Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 28 - Iran Iraq War Part 6: The Wild and Wacky World of Iraqi Weapons

Episode Date: December 3, 2018

We aren't done quite yet! Joe is joined by Travis Haycraft as Travis takes us on the wild, insane, and criminal world of Iraq's weapons procurement program during the war and it's effects. Support the show and get access to our bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Follow the show on twitter @lions_by Follow Joe @jkass99 Follow Travis @Haycraft_Travis

Hey everybody, this episode is brought to you by Lift Big Eat Big's new workout program, The Phalanx Method. Coach, powerlifter, strongman, and historian, Brandon Morrison, took a unique approach in his creation to this three-block, six-month-long effort. Using ancient sources and modern techniques, he was able to recreate the training of one of history's most destructive military forces, the phalanx. And it's not just the sales line either. This is only three days a week in the gym and it's brutal. I've competed in powerlifting, CrossFit, and spent

way too much time doing brutal army PT. And this is the hardest thing I've ever done before. And you can do it at a commercial gym or like me from your garage. He also includes little historical tidbits every week to keep you interested and to keep you hooked. If you want to challenge yourself or just try something new, go to www.liftbigeatbig.com and enter the promo code donkey to get 15% off the phalanx method. Are you ready to become a warrior of oak and bronze? Good evening from Baghdad. One of the world's oldest cities, has become one of the world's newest power centres. As soon as major hostilities broke out between the two oil producers, Iraq and Iran, we came here to Baghdad to watch OPEC at war, to look in particular at a regime

seeking supremacy in the Gulf, and at its remarkable president, Saddam Hussein, one of the least known but most effective rulers in the Middle East. As the conflict between his country and Iran got underway earlier this year, it was Saddam Hussein who declared, whoever climbs over our fence, we shall climb over his roof. over his roof. Hello, and welcome to another episode of Lions Led by Donkeys. I'm Joe, and with me today is Travis Haycraft. Travis graduated from the College of William and Mary with a major in Middle Eastern Studies and researched heavily on the arms industry during the Iran-Iraq War, which is why he's

with us today. How are you doing today, Travis? I'm doing pretty good. I'm actually here in Iraq at the moment, reporting live on events that happened 30 years ago. So I'm doing pretty well. Yeah, that's about as live as we can hope for, I guess. Yeah. So how's everything over there in Erbil these days? Well, thank God the weather's starting to cool down. I mean, it is Iraq,

so the summers are pretty brutal. But the weather's getting nice, so people are starting to go outside. And I don't know, Erbil's a cool city. There's not a whole lot to do, but it's very like, I don't know, there's lots of young, rich urban Kurds who want to take Instagram selfies. So I think it's pretty much like the rest of the world. Yeah, I feel like they've pretty much got the Western world all figured out there. Yeah, I mean, we bombed them enough. So now they got Instagram. So it's all worth it in the end. It's all just one giant flat circle in the end. Yeah, absolutely.

So you were saying that when we started started contacting each other on twitter you said that the iraqi arms industry was pretty bananas at the time oh absolutely yeah ted did you have you end up watch uh have you ever watched the movie american made the new tom cruise movie about like the drug wars and or the c running drugs to the U.S. and like exchange for arms and like Nicaragua and Colombia. Yes. And I was surprised how much I liked it. No. Yeah, me too. It was really fun. And so actually I ended up watching that kind of in the middle of when I was doing my research on the Iran-Iraq war and like the arms industry of Iraq. And I was thinking if somebody made a movie about the, like the arms procurement program for Iraq during the time,

it would probably end up looking a lot like American made and it would have a similarly sweet soundtrack. Um, so that's, I made my playlist of all this like sweet Soviet or not Soviet. Um, I'm, I'm tired. Uh uh but sweet like 70s

like blues rock and like like led zeppelin allman brothers band uh jimmy hendrix um and listen to that while finishing up my research because i think it would fit the movie pretty well but anyway yeah it's a pretty it's a crazy story and um there's uh there's a lot to get into so i guess i guess we can get started on that yeah um so i know in your uh the first episode you ended up talking a lot about the like the iranian revolution and the lead up to the war mostly from the iranian side and uh but not everything was happening on the Iranian side. In Iraq, the seeds for the war had been planted for a long time. I don't want to get too down into the weeds of the politics

because I want to focus mostly on the arms industry. But in a sense, they're very linked to each other you can't really separate one from the other um especially with the figure like saddam hussein who um he was uh he was born in like the 1930s in to create in which is like i think it's about two hours north of baghdad and uh he was poor kid. He wasn't particularly well-educated. But he was very ambitious. And he quickly got into the kind of the street thug arm of the Ba'ath Party, which is like the Arab Socialist Party in Iraq.

And at age 20, he ended up committing his first political assassination. Wow, they grew up so young. Yeah, I mean, the rest of us were in college or, you know, just drinking at bars and stuff. And he was killing people for politics, which is, I don't know. I mean, that's one option, I suppose. Um, and, uh, but in it, he, he kind of made himself, um, a pretty important figure in the kind of a low to mid levels of the Ba'ath party pretty early on. And, um, in the, so the Iraq gained independence or like real independence from the UK, um, in, I think like 1956 or something like that with the military coup that overthrew the

King, um, who was more of like a british puppet and uh the new government started buying more weapons from the soviet union um instead of the british so they were this is like the 50s they would have been buying like um t-34s and then like t-54s so like very very early World War II era tanks and then like very early Cold War era tanks. And then for jets like MiG-21s, I think. But either way, they weren't really buying a whole lot because Iraq was not particularly rich at the time and they were pretty fractured. I mean, the Kurds in the north were making a lot of noise and being uppity.

And so there's just a lot of other considerations beyond building the military but then there's a lot of political instability um throughout the late 50s early 1960s the both party was fighting with the communist party who was fighting with like ethno-nationalist parties from like the Kurds or the Turkmen. Um, and then there are religious elements as well, but eventually the Ba'ath party became kind of the number one, um, actor and Saddam was pretty, it was by this point or like the mid to late sixties, pretty much numbered one, number two in the Ba'ath party. So in 1968, there was a coup that overthrew the government and Saddam led it. And in typical Saddam fashion, he overthrew the government by driving a tank through the gates of the presidential palace, beating half to death the head of the army,

and then personally taking him at gunpoint to the airport and putting him on the first flight to morocco um where he served uh or was in exile for quite some time before being then assassinated um by iraqi agents at some point in the 70s so i mean you'll start to see a pattern with saddam he uh i mean obviously he ended up being a brutal dictator and he's not exactly the nicest person around. No, not Saddam. Not the romance writing, you know, freedom fighter. I really want to get my hands on one of those books. I have been looking for so long and I can't.

I think one was called like Zabaya and the King or something like that. Yeah, something like that. I think it's Zaynab, Zaynab and the King. I found one copy on Amazon for like $150. And yeah, go ahead and donate to the Patreon so I can buy Saddam's books. Oh, I will, yeah. Do that as a reading series in a couple of weeks. Oh, he's dead.

So we don't have to worry about giving him any, you know, royalties. Well, that's true. Yeah, yeah. But I guess then at the same time, you couldn't have him on as a guest on the pod so oh god i would love to i think his daughter's still alive so you know oh yeah they're in um jordan actually i think or qatar i can't remember i know he has is it like two daughters i know one is like a huge saddam um apologist and the other one was kind of like you know he was kind of an asshole but he was a good dad yeah i think he has two daughters and then his wife and i think they're both in jordan all of them are in jordan one's in qatar and they're all like they all have arrest warrants

out on them from the iraqi government or at least at least supposedly um the official reason is because they supposedly like provided tons of money to like sunni insurgents during like 2006 2007 and also isis oh yeah with the bathys loyalists joining them pretty much as soon as they invaded yeah that's uh that little that little guy it was actually funny i was talking to uh one of my iraqi co-workers here and we were talking about this just like two or three days ago, um, about Saddam's family. And one of them was like,

