Pod Save the World - 20 years after the invasion of Iraq

Episode Date: March 17, 2023

Ben and Tommy record a bonus episode to mark the 20-year anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq to try and answer the question: how did the Iraq war change America and the world? They’re joined by journalist and Iraq war supporter turned vocal opponent Peter Beinart, and Congressman and Iraq war veteran Ruben Gallego. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast. 

Welcome back to POTSave the World. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Ben Rhodes. And we are back with a special episode to mark the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. On March 20th, 2003, Ben, U.S. planes started dropping bombs on targets in Iraq. Many of those initial strikes were designed to target Saddam Hussein himself and his kids and decapitate the government. Obviously, that didn't work. And later, U.S. forces invaded the country and have been there basically ever since. It's kind of hard to wrap your head around the fact that that was 20 years ago. I know that's like an old guy comment, but doesn't feel like it. Yeah, it doesn't. Although it's funny, I moved to D.C. in June of 2002, fresh out of grad school. Me too. I was there in 2002. So to me, it kind of traces

the arc of my entire professional life. It's kind of interesting. You know, I was this kid at a school. And then, you know, within a few months of being in D.C., like the drumbeat to war started. And so It's a very cute memory for me. Yeah, me too. It's hard to describe how terrible the bush years were if you didn't live through them. So today we want to try to unpack the question 20 years later. What was the impact of the Iraq War? It's a big, sprawling question that spans continents in many years.

But here's how we're going to try and tackle this. So you're going to hear two interviews. Ben spoke with Peter Beinart. Ben, can you just explain why you wanted to talk with Peter and kind of what the thrust of that conversation was? Yeah, no, it's connected to the fact that, you know, when I, moved to D.C. Peter was the editor of the New Republic, even though he wasn't that much older than us. He was a very young guy. And he was one of the most strident supporters of the war, editorializing constantly in support of the war. And the New Republic was kind of the home base for like liberal

support for the Iraq War. Peter very, I think, admirably kind of not only apologized for that later, but kind of examined what his own thinking was and why he kind of fell for that. And so we talk about what it was like to go through the process of holding himself accountable for his own views on Iraq, why, you know, others didn't among the many Iraq war supporters, and what some of the consequences have been in the region, in Iraq, for American foreign policy, and the opportunity costs, the things that we could have done other than invade Iraq. So it's a great conversation. Peter is really smart, as always, and very honest and reflective. Yeah, very thoughtful guy. A deep cut by an artwork that's very good is the Icarus syndrome.

It's about American hubris, which I think will be a theme of today's conversation. So after that, you'll hear my conversation with Ruben Gallego. Ruben Gallego is a member of Congress. He is currently running for the U.S. Senate in Arizona. He's also an Iraq war veteran and one who was a grunt and saw some truly brutal combat during his tour back in 2005. I talked with him about, you know, what it was like serving his very public battles with PTSD and his friends battles with PTSD.

and how a rock informs his work as a lawmaker and how he votes, it's still very hard for me to do an interview and be like, please, for my show, talk about, you know, some of the worst moments of your life. But I think he's doing it to, like, destigmatized conversations around PTSD. And, you know, I think wipe away kind of the bullshit movie version of what a war is like. Yeah, no, he, and he was a real hero. I mean, he was in, like, some of the toughest fighting.

And, yeah, you have to remind yourselves constantly and check ourselves. that there are people who experience this much more intensely than any of us did. And so I'm really glad we had that perspective. Yeah, for sure. But before we get to those interviews, Ben and I are going to try to just set the scene and offer some thoughts and some context about, you know, 20 years after Iraq. So, you know, Ben, there's sort of a very literal way to frame the question of, or to answer the question of what was the war's impact.

And that's just with raw numbers. So I'm going to read a few of them. A lot of them come from the Brown University, the cost of war project, which is truly excellent and worth checking out if you want to dig into the the stats and some other press reporting. So, you know, first just the death toll, 4,598 members of the U.S. military, 3,650 U.S. contractors. Between 45,000 and 48,719 members of the Iraqi military and police were killed between 34,000 and 39,881 opposition fighters, between 185 and 208,000 Iraqi civilians were killed. So just a staggering, staggering death toll, especially for the Iraqis.

And then in terms of just financial cost, I mean, the estimates range from two to three trillion, but, you know, I think that could honestly be too low. I saw recently that the Congressional Budget Office rescored the cost of the Pact Act, which was that bill that passed last year after an insane Republican filibuster for veterans who were exposed to burn pits, gives them VA health care. And they found that that bill alone is going to cost $800 million over the next decade. And a lot of those are Iraq veterans. And remember, the Bush administration projected that the cost of the war would be between 50 and $60 billion.

And then, you know, oil revenues would pay for it. So, Ben, like, those numbers are staggering. You know, I think maybe what's more shocking is how little official accounting is of the cost. You can't always nail down these numbers precisely. But I think more than a million U.S. military personnel and contractors, like total served in Iraq at some point. It's worth noting that 2,500 U.S. troops are still there. First question, like, what numbers jump out of you? And, like, how do you make sense of a cost that large?

I mean, first to take the human toll, you mentioned Ruben Gallego's kind of PTSD. So when you think of the wounded Americans or the Americans that lost loved ones, the circles of trauma go out from that, right? So that's family members who lost a loved one or out. to care for a deeply disabled veteran, for instance. So that gets you, you know, you just think about all the other lies that are impacted by that loss of life. And in Iraq itself, I mean, I remember I went to Iraq kind of right, kind of at the height of some of the fighting in 2006.

And at that time, there was a lot of sectarian violence, militias. And there were dozens of people just being killed, you know, the Shia, Sunni violence, civilians being killed in the night. And kind of what I've always thought about is, like, what must it have been like to be, you know, like a 10-year-old Iraqi when the war started and to basically live surrounded by this violence your whole life, you know. Ben, one just anecdote on that. The BBC just did a series on the Iraq War that was brilliant.

The first strike on Saddam was at this retreat he had called Dora Farms. It was like a compound outside of Baghdad. The BBC interviewed a kid who was 12 years old when that strike happened and lived in that neighborhood. And that was just a perspective you never heard for the first few years of the invasion. That's right. And because I make that point because like then, you know, that's, you know, millions, tens of millions of people that, again, you know, they may not be in the list of the numbers killed, but the trauma, you know, of just living around that violence for that long a period of time and the displacement, you know, their refugee flows or internally displaced peoples. they're people that lost their homes. I don't think we can adequately get our minds around the human cost.

And then on the money, yeah, I'm glad you mentioned the Bush estimate of $50 billion because it just speaks to the dishonesty in how this whole thing was presented. But just think about what could have been done with that money. I mean, we basically could have solved the climate crisis. You know, if in 2003 someone was like, okay, we're going to spend $2 trillion to transition to clean energy. I mean, I know that it wasn't politically feasible. But still, I mean, just that's money that wasn't.

spend on other things, you know, or that's, you know, and that, that's what I think about is just like, man, what, what, what, not only how bad did this go, but what else could we have done? Yeah. Yeah. And also, you know, I've read that since the war, I mean, there's a lot of, I think, sort of still unaccounted cost. I mean, I talked about that score of the Pact Act, the burn pit legislation. That's a score of the cost over 10 years, but it's going to, yeah, they're going to pay benefits and health care longer than that. And then there have been a bunch of reports about how babies born in Fallujah have dealt with, which is some of the where the worst fighting was in Iraq, babies born there have dealt with a disproportionately

higher levels of birth defects. So this is, you know, sort of an ongoing daily tragedy for the Iraqi people. I mean, another way I think to think about the cost is, from a U.S. perspective especially, is the vast reputational damage that it did to our standing in the world. Obviously, Iraq didn't have weapons of mass destruction. They didn't have chemical weapons, biological weapons, they weren't pursuing nuclear weapons that damaged the intelligence community's reputation and our credibility generally. I mean, what Saddam Hussein ultimately told the U.S. government when he was finally captured was he had given up his WMD program, but didn't want to say so because he didn't want Iran to know so that they wouldn't, you know, because they'd fought a war

together, right? So he was just trying to keep it a secret. Yeah, it's, I mean, the credibility costs, I think are similarly kind of massive beyond the surface because I think when people look back on this from history, the period of time like after the Cold War was this window of time when things seem to be moving the right direction. Like democracy is spreading, globalization spreading, standards of living arising, you know, all these things seem to be trending in the right direction. And the U.S. is in this moment of primacy, in this moment of, you know, almost unparalleled historical, hegemony over a lot of, you know, a lot of global events, not all. I think Iraq is kind of when that ends. You know, I think when people look back, the decision invade Iraq kind of unraveled the

order that the U.S. is trying to build, which was an international order based on kind of international law and international norms and all this stuff. And to do something so self-evidently stupid and flagrantly against those international principles, you know, to invade and occupy a country on a false premise. I think that that was like the, you know, the explosion that began to unravel the international order and the trust in the United States. Because it was both the fact that we'd done something so against all of the norms that we were trying to uphold.

