Margaret Thatcher publicly warned George Bush that don't you go wobbly on me now, Bush, essentially attacking his manhood from her?
Yeah, so it was about three or four days after the invasion took place.
And she flew out to Aspen, Colorado.
She had a pre-planned trip already out there.
And then she told Bush, I think, more or less in those words, you say, you know, keep, you've got to, you don't go wobbly.
And essentially, you've got to send your troops in.
You've got to get that guy out of there.
And that was really a big deal.
I mean, people think, you know, it sounds kind of silly or trivial or that kind of thing.
But he had already been called the wimp president.
As Bill Hicks said, that really had stuck in his craw.
It was like the cover of Newsweek, the wimp president.
And here was a woman saying, challenging him that you can't be less of a man than I am.
And so then the answer was, that's right, he can't be.
Especially when England is, you know, the former mother country, but the junior power to America in the world that with that kind of challenge, there's basically no way he could take it up.
So then that leads me to the next question really, which is about the refusal to negotiate.
Because, of course, the invasion, it took five months to build up.
In the Saudi desert to prepare to attack Iraq and Iraqi forces in Kuwait.
So that was a long time for Saddam Hussein to back down.
And it's obvious he wasn't going to get down on his knees and beg.
He had to save some face.
But, you know, just like kind of with the Waco massacre, it's a fair question that why didn't he just pull out then?
He could have, right?
What was it that Bush would have to promise him to get him to just go ahead and leave Kuwait?
As you said, Bush, because Saddam now has, before his people and before his army, Saddam has made this move into Kuwait.
And this is not a democracy.
This is a true dictatorship.
And he's got to be constantly proving his manhood and his leadership as well.
And to move his troops in and then have to, you know, tail between the legs, sort of leave in the face of American pressure, that wouldn't have worked for Saddam either.
He probably would have been overthrown the next day by a military coup.
And he knew that.
So he had to at least appear tough, appear to get something for those efforts.
And I think one of the things he tried to get was one of the small coastal islands near the border with Iraq, an island that would give him an additional port, something that wouldn't have cost Kuwait anything, would have been face-saving for Saddam.
But Bush was and was intent that Saddam was not going to be able to save face and he was going to have to leave, period.
And I don't think there was any way that Saddam could just do that without probably being assassinated or overthrown the next day.
So in other words, he would have had to really get something from Bush.
But then it's your position then that Bush could have talked to, really could have on behalf of the Kuwaitis negotiated that island away and that would have been good enough, something along those lines?
Something or debts.
I'm sure if they'd wanted to avoid what actually happened, moving their troops militarily into Iraq, moving their troops militarily into Kuwait, defeating Saddam militarily, I'm sure they could have done that.
Many different ideas were brought by the French, by the English, by the Jordanians, but Bush did not want to hear them.
He was going to knock Saddam out and that was it.
Right.
Well, and I remember I was in ninth grade at the time, but this absolutely was clear.
Once they started this thing, there was no way they were going to not invade.
And it was almost a perfect replay of the same situation in 2002 later on, where once they start building up in Kuwait, in that case Saudi, then it's on.
And now, so to that, they told some massive lies to start Iraq War One.
I mean, certainly they couldn't fake the fact that Saddam's Iraq had in fact invaded and occupied Kuwait and was looting the place.
That was true.
And yet, tell us about the threat that Saddam presented to Saudi Arabia, that he might roll in and sack Riyadh, as well as, if you could, the babies and the incubators and all that, that mattered so much to American public opinion in 1990 and the build up to the war.
Well, there was a story that, you mentioned the incubator story, which essentially that they got, they had hearings and set up hearings in Washington.
And they had this very moving testimony given by a young woman.
I think she was just a teenager, I believe, who described what happened in a hospital when the Iraqi troops came into the hospital after they'd invaded in Kuwait City and they ripped children out of little pre-born, premature kids.
They ripped them out of the incubators and threw them to the floor.
And these were ghastly tales.
And it turned out that the woman who gave the most moving testimony to this whole thing turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador in Washington.
The whole thing was a farce.
It was a setup.
And it was set up by a PR firm in Washington that had been hired to do PR for the Kuwaitis to back up the idea that the United States should go in and invade.
