3/20/18 Jonathan Schwarz on the history and lies of the Iraq War

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All right, you guys introducing the great john Schwartz.
And he's now at the intercept for many years.
He wrote the blog tiny revolution, which comes from a George Orwell quote, think every laugh is a tiny revolution.
And, well, one of the things I like about john is that he's got an encyclopedia brown steel trap type memory for all the lies that the government tells when it comes to our foreign policies, and particularly I'm thinking of on Iraq war two, and everything that was done and said to get the American people to support and allow to whatever degree they did that war to to be launched 15 years ago.
And so that's what we're going to talk about here today.
Welcome to the show.
How you doing, john?
Hey, well, I'm always glad to talk to you.
Thank you for your kind words.
I will say that there were so many lies about Iraq, that even I find them leaking out of my brain.
Like, it was one of the most impressive cavalcades of lying in human history.
And it's at this point, it's a little bit hard to keep track of it.
And I think it's good for us to take a look back for ourselves and for people who maybe were a little bit younger.
When this was happening, just to remember what an incredible series of events this was.
Yeah, it really was something else.
And and that really has been a big part of my thoughts and putting this together.
And I'm going to later on today or tomorrow, I guess I'm going to talk with Gareth and hope to have a big long talk with Gareth about all the different phases of Iraq war two as it developed, as well to to kind of go with this, but I get this a lot now.
I mean, we're living in the future.
And, and there are a lot of people who are just in elementary school or, or junior high or whichever it was way back then.
And they really don't know much about this, but they want to know now.
So, alright, so I want to start john, with this thing.
I'm sure you've heard it a million times you get it in your email box or people on Twitter asking about, yeah, but there's this New York Times story that says that they found the weapons of mass destruction after all and confound George Bush for not going ahead and taking credit and saying, See, I told you.
So, but here it is.
And this is the kind of thing that it goes around around, especially on like, you know, dad and right wing uncle email chains and stuff where nobody ever reads the actual article, they just read the headline.
And the story is about American soldiers.
It's a New York Times story about American soldiers who were wounded when they found chemical weapons in Iraq.
And so here, let me I have all the best quotes here.
But I think it's important that we just kind of start with this, because it's the kind of thing that people really do ask me about a lot, it may be the most interesting aspect to it that didn't it turn out that they found the weapons after all, the article is called the secret casualties of Iraq's abandoned chemical weapons.
And it's by CJ Chivers, which are secret casualties of Iraq's abandoned chemical weapons.
And so but of course, and I know that, you know, the obvious punchline here, if people had the background, would be that these were all chemical weapons from the Ronald Reagan era, when the USA backed Saddam Hussein, none of them were from after the 1991 era at all.
They'd all been declared to the United Nations inspected and declared.
And had it was decided by the authorities, then it's better just leave the stuff out in the desert where it'll lose its shelf life soon enough anyway, it's safer than transporting stuff.
And so just leave it out there.
But none of this in any way confirmed, zero of it, none of it in any way confirmed the Bush administration's narrative that there were active weapons of mass destruction programs.
And, you know, they were compiling stockpiles of more in preparation to use against anyone.
None of that was true.
No chemicals, no germs, no nuclear of any kind.
It was all, you know, none of that was right.
None of that was right.
And the only way that you can buy that this news story says anything like Bush was right is if you just refuse to read the article, because the article states, and I have the quotes out of what, let's see, six different paragraphs here, where they explain six ways from Sunday, that this doesn't mean Bush was right.
This means that Bush's father sold these weapons to Saddam in the first place when he was the Vice President of the United States.
See, and that's it's all you got to do is look at it.
I'm not gonna sit here and read all the quotes, but all you got to do is actually read the article to the end.
And you'll see that it absolutely itself debunks the narrative around the article.
And that's why they always tell you, oh, the New York Times said that, but they never give you the link.
And if they do give you the link, you know, they didn't read the whole thing.
Again, it's the secret casualties of Iraq's abandoned chemical weapons.
And what the hell, I'm sorry, John, I'm going to ask you questions in just one second.
But there's one more, which is that there's an Associated Press story about how they moved a bunch of uranium out of Iraq to Canada.
And it was a bin full of yellow cake uranium.
But if you read that whole story, you'll see that this was all declared to the UN in the 1990s.
It was in a storage locker with a padlock on it.
And the padlock was still secure.
And of course, the yellow cake was worthless anyway, unless they had the capability to transform it to gas and enrich whatever this and that.
And they didn't have a weapons program, any kind of Manhattan Project with which to do that.
And so the whole story is completely moot.
But again, it serves as just enough to shed doubt and muddy the water and make it seem like yeah, well, maybe he really did have at least some weapons and this and that.
But yeah, no, really.
That's not right at all.
And I just kind of want to start out by because I think probably people are clicking on this, this may be this, this actual article, or those two articles may be why they're listening to this.
Because this gets brought up so often.
Do you know about this?
Do you have a comment on that?
Oh, I don't just know about it.
Like I've written, I don't know, at least one, maybe more articles about it.
Great.
It's, this is really the equivalent of people believing that because like, about a mile from where I grew up, and just outside of Washington, DC, there's a new suburban housing development that, you know, fairly recently, they were building big new mini mansions there.
And what they discovered when they were digging the foundations for these new big expensive houses was very old mustard gas.
Because this had been used as some kind of like chemical weapons center, manufacturing center by the US Army during World War One.
And they just buried this mustard gas at some point, and everybody had forgotten about it and had lost track of it.
Yeah, yeah, no, I'm not kidding at all.
And this isn't a really expensive part of Washington, DC.
So the people buying these homes were not happy about having mustard gas in their neighborhood.
But anyway, these stories about Iraq and claiming this, this justifies George W. Bush, that's like saying that the United States has a chemical weapons program because of this old mustard gas.
And what actually happened was like during the 1980s, they managed, they did, they manufacture and use a gigantic amount of chemical weapons when the war is over, they still have big stockpiles of it.
And believe it or not, the Iraqi Army is not unbelievably, you know, it's not tremendously well organized.
And they did make a very good faith effort to try to turn over or destroy all the chemical munitions that they had left over.
And, you know, the US Army, like loses supposedly a billion dollars worth of equipment every year.
The Iraqi Army is not better than the US keeping track of stuff.
And a lot of these chemical weapons, these munitions looked exactly they're like shells filled with with chemical weapons, and they looked exactly like regular artillery shells.
And they would get mixed in with the stockpiles of, you know, regular artillery shells.
And, as I say, they did make a good faith effort.
And they did turn over almost all of it.
But there were still, you know, from time to time, shells that people didn't realize, you know, had mustard gas or other kinds of chemical weapons in them, that would be found.
And US troops would get exposed to, you know, after the invasion during the occupation.
And so, you know, in a sense, like, did Iraq have, like, quote, have chemical weapons?
I mean, like, yes, in the sense that there were chemical weapons, you know, very small amounts, mostly degraded, some of them, fairly harmless, some still dangerous.
But on the territory of Iraq, like, yes, they did exist there small amounts.
Did the Iraqi government know that they had these chemical weapons?
No, they didn't.
So it's really shameless of people to claim that this justifies the invasion.
It's, you know, I understand why people are confused by this.
Well, I'm not even sure.
Are you sure you're right that all of it wasn't known and declared by the Iraqi government?
Because I believe it was.
Actually, it is.
You're right.
It is.
It's a little bit more complicated than what I'm saying.
I mean, there may have been some and maybe it's a little bit of both, huh?
Yeah, it's a little bit of both.
You're right to make that distinction, because some of the chemical weapons that U.S. troops were exposed to were things that were just, you know, they just lost track of, got mixed in with the regular weapons.
Then there was also, you know, one of the main centers of manufacturing chemical weapons in Iraq.
They had various bunkers that were filled with chemical weapons during the Gulf War.
I think one in particular was damaged by bombing.
And the inspectors decided it's just too dangerous to try to go into this bunker and take these chemical weapons out of there.
And so they sealed it.
Everybody knew it was there.
No one thought that Iraq was, you know, like hiding it somehow.
It was known to everybody.
And after the invasion, once, you know, the U.S. lost control of this chemical weapons site, there were people, you know, it does seem to be the case that people broke into this bunker and took some of the chemical weapons out.
So so you're right.
There's there's sort of two cases.
There's the stuff where Iraq just lost track of it.
And then there's the stuff where everybody knew it was there, including the United States.
And people grabbed it out of the bunker afterwards.
So it's a complicated story.
I understand why people are confused by it.
But the main point is, none of this justifies the Iraq war at all.
Well, I mean, even that the main point is there was no effort by Iraq to have and use these weapons in any way ever.
They were completely over it.
The 1980s were over by the end of 1991.
Full stop.
There's just nothing to any of it.
Yeah, you know, I would say that it's even worth going back further to truly understand what happened, like just really quickly.
The the war between Iran and Iraq began in 1980 when Iraq invaded Iran.
And Robert Perry, the late Robert Perry, very sadly died recently, you know, dug up documents demonstrating pretty convincingly that Jimmy Carter in 1980 had given Saddam Hussein a green light to invade Iraq.
It said, go ahead and do that.
And that actually makes sense, of course, because that was at the time when Iran was holding the U.S. embassy personnel as hostages.
And so you can see how you'd be sitting around in the White House and be like, let's let's put some pressure on Iran and let Iraq do this.
Anyway, the point is, we were not necessarily opposed to this truly horrendous war that lasted much longer than people believed it would.
And during the war, that's when Iraq really began developing chemical weapons, biological weapons.
They started a nuclear weapons program.
But what's important to know is that during the 80s, during the Reagan administration, Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, which is a dumb propaganda term, but we should use it anyway, since that's the only thing that really people know it as.
It was not a reason to, you know, invade Iraq as it became in 2003.
But it was just just a bad, you know, PR problem for the Reagan administration.
So they tried to tamp down any news of Saddam Hussein, like actually using chemical weapons, both on Iranians and on Iraqis.
We also knew that Saudi Arabia was funding the Iraqi nuclear program during the 1980s.
They gave them like five billion dollars to do this.
We knew this and didn't say anything.
Anyway, so the point is that weapons of mass destruction were never something that the United States genuinely cared about Iraq having.
It's nothing that we were ever truly afraid of ourselves.
And we also didn't want to go to Baghdad.
And it's been completely forgotten now.
But Saddam Hussein probably would have been overthrown by popular uprisings.
There are ones in the north and the south, if we'd supported them anyway, if we'd supported them in any way.
But we didn't because we didn't want to have a popular government.
We didn't want to have like the people of Iraq overthrow Saddam Hussein.
We wanted to have like an Iraqi general overthrow him.
And so at that period, the sanctions that had been placed on Iraq before the war were extended until Iraq had been disarmed of its WMD.
And for a couple of months, for a couple of years, Iraq played games with the inspectors.
They lied about what they'd done, how far they'd gotten with the programs during the 1980s.
They didn't actually have any WMD left at this point.
This is like end of 1991, 92, 93.
They didn't have chemical weapons.
They didn't have biological weapons.
They surreptitiously destroyed them all.
But they did have some of the documentation.
And 1995, we have talked about this many, many, many times before.
Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, Hussein Kamal, defected from Iraq to Jordan.
And he told the US.
He told the UK.
He told UNSCOM. He actually told CNN.
He went on international television and said, Iraq doesn't have any weapons left.
