Episode Transcript
[00:00:14] Speaker A: Hello, welcome to the Call Like I See it podcast.
I'm James Keys, and in this episode of Call Like I See it, we're going to take a look back at the Iraq war, which began 20 years ago this month with the invasion of Iraq by the US and its allies and officially came to the came to an end in 2011, and which many have called one of the most, if not the most consequential geopolitical move in the 21st century so far.
And later on, we're going to discuss the disconnect that has been observed and that many feel between their actual chronological age and how old they feel they are, how old they see themselves, particularly in the context of older people feeling like they're just younger in age.
Joining me today is a man who is known to shoot off his takes rapid fire like a machine gun. Tunde ogonlana Toonday, Are you ready to show the folks today why you just want to rock?
[00:01:13] Speaker B: Always. Man who doesn't want to rock?
[00:01:17] Speaker A: We all just want to rock, man. There we go.
[00:01:19] Speaker B: That sounds like fun.
[00:01:23] Speaker A: Now recording this on March 20, 2023. And we note that yesterday, March 19, was the 20th anniversary of the US and its allies of invading Iraq for the stated purpose of removing Saddam Hussein from power and freeing the Iraqi people. Now, at the time this war was sold and also generally seen, together with the war in Afghanistan, which the US started in late 2001, and the immediate aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attack in the US. And overall, as part of the US's war on terror campaign and part of the selling of the war involved efforts to connect Hussein with Al Qaeda or to claim that he possessed or was acquiring weapons of mass destruction that were going to be used ultimately on the US or its allies. We know now, however, that this was in large part a knowing deceit by the US government and that the motives for the war were very sketchy, to put it mildly, and that this conflict now can be seen as a $3 trillion plus misstep that arguably set in motion events that would ultimately make many societies on at least four different continents less stable and the people in them less safe. So long wind up. But to get us started, Tunde, as we hit this 20th anniversary of the US invasion of Iraq, what about that, that big action right there and then what followed after? What comes to mind or what? What do you think about when you think about that conflict?
[00:02:57] Speaker B: You know, it is interesting after 20 years, I know that the war has been in our lives for it wasn't 20 years ago that we were enmeshed in it. But the start and the symbolism of the past 20 years to me is interesting because then I, of course, in preparing for the show, reading, watching different interviews, things like that, and it just got my mind back to remembering that era and that period of time.
And I think, you know, I want to talk a little bit about where we were as you did, a great lead in here with things like the reasons we were given, why we went to war, for example, and then not here with these comments now, but I think through the show I want to discuss a little bit of how, where I think we've gone since taking this initial step.
I'd say this post 911 era, because I would say that Iraq and Afghanistan represented a change long term and not only for us internally, but like you said, globally as well.
[00:04:00] Speaker A: Well, I think it's fair because I don't know that the justification and the ability for the US Government to get itself into Iraq would have been there, so to speak, if it wasn't for what the state, what 911 did to set the stage for kind of the way the people, you know, people's mentality was no, 100%.
[00:04:20] Speaker B: I appreciate actually that interjection because it allows me to think about then things that you and I have heard of and the audience, you know, maybe not sure if this was well known, but things like the Project for a New American Century. Yeah, that was a kind of a manifesto written in 1998 by people at the time who ended up being very influential in the Bush administration. I mean, his brother Jeb Bush was one of the signers. Dick Cheney was one of the signers, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy Defense secretary at the time of the Iraq invasion. And this was, you know, to their defense, I guess, a group of men who had been kind of born in the fires of the Cold War, you know, the kind of post World War II era. And by 98, they're only six, seven years after the fall of the Soviet Union. So they had a lens of the world that was from that period of time. And they were looking at things like oil and in regions of the world like the Middle east, as where we, as America strategically need to be focused in the new century. So to your point, 911 gave a good reason once you had a reason to go to Afghanistan. If we look on a map, there's only one country in between Iraq and Afghanistan and that's Iran, which I'm sure will be brought up in the discussion a bit later.
[00:05:36] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So you look back at it just as kind of the. One of the key pillars in this kind of new century. Yes. What's happened, this new geopolitical kind of stance order, so to speak.
[00:05:50] Speaker B: Here. Let me follow up with you on that as a new pillar because. Yes. And something you said to me in private, which I want you to elaborate on, because I remember saying to you that Iraq was the moment, the lead into the war is when I first in my life saw the real nativist streak in America, the tribalism, where it was, you're with us or against us. And, you know, and you said something interesting, which was. Yeah, Afghanistan was the one that most Americans would agree or were able to agree and say, okay, seems that Al Qaeda, who did what they did to us on 911 came from that.
[00:06:24] Speaker A: Who were based there. Yeah. Established.
[00:06:28] Speaker B: Yeah. Going in there kind of made sense to just disrupt that. But then Iraq was the one that was.
Well, and then that's where I pass it back to you. But it was a little bit more of a.
[00:06:38] Speaker A: It was a war of choice, as we know now, and many called out at the time. And so it created a level of division that really wasn't there with the Afghanistan, at least the initial part of the Afghanistan campaign, which that's one of the things I want to get to later. And just in terms of how the war in Iraq splintered attention. And so you can look, we just actually did a show about the withdrawal from Afghanistan, which was done not in a triumphant way, but just in a. Well, we just got to go, you know, nothing.
[00:07:07] Speaker B: Wheels up.
