School of War - Ep 43: Eli Lake on the Bush administration in the Middle East

Episode Date: September 13, 2022

Eli Lake, host of The Re-Education and national security journalism fellow at the Clements Center, joins the show to talk about 9/11 and the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.  ▪️ Times  • 02:04 Introduction • 02:43 From Philly To The Middle East • 05:14 9/11 • 07:49 The World Before  • 09:20 No More Nation Building • 12:03 Neo-Cons Or Not • 18:09 Liberal Internationalists  • 22:05 Early Mistakes • 29:08 Baking In Problems  • 32:46 The Bonn Conference     • 37:04 Capable Of Being Free • 41:04 Toppling Sadam - Right or Wrong?     • 45:47 WMDs And Insurgency • 53:25 New Strategies     • 56:51 The Surge  • 59:01 The Loss Of Choice

It's strange to think about the war in Iraq and the beginning of the war in Afghanistan as military history. But here we are. Today, we're going to shift focus from the present moment and from China and take a look at the Middle East policy of the Bush administration. My guest and I will relitigate the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, question what, if any of it was worth it, and see what strategic opportunities may have gotten missed along the way. One question on my mind. Were we failing to focus on the most significant adversary in the region, Iran, all along? But first, a word from our sponsor. From the grocery store to the gas station, working families are getting hammered by rising prices.

But instead of focusing on inflation, Congress is pushing anti-innovation legislation that will impose more financial burdens on working people and seniors. Their misguided agenda could cost public pension plans $109 billion. Teachers, firefighters, and nurses would pay the heaviest price. Congress needs to focus on inflation. and leave American workers alone. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamous. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stale.

We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. The people who are not seen them. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. Delighted to be joined today by my friend and fellow Nebulous Media podcast host, Eli Lake.

He's the host of the re-education here on Nebula. He's the National Security Journalism Fellow at the Clement Center, University of Texas, Austin. He's a contributing editor of commentary. And by the way, among many remarkable pieces, he's written there, he wrote a fantastic piece shortly after Putin went into Ukraine called The World Has Changed and We Must Change Along with It. but I highly recommend to all our listeners. And he's a columnist for the New York Sun.

Eli, thanks for coming on the show. It's great to be here. I'm so glad we're finally doing this. You have a great podcast, Aaron. Thank you. As do you, as do you. So, you know, our subject today, we'll see how far we get. We may just cover the Bush years,

but our subject today is to address American strategy in the Middle East, starting roughly around 9-11. Yeah. But I wanted to ask you a bit about yourself first. I mean, because a lot of, I mean, I think the two things overlap, a lot of your career has dealt with this subject matter. So tell listeners like, you know, where you grew up, how you became a journalist, and how did you start spending a, you know, a fair chunk of your time and attention on this subject. Well, I grew up in Philadelphia.

I am a Gen Xer. So I was a child in the 70s and an adolescent in the 80s and a young man in the 1990s. And when I was in high school in the late 1980s, right around the time of the first Intifada in Israel. I was on a, my school, which was a Jewish day school, had a sort of a semester abroad in Israel and where we lived in Jerusalem in a dorm there. And so one of the things that we did as high school students was, you know, when we had free time, I would go to the hotels in Jerusalem and I would observe the foreign correspondence. And I just thought they had a really fun, an exciting life, hanging out at cafes and then waiting for something to happen and writing about it. And it just, it was kind of the romance of it really seduced me.

And I think it was around that time. I was about 16 years old. It was my first real time, first time living abroad. And so I thought, I think I want to do that. And I'm lucky enough that I was able to do that in my career where I've, you know, I've covered a lot of things in Washington, but I have gotten a chance to live abroad in Cairo and to spend a lot of time in Iraq. and other places in the Middle East covering these stories. And so that's kind of how I did that.

And then in 2014, I was hired by Bloomberg as a opinion colonist. So I do opinion journalism, which is still journalism. You have to think journalistically and try to think about what elements of your arguments are wrong. But it's at the same time you're writing from a point of view. I do have a point of view. You could say that I guess we are both American hegemonists in the broadest sense. But I think I'm different than somebody who maybe comes at this as just a sort of policy won't type or a partisan that will only kind of want to support like one particular party.

I try to approach the topic journalistically, though. I think I'm up front with my priors, such as my Zionism would be one. And my belief that America should be a great power. I think we were both in Cairo, actually, around the same time. because I remember Christopher Hitchens telling me to look you up. That's right. That's right. I think I was, yeah, right.

Yeah. And my, I was doing something similar to you, though, with much less success. So I went and did the next logical thing, which was to join the Marines, whereas then you had a journalism career that worked out. Well, I'm a little older than you. So I was lucky. I mean, 9-11 hit at a time when I was a State Department correspondent for UPI. So I was already kind of beginning to be established, I guess.

And it was, it opened up. opportunities to write for National Review, Weekly Standard, and the New Republic. But I was in like my late 20s at 9-11. So there's a difference when you're just starting out and you're like, I want to go to the region. Nobody knows you are. So I say, that was me. Yeah, but now it's also like, you know, it's, I would recommend it if you, that's how you learn how to do this and you sort of immerse yourself in the culture, which is very important to try to spend some time living abroad to get, especially if you're going to study a region or something like that. So let's let's talk about 9-11. and we can kind of start personal.

Where were you? How did 9-11 hit you? I was on damn 9-11. I was returning from like a briefing that I believe it was a Chinese ambassador with other journalists and I was walking to the State Department. And then I saw a line of everybody in the State Department leaving the State Department.

And, you know, our cell phones did not work. We stayed. You know, that day was really crazy because I remember the State Department had to set up like a press center in another location and like trying to get that information to everybody was, you know, really. So, you know, at that point, I was writing for a wire service. So anything I could file and everything I was doing became, you know, it was the story. And I think I did write, I did write that for, I'd sort of, you know, by the end of the day, we all knew that it was a terrorist

attack and, you know, people had started. There were people who were, they had, there were people who had, followed and covered like study studied al-Qaeda certainly before 9-11 but after 9-11 that became the the topic so the other big thing I remember is trying to get on the internet at the time which was very different a congressional research the CRS the congressional research service had a report on al-Qaeda that was like the one thing that every journalist was the first thing we kind of went to And then there were a couple books about it. There was a book by Rashid called Taliban. I don't remember that.

