Blowback - S1 Episode 5 - "Dead Links feat. Will Menaker"

Episode Date: July 13, 2020

The media episode, breaking down some of the journalistic fuck-ups and pundit idiocy that steered us toward war in Iraq. Featuring special guest Will Menaker. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

his dad, by the way, was on Team B. And Daniel Pipes, at the time was the head of the Middle East. He was still the head of the Middle East. Richard Pipes was his dad, right? Yeah. Yes. Okay.

I'm going to make sure I got that right. Richard Laying Pipe. That's why he got the job. Yeah. They were like, I don't agree with his methods, but he can fucking lay pipe game is five star. Speak about this touch sign. Speak about this lunch sign.

Speak about this lush sign. Welcome to blowback. I'm Noah Colwyn. I'm Brendan James. Today's episode is about the media. We've titled it Deadlinks. Speaking of links, if you feel like getting access to all 10 episodes of blowback with bonus episodes, this is the last time we're going to put the call out. sign up for Stitchier Premium with the link, StitcherPremium.com, enter promo code blowback for one

month a free, ad-free, premium listening. All right, that's enough of that. What are we got today? So for the Iraq War to have gone down the way it did, a lot of things in a very specific order and specific timing needed to happen. The Bush administration needed to raise suspicion that Osama bin Laden was in cahoots with Saddam Hussein. The Bush administration, also had to convince the world that Saddam Hussein had WMDs and he planned to use them. The Bush people needed to get Congress on board and Colin Powell had to go to the UN to at least pretend that the U.S. cared what other countries thought. And to sell all that, the White House needed some help from the media.

And boy, did they get it. For today's episode, we're actually going to chop it up into a couple different parts. For the first bit, Brendan and I are going to be walking you through some of the reporting that was used to support the case for invading Iraq. And then in the next part, we're going to bring in special guest, Will Menaker. Hello. Or if you so choose, it can contribute throughout the episode. If I so choose, I can contribute to the war in Iraq and selling it to the American people.

And once we're done selling the war in Iraq, we're going to discuss a little bit, you know, more of the punditry and a lot of what Americans might have been seeing on TV or a newspaper or editorial headlines, op-ed headlines from that time. The blogs. Will and I have a special soft spot for the blogs because it was the emergence of the, that form in it i mean you couldn't have matched up a better form to content this will be good because you know much of my current personality disorder is based on being deranged by uh watching the media uh in the run up to the iraq war and reading some of the people who were in favor of it but it's been such a long time that i feel all those tumors in my body all had names but i've forgotten a lot of them even though i know they're still there killing me every single

day. We've already discussed how a lot of the first public links between 9-11 and the invasion of Iraq, how a lot of those were drawn up pretty soon after the towers came down. And so after months of talk about how Saddam was looking to develop, you know, weapons of mass destruction and how Saddam was a character that we needed to start looking more closely act. Dick Cheney, speaking on Meet the Press in December 2001, made this crazy claim that a 9-11 hijacker had met with an Iraqi intelligence official in Prague. It's been pretty well confirmed that he did go to Prague, and he did meet with a senior official

of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the attack. On day one, if you remember, James Wolsey, the former CIA chief, had gone on TV and immediately said, like before the Bush administration even got to it, said, I think Saddam is the real mastermind behind 9-11. So that was September 12th, 2001.

was he wasn't the only one who had those kinds of ideas. In fact, there was one fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a woman named Lori Milroy, who had a lot of those same ideas. And actually, Lori Milroy co-wrote a book in 1990 about Saddam and the Kulf War. And her co-author on that book was a certain New York Times reporter named Judith Miller. Now, you describe yourself once described smart, fearless, relentless, to now, to pushy would do anything for a scoop, warmonger who helped sell and carry out the war. You said you laughed and you cried. Right. Well, I've been called worse. I've been called worse.

Miller was a well-known person at the time. She'd been the deputy bureau chief of the Washington Bureau in the late 80s, like years before anything to do with 9-11 or the Iraq War. But over the course of the 90s and into the early 2000s, she became very well known for reporting on Al-Qaeda and, you know, the emerging fight against global terror. In fact, her specialty and the thing for which she became particularly well-known was reporting about chemical and biological weapons and the ways in which terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda supposedly wanted to acquire those weapons

and use them against the U.S. And after 9-11 it happened, Miller's expertise and her deep sourcing in D.C. and among neo-conservatives especially was very quickly given the fast track at the Times. The New York Times editor at that time was a guy named Howell Raines, who is known for being perhaps the worst editor

in the modern history of the New York Times. he was responsible for the Jason Blair Fabulism scandal Reins was supposedly responsible for this kind of no holds barred culture and when 9-11 happened he supposedly told Miller go win us a Pulitzer.

Actually a month after 9-11 happened there was this whole network of anthrax attacks that went to media and government organizations and a bunch of these were hoaxes, some were real. Initially the suspicion was of course that this was tied to al-Qaeda and global terrorists that was disproven. I remember the insane thing about the

anthrax attacks is you're right they happen like weeks after 9-11 did literally and i remember like you know being like watching the news or like being glued to the tv every day because like the people forget like the anthrax attacks freaked people out like as much if not more than 9-11 one of the three congressional offices where anthrax has shown up is that of hoosier mike pent pent's family and staff were tested for exposure today but he had a stern message for those responsible to the people who did this, our message to you is simply this. You have failed again.

Because 9-11 was like you know, yeah, ground zero. Lower Manhattan was very like, you know, isolated into like, you know, the most major part of America, but people, you know, didn't feel touched by it in the same way, whereas now everyone was thinking like every letter that they touched, they were going to

breathe in a fucking lungful of anthrax. Well, actually. And the other scary thing is, nobody, it was never a resolve. Nobody has any idea who sent those anthrax letters. We talked about that in an earlier episode. And I believe once the anthrax itself, and the ones that were deadly,

that ended up killing a few, I think, postal workers for the most part. Didn't Dan Rather get someone? There's a great. This is jumping ahead into my half of it, but this is as a good time as I need to bring it up. There's a post from Andrew Sullivan on October 11th, 2001, right around the anthrax time. I worked as Andrew's intern a long time ago.

I got to get that out of the way. And this is a paragraph. Are you on speaking terms with Andrew? Not really. This is a paragraph in a post that is hysterical the whole way through, but my favorite part of it. The key thing to look for is whether there is any Iraqi connection to the Florida anthrax outbreak. If there is, then this war will be expanded, whatever Colin Powell wants. I had my own biochemical jitter today.

