The Iraq War: 20 Year Later - A Brian Kilmeade Show Special Presentation

And now, a Brian Kilmeade show special presentation, The Iraq War. Twenty years later, here's Brian Kilmeade.

Hi everyone, Brian Kilmeade here and it's time for a Brian Kilmeade show special presentation, The Iraq War 20 years later. And who better put it all in perspective than General David Perkins, now retired, U.S. Army four-star general. Then he was a colonel. His last assignment for retiring was commanding general of the United States Army training and doctor in command. And I had a chance to stay with him before the war started, actually two weeks before the war started in Kuwait. And we've kept in touch ever since. He went on to great things at the Pentagon and beyond. And his fighting prowess, his ability to strategize on the fly is legendary and will be taught for years to come. He is also somebody who did the Thunder Run and said, you know, why wait here? Why don't we just take Baghdad?

And he did. General Perkins, welcome back. Hey Brian, good to talk to you. How are you doing?

I'm doing good. What rank were you when I met you? I was a colonel.

You're correct. I was a colonel at the time. 3rd Infantry, 2nd Division? 2nd Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division. So what was your assignment when the war started? So when you visited me there in Kuwait in the desert, I was the 2nd Brigade commander of the 3rd Infantry Division.

So I was the brigade commander. Do you think, first off, can you believe it was 20 years ago? Does it seem 20 years ago to you? You know, when you start thinking about this, in some ways it seems like yesterday, when I can recall some of the more vivid memories. And then in other ways, it's almost a lifetime ago.

So it spans the whole spectrum, I think, both emotionally and intellectually. But it is amazing it's been 20 years. They went by fast. You know, and put in perspective, leading up to this war, I mean, we had 9-11th and the invasion of Afghanistan. We miss Bin Laden, but got a lot from Mohammed Atef on down, got a lot of higher ups. And almost immediately we realized one of the main problems of one of our main enemies was Iraq, and it was going to be a problem. And we started getting onto the Iraq footing. When did you realize that Iraq would be next? Yeah, so our brigade was sent over there in September of 2002. And we were there in the desert where you linked up with us, in the Kuwaiti desert, really initially as a defensive mechanism to, you know, the neighbors have been rattling both in Iraq and in the Mideast and trying to prevent what happened with the previous invasion of Kuwait with Saddam.

So it was kind of a defensive measure, kind of a show of force. And then things started developing, I would say around the November or December timeframe, about the time when you came and visited us, that it seemed like a lot of things were being put in place, that the U.S. was going to invade, and then it got real serious after the beginning of the year. So when the invasion happens, and we know it was imminent, he kicked out the inspectors, he said, let him back in or this is going to happen.

He knew he wasn't going to let him back in, so this was on. When did you realize, as you crossed the border from Kuwait to Iraq, that this would be different? They weren't going to necessarily blow up the oil wells. They weren't necessarily going to be mass surrenders of a pitched army.

Yeah, so that's a good question. I mean, we spent, so there was the proverbial berm there between Kuwait and Iraq. We spent a lot of time war gaming that and how we would get through. And I had a number of Desert Storm veterans in my brigade.

I was not one. I watched Desert Storm on TV while I was teaching at West Point. And so I think there was this initial assumption that it was going to be Desert Storm-like.

But the speed that we went across the berm and the initial lack of resistance immediately sort of clued us in that this is going to be different. And, you know, Saddam had learned some lessons from Desert Storm and that was don't meet the Americans head on in the wide open desert because the Americans are very good at that. And their Air Force will destroy you and then they can deploy large armored formations and they can make quick work of you. So Saddam had really pulled his conventional army and large forces back into the population areas because historically the U.S. has not done as well there as we had in the wide open desert. So it quickly became clear that had become his strategy. Can you talk about the Thunder Run and what stood out from you and the decision you made in the battlefield, the power that you do have as a commander in the battlefield, which I think makes our fighting force unique.

