Fortress Redux - The Sacking of Fallujah w/ Ross Caputi and Scott Spaulding – Ep 125

[00:00:09] This is Fortress On A Hill with Henry, Danny, Kagan and Giovanni.

[00:00:17] Welcome everyone to Fortress On A Hill, a podcast about U.S. foreign policy, anti-imperialism,

[00:00:24] skepticism and the American way of war.

[00:00:27] I'm Henry.

[00:00:27] Thank you for joining us today.

[00:00:30] With these is my two co-hosts in crime, Giovanni and Kagan, fellas.

[00:00:36] How are you doing today?

[00:00:38] Excellent.

[00:00:38] Great.

[00:00:38] And Ray, did you have this fun discussion?

[00:00:41] So fun.

[00:00:47] And we are, Giovanni, how are you doing, man?

[00:00:52] Doing great.

[00:00:52] Doing great.

[00:00:54] I got a number of taking the mute off when I talk.

[00:00:58] But I'm going.

[00:00:58] Doing great.

[00:00:59] Happy to be here.

[00:01:01] Happy to see you all.

[00:01:02] I talked to our guests and engaged in this discussion.

[00:01:05] Hell yeah.

[00:01:06] So we are joined today by Ross Caputti.

[00:01:10] Did I say that right, Ross?

[00:01:11] That's enough.

[00:01:13] And Scott Spalding.

[00:01:17] Both of these fellas are United States Marine Corps veterans and they participated in

[00:01:23] the second battle of Fallujah as U.S. history books put it.

[00:01:29] I would have to definitely agree with the title of Ross's book that he co-wrote about

[00:01:35] this, that it is we are talking about a siege.

[00:01:38] We are talking about a siege of a city over a long period of time and a lot of different

[00:01:43] events.

[00:01:44] And I thought it would be really instructive for us to go through and talk about some

[00:01:49] of the things that stuck out to us both as, you know, with our guests here, with

[00:01:54] their on the ground experiences.

[00:01:56] But much more importantly is their views and advocacy about a different set of experiences

[00:02:03] about the experiences of the Iraqis on the ground, of the people who actually lived

[00:02:08] through the siege of Fallujah.

[00:02:11] And we're going to just talk about it, talk about what sticks out to us and how it can

[00:02:18] be seen as an example or as a bit of a blueprint for the war in Iraq and indeed

[00:02:25] the war on terror.

[00:02:28] So first thing I wanted to do is I wanted to read a little portion of the

[00:02:33] introduction to Ross's book and Ross has has done an incredible amount of advocacy

[00:02:40] and work on Fallujah as a city, on the people who live in Fallujah, on the

[00:02:46] environmental destruction that has taken place there since the US occupation.

[00:02:52] So here's the quote, quote, we assert that the way in which the conflict is

[00:02:57] remembered is of great political, legal and moral significance, particularly if

[00:03:02] we are serious about addressing the injustices heaped upon ordinary Iraqis.

[00:03:08] Current US foreign policy in Iraq continues to ignore how the invasion of

[00:03:12] 2003 and its subsequent occupation contributed to Iraq's ongoing problems,

[00:03:17] refusing to acknowledge how the crimes of the United States closest allies in

[00:03:22] Iraq, the Iraqi government and sectarian militias are making

[00:03:26] resolution and reconciliation impossible.

[00:03:29] The United States current strategy is in many ways a more limited version of

[00:03:34] previous mistakes and miscalculations.

[00:03:37] It's apparent inability or willingness to understand how each operation in

[00:03:42] the Fallujah set the conditions for the next contributing to what became a

[00:03:47] regional conflagration has a time spent breathtaking.

[00:03:51] The history of what happened in Fallujah illustrates the time-oddered

[00:03:55] folly of seeking to apply external colonial military

[00:03:59] solutions to the complex, complex political problems of other nations.

[00:04:04] A historical lesson that sadly, the powerful seem unable or reluctant to learn.

[00:04:13] Ross, I was hoping we would start with you.

[00:04:16] Can you talk about the initial invasion and what was happening with

[00:04:20] Fallujah at that time?

[00:04:22] And will you bring us up to say just before the mercenaries were killed?

[00:04:28] OK, so spring in 2003 to about spring in 2004.

[00:04:32] Yeah. Sure.

[00:04:34] I mean, I don't know how much detail I should get into why we invaded Iraq,

[00:04:39] the international law physician to the invasion.

[00:04:42] The US was making the case that Saddam Hussein was not only a threat

[00:04:48] to his neighbors, to neighboring countries, but also potentially a threat to us

[00:04:52] through what people call the nexus argument.

[00:04:55] Unstable dictators could potentially form an alliance with al-Qaeda

[00:05:00] and lend them weapons of mass destruction.

[00:05:03] We knew Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction

[00:05:06] because we gifted and sold the great many of them to him

[00:05:11] while we were supporting him during the Iraq War.

[00:05:14] There were ongoing weapons inspections at the time, although it was

[00:05:19] a bit murky to what extent Saddam had been looting the weapons inspectors

[00:05:24] and hiding potential WMDs.

[00:05:27] It was an ongoing process.

[00:05:29] The US said that the weapon inspectors had failed and, you know,

[00:05:33] they weren't able to do their job because Saddam Hussein was

[00:05:38] throwing up roadblocks to the process.

[00:05:40] Others within the UN Security Council and other people in the UN

[00:05:46] said that it was a process that was working just needing more time.

[00:05:50] So the US infamously went unilateral, decided to invade the country

[00:05:55] without a UN Security Council authorization.

[00:05:59] So it was technically an illegal invasion of the country.

[00:06:06] We invaded March 19, 2003 within about a month, the invasion phase.

[00:06:12] Over 6,000 civilians were killed, mostly through the shock

[00:06:17] and upbombing of the country.

[00:06:19] At the time, it's really hard to measure how Iraqis felt about us

[00:06:25] invading their country.

[00:06:27] I think to my knowledge, there was a great deal of mixed feelings.

[00:06:31] Very few Iraqis like Saddam Hussein.

[00:06:33] There was very little support for him throughout the country.

[00:06:36] Although at the same time, I mean, nobody wants a foreign country

[00:06:39] invading their country, especially when they're doing shock

[00:06:43] and upbombing, particularly in the manner that we were doing it

[00:06:46] in urban areas like Baghdad, with huge amounts of civilian casualties.

[00:06:52] Nonetheless, it happened.

[00:06:54] And then we rolled into the invasion, the occupation phase

[00:06:59] starting around.

[00:07:00] And so now we're in May of 2003.

[00:07:07] At that point, there really wasn't any armed occupation

[00:07:11] to armed resistance to the occupation.

[00:07:15] However, the U.S. then formed the Coalition Provisional Authority,

[00:07:21] which was sort of an interim government led by

[00:07:24] diplomats of the invading occupying forces

[00:07:28] who were then running the show in Iraq.

[00:07:30] And that's where there started to be resistance,

[00:07:33] first political resistance and then later military resistance

[00:07:37] because there were foreign powers running Iraq

[00:07:41] and not allowing Iraqis to to have a participatory role

[00:07:46] in creating a transitional government.

[00:07:48] And that's exactly how the whole conflict in Fallujah started.

[00:07:51] Basically, it started the fight started over U.S.

[00:07:55] interference in the democratic process in Fallujah.

[00:07:58] Fallujah's wanted to set up their own post Saddam City Council

[00:08:03] to run city affairs, whereas the U.S. wanted to run the whole show.

[00:08:06] They wanted to have a military presence in the city.

[00:08:10] People in Fallujah didn't want that for mostly for cultural reasons.

[00:08:13] They felt it was an invasion of privacy.

[00:08:15] They felt it got in the way of kids being able to go to school and stuff like that.

[00:08:18] There was a real there was an infamous incident

[00:08:23] believe it was in May of 2003, where

[00:08:27] U.S. soldiers took over the school school building.

[00:08:29] This was the 82nd Airborne took over school building in Fallujah.

[00:08:32] We're using it as sort of like an oversight post

[00:08:36] in there was a protest outside the school because people just wanted

[00:08:39] those U.S. soldiers to move to the outskirts of the city.

[00:08:42] So kids go to school, make a go about their business.

[00:08:44] They didn't like soldiers being on roofs with binoculars

[00:08:47] because in in Iraqi culture, that's a huge invasion of privacy.

[00:08:51] They didn't like the checkpoints.

[00:08:53] They particularly didn't like women being searched at checkpoints.

[00:08:56] And it's not really sure it's not really clear what happened.

[00:08:59] But at some point, U.S. soldiers started firing to the crowd.

[00:09:02] Some U.S. forces say it was in response to gunfire coming from below.

[00:09:08] Others on the scene, including journalists, say there was no gunfire from the crowd.

[00:09:12] Perhaps somebody threw a shoe.

[00:09:14] A soldier overreacted, fired into the crowd.

[00:09:17] Nonetheless, over a dozen people were killed.

[00:09:20] Several dozen were wounded.

[00:09:22] And that really kicked off the armed insurgency infillusion,

[00:09:25] which became the largest center of insurgency in the entire country.

[00:09:29] So now we're taught now we're like, you know, summer of 2003,

[00:09:34] where the insurgency is beginning to pick up steam throughout Iraq,

[00:09:37] but particularly in Fallujah.

[00:09:39] And there's this tit for tat kind of back and forth between insurgent groups

[00:09:43] in the occupied U.S. occupying forces in Fallujah.

[00:09:46] As insurgents started to push harder and harder

[00:09:49] to try to kick soldiers out of their city, U.S.

[00:09:52] soldiers would respond with, you know,

[00:09:56] more and more combat tactics to try to squash the insurgency.

[00:10:01] Never really listening to what the fundamental problem was,

[00:10:05] was that they just wanted to govern their own affairs.

[00:10:07] So this was the ongoing fuel of the conflict.

[00:10:13] People in Fallujah were fighting because they wanted to run their own affairs.

[00:10:16] They didn't want foreigners, you know, running their affairs.

[00:10:20] They wanted to put their own post-Sidem government together

[00:10:23] and the U.S. just wasn't allowing that to happen.

[00:10:26] Things continued to escalate all the way until spring of 2004

[00:10:30] with the famous Blackwater incident.

[00:10:32] At that point, dozens of civilians have been killed

[00:10:36] in the conflict between the insurgents and the U.S. soldiers.

[00:10:41] And then, you know, just like one day, these

[00:10:43] these Blackwater contractors decided to roll through Fallujah.

[00:10:48] Most likely people in Fallujah didn't know that they were contractors

[00:10:52] and not U.S. soldiers because they're, you know,

[00:10:54] they're dragging through there in the humbies, I believe.

[00:10:56] Well, the vehicles got ambushed.

[00:10:59] They dragged the bodies out of the vehicles, mutilated them.

[00:11:05] This was all caught on camera.

[00:11:06] It became this huge media incident.

[00:11:08] I believe this is late May, like May 28th of 2004.

[00:11:14] It was right after a change of command to the Army unit left,

[00:11:18] Marine unit roll.

[00:11:19] March. It was March.

[00:11:21] March. Thank you. March 28th.

[00:11:24] Became this huge media spectacle.

[00:11:26] And the way the media presented it was, you know,

[00:11:28] these were civilians who were attacked for no reason at all,

[00:11:31] driven by a sense of anti-Americanism, religious fanaticism.

[00:11:35] And it created enough outrage back in the U.S.

[00:11:39] to pressure a retaliatory operation in response to this.

