Jocko Podcast - The Unravelling 2: Saddam at War

Episode Date: July 20, 2020

The Cold War and the Islamic revolutions of 1979 raises false hope among US policymakers for Saddam Hussein, whose blood-soaked reign would begin and end in war.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is the Jocko Unravelling Podcast, episode two, with Daryl Cooper and me, Jocko Willink. I know that the last episode, you know, we wrapped up with a pretty a harrowing account. And you kind of said, well, we'll move on to other things, but I got to keep us there for one more account here. It goes like this. horror in Saddam's Iraq takes endless forms. In 1987, 1988, Iraqi Air Force helicopters sprayed scores of Kurdish villages

with a combination of chemical weapons, including mustard gas, sarin, and VX, a deadly nerve agent. Scores of thousands of Kurds, most of them women and children, died horrible deaths. Of those who survived, many were left blind or sterile or crippled

with agonized. lung damage. But most of the Kurds slaughtered in that season of mass murder were not gassed, but rounded up and gunned down into mass graves. Those victims were mostly men and boys, and their bodies have never been recovered. In one village near Kirkuk, after the males were taken to be killed, the women and small children were crammed into trucks and taken to a prison. One survivor, Salma Aziz Baban, described the ordeal to journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, who reported on Saddam's war against the Kurds in the New Yorker in March. More than 2,000 women and children were crammed into a room and given nothing to eat.

When some starved to death, the Iraqi guards demanded that the body be passed to them through a window in the door. Aziz's six-year-old son grew very sick. She says he knew he was dying. There was no medicine or doctor. He started to cry so much. He died in his mother's lap. I was screaming and crying, she told Goldberg.

We gave them the body. It was passed outside and the soldiers took it. Soon after she pushed her way to the window to see if her child had been taken for burial She saw 20 dogs roaming in the field where the dead bodies had been dumped She said I looked outside and saw the legs and hands of my son in the mouths of the dogs The dogs were eating my son then I lost my mind and that is from an article Called Saddam's Shop of Horrors written by Jeff Jacoby and I was from the Boston Globe in 2002.

So, you know, that's 2002, right? It's not like we didn't know that this stuff was happening, right? We didn't invade until 2003. This is 2002. We know what's going on in there. So where does that kind of, where's that guy come from? How much you know about his origin story? I know pretty decent amount.

I mean, it's a super villain origin story in some ways. Completely. You know, his father and brother die of cancer while his mother's pregnant. His mother is so depressed that she tries to abort Saddam, but he survives. And so she just abandons him, and he goes to stay with an uncle for a while. He eventually comes back to his mother after she remarries, but the stepfather just abuses him terribly. And so he flees and goes back. It's like, well, that's how you start.

Those are the opening ingredient. for how you get a guy like this. But I think it's important. Remember, too, like the stuff you're reading right there, all this stuff that happened, one guy does not do that. One person cannot do that.

Hitler can't commit the Holocaust by himself. And Saddam could not create that terror state all by himself either. Yes. I'll tell you what, man. Leadership is the most important thing on the battlefield, and it's guys like Hitler and guys like Saddam. Man, they set the condition.

and then what's really scary is, you know, as we see in when atrocities take place, right? Sure, it's not, it's not that leader. It doesn't take, it doesn't take much. It doesn't take much to lead people down this road. Like all the, all the, all the, you know, you want to throw it out there that people are, you know, naturally benevolent and they're natural.

People want to help each other. I get it and I I know that that is a thing to you can convince yourself of and it's probably right in many cases in the right conditions You change those conditions and It's it's it's not a it's not a stretch. It doesn't take as much as you would hope it takes To lead people down this path. It just that's the that's the horrible truth and that's why we have to be so aware of it. That's why you have to understand it. You know, when we did the, when we did the podcast on the Mealai massacre

and the Sand Creek massacre, and we went through those. But when I did Mealai on my podcast, you know, those were normal people. That was a, that was a cross-section of America. Now, one of those, and I had this conversation with Jordan Peterson as well, which was I had told an army group

that they had sadists in their platoon. Like I said, listen, you got, and I, and they were looking at me, and I talk to people a lot, I can read a crowd, and they were looking at me as if I was, you know, a little bit crazy and maybe just, you know, trying to be extreme or whatever. And I, and I, I'm looking back at them. I'm thinking, oh, they don't believe me right now. They don't believe me. They think I'm wrong or they don't believe me or this is just hyperbole and no, no, no. And so I said, oh, wait a, wait a second. You guys are looking at me like, I don't know what I'm talking about here. Like you're,

like you're going to be in a platoon and this was actually young. you know, uh, officers on the way to being commissioned. So what was that? Officer candidates or cadets. And I said, you're looking at me like I don't know what I'm talking about right now.

And, and I said, let me, let me ask you this. If I'm wrong, then how did, how did me lie unfold? How did that happen?

If, if you've got a platoon or a company and there's 150 guys and there's no bad apples in there, how does that happen? That one, that one company just happened. They get all the bad guys in the army. And, you know, when I actually drilled down a little bit with Jordan Peterson, and I said, hey, you know, this is what I told these army guys.

I said, I told them in a platoon, they got a sadist in there. Am I right? And I think I said murderer or two, you know, which I don't know what the, I don't know how you draw that line. But he said, well, he said, how many people in a platoon? I said, 40. And he goes, oh, yeah, you're good. You're in. especially because there's a whole chunk of civilization that just don't go in the military, right?

At that chunk that just doesn't want to go in the military, almost none of that Mercedes, right? As soon as you're in the military, you have a higher percentage of, you know, what are you signing up for? I'm signing up to shoot people and kill people. That's what I'm signing up to do. So there's a whole element that's already gone. So one out of 40 is pretty, pretty nice, pretty generous. And so as we talk about this, it's like, yes, I get it that it wasn't all Saddam, clearly. But man, he absolutely set the conditions for this.

