The Unravelling 2: Saddam at War

this is the jocko unraveling podcast episode 2 with daryl cooper and me jocko willink i know that the last episode you know we wrapped up with a pretty harrowing account and you kind of said well we'll move on to other things but i got to keep us there for one more um account here it goes like this horror in saddam's iraq takes endless forms in 1987 1988 iraqi air force helicopters sprayed scores of kurdish villages with a combination of chemical weapons including mustard gas sarin and vx a deadly nerve agent scores of thousands of kurds most of them women and children died horrible deaths of those who survived many were left blind or sterile or crippled with agonizing lung damage but most of the kurds slaughtered in that season of mass murder were not gassed but rounded up and gunned down into mass graves those victims were mostly men and boys and their bodies have never been recovered in one village near kirkuk after the males were taken to be killed the women and small children were crammed into trucks and taken to a prison one survivor salma aziz baban described the ordeal to journalist jeffrey goldberg who reported on saddam's war against the kurds in the new yorker in march more than 2 000 women and children were crammed into a room and given nothing to eat when some starved to death the iraqi guards demanded that the body be passed to them through a window in the door aziz's six-year-old son grew very sick she says he knew he was dying there was no medicine or doctor he started to cry so much he died in his mother's lap i was screaming and crying she told goldberg we gave them the body it was passed outside and the soldiers took it soon after she pushed her way to the window to see if her child had been taken for burial she saw 20 dogs roaming in the field where the dead bodies had been dumped she said i looked outside and saw the legs and hands of my son in the mouths of the dogs the dogs were eating my son then i lost my mind and that is from an article called saddam's shop of horrors written by jeff jacoby and i was from the boston globe in uh 2002. so you know that's 2002 right it's not like it's not like we didn't know that this stuff was happening right we didn't invade until 2003 this is 2002. we know what's going on in there so where does that kind of um where's that guy come from how much you know about his origin story i know pretty yeah decent amount i mean it's a it's a super villain origin story in some way completely um you know he his father and brother die of cancer while his mother's pregnant his mother is so depressed that she tries to abort saddam but he survives and so she just abandons him and he goes to stay with an uncle for a while he eventually comes back to his mother after she remarries but the stepfather just abuses him terribly and so he flees and goes back it's like well that's how you start that's that's those are those are the opening ingredients for how you get a guy like this but i think it's important to remember too like the stuff you're reading right there all this stuff that happened one guy does not do that one person cannot do that hitler can't commit the holocaust by himself you know and saddam could not create that terror state all by himself either yes um i'll tell you what man leadership is the most important thing on the battlefield and it's guys like hitler and guys like saddam the man they set the conditions and then what's really scary is you know as we see in when atrocities take place right sure it's not it's not that leader it doesn't take it doesn't take much it doesn't take much to to to lead people down this road like all the all the all the you know you want to throw it out there that people are you know naturally benevolent and they're naturally people want to help each other i get it and i i i know that that is a thing to that you can convince yourself of and it's probably right in many cases in the right conditions uh you change those conditions and it's it's it's not a it's not a stretch it doesn't take as much as you would hope it takes to lead people down this path it just that's the that's the horrible truth and that's why we have to be so aware of it that's why we have to understand it you know when we did the when we did the podcast on the milai massacre and the sand creek massacre and we we went through those but when i did milai on my podcast you know those were normal people yeah that was a that was a cross-section of america now one of those and i had this conversation with jordan peterson as well which was i had told an army group that they had sadists in their platoon like i said listen you got and i and they were looking at me and i i talk to people a lot i can read a crowd and they were looking at me as if i was you know a little bit crazy and maybe just you know trying to be extreme or whatever and i i'm looking back at them and i'm thinking they don't believe me right now they don't believe me they think i'm wrong or they don't believe me or this is just hyperbole and no no and then so i said oh wait wait a second you guys are looking at me like i don't know what i'm talking about here like you're like you're gonna be in a platoon and this was actually um young you know uh uh officers on the way to being commissioned so i wasn't officer candidates or cadets i said you're looking at me like i don't know what i'm talking about right now and and i said let me let me ask you this if i'm wrong then how did how did milai unfold how did that happen if if you've got a platoon or a company and there's 150 guys there's no bad apples in there how does that happen that one that one company just happened to get all the bad guys every bet and you know when i when i i actually drilled down a little bit with jordan peterson and i said hey you know this is what i told these army guys i said i told them in a platoon they got a sadist in there am i right and i think i think i said murderer too you know which i don't know what the i don't know what how you draw that line but he said well he said how many people in the platoon i said 40 and he goes oh yeah you're good you're you're you're in especially because there's a whole chunk of civilization that just don't go in the military right and that chunk that just doesn't want to go in the military almost none of that mercedes right you as soon as you're in the military you have a higher percentage of you know what do you what are you signing up for i'm signing up to shoot people and kill people that's what i'm signing up to so there's a there's a whole element that's already gone so 1 out of 40 it's pretty pretty pretty nice pretty generous and so as we talk about this it's like yes i get it that it wasn't all saddam clearly but man you you he absolutely set the conditions for this yeah and that was the other thing interesting the thing about the milan massacre is that it was one officer you know thompson who had flown in saw it was happening flaw back flew back to headquarters said these guys are murdering people just tell you need to stop it and the the