We don't necessarily need go signs from the Pentagon. What led to the Thunder Run and the attack on Baghdad? Yeah, so as we were just discussing, it became clear this was not going to be a Desert Storm battle in the wide open desert. Saddam had pulled his conventional forces and actually a fairly large army back into the population centers because the U.S. historically has not done well there.

You can look back at Mogadishu and other examples of that. He thought he being Saddam, that's what he could leverage and therefore he was going to try to, I think, set up for a war of attrition. Urban environments tend to be very lethal environments, very high casualty producing environments. You can look all the way back to World War II and the Battle of Stalingrad and other things like that. And he thought that that would really convince the Americans not to go into Baghdad, not to go in the city because they would be unwilling to take that number of casualties.

That is not necessarily where we have the advantage. And so it became clear that we were going to have to fight on his terrain being Baghdad or the urban area, but we can't fight with his tactics. And his tactics would be delay, increased numbers of casualties. He's willing to take the number of casualties.

He assumed the West and the Americans in particular would avoid high numbers of casualties. And so what we did was come up with a strategy. As you said, the American Army, one of our big strengths is our ability to empower junior leaders, well-trained leaders, well-led units all the way from a squad, in this case up to brigades and divisions, and empower them and let them make decisions. And so we had done the analysis as we went from Kuwait up to Baghdad that our advantage would be a very quick thrust, a very heavily armored force. We were an armored brigade, a tank brigade to go in very quickly, react and create, if you want, for lack of a better term, chaos that his soldiers were not trained for.

They don't have the discipline for it, and they don't really have the culture for it. And that's the strategy we chose. And you did.

And I remember you take Baghdad, Saddam Hussein flees, and I remember you told me, and Eric Wesley, who's now a general too, you said that in the beginning people were walking up to you saying, okay, now that you're here, what do I do? Am I allowed to set up a table here? Can I sell shoes?

Can I sell this? Everybody wanted permission to do everything. And you're trying to say, these people don't know what it's like to have any type of free will. Yeah, so that clearly, I would say is a lesson learned from me, is that we Americans really underestimate people who have lived under tyranny, who have lived under oppression, whether it be the old Soviet regime or Saddam regime. I mean, how that just saps people's will, it saps their independent thought, it saps their vision for a positive future.

And they literally are just used to somebody telling them every aspect of their lives, what they can and cannot do. And then as soon as we came in and took Baghdad, they assumed that's how we would act towards them as well. Yeah, and obviously there was some chaos there. The army was dismissed, the hunt for Saddam Hussein took place, Hussein and Qusay get killed, the brutal sons. And then this is the story, December 14th, 2003, cut for it. Yesterday, December the 13th, at around 8 30 p.m. Baghdad time, United States military forces captured Saddam Hussein alive.

He was found near a farmhouse outside the city of Tikrit in a swift raid conducted without casualties. So they got him. What did that do to the war effort? You know, so now it is clear that Saddam is no longer in charge, although he really had not been in charge for a long period of time. But another point that I'll make here, Brian, is if you take a look at the fall of Baghdad and the seizure of Baghdad in April of 2003 and then the capture of Saddam in December. And then actually, you can fast forward many years later to Osama bin Laden raid. Those are very, very difficult military operations to plan, to execute, to pull off.

And in each case, they were done with lightning speed. They were successful tactically at the tactical level in very low numbers of casualties. And I think what that does is it builds the expectation amongst the American policymakers and the American public at large. That war is easy and that being successful is not that hard. But yet you compare that to what's going on right now in Ukraine with Russia. And, you know, the Russians tried to invade the capital city, which is half the size of Baghdad. Ukraine's three million, Baghdad six million, Ukraine's right next door to Russia. You know, Iraq is thousands of miles away from us. And the Russians have taken, by some estimates, over 200,000 casualties. They had 150,000 people in the initial invasion going into Kiev and they have failed. And if you take a look at when we took Baghdad, the Thunder Run, we had a thousand Americans at our brigade going into the city and took, although each one of them very significant to their family and sad for us, took eight soldiers KIA. And I think that's one of the lessons learned as well, is that if you apply American military force historically, especially recent history at the tactical level, it is going to be successful and it's going to be fast. Therefore, you've got to think about how do you exploit that success? Exactly. And we come back after the success comes the real challenge, finding a standing up a security force so we can leave.

