peterbergen, Author at PeterBergen.com

When a newly-hired intern at the International Criminal Court was arrested and revealed to be a Russian spy, it begged the question: what was he up to? Now that Vladimir Putin has a warrant from this court for his arrest, it’s not hard to imagine the spy was planning to tell Moscow about evidence that is accumulating in the case against Russia for its atrocities in Ukraine. Turns out the evidence is abundant — and this may be the conflict that finally makes it hard to get away with war crimes.

“Soldiers Don’t Go Mad,” book event with Charles Glass, New America Online

From the moment war broke out across Europe in 1914, the world entered a new, unparalleled era of modern warfare. Within the first four months of the war, the British Army recorded the nervous collapse of ten percent of its officers. In his new book Soldiers Don’t Go Mad, New America International Security Program Fellow Charles Glass draws upon rich source materials from World War One and his own deep understanding of trauma and war to tell the story of the soldiers and doctors who struggled with the effects of industrial warfare on the human psyche. Told through the lens of two soldier-poets during World War One, Soldiers Don’t Go Mad investigates the roots of what we now know as post-traumatic stress disorder. In doing so, Glass brings historical bearing to questions of how war affects mental health and how creative work can help people come to terms with even the darkest of times.

Join New America’s International Security Program for a discussion with Charles Glass, author of Soldiers Don’t Go Mad: A Story of Brotherhood, Poetry, and Mental Illness During the First World War. Glass is a fellow with New America’s International Security program and a writer, journalist, broadcaster and publisher, who has written on conflict in the Middle East, Africa and Europe for the past forty-five years.

Join the conversation online using #SoldiersDontGoMad and following @NewAmericaISP.

Participant:

Charles Glass
Author, Soldiers Don’t Go Mad
Fellow, New America International Security Program

Moderator:

Peter Bergen, @peterbergencnn
Vice President, New America
Co-Director, Center on the Future of War, ASU
Professor of Practice, ASU

The unnecessary price of Covid-19, CNN.com

Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is the author of “The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World ” and was the founding editor of the Coronavirus Daily Brief. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion at CNN.

CNN
—
According to a new report, half a million Americans may have died unnecessarily of Covid-19. At the same time, the US government spent trillions to deal with the pandemic when better preparedness could have saved many lives and much money. American schools were also closed for many months unnecessarily, with students paying the price.

The report, “Lessons from the Covid War,” by the Covid Crisis Group, is being published as a 347-page book Tuesday. It will likely stand as the most authoritative account of American policy failures and successes during the war against Covid-19.

The report makes for sobering reading, concluding that “no country’s performance was more disappointing than the United States.” The group came to that conclusion because, despite the great depth of scientific knowledge in the United States, American “excess deaths” during the pandemic were about 40% higher than the European death rate.

If the US had had a similar rate to Europe by the end of 2022, “probably” at least half a million Americans wouldn’t have died, according to the report. That’s a big number. The federal government also deployed $5 trillion to deal with the consequences of the pandemic. That is also a big number.

Given America’s hyper-partisanship, just about everything about the Covid-19 pandemic was deeply politicized – from the precise origins of the coronavirus in China, to lockdowns, mask-wearing, school closures, vaccines, and the best drugs for treatment.

As a result, there has been scant official reckoning over how the government fared during the pandemic and what lessons might be learned for the inevitable next pandemic.

A 2022 bipartisan bill seeking to establish a National Covid Commission never made it to the floor for a vote in the US Congress. This is astonishing when you consider that more Americans have died of Covid – around 1.1 million so far – than all the Americans who died in every US war going back to the American Revolution.

So, without a congressionally mandated inquiry like the 9/11 Commission, 34 American public health experts, physicians, and other policy experts decided to investigate what went right and wrong during the pandemic.

Starting their work in early 2021, the non-partisan Covid Crisis Group conducted “listening sessions” with 274 people who had played some role in responding to the pandemic or had been affected by it.

The group was directed by Philp Zelikow, a leading historian and former senior State Department official in the George W. Bush administration who had also served as the Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission, which had set the gold standard for how to conduct a comprehensive examination of a major catastrophe and the lessons that could be learned from it.

Other members of the Covid Crisis Group included Michael Osterholm of the University of Minnesota who had been publicly warning of the emergence of a global pandemic for a decade and a half before Covid-19 first emerged; Dr. Margaret “Peggy” Hamburg, the former Commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration and Dr. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, former chair of the Department of Bioethics at the National Institutes of Health.

The report examines both the “lab leak” theory that the coronavirus accidentally escaped from a research lab in Wuhan, China, and the natural transmission theory that the virus moved from a wild animal into humans. But the report doesn’t come down on the side of either theory, which seems fair enough given the inadequate evidence.

Dr. Drew Weissman and Katalin Karikó of the University of Pennsylvania
Opinion: Thought mRNA vaccines would end with the pandemic? Think again
The Chinese government’s penchant for secrecy was on full display in the early days of the outbreak. As a result, the origin issue may never be fully settled as it would have required considerable transparency by the government about what was happening in Wuhan at the beginning of the pandemic.

Yet, as the report points out, “both theories drive toward common urgent insights for action.” If the virus occurred because of animal transmission, that calls for improved surveillance for new viruses, using tools such as monitoring both work absenteeism and Internet searches that might indicate new viruses may be making the rounds, as well as increased biomedical surveillance.

And if it was a lab leak, better safeguards must be put in place for research on viruses worldwide given that “synthetic biology” will likely be one of the defining technologies of the 21st century.

The American health system is a patchwork of 2,800 state and local systems, according to the report. This would have made a coordinated national response to Covid-19 challenging to pull off in any administration, but the Trump administration’s response at the federal level “failed quickly.”

Some Trump officials did understand the likely dimensions of the Covid pandemic early on. Matthew Pottinger, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who spoke Mandarin and had covered the SARS outbreak in China, served as senior director for Asia at the National Security Council. Pottinger warned then-President Donald Trump in late January 2020 that the virus spread quickly from human to human, often without apparent symptoms.

A customer wears a face mask as they lift weights while working out inside a Planet Fitness Inc. gym as the location reopens after being closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, on March 16, 2021 in Inglewood, California.
Opinion: Were masks useless? The deceptive interpretation of what science tells us
The Trump administration soon banned non-American travelers from China from arriving in the US. While that may have slowed the spread of the virus in the U.S. a bit right at the beginning of the pandemic, travel bans were not especially effective given that the coronavirus is so transmissible, often spreading without symptoms in an age of mass global travel.

A problem in the US government’s early response was the lack of effective tests for the virus during the first months of the pandemic. By contrast, South Korea, better prepared for the emergency, had tens of thousands of tests running daily by mid-February 2020, according to the report.

The report found that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) – despite its name suggesting that it is at the forefront of preventing the spread of disease – didn’t do operational pandemic preparedness, but instead acts as a quasi-academic institution that collects and analyzes data after an incident has happened. In a chilling finding, the report says when it came to tracking Covid-19 cases in the United States, researchers at The Atlantic magazine’s Covid Tracking Project did a better job in real-time than the CDC did.

There has been scant official reckoning over how the government fared during the pandemic and what lessons might be learned for the inevitable next pandemic.

Compounding the problem at the federal level was President Trump, who, as is well known, continuously played down the threat posed by the virus and refused to wear a mask when masking was one of the few tools that prevented the spread of the virus before vaccines. By April 2020, Trump had decided that Covid wasn’t much worse than the flu, and he wanted to “reopen” the economy as he was “deep into his reelection campaign,” according to the report.