Remember, Bush called him worse than, he called Saddam Hussein worse than Hitler.
And this was the same Saddam Hussein who Bush and figures from his administration had been attempting to coddle in the months before the invasion.
They were going back and forth with how they felt about Saddam.
Sometimes they were offering new trade deals.
They were offering to ease his frustrations at the attacks supposedly by American publications on him.
They were telling him they don't really speak for the American government, don't worry.
And then a couple of months later, all of a sudden this same man becomes worse than Hitler.
So there's no way if he's worse than Hitler, of course, there's no way you can negotiate and leave him in power.
Right.
Well, and they got back to that.
In fact, in Iraq War II, even then, yes, so damn insane.
That was the catchphrase that you can't deal with the guy.
They replayed that same script against the Branch Davidians.
In fact, with some modifications and really that was what they ended up copying almost perfectly in 2002.
He's crazy, so you can't negotiate.
He's got illegal weapons and he's mean to his own people.
We have to save his own people from him.
And there was no other choice but to go in there and attack.
And that's exactly the same kind of scam.
The American people fell for it really three times in a row.
And since then, too, and pretty persuasive.
Yeah, pretty persuasive.
And of course, Saddam Hussein actually really was a bad guy.
And the Anfal campaign against the Kurds, for example, some Kurds who'd sided with Iran during the Iran-Iraq War, killed almost 100,000 of them or something.
And that was at a time when Ronald Reagan was helping to back his government, the Reagan-Bush senior government, when he was vice president.
And arming him with chemical weapons, helping him buy chemical weapons from our European allies anyway, to use against these Kurds, as well as against the Iranians.
So he was a guy who absolutely was a world-class war criminal, but every bit of it had been at least on America's watch, if not at our behest, as in the case of the war against Iran.
So you're right.
Yeah, he was nearly as bad as Hitler, but only because America had put him to work that way.
So it was pretty rich for them to then use that as the excuse to go and attack him the way that they did.
And now can you talk a little bit about the way that the air war was conducted?
Because one thing I remember from ninth grade is that all they showed us was, you know, fancy satellite or laser-guided bombs, you know, flying in windows and down chimneys, and these pinprick perfect strikes, which minimize collateral damage and make sure we're only killing the bad guys.
And yet it turned out that 80-something percent of the bombs they dropped in that war were just plain old dumb bombs, Vietnam-era dumb gravity bombs, without that guidance at all.
It was all a big propaganda campaign.
And also they had deliberately, and they bragged about it, didn't they, their specific targeting of civilian infrastructure in the country, water, sewage, electricity, roads, all roads and bridges throughout the country.
I got hold of the word defense intelligence agency reports that came out during, after the bombing that specifically reported on how successful they'd been in knocking out infrastructure, in power systems, potable water, the things that the nation needed to survive, that the people needed to survive.
And these were out in some cases for 10 or 15 years after the war, because at the same time, after they knocked all these things out, the United States then put an embargo on Iraq, embargoing just about everything, including most basic medicines, from getting into that country.
And it's estimated that some 300,000 to 500,000 children died because of that embargo.
Right.
Yeah, which had helped to prevent them from rebuilding any of that infrastructure that had been bombed.
So, you know, under the pretext that all chlorine must be for chemical weapons, you're not allowed to import any chlorine.
And so, in other words, people are just drinking diseased water and that kind of thing.
And they knew exactly what they're doing.
And they told the Washington Post, yeah, we know what we're doing and things like that.
So, you know, as you're saying, DIA reports, but also just plain old talking to the press that, you know, you get rid of Saddam for us and we'll help you rebuild your electricity.
That was one quote.
Well, this is the thing that's interesting with the U.S. and embargoes.
When you add up the number of countries that the United States has embargoes on today, you wonder if any of these embargoes have ever been successful, other than simply killing civilians.
Right.
Yeah, and then they call the non-interventionists isolationists, when they're the ones who have sanctions on everybody and their mother around the world, preventing trade and preventing free relationships and associations between people and businesses, every direction that you look.
Of course, in keeping with them being the worst of hypocrites on everything, that's another thing that they're the worst of hypocrites on.
