Alright, y'all welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio, I'm Scott.
Our first guest on the show today is Michael O'Brien, he's just written his first piece for Anti-War.com, I hope there's more coming.
His bio reads like this, Michael O'Brien is the author of America's Failure in Iraq, and in fact I believe you can go to Americasfailureinirak.com to find out all about that, and I'm going to ask all about that here in a second, but here's more about Michael O'Brien.
He was a Department of Defense contractor in Iraq from 2006 to 2007.
He was on the National Headquarters staff of the Bush-Cheney 2000 campaign in my hometown of Austin, and served in the administration of George W. Bush at the State Department and the Office of Homeland Security.
Michael O'Brien is a graduate of West Point, and was an infantry officer, an army ranger, and a paratrooper.
He lives in Arlington, Virginia.
Welcome to the show, how are you doing?
I'm doing fine, Scott.
Well that's quite an interesting bio for someone who writes for Anti-War.com, or at least has written one now.
Something happen that changed your perspective about things or something?
Well, to say the least, Scott, I was never a big fan of the war, of the invasion in the first place.
I supported George Bush because I worked for him, he was our president, but I'd read a lot about it, about Bremer, Paul Bremer disbanding the Iraqi Ministry of Defense and Ministry of Interior and all of that, but when I went over there and I worked as an advisor to the Iraqi Ministry of Defense, essentially I was part of about a 2,000-person team that was there to reverse what Paul Bremer did.
We were there to get the Iraqi Ministries of Defense and Interior back up on their feet from nothing, from scratch.
And I worked with Iraqis every day at the Ministry of Defense, and they would say to me, Mr. Mike, we understand Mr. Bush wants to fight the war on terror, but why did he pick Iraq to do it?
And that's the God's truth, they would say that to me, and I just had no answer.
And then the more, the longer I was there, I was there 14 months, the longer I was there, I was like, you know, I just kept asking myself these questions, why did we invade in the first place?
You know, we didn't find any weapons of mass destruction, although we certainly tried.
We did get rid of Saddam Hussein, a bad actor, no argument there that he was a, you know, he needed to go, but the thing about it is, is that the life of the average Iraqi before we invaded, based on what they told me, you know, it was okay.
I mean, you know, if they stayed out of trouble and didn't get in trouble with Saddam or any of his lieutenants, they lived a very normal life.
And you know, so with the Gulf, the way the Gulf War ended in 91, the sanctions in between, and then the invasion of 03, I just, and we never hear about all the Iraqis that died.
We just, we never hear about them.
We just, we hear about the American soldiers that died, but we never hear about the Iraqis that died or, or the civilian contractors of which I was one.
And you know, we don't, we don't hear about.
That part was the dirty little secret kind of, right?
I mean, if you wanted to read Scahill, you could read Scahill, but otherwise basically they didn't want to, you know, that word mercenary is a dirty word left over from when the paid Germans came to fight on the side of the British in our revolutionary war.
You know, we don't like that around here.
And so privatizing out so many of the soldier's duties was the kind of thing that never really got much play because the, as much as George Bush wanted to run the war that way and his team wanted to run the war that way, they certainly didn't want to discuss that very much in public.
I don't think.
Absolutely not.
And you know, really there were two types of contractors over there.
There were security contractors who are absolutely mercenaries.
You know, the old expression, if it walks like a duck and quacks, quacks like a duck, it's a duck.
And these guys are mercenaries.
Now I was not a security contractor, you know, but, but, but Blackwater and triple canopy and these guys, they, they definitely absolutely are because if somebody, if a civilian does the job that a soldier should do and normally would do, they're a mercenary.
And the thing about it is, and I discussed it in my book is that, that beast called the military industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower talked about in 1961, well, we're here, you know, it's alive and well.
And I discuss in my, in my book, you know, we don't declare war anymore because it would be too difficult for the president, any president to pull off.
So we go over and it's not officially a war.
And now, now we're going over with more and more contractors, you know, and him and all over sending say 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, but nobody bats an eye.
Nobody even knows we've sent over a hundred thousand contractors and it's, it's making fighting our wars, you know, quote unquote, a lot easier to get the country involved in our reasons for going don't have to be as clearly cut and defined.
