Blowback - S1 Episode 6 - "Year Zero"

Episode Date: July 20, 2020

Welcome to the Green Zone, where America rules from Saddam’s old palace. The US occupation begins the destruction of Iraq, Rudy Giuliani almost becomes Viceroy, and Halliburton hunts and kills baby kittens.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

All right, check this out. Once the Americans invaded Iraq, we discovered that Uday, one of Saddam's sons, had like a zoo, like a personal zoo. So in the chaos of the invasion, all these animals got loose. And so one of the military's jobs was to go around and capture, recapture, you know, bats and gerbils and cheetahs and shit. Eventually, they managed to get most of them, the really big or dangerous ones. But there were still some animals that had managed to tuck themselves away inside of the green zone. And a lot of them were kittens. So the American occupation staff ended up coming across a lot of these little cute baby kittens. And so they started to name them and play with them and, you know, basically adopt them.

And they would get them little treats from the commissary and just make a little nice home for them in their trailer or whatever. But then, when Halliburton managers discovered the pets in their midst, they asked the Marines guarding the palace to shoot the cats on site. Fuck. Then you had Marine death squads on the hunt for little kittens all across the green zone. Baghdad. You might call them kitty contras. You make feline phalangists. That's all, that's all, wow, that's good. The horrified American occupation staffers started to hide that the kitties, you know, giving them asylum. But from the book about the green zone here, the Halliburton cat killers finally got wise to the asylum strategy and deployed Filipino contract workers on a

hunt and kill mission. They opened up every trailer while the occupants were at work and rounded up every cat they found. So, and that's just how they treated the cats, folks. Speak about this last sign. Welcome to Blowback, a podcast about the Iraq war. James. And I'm Noah Coleman. And this is episode six, which we're calling Year Zero. We've now reached the point in our story where America has invaded Iraq. And this episode will look at the first year of American occupation, which much like the concept of Year Zero under the Khmer Rouge

in Cambodia in the 70s, we decided that virtually all existing institutions would have to be destroyed. I think a good way to think about Year Zero is to draw from the wisdom of V. I. Lenin. Vladimir Iliich Oliadov. Who once said that, quote, there are decades where nothing happens and there are weeks where decades happen. In the worst possible way, the first year of the occupation in Iraq would embody this idea. Yeah, we're going to see how immediately after the invasion, basically everything went to shit. From the electrical grid getting knocked out, the lack of clean water, the lack of any social services, the lack of any law and order, complete political chaos, how

America achieved all of that and then managed to make it even worse. And we also want to look at, you know, like the grubby, slimy, corrupt side of the occupation, the business, you know, all the deals that started to get made, all the handshakes happening over the rubble of Iraq, all the no-bid contracts that went out to everybody's friends. You know, not as some kind of side effect of chaos or whatever, but because of the openly capitalistic free market ideology that was driving the remolding of Iraq under American occupation. And we're going to do that. And we're going to to meet the characters that administered that occupation. We're going to meet Paul Jerry Bremmer, the viceroy in Iraq, which is a just openly imperial term that we decided to use.

Well, it's funny because when you think about it in 2003, I'm pretty sure that the place most Americans would know the word viceroy from is Star Wars. A phantomenis, yes. Yeah. Maybe they got it from that. I absolutely think they got it from that. Vice Roy, your occupation here has ended. Also a surprise guest appearance from New York City's own Bernie Carrick, the one-time police commissioner who is going to somehow surpass the corruption and violence that marked his own domestic career while he is in Iraq. So we got a lot of big personalities this episode. But I think we also are going to be seeing the pivot point that is summed up by, in my opinion, a quote from, none other than Saddam Hussein, which I found the other

day. He once said, quote, politics is when you say you're going to do one thing while intending to do another. Then you do neither what you said nor what you intended. Oh, thank you, Saddam. A couple episodes ago after 9-11 happened, we saw what the Bush administration said it was going to do, pursue Osama bin Laden, avenge America, blah, blah, blah. Then we looked at what they actually intended to do, invade Iraq, create a new outpost for American interests in the Middle East. And in this episode, we're going to see how things turned out to be neither what they said nor what they intended. Operation Iraqi Freedom. The word freedom has always been an American buzzword, but under the W Bush administration,

it was doing heavier lifting probably than ever before. It became almost a kind of verbal tick or incantation. I mean, for Iraqis, it was a. horrible and sick joke. There's a story about an American general 11 months after the US invaded being asked about the horribly loud sound of helicopters flying over the heads of Iraqi children trying to sleep at night. And his response to that issue was to say, quote, well, that's the sound of freedom. What? That doesn't sound like freedom to you? And freedom is, of course, obviously, this kind of warm and fuzzy devil speak, where the Bush administration

is collapsing as many civil liberties at home and abroad as possible in the name of spreading democracy and freedom. But also the other part of freedom and what has always been an essential part of freedom as American politicians talk about it is quote unquote economic freedom. Paul Bremer, the occupation viceroy, when he was asked by a journalist about what his top priority in Iraq was, here's what he said. Full scale economic overhaul. Quote, we're going to create the first real free market economy in the Arab world. and that America would, quote, corporatize and privatize state-owned enterprises.

Yeah, I think in that way we were very much interested in bringing freedom to Iraq. But as you mentioned before, freedom for those in power, of course, meant the liberty to pursue business and enterprise to accumulate capital, basically, with no obstacles, no limits, and no international law to slow you down. And a lot of the attempts to achieve that would come to pass. A lot of them would fail miserably. and some of them would, through sheer pressure and chaos, mutate into something else entirely. These front gates to Saddam Hussein's main presidential compound were blown down by coalition forces days ago.

The grass really is greener inside the walls of his massive presidential compound compared to the dirt and dust throughout the rest of Baghdad. The green zone was the headquarters of the American occupation of Iraq. It was about four square miles in the middle of Baghdad, barricaded, walled off, completely secure. And once you got inside, as one Iraq, he put it, you weren't really in Iraq anymore. You were in America. There were burger joints, Chinese restaurants, pizza, and all the little creature comforts from home. People went on their morning run under a nice, bright blue sky. Posters of like World War II propaganda everywhere to, you know, really hit home this analogy among the soldiers that you're, you're doing the same thing that we were doing in the 40s.