Oh, his wife. Oh yeah. She was so ugly. So it's, I mean, and he was Kurdish too. And that's the first thing he remembered, um,

was that she was ugly and not like the Al-Anfal genocide campaign. So, you know, priorities. Yeah. You, I mean, you might not be a looker but

have you ever been uglier than genocide damn i didn't think about it that way but no you're right wow yeah anyway so saddam was um he was a pretty ambitious guy and he knew how to use any and all available means to get what he wanted, be it personally killing his political enemies or sending in the army to commit genocide. He knew how to get what he wanted and he also knew very well what he wanted. So he took power in 1968. Well, he wasn't number one at the time. He was he was in like a power sharing agreement with his cousin um but he was de facto like number one or number two in the country after starting in 1968 and um when he took power the iraqi military was not in really good shape um it wasn't very big

it was poorly funded it had like 90 some thousand troops at the time. And its annual defense budget was 250 million dollars, which which is in 1968 dollars. So that's probably like I don't know about like a lot. I mean, obviously, it's probably a couple billion in modern. Yeah. Twenty eight dollars. But it's still pretty small, even for the time. And they had just one single armored division with only 500 tanks and most of those were t-34s and t-54s um and like a handful of t-55s which are like the i think they first started entering major production in the late 50s early 60s

so even their best tanks weren't like brand new and they didn't have very many of them and they also had a couple of older british tanks like the centurion which was like the first i think kind of main battle tank concept or at least kind of got the ball rolling on that and then even they even had a couple of old um american world war ii era m24 chaffee light tanks oh man um so they had a pretty diverse um group, group, so they had no real like single supply chain or anything. Um, and the tanks they did have weren't that great. Um, and then they had just this a hundred armored personnel carriers, um, which are mostly like Soviet BTR 152s and then a couple of British ferret armored cars. Um, so again, like very little in the way of mechanized

equipment, um, and, uh, and tanks. And then their air force was similarly not particularly great. Although, um, it was probably a little bit better off than the army, um, because they had, uh, like a few dozen make 21s, few dozen make 17s and, uh SU-7, so like early Cold War Soviet fighter jets and bombers and stuff like that. And then a couple of like old British jets. And even their Air Force wasn't that great. And also the worst part was that they had essentially no independence in how to use or maintain their equipment. The Soviets were in charge of all of the maintenance of any Soviet-made equipment. It was Soviet technicians who were contracted to maintain everything,

and they would never teach Iraqi technicians how to repair engines or anything like that. So, for example, if a jet needed its engine repaired, they had to send it back to the Soviet Union for that to happen, which meant that they were... Sorry. Oh, yeah. Don't mean to interrupt, but isn't... We talked about this a little bit, but isn't that kind of what the US does now? Yeah, pretty much, actually. We do, especially with Iraq, like with all the Abrams tanks and the F-16s that we sold them, I'm pretty sure those are 90% maintained by Americans, or at least American companies, which makes it really expensive and kind of a pain in the ass, generally, to get those things running if you're like in a pinch like i know that the americans refused to deliver f-16s that the iraqis had paid for in cash even like while isis was like within mortar range of baghdad airport um so if you've got an unreliable partner selling most of you most of your weapons you're in kind of a bad situation um which is where the Iraqis found themselves in

right after Saddam gained power because he immediately tried to suppress the Kurdish rebellion. And this is 1968, 1969. And the Soviets immediately cut off aid because the Soviets were trying to play both sides by being friendly with the Kurds and selling weapons to Iraq. And so you couldn't be friendly with the Kurds if the Iraqi army was killing all of them. Time really is a flat circle.

Honestly, though. You know, history repeats itself. And honestly, I don't think any learning we can do will prevent us from repeating it. Yeah. we can do will prevent us from repeating it yeah and uh so yeah so the soviets cut off all their support and the iraqi army basically immediately stopped working um because they can't maintain any of their jets or their tanks and they don't have any more bullets or bombs um and what this ends up doing is is uh the saddam is humiliated and he's forced to sign an agreement with the head of the Kurds, Mustafa Barzani, who they signed an agreement that basically said that in 1974, Iraq would give them autonomy. And in the four preceding years, there would be a ceasefire.

but also more importantly this kind of taught saddam a lesson a very important one and that was that you can't rely 100 on the soviets and that means you're gonna have to start buying from other people and also in order to beat the kurds you're gonna need a bigger military and a better military and uh he soon after started looking towards other countries and he was initially looking mostly at france um but he didn't really do anything um particularly serious in 1972 he met with uh the french president at the time uh george pompidou i never studied french so my apologize my apologies in advance there's going to be a lot of butchered french pronunciation oh i get it all the time yeah i can do the arabic stuff and the iranian or stuff but not the french or the brazilian or

brazilian portuguese which we will be getting into later uh but yeah so he bought he bought a couple of helicopters and some armored cars but nothing too serious at the time but the the french thought the iraqi cash looked just like any cash and that means it worked um so they were pretty interested in continuing the deal and uh the iraqis were also interested in continuing with their uh their purchases from french but from france but things only went into high gear um in 1973 when something happened that didn't involve iraq at all namely in october of 1973 egypt and syria launched a dual invasion of israel um the the war was quick and brutal um and the Egyptians and Syrians were eventually defeated by the Israeli military.

And at the time, the Israelis were mostly equipped with French and American equipment like M60 Patton tanks and Mirage III jets from France. from France. And the Egyptians and the Syrians were equipped mostly with Soviet equipment like T-55 tanks, T-62 tanks, and like MiG-21s, MiG-17s, things like that. And the Iraqis watched the war and they watched the Syrians and the Egyptians lose. And the lesson Saddam learned from the war was that the Soviet equipment was inferior to the Western equipment that the Israelis were using. And unfortunately for Saddam, um, and potentially fortunately for the world, well, I don't know about that, but, um, he, he wasn't necessarily entirely correct. Um, he kind of made the mistake of thinking that the, um, and this would doom him later on as well that all that mattered when it comes to military is what kind of equipment you have like you need the fanciest

most expensive equipment and that's going to win you the war and uh this wasn't the case in 1973 for the egyptians and the syrians like they their tanks were probably equal or superior to the um israeli tanks like a lot of the israelis weren't entirely equipped with m60s like when the syrians um were launching their assault on the golan heights the israeli defenders were equipped with um uh centurion tanks uh the british centurion as well as a lot of like modified um enforced shermans like the american world war ii tank oh wow and those were up against the syrians had t-55s and t-62s which were categorically technically superior to the sherman and centurion tanks that the israelis were using yet nonetheless the uh the syrians were pretty soundly defeated in Golan.

I think they sustained something like 500 tank losses versus about 200 Israeli tank losses. And then were basically completely routed with an Israeli counterattack. And a similar event happened with the Egyptians when they were attacking in Sinai. Again, despite having more and possibly better tanks they were defeated and the reason for this was because the um the israeli tank gunners were far better trained and more experienced than the syrian and egyptians like the the israelis could pretty comfortably engage targets starting at around 1,500 meters, while the Syrian and Egyptians were really unable to do anything past 1,000. So there was at least a 500-meter gap where the Syrians and Egyptians were basically sitting ducks.

And that's a large part of the reason they ended up losing. Yet nonetheless, Saddam looked at the war, and what he saw was, I need to buy Mirage jets, and I need to buy Mirage jets today. And that's what he did. like a huge plan to completely revamp the Iraqi industrial base in order to build and expand its military industry, in order to build and expand its military. And this was going to require a really just complete overhaul, or really not even overhaul implies that there was something to start with, but there really wasn't in this case. Iraq basically had no military industry, and what industry it did have was basically related to oil refineries and shipping. And an oil refinery is great for making oil, but it's not really good for creating tanks.

And so what they needed to do was build factories, build electrical plants, build chemical plants, as well as purchasing weapons. stated to a gathering of journalists that we must cooperate and deal with states and companies who implement for us here in Iraq projects that our experience and capabilities cannot handle in their entirety or which are beyond our technical capabilities, which basically meant that they needed a kind of a dual approach to this, namely buying new weapons and equipment and also training, hiring foreign experts and engineers in order to build factories and stuff, as well as training Iraqi experts. All from scratch? All from scratch.

They started with nothing and basically they used Iraq's oil money to buy the skill they needed to go from zero to 100 within 10 years. So thousands of foreign experts, engineers, physicists, and so on sort of flowing into Iraq from a number of different countries like France, Brazil, Yugoslavia, and so on. Brazil, Yugoslavia, and so on. And Saddam turned to the very important business of basically going on a huge shopping spree across the world. For example, to kind of kick it off, in March of 1975, French sales experts from the Dassault Aviation, which was the French company that manufactured the Mirage fighter jet, as well as the engine manufacturing company, Snecma. I probably pronounced that wrong.