I saw two separate pigeons flailing in distress on the sidewalk, one block apart. A man walking nearby saw me notice and said he had come. contacted the public health department almost certainly nothing but you don't realize how unconsciously you're looking out for things until you see them in front of you so andrew like if like the general spirit of the nation at that time was yeah as you said every around every corner was a flailing pigeon due to anthrax yeah yeah just to be clear though uh judith miller was never sent anthrax no also uh we cannot go forward without noting that anthrax is one of the things we definitely sold Saddam Hussein in the 80s.

So within the world of the New York Times and quickly with the media at this moment, Judith Miller became an incredibly visible face. She was on TV all the time and her reputation was that she was an incredibly dogged and talented reporter who had absolutely no people skills and who set loose by Howell Raines to go win the paper Apollitzer had sort of started fucking things up. Beginning in December 2001, when Cheney goes on meet the press and his Bush officials begin publicly connecting the 9-11 hijackers to Saddam Hussein in Iraq, a number of Judith Miller bylines begin appearing on a bunch of blockbuster stories in the New York Times. In December 20th,

2001, she writes a story about Iraqi who tells of renovations at sites for chemical weapons and nuclear arms. In February 3, 2002, she describes a bunch of Kuwaitis who come to the U.S. lobbying for action on Iraq, that they need change. These are people aided and supported by a number of well-known neo-conservative pundits like the professor Fuadizami, who would later become key cogs in the Bush machine pushing war. In March 2002, a nation challenged leadership, White House wants chief of chemical arms group to resign. Basically what happened was that the head of the organization for the prohibition of chemical weapons, the international group that was about a fifth funded by the US that monitored chemical weapons was told that they needed to not let Saddam let inspectors in,

and that in fact they needed to get with the program and to support the U.S. as bullying of the increasing calls for Saddam to just, you know, like step down or whatever. Actually, what happened, Judith Miller talks about how this guy was being too soft on Saddam and that it wasn't clear that he really understood the threat. And what happened behind the scenes, as reported by Medi Hassan last year,

was that this official, the Brazilian diplomat Jose Bustani, who headed the OPCW, was threatened directly by John Bolton. He was threatened by Bolton for negotiation. with Saddam Hussein to allow the OPCW to make unannounced visits and Bolton told Bustani you have 24 hours to leave the organization and if you don't comply with this decision by Washington we have ways to retaliate against you pause we know where your kids live you have two sons in New York Jesus Bolton said that to

Bolton said that and Miller reported that the White House was pressuring Bustani except she described it as Bustani being too much of a wimp and not because John Bolton was literally threatening to put a hit on his kids. And this is all crescendoing in mid-2002 basically at a time when the U.S. is starting to do a lot of this sort of subterranean level muscling that by the end of the year will come out in full force. I have no problem talking about the New York Times as a monolith in the lead up to the war because as we don't even really need to go into, they editorialized in favor of it. And their star reporter and the person they gave the most oxygen to was a relentless propaganda. for it. But there were other reporters at the time, I'm sure very frustrated reporters who were uncovering all kinds of ways in which this this supposed, you know, Hollywood-style screenplay-type

narrative that was building the case was either thinly sourced or entirely fabricated. But what may have felt like kind of a low hum of a war effort developing throughout 2002 really amped up during a period of time that I like to call Black September. On September 8th, Judith Miller and a co-by-line story with another reporter, Michael R. Gordon, who co-bilined a bunch of these, but is basically understood not to have supplied the bulk of the erroneous reporting. He simply just is... He just put the part where it said Iraq is a country in the Middle East. Saddam is saying he's the president. True. September 8th, there's a story. Threats and responses. The Iraqis. U.S. says Hussein intensifies quest for ABOM parts. Yeah. This is the story about Saddam's acquisition of aluminum two.

Tube time. Tube time. I call it tube time. And these were tubes that were supposedly only could be used for centrifuges and were a sign that Saddam was ramping up his effort to acquire a nuke. Five days later on September 13th, Baghdad's arsenal. The White House lists Iraq's step to build banned weapons, describing the whole litany of measures that Iraq was supposedly taking to assemble the weapons it wasn't supposed to have.

Just want to jump in and say that in the course of these whatever articles or reports from from Judith Miller, she left out the fact that Hussein Camel, who we talked about a couple episodes ago, had defected in the 90s and told UN inspectors that Iraq had destroyed all of its WMDs back in the 90s. That was a, you'd think that would be a fact that would be presented alongside all the other reporting, but it was not in the conversation.

Well, it's a thing, because it's funny you say that, because then the next article that she wrote in that month, when September 18th was about weapons inspection. The headline being, verification is difficult at best, say the experts, and may be impossible. I mean, you bring up the, the weapons inspectors thing, like, a huge

part about this, and especially, like, in terms of, like, the media's role in it is I remember, like, at the time in, like, yeah, 2002, especially when they're, like, they're really, you know, Afghanistan, like, that was easy to do because the people, you know, al-Qaeda was in Afghanistan.

But what they, you know, as we all know, what they really wanted was Iraq, and that would take, you know, a year's worth of laying the groundworked and the media helping them out with that. A huge part of that was demonizing, vilifying, and just casting doubt overall on, like, the weapons inspectors. Yeah. In them individually, Hans Blicks and others. Anyone involved... Remember Scott Ritter? Scott Ritter.

There's a big wamp-womp, the conclusion to that story with him personally. But, yeah, he was really going for it. I remember, like, even before Hans Blix, it was like the near enemy that had to be defeated first before they could get their big enemy was anyone involved in the UN's weapons inspections teams or any expert on international arms control or biological weapons that would or could have the expertise or knowledge or experience to cast doubt on any of this. So the media effort to demonize the entire, the weapons inspectors themselves personally, but the entire program, program in general was like the key thing to like make it seem like not only they they don't know what they're doing but they're being denied access to sites that they're being bullied and they're like they're just like they can't get the job done right like they're either they're there's when they say they're not finding anything they're lying or are two bitch

made to like get to the real shit right iraq is still hiding shit and like yeah like they are these inspector Clousseau like figures just being run around in circles by like a dastardly conspiracy of evil that is so vast that like it's hiding a secret nuclear weapons program yeah well the shrodger's nuke point of the story where the times is then just saying you know what we basically can't ever be sure that we could verify it i mean at that point you're it's but you're pushing that there's no way of ever knowing except invading and finding out and this is the megadal style of argumentation right when the facts provided with you are heavily weighed against the argument

that you're trying to make, what you say is, well, what, what are facts? What is knowledge? What is knowledge? Can anyone really ever know anything? They all just, well, this is the thing is that these, like the Times editorial board, for example, because their own newspaper was reporting

all of this as fact, they took it as fact. The day that Judith Miller is writing in the New York Times about how the nuclear weapons inspectors are, you know, faced with this impossible challenge and that they'll never ever be able to find anything and it's such a tragedy you have the new york times writing in its own editorial declaring if and when attempts at a full scale weapons inspection fail the security council should be prepared

to give its explicit consent to the use of force well this is also like a really important point about the like the weapons inspection regime and the way the media um covered it is that when like the weapons inspectors would say we're not finding anything that was used as proof that there must be something there. Of course. The more you don't find, the more dastardly and nefarious that we know that what's really going on is even more terrifying because, like, if it were, like, they really didn't have anything, we would have found something.

