"In the Room with Peter Bergen" transcript: Episode 24

Episode 24: The War that Americans Forgot, Iraqis Can’t — and Iran Won

20 years ago, a massive statue of Saddam Hussein was pulled down in Baghdad, a day that for many Iraqis signaled hope for the future of the country. But America’s invasion did not come with a coherent plan for what should come next, and those hopes were dashed. What is the legacy of U.S. intervention in the country today? Peter travels to Iraq to find out.

Please note: Our show is produced for the ear and made to be heard. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the audio before quoting in print.

###

Mina Al-Oraibi: I think emotions were really crystallized in April, the 9th of April when Saddam's statue came down.

[ARCHIVAL SOUNDS OF A CROWD CHEERING]

ARCHIVAL 2000s Newscaster: There it goes… there it goes!

[ARCHIVAL SOUNDS OF CHEERS, THE THUD OF THE STATUE, CLANGING AS THE CROWD BEATS THE STATUE WITH SHOES, CHAINS]

Mina Al-Oraibi: Seeing the statue fall down on the TV screens, it was a release. You know, this idea that Saddam's regime could actually come to an end.

Mina Al-Oraibi was living in exile, in London, when the U.S. invaded Iraq, her homeland in 2003. Al-Oraibi’s father had been an Iraqi diplomat, but he defected from Saddam Hussein’s regime, and for the security of their relatives still living in Iraq they never spoke with them by phone. The day that Saddam Hussein’s statue was pulled down, Al-Oraibi was in the car with her father, and her cell phone rang. It had been 13 years since she’d heard her uncle’s voice.

She told me the story of that day as we sat at a university in northern Iraq earlier this year.

Mina Al-Oraibi: I heard his voice I said, ‘Dad, pull over.’ And so we pulled up and I gave the phone to my dad and my father started crying. So I got out of the car. Because I wanted him to have that moment. So I remember that moment so clearly, because for us, it was that release that we could finally reconnect with the country, with our family. Everything changed after that.

Peter Bergen: So two decades later. How do you feel about that moment now?

Mina Al-Oraibi: The biggest sense is how many lost opportunities there have been. It could have turned out so differently.

Peter Bergen: How?

Mina Al-Oraibi: I don't think the removal of Saddam Hussein would've necessarily led Iraq to a path of sectarian strife, of ISIS taking up for a momenta third of the country's territories, of the corruption that is embedded in all walks of life in the country now, of the militias that roam the streets, all of that.It didn't have to go that way. I think the biggest frustration looking back is that 20 years on, we should have been in a much, much better place.

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

Mina Al-Oraibi: When the war itself started, I think it was such a mixed bag of emotions So you're going through all of that but then also for a moment thinking, hang on, can this be the change that Iraq needs?

Two decades after the massive statue of Saddam was taken down by the U.S. military, there isn't much nostalgia in the country for the former dictator. After all, he had plunged his country into wars with two of his neighbors: Iran in the 1980's and Kuwait in 1990. Conservative estimates suggest that at least half a million people were killed during those wars.

At home, Saddam’s army also waged a genocidal campaign against the country’s Kurdish minority and others,

ARCHIVAL1980s Newscaster: In the last week, Iraqis have attacked town after town in Kurdistan.

killing as many as 290,000 of his own people,

ARCHIVAL 1980s Newscaster: The Kurdish people of Iraq have been fleeing from their mountain villages...

thousands of whom died because Saddam’s men used poison gas and nerve agents against civilians.

[ARCHIVAL SOUND OF KURDISH MAN SOBBING]

And yet, after Saddam was toppled by the U.S., the American occupation of Iraq turned into a fiasco that contributed to a civil war that tore the country apart, killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. More than 4,500 U.S. soldiers also died.

And the war gave al-Qaeda a new lease on life. The terrorist group had been greatly damaged by the global effort to defeat them after 9/11. But the U.S. invasion of Iraq stoked the flames of Osama bin Laden's warnings that the U.S. wanted to dominate the entire Islamic world. And soon, a new branch of the group sprang up. Known as al-Qaeda in Iraq, the terrorist group conducted hundreds of suicide attacks against American and Iraqi targets in the country.

