Blowback - S1 Episode 0 - "Iraqnophobia" feat. H. Jon Benjamin & James Adomian

Episode Date: March 17, 2020

Brendan and Noah drag the Iraq War out of America’s memory hole to see how it shaped our world today. Meet the rogues’ gallery of George W. Bush’s administration and Saddam Hussein’s family. Featuring special guests James Adomian and H. Jon Benjamin.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

I should All right Oh, I love this show Huh? Oh, yeah, hi, this is Saddam Hussein Howdy there, big guy? Who's this, Bush? How's it hanging?

I'm fine, yeah, I'm just having a snack. What's you got going? Some dates. You're on date? No, dates. It's a fruit. I don't think you have them there. Super. They're like plums. They're like big raisins.

Right on. So listen, Saddam. I was thinking we should have a chat about all this big bad war talk. You know, away from all the cameras and all that nonsense. Yeah, I'm watching it on TV right now. Are you serious about this? Yeah. Oh. Why? Listen, Saddam. As Aladdin was said, we've got a whole new world here after September 9th. 11. What's that got to do with me? Well, I got to tell you, there's folks

that's telling us that you helped us with the plan of those attackers. Who? Well, we got some intelligentsia. The shows you were working with them, you some have been, you know... Oh, yeah? Who says that? We have evidentiary, you know, sources.

Testimonials, it's things, that kind of stuff. Yeah, I asked who. Listen, it's not just even about 9-the-11. We got intel here, showing you possess weapons. and their weapons are made for fighting. What weapons? Weapons of WMD.

Look, let me tell you something. I'm not sure if you know this. Your dad and I, we used to work together. I don't need. Just hold on. Back in the 80s, he and I were working on this project I started, the Iran-Iraq War. You ever heard of that?

Hey, hold on, okay? Your dad and Rumsfeld, we did some great stuff together. Right, good. He invited me to his, you know, ranch. I love that. ranch dressing. My dad's a great guy. No question there. Well, yeah, except his buddies told me to borrow a bunch of money. Right? That's what they do. So I try and, you know, jump on some assets in Kuwait and he freaks out. Well, come on. I don't know what that was about. But you know what? It's forgotten. Okay? I don't even

care now. Here's the thing though, sad I am. My daddy's not running this thing. I am. I'm giving you one chance here to hand over your weapons. What? Weapons. There are no weapons. Ask your dad. All right. Cool your jets. I don't have any jets either. We're just asking you to cooperate with the cooperation. Fine. I'm happy to cooperate. Send inspectors.

Make yourself at home. What? Was this a little bit of reverse psychiatry? Reverse? Reverse what? Rabbit season, rabbit season. Look, you're misting gentrifying the international community. And I'm telling you, we're going to have to go in there.

So now we're not even doing inspectors. What happened to the inspectors? No, no, no. We will. We will. But if they don't find anything, we're going to go and inspect with, you know, explosions. What is your problem? We gotta...

Put your dad on. No, I'm not putting dad on. No, no, no. You listen to me, he-ha. Put your dad on. Put him on right now. My dad is not here. He's at work.

Put your father on the phone. Fuck you. Talk soon. Not a little. This. Cousay. Cuse, get up on the roof and adjust daddy satellite dish. I'm getting nothing here.

Fuck me. Speak about this sign. Speak about this last sign. Speak about this last sign. Welcome to Blowback, a podcast about the Iraq War. I'm Brendan James. And I'm Noah Colwin. And this is our free giveaway episode, a treat, a sampler, a taster.

Think of it as a podcast hors d'oeuvre. Yeah, a prologue. Some of you may know me from my old podcast, a comedy, left-wing politics show. The Slate Political Gab Fest. This snark-snark revolution, very proud of the work I did on that show. And Noah. And I'm an editor at The Outline, and I've covered technology and politics for Vice News, re-code, New York Magazine, and a whole bunch of...