Just an underground, like, when the camera goes into the earth and you see, like, dinosaur skeletons and stuff. Deep, deep in the earth's crust, Saddam has a functioning centrifuge that is about to blow everybody out. And not only that, but this reflects perfectly, like, it echoes and matches because it's the exact same people, what the team being. program in the Pentagon in the 80s in the early, like Reagan administration did

about these supposedly secret Soviet doomsday nuclear weapons programs where they would take their, like the analysis to like the CIA or the State Department who would be like, there's no evidence for any of this, or like anyone who even spoke Russian or had any familiarity with

the physics or like you know, an application of like how to build a nuclear weapon or anything like it. And they said like these satellite images you're showing us, show you show us nothing there's nothing there and they they would go aha yep but of course it shows nothing the fact that we can't find anything just proves even beyond any shadow of a doubt that the soviets have an even more secret even more dangerous secret doomsday weapon one uh one paul

was a part of team b richard pearl and again it's like i say it echoes but it's the exact same people doing the exact same thing with the exact same arguments the difference being that this time around, they had wait, shall we say, a way more close and intimate relationship with, for instance, the New York Times. Yeah. And a certain reporter we're just talking about. That kind of thing happens in a war. It has to be

expected. If you're in a war, you're going to lose a building and a plane, and maybe a small town in a schoolroom. You should reckon about once every week. Get ready for it. 9-11 gave people, like, a sense of purpose and excitement that they didn't have throughout like the 90s or even

80s. Or even during the first goal for it was just like finally america like we as journalists like we're no longer just sort of like describing the world after the fact that that it happened like we're making it like we are part of something we have a mission we have a grander purpose and narrative that is imbued our life with an excitement and a glamour and a purpose that was lacking before like martial vigor and spirit yeah and but also like a sexiness and like and again excitement cinematic they weren't just like you know uh covering uh the president's sorted blow jobs in the oval office or you know just like grinding deficit ceiling yeah bullshit like that it was just like that they were you know yeah they were they were they were part of like

a new greatest generation that had that most importantly had had an had an evil had a villain in the world like you know that met the scale of american might and power miller would go on to write a whole bunch of other stories that would help midwife the invasion of iraq but it's really her bylines at this critical moment that sort of provide the substance of the case for war that would get presented at the UN and that Americans would see play before their eyes on TV for the following months. She reported as fact that the Iraqis were acquiring materials to develop WMD and that there was nothing inspectors could do to prove otherwise. And if the U.S. were to get on with an invasion, it would need to strap in and support the real network of exiles in opposition who knew how to take reins of the country, particularly the INC, led by one. Chalabi. It's no coincidence that this particular version of facts ended with Chalabi,

triumphantly returning to Iraq, with full-throated U.S. support to lead the Iraqi people. Because according to an email that Judith Miller herself wrote to the New York Times Baghdad Bureau Chief, an email that was made public in 2005, she said that Chalabi, quote, has provided most of the front page exclusives on WMD to our paper. She would later actually say that those kinds of emails are just the things that reporters say in the heat of the moment. The email, that email, was made public by Howard Kurtz, who is then a media reporter for the Washington Post, but who these days is a stooge host on Fox News, which is ironically where Judith Miller gets her paycheck to be on TV these days.

Once we invaded in March 2003, Miller worked fucking overtime to defend a reporting from allegations that she had been taken in by the Chalabi bullshit network, because what was increasingly becoming clear was that Chalabi had constructed this, you know, parallel intel network that was feeding information to Cheney and Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld and so on. And in this case, also, part of where things start to get a little bit complicated, I think, as you know, when Miller, for example, insists that she, you know, like, shouldn't really mean that all of the front page exclusive came from Chalaby, which is, no, you're right. They probably didn't all come from Chalaby, but they came from all the same people who are drinking from the same, like, river of sewage

at different points. Yeah. Sometimes that story would come from Chalobie. Other time, it would come from other parts of the Bush administration. Who'd come from TalkMed Rolabe. Yeah, exactly. Two completely different sources. The Times and ultimately ended up writing a Mayacolpa for all of her fuck-ups and everything in 2004, without ever mentioning her by name, but acknowledging that they got a lot of the facts around.

Yeah. Oh, wow. I think if you want a really full fiske... What did they say in that piece? So the Times Mayacolpa from the editors, the Times in Iraq. Over the last year, this newspaper has shown the brinket right light of hindsight on decisions that led the United States into Iraq. We've examined the failings of American and allied intelligence, especially on the issue of

Iraq's weapons and possible Iraqi connections to international terrorists. We have studied the allegations of official gullibility and hype. It is past time we turned the same light on ourselves. The one thing that they do note, however, and they name check this person, is that they say that, quote, the most prominent of the anti-Saddam campaigners, Ahmed Chalabi, has been named as an occasional source in Times article since at least 19. 1991 and his introduced reporters to other exiles. He became a favorite hardliners within the Bush administration and a paid broker of

information from Iraqi exiles until his payments were cut off last week. That was in 2004, by the way. The Times said they're sorry, but really that they didn't provide a fully honest accounting. And if you want to find that honest accounting. And again, it's 2004. So the war is just well underway. Sheurning in full force and just one slaughterhouse after another. If you want to get a full accounting of Judith,

Miller, the most readable one without having to, like, you know, read, like, like, assemble a whole bunch of books is the journalist Michael Massing's piece in the New York Review of Books from February 2004. The headline is now they tell us. It's a really, really good documented accounting of all the specifics of Miller's fuck-up. Welcome back to my guests tonight.

Former investigative reporter for The New York Times, currently a commentator for Fox News, who a new book is called The Story, a reporter's journey. Please welcome to the program. Judith Miller, come on out. The intelligence was what it was. you know, people like me could make it up. The intelligence wasn't what it was, and not everybody got it wrong.