But I was like, I just remember trying to like, okay, I got to get smart on all this stuff. I had written stories about the Taliban. I mean, it was something that I'd covered. But then it was like, this is going to be the thing that we're going to be looking at for a long time. Yeah. So, you know, prior to 9-11, on 9-10 as a one, what were the focuses of American policy in the Middle East, which is to say also, I mean, related, similar question. What were journal attention to in the Middle East?

Okay. So that would be the second indifada in Israel was a big story for the Middle East and whether or not you could revive what was known as the Oslo process. There was still a story in terms of the no-fly zones that the U.S. upheld in northern Iraq and southern Iraq. And of course, there was this question about what would happen with the so-called reformer president of Iran, Muhammad Khatami. and would it be possible to continue an outreach to the Iranians that had started under Clinton? So those were the sort of stories that were swirling in the background. And yes, there was also a story about, you know, what were you going to be able to do of anything with the Taliban? Could you present Taliban to hand over al-Qaeda because there was still, there was a terrorism story with al-Qaeda because of the 1990s,

bombings and all. So that was something that people kind of, but again, that al-Qaeda and terrorism, and it was a story, but it wasn't the story. After 9-11, that becomes the big focus. And the Bush administration had come into office with a policy platform as far as foreign policy was considered that took issue, right, with the sort of liberal internationalism of the 90s, right? We were to steal a phrase from later in our politics, we were going to do a little bit more nation building at home or something. That's probably not quite the right phrase to sum up the spirit of the 2000 Bush campaign, but certainly that we weren't going to be nation builders

abroad. I was quite young at the time, but I do remember that being a theme of the Bush platform. Well, it was in the 2000 Republican Convention. Condoleezza Rice gave the speech in which she famously said, we are not the world's 911. Did those words take on a very different significance after 9-11, of course? And there was an emphasis from George W. Bush to pursue what he called a humble foreign policy. And there was a sort of, I think the Republican Party you could say, was divided on the question of nation building. There was always a faction of the GOP from a foreign policy perspective that didn't understand why the United States was going to bother in trying to rebuild the Balkans. There was a fight about that. Bob Dole was very skeptical of that intervention.

And then there were, of course, the neoconservatives who were a rising force, I think, in the 1990s, who saw, who thought that America should have a much kind of, you know, a kind of grander vision and support democratic movements. And Iraq was really the test case for that because the war had ended in the first Gulf War had ended in such a way that Saddam remained in power, though so weakened and under so many sanctions. And that you had this, you know, melt for many years, Saddam evaded and defied the UN weapons inspectors to verify that he, that his weapons of mass destruction were no longer there. And he didn't take the steps to assure the world. And we later found out, by the way, that that was for a, for, that he was being rational to an extent because he didn't want his internal enemies or for that matter, Iran to know that he didn't have. an active nuclear program or, you know, stocks of chemical weapons. Though he did kind of have stocks of chemical weapons. It's a little bit different kind of story, but he didn't have the mobile biological weapons labs or things like that. But he left the impression by threatening to shoot down like surveillance aircraft and not allowing his scientists to meet without, you know, Iraqi minders or things like that, that he was he was uninterested in fully complying. So all of that

stuff was sort of in the air, you know, at the time. And just to stick with our sort of, you know, the world before theme for a moment. Sure. You mentioned the neocons. What was the balance of power within the foreign policy making, you know, apparatus of the Bush administration prior 10-11, of whom, you know, people who self-identified as neoconservatives were really only one part. Like, remind people who were the key players who among them were, you know, because by a year or two later, everyone was a neocon. George Bush was a neocon. Dick Cheney was a neocon. Donald Rumschold was a neocon. What was the reality, what does the word even mean in this context? And what was the reality of the influence of that group within the administration? That's a very good question. Well, I mean,

you have to start with Dick Cheney, who has certainly his position changed very much on 9-11. But before 9-11, Dick Cheney, when he was out of power, so he was Secretary of Defense under George H.W. Bush. and then he goes on to become the CEO of Halliburton. But as the CEO of Halliburton, he helped form and lead an organization called USA Engage, which in the 1990s was a group of multinational corporations that sought the lifting of sanctions on countries like Iran and Iraq, because it was a pro-business position. So Cheney was what you might say is kind of part of the realist foreign policy school before 9-11. Then there's Colin Powell and his deputy, Richard Arnman.

Armitage. Powell and Armitage were not neoconservatives by any stretch. That was the State Department. There was a neoconservative, prominent neoconservant named Paul Bulfo, which he was the Deputy Secretary of Defense, but Donald Rumsfeld was by no means, who was the Secretary of Defense. Rumsfeld was not really a neocana either. He was another one of these kind of classic foreign policy realists. Now, I should say that Cheney and Rumsfeld allies in the Nixon administration and then the Ford administration, when everybody else is purged, they kind of, you know, get the keys to the Kingdom at a very young age, the youngest chief of staff, youngest secretary of defense. And in that, in that period, they were skeptical of Henry Kissinger, who was the sort of

Uber Republican realist. And specifically Kissinger's idea of detente with the Soviet Union. So they were Cold War Hawks, but they weren't really neoconservatives because what neoconservatives in a foreign policy sense, by the way, when you say neoconservative, I think the clearest definition of it should be somebody who migrates from left to right. It's originally kind of how you think about it because it's not a foreign policy idea only. I mean, there's a whole school of neoconservatives who think about criminal justice, for example, and all kinds of things like that. Indeed, parents of the generation of neoconservatives who are really relevant in the late 90s and early on. Sure.

Right. Not primarily foreign policy focused. No, no. I mean, in fact, I mean, you could argue somebody like Norman Podaritz is so much more than just a kind of political essayist. I mean, he's he writing about, he's writing memoirs, he's writing, you know, commentary is doing literary criticism. There's a lot of concern about the academy. There's people like figures like Alan Bloom. It's a much wider movement than just foreign policy.

