The Unravelling 2: Saddam at War

The Cold War and the Islamic revolutions of 1979 raises false hope among US policymakers for Saddam Hussein, whose blood-soaked reign would begin and end in war. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jocko Willink?

  This is the Jaco Unravelling 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 gotta keep us there for one more account here.

• 0:28Jocko Willink?

  It goes like this: "Horror in Saddam's Iraq takes endless forms.

• 0:34Jocko Willink?

  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.

• 1:20Jocko Willink?

  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.

• 1:34Jocko Willink?

  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.

• 1:50Jocko Willink?

  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.

• 2:08Jocko Willink?

  Aziz's six-year-old son grew very sick.

• 2:13Jocko Willink?

  She says, "He knew he was dying.

• 2:17Jocko Willink?

  There was no medicine or doctor. He started to cry so much."

• 2:24Jocko Willink?

  He died in his mother's lap.

• 2:28Jocko Willink?

  "I was screaming and crying," she told Goldberg.

• 2:33Jocko Willink?

  "We gave them the body."

• 2:37Jocko Willink?

  "It was passed outside and the soldiers took it."

• 2:43Jocko Willink?

  Soon after, she pushed her way to the window to see if her child had been taken for burial.

• 2:51Jocko Willink?

  She saw twenty dogs roaming in the field where the dead bodies had been dumped.

• 3:01Jocko Willink?

  She said, "I looked outside and saw the legs and hands of my son in the mouths of the dogs."

• 3:11Jocko Willink?

  "The dogs were eating my son."

• 3:16Jocko Willink?

  "Then I lost my mind."

• 3:25Jocko Willink?

  And that is from an article called Saddam's Shop of Horrors, written by Jeff Jacoby. And that was from the Boston Globe in 2002.

• 3:39Jocko Willink?

  So...

• 3:42Jocko Willink?

  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.

• 4:01Jocko Willink?

  So... Where does that kind of, um...

• 4:06Jocko Willink?

  Where's that guy come from?

• 4:07Speaker 01

  How much you know about his origin story?

• 4:09Jocko Willink?

  I know a pretty decent amount.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  I mean, it's a supervillain origin story in some ways.

• 4:14Jocko Willink?

  Completely.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  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 the, 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 hap... One guy does not do that.

• 4:51Speaker 01

  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.

• 5:00Jocko Willink?

  Yes, um, I'll tell you what, man.

• 5:07Jocko Willink?

  Leadership is the most important thing on the battlefield and it's guys like Hitler and guys like Saddam, 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

• 5:33Jocko Willink?

  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, you can convince yourself of and it's probably right in many cases, in the right conditions. Uh, you change those conditions.

• 5:59Jocko Willink?

  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, 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 Mele massacre and the Sand Creek massacre and we went, we went through those, but when I did Mele on my podcast,

• 6:28Jocko Willink?

  you know, those were normal people. 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'm, I talk to people a lot. I can read a crowd and they were looking at me

• 6:52Jocko Willink?

  as if I was, you know, a little bit crazy and maybe just, you know, trying to be extreme or whatever and I, and I, I'm looking back at them and I'm thinking, oh, they, 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, no. And then so I said, oh, wait, wait a second. You guys are looking at me like I, like I don't know what I'm talking about here.

• 7:12Jocko Willink?

  Like you're, like you're going to be in a platoon and this was actually, um, young, you know, uh, Officers on the way to being commissioned. So what was it officer candidates or cadets?

• 7:24Jocko Willink?

  And so you're looking at me like I don't know what I'm talking about right now.

• 7:28Jocko Willink?

  And, and I said, let me, let me ask you this. If I'm wrong, then how did, how did Mila unfold? How did that happen? If, if you've got a platoon or a company and there's 150 guys and there's no bad apples in there, how does that happen?

• 7:43Speaker 01

  That one, that one company just happened to get all the bad guys.

• 7:46Jocko Willink?

  Every bad. 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 him in a platoon, they got a sadist in there. Am I right? And 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

• 8:08Jocko Willink?

  he said, well, he said, how many people in a 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.

• 8:26Jocko Willink?

