Jocko Podcast
Hosted by Jocko Willink
Jocko and Darryl Cooper discuss the "beginnings" of the war on terror. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content
10,679 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
This is the podcast formerly known as The Thread with Daryl Cooper and me, Jocko Willink. And we are re-releasing these, this original series, or the original episodes in this podcast. I guess it's more than a series because we're going to keep doing it. But we had to rename it. It turned out that there was already a podcast called The Thread, which I didn't check or Google or look, didn't know it was a thing. And the people, well, there's another podcast. And so they came at us with cease and desist letters and legal action and all that stuff, which is fine because they own the name. So we needed a new name.
We bounced around a bunch of ideas and landed on the Jocko Unravelling Podcast. Why did we pick that name? One is, why did you pick Jocko? Well, it's real easy. I own that name. No one can Trump us or, you know, threaten to sue me for using my own name. So we are protected there. And unraveling, because the intent is still the same as the original idea behind The Thread Podcast. What we're going to do is unravel what is happening in the world today and get to some of the root causes.
And maybe even if we don't get to root causes, we at least get a better understanding of the world by unraveling what we see. And it's also, not only because we're unraveling things and looking at them in a more granular level, there's also obviously another meaning to the word unraveling. It means things coming apart. And, well, the world and specifically humanity in many ways like human life, life, they're similar.
Humanity and human life are similar in that they can both be incredibly durable and adaptive and resilient, but they can both also be unbelievably fragile. And you can have one man be shot 20 times and survive and walk away.
And someone else can catch a random piece of a ricocheted bullet.
A tiny piece of a ricocheted bullet and die.
And society and humanity can be kinda like that sometimes. It can survive all kinds of turmoil and chaos and then in one instant, one event can change it forever.
Or can at least dramatically alter its course.
It can cause things to unravel.
So we started off this podcast in the first, what is it? The first number of what, seven? The first seven? The first seven of these that you will listen to, if you haven't listened to any of them yet. We dove deep into the Iraq war. And I guess we kinda fell into that. You kinda got in a kick. You wanted to go hard, right?
Mm-hmm. Figured it was a good way to start.
So, so Daryl wanted to go hard, which, which makes sense because he had his own experiences. He had his own knowledge. He had obviously read and studied and
was, was deployed over in that region. And then on top of that, you know, he knew, well, he wanted to know about my perspective on the ground. And so the first of these seven, we, we go deep, deeper than I think we planned to. May have veered off the course, the original intent of this podcast, which is sort of to bring things or to look at things that are happening today. But at the same time, you know, every, it's okay because everything's related. And, and the better that you understand specific events in the past, the better you understand all events. And the better you will understand
the way things unravel.
So with that, this is an interesting scenario that's unfolded that you and I are sitting across from each other at a table. I talked about this a little bit when you were just on my podcast, the Jocko podcast, about how we got here. But just to, just to kind of review how we ended up here, you have a podcast called Magermaid. Yes. In my opinion, one of the best podcasts there is. And I have a problem with, I have a problem with the educational system in America. That problem is kind of based on the fact that people don't tie or teachers, and when I say educational system, I'm talking
all the way from the time you go to whatever kindergarten through college, which I didn't go beyond college, but the whole time, you're getting all this information, but all the information is disconnected. In other words, there's no thread that ties it all together. When the reality is, as you know, and as I eventually learned myself, everything actually is connected. Everything is connected, whether it's science, or math, or history, or literature, or politics, it doesn't matter. You take any of those things, and there is a thread that ties it to everything else. This is human history, and we miss that. And it makes
it for me, it made it harder for me to, to understand things at a deeper level, because there's no context around them, right? You're just getting like, oh, here's a chunk of time period. You take this history class about this part of American history, or this part of European history, or this scientific period gets passed, and you're just learning these chunks, but they're not, not connected. So you don't, I never felt like I developed as much comprehension until I started to fill in these gaps. And then you take that, you roll that one step further, and you look at our news media today, and They take these, they take the events that are unfolding around us and they give me to you
very one dimensionally with very little depth. Occasionally, you can get to two dimensions on a subject here or there, but they certainly aren't taking the events that are happening today, which all have threads that lead into history that give you better understanding of the things that are unfolding before our very eyes. So, you know, since I'm a listener of your podcast, you're a listener of my podcast. I was actually on your podcast one time. We, we did a, we did a Menage A Trois podcast with you and me and Daniele. And that was,
that was really cool. I enjoyed doing that. But I eventually said, hey, man, do you wanna, do you wanna do something where we talk about what's going on in the world right now and we dig deeper and we pull the thread on how events got to where they are? What do you think?
I think it's necessary. You know, you talked about the news media. When you have no context, it makes everything a surprise. Everything that happens is just a surprise. 9/11 happens and it's just a surprise. Who are these people? Nobody knows. It's just completely out of nowhere. And that leaves us vulnerable to anybody who comes along and says they've got a story that explains it, you know? And sometimes the people sharing those stories have agendas. Sometimes they don't have all the facts. And like you said, everything's connected. You can, you can take any event, you know, we could say, what is World War II? Well, it happened between 1939 and 1945. Well, did it? Or did it start at the Treaty of Versailles? And then
if that's the case, does it go back before World War I? And what about the ending point? Did it end in 1945? Are you sure? How, how far out does that go? You can take that all the way out to Adam and Eve if you want to. Figuring out how to draw those lines could be difficult, but, but that's what it's about. Figuring out how these things connect to the world we find ourselves in now so that when things happen, it's not such a surprise and you're not so vulnerable to people peddling stories with an agenda behind them.
