Podcast: The costs of invading Iraq: Sen. Tammy Duckworth & Richard Engel assess war's lasting effects, 20 years later

TRANSCRIPT: The costs of invading Iraq: Sen. Tammy Duckworth & Richard Engel assess war's lasting effects, 20 years later

Richard Engel:

Iraq was a war of choice, and it was perceived to be a reality because certain intelligence had been cherry-picked and the Bush administration believed it was some kind of reality, but it was a war of choice. And many within the administration, many in the intelligence agencies knew that.

Tammy Duckworth:

The cost of war goes on for many decades after the formal ending of those conflicts. How can someone kick down doors looking for the bad guys if they wonder whether or not they're going to be cared when they get home, and whether their families are going to be supported if they were to killed in action.

Ian Bremmer:

Hello and welcome to the GZERO World Podcast. This is where you'll find extended versions of my interviews on public television. I'm Ian Bremmer, and on today's episode, we are examining the legacy of the Iraq War on the 20th anniversary of the US-led invasion.

Over a decade after US withdrawal, the war still cast a long shadow. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed, the emergence of ISIS as a global threat, and Iraq's continuing political instability and sectarian violence. Not to mention how the war and its lead up damaged US credibility complicating America's current goal of uniting the world against Russia's invasion of Ukraine. This week I'm talking with two people with firsthand experience of what it was like to be in Iraq during the invasion, and whose work continues to be shaped by the long legacy of war US Senator Tammy Duckworth and Chief Foreign Correspondent for NBC News, Richard Engel. Let's get to it.

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Ian Bremmer:

Senator Tammy Duckworth, thanks so much for joining us on GZERO World.

Tammy Duckworth:

It's good to be on. Thanks for having me.

Ian Bremmer:

So we're talking about the 20th anniversary of the Iraq War, something you experienced very personally. It was back on November 12th, 2004 when an RPG pierced the plexiglass floor of a Black Hawk that you were piloting exploding next to your legs and changing your life. Today you sit as a senator on the US Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committee. I want to ask you, how do you think about Iraq, your experience and your life 20 years later?

Tammy Duckworth:

Obviously it was a turning point in my life. I wouldn't be on this path to public service here in the United States Senate were it not for me being wounded and ending up in the hospital at Walter Reed and meeting a newly elected senator from Illinois by the name of Barack Obama who had had only been in office, I think he was elected November 6th, and I was injured November 12th. And meeting him and he was on the Veterans Affairs Committee and developing a relationship with him and Senator Durbin, which led to me eventually running for office.

But at this point, 20 years from when the war started, I feel that Iraq is somewhat unfinished business for what Ihope for the country, which is to one day be a friend and ally to the United States in the way that we have developed relationships with countries like Japan and Korea and Germany. We're very good in the United States of turning former adversaries into allies and long-term friends. And I think we're on still a very long path for that with Iraq, but I hope for them to develop and grow their democracy. So I don't think the work is quite done yet, but the work of the military is certainly done there.

Ian Bremmer:

What's the obligation of a country like the United States to ensure that Iraq is a friend, that the Iraqi people are friends of the United States?

Tammy Duckworth:

I don't know that there's an obligation to ensure that they're friends of the United States, but I think that what America does very well is to maintain those relationships. I think we met our obligation, that is of helping Iraq become a democracy. Now the path that they choose to move forward on is theirs and that of their Iraqi people. But I do feel that there is an opportunity there in Iraq for us to develop a friend in the Middle East and a part of the world that often is not very friendly to the United States. And that is why I think it's really important for us to maintain our engagement with the government and the people of Iraq.

Ian Bremmer:

It's a turning point for your life, in some ways also a turning point for foreign policy of the United States in the region. How do you think about America's role in the Middle East today? Certainly feels a lot different even in these last days than it has in the past years and decades.

Tammy Duckworth:

Yeah, I think we've made that shift from that very strong military presence to one where we are engaging on a much more diplomatic field. I would like for us to be more engaged economically. I think there are opportunities in the Middle East for us, but we really have to work very hard at developing those relationships.

