Blowback - S1 Episode 4 - "Mars Attacks"

Episode Date: July 6, 2020

America sends Colin Powell, Good Cop, to the UN for one last PR stunt before we invade Iraq. The portal to Gozer the Destructor is opened and the war begins. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

I intend to join those tomorrow night who vote against military action now. It is for that reason, and that reason alone, and with a heavy heart, that I've resigned from the government. Yeah. Okay, that was Robin Cook, Foreign Secretary of the British Labour Party, resigning as foreign secretary on March 17th, 2003 over the Iraq war. And I just want to start this episode playing that clip because this was something you could actually do. You could resign, no matter how higher position, no matter how central you were to the cabinet of your government. In contrast, here is Colin Powell, Secretary of State, reluctant warrior, peacenik general, the good Republican,

about a month earlier in front of the UN Security Council. We know that Saddam Hussein is determined to keep his weapons of mass destruction. He's determined to make more. Clearly, Saddam Hussein and his regime will stop at nothing until something stops him. I don't think it's crazy to say that if there's one person inside of the government, inside the Bush administration, who could have stopped the Iraq war. Who had all of the credibility in the world. Yes.

Colin Powell was the one person who perhaps could have stopped the law. whole thing in its tracks with with the resignation or at least delayed it fatally because delay almost meant the same thing as exactly precisely death for the cause of the war you know call a press conference say i'm resigning they're trying to cook up intelligence they're trying to lie us into a war we have to stop it it's going to be a huge disaster just imagine if you tried it we know that powell was skeptical of the evidence we know that he basically hated dick cheney and don rumsfeld we know that he thought it was a bad idea so why didn't powell walk away this is from bob wood book, Plan of Attack, about the lead-up to the war. No way on God's earth could he walk away

at that point. It would have been an unthinkable act of disloyalty to the president, to Powell's own soldiers code, to the United States military, and mostly, here we go, to the several hundred thousand who would be going to war. The kids were the ones who fought, Powell often reminded himself. So, yeah, they'd be marching off to the war that he could at this point still have maybe prevented. And in fact, he said, Powell said he was flattered, quote unquote, to be asked to go to the U.S. So with all this in mind, I love New York. I get to have a great Sabaro's pizza. Only in this crazy mixed up city. Could we go to war on false pretenses and destroy a country? I wanted to start the episode off with this, because this is Colin Powell's last stand.

and he's, you know, standing in the exact wrong direction. To quit while it was underway was not my way of doing business and serving an administration. If military action is undertaken, I'm with you, I'm with you, to support you. But it really makes sense because as we covered in our prologue episode, this was a guy who started his career in the military, covering up the Mili Massacre in Vietnam, covering up Iran-Contra in the 80s, prosecuting the extremely brutal war on Iraq in 1991 that helped pave the way for this war. one. And here he is, choosing to go out in history with all of his highfalutin ideas about honor and code and statecraft backing yet another slaughter, yet another massacre. Just a little bit of trivia here before we get started. A friend reminded me of this. In Tim Burton's film, Mars Attacks, maybe his last really good one. So good. There's a character in it based on

Colin Powell, played by the great Paul Winfield. He's a general who gets called up by Jack Nicholson, the president, to go meet the Martians when they land, you know, be in the spotlight. And there's a line that could not sum up company man, Colin Powell, any better. He gets the call. He's the pick. He puts down the phone and turns to his wife and says, But didn't I always tell you, honey, if I get stayed in place, and I never spoke up. Good things are bound to happen. Yeah. Okay. speak about this luck sign

speak about this love sign speak about this luck sign welcome to blowback a podcast about the Iraq war I'm Brendan James and I'm Noah Colwyn and this is episode four Mars attacks as usual if you're liking the show and you enjoy it

why not sign up to stitch your premium and get access to all 10 episodes and the bonus episodes that we have coming down the pipeline, just go to StitcherPremium.com, promo code blowback, one word, and you get ad-free listening, free for one month. In the meantime, you heard our little cold open there. This is episode four, Mars Attacks. And this is it. This is the one where we actually go to war.

We'll take a little field trip to the UN and see the Bush administration, dot the T's and cross the eyes. We'll see a few last chances to prevent this whole thing, but then, of course, we'll take you through the invasion of Iraq in 2003. All right. Let's get into it. If you had to sort of break down for the president, you were advising him how much time you commit to Iraq versus how much time you commit to the economy, what would you say? Well, I'm starting to think that people are much more focused now on the economy. They're getting a little bit tired of, you know, hearing we're going in, we're not going in. You know, it's sort of like either do it or don't do it. He's either got to do something or not do something, perhaps, because perhaps he shouldn't

be doing it yet, and perhaps we should be waiting for the United Nations. So last we left our anti-heroes, our villains in the Bush administration, they had pitched and sold the war to the American people, filling their heads with nightmares of Saddam and WMD and Al-Qaeda, and the culture is starting to form around the idea of war. You know, you've got the country songs. People say We don't need this war But I say there's some things

Worth fighting for You've got the video games Quest for Saddam Hey, can you spot the real Saddam Among the doubles and then maybe smack them with a shoe This is part of a new reality-based video game We're going to talk to the game's very clever designer coming up next Still though, polls showed at the time that 64% of America

supported the war, but that dropped to 33% if no allies joined up. This was why Powell was so passionate about going to the UN, you know, getting a green light. That was his contribution to the war effort, you know, to Bush. He was like, look, I did this in 91. It'll get everyone on our side. Let's do it. This was in keeping with the Bush administration's style up until that point. Bush's chief of staff, Andy Card famously had said about selling the Iraq war, quote, you don't introduce new products in August. But it was getting to be fall. And so going to the UN was basically another version of the PR that they'd been doing this entire time. So we said, okay, let's go to the UN and get a rubber stamp. And much like the Gulf War in 91, you get a coalition of nations together to show that