But also, people didn't trust us anymore. We look, like, we didn't know what we were doing. You know, like we, you know, and it's kind of the veneer of American, you know, ingenuity and, you know, was all pierced in Iraq. Yeah. And, you know, so I mentioned the WMD. It wasn't just the intelligence assessments about weapons of mass destruction that were wrong.

President Bush overtly tried to connect Iraq to 9-11 and al-Qaeda by saying things like Iraq trained al-Qaeda members in bombmaking and poisons and deadly gases. That was totally false. And listen, but I actually do have some sympathy for members of Congress who voted for the war based on the very flawed intelligence they were given. But it's also worth remembering that, according to the Washington Post, only six U.S. senators and a handful of members of the House read beyond the five-page executive summary of the 92-page National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq. They had access to, like, admittedly, a very hastily and poorly put together product. But the fact

that a bunch of, most of them didn't even read it is, I don't know, that that, that, that should be something you're ashamed of. Yeah, and I, you know, it's funny Tommy. Like, we've talked about the blob and, you know, my kind of critiques of the foreign policy establishment. To me, that all goes back to that debate because I remember, you know, I was ambivalent about this war. Hey, it was made more the confusion of, I thought these guys were in Afghanistan, you know.

Yeah, yeah. I remember that when Colin Powell made that case to the UN and he held up like a fake vial of anthrax and I believed Colin Powell. Like, you know, it's almost hard. Maybe younger people don't remember. there was a time when there were people like Colin Powell that everybody trusted. And so to me, I've always looked skeptically at people who said that they know better, you know, particularly in the national security space because of that. So I think we lost something intangible,

not just the intelligence communities trust. It's the members of Congress that didn't read the intelligence, like you said. It's the people like Colin Powell who knew better. We know from accounts that he was against the time, but still went up and read this script that was full of lies, essentially. And the consequences then spread from that because the justification was entirely about weapons of mass destruction or was maybe about this tenuous connection to al-Qaeda. Those things are proven wrong right away. And so then after the invasion, Bush kind of post facto says it was really about democracy and spreading democracy and ending tyranny in the world. And I think that did a lot to discredit democracy. If you look at the data around democratic backsliding in the world, it kind of

starts right after the Iraq war. It really does. And I think the democracy got connected to American imperialism, frankly, for lack of a better way putting it, because Bush was kind of describing this insane war as about democracy. And that kind of discredited, you know, quote-unquote democracy promotion around the world in ways that I think contributed to the tide turning against democracy. Yeah, I mean, democracy promotion sort of turned into a euphemism for, hey, we're going to invade you. Ben, do you remember in around 2005, 2006, there was a reporter at like congressional quarterly or one of those publications that went around doing all these interviews with like counterterrorism officials, lawmakers, members of Congress, law enforcement, et cetera. And at the end, it would be like, hey, what's the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite? And almost none of them could answer it.

I mean, like, sort of like the most critical schism in Islam from a religious perspective and also sort of an ethnic political, how the region is. divided in terms of like who is sort of adversarial with others, they just didn't know the answer. And it's astonishing level of ignorance about a country that we were going to basically occupy and try to run. And people also forget that initial period when Paul Bremer was like basically the colonial governor of Iraq, like we were running the country, right? And what's so like ironic about that is we invade this country and take out a Sunni dictatorial regime that represented, a minority, the Sunni minority that dominated the Shia majority. So what happens when we then have a majoritarian rule in Iraq? Well, the Shia majority takes power and guess who else is Shia?

The Iranians. And so the same neocons who are always frothing at the mouth about the needing take on the Iranians, the single biggest strategic gift to Iran since the Iranian revolution was the American invasion of Iraq and the installation of a Shiolid government. And that's not to say that there shouldn't be a democracy. But like nobody even thought this through. Like nobody like because they didn't like they just didn't project forward what it would mean to kind of upend the Pandora's box

of this sectarian conflict that had kind of been simmering underneath the surface of Saddam Hussein's rule. Yeah, it's hard to overstate how little and how poor the post-invasion planning was. Everyone should read, if you're interested, fiasco by Tom Ricks, which documents the sort of first couple of years after the invasion. Basically, the U.S. did not send enough troops.

And that meant that things, there were, you know, for example, massive Iraqi ammo depots were just left unguarded. And those were looted and used against U.S. troops for years and years and years. We basically just didn't secure millions and millions of weapons that were then used to fire at U.S. troops. And we dismissed the Iraqi army, right? So we basically disband the Iraqi army that then becomes the insurgency with those weapons, you know. Assassins Gate by George Packers, another great book on this. So just complete absence of planning and

understanding and all the poor decision making to try to wipe this slate clean, get rid of the entire Iraqi state and rebuild it from scratch. You know, I will say, Tommy, like, that is all true. But sometimes it bothers me that some war supporters, like a lot of them, will say, well, it wasn't the war, it was poor execution. And to me, sometimes these debates about not having sent enough troops, all true, kind of allied the fact that the decision was fatally flawed from the beginning. And you might have had much better execution and it might have been like slightly less bad, but you still would have had a complete and utter fucking mess. And so I think we have to not let people off the hook. I mean, God rest his soul. Like John McCain was kind of like the,

I think the exemplar of this view. Like, you know, and, and, and, And I just think that that avoids accountability for the decision itself, which is what really set this all in motion. Absolutely. The other thing you hear a lot, which is true, is that Saddam Hussein was a very bad guy. He had WMD in the 1980s. He used chemical weapons against Iran. He used chemical weapons against his own people.

And after the Gulf War in the early 90s, the CIA figured out that Saddam Hussein's nuclear program was further along than they had realized. So they felt burned in the other direction from Saddam previously. But again, that doesn't let you off the hook for using completely flawed and cherry-picked intelligence to make the case that they currently have WMD when we all know they did not. You know, in terms of reputational risk, it's also worth noting that the Iraq War created serious tensions with allies like France and Germany. You and I are old enough to know, remember when the House of Representatives banned French fries and renamed them Freedom Fries. That actually happened. Just so people know that the Republican House members were just as fucking crazy in some ways back then,

they just kind of hid their crazy, came out on things like Freedom Prize. Yeah. You know, there was a total lack of accountability for a torture of Iraqis at Abu Ghra prison. I mean, the list goes on and on. That gets into this big, big question of like, what was the impact in the legacy of the Iraq war kind of globally? Let's look abroad first. So I think you made the most important point already, which is toppling Saddam Hussein increased Iran's influence. in the Middle East. And also, I think, led to the rise of all these Shiite militia groups that we have

been fighting ever since. Like, it's hard to overstate how beneficial toppling Saddam Hussein, their arch enemy for years of our decades, was for the Iranians. Yeah. And all this sectarian tension in the region. So, like, you take this Sunni-led adversary of Iran that's right next door, you remove that government and basically the government you install becomes very kind of infiltrated with and friendly to the Iranians. And then in the kind of chaos of the insurgency in the sectarian violence there, all these Shia militias, you know, take root, many of whom have ties to Iran. That sectarian violence kind of contributes to, not kind of, it directly contributes to the rise of ISIS. ISIS is al-Qaeda in Iraq. So Al-Qaeda in Iraq didn't exist before the war. They take hold in

the insurgency. They become a lethal part of that insurgency. And then over time they evolve into ISIS. And then the sectarian violence in Iraq, it spills into neighboring Syria, where you have an al-a-white, kind of Shia regime governing a Sunni majority. So kind of the mirror image in some ways of the sectarian dynamic in Iraq. And, you know, it goes from there. The sectarian violence and conflicts and terrorism across the region were made exponentially worse by the invasion of Iraq. Absolutely. And we're still living with the concept. You know, it's contributed to everything that we see in the region today, the Saudi Iran conflicts and all these proxy wars, they all kind of have their own flavor of the same basic sectarian conflict that was unleashed

by the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. It was like kicking over Hornets Nest that has been spreading around that region ever since. Yeah. And look, you know, there's lots of knockout effects from that. I mean, this sort of gets us into the domestic politics question. But all the people that I think, you know, are in many cases fairly frustrated that Obama, didn't enforce the red line when it came to Syria, need to remember that Iraq played a role there because the British Parliament voted against joining U.S. strikes on Syria with MPs saying explicitly that the U.K. should not blindly follow the U.S. again like Tony Blair did with Bush and Iraq. Germany was just as unenthusiastic, right? I mean, that ghost followed the Syria decision.

