The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - National Security Expert Explains the Disaster and Chaos of the Iraq War

Episode Date: February 6, 2026

Noam Dworman, Dan Naturman and Periel Aschenbrand are joined by Michael Mazarr, Senior Political Scientist at the RAND Corporation, author of 10 books including Leap of Faith: Hubris, Negligence, and America's Greatest Foreign Policy Tragedy. Mazarr explains why the Iraq War was not an Israel-driven conspiracy but a catastrophic American decision born of post-9/11 panic, hubris, and bureaucratic failure. It’s a needed rebuttal to takes like Dave Smith’s, which mistake confident rhetoric for serious historical analysis. Leap of Faith available here:  https://a.co/d/06H6wnO1

No. Nobody's excited about these except for me. I think they're cool. Thank you, Mike. I appreciate that. I want to take it as a souvenir. You can. We can give you some fresh ones.

Yeah, we're lucky. This is live from the table, the official podcast at the World Famous Comedy Seller, available wherever you get your podcast. Available in particular on YouTube. if you want that multimedia experience. This is Dan Natterman with Noam Dorman, owner of the World Famous Comedy Seller with locations in New York City and Las Vegas, Nevada. Piri Al-Ashan Brand joins us.

Hello. She's our producer as well as an on-air presence. And we have with us in studio Michael Mazar, senior political scientists at the Rand Corporation, author of 10 books, including Leap of Faith, eubris, negligence, and America's greatest foreign policy tragedy welcome michael uh before we get into things i would like to give a shout out to a woman uh whose birthday was recently and i did a birthday party in her home and she said that this was her

favorite podcast her name is eleanor i don't know her last name but eleanor if you're listening thank you for listening and we appreciate your appreciation are you getting a kickback for this in some way no but she she said it was her favorite podcast that's so nice why not give her a shout out but did he pronounce your last name correctly perfect Oh, all right. Did you check in advance? No, I just, I winged it. All right. Before we get into Iraq, what else do you want to talk about? The new club.

Well, you got mad at me when I said what I wanted to talk about. No, not about the cups. No, you said about something else. Oh, Alex Pready? Yeah. Is that I pronounced name? Alex Pretty, I mentioned it. Yeah. What did you want to say? Well, you hadn't weighed in on it. So if you want to, maybe.

I haven't been following the news very much lately. As I told you, I've been working on the opening videos for the new club that's going to open someday. The opening day of the club is, goes back, it's moving away from me like an one of those Alfred Hitchcock special effects. But my general

take on all of that, I don't want to hold on. My general take on all of it is that none of these people are murderers and none of these people should have died. And I feel the same way about this as I feel about the ass-backwards

procedures that Israel had for distributing aid in Gaza where people ended up getting shot, not knowing where to line up, you know, this kind of, the real blood on the hands is at the people at the very top who are supposed to be able to understand what is likely going to occur based on their planning, quote-unquote planning. And in chaotic situations, like hungry people lining up or like ice running around, you know, swarming in protest and trying to round people up. I don't know the details about it with guns involved and violent, people get killed. And my feeling is that if either of these cops were actually murderers or ICE agents...

They actually weren't technically ICE. I believe they were Border Patrol, whatever they are. If any of these people were actually murderers, cold-blooded murderers, they would have killed somebody by now and they would have found an opportunity, you know, where they're much more likely to get away with it than with people shooting it

with cell phone cameras from five different angles when somebody else gun. So that's how I feel about it. That's how I feel. I don't know. I think it's absolutely terrible and I hope they stop. I've moved way to the left on immigration.

Not that I was ever a right wing about it, but just I just have to note that no matter what we think about the, I think the correct or logical thing, which is to say that what we have laws, so how can you say laws shouldn't be enforced? How can you just say that anybody gets here should be allowed to stay, right? It makes a mockery of the law. But two things. First of all, we didn't enforce the law for years and years and years and years, so much that, you know, in a different context of the law, you would say that you're precluded from enforcing it, like almost like an adverse possession. There's various things, like contractual

terms can be ignored by a judge if you've allowed it to be violated for many, many years. And when a country just simply doesn't enforce a law for 30, 40, 50 years, it's very difficult to tell people, you knew you were breaking the law. But even more importantly than that, I think that the fact is that once people put down roots here and become part of the fabric of the country, they become humanized to us, and we just can't bear to see them thrown out. We just can't bear it. I just don't think, like, you can bear it if you know somebody committed a violent crime. Fine, get them out of here. But that's a very small number, much smaller than Fox News would have us believe. And the rest of them, I think that are going to have to stay one way or another, and they need to really enforce the border.

and Trump should have traded whatever, you know, lack of enforcement or lack of deportations for some serious legislation. I don't know. I mean, you know, smarter people than I have broken their heads trying to solve this problem. But I don't think we're going to kick all these people out. I don't think anybody really wants to kick them all out. And I don't see how the wheels of America wouldn't screech to a halt. We just did a whole renovation around the corner. We're doing it.

There's not an American-born person to be found. And I'll tell you guys another story. You'll like this. I don't know if I'm allowed to tell it, but I heard from a reliable source that during this snowstorm that happened now, there was question about whether or not to close the Broadway shows. And the producers of many, most of the Broadway shows decided to stay open during the storm. And lo and behold, thousands of people with tickets actually showed up to see the show. They braved the snow.

They went into the subway, wherever it is. but what happened was large portions the word that was used was half I don't know if it was actually half of the casts of the shows didn't show up you know who showed up all the older members of the casts the people was harder to travel

the younger generation felt they were quote unquote not safe they felt like you're making us unsafe meaning that on top of immigrants being such great workers I think we have to admit, we have a problem with the youngest generation who feels that the very notion of having to work is almost like an imposition on their extended childhood or something. I know I sound like an old fuddy dud, but I'm experiencing this.

So anyway, we need the immigrants. They're fantastic. I wish they were more patriotic, I have to say, but anyway, that's it. And I said one of the... I don't know how patriotic the average American is these days. Yeah, but of all my... Everything I'm saying, as much as I am very, very pro-immigrant, I can't lie, compared to, like, my father's generation, our parents,

if you speak to the current generation of immigrants, they have nothing good to say about the country. I'm telling you, I've had this conversation with, like, 40 or 50 employees are like, yeah, yeah, I'm just here until I can go back, and, you know, America's bad for this, and America's bad for that. Even people who become citizens. Anyway, leaving that aside, I'll tell you what other thing. And then we get to Iraq.

I had a real, like, guilty moments this week. or last week. And I consider myself to be a pretty empathetic person. I can be very moved by the deaths of people that I don't even know. Like, I remember when Christopher Hitchens died, like, or if I hear stories. I mean, I'm not a heartless person. You know me. I'm not. But this is how, this is how frail human empathy is. So there used to be a, there used to be a barbershop on Thompson Street, where I used to go to since I was a little boy, and there was one on Sullivan Street, where I started to go to later. And then the, and I saw Marcy on Sullivan Street, which is closer and when I was older,

and Ralph on Thompson Street when I was a little boy. And then the barbershop on Thompson Street shut down. And the two barbershops merged. Wow. And then every time I went to the barbershop, I preferred Marcy's haircuts. And every time I went to the barbershop, I had to walk by see if there was somebody in the chair with Ralph. That way I could walk in.

