Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - "Did we break Iraq?" with Eli Lake

Episode Date: March 20, 2023

Twenty years ago this past week, on March 19, 2003, the United States invaded Iraq, marking the second time the U.S. fought a war in Iraq in just over a decade. What is the legacy for U.S. foreign policy, for the Middle East, and for domestic public opinion on America's role in the world? Journalist Eli Lake traveled to Iraq six times since the invasion 20 years ago. He is contributing editor to Commentary Magazine and a columnist for The New York Sun. He was formerly a columnist for Bloomberg. He is also the host of "The Re-education with Eli Lake" podcast. Items discussed in this episode: "The Iraq War, 20 Years Later" -- https://tinyurl.com/yzx7juzc "Saddam Hussein's Demise" -- https://tinyurl.com/bdhdu2et

General Mattis has a line that he likes to say, which is, it's not just should the American military do the right thing, but does it have the capability to do the right thing? And so I do think that there was like an argument you could have made saying, listen, we're not built for this. We don't have the infrastructure. We don't have the expertise or whatever to really handle something this massive a project of dealing with Iraq that has been broken by a Saddam Hussein. That's a fair point to make, but it doesn't relieve you again of like, 2003, the United States invaded Iraq, marking the second time the U.S. fought a war in Iraq in just over a decade.

It commenced a conflict that resulted in the deaths of over 4,000 members of the U.S. military and it injured many more. And of course, there are the staggering number of Iraqi lives lost. This war and the subsequent occupation and the surge in Iraq in 2007, all of these events in Iraq and others had cascading effects on our troops, their families, and the Iraqi people and the broader Middle East. It shook up geopolitics globally. How should we think about

the decisions leading up to, during, and after the initial invasion? What is the legacy of that experience? What is the legacy for U.S. foreign policy for the Middle East and for the intersection of U.S. politics and American foreign policy? It's a topic that I'll be returning to from time to time because it continues to have considerable implications for America's role in the world. I was personally involved in some of these events, having served in a civilian role for the Pentagon in Doha and then in Baghdad in 2003 and 2004. Journalist Eli Lake traveled to Iraq six times, the first time when I was there in my U.S. government role, and he was there as recently as the past few years. So he's been reporting on the full arc of America's engagement in Iraq. Eli is a contributing editor to Commentary Magazine and a columnist for the New York Sun,

and he was formerly a columnist for Bloomberg. He's also the host of the excellent podcast, The Re-Education with Eli Lake, which I highly recommend that you subscribe to. I'm a subscriber and a regular listener, and we'll post the link to it in the show notes. Eli is also one of the most thoughtful and certainly most plugged in analysts when it comes to U.S. foreign policy. Eli Lake on a rock 20 years later. This is Call Me Back. And I'm pleased to welcome to the podcast my longtime friend Eli Lake, host of the Re-Education podcast, the Re-Education with Eli Lake, contributing editor to Commentary Magazine, columnist for New York Sun, prolific writer

on a whole range of issues, especially related to national security affairs. Eli, thanks for coming on. It's great to be here. Love this podcast. And I love yours. And us podcasting together is long overdue. So I'm glad we're doing this. I was prompted to reach out because I read and listen to most of what you put out there, but there were two

items in particular that really resonated with me. One was an essay you wrote for Commentary Magazine on the 20th anniversary of the Iraq War, and as well as a podcast that you just posted on the re-education, same topic, long form, had a lot of commentary monologue by you, which was just with incredible history, and then you had a guest on, David Wormsert, which was also excellent. So we're going to post both the essay and the podcast in our show notes. But I wanted to hit some of these themes. As I said in the introduction, having spent meaningful time both in Iraq and in some of the debates around Iraq during the Iraq War, after the Iraq War, the 20th anniversary of the Iraq War seemed like a pretty appropriate time to sit down with someone

like you who's been thinking about these issues as well. Most of the time I agree with you on some of these issues. I quibble with a couple of your observations, but I look forward to having a conversation. And I just want to start with something that you have focused on, Eli, that a lot of the punditry, I mean, in early days, as we were going into Iraq, this question was considered, and then Iraq became such a mess that this question seemed to kind of get airbrushed from the public discourse about Iraq. But 20 years later, it is worth asking. And it's not to airbrush what has gone wrong in Iraq, but it is a core question that we have not contemplated in a long time, and a question you ask in your podcast, which is, did we break Iraq, or was Iraq already

broken when we showed up in 2003? So why, I guess my question for you is twofold. Why did, why are you so focused on that question? And where do you come down on it? Well, let me answer the first part first, or the second part. I think it was broken by the time the U.S. invaded in 2003. But I focus on it because I really think that you have to look at the overall intervention in Iraq as starting in 1991 and not in 2003. Because 1991 is when George H.W. Bush pulls together an unprecedented global coalition with unanimous support from the UN Security, to drive the Iraqi army out of Kuwait. There was no mandate to then take this force led by the U.S. military into Baghdad and finish Saddam Hussein off. But it looked for a minute like that might happen on its own, because once the Iraqi army was defeated, there were uprisings in major southern cities, which were large Shia-majority cities, and Iraq is a Shia-majority population.

The Karbala, Najaf, Basra. Yeah, Basra, right. And then in the north, you had as well, because... And George H.W. Bush, I think, who did a lot of very good things as president, I think made an important blunder because he encouraged the Iraqi people to rise up and then empowered Norman Schwarzwaff, the general at the time on the ground, to negotiate a ceasefire with Saddam Hussein's regime that would allow Saddam Hussein to use the remaining attack helicopters

and a couple other kinds of things to just brutally suppress these people who had been encouraged by the United States to rebel. And that, I think, you know, and it was a real problem at the time. This is all sort of memory hold. But there was a lot of people who questioned in the moment, why did you stop short? And, you know, we could debate it.