And then, so can you also talk about the highways of death?
Because, you know, I asked the other Scott Horton, who is an international human rights lawyer and a very hardcore anti-torture guy and stuff.
And he told me that he thought that technically speaking, these were not war crimes.
But I think morally is a different question.
And I don't even know if he's right about that, but seemed pretty bad.
Yeah, it's and it's not clear how many were killed in it.
These were when the Iraqi troops were trying, desperately trying to get out of Kuwait back to Iraq.
And the United States pummeled them with, with fighter bombers and helicopters, strafing them as they, you know, as they tried to get just simply to retreat.
And thousands supposedly were killed at that time.
Nobody really knows how many.
But it was, it was one of the things that obliged Bush in a way to end the war quickly because of the publicity he was getting over those bombings.
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All right.
Now, please.
The Great Betrayal, I think, is what you call this chapter in your book.
George Bush Sr. encouraged the Shia and the Kurds to rise up and overthrow Saddam, but then he changed his mind.
Why?
Well, it's not clear why he changed his mind.
First of all, he changed his mind because he didn't need them any longer.
In other words, he made radio appeals on Voice of America to Iraqis to rise up.
And planes even dropped millions of leaflets over Iraq in the shape of kind of Iraqi money, paper money, so people would pick it up.
And there was a message from George Bush, George H.W. Bush, telling them to rise up and overthrow Saddam.
So I guess it was natural for them to conclude that if they did, maybe there'd be some help from outside.
And they did rise up and they got very far towards overthrowing Saddam.
And a lot of his top generals were wavering when they saw that the uprising seemed to be successful.
But the United States let Saddam's military continue to fly their helicopters, using them to strafe the uprising.
And also they prevented American troops from only one or two kilometers away from where the uprisings were occurring.
They prevented them from helping the uprising in any way whatsoever.
Even giving them arms, helping, even the American troops actually blocked the people who were rising up.
They blocked them from trying to, from getting arms from the stockpiles that Saddam had left behind.
So they weren't even neutral, really.
And in the end, they were savagely put down.
I mean, they figured that over 100,000 people, over 100,000 Shiites were killed in the uprising in the south.
And in the north, thousands of Kurds were also killed.
But what saved the Kurds was that there was television coverage of what was happening to them.
Television from near the Turkish border as the Kurds were desperately trying to flee into Turkey.
And so that television coverage got on CNN and other American channels.
And Bush was forced at that time to declare a no-fly zone over the Kurdish area to protect those refugees.
But there was no television coverage in southern Iraq.
And so Bush did nothing.
And Saddam went ahead.
And as I said, probably over 100,000 Shiites died in that uprising.
Later on, Bush even denied that he had even called for an uprising.
But there's audio evidence of it.
And I have copies of the paper money that was dropped telling them to rise up.
By the way, I was wondering, are those pictures of those leaflets, are they in your book?
I'm really not sure if they are, but they may not be.
I did a documentary also where you can hear that.
You can hear his voice and you see the leaflets.
I can give you the link to that documentary.
Right.
I'm actually, I'm looking at the, oh, here it is right here.
I'm pretty sure I must have gotten this from your documentary.
Right 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.
There is no...
There you go.
And if I remember right, that was from your documentary where I got that.
And then, in fact, as long as we're here, this is only just 10 seconds too.
They had kids in incubators and they were thrown out of the incubators so that Kuwait could be systematically dismantled.
And then, I was sorry to laugh.
In fact, I read a thing the other day, another article about Bush, you know, because this is on the occasion of Bush Senior's death now, and everybody's writing all these hagiographies about him.
And this writer said, he told a story about his brother who had just become a father and who said, eh, who cares if Iraq invades Kuwait?
And then they came out with this propaganda about killing the babies and stealing the incubators.
And the guy wrote, my brother got so mad and became the biggest war hawk.
We gotta go attack Iraq.
And it really did move public opinion to such a great degree.
And, as you say, based on a total hoax.
It just goes to show what suckers people are for that kind of thing.
But now, so on the great betrayal there, I think it's worth, right, going back over, Barry, isn't it, how this is why Jimmy Carter told Saddam Hussein that, yeah, go ahead and invade Iran.