Yeah. And then as we were having these discussions, some things were kind of in our face a little bit about. Well, Soleimani had just been killed. We're talking about Iran. We're talking when you're and if you're gonna talk about Iran, you absolutely have to talk about Iraq. You have to talk about what unfolded there with ISIS. And then where did ISIS come from? And then again, now, now, this is exactly where it all starts. It's like, oh, you start to pull the thread on this, and you say to yourself, okay, what is really going on at a deeper level when we start to pull the thread? And then you kind of came back at me after we we had talked about a couple of different topics we could go through, and you came
back to me and, you know, you said, hey, man, why are we even playing around here? Let's talk about, let's talk about Iraq, and go through it with a level of detail so people have some real understanding of what's of what has happened there, and what our involvement there has looked like, and what led to our involvement there. And I started kind of filling in some of the blanks that you had about things that I had seen. And then you started saying, oh, wait, you were there for this. Oh, wait, you were there for that. And then it kind of just builds a story around itself. And you said, let's let's do some, let's do that. And I said, yeah, cool. Sounds good. I will say, and you and I have agreed to try and put some constraints around this in terms of time.
You and I both have ridiculously long podcasts. You know, my longest is five hours and 25 minutes, I think. I don't know what you what's your longest?
Close to seven.
You've which one was seven?
The last one was like 640, I think.
Oh, that was a good one. Yeah. So you and I both said, okay, we're not going to do this. And you and I clearly both have a propensity to just go. And so we're going to try and keep well, we'll keep this to about an hour. And then we'll just we'll just go to the next topic in another episode. So that way people can chunk it up and don't have to worry about trying to find where it is on the on their on their podcast platform, and trying to figure out where they left off, etc., etc. And plus to give us just a natural sort of gargle of you and me going completely into the
Seventeen hour zone.
Yeah, let's do it.
So, when we talk about Iraq, where do you want to kick this thing off?
You just gave me the starting point I wanted, actually, which is talking about ISIS coming out and how, to most people, where did ISIS come from? They came out of nowhere, right? Came out of the chaos of the Syrian civil war, for all anybody knows. I mean, that's really the way it was portrayed, is this, just this group rises up out of the sand and comes into Iraq, and they're creating all of this chaos, and most of the public, they came out of nothing, right?
Like a spontaneous, spontaneous group appeared out of nowhere, is what it appeared to be a lot of people. I will say that I believe the term Islamic State began to get used just after I left on my last deployment, I'm gonna say 2007 is when I believe they started to use the term Islamic State.
That is correct, yeah, yep. But who started to use that term is the point, right? That group didn't come out of nowhere. And, you know, by the time ISIS comes around, most of the public in the West is kind of disengaged from Iraq. They've moved on, they don't want anything to do with it. This is when President Obama's in there, and he ran on getting us out, you know, and for, you know, when you're part of the public getting the narrative the way they were getting it, it's understandable why they were just like, why are we here? Enough is enough. Get us out of there. And that's where we were at by the time ISIS came around. The majority of Americans at that point could have cared less who was controlling Fallujah or Ramadi or anything like that.
ISIS got our attention, though, because this group came out of nowhere, and they seemed to be engaging in acts of violence that were so over the top and so barbaric that, that people thought that this, nothing like this had ever happened before. That's what people thought. I mean, because they didn't, you know, again, coming back to the, to the history and the context of it. In August of 2014, you know, they're turning on their TVs, they're going on to websites, and there's an Australian citizen who's traveled over the Middle East with his seven-year-old son, and he's putting up a picture of his seven-year-old son, holding up the head of a Syrian soldier. And people are saying, wait a second, now this is something different, right? A few days later ISIS releases a video
featuring Jihad John, speaking in perfectly plain English, threatening the camera with a knife, and then sawing the head off of American journalist James Foley. And this starts to get people's attention, right? The group starts releasing all of these propaganda videos, these slick propaganda videos. There was, of course, the famous one with the Jordanian pilot that had gone down, that they captured, that they burned alive in a cage. They're filming themselves, they're not hiding this, they're filming themselves throwing homosexuals from rooftops.
How much of this, as that's unfolding, right? How much of that is the modern-day 24-year-old, social media, egocentric, me, me, me, hey, if I'm gonna go out and do jihad, I'm gonna take pictures of it?
Yeah, yeah, I think that's probably, you're on to something there. I mean, because there, there were videos before, but now you can get famous. You know, you can get famous, and it's probably, it's probably got something to do with the step up in school shootings and everything as well. You know, it's, it's a way for somebody with no identity, and living in a world where it seems like they don't have any ability to exert will on the world. You know, nobody notices them. You're just a nobody. What you're gonna notice, you're gonna notice this.
Was the strategy of making these videos, okay, so we have, we have some element of, this is just the new world, this is social media, I wanna be famous, it's about me, I'm Jihad John, with, with, where was he from? The British accent?
British, yeah.
And, but do we know where he was from in Britain?
I'm sure we do. I don't.
So here's this guy, so I'm gonna get famous, that's part of it. Part of it had to be, hey, we're gonna recruit, get people down here.
Yeah.
Which again, what a, what a, what a just, who are you recruiting?
That's, that's the question, yeah.
If we're sawing off people's heads on camera, who are we recruiting? I, well, we know who we're recruiting.
And it worked. Yeah. Tens of thousands of those people responded to the call, and those people were living in our societies before. Before they went down to Iraq, they were living in our cities. I mean, there's, here's, here's like one that, uh, I haven't watched too many of their, of their videos, but I've watched some of them just to try to get an idea. And there was one that stood out where, um, it takes place in an old, broken down amusement park. And it's got a bunch of kids executing prisoners. Um, there's one where a boy who is hardly big enough, the, the gun that they give him is too big for his hand. Right? And he shoots a Kurdish prisoner in the head.