[00:07:08] Speaker A: Yeah. Literally, we're not making things better anymore. You know, like, we can't even argue that we are, you know, so it's like we just got to go. But the thing that stands out to me most about the just the looking at the Iraq war, looking back at it, was just the paradoxes that are built in. And some of this is with the benefit of hindsight. But you can also say some people were saying this at the time, you know, like there was conflict. And as you just. You referenced and you know, in terms of what I was saying before there was conflict in the country on whether or not we should be going into Iraq for practical reasons, like, hey, why don't we finish the job in Afghanistan? For some people who were distrusting of the people's justification, leadership justification were going in. But to me, the paradox is because I'm glad you pointed out the center or what was it, the, the. The. The product project for a New American Century. Because one of the paradoxes I see is, I think there were overall good intentions in going in there from the actors perspective. I don't think we all would share that perspective if we heard everything that they had to say about it. But they were looking at, okay, we got finite resources that, that we're very dependent on. We need to secure our ability to have this stuff we want. You know, I think that in general, they were looking at this and saying, hey, this will make America better in 10 years, this will make America better in 20 years. But they didn't just come out and explain that they've used lies to get there. So whether their intentions are good or bad, they came up with a justification. They came up with a pretext to do it, which is wrong no matter what. And people, I would be one to quibble and say your intentions probably are misguided as well, but I, I think they thought their intentions were good and they knew they were lying. So I'm looking at it from their perspective as far as that paradox. Another paradox, though, involves the idea of nation building, which is something that as time has evolved, and this is the Iraq conflict was one of the ones that has revealed some of the folly of that in the, in the 21st century. But the, the idea of, we're going to conquer you, we're going to knock out you're, come in, defeat your army, disband your army, and then you know what, we're going to give you what you've always wanted. We're going to give you a government, we're going to give you a structure, we're going to give you an army. And it's like, well, hold on, you came in and you knocked all this stuff out. And then you say, hey, we're going to do all this stuff, we're going to put all this stuff back in place and you can thank us for it. And so it's like, it's this weird kind of thing where it's like, okay, we're going to set up things for you the way we think is best by breaking all of your stuff. You know what I'm saying? And in that, though, is something, hey, we think what we have is good and we want to show you how to do it. But this level of hubris to get there is jarring in hindsight and at the time, again, because this was, there was dissent about this.
[00:09:44] Speaker B: No, and I think you're right. I mean, look, I can't help, and I'm not going to stay on this theme for a long time because it shows about Iraq but as you said that I can't think of helping Russia. Think about Russia's invasion of Ukraine because the same kind of justification is what's given to the Russian people. There's a dictator in Ukraine who's a Nazi and we got to go denazify the country. And by doing that, we're going to help the Ukrainian people. We're going to save their lives. We're going to save them. And think about what. I mean, I think to the credit of our military, I got enough friends that fought in Iraq.
They were never trained to go just wantonly go attack civilian buildings and stuff like that. I mean, like what the Russians are doing, just indiscriminately throwing missiles into neighborhoods. Now, that's not to say that we can ignore that Iraqi civilians did get killed. I definitely want to state that. Unfortunately, there were a lot the estimations I've heard as high as 250,000 Iraqi civilians died over the, whatever, 11 to 15 years that we had really hot operations there.
[00:10:46] Speaker A: Well, and we made their. I mean, whether it's that it could be more, you know, but we made their homes a war zone.
[00:10:52] Speaker B: Yeah, well, exactly. And that's why I'm not, I'm not defending us in that way that, you know, civilian deaths are horrible, no matter how you look at it. But it humbled me this weekend. That's why I want to say it this way. After what we've experienced in the last year of watching Ukraine go into, sorry, Russia going to a sovereign nation of Ukraine for reasons that they had to go help their people from an evil dictator.
Now I tend to believe that Saddam Hussein was a bad guy and was not a good type of leader I'd want to live under. I probably think Zelensky seems a lot better than him. But the point is that it really humbled me as an American because I'm proud of my. And I love my country, but I just kind of couldn't help as an honest person with a rational mind, say, you know, all these arguments I'm hearing when I'm watching that old video of Bush and Cheney and Condoleezza Rice saying we don't want the smoking cun to become a mushroom cloud. All this fear, remember, that they pushed onto the American people. And then unfortunately, even like I've mentioned to you before, Colin Powell convincing the world because he was kind of the trusted guy. Yeah.
[00:11:58] Speaker A: He had credibility. That.
[00:12:00] Speaker B: Yeah. That there was weapons of mass destruction, which 20 years later, I mean, it's almost like, I wonder why. How come they didn't plant something, just at least save face, you know what I mean? So I think I just wanted to say that on the show here that as an American who's an America first guy in that way, and I love my country, I had to honestly think of watching stuff over this weekend with the anniversary, just have that dissonance as a human being saying, I see the similarity here to Russia and Ukraine and it doesn't make me comfortable.
[00:12:30] Speaker A: And how it. Well, particularly in how it was sold. And I mean, I think part of that, though, is a measure of that those are kind of the greatest hits of going into another country. You cast it as a threat. You cast it as the dictator and this and that and so forth. And so ultimately we leaned into kind of that playbook. If you want to go. If you want to create a pretext to go into another country, it's not us. And Russia aren't the only ones that have used that playbook. Of course you want to create a play, a pretext to go into another country, you either stage some attack against yourself that they did, or you trump up the, hey, these guys doing this, these guys are doing that, and so forth. And so it is, though, you know, to see actually the Russia instance. And again, you got to be very careful making comparisons here, you know, because there is. It's a different situation.