commanding officer gets on the horn and says hey stop killing people and they were like okay they stopped like instantly yeah it's instantly you wouldn't believe if you saw it in a movie you wouldn't believe it like waking up from a dream you wouldn't believe it if you saw a movie oh they just gonna stop now no that's what happened they got told no and they stopped i wish i would have brought i read an account by a guy who was a member of isis and he had this he had done it all sex slavery killing i mean everything and he sort of he describes it as like waking up from a dream he's in the middle of massacring a village of an assault on a village and he snaps out of it and goes what am i doing and he found his way out of it after that he talks about this stuff now i have to i'll bring some of that in tomorrow um and you wonder like okay that's a guy who's capable of waking up and saying what am i doing that's the same guy who was he's raped he has murdered children with conviction doing it with conviction you know um we're complex creatures and we're very adaptable creatures and we can adapt to whatever environment we find ourselves in and i think one of the things that you know we have certain models that we use for thinking about other people's behavior and we think about you know we think about like the french resistance in germany right or the partisans out in the east when when germany overran them we think well they didn't give up right they just kept fighting and they resisted the power okay what if what if it's over hitler won because that's what happened in iraq hitler won it's over and now you've got to adapt yourself to that society because nobody's coming to save you you know not until 2003 at least i mean that's that's it and you got to figure out how to survive in a place where um you don't just get killed for treason you get killed because you know somebody's having a paranoid attack and that's it or or somebody needs to send a message to a bunch of other people it's got nothing to do with you you got to figure out how to navigate that people can become very different creatures than they kind of naturally devolve into when they live in vermont you know um i've seen some pretty devolved creatures up in vermont yeah no it's uh actually vermont's probably a place where you wouldn't evolve you'd get better you become a better person up there in the in the woods in the sticks so let's go back to saddam yeah where were we at have you ever seen the video it's an amazing video the video um when he at the meet at the bathurst meeting where he took power yeah yeah yeah yeah it is i tell every i tell everybody to watch it and watch him and so for the people who haven't seen it um there's like a nine minute version out there kind of cuts it short you can go see the thing but um he's got all so he's taken over right from general kasim who's the guy before him and he's taken power and he calls all the bathurst party leaders and senior senior membership into this assembly hall and they're you know some people are talking everything saddam strides up and he is i mean you watch him and he is just like either a great actor or what he is confident he is just striding up there with an arrogant pose and he starts speaking about the traitors that are out there and all the people that are besetting the country of iraq and the party and blah blah blah and people are like yeah okay and he reaches down and just slowly pulls this big long cigar out of his pocket and lights it and he's on there on stage and he starts smoking this cigar and he just starts saying if i call your name stand up and go to the back of the room and people are kind of start to look around at each other he's planned all this so he's having it filmed and he knows who's going to be called so like the camera will go to some of them sometimes and as he's calling his names people are kind of looking like what is going on they know what's going on but they're just they're they don't know what to do and so they get up and they head to the back where the guards are and finally one guy goes stands up and he says wait why did you call me i didn't do anything i didn't do anything and saddam just says if i call your name please stand up and go to the back with the guards and the guy just goes back and people go back and people are starting to look at each other and realizing like what's happening here and uh that these guys are being called back to go be executed and then afterwards he up he says a few words and all of a sudden the people just break out long live saddam long live saddam and they're all giving him like a big standing ovation because what else are you going to do in that situation right and uh you know this is a guy who was in power for over you know for almost 30 years for 25 years and he had a long long period of time to find exactly the people to put into positions who were going to do exactly what he needed him to do to keep control of that of that society and the rest of the people there had to figure out how to survive under that i mean from uh the moment saddam takes power he is at war essentially you know 1979 he takes power and he's at war with iraq next uh with iran the next year and it's a war that kind of gets lost today a lot of people just slide right past it i mean it was one of the it was probably the worst war in the second half of the 20th century in a lot of ways at least the way it was fought for sure brutal over a million killed you know devolving to a point where the two sides are just launching you know uh ballistic missiles at each other's cities just population centers indiscriminately just launching them at each other you know chemical weapons being used on population centers purely to terrorize you know to let people know that you better not rise up and uh this at this point saddam's pretty a pretty secular leader yeah i mean this isn't a guy that's out you know touting islam as uh as the rule of law around iraq he would stay that way till the 90s yeah yeah um the baptist party is a secular kind of socialist pan-arab arab nationalist party and um you know that's why one of the things i think people really really lose a little bit today is they think that like america and the middle east that we've just been over there pulling the strings like the puppet masters from all the way back like from 1776 or something that's what we've been doing when you know centcom wasn't even stood up until 1983. you know the iran iraq war been going on for three years this is 10 years after the oil crisis and central command's not even stood up and i remember after the uss stark got hit the frigate got hit by a cruise missile in 1987 even in 1987 the response to that from a lot of the navy brass was why are we over there what are we what are we doing here you know we were very much reacting to events and we didn't know a lot about who these people were you know uh when somebody like saddam comes along he seems like a secular nationalist type leader he's got some worrying tendencies but he's only been around a year and meanwhile we've got