But when it comes to foreign policy, it was a view that the United States, after the Cold War, didn't really have a rival superpower. It should use its power in such a way to help democratic movements and help countries that are less powerful, transform. into liberal democracies. And it was in that context, especially at the end of the Cold War, you have to understand something about the 1990s because it wasn't just the neoconservatives that thought this was also the liberal internationalists who were kind of the on the Democratic side. The big question was, why didn't we do anything to stop the genocide in Rwanda? It was not what were we doing meddling in the Balkans or what were we, you know, why do we think we could, you know, build a stable Kosovo or something?

It was largely assumed that the U.S. military and that U.S. power was transformative in these situations. So, which leads to sort of, well, I guess we'll get there later, but, you know, in 2003, the United States launches a regime change war in Iraq. And very few people. It wasn't just the neocons. It was like everybody believed, sure, if we just put enough money and can do American spirit and energy into it, we'll make Iraq a better place. And that was a much harder task, although it's, I don't agree with a kind of conventional wisdom that Iraq is a worse place. I think Iraq is a better place. I just think it was a much harder fight. And it was, it was, and in many ways it also proved America is not equipped to do this

kind of wholesale nation building where, you know, we, we are sending, what, USAID officials to small Iraqi villages to make sure that the local town council has enough representatives of women and transgender or whatever. You know what I'm saying? And that's the kind of stuff that happens in this weird way that we are bringing these very advanced American ideas to a culture that is not, doesn't share our values and is very different. Eventually, though, the strategy in Iraq, I don't want to go off too much when it did change. And David Petraeus and his officers in their counterinsurgency strategy worked with, you know, the tribal leaders on the, particularly in Western Iraq, the Sunni tribal leaders who were themselves, you know, at one point working with Al-Qaeda and,

you know, probably wouldn't have passed any kind of ideological purity test or anything like that. So anyway, I say all this because the neo-conservatives were a faction within the George W. Bush administration, but by no means they were they the dominant voices. You know, it was much more of a kind of standard Republican realism. And there were hawks, you know, I mean, certainly, but being a hawk is not the same as being a neoconservative. So what's the, can I ask just like a wonk cerebral question, then we'll get to Afghanistan and then Iraq.

But so you just drew a distinction between hawk and neocon. Yeah. Earlier, you drew a distinction between neocon and liberal internationalists. Maybe we should start there. You know, there's a certain kind of right-wing critic of the neoconservatives who takes the position. Well, that they're all just, they're all liberals. There is no meaningful distinction between the kind of neo-conservatives that, you know, say,

a Bill Crystal was in the year 2001 and, you know, the liberal internationalists of the Clinton years. You know, to what extent is there any substance to that critique and to what extent is it just wrong? And there are meaningful differences between the neocons of 2001 and the liberal internationalists who were influential in the Clinton foreign policy. Well, I think there are meaningful distinctions. Liberal internationalists try really, in my view, almost fetish on. the idea of multilateralism and working through the United Nations. I think, you know, conservatives are correctly skeptical of the United Nations at this point

and understand that countries like Russia and China will veto anything that's sort of meaningful and are less reluctant to work outside of the United Nations. Although it should be said that George W. Bush before the Iraq war, and Colin Powell certainly wanted this, there were, you know, they did want to work. They did want a UN Security Council resolution, if only for just a matter of appearances or trying to, you know, international legitimacy. But I think that liberal internationalists kind of fetishize that. They believe that it's, it's not a legitimate war unless there is a UN Security Council resolution, although they supported the intervention in Kosovo, even though

there was no UN Security Council resolution, but they'll say we had the buy-in from NATO. But it's, so that's an important distinction, which is that neoconservatives are more comfortable with what might be called coalitions of the willing than liberal internationalists. And I think that is an important distinction. And then just in general, I think somebody who is a hawk is generally in favor of a large defense for the United States and would be in favor of punitive strikes against a country. But certainly has no particular interest in long-term commitment to sort of rebuild countries so that they are, you know, more democratic or something like that. John Bolton. Yeah, John Bolton doesn't care.

John often described as a neo-conservative, but completely inaccurate. No, no, no. I think John Bolton just, John Bolton really doesn't care. And also, John Bolton has an if you will, an even stronger or more strident critique of the United Nations, which is that it undermines American sovereignty and undermines the American Constitution. So for Bolton entering into a, like entering into the Iran nuclear deal is a disgrace because it really undercuts American sovereignty and freedom of action. So 9-11 happens, and the first piece of business, obviously, is dealing directly with al-Qaeda, going after bin Laden, and al-Qaeda is being sheltered at this point in Afghanistan. And if we say there was something like, you know, approaching universal support for the invasion of Iraq,

certainly very significant support. I mean, there really was approaching universal support for going into Afghanistan. I mean, Barbly is the sole dissenting vote. Yes. And, you know, at the time, and then, you know, during and certainly the peak of the, the crisis of American power in Iraq, you know, and when Barack Obama is running for president in 2008, the narrative very much becomes certainly on the left, you know, Afghanistan is somehow the good war. Iraq was the bad war. Iraq is or excuse me, Afghanistan has suffered from neglect to the consequence of Iraq. We need to focus there and sort of do something to make amends about our sins and Iraq. We'll come to all that.

But the question I want to ask is obviously, you know, what we know now about what happened in Afghanistan during the Obama administration. And then obviously it said, you know, CODA last year that Afghanistan itself posed serious problems that cooked for a long time. And ultimately, we did not handle. When you look back to those early months, I guess it was October, October of 2001 that we went in with special forces in the agency. Marines into Kandahar around that time, maybe November.

And, you know, the Taliban were routed swiftly. We had the Bond Conference in December. You know, everyone was very proud of themselves. We didn't get bin Laden. That was obviously an early problem. But the destruction of the Taliban regime was swift. And everyone was very proud of themselves. There was a lot of padding on the back.