Almost everybody did, except for Knight Ritter. You don't believe that you were manipulated or that you accepted it. All journalists are manipulated and all politicians lie. So Judith Miller was just one reporter, one newspaper, and... Yeah, we don't want to, I mean, that is a very, she was a very, very important conduit for all this stuff. And she's a great example of how the shitty information that was flowing to the White House from Chalaby, that they enthusiastically used to goose their case for war

was also the same information that was going to Judith Miller and led us to this kind of confrontation. It's like Chalaby was like the puppet master of all this either. He had his own agenda. Yeah. And it was like everyone was telling each other

lies that they wanted to hear. Yeah. I don't think Judith Miller, I mean, I guess like maybe at some point she's just like, oh, I believe what they're telling me, but at some point, like, again, whether it's the Office of Special Plans, it's Judith Miller,

it's the entire media at no point does anyone actually have to be like I'm being lied to or I'm consciously telling a lie it's because everyone is telling each other it's a game of telephone where everyone is telling each other the exact thing that they want to hear which is what they need to hear to get the war in Iraq done

and they all want it for different reasons and they all have different reasons to either believe disbelieve it doesn't matter like everyone is cutting everyone else it's all just one big circle and like there's like it's all all just one big grift. Like, nobody, nobody is really the mark here,

except for the fucking sucker reading the New York Times. Credit default swap style, you know, news reports are being passed around and being stacked into each other and mixed up with each other. Yeah, exactly. Sell that to someone else, and then they'll make a new stack and sell it back to you. And, like, you know, like, in retrospect, they can, they can now pretend like, oh. So confusing. That Amin Chalabi.

Yeah, you know, like that, what a, what a nefarious villain he was. Yeah, he just, yeah. Oh, he was just. you damn believable. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Our sources were just too good. We had no reason to disbelieve them. Yeah, yeah. But again, like, their reason

was not, like, the New York Times, like, oh, let's lie on behalf of the Bush administration to start a war. Right. There was just like, as you quoted Harrow-Lanes, get us a Pulitzer. Yep. How do you get the Pulitzer? By telling the stories that no one else can. Right.

How do you tell those stories? By getting the information that no one else has. Who's giving you that information? The people who want you to have it. And, you know, there are other names, Walter Pankas at the Washington Post. Former CIA guy. Jeffrey Goldberg at the New Yorker,

who will be talking about later. Former prison, concentration camp guard. Bob Woodward at the Washington Post, who's reporting... Office of State Naval Intelligence. Not a joke. Not a joke. None of those are jokes. None of those are sads there.

And by early 2003, editorial boards around the country were saying, you know, the Denver Post, the Washington Post, the Dallas Morning News, the San Antonio Express News, the Tampa Tribune, they're all either unequivocally

or with very slight equivocation saying, all right, I think it's time we take action on Iraq. And that said, there were still a handful, a very small number of journalists who did get it right. Or at least people who said that the slam dunk case for war was not actually such a slam dunk. The most famous of these were the Knight Ritter newspaper chains Washington Bureau. There's a story in the New York Times this morning. This is, and I want to attribute to the Times, I don't want to talk about, obviously specific intelligence sources. Now ordinarily, information like the aluminum tubes wouldn't appear in it.

It was top secret intelligence. And the vice president and the national security advisor would not be allowed to talk about this on the Sunday talk shows. But it appeared that morning in the New York Times, and therefore they were able to talk about it. Night Ritter was running the mirror image headlines, but just the ones that didn't get cable play. For example, September 6, 2002, lack of hard evidence of Iraqi weapons worries top U.S. officials. September 12th or 2, Iraq has been unable to get materials needed for nuclear bomb, experts say. October 4, 2002, CIA report reveals analysts split over extent of Iraqi nuclear threat, and so on and so on.

There were voices who were saying things contrary to what the rest of the media seem to be saying. And not opinion pieces, not loopy. lefties saying, I love Saddam, and I, I, I hope he does have WMD and he kills all of our troops. It was, this was reporting. This was actual, uh, whatever gum shoe. And what I mean, which is important because it's like, the examples of Knight Ritter shows that it's not like, yeah, like the whole media were just so buffaloed by this thing. Right. Like if, if the New York Times was an ethical institution or a professional news or organization, uh, they would, they would have, they would have exposed all of this stuff. They would have had these same stories. They would have questioned

this stuff. They could have. They could have, absolutely, if they wanted to, but they didn't want to. And again, it's like, it's, I mean, not to psychoanalyze it too much. It's hard to say, like, were they actively thinking, like, oh, who, who, I can't wait to help the Bush administration lie us into a war. But I think the broader point with most of these people, if you go down the list, is that I think, like, they just assumed that, like, 9-11 changed everything. Yeah. We're a new country now. Yeah. And most importantly, they're from a generation and certainly a generation of journalists that, their self mythology is so greatly tied up in the Vietnam War and the experience of like the heroic journalists who expose the lies of that war. But I think, again, not to psychoanalyze

them too much, I think all of them feel kind of guilty about that. And that Iraq or like post-9-11 America is going to be the test case for America finally getting over Vietnam. And the way to get over that is like, we can be a war country again. And we're going to do a war that's good. We're going to be the good guys. And the press is going to work with the military. government and not turn the public against it or demonize the troops or do any of the things that we did in the Vietnam War that we supposedly think is like the highest calling of the American press. Yes. And the thing is it's just like it's also the war is going to happen. Yep. All the serious people agree that we're going to do it. And it doesn't really matter why, but it's going to

happen. And if we don't get on board, we're going to look like assholes. And let's not forget that Judy Miller was supposed to be working on a larger project. in a post-invasion, which was an account of the WMD hunt in post-war rock, the successful WMD hunt in post-war rock. That never materialized, but, I mean, that's as much of a... Did she ever write that book? What was it called, if he had them? After 9-11, a lot of people's brains were broken, not just in politics, but also among the

American people. A newspaper reporter at the Washington Post told Michael Massing, for example, that whenever they ran an anti-war peace, they would just get tons of hate mail and they would get threats and all these people claiming that they were un-American. So there was already a climate that was conditioning people to accept information. Yeah, Will, we talked about this in an earlier episode, obviously, you know, you have to establish the, the orgiastic, like, xenophobia that overcame the country after 9-11 to understand a lot of what came next. And I remember, and we pointed out, that Jonathan Alterpiece, I don't know if you ever saw this, where he literally just wrote a headline, said, well, I guess it's time to torture now. Everyone talk about incentives, talk about it's like some of it was calculation. Judy Miller had a book that she was going to get paid for possibly. But Jonathan Alter wasn't getting a fucking raise for writing, I want to torture people. He just felt like a patriotic guy, I guess. And when there were people

who felt contrary, when there were people who said, actually, let's take another look at this, Let's, or let's at least have a different forum, a different forum. They were marginalized quickly and swiftly. Is that Phil Donahue's music? Yeah. The best example of this was the legendary news talk show host, Phil Donahue, who was perhaps the only sane voice on cable news during this time. What happened to you directly as a host on MSNBC in the midst of the run-up to the war? The biggest lesson, I think, is how corporate media shapes our opinions and our coverage.

