153. The Road to Iraq: Weapons of Mass Destruction (Ep 1)

19:40David:another. Thank you for that explainer. So in Iraq, I guess we should just, the specific context of Iraq is it had become independent from Britain in the 30s, ruled over initially by a Hashemite monarchy. So the same family that the Brits also put in charge in Jordan, and they're still there in Jordan. But in Iraq, in 1958, there's a military coup and Iraq becomes a republic. And the Ba 'athists are kind of in the mix at that point. But they do not like the fact that Iraq's then prime minister is flirting with some communists. And so there's a plot by the Ba 'ath Party to assassinate Iraq's prime minister in 1959.

20:17David:Now, interestingly enough, there are claims that the CIA might have had some role in this, because would you believe that those devious Machiavellian types of the CIA might engage in plots against people who are flirting with communists? Not in the 50s, for sure. No way. Right. Just amazingly, it just seemed to have happened in Guatemala and Iran, according to previous series we've done. And so there's no kind of hard proof for it, but it's not implausible anyway. The CIA have a little flirtation with the Barfists at this point. But the plan is it's an assassination plan against Iraq's prime minister.

20:55David:And Saddam is part of the team, but he's a late arrival to the team and he doesn't seem to be well trained. They're going to ambush the prime minister's car. the story is Saddam because he's a bit hot headed shoots early too early and it screws the whole thing up and the Prime Minister's driver is killed but not the Prime Minister and Saddam himself gets shot in the leg he then has to escape from this failed assassination attempt the legend is he swims across the Tigris River to escape he goes on the run hiding in a farm and eventually flees the country making his way to Cairo where he then embeds himself in a world of kind of exiles and plotting.

21:40David:And actually, one of the things I did was make a documentary. I produced a documentary for the BBC about the kind of making of Saddam Hussein in his early days. We actually went to Cairo and we managed to track down someone from Egyptian intelligence who could recall Saddam Hussein as a young man. And he said, he was always plotting. He was plotting, plotting, always plotting. But anyway, in 1963, the Barthists then launch another coup to take over the country. Again, does the CIA help the Barthists? Maybe, who knows? I mean, one of the interesting questions about that is, of course, neither side would want to admit it later if there had been some help, because it doesn't look great for the CIA, it doesn't look great for the Barthists to be helping each other.

22:23David:But whatever it is, Saddam comes back from exile. There's more plotting, there's more coups. I think what you get in this period, though, with all this plotting, is Saddam learning that you've got to be ruthless to take power and then hold on to it and be suspicious of everyone. So that's another core part of his personality.

22:47Gordon:And so by 1968, he's the number two guy in the country. He's ridden this train of coups and plotting to a very high position. Saddam actually told one of his friends that he deliberately stayed behind the scenes to concentrate on building a secret security and intelligence network. That makes sense. That tracks with how you become effective in a political environment where power is rotating constantly and it's really unstable. So that's a level of sort of learning and intelligence and comprehension that I think he has about how you take and hold power in this kind of system. Yeah.

23:24David:And then July 17th, 1979, 11th anniversary of the revolution, the then president resigns, apparently just because he's old and tired. And Saddam Hussein, now aged 42, is appointed Iraq's new president. And of course, what do you do when you've just taken over? You immediately move against your opponents, don't you? You basically take out everyone and you make clear what kind of rule you're going to have. Five days later, he summons 200 Ba 'ath Party members to an auditorium. And it's a great scene, isn't it?

23:57Gordon:Steve Cole, who has a relatively new book out called The Achilles Trap that I think is fantastic and describes the relationship between the US and the CIA and Saddam going back decades before the war, describes this scene really well. He compares it to a Stalinist scene from the 1930s where Saddam's sitting at a table on the stage, puffing on a cigar. There's TV cameras rolling. and of course what do you do to purge people you say that there's an awful plot that's already been discovered against saddam and that some of the plotters surprise surprise are in that very room wow and so saddam gets up unfolds a piece of paper of course you know all pre-planned and choreographed reads the names out loud of 60 people that he is obviously loved and trusted They're walked out of the room and Saddam, like so many psychopathic people, is also very emotional.