[00:13:20] Speaker B: Yeah, there's a lot. You cheapen both of them. There's just a lot of similarities.
[00:13:23] Speaker A: I think the selling of it is the one we can really point to as the similarities and, you know, the idea. But you flatten almost both of them. You kind of make both of them. You reduce both of them and the unique conflicts that they are by looking at them.
[00:13:35] Speaker B: But even like you said, though, the hubris that we were going to go into another country and give them freedom through the barrel of a gun, really, I mean, and I don't mean to sound all hokey like that, what I'm saying is this assumption that the rest of the world wants to live like us was how it was sold to us. You see what I'm saying?
[00:13:51] Speaker A: And that goes back that again, says about us because it was sold to us, because that's what we are willing to. That's what it was thought that we were willing to believe, basically.
[00:14:00] Speaker B: That's what I'm saying.
[00:14:02] Speaker A: One of the other things I wanted to mention before we move out of this part is the idea that they remember what came out of this in the war on terror, was that they hate us because of our freedoms. Remember that Exactly. Which is another one of these pulling on your emotional strings. But it doesn't really add up from the standpoint of any kind of logic. Like, no, they hate us because like al Qaeda said why they hated us.
[00:14:23] Speaker B: Because we have faces in the Middle East.
[00:14:25] Speaker A: They have nothing to do with our freedom. It's like, so ultimately we're looking at it and you know, like, because they see what's going on, it's like, oh, yeah, you guys want to be here and you guys want to control here because of oil, you know, like, so ultimately when you're looking at it in terms of, okay, yeah, the US Made this misstep and it's not to cast the US as some major villain, even though this kind of action definitely makes it more difficult for you to walk into any room with credibility, people wanting to work with you in the future as opposed to feeling like they have to or whatever. But one of the things that's interesting about this that I want to mention before we jump is just the idea of, like you said, we're going to give you freedom from the end point, from the barrel of a gun. One of the things that Biden said when we were pulling out Afghanistan was talking about how we can't go, we can't use the military as the front of the cutting edge of how we're going to spread values around the world, you know, and just that that's not a workable solution because one of the things that was kind of driven home by the Iraq war, I mean, this was seen all the way back to Vietnam, but just that these insurgency type things, it's difficult. Those are difficult. You could be the biggest, baddest superpower in the world. These insurgency type things are very difficult to put down when they're coming from the, they're coming from the masses. It's not all of the masses doing it to you, but it's not, they're not just getting out in the battlefield and fighting with you. So. But I want to get to the next point on this. And that is like we did, you know, I've mentioned, and it's been talked about just how consequential this was in terms of how this reverberated in Europe when you had, and you've talked about this with population, you know, refugees and stuff moving and how that's changing political calculations and stuff like that. Obviously, in Asia, you know, this has been big with the Middle east and then over to Afghanistan and even in Africa, also in the U.S. you know, like you talked about the Nativists and all that kind of how that really picked up here and we haven't seen that really dissipate. And one of the things in the US also is just the lack of trust. You know, this exposed a very big gap in, hey, what America says versus what's actually true. So of all of these, and then there's more. I mean I'm just top level and all this stuff.
[00:16:18] Speaker B: But no, they're all there.
[00:16:19] Speaker A: Dominoes, man. Like, which touch, you know, would you want to touch on a couple of them? Just kind of what, what is, what's significant to you about any, any of these or, you know, a couple of.
[00:16:27] Speaker B: No, let's, let's hit a few because they're all significant to me. I think we gotta, you know, we got to be careful that obviously the world will always be changing over a 20 year period. So how much of this is directly influenced by let's say the Iraq war and our post 911 stance and culture? And how much of it may have started to happen anyway? I'm not sure. Right. Like for example, of course.
[00:16:50] Speaker A: And then it becomes. And it's all a mix. So even if we're saying that the Iraq war had something to do with it, it's still, it's not saying it's 100%.
[00:16:56] Speaker B: Just to give the example is China may have become the superpower. It is over the last 20 years anyway, whether we invade Iraq or not. Right. So that was an example of something that may have happened with or without this. But the point I'll start with is here at home. And then I'll get to some of what I see internationally.
And going back to what you said is 911 allowed some of the nativist spirits in our country that we haven't seen really in you and I's lifetime and probably since the 60s to really jump out and come to the forefront. And so what are those spirits? That was the tribalism like you said about us versus them, you know, and I don't want to be too hyperbolic about all this. Right. But the Arabs and people in the Middle east are brown and they kind of, for a lot of Americans would say they're all the same, but they're not from an ethnic and cultural standpoint.
[00:17:51] Speaker A: So for example, just real quick with that part of that though was how it was sold to us and how we received it. Because remember, it was very easy, quote unquote, to conflate the Afghans and the Iraqis and it's like, well, hold on.
But it was easy for us to accept that. Because you said, like, all, they're Muslims and brown. And you'll go ahead.
[00:18:10] Speaker B: Yep. Because like we talked about earlier when we had the private conversation, Afghanistan, most, I'd say the majority of Americans understood that we wanted to and should have do something in that country to remove the threat of Al Qaeda having basically a country of their own. Right.
[00:18:30] Speaker A: Free reign to operate, you know, plan and all that stuff.