I don't really want to spend too much time on it. There was no international mandate for it. There was a view that the coalition wouldn't hang together if they marched into Baghdad. And there was a sense that you didn't want to have a quagmire like Vietnam. And those decisions have been praised in the aftermath of the 2003 war. uh marched into baghdad and there was a sense that you didn't want to have a quagmire like vietnam and Those decisions have been praised in the aftermath of the 2003 war But at the time in the 1990s it was seen as a kind of betrayal and even I think george hw bush saw it as a betrayal because

Within a few months he authorized what are known as no-fly zones for the north and the south of the country so the u.s is now patrolling iraqi airspace plus the united states is south of the country. So the U.S. is now patrolling Iraqi airspace, plus the United States is sort of the main kind of force trying to hold together crippling sanctions on Iraq, and later they're modified so that they can use their oil profits to get food and medicine, which Saddam exploits, because Saddam never complies with the terms of that ceasefire that Schwarzkopf ironed out after the Iraqi army fled Kuwait, I should say. So you have this issue throughout the 90s, which is that Saddam had stocks of chemical and biological weapons, and he had a nuclear program that was further along than anyone knew in 1991. And conditions under which you know the war ended was that he had to demonstrate that he had gotten rid of those stocks and he never did that in fact he went

out of his way at times to defy the weapons inspectors we would later learn that he wanted to persuade his neighbors and his own population that he still had these awful weapons because he saw them as a key to his survival. But he was also trying to kind of wriggle out of the sanctions. But he made it seem like he had something to hide and he was willing to endure these crippling sanctions on his entire country as a result of that. And so it was this problem. And again, we were patrolling the no-fly zones.

There was a sense that we had betrayed the iraqis in the aftermath of the war and so all of this is sort of in the atmosphere it's a major foreign policy challenge or at least a regional one for the united states leading up to 2003 when george w bush makes the decision to go in and so just let me just let me just jump in there. So just to put an exclamation point on, you know, the Shiites represented in Iraq, mostly concentrated in the south, south of Iraq, the areas you're talking about, about 60% of the population. So they're a majority of the population. The first time I stepped foot in Iraq was on April 9th, 2003. At that point, I'd been in Doha for most of the war, but then I was sent to Kuwait because that's where the Garner team, the reconstruction team, was launched from, and I just did a day trip from Kuwait City to Umm Qasr on April 9th. Coincidentally, April 9th was

the day the Saddam statue came down in Baghdad, but I happened to be in Umm Qasr just for the day, and then we went back that evening or late that afternoon to Kuwait, and then I formally launched soon after that to Baghdad. But what I was most struck by on April 9th is as we were documenting, we had camera crews and whatnot. We were interviewing Iraqis in Umm Qasr, and all they wanted to talk about is how we had abandoned them in 1991. That was, so it was like stunning.

Here I thought, wow, our military came here, our military had marched through the south, was on its way to Baghdad, you know, we were quote-unquote liberating their country, and every Iraqi I was interacting with was talking about abandonment, talking about how the United States couldn't be trusted. I mean, this is in the middle of us managing this massive operation, and we're being told we can't be trusted. And that was the message they had for us. My only point is I don't think people in the U.S. fully appreciate the extent to which we were dealing with a hostile, hostile not like violently hostile, but hostile meaning distrustful population in Iraq because of what you're describing. Well, and I sort of look at it like this. I mean, the Iraqis suffered doubly, right? I mean, they suffered under Saddam Hussein. And I mean, it's important

to say here that in 1979, Saddam Hussein basically performs a hostile takeover of the nation state of Iraq in a televised purge, where he gets all the senior people in the bath party in a room, in a big auditorium. He gets a guy who was tortured into a false confession of some plot. He reads the names of about half the people there. They all go out into a yard. And then the remaining people are told that they are going to participate and they have to be the ones pulling the trigger. So they're now sort of lashed to this new regime. And once Saddam consolidates the power, he invades Iran.

And it's a pointless war that lasts eight years kills a million people ends in stalemate that war is over then he launches this on-fall campaign against his Kurdish population in northern provinces his blood his his his taste for blood is not sated and 1990 he then invades Kuwait and attempts to annex just to be to be clear, in the Anfal campaign, he, his military, killed, maimed, and tortured like hundreds of thousands of Iraq's Kurds after the... Well, it's between, I mean, it's hard to get a... Yeah, and it's not just, by the way, the killing.

I mean, the numbers, the death toll, conservatively estimated, might be 50,000, but it was basically wiping whole villages off the map. But I'm talking about maiming, torturing. I mean, it's not just killing. That's my point. It was, yeah, it was mass terrorization. Absolutely, all of it.