You're lying media. You're part of, like, the establishment. Absolutely. So, we're doing a show about the Iraq War. Why? I think... Well, this was your idea. So you're blaming me already.

I think it's a skeleton key for understanding where we are now. First, you said to me, hey, no one's really done a show, or at least one like we want to do, about the Iraq War. And I was like, hey, you know, what is there to say? Everyone basically knows now it was bad. WMD.

It wasn't there. they lied, et cetera, et cetera. But then I started noticing George W. Bush hanging out with Michelle Obama and Ellen. And I saw an article including Dick Cheney and John McCain in the hashtag resistance. And I saw people, liberals, supposed lefties, approving of coups in Venezuela and Bolivia last year. And then I thought, okay, there is something here. It's worth retelling the story of the Iraq war. Because what's really happened, what explains all that, is that we Americans have shoved the Iraq War, this century-defining war crime, down the memory hole. I mean, the Obama years and the Trump administration have put so much distance in American minds between what happened then and what's happening now. I mean, Obama initiated a horrifying new bombing campaign in Iraq in 2014, the guy who ended the Iraq war, quote unquote.

Today I authorize two operations in Iraq. Trump just assassinated an Iranian general inside of Iraq, which is part of the proxy war that's been going on since we invaded in 2003. President Trump has not spoken directly about the killing, but he did tweet this image of an American flag shortly after the attack. The Syrian civil war that most guilty liberals pretend to care or know about is partially one big spinoff of the Iraq war. How it was possible for this group ISIS to sort of sweep in to western Iraq.

I'm looking at a poll here. It says that 51% of Americans now say that they opposed the Iraq war back when it was launched in 2003. But a Pew poll conducted at the time in 2003, right before we went in, showed that 72% of Americans actually supported the war. Only 23% were opposed. So not only is there a sort of cultural amnesia, a political amnesia about what happened, but there's an actual, like, among regular people, there's an actual amnesia about whether or not, they supported it, whether or not they opposed it. So that's a disturbing trend. And so many of the ghouls and goblins who made this thing happen, we killed 600,000 people in Iraq. You know, I don't know if people know the figure. I don't know if people know that we designed a forced labor system in Fallujah. I don't know if people know that we used white phosphorus on Iraqis still cause birth defects to this day. This is the kind of stuff that I realized, sure, that could use a

retelling. Did you believe ever that Saddam Hussein when you had to cast that vote to authorize the war in Iraq, did you ever believe that Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons? Well, Chris, I'm just telling you that that was the prevailing opinion. People have been able to sort of do some sort of jiu-jitsu to explain that it was really the moment. You kind of had to be there. You know, it was really just there was a lot of, you know,

ifsands or butts, a lot of what have yous. And I think it's about time that we sort of go back and examine the ways in which, no, they did have a choice. They chose wrong. So strap in, join us, be with us as we go down this horrifying journey into the past because we want to do it with some fun. We want it to be entertaining. There's going to be sidebars.

There's going to be gags. Obviously, if you heard the opening sketch to this episode, we're going to mix the lowbrow and the highbrow, the funny and absurd with the disgusting and the enraging. And hopefully that captures the full nature of this night. nightmare that we unleashed. Every journey begins in the mind. All right. I want to take this out.

These are Iraqi dinars from a long time ago. This was given to me by, at a show, last year. Oh, wow. They got Saddam's face on him, and he's looking good. He's probably like, you know, in his prime here. They're very beautiful. They're central bank of Iraq, 250 dinars. And if you follow the news, you might know that there are a bunch of MAGA people who think that the Iraqi Dinar will at some point be worth millions of dollars once President Trump revalues the currency.

One thing I think they don't realize there is that revaluing a currency involves printing new bills and the old money is not submissible. So if you've stocked up on dinars like that and you try to cash them in for like a billion dollars, they're not going to be valid. But you have two right here. You're telling me that like MAGA people don't necessarily understand the nuances of. They haven't thought it through. Yeah. They haven't thought it through. But in case they're right, we here have, I have a $250 note.

