S1 Episode 0 - "Iraqnophobia" feat. H. Jon Benjamin & James Adomian

If you're interested in what's happening in the world of technology, you will love our round table news show this week in tech Hi, this is Leo LePort every Sunday. I bring the best tech journalists together to talk about the week's tech news This week the showdown between Anthropic and the Department of Defense Apple's big week ahead Samsung's new phone and a whole lot more join me this week and every week for twit You'll find it at our website twit.tv or wherever you get your podcasts I should I love this show Yeah, yeah, hi, this is Saddam Hussein. Howdy there big guy Who's this bush as a hangin? I'm fine. Yeah, I'm just having a snack what you got going some dates You're on date. No dates. It's a fruit. I don't think you have them there Super sorry. They're like plums are like big raisins right on right? So listen Saddam. I was thinking we should have a chat about all this big bad word talk You know wait for all the cameras and all that nonsense. Yeah, I'm watching it on TV right now. Are you serious about this? Yeah, oh Why listen Saddam as a ladden was said We got a whole new world here after September 9 11 What's that got to do with me? Well, I got to tell you there's folks that's telling us that you have just the plan those attackers who Well, we got some intelligence here that shows you were working with them You you saw them have been you know, yeah, who says that we have evidence. You're you know sources Testimonials is think that kind of stuff. Yeah, I asked who listen. It's not just even about nine the eleven We got intel here showing you possess weapons and their weapons are made for fighting weapons Weapons of WMD look let me tell you something. I'm not sure if you know this your dad and I we used to work together I don't need just hold on back in the eighties He and I were working on this project. I started the Iran Iraq war. You ever heard of that? It's not what they hold on Okay, your dad and rumsfeld we did some great stuff together right good He invited me to his you know brand. I love that ranch dressing But that's a great guy no question there. Well, yeah except his buddies told me to borrow a bunch of money Right, that's what they do so I try and you know jump on some assets and Kuwait and he freaks out So I don't know what that was about, but you know what it's forgotten. Okay. I don't even care now Here's the thing though sad I am my daddy's not running this thing. I am I'm giving you one chance here to hand over your weapons What weapons there are no weapons ask your dad All right cool your jets. I don't have any jets either I was just asking you to cooperate with the cooperation fine. I'm happy to cooperate send inspectors make yourself at home I will wait wait wait was this a little bit of reverse psychiatry reverse what? Rabbit season rabbit season look at your missed in gentrifying international community And I'm telling you we're gonna have to go in there. So now we're not even doing inspectors What happened to the inspectors? No, no, we will we will but if they don't find anything we're gonna go in spec with you know explosions What is your problem? We got to put your dad on no? I'm not putting dad on no no no you listen to me He huh put your dad on put him on right now My dad is not here. He's at work put your father on the phone fuck your talks This who say Who say get up on the roof and adjust out. He's sad like this. I'm getting nothing here Welcome to blowback a podcast about the Iraq war. I'm Brendan James and I'm Noah Colwyn and this is our free giveaway episode a treat a sampler a taster Think of it as a podcast or a derv yeah a prologue some of you may know me from my old podcast a Comedy left-wing politics the political gab fest this snark snark revolution very proud of the work I did on that show and and no and I'm an editor at the outline and I've covered technology and politics for vice news Recode New York magazine and a whole your lying media you're part of like the establishment I was really so we're doing a show about the Iraq war Why I think well this was your idea So you're believing me already. I think it's a skeleton key for understanding where we are now You know first you said to me. Hey, no one's really done a show or at least one like we want to do about the Iraq war And I was like, you know, what is there to say everyone basically knows now it was bad WMD it wasn't there they lied etc. etc. But then I started noticing George W. Bush hanging out with Michelle Obama and and Ellen and I saw an article including Dick Cheney and John McCain in the hashtag Resistance and I saw people liberals supposed lefties approving of coups in Venezuela and Bolivia last year and then I thought okay There is something here. It's worth Retelling the story of the Iraq war because what's really happened what what explains all that is that We Americans have have shoved the Iraq war this Century defining war crime down the memory hole I mean the Obama years and the Trump administration have put so much distance in American minds between what happened then and what's happening now? Obama initiated a horrifying new bombing campaign in Iraq in 2014 the guy