And doing something that we're seeing similarly in China right now, we see with these camps in Xinjiang, with the Uyghur population, this was an attempt to Arabize the Kurdish population. In China right now, we see with these camps in Xinjiang, with the Uyghur population, this was an attempt to Arabize the Kurdish population. So it was not just killing lots of people, not just relocating them, but really a kind of cultural erasure as well. And so that's the on-fault campaign. And then it's the invasion of Kuwait. And so it was reasonable at the

conclusion of the war against Kuwait and the first Gulf War to say, we cannot trust you with any kind of advanced military weapons, especially chemical weapons, which he'd already used against the Kurdish population in Iran in the 1980s, especially with a nuclear program. And yet, Saddam Hussein never demonstrates that he has disarmed and he defies weapons inspectors throughout the 1990s. I think that these wars, plus the nature of the regime, which is a cult of personality where children are encouraged to inform on their parents, neighbors are encouraged to inform on their parents. Neighbors are encouraged to spy on their neighbors. Bureaucrats live in fear. People are disappeared. There is a network of gulags. It's very similar to Stalin's Soviet Union. These kinds of things, they destroy the organic civil society that was before, and it warps a nation. And if we don't think that there was some connection between the pent up vengeance and

rage that happened after the fall of the dictator and then what the dictator did to the country, then we're deluding ourselves. I think those two things are absolutely connected. Yeah, I would say two things. First of all, in your podcast, you talk about Kanan Mechia, who's a fascinating character who I got to know a little bit during the time that I was in Iraq. And you quote extensively from Christopher Hitchens, who was quite eloquent on these issues. And particularly that scene you just described at the Ba'ath Party meeting where Saddam starts executing.

Yes. Yeah. Well, the key is he has the survivors execute those who've been condemned, which is how you kind of get your loyalty, so to speak, to the tyrant. Right. But what I remember many of the officials I worked with in Iraq, including Ambassador Brimmer, focusing on that first year after the war was we completely underestimated the legacy of three-plus decades of communal repression, what that does to a society.

It's almost easy to say, all right, we're going to behead the regime, we're going to get rid of Saddam and Uday and Qusay, and tens of millions of we're going to behead the regime, we're going to get rid of Saddam and Uday and Qusay, and tens of millions of people are going to be free, and they'll work with each other, and they'll work with us in rebuilding their country. And it's just, you don't fully appreciate the depth and breadth of score settling that has to play out. Not that you want it to play out. I'm just saying that, that was, was going to play out. I mean, I remember soon after we got there, we visited a mass grave in Southern Iraq where there were more than 10,000 bodies buried. And over the following year year we discovered 300 other mass graves around

the country not all with 10,000 remnants of 10,000 buried there but still massive numbers I mean you just think about I remember I mean there were there were there were grandmothers and mothers and aunts who had loved ones that they knew were buried in these mass graves. And when we were digging up these mass graves, there was a team of experts who were trying to figure, you know, from different human rights groups and whatnot to figure out what had happened there. These family members were showing up. This one was in the South. They knew their loved ones had been slaughtered there.

The idea that, and they were, I just remember them wailing. I mean, wailing, crying, screaming, to think that this could be pervasive across an entire country, and that the society would not be fundamentally broken, that would have to go through some, again, you don't want it to, but it was almost inevitable, some kind of, score settling is almost like diminishes what's going on it's just but but there was going to be bloodletting right right um and that is absolutely something that that you know all of us and i know the the pre-war planners didn't didn't. But when you talk about this broken society,

so your point is what? Well, let me put it like this. It's in service of the... If George H.W. Bush had allowed Saddam Hussein to swallow up Kuwait, there could be an argument that, you know, we hadn't really intervened in Iraq. I mean, America was the remaining superpower after the cold war but we we the fact is that we did defeat his army

there was the mixed message of 91 we enforced the sanctions we were patrolling two-thirds of the country we were already involved in iraq and the decision even though you could argue it kept the you know it kept the coalition together in 1991 to stop short of Baghdad and allow Saddam to use his helicopters to suppress the uprising well it condemned the Iraqi people to a dozen more years of this tyranny some of that is on America but more importantly what do you do I, do you expect or do you want the regime to survive into perpetuity? After 9-11, would you want to have a counterterrorism relationship with Saddam Hussein? Could America morally, morally live with itself if it did such a thing? And does that not also have an effect on the people of Iraq?

So the question I say is that, well, if you think that it could have survived into perpetuity, is that a good thing? I mean, Saddam Hussein had already launched these other wars and did all these other terrible things. And then if you didn't, if you thought that actually it was really unstable because there were so many Iraqis who wanted his head and were willing to do almost anything to get to him. And eventually, sooner or later, it would crack. Well, then, you know, eventually there would all of this sort of bloodletting that resulted from the removal would happen anyway. And I think America would have been dragged into it as it is. But you can't just say,

America invades, all this terrible stuff happens, it's on America, because leaving Saddam in place would not, in my view, necessarily have prevented it. But even if it did prevent it, it's almost maybe that was worse. You know what I'm saying? You're leaving and, you know, you're giving Stalin more time to further,

you know, just as, you know, Kahnamekia has said, and I think I quote him in this. And the healing, and the healing, if he were to fall at some point, I mean, you know, Sad you know kanamaki has said and i think i quote him in this and the healing and the healing if he were to fall at some point yeah you know yeah saddam was in power to you know some three decades there was he was he was like in power three times as long as the almost three times as long as as the nazi regime was um i mean you just what that does to a people into a society uh particularly when you have ethnic and sectarian groups, you know, being played against each other under that kind of repression, three plus decades is long. And it did so much damage to the country.