And we can go over there and, and, and because we're augmenting the military with so many contractors, we don't have enough men, men in uniform to do the job.
Right.
Well, and we know now from reading McClatchy newspapers on a regular basis, Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay and the guys over there have documented the creation of Hillary Clinton's new private army to protect the giant embassy there in Baghdad.
And this is a great way to say that we're getting the troops out while, you know, really just disguising them in their mission.
But I want to get back to you because so, I mean, you're describing basically you're, you're in Iraq, you're an advisor, you're, you're a paid contractor advising the ministry of the Iraqi ministry of defense and the creation of their army, the undoing of Bremer's order to disband it, as you said.
And then was there a particular atrocity that made you just throw up your hands or at some point, you know, at night you're getting into your bunk and thinking, what the hell am I doing here at some point, cumulative sort of a BS got finally too much to bear or how did this happen?
This change in you?
Well, what happened was, you know, I, you know, I like to stay up on top of things.
I like to stay up on top of current events, which I've, you know, always done.
And when I got over there, when I got hired, it started right at the very beginning.
I was hired by a defense department contractor and I don't want to mention their name.
And I went over there and my first day there, my manager in Baghdad says to me and about four other guys, well, you know, you might do the job we hired you to do, but then again, you might not, you know, things changed a lot over here in Baghdad.
And I'm going, well, you know, I'm saying to myself, what do you mean I'm not going to be doing what I was, I sent, I came halfway around the world to do a job.
And the point he was making was, well, really, you know, you're really here to, for us to collect a fee.
I mean, the reason you're here is, well, you're a contractor.
And if you're not here, our company can't bill the Department of Defense.
So your job really is to stay alive and not, you know, not end up in a pine box.
And the longer you're here, you know, the more money that, you know, you get paid and the more money the company gets paid.
Isn't that cool about the Iraq war, where the whole thing is just nothing but lies all day long.
And yet there are times where the truth comes through in such plain English.
It's just great.
It reminds me of the way you just phrased that reminds me of the kids coming back in 2005, hanging out with Cindy Sheehan talking about how, yeah, well, you know, the reason we call them Hodgies is so they seem a little bit less human.
So it's easier to kill them and just wow.
Oh, OK, good.
There we get the start truth.
You're here so that we can rip off the taxpayer.
Well, the thing, you know, the thing is, and it's all it all gets back to we don't declare war anymore.
Therefore, we don't have to have clear goals and objectives.
Therefore, we don't have to send enough soldiers and we can augment it with three times the number of contractors.
And all these security companies, they're all they're all run by ex-military.
The company I work for, the number one and two guy were former former four star generals in the army.
So generals now, the majority of the people are their commander contractors.
So who better to run a contracting company when they retire?
And but the other thing, it's just it's the modern Praetorians, right?
It's a replay of the Roman Empire.
Now, hold it right there, Michael, because we've got to go out and take this break.
I hope I can even keep you into a third segment, too, because we have so much to talk about here.
But we'll get to that.
I'll talk with you about that during the break here.
But everybody, it's Michael O'Brien.
Go look at antiwar dot com right now.
We're running in the viewpoint section.
His first article for antiwar dot com.
Do Americans know what happened in Iraq?
Of course, the answer is no, but we're going to find out the truth.
What's up next?
Visit the Liberty Radio Network program guide to find out at shows dot lrn dot fm.
That shows dot lrn dot fm.
It's so alive from baseball, the apple pie, the bomb.
Waco, Texas, Heaven's Gate, the Oklahoma bomb.
The Desert Storm Syndrome experiment that went wrong.
Inject our own because they probably won't come home anyway.
Nonconflict was a mere experiment.
So just came back from the war.
Couldn't tell you where they went.
And commandos that don't come back.
They used to their advantage.
All right, y'all.
It's antiwar radio.
I'm Scott Horton talking with Michael O'Brien.
He's written his first piece for antiwar dot com.
It's in the viewpoint section today.
He's the author of a book called America's Failure in Iraq and was a D.O.
D.contractor advising the new Iraqi government how to put their army together.
Back in 2006 and 7, worked for Bush and Cheney and State Department, Homeland Security, West Point, Army Rangers, paratroopers.
Now, exactly what was your rank in the army before you went and became a contractor there, Michael?
