Blowback - S1 Episode 1 - "Rosebud"

Episode Date: June 15, 2020

We trace the origins of America’s perverse relationship with Iraq, from the Cold War to the Iran-Iraq War in the 80s. Assassinations, coups, counter-coups, and the rise of Saddam. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

The voice is a place, let's think about Russian, and more, more, I might give you a chance if you wanted to take a... The voice you hear is Richard Nixon in the Oval Office in 1971, giving advice to a strapping young bureaucrat and former college wrestler named Don Rumsfeld. Dispensing career tips was Nixon's favorite thing, and in this case he was brainstorming what part of the world young Rumsfeld could use to build his resume as a diplomat. In case you couldn't hear those last thing to do about the Middle East. In case you couldn't hear those last words, Nixon insisted to Rumsfeld,

there's nothing you can do about the Middle East. And yet 13 years later, Rumsfeld strode through the Republican, palace in Baghdad to grip the hand of one Saddam Hussein. He was there, both on his own and as a representative of the American government, his goal to offer U.S. support to Saddam for Saddam's war against Iran. There are a lot of conversation around that he's a madman and crazy and so forth. I don't happen to believe he is at all.

He's a strong man. He's an intelligent man. He has a totally different value set than those of us in the United States. Iraqi cameras captured the meeting on video and, 20 years later, during the buildup to the Iraq War, the footage was played to Rumsfeld on CNN. December 20th, 1983, you were meeting with Saddam Hussein. I think we have some video of that. Tell me what was going on during this video. Where did you get this video? A couple of days after he rewatched that video, Rumsfeld stood in the White House press room,

cameras rolling again as he laid out the case to invade Iraq and to topple his one-time partner and our one-time client, Saddam Hussein. Every day, every week, every month that goes by, his weapons of mass destruction programs are more fully developed, more mature. Every day that goes by gives them other opportunities to connect with terrorist networks. How exactly did Rumsfeld get from his coffee with Nixon in 1971 to his consultation with Saddam in 1983 to his showdown with Saddam in 2003? That story is part of a much bigger one, namely how and why did Saddam ever get to be a friend and ally of America? only for us to then nominate him as global supervillain. Did Saddam turn on us?

Or did we turn on Saddam? And what is all this reveal about why we really went to war in 2003? Because something tells you, Rumsfeld knew the answer to that. When confronted with the footage of him meeting Saddam in the 80s, he didn't appear angry or irritated or ashamed. He simply said, Isn't that interesting? There I am.

There I am. Speak about this. Welcome to blowback. podcast about the Iraq War. I'm Brendan James. And I'm Noah Colwin. And this is our first episode, Episode 1, Rosebud. The show is going to come out weekly, dropping every Monday. But for those of you who don't want to wait, all 10 episodes of the main show are available right now in Stitcher Premium. You can get there by going to Stitcher Premium.com and signing up with the code, blowback, one word, which gets you a free month of Stitcher Premium. You're going to get ad-free listening, access to all

the Stitcher shows that they've got and access, of course, to all 10 episodes of a blowback. Plus, we've got bonus episodes coming in the pipeline, several of which are only ever going to be accessible through Stitcher Premium. So you'll get those as well. So if you want to listen to all of Blowback right now or at any point over the next couple months, that's StitcherPremium.com promo code Blowback. One more thing is that you might have noticed there's also an episode zero that's in your feed. Give that a listen if you haven't already because it's a prelude to the rest of the show. We talk about why we're doing this and what we want to get out of it, what we want you to get out of it. And we introduce a lot of the characters that we'll be going on

this perverse journey with. We get to know a little bit about Rumsfeld and Cheney and Condi Rice and Colin Powell and Paul Wolfowitz and all these goblins and ghouls that will become very important for the story coming up. But once you have listened to that, this is the real first episode where we start our story. And it's called Rosebud, because before we even get to 9-11 and the Bush administration and the actual war in Iraq, we want to find and trace the origin, you know, of America's perverse relationship with Iraq. Right. And to appreciate the full horror and irony of what happened when we invaded Iraq in 2003, you have to go back a long, long ways to see where the story begins. And it's a

story of British colonialism and Cold War politics and then the rise of Saddam. Yeah, we're going to see this revolution happen in Iraq at the end of the 50s. And in that revolution, we're going to meet two very important characters, one being Saddam Hussein himself, the other being Ahmed Chalabi, the self-appointed arch-nemesis of Saddam, who flees in the 1950s, his own country, and promises someday to come back with an American army and install himself as ruler. All right, let's do it. At the center of our world lies the Middle East and at its very heart the ancient land which is Iraq. Two great rivers span its length, the Tigris and Euphrates. Out of this ancient heritage, the citizens of one of the world's youngest nations

We're building a new life and a modern... It's doing the work for us. We can just leave that on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In 1920, Winston Churchill shot off a letter complaining about an uprising in Iraq, which was currently under British Dominion. And this is what he wrote.

I am strongly in favor of using poison gas against uncivilized tribes. Gases can be used which cause great inconvenience and would spread a lively terror. And the mustard gas on this occasion was not available, unfortunately, but the British did what they normally did and bombed the shit out of Iraqis, men, women, and children, until it was quiet again.