ARCHIVAL 2000s Newscaster: Car bombs were detonated just minutes apart. [ARCHIVAL SOUND OF THE BLASTS] The explosions clearly powerful enough not only to cause...

Al-Qaeda in Iraq later morphed into ISIS, which seized vast amounts of Iraqi territory in 2014 and instituted a reign of terror.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster: The Islamic extremists swept across Northern Iraq two months ago, seizing Mosul, the country's second biggest city.

[ARCHIVAL SOUNDS OF CHEERING IN ARABIC]

And the effects of the U.S. invasion of Iraq reverberated globally in other unintended ways. For example, the Iraq War also set a precedent for other unprovoked wars of choice like the one we see today in Ukraine. A point the man who started the Iraq War…

ARCHIVAL Conferencier: Please welcome the former president of the United States, George W. Bush…

…recently, and quite inadvertently acknowledged…

ARCHIVAL George W. Bush: Thanks for being here!

…when he was making a speech about the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

ARCHIVAL George W. Bush: Russian elections are rigged. The result is an absence of checks and balances in Russia, and the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq. I mean of Ukraine… Iraq, anyway… [CROWD LAUGHS NERVOUSLY]

That’s quite an “anyway.” Anyway… the Iraq War also played out in unpredictable ways in American politics.

Hillary Clinton’s presidential ambitions were always hobbled by her vote in Congress in favor of the Iraq War.

ARCHIVAL Hillary Clinton: It is with conviction that I support this resolution as being in the best interests of our nation.

An obscure state senator from Illinois became president in part because of his opposition to the Iraq War.

ARCHIVALBarack Obama: I said I could not support a dumb war, a rash war.

And a reality star business guy from New York City campaigned on a promise that he would get the U.S. out of its endless post-9/11 wars.

ARCHIVAL Donald Trump: The war in Iraq, we spent 2 trillion dollars, thousands of lives. Obviously it was a mistake.

The entire case for war was built on American intelligence that was shoddy at best and fabricated at worst — that Saddam Hussein had an active weapons of mass destruction program and was in league with al-Qaeda — false claims that poisoned American politics for many years. Trust in the U.S. government declined from a high of 60 percent shortly after the 9/11 attacks down to around 25 percent by 2007, when the Iraq War was at its height.

But as the years have passed, the spotlight on Iraq has faded.

That’s too bad. Because the fallout from this ill-advised, unjustified war — in addition to the devastating loss of human life — not only decimated the institutions necessary to rebuild Iraq. It also had another unintended consequence: strengthening the regional power of one of America’s greatest sworn enemies — Iran.

Mina Al-Oraibi: Iran's come out much more influential than it could have ever dreamed.

[THEME MUSIC BEGINS]

I recently traveled to Iraq — a country still struggling to rebuild. A country still hosting 2,500 American troops — to find out how all this happened, what it means for the world, and whether or not Iraq is ever going to recover.

Simona Foltyn: A lot of people are now, once again, yearning for a strong man, especially young Iraqis who never lived under Saddam Hussein. And that is a really worrying sign.

I’m Peter Bergen, welcome to In the Room.

[THEME MUSIC SURGES, THEN FADES]

It’s worth remembering what it was like for Iraqis before the U.S. invasion, under Saddam Hussein’s regime. In Sulaymaniyah, a city in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, a tour guide showed me around the Amna Suraka museum. It’s a former prison that one journalist described as the world’s most depressing museum. Here, Saddam’s men tortured and executed thousands of Kurdish civilians.

The location of the prison, in the middle of the city, in a residential neighborhood was not an accident: Saddam wanted everyone to know the fate of those who opposed him, or might even be thinking about it. The prison has been eerily well-preserved: long, concrete hallways and dark cells, as well as the instruments of torture used by Saddam’s men: bloody pliers to pull out nails, machines to apply electric shocks, and whips to beat prisoners.

The exact number of Kurds killed by Saddam’s men may never be known, but the museum paints a grim picture of the genocidal campaign waged against them.

Peter Bergen: So we're walking down this very long corridor. It's covered with these shards of glass. Each of them represent 182,000 Kurds who were killed by Saddam and on the ceiling these are these, a bunch of very small, like fairy lights. Each of them represents a village that was destroyed by Saddam, which is 4,500 villages. And this place goes on and on and on It's a long hallway that shows you the extent of Saddam's really fantastically brutal campaign against the Kurds.