And imagine another decade or two. I mean, you know, that's that's right. And and so, again, I think that there's a fair amount of blame to say that America really wasn't prepared to administer a country like Iraq with all of these problems. And you talked about I mean, we didn't know how bad it was, all of that. There's a lot of fair criticism. And I think there's another fair point, which I disagree with. But if you if you just wish to argue, you know, that it's still not worth it um it's too high a cost for america to pay and it's it's a shame for the iraqis but we you know that's not it's not really our our business i suppose you could argue that what i don't think is correct is to say that all of the bloodshed all of the misery it's on america america caused that we are the we are the source we are the cause

ultimately of like you know however many hundred thousand ir thousand Iraqis were killed. When in fact, for most of the time the United States was there, particularly in that first decade, the United States was the only military force that was trying to prevent this competitive ethnic cleansing. And it was eventually, I think we learned how to do it in around 2007 with, you know, what's been called the surge in General David Petraeus, because the U.S. military is a remarkable institution in terms of its ability to kind of learn quickly from its mistakes. But when we got there, we weren't really prepared for it. And maybe there is a deep question here about America doesn't have the temperament that, say, the British did when they were, when they had an, I don't think America really has an empire that's comparable to what

we call the British Empire, so I don't, I don't buy that analogy totally, but maybe we are not capable of a really, like, the kind of long-term presence in a country, like, after, you know, the the Ba'athist experiment of Saddam Husseinsein necessary to sort of calm things down over a generation. Um, we don't, we don't, we can't really do things like that in that timeframe. And the one time that we were successful in it in Germany and Japan after world war two, you know, we, we, we dropped firebombs, you know, we, we, we dropped an atomic weapons on, you know, Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and we weren't willing to use that kind of violence in Iraq. So I, I, those are open questions as I see it, but I don't willing to use that kind of violence in Iraq. So those are open

questions as I see it. But I don't accept that you put everything at the blame of the American so-called, it wasn't an occupation, but the American presence in Iraq. And then after 2011, when Barack Obama did a full withdrawal, the prime minister at the time, Nouriel Maliki, took advantage of it. And he, you know, as a former victim of Saddam, began to act like Saddam. And he went after the Sunni tribes that aided the United States in the fight against Al-Qaeda in Iraq. And that presented an opening, of course, to ISIS. And the United States and Iran, I should say, intervened again in around 2014. But remarkably, the Iraqis got through that as well. And throughout all of this, all of these odds, and we should, I think, recognize this, they've had successive and competitive elections. They have a constitution that's been ratified.

Six elections and a national referendum since 2004. Yeah, and that's an accomplishment. And I can go through the data. Extremely high voter turnout. Again, this is not to sugarcoat what went wrong, but point to me another country in the region, another Arab country that has had multiple national high participation. When I say high participation,

I mean, in some cases, people risking their lives to go vote. I mean, these elections were- You had to risk your life because they were targeted by Al-Qaeda and later ISIS, who did not believe in voting or anything like that. And then the average lifespan has increased since before the war by five years, or at least, I mean, there's the data before COVID.

It dipped a little bit after COVID. The GDP has increased tenfold. Iraq's oil is back online. You know, there are a huge amount of problems. There's endemic corruption in Iraq right now, which I think is a real threat to all of these things that we've just spoken about. There's also the presence of these Shia militias, mainly, that were necessary in defeating the Islamic State, but are still there and are a real challenge to the monopoly of violence

of the Iraqi army that we spent all this time training. So it's not to say they don't have problems, but they're in a better, it's better in 2023 than it was under the horror of Saddam Hussein's tyranny. Yeah, I mean, just some of the data. So when we got to Iraq, the Ministry of Planning told us that before the war, inflation was running at an annual rate of 110 percent. Sorry, 110,000 percent. Sorry, 110,000 percent. Unemployment was 50 percent. Civil servants hadn't been paid in salaries or pensions for three months.

Iraq's electricity production was less than half of what was needed. I mean, I can go on and on. The Iraqi government basically had no revenues. Hospitals and schools were closed. The banking system, it was basically an all-cash economy. The banking system was shuttered. It was like a well-armed Potemkin village. I mean, the World Bank estimated that Iraq's GDP was like $20 billion for a country. Yeah.

And by the way, all the while, Saddam Hussein and his family and his henchmen lived in unspeakably lavish luxury. And that's why I think that the way to understand Saddam Hussein is a hostile takeover of a nation state. It would be as if the Gambino crime family took over New York state in Albany or something like that. I mean, the point is, is that it's not just he's a bad dictator. There are a lot of bad governments. There was something worse about it and the potential for somebody like this, for this crime family to then be supercharged eventually if the sanctions collapsed by having

all of these oil reserves. I mean, I that's a national that's an international security threat that we that any president would have to deal with doesn't you know it's not a neocon or a republican or whoever it's that's something that an american president will have to look at and say well we can't allow that right and the and, I don't want to rehash all these arguments. The debate over weapons of mass destruction, I think, also became too much of a one-dimensional debate or discussion after the fact, which is the Bush administration said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were not weapons of mass destruction. Both those things were true, by the way. The administration said there were weapons

of mass destruction, and there were not weapons of mass destruction. But what often got lost in translation was there was a program to support weapons of mass destruction that Saddam either at least wanted the option to turn on at a time of his choosing or at least project to the region and his adversaries in the region that he had the capacity to turn on. Can you explain that a little bit? Why? I mean, because that's sort of an important point that gets lost when we talk about why America went in and why America had an interest in dealing with Iraq one way or the other beyond the issues that you're raising. Well, I mean, to go back even further,

it wasn't as if Saddam Hussein kept saying, I'm innocent, I'm innocent. You know, what can I do to get out of these sanctions? He instructed his military to shoot at the surveillance aircraft that were there to monitor, you know, his military to shoot at the surveillance aircraft that were there to monitor his military installations. He wouldn't allow his scientists to meet privately in a secure location with these weapons inspectors. At one point in the 90s, he briefly held them hostage and then kicked them out of the country. These are the actions of somebody who wanted to make it appear that he did have these weapons of mass destruction.

