Blowback - S1 Episode 2 - "American Psycho"

Episode Date: June 22, 2020

Before George W. Bush, there was Daddy Bush and Bill Clinton, who killed thousands of Iraqis and pushed the country to the brink of famine. The Gulf War, brutal sanctions, and the End of History. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

The time has come for the mother-in-law of all battles. Soon the world would tremble as I, Sudan-Hinsane, unleash my really neat new armies up on the Mideast. Nothing can stand in my way. Uh, excuse me, is this the Baghdad cafe? In April 1991, after driving Saddam Hussein's army out of Kuwait on the high, highway of death. Colin Powell, who was then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the highest-ranking military officer in America, he made a confession. He said he was running out of demons, running out of villains. I'm down to Castro and Kim Il-sung, he complained. Yeah, and his swagger there makes

a lot of sense, you know, because we're, in 1991, the Cold War is basically over. The Soviet Union's collapsing. The U.S. just thrashed an uncooperative ex-lacky. in Saddam, and America was sending the message. There will be no more struggle, no more debate, no more alternatives. Everybody, allies, enemies are going to get in line, kiss the ring, and enjoy their participation in the global marketplace. We have to provide food and shelter for the homes and oppose racial discrimination and promote civil rights while also promoting equal rights for women.

we have to encourage your return to traditional moral values. Most importantly, we have to promote general social concern unless materialism. We thought we had gotten rid of the demon of Saddam. We made an example of him. We made an example of him. We embarrassed him so thoroughly. Spanked him. Just totally beat his ass.

But after the Gulf War, this kind of swagger that called him. Colin Powell had, it didn't necessarily last. In fact, Saddam Hussein began dancing in our nightmares. He basically taunted us with his very existence. And Saddam's image bled into the culture, like writ large as well, becoming this new paradigm of the scary evil dictator. Oh my God, that's Saddam Hussein, the dictator. Saddam, I am the dark ruler, not you.

Relax, bitch. You better see him. Little fools, I am the leader of Iraq, the supreme commander, the mighty Saddam insane. Here, have some dynamite down your pan. After the Gulf War, Saddam more than anything, represented a loose end, something that the Americans would have to tie up eventually. And until we got there, America, more than anything else, made sure that Iraqis, Iraqi civilians, everyday people would pay the price until we came to finish the job. Welcome to Blowback.

Speak about this last sign. Welcome to Blowback. Welcome to Blowback. Welcome to Blowback, a pod. podcast about the Iraq War. I'm Brendan James. I'm Noah Coleman. And this is episode two, American Psycho. Thanks for joining us. We'll remind you that if you ever feel like binging the show or skipping ahead and not waiting week after week for new episodes like a chump, you can sign up to Stitcher Premium. Go to Stitcher Premium.com. And if you use the promo code blowback, one word, you get a month free of Stitcher Premium Access. And that's going to get you all 10 episodes of this show, as well as bonus episodes, a couple of which will only ever be on Stitcher Premium, as well as the rest of the whole Stitcher catalog. So Stitcher Premium, promo code blowback, binge away. All right,

what are we doing? What would you say, Brendan, if I told you that the Gulf War never actually ended? I would make the Tim Allen home improvement noise. As you should. Because the thing is, is that the Gulf War, you know, it happened. We, you know, Saddam invaded Kuwait and the Americans went into Kuwait to kick Saddam out. Right. And we chased him, you know, back to Baghdad and everything. Yes. And, you know, like, it's all done.

Okay. Except the thing is, it wasn't all done. Saddam may have left Kuwait, but we didn't stop fighting Saddam. They bombed him periodically. They backed a bunch of coups. They did terrorism inside of his country. Basically everything's short of going back in with troops on the ground. But none of that worked.

Right. And in fact, the ultimate effect of all this was really just to emiserate millions of Iraqis. In this episode, we're going to take a closer look at the Gulf War and what came after. And I think the reason we want to do a whole episode about this, you know, it's like Iraq War origins. You can't really understand what's going to happen in 2003 without seeing how, A, we started to demonize Saddam in the popular imagination. So by 2003, he was an obvious candidate for Big Bad besides Osama. And B, more importantly, you have to understand how low we be. brought Iraq throughout the 90s. We basically took it from what Saddam had made it, which was

a troubled, but still viable modern society in the Arab world, to a failed state. And a failed state is very easy to pick on, very easy to invade, not so easy to occupy. Exactly. What we did throughout the 90s, you could look at it as priming the pump for the kinds of wars that more adventurous people, to put it delicately, in charge of the American government, uh, would want to do later on. All right. Episode two, American Psycho. Mr. Ocean, what we're trying to find out is, was there a reason you chose to commit this crime? Or was there a reason you simply got caught this time? In the summer of 1989, Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi exile and con man that we met last episode, fled his new home of Jordan

in the middle of the night. He insisted to everybody he was going on a vacation. vacation, but he would never come back. Why? He had helped cause a financial crisis. A couple months earlier, some of his family members' businesses had been busted in Geneva, and now Chalaby was starting to sweat, and for a good reason. The economy of Jordan, where he'd been running this bank and living for several years, was in freefall. The 80s were fast times. The Reagan years, obviously, in America, you know, made a grift out of everything. But it also left a hangover in places like Jordan, which is sometimes nicknamed the Gucci Kingdom. And the central bank of Jordan now required all private banks to deposit 35% of their foreign money

to help stave off a huge crash. Chalaby ran the second largest bank in the country, but he refused to hand over the money and stalled for months. The reason why Cholabee's books were cooked. The government sent in liquidators flanked by security services. So Chalaby, once presiding over. one of the most lucrative banks in the entire Middle East slips away in the middle of the night

into Syria. This was a huge scandal. Chalabi tried to get ahead of the story by calling all the Western journalist friends he'd met in the 70s and the 80s, first saying it was just a big misunderstanding and then claiming he was actually framed up by the government of Jordan

