The Dispatch Podcast - ICE’s Siege Mentality

Episode Date: January 27, 2026

Steve Hayes is joined by Mike Warren, Dispatch contributor Mike Nelson, and Mindy Belz to discuss the shooting of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis and what the rebuilding of Mosul, Iraq, can tell us about the future of the region. The Agenda:—Alex Pretti's death—ICE vs. counter-insurgence—Protest at Cities Church—Massacre of protesters in Iran—Striking Iran—Chaos, not strategy—Mindy's piece for The Dispatch: "Finding the Way Back From War"—Carp barbecues in Baghdad (masgouf) Show Notes:—Wall Street Journal analysis of ICE shooting of Alex Pretti—Retired Green Beret's defense of the administration on X—DHS officials frustrated with administration's lies—Mike Nelson on the Iran nuclear facility strikes —Kevin Williamson: "Gun-Blaming in Minneapolis" Pre-order Sarah Isgur's new book, Last Branch Standing, here. Skipped lightning round question: Who was the most influential or effective adviser to Donald Trump in the first year of his second term?David French: Stephen MillerMike Warren: Stephen MillerJonah Goldberg: Stephen MillerSarah Isgur: Stephen MillerSteve Hayes: Stephen Miller The Dispatch Podcast is a production of ⁠⁠The Dispatch⁠⁠, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including access to all of our articles, members-only newsletters, and bonus podcast episodes—⁠⁠click here⁠⁠. If you’d like to remove all ads from your podcast experience, consider becoming a premium Dispatch member ⁠⁠by clicking here⁠⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Dispatch podcast is presented by Pacific Legal Foundation, suing the government since 1973. Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Steve Hayes. On this week's roundtable, we'll discuss a second killing and a second look at ice in Minnesota. Iran and the United States beefed up presence in the region and the rebirth of Mosul, Iraq. We're skipping not worth your time today, but it'll be back Friday. Do you love the dispatches journalism, but don't have. have time to read it all? We hear this pretty frequently from our members, which is why I'm very excited to introduce Dispatch Voiced, a member's only podcast feed that helps you keep up with our work on your schedule. Here's how it works. We've built two feeds, editor's picks for

our biggest stories and the morning dispatch for our daily newsletter, powered by realistic AI voice models created by 11 labs. These high-quality audio versions are delivered right to your favorite podcast player. Whether you're commuting at the gym, out grocery shopping, even walking the dog, dispatch voice fits our reporting into your schedule. Jonah Goldberg's latest column? The biggest news from Capitol Hill? Our most colorful cultural analysis? Now it's all available in your podcast feed, ready when you are. Most episodes use advanced AI narration that sounds remarkably like a professional audiobook reader and will occasionally feature authors reading their own work too. Ready to take the dispatch on the go, members can set up their feed on their account page

at the dispatch.com. Not a member yet? Start listening today when you join the dispatch. I'm joined today by my dispatch colleague Mike Warren, as well as dispatch contributor and former special forces officer Mike Nelson, along with veteran global affairs journalist Mindy Bells, who has covered wars and victims of conflict in Afghanistan, Syria, Sudan, the Balkans, and Iraq, which she wrote about for the dispatch this past week. Let's dive in. Welcome, everybody. I'm very eager to get to Mindy's piece, which was a wonderful piece, a beautiful piece, an informative piece. One of the pieces I'm most proud of publishing in recent dispatch history, but we have to talk about the news, both over the weekend and over the past couple months. First on another shooting in Minneapolis.

Now, Mike Warren, I'll start with you. Over the weekend, we saw a shooting, as is the case with these moments in our current life, multiple videos capturing the horror at every sort of moment. People can rewind it and look at it again and study it frame by frame. there was a shooting, there was an immediate reaction, there were sort of more thoughtful reactions as time wore on. Can you just give us an update on what happened? Well, I think the first place to start, Steve, is what actually happened. And this is based on all those videos you mentioned and analyses of those videos by reputable news organizations. I thought the Wall Street Journal's kind of frame-by-frame analysis was the most made the most sense.

And so, but as you said, there are supposedly investigations. So let's talk about what actually happens. So on Saturday morning, there is another protest in Minneapolis. Whittier, I believe, is the name of the neighborhood where this particular protest was happening. They are anti-ice, anti-CBP. that's Customs Border Protection, anti-federal government immigration enforcement protests that are happening. This was happening on Saturday morning.

One of those protesters was an ICU nurse 37 years old named Alex Preti. He at some moment on a street in this neighborhood approached officers who were dealing with another protester, pushing these protesters. there was some kind of scuffle. I don't want to make a judgment about what preceded his coming over to these officers, but he did. He was filming on his phone, and there were multiple videos that were filming from different angles this whole interaction.

Preddy was carrying a pistol, which he had a concealed carry license to carry that, so he was carrying it legally and he was concealing it legally as well. he approached the officers and seemed to be in some sort of disagreement or scuffle with them. One of the federal officers, the CBP officer, pulled the handgun off of Preddy's person, so he was disarmed. And at some point in that process, he was also pushed, Prattie was pushed to the ground. there are probably about five or six customs and border protection officers around him at this point. And the next thing that we see and here in these videos are about nine or ten shots being fired. It's very clearly coming from one of the customs and border protection officers,

not the one who disarmed him, but a separate officer into Preddy's back. Preddy was killed. That's what happened based on all the information that we have. So it's important to just sort of know what the factual rundown of the event itself. What happened on Saturday after that is really a continuing story that we've been following, that we've been covering, that we have been witnessing over the past year of the Trump administration. Administration's Enforcement of Immigration, which is sort of an immediate reaction from administration officials to declare that this was, that Alex Pretti was trying to, one term that was used, and I'm quoting, was attempting to massacre federal officers. That is, not only is that not clear

from the video, it's just not accurate to describe what he appears to be doing. Again, he has his gun holstered until it is taken away from him, and he is filming on his cell phone. The administration officials continue to say that he was acting in a way that was putting these officers in danger, and very quickly they asserted that the shooting was justified. Over the course of several hours, as people began to share videos that demonstrated that this narrative from the administration was incorrect, false and had holes in it was incomplete at best, but I think that's being even too generous. The administration continued to double down on that position. There were folks from the Justice Department who were tweeting about this.

I mean, this is sort of ridiculous to think about it, but they're sort of tweeting as sort of a live event has just happened about how approaching an officer, a federal officer with a gun. means you're going to end up dead. It was what one attorney in the Justice Department political appointees said. You've since heard that argument from people like Cash Patel, the FBI director, and other administration officials. So the administration, which has demonstrated an inability to tell the truth about incidents like this, continue to do so with Alex Prattie. And I think the last thing I'll say here, and then, Steve, you can open up the discussion is the reaction not only from sort of the usual suspects of opponents of the Trump

administration and the Trump administration's immigration enforcement, there were people beyond that. People, guns rights advocates, Republican members of Congress actually expressing at the very least questions about what happened in the administration's narrative of it and at most challenging the administration on this. and you've since seen a number of congressional Democrats say they will no longer be voting to fund DHS until an investigation can be done. The administration is essentially saying the investigation is going to be done by DHS. And CBP has said that the officers involved in this incident are still on the job, again, very much against the protocol. So it's another mess.