Because, as I said earlier, what we learned from interviewing him and his top regime officials after they were captured was that he believed that if Iran and others in his own population, including, thought that he didn't have this stuff, that his life and his power would be at risk. So that's the first thing, is that it's not just a matter of like, well, you know, Saddam was doing his best to try to get out of the sanctions and we just wouldn't listen. That's not what happened at all.

But the second thing is, is that this is very important, is that he had this capability in some cases to produce like mustard gas, I think in a matter of weeks, VX agent in a matter of a couple months. So the plan was to keep the infrastructure in place that allowed you to build, to kind of build on an industrial scale, chemical weapons, and also, I suppose, biological weapons. He had

the technology, he had the know-how, he had the infrastructure in place, and so as soon as the sanctions were lifting, he would be rearming. And that to me also points out to the fact that the problem was not, you know, the weapons of mass destruction, it was the man himself who was this threat, and that sooner or later we were going to have to come to terms with that. I think you could argue, if you wanted to go back, sort of knowing what we know, that he didn't have the weapons of mass destruction, so maybe the task wasn't as urgent, then perhaps we could have gotten rid of Saddam Hussein, you know, similarly to the, you know, partnering with local forces the way that we did against ISIS, where you have really great special operators embedded with kind of regional and local

fighters, and then give them air support. And that would be different than, you know, sending in, at I think the peak, what, 170, 180,000 US forces. That I think might have been a better approach, but the end result had to have been regime change. So to your point about not being prepared for securing and administering a country this damaged and this large, I want to read a quote to you, which is, certainly the authorities in Washington who had prepared our policy directive did not visualize these conditions. This is a quote not from the civilian team that showed up in Iraq in April and May of 2003. This is a quote not from the civilian team that showed up in Iraq in April and May of 2003. This is a quote by Lucius Clay, who was one of the top U.S. administrators for post-war Germany,

who played a very similar role to the Garner team and the Brimmer team. And this is what he wrote, reflecting on his time in the 1940s, he was the U.S. military governor, sorry, in charge of occupied Germany. So other than the broken society and the three-plus decades of communal repression, like Lucius Clay, we were dealing with something

that we were just overmatched for in terms of the resources we were dealing with. How did we get that part so wrong from your, I mean, I have my own views, but I'm sort of very deep in it and maybe sometimes very emotional rather than analytical about it. You have the benefit of, I mean, you've spent a lot of time in Iraq, but you come at it more as an observer and an analyst. What was this disconnect? It was a dramatic disconnect in terms of – we in the U.S. government don't have the equivalent of what they once had in the U.K., an office that groomed like Jerry Brimmers and Jay Garn's to go around the world and lead teams to run countries. So we kind of just flipped a switch and did it and then found ourselves unbelievably overmatched. Well, the first thing is I think there were different visions for a post-Sinai Iraq.

So there was one vision, which was you largely would kind of keep most of a lot of the regime in place. You take out the top level and you would sort of work on some sort of transition. And there was another vision, you know, and there were different personalities who had different supporters in different parts of the U.S. government. So Ahmed Chalabi had great ties with the Pentagon civilian leadership, but someone like Ayatollah had great ties with the CIA. And so there were these competing agendas, and there was never a kind of across the government, this is what we do, this is our plan for how we're going to deal with Iraq as soon as the regime falls. And part of that was because the Bush... So just for our listeners who don't know all the characters, so the U.S. government had been working with a number of Iraqi exiles in the lead-up to the Iraq War for years.

Yes. And they were advised by these Iraqi exiles, and it was understood that these Iraqi exiles would play a role in a post-Saddam Iraq. But the point Eli's making here is different factions of the U.S. government had their favorite Iraqi exiles in terms of who they wanted to work with, and many of those Iraqi exiles were distrustful or adversarial to other Iraqi exiles that were

advising other parts of the Iraqi government. So the case of Ahmed Chalabi, he was working closely with various players in the Pentagon, and they trusted him, and they were being advised by him. And then Ayad Alawi, who's, you know, another, represented another faction of exiles, was working closely with the CIA. Chalabi thought that Alawi was too close to the Sunnis, even though he was not a Sunni, but he thought he was too close to the Sunnis. Alawi thought that Ahmed Jalabi was disconnected from Iraqi life and that he'd been out of the country

for too long. And so we brought in these exiles, we parachuted in these exiles after the war, and the idea that they could all get along was something that was completely missed. It wasn't going to happen. Yeah, and there was, I mean, and there was like wildly inconsistent like approaches to what we, what was known as de-bathification.

So there were some local commanders and like the British at one point, like they, they were fine with fairly senior bath people maintaining order. And then there were other, there was another message from others who were like no you have to you know these people were part of a great evil and there was something that was kind of a little bit hard i think there were parts of it that it's hard for those of us who didn't grow up in this kind of system to understand it but everybody is implicated when you are living in a in a bathys system or a stalinist system or something like that like everybody has done something they've been both a victim and they've and and you know

to quote the famous essay from camus they've been both a victim and an executioner so it's like there's a lot of shame even though um because if you wanted to have any kind of life that was not you know absolutely you know living in deprivation you had to have any kind of life that was not absolutely living in deprivation, you had to basically compromise and go along with this bath party that was horrible and quite cruel to people, and it was built into the system. So I don't think a lot of people understood that. So in some cases, the debathification went far too far, going after people who probably didn't have much of a choice. But in other situations where you had, you know, a sort of local decisions,

they let guys who should never have been in charge of anything stick around. And I think that that also added to a lot of problems in the administration in those first early years. Yeah, I'll add a couple of points to that. One, I don't think you can underestimate the challenge of trying to run a country when the occupying force can't provide basic security to the country. I remember a conversation that Ambassador Brimmer had with Vice President Cheney at one point. I was in Brimmer's office when he was having this Vice President Cheney at one point. I was in Brimmer's office when he was having this conversation with Cheney, and he said, Mr. Vice President, I think we have the worst of both worlds.