America is not just going it alone, cowboy style. Of course, we were already preparing to go to war and General Tommy Franks had been hard at work on the plans that Rumsfeld had told him to draw up in November of 2001 shortly after 9-11. Yeah, like the particular departments that were prepping for the Iraq war way before we ever had any authorization from Congress or the U.N. We call them things like the Office of Special Plans rather than the War Office, because we had to pretend we weren't already committed to doing it, whether we had any kind of U.N. coalition or not. And this follows a particularly useful rule of thumb or heuristic that they came up with in the loop. Don't you think that we should discuss the

practical implications? I mean, this is after all the war committee. This is the future planning Committee. So fall 2002, both Rumsfeld and Powell unleash a campaign of diplomacy to strong arm the UN into slapping a resolution on Iraq to force Saddam to supposedly give up his weapons of mass destruction. But a funny thing happened. So Saddam actually announced that he wanted weapons inspectors to come into Iraq well before any resolution forced him to. Sounds like a good thing, but in fact, the Bush administration saw it as a huge setback. For one, this put a dent in the idea that Saddam was hiding WMD at all costs. Second, the real point of any UN resolution that America could get was to control the language

of it so that no matter what Saddam did, we could find a way to declare him in violation of the letter or spirit of the resolution. And look, if you believe that Saddam is the most mendacious and evil person on the world stage, then why would you ever give him a chance to, you know, lie to people once again, once he's proven that he can't be trusted? In fact, his willingness to accept weapons inspectors was actually produced as evidence of his guilt. Yeah, this attitude, this damned if you do, damned if you don't approach towards Saddam, was articulated incredibly transparently by press secretary Ari Fleischer on December 2nd, 2002 at a press conference. If Saddam Hussein indicates that he has weapons of mass destruction and that he is violating United Nations resolutions,

then we will know that Saddam Hussein again deceived the world. If he declares he has none, then we will know that Saddam Hussein is once again misleading the world. All right. Let's head now to the UN Security Council in New York City. What if there was a power-sharing situation? Power-sharing. You all were in charge equally, but no major decisions can be made without a majority or two. What's this the fucking UN now? I forget it. Forget I said it. Fuck that.

Right from the start, our best friend, due in no small part to his personal relationship. with George W. Bush was Tony Blair's government in the U.K. Look, I would never support anything I thought was wrong out of some blind loyalty to the U.S. I'm looking forward to this time. It's awfully thoughtful of Tony to come over here. It's an important meeting because he's an important ally and important friend. And his unwavering unity with Bush would actually cause some problems for Blair politically at home further down the line. Our main rivals, on the other hand, were France and Germany. Both were highly suspicious of America. drive toward such an aggressive stance on Iraq, not to mention immense opposition to the war

among their own populations. And Colin Powell spent a lot of fall 2002 on the phone deep into the knights with his diplomatic French counterpart. And they would haggle over the language of the resolution, even certain words, because America was trying to give itself as much wiggle room to bust Saddam for violating either the spirit or the language of the resolution so we could go in no matter what happened. But Powell pulled it off. And in early November 2002, we had our first U.N. resolution one, four, four, one. The result of the voting is as follows. The draft resolution received 15 votes in favor.

A very aggressive resolution meant to compel Iraq to comply with weapons inspections. The draft resolution has been adopted unanimously as resolution 1441. So let's take a look at some of the threats and bribes that the United States would pull out of its hat in order to get countries to go along with it, the UN. Roll those security council members. Bulgaria. was on the brink of NATO membership and also dependent on the U.S. for millions of dollars in developmental aid. Guinea and Cameroon. Both of these guys were on the hook for preferential access to U.S. markets through a couple treaties that prevented anyone from participating who, quote,

undermine the United States national security or foreign policy interests. Mexico. The U.S. ambassador apparently threatened Mexico that the U.S. Congress would block any legislation relating to Mexico as revenge for a no vote. Pakistan. They were playing ball after 9-11 and received billions in aid and forgiveness for any of the coups or terrorism that they had done in the years preceding. Would all of that continue if they cut and run on the next stage of the war on terror? By the way, that's a pretty nasty Islamic militant

insurgency you have going on at home. We could help you with that if you wouldn't mind helping us with something. Syria happens to be located right next to Iraq. And, I mean, what are you Saddam's friend or something? If you're not, maybe we could take you off the list of state sponsors of terror. Would you like that?

Even the two heavyweights, France and Germany, we pulled out the big stick. France. The House leadership threatened to slap sanctions on French wine and water. Germany. The U.S. threatened to pull its military bases out of Germany, and both France and Germany also faced the possibility of a chill for access to U.S. contracts, defense industry, or otherwise. So with that shakedown, we had our first U.N. resolution and the beginning of inspections inside of Iraq in November 2002. What happens on December 8th?

December 8 will begin the beginning and will mark the beginning of a process, a process of verification to find out, whether or not Saddam Hussein is indeed telling the truth and whether or not he has indeed disarmed. So while this pageant got started, you know, America pretending it was just trying to give Iraq a clean bill of health through the UN weapons inspectors, the U.S. military was already at work planning the invasion and was trying to think of ways to secure those WMD once we took over Iraq. And there was a major general named Spider-Marx who was going to be in charge of hunting for the WMD once we got there. Kind of like Matt Damon in that terrible movie we watched. Oh, Green Zone. Green Zone. Yeah, like the head of that unit. And around this time, he and his deputies started to meet for

brainstorming meetings that they called, quote, Sunday afternoon prayer sessions, because that's how much evidence they were turning up on WMD before the war. So the idea of a Hail Mary was quite, quite literal for them at that point. And in the Oval Office itself, in December 2002, the CIA presented President Bush with basically the PowerPoint, the pitch, to the president, presenting, quote, unquote, the case on WMD. I can only imagine what the clip art in that one looked like. Yeah. And this was the type of thing that would have been eventually presented to like a jury with