How much do you have? I also have $250. Okay, great. Yeah. So we're rich. Yeah, we're rich guys now. Yeah. I mean, so when this was made, I mean, Saddam is, he's wearing a suit.

He has a full head of hair. Yeah. I mean, he never lost his full head of hair. No, that's true. In fact, it had actually only grown when he was captured. Before we invaded, you know, what was Iraq like? Yeah. I mean, we're going to get into a lot of this stuff in the show, but people have this idea, of course, of it was a dictatorship under Saddam.

There's the Ba'ath Party, which was his party, an authoritarian, you know, Arab Nationalist Party. It's true. It's basically true. It was a dictatorship. Saddam consolidated power at the end of the 70s. He was already kind of the real heavy, but he made it formal. And then throughout the 80s, he became the face of, you know, Iraq's political dictatorship. But Iraqi society and, you know, culture and was more than Saddam. Of course it was. Iraq was one of the most progressive and most developed, if not the most, at that point, at that moment of time in the 70s and the 80s, it was the most developed and progressive Arab country in the Middle East. I mean, there were tradeoffs.

Like, you know, as we just said, we don't want to minimize the fact that Saddam was a cruel dictator who did awful things, particularly to ethnic minorities in Iraq. Yes. The party was brutal to those who did not like or did not want to like. side of things. Iraq had one of the best healthcare systems in the region, best education systems, women's rights, etc. It wasn't some rinky-dink third world failed state or whatever.

It became that once we got involved, or got more involved than the 90s, which made it very easy in 2003 to say, look at this place. We got to renovate, you know, by going in with some explosions. But yeah, Saddam it was a very tightly run ship under his regime. He did

run for president again a couple times, you know, quote unquote, ran for president. And he did that in 2002, a year before the war. And do you know the campaign theme, like the song that he used to campaign? No. Against no one else, just him. I do not. What was it? All right, I'm going to play it. Tell me if you can name that tune. Oh, my God. There would just be like cars driving around Iraq, blasting. I will always love you with, like, pictures of Saddam as, you know, the daddy.

That's a little on the nose, man. I know. It's really on the nose. Speaking of, here is a ad from the 2000s about joining the Army. What are you setting your sights on? And when you see it, will you be ready? Call 1-800-645 Army, and you'll also get this free boony hat. Whatever you're looking for, the Army can help you find it.

One of the things that coming into making this that I wanted to know more about was, you know, what was the moment in 2003, like how did we, you know, prepare a nation or condition people to accept that it would be necessary to go in and just, like, dominate another country into ruins? Yeah. I mean, obviously there was the formal case for war. There was the whole edifice of Saddam, turning Saddam into this interdimensional villain. Right. And, you know, 9-11 had people running scared. Exactly. That's a huge part of it. It's war. Come on.

All right. It's a Japanese. This is Pearl Harbor. It is. We got to go bomb everything over there now. We got to bomb the hell out of them. You know who it is. I can't say, but I know who it is.

We'll get to that, obviously. But there was also the cultural side of things. Obviously, conservatives immediately, you know, press the country music button. And there's 8,000 songs, you know, by Alan Jackson. But it wasn't, you know, it wasn't just conservatives. I mean, you had, there were like our friendly old libs at SNL, for instance. I don't think that they necessarily had their heads screwed on straight either. S&L, somehow everyone, I think, continues to think of it as the loyal comic opposition because they make fun of President Cheeto or whatever, even though they had him on the fucking show.

But in 2003, I found this clip. S&L is using the months before the war to make fun of not the Bush administration, not their insanely bullshit case for war that's about to get a lot of people killed, but to make fun of some of the few people standing in between us and the gates to the hell dimension, the U.N. Weapons inspectors. Watch out, Iraq. Here they come. We are UN weapons inspector. Open up now. Here we go.