That week after the chemical weapons attack, I remember, and I wrote about this, But like in the first briefing we had on the intelligence around the chemical weapons attack, which is clearly Assad, right? But Jim Clapper, who's a great guy. But he comes into the... Director of National Intelligence. Director of National Intelligence, sorry. And the first thing he says is the intelligence on this is not a slam dunk.

Now... That goes of George Tenet. The ghost of George Tenet. Because George Tenet famously said the WMD case was a slam dunk. And so he was, I think, making a point of saying, like, hey, don't let the intelligence community be the basis for this war. Like, if you want to make that decision, we'll give you the information. And I actually then had to go write the assessment of the chemical weapons attack because the intelligence community did not want to write a document that could be used as a basis for war. And you felt the ghosts of Iraq that whole week because then the Brits, they pull out, their parliament votes against us.

And then when Obama says, okay, I'll only do this if Congress authorizes. it because I actually believe Congress should authorize military intervention, the support evaporated because nobody wanted to take the same kind of vote that they took on the Iraq war, because that ended up being politically devastating to some people. And so you just felt the ghost of Iraq, like the people didn't trust us, the intelligence community didn't want to be out front again. Nobody was with us except the French, like literally the only country willing to do this. And look, that was a very difficult and painful circumstance, but very connected to the to the ghosts of the Iraq war and the lessons of the Iraq war, which are maybe we can't,

maybe we don't automatically make things better by invading countries. Yeah. And you talked about sort of Congress opting out of hard decisions when it comes to war and peace. I mean, the politics of the Iraq war in the U.S. are kind of weird. Obviously, Bush got reelected over John Kerry in 2004, but that was, you know, a complicated choice between two people who had supported the war. But, you know, then Republicans get crushed in the 2006 midterms in part because of Iraq. I would argue that Iraq is a huge part of why Obama won the primary, a auxiliary Clinton, yeah. Trump pretended to be anti-war,

even though he supported it, but that obviously helped him. And then now we have Joe Biden as president who voted for the war, but I don't know, I guess it's been a long time and it's just a completely different election. But it's also the common thread, right?

Because like Obama gets elected in opposition to the war, he pulls out most of the troops from Morocco and Afghanistan. We went from, I think, 180,000 troops in those countries at the beginning to like 10,000. to 15,000 at the end, and he doesn't intervene to remove Assad in Syria. And then Trump kind of becomes this America first kind of isolationist guy. And then Joe Biden pulls out of Afghanistan completely, you know. So the one kind of common thread is this shift to, like in both parties, to like a serious reluctance to use military force, which, by the way, may be healthy. Yeah, yeah.

Now, there's another thing. I've always thought about two times. He said, like, what it did psychically, particularly the American right wing, because if I was a Fox News viewer in 2003, I mean, I was told George Bush was Winston Churchill, we're going to win these great victories. I remember the National Review, like, you know, had him on the cover, the Liberator. You know, he's flying on aircraft carriers with Mission accomplished banners. And if you watch Fox, you're like mainlining at that time, like a diet of jingoism and

America triumphalism. And even as the work went bad, like you're constantly being told, it's about to turn around, you know, Dick Cheney's saying the insurgencies and its lost throws. And, and we did, that didn't happen. Those people were lied to, you know, those Fox viewers, as they're continuing to lie to. But I make the point because something kind of weird happened as we enter the Obama years and becomes clear that we're not going to win great victories in the war in terror. In fact, you could argue we're kind of losing aspects of it. when you look at the news in a place like Iraq, I think when superpowers don't win wars,

and particularly when they don't win wars that ended up being based on faulty premises, like dark stuff happens. And I think people start looking for scapegoats, right? I mean, anytime a country loses a war, there's always a scapegoating that happens. And suddenly the enemy that used to be on Fox, like Saddam Hussein, that enemy became radical Islam,

a black president, immigrants at the southern order. The otherization that used to all be, this kind of this machinery of hate that was chinned up to support the Iraq war, kind of moved around and just started to encompass other targets because it was inconvenient to talk about the fact that we weren't going to win the wars that George Bush promised. I mean, if you just line up the statements from the Bush people

about what was going to happen to Iraq with the reality, it's an astonishing failure against what they promised people. And I think it explains, a lot why the Republican Party went kind of nuts and why their voters were like, I don't trust the establishment. The system is rigged. And they were willing to listen to a guy like Trump. It's not, you know, it's not kind of rocket science when you think about it. Yeah, two thoughts on the sort of cultural impact. I mean, one, in terms of the media and media coverage, like Fox was by far the most pro-war, right? And it was indistinguishable from sort of white house propaganda. It also had the highest

ratings. Weirdly, Ben, I was thinking back to Phil Donahue was this anti-war voice on MSNBC. His show got canceled a month before the invasion. And I think, you know, looking back from today, I think the media has learned some lessons, like they're a little much more critical of intelligence, but not all of them. And also, you know, there were some reporters specifically Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landy. They worked at Knight Rider at the time, which I think doesn't exist anymore. But they published a series of stories questioning the case for war. And they really got it right by talking to not like, you know, the top people by talking to the senior administration officials. Yeah, they talked to like mid-level analysts and the bowels of the CIA and stuff. And it's not like those two are now huge

celebrities hosting Sunday shows while, you know, the big pundits who supported it and the columnists were punished. Like, you know, it didn't really harm the people who supported the war. And then, you know, I also read a really interesting piece in the FT about the author's sort of view that the Iraq War did not really have a widespread cultural impact. in the West, especially as compared to Vietnam. Now, I think, you know, my conversation with Ruben Gallego will make clear that it had an enormous impact on him. But, you know, you contrast Vietnam where there were protest songs, movies like born on

the 4th of July, platoon, full metal jacket. And, you know, after Iraq, there was like the Dixie Chicks getting, you know, ostracized for being anti-war. There was the heart locker. But there, you know, I think because Iraq was an all-volunteer army as opposed to Vietnam, with a draft and a way higher casualty count. There was just this like damage to our psyche that went a lot deeper. Yeah, that's a really interesting point.

And, you know, one of, we embedded in that, Tommy, we should point out that there was an anti-war movement, you know. There was. There were big protests. Globally huge protests. And in this country, they're a big protests. And what's really interesting to consider looking back is that the people that got it right have been far less successful than the people that got it wrong.

You made this point, but like, and I don't want to start naming names here, but I mean, just kind of look around at the senior figures and, you know, in American politics and media. Like, by and large, they're generally Iraq war supporters. And the people who were kind of dismissed as lefties around those debates, even though they were right, it was like still they were kind of evicted from the discourse, you know? And that's- It is unsurious. Says something kind of weird about the 21st century America, because you're right,

there was this kind of reckoning after Vietnam. I think your point about the draft is really true. The casualty count was higher in part because just medicine, battlefield medicine, saved a lot more lives in Iraq than they did in Vietnam, right? The casualties could have been as high, were that not the case? But I think also just the scale of incompetence. And because, you know, it's hard to admit when you were that wrong about something. You know, and I think America just has not wanted to confront that.

And again, we've mentioned that, you know, there was something called the Vietnam War Syndrome, which the blob types used to say, Americans' reluctance to go to war for a while after Vietnam was because of that. Well, you start to see people say, well, we don't, we can't have an Iraq war syndrome where we don't go to war because of what happened in Iraq. And it's like, why not? Like, maybe we should, maybe we should have an Iraq war syndrome.

Yeah, I mean, look, the medicine absolutely reduced the casualty count, but it's worth noting that the Brown University Cost of War Project estimates that 1.8 million U.S. veterans today have a disability as a result of post-9-11 war. So that includes Afghanistan. But on that cultural point, Ben, you know, I've heard people argue that, you know, maybe the intervention in Kosovo during the Clinton administration kind of lulled people back into this sense that humanitarian interventions were easy and just and everyone was like kind of looking for democracy. I read a great piece the other day by Chris Hayes that he wrote in 2006 where he talks about this phenomenon in the late 90s where everyone became obsessed with World War II and the greatest generation. And there was this sense that, you know, Vietnam scarred a generation of people because the government lied and the cost was so horrific. And that World War II was seen as this kind of pure war.

And there was a hunger around Iraq for a like manichaean, black, white kind of good war again, where we topple an evil dictator. And, you know, you and I were talking the other day that you're kind of starting to see that in the Ukraine discussion. And while I agree, like there's an obvious aggressor, Russia, and an obvious sort of. of good guy defending their territory in Ukraine to simplify things a lot. It doesn't mean it ends well. Yeah, there's an amazing book called Looking for the Good War by Elizabeth Samet. And I actually wrote a review of it. If people want to have the cheat sheet, but she makes entirely this point, which is that the kind of glorification, deification of the Greatest Generation, had a lot to do with like the politics of the moments when that took place.