We have an ineffective occupation. Meaning, the Iraqi public can handle an occupation if they believe that we can provide them basic security. In other words, an occupation is at best uncomfortable, at worst humiliating to a population. But if you're providing basic security so people can send their children to school or go vote or just try to resume some normalcy of lives, they can learn to live with American tanks on the street corner if they know it's not permanent and they know it's helping to let them return to some modicum of normalcy.

But you can't have the tanks on the corner and the knowledge amongst the population that America or the Western coalition is occupying their country while they're getting slaughtered by their fellow citizens. Yeah. I mean, that is like not, that's like the worst. So then it's like we're humiliating them with this occupation and we're incompetent at it. And I remember there was a study sent to Ambassador Brimmer that looked at the history of the successful occupations – they're not successful – of occupations going back to World War II.

I think it was – I'll post the study. But it looked at like Germany, Japan, all the way up to the Balkans. And it looked at a number of these occupations. And the study basically said, I think it was a CSIS study, the study basically said or concluded that the average local population to occupying force in successful, quote unquote, successful occupations was about 20 to 1. That is for every 20 people in the local population, you had one or at least one occupying soldier to provide basic security. In Baghdad, in the spring of 2003, the ratio was 700 to 1, right? So for every coalition soldier,

there were 700 Iraqis. While there there was all this you know bloodletting happening and these riots and just total chaos and no security yeah so that it also is like was like a massive mismatch because again i come back to the the pentagon's um conception seemed to be of the war we'll decapitate the regime and we'll get out of there. We'll have a very light footprint and we'll let the Iraqis kind of figure out how to run their country. And what actually happened was total chaos once that regime was decapitated and there was no security provided by anybody really, at least in the beginning, to just calm things down. I think that's right.

And, you know, I think we may disagree on this, but I think the decision to decommission the army, you know, it just created a kind of unemployed young male problem that was turned out to be jet fuel for an insurgency that was comprised of some of the former Ba'athist officials, but a lot of jihadists and people who wanted to sort of wave the banner of Al-Qaeda. And that didn't help things much either. But at the same time, I also think that the left and the Democrats got something really wrong in this period, which is that they believed that the cause of the violence was the occupation. Because they were looking at Iraq from a model of like Vietnam. And that was completely wrong. I mean, what they I think what they think they missed was that there were a lot of Iraqis who, who wanted to settle scores with other Iraqis. And there was an, and that, that the only chance we had to stop that was to,

uh, it was to eventually engage in a kind of counterinsurgency. But to this day, you will find lots of people sort of criticizing the war and saying, and, and understanding that, you know, the insurgency

was a response to the conquest or the toppling of Saddam Hussein. And I think that's just wrong analytically. And I think it has this kind of perverse effect of blaming America for the murderous acts of fanatics and terrorists that America's trying to... You can blame America for not preventing it more once they were the administrator, but you have to acknowledge here that the only chance that Iraqis had that was an alternative to Al-Qaeda or Iranian-backed lunatics was America and the coalition.

Yeah. So on the issue of the decommissioning the army, it is obviously a very sore subject. So first of all, it was administration policy. There's this characterization that this was just Brimmer and his deputies in Baghdad making this decision unilaterally. The Pentagon was very involved with it, right up to top people reporting to Secretary Rumsfeld. I remember reviewing the order with Secretary Rumsfeld's chief of staff before the order was issued. But like debathification, it is very easy, and I think it is true to some degree that the debathification policy and the disbanding army

created fuel for the insurgency. But like many of these policy issues, there are trade-offs. It's like, you know, compared to what? So what we were dealing with when we got to Iraq was the Saddam's army had basically collapsed. I remember in a briefing with Abizaid and senior defense department officials who said they could not find a single standing unit of the Iraqi army after the war. They had just completely scattered. Now, keep in mind, 60, 70 percent of the conscripts were Shiites.

They had been abused by the officer corps, which was predominantly Sunni, loyal to Saddam. They were happy to get out of Dodge. They scattered. They didn't want to keep these units intact. Yeah, we should also say the Iraqi army was a terrible institution. It had done lots of awful things. It wasn't like... Yeah.

I mean, I spent a lot of time in Egypt, and you could say the Egyptian military has a different tradition than, I don't know, the Wahhabarat there, you know, the intelligence service. There were no good institutions left by 2003 in Iraq. Right. And this army was the principal tool of Saddam's oppression, the Iraqi army. And so at the beginning of this conversation, when you were describing what was going on, for instance, in the south with the Shiites, at that time, Ayatollah Sistani, who was the most senior Shiite cleric, he was the most influential voice in the Shiite community, which again represents the overwhelming majority of Iraq's population, very distrustful of the U.S. and of our presence, and we were trying to get Sistani to signal to the Shiite population to work with us, to not distrust us like they

had good reason to distrust us back in 1991. So there we were in 2003 working. We were back channeling back and forth to Sistani and Najaf, and it's very dramatic how all these discussions were happening. And he was inclined to signal to the Shiite population to work with the coalition rather than work against the coalition. But he said, all that stops if you guys reconstitute Saddam's army. Oh, I did not know that. I didn't know that. That actually changes my thinking because I know how important Sistani was. Yeah, that's a very good point. And if you reconstitute Saddam's army, that to us