And I said, oh, I'm sorry. I got, I'm in a hurry. And Marcy would cut my hair, you know. I'd always have to try to, because I don't want to hurt Ralph's feelings. And then last week, I went into the barbershop, and only Marcy was there. I said, where's Ralph? Ralph died.

And I've known this guy, I mean, I haven't been friends with him. I don't think about him. I know he has grandkids. I'm obsessed. I was little boys. It's like 78 years old. And, of course, I was upset that somebody I knew died. But do you know that, and I'm so ashamed of myself, that maybe the first thought I had was,

now I don't have to go through this thing about hurting feelings anymore. And I'm not proud of this. I'm being honest, but this is very human, right? Like, you're shaking your heads. Why? Because I shouldn't say it out louder because I'm particularly bad for having that. Because you're particularly... No, I'm just kidding.

Maybe you're right. It's sociopathic. And then I kept trying to push that thought down. But this was such stress to me every time I went into the barbershop. And all of which is to say that we expect humans to be all perfect or not perfect. I think that what I'm thinking is actually, it's perfectly normal. It doesn't mean I don't care about, God forbid, about anybody's death. But it shows that you can read somebody's text message or hear that joke that somebody told or some, you know, some snippet of a person.

And it's just the tip of an iceberg that pops up at that moment. And it doesn't really tell you about the iceberg below. And we tend to only get tips of icebergs from people. And we make huge judgments about them. And if somebody had joked in an email, like, if I jokes, now I don't have to worry about that. They say, oh, my God, what kind of monster? not a monster at all. I would do anything for his family now. But anyway, so that's that. Okay. So let's get to... I'm sure they'll take solace in knowing that you don't have to worry about that anyway.

They don't listen. They don't listen to that. But it's something that's been occupying my mind. Because I'm like, what is the matter with you? What kind of thoughts are these? Anyway. Well, when I found out my... Wait, wait, wait, wait, no, I didn't finish the story. Shit, I didn't finish the story. And here's the best part. God punished me. Do you know how he punished me? How? Because after... Marcy died. You know, you're like my wife.

Kill every story. Well, almost. So after 15 years of dealing with this problem, I went in today to get a haircut. Marcy up and left without notice. So now I don't have Marcy or Ralph to cut my hair. And now I have this other guy there. I don't know who he is.

So like, I got one week without Ralph. And then, so God's like, oh, no. You're going to, okay. So introduce him again. Let's go. Michael Mazar! Yes, he wrote the book. Leap of Faith.

Leap of Faith. Yes, leap of faith. Okay. So this is why I'm so happy to speak to you. First of all, this book is fantastic. Anybody who's interested in history of the Iraq War, this is the book to read. Obviously, you understand that this has become a huge issue now with Mir Schimer and Dave Smith and everybody blaming Jews and Israel.

And basically it's become like an assumption now. that the Jews and Israel were behind the Iraq war. You're aware of this, correct? Certainly aware of the argument, yeah. Yeah. Can you turn them up a little bit? And for some reason, no one's asked you to weigh in on this. Like Piers Morgan hasn't called you.

They haven't asked you to debate Dave Smith. No. I mean, in the stuff that I saw all along researching this, frankly, I mean, I guess it's coming up with some of these people now, but it was never really that much of a front burner issue because I think people that were involved in the process, people that knew people in the process, just knew that there were selected folks involved in the U.S. government and outside for whom Israel was really a dominant consideration. But it wasn't the president, it wasn't the people at the top, it wasn't the motivation,

there were other motivations. So it just, you know, for, I think people that are kind of closer to the issue, it hasn't got the resonance. I don't see it in kind of the community that discusses it from sort of the policy side as much. The grown-ups are not taken with this issue. Not from what I've seen. Right. Before we get into specifics, tell the listeners so they understand how credible you are.

What was the research that you did? Who did you speak to? How many people? I know some of the names are off the record, but as much as you can... Yeah, so I ultimately spent about 10 years working on the book. I started, I was working at the National War College at the time, and even in the summer of 2003, after just a couple of months of the war, we started getting folks coming back as students who were very frustrated because they were uniformed military officers and participated in the first few months,

and then were yanked out to go to war college. But they were telling stories about, you know, all the screw-ups and how badly it was planned and all the rest of it. And, you know, I'd had a sense of it, but I'd really started to get a thought of, a story that ought to be told. So I started talking to people fairly quickly, but then it took a while for it to really come into a research project. So it took about 10 years. I read everything I could find, read all the declassified stuff, tried to do some FOIA requests and got basically nothing out of it. And this has been the experience of just about everybody who's tried FOIA stuff in relation to the war and related things as the government just is not releasing things. But I got some declassified

stuff and then did about 100, 120 interviews with people who I promise all them anonymity. So, but these were folks from kind of colonels who were on the front lines or in the planning process in the Pentagon all the way up to cabinet level officials all across the different agencies, intelligence officers. 120 different people? Yeah. And can you say how many people, you know, one degree of separation from the president, you interviewed, cabinet people? Oh, yeah, one degree of separation. I mean, cabinet people who dealt with him all the time. And also.

How many of them were? those? How many of the people that you interviewed were people who were taking their orders directly from the president without an intermediary? Well, you know, the people that you could say take their orders directly from the president are really only the NSA, only the cabinet-level people. So it was a few of those, and then some others turned me down. But then there's a bunch of other people that interact with the president regularly, intelligence briefers and second-level people in the departments that are always in meetings with the president, political advisors in the White House. So lots of people who were who were close to the president. And then of course,

you know, one of the challenges is you talk to enough of those people and you get a sense that it's the touching the elephant problem, right? You're getting all these different stories. And then Bush eventually publishes his own memoirs, which are going to be kind of like his story, but I think there's a lot of truth in them. Other people write memoirs who were close to him. So you put together hundreds of pieces of data to kind of come up with your interpretation of somebody and their motives. All right. So early in the book,

and by everybody, jump in, and you can guide my questions, by the way, too. But early in a book, you talk about America, that part of the story is just America's missionary zeal.

Yeah. And this kind of American exceptionalism. Talk about that. Yeah. Yeah. So it's basically the idea that something like this doesn't come out of thin air.

If people started in the Netherlands, started talking about invading a neighbor, for the most part, the reaction would be you're out of your mind. But in the United States, States, we have this sense that certainly since 1945, and of course, back with roots long before that, we represent certain values that ought to be universal. We have a mission to improve the world, and we have the right to go out into the world and do things. And that kind of missionary

sensibility, as I argue, produces some wonderful things, like the Marshall Plan and helping to rebuild Europe and humanitarian assistance and all this sort of stuff. And also, it is used by folks who say we want to overthrow this government, we're going to invade this place, always in their mind thinking, well, my goal is this American zeal to make the world better, right? But, you know, it's interesting, the analogy to, to, it's somewhat loose, but the Minnesota situation, everything you were saying about that in terms of putting people in bad situations without thinking through all of what's going to come of it and the human factors that are going to screw up your effort to plan this carefully, you know, it's the story of this too. So yeah,