It's another tragedy. It's another example of the administration not being truthful about what happened in their operation. And increasingly, I would say, what's changed and what is different is increasingly fewer people seem to be buying their narrative. Yeah, that's a terrific summary, Mike. Thank you very much. Just add a couple points there. As you pointed out, within an hour to have a... of the shooting, Stephen Miller, who I think we all agree is President Trump's most influential advisor.

We discussed that on last week's podcast. Certainly seems to be driving policy in these areas, took to Twitter and said a would-be assassin tried to murder federal law enforcement and the official Democrat account sides with terrorists. He went on and sort of made the same argument. I would say, Mike, to add to your kind of blow-by-blow account, it appears, and again, you know, one of the difficulties with videos, one of the difficulties with having everything in our lives video these days is that there's a story that happens before the video starts. So with that caveat, I will say the long.

longer version of the video, which was nearly three minutes, basically shows Alex Prattie directing traffic. He's got his video, his phone up, as you said, Mike, videoing. One of the officers, the immigration officers, approaches a young woman, pushes her down. Pretty goes over to try to help her up. And at that point, this group of ICE agents tackles him, takes him to the ground, grabs his gun, and then there is this shooting. Mike, to you, Mike Nelson, as you watch this, what are your thoughts? On the one hand, you know, I think it's hyperbolic to say, in some ways to say, oh, well, this looks like the kinds of things we're seeing in combat zones all over the world.

And, you know, certainly it's nothing like the most intense days of urban fighting that our troops saw in Mosul and in in other places. On the other hand, there is something to this idea of sort of the chaos of this moment. I mean, it's just, I think it's hard for those of us who haven't been involved in this kind of close in action to understand how do you go in the space of two minutes, two and a half minutes. This guy's protesting, he's out directing traffic, and then he's dead. what did you see when you saw the video?

So a couple different things. First of all, there are certain things about the commonalities or the truths of combat in and among the population and some of these situations they're seeing where there might be similarities, the fog of war, as it's commonly referred to. But generally, I think that the analogies with combat can be a little unhelpful because we have to remind ourselves. You know, we heard this in the terminology that was used in the aftermath. These are terrorists. These are assassins.

Many people have said these are enemies. I've had people talk to me about this that say they're going out, the ICE and CBP officers are going out among, quote unquote, hostels. And I think it's important to come back and remind ourselves, these are American citizens. These are these officers, fellow citizens that they have taken an oath to protect and defend, even when they're in their face yelling at them, right? So it's an entirely different mindset from these are my adversaries who are hiding among the population. And these are my fellow citizens who happen to disagree with me.

And I think what we see from a lot of the terminology from Bovino and others that they kind of have adopted this mindset that these, I mean, they talk about this being a domestic insurgency, right? That it's it's a signal group. It's people who bring, you know, pot luck to the protest groups. Just the presence of organization does not make them an enemy adversary. so to speak. But back to your point, though, I do think there's a version of this where things can be unacceptable but understandable on the part of the officers, where the one officer removes Prettie's pistol and leaves the scrum. Then you hear another officer, it sounds like, or potentially the same officer, say gun, gun, gun. That could lead to confusion. There's some

analysis, I'm not sure if it's valid or not, that Preddy's pistol, when it was removed, may have negligently discharged at the cop who pulled it, may have accidentally fired it. So then they hear a gun, gun, gun, they hear a fire or a shot, they react. There's the potential for just, you know, sympathetic gunfire where once one officer's engaged, you are, the other officers may be, you know, basically seating their decision making to, he has seen something that's a threat, therefore I must back him up in that split-second decision. But what the administration is doing, I think that isn't helpful is there's no, first of all, there's the common sense explanation of what we all see that this looks like a horrible mistake, right?

That they killed this man without cause. There's no admission of that, that our officers made a mistake. Second, you know, degree in would be there was a lot of confusion, and this is why we recommend people stay away from engaging with our officers. and this is the kind of tragedy that occurs, and we regret the loss of life. But then they went all the way to this is an enemy, this is an assassin. There are people celebrating his death, saying he got what he deserved, not in the administration, but in administration adjacent.

And I think that's the problem that you're never going to get to the truth, number one, with DHS, who's already declared that this was virtuous and righteous, and he was an assassin, conducting their own internal investigation. and then you're never going to get back the faith and trust of the people when we can all see what actually happened, weighed against the explanations, and then back this up against the history. This is the same administration that last week was swearing up and down,

the president never said Iceland in his comments when we all heard him say Iceland. Right. So if they lie over something small, they'll lie over something big, and then they lose public faith and trust. Yeah, I mean, the original, you heard from administration officials right away, Mike, that he was quote unquote brandishing the weapon, that he approached officers, that this was domestic terrorism, you know, that he was seeking to conduct a massacre. I mean, whatever you want to say about this, and I think there's far less, I think in the shooting of Renee Good,

who was the woman who was shot a few weeks ago, there was at least a plausible argument that the officer who shot her might have felt threatened by the fact that the vehicle was, was moving forward and potentially toward him. We could see with the benefit of hindsight, looking at the videos that the wheels were turned the other direction. She appeared to be fleeing, not trying to mow him down. But you can understand somebody in the moment misinterpreting that. What we're hearing from top administration officials,

what we've heard in the hours immediately after the shooting, they're just lying. They're just making stuff up. There's no other way to put it. That's what they're doing. They're trying to create a narrative that contradicts what everybody can see on video. He was not brandishing his weapon.

He did not assault the officers. There's no indication that he was planning for a massacre. I mean, all of these things collectively, I think, dramatically hurt their credibility. Mike, I want to read to you before I turn to Mindy here a note. And this comes from someone, I don't usually grabbed this stuff off of Twitter. This comes from someone named Eric Schwamm, who says he was a former Special Forest Warrant Officer with multiple rotations running counter-insurgency ops.

