Genocide & Dreams: Iraq

Iraq’s modern history is often told through war and geopolitics, but far less often through memory, trauma, and survival. In this lecture, Dr. Roy explores Iraq through the intertwined lenses of genocide, imperial ambition, and the fragile dreams that persist in the aftermath of destruction. Dr. Roy traces how repeated foreign interventions, authoritarian rule, and ethnic targeting reshaped Iraqi society, leaving deep scars that continue to shape the region today.

Takeaways:

• Iraq’s borders and political systems were imposed through imperial decisions rather than organic state formation.
• The Kurdish people experienced systematic genocide under the Ba’athist regime, including the Anfal campaign.
• Chemical weapons were used against civilian populations, most notably at Halabja, with long-term generational consequences.
• Dreams, art, and memory often become forms of resistance when political expression is suppressed.
• Authoritarian regimes rely on fear, fragmentation, and silence to maintain control.
• Foreign powers repeatedly prioritized strategic interests over human life and stability.
• Trauma does not end with violence and continues to shape identity, trust, and governance.
• Post-invasion Iraq struggled to reconcile justice, memory, and reconstruction.
• Genocide leaves cultural and psychological wounds that persist long after regimes fall.
• Understanding Iraq requires listening to voices beyond headlines and military timelines.

Resources & References:

• The Anfal Campaign
• The Halabja Chemical Attack (and its long-term effects)
• Ba’athist Iraq and Saddam Hussein
• The Iran-Iraq War 
• The Gulf War 
• The 2003 Invasion of Iraq
• Kurdish History in Iraq
• Genocide Convention of 1948
• Postwar Trauma and Memory Studies

Beyond the podcast: 

• Want to watch this lecture? Check out the full video. 
• Want to support the show? Buy Roy a coffee!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi, this is Dr. Roy, and welcome to my podcast. I'm here to tell you the enemy of every state is an ignorant population. It is too easy today to have uneducated people or people who are ignorant of a subject go to the internet and then spiral into some kind of bizarre conspiracy that misshapes their worldview and then creates people who don't quite understand the world they live in. What you need is a well-educated public that can see through whatever nonsense is happening. The last thing you want is a public that isn't steeped in reality. You want to give people an expertise, but you have to give them that well-rounded background. Because that's what creates the culture. How can you know anything about humanity if you don't do these things? Tonight's topic is Iraq. Um and so this is uh kind of a rough topic because it ends badly. I mean, I think probably that's not a spoiler alert kind of situation. Um, but and then me being who I am, I'm gonna I'm gonna run us back and then run us forward so that I make sure you have enough background to sort of fully appreciate this. Um in effect, Iraq's problems begin when the British discovers something really awkward in the 1890s. And it's this uh there were three oil companies on planet Earth, basically. Um the United States takes credit for starting the oil industry because we found oil in Oil Creek, Pennsylvania in 1861. Um it's kind of weird to say you found it in Oil Creek, because obviously the creek got named after the oil. But what I mean by that is we somebody actually dug a well next to the creek, and sure enough, they tapped um an oil field and oil began flowing. And so that became sort of effectively the first uh oil strike in the United States. But by the 1890s, the oil companies, and there were a lot of them, had basically been gobbled up by three corporations. And they were Shell, which was English, Royal Dutch, which was Dutch, and Standard Oil for the United States. The problem that the British had in the 1890s was Shell got bought up by Royal Dutch. And so the English owned 49%, the Dutch owned 51%, which meant that technically the English were still in this picture, they just didn't have controlling interest. And technically, the Netherlands was a British ally, and technically the United States was a British ally, but the British Empire didn't want to be reliant on its minor allies for its oil supply. Because in the 1890s, the British decided that oil was the new call, that the future was oil. And so they decided they had to solve this problem. And what they decided to do, so the way you looked for oil back in the 1890s was you walked looking at the ground, and if you were lucky, you'd step in it and you'd hear this little squish, and you'd look at the bottom of your shoe, and what you wanted to see was sort of a black substance, and then you celebrated. Think about how weird that is, that that's how abundant oil was. You could just walk around hoping to step in it. Um, but obviously that's not the only way you find oil. The other way, and that's why you have to look down, um, is you would find black shale or black sandstone. Both are porous rocks, and they would suck the oil into them, and then they would they would turn them black. And that's how you knew, okay, there's probably oil there, and then you need to dig. So the earth's huge. To have somebody just sort of walk around looking at their feet, yeah, good luck, good luck, right? You know, you do it kind of in your area because you're just hoping you're lucky and you're you're in Texas, but sort of short of that, that's not a very effective means for finding oil. So the British decided to do something really interesting. They decided to scour history books looking for historical references to oil. We would never do that because we're illiterate, but the British they could read, right? They were running the greatest empire on earth, and they knew about the the ability to read, and so they went for it. And sure enough, they ran into text after text after text talking about ancient oil supplies. Because it turns out, really, it's medieval oil supplies. It turns out that in the medieval period, the Arabs were actually going out and getting oil. In fact, um the it was the Arabs and the Romans who were getting oil. The Arabs had figured out two things to do with oil, and one was they would put them in a glass sphere and that with a little wick that would go into a hole, and then you'd light the wick, and then you'd throw it in combat, and it was sort of like a hang grenade with napalm in it. And they used it in warfare, and uh they were the soldiers that utilized this were nathayin. They were sort of the first grenade throwers in combat. Um, the other thing that Arabs had figured out to do with it was they would pump it through pipes in medieval cities throughout the Middle East and North Africa, and they would come up into these poles, and then they would light the poles during the night, and you had night night lights. They lit up their streets at night a thousand years ago in the Arab world. And the Brits are reading this and they're going, holy crap, there's got to be oil somewhere in the Middle East that the Arabs were getting their oil from. The other, the Romans, on the other hand, um, it was the first time the Arabs put the city of Constantinople under siege, Rome was done. There was nothing the Romans could do to stop Constantinople from falling to the Arabs. And they're they're beginning to panic. And so the emperor, the Roman Emperor, put out this contest and he said, Hey, if anybody's out there, can can they invent something to save us? I will give you a lot of gold. And there was this Syrian refugee who there was a Syrian refugee who was living in Constantinople, and he went out and he actually made an invention. He invented the flamethrower. Um, it was oil, they put oil in this thing. They actually heated up oil in a copper ball. They had a tube coming out of it, and that would pressurize the oil, and then they had a nozzle on the air, then they open it up and they just hold a stick that's on fire in front of it, and right? And the Roman fleet came out, and the Arabs were like, oh, this is the end of the Roman fleet. We'll wipe them out. And the Arab fleet came out and they're coming up on each other. The Arabs have no idea what the Romans had. And the Romans literally lit the Arab fleet on fire, and that's how Rome was saved. Uh, the Arabs attacked a few decades later. Same repeat thing, the Arab fleet gets set on fire. Uh and then Constantinople will fall to the Ottoman Empire um 750 years later. So they they literally put off the the ultimate collapse of Constantinople by 750 years. That's not bad, right? That's a it's a pretty good run. Oil. The English are like, okay, clearly there's there's oil somewhere between Constantinople and Persia. We need to find it. So the English decided they needed a base of operations in the area. Now they had already captured uh Bahrain, Gatha, the Trucial Coast, which today is called the United Arab Emirates. They called it the Trucial Coast as in truce, as in a deal to stop fighting. And the reason they called it that, and they they also occupied Oman, the reason they had taken these chunks of land was the people that were living there were doing piracy in the Arabian Sea, and that piracy was interfering with British trade with their colony India. And so what they did was they went and they occupied this chunk of the Arabian Peninsula. Another group of people in the area, though, wanted to break away from the Ottoman Empire in what is today Kuwait. And so what the British did was they said, we'll help you, we'll support you, we'll make this happen. Um and they they actually, the Brits went in, they broke Kuwait out of the Ottoman Empire, and then they turned that now into their base of operations in the year 1900. So Kuwait is separated from the Basra province of the Ottoman Empire in the year 1900. Now that the Brits are in Kuwait, they they go to the Persians and they say, hey, we want to make a deal with you. We we think there's a high probability somewhere in Persia there's an oil deposit. Now, the rulers of Persia at the time were a group of uh opium addicts called the Qajars. Now, I I'm not just loosely throwing out opium addicts here. They were like totally high all the time, every chance they got. So the rulers of the of Persia were a catastrophe, right? Um they and the British said, look, we we we control the flow of opium in the world. We'll keep it flowing into your dens. You can just be high all the time, that'd be great. If you will sign for us a really good concession deal in case we find oil. And the concession deal the Brits got was a 95-5 deal. Normally you get a 50-50 deal, right? Because the oil belongs to Persia. The English found it and they're pulling it out of the ground. You split it 50-50. The British got a 95-5 deal. That's how high the Qatars were. Um, so the British are thrilled. They create the Anglo-Persian oil company and they start sending people into Persia, and they're just doing the walk around, hope I step in something, looking at the ground as they go. In the meantime, the British begin talking to the Ottoman Empire. They go, hey, we think there's a high probability that there's oil somewhere here in the Ottoman Empire. We would love to get a good concession from you here. And the Ottoman Empire was openly talking. The problem for the British was that the Ottomans were actually a little bit more interested in the deal the Germans were willing to make for their oil. And so the Ottomans were talking to the Germans, they were talking to the Brits, but they were leaning German. And finally, the Brits find oil. They find oil in Khuzistan, which is the southwest corner of Iran. It's ironically enough the Arabic-speaking part of Iran. Uh so even though Iran is a non-Arab state, right, it's ruled by Persians, um, and it has a huge Turkish population, a huge Kurdish and Baluchi population, um, at the end of the day, and it's oil-rich, it is the Arab-speaking part of Iraq that's the oil-rich part. So God really did put all the oil underneath the Arabs, even in the case of Iran. And the the British go, they start working on, I think 1905 is when they found oil in in Iran, and they immediately start working on this. In the meantime, the Ottoman Empire finds oil up in the north. Uh in the Mosul Kirkuk area, they find oil. So it was the Mosul province of the Ottoman Empire, and the the Ottomans sign a deal with the Germans. The British go, okay, this is irritating. We wanted that oil, but it's okay because if we ever go to war with the Germans, they're gonna have to ship it out through the Tigris River, which will go right past Kuwait, so we can just basically maintain a military force in Kuwait with the express intent of sinking any ships going through the Persian Gulf. So this is a perfect arrangement as far as the British were concerned. They've got their oil secured in Iran, they can interrupt German oil coming out of the Ottoman Empire. And then, of