Well, I've been out of the army many years, but I was a captain.
I was a captain when I got out.
I did not retire.
I got out after my commitment from West Point and then I went into private industry.
I see.
All right.
So now let's talk a little bit about this article and this ridiculous Fox poll.
In fact, before we get to this Fox poll, because it's about how wrong the American people are about Iraq.
But of course, the main reason that the American people are wrong about Iraq is because TV has never even attempted to explain who's who or why anyone is fighting or who's on what side and at all.
I mean, even on a junior high level, they just don't ever even try.
And I guess I already knew this from, you know, especially back in the heyday of the war.
I was in charge of answering the letters at antiwar.com and we used to get a lot of letters from the soldiers.
And I learned then that they really had no idea what they were doing over there.
And I just finished reading The Good Soldiers by David Finkel.
And, you know, he kind of the irony is in there.
He he put the irony in there.
And basically, he's talking about these guys are in charge of patrolling eastern Baghdad, which was a Saudi faction controlled area during 2006 and seven.
And none of these guys, including Lieutenant Colonel Kuzlar, Kuzlar, however you say, had any idea what they were doing.
They didn't know that they were actually fighting on Todd All-Sauder's side in a civil war against the Baathists.
They thought that he was the bad guy or something and that they were protecting the people of that neighborhood from themselves.
And, you know, the same kind of BS that they feed us on TV.
This is what the soldiers thought.
They had no idea of the role they were even playing in that war.
And I was wondering if you could tell me, like, is that was that kind of ignorance just completely endemic throughout the Green Zone, too, where nobody even is honest enough to say, look, these guys are the Dawa Party.
These guys are the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution and, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
Let me let me just start my answer by saying this.
All coalition forces were under a four star U.S.
Army general.
It was Raymond Odierno just transferred it over to another guy before Odierno.
It was Petraeus before Petraeus.
It was George Casey.
But underneath that four star general, there's two U.S.
Army three stars.
One is the commander of all the combat forces, coalition combat forces.
They're the ones that are that go out.
They're the ones that are, you know, fighting the fight in the cities and towns across the country.
The other three star general was the commander.
And this is a long, a long, a long title, the commander of the Multinational Security Transition Command, Iraq.
And that was the organization I was assigned to in the international zone, formerly the Green Zone.
It was changed to the international zone and in Baghdad, which is just a walled compound with the city on the Tigris River.
And we were there for a reason to get the Iraqi ministry with the national police, the Iraqi Ministry of Interior and the Iraqi Army.
Essentially, they have they have no Air Force or Navy per se back on their feet from nothing.
So back to your question, I would not be able to answer what the soldier's perspective was.
I can answer what a contractor's perspective was in Baghdad.
And of course, I traveled all around the country the whole time I was there dealing really, really dealing more with the Iraqi army.
I was dealing with Iraqi army generals and generals more than I was maneuver infantry units.
But I was dealing back in the international zone with U.S. military that were also advising the Ministry of Defense and Interior.
And one of the things that one of the things I bring out in my book was the complete lack of coordination, the dysfunctionality of this three star command of the Multinational Security Transition Command, Iraq, and the total dysfunction between the military and the civilian contractors that were there to help them.
In the first segment, you kind of you asked me what was it a progressive thing?
What was it that got to me?
I mentioned the issue of realizing very early on that really, I was more I was a warm body.
Nothing more.
I'll give you another example.
I'm actually a commercial real estate guy.
I've been in commercial real estate for about 23 years.
And my job was to was involved in getting the Iraqi army, its land, its bases, its facilities, the construction.
I was an advisor on all that.
It was the infrastructure of the new army.
You can't recruit a soldier and give them a weapon and a uniform without a place for him to operate out of.
And that's what that's what I did.
So I'm there about a month and I and I gathered all these coalition was really U.S. military.
And I'm like the only civilian.
And I gather all these military because no one's talking to each other.
And I gather them all together.
And we're talking about land basing construction for the Iraqi army.
And it comes out that they're they're grabbing land from Iraqis without securing the title to it.
And I go, well, you know, I've done some research here and there is private ownership in Iraq.
There's about four different forms of ownership.
And they looked at me like I had three heads.