Ageless Iraq is no longer a remote, isolated country. Today, she is a main junction in the east and west. So in 1921, after this uprising, the British let the Iraqis have an election to install themselves. a king. And it ended up being a guy named Faisal the first. And what was the election that got Faisal looked like? It was he well, he ran as a single candidate. And he got 96% of the vote. Sick. That's the thing with the British Empire is that it's sort of like British TV versus

American TV where they did everything first, you know, the office, chemical attacks, divide and rule. But they did it very deadpan. Right. It's just kind of ironic. And the American approach is a lot more earnest and Jim and Pam get married and Iraq gets to be a real democracy. You know, and the British are just like, fuck it. You have a king now. You voted him in 96%. This is the original series. This is the UK. BBC. BBC Iraqi occupation. Now, a word about oil. Wealth in Iraq was absent until man found oil deep below the unproductive sand. The British took over Iraq from the Ottomans right around the time that oil was becoming the

uber commodity that we think of it as today. And Winston Churchill, when he wasn't writing letters saying that we should gas Iraqis, helped negotiate a sweetheart deal for the company that would eventually become BP. And it transitioned the British Navy from the still dominant coal to oil. And it was a secret deal. This was right before World War I in a period called the Great Unrest, which was a nearly half decade of intense labor action and strikes. Churchill was one of the guys in charge of putting down those strikes.

So converting to oil was one of those technological innovations that, you know, we think of like automation today that gave workers less leverage and less control over the production process. And oil was also a key part of imperial politics at the time, right? Well, this is sort of when that happened. So in the early 20th century, you have these oil companies, former cartel, basically, and carve up Iraq, and they're going to end up running it just as much as any government for a long time. And they create a consortium called the Iraq Petroleum Company, which, contrary to its name, gives precisely zero shares to the nation of Iraq itself.

Sheep stuffed with rice and a host of other good things. But that's only the first of the good things that will come to Iraq, thanks to oil. So after World War II, and in fact before that war was even wrapped up, America had already set its sights on the new enemy, the Soviet Union, which to American elites and military and captains of industry was a much bigger threat than the Nazis or fascism ever were. After that war, a now-superpowered America began to take an interest in Iraq as well. So that was what America really cared about in the Middle East at that moment, was using Iraq as a bulwark against the influence of communism and socialism. What can we do about it?

Every part of the world was going to be a front in our fight against the Red Menace, which is pretty rich because, say, for example, in the Middle East, in the late 50s, the Soviets proposed a moratorium on any meddling in the region. This included an embargo on weapons, pulling out all troops, closing all bases. And they offered this more than once, and the Western powers patiently listened to this pitch and responded. How about new? So by the end of the 50s, Iraq. functions as an outpost to British imperialism, a front in America's Cold War, and a valuable

holding of the international oil cartel. How did this work out for, let's say, I don't know, people of Iraq? Yeah, not good. Aside from a class of local collaborators with the British, Iraq was incredibly impoverished, not that it was a poor country. It was generating loads of wealth. It's just that all that was going to the American and British oil companies. Meanwhile, actual Iraqis lived in squalor. Their government didn't care about them. Infant mortality was 250 per thousand. There were no social services of any kind, and life was getting grimmer all the time. So maybe that's why in July 1958, the Iraqis had decided enough was enough. It was time for a revolution, and the British-sponsored monarchy went down. Without warning, revolution has swept

away the young king Faisal of Iraq. Explosive news from the Middle East, a military coup and mob revolt in Iraq topples King Faisal. Iraq becomes number one dangerous spot. People rose up all over the country, but the vanguard of this 1958 revolution was a free officer corps, a bunch of military nationalists, whose leader was a guy named General Qasim. Cassim was really imitating Nassar, the president of Egypt, who had done something similar in his country a couple years before.

And Nassar is important here because he's the poster boy, the avatar of anti-colonial pan-Arab politics in the Middle East. Iraq so vital to the Baghdad pact is temporarily at least in anti-Western hands. Meanwhile, back in America, President Ike Eisenhower and Vice President Richard Nixon held their breath and were preparing for a possible American military intervention to prevent any gains by the local Iraqi Communist Party. The Iraqi Communist called for provisions of bread, withdrawal of all foreign troops, democratic freedoms, things like that. One U.S. diplomat on the ground in Iraq wrote that the communists had support because they, quote, had worked very hard and are extremely well

organized. The veteran premier Nuri S. Side is deposed. He has fled and the Republican rebels have offered 10,000 pounds for his arrest. So this guy, the prime minister, when the revolution finally came, he tried to flee. And he was shot in the street and his body was rolled over by trucks until it was a fine pink paste. People just kept running him over until he was like pink mist. Like with like a steamroller? No, it did. No, like the naked gun with... My father went the same way. So this understandably made the British and American governments pretty nervous.

So they dispatched troops to friendly countries within the region. The basic fear was that revolutions like the one that had just happened in Iraq would continue to crop up and spread and then unite under Nassar. Remember Nassar was the first among equals in this anti-colonial movement that was happening in the Middle East. And that pretty soon all of the friendly governments to Britain and America would be overthrown. Only one thing is certain. The Kremlin is jubilant. Krushchev was quick to see in NASA, the leader who could weld the Arab world into anti-Western unity. Now, it's in this moment that we meet two characters of our story, sort of the Batman and Joker, who were found on opposite ends of this revolution. As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be Abathist.

Saddam Hussein was 21 in 1958, the year of the revolution. And he had grown up in the country, in the middle of Iraq. He was a country boy near the city of Tikrit. And it was a lot like the country anywhere. A lot of people carried guns wherever they went, and local loyalties and connections counted for a lot. And a year before the revolution, Saddam had joined an up-and-coming political movement called the Ba'ath Party.

And let's pause here to talk about what the Ba'ath was because it's going to become very significant to our story. The Ba'ath Party was in a couple countries in the Middle East. They'd eventually split off and have rivalries. And their ideology was just kind of a hodgepodge. You know, it was a little bit nationalism, pan-Arabism, it was a little bit socialism. It's not to say communism because of the Ba'ath was one thing.