And then, of course, would lead to the surge. It's our privilege to have with us four star General David Perkins. We talked about the days when he was a colonel, as we look back at 20 years since the Iraqi war.

Don't move. You're listening to a Brian Kilmeade show special presentation. The Iraq war 20 years later. More with Brian right after this. Play style adventure with your friends and four player co-op with cross play and cross progression on all platforms on June 6th. Hell welcomes all pre-purchase now at Diablo four dot blizzard dot com.

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Subscribe and listen now by going to Fox News podcast dot com. You're listening to a Brian Kilmeade show special presentation. The Iraq war 20 years later. Welcome back, everybody. We're looking at 20 years since the Iraq war.

This is a Brian Kilmeade show special presentation. 20 years in review. So General Perkins, you guys, the invasion successful Saddam Hussein is captured.

When did you realize it was a mistake. If you do think that to dismiss all Sunni members of the Army and tell everyone tell them to go home because they end up making the back of the insurgency. Correct.

Yeah. So, you know, that happened in the summer of 2003 while I was still there as brigade commander. And this comes back to the point I said earlier that that one of the planning factors has to be that the American military is without peer tactically and operationally in and we'll get the job done. And so what you've got to think about is don't obsessively focus on just the immediate task at hand, the tactical task in hand.

But the proverbial, you know, when a dog chases the car, what does the dog do when it catches it? Really think about what happens if this is successful, because it's going to be very quick. And if you wait until you get that level of success to come up with the next series of plans, you are going to be behind the power curve. So, General, in a very diplomatic way, are you saying you planned the invasion, but nobody planned post invasion.

That was Jay Garner who didn't even have transportation into the city. And then he had to set up something and it didn't really work because most of his connections were Kurdish. I think we all could have done a better work and plan planning for success, maintaining the momentum and leveraging success.

Got it. I want to bring it to, so we knew the chaos, we took the casualties, it started getting really rough. But I don't think you can overstate the brilliance of the surge, the design and the execution. Here's George W. Bush announcing a cut six. This is a strong commitment. But for it to succeed, our commanders say the Iraqis will need our help. So America will change our strategy to help the Iraqis carry out their campaign to put down sectarian violence and bring security to the people of Baghdad. Using the Iraqis as partners, the surge is something I'm sure you're going to study in military colleges for generations. And once it works, it's helped design by General Keane and David Petraeus. Here's what Petraeus said September 10, 2007.

This is about eight months later, cut seven. The military objectives of the surge are in large measure being met in recent months in the face of tough enemies and the brutal summer heat of Iraq. Coalition and Iraqi security forces have achieved progress in the security arena. Amazing. Right. And you teamed with the local tribes to do it, understood with who the insurgency was and returned the country back to the Iraqis, correct?

Yeah. In fact, I had, you know, Iraq was the gift that kept on giving. So I had two more subsequent tours to Iraq.

What are the tours? I worked for General Petraeus just right after he had made that announcement there and the surge had gone on. And another lesson learned is it is very important how the U.S. finishes these jobs because it not only relates to that mission, but it is developing your reputation for what will, if history repeats itself, which it generally does, will be further conflict. And other partners and coalition members that we work with look to the U.S. to be the leader and they base that off the reputation of the last big event that we had. And so I think doing a, you know, ending it up in a positive way is very important, not just for that mission, but for the follow on ones, especially your reputation. Right. And of course, we did pull out early. Obama promised to do it.

Politics got in the way. And then in comes ISIS. We go back in and we'll talk in the next half hour about where Iraq is today and what would have happened had we not got in. General, you have to feel great about your service. Overall, when you look back and you lost a lot of friends, do you feel as though this mission was worth it? I feel that the missions we were given at whatever unit I was at multiple times, those missions were accomplished tactically. It really did move the needle very far down the road. I mean, I hate to think what would have happened if those were not successful missions and every life lost is a tragedy. But I think those soldiers and their family members can rest well at night knowing that they serve their nation and really the global community in the finest tradition, the U.S. military. Absolutely.