who ended the Iraq war quote unquote today I authorized two operations in Iraq Trump just assassinated in Iranian general inside of Iraq which is part of the proxy war that's been going on since we invaded in In three president Trump has not spoken directly about the killing but he did tweet this image of an American flag shortly after the attack The Syrian Civil War that most guilty liberals pretend to care know about is partially one big spin-off of the Iraq war How it was possible for this group ISIS to sort of sweep in to Western Iraq I'm looking at a poll here. It says that 51% of Americans Now say that they opposed the Iraq war back when it was launched in 2003 But a pupil conducted at the time in 2003 right before we went in showed that 72% of Americans actually supported the war Only 23% were opposed so not only is there a sort of cultural amnesia a political amnesia about what happened But there's an actual like among regular people There's an actual amnesia about whether or not they supported it whether or not they opposed it So that's a that's a disturbing trend and so many of the ghouls in goblins who made this thing happen We killed we killed 600,000 people in Iraq, you know I don't know if people know the figure. I don't know if people know that we designed a forced labor system in Fallujah I don't know if people know that we used white phosphorus on Iraqis still cause birth defects to this day This is the kind of stuff that I realized sure that could use a retelling did you believe Ever that Saddam Hussein when you had a big cast that vote to authorize the war in Iraq did you ever Believe that Saddam Hussein had nuclear weapons well Chris. I don't I'm just telling you that was that was the prevailing Opinion people have been able to sort of do some sort of jujitsu to explain that it was really the moment you kind of had to be there You know, it was really just there was a lot of you know if sands or butts a lot of what have yous and I think it's about time that we sort of Go back and examine the ways in which no they did have a choice they chose wrong so strap in join us be with us as we go down this horrifying journey into the past Because we want to do it with some fun. We want it to be entertaining. There's gonna be side bars There's gonna be gags obviously if you heard the opening sketch to this episode We're gonna mix the low brow on the high brow the the funny and absurd with the Disgusting the in raging and hopefully that captures the full the full nature of This nightmare that we unleashed every journey begins in the mind All right, I want to take this out. These are Iraqi dinars from a long time ago This was given to me by At a show last year. Oh well, they got Saddam space on them and he's looking good He's probably like you know in his prime here. They're very beautiful This central bank of Iraq 250 dinars and if you follow the news you might know that there are a bunch of Maga people who think that the Iraqi dinar Will at some point be worth millions of dollars once President Trump re-values the currency one thing I think they don't realize there is that re-valuing a currency involves printing new bills and the old money is not Submissible so if you've stocked up on dinars like that and you try to cash them in for like a billion dollars They're not gonna be valid But we have to you're telling me that like Maga people don't necessarily understand that they haven't thought it through Yeah, I haven't shocked but but if in case they're right we we hear have I have a $250 note. How much do you have? I also have 250 okay great. Yeah, so we're looking at Yeah, we're rich guys now. Yeah. I mean, so when this was made, I mean, Saddam is he's wearing a suit, he has a full head of hair. Yeah. I mean, he never lost his full head of hair. No, that's true. In fact, it had actually only grown when he was captured. Before we invaded, what was Iraq like? Yeah, I mean, we're gonna get into a lot of this stuff in the show, but people have this idea, of course, of it was a dictatorship under Saddam. There's the Both Party, which was his party and authoritarian Arab nationalist party. That's true. It's basically true. It was a dictatorship. Saddam consolidated power at the end of the '70s. He was already kind of the real heavy, but he made it formal. And then throughout the '80s, he became the face of Iraq's political dictatorship. But Iraq, he's society and culture and was more than Saddam. It wasn't like it was-- Iraq was one of the most progressive and most developed, if not the most, at that point, at that moment of time. In the '70s and the '80s, it was the most developed and progressive Arab country in the Middle East. I mean, there were trade-offs. As we just said, we don't want to minimize the fact that Saddam was a cruel dictator who did awful things, particularly to ethnic minorities in Iraq. Yes. The party was brutal to those it did not like or did not want to like. On the other side of things, Iraq had one of the best health care systems in the region, best education systems, women's rights, et cetera. It wasn't some rinky-dink third world failed state or whatever. It became that once we got involved. We got more involved in ideas, which