Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 27- Iran Iraq War Part 5: And then things got worse

Episode Date: November 26, 2018

Episode 27- Iran Iraq War Part 5: And then things got worse by

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 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. roof. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe and I'm Nick returning with me today is Nick for the last time in a very long time. Yes the next step hopefully soon the next episode will be my chain of command. Yeah it'll be good. Some donkeys. Yeah so Nick

will be this is Nick's last episode with us for about a month and a half um he's going to japan yes uh which we found out about wednesday yeah wednesday thursday yeah yeah surprise uh it was great um so today is the final episode of our iran iraq series uh it's a podcast arc that quickly spun out of control of my original three parts that I had planned. You know, I thought three episodes was good back when we covered the War of 1812. It was a pretty solid blueprint for this arc going forward.

But then I quickly realized that it was really dumb for thinking that a war that lasted nearly a decade and involved most of the goddamn world could be covered in three hours. That's my fault. This is a lot of shit. Yeah. And, you know, there's a lot of shit we had to leave out.

So here we are on part five, and I still had to cut out a ton of stuff, along putting aside the entire Iran-Contra affair for a later date and bringing in a specialist to talk about Iraq's weapons procurement program, which will be the episode next week. This one kind of got crazy. So what I'm saying is this is the last time I let our listeners vote on a topic. I'm kidding. I love you guys.

You gave Nick and I the opportunity to daydream about Iraqi army wizards and allowed me to talk about electrocuted entire Iranian army with a weaponized swamp and building a road out of corpses. A lot of Pauls. Yeah, I actually I still stand by the fact that Corpse Road makes a pretty sweet black metal band name. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Corpse Road. Corpse Road or like Corpse Highway.

Corpse. And like if they had like a side project to be like Corpse Off-Ramp. Corpse Off-Ramp. Yeah. The behind the scenes yeah yeah behind the music corpse off ramp uh anyway uh so the end of our last episode we talked about the what became known as the iranian psalm a pistachio farmer who destroyed his own army iranian cosplayers dressed up like the imam hussein leading charges on horseback and the

iraqi army finally discovering the only thing they were good at was defending. Though Iran was slowly overwhelming them from the north and the south. Massive casualties did nothing to disrupt the Iranian army, however. Much like our boy Luigi Cordona in the Kingdom of Italy, Iran attempted to make up for its myriad of weaknesses by constantly going on the attack, regardless of the outcome. Still human waves? its myriad of weaknesses by constantly going on the attack regardless of the outcome still human waves oh well you know they kept saying that we're gonna tone back the human waves and i would hope so but they didn't really i mean their casualty levels are still catastrophic so i don't know

like they they attempted to move towards like small unit tactics but like what's small unit to them i would assume like normal infiltration tactics but they had become so dependent on the human wave attacks that was really all they knew and it didn't help they had very limited armor so they really had nothing else to fall back on except they're just like here's a whole bunch of meat yeah uh this totally undermined the iranian own military effort of maintaining their heavy weapon systems which they still could hardly repair let alone replace and since uh dynamic offensives were over and the iraqis were safely behind their massive entrenchments the iranians were no longer uh able to capture large amounts of iraqi vehicles and equipment which was kind of accidentally turned into the backbone of the Iranian,

uh, military effort at this point. Some surplus. Yeah. Like, uh, you know, they weren't unlike the Iraqis.

They didn't have a blank check from anybody, uh, to keep the war effort going. Uh, so when it came to heavy armor, their best bet was capturing Iraqi stuff and then kind of holding it together with duct tape. Uh, heavy armor their best bet was capturing iraqi stuff and then kind of holding it together duct tape uh and they also had some indigenous uh manufacturing plants to try to put out replacement parts but it's not like they had t-72s rolling off the assembly line or something um but you know

in the beginning of the war when especially when iraq invaded they were capturing so much iraqi shit because iraq's iraq's army was trash. Oh, yeah. That it kept the Iranian war effort going for years. Learn that. Yeah. Their cool equipment, turns out they needed to actually learn how to use it.

But they had the warrior spirit, man. Did they? That's what Saddam thought. Yeah. That's what Saddam thought. So while the Iranian corpses were piling up in front of them, the Iraqi army's footing was dire

unlike the Iranians they had a hard time replacing soldiers and ever since the war started they had by far the worst commanders of the war that's like one common thing that you see among the historical narrative here is like the Iranians were hurting for everything but they had better commanders so they had to work with what they had i feel like any any commander would be better than any iraqi commander they had some real fucking idiots what we've gone through yeah at the same time i mean iran also kind of disregarded a lot of their actually traditionally trained military scholars and officers that managed to survive the purge and then put an army in charge gave a pistachio farmer the charge of an army um and they came up season must have been really bad for him

to do this yeah well he dabbled in theology which was apparently all you needed to get promoted within the government um but you know is i think the the concept of good commander uh can get alternative alternatively switched out with successful commander and there's a lot of I think the, the concept of good commander, uh, can get alternative, alternatively switched out with successful commander. And there's a lot of successful commanders that got really fucking lucky. And I mean, if I, I don't think Iran would have been able to push Iraq out of Iranian territory like they did.

If the Iraqis had anybody in, anybody competent in charge. Oh yeah. Uh, but they didn't. And here we anybody competent in charge. Oh, yeah. But they didn't, and here we are. Starting from the top. Oh, yeah. Or maybe if Saddam didn't want to be in charge of everything and let his military be a military, I don't know.

But half their schooling was just talking about how cool Saddam was. So they didn't have great minds. This guy? Mustache? Cool as fuck. Yeah. Solid mustache. Cool as fuck. Yeah. Yeah. Solid shades. So, I mean, the only thing Iraq really had going for them was like the rest of the world wanted Iran to lose.

And that was a pretty strong trump card to have because it was like I talked about in the last episode, whereas like Iraq was like that RPG boss that is scripted for you to lose to. So like no matter what you do, he won't die because he just keeps responding like health bars or whatever. Because the Iraqi military would have fallen apart in like 1981 if it wasn't for everybody else. But now here we are like 1986, 87. He brings those asshole henchmen while you're fighting him. You got to fight them too. Yeah. And it's just a never ending way him. You got to fight them too. Yeah. And it's just a never ending way of them

because somebody wants you to lose. Yeah. But, you know, all this, you know, that blank check and the overt support of the Americans, the French, the Brazilians, everything else that didn't stop the Iraqis from attacking an American frigate, however.

What? Yeah. So the USS Stark. I'd attack that too. Yeah. I don't like Star Trek. Stark. Oh, you said Stark.

Yeah. Oh, I don't know why I heard Star Trek. Yeah. And you haven't watched Game of Thrones, so I can't make a Game of Thrones joke here. I just can't even deal with you right now. Well, Star Trek, that's what I got from it. Stark Trek.