You got weapons? No. Okay. UN weapons inspector. So that's Robert De Niro in a guest appearance, and Jimmy Fallon, again, you can see all of our greatest horrors germinating out of this moment. And then Fred Armisen plays in a rocky guard who's clearly hiding weapons behind that door. I mean, look, and if that's what, like, goofy, like, two-bit comedians were fucking saying, then, like, imagine what they were actually

saying on cable news. Ah, well, you might be, you might be interested to know what MSNBC was doing at the time. What, what, the, the good liberal opposition? Oh, man, no, man, ma, ma, ma, ma, ma, ma, ma, ma, ma, a, quest for Saddam. Want to catch Saddam Hussein? Well, a very popular new video game allows you to do just that. The reality-based game features many funny scenarios. And joining us right now from Sacramento is Jesse Petrilla. He is the video game designer who at just age 18 created the wildly successful quest for Al-Qaeda game. Okay, that clip you just heard, I think the audio speaks for itself, but just to give you the visual element too, that's MSNBC. There's some

anchor. It begins with a clip of the video game, which by the way, looks like shit. That game looks horrible, and it was not well-designed, and that guy isn't clever. Not poggers. And there's a bunch of Saddam like lookalikes in a room and they're doing, you know, racist Arabic sounds that this guy thinks sounds like Arabic. Players get down to hunt the former dictator of Iraq, Saddam Hussein. Jesse, thanks for joining us.

Good morning, Alex. It's good to be here. Well, I have to tell you, I've been laughing. Every time we've been playing this, so behind the scenes, you can't hear me, but the homino homina. I mean, it's great. And then the anchor starts the segment. It goes, oh, I love that bit. Oh, blah, blah. That's on MSNBC. She's doing

She's doing a racism, folks. And then she continues to interview this absolute moron who obviously his his dev career did not take off from there but at the time that got you on cable news uh to murder saddam in a video game and have msnbc pimp your game out by the way i looked up the guy the the game developer there uh and would it surprise you to know he is not making video games but is a giant maga guy who was posting incessantly about how aOC is a dumb broad who uh needs to you know he'll he'll tell her what's what when i look at this thing what you've created

and it's like, look at this! Yeah, nice job! None of you! So let's talk about, if you will, the cast of characters that we're going to meet and spend some time with during this show, because they're all very colorful. First up, obviously, there's Saddam. Right. We're going to start the show in Iraq, and we're going to obviously see him

wear a lot of different hats and go through a lot of different changes. Saddam was born in 1937, and he grew up in the middle of Iraq and a pretty poor. He grew up near the town of Tikrit in central Iraq from a fairly young and early age involved in Arab nationalist efforts to, you know, claw back Iraq from colonial powers. And, you know, he was involved in assassination attempts. He was a pretty well-connected guy and had a reputation as a thug. I mean, he was reputed to have committed his first murder while he

was still a teenager. Yeah. Also, as we'll see as is an interesting part of the politics that that shape Iraq in the 20th century before Saddam takes power. Big anti-communist. Oh, yeah. The Ba'ath Party were, you know, we're going to get into the Cold War stuff, but Saddam was a nationalist. He may have been anti-British, but he was no fan of the Reds. Right.

And, you know, this is also part of what explains his rise to power. The fact that he was such a diligent and effective anti-communist helps explain why he was able to become the strong man that he was in the 70. And why we liked him so much. Exactly. Also, Saddam had, we don't get to this stuff as much, just because, you know, you got to make some choices. but he had a very soap opera family arrangement.