As a result, the Covid Crisis Group concluded that “Trump was a co-morbidity” with Covid. Comorbidity is a medical term meaning that a patient suffers from two or more chronic diseases simultaneously.

With little in the way of federal executive leadership, the war against Covid-19 was left up to the governors of the 50 states and to local authorities. The conventional narrative that red states favored opening up for the economy’s sake and blue states favored shutting down to save lives is overly simplistic, according to the report.

Most states adopted more of a purple approach whether they were run by Republican or Democratic governors – they chose to begin to open up when the virus seemed to be abating, as it was in May 2020, and close back down again whenever the virus came roaring back, as it did in the winter of 2020-2021.

Given the understandable angst that many Americans had over school closures, the report points to some fascinating data from UNESCO showing that in countries like France and Spain, schools closed or partly closed for only two weeks and 15 weeks, respectively. While in the US the average school closures lasted 77 weeks, which particularly affected children from disadvantaged communities and kids with disabilities. “Closed schools, even with remote education, failed many students, particularly those already most at risk for disrupted learning,” the report noted.

The UNESCO school data suggests that there must have been a more thoughtful way to manage American school closures. The report points to research about safe and smart ways to keep schools open that was undertaken by Covid Crisis Group member Danielle Allen of Harvard, Brown University, and the research institution, New America (where I work), as emblematic of an approach that could have been followed but wasn’t. It included developing infection prevention and control programs at each school.

The operation to develop workable vaccines was a true American success story. The report credits a framework outlined by Richard Danzig, a former US Secretary of the Navy with expertise in biowarfare, who wrote to an informal network of colleagues in late March 2020, advocating for “previously unthinkable government support” for vaccines financially and for expediting their laborious approval process.

Danzig also recommended invoking the Defense Production Act so that the manufacturing of the vaccines could be scaled up quickly. Danzig said that if the right resources were directed at developing a vaccine, it could be available as quickly as only six months, which would be an extraordinarily fast turnaround as typically effective vaccines take five to ten years to develop.

Danzig’s ideas helped germinate Operation Warp Speed, led on the Pentagon side by General Gustave Perna, an expert on logistics, and on the civilian side by a former Big Pharma executive, Dr. Moncef Slaoui. With political top cover provided by the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who supported Operation Warp Speed, General Perna secured $26 billion to fund the operation, according to the report.

The vaccines that succeeded in Operation Warp Speed were based on messenger RNA (mRNA) rather than on a weakened or inactive form of the virus typical of many vaccines. Using mRNA, researchers made cells produce a protein that instigated the immune response against the coronavirus. The basic science of mRNA had been around for decades, but it had never been used in a workable vaccine.

Companies such as Pfizer and Moderna produced effective vaccines in just months. The government invested $1 billion in Moderna and placed another $1.5 billion order for 100 million vaccine doses. Pfizer didn’t take US government money during the research phase for its vaccine, but the government initially guaranteed to buy more than 100 million doses from Pfizer for $1.95 billion.

As Danzig had suggested, the Defense Production Act ensured that the materials needed to make the vaccines were quickly secured. At the same time, the government partnered with major American pharmacy chains to ensure that jabs got into arms quickly once they became available.

The report underlines how a perfect constellation of factors made Operation Warp Speed succeed, including the right leaders at the Pentagon and in the private sector harnessing existing, long-term basic research into mRNA. Operation Warp Speed was arguably the most significant achievement of President Trump and his administration.

You might have the best vaccines in the world, but that doesn’t do you much good if there are substantial percentages of your own population who are hesitant to be vaccinated.

A National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine panel co-chaired by Dr. Helene Gayle – who had led efforts to combat AIDS at the CDC – warned in October 2020 that the CDC needed to develop a campaign using behavioral science and social marketing techniques while partnering with hospitals, faith-based organizations, and community centers to help increase vaccination uptake. But as the report notes, “That didn’t happen.”

Vaccinations also became politicized; by July 2022, 90% of Democrats reported being vaccinated to some level, compared to only 69% of Republicans. It turns out that your politics, in this case, could literally kill you.

During the Delta wave of Covid-19 in 2021 and the Omicron wave of 2022, “the vast majority of hospitalized patients were unvaccinated,” according to the report. By early 2022, one study found that there were somewhere between 120,000 and more than 350,000 excess deaths in the US because of vaccine hesitancy.

The key to preparing for the next pandemic is, of course, preparedness. The Covid Crisis Group underlines how “time is everything” when managing a possible pandemic, as just one week can mean the difference between a mere outbreak and the emergence of a full-blown pandemic. That means creating “early warning radars” worldwide that can detect emerging threats and ensuring the most stringent controls at labs around the world doing “gain of function” research so manipulated viruses don’t escape into the outside world.

The Covid Crisis Group has performed a major public service with its comprehensive investigation of the pandemic, an investigation that the US political system proved largely incapable of doing. This itself points to a general failure of American governance that the report underlines on many of its pages.

Still, the publication of this report by a group of concerned experts is also a testament to the enduring strengths of American civil society, which Alexis de Tocqueville had noted in his travels around the United States almost two centuries ago.

“The Return of the Taliban” book event with Hassan Abbass, New America ONLINE

[ONLINE] – The Return of the Taliban
Afghanistan After the Americans Left
EVENT

Since the fall of Kabul in August, 2021, the Taliban have held effective control of Afghanistan—a scenario few Western commentators anticipated. Yet reestablishing control after a twenty-year-long bitter war against the Republic of Afghanistan poses a complex challenge. The Taliban is now facing debilitating threats—from humanitarian crises to the Islamic State in Khorasan—but also engaging on the world stage, particularly with China and central Asian states. What is the Taliban’s strategy now that they’ve returned to power? In his new book The Return of the Taliban, National Defense University Professor and former New America fellow Hassan Abbas examines the resurgent Taliban, profiles its key leaders, and provides an important look at conditions in Afghanistan today.

Join New America’s International Security Program for a discussion of the Taliban and Afghanistan after America. To discuss this topic, New America welcomes Hassan Abbas, author of The Return of the Taliban and Distinguished Professor of International Relations at the Near East South Asia Strategic Studies Center, National Defense University. He was a 2017 Carnegie Fellow and a 2018 Eric & Wendy Schmidt Fellow at New America, and is the author of numerous books, including The Taliban Revival and The Prophet’s Heir.

Hassan Abbas, @Watandost
Distinguished Professor of IR, National Defense University
Former New America Fellow

Peter Bergen, @peterbergencnn
Vice President, New America
Co-Director, Center on the Future of War, ASU
Professor of Practice, ASU
Co-Editor, Talibanistan

Why Biden’s promises on democracy ring a little hollow, CNN.com

https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/28/opinions/afghanistan-democracy-biden-questions-bergen/index.html

Opinion: Why Biden’s support for democracy rings a little hollow
Opinion by Peter Bergen

Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is the author of “The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN. View more opinion on CNN.

On Wednesday, President Joe Biden is hosting a “Summit for Democracy” in Washington, DC. Obviously, the Taliban, the de facto government that rules Afghanistan today, won’t be attending this summit.

This makes the premise of the democracy summit ring somewhat hollow because while the Biden administration does an excellent job of trumpeting its commitments to democracy and women’s rights, only a year and a half ago, it cavalierly abandoned 40 million Afghans to the Taliban’s misogynistic theocracy.