24:58Gordon:And he dabs his eyes with a handkerchief. 21 of them are executed by a firing squad.

25:04David:That's the way he rolls. And he's building as well a cult of personality. Another great detail from that book. By 1979, he's becoming a film producer. He bankrolls a film called Clash of Loyalties about Iraq's creation starring Oliver Reed, who in his time was a famous British actor, rather a drunken British actor. Then Saddam commissions a six-hour TV adaptation of his own early life, which, again, we'd all do if we had the time and the money, with a lookalike playing him. And then he pays Terence Young, who directed the first two Bond movies, to edit this film. And he's, of course, the glorious saviour of his nation, an eagle, as his mother calls him, and a champion of the Arab world.

25:49Gordon:1979. That is the year that Saddam comes to power. It is also the year of the Iranian revolution, which brings Khomeini and the Islamic Republic into being. And Saddam sees himself as the champion of the Arab world. And that is very much in contrast and in conflict with the Iranian revolution and those Persians over there in Iran.

26:13David:Yeah, that's right. So on September the 22nd, 1980, Saddam launches airstrikes on Iran. And the next day launches a ground invasion into Kuzestan, a strategic western province in Iran. He's going to claim he was provoked. You know, it wasn't him who struck first. Now, this was supposed to be a quick lightning strike against the Iranian regime, which had not bedded in, but which he thought would be a threat to the region. Saddam seeing himself as leader. He thought there'd be an uprising from some regions from minorities. Does that sound familiar? Leading to a quick, decisive victory against the Iranians.

26:51David:You can see where we're getting there.

26:52Gordon:The province he invades, Kuzestan has, I'm not sure at the time if it was majority Arab, but it has a significant Arab population. So I suppose Saddam drew a straight line from the beating heart of the pan-Arab world there in Baghdad, presuming that the Iranian Arabs would rise up. didn't work. These quick wars in Iran don't seem to go very well. And this one's an absolute disaster, isn't it, for Saddam?

27:19David:Yeah. I mean, Iraq immediately gets bogged down in this war, and it becomes clear it's going to become a war of attrition. Iraq bombs Karg Island, which is the crucial oil terminal, which is in the news this year as well. And in retaliation, then Iran attacks shipping, carrying Iraqi oil in the Strait of Hormuz, again, Again, sounding somewhat familiar, what you get in that case, let's hope we don't get it this time, is a brutal eight-year war in which Iran uses these human wave attacks of quite young recruits. It shapes the Iranian regime. So I think if you want to understand Iran today, you have to look back at this war, don't you?

27:58David:Because it creates this cult of martyrdom and embeds the Revolutionary Guards in power and makes it think about how it preserves itself against being under attack.

28:08Gordon:One, you know, we should say this, this will not be a series about Iran, but it is important to the story about this journey is kind of conflict between the US and Iraq. And it'll be really important to that story for a couple reasons, in particular, with respect to the Americans and WMD. So maybe there, let's take a break. And when we come back, we will see how Saddam navigates the end of this war.

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28:53Gordon:Ooh, with that, you know this is going to be full of twists and turns.

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29:30Gordon:This is a fast-paced, edge-of-your-seat story where you never quite know who to trust, Or what happens next?

29:36David:That's right. So it's the next great thing to binge and you can watch all episodes from the 30th of April on Sky.

29:45Gordon:Welcome back. We're in the Iran-Iraq war in the middle of the 1980s. And this is where Saddam Hussein's relationship with America, including the CIA, starts to get really complicated.

29:57David:Yeah, that's right. I mean, suddenly having not been very keen on him, in the American eyes, Saddam is the lesser of two evils for Washington, because they really don't like the Iranians, as we know, hostage crisis, all these other things. So there's an element of my enemy's enemy is my friend. So as Iraq starts to struggle in this war against Iran, the CIA offers covert help to Saddam Hussein, primarily in the form of satellite imagery and intelligence about Iranian positions.

30:27Gordon:A former and also future US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, no less, goes as an envoy to Iraq in 1983 and

30:43David:1984 to discuss this cooperation. The reality, though, is that I think the US doesn't really want Saddam or the Iranians to win. It wants a stale meeting. It's quite useful if these two countries just pound each other.