There was a lot of drama. Saddam had two sons, his heirs, Coussay and Uday. Gusei was like the straight lace. He was pretty competent. Ude was a complete fucking monster. He was a psychopath. He was like Ralph Siforetto. Just like, I mean, honestly, like a huge sex criminal

would shoot people at parties for fun. Exactly what you think of as like a dictator's spoiled brat kid who inflicts only pain and misery upon everyone around him. It was a very bargain mafia show type drama. and in fact they did make HBO did make a really bargain like soap opera not good it was called house of Saddam it ran on HBO in the mid 2000 although let's be clear it is like a delicious kind of irony that they got in Israeli who is you know like in Arab Israeli who was a good actor but in Israeli nonetheless to play Saddam yeah Saddam though is I guess you could look at the biggest winner in the second half of

the 20th century in Iraq but that also meant that they were people who lost out pretty big and who would spend the rest of their lives trying to plot against Saddam and who might see an opportunity when we started grumbling about going to war against Saddam in the early 2000s. Enter a certain man named Ahmed Chalabi. What role would you like to play in any new government? If you were asked to run to be the new leader of Iraq, would you accept? It's not about me personally. I do not want to answer this hypothetical question.

Chalabi was in Iraqi exile. He split the country after a revolution that. happened in the 50s in Iraq. Saddam stayed and took over eventually. Chalabi swore one day he would come back and he'd take over. He was the model of one of those guys, an exile who lives in the West after a revolution happens in their country, who then becomes a very, very willing partner of the CIA or the State Department, DOD. Chalabee was all three of them at different points of his career. And he was the guy who, more than anyone else, outside of the American government, was in it to win it against Saddam and helped us do it.

And he was himself like this totally like strange and colorful character, right? Very, very, he was, I say he's a Coen Brothers character brought to life. He is, there should be some biopic about him. Although I don't, I wouldn't trust Hollywood to do it, but someone should do it. The Safdi brothers should do it. Yeah, that makes sense. I mean like how so. So first off, to give you a sense of him, everyone knows what Saddam looks like.

But Chalabi, he, I have to say if you had to cast him, I would go, he looks like John Lovitz. Well, I'm sorry. All right. I guess I was just thinking of myself. He's in Iraqi John Lovitz. He's short, squat, kind of frumpy looking. But he had very good taste.

He was very erudite. He was very sophisticated. He came from this rich, wealthy business family. That was why he fled Iraq when this populist revolution happened in the 50s. And he could recite poetry. He could rattle off a bunch of trivia about the Japanese empire. Wasn't he like a mathematician or something? Yeah, after he left Iraq, he grew up in Lebanon for a bit and became a professor

of mathematics in Lebanon. He would later then claim that he invented some code-breaking thing that his colleague did or a mentor of his did, just which goes to show how genuinely the raw intelligence he had and then the raw malfeasance that was attached to that intelligence. So yeah, a total flimflammer, his whole life, just one of the great con men of all time. Because as we'll follow him throughout the show, he keeps bouncing back. He gets kicked out of his country. He bounces back. He makes a bank in Jordan.

He starts to steal a shitload of money, millions of dollars from Jordan. he bounces back, he gets a job with the CIA trying to overthrow Saddam. He fucks up his chances with the CIA, gets kicked out, comes right back, gets in there with the Bush administration, and then lands in Iraq in 2003, ready to take over. So he's one to watch. Freedom's untidy, and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They're also free to live their lives and do wonderful things. Probably the most famous, like, bureaucrat of the Iraq war was Donald Rumsfeld.

The face of the war, really? Yes, exactly. Anytime in the show where you hear like a clip of someone on a podium from the Bush administration and their whiny, smug little voice, it's Rumsfeld. And it's funny because he actually didn't begin his political career as a hawk, actually. You know, Rumsfeld, he began his political life fairly young in the 60s as a congressman from Illinois. And he was a fairly moderate guy. He, you know, was pro-choice. He co-bonsored the Freedom of Information Act.

