Blowback - S1 Episode 10 - "The Iraq War Did Not Take Place"

Episode Date: August 17, 2020

Invading Iraq means never having to say you’re sorry. The end of Bush, the broken promise of Obama, and the rise of ISIS and Donald Trump.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

On Monday, George W. Bush will campaign in South Carolina for his brother. As you've said tonight, and you've often said, the Iraq war and your opposition to it was a sign of your good judgment. Do you still believe President Bush should have been impeached? First of all I have to say, as a businessman, I get along with everybody. I have business all over the world. I get along with everybody, which is my obligation to my company, to myself, etc. Obviously, the war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake, all right? Now, you can take it any way you want, and it took Jeb Bush, if you remember at the beginning of his announcement, when he announced the president, took him five days. He went back. It was a mistake. It was a mistake. It took him five days before his people told him what to say. And he ultimately said it was a mistake. The war in Iraq, we spent $2 trillion, thousands of lives.

We don't even have it. Iran is taking over Iraq with the second largest oil reserves in the world. Obviously, it was a mistake. George Bush made a mistake. We can make mistakes. But that one was a beauty. We should have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East.

So you still think he should be impeached? I think it's my turn, isn't it? You do whatever you want. You call it whatever you want. I want to tell you, they lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none, and they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass.

Okay. speak about this love sign I'm welcome to blowback I'm Brendan James And I'm Noah Colwyn And this is episode 10 Aachnophobia So if you've hung in there with us through 10 episodes

we appreciate you and we love you. That's going far. I don't have any commitment to... You may think that they're hogs. I think that they are our friends. On today's episode, the last episode, we are going to wrap up a couple of details and finer points in our story

from the end of last episode and also continue to talk a little bit about the aftermath of the surge, the exit of George W. Bush and his administration, the entrance of Obama. And we're going to close the episode with a bit of a reflection on the whole story and where we are now. The military objectives of the surge are in large measure being met.

In recent months, in the face of tough enemies and the brutal summer heat of Iraq, coalition and Iraqi security forces have achieved progress. in the security arena. So by December 2008, a full 58% of Americans thought that it had been a mistake to invade Iraq, according to Gallup polling. It seemed fairly obvious by that point that things had gone totally wrong. Saddam Hussein, now dead, was not some global load star of jihadism. WMD wasn't in Iraq.

Technically, while Al-Qaeda was in Iraq, that was only because we invaded Iraq. And then Al-Qaeda also came into Iraq. It was a fuck-up. epic civilizational scale i guess now the much vaunted strategy of the surge which we talked about last episode and we're going to wrap up on today uh it was something of of a flop it wasn't a flop in the sense that like things immediately went to shit when the surge happened but just that the actual uh accomplishment of the surge was not the thing that it was made out to be it was the batman versus Superman of military strategies.

Stay down. If I wanted it, you'd be dead already. It did technically achieve its goal, but it was in a paltry comparison to what everyone expected and desired. Right, right. I do think that the Christopher Nolan version of the Iraq War, had we ever been able to wage it, would have been a real crowd pleaser. The Iraq Body Count Project, a civilian monitor of the death toll since the invasion,

They reported in 2008 that about 25 Iraqi civilians were killed per day that year, which was a significant decrease from over 70 civilians killed per day around that number in both 2007 and 2006 when Iraq was in the middle of a civil war. This is 2008. It's down to 30. It's down to like 25 per day. So actually that number, well, 25 civilian deaths per day, it was a really big decrease, but that was the same number of civilian deaths per day as you had in the first. two years of the American occupation. I guess the way I would put it is that like, you know, the country of Iraq was still an occupied, over-policed, like war-ridden, like ruin. Yeah.

Uh, no one was particularly happy. And also, of course, by December 2008, the Bush administration was on its way out. As we meet tonight, our economy is undergoing a period of uncertainty. At kitchen tables across our country, there is a concern about our economic future. There's only one way to eliminate this uncertainty. Make the tax relief permanent. The Obama boys hadn't yet come into power. That would happen a month later.

But in December 2008, George Bush took a trip to Iraq. And it was kind of like a farewell tour. Sort of like, I don't know, like Van Wilder going to like memorialize all the places he like puked and destroyed during like his six years in college. Here's how Bush would spin things about what his legacy in Iraq would look like while he was on the ground in Iraq speaking to troops in December 2008. Many said the mission was hopeless. Many called for retreat.

Retreat would have meant failure. Failure is never an optioned. Instead of pulling troops out, we sent more troops in, called the surge. And because of you, because of your courage, the surge is one of the greatest successes in the history of the United States. What's wrong in the term? The way I would put it is, like, that's the message he's telling the troops. And to some extent, it's also the message that he's telling, like, you know, himself. Yeah, himself and Americans, which is that, you know, we tried our darned us.

Yeah. And because we tried our darned us, we therefore didn't fail. Right. And because we didn't fail, we won. So that's how the troops responded. That same day, however, Bush would get a very different reaction from a different crowd of people. Speaking at a press conference, also in Baghdad, alongside Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, here's a story that you probably heard about.

It's being referred to as the toss heard around the world. In fact, many Iraqis are showering accolades on the journalist who threw his shoes at President Bush. And then through first one, then the other at President Bush. The journalist who threw the shoes heard around the world was one, Muntadar al-Zaidi. An Iraqi journalist working for an Egyptian broadcaster, Al-Zai Disharra at Bush as he threw the shoe. This is a goodbye kiss from the Iraqi people, you dog. He would go on to serve nine months in jail for the shoe-throwing,

and he would later claim upon his release that he had actually been tortured during that time. He was given broken bones. He was whipped. It was nasty. As demonstrators across the Arab world called for Muntatar Al-Zaidi's release, his stature as a folk hero was growing. So what if the guy threw a shoe at me?

Al-Zaidi wrote about throwing the shoes after he was released from prison, and this came out in about September 2009. And I'd like to read from part of Al-Zaiti's Abed now. Over recent years, more than a million martyrs have fallen by the bullets of the occupation, and Iraq is now filled with more than five million orphans, a million widows, and hundreds of thousands of maimed. Many millions are homeless inside and outside the country. We used to be a nation in which the Arab would share with the Turkmen and the Kurd and the Assyrian and the Sabian and the Azam and the Azam. Azid his daily bread. And the Shia would pray with the Sunni in one line. And the Muslim would celebrate with the Christian the birthday of Christ. This despite the fact that we shared hunger under sanctions for more than a decade. Our patience and our solidarity did not make us forget the

oppression, but the invasion divided brother from brother, neighbor from neighbor. It turned our homes into funeral tents. So I wanted to set that up because I think for reasons that will become clear throughout the episode. I think that Al-Zadi's message and the rage that he felt at Bush, I think that it will suggest why certain things happen in the way that they do in terms of protest in Iraq, beyond just like the sheer brilliance of that moment. Yeah. And can you imagine if the shoe had connected?

