Iraq War

Mm

... or misleading propaganda over the Iraq War.

Um, then deliberate flouting of basic laws against torture, ethics and so forth, and much else.

And, and that w- kind of deeply shocking to a lot of people, but also, uh, set up global examples of how it was possible to behave, hugely undermined the kind of sense of international community-

Yeah, I do that all the time.

Um, the Ir- the Iraq War kicked off, and the memory of September 11th wasn't even two years old.

Uh, so there was huge fears of terrorism.

Ended up patrolling the New York City subway system with the NYPD that, at that point.

[laughs]

And then, and then you back it up just like Burnham backed up the Iraq War.

That's right.

I haven't forgotten.

Uh, did he get what he wanted? Well, the US did remove troops from Saudi Arabia.

Mostly, we took out most of them in 2003, uh, following the invasion of the Iraq War.

Whether or not that was really tied to any of his demands or something that we were just doing organically for our own reasons, working it out with Saudi Arabia, eh, we just didn't really see a need for troops in the region, so hard to attribute that to what he did on 9/11, but it was a goal of his, and it did happen.

Uh, end US support for Israel.

So you're constantly learning from an event that happened 25 years ago.

Uh, you could argue, Aaron, uh, politically, Obama doesn't become president, at least not at that time, had the Iraq War not happened.

Mm-hmm.

Uh, you could argue, again, Trump does not become president or at least the climate that created Donald Trump does not become president if you don't get the more, uh, nativists close the border, uh, you know, not quite America first at the time, but isolationist mood that hit the country.

You had to take the fraught votes to authorize a very expansive use of presidential power to launch the war on terror.

And later, the Iraq war in particular.

On Iraq, I think I have the numbers right, 29 of the 50 Senate Democrats, including you, voted yes.

So the Democrats were fairly divided.

I mean, I'm sure they've seen it on video, but nothing like the shock that it was to everybody who lived through it.

But they do remember, you know, parts of the Iraq war.

They remember the amount of, you know, bloodshed and all of that.

And and that is That is what Donald Trump characterized, you know, in the 2016 election.

So you have these, he starts his day with these highly secret, nerve-jangling briefings every day, often including information that turns out to be false alarms.

By the way, it is impossible to understand the atmosphere in which the Iraq War starts getting considered and comes to a really, high level of attention in the spring and early summer of 2002 without understanding this internal atmosphere that actually isn't even being seen by a lot of people working in the U.S. government because it's really concentrated right on the White House, right on these morning briefings that only went to a handful of people.

Let's turn to the report itself, Philip, which came out in July of 2004, July 22nd, 2004.

And I would direct your attention to Sections 12 and 13 of the report.

I'm the proud Gold Star mother of First Lieutenant Ken Ballard.

He was killed in the Iraq War.

Ken is buried at Arlington.

So for me, Arlington has been a nice, quiet place.