And the Office General de l'Air, which, again, pronunciation is probably terrible. But that's the French military export office, particularly with regards to air equipment. They all visited Baghdad, and they met with Iraqi military officers, and they said that they would sell them the Mirage III jets that the Israelis had used to great success during the 1973 war. But not only that, they would do one better and actually sell them the brand new Mirage F1 jet,

which the company had only just started production and the French Air Force hadn't even gotten access to yet. I feel like this is a con. No, it is not. The deal would eventually be finalized in 1977, despite all. And it only took that long. It only took two years than a French Air Force, you know, not wanting to sell their equipment to some crazy Middle Eastern dictator. Yeah, I mean, a lot of people don't realize

that France is one of the largest arms dealers in the world. I mean, you know, there's the US and Russia and China, but France is up there. Oh, and even more so at this time, because they saw themselves as kind of the, I mean, you know, there's the U.S. and Russia and China, but France is up there. Oh, and even more so at this time, because they saw themselves as kind of the, because this was before China really entered the game. So the French saw themselves as kind of the third way of arms exports. So if you were a non-aligned country and you weren't sure who to buy from, you would almost certainly be able to buy from France, as evidenced by Saddam Hussein being able to buy basically anything. And we're going to get to some pretty scary stuff as far as to what the French were willing to sell.

Oh, boy. Yeah, so as the Mirage deal was being finalized in Baghdad, Saddam visited the new French president, Jacques Chirac, in Paris and signed a series of very large deals for both weapons and infrastructure. Infrastructure included things like petrochemical plants, desalination plants, gas liquefaction complexes, as well as things like housing projects, telecommunications, like infrastructure, broadcastingcommunications, infrastructure, broadcasting networks, fertilizer plants. And then more on the military side, defense electronics

factories, truck and car assembly plants. They wanted to build a new airport, a subway system, a naval yard. And then on top of that, Exocet anti-ship missiles, Milan and HOT anti-tank missiles, Magic, Martel, and Armat. I think those are air-to-air missiles. Alouette, Gazelle, and Super Puma helicopters, AMX-30 self-propelled howitzers, radars, and, wait for it, a nuclear reactor.

A fully functional nuclear reactor to be built in the western Anbar desert near the town of Qaim, which they would be dubbing the Tammuz facility. And this facility would explicitly be capable of producing the material for a nuclear weapon. France, what is you doing?

Yes. And the French did this basically without hesitation. And Iraq basically just immediately transferred cash to them. And the French basically immediately transferred them whatever they asked for, be it a nuclear reactor, aircraft, the latest aircraft, and the latest in tanks and other equipment.

So yeah, the French were a little crazy at the time. I think they were maybe trying to prove themselves a little too hard. But yeah, so basically as soon as this deal was signed, the French started putting together the stuff that they needed to transfer the reactor. And there's a whole saga about the transfer and the production of this nuclear reactor that's kind of a story for another day but uh suffice it to say it was pretty crazy but they did eventually begin construction of this facility and were pretty close to getting it up and running um by the time the the war with iran started but it wasn't just france um the uh saddam was smart enough to not lay all of his uh hopes just on the french and he also

started turning to particularly other developing countries um like other non-aligned countries that were starting to develop their own internal arms in other industry like brazil yugoslavia egypt and china um and also these countries were even better than France, for example, um, because they were selling their stuff for really cheap. Um, and so particularly Brazil, Brazil is probably the most important country other than France and the Soviet Union, as far as the Iraqi military and military industry was concerned. Um, and this, this relationship started in 1976 when the Brazilian manufacturing group Engesa, I believe is how it's pronounced, signed an $836 million deal for 150 Cascavel armored cars and 150 Urutu scout cars, as well as more than 2,000 other trucks and transportation vehicles, like logistical equipment.

and transportation vehicles, like logistical equipment. And they would continue selling kind of like the less sexy equipment, like trucks and mechanized vehicles for the duration of the Iran-Iraq war. Meanwhile, the Soviets are kind of looking back down on Iraq and thinking like, oh, shit, we're missing out on a lot of cash right now and uh so in 1976 they signed a deal uh they reopened um arm sales to iraq and sold uh mig-23 fighter jets which was at the time the most advanced um that the soviets had it's the uh i think it was the first soviets uh what's it called like variable wing geometry kind of like the f-14 um where the wings can like rotate adjusting to adjust for like speed and

stuff so it's kind of pretty cool very advanced um and so they sold 100 of those or 130 of those to iraq and then also more importantly they agreed to train iraqis on maintaining and uh like building replacement parts and stuff for the the equipment they sold so now they have the most advanced russian jet and the most advanced french jet at the same time yes yeah and uh just two years after that they would sign another deal for three billion dollars at the time which was the largest uh deal in iraqi history at the time um in which they they started delivering the mig-23s as well as they sold um scud b ballistic missiles il-76 transport planes mi8 transport helicopters 9k32 strela um shoulder launch uh anti-air missiles um as well as the mig-25 interceptor which the mig-25 is cool because that was the uh the um the soviet jet that got it had like a cruising speed of like

mach 3 or something like that and an altitude of 80,000 feet. It was kind of what they used to counter the SR-75 scout plane. It's basically two enormous engines with a tiny little cockpit. And they sold those to Iraq as well. Does it seem like Iraq would have much of a reason to own those if they're solely used and manufactured to cover the blackbird well i mean well yeah you're not wrong they they didn't end up really being all that useful for iraq i think in order to just kind of prove just how far the tables have turned with regards to the relationship between the Soviet Union and the Iraqis. In April of 1978, Saddam ordered the Soviets to move their embassy in Baghdad

because he believed that they were using the fact that it was very close to the presidential palace to spy on him with long-range microphones or something like that. I mean, they probably were. I mean, he probably wasn't wrong but nonetheless uh this was very much a power move uh because the soviets of course refused and uh saddam uh immediately cut off their water and electricity supplies and the soviets moved their embassy like three days later. So when discussing the concept of BDE or Big Dick Energy, I believe we may have to concede that Saddam Hussein had BDE. Saddam Hussein, Big Dick Energy originator.

Perhaps he even invented the concept. And I'm saying that in Kurdistan, so I expect the Asayesh to kick down my door any second. But anyway, so yeah, they moved their embassy and the Soviets were pretty much – by this point, they were no longer the key figure when it comes to the Iraqi military industry. In fact, in the beginning of the 1970s, they had 95% of the Iraqi arms industry or share of the Iraqi arms industry or Iraqi arms purchases. By 1979, they were down to 63%. So they're still pretty important, of course. The Iraqi army still ran on T-55s and AK-47s. But a lot of the most important things that the Iraqis had developed over the last decade

were those kind of self-sufficiency things. So if the Soviets immediately withdrew their support, as they had during the Kurdish war, the Iraqis would be able to pick up the slack either with other countries selling them weapons or with their own production capabilities. Similarly, for the Americans in the audience, don't think that you're innocent either, because in January of 1980, the General Electric Company sold a number of ship engines, which were intended for Italian-made frigates that the Iraqis were going to buy for an $11 million deal. And the first deal that the Iraqis were to make with the United States. were to make with the United States. Similarly, the Bell Helicopter Company sold a number of transport helicopters.

I don't know if you could hear the quotation marks around transport because they were painted tan and had mounts on the side of the fuselage for things like transporting rockets into the enemy's tanks. Just humanitarian supplies is all. Yeah, humanitarian machine guns and humanitarian missiles. Of course. Yes.

However, the U.S. pretended to have a conscience and the deals were blocked by the Senate because Iraq was at the time labeled a supporter of international terrorism. However, the Carter administration overruled this decision and allowed the deal to go through. And while the United States would never have quite the same importance with regards to arms sales to Iraq as some of the other countries would, importance with regards to arms sales to Iraq as some of the other countries would, this relationship between the Americans and the Iraqis would continue until 1990 with the invasion of Kuwait. So on the dawn of the Iran-Iraq war, on the dawn of Iraq's invasion, the Iraqi army of 1980 was significantly different from that of 1968.