It was anti-communism. Yeah, that was the glue that held them together and would ultimately form the base of their support from abroad and internally was the fact that they were the most effective anti-communists. I kill a communist for fun. For a green card, I'm going to carve him up real nice. And they weren't really ever a popular party. And they didn't claim to be a popular party. Yeah, its message was that of Renaissance for the Arab world, and it would have cells that would come to power, you know, of Ba'ath parties. Right. And this included like military officers and people from the professional and upper classes, but it

was not a mass movement. Yeah, that's true. And the ideology we'll see is going to twist and turn and largely end up serving the leaders of the Ba'ath party rather than the other way around. For his part, Saddam later said that he became a nationalist and not a communist because social divisions where he grew up were not that significant. Quote, I never felt at a social disadvantage, even I, a peasant's son. Now, the Ba'ath party are going to turn big time on General Qasim. But in these heady days of July 1958, they're still basically on the same side

kicking out the hated British puppet regime. So while Saddam was cutting his teeth in this new revolutionary political situation by joining the Ba'ath Party, the man who would one day flatter the Bush administration

into war with Iraq in 2003 was having a very different experience of the revolution. Ahmed Chalabi was born in Baghdad in 1944, and he grew up about as far from Saddam's circumstances as you could probably get. He was the ninth and final child of an incredibly prominent, wealthy, Shia business family. And his father had connections with the British and the monarchy and Shia leaders all throughout Iraq. Chalabi was 14 when the revolution broke out in Iraq.

And his biographer, Aram Rostin, writes that at this time, Chalabi was pampered, happy, and studious. And he never saw the squalor and misery that his fellow Iraqis were living under that we described before. Rosten writes, from his childhood perspective, weighs high to the wealthy and well-educated. This Iraq was an eclectic and tolerant place. So for young Chalabi watching it all come crashing down with this revolution, it sparked his lifelong obsession. not only to restore this fictional Iraq of his memories, but to be the one in charge of it next time. And a relative told Chalabee's biographer,

if you're looking for Rosebud, like Citizen Kane, look to the 1958 revolution. Because as much as they wanted it, Chalabee and his family did not get their American invasion that year. But he'd spend the rest of his days working on that. So by the end of the 50s, we've seen Iraq go from being a British possession to becoming an independent state under the nationalist military regime of General Qasim. Unfortunately for Qasim, he didn't really end up pleasing anybody during his short few years in power. He pissed off the Americans and the British by nationalizing a lot of Iraqi oil.

He also pissed off the Ba'ath Party by not going far enough and being more revolutionary like. Nasser. And he also pissed everyone off by having communist friends in and out of government because he needed a popular base of support to do the things he wanted to do. We should also probably mention that at this point, Baghdad is skirmishing, if not outright going to war with the Kurds. And let's, for people who don't know, let's, let's clarify who the Kurds are in Iraq. The Kurdish people are a cultural and ethnic minority that live mostly in northern Iraq, but there are Kurdish people in Syria and Iran and other countries in the region. Yeah.

And we'll see all types of horrific confrontation between Baghdad and the Kurds coming up. But at this point, they're kind of on the same side as everyone else, including the Ba'ath, in wanting to get rid of Qasim. Hard cut. October 7th, 1959, you have a dashing. Let's just be honest. We've seen the photos from him. He's hot.

He's looking good. He looks really good. A dashing young Saddam, who's seen. who at this point is 22, with a machine gun in hand in Baghdad, downtown Baghdad, waiting for Kassim's car to come rolling down the street. And he's part of a larger kill team of six other guys, and they're going to really do the deed, but he's going to provide cover for his comrades. And to be clear, I don't believe that he was actually supposed to be there in the original plan.

That's true. He was a last-minute call-up. Yeah, he was, he was, like, somebody got, somebody got sick. Yeah. And he was the guy that they pulled up. So, like, this was not, these were not, like, you know, CIA trained expert death squads. This was... Rather, rather amateurish. Yes.

These were, this was the JV team of coup of coup plotters. Yeah. It was so amateurish, in fact, that they didn't kill Qasim. And who did they kill instead? They killed one of their own guys. As Edil Darwish and Gregory Alexander's talk about it in their book. Unholy Babylon. They were organized around the car, and they pulled out their guns, and they started shooting.

The aim was terrible, which explains why there were some people caught in their own crossfire, but also there were guns that jammed. So the whole thing, from the moment that they tried to carry out this assassination attempt, and then Qasim went to shit. Instant fail. So Qasim was hit, though. He was hit in the shoulder and the arm, and, you know, he was pretty gravely wounded. He ended up surviving.

His driver did not. Saddam, either, I mean, probably through his own partners, was hit in the leg and he scrambles, he flees. We know he was being hunted by the intelligence services and he escaped to Cairo through Syria. And there he was remembered alternatively by different people as a stoic straight edge and a troublemaker and a deadbeat. And again, who's to say? Notably, Palestinian journalist Saeed Aburish believes that this is around the time when he was in Cairo. Saddam became in touch with the local CIA station to further any general kind of plans or schemes against Qasim. Yeah, because even though this hit didn't work, the CIA still wanted him gone.