And Iraq at that time knew that he was going to reveal that they'd been hiding this documentation.
They turned it all over to UNSCOM. At that point in 1995, Iraq was completely clean.
And we knew this, or at least we had very, very good information that this was true because Saddam trusted Hussein Kamal to run all the WMD programs.
We knew that.
He was in charge of all of them.
So that was 1995.
There was no real reason to think that Iraq had anything left, anything that was still justifying the sanctions.
But that's the key point about the whole story with weapons of mass destruction.
Why Bush was able to jump on this in the first place is that we wanted the sanctions to remain in place forever.
And unfortunately, according to the UN resolutions, they couldn't remain in place forever unless Iraq still had weapons of mass destruction.
And so we had to continue lying about it, continue claiming they had them in order to keep the sanctions on, in order to punish Saddam Hussein for defying the United States and hopefully get him overthrown.
And so that's where we were when George Bush was running for president.
People who really paid close attention to this knew that Iraq had nothing, knew that the US policy was based on maintaining the sanctions no matter what.
Robert Gates actually, you know, long, long ago before he was defense secretary, when he was deputy national security advisor to Bush, number one, said, you know, Iraqis will pay the price while Saddam Hussein is in power.
All possible sanctions will be maintained until he is gone.
And that was US policy.
It had nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction.
They were always the excuse.
OK, so that's a long, long, long wind up to Bush running for president.
They had to the UN because he was terrified of being somehow caught not giving up every last scrap of paper that would add up to, you know, copies of everything that Hussein Kamel had given them.
And so, as Scott Ritter put it, they knew and they were satisfied by the end of 1995 that all of Iraq's chemical weapons and the rest of their nuclear program and etc. had all been destroyed by the end of 1991.
And he said they did cheat.
They tried to keep some mustard gas, but they got caught and it was all destroyed by the end of 1991 and that they were totally satisfied of that by the end of 95.
And then in 1997, Rolf Eckius from the UN, from UNMOVIC or whichever it was at the time, I forget, they were ready to certify Iraq weapons of mass destruction free.
And that was when the new Secretary of State Madeleine Albright gave a speech where she announced, again reiterating what you just said about the Bush senior policy, that these sanctions really aren't about weapons either way.
They're about regime change and they will stay on until the people of Iraq overthrow Saddam Hussein.
And it's worth mentioning, of course, that Bush senior encouraged the Shia and the Kurds to rise up and overthrow Saddam in 1991 after the war, but then changed his mind and let Saddam massacre them all with his attack helicopters and tanks.
When they realized that if they do let the Shia, I don't know about the Iraqi people, but if they let the Shia majority come and take power there, they already had Iranian backed militias.
The Bata Brigade and these others were already coming across the borders from Iran to help lead the revolution.
So that was when they panicked.
They realized they were reversing Reagan's policy of supporting Saddam to contain the Iranian revolution.
Now they were importing it.
So they call it off.
And in fact, Barry Lando, the journalist, says that they even landed American helicopters on a highway to prevent an Iraqi army division from marching on Baghdad and marching on Saddam and made them turn back.
Outright intervention, not just allowing Saddam to do it, but intervened even on his side there.
And then that's a big part of the setup for Iraq War II as well, because that's where Bush Jr. picked up where Bush Sr. left off.
But anyway, as far as you're saying the regime change thing, it's worth noting that here they had encouraged the people to rise up, then stabbed them in the back and left them high and dry like the Bay of Pigs kind of thing when they had the chance.
Then they deliberately put on this policy of blockade and starvation against the population of Iraq, as they put it, to make them so desperate that they would do anything to rise up and get rid of Saddam, even though they had their chance already and we backstabbed them.
And now they are literally quite materially weaker in every way, starting with calories and in a weaker position compared to their dictatorship and have less and less ability to overthrow him all the time.
But then, as you put it, this is basically just the status quo for the entire Bill Clinton years.
They just kept it that way.
Yeah, it's an incredibly ugly story.
And of course, part of the stated justification for the 2001 terrorist attacks by al-Qaeda were the sanctions on Iraq because they were killing so many Iraqis.
It was also because of the stationing of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia.
And so it's just something that certainly Bill Clinton in particular wants examined almost as little as George W. Bush.
Everybody knows pretty much the role that George W. Bush played in this.
Very, very few people know what Bill Clinton did.
They passed the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998 and Bill Clinton signed that.
I remember well Ron Paul's warning against it, that maybe Bill Clinton isn't going to war, but the next president obviously is at some point.
Once we declare regime changes our policy, then that means what?
At all costs?
I mean, obviously it does eventually.
Yeah.
And something that's extremely important to remember if you want to understand Saddam Hussein's behavior is that UNSCOM was also used as a cover for various U.S. attempts to spy on Iraq and conduct a coup and overthrow Saddam Hussein around that time.
And what that meant is that there are various times when the inspections were blocked by Iraq and we saw this as outrageous and believed that this obviously proved that they were hiding some kind of weapons of mass destruction from the inspectors.
What actually was happening, we now know, the CIA says this itself, is that the inspectors at various times were trying to go places where Saddam Hussein was.
And just like the Secret Service would not allow international inspectors to show up at the White House if China had declared that we were trying to assassinate the president of the United States.
And they knew that these inspectors were using the information that they gathered, or at least various spies were, in order to assassinate the president.
Of course the Secret Service is not going to let them in.
Yeah, but the president has a secret chemical weapons factory directly beneath his bedroom.
That makes perfect sense.
That's a real deep cut for people who may remember 2003 is that there were lots of claims that Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons factories were all in the basements of his palaces.
Yeah, they really did say that.
That's why he won't let us inspect his palaces because those are very likely sites of chemical weapons factories, secret ones that somehow we can't see from space.
Like any political leader, but particularly Saddam Hussein, of course they want to live on top of a chemical weapons factory.
That makes perfect sense.
Now here's a fun note.
Everybody remembers the Monica missiles.
The day that Monica Lewinsky started testifying before the grand jury, Bill Clinton bombed a crucial antibiotics factory in Sudan.
Everybody always says, oh, it was an aspirin factory, like it was no big deal.
But thousands of people died from being deprived of the medicines that factory produced on the false claim that it was a chemical weapons factory, this time for Osama bin Laden.
And then also missed by hours and hours, maybe days in bombing some empty training camps with cruise missiles in Afghanistan.
But hardly anybody ever brings up the fact that Bill Clinton launched Operation Desert Fox, which he named after Rommel, the Nazi, in December of 1998 on the day that the full House of Representatives was to begin debating the articles of impeachment against him.
And then he kept the thing going for five or eight days or whatever it was, in the most obviously cynical attempt to bomb a bunch of weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist.
But boy, you'd think he'd be done after a full week of bombing over there, that then they would have got all the suspected sites, right?
But in fact, Bill Clinton later claimed Fox News cornered him in New York City on a corner one day coming out of somewhere.
And he said, well, you know, I think the reason they can't find all the weapons of mass destruction, it must be because I got them all in my Operation Desert Fox in 1998, the Lion SOB.
That's fantastic.
I have to say, I did not know that.
I will have to find that.
Oh, yeah.
No, I should find that clip, too, man.
It's out there where he's like, oh, yeah, that's probably why they can't find him, because they say to him, you said like it's all his fault.
You said they had weapons of mass destruction, Bill.
What's the problem?
You hung Bush Jr. out to dry here is what they're basically trying to do.
Right.
And he's like, well, I must have bombed them all in 98.
That's the thing.
But another completely cynical thing.
And importantly, Bill Clinton ordered the U.N. and ordered everybody to pull the inspectors out of the country in time for the bombing campaign.
And so this became then the basis for the lie that Saddam threw all the inspectors out of the country.
Now we can inspect.
He must be making bombs.
Yeah, that's right.
Just just before Desert Fox, you know, obviously UNSCOM was not going to allow its inspectors to be there while we were bombing the hell out of the country and they pulled them out.
And then after Desert Fox, you know, it is true, like Iraq said, well, we're not going to let the inspectors back in.
In retrospect, again, that makes perfect sense.
Like we demonstrated, number one, that even if Iraq was disarmed, we were never going to lift the sanctions.
We'd also demonstrated, number two, that they were being used as a mechanism to spy on Saddam Hussein and try to overthrow them.
Then we, number three, had bombed the hell out of Iraq at the end of 1998.
No country would be like, well, now that you've stopped bombing us, inspectors, come back.
That's crazy.
And so that was the status quo in 1999, 2000, as Bush was running for president.
And one thing that people, weirdos like us, like to talk about all the time is this guy, Mickey Hirschquist, who was buddies with the Bush family.
And he was hired to ghostwrite the standard campaign autobiography that everybody apparently always has to have when you run for president.
And so he spent a lot of time hanging out with George W. Bush and just having conversations with him that he was going to use to shape into this book.
And years later, Hirschquist revealed that Bush had talked to him about how, at the time, this is 1999, he wanted to invade Iraq.
And the reason why he wanted to invade Iraq was because he saw from his father's experience, and also the experience of Margaret Thatcher, that wars make you really popular.
And that when Margaret Thatcher had the Falklands War during the 1980s, that she'd gotten super popular in England, that his father had been super popular after the Gulf War in 1991.
And so you had to find some country to attack so that you could pass all the domestic legislation that you wanted to do.
He explained all of this to Mickey Hirschquist.
Which, by the way, if people just search the Path of War timeline, it was put together by my wife and her assistant, Larissa Alexandrovna and Muriel Cain, the Path of War timeline.
And that's the second entry here, after the foundation of the project for A New American Century, which we're going to return to for a second.
It's these quotes.
It says, here's one of the quotes.
One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.
Start a small war.
Pick a country where there is justification you can jump on.
Go ahead and invade.
And this was the guy who was hired to basically ghostwrite the campaign book.
It's not like he was some Democrat with a vendetta out to undermine Bush.
I highly doubt that.
It seems like he wouldn't have got the job in the first place.
I've got to admit, I don't know much about Hirschquist, but can you comment on that?
The amazing thing is, eventually they decided that they wanted to have somebody else ghostwrite it.
But he remained close to the Bush family, and I think he actually wrote a book about Prescott Bush, George W. Bush's grandfather.
As you say, this was not a Democratic infiltrator.
This was somebody who was sympathetic to the Bush family.
And what he revealed years later was that this was as cynical as your worst imagination about these people.
They are, in fact, this cynical.
We're going to start wars just to make ourselves look good because they're popular.
Yeah, you're not going to be able to quote-unquote privatize, and I mean those quote-unquotes too, Social Security in your first term.
That's a second term thing, but you've got to make sure to get your second term.
You're going to have to attack Iraq.
So now, let's talk about the Project for a New American Century, and Bill Kristol and Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perl and David Wormser and Stephen Hadley and whoever else I'm leaving out.
Fythe and Abrams and Edelman and Shulsky and the neoconservatives.
What's their deal?
I can't remember if John Bolton was part of the Project for a New American Century, but he might as well have been if he wasn't.
Yeah, and Bolton, he's an important case because he's actually not a neocon.
He's a lifelong right-wing nationalist, Goldwater type since the beginning.
But very close to them, might as well be one of them on virtually everything as far as I know, and including members of all of their groups.
Yeah, so the Project for a New American Century was this quasi-think tank.
Basically, it was just created to push for a war with Iraq and as many other countries in the Middle East as possible.