course, World War I happens. The whole goal of the British in World War I is to disassemble the Ottoman Empire. The problem for the British is this is this they thought they could do it easily by the Gallipoli campaign. In 1915, they invade Gallipoli. Their goal is to capture the Dardanelles and then from there move on Istanbul itself and take it out. And then thinking the Ottomans will capitulate once they lose their capital. But Gallipoli ended up being a lot like Constantinople. But it just the the the British lose really badly. It's a catastrophe, actually. Um, but but don't worry, it was mostly Australians who died, so nobody's really that upset about it. And so uh there's hi there there's some Australians who occasionally watch my videos, that was for them. And they they know it. Uh it's their Gettysburg. They they will actually go do trips to Gallipoli because it was such a catastrophe. Um in any case, actually the movie Gallipoli, get a box of Kleenex, and it's the only Mel Gibson movie ever made that was any good, except for Roguelier, that was really good. Uh and then and then and then watch that. Uh I think it was his first movie too, so that's kind of a bad sign when it's your first movie's your your last good one. Except for Roguelier, that was fantastic. Um, anyway, so the British need to rethink how they're gonna take out the Ottoman Empire after the Gallipoli disaster. They come up with why don't we arm the Arabs who no longer want to be ruled by the Turks? Why don't we why don't we arm the Arabs? And they they they fund an uprising that gets turned into the movie Lawrence of Arabia. So just to give you uh a cultural reference there. The Arabs are wildly successful, way more successful than the than the British had hoped. In fact, so successful that the British actually end up undermining their own position. The Arabs beat the British army to Jerusalem and take it, and then they beat the British army to Damascus and they take it too. And what the Arabs end up doing is they end up trying to create a kingdom that goes from Hejaz through Palestine, Syria, and into Iraq that's independent of the Ottoman Empire, but also, and this is the part the British don't like, independent of the British and French empires as well. Because the British and the French had sat down and drafted Sykes Pico. And what Sykes Pico was, it was an agreement to disassemble the Ottoman Empire in a very specific way. As a bonus, they were also gonna take the Persian Empire, it wasn't an empire, this the state of Persia that erroneously called itself an empire, and also split it as well. And here, the way they were gonna do it was um Constantinople and the area around that was gonna go to the Russians, the Izmir area was gonna go to the Italians, uh, the Greeks were gonna get a huge chunk as well. And then uh, I'm sorry, Izmir was gonna go to the Greeks, Konya was gonna go to the Italians, and then uh Iraq, which was didn't exist yet. Iraq's a made-up thing, it doesn't exist. It's a figment of everybody's imagination. Um, which was the Mosul province, the Baghdad province, and the Basra province were gonna be handed over to the French, along with Lebanon and Syria, the British were gonna get what is today Jordan and Palestine, and the British were gonna get southern Persia, and the Russians were gonna get northern Persia. But to follow up their plans, the Russians went and had a communist revolution. And they they they had they wanted nothing to do with this imperialist move. So when the Russians pulled out, it meant the British couldn't conquer southern Persia, because the only way the British were gonna get Persia was if the Russians went into the north. So that meant that there was no way to get anything in Persia. So the British just went to the French and went, sorry, we're taking Iraq after all. We had told you we were gonna give it to you, but that's not gonna work. And what were the French gonna do? So they they uh they accept. The reason the British need either Iraq or southern Persia is so that they can have direct access to that oil supply. Because they believe that having the British themselves be reliant on the United States and the Dutch is just it's just not okay. Um the the British end up going into Iraq, but it in a roundabout way. They can't just go into it because now there's this new state. The state is run by Faisal. Uh, for the for the Lawrence Arabia uh Lawrence of Arabia reference, it's Alec Guinness's character. And and FISO basically declares himself a king, they're administering this territory. So the French and the British begin doing sabotage. They set buildings on fire, and then when the Arab fire department tries to run the pumps to pump water through the hoses to put the fire out, the French who are running the water company turn off the water company and there's no water, and so there's rampant raid fires. The British and the French are bribing Arab tribal forces so that they split them against each other. It turns into a mass, and then the French invade. The French come in through Lebanon and they fight the Battle of Mysaloon in 1920, and they defeat the Arabs. Uh, they had tanks and biplanes and guns, and the Arabs actually had some guns, but mostly they just had foot soldiers, and it was uh it was a bad battle. And afterwards, uh the French move into Damascus and Salahedin, the Saladin, and right, but Salahedin's his name. Saladin is like a restaurant you do that's that's sort of salad-oriented, but it does dinners. Anyway, I've always thought that you could and you could have like a picture of Salahedin. No, you're not buying in. Um you can have my idea. I don't really want to do that. Um anyway, so Salahadin, the Kurdish ruler who managed to unify the Arabs enough to defeat the Crusaders, right? He's buried in Damascus, and the French general, after defeating the Arabs at Mysaloon, walks up to his tomb and kicks it and says, We are back, Saladin. And right, so if you were wondering if the European occupation of Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine was another crusade, it was another crusade. Just in the in the mind of Arabs, it was a crusade, and in the mind of them it was a crusade. They may not have called it a crusade, but it was a crusade. They got the Holy Land back, they were so excited. The British go into Jerusalem. Turns out the Iraqis aren't on board. The Iraqis go into a state of rebellion. The British will actually bring in biplanes and they bomb the city of Baghdad. And it's one of the world's first ever aerial bombardments of a city. Um it's 1920. And, you know, biplanes, they're just they they have a bomb, they arm it, and they just throw it out the cockpit of their, you know, cloths tightly strapped onto wooden frame airplane that they're flying through the air. And uh there was public outrage. And uh it appears that Prime Minister David Lord George, in a private conversation, said, You ready? Britain reserves the right to bomb insert N-word. Isn't that cool? Um, the British continue to do the bombing campaign despite a little bit of public outrage. And eventually the Iraqis just they don't want to do this. They don't want their city being destroyed from the air, and they basically capitulate. Uh the British go to Faisal and they go, hey, we hear you're unemployed. Uh, would you like to basically become the king of this new kingdom we just created out of magic, out of thin air? We're gonna call it Iraq. Now, one of the cool things about calling it Iraq is nobody knows where they got the name. Um there have been two atta there are two sort of dominant ideas, hypotheses about where the British got the name. One is it's Uruk, as in the ancient Mesopotamian city-state, and the British just misspelled it, and Uruk became U or UK became Iraq, maybe. The other one is in ancient Arabic, it's no longer used, but Iraq means riverbank. And there are two rivers that flow through Iraq, and then there's Mesopotamia, so you know, which literally means betwe between two rivers. So maybe, maybe that's the name. The name of the country is riverbank. They took the the Mosul province, which was largely Kurdish, the Baghdad province, which was largely Sunni but Arab, and then they took the Basra province, which was largely Shia and Arab, and they just jammed them together and created Iraq. They uh they carved the bottom part of the Basra province off and gave it to the to the Saudis. The Saudi royal family had managed out in the midst of all the chaos of the Hashemites being defeated in Syria, they actually captured the western part of Arabia, the Hejaz Mountains, and they make this new state that they're calling Saudi Arabia. Uh, it would be like if we had we renamed the United States Trumpy America. Uh the Saudis are the royal family of Saudi Arabia. It's not like it has that Saudi is like the name of a country or something. It's just it's just the name of the rulers. So it's a kind of a weird name. Um in any case, Faisal agrees, and they begin running the state of Iraq. It turns out there isn't just oil in the north in what was the Ottoman Empire's Mosul province. It turns out there was oil in the south in the Basra province as well, in in both the Iraqi part of the Basra province, but also in the Saudi Arabian part of the Basra province, and just to make things more interesting, Kuwait itself also, which used to be part of the Basra province. So it just turned out Basra had oil. The English are thrilled. And then in 1905, the same time that they had found oil in Iran, Iran had actually tried to have a democratic government put into place. And I'm going to go in more detail with that later or next semester when I do part three in this. Series of lectures. Iran will be next. But just the the short story of that is they overthrow in 1906 with the Russian help, they overthrow the democracy. And the reason that matters is because that's going to trigger a reform movement in Iran that's authoritarian in essence, but nonetheless is going to make some changes, including a name change. Persia is going to rename itself Iran. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company becomes the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Eventually, to make that story a little weird, that company will get renamed again and will become called British Petroleum. So that's the origin of the company British Petroleum. Isn't that cool? It was originally really Persian. In any case, Iraq's are plugging along. It's part of the British Empire, it's a protectorate, it's a kingdom, it has a king, it'll have a Faisal II who replaces Faisal I, and it'll even have a Faisal III, but that's where that ends. In 1958, Iraq has a revolution. They execute Faisal III and they declare the creation of a republic. So for those of you who were at my uh Egypt lecture a week ago, what basically in a nutshell, what had happened was Egypt, or who weren't there, I'll tell you what happened in a nutshell. Egypt and Syria had unified in 1958. Iraq breaks away, uh, gets rid of the royal family and is trying to break away from the British Empire in 1958. Um Lebanon is on the brink of a civil war in 1958. Iraq declares that it wants to reunify with Kuwait the same year. The United States threatens to nuke Iraq to prevent Iraq from invading and uh annexing Kuwait, and the United States sends the Marines into Lebanon and shoots the place up to make peace, right? Because that's what we do. We're peacemakers through violence. The reason all of this matters is because even before 1958, we had gotten in the habit of creating a lot of chaos in the Middle East. Now, there were there were there were three guys who were largely responsible for this for this, a guy named Miles Copeland, um Kermit Roosevelt, and I forget the other Roosevelt, but it's his brother, it's another Roosevelt. And they were CIA operatives who brand new CIA, right? Post-World War II, it's it just started. But basically what happened was a Yale fraternity decided to create a secret organization that would run around the world overthrowing democracies and assassinating people. And then if if the United States government wanted to work with them, that would be great, but it wasn't necessary. And they and these three guys go to the Middle East. Now, one of the reasons why the three men went to the Middle East is they were actually, this is a really weird story, but they were actually Arabophiles. They actually really liked Arab culture and they kind of wanted to immerse themselves in Arab culture, but but they were clearly totally pro-US. So they what they did was they they sort of glorified Arab culture and they just sort of wanted the cool parts of it. But at the meat in the meantime, they were still totally working for US interests. Their first action is done by Miles Copeland, and what he does is in 1949, he overthrows the fledgling democracy in Syria. It'll destabilize Syria so catastrophically it takes 21 years for Syria to get back on its feet. Um, interestingly enough, it gets back on its feet because