As Afghanistan fell to the Taliban, President Biden said that Afghans didn’t fight to save their own country. Was this accurate? In fact, an estimated 66,000 Afghan soldiers and policemen died fighting the Taliban during the course of the war.

In August 2021, the last US soldiers left Afghanistan, ending America’s longest war. Their botched withdrawal was the final unhappy chapter of the two decades of the United States’ war in Afghanistan.

Will Americans learn anything from their mistakes and successes in Afghanistan? House Republicans, who are, of course, in the majority in the US Congress, are already holding hearings about the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan during the first year of the Biden administration.

Some House Republicans are even advocating for impeachment proceedings against Biden, partly because of the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, during which 13 American service personnel were killed at Kabul Airport by an ISIS suicide bomber, and at least 170 Afghans also died in the attack.

Of course, any examination of the US record in Afghanistan is something of a double-edged sword for Republicans since it was the Trump administration that signed the agreement with the Taliban in 2020 that set the stage for the total US withdrawal from Afghanistan. And the House committee investigating the January 6th attack on Congress also uncovered evidence that then-President Donald Trump planned to order all US troops out of Afghanistan just days before he left office. However, that order wasn’t carried out.

In addition to the Congressional hearings already underway, there is also an independent, congressionally mandated bipartisan Afghanistan War commission that has been formed to examine the two decades of the conflict. The commission comprises 16 experts, who worked in the US government, media and think tanks focusing on Afghanistan or related subjects.

Blinken subpoenaed by top Republican investigating Biden administration withdrawal from Afghanistan
This commission is desperately needed as history suggests that as much as Americans might want to put Afghanistan in the rear-view mirror — just as they did with the Vietnam War — overseas wars will continue to be part of the American story in the future.

The establishment of the Afghan War commission is significant because there was never a comprehensive examination of the conduct of the Iraq War by the US government as there was in the United Kingdom with the British Chilcot Inquiry. That inquiry generated a massive 6,000-page report that examined every aspect of Britain’s role in the Iraq war. (The US Army history of the Iraq war published in 2019 is authoritative but was necessarily focused on the military history of the conflict.)

There are many useful policy lessons to be learned from the US project in Afghanistan and how this avoidable tragedy unfolded. Below are 31 questions that the Congressional hearings examining the Afghan conflict and the Afghan War commission might try to answer.

These questions are grouped into five thematic areas: the early decision-making in the years after the fall of the Taliban and how it impacted the conflict; the nature of the US military challenges in Afghanistan; the political issues that made Afghanistan a challenging country to govern; the background around the withdrawal deal that the Trump administration inked with the Taliban in 2020, which the Biden administration then followed through on, and how the final chaotic US withdrawal in the summer of 2021 then played out.

1. Just months after the 9/11 attacks at the battle of Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan in December 2001, the leaders of al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, were surrounded by Afghan fighters and a small number of US Special Forces and CIA personnel. How did the leaders of al Qaeda slip away to fight another day? And to what extent did this give the terrorist group another lease on life?

2. Did the December 2001 Bonn Agreement made between several anti-Taliban factions after the fall of the Taliban undermine the future Afghan government by imposing a centralized, top-down presidential structure on a country that has always been ruled in a decentralized manner?

3. Was there a moment in 2002 when a more just and lasting peace might have been reached with the Taliban when they were utterly defeated and some of their leaders were seeking a peace deal and possible integration into the Afghan political system?

4. To what extent did the 2003 Iraq War drain US military and intelligence resources and White House attention away from Afghanistan?

5. What were the weaknesses of the Afghan army? And were some of those weaknesses, in part, the result of trying to mold that army into a US-style military?

6. Taliban leaders often lived in the safe haven of neighboring Pakistan, while the Taliban also recruited suicide bombers from Pakistani madrassas. Safe havens are often the key to success for insurgent groups, according to a 2001 RAND study of the issue. How important was the role of the Pakistani haven in the regrouping of the Taliban?

7. Pakistan has fought three major wars with India on its eastern border, so it has always wanted a pro-Pakistani Afghan government on its western border. Hence the Pakistani military doctrine known as “strategic depth,” which helps to explain Pakistan’s support for the Taliban. Given this fact, did the US ever have real policy options to reduce Pakistan’s support for the Taliban?

8. What were the sources of Taliban strength? Opposition to American and allied troops that were seen as “infidel” invaders? Anger at the corruption of the Afghan government and police? The Taliban’s control of the lucrative opium trade? Some combination of all of these?

Members of, A company, The Highlanders, 4th Battalion The Royal Regiment of Scotland, (4 SCOTS) on a Patrol from Patrol Base Attal in Afghanistan. (Photo by Danny Lawson/PA Images via Getty Images)
Independent probe into alleged extrajudicial killings in Afghanistan by British military begins
9. Between 2016 and 2020, more than two thousand Afghan civilians were killed in US or Afghan airstrikes, according to one analysis of UN data. How important were Afghan civilian casualties in fueling support for the Taliban?

10. How successful was the CIA drone program against al-Qaeda in Pakistan? The drones certainly decimated the leadership of al Qaeda. Still, they also engendered great Pakistani resentment against the US, particularly when the drone program was at its height during the Obama administration. This complicated US efforts to ally with the Pakistanis to fight jihadist groups based in Pakistan.

11. During the first year of the Obama administration in 2009, why was there a shift to a much larger mission that involved surging tens of thousands more US troops into Afghanistan? And how critical was the success of the “surge” of US troops in Iraq in 2008 in affecting military advice to President Obama about what to do in Afghanistan?

12. Widespread corruption was corrosive to the legitimacy of the Afghan government. Was that the key failure on the Afghan government side?

13. Flawed presidential elections produced flawed Afghan governments. How culpable were Afghanistan’s leaders like presidents Hamid Karzai and Ashraf Ghani for what transpired in Afghanistan?

14. How damaging was the consistent US inconsistency about its Afghan policies during the two decades after 9/11, since most US diplomats and soldiers in Afghanistan served only one-year tours so they were typically reinventing the wheel on each rotation?

15. In all the discussion of the mistakes made in Afghanistan, sometimes it’s easy to lose sight of what went right in Afghanistan. In addition to the rise of independent media and the provision of education to girls and jobs for women, what else worked? Programs like the National Solidarity Programme, which offered small grants for public works to local communities in consultation with those communities?

16. Beginning with a speech by President Barack Obama in December 2009, the US started publicly announcing its plans to withdraw from Afghanistan. How important was the constant public discussion of the US withdrawals in undercutting the Afghan government?

17. How crucial was President Donald Trump’s also constant trumpeting of his planned withdrawal of US troops in undermining the Afghan government?

18. Why did Biden go through with the Trump agreement with the Taliban, even though the Taliban were observing almost none of the terms of the deal and his military advisers were warning that a total withdrawal would result in the collapse of the Afghan army and government?

19. In May 2021, the chief American negotiator with the Taliban, Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, testified before a US congressional committee that anyone who thought that the Taliban would take over Afghanistan was “mistaken.” Khalilzad also asserted that the Taliban wanted normal relations with the rest of the world so that would positively affect their behavior. Why was he so wrong?

20. Did the Taliban win at the negotiating table from the Americans what they couldn’t win on the battlefield from them?

21. How vital was the exclusion of the elected Afghan government from the US-Taliban negotiations in undermining the government’s legitimacy?

22. In 2021, there were only 2,500 US troops in Afghanistan who were mostly serving as advisers to the Afghan military. Could there have been a politically sustainable policy for the U.S. to remain in Afghanistan? (The US has more than 25,000 troops today in South Korea, seven decades after the end of the Korean war.)