He says, I've seen organized resistance up close from Anbar to Helmline. The pattern is quite familiar. Spotters, cutouts, dead drops, or modern equivalence, discipline comms, role specialization, a willingness to absorb casualties while bleeding the stronger force slowly. What's unfolding in Minneapolis right now isn't protest, quote unquote. It's low, level insurgency infrastructure built by people who's clearly studied the playgroup. He goes on and sort of walks people through and says, this isn't spontaneous outreach. This is C2, command and control with redundancy, OPSEC hygiene, task force organization that would make a SF team sergeant not in recognition. Replace, quote, ICE agents with, quote, occupying coalition forces in the structure

maps almost one to one early stage urban cells we hunted in the mid-2000. He ends by saying he doesn't want escalation, but we need to call this as it is. History shows these things don't de-escalate on their own once the infrastructure exists, and the cadre believe they're winning the information war. We either recognize what we're looking at or we pretend it's still just activism until the structures harden and spread. Your call, America, but from where I sit, this isn't January 26 politics anymore. It's phase one of something we've spent decades trying to keep off our own. soil. Again, I don't typically like to grab stuff from social media, but this has gone tremendously

viral 30,000 likes as I'm reading it, and it's being presented, being shared by people who are defending the administration's behavior here. Mike, I just wonder if you have a reaction to that assessment of what we saw. So it's funny. He and I served in the same Italian several years ago, and we didn't know each other well, but we connected recently over Twitter and pointed out that we served in the same time at the same time. So it's incredibly hyperbolic, right? And there's a lot of slippery slope in there. So not meaning to go too much into like the UW theory, but resistance movements are composed primarily of guerrillas, auxiliary, and an underground. And there's a lot of infrastructure that it goes into it before it gets to the latent incipient phase of true insurgency.

Now, it so happens that some of the resistance. activities that look like the activities of an underground, spray painting, I mean, we might get to it when we talk about Mide's peace. There were, you know, huge part of the Muslawi resistance was spray painting a meme, which was, you know, a single M in Arabic, which stood for resistance. And that was just, you know, acts of graffiti, acts of defiance against ISIS. Was that part of a member, a part of an insurgent resistance? Yes. Is spray painting here in the United States necessarily indicative of insurgency? No. Right. So it's the thing. that might look the same, there were a couple steps before you get to this. This was incredibly

hyperbolic. Like I said, once again, is there organization in some of these protest movements? Absolutely. Was there organization in the Tea Party when they put out email chains and said there's to be a protest at this time, be there with your Gadsden flag? Was that an insurgency? Or was it just rallying up your message board to make sure everybody knew where to be when? January 6th happened, you know, with communication. And that was, far more of a resistance activity than what we're seeing in Minneapolis. Now, again, are there some people who are calling for, there are some people I've seen on social media who are calling for armed resistance against CBP and ICE, and that is an entirely

different thing. But there are no indications that Preddy was part of that. All he was talking about was recording, monitoring, sharing information, blowing whistles, those kinds of things. And that is far cry from organized insurgency. Yeah, I saw one pro, I, social media account put out what was what they represented to be sort of the manual for these protesters. And, you know, the reaction was that this was a real gotcha moment, that it shows just how organized the protesters are. And certainly it did. I mean, this tremendous amount of organization, I think it's fair to raise questions about where their funding is coming from, what it means. But I will say, having read, I'm a lot of, I think,

I don't know, it was 20-plus page manual. What struck me is that they were repeatedly instructing the people who were participating in these ice monitoring protests, ice monitoring activities to be safe, not to be confrontational, not to get involved. Don't put yourself in a dumb situation. Do not escalate. De-escalate was a word that you read throughout the thing. Well, it's certainly the case. I mean, people have been arrested for throwing ice blocks. at ICE officials, otherwise assaulting ICE officials.

It was an ICE official this weekend who had his finger bit off. And it's definitely the case that since the beginning of this, the number of reported assaults on ice and customs border patrol officials have spiked. But it seems to me, Alex Prattie, as you point out, Mike, was not necessarily part of that move. There's no indication yet that he was part of that moving or wanted to do anything violent. Mindy, coming to you, one of the things that's been interesting in the, you know, 36 hours since this horrific shooting has been, it seems to me, a change in the way that people are talking about these things. You know, as we've watched this kind of slow simmer turn to a boy, I think the question was when people were going to say sort of enough is enough. and there are at least early indications that this might be that moment. You had a statement put out by 60 prominent Minnesota businesses saying we can't abide this.

This has to change. You had Democrats, as Mike Warren noted, seem to reverse their position on whether they would vote for a government funding bill that would include funding for DHS in the aftermath of this, including several senators who, for whom that was a switched position. you've had professional athletes speak out about this you've had sort of a collective moment here where I think people are saying enough and what's interesting to me is it seems like the administration is listening after the initial lies that came from Stephen Miller and Christy Noem and others you had administration officials sort of take a step back and say well we we are there is going to be an investigation it looks at this point like it's going to be an investigation by DHS, not the FBI, not others. But taking a step back, sort of acknowledging that they might have gone too far. There was reporting from Bill Malugian, who's a Fox News correspondent who covers border issues, immigration, saying that there was real frustration inside DHS about this inside Customs Border Patrol

because people think that they've gone too far. The spin is crazy. they're frustrated. He pointed to one official who told him he thought he might be wanting to quit as a result. And even Donald Trump has said, hey, at some point, we're going to pull these officials from there. When you look at this, do you think that this could be that galvanizing moment? Or are we likely to just see this either in Minneapolis or elsewhere on a continuing basis? Yeah, I think it's a big question. And I just would say two things. I mean, in terms of DHS strategy here in Trump's White House strategy, you know, are we talking a potential retreat or are we talking to faint, you know, just to regroup and come back again? I think the administration has made clear, and I think what we're seeing unfold in Minneapolis is a program or a program, if you want to call it that, that they plan to carry out in other cities.

They've been ramping up toward this with the crackdowns on Chicago, on Charlotte, on, you know, which, which because I live near Charlotte, you know, you want to laugh, except that it's so serious that Charlotte is being called a red state city. You know, it's a banking city where everyone wears ties. I mean, it's the epitome of a conservative city that happens to have a Democratic mayor right now. And so, but my point is that we've seen this clear strategy. And I just want to emphasize something that has stayed out of the news because there's just so much to follow. There was this interesting kerfuffle that you saw at City's Church in Minneapolis where protesters came in. They were protesting a guy who was a pastor at that church. And all the news accounts were saying, who may have. have worked for ICE.

The guy is the head of immigration enforcement for ICE, not only across in Minneapolis, but across four or five states. He's a regional head. He's 15-year veteran of ICE. They are putting in place people who are on board with the program, people who are veterans of wars, John Ross, the killer. of Renee Good, an Iraq war veteran. We don't know anything at this point about who killed Alex Preti, but they're putting in place

a siege mentality and putting in place people who are able to carry that out. And I think what Mike described is part of that idea, and it's meant to intimidate. And you don't have a community that is, say, like Mosul, because I've been focused on that a lot. You know, Mosul came into the Iraq War, having endured a decade of subjugation by Saddam Hussein, that included food shortages, that included seeing a diverse community turned into a bath party heartland where you couldn't step out of line from the bath party. So they had some warning and some opportunity to dig into their resilience. Minneapolis came into this as a community with a low-crime rate, with fairly decent relations among its immigrant communities, and particularly among its Somali population.

