Blowback - S1 Episode 8 - "Electioneering"

Episode Date: August 3, 2020

The American public votes to give Bush another term, right before a big dose of buyers’ remorse. In Iraq, the new "democracy" struggles to get elections off the ground as the situation careens toward civil war.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Freedom in Afghanistan, say goodbye, Taliban, free elections in Iraq, Saddam Hussein locked up. Somers stand underground, al-Qaeda now is finding out. America won't turn and run once the fighting has begun. Livia turns over news, Lebanese won't freedom to. Too serious force to leave. Don't you know that all this means? Bush was right. Bush was right.

Bush was right. Bush was right. Cheney was right. Connie was right. Romney was right. Blair was right. You were right. We were right.

The right was right. Bush was right. You got that right. Bush was right. Bush was right. Honestly, I think that song and several other songs that they did kind of go. There's another one called The List, which is just a list of liberals from 2006 or whatever that, like, you know, half of them, you would probably remember now, it's like, you know, Susan Sarandon and Michael Moore and

Hillary, but then so many other ones where Ward Churchill, they name check. It's like, we didn't start the fire, but for, but for libs. I mean, we didn't start the fire is also kind of the mode that they're operating in in this song, too. Well, it's like, you know, they're a punk band, like they're there. That's punk. That's hardcore, but yes. What would you call it? Uh, hell. Yeah. By the way, it's blowback. Hi. It's episode eight, electioneering. I'm Brendan James. And I'm Noah Coleman. I just thought we should start this episode off with that song because, uh, A, we finally got the rights to it. And it's now the theme song of the show. Oh, yeah. And B, uh, we're at that point now where we've invaded Iraq. We've occupied

Iraq. We're fighting terror. Bush was right. Everything's going great. Yeah, everything's going super. And now we get to start asking the big questions about what will a future Iraq look like. Yeah. And a big part of that, though, is making sure that we don't hand the keys. of that occupation over to a cut and run latte sipping French, gay Democrat and that we keep

the big man, the commander in chief who's been doing such a great job in the driver's seat and we're in the heady days of election 2004 when America decided. And boy did we decide things. energize the hip-hop community with political summits.

Sean Pied in E.combe rallied thousands of urban youth to get out and vote with his vote for die campaign. People said vote to die. People voted because Puffy said vote and die. Vote to die. A lot of people from where I'm from felt betrayed because you had kids who, first of all, didn't give a fuck about voting, but they stood in line for two and three hours. They missed class. They miss work to make sure that they voice.

was heard and that's sort of bad. That's sort of like you're having sex for the first time and you get aged. To bring us back to 2004, to bring us back to election fever 2004, I found this article from the New Yorker by the New Yorker staff writer, Philip Gorovich, from 2004 from that summer around the time of the Democratic National Convention. And I think that it's actually a really, it kind of spoke. to me. I'll read the passage that actually

really most spoke to me. John Kerry's position has not changed and seven months later, his critique of Bush is shared by a growing majority of voters. But passionate antipathy to Bush has not translated into a corresponding enthusiasm for Carrie.

I don't think that there are any lessons there, so I'm going to move on. The Democratic primary in 2004, we don't spend a ton of time talking about domestic politics on the show. We're going to make an exception now to help establish some of the themes, the domestic politics that are guiding some of the decisions that are being made by American leaders in Iraq.

I mean, the 2004 election was about Iraq. There were, of course, other issues in play, but the central focus of both campaigns was Iraq and the war. And here's a big problem is that many of the Democrats, including John Kerry, supported the war in Iraq. Whoops. And this was a very, very, very. big problem because it meant that the campaign that Carrie ran against Bush was not actually about the details of what was going wrong in Iraq so much as it was about that John Kerry was the

kind of guy who could do the Iraq war better. I mean, he was reporting for duty. I'm John Kerry and I'm reporting for duty. So there were some funny flukes early on in the Democratic in the 2004 Democratic primary Howard Dean is probably the most well-known of the would-be contenders who burned bright and faded fast

before the Iowa caucus. Al Sharpton also led the polling at one point. But really, once the Iowa caucuses happened, John Kerry sort of ran away with it and it became quite clear within the first week or two

that he was the strong horse in the primary. And the media was also very horny for John Edwards, however. Well, that's, he has that effect. He had that appeal. on people. And if you want some idea of the kind of inspiring message that John Kerry's campaign

was selling, here's, I think, a good distillation of it. For four years, we've heard a lot of talk about values, but values spoken without actions taken are just slogans. Their values are not just words. Values are what we live by. They're about the causes that we champion and the people that we fight for, and it's time for those who talk about family values to start valuing families. The central idea of Kerry's presidential campaign was that he was a very different guy from George W. Bush. The strategy. Like morally or... I mean personality, just that he was a totally different animal. I remember he brought up their grades. I remember that at one point he said, I got good grades and Bush got bad grades. And, you know, he was the intellectual and Bush was like

the country bumpkin. Right. And he played this kind of stuff up. But the problem was that George W. Bush wasn't that unpopular yet. Bush polled, generally speaking, around 50% all throughout 2004 in terms of favorability from voters. And another kind of funny thing in hindsight was how much John Kerry talked about God in the 2004 election. You can find a lot of headlines about it and the whole, like, he would be the first Catholic since Kennedy kind of thing. Like they were really trying to play up this idea of like John Kerry as some kind of, you know, inheritor of the Kennedy legacy, as if that would be what beats back Bush. Also, the other part of this logic was that John Kerry was a Vietnam war event. He had founded, you know, Vietnam veterans