[00:18:33] Speaker B: Yeah. And sorry, Osama bin Laden was wealthy enough that he basically bought the Taliban government to allow him to just be there and do all their training and their operations. Right. All the same video we saw a billion times of the guys in the monkey bars in the middle of the desert. Right. And so. And so. And so. But that's real. So I think most Americans, you know, except for people that really are about no war ever and peace only every other American was like, okay, I get it. We got to go there.
Then. That's where I think people like you and I that understood the differences between different groups and people under, you know, that looked at information that Saddam Hussein also looked at Al Qaeda as a threat because he was a secular Muslim. All the stuff that is kind of intellectual. Right. We said, okay, it doesn't appear that, you know, and. And the UN's going in there. They're not finding any weapons. Da da, say, okay, well, maybe you don't need to invade this country. But like you just said, the way it was sold to Americans was that, oh, it's all. Whatever's in the Middle east is a threat. Da, da, da, da. And so that's what I mean by the tribalism and the nativism became public again for the first time in our life in that way. Then we got the religious aspect, the Christian nationalism. Remember, George W. Bush would use words like, this is a crusade.
[00:19:48] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:19:48] Speaker B: You know, again, just like.
[00:19:50] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:19:50] Speaker B: And just, just like we learned with President Trump, leadership's important and words matter. Maybe not everybody's going to think of a religious war when you. When a president uses the word crusade. But you know what? A lot of people did.
[00:20:00] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:20:01] Speaker B: And they started. We started seeing a lot of public stance come back about things like this is a Christian nation. Then you and I did a joke about it on the show. About 10 years after the Iraq invasion, 200 state legislatures, or there were 200 bills around this country and state legislatures about not having Sharia law in this country. So again, the fear of Islam and the Middle east and all that stuff led to actually us changing how we act in this country about a lot of Things. And so before I go to. I'll kick it back before I go on the international side. But that's what I saw internally was it began these kind of frictions and divisions. And like we rightly pointed out, unfortunately the leadership allowed a lot of Americans to distrust their government in a different way than maybe we had distrust. It was almost like the Pentagon Papers again. Oh yeah, the government lies and they do all this stuff. Yeah.
[00:20:59] Speaker A: Like people that otherwise might be inclined. I think really what it is, it's not just the traditional people who have distrusted the government, some for good reason and some for not, but the, the kind of establishment oriented people had to look at the government like, whoa, whoa, what's happening here? And you know, you look at it and like, you look at things like this and you see you can almost point, you know, draw a straight line from stuff like this to the, like the, the, the Muslim ban that was attempted, you know, and you know, 2016, 2017 or you know, 2017, 2018 and so forth, where it, it became about in large part, the religion was the tie that bind. And we had conversations in the 2000s about, oh, well, is Islam just a religion of terrorism and all this other stuff. And just like, you know, like, clearly like that stuff was, was so such from a motivated place because religion has been. I mean, the people who argue against the religion, people, you know, the Bill Mars of the world, always talk about all religions end up with these, these kind of, you know, like these groups within them that are willing to go to the mat, so to speak. But you know, I think when you look at it internally like just that, that establishment piece and that was the term I wanted to use, where the establishment couldn't be trusted anymore was something, you know, from people who otherwise were inclined, really opened the door for different types of people to assume power, you know, and that's really what it is. I think that it wasn't that, you know, like the Americans changed completely. It was just that it was like, okay, well, we've always had these various factions, but a lot of times they've been marginalized. People that were more extreme or more xenophobic or anything like that, but when, when the establishment people, when the quote, unquote, serious people are out here starting wars and you know, all this other stuff, and it's like, well, hold up. Well, maybe we should listen to the people that they call crazy. You know, like, maybe we spend more time with them. To me, though, the most interesting part about this was the splitting of our attention, which I think ended up causing us to fail in everything. And when I say us, I mean the U.S. because it's, it's like when you, when the U.S. and this was said at the time, this was one of the more I bring this up because this was one of the more influential things to me was just like, well, hold on.
We're, we're trying to do something over here, you know, like, so to speak, in Afghanistan. And now we're going to say we're going to do something over there. And then. So how are we going to end up doing both of these? And this just kind of in the word hubris comes back because it's just like, well, hold on. So we just decide like the people who knew that there weren't really weapons of mass destruction but thought this was an important strategic thing, they just decided like, we'll just do both. Like this. Either it's so easy or this and that. And it's like, what? And you look now in hindsight, and it's like, well, we kind of didn't accomplish what we wanted to accomplish in any either place.
[00:23:31] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:23:31] Speaker A: You know, because Afghanistan, which again, we just pulled out because we just said, hey, we can't do anything about it. Iraq is, you know, equally or more corrupt as it was before, which was the bigger problem then was it was a system of patronage, which Hussein. And you know, now it's just, it's just just the same kind of thing as far as corruption and stuff. And it's, there's still violence, there's less stability, there's more freedom. People say, you know, hey, it's more freedom, but it's, it's very dangerous. You know, like, you got a lot more stuff going on. So to me, you know, and I know you want to get in some international stuff, but just in terms of how the US Kind of sees itself and I'm, conversely, when we talk about international, I'm going to talk about how people see the US but how the US Saw itself and how the people who in the US Were able to gain more credibility or who lost credibility was the most interesting aspect of this to me. You know, with. As far as, because, you know, like these, these blocks matter, who these, who these blocks of people align with. If establishment people aren't aligning with establishment candidates anymore because they don't trust them, that's a significant shift.