The Baathist wanted him gone. Correct. Other Arab leaders wanted him gone. Let's whack this cuck sucker and be done with it. In spring of 62, John F. Kennedy asked the CIA to begin plotting for Qasim's overthrow and, you know, I don't know how exactly that conversation went down. Ask not what the bath party can do for you, but what you can do for the bath body. Something like that. Yeah. Now, Kennedy's go-to man was Archie Roosevelt, Jr., who was one half of a CIA spook brother duo with Kim Roosevelt, who engineered the coup in Iran in 1953,

which is a real dream team, brother. The Kubi brothers. Yeah. And by the way, look up their photos. They both look like absolute freaks. Wait, hold on. Let me, can I pull this up? Yeah, you can pull it up. I'm going to keep going. The CIA's health alteration committee, which is a real, that's a real thing, sent a poison handkerchief to Qasim, or some people say one of his colonels, in an attempt to send a message. That handkerchief did an Egyptian to my mother give. What happened next will shock you. The streets of ancient Baghdad become the scene of a short but decisive revolution that topples

the pro-communist government of Premier Abdel Karim Kasim. February 1963 on Ramadan, military officers allied with the bath carried out a temporarily successful coup. But it was successful enough that they executed Qasim on live TV. Well, it's the hallmark of any successful coup, really. Right. Once you have TV, you've got to do the execution. And his corpse was buried in a shallow grave and chewed up by dogs. So the Ba'ath party had arrived. Now, the big question here, how involved was the CIA in the overthrow of Qasim and the rise of the Ba'ath party?

because this is the ascension of Saddam Hussein's party, the one that he will take over and then rule Iraq for the next several decades until the Americans invade in 2003. So if we had anything to do with helping them or installing them, that'd be pretty fucking goofy, wouldn't it? This is what Abath Party secretary said in an interview in the 90s, quote, We came to power on a CIA train. James Critchley, who was once the CIA's head of the Middle East at the time of the coup, quote, we watched the bath's long, slow preparation to take control. We really had the tease crossed on what was happening. We regarded it as a great victory. And they had definitely developed assets by 1961, of which Saddam was probably a junior example. And this is an anecdote, but a friend

of mine who's from Kurdistan, he said his dad saw a friend of his or an acquaintance of his at like the market one day back in the 60s. And the guy was like, yeah, hey, I actually just joined the Both party. And, you know, these are people who are members of the ethnic minority. And so his dad was like, what the fuck? Why would you do that? They're Arab nationalists. They hate us. And he went, well, I did it because I'm getting a stipend from the CIA now. So I think that- Yeah, I subscribe to the CIA's Patreon. Yeah. The presence of the CIA, I think we can definitely say, was confirmed at the very least. And one thing is for sure, which is that when the coup was complete, Bathis death squads rolled up their sleeves.

and began, as the British put it, quote, winkling out the communists. The new government, which promises a modification of Qasem's bitterly anti-British, anti-American, and anti-Nasar policies, has been emptying the jails of political prisoners and replacing them with communists, rounded up since the revolution. Up to 5,000 were killed following the coup in 63,

and about 15,000 rounded up in total. And the new Booth government worked with the Iraqi Petroleum Company in sending political prisoners to concentration camps. When they are found, the communists from, other countries are deported. Native Reds are set before firing squads. As the Arabs show, they are more concerned about the dangers of communism than is realized. A U.S. diplomat put it a little more sociopathically, quote, we were very happy. They got rid of a lot of communists. A lot of them were executed or shot. This was a great development. So while this is going on in Iraq,

like the bots have taken power and like cassim is gone and they're going to work on the communists like where's saddam uh saddam at this point has arrived back in iraq from cairo back in iraq back in the new york groove back in the bagdad groove saddam at this point had arrived back in iraq uh and he was now starting to climb the party ladder there's tell from both his own myth-making and then the myth-making of his enemies that he was presiding over the torture rooms and putting people in acid and stuff

and I don't know if we can, again, trust either rather cinematic telling of what he was doing around this time. We do know that around this time he married his lovely wife, Sajita, and they started what would become a very close-knit and loving family. That's a man who doesn't spend time

of his family can ever be a real man. Whatever the degree of CIA involvement, the U.S. government made contact with the Ba'ath hours after the coup and pledged recognition for the new regime. And in April, we started shipping the arms, which the Ba'ath would use to hack away at the Kurds. By this time, the Soviets were providing support for the Kurds against Baghdad, which made the Kennedy administration back the Ba'ath Party even more than they otherwise would have. And that summer, the USSR actually suspended military aid to Iraq. and they went to the U.N. and called the Baoth Party a fascist, quote, regime that was committing, quote, genocide, which, of course, are charges that rather insincerely were going to hear from the U.S. decades and decades later, after this instance of us completely supporting them. Okay, I call this segment, what the Christ is wrong with the Kurds, Bob, because... NBC News, projected Richard Nixon, the 37th president of the United States.

In 1968, the Ba'ath Party took power again, as did Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. Having lost a close one eight years ago, and having won a close one this year, I can say this. Winning's a lot more fun. The big picture at this moment is that the British are getting out of the Gulf States, winding down imperial commitments. Nassar is dead in 1970. Sadat is who takes his place in Egypt. and it's largely a reaction to Nassar, his assumption of power, and he expels a bunch of the Nassarites of Pan-Arabism is no longer...

On the wane. Yeah, it's not the force that it once was. R.I.P. Shut out. Yes. Moscow, meanwhile, is, like, retaining influence in a couple different pockets in the region, but functionally, the story is still one of what the Americans are then doing. It means that they have to find their boys. Yes.