against the war in the late 60s and early 70s, and he famously threw his ribbons over the wall. And, you know, he was an icon of the respectful soldier protesting this misguided war. Right. They thought that kind of personality difference would run well against Bush. Americans hadn't actually yet settled on Iraq being a, quote, mistake. If you look at it, at the historical Gallup poll asking Americans, do you think the invasion of Iraq was a mistake, it doesn't yet actually get over the 50% mark until the, funnily enough, months and months after the presidential election in 2004. So by that point, the Iraq war, while not necessarily an incredibly popular thing, it wasn't yet conceived of as this administration destroying maneuver

that it would later become. So what's coming out of Iraq for American eyeballs, you know, during the month leading up to the election. It's clearly not the complete chaos and civil war that everyone's going to recognize only really a few months later, certainly a year later. There's violence, but it's, I don't know, under control. I mean, it's, you know,

you would see Fallujah, which we discussed in the last episode, Fallujah is happening during this summer. What Americans are still getting is an understanding of the war on the ground as a fight for freedom. What we've been describing, as an occupation hadn't necessarily sunk in that way for most Americans and for most voters.

They still thought of it as a war that we were fighting with clear villains who we were going to usurp and replaced with freedom and democracy lovers. And in 2004, you saw suicide bombings that would pick up in August of that year. Investigators are about to conclude they're looking to the exact cause of the blast. At this point, it looks like it was an improvised explosive device worn by an attack or you know people think that the trump 2016 election was like where he's like literally like fondling an american flag like bush kicked that shit up to 11 yeah and given that he was a president at war it sort of makes sense perhaps one of the most one of the most egregious things that he got caught doing

that pissed off a lot of people and was seen as even a step too far for him was this ad that he ran um that worked in 9-11 imagery to target john carey here's like a description from the guardian at the time of the clip that describes it as you know a 30 second commercial which includes quote a brief clip of a body in the American flag being lifted from the wreckage of New York's World Trade Center, firefighters who emerged as heroes of the rescue effort also feature in the adverts. But the response from actual families of 9-11 victims was one of just mass horror and frustration and outrage, and they all scolded Bush. Another obviously big line of attack and the thing that, you know, you would have heard a lot

was that John Kerry was a inveterate flip-flopper. I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it. that John Kerry changed to become an anti-war vote when the political climate changed in this country. I voted the way I voted because I thought it'd met the national security interests of our country, which is why I've opposed it since day one. But like the most famous Bush campaign tactic or Bush campaign adjacent tactic for 2004 was the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. It was an outside group funded in large part actually by Teaboon Pickens, the fossil fuel baron. Gargoyle.

Yeah. who basically funded this whole outside group to make a series of claims and publish a best-selling book that claim that actually John Kerry was lying about the three Purple Hearts and Stars that he supposedly won. They served their country with courage and distinction.

They're the men who served with John Kerry in Vietnam, tortured for refusing to confess what John Kerry accused them of, of being war criminals. T. Boon Pickens, an Oklahoma billionaire who believed in shit like Peak Oil, and was a total crank. He was the guy who funded

Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. And the claims were totally bullshit. It's really not worth going into them in detail because they were just, it was like... Well, you say that. He offered a million dollars to anyone who could disprove them, and I don't think anyone took the...

Correct. You know what that was called? No. Swift Boat Challenge. Everyone around the country was... This is around YouTube. You know, they were starting to videotape themselves at home, just trying to do the Swift Boe Challenge.

You take the ashes of your Vietnam vet granddad. You'd swing them down. No water. nothing you just had to swallow them right and people couldn't do it most of the time so basically the 2004 election was a contest between a cautious establishment democrat who wanted to go back to traditional liberal norms of governance and international policy and his opponent was a dangerous lunatic who couldn't be controlled and could not be in the white house for one more second if at all you may have an idea of how this ended on election day although early exit polling

suggested that Carrie had won. And this is, by the way, like, you could look up Marine Dowd's writing about this. There's a whole generation of columnists who were scarred by the experience of having pre-written Carrie Victory columns because they just looked at exit polls. The exit polls were wrong and Kerry lost. Now, if you want to get your head in a dark, dark place, Google Ohio voting machines 2004. And there were specifically War on Terror related wedges that the Bush campaign used to drag him across the finish line as well. Right. I mean, you had obviously

like those infamous, like color-coded threat level alerts. Ever since 9-11, we, you know, they instituted this system of, you know, threat levels that we faced from, I don't know, Al-Qaeda or Osama. I mean, it was literally just- Yellow to orange, to red, or whatever. Former members of the Bush administration are out and forced today attempting to discredit Tom Ridge, the first head of the Homeland Security Department. ranch has a new book coming out, claiming he was pressured to raise the terror threat level on the eve of the 2004 presidential election. Better not do anything that will rock the boat. And, you know, and Kerry, of course, ran on the line that, like, you know, Bush was, you know, like, you know, actually with these kinds of policies was, you know, was inciting further terrorist activity.

And then the big thing was in October, Osama bin Laden himself, a video purportedly from him ended up in Al Jazeera, and it was him. and he quite simply, you know, condemned and castigated Bush and called him a bad guy. CIA analysts at the time, I mean, at least they claim this now, but they said, you know, oh, yeah, this is very obviously designed to, like, boost Bush's chances because Osama bin Laden wants Bush to be in president because he, you know, can continue to escalate. And remember back all the way to episode three, we, not even the Bush administration, but American policy in general, it worked with Osama every step of the way to turn him into the president of terrorism. And there's a post actually written for the. nation in September 2004 by David Sorota and Jud Legham that I actually think does a really good job in its opening two paragraphs of kind of encapsulating the more subtle ways

that the Bush administration was pushing this idea of Kerry as like a weak little bitch on terror. So here's how it begins. On August 11th, 2004, John Kerry criticized the Bush administration for blocking a bipartisan plan to give seniors access to lower priced prescription drugs from Canada with almost 80% of Medicare recipients supporting Carrie's position. the Bush campaign was faced with the prospect of defending a politically unpopular position. That same day, in an interview with the Associated Press, FDA acting commissioner Lester Crawford said terrorist cues from chatter, quote unquote, led him to believe al-Qaeda may try to attack Americans by contaminating imported prescription drugs.