But what's interesting about the Project for a New American Century is that they explained very honestly and clearly the actual U.S. concern with weapons of mass destruction.
There was no discussion.
There was a long, long paper that they produced that you should try to find and read.
It's still on the internet.
It's rebuilding America's defenses is what you're talking about, right?
Yeah, rebuilding America's defenses.
And what they say is not that, oh, we're scared that Saddam Hussein has chemical weapons.
He's going to use them to attack the United States.
What they said was the issue is that countries like Iraq, countries like Iran or North Korea, if they have these weapons, they can deter us.
They can deter us from attacking them.
They can deter us from doing whatever we want in the Middle East or in East Asia.
And that's admirably honest.
It's just that nobody apparently in the U.S. media was able to get that paper and read it.
All right.
Now, so there's another important paper, and I kind of skipped this one on the timeline here, but it's all right.
1996.
In fact, it's two of them.
A Clean Break, a New Strategy for Securing the Realm and Coping with Crumbling States.
And both of these were primarily written by David Wormser, but then also Richard Perle and Douglas Feith and others signed on.
And at least the first one is explicitly a position paper for Benjamin Netanyahu and his incoming government in Israel in 1996, the first time he was the prime minister there.
And what it says, amazingly, if you read it carefully, it's like, wait, what?
The problem, of course, for Israel is Hezbollah, and Hezbollah is backed by Syria, and Syria is friends with Iran.
The Shiite Crescent, the evil Persian Empire, right?
And so the solution to this problem, John, is to focus on getting rid of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
The Ayatollah's number one enemy.
And why does this make any sense?
Well, if you ask David Wormser in 1996, it's because Ahmed Chalabi told them that what we'll do is we'll get a Hashemite king.
We'll get a cousin of the King of Jordan, and we'll put him in there.
And let me tell you about the Shia of Iraq, okay?
They love bending over and taking orders, man.
That's what they live for.
And if we just give them a Hashemite king, they'll be completely compliant, and then we'll have this awesome new structure in the Middle East.
And then, of course, installing a king was a bit unpalatable, so they swapped out the Hashemite king with Ahmed Chalabi himself, would be a great choice to be the new leader.
And what's going to happen is then Iraq, Shiite-dominated Iraq, will be loyal to the United States, and we'll put all this pressure on Iran, and we'll make an alliance with Israel, and stop funding Hamas, and basically abandon them, and build an oil and water pipeline to Haifa.
And Shiite-dominated Iraq will be Israel's new best friend in the Middle East.
And these geniuses, and I always wondered whether Poindexter and Wormser from Revenge of the Nerds were actually named after the Reagan administration guys.
But anyway, here they are.
And David Wormser, this was the policy that they bought.
And it was Ahmed Chalabi blowing all this smoke up their ass about how it was going to work out at the end, if only they would give him the power.
And really, they bought it, John, it looks like to me.
Yeah, it is when you read that kind of stuff.
And I mean, again, like that's on the internet, and you can find it and read it.
You realize that these people are maybe eight years old, and they're like eight years old, they're eight years old, and they've just learned how to play risk.
And they think the world actually works like that.
It's really terrifying to realize just how dumb the people who run the world are.
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Thanks, guys.
It really is.
It's something else.
And you know, Wormser even says in Coping with Crumbling States, this is the famous quote, what we want to do is expedite the chaotic collapse in Syria.
That's right.
Will lead to a better circumstance for us there in the future.
And he also says that, yes, of course, all these policies of regime change and chaos and war could cause a rise in, I don't know if he names bin Laden specifically, but more or less the implication is bin Ladenite type Sunni radical terrorists, such as we've already been attacked by in the 1990s when he was writing it.
But he says, but oh, well, you know, that'll be worth it.
If we do, because and I'm sure he couldn't imagine just how much of a favor they would be doing for America's al Qaeda enemies there in pursuing the war.
But still, he basically here was a group that was actually attacking us, unlike, say, Iran and Hezbollah.
But you know what?
If what we do empowers them, then that'll be fine.
That was as early as 96.
Yeah.
All right.
So then Dick Cheney becomes president, sort of.
That's right.
January 20th, 2001.
Dick Cheney is sworn in as president.
Yeah.
And again, for people who were not paying attention to politics now, the reality is that Dick Cheney was pretty much president of the United States during George W. Bush's first term.
Like George W. Bush had absolutely no knowledge of or interest in the world.
But Dick Cheney sure did.
And he made a lot of stuff happen.
And one of the things, of course, is that even before 9-11, they had all agreed, you know, we're going to go into Iraq as soon as we can possibly find an excuse.
On that excellent timeline, one of the things that's mentioned is Bush's Treasury Secretary, Paul O'Neill, he revealed that like in cabinet meetings that they were talking about it before 9-11, you know, when are we going to find the opportunity to invade Iraq?
And then it's September 11th, 2001.
Al-Qaeda pulls off the most spectacular terrorist attack in human history.
Within hours, we know from Rumsfeld's notes, like somebody FOIA'd Rumsfeld's notes from that day.
Rumsfeld was asking his aides, like, can we use this as an excuse to invade Iraq?
Like, get me the evidence.
Is there anything we can we can use here?
Again, that's something you can find on the Internet.
And from that point forward, they were absolutely certain that this was going to give them the opportunity.
And from their perspective, you know, Afghanistan, that was that was too boring and small for the political bump they were looking for.
Like Afghanistan, you know, that's that's a teeny tiny war.
That's that's something we're going to win so easily in Afghanistan.
It's not going to take long enough.
That was their mentality in 2001.
And then January 2002, Bush's State of the Union address.
He names Iran, Iraq and North Korea as part of the Axis of Evil.
It's clear from that point forward that they're gunning for Iraq.
And the word goes out to all the intelligence agencies that, you know, we need you to give us a reason.
We need you to provide the quote unquote evidence that we're going to use to invade Iraq.
And the intelligence agencies actually did that.
Again, another story that's been completely forgotten, but the people who are not really politically aware at the time, I think, would be stunned by.
There's this guy, Alan Foley, who is the head of the what was called WINPAC, the Weapons, Intelligence, Non-Proliferation and Arms Control Center at the CIA.
And they were largely in charge of doing the CIA's analysis on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
He gathered his analysts together and told them, you know, if the president wants to go to war, our job is to find the intelligence to allow him to do so.
And like I think two or three people who were in the room at the time have written books mentioning that.
And this was this WINPAC group at CIA was sort of a team B side project at CIA, I guess, built for the purposes of outflanking them on the hawkish side of every issue in the first place.
But these were the guys who really championed the story of the aluminum tubes, which everybody knew were made by an Italian firm, our allies, for rockets that you shoot, you know, like Katyusha type rockets you shoot out of the back of a pickup truck.
That couldn't possibly have been for a centrifuge program that Iraq couldn't possibly have a Manhattan Project without the Americans knowing where it was.
Or, you know, the ability to transform the yellow cake that they already possessed under IAEA declared lock and key to hexafluoride gas to introduce into centrifuges or anything like that.
But anyway, aluminum tubes, aluminum tubes, aluminum tubes, they must be making nukes.
They said over and over again, and the Department of Energy debunked it, and the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the State Department debunked it, and the rest of the CIA didn't believe in it.
But WINPAC said so, and that was good enough.
And in fact, I'll still remember, I'm sorry, I'm going to keep talking right here.
The Washington Post debunked the aluminum tubes, had a whole thing about how they couldn't possibly be used for centrifuges.
They were not the right strength or quality of metal or anything like that.
And that was on September, I think, the 12th of 2002.
But, oh well, it was like it never happened.
It was near the top of the page on antiwar.com, so it was like a big headline to me, but it was only on page 43 or some crap of the Post, and nobody cared.
And so they just went on for months and months, all the way up into the war, saying aluminum tubes, aluminum tubes, aluminum tubes.
They're going to hit you in the head with an aluminum tube, even though it had already been debunked for months and months on end.
Yeah, there were really only two things that we had that suggested or could be used to claim that Iraq had restarted a nuclear weapons program.
And as you say, the aluminum tubes were one part, like obviously blatantly bogus.
Like everybody who understood how you make nuclear weapons in the US government realized that this was garbage.
And then, of course, the claim that Iraq had been seeking, not that it had gotten, but that it had been seeking yellowcake uranium from Niger.
And so those were the two pillars of this claim that Iraq had a nuclear weapons program.
They were both just absolute nonsense and just like embarrassingly dumb.
And here's the thing about this guy, Alan Foley, the guy running WinPAC.
He was not embarrassingly dumb.
Someone spoke to him, a guy, a former CIA analyst named Melvin Goodman, spoke to Alan Foley a couple of days before the invasion of Iraq 15 years ago and asked him, you know, so what's your prediction?
Like, what are we going to find in Iraq once we get there?
And Foley said, well, not much, if anything.
Oh, well, just doing his jab, that's all.
Just giving the president what he needs.
Talk more about the Niger uranium forgeries.
You know, we're going to skip back and forth around here because I'm just treating it sort of like a lazy Saturday afternoon conversation.
I don't care how long it lasts.
I hope you have time and ain't too thirsty.
But because we're going to have to jump back and forth about what's going on in the vice president's office and the different weapons of mass destruction lies and all different things.
And, you know, try to not be too scattershot about it.
But there's a lot of extraneous ideas to be picked up on here if we want to really cover it.
But yeah, so the Niger uranium story and those forgeries.
Talk about that, please.
Yeah, that's incredibly bizarre because, you know, the best evidence now is that somebody in Italy had tried, you know, had forged these documents that, you know, it was just obvious.
Again, if you knew anything about Niger, apparently you could figure it out just by Googling.
And the U.N. inspectors eventually did do that.
Like when they got a hold of these documents and looked at them, it took them five minutes to realize that these obviously were not real.
But somehow, you know, because the word had gone out to the CIA and all of the various intelligence agencies, you know, we want any evidence, like no matter how dumb, like no matter how obviously untrue, like this got passed up along the line until it was being used for the Bush State of the Union address in 2003.
When he was basically making the final declaration of war against Iraq.
It's just incredible.
And it's just like you can see this is how human beings work.
Like if you want something to be true, like any purported evidence, like no matter how obviously wrong or sketchy, like just something you saw on some blog somewhere, like you'll pick that up and you'll use that.
If you don't want to believe anything, like like no amount of evidence is enough.
And it's just it's really, again, it's shocking that the world is run this way.
I mean, it's shocking and it's terrifying.
And honestly, it's just it's gotten actually even worse since 2003.
Yeah.
Well, let's let's stick with 023 for now, though.
But yeah, no, it is.
It's it's well, look, it's the same old thing.
And I say this all the time, but it's useful to me that you look at how easy it is for them to say that David Koresh and Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Un and Ayatollah, they all have illegal weapons and they're bad to their own people.
And they're so caught up in their ideology or religious beliefs or whatever it is that we just can't deal with them in any kind of talking way.
We can only kill them.
And American people just keep falling for this over and over again.
And luckily, it hasn't broken out into open warfare against Iran or North Korea yet.
But, you know, the narrative is certainly the same one over and over again.
You know, on February 28th, 2003, I protested alone in front of the Texas state capitol with a sign said forget Waco.
Because to me, the lesson was obvious that, you know, you see what they're doing where they just demonize people and then kill them.
Like, how are you going to keep falling for this stuff, everybody?