some top secret, you know, national security clearance. In attendance was most of Bush's cabinet and CIA director himself, George Tenet. And I'll read from Woodward here. when the CIA concluded there was a look on Bush's face of, what's this? Which, let's be honest, I mean, how often was that a look on his face? And then a brief moment of silence. Nice try, Bush said. I don't think this is quite, it's not something that Joe Public would understand

or would gain a lot of confidence from. And Bush turned to George Tenet, CIA director at the time. I've been told all this intelligence about having WMD, and this is the best we've got. So even Bush is saying like, wow, this war is bullshit. And from the end of one of the couches in the Oval Office, the CIA director George Tennant rose up and said, it's a slam dunk case. So with even George Bush admitting that the case for war was a little wobbly, the UN weapons

inspections became even more important for propaganda and selling the war. We didn't really want inspections. We didn't actually really plan on. carrying them out. We were, you know, they were sort of a formality that we would maybe sabotage. And really, the only purpose they served was for the U.S. to go and say, hey, we did it. Look around. We did it. We tried. And then we could go to war like we wanted. Bob Woodward reported at the time, along with his colleagues at the Washington Post, that a source within the administration said, quote, we don't want a smoking gun.

The whole intent of Resolution 1441 and the way it was written was to keep the burden off us, End quote. Woodward in his book says, I should have pushed for a front page story on this, even on the eve of war, presenting more forcefully what our sources were saying. Bob? Agreed. You should have done that. Why can't you present your own evidence for God's sake. Nobody's stopping you. And Butler, no damn well that we pulled the inspectors out. I think Helen, the burden is on Saddam Hussein to comply with the will of the United Nations.

We now flip over to Kurdistan in the north of Iraq, where, as we discussed last time, the CIA is desperately seeking intel of any kind from defectors or people willing to spy on Saddam. And just like 40 years earlier, when the CIA was paying people inside of the Ba'ath Party to help the Ba'ath get into power, they were now paying people to help try and oust the Ba'ath Party from power. So the CIA flooded Kurdistan, which let's remember is an autonomous province inside of Iraq. rock that has not yet even the full trappings of a state. It flooded Kurdistan with so many $100 bills in payment for different informers and information that it actually caused hyperinflation because everyone was using $100 bills to pay for everything. The primary guy who the CIA recruited, their top guy was a raging alcoholic, the head CIA agent in charge of milking him and, you know, keeping him going like Leo and Martin Sheen and the departed. He had to

stay up and sit with him all night every now and again during his drinking binges where he would cry and like talk about wanting to kill himself. So just a good source. Honestly, I relate to that a lot. If the word rock star is anything. He's the sir, we have our top ballers on it. I mean, it was like just as we mentioned last time, a coterie of alcoholics, sexual perverts, drug addicts, all of those things are fine to be. I'm not really knocking any of those lifestyles. No, it's more just... But they're not what you think of when you think of the... Rockstar intelligence.

Yeah, exactly. Because what I think of is I think of guys in like tactical khaki vests. Oh, sure. Like a pistol tucked into the waistband of their pants, like Sean Penn and that camp in Haiti, where it's just like, it's like one second away from blowing off his dick. We make fun, but the CIA did manage to get a couple rock star agents into Saddam's regime. In fact, a bodyguard for Kusay, Saddam's son, became a rock star and began phoning in through secret communications to the CIA. And they thought they were getting really good stuff about, you know, Iraqi submarines and intelligence plans and maybe even soon WMD.

But... But... One day, a call came in from one of the rock stars that wasn't right. The man was speaking under duress. then a different voice said something like quote we knew you were CIA the phone went dead and stayed dead one of the rock stars had been caught

by some element of Saddam security service then the rock star appeared on a rocky television he had clearly been beaten and tortured quote I have been caught I am a bad person I am a traitor someone in a uniform waved Theraya which was the type of high tech communications that the CIA used before the camera saying anyone caught with one of these was a dead person

and all his brothers and his father would be killed, too. The base that the CIA was running never again heard from 30 of the 87, the Raiophones. Mr. Ahmed Chalabi, who had worked so hard throughout 2002, in order to produce some, quote, unquote, intel that would be useful in invading Iraq, much of which would end up inside colon, inside of colon, Powell's colon, inside of, no, inside of colon, Powell. Nice. I'm cutting it anyway. A lot of it will end up in Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations and the Security Council on February 5th, 2003. So Chalaby now looks ahead. He reaches out and begins to court and schmooze for backers and supporters in the West in the powerful positions,

knowing that there will be a power struggle in Iraq after the Americans invade. It starts telling people, you know, Iraq actually may have greater oil reserves than even Saudi Arabia. and if I end up in charge, maybe you could get a good piece of those oil reserves. And Iraq has a lot of oil underneath there, but to say it's more than Saudi Arabia might have been a bit of a stretch. But if anyone could sell that idea, it was probably Chalibi. And he's also starting to make the rounds in the press, you know, as the face of the alternative to Saddam Hussein, the educated, clean, erudite, Iraqi Democrat, you know,

staying on message. And by the way, there's this really interesting character, a Chalabi hanger on, named Francis Brooke, who was this washed-up PR guy who in the 90s started hanging around Chalaby and became like a devoted follower of his. And he shed his skin as like a suit in America. And he joined Chalaby on all of his little excursions in the Middle East and suddenly now had like slung an AK-47 over his shoulder and became like this little pint-sized Lawrence of Arabia. I just want to spotlight this one quote he gave when Chalaby and his guys were getting interviewed before the war. He told a journalist that Saddam Hussein was so brutal and so genocidal that he would

support removing him, even if it killed, quote, every single Iraqi. But show business aside, Chalabi did have one thing he was supposed to do for the American military, which was recruit a popular militia, a volunteer army that would help the Americans during the invasion. Probably something on the order of about 3,000 guys. I'm just having like Cuba flashing. Before my eyes. Oh, absolutely. It's very, it's very familiar in a very doomed and fucked kind of way. The Bay of Piglets.