the iranians over here who just took over with like an extreme islamist revolution overran our embassy took a bunch of our people hostage and are are starting to act out in some pretty extreme ways and so that's the context that saddam comes into the picture and all of a sudden he wants to fight with iran he's got a big soviet army you know the iranians unfortunately have a pretty well-equipped military as well because we were the shah's you know we were his friend before that and so they took possess we had just in the last few years before 1979 had sold him a bunch of f-15s and a bunch of just great aircraft and it gave saddam fits in the war because of that but i mean they had a pretty well equipped army you know we had been equipping iran as an ally for years and now you have this revolutionary government yeah this is when you see the pictures of iran in 1974 and the women are wearing mini skirts out in town and it looks like a metropolitan western country yep and i you know it's one of the reasons that a lot of people get on my case because i tend to give i tend to give saudi arabia a little bit more of a break than a lot of people i know and the reason i do it though is as opposed to a place like iran where iran was a certain way you know where women were free and it was relatively modern place and then they had this revolution that said nope no more of that and presumably a lot of those people who were enjoying their lives back in the day still live there and now they have to live under this regressive you know in this regressive manner saudi arabia however however they look to us obviously it's not acceptable and you know according to the way we do business they're as liberal now as they've ever been you know it's a slow long project but it's not like they were a certain way and then they got taken over by these crazy islamists and you know uh iran's not that way iran was a relatively free and open secular country you know where women were free and uh so all of a sudden you get this revolution and the revolutionary part's important right because it's not just a government that's kind of hostile now and maybe is doing things passing laws social social laws and stuff that we don't like it's a rev it considers itself a revolutionary state like the soviet union did so it's not just an enemy country it's a revolutionary movement and they're eyeing the rest of the muslim world you know it's why they established hezbollah and lebanon it's why now they're still trying to establish an iraqi version of that like to this day is it's built into their system into their ideology that this is an expansionist thing there's a larger project so it doesn't just involve them it involves the rest of the muslim world so that's very worrying to us in 1979 they've still got our people you know that they're holding captive from the embassy saddam comes along he starts fighting with these people and of course at first we're kind of like all right maybe this guy's all right let's see how this plays out right he hasn't done all the things he's gonna do yet he's not a nice guy we know that um but we don't have the whole story and we kind of have some hope and so we start out in the iran-iraq war and you know we're kind of hoping that maybe he can who knows maybe create enough stress on the iranian regime that they flip back over or something like that and you're also you're also looking at the situation you got a leader coming into power and you don't really you know like you said you know he's bad but you kind of think well he's stepping into power he's going to want influence he's going to need what we have we can how can we how can we how can we bring them along how can we bring them onto our our team yeah yeah that was definitely the thinking and you know we didn't know who we were dealing with we did not recognize the the level of of beasts that we were dealing with with saddam and i think by the end of the 80s we had a pretty good idea that that was the case because we'd end up at war with him ourselves shortly after that i mean the iranians you know again like they they seemed very dangerous at the time this is a big country large population a well-equipped military um with an expansionist foreign policy and when they were fighting iraq you know these are people who are who are who are sending human waves of teenagers across minefields to clear them with no weapons just sending human waves of kids across minefields to clear them out um this is this was a regime that looked very very dangerous and they were dangerous um we just maybe you know we allowed ourselves to get sucked into some illusions about you know how how controllable saddam hussein was that's for sure when uh yeah i think uh there's a lot of there's a lot we don't know about the casualties in the iran iraq war but most estimates have it between 800 000 and a million people it's a big war it's a big conventional war the battle of basra toward the end of it i think was the biggest battle since the second world war if i'm not mistaken maybe since one of the one of the korean war korean wars battles but um i think uh 65 000 iranians and 25 000 iraqis were killed i mean it's a big battle that's a big battle um you know in a set piece battle we're just not used to those kind of things anymore there's a lot of trench warfare going on and they are just this is a war of attrition i mean literally the i mean they're at the point toward the end where their manpower is depleted and they're just launching studs at each other's cities you know and um it's a brutal thing and uh that ends in 1988 a month before that is when uss vintenz shot down that iranian airliner but as the iranians now know from their recent experience things happen yeah i brought that up uh i was surprised it wasn't brought up more um after this recent incident you know and this is again you know when you start talking about the the theme of having a thread tie back to the but yeah the vincennes uh shot down an iranian airliner however many souls were on board you know hundreds or 150 or whatever that number is yeah i mean so it's a massive loss of life and you know we very very actually very similar circumstances when you pick that apart you know the the iranian shooting down the airline iranian shoot down of the airline was it was so similar like the panic buttons going off you know they there's there's uncertainty going on i remember i had some people that i knew not military people who um when the iranians shot down that airliner they were kind of being like oh something like that doesn't happen by mistake i'm like no totally yes it totally happens by mistake very very easy you don't know who's running that thing they've never been in combat before you know that the person running that air defense battery has never been in combat they've never had a situation where it counted and uh yeah they're in a situation where they're probably expecting to be hard you're all spun up you're waiting to get attacked by the americans and all of a sudden you know you're you're you know you and i can picture