Oh, my God. In addition to all the other cursed things about this war and that presidency and that man of George W. Bush, he also made. managed to fucking dodge that shoe. There's some satanic thing going on there where he was just shifted, just given a little bit of a heads up from Satan. If he had been hit on videotape and it was forever after, you know, like clipped and vice. This actually, this confirms a theory of mine, which is that we live in the universe of the Omen 3. Yeah. In which Damien, uh, well, we'll see how Pete Buttigieg does. This is being recorded in March and early, in late February 2000.

20th. Through no fault of his own. The shoe didn't connect and I just, God damn it, do I dream. The throw was good. The throw was great. Bush, I guess we have to just begrudgingly acknowledge Bush had a good moves there. There are two, like, there are two great throws that I will look up on YouTube to watch. One is that one, especially when the anniversary comes up for it every December. Sure. Because it's like, it's a great video and everybody should be reminded of it. And then the other one is that video of Randy Johnson just like obliterating a bird. The arc of history is long, but I think it bends towards George W. Bush getting hit with a shoe at some point, in the face. I mean, he has like, he's like, he's like a really healthy guy now, right? Like, it's many years left. We'll talk about that.

Parity, satire. This is satire. I'm just saying that the universe might do it. I'm not telling anyone to do it. But the universe? The universe, you know, the conning of reason, you ever read Hegel? Huh? That's what I'm talking about.

It's philosophy. I'm not urging anyone to do anything unless you live near him or see him. Have we talked about how several people wanted to break up Iraq at one point? Joe Biden was a proponent of this. Big Joe Biden has talked for months about dividing Iraq along ethnic lines, letting the factions calm down, then getting the heck out. Now some military analysts say this might work. Which was a proposal to cut it up into three different ethnic. technically cleansed, if you will, segments, and just say, forget it. It's not going to be

one country. We fucked it up too much. Let's just do some British style map carving and call it a day. It didn't end up happening, but that's the kind of stuff that was being floated and the surge was supposed to rescue us from a decision like that. On this very important matter, I would extend a hand of friendship to the president just to say to him, calm down with the threat. There's a new Congress in town. We respect your constitutional role. We want you to respect ours. This war must end.

The American people have lost faith in the president's conduct of the war. So now just to shift things to the situation on the home front back in the U.S. With the midterms in 2006, there was finally some domestic congressional pressure on Bush, now that the Democrats were in the majority. So, for example, in the middle of 2007, Bush vetoed a military budgeting bill that was, you know, giving him funds for war because of provisions that congressional Democrats had written into it requiring a timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq. We hated those timetables. I mean, it was the thing that Bush resisted and they said, you know, a timetable would, you know, of course. Give the enemy the signal for when to kick things back up. Exactly, which is an idiotic argument because.

one, that's not how war works. It's not like our enemy's just going to go hide out and just whatever. The point is that it's like very nakedly stupid and they knew it was stupid and they said it anyway. And this is the middle of 2007 and Bush is vetoing a bill then. I mean, after all, like, you know, by September 2007, a Gallup survey showed that more than 50% of Americans would say that they wanted American troops home within two years. So the domestic pressure is like really building on Bush. But he's a lame duck at this point, right?

Kind of. I mean, his approval rating is now like, like, like it is it is it is bottomed out in the 30s and domestically you know he had done a bunch of stuff like the social security reform thing failed the beginning of his second term that really poisoned him and and and obviously like with the economy now beginning to implode i mean this hasn't quite happened this doesn't really have quite happened yet but like in the fall that's going to become another big problem for him um like there's very obviously like pressure's mounting and petraeus remember he went to congress in september and delivered that report and you know that show

that like are said that oh things are so much better now that i think it gave bush what he felt was the position to say all right we'll we'll get to a withdrawal which is why in the same month that petraeus delivers that report in september dozen seven bush announces the first like significant drawdown of troops in iraq now it's i say significant drawdown because he took out 20 000 soldiers which was two thirds of the number that he'd sent in with the surge but it was still like the first drawdown that he announced in any meaningful way So, Brendan, remember that thing we talked about in episode two, about how the Gulf War didn't really end? Right.

I think the Iraq War as a defined military operation with a large, massive presence of American soldiers on the ground. It's beginning to end in the middle of 2008. And it will ultimately end because of the SOFA agreement that was struck in the middle of 2008 requires a drop-dead, full American withdrawal by the end of December 2011. So just by the way, sofa, what does that stand for? Well, it's a couch. Yeah, but in this context. Oh, a status of forces agreement. Yeah, so, you know, meaning the arrangement that will allow us to withdraw our forces and their status.

Correct. Now, one thing you might be wondering, if they came up with this, you know, December 2011 withdrawal date, and they're confident that they can actually get to that point and that everything will be, you know, done as necessary by then, And that even that number of people that are leaving in December 2011 are probably just a very small number of the total number of U.S. troops in Iraq that had been there to that point, that requires a relatively speedy turnover of power to the Iraqis themselves. And given that they are signing this agreement in the middle of 2008, when less than two years before, it was very obvious that the Iraqis were in no position to do that. what changed? How was it that all of a sudden the Americans did feel comfortable giving security responsibilities over to the Iraqi government and the Iraqi military? The first part of this is all of those factors that we discussed earlier about why the surge, you know, quote unquote, worked. We had reduced daily violence to a degree. There was even an illusory projection of more stability, a formally trained army and

police force. There was like a plateau, like some sort of level at which politics could sort of happen. Right. And so the second part of the, you know, like how did this transfer happen is that. It's the politics. Iraq finally had arrived at a stable enough ruling political coalition that while very fragile and very tense was workable. Now, obviously it wasn't really workable because like things ultimately, of course, would go to shit. But if we're just talking about like this interim, like short to medium-term horizon period of time, this few years, like, beginning in roughly 2007, or, I mean, really, 2008 through, like, the rise of ISIS, then, like, yeah, I mean. If you're a lame duck Bush presidency, you're looking at this going, this is our shot.