Knowing what you know now, were there mistakes being made early on in Afghanistan? Or did those come later? I have a different view, which is that I don't really have. of many criticisms. I mean, there is a criticism, which is that you could argue that bin Laden was sort of allowed to escape. Obviously, we now know that there's a faction of the Pakistani deep state, for lack of a better word, that was thick as thieves with the, with al-Qaeda and the Taliban. So, but he escaped from the Toribora Mountains. And that was, I mean, it would have been better to get him. And I think that they, they kind of outsmarted the United

States because they they they they they were able to kind of spoof radio transmissions or something to make it seem like bin Laden was one place when he was another place so he cleverly got away as we now know to Pakistan but the real criticism I have comes after that which is that there is a bond conference and there's a general approach mainly run by the CIA side and special operators which is that we're going to have to really run a kind of a proxy war against the remnants of the Taliban and other terrorist groups that are still going to be in Afghanistan, and it's a counterterrorism mission. And we're going to have, in order to do that, we're going to have to make friends with people like Dostom, like in other warlords who were

completely anti-democratic, illiberal thugs. And then there was another policy at simultaneously that is sort of represented by the Bond Conference and efforts to have a, and a lawyer Jerga to rebuild a central government in Kabul that will be democratic and respect rights and all this great stuff, which I believe from the very beginning is on a collision course with the counterterrorism mission. So there's the nation building mission and the counterterrorism mission, which I don't think really, if you think about it, it would be very difficult to try to square that circle. And they were both, you could argue, important. But at the same time, it led to a situation where the United States was effectively backing new regional warlords that were

more corrupt, more cruel, more vicious than the Taliban. So by the end of the George W. Bush administration, there were plenty of Afghans who, it's not like they liked living under the Taliban, but they just said, well, you know, when I was in the Taliban, at least my children were not, you know, abducted and raped by the warlord or something. Do you know what I'm saying? So we had this problem, which is that the local population did not buy into the United States military presence. It had become less of a focus because of part of the Iraq War. And so then I think, you know, Obama then says, okay, let's try it all again. But we never resolved this fundamental paradox of our mission there, which was the counterterrorism.

And the counterterrorism mission is not just a matter of like, well, you got these badasses and drones. and we're going to shoot people and, you know, take no... It's not that. It's what counterterrorism mission means is a partnership with illiberal anti-democratic forces in the country. That's what it means in practicality. And there's something that's deeper than just a failure of military planning or presidential leadership.

It's something almost cultural because it's hard for us. Like if we were the British Empire, Aaron, I don't know if you would agree with this, but if you were the British American, like, yeah, we made a deal with the He's a rough character. But, you know, works for the, works for the East India, you know, company. It works for us, you know. We're not like, we're Americans. We are idealistic.

We don't like to fight a war that's, you know, we like to fight a war for like, you know, truth and justice and freedom. I mean, that's, that's us, you know. So it's hard to then wrap our heads around the fact that, like, we're going to be allies with a guy who, you know, put captured soldiers in an oil drum and then told us, you know, as soldiers to indiscriminately shoot them and then suffocate them. You know what I'm saying? It's like, this is like a hard thing for us to accept.

That's, you know, and at a certain point, we've got to be honest with ourselves. So if we can't accept that that's what it's going to take in order to do this mission, and I think that there were people like Dictaining right after 9-11 who really tried to be honest about this saying we're going to have to do a lot of things in the shadows and things like that, well, okay, so we have to be, if we're not going to accept that as a country, that this is what we're doing now and a lot of it's going to be kind of ugly, then maybe we should think we shouldn't do it, you know what I mean? Or we should figure out another way to do it. But instead, what we did was we had these sort of two, these two wars that we were doing it were cross purposes. And it doesn't mean, by the way, that there weren't real accomplishments in like Kabul. If you went to Kabul, I've not been to Afghanistan, but if you would go to Kabul and this, period, it was becoming the life again in that city. Like there really was a revival. And that was a good thing. But for the rest of the country and the idea that it was all going to be centrally run from Kabul is it's not, it wasn't going to work. It couldn't work. And we undermined ourselves.

And it led to a lot of painful and really bad decisions towards the end of the 2000s that were in the prelude or the run up to ultimately Trump making a deal with the Taliban. And then Biden carrying out that deal leading to the disgraceful and a terrible surrender of a year ago. It's a really interesting analysis. I mean, I think I agree with a lot of it. I mean, you point right at the end there to a complexity that I think is worth trying out, which is, you know, I don't think, I'm curious to know how you would respond to this. I don't think we can draw like a clear bifurcation or like draw a dichotomy between, on the one hand, you have these nasty warlords and, you know, as it were,

local dissent and dissatisfaction with their reign of terror is the cause of all of or many, most of our problems will say. Meanwhile, you have the sort of, you know, the democratic Karzai regime, ineffectual as it may be, but generally speaking. And corrupt. Exactly. Well, this is the complexity I'm getting to. Yeah.

It's not, it's the seeds of the insurgency and of the renewed energy of the Taliban, circa 05, 06 and on, have a lot of sources. and it's not just overbearing warlords, right? It's the corrupt, self-dealing, often brutal, certainly ineffective Kabul government is a contributing factor in its own right. Sure. Adds is this weird dynamic where because of the,

like even the constitutional structure of the Kabul government, not that the constitution was much more than a dead letter, but that that document and the sort of internet, if you will, the liberal internationalist spirit that prevailed amongst the assistance, given that government in Kabul, that was never going to be acceptable to right-wing past students who provide, you know, a large part, the manpower and energy for the Taliban. So from the very start, I mean, all I'm trying to say, I guess, is I think your analysis

is interesting. And the warlords certainly were a part of the problem, or perhaps, to paraphrase something, you said, a part of a solution that we were never really going to fully be able to embrace as a nation. If anything, my response to you, though, is that actually the pumps were even more complicated. Oh, yeah, no, no, I accept it probably was more complicated. And now that we're mentioning all this, I would add a couple other issues. One of them is that like, I just think you got to focus on the fact that like it was a mistake to think that you should have a central

government that would control the whole country. I agree, completely. So Kabul could still be this sanctuary of, you know, light in an otherwise, you know, rough neighborhood. You know, you might have been able to make that kind of work, but you also did not want to get in a situation where you let, you don't want to, you know, you want to be able to say, all right, over here you guys, you know, you're the local governor and we're not really going to try to get you

to do certain things our way. And that might have been good. But I'd say another thing is this. The US military, most of what the US military did in Iraq and Afghanistan is train the militaries of Iraq and Afghanistan. and equip the militaries of Iraq and Afghanistan. And we screwed that up enormously.