  Almost none of them are sadists, right? You, as soon as you're in the military, you have a higher percentage of, you know, what are 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 do. So there's a, there's a whole element that's already gone. So one out of 40 is pretty, pretty, pretty nice, pretty generous. And so as we talk about this, it's like, yes, I get it that

• 8:51Jocko Willink?

  it wasn't all Saddam, clearly. But man, you, you, he absolutely set the conditions for this. And that was the other thing, interesting thing about the Mila massacre is that it was one officer, you know, Thompson, who had flown in, saw what was happening, flew back, flew back to headquarters, said, these guys are murdering people. 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. It's instantly, you wouldn't believe, if you saw it in a movie, you wouldn't believe it.

• 9:20Speaker 01

  Like waking up from a dream.

• 9:21Jocko Willink?

  You wouldn't believe it if you saw in a movie, oh, they just gonna stop now? No, that's what happened. They got told, no, and they stopped.

• 9:29Speaker 01

  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 described 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. 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

• 10:11Speaker 01

  it with conviction, you know? 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 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.

• 10:53Speaker 01

  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 it. And you've got to figure out how to survive in a place where 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 somebody needs to send a message to a bunch of other people that's got nothing to do with you, and you've 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?

• 11:30Jocko Willink?

  I've seen some pretty devolved creatures up in Vermont.

• 11:35Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, no, it's uh, actually Vermont's probably a place where you wouldn't evolve. You'd get better, you'd become a better person up there in the, in the woods, in the sticks. So, let's go back to Saddam.

• 11:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:47Jocko Willink?

  Wh- wh- where were we at?

• 11:48Speaker 01

  Have you, have you ever seen the video? It's an amazing video, the video um, when he, at the meet, at the Baathist meeting where he took power.

• 11:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 11:56Speaker 01

  It is in, 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, it kinda cuts it short, you can go see the thing, but um, he's got all, so he's taken over, right, from General Qasim, who was the guy before him, and he's taken power, and he calls all the Baathist party leaders and senior, senior membership, into this assembly hall, and there, you know, some people are talking and 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 the people are like, "Yeah, okay."

• 12:41Speaker 01

  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 kinda, start to look around at each other, he's planned all this, so he's having it filmed, and he knows who's gonna be called, so like, the camera will go to some of them sometimes, and as he's calling these names, people are kinda looking like, "What is going on?" They know what's going on, but they're just, they're, 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."

• 13:24Speaker 01

  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 gonna do in that situation, right? And uh, you know, this is a guy who was in power for over, you know, for almost thirty years, for twenty-five 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 them to do to keep control of that of that society.

• 14:09Speaker 01

  And the rest of the people there had to figure out how to survive under that. I mean, from the moment Saddam takes power, he is at war essentially. You know, 1979, he takes power and he's at war with Iraq the next 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.

• 14:37Jocko Willink?

  For sure. Brutal.

• 14:39Speaker 01

  Over a million killed. You know, devolving to a point where the two sides are just launching, you know, 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 to let people know that you better not rise up.

• 15:04Jocko Willink?

  And this at this point, Saddam's pretty a pretty secular leader.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:14Jocko Willink?

  I mean, this isn't a guy that's out, you know, touting Islam as the as the rule of law around Iraq.

• 15:20Speaker 01

  He would stay that way till the 90s. Yeah, yeah. The Ba'athist party is a secular kind of socialist, pan-Arab, Arab nationalist party. And, you know, that's why, one of the things I think people really, really lose a little bit today is they think of 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 that's what we've been doing. When, you know, CENTCOM wasn't even stood up until 1983. You know, the Iran-Iraq war had 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

• 16:03Speaker 01

  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, when, 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.

• 16:47Speaker 01

  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 possession. 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.

• 17:16Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, this is when you see the pictures of Iran in 1974 and the women are wearing miniskirts out in town and it looks like a metropolitan, western country.

• 17:24Speaker 01

  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 and 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.

• 18:09Speaker 01

  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, Iran's not that way. Iran was a relatively free and open secular country, you know, where women were free. And 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 in Lebanon. It's why now they're still trying to establish

• 18:53Speaker 01

  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, that there's a larger project. So it doesn't just involve them. It involves the rest of the Muslim world. And 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, alright, maybe this guy's alright. Let's see how this plays out, right? He hasn't done all the things he's gonna do yet. I mean, he's not a nice guy. We know that. 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

• 19:35Speaker 01

  maybe he can, you know, who knows, maybe create enough stress on the Iranian regime that they flip back over or something like that.

• 19:41Jocko Willink?