30:56Gordon:It's worth dwelling for a minute, I think, on how the U.S. perceived Saddam at this time, which is kind of hard to do because we have not yet had the first Gulf War, the Persian Gulf War. We have not yet had 2003. We have not had the whole sanctions regime in the 90s, all of which we'll talk about. But if you just go back to this point, what is the American sense of Saddam? Is it just he's another brutal Arab dictator who could be our brutal Arab dictator, but we kind of don't like him and he's unstable. And so we're just going to hope these two countries swing at each other for a while and bleed each other out.

31:34Gordon:I mean, what's the sense of Saddam at the time?

31:36David:Yeah, he's definitely not a kind of client dictator like some of the other dictators in the region where the US has got defense deals and really actively supporting them. Because he is, one of the things about Saddam is he's very anti-Israel and he is very fiercely kind of Arab nationalist. But he's useful. And I think that's why we're fundamentally talking about a largely covert relationship at this time, rather than a real overt friendship between the US and Iraq. But it's interesting because then in the mid 80s, the world learns that the US have been shock horror double dealing because there's been this thing called the Iran Contra affair, which is where the CIA was also secretly helping Iran, or at least the White House was, and supplying it with US weapons.

32:29David:I mean, it's a kind of wild story, isn't it? We haven't really got time to get into the depths of it. We should definitely do it sometime because it's a crazy story. But it was giving the Iranians weapons in order to get hostages freed and then channeling that money to contras in Latin America to avoid the fact that Congress hadn't wanted them funded. Something like that.

32:53Gordon:It was all part of the Reagan trickle down economy, Gordon. Eventually that money was going to trickle down to ordinary Americans. No, you got it right. And it says the insanity of how you just described it is why it would make a great series on the pod because it is absolutely wild. And Saddam, this is what I find this so interesting about the character of Saddam Hussein. Because Saddam is shocked by this, by these revelations. He thinks, well, I thought the Americans were supporting me in the war. So for a ruthless, double-dealing dictator who I think has been in the sort of muck and mire of the human experience, you would think he would see all of this as part of the game, but he doesn't.

33:37Gordon:He's constantly misreading the US, constantly misreading the US.

33:44David:and has this view as well of the CIA being all powerful, which I think a lot of people, particularly in the Middle East, which of course it is. Which of course it is. Of course it is. Infallible, all powerful. But he has this vision of it. So he's a little bit kind of confused by this. So that's one aspect of the Iran-Iraq war, which is very important for our story, which is this kind of strange relationship with the Americans. The second bit, though, is where we get to weapons of mass destruction. WMD, the shorthand, nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, They're all a bit different. But the Iran-Iraq war is also very important to understand these.

34:18David:So maybe we should start with the nuclear one first.

34:21Gordon:So in the 70s, Saddam, when he had been vice president, had been tasked with getting nuclear technology from France for peaceful purposes. Obviously, Gordon, right? I mean, this is clearly what they were after. We talked about this a bit in our short two-part series on Iran, which we released on April 13th, looking at this question of what you could do to degrade Iran's nuclear capabilities. And so really, the Iraqi desire ambition for a nuclear program predates Saddam's regime and presidency.

34:56David:Yeah. Saddam is, as I said, very violently anti-Israel. He wants to be a leader in the Arab world, confronting Israel. Israel, They all know how the bomb. So that's another one of the drivers. We talked a little bit, didn't we, about how then Israel obviously does not want Iraq to get the bomb. And we have these Mossad plots, bombings, assassinations, and actually an attack on Iraq itself in 1981.

35:24Gordon:Yeah, the reactor arrives and is on the path to becoming operational. But in the summer of 1981, Israel targets that reactor before it's loaded with fuel. There's an airstrike. Again, we talked about this briefly in our nuclear series on Iran. In less than two minutes, Israel has blown a hole in the reactor's dome and destroyed the control room inside, which causes an upper floor to collapse into the reactor's core. And that piece of technology, that critical piece of Saddam's nuclear ambitions are destroyed in just a couple minutes of Israeli air power. But it's not the air force. Oh, but it's not the end?

