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Samuel Helfont, "The Iraq Wars: A Very Short Introduction" (Oxford UP, 2025)
01:02:15
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- [00:00]
A
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B
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased to welcome back onto the podcast Dr. Samuel Helfont to tell us about his latest book titled the Iraq Wars, A Very Short Introduction, published by Oxford University Press in 2025 as part of their Very Short Introduction series. Now, Samuel has been with me on the podcast before to talk about his research into, well, many of the aspects we're going to be talking about today. But this new book takes us through, really. The Iraq wars, plural. That's a really important part of the title, and we're going to talk about that here because a lot of the things that we're going to be discussing, probably many listeners remember it wasn't that long ago, for instance, to go back to 1991 or back to 2003, or thinking about ISIS more recently even than that. But thinking about them all together as sort of one book obviously, is perhaps worth, I think, some further discussion. So, Samuel, thank you for coming back onto the New Books Network to tell us about your newest book.
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C
Thank you so much for having me back on.
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B
Could you maybe introduce yourself a little bit for listeners who haven't heard your previous interview and then tell us why you decided to write this Book. What's the contribution and argument you're making with this project?
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C
Okay, well, yes, my name again? Samuel Helfont. I am an associate professor of strategy and policy in the Naval War College Program at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. So why this book? I mean, I've done a bunch of work, you know, with Iraq, Iraqi history, Iraqi archives, written a few, a couple books with. With the. Based on the internal archives of Iraq. But as a. As I've done more and more research with Iraq and taught about Iraq and in these wars, you realize that they're best understood as a sort of string of events that, that, that come together. And more and more other historians are starting to see that, too. And more recent books are coming out that, that really do, you know, draw a line from the Gulf War or even sometimes Iran, Iraq war, straight through the ISIS campaign. But there wasn't really any short volumes that were really easy to digest that could bring this all together and make this argument very succinctly. So I decided to do that.
- [03:30]
B
Well, a succinct introduction there, too, and a very clear kind of scope there of this book. So we are starting in this book from the Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, Right? Is that where we're starting with the kind of trajectory here?
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C
That's correct.
- [03:46]
B
Okay, great. So that gives us a useful starting point to then build off of. And the obvious question there is, if we're thinking about kind of chains of events altogether, why did he invade Kuwait? And kind of why did he think he'd get away with it? I mean, obviously there's the analysis that was done immediately after the fact around what he was doing. But we didn't have archives access, for example, in that moment. Obviously, things happened in the early 2000s that also inhibited some of that kind of more distant analysis. So from the position we're at now, from the massive amount of research you've done, what sort of understanding can we have of why he made these decisions and what he thought would happen?
- [04:27]
C
Okay, yeah, these are great questions. And it gets to, you know, not only why did he. Why did he invade Kuwait, but also why am I starting the book here, which isn't as obvious as it might seem? And we'll get to that. And I'll get to that in a second. So why did he invade Kuwait? There's a. A number of different reasons. There's not one smoking gun sort of causes belly that someone has looked in the archives and found. Instead, what you get is a constellation of reasons. His regime was in debt from the Iran Iraq war and it needed, it needed money. Oil prices were too low for him to fully refill his coffers. Kuwait was a very rich country to the south. This is sort of the most obvious reason. They also, there was always a tension between Iraq and Kuwait. It didn't begin in 1990. The Iraqis, no Iraqi leader, even prior to Saddam, accepted that Kuwait should have been its own independent country. Iraqis, Iraqi leaders at least had seen Kuwait as a part of Iraq and that something that was sort of peeled off by imperialist British schemes, you know, back in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And so there's always this, this idea that maybe they should be reunified. The fact that Kuwait had a lot of oil made that even more, you know, gave them even more reason to do so. There's also access to, to the seas, which is important. If you look at the Iraqi borders, it has one sort of outlet to the sea on this fall peninsula, but it's a very, it's a marshy sort of mud flat. You can't get deep water ships in there even today. For Iraq to export its oil, it has to do this on this kind of offshore piers that they have to send way out into the, into the ocean. So Kuwait on the other hand, is a huge big harbor. Ships can come in and out. This would have given Iraq access to the sea. So these are the normal reasons that were given. More recently there's been a lot of research with the, with the Iraqi archives that show that the end of the Cold War was also very important for Saddam's understanding or his motivations for invading Kuwait in particular. You know, he had always, the Iraqis in a lot of Middle Eastern states had always relied on the Soviets and the Americans to sort of balance each other. Now that the Soviet Union was fading very quickly, he was afraid that America and its allies would simply impose their will on the region and he wanted to act quickly before that happened. There was all sorts of conspiracy theories that he had mixed in there that weren't necessarily connected with reality. But certainly he understood that there was changes and he wanted to be proactive and changing them. Which is also why I think it's important to start the book here with this event. Some of, as I mentioned, there's a lot of research coming out, other historians that are linking these Iraq wars, sometimes they throw in the Iran Iraq war into these Iraq wars. But the reason I start here is really because it's the end of the Cold War that makes these, the global event worth speaking about. Worth having something like a very short introduction about, because this was caught up. And I'm sure we'll continue to talk about this from the American side too, because this, these wars were caught up at. In the post Cold War moment. They became a centerpiece of sort of global history in the way that sort of the Iran Iraq War, Iran Iraq War wasn't.