It's the same damn thing.
And especially when, you know, again, I'll bring up the heroic Ron Paul here.
When he opposed the resolution in 2002 to authorize the war, he got up there and asked, he had like the 30 questions that they won't ask or answer about this and whatever.
But they were all based on truths and good questions.
And what he talked about in their part of it was, you guys do realize that Saddam Hussein doesn't even control the whole country.
You know, certainly all of Kurdistan is autonomous and under American protection.
No drive, no fly zones out of those bases in Saudi Arabia.
We're going to talk about Wolfowitz and those bases in a second.
Remind me if I forget.
And he's still under no fly zones, doesn't really have military domination.
There's lesser degrees, but still somewhat autonomy in the south, too.
Certainly compared to his real state control, which only extended to Fallujah, Ramadi, Mosul and Tikrit and Samara, maybe in Baghdad itself, but not even the whole country.
And we had air dominance over Iraq the entire time since the first Iraq war in January of 1991.
And he hadn't shot down a single one of our planes, certainly after the war.
They hadn't been able to shoot down a single one of our planes.
It was claimed that they locked their radars on.
I don't know if they ever even fired a single missile, John.
I don't think that they fired a single missile at an American plane the whole time.
And as Ron said, they have no Navy.
They have no Air Force.
They have no power at all.
How can you sit here and say this war is going to be a cakewalk?
This war is going to be easy.
Bill Clinton went on David Letterman and said, trust George Bush on this.
It's fine.
It'll only take two weeks.
It'll be great, Bill.
I mean, it'll be great, Dave.
Believe in it.
And even David Letterman said, well, I don't understand.
Because if they're going to be so easy to beat, then how can they be such a scary threat then?
And so, but think about the level of nonsense that the American people were fed and were all too happy to believe in so many cases.
About the threat that this pathetic, tiny, third world, fourth world country with a GDP of nothing somehow posed to the United States of America.
It was absolutely, I mean, especially looking back on that.
Like, hey, do you believe that your dad fell for that crap?
Yeah, he did.
All right.
You know, a lot of Americans even destroyed permanent friendships and family relationships over how dare you question our great leaders on this.
That was how bad people were caught up in this.
To just the nth degree on a story that couldn't possibly be.
What do you mean they have a Manhattan Project, but you're not sure because you can't find it, but trust you, it's there somewhere, but we don't know where?
I mean, come on, man.
Sorry, but that's the reality of what happened in 2002 and 2003.
They said, listen, we're going to lock you into war with Iraq and whatever it takes to get you to go for it.
And then they just came up with a bunch of lies and they just went like a football player, shoulder forward, full speed ahead and just ignore all opposition, pretend it didn't happen.
And elevate all choir members who cheer along.
And they did it.
It was amazing.
It'd be like if I just said I got invading your house and kill you because of the threat you posed to me.
Is that level of crazy?
And, you know, people like us have debated and discussed ever since then.
You know, were they lying or were they idiots?
And I've always believed that it's, you know, it's not an either or question.
It's more sort of a both and situation.
I think the smarter members of the Bush administration absolutely were lying or consciously lying.
The dumber members, Doug Feith, for instance, I think they actually believed a lot of the ridiculous things they were saying.
But overall, I think the right way of looking at this is not necessarily that they knew that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and just decided to use this as a justification anyway.
I think that they just didn't care.
Like it was just irrelevant to them.
This was a useful pretext.
I think that some of them thought when they were consciously lying about what the evidence was.
I think some of them thought that they were like framing a guilty man, right?
That they thought that Iraq would have something that they could use as an excuse that we would invade and we would find something that we could go and, you know, George Bush could talk about on national television about how, you know, we've located the terrifying WMD.
But it is truly one of the most like just looking back on it now, I still cannot believe that this happened.
Like you can tell.
But both you and me, Scott, are speechless just thinking about it.
I have very few archives from my radio show before the interview show.
But I do have one clip somewhere of me in 2002 talking about it.
And my remark in it is something close to, you know, we do aggressive war a lot.
America starts wars a lot.
I can't think of a time where they just announced in advance that we're going to launch an aggressive war.
And it's going to take like a year or so to build up the forces necessary to get it done and everything.
And so we're just going to lie to you between now and then.
And just it's going to happen.
There's nothing you can do to stop it in this fashion.
This was, you know, I guess in the fall of 02.
And, you know, I remember I was actually when Colin Powell gave his speech.
I was listening to it on the radio in my truck on NPR News, painting a house with my buddy.
And I was debunking virtually everything he said.
There were a couple of things in there I hadn't heard of before, like about Zarqawi.
But that all, you know, completely fell apart soon enough.
But it was easy enough to debunk most all this stuff, right?
Like by, as you said, bringing up Hussein Kamel.
I saw him interviewed on CNN in 1995.
He was talking to me about that.
I already know, you know.
And in fact, it was Cheney who invoked Hussein Kamel in the half-truth and said, oh, he admitted they lied.
But anyway.
They actually all did.
This is one of the reasons when I knew for sure that they were lying.
Oh, Powell did invoke Kamel in the UN speech?
Yeah.
Oh, then I certainly would have called him out then to my buddy.
It was me and my buddy painting a house.
And I was just debunking everything he said.
For anyone to.
Brought him up, too.
Like this is this is how cynical they were.
You know, Kamel had said 1995, we don't have any WMD left.
Like we're totally disarmed.
Then Cheney, most explicitly, but also Powell, Rumsfeld and a couple of others.
Tony Blair did, too, used Hussein Kamel.
They used him and could use him because he was dead by that point.
He'd returned to Iraq and been killed by Saddam Hussein.
They could use Hussein Kamel and claim that he'd said anything they wanted.
And what they wanted to have him say, the words they put in his mouth was, oh, yes, we definitely have a terrifying nuclear weapons program going on.
And so not only did they not tell the truth about what he said in 1995, they claimed he'd said exactly the opposite.
Yeah.
All right.
So now I don't want to forget that Scooter Libby and Dick Cheney himself, I think at one point, but certainly Scooter Libby was said to have made 14 different visits to the CIA to say, come up with more and worse about Saddam Hussein.
Yeah, I mean, it was, you know, just basically like, look, if you if you work in a big government bureaucracy, you know what that means.
And, you know, especially at that time with this crazy, crazy war fever, you know that if you produce garbage analysis that supports what the government wants to do, like you're never going to be punished for that.
On the other hand, if you support good analysis that contradicts what the government wants to do, you're like you are going to be severely punished for that.
Like you'll be punished for telling the truth.
You will never be punished for telling the right lies.
And, you know, part of this and I certainly don't mean to acquit the CIA because they absolutely told and also vouched for plenty of lies in this case.
But really, from the beginning, it seemed like Cheney didn't trust them to come up with the right lies.
And so this separate government, as Colin Powell called it, the Cheney-Neocon-Cabal in the separate departments, that they created this thing in the DoD under Douglas Feist Policy Shop called the Office of Special Plans, where their job was digging through the CIA's trash and whatever else they could find to try to frame up Iraq for WMD.
And you mentioned that earlier.
I wanted to get back to that.
WMD means Conflate Mustard Gas with Atom Bombs.
Right.
Now, if somebody could spread like an effective smallpox plague, like, OK, you could throw that in with atom bombs, I guess, if you want to conflate those two things.
But Battlefield Chemical Weapons?
I mean, nobody wants to die of sarin, don't get me wrong.
But that's not really a weapon of mass destruction like an atom bomb, which can kill everyone in a city.
So that is a huge propaganda, loaded propaganda term, as you say there.
But now I forgot what my point was.
Oh, the Office of Special Plans.
And so you had Edelman, Eric Edelman, and Abram Shulsky, and Elliott Abrams, and Michael Rubin, and Michael Ledeen, and I forget who all.
But it was Abram Shulsky basically ran it for Fyfe.
And they came up with a huge amount of propaganda.
And if people want to go check this out, if you just put in 16 articles about Iraq, you'll find it's just a series of tweets by me.
And it was saved on a page.
And it's just a great it's actually like 18 or 20 really great articles about how they lied us into war and especially focusing on the neoconservatives.
And so I guess I'll let you remark about the OSP if you want before I move on to the Counterterrorism Policy Evaluation Group.
I think you've pretty much covered it.
I mean, like they are scared that the CIA is too rational and too professional to give them the lies that they need.
And so neoconservatives have done this since the 1970s have been like, oh, well, you know, the regular intelligence apparatus of the United States has been, you know, is shamefully weak and unwilling to tell Americans the truth about the terrifying threats that we face.
So they, you know, they create these sort of alternative parallel groups to give them the answers they want.
And the Office of Special Plans was just like the latest along the line of this thing.
Now I'm trying to remember after I brought it up.
I know it was Michael Maloof.
And do you remember was it Fythe or himself or who was it that helped Maloof come up with the lies about Iraq and Al-Qaeda in the counterterrorism?
I always say it in a way that makes sense, but it was different.
It's not the counterterrorism policy evaluation group.
It's the terrorism, counterterrorism policy group or some weird thing, right?
Yeah.
You know, honestly, at this point, I cannot even remember.
You know, there was a time when I knew all the details about that, but I don't know.
I've moved on to, you know, newer and in some cases, you know, even worse lies.
You don't relive this every day, all day?
Oh, man.
No.
Okay.
Well, anyway, there was a thing and it was, I know Michael Maloof was one of them.
And, you know, one of the men from JINSA, as Jason Vest called them.
And so this is an important thing to talk about here, too, is the think tanks.
It's not just the Project for a New American Century, but this thing was really led by the American Enterprise Institute.
But then also the whole web of neoconservative foundations, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, that's JINSA.
But also the Center for Security Policy and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
And there's more that I'm forgetting.
I'm sorry.
I don't mean to fail to incriminate anyone who deserves it.
But this was a huge part of the chorus.
And then, of course, there's the New York Times, the Washington Post, and then especially the National Review and the Weekly Standard.
And then all the TV shows and the echo chamber that was created to make these lies seem true, to make this threat seem real.
So go ahead and say what you like about think tanks and TV shows and newspapers and the neoconservative movement.
And think about how effective they were, right?
In getting really like, what, 50, 60 guys in government and in publications just completely ruled the consensus in creating this war.
It's really incredible, right?
Yeah, I have to say it was good work.
It was very impressive.
Like from, you know, sort of a standing start where any rational person realized that invading Iraq would be a horrible idea.
Like they actually made it happen.
There's a good point in the documentary called Why We Fight, which is from, I think, 2005 or 2006.
Yeah, it's a great documentary.
Yeah.
Yeah.
If you are interested in the subject at all and have not seen Why We Fight, I could not recommend it highly enough.
It's fantastic.
And at one point in it, the whole movie is about Eisenhower talking about the military industrial complex.
And one of the people says, you know, what you have to understand is that it's now not just the military industrial complex.
It's the military industrial think tank complex.
And, you know, these think tanks, they're funded largely, you know, the ones that we're talking about.
They're funded by defense corporations, people who make all their money off of war.
They act as a place for, you know, government officials who are out of power.
Like, you know, when the Democrats are in power, all the Republican foreign policy people get paid to just hang around and, you know, write papers calling for war, you know, at these think tanks.
And then when, you know, whenever their party is in power, then either you're hired by the government or you're out there and you're still working at the think tank supporting, you know, your team.