this you're probably actually you better than me because you were in the uh in the combat information center is that it what's the cic yeah that's it so you're in that on a ship and there's all of a sudden you know someone's going all right we got it we're tracking we're tracking an inbound and there's that spin up of the voice and and now you got to make a decision you got to make a decision what we're going to do we see something on the radar we're looking at it we know we're vulnerable to attack right now we're anticipating attack oh where's it heading we're tracking oh guess where it's heading for us all right hey we need to take this thing out this is a missile this is an attack boom this is a this could so easily happen it's ridiculous actually how easy it could happen in 87 when the start got hit by an iraqi cruise missile two cruise missiles i think the um the tao tactical action officer and the commanding officer they got disciplined for failing to defend their ship and i i gotta imagine i mean they're sitting there like is this really happening right now if i hit fire am i gonna kill a bunch of civilians like that's a that's a worrying thing you know and it's got to be a tough i've never had to make any decision like that obviously and uh yeah it's a tough one i mean especially if you're panda i have to imagine that night when the iranians launched those missiles at us a few months ago they must have just been sitting on pins and needles bracing for impact especially with trump you know you know what that guy's gonna do and if he does respond you know it's going to be overwhelming and uh they had to have been bracing for impact i mean it up you know they called ahead and everything supposedly but i mean golly you just don't know and the vincennes had had similar like spin-ups going into that shoot down as well where it was that wasn't that wasn't uh again i'm not saying uh not making excuses but sitting here and i can understand how that unfolds i always bring up the fact that in ramadi there was blue on blue you know there was humvees that shot at other humvees yeah so so think about that you know like humvee one of the most recognizable vehicles ever made which is solely used by the us military and i guess we had iraqis using at that point as well but the enemy was not driving around in humvees years later isis was driving around in humvees but at that time there was no one driving around in humvees no enemy and and you know a young guy paranoid and freaked out and scared and you know sees a muzzle flash or sees whatever and i'm gonna engage that's what happens it's horrible knowing that you know if you fail to act then the next second you might be dead and you just gotta do it and it's the wrong decision but and yeah when you're dealing with something like air defense you're not looking at an aircraft up there you're looking to blip on a radar screen you know at an aircraft that's out of visual range and so saddam yeah we're talking about saddam this guy comes into power in 79 starts executing people starts terrorizing population immediately goes to war with iran has an eight-year-long war it's the bloodiest war the second half of the 20th century um just a brutal you know horrible war that's fought with incredibly brutal tactics uh that ends in late 1988 and you would think that like maybe saddam would want to kind of take a breather but it's not it's not what this guy's about and it was kind of a draw yes it came to a draw basically yeah no neither side achieved any uh you know any gains through it saddam was the one who launched the war and he didn't achieve any gains so you could say he lost on that count but yeah but yeah um yeah 19 that's late 1988 by early 1989 saddam is already telling kuwait so a lot of the other arab countries worried about iran too so they were financing saddam they were loaning money things like that and already by early 1989 saddam is telling kuwait hey you're gonna have to forgive that debt because we were defending you two and we're not paying that 65 billion dollars and kuwait's not willing to do that they say that we're we're not going to do it saddam's like oh you're going to do it and by the next summer summer in 1990 he's invading kuwait so no rest for the weary right and he does it in an unpredictable way um i remember seeing an interview with mubarak the egyptian president at the time long time egyptian president and we were allies with mubarak we knew him well and he was not just allies with he was friends with saddam hussein by this point he knew him they would talk on the phone and uh he called saddam on the phone and he says what's going on here are you going to invade kuwait and saddam tells him no no i'm just bluffing just don't worry about it it's totally fine the next day he invades kuwait oh and so so actually here's what happened there's something else in there is mubarak comes and tells us that he says hey he's bluffing don't worry about it and so our ambassador at the time gets called in by saddam and uh saddam wants to feel him out right see how we're doing with this whole thing and our ambassador had just heard from mubarak he's bluffing don't worry about it don't don't push him and so he says oh you know arab on arab like affairs that's not really our business we're not we don't really i'm not invested in this and saddam goes all right and the next day he invades kuwait right so mubarak nobody had any idea what was going on here i mean i don't even know if i i read that quote in the last episode that he tells somebody one thing he tells another person another thing and then after that he does something completely different that surprises he's even surprises himself yeah and so maybe it was something like that i mean he you know it's it's not beyond him just the mentality that you're dealing with i mean you go you go in an eight-year war and by the way you're sitting in a place in a country that's got these incredible amount of natural resources i mean you could saddam hussein could have lived i'm going to say like live like a king but like he could have lived because he did live like a king but he could have lived like a peaceful king and just had an incredible oh yeah you know an incredible existence especially with iran right there threatening everybody we would have been happy to make him the face of the arab world we would have been happy to do it so that's where you start you know that's where you start to really you know look when people are driven to some sadistic evil pathology in their life because they don't really have a choice like you go i kind of understand that imagine even if you even if you're like let's say you take power and just to set everyone straight you murder a bunch of people that you think might rise up against you and then you look around and now everyone is just totally good to go they're like they're they're cheering for you and you go you know what all right hey we're good i'm going to ride this out i'm going to take advantage of this and then maybe you're a little bit crazy and you go you know what