Ian Bremmer:

When you see an announcement from the Chinese government that Xi Jinping has brokered a breakthrough between the Iranians and the Saudis indeed announced in a trilateral agreement in Beijing, is that something that we as Americans should welcome?

Tammy Duckworth:

Why would we not welcome more peace in the region? I think we should welcome more peace in the region. If there can be peace, if there can be cooperation between Saudi Arabia and Iran, that's good. But we also have to take a look at what Iran is doing in countries like Iraq, where they are undermining the democracy that's there, where they are negatively influencing the economy in the region. There's a lot more that can be done. I will always support a greater peace in the region, but let's make sure that it's a true one.

Ian Bremmer:

The reason I ask is because there are some that would say that Iran as a rogue state, Iran, is supporting terrorist activities in the region, including against American allies and friends, is not a country that you should be normalizing relations with. So therefore the United States wouldn't do that. The Chinese have. So that that's I guess the nature of whether we consider that's something that we should be actively supporting.

Tammy Duckworth:

Well, I think that what we need to be working is to make sure that we put some limits on Iran's ability to act as a rogue state. It's why I supported being in the nuclear treaty to support keeping Iran from developing its greater nuclear capabilities. But that means you have to engage with them in order to do that. So I am taking the news cautiously and will be keeping a close eye on it. If Iran can truly meet international norms, then I welcome that, but I don't know if the will is truly there.

Ian Bremmer:

No, thank you Senator. So you've talked a little bit about the fact that you believe that America's military role, at least on the ground in regime change in Iraq is over. So too in Afghanistan, you've said the US should have a greater economic role than it presently does in the region. I'm wondering what you think about its diplomatic role, in particular the idea that the United States promotes and exports democracy. Controversial, something that of course without it today the Iraqis would be living in a very different kind of country, but also an awful lot of eggs get broken when you try to make that omelet. What do you think about American promotion of democracy both in the region and more broadly?

Tammy Duckworth:

Well, I think when there's true democracy in a region, economic prosperity does follow with that. And so I think that promoting democracy is also good for peace and prosperity in the region. I don't apologize for wanting to spread democracy around the world because it is the one that most benefits every day hardworking people and doesn't allow just the elites to prosper as an authoritarian regime would. But I do think that it requires a lot of hard work. It means that you have to consistently have free and democratic elections. And it does mean that you have to listen to all parties and all of those things. And we don't always do that well here in the United States ourselves, but certainly we need to continue to strive for that robust democracy. But it is hard work every single day, every single election.

Ian Bremmer:

When President Biden says that the world today is a battle of democracies versus autocracies is that a worldview that you find yourself identifying with?

Tammy Duckworth:

I don't know that it's a battle, but I certainly do think that those are the two opposing ideas and ideologies. And certainly I know that the PRC and their leader has the idea that autocracy, authoritarian regimes are the ones that are going to be the most effective. Well, let's see about that. I do think that democracy is still the best form of government and that with it, we can bring real economic prosperity to a nation, to a region. So I'm always still going to be making sure that we stand up for democracy and democratic norms around the world.

Ian Bremmer:

I asked you that Senator, in part because when you look at the Middle East, there aren't a lot of democracies. The Arab Spring, of course, did not end up the way that a lot had perhaps hoped, including young people on the streets in Egypt, even in Tunisia. Israel is a democracy, but even that increasingly is having some challenges on the ground, and we've seen that with the massive demonstrations in Tel Aviv over the past weeks. If it's democracy versus autocracy in a region like the Middle East, does that just mean that the United States is going to play less of a role?

Tammy Duckworth:

I don't think so. I think we continue to bring pressure to bear. I think we have to field a team and be there and talk about the fact that, hey, you know what? These are the things that we expect. And I think we are also an economic powerhouse and that people do want to do business with us. And they know that when they do business with America, we don't come in with a debt trap the way the PRC government run programs do, and that we can be true partners. But that means that they have to be more democratic. And I think we just need to continue to stay the course and push for the role of democracy in all of these countries with whom we want to engage.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, the Chinese, of course, come in with Belt and Road. They come in with large state directed investments in these countries. Definitely complications in terms of the indebtedness as you mentioned, but also a lot of infrastructure. The US is mostly driven by the private sector. So when you say that the Americans as a government should be doing more economically, what specifically do you mean in a place like the Middle East?

