https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=YlGg6_XeKqc
So what I’m going to address today is a modern myth. The modern myth is around the Second Iraq War and the things we tell ourselves. Now I lived through a lot of this, I remember things, and I took notes and I have since done some research. So let’s dive in. In order to understand the Second Iraq War and the claims about weapons of mass destruction, we first need to understand something very, very important, which is there was a first Iraq War before this, and as the result of that war, whatever There was a treaty in place, and it was a lengthy treaty. Now you can whine about the first Iraq War, that’s fine, but Iraq went into another country with tanks. That’s why we got into a war with them. Seems pretty reasonable. And you can say, oh well the Second Iraq War was completely unjust if they were under treaty. They’re under treaty. So there are some important facts to understand. Iraq accepted the treaty. They accepted the UN Security Council’s resolution, which was part of accepting the treaty. And the President Saddam Hussein agreed to give up all weapons of mass destruction and pay damages for its seven-month occupation of Kuwait. It agreed to this. So it agreed to give up all weapons of mass destruction. Now that is a quote from 1991 United Nations April 6th. That’s a quote that’s in the document. Look it up yourself, I did. So there are things such as weapons of mass destruction. Some of the definitions, and again you can look all this up, I did. I looked it up like a couple days ago. So this is all fresh info. Nuclear weapons, biological weapons, chemical weapons, and missiles. Now it’s very hard, because they have changed the definition several times, to look up which missiles and why and how. My remembrance, my recollection from the time period is that live on a CNN camera, live, a live CNN feed from the Green Zone in Iraq, a Chinese silkworm missile landed outside the Green Zone and didn’t explode, but it was a Chinese silkworm missile. And those were a lot. Those were barred. Why? Because the determination of whether or not a missile is a weapon of mass destruction is not merely its payload, but its payload capability and the distance it can fire. And so all weapons of defensive nature are not weapons of mass destruction because they’re defensive. But any weapon that can be outfitted to launch, say, into another country, with a sufficiently large payload of some explosive, to cause destruction on a mass scale, should qualify the missile for a weapon of mass destruction. Now again, silkworm missiles were considered banned. So were certain types of Scuds. Not all the Scuds, because some Scuds are defensive, some Scuds are not. Iraq had previously fired a Scud missile at a US warship in the past. So there were Scuds found. There was at least one silkworm missile found in Iraq in the middle of the war, right, or in its aftermath, okay. Iraq had biological weapons that they did. Some of them escaped the country. There were, I believe, six trucks that went into Syria, if I remember correctly. This was reported at the time, right, on the news, right, everybody agreed. So before you go hanging the news, all they did was flip what they believed, okay. Now that I don’t agree with because I think they had the story right the first time and the narrative changed and that’s a problem. The definition of weapons of mass destruction comes from the United Nations. It doesn’t come from the US, okay. It is part of the treaty that the United Nations drew up where they were supposed to do all kinds of things, like be able to inspect certain facilities in Iraq, which they were barred from doing more than once, more than twice, more than three times, several, several times, okay. There was a resolution before the second Iraq war put before the UN and 80 percent, if I remember correctly, 80 percent of the UN voted basically to execute the war in Iraq, the second war, okay. 80 percent of the UN. So if you agree with democracy, then sometimes you should. There you go. The UN wanted that second war. What happened was, I think it was two of the Security Council, it might have been three of the Security Council countries vetoed the war. All of the countries that vetoed the war had sold weapons to Iraq that they were not supposed to sell to Iraq under UN treaty. So they were covering their own tail for having violated the UN agreements that they had previously signed and agreed to and forced Iraq to sign, right. This is why arms dealers exist, right. They get a lot of money so that they can take the fall in case countries don’t want to get caught doing things they’re not supposed to do. So that’s what happened here. Now, any missile of any size that is outfitted with a biological weapon or with a chemical weapon or with a nuclear weapon is automatically a weapon of mass destruction. Fair