In general, people should realize they probably don't. Iraq was a problem, whether we wanted to address it, how we wanted to address it. He was going to be a problem that had to be dealt with.

And we were the only people to deal with it. And and that's what we're talking about 20 years later. I appreciate everything you did and everyone listening, anyone who served. Just know that people are in awe of our military and the execution, even if some politician made some decisions that were ill advised.

And I believe in the long run, this will really work out for our national security in the Middle East. General, it's been great getting to know you. Thanks so much for your reflection and always thanks for your service. All right, Brian. Well, again, always a pleasure to talk to you. And thanks for kind of putting this whole chapter of our history in perspective.

Absolutely. We come back, we continue this special edition of The Brian Kilmeade Show, The Iraq War 20 years later. You're listening to a Brian Kilmeade show special presentation, The Iraq War 20 years later. The facts and Iraqi's behavior, Iraq's behavior demonstrate that Saddam Hussein and his regime have made no effort, no effort to disarm as required by the international community. Indeed, the facts and Iraq's behavior show that Saddam Hussein and his regime are concealing their efforts to produce more weapons of mass destruction. Colin Powell, his secretary of state at the time, February 5th, 2003, and his address to the United Nations, consolidating the understanding that weapons of mass destruction were on the march again inside Iraq. We have no choice but to invade unless they let weapons inspectors in.

They said no, the war was on. As we continue the Brian Kilmeade show special, Iraq War 20 years later, let's bring in Eli Lake, who covered every step of this war. He's a contributing editor currently at Commentary Magazine, columnist for the New York Sun, host of the Re-Education Podcast, and you can follow him on Twitter, at Eli Lake. His latest commentary story really encapsulates where Iraq is today and beyond the Iraq War 20 years later. Eli, welcome. Thanks so much for having me, Brian. Hey, do you remember your thoughts when you were watching that address?

Yeah, I did. I thought that, like most people, that you could tell from Saddam Hussein's behavior he wouldn't allow weapons inspectors to meet privately, for example, with his scientists. He would, you know, still was threatening to shoot down surveillance aircraft over areas of the country that he was not prepared to disarm.

And what I didn't know, and I don't think what Colin Powell knew in that moment, was that part of Saddam Hussein's strategy was to persuade his neighbors and his own population to believe that he had chemical, biological, and other kinds of weapons of mass destruction as a deterrent for, you know, what he believed would be either an uprising at home or an invasion from one of his neighbors. Uli, what I think you did great in listening to in the past and reading your commentary now is to bring us back to that time. It's not okay just to say, well, here we are in 2023 and 2024, and we're analyzing the Iraq War from our perspective. You got to go back to when it started, 2003, what was happening every night in the news from George H.W. Bush's regime to Bill Clinton's. It was Iraq rising up again, taking out the Kurds, putting down the Shia, rattling the cages of its neighbor, kicking out weapons inspectors. Iraq was a huge problem.

I think you, yeah, I think you really summed it up. I think you have to go back to 1991. In 1991 is when you have this extraordinary, you know, kind of coalition of many nations right at the end of the Cold War, where the U.S. liberates Kuwait. There was a question as to what to do with Saddam Hussein's regime, and there were mixed signals that were given at the time from Washington.

On the one hand, George H.W. Bush would say that the Iraqi people perhaps could rise up and retake back their country, which is a very nice sentiment. On the other hand, Norman Schwartzkopf, who was the general at the time, allowed for Saddam Hussein to use his attack helicopters and the remaining tanks basically to go after kind of any kind of internal insurrection. And so those mixed messages that the United States was not willing to go all the way to Baghdad because of the terms of the coalition and so forth, created the conditions under which many Iraqi Shia, particularly in the south, did rise up and they were slaughtered. And then when Saddam Hussein decided to try to continue that approach in the north against his Kurdish population, that was too much to bear. And the Bush administration created what was known as the no fly zone.