Tammy Duckworth:

Well, I think there's greater opportunities for engagement. And then by the way, the debt trap that the Chinese, the PRC I should say, comes in with is one that has been recognized as such and that it has resulted in the loss of major infrastructure like ports. You can see that happening in Asia, for example.

Ian Bremmer:

We saw that in Sri Lanka. Absolutely.

Tammy Duckworth:

Exactly. And I think that lesson has been learned around the world. I think people have seen also what's happened to mineral rights in countries in Africa where the PRC has been operating for a while now. I do think that we continue to engage in the Middle East. I think we continue to bring in the free market system. It works. It works for us. And what American government can do is to continue to push for those trade deals, those trade agreements that will allow that free market to work.

Ian Bremmer:

So multilateral trade agreements, like for example, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which the Americans ultimately couldn't get done, you want to see more of that kind of thing multilaterally around the world.

Tammy Duckworth:

Right. We have other agreements that we're working on right now in the Indo-Pacific region, for example. But there are lots of different ways that we can engage. Yes.

Ian Bremmer:

Let me ask you, do you see the Iraqi people today as significantly better off than they were when you were fighting on the ground?

Tammy Duckworth:

I do see that they're significantly better off than they were when we were fighting on the ground, but also significantly better off than they were under Saddam Hussein. I do think that there's still much needed room for improvement in investment, that young people of Iraq have a huge unemployment rate, and this is a country that is very young. You also see malign influence from Iran backed factions within Iraq, including within the Iraqi government itself that we need to be very careful of. And you still have issues up north in the Kurdistan region where you see the Kurds who are attempting to really run their autonomous area in a very responsible way, but still being under the negative influence, negative oversight from the government in Baghdad cutting off their oil revenues and the like for example.

Ian Bremmer:

Senator. We're still a relatively young republic and we're not always the most reflective. It's 20 years on and with all the headlines that people are paying attention to, what are the lessons you think that Americans, perhaps especially young Americans, should learn, should think about after we pass this date?

Tammy Duckworth:

That democracy takes a lot of investments. And I sort of have a similar conversation but not aimed at young Americans. I was in Indonesia recently talking to some folks there and I said, "Listen, remember that over a hundred years after our nation's founding, we had a civil war where we killed tens of thousands of Americans." And that was almost a hundred years after we had become a country. So let's be very clear about how hard the work of democracy is. I'm not saying that these other countries should have civil wars, but just that even American democracy has faced some significant challenges well into our ninth decade of being a democracy. All that should teach us is that we have to put in the work every single day.

Ian Bremmer:

Is the state of democracy today, I mean, if you are up there giving the State of the Union senator, state of democracy strong in the United States right now?

Tammy Duckworth:

Yes, I do think it's strong because you see all of these activist groups and all these folks, whether or not you agree with them, speaking out, stepping up. I was just on a call with a group that supports access to reproductive rights and reproductive healthcare. Not necessarily just abortion, but just all reproductive healthcare. You see all of these young groups and young people very eager and actively participating. And I think that shows the strength of our democracy.

Ian Bremmer:

Before we close I do want to ask you about veterans, a cause of course that's very personal for you, and there is an obligation, no question, to all the people that have been fighting and serving their country, many of whom didn't come home, and many of whom that did come home have suffered greatly. What does the United States have to get right when it comes to veterans' services for our young men and women?

Tammy Duckworth:

I think first American people have to understand that this is a cost of war. That the cause of going to war isn't just the tanks, the guns, the helicopters, and the ammunition during the period of actual conflict. That cost of war goes on for many decades after the formal ending of those conflicts. And that cost of that war is the obligation we have to our veterans. And that's the deal we made with veterans upfront. And so we have to honor that and we have to honor their service and their sacrifices. So this is not a negotiable that, okay, maybe we will live up to our promises to our veterans. No, it's non-negotiable, we have to live up to our veterans because we would never get folks who would step forward and volunteer and serve in the way that they have if we continue to break our promises to them.