And this is why Saddam wanted to invade Iran in the first place.
It was because they were terrified of the Shiite revolution that had taken place in Iraq.
Iran in 79, that had overthrown the American sock puppet.
But also, it threatened to have more influence with the super majority Iraqi Shia Arab population than the Iraqi state had influence over them.
And so to preempt a Shiite uprising, a feared Shiite uprising, Saddam conscripted all those Shiites and force marched them into Iran to try to destroy the Iranian revolution and to co-opt their status as Arabs and Iraqis and use that against the Shia in that way to contain that revolution.
And they were also afraid because the oil in Saudi Arabia is all under where the Shiites live in Saudi Arabia and under the tyrannical thumb of the Sunni kings there.
And so that was the whole reason in the Reagan years they backed Saddam against Iran all that time.
And then that was why they changed their mind in the uprising.
It was because they realized that the Bata Brigade, who had taken Iran's side when Saddam invaded Iran, they were coming back across the border.
They were taking control over the revolution.
And so it was going to be Iran's friends in the catbird seat if they let it succeed.
And then that was why they choked and betrayed them, right?
Yeah.
It wasn't quite clear.
It was the Shiite uprising in southern Iraq.
And many of the Shiites in that uprising were very friendly with the Shiites and linked to the Shiites in Iran.
Very strong links with Iran.
But it doesn't mean that they were under Iran's thumb.
And I think it's still not clear to what degree Iran was actually responsible or linked to that uprising in Iraq.
But there was a fear that they were, and that if the uprising were successful, that Iran would be running Iraq as well.
And that's what matters, right, is the Bush administration's perception at the time.
Which obviously, because we know now in hindsight from Iraq War II, what happens when Bush Jr. picks up where Bush Sr. left off and in fact puts the Shiites in power.
The power factions that seized power were the Bata Brigade, the Supreme Islamic Council, and their Bata Brigade army who'd been living in Iran for 30 years.
They were the ones who came in and inherited the power.
Their guy, al-Mahdi, is the prime minister right now.
Yeah.
No, this is what's so sad today is that there's fear that Iran's increasing its power in Iraq.
Well, Iran did increase its power in Iraq.
And it is still a very powerful player in Iraq today.
As you might say, the United States, I mean, after all, Iran dominates that part of the world.
And it's only natural that they're going to be a powerful player in Iraq.
They can be a powerful player without controlling it.
And I think that's what the situation is today.
Absolutely.
Well, and then as you said there, that after they betrayed this revolution that they'd encouraged, then that became the excuse to stay in Saudi to wage the no-fly zone patrols and also to enforce the continuing blockade against the irrational madman Saddam Hussein who can't be negotiated with and can't be brought back in from the cold.
And there was this fear of his, now this new thing was that he was going to be a nuclear power.
And it was to, the embargo was to sort of first prompt the Iraqi people to rise up against Saddam, but then it was also used supposedly to force Saddam to give up his nuclear weapons, which he didn't have.
I mean, that was part of it.
But it was also just the idea that if you put enough pressure on a people, they will rise up and overthrow their leader.
Let me ask you, how dishonest was that at the time or just how ridiculous was it, do you think, when they had just encouraged a revolution and gotten one and then stabbed him in the back and betrayed him and left them in the position where, as you said, 100,000 people were killed and they were in no position to rise up.
I mean, I can see where theoretically someone would say that, not that this works, but I could see how a denizen of D.C. would decide that if you strangle a people to death enough, they will finally be so desperate that they will risk everything to overthrow their dictator for us.
But not in this circumstance.
When we just saw what happened, they rose up and they had their chance and it wasn't good enough and they failed.
There's no way they're going to get a second chance at that.
And so, you know what I mean?
They continued that in the name of making the people so desperate to overthrow Saddam, they kept the sanctions regime.
And yet they had already proven that it was far too late for anything like that to ever have a chance to happen again.
Yeah.
And in the end, it was the people that suffered for it.
You know, it's like in a way, if you look what's going on in Yemen today, the sanctions that the Saudis with American backing have put on Yemen are just strangling that country.
Hundreds of thousands of Yemenis have died.
Millions are refugees.
And the purpose of the blockade is what?
