Doomed to Fail - Ep 209: History Repeated - Israel, Iran, and Iraq

Episode Date: June 30, 2025

Let's dive into the history between Iran, Israel, and Iraq. You probably won't be surprised to know that there has been conflict in the Middle East as long as there have been humans.  Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

In a matter of the people of the state of California versus Hortonthal James Simpson, case number B.A.019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Boom, we are back, Taylor, and it's two weeks later. How are you? Good. It's one week later. You haven't changed.

Oh, yeah, it's one week. I haven't changed on the same. Sweet. Well, yeah, we had a fun story last week. And you know what's funny? is we talked about how we're going to release once a week and then I came up with like this topic for today

and I realized that given the news cycles this might be like not relevant anymore or but honestly you know what I was thinking the other day is that we didn't even talk about their India flight crashing I didn't hear

okay wait let me choose this I'm going to go welcome to Jim to Fail we bring you histories notorious disasters failures anything we were a ton of episodes I'm Taylor this is far as and a lot of

our episodes about plane crashes and the news is so crazy you didn't even talk about the Air India crash in June tell me what you think flaps flaps it's flaps it was super low and it wasn't climbing it has to be the flaps they had to have had the flaps retracted

I watch a lot of plane crash videos and like you would know flaps not being extended at low speeds is like the number one way people get in trouble but it's also a Swiss cheese thing which is like with a triple triple seven that's fairly advanced

like you would assume the plane has automations in place that's my question for you yeah yeah like why would why would that be a thing like at all you know yeah something there must have been other factors that went into it but just like pure physics and mechanics talk

like I think it was just the flaps weren't extended I also cannot get over that man walking away the guy who survived wasn't like found strapped to his seat on fire he got out he's in the exit row he got out and he was like walking down the street days and there's like a video of him walking down the street there was a thing I saw on Instagram

which could be fake but apparently there was another crash I forgot what airline it was but it was the same seat it was the same seat some guys were there was the same seat okay I'm going exit row from now on which makes sense because like in an emergency you want the quickest

way out. Well, my theory, my theory is like from a structural integrity perspective, the strongest part of the plane is always going to be like where the wings are. Wings are. Yeah. And so you kind of want to shoot for that area. But like realistically, most like, I always shoot for the wings area because I feel like it's the last, least, least bumpy that I can afford. Yeah. Yeah. Here, it's less puppy at front. I'll never be able to sit up there. So how, what do I know? You know? Also, I think that you have a higher chance of death in the front than you do in the back. At least you were laying down. At least you were laying down.

You had like space, like room, and you were comfy. But anyhow. Anyway, my point being, yeah, who the fuck knows what's going to happen in two weeks? Who let us live in interesting times, right? Yeah. So, okay, I am going to weave several tales together in a slight little web that has to do with modern times and shows how history can repeat itself in different ways, different formats, but it's kind of always the same thing over and over again.

What? As far as it never happens. That never, ever happened. That isn't like the freaking story of our lives. This one, this one blew me away because there's a lot of stuff here. There's stuff that y'all are going to have known about or heard about if you're like, if you keep with like world geopolitics, but like if not, like, some of the, some of the, this stuff is going to be kind of surprising. And it's going to involve several actors that are

prescient, again, using that term a lot to modern times, such as Iran, Iraq, Israel, and the U.S. And it's going to happen in the late 70s to the mid to late 80s, but it's going to look crazy similar to like these times that we're in. Literally, when you saw that, I was like, the year talk about like actual actors no i was like oh tom cruise um whatever i'm dumb you keep going so real quick overview starting in pre-1979 at iran at that time the ruler was this guy named um shah rizapalavi shah means king he was acting as the king of the u.s it was a monarchy the u.s loved him the u.s loved iran the shah was super friendly towards the u.s and the u.s interests they had a great trading relationship iran was a huge purchaser

of munitions and weapons from the U.S. and technology from the U.S. And just overall, it was like a really good dynamic that they had going for each other. In addition, Iran bordered the Soviet Union during the Cold War and the Shah provided resources to the U.S. So the U.S. people would go be based there and do their spying stuff.