In fact, shortly before the invasion, an Iraqi representative at a UN conference on science and technology in Vienna declared that Iraq would establish an arms industry capable of full self-reliance and security and su sufficiency and security for both iraq and the arab world by the year 2000 and the army and the military industry to match it had indeed grown substantially in fact the iraqi army was up to about 190 000 active duty soldiers and 250 000 in reserve from just 90 000 in 1968 and the 1979 defense bill was 5.1 billion, up from 250 million in 1968. And Iraq could count on its suppliers, Brazil, China, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, West Germany, Egypt, France, the United Kingdom, Hungary, Italy, Jordan, Libya, Poland, Romania, Spain, Switzerland, the Soviet Union, and the United States.

And they now had thousands of tanks, mostly T-54s, T-55s, and T-62s, but also things like French AMX-30s and a couple of other models and makes, and about 2,000 APCs or other armored fighting vehicles of Soviet and Brazilian make, as well as hundreds of artillery pieces and plenty of any tank missiles from France. They also were starting to receive deliveries of the Soviet Union's latest and most advanced tank, the T-72, which if once they started receiving it, that would make it the most advanced tank in the region. And they also had in the sky in their Air Force 12 Tu-22 supersonic jet bombers, 80 MiG-23s, 60 Su-7s, 30 Su-20s, and 115 MiG-21s. and they were starting to receive the delivery of their mirage

f1s from france however those wouldn't really become relevant um during their early days of the uh of the war and um at the same time perhaps even more importantly than all those fancy new weapons they had bought they uh iraqi factories Iraqi factories within Iraq were producing pretty much all of Iraq's small arms, RPG-7s, various pistols, as well as aircraft bombs, heavy machine guns, and 23 and 30 millimeter cannons, fuel air bombs, mines, and so on. And of course, ammunition to fuel all of the above. I mean, you can hardly blame them for sticking to those frames. If they didn't get involved in like three incredibly destructive wars, those tanks would still be working today. And some of them still are.

The T-72s that Iraq bought, those are still in the Iraqi army today. I don't think they're still using any of the T-55s or T-62s. But the T-72s are still in use for sure. And of course, the AKs and the RPGs and stuff, those never go out of style. Those will be in people's hands long after everybody listening to this is dead. Oh, absolutely.

But I think in order to give context to where the Iraqi army is at the time, we have to briefly discuss where the Iranian army was at the time because that, by this point, by 1980, that's Iraq's chief rival. They've suppressed the Kurds. They are kind of putting Israel on the back burner and they really want that oil in Khuzestan. So the Iranian army, at least before the revolution, had over 400,000 soldiers in it and was one of the best funded and best equipped

in the world. They were the best American customer. So good, in fact, that one of the best funded and best equipped in the world they were the best american customer so good in fact that iran was the only country allowed to buy the brand new f-14 tomcat fighter jet made famous by top gun um and uh the only one and now that aircraft at the time was considered probably the most advanced most powerful fighter aircraft in the world um and the iranians were the only ones allowed to buy it they also had like f4 phantom jets and uh lots and lots of m60 tanks and uh from the u.s and chieftain tanks from the uk the chieftain never really saw any use except by Iran. But it was a pretty advanced tank. I think the Chieftain was the first tank to use the Chabim armor, which was like the – what's the word? It's like the laminate armor.

It's not just pure steel. Oh, the composite armor. Yeah, composite. That's the word. And so it was pretty advanced at the time as well. And the Iranians had 870 of them. Oh, wow. Yeah. So the Iranian army was really well equipped right before the revolution. However, immediately after the revolution, it was very much in question how much of that, how much of those soldiers and how much of that equipment would actually be able to fight in a real war.

And so that's kind of what the Iraqis were betting on when they launched their invasion. And they weren't wrong, not entirely at least. So they invaded, and I believe it was like September 20th or something, 1980. And the Soviets, as if on cue, immediately cut off all their support of military equipment to Iraq. But the Iraqis didn't really care because by this point they had enough

of their own manufacturing and were buying from other sources for it to have little effect on the war effort. And the initial invasion was spearheaded by a lot of Iraqi tanks, mostly T-55s and T-62s at this point. But they were definitely outnumbering the Iranian tanks and definitely had the element of surprise

and absolutely had the element or the advantage in terms of planning and cohesiveness of their military. But as I'm sure will be covered in episodes two and three, this didn't really help anyway. No, not so much. Yeah, so the invasion pretty much immediately bogged down both on the land and in the air.

So the interesting thing about the air battle was that, unlike on the ground the iraqi air force despite buying a lot of brand new equipment from the ussr and france still didn't really have an advantage and that was mostly geographic um because tehran is something like a thousand miles or no not a thousand miles a thousand kilometers away from the iraqi border and it's over a huge mountain range. So the, uh, the Soviet or the, the, the Iraqis, uh, attempted to launch like a crippling airstrike with their TU-22 supersonic bombers, but it didn't really work out very well. And on also the Iranian air force was, even after the revolution had better equipment and their pilots were much more experienced and

better trained than the Iraqis, at least iranian government let them out of jail but they were able to shoot down a lot of iraqi airplanes and honestly from day one the uh the iraqis were kind of on the back foot um in the air war because their their aircraft weren't quite good enough and the iranians had a huge geographical advantage. And perhaps even more embarrassingly with regards to their equipment and the level of training the Iraqis had, during the start of the war,

the Iraqis tried to use a lot of helicopters, but Iraqi air defense guys on the ground had a habit of shooting them down a lot. And so they instituted a policy where if Iraqi helicopters were in operation in that particular theater, all air defense had to be shut down. Which, of course, had the consequence of allowing Iranian helicopters and aircraft free reign. of allowing Iranian helicopters and aircraft free reign. There was one anecdote I read during my research where this Iraqi general was doing reconnaissance on a hilltop and he saw a couple of Iranian Cobra helicopters

flying in low and really close and attacking Iraqi positions. And he called in to air defense artillery and was like, hey, why aren't you shooting these guys down? And the guys responded back that well they were under orders to not fire their weapons because there were iraqi helicopters somewhere so the uh despite this enormous equipment advantage that the iraqis had going right into the war it didn't really pay off very well. And, uh, so as the war grinds on, it quickly becomes this very like attritional meat grinder for both sides. And, uh, even within the

first year or two, the Iraqis have basically exhausted most of their initial tanks, uh, like tank, um, arsenal. And, um, so both sides, but especially the Iraqis are trying to immediately fill the gaps in their armored divisions with whatever they can find. And because the Soviets have stopped selling, they turned to Warsaw Pact states and China, Poland ships, 250 T-72s to Iraq in 1982 and China, which produced at the time several kind of not quite copies of the T-54 and T-55, which they labeled the Type 59 and the Type 69. Nice. I see what they did there. Yeah, you know, they knew what was up. And so they started selling these tanks to iraq and iran but mostly iraq so by the end of the war the chinese would actually sell something like two to three thousand of these

tanks to iraq mostly type 55 type 69s um and in fact these tanks were so cheap that iraqi tank crews if the if they threw a track or the engine broke down or they got damaged during battle, they would just abandon it and not even bother to take it back for repair because it was cheaper to just buy a new one than to have it repaired. That's insane. It's pretty crazy, yeah. and uh i mean at the same time some of the other equipment that um the iraqis bought particularly from france with regards to electronic warfare equipment was starting to have an impact on the battlefield now i know basically nothing about electronic warfare um so i'm not going to go into too much detail on that um beyond stating that for any electronic warfare nerds in the crowd you you were here too um but yeah so the equipment that the iraqis were mostly using was tanks rifles artillery and so on but um saddam

didn't want to stop there uh so as i mentioned earlier they had begun production on a nuclear reactor in the western desert of iraq in the 1970s, sold to them by the French. In, I believe, 1981, the Israeli Air Force bombed that reactor and completely destroyed it. And from that point on, Saddam basically just shelved the nuclear his nuclear ambitions it's too expensive it's too um kind of politically difficult for obvious reasons um and also he was in the middle of a war that ended up being a lot more difficult and a lot costlier than he had expected and the other the the easiest kind of weapon of mass destruction to produce is chemical weapons. And for a country like Iraq, which had a massive oil industry, they also had a legitimate excuse to build chemical plants because the refining process for oil requires a bunch of pretty nasty chemicals.