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B
Hmm, okay. That's helpful to understand what's going on in this moment and as you said, why you started the book at this point. So thinking about this impact then, of the end of the Cold War, if we turn to the American side of things, how did the fact that the Cold War was ending. Had ended? I mean, obviously that's a tricky question in of itself, but how did that influence the decisions made on the American side about intervening in Kuwait?
- [08:52]
C
Yeah, it was, it was essential. So not only is the end of the Cold War an important part of Saddam's decision making for launching this war, but then what should the Americans do about it? And we look back now and we think, oh, it might be just taken for granted that the Americans would, would respond. But at the time, that, that certainly wasn't the case. In fact, the first meetings that they had at the White House right after, right after Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, Bush wasn't there, neither was the National Security Advisor. But other senior principals like the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff and other cabinet members were at this National Security Council meeting. And, you know, they essentially came to the conclusion that the juice wasn't going to be worth the squeeze. That yes, they didn't like the fact that Iraq invaded Kuwait. But, you know, in the end of the day, this was something on the other side of the world. Iraq had this large military, some by some estimates, fourth largest army in the world. Kuwait, you know, certainly wasn't a democracy or an ally of any type. They weren't unfriendly, and we relied on them for, for oil. But other than that, there wasn't really any shared values between the Kuwaiti government and the United States. So, you know, why should the US Go across the world and fight this, this large army? You know, in one, you know, one particular quip that came out that was reported at the time was something along the lines of, Kuwait is a gas station, and what do we care if the name changes as long as they're pumping out the gas? So this was one of the initial assessments, and this is actually what Saddam had anticipated. Right. This is why he, he thought that he could get away with this because he imagined that this would be the response, that it would just be too much. The US Wouldn't like it, but it would be too much for them to really devote themselves to reversing. But as this is going on, we have to remember the context. Right? This is the summer of 1990. George H.W. bush is in the middle of negotiating German reunification. This is, you know, issues at the center of world order for a long time. He's thinking about what type of world is, is going to replace this Cold War world that had sort of plagued global politics for several decades. And George H.W. bush was committed to some sort of rules based world where the US Was certainly at the top of the pecking order. But at the end of the day it was, it was overseeing a world that played by the rules that had, you know, what we might call a liberal world order. He thought this would be good for the United States to have this world order. And if you have one country just invading and gobbling up another country because they can, this was a threat to that, to that world order. And so when Bush comes back to his cabinet and then goes public with his, his reasonings, it really is about this, shaping this, what he calls a new world order, which he makes, he makes this statement and you know, makes it privately to, to other heads of state in the summer and fall of 1990, but he makes it publicly to, to a joint session of Congress in 1990, in September 1990, where he says one of the goals is a, a new world order. And the war really doesn't make sense without this kind of global post Cold war outlook. Why is the U.S. going to send, you know, 500,000 troops to the other side of the planet to save Kuwait? It wasn't just about Kuwait. It was about shaping an international order for generations to come. Is the, you know, the language that, that he used.
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B
So that is helpful framing on kind of both sides of the conflict in terms of the stakes here. Right. It's not just about who gets to control Kuwait's oil. Right. As that comment mentioned, there are sort of, there's a bigger picture being thought about on the, on Iraq side and on the US side, which framed that way kind of makes it even more surprising that like the war ends badly for everyone and like, not even in a way of kind of like, well, if everyone's equally annoyed, then everyone sort of has an incentive to keep going much more in a sort of bad piece. Why would anyone stick with this? Which is of course how we're often used to thinking about like, the consequences of World War I in terms of leading up to World War II. Your framing here of kind of putting all the pieces together kind of brings that to mind for me. Like, why did we end up with this initial war ending in a way that kind of seems bad for the Iraqi government, bad for the Iraqi people, bad for the U.S. bad for the U.N. why?