And then he joined the Nixon administration. He's also actually pressing to end the Vietnam War because he thought it was a loser. Yes, he was, and it actually got him in trouble with Nixon, who then sought to shunt him out and, you know, send him far away, which meant that when Watergate happened and Gerald Ford needed to suddenly staff an administration, Donald Rumsfeld was one of the first people he went calling. He was clean. Ironically, Nixon kicking him out meant that he was completely shielded from the effects of Watergate. And so Donald Rumsfeld was the Secretary of Defense under Ford. And then in the 1980s, he goes, you know, let's say we go, he goes freelance. He re-enters the private sector. He, he, has, you know, a number of, like, you know, well-paying corporate gigs. G.D. Searle. I mean, and it was also the chairman. He made the diarrhea medication and the laxative. And he was the chairman of the pharmaceutical giant Gilead.

But in the 1980s, actually, what you would probably, you know, we'll get into it a little bit later. But he also did some freelance work on Iraq for the Reagan administration. Rumsfeld re-enters the picture in 2000 as George W. Bush's pick for Secretary of Defense. I mean, and, you know, his reputation at this moment, you know, he was a former, he would been a wrestler at Princeton and he was you know he was a he was eloquent he had you know he he was a charming it's crazy though because people magazine named him one of their sexiest men alive in 2002 yeah he he held court with the press he would uh you know trade barbs and wink and do these little smiles and do these little pirouettes and honestly you'll hear it in the clips

we play everyone loved him these fucking people in the white house press corps loved him the images you are seeing on television you are seeing over and over and over and it's the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase. And you think, my goodness, were there that many vases? One guy in the Bush War Cabinet who stood out a bit, or at least who people thought stood out, was Colin Powell. He was viewed as, you know, the reluctant warrior, the voice of reason within the Bush administration, a moderate. And we need to take that apart in the show. And in a certain sense, you can see the appeal of Powell symbolically.

where Jamaican immigrants grows up in the South Bronx. African-American man makes it to the top of the American military hierarchy. He had a good rapport. He was charming. He was good on camera. He appeared like a thoughtful, reflective statesman. But in reality, this is a guy who, when he did a tour or two in Vietnam, was instrumental in covering up the Mili Massacre in that country.

In the 80s, when he ascends even higher up in his administration jobs, he helped cover up Iran-Contra and managed to make it out of that. of that completely unscathed. And then when he's finally top dog and head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the 90s, he executes the Gulf War, one of the most brutal assaults on a third world country that America had completely flipped and turned on in Iraq. Throughout the 90s, he floats above politics and the culture wars and just gets bipartisan adulation. So that lands him in George W. Bush's State Department in 2000 and he's viewed as the good cop, you know, and again, the voice of reason in the room. Right. But of course, that

image and that reputation was totally unjustified. On behalf of the administration, Powell claimed Saddam Hussein was trying to buy raw material from Africa to build nuclear weapons, and he gave an elaborate description of an Iraqi weapons program that, as it turned out, never existed. This Bush War Cabinet, they called themselves the Vulcans because of the quote-unquote Vulcan statue in Alabama, which is where Condoleezza Rice was originally from. She was born in Birmingham, and then her family relocated her to Denver because her father worked at the University of Denver, where she matriculated at an extremely young age. She graduated at 19 years old.

A piano virtuoso? She was originally her initial plan when she started college was to become a concert pianist. If only. But life, you know, has a way. She's done concerts with yo-yo-ma and shit. Yeah, I mean, which is... He's a girl boss, is what I'm saying. As befits such a reputation, she went to Notre Dame, got her master's, then went back to the University of Denver, gets a doctorate, specializes.

in the Soviet Union, specifically in Czechoslovakia and Eastern European politics. And, you know, she got a judge, she almost immediately gets a job teaching at Stanford. And while she wasn't really a right-wing ideologue like, you know, Rumsfeld or, you know, other people at this moment... She came out of like the Kissinger

type mold of real... Realpolitik is how people would describe it, but that's, that gives it too much credit. Well, she was such a real politic person that, despite going on to help wage war against WMD and Saddam, in the 90s, she wrote a paper saying, we could contain a nuclear sedate.