There were two of them in the north and the south of the country. But that's really the beginning of, you could say, the unfinished war is 1991 and the terms under which Iraq had a ceasefire, which is they had to prove that they were going to get rid of their weapons of mass destruction. And that was what that's the precedent.

That's the antecedent. That's the history that led to the 2003 moment. After we invaded with H.W. Bush and the big coalition, we did what we said we were going to do and not take Baghdad, you know, killed, you know, wiped out their tanks, wiped out their army. These people were mass surrendering in a way we weren't anticipating. We thought this 500,000 man army was going to fight to the death. They blew up their oil fields. And in the end, it was a big victory for Schwarzkopf and H.W.

Bush. But in it, we found out when we went in there how many more weapons they had in systems they had biological and chemical weapons in a nuclear program that we didn't even know about. And later when there was a defector, which was one of Saddam's son in laws, they brought us to other areas where they had weapons of mass destruction in these chicken coops. Right.

That's right. And what you're talking about there is this period where the United States had no idea how how advanced the Iraqi programs were in 1991. And that was a lesson that the U.S. intelligence community and not just the U.S. intelligence community. I mean, I would say the Israelis, European services, everybody sort of took a much more alarmist view of Iraqi WMD after the experience of 1991 and learning just how far advanced all this was. And so you were absolutely right that in this period of the 90s, this interregnum between the First Gulf War and the Second Gulf War, there were defectors, there were all kinds of people that were basically painting the story that the that Saddam had a far more established WMD program and was going out of his way to try to conceal it. But we didn't know was that Saddam Hussein needed to wanted to have his neighbors and his population, as I said before, believe that he had these weapons when he really didn't.

He tried to kind of almost like it's a triple bank shot. What he wanted to do was wriggle out from under the sanctions. So they would give nothing to the inspectors, but still persuade the Iranians in particular. He had these.

So you better not mess with them. And that was his strategy. And it was working in right up until 2003 because the sanctions were collapsing.

There was some talk about maybe modifying them in some ways. And Saddam thought that that was his strategy for survival. And then, of course, he didn't survive. You know, once George W. Bush launches the war in 2003. And here's how it sounded.

Cut to my fellow citizens. At this hour, American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger. On my orders, coalition forces have begun striking selected targets of military importance to undermine Saddam Hussein's ability to wage war.

These are opening stages of what will be a broad and concerted campaign. And it was. And we got to Baghdad quicker than anyone thought.

And we talked about this with the thunder run and everything. And when we got there, what do you think? What do we found? What did we find? Do you think that was surprising? Well, I don't necessarily know what's surprising, but what we did find evidence of mass cruelty from this horrible regime. And that's the part of the story that I think has really been missing in a lot of these retrospectives, which is that we found, for example, in the headquarters of the Iraqi branch of the International Olympic Committee, which was run by his son Day.

Medieval torture devices, which were employed against athletes that did not perform at the level expected in international competitions. If you can imagine, that is really a kind of level of sadism that we just don't encounter, that you would have an office of what is supposed to be a respected international organization, the Olympic Committee, turned into a torture chamber. And that, to me, is one example out of many of how we sort of see the really systematic brutalization of an entire population under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein.

It's true. There are a number of very cruel dictatorships in the world, and the United States has not and cannot attack every single one of them in the name of human rights. It's an unrealistic idea. However, I am not going to be among the many people who are in the consensus today that it was a mistake to try to liberate Iraq. I do think that getting rid of Saddam Hussein was a morally just thing to do. So what is Iraq like today? And as you mentioned, John McCain thought it was a mistake in retrospect, and he says I take some of the blame. When we come back, what Eli Lake says Iraq is like today, and that maybe where people are too quick to say this was a bad move for the U.S. This is a special edition of The Brian Kilmeade Show, Iraq War 20 Years Later. You're listening to a Brian Kilmeade Show special presentation, The Iraq War 20 Years Later.