They were terrified of the anti-war voice, and that is not an overstatement. Can I just say, though, do you know with the title of the MSNBC program? Because we should say, Phil Donahue was on MSNBC in particular, the liberal MSNBC. Even back then, it wasn't quite as lean forward or whatever it is now, but it was definitely supposed to be an alternative. Yeah, it was supposed to be like, it was supposed to be not CNN, but definitely like mirror image. Do you know what the, the name of the show was that replaced Donahue? What? It was a running segment called Countdown, Iraq. God damn it. And it was just generals and, you know, flax and people who couldn't wait to get the war going. Another example

of it is that even I don't know the names of the Knight Ritter and McClatchie reporters, right? I don't have tumors in my body named after them. Right. I'm sure they weren't drummed out of media, but they haven't been promoted as highly as Jeffrey fucking Goldberg. No, there should have been obviously in any rational understanding of good work, reaping rewards. They should be something like the household name or at least the industry name that all of the people who fucked up or intentionally led us to war now.

The only one who's like suffered any like minor professional consequences is Judy Miller who like her, but I suffer. I mean she's like only on Fox News now because that's the only one who takes her seriously which like maybe from where she once was is a demotion but like whatever she's still getting paid she's still in the fucking media like

the vast majority of these people not only have not suffered any professional consequences for let's be honest fucking up as a journalist or a commentator in like the biggest possible way you can do they've all been promoted they've all failed upwards because I think like what this

is a textbook example of like they're promoted not in spite of it, but because of it. What's not a scandal? They've proven that they did their job for the people who run these magazines or own these magazines or like their sources or whoever. They're part of the Costa Nostra. They were willing to take the hit for the team to get done what was needed to get done. And that's why people like David Frum and Jeffrey Goldberg are still on your TV

and were in your fucking magazines and newspaper. So one of the, like, to our point about how it wasn't just Judith Miller, The Washington Post also ran on its front page a huge number of stories that, you know, just parroted the Bush administration line. For example, stories that didn't make the front page include observers, evidence for war lacking. Report against Iraq holds little that's new. Danger. Reverse course, please. Unwanted debate on Iraq-Al-Qaeda links revived. UN finds no proof of nuclear program, IAEA, unable to verify U.S. claims.

Bin Laden, Hussein Link, Hasey. U.S. increases estimated cost of war in Iraq. U.S. lacks specific on banned arms. Legality of war is a matter of debate. Many scholars doubt assertion by Bush. Bush clings to dubious allegations about Iraq. And again, as you said, in the alternate universe, we're in the one with everyone has the goateeatine.

Yeah, we're in the mirror mirror, the evil spock. In the regular good universe, all of those non-page-one stories would have been, like in the Vietnam era, slapped with a huge splash in front of everyone every single day. Like, links between Saddam and al-Qaeda, kind of hazy. Like, case dubious. UN finds no evidence for news. You know, the thing is, like, the fact that all of those stories existed shows that, like,

you know, there's no mystery or, like, conspiracy. Like, the press can be competent or, like, do its job. But, like, I think the thing was, at the time of this was going on, the war was so fucking popular, like, Bush was so popular that I really just thought, even if these people, like, on some level, probably just. thoughts of themselves, even if we don't find any W&Bs, even if all our A1 reporting is shown to be fraudulent, the war will be such a success and everyone will be so happy with it and people will be cheering and kissing our troops in the street that if we front load a story

that makes this all look like shit, like we'll look bad too. Yes. Or like, we want to get on the team for the big victory. Whatever else you can say about this war, let me just make one point. George Bush is not fighting this like Vietnam. Whatever the, we don't need to re-fight the whole history of Vietnam. Maybe. That's the danger of Saddam may be. But it's not going to happen. It's not going to happen. This is going to be a two-month war, not a...

Park Hill. It's going to be... I think it's time we start talking about some Cretans. So all of that was vegetables. That was the story of how the New York Times, the Washington Post, you know, the, whatever, the papers of record, covered the war. But now, just for a little bit, I think we can have some fun with people who, if you listen to Will's show, my old show, that you're familiar with the day of the... the duck hunt. This is more of the pundit side. So let's just do a little bit of a tour. I've divided this chronologically. The sort of days after 9-11, the build-up to Iraq, and then things start to go off the rails, and then where they were basically at the end of the Bush term. All right, so let's get into the... These next ones are easy drive-bys. They encapsulate the war chubby that

everyone was getting. Just triumphalism. Afghanistan out of the way. Liberals come on board. The water's fine. Let's all get behind the idea of war in Iraq. Here's Bill Crystal and Robert Kagan. Weekly Standard, January 2002. Quote, if Bin Laden had left Central Asia, he'll be hard to find. Who knows how long it may take. Meanwhile, history moves on, and the clock is ticking in Iraq. So just like, immediately just declaring,

Bin Laden, we're done with that. That show's boring. Yeah, 2002, it'd be like, yeah, like, that guy that we convinced everyone is the most evil person alive, who literally did 9-11 and killed 3,000 Americans on one day. If we get him, maybe we will, maybe we won't. Who cares? It doesn't really matter. Meanwhile, the march of history goes on every day. Saddam Hussein. Things on the move.

There's our boys. And blue. They look fine. Hey, boys. Say hello to the camera, boys. So then... Which should have been a clue about, like, what was really going on with these people. Osama escaped. And looking back at the clips and everything, everyone's kind of fine with it. They just go like, okay, wow, you let him escape. I thought we were going to catch him. Anyway, I mean, I think that, like, they're, you know, they're able to do that because Osama didn't exactly have much luck in never getting anything further off the ground. Sure. I think they knew that he was, it was a one- Exactly. We talked about al-Qaeda.