enough. But the presence of biological and chemical weapons, and we know chemical weapons were in Iraq and were used in Iraq on their own people prior to the war, in between the wars, right. So during the treaty time this happened. Also, you know, Iraq was aiming a cannon at Israel, which last I checked is one of our allies. But anyway, any legal cannon, like one that isn’t supposed to exist because it can fire too far at another country, for example, which is, you know, not good. So it’s not like Iraq doesn’t have a history of bad behavior here. Like they did invade Kuwait and yeah, it’s not a great country. Now, one of the other important points, aside from barring UN inspectors from validating that weapons that they knew were there in the country after the first war were destroyed, so they couldn’t validate that those weapons were destroyed. They couldn’t account for them. So Iraq still had them. This is all verifiable after the fact because when we went in, we found them. The US found them. There are records of all of this. They are extensive, right. Lots of high explosives qualify for mass destruction because look what C4 can do, right. Look what a truck full of ammonium nitrate could do in Kansas City, right. You can take out buildings pretty easily with explosives. And some of that is large enough in size that that’s mass destruction, man, you know, or just having a lot of it. I think all of these are fair. Now, the bigger issue for me is that George W. Bush was rather clear, like if you’re going to support terrorists in any way, shape or form, you’re our enemy and we’re coming after you, right. That happened after 9-11. And Saddam, and I remember this distinctly, went on TV and said, we have terrorist training camps. And he showed footage of terrorist training camps. And we’re a training terrorist. He did that. He did that on purpose. Fair enough. Like you’re allowed to do dumb things, okay. But that kind of guaranteed that we were going to go in. Now, we already had grounds to go in. We already had grounds under the Treaty of the First War to go into Iraq at any time and wipe it off the map. Like that was an option that was already available to us from the UN. Okay. So you can whine about nuclear weapons all day long. But that wasn’t the only condition under which we were allowed to go in under the treaty. Sorry. So if you want to say the Second Iraq War is not justified, you’re just wrong. Like you’re just wrong in every possible way. It was not only justified, but the UN wanted us to do it, except for the countries that were selling illegal weapons. That happened. France might have also vetoed us because they sold them something. So it might have been three of the members of security council. But like they had clear interests. China and Russia had sold illegal weapons to Iraq that were forbidden by the UN to even be there. And they’re likely also forbidden on the other side. Now, now we can get into it. So look, were there nuclear weapons or nuclear weapons capability in Iraq? No, there were not. Okay. But no one knew that because the UN inspectors weren’t allowed to inspect the places where they thought those things had been. Okay, so nobody knew and nobody could have known that they didn’t have nuclear weapons capability. There was no way to tell what we did know. And this is where it gets really tricky. Okay. England and France independently verified that there was at least a strong possibility that Iraq was trying to buy yellowcake, which is yellowcake uranium from Niger. Okay. They did that. We tried to follow up. We sent a guy named Joseph Wilson, who was the husband of Valerie Plame, and this is a big dust up with the CIA. And he made a bunch of statements about the capability of Niger to sell yellowcake to Iraq without getting caught. Okay. But in his report, in the report from from the UK, and in the report, and these are all independent reports, right? From France, they all said, yes, Iraq seems like they were trying to buy yellowcake. Okay. So they played a game with the reporting and Joseph Wilson did this, I guess, in a book or at least in an article saying, oh, there was no chance that Iraq could get yellowcake. Okay, but that wasn’t the issue. Right? Maybe they couldn’t get yellowcake from Niger, but maybe they could get it from somewhere else. I don’t know. This is why arms dealers exist, to find ways to sell things for governments that governments don’t want to get caught selling. That’s what arms dealers do. That’s why they have lots of money, because they act as middlemen and fall guys in case people get caught. Fair enough. Okay. So going in under the assumption that they had a way to use the uranium seems like the safe bet. Okay, the fact that they didn’t was a impossible to know, and be an unsafe bet. Right? Because we didn’t know. And so that’s really, really important. And that’s the and that’s the problem is