Oil requires a bunch of pretty nasty chemicals. And so pretty much from the which is south of Baghdad, which would be capable of producing about 4,000 tons a year of phosphate chemical weapons precursor. I'm sure they only meant that for farming purposes. I'm about to get to that. Farming bodies. Yeah, exactly. And so while Thyssen-Reinstahl officially denies knowledge of the plant's actual use

um obviously this claim is uh well politely highly suspect and impolitely complete bullshit because the layout of the plant did not at all fit a standard pesticide plant model it was too small to be useful for like an actual pesticide plant and also had a lot of like you know armed guard posts and bunkers and things like that which aren't normal in um a pesticide plant and also had a lot of like you know armed guard posts and bunkers and things like that which aren't normal in um a pesticide plant yeah you see those everywhere in like you know nebraska where they use tons of pesticides they definitely have t55s at the you know the chemical plant outside the city in what's the capital of nebraska uh omaha lincoln one of those two i don't know lincoln cities nebraska but yeah you know they've got t55s just at all the plants out there

um but also they they weren't just limited to this and reinstal they uh they were also negotiating with um carl kolb gmbh and I believe GmbH stands for Gesundheit, Verheit, Hoffens, Genocide. I don't know very much German. So this is a West German chemical company, and their salesmen in Iraq, Klaus Franzl, Helmut Mayer, and Hans von Auschwitz, not literally, but basically they're all Nazis. Like, unironically, they were Nazis. Well, I mean, if you're going to buy gonna buy chemical weapons you're gonna go to the experts i mean they knew what

they were doing and uh so yeah they were meeting with the iran iraq's um uh like military industry particularly this guy amir al-sadi who was their head of like their kind of wnd program at the time and they began working on plans for a enormous chemical weapons plant in samara which is north of baghdad and again officially the plant would be for pesticides but franzl and mayor um obviously knew exactly what the real purpose of this plant was and by extension carl kolb did as well um and so this plant was enormous it was over 200 square kilometers um yeah kilometers and uh fucking massive yeah that's like the size of oh like a mid-sized city i think um and uh but i mean in this chemical weapons plants defense um it wasn't all like concentrated.

It was deliberately designed to be very spread out. So it's not easy to destroy in one like bombing raid. And it was full of hardened bunkers and underground production lines and so on. And this plant would be producing weapons or chemical weapons by 1983. And this plant would produce mustard gas, sarin gas, and tabun. Tabun? I'm not sure how to say that. But some pretty gnarly stuff. And their chemical weapons would start being put into use pretty much immediately after they rolled off the production line in 1984, I believe, during the Battle of Majnun Island. And initially, their chemical weapons weren't particularly potent.

The Iraqis say they had a 20% fatality rate, while the Iranians say that it was probably a little bit lower than that. But nonetheless, they quickly readjusted their mixture of the particular chemicals in a particular piece of ordinance and um by 1985 they were probably up to roughly a 60 fatality rate wow and the thing with yeah the thing with chemical weapons is that they're like even during this war when they were used on a large scale they were more of a psychological weapon than they were um like a practical weapon to like kill as many people as possible oh yeah yeah like they could probably kill a similar amount

of people with like you know conventional artillery or bombs or something like that but the the level of fear that is instilled on a like a line of defenses when the chemical weapons start coming in is probably even more effective than just you know killing them outright with explosives right and i mean the the idea of being blinded and having your skin blister and and explode off of you or watching your friend drowned in their own lung juices is significantly more terrifying than just getting atomized out of existence by an artillery shell. Yeah, exactly. And yeah, so from that point on, the Iraqis would be consistently using chemical weapons

through the end of the war. But they weren't stopping at chemical weapons. They also began a plan to produce their own long-range ballistic missiles. So between 1982 and 1986, pretty much everyone thought the war was in kind of a perpetual stalemate. The Iraqis didn't hold any significant territory in Iran, and the Iranians didn't hold any significant territory in Iraq. And nobody really thought anything was going to change. significant territory in Iraq. And nobody really thought anything was going to change. Most countries were still selling, you know, a little bit of stuff to Iraq, but the war wasn't really in full swing at the time, or at least they didn't think so. And so there wasn't a whole lot

of urgency, either on the side of the Iraqis or on the various countries arming them. But during this time, the Iraqis began a pretty substantial campaign of terror bombing of iranian cities mostly with ballistic missiles and at the time they they had the short-range stuff like the scuds which i think have a range of about 300 kilometers um so those couldn't hit tehran they could only hit the cities closer to the border with Iraq, like Khurramshahr. The cities that they've already attacked. Yeah, basically. So it wasn't really, I mean, they were scary and they killed a lot of people, but it wasn't nearly as effective as they wanted it to be.

And so in order to expand their ballistic missile program to be more effective, they turned to a pretty unlikely partner, Argentina. Didn't see that one coming. Neither did I. So the military junta in Argentina had actually had a nuclear program prior to the Falklands War. And they were developing a long-range ballistic missile program in conjunction, which they called the Condor program. And surprise, surprise, they were being helped by the West Germans, specifically the company of Messerschmitt-Bolkow-Blohm, or MBB, and the Italian defense company, SNIA. So just think about where the Nazis went after World went after world war ii and uh those countries are now helping iraq and the same companies too and it was called the condor program yeah so you see

you see the roots uh and of the not it's nazi roots all the way through the 1980s and uh so yeah so the and also course, the French were involved because they were involved in everything in this sordid affair. And Saddam wasn't really too concerned with the fact that the Argentines were under a lot of international scrutiny at the time because the Falklands War had just ended. But he wasn't intending to buy the Argentine missiles, merely acquire the technological capabilities and then incorporate those into his own ballistic missile program.

And simultaneously, in order to – but I mean a ballistic missile program is super expensive, and so they needed the free cash to do this. And by this point, their finances are getting a little tight, and they've got a lot of debt. point their finances are getting a little tight and they've got a lot of debt um but the americans you know they're they come in to save the day by uh giving the iraqis one billion dollars a year in food aid uh yeah pineapples grenades yes well it was just cash however However, it was cash that the Iraqis desperately needed in order to free up resources to buy things like long-range ballistic missile technology or chemical weapons. Because I think at this point in the war, the Iraqis were spending something like 75% to 80% of their GDP on their military. Absolutely. So the U.S. was just kind of paying their home bills so they could just keep spending everything their military. Absolutely. So like the US was just kind of like paying their home bills so they could just keep spending everything at weapons.

Basically. Yeah, so this deal comes through in 1984 at the exact same time that, I think it was March of 84 roughly, that this is the exact same time that Iraq first started using massive chemical weapons bombardments on Iranian positions on Majnun Island. And the American ambassador to Iraq at the time was fully aware of Iraq's usage of chemical weapons.

The official position was that they never knew. But, of course, that's complete BS. They knew exactly what was going on and uh the american ambassador said something along the lines of um the uh the iraqi use of chemical weapons was like a necessary evil or something like that because they considered their friendly relationship with saddam hussein to be more important than his usage of chemical weapons i'm sure glad he wouldn't end up looking fucking stupid in like 15 years less than six years i mean honestly we're gonna get to there's gonna be another example a little bit later on that similarly create scary uh or at least kind of darkly ironic um so anyway uh the iraqis begin production on a massive missile research and production

facility called the Saad 16 facility outside of Mosul. And involved in this are 38 West German and Austrian companies, as well as hundreds of European engineers and thousands of Iraqi security personnel and Iraqi engineers and technicians. So this is, we're now getting to around 1986. And in, I believe, February of 1986, the Iranians launch a pretty major offensive, seizing the southern Iraqi peninsula of Faw, which basically cut off the Iraqi access to the Persian Gulf and routed some of Iraq's largest and most important units.