Yeah, yeah. And it's like, as we go through this list, it's like, for me, like, to this day, I'm like, if we're so much of my, like, current politics or, like, you know, like, view of the world is the Iraq war and, like, how people in this country responded to it, especially in the media. But to me, it's just like, it's the liberals that are so much more fascinating and an interesting case of like how evil works in our world because like the conservatives or like

the neocons or whatever if you're fucking Charles Crownhammer or any of these fucking ghouls it's like no big surprise that they want war to happen and that they glorify and exalted and it like gets them off when they think about American military men

and missiles fucking shredding some you know Muslimic style terrorists or getting doing good by getting rid of evil in the world. There's no surprise that that gets their dick off. It's the liberals that fascinate me even more because it was like, as I mentioned to earlier, that this, the transparent need with which they wanted to prove themselves to be like, we're not like the Vietnam liberals. We can be against war if it's a bad war, but if it's a good war, we won't just reflexively be against war because that's unsurious. To your very point there,

in this part of the timeline, I have Michael Walzer, who is, He's a political theorist. He's the co-editor of dissent. You know, that's, that doesn't even tout itself as liberal so much as left liberal or whatever. Walser also enlightened after his younger years, you know, like a new left ruffian. He's over that. He's older and wiser. He took the incredibly important moment before the war in Iraq to chide leftists for, quote, the radical failure of the left's response to 9-11 and the global war on terror. And this is what he wrote in 2002 quote stop the bombing wasn't a slogan that summarized a coherent view of the bombing or of the alternatives to it the truth is that most leftists were not committed to having a coherent

view about things like that they were committed to opposing the war in the second half of the 20th century the united states fought both just and unjust wars it would be a useful exercise to work through the lists and test our capacity to make distinctions to recognize say that the u.s was wrong in Guatemala in 1956 and right in Kosovo in 1999. And that just, when you were just speaking there about liberals, I think that was a key moment that, you know, this isn't a Balkans podcast, but the Kosovo intervention in 99 was a war in which we did not get UN approval to do it, acted unilaterally, and the bombing of a country absolutely 100% exacerbated the problems that we claimed we were there to solve. I think of our modern era that we're talking about,

the first good liberal war, Kosovo. So it was this assist into Iraq. And the bad wars that we'd fought. Not since Vietnam had any of them yielded any actual consequences for America. So there's also the fact that it's very easy for liberals to forget about the bad wars because even if the Gulf War did make you uncomfortable, and even if Granada did make you uncomfortable, it didn't matter because that when the time did come where you had to make a choice

about whether to go to war. It was very easy if, like, you're, you know, doing what Walters is doing and going through some weird internal ledger of, like, good war, bad war, and to come to the conclusion that, well, it doesn't quite matter which one this will be in, because none of the other ones, like,

ultimately meant shit to us. I think also, going forward in general, a good thing to remember is a lot of these things were written while or after the Afghanistan war was supposedly being wrapped up. Yeah, if the higher beings that find this in, like, a thousand years, please let us know how that ended.

The only country that, that will still somehow be around his Afghanistan. Next, Tom Friedman, everyone's favorite. Oh, the best. The king. The absolute king. Roll that, suck on this clip. And what they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house from Basra to Baghdad

and basically saying, which part of this sentence don't you understand? You don't think, you know, we care about our open society. You think this bubble fantasy we're just going to let it grow? Well, suck on this. Okay. That, Charlie, was what this war was about. New York Times, July 31st, 2002.

What he's about to say here, this did not happen. Quote, let's say a U.S. invasion works. And in short order, Saddam is ousted and replaced by an Iraqi Thomas Jefferson. Or just a... A Iraqi Thomas Jefferson who also owns slaves. Yeah, exactly. The analogy in full.

Or just a nice general. ready to abandon Iraq's nuclear weapons programs and rejoin the family of nations. Just to be clear, he's saying that's like the basic thing we can expect. That would mean Iraq would be able to modernize all its oil fields, attract foreign investment, and in short

order ramp up its oil production to its long-sought capacity of 5 million barrels a day. Where he's going with this is the bottom line, a quick victory that brings Iraq fully back into the oil market could lead to a sharp fall in oil incomes throughout OPEC that could seriously weaken the oil cartel and Rob, it's many autocratic regimes of the income, they need to maintain their closed political systems.

In fact, give me sustained $10 a barrel oil, and I'll give you revolutions from Iran to Saudi Arabia, and throw in Venezuela, which is a very interesting little name check there. Wow. Just, yeah, yeah, throw in Venezuela. Yeah. This is also hilarious because Thomas Friedman would go on to be like the American press agent for Muhammad bin Salman's Saudi Vision 2020. And in closing there, if that scenario prevails, you could look. look at an invasion of Iraq as a possible two-for-one sale, destroy Saddam, and destabilize OPEC at the same time. Buy one, get one free. What a stupid fucking movie. You remember this kind of rhetoric at the time where it's just like, I mean, obviously, we just throw shit at the wall and see what sticks. Well, yeah, I mean, half the people didn't mean it, but they're like, yeah, and once we're done with Iraq, we'll move on to other really evil places like Saudi Arabia.

Syria. Yeah, or Syria places that, I mean, Iran, I think they meant. But they never meant ever that we were going to challenge the order. Saudi Arabia. Yeah. Okay. Here's Here's the boy who's still pissing everybody off today, Jonathan Shate in an article called Why Liberals Should Support the War. And I just want to note that years later he would also write, why liberals should support a Trump nomination. Like the same exact fucking language. But the first version was why liberals should support the war.

The only thing I'll really quote from here was, ultimately the central question is, does war with Iraq promote liberal foreign policy principles? The answer is yes, it does. And I got to say, you might as well agree with that because, as you pointed out, there was a case for war basically made by Clinton that maybe he never really wanted to follow through, but all the bullshit stuff,

like if we had gotten it rubber stamp by the UN the second time, you could square all of this with like the Kosovo war. If we had like a couple more allies, or like if we just filled out the proper forms, like these people would have done it with like a better plans, they would have all been fucking fine with it. Yeah. And look at all the libs who over the past couple years have supported things like a coup in Venezuela

or equivocated, if not outright supported, regime change in Bolivia. Here's Nick Christoph, New York Times, September 2002. He's writing a lot about the, you know, the winds of war and where we're going. Myself, I'm a wimp on Iraq. I'm in favor of invading, but only if we can win easily.

And I guess points for honesty. Yeah, wow. But that was... that? Yeah, September 2002. Link in the show description. I mean, like, I know that earlier we were like stressing that, look, it wasn't just the New York Times, but like... A lot of it.