that missionary impulse is sort of enables so much of the behavior that we do around the world. You think that many people in this case were motivated by altruistic motives that they wanted to make the world a better place. Yeah. Out of altruism or out of, it's good for America. Well, so this is the problem is the line between those two things is really fuzzy, right? Especially for senior officials who are, you know, they've got a certain amount of altruism, but it's their job to think about the national interests of the country. So, but in this case, now, as you see in the book, I was not in favor of this. I think it was a mistake. I think it was a tragedy. It was a terrible thing to do. So I'm not defending it in that sense. But in their minds, yeah, it's in our interest because post 9-11, we got to go kick the hell out of somebody to deter the world and Saddam is allegedly tied with the terrorists when he really wasn't. But they also, at least some of them, some more than others. Like Rumsfeld, I think, is very much a hard pragmatist. This is in our interest. People like Wolfowitz very much idealistic, thinking I'm going to, I'm going to kick that regime over, and it's going to start this domino effect through the Middle East

and spread democracy. Now, that was way too simplistic. But I think he legitimately believed that. it's this, I think with almost any of these things, it's this mix of if you have a dozen key people at the top. Some really, you know, hard self-interest, some degree of altruism, other kind of motives are on the side. A mix of motives, you know, in this case, WMD and human rights and counterterrorism and change the Middle East and all kinds of things. So it's a mix. But there was definitely some altruism. And I think George W. Bush really thought he was doing a good thing not only for the United States but the world. Now, it was a mistake. He was wrong, but I think he thought that. So altruism may be not, as I interpret it, may not be the precise word, actually. I think, and I think that, and I'm one of these people, we Americans believe

that it's win-win. When America sacrifices to make the world a better place, it does good for the world and also does good for America. Yeah. So, and we had so many examples. So it's not exactly, altruistic, meaning we want to do good for the world and we don't care, even at our own, even at the expense of ourselves. Right. Although we will do that to some extent. We'll take some pain on behalf of the rest of the world, right? Yeah.

But in general, we look back on what we did post-World War II and are proud of the result. We think the result has been good for everybody. And we look back on our hesitations prior to getting in earlier to the world and say, oh, my God, the world would have been much better if we had simply moved quicker, right? Yeah. But prior to 9-11, you're right, there were already grumblings, rumblings of people who thought we should and needed to reshape the Middle East, correct? Yeah, and particularly take down Saddam. And those perceptions at that time, I don't think altruism had really much at all to do with it. And as I argue in there, what most people don't appreciate is at the end of the Clinton administration,

Sandy Berger, the second national security advisor under Clinton, and a bunch of his senior Middle East AIDS. Is one who went to jail? He got in trouble. He got in trouble later for, yeah, for classified information in his sock or something. But they really, and even Al Gore really believe we got to take this guy out. out. Now, the thing was, prior to 9-11, the idea of suggesting an invasion just wasn't going to fly, and they knew that. But they were investigating every option they could think of, and that's how we get involved with this guy. You say it wasn't going to fly, meaning if they had their way, they would

want to invade, but they weren't going to... So it's hard to say. I think, I don't think anybody wanted to do that, and they realized it would have been hugely costly and risky and stuff, and so, you know, there wasn't, you needed the shock of 9-11 to change the risk calculus. But they really believes Saddam had to go. And so they're toying with all these coups and stuff like that and a couple, a few of the failed coups. And that's how they get involved with this guy, Chalaby and others. And so they're really plotting for his downfall. Charlie was this kind of, was he a huckster?

I don't know what he was. So in Iraqi exile, who in the classic American history of an exile who says, give me a bunch of money, I'll overturn this bad government in this other place. I'll become the leader and it'll all be great. And he made a lot of promises that he wasn't really. And he shared a lot of information that was bogus and he knew was bogus. All right. So then, so everybody thinks Saddam needs to go.

Not for America's sake, for Israel's sake, for what was, why would Bill Clinton think Saddam? So the, the core kind of line all throughout is strictly for America's sake. One thing to keep in mind is something that really hit them. So to your point about we failed to do good things and we need to go back. This was a perception about the first Gulf War. So it ends in 91, particularly the Shiites in the South revolt and get annihilated

by Saddam's forces and we feel guilty about that. And they discover that he was much further along in the progress to a nuclear weapon than anybody had known. And this spooks the U.S. intelligence community. So they sort of flip and become overly sensitive information about it. Like, we're never going to let that happen again. So there's this sense that he can hide weapons of mass destruction. He had a bunch. He's dangerous. He still wants to invade other people. And so we had all these sanctions on him from the Gulf War, but those were crumbling.

So let's just make this point because it's important. And by the only issue isn't Israel here, but it's the hottest issue. That when Saddam invaded Kuwait, as I remember, it, George Bush, Sr. was very upset about it, but Margaret Thatcher famously told him, don't go wobbly, George, meaning like she was the one who propped him up and saying that you can't let this stand. Yeah. All of which is to say that nobody thinks that Margaret Thatcher was concerned about Israel when she thought that it was important to put the West's foot down in the Middle East. Well, and, you know, I think to some extent Israel's always in the background of American

thinking about stability in the Middle East. So it's there. But not Margaret Thatcher's. Well, or maybe so. I don't know. I don't know. I haven't studied her. Presumably not as much.

But in the Gulf War case, and George H.W. Bush was not a big fan of Israel, George Bush, Sr. Yeah. So. When you say concerned about Israel, because it's an important player in the Middle East, not necessarily because. Well, in the United States has a commitment to Israel security, you know, and has for Taiwan, Israel, Ukraine.

These are all right. non-allied commitments that we have. And, you know, as recently when we helped to defend them from Iranian missiles and stuff like that. So yeah, that's if when countries in the Middle East, and Saddam, of course, was one of the, I mean, now we think of Iran, but Saddam was violently anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, called for the destruction of the state of Israel. Now, there wasn't much he could do about it. And to oppose the Iraq war, you could say, we could deter him from messing with Israel very easily because he would know that if he did that, we would just blow his military off the face of the earth. But he was perceived as a threat, but the invasion of Kuwait is more about oil and control

of the Middle East. And yeah, Israel is kind of in the background, but the immediate thought was, no, I mean, he, you know, he's just displayed, and the fear at the time was he was going to go into Saudi Arabia. Nobody knew, and at the time, there was a lot of exaggerated threats, but, so the fear was he's just going to keep going. So this is a threat to oil supplies, Middle East stability, threat to America. We've got to do something about it. So yeah, then there's a question of, do we send forces to kick him out? And there's a debate about that in the first Bush administration. Colin Powell is on the side of saying, not immediately. Let's use economic sanctions for a long time. And I don't know if her, there's always a debate about how decisive her, Thatcher's intervention was.

But yeah, she comes into Bush and says, hey, you got to do something about this. And I think he probably would have ended up there anyway if Saddam had and left. So anyway, at the end of that war, we think, ah, great victory, but then within a, really, within a year, the sense is, wait a minute, he had a lot more WMD than we thought. He's still there. He's still a threat. They really thought there would be an uprising against him after that war, and there wasn't. And then gradually, the sanctions we put on are collapsing. He's getting more trade with Europe and elsewhere. So there's this sense by the late 90s. Our whole policy toward Iraq is collapsing. He's still a threat.

He probably has WMD. This is not sustainable. We're going to have to do something about this. The Clinton administration had got there. The Bush administration was basically in the first nine months in exactly the same position that Clinton was, which is, yeah, we kind of agree, but there's not much we can do about it because we're not going to go invade. Then 9-11 happens and it changes everything.