Right. For a moment, before we leave this moment in time, I do want to also take note as something else that's happening more below the surface in Iraq that I believe very obviously and strongly foreshadows some atrocities to come. If you looked closely at, Iraq. Yeah, things were better than they were the year before, but there was still something pretty heinous happening on the ground. For example, in April of 2007, near the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, an 18-year-old Yazidi woman. Yazidis are a distinct ethnic, religious, and cultural minority within Iraq, primarily in the north. An 18-year-old Yazidi woman named Dua Khalil Aswad was murdered. It turned out that she was killed by her family in a so-called honor killing as she

had run off with a Sunni Muslim boyfriend and had converted to Islam. A video of the murder was pretty widely disseminated and it showed a crowd of people watching not helping her as she was stoned to death by her uncle and cousins. Now not long after this video, a group of hijackers took over a bus in Mosul and they ordered everyone off the bus except for a couple dozen Iraqi Yazidis who were then lined up in front of a wall and shot. Four months later in August 2007, four car bombs and two entirely Yazidi communities were detonated in a coordinated attack, killing almost 800 people

and leaving more than a thousand homeless. It was the most devastating car bomb attack of its kind during the Iraq War. If you at home are starting to maybe piece together a bit of a foreshadowing here of a certain group with a certain name, with a certain style that might be taking shape, you'd be right.

So I don't know you heard Brendan, but the Americans by 2008 had kind of a pickle on their hands. So the economy is kind of like a stick shift, I guess, in that if you move the thing too much and jerky in different ways and badly, it fucks with the car. And somebody had done that too badly with housing securities and, well, things went bad. CBS News special report, a presidential address to the Thank you. Evening. This is an extraordinary period for America's economy.

Now, while at long last, withdrawal was a word that George W. Bush was finally using, and it was a political reality in America. The Iraq War was being talked about in a totally different way on TV for a different purpose back home. And that's because the 2008 election was already underway. Now, the Republican primary would resolve itself in the psychotic way that you would. You'd imagine, you know, it's all the fallout from the Bush years. They're, like, you can't actually defend Bush, but you have to, like, mount a case for conservatism. It's sort of a doomed position.

Really good time to be a Democrat. Maybe that's the reason why Rudy Giuliani was the clear and obvious frontrunner for most of 2007 until the primaries actually started to happen. Yeah, the Republican Party definitely, they knew they were up against this Bush legacy, least of all, least of all the war and now the economy. Now, the Democratic primary, on the other hand, was way more interesting. For starters, the two candidates were Hillary Clinton, senator from New York who had voted for the Iraq war, and this guy. Us rushing headlong into a war unilaterally was a mistake and may still be a mistake.

Now, the twin issues of the 2008 election, as we said earlier, were Iraq and the economy. A gallop poll from 2008 as the Iowa caucuses in New Hampshire primary were getting underway showed that Americans cared about Iraq and the economy above all else. the primary fight between Clinton and Obama reflected as much, and there's a lot of other stuff around the edges that we could get into. As for the Iraq stuff, here's Obama on the debate stage in 2008. I was opposed to Iraq from the start, and I say that not just to look backwards, but also to look forwards, because I think what the next president has to show is the kind of judgment that will ensure that we are using our military power wisely.

Senator Clinton, that's a clear swipe at you. really Brendan I want you to stop me if you've heard this before Hillary Clinton when confronted with this attack did not

respond in the most effective stop manner here's a headline from a story from 2007 in the New York Times the headline is Clinton gives war critics new answer on O2 vote

the way the story describes is that like a whole bunch of advisors like the Hillary Clinton Brain Trust who had to come up with like what is her answer on Iraq like how do we answer this no because it's a massive liability as we've said so ultimately the way Hillary would explain this massive liability as Brennan put it is that she quote in the end she settled on language that was similar to senator John Carey's when he was the Democratic nominee in 2004 that went well that if she had known in 2002 what she knows now about Iraqi weaponry she would have never voted for the Senate resolution

authorizing force right now but here's the more perhaps relevant detail which is the excuse that was given for why this is the answer. Quote, yet Mrs. Clinton herself never wanted to apologize. Even if she viewed the war as a mistake, she argued that an apology would be a gimmick. I actually just want to, I didn't get to say this in the original episode when we covered that. This was right before the war, right before we invaded in 2003. Hillary is at a press event with Charlie Rangel, New York Congressman. Quote, at one press event in New York, she nodded when Charles Rangel said Bush had failed

at the U.N., but when reporters asked Clinton to repeat what Rangel had just said, she bit her tongue. On March 17th, as U.S. troops mobilized, she issued her strongest statement in support of the war effort. So here she is in 2008 doing the same thing she did right before the war, which is saying, okay, yeah, you pigs want me to apologize. I'll make some noises like that. But deep down, she was confident what she was. Also, I mean, let's be clear, this is hubris. The article that I just quoted from when she's coming up with that answer is February 2007. We're losing all of the Pumas who have been listening to this show up until now. I mean, but it's like, that was like they lost the pants.

She didn't dissipate running against somebody who happened to have been an adult at the time of the invasion of Iraq who didn't support it. I just want to jump in and say, before we sound like we're giving Obama too much credit, I do want to note, this is this is alt history or whatever, but he wasn't actually in the United States Senate at the time that he was opposing the war. I mean, it was good that he said it, but no, it was good that he said it. Who knows how we would have voted? But the point isn't about like that this is because Obama's a good guy. It's just to show that like. This is what she faced. Exactly. This is what she was up against. And it was like the giant fracture line. Like, I mean, look, if you want to talk about, like, lessons legitimately learned by the Democratic electorate from the 2004 election, it's that you can't nominate somebody who voted for the Iraq War. Yes. Except they tried again.

I mean, well, I mean, this time, a bunch of them did, but then Obama won. You, like, he won the primary, like, fairly conclusively. Yes. And there are perhaps lessons to be drawn from Iraq War vote nominees in 2016 and maybe even in 2020. Who knows? I'm really, I haven't turned on the TV in about five years. I don't know what's going on. So I think we should just move past that.

