Yeah, which means for him, restoring the monarchy.

Yeah, you know, it is a really good time to revisit this issue, especially because there’s already been, in your lifetime, an absolutely disastrous attempt at regime change, which was the invasion of Iraq in 2003. And I think the lessons of Iraq only strengthen our analysis of the way in which the United States, when it invades these countries and engages in regime change or nation building, the result is always the same. We talked in the past about Vietnam and how in the Vietnam War, the United States installed a regime in the South and why that regime not only failed, but I made the argument that it had to fail.

And I think the disaster of the Iraq invasion only further illustrates not only that regime change or such attempts at it are morally wrong, but that they always, and I would say necessarily, deploy a logic that ends up being disastrous for the people inside that region itself. So there’s absolutely no reason to think that an invasion of Iran will result in Iran being great or the Iranian people being liberated. If you just look at the lessons from Iraq and the lessons from Vietnam or even Afghanistan, what you see, I think, is a steady pattern, which one can show is being driven by very predictable forces, where the outcome ends up actually being disastrous for the region.

Right. Regime change is essentially a fancy term for imperialist invasions. And these occur when the United States feels that it’s lost the normal instruments of what’s called “soft power.”

We talked about soft power in our episode on USAID. When it feels that it cannot rely on soft power anymore, and it has to actually go in and physically change the nature of the political class and sometimes even the ruling class. So, it is the ultimate kind of weapon in the arsenal of empire, you would say, of modern empire. And in the case of Iraq, the attempted regime change unfolded over the course of actually around almost fifteen years.

Remember that in the 1980s, Iraq had a long war with the newly established regime in Iran. And this was a war in which the United States basically tilted towards Iraq. So Saddam was kind of a favored child in that region for the better part of a decade.

The problem was that at the turn of the decade, Saddam Hussein made the mistake of invading Kuwait, which initially it looked like the Unites States was giving its green light to, but very quickly, Bush Sr. turned around and said that this would not be allowed to pass. That’s the first Gulf War that Bush Sr. launched. And in 1991, when the war ended, the United States did something interesting.

Instead of completing what it saw as its mission, and thereby toppling the Saddam Hussein regime, it left him in power. Now, why did it leave him in power? At that time, Bush Sr. was worried that if he got rid of Saddam Hussein, it might result in a fallout regionally, where the Iraqi state, if it became unstable, would transmit that instability to other neighboring countries.

So what they did was let him keep his power and they withdrew their forces. Now, this was, it should be understood, in no way was it for them a green light for the Hussein regime to continue. It was very grudging acceptance that they didn’t, at the moment, think that the risk was worth it.

When Bill Clinton, becomes president in 1992, he much more aggressively seeks to topple the Saddam Hussein regime. But he does so not through an invasion, but by the installation of a really brutal regime of economic sanctions. This sanctions regime closed off trade for Iraq for much of the 1990s and it was incredibly destructive to that society.

In the history of the period, looking back, the sanctions regime is often presented as a way of trying to hem Saddam Hussein in, trying to keep him from doing more mischief.

In fact, these sanctions were anything but humane. The United Nations deems them responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Just as important as the fact that Clinton never wielded the sanctions as simply a containment measure, he always was hoping that they would trigger some kind of uprising in Iraq, so that they would be a trigger for regime change. The Clinton administration was trying to do everything short of invading to topple Hussein. It even tried to assassinate him several times, but they all failed.

This was a moment of euphoria for the American state globally, because the Soviet Union, which had always been something of a counterweight, even though it was a minor one, as I said in a previous podcast — that Soviet rival was now gone. So as early as 1990–91, the foreign policy establishment laid out a plan for a kind of unrivaled American hegemony in global geopolitics, within which the Middle East was seen as an area where they would no longer have to worry about potential Soviet responses to American expansion. So from Latin America through the Middle East all the way into East Asia, the United States now saw itself as the sole superpower, which in fact it was. So for Hussein to still be in power in the Middle East through the 1990s was seen as a real kind of thumb in the eye of American power. From 1992–98, the sanctioned regime was allowed to do its work in the hope that it would trigger an uprising, but that failed. In 1998, Clinton lost patience and in fact unleashed a bombing called Operation Desert Fox.

