Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 26 - Iran Iraq War Part 4: Marsh Madness!

Episode Date: November 19, 2018

On the 4th part of our Iran Iraq War series Joe is joined in the studio by Tom to talk about the insanity of the Battle of the Marshes and that one time Iraq built an entire road out of corpses. Follow the show @lionsby Follow Joe @jkass99 Follow Tom @tankcptnemo If you think what we do is worth a dollar you can donate it to us here and unlock all of our bonus content. https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys

Hey everybody, this episode is brought to you by Lift Big Eat Big's new workout program, The Phalanx Method. Coach, powerlifter, strongman, and historian, Brandon Morrison, took a unique approach in his creation to this three-block, six-month-long effort. Using ancient sources and modern techniques, he was able to recreate the training of one of history's most destructive military forces, the phalanx. And it's not just the sales line either. This is only three days a week in the gym and it's brutal. I've competed in powerlifting, CrossFit, and spent

way too much time doing brutal army PT. And this is the hardest thing I've ever done before. And you can do it at a commercial gym or like me from your garage. He also includes little historical tidbits every week to keep you interested and to keep you hooked. If you want to challenge yourself or just try something new, go to www.liftbigeatbig.com and enter the promo code donkey to get 15% off the phalanx method. Are you ready to become a warrior of oak and bronze? Good evening from Baghdad. One of the world's oldest cities, has become one of the world's newest power centres. As soon as major hostilities broke out between the two oil producers, Iraq and Iran, we came here to Baghdad to watch OPEC at war, to look in particular at a regime

seeking supremacy in the Gulf, and at its remarkable president, Saddam Hussein, one of the least known but most effective rulers in the Middle East. As the conflict between his country and Iran got underway earlier this year, it was Saddam Hussein who declared, whoever climbs over our fence, we shall climb over his roof. over his roof. Hello, and welcome to another episode of Lions Led by Donkeys. Joining me today in the studio for like only the second person we've ever had in here is Tom. It's good to be here. I decided, you know, I was up in Seattle for a long weekend.

I decided to come by to visit Stately Kasabian Manor. Yeah. Joe's kind enough to have me on the podcast. My weird dungeon-esque podcast room. I mean, I like what you've done with the place. It's kind of concerning. I'm worried about the chains hanging from the ceiling, but I didn't want to say anything about it. Don't kink shame me, Tom. Hey, whatever makes you happy.

So today is part four of the Iran-Iraq war. So unless you're weird and you want to start at part four i recommend going back and listening to part one through three um and last time we ended with the iraqi forces dug in at their southern border and the iranians posed to go on the offensive into iraq for the first time uh now i'd be remiss if i didn't point out that there is a fair number of people in the iranian government who do not actually want to invade iraq um they were trying to take like the moral high road like uh because iraq invaded first and trying to take like the moral high road like uh because iraq invaded first and then they they turn into some popular struggle of uh collective self-defense and um now they're on the offense now you know now they're trying to invade them and it made

them look bad uh morally um but the ayatollah's whole thing was he wanted to spread the revolution well now he's got iraq on the back foot and he can spread the revolution by force and uh he controls everything anyway so nobody's opinion really matters just the illusion of trying to be on the moral high ground but at the end of the day the ayatollah is still the ayatollah like i understand your prime minister but you do know that's a useless post with no powers right okay take it. Take it. Take it. Neither chief. Yep. Um, these individuals were actually backed by Iranian army officers, uh, which is pretty bold to throw in government and fucking hated them. Um, and they were pragmatic about it.

They're like, our army cannot sustain the offensive. Yeah. It's crazy that you might want a little bit of experience in your army when you're actually trying to involve, you know, engage in complex maneuvers yeah or like supplies like they didn't have they barely had ammo for like artillery barrages like we can't invade they're dug in with defense and depth strategies and uh but the pro-war voices were the ayatollah himself which means you're boned and legions of the revolutionary guard who are absolutely down for some revenge. The whole installing Islamic public of Iraq thing that they've been preaching about since

before the war, they actually began a saying of the road to Jerusalem passes through Karbala, became popular in revolutionary circles, meaning, of course, that the conquering of Iraq to spread the revolution through the region ultimately deceives one of Islam's most holy cities in the grips of those damned Israelis.

Yeah, of course. It means to an end. It's a very long t-shirt slogan though i don't know if they could really pull that off yeah well i mean if you ever look at their posters they're pretty long-winded and involved it's like a weird airbrushing t-shirts from the 80s except it's like all of their political banners and stuff. All of them have some like weird, shitty picture of some martyr on them that is only half spray painted on correctly. Yeah. I mean, the Iranian army or mostly the Revolutionary Guard, but we're just a little high on all their victories in Iran. So the tiny bit. Yeah.

And by all by all means, if they would have listened to any of their military officers for the first time of the war, they would have known better. And their plan was to surround and destroy the entire Iraqi Three Corps while taking over the city of Basra, the third largest city in Iraq. The original plan was to storm through Iraq and seize the capital, ending the war. Of course. You'd think. I mean, good thing nobody's ever thought that before. It's a bold strategy. Yeah.

The reality then set in when everybody realized they didn't have the supplies, weapons, vehicles, or logistical capabilities to do that. Yeah, but they had the spirit. Yeah. They had that thirst for glorious murder. So they settled on simply taking Basra and waiting for the Shia to rise up against their oppressors after watching the glorious legions of the Revolutionary Guard liberate them. against their oppressors after watching the glorious legions of the revolutionary guard, liberate them, which is,

it should sound familiar because it's literally the exact same fucking plan as the Iraqi invasion. Um, the Iraqi plan for invasion was to go in, seize, uh, Kuzestan and then just assume the government would fall apart. And it worked great.

It worked magnificently. Um, like I said, this entire game is like this entire war is a chess game being played by two fucking idiots. Only know how to play checkers. And it's astounding to me. I've said like probably a dozen times now. Neither side ever learns from history because they end up fucking cosplaying the Western front of World War One here in a little bit.

But like at least that's like that's 100 years ago today. Really. So I could get them not cracking their history books. I mean, they did just purge all their intellectuals. So but they couldn't even remember two years ago when Iraq invaded. So on June 13th, 1982, 200,000 Iranian troops stormed over their border in true 20th century Western Front fashion. It was preluded by two days of heavy artillery bombardment. And almost exactly like the Western Front, the bombardment did

nothing. While the Iranians were debating whether to invade or not, the Iraqis have been digging themselves in pretty well. They constructed concrete reinforced bunkers, trenches, and earthworks stretching back miles. And when they ran out of building supplies, they would just dig in a whole tank.

Which is actually, the iraqis did significantly better uh using their tanks as pillboxes effectively uh because whenever they try to maneuver them they get all fucked up and get slaughtered um saddam also doubled the iraqi army through conscription conscription to around a half million men almost all of them are on the border uh like they had done previously iran volunteers, most of them child soldiers, stormed through the many fucking miles of landmines that the Iraqis had dug in and cleared them with their own bodies. This time, though, they had several other volunteers dressed up as Imam Hussein. I actually was not familiar with who who Imam Husseinsein is uh because my islamic history is a little rusty uh he's the grandson of prophet muhammad and a hero of the legendary historical battle of karbala

the fake imams would mount white horses and charge into battle to galvanize the volunteers to follow them into the warm embrace of modernism they're normally only armed with a flag so let me get this straight the iranian plan was to have cosplayers inspire their soldiers yes riding in the battle unarmed on horseback on horseback yes and it ended well i assume uh it took three days of constant assaults for the iranians to finally overrun the first iraqi positions oh good uh during the battle the combatants would get so close to one another that iranian soldiers could actually climb on top of iraqi tanks and throw grenades in that's absolutely insane so it's just like dismounted infantry charging across minefields and attacking in place dug in concrete defenses with iraqi tanks that are dug in yep

that is amazing yeah and the iranians got over their just incredible lack of heavy weaponry by waves of waves of people uh their air force is pretty solid i mean at this point they pretty much have air superiority but the concept of close air support is still distant to them so they hadn't thought to use their support superiority to their advantage during this offensive not directly in battlefields they normally would only use their air superiority to bomb iraqi uh like infrastructure and that was working really well uh the iraqi economy would have completely collapsed if it wasn't for western support okay um they had no functioning arms manufacturing anymore their oil output was

ceased to a trickle um but good old uncle sam kept them afloat thank god for that yeah like a billion dollars a month i think at some at some point. We were giving them. A drop in the bucket. Yeah. It was technically for quote unquote farm aid and agricultural aid. But what they actually were, were thousands of tons of pesticides that Iraq would use to make chemical weapons. Oh, good God. Actually, did you ever watch the Chappelle show?