Except who are the baddies? as to who you were emulating. Maybe they left that a little bit of a, it's a floating signifier. Yeah. Are we the bad days? The center of the green zone, the center of operations for America,

was inside of none other than Saddam's old Republican palace. Same place the big bad dictator had lived, same place he had ruled over Iraq, same place Rumsfeld went to shake his hand in the 80s when he was carrying out the Iran-Iraq war. So good optics, as usual. If the green zone was, you know,

a little utopia, Palace was the inner sanctum. It was huge with all these big murals and like dictator kitsch from the Saddam era, the chandeliers and pillars. But now that the Americans had moved in, this gaudy sort of regal atmosphere was now mixed with this almost startup like Kinko's atmosphere of all these bureaucrats, you know, stacking papers and turning some 3,000-year-old desk into their intern's cubicle and post-it notes and everyone shuttling around trying to, I guess, start up the business of a nation state that they had just pulverized. I mean, so basically it was like a bureaucratic nerve center.

It was a zoo. There were soldiers. There were officers. There were generals walking around, but there were also bureaucrats from the State Department or the DOD or the occupation authority. There was a swimming pool out back where if you weren't on active duty, you could have a drink, you could take a dip in a pool, you could sunbathe. And Rajiv Chandra Sekharan in his book about the Green Zone talks about all the, you know, the big troops with their rippling muscles. Our big strong troops. Yeah, I mean, oh my God.

God, if Trump was a president while this was going on, he would not be able to turn off. He would have probably tried to find a way to have like, uh, like, you know, Miss Universe of the military. A lot of the staffers inside of this palace were just Republican grunts, you know, who were doing a stint in the Iraq war before they went on to the 2004 campaign to reelect Bush. Because of course, all this was going to get done in Iraq very quickly. There'd be no need for, say, a podcast to be made about it, uh, 17 years later. Excavating this for the, yeah, for the masses.

Troops got a shitload of food made just like back. home barbecue ribs fixings the only thing i'm seen i'd like to put an amend on perhaps a little more room here for the fixings you know what i'm talking about oh we're going to have a lot of fixes we're going to have so many fucking ficsons up in this motherfucker obviously none of the preparation or serving of pork was done with any respect for the people of the muslim faith inside of the kitchen who were made to do all of this this also doesn't just apply to iraq it's worth mentioning that this is also if you take a look at Kabul and the american presence in in Afghanistan, all of our 2000s foreign adventurism in places where we had these concentrated

military presences, we absolutely created these, like, kind of, like, you know, frankly humiliating colonial spaces. On that note, let's talk about how things were going outside of the green zone. I picked up a newspaper today, and I couldn't believe it. I read eight headlines that talked about chaos, violence, unrest, and it just was henny, penny, the sky is falling. I've never seen anything like it. They showed a man bleeding, a civilian who they claimed we had shot. One thing after another, it's just unbelievable how people can take that away from what is happening in that country. There's Rumsfeld in touch as ever.

After the invasion, the Iraqis woke up to a country where electricity had vanished. Clean water was gone. We have no batteries. Four and five days, nothing. Schools, hospitals, security. And here is a country that's being liberated. Here are people who are going from being repressed and held under the thumb of a vicious dictator and they're free. Looting of public property, of shops, of homes, of cars, of trucks was everywhere. The images you are seeing on television, you are seeing over and over and over. And it's the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase.

And you see it 20 times. And you think, my goodness, were there that many vases? Basic elements of social services, which of course America had made sure were reduced to crumbs after the Gulf War and throughout the 90s, even they were gone. And it's untidy. And freedom's untidy. And free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They're also free to live their lives and do wonderful things. Everywhere was bombed out, you know, especially in very urban centers like Baghdad, a 21-year-old. old student who was surveying the absolute destruction in his own neighborhood, turned to a journalist, and said, matter-of-factly, quote, fuck all Americans.

The future is this, is this freedom? What kind of freedom is this? And on top of all of that, Iraqis had a foreign army, 150,000 troops worth, patrolling their streets, and, depending on how suspicious the Americans were of their community, busting into their homes, kidnapping them, humiliating them, sometimes outright shooting them. A lot of families, the breadwinner, the oldest male, knew that eventually the Americans would come smash down their door and drag them away on some suspicion. So they just got up every morning in the wee hours, got dressed, made a cup of tea, and just sat waiting for them to arrive. In Thuluya, town 90 minutes north of Baghdad, U.S. soldiers shot and killed a 15-year-old that they thought was a threat. He'd

been waving a white flag. In one raid, they burst in and caused a mother to drop her baby on the floor. And in another, they ended up beating a 19-year-old disabled kid with the butts of their rifles. They carried out dozens and dozens of raids like this. There was something called Operation Peninsula Strike. Perhaps most significant was a massacre carried out in the city of Fallujah, west of Baghdad, in which American troops opened fire on a crowd of a thousand unarmed Iraqis killing at least 20. Fallujah would go on, of course, to become one of the strongholds of the city insurgency. And I want to go now to a bit of our conversation with our Iraqi friend, Raid.

He was not a fan of the invasion, but he noted in talking to us that there were some Iraqis who would come out and greet the U.S. troops and thought that, you know, this was the beginning of a promising new future, but that it didn't last very long. How long did it take for that to wear off? It started wearing off almost immediately. I think the few days after the invasion. A small but noisy group of protesters. Some, equating George Bush to Saddam Hussein. Iraqis were, many of them, were standing outside government buildings waiting to go back to work. The Iraqi public sector at the time constituted the majority of jobs in the country.

So people wanted to go back to work. So right off the bat, we're mixing occupation with humiliation with unemployment. Beyond the gate, unpaid former soldiers, the unemployed, the frustrated. How did we not see something like that coming? If you recall, Doug Fife. Neocon, Mr. Bean. Yes, neocon, Mr. Bean. One of the things that you say was that we didn't have the manpower or the resources to do it.