And here we probably should have taken a Soviet approach, which was to not have, you know, intricate supply lines, complicated equipment, and instead come up with a much, you know, cleaner kind of way to get some of the basics to these fighters, but not necessarily try to turn them into American army units, which is a huge mistake that we made. And I think in some ways because it was also very profitable

for a lot of military contractors. But that was the wrong way to do it. What we needed to do was sort of set up really simple kind of supply lines that were not that complicated. Use weaponry that was available in that part of the world. That was easy to repair, allow and accept for a certain level of corruption, which is just going to be always in certain elements, you know, these places, but we didn't. So we, so, so the idea that we trained the Afghans to

fight with close U.S. air support was one of the many reasons that they ended up getting so screwed when, you know, Biden sort of, you know, oversaw this haphazard withdrawal. So we're off to the races in Afghanistan. It seems like you and I both agree, at least in general, that we're baking some problems in relatively early on. One other thing I would just add, by the way, before we move on to Iraq, I've always been curious about and wondered why at the Bonn Conference in particular, and I think Khalil Zat played a big role in this, why the idea of the monarchy of a restoration of the monarchy was sort of rejected almost offhand. Right.

As a way of establishing a kind of government that would be, you know, in its ideal version. And, you know, I have not, as it were, surveyed the credentials of the individual members of the royal family. So this is a bit 30,000 foot. But if it had been well executed, a regime that could have been simultaneously better rooted in Afghan traditions and also less ambitious, to your point, the notion that, you know, you were going to have, that Afghanistan was going to be a country like, you know, France, where we could expect that if you shoot someone on the Franco-Italian border, like there's some French police who have to answer to someone in Paris who are actually going to do their honest best to find you and hold you to account, which I, which I promise you was never the case. Yeah, try to imagine that into Afghanistan. Yeah, exactly. We both know how that went. There were a lot of issues.

I mean, the Bond Conference also thought that the Iranians could be constructive partners. You know, this was a time when there was a lot of effort, especially the State Department, to try to, you know, make the Iranians an ally against what they saw as primarily kind of a Sunni adversary in al-Qaeda, without appreciating that as another outlaw rogue state, the Iranians were happy to at times cooperate when it suited their interest with al-Qaeda, which is an enormous, and also they again underestimated the depth of enmity that the Iranian regime had against America. So there were a lot of problems with the Bond Conference. But it was also you've got to look at it in the context of that era.

Coming out of the 1990s, America winning the Cold War fall the Berlin Wall. There was the sense that, I mean, the phrase, the end of history is often abused and has become a little bit of a cliche at this point about how long it was. But there was a sense that democracy and liberal democracy was on the march. This was the only viable system to arrange, you know, for countries. So the idea of bringing in a monarch was anathema to the prevailing kind of, you know, conventional wisdom of the day.

Yeah. You know, there were people you've got to remember. If you go back and look at George W. Bush's speeches, he didn't initially sell the Iraq war or the Afghanistan war as war of, you know, freedom versus tyranny. But he certainly would make that as a kind of secondary argument. And you would talk about how it was racist to think that Arab people or Pashten people didn't want to live in freedom. And I got to say, I kind of, I'm like maybe the last one. I still agree with that. I think that's true. I think everybody, it's just much more complicated. And the thing that he didn't know, that Bush didn't understand, was that that can be true. And I think it is true that a lot of Arabs want to live in freedom. We saw that in the Arab Spring. But it doesn't mean that the United States is capable of building these regimes and building a government that will deliver it. There's two different questions about capability. And then what are the what are these people want? And that was the problem is that we just thought, you know,

we can do anything. We just won the Cold War. You know, I mean, that was the idea. That's what, that's what's animating the original 9-11 wars is that we get this attack. It does freak us out. But it's not just the power of nightmares, the left-wing critique. Like, oh, my God, we became a fear-based society. I mean, that's a lot of crap. It's the, it's the optimism. It's the sense of just, like, limitless potential that is coming out of America's victory in the Cold War. That's what got us. More so than, you know, I do think there is something that we now look at at 21 years later, and Cheney certainly believes at the time, there is something to be said for you can't just have a policy that's based on we can never allow this thing to ever happen again,

although you could argue that there hasn't been anything close to a 9-11 scale attack since 9-11. But I do think that there's like, you can't make counterterrorism or stopping or preventing terrorism the only focus of U.S. grand strategy. That's a bad idea. A couple of responses that. First is to your point on Bush, I remember Hitchens, this was a favorite argument of Hitchens making the point that, you know, to suggest that Iraq is incapable of democracy is at some level, you know, either racist or could be racist depending on how you're formulating or

what's on your mind. I mean, I think of course it's true. But I just want to expand in your point. It's not only that, you know, that may be true, but American power is incapable of, you know, bringing to pass what we want to see. It may also be true that, you know, it's not for racial or ethnic reasons, you know, that the Egyptian liberals who wanted freedom in the Arab Spring, you know, ultimately failed. It may be that there are cultural and political reasons why a particular society, you know, economic reasons or a particular society that's not capable of building at that moment in time. Yeah.

Lasting liberal democracy, stable, liberal democratic institutions. That wouldn't, there wouldn't be, it's nothing to do with, you know, the foundational books of their culture necessarily are certainly nothing racial, but very immediate circumstances. Yeah. I mean, it is a thornier question in the way it was sort of presented at the time. I still think, though, that the tier, the tiering. is an unnatural condition for human, for human beings. So I do think that any time you have the kind of the caprice and cruelty of a tyrant ruling over a country and all that comes with that,

that there is going, you're going to create, there will be a resistance in some way. It may not be successful. But, you know, it doesn't address this other question, which is that the United States government is very powerful. It can do many things. But one of the things that cannot do is just decide that they're going to rebuild a society from scratch. And it did happen that in World War and the aftermath of World War II, in Germany and Japan, the U.S. did have some success. But again, the other thing there is that it's like we forgot that we were, that in order to get that effect of why we called a year zero,

we had to use an enormous amount of violence, dropping atomic bombs in Japan and firebombing cities in Germany. And I don't know, I mean, I would put this to you, Aaron, And do you think the United States could ever use that level of like wanton destruction and violence? Again, I don't think we could. I don't think we could just decide, okay, we got to win this war. So, you know, we're going to do everything we can and drop an A bomb on Baghdad. We could have done that.