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

Makwan Karim: [TRANSLATING FOR MUSEUM GUIDE MUSTAFA KHALIL]Room number two used to be like, put children only…

Peter Bergen: Children's prison.

Makwan Karim: [TRANSLATING FOR MUSTAFA KHALIL] Yeah, uh, these children who were like, uh, younger than eight years.

Peter Bergen: And there's a tiny little window, that's the only light they had. And the writing on the wall: ‘I was detained at home. I was only 15 years old. They changed my age to 18 so I could be executed. I'm about to be executed. I'm sorry, my mother and father, we'll never meet again.’ Wow.

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

Peter Bergen: This was the women's prison.

Makwan Karim: [TRANSLATING FOR MUSTAFA KHALIL] Yeah.

Peter Bergen: Pregnant women were brought here to be jailed and then they would have their kids in this prison...

Makwan Karim: [TRANSLATING FOR MUSTAFA KHALIL] Yes, they tortured the mothers by giving away the child.

Peter Bergen: Oh my God.

Makwan Karim: [TRANSLATING FOR MUSTAFA KHALIL] So they were being separated and they never saw each other.

Peter Bergen: Oh my God.

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

When Saddam fell, Iraqis like Mina Al-Oraibi were hopeful. Maybe this was the beginning of a better future. But it quickly became clear that the Americans and their allies didn’t have much of a plan, nor did they understand the complex ethnic, religious and political divisions in the country.

Extreme sectarian violence overtook Iraq in the vacuum created by Saddam’s removal from power. For the first time many Americans learned the terms “Sunni” and “Shia,” a doctrinal division between Muslims that is almost as old as Islam itself. It began shortly after the death of the Prophet Mohammed.

Saddam was a Sunni, and most Iraqis are Shia. Despite the fact that political power was mostly held by minority Sunnis during the Saddam era, the Sunni and the Shia coexisted relatively peacefully before the U.S. invasion. But the U.S. occupation brought elections to Iraq which inverted the pyramid of power in the country. The Sunnis who had been on top in Saddam’s Iraq were now on the bottom and dominated by the majority Shia. Al-Qaeda in Iraq soon found a fertile recruiting source among disaffected Sunnis.

In 2006, the bombing of a major Shia holy site, the “Golden Mosque” in Samarra, by al-Qaeda in Iraq, greatly escalated tensions between the Shia and the Sunnis.

ARCHIVAL 2000s Newscaster: To the Shia Muslims here and all over the world, this mosque was profoundly sacred. And now today, still sacred, it is a ruin.

And Iraq was plunged into a full-blown civil war during which around a hundred civilians were being killed every day, a conflict that lasted for two years before it began to tamp down.

ARCHIVAL 2000s Newscaster: The desecration: a call to arms... [SOUNDS OF CHANTING SURGE, ECHO, THEN FADE]

Peter Bergen: Thomas Hobbes wrote Leviathan in 1651 at the end of the English Civil War, and he basically made the point that the only thing worse than a dictator is a civil war and anarchy. I mean, was the problem that the United States knocked out this dictator very efficiently and then just really didn't have a plan for what came next?

Mina Al-Oraibi: That was a big part of the problem, of not having a plan. When the U.S. decided to become an occupying power and make certain decisions, like dismantle the military, dismantle state enterprises, start messing with different ministries and yet not replace it with something else.

To understand how the U.S. occupation of Iraq turned into such a debacle, I also spoke with Emma Sky. She's the director of Yale's International Leadership Center, and she was there on the ground shortly after the invasion. I asked Sky to reflect on the political philosopher Hobbes' observation that if you destroy a strong state you are left only with anarchy, in which life is "nasty, brutish and short."

Emma Sky: When I arrived in Iraq and I was in Baghdad and went downtown, and I was looking just at these beautiful buildings, which had been completely looted. And I just stood there looking and an Iraqi man walked past me and he said, عالم هوبزي, “It's a Hobbesian world.” And I looked at him and I thought, who's this Iraqi talking about Hobbes? And it always stuck in my mind because I think up ‘til then I'd always been focused on human rights abuses of states. I'd had no imagination of what a world without a state was like.