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C
Yeah, so, and you're right to point out it's the end of the war. I mean, by, by most accounts, the, you know, the lead up to the war for the United States and the George H.W. bush administration, diplomatic historians and scholars, international relations generally give them high marks for the buildup to war and in some ways the execution of the war in some parts of the execution anyway. You know, they do this through the United Nations. They have a lot of multilateral diplomacy. They spend a lot of time making sure that they're getting everybody on, you know, on, on the same, the same, the same team. Economically, for the United States, this is very good. The U.S. you know, spends very little of its own money on this war because everybody else is, is contributing. But the way that the war ends generally gets very bad marks. Partly, there's a few reasons for this. One is that the US Simply was unprepared. There was a working group in the Pentagon that was working on, you know, what's called war termination. Had end the war, but the war ended so, so quickly that they never finished their work. So General Schwarzkopf, who was in charge of the US And Western forces, he shows up to the, the, the ceasefire negotiations at the end of the war and he, he doesn't have any plans, so he just has to kind of wing it. No one had given him any directions and he is flying by the seat of his pants. So that's never a recipe for success. And you know, he made some concessions in a way that, that turned out badly later on. For example, allowing Iraqis to, to fly helicopters which he thought they were just going to be using to get around Iraq. It turns out that they're, they use them to, you know, put down rebellions and slaughter their own people while the US Stood on the sidelines because it had granted that, that concession. There are a few other things that, that went, that went wrong. There was assumptions on the U. S side that Saddam Hussein would not survive the end of the war. Anytime you have a war like this, you have a leader, you have leaders who are going to want to, you know, from the American side or from any, you know, comparable situation, you'll have A leader that they really want to get their public behind them. So they start making statements. You know, this guy is not just did he invade Kuwait? But he's. He's evil. And we can't live with this type of evil in the world. Right? He's Hitler is the way was the language that was. That was being used at the time by the American administration and by others as well. Well, if you have Hitler, then, you know, you can't live with Hitler. On the other hand, they had agreements through the United nations about what they. What the United States could do and what it was tasked with doing and what it had a mandate for doing. And it made such a big deal about, you know, having U.N. support for this and having this backed by the U.N. the U.N. said nothing. The mandate from the U.N. said nothing about regime change in Iraq. So you have a coalition that's put together that doesn't believe in. Is not there for regime change. On the other hand, you have a sentiment in the United States. It's not an official policy, but it's a sentiment that they can't live with an Iraq that is still ruled by Saddam Hussein. So all the official plans are to, you know, the official plans aren't regime change yet there. The no US administration, not just the George H.W. bush administration, which we'll get to the other ones later on, is willing to. To live with Saddam Hussein being in charge, yet they have no plans to. That are capable of. Of getting rid of him. And then there's finally the way that the war ended on the US Part. The way wars generally end. If you, you know, study military theory, go back to someone like Carl von Clausewitz. He, you know, states this very clearly. They end when, when the, when the, the. The vanquish side gives up, right? They say, we've had enough and we don't want to keep fighting. That didn't happen. That didn't happen here. The United States decided that the Iraqis had had enough and stopped. It was. There were some very bloody incidents at the end of the war where the US Was routing Iraqi forces. This really didn't look good on tv. Certainly didn't look like anything aligned with a new world order or a more peaceful, liberal international system. And so the Bush administration said, that's it. We've had, you know, they decided that the Iraqis have had enough and they. They called the war off. But from the Iraqi standpoint, it's become clear now with all their internal records, they looked at it as, you know, they took the beating from the United States, they survived, and it was the US who quit, not the Iraqis. And so the Iraqis, you know, really didn't feel like they had to make concessions or that they couldn't just continue to act the way that they had been acting previously because they didn't see themselves as the defeated party.
- [19:31]
B
Okay, so that certainly sounds pretty messy. Right. That begins to make sense of sort of what happens then afterwards in the 90s, taking the Iraq government side. That's, I mean, really what you've laid out for is kind of a tricky minefield there that they have to navigate. There's the sort of domestic perception, there's the world order questions, there's what did the US Say versus maybe what does the US Want? How did Saddam's government try to navigate this and how did that play out over the 90s?