There's another one where they've got a prisoner tied up on like a broken down carnival ride. And they give this kid a big old knife, it's way too big for him, and he climbs up on this thing and murders this guy. There's one like well-choreographed scene where this kid is walking through, you know, those like, uh, those plastic ball pits?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
They got this kid walking through like this dusty ball pit. And he gets there and somebody hands him this big gun. And he kind of closes his eyes and looks away and blows this dude's brains out. There's other videos where they've got kids executing other kids. If you've got kids killing people in an amusement park, you're doing something very different than just saying, uh, you're sending a very specific kind of message about what kind of people you are and who you're trying to attract at that point, right? I mean, this isn't just, you know, the kids are in on the jihad too. They're doing this in an amusement park. That is a level of depravity that's, that, that, that take, you know, that seems to take things to a new level, right?
Seems to, that's kind of where I wanted to go with this is, uh, maybe the slick production values were kind of shocking to people like you, to some of my friends who were in Fallujah, some Marines and, and others that I know. But the level of violence that these people were exhibiting was not a huge surprise. Um, because you'd seen it before. Most of Americans had not seen it before. And I think that people don't realize that there's a thread, not just a tenuous one, a very direct organizational thread connecting the individuals and the groups from Al Qaeda in Iraq, the people you were fighting in Ramadi, that we were going after in Fallujah in 04, right on up through the Islamic State. These are the same people. Some of them swap out.
We kill the leaders and people step up. But these are groups that have gone through name changes. And then you can take it back further. And it's not just Al Qaeda in Iraq. A lot of these people are former Ba'athists and Iraqi army soldiers, officers, people who were regime loyalists. And so I knew a lot of people who would have this attitude of like, well, look, I was against the Iraq war. George Bush is a war criminal and so is Dick Cheney, the whole lot of them. They should all be in jail. But ISIS is, this is something different. We really got to do something about this. And they don't realize, and it's not their fault, because this is just not, this was not how the narrative was presented to them.
They don't realize these are the same people doing the same things that we were fighting in the war, in the early days, and the people who were actually running that country before we went in. And I think that's something that, that's a connection that does not get made for most people. And I wonder if they really understood that, that these ISIS people, especially after 2010. ISIS after 2010 was almost entirely run by former Saddam regime loyalists. Okay? And so these people were running that country before. And if you knew that, if you understood that, how do you feel about going in? And I get it, you know, from a strategic standpoint or whatever, you can have reservations. You can't clear up every evil in the world.
But I wonder, I think a lot of people would maybe consider it differently if they understood that. And yeah, it's a tough message to get out to people. And I don't know why it didn't get out more clearly during the war.
Well, it was good, I guess it was good rebranding. Right? It's good rebranding. I had, at Echelon Front, I had, I got an offer to work with a company. They said they wanted me to do a keynote speech. And the, the, the name of the company was some real, I didn't recognize it, you know, I said, oh, you know, what's the company? Whatever the name goes, Brandex or whatever, some, just... Didn't didn't didn't strike me in any way. And you know, they wanted me to come and do a keynote and you know, so my my director of operations, Jamie said, oh, we got this company. They wanted to do keynote. I said, oh, okay. Let me let me take a look. Let me see who they are. And it was a giant tobacco company. And it was a company that had changed their name, whatever, five years ago, three years ago.
And I said, oh, no, I'm not doing that. And the thing was like, you know, it's good branding. They I didn't know who it was. And that's that's a
Who was doing that branding, though? I I I know a Marine who was in Fallujah, who told me, he didn't do this himself, but he knew the people who did. Um, that there were torture rooms that they found in that city by the smell.
Uh, for sure.
And that and that you would walk into houses that looked normal in normal neighborhoods. And I remember reading this one Marine major talking about how you would wander through this normal house and you would open up a door into a bedroom or garage and it was Silence of the Lambs in there. So who's who's doing that branding? Like, that's, you know, like, who is hiding that from people? And I I don't know if it's hiding. I don't know. Maybe they thought it was just too gruesome and we don't want to put that on the I don't know.
Well, I'm I'm saying the rebranding done by the by the perpetrators themselves. In other words, you know, quote, changing from insurgents to Al Qaeda in Iraq to ISIS. Those are those are changes that got made along the way. And there's also there are also, um, you know, groups where a group would grow and people they'd take on new members that came from the other group. And so it's the same group of people with a different name and maybe a couple of different leaders here and there. But it was it seemed like one of the reasons that people said, and you actually you actually just said this minute ago, you ISIS came out of nowhere. You you just got done saying, you know, ISIS has been around for a long time.
And then you in your own, you know, you just were telling the story. You said, I I people were shocked because ISIS came out of nowhere. Even you just
Well, I meant that was the perception.
Yeah, that's the perception. But I mean, even you just said ISIS came out of nowhere. You had literally just said ISIS has been the same group of people. And then, you know, you're making the point that ISIS came seemed to come out of nowhere. But I'm saying, look, these these groups changed their names. And when you change your name and they changed their look too, right? They went to this, you know, they they made a flag, a a new flag. And they carried that flag and then they put on the all black outfits, which Well, quite honestly insurgents, a lot of times, sometimes they wear black, but a lot of times they were just wearing, you know, the, the tracksuit was the, was the kind of typical
uniform, or a dish dash, or whatever. So, there was some branding that happened, that I think helped confuse the rest of the world, in cutting that thread, subconsciously, that they didn't, couldn't make a connection, that this group, this is the same group of people.