and one of those boys is definitely going to be the Shah of Iran. You know that fat cock sucker says I look like the Shah of Iran? I never got that at all. That piece of shit. His imperial majesty, Mohamed Reza Shah Pahlavi of Iran, begins a three-day visit to Washington. U.S. presidents from Kennedy to Carter regarded the Shah as the ideal ruler to secure the interests of the West in the Gulf area now that the British had left. The portrait of Iran today, especially today, is that of the Islamic Republic. But that did not yet exist in the Nixon years. Iran was still

a secular monarchy and a dictatorship, thanks to our coup that we did there in 1953. So under the Nixon doctrine, the Shah was a great partner of the U.S. He was also a huge piece of shit. Demonstrators protest outside the West Berlin Opera House where the Shah of Iran with Empress Farras attends the performance of Mozart's magic flute, denouncing the Shah as a murderer who arrests, tortures and kills political opponents, the crowd clashes with Berlin police. During the Nixon years, and in fact beyond his resignation, Kissinger in the 70s pursued a policy of triangulation between Iran and Iraq, who both hated each other and were sniping over pieces of territory and access to the Gulf, and the Kurds, to whom we gave a shitload

of money and guns and outright encouragement in their war against Baghdad for independence. The Shah loved this because it was a way to tie down and embarrass his neighbor and rival in Iraq. For the past six years, Galala has been on constant alert for the daily wine of Iraqi jets overhead. It's the main supply center for the Kurdish warriors, or Peshmergers, as they call themselves. The name means those who are prepared to die, and hundreds of them have died for what they now call the liberated area of Kurdistan. But in early 1975, Saddam, who is now the clear strong man in Iraq. Iraq, even though he was still technically number two, slipped to Algiers with the Shah, and with American mediation, the two hammered out a deal to play nice and stop sniping at each other.

This was a big victory for everybody except for the Kurds, who were on the eve of facing a brutal campaign from Baghdad. And after all those years of being encouraged and supported by the U.S. and the Shah, their former benefactors said, oops, got to go, and left them to slaughter. Little Polly was good to go. Fuck a car never came. They left them waiting outside his house like an asshole. What was the U.S. saying about Saddam in the 70s? What was Saddam actually doing at this moment domestically? He was increasingly taking hold of the right levers of power that you would need if you ever wanted to, say, stab your boss in the back in 1979 and take over.

But more broadly than that, Saddam was one piece of a very successful, it has to be said, Ba'ath administration in the 70s. Iraq through no shortage of oil wealth, but also some quasi-socialism that was well administered by the party. It became probably the most dynamic and, if you like, progressive state in the Arab world. And I'm just going to real quick throw it to our friend Ra'ed. He's an Iraqi political advocate and activist who we've interviewed for a lot of different things on this show. Here he is talking about this, you know, version of Iraq that used to exist. The economy was blooming there.

Iraq was becoming a major regional power. So things were stable. There was definitely political dictatorship. But outside of politics, life was okay. The government provided Iraqis with basic services. Iraq had one of the best education systems, one of the best health systems in the region. It basically just became one of those success stories of a third world country, you know, post-colonial, that managed to turn its natural resource wealth into a thriving economy. And one thing Saddam did visibly, even though he was still at this point, only number two in the party, is that he fully wrenched the Iraqi oil reserves away from Western companies.

And so that was a hugely populist and nationalist move that he would be dining out on for the rest of his days. There was also a CIMMO to talk about what the Americans thought. They say he's a shrewd, ruthless operator, adept at keeping his opponents off balance. I feel like there's somebody we should check in on it. Yes, Ahmed Chalabi in the 70s, while all this stuff was going on back in Iraq, he had moved to Lebanon and had become a professor at the American University of Beirut. And he was a mathematician. He was apparently quite bright in this field.

But the Lebanese Civil War that was raging in the 70s started to get a little bit hot for him, and he packed up and left and took up his real birthright as one of the many corrupt children running the Chalabi banking empire. He relocated to Jordan and founded a bank called Petra Bank. In 1978, the bank's assets were 40 million, and by 1982, they were 400 million, a tenfold increase. And he built a big mansion and started to make friends with a lot of Western journalists and think tank people and politicians, many of whom will come in handy.

in the Rolodex several years later. But one person in Petrobank recalled during its boom times, you could determine something was not kosher. This will all erupt next episode. Suffice to say, not for the last time, Chalaby had shed his skin and gone from Professor to one of the most powerful economic influencers in the Middle East. So by 1979, Saddam has a peace deal with the Shah

and another campaign against the Kurds behind him. Warming relations with America, particularly with the CIA, which, oh, look at that, was run by George H.W. Bush, whose son W. around this time was, around this time, I think, forming an energy company with Bin Laden's brother. So starting to come into his own. But Saddam, this is when he really became the man he'd be for the rest of his life. It was the year that he made his big move. It was July 1979. and he simply approached Hassan al-Bacher, who is his cousin.

He's the guy, I mean, he's the head of the Ba'ath party. He's a de facto head of state. President Ahmed al-Bacher has become little more than a figurehead. And according to Saddam's propagandists, too old and ill to govern. And Saddam told him, you look ill. You should really take it easy. And let me cover the presidency for you. I think you'd be better that way.

And Bachar was like, no, I feel fine. Oh. I have to go now. What happened next is referred to as the Ba'ath Party purge, and it's exactly what it sounds like. Saddam called a emergency assembly of Ba'ath Party officials and leaders. He sat in a crowded hall at the front of the room, jumping a big cigar,

and informed everybody that regrettably he had discovered the existence of a Syrian-backed plot inside of the Iraqi Ba'ath Party to overthrow him. the legitimate leadership of the country. Out was trotted, an unfortunate man who behind the scenes had opposed Saddam's seizure of power. Clearly, having been tortured, he read from a piece of paper a confession that he had indeed been part of a plot. And this was all spooky enough, but then he began to read off a list of names of people

who were in the hall, who were supposed co-conspirators. And this was all videotaped. Some protest their innocence, but are quickly hauled away. Others in the assembly begin to weep and chant proclamations to his greatness and declare absolute loyalty to his rule. As soon as major hostilities broke out between the two oil producers, Iraq and Iran, we came here to Baghdad to watch OPEC at war, to look in particular at a regime seeking supremacy in the Gulf, and at its remarkable president, Saddam Hussein,

one of the least known but most effective rulers in the Middle East. As Saddam's rise to power in Iraq in the 1970s was being cemented, things were getting dicey for America's best friend in the region, the Shah of Iran. As Iran's urban population was exploding, rents were getting higher, inflation was becoming a bigger problem, and civil services, more generally across the country, began breaking down. Although Iran bought into Western companies and invested millions in Asia and Africa, many Iranians remained poor and illiterate.