- [20:01]
C
Yeah, so the Iraqis were actually quite savvy. Right. You know, when you get into the Iraqi records, which again, we have now, they're quite savvy, they, they understood the predicament that they were in and that this wasn't necessarily only about Kuwait. They realized that this whole idea of a new world order, the UN Security Council and all of these institutions that were, that were being empowered as part of the post Cold War order were being. Iraq was being used as a test case that, that, that could demonstrate the validity of, of all these new institutions and sort of new post Cold War liberal approaches to international politics. And so they realized that they needed to break up these coalitions in these international institutions that had aligned against them. Right. The Gulf War coalition was a massive coalition. It was the largest since the end of, since the end of World War II. It had not only NATO and pro Western allies in the Middle east, but it also had Eastern bloc countries and even, you know, countries like Syria, which had been supported supporting the Soviet Union and a longtime adversary of the United States. They'd all joined this coalition together. You had, you know, the five member, five permanent members of the United nations all voting together, China sometimes abstaining, but not, certainly not blocking, not blocking US Initiatives at the UN Security Council. And so all the sanctions and everything, all the, everything that was being imposed on Iraq, which I should mention too, you know, there have been sanctions that were imposed upon Iraq as part of the initial reaction to the Iraqi invasion to Kuwait, because the end of the Gulf War was so, was so messy. The Americans pulled out and they had this ceasefire negotiation, but they had a bunch of demands for the Iraqis to, to disarm, to get rid of weapons of mass destruction, to denounce terrorism and a number of other things. It's actually, at that time, the ceasefire resolution was the longest UN resolution in history up to that, to that, to that moment in 1991. But they didn't have a means to enforce this because there were no troops on the ground in Iraq. And so what they did is they kept sanctions in place. The UN kept sanctions in place after the war was over until Iraq, until Iraq complied. Now, these sanctions were quite harsh. You know, later on in the 1990s, the international community would learn things like smart sanctions or how to do targeted sanctions. But this was really the first time that they were trying something like this, and they were just blanket sanctions. So they, you know, you couldn't really get any kind of food or medicine or anything into Iraq at first. Eventually they would, they would ease up as the conditions really got horrible in Iraq. But these sanctions stayed on place. There was weapons inspectors on the ground in the country. Iraq didn't like all this and realized that it was, you know, the center of gravity here for, for them was the united, the United Nations Security Council, which was imposing all of this on, on Iraq. Everything the United States was doing, or most of what it was doing was, was run through the Security Council. So the Iraqis, what they wanted to do was break up this consensus at the, at the UN Security Council. And so they had oil still, even if they weren't allowed to sell it. It was a sort of nascent power that they had. They could offer oil contracts to, you know, to, to states for future dates so that they could, you know, benefit from, from Iraqi oil, get good prices. And so they were able to peel away first countries like Russia, you know, some other countries in the global south. Eventually France, they would, they would peel off. And so, you know, their, their strategy was to break up this, this international coalition that had formed to impose these sanctions and inspections on Iraq during and after the, the Gulf War, which is also what made this such a tricky issue for the United States and Great Britain and other, some other powers, because they saw in Iraq not just an issue of, say, weapons inspections or a ceasefire negotiation, but Iraq as this, this test case for a global order. So you get, you know, Clinton, you know, President Bill Clinton speaking with the French leader Chirac, and Chirac is trying to convince Clinton that, you know, we should ease up on Saddam. This is, this is just getting too much at one point. And Clinton responds, what are we supposed to, to do if we, if we let him get away with, with not following the UN resolutions, then you know, what good are these resolutions? And the whole idea of international law or a rules based system falls apart. So those are some of the, you know, some of the larger issues at play here. During the 1990s. It really becomes a cat and mouse game. But it's not between the United States and Iraq. But it's not over necessarily what's happening in Iraq. It's about these sort of global systems of our global order. You know, Iraq wants to break up this kind of rules based international system that's run through the Security Council. The US Wants to keep it in place and keep Iraq as a test case to show that it can work.
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B
Okay. So again, this is really helpful to kind of keep in mind the bigger picture here and that it's being seen as an issue of a bigger picture. This is not just you from a distance of time kind of saying that like this is very much how it's being perceived at the moment. So if we are then moving forward in time, Obviously we've got 9 11, right? And quite often the 2003 invasion by the US of Iraq is talked about kind of specifically in that context. But as we've gotten further away from it, I think some of these elements of like, well, it's not exactly the first time that the US has been involved with Iraq and Saddam Hussein. Right. These things that you've been telling us about were very much relevant at that point, even if maybe that wasn't the conversation in the moment. So now that we do have more of this distance and this bigger picture thinking, to what extent should we understand the invasion in 2003 as being about 9 11? Like obviously it's not, not a factor at all. But like how much of a factor is it?
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C
Yeah, I mean, I think 911 is a necessary factor or necessary element in this. I'm not sure that you would have had the Iraq war, at least in the way that we, we had it in 2003 without, without 9 11. But you're right in pointing out that, you know, this wasn't, this is, 911 was a, a trigger, but it triggered, you know, it fed into something that was that a process that had been going on for a long time. You know, as I mentioned, the US was never, was never going no US administration, not the George H.W. bush administration, not the Bill Clinton administration and not the George W. Bush administration. None of them were willing to live with an Iraq where Saddam Hussein was still in, in charge. The Bill Clinton administration says this very explicitly. You know, they said even, even If Iraq complies with, with all the U.N. you know, resolutions on, on weapons inspections and everything else, they're still not going to lift sanctions. In 1998 you have a bipartisan bill that you know, passes the Senate, a Republican led Senate and is signed by the Democrat Bill Clinton, which is calls for, makes it clear that the American policy is regime change in Iraq. So from 1998 on, the policy of the United States is to get rid of Saddam Hussein and to overthrow his regime and replace it with something else. And this is a quite popular policy in the United States. As I mentioned, bipartisan support. But at the time the United States really isn't willing to put together a massive force, send them to the other side of the, the world and, and invade Iraq. And so they have other strategies to do this. They attempt several coups. They're trying to squeeze the, that administrative squeeze the, the Iraqis through, through sanctions or you know, just figure out some other way to remove Saddam Hussein from power. So when 911 comes, that policy doesn't change the idea that, you know, the Americans have wanted to get rid of Saddam Hussein. They've been trying to get rid of Saddam Hussein. That stays constant. What changes is now you have the will of the masses in the United States are willing to do much more. They're willing to pay a much higher cost because they perceive themselves as under threat from these kind of Middle Eastern, you know, movements or whatever else. Of course these aren't connected to Saddam Hussein. Saddam Hussein is not connected to, not connected to 911 attacks at all. You know, he did support different terrorist groups around, but, but not, not the 911 attacks. That is sort of lost in a lot of the, the politics politicking of the time in the United States. You have the George W. Bush administration making statements that they almost certainly knew were, you know, not fully true. I'm not sure, you know, they might have believed some of it's hard to get inside their, their heads. But certainly they, they, they, they were exaggerating if not outright misleading in some of their statements about the evidence connecting Saddam to, in Iraq to the 911 attacks. But put that aside for now. The, if you asked about the role of 9 11, it was to change the US strategy but not necessarily the US policy towards Iraq. So the US had a regime change policy. They were trying to carry out regime change. What 911 did is it made possible a different strategy that was much more costly, much more robust that the American people were now willing to send a large military force to overthrow Saddam with a Conventional, conventional military operation.