made it very easy in 2003 to say, look at this place. We got to renovate by going in with some explosions. But yes, Saddam, it was a very tightly-run ship under his regime. He did run for president again a couple times, you know, quote unquote, "ran" for president. And he did that in 2002 a year before the war. And do you know the campaign theme, like the song that he used to campaign against no one else and just him again? I do not know what was it. All right, I'm going to play it to tell me if you can name that tune. [MUSIC - "I Love You"] Oh my god. There would just be like cars driving around Iraq, blasting. I always love you with pictures of Saddam. You know, the daddy. That's a little on the nose, man. I know. It's really on the nose. Speaking of here is a ad from the 2000s about joining the army. What are you setting your sights on? And when you see it, will you be ready? Call 1-800-645-Army. And you'll also get this free boonie hat. Whatever you're looking for, the army can help you find it. One of the things that coming into making this that I wanted to know more about was, you know, what was the moment in 2003? Like how did we, you know, prepare a nation or condition people to accept that it would be necessary to go in and just like dominate another country into ruins? Yeah. I mean, obviously, there was the formal case for war. There was the whole edifice of turning Saddam into this interdimensional villain that went-- Right. And, you know, 9/11 had people running scared. Exactly. That's a huge part of it. It's war. Come on. All right. We got to go-- It's a Japanese. It's Japanese. This is Pearl Harbor. It is. We got to go bomb everything over there now. We got to bomb the hell out of them. You know who it is. I can't say, but I know who it is. We'll get to that, obviously. But there was also the cultural side of things. I mean, obviously conservatives immediately, you know, press the country music button. And there's 8,000 songs, you know, by-- But it wasn't just conservatives. I mean, you had-- There were like, you know, like our friendly old lives at SNL, for instance, I don't think that they necessarily have their heads screwed on straight either. Yeah, SNL, somehow everyone, I think, continues to think of it as the loyal comic opposition because they make fun of President Chido or whatever, even though they had him on the fucking show. But in 2003, I found this clip, SNL is using the months before the war to make fun of-- not the Bush administration, not they're insanely bullshit case for war that's about to get a lot of people killed. But to make fun of some of the few people standing in between us and the gates to the hell dimension, the UN weapons inspector. Watch out, Iwraff. Here they come. We are UN weapons inspectors. Open up now. Here we go. You got weapons? Nope. [LAUGHTER] OK. UN weapons inspector. So that's Robert De Niro, and a guest appearance. And Jimmy Fallon, this-- again, you can see all of our greatest horrors germinating out of this moment. And then Fred Armason plays in a rocky guard who's clearly hiding weapons behind that door. I mean, look, and if that's what goofy, like, two-bit comedians were fucking saying, then imagine what they were actually saying on cable news. Ah, well, you might be interested to know what MSNBC was doing at the time. Well, what the good liberal opposition? [CHATTER] [CHATTER] Wanna Cat's the Dom who's saying, well, a very popular new video game allows you to do just that. The reality-based game features many funny scenarios. And joining us right now from Sacramento is Jesse Petrilla. He is the video game designer who at just age 18 created the wildly successful Quest for Al Qaeda game. OK, that clip you just heard-- I think the audio speaks for itself, but just to give you the visual element too. That's MSNBC. There's some anchor. It begins with a clip of the video game, which, by the way, looks like shit. That game looks horrible, and it was not well designed, and that guy isn't clever. Not poggers. And there is a bunch of Saddam, like, look-alikes in a room. And they're doing racist Arabic sounds that this guy thinks sounds like Arabic. Players get down to hunt the former dictator of Iraq's at whom saying, Jesse, thanks for joining us. Good morning, Alex. It's good to be here. Well, I have to tell you, I've been laughing every time we've been playing this, and behind the scenes, you can't hear me, but the home of the-- I mean, it's great. And then the anchor starts the segment and goes, oh, I love that bit. I'll be the home of the-- That's what MSNBC is. Good work. She's doing a racism, folks. And then she continues to interview this absolute moron, who, obviously, his dev career did not take off from there. But at the time, that got you on cable news. To murder Saddam in a video game and have MSNBC pimped your game out. By the way, I looked up the guy-- the game developer there. And would it surprise you to know he is not making video games, but is a giant mag-a-guy who's posting incessantly about how AOC is a dumb broad who needs to-- he'll tell her what's what. When I look at this thing, what you've created, it is like, look at this. Yeah, nice job. None of you. So let's talk