Hello and welcome to colonial outcasts where we all yearn for the dismantling of empire for all of our sakes.

My name is Greg Stoker.

I'm a former U.S. Army Ranger with four tours in Afghanistan, and I'm joined by co-host Mark Wayne.

And look, there is no better case study for why empire is bad for all of us than the Iraq war.

The people of West Asia know it. It overthrew a stabilizing government and say what you want about

Saddam. He kept sectarian and regional violence in check and created a war-torn power vacuum

that killed over a million people and directly contributed to the rise of the

Islamic State, which really has nothing to do with Islam. Plenty of Americans died to, or were maimed,

or took their own lives from a combination of PTSD and knowing it was all for a lie. Trillions of

dollars were washed out of the public sector tax base and into the private through defense contracts to the military industrial complex, all under the cover of a complicit media and academic network bent on manufacturing consent for a lie and for a war.

There were no WMDs in Iraq.

There was no al-Qaeda presence in Iraq until after we arrived.

And this is something we take for granted, that it was literally all for a lie, natural resources,

imperialism, late stage finance capitalism, name it. And I don't think most Americans have

grasped what we did to Iraq, one of the oldest civilizations

in the world in order to bring freedom and spread democracy through full spectrum dominance.

There are two incidents that bring the rank injustice, actually three, and we'll get into a third,

but two incidents that bring the rank

injustice of that war into the light in an age before social media could live stream a

genocide in Palestine. First is Abu Ghraib, the U.S. run torture prison outside of Baghdad,

and the infamous Haditha massacre of 24 civilians by U.S. Marines in Iraq in 2005.

A salient difference between these two crimes was that the Haditha massacre lacked photos in the

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