Crawford refused to provide any details to substantiate his claims. That's the kind of shit that the Bush people were pulling. And it worked because on Election Day in 2004. I'm humbled by the trust and the confidence of my fellow citizens. It wasn't totally unequivocal that he won. You can Google Ohio Voting Machines 2004 if you want to give yourself a fright. With that trust comes a duty to serve all Americans. But Bush won.

And I will do my best to fulfill that duty every day as your president. In January 2005, he delivered his second inaugural address. This time, it focused on human rights and foreign policy. It's, I think, worth to hear at least a little of it to get a sense of the high-minded language that the Bush administration was using to talk about what was going to happen in Iraq for the next year. When the Declaration of Independence was first read in public,

and the Liberty Bell was sounded in celebration, a witness said it rang as if it meant something. In our time, it means something still. America in this young century proclaims liberty throughout all the world and to all the inhabitants thereof. Renewed in our strength, tested but not weary, we are ready for the greatest achievements in the history of freedom. there's a moment here

Michael Gerson who was the speechwriter yep he was the Bush speech writer at this moment Bob Woodward reports that he worked himself into a frenzy actually in writing this so much so that

well I'll just read from Woodward directly here quote Gerson was exuberant hoping for something equivalent in foreign policy to Einstein's unified field theory of the universe he was so pumped up that he had a heart attack in mid-December. We can't. Not tonight. I ain't fight?

Yes, tonight we're going to fight. Just let me get my breath. Can I get my breath? Is that against the rules or something? The doctors told him it wasn't overwork. It was a combination of genes and stress. So after the 2004 election, there was a tremendous shakeup. The Bush administration moved Condoleezza Rice from the National Security Advisor Post to Secretary of State.

Colin Powell, I guess tired of being the guy nobody listened to, but also tired of being the guy with not enough courage to actually do anything about it, decides to leave quietly. Condi, as we'll get into, and as we've mentioned before, was fiercely defensive of the president at any given moment. She was ride or die. And so putting her in the position of Secretary of State was probably a no-brainer at that point after Powell had frankly outlived his usefulness, having given the UN speech. Right. And we don't get into this episode, but we're going to talk a little bit about how these changes and the makeup of the personnel of this. this stage will come a bit unglued as the insurgency becomes a civil war.

As the polls opened in Iraq's nationwide election, Iraqi police drove through the streets playing loud music that encouraged Iraqis to come out and vote. In January 2005, you have the first set of elections in Iraq. And when Iraqis went to the polls that following January, the primary political circumstance that they were dealing with was just that the vice. violence was getting worse. In particular, by this point, the Sunni militias would start ramping up suicide bombings, as we've discussed, and you start to see the Americans fighting with Muqtad al-Sadr and the Madi army in Baghdad, Najaf, and elsewhere. The interim government

led by Ayatollawi, the guy that the U.S. was comfortable running the show. Yeah, the old CIA hand that we had used in the 90s, he was prime minister. He was not particularly well-liked by anybody in Iraq at this point. And so pressure had been mounting on the Americans to hold elections and the time had come to actually hold them. The plan that was developed was to hold an election to establish a parliament. And that parliament would then help trigger a multi-phase transition towards a serious government with a prime minister and a constitution. There's three elections. The first election was in January 2005. That would pick this parliament. that will then go to work on drafting a constitution.

Correct. And then in October, this parliament, the Iraqi National Assembly, would then take a draft constitution to be voted on by the Iraqi people. Again, so the Iraqi people vote for a parliament in January. Then they vote for a constitution in October. And then in December, they vote to form an actual government. This was like the three-tier plan that had been cooked up to... bring Iraqis, you know, their long, coveted democracy. And obviously deliver the Bush administration a nice, sweet photo op with the ink on the fingers.

And they need it. Purple ink on the fingertips. Right. As that would be the iconic image of what those elections were supposed to mean. And to be clear, the Bush administration needed this victory at this moment. Right. Because as we've discussed before, beginning in August 2004, suicide bombing campaign starts. A lot of the Iraqis start, you know, like, like this emerging. insurgencies clearly forming itself, particularly among Sunnis. Attacks on American soldiers are increasing, and it just becomes quite clear that actually the situation on the ground isn't that great. So we could all use a win, right? Yeah, exactly.

Just to be clear about how bad it was, there was like a steady increase in the deaths of suicide bombings that would actually peak around the time of the elections. In fact, hitting a new high in February of 2005, more than 200 deaths from suicide bombings a month, many of which would happen during the time of the election. It's actually quite tricky to achieve your goal of instituting a democracy out of whole cloth when the polling places and their routes that people used to get to those polling places are sites where you could be blown up at any given moment. It's generally considered bad form for a democracy not to let people exercise their democratic rights.

And lungs and arms. And of course, like the political leadership was like lying about the state of affairs I had a lawy when he was visiting the U.S. around the time of the presidential election in 2004, he said in Washington that 14 out of 18 Iraqi provinces were completely safe. Why is it always 14 out of 18? I think it's... If you remember back in the 90s, after the Gulf War, 14 out of 18 provinces in Iraq were free of Saddam for a brief period and they were rising up.