about, if you will, the cast of characters that we're going to meet and spend some time with during the show. Because they're all very colorful. First up, obviously, there's Saddam. Right. We're going to start the show in Iraq, and we're going to obviously see him wear a lot of different hats and go through a lot of different shames. Saddam was born in 1937, and he grew up in the middle of Iraq in a pretty poor place. He grew up near the town of Tikrit in Central Iraq from a fairly young and early age involved in Arab nationalist efforts to claw back Iraq from colonial powers. And he was involved in assassination attempts. He was a pretty well-connected guy and had a reputation as a thug. I mean, he was reputed to have committed his first murder while he was still a teenager. Yeah. Also, as we'll see, as an interesting part of the politics that shape Iraq in the 20th century before Saddam takes power, big anti-communist-- Oh, yeah. I mean, this is-- We're going to get into the Cold War stuff, but Saddam was a nationalist. He may have been anti-British, but he was no fan of the Reds. Right. And this is also part of what explains his rise to power, the fact that he was such a diligent and effective anti-communist helps explain why he was able to become the strong man that he was in the seven. And why we liked him so much. Exactly. Also, Saddam had-- we don't get to this stuff as much, just because you got to make some choices. But he had a very soap opera family arrangement. There was a lot of drama. Saddam had two sons, his heirs, Kusay and Ude. Kusay was like the straight lace. He was pretty competent. Ude was a complete fucking monster. He was a psychopath. He was like Ralph Siferetta, just like-- I mean, honestly, like a huge sex criminal, which shoot people at parties for fun. Exactly what you think of as like a dictator's spoiled brat kid who inflicts only pain and misery upon everyone around him. It was a very bargain mafia show type drama. And in fact, they did make HBO, did make it-- They really bargain like soap opera. They're great. Not good. It was called House of Saddam at round on HBO in the mid 2000s. Although, let's be clear, it is like a delicious kind of irony that they got in Israeli. Who is, you know, like in Arab Israeli, who is a good actor, but in Israeli nonetheless, to play Saddam. Yeah. Saddam, though, is, I guess, you could look at the biggest winner in the second half of the 20th century in Iraq. But that also meant that there were people who lost out pretty big and who would spend the rest of their lives trying to plot against Saddam and who might see an opportunity when we started grumbling about going to war against Saddam in the early 2000s. Enter a certain man named Ahmed Chalabi. What role would you like to play in any new government? If you were asked to run to be the new leader of Iraq, would you accept? It's not about me personally. I do not want to answer this hypothetical question. Chalabi was in Iraqi exile. He split the country after a revolution that happened in the '50s in Iraq. Saddam stayed and took over eventually. Chalabi swore one day he would come back and he'd take over. He was the model of one of those guys, an exile, who lives in the West after a revolution happens in their country, who then becomes a very, very willing partner of the CIA or the State Department. DoD. Chalabi was all three of them at different points of his career. And he was the guy who, more than anyone else, [BLANK_AUDIO] outside of the American government was in it to win it against Saddam and help us do it. And he was himself like this totally like strange and colorful character, right? Very, very. He was, I say he's a common brother's character brought to life. He is, there should be some biopic about him, although I don't, I wouldn't trust Hollywood to do it, but someone should do it. The safty brother should do it. Yeah. That makes sense. I mean, like how so? So first off, to give you a sense of him, everyone knows what Saddam looks like. But Chalabi, I have to say if you had to cast him, I would go, he looks like John Loveitz. Well, I'm sorry, all right? I guess I was just thinking of myself. He's an Iraqi John Loveitz. He's short, squat, kind of frumpy looking. But he had very good taste. He was very erudite. He was very sophisticated. He came from this rich, wealthy business family. That was why he fled Iraq when this populist revolution happened in the 50s. And he could recite poetry. He could rattle off a bunch of trivia about the Japanese Empire. Wasn't he like a mathematician or something? Yeah, after he left Iraq, he grew up in Lebanon for a bit and became a professor of mathematics in Lebanon. He would later then claim that he invented some code breaking thing that his colleague did or a mentor of his did, which goes to show how genuinely the raw intelligence he had and then the raw malfeasance that was natural intelligence. So yeah, a total flimflammer, his whole life, one of the great con men of all time. Because as we'll follow him throughout the show, he keeps bouncing back. He gets kicked out of his country. He bounces back. He makes a bank in Jordan. He starts to steal a shitload of money, millions of dollars from