And you can create this cacophony that seems as though like all of America is calling for war with a pretty small number of people.
And that's exactly what they did.
Yeah.
It's such an echo chamber.
And then, you know, I guess we throw in here how Charles Grothammer and them are all still on TV, right?
I mean, I haven't been watching TV lately, but virtually none of these guys paid a price other than, you know, Richard Perle has kind of fallen out of much attention.
Michael Ledeen was lowered in profile a little bit.
But other than that, I mean, Danielle Pletka is still Jake Tapper's guest twice a week or whatever, right?
It is incredible.
I mean, that almost no one has paid any price whatsoever.
One of my favorite examples is Jeffrey Goldberg, who then was, I think, a staff writer at The New Yorker.
And in the fall of 2002, he did like an online debate in Slate.
And this is a direct quote from Jeffrey Goldberg that I pulled up so that I could read it to you and you could remember it with me.
He said, The administration is planning today to launch what many people would undoubtedly call a short-sighted and inexcusable act of aggression.
In five years, however, I believe that the coming invasion of Iraq will be remembered as an act of profound morality.
And this was the guy who wrote endless lies about Saddam and Osama and their military alliance against America for The New Yorker.
Yeah, he wrote a ton of stuff that was turned out not really to be true.
But John McCain, I think, took one of his untrue articles and put it at the congressional record and talked about it on the floor of the Senate.
But the whole point of reading that crazy, embarrassing quote from Jeffrey Goldberg is that he is now the editor in chief of The Atlantic.
Of course.
Far from suffering any career consequences.
No, absolutely not.
I mean, he's the arbiter of who's allowed to be a journalist or are they anti-Semitic, according to him.
And he's destroyed a lot of people or certainly tried.
Good old Commissar Goldberg, definitely the guy who should be the judge of that.
If anybody is not familiar with the career of Jeffrey Goldberg and you want to understand this kind of thing, check it out.
It'll help you understand a lot of that.
In fact, there's a great thing, The Shame Project.
If you just put in shame and Jeffrey Goldberg, I think it's Mark Ames and Yasha Levine.
And I guess I appreciate it when they do character assassinations against people I don't like.
So go ahead.
So you mentioned about these think tanks and their ties with the military industrial complex.
So I want to go down that road just a little bit here because a big part of my learnings of the history of the American empire really centered a lot around first the Morgans and then later the Rockefeller families and their role in creating the American empire after World War II.
And they basically controlled foreign policy consensus through the Council on Foreign Relations.
And that was basically it.
So that was the foreign policy think tank of oil and banking and the old WASP consensus.
And the Jews and the Catholics weren't allowed, basically, just like it was a country club or something like that.
And I know a little bit about this because this is also sort of the history of the libertarian movement.
Is that the libertarian movement was really founded by Jews and Catholics who also weren't allowed to participate in real power.
Only they didn't really want power anyway.
But so they were sort of part of that same social class of intellectuals, upper middle class intellectuals, but who couldn't really break into the establishment.
But so for the neocons, they wanted in bad.
And I love the way Andrew Coburn puts this, that the neoconservatives is the cross between the Israel lobby and the military industrial complex.
Because where oil and banking already had the CFR, the military industrial complex, the new right that grew up after World War II, they didn't really have eggheads to write up policies to justify all their rent seeking, basically.
And so they hire the Israel lobby, the vanguard of the Israel lobby, this neoconservative movement, a.k.a.
Richard Perle and his friends, and bankrolled their move to create, as I partially listed, this plethora of think tanks all over the place to create this echo chamber and basically outflank the CFR.
And there are plenty of neoconservatives inside the Council on Foreign Relations now, but I'm talking about in the 70s and 80s.
And so this is sort of a huge part of where this thing comes from is Lockheed and Northrop Grumman and Raytheon and the interest that they have that coincides perfectly, not the American people's interest, but these companies' interests, coincide perfectly with the interests of the Israelis.
Let's just hawk it up and turn the Middle East upside down, why not?
And there's a killer article, John, I'm sure you've read it probably.
It's Richard Cummings, and he originally wrote it for Playboy.com, and it's called Lockheed Stock and Two Smoking Barrels.
And you can find it on my website, ScottHorton.org, and you can find it at CorpWatch.org.
I don't even think you can find it at Playboy.com anymore, but you can find it reprinted in a few places.
And he talks about every one of these Netanyahu, Ariel Sharon type, Likudnik, neoconservatives in the Cheney regime here.
They were all Lockheed guys, just as much as they were pro-Likud, they had one association or another, a paid association with Lockheed, and not just working at their think tanks, but with Lockheed itself.
And that was Pearl, and Wolfowitz, and Feith, and Wormser, and Libby, and all of them.
And I think Hadley was the exception, but Hadley was a lawyer at a firm that represented Lockheed.
And it was basically, what he says is, you know, you think this is all about what Ariel Sharon wants, which is, you know, he ain't denying that, but he's like, what it's really about is big ticket sales.
And Lockheed has decided that they don't even make products for the market at all.
They only sell to the military, and they need the military to be busy, to need their stuff.
And so Bruce Jackson, who was a Lockheed vice president, helped bankroll the Committee to Expand NATO in the 90s, and then later, the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which ran a huge propaganda campaign in 2002 and 2003, mostly not focusing on the weapons, but on Saddam's human rights abuses and so forth.
But that was a huge key to what was really going on here, and so people ought to definitely take a look at that, too.
Yeah, take a look at that.
I, for sure, remember that article, the Lockheed article, and I certainly remember Bruce Jackson.
It was actually one of the first interviews I did on anti-war radio when I started as a full-time gig in January of 2007, now that I think about it.
Well, I'm still sad about this.
Back when I first started working for First Look Media, I was going to be part of something run by Matt Taibbi called Racket.
And one of our first big projects was going to be all about Bruce Jackson and a visit that we made to him at his chateau in the south of France.
And I actually had a friend who took a selfie of herself inside Bruce Jackson's chateau, the chateau that he— And you sat there and interviewed him, and you never published it?
It's a long, sad story that I would have to probably tell you privately, but Ken Silverstein did write a great article that later came out, I think, in Vice about Bruce Jackson.
Oh, I missed that.
Yeah, look that up.
If I'm remembering correctly, it definitely was in Vice, so check that out.
Man.
All right, so that's Ken Silverstein in Vice, and then Richard Cummings, Lockheed's stock in two smoking barrels, was that other one there.
So let's talk about what you were saying before, and it's come up over and over, and it's the most important thing in the world.
And that is that in Iraq War I and a half—well, in Iraq War I and in Iraq War I and a half, all through the Bill Clinton years, America occupied Saudi Arabia in order to bomb and blockade Iraq.
And somehow those—I think too often, even among people who understand the list of reasons that bin Laden cited for attacking us, maybe fall short in realizing the connection there, that that was the deal.
We had this dual containment policy, and so we had to contain Iran and Iraq, not bounce them off of each other or make friends with both, but instead we must contain them both, and especially Iraq, from these bases in Saudi.
And there's a great quote I have in my book, which is an anonymous quote, but I'm sure it must be Wolfowitz.
I should have asked Meade if he could admit now whether that was Wolfowitz or not.
But there's another quote just like it that is Paul Wolfowitz from the Vanity Fair interview, where he says, listen, you know, the bases in Saudi was a huge part of Osama bin Laden's motivation and recruiting propaganda to get people to attack the United States.
So it's really important that we get our troops and close these bases and get our troops out of Saudi Arabia.
So that's going to be one of the great benefits of invading Iraq, is we'll be able to move our bases a few miles north into Iraq, and surely they won't mind, you know, and it'll be fine.
So that was his argument.
But anyway, with that huge truth admitted in there, and in fact, people might remember Ron Paul under fire by Danielle Pletka at an AEI-hosted Republican Party debate, said, look, it's all blowback.
They only attacked us because we had our bases in Saudi to bomb Iraq.
You can ask Paul Wolfowitz.
He's sitting right there.
Isn't that right, Paul?
Which was, man, Ron Paul at his greatest right there.
And then, I swear this is true, and you can find the YouTube of it.
Cut to Paul Wolfowitz, and he's literally sinking in his chair and biting his thumbnail like it's just a cartoon, like it's a sitcom or something, where he's like, wah, wah, wah, sinking in his chair that he's being called out for admitting that why did they attack us?
Because we started the fight, because we invaded their country, with their king's permission or not.
We were invading their country and using our bases there to bomb the next-door neighbors.
That's why they attacked us, and even Paul Wolfowitz says so, and the whole crowd goes, wah, wah.
And anyway, that's a good one.
Side point about Wolfowitz embarrassment there, but the point being, and you had this other quote that I lifted from you and put in my book, which was given anonymously to, was it Walter Russell Mead?
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, who basically sang the same thing.
In fact, oh, and it's a better quote, right?
Because the quote is, hey, look, 9-11 is the cost.
It's a senior Bush administration official says, a senior Bush administration official says, 9-11 is the cost of containing Saddam.
No bases in Saudi, no 9-11, and so here we are.
Which, hey, wow, that should have got on the front page of something.
Yeah, it is amazing.
I mean, that article has disappeared from the internet, but you can still find it at archive.org, and I don't know, if you have show notes, definitely send people there because, again, if you want to understand this kind of stuff, this is exactly what you need to read.
What was demonstrated by this senior Bush administration official is that they understood that when they were saying we were attacked on 9-11 because Al-Qaeda hates freedom, they knew that that was total nonsense and that they were just blatantly, brazenly lying to America.
They knew that Al-Qaeda had very clear stated motivations for what they were doing, and as you say, one was the US troops in Saudi Arabia, and these guys, what's so funny about this quote is that they're making exactly the argument that you and I would make.
These policies led to 9-11.
US foreign policy caused 9-11.
This was blowback from what we'd done to the rest of the world.
So they're just openly saying that, but they come to different conclusions than we would have.
I don't think you and I would have been like, well, US foreign policy caused 9-11, so we better invade Iraq.
Yeah, well, when the guy, and this guy was not tied to Saddam Hussein or Al-Qaeda, although Cheney's pet conspiracy kook, Laurie Milroy, tried to say it was a connection to both, but this guy basically took a hard left at a double left turn lane into CIA headquarters parking lot in 1993, pulled an AK out of his trunk, and shot a bunch of people at the light, killing three CIA employees, and then he got away.
He fled to Pakistan, got away, and then they caught him, and they brought him back.
And the headlines on any of the cases, if you read about it, is the US attorney's case against him, his means, motive, and opportunity.
His motive was that he was mad about American support for Israel, and he was mad about American occupation of Saudi Arabia, and bombing of Iraq, and blockading of Iraq.
And that was the prosecution's case against him.
And by the way, I didn't put this in my book because I forgot I had put it on a bumper sticker until after my book was out, but Dick Cheney himself said on September 16th in the infamous We Have to Go to the Dark Side interview with Tim Russert on Meet the Press, he says Osama bin Laden's goal, obviously, was to force us to withdraw from that part of the world.
And of course, so he's saying, well, we must be defined and not give in to that.
But first of all, wow, what an admission, right?
But then also, he's ignoring the fact that bin Laden wasn't trying to get us to leave today.
He's trying to get us to completely wreck ourselves on the rocks of the Middle East and then go, which was the strategy America had helped him employ against the Soviets in Afghanistan, well, him and others, in the 1980s.