And a lot of people started to get scared that the Iranians were actually going to win this thing, which nobody in the West and not even the Soviet Union wanted. And so it was at this point where things really went into high gear. So it was at this point where things really went into high gear. The Soviets immediately provided an enormous $9 billion arms deal to the Iraqis in 1986, which included more than 2,000 tanks, which included 800 T-72s, 300 fighter aircraft, 300 surface-to-surface ballistic missiles, mostly Scuds, and thousands of pieces of heavy artillery and armored personnel vehicles. The Chinese also came in, the French came in, basically the whole gang was here selling weapons. And by 1988, in Iraq's eventual counteroffensive that routed Iranian forces and ended the war, Iraq had in its arsenal 4,500 Soviet T-55, T-62, and T-72 tanks, as well as 1,500 Type 69 Chinese tanks for a total of, what is that,

6,000 tanks, which is a lot of tanks. That's pretty ridiculous. which is a lot of tanks. That's pretty ridiculous. How big of an asshole do you have to be to make China, the Soviet Union, and the U.S. all work together to try to stop you from winning a war? Well, you know, I'm going to hesitate to say that Khomeini was a bigger asshole than Saddam at this time. Yeah, I mean, That's certainly arguable.

You have to piss off a lot of the wrong people. And the Iranians had managed to do that rightly or wrongly with their revolution. I always kind of unfairly, fairly compare this to the French Revolution where

a whole bunch of people who had nothing in common banded together to try to kill it in its womb and yeah it's pretty similar yeah but i guess hominy doesn't go get to uh like a baby exiled at saint helena to die in ignominy no instead he had a kick-ass funeral so yeah instead he fought world war one two the electric boogaloo and and kept his independence yeah so i guess he was more successful than napoleon yeah i guess so hot take alert at least he got to die in his throne yeah yeah honestly um so but yeah uh the uh this counter-offoffensive required not just a lot of new equipment being bought from the Soviets and the Chinese, but also they needed to reform the Iraqi military industry. And Saddam had just the man for the job. In January of 1987, he handed control of the State Organization for Technical Industries, which was the branch of the Ministry of Defense, which was responsible for arms production and arms procurement,

to Hussein Kamel, who was Saddam's cousin and his former bodyguard. And this was probably the one time in history where nepotism really worked out. Because this guy, he knew what he was doing and under camel's tenure at the at sody the state organization for technical industries the efficiency and capacity of iraq's military industry greatly increased um and the bureaucratic red tape that existed camel just cut right through and he was really really good at going from the conception of a particular project to the production of that project in record time and in fact he is quoted as saying because of the war all of us were in a hurry and this allowed us to cut red tape. For instance, we performed no feasibility studies

in the normal sense. Because we are all fighters, we know the end use of our weapons. Sometimes a simple telephone call between a military user and myself can get the process going. While some of us work on building a prototype, others begin designing production tools, et cetera.

So in 1988, his organization was combined with the Ministry of Heavy Industry and Military Production to form the least intimidating sounding but scariest in actual reality organization, the Ministry of Industrialization and Military Industrialization, or MIMI. and military industrialization, or MIMI. And so that put this guy, Hussein Kamel, in charge of the entire Iraqi industrial apparatus as well as most of its oil industry and obviously its military production. And so his plan as the head of MIMI had two prongs. The first was to build the basic sustainment equipment for the army,

so local assembly of tanks and spare parts, rifles, ammunition, boots, etc. This would replenish Iraq's depleted stocks of equipment and ammunition, and this would be done almost entirely by Iraqi industry and Iraqi engineers and technicians. would be done almost entirely by iraqi industry and iraqi engineers and technicians um and the second prong was to build long-range ballistic missiles that could reach cities such as tehran and destroy iranian civilian morale this would be accomplished quite successfully as in 1986 the soviets had sold them 300 scud b tactical ballistic missiles which are with a range of about 300 kilometers however the range to tehran is 900 kilometers so they needed to figure out a way to turn these missiles um basically make them turbocharged to go three times their

normal distance in order to do this they signed a a deal with Brazil and France, the usual suspects, and they shipped a couple of examples of these missiles to Brazil, where they were disassembled by Iraqi, Brazilian, and French engineers, and reverse engineered. And they were able to modify them successfully in order to launch and hit targets more than 900 kilometers away in order to do this they had to like repurpose parts from some of the missiles so they ended up cutting down their arsenal from 300 to 200 but that was more than enough their first missile with a range of 900 kilometers they dubbed the al-hussein of course and the second missile they call it which with a range of i think closer to a thousand kilometers they dubbed the abbas missile and these are

basically the two names that they would use for all of their equipment they weren't particularly creative when it came to naming their things yeah saddam really liked him some some saddam oh yeah he did um but now we're gonna get to probably the craziest part of the whole story um if you didn't think any of the previous stuff was crazy enough i have the story for you and we're gonna talk about gerard gerard gerald i can never pronounce the name correctly gerald bull and project babylon oh i love this story oh yeah it's a good one so a little bit of background there's this guy gerald bull he was a canadian engineer um kind of your quintessential mad scientist eccentric genius um in college he knocked

down the walls of his advising professor's office in order to make room for a wind tunnel and then when he got out of his phd program he worked for the canadian military who were at the time designing attempting to create their own independence from kind of the United States or UK's military industry. And so they were going to design a anti-air missile called the Velvet Glove. And Gerald Bull was kind of, he took the lead on the project, but he got incredibly frustrated with the Canadian government and eventually quit. And at the same time he was developing a very bizarre fascination that i think is probably unique to this guy in all of history

and that is he wanted to put a satellite into space with a cannon uh because i mean i can kind of understand why he was upset with the can Canadian government because he's working on a project that was trying to build the Velvet Glove. But I mean, at the same time, I'm starting to think that he was like, but have we tried putting more cannons on it? That's basically exactly what happened. His idea, and he's probably not 100% wrong, was that using rocket boosters to put satellites was too expensive. And if you just shoot it out of a cannon, it's going to be a lot cheaper. But, um, you know, it's not a bad idea, I guess, in concept, but he was obsessed with

it. He was absolutely obsessed with it. And everything in his life from that point forward wasn't similarly related to getting funding in order to do his testing now he did a little bit of testing with um funding from mcgill university and the u.s navy where he took an old like battleship cannon um and put it in barbados and pointed it up and uh honestly that's the kind of science that would have gotten me out of history and into engineering we don't do that kind of stuff anymore um but yeah he actually there was some promise in his

idea and that's why he got a little bit of funding but eventually the funding ran out and uh he was kind of left uh left the drift as it were and uh but he uh kind of on the back of a napkin designed the gc45 155 millimeter artillery cannon and a accompanying 155 millimeter shell to fire from this gun this gun the gc45 put literally every other artillery cannon ever designed to shame so he basically accidentally built the best cannon ever on the back of a napkin. He then sold this design to a number of entities, particularly the Austrian company Bost Alpine, which would then begin to produce that particular gun under the name of the GHN-45. This gun made a pretty serious impact it ended up in the hands of apartheid south africa for which gerald bull was put in prison um for breaking uh the saint the arms embargo on south africa although honestly it wasn't entirely his fault he did ask the carter

government whether or not he could sell them and they basically said yes and then he or no i think it was the i forget the 70s presidents but one administration basically said yes. And then, or no, I think it was the, I forget the 70s presidents, but one administration basically said yes. And the next administration was trying to be harsh on apartheid South Africa. And so they put him in jail. But I mean, also, it was apartheid South Africa. You probably shouldn't have sold guns to them in the first place just for moral reasons. But anyway, he did. I don't know.

just for moral reasons. But anyway, he did. Yeah. I don't know. I feel like we're expecting a lot of morals from a guy who invented a space cannon on the back of a bar napkin. Pretty much, yeah. But anyway, this gun was pretty effective.

It was... Once it was put into South African use, the Soviets noticed it because they were backing the Angolan communist forces who the South Africans were fighting against, which honestly, the Angolan civil wars could probably be its own series of episodes. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I can't ignore a blood diamond war that involved rebels getting jet fighters and shit. Yeah, I mean, it was Cuba versus apartheid South Africa. I mean,

how crazy is that? And who do you root for? Neither. It's like that meme from the Godzilla movie where the guy's like, let them fight. Yes. Yes. Yeah.

But, uh, so yeah, so a number of these GC 45 cannons end up in both the arsenals of Iraq and Iran. And their incredible high quality ended up catching the attention of Hussein Kamel's organization. And in November of 1987, he placed a call to Gerald Bull's offices in Brussels, Belgium. He placed a call to Gerald Bull's offices in Brussels, Belgium. Soon after, Gerald Bull and his sons, who were his business partners and associates, which didn't work out quite as well for him as it did for Saddam, flew to Baghdad in order to meet with Iraqi officials, particularly Hussein Kamel. to develop an indigenous family of Iraqi artillery based around Bol's designs and to also provide assistance in further developing Iraq's industrial and engineering capabilities.