But even at the time, when the war was going on, I, I know, that back here at home, the reality of, think about when, uh, I'm sure this is personal for you a little bit, but, um, when, uh, the movie American Sniper came out, and you had this huge, obscene push from certain quarters of the media and other places, that were just, just going hard at Chris Kyle, because he called, you know, he, he used the word savages, and something like that, and they're like, he's calling Iraqi savages. That, that makes sense, if you have no idea what you guys were dealing with over there. And most people don't. They
don't realize, like, that, you know, the Iraqi insurgency isn't, it was not the same, it was not just some resistance group. That there was a level of, of, of obscenity, and violence, and evil, that had taken root over there. Um, that was, that, it was really unique in a lot of ways, except that, you know, it was what you see from ISIS, only they didn't cut the slick videos, for everybody.
Yeah, and, and to that point, I mean, um, Chris Kyle calling the enemy in Iraq savages, was not just Chris Kyle, that was me, that was everyone in Task Unit Bruiser, that was many of the people over there. And, you know, I, I've, I've gone back and forth with people on this, and, and one of the things that I, I've said is, when, you know, someone say,
Isn't it dehumanizing to label the enemy in this way? And I said, we didn't need to dehumanize this enemy. They dehumanized themselves. That's what they did. The actions that they took were, were beyond comprehension. Beyond, and you know, just before, just before I showed up in Ramadi, there was a guy that had been helping the coalition and he was working with, I think he was working closely with the task unit that was there before us, but it might've been one of the, one of the adjacent units. But the insurgents found this out and they, they, they skinned the guy alive, right?
And you're rolling in there and you're thinking to yourself, okay. This is who we're dealing with. These aren't, these aren't humans. These are not humans. You don't skin someone alive if you're a freaking human being. That's not what you do. And so we knew out of the gate, that's, that was like our in briefing to Ramadi. Here's who you're, here's who you're going to be dealing with.
And knowing that, you know, I think maybe you go into a fight, go into a war and you know somewhere in your mind that, you know, you're a soldier, soldiers get shot. You catch an AK round, you get blown up by an IED, whatever. I remember reading in, I think Leaf told the story in Extreme Ownership. One of the times where him and another guy, I think just a Marine, they ended up getting separated from the group for a while.
It was near the beginning. It was our EOD guy, yeah.
And yeah, that's what it was. And you get separated, things happen. This is a place where, you know, you can kind of handle catching an AK round. Where if you get wounded and they get their hands on you alive, your suffering is going to be limited by their creativity and that's it.
And that's those, that these are the kind of people that you're, that you're dealing with.
And then the thing you have to remember is that their creativity, as I'm sure we'll get into, it's not there on the spot creativity. It's, it's creativity that's decades of experience on how to torture human beings to death.
In 2008, I was, there's this jihadi message board. It got shut down like later that year, but it was kind of the most popular one at the time. And after the Ambar awakening, there was a, that's all they were talking about, right? That the people of Ambar were traitors, apostates for
So, so this is a, this is a, a message board on the internet?
Yes.
That you would go on and read what these savages were saying?
They would talk to each other. Some of them were just supporters from around the world. Others, you know, supposedly were over there. But these were all people who were on that side. And they were talking about it in that manner. And there was this one discussion about what had happened in Ambar after Ramadi had fallen, you know, from their perspective fallen. And, you know, people are complaining about the people of Ambar, all this. And one guy steps in and says, don't worry. You know, yes, we've lost this, but we've got a long time horizon and there's nothing to worry about. As long as our leader Abu Omar al-Baghdadi is here with us to lead us. Abu Omar al-Baghdadi died in 2010 when we took out most of the leadership of ISI.
He was replaced by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS that everybody knows, who went up the steps of that mosque in Mosul and, you know, announced the Islamic State. There's a direct line of succession going back there. And you can take him from Abu Omar, you go directly back to Zarqawi. You know, these are the same people. In 2004, you know, this is stuff that I didn't know until maybe a handful of years ago, that in 2004, the stuff that they were finding in Fallujah, right? Where they would go into these torture rooms and find people chained to the wall with their legs chopped off. That had happened while they were still alive. You know, just people mutilated and beaten to death. That's not even worth mentioning. That's just everywhere.
You know, people who are just, who are found alive, just incoherent from torture and starvation, who are booby trapped, you know, to blow up if anybody comes and tries to help them. And none of that kind of stuff. You know, all I heard coming out of, especially first Fallujah, watching most of our news media, is that we went in too hard and, you know, Mattis and the rest of the Marines bit down on their, you know, mouthpieces a little bit too, too hard and went in there and tore the city up and killed a bunch of civilians. That's the narrative that got back to us.
Really?
That's interesting.
And You know, I think that, uh, yeah, it was only in like maybe the last handful of years that I and so who's in charge of Al Qaeda in Iraq at that time? That's Sarkawi. These are the people, right? These are the insurgents. And they're doing all the things that, you know, that, that, that now today, when, you know, it's ISIS, we say this is something different and we have no choice but to act. And, uh, and you can trace that directly back. Who were, who were people who ran, um, you know, people who ran for ISIS, who ran the ministry of finance, the military ministry, the security ministry, the interior ministry? These are all former Baathist Saddam regime guys. Okay? The Saddam regime provided, you know, most of the NCO type guys, most of the junior officer
type guys, you know, in their organization. That's who these people were. And like you said, there's decades and decades and decades of experience in torture. You know, the, the, the Iraqi insurgency is, uh, it's, it's, it's very interesting and different because you go back and read Mao, go back and read general like Vo An Giap, the Vietnamese general, and, you know, they would talk a lot about like, we don't have supply trains, logistics trains, we don't have factories like the state does, we don't have any of that support structure. They have the ultimate weapon. We need the people, right? And we gotta make sure you read Mao's stuff and he says, look, if you gotta go into somebody's house, roll up your bedroll when you're finished and close the door behind you gently when you leave and don't lie to the people.