And because it weighs framed, it's like literally like in all of human history, these are the greatest people ever. And, you know, the American exceptional is on steroids, you know. And I remember Tommy like when the World War II memorial opened on the mall, right? Which is great that that, you know, exists. But there was, you know, it's a kind of, it's a very triumphalist memorial. It's, you know, Greek kind of columns and, you know, there's nothing somber about it. And I remember at the time people saying this memorial says more about how Americans are thinking

today than how they think about World War II. Like there was the, because it gets to a cultural impact point. Like, there was like some desire to repeat the glory of like the Tom Brokhov version of World War II. By the way, without necessarily really dwelling on the horrors of World War II. Exactly. And again, I think we've learned in Iraq and Afghanistan that wars aren't that simple, you know, and actually another consequence you could argue, right, is taking our eye off Afghanistan for like seven years in the Bush years, you know, maybe Afghanistan would have

turned out differently if we didn't start another war before we finished the one in Afghanistan. Yeah. So I was thinking to sum it up. Like, I wonder if there is a big policy lesson here. I think there's sort of an obvious point that I talk about with Ruben Gallego, which is you cannot send the U.S. military to solve political problems in other countries. But I wonder if it's even bigger than that, which is that intervention should not just be a last resort. It's probably the least desirable option in any event, and that containment for Saddam Hussein probably would have worked. I would argue it's a lesson that our boss, Barack Obama, failed to learn when it came to Libya,

when we got pushed into a humanitarian intervention for, I think, perfectly just reasons and ones that were fairly reasoned at the time, that they were worried that Gaddafi was going to basically kill everyone in the city of Benghazi, but ultimately it has led to a failed state, and fighters from Libya and weapons from Libya have spread across northern Africa and the region and helped destabilize it. And that when you think about, I don't know, the next problem coming down the pike, like let's say North Korea, maybe that's something we should think hard about. Yeah, there's Phil Gordon, who worked in the Obama administration, is currently in the Kamala Harris's national advisor, had a pretty, like, famous quote, which was that, like, we, I don't want to get it wrong, but essentially, in Iraq, we went in with a lot of troops, and it was a disaster. In Libya, we went in with very, with no troops on the ground, and it was a disaster. And in Syria, we didn't intervene, and it was a disaster. And his point was essentially like the humility point about America's ability to shape the politics in other countries. One lesson for me, you know, not as a military expert, but as someone who's kind of lived up close to military questions for a long time now, is that the military can accomplish a specific mission, right? Like go kill Osama bin Laden, blow this thing up, destroy this infrastructure, right? That's what military is supposed to do.

Win this, you know, not build the thing after, right, or not replace the government. Because even in Libya, there's an interesting question of like, okay, there's one argument you shouldn't have intervened at all. But there's another argument that you stop them and save this city, Benghazi, that they were about to destroy. But then that's it. You don't keep going until Gaddafi's gone. The regime change component is where it really gets dicey. So I think not using U.S. military to engineer the politics and countries, having some humility about what can be achieved around the world. But also, I think having some respect, if the rest of the world thinks what you're doing is crazy, like maybe you should listen.

And like, you know, our closest allies other than Tony Blair, like, thought this was nuts and we're saying so at the time. And you can't set up a world that is supposed to be based on international rules and norms and the UN and all these things and then say, you know what, when I don't like the answer I get from that system, I'm going to ignore it. because that's the same thing. I mean, look, I'm not, it's not what aboutism, but it's essentially Putin's argument. You know, like, you know,

if I don't like the answer I get from the UN Security Council, I'm just going to completely ignore international law. And I think the U.S. doing that so flagrantly in those early Bush years on Iraq and a bunch of other stuff, torture Guantanamo,

it made a mockery of the system that we built. And so to me, I think there's a continued lesson that like, if we want other people to follow the rules and the norms, like, how could we possibly expect that to happen if we don't? And that applies to Ukraine, too, because that's why the global South is not on board with our Ukraine policy? Because they're like, why should we listen to you guys? Yeah, absolutely. Okay, we're going to take a quick break and we come back. You will hear Ben's

conversation with Peter Beinerd to stick around for that. We are very pleased to welcome back to Pod Save the World, Peter Beinart, who is the author of the Beinart Notebook, a newsletter that everybody should subscribe to on Substack. Peter, good to. talk to you again. Yeah, great to be with you. So, you know, we're talking about the anniversary of the Iraq War 20 years. It simultaneously seems like an extraordinary long time, but not that long. And you're like a really interesting guy to talk to. Just so people, you know, know your backstory, because we have people who listen to this podcast or probably the same age as the Iraq War. You know, you and I were kind of the same, you know, in a lot of ways in that

I'll set this up as kind of our parallel stories, right? Because I moved to DC after 9-11 in June of 2002. I was pretty hawkish back then. I was super, I was a New Yorker. I'd seen the attacks. I was shaped as we'll talk about by the kind of liberal 90s. And you were the editor of the New Republic. And so I was like your target reader, 24-year-old think tank employee in D.C. like ready for the war and terror, you know. And you guys editorialized. really pretty aggressively in favor the war with a lot of the leading lights of the liberal intelligency of the time, names that would be known to people to this day. But, and just to contextualize this before we break it down into pieces, you unique among the commentariat that was supportive

of the war, very publicly, you know, wrestled with your regret over that decision, you know, kind of changed not only your view of the Iraq war, but applied that kind of intellectual rigor to your views on a lot of other things, too, pretty soon after the war took the turn it did almost right away. So that's kind of the context. People who know you on this podcast and from your writing might be surprised to know where you started. And so I just wanted to roll back the tape here and start with the basic question of what informed your support of the Iraq war in the run-up to that invasion. You know, I spent a lot of time thinking about that, you know, what it was, what set of experiences I had had that led me to come to this really catastrophic error in judgment

that cost the United States and cost Iraqi so much. And I wrote a book kind of about that called the Icarus syndrome, which was about hubris. And a big part of the argument was that 9-11 hit the United States after a decade or so of what American, at least American foreign policy elites perceived as a huge amount of success. And that what you tend to see in the history of American farm policy is when the America, it's a little bit like Las Vegas. When people feel like they keep winning, they double down their bets. And so for me, the story actually, it's a story first of the increasing confidence, overconfidence, that democracy was so universal that if you got rid of a terrible dictator like Saddam Hussein, that democracy would likely emerge. And I think that was a product of

what people call the third wave of democratization, which spread not just through Eastern Europe, but Latin America, East Asia. I mean, Africa, you've written a lot. of course, Ben, about the way in which that has started to roll back. But this was the kind of high point of that confidence, I think, a pretty superficial confidence in retrospect about the universality of liberal democracy. The second thing was that America had had a bunch of relatively small wars that it had won, or at least it seemed like it won. And I think that starts with Panama, which is a war that people don't think about that much. It's funny, people think of Ronald Reagan is this big hawk. But Reagan was very, very reluctant to send U.S. troops overseas. He sent arms

overseas to fund guerrilla groups. But because of the legacy of Vietnam, he was very skittish. And he would not send in troops to invade Panama, the end of his presidency, when some people were pushing him to. But by the way, he pulled troops out of Beirut. You know, he got them out of a situation where there had been a terrorist attack, you know. Just to note that. Because the legacy of Vietnam through the 80s was very powerful about the consequences of sending troops into war. But what happened was that Bush 1 went into Panama, and it seemed like it went pretty well. In fact, Americans even kind of seemed like they were greeted as liberators when they overthrew Noriega, who was a bad guy.

And then the Gulf War came along in early 1991. Everybody that I respected, who was a generation older than me, said it would be another Vietnam, you know, like the New York Times editorial page and Ted Kennedy. I mean, I was a liberal. I looked up to these people. And it wasn't Vietnam. The U.S. won pretty easily. Now, I don't want to say, you know, I don't want to, I don't want to whitewash what happened. A lot of huge numbers of people were innocent people were killed. But, and then Bosnia and Kosovo in 1995 and 1999 were a very big deal for me when I was in college and in my 20s. These wars of ethnic cleansing led by a really kind of like fascist, Yugoslav government that the U.S. dithered and dither and dither because people said it would be Vietnam.