But this is something, once again, the United States is very much involved in.
Yeah.
And then, and of course, in Yemen, it's in the name of increased Iranian power.
In the war in Syria, where American support for the jihadists and the Sunni-based insurgency there ended up leading to the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq War III, that was in the name of, as Obama told Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic, that, yeah, this is to take Iran down a peg.
Essentially, because George Bush gave their friends Baghdad, we want to take another one of their friends away in Damascus.
And that'll be like our consolation prize for the big blunder of Iraq War II.
And then it ended up, when it led to the rise of the Islamic State, blowback on an accelerated basis there, they had to launch Iraq War III, which was, guess what?
Again, on the side of the same Shiite militias in Iraq War II that they wished they hadn't just fought the war for.
They ended up fighting another war for them.
And, you know, helping give them more dominance over the predominantly Sunni regions of the country than ever before.
And then, still, they want to complain about Iran.
Finally, they got rid of the Dawah Party, and they put Skyri right in power, who were even closer to the Iranian government than the Dawah Party was.
I mean, damn.
You wouldn't want to hire these neocons to hurt Iran for you, because all they ever do is make them more powerful and make the al-Qaeda terrorists on the other side more powerful in response.
Yeah.
Unfortunately, not just the neocons, but just about every American politician.
I think one of the things, of course, that really threw American policy in that area from the beginning was the hostage crisis, the taking of hostages by Iran, which America has never forgotten.
And that's been kind of a stain on Iran, no matter what kind of government they have.
Oh, yeah, these are the guys that took Americans hostage.
And even that was a huge mistake by the United States, too, letting that happen.
Well, you want to tell that story?
I got actually like two more minutes, and I want to hear it actually from you if you got one.
I was working on another story for 60 minutes.
In fact, we got hold of the documents that were seized by the students who took over the American embassy during the Iranian revolution.
And among those documents were communications back and forth between the political officers in the embassies, and Washington.
And at the time, there was a move from the United States, they were going to allow the Shah of Iran, who had been thrown out of Iran, they were going to allow him to come to the U.S. for medical treatment.
And the embassy told Washington, you know, don't.
You know, if the Shah comes for medical treatment, we're likely to have the embassy is going to be taken hostage here.
It's going to be an attack on the American embassy here, because there had already been one before.
And in fact, that's exactly what happened.
And that's how Americans got taken hostage by something that had already been warned by their own people in Iran that was going to happen.
Right.
And isn't it right?
Have you reported about this, that the CIA and the State Department had previously told Carter that go ahead and allow the Ayatollah to come to power, tell the French to let him get on the plane and go back to Iran and take over, because we know this guy.
He helped us to overthrow Mossadegh in 1953.
And we can work with him and it'll be fine.
And it really wasn't until after that hostage crisis, when they let the Shah into the country for medical treatment, that everything all went to hell.
But that their plan at the time was for, you know, the relationship between America and the Iranian government to stay more or less the same.
Yeah, well, I mean, Khomeini was surrounded by a lot of very moderate Iranians who had been actually educated in the United States.
And they thought they could use him.
They would govern and that he would be kind of a figurehead.
But in a way, he double-crossed them and he took over.
I see.
Oh, man.
All right.
Well, I'm really sorry I got to go because I think I could interview you all day.
But you know what, I am going to read this book soon and then we'll have to really go over some history.
Always great to talk to you, Barry.
Also, take a look, if you would, my book, Deep Strike, which is about an American president who got elected with the help of Russian hacking.
Oh, okay.
Pleasure to talk to you.
That sounds fun.
All right.
Thanks, Barry.
I appreciate it.
Bye-bye.
All right, you guys, that's Barry Lando.
And this piece is at Counterpunch.
We're going to be linking to it on Antiwar.com as well.
It's called Poppy.
That was one of the nicknames for Bush Sr.
Poppy lit the fire.
Bush and Iraq.
That's at Counterpunch.org.
And his book is Web of Deceit, The History of Western Complicity in Iraq.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at LibertarianInstitute.org, at ScottHorton.org, Antiwar.com, and Reddit.com slash Scott Horton Show.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and The War in Afghanistan at FoolsErrand.us.