though i kind of want to be you know that guy so i'm going to start a war with with you know with iran with my neighbor over here so you roll into that you get them you know hundreds and hundreds of thousands of your own people killed you don't get what you want but you know what you get you you finally end up with a truce everyone knows that you'll fight if needed so now maybe you look around and you go you know what all right i've i've kind of established myself everybody knows not to mess with me um i've got billions of dollars worth of oil i've got security because my you know my my i've protected my borders i'm good i'm good i'm gonna ride this one out i'm gonna i'm gonna watch netflix and chill right what kind of a person gets through all that and has the opportunity just to like do to live a good life and says you know what man kuwait looks pretty tasty that's a that's a that's a really and i guess you could make the same you know you could make the same argument with hitler right you know i mean how much is enough and how much is enough you know you're storming into czech slovakia you're storming into poland you've got these great resources now you know what russia england i'm going that's like a different mentality yeah and yeah and after kuwait's military stands down because they have no chance against iraq that guy now owns over 20 of the world's oil that guy right that's what we're looking at and he's massing troops on the saudi arabian border which just down the eastern uh shore over there is where the vast majority of their oil is and so that's that guy's now got this place and this is right after the cold war right the soviet union's still around in 1990 but the wall fell in 89 and america is kind of the big dog now everybody knows that and george h.w bush is president and he says this is kind of an opportunity to show the world you know what the american-led global order is going to be going to be like and um he one of the things we got to remember about this i think this gets twisted up in our heads a little bit now that the gulf war was kind of you know because it went so well and everything just kind of because of the way the iraqi army fell apart we were not sure about that going in yeah for sure so seaman recruit willink uh joined the navy shipped out september 13th 1990. so you know we hadn't started yet so there was still a lot of unknowns and man i was fired up and i remember and i'll have to try and find this at some point in my life i remember hearing they anticipate 40 000 casualties in the first 48 hours yeah and i thought man i'm gonna get i'm gonna get after it you know i was i was fired up and you know i just had a guy on um who was there for for the push-up he's in the marine corps and like 100 percent 100 percent thought we thought or the u.s military wasn't there but the guys that were on the ground there 100 thought we're going to get you know there's going to be chemical biological attacks that's what's going to happen mop level you know they're in and out of their mop level suits all day long putting the gas masks on put them away i mean we 100 and so as soon as you start throwing chemical and biological weapons into this scenario you're you're going to lose you're going to lose a lot of guys i i can't even it's the strength did you ever have to put on mop gear yeah did it not like strike you as the saddest excuse for like something that's gonna save your life for instance on the like first of all it's in two pieces right so you've got like these pants on they're not even they're not even like a bib that would come up higher they're just pants you put them on over your regular pants there's a drawstring there's not a belt there's a drawstring so you just pull this thing tight and then you put a jacket on over your upper body so there's there's a big gap yeah like this is going to save you is that what we're saying and you got a maneuver in the desert yeah and that's all fine that's all like take take all the maneuvering out of it i'm just saying if you put me in that suit and you said okay i'm going to put you expose you to chemical weapons now i'd be like cool appreciate it i got a 20 chance of living and it's only if i can run away quick enough i had no faith in those suits and we had good suits too like we had the good ones i had this blower contraption that when you put on your gas mask it would it would give you it would it would send positive airflow into your into your into your uh mask so it was like really nice uh yeah so it's very strange there were estimates um that had the first marines you know the first marines just rampaged through the iraqi army for sure when they went up but there were estimates going in saying they might lose 10 to 15 000 on the first on the first push there were estimates that said we might lose one out of five aircraft on the first attack and so we didn't you know the guys who were planned the military guys colin powell general schwarzkopf these were these were jos in vietnam and so when we were looking at doing this we were hesitant at first for sure it started off with like george bush was like we need to make statement here but a lot of the military guys like i've seen this movie like i want clear political objectives and more than that i want overwhelming force and gladly that's what bush gave him we brought six carrier strike groups in there we brought the seventh corps down from europe we brought the first marines and the marine expeditionary force we had arab allies we had a bunch we came rolling deep well three hundred thousand four hundred thousand troops what was the number do you know the number off the top of your head it was over four hundred thousand when you count the arab allies and six carrier strike groups i mean we hit it hard and i think that even our own side didn't quite realize how far we had come technologically now saddam thought this is some there's some lessons learned on both sides that ended up coming back to bite us both um in the first iraq war saddam thought this is a technological power these americans are technicians they're not soldiers and um you know all their fancy gear is not you can't win a war and so we hit him watch this we hit him hard we drive him out of kuwait but when we didn't pursue him he thought we were afraid to yeah you know he thought we were afraid to go pursue him and fight and um i got to uh i guess it must have been like 93 94. i guess okay 94 94 when i was in kuwait and you know we would we were going out to the desert train but we went up the highway of death and like still there was littered yeah there was vehicles you know destroyed and man you ever heard about the um again now we're talking about it's not just saddam but there's there were there were maybe you've heard the story there were kuwaiti there were there were places where they had kuwaiti women nine months later where they had these orphaned kids because so many kuwaiti women had been raped by the by saddam's soldiers that they had these orphans pretty much have you heard that yeah yeah there's no there was no