And now we got the same... I don't know why it's always that number. I mean, it's just as popular. Callback. Yeah, callback. And this was also like the Bush administration line. In fact, Rumsfeld used that 14 out of 18 line himself. And other officials, though, like Wolfowitz and Hadley and Rice, were all being told by their direct reports.

And even like when they went and visited on the rare occasions that they did, they would actually learn that no, things are pretty bad. So the Bush administration, which was focused on tamping down. violence throughout 2004. Their initial ideas about elections were just to say, no, no, no, we'll get to those eventually. The person who was most agitating for elections, though, was a sort of nominal ally of the U.S. at this moment, and that was Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who you may remember as the older, wise man, like, moderate position figures is how he was sort of cast. He was the guy with whom the Americans would be able to work. And as we discussed at the end of the last episode, he was also instrumental in helping the Americans settle things down with the Mahdi army and

Maktada al-Sadr. So Ali Sistani throughout 2004, you know, his supporters would march in the streets and say elections, elections, elections, and they had actually begun doing this as early as 2003 because Paul Bremer was so clearly fucking things up that they felt that they had a real opportunity to lobby the Americans to do so. This was also a really important power grab for those Shia more, you know, quote unquote moderate Shia clerics because it was a way for them to show to the Americans that they were the people who they were the only option that they had to work with if they wanted to beat back both Maktada al-Assadr and the Sunnis. And the job of the world that those of us in the world who desire for there to be peace

is to be aggressive in the spread of freedom. By December 04, Bush was firm that, all right, we're going to do elections. We're going to get it done. It's to stand with those brave citizens in Iraq who want to vote. And that's exactly what we will do. Go ahead. Follow up. He had been told by, you know, intelligence, his advisors in the CIA that actually doing elections would probably just provoke a civil war because, again, the Sunnis were so disenfranchised and so distrusting of the political process.

There was no way that they would accept any set of elections or this, you know, transition to a new kind of government. There was not in a uniform enthusiasm about how these elections would go. I mean, for example, the Kurds took part because they didn't exactly have, you know, what else were they going to do? But within a few months, Kurdish militias would begin. fighting with the ostensible political authority of this government. Yeah, the Kurds, we should, if we haven't noted it, I don't think we have at this point. I mean, a big winner, like an unambiguous winner of the invasion, as far as the Iraqis go, were the Iraqi Kurds.

Because think about it, they have the north of the country already autonomous due to the 90s and the no-fly zone that, you know, separated them and insulated them from Baghdad. Now they have a political culture all of their own up there, you know, a shadow government basically operating. They're then allowed to enter the national kingmaking and politicking from that sort of leg up and are a favorite of the Americans, unlike the Sunnis that are starting to cause trouble, unlike some of the Shiite blocks like Muktaudor al-Sauder. The Kurds and then the moderate Shiites are America's darlings. And so, on January 30th, 2005, Iraqis went to the polls. All right, line them up. It's election day.

World news tonight from here in Baghdad, a country about to close down for three days in the hope that it will be safer to vote. This historic election begins the process of drafting and ratifying a new constitution, which will be the basis of a fully democratic Iraqi government. Well, more than 14 million Iraqis are eligible to vote on this election day. Hunting the suicide bombers on the country's western edge. said they expect about 8 million to turn out and vote. Other estimates are lower. The Iraqis and Americans serving the city of Mosul, surrounded by violence all the time.

Terrorists and insurgents will continue to wage their war against democracy. The Marines refer to this area as the Wild Wild West. And we will support the Iraqi people in their fight against them. And another children's character is embroiled in controversy. PBS pulls the show from the air that includes lesbian couples. turns of this election are as follows. As expected, Ayatollah Ali Sistani's United Iraqi Alliance, this block of 22 different Shia political parties, came in first with 48% of the vote. Shal al-Talabani, the leader of the Kurdish political bloc in this parliament, was in second place

with 26%. And Ayatollawi, the Americans handpicked guy for this moment, who was hopefully going to be there, you know, handmade in democracy. He came in with a whopping 14%. Yeah, that'll be a trend in years to come. American favorites, not being Iraqi favorites. Surprise. But yeah, the United Iraqi Alliance, that Shiite supergroup, basically. The velvet revolver of Iraq, yes, go on. Right. It didn't get a majority.

It was expecting two-thirds and it didn't get it. So it had to make a common cause with the Kurds. But at the very least, they could still pick the next prime minister. So after these elections, there would be a sort of temporary prime minister that would be designated

to lead the government. By the super Shiite block. Right, correct. With the Kurds as an assist. And the only person who sort of came together as a favorite for this position was a guy named Ibrahim al-Jafri. Well, actually, that's not quite true. There was one other guy who threw his hat in the ring. We are grateful to President Bush for liberating Iraq, but it is time for the Iraqi people to run their affairs. Chalabi's problem, it seems, is that he's not governing Iraqi affairs. Prince Chalabi, Ahmed Chalabi, is now, after long, long last, entering Iraqi politics.

And he throws his hat in the ring as a candidate for prime minister. He, of course, at this point, owned his own newspaper, which ceaselessly promoted him as the best man for the job. And at first, as you said, you know, Joffery was definitely the favorite, but there were six candidates, and then three, and then it was just two. It was down to Joffrey and Cholabee. He was running around, lobbying, making promises, you know, the Cholabby way. He was doing, he was making deals. Making deals. I mean, that is his thing.