And so they just, you know, it's always a half truth.
But still, what an admission right there out of Dick Cheney's mouth, never mind what Junior says about freedom.
This is about America picked this fight.
It's all Bill Clinton's fault.
Why is that so hard to say?
Everything's Bill Clinton's fault.
Yeah, it is incredible when you look at the history, the degree to which Bill Clinton just like set this up for George W. Bush, you know, like did everything possible for George Bush to come in and be the closer.
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All right.
So let's talk about Ariel Sharon, because James Bamford in his book, A Pretext for War, and Julian Borger in his article, The Spies Who Pushed for War, and Robert Dreyfus in his article, Agents of Influence, that he wrote for The Nation.
They all say that Ariel Sharon created his own office of special plans in the prime minister's office in Israel because, like Dick Cheney, mirror image, he didn't trust the Mossad to come up with good enough lies.
I'm sure they came up with some.
But he had his own little OSP that they created to manufacture lies in English to stovepipe directly through the neoconservatives, through Libby and to George W. Bush without having to even go through the CIA.
The same as with the OSP.
Yeah.
I mean, it is incredible.
One of my favorite things about Ariel Sharon is it's I don't know if you've ever mentioned this before, but that when they were getting ready, I think it was 2002, 2003.
Anyway, Sharon came over to visit George Bush.
And later it came out that Sharon was even he was kind of shocked when Bush told him about bin Laden, that he said that if the US captured bin Laden, I will screw him.
And Sharon told friends about that and I'd like to take it back.
He was when when George Bush told him that.
But yeah, his malaprop is remember when John McCain was like, I will follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell, which is like, wait, you mean he's your leader and commander and you're his loyal servant?
Sorry.
And tried to make it happen.
And bin Laden, you know, this was not on the weapons of mass destruction.
That was a pretext for our war.
But Israeli policy towards Palestinians is actually very honestly felt by many, many people in the Arab world, including bin Laden.
And as the commission report says, you know, that they wanted to change the date of the terrorist attacks on the United States because they were so upset about what was going on.
Yeah.
And yeah, and that is an important point.
And I talk about that in the book.
Not that this is an ad for my book, but there's a lot to it about all the different times.
I mean, especially, I guess it's worth mentioning that it's a little off subject of Iraq, but not really.
It's how they got into this mess was in 1996 when Israel, I forget if it was Rabin or Rabin, it was Shimon Peres, I guess, launched Operation Grapes of Wrath in southern Lebanon.
And this included the Kwana massacre, the Kana massacre.
Actually, it's now called the first Kana massacre because there was another 10 years later in 2006.
But anyway, it was a bunch of women and children, 108, I think, women and children killed or 110 women and children killed in a UN shelter by the Israelis.
And so what had happened was just a couple of days before that, even just at the launch of that war, Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker, had filled out his last will and testament, which was basically the equivalent of him going down to the army recruiter's office and dedicating his life to the fight against the enemy.
And then when he and his buddy Ramzi bin al-Shib heard Osama bin Laden or read the message of Osama bin Laden's first declaration of war against the United States in 1996, where bin Laden went on and on about Operation Grapes of Wrath and particularly the Kana massacre, that was when they agreed, according to Terry McDermott in his biography of the Hamburg cell of 9-11 hijackers.
It's called Perfect Soldiers, that they agreed that that's it.
We're joining up al-Qaeda with this bin Laden guy and figure out what we can do to join up the war because they, like bin Laden, blamed America for what Israel was doing in Lebanon, which is something that maybe most Americans can't understand.
But they sure as hell did.
And they blamed us because they're basically collectivists, right?
And just like Israel with the collective guilt.
We pay taxes, so it's our damn fault.
That was their point of view.
And on Shades of Grey, it's true.
Yeah, again, I mean, it's hard for Americans to understand this because nobody ever connects these very obvious dots.
But as you say, this, this really horrifying massacre in 1996 in Lebanon was absolutely like a very powerful motivation for bin Laden himself.
And for Mohammed Atta and other people in al-Qaeda.
And we are going to forever be the target of these kinds of attacks when we support these kinds of atrocities in the rest of the world.
All right.
Now, there's so many more things we got to get to.
We're already at an hour and a half, but I like talking to you and we got to definitely talk about Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
So why don't you?
You know, this is such a distressing part of the story.
Actually, I'm going to let you take this because, you know, I remember this to some degree, but probably not as well as you do.
All right.
Well, hell, I just read a thing the other day at Task and Purpose, this new military site.
They have a good, sharp, cynical edge there.
And they ran an article that was about, well, I was there for the very beginning of the Iraq War special operations forces near Kurdistan or in Kurdistan, preparing the battlefield before the war and at the early part of the war.
And it's just one more.
This is just a couple of weeks ago.
It's just one more retelling of the story of how all of our guys in the CIA and the military knew the highest levels and they cared that this guy, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, from whichever al-Tawheed, this and that, was in Kurdistan and he was a major danger.
This was part of Colin Powell's speech.
This was one of the lies that came from Ahmed Chalabi in them was that Saddam had given Zarqawi surgery and a peg leg after he'd been wounded in the Afghan war where he was a member of al-Qaeda there.
So this was the connection.
And I think Powell didn't go that far, but that was one of the stories that certainly went out to the media over and over again.
But the story that Powell told basically lied by omission and pretended that Zarqawi's presence in American protected autonomous Kurdistan amounted to, he's in Iraq.
Like you just said, was there a mustard gas shell on the ground?
Yeah, but is that all you need to know?
No.
So was, in fact, was Zarqawi making chemical weapons himself in American protected anonymous Iraqi Kurdistan?
Yes.
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, the funny part about this is that if you were going to go by this rationale, what we really should have done was attack the Kurds in northern Iraq.
Yeah, or maybe just him.
They had no control over him either, but Saddam Hussein had even less.
Yeah, exactly.
And so and now the history of this guy is that he had told bin Laden, no, I don't want to join your movement, which has been on attacking the U.S. because he wanted to focus on more parochial concerns, killing the king of Jordan and which, you know, is an attack against the United States as well.
But anyway, so Colin Powell told the American people and the people of the world that this guy who said, you know, nice to meet you, bin Laden, but no, I will not join your group and who was wanted by Saddam Hussein as a threat, a terrorist threat against his regime and was known to be an American protected autonomous Iraqi Kurdistan somehow served as the link between Saddam and Osama bin Laden and their movement.
And so that was in the U.N. speech and it was a major talking point, I'm pretty sure in the media before and after as well.
And then the reality was, as I was saying in that task and purpose article, the military and the CIA, you know, they're not politicians.
They're a little bit worried.
Some of them are, but they're a little bit worried about the reality of this guy.
And so what they want to do, and apparently he was trying to make, you know, scale amounts of ricin or something, supposedly, and they wanted to attack him and kill him.
And they asked George Bush about it repeatedly.
They asked him for permission.
And, you know, part of the story about this, to me, is just how many great articles there are about this.
And Jim Michalczewski at NBC News did a great story about it.
And I don't remember the rest, but there must be, I don't know, I must have read at least a half dozen solid retellings of this story from independent and different journalists with, you know, slightly different sets of facts in them and so forth.
About how the military really, really, really wanted to kill this guy before the war and Bush wouldn't let him because they needed their talking point.
And then once the war started, of course, he became a nightmare.
Now, he was a godsend to them in a way, even after the war, because whenever there was Iraqi resistance, they blamed it all on Zarqawi.
That way they could say, this isn't, you know, Iraqi patriots defending their homeland against a foreign invader, and this isn't even the Sunni minority defending themselves against the now American-backed Shiite majority fighting against them.
No, this is just terrorists.
Terrorists, terrorists, terrorists.
They're the only ones who would stop the Iraqi people from achieving their dreams, an American-installed democratic state here that we're working on.
And so they blamed all insurgencies in all of Iraqi Sunnistan in Iraq War II on Zarqawi, really beginning at least in late 2003, I guess.
And importantly, he was the founder of al-Qaeda in Iraq, John, right?
Except he didn't declare his loyalty to bin Laden until the end of 2004, a year and a half into the war.
And then he declared, okay, fine, I'm loyal to your goals.
And then he wasn't really, because he focused on not attacking the American occupiers and uniting the Iraqi Arabs against the Americans, but instead on picking a fight with the Shiites, and one that he helped the Sunni minority lose and lose badly, which was against what Zawahiri and bin Laden apparently wanted him to do.
So there's your big fake connection between Saddam and Osama.
It was this guy who was tied to neither, and so could hardly be tied to both.
And then when they let him live, he actually ended up becoming the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, which I'm sorry, because I did say they certainly embellished his role.
But at the same time, we shouldn't underplay it, because he actually did play a very large role in fomenting civil war and killing a hell of a lot of Shiite civilians, and including American soldiers, too.
Not that they led the Sunni insurgency in Iraq War II, but they were a very deadly part of it, al-Qaeda in Iraq.
And then this is the group that, even though the Sunni tribal leaders ended up eliminating their power almost entirely in 2006 and 7 and 8 and kept them down, after Barack Obama took their side in Syria.
Of course, there are many Syrian members of al-Qaeda in Iraq.
Well, they all went home and, backed by the Iraqi faction, started the war in Syria.
Jabhat al-Nusra, they called themselves.
And America and all of its allies, Israel, Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia, all took their side and helped them fight this war.
And that's what ended up leading to a split, then, between al-Nusra and ISIS, where ISIS is just the Iraqi-dominated faction of al-Qaeda in Iraq, whereas Nusra is the Syrian-dominated faction of al-Qaeda in Iraq.
And at that point, the Islamic State of Iraq, ISI, al-Qaeda in Iraq, split from al-Qaeda and tried to declare their own caliphate, which lasted three years, and got hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people killed in Iraq War III, that had to clean up that mess that they created.
Sorry for running on ahead like that, but the point being that when people say al-Nusra, and when people say al-Qaeda in Iraq, and people say the Islamic State, that's Zarqawi's group.
That's the group that never had to be at all.
That's the group that, this guy was nothing but a two-bit rapist, nobody, piece of garbage with, you know, 50 followers, and no territory and no power at all.
And the Americans turned him into a real monster.
And the consequences are still going on.
I mean, it's almost, it sounds crazy to, like I'm oversimplifying it too much, but yeah, no, that's what happened.
And, you know, I'm sure to you, and I know on my show, the whole policy in Syria was just as bad as when they lied us into war with Iraq, in terms of being the slowest motion train wreck of disaster of, I can't believe you're doing this, and doing it anyway, that you could imagine.
And Patrick Cockburn, the best in the world, was on this show for years, literally for three years straight, saying the American-backed insurgency in Syria is re-energizing the Sunni-based insurgency in Iraq.
And it's a real problem, because the Iraqi Shiite government doesn't really have that much control in the predominantly Sunni areas in the West and the Northwest.
And so, you know, they call themselves the Islamic State of Iraq for a reason.
Beginning in 2006, they said exactly what it was they wanted.
And it was Barack Obama who gave it to them, even more than George W. Bush.
Because like I said, Bush, you know, he gave them Western Iraq to be their, you know, battlefield training ground for eight years or whatever.
But then the local tribal Sunnis eliminated their power and really stomped them down to a great degree.
It was only the war in Syria that saved their bacon from the fire, or whatever mixed metaphor of terror.
So how do you like that for my answer about Zarqawi?