36:05Gordon:Oh, man. Surprise, surprise. Shockingly. Shockingly. And we talked about this a little bit in that series, but this is where we asked the question of, well, is this Israeli strike successful? It was successful in destroying the reactor, but then it changes Saddam's calculations about the path to get to a nuclear bomb.

36:27David:Yeah. Rather than thinking, I'm not going to go for it, he wants to double down. He really wants one now. And he believes he needs one as a deterrent and as a means of projecting force. So after the strike, Saddam summons a top nuclear scientist, a man called Jaffa Dihajaffa. I met him actually after the Iraq war of 2003. I met him in 2004 in Paris. And I did, I think, the first interview he did after the fall of Saddam. Really interesting character. He is effectively the godfather, to some extent, of the Iraqi nuclear program as it was. Very erudite, very smart, very proud of his work. And like all of the best people who've trained in Britain, which is, he definitely had a mixed view of Britain, but he spent 10 years at boarding school in Britain and then being at university in Britain, learning to be a nuclear physicist.

37:19David:And then Saddam had asked him back first in the 70s to work on the nuclear program. He'd actually been jailed briefly. It's a really interesting story because he pleaded for the release of another nuclear scientist who was a friend who'd been imprisoned for not being willing to help Saddam. But after the Israeli strike, after 1981, Jaffa is summoned by Saddam. And Saddam tells him, and he recounted this to me, Saddam says, I want a bomb. I think I need one as a deterrent against future attacks. And I want you to build me one.

37:54Gordon:I'd imagine, Gordon, you're very proud to have matriculated the father of Iraq's nuclear bomb. Where did he go to school, by the way, when he was in the UK?

38:03David:Well, he went to Seaford College, a boys boarding school in Sussex. And then he goes to the University of Birmingham and studies nuclear physics there. He is actually a very impressive scientist. And that's one of the interesting things about him, is I think he was underestimated, because I think a lot of people go, how does this guy know about nuclear physics? He knew what he was doing. So he goes back to Iraq in the 70s, because Saddam can see his value. At one point, interestingly enough, he's jailed, just briefly, for pleading for the release of another nuclear scientist who'd been jailed by Saddam.

38:42David:so he's standing up for fellow scientists as well but he's summoned by saddam after that strike in 1981 by israel and saddam tells him directly and i remember him talking to me about this that saddam says i want you to build me the bomb and of course they're going to have to change routes they can't do it with a big reactor anymore it's too obvious so instead he's going to go down the clandestine uranium enrichment route.

39:13Gordon:It's the Iranian route, right, in some ways?

39:15David:To some extent, yeah. The Iranians also go down the enrichment route. They are using centrifuges, but Jafar thinks, well, these are quite hard to build. And he's right. They're hard to build and hard to get the parts without being spotted. So instead, he actually goes down another enrichment route involving something called electromagnetic isotope separation, David, which I'm sure - Are you going to do the science explainer on it now?

39:39Gordon:You should. I think this is your chance. I should.

39:41David:You use electromagnets to separate the isotopes. Yeah, that's right. That's what you do. But it is one of the techniques used in the Manhattan Project in America in World War II. And you do use large magnets, I think. That's all I know.

39:56Gordon:Really, really big magnets are an important part of it.

39:59David:Which, again, sounds a bit Austin Powers. But it's quite hard to produce it. But Saddam is obviously pressuring him around 1987. Saddam is saying, you know, press forward for a bomb. Jafar says, maybe I can get one by 1990. And Saddam tells him, if you produce the nuclear bomb, I will make a golden statue of you. Which is a very kind of Saddam kind of offer. That's what you want, a golden statue.

40:26Gordon:What does Jafar think about producing a bomb for Saddam Hussein? Does he have some moral qualms about this work or is he cool with it?

40:34David:I asked him about this directly and I said, you know, Saddam's a dictator. he's not a pleasant man did you have any qualms about trying to build him a bomb and there was this long pause and he says well we didn't quite get to that stage but you're on the way i said and he said you know uh i didn't think about it very much i was just kind of engaged in the technical side i think fundamentally he viewed it as creating a deterrent to prevent iraq being attacked and that being his duty. So the one thing he does do, though, quite successfully, and again this is really important for our story, is he's good at keeping it secret.