Yeah. god um actually did you ever watch the chapelle show yeah uh do you remember um uh they had a guy uh known uh paul mooney he dressed up as negro damas oh yeah and somebody asked how the united states knew that iraq had weapons of mass destruction he's like they kept the receipts that's that's where i came from yeah oh man and man. And the Iranian army would actually go on to push nine miles in, which is a really good day if this is 1918. Yeah. But since it was 1983, the Iraqis immediately began to push them back with helicopters and airstrikes. Oh, God. They also began to pour chemical weapon shells and bombs into the masses of Iranian troops.

Like before, the Iranians still really did not have any chemical countermeasures. And I know I talked about before that Iraqi chemical weapons weren't that good at first. Like somebody told me it's like 20 percent lethality. Yeah. This point of the war, it's almost 50 percent. Jeez. It would eventually go up to 80 percent. Wow.

Lethality as they worked on their mixture. Made better use of the farm equipment from the United States. That's right um so it did a lot and also for some strange reason uh the iranians had been getting dosed with mustard and taban and sarin gas for for years now um but they actually routed uh an entire iranian division by bombing them with tear gas holy Holy shit. I mean, not lethal tear gas. I mean, you know, you and I both experienced the joys that is CS gas. It sucks. Like they're like, you know, the one in 20 in the one in 20 people in the population

that aren't affected by CS gas and everybody hates them in the gas chamber. But that's right. I mean, my experience is just horrifying in the gas chamber. Like my brain shut down and I stopped functioning as a human being. It's just nothing but tears and snot it just fucks my soul yeah like i i hated everybody and i was the youngest one and i was a platoon guide when i was in basic training so they made me stay in there as my entire platoon went through doing jumping jacks and hacking up lungs and shit it was awful i mean i but that was in an enclosed space i've never been i've never been tear gassed in an open space before imagine it dissipates pretty fast but i mean there's a good chance they probably

thought they got mustard gas and they're running for it i mean a whole division getting routed by cs gas is amazing still i mean it definitely affects you but to the degree that a whole division routed yeah i think you're right they probably did think it was something worse and i mean if i'm gonna hit by gas i'm getting the hell out of there especially if iraq is chucking gas at you you're going to assume it's gonna melt your skin off yeah exactly drown in your own lung juices yeah the lovely imagery that is thank you for that uh you know and that's it's something that kind of goes back through all of chemical weapons history i mean yeah they they hurt thousands of people but the main weapon at use there is is fear yeah a lot more people than you actually hurt or kill i mean the whole point of it is you know

now you use chemical weapons the idea is the enemy has to put on all of this gear that restricts their ability to move unfortunately iranians didn't have that so it's mostly just having their skin melt off in front of them yeah Yeah. And actually, in the last episode, we talked a little bit about a video that the Iranians made where they did put on something resembling a chemical suit to fuck with a mustard gas shell that they dug up. So they don't have a great grasp on the concept of chemical weapons, which is pretty clear because the shells are loaded up with a liquid, which then turns to gas when it's introduced to oxygen. Yeah. So they put on, at most, a mask. And they're wearing regular uniforms outside of that. Well, mustard gas is a blister agent.

You don't have to breathe it in. And so they unscrew the shell and then pour out the liquid into what looks like a mason jar. So as soon as they pour it out, it immediately starts turning the gas and fucking everybody up uh the only thing they use for protection is what looks like kitchen gloves and they just dump it all over each other on accident too it's it's not good as long as they had gloves and ipro that's what mattered that rail mode along yeah um so through all those um chemical weapons and the counter-attack at the end of the day the iranians only had a two mile chunk of the front left in true western front uh fashion um the second

massive push by the iranians uh using the same tactics as before managing to go within eight miles of the target city of basra and that's as far as they would go uh the iranians finally burned through their supplies including ammo and once again were pushed all the way back to where they started it it's funny it's almost like this whole war would be different if people actually listened to their military commanders yeah two straight offensives that led to a net gain of zero i mean so like the iranians during these offensives were the was it just strictly light infantry or did they have vehicles they have some vehicles but they try not to use them like uh they try to use their tanks very sparingly because unlike the iraqis they will

not be replaced um really the only backer that they had during this war is syria and the only thing syria really did is shut off a oil pipeline to iraq so they couldn't export their oil so slightly annoyed the iris really. Okay. I mean, eventually Iran would have a different backer in the form of the United States through the Iran Contra scandal, but that's something we'll talk about later. At no point were they getting resupplied as heavily as Iraq was ever. So they have,

they got a lot of pickup trucks, so they use those. Oh, the classic Toyota Hilux. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, they had a lot of T trucks so they use those um that was a classic toyota hylux yeah yeah and uh i mean they had a lot of t-55s um but the their only real strength that they had outside of wave after wave of screaming volunteer was their air force yeah uh which is interesting because they won using american trained pilots and american jets yeah and uh it's been said before

but like uh they're during the huge officer purge post-revolution um because the military is always seen as like the shah's backer they're the ones that kept them in power for a long time um one of the major thing they purged me i would assume it's an accident because it's weird to target this group of people was chemical warfare officers. That is odd. So they had no way to protect themselves when chemical weapons are getting thrown away. So basically anybody with any kind of experience in chemical weapons was purged. Yeah, that's kind of weird. I mean, my experience with chem core officers is you have a strange mix of the guys that are super nerdy about chemical stuff.

Like legitimately enjoy chemistry and things and then you have the people that just like for lack of a better word morons who got stuck in the chem core right and they don't really know what they're doing and they are not performing well so i don't know if the iranian chem core was similar but regardless they killed off one of their main sources of knowledge that could have helped them in a war against the iraqis who had chemical weapons and were using a lot of them. Yeah. And their purge just affected the military in general to the point that, like, the military is afraid to say anything, which is why it's pretty surprising that they objected to an invasion. But they actually would eventually get a time to shine and then quickly have it taken away from them.

But they actually would eventually get a time to shine and then quickly have it taken away from them. So after the Iranians finally burned through everything, the only thing that saved them from total rout and destruction all the way back to the Iranian border was through heavy airstrikes. The Iraqis thought it was a good idea that the Iranians stopped pretty convincingly. They tried and the Iraqis dug in a lot of their tanks. So they were effectively attacking back with helicopters and and uh and light infantry as well so they get eaten up pretty easily by the by the airstrikes um because their human wave attacks are only really good at penetrating one section of the line at a time which isn't good when you're trying to invade an old country that's been turned into nothing but a defense in depth trench nightmare. Yeah. The Iraqis had three whole armor divisions parked behind the line because they learned from fighting in Iran that our line gets penetrated in one place.

And then the Iranians kind of flood through that one area. Yeah. So they actually kept these three divisions in reserve. And whenever the Iranians would bust through a part of the line, they just pull the tanks up. Yeah. And I mean, this would cost the iranians 20 000 casualties absolutely insane yeah i mean the those three divisions were chewed up pretty bad as well but i mean in comparison not as bad and the lines held so clearly worked um and that's where the war would kind of stand for quite some time uh after the destruction

uh the of the operation iran would try and try again to breach iraqi lines to try for that glorious push towards basra and would fail each time one the biggest would be uh called operation before the dawn where they would launch 200 000 reserve members of the revolutionary guard to attack along a 25 mile front where they didn't succeed in pretty much anything other than getting torn apart by minefields. And that's the thing is like the Iranians never really let casualties slow them down. Like at no point like, my God, look at all these dead bodies. Well, now the minefields are gone. So I just hunt the good stuff.