  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 gonna want influence, he's gonna need what we have, we can, how can we, how can we, how can we bring him along? How can we bring him on our, our team?

• 20:01Speaker 01

  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, the level of, of beast that we were dealing with with Saddam. And I think by the end of the eighties, 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, but 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, with an expansionist foreign policy. And when they were fighting Iraq... You know, these are people who were, who were, who were 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.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  This is, this was a regime that looked very, very dangerous, and they were dangerous. 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, uh, Korean War's battles, but, um, I think, uh, 65,000 Iranians and 25,000 Iraqis were killed.

• 21:30Speaker 01

  I mean, it's a big battle.

• 21:31Jocko Willink?

  That's a big battle.

• 21:32Speaker 01

  Um, you know, in a, in a set piece battle, where 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, they're, I mean, they're at the point toward the end where their manpower's depleted and they're just launching scuds at each other's cities, you know, and, um, it's a brutal thing. And, uh, that ends in 1988. Month before that is when USS Vincennes shot down that Iranian airliner. But as the Iranians now know, from their recent experience.

• 22:10Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 22:11Speaker 01

  Things happen.

• 22:12Jocko Willink?

  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, the theme of having to thread tie back to the, but yeah, the Vincennes, uh, shot down an Iranian airliner, however many souls were on board, you know, hundreds, 150 or whatever that number is.

• 22:32Speaker 01

  Two ninety.

• 22:33Jocko Willink?

  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 button's going off, you know, they, there's, there's uncertainty going on.

• 23:03Speaker 01

  I remember I had some people that I knew, not military people, who 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, it totally, totally happened 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 yeah, they're in a situation where they're probably expecting to be targeted.

• 23:31Jocko Willink?

  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, probably actually you better than me, because you were in the, in the Combat Information Center, is that it? What's the CIC?

• 23:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's it.

• 23:48Jocko Willink?

  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 inbound. And there's that spin up of the voice, and, and now you've got to make a decision. You've got to make a decision of what we're gonna 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 it. 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.

• 24:21Speaker 01

  In 87, when the Starb got hit by an Iraqi cruise missile, two cruise missiles, I think, the TAO, Tactical Action Officer, and the commanding officer, they got disciplined for failing to defend their ship. And I, I got to 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 to, I've never had to make any decision like that, obviously. And yeah, it's a tough one. I mean, especially if you're Pan. 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.

• 25:00Jocko Willink?

  Bracing for impact.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  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 they had to have been bracing for impact. I mean, it, you know, they called ahead and everything supposedly, but I mean, golly, you just don't know.

• 25:18Jocko Willink?

  And the Vincents had had similar like spin ups going into that shoot down as well. Where it wa- that wasn't, that wasn't a, again, I'm not saying, 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.

• 25:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:43Jocko Willink?

  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, well, I guess we had Iraqis using it 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.

• 26:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:04Jocko Willink?

  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.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  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, and yeah, when you're dealing with something like air defense, you're not looking at an aircraft up there. You're looking at a blip on a radar screen, you know, at an aircraft that's out of visual range. And so Saddam, uh, yeah, we're talking about Saddam. This guy comes into power in 79, starts executing people, starts terrorizing the population. Immediately goes to war with Iran, has an eight-year-long war. It's the bloodiest war of 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 wanna kinda take a breather.

• 26:59Speaker 01

  But it's not, it's not what this guy's about.

• 27:01Jocko Willink?

  And it was kind of a draw.

• 27:03Speaker 01

  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.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  So a lot of the other Arab countries worried about Iran too. So they were financing Saddam. They were loaning him 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 too and we're not paying that $65 billion." And Kuwait's not willing to do that. They say that we're not gonna do it. Saddam's like, "Oh, you're gonna do it." And by the next summer, summer of 1990, he's invading Kuwait. So no rest for the weary, right? And he does it in an unpredictable way. I remember seeing an interview with Mubarak, the Egyptian president at the time, longtime Egyptian president. And we were allies with Mubarak. We knew him well. And he was not just allies with, he was friends

• 28:07Speaker 01

  with Saddam Hussein by this point. He knew him. They would talk on the phone. And he called Saddam on the phone. And he says, "What's going on here? Are you gonna 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 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 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,

• 28:49Speaker 01

  Arab on Arab like affairs, that's not really our business. We're not, we don't really, 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 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 even himself.