Like, it was all very, like, friendly. The same can not be said about Iran's neighbor, Iraq. Apparently the tensions between Iran and Iraq go back to ancient Persia in Mesopotamia times. So, like, it's been a long, long-going thing. In 1979, when the Shah's regime fell to Ayatollah Khomeini, fundamentalist, he was running the fundamentalist Islamic Revolution. Saddam Hussein saw an opportunity.

He took note that all the top military commanders for the Shah had fled the country or been executed. And he thought the Ayatollah's regime was too weak. And so, hey, we've hated these guys for 2,000 years. Let's do it. Let's go for broke. totally. I feel like I'm trying to interrupt, but I feel like

I was last, whenever I talked about Sappho a couple weeks ago, like that island of Lesbos was in like the most ridiculous spot in the whole entire world. And when I was looking at it, I was looking at Constantinople, Istanbul, like that is like on the only little tiny spot connecting

by land, like the Middle East and Europe on like the west side, right? I think so. So we're just like that, well, of course so many crazy things happen there, you know, because everyone's been fighting there. Forever. Well, everybody's been there forever. It's been like they called the cradle of society.

That's exactly. Oh, that proves all the points that we're never going to do anything because we're all going to kill each other. You know, like the whole world, like longer we're together than more we hate each other. No, it's so true because when I was reading this, and they were talking about like ancient Persian Persia and Mesopotamia, having beefs over like this one straight that runs between them and like that's where all this kind of like happened and like where all this started. It's always the same thing. We're just going to do what we've always done, except with different munitions.

Like, that's all that's changing is we're getting better and better at killing each other. Until we can't do it anymore, you know? Yeah. Cool. So to add to Iran's dire situation after the revolution, immediately following the revolution was when they were on hostage crisis happened. Right after that is when the U.S. under Jimmy Carter slapped sanctions on the country, including bans on all military arms sales. so they were about to go to war with less military power

and an aging military structure that they could not update or purchase more to update for. So in early 1980, Saddam launches his invasion into Iran and it really didn't go as he hoped. What he had hoped for was a super quick victory. Like, hey, we're going to cripple these guys because he was right. Like his military was way better than Iran's military.

When it happened happening was it ended up dragging on for eight years and became just a war of attrition. I think I read somewhere around a million people died in this eight-year time period. So this is like a big, big war in the human toll. In the interim, Iraq did things that would be viewed as crimes against humanity. So they would deploy things like chemical weapons, like mustard gas, and nerve agents like CERN, which is like a war crime.

Like you can't like the UN recognizes that as such. And you shouldn't do that. That's not even. Like, you're attacking to that point. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, in addition, Iraq had acquired a nuclear reactor from France of all places and established the Tuatha Nuclear Research Center.

Wait, so they just, like, borrowed one? No, they bought it. But they, like, they mailed it to them? So, so they actually had French scientists there working in this research facility because I guess you can't just ship it. I guess you, like, need to actually set it up and, like, do things to it. it. Or nuclear reactor is arriving on Tuesday.

Did you clear the living room? Yeah. Iran and a lot of other people saw this as a problem again, very interesting. Because they looked at Saddam Hussein who's been using weapons like nerve gases and things like that.

And they saw that this guy's working on the potential to develop a nuclear device, a nuclear weapon. And so they were like, can't let this country have a nuclear weapon that was like the entire premise of iram was like he's he's too crazy he's too unstable we can't it's so interesting it's like come on like and the other thing i was thinking about as i was like writing this was like western democracies have like a feature or a bug depending on how you look at it we turn over leadership on a consistent

basis which has positives because it means that you can go one direction in the country but then you can change it and then you can go back, they can change it and all that stuff. The bad part is that there's no like historical consistency. Exactly. That's the word I was going to say, consistency. You're just redoing everything that last guy did. But this, this happened like 40 years ago under the same people. It was like the exact same stuff that's happening today with the same actors. It's crazy. And so Iran was like, look, we got to figure out this nuclear research facility situation. We can't let him enrich uranium and build a nuclear bomb. He'll probably use it.

And so they've launched air strikes into Iraq to strike down this facility, which is interesting because another country in the region also had an interest in Iraq not obtaining a nuclear weapon. Can you guess who that is? Israel. Yes. So Israel and Iran's relationship after the revolution was odd. Obviously Iran is a fundamentalist Islamic country.