I don't believe I raised the troop level issue in that connection, but, I mean, you'll tell me if I misremember my own book. We refreshed his memory. That's a fair point. Your point's correct. He was put in charge of post-war planning at the Defense Department. You know, he had done such a good job assembling all the intelligence showing that Saddam had WMD and ties with al-Qaeda. that, you know, he moved right along into the putting together the future of Iraq. So right before the invasion, when it was go time and basically no homework had been done,

the Defense Department set up what was going to be the initial governing body of Iraq by America. It was called Orha, the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance. The first guy we put in charge of it was just a placeholder. He was this ex-general named Jay Garner, who, I guess the cultural analogy would be Jack Lemon in what's it called? Oh, Glyn, Gary, Glen Ross. Oh, what do you mean? There's no electricity in the eastern part of the city.

Yeah, he's basically a hapless guy who discovers himself in the middle of a huge boondoggle. Well, I like that quote about how he felt going into it that sort of summed up his attitude. He's like staying up late into the night, you know, making to do lists. And he says, you know, I thought this was going to be super hard, but I never failed at anything. Yeah. And he starts looking at the reconstruction funds, you know, that he's going to have in Iraq and realizes it's not going to cut it. It was something like $17 billion or $18 billion. And that wasn't even a year of GDP, even when Iraq was doing really badly. So he goes to Rumsfeld and he says, hey,

I'm going to need a lot more, like billions more, if we're really going to put this country back on its feet. And Rumsfeld looked at him and, you know, ever the deficit hawk, whether it's New York or Baghdad, said, if you think we're spending our money on that, you're wrong. Similarly, there was a quote from Colonel Paul Hughes, who was another occupation official. He said, we don't owe the Iraqis anything. We're giving them their freedom. Remember the freedom that we mentioned earlier. That's all we should give them. We don't owe them any other benefit. This idea that basically the Iraqis should shut the fuck up. Let us do what we wanted. Don't crow too much. You're being given a new opportunity to succeed. Your government is a blank slate. Your home is a blank slate. Your family

is a blank slate. It's gone. You can get a new, better one now. Thank us. But don't look for any money or assistance. Yeah, don't look for a fucking handout. Yeah. So when the invasion was rolling out and there were basically a couple weeks before the occupation was going to start. Our crack American occupation team, you know, that was assembled, were so unprepared. There were appointees to Iraqi government ministries, Americans that be taking over, who were literally looking up details about their jobs and their sector of the economy on the internet. The guy who was going to be put in charge of the foreign ministry, he was posting on message boards asking for advice. And then finally, they're in Kuwait waiting to deploy after the invasion is over, and they're

just watching TV as all of their buildings and ministries are being bombed and or looted. And they would just turn to each other and go, oh, there goes your ministry. Oh, there goes mine. There was, of course, one ministry that was protected from day one. Do you want to, does anyone at home want to guess which one that was? The oil ministry. Once they actually got into Baghdad after the bombing, things were so chaotic and they were so unprepared, they actually went into the street and just asked people, Does anyone know anyone in the transportation ministry? Does anyone know anybody in the health ministry? Gulf War II Electric Bugaloo. Let's talk about the electrical grid because this was one of the central and most visible and tangible failures of the American occupation.

The Iraqi electrical grid, if you remember, you know, back in episode one, we talked about how in the 70s Iraq was the most modern and developed country in the Arab world, arguably. one of the key parts of that was the electrification of the country. The problem was, is that after the years of lead, be it the Iran-Iraq War, the Gulf War, and the bombing by the Americans, and then the sanctions throughout the 90s, the once very modern and efficient electrical grid had, just through the drift of time, become an obsolete, aging, and rickety piece of trash that didn't cut the mustard in the 21st century. By the end of the invasion, 4% of pre-war electricity was being generated. Iraq was effectively without electricity. And, you know, I mean, it boggles the mind to think about.

This affected not only personal consumption, this affected transportation, this affected hospitals, this affected air conditioning. In the summer, Iraq can get up to 120 degrees Fahrenheit. And just like in the 90s, it affected the supply of clean water, which was made drinkable by electric purifiers. and the Americans would spend the next year and beyond, not even trying to improve Iraq's pre-war electricity levels. They would be trying to get back to the pre-war electricity levels under Saddam. And one of the things that Iraqi started to remember is after the Gulf War in 91, they said to journalists like Anthony Shadid,

yeah, say what you want about Saddam. He got the power back on again. So the truth is that by this point, in the months after the initial invasion and into, the American occupation is that Iraq was already billions of dollars, not just millions behind on infrastructure. And the supreme irony, I guess, is that the U.S. spent a decade bombing and starving a modern country into a basket case over the 90s. And then once we invaded, we were shocked and appalled at the condition in which everything was in. So Jay Garner, though,

wasn't actually meant to be anything resembling even like a semi-permanent solution. He was, He was a placeholder for, I guess, whatever the Americans wanted to do next once they figured out what that was. Yeah, he was the beta program. So what, how did Jay Garner go away and what came after? Well, this gets at a debate that was going on inside of the Bush administration. Neocon types generally favored the idea of handing things over to the Iraqis more quickly and getting their democracy started with a huge caveat that the people that would be put in charge at first would be the exiles like Ahmed. Chalaby and other pro-Western favorites who would probably hold on to power even after the elections. But others felt that the security situation, the lack of any real law and order and

the potential for violence, made elections a really bad idea. They could be destabilized easily and we needed to put the horse before the cart, so to speak. And they wanted to opt for a old-fashioned imperial entity like a viceroy. This would be an American sent over to Iraq as dictator for a year, basically. But, you know, who to pick? Here's a short list of some of the main candidates that were being debated for Viceroy. My favorite and the one that I sincerely wish had happened, Rudy Giuliani. Yes. America! America! It would have been funny to hear that Giuliani was on the short list to become Viceroy of Iraq in 2003. It would have been funny to hear it in 2008 after he had made a fool out of himself trying to run for president

and failed miserably. It would have been funny to hear it a couple years ago when he went MAGA. But to know now as he enters the final terminal stage of his life, you know, looking like a Dick Tracy villain and with his, you know, bed panty. He's like, there's like molting on Fox and Frank. It is truly a loss for history that he did not take up off in Iraq, because he might still be there today as like a Colonel Kurtz. America! One of the reasons they didn't go with him is because he was too sad about 9-11, which had still, you know, only just recently happened, and that also he had just opened a

consulting firm. Bill Weld was on the list, Gary Johnson's running maid. Bob Dole, I don't know how old was he by then. How high his pants were at that point? Probably not quite as high as they are now, but he would agree with the Shia. Yeah, yeah. Actually, the problem is that he... About the outlawing porn.