And that was the other thing, interesting thing about the Mila massacre is that it was one officer, you know, Thompson, who had flown in, saw what was happening, flew back to headquarters, said, these guys are murdering people. You need to stop it. And the commanding officer gets on the horn and says, hey, stop it. killing people and they were like, okay, they stopped. Like instantly. Yeah. It's instantly. You wouldn't believe, if you saw it in a movie, you wouldn't believe it.

Like waking up from a dream. You wouldn't believe it if you saw it movie, oh, they're just going to stop now? No, that's what happened. They got told, no, and they stopped. I wish I would have brought, I read an account by a guy who was a member of ISIS, and he had this, he had done it all, sex slavery, killing, I mean, everything. And he sort of, he describes it as like waking up from a dream.

He's in the middle of massacring a village, of an assault on a village, and he snaps out of it and goes, what am I doing? And he found his way out of it after that. He talks about this stuff now. I'll bring some of that in tomorrow. And you wonder like,

okay, that's a guy who's capable of waking up and saying, what am I doing? That's the same guy who's raped. He has murdered children with conviction, doing it with conviction. You know, we're complex creatures and we're very adaptable creatures. And we can adapt to whatever environment we find ourselves in. And I think one of the things that, you know, we have certain models that we use for thinking about other people's behavior.

And we think about, you know, we think about like the French resistance in Germany, right? Or the partisans out in the east when Germany overran them. We think, well, they didn't give up, right? They just kept fighting and they resisted the power. Okay, what if it's over? Hitler won. Because that's what happened in Iraq. Hitler won.

It's over. And now you've got to adapt yourself to that society because nobody's coming to save you. Not until 2003 at least. I mean, that's it. And you've got to figure out how to survive in a place where you don't just get killed for treason. You get killed because, you know, somebody's having a paranoid. attack and that's it or somebody needs to send a message to a bunch of other people it's got nothing to do with you and you got to figure out how to navigate that people can become very

different creatures than they kind of naturally devolve into when they live in Vermont you know I've seen some pretty devolved creatures up in Vermont yeah no it's uh actually Vermont's probably a place where you wouldn't evolve you'd get better you become a better person up there in the woods in the sticks. So let's go back to Saddam. Yeah. Where were we at? Have you ever seen the video? It's an amazing video. The video, um, when he at the, at the Bathist meeting where he took power. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is in, I tell everybody to watch it and watch him. And so for the people who haven't seen it, um, there's like a nine minute version out there that kind of cuts it short. You can go see the thing. But, um, he's got all, so he's taken over, right?

from General Kassim, who was the guy before him, and he's taken power, and he calls all the Bathist Party leaders and senior membership into this assembly hall. And there, you know, some people are talking and everything. Saddam strides up, and he is, I mean, you watch him, and he is just like either a great actor or what, he is confident, he is just striding up there with an arrogant pose. And he starts speaking about the traitors that are out there and all the people that are besetting the country of Iraq and the party and blah, blah, blah. And the people are like, yeah, okay.

and he reaches down and just slowly pulls this big, long cigar out of his pocket and lights it. And he's on there on stage, and he starts smoking this cigar. And he just starts saying, if I call your name, stand up and go to the back of the room. And people are kind of start to look around at each other. He's planned all this, so he's having it filmed. And he knows who's going to be called. So like the camera will go to some of them sometimes. And as he's calling these names, people are kind of looking like, what is going on?

They know what's going on, but they're just, they don't know what to do. And so they get up and they head to the back where the guards are. And finally one guy stands up and he says, wait, why did you call me? I didn't do anything. I didn't do anything. And Saddam just says, if I call your name, please stand up and go to the back with the guards. And the guy just goes back and people go back. And people are starting to look at each other and realizing like what's happening here.

And that these guys are being called back to go be executed. And then afterwards, he says a few words. and all of a sudden the people just break out, long live Saddam, long live Saddam, and they're all giving him like a big standing ovation because what else are you going to do in that situation, right? And, you know, this is a guy who was in power for over, you know, for almost 30 years, for 25 years. And he had a long, long period of time to find exactly the people to put into positions who were going to do exactly what he needed them to do to keep control of that society. And the rest of the people there had to figure out how to survive under that. I mean, from the moment Saddam takes power, he is at war, essentially.

You know, 1979, he takes power, and he's at war with Iran the next year. And it's a war that kind of gets lost today. A lot of people just slide right past it. I mean, it was probably the worst war in the second half of the 20th century in a lot of ways, at least the way it was fought. For sure. brutal. Over a million killed. You know, devolving to a point where the two sides are just launching, you know, ballistic missiles at each other's cities, just population centers indiscriminately, just launching them at each other, you know, chemical weapons being used on population centers purely to terrorize, you know, to let people know that you better not rise up. And at this point, Saddam's a pretty, a pretty secular leader. Yeah.

I mean, this isn't a guy that's out, you know, touting Islam as the rule of law around Iraq. He would stay that way until the 90s, yeah, yeah. The Baathist party is a secular kind of socialist, pan-Arab nationalist party. And, you know, that's why, one of the things I think. I think people really lose a little bit today is they think of like America in the Middle East that we've just been over there pulling the strings like the puppet masters from all the way back, like from 1776 or something, that that's what we've been doing. When, you know, Centcom wasn't even stood up until 1983.

