Blowback - S1 Episode 9 - "How Do You Fuck That Up?"

Episode Date: August 10, 2020

The empire strikes back. As Iraq deteriorates into civil war, the Bush administration taps a new man to lead a new American strategy. Which means saying goodbye to an old friend.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Better late than never. Butchie. I'm here to make peace. Then I'm gonna do it and make things right. You could do something, I guess. You could die, Jr. How? How do you fuck that up?

How do you fuck that up? Speak about this hot sign. Speak about this luxury. Speak about this love sign. Welcome to blowback. I'm Noah Colwyn. I'm Brendan James. Episode 9, how do you fuck that up?

So just to reacquaint everybody with where we are in the timeline right now, December 2005, elections just happened. Iraq went to vote for a new part. parliament that would select a prime minister, and the winner was, as was expected, was the large, powerful Shia bloc and Nouri al-Maliki was the guy who became Iraq's prime minister. Next, Iraqi prime minister, Nori al-Maliki talks about security issues. So the Bush administration wanted these elections to symbolize that the Iraqis were prepared to take control of security for themselves. Of course, this wasn't the case at all. They were

nowhere near ready, and the Bush administration just didn't have a plan to deal with that fact. The country was careening towards civil war. People at home had finally really begun to sour on the war. In fact, you saw Bushla's approval ratings start to slide toward the 30s, where it would pretty much stay for the rest of his presidency. And the violence within Iraq would reach this fever pitch that the Americans couldn't really figure out how to deal with, unless they wanted to do something that Donald Rumsfeld was not willing to do. And that was to put more troops on the ground.

A strategy that would become known as the surge. We're going for the heavy hand now. Yes. The surge was a violent, brutal policy. It was the deployment of tens of thousands of American soldiers for the purpose of re-securing Baghdad and fundamentally reinforcing the maintenance of the Shia-dominated political status quo. The surge was more than anything else in abdication of the idea that the Americans felt that they could peacefully build a new political entity under which all Iraqis could live together with adequate representation. So with the realization that the surge was the way we wanted to go, there was also the realization that Rumsfeld had to go.

But before we get there, I think we should check in on an old friend. American forces finally caught up with Saddam Hussein today. He was hiding in a crawl space, a spider hole, the military called it, underneath the floor of a small shack outside his hometown of Decrete. He was described as disoriented at first, and then as time went by, on repentant and defiant. After Saddam Hussein was captured in December of 2003. On your birthday. When he was captured, when he was found in the spider hole outside his hometown of Tikrit,

the American media and the Bush administration obviously talked up what a huge victory it was, and they talked about what it would mean that Saddam would face justice. Saddam Hussein, captured and jailed, is still the same raging time. parent. Only now without a throne. When Saddam was brought in, he was first debriefed by a CIA analyst named John Nixon. And Nixon met with Saddam for hours and hours over a large number of meetings in the first weeks after Saddam's capture. And the picture that emerges from Saddam's encounters with Nixon, which Nixon wrote about in a book published in 2016, is a version of Saddam that is so different from the kind of Hitlerian image that we painted of him prior to invading.

Yeah, remember, like, before the invasion, the round-the-clock footage of Saddam with the rifle in the air, shooting it, the kind of godfather pose, the entire 90s, as we discussed back in episode two, of puffing him up culturally, like pop culturally, as the image of a dictator. We did all that work for him, turning him into the epitome of evil. And then after we capture him, we do an entirely opposite campaign of painting him as basically a hobo with this big scraggly beard. you know, having the, his tonsils, you know, checked out humiliatingly, under the unflattering light of a gas lamp. The big come-down treatment. Yes. And the gulf between the reality of what life was like in Iraq and what Saddam was up to prior to the Americans' invasion and what the Americans thought was the case, or at least deluded themselves to be the case, was vast. For example, Nixon found from talking to Saddam that it didn't seem like he was actually really running Iraq on a day-to-day basis prior to the invasion. Actually, while Saddam still had total control and the Baathas party was still in control,

he delegated a lot of the responsibilities that he previously would have taken on himself. And he was actually pretty bored with politics in general and had spent a lot of his time working on his novel. Whenever you come in here and interrupt me, you're breaking my concentration. You're distracting me. And it will then take time to get back to where I was. In fact, Saddam was so bored with all of the details of governance. There's really no way that you can come to the conclusion. that this was a guy who was, you know, really a live and present danger to the American public.

I mean, he barely had a handle on his country's own basic economic policies. Here's a snatch of dialogue from the Nixon book that I think is particularly revealing. When the conversation moved into areas that made Saddam uncomfortable, he would claim that we were interrogating him and that the discussion was no longer about history. When I asked him about trade between Syria and Iraq, Saddam erupted. Trade? Who cares about trade? Do you think Saddam is a tradesman? This is the scum of history.

So rather than some sort of ideologue obsessed with reigning terror on everyone around him by 2003, Nixon found that actually Saddam was mostly obsessed with money. He talked about how he believed the American soldiers had stolen money from him at the time of his capture. And the people at whom he directed the most venom in conversation with Nixon were the people he suspected of stealing from him in the Iraqi government. So when you think about then, when Saddam was told by the Americans and the British that we're going to come fuck you up and look. you hand over nuclear weapons that you don't have, Saddam was very confused. In fact, he thought that 9-11 actually would bring the Americans closer to him because the last time around that the Americans needed to help dealing with a group of radical Islamists who they were scared of in the 80s, which was the Iranians, they were happy to give Saddam money and resources to go after the bad

guys. Certainly that's how we ended up getting cozier with guys like Mubarak. We were already very cozy with them. But even more so, the war on terror, like we talked about back in episode three, this was a chance for every secular dictator in the Arab world to get more support from Americans, you know, either actual money or material or just diplomatic support. Gaddafi, ironically enough, was one of those guys. But he did it by both playing up his credentials for fighting the war on terror with the Americans and playing good cop to Saddam's bad cop and saying, here, you can have my WMD. I know Saddam didn't hand his over. Saddam was, at least being reasonable, thinking that the Americans would come to him after 9-11 and say,

hey, why don't we, you know, let's let bygones big bygones. You rope up some jihadis, send them our way. We'll use the sanctions. Let's get back on track. And, you know, when you also think about, like, the faces in the Bush administration who were communicating this to Saddam, it was literally George W. Bush, whose father worked with Saddam. And the Secretary of Defense, who was, you know, organizing all this military planning to come, fuck up Saddam in this country,

was the guy who had flown to Iraq in the 1980s to offer the support of the Reagan administration. Don Rumsfeld. There are a lot of conversation around that he's a madman and crazy and so forth. I don't happen to believe he is at all. A vicious dictator ruled

Iraq. He's a strong man. He's an intelligent man. He was a man who took pleasure in having dozens of people thrown off the tops of several story buildings. He has a totally different and values set and those of us in the United States. And who murdered literally hundreds of thousands of people over his time in office.