They gotta know that we're on their side. Iraqi insurgency was not looking at things like that. You know, these were, first of all, a lot of them are foreigners. And second of all, they're coming from a place where if you don't do what they say, you're an apostate anyway. And they felt just, and a lot of them were former regime guys, Saddam guys, who had been used to for decades, ruling that country through pure brutality and terror. And it's not a matter of getting the people to believe that they're on, that you're on their side and fighting their war. It's that you better be afraid of us and the Americans can't protect you. And, uh, you know, that's the mentality that they brought to these people. And whatever some of the Iraqis may have thought of the Americans early on, and maybe they, you know, there were, there were some who said, yeah, somebody's coming and fighting
for Iraq or whatever it is, these insurgent groups, they learned pretty quickly. Um, they learned pretty quickly what these people were about, but by that point, you know, they, they were cowed into submission for the most part.
Yeah, well, the, the, yes, and that's what's, that's what's hard because when you're in a struggle for power, the benevolent way is obviously better, but you have to have the, you have to have benevolent benevolency and you have to have power. Like you, you have to be able to back it up. And then you have to have the willingness to back it up. And then you have to have the understanding that you back it up in the right way. So it's really, the, uh, fighting that war with those rules is really, really hard. The other
side that just is gonna rule through fear, that's, that's an easy, that's the, the, how long does it take to come up with the, the concept of operations for that? 15 minutes? How long does it take to come up with the concept of, of operations to do this in a benevolent way? How, and then you get into the ground truth of how does an American differentiate between when they go into a house between someone that's from Syria and someone that's from, you know, wherever in Iraq? The, the answer is they can't. It's very, very difficult. Now, once we were working with Iraqi troops, they could do it. But when we first got there, the first, well, the first three years, that's, that's a, it's a, it's a shit show.
And we just don't have the capability of going into a building or going into a neighborhood and figuring out, oh, this guy's from Syria, but this guy, you know, and I always talk about, how long does it take, how long does it take for you to tell that someone is from the, the north or the south? You know, someone says, if someone says, hey, how y'all doing today? It's like, oh, okay, you're from Texas. Cool. Got it. If someone, you know, comes in with a strong New England accent, you, you know that. If you ask them what they had for breakfast, you know, and they say grits, cool, you know, they're from the south. If they say bacon and eggs, you know, you know, you mean like you can figure it out. We couldn't do that. And so now you're applying your force, just kind of blanket applying your
force. But at the same time, you're trying not to do that.
No.
All the other side's doing is just, just applying force. That's what they're doing. And their only mission is to make everyone so fearful, they win that war. They win that struggle. Because of those reasons. And look, good, I believe wins in the long run. But when you go into that situation, then you've got, you know, Americans that are trying to figure out who's who. And they're trying to assemble this thing. You know, they're trying to
they're trying to build a dollhouse, right? They're trying to build a dollhouse.
Trying to get these little pieces together and it's delicate. And that's what you're trying to do. Meanwhile, the only thing the other people have to do is smash the dollhouse. That's all they need to do is smash it. It's just that much easier.
And to let every single person know that if they somewhat just pick up a hammer or a chisel to help you build it, then their whole family is dead.
Murdered.
No, this, I mean, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a group whose goal was chaos and death, you know, it was, because like you said, they don't have to do anything other than make this place impossible to live in. You know, under the, under the idea that that will cower the population and will eventually get frustrated and leave. And, um, you know, I want to talk about the regime a little bit too, because you'll have a lot of people say, okay, okay. So ISIS and Al Qaeda in Iraq, those insurgents, we can connect that thread. That's fine. And yeah, there were some, there were a lot of Ba'athists and Iraqi officers in these groups and everything, fine. But we created the circumstances for those things to arise because we went in there and smashed the Iraqi state and created this chaotic situation.
And look, as we'll get into in future episodes, I think that especially at the civilian command level, there were aspects of the planning that were criminally stupid and criminally negligent in a lot of ways. It was not handled well in those early days, right? But as far as the idea of going in there, like we, you remember.
We'll, we'll get into that. I want to, I want to interject this.
It's really hard to predict what is going to happen. And doing something stupid, making a bad decision is something that can happen in war. War is so dynamic. So if, if someone makes a bad decision, so the, the statement that you just made, uh, there was some criminal negligence in the planning. Okay. Here's why I will push back against that.
I figured we'd get into this a little bit.
Well, well, here's why I'll push back against it.
You make, and then I'll, and then I'll come to your side a little bit. You make a mistake. Okay. Look, what you do when you make a mistake and you see things are going bad, you say, hey, listen, I picked the wrong strategy. This isn't working. This is where I'm due to correct it.
As far as I'm concerned, when you do that and you take ownership of, of your decision and you recognize that it's not working, I, I, you got redemption from me and you're going to adjust. That's okay. Well, the problem that I ran into is, or the problem that I have where the, where, where the negligence comes in is, oh, I made this decision. It's not going well. Uh, I'm going to keep going with the same decision. I'm going to keep pushing in the same direction. I'm going to keep trying the same strategies and tactics over and over again, even though it's not getting better. And in fact, I'm going to go harder in that direction. So, you know, I'm sure we'll get into what those decisions were, but my biggest problem with the way things unfolded
wasn't that we as a nation, our leaders, we as a military, not that we made a bad plan. It's that as the plan was executed, things didn't go the way we thought in some cases. And that's going to happen and we didn't go, oh, yep. Okay, cool. Look, didn't, we didn't expect this. Okay, let's adjust. We didn't say that. We didn't say that. It took us too long to figure that out. And there's a bunch of reasons behind that. I mean, I mean, one of the reasons I'll throw out right now is the way the military currently, you know, World War II, when you went to war, guess when you were coming home? When the war was over. When the war was over. Yeah.