All right. So, well, they claim they attacked it on accident. I can't even deal with you right now. Oh, Star Trek. That's what I got from it. Stark Trek. All right. So, well, they claim they attacked it on accident. They attacked it with a modified business jet armed with a French-made exocet anti-shit missile. That's fucking awesome. So this actually means, so early in the war, the Iraqi military and the Iraqi Air Force in general

was pretty incompetent. They had really good jets, but really terrible pilots. And later on in the war, France actually agreed to train them better, like train their pilots to like survive 20 minutes in combat. And they also supplied them with Mirage jets, Exocet missiles and everything else. So this means that 37 U.S. naval personnel were killed by a French missile out of a French jet by french trained pilots nice in a war that the united states was supplying weapons to as well so this was like america so this was a business it was a modified business jet so this plays into my whole thing of taking your land

with a cessna i mean it worked i don't think you could strap an exocet missile onto a cessna that's what you think i don't know. It's worth a shot, I guess. I'm a pretty handy guy. Yeah, I mean, duct tape, some extra bolts. Just hang out the end of the window and just kick the exocet off the wing. My dog is my co-pilot. That's not a good sign. That's a good sign.

So at first, the Iraqis claimed the ship was in Iraqi waters, which was not true. Instead, it was actually two miles outside of Iraqi water borders. And even then, like, Americans operated in Iraqi waters all the time because they were helping the Iraqis. Yeah, I would imagine. Also, the ship was very clearly marked, and it's a frigate. You're not going to confuse a battle frigate for virtually anything else. Later, Saddam apologized and claimed the pilot mistook the ship for an oil tanker, which at least that makes sense in theory because they're blowing up oil tankers. But it doesn't make sense because it's a fucking frigate.

Yeah. He also reassured the Americans that he found the pilot and the pilot was executed for his actions. Other Iraqi Air Force officers point out that was in fact a lie and the officer was given an award. Holy fuck.

Yeah. I couldn't find any like accounts of that pilot still being alive and like talking and stuff because I mean there's a good chance he got killed in like the other two wars that quickly followed this one or maybe even later in this one. Uh, maybe just after the award.

Yeah. Yeah. Uh, so as dumb as the Iraqi military leaders were, they knew they were in trouble, but Saddam didn't. Unlike certain stupid former Iranian presidents, he never attempted the command from the front and only knew about the goings

on of the war from, from military briefings. The generals were hoping things would stay, uh stay static long enough for them to figure everything out because they lied their asses off. Saddam was told the army was doing fine and the Iranian losses, already incredibly high, were so high the country was getting ready to collapse, just like they said it would almost a decade before. Oh yeah, I don't feel like getting shot in the head. Right. And it's funny because at the end of the war,

when they're calculating a casualty totals, Iraq still claims they killed north of a million Iranians, which would have been some, holy fuck, which would have been some absurdly large percentage of the entire population. And it's definitely not true. And they did that same thing throughout the entire war is like, Hey,

look, we killed 600,000 Iranians in this offensive. Like, no, you didn't. That would be their entire army. Yeah. Holy shit. But they publish those numbers all the time, and they're all obscenely large, which is why it's actually really hard to find out how many people actually died,

which we'll go over at the end of the episode. I'm sure that got Saddam hard. Oh, yeah. It was how he showed what limited success that he had. It's like like we're still here and we're i mean even if he published the actual casualty totals they would have been very high and made him look good and honestly i'm pretty sure he doesn't even nobody really knows i'm honestly sure like you said you couldn't find any uh well i mean there's numbers but

they fluctuate wildly and they're still finding bodies today. And also those bodies probably mix in pretty well with all the wars that have been going on in the region since. I imagine the road didn't help since they're making roads with the body. Yeah, corpse roads in the middle of a marsh probably definitely hurt numbers, number calculations. I got a hand here. Yeah, yeah. So the Iraqi leadership had no idea who was telling the truth, and they actually ended up accidentally being kind of right. And the aftermath of Operation Karbala 5, which we nicknamed the Iranian Psalm, was actually a huge blow to the Iranian military and government. As such, the Iranian public actually became incredibly war-weary.

But the Iraqis had no idea about any of this. So they accidentally tripped back assward into telling the truth. I mean, remember, this isn't that far from the heady days of the revolution of men and women taking to the streets and casting aside the imperial yoke. It had been nearly a decade of very hard war though. And think of how many, uh, think of how terrible those Iranian casualties were this whole time.

Uh, so like that's been since day one, like when the Iraqi stormed over the border, uh, the foot soldiers and main supporters of the original revolution, the leadership aside, we're all pretty much dead, uh,

killed in the first, I mean, remember all the the really excited um volunteers oh yeah yeah they're all fucking gone oh they've been gone for years uh and if they survive they're now officers because they're the last ones standing that's how you know you fast-tracked yeah yeah it's really easy to get promoted when everybody else is dead uh because of this the hordordes of volunteers that Iranian tactics depended on kind of started to dry up.

Like the Iraqis, the Iranians ramped up their conscription numbers and further pissed off their population. Despite the fact that their conscription numbers were the highest they'd been all war, their military power actually dropped. They just didn't have the population. When they come out with conscription numbers,

they would just tell a certain town, certain city, you need this many bodies. But there wasn't that many left. There just wasn't the population of military-aged men who could fight that they wanted. And remember, they burned through the majority of their military, militarily acceptable male population, no matter how low their standards dropped.

And remember, like the, the bossy and the revolutionary guard Corps started off with people missing limbs and child soldiers and the elderly. Like it already started pretty low. You had a high school. Yeah.

And it burned through those. This caused mass desertion within the regular army and the guard, as well as a huge flight of any men who hadn't desertion within the regular army and the guard, as well as a huge flight of any men who hadn't been cut off the drafts of the surrounding countries, to include Iraq. A lot of Iranian dudes just ran to Kurdistan. What the fuck?

Yeah. Which ended up being a huge mistake, which we'll talk about. But, yeah. Because of this, Iran was totally unable to mobilize enough soldiers to launch a major offensive after their failure of Karbala 5. Didn't stop them from trying, but they just didn't have the material. And by material in Iran, I mean people. People.

Because that's really all they got. Yeah. Also, for the first time on either side of the war, massive anti-war demonstrations began to unfold within Iran, which is really surprising because, I mean, you have to think the vast majority of the people who are in these demonstrations, I'm going to assume, kind of remembered what happened to the people that were protesting before the revolution. Oh, I would assume the same. Yeah.