You know, the Iran-Iraq War been going on for three years. This is 10 years after the oil crisis and Central Command's not even stood up. And I remember after the USS Stark got hit, the frigate got hit by a cruise missile. in 1987. Even in 1987, the response to that from a lot of the Navy brass was, why are we over there? What are we doing here? You know, we were very much reacting to events, and we didn't know a lot about who these people were. When somebody like Saddam comes along, he seems like a secular nationalist type leader. He's got some worrying tendencies, but he's only been around a year. And meanwhile, we've got the Iranians over here who just took over with like an extreme.

Islamist revolution, overran our embassy, took a bunch of our people hostage, and are starting to act out in some pretty extreme ways. And so that's the context that Saddam comes into the picture. And all of a sudden, he wants to fight with Iran. He's got a big Soviet army. You know, the Iranians, unfortunately, have a pretty well-equipped military as well because we were the Shah's, you know, we were his friend before that. And so they took his act. We had just in the last few years before 1979 had sold him a bunch of F-15s and a bunch of just great aircraft. And it gave Saddam fits in the war because of that. But I mean, they had a pretty well-equipped army. You know, we had been equipping Iran as an ally for years. And now you have this revolutionary government.

Yeah, this is when you see the pictures of Iran in 1974 and the women are wearing many skirts out in town and it looks like a metropolitan western country. Yeah. And, you know, it's one of the reasons that a lot of people get on my case, because I I tend to give Saudi Arabia a little bit more of a break than a lot of people I know. And the reason I do it, though, is as opposed to a place like Iran, where Iran was a certain way, you know, where women were free and it was relatively modern place. And then they had this revolution that said, nope, no more of that. And presumably a lot of those people who were enjoying their lives back in the day still live there,

and now they have to live under this regressive, you know, in this regressive manner. Saudi Arabia, however they look to us, obviously, it's not acceptable. And, you know, according to the way we do business, they're as liberal now as they've ever been. You know, it's a slow, long project. But it's not like they were a certain way, and then they got taken over by these crazy Islamists. And, you know, Iran's not that way. Iran was a relatively free and open secular country, you know, where women were free. And so all of a sudden you get this revolution.

And the revolutionary part's important, right? Because it's not just a government that's kind of hostile now and maybe is doing things, passing laws, social laws and stuff that we don't like. It considers itself a revolutionary state like the Soviet Union did. So it's not just an enemy country. It's a revolutionary movement. And they're eyeing the rest of the Muslim world. You know, it's why they established Hezbollah and Lebanon. It's why now they're still trying to establish an Iraqi version of that, like to this day, is it's built into their system.

into their ideology, that this is an expansionist thing, that there's a larger project. So it doesn't just involve them. It involves the rest of the Muslim world. So that's very worrying to us in 1979. They've still got our people, you know, that they're holding captive from the embassy. Saddam comes along, he starts fighting with these people.

And of course, at first, we're kind of like, all right, maybe this guy's all right. Let's see how this plays out, right? He hasn't done all the things he's going to do yet. He's not a nice guy. We know that. But we don't have the whole story. But we don't have the whole story, and we kind of have some hope.

And so we start out in the Iran-Iraq war, and, you know, we're kind of hoping that maybe he can, you know, who knows, maybe create enough stress on the Iranian regime that they flip back over or something like that. And you're also looking at the situation. You've got a leader coming into power, and you don't really, you know, like you said, you know he's bad, but you kind of think, well, he's stepping into power. He's going to want influence. He's going to need what we have. we can, how can we, how can we, how can we bring them along? How can we bring them on our team? Yeah.

Yeah, that was definitely the thinking. And, you know, we didn't know who we were dealing with. We did not recognize the level of beasts that we were dealing with with Saddam. And I think by the end of the 80s, we had a pretty good idea that that was the case because we'd end up at war with them ourselves shortly after that. I mean, but the Iranians, you know, again, like, they seemed very dangerous at the time. This is a big country, large population, a well-equipped military with an expansionist foreign policy. And when they were fighting Iraq, you know, these are people who are sending human waves of teenagers across minefields to clear them with no weapons.

Just sending human waves of kids across minefields to clear them out. This was a regime that looked very, very dangerous. And they were dangerous. we just maybe, you know, we allowed ourselves to get sucked into some illusions about, you know, how controllable Saddam Hussein was, that's for sure. When, yeah, I think there's a lot of, there's a lot we don't know about the casualties in the Iran-Iraq war, but most estimates have it between 800,000 and a million people. It's a big war.

It's a big conventional war. The Battle of Basra, toward the end of it, I think, was the biggest battle since the Second World War, if I'm not mistaken, maybe since one of the Korean War's battles. But I think 65,000 Iranians and 25,000 Iraqis were killed. I mean, it's a big battle. That's a big battle. You know, and a set piece battle. We're just not used to those kind of things anymore.

There's a lot of trench warfare going on. And they are just – this is a war of attrition. I mean, literally, I mean, they're at the point toward the end where their manpower is depleted and they're just launching scuds at each other's cities, you know, and it's a brutal thing. And that ends in 1988. Month before that is when USS Vintens shot down that Iranian airliner. But as the Iranians now know, from their recent experience, things happen.

Yeah, I brought that up. I was surprised it wasn't brought up more after this recent incident. You know, and this is again, you know, when you start talking about the theme of having to thread tie back to the, but yeah, the Vincennes shot down an Iranian airliner however many souls were on board, you know, hundreds of 150 or whatever that number is. Yeah. I mean, so it's a massive loss of life and, you know, we very, very, very, actually very similar circumstances when you pick that apart, you know, the, the Iranian, you know, the Iranian, you know, you know, shooting down the airline, Iranian shootdown of the airline was, it was so similar. Like the panic buttons going off, you know, there's uncertainty going on. I remember I had some people that I knew, not military people, who, when the Iranians shot down that airliner, they were kind of being like, oh, something like that doesn't happen by mistake. I'm like, no, totally, yes, it does. Totally happens by mistake.