23. Might a US military policy of “go light, go long” have had the best chance of success in Afghanistan since it likely would have been more sustainable politically in the US and it would have reduced the visibility of the American military presence in Afghanistan?

24. To what extent did Biden’s experiences as vice president during the 2009 policy debates in the Obama administration about Afghanistan affect the outcome of Biden’s 2021 Afghanistan decision? In 2009 Biden was opposed to the Pentagon wanting to surge tens of thousands of US troops into Afghanistan, a debate that Biden lost. Did the scars from that debate help to inform Biden’s decision in 2021 to withdraw entirely from Afghanistan, despite the opposition of the Pentagon brass?

26. What were the key decision points during the withdrawal ordered by Biden – for instance, the closing of the massive Bagram Air Base near Kabul – and how did these decisions affect the calculus of the Afghan military and government?

27. Why did the Biden team reportedly ignore a “dissent” cable from State Department officials serving in Afghanistan in July 2021 that sounded the alarm about the deteriorating situation there? (The Republican head of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Rep. Michael McCaul subpoenaed that cable on Tuesday.)

28. Why did the White House only convene its first high-level meeting on August 14, 2021, to discuss evacuation just hours before Kabul fell, according to a Congressional investigation by Senate Republicans?

29. How critical was President Ghani’s sudden departure from Afghanistan on August 15, 2021, to the collapse of the Afghan government?

30. Why were so many American allies left behind in Afghanistan? The Association of Wartime Allies, an advocacy group for Afghans who had worked for the US, estimated that only about 3% of the 81,000 Afghans who had worked for the US government and had applied for special visas, made it out of Afghanistan, leaving 78,000 behind.

31. Did the ignominious US withdrawal from Afghanistan affect Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to move an army to the Ukraine border three months later?

Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) 20 Years Later, ASU ONLINE

Join the Center on the Future of War for an event with Co-Director Peter Bergen to discuss Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) 20 Years Later.

This is part of a series of events featuring faculty from the ASU Online M.A. in Global Security (MAGS) at Arizona State University’s School of Politics and Global Studies.

Peter Bergen is a journalist, documentary producer, vice president for global studies & fellows at New America, CNN national security analyst, professor of practice at Arizona State University, where he co-directs the Center on the Future of War and the author or editor of ten books, three of which were New York Times bestsellers and four of which were named among the best non-fiction books of the year by The Washington Post. The books have been translated into twenty-four languages. Documentaries based on his books have been nominated for two Emmys and won the Emmy for best documentary.

For more information contact:
ASU Center on the Future of War
School of Political Science and Global Studies
hruzbas@asu.edu
https://futureofwar.asu.edu/

Was toppling Saddam Hussein worth it? The answer isn’t straightforward, CNN.com

Sulaymaniyah, Iraq
CNN
—
Two decades ago, on March 19, 2003, then-President George W. Bush ordered the US invasion of Iraq. A week later, near Najaf, a city in southern Iraq, then-US Major General David Petraeus turned to the American journalist Rick Atkinson and asked him a simple question: “Tell me how this ends.” That remains an excellent question.

The Amna Suraka Museum, which was once a prison and torture site used by dictator Saddam Hussein’s intelligence agents in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq, is a good place to try to contemplate the legacy of the US invasion and, perhaps, an ancillary question: Was it all worth it?

When I visited the former prison earlier this week, I found it located in a pleasant residential neighborhood in Sulaymaniyah, in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq. The location of the prison in the middle of the city was not an accident: Saddam wanted the local population to know what awaited anyone who opposed him, or those who might even be thinking about opposing his regime.

The museum is a chamber of horrors showcasing the cells where prisoners were tortured by electrical shocks and had the soles of their feet beaten so they couldn’t walk. Juveniles were brought to the detention center and their ages were changed to be more than 18 so they could be “legally” executed, according to a museum official I spoke to.

The prison cells are each quite small, with almost no light. During Saddam’s era, they were packed with prisoners who shared overflowing toilets.

In the museum, there is a long corridor – known as the “Hall of Mirrors” – consisting of fragments of glass that represent each of the 182,000 people Saddam’s men killed during his 1988 “Anfal” campaign (which is the estimated total number of deaths made by Kurdish officials). Small twinkling lights on the ceiling represent the 4,500 villages in the region that Saddam’s forces also destroyed.

One of the 20th century’s worst tyrants
Three and half decades ago this week, on March 16, 1988, Saddam conducted one of the most notorious crimes of his murderous dictatorship, killing thousands of Kurds using poison gas and nerve agents.

There is little question Saddam was one of the worst tyrants of the 20th century. He killed as many as 290,000 of his own people, according to Human Rights Watch. He also launched wars against two of his neighbors – Iran during the 1980s and Kuwait in 1990. Conservative estimates suggest that at least half a million people were killed during these wars.

So, when Saddam was toppled by the Americans two decades ago, at least some Iraqis were happy. And Iraq today has made some strides to a more accountable political system compared to its neighbors in the Middle East. Iraq has held several elections since the US invasion in 2003 that were followed by peaceful transfers of power.

And yet, after Saddam was toppled by the US, the incompetent American occupation of Iraq contributed to a civil war that tore the country apart, killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. More than 4,500 US soldiers also died. The war also gave al Qaeda a new lease of life. The group known as al Qaeda in Iraq later morphed into ISIS, which seized vast amounts of Iraqi territory in 2014 and instituted a reign of terror.

The Iraq War also set a precedent for unprovoked wars that we see playing out in Ukraine today, which the Russians are already using to good effect. At a conference in India earlier this month, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called out what he termed a US “double standard” saying: “[You] believe that the United States has the right to declare a threat to its national interest, any place on earth, like they did… in Iraq?”

This message may not resonate much in the West, but it does in the Global South where the US-Iraq War and the Russian war in Ukraine are seen by many as wars of choice rather than of necessity.

Of course, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s’ conduct of the war in Ukraine is orders of magnitude more brutal than the American war in Iraq. Also, Putin’s forces are attacking a democratic state, while, in Iraq, Bush ordered an invasion that toppled a dictatorship.

That said, it’s worth underlining some of the wars’ similarities: Both wars were started because of false claims – the US war in Iraq was launched on the basis that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and links to al Qaeda. The US media mostly parroted those claims. As a result, months before the US invaded Iraq, most Americans believed that Saddam was involved in the 9/11 attacks even though there was no evidence for this.

Putin justifies his war in Ukraine by claiming that it isn’t a “real” country and should be subsumed into Russia. Meanwhile, Russian media asserts that its soldiers are fighting “neo-Nazis” in Ukraine. Despite these false claims, most Russians support the war, according to independent polls.

Also, neither the Iraq War nor the war in Ukraine have had much in the way of international support. Unlike the case of the US-led war in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks, which had a mandate from the UN Security Council, neither the US invasion of Iraq, nor the Russian invasion of Ukraine had UN Security Council backing.

In the museum dedicated to Saddam’s crimes against his own people, you feel the weight of his brutality. The US getting rid of Saddam was for many Iraqis something to be celebrated, but what followed, from the civil war to the rise and fall of ISIS, has inflicted additional great suffering on the Iraqi people.

To those who say: “Was it all worth it, toppling Saddam given what we know about how the last two decades played out?”, that may be missing the point today. Iraq has a new government and sits on the third largest oil reserves in the world. It should be one of the richest countries in the Middle East, but instead the cancer of endemic corruption has eaten away at government intuitions and international companies are often hesitant to invest in Iraq.