You know, you just got to find the silver lining on things. And frankly, it inspires me. Yeah. And, you know, he like the Iranians really doubled down when when met with failure there. The Iranians operated on the at first you don't succeed. Try, try again. School of Luigi Cadorna, the patron saint of our podcast. They launched Operation Dawn in the north of the country when virtually it

ended the same as before, as before the dawn. And then they would go on to launch 10 more dawn operations to virtually no effect. Luigi would be so proud. He's smiling in his grave, smiling, surrounded by the dead Italians to their graves.

They would have the same effect as before and lined up thousands of their own soldiers to like slowly run over them with a tank it was like the same effect like out of the beast have you ever seen the beast it's on my list it's like i know it's one of the great tank movies but i still need to watch it oh it's great i will definitely be reviewing that for a fucking episode eventually um it's impressive when you think about it like i mean you know we make a big deal out of like china and russia in terms of population differences between the united states and them but like you know the days of the grand armée in the 19th century you know napoleon's

armies were france mobilized their entire population against the world and were able to conquer most of europe uh there's a little bit different when there's a technological difference between conscripts that have to march towards lines of muskets versus conscripts charging across minefields, getting hit by chemical weapons, charging against dug in tanks. Like, you know, numerical advantage is not enough compared to training and experience and actual knowledge on simple things like tactics and logistics and strategy yeah and you know it's what's interesting is in comparison the iranians had better tactics um when given the chance to use them when they weren't trying to breach transfer lines they actually had something resembling combined arms warfare which the iraqis did not have um but the iraqis would really only fight well in static defense uh once they actually had to maneuver, terrible.

But the Iranians were hamstrung by the fact that the vast majority of their military was actually not a military. There's just a whole bunch of dudes in jeans with rifles. Volunteers that are showing up and that enemy at the gate scene where they hand out one rifle and the other guy has a clip of ammunition. Similar to that kind of thing, wasn't it?

Effectively. The only thing they did have, thanks the shah was like an abundance of small arms but anything above like a machine gun that was rare and few and far between um so i would actually be remiss if i did if i just discarded all the dawn operations is useless uh some of them actually accomplish huge if very temporary victories uh for the iranians when those was dawn 8 and 86 um the ojo espn8 the ojo uh iran invaded iraq's alfa providence with a hundred thousand soldiers in an operation planned and carried out by officers that were like layers of contradictions. They were former imperial Iranian officers who'd survived the purge and been trained by Americans prior to the fall of the Shah.

So I don't know how they managed to survive that. That's impressive. They were definitely targets of the revolution. I think they just stayed quiet until everybody realized that they needed them. I need to survive long enough until they realize it might be valuable yeah uh and uh one bright spot that did occur during this time however was the iranians did get some help uh within iraq but it wasn't from their fellow shia as they planned it was the kurds uh because kurdistan will take any chance to shoot at the iraqi government they can get yeah um this did not end in the victorious liberation of kurdistan however instead of just

laid the groundwork for a horrible horrible war crime later down the road, which we will talk about. After all this, Iran knew they had to make changes within their army. Iraqi defense in depth tactics had effectively ground their human wave assaults to being useless. I mean, even when Iraq had invaded Iran and the human wave attacks were like the new thing, because they were actually, I mean, didn't know what the fuck to do with it.

I mean, really nobody does. Like nobody knows how to react when like hordes of screaming people are coming at them with no regard for their own safety. Not many people react well to that. And it worked really well because the Iraqi army wasn't dug in. They were still trying to maneuver things like that. But once they came up, like crack the history book and realized, oh, if we just put trenches behind one another, it ends up pretty well.

Yeah. So the Iranians knew they had to evolve. And actually, their casualties were becoming so high, they were running out of volunteers. So that's a motivator. Yeah. Human wave attacks aren't inspiring for retention numbers and recruitment. Especially when all the white horse riding heroes are fucking machine gunator. Yeah. Human wave attacks aren't inspiring for retention numbers and recruitment, especially when all the, the white horse riding heroes are fucking machine gunned.

Um, they fixed that with mass conscription as, uh, they too began to evolve into a state of total war. And finally the revolutionary guard and their Iranian military would work together for the first time. That was like the huge revolution in an Iranian military moment there. Maybe we do this together.

Um, and despite the new friendship, however, uh, the Iranians knew they could not hope to stand toe to toe constantly, uh, with Iraq's massive advantage of tanks and heavy weapons and, and technology.

So, um, they would try to pick their battles in places where Iraq would be hamstrung like marshes marshes you say yeah uh which of course leads us to the battle of the marshes in uh 1984 one of the weirdest battles i think i've ever heard of and we've covered a lot of strange battles in this podcast to include a war on emus i still think the the battle of the marsh is a stranger um that's a tall order yeah yeah and i honestly i think the emus probably would have done better than the iranian soldiers

um so the southern portion of iraq is full of marshes wetlands and bogs and gross ass shit where nick likes to get his whiskey from um drinking aside marshes are good for other things you can't drive a tank through one and they absorb the blast from artillery and bombs really well because once again knowing the story everyone learns from history the iraqis failed to defend the marshes because they thought they were totally impregnable i mean why would anybody go crawling through some disgusting swamps right it would be dumb enough to attack through these marshes yeah these wide open marshes and these aren't like you know michigan's pretty swampy in some areas uh growing up but like these aren't bogs and swamps like i pitched them they're like six foot deep in some places it's like a

small lake yeah um which i guess is the very definition of a swamp uh so um so we're talking more like you know deep louisiana yeah like bayou yeah it's pretty hard to maneuver through and everything yeah full of gators. I don't know if there's any gators there, but I like to think there are. Let's just pretend there's gators. It's funner that way. They're also on the Iraqi side. Alligators.

Noted bathists. So the Iranians would decide to attack in a different way. By using something Iraqis have apparently never heard of. Those things are called boats um and you know i guess it's not too surprising for the iraqis to like completely discount the concept of naval amphibious attack because their navy had been hot garbage and destroyed since beginning of the war you're telling me that middle east countries don't really invest in their navies you know funny thing uh iran had invested well iran didn't invest heavily in their navy the americans did uh to thean had invested well iran didn't invest heavily in their navy the uh americans did uh to the point they actually built i think it was two or three

battleships really uh or destroyers when the two not big on naval history uh and they're like for the shah yeah like specifically but they uh the revolution happened before they could be delivered um and uh the the i think the americans took years trying to show them off on somebody else and i think they're called like the dead generals or the dead admirals class because they're all named after dead admirals yeah uh but yeah uh i can't imagine how much stronger the iranians would have been with fucking two massive destroyers on their side too because with nothing but speed boats they were destroying the iraqi Navy yeah so and also because the American Navy end up fighting the