is a tell that this is 1991 again. And so the army has to be shut down. And in the north, the Kurds, Talibani and Barzani, the Kurdish leaders, had conveyed to us that if, in much more explicit terms, we will secede. If you reconstitute Saddam's army, the Kurdish north will secede from Iraq. So at the time, we—first of all, there was no army. They were gone. I mean, they were like, they were gone. They stripped down barracks. Units had demobilized, there was nothing left. So all we could do is either bring back, try to go out and, you know, send a message that we're bringing back Saddam's army. Right. And that would have completely alienated the Kurdish leaders and the Shiite leadership,

the clerical leadership, and that would have created its own absolute nightmare. I mean, real nightmare. We would have splintered the country, would have been a, mean, it would have been a war with 60% of the population. We would have lost 20% in the north. Or we could say we're going to start a new army. We're starting a new army, and it won't be Saddam's army. And everyone up, and as we made clear, everyone up to the rank of colonel from the old army would be able to serve.

In fact, in the end, most of the people who did serve in the new Iraqi army had served in the old Iraqi army. But that senior leadership is gone. And then we provided severance payments and pension payments to everyone, whether they had served in the previous army and served again or not. I think a big mistake was the communication of that. We did not communicate that, the synchronization of that. So I think there were some who joined the insurgency who were bitter

that they were feeling like they were being shut out of Iraqi society, and they weren't being paid. And so, but that really represented like a minority of who was joining the insurgency. There were some who were joining the insurgency because it wasn't about whether they got a severance payment or not. It was because they were part of Saddam's leadership team in the military, and they were suddenly out of power. And they saw which way the winds were blowing, and they wanted to try and slow it down. And I don't think anything we could have done in terms of getting the payments right or whatnot would have made a difference. On debathification, it's a similar dynamic.

We had to send a message, again, to the Shiites and to the Kurds and to parts of the Sunni population that the Ba'ath Party was done. Again, the part of the society of the Ba'ath Party that was, quote-unquote, debathified was only 1% of the Ba'ath party that was that was that was quote-unquote debathified was only 1% of the Ba'ath party so right right one tenth of 1% of the total population it was tiny mistake we made there was the implementation of debathification we turned over to some of these Iraqi political leaders that you were talking about earlier we put them in charge of, because we gave those who were debathified the opportunity to appeal their debathification,

their kind of loss of place in society, and they could appeal it and how the appeals process worked and all that. We immediately turned that over to, you know, you mentioned Chalabi, to Ahmed Chalabi and others, and they ran, it was very political the way they ran it. That was a mistake. But anyways, my only point is the whole thing was messy.

There were no good choices. It was constantly just trying to figure out. I think that's a fair point. I mean, General Mattis has a line that he likes to say, which is, it's not just, you know, should the American military do the right thing, but does it have the capability to do the right thing? And so I do think that there was like an argument you could have made saying, listen, we're not built for this. We don't have the infrastructure. We don't have the expertise or whatever to really handle something

this massive a project of dealing with Iraq that has been broken by a Saddam Hussein. That's a fair point to make, but it doesn't relieve you again of like, okay, but how are you going to deal with this big Saddam Hussein problem? So if you wanted to sort of say this wasn't it, America didn't have, invading and administering the country the way that we did was just not something that we really had the capability to do well and it would have been better had we but we but we still had to get rid of Saddam Hussein the other point though I mean I can argue it is that we really you know that was the only way that you could guarantee that you could get rid of Saddam Hussein there was a famous

saying from Anthony Zinni a former general when he was asked about these plans in the 90s to try to use the Iraqi National Congress and arm them and and he called it, it would be like the Bay of Goats, a reference, of course, to the Bay of Pigs in Cuba. So we're never going to know because we did what we did and history has already happened. But I wanted to try to bring back this idea that, you know, the problem here starts with Saddam Hussein. And it's wrong to blame America for the damage that he did to that country. And I think that's the key takeaway. Okay. So now I want to ask you two questions and then we'll let you go.

I'm enjoying this conversation for a variety of reasons, which is it's kind of therapeutic. How do you evaluate where Iraq is today? Okay. I mean, there's no question, there's no question based on the data we went through that Iraq is better off today with all the horrors. Iraq is still better off today than under Saddam. But let's table that. Okay,

I think we agree on that. But where is Iraq today in this fast-changing Middle East, right? Iran on the march with the nuclear capability, you know, Syria basically utterly decimated and destroyed in brutal repression and civil war. And we can go through the kind of post-war spring, the post-2011 Middle East. But so where is Iraq today in the midst of all this? Well, I mean, it looks much better than Syria, and I would say it looks much better than Iran. But that said, I do think you have to take very seriously

that it's something, it's obscure. It's known as the dollar auction. But this policy that we've had of initially infusing cash from the New York Federal Reserve into the Iraqi economy so that they could purchase imports has been so abused by this sort of new class of, you know, fraudster plutocrats, that this is something that really does threaten the stability of the government and the success of elections and things like that. And the other big thing are these militias, which, you know, the central government has not been able to sort of deal with.