41:13David:So the CIA do not know about this clandestine program that Jafar is building. And they are judging that Iraq couldn't build a bomb without foreign help or equipment or a nuclear reactor. And I think, you know, it's interesting because I think they're quite dismissive of scientists like Jafar. I think the view is these Arabs, they can't build their own bomb. It requires Western help, Western technology, Western assistance, or something else. And I think they underestimate him and others.

41:43Gordon:Well, I suppose at the time, that's a logical assumption. It's an assumption. But the Israeli program was created in part from stealing plans and technology from other programs. In the 70s, the Iraqi program, that reactor was a French reactor. And so much of the technical expertise and scientific expertise that the Iraqis had in the 70s was from France. So it's a reasonable assumption, but this will be a problem much later because it's an assumption that is untested and is proven to be dramatically wrong in time. And it's not just when we talk about WMD, it's not just nuclear, is it? it's chemical weapons as well.

42:30David:Yeah. And these are an important part of our story because after the 1981 strike on the nuclear reactor, Saddam also orders more work on chemical weapons, calls it Project 92. The aim is to develop things like mustard gas and deadly agents like sarin and VX, which you can place on artillery shells.

42:49Gordon:This stuff is really nasty too. I had a little bit of experience with this when we were dealing with the Syrian chemical weapons issue in 2012 and 2013. And this stuff is just awful. And I think it's important to at least mention what it does to a human when the human inhales this or is exposed to it, because it's a large part of why there's so much horror about someone like Saddam or regime like Saddam's having these kind of weapons because what these chemical weapons, they more or less do is they kill your body's ability to turn off its own nervous system. And it leads to things like tightening of the chest.

43:32Gordon:You can't breathe. You go into seizures. You lose muscle control over your entire body. It's agonizing when you're exposed to this and when someone's dying. So it is a really horrifying set of weapons that Saddam is trying to build.

43:49David:Yeah. And with help from German companies, Iraq builds in the early 80s what's officially the state enterprise for pesticide production at Al-Mutana. But in reality, that's his chemical weapons facility. And what's important is he's not just going to develop it, he's going to use things like mustard gas in the Iran-Iraq war at that time. It's being used because, as we said, it's a kind of war of attrition. You've got the Iranians throwing human waves at them. And that's where the Iraqis think, well, what's useful is chemical weapons. Now, again, this gets to some controversial areas, because what did the US know about this?

44:29David:Because if you go back, you'll remember the US is supplying satellite imagery of Iranian positions, which the Iraqis are then hitting with chemical weapons. Now, that is different from saying the US was directly encouraging or supporting the use of chemical weapons. And I don't think they would have done, but they certainly knew they were being used because reports start to emerge. And that satellite imagery continues during that period. I think maybe the most

45:00Gordon:dramatic and awful use of chemical weapons came in a place called Halabja, which I think you've you visited, Gordon?

45:09David:Yeah, I was in Iraq in this Kurdish region. So it's in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq. And I visited just before the war in 2003. So I was there in February 2003. And I went to Halabja. And this was a place that Saddam targeted because the Kurds were allied or seen as sympathetic to the Iranians. And there was something called the Anfal campaign linked by one of Saddam's cousins who becomes known as Chemical Alley, which is because he was gassing the Kurds. So I'm there about 15 years afterwards. So obviously there's nothing physically left. But I remember interviewing one guy who showed me a bunker in which he'd hid when the chemicals had been dropped from the sky over the town.

46:00David:And he told me about how he just emerged eventually from this bunker and found that most of his relatives had died from the gas attacks and i think something like 5 000 are killed in halabja in one town alone it is a reminder that saddam is a terrible tyrant and actually did have chemical weapons and did use them against well his own people. But at the time, the US downplays the reports, doesn't say they're not true, but people don't care about them. But for many people, this is one of the reasons why they will want to get rid of Saddam is because they will view him as a murderous tyrant, you know, for those people who care about human rights and the Kurds.