And from that point onward, Clinton was actually fully committed to mobilizing the military, again, short of invasion, but mobilizing it to the extent possible to get rid of Hussein. From 1998 onward, the United States was fully committed to regime change over and beyond what the sanctions regime was.

Absolutely. They wanted Hussein gone. They just weren’t sure. . . . There were two factors that they were worried about: one was the regional fallout and the other was the domestic American population, because they would be invading a country that did not pose any immediate threat to the United States. And this would be a pretty difficult kind of a public-relations challenge .

That is what 9/11 changed because in the aftermath of 9/11, Bush used every means possible to somehow peddle the fiction that Hussein was in some way involved with the Twin Towers coming down, and then that he was building nukes.

We have to distinguish between motivations and justifications. If the question is about justifications, the main justification was weapons of mass destruction. And as I think it was Cheney who put it, he said that [Hussein] is developing weapons of mass destruction, which was an absolute lie.

We know now, and in fact, every credible source knew back then that that was not true. But the claim was that he is developing them and we wouldn’t want a mushroom cloud to end up being the evidence that we had given them too much leeway. So there was an explicit attempt at a war scare using nuclear weapons as the justification to do what’s called a preemptive invasion.

In some readings of international law, it is legal and justified to invade preemptively if you think there’s an imminent threat that’s being leveled at you. Now, this was an incredible stretching of that doctrine, but it was given a legalese kind of interpretation to say there was an imminent threat coming from Hussein. And so the fiction of weapons of mass destruction was deployed.

This is important to keep in mind right now because there is, once again, this talk that Iran may just be weeks away or months away from a nuclear weapon. And so I’m sure that’s going to be deployed again in the event that they try to invade. Now, in this case, actually, Iran would be crazy not to develop a nuclear weapon since now that it’s been bombed for no apparent reason under the fiction that it has this fissile material, the most rational thing for it to do is actually develop that material.

In the Iraqi case, though, it was a complete fiction. The real reason they invaded was that they had for over a decade wanted to topple Saddam Hussein. And now one of the two major impediments, which was domestic public opinion, they felt was malleable enough to do it.

The only remaining issue was, would they be able to handle the regional fallout? And here there was a kind of hubris. The Bush administration was filled with absolute jackasses who were so arrogant.

Yes, please excuse the academic jargon here. They were filled with these people who thought not only that they would be able to handle the fallout, but they saw the invasion of Iraq as just a stepping stone to the real prize, which would be the invasion of Iran. And right now, today, all this talk about invading Iran should be linked back to that fantasy twenty, twenty-two years ago, that the real prize in the region is toppling Iran. And the saber-rattling right now is a kind of resuscitation of that fever dream that they had.

The motivation was that, during the course of the 1990s, Hussein had, in order to sustain himself against American aggression against him, he was trying to reinvent himself as a kind of modern-day Nasser. Now, this would not have mattered if he was just some tin-pot dictator somewhere in the corner of the world. But Iraq, by the late 1990s, was sitting on top of what was estimated to be the second or third largest reserves of oil in the world.

Because he had that leverage, he would also necessarily have a lot of visibility. Now, remember, the United States at this time is thinking of itself as the sole superpower, as the global hegemon, the power that can call all the shots. At that time, to have in the Middle East, now not one but two regimes that are anti-US, Iran as well as Iraq, was deemed to be intolerable.

Iraq was seen as the more vulnerable one. And so you start by invading Iraq, and then you saunter into Iran. And the fantasy was you’d be treated with garlands and parades and all that because you’re liberating these two regimes.

Both of them held the same promise, which is two countries swimming on oil, both of which, if you topple these unfriendly regimes, would get rid of the last remaining holdouts to American power in that region.

Oil was never the direct reason for the invasion. At best, it was an indirect reason. So what would the direct reason be?

The direct and most vulgar reason would be they wanted to invade so that they could take control of the oil and make sure that the oil was directed toward America, perhaps at concessional prices. Well, none of that had to be done if all it wanted was access to oil because oil was the main source of revenue for the Hussein regime. So there was no universe in which Saddam Hussein would refuse to sell oil to the United States.

If all the United States wanted to do was get access to the oil to make sure it has uninterrupted access, all it had to do was lift the sanctions regime. The moment it lifted the sanctions regime, Hussein would have opened up the sluices and sold all the oil that the United States wanted to them because as I said, that was his main source of revenue. And so too in the world.