Sky had an unusual journey on her way to work in Iraq as a British government official. She’d studied Arabic at Oxford and then worked as an aid worker in the West Bank, in Israel, helping Palestinians.

In 2003, an email from the UK Foreign office popped up in her inbox. It was asking for volunteers to go help the Coalition Provisional Authority, which was the transitional government set up in Iraq by the American and British governments. The Provisional Authority had a tall order: to provide security, put the country on the path to democratic elections, and rebuild the economy after the fall of Saddam. Sky, with her Arabic language skills, was a natural fit. So, even though she opposed the Iraq war in the first place, she responded to the call.

Emma Sky: You know, I was one of these people who was passionately against war, passionately against the invasion of Iraq in 2003. And when the UK government asked for volunteers to go out to Iraq, I volunteered. So that's how I ended up out there. I mean I volunteered because I wanted to apologize to Iraqis for the war and help them rebuild their country. I didn't want the only foreigner for Iraqis to meet, to be a soldier with a gun.

Sky packed her bags and prepared to depart for Iraq where she planned to spend three months helping to rebuild the post-Saddam country. But she still hadn't been briefed about what exactly she was going to do.

Emma Sky: They said everything would be clear on arrival. So I thought, I'll take them for their word. It’s the British government, they must know what they're doing. So that's what I did. I followed these instructions, arrived in Basra, and nobody was expecting me. So then I got on a plane and I went up to Baghdad. And I knew that the headquarters of the Coalition was Saddam's Palace in downtown Baghdad. So I found a bus from the airport to downtown to the Green Zone, walked into the palace and said, “Hello, Emma from England, come to volunteer.”And there was a list there with my name on it. So I thought at least somebody somewhere knew that I was supposed to come. But after a week in Baghdad, they said, look, “We've got enough people here, try the north.” So I kept going and I got to Kirkuk. And when I arrived in Kirkuk, I was told that I was the senior civilian in the province reporting to Ambassador Bremer in Baghdad. Kirkuk was a very, very complicated place that I knew very little about. It had about 1.5 million people.

Peter Bergen: How old were you then?

Emma Sky: I was 35.

Peter Bergen: So you're in charge of this enormous province, in this foreign country at the age of 35.

Emma Sky: Yes. And in case you're wondering, I had never been, you know, mayor of a town in the UK or anything like that before. [PETER LAUGHS] Everybody was focused on the military operation to overthrow Saddam. There had been little focus on what came after.

That’s very much an understatement. There was virtually no planning for the “day after” Saddam fell. The U.S. State Department’s few plans were simply ignored by the U.S. military which was essentially running the country. So that meant volunteers like Emma Sky could end up “in charge” of vast swaths of Iraq.

During Sky's first week in Kirkuk, rockets were fired into her house. She miraculously wasn't hurt in the attack. But the house was unlivable so she moved into a tent on the airfield of a nearby U.S. military base.

Emma Sky: There was this brigade there, the 173rd Airborne Brigade and they were running everything in the province. And I only had like two or three staff, and I spent my first weeks just taking notes on everything the U.S. military was doing because they were running everything and then criticizing them.And the colonel — they had a very capable colonel — he said, “Look, instead of just all the time criticizing us, why don't you just come and work with us and help us do the right thing?” So that's kind of what happened. I found myself really integrated within this brigade and helping them define what success was. Success wasn't U.S. military running schools, hospitals, water, sanitation. Success was Iraqis running all of these things.

But that wasn’t going to be easy. With the removal from power of Saddam Hussein, 30,000 members of his political party, the Ba’ath party, were dismissed from their positions by the Americans running Iraq. Membership in the Ba’ath party had been pretty much compulsory for anyone who wanted to get ahead in Saddam’s Iraq. Now, suddenly, this pool of experienced people that had once run Iraq were mostly out on the street.

Emma Sky: So it meant that then we had schools without teachers, we had hospitals without doctors, and people who we were working with then started to see us as the enemy.

Peter Bergen: You wrote a book about this called The Unraveling, about this entire period. Why the title, The Unraveling?

Emma Sky: Unraveling is an acknowledgement that everything we tried to do all came apart. So it's not a happy end, but hopefully it pays tribute to those who tried so hard to make Iraq a success. And in a way, it is an opportunity to remember the lives that were lost. A lot of the characters in the book are dead, but in the book, you live their stories. You see who they were and what they tried to be and achieve.