Like, really, man. So there's some lib stuff. Back to conservatives. Fred Barnes. He's a good one. Yeah. April 2004 in the Weekly Standard. Doing the full victim blame, which was of course pervasive about Iraq. Because at this point, okay, 2004,

we're in. We're in Iraq. We've been occupying for... Oh, yeah. It's turned into a total charnel house. So at this point, the bodies are piling up. The democracy is not flourishing. Nicholas Christoph has now saying, wow, I shouldn't have been for this war because it's not easy. So retroactively, I'm against it.

Yes. Here's Fred Barnes. The transformation of the country into a peaceful free market democracy is a bigger, more demanding, and far more difficult project than you ever dreamed. Nonetheless, a year after the fall of Saddam Hussein, Operation Iraqi Freedom has gained impressive momentum. Iraq has traffic jams, street life, drinkable water, reasonably reliable electricity, and is about to experience an extraordinary economic boom.

But don't assume a growing economy and declining terrorism spell success. There's a serious obstacle remaining, the attitude of many Iraqis. So, A, he's wrong about everything that he projected there. And in fact, as we'll discuss soon, post-war electricity levels did not actually meet. pre-war electricity levels for much of the first year of the occupation and onward. Drinkable water is a generous way of describing the infrastructure after we thrash them with sanctions for 10 years. Traffic jams and street life is another way of talking about marketplace bombings and roadside bombs. But then at the end there, just if anything will go wrong, it's going to

be the fault of these just small-minded people. Oh, the article ends like this. I'd like to see one other thing in Iraq, an outbreak of gratitude for the greatest act of benevolence one country has ever done for another. A grateful Iraqi heart would be a sign of a new Iraqi attitude and signal of sure success. So, uh,

just really makes you, these are the absolute fucking demons. Yes. Who, uh, like this is, yeah, this is a, that thing at the end there about an outbreak of gratitude for the most benevolent act, this is the closest thing to like honesty that these people are capable of. Yes.

They're like serial killers who write letters to the families of their victims. Yes. I'm going to wait outside of the Iraqi embassy as they come bouncing out. Yes, yeah. So here's David Brooks. Lib, conservative, don't really know. Some kind of weird, just annoying man. Just cuck.

Yes. It doesn't matter. Here he is. Back in the days when I think we can say he was, styled himself as more of a conservative rather than a mushy-washy centrist. Because he's in the weekly standard. April 28, 2003. A couple weeks after the invasion, Brooks wrote that the anti-war left would soon have to confront how wrong they were.

Quote, there will be no magic aha moment that brings the dream palaces down. Even if Saddam's remains are found, even if weapons of mass destruction are displayed, even if Iraq starts to move along a winding muddled path towards normalcy, no day will come when the enemies of this endeavor will turn around and say, we were wrong. Bush was right. Nevertheless, the frame of the debate will shift. The war's opponents will lose the self-confidence. vitality, and they will backtrack.

Smash cut to David Brooks in 2004 in the New York Times. The first thing to say is, I never thought it would be this bad. And he still kind of goes, oh, I think in 20 years it'll be good, and I don't

fully retract it, but just that absolute smug certainty that the anti-war people are going to be the ones backtracking, and then a year later. It's also really prescient with Brooks about like talking about like, you know, they'll never say we were wrong, but they'll lose their confidence and vitality. It's just like with just the pure projection in all of his columns where it's just like every day that goes on, his confidence and vitality is just sapped from him bit by bit

until he has to write a whole book called The Second Mountain about like being able to get a boner again past 50 in your life. So now we're in the section of recognition that things did not go his plant. There's only among the real hardcore is triumphalism still there. And even those who supported the war now have, they have to acknowledge that something has gone wrong. I've titled the section, I was wrong, but for the right reasons. The one that really sums it up is the New Republic. New Republic, obviously, probably the gold standard for liberal advocacy for the war. That's right. It was the intellectual journal of like liberal hawks. Like there was, like Kenneth Pollock, who wrote the book The Threatening Storm, Paul

Paul Berman, he was a TNR contributor, obviously Leon Weaseltier, pre-cancellation, Leon I mean, and Marty Perrits, most of all, who owned the magazine at the time and served as its publisher. This was, they were the biggest cheerleaders of the, we vote for Democrats and have PhDs camp. Editorial from 2004 in June. It was titled not, We Were We Wrong, Period. But were we wrong? Question mark. quote should we have known that the key assumption underlying our strategic rationale for war would prove false

in retrospect we should have paid more attention to these warning signs but at the time there seemed good reason not to we feel regret but no shame which is again i mean honesty best policy sorry it's just you bring up kenneth pollock real quick yeah his book in the the threatening storm the case for invading that was the guy who was like look we're liberals we're serious we know the facts we're not like these crazy, like, neo-clones, whatever. But Kenneth Pollock, he's a serious guy. This book is the best possible case. And, like, if you read it, you will be for the war.

I think in the Chapo book, I described it as the Turner Diaries for the liberal hawk set. But I just want to read real quick, this is from another Meaaculpa. This is from Matt Iglesias, is four reasons for a mistake that was his at stab and a mea culpa for being, you know, a big hawk for the Iraq war. He lists four, four reasons, four strands of argumentation that led to them. being wrong. The fourth and last one is just Kenneth Pollack. And he says here, the formal case for war that I found compelling was Kenneth Pollock's The Threatening Storm. I discussed this book in some detail in my own book, but to make a long story short, its argument of structure is

badly flawed. Roughly speaking, he says, if we invade Iraq and a pony shows up, that will be better than the alternatives. Therefore, invading Iraq is better than trying to muddle through, which is great, except we're missing the pony. This problem is what Robert Farrely's Jedi principle is about Okay, I We don't even have time to go into Yeah, but where's the pony? The pony never showed up.

Why didn't we know that the pony wasn't there? This speaks to like, you know, conservatives of this period. Like they, like I said, their dick was fully on hard and they all just thought of themselves as like military men and Rambo and tough guys. And this was their like gritty, no holds barred, like fucking,

cigar chomping, Sergeant Rock and his howling commandos moment. The liberals, like, fucking Iglesias and all these cowards, like, again, the way they talk about it is just so telling. It's just, it's so fucking childish. They're like, but our problem was, we were

thinking about, this is the Green Lantern Theory of Power. This is the, the Gala Friyan fallacy as known on Doctor Who of like the, just like, fucking, just a total fantasy. As we read it, it is hard to decide which one is more nauseating. Physically revolting, because you read

that Fred Barnes thing, and it's like, wow, this is the most evil thing you could possibly say. But then you read, you'd say the Jedi theory of power, and I find some of the anti-war advocates are indulging in the Green Lantern fallacy. Just to patch this in before, but the New Republic

thing, the WMD case, they originally accepted, that's been disproven, but they still went on, because again, there's a question mark at the end of their post. Were we wrong? They say, with all these tragedies, how can there still be a moral case for the war in Iraq. Because Iraqis today, no matter how scared and how bitter, are, in some meaningful sense, free elsewhere. The outcome of that debate is in Arab hands, not American ones.