[00:11:44] And that would be the first siege at Fallujah.

[00:11:46] And I can say more about, you know, why this is siege warfare

[00:11:50] and why phrasing as a battle isn't really appropriate.

[00:11:55] But I think that got us to where you wanted to be.

[00:11:57] Is there anything else you want me to touch on?

[00:11:59] No, no, that was great.

[00:12:03] So I don't know how I found stumbled on this just today,

[00:12:07] but I've done different searches about what about the deaths of the mercenaries

[00:12:12] and, you know, kind of the circumstances around that.

[00:12:15] And it actually turns out from,

[00:12:18] I don't know if their records from Blackwater are just just journalists stuff,

[00:12:21] but there were actually two teams that were,

[00:12:24] I don't know if the teams were supposed to be traveling together

[00:12:27] or they were traveling separately.

[00:12:29] But a Blackwater manager, I don't know exactly what their expertise was,

[00:12:35] told gave them a route to go through directly through Fallujah,

[00:12:39] which was an area that our coalition forces weren't really going into Fallujah,

[00:12:45] certainly not in mass and certainly not much of the time.

[00:12:50] And so these two teams, which, you know,

[00:12:53] the kind of guys that we're talking about here, we're talking about, you know,

[00:12:56] former army rangers, former Green Berets, maybe Navy Seals,

[00:13:02] but usually guys that are pretty tactically and technically proficient

[00:13:06] in what they're doing.

[00:13:08] And so the two teams, one team went through Fallujah,

[00:13:12] and that's the story that we know of the four mercenaries who were killed.

[00:13:17] And then one team decided to travel around Fallujah.

[00:13:22] They made it to their destination.

[00:13:23] They did whatever mission they had, and they made it back to Baghdad in the same day.

[00:13:30] And so it seems that the route, you know,

[00:13:34] that I don't know exactly why that other team still went in that way,

[00:13:38] but at least that there was some very specific actions by the other team

[00:13:44] knowing that that would have was and absolutely should have been treated

[00:13:49] as a hostile place to go, not a place to go with,

[00:13:51] especially not with that, with the amount of personnel they were supposed to have.

[00:13:55] They were also down to other mercenaries

[00:13:58] that would have been their door gunners.

[00:14:01] So there was a lot of reasons as to why this ended up happening,

[00:14:06] not including the fact that these guys were driving through an area

[00:14:09] that was very hostile to coalition forces at the time.

[00:14:15] And so it's

[00:14:18] oftentimes we don't we don't know these these details.

[00:14:21] We don't know, you know, did the military mean for it to happen that way?

[00:14:26] Was it a was it an accident?

[00:14:28] Was it, you know, how did it end up coming about that way?

[00:14:32] And so I go through all this because it after reading that today,

[00:14:36] it reminded me of an ambush that I survived going through when my my platoon was

[00:14:43] was in a Jaff. We were we were it was around the time around April 4th when

[00:14:50] McDonald's, Otters,

[00:14:52] Maudi army was starting to rise up partially in response to what was

[00:14:56] happening in Fallujah, but partially because of the CPA's own actions towards

[00:15:01] Seder and the squad leaders from the base that we were traveling to had told

[00:15:07] my lieutenant, do not drive through the city. Drive around the city.

[00:15:11] We have a specific route. We'll show it to you here.

[00:15:13] That was not the route he sent us on.

[00:15:16] And so five shot out tires later, we managed to make it to our base.

[00:15:23] Thankfully, everybody was still in one piece, minus a few a few simple

[00:15:28] shrapnel wounds, but still based upon the amount of fire we went through,

[00:15:32] we felt very, very lucky that we were able to make it through that.

[00:15:37] And so, you know, I point this out because it's it that

[00:15:43] all of the different factors that can play into these kind of situations

[00:15:46] and why it was chosen to do this, why soldiers fell back to a certain

[00:15:50] spot and not a different one.

[00:15:53] But that it was it was for a for a time, people thought that they were

[00:15:58] making the calls right. They thought that it was OK.

[00:16:01] It's OK to drive through Najaf in early April, 2004, when it is filled

[00:16:06] with with Monty Army guys trying to consolidate their own base there

[00:16:11] and trying to push back coalition forces.

[00:16:14] So anyways, enough about that.

[00:16:19] So Roscoe, yes, please do tell us about siege warfare.

[00:16:25] Well, I mean, it's kind of a curious historical phenomena that

[00:16:31] you know, during the global war on terror, siege warfare comes back as an

[00:16:35] urban tactic, you know, as we're, you know, most of the urban operations

[00:16:40] that we were doing, you know, are dealing with dealing with cities,

[00:16:46] sometimes small cities, sometimes really large cities like Fallujah.

[00:16:49] A lot of times, you know, what any time we're doing some kind

[00:16:53] of urban operation, we can be cordoned off the area, right?

[00:16:57] And then we, you know, whatever, you know, it's a it's a raid or, you know,

[00:17:00] some high valley target or something like that.

[00:17:03] In the case of Fallujah, though, the entire city was the target.

[00:17:06] So we completely cordoned off the city, blockaded it at every

[00:17:12] entrance and exit point all around the city, cut it off for days.

[00:17:16] And, you know, there was an air campaign leading up to then a ground invasion.

[00:17:21] It's classic siege warfare.

[00:17:24] It didn't necessarily start in Iraq.

[00:17:26] I mean, you can even look to Palestine for some of the earlier precedents,

[00:17:30] like, you know, the, uh, the siege of Geneva, Sarajevo, even.

[00:17:35] But nonetheless, this became a fairly common tactic, you know,

[00:17:45] there were several cities in Iraq where the entire cities were

[00:17:49] sort of besieged in the same sort of way and breaking on some of

[00:17:53] the moment, but Fallujah was almost recently in the war against ISIS.

[00:18:01] Root bus in Western Iraq was treated in much the same way, just

[00:18:05] a, on my following deployment as a small, much smaller town,

[00:18:10] but it was completely cordoned off with only three entry points.

[00:18:14] Only and one of those was only for civilians.

[00:18:16] Yeah, they continued that practice.

[00:18:19] And Ross, can you share with us how, how big exactly?

[00:18:23] Because we hear from you, Fallujah, we just, we're, but you know,

[00:18:26] can you give us a picture of how big that city is that, you know,

[00:18:29] actually, uh, to your best estimation?

[00:18:32] And also the policy of or the, the strategy of person's control.

[00:18:38] No, once you're cordoned off the city, who gets in, gets out, et cetera.

[00:18:43] Yeah. So I mean, Fallujah is a big city.

[00:18:46] Estimates range from 300 to 400,000, but traditional Arabic architecture

[00:18:51] doesn't have high rise buildings.

[00:18:53] So it's like sprawling.

[00:18:54] It's just really large city population wise.

[00:18:56] It's probably like similar to like, I don't know, Providence, Rhode Island.

[00:19:00] But in terms of just like, you know, depth, it's like a big sprawling city.

[00:19:06] So I mean, during the second siege in November, 2004,

[00:19:10] I believe there were six battalions took six battalions to completely,

[00:19:14] you know, sweep through to cordon off and sweep through the whole city.

[00:19:18] Um, I'm not, I wasn't on the cordon itself.

[00:19:22] My unit was one of the ones sweeping through the city.

[00:19:26] But I mean, you know, they were completely surround.

[00:19:29] They set up checkpoints and after the battle,

[00:19:32] the cordon stayed in place for years all the way through till 2008, I believe.

[00:19:37] There were checkpoints all around the city at the major entrance

[00:19:40] and exit points and fallutions were given ID badges

[00:19:44] and like ranked according to their security threat, like high, medium or low.

[00:19:51] And in order to get in and out of the city to either go to school

[00:19:54] and bag data or go find work in some outside town,

[00:19:56] because none of that is happening in Fallujah under siege.

[00:20:00] They had to go through these checkpoints

[00:20:01] and took hours for them to get out just to go, I don't know,

[00:20:05] sell vegetables or something like that outside of town.

[00:20:11] And there was, you know, for the

[00:20:16] for looking at what at what became of the insurgency and how

[00:20:22] how Fallujah I wouldn't certainly wasn't the beginning of that,

[00:20:26] but it was one of the biggest aspects of of the insurgency

[00:20:30] as it really kicked off there in late March, early

[00:20:34] early April 2004,

[00:20:37] that Fallujah had already had a whole host

[00:20:42] of incidents with the US military in different ways.

[00:20:47] There was some mis I hate saying it this way,

[00:20:50] but there was some some misdropped bombs from the Gulf War

[00:20:54] that fell onto market areas adjacent to Fallujah

[00:20:58] that killed dozens if not more.

[00:21:00] And if anything, you know, coalition casualty numbers are going to be low.

[00:21:05] You had the Roswell, you talked about the the protests at the school,

[00:21:10] the shooting of the school and there was another shooting that happened a little

[00:21:13] bit later. This was at the Bath headquarters where the

[00:21:19] isn't that where the CPA had taken over or was it?

[00:21:22] I can't remember if it was the CPA or it was the Marines.

[00:21:26] Hold on. Is this an incident in September?

[00:21:31] You're taking those?

[00:21:35] Um, no, no, this is this is something different.

[00:21:38] This might have been the same day as the the school massacre.

[00:21:43] Okay.

[00:21:43] The guys at the headquarters and then I think it might have moved downtown to the school.

[00:21:50] And then I think also in September, there was another incident with new police

[00:21:55] forces, Fallujah's wanted their local guys to be the ones police in the city.

[00:22:00] The CPA was trying to impose their newly trained police force on Fallujah

[00:22:05] and it was a little skirmish there that killed about a dozen.

[00:22:10] Um, and then we also have, you know, one one incredibly huge factor is just the

[00:22:16] overall treatment of Iraqis post Gulf War, but for the invasion that involved

[00:22:25] bombings of different kinds in operation Desert Fox, among others.

[00:22:30] And of course, the many, many, many deaths that were caused as a result

[00:22:34] of US sanctions.

[00:22:37] So, you know, it would it would be really naive of anybody to look at it and not

[00:22:41] take that historical step back and know that even for the little that

[00:22:46] fallujah's had actually seen living in the flesh Americans, that they already

[00:22:51] had a very extensive and very bloody history with America up to that point.

[00:23:00] And it's a really important point because, you know, here in the States

[00:23:03] when the United States says we're going to help Iraq, Iraq build its democracy.

[00:23:08] Nobody really questions that here.

[00:23:09] We believe that our country and a lot of cases it is, it has genuine goodwill

[00:23:15] towards these other countries and is trying to help Iraq for very good reasons.

[00:23:19] Most Iraqis are really skeptical to those claims that were there out of, you

[00:23:24] know, a sense of goodwill to help them build their democracy.

[00:23:27] And there was a lot of things wrong with the way that we were going

[00:23:30] about it there.

[00:23:30] Iraq's had very good reasons for being against it.

[00:23:35] But.

[00:23:36] It wasn't being well reported in the news.

[00:23:38] A lot of Americans didn't.

[00:23:39] Americans just sort of think like elections equal democracy, that there is no

[00:23:43] real like qualitatively better or qualitatively worse democracies.

[00:23:48] And since we're bringing democracy to Iraq, if they don't want it, then

[00:23:52] there they get lumped into this rejectionist camp, particularly Sunni

[00:23:56] Arabs where Sunni Iraqis were being lumped into this rejectionist camp

[00:24:00] because they were opposing, you know, what we were trying to do in their country.