All right. So then 9-11 happens. And, you know, if you didn't live through it, it's impossible to explain it to anybody with what the PTSD was of that moment. I mean, anybody, you can, it's, you can kind of, uh, COVID was somewhat reminiscent of it, like just the, the fear we all had of leaving our house after COVID. Um, I'm sure people who lived through the, you know,

October 7th have an idea what it's like. But the psychological effect, I mean, I had literally waitresses afraid to come to work. a few days after 9-11, because as ridiculous as it would seem that Al-Qaeda's next target would be the comedy seller, right? Or they nervous, perhaps, about the sub, we're taking the sub. No, no, like, there was, Dan always has to do that.

But that they were, everybody was scared to go anywhere for a while. And in that context, okay, what was the post-9-11 attitude and how did that lead to the decision? to invade Iraq. So the two things. One is exactly right in the psychological effect. Now imagine you're a senior U.S. national security officials

responsible for the security of the country. Not immune to that psychological... Right, not at all. But even worse in the sense that it was your job to keep the country safe and now look what's happened on your watch. So, you know, everybody that I talked to and all of the memoirs, it's the same thing.

You cannot exaggerate exactly as you're saying. the psychological effect of this, the sense of vengeance that they wanted to have, the sense of fear that another attack was coming. I mean, we forget that now. And now we think it's exaggerated, and it was at the time, and some thought it was. But they really thought we were in for a whole series of significant attacks. And so, yeah, it totally, any kind of risk assessment you had was just totally changed. So, you know, there's that piece. It empowers people in the administration, who are the hawks, who say we have to go out and do hard things. And so, yeah, it just completely changes the context for that debate.

And as of the night of 9-11, Bush is already thinking about Iraq. Within two weeks. Now, why? Did he think Saddam Hussein was in on it? So he told a number of people in those first days, Saddam's got to be involved in this. His intelligence community very clearly came back and said, no. he wasn't. And we now have a whole bunch of documents

from Iraq's kind of archives that have all these discussions of Saddam talking to people at the time internally when he had no incentive to lie, saying we had nothing to do with this. But yeah, so he had that suspicion on September 14, 15, so just a few days after, they have this meeting out of Camp David where the official Defense Department plan

is to go after Iraq along with Afghanistan and al-Qaeda. And Bush says no. And at one point he gets pissed off at Wolfowitz. He says, just shut up about this already. I'm not doing Iraq right now. But he then will tell people, but we have to come back to it. So you have this sense of like there's this enemy out there that's not sustainable to leave in power.

Now we have a world where terrorists plus WMD imagine, you know, the people on the streets of New York if there had been a biological attack where this shit was all over. And his perception is, I can't allow this to stand. Now, if you step back from that emotional reaction, I start asking hard questions, and then eventually ask questions of, okay, well, if you actually invade what happens then, you would have, I think, come to a different conclusion.

But yeah, this intense... He believed that God was working through him in some way? So, yeah, I mean, you know, yes. I mean, he's a person right who's... That's unsettling. Well, I guess it depends on what God is saying and like how much he's directly like, you know, God just told me to do this. But he, you know, he's... The Zodiac killer said too, right?

Well, yeah, exactly. Like, you don't want that level of sort of I'm under the influence of. But, you know, he's a guy who's born again. You know, he was lost. He was an alcoholic, probably. He was in bad shape. And he believes that his faith cured him. And for a lot of people, that's great, right?

And to say, I believe that I'm an instrument of God. In one context, it doesn't like mean a lot. But in his sense, so another theme I write about the book is certainty, right? You do not want senior officials in a mindset of I know the answer. There's no doubt in my mind. And so his faith, I think, reinforced a natural sense, a natural instinct on his part, being an instinctive kind of gut player, that once I get a conviction, that's it.

And now, just as a matter of illustrating the psychology, what was Cheney's, was it a 1% rule? Yeah. Talk about it. So that gets to this idea of the risk calculus. Yeah. So basically, post 9-11, his thing is, if there's a one, in this context,

the application would be, if there's a 1% chance that Saddam has, WD and I might give it to a terrorist, we have to invade. Because we cannot allow these risks to exist. And that's what 9-11 does. It makes people say, I will not live with risk. Now, in the real world, we have to, we live with the risk of Russia nuking us every day. It's a fractional risk, right?

You have to live with some risk. It's not so fractional because there have been false alarms and we came close to it. Not so much recently, but yeah. I mean, in Cuban Missile Crisis, we came, you know, the one guy on one Russian submarine who would not go along with the order to fire a nuclear-tip torpedo. We were one dude away from maybe a nuclear war. Yeah, there was one guy, I don't know if it was that, or later on who should have fired and just decided it's got to be a... So in 83, yes, there was a warning officer who looked at a false alarm in their warning system amid a context.

Talk about certainty, so is a different issue, but Andropa... It's related. Andropov, the leader at the time, had become convinced that Reagan, because of his toughness, was getting ready to nuke the Soviet Union. And he set up an intelligence operation, basically said, find me all the evidence that this is about to happen, so I'm not surprised. So then you've incentivized your people to go out and look for all the evidence on one side of the issue.

So these guys were like walking around the State Department every day, seeing are the lights on at night, are they getting ready to start a war? So he's paranoid. Now there's a false alarm. And there was this one warning officer who made the judgment and put the word up the chain. This is a false alarm. He didn't know. He just, he made a judgment.

He made a guess in effect. I mean, I think there was pretty clear evidence that, like, there would have to be a lot of other stuff going on if this was real attack. But can I tell you why this is so deep? But it's all related to a wise person, which is that, and I made this analogy before. Let's presume that COVID was a lab leak. I think most people think it was probably lab leak now. There was some kind of research going on in that lab. But in the end, the most deadly event in modern history was the accident.

It wasn't the use of whatever it is they were developing, whether it was weapons or not. It was the accident. We have all these false alarms. And actually, there was another case of a missile that actually fell and five out of the seven dip switches tripped, which would have exploded, meaning that we constantly analyze these situations

in terms of the fact that deterrence will hold. They would never do that because we do this, mutual short destruction, even if Saddam, even if Iran does get a nuclear bomb, but they would never use it because, well, yeah. Really? That's not actually the risk. That's probably true.

If everybody's perfectly rational, deterrence probably would hold. The risk is that these backwards regimes in authoritarian countries where nobody tells the boss where he doesn't want to hear and nobody has any procedure for inspection and everything is bullshit, something is going to happen accidentally just like it happened out of a lab in China. And I can't believe that these responsible people weren't looking at the Middle East and saying, if we don't do something about this part of the world, we're all doomed. They're going to get WMD,

I mean, you know, biological, chemical, nuclear, and sooner or later something awful is going to happen. They're going to use it on each other. There's going to be an accident. The only hope we have for the future, and by the way, I think this is still valid today.

The only hope we have for the long-term future is that we have to, you know, detour away from this trajectory in that part of the world. And I think those were the arguments that I heard that were most convincing to me at the time. It's kind of the argument that Tony Blair was making. Right. I don't know what you think about all that. Yeah. So, I mean, certainly a lot of people would make those arguments.