[00:24:31] Speaker B: Yeah. And, you know, it's interesting, as we segue now to the international, I'll bring up something very interesting. I saw watching, actually a report on the 20 year anniversary today. So one of the, you know, the international reporter that was there 20 years ago on that Shak night, the first night when we did the air raids, he was reporting how he went back to the same hotel for this 20th anniversary to stay in the same room just so he could flood himself with also his, you know, the memories and all that. And what's interesting, he was reporting at that time from that square where most of us have seen that famous video footage of right after we got to Baghdad, and the Marines were helping the Baghdad people of Baghdad pull down the statue of Saddam. You remember that first they put an American flag over there. So what's interesting is he said this is. He was talking about how interesting Baghdad is because there's so many different messages. He goes, some people love the Americans, some people hate him. You know, all that stuff. And he said, and he was standing right on that spot where that statue was, and he says, this is where that statue was 20 years ago of Saddam Hussein. And he points right at a huge billboard and he says, and the irony, in a sense, is the billboard is of that guy Soleimani, the Iranian general who we killed in a missile strike just recently, like in the last two or three years.
[00:25:54] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:25:55] Speaker B: And so what he talked about was Iran's outsized influence now in Iraq.
[00:26:01] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:26:01] Speaker B: And I thought what an interesting just image that the guy just put there, that 20 years later there's no longer a statue of Saddam. You know, we took him out in a sense, but what we did is we gave Iran more power in the region.
[00:26:14] Speaker A: Correct.
[00:26:15] Speaker B: By our invasion. Because for those that don't understand the whole kind of, let's say two or three generations of history there, Saddam Hussein was the check on Iran for many years.
[00:26:26] Speaker A: Yeah, we supported Saddam.
[00:26:27] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:26:28] Speaker A: There was a war when he was at war with. With Iran, and he became. And so to speak, just. Just for. That's good history. For. He became the dog that bit the. You know, our guy who bit our hand when he took over Kuwait.
[00:26:39] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:26:40] Speaker A: That's what happened with Desert Storm was like, oh, you can't be in kuwait. But George H.W. bush didn't want to go in and destabilize the region. And so he stopped. He said, all right, we got you out of Kuwait. We're not taking you out. So there's an irony to it that.
[00:26:54] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:26:54] Speaker A: That the second time with his son, he was like, no, no, we are going to take you out. We don't. We're not going to destabilize the region because we're just so cool. And you know, he was, he was wrong.
[00:27:04] Speaker B: But going back directly to the geopolitics and I'll be quick here and kick it back is is power vacuum that was created. I think to your point. I'm not going to sit here and judge the actors who started it, what their long term intent was because I don't know. But I think clearly the idea that we were going to go collapse this nation, take away their whole government structure and all that and then somehow in.
[00:27:29] Speaker A: Disband their military, disband their army.
[00:27:31] Speaker B: Yeah. And just. And they'll be fine. I think that was ill conceived. And so clearly what happened was the power vacuum with Saddam and our inability to maybe fill that void pretty quickly then led to things. Remember, part of the lie that got us in there was that he was in bed with al Qaeda. But by 06, al Qaeda in Iraq really existed. That was part of the power vacuum. Remember all these guys, I don't remember the guy's name. I can see him in my mind now. But. But the leader of Iraq and Al Qaeda and we finally killed him. And there's all these heroes.
[00:28:07] Speaker A: Remember also that also created. Let's set the stage eventually for the Islamic State.
[00:28:12] Speaker B: That's what I was gonna say. So that's where I was going. Isis, right?
[00:28:15] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:28:15] Speaker B: It also sets the stage for Russia to come back and have a strong footprint in Syria because Saddam was also a check on Bashar as Al Assad and what was going on with the Kurds and all that. Cause we also the CIA and all them let Saddam deal with that. We weren't the ones in front. And so once we were focused on Iraq and Afghanistan, Russia started creeping back into Syria.
Think about it. Then with the Islamic State and the Syrian stuff led to the migration issues of the mid 2010s, you know, the 2000 teens, which led to the political destabilization in Western Europe.
[00:28:53] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:28:54] Speaker B: So all this stuff.
