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Radio War Nerd EP #458 — Iraqi Insurgency, Part 1: 2003-04 (feat. Rob Ashlar) (Patreon)

Published:
2024-07-23 00:07:38
Edited:
2024-07-23 00:09:58
Imported:
2024-07
Tags:

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Content

Guest: Rob Ashlar

Recorded: July 18, 2024

The first in our 2-part series with Rob Ashlar on the Iraqi insurgency, one of the most important guerrilla movements of the past 50 years. This episode, we trace the early mutations of the Iraqi insurgency 2003-4 ending with the Second Battle of Fallujah.

Subscribe to Rob Ashlar's substack Read Rob Ashlar's article "Monotheism and Struggle: The Story of Iraqi Insurgency, 2003-04" in Cosmonaut.Check out RWN EP #435 with Rob Ashlar: IS-KP's Friends in US-Occupied Afghanistan

*Map of Anbar province

*Glossary:Abu Musab al-Zarqawi ("Zarqawi"): leader of JTJ (Jama'at al-Tawhid wa-l Jihad), then Al Qaeda in IraqUmar Hadid: Top Zarqawi lieutenant in Fallujah, killed Second Battle of FallujahAbu Muhammad al-Adnani ("Adnani"): Co-founder JTJ, later spokesman for ISISSheikh Abduallah al-Janabi ("Janabi"): Fallujah leader, sometimes allied with ZarqawiMuqtada al-Sadr: Shia leader, Mahdi ArmyJTJ (Jama'at al-Tawhid wa-I Jihad): Zarqawi's first jihadi group in Iraq, later becomes IQI/Al Qaeda in IraqNick Berg: American contractor mysteriously arrested, released, kidnapped & beheaded in 2004

**Hey Kiwis! Join the War Nerd in Wellington, NZ!"How To Read Wars: A Public Conversation with John Dolan" with the Wellington Socialist SocietyWhen: Thursday, July 25th at 6pmWhere: Bedlam & Squalor, Level 1 18 Garrett St, Wellington, New Zealand

Total time: 1:14:54

Direct link to this episode's mp3 here

*

Subscribe to Radio War Nerd at patreon.com/radiowarnerd

Sound production by Telescope Audio

Check out the Radio War Nerd Merch store here!

Order your print or ebook of John Dolan's new book Erdogan Pizza: Dispatches from a Violent & Grotesque World

Files

Comments

Danny Duplex

Glad to see Rob return. I actually thought of the IS-KP episode because of that batshit speech Trump gave at the RNC. At one point when he has rambling he said Biden shouldn't have withdrawn from Afghanistan because they would still have a millitary base "right next to where China test their Nuclear Weapons." Obviously that point was filtered through his rambling but still a weird moment nonetheless.

Isaac Suárez

RWN- thank you. Brilliant episode (and exactly the kind of analysis we lack in anglophone accounts of the war. Rob Ashlar is brilliant.) Re “the Iraqi insurgency was already sectarian”- this makes a perverse sense if you take a step back. The Iran-Iraq War had scarred a generation of Iraqi soldiers and ended the “salad days” of Baathism abruptly for Iraq’s middle class. It also politicized Shiite and Kurdish identity- both populations became suspected enemies- working in league with Iran (and, from the view of Sunni Arab Iraqis, the “shadowy” forces behind Iran.) If you were a Sunni, you did not need to be a Baathist to hate Iran and see “sinister conspiracies” all around your country. You could despise Saddam, and despise the forces that you (with reason) blame for your loss of living standard and humiliation. Sectarian Salafism offers a banner to die under, and a mythology to give your struggle (and death) meaning. The old regime provided weapons and an ample supply of trained (and even veteran) soldiers. The abject failure of the Coalition to govern, protect your community, or deliver on its promises gives you both grievances and a powerful sense of contempt. The ascendancy of a thuggish, corrupt, and sectarian Shiite political milieu (and arrogant, corrupt, and cynical Kurdish politics) grants you a set of enemies you can hit. As with the Ashlar episode regarding IS-K, there’s a sickeningly clear, but rarely spoken logic to the Sunni insurgency. The road to sectarianism, in war scarred states like Iraq and Afghanistan, is shorter than most care to acknowledge. The error Americans make is to assume that this sectarian is innate and eternal. It is no such thing. It is created, forged by defeat, suffering, and bitter humiliation.

Sam Zeng

Rob is a Gem, I was having a pretty bad day till listening to this. Hats off to Rob again for giving us the history of the recent past which our government are keen on making sure we do not remember.

Adam Murphy

Really looking forward to this. After shock and awe I thought the US military was practically omnipotent. The insurgency disabused me of that notion.