The 2,500 US troops that remain in Iraq today provide not just help to the Iraqi military, but also make a political statement that the United States plans to stay engaged in Iraq for the foreseeable future – rather than abandoning the country as it did in Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, when all remaining US troops were pulled out.

‘At my first meeting with Saddam Hussein, within 30 seconds, he knew two things about me,’ says FBI interrogator, CNN.com

Opinion: ‘At my first meeting with Saddam Hussein, within 30 seconds, he knew two things about me,’ says FBI interrogator
Peter Bergen
Opinion by Peter Bergen
Updated 9:51 AM EDT, Tue March 14, 2023

Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is the author of “The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and the World.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on
Two decades ago, on March 19, 2003, President George W. Bush ordered the US invasion of Iraq. Bush and senior administration officials had repeatedly told Americans that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was armed to the teeth with weapons of mass destruction and that he was in league with al Qaeda.

These claims resulted in most Americans believing that Saddam was involved in the September 11, 2001, attacks. A year after 9/11, two-thirds of Americans said that the Iraqi leader had helped the terrorists, according to Pew Research Center polling, even though there was not a shred of convincing evidence for this. Nor did he have the WMD alleged by US officials.

US and UK forces defeated Saddam’s troops within weeks, but an insurgency sprang up against the invaders, which persisted for years. On December 13, 2003, US Special Operations Forces found Saddam hiding in a one-man-size hole in northern Iraq.

The FBI decided that George Piro, a Lebanese American special agent in his mid-30s who spoke Arabic, was the right person to interrogate Saddam. Piro’s work ethic was impressive: He would arrive at the FBI gym in downtown Washington, DC, at 6 a.m. for a workout, so he could start on the job at 7 a.m. at his office, which was lined with Middle Eastern history books.

The stakes could not have been higher for the FBI. Piro was under tremendous pressure to find out from Saddam the truth about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and purported ties to al Qaeda. CIA Director George Tenet had famously told Bush that the case that Saddam had WMD was a “slam dunk.”

Ukrainian servicemen fire an anti-aircraft gun towards Russian positions on a frontline near the town of Bakhmut, amid Russia’s attack on Ukraine, in Donetsk region, Ukraine January 15, 2023. REUTERS/Oleksandr Ratushniak
Gen. David Petraeus: How the war in Ukraine will end
The Iraq War was also sold to Americans as a “cakewalk.” Instead, hundreds of American soldiers had already been killed in Iraq by the time of Saddam’s arrest.

The CIA first questioned Saddam. And then over a period of seven months, Piro talked to him for many hours a day, with no one else allowed in the interrogation room. He discovered from the Iraqi dictator that no WMD existed and that Saddam only had contempt for Osama bin Laden, the leader of al Qaeda.

The dictator’s discussions with Piro confirmed that the Iraq War was America’s original sin during the dawn of the 21st century — a war fought under false assumptions, a conflict that killed thousands of American troops and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

The war also damaged America’s standing in the world and the credibility of the US government among its citizens. Even the official US Army history of Iraq concluded that the real winner of the war in Iraq wasn’t America. It was … Iran.

After interrogating Saddam, Piro ascended to high-ranking positions at the FBI, retiring in July as the special agent in charge of the Miami field office. Now he is writing a book about his lengthy interrogations of the Iraqi dictator for Simon & Schuster.

As the 20th anniversary of the start of the Iraq War approaches, I spoke to Piro about what some consider the most successful interrogation in FBI history and the aftershocks of the US invasion of Iraq, which are still being felt today.

George Piro: I received a call on Christmas Eve, at about 5 o’clock in the evening, from a senior executive in the Counterterrorism Division. And he informed me that I had just been selected to interrogate Saddam Hussein on behalf of the FBI.

Piro: Panic. Initially — I’ll be honest — it was terrifying to know that now I was going to be interrogating somebody that was on the world stage for so many years. It seemed such a significant responsibility on behalf of the FBI. I went to Barnes & Noble and bought two books on Saddam Hussein so I could start improving my understanding of who he was and all the things that were going to be important in developing an interrogation strategy.

I had already been to Iraq once, the first element of FBI personnel to deploy, and I had begun to develop an understanding of Iraqi culture and the Baath Party, which was led by Saddam.

Saddam was born on April 28, 1937, in a small village called al-Ajwa (near Tikrit). He had an extremely tough childhood as he did not have a father, and his mother married his uncle, who became his stepfather. Growing up, Saddam and his family were very poor, and initially, he was unable to attend school, but that childhood shaped the man Saddam became.

His childhood instilled in him a deep desire to prove everyone wrong about him and not to trust anyone, but to rely solely on his instincts. As a young man, he joined the Baath Party, and one of his early assignments was to assassinate the then-prime minister. The assassination attempt failed, and Saddam was forced to flee Iraq. But upon his return, he was seen as a tough guy, an image he would promote throughout his career.

Saddam, here in the Iraqi capital in 1983, projected a tough guy image throughout his career.
Saddam, here in the Iraqi capital in 1983, projected a tough guy image throughout his career.
Pierre Perrin/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images
At my first meeting with Saddam, within 30 seconds, he knew two things about me. I told him my name was George Piro and that I was in charge, and he immediately said, “You’re Lebanese.” I told him my parents were Lebanese, and then he said, “You’re Christian.” I asked him if that was a problem, and he said absolutely not. He loved the Lebanese people. Lebanese people loved him. And I was like, “Well, great. We’re going to get along wonderfully.” (Saddam was a Sunni Muslim, while most Iraqis are Shia Muslims.)

Bergen: How long were you with Saddam? And, of course, you’re communicating in Arabic throughout, right?

Piro: About seven months. Initially, I would see him in the mornings. I would translate for his medical staff. And then, the formal interrogations were once or twice a week for several hours. As time went on, I started to spend more and more one-on-one time with him because I could communicate directly and very quickly with him. I built that to about five to seven hours every single day, one-on-one, a couple of hours in the morning, a couple of hours in the afternoon and then a formal interrogation session or two a week.

Former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein chastises the court moments after his half brother, Barzan Ibrahim al-Tikriti, was forcibly removed from their trial held in Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone, 29 January, 2006.

And we talked about everything. So especially in the first couple of months, my goal was just to get him to talk. I wanted to know what he valued in life and what his likes, dislikes and thought processes were. So we talked about everything from history, art, sports to politics. We would talk about things that I knew he wouldn’t have any reservations or hesitations to talk about.

People have asked me about the first interrogation I did of Saddam, saying, “What was the topic?” The majority of that first discussion was about his published novel because I knew he wasn’t going to lie about that. And I had researched and studied the book.

Piro: So Zabiba was a beautiful Arab woman, and she was married to a horrible old man. Of course, Zabiba represented Iraq. The old man represented the United States. The king, handsome and dashing, rescued Zabiba from her misery, and they lived happily ever after. Of course, you can imagine who the king was. …

A key thing that can enhance the outcome of an interrogation is subject matter expertise. It’s extremely difficult to lie to a subject matter expert. Now, when you add that with a good interrogation strategy and approach, you are really increasing your likelihood of success with an interrogation. As an FBI agent and especially as an interrogator, I knew I wanted to know everything I could about Saddam because inconsistencies are indications of deception.