limits there were all sorts of atrocities they committed in kuwait while they knew the whole world was watching that's the crazy part about it you know he had a level of arrogance and i mean which led to a lot of bad decision making on saddam hussein's part um you know he thought he thought his military was ready he thought we were gonna you know get a bloody nose like you know if we tried to go after him and he he blamed the loss on his general he had a bunch of his generals executed afterwards he blamed that on his military leadership and on the cowardice of like you know some of the some of the officers who had just let order break down he did not accept that he had lost that war and he thought we were afraid to go after him and it is kind of strange when you think about it how quickly they broke down because here's what you'd think and like wait you just got out of an eight-year war with iran you are hardened combat soldiers that's very strange i wouldn't have predicted that you know i some sometimes i talk about the fact that i don't bet on the ufc you know the ultimate fighting championship i don't bet on the ufc and the reason why is because there have been i'll say about 10 times in my i've been following the ufc since it started there's been about 10 times where i knew i had inside information like you know because i'm friends and training partners and training with people and training with people that were about to fight i had inside information where i would have easily said oh i'll bet the house i'll bet my you know i'll bet next year's paychecks that this guy is going to win and sure enough i'd lose i would have lost and i i realized you know there's been a couple times where i had good inside information played out just the way i thought it would but as joe rogan says it's a fight yeah and anything can happen in a fight so if you were to tell me and i'm trying to look i'm trying not to be not trying not to use the benefit of hindsight because it's real easy to look back of course we've got the technological power and even when you just i i threw that out that little arrogant quote when you're like they didn't think they could beat us technically and i said watch this you know i'm sitting here saying that if you would ask me knowing what i know now hey uh who's gonna win or what kind of scrap is this gonna be you've got eight years worth of hardened combat veterans on the iraqi side versus and by the way they're fighting in their home like turf versus these americans the last thing we did on a large scale was vietnam which we didn't like you know we didn't like that and now we're going toe-to-toe with these guys that's a much tougher thing to think about and yeah i mean we think about the generals at this time all those generals vast majority of these generals were vietnam guys that were looking at this thing going okay i'll go but we better be hit them with overwhelming force but yeah i've never really thought that deeply about it the fact that this was not a this is not a given and it ended up the fact that it was so easy which is exactly what it was and i'm curious i mean the the the iraqi soldiers just fell apart fell apart and ran yeah it was like it's kind of crazy to think about why would you why didn't you fall apart and run from the iranians our biggest problem early on those first few days of the assault became processing all the pows who were surrendering we were like we don't really have the manpower to deal with all these people i think part of it was that you know just in that massive choreographed airstrike at the beginning we took out all of their air defense all of their communications and just their whole everything that linked their military structure together just went dark and so every little unit that's spread around is now just out there on their own basically they got to send runners if they want to talk to somebody and then the first marines just rampages straight at them and and to your point you know this is uh you know this is the this is centralized command right this is this is not a bunch of hey i got cut off from my unit but i know what the objective is and i'm going to carry it out regardless that's not the iraqi army the iraqi army is i'm not doing a damn thing most arab armies are like yeah yeah i'm not doing a damn thing until i get told exactly what to do because i'm not going to get even still it is crazy when you think about the fact that those juniors and colonel or generals and colonels and stuff they knew that if their unit just decided to surrender that it's going to be bad news for them and yet that's what happened in mass masters yeah it's it's hard to understand the psychology behind that yeah actually and it taught us some you know we learned some negative lessons from that as well well yeah we absolutely learned some negative lessons from that although i i i don't know right i mean let's face it the the opening the opening um salvos of of the invasion in 2003 yeah were pretty much the same thing i mean pretty much the same thing there was some there was there was more resistance obviously as we pushed up i mean and again i just had a guy on gunny buster who was um who was on the push-up you know nazaria there was a little hesitation there was some some fighting but it was vastly massive surrender yeah i mean the american military is it's something that's never been seen before i mean and even if you take the technology out of it when you put the just the communications and coordination the multi-force coordination um you know it's crazy to me i used to play uh paintball a lot with my friends and we would go play paintball and we were all fast we were athletes we went you know whatever and we'd go out and play and we would sometimes run into these fat old guys who had been playing together for a long time who just knew how to move they knew how to work together cover and move and all that kind of stuff and they would just butcher us and it's insane how how much of a difference just knowing what you're doing really makes and uh i i how how many times do you read about like you know um ranger unit in uh afghanistan ambushed by the taliban one ranger wounded 32 taliban killed you know 52 like captured and it's like wait i get that we have stealth bombers and satellites and all that but like this is still just dudes with guns right it's like well yeah yeah and no i mean american military is a buzz saw that you just you know feed human beings into when it gets worked up and uh but i think what i meant was it kind of gave us this lesson that like man not only is war easy yes it's uh it's kind of it's politically uniting you know you remember back back in the early 90s there was that music video voices that care it was like every huge celebrity the biggest people i mean it was bono and will smith and i actually don't remember this at all it was it would be the equivalent of today of like katy perry and taylor swift what was it uh like a music video pro troops or something yeah it was just saying to the troops voices that care we're thinking about you