So, huge demonstrations spread to nearly 100 Iranian cities and soon soldiers joined in with them, just as the original revolution had a decade before. The Iranian government acted with the level head you would expect from a despotic theological dictatorship that only a few years before dragged counterrevolutionaries out into the street and murdered them. Revolutionary guardsmen were dispatched to machine gun people in the streets, killing untold dozens, if not hundreds of protesters. It is impossible to figure out actual numbers on this yeah because the iranian government is not talking about it um i i found numbers that said like 20 20 20 people that's it that's the only thing but there's no way that's accurate because i mean 100 cities the revolutionary guard who have just been they're definitely people from the front there's definitely more than 20 people i would have met 100 cities

100 cities that's less than one dead person per city yeah there's no way than 20 people i would have met 100 cities 100 cities that's less than one dead person per city yeah there's no way that's true uh so going even further revolutionary guards and policemen set up roadblocks at every intersection of every city in town looking for men who might be trying to flee the draft which actually seems like a massive waste of manpower to me like if you just put all those dudes from the roadblocks at the front you just made up a whole drop class yeah you're i feel like you're probably only catching like what a handful of guys too maybe even if even if that yeah i don't know uh while iran did not want to quit the war they finally accepted that there would be no final victory towards basra our wonderful pistachio farming friend hashemi Rashashani, who, for reasons that escape me, had not been fired after leading what had been known as the Somme of Iran, did not get fired.

He's probably cooking up good pistachios. Cooking up on the side. Yeah. Would you like some extra salt on those, Mr. Ayatollah? He went on TV to announce that the Iranian people at human wave attacks would officially end though. That would be a lie. Again,

the Iranians would instead hunker down and arm opposition groups within Iraq. Mostly the Kurds in the North of the country who had already been helping them economically. Both countries were in total shambles. Iran's oil output had slowed to a trickle due to the American operation. Earnest will, which we talked about, I believe in episode two,

um, causing the countries who would have traded with Iran to stop because it's no longer worth the risk, uh, due to their main cash source, drying up inflation, shut up by over 50% and unemployment of the people who weren't at the frontline,

stop clearing landmines for the Ayatollah grew so large. I simply stopped counting it. What? Yeah. Like imagine your, your unemployment rate is so. What? Yeah, like imagine your unemployment rate is so high that the government's like, oh, fuck, a lot? The U.S. Navy also joined in

active combat operations on the Shat al-Arab against Iran, destroying any hope that the economy would ever get back on its feet. There's actually one instance of the American just straight up sinking an Iranian frigate. Part four is a downer.

Sorry, part five. Oh, it gets worse. Sweet. We haven't gotten to the genocide yet. Oh, there's genocide. Oh, yeah. Is that the cherry on top or are we still? I don't know.

Some of our episodes are, so for our new listeners, which we've gotten quite a few since I accidentally got Twitter famous that one time. Nice. We used to have a saying. We don't use it so much anymore, but we call it pralines and dick. Yes. Where there's like someone will do a lot of bad stuff, but they'll also have done like one good thing. So yeah, it's like eating an ice cream flavor called pralines and dick.

And I feel like still the dick would overpower the sweetness. But you also need the saltiness with the sweetness to bring out some pretty good sweetness. If the Iran-Iraq war was an ice cream flavor, it's just all dick. It's all dick all the way down. It's dicks all the way down. You might have spilled like a drop of ice cream.

Maybe. Maybe. I don't even think if that, no. It's all dicks. Yeah, so it just gets worse it's like I said on Twitter it's like

on our Twitter account that if the Iran-Iraq war had a tagline it just wait it gets worse all the way until it ends and then it gets worse again so Iraq had actually

accumulated so much debt from their countless loans that the international part from their international partners there was no hope of paying any of them back do you think the magician tried to make them disappear Al-Qazan fuck we're still poor from their international partners, there was no hope of paying any of them back. Do you think the magician tried to make them disappear?

Alakazam. Fuck, we're still poor. He didn't go to financial wizarding school. I see. Yeah, his major was in pulling rabbits out of the hat or also just eating away other people's wands like in Harry Potter. Make this debt disappear uh a rabbit yeah so i was like yeah yeah forget about the debt guys we got another week yeah

sweet uh they'd also taken so many casualties during the war they ran out of workers there keep their country together and functioning like you have to remember like it's kind of like oh you know world war ii or you got the home front where women the elderly things like that are everybody's hands on yeah people are the people who can't fight are in the factories well that part had already passed and then saddam put all the people from the factories at war as well they all died nice uh so now there's really nothing it's pretty much just a a giant army that also has a country. Um, kind of like America now. Uh,

so they, uh, so their, their economy had collapsed and now they had no infrastructure. So their internal, even though people are just giving them billions and billions of dollars, it's not doing any good cause they have no infrastructure. Yeah. Um,

that didn't stop Iraqis from carrying out civilian terror bombings within Iran. However, this time with, uh, something called enhanced mustard gas. They called it like dust mustard gas. Enhanced. Yeah, like apparently the particles were so fine that there was just no escaping it. It would cling to everything. Good thing the BBC didn't cover that.

Yeah, it was far more deadly than anything they'd ever used before. And like you remember how I said their casualty rates slowly climbed upwards to damn near 80 this is it yeah 80 of people who were wounded by this particular mustard gas would die which is intense well it's enhanced yeah it's it's like mustard gas 2.0 i don't know there's no good name for it no there is not no nobody had a an actual name for it other than like dust gas or like in hand I don't know no mustard gas to electric boogaloo it's a recall so we call everything all everything yeah electric foo-poo-loo

electric lung juice salute I ran in Iraq also had a again broken into another wave of what we called the War of the Cities. This one having the lovely nickname of the Scud Duel. Because both sides managed to get their hands on tweaked Scud missiles that could fly. Well, they weren't manufactured this way. So Scud missiles are manufactured all throughout the Middle East, Russia, stuff like that. And then they sent them to third party countries to make them fly

further so you got jailbroken missiles that's right yeah sweet yeah I'm pretty sure they're also made by Apple there'd be some shit yeah the iScud platform comes separate yeah it's just like a smooth piece of like white metal but there's no like

it's so far evolved past the point of reverence. There's nowhere to actually plug in the fuel. It just sits there and be useless like an iPhone. Mine's done pretty well. Do you have the one? Do you have the one where you can't plug in headphones anymore? Yes, and I hate it.

Yeah, well, there you go. There you go. Now they're going to sell them right back to you. Yeah, I know. So both sides launched hundreds and hundreds of Scud missiles at one another. Now, if you don't know a lot about Scud missiles, one, welcome to being normal. Two, you should know that they're not that far removed from the vengeance missiles of World War II. They're pretty much just giant, dumb missiles.

They have some kind of targeting system on there, but we're not talking about cruise missiles here. So the first time I heard of Scud missiles was on,'s that movie bravo 20 oh yes god that's where most people heard of scuds for the first time was the gulf war yeah or things related to the gulf war um they're not i mean now saddam did modify them to carry chemical weapons which is awful uh but it's a lot like um an unscientific comparison here would be like the rail guns that uh germany likes to use they're like really scary in theory but you can't fucking aim the goddamn things you just kind of aim it towards the city and let it fly hope it goes yeah yeah it's like the norton bomb site where it's like i hit it with those fucking things

jesus christ i hit within 10 miles i I win. Oh my God. Yeah. That's I hope we can cover the early. Oh yeah. One day. That's one day. One day. So rather than the accurate bombardment of any enemy infrastructure, which would be like the dream of using these things, you know,

in total war, civilian terror bombings, you want to destroy how they're making war. It was more like those scenes from like an old Western or like we're both playing red dead redemption 2 right now so it's like two drunken cowboys firing their pistols wildly into the air and then running as the bullets come back down no one really understands what they're playing with red dead's making me watch a lot of western movies though unforgiven's the

only good one tombstone was good tombstone is good i stand corrected 310 to yuma was good i don't like Ethan Hawke. Really? Yeah. He's got a weird face. That's Ethan Hawke, right? Or is it Christian Bale? Christian Bale.