• 29:10Jocko Willink?

  That surprises himself.

• 29:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so maybe it was something like that. I mean, it's, it's not beyond him to just make that decision.

• 29:17Jocko Willink?

  Just the mentality that you're dealing with. I mean, you go into 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 gonna 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, you know, an incredible existence.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  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.

• 29:47Jocko Willink?

  So that's where you start, you know, that's where you start to really...

• 29:52Jocko Willink?

  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, they're, they're cheering for you and you go, you know what? All right. Hey, we're good. I'm gonna ride this out. I'm gonna 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.

• 30:34Jocko Willink?

  So I'm gonna 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 it, you, 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.

• 31:16Jocko Willink?

  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, 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 Czechoslovakia, you're storming into Poland. You've got these great resources now. You know what? Russia, England, I'm going. That, that's like a, a different mentality.

• 32:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:02Jocko Willink?

  And.

• 32:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 32:05Speaker 01

  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 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's kind of the, the big dog now and 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.

• 32:49Speaker 01

  And he, one of the things we've got to remember about this, I think it, 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.

• 33:05Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, for sure. So, Seaman recruit Willink, uh, joined the Navy, shipped out September 13th, 1990. So, you know, it 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 some, at some point in my life. I remember hearing, they anticipate 40,000 casualties in the first 48 hours.

• 33:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:32Jocko Willink?

  And I thought, man, I'm going to get, I'm going to 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%, 100% thought, we thought, or the US military, I 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 mask on, putting 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 straight, you, did you ever have to put on mop gear?

• 34:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:18Jocko Willink?

  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 behind you. They're just pants. You put them on over your regular pants. There's a drawstring. They're 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. Like this is gonna save you? Is that what we're saying?

• 34:55Speaker 01

  And you got to maneuver in the desert.

• 34:56Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, 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 gonna 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. 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 mask. So it was like, really nice. Yeah, so it's very strange.

• 35:29Speaker 01

  There were estimates 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 planted, 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 a statement here. But a lot of the military guys are 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 them. We brought

• 36:13Speaker 01

  six carrier strike groups in there. We brought the 7th Corps down from Europe. We brought the first Marines and the Marine Expeditionary Force. We had Arab allies. We had a bunch of it. We came rolling deep.

• 36:24Jocko Willink?

  Well, 300,000, 400,000 troops? What was the number? Do you know the number off the top of your head?

• 36:29Speaker 01

  It was over 400,000 when you count the Arab allies and stuff. And six carrier strike groups. I mean, we, 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 gears not, they can't win a war. And so we hit him.

• 37:01Jocko Willink?

  Watch this.

• 37:02Speaker 01

  We hit him hard, we drive him out of Kuwait, but when we didn't pursue him, he thought we were afraid to.

• 37:07Jocko Willink?

  Yeah.

• 37:08Speaker 01

  You know, he thought we were afraid to go pursue him and fight. And um.

• 37:12Jocko Willink?

  I was, I got to uh, I guess it must have been like ninety-three, ninety-four? I guess it was, okay ninety-four, ninety-four, when I was in Kuwait and you know, we would, we were going out to the desert to train, but we went up the highway of death and like still there was.

• 37:29Speaker 01

  Just littered.

• 37:30Jocko Willink?

  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 this story. There were Kuwaiti, there were, there were places where they had Kuwaiti women. Nine months later, where they had these orphan kids, cause so many Kuwaiti women had been raped by the, by Saddam's soldiers, that they had these orphans, pretty much. Have you heard that?

• 38:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, there's no, there was no limits. There are 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 it 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.

• 38:45Jocko Willink?

  And it is kinda strange, when you think about it, how quickly they broke down, because you, well 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?

• 38:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:59Jocko Willink?

  That's very strange. I wouldn't have predicted that. You know, I, sometimes I talk about the fact that I don't bet on the UFC.

• 39:07Jocko Willink?

  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's gonna win. And sure enough, I'd lose. I would have lost. And I realized, you know, there's been a couple of times where I had good inside information and it played out just the way I thought it would.

• 39:52Jocko Willink?

  But as Joe Rogan says, it's a fight.

• 39:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:56Jocko Willink?

  And anything can happen in a fight. So if you were to tell me, and I'm trying, and I'm, look, I'm trying not to be, not, try not to use the benefit of hindsight. Because it's real easy to look back, oh, of course, we've got the technological power. And even when you just, I, I threw 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 have asked me, knowing what I know now.