[00:28:55] Speaker A: Well, in large parts of Europe, you know, like not just. That's what I'm saying with all the refugees that were coming, you know. And like I think that it's good because what these are really are dominoes. Like you look at the power vacuum that's created and then that vacuum gets filled. And the thing about Saddam, and this is not in any defense of Saddam, Saddam was a brutal guy, you know, like. And in many respects people thought that you needed to be a brutal guy. But he did, as you pointed out in several ways, he was a check on various powers in that area. Once we Took that out. And this is part of the reason why H.W. bush, you know, like, this was part of the intelligence there. It's like, all right, well, maybe we need to, you know, like, we need to let this, you know, keep this in place because this is not something that has, boy, this is an area that can boil over, that's not boiling over right now, but nonetheless, and so you create that vacuum. You, you know, Iran. So we was it, I believe it was Rumsfeld or it was one of the, you know, one of the people in charge. Then we called, it was Iraq, Iran and North Korea, the axis of evil. And Iraq and Iran weren't cool. Like they were at each other's throats. And so if Iran was a adversary at that point, by taking out, like Iraq, you, you strengthen Iran. I think the lack of credibility, like the US already didn't have a ton of credibility in the, in the Middle east. And, you know, the support of Israel was a sticking point for a lot of countries. But after this, it was something that, even to this day, it's something that we're, we still live with in terms of we can influence because we're, you know, strong and we have, you know, we, we spend money, so to speak. But the credibility is very, very, very. It's, it's as low as it can be, really. I mean, to the extent that you have China now exerting diplomatic influence, and China just negotiate or helped negotiate this deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia, who have been not cool with each other for a really long time as well, so you see how it can reduce the US's influence in the Middle East. So there's that. And then when you're looking at, like you, you, like you mentioned, changes that happen in the Middle east influence Africa, they influence Europe. You know, these are, all right, all these countries are right next to each other. So when you look at it, you're saying, okay, this destabilization act here, this act of destabilization, for whatever reasons that it was done, ends up leading to all of these cascading effects, which. Does this give cover to Russia? Well, Putin cites the Iraq invasion when he goes into Ukraine. It's like, does this give cover to other actors who, people who we may be adverse to, to go do things they want to do because again, it lessens our credibility. So ultimately, the point I want to make there is that when you're talking about international relations, when you're talking about interactions between countries and so forth, these types of things, the initial, the deception and Then also the fallout. People can blame you for both. It's not just, oh, well, you lied to us and yada, yada, but it's like you just screwed everything up. Like, you know, and so ultimately the US Is in a situation where we, to put it mildly, it's a lot of egg on your face. But ultimately, there are a lot of countries that look at us like you guys are destabilizing the world, not making things better, not saying all this, you know, beacon of freedom and so forth. So I think that, you know, it's.
[00:32:02] Speaker B: Interesting, as you're saying it, made me think our chickens have come home to roost in a sense, because 20 years ago, we got lied into a war that destabilized, you know, like you're saying these certain regions of the world. And we got lied into it because of our own emotional state. Right. Like, we, we let ourselves. Like I said, anybody who has kind of intellectually thought about it could understand that there wasn't really a reason to go into Iraq based on what we were told because there didn't seem to be evidence unless you wanted to just believe the drawings that Colin Powell. But if you listen to the UN Secretary General or the, you know, all these other people, it didn't appear there was anything there. But people don't care, right? They don't want to listen to facts. They want to feel good about how they feel and be right. And it just reminds me of like, how we're seeing the big lie play out in this country now and is destabilizing us internally. Now, that's what I mean by chickens coming home.
[00:32:54] Speaker A: But I want to say this, though. Like, I think the fear aspect, I not say you give people a pass at that time, but the use, and this is the key piece about the use of fear when you're talking about mushroom clouds and weapons of mass destruction. I think I almost say, like, when the government is saying that if you are an establishment siding person in general, I mean, I don't think you can condemn people, so to speak, for believing that, like, at the time.
[00:33:16] Speaker B: No, I don't.
[00:33:17] Speaker A: While there wasn't, it wasn't substantiated with, you know, by the UN or anything like that. But I mean, it's. You put like, it wasn't just emotion is where I would push back on you.
[00:33:27] Speaker B: There were industry people after that. I'm not making this about the election, but I'm just saying that there was also people in leadership saying so stuff that we now know. We just did a show on this, that some people said things that they have said and we've seen text messages now that they knew were bs.
[00:33:41] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:33:41] Speaker B: And what I'm saying is Condoleezza Rice and Dick Cheney and the people really on the intelligence side that had all that intelligence. Condoleezza Rice, I remember seeing a clip this weekend. That's why it's fresh in my head. You don't want this smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.
[00:33:55] Speaker A: Correct.
[00:33:55] Speaker B: She was the National Security Advisor. She knew that this guy didn't have wmd. That's my point. So this is what I'm saying about it's come home now that it's all in our. We're destabilizing ourselves with this.
[00:34:05] Speaker A: But I think we have to be. We have to point the finger at them and less like, I don't know that you can point the finger at the American people in general on that point because they were lied to by people who would know these types of things.
[00:34:17] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:34:17] Speaker A: But I want to move into the next topic. It was something you sent me a couple weeks back, just talking about the phenomenon which is observed and like, it's something that's been studied because everything's been studied. But just how in many cultures, people think of themselves as a different age than they actually are. And they really was highlighting how someone who's 65 might think of themselves as 45. Or, you know, someone who's 80 might think of themselves as 65. And, you know, or somebody who's 45 might think of themselves as 35. Just a lot of times people feeling like they're younger and then in many respects, they'll see better health outcomes for people who think of themselves as younger again, at least in the cultures where this has been studied. So now this was a very long article. We'll have it in the, in the show notes. But just this phenomenon and, you know, what did you pull out of this? Or what stood out to you in here?
[00:35:04] Speaker B: I don't know, man. I was thinking, do I feel like I'm five today or do I feel like I'm 85? No, it's. Look, I think we can all relate to this because, I mean, look, time is a human construct in a certain way. Right? We perceive it and then we perceive, you know, we've talked about things like our circadian rhythm. We have 24 hours in a day. We've evolved to understand those patterns. We have, you know, the 365 days in a year. So time clearly is something that is real for us as we've manifested our knowledge around it, but you also spend all the time with yourself. And so one thing I realized as we're kind of preparing for this is I think it's harder to imagine yourself older because you haven't been older yet. Right, but there. But you've been.
[00:35:55] Speaker A: But that's not true because younger people imagine themselves as younger. You know, like people think of themselves like, oh, I'm 16, but I feel like I'm, you know, 22 or whatever. Like you see that phenomenon. I think you see that, that's.