Well, now they've got some real good ideas about the treatment of women in their society. Yeah. So others here, Larry Summers. Who also has some funny idea about women that... Indeed, he does. And, of course... Well, I mean, you can see why he was on the list talking about... We haven't gotten to it in full yet, but the liberalization of the economy, the total overhaul.

He would have known how to do that. The Defense Department's own Paul Wolfowitz. Oh, the stars! You really keep up with all that. All right here tonight. Oh, yes. But we'll meet who they actually chose. in just a little bit.

If you recall, there was that colonel who was part of the Army's WMD hunting squad, and he had been writing haikus before the invasion. He kept going, and here's another one. Where is WMD? What a kick if he has none. Sorry about that. The first weeks after we had secured Baghdad and had successful, hopefully, to most people's minds, won the war. The lack of WMD was sort of a big question mark

hanging over everything. And the Bush administration was, of course, feeding the press and the American public, all these reasons why they weren't materializing yet, but don't you worry about it. Yes, sir, you bet you're going to be there in just a couple days, just a couple seconds. I'm sure they'll turn up. A former U.S. diplomat published a scathing, I guess, whistleblow in the New York Times talking about how he personally knew that the Bush administration had made up intelligence relating to Saddam's efforts to find WMD. Don Rumsfeld and his team have failed the president of the United States. They badly underestimated what the consequences were going to be of the high risk,

low reward option of invasion, conquest, and now occupation of Iraq. This got a lot of attention and drove the news cycle for quite a bit. And just in combination with the fact that it had been months and months without a whiff of WMD meant that the Bush administration felt like it had. had to do something formally. So they put together a task force. It was called the Iraq Survey Group. And its purpose was to quote the Lion King. Look hard. The guy they put in charge was named David Kay, who was a U.N. inspector who had been to Iraq during the Gulf War. According to Woodward, Kay left his first meeting with Bush, quote, shocked at his lack of inquisitiveness.

David Kay thought of himself as a guy who wanted to do his job right, and he took off for Iraq to do so in June 2003. And all the stuff that we talked about in episode three, you know, the mobile weapons labs and the underground tunnels and the aluminum tubes, et cetera, et cetera, David Kay and his team would discover to be absolute shite. And I guess then the Americans were getting pretty desperate to find any evidence by this point. Cheney approached David Kay and said, yeah, I heard you're having a tough time finding stuff. You know who could really help you out. And he gave him the name of one Manucer Gorbanafar. And I had never heard that guy's name before. You probably have never heard this guy's name before. But he was one of the key scam artists behind Iran Contra. A former CIA

source terminated him in 1983 because he was, quote, a talented fabricator. And in 84, the CIA itself issued a burn notice on never working with him. This was the guy in the chain. He was like, he'll set you straight. He'll tell you where they are. The arrangement here was supposed to be that he had an Iranian source who knew all about Iraqi WMD. The only thing was, and again, it's not a scam, okay? I know what you're thinking. It sounds like a scam. It's not a scam. The only thing is this source wanted $2 million in advance and would only talk through Gorbonafar. So, much like Jay Garner, David K. is slowly or perhaps even quickly realizing that his job is to cover up or facilitate a giant scam.

And by June 2003, K had realized, quote, the nuke's story was falling apart, that Iraq had nothing since 91, and there was, quote, nothing to back up the idea that there had been stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons. They had found nobody who had produced, guarded, or transported, or knew about them. And apparently when he finally realized all this, he started to hear an old Peggy Lee song. Boom, boom, boom. Is that all there is? Is that all they is?

So Kay gives an update on October 2003. So far, it's a no-show. Colin Powell was so pissed off at Kay's inability to spin the no-show so far that he, again, remember, Colin Powell, reluctant warrior. Yeah, good voice of sanity in the room. He called George Tennant and was outraged that Kay was not doing a good enough job lying. So Kay was going to resign pretty soon because even, with that attempt to put a smiley face on for a little bit. He knew he was not going to find anything.

I mean, it's also, it seems like kind of a fruitless job to find nukes that aren't there. Yes, it's a bit of a bummer. So he was going to resign after he gave his final report, but George Tenet may be chafed by Colin Powell, reaming him out, begged him to do it after the State of the Union in January 2004. And leading up to that State of the Union, Kay was heard to give advice to Republicans like, quote, stop talking about WMD because you're not going to find that. And so Bush, interestingly, if you listen to the 2004 state of the union, he stopped saying things like weapons of mass destruction, which he had been, of course, throwing around all the time in former state of the unions and addresses to Congress. And he started saying things like, quote,

weapons of mass destruction related program activities. We're seeking all the facts. Already the K report identified dozens of weapons of mass destruction related program activities. So a little while after that state of the union, January 2004. K did resign, and he gave his testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee and concluded about Iraqi WMDs, I don't believe they existed. So as all the WMD shenanigans are playing out, Jay Garner leaves Iraq in May 2003 and is replaced by the Viceroy. Coming down the aisle from Greenwich, Connecticut, weighing down. 246 pounds, Hunter Hurst Homesley. Our first opportunity here on the wrestling challenge

to see Hunter Hurst Hemsley, a man that is an aristocrat in his own words, a man that says he will bring civility and class to the World Wrestling Federation. Well, a very pompous individual indeed. You notice that nose was stuck up in the air, Jim. certainly has a total disdain for the fans. Today it's my honor to announce that Jerry Bremer has agreed to become the presidential envoy to Iraq. Paul Jerry, Paul, George, Jerry Bremer was a dandy in the desert, an aristocrat in Arabia. He started every day with a run in the morning, quick shower, breakfast, and he was in his office by 6.30 a.m.

with a stack of memos on his desk. Success mindset. Absolutely. He made his way around Baghdad every day in a convoy of Suburbans and Humvees. Each one fitted on top with either a 50-cal machine gun or a Mark-19 grenade launcher. And he's suburban was packed with big, beautiful, ex-Navy seal private military contractors. Poured into their black t-shirts, sporting M-14 rifles and Kevlar vests. These were the Crem de la Crem because Blackwater served as Bremer's private security detail. What was Bremer's uniform? Navy pinstripe suit? with a pocket square, crisp white shirt, red tie, and tan combat boots. He was a career diplomat from Connecticut who fancied himself a Francophile.