You don't believe that Senator Obama's a Muslim? Of course not. I mean, that's, you know, that there is no basis for that. You know, I take him on the basis of what he says. And, you know, there isn't any reason to doubt that. And you said you take Senator Obama in his word that he's not a Muslim. You don't believe that he's a Muslim. No, no, no, there is nothing to base that on, as far as I know.

He says one thing in speeches, and then he turns around and does this. It is not hopeful. It is destructive, particularly for a Democrat, to be discrediting universal health care by waging a false campaign against my plan. Do you don't buy the party unity argument? I don't because, again, I've been around long enough. My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? we all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. The last thing I want to point out to about the Democratic primary was just this ad that Hillary Clinton ran that was fairly famous.

You may remember it or have heard it referenced. And it's just the kind of thing that is so bizarre and of its time and place that it's probably worth listening to in full. It's 3 a.m. and your children are safe and asleep. But there's a phone in the White House and it's ringing. Something's happening in the world. Your vote will decide who answers that. Call. Whether it's someone who already knows the world's leaders, knows the military, someone tested and ready to lead in a dangerous world. It's 3 a.m. and your children are safe and

asleep. Who do you want answering the thorn? I'm Hillary Clinton, and I approve this message. Major Thomas Newman. Dude, I know. Music going on in the background there. I mean, that is just like West Wing music. Yes. So in the end, Barack Obama conquered the primary with hope and change, and he squared off against John McCain and Sarah Palin, if you remember her. What insight into Russian actions, particularly in the last couple of weeks, does the proximity of the state give you? There are next door neighbors, and you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska.

McCain's victory, as it relates to Iraq, is a little bit interesting just because he was actually a huge critic of the Iraq war in the sense that he didn't go far enough. Exactly. Didn't go far enough. And guess what? Remember, all the way back, we mentioned in episode three, that the neocons, whether the, you know, in government or out, and Akhm Chalabi, they were McCain guys. They didn't like Bush at first because they weren't sure, I mean, during the campaign or even in the aftermath of 9-11, they weren't sure if he was going to step up. And they all knew that McCain from the very beginning was, even if he was squishier on social issues, was a stone-co-killer when it came to foreign policy. President Bush has talked about our staying in Iraq for 50 years. Maybe 100. All right. So, let's pause for a moment. It's January 2009.

Barack Obama is inaugurated as president. Here is what he says he's going to do about Iraq. After we remove our combat brigades, our mission will change from combat to supporting the Iraqi government and its security forces as they take the absolute lead in securing their country. Bush administration is officially over. After what seemed like, I was a bit young, you were probably a bit young, but even at that age, like what seemed like, what seemed like, and it. eternity, that this guy was never going away. Does this sound familiar to anybody? In a world in which you felt like you never again were going to see a ray of light, he was finally gone, ding dong the witch is dead style elation swept over America. And on no front was the attitude of elation and

the change of expectations greater than on the Bush administration's signature policy and signature failure and signature crime, the Iraq war. America. In the face of our common dangers, in this winter of our hardship, let us remember these timeless words. With hope and virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents and endure what storms may come. Let it be said by our children's children that when we were tested, we refused to let this journey end,

that we did not turn back nor did we falter, and with eyes fixed on the horizon and God's grace apart. Today, shake, shake, shake, shake, check. Tonight, I can announce that America will lead a broad coalition to roll back this terrorist threat. On the ground in Kobani near the Turkish border, ISIS fighters trade fire with Syrian Kurdish. An ISIS suicide bomber speeding towards advancing forces today. Rocket finally taking it out. The first American killed in Iraq in this urgent effort to take out ISIS.

So that's 2014. It's around three years, two and a half, three years after American troops have been pulled out of Iraq. Why are we back there again? It happened again. We remained in Iraq in more creative and insidious ways. and then just went back in in 2014. So let's back up a second. Let's actually go back to when Obama gets into office

because I don't really think we talked about that yet. So around 150,000 American troops were still deployed in Iraq when Obama began his term as president. And while Obama would remain bogged down in Afghanistan where he increased troop levels. And where he would go back on his promises about closing Guantanamo. Yep, never happened. And so on and so on.

he would adhere, for the most part, to the Iraqi withdrawal timeline. Right. Though he would futz with the timetable a bit, the last U.S. troops were indeed out of Iraq by mid-December 2011. It was a huge, like, benchmark for his administration to say, look, I'm delivering on a progressive campaign. I'm delivering on the change. Right.

And you may be wondering, dear listener, as Brendan and I certainly do, and as most people, I think with a pulse and brain cells do, given that Obama was a Democrat, president with a majority in Congress for time why didn't he try and do anything to examine the wrongdoings of the bush administration as it relates to the iraq war a perp walk exactly and and also you know this is also not just about the iraq war because i'll take a second here to acknowledge that you know throughout this time that we've been talking about iraq there are all these other different like related and accessory kinds of scandals and issues that are part of the bush administration's broader war on terror and that obviously have ramifications so far and so wide that we can't

necessarily cover them within the purview of this podcast. One of those obviously was the torture memos and the torture report that was put together by the Senate Intelligence Committee in the latter half of the 2000s. Those elements we obviously addressed in the Abu Ghraib episode a bit, but I do think that it's important to bring up here that when we talk about prosecuting, you know, Bush administration officials, a lot of the specific context in question, questions that were asked of the Obama people were about going after former Bush administrations for sanctioning torture specifically. And the Obama people, for the most part, had a pretty consistent answer about why they didn't want to do any of this. And here to kick that off is

Rahm Emanuel, who was then Obama's chief of staff on ABC. This is not a time for retribution. It's time for reflection. It is not a time to use our energy and our time in looking back and in a sense of anger and retribution. We have a lot to do to protect them. America. So what people need to know, this practice and technique, we don't use anymore. You banned it. All of the kinds of like normal political calculations that we would make about like what would happen to Iraq in this moment are going to be very, very swiftly revised. We're rightly bringing this up as a huge missed opportunity, a criminal negligence.