[00:36:07] Speaker B: I mean, I, I don't see that. I mean, because you can't really. Like, I can, I can think of myself or imagine myself as a 16 year old version of me because I've already been there, but I can't really fathom the 75 year old version of me. And, and it's just interesting. I found some interesting things in the article.
So, like one I'll quote here. A friend nearing 60 recently told me that whenever he looks in the mirror, he's not so much unhappy with his appearance as he's startled by it.
As if there's been some sort of error. The guy says, yeah, where his exact, we're his exact words. And it's funny because, you know, I just turned 45 last week, so I know that half the people listening will think, man, what a, what a baby. He's such a kid. And the other half might say, damn, he's old. So we're right in the middle, right, we're right middle aged. But the point is, is that, yeah, it's funny, like I'm fine with when I look in the mirror, but I do now start to see like, oh man, you know, I'm starting to, I got the crow's feet, you know, I got all this gray hair on my face. I'm starting to have, you know, the bags and lines under my eyes because, you know, my face is getting thinner because I have less collagen filling me up. You know, I'm noticing that I'm getting, you know, just the way I'm aging. I'm getting slimmer because I'm losing muscle mass, you know. And so it's, that's what I liked about that, that part of the article. I was like, yeah, I'm not really upset. I kind of just startled.
Who's this dude?
[00:37:26] Speaker A: Well, no, I think the idea that you look at yourself or think of yourself as a younger age because like I said, that's what the article spent most of his time talking about. That like there was the quick mention about how, you know, you see that in teenagers as well or whatever, but. Or you can see it in teenagers as well. But you know, what's interesting to me is the idea of. It's almost like in that. Built into that phenomenon is kind of seeing yourself kind of in an optimal way or where you see yourself as optimal, slash, attainable. Like, you don't see yourself if you're 70 and maybe as 32, when it's like, oh, yeah, but it's like, no, no, no, I'm still, I'm still can work well as good as I did when I was 50, though, you know, like. So to me, it was. It's never like. Or it's rarely. I should say something that's completely foreign. It's. It's. It's almost like a slightly more optimized version of yourself. And you're talking about older, feeling younger. It's. It's a better performing probably in some respects. But the other thing that was very interesting to me about this and I mentioned this, I kind of threw this in.
[00:38:26] Speaker B: You can't say that. Not me. Follow up with a nice joke and say, they got pills for that now, bro.
Talking about performance. Come on, brother.
[00:38:35] Speaker A: There's, like, ways to perform.
[00:38:37] Speaker B: They'll make you feel like you were 21 again. And remember, like, wow, that's what it was like.
[00:38:43] Speaker A: But no, but the other thing I wanted to mention on this, which I found to be very interesting, is that the phenomenon does appear to be cultural in some way, where in cultures, more like collective cultures, you know, like in Asia and Africa, the phenomenon is much less pronounced or it's absent altogether. And cultures where the elderly are more revered, you know, like elders and so forth. And so I found it to be very interesting because it's almost like there's some feedback built into this where it's not just how you see yourself, but how you see a value in yourself, so to speak. So in the United States, you know, you were looking at the most valuable demographic, if you go by ratings, is like 25 to 35 or something, or, you know, whatever that is that. That demographic range, or even into the next one up going into the 40s. So are we all kind of subconsciously wanting to be in that kind of age range or close to that age range? Because that's what our society values. Whereas if you're in Asia, you know, you might just say, I'm good being old, because this is what society values. So I was.
[00:39:45] Speaker B: I think there's a big part of that I would be totally on board with, you know, that idea because I do think, like we just said, time being a construct of the mind, in a sense at least the human ability to understand time.
Then. Then of course, that we're influenced by what our culture, you know, the pressures of our culture and what we perceive as the optimal times to maybe be in existence. So, yeah, if a culture's like, that's what I was thinking and preparing today because I thought, okay, we're not, we're not old enough that we have too much of a lens, right. Like, when I'm 85, if I'm still alive, hopefully, maybe you can ask me what stage was the best that you felt?
And from what I hear from older people, right, that are older than us, I feel like we're right in it. Actually, from what I hear from most people that are, let's say, 65 plus, they'll tell me today, you know, my 40s into my early 50s was the best time of my life. And I realized, I feel that because I think you and I might feel similar because we're healthy generally and take care of ourselves, which is we're still relatively young enough where we can move around, we can lift weights, we can still play sports, and our physical ability is still there. But we're old enough, we're parents, we've been married long enough, we have some life experience, we can mature and we're, you know, maybe we're not as emotionally reacting to things and all that.
[00:41:08] Speaker A: Also, also with that is you have some level of, like, if you've worked this whole time, then you know, you have some level of professional success, professional.
[00:41:16] Speaker B: Kind of gravitas, go on vacation, know you can, you can, you can enjoy things now. And we've also, again, also culturally, right, we've learned to appreciate a good, you know, cabernet or a nice glass of whiskey. You know, there's certain things that we can appreciate now that maybe at 21 we didn't. And so, and so those all come into play. But then I thought about, I think actually your physical well being has a lot to do with it, because then I've met people that'll tell me their best, you know, in their 60s or 70s, the best years of their life when they were in their high school or their 20s. But then I'll look at them and they were in a place by the time they were our age that they were already unhealthy. You know, either they were obese already or they couldn't. They had some physical ailments. And so that's what I kind of think too is that I think we're nostalgic as human beings, that the part of our life that felt the best also is probably what we want to go back to.