I get those two confused all the time. Is that the only reason? Just weird face? If he's not Batman, I don't give a fuck. You can... There's no getting around it. No. Now, 310 to Yuma with Batman.

I'd watch that. That's a movie I would watch instead of like futuristic gadget what you doing cowpoke wooden gadgets fucking batarang yeah made out of cow bones I don't know he did have cows

so yeah that makes sense so back to reality I guess I don't know so for the first time of the war Iraq was given a wonderful gift from the United States of America in the form of laser guided bombs. This would actually be interesting. So remember, we're talking about like late 80s here. What's not far from right now, the period of time we're talking? What's not far?

Yeah, there's a lot of things not far. Gulf War, mostly. What? And one of the major things from the Gulf War is look at all these smart munitions. Like, even though, like, they still dropped more dumb bombs than smart munitions. But that was, like, the propaganda thing that the videos from everywhere was, watch as this one bomb lands directly on target. Well, guess where they tested them? They gave them to Iraq.

Really? Yes. Holy fuck. And then they tweaked them later on when they found out their weaknesses so they gave train they trained iraq on these right training is a strong word that's okay that cool that's what i'm getting at yeah so they don't they didn't really train iraq and much they said some shit and said here's a manual right it'd be like it's like if you gave an ak-47 to like an eight-year-old child soldier, he'll figure it out in general. One way or another. And it works.

It could work better, but it works. Yeah. I just want to know how they tweaked it. How they fixed the bomb? Well, tweaked, because... Well, I couldn't find a whole lot because the CIA still has a lot of classified shit

on the war war as you can imagine um but i mean they had years to work on the bomb in between uh from when they first gave it to him and i imagine they they really like to see how accurate they were and then fuck with the computers because i mean remember we talked about in the second episode iraq's getting all their targeting data from us yeah from satellite imagery so uh the the combination of satellite imagery with smart bombs is is new this is the first time it's ever happened so iraq was used as a test ground to later bomb iraq time is a flat circle it turns out this is weird yeah that's yeah that's pretty common for the it gets weirder.

But yeah, it gets worse, too. Oh, yeah, I imagine. Yeah, it's all dicks. Nope, really. So for the first time, also, Iraq had the ability to strictly target Iranian infrastructure because even though they weren't really well trained on the laser guided bombs, it's hard to fuck that up. They could actually attack Iranian infrastructure with that. bombs it's hard to fuck that up they could actually attack iranian infrastructure with that um so they they they hurt it so bad that um the iranian the iranian uh weapons manufacturing was already pretty much at crippled but they almost killed it entirely so i mean this whole

time iran has been teetering and this is one of those weapons that have been given to him five years before i don't know if they existed five years before but iran probably would have lost by now um so uh you would say iraq was pretty accurate with them pretty good with them accurate enough enough okay for this theater absolutely for like propaganda purposes no they were still bombing neighborhoods and shit but well i imagine saddam was like, whatever. Yeah. Saddam doesn't give a fuck. Yeah, I know. So unsure what to do to counter the Iraqis,

the Iranians again went on the offensive. This time with Operation Zafar 7, and it was to- Seven. Seven. Now, I couldn't find a whole lot of details on Zafar 1 through 6, mind you. I wonder if they just picked it for the name.

They have a lot of strange names. The tongue better 7. Yeah. So this time it was for their goals in Iraqi Kurdistan. Their goal was to capture the Darbandi Khan Dam, which still exists today and was on the news pretty recently for nearly being leveled by an earthquake. And I know what you're saying. Why do they build a dam on a fault line? You're not supposed to do that.

Well, it turns out it's pretty much half-assed and it's a giant architectural nightmare. I feel like this whole war has been half-assed along with... Oh, the dam was built in the 50s. Holy fuck. Yeah, yeah. So it's still standing, which surprises pretty much everybody in 2018. the 50s holy fuck yeah yeah so it's still standing which is like surprises pretty

much everybody in 2018 the 50s yeah but also um the the dam controlled a lot of the electrical power grid uh for the entirety of northern iraq yeah so if the if the iranians captured it they could make life a living hell for iraq um so iran knew that the Kurdish forces, even combined with their own, would not be able to hold on to territory very long. Instead, they were just using it to improve their position for future peace talks or a ceasefire. Despite this, the Iraqis were still pushed back around 400 miles. The only way the Iraqis were able to stop their advance was by letting fly with chemical weapons, as they normally do.

By now, the Iraqi chemical weapons development was as good as it would ever be and killed more Iranians than it ever had before. 60% of all of the Iranian casualties, this also includes the Kurdish casualties from the offensive, were from gas. From this offensive yeah and they still haven't got a lot of countermeasures for this now uh one of the ways because remember uh iraq's denying that they're using chemical weapons as dumb as that sounds yeah um one of the ways that independent journalists found to prove that they're using chemical weapons is they went to some of these battle sites.

And they found amongst thousands and thousands of dead Iranians was like uncountable tens of thousands of atropine injectors. And for people not in the know, atropine is the most common counteractive drug to use on the effects of chemical weapons. Is it like an EpiPen? Yeah, it's an auto-injector. When I went through basic training, granted I'm old, so I went through back in 2005, we were taught how to use those

in our NBC class for our anti-chemical weapon defense class. We were even taught, if you see a flash, just lay down on the ground and face away from it, and you'll be fine. Yeah. What? nuclear weapon what yeah it made no sense if you see a flash yeah if you see the flash you're fucked yeah you're pretty much dead you just die but uh yeah

yeah so you you're supposed to use an auto injector of atropine um it's not foolproof but it'll help you not die from it now it doesn't matter for a lot of these agents that IRAC is using, they're blister agents, so it doesn't matter. Your skin's gonna blister up and pop and get disgusting anyway. But blister agents generally don't kill you.

It's the other ones that do. Imagine it would just suck. Yeah, yeah, it's awful. It's a horrible, like you go blind because your eyes fucking blister. If you breathe it in, you get blisters in your lungs it's it's awful um that's why it's uh they're so terrifying is that there's a good chance you

won't die from it but living through it's almost worse than dying your life will suck yeah yeah so that's how they the one of the ways they prove that yes irx using chemical web it's not anybody really gave a shit. Everybody waved their hands on it. If you've been paying attention to this series so far, you know Saddam does not take anyone dissenting against him, let alone rising up against him. This collaboration of the Kurds with the Iranian defenders had not gone unnoticed by Saddam. And he was waiting for his chance to get revenge on this population.