Very, very easy. You don't know who's running that thing. They've never been in combat before. You know that the person running that air defense battery has never been in combat. They've never had a situation where it counted. And, yeah, they're in a situation where they're probably expecting to be targeted. You're all spun up. You're waiting to get attacked by the Americans.

And all of a sudden, you know, you're, you know, you and I can picture this. Probably actually you better than me because you were in the combat information center. Is that it? What's the CIC? Yeah, that's it. So you're in that on a ship and there's all of a sudden, you know, someone's going, hey, all right, we got it. We're tracking.

We're tracking an inbound. And there's that spin up of the voice. And now you've got to make a decision. You've got to make a decision what we're going to do. We see something on the radar. We're looking at it. We know we're vulnerable to attack right now. We're anticipating attack.

Oh, where's it heading? We're tracking it. Oh, guess where it's heading for us. All right. Hey, we need to take this thing out. This is a missile. This is an attack. Boom.

This is a. This could. so easily happen. It's ridiculous, actually, how easy it could happen. In 87, when the Stark got hit by an Iraqi cruise missile, two cruise missiles, I think, the TAO, Tactile Action Officer and the commanding officer, they got disciplined for failing to defend their ship. And I got to imagine, I mean, they're sitting there like, is this really happening right now? If I hit fire, am I going to kill a bunch of civilians?

Like, that's a worrying thing, you know, and it's got to be a tough, I've never had to make any decision like that, obviously. And, yeah, it's a tough one. I mean, especially if you're pan... I have to imagine that night when the Iranians launched those missiles at us a few months ago, they must have just been sitting on pins and needles. Bracing for impact. Especially with Trump.

You know, you know what that guy's going to do. And if he does respond, you know it's going to be overwhelming. And they had to have been bracing for impact. I mean, you know, they called ahead and everything supposedly, but, I mean, golly, you just don't know. In the Vincense, it had similar, like, spin-ups going into that shoot-down as well, where that wasn't, that wasn't, again, I'm not saying, not making excuses, but sitting here, and I can understand how that unfolds. I always bring up the fact that in Romani there was blue-on-blue, you know, there was Humvees that shot at other Humvees. Yeah. So, so think about that, you know, like Humvee, one of the most recognizable vehicles ever.

made, which is solely used by the U.S. military. And I guess we had Iraqis using it at that point as well, but the enemy was not driving around in Humvees. Years later, ISIS was driving around in Humvees, but at that time, there was no one driving around in Humvees, no enemy. And, you know, a young guy, paranoid and freaked out and scared and, you know, sees a muzzle flash or sees whatever, and I'm going to engage. That's what happens.

It's horrible. Knowing that, you know, if you fail to act, then the next second you might be dead and you just got to do it and it's the wrong decision but and yeah when you're dealing with something like air defense you're not looking at an aircraft up there you're looking to blip on a radar screen you know at an aircraft that's out of visual range um and so saddam uh yeah we're talking about saddam this guy comes in a power in 79 starts executing people starts terrorizing population immediately goes to war with iran has an eight-year-long war it's the bloodiest war the second half of the 20th century. Just a brutal, you know, horrible war that's fought with

incredibly brutal tactics. That ends in late 1988. And you would think that like maybe Saddam would want to kind of take a breather. But it's not what this guy's about. And it was kind of a draw. Yes, it came to a draw, basically, yeah. Neither side achieved any, you know, any gains through it. Saddam was the one who launched the war and he didn't achieve any gains. So you could say he lost on that count. But yeah, but yeah. Yeah, that's late 1988. By early 1989, Saddam is already telling Kuwait. So a lot of the other Arab countries were worried about Iran too.

So they were financing Saddam. They were loaning of money, things like that. And already by early 1989, Saddam is telling Kuwait, hey, you're going to have to forgive that debt because we were defending you too. And we're not paying that $65 billion. And Kuwait's not willing to do that. They say that we're not going to do it. Saddam's like, oh, you're going to do it.

And by the next summer, summer in 1990, he's invading Kuwait. So no rest for the worry. And he does it in an unpredictable way. I remember seeing an interview with Mubarak, the Egyptian president at the time, longtime Egyptian president. And we were allies with Mubarak. We knew him well. And he was not just allies with, he was friends with Saddam Hussein by this point.

He knew him. They would talk on the phone. And he called Saddam on the phone. And he says, what's going on? here, are you going to invade Kuwait? And Saddam tells him, no, no, I'm just bluffing. Just don't worry about it. It's totally fine. The next day he invades Kuwait. Oh, and so actually here's what happened. There's something else in there is Mubarak comes and tells us that. He says, hey, he's bluffing. Don't worry about it. And so our ambassador at the time gets called in by

Saddam and Saddam wants to feel him out, right? See how we're doing with this whole thing. And our ambassador had just heard from Mubarak. He's bluffing. Don't worry about it. Don't push him. And so he says, oh, you know, Arab on Arab like affairs, that's not really our business. We're not, we don't really, we're not invested in this. And Saddam goes, all right.

And the next day he invades Kuwait, right? So Mubarak, nobody had any idea what was going on here. I mean, I don't even know if, I read that quote in the last episode, that he tells somebody one thing. He tells another person another thing. And then after that, he does something completely different that surprises he's even. That surprises himself. Yeah.