He's a deals guy. He's a deals guy. In a rather poetic twist, after years and years of successfully greasing palms and politicking outside of his country, to a degree of success that resulted in an invasion of his country, I mean, altering the course of world history, chalobie was unable to achieve the same. success at home now that he had quote unquote liberated Iraq. Pray tell why. No one really liked him or wanted him to win or be in charge. But also at this point, Chalabi is tarred not only with his association, his close association with the Americans who have now, you know, blown up the

country and are marauding Iraq's economy, but also with the Iranians. You remember back in episode two, we mentioned that Cholabee throughout this entire time is a double agent for Iran. Senior U.S. officials tell NBC news that recent information confirms the INC was supplying intelligence about U.S. operations in Iraq to Iran. And we know that, we don't know exactly, you know, how he was helping Iran, but we know that he helped them break some codes at one point to get one over on the Americans. And we know that he never told the Americans any of the shit that he was getting from Iran. Are you saying that you've never been to Iran, you've never met with a revolutionary

government? And do you have, of course I've been to Iran. As I've been to the United States. That is not that. That is not the issue. The issue is, do you coordinate your activities with Iran's revolutionary Quds force? Iran is a neighbor of Iraq. We have good relationship. So everyone in Iraq correctly saw him as the dandy scammer. artist who didn't give a shit about any of his countrymen. And also, let's not forget, ever since he's been back in Iraq, he's developed this, you know, really, uh, reputation from like his INC thuggery and all that. Yeah, exactly. On that note, we actually, we shouldn't forget this. In May 2004, the Iraqi, like, special crimes unit raided Chalabi's fucking compound.

Now to the story of Ahmed Shalabi, an Iraqi exile, who has always been a controversial figure, he has been cut off by the administration and now raided by Iraqi police. Today, Ahmed Chalabi woke up to Iraqi police armed with warrants backed up by U.S. troops, kicking in his door, waving guns. One of his closest associates flees to Iran, of course. They ransacked three buildings, seizing computers, documents, and weapons. Still, he says, I am America's best friend in Iraq. And that's when Chalabi kind of did this to the Americans' heel turn.

where he became anti-American and said, okay, thanks for invading. Now you need to go. And he starts to cozy up to none other than Mukta al-Sauder and becomes kind of like an informal advisor, all the while hoping to tap into Sauter's constituency. But as we can see in this first round of elections in January, it didn't pan out. He withdrew his nomination in order to,

according to his allies, Chalabi's still very devoted and faithful allies, although it's an ever-shinking group. he magnanimously withdrew his nomination in order to spare the Shiite supergroup block any kind of split or fracturing so then Joffery was crowned prime minister and eventually took the post up in April still even though Joffre got the top spot chalaby did get deputy prime minister as his position as well as acting oil minister which is no small prize and he was going to lick his wounds to try and make a comeback in in the December elections that were going to put the permanent government in place.

And wouldn't you know it, the day that he was confirmed as deputy prime minister was the same day that the trade bank of Iraq, which was run by his nephew, announced disagreement with card tech, Chalabi's ongoing credit card fraud company. So a question that dear listener you may have is whether or not these elections were actually legit. Like, this was supposedly the first test of Iraqi democracy. How did the elections themselves go. On a scale from, you know, 100% UN OAS approved to Iowa caucus level. Right. You know, how disastrous were they? Let's back up a second. As we've said throughout this episode and earlier, the Americans had a real Sunni legitimacy problem. Sunni Muslims interact and not take

them seriously because they understood that they would have less political power in whatever new structure emerged in Iraq. And the Americans were shelling the shit out of them. in Fallujah. That too. So it was reasonable to assume and you could already foresee Sunni Muslims in Iraq would not really want to participate in these elections, which is why they didn't for the most part. In fact, there were reports that, you know, you had like single digit percentage turnout in the Anbar province, which makes up the western chunk of Iraq dominated by Sunni Muslims. And so even though you had this kind of initial expectation about the Sunni Muslims, the U.S. was still hoping and Bush still hoped and talked about the elections in a language as if they were going to be some kind

of, you know, usher in some sort of miracle of Iraqi democracy. Men and women have taken rightful control of their country's destiny, and they have chosen a future of freedom. Of course, they did not have this legitimizing effect. Iraqi Sunni did not vote in this election in any meaningful way. And as Patrick Coburn observes, you got the sense from looking at these elections, that These elections were not structured in the way that was about what was best for Iraqis. It was really about the American political priorities and needing a big win.

A dubia, so to speak. By participating in free elections, the Iraqi people have firmly rejected the anti-democratic ideology of the terrorists. So as we're getting into elections, and we've just been talking all this time about how it was kind of clear what was going to happen. You may be wondering if they knew that all this was going to happen. and Bush may have himself been told that it was going to go this way, this kind of short-term thinking about like what elections could do for a morale boost and all that kind of stuff. You may be wondering, where were the grown-ups who might be thinking, oh, this was actually not such a good idea?

I think a person who's probably really good to look at at this moment as an example of where the grown-ups' heads are at within the Bush White House is Condi Rice. The work that America and our lives have undertaken and the sacrifices we have made have been difficult and necessary and right. So, you know, like Condi, loyal as ever to Bush, is going out and offering testimony about the way that, you know, we are winning this damn thing, that we are training more people, again, that we are training more Iraqi soldiers every day, that we are doing everything we can to clear, hold, and build. Those are the three words that she would say repeatedly to describe the American strategy. What's clear, what's hold, and what's built. So Condi's top deputy, this guy at state, Philip Zelikow, comes up with this idea of what this new strategy should be. And it will become shopped around publicly and will become known as clear, hold, and build. So originally, Zelikow ripped this from a book called A Better War that came out in 1999.