They have always, well, since the Shahs, I mean, since the revolution, they've always been for the destruction of Israel and publicly the government of Iran would say that they would call they would say death to Israel secretly and behind the scenes they worked together of course they did that's exactly oh they would like work together they were like they look we have this common enemy and we can use each other's resources to neutralize that enemy and in Israel's credit they were less vocal in their opposition to Iran at this point so their prime minister in 1987, a guy named Yitzhak Rabin stated publicly, quote, Iran is our best friend and we don't intend to change our position, end quote.

Unfortunately, Izak Rabin also was assassinated because he struck a deal with the Oster Arafat for like peace with the PLO and some Jewish fanatics and Israel hated him for it and they shot in the head. So like anyways, like whatever. That was a state of affairs though. Like just to give you a little bit of context. Cool. I'm just doing long drawn out size.

I hope that recorded. Yeah. My size really that long. No, I just did one. I just hope I hope that it was a good background noise to whatever you were saying. Great. So Israel was tickled pink that Iran was attacking this facility. Some countries like France would later state that even this attack by Iran was done with coordination with Israel, up to the point where the fighter jets were being flown by Israeli Air Force.

It was documented that they were Iranian fighter planes. but then some intelligence came out that like this was such a deep collaboration that they actually let the Israeli Air Force run the operation with their weapons because also they were like you know mass the fact that they're working with Israel for one publicly but they had better access to Iraq because they're right there so the bombing knocked the facility out of commission but it hadn't totally irreparably damaged it they knew this because Iran had taken high altitude reconnaissance pictures of the area and then relayed those to Israel. That's the degree in which these two were working hand in hand.

Israel started up planning a thing called Operation Opera, which was to further bomb the facility to knock its ability to be used completely off course, go all the way in. What does France have to say for giving it to them? So I never researched why France got involved in this, but I know that they were very much on the side of Iraq in this situation and they were really pissed about what Iran and Israel we're doing and that's why a lot of the intelligence that came out that like showed the collaboration came from french intelligence because they were very interested in what was going on um to the point where like we'll get into it later but like after this next round of bombings

occur like french nationals were killed on site because they're there as scientists to like get this thing up and running wow yeah so israel starting to launch this thing called Operation Opera, which was to just bomb this thing into oblivion, and they would have to fly super deep in Iraq. It's in the middle of Iraq. They had to fly super deep in Iraq to do this. And so they needed timing cooperation with the Iranian Air Force because they needed the Iranian Air Force to be like really hammering the Iraqi Air Force so that there would be too distracted to like pay attention to what was going on on the other side of the border. That was the idea. And nine months after that initial bombing, Israel took on that mission and completed it.

Apparently they had to carry additional gas tanks on their jets to make the flight all the way there. They had to do some weird routing through this one corridor that's like between Iraq and Saudi Arabia that they didn't have any radar for because Iraq thought we're never going to go to war Saudi Arabia. So just leave this as a dead zone. So it literally flew down this corridor until they were like well deep within Iraq. And then at that point, Iran was distracting their military with their air force. And so they just got in bomb the hell out of this thing. All I'm picturing is like for some reason, that last Top Gun movie where he does it like ridiculous thing where he goes through the mountains.

Yeah. That was so stupid. Like we all know what age does to you. Like, come on. It was the dumbest scene. That took me out of the reality of it. But whatever. Go ahead.

Okay. I thought I had a question, but. I don't know, I'll come back to it. So amidst all this that's going on, we're going to transition to the other player and actor in this, the United States. The U.S. was having a hard time with its relationship with Iran, and almost more important than that,

it was having a hard time with its relationship in Nicaragua with some left-wing groups that were taking control of government. They're called the Sandinistas. a group operating out of Honduras was intent on pushing back the influence of this group of the Sandinistas out of Nicaragua because the Sandinistas were focused on you know it's interesting they always call it left left wing ideology and like I don't know how much I buy into that framing of it it was full on communism it's full on communism yeah yeah but like I don't know culturally we just call it left wing ideology but to me it's like

its own separate thing over there because I don't I don't think Kim Jong-un is like a super left progressive. No, I think, yeah, exactly. So anyways, the Contras, they were trying to push back to Sandinistas, and Ronald Reagan, who was president, defeating Jimmy Carter after the Iran hostage debacle, he very much wanted to do everything he could to repel communism out of every region of the world that he could. So he was very interested in trying to support the Contras.

he had one problem a thing called the Boland amendment. This was a law that was passed by Congress making it illegal for direct financial support from the United States or any of its agencies to support the Contras.