You know, for the Marine Corps and like special operations, Marine Corps is six month deployments, special operations, you know, four to six month deployments. Again, there's variations in that. Army year, you know, sometimes they get stretched out. The army, the army could do some deployments. You know, they'll go, they'll go 12 months, 14 months, 16 months. And then at the end of that, you're going home. Yeah. And all of the continuity and all that knowledge, look, you, you and I can spend, you know, two weeks doing a turnover, but at the end of a 14 month deployment, there's no possible way I can give you the information that I have in my head. So you get fresh blood coming in, they get turned over the strategy, they look at the strategy, they say, you know, okay, we'll try, we'll try to, we'll do better.
And they keep trying it. So that's where I have a problem with leadership in any, in any situation.
And there were military people who tried to push back though, and they were getting blocked a lot at the political level. And that's what drives me crazy.
Yep, absolutely true, absolutely true. There was, there was absolutely people that kind of fell on their sword as well. To, to say, hey, we're doing this wrong. You know, this is, this is classic Hackworth, right? This is about face. Uh, as the full bird Colonel, the youngest Colonel in the army at the time, saying, hey, or not at the time, but he was the youngest Colonel that had been selected to Colonel. And, and now had been a Colonel for several years, but for him to say, hey, if we don't change the way we're doing this, we're gonna lose. And he got drummed out of the army. That was it. Game over. You know, he was out of the army after, and he was the most, the most decorated, one, one of the most decorated
soldiers, officers, military men in the army. And he, and, and that's something else we can talk about. Because when is it the right time to do that? When is it the right time to, to, to say, you know what, I'm not gonna do this anymore. I'm gonna go to the press and talk about this. Because then you lose all your influence. Right? Cause he was gonna be a division commander next. So once you're a division commander, all of a sudden you're controlling, you know, 15, 10, 15,000 troops and you're controlling all giant area. And you can make some real adjustments to the way you're fighting the war. Well, guess what?
He didn't do that. And he fell on his sword at the end and lost all of his influence. And by the way, that war, he fell on his sword, it didn't help. The war kept going. Kept going. And, and now, you know, of course, we look back and we see that, we see that people like McNamara and they, they, they did not see a
They did not see a victory out there on the horizon and they barely even saw a, a, an honorable departure like we knew and we kept going. And so, yeah, there's, there's definitely, I'm sure we'll get into that. Yeah. Um, as we, as we discuss this subject.
Let's talk a little bit more while we're still in this episode because we will get into all that. Um, I want to talk a little bit more about the regime itself. Um, people have an idea that Iraq, that under Saddam Hussein was a tough place to live. Um, I, I don't think people quite, you know, they think he's a dictator. Yeah. He executed his political opponents. Assad's a dictator too. You know, he's even a Baptist dictator, very similar. I don't think they're that similar. I think that Assad is a dangerous, brutal guy. I think Saddam was one of the unique characters in the 20th century. I think he was a psychotic paranoid on the level of somebody like Stalin and that if he would have had those kinds of resources, he would have done the same things
that Stalin had done. And, uh, one of the, one of the best windows into that is looking at the way that he let his sons run around that country. Um, cartoonish, cartoonish, uh, stereotypes of what like the gangster boss's son, psycho son is like, right?
You can't make it up.
From a B movie, you know, that kind of thing. And, um,
when, when you hear about somebody like Uday Hussein, making a sport out of going to, going to weddings of regular people and deciding that he likes the way the wife looks and having his men escort her to the back so that he can do what he's going to do. And the husband shoots himself at the wedding because of the dishonor or lets it happen because everybody knows that if you resist, your whole family's dead and you can't go tell the government because he's the, he's Saddam's son. Everybody knows what he's doing. Everybody knows that this is a, an accepted
kind of known part of that society, um, where there's nobody to appeal to. Um, it, it, it gives you some, some bit of a window into what that regime was really like. Um,
And, and Uday was so bad.
That he he basically worked himself out of a job.
Because he was the older son and he was so so absolutely reprehensible in his activities, you know, and that's an activity like you you kind of threw it out there like um you know, this this happened this one time. No, that that was like what he did.
Go to a wedding. Take the bride. Take her away, rape her. And then, you know, walk away.
And that kind of stuff really wasn't what cost him his job either, or his position like what cost him his position was doing that kind of thing to important people. You know, he got married to some of Saddam's closest advisers daughters, and then he beat the hell out of them, things like that. That's really what, you know, what what got him in trouble. All the other stuff. You know, that stuff was par for the course. I mean, so the State Department, uh, just known documented methods of brutality under that regime, crucifixion, hammering nails into people's fingers and hands, amputating. This is gruesome stuff, but amputating genitals and breasts with electric carving knives. This is stuff that's documented, you know, um.
You've we've all heard of the rape rooms. That's not made up by George Bush, you know, taking people's daughters, wives, children, raping them in front of the parents and family members, you know, to get them to talk.
To get them to confess so that they would they would be executed.