And I think that was Bush's intent was I want to bring this region to a new place. For their sake and for ours. Right. Well, which gets back to the altruism thing. Yes. Is that mixed, right? The dominant thing is for our sake, because we wouldn't do it if we didn't have our interests, you know, at play. But now that we're doing it, let's, the problem is, and this gets to your earlier point about, you know, I think Lablick and other things. another thing that this really illustrates is how kind of a, you know, like met a point, but we've gotten to a lot of governments, government officials believe that they can engineer large scale systemic and social solutions and they forget about how many accidents are going to undermine what they're trying to do, whether it's, oh, we'll do all this gain of function research and there'll be these labs and it'll be fine, you know, well, you have a leak and there's a disaster. We're going to invade a country and prop up a new demise. democracy. Well, so that I, you know, it's interesting, and I have this one quote in there that I find just really struck me when I ran across it, this interview that Cheney gave in like 95 when he was asked, well, in 91, why didn't you go to Baghdad? Why didn't you throw him out of power then? And he said, let me tell you what would have happened. And he went through this whole description of exactly what happened after 2003. We'd go in there. They'd fight us. Only the Brits would be with us. There'd be a civil war, be a disaster. People would die. and what he concludes by saying is Americans are addicted to solving problems. Sometimes you have to just manage problems. And in the effort to have some grand solution, you create sometimes more problems than you're really solving. So that's part of the, I think, attitude behind it as well. But what I found so ironic was all these conservative, I mean, that's like a basic principle of conservatism is be careful of social engineering, right? So you have all these conservatives and this. I mean,

that are like, I've argued in the past that American social welfare programs were misguided because you can't do social engineering. So let's go to a country we know very little about and plan to social engineer their whole, like it just doesn't compute. It doesn't make sense. The decision to go to war after 9-11, was that because the administration felt that America would be behind it because of 9-11 or because 9-11 engendered in them, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the. reality of what could happen. Well, very much the second. I mean, George W. Bush didn't care. I mean, in a way that you can admire or whatever, he didn't care whether America was behind him. And this, this comes out in the later Iraqi surge decision when things are going really badly through

2004 or five, and he's presented with this thing of either you can send a whole bunch more troops in or you can start getting out. And his commander at the time basically said, let's begin to disengage as of like 2006. And he said, no, I owe it to the Iraqi people to try to make this right. And his political advisor said, the American people are going to hate this. And he said, I'm, I got to do it anyway. So I don't think it was that. He was vindicated in that decision. Well, he was lucky in that decision. Okay. Because lucky and vindicated. Well, I know. Right. Exactly. I mean, you can, I do think there's something to admire in somebody who says, uh, I feel like, political leader who takes a huge risk like that because they think it's the right thing to do.

I think that's what he was doing. We got lucky in that, the, the so-called Sunni away i.e. a lot of Sunni communities got tired of the al-Qaeda and other extremists in their midst, and they decided to work with the U.S. military to get rid of them. Had that not happened, it would have been a very different outcome. But anyway, so they were trying to lead the American people, but a critical thing about this is it's easy to forget that the country was behind it. The Democrats in Congress voted in droves for this war. The Washington Post editorialized in favor of this war. Many leading newspapers editorialized in favor of it. The Clinton supported it, right? Yeah, absolutely. And that was the... Yeah. So, um, so it, there's, there's a lot of people who, you know,

is one thing I say that, like, about the only thing of Donald Rumsfelds that I agree with is he would always complain later. All these folks had an opportunity to be against the war. Many of them were not. And then when it went bad, they were against the war. Oh, we should, we should spell out. why was the war and why is the war considered to have been a mistake? Well, primarily because the major reason that they gave for it was he has WMD, we got to get. But that wasn't, but we kind of, that wasn't really the reason, right? Well, so would Wolfowitz have said that was really the reason? Wolfowitz himself, because he was more of an idealist, had more of the democratization thing.

but you know the problem is and this is so one reason is and I think yes for a lot of people the the terrorism WMD connection was central and for George W. Bush in general I think if he'd been assured that they didn't have it and couldn't get it couldn't get it but how could you ever be assured well right I know but like at least in the near future I'm not sure he would have ordered this in the way that he did okay so I do think it's pretty central. So one reason is, not only was that wrong, in some ways we should have been able to know it was wrong. Like, for example, when Bush gets the real full presentation of the intelligence community of all the evidence, his reaction is, well, where's the real stuff? And that's when

George Tenet has to say, oh, it's a slam dunk, Mr. President, because he's trying to reassure him. But Bush is a smart guy, and his reaction was like, wait a minute. So if I had that reaction, I might say, okay, we got to look into this more. So anyway, there's that failure. Can we apply the 1% rule to that? Like if there's a small? Well, exactly right. So Cheney's reaction is, I don't really.

I mean, if there's a, the evidence is mixed, I don't know. I don't trust Saddam. He might get it in the future. So, and this is what, you know, some of the guys I interviewed were backers, senior people of the administration, they'll say, I kind of knew there were doubts. But I was not willing to live in a world where he might ever be in a position to get it. So, but there's that failure. there's the planning and decision-making failure,

which is it was completely amateurishly put together, and the whole notion of what we're going to do afterwards was just, there was really nothing there. So, you know, I hate to stop it, but it's just the way my brain is like stopping in every little thing that you're saying. I've heard this accusation that it was amateurishly put together. Yeah.

Which begs the question, if it had not been amateurishly put together, yeah, yeah, yeah. Could they have succeeded? So I've always hesitated to say yes, because my instinct is we shouldn't be invading and overturning other countries. You talked to Iraqis who wanted Saddam gone and wanted their country to have a better opportunity for the future. You talk to some U.S. military folks who will tell you about the first week, two weeks, when things were quiet. Iraqis were starting to go about their business.

You know, so, but the problem is. is the amount of effort that would have taken to make it go right would have been immense. And we know for a fact that when people came to Bush and other senior leaders and said, you know, well, if you want to do this right, here's what you got to do. Their reaction was, we're not doing that. I mean, crazily at one point, this guy, General Garner, planning the post war, came to Rumsfeld and said, so I need more money for my planning. How much you need?

Like a billion dollars. And Rumsfeld says, Jay, if you think we're spending a billion dollars of American taxpayer money in Iraq, you're spoken something. That was the mindset, you know. So the problem is there's this dilemma, which to me leads the decision of, okay, we can't do this. We can't send 700,000 troops and monitor peace all throughout Iraq and spend 15 years training their military. We're not going to do that. So if we're not prepared to do that, you shouldn't do it. Now, once the war started and I really remember it,

Fox News kept saying, weapons lad, discovered, and then it wouldn't be, well, it was only Fox News. Every other network was like, you know, skeptical. When they finally realized internally, when they had the oh shit moment, and then that closer, there aren't a weapons of mass destruction here. Like, what do we know about that moment? Were they pointing fingers at each other,

with like this is a all the people died. I mean, I can't even imagine the stress of that moment. So, you know, it's interesting.

I mean, I asked a bunch of people about that moment and obviously, some of the true believers described it as kind of an oh shit moment and like everything

I thought about this is trying out not to be true. But frankly, there was this other motive. So you said WMD wasn't the only thing. And another motive was from the beginning

they were saying, all right, after 9-11, we've got to show the world, you do not do this to America. And the thought was, literally, they would say there's not enough targets in Afghanistan

to blow enough stuff up so that the world says. And even Tom Friedman had this op-ed in the New York Times where he said, Afghanistan isn't going to, the United States has to go kick the hell out of somebody

to just as a demonstration effect. So you put that together with those who always thought well, I want to change the Middle East. That's my reason and this and that and the other thing. And so there was enough still there where people could say, all right, well, that's kind of embarrassing. But here's all the things we are still accomplishing in their minds. So a lot of justification going out. Yeah, I don't remember in detail, but was this war sold to America as simply about weapons of mass attraction or about all these other motives that you just? I think it was sold 90% on WMD. I mean, there's a famous Condi-Rice thing where she says, we don't want.

you know, the next warning to be a mushroom cloud. Bush used that same phrase. Cheney gave a famous speech before the Veterans of Foreign Wars where he said Saddam now has a nuclear weapon, basically. So, yeah, I think that was the WMD terrorism nexus to me was the centerpiece of how it was sold. By the way, just to dispose of this, or I don't want, I shouldn't lead the witness, but we hear Bush lied, Bush lied, Bush lied. Yeah. There's no, there's nothing in your book which indicates that Bush lied. So, and this is, yeah, I mean, this pissed a few people off about the book because I didn't call him liars and criminals.