Yeah, I mean, the cynicism of the Bush administration, I think they got proposals from the Pentagon multiple times in 2002 to destroy his training camp in Northern Iraq.
And Bush decided, like, no, we want to have this guy who, as we know now, truly was extremely dangerous and much less like a political or even a terrorist leader than just like a serial killer.
But the Bush administration decides, like, no, we want him as a talking point to get our war.
So we're just going to leave him be.
It really is incredible.
And as I say, this is one of the most cynical stories in all of US history.
But this part in particular is especially shocking.
Yeah.
Well, listen, I just talked with Kiriakou about this, and I don't want to spend too much time on it.
But it's worth pointing out that Zubaydah and al-Libi both were tortured by the CIA into implicating Saddam Hussein as well, falsely.
And you can read about al-Libi all over the place in his role in that.
And you can read about Zubaydah's role in implicating Iraq under torture in tortured reasoning by David Rose in Vanity Fair.
And these were the other two major sets of talking points about Iraq and al-Qaeda on top of whatever they were coming up with at the Pentagon.
And that was a huge part of it.
And you know what?
I had totally forgotten this if I ever knew it, or I don't know what, John, but this is so huge to me, man, that I finally, what, two or three years ago or something, I saw the clip of Donald Rumsfeld saying, well, you know, there are different kinds of knowns.
There's known knowns, and then there's unknown knowns, and then there's unknown unknowns, and there's known unknowns, and we don't know which kind of known is known at this point.
And this, and you know what the question was?
The question was, what's the evidence that Saddam Hussein is allied with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda?
Oh, wow, I'd forgotten that completely.
That the atmosphere in politics and just in regular, not even political, but just regular life in America at that point was so based on shaming the hell out of anyone who would dare breathe a word of opposition to this.
And like I mentioned earlier, where families were torn apart by this.
Best friends for life were torn apart by whose side are you on in this war?
And really, it wasn't until, I guess I'm skipping ahead, but it wasn't until Katrina drowned New Orleans in 2005, and Bush and the federal government basically sat and did nothing for like six days.
And you finally had Anderson Cooper started crying on TV, and now finally the spell is broken that now maybe these guys aren't the world's greatest managers in the whole world's all history, as we had insisted that you believe and assent to, even though it was based on what?
That the worst attack on America had happened on their watch.
And that was why we had to believe in them so badly.
And that was why, how dare you, you traitor to America, if you don't want to do this war, if you know better than this.
And, you know, I mean, people's lives were destroyed by this just by, you know, the pressure and the fighting about whose side are you on.
And I don't think it's overstatement to at least, or it's not really a statement, but, you know, to look at the, you know, in a dialectical kind of a way, the way that the left and right divide, which already existed for whatever reasons before, of course, but I mean, culturally speaking in America, got so much sharper.
In fighting over Iraq, and then, of course, as part of that, fighting over torture, and you're either for it or you're against it.
And the Bush administration insisting that all good patriots support our enhanced interrogation, and then people go, oh, okay, my marching orders are to line up behind this.
It's not torture, but I support torture.
Okay, let's do it, and all of that.
And it, you know, and then, not that we'd have been better with Hillary or anything, but Obama was sort of the backlash from Bush that, like, even after eight years, sort of the American people in the swing vote center said, like, hey, we need to do something to make up for that, to tell the world we're sorry, and we wish we hadn't done that.
And Bush really was an idiot after all, and maybe we shouldn't have attacked Iraq, and that kind of thing.
And then, but of course, then that came with all its own consequences, and you see, I don't want to put too much of it on a singular cause, but you can see how much this made the divides in America worse, culturally speaking, of people just hating each other.
I mean, think of all the people.
Imagine, John, for a minute, that you believe that Saddam did 9-11, because everybody knows that, because you're an American right-winger, and everybody knows that.
And now, half of America, the entire left half of America, the wimps, the traitors, the art fags, whatever it is, it's their problem, they don't want to defend America against the tyrant Saddam Hussein, who killed all those people in New York?
Like, how much would you hate your countrymen if they really were that bad of traitors?
I mean, I argue that we could have negotiated over Osama bin Laden, but I never heard anybody argue that nobody should have ever done anything about September 11th, you know what I mean?
If you really attack America, you're going to have to pay one way or the other, right?
But they had hundreds of millions of people convinced that the other half of us were traitors to our country, because we would oppose retaliation for someone slaughtering thousands of our people.
And then, of course, everybody on our side of the argument was going, no, you idiots, and trying to explain, but that didn't work.
I just hate George Bush.
I think he did so much to, you know, when all he had to say after September 11th was, hey, be cool, everybody.
We have 400 enemies in the world.
This was a big attack, but there is no empire behind it.
It's just a small group of terrorists, and we're going to kill them, and we'll be home by Christmas, and we're going to be cool, and we're going to bring our troops home, and we're going to prove to the world why we're not the kinds of people that you should ever want to attack, because we're awesome.
And that's all he had to do.
And instead, all of this, and all the – I mean, I guess what I was just ranting about is, in a way, the least of our problems compared to the actual dead and the wars and all of that.
But you know what I mean?
It just seems like – this is no Al Gore commercial, but it didn't have to be like this.
Yeah.
I mean, of course, the biggest consequences were for Iraq and the Middle East that we just totally shredded.
But you're absolutely right that American politics and American culture has gotten so much uglier, and I agree.
It grows out of this, and it grows out of the crazy stories that a lot of people get told.
Like, how could you oppose invading Iraq, even what Saddam Hussein did on 9-11?
Like, what kind of lunatics are you?
And you may remember in the article we were talking about earlier by Walter Russell Mead, it's clear from that that this was a strategy on the part of the Bush administration.
They were never going to say Saddam Hussein did 9-11, but they very consciously implied that he was connected to it.
Cheney did.
Yeah, and they never – Cheney did.
The rest did, but Cheney did.
Cheney did claim that I'm not.
Yeah, the Prague connection, yeah.
Yeah.
So that is right.
They did sometimes make these totally bogus claims about a direct connection.
But they allow – they implied it, and they certainly never denied it and tried to say, like, oh, well, believe me, if you think that, that's totally wrong.
And they knew what they were doing, as that article describes.
Like, just their perspective was like, oh, well, if Americans believe this so much, the better.
That's right.
In fact, Sam Gardner, remember him?
He was a former colonel who did some whistleblowing and some criticism back when.
And he pointed out, he goes, it's the excluded middle policy, and here's what you do.
And he quoted George Bush.
It was an interview that he did with Kevin Zeese.
And he says, here's what you do.
And here's what George Bush did over and over again.
This is one thing he was actually good at.
He would go – people would outright ask him, or he would just sort of repeat the question rhetorically and say, people ask me, why do we have to attack Iraq?
Well, we have to attack Iraq because of September 11th.
That's right.
Because that day we learned the lesson that you have to start all the wars from now on instead of ever letting anyone attack you, which, of course, is just presuming that Iraq is going to attack us.
It's just a bunch of nonsense.
But anyway, in the meantime, in that dead silence, and especially because George Bush was so handicapped, rhetorically speaking, anyway, right, that you help him.
You go, I think what he's trying to say is because Iraq did September 11th, because of September 11th, because they did September 11th.
This is obviously what he means.
And you can think about that for like seven seconds before he finishes and says, because we learned the lesson that day, blah, blah, blah.
And even if you catch on, still it had the emotional effect on you in a way.
He got away with giving you the impression for a minute that Saddam did that and made you hate him that much for at least a second.
And when you figure – even if you figure out what he was doing to you at the second half of the sentence in a minute, he still got you.
You know what I mean?
And then they did that over and over again.
Well, because of September 11th, two Mississippi, three Mississippi.
And you're supposed to just sit there and figure out what he means by that, you know?
Bastards.
All right, wait.
We're still not done because there's something I'm forgetting.
But there's also James Risen in the New York Times about six months into the war.
He wrote up an article about Richard Perle and his meeting with a representative of Saddam Hussein in London.
You want to tell us about that one?
You know, I'm ashamed to say that that's another thing that has slipped my mind.
Even though I work at the same place as James Risen now, which is very exciting for me.
We should interview him about this and get the full story.
How about that?
Now, is this the attempt to have a last minute deal?
Oh man, it was a complete surrender.
I'll never forget reading this.
Tell me all about it.
So I remember still, like I was on the road and I stopped at the gas station and saw the cover of the New York Times and started cursing so loud that, look at this.
And it's not just anyone.
It was Richard Perle himself who went to England and he met with a representative of Saddam's government and they completely surrendered.
And they said, listen, you know, indicating the same kind of confusion as a lot of other people had about what's even going on here anyway.
He said, listen, if this is about oil, we'll sign over all kinds of mineral concessions to your companies and all that.
We don't want to fight with you about that.
We'll totally work that out with you guys.
And if this is about Israel, man, forget Hamas and Hezbollah.
I don't know if they ever backed Hezbollah.
Forget Hamas.
We won't support them anymore.
We won't give them any more money, we swear to God, and we'll totally make friends with Israel if that's what you want.
If this is about weapons of mass destruction, which I don't think it is, he must have said.
He said, you can send in the army, the CIA, and the FBI, and the UN inspectors to look and do whatever you want.
And I remember that specifically, that it included cops and soldiers to come in and look.
Didn't they say you can send 2,000 FBI agents?
I don't remember the number, but I remember that certainly civilian cops was part of it.
You know, your best detectives or whatever, you know.
And then he said, if this is about democracy, did somebody say something about democracy?
I'll tell you what, we'll hold elections.
Just give us a minute to organize some things and make sure we don't just put the Dawa Party and the Baata Brigade in power here, if you know what I mean.
And Richard Perl told him, you tell Saddam, we'll see you in Baghdad.
Complete surrender.
Now I do remember this.
And just another incredible part of this story that just goes to show in all of these situations, the goal of the United States is to have a war.
And we will do anything possible to prevent peace.
Yeah.
And, you know, I just saw a thing on Twitter.
I forget now if it was this morning or yesterday.
I think it was last night.
I saw a thing.
You may be familiar with this lady and help me out with her name, maybe.
She's a former CIA lady now on Twitter named Nada Bacos.
Is that right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I know her for sure.
And she's certainly no like, you know, Ray McGovern or anything like that.
She's a pretty hawkish type from what I understand.
But she had a little tweet storm, you know, thread thing yesterday where she talked about how at CIA we never could confirm any of this Iraq al Qaeda stuff.
And we told them that that this stuff isn't true and you shouldn't use this as a reason because it's just not good enough.
And Michael Shoyer, the former chief of the CIA's bin Laden unit, who himself wrote a book called Through Our Enemies' Eyes that did implicate Iraq.
He said that after September 11th and then again before the war a year and a half later, they reviewed all of their material and that he had just been wrong and that actually none of that stuff held up.
And there was no operational material relationship of any kind between Iraq and al Qaeda other than Saddam was terrified of them and wanted his agencies to protect him from them.
And that was it.
And that they told as Shoyer, I believe, told me personally on the show that, well, I sure told George Tenet.
I don't know if Tenet told George Bush or not, but certainly that was the CIA report.
And I believe it is reported that they got all that intelligence.
And then there was also Habush and Sabri who were two high level CIA spy sources inside the Hussein government, both of whom swore up and down forever that there's nothing here.
And they knew.