And it was like a deal with the devil in 2014. You had an emergency. The city of Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq, had been taken over by ISIS. The Iraqi military basically evaporated instead of trying to fight them. And the only people that were, you know, willing to sort of fight were these militias. And they were blessed by Sistani. They were largely trained and directed, you know, through the Iranians and their allies. And that's a huge problem. When I was there in 2015, I remember visiting one of these frontline military units, and they were taking orders from the Badr Brigade, which is the militia associated with one of the main Shia confessional parties. So those are really big challenges, and Iraq is going to have to figure out a way. But at the same time, I think those are much better challenges than your second largest city

is run by a bunch of 8th centuryians and uh you know their yuzidi population is being in danger of being wiped off the planet because of them uh so um it's a testament i think to the resilience of the iraqi people and also the strength of the united states and and uh i i don't like to credit Iran with anything, but Iran did play a role in that, that, that the second terror war, uh, ended in a victory for the Iraqi state. That's a good thing. But, uh, you know, there's still a lot of work to do. Last question for you. Um, where, I mean, here we are on the 20th anniversary of the invasion and it's getting some attention. But by and large, it feels – other than the families that made the ultimate sacrifice having lost loved ones for big parts of the United States, United population it's it's amazing to me i mean it's

like sort of the country's moved on on the surface it's moved on and and and we've just sort of forgotten about it if you will i mean i wasn't alive during the 20th anniversary of the start of the korean war or you know i'm trying to think about these other like how these wars are but it just one would think this would be and yet the a bigger inflection point and it's just not and there's a whole bunch of we just came out of a pandemic there's a another war in europe now there's there's plenty of you know things going on in the world that may be why we're we're just not looking back at anniversaries important anniversaries of previous wars even as um complicated and messy and tragic in some respects as this one was.

But I guess, on the surface, why do you think that is? And then what do you think the lasting, you and I were talking offline about the lasting implications about the impact that this war has on our politics. So what is your reaction to those two? Well, I mean mean the first i would say is that it's a strange feeling in middle age to encounter arguments i remember as a young man when the iraq war started that i associated with like the gnome chomsky left coming out of the mouth of nationalist conservative republicans that's just like you know i'm still kind of blown away with it i mean it's because you know i i've lived too long. I guess I know too much to know.

Like, it's strange when you hear Donald Trump, you know, make arguments that sound like, you know, they should be printed in the Nation magazine. And so that is a change in our politics. Sometimes I think it's overstated. I think you would know better than I. I don't know that that represents a majority of the Republican Party, let alone a majority of the United States. And sometimes it's hard to tell whether these are lasting positions. Some people, I think, really believe it. Or is it just that this is a popular, you know, it's an opportunistic

play for other politicians who want to position themselves, but these are not deep convictions. But that's disturbing because I think that historically the Republican Party, at least since, you definitely say at least since Reagan, was the check on, like, to make sure America did not become too appeasy, if you will. And it's, can it be that check today? Because ideally, I would like to see a Republican Party that would hold the Biden administration's feet to the fire on Ukraine for not giving enough and for, you know, giving just enough for the Ukrainians to prolong a war, but not to win it. That to me should be the natural Republican position, but it isn't right now because it seems that like at least a significant part of the party, if not half of the party, doesn't think we should be helping the Ukrainians at all. And I think that that's all

stemming from the aftermath of the Iraq war. But the other part of it is that I don't think it's fair to say that nothing was accomplished, that the war was just a waste, as we talked about before. A new constitution, six consecutive elections, you know, the beginning of a country that's rebuilding, and finally, like, you know, seeing a country like moving on from this sort of dark nightmare of Saddam Hussein, that's something that American arms made possible. And I'm proud as an American that we played that role. Yeah, I second everything you say. I do think there is an element in American history of candidates for president generally saying one thing about America's role in the world and foreign policy as candidates. And then when they get into office and they're greeted with events and intelligence briefings, having a much different approach. Remember George W. Bush said, we're not America's 9-1-1. George W. Bush.

We're going to lead with humility. He's a humble foreign policy. Right. He was reacting to America's role in the Balkans, and that's how he ran. And I remember people in our world, Eli, oh my God, he's, you know, he's an isolationist, I mean, you know, he's an isolationist light, whatever. And then there we are, 9-11, the war in Iraq, war in Afghanistan, the surge. So I do, and I do remain, I mean, I think you're alluding here, I mean, there's Trump, and then there's some things

DeSantis has said about Ukraine. I mean, it was one remark and I have to on DeSantis really quick. I would love to and I really want to hear what you but I think say it was one really awful phrase because that is not a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia. It's a pure, savage, naked, active aggression on the part of Russia. However, it wasn't like he was committing himself to an America-first neo-isolationism. Right. And there seems to be enough room. And it's not clear that he was arguing for a policy

that's much different than the one that Biden is running right now. Yeah, that's right. So let's not lose our heads just yet. Right. And remember, just look at DeSantis' record when he was in the House of Representatives, and remember that he served in Iraq

in the U.S. military. I was actually on a trip with him years ago to Israel. I mean, this is not some... He's pretty thoughtful and sophisticated and I would say internationalist about America's on behalf of a muscular foreign policy.

So yes the the statement was unfortunate but the anyways i think you're right there's time yeah so there we are eli we're leaving we're going to end on an upbeat note oh i say thank you so much it was really an honor to be on the podcast i love it i listen to almost all of them so thank you so much all right we'll have you back on thanks for doing this all right. That's our show for today. To keep up with Eli Lake, you can find him on Twitter at Eli Lake. That's E-L-I-L-A-K-E. You should also subscribe to his podcast, The Re-Education Podcast, which you can also find at Nebulas Pods, at Nebulas Pods. You can find his work

at Commentary Magazine. He's a contributing editor there. And I highly recommend you keep up with all his writing and reporting. Call Me Back is produced by Alain Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.