And I said, well, you know, if we're here to you know, if we're exporting democracy, guys and gals, and if we're exporting democracy and the rule of law, doesn't it make sense to to get idle like we would in the States?
And it was like I was talking to a wall.
And that was just an example of all the problems that I had at one point, Scott.
This is this is no lie.
There were one hundred and twenty five thousand claims for land that had been wrongfully taken from its rightful Iraqi owners.
That's the American way, eminent domain.
The people own everything before an individual does, just like American communism only exported.
Well, you know what the thing about it was in the initial stages of the war, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers actually did take the steps to secure the land legally.
It was after the initial phases in like 04 that the transition from coalition back to Iraqi control, it was all this transition transition.
It was that it was then that we got lazy.
It was then that everything just the rule of law just went right out the window.
But now, so at this big meeting, I understand that your focus was on, you know, more narrow topics and whatever.
But I mean, these three stars, they knew who.
Right.
I mean, come on.
They had to have known who the bottom brigade was.
Right.
I mean, it seems like.
I don't know.
Well, anyway, I got it's too long of a comment slash question coming out of my mouth right now with the music already playing.
So just hang on.
We'll come back from this break and more with Michael O'Brien.
He's got one at antiwar dot com.
His website is America's failure in Iraq dot com.
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Amazon dot LRN dot FM.
All right, kiddos, welcome back to the show.
It's antiwar radio.
Appreciate y'all tuning in to the show.
Today, coffee's finally kicking in a little bit here and doing a little better.
I'm talking with Michael O'Brien.
He's got one at antiwar dot com today.
And he's also got a website, America's failure in Iraq dot com.
The piece on antiwar dot com today is called Do Americans know what happened in Iraq?
And I guess I'm still stuck on.
Did they ever know what was happening in Iraq?
Did they ever know what was happening in Iraq and including the commanders there?
Obviously, the entire war was a giant mix of evil and stupid.
And, you know, here are these guys.
We just fought a war for Iran.
Really, Ahmed Chalabi, according to the CIA and the DIA, was an Iranian spy.
He didn't just let them know after Doug Fyfe told him that America was tapping all of the Iranians communications, but he actually was sent by them to lie us into war in the first place.
To get rid of their old enemy, Saddam Hussein, and turn the country over to the Ayatollah Sistani, which is what has happened.
They've taken all of everything from Baghdad to Basra.
And then the one Shiite nationalist leader, Muqtada al-Sadr, America did nothing but accuse him of being an Iranian and attack him over and over again and drive him into the arms of Iran when he was the one nationalist in the country.
So I guess what I was getting at at the end of that thing was when we went out to break there, Michael, was that you guys basically were in the middle of fighting a civil war on behalf of Iran against the Sunni minority and particularly, I guess you can't call it an ethnic cleansing, but a religious cleansing more or less or something, sectarian cleansing as they like to call that, the expelling of the Sunni population from Baghdad and the consolidation of power by the Iranians over that land.
And yet at the same time, especially this is the era when you were there, 2006 and 2007, this was when more than any other time they were trying to pretend that Muqtada al-Sadr was an Iranian agent and they were attacking Muqtada al-Sadr and driving him into the arms of the Iranians.
And I just wondered like whether they were doing it on purpose and whether they knew that all that was going to do was all their entire war was going to accomplish was making sure that they failed and were kicked out at the end of the day by the majority that in fact doesn't need them like Saddam Hussein did.
Well, you know, Scott, I honestly I don't know.
I mean, on the whole issue of Muqtada al-Sadr, I don't, I can't really think of it.
Well, and the Supreme Islamic Council for that matter.
I mean, really Bush preferred the scary guys, but they were even closer to the Ayatollahs than Iran and Sadr.
Don't know.
I mean, all I can talk about, you know, in my book, I talk about the reasons that we were given for going over there in 2000, 2003, and the lack of a connection between 9-11 and our invasion of 2003.
And also the fact that our invasion of Afghanistan really made a lot of sense.
But then we switch everything, you know, paddles in midstream and we go to Iraq.
I mean, I understand what you're saying about, you know, the different factions and all I can definitely talk about.
The reason I'm going off about this is because, of course, the Sunday Times, Rupert Murdoch today is putting out a story that's blaming Iran for all of our problems in Afghanistan, which is basically the same narrative as 2007.