Iranian Navy that would have been interesting if they had destroyers yeah yeah definitely like I said they the Iranians said they said you use boats yeah they went across them in speed boats like something in a Miami vice it's like these weren't military boats they were like inflatable dinghies

and speed boats and just imagine this like really cool yacht to be on belong to the Shah and says a bunch of guys with ak's hanging off the side of it firing tropical shirts wearing aviator sunglasses and hawaiian shirts is firing off inside of it yeah hell yeah uh the iranians attacked the oil producing majnun islands and captured them uh via landing troops uh from a helicopter so yeah apparently the iraqis forgot about air assault as well it's all the thing yeah so that'll be the one nice thing i'll ever say about air assault in this podcast uh never noted but never ever acknowledged after this point yes yeah so don't be too happy uh by the time the second wave of iranian helicopters

were loaded down with soldiers were coming in uh the iraqis are actually ready and intercepted them with fighter aircraft never a good sign there's there's 50 helicopters all but one were shot down full of soldiers oh good yeah and they honestly that's a pretty big hit to the iranians not because they lost so many soldiers that's just another day at the office for them but they can't replace us they lost the helicopters and the iranians actually sowed confusion in iraqi ranks by camouflaging themselves which i assume means just covering themselves in fetid swamp shit and then like working behind enemy lines iranian commandos actually got so far behind the iraqi lines they managed to destroy a bunch of their artillery um and going back to like when iraq invaded iran iraq is not good at like

keeping account of their lines. One time the Iranians built an entire road behind enemy lines and then bust in a division. Iraq's just not good at this. I mean, you have to say something about if you have a bunch of commandos suddenly pop out of the swamp behind you

and they're all looking like the swamp thing covered in peat and mud and shit. Psychological damage would be horrifying for that to happen to me. Like if I was just a random Iraqi guy sitting there and suddenly the swamp thing is coming to attack me. It's like the old, really stereotypical Navy SEAL commercial. Oh, they're slowly coming out of the swamp. Except it's just a whole bunch of dudes in like fucking T-shirts smelling like awful swamp pond shit.

Oh, man. The Iraqis countered this disgusting. I assume they smelled like Lafroi swamp monsters. And they actually used tons of helicopters like hunt them down. And of course, chemical weapons, because the Iraqis can't do anything without dousing everything in mustard gas. Can't go wrong with that. Yeah. Eventually, the Iraqi helicopter teams begin to suffer heavily from ground fire so they thought of another

countermeasure what doesn't mix well with water electricity uh so channeling their inner acme department of horrible war crimes uh the iraqi officers began unspooling thousands and thousands of feet of black thick black electrical cables like the same ones that they have hanging power lines um through the marshy battlefield a network was soon formed that snaked through the patchwork of lagoons the cords all went back to massive generators the iraqis had brought to the front just for this reason like now i'm gonna go in depth of how this worked and it worked really well but like imagine being the guy at a staff meeting and uh everybody's coming up like well maybe we should put this in the trench maybe we should count them helicopters and then someone who's like not paying attention but also watching like old roadrunner cartoons like i got a fucking idea that's exactly what it sounds like it sounds

like somebody had been watching some wily coyote shenanigans and was just like maybe if we electrocute like if we electrify the entire swamp yeah and somebody signed off on us somebody was like joe hansen that's brilliant go out there and this is like dozens of miles of swamp like this it's a lot of fucking cable that's a lot of cable i mean you have generators lined up like this was a significant it wasn't just like one hillbilly trying to kill a bunch of gators out in his bayou like this was legitimate miles and miles of ridiculous infrastructure just to electrify the swamps because of those damn iranian boys again yeah um yeah so all the cords led back to giant generators once the network was completed an hierarchy officer turned towards a journalist who was there and remarked quote you wait until

nighttime and you'll see how the you were that we are going to be killing these Iranian dogs. We're going to fry them like eggplants somewhere. A P.A. like Iraqi P.A.O. just has his head in his hands, just regretting that he allowed the journalist to go without an escort. So that's the interesting part. The journalist, his name is like Martinerickson uh wasn't actually greenlit to go into iraq uh he just went and he was driving like a corolla to the battlefield and then just showed up which is um i i don't know how he got through the swamps with like ship anchor size balls seriously because this is all in brass balls this is the same point that like saddam is shooting everybody that displeases him personally in the cabinet office.

And he's just rolling up there in his rental Corolla, just like, please direct me to the war. Yeah. Which way to the front? And then some Iraqi officer also has a lot of balls for not having him like take it away. Because you can imagine being the guy that's that like gets interviewed. Then Saddam finds out about it. It's probably not going well um so as the sun went down there iraqi sorry the iranian revolutionary guards began their almost nightly advance towards iraqi lines some of them were aboard boats others were trudging to the sick uh gross swamp once they got within ray and range of the iraqi lines iraqi artillery

batteries began to open fire but this wasn't a bombardment they knew the bombardment wouldn't work instead they were just using it to scare them off their boats because the boats were unarmored and the iraqis saw multiple times before that that if they shut out the iranians while they're on the boats iranians would just jump off because they're safer in the water um have you ever seen that mythbusters episode where they shoot into the water to see how much damage it does yeah like literally a foot of water is all you need to be safe. So it's a lot safer to be swimming through some bog shit than in a boat. But unfortunately for the Iranians, it's exactly what the Iraqis wanted them to do.

Somewhere down the Iraqi line, an officer shrugged, really hoping this stupid idea would work, and flipped the switch to the generators. Instantly, thousands of volts surged through the marshlands where the hundreds if not thousands of iranian soldiers were fucking flash fried in swamp grease holy shit um this caused a general retreat amongst iranian soldiers and they were totally unaware what the fuck was happening because it's not like it's not like cartoons where you actually hear it like people are just dropping dead and like falling into the swamp not moving anymore nobody had any idea what the fuck was happening these Hundreds of guys are suddenly frying in the water. Yeah. They have no idea what's going on.

Yeah. The Iranian soldiers are probably wondering about all those rumors. They probably heard about Saddam's fucking personal magician as they watch their squalid fucking eyeballs melt out of their head. But they really miss the Shah's personal magician at this point, which I'm still heartbroken that we know nothing more about him. Yeah. Yeah.

I need to do a postscript need to get a hold of that magician get some information so i mean i have to i have to wonder i'm sure that the twitter uh military law experts and jag officers can weigh in on this but is it actually a war crime you know i don't think it is water i don't think it is not i mean we're really mincing a war that features heavy use of chemical and biological weapons but yeah and let's routine execution of pows and torture there's a lot worse going on against the laws of land warfare going on here yeah uh not a lot of respect being given to any kind of law here uh i'm gonna say uh that it's probably not a war crime i mean in comparison everybody everything else this is pretty mellow

i mean just imagine a war so bonkers that electrifying miles of swamp is, it's okay. I have to imagine it's still taught at the Iraqi Staff College. When in doubt, roll out the generators. There's still a long line of cable in the Basra

swamps just in case that I never get any ideas again. So many Iranians died that mark fineman of the los angeles time said quote the following morning iraqi troops began another grisly routine that the officer called the morning road detail they made their way through the marshes gathering up dead iranian soldiers like dynamite fishermen harvesting a day's catch working methodically the iraqis piled the corpses up one by one in the water head to toe stacks five high and five across together the human piles formed long rows the width of a troop truck the top layer just above the water's surface each row extended a straight line through the marshes

from the iraqi positions towards the iranian border finally the rows are sprinkled with lime and covered with a foot layer thick of desert sand it was the iraqi method of road building using bodies as their enemies to consult us to construct assault routes for tanks and trucks the iranians would lose over 40 000 soldiers in the marshes before finally giving up i know it's for oily fucked up but that's one of the most metal things i've ever heard in my life corpse road building roads with the bodies of your enemies yes like gangas khan didn't even do anything like that. That is insane. Yeah.

They're one head pyramid away from being. It's just like the Mongol hordes. Like we're just piling up bodies. I mean, they must have faith in the structural integrity of corpses. Well, Iranians are known for their road constructing abilities. They're very hardy. Their bodies. When you stack them five high.

That is absolutely bonkers. Imagine being this soldier that's like, so we're just driving on bodies now, huh? Okay. That's going to be morale killer. It's just like, well, I guess I'm just stacking corpses to make roads. Some civil engineer is just very upset

that his degree is being used to make corpse road. Yeah. Corpse boulevard. Yeah, fucking amazing uh i get like imagine being the guy that uh it gets you like the the orders from on high to what to do like uh well we have to build these roads across the marshes right uh just use what you got and some like really bright lieutenants like looks around just these fields of dead iranians like got an idea the light bulb goes off over his head because we're

we're living in a acme cartoon looney tunes cartoon now oh god uh i mean there were some bright spots uh while the attack was a total bloody failure it did show the iranians that swift nighttime boat attacks could work assuming you didn't run into electrified swamp how many more times could that fucking happen like guys that guys, that probably won't happen again, right? That's an interesting caveat to put into your planning considerations. It's like, is the swamp electrified? Are we fighting Saddam Coyote? Saddam E. Coyote.