Can we what a Contra is again? I think of like the video game. Oh, it's a rebel group. It's a rebel group that is a bunch of Nicaraguans who are trying to push back the incursion to the government by the Sandinistas but they're operating out of Honduras. Is Contra like a proper noun or is it like a thing?

Yeah, I think it's a proper noun. I think he's a name. Yeah, it's always capitalized when I read it. So the Bullen Amendment came about because first off, the American people were still suffering the hangover brought on by the Vietnam War and trying to defeat communism there and just meddling in other countries affairs, which like was growing out of fashion, I guess. Yeah.

Also, the conscious weren't like some amazing, noble group of like freedom fighting farmers like they they were kidnapping and assassinating people they were leading civilian massacres they were doing terrorist attacks on villages and infrastructure within the country like they weren't good so so that's why they passed the bold and amendment because they're like hey we we know Reagan's going to try and go do do this stuff and we don't want any of this stuff to happen because we need to stop mentally other other countries affairs and Reagan and his team had to come up with an idea with a way to provide resources to the Contras and off their book

so that it's not in direct violation of this law because presidents have paid the law. Right. They're going to do it anyway. And their solution was Iran. So shortly after the Iran-Iraq war had started and the Iranian hostage crisis was underway, the Reagan administration had called around other countries

and demanded they not provide weapons or munitions to the Iranians in their effort to repel the Iranians. Iraqis. They're like, we're not for these, like, whatever. My theory on this was let them kill each other. Like, we don't want to support the Iraqis, but like now we have a very obvious geopolitical reason not to support Iran either. But as time went on, the administration realized two things. One, that arms embargoes don't work. The countries that have no interest in appeasing the U.S. or whatever the country is that issues the embargo, they step in and fill the vacuum, like the USSR, which could further deteriorate U.S. influence

within, during the Cold War, which ironically enough, I read an article earlier today after the bombing of the Iran nuclear sites, that literally Russia came out and was like, you realize that other countries can just give them a bomb, right? Like, I mean, they're, like, I don't know how well this is going to play out. Yeah. Totally. I always, I'm sorry, I always forget how close. the Middle East is to Russia.

Yeah, Ron shows a border with it. Yeah. It's wild. The other thing that the Reagan administration realized in the middle of all this going on was that they had a money problem. The Boland Act had passed and on paper and legally, the administration could not fund the Contras, which he desperately wanted to do,

enter the solution. Israel and a secret group of non-agency employed but administration-connected staff who would call themselves, quote, the enterprise. From where? From the United States? The U.S. So these are not people,

they're not acting on behalf of the administration. They're not acting on behalf of the agencies like the NSA or the CIA or any of that. But let's just call them really close friends of people within the agency who want to do favors for the administration. They decide to break the embargo indirectly. So the U.S. policy was still that we will

not supply weapons to Iran. Instead, they would sell weapons from, quote, the enterprise to Iran facilitated through Israel to provide cover in case anybody started digging into this. Again, this weird interplay where, like, there's, there's collaboration, but we hate each other, but we'll work together, like. Totally. Enemy of my enemy. Exactly.

And then the enterprise would then take the funds generated from Iran, pass through Israel, and then funnel them to the contras. Honduras for their battles with Dicaragua. And it went on for years until 1986, when Lebanese magazine revealed that the weapons used by the U.S. were new and could only have been sourced by the U.S. in Iran.

And so this went on to be like a huge deal for Reagan and obviously as Vice President George H.W. Bush saying they knew nothing about any of this. Oliver North goes to trial for 16 felony counts, all kinds of violating this statute and that

regulation, all kinds of Tell me how all over North is again. So he was a general who was kind of like the fall guy for this whole enterprise. Well, literally the enterprise. Wow. Because what are you going to do? You're going to pin on Reagan. You're going to pin on Bush. Bush goes on to become president.