The Iraqis can only build a bomb with a copper core because the Iranians are giving them to them.
And they never proved that.
But they said it 7 million times until everyone believed it was true.
When we were fighting for Iran in that war, that's what the surge was for.
The surge for the Iranian revolution in Iraq.
Well, don't know about that.
I do, because I know Gareth Porter.
That's Gareth Porter's article on antiwar.com today is, oh, yeah, surge narrative, success narrative, huh?
Here's what really happened.
And, of course, we were covering it live day to day at the time.
So or not from there live.
But you know what I mean?
So anyway, I'm sorry.
I just it's the number one thing that drives me crazy.
And it's really the the answer to, you know, your article today.
Do Americans know what happened in Iraq?
No, they don't.
They just fought a war for Iran.
They gave up their next door neighbor's kid, if not their own, to go fight a war on behalf of Iran.
And no, they have no idea.
And and then I'd like to give you a chance if I'll shut my mouth and let you talk a little bit about what this new Fox News poll actually says about what the American people think about the Iraq war here.
Well, the it was very interesting that that poll, the the Fox News poll and I and as I said in my as I say in my article, it asks some very, very basic questions.
Do you think the war was a success?
Yes, no.
You think it was the right thing to do?
Yes, no.
But as I mentioned in my article and I looked at the poll and it does it doesn't ask other questions, kind of like qualifying questions.
Have you ever been to Iraq?
Yes, no.
Have you ever read a book on Iraq?
Yes, no.
Do you have any idea how many Iraqis died in our as a result of our invasion?
Yes, no.
And obviously, of the 900 people that were polled by telephone, you know, of course, this is just conversation, but I'd venture to say of 900 people, maybe maybe 20 would say, yes, I've been to Iraq.
They'd be former contractors or servicemen.
Maybe 10 would say I've read a book on Iraq.
And maybe five would say that they maybe three would say that they have an idea of how many Iraqis died.
Yeah, maybe one of them would say they listen to this show.
Well, you know, I don't know.
You know, there's a lot of people that feel that the Iraq war was was a mistake.
A lot of people that a lot of people that I talk to that think it was a mistake.
And the thing is that, you know, I believe that the the Iraq war was a mistake because we were not given direct, real solid reasons for invading.
We didn't invade with enough forces.
We disbanded the Iraqi Ministry of Defense and Interior.
And when we did that, we did two things.
We took away the ability, the inherent internal ability of the country itself with our help and oversight.
We three things.
We fired every national policeman, which was the size of an army and every soldier who now hates the United States because they don't have a job.
And the third thing is we provided fresh recruits for the insurgency all with their weapons.
And when that was done by Paul Bremer, what we did was there are people that say that we ended the Gulf War in 91 because the way we did because we wanted to prevent a power vacuum in Iraq.
Well, that is exactly what we did in 0304.
We created the very power vacuum that we were told we didn't want to create in 1991.
And then on top of all this, we did nothing for about three and a half years under the command of General George Casey, who is now the army chief of staff.
That's a whole other topic.
He did nothing for about three years.
He was there, I think, two and a half years as the commander.
And it was not until the National Security Advisor, Stephen Hadley, and his aide, Megan O'Sullivan, went to George Bush and said, Mr.
President, this is not going well at all.
We've got to do something.
And that actually eventually led to the surge.
And I do want to say one other thing while I've got this opportunity, Scott.
There's a little known fact that a lot of people do not know about.
I'm sitting at my desk in Iraq one day, and a guy sends me an email, and it was a link to a Washington Post article dated August 6, 2007.
And when he was the very first commander of the unit that I was attached to, the Multinational Security Command in Iraq, David Petraeus, as a two-star general, ordered 190,000 AK-47s and other weapons for issue to the Iraqi army and the national police.
And they disappeared.
And the article...
That was when he was in charge of Mosul, right?
That was like the first little mini-awakening.
I'll bribe everybody by arming them up.
But then when he left, they all just used the weapons to fight.
Hey, can I keep you another 10-minute segment here?
I like asking you questions.
You have interesting things to say.
Everybody, it's Michael O'Brien.
He's written his first piece for antiwar.com.
Do Americans know what happened in Iraq?