- [31:16]
B
Let's talk more about that conventional military operation. Obviously this is to some extent asking you again to peer inside the heads of people, but what were some of the debates happening within the military that influenced those decisions about what the conventional military operation was, would actually look like?
- [31:33]
C
So yes, you know, there's, there's two levels we say within the military. I think it was, it was quite clear. The military knew what it wanted, it had plans, it knew that Iraq was, was an issue, you know, from the 1990s on. And they had, they had, you know, plans that were, you know, sort of normal military contingencies that, that you might find for, for any possibility. And they, looking back on them, you know, they, they were quite reasonable as military contingencies go. They had, you know, 400, 000 plus troops and you know, they had thought through these, these different, different scenarios of what it would be, what they would be asked to do in Iraq and built a force that was willing to do that. What you have at the political level is something else. Right? So in the, you had debates going on in between the military and, and the political leaders in the 1990s where you had a lot of people like Colin Powell who were veterans of Vietnam and wanted to avoid another quagmire like Vietnam. And so they came up with, in the 80s and then in the 90s, really reinforcing this, that the US really shouldn't get involved in any military operation unless it does so, you know, overwhelmingly and decisively, and that it gets in and gets out of that, that conflict, which meant that it made it difficult for the United States to get involved in small, cheap operations around the world. The military wanted, if you, if the US Was going to go do something, it was going to go all in every time and never, never do it with only part of its, of its effort. So there were leaders in the defense leaders that were more on the political side. People like the Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, who said, no, we want to have a military that can do things quick and cheap or else we end up having this large military, we spend all this money on it and we can never use it. And that doesn't make much sense to them. And so he wants to. Rumsfeld, the, you know, Secretary of Defense under the George W. Bush administration, wants his legacy to be a transformation of the military, that there's a revolution in military affairs, that we now have information technology, we have smart weapons, we have laser guided bombs, we have very precise intelligence. And his argument is that we can use the military to do small, quick, cheap operations, which means we can use them in many more cases than we weren't that we would have been able to previously. And so this thinking about a transformation of the military and the way it's used shapes the way that Donald Rumsfeld wants to carry out the Iraq war. He sees the Iraq war as a way to solidify his legacy of Iraq, of a transformed American, American military. And so what he's going to do is he's going to start cutting down the numbers that the military had proposed. He keeps. Every time they, they give him a plan, he cuts, cuts it and cuts it and cuts it. And so the plan gets down, whittled down to, you know, just over 100,000 troops to go into Iraq and take out the Iraqi, the Iraqi regime. He doesn't want to have those troops stay around for very long. One of the Republican critiques of the Clinton administration in the 1990s was that the Clinton administration was using the American military for nation building in places like the Balkans. He didn't want to do that. He saw the military's role as going in and defeating other militaries and then, and then leaving. So, of course, what this means is there's enough troops to go in and defeat the Iraqi military, but there's not enough troops to secure the country and to prevent it from, from turning into, you know, some of the chaos that we saw post 2003.
- [35:54]
B
So given then those plans and the kind of. Well, to some extent what you're describing are kind of built in issues with them. So was this strategic failure that the invasion, occupation turned out to be inevitable just from kind of that moment on?