of a tyrant named Hafaz al-Assad. When he dies, his son takes over his son's name is Bashar al-Assad. Bashar al-Assad is the current guy that we hate so much in Syria. So, in effect, if you really hate Bashar al-Assad, you have nobody to blame except yourself for setting up Syria for this tyranny after overthrowing their democracy in 1949. In 1953, Kermit Roosevelt feeling really jealous and left out because he didn't get to overthrow a democracy. He'll be the one who masterminds the overthrow of the Iranian democracy. And the effect of this, of course, is that it creates lots of chaos. So in 1958, one of the things that we're looking at is, well, two of the things we're looking at is one, how do we prevent Iraq from joining Syria and Egypt in night, right, as Iraq is breaking away from the British Empire, its immediate stated goal was to merge with Egypt and Syria in the United Arab Republic. We don't want that to happen because there's a possibility that the Arabs will create a large, stable, socialist state that'll have a lot of petroleum wealth, and it'll probably use that petroleum wealth for its own internal development, and it'll probably use that petroleum wealth to st to make itself into an actual power. We don't want anything to do with that. We want Arabs broken up into as many states as possible so that they can bicker amongst each other and backstab and kill each other and we can divide and conquer them. And so one of the things that we realized was the weak point in the 1958 Iraqi revolution was the communists. The communists did not want Iraq to join the United Arab Republic. Uh the Soviet Union was obviously funding the communists, so we decided we should do the same and we began funding the communists, and it worked. We gave them just enough that they managed to get just enough power in parliament that they prevented Iraq from joining Egypt and Syria. And then Gossom is the guy who takes over in 1958. Uh the CIA goes in there and cleans it up by executing, by assassinating Gossom in 1963. That triggers 13 years of chaos in Iraq, where there's one coup after the other. And it finally settles in the mid-70s when another uh another person on the CIA payroll, Saddam Hussein, um, who had actually been involved in a government in the 60s, but that got overthrown in the coup, basically gets involved in another government in the 70s. He's not the president initially, but it becomes pretty clear pretty early on that he is super powerful. He wields a lot of influence. The actual president is sick and dying, and Saddam Hussein is sort of in the back running the show. Um, we decided that we should test Saddam Hussein out. That it wasn't just enough that he was on the CIA payroll, it wasn't just enough that we had worked with him in the past and we'd established this nice relationship with him in the 60s. We wanted to really test him. And so what we did was we produced a list of several hundred Iraqis that we didn't like. They were mostly socialists, they were university professors, scientists, just people that you in general you don't like, right? Um the the riff raff of the world, the guys, the big thinkers. And so uh we produced the list and we handed it to some Saddam Hussein with no instructions. We didn't say anything bad about the guys. We just went, well, I mean, we did. We said we don't like these people. They're in your country. So Saddam Hussein mass arrested the whole lot of them. He did a handful of kangaroo court trials where they were going to be found guilty, but all at the same time. Like there'd be like a hundred defendants at a time. And then the judge, spam, guilty. And then he hanged them all live on TV, prime time, all state-owned channels. And we went, yeah, that's our guy. That's artistry. We didn't tell him what to do. He was making it up as he went. You don't like these guys? Dot, I got it for you. So uh enters a complication. The complication is the Ayatollah Khomeini. So Khomeini had been in France, but the French didn't really want him anymore, and he goes to Iraq. Iraq, because Saddam Hussein is basically uh one of our allies in the region, although it's kind of a weird relationship. But that means that we effectively have control of the Ayatollah Khomeini. Now, we had seen how fundamentalist Muslims could be advantageous to us in our foreign policy pursuits. Uh, for example, we were funding fundamentalist Muslims in Egypt because we realized that if we funded the Muslim Brotherhood, it destabilized the socialist government that we hated. And so this is this is a great tactic for us. So the way everybody who was in the intelligence field saw the Ayat al-Khomeini being in Iraq was this was an issue, a person you could use if you needed to in Iran. So he's sort of like a reserve emergency tool. And we're gonna need him in Iran because Iran in 1953, we overthrew the democracy. Iran ended up in a quarter century of tyranny. But that tyranny was really strange because it was also very pro-US. So pro-US, people began calling a nickname for Iran became the Little United States. Another one was the shopping mall of the Middle East. Um I I think I'm pretty sure this is true, that bleach, the number one consumer of bleach in the world, became Iran. That every every woman in Iran had a nose job and her hair was blonde. Like it was a country of blondes. Like they had a higher percentage of blondes than Sweden does. It was incredible. And of course, right, Iranians are pretty much all black hair, so this is like just a lot of bleach consumption. Um to the point where Gugush, the popular singer, the front cover of her album in the 1970s, has her with two handguns and she's wearing cowboy boots and a skirt and a cowboy hat. Right? And this is an Iranian pop mat uh musician who's dressed as a cowgirl because that's how far Iran had gone culturally. It was to the point where we actually kept some of our mint copies of our mints for our money in Iran. Like, what the hell was our money doing? Why wouldn't we do that? I I'm still trying to figure that out. The only thing I can figure out is that the CIA was using them to mint currency so that they could have currency instantaneously. Because that was our CIA headquarters for all Asia operations. So everything we were doing in China or Thailand or the Philippines or India or Pakistan, we were doing it out of Tehran and in our out of our embassy in Tehran. And so we put all our eggs into Iran, and the Iranians hated us at this point because we had stuck them with 26 years of tyranny. We had overthrown their democracy. They were done with us, they have a revolution, and they want they want to go the other direction. They want they want to reject American culture. They see American culture as tyranny imposed upon them by the Shah of Iran. And so what ends up happening is this massive pendulum swing in anti-American sentiment. Um we have a problem though, that anti-American sentiment can go one of two directions. It could go communist, because the Tudet Party was very powerful in the Iranian revolution, or it could go fundamentalist. And so we tell Saddam Hussein, release the Aitolla Khomeini. Send them. Because here's our thinking. If Iran goes fundamentalist, they'll never be able to work with the Soviet Union, because the Soviet Union is atheist, right? Because Marxists believe religion is the opiate of the masses. So how could a fundamentalist state and a Marxist state cooperate? So even though we're gonna lose Iran, either way, if it goes fundamentalist or it goes communist, we lose Iran. We figured at least the Soviet Union wouldn't get it. And and of course, when once the fundamentalists get the upper hand in the revolution, they mass execute the communists, and the communists are like falling over each other to get out of Iran, and it works. And the Iranian revolution becomes the Islamic Revolution instead of another communist revolution. In 1981, the the Iranian government decapitates its military, and I mean literally. They purge the generals, they purge the admirals. Uh the Air Force generals just flew out of the country, they escaped. But but a bunch of the army generals get caught, um, and they just literally decapitate them. And then what Iran does is they say, look, we're all equal, we don't need any more generals and admirals. It's just a little irrational. Um and so the Iranian Navy ends up being commanded by captains, and they they actually manage to put up a good fight because they're gonna have to, because we talk Iraq, our proxy state, into attacking Iran in 1981. And the reason that Iraq wants to do this is the part of Iran that has the oil is the Arabic-speaking part. So what Iraq is gonna do is they're gonna claim that they're attacking Iran to liberate their fellow Arabs in Iran, which is gonna be a huge boon to Iraq's oil production and will make Iraq psychotically rich if they can pull this off. Now, they should have known they couldn't, because Iraq is Iraq is one-third the size of Iran, both in terms of territory and in terms of population. And so, you know, that's a tough fight when you're out numbered three to one. But we convinced them that they could do it because we because our because the CIA had convinced Saddam Hussein that Iran's military was in total disarray from having been decapitated, and that that the Iranians would not be capable of putting together a decent fight. Um, it turns out to be totally wrong. The Iraqi military um grabbed Kharamsha after the bombing the city. They were swinging around because they were going to try and grab Abaddon. Abadan at the time had the world's largest oil refinery and they wanted to capture it. They're coming around the edge, and the Iranians stopped them. We're only talking a few miles into Iran. We're not talking hundreds of miles in. And the Iraqis thought, okay, our our our armor can go even further to the east to come around. The infantry won't be able to keep up. But so they they decided to race their armor without infantry support to try and swing around again, and the Iranians stopped them again. And they never capture Abadan, which is ironic because in Arabic, Abadan means never. And so they're trying to capture the city of never and never did. Um, but they destroy it. They destroy the oil refinery in in Abadan and they wreck the city. And then Iran and Iraq end up in this eight-year-long nightmare war, which reminds everybody of World War I. It's trench warfare, it's going nowhere. The Iraqis are catastrophically outnumbered, and the Iraqis are wondering how they're going to extract themselves from this. Iraq immediately starts to make gestures to surrender. Like, but you know, they're they're hoping they get a like a well, we'll let's go back to the old border surrender, not a not a real surrender. And Ayatollah Khomeini goes, never, you attacked us. We're gonna fight this war to the end, you're gonna pay for this. And we realize that there is a distinct possibility Iraq is going to collapse. That we, you know, our attempt to get a vengeance war against Iran may have just backfired on us. Because if Iran conquers Iraq, it's gonna turn our new enemy in the Middle East into a superpower. And so we begin funding and arming the Iraqis as fast as we can, to the point where we start giving them gas. We're giving them VX gas, sarin gas, mustard gas. We're loading them up, and the Iraqis begin using this on the Iranians. In 1987, of course, this turns into the Halabjah disaster. What had happened was U.S. satellites reported that the Iranians had captured the Kurdish village of Halabjah. And the Iraqis went in with helicopters and gassed the city or the village in the night. And then, of course, in the morning, satellite images showed that what had happened was the Iranians had pulled out and the Kurdish villagers had moved back into the village and we couldn't see it because it was at night. And so when the gas was dropped, it was dropped on the villagers, not the Iranian military. At that point, we have a problem because, right, the Reagan administration had been effectively backing Iraq. We were selling weapons to the Iranians too, but that's because we know a good business deal where we see one. Um, but we were we were really supporting the Iraqis. Um and so what the Reagan administration did was we sent Jean Kirkpatrick to Iraq to cover up the story. And she actually blamed Iran for the gassing uh in Halabra, which was amazing because the Iranians were not using gas. They did not deploy gas the whole war. Uh it was the gas was used one-sided. Um, I'm I've talked to uh an Iranian vet, and and uh he said it was the most surreal thing fighting the Iraqis because the Iraqis had night vision goggles, they had some of them had flak vests, they had the, you know, they had the best equipment imaginable. And the Iranians, they were lucky if they had boots, right? And they're going into battle against this super supplied army, even though they outnumber them three to one, they were also taking casualties at the rate of three to