Like, I mean, you need a fall guy. He ended up getting convicted on, I think it was three felony counts. And then that ended up getting overturned on appeal. Like, he ended up just going home. So like he literally, nothing happened. Which, like, honestly, in my mind, I'm like, I don't know. Like, why do you need a fault guy?

Like, you know who made this happen, but you can't do anything about the guy who made it happen. So why do you need to punish anybody? Like, so. And Reagan actually, to his credit, he turned out to be right because after news broke of this, and before the Iran, Iraq War had concluded, Iran went on to source weapons from the USSR, from China, from North Korea, and to some extent from Israel itself. So that ended up happening. That was actually the outcome that they anticipated.

Ultimately, as I mentioned, a ceasefire was reached between Iran and Iraq after eight years. And the camaraderie, they shared with Israel, obviously deteriorated to the point that we're at today with the exact same thing involving the exact same countries as we go on and keep repeating the same history. I... Yeah. I think that's what's going to happen. It's wild. When I started, like, going into this and was like, oh, I wonder how far this, I can

scratch the surface. I was like, all right, so Iran, Iraq, okay. Wait, Israel helped. Wait, the U.S. helped, but they did it indirectly. Like, it's like, it's so weird and convoluted. And it's like, I don't know. It, like, writes itself like a story, like a narrative story. of like a fictional book or something i don't know no totally you'd think like we wouldn't do it

again but we can consistently do it like iran literally did exactly to iraq what the u.s just did to iran like yeah but again but again like it's the same leaders like on the irani inside there's only been two leaders of Iran. One was Ayatollah Khomeini after the revolution, and then the guy who's on office now, who's... Right. And we've turned over so many times. It feels...

I feel so distant from Ronald Reagan, you know, in some ways. Yeah, like, anyways, I thought that was absolutely fascinating in how we're here. And, yeah, we'll see where it goes. But to the old quote, the World War III, will be fought with nuclear weapons and World War IV 4 will be fought with stones. Yep.

That feels like we're closer to that reality today than we ever been. Yeah, I totally agree. It's not great. So. But continues. But stay positive, everyone. Stay positive. I mean, find a joy.

You can't be unhappy. Get a turtle. I don't, yeah. Heat up a potato. Yeah. Have a big potato. And then, I don't know, run for office. I have a baked potato and chill.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. But that's my story. I thought it was super interesting. The more I dug into it, the more I found. Honestly, if I spent like another 10 hours on this, which I easily could, I could probably find 15 other strings that are kind of connected to this. They can come out, but we'll leave it.

We'll leave it up with that. I love it. No, it's super interesting. And like, yeah, I mean, again, we could do like generation by generation. who was fighting in that area. Yeah, yeah. All the way back till we, the people came out of Africa through that area and then dispersed. God, it's so weird.

It's so weird. Especially because, like, culturally, there's so much shared heritage. You know, it's funny, when I, whenever I was, like, when I was in college, I had a lot of them, like, like, actual Israeli friends. And, you know, we had no reason to, like, not like each other, obviously. And so we'd talk and we'd learn about each other's culture. I'm like, oh, y'all do that, we do that, too. Oh, y'all do that, we do that too.

Oh, you eat that? Yeah, we have that too. Like, it's literally the exact same thing, but for some reason, it's like, let's kill each other. Let's kill each other. It's wild. Or, like, yeah, or in Europe, it's like, you're a different kind of white than me. I know, I know. It's like, all your food is bland.

Like, I get it. You need war to feel alive because you can't eat. So, like, it is what it is, but. Yeah. Yeah. Anywho. that's the story let's see what happens by the time this is released maybe i'll have an amendment to this but tbd i know we'll see i mean who knows it's been for anything can happen yeah

legit for real well cool well thank you yeah appreciate it if anyone has any thoughts or ideas set us a dope to fail pod at gmail dot com doomed to fail pod on all the social media and we'll see you next week and i hope you're having a good summer and you know what If you have the space and you have the time, get yourself a turtle. Yeah. He's a tortoise because he's a trotus. Tortoise, I'm sorry.

Turtle is the one that swims, right? Yeah, but we do put him in water and we put him in water. He poops. Aw. He's very cute. Yeah. Sweet. Well, you're good?

I'm good. All right. We'll go ahead and cut things off there. Thank you.