that, you know, you can be upset at Colin Powell for lying, but he had no way to know if he was lying. And if you want to justify going into a country, and you had no success so far, and I was there, they had no success saying no, no, no, there’s treaty violations. It was like, oh, well, you know, it’s not really treaty violations. I mean, just the UN inspectors are delayed a few days. No, you can’t delay the inspections that gives them time to move the stuff. It’s not just suspicious. It’s deliberately antagonistic. Okay. I have no problem with countries being deliberately antagonistic. But if you antagonize me, and I punch you, that’s on you, not me. Okay, like, especially when there’s a treaty, and you’re not following the treaty. Okay, if you choose not to follow a treaty, and you get stumped for it, that’s on you. Okay, so this whole thing about no weapons of mass destruction is a lie. A flat out lie. The media, I watched it happen. The media kept re, re identifying what weapons of mass destruction were. It wasn’t their determination. That was built into a treaty. It was written in the UN agreement. Okay. The UN defines what weapons of mass destruction are. Not you, not me, not the US government, and nobody in the fourth estate, nobody in the media. They don’t do that. They can’t do that. They’re too stupid. They’re not experts at that. And they’re not tip, terribly bright on average either. Just to let you know, a little known fact, they’ve done studies, okay. People in the media, especially, you know, like talking heads and stuff, and a lot of people that talk on the media, they have a below average IQ score, and below average education compared to other professions. No, really, they do. Big problem, in my opinion. There are some notable exceptions, for sure. And, and interestingly, those notable exceptions didn’t report the news the same way as everybody else, at least not back then. I don’t know what the hell’s going on now because I don’t watch the news anymore. And neither should you. It’s a waste of time. There’s too much, too much, too much of this game going where they’re just redefining terms like weapons of mass destruction, which again, they have no cause to do. It’s not relevant to a contract and a treaty that you have with the UN, right. And it’s not your business to redefine weapons of mass destruction. And I would argue that a large missile with enough C4 in it is a weapon of mass destruction. And if it can carry that much C4, maybe it’s a weapon of mass destruction and shouldn’t be allowed in your country, especially if it has a range where you can hit a country or two away from the middle of your country, right. Like that seems reasonable to me. And it seems reasonable to me to stop those people. Okay, so this counter narrative that has sprung up that now everybody believes that they didn’t have any weapons of mass destruction is bullshit. It’s a lie. It’s wrong. It’s incorrect. It is factually no. It is just anti factual. And there are tons, I’ve looked at them before in the past, tons, tons, thousands of papers documenting what was found in Iraq after the war. And all the illegal stuff is documented. And the UN knows about it. And there are whole articles on it. I just got done looking it up. You can look it up too. You can look up uranium yellow cake, right. You can look up terrorist camps, Saddam, right. You can look up the United Nations Treaty with Iraq, right, as part of the end of the first war, right. And, you know, a bunch of this stuff was made illegal after 1991. And we’re talking about 2003 and it’s still there. That’s a long time to be tolerant of a country, you know, having bad things that they shouldn’t have. That’s a long time. And the treaty was still in effect. Like they were supposed to give all this stuff up, period. They weren’t supposed to have it. And so there were the opening of terrorist camps that has been since verified up until 2003. Like, you know, there’s no question about whether or not the US should have gone into Iraq and shut down terrorist training camps after 9-11. Yes, they should have. And yes, they did. And whatever else happened? Well, look, and look, I’m not going to give my opinion on the absolute horrific debacle of what happened after the war as a result of people like Trish W. Bush, who just like must have had the world’s dumbest advisors or something to have botched the plan about what to do after we crush them. Right? Because that’s really what that was about. There’s no end of criticism I have on that front. But whether or not we should have gone in? Oh, no, there’s no question about whether or not we should have gone in. That was for everybody’s protection and goodness. And they were asking for it. Right? And really, the problem is, we in the West do not understand, and I’m not claiming that I understand this either, but I have talked to people about this for years and