This is in 2004. We've only been there for a year. Even in Iraq, although we must still assist as best we can, our control is slipping away. Ultimately, it is this new, bewildering, liberating debate rather than U.S. force of arms upon which our hopes for Iraq and the whole of the Arab world now rest. Americans no longer have the power to redeem this war, but Iraqis still can. Which, as far as I'm concerned,

is what Fred Barnes is. The most evil thing in all of it is just like their inability to ever grapple with the fact that, like, not just that their like analysis was wrong, but their, like, their morality was wrong. And the way in which they distance themselves

from being active participants in any of this, and like this idea, they always talk about it, like the war just sort of happened. Yeah. and like and that if anything like now that it's going so bad it's actually kind of the iraqi's fault yes and we did it for them and is still justifiable because technically they're freer now than they were but if it goes wrong you know look look we fucked up because we trusted them on october 31st 2006 at 2.34 p.m. Andrew Sullivan had his conversion and he was smart enough to do it two weeks before the rest of the elite ruling class I just love I love I love this line.

This is what I'm deciding was the moment. He opens a post, I have come to see that many, many liberals are indeed my brothers and sisters. So that was his, and afterward he would be, you know, anti-war. Tom Friedman, check in with Tom,

August 4th, 2006. It is now obvious that we are not midwifing democracy in Iraq. We are babysitting a civil war. So just again, always in the most fatuous. Mackie is like their fucking children.

All the people who are killing there are just like, we're a babysitter and the kids are acting up like it's fucking like Calvin and Hobbes, you know? Here's David Brooks, many years later, 2015. In the New York Times in a column called Learning from Mistakes. This one is really appalling, and I have to read the whole intro. If you could go back to 1889 and strangle Adolf Hitler in his crib, would you do it? At one level, the answer is obvious.

Hell yeah. Of course you should. If there had been no Hitler, presumably the Nazi party would have lacked the charismatic leader it needed to rise to power. Presumably, there would have been no World War II, no Holocaust, and no millions dead

on the eastern and western fronts. But, on the other hand, if there were no World War II, I cannot believe he's writing this. On the other hand, if there were no World War II, you wouldn't have had the infusion of women into the workforce.

You wouldn't have had the GI Bill and the rapid expansion of high education. You wouldn't have had the pacification of Europe. If there's no World War II, you don't need the pacification of Europe. Yeah, there's a... Pax Americana, which led to decades of peace and prosperity, or the end of the British and other empires. History is an infinitely complex web of causations. To erase mistakes from the past is to obliterate your world now. Literally the butterfly effect of defense. That's what happened. He saw that movie. He saw that movie in his mid-2000's brain,

David Brooks saw the butterfly effect and decided I found a way to explain away my support for the Iraq War. Yes. Jesus Christ. This is just my contribution to this. This is,

we're going back in time now to October 3rd, 2002. Game time. This is a good one to end with because, like, he wish-casts it into the future at the end. This, to me, is like the purer example of, like, Iraq war punditry

by a guy who is more powerful and influential our media now than he was. in 2002. He's the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic, of course, of course, to the poor sign prison guard, Jeffrey Goldberg. This is in Slate.com in the Dialogues section from October 3rd, 2002. The title of this piece is Aflatoxin. David Plotz has offered a not-unconvincing argument for Saddam's removal, but let me offer a better one, Aflatoxin. And then he just goes on and on with a bunch of like... You had me at Aflatoxin. Yeah, he just goes on, he goes on to explain what Aflatoxin is.

It literally doesn't matter. He spends the first couple of progress showing how smart he is by knowing what aflatoxin is. Yes. So he goes on to say, I do not want in this space to rehearse the arguments for invasion.

Jacob Weisberg and Ann Applebaum have done a better job of that than I could. And they have also explained why multilateralism and congressional sanction are not the highest moral values known to man. There is not sufficient space as well

for me to refute some of the arguments made in Slate over the past week against intervention. Sorry, arguments made, I have noticed, by people with limited experience in the Middle East. Their lack of experience causes them to reach the naive conclusion that an invasion of Iraq will cause America to be loathed in the Middle East rather than respected. I love that because Jeffrey is, of course, referring to his experience in the Middle East as a prison guard where, you know, according to him, if you beat, humiliate, and degrade Arab Bend,

they won't loathe you, but they'll fear and respect you. That is exactly what he was thinking in his head when he wrote this. Well, and he's also doing, like, he sits down and interviews Hamas. He interviews the Peshmerga militias in Kurdistan. He knows the real, he knows the real shit, man. I will try instead to return to the essential issues. The moral challenge posed by the deeds of the Iraqi regime and the particular dangers the regime poses to America and its allies. Its allies.

Yep. Wink, wink. Everything else to my mind is commentary. So he goes on to the end here. Last paragraph. The administration is planning today to launch what many people would undoubtedly. call a short-sighted and inexcusable act of aggression. In five years, however, I believe that the coming invasion of Iraq will be remembered as an

act of profound morality. Jeffrey Goldberg, ladies and gentlemen. So that probably does it for a, I don't know how I feel at the end of this. I just feel dirty. Yeah. Hey, well, thanks for playing in the mud with us. Yes. Like I said, all this shit is just still with me.

It's like, it's never going to go away. wish I could get this shit out of my brain or stop knowing or caring about these people. But they're all still here. Yep. They're all still here, except for a few minor exceptions. They're all still here. They're all still planning the next war. They're all fucking, you know, like, some of them are resistance now.

David Frum gets up every day and is like, can I get a jog in before lunch? Like, it's just, it's the, it doesn't, yeah, I don't know what to say. Yeah. Sorry, we bump, I can visually see we've bummed you out on a, uh, on a holiday, but so thanks again to Will for coming on. We will see you next week. I'm Brendan James. I'm Noah Colwyn.

Later. Good afternoon. I'm David Remnick from the New Yorker, and we're welcome to a conversation with Seymour Hirsch. Thank you. What do you think is going to happen and what do you think is not going to happen, or do you have no idea?

It doesn't matter what I think. I mean, I don't know. This doesn't. I mean, it matters what I can learn or what I know. It doesn't matter what I think or what I think.