But America is never going to go back and put someone on trial, give someone to the ICC, you know, put Rumsfeld and the fucking Haig. put Bush in the Hague. They deserve to be there and worse, parody satire. No, it's not going, yeah, but it's not going to happen. But it's never going to happen. And as we now know, no offense to the Potta of America crew, it certainly wasn't going to happen under the utterly feckless and compromising regime of Barack Obama. Correct. What's about to happen in Iraq, however, as all of this is kind of taking shape in America and as the Obama people are figuring out their withdrawal and, you know, also trying to figure out, scramble and figure out what their Afghanistan

policy is actually going to be. In the Middle East, more generally, though, things are happening beneath the surface that are going to just dramatically change the calculus for basically all the... Everyone involved. Exactly. And I'm talking about specifically the Arab Spring and then the Syrian Civil War. Backling to keep Iraq from breaking points, but our Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's sectarian policies at the heart of the turmoil. So one of the things that had begun to happen in Iraq as the Americans were beginning to figure out their plans for a transition, and a withdrawal was that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had begun consolidating an enormous amount of power to himself. The Iraqi government, from the time that it was formed as this kind of like

fragile kind of sort of almost like compromised thing in 2006, over the years had evolved into something much, much beefier. Iraqi military and Iraqi police units had begun to, you know, acquire some measure of cohesion. And many of the special units being trained by the American military were becoming more and more deadly and effective. In fact, a lot of these special units and a lot of these forces would ultimately answer to a specific entity called the Baghdad Operations Command, which was basically a central military hub controlled by Nouri al-Maliki and that went around basically all the other, you know, the civilian and military hierarchy.

And as the rest of the Middle East was convulsing, and Hosni Mubarak's government fell, and Muammar Gaddafi's government fell. You, in Iraq, also had a separate surge of protests. and you had many people clamoring in the streets who were incredibly frustrated with life under the Maliki government, in part because of the kind of brutal control that he was now exerting and the sectarian violence that he was enabling. And Maliki's been there at that point for years. He shows up as prime minister in 2006, and he's going to be there for almost a decade. He's going to continue to be prime minister until, like, 2014.

Obviously, like a significant part of the problems with Maliki were just how insanely corrupt his government was. Maliki himself was incredibly vicious and corrupt. He targeted members of his own government. He had somebody sentenced to death in absentia. He absolutely tried to tighten his grip on power. And so when the Arab Spring arrived in 2011, he reacted brutally, cracking down on Iraqi protesters who had taken to the streets, frustrated by the economic conditions they lived in,

Maliki's brutality, and with the fact that while things under Iraq were perhaps maybe a bit better than they were during the height of the American occupation or the subsequent civil war, things still stuck. And so the thing with life under Maliki for Iraqis, you also had just like a continued state of mass deprivation. For example, the share of Iraqis living on less than $2.20 a day, it stayed at around 20% between 2007 and 2012. So during this time that is like the end of the Civil War into the transition to power, the number of Iraqis who are still living in dire poverty is still tremendously high. And a lot of the problems in terms of the inequality and the poverty within Iraq

were being masked over by the fact that the prices of a barrel of oil were about double what they were a few years previously. You know, they'd gone above $90, $100 a barrel when, you know, just a few years earlier, it was like half that. The commander of the U.S.-led coalition telling the BBC, ISIS will likely use human shields. They are a very resilient and challenging foe. They're very adaptable, very crucial. Creative, cunning.

So this is the entrance of ISIS as we think of it. Who were ISIS, who were the guys in it? How did they come about? So, I mean, like the leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, RIP, he was, on his associates were former Al-Qaeda and Iraq guys who by 2013 had been pushed out of Iraq and into Syria. And the Syrian Civil War obviously had kind of like, because the Syrian Civil War was this insane protracted conflict where like Assad obviously it was not getting dislodged it created all of this kind of opportunity for like jihadist ferment and so guys like ISIS they go over to Syria

they're able to bulk up their size because in Iraq it was Islamic state of Iraq right and then they get pushed into Syria in 2013 they get kicked out of the country and then they just upgrade while they're in Syria and rename it yeah Islamic state of Iraq and 11th that's correct and so while they're in Syria you know they they rename themselves and they and now they're a caliphate they're whole big thing. And at the same time, they're developing allegiances, expanding their breadth of power within Iraq. And, you know, by January 2014, they've taken over the like Sunni cities of Fallujah and Ramadi, both of which, you know, especially Fallujah, as we've talked about in the show, were huge strongholds of the Sunni insurgency against American forces in the first part of the Iraq war. Those fall under

ISIS control. And then obviously the big thing that everyone remembers was the summer of 2014 when there was the ISIS blitzkrieg across the country, and ISIS took control of the city of Mosul, you know, a city of a million people, and everybody suddenly understood that, whoa, ISIS is for real. And it was that charge that obviously led to the clip you heard earlier of Barack Obama saying that we had to do that thing that we didn't want to do and send troops back to Iraq. We are hitting ISIL harder than ever. 35 air strikes against the terror group in the last three days between Syria and Iraq. These actions, including more firepower and special operations forces are well underway.

Suicide bombers have been the go-to tactic of ISIS dozens deployed. You know, it's also important to note here, though, that like where did ISIS's sudden power come from? Like the weaponry in many cases came from, you know, the United States military, from like arms that were given to insurgents or that have been taken over the course of the Iraq war or also aid that had been given to Syrian rebels that later wound their way back into Iraq. but I think that the, you know, like, the more important thing about, like, how ISIS was able to blow up was because ISIS had begun, but ISIS was able to just explode in popularity, was, or at least, like, develop a real constituency of support was because a lot of ISIS's leadership, especially in Iraq, was actually composed of, you know, like, fairly familiar Sunni faces. In fact, a cousin of Saddam, in addition to, like, you know, like the son of his, like, half brother were people who joined ISIS and were known for having joined ISIS. Many Bothists had actually come, or many former Bothists, rather, would within ISIS come to lead, you know, really critical civic institutions like the finance ministry, for example. And Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and other top ISIS leaders, you know, part of the reason that they all came together, they were all Sunni resistors of the U.S. occupation who had, like, forged ties together as in an American prison, infamously, Camp Bucca.

Yep. Last year, I also pledged that we would work with our allies to extinguish ISIS from the face of the earth. One year later, I am proud to report that the coalition to defeat ISIS has liberated very close to 100% of the territory, just recently held by these killers in Iraq and in Syria and in Iraq. other locations as well. For our purposes, I think this is where we're going to let the narrative end. And this is not because ISIS is not relevant to the story of the Iraq war or anything, but because I think that this is where Brendan and I have officially run out of steam on the story

that we can tell right now. We have to pick an end date at some point for the purposes of the show to wrap up just because what's happening now, what happens after 2014 and the growth of ISIS and then the retraction of ISIS and slight resurgence of ISIS. There's some group now white flags, you know, is the new identified like hardcore ISIS. ISIS were a bunch of fucking sissies. We're the real shit. If we're drawing the line here, it's because you see what was produced. You see how we have gotten from the memory hold history of the Iraq War and what happened and what germinated inside of it and what alien chestburster exploded from the body, you know, after we contaminated the country.