More with Brian right after this. You're listening to a Brian Kilmeade Show special presentation, The Iraq War 20 Years Later. Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.

Because of you, our nation is more secure. Because of you, the tyrant has fallen and Iraq is free. And that was May 2nd, 2003, but as we all know, the war went on.

We had to change tactics, have a surge. God captured Saddam Hussein. So much was done and completed in order to ultimately get it right. And now we have 2,000 troops there after the rise of ISIS and outgrowth of Al Qaeda. And the current government wants us to stay. It was supposed to be an operation, as you write, Eli Lake, of $200 billion. It's cost $2 trillion. So people say, well, Iraq was a mistake. But you say not so fast.

Why? Well, I think the first thing you have to look at is that there have been six successive national elections. There is a constitution that has been ratified by a vote of the Iraqi people. The fact that there continues to be elections and that they are competitive elections, we don't know the outcome of them. And there's certainly, you could argue, flawed elections. There certainly is corruption in Iraq, that's for sure. But that itself is a major accomplishment when you consider that you had a nasty and awful terrorist organization, first in Al Qaeda and then in ISIS, that did everything they could, much like the Taliban, to prevent anyone from voting and to terrorizing people who had the courage to cast their votes in these elections. Second of all, when you had Iranian-backed Shia death squads, you had almost a kind of, you know, I would say two terror wars and a sectarian war in the middle of all that. For a country to have not just one, not just two, but successive elections on a national scale, that really is, I think, a near miracle and it's something that should be celebrated, even if the United States failed to adequately respond at first to the insurgency.

And you can find all kinds of other laws. I'm not denying them, but I'm saying that you've got to look at the other side of it. The other thing is, is that the GDP of Iraq is now tenfold what it was, you know, in the last days of Saddam. Now, granted, that was under international sanctions, but it was those sanctions existed because he deliberately did not comply with the terms of the 1991 ceasefire. So the idea that, you know, the country now has its oil flowing, it now is in a much better place economically. And then, you know, the other part of it, I would say, is that there is now, you know, very much of a free press in Iraq.

It's very boisterous. It's not a perfect country in a lot of ways. There's still a ton of corruption and it's something that the Iraqis are going to have to, you know, really come to terms with.

But on the other hand, I think there are some things that are important. It's not just that you got rid of Saddam Hussein, but you replaced that system, at least with regular elections and a constitution, and that's important. I mean, like our guest here who has covered this war from even up to today, people point out they have not become a vassal state of Iran.

They have got further independence. And you point out that even though the current leader is Shia, obviously they are mostly Shia in Iran, they are looking for their own identity and they push back about telling our 2,000 troops to go home. People realize we were not in it to get their oil. We were not in it to dominate Iraq.

We were in it to give them an opportunity to be a free country. Do you think that's beginning to resonate? I don't think it's resonating really in the West, but I think if you go to the Middle East and you look at where the trouble spots are right now, it's interesting how Iraq is kind of, you know, much more stable than a lot of the other places in the Middle East. And you can't just say that, you know, the fall of Saddam Hussein is sort of the cause of all this instability. I'd say the cause of a lot of the instability is the Iranians and, you know, the remnants of this sort of jihadist Sunni ideology. You can go through the list, but I think in that you're seeing closer to the region sort of a better understanding of what the implications of the war are still in America. It is, you know, I think you now have a Republican Party where the kind of maybe rising faction of it is very much saying that the Iraq war is a mistake and the Democrats, you know, they define themselves in the 2000s and the 2010s as the party that opposes now the Iraq war, even though many of their representatives, including Hillary Clinton, voted for it at the time.

Absolutely. In the place you had 70 senators vote for it. And by Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Larry King, you could see it all. They all thought they had weapons of mass destruction. People try to rewrite this history or say George Bush lied to avenge his dad not finishing the war. It is just total, if I could steal Joe Biden's line, malarkey. But you say one of these key moments, what happened during the Trump administration, here's the then president, January 3rd, 2020, cut 10.