He had once been Henry Kissinger's assistant in the State Department in the 70s, and he later worked for his lobbying firm in the 80s, Kissinger Associates. And if you remember, that was right around the time that that firm was brokering deals between U.S. companies and one Saddam Hussein. And true to this background, once the occupation was seen, settled in. Bremer lived in a villa, furnished by Halliburton. And I want to note some details about his office in the book, Imperial Life. The bookshelf was, quote, nearly empty, except for, again, he keeps coming up, Rudy Giuliani's book Leadership. He also had a frame photo of himself doing the

Boston Marathon, and a big wooden plaque that read, quote, success has a thousand fathers. You may know that phrase, and you may know that there's a second part to that phrase, but it wasn't on Bremer's plaque. But despite all of his fancy book learning, Rudy Giuliani's leadership, et cetera, Bremer's understanding of Iraq was lacking. And there's this passage that Woodward describes of like his first time meeting Bush. And he basically says Iraq is a land of contrast. When we wanted to send an emissary to Iraq's top spiritual leader in Ayatollah, the viceroy in Iraq sent, quote, neither a diplomat nor a politician, but a wealthy urologist who had developed and patented a penile implant for impotent men.

He also seemed to just have a basic contempt for the people of Iraq, which would not be a good look in the year that he spent as viceroy. For example, he once told Paul Wolfowitz, speaking about Iraqis in the governing council, those people couldn't organize a parade, let alone run a country. Just, you know, just not the utmost respect for his colleagues. Or for the country that had existed, like had plenty of parades In the years before, like, I wonder why the parades stop.

But with that, so with that opinion in mind, you would understand why in July, a couple months in, Bremer created a toothless Iraqi governing council made up of compliant players from the different ethnic and religious blocks of Iraq's political scene. But they would remain just a bunch of figureheads, basically. And it was really Bremer who was running the show. And his occupation administration would be called the C.P.A. Coalition. Coalition. provisional authority. The coalition forces did not come to colonize Iraq. We came to overthrow a despotic regime. That we've done. Now our job is to turn and help the Iraqi people regain control of their own destiny. Bremmer's to-do list during his year in Iraq was basically twofold. Cracked down on resistance to American rule, obviously we had to take over the

country, but mainly turn Iraq into a free market paradise. It's going to be a very wrenching, painful process, he said at one point, quote, as it was in Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall. You know, that process in Eastern Europe, which created the largest drop in life expectancy and recorded history for peacetime, that's what this was going to be, it's going to be like that. That's a good sign. A very successful transition to capitalism. Now, of course, what does this mean? It means stuff like foreign investment, privatization of state-owned enterprises, the elimination of subsidies and rations and things like that. And leading up to the war, and the Treasury Department concocted a big scheme to do all of this stuff. Notably, it did not

include any particular plan to tackle the resulting unemployment or social immiseration. The American official carrying this out was called the Director for Economic Policy. And the first guy on the job, of course, was a Reaganhead, a former VP of Bank of America, and obviously a personal friend of Vice President Dick Cheney. And true to type, he approved of people in the early days of the occupation stealing, state or public vehicles, taking over buildings and assets, because it was jump-starting the mission of private entrepreneurship. It was primitive accumulation, as Marks would say. I will walk deeper into the belly of the beast if it means I'm able to further limit reckless government spending. I mean, I have so many ideas. Some are simple, like take down traffic

lights and eliminate the post office. The bigger ones will be tougher, like bring all of this crumbling to the ground. And this guy went around slashing tariffs and the top layer of the tax code was like totally obliterated. This of course was assuming anyone was even going to be paying taxes in the incredibly chaotic months that followed. Most importantly, perhaps in those early days was the foreign investment law. This was the heart of American interests in Iraq. Right. And this was this is the legislation that would give foreign multinationals the ability to buy and operate enterprises, owned by the Iraqi government itself. And the Iraqi governing council, you know, the puppet authority set up by the Americans before, they were even skeptical of this. And it took Bremer and other officials

parading a bunch of, you know, vampires and ghouls from the World Bank to try and, you know, persuade these Iraqis of the virtues of allowing what used to be public services and goods in their country, but come under the ownership of foreign companies. And in fact, one of the key players in shoving this awful thing down the throats of the Iraqi Governing Council, that was Colin Powell. So another wonderful notch in his belt for being, you know, the reluctant warrior once again. Yeah, the good guy in the room willing to plunder Iraqi public goods for private benefit. Yeah, and honestly, this is hardly the end of the story, but it is sort of the moment where things come full circle from our first episode, because if you recall, why would Iraqis be suspicious of

some arrangement like this? I just can't imagine. It placed Iraq straight back where it was at the beginning of the 20th century in which, as you remember, the Iraq Petroleum Company, for example, was wholly foreign-owned, and none of the wealth ended up producing any social or public good for the people of Iraq. With this mission to privatize, privatize, privatize, we can now bring up why the CPA might have been nicknamed the Neocon Children's Brigade because of all the little babies that we brought over to do the dirty work. I think most notorious is the case of the 24-year-old Yale grad who was sent over to completely reform and reconstitute Iraq's stock exchange. He had not studied finance or economics, and he didn't even particularly follow American markets at all, but he was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. And he became drunk with power within about two weeks and thought that he was going

to build the exemplar of a stock exchange for the entire Arab world. Didn't happen. Next was a 30-year-old private equity guy who was a... you know, called in to help with privatization. I don't know what he's doing now, but I'm sure it's abhorrent. Right-wing think think things like the Heritage Foundation, I think unbeknownst to their applicants, people who were applying to become part of, you know, the American Welfare Elimination Institute,

their applications bypass the think tank and went straight to the Occupations Home Office. So they just got gigs immediately. They were the gophers that were putting together entire budgets, you know, for the new Iraqi state. Stuff like that. And that's not a joke. Some of our...