She was just a little bit more savvy and gun-shy than some of the most aggressive hawks in Republican politics. The magnificent men and women of America's armed forces are not a global police force. They are not the world's 911. In her personal politics, she was a fairly

moderate person. But over the course of the 80s and the Reagan years, and as she moved into the George H.W. Bush White House and took on really senior positions in terms of dictating H.W. policy on the Soviet Union, especially as the Soviet Union, you know, started like knocked down the Berlin Wall and began with drug from Eastern Europe. She became somebody whom, you know, H.W. Bush and his advisors, whom they would rely on and value a lot. And so through the 90s, of course,

you know, she, after H.W. Bush leaves. She gets to, you know, do things that make money. For example, she joins the board of Ed Chevron. So she starts as, and is covered in the press as well, as this really kind of star, I think someone said, of the administration. Andy Card, who was George W. Bush's chief of staff at one point, said she's the star of the administration. But as we'll see, she was somebody whose political star, you know, was entirely hitched on her loyalty to Bush. Bob Woodward reports that George H.W. Bush and talking with one of his advisors, you know, well into the George W. Bush years, you know, he said that he thought of Condi as just a great disappointment. There will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire a nuclear weapon. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom plow.

So we've just talked about a bunch of the people who are either the decision makers or the people who pretended to be the decision makers. But, you know, like, let's take a moment to talk about the brains. Let's talk about Paul Wolfowitz. The quote-unquote brains. The quote-unquote brains. Paul Wolfowitz. Paul Wolfowitz was the son of a Cornell mathematician who when he himself went to Cornell,

he studied and became a disciple of Alan Bloom, the famous conservative intellectual. And then Wolfowitz goes on to you Chicago, where he becomes a disciple of Leo Strauss. and he's, you know, really supposed to be, like, conservative brainiac. Wolfowitz is a great example of, like, this conservative professor to praxis pipeline, where, you know, neoconservative ideologues emerging around the time of the Reagan administration get brought into the fold. By the time 2000 rolls around and George W. Bush, you know, needed brainy people to come and do his administration, Wolfowitz, would be naturally one of the people that Rumsfeld taps.

I read the other day in an interview, you took issue with the moniker architect of the Iraq War. Why do you not accept that title? Because I was not in charge. I was not the commander-in-chief or even the Secretary of State or the Secretary of Defense or National Security Advisor. And more importantly, because I think, and I thought at the time, there were a lot of things that should have been done differently. But there is no question in my mind that we will be much more secure when we win this

battle in Iraq, and we will win it. Now, the pinky to Paul Wolfowitz's brain would be a guy named Douglas Fythe. he was the Undersecretary for policy in the Defense Department. Doug Fyth was the guy put in charge of, for example, the following things. Connecting Saddam to Al-Qaeda, proving that Saddam had WMD, planning the occupation after we invaded Iraq. None of these things, as you can probably tell, worked out quite well in the design or the execution. And this was a man who, by his own colleagues in the Bush administration,

was roundly and consistently mocked for being. a complete dullard. What was that fucking Tommy Franks line? Tommy Franks, who was the head of U.S. Central Command, who will execute the Iraq War, was once quoted as saying about having to deal with Fythe in planning for the war. Quote, I have to deal with the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth almost every day. That's how he talked about Fythe. General Franks, I don't have to tell you what he said, but he called you. It was not nice. It was not nice. was not nice. Eventually, Fythe got a report card once the war had kicked off. This was by, again, one of his colleagues, one of his fellow Rumsfeld guys, who said, quote, after two years, Doug's

leadership has not improved. That's pretty brutal for, you know, for bureaucrats speak. And his nickname and his department's nickname was, quote, the lunatic Fythe and his evil spawn. But he was, after all of this stuff, incredibly, incredibly and deeply loyal to Donald Rumsfeld. And I've just arranged a supercut here of what it was like to listen to the genius, Doug Fyth, give a presser on the inner workings of his department. Good morning. On the issue of this strategy, as you'll see when you read through it, does not, the, there are concepts in here, though,