A clean city, a city with beautiful parks and lakes, the city where you could walk in the snow because it has heated sidewalks. I mean, in one way, it's one of the most functioning cities in the United States. And this Midwestern grit and resilience that we're now seeing come out. And they had no warning. They simply became, you know, had to deal with the shock value of all of this. When I talked to my friends who live there, they still now more than a month in or just in shock. And I think that the ICE regime is taking advantage of that.

And I think that what I'm hearing described is very interesting to really exceptional war photographers, David Goodenfelter and Sinsic Yarr have been in Minneapolis now for the last few weeks. And Sinsig said just last night, I think he just posted something on social media where he says, residents I've spoken to are furious and want the agents out of their city. I've seen tense encounters everywhere. I've covered unrest around the world. And the anger among protesters here is among the most intense I've ever experienced. I'm not sure I'm getting at your question, but I just tend to think that we're in such unprecedented territory that our analogies are only going to carry us so far. And it feels like it's being turned into a combat zone. It was not a

ready combat zone that these U.S. troops, if you want to call them that, simply entered to bring control to chaos. I think they've caused the chaos in so many cases. Well, I do think we're looking at something that could be a potentially galvanizing moment, particularly as you continue to monitor the reaction as it comes in and people seem to be sort of fed up with what's been happening. Before we take a break for ad, consider becoming a member of the dispatch. You'll unlock access to bonus podcast episodes and all of our exclusive newsletters and articles.

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We're back. You're listening to the dispatch podcast. Let's jump in. I want to leave Minneapolis now and head to the Middle East. We need to spend a moment at least on what's happened in Iran. We have seen it's a massacre. It is a repressive regime that's been repressive for decades feeling threatened and massacring its own citizens. The range on the death pole is vast, but even the Iranian regime allows that several thousand people have been killed.

they claim 400 or so of government officials and soldiers. But some of the estimates on the death toll range into 30,000 plus. Pretty incredible when you see it. New York Times reported over the weekend that January 9th, Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khomeini, ordered the Supreme National Security Council to crush the protests by any means necessary, citing two Iranian officials briefed on the Ayatollah's directive. Mike Nelson, that's what we've seen there. President Trump initially weeks ago, before these protests were put down in this manner,

warned repeatedly the regime, if you fire on the protesters were coming for you, that hasn't happened. I had a conversation with somebody last week who said that President Trump had been presented with a number of options more than a week ago, and he was unsatisfied with the options, in part because they weren't big enough. We've seen now the movement of a battleship into the region. We've seen some reinforcements from the U.S. military sent potentially to be put in place to do something bigger, as the president has reportedly suggested he wants. As you watch all of this, what are your reactions? And do you anticipate that this is all in preparation for some kind of attack? I mean, I think that we have to go back and look at what the purpose of what we would do

was intended to be, you know, based on the president's rhetoric. Patten, I think, I'm going to paraphrase it, and I might get the quote slightly wrong, but said, you know, a partial plan executed now and at the right time is better than a perfect plan executed too late. The intention, or at least in the president's rhetoric, was, to be supportive of the pro-democracy, pro-freedom protest movement, and to protect their lives and their protection, that moments come and gone, right? The protests is largely, you know, Iran has learned the potentially correct lesson, unfortunately, that all they needed to do was kill off enough of their own people quickly enough before the spark rose into a full fire.

Not only have they, not only did they get away with the mass slaughter of the protesters, they have in several communications by several officials pointed out, we are not backing off of our executions. We are not listening to the president. We are not doing what the president has said. We have guaranteed to do in reaction to this threat. So whatever face saving the president might have tried to get out of that, you know, the backward justification that at least they stopped the 800 executions, at least rhetorically, the Iranians are saying that's not true. Now, we know that the Lincoln CSG has crossed from Indo-Paycom back into Sancom. Now, for not many to get too into the weeds, but over the past, we'll say, 20, 30 years,

it is incredibly rare not to have a CSG, a carrier strike group, or in some cases, too, in the Sancom region, because it was the priority theater for so long. We've seen, you know, going back to the Obama administration, trying to shift away from that, the Pacific pivot, and then we had this NDS and NSS that have come on that have deprioritized Sancom to a certain extent. I don't know that some of the options, I mean, when I was at Sancom, we had a wide range of options from small and punitive to larger scale of tax. And I know that Sancom has done a lot of work to prepare options for whoever the president is to strike against Iran under any number of circumstances and scenarios. But one of the things that I have to wonder is it may

not be the options for strike, but also the options for force protection after the strike. We remember when we did both the strike on Soleimani and the president's first administration. The head of Iran's Revolutionary Guards Corps, Kud's force. Right. Sorry. Yes. Kassum Sulamani, who was the architect of much of their nefarious activities throughout the region. Right. And the president ordered the drone strike on him in his first administration. and then we did midnight hammer against the nuclear program earlier just in 2025. In both cases, the Iranians, and it may have been pro forma, but they did respond with missile strikes. A lot of our ballistic missile protection, some of it is land-based in Qatar and other locations,

and a lot of it is based on those CSGs that have ballistic missile defense partially for the fourth protection of the fleet, but also to tie into a larger regional network. we may not have had as many options because the CSG was not there. And one of the things that I find ironic is we may have missed an opportunity to strike a major blow against one of our, you know, strategic adversaries since the late 70s and to work on behalf of the pro-freedom movement because we decided to put a CSG in the Caribbean striking it, you know, four-person drug boats because we moved, you know, the Navy can only fleet so many of these out at any even time. And we decided that Southcom was a priority theater above CENTCOM, and that left us with fewer options. So now we see the Lincoln's coming in. It's in the CENCOM waters. So it's cut over from Indo Peacom into CENTCOM control.

It's still not within range of Iran, is what, you know, it's still going to be a couple more days. But at this point, the president may do something just to show that he, you know, because he does not like being ignored. He may do it as a face-saving measure or punitively like we did when the, like he did when the Syrians used, when Assad and still controlling Syria used chemical weapons. But as far as assistance to the protesters, I think that moment's come and gone. And I think it's going to be a real stain on his legacy. It's, I would argue, worse than Obama's red line for 2013. Because just to the scale of death and that, you know, there were people who probably went into the streets. believing President Trump has our back.

I will go up and show up to protest because the president won't let anything bad to happen us and they're dead now because of it. Mindy, to Mike's last point, it is the case that people pay very careful attention to what the United States president says in moments like this. I remember when I was doing interviews with Iraqi expats in the months before the launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003. I had, I interviewed one young man who I think he was in his, you know, maybe mid-20s. And I asked him about the first Iraq war.