But, you know, I mean, the American military at long last was finally delivering Chalabi his dream invasion. So they asked for this 3,000 strong force from him. And do you want to know how many people he ended up recruiting? He delivered no one. Market zero. Next frame. He gave the Pentagon nobody. He was just too busy.

Did he get paid for this? Of course he did. The last-minute efforts by the Pentagon to scramble and get their own guys amounted to 74 people. After the invasion, Chalabi would deal with militias quite a bit, but right now he wasn't really putting the work in. This, of course, gets us back to an issue that would bug and haunt everyone on the Pentagon side, which is not enough troops. As you pointed out earlier, it also goes back to why, you know, part of the impetus for doing this whole international alliance, thing and trying to rally international support, which was to cover up the fact that it seemed very early on that there was a gulf between the troop levels that Pentagon people were saying

that we would need and what the people selling the war were saying we would need. There was a guy on the military's WMD Hunter team. He served under that guy's spider marks that we mentioned earlier. And he wrote haikus during this time, both before and after the invasion. And an early one reflected this concern over Rumswell's refusal. to supply enough troops. Rumsfeld is a dick. Won't flow the forces we need. We will be too light.

It's also around this time that I have to note, we add a guy to the national security staff whose name is Frank Miller. And I can't pass up the joke that clearly this was a gesture by the Bush administration to execute more of a gritty, kind of realistic reboot of the Iraq war from 1990.

But still grounded with fantastical comic book element. Absolutely. They knew they had to call in the master, the man who did the Dark Night Rises. And who would literally go on to become the most racist against Muslims' man you could have possibly... We're not actually talking about the Frank Miller who worked for the Pentagon now. We're talking about the comic book artist who did Batman, but if he had been to Vietnam type comic book. Yeah. And he wrote a whole graphic novel that he got an insane amount of trouble for because of just how racist it was. It was about the Middle East. And it was like a whole, like a Middle East like villain or something. What's that called?

Holy Terror Okay, well, yeah Wait, wait, wait, I want to read the Wikipedia Because this is like Holy Terror is a 2011 graphic novel by Frank Miller Which follows a costume to vigilante named the Fixer

As he battles Islamic terrorists After an attack on Empire City Dude, I love it Zach Snyder should option that As originally announced The plot revolved around Batman Defending Gotham City From an attack

From an attack by the Islamic terrorist group Al Qaeda According to Miller The comic would have been in a piece of propaganda in which Batman, quote, kicks al-Qaeda's ass. We ring in 2003, with some bad news on the horizon for the Bush administration. In late January, Hans Blix, the UN weapons inspector in charge of inspecting Iraq, releases the first of what was supposed to be many reports,

indicating that no WMD had been popping up inside of Iraq. Iraq has, on the whole, cooperated rather well so far with Amnavik in this field. The most important point to make is that access has been provided to all sites we have wanted to inspect. And with one exception, it has been prompt. And like we said before, the Bush administration figured something like this was coming, and so they had to start to spin. Can we presume that the president is very happy that Mr. Blitz says there's no smoking gun in the search for weapons in Iraq? Well, the problem with guns that are hidden is you can't see their smoke.

but it wouldn't be disappointing if there were no weapons there we know for a fact that there are weapons there and so the inspectors also went on search all about if you know it's a factory so there's uh again press secretary ari flesher being challenged which he was all the time by the great white house press correspondent helen thomas who was working for upi and she correctly asks there uh if we know that saddam has weapons already why are we bothering with inspections. Why are we doing it? Yeah, really bad timing in particular because the very next day after this report drop, Bush would deliver the state of the union address. One thing that stood out in this particular speech, though, is a line that he delivered with massive pedophile Dennis

Hastert right behind him. It's just an aside. One thing that you should keep in mind is that whenever George W. Bush or anybody is addressing Congress at this moment in time, one of the other indelible stains that is going to be left on this chapter of history is that Dennis Hastert is constantly behind him. Has to be, because he is the Speaker of the House, and in a decade later, he will be, like, just like the biggest, literally the biggest pedophile ever in American politics. Yes. One of the lines in this speech is the claim that Saddam was shopping for uranium in Niger,

one of the debunked pieces of intelligence that we talked about last time. The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently saw significant quantities of uranium from Africa. It debuts here. and was previously pulled out of a different speech in Cincinnati he gave in 2002 in October. But they just said, fuck it. Let's throw it in. We're close to game time here, you know. Let's just throw everything we got. Throughout the entire dance at the U.N., fall of 2002 and early 2003, the Bush administration was basically relying on the idea that the first resolution, the one we talked about, 1441, could be used to justify attacking Saddam based on some slip-up or miscarriage.

calculation on his part. They did not want to waste time on going for a second resolution that more concretely laid out a justification for war at the United Nations. But in February, they changed their mind. The reason was because Tony Blair, Bush's best friend in the UK, was facing very, very intense opposition to the war, not only at home among his population, but even within the labor party. There was a chance with enough defections from his own party and with pressure from the Tories, that Blair actually could face a vote of no confidence that would push him out of office. So Blair went to Bush hat in hand saying, I need a second resolution. I need to give this thing some sense of legitimacy, which for him and his government, the calculation was approval by the

United Nations in the spirit of multilateralism or whatever. Bush apparently had genuine respect and enthusiasm for Tony Blair. Fuck knows why, but he did. And so he told his people to get to work on securing a second resolution at the U.N. that would formally, officially approve war on Iraq. Colin Powell went before the U.N. Security Council to present evidence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs. Colin Powell's arrival at the U.N. Security Council to give a speech on February 5, 2003, was crucial. What you will see is an accumulation of facts and disturbing patterns of behavior. Sodom Hussein and his regime are concealing. their efforts to produce more weapons of mass destruction.