And his website is americasfailureinirak.com.
That's the name of his book.
And we'll be right back to finish this up.
Jeremy Sapienza is in the place.
And Angela Keaton, too.
Hang tight.
You're listening to the best Liberty-oriented audio streamed around the clock, on the air, and online.
This is the Liberty Radio Network at lrn.fm.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's antiwar radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Michael O'Brien.
He's written his first piece for antiwar.com.
Do Americans know what happened in Iraq?
And, of course, the answer is no.
They don't have any idea.
And when we were going out to break, you were talking about Petraeus and Mosul, back when he was a two-star.
Go ahead.
Well, actually, it was when he was the commander.
I don't believe it was Mosul.
He was the commander of the Multinational Security Transition Command, Iraq, which was down in the Green Zone at the time.
He was the first commander.
This must have been after Mosul, then.
Yeah.
Yeah, see, Mosul, I believe he was the commander of the 101st at that time.
But after that, I believe, after that, after commanding the 101st, they sent him down to Iraq, Baghdad, excuse me, to be the first commander of this new command, because defense won the food fight between itself and state.
And defense got the job, got tapped to reverse what Paul Bremer did.
And Petraeus got tapped to be the first commander of this unit, and which, you know, a couple years later, I was a part of.
So here I am at my desk in the International Zone in Phoenix Space, which was the headquarters of this unit.
And I'm reading this Washington Post article, and it's right in the article, Washington Post, August 6, 2007.
And it was written after a GAO report, the Government Accountability Office issued a report of the audit.
They did an audit of these missing weapons, and the result was they're gone.
You can't find them.
And the reason I'm highlighting this is because not all, you know, among all the mistakes that we made, the invasion, the reasons or lack of, lack of, you know, people would say to me, well, you know, we thought we had met weapons of mass destruction, so we went.
Well, that's like, okay, the sun's glaring my eyes, so I'm going to guess the light's green, and I'm just going to go through the intersection.
That doesn't work.
You've got to know it's green.
Well, that was just the excuse.
Paul Wolfowitz himself told Vanity Fair, look, that was the one reason that we could all agree on for bureaucratic reasons.
That's, it's, they learned in 1991, it's the only thing that can get the moms in the focus group to support an aggressive war is the threat of a nuclear bomb going off in their town, and then they get on board.
They tested everything in the world in 1990, and then finally they said, he could nuke you, and the focus group said, what nuke?
Okay, go ahead and invade Iraq.
Yep.
And so that's the lesson.
That, that, that, that's what happened.
And they were lying.
We, we, well, yeah, you could, you could say that.
And, and so we, we go there, and then the execution of this invasion was just, you know, bogus.
Didn't have enough troops.
Donald Rumsfeld originally wanted to invade Iraq, which is the size of the eastern, the size of the eastern seaboard of the United States with 35,000 soldiers.
I mean, that simply is, I mean, that's just, that's just ludicrous.
And then the number eventually got raised.
But then we go over there, and we disband their, their, their entire, their own security apparatus.
And then we lose 100, you know, the Marine Corps is like 220,000 Marines.
You could, you could arm the Marine Corps with that number of weapons.
And what bothers me is, you know, I'm a West Point graduate, and so is David Petraeus.
Scott, when I was in the United States Army, I mean, I was an infantry guy.
I went to ranger school.
You didn't lose your weapon.
I mean, you didn't lose your weapon, unless you were going to get booted out of the Army.
He lost 190,000 of them.
And the thing about it is...
I think I just found the title for this interview.
That time David Petraeus lost 100,000, 190,000 AK-47s.
Well, well, but, but he got promoted from two star to three star to four.
After that happened.
Yeah, well, and one day he's going to be the military dictator of this country, too.
He just holds your horses.
We'll see.
And Scott, what's the point?
No one's held accountable.
No one's held accountable.
The American people deserve better.
The American people deserve people that are held accountable.
Hey, we all screw up.
I mean, I screw up.
We all screw up.
But gee whiz, I didn't lose 190,000 AK-47s.
And those weapons were used to kill American soldiers.
Well, I'm glad that you get back to...
I'm glad you get back to the American people, because as this Fox poll indicates, the American people in general, their one need above all other is self-justification.