And so maybe it was something like that. I mean, it's not beyond him. Just the mentality that you're dealing with, I mean, you go in an eight-year war. And by the way, you're sitting in a place in a country that's got these incredible amount of natural resources. I mean, you could, Saddam Hussein could have lived, I'm going to say like, live like a king. But like he could have lived, because he did live like a king, but he could have lived like a peaceful king and just had an incredible, you know, an incredible existence. Especially with Iran right there threatening everybody we would have been happy to make him the face of the Arab world We would have been happy to do it so that's where you start you know that's where you start to really

You know look when people are driven to some sadistic evil Pathology in their life because they don't really have a choice like you go I kind of understand that Imagine even if you even if you're like let's say you take power and And just to set everyone straight, you murder a bunch of people that you think might rise up against you. And then you look around and now everyone is just totally good to go. They're cheering for you. And you go, you know what? All right.

Hey, we're good. I'm going to ride this out. I'm going to take advantage of this. And then maybe you're a little bit crazy. And you go, you know what, though? I kind of want to be, you know, that guy. So I'm going to start a war with, you know, with Iran, with my neighbor over here. So you roll into that

You get them you know Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of your own people killed You don't get what you want But you know what you get it you you you finally end up with a truce Everyone knows that you'll fight if needed So now maybe you look around and you go you know what? All right I've kind of Established myself everybody knows not to mess with me

I've got billions of dollars worth of oil I've got security because I've protected my borders. I'm good. I'm good. I'm going to ride this one out. I'm going to watch Netflix and chill, right? What kind of a person gets through all that and has the opportunity just to like do, to live a good life and says, you know what?

Man, Kuwait looks pretty tasty. That's a, that's a, that's a, that's a, really and I guess you could make the same you know you can make the same argument with Hitler right you know I mean how much is enough and how much is enough you know you're storming into Czechoslovakia you're storming into Poland you've got these great resources now you know what Russia England I'm going that that's like a different mentality yeah and yeah and after Kuwait's military stands down because they have no chance against Iraq.

That guy now owns over 20% of the world's oil. That guy. Right? That's what we're looking at. And he's massing troops on the Saudi Arabian border, which just down the eastern shore over there is where the vast majority of their oil is. And so that guy's now got this place. And this is right after the Cold War, right?

The Soviet Union's still around in 1990, but the wall fell in 89. And America is kind of the big dog now. and everybody knows that. And George H.W. Bush is president. And he says this is kind of an opportunity to show the world, you know, what the American-led global order is going to be like. And he, one of the things we've got to remember about this, I think this gets twisted up in our heads a little bit now,

that the Gulf War was kind of, you know, because it went so well, and everything just kind of, because of the way the Iraqi Army fell apart, we were not sure about that going in. Yeah, for sure. So Seaman recruit, Willink uh joined the navy shipped out September 13th 1990 so you know we hadn't started yet so there was still a lot of unknowns and man I was fired up and I remember and I'll have to try and find this at some point in my life I remember hearing they anticipate 40,000 casualties in the first

48 hours yeah and I thought man I'm gonna get I'm gonna get after it you know I was I was fired up and you know I just had a guy on um who was there for for the pushup he's in the Marine Corps and like 100% 100% thought we thought or the US military I wasn't there but the guys that were on the ground there 100% thought we're going to get you know there's going to be chemical biological attacks that's what's going to happen mop level you know they're in and out of their mop level suits all day long putting the gas mask on putting them away I mean we 100% and so as soon as you start throwing chemical and biological weapons into this scenario,

you're, you're gonna lose a lot of guys. I can't even, it's the straight, did you ever have to put on mop gear? Yeah. Did it not like strike you as the saddest excuse for like something that's gonna save your life?

Yeah. For instance, on the, like first of all, it's in two pieces, right? So you've got like these pants on. They're not even, they're not even like a bib that would come up high in your, They're just pants. You put them on over your regular pants.

There's a draw string. There's not a belt. There's a draw string. So you just pull this thing tight. And then you put a jacket on over your upper body. So there's a big gap. Yeah. Like this is going to save you.

Is that what we're saying? And you got a maneuver in the desert. Yeah. And that's all fine. That's all. Like take all the maneuvering out of it. I'm just saying if you put me in that suit and you said, okay, I'm going to put you expose you to chemical weapons now, I'd be like, cool, appreciate it.

I got a 20% chance of living and it's only if I can run away quick enough. I had no faith in those suits. And we had good suits too. We had the good ones. I had this blower contraption that when you put on your gas mask, it would give you, it would send positive airflow into your, into your masks. So it was like really nice. Yeah.

So it's very strange. There were estimates that had the first Marines. you know, the first Marines just rampaged through the Iraqi Army for sure when they went up. But there were estimates going in saying they might lose 10 to 15,000 on the first push. There were estimates that said we might lose one out of five aircraft on the first attack. And so we didn't, you know, the guys who were planning, the military guys, Colin Powell, General Schwarzkopf, these were, these were JOs in Vietnam.

And so when we were looking at doing this, we were hesitant at first. For sure. It started off with like George Bush was like, we need to make a statement here. But a lot of the military guys are like, I've seen this movie. Like, I want clear political objectives. And more than that, I want overwhelming force. And gladly that's what Bush gave him. We brought six carrier strike groups in there.

We brought the 7th Corps down from Europe. We brought the first Marines in the Marine Expeditionary Force. We had Arab Allies. We had a bunch of it. We came rolling deep. Well, 300,000, 400,000 troops? What was the number? Do you know the number off top of your head?

It was over 400,000 when you count the Arab Allies. Exactly. And six carrier strike groups. I mean, we hit it hard. And I think that even our own side didn't quite realize how far we had come technologically. Now, Saddam thought, there's some lessons learned on both sides that ended up coming back to bite us both in the first Iraq war. Saddam thought this is a technological power. These Americans are technicians. They're not soldiers. And, you know, all of their fancy gears, it can't win a war. And so we hit him hard. Watch this. We hit him hard. We drive him out of Kuwait, but when we didn't pursue him, he thought we were afraid to. Yeah. You know, he thought we were afraid to go pursue him and fight. And I was, I got to, I guess it must have been like 93, 94.