I didn't find evidence that, now, Rumsfeld is a particular character. I can't know what's going on in his mind. It wouldn't surprise me if there were things he was saying that he absolutely knew not to be true. Although he was really skilled at like having these. complex constructions that nobody could figure out what the hell he was saying as opposed to lying. But yeah, George W. Bush, Cheney, these people, I think they believed what they were saying in terms of this is why I have to do it. It's just that they had gotten to a point of certainty that was dangerous. But there's no way Rumsfeld could have known there were no WMD privately while those other people

around him thought they were. Well, you know, he'd have private intelligence, right? He, so, so there's this one, um, intelligence report that I quote in the book that came out later, declassified from the J2, which is the, the joint staff's intelligence folks. And it says basically all this stuff is hearsay. We, we, we have very poor evidence of what he actually has, you know, we really don't know. And it has a stamp on it, sect deaf has read. So he was clearly getting some evidence that there were. doubts whether he didn't believe them or whether he didn't care and thought, we just got to get

rid of Saddam. So whether he has him or not, I mean, there were guys I interviewed that came very close to, like war advocates, senior, very senior people that came very close to saying that. Like, at the end of the day, I don't really care because he might have someday. And that was the risk. Or he might have at that time. It wasn't certain to a certain. True, true, true.

But like, if you were to tell him. hey, you know, we can, we can verify that it's like a minimal chance that he, certainly nuclear weapons, minimal chance. And the Kambio stuff, probably not. Because the thing is, Saddam had actually made the decision to get rid of him. And he even, he sent out orders to his military. If I find that you haven't destroyed this stuff, you know, your ass is in trouble. So he really had done it.

But I think a lot of these folks would say, even if you assure me doesn't have it now. I still would support this. Why was he doing things like, maybe I'm remembering incorrectly, but there'd be like some weapons, and weapons scientists that were supposed to be interviewed and would see on TV,

like Saddam come, whisk him away, so the one could interview. Of course he's got weapons of matters. Why would he do that? So there's, I mean, they were hiding a lot, but just not evidence of,

I mean, one of the tragic things is they had all this paperwork showing that they had destroyed stuff. but they destroyed it because they didn't want to give anything to these inspectors. So they had no sort of proof when that came to one of the things. So there's a guy named Steve Cole, a journalist who wrote a book about it with a lot of kind of Iraqi side stuff. And his thesis is, which makes sense to me, that those inspectors could visit a lot of sites without being messed with. When they would go near any place that was one of Saddam's residences or hiding places or whatever,

these guys always thought, as Saddam did, that the inspectors were part of an American plot to undermine him. So whenever it had to do with some place that they thought was really sensitive because it was his sort of place, then you'd see guys like taking materials out or whatever just because they didn't want any intelligence about Saddam, his whereabouts, whatever, to get to these folks. So they were obstructing them. They were pulling stuff out the back door as they were arriving at the front door. It's just that, and if you already assume they got WMD, it seems pretty obvious. Look, they got to be pulling this stuff out. Is it in some, and I want to get something else, is it in some way also an indication that Saddam

didn't take? He didn't realize that the threat was imminent and real, because he was acting exactly like one would act if you want to provoke America. 100%. He, you know, because the thing is, by this time, Saddam was not really involved in the governing of his country. He was writing novels. Like literally, when, when, and even when the American forces came in, of the country. When he was in hiding before we found him, he was working on his fourth novel, which was some allegory about, you know, America invading Iraq or something like this. He, you know, and it's funny because you hear these stories of the guys who were asked to edit this stuff, you know, it's like, okay, that grammar is wrong, but a mic...

Was he as talented, a talented novelist? Apparently not. Was he a better novelist than Hitler was a painter? I wouldn't be able to say. I don't know. I don't think Hitler was actually it wasn't that bad. Yeah, probably worse.

Workman-like, as they say. So one of the little story that I find, like it's an inscrutable and it's like something I just think about, like this guy, Scott Ritter. Yeah. So Scott Ritter was his weapons inspector.

Right. As I, correct me from him. Yep. And in the first Gulf War, he was this great hero. Because he found a lot of the stuff that had to do with some of their programs. And he was powerful.

He was brave and he went into a lot of places. Then in the second Gulf War, or the second Iraq, in the Iraq war, he was telling everybody, he has no weapons, he has no weapons, he has no weapons. And they just trashed this guy. He's on the payroll. He's this, he's that.

So for years after that, I'm always like, you know what? Be careful when everybody trashes somebody because look at Scott Ritter. He wasn't anything that they said he was. He was upright and he was right and he was a truth teller. And now, years later, we find out Scott Ritter is a total fucking headcase,

crazy person with a newsletter that finds conspiracies everywhere. Yeah. So it's just like you just, if I use the word inscrutable, you just don't know, there's no rule of thumb that you can stick to for very long about anybody or about anything, any, any method of analysis of anything. Well, one of the challenges, I think, is when there's a, there's like conventional wisdom that spreads throughout. So by the time we're getting ready to go to war, like I said, you've had this overwhelming. The congressional vote on 2003 was more unanimous than the congressional vote on 1990, 91. after Saddam had invaded another country because of 9-11. You got all these newspapers editorializing.

Everything comes down to the psychological effect of 9-11. We said it once at the beginning. But there's no way to understand this story. 100% without having been through that. 100%. It was everything. So at a time like that, the people that are going to be willing to stand up against that and be attacked, right?

They're going to be iconoclass. there are going to be people on the edges, right? Mavericks, who maybe later on, their maverick mindset takes them into weird places. Yes. And then people say, well, look, you should never listen to it anyway. But at the time, you need to adequately listen. But the thing is, there were lots of people short of, and I don't know where Ritter was in 2003 as opposed to now. But there were people trying to go to Bush and some senior folks and say, like, you know,

you got to think more carefully about this. just didn't listen. All right. Before, in your book, what I didn't find was any mention of what I've read that Ariel Sharon had counseled the Bush administration not to invade Iraq. Is that true? Do you know what? I can't, I can't say. I don't know. It didn't come up in any of the discussions. Did anything about Israel or the impulsive of Israel? Well, sure. I mean, you know, there were folks that were arguing that that was the reason for the war. that you interviewed.

No, well, people just writing articles out in the world. Right. But other people I interviewed, there's nobody. Now, there were definitely folks who were known in the administration to be very sympathetic to Israel, but even other people dealing with them would say, okay, the arguments they were making were not about that particularly, you know, it was this other stuff. And had there not been the WMD issue or other things, there's no way we're going to do this just because we care about Israel.