A second interpretation is that they wanted their oil companies to be in charge of the production. Well, this also is untrue. The oil companies had already worked out a very stable set of relationships with Iraqi oil producers and they were doing fine.

And the best proof of this is after the invasion, the United States did privatize Iraqi oil, but it didn’t hand it over to American oil companies. In retrospect, if you wanted to see who benefited the most from grabbing control of oil production, actually it was China. China now has more control of Iraqi oil than any other country in the world.

So, the vulgar interpretation that they wanted access to the oil doesn’t hold any water because they could have had stable access even without toppling the regime. Now, I think oil did play an indirect role, which as I said earlier, is that it did give Hussein geopolitical leverage by virtue of his prestige and by virtue of the fact that while he would not cut off supplies to oil, he could change its flow. He could interrupt it.

He could fiddle around with oil prices in a way that would be detrimental to American interests because it would inject a dose of volatility to oil markets and to oil prices. All of that makes it much more attractive to have a pliant regime in the region rather than somebody who’s trying to use his leverage to bolster his place in the local power configurations within the Middle East. So I think all we can say about oil is that the kind of narrow version of the “oil grab” hypothesis I don’t think really has any real traction, but oil certainly was relevant as a background condition for the invasion.

It’s not clear that it failed to accomplish its goals. What it did fail in was in giving anything resembling a stable and democratic regime to the Iraqi people, which was what its stated intentions were. So let’s just go through what happened.

The kind of popular academic lesson of the Iraq war is that there was a huge mistake that was made when the United States tried to implant a new regime. And the mistake really had two dimensions to it. The first one was that it dismantled the Baathist party.

Now this was the ruling party in Iraq, which had become the main source of employment for hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. They would become party members and through the party would get employment in the government, in state enterprises, in all sorts of public sector jobs. Party membership was a kind of a step towards party patronage, just the same way you’d had in the Soviet Union.

So, Paul Bremer, who was in charge of installing the new regime, dismantled the Baathist party and then also dismantled the Iraqi army, which was the other great source of employment. And the popular, accepted academic interpretation is that in doing so, he created a lot of disgruntled Iraqis and that is what started the kind of resistance to the American occupation there. All right, now that is all true. All that happened. He did in fact blunder in this way. He did in fact give some sort of fuel, some kind of fodder to an Iraqi resistance.

But the truth is, that’s not the reason it failed in any way that the promise of the invasion was, which was make Iraq great again. You know, the first MIGA, as you would say.

Yeah, Bush can say “I did it first.” The real reason was, there was no way the United States would have allowed a popular, national, even quasi-democratic regime in Iraq. And the reason for that is simple. Iraq was, as I said, sitting on top of an ocean of oil. And for any democratic, popular regime in Iraq, the nationalization of oil, to have local control over oil, would have been an absolute must, an absolute precondition. Because Iraqis hold their oil resources as a kind of jewel.

So for the United States to have gone in, gotten rid of Hussein, and then actually said, “okay, now we’re going to let the Iraqis settle their own fate, direct their own future, now that the dictator is gone,” it would have meant allowing, at least in principle, the possibility of a new nationalistic regime, albeit more democratic one.

The real problem the United States had in Iraq was not that Hussein was a dictator. The United States has never had a problem with dictators. In fact, it’s done everything it can in many parts of the world to sustain the dictators, as long as they do what’s really important, which is what was also important in Iraq, which is play by American interests. The real problem with a post–Saddam Hussein regime would have been that it might have been another nationalist regime.

And that would have meant, again, having somebody in the region who may not play along with American designs vis-à-vis oil and vis-à-vis geopolitics in the region.

That’s exactly right. In both cases, here’s what happens. Under the promise of restoring or implanting democracy in one of these countries, what they actually do is put in place a puppet regime.

The reason they have to put in place a puppet regime is that they cannot take the risk of an actual democratic government taking an anti-American stance. In Vietnam, this is for Cold-War reasons. In the Middle East, it’s because of the oil.

They cannot risk a regime coming into power that is more popular than Hussein, but is equally nationalistic. So what they do is they go in, and of course, Bremer makes this mistake or that mistake. But assume, for a second, he hadn’t made those mistakes.

Assume for a second he’d kept the Baathists in power. Assume for a second that he hadn’t dismantled the entire army. What then?