one. Um, the low number for the fatality rates in the Iran-Iraq war is uh three-quarters of a million dead Iranians and one quarter of a million dead Iraqis. The high number is double that. So the truth is probably somewhere in between. The war ends. Um, the United States actually tried to take credit for the war ending. There was an Iranian airplane crossing the Straits of Hormuz and we shot it down. I think it had like 300 passengers on board. And shortly afterwards, Iran went to the Iraqis and said, okay, we're ready to we're ready to end this. And so the R press actually tried to spin it like the catastrophic loss of life of 300 people pushed the Iranians to go to peace. They just lost it. Three-quarters of a million people. I doubt that extra 300 had anything to do with it. That's beyond narcissistic, delusional. Uh maybe stop trying to do weird spins like that. Anyway, uh the Iranians were wanted to end the war because it was clear Iraq was not going to lose, and it was clear that it was just costing both sides catastrophic amounts of money and lives. The war ends in 89. Um, and at that point, Iran and Iraq, together, both OPEC members, go to the OPEC meeting. And they go, hey, we're in really big trouble. We're in debt past our eyeballs here. We need some kind of relief. And OPEC agrees that what they're gonna do is they're gonna scale back production, all the OPEC members, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, everybody's gonna scale back production, and then they're gonna allow Iraq and Iran to increase production so that the amount of oil output will be the same as it was. That way there will be no price change. And that's the gift they're gonna give to Iran and Iraq because the amount of oil they're selling on the markets will be large enough that they they will be able to sort of pay off some of this debt. Everybody's happy, there's a lot of hugging and kissing, right? And because Arab men kiss each other on the cheek. And so afterwards, they're all excited and they're hugging and they're kissing, and everybody's thrilled. And Iraq and Iran are thinking, okay, you know, given some time, we might even like each other again, who knows? Uh in part because you have to remember that one of the Shia's most holy sites is in Iraq, and Iraq, the largest religion in Iraq are the Shia. So, like, there was need for this war to get into their past. They needed to fix this somehow. And this felt like a first step. And then Iraq notices something really weird. Iran does too, everybody does. The price of oil is plunging. The price of oil should not be going down, it should be stable. Because OPEC agreed to roll back production to compensate for Iraq and Iran's increase in production so that the price would remain stable. But the price is not remaining stable. So somebody is cheating. And the OPEC members are looking at each other like, who's cheating? Oh, not me. And then Iraq notices it's Kuwait. Their oil sales are through the freaking roof. Kuwait's flooding the oil markets. And Iraq sends a well, hey, what are you doing? You agreed to lower prices. You flooding the markets is causing the price of oil to crash. We we don't have revenue here. We're we're we're we're dying. We need you to increase, decrease production so that the price will all go back up. So we have the revenue so that we can pay off our debt. And then Iraq noticed something. So there are oil fields on the Iran-Iraq on the Iraq-Kuwaiti border. By what happened was when those oil fields were discovered, Iraq and Kuwait sat down and they worked out a deal whereby they agreed to how much each country could pump out per year. So, right, because there's no way to split the oil 50-50 by any other method than, okay, you get this many barrels per year, or we get this many barrels per year, and you just pump it out of the ground at that rate. So that's what they do. Well, Iraq notices that the wells are going down, the oil levels in the wells are going down at a pace much faster than they ought to be going down if Kuwait is pumping at the right rate. And so Iraq actually starts monitoring this, and it's clear Kuwait is pumping out of their joint wells as fast as they can, and they're breaking the treaty. So Iraq asks for a UN team to come investigate those joint wells to determine whether or not Kuwait is in fact stealing the oil. They know the answer, they just need uh an unbiased third party investigation. The third party investigation concludes that Kuwait was in fact stealing the oil from the joint fields, but that Kuwait, in fact, was doing something else. The investigative team, the UN investigative team, noticed that there were oil rigs in the desert in Kuwait in places where there were no oil fields. But what they noticed was that nearby, across the border in Iraq, there were oil fields. And so they began monitoring and they found out that Kuwait was slat drilling underneath the border right into uh Iraq. Like they weren't just stealing on the fields that were jointly owned. They were actually under the border, stealing from fields entirely inside Iraq. So the Iraqis go, here's the evidence that Kuwait's stealing from us. They go to the Kuwaitis, they go, you gotta stop. Stop right now. And the Kuwaitis ignore the Iraqis. The Iraqis go and they tell the UN, what do we do? I don't know what to do. They're stealing our oil and then they're using our oil to flood the markets, crashing the prices. This feels like an act of war because this is deliberately undermining our ability to recover from the Iran-Iraq war. And they won't respond to us. We keep telling them to stop. They won't respond. And the UN, of course, doesn't the General Assembly doesn't have any power, so there's nothing to gain out of that. The only way you get anything done is through the Security Council. So Saddam Hussein asks Ambassador April Glasby for a meeting. The US ambassador. Ambassador Glasby shows up, she sits down. There's actually a recording of this. It's really, really grainy. It's terrible quality. Um and you can hardly tell what's going on, you can hardly tell what's being said, but there's a transcript of what was said. And in a nutshell, Saddam Hussein says, Kuwait is stealing our oil. The UN confirmed it. This is this is here's the evidence. And Ambassador Glasby goes, yes, the United States believes Kuwait is in the wrong on this. Saddam Hussein goes, I don't know what to do. They're undermining our economy. We can't get back on our feet. We've tried diplomatic avenues. They're non-responsive. And she goes, again, the United States believes Iraq is in the right here. He says, Iraq is going to have to do something about it. She says, the United States is unconcerned with what Arab states do to Arab states. He interpreted that conversation as go ahead and invade Kuwait, we're okay with it. And he does. In August 1990, the Iraqi military enters into Kuwait. The battle takes 24 hours, making it not the shortest war or about war. Technically it's a war, right? It's just a 24-hour war. It's not technically the shortest war. The shortest war was when Germany invaded Denmark in World War II. That took two hours. And the casualties were even lower than the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. One guy died and an armored car was destroyed in the Denmark event. In the case of Kuwait, the reason it took 24 hours and it didn't take two was it took that long for the Kuwaiti military to retreat into Saudi Arabia as the Republican Guard systematically moved into Kuwait. Saddam Hussein sent his elite Republican guard. They were battle-hardened troops who had seen hell on earth fighting in Iran. These guys were, they were not normal human beings, but they were extremely disciplined. And the reason why you send an extremely disciplined force into a situation like this is because normal troops rape. Normal troops loot. Normal troops break shit. Disciplined soldiers like this elite unit, they will only do that kind of violence if they are told to. They do what they are told. And that's why he sent in the Republican Guard, because he didn't want there to be looting and breaking and raping. He wanted this to be a very clean, simple move. And it was. George Bush Sr. gets up in front of the world, right? He gave permission to do this through April Glasby. And he says, Iraq invaded Queen, I don't see any problem with it at this moment. I'm going to look into it more. Margaret Thatcher calls the president up and goes, let's meet in Aspen. They fly to Aspen, Colorado. They spend two days together. They come out of a meeting, and George Bush Sr. gets up in front of the world and he goes, Saddam Hussein's a hitler. He's a hitler. And I kept wanting to say he's not. He's a Hussein. It's a different name. It's a different name. They both start with H. That's where that ends. Uh he's a Hitler. We have to stop him. What did Margaret Thatcher tell George Bush Sr.? Like, what happened in that conversation? She flipped his position on this. And I can't tell you because it was a private conversation, but I can show you the results of what happens. He announces Operation Desert Storm. We are going to move soldiers into Saudi Arabia with the intent of defending Saudi Arabia against an Iraqi invasion. So just for the record, the Iraqi military in 1990, had it wanted to invade Saudi Arabia, would have completely overrun the east coast of Saudi Arabia, where all the oil rigs are in less than a two-week span of time. They would have actually been to Oman in that two weeks. It would have taken them about 14 days to run down the coast. There was nothing the Saudis could have done to stop them. They wouldn't have even been a really good speed bump. We had the RDF, the Rapid Deployment Force. We wanted the Rapid Deployment Force in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution. We put it in the BIOT, the British Indian Ocean Territory, Diego Garcia, an island in the middle of the Chagos Islands. The British are actually in a boundary dispute with the Mauritius about whether they should own the Chagos or not. It doesn't matter. They do, right? Might makes right. But we lease it from the British. So it's kind of a nice deal for the Brits. They make a little bit of money leasing us to this island after the British ethnically cleansed the island of the natives and put them on other islands, and now we can just do whatever we want to there. Now the RDF could have reacted to a US invasion of Saudi Arabia. It just wasn't large enough of a force that it could have stopped an Iraqi invasion of Saudi Arabia. It would have just caused us a bunch of serious casualties. What it could have done is it could have moved into Muscat in Oman and then secured that so that we would have had a port of entry, we would have had a bridgehead without having to do like a Normandy-style invasion. And then by the time Saddam Hussein got there, right, we could have deployed B-52s, we could have brought in our aircraft carriers, and we could have been tearing up his military, and we probably could have prevented with the RDF the capture of Muscat. I'm telling you all of this because if you were Saddam Hussein and you were worried that the United States was going to attack you, that's exactly what you would have done. You would have raced the Muscat. And the reason you would have done this is it would have taken months to dig you out of Saudi Arabia. And because you were sitting on top of the oil fields in Saudi Arabia, you could have used them as leverage. I'll blow this whole thing up if you come after me. And the reason I'm telling you that is because he didn't. He didn't do this. And he could have, even after we declared Operation Desert Shield, we sent in the 82nd Airborne. While we're deploying the 82nd Airborne into Riyadh, he could have gone right down the coast. There would have been nothing we could have done to stop it. In fact, if we had moved the 82nd Airborne into this way, they would have been overrun because they would have just been so severely outnumbered and it would have been a disaster for us. Which so we wouldn't have, we would have left them in Riyadh and waited for reinforcements to arrive. In other words, from a military standpoint, there was nothing to defend because if he wanted to act, he would have acted then. He would not have waited patiently and politely for us to slowly, and it was slow. It took us the whole rest of 1990 to deploy our forces into Saudi Arabia. We basically took five months to deploy. And he just sat there patiently and let us do it. And then we began Operation Desert Storm, where we began systematically bombing Iraq. We dropped more tonnage of explosives on Iraq in that five weeks than were dropped in the entire eight years of World War II, including the two nukes. World War II, you know, the thing that took place in Japan and China and Indonesia and the Philippines and Poland and Germany and France and Italy and Greece and Yugoslavia and Russia and Britain, that big thing. We dropped more tonnage of TNT on