46:46David:And there were definitely constituencies who felt that, who remember Halabja and say, this is kind of dark, evil man.

46:53Gordon:And in particular, a lot of Iraqi exiles who will repeat that mantra, which is true over and over again to people in Washington and in London in an attempt to sell the war. But by the summer of 1988, the Iran-Iraq war has come to an end. I think it's fair to say nobody won this one. It ends essentially in a draw. It has cost the Iraqis a lot of money and lives. And Saddam wants to be a winner, and to probably, thinking back to his past and his sort of ruthless upbringing, understands that not winning a war might be interpreted as a sign of weakness, both by the Iranians and by people inside his own regime.

47:42Gordon:So he needs money. He needs to replace what he's lost at the war. and what does he do next, Gordon?

47:50David:Yeah, Saddam is also becoming a bit more angry and paranoid and a bit unbalanced at this time. I think that's the general view. He's building bigger monuments to himself. He also has these two sons, and we'll come back to them, Uday and Kuse, who are barbaric and corrupt. And he's also lashing out against the West. He wants to be the champion of the Arab world. He actually hangs a British journalist from the Observer newspaper who'd collected soil samples. in the country to try and prove the use of chemical weapons, claims he's a spy. Saddam is preoccupied with assassination plots, particularly with Israel.

48:27David:But as part of his move against the Arab world, the next move does surprise everyone. He's angry that the Arab states had loaned him money but now want the money back. Kuwait in particular, he's angry at because it won't wipe out the debts that he owes them from the war. There's also a longstanding border dispute. Iraq and Kuwait have a border together. He claims that the Kuwaitis are slanting their oil drilling under the border to steal Iraq's oil. But he does something which I think no one really thought he would do in the summer of 1990, which he decides he's going to invade Kuwait and seize it.

49:09Gordon:In one sense, it's out of the blue. And in another, there was a buildup observed, because the CIA is watching satellite imagery, presumably of the troop buildup on Iraq's border with Kuwait. Another important theme of this series will be, we're not in the mind of Saddam Hussein and have a hard time understanding the kinds of things Saddam Hussein does and why he does them. We mirror image onto Saddam when he has his own logic and interior kind of rationality, but it's thought to be a bit of a coin flip whether he's not going to invade.

49:41David:Yeah. The question is, is he just building up forces on the border to pressure Kuwait, or is he going to do it? It's a bit like the debates around, is Russia going to invade Ukraine in 2022? Surely Putin won't be mad enough. Well, in this case, Saddam is. There's a little interesting failure of US deterrence because Saddam seems to think the US is not going to object. And he has a meeting with a US diplomat in Baghdad and he monologues this US diplomat, April Glasby, for about an hour, which Saddam does. And she, in response, gives him the official line, which is, we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts like your border disagreement with Kuwait.

50:19David:Now, she thinks, well, this is actually, I'm just giving him the official line. But he's like, oh, well, you know, why didn't you tell me not to invade? Right. I mean, exactly. It's one of the many times where Saddam misunderstands Washington. And I think his failure to understand America is one of the themes of our stories. He thinks, again, the CIA is all powerful. They'll know he's planning to invade. So if they don't want him to invade, then they'll tell him not to do it. And instead, they just kind of come out with some, you know, line. So So he thinks he can get away with it. August the 2nd, 1990, Iraqi troops go into Kuwait, says it's going to be annexed to be Iraq's 19th province.

50:59Gordon:Exciting news for the Kuwaiti royal family. Yeah.

51:02David:Thrilling. In Baghdad, it's interesting. The number two in the US embassy at the time is a diplomat called Joe Wilson, and he's going to play a role later in our story. And he kind of recalls being woken up in the middle of night, said, you know, I have the White House on the line. and he's kind of half asleep and he thinks it's the president. And he says, I stood at attention stark naked and saluted. And then the line went dead. And then he calls back and it's actually just the National Security Council telling him, don't you know there's been an invasion? What's happening? And he goes to see Sudan who says, we'll keep Kuwait.