They don't want to admit the truth about this.
I'm not sure they do deserve better.
I mean, here the American people are patting themselves on the back for killing a million Iraqis, for destroying completely the Druze and the Jews and the Yazidis and all the minority religious communities in that country, for installing people in power who regard a woman's smile to be a felony.
The American people who support this deserve to live like the Iraqi people have to live.
Why should they get accountability?
They're the ones who should be held accountable.
Well, you bring up a good point.
The thing about it is there's too much...
When I read that Fox News article, all that came out at me was the majority of Americans, based on that poll, just based on that poll, that says to me that the majority of Americans are America right or wrong.
America right or wrong.
We're American and America right or wrong.
And you know, I love America, but I just don't like it when we make these mistakes.
That's why I wrote my book.
You know, we do make mistakes, but gee whiz, lives are at stake.
If you make a mistake on a day-to-day basis, that's one thing.
But to make a mistake of the magnitude of the lives, isn't life the most important thing?
And you know, sometimes I question if people in power in our country ever ask themselves that.
And it's not just us.
It's these Iraqis caught in the crossfire.
And an American soldier who dies, that's one casualty.
An Iraqi who dies is another category of casualty.
A contractor who dies is another category of casualty.
Everybody who died as a result of that war.
And I say to people, well, people go, well, we don't really know how many Iraqis died in the war.
And I go, you know what?
You're right.
We don't.
But I'll tell you one thing.
They wouldn't be dead now if we hadn't invaded.
No tree.
They wouldn't be dead.
I don't know what the number is, but they wouldn't be dead if we hadn't invaded.
Well, and look, the studies of the excess deaths are credible and there's numerous ones of them.
And, you know, I talked with Alan Hyde from Opinion Business Research in the UK.
He funded the study himself.
It wasn't a George Soros thing or anything.
And when his people came back and said a million were dead, and that's a conservative estimate because we couldn't even go to Anbar where the casualties were much higher.
He said, you know what?
Go back and do it again and make sure.
And they spent it.
He wouldn't come on the show.
He said, no, give me another six months.
They spent another six months studying it.
He said the number of excess deaths from 2003 on was a million people minimum.
And that was on top of a decade of sanctions and bombings by Bill Clinton that killed a million before that.
As Joy Gordon shows in her new book, this was a society that imported two thirds of their food that Colin Powell and the rest of them completely destroyed.
They killed a million people through disease and starvation.
And destroyed the Iraqi economy.
And then so the million is the excess deaths on top of that rate of death, which was, in fact, Joy Gordon says in there, this was the longest sustained increase in child and infant mortality in the history of mankind.
I mean, since the Industrial Revolution around the world, infant mortality has been going down, down, down, down, down.
Well, in Iraq for a generation, it went up, up, up, and there's nobody to blame for that.
But the USA really can't really argue with you on that one.
Yeah, people talk about still they talk about this week.
They're saying, Michael, that you just don't want to admit you don't want to give credit to the heroic George Bush for having the courage to do the surge and provide this great victory for the American people.
And that's the dominant narrative this month.
And you know what?
The surge was the one thing that we did right only because we had to because the previous four years were a disaster.
And the people that say.
No, man, no.
All the surge did.
All the surge did was help the Ayatollah Sistani take Baghdad for Iran and kill even more people.
It didn't accomplish anything.
What accomplished the decrease in violence was the Shia won the civil war and the Sunni cried uncle.
And then finally, Petraeus undid that Casey policy and pulled the troops back to their bases instead of sending them on search and destroy and kill everybody missions all day.
That wasn't a success of the surge.
That was the success of Sauter and the Bata brigades.
And all Petraeus did was help make it look legit.
Well, don't know about that.
I do know that the surge was implemented in 2007 because the previous four years were an absolute disaster.
And the thing about it is, is that, you know, when people say that the Iraq war, our invasion was a success and they based the whole thing on the surge, not, not, not, you know, I'm not touching on the things that you mentioned just a second ago, but when they base the whole thing on the surge, I shake my head because I go, but that's, that's reverse logic.
And you can't base our invasion in 03 on something that was done in, you know, seven.
So, you know, it's like, like I said, it's reverse logic.
It doesn't, it doesn't make sense.
Yeah, sure.