I love that book. Yeah, right. And initially, the strategy as identified as described in that book was called Clear and Hold. Oh, that's Vietnam, right? Right. And that's what he says was actually, if you look at the one thing in Vietnam that worked, the author of this book claimed it was this clear and hold strategy. And Zelikow, because when you make policy at this level, I guess you are also always doing public relations. He decides that this is, and how Woodward's puts it, clear and hold was not enough. It needed another pillar that was positive, more declarative. Holding was too passive. He came up with the, hold my dick, man. He came up with the notion of clear, hold, and... Build, to clear areas from insurgent control, to hold them securely, and to build durable Iraqi institutions. As I've said, our strategy is to clear, hold, and build. The enemy strategy is to infect, terrorize, and pull down.

These Iraqi institutions must sustain security forces, bring rule of law, visibly deliver essential services, and offer the Iraqi people hope for a better economic future. None of these elements, as you have said, Mr. Chairman, can be achieved by military action alone. So as you heard in that clip, what, you know, Rice is talking about is about training Iraqi soldiers and doing all these steps. And there's like a real kind of confidence and swagger going on here. But there's also a point of distinction that Rice is drawing between herself and her good colleague, one Don Rumsfeld. There's been a pattern where people have tried to diminish the capabilities of the Iraqi security forces. As we've discussed in the pilot, part of what Rumsfeld's idea of how we would rage war in Iraq was that we were going to do it lean.

Yeah. We were going to do it. Mean. Well, we were going to do it. Like, you know, it was going to be a war in Iraq, but it wasn't really going to be Americans conducting that war in Iraq because we were going to transition to letting the Iraqis take over. The reality is that a large number of them are doing exactly what it is they were organized, trained, and equipped to do. And increasingly, they are doing it with less and less. external support from the coalition country vietnamization in iraq precisely and when rumsfeld and his camp

which was you know like like cheney was his biggest ally at this moment in the white house when they got wind of what rice was saying and what she was saying in congress they were furious because was it the build or the hold or the clear well it probably liked clear i mean they loved clear. But I think that the problem that they had with all of this was that there was this kind of assumption that Americans would have to be doing a certain amount of work. Remember at the beginning of the occupation in episode six, the heads of it went to Rumsfeld and said, we're going to need billions more to properly reconstruct Iraq. And he said, if you think we're spending American dollars on that, you're wrong. He was Mr. Do it on the cheap, hand it over to the

Iraqis. Wamb, thank you, ma'am, mission accomplished. Right. And in the next episode, we're going to get into some of the really like fucking awful consequences that this thinking had in terms of how the war was administered, particularly with regard to everybody's favorite private entrepreneurs, Blackwater. For the moment, though, what you see in this divide over clear hold and build and how much obligation the Americans had and what, it, you know, was this genuine divide within the White House, but also there was really just kind of a more petty side to it as well. And that was the simple fact that Donald Rumsfeld looked at Condi Rice and he saw a threat. And Donald Rumsfeld.

Strong black woman. She was. She very much was. And look, this was also part of like to her credit. She's also evil. Yes. And she like, you know, and like the press, like she got more favorable press than anyone else in the, I mean, Andrew Card, who was Bush's chief of staff who resigns in 2006. At the time of his resignation, he says, Condi Rice is the star of this administration. And it is nothing to do with anything she did, but it's because of who she cut her profile in contrast to. Rumsfeld was, you know, he had the power. He was tight with Cheney, who was really the person who was like, you know, calling the shots and quarterbacking power. When Powell and Rice got to have meetings

with Bush alone, for the most part, they weren't ever really alone. Cheney was in the room. And so when you think about the ways in which this like sort of personal discord between Rice and Rumsfeld manifested, there's actually one story that probably captures it best. And the Journalist Barton Gellman's biography of Dick Cheney, Angler, that came out in 2008. One story shows that basically Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld, you know, were working to cover up the fact that Bush had set up these special military tribunals for terrorist suspects. So when Rumsfeld and Cheney were putting out fires related to Guantanamo and the rules of detention around people who were being held there, Bryce was trying to figure out some measure of, you know, damage control in a way to discuss the tribunals. She ends up trying to put together a meeting with all of, you know, the most senior people in, in the building.

And she's, you know, says like, all right, she invites Rumsfeld. Is she secretary of state at this point? No, she's still the national security advisor. Right. So she invites George Tenet, who is still then on his way out. But he was that. Slamdunked on case. Yeah.

George Tenet. Like, the head of the CIA, he was on his way out. And she invites Rumsfeld. Like, everybody was trying to get at least some people on the same page. And Rumsfeld keeps dodging these meetings. In fact, he said Paul Wolfowitz in his step. Yeah, I mean, and that's the biggest fuck you of all is making someone talk to Paul. of ways. So here's how Gelman describes the moment in the book when the meeting is taking place

and Rice sees that Rumsfeld isn't there and that he's dicked her around again and cut her out of this, you know, high profile part of the administrator. Humiliated her. Yeah, he humiliated her by cutting her out of this very, you know, important high level discussion. Quote, something happened to Rice's face, control melting away, her eyes welled up and her next words caught in her throat. The men in the room did not know where to look. She started to cried, said one of them. And she said, I can't remember the exact words because I was so shaken, something like, we will talk about this again. And she turned and walked quickly out the door. So, simping for Condi.