51:34David:And if you don't react, we'll give you all the oil. We'll be your regional enforcer. We promise not to attack Saudi Arabia. But if you fight us, we'll spill the blood of 10 ,000 soldiers in the sands of Arabia, and we don't believe you'll do that. That's Saddam's kind of view. Seems reasonable.

51:52Gordon:But of course, the US does decide to drive them out of Kuwait. It is in part about oil. It's also about an expression of this new world order post the collapse of the Soviet Union. The US wants to show that it is going to enforce these kind of rules, that you can't redefine boundaries by force. And it's also a win for the Brits, isn't it, Gordon?

52:15David:Yeah, because famously, Margaret Thatchews, just at this point, about to finish, her time as prime minister, calls up US President George H.W. Bush, the first Bush president, and says, this is no time to go wobbly, George, which is to try and stiffen the US spine, which I love. But what it means is also they go through the UN as well.

52:37Gordon:Are you claiming that George H.W. Bush might have backed down had the Iron Lady not stiffened his spine, Gordon?

52:45David:I don't know. Well, I think everyone likes that because it's very Thatcher-like. But they also go through the UN, and that's an important part of the story. So the UN is involved, they get UN authorization to do this, and then the US assembles this massive military force, something like half a million troops, don't they, in Saudi Arabia.

53:04Gordon:That will, of course, become a major sticking point for Osama bin Laden at that stage, and will become a large part of his complaints against the United States and the royal family in Saudi. This is interesting, though, that Saddam had chemical weapons ready to use during the Gulf War, but he doesn't use them.

53:24David:And the U.S., of course, know he's got the chemical weapons because they know what's happened in the Halamchur and places. So the U.S. sends a message and there's a meeting between the U.S. Secretary of State James Baker and his Iraqi counterpart. And the U.S. says, you know, do not use chemical weapons on our troops. And the U.S. even suggests it would consider going nuclear against Iraq. in response. And Saddam remembers this as Iraq being told, we will send you back to the pre-industrial age if you use chemical weapons. I mean, who does that sound like? It's kind of interesting, isn't it? It sounds Trumpian.

54:02Gordon:It does. There was a threat leveled against, was it the Pakistanis that if they didn't help after 9-11, do I have this right, that they would be bombed back into the Stone Age. That was another threat leveled against them. So we have some consistency here.

54:22David:Yeah. But it's interesting, isn't it? The finer arts of diplomacy, Gordon.

54:26Gordon:This is all this tactful diplomacy.

54:29David:Yeah. The Iraqi officials call what's coming the mother of all battles. But of course, it's totally one-sided because the US starts its aerial assault January 17th, 1991. First use of these kind of guided cruise missiles as well, isn't it? The other thing though, again, this is so interesting when it comes to the echoes of today, is that as they're building up for the ground invasion, the US make clear they want regime change, but they want the Iraqi people to do it rather than for the US forces to do it inside the country.

55:00Gordon:Yeah, some pretty strong echoes of the beginnings of Operation Epic Fury. Trump essentially told the Iranian people that this was their time to rise up. They won't have a better opportunity, very similar to the messaging around the Gulf War. So on February 15th, President Bush, again, H.W. Bush, says that there is a way of avoiding a war, and that was for the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam to step aside. The CIA translates Bush's remarks to Arabic, broadcast them into Iraq, and the ground war begins. It lasts only 100 hours from February 24th.

55:43Gordon:It is amazing. It's quick, and it also is, it's not just the US. There's a massive allied force of 41 nations that goes in, and the Iraqi army is absolutely overpowered and mowed down and retreats back into Iraq.

56:00David:Yeah, and I remember this at the time, that the US was almost squeamish about the level of destruction it was inflicting on retreating Iraqi forces. I mean, they were just mowing them down as they retreated. And it's almost too easy. And at this point, the US has clearly won, but it doesn't want to go all the way to Baghdad because the mandate they've got from the United Nations is to eject Iraq from Kuwait. and so they decide okay that's what we're going to do at that point we're going to stop and uh there's not actually that much dissent at the time but the decision is we're not going to go all the way up to baghdad and do regime change ourself it's fascinating to me that dick cheney for example who was the defense secretary at the time didn't seem to have any major issue with this

56:57Gordon:you think of Dick Cheney as being constantly hawkish, and yet he seems to have gone along with this. Everybody in Washington thinks that Saddam is very unlikely to survive a defeat. So it's just a matter of time before someone inside the regime or some internal coalition of Kurds and oppositionists takes him out.