[00:24:04] But I mean, you know, you had the head of the CPA, Paul Bremmer, who had his

[00:24:09] hundred orders, basically a hundred dictates that he was trying to have

[00:24:12] written into the new Iraqi constitution without any Iraqi consent, not even a

[00:24:16] plug set, no, not even like a, you know, a polling of Iraqi opinions

[00:24:20] on whether or not they wanted these like enormous sweeping changes

[00:24:24] that Paul Bremmer was was enacting, written into their constitution.

[00:24:30] They just weren't being involved in the process of building their democracy,

[00:24:34] which is obviously very problematic.

[00:24:37] Yeah, and pretty much when it comes on to it comes on to this

[00:24:42] this ideology of the other civilatory mission of the 18th century, the 19th

[00:24:47] century, for example, in the West End, you know, you go back to the

[00:24:51] White, you know, to Whiteman's Burden, where is the the the burden

[00:24:57] and it is the responsibility of of of, you know, white, you know, imperial

[00:25:04] countries to spread civilization around the world, right?

[00:25:08] You know, take our civilization and you put a democracy now, you know,

[00:25:11] which pretty much subject to the civilization.

[00:25:13] But it goes back to back to the Eric, goes back, amigos,

[00:25:16] back to Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798, you know,

[00:25:20] where they were, where they felt they have a civilatory mission as well to,

[00:25:24] you know, to enter this this country, that was strange to them and just shape it

[00:25:28] into their will. I mean, I recall going back to what you said earlier,

[00:25:34] Ross, about the feelings towards towards Saddam and the reasons that were

[00:25:40] given to us, you know, as to why the the necessary to invade.

[00:25:45] I remember that vividly I was in the military then.

[00:25:48] Also, I was a teenager doing the division or the award in the 90s.

[00:25:55] And when I remember that I joined the military actually in 1990

[00:26:00] in a war against Iraq.

[00:26:02] I remember saying Saddam going from from hero to zero because prior to 1990

[00:26:08] have done with an ally. It was a good guy, right?

[00:26:11] Then right overnight, you know, very old William, he became the most

[00:26:16] he came to the T of the pond overnight.

[00:26:19] You know, he came to New Hill or the Middle East overnight.

[00:26:21] I remember all the rhetoric of Bush senior talking about how he became

[00:26:25] old, you know, just overnight, you know, and it was what was hypocritical

[00:26:29] about it was that when when Saddam was a hero, when Saddam was the best

[00:26:35] friend America has in the Middle East, Bush senior was directly CIA.

[00:26:40] You know, so the senior has had this relationship with them, you know,

[00:26:43] through this transition.

[00:26:46] Also, you mentioned about the I hadn't mentioned about the the siege.

[00:26:51] The siege goes way beyond beyond beyond the siege of the region goes

[00:26:56] all the way back to the sanctions in Iraq.

[00:26:58] I recall the direct the sanctions be the most fierce session ever imposed

[00:27:04] but then the country. This was a UN session, by the way.

[00:27:06] Nothing can go inside or outside

[00:27:10] of Iraq without, you know, these country session countries.

[00:27:14] Not about a number of the British and the army of planes, you know,

[00:27:20] patrolling Iraq, guys, Iraq lost after nineteen nine lost.

[00:27:24] It's it's it's airspace, you know, it's just it was being

[00:27:27] fired at twenty four seven they were bombed throughout the the

[00:27:30] country as well.

[00:27:32] The nineteen ninety nine act

[00:27:37] HR Ford four six fifty five, which became law,

[00:27:41] which is a congressional law that came out, which is the the Iraqi

[00:27:45] Freedom Act, which gave the United States the responsibility or the duty

[00:27:51] to to impose for the markets in Iraq and removes Saddam from from from power.

[00:27:57] That was in nineteen ninety eight.

[00:27:59] You know, that was that was prior nine and a half.

[00:28:01] And so so the policy to move

[00:28:03] so down was there already, you know, they were working towards it already.

[00:28:08] Also, Scott, what you got?

[00:28:10] What you got to say, you know, to do that?

[00:28:12] I need to learn on you too.

[00:28:14] I thought the space forward.

[00:28:17] Now, well, the one thought I was having that

[00:28:21] is you reminded me of and I thought I've earlier was

[00:28:24] that what's interesting too is the way we

[00:28:30] could very easily other a group of people

[00:28:35] and over very simple things that I take an example like, you know,

[00:28:40] I particularly remember being taught and it wasn't until because I kept going

[00:28:44] on, I went four times overseas on deployments.

[00:28:47] And by the fourth one it dawned on me.

[00:28:50] They give you these culture even by 2004 when I was getting ready to go to

[00:28:55] Fallujah, you know, we had civil affairs, at least we were getting Iraqi

[00:28:59] cultural training all the ways that they're different from you.

[00:29:02] You know what I mean?

[00:29:04] And to people in the military who are so I mean everyone's tuned

[00:29:08] into looking for differences, but Meridians in particular,

[00:29:11] who are all identical can see microscopic differences between

[00:29:16] themselves and the Marine next to them, something that no one else

[00:29:20] can notice.

[00:29:21] And I felt like the cultural training we got sort of primed the pump

[00:29:25] to see them as different, even though it was meant to be understanding.

[00:29:30] You know, they this is when they don't like when you put their

[00:29:34] show them your feet and it's like, well, I wouldn't like if you stuff

[00:29:37] your dirty muddy boots on my furniture either.

[00:29:41] And and where they don't like when you come in their houses

[00:29:45] and look at Lyra, their women, it's like, yeah, I wouldn't appreciate

[00:29:48] anyone disrupting me in the middle light.

[00:29:51] And another example that you made me think of Ross was the binoculars thing.

[00:29:57] I live in Baltimore and there's nowhere where it would be normal

[00:29:59] to look at another human being with a pair of binoculars or acceptable.

[00:30:03] Yeah, no.

[00:30:05] But we were sort of primed to see, well, that's just a cultural moray

[00:30:09] they have, and that's how they're different from us when in fact

[00:30:12] where it's something that makes us the same, but we're taught

[00:30:15] to see difference in a way that's

[00:30:20] percutaneous, but it's well intended.

[00:30:23] Yeah, it just reminds me of what you just said.

[00:30:26] There are some of the sensitivities, a cultural train that had also on that

[00:30:30] were, you know, where it said that it recommended live to save face.

[00:30:35] It also knows right there in the book that they gave us, right?

[00:30:37] You know, recommend live to save face.

[00:30:41] As if a Marine never did that once in their life.

[00:30:45] And the, you know, specifically for the citizens of Fallujah

[00:30:51] that the demonization went even further than that

[00:30:55] because they wanted to really create that image of, you know,

[00:31:00] a city under siege or under control of the insurgents or the terrorists.

[00:31:05] There was a quote I found in it.

[00:31:07] It was an eyewitness to war report done by the army.

[00:31:10] It's filled with officers and senior NCOs.

[00:31:13] There wasn't a single junior ranking person that I could find.

[00:31:16] But they said that one of the things that they briefed

[00:31:19] people quote, most of the inhabitants practiced extreme

[00:31:23] Wahhabism and were traditionally hostile to all foreigners,

[00:31:26] meaning anyone not for Fallujah.

[00:31:29] Well, Scott, just what you were bringing up, all of you know, is like,

[00:31:32] okay, you're near.

[00:31:34] You want to know stuff about me.

[00:31:35] Where are you from?

[00:31:36] Oh, I'm from, you know, I'm from 7000 miles away.

[00:31:39] Fuck you, dude.

[00:31:40] I don't, you know, and I think that we all are when we're when we're

[00:31:44] more keyed into it.

[00:31:45] But this was much more about saying these are their differences.

[00:31:48] Not that we have the same differences so that we actually could

[00:31:52] understand why they did it so we could understand why Iraqi men

[00:31:56] might lie to say face.

[00:31:57] Not that we don't do it.

[00:31:58] Not that it's certainly among the military, but they wanted to

[00:32:03] they wanted to still down and really, you know, just short of saying

[00:32:07] everyone there is a terrorist.

[00:32:08] Everyone you run into is a terrorist.

[00:32:11] And that, and that of course, bleeds into the overall strategy,

[00:32:15] especially during the first siege.

[00:32:17] And I'm actually, I think both of them, which was in terms of

[00:32:22] snipers just shooting people down.

[00:32:24] Just it didn't matter once it had begun that the the Marine

[00:32:28] leadership had done kind of a hands-off thing.

[00:32:30] It wasn't something that was an official order, but it was

[00:32:33] something that they definitely enforced for themselves.

[00:32:37] Kid goes out of a house to get some water for his family,

[00:32:40] gets shot.

[00:32:41] His parent goes to save their kid like anyone would absolutely do

[00:32:46] and also get shot in the process.

[00:32:48] They had no they weren't insurgents, they weren't terrorists,

[00:32:51] they weren't any of those kind of things.

[00:32:52] They were people trying to survive.

[00:32:55] But then again, so much of the story of Fallujah is just a

[00:33:00] a walk through a park of war crimes of all kinds of different

[00:33:03] things taking away the water and electricity from people.

[00:33:05] Forcing all military age males to stay in the city while

[00:33:11] their family had to leave, which if you know anything about

[00:33:14] Islam and especially Sunni Islam is that that's just not

[00:33:17] the way their society works.

[00:33:19] That they're supposed to have, you know, male escorts

[00:33:22] with with female relatives.

[00:33:25] But again, something else that we would call bizarro that

[00:33:28] we would never do anything like that except that we fucking

[00:33:30] do.

[00:33:31] Yeah, it's, you know, when I was reading through your

[00:33:34] thoughts on this.

[00:33:35] Um, I had never until you've said it that way considered and

[00:33:41] I um and maybe if I could try to rearticulate it because I've

[00:33:45] still it never occurred to me until now that.

[00:33:50] Oh yeah, we said all women and children can leave.

[00:33:53] What, you know, we said everyone should get out.

[00:33:55] Everyone was the whole the soul siege.

[00:33:57] There was a constant propaganda campaign that you can leave

[00:34:01] and that only the good and we convinced ourselves that

[00:34:04] only the bad guys were going to be left behind.

[00:34:08] Um, but of course, like you said, there's a million reasons

[00:34:12] why somebody and I could give some examples that I encountered

[00:34:15] why somebody might stay be compelled to stay in the

[00:34:18] city and since that father in the family is compelled to

[00:34:22] stay in the city for whether it's just to protect his

[00:34:25] livelihood to try not to get looted any myriad of other

[00:34:29] reasons I could give you some real age with some examples

[00:34:31] we've talked about before but um, but I mean, the family

[00:34:36] needs to stay as well.

[00:34:37] You know, the example specifically that I encountered

[00:34:40] was a father of two.

[00:34:43] And it's very sad that the standard of care is as low

[00:34:46] as it was there, but there was a father of two mentally

[00:34:48] disabled adult sons who he knew he couldn't leave

[00:34:56] the city with.

[00:34:58] He knew he couldn't care.

[00:34:58] He unfortunately they the interesting thing was they

[00:35:02] convinced themselves at first they had found some sort of

[00:35:04] torture chamber, but in the evenings he would handcuff his

[00:35:07] son's bed because he was the sole caretaker for these

[00:35:12] adults who were severely mentally dim, you know,

[00:35:17] mentally deficient.

[00:35:20] Let's say I am failing at my words are failing

[00:35:21] you badly at the moment.

[00:35:22] I sorry, but but he found them changed to the bed and

[00:35:26] we found them changed to the bed and are like, what is this?