Iraq remains a corrupt gangster state, extremely authoritarian, incredibly unstable, and that's the status quo. I think people recognize that picture. And that picture, we finally arrived at that point with the rise of ISIS. And so if you're looking around now, if you read the news, if you read, you know, some new city is being retaken or some new city has been lost by the Iraqi army or some new group is popping up. I think if we had something to set out to do with the show is give you a basic idea of why and how and that these guys didn't come from a vacuum, these problems didn't come from a vacuum. Zarkawi, the guy that we said was al-Qaeda in Iraq who really wasn't until we made him that. That's his organization is what spawned ISIS. I think the particular, like the particular

an immediate and obvious lesson worth, you know, resting with there is that, you know, when we invaded Iraq and Jeremy Corbyn warned of thousands more deaths in Iraq will not make things right it will set off a spiral of conflict of hate of misery

of desperation that will fuel the wars the conflict the terrorism the depression and the misery of future generations what that took the form of was ISIS and all of this like all of these things are just reverberations that exist

because of a thing that we did. This is probably as appropriate a time as any to mention the estimated death toll of the war. This doesn't count the deaths from sanctions in the 90s. This is just from the invasion onward into the sectarian conflict and the coalition airstrikes and raids and maskers of Iraqis.

The general estimate is over 600,000 people killed in Iraq. Well over half a million people killed. Some studies say less. Some studies say more. But no one disputes it is in the hundreds of thousands. Last night at my direction, the United States military successfully executed a flawless precision strike that killed a number one terrorist anywhere in the world. Qasem Salamani. So I think we should probably reframe and situate

ourselves in the more immediate present and talk a little about what's happened in Iraq in the last few months and last year. So broadly speaking, a social protest movement has taken root in Iraq and like the largest ever, perhaps in the country's history. And you have people from all elements of society, nonviolent protest, mildly violent protest,

but they've taken to the streets to protest the state of the current Iraqi government. In Iraq, three more protesters have been killed today as demonstrators continue their campaign for new elections and an end to corruption. In Iraqi Prime Minister was forced to resign last year and a new one, Muhammad Tafik Alawi, was brought in to at least be a fresh face because the change that Iraqis are clamoring for in the streets is something quite total. Most of the protesters are young Iraqis who want an end to American and Iranian interference in the country. And in January of 2020, these protests took on a bit of a different flavor. which was because Donald Trump decided to kill the Iranian general Qasem Soleimani in a drone strike in Iraq. More than 500 people have been killed by security forces.

This then triggered a massive wave of protests against U.S. presence in Iraq, which has now turned into an extended game of chicken between the American government and the Iraqi government over Americans withholding aid and demanding that they'd be allowed to stay in the country. Because Parliament voted again. I mean, that's not the first time they've done that either. Exactly. But like the Iraqi parliament voted again to say like fuck off, get out of here. Yes. Yes. And the Iranians, which we'll say more about in a few minutes, have emerged in a much more public way than I think of they've ever been as a real counterweight to U.S. influence.

Within the sphere of influence in Iraq, these are the two like major players. And Iran has always been there. But now the Americans through this like insane and aggressive and outsized action have drawn them out. We're not saying that Iran is the true hand guiding everything evil in Iraq. But it is a reality that the Iranians, quite rationally as a regional power, are meddling in a country that we blew up to see if they can swing certain things in their favor. The Iranians were also a hand for, like, they enhanced a lot of sectarian violence throughout the American occupation in Iraq. And they also were a force for stability at different moments.

Kassem Soleimani was instrumental. I mean, things like the SOFA agreement for the U.S. withdrawal, that did not happen without the agreement of Qasem Soleimani. The Iranian government has always maintained an active degree of influence. And, you know, they trained Shia militias that were fighting against American-trained militias. Like, it was a proxy war, not to minimize that. And we took out Soleimani. And what was the line was he was a whole, even liberals who don't like Trump's style or whatever the fuck. They said he was obviously a murderer and a terrorist.

And, uh, okay, I don't, you know, I could see certainly some Iraqis feeling that way. I don't really give a shit what Americans have to say about that. But if that's the case, get ready to multiply those qualifiers by 1,000 to General David Petraeus. All right. And Donald Rumsfeld, because if what Soleimani was doing qualifies as that stuff, we were doing it even more and for way longer. I said, keep the oil. Keep the oil. Keep the oil. Don't let somebody else get it. another update i think we want to do as we bow out here is about oil you remember one of the first things we talked about on the show was you know basically a hundred years ago the international oil cartel

carved up iraq and sat on its oil fields and basically exploited every barrel until saddam kicked them out in the 70s of course as we've also discussed one of the main priorities of the american invasion was to crowbar that Iraqi oil industry back open to let back in foreign capital and let the international oil companies, including American ones, wet their beaks. But we saw how in episode six that really didn't happen so smoothly because of the violence within the country, including assassinations of those looking responsible for privatization and the selling off of the Iraqi's own national industry. But as things calmed down after the surge, companies that had lobbied to get in there in the first place, like ExxonMobil and Shell and Total Oil,

they got a piece of that action again. Iraqi oil stayed a state-run enterprise, but they did contracts with these companies to basically profit share. But the fact that we failed to convert the oil industry from a state-owned enterprise into just a total free market paradise, that was a blemish on the record of the invasion and the occupation. And we never stopped trying to correct that mistake. The Bush administration was really pushing for the new Iraqi oil law, which was actually written by the consulting firm bearing point. But the Iraqi parliament increasingly, you know, stubbornly nationalistic about the thing that makes 99% of their revenue and good on them, has repeatedly stymied attempts to actually

pass that law years and years after the fact. And then, of course, also increased violence and instability when ISIS basically took over half the country in 2014, around then. International firms were even more skittish to do any business in Iraq. And the last time that there was a new round of bidding, a lot of the big dogs, they missed out on the contracts. So it's an open question as to whether or not one of the main goals of not only the Bush administration, but international capitalism, is ever going to really get that Iraqi oil all nice and wrapped up in a pretty bow?

