Had we known at the time that Iraq had actually gotten rid of all of its weapons
of mass destruction and discontinued its nuclear program.
I don't think the president could have gone to war even if he wanted to.
I don't think you would have had the support from the Congress of
the United States to go to war and in which case,
the war would not have happened.
>> Stephen Hadley was the national security adviser under the George W Bush
administration.
And during a recent interview on CNN, he repeated the lie that
the United States government was genuinely under the assumption that Iraq had
weapons of mass destruction which justified its preemptive illegal war.
However, there's a lot of evidence indicating otherwise and
the reason why we're talking about this now is because of the fact
that it is the 20-year anniversary of the Iraq invasion.
And there are a number of people attempting to do
revisionist history on that war and it's important to know the facts.
Now, going back to what Hadley said there, keep in mind he's making excuses for
that disastrous decision to do the preemptive war.
And when Colin Powell during the Bush administration testified
before the United Nations to argue that there absolutely were
weapons of mass destruction.
He knew that that wasn't necessarily true.
His team ignored the objections coming from the State Department's own
intelligence gathering division to some of the material contained in his speech.
This is BS, he reportedly erupted just three days before giving the speech
as he looked over the evidence prepared for him.
It had been less than two years since Powell had said that Hussein hadn't
developed any significant capacity or capability, I should say,
with respect to weapons of mass destruction and even less since he told
the Senate that he hadn't been terribly successful in pursuing a program of WMDs.
>> Yes. So another context here is, of course,
the war with Ukraine and the comment that most angered me as usual comes from
so-called journalist Jonathan Carl from ABC.
We'll get to that in a little bit.
But look, guys, the Ukraine war was started by Russia.
Okay.
There's no question about it.
They did aggression.
I think we should help Ukraine agree to which we should spend money helping
Ukraine is a very open question.
Okay.
And right now we spend a ton of money and
these defense contractors get rich off of it.
And that's why we're so animated by helping our brothers in Ukraine.
So keep it real on that.
This Iraq war was an absolute disaster.
They're now doing complete revisionist history.
The people who started that war was us, unmistakably us.
Don't lie about it.
If you're in the news business, you're supposed to tell the truth.
And be honest with your audience.
Saddam Hussein did not attack us on 9/11, they did not have weapons of mass
destruction and we knew both of those facts.
Colin Powell lied about it.
Dick Cheney lied about it.
Rumsfeld Bush.
They all lied about it.
But the news business is in the business of protecting the powerful.
So they all pretend, golly, gee, nobody knew that they didn't have weapons of mass
destruction and you all knew he didn't attack us on 9/11.
Why are we randomly attacking another country?
We were the aggressors.
We were an empire and we did not do it so
that the American people could gain from it.
We did it so corporations that contribute to all these crooks,
all these corrupt politicians could benefit from it.
>> That's exactly right.
And it's so important to talk about the costs,
not just the financial costs of that war.
In fact, even though it was nearly $3 trillion
that pales in comparison to the human cost of that war.
Remember, the support for the war was entirely manufactured through a false
premise that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
And now it's abundantly clear that he did not.
Okay, that we were lied to, but the goalposts have moved to.
Well, we got rid of an evil dictator.
That's all that matters.
We got rid of an evil dictator real quick.
I wanna go back to some of the comments from The Bush administration at the time.
Starting with Dick Cheney who was quoted in August 26 of 2002 saying simply stated,
there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.
There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends,
against our allies and against us.
By the way, the United Nations weapons inspectors also failed to
find any hard evidence indicating that there were weapons of mass destruction.
But nonetheless, the preemptive war happened,
the Bush administration hold on real quick.
Also, you're gonna love this because I remember one of the things that
attracted me to TYT was that Cenk ranted about this so aggressively at the time.
The Bush administration also manufactured consent for
that war by making it seem as though Iraq was behind 9/11.
Bush himself raised the specter of nuclear annihilation and
falsely insinuated that Iraq was connected to the 9/11 attacks by discussing
the supposed links between Hussein's government and Al Qaeda.
Iraq played no role in the 9/11 attack.
Go ahead, Cenk.
>> Yeah. So look,
this is what drives me crazy by the mainstream media and by the way,
partly the right wing it drives them crazy as well.
Cheney is a giant liar.
So, yeah, he's right winger.
And at the time, all the right wingers loved him.
They loved that he was Darth Vader.
They loved how evil he was and how he brought back torture etc, right?
They didn't love the warrantless wiretapping.
Okay. So I'm being
honest that nobody liked that.
The right didn't like it, the left didn't like it but they like the torture.
They like bombing Muslims etc.
Okay?