How can someone go kick down doors looking for the bad guys if they wonder whether or not they're going to be cared when they get home, and whether their families are going to be supported if they were to be killed in action? And so we have to make sure that our troops can focus a hundred percent on the task at hand, which is to hunt down and bring the fight to our enemies when we ask them to. And they can't do that if they're worried about what happens after their time in service. So it's really vitally important for us, not just because it's an honorable thing to do, but it's also militarily the right thing to do for our military readiness.

Ian Bremmer:

Senator Tammy Duckworth, thank you for your service.

Tammy Duckworth:

Thank you.

Ian Bremmer:

And now the civilian perspective, my conversation with NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent Richard Engel, who was one of the only US television journalists on the ground in Baghdad when the invasion began, and who continues to report on how the war impacts Iraq today. Richard Engel, welcome to the show.

Richard Engel:

It is a pleasure to be here. I've not done this before. I've known you for years, but I've never done your show.

Ian Bremmer:

Well, it's about time and I'm glad that we're doing it for a pretty important occasion. 20 years since the war in Iraq feels like not that long ago, though easier to say if you're an American. You were there. And I want you to start by telling us just a little bit, you're a young freelance journalist in the Middle East-

Richard Engel:

It was a long time ago.

Speaker 4:

-and suddenly, how do you end up in Baghdad? Give us the story.

Richard Engel:

What happened was Saddam Hussein obviously was the entrenched dictator. It was very hard to get access to Iraq. And then as the war was approaching, it was getting more and more difficult. Because the Iraqi government wanted to allow in a certain number of journalists, and to their credit, they weren't picking and choosing which networks, and they weren't picking and choosing the names of reporters and correspondents. But what they were doing is limiting access. So each news organization, depending on its size, got one or two reporting teams. And as you rightfully said, I was a young, fresh-faced freelancer, didn't have any real deep established connections at major networks, but I did know the region. I had been already living in the region. I did know Iraq, I spoke Arabic. I'd been to Iraq before and felt that this was a tremendously important story. I thought it was going to be a turning point in the Middle East.

So was fundamentally determined to get there, but couldn't get a visa. So I ended up getting a human shield visa, the long and the short of it is, meaning I promised that I would be a human shield for Saddam Hussein and he was giving out visas or his government was giving out visas for this purpose to get preferably Americans, but really anybody who would go there and say, don't fight, let me chain myself to a power plant or an airfield and be a peace activist. It was a way to get in. It was a way to get the visa. And then once I was in the country, I never chained myself to anything. I just went underground.

Ian Bremmer:

There was no pressure for you, no one followed up on that? I mean, you have to be willing to execute on the ground if you're going to actually-

Richard Engel:

I was not willing to execute on the ground. I was counting on my ability to-

Ian Bremmer:

I meant Saddam.

Richard Engel:

Oh, yes, yes, you know what? His government wasn't that good. It wasn't that, we're talking, by the way pre-internet, pre-social media, pre-massive surveillance data. You could kind of disappear there. And it would take a local informant, a taxi driver, a police officer, you would have to get busted. They wouldn't bust you automatically. There were a lot of eyes and ears on the ground, but you had more time than you do today.

So I went there. I had this visa, and then pretty much everybody else from the United States broadcasting were either thrown out or pulled their people out because they thought it would be suicidal to stay, too dangerous. So I was there as a freelancer, had a credential of some sort, and the war began and I started reporting.

Ian Bremmer:

And what was your life like as the war began and you are on the ground and you don't exactly have a big team around you, you're figuring out security kind of day by day. What was your experience?

Richard Engel:

My team was really me. So I had some money, cash in a sock that I wore. It was like a double layered sock, like a sleeve sock. It's like a money belt, but you can wear it around your ankle. And I had a driver and a couple of other connections and a freelance live shot position that was working for ABC at the time, freelancer. So ABC was paying for a live shot to go up, and I had my own camera and I had a driver and some cash, and that was basically it.