- [36:09]
C
So this is the big question for people who are looking at this event, right? And it's a classic question. Was this bad policy or bad strategy? Right. Should we, was it. Was this at all? You know, could the military have done this, had a better plan and better political leaders or not? My inclination is to say no, that this was not going to work. And that's coming from. And, you know, there's some reasons to be skeptical of what I'm saying, so I'll give those in a second. But when, when you look at the, the Iraqi records, the internal Iraqi records, the, the Iraqi government, Saddam Hussein's government, really had that country under pretty tight control. This was actually a misassessment by the United States. The United States thought that the regime was. Iraqi regime was crumbling, that Saddam wasn't really exercising as much control as he did previously because of sanctions and no Fly zones and, and weapons inspections and all this, that he had lost, lost control of many parts of the country. That turns out not to be the case. He didn't have control in the north. Everyone knew that of the Kurdish north, he had lost control of that after the Gulf War. But in Iraq proper, the Arab parts of Iraq, the Iraqi government, the, and the ruling Ba'ath party still had that country under very tight control. And you know, things like religious institutions, they had specially trained people in the government that were in these religious institutions, knew what they were seeing, knew all the landscape, the people on the ground. And if anyone sort of stepped up and said the wrong thing, they could quickly deal with these problems. And they had this in all different sectors around Iraq. So once you break that regime, then, you know, there was no way that the US or outsiders of any sort were going to be able to come in and replace those Iraqis who had decades of experience with running these institutions, but also keeping a very diverse, multi ethnic, multi, multi sectarian population together. I just, you know, looking back on it now, I don't think that, you know, even if you had 400,000 troops on the ground that it would have been able to control what Saddam, you know, after what's, after the, you know, after they broke what Saddam had built over several decades that they were going to be able to hold that together. It was always going to be a giant mess. Now there are some, you know, some, some, some. A case to be made for the other side of this argument. Initially after 2003, there was, you know, some hope by, you know, what was left of the Iraqi middle class that, hey, the Americans are here. Saddam was pretty nasty. You know, he had been killing his own people. Everyone sort of knew there were torture chambers and, and you know, people were disappearing and the rakis had been at war for, you know, past two decades when the United States came in and there was some relief by, you know, middle class Iraqis that maybe the US will come in and be competent and you know, Iraq can, can there'll be a new day for Iraq. And they, you know, some of them were, even though they didn't like the invasion, right? They wouldn't have, they wouldn't have if they had a choice, they wouldn't have voted for an American invasion of Iraq. Once it was set in motion, they were willing to give the United States a chance. But you know, as soon as the United States takes over, there's no one to guard these different facilities. You have a population that's really just been beaten down by A combination of regime repression and international sanctions. And all of a sudden, you know, there's just freedom on the streets. But there's a fine line between just freedom and anarchy. People are stealing things, there's no one to guard. You know, if you have a store or something like that, people are just coming in and looting everything. It was just chaos. And so very quickly this, you know, people who are willing to give the US A chance turned against the United States. There was also, you know, incidences in some of the prisons like Abu Ghraib, where very low ranking American officials were caught doing things which can only be called, clearly some sort of torture was going on. And so this mismanagement by the United States, which happened quite quickly and was, was apparent right away, just lost, you know, the trust of any Iraqis who were willing to give the U.S. a chance. Now, if, if the U.S. had brought in, you know, say 400,000 people or even had managed to get what it had done for the Gulf War, right, which was 500,000Americans, another 250,000 coalition troops, if we had had a force of that size, then clearly a lot of these problems could have been mitigated. There could have been, you know, safe streets, people's livelihoods wouldn't be endangered. You wouldn't have such low ranking people running amok in some of these prisons without any real oversight, you know, so some of these issues could have been taken care of. There's also the problem of, you know, the Iraqi military had dissolved during the war, but especially the officers expected to be called back. The US Made decision not to call them back and just start over, which left a lot of people, you know, who are home with guns and trained in military affairs unemployed and unhappy. And that's never a good situation. So, you know, a lot of these, there was a lot of mistakes. There were a lot of mistakes like that. And, you know, there are some people who would make the case that if the US had done this right, it could have led to a better outcome. I'm skeptical. Just after looking at how Saddam Hussein ruled that, that country and the system he built. Once we broke that system, I find, I find it difficult to, to believe that, that the United States could have, could have, you know, held it together without the level of expertise that the Iraqis had.
- [42:58]
B
And this is obviously a perspective where we can put the pieces together without it being sort of in the heat of the moment, as it were. But it's not like at the time in 2005, 2006, 2007, there weren't things happening that made people go, wait a second, like this isn't working right. This is really chaotic. It's not like we're only saying that now. And as you've just outlined there, there were a number of reasons that this. There was lots of violence, there was lots of resistance to the US invasion. Why then didn't the US Take the threat of ISIS seriously until what many people would say is kind of really late. The fall of Mosul, for instance.