• 40:20Jocko Willink?

  Hey, uh, who's gonna win? Or what, 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.

• 41:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:01Jocko Willink?

  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 was not a given. And it ended in the fact that it was so easy, which is exactly what it was. And I'm curious, I mean, the, the Iraqi soldiers just fell apart.

• 41:25Speaker 01

  Fell apart.

• 41:25Jocko Willink?

  And ran.

• 41:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:26Jocko Willink?

  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?

• 41:33Speaker 01

  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 gotta send runners if they want to talk to somebody. And then the first Marines just rampages straight at them.

• 42:06Jocko Willink?

  And, and, and to your point, you know, this is, um, you know, this is the, this is centralized command, right? This is, this is not a bunch of, hey, I got caught off in 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.

• 42:21Speaker 01

  I think most Arab armies are like.

• 42:23Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah. Uh, I'm not doing a damn thing until I get told exactly what to do because I'm not going to get.

• 42:28Speaker 01

  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, mass, mass.

• 42:40Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's hard to understand the psychology behind that, actually.

• 42:44Speaker 01

  And it taught us some, you know, we learned some negative lessons from that as well.

• 42:48Jocko Willink?

  Well, yeah, we absolutely learned some negative lessons from that. Hmm. Although,

• 42:59Jocko Willink?

  I don't know, right? I mean, let's face it, the be the opening, the opening salvos of, of the invasion in 2003.

• 43:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:08Jocko Willink?

  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 Bustler was, um, who is on the push up, you know? Nozaria, there was a little hesitation, there was some, some fighting, but it was vastly massive surrender.

• 43:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, the American military is, is 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 how, I used to play paintball a lot with my friends and we would go play paintball and we were all fast. We were athletes, we were like, you know, whatever. And we would 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.

• 44:06Speaker 01

  And, uh, I, you know, how, how many times you read about like, you know, um, Ranger unit in 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 buzzsaw 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.

• 44:42Jocko Willink?

  Yes.

• 44:42Speaker 01

  It's, uh, it's kind of, it's politically uniting, you know? You remember back, uh, you remember back in the early nineties, 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.

• 44:58Jocko Willink?

  I actually don't remember this at all.

• 45:00Speaker 01

  It was, it would be the equivalent of today of like Katy Perry and Taylor Swift.

• 45:04Jocko Willink?

  What was it? Uh, like a music video pro troops or something?

• 45:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was just singing 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.

• 45:14Jocko Willink?

  I was probably in boot camp or something because I do not remember that at all.

• 45:17Speaker 01

  It, you gotta watch it just for the different times. It's because today it would be hard to imagine anything like that. And especially from that class of people. Um, and it was so it was politically unifying, you know, it was kind of, we didn't lose much of anybody. You know, we behaved ourselves very, very honorably, you know?

• 45:39Jocko Willink?

  Yes, you are, then I, then I accept your assessment that some bad lessons were learned, not so much about. Yeah, about, about, we, we learned the lesson that this was gonna be easy.

• 45:50Speaker 01

  And then Kosovo reinforced that.

• 45:52Jocko Willink?

  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.

• 46:03Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 46:04Jocko Willink?

  And you look up and you go, well.

• 46:06Speaker 01

  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 kinda too cautious. A little too scared, a little too shocked by Vietnam, you know, and 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. 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 gonna go into Iraq.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  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, a little bit of distrust between the civilian and military leadership that came in.

• 47:02Jocko Willink?

  Ah, that's really, um, really disturbing. But it's such a, it's like, as, as you, as you talk about it, 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. Instead of explaining, they just get mad and they say, you know, I'm telling you, you gotta trust me. And like, that, that, all, that's all, all that is. It's, it's, it's awful. It's awful.

• 47:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, and, um.

• 47:38Speaker 01

  You know, I think that the intelligence side as well, you know, our intelligence did not see the invasion of Kuwait coming, it caught us off guard. And so, you know, some of the civilian leadership lost trust with the intelligence community there. When 9/11 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 to 2003 between, you know, the brass at the DOD and some of these other places and the actual military leadership and the intelligence community leadership. And I think, you know, there were, we'll get into that in maybe the next episode or so, that, you know, there were some breakdowns in communication at the leadership level that

• 48:21Speaker 01

  ended up filtering down to you guys on the ground, and that's what I'm kind of interested in hearing about.