This is what the administration was doing in the months of 2004 and into 2005, where when they should have been, you know, articulating this, like, vision. There was just bureaucratic infighted. Exactly. They couldn't even agree on anything. So that's when she was national security advisor. When she gets to Secretary of State, that's the kind of bad blood. That's the kind of history that she has with Rumsfeld, only a couple months before, which now, as they're both cabinet members, will define the wrangling over the future of Iraq between the two departments. And we'll see who gets the last laugh in the next episode. So that's behind the scenes, you know, this bureaucratic palace intrigue. But

to the American public, watching TV every night, getting updates on their favorite TV show, the Iraq War. The insurgency, the one we discussed last episode, Al-Sauder, Fallujah, the Sunni Triangle, this is starting to bubble up. It's getting harder and harder to ignore, as we've been describing. I mean, like, and the suicide, the rate of, the rate at which suicide bomb in your mouth there. No. The rate at which suicide bombings are occurring is steadily increasing. And American soldiers are starting to get murked. And it's, and it's becoming clear that this isn't tapering.

down. If anything, it is increasing. Yeah, because, you know, people were told in the very beginning of the war, there's going to be a trickle, you know, violence still from former Balthus, and, you know, the Al-Qaeda that we said was there. Now it's been a year, it's been over a year. We're getting, we're getting into 2005. It's been almost two years, and there's still fucking violence, and it's actually getting worse. Cheney goes on, Larry King, and says that the insurgency is not only under control, it's about to fizzle out. No, I think, we may well have some kind of presence there over a period of time but i think the level of activity that we see today from a military standpoint i think will clearly decline i think they're in the

in the last throws if you will of the insurgency and you know i i will say i you know look the news wasn't all bad in fact there's some fun there's some relatively funny things that were happening at this time you know bob woodward scamp that he is has a fun detail i think about um bush and and and Carl Rove, his chief political strategist that I think is worth bringing up here. So here, actually, you know what, you read this. Bush and Rove in particular dwelt on quote-unquote flatulence, passing gas,

and they shared an array of fart jokes. The son of one senior White House staffer had a small toy with a remote control that produced a farting sound. The staffer brought it to the White House and placed it under Rove's chair for the morning senior staff meeting on July 7th.

But when they learned about the terrorist bombs in the London subways and buses that morning, the prank was postponed. I hope they did get around to doing it. Now that we've dispensed with some levity and we return to what's actually happening on the ground, the fact that the Bush administration was unable to actually like, you know,

eliminate insurgents, created some very substantial problems for them. And it led Bush in particular to start talking about how we were fighting the insurgency in some particularly kind of blinkered ways. This is where we get into the conversations about Bush's scorecard. When Bush was agitating his, you know, secretaries of defense and state and everybody else to give him, you know, hard numbers on what was being done and how they were winning, his mind drifted pretty frequently toward just the simple idea of body counts.

this is actually fairly similar there's a good parallel here with Vietnam David Halberstam wrote a lot during Vietnam about how obsessed the Americans were with just the number of bombs that they dropped. They measured their progress for the most part in terms of how many explosives they were able to drop

and how many estimated casualties they were able to cause. I mean this is you know this is the basis of you know Robert McNamara's horrible legacy and in Bush's case wasn't so well developed in terms of tabulating how many people died but the man was obsessed with body counts. Well, and remember he had that drawer of his desk where he would go and cross off the latest al-Qaeda guy to get lit up by a drone. Yes, he would draw literally a big

X through the photo of the people on this list. And, you know, only 10 more to go. And so the way that you can see this is that he begins measuring the success of the war in these kinds of terms. When he's told by Andy Carr, his chief of staff or Condoleezza Rice about, you know, something that just happened, he would say, oh, they killed three of ours. How many did we kill of them or something? Since the inception of the Iraq war, I'd like to know the approximate total of Iraqis who have been killed and by Iraqis. I include civilians, military police, insurgents, translators. How many Iraqi citizens have died in this war? I would say 30,000 more or less have died as a result of the initial incursion and the ongoing violence against Iraqis.

I'll repeat the question. If I don't like it, I'll make it up. And generals, you know, would kind of whine about how much Bush actually asked for these kinds of body count measurements. And this sort of rhetoric and this kind of way of talking about the war as of either clear hold and build or of talking about how many insurgents and terrorists were killing or of pointing to Iraqi democracy, it's starting to wear a bit thin on the American public. By August 2005, for the first time, a consistent majority of the American people start calling the invasion of Iraq a mistake. The Bush administration is in the throes of crisis at this moment. The constitutional round of this Iraqi elections process is about to kick in in October

in Iraq. Step two. Phase two, however you want to call it. And they're just, And the Bush administration has no clear strategy. Rumsfeld has shut out rice. There's not really clear information going up top about whether or not this new government is going to be able to do any of the things that the Bush administration is telling Congress and the press that it can do. So as all of these components of the strategy are kind of failing or falling apart because they're not really a cohesive strategy, Michael Gerson, the Bush speech writer, goes and

seeks out Henry Kissinger for Sage Counsel on what to do. Kissinger gives Gerson a copy of this infamous salted peanut memo that he gave Nixon about Vietnam. And this memo says, quote, withdrawal of U.S. troops will become like salted peanuts to the American public. The more U.S. troops come home, the more will be demanded. Now, it's in this moment when Gerson is being told you can't bring home troops that you have more people start to demand what's our timetable for leaving. And you start to have a public conversation about that and when the insurgency will end and what does the actual long-term plan look like and it's here that donald rumsfeld as really the architect of the actual execution of

this war and of the american occupation he has some interesting answers to these questions in 2005 some in congress have suggested that deadlines be set that would be a mistake it would throw a lifeline to terrorists who in recent months have suffered significant losses in casualty and any who say that we've lost this war or that we're losing this war are wrong. We are not. So in October, the Iraqi National Assembly, which, you know, by this point had conceded to some more Sunni representation to actually garner some legitimacy. The October, they took its draft constitution to the Iraqi people and it was passed by a fairly