In July 2004, about half a year after Saddam was first captured, the actual legal proceedings against him began. And he, along with 11 others, including his half-brother, were tried by an Iraqi special tribunal that was actually set up around the time he was captured by Paul Bremer at the direction of Rumsfeld. To give you a sense of how serious and organized a procedure this was, the tribunal was led by a guy named Salim Chalaby, the nephew of one Ahmed Chalaby. And Donald Rumsfeld,

as basically a fuck you to the international criminal court, declined to give Saddam status as a prisoner of war, which would have made available certain international legal opportunities for him in terms of trying his case. So let's just get this right. We didn't hand Saddam over to an international court. No. This wasn't like, like even Milosevic, you know,

he ended up at the Hague. We're not giving him over. to the international community, despite the assumed protocol there. No. And in fact, it was because of a lot of what the ICC and other international legal institutions were saying about American conduct in the Iraq war in the first place and their frustration with the invasion that led Bush and Rumsfeld to say, no, no, no, fuck you. Like, we're not going to do this your way. We need your sinking court. This whole court's out of order.

Precisely. And so what they set up and said is the special tribunal. In Iraqi, like, within the national borders of Iraq and officially Iraqi affair. Correct. And which is not the way that these things are supposed to go because of precisely what it can lead to, which is exactly what. I don't see anything bad. Yeah. Look, there's no foreshadowing here. No foreshadowing on this podcast whatsoever. So while Saddam did a whole host of evil shit while ruling Iraq from gassing the Kurds, to draining the marshlands in southern Iraq and forcing the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Shia Muslims. Yeah, we didn't care about that. What he was charged with was ultimately the murder of 150 Shia Muslims in a town called Dejail. And it was a massacre that took place in 1982 after Saddam was nearly assassinated. And so Saddam's trial actually began in the fall of 2005. In a courtroom amid tight security, history was made. Saddam Hussein finally went on trial.

From the start, Saddam was defiant, even unruly toward the presiding judge. Refusing a dozen times simply to state his name, I am the president of Iraq, he said. You know me because you're an Iraqi. I seek to expose a fraud, he said. One last thing Saddam Hussein was told today is he listened to the charges against him. If he is convicted, he could face execution. Now we get to the incident that most directly inspired the name of this episode.

Saddam was convicted in November of 2006. Big surprise, he was found guilty. Six weeks later, he was hung to death. Well, this sucks. So from soup to nuts, Saddam's execution was a complete disaster. For one thing, he was hung to death on the day of aid, a Muslim holiday. It absolutely alienated, of course, all of the Sunni, who had at least some sort of appreciation for Saddam, given how currently fucked up things were in Iraq.

Also, for one thing, the military base he was hung at was called Camp Justice. Now, the actual hanging itself was also a clinic in how to not do any of these kinds of things. produced perhaps the most famous viral video of the Iraq War. Within hours of the actual execution itself, a cell phone video taken by a soldier in the room, went viral. You may be hearing there that those are supporters of Maktada al-Sadr who happened to be in the room, who are chanting and jeering at Saddam. It's not known exactly what Saddam was saying as he was being led. up to the platform to be hung, but one report says that his last words may have been a reply to somebody who told him to go to hell. And his response was, the hell that is Iraq. The US would

later claim that they actually had nothing to do with the planning of the execution, even though it took place on an American military base and was the result of a prosecution that they had themselves set up. Well, so it's never, it's never happened again. Some will find the pictures disturbing. Muammar Gaddafi's blood-soaked body is paraded like a trophy by jubilant fighters. We definitely didn't go on TV and gloat about it or anything. We came, we saw, he died. The U.S. claimed that they had nothing to do with it. The U.S. military spokesman, General William Caldwell, this was actually his line about it. Quote, would we have done things differently? Yes, we would have.

Stakes were made. But that's not our decision. That's an Iraqi government decision. That's not an MP. That's a YP. Your problems. All right, now you're talking above my head, all right? I don't know this industry jargon. Y, P, MP, whatever. And I do want to take a second here to repeat the fact about, like, how viral this video was. Because when you start talking about the moments that would most galvanize Sunni militants in the coming years,

the execution of Saddam Hussein would be the thing to which they point. I mean, it's almost just too obvious to point out that the word martyr becomes very important here. Correct. And one weird, like, thing about... How do you fuck this up? How do you fuck this? One detail I want to just throw in here that's a little weird is there was actually believed to be a phenomenon of copycat deaths because this is, you know, like early internet panics. Because remember, this is like 2006.

YouTube started in like 2007 time challenge. Literally like, oh, a nine-year-old boy saw the video and hung himself. Wait, did that happen? Yeah, there's a story. There's like they believe that there are like multiple casualties. There's a whole guardian article about it. I'm not kidding. Slender Saddam.

Slender Saddam, man. So the invasion of Iraq and the occupation. and everything, like, it's a nesting doll of horrible decisions, not just obviously the fucked morality that led us into this war, but also just in terms of, like, administrative competence, just you could not ask for worse decisions to be made. The execution of Saddam Hussein, just from a pure level of how easily it could have been avoided

and how much of a black market became in the years after is, for me, at least, at the top of that list. dozens of bodies appear on the Capitol streets every morning So this is where things really take a turn I mean violence has been increasing It's been horrifying Iraq at that point was a failed state In which gangs rove the streets

And pick people up for ransom And there was a total breakdown of social services It was it was a nightmare to begin with But this is where in 2006 We enter, I don't think we need to put scare quotes around it A civil war. Correct. Born by families on both sides of Iraq's sectarian divide.