You know what? They were some of our best people. So how did all this privatization stuff go over with Iraqis? Let's just look at one example at the state company for vegetable oil. One day in summer 2003, factory workers who had been laid off due to these policies kidnapped their boss, shot them in the head,

and sent the message that any further privatization would result in more debt. That was the most vocal attitude of Iraqis who were not so keen on the foreign companies taking over their assets and sending them out on the street. As in many socialist economies, Iraq's state-owned enterprises hobbled economic growth. And because they didn't face the discipline of the market, they destroyed value rather than creating it. We have imposed hard budget constraints on these SOEs now, and we are evaluating all of the state-owned enterprises to see which ones should. be closed immediately. A central lesson from the past. Well, why are you helping Iraq in the first place? Why are you helping Iraq? Why are you helping Iraq? You're hurting people over there. Innocent lives

destroyed. It's ridiculous. Well, if he tried that in Iraq three months ago, he now would be dead. The policy that we're about to describe is the thing that could, as in a single policy, in a single idea, in a single process, in a single course of action, most be the reason for a lot of what will come next in terms of violence, security, political instability. Economic breakdown. Exactly. It will come from the policy known as debimboification. What is it? Let me. No. de-bathification So what is debathification?

The Bush administration would tell you simply it is the policy to take apart the Ba'ath Party apparatus in Iraq, the Saddam loyalists, clear them out so as to provide a blank slate for Iraq's new, healthy, non-totolitarian democracy. It sounds a lot like the word denazification. the process by which, in theory, we got rid of Nazis in positions of power after World War II

in Germany. This term came out of a meeting with, wouldn't you know it, Ahmed Chalabi. So we've talked a lot about the Ba'ath Party on the show before. But just as a reminder, it was a hodgepodge of Arab nationalism and quasi-socialism. And we could go on about why it's historically ignorant and cynical to call any post-colonial nations party, no matter how authority, authoritarian or gross like the bot, analogous to the Nazis, you know, a highly industrialized European idea. But let's just say they're not the same. And especially by this point, Saddam's Ba'ath party was just Saddamism. It wasn't anything anymore in the ideological sense. Bremer doesn't care. Order number one of the CPA debaithification. The order goes into effect

and everyone who had had a Baoth party ID card was purged from their job. their sector of the economy or their place in government, it meant that there was not a lot of people left over to do anything. We're essentially describing an unemployment program for tens upon tens upon tens of thousands of people. I want to visit my school in the University of Baghdad, the School of Architecture, and realize that the head of the department, Dr. Hussam Rawi, this amazing architect and professor, was fired on the spot because they said that he was a member of the Ba'ath Party.

So he was standing there in the middle of the school and everyone was talking to him, people were really shocked that he was fired. So you're spot on with your analysis about the Ba'ath Party affiliation. Bath Party used to run the country, maybe in the 70s and 80s. In the 1990s and early 2000s,

it became a nothing burger, became an affiliation that is, in many cases, not an inch deeper than us here, U.S. Americans being registered Democrats or registered Republican. Ultimately, what Tabathification became about in reality and not in the imaginations of American foreign policy thinkers. In reality, it became about looting in a way to destroy and ring profit and expropriate from public institutions of Iraqi society. It became about score settling between various cliques within Iraq that were vying for power

in the post-Saddam vacuum. And then it just became about this effort to make huge swaths of Iraqi society non-persons. And many of these people who were affected were not particularly political and also people who could do very important professional jobs like doctors and engineers, eliminating them from society at the most critical moment in Iraq's reconstruction. You thought that was bad. The next major order that Paul Brimmer gave was to disband the armed forces. This was, to put it short here, basically the same effect of debatification, but for a trained military with a bunch of guns at home. And everyone was sent home about half a million guys. All these guys wanted who were getting let go, according to their officers who were telling the

Americans was a $20 emergency payment from some kind of central government. And they never got it. It was closest you could get to making a policy to create your own insurgency. And that is exactly where we saw a lot of these guys again. Iraqi protesters attack a UN car minutes after two have been shot and killed by American forces. This man says he tried to help them. Look at this. He says This is what the Americans call freedom. U.S. forces outside the coalition's headquarters say their patrol opened fire after coming under attack. Many of the demonstrators are former Iraqi troops demanding jobs.

After the shootings, tensions are high. And that's just what these hustlers look for. They cruise from casino to casino looking for weak dealers the way lions look for weak anthrault. All right, let's talk about some of the business, the deals, the deals that were happening all over Iraq in the wake of the war. A couple of the big contractors, you know, we've mentioned a few of them already. Bechtel, Halliburton, obviously, Blackwater for security, and good old General Electric. And, of course, all of the subsidiaries that could be useful to us for many of these fine companies.

Today, I want to make beans. Beans, the fast food Lebanese. One thing Americans really wanted to get off the ground was Iraqi television, because most Iraqis, whenever some probably horrible new piece of news happened, would switch immediately over to Al Jazeera, where, say, what you want about Al Jazeera. At the time, people found it to be the most honest and accurate reporting about what was going on inside of the country. By the time the Americans actually slapped together a TV network for Iraq, it was completely inadequate. And everyone had a nickname for it, which was the Lebanese.

cooking channel because that's basically all that was on anytime some new piece of news broke out and people flipped on the TV. These beans are soaked for 12 hours and then cooked for three hours. A huge part of the fuck up was Doug Fythe being in any way a part of this. There was a corrupt no-bid contract given to a place called S-AIC, which stands for Science Applications International Cooperation, which is the most... That's the most Nigerian Prince company name I think I've ever heard. Yeah, or like Globex, like in The Simpsons with Scorpio running it. And you'll be surprised to learn that it was yet another Iran-Contra guy who was the head of this company. Apparently, he used a bunch of the money to just buy a bunch of white hummers that he and his staff would drive around Iraq and didn't do so much work on the TV side. Eventually, the network was there to stay. It's still around now. It's called IMN. And Iraqis went from seeing Saddam propaganda every day of their lives to U.S. and British programming. like Towards Freedom TV. Then there's the saga of this American startup called Custer Battles, which got a bunch of contracts to provide vehicles and security and general services for the