With all of the usual pomp and circumstance about the American desire to live in a peaceful world and to bring evildoers to justice, Colin Powell laid out the case for war for the international community and many liberals at home who respected him so much, and he went on to cite all of the cooked intel that we talked about last episode. My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence. He talked about the aluminum tubes that were supposedly proof of Saddam's nuclear capacity.

Most U.S. experts think they are intended to serve as rotors and centrifuges used to enrich uranium. He talked about those mobile labs that were invented by Chalaby and curveball, the informant. This defector, a second source, a third source, also in a position to know, mobile production facilities used to make biological agents. He talked about Zarqawi, the supposed bin Laden fanboy who turned out to be a bin Laden rival in a part of Iraq that Saddam didn't control. Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab al-Zakawi, an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden.

He talked about how Saddam might have even maybe been responsible for the anthrax attacks inside the United States. For example, they can produce anthrax and botulinum toxin and dry agent of this type. is the most lethal form for human beings. He spun a story full of claims that his own State Department had labeled in their intelligence reports one after the next as weak, all caps.

What Powell does, and you can see this, and you hear this in the speech, he's making an appeal in a certain sense based on his personal demons about his own reluctance and overcoming it, and it's an emotional argument. It's not a factual one. And not only was Powell trying to make a case,

in front of the representatives of the Security Council members in front of him. He was trying to make a case to anyone wavering, be they skeptical Republican or Bush-hating liberal, back home. This isn't a media episode, but I think one example of the type of reception Powell's case got from just that type of liberal, was Mary McGrory, who was a liberal columnist for the Washington Post. She wrote, I can only say that he persuaded me,

and I was as tough as France to convince. She said that she'd been hoping Powell would oppose war, but, quote, the cumulative effect was stunning. She added, I'm not ready for war yet, but Colin Powell has convinced me that it might be the only way to stop a fiend and that if we do go, there is a reason. Back at the White House, one advisor

called this type of conversion, quote, the Powell buy-in. Last episode, we talked about the growing anti-war movement, which was already turning out hundreds of thousands and in some cases millions of people in America and Europe. in january 2003 there were worldwide protests 50,000 people here 50,000 people there and the Guinness Book of world records in mid-February apparently gauged it to be the largest protest in human

history there were millions coming out and looking at a at a sticker here for one of the events in February that i think the really big one says the world says no to war Amsterdam Barcelona Cape Town, Salpalo, Ramallah, Bangkok, San Juan, Toronto, Istanbul, London, Manila, Jakarta, Warsaw, Athens, Berlin, Paris, Cairo, Tokyo, Rome, and more. United for peace and justice. After the invasion, after the occupation, the American anti-war movement would continue to exist, and it would, you know, sort of be around right up until, generally speaking, the time of the 2006 midterm elections when the Democrats took back Congress. And there's an argument that the anti-war movement began to die at that moment because it had become so attached to the Democratic Party establishment or it was financed by the activist wing of the Democratic Party establishment. And the problem with hitching your wagons to the Democratic Party is that the Democratic Party doesn't give a shit about you. And sure enough, in 2006, after they had all gotten elected, Nancy Pelosi, for example, abandoned the anti-war movement, went on to fund Bush's wars to the tune of Bill.

of dollars, completely sidelined activists who had campaigned with her and legitimized her as a true oppositional figure to Bush and everything bad that he represented. The Democrats split, and with them went the money and the focus and the attention given to the anti-war movement in America. A couple weeks after Powell's speech at the UN in the middle of February, Hans Blix resurfaced to issue another fuller update on. the hunt for WMD. Nothing described by Powell in his speech had been discovered, and Blix wrote that he was getting access to all the sites he wanted with no sign that the

Iraqis had been informed of any inspections beforehand in order to hide things or move them around. There were some caveats. He wanted even more cooperation from Iraq, but they weren't being barred or given the run around or shot at or anything nasty. He wanted a couple more months to fully complete the job, but had noted by this point that there was no evidence that Saddam had revived any of his WMD programs from the early 1990s. So ever since the fall of 2002, the Americans had steadily been amassing a really large military presence in the Persian Gulf. Now, other countries opposed to the invasion like France, saw this and just thought, oh, that's the Americans flexing. But by January 2003,

that number of American troops in the Persian Gulf had ballooned to a quarter of a million, not counting the British and Australian troops that had joined them there. Actually, the French president, Jacques Chirac, actually got an aide to go meet with Condi Rice to explain that the French could not be a part of any war of this kind of size because of the very obvious destabilizing effect it would have on the region. Rice, who, as we said before, has written a whole paper on how to contain a nuclear Saddam Hussein tells the French aide that the biggest risk of all would be leaving Saddam Hussein in power. So with all that, making the U.N.

look increasingly unlikely. There's one more story I think we should mention here, and that's the story of Catherine Gunn. She was a British translator who worked for one of Britain's intelligence agencies, and one day she was copied onto a highly classified document that revealed the U.S. was coordinating an effort to spy on members of the Security Council to blackmail them into approving the U.S. move for war at the United Nations. She leaked the email to the British press, And on March 2nd, only a couple weeks before we would eventually go to war, it came out, and it was a huge scandal. British authorities arrested her and charged her with violating the Official Secrets Act. It was kind of like an Edward Snowden situation.