And the Americans had hoped that actually things would go the other way, that a government, one elected by Iraqis, you know, democracy was going to make a comeback. In fact, that's kind of how Bush pitched it. Iraqis of every background are recognizing that democracy is the future of the country they love. One Iraqi, after dipping his finger in the purple ink as he cast his ballot, stuck his finger in the air and said, this is a thorn in the eyes of the terrorists. Now, as Brandon just mentioned a minute ago,

there were some really big fucking impediments ahead of the Americans. For example, Iraqi oil exports had fallen by about a fifth from the year earlier, which meant that the Iraqis were short about $2 billion to $3 billion for the first quarter of 2006. By the beginning of 2006, a low-end estimate put the number of kidnappings in the country at around 30 per month, a tidy business for militants raising money to fight the Americans and one another. an average of four Iraqis were killed a week by American troops.

Yeah, and I think this is a good time as any to check back in with our Iraqi friend, Ra'ed, because he has more than one story about what could happen to you if you lived in Iraq during this descent into civil war. I come from a mixed family. My family is half Sunni. So, like, the sectarian affiliations that we've never discussed before, became more prominent and you could also hear, you know, some of these sectarian narratives seeping through our family conversations. I was kidnapped by a sectarian militia in the south of Iraq in a city called Nasseria. So I used to travel around the south every week. And one week I got kidnapped with one of the other members of the small nonprofit that I started.

started. They were just flexing their muscles. They asked us, what do we do? Where do we get our money, et cetera? So after that, they released us in the next morning. And after that, I decided to leave the country. I thought that that was a good. Yeah, that's understandable. Yeah. So I left. After, after I left, my mother was carjacked right outside our home. And she ended up leaving the country. And then we, We had the biggest incident with my brother, where he disappeared one day, did not come back home from school. And we thought he was dead. My father was left, the only one who was left in Iraq at the time. And my father spent two entire weeks going through hospitals and morgues, going through hundreds of dead bodies of young. iraqi boys who are the same as his age as my brother's age and trying to identify if he's there and they always tell people that the next time i saw my dad he looked like he aged a decade

in those few weeks um we ended up finding my brother alive he was abducted by an iraqi government militia it's a paramilitary by the iraqi government affiliated with the ministry of interior and we ended up paying you know whatever like a ransom bribe getting him out and that's when my family left like this story is like a microcosm of literally millions of other stories that many of them had happy endings like this one where we left the country many of them not so happy i mean one thing you get at this idea of like the mystery I mean, the actual Iraqi government, you know, is the one responsible behind this. Right. What happened was a group of American KPR tankers. The vehicle caught on fire and was went ahead and stopped. We pulled the drivers out. Another truck was attacked by a RPG.

State Department figures showed that almost three years after the invasion, Iraq was just barely coming up on the levels of electricity production that it generated before the war. All the way back in episode six, a couple months after the invasion, electricity was you know, basically non-existent. Paul Bremer was supposed to sort that out within one year. We're in 2006 now, and it's still not pre-war-level electricity. I mean, unemployment was at between 25% and 40%. We'd never get an actual number and probably much higher. And there was such an issue with corruption within this new government and within the Iraqi police such that, you know, they would be told to defend an oil pipeline. And then they would

leave to let the oil pipeline get attacked. And then they would go back and say, actually, we need to get paid more if you want us to actually protect this. So, cops. If you want to look for, I guess, like a starting point that really sets the tone for the violence and the deterioration of things and how things escalated from even the already shitty place therein in 2005, the incident that we should probably look at is the February 2006 bombing in the city of Samara. February 22, 2006, when this holy place was blown apart.

The Golden Dome Shrine in the town of Samara, North of Baghdad, one of the holiest sites in Shia Islam. I think, actually, of all the stuff that we've talked about in this show, for me personally, the bombings in Samara are the thing that make my blood boil the most, not because they were the single most brutal thing that happened over the course of American time there, but because of the way that we lied about it. It's bombing so incendiary, moderate Shia leaders who had managed to hold back their faithful in the face of violent provocation for nearly two years, finally lost control.

Just to give you the facts of this, on February 22nd in 2006, a bunch of bombs went off in the Iraqi city of Samara, which is to the north, destroying an important Shia shrine. The Americans, of course, went to a convenient explanation for the bombings, which is that it was Al-Qaeda, it was Zarqawi, and, you know, whether- Cari, the guy we had anointed as the sole leader and instigator of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq. Right. The facts of the situation were that a bunch of Shia worshippers had died quite viciously, and Maktada al-Sadr and other Shia militants were out for blood. The weeks after the bombing, said to be by Al-Qaeda, though it never claimed responsibility, saw scores of Sunni mosques attacked. What had been ad hoc sectarian attacks turned into systematic, widespread campaigns of ethnic cleansing. Now, these reprisals, Donald Rumsfeld denied that they happened. In fact, he and General William Casey, who was the top commander of all U.S. forces in Iraq,

were telling a really completely different story about what was going on. They wasn't really clear what planet they were on. Here's just an example of the kind of stuff that they were saying. According to General Casey, the number of Iraqi deaths had been exaggerated, and I guess that is to say nothing of the apparently inaccurate and harmful reports of U.S. military conduct. And then I noticed today that there's been a public opinion poll reporting that the readers of these exaggerations believe Iraq is in a civil war, a majority do, which I suppose little wonder that the reports we've seen have had that effect on the American people. Now, remember what I said about Condi Rice in the last episode and what she testified about before Congress in January 2005? As I've said, our strategy is to clear, hold, and build.

The enemy strategy is to infect, terrorize, and pull down. So by mid-2006, as Condi had eased into the Secretary of State job, you know, her post-2004 reward for her Bush loyalty, now that Colin Powell said, you know, went by-bye. Yeah, just for everyone. at home. When did that switch happen? When is Colin Powell out and when is she? Oh, Colin Powell is out as of mid-2005 and Condi Rice is brought in then. The change had been announced before, but they obviously had to do some politicking around the edges. And Condi's replacement was a guy named Stephen Hadley.