He still would have had to absolutely disallow any kind of popular, democratic direction of the Iraqi political economy. And you can see this in what they actually did. In addition to dismantling these two institutions, the second thing they do is when they implant a new Iraqi government, they don’t look for local representatives, people who were maybe mobilizing against Saddam Hussein, people who had local popularity.

What they do is they parachute in a bunch of corrupt hooligans, mafiosos, and charlatans who have no local base, but who do have tremendous popularity with the CIA, with the Pentagon, and the State Department. Ahmed Chalabi is the main such character, right?

Exactly. So here’s the logic of it: They bring these people in whether Diem in Vietnam, Karzai in Afghanistan or these quislings in Iraq. They all have very narrow support bases. They have narrow support bases because the United States can’t allow anyone with deep national support to take power, because they will have the leverage to oppose US designs.

So the person who’s acceptable to the United States is the person least acceptable to the local population. Because they have a small support base, they have to do two things. They have to use undemocratic, dictatorial measures to maintain themselves in power. In Karzai’s case in Afghanistan, it was an ocean of bribes and selected assassinations.

In the case of Vietnam, it was thousands and thousands of assassinations and relying entirely on the American army. And in the case of Iraq, once again, it was a complete reliance on American support rather than local support. This, in turn, delegitimizes the regime even further.

And the result is either a civil war or a long, drawn-out, frozen conflict in these countries. The key point is this: in each and every case, the justification, the promise is that the invasion is being done to topple a dictatorial regime or to topple colonialism and put in its place real national sovereignty.

But that is always a lie. Because to allow for national sovereignty would be to allow for the possibility of a country deviating from American preferences in the region. And the fact is, when it’s a choice between American preferences and the preferences of the people who are in those countries, the Americans naturally always opt not just for prioritizing their preferences, but for crushing militarily, if they have to, the aspirations of the local population.

This is why it’s a fantasy to say that the problem was Bremer, and if he had only handled it differently, the invasion could have worked. That’s an absolute fantasy. Given the real motivations for the invasion, which was to put Iraq in line with American designs in the region, there was no universe in which actual open democratic elections would have been allowed to play out at the time for the reason that they would have brought about results that were unacceptable.

The second one is important because it’s being brought up again and it will make the rounds if the United States starts saber rattling again. This is the view that Bush’s mistake was to import democracy to a culture that wasn’t ready for it. Ironically, this is the favorite liberal criticism.

The problem, this criticism goes, is that these are regions that have never had democracy. And you can’t shove democracy down a people’s throat through a military invasion if they’re not ready for it. In a minute I’ll get into why it’s empirically mistaken. But let me just point out how profoundly racist it is. It presumes what colonial masters have been saying for a hundred years, which is that the darker nations, the nations in Africa, in Asia, the problem they have is that they’re not ready for democracy and it’s the West’s job to either tutor them or to wait till they’re ready. And that’s what the relationship of trusteeship is.

The idea is that the West will rule them until they’re ready. And then when that golden hour comes and they’re culturally suited to govern themselves, the West can dutifully hand over power to these nations.

It’s racist because what does democracy actually require? Democracy is simply the institutionalization of people’s desire for some kind of self-determination, for having control over their own fates. Now, why is that something that’s deemed to be absent in the Middle East or absent in other parts of the world?

Where was it in the West? When the West got democracy, was there a foreign power that tutored them? Was there a period of tutelage?

The way you learn about democracy is by having democracy. So when are the people in any region of the world culturally ready for it? Well, they’re always ready.

They’re always ready because it is an elemental fact about human nature that people don’t like being bossed around. If you see democracies failing in parts of the world, it isn’t because the people aren’t ready. It’s because elites have the power and the wherewithal to resist democratic changes.

And this brings us to the empirical record. If you look at the actual history of the Middle East in the twentieth century, the entire century is a story of ordinary people in the Middle East trying to establish a national sovereignty — that is, independence from imperial powers — and have popular control over their governments. And ironically, Iran has been one of the countries that led the struggle. So in 1905, Iran had what was called a “constitutional revolution,” which is one of the first attempts to install a constitutional regime in the region.

Then again in 1954, famously, the United States and the CIA toppled a nationalist regime led by Mohammad Mossadegh, which was trying to take control over Iranian oil reserves.

Same is true of Iraq. The same is true of Syria. The story of the twentieth century is people of the Middle East trying to establish their sovereignty against empire and against their local dictators.