Piro, right, with Todd Irinaga, a fellow FBI agent, in 2003. Piro questioned Saddam over seven months.
Piro, right, with Todd Irinaga, a fellow FBI agent, in 2003. Piro questioned Saddam over seven months.
Courtesy George Piro
I wanted to understand Saddam and know Saddam as well as he knew himself. To give you an example: Saddam’s decision to invade Kuwait in 1990. I interviewed all the other “high-value detainees,” and we specifically talked about that decision. And there was a critical meeting where Saddam decided to invade Kuwait. I knew where everyone sat in the conference room, what Saddam did, where he even placed his gun belt, and how he positioned it.

So, when I was speaking to him, I would bring up those little details to reinforce how knowledgeable I was and how difficult it would be to misrepresent or lie about facts. It puts a tremendous amount of stress on the detainee when they are facing a subject matter expert because they must think so hard to develop any kind of lie that has a chance of maybe succeeding.

Bergen: At this time, the CIA was running its “coercive interrogation program.” Were you cognizant of this parallel interrogation program, or you found out about it later? And what did you think about it?

Piro: I found out about it later, and of course, I’ve never used “enhanced interrogation techniques,” as they’re referred to. They’re against the US Constitution, against FBI policy, and it goes really against the core values of the FBI. So, for me, it was never really an option because I’ve never used them, don’t know how to use them, nor would I want to. I feel it goes against who we are as a country and what we represent.

What was to my advantage, I was told by the FBI’s assistant director, Counterterrorism Division, “Be prepared to spend a year with Saddam Hussein.” So, I didn’t have to rush through the process. The intelligence value of the information that we wanted from Saddam didn’t diminish over time. It was as valuable whether we got it on Day One or Day 365. It was about getting it. It’s different than when you’re interrogating a terrorist, and there’s a threat or a plot, and you’re under a clock, and your goal is to prevent an attack. So, of course, your approach is going to be different.

What we wanted to know was buried in Saddam’s head, and it was strategic. And it was getting him to share that. So, developing an effective long-term interrogation strategy was really the key.

Bergen: After 9/11, many Americans believed that Saddam was personally involved in 9/11. Did he talk about it?

Piro: As you recall, prior to the invasion of Iraq, there were officials within the Department of Defense that had claimed that Iraq was operationally involved in 9/11, and we had to determine whether that was factual or not. That was our second-highest priority. Our first one was Iraq’s WMD program. Second was the extent of the relationship between al Qaeda and Iraq.

Saddam told me that he didn’t like Osama bin Laden and that he didn’t believe in al Qaeda’s ideology because it aimed to create an Islamic state throughout the Arab world. Well, Saddam had no desire to turn over power or relinquish anything to someone else. Saddam would joke about Osama bin Laden, saying, “You really can’t trust anybody with a beard like that.”

The other Iraqi detainees confirmed that there was no operational relationship with al Qaeda. I would describe it, at best, as an arms-length relationship. Saddam told me it was imperative to find out what al Qaeda was focused on, and then if he could manipulate them, that would be an added benefit.

Piro: Saddam wanted to be considered one of the greatest Arab Muslim leaders in history. In his mind, he was the third greatest warrior in Arab Muslim history.

Piro: Yes. It was the Prophet Mohammed; No. 2, Saladin; and then he’s No. 3. So, for Saddam to be recognized as that kind of great leader and warrior, he had to be seen as religious. But he was very secular. He promoted Arab nationalism versus the Islamist perspective. He was more focused on the Arab aspect of Iraq versus the Islamic aspect of Iraq.

Saddam considered himself the third greatest warrior in Arab Muslim history, according to Piro.
Saddam considered himself the third greatest warrior in Arab Muslim history, according to Piro.
Faleh Kheiber/Reuters
Bergen: Tariq Aziz, his foreign minister, was a Christian, right?

Piro: Yes. Tariq Aziz was his deputy prime minister, at one point, and his minister of foreign affairs. He was Chaldean, which is Catholic, and Saddam never forced him to convert or anything like that. Most of his staff in his palaces and presidential sites were Christian.

Piro: When I was selected to interrogate Saddam, I went over to the CIA at Langley (Virginia). I met with officials from the agency, especially those focused on Iraq and Saddam. I was allowed to review previous reports of Saddam’s CIA debriefings, and it was very evident to me that Saddam was very reluctant and unwilling to talk about WMD and al Qaeda, especially initially. He was very guarded.

So, for me, I wasn’t going to bring up WMD or al Qaeda until I felt Saddam could be honest, forthcoming and willing to discuss the topic. It didn’t make any sense to bring up something when you know he won’t want to provide truthful answers or engage in the topic.

We put the WMD and (al Qaeda) questions aside, and the initial focus was developing rapport that was going to be critical as time went on and when it was going to be necessary to bring up those difficult or sensitive topics.

On his 67th birthday, while he was in prison and I was interrogating him, the Iraqi people had the opportunity to show not only the world, but more importantly to him, how they truly felt about him. And they did. And it was overwhelming hatred.

The Iraqis were celebrating not being forced to celebrate Saddam’s birthday, and that day, he saw that on TV. And it took a significant emotional toll on him, and all day, that affected him. It made him depressed, and at the end of the day, the only people who cared that it was his birthday and took time to really recognize it were agents of the FBI.

It picked up his spirits, and that was part of the process for consistently looking for different ways to strengthen that rapport because there did come a time when he said, “I don’t want to answer any questions,” but then he goes, “But I still want to talk to you.” And it got to the point where I was able to say to him, “Listen, if you don’t want to tell me something, that’s fine, but don’t lie to me. It’s disrespectful.”

So, when it came to WMD, I didn’t bring it up until about five or so months into the interrogation.

Piro: So, what he told me was that, of course, Iraq did not have the WMD that we suspected he had; Saddam had given a critical speech in June of 2000, which was a speech where he said that Iraq had WMD, and a lot of people wanted to know why — if he didn’t have WMD, why did he give that speech? So they wanted me to ask him about the speech, and I looked for a way or an opportunity to bring up the topic and be able to have a candid conversation with him about the speech without him realizing I was interrogating him about WMD.

And when he told me about that speech, his biggest enemy wasn’t the United States or Israel. His biggest enemy was Iran, and he told me he was constantly trying to balance or compete with Iran. Saddam’s biggest fear was that if Iran discovered how weak and vulnerable Iraq had become, nothing would prevent them from invading and taking southern Iraq. So, his goal was to keep Iran at bay.

Bergen: In that period before the US invasion, he was posturing that he had WMD or being ambiguous about it to deter the Iranians from invading Iraq. Is that what you’re saying?

Piro: Absolutely. Because that was his most significant threat. It wasn’t the United States. It was Iran, and he was purposely being misleading or kind of ambiguous about it. If you recall before the war, every intelligence agency around the world had come to the same conclusion that Iraq had WMD because of Saddam’s posturing, some of his vague statements and his prior history of using chemical and biological weapons against his people and also developing a nuclear weapons research program. And that worked to his advantage when it came to Iran.

Bergen: And, of course, during the 1980s Iraq and Iran had fought a nearly 8-year-long war in which hundreds of thousands died on both sides. So that was keeping him up at night, even more than the Americans, right?

Piro: Absolutely. Because if you recall, initially, the Iranians were making significant gains, even though the Iranian military, at least the leadership, was purged. They were able to seize some Iraqi land initially during the first phase of the war, and then there was a stalemate.

And what really turned the tide was in 1987, where Iraq was able to fire and strike deep into Tehran, but the Iranians couldn’t respond because they didn’t have the weapons capability Iraq had. So they couldn’t bring that same type of response. And that’s what brought Tehran to its knees and forced Ayatollah Khomeini to come to the negotiating table.