You know what I mean? There had to be not only these other threats, but then 9-11 on top of it. So, yeah, that just didn't, like, I don't know about the Sharon thing. There were definitely some of the other Arab governments were worried about it. And they were saying, don't do this unless you're really serious, because they knew very well that the whole thing could fall apart and blow back on them. Did the Arab governments think that you're doing this for Israel, or were they suspicious that Israel was the reason? I couldn't tell you. I just had a question. Are there, and this idea of like America going in and like saving the world or whatever version of that.

Is there, are there any correlations between what is going on in Iran now that are in this same like idea? So, you know, for some people, probably that's part of the motive. I mean, as I look at U.S. policies toward Iran over the last few years, you know, yeah, there's somewhere in the background this notion that the Iranian regime is this theocratic dictatorship and it's better for the Iranian people if they can have. And I think there's truth to that. But the motivation for current U.S. policy, I think, current U.S. policy is much more narrow, much more self-interested.

All right. Let's play this one video and then if there's anybody, is anybody there to take calls? If there anybody. Not at the moment. Yep. Not at the moment. Okay, okay. Anyway, let's play the video. This is a debate between Dave Smith, the comedian-com political analyst, and one of the smartest men in America, my friend Mr. Coleman Hughes, and this is about the Iraq where I go ahead.

That wasn't in the paper, and that got added later. But I think it's still pretty relevant. That's kind of half the enchilada. Let's talk about this. No, I don't see. Okay. Let's talk about this, this, this, Wesley Clark memo that he never saw.

Okay. So four-star General Wesley Clark. He never saw it? Yeah, he says so in the C-SPAN interview. You don't remember this? He's talking about it. He says, he's talking about it.

Yeah, he says, I'm talking to the Joint Chiefs and staff. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. He says he handed him the paper and he was like, all right, no, no, no, right. Don't look at that. He says, do not show this to me. I don't want to be on the hook for seeing classified info.

Yeah, I think it was, you're talking about the interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, right? Yeah, yeah, yes. Yes. So the memo that Wesley Clark never saw. Okay. said according to his hearsay,

and it would be dismissed in accord his hearsay, that we're going to overthrow seven countries in five years as Iraq, then Syria, then Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Iran. So the first thing I want to say about this is that Pentagon... How do I skip forward? Because I think I started the video too soon. Which one of my...

Skip forward to where Dave starts talking. Okay. No, keep on. That was laid out. Do you have any evidence that this memo was actually important as opposed to one snowflake in a shifting strategy of 60,000? Well, I think, okay, so first of all, Wesley Clark has actually clarified a bunch of this more recently. But he did talk about how he had actually seen the plans originally a decade earlier in 1991. That was some separate Israeli study, he said, right?

He didn't see this memo. It was kind of, it was a little bit clunky the way he said it. He said it came from Paul Wolfowitz's desk and that he had brought it to Brent Skokroft, I think, who had said, let's look at that after. Yeah, he said it was, it was resurrected in an Israeli study later. And it wasn't exactly clear what he was referring to there. But again, we got a four-star general, right? And he was not saying, like, because this was kind of weird when I, I remember Douglas Murray kind of taking a,

similar line with this one. I put up the clip. Go ahead. Conversation with him. But he wasn't saying like, oh, there's a memo or there's just like something. Like what Wesley Clark is saying, and you're right, it is him saying what he heard from someone else. But he was saying, and a four-star general felt comfortable enough to like say this on national

television, that he went to the defense department and was told that the decision had been made, that we were not only going to a wreck. The way he tells the story is he came in and he found out they had decided they were going to invade Iraq. Then he comes back a couple months later. This is late 2001. And the guy goes, dude, it's so much worse than just Iraq. We're going to topple seven countries in the next five years. Now, he said he goes to show him this. And Wesley Clark's like, I shouldn't really be looking at that document there. And this might be a crime for you to be showing this. But okay, so what we have is a four-star general saying he's, he knew of these plans a decade later. The same

group of people is now back in power after being kicked out, you know, for the Clinton years. They're now back in power. He's saying the decisions been made that we're going to war with, hold on one second. Hold on one second. He didn't even, he wasn't even allowed to see the memo. Let me just finish the point. Okay. Then you can respond to this. He's saying, you're right. He didn't see the memo. It's just a four star general saying that somebody at the defense department told them the decisions to be made. And then in the following years, we didn't overthrow five, seven countries in five years, but we did overthrow a bunch of the ones on the list or target a bunch of the ones on the list.

Okay, okay. My argument. So forgive me, I was rushing and I actually cued up the first two minutes that I didn't want to show. But okay, this is a, this is a very hot issue. Yeah, yeah. What do you know about it? So, yeah, you don't put it to bed, one way or another.

We don't, we don't need, like, secret. I talk to one person. There's, there's declassified PowerPoint briefs that. So what this goes back to is the war on terror plan, which is prior to Iraq and Iraq becomes part of it. That's a whole separate. issue, right, is the decisions we made right after 9-11, not to just go after Al-Qaeda, but to go around the whole world and destroy terrorism generally. As part of that process, as part of the war plan for

the war on terror, there were elements of plans that had a bunch of countries listed. And this stuff has been released. It's declassified. You don't need to have secret meetings with people. And essentially, I didn't, I don't remember all of them, but I think basically the countries he was listing were sort of on this thing. But these were aspirational. These were a relatively small group of people in the Pentagon who had this notion that there's a global spider web of terrorists all working together with these terror supporting regimes. And it's this whole interlocking thing. We've got to take it down.

So they had this notion of, and, you know, I have a quote in the book that one of the people I interviewed was on a plane going to Kuwait to plan for the war. And one of these sort of advocates said, you know, this is actually just the first step on the road of Tehran. But it's not at all clear that George W. Bush was ever thinking that way. We never came close, as far as I know, to really having, you know, like Bush saying, okay. And there's all this evidence of the whole planning thing for Iraq, of Bush saying, I want war plans, and blah, blah, blah, there's no evidence that he was sitting around saying, okay, and what's the next point? And, and, of course, once we get to Iraq, then Afghanistan is turning bad. There's no way in hell we're going anywhere else after that, because we're exhausted by Iraq. anyhow. So there was this, this is one of the things about this planning process. There are,

and you'll find this probably in every administration, more so here, groups of people that have some kind of extreme ideas. And later on you find their papers and their members, you're like, holy crap, the government wasn't planning to do that. These guys wanted to do that. But, and what's funny about this story is I'm quite certain that Wesley Clark probably still had a security clearance at that time. So even though he wasn't active duty, so he probably could have looked at that if he wanted to. But yeah, there's, there's not like some secret conspiracy that was to invade a bunch of countries. What seemed weird about it to me is that if there had been this decision made years earlier and it was a important and kind of decision everybody understood

was guiding their current behavior, you'd have reference to it over and over and over in these conversations and these interviews that you can't plan for something like that without leaving a paper trail. Like very specifically, if you want a military option to invade those countries, you have to go to the uniformed military and say, develop a plan to invade Syria, whatever, you know what I mean? And they'll generate that. It's an enormously time-consuming thing to generate a war plan. The combatant command will do it. There will be hundreds of people involved. And if they did that for all these countries, so no, it was a germ of an idea in the minds of, I don't know how many people, six, twelve, something, who were especially true believers,

Not only or particularly in the Israel connection, but in the idea of this extreme version of this missionary sensibility that we're going to topple all these bad guys, in part because they're all linked to terrorists. But the higher you go, the less that that resonated. I mean, the isolationists have always believed somehow that, you know, we can just check out from the rest of, of the world and it won't ever affect us.