Iraq in that five weeks than in eight years in all those countries combined, including the tunics. We blew up their hospitals. We blew up their police stations. We blew up their bridges in the country that's two big rivers running down. It was a mess. We smashed that place to pieces. We blew up their pharmaceutical production facilities. We blew up their baby formula production facilities. We actually were experimenting with bunker busters and launching bunker busters into the ground to take out civilian bunkers, not just military bunkers. And we were killing civilians who were underground in military and military-grade civilian bunkers that we almost certainly knew were civilian bunkers and not military bunkers. And then we did the ground invasion. The ground invasion did not take long. Egypt led the Arab forces into Kuwait. When Iraq had invaded Kuwait, there was a charge that the Iraqi soldiers had actually killed babies. The charge was that the Iraqi Republican Guard had actually gone into hospitals and grabbed babies out of the incubators and bayoneted them and were walking around the city holding babies on the end of bayonets. That's beyond outrageous, not just because there's what's the point in that, right? Like that doesn't even make sense, but it makes sense on an even more ridiculous level. Kuwaitis are Arabs, Iraqis are Arabs. Why would Arabs do this to Arabs? Like what would what would be there isn't even the you can't even go racism, because there's no racism to be had in this moment. It turned out that the woman who had made charges that the CIA claimed were legitimate and that the United States claimed they were operating on was in fact a Kuwaiti princess who was in fact a CIA operative who was fabricating lies. And she later admitted to all of this just for the record. But anybody who had a half a brain knew at the time that's what was going on because it made no sense. It was just too outrageous. So when the Iraqis invaded Kuwait, there was no damage done to Kuwait. In fact, here's what the Iraqis did when they invaded Kuwait. They declared it the 19th province of Iraq. They told the royal family, you gotta get out of here. We don't want anything to do with you. They then told the administrators, you are now the administrators for this new Iraqi province. They told the business leaders, you're now the business leaders in Iraq. You keep doing what you were doing. And they tried to leave Kuwait completely intact. Their goal was to integrate Kuwait into Iraq, not to destroy Kuwait, not to extract vengeance for some from some weird false wrong. And in fact, one of the weird things that they did was they declared that all Arabs in Kuwait, whether they were Kuwaiti or not Kuwaiti, could, if they wanted, if they were Kuwaiti, they automatically got Iraqi citizenship. But if they were not Kuwaiti, they could apply for Iraqi citizenship. And then they, but but in a streamlined process. So they would get it within just a very short period of time. And then on top of that, they said all non-Arabs living in Kuwait can apply for Iraqi citizenship, which is remarkable because two-thirds of Kuwait's population was non-Kwait, who had no rights. So all of a sudden, in a country of a million and a half people, where a million people don't have any rights, that million people could have rights because they could become Iraqi citizens. On top of that, of course, Iraq is a secular state that actually gave women rights. The Kuwaiti uh human rights actually went up, not down under Saddam Hussein. They went from a tyranny that was completely patriarchal in orientation. They didn't even have a parliament in Kuwait because the uh the king in with the snap of a finger in 1986 dissolved it because it was annoying to him. Um by contrast, Iraq did have a parliament. Now, Saddam Hussein was a tyrant for sure, but that parliament did from time to time stand up to him and force him to placate them to at least to some degree so that they could be the presentation that they were a republic. And the interesting thing about that was the Iraqi parliament was 34% women. The US Congress in 1990 was 2% women. And so one of the things you would hear from time to time that liberals did this, this was fascinating to me. Liberals would go, well, we're gonna help improve women's rights. We'll make things better. And it's like, wait, the country with 2% women in its legislative body is gonna help the country with 34% women in its legislative body. That's fascinating. By the way, it's 5% today, so job well done. Good job increasing women's representation in Iraqi parliament from 34% to 5%. That was an incredible increase. Um by contrast, when we do the liberation of Kuwait, we bomb everything. We bomb the hell out of the place. We don't just bomb Iraq, we bomb Kuwait. We bomb everything. And in fact, one of the weird things was on the day the ground invasion started, Saddam Hussein surrendered. He got up in front of the world and he said, We surrender, we surrender. We surrender claim to Kuwait, we don't want, we're letting it go again. We we don't want to fight. We quit. George Bush Sr. said, No, it's too late for that. You should have surrendered a long time ago. He then went to Mikhail Gorbachev, the president of the Soviet Union, he said, please tell the president of the United States we surrender, please act on our behalf to negotiate our surrender. We're done. We surrender. And Gorbachev sent a memo to George Bush Sr. saying, hey, the Iraqis surrender, there's no reason to do the ground invasion. And Bush said no. Uh Saddam Hussein asked Gorbachev to do it again. He did it a second time, and we went in. Uh Saddam Hussein ordered all the military personnel in Kuwait to evacuate by any means available. They literally grabbed every truck, bus, car, pickup truck they could, and they took off down the Basra uh Kuwait highway, trying to drive away as fast as they could. So what we did was we came in, uh, I believe primarily with A-10s, but I could be wrong about that. We came in with aircraft and we dropped incendiary bombs all up and down that highway, and we brought we burned the retreating army to death. There was burnt corpses everywhere. Um, a photographer decided that he would go and photograph it. So there's plenty of photographic evidence. Um, if you're into really morbid pictures, they're great. Um, in the meantime, Saddam Hussein then went ahead and set the oil fields on fire. And so now there's all this toxin being dumped into the atmosphere as the oil fields go up. And then just to make things more interesting, it was our first time that we went ahead and deployed uh microwave communication devices in a combat situation live. And we didn't know what having soldiers walk through microwaves was going to do to them, which was fun because we could experiment live experimentation. It's always the most effective way to find out what happens. And then to make things more interesting, we were worried about anthrax. So we vaccinated our military with anthrax vaccines that had not been tested and were not FDA approved. But again, right, there's nothing better than to just do live tests. Um, and then of course, we now know there's a hundred thousand, eighty to a hundred thousand vets who have Gulf War syndrome. Gulf War syndrome's um symptoms are your immune system is messed up and uh lots of birth defects. And so it's probably a combination of the petroleum burning in the atmosphere, the microwaves going through, and then possibly that vaccine. Um then as if that wasn't enough, we use depleted depleted uranium shells to take out Iraqi armor. Um depleted uranium doesn't isn't what it sounds like. It sounds like, oh, it's depleted, it can't be dangerous. It's uranium 235 as opposed to 238. Sorry, it's the other way around. It's uranium-238 as opposed to 235. 235 is the weapons grade stuff, and 238 is the leftover after you're making weapons grade material. All you're doing is you're upping the percentage of 235 in your in your uranium. Um and what we do then is we take the 238, which doesn't have 235 in it, and we make shells out of it. It's totally radioactive material. It's just not, you can't, it's not good at making bombs. You could upgrade it to plutonium if you wanted to make a nuke, but that would really be your only way to make a nuke out of 238. But the reason we use it is because it's really super heavy, right? 238. Uh, it's really high on the periodic table. It's dense material. And it turns out when metals are traveling at fast speeds, they do weird, weird, weird things to each other when they collide. And having having a really dense metal hit any kind of metal at a high speed, like basically when a 238 shell hits uh a tank, the tank melts. I mean, it is it is amazing what it does to it. You almost don't even have to put an explosive shell inside. Like it is good stuff. Um, the Department of Defense in the 80s issued a warning saying that we should not use depleted uranium shells on a battlefield where we had soldiers on it. And we totally did in that first war. Um, so that also was probably a contributing factor to Gulf War syndrome. As far as I know, we don't actually have it pinned down what caused this. Um, in any case, we do know that the depleted uranium is going to have an effect because after we leave Iraq, the rates of cancer, especially in the southern part of Iraq, go through the roof. Um, Medsam Sans Frontier, uh Doctors Without Borders, ends up in southern Iraq doing volunteer work. And one of the things they keep reporting over and over again is nine-year-old girls with breast cancer. And the that was a real problem because we did not allow Iraq to import medicine or food. We cut Iraq off from the rest of the world. What happened was George Bush Sr. got up in front of the world and said, if Iraq gets rid of its weapons of mass destruction, we will allow Iraq to re-enter the community of nations. Of course, everybody knew he meant chemical weapons. Uh I'm loathed to call chemical weapons weapons of mass destruction, but that's okay. We knew what he meant. Um, what he meant was the sarin gas, the anthrax gas, and the mustard gas that we had given to Iraq. And the reason we knew Iraq had it was not just that they used it, but we have the receipts. We we have the the the seller copy. You know what I mean? Like it was. And so we said, you gotta get rid of these. So Saddam Hussein misinterpreted what he was being told. The guy needed to work on his language skills, I think. He misinterpreted what George Bush Sr. apparently meant. He took all of the remaining stockpiles of weapons into the desert in August of 1991, so just after the war was over, and he blew them all up. Just blew them up. So the UN weapons inspection regime shows up. And the UN weapons inspection regime goes, we need your missiles. We need all the warheads with these gases, hand them up. And the Iraqis go, we don't have any. And we and we're like the weapons inspection regime goes, here are the receipts. We have the serial numbers. We need we have the serial numbers. Isn't that crazy? For every warhead. We knew exactly how many warheads. We had the serial numbers. And the Iraqis go, yeah, we have them. You didn't right? Like we thought when you said you get rid of them, we would blow them up in the desert. You wanted people to know you you gave us these weapons? And we're like, yeah, you have to turn them over. And they go, Well, we can't turn them over. We blew them up. Isn't that what you meant? And we go, oh no, that's not what we meant. We're gonna have to now find the serial number for every warhead. And the Iraqis go, how? Drive us to the desert. Scott Ritter, a colonel, United States Marine Corps, becomes the on-the-ground weapons inspector, but self-identified conservative Republican. He goes out into the desert to where they blew up these warheads. And he had his team. They're in full, full gear. They've got the suits on, right? And they got they've got a screen and they're shoveling and sifting, shoveling and sifting. They're looking for the bits of serial number, and they they they're finding them slowly but sure. Sifting the desert. And every time they find a serial number, they log it down, scratch that one off. And this goes on from 1992 to 1998. Six years. Iraq has had its food and its medicine cut off. The population of Iraq is in serious trouble. They're having immune system problems because of all the depleted uranium we dumped all over southern Iraq. Because we blew up their formula factories and so kids don't have formula, because we blew up their pharmacies so they don't have medicine. What starts to happen is public pressure starts to build on the United States and Great Britain, because we're the ones in. Forcing these brutal sanctions to ease the sanctions. And so we create the oil for food program. We will let Iraq sell to us at undermarket value oil. And then in return, we will let them buy limited quantities of things like acidaminiphant, which is great for a headache, but terrible for