[00:35:29] This is a torture chamber.

[00:35:31] They're kidnapped and it only took the interpreter to explain

[00:35:34] that he couldn't leave the city because he knew that there

[00:35:36] was nowhere else he felt like he could keep them safe.

[00:35:39] I can only imagine how horrible it was for not only

[00:35:42] for his two sons to process a battle going around them

[00:35:46] and Marines kicking in their doors.

[00:35:48] And then the father trying to explain all of that had

[00:35:51] to be horrifying, but there was nowhere else for him to

[00:35:53] go.

[00:35:54] You know what I mean?

[00:35:55] And this and we convinced ourselves that anyone that was

[00:35:58] still in the city would be a bad guy.

[00:35:59] And that yeah, if they're running from house to house,

[00:36:02] it's it's only because they're moving from one weapons

[00:36:04] cash to the next.

[00:36:06] And they're just they've came up with this artful dodge

[00:36:08] where they think they can get away with the exploiting

[00:36:11] the ROE exploit their exploiting the rules of engagement

[00:36:14] by not carrying weapons is what legitimately Marines

[00:36:17] were convinced was true that they were leaving their

[00:36:20] weapon in one house to go to another weapon in another

[00:36:22] house. And they think they could they could just walk

[00:36:25] across the street unarmed and we won't shoot them

[00:36:27] because those are the rules.

[00:36:29] And Marines convinced themselves that no, that's

[00:36:32] just because he's moving.

[00:36:32] He's a bad guy.

[00:36:33] He's just moving from one cash.

[00:36:35] I would imagine that even the even the gentleman with

[00:36:38] the disabled sons would end up dealing with a whole

[00:36:42] torrent of questions about his sons because someone

[00:36:46] might be convinced that they were trying to fake it,

[00:36:48] that they were trying this is a way that we can we

[00:36:51] can leave the city is my sons will do this.

[00:36:52] I mean, I'm sure I mean you saw them.

[00:36:56] You you understood that these were not people that

[00:36:58] were capable of being actual combatants.

[00:37:01] But I could see somebody stand in the line there.

[00:37:04] You know, it's like sorry, the other fakers, you guys

[00:37:06] go back, you know, just but it's that kind of cruelty

[00:37:09] that that kind of underrides this whole thing.

[00:37:13] Yeah, it was very casual.

[00:37:15] But and this was preceding the battle, which you

[00:37:18] mentioned the water supply, and it was more than

[00:37:21] the damage to the actual formal water supply.

[00:37:24] You might be aware in a lot of developing countries

[00:37:27] and especially that's probably not the best term.

[00:37:30] But in a lot of in Iraq, in particular, there's

[00:37:35] you know, water supplies being intermittent and whatnot.

[00:37:37] They'll have a cistern for water on their roots.

[00:37:40] And in one of the

[00:37:44] and when there were firefights,

[00:37:48] I when we were in one, this is pre battle.

[00:37:51] We were we were when we didn't have anything else to shoot at.

[00:37:55] Of the.

[00:37:58] The company gunny or whoever was out there, we were sitting

[00:38:01] there not shooting at anything.

[00:38:03] He looks he looks at us on the truck.

[00:38:04] It's like what are you shooting?

[00:38:06] I think it's like, well, we don't see anything we can shoot.

[00:38:08] You know, any targets, he says hit the water cisterns,

[00:38:11] deny the enemy.

[00:38:12] So we just started machine gunning all those cisterns on roof tops.

[00:38:16] We could say.

[00:38:17] I was going to ask you that about the tactic of dry and fire,

[00:38:20] going to a place and, you know, your phone call enemies hiding

[00:38:25] somewhere so you want to drop fire.

[00:38:27] So, you know, so you provoke by drop fire.

[00:38:29] How does that work?

[00:38:33] Ross, you do you want to we weren't doing that.

[00:38:36] I was in civil affairs.

[00:38:39] But we were just we had we were

[00:38:43] in there, we had OPs surrounding the city

[00:38:47] to the north along that road and they would get in contact.

[00:38:50] And then they more or less use that as an excuse.

[00:38:53] And the one incident I was in, the reason we got involved

[00:38:55] was we happen to have had the four at our control were with us

[00:38:59] to go out and site some places that were supposed to be non-fight.

[00:39:03] Like, basically, you know, hospital

[00:39:06] mosques thing that shouldn't be bombed ideally.

[00:39:09] We had we had them with us and

[00:39:12] an observation post came under fire

[00:39:14] and they asked us to bring the forward air controller there

[00:39:17] instead of because we were already leaving

[00:39:19] and we're already out of control with them.

[00:39:21] So we brought him there.

[00:39:22] And then more or less, they used as an excuse

[00:39:25] to move back the city by a couple of hundred yards from where that O.P. was.

[00:39:29] They just dropped on every house within 100 yards of the belt of the O.P.

[00:39:34] And just leveled everything just to give them some more.

[00:39:38] They I explain explicitly, we want more standoff from the O.P.

[00:39:42] So it doesn't matter if we're taking fire from there or not.

[00:39:44] This is our excuse to to flatten some buildings

[00:39:49] amongst other things.

[00:39:51] So I could speak to that.

[00:39:52] But the reconnaissance by fire thing I

[00:39:55] I didn't personally encounter.

[00:39:58] So yeah, we I mean, similarly,

[00:40:00] we're operating with the assumption that there are no civilians in the city.

[00:40:04] Our command absolutely shouldn't own better

[00:40:06] because the day before the ground sea started,

[00:40:09] Red Cross estimated 50,000 civilians were still in the city.

[00:40:13] In reality, it was probably at least 50,000.

[00:40:15] But I don't know when it exactly started, maybe second or third day,

[00:40:19] we started doing reconnaissance by fire just, you know,

[00:40:23] come across a house either spread down to 240 Gulf,

[00:40:27] throw a frag grenade inside the house first.

[00:40:30] If you hear something, then, you know,

[00:40:32] we'd either call up the tanks, fire the main gun round

[00:40:35] or we had bulldozers to sometimes we just started bulldozing houses

[00:40:38] straight to the ground.

[00:40:40] If you didn't hear anything, it was safe to go in.

[00:40:43] So, you know, Scott, you kind of mentioned they have this kind of tunnel system

[00:40:46] where fighters were bouncing from from house to house

[00:40:49] where they had different, you know, firing positions set up.

[00:40:53] And it happened a couple of times where, you know,

[00:40:56] Marines would kick in the door and there's a machine gun

[00:40:59] behind a sandbag bunker and they just they got blasted.

[00:41:03] And after we lost a couple of guys,

[00:41:05] we just started putting our own welfare first and stopped taking these kinds of risks.

[00:41:10] So that's why reconnaissance by fire was being used in the first place.

[00:41:15] Even though it absolutely put civilians in danger.

[00:41:20] Us on the ground, we there were very limited moments

[00:41:25] where we saw civilians, even after we saw civilians,

[00:41:28] we continued to operate with the assumption that that's somehow an exception.

[00:41:32] This is a city void of civilians.

[00:41:34] We don't need to care about anybody but ourselves in this particular sense.

[00:41:38] We don't have to safeguard anyone else's well being or safety.

[00:41:42] Maybe a weekend, we got a command over the radio

[00:41:46] that we had stopped reconnaissance by fire, so it was alarming some people.

[00:41:50] But nonetheless, it went on for about a week unchecked.

[00:41:53] The understanding about the way that the homes are built

[00:41:57] in Fallujah and Iraq and places similar to it was that because it's

[00:42:02] a cinder block house, it's a very solid, they're very solid structures.

[00:42:05] They last a really long time and so they withstand to explosives

[00:42:10] and arms reasonably well, especially compared to the kind of stuff

[00:42:14] we have here in the States that allowed the strategy that they could.

[00:42:19] You could frag the courtyards.

[00:42:21] You could frag every single room in a house.

[00:42:23] There really weren't many limits in that way.

[00:42:27] And so and especially when it came around to using things like white phosphorus,

[00:42:32] or thermobarics, is that it really doesn't seem to me like they could have

[00:42:37] any kind of a good hold on how much more extensive damage was happening.

[00:42:42] Not just in the buildings they were in, but if people were hiding

[00:42:45] in houses on either side, you know, thermobarics could end up

[00:42:48] collapsing people's lungs and doing all kinds of all kinds of things.

[00:42:53] And they've said what you mentioned, Ross, is that the the

[00:42:56] you know, the strategy, you know, it just became worse and worse

[00:42:59] as time went on because they did not want to have more green casualties,

[00:43:03] which I can appreciate that.

[00:43:05] I can appreciate not wanting anybody else to get hurt.

[00:43:09] But there's supposed to be that line in there that

[00:43:12] in terms of like civilian lives are American troops willing

[00:43:16] to risk themselves for civilian lives.

[00:43:19] Why are they not?

[00:43:20] We're hearing that from other people's general Thomas Schrack or

[00:43:25] all that.

[00:43:27] Yeah, Joe Thomas Schrack, I remember him because he said on any of you

[00:43:30] that, you know, that the United Business of that he was asked about

[00:43:34] civilians, casualty, and he said the American

[00:43:38] line of business of conspillions cash to write said that on TV.

[00:43:42] And there's another general on a study from his head or

[00:43:46] someone else that that said that, you know, value more of the

[00:43:50] the life of an American soldier is way time, you know, more

[00:43:54] value than that of the Iraqi.

[00:43:56] Therefore, that's people up around the last machine.

[00:43:59] Ross, I want to make a point too, which said about, you know,

[00:44:02] you're operating under the void of civilian presses in the area.

[00:44:06] Why people leave?

[00:44:07] They're getting a chance to leave.

[00:44:09] You can bring a home here to Katrina, for example.

[00:44:12] People were told to leave New Orleans area, you know, and

[00:44:17] and people left, but people stayed.

[00:44:20] You know, and then when Katrina had the water, you know,

[00:44:24] bikes broke and people started running and dying.

[00:44:27] Everything they were hearing, people were saying that, well,

[00:44:30] you know, give me the opportunity.

[00:44:32] Why would they stay in the city?

[00:44:33] Well, no one considered that you can't live the city.

[00:44:36] If you can afford to leave the city, only those who can afford

[00:44:38] to leave the city left the city, the audience, but those

[00:44:41] who couldn't have stayed and just like other things, you know,

[00:44:43] if I leave someone will steal my stuff or bring it to my house,

[00:44:46] etc., etc.

[00:44:48] We're just way out, you know, it might not be that bad

[00:44:51] anywhere, you know, people do that routinely when they're told to leave.

[00:44:55] They're all the hurricane percentage.

[00:44:57] Just wait it out.

[00:44:58] We just wait it out because it's not that bad, you know,

[00:45:02] such like tons of reason why would you want to leave a city?

[00:45:05] You know, I did a series of oral history interviews

[00:45:08] with some refugees from Fallujah living in Europe

[00:45:12] in the way Fallujah speak of people who were stayed in the city

[00:45:17] during the Second Siege.

[00:45:18] They referred to them as the families that stayed.

[00:45:20] Oh, they're one of the families that stayed like with reverence

[00:45:24] as like a kind of honor for the people who, you know,

[00:45:27] had the courage, like even what, you know, in the situation

[00:45:30] that Scott was talking about where they just didn't have

[00:45:32] like the means or the ability to leave the city.

[00:45:35] Nonetheless, they're treated with honor

[00:45:38] that they had a sense of courage to not abandon their city

[00:45:40] in its most dire moment.