That's juicy. And one of the chances was, well, now they're invading and attacking from Kurdistan. That is when the Al-Anfar campaign was planned. Now, despite the fact that Iranians were taking over all this land, it actually gave the Iraqis an excuse to carry out something they've always wanted

to do. That is to push Iraqi Kurdistan and Arab eyes the area by force. Now consider Kurds and Iraqis have never got along. No. Different culture, different language, different everything. Kurds have always

won their own independence. And if you remember back to the first episode, the Shah of Iran and his even uh fomented unrest in the region one of the things iraq has always wanted to do is get rid of the fucking kurds uh they were going to send people in as settlers uh get rid of the kurds uh root out their culture and one of the best ways of doing that was by killing them all and that's how they started um so they were going to kill rape and loot until they no longer had a minority settled at their northern border the operation was planned by ali hassein al-majid who is saddam's cousin and who would actually eventually going to be known as chemical ali and be arrested by american forces in 2003

yeah he would be hung with Saddam. Yeah. So he was also the secretary general of the Baathist party's northern region, meaning Kurdistan. It was his region to be in charge of. And because of the way the Iraqi army is, being the secretary party general means you're effectively military commander as well. Generally, the Iraqi army would push into a Kurdish area and just go wild.

Al-Majid told his forces that stealing everything, including taking Kurdish women, was totally legal. Any military-aged males were thrown in concentration camps where torture and execution was widespread and common. Saddam and his cousin decided the best way to take out pockets of Peshmerga fighters

which Peshmerga is the Kurdish army, effectively. I know there's going to be some people that's not an exact explanation of Peshmerga fighters, which Peshmerga is the Kurdish army, effectively. I know there's going to be some people, that's not an exact explanation of Peshmerga. Just know that they're Iraqi Kurdistan's army, effectively. The best way to get rid of them was by raining down chemical weapons on them, rather than

committing ground forces into an area. Remember, they had to save those ground forces for fighting the Iranians. Yeah, what little I'm sure they had. Which brings us to a small town known as Halabja. On March 16th, 1988, an attack began that would last for five hours. It began with conventional rockets and napalm attacks, followed by helicopters and jets doing low-lying airstrikes of chemical weapons

in one of the residential areas of the city. Survivors said that first white smoke, then black, and then yellow began coming from the bombs and washing over the city in a cloud that rise nearly 150 feet tall. One survivor said, quote, I saw things I won't forget as long as I live. It started with a loud, strange noise that sounded like bombs exploding, and a man came running into our house shouting, gas, gas. We hurried into our car and closed its windows. I think the car was rolling over bodies of innocent people that died in the streets. I saw people lying on the ground, vomiting a green color liquid while others became hysterical and began laughing loudly before falling motionless onto the ground.

Later, I smelled an aroma that reminded me of apples and I lost consciousness. When I awoke, there were hundreds of bodies scattered all around me. After I took shelter again in a nearby basement, the area was engulfed by an ugly smell. It was similar to rotting garbage. Then it changed into sweet smell, similar to that of apples again. And there's a particular nerve agent,

I believe it's mustard or VX gas that has a sweet smell. So he was smelling something that definitely should have killed him. That's fucking dark. Yeah. Holy shit. Another said, quote, our loved ones,

your friends, you see them walking around and falling like leaves to the ground. It's a situation that cannot be described. Birds began falling from their nests than other animals than humans. It was total annihilation. Whoever was able to walk out of town,

left on foot. Whoever had a car, left by car. But whoever had too many children to carry on their shoulders, they stayed in town and succumbed to the gas. Almost immediately, Iranian doctors and journalists were on the scene, spreading the news as fast as they could. A British ITV film crew was also on the ground very quickly. And there's actually a lot of videos and pictures of this incident um and uh the only medical care that was rendered to the few survivors that got gas was by iranian military did they have any like what is it do they have anything to help with that

uh if they if they caught them fast enough they could give them atropine um other than that i mean a lot of the people that were wounded by the gas did not survive uh because it's just so far away from getting like the critical medical care that that you need to survive something like that um so almost immediately like i said uh journalists were on scene one of them was a guy named uh keva golston he was an iranian. And he said, it was life frozen. Life had stopped, like watching a film and that it suddenly hangs on one frame.

It was a new kind of death to me. The aftermath was worse. They had 15 or 16 beautiful children begging us to take them to a hospital. So all the press sat there as we were handed a child each to carry. As we took off, fluid came from my little girl's mouth

and she died in my arms so now the entire world knows about this this is not a secret almost immediately this is on every news channel um it was probably one of the dumbest things that i could have done uh even if it's something he had weird gross dictator dreams about so like how the hell would he defend this he blamed iran how'd that go better than you'd think really uh so iraqi foreign minister tariq aziz who we've talked about briefly before said quote there's no use of chemical weapons and no necessity of using them and he called the thousands of dead kurds chemical martyrs he claimed that these dead Kurds

were martyrs of Iraq because they were killed by Iran when in reality they're victims of an Iraqi genocide fuck yeah that's like calling the Jews and the death camps like glorious martyrs to the motherland clearly the international community which remember had been supplying and helping Iraq build its chemical weapons infrastructure, did not believe them, right? You must be new to the show.

Hi. So, American intelligence suggested that it was totally an Iranian attack. Or, in the worst case scenario, the Iraqi forces did not know it was a civilian area. What the fuck? Now, this is absurd. Remember, we're talking about a city in iraq of course iraq knows it's a it's a it's a city um and there's very little chance that the u.s did not know what what exactly was happening there remember the u.s had been supplying iraqi

forces with sail images to guide their airstrikes for years and it's not like they had a feed um going straight to iraq yeah this intelligence was forwarded to uh like foreign attaches and then it was given to the iraqis sometimes the iraqis would ask for it certain areas things like that and then they would be given to them there had to be a request for information on this area for to an American source who then got it for them and then gave it back and then saw what happened. So the things that they were supplying, the videos, the photos, all the recon, that also include Iranian positions during operations of year seven. According to a declassified CIA document from the time, the US knew Saddam was using chemical weapons as far back as 1983. By the late 80s, it was so accepted that the Iraqis were using banned weapons that Air Force Colonel Rick Francola, who was one of those military attachés I told you about in Baghdad at the time, said, quote, The Iraqis never told us they were intended to use gas.

They didn't have to. We already know they would. Yeah. Yeah. And remember, we're also supplying them massive amounts of pesticides, which then are turned into chemical weapons. Pretty sure you could read between the lines.

Yeah. So, it's not that stretch of an imagination to say that the same people that three years from the time of this genocide when the U.S. invaded during the Gulf War, one of the things that people talk about during the Gulf War was that we told the Kurds to rise up against Saddam. So rewind that three years. We are sponsoring their genocide. Wow.

Yeah. That's shitty. Holy fuck. This will not be the last time america stars in a shitty act during this episode oh there's more there's more cool uh the british went one step further accepting that it was totally iraq mi6 said iraq did that on purpose but also said quote punitive measures such as unilateral sanctions would not be effective in changing Iraq's behavior over chemical weapons and would damage British interests to no avail.