And then the U.S. intervened and actually ended up stopping those wars. And I think that really primed me when to think that the U.S. was capable of doing things militarily, that it really was not capable of doing. And I had been told about Vietnam so many times that it was like the boy who cried wolf. And I couldn't actually see that there were a lot of really important lessons for Vietnam that really needed to be thought about on the eve of the Iraq. rock war and I kind of cast those aside. Yeah, I had a very similar experience shaped by those successes or apparent successes in the 90s, moved down to D.C. I remember the drumbeat to war

started and I was kind of confused at first like, hey, I thought we were in Afghanistan, you know. But what I remember like you is I felt a bit orphaned in that everybody that I kind of, you know, the intelligentsia, right, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the New Republic, then, you know, the Colin pals of the world and the, you know, the kind of democratic foreign policy establishment generally is lining up behind this thing. Actually, the guy I was working for at the time, Lee Hamilton, had voted and led the debate against the Gulf War and was also a skeptic of the Iraq War. And the interesting about the Gulf War is that if, when I pressed him on it, you know, he said, well, if you actually read bin Laden, like it was the presence of American

troops in Saudi Arabia that kind of like, he was basically like, the Gulf War wasn't quite as clean as we thought in terms of consequences, if we're honest, if we actually listen to what these people are telling us. Okay, so we're going to work our way to the consequences of the war. But I do want to ask you, so I had the same process as you. Like this, I was wrong to ever even consider that this was the right idea. I was, you know, like seeking out like whoever the next Barack Obama was going to be, the first person who came along and said, this war was a terrible idea. I was frustrated that John Kerry wasn't more anti-war in 2004. What's interesting to me is how few people in the kind of foreign policy establishment or the kind of journalist intelligentsia liberal

establishment did what you did. You know, very few of those leading voices for the war acknowledged that they were wrong. Usually they said, oh, we didn't send enough troops or, you know, we shouldn't have disbanded the Iraqi army. There's always some tactical reason when it was pretty obvious that plopping down 150,000 American troops in the middle of Iraq was not a good idea. Why do you think that is? Like, did you think when you publicly, you know, wrote that book and made that shift that more people would follow suit? Why do you think you're so lonely in kind of reckoning with your own views? Well, to be fair, I think there were people who said that they were wrong, but they didn't necessarily make as big a deal of it as I did. You know,

They kind of said it in passing and moved on. I think that, you know, because it's never, it's not fun to dwell on, like, you know, on having screwed up. I think for me, there were a couple things. First of all, I just wasn't really sure how I was going to continue to write about American foreign policy. Because, like, this wasn't a small thing. Like, this was really connected to my entire view of America's role in the world. Like, and so it wasn't like I could just say, oops, I made a mistake here. Like, there were other issues coming along, you know, Iran was coming along, other things.

And I didn't know, like, I didn't have a framework because my framework had kind of collapsed. And so I felt like unless I really thought through why I was wrong, I wasn't going to be able to figure out what I thought about anything else, you know? And I wasn't really going to be able to ask anyone to trust me in my view of anything else, you know? So that was kind of intellectually. I think also, you know, I was just really felt very guilty. You know, my sister-in-law was a doctor in the army. It's still a doctor in the army. And she got deployed to Iraq and had to leave her very small child.

And then she got deployed to Afghanistan, had to leave. By that point, they had another kid. And thank God she was safe. And she never kind of gave me a hard time about it, really. But I was thinking, like, what she's going through is partly and, you know, the consequence of what people like me who was in Washington supported. Michael Kelly, you know, you remember who was, my editor who was my boss for a while at the New Republic, someone I really, really deeply, deeply admired, went to cover the war and got killed covering the war. And then, I don't know if you

remember this, but, you know, it wasn't too long after the war started that you started. I remember starting to see homeless Iraqans like on the streets of New York. And I was just thinking, like, here I am. I didn't fight in that war. You know, I was kind of, whether I deserved it or or not was kind of at a fairly young age at editing this fairly influential magazine. And I just felt like, you know, I had to, uh, I had to like take some kind of accountability for this, you know, because so many people's lives had been upended and destroyed as a result of these kind of things. Um, so, you know, I, that was, I guess, what led me to try to write my way through this,

uh, you know, in the subsequent years. Okay. So that's a great pivot to like, I want to, I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to, going to take different pieces of consequences. And I guess the one I'll start with because it comes out of what you just said is like, you are describing someone who has a voice in the public discourse and is holding themselves accountable. What do you think the consequences have been in terms of the public's trust in public in this country, or you could make it a global public, the public's trust in American journalism that reported the WMD claims, in American kind of opinion

leaders who, by and large, lined up for the war, and in the American foreign policy establishment that kind of turned out the intellectual basis for the war, these are going to feel like softballs, but I think that we actually really need to explore this 20 years on. What is the cost of more people not doing what you did in terms of public's trust in kind of the establishment view of American foreign policy in its role in the world? Yeah, and look, I don't want to depict myself, you know, as some hero here. I mean, I was one of the people who got it wrong. I mean, there were people. There were people. There were people. There were people. There were people. who got it right, you know, there were people, and including, you know, at John Judas, for instance,

even though he was at the New Republic and even though virtually everyone at the magazine and, you know, the magazine supported, he was, he was an exception. He said, like, I think this is wrong. I think, but I think the consequences have been, have been tremendous. I mean, just look at the presidents that have gotten, that got elected, right? Barack Obama, you know, I need to tell you, coming out of nowhere, defeating Hillary Clinton, in part on the strength of first Howard Dean, 2004 coming out of nowhere because he was the only major Democratic primary candidate who opposed the war. Then Obama, riding that in part to defeating Hillary Clinton. And then Donald Trump, you know, the signature moments of his primary campaign was when he was willing to say to the other

Republicans like, hey, guys, the emperor has no clothes. Like George W. Bush screwed up, you know. By the way, Peter, Obama, like when I first moved out Chicago in the campaign, there was a debate. I don't remember in the beginning of August, Obama's 20 points down. It's its soldier field in Chicago, and he's getting attacked on his foreign policy by Hillary, Joe Biden, all of them. And he says, I'm not going to be lectured by the same people who are responsible for the biggest foreign policy mistake of my life. Yes. That transformed that campaign.

The same moment Trump had four years later. Yes. No, right, because it was saying the thing that's true that somehow you're not supposed to say, or the conventional wisdom says you're not supposed to say. But I think what worries me is that, well, I mean, Trump. Trump and Obama have completely different foreign policy views. But in their different ways, Trump, I think Obama in a much better way, they were both trying to break out of some of the assumptions that I think had proved like so catastrophic.

But what worries me is that I do think that even when you have a president who wants to break out of those to some degree or other politicians, the infrastructure in Washington, and I knew you, you know, you talk about this a lot. The infrastructure in Washington makes that really, really difficult. that I think that there are a number of things. I mean, part of it, I think, frankly, is just the fact that a lot of people in Washington, even though, you know, they may be thoughtful, good people who think they're trying, you know, think they're trying to do the right thing.

Their own careers are partly subsidized by defense contractors, you know? I mean, a lot of these think tanks get money from defense contractors and a lot, you know, a lot of people work for consultants for defense contracts or sometimes for foreign things that are paid for by foreign governments that have an interest in the U.S., like having a very, very kind of big military footprint around the world. And that shapes the conversation a lot. And then also this kind of like this fear that, you know, goes back to, it goes back to Vietnam, it goes back to the McCarthy period, the liberals that you're constantly trying to prove that you're tough enough, you know, that you're not that you don't have any illusions about America's enemies, you know. And I think this kind of

these combination of things, I think often crowd out the kind of voices that would be able to question kind of like more fundamental assumptions about American farm policy. And they kind of often push the conversation. I mean, it's incredible. We're still in a moment now where like people are proposing war with Iran, you know? Yeah. Like the fact that that could still be a thing. given everything that America has seen with, you know, is, I think shows that like the structural bias that exists. Well, that leads me to the Middle East because that was going to be another question of like, what are the cons.

I mean, the consequences in Iraq are the starkest in that you've had, you know, over, certainly over 100,000 people killed. You've had just paralysis of sectarian politics. You've had a whole generation of people kind of grew up in a country just not knowing what it's like to be secure. But you also have Iranian influence. And so I want to, what is the, for those who, who missed this moment in American discourse, the argument was that you would have this democracy plop down. And the pro-war argument was you'd have this democracy plop down in the Middle East. And that would be this positive influence to democratize the region and would diminish

the influence of an Iran and the influence of Assyria because they'd be on the back foot. what is the reality do you think of the war's impact on the Middle East, on Iran, and on the kind of debate around these issues? Yeah, I mean, I think at the time people looked at the Kurdish areas in northern Iraq, which kind of had had kind of autonomy from Saddam and seemed like they were kind of thriving as fairly open societies. And then you had these Iraqi, you know, Iraqi kind of emigree or exiles, some of whom were kind of pushing this line. But yeah, in retrospect, And it's funny, we have now realized, I think, in ways that I should have realized back then, you know, just about how unbelievably difficult it is to make liberal democracy work anywhere.