[00:42:11] Speaker A: Because, well, but that's, but that's a different phenomenon than what's being talked about here. It's not about what life or what age would you want to be? Because in part of the, the discussion in here talked about oh well, people, what age could you be? And a lot of people would pick their, their age that they are now or very close to it. But it's actually how, what age do you see yourself as? You know, like okay, I, I see myself. I, I, I'm not, I don't, I'm not like these other like you for yourself it'd be like I'm, you're 45. You don't see yourself like these other old 45 year olds running around. You're, you're much more, you have much more in common with the 37 year olds that you're around. Or myself, I'm 43. Same kind of thing. Like, oh, you know, the dudes that are my age aren't pushing weight like I'm pushing weight or doing stuff like I'm doing. You know, they put them on the bench pressing those dudes, those old dudes, man, they can't see me. So I think part of it is how we see kind of what our perception is of what we should be at a certain age or what everybody else we see is at a certain age and then where we fit in, you know, so to speak. So a lot of that and then, so it could be how you feel, but they could also just be kind of what you conceive a 50 year old should be or is supposed to be. And then if you aren't doing that stuff, you're doing stuff that you perceive a 42 year old should do, then you, that you would look at yourself as that age. So ultimately I think it's a fascinating study though because, or these studies, they're plural. There's a lot of studies they're looking at because it looks at again how this disconnect in our mind versus something that's measurable, something that is. And we see this in other places in society where it's like, okay, I may be blank, but you know what, I'm not going to be blank, I'm going to be something else, you know, because that's where my mind is with it. And so it's not something.
[00:43:53] Speaker B: Hold on. Stop the press. Sorry.
Trans age. Because that what we're talking about here.
[00:43:59] Speaker A: We see. We see trans with age. We may see it with. We see it with people with race.
[00:44:03] Speaker B: Hold on, hold on, hold on.
[00:44:04] Speaker A: We see it with people with race.
I know, but I feel like I'm.
[00:44:08] Speaker B: Having an epiphany because now I can. So you're telling me I can create a new demographic here? Because I'm going to go. Could I legally petition to say that I feel like I'm 28. So I'm going to go get my birth certificate legally changed so I cannot be 45 and be 28.
[00:44:25] Speaker A: Hey, well, that's.
I have an answer for you. That's if your main issue for the way that you feel that your age is, is how other people treat you and not just how you want to behave yourself.
[00:44:37] Speaker B: Because I was going to say because the Century Village condos are cheaper than the regular condos because they're limited to age 55 and up and there's not that much demand for them. So maybe I'll go the other way and make myself 65 so I can go live in one of these. Pay less for my housing. I really like this. All right, well, I'm in.
[00:44:57] Speaker A: Load, like, get yourself a banner, get yourself a group and start protesting, man.
[00:45:02] Speaker B: But real quick, because I know you want to be out. But just to finish up on a serious note, your last point. You know, this is a totally different discussion that we could have a show on because it reminds me of an article I read a couple years ago, which was one of the biggest shifts in human existence was the invention of mirrors. Believe it or not, when there was enough mirrors that the average person could have a mirror in front of them. Because it was the first time on Mass that human beings could like, see themselves.
[00:45:30] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:45:30] Speaker B: I mean, unless you had like a still body of water, like a pond before that, you know, people in the desert probably never got to see what they look like. You know what I mean? And so this idea of. That's when we started thinking about things like, okay, even if you did, though.
[00:45:43] Speaker A: By the way, you still weren't going to be sitting there inspecting yourself every day, hey, I got to go to. I got to go somewhere. Let me go check what I look like. All that stuff like how being able to get that self feedback every time you're about to do something just didn't exist.
[00:45:56] Speaker B: And I think. But that's what I think feeds into this a little bit. That's why I said it's not the same discussion, but it's kind of adjacent in parallel because I think part of how we feel is also who we're around. So let's say you could have been 3,000 years ago, you know, 70 years old. If you're around a bunch of 30 year olds because you can't see yourself really. I mean, you might just see the wrinkles on your arms and stuff. You're, you're really, your mind thinks you look like them in a sense. And. But now in today's world, if I'm around a bunch of 30 year olds, I know I look 45 because I look in the mirror every day. So there's still some part of my subconscious thinks, oh man, I'm the old guy.
[00:46:31] Speaker A: Well, you know, but I mean, and not going down this too far, but a lot of the times in that sense you just wouldn't have the self feedback. You would, you would, you would know how you looked based on how other people treated you.
[00:46:41] Speaker B: So now I can be trans age. See, I walked into that now.
[00:46:45] Speaker A: Yeah, that, but that actually bring it full circle. That's how like instead of you judging yourself based on other people treat you how other people see, you're judging yourself based on your own what, you own what you see and then that is then influenced by what's going on in your own head.
[00:47:00] Speaker B: So you just justify trans age.
[00:47:03] Speaker A: So I don't attack or justify any of those. You know, like what goes on in the human mind is when the audience.
[00:47:12] Speaker B: Sees that in six months, all over social media. Just remember where it started. Okay.
[00:47:17] Speaker A: So. But I think we can wrap from there. We appreciate everybody for joining us on this episode of Call. Like I see it. Subscribe to the podcast, rate it, Review us, tell us what you think, send it to a friend. Till next time, I'm James Keys.
[00:47:27] Speaker B: Tun D1L all right, we'll talk to you next time.