large margin, but only because the majority of the country is Shia. And Shia people voted for the constitution and Sunnis largely voted against. Many people have no faith in the democratic process. You've seen the mass protest by shears. Many shears are not on side. Are you, for example, happy with the compromises that have been made? They don't seem to be satisfying anybody. Well, in the words of Thomas Friedman, success should be characterized in situations like this

when you have a document that everybody is equally dissatisfied with. So at the end of 2005, we have the final phase of this election year. They had the January elections that set up a parliament. They had the October referendum that decided the Constitution, and now we had the final for real's government that was going to actually rule Iraq over the next several years. Yet the goodwill and enthusiasm of Election Day is long gone. Voters are disillusioned because the leaders they elected have spent so long force trading, and the power vacuum has enabled the insurgents to regroup. No one wanted to come out on top of this one more than Ahmed Chalabi. And he was doing some horse trading and was hoping that he had won over Sotter's constituency. And at this point, he's left the United Iraqi alliance.

He's just fighting it on his own. Results roll in after December 15th. As the votes are cast, Chalabi turns out to get less than 1% of the ballots. Only 8,000 people in Baghdad vote for him, which was statistical. drastically insignificant. Meanwhile, the United Iraqi Alliance, the big Shia block that he had left earlier that year, takes the day. On every single issue, he was either dishonest, self-promoting, or, you know, vengeful towards his previous enemies. Back home, the neocons are aghast. They think the elections were rigged. They couldn't be that their boy had possibly been so irrelevant to

Iraqis, so meaningless, or if not noxious, a presence given his association, not only with their sorry asses, but with his friends in Tehran. Chalabi had American military and political leaders thinking the Iraq war would be a cakewalk. Later, he was accused of tipping the Iranians off to American intelligence secrets and effectively banned from the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. As Rossin says, voters treated him like he didn't even exist. Our efforts to get Ahmed Chalabi himself to comment for this story were not successful. So just drink this in because this is sort of poetic justice.

You know, Chalaby, after all these years of bringing in American interference, of bringing in American bombs, of bringing in CIA, of bringing an invasion, of bringing an occupation, because he wanted to go back to the fucking 1950s when his family were millionaires inside of Iraq, and that he could rule modern day Iraq with a rent-a-cop American army. After all of this, all of the politicking, all of the lobbying, all of the ass-kissing and the poetry reciting to stupid, fucking neocons and liberals alike. After all of the intelligence doctoring and all of the flim-flam, all of the millions and millions he stole from Jordan, after everything leading him up to this point, Chalabi finally gets his oh so precious Iraqi democracy, and he instantly evaporates.

Chalobie was the biggest loser of the December elections. And the results as they came out were, for the most part, kind of similar to what the results were in the January 2005 elections. The proto ones. Right. Yeah. That sort of initiated this whole, you know, phase of votes. Exactly. But what was different this time was that there still needed to be some massaging and negotiating among the Shia parties to figure out exactly who would be the next prime minister.

Now, it's funny because the Americans argued tremendously over who. it was going to be. Noriel Maliki, the guy who would ultimately become Iraq's prime minister out of this process, he actually wasn't the Americans, like, negotiated pick, although many Americans wanted him. The guy who is commonly credited with actually having negotiated the deal that got him into power was Qasem Soleimani. No way. Yes. Yeah, because I was about to say, some Americans were worried that Maliki was too close with Iran. Precisely. And if we're looking for reasons that are going to explain what's going to be the crisis of the next episode, you can start to look at Noreal-Maliki as just one great example of it. If we've communicated anything in this episode,

I hope it's to express just how weak and fragile these political institutions within Iraq are and how haphazardly the Bush administration tended to their needs. The Bush administration was not really focused on actually developing a real response to the insurgency, which was itself an evolution of a fundamentally political problem over who would get to be the people that ruled Iraq into the future. And the failure to actually address that problem would, you know, it's, you could say that like, well, of course, they invaded Iraq. This was bound to happen. Yes. But the way that this would mutate in a really destructive way would not really become clear until 2006. Because what we're really on a course right now for at the end of 2005 is civil war.

so next time on blowback we're going to look at the iraqi civil war we're going to look at some of the american government officials who actually finally face some consequences for their gross incompetence and we're going to talk about the actual strategy that the americans finally settle on to maybe think about getting themselves out of iraq possibly thanks for coming see you next time Bye. we can't stand. If you don't like it, go write your own and start up your own band. But this is our song and this is our list.

We apologize to the ones we missed. This is a song about liberals that we can't stand. Nancy Pelosi and Robert Bird Susan Sarandon and Whoopi Goldberg Chuck is Schumer and Martin Sheen His son Charlie and Howard Dean Lincoln Chaffee and John McCain Arlen Specter and Christopher Shea

Lindsay Graham and Olympia Snow Along in the zoo with the other rhinos This is a song about liberals that we can't stand If you don't like it can write your own And start up your own face But this is our song And this is our list We apologize to the ones we missed

This is a song about liberals That we can't stand One was dry said O'Brien free Mother Redford And Bruce Springsteen This is a song about liberals That we can't stand

Rosie old dog And if you don't like it, Go write your own And start up your own band But this is our song And this is our list We apologize to the ones we missed This is a song about liberals

That we can't stand This is a song about liberals That we can't stand And lest we forget at the queen We crown our list with Hillary This is our song

And this is our list We apologize to the ones we missed This is a song about liberals That we can't stand This is a song about liberals That we can't stand Thank you. ...

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