And that brings us to Operation Dawn 8. Like I said, it would be a mistake to say that all of the Dawn operations were hilarious failures. But this one was not. So in 1986, the

American-trained Shaw officers planned a nighttime attack by having swarming hordes of rubber dinghies to storm across the Shat al-Arab and take Iraqis by surprise. It's hard to take a military operation seriously that uses dinghies. Yeah, yeah. And it's fun to say dinghies. I guess I could have called them swift boats.

Dinghies is better. But I'm going with dinghy. Dinghies is better. Yeah, it worked. The entire Al-Fahd province was captured in only 24 hours. was captured in uh only 24 hours uh despite constant iraqi counterattacks led personally by the iraqi chief of staff a guy named maher al-rashid the iranians would hold on to this massive piece of land until the end of the war though uh side note about our friend al-rashid uh saddam was practically in love with the guy for some reason um he was uh so the iraqi army

went to shit at the beginning of the war and Saddam actually pulled them out of retirement to put it back together despite his constant failures he was never fired or executed like everybody else was he has that Luigi Cadorna look

yeah he's never good at his job but I like his face Rahad Al-Hamadi who's the Republican Guard Commander actually called Al-Rashid

quote the dumbest person in the army which is honestly one hell of a insult at this point. Dumbest person in the Iraqi army is like the mayor of the village idiots. Yeah, yeah. One reason that Al-Fah fell so quickly is that it wasn't actually being protected by the Iraqi army. The Iraqis, assuming the Iranians would never assault across the Shatt al-Arab, hardly bothered to protect it at all. If that sounds familiar, you're catching on. They put units of what is known as the Iraqi Popular

Army in charge of the area, which is like hardly a militia. It's effectively the Iraqi version of the Basij volunteer units of the Iranians, except the Iraqis would confusingly conscript people into this militia.

It does not make sense. So it's kind of like the British Home Guard in World War II where it's just the old guys that can't enlist, so they go around with a broomstick ready to hit Nazis that land in Britain. Yeah, effectively the same thing. But they'd actually drafted people into this organization? That's bonkers. Instead of drafting people into their army and actually

training them, I guess it's easier to just draft them and like here you're in the military now have a stick have this pointy stick um yeah it was a little more than a bath party militia like i think the only thing you had to be a party member which was pretty common in iraq anyway at the time yeah um it was made full of uh teenagers and old men some at least 50 years old and at the first end of a fight the vast majority of them dropped their weapons and ran as fast as they could. As untrained militia do. Yeah. The only time militia are ever good, and I've learned this from Empire Total War, is if you smash them in the middle, surrounded by people who won't run.

So apparently Saddam needs a brush up on his line tactics. In response to this, Saddam relaunched what is now known as the war of the cities. Now the war of the cities technically began back in 1984 when I ran refuses initial really bad attempts at negotiating a ceasefire. It was weird. It's like it would have worked as a tactic if Saddam wasn't a fucking idiot. Well, it's kind of like the undercurrent in this entire story.

Yeah. Yeah. It's like a like the undercurrent in this entire story. Yeah. Yeah. It's like a debate, but everybody has CTE. But I didn't want to cover the multiple pieces of the war of the cities within the Iran-Iraq war bit by bit because it'd just be confusing as hell. So we'll cover them all right now. So the war of the cities was a series of air and missile strikes against civilian targets inside Iran. And it was the first time in the history of war where both sides would attempt to strike at each other with ballistic missiles which is nice um that's kind of fun that's good cheeky and fun version of war you

know when you're using ballistic missiles on each other yeah on each other and towards the end of the war uh iraq would actually get uh some uh tweaked skid missiles that they'd send off to brazil of all places um and they would be able to travel a thousand kilometers all the way to Tehran. It was, in fact, an extension of the total war program that both states were waging and was a terror bombing campaign against citizens. Now, the excuse was factories and infrastructure were the target. Factories and infrastructure were the target. And that may have been the case at first. But Iraq's attacks on Iran were incredibly inaccurate and would just wipe out entire city blocks from time to time.

Scuds aren't known for being very pinpoint accurate weapons. No, not at all. And some of them were full of chemical weapons, which is where the U.S. got the idea to be worried about them during the Gulf War. Because they gave them both the Scud missiles and the chemical weapons. I was going to say my dad was in Desert Storm. He was a finance officer driving around the desert with satchels of money to pay the soldiers. So he told me that, I mean, the thing they were really worried about, I mean, he was sitting in Saudi Arabia for six months because the war lasted all of 72 hours, the actual ground campaign.

He would talk about how they're just worried about SCUD missiles. And, you know, Saddam was hucking SCUD missiles all over the place, hucking them, firing them at like the Israelis, firing at Saudi Arabia. And it's just interesting that that tactic didn't originate in Desert Storm. You know, something that was done during the Iran-Iraq war. Yeah, he's just flinging them randomly like there's i don't i don't know i'm not a missile tech guy uh but i have been told that there's it's pretty much a v2 rocket and that you just point it in the general direction let it fly yeah um but it wasn't a constant thing either like it if you could picture this as like his version of the battle of britain or like uh any other kind of uh total war bombing campaign where you try to sever the,

uh, infrastructure and the, and the supply lines, you have to keep it consistent. So they don't rebuild. Yeah. And, uh,

Saddam never did. Um, it was, it wasn't constant. The attacks always begin and then quickly. And once that I'm got distracted by something else, um, because they,

it would only start when he got pissed off about something. Like they took the alpha ProvFahd Providence. So he's like, oh, have some missiles, fuckheads. And then like it only began in the first place because they shot down a ceasefire idea. Like it wasn't a tactic as much as he was just angry and wanted to show them how angry he was. So it was like the version of shit posting on Twitter when you're in a bad mood. It's just hucking scud missiles at cities. Saddam, noted shit poster.

Noted shit poster, shit poster except to use chemical weapons instead of tweets yeah and which i mean i think we can all agree that the uh the tweet war is much more tragic yeah i'm proud veteran yeah i'll wear that ribbon happy veterans day you're welcome for my service that's the only thing actually because i keep getting posted by everything or i get uh tagged by everything on facebook and stuff and like oh uh shout out to all my veterans the only thing i posted was uh was a picture of um uh the king of persia from 300 with his arms out yeah and it just says you're welcome for my service because because i'm just i'm just insufferable you're a proud veteran i appreciate your service your shit bag shit bag of legend uh yeah published shit that's right that's right take that all the sergeants that

said you want to be a writer when you're in the army no really what's your plan shut up kasavian yeah fucking idiot re-enlist or die if you don't re-enlist you're gonna die homeless and addicted to drugs uh jokes on you i can't afford drugs i can't get addicted if i can't afford them i'm not pretty enough to sell myself i don't know i mean i'd probably throw a fiver at you it's good that might get me a joint at one of the corner stores here um so these uh i mean the raids are dumber uh than it sounds when you look a little closer at them uh these raids would get more and more effective as the Iranian Air Force was ground down over time because Iran couldn't replace their jets and they didn't have any replacement parts to fix the ones that got heavily damaged. They'd like cannibalize some damaged jets to fix other ones.

There's only so much you can do. Yeah. And unlike like almost the entire Iranian war effort is centered in Iran, unlike Iraq, who had half the known world flooding it with weapons like half the shit Iran was getting. They were building or refurbishing or slapping together in Iran. Yeah. So thousands of Iranians would be killed and tons of damage was done to the teetering Iranian state. But then, like I said, Saddam would just get bored and do something else, giving the Iranians time to rebuild and beef up their anti-air networks. So a good example of that was Al-Fah when the Providence fell.