However, most interesting to Bol was Kamel's insistence on eventually putting Iraqi satellites in orbit. Bol, of course, jumped on this opportunity and brought up his supergun idea, and Kamel, who knew that Saddam really wanted a uniquely Iraqi prestige project, was very excited about the super gun idea. And they eventually allotted the project $25 million, and Gerald Bowles' company dubbed it Project 839. The Iraqis would give it a much cooler name, namely Project Babylon. And they began construction on a 100-meter-long artillery cannon.

That is like, what, 320 feet long, I think? And it had a bore of, I believe, 10 feet. Jesus. Yeah. and it had a bore of i believe 10 feet jesus um yeah they would never finish it but they did build a baby babylon which was i believe 30 meters long so still about 100 feet long with a bore of like five feet or something like that and tested it a few times i believe um but yeah so this this guy gerald bull was pretty deep into the iraqi arms industry by the end of the war yeah i can imagine how he sold this to saddam he's like you know i got this idea for a space cannon and saddam's like you know i like big guns as much as the next time this sounds pretty fucking stupid and gerald's like i'll name it the saddam cannon

and saddam's like when do you when can you start i mean honestly that's pretty much what happened um that's kind of how a lot of people ended up selling things to saddam uh but yeah so unfortunately or fortunately none of uh bull's's input really had much effect on the end of the war itself. Because by the time he was starting to draw up designs for various guns, be they artillery pieces or space cannons, the war was pretty much over. So the war ended in kind of over the summer of 1988. So the war ended in kind of over the summer of 1988. And in order to do this, the Iraqis produced enormous quantities of arms and ammunition in order to eventually rout Iraqi forces or sorry, Iranian forces and force a ceasefire or and then an eventual peace agreement. So the war ended in, I believe, August of 1988, officially. But that's not quite where the story ends. We've still got about a year and a half to go

before really finishing off the story. And that will involve kind of one last really crazy thing. So after the war, the Iraqi arms industry was really in full swing they did not with uh reduce spending um on military procurement after the war ended so even though they were no longer fighting anybody they were still spending tens of billions of dollars a year on producing uh new equipment buying buying new weapons and building new factories and chemical plants and things like that. The military industry employed over 100,000 people. And by this point, they had probably the best educated workforce in the entire Arab world because they had spent

billions expanding the university system in order to get Iraqi engineers into engineering in order to build guns. Then they were also starting to do license assembly and production of T-55s and T-72 tanks. In fact, they even modified the T-72 with a Chinese electro-optical dazzler active protection system, which was similar I don't know if you know about the Shdora it's basically they designed it so if you fire a laser guided missile at the tank

it'll point at the laser and disrupt it so the missile just goes off and blows up and so they bought they bought some of these from China and were installing them on their T-72s. In fact, I think the Russians were kind of the first to do active protection systems. They had one in the 1970s on T-55s, actually, but it never really went into major production.

And they sold – it was called the Drozd APS. It was called the Drozd APS, and they sold them to China and an unidentified Middle Eastern customer, which was probably Iraq, because I don't really know who else would have bought it at the time. But anyway, yeah, they were producing aAL-1 anti-tactical ballistic missile, which was a missile designed locally and produced locally to shoot down ballistic missiles fired at Iraq. They were also producing the Waleed long-range ballistic missile, howitzer and the 210mm FAL self-propelled howitzer, which fired a 200kg shell over 40km. What's that? They liked their big guns. Yeah, and they were also producing a number of rocket artillery systems

and other licensed production of Soviet 122mm howitzers. They also, on December 7th of 1989, they test-launched the Tammuz rocket, which was capable of putting satellites in orbit or firing a guided missile up to 3,000 kilometers. But it wasn't a cannon. It was not a cannon, and so Gerard Bull did not care about it,

and Saddam probably didn't care about it either. There's actually an interesting footnote to the whole Gerard Bolt story, and that was in 1990, he was assassinated by the Mossad. Oh yeah, I was going to get to that. So apparently his space gun was more grounded in reality than we gave him credit for. Honestly, I think it was um i know i think the u.s briefly toyed with um testing similar concepts after his death but i think ultimately no one's really quite crazy enough to do it for real and give it what it really deserves because i mean if they did

end up producing it it wouldn't just be able to put satellites in orbit it could also put shells in tel aviv and that reminds me exactly to uh what about a month ago now where the u.s army came out with uh their plan to come up with an artillery piece that could fire like a thousand kilometers is that's like so space cannon all right yeah what are you gonna do with that yeah i don't know yeah but basically by like late 1989 the iraqis were producing pretty much everything they would need as well as a lot of stuff they really didn't need um and uh the only thing they weren't building at the time was aircraft but they were even trying to amend that lacking so they signed a deal with our old friends the french to license assemble

60 mirage 2000s which is the newest um french fighter jet which i believe came out in the mid-80s, as well as licensed production of 60 Alpha Jet trainers. And this would be a, I think it was like a $10 billion deal or something like that. And once they finished the local assembly or production of these aircraft, they would be able to build their own aircraft industry on top of that expertise gained and then produce their own Iraqi aircraft. So Saddam was pretty proud of what he had built, and he kind of wanted to show it off a little bit. And so between April 28th and May 1st of 1989, he hosted a massive arms exposition in Baghdad, which he called the first Baghdad International Exhibition for Military Production,

in which over 100 companies from dozens of countries showed up. And I love this. The motto of this expo was Defense Equipment for Peace and Prosperity. Of course. Definitely doesn't sound like a, you know, oxymoron. And that's definitely not something that um saddam hussein should ever say no but um to kind of really underscore the the the cynicism the greed and the violence of the whole iraqi military industry and the various companies that and countries that helped build it the whole expo opened with a pretty shocking incident of violence in which um an egyptian alpha jet aircraft or sorry an alpha jet aircraft

piloted by an egyptian pilot was going to be shown at the the expo and it was coming into land at the airport which was where the expo and it was coming into land at the airport, which was where the expo was occurring. But they miscalculated the flight path and they strayed slightly too close to the presidential palace where there were many anti-aircraft guns manned by the Republican Guard. Oh, God. They immediately shot down the aircraft. The pilot and co-pilot were able to eject and survive, but the jet crashed into a civilian neighborhood

and killed dozens of people. Yeah. That might be the most Saddam way to begin anything. Yeah, that's kind of what I'm thinking. It's just unnecessarily violent and brutal, all for no purpose whatsoever. Okay, everybody, welcome to my second book launch. Now, if you pay attention i'm

gonna unleash this tiger into the local elementary school honestly the more you read about like especially his sons uday oh my god who say they're fucking nuts yeah did you see the movie um the devil's double yes yes fantastic movie or at least it was before I studied the Middle East. I haven't watched it since, but it was pretty good back then. It may not hold up, but it's worth a watch, I think. I was really hoping for an excuse to talk about Uday and Kusei during this series, because they're so snidely whiplash evil. Oh, yeah. They're messed up. Yeah, and when you study history, it's like you can't call anybody outright evil because you have to put them in the context of their time.

And like, you know, I understand why they did X, Y and Z. But it's like, oh, no, these guys were born around the same time I was and they're fucking terrible people. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. The more I hear about particularly Uday, like it's just it's just depressing like it stops being like you can't even laugh at it like from a like haha they were so crazy kind of way like they were just fucked up like right but um but anyway like at the expo a lot of the iraqi stuff on display was kind of crude or literally just shells that like were pretending to be real things um like gerald bull had a 210 millimeter self-propelled howitzer there that was literally

just like a model but he was pretending it was real um has this been on a cardboard i mean probably something like that yeah and they also had a they modified a t55 which is supposed to have a hundred millimeter gun but they had stuck the 125 millimeter gun from a t72 into the turret and uh there's like no way that would actually work um in real life but it looked cool as hell so they made sure it was prominently displayed. They just shoved it in the turret and were like, look, it totally functions. Pretty much, yeah.

So there's a French engineer who was in attendance who commented on the production quality of a lot of the Iraqi stuff. And he said, quote, they don't lose over any sleep over quality control, do they? And you know something? In the end, they're right. We spend a fortune trying to smooth out those rough edges. We make three-star bombs, polished as a mirror and as expensive as jewels. But in the end, they're all the same.