a clash of purple

Why did the occupation take sides in the sectarian conflict? Why *did* the regime fail so badly? It's not like Saddam had any legitimacy. If I understand correctly, it's a very different situation from Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, the Americans didn't really care and there was effectively no mission and no oversight. Everyone was just stealing money from the U.S. taxpayers, and people supported the Taliban over the corrupt collaborators. Iraq, as far as I know, was something the American leadership actually cared about. Nobody was loyal to Saddam and his regime. It seems like, with all the resources the U.S. expended on the occupation, there was an opportunity to work something out that most people could live with. Maybe not a Western-style liberal democracy, but some kind of government that had some support from... *anyone.* An institution that could at least protect the population from DAESH and not drop everything and run away at the first sign of their coming, as Elijah Magnier talked about. It's not impossible to build cross-sect militias, as the Iranians demonstrated in both Iraq and Syria. So why didn't the Americans do that to begin with? Did it all boil down to oil? Were the Shia death squads the only ones who would let the Americans liberalize the oil? Were the occupation forces too provocative for the locals to put up with? Did the leadership just have some irrational fondness for the corrupt losers they put into power? It's just endlessly shocking to me that, with all the money spent on these occupations, they don't seem to accomplish *anything* except pointlessly killing people and turning everyone against them. Couldn't they just buy everybody off? Like, instead of flying Taco Bell to the bases there for the troops, why not just hand every household $10,000 in cash and promise there's more where that came from as long as they don't join the insurgency? What did the coalition leaders think they were accomplishing?

Tristan

I think the decade after the first Iraq War was all about breaking Sadams legitimacy and breaking down the infrastructure of Iraq through really harsh sanctions. So when the US rolls in again there's like a 'potemkin State' just ready to fall over. Looking at how Iraq was doing during and after the 90s it seems like such cruel joke to just go in and shoot the place up again, on top of all the other evil.

Gary Wall

cant wait for the next episode! This was really great!

Sean

Iraq was definitely more on the forefront of American’s minds, but to say that the Bush Admin “cared” about it is debatable. The provisional government was staffed with 20-something Republican nepotism hires who were tasked with building a liberal democracy in a country that had been under sanctions for decades and had its entire infrastructure destroyed in the “shock and awe” bombing campaigns. When I studied the insurgency in college in the 2010s, my understanding was the De-Baathification process was the final straw, dissolving both the civil service and the military and putting thousands of Iraqis, many of them with military training, out of work in a devastated country. I agree with Rob that many of the chess pieces were set before the invasion even began, but so much of US strategy early in the war was just insanely punitive to Iraqis, and they paid the price for it.

Mark Ames

do dust devils count?

Miko

On the Ezra Klein making it big topic, he may have made it big but he has nothing important to say. In 20 years there will be nothing of his worth reading, just piles of dated conventional wisdom and pandering to a dying system. The RWN archives on the other hand, will be a phenomenal oral history for as long as you guys continue it. And not to be grim, but even after your gone, both of you will have actual professional legacies you're leaving to future generations.

PostmasterFenian

I feel like they don’t maybe? Idk to be fair I didn’t see the tornado but neighbors did

PostmasterFenian

Gotta love climate change though it brings the tornados to wherever you are!

Nicholas Moore

I can’t hear mention of Ba’athism anymore without thinking about the trillbiillies and the Ba’athist coal miner

Gary Wall

wait what is this bit, that sounds hilarious

William

I’m feeling attacked for calling New York tornadoes bitch made and gatekeeping tornado victimhood /what it means to be living in a place where swirly wind knocks shit down. Waiting for an apology, Mark

William

Okay, so, why isn’t anyone talking about how hard it is to break into the assasination pro leagues? Here’s a guy who was forced to work at a nursing home while pursuing his dreams of chucking lead at high value targets. Did he have the privilege of being born into a family of gun enthusiasts? No. Did he have any talent? None to speak of, it seems. Actually, despite all his struggles and grinding he couldn’t even get an fbi agent to keep an eye on him, or entrap him in a scheme… smdh

Simon

Great episode. I like Ashlar's approach. I'm also glad Mark brought up Gaza with respect to Fallujah. Whenever an American talks about the unique evil of Israel, I always think it's denialism of America's invasion of Iraq. Every awful tactic Israel employs--torture, white phosphorus, sieges, sanctions, leafleting civilians to tell them you're going to massacre them--has an American precedent in Iraq. This creepy NYT embedded piece that covers a hospital invasion really stuck with me and immediately came to mind with Israel's most recent Al-Shifa destruction. https://archive.is/eVTLb (Fun fact: Al-Shifa was also the name of the pharmaceutic factory that the US bombed in Sudan)

Kevin Walsh

Every manager/administrator has to spend the first couple of weeks on a new job learning from their subordinates how things work before they can actually make any sensible decisions. The language barriers alone would have made setting up a new administration challenging even if the Bush Administration had sent over competent managers and hadn't sacked huge swathes of Iraq's civil service. Combine that with the (illegal) mandate to privatise Iraq's state owned industries, and it's no wonder the occupation was a disaster.

Raphael Wakefield

It's weird to bring up Nick Berg and not mention that he had contact with a 9/11 hijacker in 2000 and was likely intelligence, as per wikipedia

drizzly_november

I didn't know that, that's very strange. Who amongst us hasn't let Zacarias Moussaoui borrow our laptop to send emails with no explanation?

Mark Ames

video confession forthcoming

Mark Ames

That's insane, I don't remember this part of the Nick Berg story, though I did write about Moussaoui way back when in the eXile, because his big thing was he wanted to jihad in Chechnya and kill Russians, and that (ostensibly) was the reason why DC FBI told the local FBI to leave him alone and refused to give them permission to read Moussaoui's laptop until after 9/11.

JDF

🐐 guest

JDF

Unless it’s not worth mentioning

Vincent

If that Nick Berg shit happened to me, I would simply recite the Shahada. What are the gonna do, kill a Muslim convert on video 😏