years and years on and off. The psychology behind winning in the West is very materialistic and fundamentally different from the psychology of winning in the Middle East. Okay? When you pull one over on the West in the Middle East, this is seen as some heroic big thing because they have very long time horizons in the Middle East because the place has been a mess since, quite honestly, the US, and it was the US and England, although the US let them, right, after World War I, quite frankly, screwed up the Middle East. Okay? And we’ve been paying for that mistake ever since. We redrew that map in a way that was really detrimental. And the reason why those countries don’t really do well and have been fighting, some of them since the end of World War I, is because we tried to draw a map in a way that wasn’t good. You can look up Lawrence of Arabia and his disappointment over the treaties that he was authorized to make and how England just stomped all over them. And look, we, the US, did that to protect British petroleum. That’s why we did it. Now, you can make lots of very interesting arguments and they might even be correct. I don’t know. I tend to think they might be correct that saving British petroleum was required to save England, like as a country. They wouldn’t have done well without oil. Whether or not that can justify the lines, arbitrary lines on the maps they drew, which caused all the wars, I don’t know. But that happened. We screwed up the Middle East. Okay? So to some extent, it is our responsibility to kind of do something to fix it because we made that mess and we should clean it up. We don’t appear to know how to do that, right? Or even be able to agree on what that should look like as evidenced by the debacle in Iran with the Shah and all that nonsense. So if you don’t really understand at least some of the history from, we’ll say, the end of World War I and the redrawing of the map, or at least some of the history from the whole Shah of Iran and that whole turnover of government in Iran, then maybe you should be a little more careful about making judgments about Iraq and Iran and Syria and basically the entirety of the Middle East. Because there’s a mess there to be contended with and it’s a mess and it has a long history. It’s not one war in 2003 or whenever it was that, you know, and all of the aftermath of that, right? You at least have to start at the first Iraq war to understand the second Iraq war. There’s no way around it. And there’s a lot of nuance and there’s a lot of mess and there’s a lot of games being played by a lot of people to this day to cover their ass, quite honestly. And, you know, a lot of people don’t want to look like they have egg on their face, but they do. And that’s really the problem with this situation. It’s very hard to untangle because of all the information that’s out there. And you don’t know what to look for unless you know something about the history. If you don’t know they violated a treaty multiple times for multiple years, if you don’t know they had chemical weapons in the country for sure that they were using on their own population, it sure looks like an unjustified war, right? But if you do know there was a treaty and you do know that chemical weapons are bad and you shouldn’t use them on anybody, much less your own people, then maybe you think the war is justified. If you do know they had terrorist training camps and announced it as a thumbing of the nose to the U.S., maybe it’s justified to go in. And again, that’s where I land on this. So I just wanted to straighten that out because, man, it really bothers me every time I hear there were no weapons in the destruction in Iraq, there were, right? And even if there weren’t, it doesn’t even matter. They had treaty violations. We had the right to go in. We had the duty to go in and make sure that because they were almost certainly trying to buy uranium to make at least dirty bombs, right? Which is another possibility that everybody, they didn’t have a nuclear plant, you can make a dirty bomb without a nuclear plant. All you need is yellow cake, actually, right? And you can aerosolize it and cause a lot of damage. It doesn’t need to cause an explosion. And those bombs, dirty bombs are way more dangerous, right? And guess who, guess who can get a dirty bomb in New York City? A terrorist, right? Or put one on a plane and crash it into a building. That could have happened. I mean, this is why we went in, guys. Like, it’s not that hard, right? And this was a good thing to do because they were trying to buy uranium as near as anybody can tell. Three different reports from three different countries, man. Whether or not they could have succeeded is a ridiculous standard. Could they have succeeded? Well, not in Niger. Well, maybe not in Niger, but maybe somewhere else. And maybe in Niger, you don’t know why take the chance. I don’t want to take a