Right. Her replacement as NSA, as National Security Advisor. Correct. Now, this changing of the deck chairs would go on to initiate the first really big policy shift at the White House level when it comes to administering the Iraq war. And I say that it's a policy shift because really I want to stress there was no coherent policy before. It was just an indefinite timeline of when the Iraqis were going to take control for themselves. But as things were getting worse and Rumsfeld and Casey were stonewalling, there was the beginning of a recognition that actually maybe we're going to need to change some things. And as, you know, the White House was dealing with 900 insurgent attacks on American troops per week from, you know, their own figures and how they couched it. But there was no

like definitive plan B or anything that made a lot of sense. In fact, Condi Rice went on Meet the Press in August of 2006 and talked with David Gregory about how there was no plan B. Plain B is wrong for your fucking life. And so behind closed doors, though, with Condi and her new job, with Hadley in the National Security Advisor position, and with the rise of other people with perspectives on the war closer to her, meaning people who were willing to at least internally talk a bit about what can we do differently than now. It was a new climate. Exactly.

And that worked to the detriment of one person more than anyone else in Bushworld. And that was Don Rumsfeld. And in the section, Rumsfeld, my homie, what are you doing? As much as we checked in with Saddam earlier, I think this is also a good moment to check in with Rumsfeld. Now, as we talked about in the prologue, we, you know, Rumsfeld's profile coming into this War was a very weird thing. He was a strange conservative politician cobbled together from like, you know, the George H.W. Bushmold in tradition, but then also became an enthusiastic, you know, like neocon booster. And somebody who helped ensure that Paul Wolfowitz and his crazy talk about

regime change in Iraq was given a high profile platform. Sure. But once we did the regime change that the Wolfowitz types wanted, he wasn't for doing it in the long haul and, you know, expending a of money to build a flourishing new democracy either. And I think that, you know, there's a couple of quotes I want to read here from the, the neoconservative author, Midge Dexter, whose husband is Norm Potter. Run that name back? The neo-conservative author Midge Dexter, whose husband is Norman Potteritz and whose son is John Potteritz. Treat boy. In 2003, she published a book that I can only describe as a like several hundred page long mash note to Donald Rumsfeld.

Okay, this is 2003. Yeah. So this is when he's riding high. Did you buy that? Yes. Can I see the cover? Yeah. For those at home, it's a book just called Rumsfeld, a personal portrait.

Turn the book around. And, well, the cover is him looking, you know, the weight of the world on his shoulders at his desk, hand pressed to his brow, probably figuring out some world historical riddle. And then the background, oh yeah, on the back, it's a black and white photo of him from his young thought days. And he's looking, I got to say, he's looking real good. And then there's a Winston Churchill quote underneath the Rumsfeld picture. This is a find. So this is coming out of 2003 when Rumsfeld is like the man. He's been named one of the sexiest men alive by people. He's on TV all the time. He's the face of the administration,

particularly the face of the war. He's made. making the press laugh. He's got the quips. He's the man. Yes. In fact, I want to read a bit from Midge Doctor about how much he's the man. Aside from its effect on the atmosphere in the country in general and in the Pentagon in particular, September 11th also marked the start of Donald Rumsfeld's unexpected life as a national celebrity. That's one of the things I remember about that day. Same. Indeed, even more than a national celebrity and even more unexpected, he soon became a media hero for numbers of American men and a kind of pin-up for countless American and not only American women, almost without regard to political, almost without regard to political

leanings. People would stop him in public places, interrupt him at dinner and restaurants, and in general treat him rather more like a Hollywood star than like an important government official. It all came about as a result of the televised briefings he frequently gave to the Pentagon Press Corps, especially when the country went to war in Afghanistan. At that point, Rumsfeld's briefings made him the chief public exponent and explainer of the war. And he conducted them with a candor so uncommon to the usual public demeanor of a public official and at the same time with so much Witten Panash that what came to be known as the Rummy show was soon playing to ever larger and ever more appreciative audiences.

So that's how Rumsfeld is being spun at the time of the invasion. Nowadays, though, and again, we've played a bunch of clips of Rumsfeld on this show, and I think you have an idea of how whatever may have been charming to the Washington press court and whatever may have been charming to the belway, and whatever may have won over his colleagues with this real pithy bluster about the way things were going, you could start to see how that curdles into something much darker and much more unpleasant.

As you put it earlier, the bottom was falling out of Iraq. Yeah. I mean, one example that I think really captures the way that like the sheen came off Rumsfeld that once the public persona that so endeared him to Bush people ultimately became a liability. In the middle of 2006, under pressure, from generals, he redeployed a unit that he probably shouldn't have that had already been redeployed repeatedly. And some of whose members were actually on their way back home to their

home base in Alaska. And so when Rumsfeld went to meet some of the family members of this unit at their base in Alaska, it did not go as planned. It wasn't actually some private heart to heart where he could apologize. He was yelled at for lying over and over again. And these lies were actually caught on tape and given to the media. And so obviously Congress, while all this had happened, you know, they'd seen what was going on because it was pretty hard to ignore, and they actually commissioned the creation at the beginning of 2006 of an entity, a committee really called the Iraq Study Group. It was co-chaired by Lee Hamilton, a former Democratic politician and James Baker, who was the chief of staff in the George H.W. Bush White House. And they took

a series of trips to Iraq at the end of the summer, beginning of the fall in 2006. And what they found on the ground was basically brutal political stasis. When they sat down with Nouri al-Maliki, for example, they didn't really understand why he thought the things that he did. For example, he told them that his biggest problem with the Iraqi police was not about preparedness. It wasn't about quality or competency. He said that the biggest problem as of 2006 was that they were still trying to get rid of Baathist elements within the police. This being kind of a way of speaking in code that there were still too many of the Sunni clique left over from the Saddam era. And Maliki, who, you know, if we're not making it clear yet, was a real sectarian Shia guy,

was, you know, using, it sounds like, the Ba'ath label to try and get rid of more Sunnis and Shiafi, if you like, the central apparatus. And it became clear to the Iraq study group that actually what was happening with the Iraqi government was not that it was coming into its legitimacy, but rather that the Iraqi government was simply serving to reify, to strengthen the kind of Shia political dominancy that the Sunnis had been afraid of all through now. And so if you're the Iraq study group, what you're seeing then is that the central political problem in Iraq is just persisting, which is that there is no political entity under which, you know, the Sunni Muslims and the Shia Muslims can credibly share power.