breast cancer. You need something a little bit stronger. We would not let them bring in any radiation because we said they might use it to build a dirty bomb or a nuke. So we can't let them bring anything in so you can do radiation treatment for cancer. In any case, by 1998, Bill Clinton is in the midst of a problem. So he's gotten embroiled in a little bit of a scandal. So what every good politician should do in the middle of a scandal is distract, right? And so he does two things to distract. One of the things that he does to distract is he fires cruise missiles into Sudan and he blows up a farm. What was it with us in pharmacies or pharmaceutical factories? Like, and the Sydneys are like, what did you do for? And then he fires cruise missiles into Afghanistan. Now the things he targeted in Afghanistan were the CIA training camps where we were working with and training the Mujahideen. The Mujahideen were the Muslim the Muslim fundamentalists who fought the Soviet Union when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. And some of those guys were the Taliban, and some of those guys were Al-Qaeda, that you guys call al-Qaeda. And so the irony was in 1998, Bill Clinton's dropping scud missiles, or sorry, cruise missiles. He's dropping cruise missiles all over Afghanistan. One of them missed, it hit Pakistan. And then he decides he's gonna he's gonna ramp it up in Iraq, too, because Iraq is a great place to distract Americans from sex scandals. And so the way he's gonna do that is he's gonna declare Iraq to be to be in violation of the no-fly zone. It doesn't matter if they are or not. We had declared that Iraq could not put airplanes in the northern or southern part of Iraq and could not have any kind of radar equipment in the northern or southern part of Iraq. So anytime we flew an airplane over northern or southern Iraq, if the Iraqis locked their radar on us to track us, we would claim that they were in violation of the no-fly zone. And so uh we claim that they're in violation, and so we declare we're gonna bomb Iraq. At that moment in 1998, Scott Ritter, who's been in on the in the gr on the ground for six years, looking for serial numbers, had 98% of the serial numbers identified. Marine, what do you expect? You know what I mean? I mean, come on, he's gonna get it done. That's what they do. He's got 98%. He's screaming at Bill Clinton, please let me finish. I'm so close. I've got this thing. Please don't bomb Iraq. Because part of bombing Iraq is the UN weapons inspectors have to leave. And Scott Ritter is like, no, if you bomb Iraq, Saddam Hussein's never gonna let us back in. Please let me finish. And Bill Clinton's like, get out. I'm ordering you out. Now, if you look at the headlines from the time period, it says Saddam Hussein kicks UN weapons inspectors out. That is a lie. That is not what happened. The United States ordered the UN weapons inspectors out so they could bomb Iraq. Um, in any case, Scott Ritter leaves. We bomb Iraq. Scott Ritter was right. Saddam Hussein did not let the weapons inspection regime back in. He was like, no, I'm not playing your games anymore. Then comes the 2000 election. 2000 election is botched, right? Gore wins the popular vote by half million votes, but he loses in Florida, but there was blatant over-the-top cheating in Florida. Like, Florida might as well be a third-world country. Its elections are so corrupt. Of course, same is true for Texas, North Carolina, Arkansas, uh, North Dakota. It's not just one place. But still, nonetheless, they there's a legitimacy problem for George Bush Sr., especially because the way he ultimately wins the election is because the five conservatives on the Supreme Court vote to give him the election, which is also another legitimacy problem. And not just because it's probably a contradiction of the Constitution, which really left it up to the House in the event you have a crisis, but because it just looks like the the he got a divine intervention from the part of the Supreme Court. When he when when Gore in December of 2000, when Gore surrendered and said, Okay, I accept George Bush as the president, I turned to my wife and I went, he's gonna start a war. He has to, because he has to fix his legitimacy. I guarantee you he's gonna attack Iraq. And my wife's like, whatever. Um he didn't initially do that, of course. What he did instead was he began picking a fight with the Chinese. And I was like, What? No! Not China, pick up a little country, Iraq! Yeah, they're they're on their knees. We've starved them and cut off their medicine now for eight years. Like, there's nothing, you we blew up their industry. China? What are you mad? We we began flying aircraft, spy aircraft into Chinese, it's not Chinese airspace, it's international waters. We're on the right on this. The the UN is even, and the World Court have even come in on our side. The problem is, is China claims that territory. So the Chinese were reacting quite violently. One of the things they would do is they'd play chicken with our planes. And sure enough, a MiG hits one of our planes, the MiG, the pilot dies, the MiG goes down, our plane is severely damaged, so it has to do an emergency landing in all places. China! Like, oh, talk about embarrassing. And I'm thinking, oh wow, what a judgment error. Not the Chinese. By the way, just for the record, the UN then publishes a report, I think it was around 2001, that 800,000 Iraqis died during the eight years of the Clinton administration because of the cutting off of their food and their medicine. They estimated that of the 800,000 Iraqis who died, 500,000 were age five and under. Madeline Albright, Secretary of State for Bill Clinton, gets asked in an interview, what about that UN report? You killed 800,000 people, 500,000 of whom were babies. How do you feel about that? Saddam Hussein is still in power. He's still there, he's still president. You didn't get rid of him. And she said, if I could, I'd do it all over again. So 9-11 happens. Mana from heaven, right? This this is what fixed Junior's legitimacy problems. He was he was in the 40s, stumbling along, everybody was mocking him, making fun of him, mostly because he just couldn't speak. Um but then 9-11 happens, and his popularity rating surged to 91% overnight, making him the president who had the highest ever popularity rating since we've been keeping track in 1948. Uh by the way, his dad got to 90%, so he beat his dad by a percentage point. And he immediately, beginning September 12th, tells his government, tells his cabinet that he wants to explore attacking Iraq. So we're we're we're we're now in the planning stages for a war in Afghanistan because we need to get vengeance, even though not a single one of the hijackers was from Afghanistan. We need to get vengeance. What we did was we took a globe and we spun it, and then George Bush picked two Muslim countries at random, right? Iraq. There wasn't a single hijacker from Iraq, Afghanistan, not a single hijacker from Afghanistan. We're gonna go after both those countries in an act of vengeance for something those two countries had nothing to do with. Um but it Afghanistan's gonna go first. That's automatic. And and one of the weird things is we actually talked to the Iranians to see if we could work together in Afghanistan, and they agreed. Uh they deeply regret that now, of course, because we didn't it didn't normalize relations. They were hoping this would be the first step, it would build trust, that they would help us out, and it didn't work. Um, in any case, while we're planning for Afghanistan, the Bush administration is already talking about going to a war with Iraq. 2002, Iraq shocks the world by becoming the first country on earth to trade oil in Euros instead of US dollars. This sends us into a tizzy, right? Because think about it. If every time there's an oil transaction, it has to be done in US dollars, which is how oil transactions were done up until then, then that means that in a way, the United States gets its little protection money for every oil transaction. Because you have to change the Korean currency into US dollars, and then you hand the US dollars over to Kuwait, and then the oil goes to Korea. And then Kuwait, what are they gonna do? They can flip their the US dollars back into their currency, or they can just leave it in the currency in the US dollars as a reserve, right? So it's like we get a little piece of every oil transaction. So if you've ever heard petrol dollar, our our currency wasn't backed by gold, it was backed by oil. And so to have a country flip to the euro freaked us out because we went, wait a minute, this could set a trend. And so now there's more people who are interested in going to war with Iraq, not just George Bush Jr. George Bush Jr. begins a campaign where every time he says Osama bin Laden, they say Saddam Hussein, because they realize the American public, because it were illiterate and don't know anything about the world, that all you have to do is just keep associating, keep associating, keep associating. So they would say, Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, even though there were bitter, fierce enemies who hated each other's guts. In fact, Osama bin Laden had put a $10 million hit on Saddam Hussein. In fact, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, it was Osama bin Laden who first offered the Saudis his forces to protect them against an Iraqi invasion. And Saudi Arabia rejected Al-Gaeda and took the US instead, ironically enough. And so beginning after Labor Day, because you start every campaign after Labor Day of 2002, we went into high gear. George Bush Jr. began talking about how we didn't need the UN, we didn't need we didn't even need Congress's approval to go to war in Iraq, that he could just do it without any approval. And then the world community went to the United States and went, okay, no, we should do another weapons inspection regime. There was that 2%. Let's just clean this up. And then you don't have to do a war. So Hans Blix becomes the UN weapons inspector. In the meantime, Scott Ritter is on a tour around the United States. He writes a book and he's screaming as loud as he can, there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq because they had a shelf life of nine years. And the last shipment was done, I think, in 88. So that meant by 97, they were past expiration date. So in 98, when Scott Ritter is kicked out, he's just cleaning up so he can get this job done. He doesn't care about what he's finding anymore. And he knows that it's all blown up. He knows the 2% is almost certainly missing because they just couldn't find the serial numbers because they were burnt and destroyed when they were blown up. And he's running around trying to convince Americans there are no weapons of mass destruction. In the meantime, Dick Cheney's office is leaking to the New York Times. There are we have categorical evidence there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The New York Times publishes an article says, the front page, uh leak from vice president's office indicates that there's categorical evidence there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Next day, Dick Cheney is asked, How do you know there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? And he said, I read it in the New York Times yesterday. There's a flawful truck making sandwiches at a construction site. Colin Powell projects picture satellite photographs of this flawful truck making sandwiches for construction workers and goes, This is a chemical weapons, a mobile chemical weapons factory. Yeah, by chemical weapons, if you mean farts, then yes, that is exactly right. If you mean like things that kill people, it was a sandwich truck. And Colin Powell has said that was the worst moment of his life. And he actually said he will never run for political office because he feels so much shame about that moment. So if you like Colin Powell and you're like, why doesn't he run? That's why he he's done. He's done with politics. It's not his thing. He'd rather do war. Makes more sense to him. In any case, we know there's no weapons of mass destruction because Scott Ritter. We know there's no weapons of mass destruction. It's a totally fabricated thing at this point. But the American public's like all getting ramped up. We can't wait to do another war with Iraq. And we don't give the weapon the second weapons inspection regime any chance whatsoever. And what we do is we actually attack Iraq on the Iranian New Year, because clearly we wanted to stick it to the Iranians too, somehow in the process. Um, it's a preemptive strike. Our allies were screaming at us: Belgium, France, Germany, please don't do this. Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder of Germany was saying, oh my god, dude, we did this before. It's called Poland, September 1, 1939. You are attacking a country that never attacked you, doesn't have the means to attack you, and doesn't, it has never threatened to attack you. Why? We know there's no weapons of mass destruction. Please, if you do this, it will send the world into chaos. George Bush Jr. cut off ties with Germany. We stopped talking to our best ally. Well, one of our best allies. The Soviet dream throughout the Cold War was to wreck US-German relations. And there was Junior going, I'm not in tactical anymore, because I'm a baby. The Coalition of the Willing is what he put together. He forced countries to join the Coalition of the Willing. Uh, Japan. It's in their constitution, they can't do this. He said, change your constitution. You're or otherwise, consider our relationship ended. The Japanese are like, okay. The Japanese have a nuclear weapons program. And the Japanese, just two years ago, I think it was two years ago, I think it was 2016, might have been 2015, created uh launched the Izumo. The Izumu is a destroyer with a flat surface large enough you can land airplanes on it. Because it's not a destroyer. And by the way, the Izumo is the name of a Japanese aircraft carrier in World War II. So they are totally hearkening back. We've done it. We have remilitarized Japan. Soon it will be the Empire again. In any case, the Coalition of Willing goes in. Iceland sent one person. Uh she was a woman. Uh Olympic body uh weightlifter. Uh she's she's that woman that that can lift cars. Have you ever seen her do? That's that Icelandic woman? Yeah, that's her. They that's who they sent. That was their entire coalition of willing force. One one really super strong woman. And we attack. Of course, the attack itself is essentially a catastrophe because there's nothing the Iraqis can do to us. Right? This is just a one-sided slaughter. So the United States' military might against a country that's literally been starved to death for 12 years at this point. Is it 12? 10 years, 10 years at this point. We go in in 2003 and we tear the place up and we militarily occupy it. We do something extraordinary. So at the end of World War I, at the end of World War II, we didn't dismantle the German state. We didn't dismantle the Japanese state. We left them intact. What we did in Germany is what we call denazification. So we had the German state intact, we just went and found the Nazis and threw them out. In the case of Iraq, we actually dismantled the Iraqi state completely. We got rid of their police, we got rid of their bureaucracy, we got rid of everything. In fact, one of the weird things that we did when we captured Baghdad, besides shooting uh live rounds at journalists in the Palestine Hotel, was we actually only deployed soldiers to protect the Ministry of Oil. We did not put soldiers to protect any other Iraqi government agency in the city. We put Marines in front of the Ministry of Oil and we left the museum wide open for looting. We left all the other government agencies wide open for looting. So what we did was we created a failed state situation. Because with no state apparatus, states are very hard to create. They take a long time to create. Because you have to create a culture, you have to create a group of people who are bureaucrats who know how to run this thing. You have to have technocrats, you have to have rules, you have to have policy, you have to have laws. There's this whole apparatus that needs to be in place. So when you go gone, that means you have to start over. It takes decades to start over. Only a person who didn't understand anything about the world would think it was okay to just completely erase a state. It makes no sense. Just take the existing state, purge it of the people you don't like, hire new people, keep the thing going. We don't, we start over. We put Paul Bremer in charge of Iraq. Paul Bremer issues a shoot-to-kill order for the looting that's going on. The Iraqis are looting because they're desperate. Ten years of sanctions have crippled our economy. They've just been bombed again. We called it shock and awe. Shock and awe is the very definition of terror. We named the initial bombing operation in Iraq shock and awe. We named it terrorism. And we inflicted terror. So the fact that the Iraqis were looting should have surprised nobody. What you needed to do was deploy Marines in front of those buildings to prevent it from happening. Instead, he issues a shoot-to-kill order, and the military is like, what are you doing? We can't do this. And they they refused to execute the order. Because this is insane. All it's going to do is make Iraqis mad at that point. And so fortunately there were some sound minds somewhere in the government, uh, in this case in the military. Because the military, as a general rule, tends to be really level-headed. It's the civilians you need to be worried about. Because, right, you don't care, you're not actually going to be the one dying. You don't have to deal with the consequences. So that's why I'm in favor of the draft. Everybody, even the women. I guarantee you the number of wars we did would drop dramatically. Universal draft. No college exemption. So even white people have to do it. Um, in any case, we are trying to get the state going again. You can't start a state from scratch in the middle of chaos, but nobody knows what to do, not even the Iraqis. For about a year, in 2004, those unemployed bureaucrats, those unemployed soldiers, those unemployed policemen get together and they create Al-Gaida in Iraq. They decide to form up into a terror organization that will do a guerrilla war to get the United States to dig the United States out of Iraq. And they begin systematically setting off IEDs, they begin suicide bombing, full-on battle. And it's a disaster. 2004 gets really bloody, 2005 gets even bloodier. We're starting to think we're gonna actually lose in Iraq, which is starting to confuse us. Like, how did we get here? How are we losing in Iraq? In 2006, General Petraeus comes up with a plan which he calls the Sunni Awakening. By awakening, it's because you're gonna smell the money and it'll wake you up. It's like coffee. Money is like coffee. We're gonna literally drive around forklifts carrying pallets of $20 bills, and we're gonna buy off with millions of dollars at a shot, we're gonna buy off Iraqi warlords and get them to turn against Al-Gaeda in Iraq. It works. The Sunni awakening is shockingly successful. And it's because of this, the Iraqi warlords they don't care about anything at this point except their own advancement, right? They're positioning themselves for the post-US because George Bush Jr. and the government is admitting, yeah, yeah, we're gonna eventually pull out of Iraq. As soon as they start admitting that, of course, the warlords are thinking, yeah, and I want to be the guy in charge, at least of my territory. It would be great if I could control that guy's territory and that guy's territory and that guy's territory. How do I position myself? And the one thing that the warlords could all agree to was that when the United States pulled up, they did not want to have an Al-Qaeda in Iraq on the ground. So the way they saw it was we were paying the money, arming them, equipping them. They were gonna wipe out Al-Qaeda and Iraq and then wipe out each other whenever the occasion presented itself, so that when we were gone, they wouldn't have to deal with Al-Qaeda in Iraq. By 2008, Al-Qaeda in Iraq is defeated. They are forced out of Iraq. They went to Syria. But Shah al-Assad went, an enemy of an enemy is a friend. By the way, that is the dumbest saying the world has ever heard. Stop thinking this. Oh my god, an enemy of an enemy who happens to be an enemy is still your enemy. No. But the guy who came up with this got murdered because of this. Like the lesson should be no, that's bad. That's bad. Anyway, Bashar Allah thinks if I I hate Al Garda in Iraq, they're horrible human beings. But if I leave them in the eastern edge of Syria and let them Operate in Iraq freely whenever they want to, it'll be a thorn in the US's side, and that helps me. Anyway, the Arab Spring happens, 2011. Syria goes into a civil war because Bashar al-Assad goes in way too heavy-handed on the protesters. He's actually shooting children, and the protesters go, screw this, if you're gonna shoot at us, we're gonna shoot back. And the next thing you know, it's a civil war. It doesn't take long for about half of Syria to to more than half to no longer be within the grasp of the state. The state loses more than half of Syria. And in that moment, Al-Gaeda in Iraq, which is physically in Syria, goes, Oh my god, this is our chance. They rename themselves Dalat al-Islamirfi Iraq. The Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. ISIL, or if you want, Daesh. But ISIL. I don't know how you get ISIS out of that. It's ISIS. That's an S at the that's not an S at the end, that's an L. ISIS was an ancient Egyptian goddess of like happiness and stuff. ISIL, on the other hand, is a terrorist organization in Syria and Iraq. They end up capturing a huge chunk of Syria, including the only part of Syria that has oil, except for the Kurdish part. So the Kurds have some oil and they have some oil. The Syrian state loses its oil supply. It's a disaster for the Syrian state, and it's collapsing. It looks like Bashar Al-Assad's days are numbered. Army generals are switching over to the rebel side. The problem is there's a bunch of different rebels, including another Al-Gaeda organization, um Al-Nusra Front, um Shamhat al-Lusra. What those guys hate Al-Gaeda in Iraq, the guys that became uh Daesh or ISIL, so much that they actually managed to get Al-Gaeda to throw ISIL out. And the reason they throw ISIL out successfully is because ISIL was so brutal that the Al-Gaeda guys were like, oh, we don't want to be associated with you, and they throw them out. Uh so brutal that just to give you an idea of how horrible this was, uh remember, you're probably too young, and it's probably okay that you don't remember this if you don't. Uh that ISIL was beheading people they were capturing. Um don't look at the YouTube videos. It will damage you. No, I'm I'm being serious. Don't look at the YouTube videos if you can find them. I'm hoping all of them have been removed. Well, why give them this? Right? Just don't look at this stuff. But they were posting these YouTube videos and they were capturing Americans and they would just cut their heads off on YouTube. Well, at one point, Al-Nusra front, Shamhat al-Nusra, actually contacted Al-Gaeda and went, Can you guys stop cutting people's heads off? This is freaking us up. Right? So it's Al-Gaeda talking to ISIL, going, stop, you're too insane, you're too inhumane. And they basically bought one of the Americans. They said, we will give you money if you will turn him over to us. I don't, they paid like a million dollars or something ridiculous like that. Our enemies, our sworn enemies, because they thought this was so horrific they couldn't bear it anymore. They bought this guy from them. They then raised the white flag and approached the Syrian state, Bashal Assad's forces, and they go, hey, we've got this American, we want to hand him over to you. And so Syria has him. They take him to the Golong Heights, the Israeli-occupied Syria, and they raise a white flag and they go, We've got this American, and then an American walks into Israel, and then that's how he gets back to the United States. ISIL was so bad Al-Gaeda was actually intervening on our behalf to try and mitigate some of the brutality they were inflicting. And then, to everybody's shock and dismay, in 2014, 700 ISIL warriors in Syria in pickup trucks and private cars drive into Iraq. There are about 60,000 Iraqi soldiers in northern Iraq. Those Iraqi soldiers were the new soldiers that we had trained and equipped. They're the guys who, after we got rid of their military, that's the replacement military. Our shining new Iraqi military for the state we created in our own image. By the way, the UN had already raided Iraq as the most corrupt country on earth. I did say it was in our own image. Those 700 men overran those 60,000 Iraqi soldiers like they were a speed bump. Those Iraqi soldiers couldn't tear their uniforms off fast enough. They were throwing all their equipment on the ground. They were leaving armored personnel carriers behind, they were leaving tanks behind, helicopters behind. The ISIL guys are just like walking around in a daze going, wow, this is all ours. They swept within weeks half of northern Iraq. They captured it. The Iraqi state was on the verge of collapse. Finally, Barack Obama interceded by doing an air campaign. We began bombing the hell out of northern Iraq to try to prevent ISIL from overrunning the Kurds. It looked like they were on the verge of overrunning the Kurds and Iraq. They actually at one point surrounded all of Baghdad. It was completely cut off from the rest of Iraq. 700 guys. It was insane. That's how catastrophically we destroyed the Iraqi state. That 700 guys conquered half of it in a matter of weeks. In any case, we have systematically, with the help of the French and