while you're over there something you could not imagine seeing today it's just a different environment it was probably a boot camp or something because i do not remember that at all you got to watch it just for the different times because today it would be hard to imagine anything like that and especially from that class of people um and it was so is politically unifying you know it was kind of we didn't lose much of anybody you know we uh behaved ourselves very very honorably you know um yes you are then i then i accept your assessment that some bad lessons were learned not so much about yeah about about uh we we learned the lesson that this was going to be easy and then kosovo reinforced that yeah kosovo reinforced that and all those people that said you need boots on the ground in order to really affect change well we went to kosovo and no boots on the ground exactly and you look up and you go well there were also intelligence like lessons that we you know the all the military all the military guys who were hesitant at first you had a lot of the civilian leadership who was looking at them like they were just kind of too cautious a little too scared a little too shocked by vietnam you know those experiences so that when we got up to 2003 you had a lot of the military side saying look we got this is not enough people to secure this country we need 300 000 we need 400 000 people we need this we need that and you know a lot of these same guys in the bush administration were the same guys in lower level mid-level positions in the first bush administration they're like wait i've heard this before from people in fact colin powell who's secretary of state now who's the one who's telling us to be very very careful here if we're going to go into iraq i've heard this from you before you were cautious in the first gulf war as well and so you know there was a little bit of uh a little bit of distrust between the civilian and military leadership that came in ah that's really um really disturbing but it's such a no it's like as you as you talk about it's just like oh yeah i mean i see this all the time right i see this all the time from businesses from leaders that they don't have a good enough relationship they don't communicate to each other properly they don't explain things in a way that could be clear and instead of explaining they just get mad and they say you know i'm telling you you got to trust me and like that that all that's all that is it's it's it's awful it's awful yeah yeah and um you know i think that uh you know the intelligence side as well you know this no our intelligence did not see the invasion of kuwait coming it caught us off guard and so you you know some of the civilian leadership lost trust with the intelligence community there when 911 surprised us again a lot of those same people come to distrust you know some of the intelligence establishment even more and it was a little bit of a toxic relationship by the time you got 2003 between you know the the brass at the dod and some of these other places and the actual military leadership and the intelligence community leadership that i think you know there were we'll get into that then maybe the next uh episode or so that you know there there were some breakdowns in communication at the leadership level that that ended up filtering down to you guys on the ground and that's what i'm kind of interested in hearing about is there anything else to to wrap up kind of pre-pre like escalation of tensions leading into into uh the invasion in o3 i think we can probably uh talk a little bit about it in the next episode um we'll talk about how we kind of started that ball rolling after 9 11. and i want to talk a little bit about what iraq was up to in the 90s as well and how we were dealing with them and how it had become this kind of festering soar that we did not have a good solution for you know that it was just sitting there because of the oil for food program and because of the way the sanctions were being cheated by a lot of countries in the most corrupt and ugliest ways you know just saddam's regime is you know letting a lot of these countries you know just full corruption take cuts from like the oil for food uh sales and then they're feeding billions of dollars back to saddam's regime ugly stuff by people who are supposed to be our allies and uh so you know it creates a situation where you you have this regime who's there who's ruling through brutality and terror who's not going anywhere the sanctions are not going to work and children are dying of starvation in the streets because of the sanctions so a lot of people are starting to say we can't keep this up we can't just start keep starving this population well okay what are you what are you gonna do you're gonna say oh saddam you got us all those u.n resolutions all none of that means that you won you outlasted us you outlasted the global community right the global order with all these institutions behind it you just you beat us you outlasted us because you were willing to inflict such suffering on your own people to watch them starve while you and your regime took all the money that you were getting and used it to control them and we just can't take watching this anymore so you know we're just going to lift all this and you admit you won and create that precedent for other people like you going forward or you know in a post-9 11 world we can go in there and do something about it and that was really you know the second iraq war if you want to put it that way is a lot of people and i think history will bear this out it wasn't a second war there were there were uh you know two uh ground fights two you know uh moments of acute combat in one long war with saddam hussein's regime we were launching airstrikes at him all through the 1990s in 1993 he tried to assassinate george h.w bush this is after he's pre he's not even president anymore and he was visiting kuwait and saddam sent a hit team over there to try to assassinate him you know a former american president and so this guy is not cowed you know he is still causing problems for us and meanwhile iran is growing and becoming more dangerous and you know we we need a functional iraq if you look at a map of the middle east it is just right there in the middle of everything and we need it to be somewhat functional but we can't help it be functional as long as this guy's in control because we can't build him up and so what do you do and um people are going to be debating you know long after we get done with this uh that you know what the right thing to do what there was but i think people oversimplify what our options were yeah and again it's well two things one thing i want to correct is i said that a guy that i had in the podcast was in the first goal for and i actually i was in my mind i was thinking but no he was on the push-up but he had guys that had been in the first goal for that kind of they they helped them along and and then i'm thinking about this and again just to frame this up you know some people say that i'm like a driven person right