chance with a nuclear material. Like, sorry, I’d rather go into a war with a country than take a chance on nuclear material. That’s just me. I mean, maybe you land somewhere else on the issue. But look, I thought it was important to cover this. I was asked to cover this. So I figured I’d do it because a lot of people just don’t understand the context. All they have is the meme of no weapons of mass destruction. And aside from just being flat out, fractually inaccurate, it’s not relevant. Really, it’s really not relevant. Because to be fair, other than the chemical weapons we have, the UN had pluns of evidence they use chemical weapons on, I believe it was the Kurds, and some other populations. When they were under treaty from 1991, those trucks went into Syria. That was widely reported. So, you know, Syria also fired chemical weapons, and had chemical weapons. And we knew this, right, during the Syrian red line thing, right, where we did nothing, by the way, which was, we had a president that announced a red line and did nothing. Probably the worst possible thing you could possibly do, right? So, and that’s wrapped up in Iraq, because I’m fairly sure, and as far as I can tell, everybody else is fairly sure, those chemical weapons weren’t made in Syria. They were made in Iraq, right? And they were gotten from Iraq at the end of the war. So, you’ve got to be a little careful when you’re thinking about these things, because there’s a lot of context you’re probably missing, because if you weren’t there, and you weren’t paying attention really closely, you probably don’t know this stuff. And I happen to be there, I happen to be paying attention very closely, and I have a really good memory, and I took notes at the time, and like I said, I’ve since looked it up, this information is still there. Some of the stuff on Wikipedia validates what I’m, some of this, I pulled some of this up on Wikipedia. This is not hidden information. It’s a little hard to suss out this stuff about the yellow cake, because unless you watch closely what they’re saying, they’re not saying Saddam didn’t try to buy it. They’re saying there’s no possible way Saddam could have gotten it, which A, isn’t true or verifiable, and B, isn’t relevant to the important part, which is he’s trying to acquire something he knows he shouldn’t acquire. That’s again a treaty violation. It’s not relevant whether or not he did. It doesn’t matter. So yeah, didn’t today, might tomorrow, might find a way. Who knows? Again, that’s what arms dealers are for. So it’s really important to suss out the nuance here, because you are being played. You’re being played by lots of people with lots of different agendas that may land on sort of the same proximal goal, which is to confuse you about the Second Iraq War. And I hope I’ve done something, at least to un-confuse you about the Second Iraq War. I can validate to you that everything I have said is something that you can probably book up today, whenever you watch this video. Although, you know, look, I’m recording this on January 9th of 2023. I looked all this stuff up within the past three days. A bunch of it up today, especially the yellow cake stuff. It’s all still available on the internet, and exactly what I’ve said is evident in the documents. Although again, you kind of have to read them closely and be careful about what words they’re using and how they’re phrasing things. So that’s what it is. And I hope that this is helpful to you to frame what’s being done. The whitewashing and the re-narrativization of a perfectly justified and justifiable war that was probably in the best interest of everybody anyway. There was lots going on in Iraq. Saddam’s sons were kidnapping 12-year-old girls and using them for their sexual exploits. I mean, these were not good people. He had like a billion dollars. I’m sorry. I think it was four billion dollars in cash that he was keeping from the people of his country and four billion dollars in American dollars. Four billion in American dollars in Iraq at that time, is a hell of a lot of money. His country was poor and the people were suffering, and he could have used that money better, but he was sitting on it. And he was going to sit on it forever, probably until he could buy his yellow cake, would be my suspicion. And maybe that’s unfair, but maybe not. So there’s a lot to consider. There’s a lot to consider. It was a very bad place. And there are no good answers. By the time you get to moving people into a country, there are no good answers. No one’s happy about that. But that doesn’t mean it’s not required. It just means that it sucks. And sometimes things that are required suck. But what doesn’t suck is that you’ve made it to the end of the video and that you’ve given me the thing that I value the most. And hopefully, you know, you’ve gotten something out of it. And that thing that I value is your time and attention.