And so they're beginning to wonder, well, if this is what the status quo is, then really, Again, what is a plan B? The midterm elections in November, a season of discontent for voters. Democrats hope so. They're trying to capitalize on public dissatisfaction with the war in Iraq and the way President Bush is handling it. With all this in mind, the other thing that's happening domestically that is affecting the way that some people are acting in Iraq, at least the U.S. officials, is that the

midterm elections are approaching. Now, part of the reason that you can say that not a lot changed in terms of strategy or even on the ground besides things just getting worse and worse and worse from 2004 was that when Bush won re-election, it was perceived as a vindication of the strategy that they had maintained up until now. Thus, the 2004 elections were used as a test of how the Bush administration had been waging war. And you could say that in 2006 for the midterm elections, they were doing the same thing again. Now, this is, I would love for this to be a Ram Emanuel Hate podcast and for us to just go in on the 2006 elections, but that's not quite how, it's not how it is.

we'll just say this is what happened. The Democrats won fucking big time. Yeah. They took back the House. They took back the Senate. It was a bloodbath. And what that meant for the Bush administration was that they actually had now to figure things out and figure out what their next step was going to be. And the first head to roll was finally Don Rumsfeld. The election has changed many things in Washington, but it does not change my fundamental responsibility. And that is to protect the American people from attack. Now, after a series of thoughtful conversation, Secretary Rumsfeld and I agreed that the timing is right for new leadership

at the Pentagon. You know, Rumsfeld survived the invasion itself. He survived installing Bremer and the CPA and all of those fuck-ups. He survived the repeated lies about the insurgency and the fact that it existed. He survived the scandals coming out of the detainee treatment

at Guantanamo Bay. And most insanely, he survived Abu Ghraib where he claimed that he twice offered his resignation to Bush. Because again, it is astonishing that he survived Abu Ghraib. It's astonishing that he survived the Gitmo detention scandal. And, you know, outside of the Iraq war, there are tons of scandals that will take down other Bush appointees, like the U.S. attorney's firing scandal that would take down Alberto Gonzalez.

Hurricane Katrina. But after the midterm elections, when the American people firmly gave a thumbs down to the Bush administration, Rumsfeld's head finally rolled. He was replaced by Robert Gates, who was previously a CIA director and who had worked with George H.W. Bush. particularly on thrashing the country of Iraq. So a week after the election, after Rumsfeld's gone, Bush signs an order that actually does the thing that Condi and all of these other White House bureaucrats

had been freaking out about for months, which is this question of like, when are we going to change our strategy? A week after the election, Bush signs in order officially ordering for a strategic review. This lays the groundwork for what will become the surge. there's a man. I won't say a hero, because what's a hero? But sometimes there's a man. And sometimes that man is not actually right for the time or place that he's in, but that doesn't stop journalists and politicians from believing that he's the right guy. Here's a story about

then-Lieutenant General David Petraeus, the man that I am describing. A story related by Bob Woodward in his book, The War Within, but it's been told elsewhere endlessly. One Saturday, morning in September 1991, Petraeus and his superior officer Jack Kane were standing together watching an infantry squad's practice assaulting a bunker with live grenades and ammunition. A soldier tripped and fell about 40 yards away and accidentally squeezed the trigger on his rifle. The M-16 round tore through the A over the name tag on the right side of Petraeus's chest and left a golf ball-sized exit wound in his back. If it had hit above the A in U.S. Army on his left side, he likely would have died on the spot. Dave, you've been shot, Kane said.

as he leaned over his downed colleague. Then they get to the emergency room after he's been shot and everything. He says, In the local emergency room, a trauma expert shoved a chest tube into Petraeus, an excruciating procedure that makes grown men scream and jolt off the table. Petraeus never moved and let out only a low grunt. That is the toughest soldier I've ever had my hands on, the doctor told Kane. So when Rumsfeld left, he was replaced by Robert Gates.

But that was really only at the title position. The person who would then come to stand in for the public. imagination about what military leadership was going to look like in America as the surge would get underway was General David Petraeus. Hi everyone, I'm Katie Couric and welcome to eye to eye. While Washington debates withdrawing troops from Iraq, General David Petraeus has his handsful organizing the surge of new troops going in. Petraeus, this guy who was tough as nails, he wasn't just tough as nails, as glossy articles in daily newspapers and magazines like Newsweek would show, actually, but

Petraeus was also a brainiac, a guy who loved staying up late, pouring over maps, having deep, heartfelt conversations with Iraqis. You know, he graduated under the top of his class, by the way. Did you know that? And the idea was that, as Bush needed to sell a new policy for how we were going to conduct ourselves in Iraq and what would be the next step, the surge, Petraeus was going to be the public face of it. He was going to be the guy who explained it. And when Petraeus arrived on the scene, he was treated with totally. Deference, like really, truly total deference. I mean, the news media went Gaga for this guy. There was a Newsweek cover story that, you know, on it, it came out in July 2004, a few months

into the surge, just read, can this man save Iraq? Well, he had all the little notches on his, on his big green general's jacket. He had all the little reds and whites. Well, the ones that hadn't been shot off. Right, sure, yeah, above the A or whatever. Exactly. So Petraeus was the Brainiac soldier scholar who would replace General Casey. as the guy executing the strategy. Whereas Casey was seen as kind of a deferential figure to Rumsfeld, Petraeus was somebody who was given a little bit more leash. And so here's how Bush himself lays out what the surge strategy will look like

on January 10th, 2007. So America will change our strategy to help the Iraqis carry out their campaign to put down sectarian violence and bring security to the people of Baghdad. This will require increasing American force levels. So I've committed more than 20,000. additional American troops to Iraq. The vast majority of them, five brigades, will be deployed to Baghdad. And Bush would really come to lean on Petraeus as an explanation for everything about his strategy. Thomas Ricks, the reporter for the Washington Post, would say that Bush mentioned

Petraeus's name over 150 times in press conferences and talks over the first six months of the surge in 2007. And as Petraeus drew it up, the key word. for the new strategy of the surge was, quote, counterinsurgency. Coim. This is a moment where it's also like a phrase like counterinsurgency. The idea of counterinsurgency sort of comes from this school of thought within these military leaders about Vietnam, which is that, listen, as we got into Vietnam, we were fighting an insurgency, and we didn't adjust our tactics to fight an insurgency.

And because these are military guys, they never say the question, and therefore we shouldn't have been in Vietnam in the first place. What they say is, well, if we were to have stayed in Vietnam, here's what we should have done instead. So the idea of the surge was to use this expanded U.S. troop presence to branch out outside of the green zone, particularly in Baghdad, where militants in Sunni neighborhoods in particular were ramping up their attacks on both U.S. forces and also against the Shia. As we go into it, who are the enemies and friends in the oncoming surge? There's America. We know that we have two major blocks of confessional militias. You're going to have Shia and Sunni groups.