You know, we now know that about, you know, we're now more aware of that in the United States. And so what happened is that, you know, and I think we've also become, at least I've become more aware of the, you know, the failed dictatorships are horrible, but failed states are also really, really catastrophic. And oftentimes when you rip off a dictator, the same thing happens in Libya, you know, Libya, yeah. You basically, what you get is, you know, a dictator has hollowed out civil society. And also the U.S. played a role in hollowing out that civil society, because it was the combination of Saddam's dictatorship and the sanctions, which eroded, which left so many people in Iraq to leave the middle class and made the country much more prone to religious extremism and

degraded the infrastructure after we had bombed them in the Gulf War. So yeah, so what you end up having, as you were suggesting, is Iranian influence increases, right, because you've got basically a failed state that Iran kind of moves into, that you also have ISIS and a kind of revived kind of jihadist, you know, terrorist movement there. And many of the problems that, and now then you essentially escalate the conflict between Iran and Israel and between Iran and United States because Iran has been empowered by all of this. So it's, you know, it's just, I think, a lesson in, they think one of the fundamental lessons is about humility, you know. It's funny. We talk about liberals supported the war, and liberals should have known better. We should have respected international law. But the other dog that

didn't bark was there were a lot of conservatives who should have closed the war. Because one of the things that conservatives are supposed to believe is that is that government actually can't do that much very well, right? So it's crazy that conservatives who didn't, don't think that government can, like, set up an anti-poverty program effectively in the United States, which is our own country in the language we speak, thought that we could go and basically create a new government and socially re-engineer, you know, Iraq. And I think there were a lot of conservatives who also should have known better, and they would have also been really important voices against the war. When you look back at that moment, right? Because it was a moment of kind of unparallarly, again, for people who are younger listeners like the United States influence in the world like in early 2002 was bananas. I mean, it was like, you know, like in the history of human beings, you know, we were pretty high up the food chain in terms of like what, you know, we just gone in Afghanistan. The whole world's with us. Everybody's scared of us. But also we have all the moral high ground. And we took all that and we generated it.

the Iraq war. We pushed all in the Iraq war. And we also spent trillions of dollars or never mind all the lives of Americans and Iraqis. But what else could we have done? This is to me the biggest indictment of the Iraq war is like, if you looked back, like, if you were like President Bush in January of 2002, like what, paint the picture of the alternative course of history that could have been pursued. I mean, it's just, it makes you weep just thinking about it, right? I mean, America had, the economy had been booming. America had real, no, real genuine threats. You know, the U.S., all the things that are now haunting us, you know, like the huge inequality gap in the United States, the hollowing out of so much of America because America didn't invest in these communities as they were undergoing

these economic changes, all the things that kind of Trump used to demagogue and bring himself to power. You know, the financial crisis that wasn't, the people didn't pay attention, opioid crisis, like all of the U.S. could have like invested and rebuilt the American welfare state and actually like helped to create economic mobility and just made this much, much better country for people to live in, you know? And so the open opportunity cost was so massive. And I think about that a lot, you know, as we move towards, you know, what I feel, what I fear is like ever more confrontation with China, you know? And, and, you know, I know you were in Taiwan, you know, Taiwan is very important. It's an incredibly important, like, success story. I'm not saying

we shouldn't care, but like the opportunity cost of these things, you know, now we're just, we're an environment where everyone now wants to massively increase the defense budget and how are we going to compete in the new high tech, whatever, military. Like the, there's just not enough conversation aside from people like, a few people like Bernie Sanders, about the opportunity cost and the way that we become this hollowed out empire that's basically that it is fundamental if the American empire collapses, it's going to be because of what happens at home. We got, we just barely got so close to it with Donald Trump. And that's because we're not actually investing in making life decent for Americans, you know? And I think that's one really, really crucial lesson of

Iraq. No, and one other, you could throw climate change in there. And if, oh, yeah, exactly. And if people think that that's like a weird, you know, that that wouldn't have been. been the thing. Al Gore, you know, was one Supreme Court decision way from being president. Yes. You know, I'm not a, like, I would just imagine, like, if the United States had spent the 2000s devoting some of those resources to climb it instead of Iraq. Well, look, Peter, it's been great having you. Nobody better to kind of unpack this with. So I really appreciate it. People should check out your substack. And if they subscribe, they can also kind of watch you have interesting conversations with interesting people. Yes, I had a conversation with you a while back,

It was great. So every should check out your stuff and look forward to keeping in touch. That's great. Thanks a lot, Ben. Okay, now you're going to hear my conversation with Congressman Ruben Gallego. Congressman Gallego, thank you so much for joining the show. So why don't we just start with your journey into the Marine Corps? I mean, Harvard to the Marine Corps, that's sort of like the standard path, right? That's how usually goes. Well, I had like even more unstandard path or non-standard path.

I should say I actually got kicked out of Harvard. And in my time off, I decided to join the Marine Corps Reserve. So I joined prior to 9-11. I just wanted to serve my country. I'm a son of immigrants. I always thought it was kind of my responsibility to serve my country, because this country has given me so much. I had never been able to achieve whatever I have and will achieve in the future

had I stayed in Mexico or Colombia. And, you know, I had to leave Harvard because I just wasn't a, well didn't get good grades and I thought you know you know what I'm going to use this time to do something that I think would be beneficial both to me and to my country so I joined Marine Corps Reserves never thought I would ever see combat I just thought you know what maybe they'll calm me up and I'll do something whatever it is but at least I'm I'm you know offering my service to the country and I was wanted to do the infantry because I just felt like if I was going to join the Marines I might as well do infantry and so that's how I found myself in the city

situation. And I joined in August 8th of 2000 and, I'm sorry, wow, numerous. It was August 8th of 2000, exactly. And then, you know, one year later, almost one year later, 9-11 happens. And then soon after that, the Iraq war starts up. So you and I are similar ages. I'm 42. It's hard to describe people who weren't kind of adults, what it was like to go from pre-9-11 to Washington the Towers get hit to everyone being scared all the time, you know? And I was scared sitting in a classroom in rural Ohio and then scared sitting in Washington, D.C., you know, reading about anthrax attacks and the D.C. sniper and all these things happening. You would sign up for this job, and then that job, the Marine Corps, got exponentially more intense.

How did that feel for you? Well, I mean, honestly, when it first happened, it felt that actually I can really participate and help this country because I was really mad. I mean, I was like, by the way, a lot of people forget there was a lot of Americans. We were intensely mad that we were attacked. We were, I mean, and we should have been and we still should be. And, you know, I thought that, you know, for some reason that they would just call me up. and I'd get, you know, airdropped into Afghanistan. And I was excited to go.

I was ready to go. I wanted to go. Because I was really mad. I wanted to, you know, you execute revenge for this country, for the fact that, you know, they slaughtered all these innocent people. And, you know, I was not, you know, I was not afraid. Like, I really wanted to go. And there was, I know that was the, like echoed the sentiments of a lot of men and women back in the day. And, you know, it was a very good, you know, people forget about it.

It's also a very unifying time for this country. You know, which is important that it was exploited in the wrong way and really, I think, set this country back. Right. Well, I mean, so then, of course, you know, the Bush administration zigs when everyone else was zagging and decide to invade Iraq. And your 2005 deployment was to Iraq and not Afghanistan. You write about this deployment in great detail in your book. They called us Lucky. It's a great book. It's like incredibly like gripping stories about what it was like to be.

It's a very raw reflection of what real war is and not what I think gets unfortunately dramatized in a positive way. Yeah, no. It sounds like you guys saw some, you know, unbelievably intense combat. I mean, can you sort of set the scene like what kind of work were you asked to do? What kind of missions were you asked to do? So I was a, you know, I was not an officer. I was an everyday infantry men and actually ended up because of us merging with another. platoon and unit and company, I ended up being the lowest man on a totem pole when it comes to, you know, being, you know, infantrymen. So I was what's called the assistant machine gunner. And so I carried an extra barrel and extra ammo in addition to my regular combat load. And, you know, I took orders. And my job was to basically do a couple of things. Number one, we were trying to do interdiction, stop the flow of weapons, men and or money, back and forth from the Syrian border to other parts of Iraq, because we were kind of in the middle of it.