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[00:47:33] Scott, you and I talked a bit about the about

[00:47:37] what the what the coalition was doing in terms of providing

[00:47:42] people a place to go in outside the city

[00:47:44] and little shanty towns and that the I think it was a college.

[00:47:48] Was it a college that you had mentioned?

[00:47:49] It was a tactical college up to the northwest of the city

[00:47:52] that we kind of arranged to warehouse some people

[00:47:54] and then a town to the northwest called Saqlouia.

[00:47:58] We sort of we let fall back to make further camps there.

[00:48:03] And so you're so yet we did at least are one of our tasks.

[00:48:09] Our main task during the battle was

[00:48:12] prior to was identifying a location for refugees be expected.

[00:48:19] It wasn't unexpected.

[00:48:21] And we didn't I couldn't recall the numbers,

[00:48:24] but you know, we were expecting at least a few thousands.

[00:48:29] And then as a part of that, we we ended up sort of

[00:48:34] and it's funny you mentioned, I'm sure to those are

[00:48:38] as the battle unfolded, we are it kind of became our battle

[00:48:42] rhythm to as the units were collecting

[00:48:48] usually their company or platoon headquarters, any civilians they came upon.

[00:48:54] We would go and collect them up and bring them out of the city

[00:48:58] and then hold them through the night

[00:49:00] so that we could release them in the morning when it was safe for them

[00:49:04] to walk up the road towards Saqlouia and where the adjunct

[00:49:07] where this place where we had made further arrangements.

[00:49:13] And that's how we came, you know, I came to a counter

[00:49:16] and sit usually overnight as like, you know, watching them.

[00:49:20] And we had to we had to keep an eye on them and deal with the,

[00:49:24] you know, some of the wounded, some of the minor wounds.

[00:49:26] If they were seriously wounded, they were evacuated.

[00:49:29] But my wounds having a medic look at them and sitting with these various

[00:49:33] families and just giving them a meal.

[00:49:38] That's where I ended up interacting with them each night

[00:49:43] as they were collected.

[00:49:44] And then by day, we were kind of touch base with those companies

[00:49:47] and they were direct.

[00:49:48] We ended up, we ended up basically

[00:49:52] after the third or fourth day and a mom who we had evacuated

[00:49:56] came to us with some other citizens

[00:49:59] and more or less offered to as a as a while we were

[00:50:04] at least the Marie Corps was the battalion was suspicious of it.

[00:50:08] But it worked out relatively well

[00:50:10] to basically bury the bodies of the dead

[00:50:14] as part of their muscle duty.

[00:50:16] So he organized his congregation and brought them to us

[00:50:20] and we would bring them in in the morning and search bodies.

[00:50:24] Well, they collected that we would search them.

[00:50:26] They would collect the bodies and bring them out of the city for burial.

[00:50:29] At the same time, we would collect living civilians

[00:50:32] and bring them to this collection point to hold them overnight.

[00:50:38] Which was, you know, a pretty grisly task.

[00:50:43] But it's how at least we ended up

[00:50:46] spending most of the battle was and it's just funny because,

[00:50:49] you know, I was only, I guess, in reality for our battalion

[00:50:52] it was maybe 50 to 100 each night they brought us

[00:50:58] of civilians,

[00:51:01] which would seem spread to a whole battalion worth of Marines.

[00:51:05] Maybe they would have encountered one or two of those each

[00:51:07] the actual infantrymen that were kicking in doors.

[00:51:10] So they would see it as this aberration,

[00:51:12] whereas I was seeing this other picture of where were a lot of people here

[00:51:16] and a lot of them in circumstances I could empathize with.

[00:51:20] You know, I recognized why they were there when, you know,

[00:51:24] mother with dementia or a bunch of small children,

[00:51:27] just a bunch of reasons why they couldn't leave or didn't.

[00:51:29] And they gave their stories and that's sort of the crack me a little bit.

[00:51:35] But I just saw it.

[00:51:36] You know, it's the strange thing I am.

[00:51:40] It almost the civil affairs thing even existing,

[00:51:44] I think because I'm a second deployment.

[00:51:46] I counted this with infantry Marines.

[00:51:48] It gives them,

[00:51:50] it almost gives more license to do bad

[00:51:53] because we have, oh, we have this one group of people who's supposed to be doing good.

[00:51:57] And I felt, well, I'm doing this job where I'm supposed to be doing the good things

[00:52:01] and helping out and alleviating the suffering

[00:52:05] and mitigating it or minimizing the likelihood of suffering.

[00:52:08] But then in the bigger picture just allows,

[00:52:11] I mean, I've seen Marine just on the lower scale when we were in Fallujah.

[00:52:16] You know, we can, well, the civil affairs guys are here.

[00:52:18] They'll pay for the damage.

[00:52:19] We can loot.

[00:52:19] We could take all the cigarettes we want because they're going to pay for the damage,

[00:52:23] you know, was there was there the more it's a more we just were there

[00:52:29] to create moral hazard almost as somebody else that will take care of the mess.

[00:52:32] So we can we don't have to worry about it.

[00:52:36] It's just an unfortunate aspect.

[00:52:38] And I don't know if there's a better way to deal with it.

[00:52:41] I mean, is it better to have somebody on, you know, at least trying to clean up the mess

[00:52:45] or, you know, it's better not to be done at all is true.

[00:52:48] But just a thought I'm having.

[00:52:53] Well, it doesn't it doesn't make sense to me.

[00:52:56] I guess it's I guess it's kind of part of what what they would put under

[00:53:00] information operations, but in terms of like.

[00:53:04] I'm sure there were probably were some mortuary affairs guys or other guys,

[00:53:08] you know, doing something there.

[00:53:10] But in terms of the number of people that actually died and in terms of trying to

[00:53:15] deal with any of it, because even if you don't care about the lives that dead

[00:53:19] bodies release certain toxins that destroy the environment.

[00:53:22] If that was a step that the coalition was willing to take to try to help with

[00:53:27] that, we certainly didn't see it.

[00:53:29] You know, thankfully, you guys were connected with those people who saw

[00:53:32] it as their duty to bury their countrymen at a at a harsh time.

[00:53:36] But, you know, Scott, for, you know, everything that you and I talked about

[00:53:41] as far as the civil affairs aspect of it and creating these places for them

[00:53:45] to go to evacuate civilians.

[00:53:49] The what was it the medical aid package that was given to the hospital

[00:53:52] after they took control of the hospital?

[00:53:54] Yeah, just these these little little placating things, these little extra

[00:53:59] things that can make it seem like, oh, it's not such a bad deal.

[00:54:02] Because if they're doing this negative thing, at least they're doing

[00:54:04] this other positive thing, but there's no balance to it whatsoever.

[00:54:08] And and of course, like if if we're to say, you know,

[00:54:11] the Red Cross numbers say we're we're estimating about 50,000 people

[00:54:14] left in the city, that means that 250,000 people because it was at

[00:54:19] about 300,000 people around the end of March, beginning of April,

[00:54:22] before everything began.

[00:54:24] You can't tell me that the coalition did anything close to housing

[00:54:28] those people, even from a short amount of time, that people hopefully

[00:54:32] they had family to go to if they didn't, they found, you know, a little

[00:54:36] shanty place or whatever.

[00:54:37] And then of course, there was no city really to go back to,

[00:54:40] especially after the second siege, the majority of the buildings were destroyed.

[00:54:44] People and people just didn't want to go back.

[00:54:47] And I don't blame them who would want to return to a place,

[00:54:50] especially after all those things that happened.

[00:54:52] And you don't even know if your home's still standing or, you know,

[00:54:56] how many of your neighbors are still alive and having to deal

[00:54:59] with all of the steps that come with that.

[00:55:03] Yeah, I'm going to have to leave.

[00:55:04] But with that thought, like you're absolutely right that I mean, we gave

[00:55:09] passing thought to people who were leaving prior, but it more or less was up

[00:55:15] to them. That was their problem.

[00:55:16] Even as civil affairs, we didn't have the time or mental space to be like,

[00:55:21] well, yeah, get out of the city.

[00:55:23] We're telling you to get out of the city.

[00:55:24] We're not telling you we don't have a place for you to go or range.

[00:55:27] We're not telling you where you can go or that, you know,

[00:55:29] we're going to take care of you if you leave. It's you need to get out.

[00:55:33] It's get out of it's get out of Norlean's not we have an evacuation

[00:55:38] center for you here or there.

[00:55:40] It's just you get out, figure it out yourself.

[00:55:44] And one of the peculiarities that I remember there was some

[00:55:48] some specificity about

[00:55:52] what we would call these people because they weren't refugees.

[00:55:56] Civil affairs would never have called them.

[00:55:58] We got classes on this beforehand.

[00:56:01] They were internally displaced persons.

[00:56:04] You can't call them.

[00:56:05] They are IDPs.

[00:56:07] Don't don't say that word in front of the media.

[00:56:09] Don't use that word in front of anyone.

[00:56:11] They are internally displaced because if you call somebody a refugee,

[00:56:14] that could trigger UN regulations on refugees that they should be provided

[00:56:21] for.

[00:56:22] So IDPs don't fall under any particular legal category

[00:56:26] and don't have to be provided for necessarily.

[00:56:29] You do it out of the kindness of your heart.

[00:56:30] If you acknowledge a refugee and displace them from their home,

[00:56:33] our military would be responsible for their care and housing,

[00:56:36] and they didn't want that.

[00:56:37] So we called them we called them IDPs and it was for a reason

[00:56:41] and that kind of speaks to all that.

[00:56:44] It's kind of like a wordplay, like, for example,

[00:56:49] term what was the term that was used on lawful combatant.

[00:56:57] It's a wordplay because, you know,

[00:57:00] in the one hand, the Bush administration,

[00:57:03] the terrorist war, this war on a tactic, which is terrorist attack,

[00:57:12] right, political or military attack.

[00:57:14] So any clear war on this attack and those engaged in this war,

[00:57:20] they call them unlawful combat.

[00:57:22] Right. If you were to war, whether the opponents,

[00:57:25] signatory of this new convention, not right,

[00:57:27] there are convention guarantees, right?

[00:57:29] You know, you got to, you know, you have to treat in certain ways.

[00:57:33] You know, after the conflict of the Soviet, let go,

[00:57:36] you know, exchange, take a patriot back to their countries,

[00:57:40] etc., etc.

[00:57:40] So just part of the part of being a POW, right?

[00:57:44] But at the same time, where you're unlawful,

[00:57:46] that means that you're not supposed to be in the battle space anyway.

[00:57:49] Right. So that makes you a criminal.

[00:57:51] So if you're a criminal, if you're a criminal person, right,

[00:57:53] that means that you have to be afforded a trial,

[00:57:57] you know, to convict you to try, etc., right?

[00:58:00] So what the Bush administration was trying to play here is

[00:58:02] these people would need the criminal that they're not,

[00:58:05] you know, they won't have to offer them a trial.

[00:58:08] But at the same time, they were truly combats,

[00:58:11] so they won't have to abide by the Geneva Convention.

[00:58:13] They didn't have Geneva Convention rights, you know,

[00:58:16] so they were like kind of limbo.

[00:58:18] They were neither this or that.

[00:58:20] So that's why you still have people in Guantanamo

[00:58:23] after all these 20 years, you know, no trial.

[00:58:27] Because they're not either a criminal or they're not either a POW.