The Sunnis are the disenfranchised group after the regime change. We've just been talking a lot about how, you know, Shia politics got a big shot in the arm from getting rid of Saddam and his clique of old to Creti Sunni thugs. But then you've also got groups, Mukta al-Sauder, and his Mahdi army being the most notable, who are Shia and who also are fighting the Americans as well. What's the like, you know, triangulation here? Who are we friends with? Who are we enemies with?

What's the lay of the land? So the surge was kind of a big, would ultimately, serve as kind of a big hinge point on that exact question. We would recalibrate and reassess who exactly our friends were and who we needed to buy to be our friends in order to make the surge such a success. So at the time of the surge, our friends were not necessarily Sunni militants because the Sunni militants had been the people most resistant to the U.S. presence in the first place. If you'll recall, we had that insane battle in Fallujah that was not just waged against Abu Musa Bal Zarqawi and the Al-Qaeda types.

but also just against, you know, Sunni warlords in the area who are fighting against American occupiers. Right. So the Sunni militants were not necessarily on our friends list. Because, again, from their perspective, they see the Americans come in, throw out Saddam, who, for all of his fault, gave us a voice as Sunnis. I mean, other people would see them as getting a disproportionate voice, of course. But for them, they've just been fucked. And the Shia, in their eyes, are now controlling the entire country. So what's our relationship with Shia militants, and why are they going at us at that point?

So a lot of the Shia militant fighting has a lot to do with Shia-on-Shia militant fighting and also Shia reprisals against Sunni Muslims. You'll recall that Rumsfeld and Casey covered up those Shia reprisals and just denied that there were bodies in the morgue after the bombing and Samara. They were not interested in acknowledging that there was a Shia militancy problem and that the Madi army was something that the U.S. actually needed to deal with and publicly address. But it was because these Shia internal rivalries were manifesting in really bloody ways. as well as when Shia militants directly responded or provoked their Sunni enemies. The wild card in terms of like the Shia militants' relationship with the U.S. is Al-S. because, again, he had this large, impoverished base of supporters who did not figure in to the American plans for how to control and rule Iraq.

What the surge would ultimately do, however, would kind of scramble these. And for reasons that we'll get into in a minute. Now, the other quality of the surge, which the U.S. didn't really talk about, until months and months into it or after the fact when it became more visibly clear to the outside world that this was such a big part of it was the practice of paying bribes. Jimmy, I'd complain, but who'd listen?

The idea was that this would be a strategy to bring them under the umbrella of at least U.S. support and to keep tabs on them and to modulate the amount of violence that they were inflicting, not to bring it to an end. Right. And Sunni militants, well, you might wonder why would they want to get in bed with the Americans

who just caused them all this chaos, by this point, Sunni militants weren't so necessarily opposed the idea. Over the last year, particularly after the bombing in Samara, that we mentioned a bit earlier, militants like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and other sort of, you know, Al-Qaeda in Iraq, foreign fighter figures had become incredibly unpopular, even among Sunnis in Iraq, simply because their aggressive suicide bombing campaigns and the way that they targeted U.S. soldiers in Shia went far and beyond what necessarily even the Sunni had the summit for, and they understood that there was no long-term resolution that was going to be reached by pursuing such a campaign. And besides, Abu Musa Balzarkawi, we didn't really mention it earlier, but he died

in June of 2006 and he was killed by the U.S. And while the Bush administration and the media treated that like it was a big deal, I don't actually think it really was in the scope of things. Right as the violence was going to get even worse, you take out the guy that you said was the source of it all, kind of maybe, and then everything continues to gnash away. That's a bit of a sign that you might have been making that all up. And the way that this change in perspective was described, like the phrase that came about to describe that why Sunni leaders were now acting in this way was called the Anbar Awakening. Local Sunni residents have become tired of Al-Qaeda's extremist ways. And now the U.S. military has persuaded them to switch sides. Now the Anbar Awakening saw the

emergence of a group initially called quote concerned local citizens but would later become what are called the sons of iraq and these would be the people who were attributed the you know new kind of found like lull in violence that was beginning to crack through in the latter half of 2006 and it was really a mishmash of you know local sunni warlords and tribes and former saddam military leaders who were ultimately reintegrated into some sort of arrangement that the u.s could live with rebathification precisely The surge failed in a lot of different ways that were not really recognized at the time. In fact, at the time that the surge was going on, everybody was crediting it with like an enormous amount of success.

And this did not help Bush's popularity by any means, in part because towards the end of 2007, something began happening in the world economy. Between 2003 and 2006, the total amount of deferred interest from world borrowers choosing that lowest payment. jumped from $21 million to $1.2 billion. That's the bar we're saying to you, I can't make my payment. I don't really want to go into it. I don't remember much about it. But the idea was that the surge was working,

and it was a really tremendous accomplishment of military propaganda that we had actually convinced people that, no, no, no, they stopped blowing themselves up. We were able to tamp down the Civil War a bit. Violence is, it's not solved yet, but it's going down, and it'll, you know, resolve better. The American government budgeted $150 million in the bribes that they paid out to all these Sunni sheikhs. One guy, an analyst at the Council in Foreign Relations, Steve Simon, wrote what I found was a very prescient article in February 2008 that articulated where this might go, and that included these bribery figures.

And basically what he found was that all of this bribery stuff turned out to be a tremendous racket for all of these local warlords and it in fact consolidated their power. Here's how he put it. The sheikhs take as much as 20% of every payment to a former insurgent. Because it was, again, former insurgents, these Sunni militants who were staffing the Sons of Iraq and all these other organizations. So if a sheikh is taking as much as 20% of every payment to a former insurgent, that means commanding 200 fighters can be worth well over $100,000 a year for a tribal chief. They got rich from this. Sure. Basically, what they found was that this process of bribery was really just,

outsourcing a lot of the security work that a government would otherwise need to do. Because, again, we did not solve the problem. You're not solving anything. The Iraqis couldn't control themselves. Basically, what you're doing is that we are engaging in contract work. These bribes were a really effective short-term solution, if you want to put it generously. And let's also be clear, the surge by itself did not accomplish this relative drop in violence and this love. What was the drop in violence like?

