Baathism

Okay.

And, um, the Shah had, uh, approached, um, the Iraqi regime, you know, and this, this was, uh, This was basically, like, in the wake of, like, the Baathist ascendancy, you know.

And they'd worked out something of a concord, I mean, which makes sense, because Iraq, along with Iran, is, you know, like the Shia heartland.

And Khomeini had been in Iraq, and he was unceremoniously banished.

But one of the interesting things about the Iranian revolution is that One of the ways Khomeini was able to, when he came back from exile, you know, he'd been exiled from Iraq for decades, okay? And the Shah had approached the Iraqi regime, you know, and this was...

This was basically in the wake of the Baathist ascendancy.

And they'd worked out something of a concord, which makes sense, because Iraq, along with Iran, is like the Shia heartland.

And Khomeini had been in Iraq, and he was unceremoniously banished.

I mean, there's so many things.

You know, they, they came in and they purged the Ba'athists, which were Saddam Hussein's party.

But here's the problem with that.

What do you think people do when there's a dictatorship and the dictator has a party to survive? They join the party.

Mm-hmm.

So when they purged the Ba'athists, they purged everyone, including the people who knew how to run the government departments.

They dissolved the army.

Well, what happens when you dissolve the army? You have a lot of trained soldiers with nothing to do who are now pissed off.

that if you remember, we decided that the way we were going to respond to 9-11 was by possibly the most stupid war that the West has ever launched, namely the invasion of Iraq.

We decided that it was the result of a regime, which is absolutely the Baathist regime, that was profoundly anti-Islamist.

We marched in there in the name of human solidarity, the whole absurd positions, I think, which largely depend on Francis Fukuyama at the end of history, but in some ways go way, way, way back.

to the Second World War and arguably the end of the Second World War, the foundation of the United Nations, but arguably even to the American Declaration of Independence with the proclamation of universal natural rights and whatever.

So the answer to that is a, is a mixed one because the first act in Iraq was a very conventional military operation.

It was about assembling a force predominantly led by the United States and found by the United States to conduct a very orthodox invasion of Iraq to destroy the Iraqi armed forces and remove Saddam Hussein, and as we subsequently know, the Ba'athist regime.

And that was very familiar territory because that was the use of conventional armed forces to fight like conventional armed forces.

And we need to remember that at that time, when that was launched, there was great uncertainty about weapons of mass destruction, and could this work, and would there be casualties.

Um, the, the turmoil in the Middle East, uh, you know, not that I'm carrying water for Saddam Hussein, who was a very, very bad man, um, but the way that 9/11 was used as the excuse to go into Iraq, which was not an Islamic extremist country.

I mean, Saddam Hussein was a Ba'athist.

He was a secular fascist.

But he had nothing to do with 9/11.

Yeah.

If you get rid of the Ba'athists, then who comes next? Who's the next most powerful force? Probably the super duper majority population of the country and their political leaders who have been hiding in Iran for the last 20 years and are now prepared to inherit the revolution.

Yeah, man.

And it's very prophetic.