And, you know, he was a kid then and asked him what he remembered. They had fled the horrors of Saddam's regime. And unbidden, he stops my questioning and says, we listened to, George H.W. Bush, he told us to rise up. We did. And then you didn't come. And I remember that. And he was saying this as a way to say he wasn't sure about what the U.S. commitment would be going into what was then the Second Iraq War. And as he did this, he stopped. And he recited word for word, the entirety of what George H.W. Bush had said when he called for Iraqis opposed to the regime to rise up. And as he was doing this, I stopped him. He was kind of going on. It wasn't a really

long statement, but he was going on. I stopped him. I wanted to get to my next question. And he cut me off. And it was very important to him that he be able to recite the entire thing that George H.W. Bush said in calling for people to rise up. Is this a similar moment, do you imagine? I think so. And I think that, you know, people living in the Middle East are, they kind of have it in their DNA to respect U.S. power. They've learned that lesson over generations. But you also have to remember that every generation kind of has to learn the particulars of it in a fresh way. And so when you think about the people who've been protesting in Iran, many of them are people who don't remember even the 2013 red line that was crossed in Syria or the 2008 Velvet Revolution or the number of times that the United States has said it's with pro-democracy protesters and then puts no skin in the game. I think the question always, and the question right now, is just what the Trump administration is not articulating a U.S. interest in Iran.

And I think there are plenty that could be articulated. I think you could make a case for why it's important to support the overthrow of this government. But strangely, and Trump is not the first leader unable to do this. I mean, there were crucial moments during the Iraq War where you thought President Bush, he's a good speechmaker. He's going to come out and tell us what we need to do right now and why and put it in the context of the American experiment. And he didn't do it. I think that's missing. I also think that we live in a very different world right now.

And a huge question is, you know, just to the idea of force protection that migrants, is NATO behind us? Who's with us? I mean, we have to ask that question. Is there anybody with us right now? And those are key things. You know, remembering, like, when we talk about Qasem Soleimani and his assassination, if you remember, the Iranians did fire some ballistic missiles in Iraq. They hit one of the bases right at the Iraq-Syrian border.

They hit another base right outside of Erbil in Iraq. There were 180 U.S. service members who had traumatic brain injuries. coming from those attacks. And we never heard about them. We never heard what happened to them, but all of them had to be hospitalized. And those are lifelong injuries. And so there is a cost here,

and we're not hearing the kind of details because we were in such a, we're just living so much in our political discourse at the rhetorical level is just lobbying misinformation. back and forth. We're not having these kind of substantive conversations that would allow us to know what sort of sacrifice American service members you're being asked to make, what our strategic plan is, should we go into a run? And I find it hugely ironic for the America First President to be contemplating

a war with one of the largest, you know, this ancient power that has also strategic oil reserves and You know, it's just like a repeat of Iraq, but we're not going to say that. It has the potential to be a repeat. Yeah, Mike, to Mindy's point, your piece on Friday, Trump's Greenland pushes chaos, not strategy. It doesn't seem like there's much of a strategy here. And the implications, I think one of the things that the president has done, particularly with his rhetoric over the past week with respect to NATO and NATO allies, where you had even friendly Europe. leaders in Italy and elsewhere push back and criticize the president for saying, in effect, yeah, our NATO allies might have gone, might have supported us in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But, you know, they weren't on the front. They didn't really do much. Deeply, deeply offended allies because, first of all, what he said is not true. Secondly, it's tremendously disrespectful, given the sacrifices that they made when they were helping us respond to an attack on our shores. Where do you expect NATO will be on something like this? And in your reporting and your conversations with folks in the administration and Republicans elsewhere in Washington, is there any sense that there's a plan here? Or would this just be? I mean, as Mike pointed out and Mindy echoed, seemed to have missed the moment. If the goal was to protect the protesters or show them that they

were supported, we seem to have missed the moment. Yeah. I mean, I think. think the short answer is there is no plan. Now, there are people within the administration who have ideas. They have ideologies that they view the sort of national security apparatus as a laboratory for them, for them to be able to sort of pursue their ideas about American power in the world. And I think that they sort of end up backfilling what the president does to fit what they are trying to push sort of long term within, say, the Defense Department or the State Department. But, you know, that piece that I wrote last week was based on the National Security Strategy, which had been released a couple months ago.

And since that, my piece was published. The National Defense Strategy was released, which is a related document. And it actually led me to – this conversation led to me to a question that for Mike and perhaps for Mindy as well about Iran's presence in that national. defense strategy. It was striking to me how unimpressive the section on Iran was. It seemed to sort of restate the successes of Operation Midnight Hammer, stating, of course, that Iran has suffered severe setbacks, you know, telling us things that we know. And then really kind of putting into words what you just described, Steve, as sort of missing the moment, you know, saying essentially, yes,

things are really bad in Iran, things have worsened for the regime, and the regime would also like to rebuild its military forces, and would, of course, like to still obtain a nuclear weapon. And so the opportunities before us to do something about this are essentially to provide critical but limited support to Israel, and that's kind of it. I mean, there's a lot of buildup in this document. The document isn't everything. It's really just sort of a guideline. But it seems to put into words a view of this particular region as it really is sort of filling in that inaction from the president.

I'm curious what you make of it and what you made of the NDS, Mike, with respect to Iran and the Middle East. I do think the president tends to talk about these things. and I think those around him both talk about it externally to us, and I imagine feedback to him. This idea that things can be handled discreetly is in short duration, not secretly. And that once these great and glorious things are achieved, that we can wash our hands of them.

You saw it in the aftermath of the Midnight Hammer, the operation against the nuclear strikes. It was, I wrote something for the dispatch, that it was the right call at the right time, that it was exactly time at a time to actually break the ladder of escalation between Iran and Israel. I think the administration has overplayed the significance of it. Iran is largely like the villain in a horror movie that you think is dead, but then comes back because you didn't make sure it's dead. Iran retains the intent to play a role as a major malign actor in the region.

Iran probably maintains the intent to act as a malign actor globally, as they have. in the past, as they have in, you know, spreading networks through the Southern Hemisphere. That intent does not change. It's literally the same leader who was doing this in the early 2000s is leading Iran now, largely because we have not taken a policy to try to change regimes or done anything to enact that. I do think that the president has come to believe that because he punished them with Midnight Hammer, that they've, quote, unquote, learned their lesson, and the problem is solved. And it's a huge mistake. stake. If we leave a vacuum in the Sengcom AOR, as many, and like you said, there are others in the

DOD who have put much more thought into this, but have their theories that they want to play out, but we can only focus on the Pacific or that we should, you know, my reading of the NSS and the NDS is that we are dividing the world into three spheres of influence. And then we're receding to the Western Hemisphere, we will dominate it as we see fit, and the rest of the world can sort itself out. But those vacuums that are left by American influence will be filled. And the people who have the desire to fill them largely are malign actors. You know, Europe is learning its lesson that we might need to unify to try to fill some of that void as they saw, you know, I think some of the lessons of the whole Greenland kerfuffle. But Iran has not changed its intent, I don't believe. Iran took a huge

looking with their regional networks in the aftermath of the war, largely because of Israel, not because of us. I think they want to rebuild those networks. I think they want to rebuild their nuclear program, both as mutually supporting strategic deterrence to do anything to destabilize the regime. And us sitting on our laurels after Midnight Hammer is not going to do anything to help dissuade them of those intent. So I do think both the SS and the NDS take a very, they use hope is a method, I think, in the way the world works. And the world's going to work the way it always has outside of our influence. Mike, I suspect that we are going to be coming back to you for further analysis in the coming days. I don't think that kinetic action is imminent, but I expect it.