As president, my highest and most solemn duty is the defense of our nation and its citizens. Last night at my direction, the United States military successfully executed a flawless precision strike that killed the number one terrorist anywhere in the world, Qasem Soleimani. Soleimani was plotting imminent and sinister attacks on American diplomats and military personnel.

How does that play into this storyline? Well, I think it definitely affects the storyline because Qasem Soleimani was the sort of Iranian spy and paramilitary master who was, you know, managing a front on multiple fronts throughout the Middle East, including in Iraq. And who was also killed with him is a guy by the name of Mohandas, who was the sort of leader of the Shia militias, which didn't have any kind of accountability within the Iraqi system. So getting rid of those two, I think may have, we'll still see, but it could potentially buy Iraq some time in order to kind of reestablish what might be called the monopoly of violence. Because there is this problem, which is that in 2000, after Obama, you know, withdraws and you see ISIS taking over almost half of Iraq in 2014, 2015, you know, the Iraqis had to find, you know, go to someone and they largely turned to the Iranians, particularly these Shia militias, in order to save their country.

And now the question is, what do you do in order to decommission them so you can get back to having a state that, you know, has this monopoly of violence? And I would say that that still is an unfinished project, but taking out Qasem Soleimani, who was a very capable enemy, is a major, you know, I think does help the Iraqis down the line in trying to figure that out. And also all the predictions that the strike against Soleimani would lead to, you know, chaos and misery, they have not come true.

It's now 2023. And all of the people who said this was the worst thing you've ever seen, there hasn't been those shoes have not dropped. So in some ways, it also showed that America can take these kinds of steps at times, and it's not the end of the world. And sometimes it can be a very good thing. So that's an area where I'd say Trump deserves some credit.

Anyway, your research is tremendous and your perspective is invaluable because you lived it and you covered it. And, you know, Barack Obama is the one who pulled our troops out early. We got ISIS. Barack Obama is the one who took out Qaddafi, had no plan. That created more, I would argue, unrest in the Middle East than we could have imagined because then Trump came in, got rid of the caliphate, and now there's somewhat peace in Iraq today.

I want to say one thing, Brian, because I think you also have to account for this. If you have three decades of a sadistic tyranny that pits the different ethnic groups in his country against one another, when you get rid of that regime, you're going to have lots of violence probably. And it was predicted at the time, people like Christopher Hitchens who supported the war said there will be violence because of the nature of this terrible regime that sort of pitted these ethnic groups against one another. So sometimes you have to look at it like that, which is that it's not always America's fault. It's not because Obama withdrew the troops or Bush went in or this or that. There's a whole history in the Middle East that's going to affect these things as well, and I think that's an important point.

Absolutely. It's never easy in the Middle East. It's never cut and dry.

Maybe if warning ahead of time this could take a while or knowing that ahead of time, that would be interesting. But I don't think Bush lied a lot into a war. I think that doesn't fly to any clearer thinking people, I hope. Eli, thanks so much. Appreciate your perspective. Thank you for having me.

Okay, Eli, you got it. He's a contributing editor at Commentary Magazine, columnist for the New York Sun and host of his re-education podcast. This has been Brian Kilmeade's show special, The Iraq War 20 Years Later. The Fearless and Proud podcast series looks at acts of bravery and strength by women, and in the first season, we'll look at women who played important roles in the Civil War. In episode three, we'll be looking at two intriguing women of the war. First, Cuban-born Loretta Janeta Velazquez, who was sent to the United States for an education by her well-to-do Spanish family. We then move on to the legendary Harriet Tubman. We'll discuss her time as a nurse, soldier, and spy for the Union Army, and talk about the Combee River Raid, a turning point in the war. Listen ad-free on Fox News podcast via Apple Podcasts, and Prime members can listen to this show ad-free on Amazon Music. Listen to this show ad-free on Fox News Podcast Plus, on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music with your Prime membership, or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.