57:18David:And they're nearly right, because the regime collapses in 14 out of Iraq's 18 provinces. Saddam's afraid. The Shia population, which is the majority of Iraq, largely in the south of Iraq, they start to rise up throwing pictures of Saddam. There's an uprising. The US have incited a revolt. This is what President Bush called for. But at that point, it doesn't come to help.

57:40Gordon:The parallels again with Iran in 2026 are pretty wild, aren't they?

57:46David:Yeah.

57:46Gordon:President Trump telling the Iranian people to rise up and then help will be on the way, and it really wasn't. So that is definitely a recurring theme. But there's a ceasefire deal that is agreed to by the US and the Iraqis on March 3rd of 1991. Saddam is allowed, this I found to be wild, that he is still allowed to fly his helicopters. It gets back, I think, to your point about the US almost being squeamish about the level of destruction that they had inflicted because Saddam survives the war with some really critical pieces of military hardware still in his possession, which he'll then use to crush this uprising.

58:29Gordon:Seems like a terrible mistake in retrospect.

58:32David:I think in hindsight, people do think it was a real mistake. And officials at the time do not realize how significant it is that they let him keep his helicopters and then he's got some you know divisions of his what he calls his special republican guard the kind of elite military and he uses the helicopters with the to basically guide his remaining troops to go and crush the uprising that the u.s had called for and they've allowed him to keep the means to crush that uprising so almost i mean it isn't a deliberate move by the US. It's a mistake. But by mistake, they allow Saddam to survive in power.

59:10David:In the north, it's slightly different because you get refugees flooding over the border. There, the US and UK decide they're going to impose a no-fly zone in the north of Iraq, which is primarily Kurdish, and shoot down any Iraqi planes which enter that airspace, which in turn will allow the Kurds in the north to establish an autonomous safe haven outside of Iraqi control. So for the next, you know, until 2003, that area will be effectively autonomous from Saddam Hussein and under Kurdish control. But Saddam remains in power in Baghdad. And that really sets the scene for a simmering confrontation between the US and Iraq over the next decade.

59:53David:And the US have effectively missed the chance at that point to do regime change, but they're going to come back to it again and again and look for other ways of doing it.

1:00:03Gordon:So having missed this really probably the best possible chance for regime change, President H.W. Bush in May of 91, so just a few months after the war ends, signs a covert action finding authorizing the CIA to create the conditions that would lead to Saddam's removal from power. So it essentially becomes policy of the Bush administration to remove Saddam from power. Regime change in Iraq becomes U.S. policy in May of 1991. But the real question is, what has happened to the weapons of mass destruction that Saddam had during and prior to the war? That answer is really surprising, and it's going to determine why everyone gets things wrong in 2003.

1:00:53David:So let's stop there. And next time we'll look at the aftermath of the war, the 1990s inspections, the run up to 2003. But a reminder, of course, you do not have to wait because if you're a member of the Declassified Club, then you can hear all six episodes of this series straight away. And, David, they get access to the bonus episodes with Alistair Campbell, Richard Dearlove, and Mike Morrell, all by joining at therestisclassified.com.

1:01:21Gordon:Also, we're reminded that we have a live show in London on the 4th and 5th of September. You can get your tickets for that at therestisclassified.com. We will see you next time.

1:01:35David:See you next time.

1:01:41Gordon:It is out of control in the White House right now. Welcome to The Rest is Politics U.S. I'm Katty Kaye. I'm Anthony Scaramucci. Who is the worst politician in Washington right now? They don't know how to manage Donald Trump. I talked to the people that organized the abduction. I'm telling you why they did it. The White House is in a bind, Anthony. Here's what I would say to you about FAFA. The chaos is the strategy. It should not have happened, and it is a violation of international law. Is he losing control of the party? I survived 11 days in Trump's White House. I know the SOB.

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