I'm not sure it's inevitable, but it seems certainly more likely than not. All right, we're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back soon with more from the Dispatch podcast. Hey, y'all, this is Sarah Isger, and you know I've got a book coming out in April. It's a myth-busting walk through the Supreme Court, showing how it is somehow both the founding father's third wheel and the only branch of government they would be likely to recognize today. And I've got a fun bonus offer for y'all. If you pre-order your copy of Last Branch Standing, you can receive a special signed bookplate from me to stick in your copy when it comes out in April.

This is a limited time offer only available until February. 9th. For more information and the form to claim your bookplate, go to prh.com slash last branch bookplate. That's pr h.com slash last branch bookplate. And if you've already pre-ordered, don't worry, that counts. You just go to prh.com slash last branch bookplate and you'll get that signed bookplate from me. Thanks, guys. Before we return to the roundtable, I want to let you know what's going on elsewhere here at the dispatch. This week on The Remnant, I sit in for Jonah Goldberg, and I'm joined by my colleague John McCormick for a conversation with Jason Zengerly, a staff writer at The New Yorker who's written a new book about Tucker Carlson called Hated by All the Right People. Search for the Remnant and your podcast app and hit the follow button. Now let's jump back into our conversation. Finally, I'm eager to spend some time on Mindy's terrific, terrific piece about Mosul, Iraq. and the rebuilding that's taking place there. If you haven't read it, please take the time.

We will put it in the show notes. Take the time to read it. I read it last week and loved the piece. And then just to refresh before we had this conversation today, I listened to it on our new dispatch voiced, where it was read to me last night when I was trying to fall asleep. And I guess it's a good test. to how compelling the piece is that I was totally exhausted. I've been sick all weekend,

haven't had much sleep. I'd read it before, and I literally put it on so that I would fall asleep to it, and it kept me up from beginning to end. Sorry, Steve. Yeah, I blame you, Mindy. Very excited to have the piece and eager for those who have not read it to take the time to do so. Minnie, let me just start with the most basic question. You went to Mosul, Iraq, And you wanted to tell this story. Can you just describe for us what you saw there and what made you decide to write this piece? Well, two broad things made me decide and your editors to agree on writing this piece. The first is just all the things that we've been talking about.

The breakdown that we all see in the world in so many sectors of the world and including in our own country, just prompting me to be looking for where are things being built up. And I've always, in covering the Iraq war, through many, many, many iterations of it, that had been struck with the resilience of the Iraqis themselves. And when I was reporting there on a regular basis, I made it a point, I mean, 2004, I lived with a family in Baghdad for a week. Flash forward, 2014, did not fully appreciate the ISIS threat to Iraq, lived in a church courtyard for a week in Baghdad to get a sense of whether anything was coming back there.

So just seeing things in different stages there. And Mosul has always been sort of the mirage in the distance because it became such a Nogo area. I mean, I knew you were there early in the war. I was not there until 2008. It was at a time when we in America were being told that the surge was working. We put more troops in, that we were seeing the insurgency died down. And the day I got into Mosul, I went in to interview the provincial council in charge of the city and the surrounding area. There was a lot of displacement because of all the fighting. all the bombing, all the kidnapping. I interviewed all these people. And provincial council itself had had three people assassinated. And so I'm sitting here with the remnant of the provincial council. We're about to have a conversation.

This is when you're there in 2008. Yeah, and we're about to have a conversation about what's good in Mosul, I thought, how things are coming back. And the lights go out. And we start hearing troops out in the hall. And they come in and tell us that there are like seven moms that have gone off in the city. And I end up having to leave in the dark in the middle of the daytime, leave this building in the dark, get into a military convoy to get out of the city because it just suddenly become so dangerous.

That was life in Mosul. It was hard to get into. It was scary to get out of. And so I always had this sense. I mean, the last time I was there was just toward the end of the War of Liberation from ISIS occupation. And I watched some of the fighting from a rooftop that was still happening. And around me, every building had been destroyed. I mean, it did look like Gaza.

And I thought, you know, I just kind of walked away thinking, poor Mosul. It's going to always be Mogadishu. It's going to always be Gaza. It's going to, you know, this is what has happened to this country through this long, long, long, long years of war. So to hear about people moving back there, to hear about the market reopening, to hear about UNESCO investing money and actually doing something, actually rebuilding these key landmarks, and to see in particular this one minaret that is kind of an icon in the city go up,

I wanted to see it for myself. I wasn't sure I believed it. And when I got there, immediately what I was struck, what I tried to convey in the article is that, you know, the structures have been destroyed. The culture had also been destroyed. The place had been ethnically cleansed. There were no Christians. There were no Yazidis.

There were no turquimans. There were no minorities left living in what had once been a very diverse city. And yet here you were with a bustling market, with people coming back, with some of the displaced Christians telling me that they're going there every week. I talked to a guy who drives to Mosul now every week so that he can buy cheese from Mosul. He doesn't live there. He doesn't feel safe enough to return there, but he feels safe enough to go and shop there and get the cheese that they all have been longing for for years and years.

So this life is returning alongside the structures themselves. And that is, I mean, to me, I can't name another place where I've seen that happen. And it's, if you've covered war for a long time, and you've walked away from the breakdown and felt like nothing good was ever going to come in the aftermath. To see this is really, it's remarkable. It feels like a miracle. Yeah. I mean, I've got about a million questions, and we don't have that much time, and I want to let the mics weigh in with their questions, too. But let me indulge me for just a couple minutes. First of my first and probably least important question regards your reporting on carp.

and I mean the fish, carp. You talk about it, they have these get-together, sort of carp barbecues, it sounds like, bringing people together. And they're eating carp. And I would just say, as somebody who's never eaten carp, I know that there are some people in the United States who do, but carp are nasty bottom feeders.