Well, no, I mean, of course not. But it depends. I mean, if you make the question more general, then, of course, the answer is it depends on the circumstances. Yeah, that's a good point. The stakes were received in 44 and 45, I think, accurately. Yeah. There's not a criticism of Truman, by the way. It's more of just saying our standards have moved on.

And if you want to sort of use the Japan and Germany example of like, well, we did it then, well, yeah, you dropped an atomic bomb on Japan and then you were able to say, all right, here's the new deal. And, you know, it was a success story because Japan is no longer fascist. And it's a, it's an ally. And it's a prosperous country. But, you know, there was a really big, horrible war before that. And then you were able to do it, right?

The other response I had to your earlier comments, which we don't need to address right now, but I would like to get to you at least before the end of the interview is, this is kind of a grand strategic question I have about the era. And I think one that you also have to take seriously the fact that, you know, it was the 20 aughts. It was not today. So things are conditioned by the history that immediately had preceded them. But, you know, in a way where we throughout focused, even within the Middle East, focused on the wrong priority and that priority should have been, you know, basically as soon as

al-Qaeda was dealt with. Iran, did we always have that priority slightly out of whack? That seems to me to be a question worth addressing about the Bush administration and the decade as a whole. Let's talk about Iraq for a minute. I don't say that's a very good question. Yeah, let me finish with that. We can't talk about the Bush administrations for policy and not address the invasion of Iraq the insurgency, the surge, and so forth. So it has become, if the universal wisdom, the winner of 2000, 2003, universal overstates it. The overwhelming energy of the argument

was that something must be done about Iraq and an invasion ultimately was what that thing was going to be. If that had tremendous, bipartisan, winded its back in 2002, 2003. I mean, something like the reverse, of course, is true today. Now, Everyone has to disclaim, Republican or Democrat, has to disclaim, you know, the wisdom, as it were, of the invasion of Iraq. Where has the pendulum swung for you, you know, knowing what you know now when you look back on the thinking in 2002, 2003, was this ultimately the right or the wrong move for American security in the Middle East? I mean, what we know now, I mean, I'm never, I'm going to be the last holdout. I'm never going to say that we shouldn't have helped to topple Saddam Hussein. It was an evil regime. It destabilized the world. I don't think it would have been wise to take the view that we should pursue counterterrorism cooperation with Saddam Hussein, which, you know, I don't know. I mean, was the idea that, but at the same time, I mean, do I think it was a mistake to approach, to sort of commit to this incredibly long-term nation-building project? And, you know, put ourselves in the middle of everything like that, which we were unprepared to do,

and we didn't have fully to understand it. I also would agree with that. But I don't think that it was as simple as it was a war of choice. We didn't have to do anything. It was sort of working before. That's not true. The sanctions were breaking down. It was a new world after 9-11. There were al-Qaeda, you know, leaders like Abu Musab Zarqawi, who traveled from the camps in Afghanistan to Iraq to set up a base there. The Iraqi state did not sponsor al-Qaeda in a traditional sense in the way that the Soviets used to sponsor foreign terrorist organizations, but they certainly were willing to kind of work with them at times. I mean, it kind of jihadist group that later was folded into al-Qaeda's presence in Iraq and Ansar al-Islam tried to

assassinate Barham Sala when he was the prime minister of the Kurdish northern provinces in Iraq before the Iraq war. So there was a lot of, I mean, it wasn't entirely like there was no interest there. But at the same time, was there, did the United States have the capability to again, you know, rebuild a country in a smart way and all that other stuff? Well, clearly not. We made a lot of mistakes. But then I look at the country now and I'm like, well, it is better off than it was under Saddam Hussein. There have been successive elections. We have another political crisis in Iraq right now. But it's kind of remarkable, if you think about it, that for nearly 20 years, or I guess 2005 or the first election.

So, you know, 16 years or something or 17 years, Iraq has had an expectation that they will elect, you know, the ruling parties and it plays out. It's not always pretty. There's much for your media in Iraq. There is a constitution. It's got a lot of problems, but it's not a basket case, which it certainly was under Saddam Hussein, and would have been under his one of his two sons. Just because you mentioned Zarqawi, I have to note that I briefly served in Afghanistan with a guy who participated in the operation that got him in the end and actually found the Iraqi police trying to spirit the body away and grabbed his body out of the back of an Iraqi police pickup truck.

I'll just call him a soldier, soldier, member of an elite unit, great American. That's awesome. You know, you can't say who. No, but I was, I am honored to have served alongside him in different circumstances. In my reporting tours of Iraq, especially when I embedded with like different units and stuff, you notice that when the special ops guys came into the chow hall, like into the mess, A, they had they had facial hair. And B, they had much cooler guns.

They had like German guns, like shit that, sorry, stuff that like, it wasn't a standard issue stuff that the regular infantry guys had. It was pretty cool. I had one of my old Marine buddies on for a couple of episodes a few weeks ago, and the language was much worse. So don't worry. Don't worry. And they all kind of hung out together and it was like they didn't really want to deal with any journalists, but it was very cool to sort of like, you know, oh, yeah. Well, as you and I both know, there's sort of special ops and then there's special ops in this gentleman. Sure. The latter category, I'm not sure every American fully appreciates the distinction, something which, no offense, I have plenty of friends who are

in the Seals, but something the Seals definitely benefit from is the lack of a lack of awareness. of the tears within these communities. Yeah. In any event, Iraq. So why don't we remind folks of, you know, the years 2004, 2004, 2005, 2006? Because there were certainly, I mean, there were a couple of big picture of problems here. One of which was in terms of American attitudes towards the war, right? Obviously, the centrality of the weapons of mass destruction argument in 2002, 2003, became a problem.

Not, I think, you know, for the reasons that, you know, as it were the left or critics of the war from the left would have, that this is all a great big lie and we were after the oil or some nonsense like that. But because there had been, what appears in retrospective, have been a genuine mistake made on the part of Western analysts in multiple countries to include ours. A mistake made, as you point out, because of action Saddam Hussein took to obscure the reality of the matter. But nevertheless, an essential place. So he had an infrastructure for making weapons of mass destruction.