the British and the Iranians and the Russians, and even to a strange and weird degree, the Turks pushed back ISIL and pushed back most of the other terror organizations that we don't like. To the point where now the only thing left in terms of Syria that's controlled by ISIL is the Idlid province. And then in Iraq, it's essentially clear. It's not quite 100% clear, but it's essentially clear. So ISIL is effectively defeated in Iraq. It is effectively defeated in Syria and Al-Gaeda in Syria, which is the Sham Um the Al-Nusra front, those guys are that they're they're down to just the Idlib province, but with a lot of other guys that we had backed, it's a mess. And they're holding on. So the Syrian Civil War is almost finished, and in the Iraqi state is almost restored. It's hard to know what the exact death toll is out of all of this, but there are some good stats that we can play with here a little bit. So we estimate that somewhere around 100,000 Iraqis were killed in the first war, and then during the Clinton administration, that another 800,000 Iraqis were starved to death or were deprived of medicine. And then during the Bush administration and into the Obama administration, the estimate is that somewhere between, and this is a Johns Hopkins studies, the estimate is that somewhere between 1.2 to 2 million Iraqis were killed. So we're looking at probably somewhere around 2 to 2.8 million Iraqis just using those numbers. But there's some other numbers that are worth looking at. For example, there were 5 million Iraqi orphans. Now at the time Iraq's population was 30 million. It's gone up since then. I think it's 34 million now. But Iraq's population was 30 million. So 5 million Iraqi orphans meant one out of every six people. One, two, three, four, five orphan. How do you run a functioning state when one out of every six people in your country is an orphan? Like who takes care of these people? But there's an interesting thing you can figure out from that five million orphans number. It turned out that Iraqi fertility rate for female fertility rate was five. So five million Iraqi orphans means one million dead mothers and therefore also one million dead fathers, because they're orphans. They're not being raised by single parents, they have no parents. So that's at least two million dead right there. Another fun stat to work with is there were 1.5 million Iraqi widows. If you assume in a population of 30 million people that you should have somewhere around half a million widows, that means there's about a million dead husbands. But you gotta remember, we've already counted a million dead husbands for the orphans, or a million dead fathers for the orphans. So that we're at about that three million mark, just with those two stats. And that doesn't, that we're not even dealing with all the dead babies that happened along the way. We're not even dealing with all the rest of it. Um, so a good number is probably somewhere right around 3 million. I I you know if you want to be on the safe side, you could probably go with the two, the two million number, but three million is probably a realistic number. The estimate is that $10 trillion was taken out of the global economy. So not only did the Iraq war cost the Iraqi people millions of lives, but $10 trillion was actually removed from the global economy. Um, it cost the United States $3 trillion to wage the war in direct in direct money. We think there's probably at least another trillion dollars in sort of extras for like for one thing, we have all these vets that we're gonna mistreat, right? That we're not gonna quite treat well enough so that we can get, so for example, the suicide rate down. Um, for the first time in US history, vets have a higher suicide rate than civilians. And the country doesn't seem to give a shit, right? This is something that we should be totally working on, and we're not dedicated to fixing. Um and this doesn't take into consideration the cost of the Afghan war, which is still ongoing. So we're looking at, since we're about a quarter of the global economy, we're probably about 2.5 trillion of the lost economic money, and then another $3 trillion in direct money cost to the federal government, plus another trillion dollars uh in indirect costs. So this is an expensive war. Um the nice thing about the $3 trillion number is it gives you a it gives you a value for human life. It cost us about a million dollars per Iraqi killed. So we really wanted to kill them. We were willing to spend a lot of money doing it. So I guess that's nice. You know what I mean? Like, you're worth a million dollars to me. Dead, and I'm willing to spend it. As if that's not enough. At one point, 50% of the Iraqi population, so about 15 million people were displaced from their homes. Most of that population was, of course, displaced internally. So, you know, they just they they moved from one part of Iraq to another part of Iraq. But on top of that, millions of Iraqis also fled the country. Uh, millions went into Turkey, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and then millions also poured into Europe. So that when the Syrian Civil War happened, there was already a huge Iraqi refugee population in Europe. So then on top of that, more Syrians start coming in by the millions as well. Interestingly enough, some of those millions of Syrians who were going into Europe were actually Iraqis. They were actually Iraqi refugees in Syria who were now refugees again because now they were fleeing the Assyrian civil war and going to Europe. So one of the other consequences of this war was we destabilized everything from Spain to Pakistan and everything from Nigeria to Sweden. So we completely destabilized all of Europe, the Middle East and Northern Africa, and even parts of sub-Saharan Africa in the process of doing this war. So this war wasn't just like some little side excursion. It had really long-lasting effects that are that are sort of getting us today. Um I want to leave some time for I'm I've thought of a couple more stats, but I I I want I think I've gotten the gist of what I want to get through to you. Uh there's only three minutes left, but I I always try to do some questions, and I don't want to torment you by making you stay really long to do more questions. So go ahead and throw some at me. I know there's a lot to do. I told you bring a box of Kleenex. Yeah. Okay. Okay, so the question is what happened when a Kurdish Iraq declared its own state? So they declared, so here's what happened. Um the the Kurdish region uh during the US military occupation basically made a deal with the rest of Iraq about where the border was going to be. Because one of the problems that we have when we try to divide states down along ethnic lines is people are messy. And you'll you'll have zones where there's people from both nations in the same area, right? And so as a result, you end up with this where do you put the border? You know, this this neighborhood is 40% this and 60% that, but then the neighborhood over here is 60% that. And so you end up you could end up with this really crazy, insane border, or but that's not easy to administer. So then you try to straighten the line out a little bit. Anyway, they came up with a deal. When ISIL invaded Iraq and the Iraqi state dissolved, the the ISIL actually attacked the Kurds and was conquering huge chunks of Kurdistan. So the Kurds counter-attacked with the help of US air support. And then the Iraqis eventually counter-attacked with the help of Iranians and then US air support. And as they were pushing, the Kurds actually managed to gobble up a bunch of territory they did not own prior to ISIL's attack. The Kurds announced they're keeping it. They announced they didn't care if what they captured was Arab or Kurdish. They were keeping everything they captured, and they literally doubled their size. And right, everybody's looking at this like, ooh, oops. Then they declare their independence, and Iraq went, nah, done. You screwed up. And Iraq immediately turned around and attacked Kurdistan. So the the irony of all of this, of course, is Kurdistan has been our ally this whole time. And but then Iraq is the state we created, and then, you know, like which side do we take? And we decided to stay out of it. And the Iraqis actually reconquered all of the chunks of territory outside of the original deal and pushed Kurdistan back to its zone and then made the Kurds say that they're not independent. Um, so it totally backfired and failed. The real goal of Kurdistan, of course, is to eventually take the Syrian peace and put it back to put it together and create a state, and then maybe down the road get the Iranian peace and the Turkish peace. I'm having a hard time envisioning getting the Turkish peace. The Iranian peace is not likely either, but it's certainly more likely than the um than the than the Turkish peace. Um having said that, the Syrian Kurds have also made a deal with the Syrian state. So there's at this moment, it does not look like either Syrian Kurdistan or Iraqi Kurdistan are going to get true independence, but there'll be autonomous regions within Syria and Iraq. Um I I'll just admit I totally support the idea of there being a Kurdish state. Uh so I have a lot of sympathy for that. I think the the catch is where do you put the border? Uh and I don't know how you do that. I don't know how you do that in a way that's not completely destructive and genocidal and ethnically cleansing-oriented. Um there is another, yes. Okay, so the question is why did Iceland attack Belgium, Turkey, and what was the other country? France. Uh, Belgium, Turkey, Germany, France. I think it's just opportunity. Um, I think they would have attacked the United States if they could. Uh, I just they just didn't have the assets or the resources to attack the United States. Uh I think they thought they had the ability to do it in Belgium, and I think that was really why they did it, or France and Germany, um, and Turkey. Uh ISIL did something that Al Gaeda thought was insane, and that was they declared a state and created a state. So ISIL itself was more of a uh a state than it was a terror organization, which is one of the reasons why it was defeatable, right? Like Al-Gaeda, we can't really defeat Al-Gaeda because it's a terror organization. How do you defeat a terror organization? Well, all you can do is suppress it. Um, it's like cancer. You get it, you're probably gonna die of it. The best you can do is treat it and try and live a little bit longer. Um so that's one of the reasons why Al-Gaeda thought ISIL was insane. And I really just think it was the resources that they had. I mean, not that they weren't insane, they obviously were. Yeah, I think it was just they had the opportunity. I don't think it was there was any, I don't think there was any thought that went into it. Okay, so the question is was the Gulf War the first US war against Iraq? So I'm old enough that I remember what the United States called the Iran-Iraq War. And originally we called that the Gulf War. Then when we decided to do Operation Desert Storm, we renamed, we took the name Gulf War and made that the Gulf War. And I found that really irritating and confusing. And then we started talking about Gulf War II, and it just it just seems really sloppy. So I think you should avoid using Gulf War just because it confuses so many people. Um and so instead of saying Gulf War for the Iran-Iraq War, it's just the Iran-Iraq War. And then the first war, uh, you could do the US war against Iraq. I think that's just a cleaner way of saying it. And then you'd have US war against Iraq I and US War against Iraq II. Um, but yeah, if you if you talk to the average person about the Gulf War, they mean the first US war against Iraq, and then Gulf War II would be the second one. As if that was the only Gulf on earth you'd have a war in. Okay, so the question is what happened after Iraq conquered Kuwait? So the they they integrated it in. They made it into the 19th province. Uh business went on more or less as usual. It was a little bit different, right? Because there is a slightly different economy, slightly different culture. But they were trying to make things normal. Um, the world then quickly put sanctions on Iraq, and so normal never really happened. Uh, and then, right, we took Kuwait away within nine months. So it never really got a chance to turn into anything. Um, but yeah, I think, you know, I've heard different accounts from individuals who lived in Kuwait during the time period. Kuwaitis hate it. So if you talk to a Kuwaiti, they will tell you like worst time ever. The Iraqis were so mean to us. Um, but then you know, when you talk to the non-Kwaitis, who are two-thirds of the Kuwaiti population, you'll know, oh yeah, it was a great time. We had we had civil rights, something we've never experienced before. So it sort of depends on who you talk to about. Uh how how bad of a period of time it was. Thanks for listening. Y'all come back now, you hear?