It's totally disgusting the idea of eating carp to me. I mean, their goldfish are carp. Mudding rivers. This is a delicacy, yeah, this is a delicacy, you say, in Iraq, in Mosul. And the fact that they can now have these barbecues is not the right word. I can't remember the word you used. But the fact that they can now get together to eat what they consider to be a delicacy is in itself an important moment in sort of the rebirth of Mosul

because they weren't able to do that before for a number of, really unfortunate reasons. Can you just talk about that for a little bit? Yeah, I mean, it was sort of a personal journey, I guess, because in 2004 in Baghdad, I had my first mus goof, which is the carp, grilled carp. It's always grilled outdoors, and then it's served with different things, and everyone has their own, like, family recipe for what spice to put on it, but it's a national dish, and I thought this is the best fish I've ever eaten. And then there came this time when you couldn't get Moskuf, you couldn't get Karp. And it turned out that primarily the Muslim clerics in Mosul had issued a fat against it because there was so much blood

and human debris in the rivers. They said it was unclean. It was unsafe. And over time, and this is where you see small evidences of comeback, the rivers are clean. And also these businessmen have set up these commercial fishing. So now it's farmed carp. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, uh, fish farms that are off of canals, the ancient canals that are, that are, that are coming off of it, but the tigers and the euphrates. But here we're talking about the tigris. So the fatwas came down and when they came down, the cart business went crazy. And when you walk through the market, the reopened market in Mosul, you come into the fish market and it's, it's, it's a wide, broad avenue.

and it's brand new, and it's got a new canopy up over it. And it's two stories. So you've got, they're selling fish on one level, and then they've got these platforms up above where they've set up these grills, and they're grilling Mosque outside all the time. And it does feel like no one can get enough Moskouf now, because I stayed with friends for a time, and they said, you're going to be here on Friday, right? We do Muskoof every Friday. And I said, no, I wouldn't miss it. built their own grill in their backyard, had a guy come in to, because it's a round grill. It's a very specialized that the fish are upright over top of the wood. So it's those kinds of signs, I think, that are actually important, that actually giving people

back a stake in their community and hope for the future. I was in, mostly, as you mentioned, in the fall of 2003, and I was there traveling with then Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. We walked throughout most, we'd gotten, you know, they had let the journalists sit in on some briefings, and people were telling us sort of how things were going. And it was a very mixed trip, I would say. We had, you know, I think in our official briefings,

we were getting the happy version of the story, and then you'd have some side conversations, and people would say, like, this isn't great. And I remember going around and asking people at the time, sort of the question that I was obsessed with was, who are we fighting? And it was a simple question, but I asked it to everybody. And I got different answers from everybody I talked to,

which was really unsettling. It turns out, I think, to have been very revealing. But we walked around that same soup that you're describing so vividly in the piece. And I remember being struck that some of the military officials who were taking us on this tour were not wearing their, helmets. I think they all had their bulletproof vests on, but the point was to say, hey, things are getting better. And this is in 2003. Mosul has been through hell in the 20-plus years since then, in particular the years that ISIS took control starting in June of 2014. And, you know,

that was the, as you report in your piece, I mean, that was the headquarters of the Caliphate. That's where Abu Bakr al-Vaqaddi declared the caliphate. ISIS ran rampant. There were beheadings and floggings in the streets less than 10 years ago. And it's made this incredible turn. Last question for me, and then the mics can jump in. You talk about, you describing the piece, the Christians, the Muslims and others working together in some ways to rebuild churches.

And I was just particularly struck by that because in the sort of pre-Saddam era, Mosul was often seen as a place where, you know, all of the different religions and ethnicities in Iraq, at least the happy story was that they could get along. They didn't always agree, but they could get along. They could survive together, coexist together. and then those tensions really rose to the fore in the aftermath of the war there. But it sounds as if we don't want to get, you know, we don't want to engage in the kind of in Happy Talk either. But it sounds like that might be coming back, or at least we're seeing the beginnings of that coming back. Is that overstating things?

I don't think it's overstating things. I think that what I felt, and again, this gets to like generational changes, I realized as I was there that I was talking to people, I had not been interacting six years. That's the longest time I've been away from there since 2002 when I made my first reporting trip there. And I realized I was talking to a whole new generation that most of the people running the shops, most of the people doing the work, the construction workers are people who, you know, were born during the war. They were born after the time that you're describing. And what they knew as children was insurgency, was not being able to leave their houses. I mean, Mosul became the hotbed of the

Sunni insurgency that overtook the entire country. And the Sunnis then boycotted the elections in 2005. That led to just a total breakdown in Mosul. And they basically went underground because, you know, we were propping up sort of a Shia, the new Shia leadership in the country at large. And that's why it became such a broken down, divided country. What was lost in that was the diversity was the way that Christians had always lived alongside Muslims, the way the Yazidis were brought in and allowed to attend the University of Mosul and those kinds of things. And the culture, the history, the layers of history that were there, that was all being obliterated, crowned by ISIS moving in, forcing the Iraq army out,

taking over the city. And so when you get to this rebuilding effort was significant about it, I think, is that what they're rebuilding are sites of trauma, are really very, they're rebuilding churches that were ISIS courts of law during the occupation, that were where people were sentenced to beheadings, to be hanged, to have their hands cut off. I mean, the photographer I went in with, he actually saw several executions in the courtyard right outside the newly rebuilt church that were walking through. And in the same way with the mosques, I mean, the mosques have become sites of trauma for Muslims because this was where Baghdaddy declared his caliphate.

He basically said, your force are against us. So if you don't join our terror movement, you're against us. And as the city was being liberated by the coalition, they began blowing up. all these historic mosques and minarets. I mean, they believe they were not sacred spaces. They believed they were idols, that kind of thing. But they also didn't want them to get back into the hands of anyone. So now that these things are going up,

one of the things that UNESCO did that I think is genius is they said, we want Christians and Muslims on our construction crews. They brought in engineers. They realized that the Christians had certain skill sets because of the type of materials that are used to build churches that are different from the types of material used to build mosques. And so it's really, I mean, it's the first time I've known of this happening, that they started with the churches. They insisted that Muslims be part of the crews there. Muslims had reasons to resist it, but eventually were brought on board because they saw that it was making the whole community better. And then they moved to rebuild the Al-Norri Mosque, and that was the mosque where Baghdadi had declared the caliphate.

Yeah. Stood up in the pulpit, very symbolic and absolutely destroyed. And the Christians were like, well, we rebuilt the churches. We're kind of done here. And the supervisor said, no, no, no, no, no. The Muslims helped you rebuild churches. We want you on this project. And even when they said we don't have the skill sets for building mosques, they said,

but the Muslims helped you. so you can help that. And by that time, people were seeing the benefits of it. They were seeing that if they worked together, their community could be come back. And what I heard from gift shop owners, from corner grocery store owners, is this sense of we know that we can do it now. We've seen what's happened and we know that we can rebuild our city. And also, in ways I've not heard anywhere else, we will do anything not to have war again.

end, just an absolute exhaustion and frustration with what they've been through and wanting to be, to see that end. Mindy, I was struck by so much in this excellent article of yours, but I was struck in particular by the importance of the physical places. You know, there's a lot of talk, you know, when there are these moments of, you know, war-torn areas, you know, the community, the sort of intangible elements. elements of community that either have been cast away or are trying to rebuild. But the focus of your piece is so much on the actual physical buildings. And I was the story of the hunchback,

which is the leaning minaret. It's like their leaning Tower of Pisa in Mosul, right? But it's, it was this minaret by accident, just like the leaning tower of Pisa was, has been leaning, had been leading for hundreds of years, and that's how the people in Mosul wanted it rebuilt. And it's incredible that they were able to do it. I would love to know a little bit more about how you think through the value, the power of the physical buildings. Clearly, people like ISIS understood it, which is why they blew up so much of these buildings. I'm thinking of, but also the sort of the power of the memory of the original buildings. Several years ago, I was in Dresden on a reporting trip, and I was struck by the story of the cathedral in Dresden,

which was bombed to Smitherhines during World War II. And then when the Soviets and the East Germans were in charge, they refused to rebuild it. as a sort of look what the evil capitalist West did to your lovely building. And of course, when the Cold War ended, they rebuilt the church to look as it did. This seems like the same, really so much of the same impulse. Why is that? Why do we need these physical representations of our past and our history to be rebuilt rather than for something new to be placed in those places?