Right. And it's not like he would lose that ability. Right. It's just that he was, by the time we got there, that we couldn't find, you know, lots of stockpiles. Although there were stockpiles that were found. I wrote about it in 2006, but then later, CJ Schevers wrote about it as well in, I think, 2014,

or maybe, yeah, around then. And there was a, you know, I mean, this was a, it wasn't, it wasn't the all or nothing that people thought, but it did not, it wasn't, it didn't pan out the way we, thought it did. But again, it's like, people don't understand the context of it. In order to end the war, Saddam Hussein had to sign an agreement that he was going to demolish and account for all of his weapons of mass destruction. We could no longer trust Saddam Hussein with such an arsenal. And he never resolved it. I mean, it's not like, you know, some of it is on, as a lot of it is on

Saddam Hussein. Yeah. No, remember he kicked out weapons inspectors in like 1997 or 98. I mean, There's all kinds of stuff that he did that you have to think to yourself, okay, like, why is he making it so difficult? Why is he doing this? And then I think another, you know, a big problem that we had, again, in terms of the American public's attitude towards the war, was, you know, in 2000, late three, certainly into four and five, there did seem to be this sort of slow and grudging acceptance of the fact that we had a serious insurgency on our hands. Yeah. I mean, I was watching, I was, I was in grad school in the UK at the time, just watching it sort of all from afar as a student of medieval Arabic thought of all the things. So paying some attention to the region. And it certainly seemed to me as an observer that the American government's messaging was somewhat behind the reality of what was being reported.

You know, is that you, you tell us about your personal experiences there. You were in and out a bit. Like, what did what did you observe and, you know, why did it seem at least to, you know, to take Washington time to realize that it had a real problem on its hands? Well, part of the problem was failing to understand that killing Zaraki was not the end of the insurgency. That's a big one. Another problem was the failure to adopt the approach that ultimately, you know, turned the tide of the war in the late 2000s, the late aughts, which was to reach out to this sort of tribal community, which the United States was for some reason not reaching out to,

and try to kind of recruit them over to our side to fight against the people that they were, they felt were their protectors and to understand that the jihadists, the al-Qaeda presence, really was able to get a certain kind of legitimacy because there was this other problem, which were the Shia militias that were, you know, supercharged by the Iranians, that were going house to house and conducting horrific war crimes and that elements in parts of the Iraqi state because the Sunnis were not participating in the national elections were dominated. So like the interior ministry really became kind of an extension of this ethnic civil war. And it was undermining many things, not just our vision for like kind of, you know, Iraq, whole and free,

but it was extending the life of the insurgency and that we had to, so our failure to deal with the Shia side of it as well. And also to deal with the Iranians. And that's the other part of it was like there was this, for a lot of reasons that don't make sense in retrospect, but at the time, you know, we're prevailing, that there was a real reluctance from the Bush administration to take on the Iranian role in Iraq.

There were still a number of people to State Department and in a broader foreign policy community that thought that Iran was going to be our natural ally against the Sunni radicals. And there was this, you know, the Democrats were convinced that Bush was a warmonger and that if he had his druthers, he would extend the war to Iran and they were going to do everything to try to stop that and that became a big focus of things. And this then extended to, you know, an unearned because it was another weapons of mass destruction thing. So it was like Democrats for a little bit there, didn't think that Iran was really building a nuclear weapon. They worked very much with

a guy named Trita Parsi. At the time, the Iranian ambassador of the UN in Toronto's Rief, who would go on to become the foreign minister. The Democrats were the thought that, you know, the neocons had Iran all wrong and that the Iranians could work with us, even though in 2005 they elect Ahmadinejad and Khatami is undermined and sidelined. And it becomes far more of, you know, that it just the super fanatics and the regime consolidated power and have been consolidating power. There was no longer kind of a reformist moment. So the failure to deal with Iran and the failure to understand how dangerous the Shia militias were was, I think, one of the factors that made it so that we didn't understand the kind

of uncertainty that we had. And that's why we needed to have a new strategy coming in. And that was like, I think, the end of General Casey. Yeah. It really did fail as a, even though it was under Casey that we got Sarkawi, he didn't understand that that was not going to, that was not the end of the insurgency. So I think it's probably worth finishing up with the search today. And then if you're free, we can continue this crossover event. Oh, yeah. Nebulous Media Enterprise. And in, you know, the weeks or months ahead was more about the Middle East. But no, no, I'm going to have you on. We're going to have a soup

nuts conversation about World War II. Oh, that's our World War I. We're going to do World War I. That's right. That's right. And we're going to, I want to focus on Lannin's famous train ride, you know, into the Soviet Union, well, Russia at the time. And how, you know, he, you know, that changes everything. I much look forward to it. One dirty, brilliant commie.

You know what I mean? Returning from exile. And the cynicism of the Kaiser. Absolutely. The Senate of the German general staff who thought, oh, yeah, let's take care of this. And then, of course, it blows back on them because the Germans, the Weimar Republic has a major, commie problem, too. I will look forward to that. Yeah, really fun. Let's chat about the surge for just a couple minutes before we both have to go. Because I think, you know, even if you take the view that there's a long, you know, there are many counts to indictment, an indictment of the Bush foreign policy. And then we would just argue over what they are and how many

they are. I do think that what gets lost sometimes in that what now becomes a sort of overwhelming energy of critique is the fact that the second Bush term ends with this extraordinary success in Iraq, a success downstream of great deal of failure and loss of life, both Iraqi and, of course, plenty of American troops. But nevertheless, a victory in the emergency. So tell the story of how that came about, how this new strategy was formulated. And then I guess the teaser can be, we could kick off the next episode. I've addressed this in the podcast before, but the same strategy was then applied in Afghanistan

with, I think, significantly less success. Oh, yes. Let's talk about Iraq. Well, it was a couple things. I mean, one of them was after Vietnam, as you know, the U.S. military didn't want to have anything to do with counterinsurgency. And they just stopped, I don't know,

for lack of a better word, thinking about it or trying to develop a doctrine. You know what I mean? They're paying attention to that. Like, just the idea that America would ever to fight another guerrilla warfare against an opponent like the Vietnam, like Vietnam or the Bia Kong. It was just we weren't going to do it.