So a lot of my time was spent on security. I booked a lot of different hotel rooms. I had different hotel rooms under different names. I had a rented apartment, I had a rented car in addition to the driver, I had fuel, I had generators. I wanted to have redundancy. Because I was very worried that a bomb would fall on my head or that the government, Saddam's government, would come and find me, make me be a human shield or something like that.

So I wanted to be able to make myself scarce if necessary. And then I was worried about the people, how would they react if I show up to the aftermath of an airstrike and there's been people killed? And I did that. And when I tell the people, "Oh, I'm from the United States", how are they going to react to me when I'm just at the time a young Arabic speaking, military-age male carrying a camera who shows up unannounced and unanticipated in Iraq after an attack. So I was nervous about a lot of things. So I tried to keep myself sparse and spread myself thin.

Ian Bremmer:

How was it to be an American on the ground there as you're meeting with Iraqis, as the United States is bombing the country? Obviously there were a lot that wanted to see Hussein go, but there's also the damage that was done at the time. What was your experience and how different was it from what you might've expected when you showed up?

Richard Engel:

So when the war began, I was very nervous that when the first bombs started falling, I'd be ripped to shreds or arrested or something terrible would happen. It didn't happen that way. Instead, the government went underground. So a lot of the government officials who were assigned to watch me disappeared.

Like I said, in the beginning, it was not that good of a dictatorship. So the people who were assigned from the information ministry, intelligence services to follow me and the other handful of reporters who were there kind of lost interest in the job once the bombing started. And the people who were regime loyalists kind of lost interest in that job too. So the fear that I had of the regime didn't materialize. The people were, if anything, they were docile, pacified. They'd been beaten down by so many years of dictatorship, they didn't act, and they just kind of waited it out.

I remember going to a restaurant before the war began, and I remember going to the information ministry the day before it was bombed, and the Iraqis were painting it, and they were painting the stones on the pavement to look nice. They had a job to do. Someone had told them to paint the stones. The country was about to get attacked by the United States, it was shock and awe and-

Ian Bremmer:

At that point it was pretty clear was it not?

Richard Engel:

It was clear. It was clear. They either didn't want to believe or they were told, because I was listening to the radio and the propaganda, they were being told just act as normal. So they were. They were still much more afraid of the clear and present danger which was their state, than the potential invasion. And then when the invasion began, these people who'd been told their whole lives to be submissive didn't do anything.

So I didn't have any hostility from the government because the government kind of was chasing its own tail at that stage. The people didn't react, and a lot of people were very happy, frankly, that the Americans were coming in and were getting rid of Saddam. The more it seemed like it was likely that the regime was losing its grip, the more people came out of their shadow to celebrate, to cheer, to help me find stories.

And then when Saddam was actually driven from power and was on the run, there was a wonderful reception for about a year. And then it got very, very ugly because of mistakes that were made by the American administration there, because of lingering resentment by the basically Sunni Muslim community that felt they were pushed out of power and now had no future. So the resentment began to settle in roughly a year into it, and then there was anger and animosity that made the place much more dangerous and changed the dynamic.

Ian Bremmer:

I mean was of course, I mean you're talking a little bit about how the attitude changed. I mean, I remember of course when Vice President Cheney at the time said the Americans would be welcomed as liberators. Clearly we saw those images of the statue of Saddam Hussein that was toppled, and all of the people around that were-

Richard Engel:

I was standing under that statue. It almost fell on me. I was on a balcony, some of those pictures you saw I took with my own little Handycam. I was right there and watched it happen. They were cheering and they were excited. And it lasted a little while. It did last a little while. But then when things didn't get better and the power didn't get put back on and the promises that they were expecting, even if they weren't explicitly made, failed to materialize, and people who were not included and felt they had no path, the Bush administration was calling them deadenders. Well, deadenders, that's a problem. When you have someone who's a deadender, that means they're desperate and they got no place to go, and they're angry and it's their country and they know it better than you do.