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

Peter Bergen: Knowing all that you do, was getting rid of Saddam Hussein worth it?

Simona Foltyn: I think Iraqis have to answer that question.

That’s Simona Foltyn, she’s a journalist and filmmaker based in Baghdad. And she's one of the few members of the foreign media who is still intensively covering the story of today’s Iraq.

Simona Foltyn: I have asked this question of many Iraqis and all of them I think will agree, perhaps except, you know, of the people who used to be in, in the Ba'ath party and enjoyed pretty close ties to Saddam, I think all of all of them would agree that Saddam was a brutal dictator who had to go. But at the same time, a lot of people are now, once again, yearning for a strong man, especially young Iraqis who never lived under Saddam Hussein. And that is a really worrying sign and really a sign how disillusioned people are with democracy 20 years after the invasion.

Peter Bergen: What went right in the last two decades, do you think, because we know obviously what went wrong. But what do you think went right?

Simona Foltyn: It's always a difficult question to answer. There is more freedom, but it's very fragile. So freedom of expression, for example, which you could argue was one of the main benefits of removing Saddam, is really under threat, especially right now. You see a systematic crackdown on freedom of speech with anybody who dares to criticize authorities facing imprisonment. That was one of the major gains of the last two decades. But even that is, is eroding at the moment. The other thing that has gone well, I suppose, is that, Iraqis did manage though with external support to defeat ISIS.

ISIS, a terrorist army of tens of thousands of fanatics who wanted to install a Sunni ultrafundamentalist regime, stormed across Iraq in 2014, seizing large amounts of territory including Mosul, the country’s second largest city. These terrorists tortured and murdered their enemies in the most appalling ways.

ARCHIVAL 2010s Newscaster: The terrorist group, ISIS, so determined to shock civilized people everywhere has now resorted to a new method of murder. They have executed a Jordanian Air Force pilot by burning him alive …

With considerable help from the U.S., the Iraqi military fought back and by 2018 had largely destroyed ISIS forces on the ground in Iraq.

Simona Foltyn: In 2018, there was this pride that they managed to defeat this terrorist organization and that perhaps, the country would really capitalize on this positive outcome to, to try to move forward. Which unfortunately, did not happen. You do see a kind of like a, you know, a normal life, in, in Baghdad. People are going out. They're, they're looking for, new things in life. There are cafes opening where you have new spaces for artists, for students, for activists to hang out, where you have a certain kind of popular culture and political discourse taking place. So those are kind of, you know, positive things that I guess I see in everyday life, but overall, you can hear how I'm really searching for things and maybe, maybe, you know, I'm being too pessimistic. But, but I mean, there are some positive things I would say.

Still, it's only been five years since ISIS was defeated and just over a decade and a half since the Iraqi civil war was at its height.

Simona Foltyn: Even though there is no conflict as such, people also don't really feel safe because they know that every few years Iraq descends into another cycle of violence. And so that really impacts your ability to, to plan for your future, to really, you know, feel safe.

There's only been one official American accounting of what really happened during the Iraq war, which is the U.S. Army’s history of the war published in 2019. Its surprising conclusion: quote “An emboldened and expansionist Iran appears to be the only victor” of the war. This isn’t some leftist critique of the war, but the considered judgment of a group of U.S. Army historians.

So what does that mean in practice? Iran is deeply involved in Iraqi politics. Some of that is to be expected; after all the Iraqi population is largely Shia and so is the population of Iran, which is right next door. But it goes a lot further than that: more than a dozen of Iraq’s political parties have ties to Iran. And many of those parties have their own private armies that are trained and funded by the Iranians.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster: These pro-Iranian militiamen chanting death to America as they tried to storm into the embassy. [ARCHIVAL SOUNDS OF CHANTING IN ARABIC, AMBIENT NOISES OF CONFRONTATION]

Those Iran-backed private armies have regularly attacked American forces in Iraq and in neighboring Syria in recent years. And some of these Iranian-trained private armies have even become part of the Iraqi military.