But eventually, the case was dropped because her lawyer was going to turn the whole thing into sort of a trial of the war and the legality of the war in general. Nobody wanted that. And I think there's a movie that came out this year about her starring Kira Knightley. So with all this put together, you know, Powell's speech being. debunked almost in real time by the weapons inspectors, leaks of spying and blackmail and sabotage and the obvious military buildup that the U.S. was doing whether or not any of this panned out. Jacques-S. President of France eventually says publicly, you know what, we're not doing this at all, no matter what they throw at us. Britain, the United States have accused France

of poisoning the process by saying that you would use your veto on any circumstances. Even in Iraq, newspapers loyal to Saddam Hussein are hailing, appraising the division in the world community, calling it a great victory for Saddam Hussein. Do you not think that your repeated a vow to veto has emboldened Saddam Hussein? We just feel that there is another option, another way, a less dramatic way than war, and that we have to go down that path. The diplomacy campaign that Colin Powell worked oh so hard at finally collapsed. there was not going to be a second resolution. Tony Blair, be damned.

With the second resolution dead, Bush would have to go forward and create an international coalition of some sort, but it just couldn't be an international coalition with the actual imprimatur of the United Nations. From a diplomatic standpoint, this wasn't some sort of crack team of nations that were assembled, cooperating and, you know, hand in glove in the way that we did, you know, fighting the Axis in World War II or whatever. And also military. it was a complete joke. We're talking about countries that were sending

literally dozens of people. My favorite was Finland sent two troops. If you look it up, this is the number of troops, two. Just like if one of those guys was not feeling well that week, it would have had to have said

one troop. So you can kind of generally categorize who were the countries that joined or signed up for and endorsed the U.S. invasion. You can roughly categorize them by what did they get out of it or what did they want to get out of it?

The first batch was what Rumsfeld started to refer to as New Europe. These were, this was basically Eastern Europe like post-Soviet Europe. Because Western Europe, led by France and Germany, you know, they were letting us down big time by not supporting the war. They were done. So that's old Europe. As if it's just like, that's

old shit's played out. Yeah, it's corny. Yeah. It's all about this New Europe shit. And what he meant by New Europe. New Europe clouded. Old Europe? No. Yes. And we're talking about Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. All of these nations except for Croatia were in line for NATO. And wouldn't you know what?

They all got in. Next up is the Middle East. And I'll just read these and you tell me if you can find the similarity among this group of nations. Bahrain, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. Man. My geez. I'm struggling. I mean, we don't want to generalize. No, but it does sound like that they are small, oil-rich autocracy is reliant on U.S. military power for the current regime's sustain control. A couple more key partners in the coalition were two silent partners who did not declare themselves openly a part of the coalition. I've said, look, we'll take help any way we can get it. And if someone wants to make it private, that's fine. If someone wants to make it public, that's nice. And it's obvious that help that's private is helpful.

And we've benefited enormously in the global war on terrorism from the intelligence sharing by countries that are ostensibly not helping us. One of those was Saudi Arabia. The Saudis posed as anti-war because, like any other Arab country, their people were completely against unleashing hell on the people of Iraq. But behind the scenes, they were lock and step with America. We've already discussed how Prince Bandar, that consigliari from Saudi Arabia, was babysitting, George W. Bush. And in fact, he would also be included in briefings that were off limits for any foreign operative. And Rumsfeld at one point let him see the battle plans that were being drawn up for Iraq. It didn't actually give him a copy, but Bandar ran out of the room like Jake Gyllenhaal

in Zodiac and started jotting down everything he had heard and seen and sent it back to his masters in Riyadh. It was asked of me how this meeting came about. And I was in Israel. I was in Israel last week. I had the opportunity to talk along with my colleagues and our codel with Shimon Perez, the foreign minister, as well as Mr. Netanyahu. Just like Saudi Arabia, Israel was loath to be seen as too closely connected to the Americans' drive for war. But of course, they supported the policy. The foreign minister at the time, Shimon Peres, told CNN, we think and know that Saddam is on his way to acquire the nuclear option. And of course, Benjamin Netanyahu, the big dog, who knows where he'll be when this podcast actually airs. He showed up to Congress and I think

I'll just let him speak for himself. If you take out Saddam, Saddam's regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region. And I think that people sitting right next door in Iran, young people, and many others will say the time of such regimes of such just bots is gone. There's a new age, something new is happening. So what were things like, inside of Iraq during this period of buildup During the UN stuff, Saddam had called a meeting with his generals and he said, I don't have any WMD.

And they were actually all frankly stunned. They thought that he had probably kept some somewhere and just hadn't told them. And I just want to cut now to another moment from our conversation with our Iraqi friend Ra'ed because he brings up a good point about a narrative that's come up after the fact about

WMD, where it goes, you know, oh, well, we sure did bungle that whole WMD thing. But Saddam, he was really posing all the time like he had WMD. And I want to listen to what Rahad has to say about that here. It's one of the prevailing narratives

in Washington, D.C. lately was that, you know, the U.S. really didn't know that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction. And that Saddam at the time posed to have weapons of mass destruction for regional reasons. He wanted to scare off Iran and Turkey and Saudi Arabia. And that's why he tricked us. He tricked us into believing he had weapons of mass destruction. And I want to say a couple of things about this. Number one, I lived in Iraq throughout the 1990s. The United Nations inspection teams

literally inspected every inch in the country. We had the U.S. and teams dig holes right outside my parents' home in Baghdad, because they got, you know, like some report that there was like a nuclear warhead buried under. Yeah, there was like this empty field in our neighborhood. I will tell you that one of my very clear memories, the weeks leading to the 2003 war, there was this one tape that was filmed of Saddam speaking. with Al Jazeera in an interview. And Saddam says, in Arabic, Al-Iraq chalin from eshahed damar shamil nihailen.