who wanted to hand him over to his arch nemesis, Saddam Hussein. Final question, Mr. Chalabi, when are you going to remove this cloud hanging over you with Jordan about the Petra Bank. That is complete nonsense. I was the victim of a

conspiracy in Jordan. As for the numbers concerning the fraud, here's the Guardian. In three main areas, there were huge bad debts about 80 million, unsupported foreign currency balances at counterparty banks, about 20 million, and money purportedly due to the bank, which

could not be found, about 60 million. So the already cast-strapped Jordanian government ended up paying the $200 million owed to the depositors, which staved off an even bigger financial crisis. Chalabi, now two times in exile from not only Iraq but from Jordan, took up residence in London. But Ahmed Chalabi was nothing, if not pragmatic, and he was quick to set up a new venture. His new income stream would come straight from the American government. meanwhile saddam hussein was having cash flow problems of his own you remember last episode we left it at the

conclusion of the iran-irac war an incredibly bloody incredibly long and incredibly expensive conflict that was finally over publicly saddam accepted victory and congratulations from arab leaders on winning the war but privately saddam was desperate for a way out of the red and aside from the obvious human cost his war with Iran had dealt a huge blow to the Iraqi treasury, the value of the Iraqi dinar, and not to mention the price of oil was pretty low. Insult to injury, this is also around the time his son Uday, psychopath that he was, created a big public scene and shot Saddam's longtime bodyguard slash pimp at a party. So Saddam's just in a real bad mood.

Saddam had simply racked up a lot of debt. Saudi Arabia had loaned him over $25 billion, Kuwait, had loaned him $10 billion, keep that one in mind, and the U.S. and Europe had loaned him around $40 billion. And having used him against Iran, America, Britain, and France, then abused him, ruling out any debt rescheduling, let alone any debt forgiveness. And with the perceived threat of an expanding Iranian revolution, you know, eliminated now, thanks to Saddam's war, Arab countries were far less interested in helping him recover as well. So I guess, to sum it up, fake friends. Saddam was trying to scrounge for cash wherever he could. He actually privatized a bunch of

companies inside of Iraq in hopes that that would raise some cash for the economy. I didn't. Oil was selling about 17 bucks a barrel, which was putting Iraq's revenues that year well below, almost half of what they were in 1980. And notably, Kuwait, right after the Iran-Iraq war, began to rather gratuitously, if you ask me, overproduce its oil, which sent prices down. right when Iraq needed them up. And let's pause here to just remark on the Kuwaiti government. This is a government that's soon going to be celebrated in America as a valuable member of the international community and a leader for modernizing the Arab world, et cetera, et cetera. Kuwait was ruled by a Chensi royal family. They dissolved parliament in 1986.

Criticism of the emir, the king was illegal. There were no political parties allowed. They had, like other Gulf monarchies, slavery and human trafficking, they abused foreign workers, they tortured people. It was a piece of shit government. But they did, of course, have a fair amount of oil money. So is it any wonder, after only a couple years before receiving backing from the West, as he invaded another country for the spoils, Saddam noticed, you know, a pretty delicious Kuwait-shaped slab of gold just over his border. You know, like in a cartoon when some guy's hungry and desperate on a boat or whatever. Kuwait just started to look like a big turkey leg that he wanted to take a bite out of. Meanwhile, in America, it's over. George Bush wins,

and the next president of the United States will be George Bush. It's 1990. Yes. The end of history is basically here. Sick. You're George H.W. Bush, a man that Hunterst. Thompson once described as a hyena with a living sheep in its mouth. Yum. And you're president now, after being number two under Reagan. So you're feeling pretty good. Except you're confronting the one true nightmare of any American president, which is the peace dividend.

But the Cold War clearly over, there is real pressure to at least partially dissolve America's mammoth military. The Defense Department in 1990 faced deep cuts that George H.W. Bush and all of his buddies in government and an industry did not want. We're spending $270 billion a year on the military, but we don't have a major enemy. I know it hurts your feelings. I know you're upset about it. I know you're hoping and praying that maybe we'll have another war.

Who you're worried about? Iraq. Even worse for HW, his poll numbers were slipping. He had a really nice 80% approval after invading Panama in January of 1990. strategy was considered a stunning military and political success. In many ways, the invasion served as a testing ground for the Persian Gulf War one year later. But they had been slipping so that by July the 80% had turned into more like 60%. So we need a little bit of a, you know, an upper here. Yeah. And I mean, this is a theme that we'll certainly see on this show, but also I think

more generally, which is that domestic political concerns in America have a very funny way of deciding what's about to happen to a country like Iraq? Because there is a flicker of light in the darkness. It looked like Saddam, still an ally of America and of H.W. Bush. He looked like he was getting ready to cause some ruckus in Kuwait. Let's back up a second. In 1989, a year before Saddam invaded Kuwait, American, British, and French arms manufacturers were still selling Saddam a bunch of war tech, rockets, aircraft systems, et cetera, et cetera. by the way, all these countries had laws against allowing them to do. Yeah. And the Bush administration supplied Saddam with helicopter engines, pumps for a nuke

plant, bacteria, and tons of unrefined sarin, which can be turned into seren gas. Particularly rich was that these types of deals were being brokered by Kissinger Associates, a lobbying firm, of course, belonging to Henry Kissinger himself, whose members included H.W. Bush's soon to be, Secretary of State, and National Security Advisor. So the guys that are going to kick Saddam's ass in the Gulf War are precisely one year before that, part of the Kissinger firm that's brokering deals to get Saddam arms and chemical weapons. This was sort of a, like, a dirty secret of Western politics

was that Saddam was an amazing customer for lots of really skeevy and dangerous weapons. And then it would become another way to make money. and another way to line one's pockets if you went to war with him or took action against him after he'd sold him these weapons. Bush also funneled money to Saddam via the mind-bogglingly criminal banking network, BCCI, which you should Google as soon as you're done listening to this. There's a passage from Saeed Aborich that I think sums up the Bush Saddam record. Quote, Bush had been a Saddam supporter, both under Reagan and after he became president.