And Iran’s large influence in Iraq has helped to turn Iran into the key regional power in the Middle East, propelling it closer to the level of countries traditionally more friendly to the U.S., like Saudi Arabia and Israel. Iran has become a dominant player in several Arab countries, from Yemen in the south, to Iraq, to neighboring Syria, and to Lebanon in the north, a region that stretches some fifteen hundred miles across the Arab world.

I wanted to know if Mina Al-Oraibi thought it was a reasonable conclusion that Iran was the real winner of the Iraq War.

Mina Al-Oraibi: It's a tough question because it depends how you define winning. So Iran's come out much more influential and able to maneuver in Iraq than it could have ever dreamed. Is it the only winner? I'm not so sure. I do think you have people who suffered incredibly under Saddam, who are not suffering in the same way again, and I don't think we should discount that too much.

Peter Bergen: But the Iranians were handed Iraq on a silver platter. Is…?

Mina Al-Oraibi: They were opportunistic.

Peter Bergen: Iran is Iraq's neighbor so it's perfectly fair that they should have influence. The population is mostly Shia here. There are these major pilgrimage sites in Iraq where millions of Iranians come every year. I mean the idea that Iran is influential in Iraq is to me that maybe that's not a big deal. The question is what kind of influence do they wield? And I can see you’re kind of grimacing. [PETER LAUGHS]

Mina Al-Oraibi: I am grimacing because there's nothing natural about two sovereign states where one state can almost control and dominate vast sectors of the other state. The U.S. and Mexico have a very complicated relationship, but you can't say the U.S. can run vast parts of Mexico or determine how certain things come about.

Peter Bergen: Is Iraq a failed or failing state?

Mina Al-Oraibi: No, I don't think Iraq is a failed state. Iraq could possibly be named a failing state because of the levels of corruption on every aspect of life.

Peter Bergen: And how does that work, the corruption?

Mina Al-Oraibi: You go into a hospital and if you don't have a contact or if you don't know somebody that you can pay off, you're gonna end up in the worst possible situation. If you want a passport you know, it could take you a year and a half to get a passport, or it could take you a couple of days and just depends who you're paying. So the problem is there's no system. It's everybody's making a buck where they can. But then there's the bigger elements, and those are of course, the corruption that comes with the contracts that are assigned. Nobody knows how actual tenders work for major government uh, procurement. You see people who suddenly become millionaires and nobody knows how they did.

Mina Al-Oraibi: I mean, money being siphoned off, left, right, and center. Customs, borders, it's really on every level. And I don't think corruption is just about money. It's also administrative corruption where it's nepotism and it's patronage networks, and you know, sometimes entire ministries get taken over by a particular political party. And then they hire their cousins and sons and sisters and aunts to take in positions. You know, members of parliament get an allowance for bodyguards, and then you meet the bodyguards and they're all literally cousins and sons of neighbors and whatever. And these are these massive patronage networks, and that erodes a state.

So Iraq is a kleptocracy. Iran wields considerable power there. Democracy is eroding. Given that bleak picture, I wanted to know from Simona Foltyn, Mina Al-Oraibi, and Emma Sky, what gives them hope for the future of Iraq?

[ARCHIVAL SOUNDS OF PROTESTORS CHANTING IN ARABIC]

They all agreed that protests by young Iraqis in 2019 — protests that didn't get much coverage in the U.S. — were hopeful signs of a new generation of Iraqis who are now demanding a truly accountable government.

Emma Sky: It's the young generation. In 2019 they had these demonstrations in Iraq and you saw these young Iraqis come out onto the streets of Baghdad to demand a country.

[ARCHIVAL SOUNDS OF PROTESTORS CHANTING IN ARABIC]

Emma Sky: You know, their slogan was, 'I Want a Homeland.' They were very critical of the kleptocratic elites ruling the country.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster: Some of them have slingshots, but most seem only to be carrying their country's flag. The protestors have been driven by a profound sense of hopelessness. The people on the streets are young, educated, and they're fed up of having a complete lack of any prospects.

Emma Sky: They understood the negative impact that Iran was having on the country, and they really, really wanted better. There were demands that they should be given opportunities to live lives, to have jobs.