[00:58:32] Yeah, absolutely. I mean, to me, that really speaks

[00:58:34] to the whole nature of OIS and the way battles are won

[00:58:39] in this new, like, bizarre kind of warfare that we have in these days.

[00:58:44] And the seizures of Fallujah really illustrate this

[00:58:47] because you don't achieve military victory

[00:58:51] by traditional military actions, right?

[00:58:53] I like capturing territory, defeating the enemy.

[00:58:56] It's a battle of perceptions.

[00:58:58] And if you even if you look at the operation orders

[00:59:00] that are written up for like, you know, Operation Al-Fajr

[00:59:03] or Operation Vision Resolve or something like that,

[00:59:06] written into the operational objectives is information operations,

[00:59:11] achieving certain informational goals.

[00:59:13] Because if you don't create the correct perceptions,

[00:59:17] if you can't create this veneer of legitimacy for what you're doing,

[00:59:22] then it's a military failure in the first seizure.

[00:59:25] Fallujah was way less destructive than the second yet

[00:59:29] because there was an Al-Jazeera broadcast crew in the city

[00:59:32] and they captured like actual children being like pulled out

[00:59:35] of the rubble of these bombed out buildings.

[00:59:37] It was considered a humanitarian disaster

[00:59:39] and the U.S. had to negotiate withdrawal out of the city.

[00:59:42] Second seizure, Fallujah, they took the information operations

[00:59:45] much more seriously and we can talk more about the way

[00:59:49] they were treating civilian casualties as IO challenges, right?

[00:59:54] Like they were avoiding killing civilians

[00:59:57] simply because of the way they thought of playing the media

[01:00:00] and hinder their military objectives.

[01:00:04] Nonetheless, because you know, of all the different things

[01:00:07] that they were doing to control the media environment

[01:00:09] around the second siege, it was far more destructive.

[01:00:13] Thousands more civilians were killed,

[01:00:15] yet this was considered a liberation.

[01:00:17] So it just speaks to like the kind of warfare and how this,

[01:00:20] you know, it's all about spin and a battle of perceptions

[01:00:23] in this like vague, effusive language in order to, you know,

[01:00:27] to create this veneer of legitimacy.

[01:00:30] I wanted to ask you about that just because, you know,

[01:00:33] the embedded reporters were told to just go with the government line,

[01:00:37] and like, don't do anything else other than that.

[01:00:41] And that speaks to why there was not a lot of pushback anywhere

[01:00:45] because they weren't allowed to even talk about it.

[01:00:47] So can you shed more light on that?

[01:00:50] The way it was presented to the public,

[01:00:52] the use of these embedded journalists is like,

[01:00:54] oh, this has given us frontline access to the battlefield.

[01:00:56] When you get to like, you know, view this in a way that,

[01:00:59] you know, Americans haven't in any past war.

[01:01:02] It's like, you know, it's exciting.

[01:01:03] It's, you know, you're right there with the soldiers.

[01:01:05] And honestly, I think it's a little manipulative of the way

[01:01:09] it uses soldiers in this kind of storytelling

[01:01:12] because, you know, Americans, we trust our soldiers.

[01:01:15] We love our soldiers.

[01:01:16] They have this really like special status in our society.

[01:01:19] In really like their experiences

[01:01:21] and this is foregrounded in that kind of story.

[01:01:24] But what it also does is it relegates Iraqis deep into the background.

[01:01:28] You never hear from Iraqis in this kind of like embedded reporting.

[01:01:32] So you get the militaries like rationales and their

[01:01:35] sort of perspective and their viewpoints, all of this up front.

[01:01:38] Iraqis are far off in the distance

[01:01:40] and it's absolutely kind of propaganda.

[01:01:42] It was treated as a and it wasn't a psychological operation.

[01:01:47] Technically it was public affairs, but nonetheless under this umbrella

[01:01:50] of information operations in really like that's the way the battle was won.

[01:01:58] We talk about about some more of what they coined the IO challenges.

[01:02:03] The hospital stuff like that.

[01:02:07] Yeah, the way that they were talking about this and discussing the way

[01:02:11] that they were going to conduct the information operations is pretty chilling

[01:02:15] because they knew that they weren't able to achieve any of their military objectives

[01:02:19] even though they're militarily superior during the first siege.

[01:02:23] I mean, the insurgents that were in the city put up an unexpectedly good fight.

[01:02:27] But nonetheless, they weren't going to like, you know, force the Marines out under fire.

[01:02:32] The Marines had to withdraw because of for political reasons.

[01:02:36] They knew this and they knew that they just needed to do something

[01:02:41] to make sure that rather than trying to like avoid civilian casualties altogether,

[01:02:46] like not conducting combat operations in residential neighborhoods,

[01:02:50] they were looking for ways that it would be less prominent in the news coverage.

[01:02:54] So telling civilians to evacuate, I was actually a sigh.

[01:02:58] I was conducted as a sire on so that there wouldn't be civilians present on the battlefield.

[01:03:04] As Scott was talking about, it was a little bit of like a placating factor

[01:03:08] in order to make it seem like, you know, we were genuinely concerned

[01:03:15] about their well-being and that this was a liberation and we were doing this for them.

[01:03:21] I'm not I don't believe that any of the Marines involved in plating

[01:03:25] this operation did this maliciously, but within the the, you know,

[01:03:29] the mindset of these input information operations with the sort of vocabulary

[01:03:33] in the framework that they were working within, it sounds a little bit cold-hearted.

[01:03:39] So in order to avoid civilian casualties being reported in the news,

[01:03:44] they just simply tried to remove the civilians from the battlefield.

[01:03:46] Then also as another factor, they embedded 96 journalists

[01:03:52] or I think 92 journalists within the different military units

[01:03:56] to cultivate this frontline perspective of the battle itself.

[01:04:00] And so it became this highly like choreographed operation, right?

[01:04:06] And there was no alternative or independent media allowed in the city,

[01:04:10] whereas there was Al Jazeera broadcast city in Felizia den first siege.

[01:04:13] If any other independent Arab media tried to get into Felizia,

[01:04:18] they would have been arrested during the second siege.

[01:04:20] The narrative was tightly controlled, tightly choreographed

[01:04:23] by the US military through this information operations

[01:04:29] infrastructure, whatever you want to call it, apparatus.

[01:04:32] There was a quote from your book that I thought was really succinctly put this

[01:04:38] is that in other words, the the IO, the information operations threshold

[01:04:42] was not about the actual level of violence use,

[01:04:45] but rather about limiting the extent to which it was reported in the media

[01:04:49] to avoid a quote unquote at first political and public reaction

[01:04:53] so that the US shaping operations and later attacks

[01:04:57] could be conducted with impunity.

[01:05:01] You know, even even even evacuating the civilians to a certain extent

[01:05:06] was a measure of IO operations because just fewer witnesses.

[01:05:11] Just as people cannot talk about, you know, I was in this house

[01:05:14] two blocks away and this happened.

[01:05:16] If the people aren't there, they're not sharing those stories.

[01:05:19] And it makes it that much easier to the propaganda line.

[01:05:23] And you know, it even goes into the months leading up to to the second siege

[01:05:28] because if you remember the first year of of the occupation,

[01:05:33] the US didn't want to say that they were facing insurgency.

[01:05:36] They were labeling all of the fighters around around Iraq,

[01:05:40] Atheist diehards.

[01:05:41] They weren't they weren't even international jihadists yet.

[01:05:44] There was there was like a negligible al-Qaeda presence in the country.

[01:05:47] They weren't talking about that.

[01:05:48] These were just either criminals or old former regime elements, right?

[01:05:53] But then there was a Psyop that started January of 2004

[01:05:58] where they started to sort of exaggerate the role of this guy

[01:06:01] out of the Zarkali insinuate that he was in Fallujah.

[01:06:05] The first these were intentional leaks

[01:06:08] that they made to Dexter Filkins at the New York Times

[01:06:11] leaking some Zarkali communications

[01:06:16] where he was claimed to be in Iraq and was communicating with some of the

[01:06:20] Al-Qaeda financiers, probably real documents, real communications.

[01:06:26] Nonetheless, there's really no hard evidence to say that Zarkali

[01:06:30] had any presence in Fallujah like ever or had a significant leadership role

[01:06:35] within the Iraqi insurgency.

[01:06:37] By all the evidence that I've been able to gather for this book

[01:06:41] and just in general, the insurgency in Fallujah was 90 percent local.

[01:06:47] There was a small international jihadist element, maybe 10 percent.

[01:06:52] It appears that they were not like they were not well liked with in Fallujah.

[01:06:56] They were considered sort of like cowboys who did not have

[01:06:59] Iraq's best interests at heart.

[01:07:01] They kind of showed up as like adventurous with their own sort of

[01:07:04] political goals to wage religious war against the Shia

[01:07:09] and reinstate a caliphate.

[01:07:11] But in reality, the majority, yes, all of the fighters in Fallujah,

[01:07:16] they were religious.

[01:07:17] They were Muslims and there was the strand of Wahhabism in Fallujah.

[01:07:20] That wasn't the major motivating factor for why they were fighting against us.

[01:07:24] They were Republicans.

[01:07:25] They were hardcore Republicans who believed, who value deeply Iraqi

[01:07:29] sovereignty, and that's really what the fight was about for them.

[01:07:33] And the information operations began presenting them

[01:07:37] to the American public in the spring of 2004 as religious extremists

[01:07:41] motivated by religious injunction to fight against us.

[01:07:46] Irrational anti-Americans, extremist, you know, religious doctrine,

[01:07:50] not like, you know, a very relatable sentiment like, you know,

[01:07:56] in their national sovereignty, willingness to fight for their country

[01:07:59] to force foreign invaders out.

[01:08:02] That's something I think most Americans would find relatable.

[01:08:05] I think if the foreign country invaded the US and tried occupying here,

[01:08:09] I'd like to think that I might fight back.

[01:08:11] I'm sure most Americans would, especially the people who identify

[01:08:14] as Republican in this country.

[01:08:16] If it was, if Iraqis were allowed to like explain themselves

[01:08:20] to the American public and explain why they were fighting against us,

[01:08:24] I think most Americans would have found it very relatable.

[01:08:27] But it was the information operations had to obscure that.

[01:08:30] They had to sort of present this other choreographed narrative

[01:08:34] to the American public.

[01:08:36] I mean, that's what the movie Red Dolls is about, right?

[01:08:38] Yeah, yeah, it's happening.

[01:08:40] So look up the word insurgent, right?

[01:08:42] The word insurgent is a party or state of being insurgent,

[01:08:48] specifically a condition of revolt against government

[01:08:50] that is less than an organized revolution

[01:08:53] and that is not recognized as a religious term of insurgent.

[01:08:58] Right. So insurgent implies that the that is a revolt against

[01:09:02] the standing legal government, you know, constitutional government,

[01:09:06] legal government, whatever you want to call it, right?

[01:09:10] And if you recall history, right,

[01:09:12] you should call the war against the Filipinos

[01:09:16] at the beginning of the 1900s called the Filipino insurgents

[01:09:20] into recently, recently the change into the Philippine War.

[01:09:23] Why? Because they were fighting against and occupying power

[01:09:25] just in the United States, right?

[01:09:27] So by calling them insurgents, right, it was it was implying

[01:09:31] that the occupied power in the Philippines were the local

[01:09:34] that were worthy international international recognized legal

[01:09:38] government in the Philippines and that people

[01:09:40] that were fighting against Americans in the Philippines were insurgents.

[01:09:43] They were they were going outside of the law to fight this people.