You know, we um, my first deployment to Iraq, when we rolled in, you know, we were right in Baghdad International Airport. That's where we were staying. And formerly known as Saddam International Airport, but there was a couple of his palaces. And you when you'd walk through, you could go to you could go to the rooms where the stuff took place, you know, where they had the hooks hanging from the ceilings, the drainage holes in the bottom, uh, you know, implements of torture. And you know, you you you get that you walk into one of those rooms. And of course, I mean, we're all um, whatever, we all got a dark side and and so, you know, somebody say, hey, did you see the room over at whatever, whatever castle it was and
no, I'm so let's go look at it. Okay, cool. So you know, you go over there and you you walk in there and Your, your, you know, your, your four, you know, obnoxious, gregarious SEAL buddies and you, you walk into that room and it's just quiet.
Guys who are pretty comfortable with violence, by the way.
Guys that are completely comfortable with violence and death and the whole nine yards. And you walk in there and you're like, alright, this is.
One of the ones I like to use on some of my liberal friends is what he did at the end of the Gulf War. Like, a lot of people don't know today, by, and by about three to five times, the largest oil spill in history was not an accident. As he was retreating out of Kuwait, he just opened up all the oil pipelines and let it spill out into the Persian Gulf. You know, partly because he wanted to block an amphibious landing, but really just to be an asshole.
Something like that, though, to do something that catastrophically bad out of spite. It, it, it shines a little more light on, you know, you can, you can kind of apply, um, you know, weapons of mass destruction. These guys aren't suicidal, right? I'm sorry, it's like, if a guy is creating by a factor of three to five, the largest oil spill in human history, just out of spite, because he's getting run out of Kuwait, lighting all the oil wells on fire, so that it was just an environmental disaster with the skies blacking for god knows how long. You don't know what that guy's gonna do. You know, you don't know what that guy's gonna do.
That tends to make a dent a little bit sometimes, because that's an unpredictable character, you know? I mean, not to mention just what he would do when people, you know, we can think, talk about the individual actions, the brutality, the torture. You know, when he was worried about the Kurds, when he was fighting the Iranians in the late, in the late eighties. You know, he used chemical weapons to kill thousands and thousands of people on population centers. He's just dumping chemical weapons.
Dumping like cocktails too.
Yep.
From what I remember, it was like VX gas, sarin gas, like all combined together.
Hey, I'm not really sure what I'm doing, but I know this is gonna kill a bunch of people. So, yeah, that, that, you know, and I'm sure this could just ignite the, the, the. The masses, the hordes to talk about the WMD thing. Because rolling into this thing.
You know, I can't believe we fell for that. Like this guy was saying it. This guy headset it, his own jet, like we had intel sources, reliable sources that were like, oh yeah, he's got him.
His own sources, his own generals.
That's what I'm saying. Reliable sources that that said, yes, he has him.
Cause he wanted his neighbors to think.
He wanted everyone to think he had him. And guess what? He did a great job of convincing everybody, including us. And sure, hindsight's 2020.
The Bush administration made a big mistake by putting all of their money on that. They shouldn't have done that.
I concur.
Because there were, when you get into what was going on in that regime, there were plenty of reasons to go take that dude out. And, um, and it was just, it was a marketing mistake, you know, they shouldn't have done it. They shouldn't have just put all of their chips on that one thing, you know? And it's unfortunate that they did. And I think if they hadn't done that, then the war, war itself might've unfolded a little. It would've given them liberty to try to win the war in oh four and oh five, rather than just sitting back and trying to avoid casualties for a while. Because they were worried about losing support. Once it started to become clear that maybe we're not going to find these things, you know, I think they didn't know what to do exactly.
So, um, there is, uh, there is this, this account that I wanted to read to you actually.
By a Saddam nuclear engineer who was married to a woman from Canada. It's the only reason he made it out alive. But he was taken prisoner and, uh, you mind if I just, I want to read his account to you because it's pretty telling what, what this place was about. His name's Dr. Sharasthani.
In 1979, there was a backlash by the regime in Iraq because of activists in the Shia community. By the summer, the regime had started large-scale executions and mass arrests. This is right when Saddam took over in 1979, so they don't exactly know what this guy's about yet, right? "I voiced my concern about human rights at atomic energy meetings. I knew I was very crucial to their atomic energy program. I thought they would not arrest me for voicing my concern. I wanted Saddam to know what I said. I was wrong. A little earlier, the regime had arrested and executed one of my cousins, al-Sharastani. He was on his honeymoon and had only been married for 14 days. He was not associated with any party. He was arrested in the street and taken away from his wife and sister, and his wife and
sister were brought to the torture chamber to see him. They had given him a hideous torture. They had filled him with gas through his rectum and then beaten him. They threatened his young wife in front of him and then they banged his head into the wall so hard that the wall was shaking, and then they killed him." By this time, Saddam was president, and he came to see us, and he told us that he was going to redirect us at the Atomic Energy Organization, that we were going to work on what he called "strategic projects." Until July 1979, we had been involved in purely peaceful applications of atomic energy. I and my colleague, Dr. Ziad Jafar, were Saddam's two advisers. We were reputable internationally-trained scientists. We were also close friends. I discussed this with him.
I said, "If Saddam wants military applications, there's no way I can continue with this organization." At that time, we didn't take it seriously because we knew Iraq had limitations. I assumed I would just be thrown out of the organization. They came to the Atomic Energy Organization when I was talking to the Board of Directors on December 4, 1979. They said, "Could we have a word with Dr. Hussein? Hussein Sharastani is his name." As I stepped outside, they put handcuffs on me, shoved me into a car, and took me to the security headquarters in Baghdad. At security headquarters, they took me in to the director of security, Dr. Fidel Barak, who was later executed by Saddam. He said that some people who had been arrested and brought to the headquarters had given my name.