I guess it was, okay, 94, 94, when I was in Kuwait and, you know, we were going out to the desert train, but we went up the highway of death. And, like, still there was. Just littered. Yeah, there was vehicles, you know, destroyed. And man, you ever heard about the Again, now we're talking about it's not just Saddam, but There's there were there were maybe you've heard the story There were Kuwaiti

There were places where they had Kuwaiti women Nine months later where they had these orphan kids because so many Kuwaiti women had been raped by the by Saddam's soldiers that they had these orphans pretty much. Have you heard that? Yeah, yeah. There was no limits. There were all sorts of atrocities.

They committed in Kuwait while they knew the whole world was watching. That's the crazy part about it. He had a level of arrogance, which led to a lot of bad decision making on Saddam Hussein's part. You know, he thought his military was ready. He thought we were going to, you know, get a bloody nose like, you know, if we tried to go after him. And he blamed the loss on his general. He had a bunch of his generals executed afterwards. He blamed that on his military leadership and on the cowardice of like, you know,

some of the officers who had just let order break down. He did not accept that he had lost that war. And he thought we were afraid to go after him. And it is kind of strange when you think about it how quickly they broke down. Because here's what you'd think. And like, wait, you just got out of an eight-year war with Iran. You are hardened combat soldiers. Yeah.

That's very strange. I wouldn't have predicted that. You know, sometimes I talk about the fact that I don't bet on the UFC, you know, the ultimate fighting championship. I don't bet on the UFC. And the reason why is because there have been, I'll say about 10 times in my, I've been following the UFC since it started. There's been about 10 times where I knew I had inside information.

Like, you know, because I'm friends and training. partners and training with people and training with people that were about to fight. I had inside information where I would have easily said, oh, I'll bet the house. I'll bet my, you know, I'll bet next year's paychecks that this guy's going to win. And sure enough, I'd lose. I would have lost. And I realized, you know, there's been a couple times where I had good inside information and played out just the way I thought it would.

But as Joe Rogan says, it's a fight. Yeah. And anything can happen in a fight. So if you were to tell me and I'm trying to look I'm trying not to be not try not to use the benefit of hindsight because it's really easy to look back. Oh, of course. We've got the technological power. And even when you just I threw out that little arrogant quote when you're like, they didn't think they could be this technical.

And I said, watch this. You know, I'm sitting here saying that. If you would have asked me knowing what I know now, hey, who's going to win or what kind of scrap is this going to be? You've got eight years worth of hardened combat vet. veterans on the Iraqi side versus and by the way they're fighting in their home like turf versus these Americans the last thing we did on a large scale was Vietnam which we didn't like you know we didn't like that and now we're going toe to toe with these guys that's a much tougher thing to think about and yeah I mean we think about the generals at this time all those generals vast majority of these generals were Vietnam guys that were looking at this thing going, okay, I'll go, but we better hit them with overwhelming force. But yeah, I've never really thought that deeply about it,

the fact that this was not a, this was not a given. And it ended up, the fact that it was so easy, which is exactly what it was. And I'm curious, I mean, the Iraqi soldiers just fell apart. Fell apart. And ran. Yeah. It was like, it's kind of crazy to think.

think about. Why would you, why didn't you fall apart and run from the Iranians? Our biggest problem early on those first few days of the assault became processing all the POWs who were surrendering. We were like, we don't really have the manpower to deal with all these people. I think part of it was that, you know, just in that massive choreographed air strike at the beginning, we took out all of their air defense, all of their communications and just their whole, everything that linked their military structure together just went dark. And so every little unit that's spread around is now just out there on their own, basically. They've got to send runners if they want to talk to somebody.

And then the first Marines just rampages straight at them. And to your point, you know, this is, you know, this is the, this is centralized command, right? This is not a bunch of, hey, I got caught off in my unit, but I know what the objective is and I'm going to carry it out regardless. That's not the Iraqi army. The Iraqi army is I'm not doing a damn thing. I think most Arab armies are like that. Yeah, yeah. I'm not doing a damn thing until I get told exactly what to do because.

I'm not going to get... Even still, it is crazy when you think about the fact that those juniors and generals and colonels and stuff, they knew that if their unit just decided to surrender, that it's going to be bad news for them. And yet that's what happened in mass, mass, mass. Yeah, it's hard to understand the psychology behind that, actually. And it taught us some, you know, we learned some negative lessons from that as well. Well, yeah, we absolutely learned some negative lessons from that.

although I don't know right I mean let's face it that be the opening the opening um salvos of of the invasion in 2003 yeah we're pretty much the same thing I mean pretty much the same thing there was some there was there was there was more resistance obviously as we pushed up I mean and again I just had a guy on gunny bustler who was on the push up you know Nazaria, there was a little hesitation, there was some fighting, but it was vastly massive surrender. I mean, the American military is something that's never been seen before. I mean, and even if you take the technology out of it, when you put just the communications and the coordination, the multi-force coordination, you know, it's crazy to me. I used to play paintball a lot with my friends, and we would go play paintball, and we were all fast, we were athletes, you know, whatever.

And we'd go out and play, and we would sometimes run into these fat old guys who had been playing together for a long time, who just knew how to move. They knew how to work together, cover and move and all that kind of stuff. And they would just butcher us. And it's insane how much of a difference just knowing what you're doing really makes. And how many times do you read about, like, you know, Ranger Unit in Afghanistan ambushed by the Taliban? One Ranger wounded, 32 Taliban killed, you know, 52. captured. And it's like, wait, I get that we have stealth bombers and satellites and all that. But like, this is still just dudes with guns, right? It's like, well, yeah, yeah, and no.