Well, so the drop in violence was just simply that the number of, of bombings went down. The number of people dying, the number of open fight, the amount of open fighting in cities around the country decreased. Obviously, there are exceptions to this, and there's a stop and start, like, fractious kind of stop and start nature to it. But by and large, the security situation had improved. Right. Now, the surge happened in conjunction with a few other developments that actually are part of what explained why the surge is attributed with all the success. Here's how Steve Simon, again, the guy from the Council on Foreign relations described some of the other things that helped the surge become the success that

it was. The grim successes of the ethnic cleansing that had already taken place. The tactical quiescence of the Shiite militiasis. That he's referring to a multi-month truce that Moktada al-Sadr signed in the middle of 2006. So basically that Al-Sauder and other she-malises by themselves had decided to put down their arms for a period of time. And obviously, the series of deals between U.S. forces and Sunni tribes.

So it wasn't just that, like, increased troop president actually won the war for us or solved anything. Right. But you'd be forgiven if you were an average American reading. The news are watching TV and hearing that we put a smart general in charge. We put more troops on the ground, our beautiful boys. And it turns out that that mopped up the mess that Rumsfeld and Bush had been spilling all over the country for years previous. A year after the surge is introduced, Steve Simon, again, this council for four relations guy, in a paragraph, I think he sets up exactly the problem that the Americans and Iraqis would encounter in the future with the surge bribe strategy. And in this, Simon is talking about how states run into the issue of losing control of these kinds of warlord groups that they bribe. Quote, states that have failed to control these forces have ultimately become ungovernable,

and this is the fate for which the surge is preparing Iraq. A strategy intended to reduce casualties in the short term will ineluctibly weaken the prospects for Iraq's cohesion over the long run. Yeah, and as we're going to see next episode, the final episode, maybe the greatest legacy of the surge is that we're going to see a lot of these same guys again in a little group called ISIS. It's been quite a time.

It recalls to mind the statement by Winston Churchill, something to the effect that I have benefited greatly from criticism. And at no time have I seen. suffered a lack thereof. So, Brennan, you remember that Rumsfeld was once Gerald Ford's chief of staff in the White House, right? Yes, he was in the Nixon White House, but was untainted by Watergate. And so then just got to hop right over into the Ford administration. A thing I think about a lot, one of the defining events of the Ford administration then was the

Ford administration's refusal to help bail out the government of the city of New York, which was heading towards bankruptcy. And one of the people arguing most vociferously to make sure that, New York didn't get any federal aid whatsoever was one Donald Rumsfeld. It just strikes me as this event that really gets, you know, what people mean by neoliberalism and that period of time is like the neoliberal turn. Sure. Really, really well. And I mentioned that, I guess, just because I'm thinking a little bit about a topic that we

haven't really gotten to yet in the show and that I want to just carve out a little bit of time here for and that I think relates a bit to what Rumsfeld was doing in the White House and the position that he took on the dead of New York City. Because when Donald Rumsfeld showed up at the Pentagon in January 2001, before 9-11, before an Iraq war had really congealed as a plan, his agenda at the Pentagon maybe wasn't what people think about. And here's what Rumsfeld described as his mission at the Pentagon in remarks that he delivered on September 10, 2001. You have a series closer to home. It's the Pentagon bureaucracy. He said money, wasted by the military, poses a serious threat.

fact, it could be said that it's a matter of life and death. So the Pentagon, as Rumsfeld correctly saw it at that moment, was a bloated mess. There were literally trillions of dollars in transactions that were missing, and meaning that accountants didn't actually know what amount of money was spent on what, and whether or not they actually got what they paid for. This is not a really new problem. In fact, there's never been a successful audit of the Pentagon in its modern history. There's a big investigation into this that was published in the nation in 2018. It's chock full of details about just how totally messy the Pentagon bureaucracy is. For obvious reasons, however, September 10th, 2001 was probably the last day in this century

that a Republican Secretary of Defense could loudly discuss military spending cuts. And so what came next? How Rumsfeld was able to thread that needle of needing to deal with the largest ramp-up for military spending in many, many years, alongside, you know, the fact that the Pentagon was a complete fucking mess, was to do something that I think jibes very, very well with his earlier record in government. And that is to outsource and to privatize. In addition to the 150,000 troops that the U.S. has on the ground in Iraq, the Bush administration has deployed a shadow army of some 100,000 contractors.

Of these tens of thousands are heavily armed. mercenaries that roam Iraq with impunity among the most powerful of the companies operating in Iraq is Blackwater USA. So Donald Rumsfeld, you know, one of the key innovations and the things that he became known for in sort of the immediate years as he began his term and a lot of his celebrity was that he was the guy who was going to modernize the DoD. And that strategy in effect was to make the U.S. lean harder on special operations to try and do more with technology. He laid a lot of the groundwork for what would ultimately become, you know, like the drone strike program. that matured more fully under Obama.

And none of that is if it necessarily new to Rumsfeld. It was a lot of it was actually a continuation of what had been picked up in the 90s under Bill Clinton. And it was actually in those Clinton years when a new kind of business sort of arose. The private military contractor or private military corporation or company. The mercenary. Right. I mean, for short, the PMC. So PMC is, I mean, they're everybody from Booz Allen to Halliburton to Blackwater.

the most infamous of them. And PMCs cover an enormous range of responsibilities in terms of government service. You know, they're not just the people, like, who wear, like, bad tattoos and hold an M4 while wearing a no-fear t-shirt or whatever on the streets of Fallujah. They're also the people who do everything from, you know,

serving food in a cafeteria to actually, like, reading and analyzing intelligence to pulling the trigger on all sorts of, you know, deadly weapons. Yeah. Remember that we talked about during the occupation episode in episode six, that Halliburton and subsidiaries of Halliburton were the ones staffing the cafeteria in the Republican Palace. And Blackwater was Paul Bremer's security detail. Exactly. And, you know, that was like a $21 million contract.