[ARCHIVAL SOUNDS OF PROTESTORS CHANTING IN ARABIC]

Emma Sky: And to see the courage of these young people. The Iraqi security forces and militias killed 600 of them by throwing gas canisters to the head and bullets to the heart. But they still came out and they made these makeshift hospitals. It was really, really inspiring. And so whenever I meet Iraqis, you never meet an Iraqi who's had a boring life. Every Iraqi, something has happened to them, and how they have coped, how they have responded. Iraq has an extraordinary history. It's been for centuries upon centuries, a multicultural place with all these different peoples. And to see people consciously trying to tap into that history of coexistence, that incredible art, music, books, that whole history and culture they have to draw on. So to see people really trying to tap into that to create a better future, things like that really give me hope.

Those protests stirred the same feelings in Mina Al-Oraibi.

Mina Al-Oraibi: They were led by a generation of people who know nothing about the regime 20 years ago who, you know, were babies when the war happened, or perhaps not even born and they want a better life. They were calling for freedom. They were calling for no external interference, particularly from Iran, and they were calling for a homeland. The questioning of how things are set up in the country now will continue to increase because there's a generation who remembers Saddam’s time and says, no matter what happens, this is better. But the next generation says, actually, ‘This is unacceptable.’ We see how other countries in the region live. We see how you can actually make politics work to the advantage of the people. And so with time, the benchmark is no longer ‘What did Saddam Hussein do in the 1980s, 1990s?’ The benchmark is what is this government doing and how can we vote it out or how can we change the system?

Simona Foltyn was more skeptical when it came to the country's future.

Simona Foltyn: Iraq is not on a trajectory right now where you can say, you know, the country is headed towards a brighter future. It is still dealing with the aftermath and the ripple effects of all of the conflicts past, and it's facing new challenges in the future that the government is ill-equipped to face. The business environment is extremely dysfunctional. So you have this, this kind of paralyzed system that is not allowing for real growth. That is not allowing for the potential that Iraq has because let's remember, Iraq is an extremely rich country. It has 40 million people who have huge potential. The fact that Iraq is so poorly governed is preventing the majority of its population from realizing this potential and therein lies the future instability: mass youth unemployment on top of that, climate change.

Climate change, it’s a threat that is facing the world over. But in Iraq, one of the legacies of America’s botched invasion is a corrupt government unwilling to do anything to really help prepare for a much hotter, and even unsurvivable future. Foltyn has been covering this issue extensively.

Simona Foltyn: Very little has been done. And while I think Iraqi farmers very much realize this is existential, I don't think the politicians have either realized it or they really do not care. Iraq is not a poor country, especially with current oil prices. It is making, you know, a lot of income that it should be using to invest in water management infrastructure that it should be using for climate adaptation. And unfortunately, that is not happening. Just in the few years that I've been here, there has been a wave of migration from rural areas to urban areas because farmers or cattle herders simply can't sustain their old way of life anymore. And that is something very worrying because in the cities, you already don't have enough jobs for the urban population.So it will just be another source of instability with potential protests, potential clashes over land, clashes over water. And we're seeing that on a small scale already happening. But still there has been no meaningful action taken at all by Iraq's elites.

Peter Bergen: What's summer like in Baghdad now?

Simona Foltyn: The city is becoming unlivable. And I have noticed this change just in the span of the five years that I've lived here because, you have of course the increase in temperatures and the drop in water levels, but what you also have in urban spaces like Baghdad is the gradual but systemic removal of green spaces. And that really impacts the temperature. It's creating this urban island effect during the summer where you have the heat reflecting off of the concrete and you don't have, really, gardens anymore or parks or anything like that where the greenery can absorb the heat.

Emma Sky describes the heat this way:

Emma Sky: It's like somebody turning on a hair dryer, full heat, full blast in your face. It is so overwhelmingly hot and for much of the time there is no electricity, so there's no air conditioning. You can see Iraqis sleeping on their roofs, trying to get a bit of wind.

On top of climate change, there are still the lingering effects of all the conflicts that have engulfed Iraq. The country’s bloody, quite recent past is on display in the museum I visited, which was once a torture and execution site. In one section, there is a memorial to the victims of ISIS, the terrorist group that controlled vast swaths of the country and that was only largely defeated within the past half decade.

Peter Bergen: These are terrible pictures of ISIS executions.

Makwan Karim: [TRANSLATING FOR MUSTAFA KHALIL] This is age restricted. It's not for anyone, especially child,

Peter Bergen: Yes. Yeah

Makwan Karim: [TRANSLATING FOR MUSTAFA KHALIL] So they are not allowed to see this and be in this room.