It was his diplomats and state department that had defended Saddam's human. human rights violations, and use of chemical weapons. It was the Bush administration that had backed loans to Saddam, accepted him as a lesser evil than Khomeini, resisted congressional attempts to censure him, and wanted to initiate military cooperation with him. So now, smash cut back to early 1990. Saddam, amazingly, felt entitled to invade a neighboring country, which we had supported him doing before with Iran, to annex their territory and sit on their oil.

And with all of his debt and desperation and low oil prices, Saddam started to accuse Kuwait of slant drilling that is like drilling into Iraqi oil claims from afar. I drink your milkshake. I drink it up. But everyone can see what he's doing. And in the months leading up to August 1990, Iraqi forces build up on their southeast border. with Kuwait. Now, curiously, in the lead-up to the Gulf War, the H.W. Bush administration showed no real concern. Famously, in July, April Glasby, who was the American ambassador to Iraq, told Saddam,

in the words of the Isley brothers, basically, it's your thing, you do what you want to do. She said that America has no interest in the Iraqi border dispute with Kuwait. And it wasn't just a fluke. She said it again in a State Department case. table in reference to the precise border between Kuwait and Iraq, quote, that she had served in Kuwait 20 years before, then as now, we took no position on these Arab affairs. And she told Saddam, when she met with him, that the Secretary of State, at the time, James Baker, was directing her to emphasize this position. A couple of days later in July, a U.S. diplomat for the Middle East, told Congress, we didn't have any defense treaty with any Gulf country. And when asked if that meant we don't have a commitment to Kuwait, he said, correct. So a couple of days later, in the beginning of August, Iraq invades Kuwait. On the morning of August 2nd, thousands of people in Kuwait City woke up to war. And suddenly, the Bush administration flips out. This will not stand.

This will not stand this aggression against Kuwait. I've got to go. Hey, what happened? So this invites the question, was Saddam set up? Some facts here drawn from William Bloom's book, Killing Hope. In May of 1990, Saddam had offered to negotiate a border with Kuwait. Per Bloom, the U.S. encouraged Kuwait to cold-shoulders Saddam and rely on U.S. arms. The Bush administration was told repeatedly of the military buildup on Kuwait's border. They ignored it. As that buildup was happening, Kuwait's entire military

remained demobilized. Nonetheless, there were war games about Iraq and Kuwait playing out in Newport, Rhode Island. George Schultz, a former Secretary of State, and now at the Bechtel Group, called ahead before the war broke out and warned his company guys to get out of Iraq before something bad happened. This one is probably the creepiest to me. A Kuwaiti diplomat, who is in Iraq, sent warnings back home of an impending invasion, and he was ignored. After the war, after the Gulf War, he tried to call a press conference and talk about this, and it was stormed by army officers and a government minister and broken up, shut down. It's from Washington Post at the time. Whatever happened there, so commenced, Desert Shield.

At my direction, elements of the 82nd Airborne Division are arriving today to take up defensive positions in Saudi Arabia. This was an American military buildup in the region to prevent an Iraqi invasion of Saudi Arabia, which we got to tell you here, no one really thought was going to happen. Bob Woodward and no less than Judy Miller at the time reported that no one in the government or military believed that. But it did give the defense budget something to do. Yeah, and Bush's approval rating, as a result of Desert Shield, got up to something like 74%. The thing is, is that military action, pretty often it's a cheap high with diminishing returns. And so Bush's approval rating was back down to something like 56% before the U.S. would actually invade Iraq in January

1991. Yeah, and we were getting ready for that desert storm. So America went to the UN and pushed through Resolution 661, which slapped economic sanctions on Iraq. Full trade embargo, food and medicine shipments were put under the control of security council. And as we'll see, even when the Gulf War ended, these sanctions would never go away. So with war clearly on the horizon, Bush assembled a U.N. coalition to prepare for it. When people talk about the Iraq War in 2003, and they say, there was no coalition, and they compare it unfavorably to what Bush's daddy did and what H.W. did in the first goal for it. By a broad coalition of armed forces in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, among many others.

And they say, wow, he assembled like all these people to go take out the bad guy Saddam Hussein. Yeah, this idea that HW employed. you know, the noble tradition of American statecraft, which his son could never do. What we really want to show in this episode is that that's not actually what happened. In reality, it was just done the old-fashioned way. Lots of bribes, lots of threats. The people that we brought along with us for the ride of the Gulf War in 1991, they didn't do so out of the kindness of their hearts or their belief in the purity of the American mission.

They did it because we either gave them cold, hard cash, or because they didn't have any other choice. In the case of Egypt, we forgave billions of dollars in debt. Cha-ching. Syria, China, Turkey, and the Soviet Union were given aid or World Bank and IMF loans, or they had sanctions lifted. And the U.S. stopped complaining about human rights in any of these coalition nations. Yemen and Cuba were the only Security Council votes, in fact, against these sanctions and against the war authorization. Yemen, by choosing not to support the Gulf War, lost the entirety of its American aid. In fact, James Baker, George H. W. Bush's secretary of state said of the Yemeni delegate who cast that vote that it was quote the most

expensive vote he ever cast not chiching all right do you want to do your uh noah's media corner before the u.s could actually get boots on the ground in Saudi Arabia and in Kuwait for desert shield and then and then later for desert storm the Bush administration had to really kind of pull out all the stops to sell the public on the war and I'm going to going to talk a little less about what Bush was saying directly to the public and a little bit more about how they were going to manage the press. When the Gulf War started, the Pentagon had a plan for how to manage and muzzle the press appropriately. The idea was that it was a combination of all of these different kinds of tactics that really hadn't been used in the U.S. for a long time.