[01:09:47] Right. So there's recently changed.

[01:09:49] Now you look it up in the book is called the the Filipino American War

[01:09:53] because because the Americans were the occupier,

[01:09:55] they were the impulse themselves, they were the cool power.

[01:09:58] Right. So the people have the right to revolt against the cool power,

[01:10:01] which is just in the United Nations Charter

[01:10:04] of an indigenous population has that right

[01:10:09] to rebel and vote and fire for liberation against

[01:10:12] a foreign occupying how?

[01:10:14] Just like you say, Ross, that it was sold to the American people

[01:10:18] that we were liberals, not occupiers that were sold to us

[01:10:23] that were received by people with flowers like the like the Americans

[01:10:27] were received in Paris, you know, after, you know, in Paris and flower.

[01:10:31] That didn't happen.

[01:10:32] So by labeling the resistors,

[01:10:35] but labeling the people fighting the Republicans

[01:10:38] or people fighting for sovereignty as insurgents, right?

[01:10:41] We're we're implying that they were operating outside

[01:10:44] of the legal constitutional or international recognized law,

[01:10:47] which implied that the Americans, Bremer was the law

[01:10:54] and what was the legal government in Iraq when in fact he was.

[01:10:59] Yeah, no, for exactly that reason, this new project that I'm working on,

[01:11:03] we're trying to shift the language.

[01:11:05] It's similarly a revisionist project to the book that I contributed to.

[01:11:10] And we're trying to talk about the Iraqi insurgency

[01:11:13] as the Iraqi partisan,

[01:11:15] similarly to the partisans in Italy during World War Two, right?

[01:11:20] It's a very comparable situation, actually,

[01:11:22] because they're under they're under Nazi occupation

[01:11:25] fighting against the Republic of Sallow, right?

[01:11:29] The the Italian collaborator government

[01:11:33] collaborating with the Nazis.

[01:11:34] It's a government that didn't have any real legitimacy,

[01:11:37] except for the legitimacy that they claimed for themselves

[01:11:40] in the same sort of way, you know, the Iraqi

[01:11:44] the Iraq partisans saw themselves as fighting against

[01:11:47] an illegitimate government that was being formed under occupation,

[01:11:50] which technically, according to international law is a legal.

[01:11:52] We can't write a constitution under under occupation.

[01:11:56] So they saw themselves as a legitimate part national liberation movement.

[01:12:00] And for that reason, we argue,

[01:12:01] partisans technically more accurate term than either jihadist or insurgent

[01:12:07] or, you know, several other conservative labels that have been thrown at them.

[01:12:13] Or you can run elections either.

[01:12:15] You can't run election under occupation, either.

[01:12:18] Oh, another thing I want to point out there,

[01:12:20] or I know you talk going to the insurgents, right?

[01:12:24] Have were you aware of the story of Colonel James Steel?

[01:12:29] I mean, yeah, we are talking about the connection without Salvador.

[01:12:33] Yeah, the Salvadorization of Iraq,

[01:12:36] the beginning of resistance against American troops there, right?

[01:12:40] It was more of America was causing

[01:12:43] it was getting a lot of heavy cash at the beginning.

[01:12:46] You know, I wonder when it started around 04,

[01:12:50] but now there's getting a lot of heavy cash, right?

[01:12:52] And it was more long, nonpartisan line, right?

[01:12:55] There was there was Sunni Shiites, you know, leftist, you know,

[01:13:01] people Iraqis that that, you know, we call them some

[01:13:05] not religious people, secular, you know, there was more.

[01:13:09] There's more of a buying effort right to repulse.

[01:13:11] Yeah, absolutely.

[01:13:13] Push to push out the invaders, right?

[01:13:15] But with the Salvadorization of Iraq, what it created,

[01:13:20] it created a train.

[01:13:22] It created virtually this one.

[01:13:24] So pretty much people within the the Iraqi newly created army

[01:13:29] created a ghost battalions of ghost units, you know,

[01:13:34] to actually operate outside of laws of war

[01:13:38] and create this friction above all the fighters.

[01:13:43] And one night then after that, then you just went to civil war.

[01:13:46] Then when they went to civil war,

[01:13:47] that's when American casualties started dropping a little bit,

[01:13:51] you know, after after they started fighting this themselves.

[01:13:54] Is that is that accurate description or can you speak to that?

[01:13:58] Yeah, I mean, I mean, the only thing that

[01:14:01] I would add to that is when I conducted my my oral history

[01:14:05] interviews and speaking with the Iraqis about this,

[01:14:07] they don't use the term civil war.

[01:14:09] That's something that the American media was using to sort of gloss over this.

[01:14:13] They spoke of it as the militia war,

[01:14:15] because really they didn't see it as like a society wide war.

[01:14:19] It was for them.

[01:14:20] It wasn't Sunni versus Shia, even though that sort of sectarian identity

[01:14:24] became very politically sensitive at that time.

[01:14:29] And most of this was being happening under the auspices

[01:14:31] of the Iraqi Ministry of Interior.

[01:14:33] That's where a lot of these, you know, ghost battalions,

[01:14:36] it's police commando units who were being trained and funded,

[01:14:39] you know, by the by the occupation by US forces.

[01:14:44] They were basically operating under the Ministry of Interior

[01:14:47] with impunity, targeting Sunni communities,

[01:14:51] abducting people, torturing them,

[01:14:53] then dumping the bodies into the Euphrates River,

[01:14:55] you know, at the end of the day.

[01:14:57] And that went on for, you know, 2006 into 2007

[01:15:00] at the peak of it was like a thousand bodies a day.

[01:15:03] The media presented it in, you know, in truth,

[01:15:08] I can't really speak authoritatively on the way

[01:15:12] information operations were influencing the way

[01:15:14] the media might have been representing this.

[01:15:16] Nonetheless, the representation was that

[01:15:20] these sectarian sentiments within Iraq,

[01:15:24] the sectarian conflict is something very old.

[01:15:26] It's been going back a thousand years

[01:15:28] in the absence of a strong state, centralised state structure

[01:15:32] to, you know, keep this from happening.

[01:15:34] Just, you know, this blood should just sort of boil over.

[01:15:37] It's just something that sort of happened naturally.

[01:15:39] And that's not really the case at all.

[01:15:40] As you're saying, like this was a divide and conquer tactic.

[01:15:43] Right. They very deliberately polarised these sectarian identities,

[01:15:48] armed them against one another,

[01:15:50] setting out these forces under the Ministry of Interior

[01:15:52] against what they saw as the real threat in the country

[01:15:55] at the time, the the insurgency within the Sunni triangle.

[01:15:58] Right. Ironically, it got out of control.

[01:16:02] And then all of these militias operating under the Ministry of Interior

[01:16:06] by the time of 2007, they were the main threat at that point.

[01:16:09] Got out of control.

[01:16:11] And then, you know, Patreus comes in with his new counterinsurgency doctrine

[01:16:15] to reign them in.

[01:16:17] Right. So the the target at that point, yes,

[01:16:19] US casualties started dropped at that point because

[01:16:24] these militias were targeting targeting other Iraqis.

[01:16:28] And that was our fault.

[01:16:32] But even even, you know, earlier, you know,

[01:16:35] but leading up to and as the beginning of the

[01:16:39] of the first siege that there were

[01:16:42] Sunni sheiks and leaders who were very, very adamant about

[01:16:46] we don't allow.

[01:16:49] We don't allow extremists in our in our circles.

[01:16:52] And we eject them.

[01:16:53] We and then they very, very firmly said this is not something that we find

[01:16:57] acceptable, but that was still the line that the US used

[01:17:00] as far as trying to demonize why they know that they're accepting Zarkawi.

[01:17:05] They're accepting all of his his worst guys.

[01:17:08] Like you said, Ross, we can't even prove that he was actually there

[01:17:11] and at all.

[01:17:14] But it really made the made the difference.

[01:17:17] But they yeah, it doesn't seem like that the

[01:17:19] the majority of the Sunni community was ever really accepting

[01:17:24] of Al Qaeda of any of these other other groups.

[01:17:28] And then, of course, the awakening came

[01:17:29] and what was, you know, the idea that portray a strategy was actually working

[01:17:34] when it only was it only had a very limited shelf life.

[01:17:37] And then things changed again.

[01:17:40] Yeah, I mean, the tragic irony of the second siege of Fallujah

[01:17:43] is it had the opposite consequences of what they wanted it to.

[01:17:48] And when I when I speak with Iraqis from Fallujah

[01:17:51] and ask them about these

[01:17:54] foreign jihadist elements that were in this in their city,

[01:17:57] they speak of them with with rancor, with like pure hatred,

[01:18:01] because they say they were the first ones to abandon the city

[01:18:04] prior to the second siege.

[01:18:06] It was the locals who stayed and tried to fight.

[01:18:09] And the local the local partisan movement was decimated

[01:18:12] because of the second siege in that after that, there was no one to fold

[01:18:17] these jihadist elements in check and they took over the city afterwards.

[01:18:21] So, you know, the tragic irony is like

[01:18:23] we actually ended up giving the city to Al Qaeda

[01:18:26] because of the second siege of Fallujah.

[01:18:28] There's some great journalism by Miroz

[01:18:32] who documented in the summer of 2004,

[01:18:34] the the Mujahideen Council in Fallujah, which was sort of the

[01:18:38] the governing organization, organizing all the different militia groups

[01:18:43] in because it was a decentralized insurgency in Fallujah

[01:18:49] loosely governed by the Shura Council.

[01:18:51] But the Shura Council was strong enough to eject

[01:18:53] different foreign elements who either were like kidnapping for ransom

[01:19:00] or were enforcing Sharia law when they when they weren't supposed to be doing

[01:19:04] we're doing different things that just were like irritating locals

[01:19:07] and they kicked them out of the city because they had the power to do so.

[01:19:10] They were capable of keeping these foreign elements in check.

[01:19:13] But after the second siege of Fallujah, they couldn't anymore.

[01:19:17] So.

[01:19:19] I know you got a book, you got a book out, but up first became

[01:19:24] in contact with you with one of your earlier words, which was fear,

[01:19:28] not the path of truth, veterans, journey after Fallujah.

[01:19:33] That was actually when I first joined

[01:19:36] the rap against the war, anti-rap lawyer, veteran organization back in 2013,

[01:19:43] remember Lee, when I first joined her,

[01:19:47] that's one of the first piece that came across was one of my first actions.

[01:19:51] That's what first action was to to share it, to screen,

[01:19:54] to screen that film at a local college.

[01:19:58] And that's what got in contact with you and we collaborated.

[01:20:02] And you know, I think I gave you like we're doing email exchanges

[01:20:06] and you know, you help me create flyer and you have to create

[01:20:10] different talking points and everything up to that point.

[01:20:14] I've never done any type of advocacy or any type of

[01:20:20] activism, anything like that.

[01:20:22] I was just really, really, really distraught and just happened.

[01:20:26] So one of the curious things that came across that

[01:20:30] that screening, I think like a little college, I got a contact

[01:20:33] with a little professor and he let me borrow his class.

[01:20:36] He bribed me with extra credit after, you know,

[01:20:39] it was after hours.

[01:20:40] We're about the 32 and stuff, right?

[01:20:43] Brought pastries, donuts and brought a

[01:20:47] you know, iced tea and everything and this and that, right?

[01:20:51] So watch the film.

[01:20:52] After the film, we had a good discussion.

[01:20:55] And I would say that the kids, the people in those room

[01:20:58] were on average in their, you know, between 19

[01:21:03] to probably mid 20s, something like that, right?