Saddam couldn’t afford to let the Iranians realize he had lost that capability because of US sanctions and the weapons inspections of Iraq. He “bluffed” his biggest enemy into believing he was still as powerful and as dangerous as he was during the 1987-’88 time frame.

I asked Saddam, “When sanctions were lifted, what were you going to do?” He said, “We were going to do what we needed to do or what we would have to do to protect us.” Which was his way of saying he would have reconstituted his entire WMD program.

Piro: No, he wasn’t surprised when it happened. Initially, he didn’t think that we would invade. If you look at the majority of 2002, he was under the impression we were going to do airstrikes, as we had done in 1998, the US bombing campaign called Desert Fox, which was four-day aerial strikes, and he was able to survive that.

So that’s why he was defiant until September 2002, which is when he realized that President Bush intended to invade Iraq. So, he changed his position or posture and allowed weapons inspectors into Iraq to try and prevent it. Still, he told me that probably by October or November 2002, he realized that war was inevitable and then started to prepare himself and his leadership and military for war.

Piro: He told me that he asked his military commanders to prepare for two weeks of conventional war, and then at that point, he expected and anticipated the unconventional war or the insurgency would kick in, and that would be a much more challenging type of warfare for the United States.

Bergen: Well, that turned out to be exactly right. … A good part of your interrogation became the basis of the trial of Saddam, right? You delved into his crimes against his people, and that evidence eventually was used in court against him and led to his trial and eventually his execution. Is that correct?

Piro: That’s correct. So, our primary goal was to collect intelligence, to answer the two key questions that brought us to war but also collect any evidence that would be helpful for his eventual prosecution because everyone understood, at some point, Saddam had to face justice for the horrible atrocities that he was responsible for.

So, we focused also on historical events: We talked about the invasion of Kuwait and the gassing of the Kurds. Saddam did make critical admissions, and not only Saddam but so did all of his other subordinate leaders.

So, we were able to gather all of that type of evidence and compile it, and I was fortunate enough to be asked to put together the report that was the basis of Saddam’s prosecution. We located and identified witnesses that survived those attacks that were willing to travel and appear in court in front of Saddam and testify to his crimes and we recovered documents and audio that supported the case.

Bergen: The big question 20 years later is, was it all worth it? You look at Iraq, and there was the civil war in which hundreds of thousands of people were killed. Al Qaeda had no presence in Iraq under Saddam, but after the US invasion, a powerful al Qaeda branch known as al Qaeda in Iraq sprang up, which eventually morphed into ISIS. Then you have the spread of sectarianism, which has always existed in the Middle East but was undoubtedly amplified by the Iraq War and spread into Syria and became part of that civil war.

Saddam was a terrible human being. He’s one of the most murderous men of the late 20th century. Yet, at the same time, he kept a lid on things in Iraq, which had a functional education system and a relatively educated population, and that all blew up due to the US invasion. So how do you reflect on all this?

Piro: That’s a very tough question. Saddam is one of the most brutal dictators of our time and was responsible for some of the most horrific atrocities in history. But on the other hand, he told me we had no idea how difficult it was to rule Iraq, but we would figure that out by removing him.

And then you ask yourself, was it worth it? As an FBI agent, thankfully, I was not in a position to think about that or focus on that; my job was to interrogate.

On the other hand, what frustrates me more is that there were key opportunities at the beginning of the war and significant failures on our part, and if we had not made those, I wonder how different Iraq would look today.

Piro: The biggest employer in Iraq in 2003 was the Iraqi military. So, we come in, and we completely dismantle the military. As in any country, a soldier relies on their salary and benefits to survive, and most have families and obligations, and responsibilities.

We didn’t realize the impact of that decision, and we just fired everyone. We didn’t think about how that was going to affect the situation in-country when you look at a workforce with a unique skill set and training that’s not transferrable to a lot of other things. And as a result, they became disgruntled and angry, and that was initially the basis of the insurgency that we faced in 2003 and 2004.

We had a very short time frame to really leverage the removal of Saddam before the Iraqi people saw us as an occupying force. I believe we had a six-month window, and we made huge mistakes.

Bergen: Now that you’re a private citizen: Do you have a reflection on where Iraq is now and what the future might look like?

Piro: I’m not too optimistic about the future of Iraq, primarily because what Iraq needs is a leader who puts Iraq first. That was the one thing Saddam did — he put Iraq first, in a sense, and consolidated everybody together. As you look at how divided it is, until someone comes in and doesn’t care about your religious or ethnic background and thinks of Iraq as one country, its future will be a challenge.

Bergen: Eventually, Saddam was executed by the Shia-dominated Iraqi government in December 2006. A video was broadcast on state television showing that moments before Saddam was hanged, the guards who brought him into the execution chamber mocked him, shouting the name of a famous Shia cleric. Did you see that? What was your reaction?

Piro: Yes. I did see that, as it was aired on every news channel around the world. And I’ll be honest, I did not enjoy it — and I’ve only seen it once, and the reason why I didn’t enjoy it, is it took away from the legality of it, right? Saddam was executed based on a conviction for the crimes that he had committed against the Iraqi people. Still, when you look at how he was executed: It looked like vengeance.

Bergen: And for people who haven’t seen this tape of Saddam’s execution, what was (it) about this that you thought was wrong?

Piro: He and I talked about his upcoming execution because he knew he was going to be convicted and executed, irrelevant of what kind of defense he raised or anything like that. So, for him, his trial and his execution were to repair or redeem his image. He wanted to overcome the image of being pulled out of the hole where he was captured by American soldiers, looking disheveled, and some labeled him as a coward for not resisting or fighting. So, for him, his trial and execution were what he wanted to utilize to erase that and give something else for people to remember him by.

At his execution, as he was brought in, those who were implementing the execution were mocking him. They mocked him, and he laughed them off, and he prayed. He didn’t have to be helped to the rope, and he didn’t wear a mask to cover his face. He came across as very defiant and, in a sense, very strong or brave. And that’s what people remember, especially among the Sunni population in the Arab world.

Piro: With the Bureau’s approval, I am writing a book about the experience. My goal is to allow the reader to have a seat inside the interrogation and to feel like they’re sitting right there watching it firsthand, not just what Saddam said because some of that is already available, but more about the experience itself, the challenges, the chess game he and I played.

I also got an inside view of the journal he kept and was able to see his thoughts and his perceptions when he was in prison. Saddam told me I got to know him better than his two sons did because I ended up spending more time with him than his two sons did. So, all of that will be in the book to give the reader insight not only into the brutal dictator but also into the other sides of Saddam Hussein.

Opinion: What went right and wrong on Covid, CNN.com

Opinion: What went right and wrong on Covid
Opinion by Peter Bergen
Updated 10:06 AM EST, Thu March 2, 2023

The Chinese lab leak report from the Department of Energy saying it has “low confidence” that the Covid-19 virus accidentally escaped from a lab in Wuhan made headlines earlier this week.

Then on Tuesday, FBI Director Christopher Wray weighed in, telling Fox News that “the FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident in Wuhan.”

On Wednesday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning responded to that assessment, saying that the lab leak theory holds “no credibility at all.”

This all adds to the confusion surrounding the virus’s origins. There is considerable science pointing to animal-to-human transmission as the origin of the virus, but there is also credible reporting and the FBI director’s public assessment that it likely leaked from labs researching viruses in Wuhan.

And we may never truly know how the Covid-19 virus originated because the Chinese government didn’t allow international inspectors into Wuhan for weeks after a new mysterious, lethal virus first emerged there in December 2019.