Ian Bremmer:

How did the media do during that time? I mean, clearly there was a fair amount of cheerleading that went on for the war. We all know now of course, things that we did not at the time. As to the intelligence, the so-called weapons of mass destruction, the reason for the war to begin with. As someone who went through it, how do you grade the media? What do you think they could have done better?

Richard Engel:

So I look at it a little differently because I was on the inside and I know my own sort of trajectory through it. So I didn't cover the pre-war buildup in the United States. I wasn't part of that machine. I wasn't covering when Congress was calling it Freedom Fries and the whole debate about whether there were weapons of mass destruction. I was in Israel at the time covering the second Palestinian Intifada and thought that was a massive story. And it was only when it looked like it was quite serious, like the United States was really going to do this, was really going to invade Iraq that I started focusing on getting the human shield visa and getting into the country. The work that I saw done was done by a group of journalists who arrived in Iraq before or right after the American invasion and spent years covering the conflict at great personal risk.

And I think this group I call Baghdad Class of 2003, did really exceptional work. Exceptional work when it was unpopular to hear. People were starting to say that things weren't going according to plan and we were being savaged in some circles in the American media that we hated freedom and that we weren't with the project and that we were just naysayers. And all we wanted to do was score points back by hitting perceived enemies in Washington.

And that wasn't at all the case. We were really living it, when it became extraordinarily dangerous and the kidnapping threat was real, and what these new groups were doing to their hostages was particularly appalling. So I saw some really excellent journalism done, both military journalism, spending time with troops, and I would say I spent, I don't know, maybe it was half half it's hard to know it depended on the year, embedded with troops and the other half just sort of free roaming around Iraq. So I think that work shouldn't be discredited, and I'm proud of the work that I did and other colleagues did in that period.

Ian Bremmer:

Things of course, have changed so much from what was happening on the ground there and what's happening today in Ukraine, a war that you've already also been on the front lines, done a lot of personal coverage and in a fair amount of personal danger. A few things I want to ask you about. I mean, one, from the political side. Back during the war in Iraq, some 75% of Republicans at the time supported the invasion, only 40% of Democrats. That feels almost exactly the opposite of what we say right now when it comes to support for Ukraine. Why do you think there is such a dramatic change in such a short period of time in the US political landscape?

Richard Engel:

It's another thing, and I don't cover US politics, I can only watch it from afar. But I think watching it from afar, it's clear to anyone that there has been a seismic shift in American foreign policy. We watched four years of the Trump administration where NATO was the enemy, and that was a head shift. I've covered foreign policy from the front lines for over 20 years now. And you agreed with it or didn't agree with it. You knew what American foreign policy was or was not.

It was generally about promoting democracy, promoting NATO, having a open economy, having what used to be called before it became some sort of bad word, a liberal democracy in a post World War II order. We knew what America was about. And then we had four years of Trump where everything was changed, everything was different. At least it seemed that way from my perspective, looking out. And I don't think we've quite regulated since then. So I don't know. But I know that things changed with the election of President Trump to the White House.

Ian Bremmer:

I want to get you more on this Iraq versus Ukraine. What lessons, if any, did you learn from the war in Iraq that you would apply to what we see on the ground in Ukraine today?

Richard Engel:

Don't do a war of choice. War truly must be the last resort. Iraq was a war of choice, and it was perceived to be a reality because certain intelligence had been cherry-picked, and the Bush administration believed it was some kind of reality, but it was a war of choice. And many within the administration, many in the intelligence agencies knew that. And for Russia, Ukraine is a war of choice, although many in Russia don't believe that. And certainly Vladimir Putin doesn't believe that. He believes it's an existential crisis. And I think over time, if you launch a war of choice, you're going to have problems. You're going to run into people who feel that you don't have the right to determine what happens in their homeland. And that happened in Iraq, and I think that's happening in Ukraine. So I think that's one lesson.