You had news reports that would come from, you know, wire services or CNN or whatever, and they would say that the dispatches went through U.S. military sensors. For the first time in decades, the Bush administration pulled out all the stops to sell the public on the war. But the Bush administration had some help. And that help was in the form of the Kuwaiti government. So as Brendan mentioned earlier, the Kuwaiti government was a royal family that did not even pretend to be a democracy. And while the Bush administration privately and the CIA and all those people may have

been ready to commit, Congress and the American public is a different story. So the Kuwaiti government hired the PR firm Hill and Nolton based in New York City and they paid them over $10 million. Colin Knowlton ran a PR campaign to basically get Americans on the side of Kuwait and to sort of germ up their sympathy. So the most famous prong of this effort was the congressional testimony of 15-year-old Naira. Our final witness is also using an assumed name. And again, we ask our friends in the media to respect the need for her to protect her family. And we finally call on Naira to testify.

Bye. Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, my name is Nayyra, and I just came out of Kuwait. Nayira went before Congress and tearfully told stories of Iraqi soldiers butchery in Kuwait, saying that they murdered babies in hospitals, like in their incubators. What I saw happen to the children of Kuwait and to my country has changed my life forever. She told this story to Congress in about October 1990. This is like three, four months before U.S. would put boots on the ground. And it's about two months after Saddam first invaded.

While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers coming to the hospital with guns. They took the babies out of incubators. Took the incubators and left the children to die on the cold floor. So here's the thing. That entire story that you just heard, for the most part, it was bullshit. Five Pinocchioes. Citizens for a Free Kuwait, the AstroTurf activist group created by Hill and Nolton, had concocted the whole testimony.

And this was before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus. This whole thing had been fixed. In fact, the co-chair of the Congressional Human Rights Congress, a congressman Tom Lantos, he defended her testimony even after people started to raise suspicions about it. Why were people suspicious? Well, it didn't really ever get disclosed until after the fact that Naira was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the U.S.

So in the fall of 1990, after we put, up Desert Shield and get our UN coalition together. UN sanctions are biting into Iraq, not to mention Saddam's struggling to actually manage all of Kuwait. Bush starts to go on TV and call Saddam Hitler a bunch. Hitler revisited. We do not need another Hitler in this time of the time of our sanctions. The United States is clearly happy to be on the road to war. But in August and then October, Saddam had reached out with ideas for a piece. Basically, he wanted access to the Gulf and some certain oil fields in exchange for the sanctions being lifted. This was ignored. Then he began releasing foreigners that were caught up in Kuwait during the invasion. It's kind of a goodwill

thing, like, you know, no hard feelings, they can go. I'm trying to send a message here. This too, ignored. In fact, the U.S. just set a deadline for him to get out by January 15th, 19th. 1991. That's when our new shiny and honestly largely symbolic UN coalition, backed by the actual American military, would move in. And Arab diplomats at the time said that Saddam was ready to pull out a Kuwait. If he, one, had guarantee he wouldn't be attacked. Two was promised negotiation on the disputes remaining between him and Kuwait. And three, was guaranteed a conference on solving the Palestine question. He also, with the typical dictator, tough guy at him. attitude, asked to miss the deadline by a couple days to save face and not look like a bitch in

front of the Americans. But you know what? At that point, the U.S. had half a million troops in Saudi Arabia, and Colin Powell was ready to use them. This is, something is happening outside. Just two hours ago, Allied Air Forces began an attack on military targets in Iraq and Kuwait. these attacks continue as I speak just before H-hour three a.m. Persian Gulf time Tomahawk cruise missiles burst into the night sky tonight the battle has been joined our mission said one CIA officer was to convince Saddam that the Holocaust was coming unless he backed down that's quite a policy um and part of that policy of course was simply kill Saddam we denied that we ever tried to assassinate him, but, I mean, one big part of the war, we're just seeing if we could pick him off. This was through laser-guided missiles at euphemistically named, quote, command and control centers. That is to say, places that Saddam might be.

But the wider policy was wider destruction of Iraq. The war against Iraq is now 12 hours old, and preliminary indications are that the massive air attacks against sites in Iraq and Kuwait, going well. Encouraging, was the word last night from the defense secretary, Dick Cheney. Human rights groups recorded that civilian areas were clearly targeted, bus stations, markets, apartments, etc. The bombing of Iraq and Kuwait now in its second full day, the results so far appear to be right on target. Well over a thousand bombing raids have taken place. There has been very little resistance so far from the Iraqis.

There was one instance of a U.S. missile striking a building, and the Iraqis claimed that the Americans had taken out a baby food factory. And everyone kind of went, oh boy, look at these guys, the propaganda. And it was obviously a munitions plant or something like that. These guys will stoop to anything. And then it turned out to be verified. Nope, it really was a baby food factory that we blew up. B-52s carrying 100,000 pounds of bombs apiece, took out buildings and carpet-bombed Iraqi armored units in Kuwait. The U.S. also used depleted uranium in the Gulf War, which is contaminating weapons with radioactive material.

The LA Times reported that U.S. forces would fire on Iraqi troops as they were waving for. flags of surrender. Then there was the famous highway of death. This was a six-lane highway that led from Kuwait back into Iraq. The Americans flew over it, blasting the William Tell overture, and just cluster bombing. Saddam Hussein's forces in Iraq are taking a murderous pounding from the Allied Air Force. Not only just the fleeing Iraqi army, but civilians, taxis, trucks, full of civilians. And this was all after Saddam for five days had been calling for a ceasefire. Colin Powell, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and in front of every camera he could find throughout the war, had previously bragged that he would simply kill the Iraqi army,

admitted in private with some uneasiness now, quote, we're killing literally thousands of people. Finally, I don't know if this is well known, there was the Amaria shelter bombing. This was a building, a shelter, that was filled with over 400 women and children. And after the U.S. military announced that the combat targets were finished in Iraq, we bombed it. And a journalist from the BBC went there in the aftermath of the bombing

and recorded eyewitness testimony. Quote, inside of the building it was still hot and the rescue workers were still finding bodies. Some of the bodies were complete. Others had been fused together by the heat in the blast and lay crooked and absurd on the stretchers as the rescuers ran out with them

eager to finish the terrible job and get away. Sometimes there would be nothing but a great mass of flesh. Downstairs, the surface of the water was one inch thick and melted human fat. We have no argument with the people of Iraq. Indeed, for the innocents caught in this conflict, I pray for their safety.