And that was through either, you know, enforcement, like we did raids, we tried to find out where they were. Good clearing. You know, I had cleared a lot of villages. A lot of, unfortunately, combat in terms of actually seeing people, you know, having to. engage with them. And then there's also, you know, the IEDs that were around, the mortars that were around. And so our job was to try to disrupt essentially what was called, you know, Al-Qaeda in Iraq at that point. And so we were the disruptors. We're the people that tried to find the guys and bring them in. So we had to do, you know, so any day could be very different. Sometimes I did some raids where I would go and

into a village with, you know, my, my guys and we'd go and pull a guy out. Sometimes we'd go in a big group and clear a whole village and go house to house every, you know, and checking everywhere for weapons and for, you know, bombs, ammunition, whatever it is, or intel. And then sometimes it was just simple, like, I need to patrol this road for whatever reason. And that's what I did that day. I mean, you guys, it sounds like it took a shock. number of casualties and saw an unbelievable amount of combat, like really brutal stuff.

I think there were 22 men from your company killed during your deployment. Is a company, how many men are in a company? Yeah, so we lost 22 Marines and one Navy Corpsman, which, you know, I don't know why we separate them because I consider Navy Corpsmen Marines. You know, they're essentially our docs. An average, a company will have what's, you know, will have three platoons of Marines, infantry riflemen, one platoon of weapons company, and then one one platoon of headquarters. You're usually looking at about 40-ish per platoon, and then also same for mortars and as well as,

I'm sorry, weapons as well as headquarters. So you're probably looking close to around 200 men altogether. And I'm not meaning to be sexist, but back in my day when we were in the combat arms, of the infantry, there were no women in our unit. Unfortunately, my unit ended up taking the most casualties of the whole Iraq war. One third of all the men in my company were either killed or wounded.

And that's just what we know physically. A lot of us still suffer from the war. My buddy are suffering both, and I'm one of them. I suffer from PTSD. And I have friends that are suffering both, PTSD as well as just in general other type of ailments that have come and sent from this war. Yeah, I definitely want to ask you about some of the mental health conversation you started and I think a really courageous way.

There's all these times in the book, you'll be like, this horrific thing happened, right? This, this IED went off. The only reason this guy wasn't there is because he paused to tie his shoe. Luck, you know what I mean? Like, what was it like? Yeah, all the time, yeah. What was it like to live with that? Like, just knowing that, like, dumb luck.

is the only thing keeping you from well i mean at first you try to rationalize everything and because you're like what why is this happening right and you're like well i did this better than that and everything else like that and then towards you know as as death gets closer and that's one of the things that in this book you know you i kind of try to you know bring out is that you feel the pace of death getting closer and closer to you because your chances are just weirders like chances of survival just this could get weird and we're like why I didn't get blown up in this like one SUV. You know, not as a few. I'm sorry.

This one Humvee. For example, my buddy and I are literally driving to do a Cag mission. That wasn't supposed to be on, mind you. I just got dropped in in the last minute. And this massive sandstorm just comes out of nowhere, just out of nowhere. And we stop because we just cannot proceed anymore. And as we stop about 10, 15 seconds later, which would have been the pace that we would have kept on, and had we not stopped with the sensor, a massive IID goes off on the side that I was supposed to go off.

And, you know, what are you supposed to do? Like, you could be the best Marine. You could be the sharpest shooter. You could be the best, you know, best fit Marine. And then that's it. It's all random luck. And so eventually you go from a, you know, I must have. be lucky or I must be doing something right to like this like really you know weird situation

where I kind of just assigned my ascribed or assigned my idea that I'm going to die and I might as well die in an honorable manner fighting and or protecting my guys because it was all out of my control and so all I could control that point was my honor and how I was my honor and how I was going to be remembered by other people. Yeah, I mean, it's very clear in the book that, like, your life became about the guys you are with and taking care of the guys you're with and loving them. And, you know, it's really like a, it's a beautiful thing. It's also, you know, a beautiful thing to read about the way you talk about your friend's

struggles with PTSD, the way you've talked about your struggle with PTSD. It's a term people hear a lot, right? I bet everybody knows what PTSD is. But I suspect a lot of people don't really know. what that means in practice. Like, can you help? What does it mean? I mean, it means like a lot of things for different people.

Like, look, we carry scars from war and like, so you may be seeing it now because it's very difficult talking about this kind of stuff. But what you should focus on is what it doesn't mean, right? If someone has PTSD, we're not weak, right? I dealt with a very inhumane condition of seven months of hard combat. The human nature is not to be in combat and has not been for quite a while.

It's not for you to ever feel that you have a constant 24 hours threat around you. And that's what men and women are in war deal with. And it will hardwire your mind to survive. Number one, that is like the first thing that PTSD is actually a survival mechanism. And first is a survival mechanism for you to survive your physical surroundings, but then it actually evolves into your emotional survival. And so, you know, my personal experience in PTSD is very different for everybody. You know, I suffer from very, you know, alertness, which in some points is actually very good.

It has been very helpful in some instances like January 6th. I saw everything happening before anybody else because PTSD and paranoia that is caused by it was seeing like a lot of like red flags. but then also it has bad sides. Like for example, I for years had made it very different for me to actually form strong and relationships with other people because I had I got so used to people dying or leaving me right away because of the war. And so I never actually formed very good, you know, strong post-war. I didn't form strong friendship, a strong relationship. and found myself kind of being, you know, more insular. You know, a lot of, you know, us end up addicted and people have different

addictions. It's not just drugs or alcohol. And like people find addictions in other forms. And like I did it in trying to find and chase like this reason why I survived. And my friends did it. And so, you know, I just kept chasing the dragon essentially. and it wasn't heroin, but it was trying to get validation that somehow God had decided that I should live versus so by friends. And so, but we're not these meek men or women that just hide from problems.

We're also not raging lunatics that, you know, you can't, they can't control. We're, you know, we are, you know, warriors and we're warriors every day in life. And this is something that we will carry for the rest of our lives. Like, I'm never going to get rid of PTSD. It's not really possible, right? It is why I am now. And, you know, a lot of what I do now is understand it, try to work with it. And then more importantly, now I try to rule model for a lot of Marines and veterans in general

that, you know, you can have a successful career. You can be honest about your PTSD or don't tell anybody. It doesn't really matter. but just go get, you know, treatment so you could be the best person you can be. Yeah. I'd love to talk about sort of like how you've brought this experience and your understanding and this like deep empathy you have for people suffering from PTSD to lawmaking. I had a friend who served in Afghanistan,

ended up being 100% disabled because of PTSD, did a lot of things you just talked about, got deep into alcohol, ended up in, you know, sort of institutions over time. And one thing that eventually like saved him was something called the godshot. It's a stellate, gagli and block shot, right? Sort of the shot into the back of your neck that can sort of, I think, block that like fight or flight instinct that had him, you know, on edge all night long. Yeah.

I mean, are there treatments or their paths or the things you're trying to get funded or that you worked on that you think are important for people to know about? Look, I think there's a lot of treatments that we should be looking at, both some of them it's technology, some of them are drug-based. I think we should be, if you're a veteran, you should be allowed to use, you know, medical marijuana in terms of being able to deal with PTSD. And, you know, I had my moments where I just couldn't get to the point where I needed to relax. And, you know, medical marijuana was very helpful to me and a couple times. I think there's a, the fact that veterans can't go to the VA and talk and get out of there without getting a very strong opioid

is very dangerous. I mean, our biggest opioid addictions happened because we were trying to deal quickly with our veterans instead of actually given the deep there that they needed. And so we just basically started drugging them up. And a lot of them ended up, unfortunately, once they got cut off, by the way, by the VA, going into deeper and deeper drugs just to, you know, fill the void. But we, even if even in states where it is legal, if you're a veteran and you, you know, try to use marijuana as part of your medical marijuana as part of your therapy or just to relax, you know, without having to, you know, just relax in general to go to sleep or to take your edge off, You can't tell your VA provider that you're doing that because there will be consequences to that, right?

And look, I would rather have veterans, you know, having prescribed medical marijuana that is, you know, clearly done under the guise of a doctor versus them being hooked on opioids. There was a lot of other treatments that do like VR technology, for example, to also help veterans understand what they went through and kind of slow down and make them, you know, kind of deprogram our alertness, our assertiveness, all the things that were very important for us to survive, but aren't necessarily, you know, necessary right now in this modern world. And tons of other drugs and therapies. And what happens a lot of times is that we, and I see we as the federal government, impose our moral values on how these people should have therapy.