Jordan. He bounces back. He gets a job at the CIA trying to over their Saddam. He fucks up his chances with the CIA. Get's kicked out. Comes right back. Gets in there with the Bush administration. And then lands in Iraq in 2003, ready to take over. So he's wanting to watch. Freedom's untidy and free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. They're also free to live their lives and do wonderful things. The most famous bureaucrat of the Iraq war was Donald Rumsfeld. The face of the war. I mean, yes, exactly. Anytime in the show where you hear a clip of someone on a podium from the Bush administration and their whiny, smug little voice, it's Rumsfeld. It's funny because he actually didn't begin his political career as a hawk, actually. You know, Rumsfeld, he began his political life fairly young in the 60s as a Congressman from Illinois. And he was a fairly moderate guy. He was a pro choice. He co-suboncer to the Freedom of Information Act. And then he joined the Nixon administration. He's also actually pressing to end the Vietnam War because he thought it was a loser. Yes. And he actually got him in trouble with Nixon who then sought to shunt him out and send him far away, which meant that when Watergate happened and Gerald Ford, and he decidedly staffed in administration, Donald Rumsfeld was one of the first people he went calling. He was clean. Ironically, Nixon kicking him out meant that he was completely shielded from the effects of Watergate. And so Donald Rumsfeld was the Secretary of Defense under for it. And then in the 1980s, he goes, you know, let's say he goes freelance. He re-enters the private sector. He has a number of well-paying corporate gigs and-- GD, sirl. I mean, it was also the chairman. He made the diarrhea medication and the laksa. And he was the chairman of the pharmaceutical giant Gilead. But in the 1980s, actually, what you would probably, you know, we'll get into it a little bit later, but he also did some freelance work on Iraq for the Reagan administration. Rumsfeld re-enters the picture in 2000 as George W. Bush's pick for Secretary of Defense. I mean, and you know, his reputation at this moment, you know, he was a former, he would be an arrestler at Princeton and he was, you know-- He was hot. He was a-- he was eloquent. He had-- you know, he-- he was a charming-- It's crazy, though, because people magazine named him one of their sexiest men alive in 2002. Yeah, he held court with the press. He would, you know, trade barbs and wink and do these little smiles and do these little pirouettes. And honestly, you'll hear it in the clips we play. Everyone loved him. These fucking people in the White House press corps loved him. The images you are seeing on television, you are seeing over and over and over and it's the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase. And you think, my goodness, whether that many vases. One guy in the Bush war cabinet who stood out a bit or at least who people thought stood out was Colin Powell. He was viewed as, you know, the reluctant warrior, the voice of reason within the Bush administration, a moderate. And we need to take that apart in the show. And in a certain sense, you can see the appeal of Powell symbolically. Parents who are Jamaican immigrants, grows up in the South Bronx. African American man makes it to the top of the American military hierarchy. He had a good rapport. He was charming. He was good on camera. He had a thoughtful, reflective statesman. But in reality, this is a guy who, when he did a tour to in Vietnam, was instrumental in covering up the Mealime massacre in that country. In the 80s, when he ascends even higher up in his administration jobs, he helped cover up Iran Contra and managed to make it out of that completely unscathed. And then when he's finally top dog and head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the 90s, he executes the Gulf War, one of the most brutal assaults on a third world country that America had completely flipped and turned on in Iraq. Throughout the 90s, he floats above politics and the culture wars and just gets bipartisan adulation. So that lands him in George W. Bush's State Department in 2000 and he's viewed as the good cop, you know, and again, the voice of reason in the room. Right. But of course, that image and that reputation was totally unjustified. And on behalf of the administration, Paul claims Saddam Hussein was trying to buy raw material from Africa to build nuclear weapons and he gave an elaborate description of an Iraqi weapons program that, as it turned out, never existed. This Bush war cabinet, they called themselves the Vulcans because of the quote unquote Vulcan statue in Alabama, which is where Condoleezza Rice was originally from. She was born Birmingham and then their family relocated her to Denver because her father worked at the University of Denver where she matriculated at an extremely young age. She graduated at 19 years old then went to a piano for Chuo. So she was originally her initial plan when she started college was to become a concert pianist. It's only. But life, you know, has a way she's done concerts with yo yo mom and shit. I, yeah, I mean, which is a girl boss is what I'm