Dollar dollar bills, y'all. They wanted that oil. This is really fucked up, dude. Also remember that the British had a pretty big hand in wanting the Islamic Revolution to fail. The Shah was their boy and they need revenge on the Ayatollah. So that probably has something to do with it as well. I guess they wanted to make that bread. Oh, yeah.

To make matters worse, no members of the international community stopped funding or arming Iraq in the aftermath of what is now known as the Anfal Genocide. The what? The Anfal Genocide. Okay.

The genocide of the Kurds in northern Iraq. To make matters worse, I keep saying that, but this actually went to the floor of the UN. And it actually ended with the vice president saying, who at the time was George H.W. Bush, W's dad, arguing in favor of Iraq still getting weapons and everybody agreed with him. Why? It doesn't have to be. I want to know how everybody believes that this is Iran

doing this. Just because they don't like them? Mostly that. Remember, they're the international boogeyman then as they are today. I mean, look in the news a week ago

or a week from now, you'll see someone shit talking how we need, like there's senators in Congress right now that call us for bombing Iran. Uh, they've been the international boogeyman for years. And I'm not saying Iran, uh, that, you know, the theocratic dictatorship of Iran is a good government, right? I don't mean to make them sound like a good guy during this podcast, uh, but it's hard to make anybody sound bad next to Saddam Hussein. But nobody should. There shouldn't be any genocides.

Yeah, there shouldn't. That's one of those things that you say that you think it shouldn't be controversial, but it is apparently. So, because of that, the Iraqi forces were finally able to recapture the Al-Fahd providence with a very little resistance from Iranian troops. The Iranians were hardly able to hold on long enough to stop the Iraqis from reinvading the Kujarstan for the second time of the war. Soon, Iraqi forces were pushing the Iranians out of the south of the country for the first time since Operation Ramadan, the initial invasion of Iraq.

The Atollah was terrified. Because remember, not that long agotoll was terrified. Because remember, not that long ago, Iran was winning. Now they're getting their ass kicked. He ordered our pistachio boy to launch another counterattack. Now they managed to drive six miles back into Iraq.

But as always, Iran ran out of logistics, ran out of manpower, supplies, and they soon ran out of steam and retreated in defeat. I hope all his tactics had to do with something with a pistachio. Like, all right, we're going to crack the shell on this.

Yeah. Like, I just hope everything had to do with pistachios. Every time, like, a field grade officer says something, he's like, that's quite nutty. And everybody's like, ugh. It's like nut-based dad jokes. Fingergunning everybody. He's like, dude.

That's gross. The only thing they're able to do during the offensive was symbolically bomb Saddam's presidential palace in Baghdad and it really did nothing. It was like a moral victory. So Iraq instead pressed their advantage and launched five different

operations called Trust in God. What? Yeah. This included retaking the border town of Salamcha and driving back into the marshes of insanity around the Majnun Islands. They surrounded and destroyed the Iranian forces there, this time without using any ACME levels of bug fuck madness. They just didn't have to. I don't know if their corpse road was still in place, though. I wonder if like when the Iranians took over the area, They're like, this road's made out of our buddies.

But it's already here. We don't have to build another road. Sorry, Bill. Yeah. And then just drive the truck over him. There's a lot of potholes here. Yeah. Iraq kept pushing.

And once again, reinvaded Iran and captured the town of Dalaran, 19 miles over the border. Then like a slap in the face, Anam shrugged and said, quote, I have no desire to conquer Iranian land and then pull his forces out. Now this is fucking, did he go into border defense or something? This is just fucking lunacy because the whole goddamn point of the war is taking over Iranian territory. But like, I,

I think it's like, look what I can do and you can do nothing. Like Saddam knew he wasn't going to drive in and take over Tehran. Like, yeah, Like, Saddam knew he wasn't going to drive in and take over Tehran. Yeah. It is around now that Iranian historian Keva Farouk notes that the Iranian military machine was totally broken and unable to continue.

Like everything else in this war, though, things still manage to become worse. Sweet. So if you're going to pull something out of your hip pocket here, how does it get worse? See, we already got a genocide, which is already fucked up yeah so now i will say this is not worse than a genocide okay but it is bad i don't know how you can get more than that um let's see child soldiers oh those have been there since day one. Okay, figured. All right. You know what? Go. All right. I got nothing. On the 3rd of July, Iran Air Flight 655 took off at 1017 local time, being flown by 37-year-old Captain Mohsen Rezian flying towards Dubai. The flight was something that happens dozens of times a day

and only takes about 28 minutes. The flight would never reach its destination, however. Crewmen aboard the USS Vincennes, a u.s navy guided missile cruiser saw what they thought to be an f-14 jet coming in to attack them so they opened fire the ship fired two surface to air missiles one of which hit the airliner blowing it to pieces of the 290 pastors and crew aboard the aboard the flight none would survive now a passenger plane is look a lot like phantoms now the problem here of course is that if it was a civilian airliner

the Vincennes was in the area because it was rushed to the theater after the incident with the Stark that we talked about the US Navy decided that it happened because there was enough air defense the Vincennes was going to supply that we talked about, the U S Navy decided that it happened because there wasn't enough air defense. The Vincennes was going to supply that air defense. They had the new, a new air defense system and it called the Aegis air defense system for tech

geeks out there. That's what they're using there when they call it like the robo ship or whatever, because it was so heavily computerized and that it was going to fill that gap. Now, American ships were definitely on edge at the time. There was the aforementioned attack on the Stark, even though that was an Iraqi jet, as well as multiple conflicts with Iranian gunboats.

And an American ship also had a sea mine not that long ago. Granted, that's like, you don't really have to be on edge for a sea mine. You hit it or you don't. Yeah. So that is about all the benefit of the doubt. You don't really have to be on edge for a sea mine. You hit it or you don't. Yeah. So that is about all the benefit of the doubt. I and most historians are willing to give the Vincennes crew and captain. That's where all that ends.

As most of you know, planes, both military and civilian, carry something called transponders. Think of transponders as a digital name tag or something that lets the world know who you are right um flight 655 had a transponder and it was set to mode three uh which is the civilian identifier for air travel so if anybody uh i mean i'm not a radar geek i'm not a super tech geek but the way uh transponders work is uh see it's uh the radar goes out hits the plane it's going to come back and read okay it's it's flying with a code three transponder it's a The way transponders work is, say, the radar goes out and hits the plane. It's going to come back and read, okay, it's flying with a Code 3 transponder. It's a civilian jet. That's how I understand it.