Agricultural performance was low. Industrial productivity disappointing. In the towns, the pockets of poverty were obvious. Sheep wandered among the debris of over rapid urbanization. These were the conditions in which the Islamic revolution in Iran took place. Residents, revolutionaries, soldiers, driving through the streets, waving pistols, rifles, machine guns. The end of Iran's monarchy came early today when Khomeini's followers took control of the palace of the Shah. On the 16th of January, 1979, the Shah left Iran.

He was never to return. Led by Shiite clerics, religious conservatives for the most part, but representing a pretty, broader coalition across society, they took the place of the Shah in 1979. For Humanei, the flight from Paris to Tehran marked the end of 15 years in exile. In an obvious reference to the United States, he said foreign advisors have ruined our culture and have taken our oil. Saddam saw an opportunity for himself. On September 22nd, 1980, about a year after the revolution, Saddam, after a few weeks

of lower-level skirmishes finally pulled the trigger on an invasion. The immediate justification for the war was control over the Shat al-Arab waterway, which is what divides Iran from Iraq and Iraq-Southeast. Although Iraq and Iran had signed that 1975 agreement that we mentioned earlier, and that agreement had put the border squarely down the middle of the waterway, that was practically ancient history of Saddam by 1980, given that the Shah was no longer running Iran. Iran. In fact, it was Ayatollah Khomeini who was running Iran. Why did either of them want the

waterways so badly? I mean, it was, it leads out into the Persian Gulf and it's an incredible and important conduit for oil shipping routes. They thus control a huge conduit for the most valuable natural resource that dictates both of these national economies. This is also, this maneuver was a response to perceived threats on Saddam's end. Iraq is mostly a Shia country, and Saddam is part of a Sunni sect that rules the country, and thus it's natural that he's kind of terrified of a Shia revolution next door. While there was never the same kind of energy to follow Khomeini's revolution in Iraq, there were still religious elements that were calling for an uprising. In fact, Mokhtad al-Sadr, who is the cleric in Iraq today with a huge populist following,

his father-in-law called for an uprising in 79, not so that Iraq could become like a client state of Iran and they could be best friends with Khomeini and the clerics in Iran specifically. But it was obviously dynamically, they wanted something similar and he wanted it for Iraq. And Saddam put him to death. Yeah, this is an early look at what will become a very key part of this show, which is from literally one generation of Al-Sauders to the next, the oppression and radicalization of certain Iraqi Shia groups and leaders, all of whom Saddam considered subversive. And, you know, there's also a kind of general sense among Arab leaders throughout the Persian Gulf at this moment, who were looking at Iran and are thinking, fuck, what if I'm next? Because this was a Shia power center that was

not under the control of their friend and benefactor, the U.S. Certainly, the United States was not happy to see the emergence of the Islamic Republic of Iran. No. And if you're Saddam and you are looking to prove that you are somebody that the U.S. wants to engage with and that the U.S. wants to invest in and nurture and support, then going after the people at the top of the U.S.'s shit list is probably a good way to do it. And whoever wins this war gets to be the dominant power in control of, I mean, effectively oil distribution networks in the most critical space of oil production in the entire world. And that's obviously no small pride.

So the stars are basically aligned against Iran here, particularly for Saddam to make a move with the acquiescence, if not outright encouragement behind closed doors of the United States. Yes. And the UN, when the Security Council convened in September immediately after the invasion happened, the Western powers intervened quickly to prevent the Security Council from putting out a statement that would have actually directly condemned Saddam. The Iranians, obviously not incorrectly, began to think like, huh, everybody's putting their thumb on the scale against us, which actually would later turn out during the hostage crisis and the occupation of the American and embassy in Tehran, that the Iranians would actually find intelligence that would actually

later go on to confirm their suspicions about what the U.S. really supported here, even if publicly everybody was saying like, oh, geez, what a what a pickle this is. Iranian resistance crumbled in the early days to the advancing Iraqis. There are signs now that they might not be having it all their own way, but in this sector, at least, the Iraqis are jubilant. Initially, it seemed like the Iran-Iraq war might actually be a short one. The word Blitzkrieg gets used a lot to describe Saddam's strategy. Saddam actually, in fact, had hoped to emulate the Israelis who, because of really, really smart

air power usage in 1967, were able to win the six-day war in six days. But the Iran-Iraq War would become, it's the closest that we're ever probably going to come to a second version of World War I. Generally, the line that's used to describe the Iran-Iraq War is that it was the longest conventional war of the 20th century. Now, these initial air attacks that Saddam wanted to use to punish Iran, they didn't work. And so then SOM switched and changed the focus to a 100,000 manstrong ground offensive, which was stopped by the Iranians at a certain point,

who had also studied the Israelis and had studied where the Israelis had screwed up in the Yom Kippur War and had been able to stop Saddam's advance. And so what was initially supposed to be like this Saddam week-long victory campaign thing, it did not turn out that way. A dawn raid by Iranian jets, signaling that Iraq does not have it all its own way in this war. By late October, 1980, about a month after Iraq first invaded, the war had reached a stalemate, and a month after that point, Iran had begun successfully executing a naval blockade of Iraq.