They got to protect Bremer. And actually, you know, Halliburton is a good one to bring up because Halliburton also, you know, won a giant massive multi-billion dollar no-bid contract. Of course, Halliburton's former chairman and CEO was one Dick Cheney. Now, of course, these contractors were not just limited to, like, the Iraq war or something. It was part of a broader trend in the federal government of shifting to contract labor. I mean, it's a trend that's mirrored in the private sector. And in the intelligence community in particular, it's also, you know, it's no coincidence that you have more and more leaks of, like, you know, snowed in size that come out of contractors because they're places where, you know, the same kind of scrutiny of employees is not as expected, for one thing. And I think that you could also say that ethos would absolutely apply to Iraq.

It may very well be one of the most controversial companies in our country's history, Blackwater, the secret of private army that for critics came to represent the ugliest face of American power. The most notorious of all of these private military contractors, of course, was Blackwater. Founded by Eric Prince, Betsy DeVos's brother, and a bona fide right-wing Christian psycho. Did your people ever kill innocent civilians? it's entirely possible. You can look to Jeremy Scahill's book, Blackwater, The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army for most of the hard details about these guys.

And what Skahill shows, as you might imagine, is that after 9-11, it's bonanza time for Blackwater. The company's biggest client became the State Department as it arranged for State Department Security, and it also won big lucrative contracts like that $21 million for protecting Paul Bremer. Right. Now, the incident that put Blackwater on the tip of everyone's tongue for the first time, It was in 2004, and it was an incident that we've mentioned in passing before, which was the murder of four Blackwater contractors in Fallujah. Kicked off the whole Fulia. Right. It kicked off like the whole siege and, you know, like destruction, multiple destructions of Fulia that took place that year.

For these pirates, on behalf of these pirates, we went to war in Fallujah. But what Eskahill points out, this incident in 2004, it didn't really sour the U.S. on private contractors at all, let alone Blackwater. In fact, just a few months after it, Blackwater was handed. even more contracts worth over $300 million. In September 2007, you know, as America was telling the world and bragging to the media about the success of the surge, Blackwater would commit its most infamous atrocity of the war. The four guards opened fire with machine guns and grenade launches

in Baghdad's Nisso Square back then. 14 unarmed civilians were killed and 17 others were injured. The guards argued that they were under fire from insurgents, but no witnesses support that claim. They killed 14 people. sounds professional yes the Iraqis were not allowed to prosecute the contractors and the Americans said they would do it

and while the Justice Department did hand down indictments against five of those Blackwater contractors in 2008 they reached a plea agreement with a six a judge threw out those five indictments the next year it was only in August 2019 almost 12 years after the massacre that the Blackwater Guard who fired the first shot was sentenced to life in prison

so I think the thing with contractors and, you know, you can read a lot more about this elsewhere. It's a detail that we haven't really been able to explore in-depth in the show. But I think one of the things that we'd like to stress, the contractors reflect sort of two, they reflect two kind of distinct impulses of the Bush administration and the Vulcans and Rumsfeld at the outset of the war. The first of which was this recognition, you know,

like this sort of like very standard neoliberal impulse to do as much as you can to slash public budgets. and to, you know, make government as light footprint as possible while using that process of declining public funding to just steer it into private hands through outsourcing and contracts and so on. Yeah. It's not a new phenomenon. And then the second impulse, I think, is worthy of also a little bit of scrutiny, is that when the Bush administration and people were planning the Iraq war, they understood that there was a pain threshold for the among the American people about what they would not stand in terms of, like, a U.S. troop commitment. like the Vietnam War required a draft to be perpetrated and that was just not even after 9-11 a draft was not on the table right and so if you don't have a draft but you have this you know the same kind of you know military commitment that's required of you to do this baseline thing of invading another country then you're going to have to find some new ways to meet that difference exactly do it with private contractors precisely so these guys we we think of them most notoriously for character out that massacre. And we think of them, of course, it's just the face of extra, like basically

paramilitary presence anytime there's a U.S. outpost or imperial holding. But they're going to stay in Iraq after the troops go, you know, not to get ahead of ourselves in the next episode. But private military contractors, Blackwater or not, they're going to be a presence in the country for a long, long time. Right. And it's also important that, like, you know, Blackwater was forced to change its name and like eight times yeah like it was blackwater then it was j z e z yeah no it was x e x oh yeah yeah yeah and now it's academia or whatever academy i mean it's like eric prince the guy who found a blackwater his new outfit is called the frontier is called frontier services group and his paymaster is as near as anybody can tell or like chinese and he's

inserted he's a very strange oh yeah he's getting into china yeah i mean well that's like his and he's you know his whole thing is he's trying to sell trump on you know using private contractors in Afghanistan and everything. Like, he wants to resurrect this in a much more public way. He wants to resurrect the British Empire, basically, in which there would just be an army for the East India Company. Yes, that was a private. So I guess it's just kind of a final irony I'd like to point out, is that, you know,

the surge was supposed to represent this idea of the U.S., you know, getting back to basics and recommitting itself to fighting the kind of war that under Rumsfeld, it had not. You know, they were going to put more boots on the ground, God damn it, like John McCain. Gain had been begging for, and they were going to get serious about the work that they had to do. And at the exact moment that David Petraeus is bragging about the success of that kind of, you know, strategy, or at least that, like, that strategy that they say that they're doing, that same month in Baghdad, Blackwater contractors who were obviously just these base psychos kill more than a dozen Iraqis.

And then not only do they kill those dozen Iraqis, but for like a decade, there is no accountability. And largely to, you know, Eric Prince isn't in jail. there remains no accountability. And his sister is in the fucking Department of Education? It's, uh... She's the biggest net worth, by the way. This isn't a Betsy DeVos podcast, although that's a good idea.

Yeah, it isn't. Uh, she is by far, far, far the most net worth of any, uh, Trump cabinet member. She's like worth a billion dollars. Yeah, oh, by far. Yeah. And it's all Amway money, which is psycho as well. But what a family. What a family.

You've got the fucking psycho, uh, you know, austerity queen. at home and then the and then the mercenary massacre brother abroad well i'm going to drop some knowledge on you now which is that like the reason i don't watch tv shows like succession is because i know that real life yeah is way more twisted yeah this that's so true isn't it um all right on that note yeah i think we've we've we've wasted enough of your time today guys thanks for listening bye Great respect that I have for your leadership, Mr. President, in this little-understood, unfamiliar war, the first war of the 21st century. It is not well known. It was not well understood. It is complex for people to comprehend.

And I know with certain certainty that over time, the contributions you've made will be, recorded by history.