And in each case, it was foreign powers allied with the local ruling classes that suppressed democracy. So the idea that the Iraqis have to wait until they’re ready or Iranians have to wait until they’re ready is simply absurd. They’ve been ready for over a century.

It’s been the local allies of the United States that have suppressed it for a simple reason. In Saudi Arabia, in the Gulf states, in all of these regions, the ruling regimes are incredibly unpopular because they’re dictatorial. And because they’re dictatorial, they survive through the helping hand of the United States. So this idea that liberals have that the mistake that the United States makes is that it tries to import democracy into regions that aren’t ready for it is the most cynical thing imaginable because the opposite is true. Americans have never once tried to implant democracy in these regions. Always and everywhere, their goal has been to suppress it.

It used to be the hallmark of all left-wing thought, that there is a universal need and capacity that we have across cultures for democratic participation, for self-determination. It’s been one of the many signs of intellectual degeneration in this neoliberal era that we’ve seen the revitalization of nineteenth-century colonial tropes. Only the difference is now it’s being done by liberals and by radicals who call themselves decolonial and postcolonial theorists.

It’s profoundly racist. There’s nothing progressive about it. And it goes into a very, I think, useless critique of imperialism, which accords to the imperialist these kind of pure and friendly motivations, which they’ve never once had.

On this supposedly liberal or radical account, you wind up with the conclusion that the fault of these imperial invasions comes, ironically, to rest on its victims. That the United States was this kind of lumbering, good-hearted fool that thought that the natives were ready for democracy, but in fact they’re not. So the lesson is, “you get into trouble for trying to do good for people who don’t deserve it.”

No, it’s not colonial because the United States went in and then it never intended to stay. It always intended to get back out. It is, however, imperialist in that you recall that I said the definition of empire in a previous podcast, I said the definition of empire is when one country restricts the sovereignty or the independent action of another.

So this is imperialist through and through. And this is what the liberal critique fails to get. The United States was never in there to try to help Iraqis gain their independence, gain their autonomy, when liberals say that the problem is that you try to import democracy. This assumes that what the United States is doing is actually attempting to do good, but it’s failing to do so. There was never any question of attempting to do good. It was always an imperial invasion.

And if there is going to be an invasion of Iran, the Iraqi experience is almost a perfect script of what’s going to happen. Because here too, the Iran oil reserves are too important to be left to the Iranians. It’s going to have to be taken over by the United States.

If it means then that the regime that will be installed will have to be one that is friendly to American interests, that’s what’s going to be done. If it means it’ll be a regime that has no social base, this is why they’re peddling the Pahlavi again, the grandson of Pahlavi again. They think he’s going to be a pliant tool over there.

He has zero legitimacy, but they’ll install him because he’s the one who’ll play along with their interests, which can only mean that he’ll maintain power through a dictatorship — which can only mean that there will be either ongoing conflict or that the country will have to be in some way subdued either through dismembering it, cutting it up into pieces, or by installing something like a military regime once again. Whatever the outcome is, there’s no way in which it’s going to be beneficial to the Iranians.

Because it was such an unmitigated disaster and because the justification for it, you know, the weapons of mass destruction justification turned out to be such an absolute lie. It was an exercise in duplicity and it resulted in catastrophe for the people whom it was supposed to support. This is a good lesson right now because all of the same tropes that were used to justify that invasion are being trotted out again for a potential justification of an invasion of Iran.

And we should remember that in the wake of that invasion, the amount of hand-wringing and the amount of apologetics that had to be issued on the part of its proponents, on the part of the people who justified it in the press and in the political class, that’s going to happen again because they are once again relying on the same tropes and the same kind of lies about Iran. So the basic lesson for the Left is this: a country like the United States, which is an aggressive imperial power, never invades for the right reasons.

It always invades for its own reasons and it always ends up being a disaster for the people who are on the receiving end of it. There is no way in which an invasion of Iran or any other country in the region, a region which is swimming in oil, will be allowed to play out in a way that deviates from American interests. So the task of every progressive here is not to think that if you just topple the mullahs, you’ll get democracy in the region.

That’s out of the question. What you’ll get is an American-controlled and American-mediated regime that’s geared towards American geopolitical interests that will almost necessarily be at odds with the interests of the local population. There is no progressive veneer that can be given to regime change in a future war with Iran.