So rather than risk losing standing, Saddam committed himself to what would become this long, drawn-out war. You got to commit. Exactly. There was no backing down. The Iranians launched a counter-offensive to take back what territory they had lost, and Iranian-backed Kurds opened up to new front of war against Saddam. Right, in the north of Iraq. As is always the case with the Kurds in Iraq and Iran-Iraq tensions. The Kurds are re-weaponized

at precisely at the point at which it becomes convenient for somebody to do that. As this is going on, there's obviously like a whole other series of like geopolitical tensions and concerns with Iraq, the biggest of which is about Iraq's efforts to acquire a nuclear weapon, which they were doing with the help of the Italians, but primarily the French. And in 1981, Israel, which was the biggest hater of Iraq's nuclear program as the only other existing nuclear power in the Middle East, bombed and destroyed Iraq's nuclear reactor called Osirac in June of 1981. And ironically, destroying Iraq's nuclear ambitions, at least at that point, proved to be incredibly important for the Iraqis.

The French historian Pierre Rzou had this to say about it. Quote, it was only once Iraq lost any hope of having nuclear power, thereby limiting the risks of proliferation in the region, that Washington and Moscow considered reestablishing their ties with Baghdad. Because up until then, you know, another desperate nuclear power in the Middle East was not something that either Moscow or Washington really wanted to deal with. That changed. But even before Osyrak, there was in the bombing, there were signs that Washington was

warming up to Saddam because of the invasion. In 1981, for example, William Eagleton, an American diplomat in Iraq, wrote in a cable to Washington, to the recently elected Reagan government, saying that, quote, we now have a greater convergence of interest of Iraq than at any time since the revolution of 1958. A year later, the State Department would remove Iraq from the list of state sponsors of terrorism. And, you know, when after the Osirac bombing happened, King Hussein of Jordan, you know, probably the West's favorite, you know, like still existing colonial ruler functionally, he got in touch with Saddam and let him know that the West would be opening to a general

softening of relations. And Moscow started delivering dozens of fighter planes to Iraq that had previously held up. So by 1982, there would have been an Iranian counteroffensive that kind of brought this war to this place of stalemate. And it's at this point that we should probably talk about the gas. Mustard gas and nerve agents were delivered by small, innocent-looking, planes based near Baghdad. At first, the scale of its use surprised the Iranians who were forbidden by Ayatollah Khomeini from following suit. Beginning in 1983, Iraq had begun using deadly gas attacks against Iran, starting with mustard gas, which you might know about from World War I. Between 1983 and 84, Donald Rumsfeld, a guy, he made two visits to Iraq, part of the Reagan administration's

efforts to beef up its relationships with Saddam's regime. Here's Rumsfeld later talking about it. Iran had taken hostages, our American people in the embassy. And it seemed logical to President Reagan and Secretary Shultz and to me that we ought to at least try to develop a better relationship with Saddam Hussein. During Rumsfeld's second trip to Iraq in March 1984, a United Nations report was released, and it concluded that Iraqi forces had begun using chemical weapons in the fight against Iran. We had a good visit, and shortly thereafter, we did reestablish relationships.

with Iraq? The Americans, they were not only okay with Iraq's use of chemical weapons, but they would actually later provide intelligence to Iraqis to help them use those chemical weapons more effectively. We also sold him chemical weapons. Yes. The Iraqis got this capacity in the first place for chemical weapons from the West. Part of this was because of steps that Saddam had taken to, quote, dessocialize the Iraqi economy, moving it away from a centrally planned economic model and letting in Western businesses. And, And as part of this and as this general trend, Iraq began developing very expansive business relationships with all sorts of Western companies that would sell him the stuff that he wanted

to buy. So just a short list of the countries that would sell him this like arms and stuff, you know, it includes isn't going to be good. No, no, no. It's it's out West Germany, Spain, Britain, France, Norway, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, and the Netherlands. Germany is actually a particularly funny case because the West German government would sell chemical weapons and materials to Iraq and then they would sell the protective gear against those things to the Iranians. Yeah. And for America's part, in the mid-80s, the U.S. Commerce Department rubber

stamped shipments to Iraq of anthrax and insecticides, which everyone knew was being used for chemical weapons. That was discovered in a Senate Banking Committee report in the 90s. The U.K. is also kind of funny, too, because basically a British Iraqi army. scheme would later bring down the Tory government of John Major in the 1990s and thus create the opening for a certain man named Tony Blair, who had some business with Saddam Hussein many, many years later. You know, and look, we backed Saddam Hussein to the Hilt and cared a lot about him, but also we let the Israelis sell weapons to Iran. Yeah, we should mention that while this is, this is a tough section because there's so many layers happening here. Because let's see here,

You have the U.S. giving Iraq intelligence and arms and chemical weapons so they can fight their enemy Iran. Then you have Iran-Contra, where we sell Iran arms so we can use the money to fund right-wing death squads in Nicaragua. Then our ally Israel bombs Iraq to destroy their nuclear capabilities. But then we also give Iran intelligence about saying the Iraqisians. But none of this is really contradictory at the end of the day because ultimately the goal of the U.S. is not for anyone to triumphantly win, but for both Iraq. Iraq and Iran to end up exhausted and weak and ultimately still under the thumb of American global domination. Eventually, however, the U.S. started to put its thumb on the scale on behalf of Iraq. American satellites had actually picked up Iranian troop movements in 1987, suggesting a

substantial Iranian offensive would be coming the following spring aimed directly at a major hole in the Iraqi front lines. The hole would have allowed the Iranians to perhaps capture Basra, Iraq's largest city close to the Persian Gulf, and it would have given Iran control of the oil fields and the shipping routes that the war was initially started over in the first place. A retired Air Force colonel told journalists many years later that he'd seen a direct message on the subject written by Reagan himself, and it said an Iranian victory is unacceptable. After supplying Iraq with valuable intelligence on Iranian targets, mapping out what the Iraqis would need to do to attack Iran, Saddam launched a sarin gas attack on Iranian forces. And it

worked. From 1987 onward, the use of chemical weapons would actually explode. In fact, CIA estimates suggest that two-thirds of all Iraqi chemical weapons used came after that year until the war ended the next year. By March 88,

Iraq would actually go farther than it ever had before in its brutality. A key front that's, well, all this is going on for the Iran-Iraq war, is the Kurdish front. And this is northern Iraq. Different Kurdish factions had different relationships of varying warmth with Iran.