- [43:36]
C
Yeah. So, I mean, you know, there is a moment where they do take it seriously because ISIS or isil, what they are, is just the next iteration of what was Al Qaeda in Iraq. You know, they changed their names. So this group emerges in the wake of the 2003. The wake of the 2003 invasion. At first the US doesn't want to take it seriously because, you know, you especially Rumsfeld, Donald Rumsfeld was trying to get in and get out. He didn't like the idea that this was going to turn into some sort of insurgency or nation building operation. So he just didn't want to admit that, that, that there was a problem. And you know, his idea was train the Iraqis up quickly and, and then leave. That clearly wasn't working. And he was, but he just wasn't willing to accept that it wasn't working until he gets fired in the wake of the 2006 congressional elections and they bring in a new defense secretary, but also a new military team led by General David Petraeus who does understand that there's a threat and starts going after groups like Al Qaeda in Iraq with counterinsurgency strategies, which are, the idea is that, you know, you go in, you clear out these insurgents, but you also, you know, help the Iraqis build something, some, some sort of political system that is, that is viable in their, in their place. So the US does actually take it seriously in say 2007, 2008, and it seems to, to work. Now, partly this is not what the US did. There was also things going on on the Iraqi side where Iraqis were turning against groups like Al Qaeda in Iraq because they didn't like, you know, living with, living under those, those types of, those types of rules. But this, this U.S. strategy or the U.S. you know, counterinsurgency operations and what you might call nation building in Iraq ends at the end of the George W. Bush administration. The Iraqis are tired of the Americans being there. George W. Bush negotiates a withdrawal plan which is executed by the Obama administration and the Obama administration, you know, they had always had Always seen Iraq as, as a bad war. This was a bad mistake to go into Iraq. It was very costly. On the other hand, Afghanistan was a more reasonable choice. But in the end of the day, the, the main US Interests were not in threats to the American interests were not in the Middle east at all. They were really in Asia with the rise in China. And so the Obama administration wants to not focus on Iraq. They want to get Afghanistan, right, And at the same time start moving towards, towards the, the Pacific. And so, you know, as, as Al Qaeda in Iraq was, was pushed down, was. It was never defeated completely, but it was pushed underground by General Petraeus and his successors. It starts to come back after the US withdrawal. So 2011, 2012, by 2013, it's very clear that there's a problem. This is also made worse by the Arab Spring, because next door in Syria, that regime basically descends into a giant civil war, leaving whole sections, especially eastern Syria, not governed by, by the Assad regime, which allows these fighters from Iraq to move freely between eastern Syria and, and northern. And western. Northern or western Iraq, which is how you get Al Qaeda in Iraq, you know, then becomes the Islamic State of Iraq and then becomes the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria or, or ISIS. By 2013, it's very clear that not only is ISIS operating freely in eastern Syria, but is moving back into certain Iraqi cities. But the Obama administration, you know, they just didn't want to deal with Iraq. They were done with Iraq. Iraq had been, you know, for them, a horrible mistake. And they didn't want to get sucked back, sucked back into it. And so there's, you know, some. Even some quite famous interviews that Barack Obama does prior to 2014, where he calls, you know, this is. Right, you know, this is the. He calls him the JV team, you know, the junior varsity team, which, you know, I don't know how this plays out outside the United States. For the United States, you have the varsity team, which is the, you know, the, the really good players. And then the junior varsity players are the players that are, you know, sort of up and coming but not ready for. Not ready for varsity yet. So he was, he was diminishing the groups like ISIS prior to their, their taking of Mosul as really not that important as local small actors that don't really affect international politics and certainly aren't enough to get the United States involved. Obviously that, you know, looking back in hindsight, that was, that was a mistake.
- [49:27]
B
So obviously then there's a whole lot we could go on to discuss further. Just about the ISIS things. But I think the key point here of the book is that these are all related. Right? We can't just start in 2014. We can't just stop in 2003. Like, all of this is very much part of one bigger project, really. In fact, has it ended? I mean, are the Iraq wars ending? We talked a bit about start date, but where would we put the end date?