Saddam ordered a series of strikes over the course of a couple of days and then stopped. The War of the Cities was actually the original reason why the Iranian Revolutionary Guard started its missile program, which we now know today as their nuclear program. Oh, joy. Yeah. So thanks, Saddam. Saddam continues to ruin everything. program which we now know today as their nuclear program oh joy yeah so thanks saddam saddam continues to ruin everything yeah yeah um they they knew and just like today they uh the revolutionary guard is almost like the main power arm of the iranian government yeah you can definitely see that um back then because they just started their own

fucking missile program completely independent of the military and government just out of the blue there's a whole bunch of religious zealots like we need nukes uh and it's not that surprising because like uh saddam had a nuke program when the war started and uh the iranians knew like if he finishes that shit we're gonna get nuk. I mean, he's already hucking missiles. He's using ballistic missiles. I mean, Saddam's not going to stop at not using a nuclear weapon if he gets his hands on one. Yeah. So a secondary effect of the fall of Al-Fah was Iraq reinvading Iran.

Tens of thousands of Iraqi troops stormed over the border and captured the city of Miran at the foot of the Zargos Mountains. It's hardly a fight. thousands of Iraqi troops stormed over the border and captured the city of Miran at the foot of the Zargos mountains. Um, it's hardly a fight. The, the city is not, does not have any kind of tactical advantages. Um, and it's entirely unimportant outside of propaganda. Yeah.

Um, so why did Saddam do that? Uh, cause he wanted to, he was, uh, offering the Iranians a trade. So I'll give you this city back.

If you give me back my Providence, this is like middle school lunch trades. He's like, I'll give you this city back if you give me back my providence. This is like middle school lunch tradesies. Like, I'll give you my snack pack for a fucking banana. Yeah, yeah. I think Saddam might just be the worst diplomat in the fucking world. It's just like, I'm going to seize one of your cities and trade it back to you. For this entire providence.

And if not, I'm going to just keep hucking missiles and killing your people. So Iran declared no takesies backsies and launched a counter-attack and the sacred law yeah yeah i now invoke nato charter 0.6 of no takesies backsies the counter-attack drove the iraqis all the way back uh to i back into iraq and cost them 10 000 dead so not a great plan, Iraq. Mission accomplished. Yeah.

The battle screwed over the Iraqi military so badly that Saddam was forced to call a general mobilization for the first time for people who weren't already in uniform. It's actually pretty surprising that he didn't already have one of those. You figure because his army was already conscripts. Yeah. But a general mobilization, you know, you're scraping the bottom of the barrel. You're getting everybody. And Saddam was actually holding off on that for a good reason. He figured the general mobilization would lead to draft riots and unrest because the economy was already trashed from the war.

I mean, they're getting billions and billions and billions of dollars from the outside, but that's all going into the war effort. So people were pretty much only being held in line for fear of getting shot. But now for general mobilization, you're going to get shot because you're going to go fight Iran. So he is a valid concern of his. But it didn't happen. Instead, everybody showed up to the draft like they were told to, even college students. But because Saddam didn't have time to fuck around with things like training or arming these people, he just shoved them all into the popular army instead of the regular army.

training or arming these people he just shoved them all into the popular army instead the regular army this is a continuing series of royal fuck-ups on both sides it's like both sides sprinting to the bottom of just dumb dumb ideas dumb tactics dumb strategic decisions you know and this war like iraq would have lost the war in six months and saddam probably would have collapsed if it wasn't for the rest of the world holding him up it is impressive when you think about the fact that the Iranians despite their royal fuck-ups on their side continue to be successful considering Iraq is being propped up by three quarters of the world yeah the entire western world and you you would think yeah I know I covered it in the first episode but like at this point is a golden opportunity for the Soviets to get involved.

Like, well, we get to fuck with the Americans again. But Iran had pissed off the Soviets so bad they wouldn't give them weapons. You know what's bad when the Soviets won't back you against an American backed organization? Yeah. On principle. Yeah. I mean, the Soviets support a lot of really awful people just like, well, as long as you fuck with the Americans, I'm on board. Right.

Right. And I mean, likewise, we've done the same thing. But like the one rule to get like Soviet aid is like, don't kill all the communists in your country. And that's what Iran did. And they fucked it up immediately. Yeah. Immediately when the revolution is like. And the weird part was, is the communists actually helped the revolutionaries get power.

And they're like, uh, guys, the tables have turned. Got you good good fucker uh and to make matters worse for saddam iranian special forces and kurdish fighters managed to infiltrate the oil rich area of kirkuk and start blowing shit up they attacked oil refineries train depots and supply dumps and managed to ambush the the entire headquarters of the iraqi intelligence service and kill 600 people in just two days holy shit um you know at this point like we were just talking about this is just unfair to iran like iraq would have imploded in on itself a hundred times over at this point but they're like do you ever play a lot of video games i play a lot of video games

have you played it like an rpg where you're not actually meant to beat the boss but you don't know it yeah so you just waste everything trying to fight this unwinnable battle that's kind of like what the iran is they're just scripted to lose no matter how hard you try. Yeah. Just by virtue of all the support that the Iraqis are getting from, you know, the Western world and they continue to do the best they can and they come very close to winning,

but it's kind of hard to, when you have the United States and all these other countries pouring billions of dollars and, you know, millions of rounds of ammunition, all this equipment to outfit the Iraqi army. So every time they fuck up, they can replace it. And direct naval support when the Iraqi

Navy fell apart. They crippled the Iraqi economy. That was one of the first things they did, but it didn't matter because they have a blank check from the rest of the goddamn planet. They crippled the military over and over and over again. Instead of winning, someone just gives them unlimited supplies of tanks, jets, and supplies and giggles while they keep

killing each other until the heat death of the universe. That's kind of like, you know, this is like that rich, dumb kid that continues to pour money and like lose it on dumb things. But Daddy made so much money that can keep going at it. Yeah. Like all the hedge fund kids. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of like, you know, if Elon Musk tried to get involved in, you know, international warfare instead of just building Bond villain projects like he does now. Yeah, he could do a lot of things

but instead he's going to launch a car into space and giggle. No, he's an absolute genius, you know. It's not massive ego that led him to launch his fucking car into space. Yeah, or call like Thai rescuers pedophiles for daring to rescue children.

Yeah, for questioning whether you know the the elon musk submersible is not a great thing to use in a fucking tunnel system like what would a british diver with decades of experience know about something like that he reminds me mr burns like the episode where he goes nuts and builds the spruce goose but it's just him all the time it's like howard hughes he just isn't peeing in jars quite yet he's not quite at the locking himself up and pissing in jars stage of rich insanity yet it's coming around the corner what would be the movie that he watches over and over again like if he was locked up i probably the martian while he masturbates this is just the

mention of mars is probably enough to get Elon Musk going. Is there a movie where a rich person is the good guy? He's definitely watching Iron Man and upset that he isn't Tony Stark. He's ignoring the part where Tony Stark realizes his weapons are the ones killing the Afghan children. Yes. He skips over that part and the rest of it is like, oh, of course he's a genius. Yeah. It's like all the Nazis that I grew up with up with that uh really liked american history x oh yeah did you

not watch the second part did you you missed the whole part where he actually realizes it's shit right like you missed that portion of it literally gets his family killed or like the marines that watch uh full metal jacket just for the first half and they never watch the second half of it because like oh man it's awesome you know all this cool stuff going on boot camp is like well a guy kills the drill instructor and then they all go to vietnam and horrible things happen to them all it's all the and then it's written by a noted anti-war activist like the whole thing is kind of like meant to trash the marine corps and yes then the marines walk in like yeah fuck yeah marines happy birthday by the way happy birthday even though you're just a member of the navy yeah yeah and i'll never ever ever let that go that is a hill i've died on worse hills i got i got a lot of uh angry people in my mentions when