The other lesson is how different they are. Iraq was, it started out as a traditional war. The United States military and uniforms went in, eliminated the Saddam government in 21 days marching up from the south to reach Baghdad. And then it became a more typical Middle Eastern war, Sunni verse Shia, Shia versus the United States, Kurds versus Arab, Arab versus Persian. So many different layers to it that needed to be explained. In Ukraine, you have both sides in uniform, trenches in between them and a very clear narrative. One country is trying to take over and occupy the other one in a flat terrain using tanks and artillery.

Ian Bremmer:

It makes you really not nostalgic for World War I.

Richard Engel:

Makes you terribly... I was just in these frozen trenches that are, frozen is better, they're starting to thaw now. So they're frozen at night and then they're wet and slushy in the day, and then they freeze again at night. And they're just mud in banks. If you're lucky, some of them are nicer and they have wooden planks to keep the sides more resilient and also neater because all the time you're swiping up against them. The mud is in them, you're sitting down in them, you're always cold, you're always muddy. Then you go down inside these little houses like something, the Hobbit houses, that are carved into the trench. People think of trenches as just a long kind of trench in the ground. No, there's lots of little rooms built into it and under it where they live and where they move and communicate, and they're very, very warm because they're insulated well. You put a stove inside, they actually become quite warm.

So you have these hot, muddy, wet, slippery bubbles underground, and then you have to trudge through the frozen ice and then you're out in the freezing cold when you're on duty or on guard and people are attacking you the whole time. I don't envy anyone who served in World War I for years at a time. We go to the trenches, we do six hours, seven hours, and then we file back. So generally you base yourself in an area near the front lines, still within range of something terrible happening to you, but not right on the front line. Then you go up to the front, you talk to soldiers, people, civilians, whatever the story happens to be. You gather your material and then you fall back to a safer position.

Ian Bremmer:

To get back to Iraq for a second. Did it change your view of the role that the United States has played in exporting democracy and promoting democracy? Do you think differently about that as a consequence?

Richard Engel:

I think it was humbling. I did believe that as did most Iraqis, that okay, removing this horribly dictatorship could lead to opportunities. The same way I believe that when I saw Gaddafi being targeted and so many people in the country were excited, I thought, okay, well maybe they have a chance. And unfortunately, Iraq didn't really emerge as a, it's a freer, but not necessarily much better, it's certainly not a stable country yet, although it's showing signs of improvement. But Libya still remains in a terrible civil war. So I think it was humbling. I think the law of unintended consequences became apparent and the dangers of a war of choice. That you need to be so lucky to get a war of choice to go well, that maybe it's impossible.

Ian Bremmer:

Afghanistan, of course, is the war that we've been talking a lot more about at the beginning of the Biden administration, 20 years in pulling out kind of a debacle for the United States, increasingly over several administrations. Iraq not so much, but 20 years later, how are the Iraqi people doing? To what extent can you talk about better off, worse off trajectory as a consequence of the country that has been so much for good and for bad shaped by the United States of America?

Richard Engel:

I wish there was an easy answer saying they're better off, they're worse off. The people are freer. The economy is connected to the world. People who lived under Saddam's Iraq were not free in any possible way of imagining. Children were reporting on their adults if they spoke about any kind of perceived seditious activity, you couldn't go anywhere. You were, I don't want to say North Korea, but your life options, if you were born in Iraq under Saddam Hussein were extraordinarily limited. The best you could hope for was to be left alone. And that wasn't even easy. So you had to toe the line and go out of your way to be left alone. And there were drafts, a million people were killed in the Iran-Iraq war, more or less for nothing. So it was a very dangerous place to live and a horrible place to live if you were and Iraqi.

Then the Americans came and they gave them freedom, but they unleashed a civil war. So that was also horrible to go through because what's the joy in being able to say what you want if somebody's going to come and cut your head off? And that happened a lot. There were assassination squads going around, Sunnis killing Shia and Shia killing Sunnis and vice versa. And now the country is starting to emerge, but isn't quite accepted in the larger Middle East yet. So I don't think they've landed yet. The country's much safer. They are much freer. So they're better than they were under the Civil War. They're better than they were under Saddam, but they haven't been embraced as a fully functioning country yet. They are still half Iran, half Arab world, half corrupt, half semi-functional.