about that countries are going to be given So you'll notice two people who were missing from that list were George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and we're definitely going to mention them and talk about them but we thought we'd focus more in the show on the minions and the minions of minions and the henchmen of henchmen

because everyone knows about Bush and Cheney and a lot of the best freaks and material come from the underlings of that administration. Coming. We've kind of split the workload into two, so I take the lead on the first half of the ten episodes and then Noah takes over. In the first episode, we're going to do a deep dive

as to like the origin of America's perverse relationship with Iraq. And after the rise of Saddam, we'll talk about our business partnership with him. We did the Iran-Iraq war with him. And then we'll go into the Gulf War, where we turn on Saddam, kick his ass, and particularly talk about the sanctions in the 90s, which killed a shitload of Iraqis

and really set the stage for what happened in 2003. We'll talk about the case for war, the junk intelligence, the assist from Ahmed Chalabi and all these weirdos. Go into the invasion. We'll go into what it felt like in the kind of American, you know, hot and heavy war climate. And then the occupation, you know, there's, it's an insane story of both malfeasance and corruption and also incompetence. And we took over a country as this great imperial power. But when we wanted to send an emissary to Iraq's top spiritual leader in Ayatollah, the viceroy in Iraq's, sent, quote, neither a diplomat nor a politician, but a wealthy urologist who had developed and

patented a penile implant for impotent men. That was the kind of occupation that we carried out. Right. And I think, you know, we talk a bit about the media. We talk about the ways in which, you know, reporters like Judith Miller, especially sort of operated as a pipeline from rotten intelligence sources like Chalaby to the public and how the case for war was made that way. We talk about, you know, again, the origins of the insurgency and how basically, of the people that we claim that we invaded Iraq to actually fight, we then unleashed on the rest of the country. And then, of course, we go and talk about the surge and the strategy that America claimed would save Iraq, but would, in reality, just put it on a course for ISIS.

And finally, I'd say the show is not trying to be a, quote, objective, unquote, history. We have a point of view. The show has a point of view. If you haven't detected it yet, I'm sure it'll become evident. I will say that our sources that we use, which you can go to our Twitter account at BlowbackPod and, you know, see all of them. They'll be online. We have tried to stick to mainstream sources in every episode because honestly, this shit was sitting out there for everyone to see. So we're citing the New York Times and the Washington Post and the L.A. Times and Bob Woodward and Cobra 2, one of the most popular books about the war. The facts and the sourcing, it's all there. It's all in plain view. And while we put

a bunch of time into this, I think what we've really just tried to do is assemble a counter history of what actually happened using the same set of facts that everyone else has had access to for all this time. Our interpretation and our emphasis, you may agree with or disagree with. But we thought that was something that would strengthen the factual backbone of the show. And the final thing on that subject of point of view,

we are obviously two American guys, and we are aware of that, both being American and being guys. And that is obviously going to affect how we see the story, how we tell the story. but one thing that I think we got lucky with is we have an Iraqi friend named Ra'ed, who is a political activist and advocate, and we bring him in oftentimes during the show and have him weigh in and have him describe through his own voice what it was like to be in Iraq. He lived in Iraq

through most of the events that we described and his family did when he wasn't there. And so that was important to us to have an Iraqi voice because we're telling the story the way that we think is right, but it was important for us to have that, and I think the show is all the better for it. So this has been our prologue. We'd like to give a big thanks to H. John Benjamin and James Adomian. Thank you, John. Thank you, James. Whose vocal stylings you heard at the beginning of the episode. Yes. There might be a few more cameo appearances by Saddam. Ooh. Oh, boy. I'm excited. Yeah, so that's our taster. That's our sampler. Thanks for listening to this one. Go check out our first episode, Rosebud. And we will see you on the other side.

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