• 48:26Jocko Willink?

  Is there anything else to wrap up, kind of, pre- like escalation of tensions leading into, into the invasion in 03?

• 48:38Speaker 01

  I think we can probably talk a little bit about it in the next episode. 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 sore 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 sales,

• 49:19Speaker 01

  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 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 gonna 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 UN resolutions, all, none of that means that. You won, you outlasted us. You outlasted the global community, right? The global order with all of these institutions behind it.

• 50:01Speaker 01

  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 gonna lift all this and, and you, admit you won. And create that precedent for other people like you going forward. Um, or, you know, in a post nine eleven world, we can go in there and do something about it. And that was really, you know, the second Iraq war, if you wanna 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, uh,

• 50:44Speaker 01

  moments of acute combat in one long war with Saddam Hussein's regime. Mm-hmm. Um, we were launching airstrikes at him all through the nineteen nineties. In nineteen ninety-three, he tried to assassinate George H.W. Bush. This is after he's, 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, uh, 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.

• 51:29Speaker 01

  Because we can't build him up. And so what do you do? And people are going to be debating, you know, long after we get done with this, uh, you know, what the right thing to do there was, but I think people oversimplify what our options were.

• 51:43Jocko Willink?

  Yeah. And again, it's, well, two things. One thing I want to correct is I said that a guy that I had on 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, I, I just to frame this up. You know, some people say that I'm like a driven person, right? And, and, you know, and, and I, I, I am, you know, there's, I, I want to do things and I want to, you know, I, when somebody says, you know, what's your goal? I'll be like, take over the world, right?

• 52:21Jocko Willink?

  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, it's like, hey, aren't you good? Like you've got a country, you've taken over, you've got billions of dollars worth of assets. You fought a long war. Like,

• 52:55Jocko Willink?

  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.

• 53:15Speaker 01

  There's actually, there is one thing that we did 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 blacken the sky, creates the biggest oil spill in human history by opening up the valves in Kuwait and sending it out 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. 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.

• 53:58Speaker 01

  And 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, you know, that wasn't gonna happen. The Sunni population wasn't gonna turn on him to hand over control to the Shiites. That's not happening, no. You know, that's not gonna 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 100,000, 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

• 54:42Speaker 01

  earlier, up into the mountains. This is in January and February, they're gonna freeze to death, they're gonna 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 gonna kill these women and children if the men don't stay put." They stay put, he massacres all the men. And so, all these Kurds flee up into the mountains, and we have junior, you know, State Department, Defense Department 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'm taking him out." And, because they felt like we betrayed those people, and we did. We did.

• 55:27Speaker 01

  You know? 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, "Well, what are we gonna do with these people?" And Turkey's like, "You're not keeping Kurds here, right?" And so, we're like, "Well..." People were worried that if we set them up in like a, 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 that 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.

• 56:05Jocko Willink?

  Was it Southern Watch? That was Operation Southern Watch?

• 56:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, um, I don't remember, actually. I don't remember. Um, I don't, I thought it was a part of Provide Comfort, like

• 56:15Jocko Willink?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, it might have been Provide Comfort.

• 56:17Speaker 01

  Provide Comfort and Provide Comfort 2. 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 Rebeel, 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,

• 56:36Jocko Willink?

  Yep.

• 56:36Speaker 01

  then the good people can come in and just build up a nice little society.

• 56:41Jocko Willink?

  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 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, 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 Cubans that were saying that, all of them that were saying that were in America. And so, they're saying,

• 57:25Jocko Willink?

  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 it's just gonna take a little bit to tip the scales is, is 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, they can rise up against them.

• 57:52Speaker 01

  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, 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 dedication as far as timeline went, some presence. But I think that what that war turned into had a lot to do with decisions that we made once we were there.

• 58:24Jocko Willink?

  There's no doubt about it. And I guess we can get on those, get into those decisions and that war next time. So if you want to support this podcast, check out our other podcasts. I have Jocko Podcast, The Warrior Kid Podcast, and The Grounded Podcast. And Daryl's got a podcast called Marger 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 JacoStore.com, or get some gear from OriginMaine.com. Got all kinds of stuff on there. Thanks for listening as things unravel. This is Jaco and Daryl. Out.