They only get used once, and the guy who's on the receiving end of one of these is never going to complain because of a few manufacturing defects. And so, yeah, so while some of the Iraqi equipment on display may have been less than practical, nonetheless, Saddam had built up a pretty impressive collections of weapons and industry. And in fact, the French chief of staff or equivalent high-level military position, his name is Maurice Schmidt, he was in, and he said, or he commented on a lot of the French equipment, which was on display. And he said later on that, I began to wonder whether or not we hadn't gone a bit too far. I realized we had better begin paying closer attention to what the Iraqis were developing. And, yeah, so the expo ended.

And less than a year later, Iraq invaded Kuwait. And soon after, the United States, United Kingdom, France, Saudi Arabia, and another of other countries launched a sustained bombing campaign of Iraqi industry, both military and civilian. Most of Iraq's military industry was destroyed, as well as most of its civilian industry and a great deal of civilian infrastructure. British troops who were deployed to Saudi Arabia in order to soon launch an invasion, many of them were not issued with desert camouflage. And you want to know why?

Because they had sold all of their desert camouflage to Iraq two years earlier. Yeah. That might be my favorite part of this whole thing. France would have had airstrikes, but they sold their entire, uh, fucking Mirage fleet to Iraq. Yeah.

Um, and they're the, the Iraqi equipment, fleet to Iraq. Yeah. And the Iraqi equipment pretty much was useless against the American. Their T-55s were pretty much immediately wiped out by American M1 Abrams tanks or bombed by F-117 stealth

jets or F-15s or shot down all their MiG-21s and mirages and stuff but honestly they acquitted themselves surprisingly well given the circumstances for there's one battle um in which iraqi t-55s had been equipped with kind of a a local iraqi produced like laminate armor that they had applied to the outside of the turret and the hull. And it worked very well. Like the Saudis launched, there's one particular tank or Iraqi T-55 tank with this armor, which was hit by multiple Saudi anti-tank missiles and sustained no damage whatsoever. Um, and so really the failure or the reason the Iraqis were overwhelmed so quickly had less to do with the quality of their equipment and more to do with like systemic crippling issues of leadership and training and strategy and tactics and basically literally everything else that requires a military to run except equipment.

military to run except equipment. That was something that I came across, and I think it's going to be in part two or three. But it was the Saddam, it was like multiple firsthand accounts of conscripts in Saddam's army and the philosophy of Saddam's military leadership, which was, there was none. philosophy of Saddam's military leadership, which was there was none. And the fact that his idea on military leadership and training boiled down to like kind of if you were a singer or like or like an artist, it's like you either have it or you don't. And it wasn't something that you like. The concept of being a warrior was not something that could be trained, which is the most absurd thing that I've ever fucking heard of.

It was pretty crazy. And of course, there was the problem of appointing political leaders to military positions when they had no idea what they were doing, or just executing generals who lost one particular battle. He did enjoy executing people.

Oh, he did. Yeah. oh he did yeah i'll give him credit for this much though even though his soldiers were executed uh for retreating and and his officers were executed uh for retreating uh for through most of history and on this podcast we've um we've gone over a few uh instances where something like this has happened especially like i think it's their second episode we talked about luigi cadorna who brought who actually brought back like roman decimation but you know nobody ever executes the officers it's almost always the soldiers except yeah at least saddam is equal in his insanity yeah saddamsein, icon of equality. Equal opportunity executioner, I suppose. That's right.

campaign against Kurds in northern Iraq, including the, I believe, March of 1988, the attack on Halabja, in which Iraqi chemical weapons were used en masse to murder thousands of civilians. Right. All with the full knowledge of the United States, United Kingdom, Soviet Union, France, and so on. And it took another two years, and it took Iraq invading and annexing Kuwait in order for the United States and its allies to turn against Saddam. So it didn't matter how many people he executed, how many people he gassed to death,

or how many countries he invaded, as long as it wasn't Kuwait or Saudi Arabia. And I feel like there is a lesson to be learned, but nobody learned the lesson as we can see now with Yemen, American support for the Saudi war in Yemen, unconditionally selling weapons as they kill by the tens of thousands Yemenii civilians so yeah and there's there's a lot of um things that we can kind of see um in between the two and it hasn't come out exactly yet but i know um obviously no everybody knows about the murder of jamal khashoggi by now but um the rumor is and i would not doubt if it's true the reason why he was killed is that he was going to expose saudi usage of chemical weapons and yeah wow if that's true that's crazy and of course nothing's

going to change no um no because i mean look what's happening in syria um yeah i'm granted i'm by no means advocating for military action in Syria. I'm one of the – I don't know if it's kind of an oxymoron that I'm an amateur military historian and a pacifist at the same time. But whenever there's chemical warfare or chemical weapon usage, everybody likes to point fingers. Oh, well, they have it. No, they have it no they have it and i mean these things aren't easy to make and keep and use effectively um there's terrorist groups generally don't have actual chemical weapons i mean we saw limit limited chemical weapons usage in iraq uh during the american occupation when uh they decided to put uh it was like chlorine precursors in ieds oh yeah and it worked terribly because that's how chlorine bombs work yeah it's

a very like precise scientific process in order to like if you actually want to kill people with chemical weapons you can't just like dump chlorine on them yeah um and you know uh i would say if uh an f-16 drops a mustard bomb canister on fucking sana we probably know is saudi arabia yeah um but yeah i don't know if anything else has has come out about that but i know that was the rumors that and because they they had been dealing with him for years and that'd be a very good reason to murder him yeah i think so i mean another theory i've heard with him is that he was killed because less of what he is doing but more of because he was never really like a big opposition guy he was usually pretty you know mainstream status quo and the like saudia status

but then um and as and he was well connected with the previous um crown prince or king or whoever and uh and so by killing him you're kind of showing to everyone else that uh like you're not safe right it was it was uh was it solomon's pretty much showing where he and you weren't safe anywhere right right and also showing that he's and you weren't safe anywhere. Right. Right. And also showing that he's bulletproof because look, nothing's happening to him yet. Although I think,

I mean, granted I, in this day and age, you see like one word from a tweet and you then base your entire worldview off of it. But, um, I think I saw another rumor,

which is like his position in Saudi is a lot more tenuous than he might have us think. Interesting. But of course, that is entirely literally based off probably one word I saw like three days ago in a tweet somewhere. That's okay. That's how you run a country these days. Pretty much. But thank you so much for coming on and going into detail about the insanity that was Saddam's weapons manufacturing complex. Thank you.

Thank you for letting me talk about it for an hour. Yeah. Nobody wants to do that anymore. Well, I mean, who else am I supposed to talk to than the guy that's in Iraq right now? Yeah, I suppose. You know, I am in a pretty good position for that I guess yeah and you know we had a little bit of a power outage there in the middle but that's alright

it's a developing country yeah that we bombed a lot specifically destroying its electrical infrastructure so clearly George W. Bush is fucking my podcast right now dude but he is in the hashtag resistance oh jesus christ oh man i i totally off topic but i explode on somebody that i knew uh i know pretty well um like in person they're not like family but i've known them for

probably 10 years and uh they said you know like say what you would say what you will about george w bush but at least he was uh he respected america or something stupid like that i guess that's nationalism distilled distilled into a fine if american nationalism was distilled into anything it'd be a bud light sold at walmart oh jesus you're not wrong uh so before we go do you have anything uh that you like to plug like a book show your twitter anything like that um no books yet however if you would like to see more hot takes about t5555s, you can follow me on Twitter at Haycraft underscore Travis. That's H-A-Y-C-R-A-F-T underscore T-R-A-V-I-S. All right. Thank you so much again for joining us. And maybe we can get you back on some other

time. Talk about some more people getting bound with German-made chemicals. That would be a really good time. Yeah. And thanks for having me on. Yeah, anytime, man. Have a good one. Yeah, you too. Hi, this is Nate Bethea,

and I'm the producer of the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. This show is brought to you by Audible. And as it just so happens, Audible is offering our listeners a free audiobook with a 30-day trial membership. Just go to audibletrial.com forward slash donkeys and browse the selection of audio programs. Download its title for free and start listening.

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