American occupation setting up a new Iraqi currency exchange. According to a memo later written by the Pentagon's deputy council, these guys were sending false invoices to the CPA, allowing them to reap way more profits than they were actually supposed to be doing under their contract. So eventually Custer Battles representatives left a spreadsheet on a conference table after meeting with the CPA. I don't know why. I leave this lying around. And it showed that work that had cost a little under $4 million was marked up at 162%. I don't know if you can do the math on that. I think that's like that's like $10 million? Yeah, just a little bit under $10 million. Jesus. So just a huge scam. There was eventually a lawsuit and they weren't allowed to obtain any further military contracts. But at that point, they had already. receive more than a hundred million in contracts from the U.S. government. So, they're laughing. Another one of our business partners in Iraq was a guy named Victor Boot. Did you ever see Lord of War

with Nicholas Cage? Yeah, good movie. This is the guy that's based on. He was a Russian arm smuggler who supplied weapons to the U.S. Army in Iraq in 2003. He was also at that exact same time on the U.N.'s list of most wanted criminals for supplying illegal guns. His client list before the U.S. in 2003, included, this is quite a clientele, both the Taliban and anti-Taliban forces in Afghanistan, Charles Taylor, who is widely known as the Butcher of Liberia, groups in Sierra Leone, Angola, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. These are places that you might know have not benefited from the flow of arms and weapons. Not quite the opposite, as I understand it.

But the King of Deals in Iraq has got to be Ahmed Chalabi. And now he finally got to go home, after all this time and get started on creating his new empire in Baghdad. The most important thing now is to move, forge ahead with the process of debaithification. The Ba'ath party organization must be uprooted. It is a cause of a great deal of difficulties now, and we must destroy the Ba'ath party. And Chalabi, you know, the one-time pinstripe suit wearing poetry reciting operator, stepped off the plane in Baghdad in 2003 with a bunch of guys as his entourage that could only be

described as desperadoes. One major general in the U.S. Army saw them get out the plane and apparently said, quote, check your wallets. Boy, that's a nasty crap. What was there? What made them so unsavory? Well, you never know it because they were called the Free Iraqi Forces. I mean, that just sounds like a good group of guys. That's what Chlabi named them. I have to say, it seems like a big part of it was that they just tended to shit wherever they wanted. I'm not even making that up.

They took up residence at the Baghdad hunting club, which was like in a suburb. And just multiple accounts here that they would shit in the showers area and sprayed graffiti everywhere. And in other instances, when they were staying in different camps, they would just shit openly on the ground and on the floor. So the diaryal dozen. yeah it was the incontinence seven yeah uh they may have been responsible for hijacking an armored truck that had 150 million in it that was going from bank to bank within bagdad and chalaby like everybody else

was putting his cronies and his family members at the trough of the very lucrative reconstruction efforts in iraq one of his guys companies would equip the new iraqi armed forces another guy would end up getting the monopoly contract for cell phone service in the south of iraq his nephew got a nice bid in a construction concern. So he's just gone from, it's really fascinating, he's gone from this polished, erudite, you know, think tank approved, business casual American whisperer to this really quite thuggish guy who's traveling with his own paramilitary organization, starting to make common cause we'll see soon with like some of the more radical Shia groups and just stealing

armored cars. And at one point, like the fucking Irishman, Chalabi, he hooked a guy up, one of the cronies we just mentioned. But the guy started getting sloppy and was investigated for a bunch of unsavory things. So Chalabee and his guys at the INC started to threaten him, you know, stopped doing business on our compound. And Chalabee's guys just showed up and shot up the guy's office. Jesus. We were witnessing with Chalabee once he actually gets into Iraq and he gets his tendrils into everything is that he he ceases to become a suit. He's no longer the suave guy telling Leslie Stahl in 60 minutes that the cancer of Saddam Hussein is coming for us all. Right. And now he's he's literally just he's a heavy. Yeah. He's bribing with impunity. He's

calling in favors. He's the black hand in Godfather too. By the way, Chalabi's like the INC's logo, like the official one that they used, it's incredibly creepy looking. It looks like the biohazard sign. What? I don't know exactly what it means. Is it like the umbrella corporation or something? It looks like Resident Evil. Again, I just, going into this, we knew that he was a bad figure.

But the whole transformation from aristocrat to build a butcher, the creepy Resident Evil logos, and the covert kind of Shia fundamentalism that, honestly, doing all this work surprised me. It surprised me how evil he really comes across. And it was also partly because he had a very effective and smooth PR operation that got him into this position. Oh, yes. We should definitely mention this. PR week, which you may know as the trade magazine. Of the public relations industry. Fine, fine people. Yes. Well, it turns out it hosts an award ceremony every year, which in 2003 honored Chalabee's publicists at BKSH for quite literally doing war propaganda.

Which, you know, I mean, it is public relations. And it was very successful. Matt, thank you. Former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Carrick, now in charge of rebuilding Iraq's police forces. Speaking of desperadoes. Okay, we have to mention here that during 2003, Bernie Carrick, former NYPD commissioner under Rudy Giuliani, became fucking interior minister of Iraq.

Bernard Carrick, nice to see you again. Good morning, Kay. You must like being back after being in Iraq for some. time now. It's nice to be home. Carrick, one of the worst thugs that's ever been on top of the pile in the NYPD, a guy who loved to crack heads and who had more than a couple mob ties that were reported on over the years, probably felt, in a certain sense, quite at home in the Iraq the Americans had created. President Bush has a mandate, clean it up, get it up and running, and turn

it back to the Iraqi people, and that's what we're going to do. Bernard Carrick, thanks for coming by. Nice to see you again, as always. Why the fuck would you send this guy to Iraq? Well, 9-11 had just happened. Of course, he was NYPD commissioner during that event. Which is the ultimate brainworm thinking that you see among the Bush administration types in the early Iraq war. And the culture at large. I mean, you could, you could, Giuliani, Carrick, these were figures that were for basically no good reason, renowned and viewed as modern day Pericles. Bernie Carrick is mostly notable, not necessarily because of the impact that

he had during his time in Iraq, but because the limited amount that he did do was so fucking weird. and insane. Yeah. I think if you had to sum up his accomplishments, it would be one bullet that said formed and trained a corrupt death squad. This force was called Ibrahim's Rangers, and I think of Crowder's Commandos, who basically turned out to hoard rocket launchers and grenades and kidnap people, hold hostages, rip them off, and torture sex workers and innocence wherever they could find them. And the idea was that these were supposed to be like elite lawmen. Yeah, some elite squad, like the shield guys. But otherwise, he was pretty out of his element. And there's these stories of him like exploding, you know, wondering who all these Iraqi people were in his