I could be wrong. Makes sense. Yeah. So the Vincennes air radar operators picked up a Mode 3 transmission, meaning they knew it was a civilian airliner. Despite many crewmen and officers later lying under oath about that, actually. The ship's system did not lie. The thing about the Aegis combat system

is it records everything. It recorded everything and proved the ship picked up and was, in fact, a mode three transmission. To do one worse, the crew said the ship was coming into an attack, which means the jet would be required to dive uh hypothetically to fire an exocet anti-ship missile right uh the ship system

record that the jet was in fact climbing as a civilian air later probably would while climbing off from you know an airport uh the the iran air jet was also transmitting radio traffic in english as was custom over civilian air traffic control systems. The Vincennes crew only attempted to contact the jet via military frequencies, which they would not be monitoring. To find out just what the hell happened, the U.S. government investigation

led by an Admiral William Fogarty pretty much danced around the issue at fault. Instead, they said that while the Vincennes crew did do some fucked up shit, Iran should also share blame. What? How dare they let a civilian airliner

fly over a combat zone? Here's the thing about that. It's literally happened every day out of that airport. Also, this is despite the fact that Iran was not at war with the United States and the jet was an Iranian airspace and the Vincennes was an Iranian waters and now the Fogarty report

refuses to acknowledge that the ship was in Iranian waters but it was the Aegis and independent investigators show that it was in Iranian national waters did anybody get fucked up for this? Okay, so you're my co-host here.

We've been doing this show for months. How do you think this ends? Oh, cool. Sweet. So Rogers, the captain of the ship, a guy named William Rogers, had a reputation for being overly aggressive and being what other officers call the combat oriented, meaning always kind of looking for a fight.

They accused him of just trying to show off. Is that an F-14 I see? Close enough. So an independent investigation found that the Vincennes commander, William Rogers, was completely incompetent and his crew was just as bad, if not worse, than he was. Further investigation showed that Rogers was hyper aggressive

and routinely violate the rules of engagement he was. Further investigation showed that Rogers was hyper aggressive and routinely violate the rules of engagement. He was supposed to be operating under this included like getting within a mile of Iranian ships just so he could shoot at them with his age system. Yeah, he wasn't supposed to do that. Dude's a dick. Yeah. On the floor of the UN US Vice President George H.W.

Bush defended the murder of nearly 300 civilians. Vice President George H.W. Bush defended the murder of nearly 300 civilians. He said that the ship acted as any other ship would, which is not what you probably should say. I would hate for every ship to act like that. I really fucking would. I'm about to fly somewhere. Good luck. Fuck.

The Japanese Naval Defense Force is going to fuck you you up every ship reacts to this yeah um so here's the depressing part ready for that more yeah later the entire crew of the ship was given combat action ribbons and rogers was awarded the legion of merit his award his award citation helpfully omitted the part about shooting down the civilian airliner. What were their points? How did they write this? Well, so they got around the combat action ribbons by giving them for prior engagements. But they also all kind of just hand wave yada yada their way through the fact they killed nearly 300 innocent civilians. And then blamed Iran. And also this is like,

this happened quite frequently during the Cold War. Like, someone freaked out and shoot down a civilian airliner. And every time it happened, it was normally Russia, because they shot down a Japanese airliner, shit like that. I think they shot down a Korean one as well. And every time,

the United States condemned them on the floor of the UN. So this time around, the Soviet Union took the chance of like, in your face, bitches. This is my chance. Yeah, they took it too. They just dragged them constantly for it.

I know I would. So with that, the war will go back to the ground where everything is getting awful. Err. Err. Yeah. Iran was now losing everywhere except in Kurdistan. Saddam saw his upper hand and began to threaten to launch another full-scale invasion of Iran.

And there's actually a decent argument to be made that it may have succeeded. Iran is pretty bad at the moment. He also made more threats to gas and bomb Iranian cities. Since his prior threats are proven true, this caused a widespread panic in Iranian cities and people began to flee for their lives. By now, the Iranian leadership knew that the international community had no intention of stopping the Iraqi usage of chemical

weapons. And they knew in many cases they were helping them. To make matters worse, the Iranian government and population now believe that the U.S. is ready to take part in full-scale war after shooting down the J the, uh, civilian airliner.

Uh, so that, I mean, if they thought they could continue holding off Iraq, they knew they were fucked. If like now the U S invades or whatever. Um, finally the Iranian government saw the writing on the wall,

present, present commander in chief pistachio boy pleaded with Ayatollah to accept a ceasefire with Iraq, telling him in order to even continue the war, let alone win it, civilian expenditure would have to increase by 700% of the nation's entire gross domestic product, which is really fancy words for it's impossible. The Ayatollah accepted UN Resolution 598 bitterly, the ceasefire of Iraq. In a live radio broadcast of the country, he called the ceasefire a, quote, poisoned chalice because he still wanted to continue the war. He just wanted to, you know, the best way to find out that you have no kind of revolutionaries in your country is just to kill your entire country through human wave attack yeah the end of the war was greeted with celebration in the streets of Baghdad well Iranians

are pretty somber as they didn't really know which is weird I think they had been so long since Iran had actually been invaded to start the war that they kind of forgot that this was supposed to be a defensive war and they saw themselves as losing even though I mean

I feel like Iraq didn't accomplish anything no they didn't no they didn't invade their country they didn't completely fuck them up no I mean if anything it made Iran stronger. I mean, not that that's how anybody wants to go around and solidify their power base, but like, you know, Saddam invading the young revolutionary republic,

it binded the pretty fractious country together and kept the Ayatollah in power for sure. So it was counter to Saddam's own goals, which is honestly on brand for Saddam. Okay. So both forces withdrew to pre-war boundaries set by the 1975 Algiers agreement. If you remember, that's the same agreement both sides withdrew from to begin the war all the way back in 1980. Nice. So I looked over quite a few different um casualty estimates and uh the only thing i can do

is give an educated guess like anybody else yeah um iran lost about 600 000 people okay uh there are still bodies being found in the areas that contain the heaviest fighting and uh the exposure to chemical weapons would go on to cause tons of medical issues and the nearly 52,000 people thought to be hurt from them. And also those chemical weapons and the secondary exposure from them, because this shit sticks around for a while, would go on to cause birth defects and kill people from diseases and illnesses and injuries years down the road. road um iran is still dealing with a fuckload of uh pretty fucked up veterans from the war uh from various different horrible illnesses that spawn in a human body after being gassed oh yeah i would imagine yeah um while there's a ceasefire in place there was not a peace treaty that's important uh neither side would come to terms over sanam's insistence that he still controlled the shot all air waterway which is another reason why the war began.

He demanded sovereignty over it. Because this, neither side returned the other's POWs, of which there was tens of thousands. It was only in 1990 that the majority of the POWs were finally released, two years after the war. Some, however,

remained behind bars all the way until 2003. Holy shit. Saddam refused to give some of them up and uh when saddam's government fell the new government's like no we still get some of these iranian pw's um it was only when saddam saw the gulf war looming uh in a year later that he ceded half of the shot all arab to iran what he was worried about was if war kicked off with Kuwait, that the Iranians would take their chance to finally fuck his shit up again. Yeah, because this whole time Iran knew that there was no peace treaty. They need to they need to rearm. So Iran is rapidly rearming while Saddam is broke as fuck.