saying. As an as befitz such a reputation, she went to Notre Dame, got her masters, then went back to the University of Denver, gets a doctorate specializing in the Soviet Union, specifically in Czechoslovakia and Eastern European politics. And you know, she got a judge. She almost immediately gets a job teaching at Stanford. And while she wasn't really a right wing idiot log, like, you know, Rumsfeld or, you know, other people at this moment, she came out of like the Kissinger type mold of real politics is how people would describe it. But that's that gives it such a real politics person that despite going on to help wage war against WMD in Saddam. In the 90s, she wrote a paper saying we could contain a nuclear Saddam. She was just a little bit more, you know, savvy and gun shy than some of the most aggressive hawks in Republican politics. The magnificent men and women of America's armed forces are not a global police force. They are not the world's 9-1-1. In her personal politics, she was a fairly moderate person. But over the course of the 80s and the Reagan years, and as she moved into the George H.W. Bush White House and took on really senior positions in terms of dictating H.W. Bush's policy on the Soviet Union, especially as the Soviet Union, you know, started like knocked down the Berlin Wall and began with Dr. Meister Neurup. She became somebody whom, you know, H.W. Bush and his advisors whom they would rely on and value a lot. And so through the 90s, of course, you know, she after H.W. Bush leaves, she gets to, you know, do things that make money. For example, she joins the board of Ed Chevron. So she starts as, and is covered in the press as well as this really kind of star, I think someone said, of the administration. He called who was George W. Bush's chief of staff at one point said she's the star of the administration. But as we'll see, she was somebody whose political star, you know, was entirely hitched on her loyalty to Bush. Bob Woodward reports that George H.W. Bush, in talking with one of his advisors, you know, well into the George W. Bush years, you know, he said that he thought of Condia as just a great disappointment. There will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapon. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud. So the, we've just talked about a bunch of the people who are either the decision makers or the people who pretended to be the decision makers. But you know, like let's take a moment to talk about the brains. Um, let's talk about Paul Wolfowitz. What the quote unquote brain. The quote unquote brains. Paul Wolfowitz. Well, Paul Wolfowitz was the son of a Cornell mathematician who when he himself went to Cornell, he studied and became a disciple of Alan Bloom, the famous conservative intellectual. And then Wolfowitz goes on to use Chicago where he becomes a disciple of Leo Strauss. And he's, you know, really supposed to be like conservative brainiac. Wolfowitz is a great example of like this conservative professor to praxis pipeline where, you know, neo conservative ideologues emerging around the time of the Reagan administration get brought into the fold by the time 2000 rolls around and George W. Bush, you know, needed brainy people to come into his administration. Wolfowitz would be naturally one of the people that Rumsfeld taps. I read the other day in an interview, you took issue with the moniker architect of the Iraq war. And you not accept that title because I was not in charge. I was not the commander in chief or even the secretary of state or the secretary of defense or national security advisor. And more importantly, because I think, and I thought at the time there were a lot of things that should have been done differently. But there is no question in my mind that we will be much more secure when we win this battle in Iraq and we will win it. Now the pinky to Paul Wolfowitz's brain would be a guy named Douglas Feith. He was the undersecretary for policy in the defense department. Doug Feith was the guy put in charge of, for example, the following things, connecting Saddam to al-Qaeda, proving that Saddam had WMD, planning the occupation after we invaded Iraq. None of these things. things is you can probably tell worked out quite well in the design or the execution and uh. this was a man who by his own colleagues in the bush administration was roundly and consistently mocked for being a complete dullard what was that fucking Tommy Frank's line Tommy Frank's who was the head of u_s_ central command who execute the iraq war was uh. once quoted as saying about having to deal with fight in planning for the war i have to deal with the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth almost every day that's how he talked about fight general franks i don't have to tell you what he said but he called you it was not nice it was not nice eventually fight got a uh. report card uh. once the war had kicked off this was by again one of his colleagues one of his fellow rumsfeld guy who said quote after two years dugs leadership has not improved that's pretty brutal for you know for bureaucrats speak and his nickname and his departments nickday m was quote the lunatic fight and his evil spawn but