And that all of that and that part, it was well reported, was briefed at the very highest levels to Bush and Cheney and the rest of them before the war.
So there is no room for honest error here.
Not really.
I mean, you can say that they led a parade that a lot of suckers bought into.
I would never deny that.
But in terms of the men who were really behind pushing this war, George Bush himself and Dick Cheney second.
You know, I pick on Dick Cheney and he deserves it.
But no, George Bush was the decider.
And that is absolutely the fact that this is on him.
And by the way, and this will be the Gareth Porter interview, but it's, you know, hey, why not mention that the eight year war changed the Middle East forever.
It gave Baghdad to the Shiites as a super duper majority city now and a government of Iraqi Shiistan forever more now that Al-Qaeda and their whatever Sunni or allied forces could never take back from them.
It took the army and the Marine Corps years to help the Shiite militias get that done.
And now there's no going back for that.
But that's going to be a source.
Not that I say I personally care about either way who's who or where.
But our government made it this way.
And as a consequence, there's going to be sectarian civil war in the region for the rest of our lifetimes because of that war, because of what they did here.
And of course, as we didn't really cover very well, but I just implied, the Da'at Party and the Supreme Islamic Council, these were the Iranian backed factions.
And it wasn't the Americans who won all the influence in Iraq.
It was Iran who put their parties in power there.
And so the whole thing from the point of view of David Wormser and Richard Perle and Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz and all the guys who got us into the war in the first place, it accomplished exactly the opposite of what they wanted.
We were talking about that on Twitter this morning.
Someone says, how could people keep calling Iraq a mistake when it was a premeditated murder plot?
You know, and my kind of tongue in cheek answer, of course, is that, well, because it didn't work out like they wanted.
It was supposed to benefit everybody but Iran.
And instead, it benefited Iran and Al-Qaeda only, you know, at the expense of Israel and America.
A premeditated murder plot that went awry.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, you could have a ham-handed bank robbery.
That doesn't make it a mistake.
Makes it a bad error of judgment, but still, obviously, also a deliberate plan to do the wrong thing.
Those aren't exclusive concepts.
And I'm sure you get that a lot, too.
We talk about how stupid these people are.
Where, look, the whole point of picking the fight in Syria was to limit Iran's power with their friend Assad in Syria.
And what did they do?
They just gave Iran a reason to go to Syria to help the Syrian army and Hezbollah fend off American-backed terrorists against them.
Bin Ladenite terrorists.
Literally sworn to Ayman al-Zawahiri, the butcher of New York City.
And all that did was empower Iran and Hezbollah, too.
Gave Hezbollah a whole new generation of battle-hardened fighters.
Whose interest does that serve, other than the people that they were trying to hurt?
Yeah.
So, yes, stupid and criminal.
Yeah.
Now, there's one other thing that I want to mention.
Okay.
I mean, there's so much in this story, we could talk for 20 more hours.
But one thing in particular that I think is also worth remembering right now is that the CIA actually constructed an operation that made a lot of sense.
And they pulled it off.
And it was exactly the kind of thing that you would want smart people at the CIA to be doing.
Which is that they found Iraqis in the United States who were related to the top Iraqi weapons of mass destruction scientists.
And they came to them and asked them, can you take on like a truly dangerous mission and go visit your family members in Iraq?
And ask them what is actually going on right now, you know, with Saddam's WMD programs.
And, you know, I don't think that I would have been willing to do that if I were an Iraqi American.
I mean, you are risking your own life, you're risking your family members' lives.
But a lot of people did do that.
And they went to Iraq and they talked to their family members.
And their family members were like, what are you guys talking about?
Like, I'm unemployed.
Like, not only do we have no weapons of mass destruction programs, like, I don't have a job.
And they came back to the United States and reported that to the CIA.
And, you know, that went into the Raiders of the Lost Ark files.
So just time after time after time after time, the Bush administration refused to take yes for an answer because they wanted to have this war.
And as you say, the Middle East and the United States and Europe, like all of us, will be paying the price for this war.
Obviously, Iraqis the most, other people in the Mideast second most.
But just everybody.
It was just a catastrophe and one that we will be experiencing as long as we are alive.
Yeah.
Listen, one more thing, too, I want to bring up.
Sorry, but hey, why not?
As long as we're here.
There's a claim that you hear all the time.
And, you know, I really like William Arkin.
We had a big fight on the show yesterday about Russia, Russia, Russia, garbage.
But he's a good journalist.
He's done a lot of great work in the past.
And one of the things he said, because I was bringing up the metaphor, the analogy or whatever of how they all the consensus about the danger of Iraq that I don't think was true.
And I see this in the same kind of light.
And so one of the things he said in his argument, it's just a side point.
So I didn't fight about it with him then.
But I'm bringing it up now because it's something that you do hear a lot on this subject.
And that is that, well, Saddam wanted everybody to think that he did have weapons of mass destruction.
In fact, Arkin's take on that was that he had told all the kings of the region, the Saudi king and King Jordan, the King Hussein of Jordan and this and that.
And maybe Hosni Mubarak, I think he said, too, and wanted them to all believe he had these weapons.
And they told the Americans that, which I don't know the truth of that.
The sovereigns themselves all claiming that.
I'm not sure what his source was for that.
But he said that.
But people say all the time that at least he wanted Iran to think he was making nukes or had these weapons still in order to deter them, which is also I don't believe for a minute.
Because, I mean, I guess he could have believed they were an offensive threat, but no real reason to think that they were.
But what these people never address, John, is that Saddam Hussein, never mind 1995, in 2002 gave a 12,000 page dossier to the United Nations saying, We swear to effing God, we don't have any weapons.
Here's all of our records.
Am I wrong about that?
No, I mean, you're not wrong.
I find the case that Saddam was somehow bluffing to be incredibly unconvincing.
And I'd be really curious to know what William Harkin was talking about, because he is a good reporter.
And that would be certainly interesting if Saddam Hussein sent secret messages to Hosni Mubarak saying, Oh, my God, you can't believe the WC that I have.
I didn't follow him down that rabbit trail because it was my analogy.
So he's having to address my analogy before he moves on to my real point.
So it was like I would have been being pedantic at that point to interrupt.
You know what I mean?
I just let it go.
But yeah, I mean, but again, like that, that makes no sense because Iraq's goal was to get out from under the sanctions.
That was like the driving goal of the Iraqi government.
And they could only do that by proving that they had disarmed.
So simultaneously passing messages along to America's allies, telling them about like, you know, we're two weeks away from our nuclear weapon.
Like that seems crazy to me, but maybe there's something to it.
But I would really like to see what the evidence is.
Yeah.
All right.
Since we're at like 158 here, John, let me end with something funny.
Remember right after the fall of the statue and the actual regime change, the fleeing of Saddam and the end of his government and the taking of Baghdad, that George Bush asked the Congress to appropriate $87 billion for the coming occupation and reconstruction of Iraq.
And Americans were outraged.
$87 billion.
That sounds really steep for this quick, easy cakewalk that you promised this would be, that would pay for itself.
What?
And I just, I like how that was $870 billion ago.
Actually, probably about 800 times that by now.
Yeah.
I mean, I think the current estimate of how much we will end up spending on Iraq and Afghanistan by the time this through, it's like $6 trillion, something like that.
Yeah, that's what the cost of war project says.
$5.6 trillion already, they say.
So that's, Bush was asking for a little more than 1% of that.
And remember how people were like, what?
I remember listening to the AM talk radio where they were like, hey, I feel like maybe there's a bait and switch going on around here.
$87 billion.
$87 billion, a measly $87 billion.
You can hardly kill any Iraqis with that.
All right.
And then, so listen, we really skipped over this and you mentioned it a little bit, but yeah, right around a million people died in this thing.
And we talked a little bit about the consequences, but it wasn't just that they lied us into it.
The consequences for the people of Iraq were just absolutely horrendous.
I'll let you have the last word about that.
Yeah, I would, I mean, there's nothing we could ever do to make amends to the people of Iraq.
As you say, maybe a million people, nobody knows because we don't care enough to really count.
But that country was kind of obliterated as a functioning entity, and who knows whether it will ever recover.
It has led, I mean, I think unquestionably there would not be the civil war in Syria without the invasion of Iraq.
At least it would be something, it would look very, very, very different and be much less brutal.
It's horrendous.
And I would encourage everybody, it's impossible for us ever to make amends, but you should try to find some ways of doing it just yourself on a small scale.
I would encourage people to read, there's an article by Ryan Devereaux in The Intercept that was published yesterday, I think, that was about just the suffering of one Iraqi family.
And you see in microcosm what happened to Iraq, and you just need to multiply that by about 10 million times to understand what happened.
Yeah, it's funny, you know, one that always really had a big impact on me was, I hate that, an effect on me, something I really remember well, was a great report that Jeremy Scahill did, I think in December of 2002, before the war, trying to stop it.
And it was about his time in Iraq in the south, and a part of it, it's a great article, this is where he says that Bill Clinton bombed Iraq on average of every third day for eight years.
And part of it is he profiles this lady whose son was killed in one of these bombings, and her grief, and she's on her knees on the ground screaming and crying and whatever to this day, she can't take it.
And it's just a small part of the piece, but he's like, yeah, you know, you think of Iraq War I and a half as nothing compared to Iraq War II, right?
That's like the Oklahoma bombing before 9-11, who cares about that?
But yeah, no, in fact, if you were this lady, this would have been absolutely the most unimaginable grief.
I mean, you think about any kid you know dying, how horrible that is.
How about if the Americans explode him to death with a 500-pound bomb, huh?
How are you going to take that, if it's somebody that you know and care about?
Isn't it funny to see side stories that kind of illuminate the whole huge thing, where you've got to zoom in for a minute and look at the actual bloodshed, the amount of grief that you couldn't possibly imagine your family going through that level of grief, you know?
Yeah, I mean, there's no way for Americans to really understand this.
Like, I can't imagine it.
I can't imagine living in a country that had been brutalized to the degree that we brutalized Iraq, you know, with an assist from other people, including Saddam Hussein.
But it's one of the ugliest stories in American history, and we have a lot of ugly stories.
And you know, that's the thing, too, is we're sitting here calling this the 15th anniversary of Iraq War II, but it's the 27th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War in general.
It's never stopped.
We've been bombing them for 27 years.
Yeah.
There's something that Christopher Hitchens said before he lost his mind during the first Gulf War.
He was on TV, and someone asked him, you know, how long do you think this war is going to last?
And you know, this was when everybody was like, well, you know, is it going to last two weeks or is it going to last two months?
This is the first Gulf War.
And Hitchens said, I think it's going to last about 100 years.
And I've always thought that was a good call.
We'll be lucky if we get out of it in 100 years.
Yeah, exactly.
All right.
Well, listen, man, I don't want this to be so long that nobody listens to it.
So we better end it here.
But I really can't tell you how much I appreciate your time this afternoon, John.
Well, I really appreciate discussing this with you.
I mean, if the people who run America get their way, all of this would be forgotten.
It's already beginning to slip from everyone's memories, including, as you can tell, mine.
So thank you for spending so much of your time on it.
It really is important.
It really does matter.
All right.
Good deal.
Thanks again, man.
Great talking to you.
All right, you guys, that's Jonathan Schwartz.
He is now at The Intercept.
But you can also find his blog, A Tiny Revolution.
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Schwartz.
No T. Schwartz.
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