Sweep the legs. rapidly rearming while Saddam is broke as fuck. Sweep the legs. There's a good reason to believe if the Gulf War came around again and he didn't make those overtures to Iran that Iran

would have actually teamed up to fuck up Iraq. Now I don't know if to be able to swallow the poison pill of working with the United States because this is two years away from trying to destroy them. A little bad blood. Yeah. And so after he

ceded all that to Iran, it would actually not be until Saddam invaded Kuwait that the rest of the world would officially acknowledge that Iran started the war. So all the way up until then, everybody for some reason just blamed Iran for just sitting there and being invaded. Like, how dare you, sir?

How dare you sit in your country? Yeah, it shouldn't have been dressed that way. This is, I'm really having a hard time trying to like even talk about this just because of how fucking shit stacks up on shit it gets worse oh okay cool uh all right this so if there's one bright side actually it's not a bright side so it's not a no ice cream, there's still no ice cream here. So much like World War I led directly to World War II, the Iran-Iraq war led directly to the Gulf War, which led directly to the American invasion in 2003. And the reason for that is – remember all those massive loans that Iraq had been taking out from Kuwait?

Yeah. Well, now the war is over. Kuwait expects to be paid back. Tens and tens of billions of dollars are owed. The problem is Saddam took one look at his economy and saw it was totally fucked. His oil infrastructure was fucked. Everything was destroyed. He has suddenly hundreds of thousands of wounded veterans

to try to take care of, which he didn't. He has this military to try to build back together which he kind of did that um so he in response he asked for quake to forgive most if not all of his debt um and then they would continue training like nothing ever happened yeah quake refused i would imagine uh it's a lot of money right and uh so saddam uh would instead go to opec which is uh like the cartel that controls oil prices uh to beg everybody in opec to stop their oil production or slow their oil production down which would make the price of oil go up meaning it would be easier for them to sell oil at a high price and pay their debts back. Right. Everybody in OPEC agreed, except Kuwait. Kuwait's fucking giving them that stiff arm.

Yeah. So, and it's interesting that, so one of Saddam's beliefs that he had actually had for quite a while, that Kuwait was supposed to be part of Iraq. And Kuwait's a really small country and holds a lot of oil wealth in comparison to a big country like iraq so this whole time like on the down low saddam wanted to fuck kuwait shit up and take it over right and this gave him a reason was because like well if i don't they're literally going to fucking bankrupt me to death because let me and uh so it was with that in August 2nd 1990 that Iraqi forces surged over

the border with their tiny neighbor starting the Gulf War and beginning the long downfall of Saddam Hussein which would later hang for his crimes against the

Kurdish population and the endfall of genocide. I wouldn't and that's our series. What a terrible series. You know it's a it, well, it's not funny, it's awful. Kuwait would fall in about two days.

Yeah. And then Iraq would fall in about 72 hours. But the result of that war was the infrastructure, because the U.S. expected a much longer war with Iraq. Like, if you look back at news articles at the time, they expected him to let loose of chemical weapons and expect tens of thousands of casualties. So they attacked what was left of his infrastructure from the Iraq war that Iran had already destroyed. So Iraq, not only was their military completely annihilated in the invasion and mostly the airstrikes. Right.

But the country was completely fucked from then on forward. And then for some reason, we invaded them again in 2003. So, yeah. I still like the whole, all the moving parts for the first Gulf War. Like there are so many, so much moving parts going on like between the Navy, the Army, and the Marines. It almost wasn't needed. Well, I think they i think they overestimated saddam they did because i mean they knew exactly what he had because we gave it to him

they can't like i said in the last episode you ever watched dave chappelle when he had uh yes paul mooney on they're like what why did we know iraq had weapons of mass destruction because we kept the receipts yeah Yeah. Yeah. Uh, same real like, well, he has divisions and divisions of tanks cause we gave them to him. Like, Oh yeah.

Good point. Um, but yeah, uh, the Iran Iraq war, not what I expected going into it. I knew, I knew probably about as much about the Iran Iraq war as most lay people.

It's not what I studied in college. Um, I'm not a scholar of Middle Eastern war history. After you telling me about it, I knew, I guess, a little bit more than what I – I didn't know that all of this was the Iran-Iraq war, essentially. Yeah, and that's a lot of things. People know about bits and pieces, but they don't know how it's all tied together. They know about the embassy siege in England.

They don't know that was tied to Saddam. Yeah, I didn't know that either. They know about the Iran-Iraq shoot down, but they're like, they just kind of gloss over the fact of why was the U.S. there in the first place. People know about the Al-Anfal genocide and the Halabja massacre, but they don't know that was also part of the Iran-Iraq war. It's a really interesting point in history. Mother of God, did it slip away from me. I did not think this would go five parts. Technically

six. Eventually we were going to do the Iran-Contra scandal because that's definitely involved. I really wanted to make it part of the series, but the parts didn't line up and I just didn't have enough time. Just to get it on recording,

how many parts do you think you're going to get out of that? I ran Contra, maybe one good long one. One good long one? Yeah. We'll see. Yeah. Because I feel like it's going to be more. It could be.

It could be another five-part series for sure. But, you know, we're not a diplomatic podcast. A lot of that's like behind the back diplomacy type shit uh which sure it's really interesting for for me to go into uh there's actually a really good podcast that does stuff like that called when diplomacy fails check them out if you're into that sort of thing um yeah i had a i had a lot of fun um researching this at the same time i did not think it was gonna absorb a lot of fun researching this. At the same time, I did not think it was going to absorb a month of my life. And on such short notice, finish this part. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I knew I had another part, but a lot of people don't know we record about two weeks out now. When it's perfect, we record about two weeks out. So I recorded with Tom when he was here last week, but we also already had part three in the boat at the time. So I'm like, well, fuck, I have two weeks to write part five. And then Nick is like, I'm going to Japan. And this is the same weekend where I have 25 pages of paper due for college. And thankfully, like a month ago when i mapped out the series i

picked out all the sources uh the only thing you have to do is pick out what you want put it on paper turn into a script i'd do all that last night so about about it is really about a day and a half fuck yeah uh but i'm happy with it i'm really happy with the series. It'll be our last series for a while at least until you get back but I look forward to covering the smaller bigger failures

in history going forward the one-off episodes we have a lot of good ones already recorded for you guys. I'm gonna have to pull in some guests

while Nick's out of town but I look I can't wait to come back. Yeah. Yeah. So until then and until until, what, December, we'll talk to you. Hopefully.

They're thinking of delays. Oh, my God. Yeah. Well, I'll see you guys next week. Nick will see you sometime in 2019. Hopefully. Bye. Hi, this is Nate Bethea,

and I'm the producer of the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. This show is brought to you by Audible. And as it just so happens, Audible is offering our listeners a free audio book with a 30-day trial membership. Just go to audibletrial.com forward slash donkeys and browse the selection of audio programs. Download his title for free and start listening.

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