building going, who the fuck are these people? And his aid is telling him like, Bernie, these are Iraqis. These people live here. That's why we're here. So I say Carrick didn't achieve much while he was in the Middle East. But to be fair, it later surfaced that he took a quarter million dollars and an interest-free loan from an Israeli billionaire, Aiton Wertheimer, who he met in Israel on a 9-11 tour he was doing. And he evaded taxes on that. He would later plead guilty in 2009 for tax evasion and making false statements. All in all, 2003, not a great year so far. But in December, the Americans did score a couple big victories. The first was that Colonel Gaddafi, long-time American boogeyman. He, quote, unquote, handed over his own WMD program. This program was to put it

generously nascent. It was basically big fat nothing. But Gaddafi correctly assumed that with the changing climate, he could go from international outlaw to partner in the global war on terror and get a sweetheart deal from the West, which until about eight years later, he got. Hello and welcome to Libya in the global age, a conversation. with Mama Gaddafi. The second victory, the real big one, was on December 13, 2003, the capture in a spider hole not too far

from where he was born near Tukreet of the elusive Iraqi ex-dictator, Saddam Hussein. Huh? Who's that? Go, go, go, go. Hey. Sir, get on the ground.

Hey, hold on the ground. Sir, I am tactically ascertaining your handcuffs. Sir, I'm saying you are officially under arrest by the United States of America. Stop it! Oh, my God. So what is your problem? Oh, my God. Sir, please maintain emotional control.

I was just crying. Ladies and gentlemen, we got him. But it's a funny thing. We put Saddam away, and yet the insurgency, which we were told was temporary and full of Baathis, started to gain even more ground. As Chalaby and Bremer and Jay Garner have been, you know, mucking about in the green zone during all this time, across Iraq, violence is increasing. The Americans' answer to why this was happening was that it was the holdovers from Saddam Hussein

and policies like debaithification were meant to solve that problem. Somehow. Somehow. But the reality is that actually debatification would do nothing to address this because the basis for why violence was increasing had little to do with Saddam Hussein. In fact, a memo that was found in late April 2003 from Saddam's intelligence services showed that whatever remaining about this resistance existed, that their instructions were primarily to kill collaborators with the Americans and to loot and, you know, acquire as much as they could. There was nothing about what was actually happening on the ground.

Even a control freak, like Paul Bremer, was only allowed a certain amount of time in Iraq. In November 2003, there had been an agreement that was signed on behalf of the Americans. that they would hand over power to an interim Iraqi government by June 2004. That was the deadline. So finally it came around, and Bremer was at the end of his year in Iraq. The list of accomplishments that he achieved while in Iraq, I mean, I guess if you wanted a positive list, it would be very short. If you wanted a negative list, well, you've just listened to this episode.

You get the idea. At Bremer's Going Away Party in the Green Zone, May 2004, I'd like to think that while everyone was sipping champagne and swapping stories and signing yearbooks or whatever. In the back of their minds, maybe, they were sort of thinking a little bit about the fact that, say, electricity was hovering around pre-war levels, but Americans had failed to drastically increase them the way we said we were going to. The great reconstruction effort, in fact, only employed about 15,000 Iraqis. Turns out the war was a much better racket for the Americans and foreign contractors than

was for any of the inhabitants of Iraq. The new army had fewer than 4,000 soldiers, which was way less than we said we'd be producing. 17 billion in reconstruction funds went missing, still unaccounted for to this day. And in one of the mutations of the American agenda we mentioned at the very top of the show, international capital did not even get to take home a new privatized Iraqi oil industry. It now, with all the chaos going on, remained in the, albeit considerably looser hands of the Iraqi state. And most ominously, for the days ahead, daily attacks on American forces were climbing month after month. Saddam's capture had no impact on muting this effect or violence, which was a big blow in the theory of the Americans that going after the Ba'ath party would be a way

to tamp down on this violence. So you saw from, you know, September 2003, four months after the American invasion, they were averaging 750 attacks a month. In October, it became 1,000 attacks. By summer 2004, that's 3,000 attacks. There's evidence that suggests that these are, in fact, undercounted numbers

based on the whole spectrum of violent activities that were not included under the category of insurgent attacks. And polls showed that by 2004, the Iraqis wanted the U.S. out. On the ground when things started to break loose, the spokesperson for the CPA told reporters, off the record, Paris is burning. On the record, security and stability are returning to Iraq.

Meanwhile, back in Washington, they were not having much more sophisticated conversations. At a National Security Council meeting in November 03, a CIA division chief told the room that we are seeing the establishment of an insurgency. in Iraq. Donald Rumsfeld chafed. He said, that's a strong word, and what do you mean? How do you define insurgency? And Bush said, I don't want to read in the New York Times that we're facing an insurgency. I don't want anyone in the cabinet to say that it's an insurgency. All of the

resistance by the American government to the idea of an insurgency is actually fairly easy to understand. And it's because an insurgency would cut against everything that they had been saying up to this point about how this war would go and how this occupation, another word that they didn't want to use, how that occupation would go. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld led yesterday's Pentagon briefing with the civilian administrator of Iraq, Paul Bremmer. They discussed reconstruction efforts and the continuing attacks on U.S. troops. The American government did not want to acknowledge that we could be getting bogged down that things could start to look like Vietnam. That's the ultimate fear lurking in the back of all of their brains. Well, you know, I forget

one of you suggested I go to the dictionary. The lesson that a lot of people like Rumsfeld took from Vietnam was that the media and access to information and the way that the war was framed in Vietnam was the big reason why America

lost Vietnam. Right, right. This time, Rumsfeld he thought he was going to nip it in the butt. See you next time. Bye. I have since gone to the dictionary and I have looked up guerrilla war, another was insurgency, another was unconventional war. It is sufficiently

complex that it may be that no one of those terms is perfectly appropriate. I've had this discussion with my friend John Abysaid, and next time he's here, you can ask him. Thank you.