The Many Lives and Deaths of Iraq, as Witnessed by Ghaith Abdul-Ahad

The Intercept Briefing

The Intercept

Politics, Unknown, Daily News, History, News

4.8 • 6.3K Ratings

🗓️ 22 March 2023

⏱️ 73 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Amidst massive protests around the United States and the world, on March 19, 2003, the U.S. began its invasion of Iraq. This week on Intercepted, Jeremy Scahill, Murtaza Hussain, and Iraqi journalist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad discuss the long-lasting impact of the war on Iraq and its people. Throughout the 20 years since the invasion, Iraq was torn to shreds by a gratuitous American occupation and a U.S.-fueled sectarian civil war. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians died as U.S. policy gave rise to Al Qaeda — and ultimately the Islamic State in Iraq.

While many commemorations of this bloody anniversary focus on the 2003 invasion, the plans to destroy Iraq were launched much earlier and were supported by Democrats and Republicans alike. Scahill, Hussain, and Abdul-Ahad discuss life under Saddam Hussein, the lead-up to the U.S. invasion, the brutality of the occupation, and the systematic refusal to bring any accountability for those responsible.

“Of course, the Iraqis could not believe that their new colonial masters had no clue, had done no planning and made no preparations for what was going to happen after they invaded the country,” Abdul-Ahad writes in his new book, “A Stranger in Your Own City: Travels in the Middle East’s Long War.” “When the myth of an American-generated prosperity clashed with the realities of occupation, chaos and destruction followed. Resentment and anger swept the country and all the suppressed rage of the previous decades exploded.”

Abdul-Ahad shares stories from his deeply human reporting on his personal journey from an architect living in Baghdad to a celebrated international journalist documenting the rise and fall of ISIS.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is intercepted.
0:30.0	Welcome to intercepted. I'm Jeremy Skahill, Senior Correspondent and Editor at Large for the Intercept.
0:39.0	And I'm Wotzahosein, National Security Reporter for the Intercept.
0:43.0	Well, Ma's this week marks 20 years since the US invasion and occupation of Iraq began.
0:49.0	And coming up in the program, we're going to be speaking to one of the great journalists to cover,
0:54.0	not just the invasion and occupation, but everything that came as a result of US policy and the US military incursion into Iraq.
1:03.0	But just a few thoughts off the bat on this 20th anniversary, Ma's.
1:08.0	I think that it's hard to overstate how much of an epic crime this invasion and occupation was.
1:16.0	It was like a crime of polusa of immense proportions.
1:22.0	And I think a lot of history and context gets lost as we move further and further away from 2003 and that initial invasion.
1:32.0	But it's important to remember that this was premeditated. It was pre-planned.
1:38.0	This was a war of conquest in search of a justification when Bush and Cheney came into office.
1:46.0	And the popular narrative that has emerged even among the liberal media and the political class, certainly the Democrats in Congress.
1:56.0	And increasingly, Republicans was that the Bush administration got it wrong. They misled Congress.
2:04.0	They misled the American people. But I think it's really, really important to remember that this war did not start in 2003.
2:13.0	You can make a case that the war started 60 years ago when the United States and the CIA helped to put Saddam Hussein in power.
2:20.0	But just to drill it down to more recent history, you had the 1991 Gulf War where Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait.
2:29.0	But he did so after meeting with the US ambassador who essentially told him, we don't really have a position on Arab, Arab disputes.
2:39.0	From Saddam's perspective, he had been a US ally for quite a long time, certainly during the Iran-Irak war.
2:47.0	But then you have the Gulf War where the US just bombs Baghdad back to sort of the Stone Age in some ways, strikes at its civilian infrastructure.
2:56.0	And then imposes the most sweeping regime of economic sanctions to that date in history.
3:04.0	And under both George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, you had regular bombing of Iraq under the guise of these so-called no-fly zones.
	...

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