he was after all of this stuff incredibly incredibly and deeply loyal to donald rumsfeld and i've just arranged a uh. a supercut here of what it was like to listen to uh. the the genius dug five a give a presser on the inner workings of his department good morning on the issue of uh. uh. this strategy as as you'll see when you read through it does not uh. the there are concepts in here though about uh. that countries are going to be given uh. so you'll notice uh. two people who were missing from from that list were George w bush and dick cheney and we're definitely gonna mention them and talk about them but uh. we thought we'd focus more in the show on on the minions and the minions of minions and the the henchman of henchman because everyone knows about bush and cheney and a lot of the best freaks and material come from the underlings of that administration uh. kind of split the workload into two so i take the lead on the first uh. half of the ten episodes and then know it takes over the first episode we're going to a deep dive is to like the origin of america's perverse relationship with a rock and after the rise of sadaam we'll talk about our business partnership with him we did the iran or a rock war with him and then we'll go into the gulf war where we turn on sadaam kick his ass and particularly talk about the sanctions in the nineties which killed a shitload of a rockies and really set the stage for what happened in two thousand three will talk about the case for war the junk intelligence the assist from upmajalebi and all these weirdos go into the invasion will go into what it felt like in the kind of american you know hot and heavy war climate and then the occupation you know there's it's an insane story of both malfeasance and corruption and also incompetence and we we took over a country is this great imperial power but when we wanted to uh. send an emissary to iraq's top spiritual leader in it's all the vice-roy and iraq sent quote neither a diplomat nor politician but a wealthy urologist who had developed and patented a penile implant for impenetment there's a kind of occupation that we carried out right and i think you know we talk a bit about the media we talk about the ways in which you know reporters like jute th miller especially uh. sort of operated as a pipeline from rotten intelligence sources like child to the public and how the case for was made that way we talk about you know again the origins of the insurgency and how basically many of the people that we claim that we invaded a rick actually fight we then unleashed on the rest of the country and then of course we go and talk about the surge and the strategy that america claimed with savorak but would in reality just put it on a course for isis and finally i'd say that show is not trying to be a quote objective unquote history uh. we have a point of view the show has a point of view if you uh. haven't detected it yet i'm sure you sure it'll become evident i will say that our sources that we use which you can go to our twitter account at blowback pod and uh. you know see all of them they'll be online we have tried to stick to mainstream sources uh. in every episode because honestly this shit was sitting out there for everyone to see so we're citing the new york times and the washing up post in the l_a_ times and uh. bob woodward and cobra to one of the popular books about the war the facts and the sourcing it's all there it's all in plain view and what we put a bunch of time into this i think what we've really just tried to do is assemble a counter history of what actually happened using the same set of facts that everyone else's had access to for all this time our interpretation and our emphasis you may agree with or disagree with we thought that was something that would you know strengthen the uh. factual backbone of the show and the final thing on that subject of point of view uh. we are obviously to american guys and we are aware of that both being american and being guys and that is obviously going to affect how we see the story how we tell the story uh. but one thing that i think we got lucky with is uh. we have an iraqy friend named rott who is a political activist and advocate and we bring him in uh. oftentimes during the show and have him weigh in and have him describe through his own voice what what it was like to be an iraqy lived in a rock through most of the events that we describe and his family did when he wasn't there and so that was important to us to have uh. in iraqy voice because we're telling the story the way that we think is right but it was important for us to to have that i think the shows all the better for it so this has been our prologue we'd like to give a big thanks to each john benjamin and james adomian thank you john thank you james whose vocal stylings you heard at the beginning of the episode yes uh. there might be a few more cameo appearances by uh. sadam who we've heard oh boy i'm excited yes that's that that's our taster that's our sampler thanks for listening this one uh. go check out our first episode rosebud and uh. we will see you on the other side java by uh. speed up at this last sign speed up at this last sign speed up at this last sign