Initially, the local Wuhan government downplayed the virus. That doesn’t necessarily mean they were covering up a lab leak, but rather this may point to simple incompetence – a pretty good explanation of most human activity. As CNN noted, “top-down bureaucracy and rigid procedures that were ill-equipped to deal with the emerging crisis” may have been to blame, a conclusion based on an examination of internal Chinese documents from the first months of the crisis.

By the time the central Chinese government got serious about the virus, it was already spreading worldwide.

While the new Department of Energy intelligence report does not settle the question of the precise origin of the virus, it does point us to the need for a bipartisan Covid-19 commission that goes well beyond US House investigations of Covid that are planned for this year.

Consider that almost as many Americans have died of Covid-19 already – some 1.1 million – as have died in every war since the American Revolution. If that isn’t a significant national security problem, I’m not sure what is.

And yet the United States hasn’t had any systematic examination by the government of how this happened. A good deal of that is likely because the whole issue of the pandemic is so politicized – but so too were the debates about whether the George W. Bush administration might have done a better job thwarting the 9/11 attacks.

The Bush administration initially blocked a commission to investigate 9/11. Following intense public pressure, the administration finally agreed to allow a commission to be formed more than a year after the attacks.

The 9/11 commission not only told the whole backstory of the attacks, but it also proposed lasting reforms that made Americans safer when they were implemented, such as the creation of a National Counterterrorism Center that coordinates all counterterrorism intelligence across the US government and the creation of a new Office of the Director of National Intelligence which coordinates the work of all of the US intelligence agencies.

A similar Covid-19 commission must be formed to investigate how the virus emerged, which responses to the virus worked or didn’t work as it spread across the United States and the lessons learned for how best to prepare for the next pandemic.

Each party should appoint subject matter experts on pandemics, epidemiology and emergency response to take part in this Covid-19 commission. It should have sufficient staff and money and subpoena power to investigate questions such as, “How did we get here?” And, “What can be done to mitigate the next pandemic?”

This general view shows the Wuhan Institute of Virology in Wuhan, in China’s central Hubei province on February 3, 2021, as members of the World Health Organization (WHO) team investigating the origins of the COVID-19 coronavirus, visit.

Assessment Covid-19 leaked from Chinese lab is a minority view within US intel community, sources say
Of course, some questions may never be completely settled, like the lab leak theory vs. the natural transmission theory.

Still, there are pressing questions that the Covid-19 commission should address so that we are better prepared for the next pandemic, which will inevitably eventually happen.

After 9/11, the US spent many billions of dollars preparing for a possible bioterrorism attack. Where did all that funding go and why were those defenses against bioterrorism not more helpful in responding to the pandemic?

Why did the Trump administration eliminate the National Security Council’s pandemic unit in 2018? What effect did that have?
An early decision by former President Donald Trump during the pandemic was to bar non-US citizens who had recently visited China from entering the US. What kind of effect did that have on mitigating the spread of the virus?

Why didn’t the US government ensure there were enough medical-grade masks to cope with the pandemic when it started?

Why was there so little federal leadership on containing the virus in the early months of the pandemic? Those decisions were primarily left to individual states. What effect did this uncoordinated response have?

Trump said on February 26, 2020, that the number of Covid-19 cases would soon be close to zero. He also claimed that the coronavirus was no more dangerous than the flu. What effect did this have on the behavior of the American public and how did that behavior impact the spread of the virus?

What role did right-wing media play in downplaying the pandemic and how did that affect sentiments among some Republicans that the coronavirus was being hyped?

Dr. Deborah Birx, Trump’s coronavirus response coordinator, told a congressional committee in closed-door testimony in 2021 that “we probably could have decreased fatalities into the 30-percent-less to 40-percent-less range.” How did she come to that conclusion?

To its credit, the Trump administration launched “Operation Warp Speed,” which saved many lives during the Covid-19 pandemic. As part of that effort, the US invested $2.5 billion in Moderna, which produced a testable vaccine on humans in only two months. Why did Operation Warp Speed work so well? And what are the lessons for future vaccine development?
Covid-19 mortality rates per capita in the US are much higher than in other wealthy nations such as Canada, France, Germany and Japan. What went right in other countries that didn’t go right in the US?

If we get some reasonable answers to these and other questions, the next pandemic that rolls around may not claim more than a million American lives.

[ONLINE] – The Invasion of Iraq – Twenty Years On, New America

This month, the United States will mark 20 years since it invaded Iraq on March 19, 2003. In the wake of the invasion, hundreds of thousands of people would die in an ensuing civil war. The war also helped re-energize a jihadist movement that was struggling to deal with U.S. counterterrorism operations and the loss of safe haven in Afghanistan. The broader story of the Middle East region, including the Arab Spring protest wave, as well as the story of U.S. power more broadly cannot be told without close attention to the impact of the U.S. invasion. Even as the U.S. sought to put the Iraq war behind it, ISIS’ surge across Iraq in 2014 reiterated that the war and its aftermath continue.

Join New America’s International Security Program for a discussion of the Iraq invasion and its ongoing impact 20 years after it started. To discuss this topic, New America welcomes Simona Foltyn, Joel Rayburn, and Abdulrazzaq Al-Saiedi. Simona Foltyn is a journalist based in Baghdad and PBS Newshour Special Correspondent and was previously Al Jazeera’s Iraq Correspondent from 2019-2021. Joel Rayburn is a retired U.S. Army officer and fellow with New America’s International Security Program. He has previously served as U.S. Special Envoy for Syria and as Senior Director for Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon on the National Security Council. He also directed the Army’s Operation Iraqi Freedom Study Group, producing an operational history of the Army’s experience in the Iraq war published in the two-volume study The U.S. Army in the Iraq War, for which Rayburn was co-author and editor. He is also author of Iraq After America: Strongmen, Sectarians, Resistance. Abdulrazzaq Al-Saiedi is a technical expert on Iraq with the Physicians for Human Rights. Previously, he was a human rights/transitional justice officer with the UN Support Mission in Libya and a fellow at the Carr Center, where he examined electoral systems in Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein. He also reported on Iraqi politics for the New York Times. He was also a Harvard Nieman Fellow in 2007. He holds an MPA from Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

Simona Foltyn, @SimonaFoltyn
Journalist Based in Baghdad
PBS Newshour Special Correspondent

Joel Rayburn
Fellow, New America International Security Program
Author, The U.S. Army in the Iraq War
Former U.S. Special Envoy for Syria

Peter Bergen, @peterbergencnn
Vice President, New America
Co-Director, Center on the Future of War, ASU
Professor of Practice, ASU

Will Vladimir Putin Get Away with War Crimes?

“Soldiers Don’t Go Mad,” book event with Charles Glass, New America Online

[ONLINE] – Soldiers Don’t Go Mad

Brotherhood, Poetry, and Mental Illness During the First World War

EVENT

The unnecessary price of Covid-19, CNN.com

“The Return of the Taliban” book event with Hassan Abbass, New America ONLINE

Why Biden’s promises on democracy ring a little hollow, CNN.com

Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) 20 Years Later, ASU ONLINE

Was toppling Saddam Hussein worth it? The answer isn’t straightforward, CNN.com

‘At my first meeting with Saddam Hussein, within 30 seconds, he knew two things about me,’ says FBI interrogator, CNN.com

Opinion: What went right and wrong on Covid, CNN.com

[ONLINE] – The Invasion of Iraq – Twenty Years On, New America

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All the Presidents’ Wars:

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