- [49:54]
C
Yeah, you know, so you're right to, first of all, and I should have, you know, made it clear that, yeah, as I mentioned, you know, just to put the whole thing together real quick, you know, the 1990 war kicks off and then you spend the rest of the 1990s. They're trying to, you know, put this, this ceasefire of the 1991 war in, in place and they're struggling to do so. And eventually, in order to take care of that problem, the Americans launched a 2003 war. So the 2003 war is really a continuation or finishing of the, of the, the 1991 war. But the 2003 war unleashes groups like that will become ISIS. Right? So ISIS, you know, really doesn't, doesn't has its origin in that 2003 war, which has its origin in 1991, 1991 war. So has it ended? You know, the US is pulling out of Iraq. We still have, you know, small groups of, of, of troops there, but between 2018 and 2019, you know, so ISIS, when it come, it had taken actual territory and held it as, as a state, right, in Iraq and in Syria. And in 20, and then 2019, you see the defeat of, of the Islamic State as a, as a state, right, as an entity in Iraq and in Syria. And so in that sense, it's, you know, it's sort of over for the United States. We, you know, the United States pulled back its, its headquarters that it had, it had a joint operations center in Iraq that was running these, these wars. And it's, it's, it's pulled back. And for the most part, the Iraqis have kept, kept their country, you know, with some American help and outsiders also. The EU and NATO and, and UN are, are helping them, but they've managed to, to keep control in their, in their country. So it, it does seem that they have ended. Of course, there are, you know, remnants of, of these groups that formed in Iraq still operating around the world. I mean, just in the last, you know, week or so here we're, we're speaking in mid December 2025, you know, you had these attacks against Hanukkah celebration In Australia, it looks early on that these are people that were somehow connected to or inspired by, by isis. You had attacks against Americans in, in Syria also seem to be linked to, to isis. So it hasn't, you know, these groups haven't gone away completely, but they do seem a little bit more manageable. They're not, they don't control territory. They're not, you know, collecting taxes from people in the way that they were earlier. And you know, the US does seem like it's able to move outside of Iraq. Right? I mean, other than that small period, you know, 2011, 2012, 2013, basically between 1990 and 2018, Iraq was the center of American foreign policy and American, you know, strategies. It was at the top of every headline, you know, you know, headlines. And not just in the United States, but, you know, across the world in Russia or Europe or Africa. They would all, you know, people have been reading about American operations in Iraq and, and that's, that era seems to be over and it's hard. You know, there could always be some massive, you know, black swan catastrophe where ISIS re emerges and takes territory back in Iraq or there's a giant terrorist attack that draws the United States back in. But sitting here in the United States at the end of 2025, it seems like there's very little appetite to go back into Iraq and to continue these. So it would take a lot to reignite these, these Iraq wars. It's not impossible, but I would say it's, it's very, very unlikely and that we can say that they're, you know, they're, they're pretty much over.
- [54:25]
B
Well, what then is next for you to work on? You've done the in depth research, you've published books, you've now got the book that puts it all together in an accessible format. So what might be on your desk now?
- [54:38]
C
So I have a few projects that I am, that I'm, I'm working on one, you know, @ the very end and one's at the very beginning. So a colleague of mine, Lisa Blades, up at Stanford University, you know, she and I realized that there had been, you know, Iraqi archives opened in, you know, around 2000. There's several different sets, but they opened around 2010 ish time frame. And so now we have a little over a decade of research with those, those records. And so in 2023, she and I brought together the main scholars who have been working on these records, you know, from really across the world. We brought them to Stanford.
- [55:23]
A
University.
- [55:25]
C
To the Hoover Institution which holds these, these the main sets of these archives. And we had a conference and then we turned this conference into an edited volume which is coming out this summer from Stanford University Press. And so she and I are editing this, this volume. It should be released in, in June. And with, you know, the main, all the main people who have been working on these, these archives. So, you know, hopefully it'll be a, you know, a kind of major statement on, on the status of, of research in this, in this field. So that's been taking a lot of time, you know, putting this together. But I'm at the end of that now. It's in production. It seems like it's, it's. It's almost done. And then I'm starting to work on a new project which looks really at the post Cold War Middle east as a center for, for global politics in a way that has really never been the case before or probably will be again. The idea is that, you know, if you look at it wasn't just Iraq. Iraq brought me to thinking about this. But as I looked through, say, UN archives or American archives in the 1990s, you realize that all the main issues that people are focusing on, all them, the vast majority of the issues that people are focusing on are in the Middle East. You have, of course, Iraq, but if you have the greater Middle east, you can also think about like, Somalia or Afghanistan. You have the Arab Israeli conflict. You have the rise of, you know, groups like, like Al Qaeda. And so, you know, thinking about why this, why the Middle east played this, this role in global politics in the post Cold War is something that I'm trying to explore in my new book. I'm going to sort of take a new look, you know, a fresh look at post Cold War liberalism, liberal internationalism. There were a lot of ideas floating around about the end of history and new world orders and things like that. So I want to look at that and I want to look at, you know, how the failure of some of those ideas to play out in the Middle east really challenged their claims to, to be universal. And, you know, there's not a, not a straight line, but there's an influence, you know, because of that, you start to get backsliding, liberal backsliding, you know, people losing faith in some of these, some of these liberal ideas about democracy and liberalism, which we see today, unfortunately, across the world. But, you know, I'm going to, I'm still in the very early stages of it, but I think you can see a lot of the origins of this backsliding and the failure of these ideas to take hold in the Middle east after the US and much of the other, you know, its liberal partners spent, you know, trillions of dollars and years and years of effort and manpower trying to impose their ideas on the Middle east, and they don't work. And there's obviously going to be a reaction to that. So that's where I'm at. It's still very early, and so I don't have much else besides these ideas and some archival work that I'm doing that's very.
- [59:01]
B
Preliminary. Well, it certainly sounds like you've got plenty to keep you busy. So while you are off working on those projects, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled the Iraq A Very Short Introduction, published by Oxford University Press in 2020. Samuel, thank you so much for telling us about your book on the.
- [59:18]
C
Podcast. Thank you again for having.