Peter Bergen: It's interesting that you have this memorial to ISIS because I thought the museum was just for the Saddam era.

Makwan Karim: They will dedicate, um, more rooms for different purposes.

It's telling that a museum dedicated to the worst chapters in Iraq's recent history isn't just about Saddam’s time. ISIS was a byproduct of the American era in Iraq. Many Iraqis remember all too well that when U.S. troops were first pulled out of Iraq in 2011 — a withdrawal negotiated by then-Vice President Joe Biden — the country fell into chaos and within three years, ISIS fighters were raising their distinctive black and white flags in cities across Iraq.

To defeat ISIS, President Obama sent U.S. troops back into Iraq in 2014 and today, U.S. soldiers are still based in Iraq largely to help keep ISIS in check.

ARCHIVAL Newscaster: About 2,500 U.S. troops remain in Iraq as part of the multinational coalition force in the fight against ISIS.

Al-Oraibi says that U.S. military commitment is important.

Mina Al-Oraibi: Unfortunately, we've seen with the U.S. and when they're not present militarily, they very quickly disengage. And so it is important. It's important for the Iraqi security forces who continue to learn from them and need to have that relationship because if they left, somebody else will fill that vacuum.

In recent decades the United States has stumbled badly when it has intervened in countries like Afghanistan and Iraq, often knowing almost nothing about the local culture and politics before it toppled the government. And then having virtually no plan for the “day after,” and somehow seeming to believe that all its virtuous intentions would be enough to fix all the broken china. Seeming to believe that all its rhetoric about democracy and nation building would be enough to make it so.

Mina Al-Oraibi: The United States believes its own slogan of being an indispensable nation. It is not, but it believes that slogan. The U.S. thinks that it has this moral conviction that people will just agree with it because it is democratic and idealistic, and frankly, people see the flaws in the United States. And so actually the symbolism and moral talk doesn't fly, and particularly not after what happened in Iraq, and then of course the withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. The callous manner in which the Afghans were left to their fate ended any talk of trying to pretend to have a moral authority. So I think that the U.S. had naivete and innocence and arrogance all rolled into one.

It’s a damning indictment, but it’s a well-considered one coming from an Iraqi who is one of the Middle East’s leading journalists. And it's a lesson worth remembering the next time that American politicians predict that a military intervention abroad is gonna be a “cakewalk.”

[MUSIC SHIFTS]

###

If you want to know more about some of the stories and issues we discussed in this episode we recommend The Unraveling by Emma Sky, The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace by Ali Allawi, and The U.S. Army in the Iraq War by a team of U.S. military historians led by Colonel Joel Rayburn.

CREDITS:

IN THE ROOM WITH PETER BERGEN is an Audible Original.

Produced by Audible Studios and FRESH PRODUCE MEDIA

This episode was produced by Laura Tillman, with help from Luke Cregan.

Special thanks to our production team in Iraq: Ramiar Dilshad, coordinators Las Salah, Hevar Sabir, translator Makwan Barzan.

Our executive producer is Alison Craiglow.

Katie McMurran is our technical director.

Our staff also includes Alexandra Salomon, Erik German, Holly DeMuth, and Sandy Melara.

Our theme music is by Joel Pickard.

Our Executive Producers for Fresh Produce Media are Colin Moore, Jason Ross, and Joe Killian.

Our Head of Development is Julian Ambler.

Our Head of Production is Elena Bawiec.

Eliza Lambert is our Supervising Producer.

Maureen Traynor is our Head of Operations.

Our Production Manager is Herminio Ochoa.

Our Production Coordinator is Henry Koch.

And our Delivery Coordinator is Ana Paula-Martinez.

Head of Audible Studios: Zola Mashariki

Chief Content Officer: Rachel Ghiazza

Head of Content Acquisition & Development and Partnerships: Pat Shah

Special thanks to Marlon Calbi, Allison Weber, and Vanessa Harris

Copyright 2023 by Audible Originals, LLC

Sound recording copyright 2023 by Audible Originals, LLC

Please note: This episode includes audio excerpts from ITN News, Radio Free Europe, Sky News, and the Guardian.