So you did have the foresight of a guy, General David Petraeus, who before he's tapped to lead the forces in Iraq, he's in Leavenworth, Kansas, and he redos the insurgency manual. So that's important because it hadn't been updated since the Vietnam era. And at the same time, you also have the beginnings of, I think, HR McMaster is involved with this, you know, the beginnings of this reaching out of the U.S. military looking at, okay, well, hey, it seems like there's some tribal leaders. And we just, the analysis was it's red on red. It was like, you know, oh, bad guys are fighting each other terrific.

And what we didn't understand is that there was this. And of course, now in retrospect, it makes perfect sense, of course, Aaron, right? is that, you know, the tribal, the, the, the Sunni tribal leaders in Western Iraq in Anbar were, we're chafing at having to live under the lunatic rule of at first Abu Saabu Zarqawi and then the various people who kind of replace it and eventually becomes what is known as the Islamic State. Why? Because they were murderous fanatics. And even the, and the Iraqi tribal chiefs were, they just, you know, they wanted to like, here. you know, continue kind of living as they do,

make some money off of some smuggling in the border. But, you know, that wasn't them. And, you know, we have these stories now about how Al-Qaeda, you know, Mujahideen guys who were hyped up and, you know, all ready to, to, you know, fight and everything like that, would assume that they could, you know, walk into some shakes, you know, home and point to his daughter

and say, okay, she's gonna be my wife now and stuff like that. Well, that's not gonna go over very well. So it was the, it was, it was a few really alert officers who said, wait a second, maybe there's an opening for us, plus a new kind of doctrine and strategy. Plus I would also say, and this has gotten less attention, but there were some very important kind of technical innovations that were made in terms of surveillance, the ability to pick up disposable cell phones, and other kinds of things that allowed for the U.S. to have a much, how do I put this, much more precise

kind of understanding in real time of the overall environment and the ability to sort of surveil it on many levels. All of that, I think, came to the point where it made this new policy, this new policy possible. But the main thing was that you just had the frustration of these tribal leaders with the jihadists. And that was enormous. And that's what, that's what, And then you had a general in Petraeus and his and his and his and his general staff, the people around him that were able to take advantage of that. And that's why you had that success at the end of the Bush years. And there was this whole Washington debate as well. And it's not just a Democrat-Republican thing about, you know, democratic hostilities of the war.

I mean, internal to the administration, right, the surge was not a was not, it was not like, you know, these officers sent back their insights and everyone slapped their foreheads and said, of course, send a bunch more troops into Iraq. that was highly controversial. Yeah. Well, I mean, the Democrats thought they were going to end the war. And they wanted to have this kind of micromanagement from Congress of things they wanted reports every two months and, you know, all kinds of stuff. And what ended up happening was the other thing is that Petraeus wasn't just a good strategic thinker on these things.

But he also understood how to play the Washington game, which is surprising because, you know, you didn't really know about Petraeus before this. So he would, he, he cultivated a lot of important Democratic members. I'm thinking about James Clyburn is one of the early ones. And he would bring these guys, he would bring congressmen over to Iraq and show them around and kind of give them a tour, explain what they were doing. And he was able to win them over. And that was also a factor of it as well, was that even, and in the end, he never really

won over Barack Obama. But if you remember, Obama then promotes him to be in charge of Central Command, then, you know, Obama fires Stan McChrystal. And so you have, you know, so Obama bonds with Petraeus, even makes briefly Petraeus as CIA director, although that didn't work out very well for David Petraeus. And, you know, the kind of like, you know, this idea of counterinsurgency kind of wins out. And then they were like, well, let's try it in Afghanistan. Because So that, and that's, that I'd say is because Petraeus understood how to, how to also win a political and media war, which he did very well. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we should, we should.

It's a good place to develop, yeah, develop the idea of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan at another time. It does, you know, to put a point on it here, I mean, it is ironic and sort of tragic. I take, I take your point. I think it's an interesting argument that probably deserves more, more oxygen that however bad Iraq is today, that there was something about. Saddam's tyranny that, you know, it's just, it's a good thing that it's gone. But, you know, nevertheless, Iraq is under substantial Iranian influence today. It is a problem. Things there are not certainly terms of day-to-day current events right now, things are not good. And I think the tragic, ironic sort of twist of all this, looking back on the odds is, you know, if it became conventional

wisdom that Afghanistan was, quote unquote, the good war and Iraq was, you know, the war of choice, well, Iraq was also the loss of choice. Iraq was one. The insurgency was defeated in roughly 2008 into nine. I wouldn't say that it's, by the way, it's, I, yes, there was the withdrawal of 2011 that you're talking about under Barack Obama. But I don't know that that was a loss because the U.S. goes back in, you know. Well, but that's, I guess that's what I mean then. Yeah, yeah.

The fact that we then had to redeploy there because of the rise of ISIS, you know, would be one count in my argument. Another count would be the substantial Iranian influence in the country today, which is a major strategic problem for us and allies of ours in the region. I mean, these are, these are, problems. You know, the rise of ISIS and the empowerment of Iran and Iraq could have been avoided with a more substantial continued presence and involvement in Iraqi politics, which Barack Obama wanted nothing to do with. Yeah, well, I certainly, I definitely agree with that, that, but on the other hand, some of it was also Maliki, who was the prime minister. Some of it was the fact that he still

thought like he was the leader of Iraqi Shia. So he made life very difficult as the U.S. was trying to, you know, decrease its footprint for the people who were our allies who helped defeat al-Qaeda at the end of the Bush term. And that was a real blow. And it would have been much better if United States used its influence effectively to try to stop him from doing that. But he did do that. But I'd say that that's, you know, so I'm agreeing with you, but I also would say some of it is also that, you know, the leadership that arises after Saddam Hussein in Iraq, you know, is really sectarian. And, you know, we didn't, we didn't get a Jefferson or Churchill or Zalensky. Eli Lake, host of the reeducation on nebulous media.

Come into the reeducation camp where we will do the work. And all sorts of other impressive credentials. Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for continued, both on your show and Sure. Crossover event. That'll be fun. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.