But Dick Cheney is just as big a liar as Donald Trump and
his lies were more consequential.
Okay.
You will never hear that in mainstream media cuz Dick Cheney is an establishment
politician.
He believes in the robbery that it goes on.
They give all the money to corporations and the media loves it.
That's why they love liars like Dick Cheney.
And by the way, do you own weapons inspectors?
Let's be clear about that cuz that is also misleading every time.
Saddam did not kick out the UN weapons inspectors we did.
>> Right. >> We did cuz we were afraid that they
might find that there were no weapons of mass destruction.
>> Right. Exactly.
And I love that you brought up the consequences of people like Dick Cheney
because I feel that during the Trump administration because of how
vicious his rhetoric is that led to the laundering of the reputations of
Bush administration officials.
People like Dick Cheney, people like Bush, it is wrong to launder what they did.
They committed war crimes, thousands of American soldiers died.
We're gonna get into the numbers of Iraqis who died as well and
the human toll in general, right?
So David Frum, by the way, the man who coined the phrase Axis Of Evil and
was Bush's speech writer recently wrote a piece in the Atlantic trying
to do his own revisionism in regard to the war in Iraq.
And this is what he wrote.
He starts off with some information about the human toll.
More than 4,000 US and coalition troops were killed.
Thousands more were gravely wounded.
Thousands, I'm sorry, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died violent deaths.
The war cost American taxpayers at least a trillion dollars is on
the low end of the spectrum.
Some reports indicate that it was as much as $3 trillion and perhaps double that
once the long-term costs of care for wounded veterans are all factored in.
But then he immediately pivots to.
As we make our appraisals at the 20-year mark, we need to consider another
assessment because he's decided to move the goalposts.
Where would the United States, Iraq, and
the region be today if the US had left Saddam in place in 2003?
If I recall correctly, Saddam was armed by the United States at one point.
>> 100%.
In fact, there's a picture of Saddam Hussein
shaking hands with Donald Rumsfeld as Donald Rumsfeld sold him weapons.
Amazingly, Saddam used some of those weapons against Iran and
then got rid of them when we put in sanctionss, etc.
We all knew that Rumsfeld knew it.
Cheney knew it anyway.
Look, guys, they use a lot of BS excuses.
He was an evil dictator.
Well, you could argue Xi Ping is a dictator in China and
has concentration camps that are filled with Uar Muslims, right?
And so that is a terrible thing.
Should we invade China because they have a dictator in charge?
>> Saudi Arabia.
>> Or Saudi Arabia, our beloved ally, right?
Of course not.
That doesn't justify an invasion.
It's an absurdity but it's never challenged in the mainstream media or
by the way, right wing media.
Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, almost every host on Fox News,
almost every host in right wing media loved that Iraq war.
Now there are a bunch of liars pretending that they were against it.
>> 100%.
>> Come on.
>> I remember that era so well.
Now let's talk about, let's actually hear from people who were
part of that illegal invasion, including private contractors like Blackwater.
10 years ago TYT covered a story about what Blackwater was up to in Iraq.
The video that we're about to show you is difficult to watch because it shows
a complete disregard for the lives of civilians.
But it's important to remember what that war really looked like and
what Blackwater was up to as they were in Iraq.
Let's watch.
>> What are you looking at Paul?
You got to Paul.
>> [NOISE] >> Yeah,
they're looking at you rolling through their town like a mad man.
The whole idea is we're the big bad Americans.
The laws don't apply to us.
Get out of our way.
And then, gee, I wonder why the Iraqis hated us.
You're not convinced yet.
Wait till you see the second video right in the beginning.
One of these guys is gonna run over a civilian and
then everybody's just gonna roll on by like nothing happened.
[NOISE]
And they just keep on rolling.
>> So that was going on.
Let's also not forget what happened in Abu Ghraib,
which was where Iraqi prisoners were being held by US soldiers.
They were tortured, they were beaten, they were humiliated,
they were made to be completely naked and pose in incredibly degrading photos.
There's more.
There's also the human toll on the American side,
the soldiers who had multiple deployments to Iraq and we should hear from them.
Let's watch.
>> Corporal Heisel finished one more deployment leaving two weeks after his
wife gave birth to their first child.
>> I always had a certain amount of guilt while I was over there for
being there at all for leaving my ride or
die lady back here with the kid and going and doing this.
[MUSIC]
>> Though, he still plays his guitar.
The tune is different.
[MUSIC]
>> Once you start to question while you're there, you can't stop doing it.
Every mission, every thing we did kicking doors in, disrupting people's lives,
bagging people's heads, bagging the dude's head, and
dragging him out of the house while his kids are standing there screaming.