and and you know and i i i am you know there's i i want to do things and i want to you know i i when somebody says you know what's your goal i'll be like take over the world right ha ha fun fun like yeah there's some there's a hint of truth in there because i want to go out and make things happen but you know i'm not looking to take over the world in a literal sense and then you think about saddam and you and you like so i'm thinking about it from my perspective as you're talking through all this stuff i'm thinking you know i like to you know as i was reflecting back on what i told you earlier is like hey aren't you good like you've got a country you've taken over you got billions of dollars worth of assets you fought a long war like even me i think i'd look around and be like all right you know what i'll i'll go ahead and we'll just call this success i've got my own nation i've got billions of dollars i'll call it good but it's not good enough there's actually there is one thing that we did uh leave out we talked about a little bit earlier but um is that after the war is over on his way out out of spite he lights up all the kuwaiti oil wells just to black in the sky creates the biggest oil spill in human history by opening up the valves in kuwait and sending it out into the into the persian gulf and then and this is really where you got a lot of people who were after 9 11 really really really looking for saddam's throat in the united states um is we had told the people of iraq meaning sort of the shia population in the south the kurds in the north rise up against saddam hussein you know yeah that's right we thought that he would be overthrown in kind of a natural way we were also talking to his generals and whoever else but we may you know that wasn't going to happen the sunni population wasn't going to turn on him to hand over control to the shiites you know that's not going to happen so we're talking to the shia population in the south the kurds in the north rise up against saddam and they do and we just watch from across the border as he annihilates them you know kills we don't actually know maybe 180 000 people all told but for sure a hundred thousand and we are right across the border in kuwait easily with the ability to stop it from happening to the shiites he drives i mean scores of thousands of kurds this is what you were reading about earlier up into the mountains this is in january and february they're going to freeze to death they're going to starve to death he's massacring these people using human women and children as human shields as he goes into their villages threatening using them as hostages saying i'm going to kill these women and children if the men don't stay put they stay put he masters all the men and so all these kurds flee up into the mountains and we have junior you know state department defense department uh officials at the time guys like paul wolfowitz who would be donald rumsfeld's deputy by the time we get to 2003 who were like if i get another crack at this guy i am taking him out and um because they felt like we betrayed those people and we did you know um and of course we went in to help the kurds afterwards you know as they were getting pushed out operation provide comfort we start dropping supplies to them and it starts out as that but then we're like what are we going to do with these people and turkey's like you're not keeping kurds here right and so we're like well we people were worried that if we set them up in like a uh you know in a refugee camp somewhere that it would turn into another palestinian situation so finally we were like let's just push the iraqi army back far enough so these people can go back to their homes and so we did that and the kurds moved in back to their homes and we were like well now we kind of inherited the responsibility to protect these people and we did that and it was awesome was it southern watch that was operation southern watch yeah and uh um i don't remember actually i don't remember um i don't i thought it was a part of provide comfort like yeah it might have been perfect provide comfort and provide comfort too and it was amazing it worked perfectly like the kurds created one of the best places in the middle east besides israel i mean just a great place up there in rebel considering the neighborhood and that was another lesson that we took that like oh okay if we can just go in there and get rid of the bad people then the good people can come in and just build up a nice little society it's that idea of if i can just if we can just tip the scales right if we can just tip the scales and i i i don't know where i originally heard this from but it was somebody that had direct relations with uh cuba like someone that was cuban or parents were cuban and had been passed down this lore which was when all the cubans in america were saying hey look all we need to do is start this thing off and the p you know everyone the cubans will rebel against fidel castro and will free cuba and you know the story was it was like all the cubans that were saying that and all the cubans and it was a lot of humans that were saying that all of them that were saying that were in america and so they're saying yeah don't worry and as soon as they got down there the cubans that were in cuba were like what are you doing no this is cuba we don't want you here and it's not quite the same situation but the idea that you can tip the scales the idea that just gonna take a little bit to tip the scales is is the the feeling that you get when you're on the outside looking in and it looks like hey if we just apply enough pressure here there's they can rise up against them and yet that is all true and yet i think that and we'll get into this we'll talk about some of those bad decisions we started to talk about in the last episode up that when we went in in 2003 that was a winnable fight and it was winnable early i think i really do i think it was something that it would have taken a long time you know it would have taken some some dedication as far as timeline went some presence but um i think that uh that what that war turned into had a lot to do with decisions that that we made once we were there there's no doubt about it and i guess we can get on those get into those decisions in that war next time so if you want to support this podcast check out our other podcasts i have jocko podcasts the warrior kid podcast and the grounded podcast and daryl's got a pad podcast called margaret made and if you want to support all these podcasts then one thing you can do to help out is go and get some gear from jockostore.com or get some gear from origin main.com got all kinds of stuff on there thanks for listening as things unravel this is jocko and daryl out

Channel: Jocko Podcast

Views: 69,267

Keywords: history, world conflict, jocko willink, podcast, discipline, fredom, leadership, author, navy seal, usa, military, echelon front, jocko, victory, darryl cooper, martyrmade

Id: c5dLzI_iYis

Length: 59min 10sec (3550 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 10 2020