I remember these words because I heard it thousands of times in state-owned media, on Al-Jazeera, in Arab media, Saddam's saying, Iraq is free of all weapons of mass destruction. We have no weapons of mass destruction. There are no weapons of mass destruction. Everyone knew that. that was common knowledge. Saddam did not pose to have weapons of night destruction. He didn't lie about it. You know, the punchline of the story of what happened in Iraq is that the U.S.

did not invade Iraq in 2003 because we were tricked into believing that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. The U.S. invaded Iraq because the U.S. knew as a fact Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction. I thought that was really interesting, and I had actually never heard that before. At any rate, we knew that he didn't have WMD because, of course, if we thought he did, we would never have gone in. But anyway, still, at this point, Saddam was feeling good because he thought that Powell had decisively failed at the UN and that the United States was chafed. Most of its allies didn't want to go to war and that maybe they would saber-rattle a little bit, but basically the threat was over. And as is noted in the book, Cobra 2, he also reminded himself, I don't have any WMD. They're not going to find any.

I'm fine. Quote, Saddam was so convinced that the United States would not prevail on the political debate that he denied a request by his military that Iraq began to sow mines in the Persian Gulf. Saddam did not want to give the United States any excuse to start a war. Meanwhile, among Iraqis, according to Anthony Shadid, the sense of crisis seemed strangely routine. Checkpoints set up on the modern German-engineered highways were manned by torpid soldiers. Long lines formed outside some bakeries and gas stations. For the most part, though, Baghdad went about its business as usual.

Workers methodically splashed cement on brick, building a long-planned addition to the information ministry. But I think underneath this calm, people knew that they were fucked. When Ceramist asked about the war by Anthony Shadid told him, quote, they're going to burn the forest to kill the fox. And let's remember, by the time of the invasion, due to the sanctions we talked about in episode two, the bombs dropped in the Gulf War. incomes in Iraq had dropped to one-fifth of pre-war 1991 levels.

Infant mortality had doubled. Most people lacked clean water. A third of young kids had dropped out of school. Adult literacy fell from 90% to under 60%. Many Iraqis had developed protein deficiencies, usually something you see in famines. And the UN, in fact, reported that the country was on a, quote, semi-starvation diet.

And as for the line that Americans were coming, as liberators. I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq from the standpoint of the Iraqi people. My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators. Last time Iraqis had heard that was 1917. Quote, our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators. That was a British major general. We all know how that turned out. Mid-March 2003, we pull the inspectors out. We're done with selling the war. We're done with the UN.

The military is locked and loaded. All that's left is to start the war. March 14th in Qatar, where U.S. Central Command is based. Tommy Franks calls in all of his army, Marine, Navy, Air Force, Special Ops guys, and puts on a screening of Gladiator with Russell Crow. He was psyching everybody up before they went to war with the Iraqi barbarians. My fellow citizens, events in Iraq have now reached the final days of decision. March 17th, Bush goes on TV and issues an ultimatum.

Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within 48 hours. March 19th, American Special Ops in the early hours move into Iraq from the West. On my orders, coalition forces have begun striking selected targets of military importance. war planners have targeted 55 of Saddam's top guys, including Saddam himself. They hand this list out as a deck of cards. Each card's got a different guy in his face on it.

Take this guy. Tastes for the theatrical like you. It leaves a calling card. I'll look into it. Early on March 19th, American intelligence thought they had found the ace in the deck, Saddam Hussein, in a compound south of Baghdad called Dora Farm. A CIA source in Baghdad claimed he'd seen Saddam enter a secret bunker. Holy cow, the war could be over

before it started. So we fire off a bunch of bunker buster munitions and cruise missiles right at the target. We got him. That's it. War's over. Oops, turns out Saddam wasn't there at all, 15 civilian casualties. Meanwhile, there's an amphibious assault in the southeast of Iraq to secure the oil fields by the Gulf. March 21st begins the aerial bombing campaign known ever after as shock and awe. The first bombs began to scream over Baghdad, all captured on TV, of course. The talking heads at CNN did not even try to hide how giddy they were. Listen to this, Jamie. These are shots being fired now in Baghdad. I want to have viewers to listen to it. This opening salvo killed as many as 6,000 Iraqis.

Absent from that list of casualties were any of the 55 top bot party guys passed around on our little deck of cards. Entering Iraq from the south, the U.S. 5th Army Corps would drive to Baghdad with a left hook from west of the Euphrates, and the Marine Corps would attack from the east of the river. The British would handle Basra in the south. Saddam and his generals expected a much longer bombing campaign, but the Americans very quickly moved in with the ground forces. Tanks, armored cars, helicopters, they were just driving through the desert. There was a place called Nazaria on the banks of the Euphrates,

and this was one of the most intense battles in the initial invasion. One unit in the Marine advance sped past everybody and took a wrong turn at Albuquerque, and they sped right into an Iraqi front line. They swing around to escape, and the Iraqi force is overwhelmed. We thought, especially in the South, that a popular revolt would occur and aid the U.S. advance toward Baghdad. It didn't happen at Anasuria. It didn't happen at other places in the South.

As all this goes on in Baghdad, there's a surreal normalcy as people just, you know, pass militia and armymen on their way to go shopping. The broadcasts from one particular Ba'ath party spokesperson, nicknamed Baghdad Bob for his reports on Saddam's imminent victory over the Americans encapsulated this, you know, non-reality in the face of the invaders advance. On April 4th, the coalition forces got word that Chemical-Ali, who was in charge of all the horrible genocidal stuff in the 80s, they got word he was in a house in Basra. It was very clear to me both before and during this operation that the sheer people were

terrified of this man. So F-16s flew over and obliterated the house. We're watching this video of the attack, and the first weapon comes in, and then the second weapon comes in and strikes the building. And you're able to see bodies like rag dolls flying up into the air. And I'll tell you, we sat there and we were cheering, thinking, yeah, we just got Chemical Ali. Just like Saddam's supposed bunker and Dora Farms, Chemical Ali was not there, and instead we wiped out 17 innocent people.