So aside from flagrantly aiming to kill innocents or just not caring, America made it a priority to destroy Iraq's modern infrastructure. And one UN brief would later report that the U.S. had bombed Iraq into, quote, a pre-industrial age. Literally bombed them into the Stone Age. And this was a strategy, and it was admitted by the military in the Washington Post at the time. Quote, some targets, especially late in the war, were bombed primarily to create post-war leverage over Iraq, not to influence the course of the conflict itself. Planners now say their intent was to destroy or damage valuable facilities that Baghdad could not repair without foreign assistance.

Military planners hoped the bombing would amplify the economic and psychological impact of international sanctions on Iraqi society. One Air Force guy said, quote, Saddam Hussein cannot restore his own electricity. He needs help. It gives us long-term leverage. And let's stay on that point about electricity because Iraq was an electric society. Because it was modern and because it had developed, electricity was extremely important. In their book, Out of the Ashes, the Coburn brothers, Andrew and Patrick note, we crippled Iraq's electric system. That obliterated water purification and distribution, sewage treatment, operation of hospitals and medical labs, not to mention agricultural production. Electricity was down to 4% pre-war level. The water supply was down to 5%. percent. Oil production was low. Food distribution was devastated. And homes were literally just flooded with raw sewage. When you get stuff like that, you get gastroenteritis, malnutrition, typhoid, all that stuff exploded inside of Iraq, thanks to our desire for post-war leverage. And getting back to that human toll of this war, PBS says that there's an estimated 10 to 12,000 Iraqi

combat deaths in the air campaign. I guess that's not including civilians. and as many as 10,000 casualties in the ground war. BBC also reports that the death toll is in the thousands. The truth is, though, we don't fully know. But also, no one in the U.S. would really care. Saddam, to use Powell's term from the beginning of this episode, became one of the last demons in the world, the go-to bad guy, and his people would now pay the price.

This is really the first war to begin, I guess, on live television. The American media was kind of a character, on its own in how the Gulf War played out. The biggest character within the general profile of the American media was CNN. This was CNN's time to shine. This is CNN, a network of turn of broadcasting system. In the last two decades, CNN has mostly become known

for the kind of cable TV pablum that you'd see on Fox News or MSNBC. CNN was actually considered sort of a reporting powerhouse. They were the first people to do 24-hour news coverage, and they'd been doing it for years. When Desert Storm happened, and when Desert Shield happened, CNN was the only news network that was really prepared for the reality of covering in a sustained way on television in American military operation abroad. Here we have live satellite coverage of all the key locations, and people could watch a war unfold live. The story that most Americans got on TV was a pretty simple one. Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait, and Saddam Hussein was a bad guy, possibly like Hitler, though there's some, you know, reasonable people can disagree.

What kind of a man is this who would crush a neighbor like he would an insect? What kind of a man would lie to his friends, Egypt and Jordan? What kind of a man would be perfectly willing to let the world condemn him as long as it doesn't stop him? Saddam Hussein was a bad man who had done bad things to the Iraqi people. And now he was about to do bad things to the Kuwaiti people. With those details that they weren't telling you were, or that the U.S. had once helped him do those bad things, and they sort of ignored the fact that his decision to invade Kuwait

was spurred in part by the position that the Americans had helped put Saddam in. Once Desert Storm really kicked off, here is what the average American heard and saw. What moves a man like Saddam Hussein, psychologically speaking, A lot of experts have given their best educated guesses at that. We're going to talk to one of them now in Washington. Dr. Post, let me ask you to guess or to anticipate what Saddam Hussein, what his reaction would likely be. Is he likely to get more dangerous, depressed, excited, motivated?

What do you think? The effect of these dispatches was not to show the American people the devastation that we were, you know, causing in Iraq and the damage that we were doing. It was actually just to sell a story of American dominance. In the Persian Gulf, no let up. The Allied onslaught against Iraq and military targets in Kuwait continued throughout the day. In Washington, President Bush promised the, quote, darned a search and destroy mission that's ever been undertaken. And the 24-hour cable news channels played this war up like a video game. Like, it was like you were watching your, like you were watching your friend play cod.

They are the rescuers of men and women and their children, spearheading the coalition at band. It seems as if it's a mass retreat at this point. There was a lot of footage directly given to the press by the military, but it was also footage that obscured the gruesome violence. The war started during the prime time hour on cable news in America. It's a war that was scripted for cable TV. It really was. So it's about three to four in the morning in Iraq.

And in America, people are sitting down to dinner. They're sitting down with the TV trays on their knees. And they're watching the, you know, like the newest amusement. And it's these bright light. flashing over the city. These are images that are going to be, you know, like you can tell that they were seared into the brain of all the producers and correspondence

because when we invaded Iraq a decade later, what do you think the invasion looked like? It was the same exact thing. You also had censorship for the first time in decades. Actual press reports that would be published with the notice that, by the way, this was censored by the American government. So-called smart weapon systems, unmanned bombs and missiles with computer brains

have outsmarted the enemy, at least for now. Catherine Currick, NBC News, the Pentagon. By the end of February 1991, the Gulf War and major combat operations were over. And if you had really wanted to unseat Saddam, now would have been the time to do it. In the days after the war, Saddam's rule briefly evaporated, and Saddam actually lost control of 14 of Iraq's 18 provinces. There's another way for the bloodshed to stop, and that is for the Iraqi military and the Iraqi military. and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator,