[01:21:06] There was one veteran, you know, he was a student there.

[01:21:11] But for the most part, no, none of them were veterans or

[01:21:13] just civilians around that age frame.

[01:21:16] I was surprised, you know, that was too far removed from

[01:21:19] from Iraq. I think Iraq is still going on.

[01:21:22] They're still talking a little bit about not as much, but

[01:21:24] a little bit about Iraq media.

[01:21:26] I would say that was 2014 when that happened.

[01:21:29] And most of the students there, they didn't have a clue.

[01:21:32] It was something vague in their memory.

[01:21:33] You know, they won Iraq and vague in their memory.

[01:21:37] Nile was so vague in their memory.

[01:21:39] You know, they know about land on the level of escape.

[01:21:41] Here in Iraq, you know, but they didn't know much

[01:21:44] about Iraq war.

[01:21:45] They knew much of what was going on.

[01:21:47] So vague in their memory.

[01:21:48] Do you have, do you guys have anything on that?

[01:21:51] Yes, I guess I just had that experience as well.

[01:21:54] Just people just kind of erased and just kind of

[01:21:57] memory.

[01:21:59] Yeah, I mean, you know, I've been doing this long

[01:22:02] enough where my work has sort of shifted

[01:22:04] from activism to advocacy

[01:22:07] now to memory work, you know, because now it's

[01:22:10] almost 20 years, you know, since the second

[01:22:13] seizure of Fallujah. I'm getting old.

[01:22:15] I'm a middle-aged man now.

[01:22:17] And, you know, the question is no longer,

[01:22:20] you know, it used to be what can I do now

[01:22:23] to prevent further bloodshed in Iraq?

[01:22:24] Or what can I do now to alleviate suffering

[01:22:27] in Iraq? And, you know, we had different

[01:22:28] campaigns that we were working on to raise

[01:22:30] awareness about birth defects in Fallujah,

[01:22:32] support the hospital, this and that.

[01:22:35] But now like there's just, like you said,

[01:22:38] it's a distant memory for most Americans.

[01:22:40] You know, I teach in college and high school

[01:22:43] these days and most of my students,

[01:22:45] they were little kids when this was happening.

[01:22:47] They have no real memory of this.

[01:22:49] And it feels

[01:22:52] sadly ironic to me that something like,

[01:22:54] you know, the Russian invasion of Ukraine

[01:22:55] is going on right now.

[01:22:56] And there's all this like moral help reach.

[01:22:59] How could Putin do this?

[01:22:59] How could he invade another country?

[01:23:01] Guys, he's done this a couple of times now.

[01:23:05] But that awareness just isn't there.

[01:23:07] So for me, the question now is, you know,

[01:23:09] how do we make this a vivid, critical memory

[01:23:12] within the American public?

[01:23:13] And I've been trying using different media,

[01:23:16] you know, doing videography, making a documentary

[01:23:18] movie, writing an academic book.

[01:23:21] You know, I'm experimenting with different,

[01:23:23] you know, kinds of media on how we're going

[01:23:25] to reach the public, create this kind of conversation,

[01:23:28] create a persistent, kind of, you know,

[01:23:31] critical, textured memory of like what actually happened.

[01:23:35] And I can't say I've had a tonic success,

[01:23:38] but you know, it's an ongoing project.

[01:23:44] There was a term in your book that I noticed

[01:23:46] I noticed today for the first time.

[01:23:48] And I think it's really

[01:23:50] prescient for for anti-war work

[01:23:53] and for the for discussing these kind of things.

[01:23:55] And it was binary reportage

[01:23:57] and that we have to understand that American narratives,

[01:24:01] especially American news narratives are

[01:24:04] it really can only go in one direction,

[01:24:06] that the United States is good

[01:24:08] and then whoever we were against was bad.

[01:24:12] And that's, you know, that's if I'm, you know,

[01:24:15] if your students do anything,

[01:24:16] I'm sure that they knew up to to that understanding, you know.

[01:24:22] But we have to be we have to be continually seeking,

[01:24:25] you know, better sources, new sources,

[01:24:28] you know, that I applaud you, man,

[01:24:30] going through different types of media,

[01:24:31] trying to see, you know, what works, what doesn't.

[01:24:33] What, you know, I've been absolutely floored by your book.

[01:24:37] It was it's an amazing piece of work and it's

[01:24:40] it's, you know, and not just

[01:24:42] not just in terms of understanding Fallujah,

[01:24:44] but, you know, you want a real microcosm on the war in Iraq

[01:24:48] and the, you know, the history of U.S.

[01:24:51] foreign policy, say 1980 to now,

[01:24:53] but even earlier by what Joani connected earlier with the,

[01:24:57] you know, the Philippine American War,

[01:24:59] or was the Spanish American War?

[01:25:02] Anyway. But, you know, we have to keep pushing.

[01:25:07] We have to, you know, and most people still are going to notice,

[01:25:10] but that doesn't mean that there isn't

[01:25:12] there isn't injustice there that needs to be

[01:25:16] needs to be dealt with and needs to be discussed.

[01:25:19] And, you know, hopefully I hope that there will be a day

[01:25:22] when Americans aren't as ignorant and unwillingly as ignorant

[01:25:26] of what their country does overseas of the horrifying things

[01:25:30] that we do overseas and pretend it's

[01:25:33] pretend it's all OK, pretend that it's it's an acceptable loss.

[01:25:37] You know, oh, and we didn't we didn't cover this in much detail,

[01:25:41] but destroying the the economic power of Fallujah,

[01:25:46] that there was an entire series of state-run companies

[01:25:50] that were there providing Fallujah and Iraqis with all kinds of things,

[01:25:55] with wheat, with rice, with, you know, the different stuff.

[01:25:58] There was a whole bunch of things.

[01:25:59] And because of the neoliberal aesthetic

[01:26:02] that every US intervention comes with, one of the first

[01:26:06] one of those hundred orders from Bremer at the start of the war

[01:26:10] was we're closing all this stuff down.

[01:26:11] We're going to we're going to bring in.

[01:26:13] We're going to make it happy for capitalism.

[01:26:15] Yeah, it's it's it's a terrifying thing.

[01:26:18] But I, you know, I applaud you for continuing with it, man.

[01:26:22] I applaud you for staying, you know, and and trying to learn about it

[01:26:26] from as many people as you can.

[01:26:27] I'm always appreciative of these opportunities to continue to talk about this

[01:26:31] and try to raise these issues.

[01:26:35] No, it's it's it's absolutely it's absolutely pivotal to what we do.

[01:26:41] I think that's a pretty good place for us to wrap it up for today.

[01:26:45] Ross, thank you again for for being here, for sharing your experiences.

[01:26:49] It's happening here is your work.

[01:26:52] I can say 100 percent certain we will have you back again,

[01:26:56] hopefully for some of some other other discussions, but maybe on more on Fallujah.

[01:27:02] Will you so we have

[01:27:05] if your documentary, if you're not the path of truth,

[01:27:07] which is an amazing watch, everybody should watch it.

[01:27:10] I may include a few audio clips of it here at the end of the episode

[01:27:14] to kind of get people looking at it.

[01:27:16] And then you have the the Siege of Fallujah,

[01:27:18] the book that you wrote.

[01:27:20] Will you let people know where they can follow and find your work?

[01:27:29] Probably not as well set up for this as I should be.

[01:27:31] I don't have like a centralized place

[01:27:34] where I keep all my stuff that I'm working on.

[01:27:40] You know, I would just encourage anyone to reach out to me personally.

[01:27:42] No, I have Twitter, I have Facebook.

[01:27:44] You know, feel free to look me up.

[01:27:46] I also, you know, I would just give a heads up that, you know,

[01:27:48] the 20th anniversary of the Anglo-American invasion is coming up this coming spring.

[01:27:54] Yeah, and myself and some colleagues

[01:27:56] were trying to put together a new project

[01:28:00] to kind of keep Iraq to keep the invasion and occupation of Iraq alive

[01:28:05] in American memory called Archive Iraq.

[01:28:08] And basically it's just going to be a centralized digital archives,

[01:28:12] all, you know, publicly available materials, public domain materials

[01:28:17] with educational sort of digital exhibits,

[01:28:21] things that can be brought into the classroom, things that we hope

[01:28:24] will just be engaging for people to read at home.

[01:28:27] And so this is what I'm working on these days.

[01:28:29] It'll be available, you know, come March 19, 2023,

[01:28:33] 20 years after all this madness.

[01:28:36] Ross, you also have a foundation just on this one.

[01:28:39] That's like a reparation.

[01:28:41] Yeah, that's true.

[01:28:42] I mean, we don't quite have the manpower

[01:28:45] what we were doing in the past.

[01:28:47] I'm part of the Isla reparations project.

[01:28:50] It's a California based 501C3.

[01:28:53] And we had done a lot of solidarity work,

[01:28:56] reparations work, particularly with the Fallujah Hospital, bringing them.

[01:29:00] We got them like ultrasound equipment and stuff like that.

[01:29:03] The what happened to the Fallujah Hospital is another tragedy

[01:29:06] that we could devote an entire episode to supporting them

[01:29:10] with their birth defects crisis.

[01:29:12] In recent years, it's just been harder and harder to fundraise around Iraq.

[01:29:16] The American public is distracted,

[01:29:19] you know, particularly during the Trump presidency,

[01:29:22] people's attention were on trying to mitigate the damages there.

[01:29:25] People's attention was towards being in solidarity

[01:29:28] with with black people and black lives.

[01:29:32] Understandable in Iraq, unfortunately,

[01:29:35] has kind of been in the background of all this.

[01:29:37] So we really haven't had the capacity to be very active

[01:29:40] with the Isla reparations project.

[01:29:42] But we're hoping to just make the Archive Iraq more of an educational project

[01:29:47] to work more with educators, college classrooms, high school classrooms,

[01:29:51] create publicly available, you know, materials and resources all free, of course.

[01:29:59] Sounds great, man.

[01:30:00] We I will I'll definitely get with you about the

[01:30:04] the archive release and we'll I'll help you.

[01:30:08] I'll do some we'll do some social social media campaign stuff.

[01:30:11] And maybe we can have you back for an episode around then again,

[01:30:14] we can talk about that in more in depth.

[01:30:16] I'd be fantastic.

[01:30:18] While we're choosing to end the discussion here,

[01:30:20] be sure to pick up Ross's book, The Siege of Fallujah,

[01:30:23] for a more comprehensive breakdown of the many ways the US occupation

[01:30:27] destroyed Luzia physically, environmentally and psychologically.

[01:30:33] All right. Well, I think that'll

[01:30:36] that'll do it for us here today.

[01:30:38] Fortress on a Hill, thank you for everybody for listening and you folks take care.

[01:30:43] We'll see you next time.

[01:30:50] We're on Twitter at Fortress on a Hill

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[01:31:07] Google podcasts, Patreon, Spotify.

[01:31:10] You name it. Almost anywhere you listen, we're already waiting for you.

[01:31:15] And hey, we're always in the market for more Patreon supporters.

[01:31:18] Please consider becoming a patron at Patreon dot com.

[01:31:22] And if you're not into giving us a monthly payment,

[01:31:24] think about giving us a couple of bucks on PayPal.

[01:31:27] The link is in the show.

[01:31:29] Skepticism is one's best armor.

[01:31:32] Never forget it.

[01:31:33] We'll see you next time.

[01:31:44] To my song.