i said all vodka tastes the same oh man you know what i'm gonna join you on that hill because i haven't tasted a vodka that tastes anything other than vodka. Yeah, yeah. It tastes like liquefied hairspray and that's okay because it gets you fucked up. Exactly. Back to the arena, right? Yeah, yeah. No vodka here because that's haram. But the Iranians just never gave up. They literally just launched more offensive, this time towards their prize of Basra. god the iranians just never gave up they literally just launched more offensive this time towards their prize of basra um now unlike the last surprising attack on alpha this one would not

be planned by military minds uh because why would you do something that worked twice in a row you gotta keep the enemy guessing shake it up a little bit yeah this time they would be planned and led by a random politician named akbar rosh rosh of shani who prior to the revolution was a pistachio merchant who studied theology on the weekends. During the revolution, he was put in charge of the Ayatollah's finances and is one of the founders of the Revolutionary Guard Corps because he thought the revolutionary purges of the Imperial Iranian Army didn't go quite

far enough. There's one person I can think of to plan and lead a strategic offensive. It's a pistachio merchant. Yeah. These are all qualities that make a successful military commander. Oh, absolutely. A casual weekend imam.

Yeah. Who's a pistachio merchant. I just dabble in imamism. You went to night school for imams. I don't know if that's a thing, but this guy apparently did it. Yeah. I went to Madras on weekends. So, you know uh with that

akbar was given a 200 000 man army made up mostly revolutionary guard and volunteers and struck out at iraqi lines on midnight of january 1987 initially uh it seemed to be the case that the iranian army they found great success incompetent iraqi soldiers and leaders folded pretty quickly and the iranians captured the town of Salamcha. Like most Iranian attacks, however, with great advances become horrible casualties. And much like the Russians during World War Two, human meat was their number one weapon and all their losses were quickly reinforced. Iraqis quickly launched a counterattack. They knew how important Bowser was and would spare no expense at driving the Iranians out.

They scraped together all their heavy weapons and sent them charging at the enemy. The only problem was Basra was a marshland and the Iraqi tanks quickly got stuck. This shouldn't have surprised them because they're in Iraq and should probably know their own country. The Iranians knew this, actually, and kept the majority of their tanks away from the battle. I mean, this certainly helped they hardly had any but still they knew iraq better than the iraqi military that's the impressive thing i mean fighting on home ground you'd expect the iraqi army to have kind of an idea of what the terrain looks like and i guess they just i mean classic s2 he never got the map sheets out in

time so nobody knew what the fuck was going on also like they were dug in very near to there so like they had to know like those are marshes, right? We probably shouldn't drive our tanks through that, right? Nah, fucking drive. Go, go, go, go. Saddam says drive the tanks. Okay. All right.

Well, if Saddam says so, I guess it'll be fine. The Iraqi Air Force, though, had no excuse. There's no swamp in the air. So using brand new Russian jets, the Su su-25 if anybody's keeping track at home the iraqis rushed hundreds of jets to try to keep the iranians at bay they actually outnumber the iranian air force a full 10 to 1 those are pretty good odds and i'm not telling you the story because it ends well uh none of it would matter the iraqis would be decimated and a full 10 percent of their entire air force is shot down over the battlefield Once again, along the Iranians air supremacy,

this is like the third time this has happened. But like we just talked about, it didn't matter. It's like they get boats full of new jets immediately. Yeah. 10% of the air force getting wiped out. I mean, it's not exactly like the pilots are,

you know, I mean, obviously you have to have a degree of training with pilots, but the Iraqis still have a lot of people. And it's not like they're at a premium with the Iranian Air Force. It seems like you had guys who had been trained by the Americans, actually skilled pilots, and therefore could, you know, deal with the fact that if you have 10 enemy jets going against you,

if you actually know what the hell you're doing, odds are still pretty well on your side. Yeah. And it's like the Iraqi army's training was, and I assume their pilot training is much the same way in that they just kind of taught them how to operate the jets and then everything else is political indoctrination here's the start button and here's how you fire the missiles and here is five like five days of instruction on how great Saddam is the Iraqi air force was so confused and misguided that um there is they actually had to come up with a rule that you cannot use.

You cannot use fixed wing air support anywhere. The Iraqi helicopters are flying because they just kept shooting each other down. The vehicle idea was not a priority of training back then. And it goes. I've probably said this in a great episode now but i can't be understanding enough that saddam's philosophy for the military was i just want the best shiniest stuff and fuck training the soldiers oh it's the classic dictator view of like you know the military is a pride point you know i i like i like parades and i like things

like that and it helps he took part in a military coup so he knew like an independently intelligent and strategic military would definitely overthrow him yeah because he's an asshole so he just did his best to fill the military full of fucking idiot yes men yeah uh and it shows it really shows uh so waves of iranian soldiers supported by close air support which they finally figured out would break over and over again against the human se sea wall of iraqi defenses even though they broke through four different lines of iraqi trenches the preceding line behind it would just keep up the fight and then retake the trench which i know i've been harsh on the iraqi military during these episodes and i'm not sorry about that they absolutely deserve it they're awful um i will die on this hill uh but once they are actually put behind several dozen feet of dirt and cement and trenches and um put in their own territory they

actually fought really well um i think a lot of this has to do with their officers and their staff officers everything else um being mostly incompetent and leading maneuvers and uh you really don't have to command fixed defense um like they they really just uh have to sit there like you you can't fuck that up yeah i mean the strategic defense is a lot easier for a reason i mean it doesn't take as i mean you can definitely put effort into it and develop a effective defense right you know engagement area development like we do in the army and things like that. But, like, you know, in terms of skill and planning considerations and stuff, it's pretty much just sit there and wait for someone to come by so you can shoot them.

Yeah. Which is what the Iraqis are. That's pretty much the level the Iraqis were at throughout the war. Yeah, that's the peak of their ability. Strategic brilliance. Yeah, they never really quite figured out combined arms warfare um they would lead uh infantryless tank assaults um they would they it was really weird i've never like you you only see this shit in like world war one yeah

um because it hadn't been figured out yet these guys don't have an excuse yeah or like world war two on the eastern front where the russians i I mean, Soviets didn't have the equipment to do anything other than launch human bodies at the Germans. Yeah. Yeah. And it I don't know. It's weird that they managed to just not fall apart because I understand that the Iraqis were held up by everybody else. But like the military still stood there and fought, which is more than I figured they'd still be doing at this point. I figured they would just be running for the hills and deserting and they were deserting a lot. There was actually that same journalist who was there for the Battle of the Marshes. Like I say, he was not a guest of the Iraqi government and he just traveled by civilian transport.