to step aside. His top deputies like his son-in-law, Hussein Camel, began taking back Iraq brutally, piece by piece, starting in Baghdad and moving outward. And a lot like, say, our betrayal of the Kurds in the 70s, we talked about last episode, people remember this in the region because this was the moment where if H.W. had really wanted this uprising, he could have supported it militarily. He chose not to. Bush told the people to rise up against Saddam. They thought they'd have our support. They don't. Now they're getting slaughtered. According to the Coburns, America actually prevented the Iraqi rebels from seizing abandoned arms storages. Instead, we took them and we sent them to the Mujahadin in Afghanistan, who would, of course, later become elements of the Taliban

and Al-Qaeda. Can't make this stuff up. One thing came out of it, which was in early April, a no-fly zone was established in the north of the country, which would last all the way up until the invasion in 2003. Meanwhile, back in London, Ahmed Chalabi had successfully rebranded. After stealing tens of millions in Jordan, he and his kin had amazingly started a London-based business detecting credit card fraud. Throughout Desert Storm, Chalabi had posed as this Iraqi opposition figure. He made friends with John McCain, who was fresh off his dealings with another fraudster, Charles Keating, Google it. And he had also written the occasional op-ed in the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. One day, after the war, he got an unsolicited phone call from the CIA.

He was a handler with this alias that is just complete porn name, Bill Ryder, R-Y-D-E-R. Let's note at this point that Chalaby is not only a wanted man for his massive fraud in Jordan, and now a plaintiff in countless lawsuits around the world, but is also being hunted by Interpol. No worries, because soon after this meeting, the CIA handler, he received his first taste of American taxpayer money, $50,000, officially now a CIA asset in the program to overthrow Saddam Hussein. His biographer, Aram Rostin, writes that the CIA also took care of Chalabi's, quote,

Interpol problem. In 92, he ended up getting convicted in Jordan. not that he'd ever return to face a sentence. And in 93, he moved out to Kurdistan in the north of Iraq. You know, now it's protected by a no-fly zone. It's going to slowly and surely become like a very solid sort of quasi-state for the Kurds inside of Iraq. And Chalibi went there on a CIA-sponsored mission to bring down Saddam. This was his big moment.

And when the head of the Near East Division of the CIA, when he was shown the new plans for covert operations inside of Iraq, he saw Chalabi's name, recognized him, and said, quote, I want all of the growth in this program to be not this guy. Still, $40 million was put toward an initial anti-Saddam project for the 90s, and that was money that Chalabi had access to. So while he was in Kurdistan, Chalabi came up with what he thought was a brilliant plan to unseat Saddam. This was around 1995. It was basically the idea that with the Kurdish forces in the north, and some American help via the CIA, Chalabi could whisper and covertly convert some key generals and some key cities inside of Iraq

to abandon their support for Saddam and then come game day all at once defect and basically overwhelm Baghdad and cause another popular uprising, which had happened in the aftermath of the Gulf War. He wanted to try that again and be at the top of the pile. But in 95, Chalabee's plan to turn the cities against Saddam, it completely flops. It's a humiliating weird defeat. Saddam pushes it back. It's a total bust. But it turns out that Chalabi, after the plan had failed, after this supposed popular uprising, it failed, he went around spreading rumors that it was the CIA guy inside of Iraq, Bob Baer, he's played by George Clooney in the movie Sieriana, that had come up with the plan. And it actually got Bayer in trouble with the CIA guys back home. And this was not the only way

the Chalabi was putting one over on his American benefactors. And what will be become a kind of low-boiling scandal for Chalabi throughout his schmoozing of the Americans. He definitely, definitely had ties to Iran. The CIA knew that the INC was shot through at a certain point with Iranian agents. At best, I think, they were liars. And at worst, they were provocateurs. If it's an INC source, it was always looked at very, very skeptically by the analysts. But that wasn't the case with the policymakers.

Chalabi was definitely basically functioning as a double agent, seeing what he could get out of the Americans, at the same time, seeing what he could get out of Iran. But it does seem as though he had a little bit more of a preference for his Iranian partners than he ever did for his American ones. I think he just respected them more. So unfortunately, after that debacle, the CIA moves over to another guy that we'll see in future episodes as well called Ayad Alawi. And Alawi fucked up his own coup against Saddam in 1996. But there was some serious love lost between the CIA and Chalaby after that aborted uprising. And one guy, one CIA guy who was just incredibly pissed off at what Chalaby had put the Americans through in their attempt to oust Saddam, went up to Chalabee and said, if I ever see you again, quote, I'll fucking run you over. Clearly the Iraqi goal is to force the international community to abandon the sanctions regime.

created in 1990. The Iraqi leadership wants to regain control of Iraq's economy without disarming. There was this UN resolution that laid out both the terms for peace between Iraq and Kuwait, but it also laid out the conditions for the weapons inspections that Iraq would have to undergo in the years after the war. There were weapons inspectors that throughout the 90s would be coming in and out of Iraq. Saddam would eventually kick them out at the end of the decade, claiming that, you know, they were spying and that it was basically one giant espionize mission. Of course, we clutched our pearls and said, this is just another example of Saddam refusing to give his country a clean bill of health on WMD. But guess what? The CIA did have agents inside of the inspections regime.

The Coburns write in their book, embarrassing revelations concerning the extent to which the supposedly independent UN agency had been co-opted by the CIA for its own purposes, game up there at the 90s. Quote, the monitoring system erected by the UN to watch former WMD centers, for example, turned out to have been used to relay Iraqi military communications for the benefit of U.S. intelligence, thus vindicating all Saddam's accusations that the inspectors were acting as American spies. Beyond that, and this is where we get into how U.S. policy was not what it claimed to be, the U.N. Security Council resolutions imposing sanctions, they had always been tied to Saddam leaving Kuwait and getting rid of WMD.