I denied any involvement in political parties. I said I was a practicing Muslim, but that I had never taken part in subversive activities. Then they brought me to a man I knew, Jawad Zobeve, a building contractor. He had been so badly tortured, I hardly recognized him. Jawad said, “I know Dr. Hussain. He comes to the mosque and takes part in our religious activities.” For them, religious activities meant anti-government activities. They said to me, “Better tell us all, you’ll regret it.” Then they took me to the torture chamber in the basement. They blindfolded me and pushed me down the stairs into the chamber. It was a big room. My hands were tied behind my back, and I was pulled up into the air by my hands.
After five minutes, the pain was so severe in the shoulders that it was unbearable. Then they gave me shocks on sensitive parts of my body. By the end of the beating, you were naked. There were shocks on my genitals and other parts of my body. After fifteen minutes, they came to me and said, “Sign.” I was in a very cold sweat. They know you’ll faint. They brought me down and gave me a short rest. I fell asleep for a few minutes. But this went on, day and night, day and night. It went on for twenty-two days and nights. Four of them did it in shifts. Barak, who had a PhD in military psychology from Moscow, was standing there. At one point, he said, “Look, Dr. Hussain. I’ll tell you what your problem is.
You think you’re smart enough, and we’re stupid. You may be smart in your own field, but we know what we are doing. Just tell us what you know and get this over.” I knew Saddam. He knew me. But this could happen to me. I remember once Saddam said to me, “You are a scientist. I am a politician. I will tell you what politics is about. I make a decision, I tell someone else the opposite, then I do something which surprises even myself.” The torture techniques in Baghdad were routine and varied in severity. The electric shocks could be everywhere, but sometimes they would burn people on the genitals and go on burning until they were completely burned off. They did the same with toes. They sometimes beat people with iron on the stomach or chest.
But with me, they were very careful not to leave any sign on me. I saw one man, and they had used a hot iron on his stomach. They used drills and made holes in bones, arms, and legs. I saw an officer, Nakib Hamid, and they dissolved his feet in acid. There was another torture where they would put sulfuric acid in a tub. They would take a man and start by dissolving his hands. Once, the founder of the Dawah Party, forty-one, Abdul Sahib Khayyil, was totally dissolved. Barak said to me, “Have you heard about Khayyil? This is where we dissolved him.” In the final stages of torture, they have a table with an electrical saw.
They can saw off a hand or a foot. The majority talk. The people who have refused to talk are exceptional. Adnan Salman, a head of the Dawah, refused to talk. He was brought in, I saw him, and by that time, they had a lot of confessions by other men who had been tortured. Adnan Salman was a teacher. Adnan knew, he was prepared. He told them, “My name is Adnan Salman. I am in charge of the Dawah Party, and none of these people are responsible for our activities. These will be my last words to you. You will never extract a single word from me.” They brought three doctors and told them that if Adnan died under torture, they would be executed. He didn’t utter a single word. Sometimes you would hear the doctors, so scared because they could not bring him back
from unconsciousness. I was in another torture room and could hear everything. I was in Abu Ghraib prison when I heard Adnan had been executed. He had not died under torture. One prisoner told me, he was seventeen and was the youngest prisoner. And so they made him sweep the corridors of the internal security headquarters every morning at seven o'clock. He saw a peasant woman from the south with tattoos, he said, a woman from the marshes with a girl of ten and a boy of about six. She was carrying a baby in her arms. The prisoner told me that as he was sweeping, an officer came and told the woman, tell me where your husband is. Very bad things can happen. She said, look, my husband takes great pride in the honor of his woman.
If he knew I was here, he would have turned himself in. The officer took out his pistol and held the daughter up by the braids of her hair and put a bullet into her head. The woman didn't know what was happening. Then he put a bullet into the boy's head. The woman was going crazy. He took the youngest boy by the legs and smashed the baby's brain on a wall. You can imagine the woman. The officer told the young prisoner to bring the rubbish trolley and to put the three children in it on top of the garbage and ordered the woman to sit on their bodies. He took the trolley out and left it. The officer had gotten to the habit of getting rid of people who were worthless.
Now, I know that. I know that there are questions about the Iraq war, about how we went about it, about whether it was a good decision. About how things went in the end when we bailed. But killing certain people, getting rid of certain people is a good in itself. And there were things going on in that country and people doing them that, that the world is a better place for not having them around. And this was a systematic, this was a regime of ISIS. This was if, people say, what if ISIS won? What if they actually had their state? We know what happened. This is what happened.
And I think people really need to ask themselves, people can have honest debates about whether it's the role of America in the world, or whether it's strategically viable, or you know, good for us to go intervene in things like this. But you're talking about a level of evil here that had taken possession of a population. That is really extraordinary. You know, it's not just a dictatorship. It's not just an authoritarian government. This is a level of evil that had taken those people in that country by the hair. And, you know, however the thing played out, and whatever reasons were given in the press for why we went over there, we tried to get those people out of that situation.
Well, yeah, we tried. I think probably a good place to wrap it up.
Yeah, we can move on from all the ugliness and some of the actual history here.
Possibly. Yeah, let's wrap this one. If you want to support this podcast, then you can check out our other podcasts, mine are Jocko Podcast, Warrior Kid Podcast, and Grounded Podcast. Daryl's podcast is called Martyr Made. You can also support this podcast and all those podcasts by getting some gear from JacoStore.com, or from OriginMaine.com. And if you were listening to this podcast on the Jocko Podcast feed, well, eventually we will create its own feed, and we'll separate these two. But look for that. Thanks for
listening, as things unravel. This is Jocko and Daryl. Out.
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