In this fight, the American and Iraqi people share the same enemies because we stand for freedom. The security of our country is directly linked to the liberty of the Iraqi people, and we will settle for nothing less than complete victory. More fighting and sacrifice will be required to achieve this victory. And for some, the temptation to retreat and abandon our commitments is strong. Yet there is no peace, there's no honor, and there's no security in retreat. So America will not abandon Iraq to the terrorists who want to attack us again. We will finish the mission.

now that we've come to the end of our rainbow yeah but there were some friends we made along the way yeah we looked back we were walking with saddam and we looked back and there was only one set of footprints um well i i frankly don't want to see any of these people again yeah let's take a farewell glance to some of the people and characters and players that we've met on our journey here because most of them are still with us and most of them are doing quite well Are they now? George W. Bush, alive, hanging out with Ellen. This person says, Ellen and George Bush together makes me have faith in America again.

With a net worth of $350 million. George H.W. Bush, dead. Dick Cheney, not dead somehow. Is it possible to sign my waterboard? Sure. That's the first time I've ever signed a waterboard. Donald Rumsfeld. In 2016, he released his own Solitaire app.

modeled on the specific version of Solitaire that Winston Churchill used to play. Well, we're joined now live by Donald Rumsfeld. Mr. Rumsfeld, there's one known known, and that is that you've got this app. Net worth $150 million. Hillary Clinton, enjoying political retirement inside of the Black Lodge. We came, we saw, he died. Net worth $45 million. Condoleezza Rice.

She joined multiple corporate boards, including Chevron, Charles Schwab, and Trans Amarthe. He wrote a book about democracy. Speaking with former Secretary of State, Condolell. Lisa Rice this morning, and Dr. Rice, your book, Democracy, stories from the long road to freedom hit stores today. Congratulations on the book. She was promoted to the director of the Hoover Institution at Stanford in February of 2020. Colin Powell. He's on the board of directors at Salesforce. He was also named a, quote, strategic limited partner at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. His daughter, Linda Powell, recently appeared in the movie The Report about the

torture program initiated by her father's former boss. Former Secretary of State and Joint Chief Chairman General Colin Powell. Hey, I just met you, and this is crazy, but here's my number. So call me, baby. Charlie, it was a lock. It was a lot. Net worth $44 million. Moktada al-Sader. Still a power broker in Iraq, last seen scolding protesters to segregate themselves by gender,

for which he was roundly mocked. Today's demonstrations were called by the former firebrand and still hugely influential sheer cleric Moktada al-Sada. Saddam Hussein. obviously dead. Give me some space here, Brendan. And finally, Ahmed Chalaby. In a weird way, I think he's sort of the heart

of the show, at least our show. He is no longer with us. He died in 2015, in November, 2015, quietly in his home in Baghdad from heart failure. And he's in hell, along with Saddam and George H.W. Bush. And despite his, his being,

evil. His saga is still, to me, and I hope to the listeners who have been with us here, uniquely fascinating. Just a guy who, he's done it all. He's a Cohen Brothers character in real life, if there ever was one. Gig after gig manages to somehow get the money spigot turned back on, somehow convert every failure into a victory and scam and flim flam till the very end, and retires basically to his weird little businesses that are at the end of the day still pumping millions of dollars into his account year after year, and then just passes away from a relatively common ailment at the age of 71. And I just want to give him his proper due as a world historical piece of shit after he's done all of this. I just want to read one last passage from the wonderful biography of him

that we've cited a lot, Aram Rostin's book. In the epilogue, he writes this about Chalibi. The blame for fouling Iraq's happy possibilities, then, lay not with him, but elsewhere. The peaceful Iraq that was so close at hand had been shattered by someone else. Quote, the real culprit in all this is Wolfowitz, Chaliby declared. To everyone's surprise, blaming Paul Wolfowitz, one of his old allies. Wolfowitz was like one of the main Cholobie boosters. Things blow up, and he points the finger directly.

directly at his old buddy. The real culprit in all this was an interesting phrase, a bit childish and almost identical to the phrase he had used on another occasion when he wanted to blame someone else. Quote, the bad guy in all this is General Anthony Zinney, the U.S. General. He'd said that back when things were going against him in 1999. Cholabee's reflex was to point to a culprit or a bad guy when he failed. And Chalabee never became a U.S. citizen, despite all of his services rendered. But I really don't think you get more All-American than that. The United States government made a major mistake by trying to justify the removal of Saddam Hussein on the basis of weapons of mass destruction.

We did not call for the invasion. President Bush decided, no, let us go to war ourselves. It turned out they knew very little. And I was very surprised that the fact that they... knew so little. What did we learn, Palmer? I don't know, sir. I don't fucking know either.

What did we learn? I think one thing we learned, to keep it simple, is in a strange and unlikely way, uh, this all spells the victory of Donald Rumsfeld. Because his whole mission, his obsession of creating a new imperial system, a new imperial system, a new imperial approach of light footprint, low commitment, low visibility, American action all over the world. This is what we've got now, after, ironically enough, his own reign and his own administration's reign. Because during the Obama years, we didn't stop going to war. In fact, we expanded the global war on terror to many new countries and started basically a genocide in Yemen

through our global war on terror partner, Saudi Arabia. But we recalibrated the acceptable scope and style of perpetrating these crimes. And that's why no one cared when Obama was in office. We started using drones. We started using unmanned vehicles. I mean special forces operations. Like the American military has become incredibly reliant on the use of special forces. And we have had special forces troops, you know, present in tons of countries that we haven't really ever discussed about what we're doing there in the first place. And even when we did go to war like we did in Libya and to a certain degree like we did in Syria and in parts of Africa, we did it sneakily. We did it slyly and we did it the way Rumsfeld probably would have wanted to do it. We didn't stay in

nation build. We just bombed the shit out of everybody and left, all with the veneer of support from the world community. It's the perfect streamlining of what Rumsfeld always wanted. And that's not a good thing. Because now we don't have to watch it on TV, whether it's Iraq or Libya or Syria. You hear about it, bubble up every now and again, you know, that some aftershock of the Iraq war, which destabilized the entire Middle East and created half of these new conflicts, let alone the conflicts that still rage in Iraq itself, it all just hums on like a humidifier, you know, in the corner of the room. And we all remain warm and comfortable, and we don't have to confront anything. You know, that's an achievement of the Obama administration. And then under Trump, first of all, as we played at the beginning of this episode, Trump ran against the Iraq war in the Republican primary in 2016. All these rubs, these debates and in the eventual rallies that would have been still ready to tell you that the WMD were in Syria or whatever the fuck, only a couple months earlier. Trump spotted a clear and obvious deficit of trust that had existed after the Bush years that was lurking in the brains of all of these chuds, you know, and he exploited it, and he exploited it brilliantly. I mean, he humiliated what was supposed to be the frontrunner, the presumptive frontrunner from the Bush dynasty in 2016.