>> [NOISE] >> For what, what are we doing?
>> About 13% of the US homeless population consists of veterans.
Permanent PTSD is just like it's over represented among
the veteran community because of these multiple deployments.
I mean, the again to argue, no the Iraq war not so
bad actually is one of the most insane revisionist points anyone can make.
And I just wanna give you Eli Lake's piece as
well in commentary where he decided to reflect back on the Iraq war and
he says the Iraq war 20 years later, it wasn't the disaster.
Everyone now says it was.
>> Yeah, of course.
So the band marches on.
So look, guys, we showed you the video of them running over the guy that's
of course, the least of it, hundreds of thousands dead.
Okay.
And when those, the propaganda done by usually American media is like,
there's combatants and then some few collateral damage we didn't intend.
No, we killed tons and hundreds of thousands of civilians.
Okay.
Babies, grandmothers, aunts,
uncles, they say, we didn't intend to hit them with our cruise.
But I mean, we hit him over and over again.
We murdered all those people, but we didn't intended really?
Well, then Chelsea Manning released the Apache helicopter video and
that's where our guys take out a bunch of journalists.
Okay? They thought, well,
I can't tell if it's a camera or a weapon.
They're not anywhere near American troops but who cares, let's kill them and
they killed them.
But then the worst yet, first responders come to take them to the hospital and
they killed them.
Okay? And what happened,
Chelsea Manning goes to jail but the guys who did the killings or
who ordered the killings, none of them had a single consequence.
Because this like machine, this corporate machine that has been
set up doesn't care about Iraqi civilians.
They don't care that.
Now they're in a great democracy.
Get the hell out of here.
Okay?
Or the American people over 50,000 killed and
maimed in that war that were Americans.
Yes.
Get their legs blown off, head injuries, etc.
And guess how much we spend in Iraq and Afghanistan?
About $5 trillion.
That's $5 trillion.
I could have gone to building schools, giving us universal health care,
taking care of your family, paid family leave.
You know how much we spend in Afghanistan alone?
$300 million a day for
nearly 20 years, $300 million a day.
And where did it go to?
The private contractors, Lockheed Martin Raytheon, all these giant defense
contractors including Dick Cheney's former company Halliburton.
But that is a grave offense to mention in mainstream media because now
Liz Cheney is a sweetheart of MSNBC of MSNBC.
And by the way, Susan Nicole Wallace, spokesperson for George W Bush.
>> Yep.
>> And all the people who started the war are all over Fox News and CNN and MSNBC.
Hillary Clinton voted for the war.
Joe Biden voted for the war.
John Kerry voted for the war.
Why is it only the Democrats who voted for the war or the presidential candidates?
Because if a person who didn't vote for the war goes into a Democratic primary,
the mainstream press rips their head off politically and
says, that's a radical outsider.
That's terrible.
You have to have people who are moderate like the American people and
wanted that war except nobody wanted that war.
And now the American people despise that war.
But we still have David Frum.
Who is David Frum?
Then Ana quoted earlier, David Frum is a NEO con that was one of the principal
architects of the Iraq war and now beloved by mainstream media cuz he said one or
two critiques of Donald Trump.
>> He popularized the phrase Axis Of Evil,
which included Iraq, North Korea, and Iran.
And the argument was that these three countries were aligned with
each other to essentially destroy the West,
to destroy America, which obviously didn't play out that way.
But it was meant to sow fear in the minds of Americans in order
to manufacture consent for the illegal war that we engaged in Iraq.
>> Yes.
So I don't, do we have the Jonathan Carl clip or should I summarize it?
>> You can summarize it.
>> Yes. So she's with Marianne Williamson.
He's one of the main reporters for ABC.
And he says, well, Iraq is very different cuz it was not a war of conquest.
Please.
No, Jonathan Carl, you obviously don't know anything about politics.
You should retire.
But let me explain why.
Okay, because Jonathan,
it was the American government does not serve the American people.
They serve their donors.
It was not a Conquest for us.
No, America didn't get the oil.
America didn't get the country.
America didn't get anything.
We lost treasure.
We didn't gain treasure, but it was a conquest for
the companies that got that $5 trillion.
It was the world's biggest conquest.
And what do you do every day?
Either you're totally ignorant of it.
It's like, the hundreds of millions of dollars they funnel to the politicians
affects their votes.
Really?
No, they're honorable gentleman having honest debates, right?
And then the people that gave them the money,
they then funnel trillions of dollars to.
No, that's gotta be a coincidence.
No, that's the conquest.
And unfortunately the conquered are not the Iraqis.
It's us.