The weapons that are being used today have a degree of precision that no one ever dreamt of. In general, our precision-guided bombs somehow managed to land on a bunch of working-class Shiite neighborhoods. Homes, shops, restaurants, it looked like the aftermath of a hurricane.

On March 28th, we hit a market in yet another working-class Shiite neighborhood. Shadid writes, one passerby recalled a five-year-old with half his face blown off. And at every point, whether there was an American force or a British force in the south or in the middle of the country, the initial layer of the Iraqi military would kind of chip away. But what would come after that would be the Fedain Saddam. These were the rag-tag militia-type units, the really fanatical guys that were defending their country with their life.

And this surprised everybody invading. They were fearless. They weren't afraid to die. And they just, it was like a human wave attack as they came pushing towards us. The Fedain, I mean, they really were rag-tag. of them were honestly teenagers. The fighting was fierce. They had planes and tanks.

And all we had were machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades, and hand grenades. And they faced down this giant army with basically just a bunch of guns and grenade launchers. They fought like heroes. I saw them with my own eyes. They run down the street, throw themselves to the ground,

put a rocket in the RP, The closer American forces got to Baghdad, the more they ran into Saddam's crack troops in the Republican Guard. In south of Baghdad, the U.S. started to move in Apache helicopters, and they descended to pick off tanks and strife the Iraqi troops. But the Iraqis killed the power grid, which sent those choppers into darkness, and then the resistance blasted everybody from the rooftops. I can remember seeing an RPG skip across the road in front of us. So I was like, okay, this is, this is for real here. This is bad. The resistance was real, it was fierce, it was desperate, but eventually the Americans ground the Iraqis down.

Fedain, the Republican Guard, they all fell to American bullets and shells, or retreated and lay quiet to fight another day. In some places, while the war, war was raging on. Iraqis just piled up bodies of their dead. In other spots, people dragged the bodies of their friends and family off of the street or dug through the rubble to try and bury them. Blood and guts and limbs littered the streets, heads floating in deep puddles of dirty water. These were people who were hoping maybe not to get clipped by the Americans just because they weren't fighting back. But as one U.S. captain put it, good people stay home. To the people that are out there watching you, they don't need to be out there. They're not typically innocent people.

A few days before the fall of Baghdad, Americans took a bridge in the east of the city. And civilians were not notified. No radio or broadcast put this out. So there were still people driving toward the Americans from the other side of the bridge. So the Americans simply lit up anybody who was making their way across the bridge toward the U.S. position. These were civilians, families, elderly people. They were all mowed down. seeing is not the war in Iraq. What we're seeing are slices of the war in Iraq. And it is not what's taking place. What you see is taking place to be sure, but it is one slice. First fell Basra in the south, and then by mid-April, U.S. troops announced that they had fully taken Baghdad. Saddam

goes into hiding. But his presence remains and haunts us on murals and posters, some now getting defaced by Iraqis, and one key statue. In Firdo Square in central Baghdad, a U.S. Marine Armed Recovery Vehicle pulled down the statue of longtime Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. On April 9th, the Americans staged a great photo op as a small crowd tried to topple the statue of Saddam. They went to the American troops and asked for their help. That is possible. I did not see that.

And you can see the symbolism. The Iraqi demonstration. traders couldn't do it on their own. So the US of A used a big, shiny, armored vehicle to drag the statue onto the ground. And Al Jazeera is carrying these very same pictures. So they are playing all over the Arab and Muslim world. They are seeing the same images we're watching right now. It's actually heartwarming to see that we had a hand in bringing some freedom to these people. They've been under the gun now for 30, over 30 years. Incredible sight. There's a sort of see-a-later, buddy field of this whole thing in there.

Another dazzling pageant unfolded on May 1st as Bush landed on a fucking aircraft carrier on the coast of San Diego in the co-pilot seat to announce that major combat in Iraq, that is to say, the war, was over. In the Battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies, have prevailed. And behind him on a big banner were the words, mission accomplished. So before we go out this week, there's one more PR coup

that happened in the aftermath of the invasion. It's the story of Jessica Lynch, America's first quote-unquote war hero of the Iraq War. We're all familiar with the name Jessica Lynch. Her story saturated the news. Soon after the U.S. invaded Iraq. She was captured as her army unit was ambushed on its way to Baghdad.

Lynch was portrayed as somebody who fought back until the bitter end, that she fired her gun until the clip went empty, even as her Humvee lay burning, and Iraqis were advancing on her position. She was kidnapped and brought to an Iraqi hospital where she suffered further grueling treatment. Almost two weeks later, grainy night vision video shows how U.S. soldiers carried her out of an Iraqi hospital. The story of Lynch and other soldiers' heroism in Nazaria, however, was kicked into overdrive when she was, quote-unquote, rescue. And soon fictional accounts of her experiences were leaked to the media by unnamed government

sources. The rescue was no rescue. It was totally staged. When the American soldiers armed with cameras and rifles stormed into the hospital and, you know, fired, the doctors and other hospital staffers reported that they were using blank rounds. There was no Iraqi army presence at all. And that all of this was simply to tell some kind of story about what had happened to Jessica Lynch

and what the American Army was willing to do to get her back and to bring her home. When Lynch herself went to Congress in 2007, she expressed deep pain at how the Pentagon had spun her story. At the same time, tells of great heroism we're being told. It was understaged by media, all repeating the story of the little girl Rambo, from the hills of West Virginia who went down fighting. It was not true. We'll see you next time. Bye.

Overall, how does that make you feel about your government? You know, it's, those are the people that you want to believe. You definitely, deep down, you want to believe what people are saying. And I think that's what happened with my situation, my story. People wanted to believe that this was the truth. But it's, you really got to kind of be careful of what you take away from stories, make sure that they're accurate. And so it's sad that they want to make up stories because now it's kind of hard to believe them.