Yeah. I'm not that well-versed in World War I, but obviously it didn't work in World War I. In World War II, obviously, the isolationists were wrong. Well, I say obviously, but this actually is why I think there's so much pressure on the Hitler point right now is because the isolationists are frustrated by World War II in their argument. So what they want to do is say, actually, no, we weren't even right in World War II. wasn't even actually a threat to us.

And then they, like Tucker Carlson, they gloss over the fact that Germany actually declared war on us, right? We didn't even do that. So, and so you fast forward to today when the world is smaller and everything's interconnected and, you know, like, and technology where they actually, people over there actually can reach our shores, right? Yeah. And they, and, you know, I come away feeling like I've had this, like, you know, difficult

child theory of history that no matter how you raise a difficult child, you end up blaming the parents, but it's really the child. that both sides are right in the sense that they both sides recognize that the Middle East is a hornet's nest. The isolationist say, don't touch that hornet's nest and it won't bother us, but I think it will. And the interventionist say we need to neutralize that hornet's nest because there's no way it's not going to come at us. And the problem is you can't neutralize it and you can't resolve it. That's right. And both sides are not to be wrong.

Yeah. I mean, somebody, I forget who it was, but some former official, I just heard this go the other day that you may not be interested in the Middle East, but the Middle East is interested in you. That's right. So it's going to come to you. But it's almost like a version of, you know, listening to the LBJ tapes about Vietnam is so tragic because he says over and over again, I can't get out, but I can't get in. He knew we wouldn't win, but he felt like we couldn't run away. So what the hell do you do? You're stuck in the middle. Similar in a case like this. So that gets back to this notion of Cheney back when he was kind of more pragmatic and, you know, kind of wise saying kicking the can down their own sounds like a sort of a minimal thing to do but often

it's the best thing to do like if you can avoid the worst violence in the region and you can avoid American intervention it's going to be messy and there's a lot this is in large of arabia do nothing it's it's often best you know it's usually best you know you know that scene in lars arabia exactly yeah well and and yeah and then he gets infuriated because it's Colonially, right they. But, yeah. But so how do you, how do, but it's so unsatisfying. Yeah.

Right. And, yeah, it's hard to do. You have a show to catch. Before we go, tell us now, you're not Jewish, correct? Correct. You're not like a fire-breathing Zionist of some kind or... Not the last time I checked. Okay.

Mazars, Lebanese? Actually, it's Maserakos. It's Greek. Cut off by my grandfather. Yasu. Yastu. So, anyway, I play a little bazooki. So, tell us, if you... had to make the, and then you'll take them down to the,

if you had to make the argument, or the best form of the argument that says, well, actually, you know, if these people weren't so concerned about Israel, we wouldn't have had the Iraq war. Yeah. If you were the attorney hired to make that argument, what evidence would you adduce? I'm just trying to steal men that argument as best, I guess,

so nobody could have. I mean, of course, there's a whole separate debate to be had about U.S. policy for Israel generally and that sort of stuff. But in terms of the Iraq war, I would say it's almost like you'd go to the attorney the other side and say, what the hell is your evidence? Because you can talk to the people involved, and they will say some folks involved in the process care deeply about Israel, but it wasn't the motivating force, probably even for them. As you said, without 9-11, you don't get this. So it's not like America would have done this for anybody without that.

And if you look at all the planning, you know, all the sort of the internal debates that have been released and you talk to people, it was. was all on this other stuff. It just was. So then folks will say, well, of course, they're not going to tell anybody. They really believed whatever. And I don't know what to do about that. But I think my main argument would be there is a complete lack of evidence that this was the dominant reason why we do. Get me another attorney. This, no, I mean, you read the book. You heard, you heard him talk. Do you believe that the Iraq war was a mistake? Not with 2020. time, but with what we knew at the time and with what was going on at the time.

I don't believe it wasn't a mistake. I'm just very respectful of the fact that when you're dealing with alternative timelines, you just don't know what would have happened. The notion that Saddam Hussein would have gotten back up on his feet and would have been happy to cause mischief and, yes, give money or, uh, uh, I mean, right up until, just as an analogy, right up until October 7th, the people who were saying,

Iran giving money to Hamas is not such a big deal for us. Like, you know, we're proving to be right. Everything was manageable in Israel until October 7th happened. And then you say, oh, shit, if we could have gotten rid of, if that Iran deal now looks like a bad deal, we should have put the pressure on Iran back then. Maybe the Middle East wouldn't be where it is today back under the Obama administration. You just don't know. It's like you just don't know.

I mean, it doesn't look like the war was the right thing to do. Either because it was badly conceived or because it was never a good idea to begin with. I don't know.

But Saddam Hussein was not nothing. That's, you know. 100%. Yeah. So these people are not dumb. So when you look back at these things, there's going to be reasons why what they did made sense to them at the time.

And I say one of the thing, you do have to go, you have a few minutes. One of the thing, there's a whole work. page, I haven't looked at it lately, of all the terrorist plots that were foiled in like the 15, 20 years after 9-11, there's this notion out there that the whole war on terror was a big waste of time and everything was just a big overreaction. That's not clear to me that it's true.

Yeah, I think it, the big distinction was do we need a much more intense intelligence and law enforcement operation to find these folks and make sure, or, Or do we need a huge geopolitical thing where we start to invade some places and, you know, it becomes this metastasizes it and this bigger thing? I think essentially all the protection we could have got came from a version of a war on terror that would have been way more restrained but achieved 95% of the same good for the American people. And just so you know, at the time when it was going on, I remember very just saying I was not all gung-ho for the war. I was for the war, but I remember very clearly saying to my father, I hope they know what they're doing. That was exactly what I said. And even, you know, I was working technically in the defense part of the time, talking to people involved and sort of had some information about it, not nearly as much as I needed.

But that was exactly what I said. I hope they know something I don't know. And I hope they know what they're doing because this seems kind of off the hook. I was very adamant and very supportive of the surge at the time, even if it might have failed. because I felt that the notion of America leaving with his tail between its legs was something we had to... And abandoning a country to more violence

after we'd already screwed it up. I felt we had to try everything rather than accept that. But the initial war, I wasn't gung-ho in favor of it. All right, listen, I just want to recommend this book to anybody who wants to listen

to this knucklehead, Dave Smith, pontificate about the Iraq war. This is the guy who actually has done the research and as I've tried to point out, has no acts to grind for or against Israel and all that. And the book is very, very convincing. And I'm very, very pleased to meet you

and very happy that you came to the club. I hope you'll come again. Perry L's going to take you down now to see the show. Yeah, we'll put a link to the book in the... Yeah, yeah, reservations under my name. Take them now. Not a link to any of... And then if...

I don't know if we have anybody out, anybody who calling in now, Steve? That's a bit late. Nope. No, okay. So we'll sign off here, unless you want to talk about something else while they go down.

You want to take a break? Well, he didn't address the war in Afghanistan. Thumbs up, thumbs down. Oh, God. That's ours. In 10 seconds. That one actually worked in the Pentagon on. Thumbs down in the sense that we eventually,

very much like Vietnam, we became embroiled in something we couldn't leave, even though we knew it wasn't working. He has a show to see. Okay, go. Bye. Bye. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Thank you. It's great to be here.