And that was, of course, so dangerous about right-wing populism. They had no allegiance to Bush or to the Iraq war, to spreading freedom or any of that shit. Everyone turned around on the Republican side and said, yeah, we lied about that. The war was a big lie. Bush's Republican rivals are pouncing. We now know that intelligence was false. No way we would have gone to war with Iraq. I want to directly answer your question, because that's what I do.

if we knew then what we know now and I were the president of the United States I wouldn't have gone to war I think even at the time invading Iraq was a mistake and that kind of right-wing populism and I think honestly him coming out against the Iraq war was a big part of it that's what made him stand out and that's what wrote him to office now of course he's there and he abides by all the same dictates that Obama did he does some things more clumsily he does some things more grotesquely but it's the same playbook and it's the same result it's variations on a theme But now that Trump is there, it's the mirror image of Obama's effect on, you know, the American psyche, which made us feel like everything's basically going to be okay now and all the really ugly aspects of America are dying or shriveling away or over. Now people think that all the ugliest aspects of America are just a daily experience, all the corruption and violence and evil. And, you know, fair enough. True. But that has had the same effect of keeping Iraq and the Iraq war and what it meant. not only for Iraqis, which I think is most important, but also for Americans, in the back of

our minds, every day dissolving further and further. Because everyone in America, who isn't a freak or an oligarch, deep down they know the game is over. I mean, the whole uninterrupted manifest destiny that went way past the 18th and 19th centuries and was supposed to go on forever, America number one, end of history, enlightened empire, all that stuff, it's over, it's done. And the last gasp of it, much like the last gasp of any kind of functional capitalism was the neoliberal band-aid in the 70s. The last gasp of this imperial hubris was the Iraq war. Well, this is the, and this is the asynchronousity, which is that even in this period of decline, we're still the people with the most nukes, though. We are still the country with the ability to

wield the most power throughout the world. Like, China's not there yet. There is no other government that comes close. To paraphrase good old Lenin one more time, things can be historically obsolete. That doesn't mean that they're politically obsolete. That is to say, you know, countries or empires or social systems,

economic systems, their time can come, their expiration date can hit. But that doesn't mean that they just stop existing. Until you get rid of them, they continue to sit there, rotting and stinking more and more every day that goes on. Correct.

And so when you, look at it from the perspective then of like all right we still have that power like you know like rome is the roman empire is still really fucking big uh except we have completely lost the ability to do the most basic functions of it you know that strange collision of events that presented an opportunity like the iraq war for these people they just like completely fucked it up top to bottom completely the last thing for me i guess then is is coming back to the name of the show actually blowback. It's the CIA's name for unintended consequences when we solve a problem and create another problem. The history of America's involvement with Iraq is certainly an example of that. But what I think

I'd really want to say going out is that we think of blowback and blowback gets talked about like it's basically karma. You know, like we do something evil and then oh, comes back to get you. But I don't think we should accept or grant this idea that it's karma, that it's unwanted. I think the real chilling thing is that the American Empire, capital, elites, military, whatever you want to say, they like blowback. Blowback is part of the whole deal because when you create a new problem, you create a new opportunity. And when you solve that problem by creating another problem, you keep the hamster wheel going. You keep the cycle going. It's not karma. It's a feedback loop. In the case of Iraq, we help the Baoth party get into power. Oh, looks like Saddam is a egomaniacal

psycho who wants to invade other countries in the region. Well, as long as we can steer him toward our enemies like Iran, no big deal. Oh, well, now he's emboldened because we helped him out and he's going for Kuwait. No big deal. Now we can bomb Iraq and put a death to the peace dividend, get the military industrial complex back on track. Oh, what's this? Now he's managed to cling on to power and the sanctions emboldened the regime while killing the people. Well, great. Now that we have 9-11 here, we can go into Iraq and finish the job and say that he's a terrorist we should have knocked off a long time ago.

Oh, no, now we've invaded Iraq and there's an insurgency and it's Vietnam all over again. No big deal. Now we can get a bunch of military contractors in. Now we can tighten our grip on the whole Middle East to get the situation under control. You know, and it goes on and on and on. And it will continue to go on and on. And that's the really spooky thing. You know, tomorrow, it could all kick up again tomorrow.

some new boogeyman that comes out of nowhere who came through some horrible American sponsored prison system in his country, kills a bunch of people, kills a bunch of Americans due to something we did a long time ago or even not that long ago, and we're back at it saying we've got to get this guy. And no one stops to think about where he came from. No one stops to think about how we created him. And the cycle goes on. So blowback, really, it's not a bug. It's a feature. It's the algorithm of empire. And the worst part of the memory holds. is that many of the people who steered us toward the worst possible decision last time

are also still near the levers of power today. And I think that that's, to me, when we think about, you know, the ways in which blowback and the real-world consequences that it has and that it's so much a function of the system feels totally inoculated from, like, politics as we know it, is because these people never touch,

like they never face any consequences for it. To me, I guess that's evidence of just how built into the system it is. All right, now that we've ended on the appropriate note of doom and gloom, let's say some thank-keys and some shout-outs here. Obviously, thanks to Stitcher for letting us do it. Thanks to Josh Lynch, who did the amazing art for the show.

And I'd like to thank H. John Benjamin and James Adomian for lending their vocal talents. Yes, thank you, John, and thank you, James. I'd also think we, I'd like to extend a lot of gratitude to all of the people who provided incredible research and have published really extraordinary and brave works of journalism and analysis that helped us bring this story to you. So we'll see you later. Thanks for having us. Keep us in mind next time you read or see something about the next nightmarish civilizational war that we start, that America starts. And then like 10 years afterward, we'll do another season. We'll do another, 10 years after that end of that crisis, then we'll do a podcast.

Yeah, when we all have chips in our head to play podcasts. Or like tin cans and string. Right. All right. Bye-bye. Oh, my God!