But after we imposed that no-fly zone in the north, Bush then said that the sanctions were actually going to last until, quote, Saddam Hussein is out of there, getting rid of any real incentive for Saddam to cooperate at all. Madeline Albright under Clinton would make the exact same noises, making the emiseration of millions upon millions of Iraqis a bipartisan policy. So it was of particular interest to everybody when Saddam's favorite son-in-law, Hussein Kemal, defected and left the regime. and went to Jordan. But after an initial flurry of attention he got, he and his brother who had come with him, they had very little to deliver. One thing they did say was that they had completely destroyed the WMD after the Gulf War in 1991. They lost interest in Hussein Kamo pretty soon after he got there. And one of those things that you can't really fully explain or understand beyond the eccentricities of a ruling family, Kamau went back to a

Iraq after Saddam reached out. Saddam assured him that, you know, this was an olive branch, and he just wanted his daughters, who were with Kamel, to come home as well. He goes back and, I mean, what can you say? He gets got. According to tribal etiquette, the Kamel brothers were given a Honda filled with auto weapons and ammo to defend themselves as the Saddam brothers, Saddam's sons, Uday and Kusay, watched their men descend on them from afar. Needless to say, the Kamel brothers lost this standoff, and Chemical Ali, the guy who had unleashed hell in Kurdistan in the 80s, stood over what was his nephew, Asen Kamel, and before killing him said, in reference to his defection to the king of Jordan, who I guess must be a short guy, quote, this is what happens to

those who deal with the midget. He then shot him in the head, put meat hooks in both brothers' eyes, and dragged them away. Some other important stuff that we can breeze through here about the 90s. In 93, the U.S. accused Saddam of trying to assassinate George H.W. Bush after he had left office. What did the United States accomplish with the missile strike against Iraq on Saturday afternoon? Just very simply, we sent a message, and President Clinton was very clear about it, that if you strike at one of us, in this case, the accusation against Iraq, is that they attempted to kill former president, George Bush, that that kind of conduct is not going to be tolerated. Long story short, this supposed assassination attempt very, very likely did not happen. Clinton only claimed there was compelling evidence. Cy Hirsch wrote an article basically disproving it at the time.

The source was the same Kuwaiti minister whose daughter had given phony intelligence to Congress in 91. And after we invaded Iraq in 2003, we found zero evidence of any plot in the files of Iraqi intelligence. What did happen, though, is that the CIA, in partnership with the United States, we found, that guy Ayodalawi, the alternative to Chalabi, arranged several bombings inside of Iraq from 1992 to 1995. McCoburn's got this story. Through Alawi and his organization, there were basically terrorist bombings that we were sponsoring inside of Iraq. Coburn's right, quote, U.S. intelligence officials played down the number of civilian casualties. Former CIA operative Robert Baer, who worked with Iraqi exile groups, recalled that one bomb, quote, blew up a school bus. School children were

killed. Not only did Saddam not try to assassinate a former president, we were murdering Iraqi schoolchildren. None of this intrigue, none of these plots ever ended up getting even close to touching Saddam. And so by the end of 1996, he had iced his traitorous son-in-law, Hussain Kamel, foiled the coup by Alawi, foiled the popular uprising idea by Chalabi and the CIA, and had in so-doing smashed the Kurds in the north again and driven the Iraqi National Congress out of the country. So Saddam, while his country and his people are starving thanks to the U.S. sanctions, he's survived and probably feeling pretty good. They want to have their cake and eat it too, to retain their weapons of mass destruction programs

and escape from U.N. sanctions. And let's close out on that note about the Iraqi population and what the sanctions have been doing to them throughout the 90s, every conceivable thing in Iraq, water, electricity, even the production of chicken, which even the poor in Iraq tasted once a day, was destroyed by the American bombing and the sanctions that came after. In fact, I think we could make it an argument of this show that the sanctions that we enforced throughout the 90s were as great a crime as either of the wars that bookended them. Well, it certainly put Iraq in the position to be conquered and pillaged in 2003. So we've talked about the degeneration of Iraq after 1991. We've talked about the sewage

pouring into people's homes. We've talked about the near starvation diet that people were reduced to. The degeneration of infrastructure throughout the country. The whole place was bombed out. Everyone was functioning on the brink of famine, which it has to be said was treated by a government rationing system. The Ba'ath Party, communist haters, though they were, a government rationing system saved their population from this. One survey found, quote, the system is highly equitable and appears to be

one of the most efficient distribution systems operating in the world. And then, with a little materialist analysis here, there rose a class of new billionaires who profited from the sanctions regime because they smuggled stuff into the country at high prices and got some lavish government contracts for reconstruction.

There was also a new UN colonial class, which was highly paid in hard currency. And of course, the reduced oil production kept 3 million barrels a day of oil production off the market, which introduced a floor to world prices, which helped the Saudis and the Kuwaitis, who had pumped hard to pay for the 1991 Gulf War. Now, eventually, the UN introduced this idea of an oil for food program. This was supposed to be a humane way to keep Saddam under the thumb of the sanctions,

but not punish his people. So oil exports would then be used to pay for the food that Iraqis could, NC introduced back into the country. This was introduced in 91, but the thing was it only allowed Iraq to make 1.6 billion every six months, which was completely undercutting the capacity it had to offer. Saddam refused it. This was proposed again in 1995 with one billion allowed every single month. Finally, with some more tweaks, Saddam accepted it in 1996. By then they had almost no money to pay for the food and the medicine that they were still allowed to import into the country. An American politician visiting Iraq at the time wrote, holds on contracts for the water and sanitation

sector or a prime reason for the increases in sickness and death. We weren't letting these things in. The picture is actually even worse because a lot of the items that were let in were just complementary parts to greater systems. So things that Iraq was approved to purchase were basically useless without the other things that had been left unapproved. One humanitarian coordinator for Iraq, this Quaker estimated that it would take 10 to 20 years to repair Iraq's infrastructure and about 10 billion to fix the electric grid alone. This was not money that was allowed by any UN arrangement. This guy, among others, concluded humanitarian aid, you know, the feel-good charity sent some money

to Iraq or give them oil for food. This was a band-aid, and the only real solution was to lift the fucking sanctions and pump in the money. So there's an elephant in the room here about casualties. What was the death toll of the sanctions? And perhaps the figure that's been thrown around the most is this figure of 500,000 Iraqi children, just children, who died as a result of the sanctions. This has been challenged. There's one paper from the London School of Economics that suggests that, you know, the Iraqi government juice the figures either by messing with the data or strong arming people on the ground. for the purpose of, you know, trying to generate an uproar to try and lift the sanctions.