I mean, American military is a buzzsaw that you just, you know, feed human beings into when it gets worked up. And, but I think what I meant was it kind of gave us this lesson that like, man, not only is war easy. It's, it's kind of, it's politically uniting. You know, you remember back, You remember back in the early 90s, there was that music video, Voices that Care. It was like every huge celebrity, the biggest people. I mean, it was Bono and Will Smith and everything. I actually don't remember this at all. It would be the equivalent of today of like Katie Perry and Taylor Swift.

What was it like a music video pro troops or something? Yeah, it was just singing to the troops, voices that care were thinking about you while you're over there. Something you could not imagine seeing today. It's just a different environment. I was probably in boot camp or something because I do not. remember that at all. You got to watch it just for the different times because today it would be hard to imagine anything like that and especially from that class of people. And it was so it was politically unifying, you know, it was kind of we didn't lose much of anybody, you know, we behaved ourselves

very, very honorably, you know. Yes, you are, then I accept your assessment that some bad lessons were learned, not so much about, yeah, about, about, we learned the lesson that this was going to be easy. And then Kosovo reinforced that. Yeah, Kosovo reinforced that. And all those people that said, you need boots on the ground in order to really affect change. Well, we went to Kosovo and no boots on the ground. Exactly.

And you look up and you go, well, there were also intelligence, like, lessons that we, you know, all the military, all the military guys who were hesitant at first, you know, you know, you had a lot of the civilian leadership who was looking at them, like they were just kind of too cautious, a little too scared, a little too shocked by Vietnam, you know, in those experiences. So that when we got up to 2003, you had a lot of the military side saying, look, we got, this is not enough people to secure this country. We need 300,000. We need 400,000 people.

We need this. We need that. And, you know, a lot of these same guys in the Bush administration were the same guys in lower level, mid-level positions in the first Bush administration. They're like, wait, I've heard this before. Warf Warf, in fact, Colin Powell, who's Secretary of State now, who's the one who's telling us to be very, very careful here if we're going to go into Iraq, I've heard this from you before.

You were cautious in the first Gulf War as well. And so, you know, there was a little bit of a little bit of distrust between the civilian and military leadership that came in. That's really, really disturbing, but it's such a noise. It's like, as you talk about it, it's just like, oh, yeah, I mean, I see this all the time, see this all the time from businesses, from leaders that they don't have a good enough relationship. They don't communicate to each other properly.

They don't explain things in a way that could be clear. Instead of explaining, they just get mad and they say, you know, I'm telling you, you got to trust me. And like, that, that's all that is. It's, it's awful. It's awful. Yeah. Yeah.

And, you know, I think that, uh, you know, the intelligence side as well, you know, this, nope, our intelligence did not see. the invasion of Kuwait coming, it caught us off guard. And so, you know, some of the civilian leadership lost trust with the intelligence community there. When 9-11 surprised us again, a lot of those same people come to distrust, you know, some of the intelligence establishment even more. And it was a little bit of a toxic relationship by the time you got 2003 between, you know, the brass at the DOD and some of these other places and the actual military leadership and the intelligence community leadership that I think there were we'll get into that and then maybe the

next episode or so that you know there there were some breakdowns and communication at the leadership level that that ended up filtering down to you guys on the ground and that's what I'm kind of interested in hearing about is there anything else to to wrap up kind of pre pre like escalation of tensions leading into into the invasion of 03 I think we can probably uh talk a little bit about it in the next episode. We'll talk about how we kind of started that ball rolling after 9-11. And I want to talk a little bit about what Iraq was up to in the 90s as well and how we were dealing with them and how it had become this kind of festering sore that we did not have a good

solution for, you know, that it was just sitting there because of the oil for food program and because of the way the sanctions were being cheated by a lot of countries in the most corrupt in ugliest ways. You know, just Saddam's regime is, you know, letting a lot of these countries, you know, just full corruption, take cuts from like the oil for food sales and then they're feeding billions of dollars back to Saddam's regime. Ugly stuff by people who are supposed to be our allies.

And so, you know, it creates a situation where you have this regime who's there, who's ruling through brutality and terror, who's not going anywhere. the sanctions are not going to work. And children are dying of starvation in the streets because of the sanctions. So a lot of people are starting to say, we can't keep this up. We can't just keep starving this population. Well, okay, what are you going to do?

You're going to say, oh, Saddam, you got us. All those UN resolutions. None of that means that. You won, you outlasted us. You outlasted the global community, right? The global order with all of these institutions behind it. You beat us. You outlasted us because you were willing to inflict such suffering on your own

people to watch them starve while you and your regime took all the money that you were getting and used it to control them. And we just can't take watching this anymore. So, you know, we're just going to lift all this and admit you won and create that precedent for other people like you going forward. Or, you know, in a post-9-11 world, we can go in there and do something about it. And that was really, you know, the second Iraq war, if you want to put it that way, is a lot of people, and I think history will bear this out. It wasn't a second war. There were, there were, you know, two ground fights, two, you know, moments of acute combat in one long war with Saddam Hussein's regime. We were launching air strikes at him all through the 1990s. In 1993, he tried to

assassinate George H.W. Bush. This is after he's not even president anymore, and he was visiting Kuwait and Saddam sent a hit team over there to try to assassinate him. You know, a former American president. And so this guy is not cowed. You know, he is still causing problems for us. And meanwhile, Iran is growing and becoming more dangerous. And, you know, we need a functional Iraq. If you look at a map of the Middle East, it is just right there in the middle of everything.