Ian Bremmer:

So I mean, that's a tough question to end on, but I mean obviously you wouldn't have supported the war, you thought it was a mistake or think it was a mistake. What can the Americans plausibly do going forward, if anything, to try to essentially make good for the Iraqi people given that decision?

Richard Engel:

It's hard to know. I would help Iraq integrate, help Iraq find its feet in the region. Iraq, like it or hate it under Saddam Hussein was a cornerstone country of the Middle East, and it was part of the Ba'ath party group. It was part of the hardline rejectionist camp, agree with the politics or not it was still part of the world. People understood who they were and what it was about and what a Iraq's role of the planet was.

Now it isn't. We don't know what it is. And I think integration is part, it is key, and I think the Arab states are trying to do that, but it's a bit of a tug of war. Is it going to be a Shia-leaning pro Iranian state or is it going to be a Saudi UAE-leaning Sunni state? And I think the country is still torn down this line. It hasn't quite figured out what its identity can be. In an ideal world, it can have multiple identities. It doesn't have to be in one camp or the other. And that would be the best outcome for this country which does separate cultural and religious lines.

Ian Bremmer:

Richard, I'm asking you in part because it's only been 20 years. In principle, that sounds like a long time but of course, and the Americans, we don't think very much about Iraq anymore, we don't talk about it very much anymore. But if you are an adult in that country today, your history has been shaped irrevocably by decisions taken by the United States, by the world's only superpower. And so I just think it's important for people not to forget that. And since you are somebody who was there and now you're here giving you a couple of minutes to talk to the public about what, if any, obligations, responsibilities, or just how we should think about that as a consequence and not forget it, I think is a valuable thing.

Richard Engel:

I do too, and thank you for that opportunity. Look, we, the United States, went into this country and invaded it even though it had nothing to do with 9/11. That's the sort of cardinal error of this whole thing. The United States said that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was somehow in a murky way tied to Osama bin Laden and the attacks of 9/11. Neither were true. So we invaded a country for a war of choice under false pretenses that people did believe but were still false pretenses. It's very hard to get past that. People did hate Saddam. He was that bad. He was that thuggish and brutal and awful. And that buys a lot of goodwill. There are still many Iraqis, I would say the majority, who think their lives are better off now than they were under Saddam.

When you were in Iraq under Saddam, the lights were out. You had no future. You were born and the most you could hope for was not get in trouble with the law and executed or thrown in jail for some minor infraction. You were limited. Now you do have possibilities, but it has been traumatic. It was needlessly traumatic.

I think the United States made a tremendous number of errors in the country, and probably we should just know about it. I think the more education, we shouldn't not talk about it. Like I remember when as a kid, people didn't talk about Vietnam because it was uncomfortable. I think that's a mistake. I think people should talk about it. They should know where all those MRAPs that are in American police stations came from, where all the counter terrorism mentality training took place. That came from Iraq. Where a lot of the surveillance state was born and perfected. That was in Iraq. Because every war does something.

World War II unleashed the Atomic Age. Iraq unleashed man hunting, global war on terrorism in general. This war was about finding people, whether they were insurgents or car bomb manufacturers or Osama bin Laden or Zarqāwī or any of the individuals, named people, who were doing something in a village that Americans hadn't known previously.

So surveillance took off, drone technology took off, tracking people with their cell phones. When do you think the iPhone came out? When do you think Google Maps came out as a sort of follow on from a CIA platform? So a lot of the things that impact us on a day-to-day level came out of Iraq. So I think we owe it to Iraq to know about this war and what happened, and we owe it to ourselves to have our eyes opened about what happened.

Ian Bremmer:

Richard Engel, thanks for sharing that.

Richard Engel:

My pleasure. Thank you.

Ian Bremmer:

That's it for today's edition of the GZERO World Podcast. Do you like what you heard? Of course you did. Well, why don't you check us out at gzeomedia.com and take a moment to sign up for our newsletter, it's called GZERO Daily.

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