I just want to note here that even if this thesis is true, this never happened. Everyone did think that 500,000 children were dying in Iraq, and we still did nothing about it. Madeline Albright, who was, you know, Clinton's Secretary of State at the time, she quite famously went on TV and said that that was actually a number that she was cool with. We have heard that a half a million children have died. I mean, that's more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it? I think this is a very hard choice, but the price, we think the price is worth it.

And we're not going to dive in here, you know, point by point, trying to refute any particular study. But we'll link to some that definitely beg to differ. And one thing we can definitely highlight is that the New England Journal of Medicine showed in 1991. This was not a group, by the way, that was working with Iraqi government opposite numbers. This was completely independent. So they weren't getting strong-armed or bamboozled by Saddam's guys. The New England Journal of Medicine showed in 1991 a triple increase in child mortality right after the war. And there is one expert who has said, quote,

I feel the excess deaths lie somewhere between the conservative estimate of 228,000 deaths and 500,000. That's the Iraqi government number. The figure may not be as high as one million, but nonetheless, these are children who should not have died and only did as a result of a tragic war and sanctions. I think that's pretty much good enough for us, too. And the main point, putting aside a squabble about numbers, is that this was intentional. This was not a tragic mishap. This was not a unstoppable thing. This was policy carried out with all this devastation in mind. And that was the plan.

The entire point was the U.S. had already accommodated itself to a reality in which you'd have a death count that high because they made the decision to specifically go after and destroy infrastructure that would make the sanctions and life in Iraq post-Gulf War as difficult as possible.

There's the Washington Post in 1991 quoting a military planner. People say, you didn't recognize that it was going to have an effect on water or suicide, said the planning officer. Well, what were we trying to do with the UN approved economic sanctions? Help out the Iraqi people? No. What we were doing with the attacks on infrastructure was to accelerate the effect of sanctions. All right. We have a question here. Gentlemen, and the white shirt. Go ahead. Yes, I have a question for Secretary Albright. Why bomb Iraq when other

countries have committed similar violations? What do you have to say about dictators of countries like Indonesia who we sell weapons to, yet they are slaughtering people in East Timor. What do you have to say about Israel, who is slaughtering Palestinians? Why do we sell weapons to these countries? Why do we support them? Why do we bomb Iraq when it commits similar problems? I really am surprised that people feel that it is necessary to defend the rights of Saddam Hussein when what we ought to be thinking about is how to make sure that he's, you know,

He does not use weapons of mass destruction. In March 1997, a lot of years of sanctions under her belt. Madeline Albright, she was heckled at this CNN town hall. We, the people of Columbus and Central Ohio and all over America, will not send messages with the blood of Iraqi men, women, and children. If we want to deal with Saddam, we deal with Saddam, not the Iraqi people. Let me say that what we are doing, is so that all of you can sleep at night.

We are facing the danger of the spread of the weapons of mass destruction. All of this was simple continuity back to the policy of George H.W. Bush. The Associated Press actually spoke to Iraqis about Madeline Albright getting heckled. When Oliverite was confronted by all the American people themselves, it shows that not only the whole world, but also the American people, People themselves are against the aggression towards Iraq, and we are all against that. It is interesting, and it is a healthy sign that at last, the American public, who has always been misinformed by the press, by the mass media, have at last began to come to grips with what's actually

happening in the world and realizing that not all diplomats and high-ranking officials of the government are informing them is true. In 1998, there was a piece of legislation unanimously passed by the Senate called the Iraq Liberation Act. Basically what it did was it made regime change through all these years of Democrats and Republicans saying that was the only thing we really wanted. It made it official U.S. policy. It didn't allocate any money for war or authorize war specifically.

But it came pretty close. And what it definitely did was turn on the money spigot to Iraqi dissidents. Who were the Iraqi dissidents? The Iraqi National Congress led by Ahmed Chalabi. And would it surprise you to know that Chalabi was such a keen lobbyist for this bill that it was known around town as Ahmed Chalabee's law? The State Department now, not the CIA. gives Chalaby a PR firm to represent him.

It's called B-K-S-H. A few years earlier, the firm was known as, see if you can recognize some of these names. Black, Manafort, Stone, and Kelly. That Manafort, that's Paul Manafort. And that stone there is none other than Roger Stone. All right, I want to go out here now with a speech from Bill Clinton in the late 90s

in tones that will be eerily similar coming from his Republican successor in which he warns the world of a dangerous mad dictator in Iraq who is certainly developing new insidious WMD with connections to international terrorism and plans to take his vengeance

against America. See you next time. Bye. know very well that this is not a time free from peril, and an unholy axis of terrorists and organized international criminals. And they will be all the more lethal if we allow them to build arsenals

of nuclear chemical and biological weapons and the missiles to deliver them. We simply cannot allow that to happen. There is no more clear example of this threat than Saddam Hussein's Iraq, a rogue state with weapons of mass destruction, ready to use them or provide them to terrorists. But if we act as one, we can safeguard our interests and send a clear message to every would-be tyrant and terrorists that the international community does have the wisdom and the will and the way to protect peace and security in a new era.

Thank you.