And we need it to be somewhat functional, but we can't help it be functional as long as this guy's in control. Because we can't build him up. And so what do you do? and people are going to be debating, you know, long after we get done with this, you know, what the right thing to do what there was, but I think people oversimplify what our options were. Yeah. And again, it's, well, two things. One thing I want to correct is I said that a guy that I had on the podcast was in the first goal for,

and I actually, I was, in my mind, I was thinking, but no, he was on the push up, but he had guys that had been in the first goal for that kind of, they helped them along. and then I'm thinking about this. And again, just to frame this up, you know, some people say that I'm like a driven person, right? And, and, you know, and I am, you know, there's, I, I want to do things and I want to, you know, when somebody says, you know, what, you go, I'll be like, take over the world, right? Ha, ha, fun, fun.

Like, yeah, there's some, there's a hint of truth in there because I want to go out and make things happen. But, you know, I'm not looking to take over the world in a. literal sense. And then you think about Saddam and you, and you like, so I'm thinking about it from my perspective as you're talking through all this stuff, I'm thinking, you know, I like to, you know, as I was reflecting back on what I told you earlier is like, hey, aren't you good? Like you've got a country. You've taken over.

You got billions of dollars worth of assets. You fought a long war. Like, even me, I think I'd look around and be like, all right. You know what? I'll go ahead and we'll just call this success. I've got my own nation. I've got billions of dollars. I'll call it good.

But it's not good enough. Actually, there is one thing that we did leave out. We talked about a little bit earlier, but is that after the war is over, on his way out, out of spite, he lights up all the Kuwaiti oil wells just to black in the sky, creates the biggest oil spill in human history

by open up the valves in Kuwait and sending it out into the Persian Gulf. And then, and this is really where you got a lot of people who were, after 9-11, really, really, really looking for Saddam's throat in the United States, is we had told the people of Iraq, meaning sort of the Shia population in the south, the Kurds in the north, rise up against Saddam Hussein. You know?

Yeah, that's right. And we thought that he would be overthrown in kind of a natural way. We were also talking to his generals and whoever else, but we may, you know, that wasn't going to happen. The Sunni population wasn't going to turn on him to hand over control to the Shiites. That's not going to happen. So we're talking to the Shia population in the south, the Kurds in the north, rise up against Saddam. And they do. And we just watch from across the border as he annihilates them, you know, kills.

We don't actually know. maybe 180,000 people, all told. But for sure, 100,000, and we are right across the border in Kuwait, easily with the ability to stop it from happening to the Shiites. He drives, I mean, scores of thousands of Kurds. This is what you were reading about earlier, up into the mountains. This is in January and February. They're going to freeze to death.

They're going to starve to death. He's massacring these people, using women and children as human shields as he goes into their villages, threatening, using them as hostages, saying I'm going to kill these women and children. If the men don't stay put, they stay put, he maskers all the men. And so all of these Kurds flee up into the mountains. And we have junior, you know, State Department, Defense Department officials at the time, guys like Paul Wolfowitz, who would be Donald Rumsfeld's deputy by the time we get to 2003, who were like, if I get another crack at this guy, I am taking him out.

and because they felt like we betrayed those people and we did you know and of course we went in to help the Kurds afterwards you know as they were getting pushed out operation provide comfort we start dropping supplies to them and it starts out as that but then we're like well what are we going to do with these people and Turkey's like you know keeping Kurds here right and so we're like well people were worried that if we set them up in like a you know in a refugee camp somewhere that it would turn into another Palestinian situation so finally we were like let's just pushed the Iraqi army back far enough so that these people can go back to their homes. And so we did that and the Kurds moved in back to their homes.

And we were like, well, now we kind of inherited the responsibility to protect these people. And we did that. And it was Southern Watch? That was Operation Southern Watch? Yeah. I don't remember, actually. I don't remember. I thought it was a part of Provide Comfort.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It might have been Provide Comfort. It was amazing. It worked perfectly. and it was amazing. It worked perfectly. Like the Kurds created one of the best places in the Middle East besides Israel. I mean, just a great place up there in Rabeel considering the neighborhood.

And that was another lesson that we took that like, oh, okay, if we can just go in there and get rid of the bad people, then the good people can come in and just build up a nice little society. It's that idea of if we can just tip the scales, right? If we can just tip the scales. And I don't know where I originally heard this from, but it was somebody that had direct relations with Cuba. Like someone that was Cuban or parents were Cuban and had been passed down this lore, which was when all the Cubans in America were saying,

hey, look, all we need to do is start this thing off. And everyone, the Cubans will rebel against Fidel Castro and will free Cuba. And, you know, the story was, It was like all the Cubans that were saying that and all the Cubans and it was a lot of Cubans that were saying that were in America And so they're saying yeah, don't worry and as soon as they got down there the Cubans that were in Cuba We're like what are you doing? No, this is Cuba. We don't want you here and it's not quite the same situation But the idea that you can tip the scales the idea that just going to take a little bit to tip the scales is is the feeling that you get when you're on the outside looking in and it looks like

hey, if we just apply enough pressure here, they can rise up against them. And yet that is all true. And yet I think that, and we'll get into this, we'll talk about some of those bad decisions we started to talk about in the last episode, that when we went in in 2003, that was a winnable fight. And it was winnable early, I think. I really do. I think it was something that it would have taken a long time.

You know, it would have taken some dedication as far as timeline went, some presence. But I think that what that war turned into had a lot to do with decisions that we made once we were there. There's no doubt about it. And I guess we can get into those decisions in that war next time. So if you want to support this podcast, check out our other podcasts. I have Jocko Podcasts, the Warrior Kid podcast, and the Grounded Podcast. And Darrell's got a podcast called Murder Made. and if you want to support all these podcasts,

then one thing you can do to help out is go and get some gear from jocco store.com or get some gear from origin, mane.com. Got all kinds of stuff on there. Thanks for listening as things unravel. This is Jocko and Daryl. Out.