Yeah, and there are examples, I think, in Germany where you've seen, you know, you go into these cities and they're unrecognizable from how they were at the end of World War II because they've got modern structures and they really intentionally moved away from what had been there because it was so painful. And I think, you know, if it had been engineered another way, that could have happened in Mosul. UNESCO did a couple of really key things, and they weren't the only ones. They were working with the European Union. USAID had some money in the area, but was never very involved. That's like a whole different story that we could spend hours talking about. But it was primarily European and UN-based organizations that were leading this effort. For instance, they started, before they started building anything by doing surveys.

And they went to the University of Mosul, which had said, had been torn down and a lot of things lost. The entire library there was lost under ISIS. So undergoing its own issues. And they said, you've got a statistics department. We'd like to deploy them to go out and run surveys. And so right away, they're pulling the community in. They actually even went, they described to me how they went out to the displaced camps on the outskirts of Mosul and extending out into Iraq to find Muslowies and to ask them, how would you like your city to be? be rebuilt. And they asked these questions, and someone came up and said, you know, it's almost, I think, a joke in the beginning. If we rebuild Al-Hopda, do you want it, do you want it leaning or do you want it straight?

Do you want it to look brand new? And across the board, like they had actual survey numbers, everyone said it has to be leaning. It's been leaning since the 14th century. How could it not be leaning? And so then the engineers are saying, we can't build it back gleaming. There's no way. There's no way we can make it look. But the organizers kept pushing in saying, yes, there is a way. And so I think that it is a combination of it is symbolic to the adherence of Islam or the adherence of Christianity. It symbolizes what they value, and it symbolizes what they believe. And so that's why the spaces are important. But it's interesting to see how it's, also symbolizes to the wider community, this is what we know. And, you know, to hear the UNESCO people

describing this, the project manager said, you know, when pictures started going up online of this leaning minaret, and it's an incredible story, they pulled all the old bricks out of the rubble, started working with the old materials, and then had to add new materials. They were debating how much of the lien they could get, and it got so technical. Like, we've got 2.9% lien, or we've got 2.5% lien. We need 2.9% lien, and they were like, no, we're good with 2.5. But they created a minaret that looks like the icon that for centuries stood in the middle of Mosul that everyone could look at.

And she described that she began getting messages from all over the, the world, from architects who had studied the old minaret, and from people in Mosul who had been displaced and were now in Australia living as refugees. And she said there was this common joy that came from seeing this old peace rise in the skyline of, you know, new again. It's a powerful story because I think it's not something that anyone would normally thought of if they had not gone through those important preliminary steps. Yeah, Mike Nelson, you've spent a lot of time in Iraq over the years. I wonder what your impressions were when you read Mindy's story.

So I think a lot of America was kind of unaware of the wholesale destruction that went into the campaign to liberate Mosul from ISIS. So in 2016, 2017, Mosul, I mean, it was obviously a great significance to the Iraqi people, as Mindy's pointed out, it was a great significance to ISIS as it was where they established their caliphate or they were they declared their caliphate and was one of the two co-capitals along with Raqa and Syria. So there were a lot of reasons that the fight became kind of a pitched battle. For the United States, it was also, you know, in 2014, in June 2014, when Mosul fell, it's when we, when the Obama administration could no longer ignore the rise of ISIS. It had largely, you know, We'd taken our eye off of, we were ignoring the Syrian Civil War. We had taken our eye off Iraq. We were ignoring and pretending that everything was fine without us. And then Mosul fell and it was this great surprise, you know, or, you know, to those who weren't,

who weren't paying attention actively. This is after President Obama had declared ISIS the junior varsity. Correct. Correct. Actually, very first thing I ever wrote was for War on the Rocks in 2014, pointing out this is that they were not the JV team. So it became a great, it became a symbolic, not just. one to liberate one of the largest cities in Iraq, the second largest city in Iraq, it became

this symbolic victory that we needed to achieve to point out, you know, the gradual defeat of the physical caliphate. When we finally kicked it off in 2016, there was, it was, I mean, CTS, Iraqi counterterrorism service with whom I was partnered with at the time down in Baghdad, they took the two ISOPP brigades that they had deployed to the one of the axes of advances, in East Mosul, they took up to 60% casualties fighting through just East Mosul, just the first phase of the operation. And then the Iraqi police on the other axes, there was a little bit of a race to the river between the two because the Iraqi police were seen as being very pro-Iranian or Iranian infiltrated. And so there was a fight for legitimacy in terms of who was going to

liberate Mosul. That against the backdrop of us, having a campaign plan that was largely reducing risk to American forces by putting us at a little bit of an advisory gap. So we were primarily providing fire support and close air support to the Iraqi forces, which was lessening our level of control in those strikes, therefore increasing the margin for air, potentially shifting some of the risks of the local population, causing more destruction in the city as we liberated. So what we found when we liberated at Mosul was, as Mindy's pointed out, the city that was largely destroyed, including, you know, ISIS destruction on the way out, most notably of the Nouri mosque. So the fact that they've recovered, and you talk about the gap in between, you know, original USAID support that helped kickstart it, and now the need to continue this, now that USAID has been gutted, you know, what has been done is, is a a miracle thus far. And I think it's also indicative of, as we look at these war torrent, you know,

Ukraine, whatever the end state is in Ukraine, it's going to require generations to recover. And as we've pointed out, used the analogy to recovery after World War II. You know, just because victory is declared, and America may take its eye off these things, the struggle's not over for the people who live there, who were lucky enough to survive the conflict and then have to rebuild. And I would just say one of the things I found encouraging was that this was. I mean, I hate to use sort of our terminology to describe it, but it felt like a bottom-up sort of community-driven, a rebuild effort, right? I mean, I think that was one of the things that made it as striking as it was. Thank you, Minnie, for the piece.

Thank you for joining us today. We are going to skip not worth your time today. It's not going away after all of the Hullabaloo last. week. So thank you, Mindy, for joining us. Thank you for the piece. Mike Nelson. Thanks for jumping in. Mike Warren, you're still working off your brutus moment from last week, but thanks also for getting up and playing hurt today. And thank you all for listening. We will be back later this week. If you like what we're doing here, there are a few easy ways to support us. You can rate, review and subscribe to the show on your podcast player of choice to help new listeners find us.

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