And sometimes it does not provide the best outcomes. Absolutely. Just sort of even like bigger picture. There are so many people in Washington, D.C. that come out of academia or think tanks or our columnists that I feel like are too cavalier when it comes to recommending the United States go to war. Very few people get to vote on these things. You have served in combat. You get to vote on whether or not the United States should engage in combat. How has serving in Iraq changed your thinking about those votes? Well, one of the things that I think makes me different

from a lot of veterans is that I was the lowest guy when it came to the ranking, right? I You know, you meet these generals, you meet these great war planners, and they talk about these great ideas about how things are going to be executed, right? When I was there in 2005, those people were doing the same thing. And it was at times that I was the first guy to execute a big battalion movement because I was in that first platoon of the first company, right? and I was the first squad, the first fire team for whatever reason that we were designated that day. And there were times that I was that first, you know, very scared, 25-year-old that had to be the first guy to enter a very hostile city. I remember one time, there was a full battalion movement, and I wasn't, you know, the ramp was going down, and we were the first fire team of the whole entire movement.

And my job was to sprint as fast as I can with my combat load about 2.5 miles to the, to the Euphrates River to try to cut off the insurgents. The general or the colonel who made that plan had no idea about me, didn't know what I was feeling, didn't know probably what the combat load that I was carrying. And so when I am thinking about the military and talking about, you know, what they should or should not do, I think about someone that was in my shoes. And there was men that were 18 years old that were doing things like this. And so, you know, I think about that. And like we have to be very judicious when it comes to our use of force and use of our men because it does have severe consequences.

and I've seen it. You know, you can't be afraid either. We had a really recent vote on the AUMF, for example, regarding pulling our men out of Syria. I voted against it. Why? Well, look, I do want to end some AMFs. I think they can be abused.

But we have a massive ISIS prison in Syria that if we abandoned our Kurdish allies that actually guard that prison, that that prison is going to be abandoned. The Turks are going to come in, push out the, push out the Kurds, and no one's going to take care of that prison. And now we're going to have 10,000 ISIS prisoners running around that area and probably do say it was again. And so, of course, I voted against that. But then there have been other cases where I have voted for limiting the use of military force,

because I do think that sometimes our exertion of power supersedes our national security. And I'm not afraid to say that. I feel like way too often the U.S. military is sent to solve a political problem when that's not their job. How do we stop doing that? Well, number one, we should be questioning the military. And I think there is an overreliance on the opinion of the generals. The problem that, you know, and I identify this multiple times. The problem with Afghanistan is that no general want to be known as a last general.

And everyone was saying, like, we just needed to turn one more corner and we'll be there. Well, we turned that fucking corner so many times. We made a goddamn circle. And, you know, nobody wanted to be there. And this is why it's important to have civilian leadership of the military to say, like, yeah, I get it. But no, we're out. Right. And we should have gotten out of Afghanistan a long time ago.

We, you know, there was probably, there was a lot of off ramps that were actually better off than what we ended up with, by the way. But we didn't want to do it because there was a lot of hubris that was involved. Hubris involved on the political side and on the military side. But I think we need to have a very healthy, skeptical view of the Department of Defense and of these generals. They're not geniuses. They fuck up all the time. And worse than probably when they fuck up, they fuck us up, right? And, you know, a really good, well-trained civilian horror that is a good, justic position.

to the Department of Defense is important. And I think we need to have more of them in Congress. And I think some of them could actually be veterans, by the way. Not of us are all institutionalists. But being able to be in the ears of our decision makers saying, like, I get what this guy is saying. Yes, he's got a nice, he's got a nice, you know, a bunch of stars here and a bunch of ribbons here. But here's an alternative view to think about this. And I think that that's what matters.

Look, you could only operate with the information you have. I think we need to make sure that we have more avenues of information so that way people can make really judicious decisions on this. I think a good example, President Biden, I think, learned a lot from what happened for all these, from all those years and decided that, you know, what's happening in Afghanistan is another, you know, quicksand situation where we end up financial staying in. And he reacted, and to some degree, he overreacted, in my opinion.

But it was based on what he had saw in the past where he felt that he was going to get trapped again in something that he had wanted. And by the way, people forget, the American people wanted out of Afghanistan too. So, you know, it's something that we just have to take lessons from. But the best thing you could do is, number one, get people around you that actually have a very healthy understanding of the military. I think having people in from the military that aren't necessarily the officer class in the military is also very important because we don't have that type of relationship with the Department of Defense. I don't know anybody I served with that was in Department of Defense. I was a grunt. So I never felt like I had to do anything to to kiss ass to those guys.

And I was able to keep them in check. I think having more people, you know, around that caliber of enlisted people. people actually matters a lot. Yeah. We've long known now that, you know, the core reason that all of us were told we were going to the war in Iraq was WM and D. They didn't end up being there. Similarly, you know, Vietnam was launched under false pretenses.

I just wondering how. You know about it. Yeah, how you feel about that in hindsight. I was a delicate question. I knew about it before I went to Iraq. I knew that this was not the case. I knew that it was like against our best national interests. I knew that this was a bullshit war.

And the like I was always going to go because I never went to war for a bullshit national interest. I never went for a president. I went to war because, you know, I had trained with these guys and I was not going to go and leave them. And I hated the war. I disagreed with the war. I knew it was a bullshit war. I knew the whole thing was, you know, made up by these neocons. but I went to war to keep my buddies alive and I could never live with myself if I didn't

if I didn't go with him. Yeah, it just seems like the fact that you were put in that situation seems so profoundly fucked up and unfair that I don't know that we've wrecked with it sufficiently. I mean, the history of this world is young men and now young women dying for old man follies. Yeah, that's exactly right. Well, like last question for you. I mean, we're just trying to think about like, what is the legacy of Iraq 20 years later? You know, I think like, Ben and my view is probably that it set in motion so many events, whether it's ISIS, whether it's general instability, that it's sort of hard to really total it all up. I just didn't know if you had

thoughts about, I don't know how Iraq changed the world, how it changed U.S. foreign policy, how it changed the country. Well, look, I think we did destabilize the region. We did a lot, we attempted to do a lot of good. A lot of us veterans went to save our men, to save our, you know, compatriots. I did it to fulfill a promise. I told the country I would serve for them. I didn't, I never said I would choose the war. I said I would serve my country.

And I have no regrets about that. I think the country may have been changed because I think it has changed. our perspective on these, you know, overseas adventures that are not in the national interests of this country. And I think that's something that we're going to be able to learn from, hopefully, that we're not going to engage in warfare that is not in direct national interest of this country. You know, and then you see that in Ukraine, for example, where we have men that are, we have no men in Ukraine, but we're sending our weaponry. But we're being very judicious about us. We're not going to send men over there because while it is important, it is not in the national

interest of this country directly, right? And I'm a big supporter of the UK war, but not enough that I want to say send American men and women to fight there. And I think that is an actual offshoot of what we learn from these forever wars. Yeah, I lied. One final final question. You are running for the United States Senate in Arizona. I'm a little disappointed that you're not more of a fan of Big Pharma and fucking people out of a minimum wage increase. But I guess, you know, that's just sort of not conscious but um curious uh how iraq in your service is informing your campaign and what you want to do in the senate look i it's it's hard because like i am this is who i am and like iraq has formed the rock wars and it like created a part of my life that is uh not going to

change um and and and has made me who i am uh what what it does inform me is again like trying to be a good steward of military might and making sure that we're not over using it and we're not also being irresponsible world leaders. And then at the same time, just the basic we need to take care of our men and with, especially when it comes to things that we're so suffering from, such as Burnpit legislation, which by the way, we're going to be hearing about for the next 20 years of the, you know, unfortunately ramifications of it. Yeah, yeah. Well, listen, thank you so much for talking to me. Thank you, guys. Appreciate it. Well, I'll say one more thing because it's not my staff is going to kill me.

W.W. Gallego for Arizona, if you'd like to donate to my Senate run. I really appreciate it. That will stay in. That's the one edit that is 100% guaranteed. Staying in. Adios. Thank you so much. Appreciate it, man. Have it going. Thanks again to Peter for joining the show. Thanks again to Congressman Gallego. Best of luck in your Senate campaign. By the way, if you want to help them out, you want to get rid of Kirsten Cinema. Gallego is your guy.

Yeah, that's kind of a no-brainer, guys. Let's get on the Gallagro train. This is not a hard one. Yeah, give him five bucks. All right, talk to you guys next week. POTSave World is a cricket media production. Our executive producers are me, Tommy Vitor, Ben Rhodes, and Michael Martinez. Our producer is Haley Muse.

Our associate producer is Ashley Mizzou. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick, Kyle Seaglin, Charlotte Landis, and DeSilius are our sound engineers. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, D.B. Bradford, and Milo Kim, will upload our episodes and videos to YouTube every one. week and check out the Pod Save the World YouTube account. Thanks to Saul Rubin for production support.