It's, it's all about self-justification.
And of course, you know, it goes back to the whole, to the question.
That's the title of your piece today is, do we know what happened there?
No, because Chris Matthews doesn't know the bottom brigade from the, from the Modi army or the Sunni and Sunni based insurgency or Al Qaeda in Iraq or anything else.
And he certainly never tried to explain it to anybody.
And so people still this day, if, if the slogan says that the surge is working, the surge is working and then is updated to the surge worked, the surge worked.
And you can't do better than a three word slogan.
It's just like every time George Bush ever gave a speech with a three word slogan behind him, protecting America's water or whatever it is.
And it's just a bunch of crap, man.
I mean, all they did was kill more people until the point where they got to the tipping point where less people are killed.
But you know what a friend of mine sent me this email.
I interviewed Patrick Coburn the other day on KPFK.
And he said, oh yeah, the violence is much lower.
Only 430 people were killed last month in Iraq.
And so my friend William decided to go and Google it.
And you know what he found?
An article from September 10th, 2008.
Last month, only 430 Iraqi civilians were blown up in Iraq.
Two years ago, exactly.
Only 500 people killed in assassinations and bombings and murders.
A government that still can't even get it together.
Sadr can't even make an alliance with his former buddies in the Dawa party.
Now the whole place is just waiting for to get even worse.
And still they say the surge works.
The surge worked, you know?
So anyway, I'm sorry for yelling at you.
But I got to push back against that.
It's just not right.
The surge didn't work unless we admit that the goal was to turn the country over to Khamenei.
Well, I can't address that, Scott.
Right.
Well, because it wasn't the goal.
It was just how it worked out in practice.
That wasn't why they did it.
They did it because Ahmed Chalabi told them we're going to put a Hashemite kingdom that's going to be allies with Israel and build a pipeline to Haifa.
And it's going to be great.
And we're going to put all the pressure on Iran to become more democratic now.
And a bunch of nonsense.
And they bought it.
So I mean, I'm not talking about George Bush was an agent of Khamenei.
I'm just saying, in effect, that was.
And that's why the people don't understand it.
Because you think American TV is ever going to explain?
Well, you know, back to that poll, the Fox poll.
Remember how we always heard George Bush say to his critics of the war?
You're not supporting the troops.
You're not supporting troops.
And I used to, you know, I worked for the guy.
You know, I've met him.
I've shaken his hand.
And I'm going, wait a minute.
Don't tell me I don't support our troops.
Of course, I support our troops.
That's kind of like a deep shot.
So in other words, if you don't support the war, you also don't support our troops.
No.
And that used to bother me.
And it kind of goes to that Fox poll.
You know, it's that I really do believe it's that mentality.
America right or wrong.
We support.
It's like a blind faith in our leadership, which, in my personal opinion, we well, you know, I mentioned it before, you know, has just been awful.
But and then you you counter it by saying, well, we get what we deserve.
I can't I can't disagree with you.
Well, I'm just having a bad day.
But the thing about it is, is that that's I it's kind of an insult saying that if I don't support the war, I don't support the troops.
Well, of course, everybody listen to me.
All these troops would be alive right now.
You got guys sitting in in in the hospital with no arms and legs who if all us non-troop supporters out here had had our way, would have been sitting safe at their bases, collecting welfare for training all day, having a good time instead of killing people and getting killed and seeing their best friends killed.
And if you want to talk about supporting the troops, how about Donald Rumsfeld when he was asked the question by that sergeant about not having armor on the Humvees?
Right.
And his response was, well, you go with what you got or something or something.
You go to war with the army you have, not the army of which you had.
Now, is that supporting the troops?
I mean, of course, he's got he's got an R next to his name.
That's all we need to know.
Anyway, I'm sorry.
We're over time here, Michael.
I really appreciate you.
I apologize again for yelling at you.
Great article today.
And and I can't wait to get a copy of the book.
Angela will be in touch on that.
And I hope you write for us some more in the future.
It's good.
Good stuff.
You will.
Absolutely.
I appreciate it, Scott, very much.
And I really enjoyed being on your show.
OK, great, everybody.
That is Michael O'Brien.
The website is America's Failure in Iraq dot com.
And he's got one on antiwar dot com today.