You know, left-wing groups were more Iran-sceptical, but generally speaking, the Kurds were, as ever, caught between Iran and Iraq. And as the war drew on, the Kurdish front along Iraq's northeastern border with Iran became a very particular area of focus for Saddam. In 87, Saddam launched the on-fall campaign, which is now pretty much commonly described as a genocide against the Kurds. Estimates generally put the number of Kurdish dead at between 50s, 50,000 and 100,000 people.

Though the on-fall campaign came toward the end of the Iran-Iraq War and was prompted by Iranian military action, it was the latest in a series of Ba'athist efforts, like a kind of Saddam effort, to Arabis, quote-unquote, Iraqi cultural and ethnic minorities, like the Kurds, the Assyrians, and Yazidis. Why would the Iraqis do it to the Arab people? They did it to us.

To us is okay. We are enemies, okay. We are fighting together. But why to his own people? In March of 88, the Iranians do it. Iranians had made a pretty substantial push to damage Iraqi electrical infrastructure in this region near the Kurdish front, and they actually made it pretty far before being beaten back by Iraq. In response to Iran's limited success, Saddam decided that a show of fear was necessary. Saddam ordered Hassan al-Majid, a cousin of his who was in charge of these Kurdish regions, to raise the small Kurdish city of Halabja, which is located a few miles west of the Iraqi-Iranian border.

between 3,000 and 5,000 people died from a combination of napalm, sarin gas, mustard gas, tube and gas, and other chemical agents. And Halabja would ultimately be the thing that actually got the international community to start more loudly declaring for the war to end. There were countless heartbreaking sites, which told stories of how parents had desperately tried to shelter their young from the invisible vapors. There's another incident that happens around this time that I think is pretty, we should talk about.

In mid-1988, an American ship struck an Iranian mine laid as part of the, quote, tanker war, this other front of the Iran-Iraq war that was basically fights between and skirmishes between Iraqi and Iranian forces actually in the Persian Gulf. On July 3rd of 88, the United States this afternoon acknowledged that a missile from an American ship in the Persian Gulf shot down accidentally an Iran-air passenger plane with 290 people on board. All of those people, passengers and crew, believed, to, have died in the crash. U.S. government initially misled reporters about how the plane was brought down, placing the blame on an overenthusiastic Iranian pilot. We believe that the cruiser USS Vincennes,

while actively engaged with threatening Iranian surface units and protecting itself from what was concluded to be a hostile aircraft, shot down an Iranian airliner over the straits of Hormuz. Captain, I'm not lying. Captain Will Rogers III, Captain in charge of the Vincennes, he was actually awarded a medal for his service in the Persian Gulf after the war was over. and defense officials and journalists have since identified that actually know it was Will Rogers who had brought the Vincennes into Iranian waters and that he should have been held responsible

for downing of the plane. George H.W. Bush, who was on the campaign trail to run as Reagan's successor at the time when he was approached about what had just happened. He was how he described his attitude on the situation. Quote, I will never apologize for the United States. I don't care what the facts are. After some last clashes in the summer of and peace negotiations in New York, the war came to an end. About 180,000 Iraqis and 500,000 Iranians died, and there were about a million and a half wounded. Iraq ended the war with a standing army of awesome size,

a million men under arms, five times as many as in 1918. They were armed with the latest rockets, tanks, and artillery. But to pay for them, Iraq's economy had been mortgaged to the tune of nearly $100 billion. The quote that gets thrown around all the time about the Iran-Iraq War is predictably from Kissinger, who while it was going on was reported to say, it's a pity they both can't lose. But in truth, they did both lose. And Saddam had to save face after eight years by claiming it was a great victory.

But in fact, after the war with Iran, Iraq would never be the same. And next week, we're going to look at the final blow that would make sure it would never recover in the Gulf War. But before we close this episode, I just want to mention. and one more incident that I think is not very well known. Near the end of the war, in May 1987, the Iraqis accidentally struck with two missiles a U.S. ship that was beaming intelligence about Iranian troop movements to the Iraqi army.

This ended up killing 37 American crewmen. Now, you'd think that, especially given recent events, something like that would result in not only headlines, but also someone getting in trouble in the Persian Gulf. But in fact, Saddam shot off a quick apology to President Reagan and submitted to a brisk inquiry from the Americans. And Reagan decided not even to demand any compensation from Iraq. And why is this? I mean, by this point, we know that Iraqi lives don't matter to these people.

We know that Iranian lives don't matter to these people. But here we see that not even American lives, not even troop lives, so sacred normally in our speeches. our culture, they don't matter either, because it's just business. And I want to go out here with Reagan speaking at the memorial of the U.S. crewmen who died by the two Iraqi missiles. See you next time. See you later. Even at moments like these, then we must address directly the reason the USS Stark and her men were there in the Persian Gulf.

You're entitled to know the important. of the role that their valor played in keeping our world safe for peace and freedom. It is a region that is at crossroads for three continents and the starting place for the oil that is the lifeblood of much of the world economy. And our role there is essential to building the conditions for peace in that troubled, dangerous part of the world. Our aim is to prevent not to provoke wider conflict. So it's a simple truth we reaffirm. here today, young Americans of the USS Stark gave up their lives so that wider war and greater conflict could be avoided.