And one time he was on a bus and it was stopped by a police car and four uniformed police officers came aboard, talked to four people, I think it was four or five young men who were just on the bus talked to them momentarily they went off the bus with them and then they shot them on the side of the road for being deserters

so there was a lot of people deserting there's something to be said about the fear of what are you going to do if you desert and you're apparently going to get pulled off a bus and shot by the side of the road broad daylight yeah but there's also something to be said about defending your homeland even if the guy running your homeland is a bastard he's still our bastard yeah it's better than having the ayatollah take over iraq and you and establish whatever sort of revolutionary Islamic government. And the Ayatollah

actually did establish a weird government in exile and put some cleric in charge who was even more extreme than the Ayatollah by his speeches. There's even like a little military called like the MEK that he stood up that we'll talk a little

bit about next episode but it they were fucking nuts even even by revolutionary standards by revolutionary guard standards they're like even the people who were like man saddam's an asshole you're sitting in a trench line you're like oh that guy's a bigger asshole like i still stay in my trench exactly um but um you know like i've said about a hundred times through four episodes now the aryan offensive quickly ground to a halt um their supplies once again ran out and they can no longer sustain the attack um and the people that they that knew how to handle what little supply and logistics the aryan needs they'd have were not consulted for the battle uh the closest thing

they they could get was about seven miles from the city and they would leave behind the 60 000 casualties the city of basra itself was largely reduced to rubble from uh airstrikes and artillery in less than a month and with good reason this battle is now referred to as the psalm of iraq um during the battle i know i've shit talked the iranian like we we just laughed at the iranians going into battle on white horses um and we're actually going to talk about one of those guys uh is revolutionary guard leader named hosan karadzai who uh who'd been a leading figure in the guard since like the revolutionary purges i think he probably got to this because he was not

a military guy he had no military training whatsoever um which is what you don't want in a military leader of course yeah i think he just got to the top of the guard because he was just really really good at shooting people who were counter-revolutionary uh he was one of the people that uh we talked about the first episode that uh would just break into people's homes and if they had anything that could be traced to the shah they got shot um he and his uh like roving band of fucking purge people like from the movie would kill so many people the ayatollah was like yeah maybe you should calm down like we still have to rule a country full of people eventually ayatollah is telling you to pump your brakes this is a pretty bad yeah yeah but he uh he was uh present at pretty much every major Iranian battle during the war up to this point to include the first battle of Kormshar before the Revolutionary Guard really had their shit together.

He would actually die while leading the 14th Imam Hussein Brigade, sorry, division armed only with a flag. Not a good idea, which is what you do in late 20th century warfare. Yeah, he was quickly machine gunned and died. So like that, it just blows my mind that they had any success because like they have no command and control. There's no like real squad decision making. It's just wave after wave of assholes with flags. And most of the leadership are guys that are in positions of leadership because they just murked the individuals that actually knew what the fuck they were

doing. Yeah. It's like, cause I always compare the, the, the Iranian revolution to the French revolution because all the purges and everything. But even then,

when they formed the revolutionary French army for the coalition wars, they still were like, OK, we have to put the military back in charge. Yeah. Even though some of them are probably totally loyal to the king. We still need these guys. Yeah. I mean, you still had that core of officers. I mean, some people that were able to survive the purges and stayed and declared loyalty to a revolutionary French government.

Like they're still the military officers, like some of the leadership of those revolutionary French government. They're still the military officers. Some of the leadership of those revolutionary French armies were definitely political appointees that rose up with the revolution, but you still had a solid core of officers who had some general idea of what the hell they're doing. I know Mill Twitter loves the shit-talk officers, as one does. Every majority of enlisted folk hate a majority of officers. It's the way cats and dogs and that nature of things. But there's something to be said about individuals who are actually trained to understand not just tactics, but like strategy and logistics and stuff.

It's it takes a little bit more than just being really motivated about the Iranian revolutionary government. You know, it's like being a devout Muslim doesn't mean that you're very effective at planning logistics that are required to execute an effective offensive it's like you know hopes and hopes and prayers only work for school shootings and for you know uh they don't really work too well for planning yeah offensives yeah uh you can't thoughts and prayers your way to uh most things yeah and you know it's it's kind of weird because uh that there's a lot of political appointees like during the french revolution who were who were officers who just had the right political connections that just didn't exist here it was like okay you worked for the shah you die

yeah and it's like man you really shot yourself in the dick um pretty much well close to literally for a majority of this war and you know you know, it's people always talk about, like you're talking about mill Twitter, talking about officers and stuff. Yeah. An officerless, leaderless army has been attempted on multiple occasions. It did not work.

It's a disaster every time. There's something to be said about this idea of, you know, everybody, everyone's a comrade and everyone's the same rank. It's like, well, there are certain endeavors in life that require a degree in structure. And you can't stop the middle of an offensive to have a Democratic vote on if we go left or right. Right. And you can't have people that don't know what the hell they're doing at all plan major offensives that are very complicated and require a lot of planning and logistical support and everything.

Yeah. And I think that's something that you come to appreciate when you get into history is like, oh, there's a lot more to this. Like even people like criticize 18th century, 17th century warfare. There's marching each other in lines. True. But there is a lot of thought that goes into that and why it works. Yeah. I mean, it wasn't just because like, oh, well, we'll just keep shooting at each other because we're morons. It's your smooth more buskets have a range of maybe 100 meters yeah past 100

meters like it's going to fly off to the left or something so there's a reason why you had to mask these guys and shoot at each other yeah at short distances it wasn't just madness and it wasn't just the officers being you know the son of an earl going on be like allow the pause to die before me i don't care that's part of it i mean there's a portion of it i mean that's that's that's why i became an officer really if you think about it purchased your commission yeah i enjoy ordering around the pores i i come from a large plantation family give me my fancy hat oh man uh well that is uh episode four uh we'll pick up next week which will finally be the final episode of their an-Iraq war

because this thing has spiraled completely out of my control. I'm honestly surprised that the war actually ever ended based off of how all this is going. I'll talk about it a little bit next episode, but I found out that the last POWs were actually not released from Iraq until we invaded

in 2003. These guys are just sitting around for a couple decades. released from Iraq until we invaded in 2003. Jesus. These guys are sitting around for a couple decades. It's like Saddam's like, no, no, I won't kill them. I just want to look at them. And just going to keep them in cages. Yeah. And I guess, I mean, they should be happy that Uday and Qusay didn't feed them into a wood chipper or something.

I'm kind of surprised they didn't. And I'm sure I haven't really looked into it quite yet, but I'm sure there's quite a bit of torture at play. Yeah. And, you know, I was talking to Nick during the last episode. I'm really sad I can't talk looked into it quite yet, but I'm sure there's quite a bit of torture at play. Yeah. And, you know, I was talking to Nick during the last episode. I'm really sad I can't talk about Uday and Kusei in any meaningful capacity during the series because they weren't involved.

Yeah. But that means I have to cover them anyway because they were killed fighting the U.S. forces. So technically, that's military history. You could do a special episode on those two. I mean, it's just amazing to think of all the bad shit and sane things that those two did i mean if you think about the evil dictators even more evil sons yes it's ude and kuse they are like there's some people in history that you have to think um like they went out of their way to be the worst fucking human being on earth like

we were just talking about leopold II of Belgium is one of them. Udi and Cusse, definitely up there. It takes a special kind of someone to be evil enough to actually install a wood chipper for the sole purpose of feeding people in feet first so you can watch their faces going through it. And that's a special kind of fucked up to do that. Yeah. Thanks for coming to the pacific the great pacific moist west i did it solely to be on the podcast i want you to know i'm trying

to ride your coattails to glory yeah i'm trying to uh yeah our patreon is so high now we just bust people in um but uh speaking of which uh if you like our show go ahead and donate to the patreon if you think what we do is worth a dollar our main episodes will always be which, if you like our show, go ahead and donate to the Patreon. If you think what we do is worth a dollar, our main episodes will always be free. But if you donate a buck, you get access to all of our bonus stuff where we talk about stupid movies and battles didn't actually happen. Like we talked about the battle of Hogwarts.

I'll eventually talk about the battle of bastards from game thrones. And I think we'll be talking about starship troopers here pretty shortly. Also donate. So I can send Tom home. Please, it's going to start getting dark here and I'm very scared. Yeah, it gets dark at like fucking four o'clock here now and it's miserable. But yeah, thanks for tuning in and you can catch the final episode of this out of control spiraling series next week. I'll be looking forward to it myself. Oh, me too.

I'm sick of reading about people getting gassed to death. Oh, come on. It's entertaining in a dark, twisted, depressing kind of way. Oh, it only gets worse. It only gets worse. Until next. That is the podcast slogan. Wait, it only gets worse.

Wait, there's worse. Until then. Hi, this is Nate Bethea, and I'm the producer of the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. Wait, there's worse. Until then. Donkeys and browse the selection of audio programs. Download his title for free and start listening. Once again, that's www.audibletrial.com forward slash donkeys to get started.