How to Sell A War: The George W. Bush Story (2025) Movie Script
1
(dramatic music)
It was 7am and I was on a
run and I got a call from my
mom and she said,
you got to turn on the TV.
There are planes flying into buildings.
It's complete chaos.
All I can remember was just looking
at the TV set in complete shock.
(dramatic music)
We couldn't figure out
in the beginning what
was happening, whether or not it was an
actual terrorist attack,
whether it was an accident.
But as more planes
were flying into buildings,
crashing into the Pentagon, it became
clear that the US was under attack.
(dramatic music)
So we're going to
see what we can do.
We're going to do our best.
This is only a few weeks after both
of us retired after 20 years of service.
But still in our hearts,
we're firefighters.
Now nothing like this had ever happened on
American soil and the scale
was absolutely unprecedented.
And so you've got this sense of
fear and confusion and vulnerability.
You know, not only in New
York, but all over the country.
Every American was
scared for their own safety
at that point, because
it wasn't clear whether
or not there were going to be more
planes flying into buildings,
whether or not there
was going to be some
use of biological weapons.
The terrorists did exactly
what they wanted to
do and that was to create terror.
And you've got to remember
those attacks happened
right in the heart of
the financial district
of New York, which some people regard
as basically the capital of the world.
And that world changed in an
instant when those planes hit.
Another plane come in and all you hear
was this rumbling, people was crying,
people was jumping out the window.
They was waving, like trying to like
say, help me, like you see their arms.
And then you saw the man jump down
and he just, everybody was jumping.
It was crazy.
I remember one of my family members
said that she could see a man and a
woman holding hands,
jumping out of the building.
She could even see his tie.
(dramatic music)
It's terrible.
Unbelievable.
I didn't think something
like this could happen,
especially in New York.
I'm sorry for all the people
that lost their lives there today.
It's very sad.
Makes you wonder what
our intelligence community is
doing, you know, to have
something like this happen.
How can this happen?
What do you think
it'll do for the psyche of
New Yorkers and the
psyche of America too?
I think it's more important the psyche of
America than the psyche of New
York, because this is world-reaching.
It's not just the city,
it's around the world.
It's going to, I don't think anything
will ever be the same again.
(dramatic music)
Americans have many questions tonight.
(dramatic music)
Americans are asking,
who attacked our country?
An atrocity which America insists
tonight will soon be avenged.
The evidence we have gathered all points to
a collection of loosely affiliated
terrorist organizations known as al-Qaeda.
Bush agreed that the US needed to invade
Afghanistan, that there
was no doubt about this.
But what was also put on
the table was to invade Iraq.
So this is what the neocons do.
They look at 9-11 and they go,
great, we can use this as an opportunity
to get what we want done.
The United States of
America will not permit
the world's most dangerous
regimes to threaten us
with the world's most destructive weapons.
It turns out we were all wrong,
probably, in my judgment.
And that is most disturbing.
You know, why were you
manipulating intelligence?
Why were you exaggerating the threat?
Is this part of a broader strategy
to reshape the Middle East?
Did you lie about
WMDs to get your way?
And I think they adopted a lot of
information that was at the time viewed as
very weak and they viewed it as fat.
The terrorists know that the outcome in the
war on terror will depend
on the outcome in Iraq.
And so to protect our citizens,
the free world must succeed in Iraq.
The public are going to trust what their
governments tell them, and
their governments have also
got to create this atmosphere
of suspicion around Saddam.
You would have to be, let's face facts,
pretty confident to have said in the build
-up to the Iraq war, Saddam
definitely does not have WMDs.
The jury was still out.
But the problem is that the US and
the British were saying,
he's definitely got them.
There were no weapons
of mass destruction, that
these were all lies, that these were all
mistruths that were peddled by the
neocons in the Bush administration.
Get ready to read
these words the fast way.
Get ready.
- May.
- Yes, May.
- Get ready.
- Cape.
Yes, Cape.
- Get ready.
- Cane.
Yes, Cane.
- Get ready.
- Pain.
Yes, Pain.
Boys and girls, you're going
to read these words again.
So at the very moment of the attacks,
the American President George W.
Bush was in Florida, in Sarasota, and he
was at this little elementary
school listening to
the kids, you know, do some
sort of reading or performance.
Okay, get ready to read the words
on this page without making a mistake.
Everybody tell me what
this part of the word says.
Rob.
Yes, Rob.
When Bush was reading
to these young children
this book, he was
actually being filmed, and
it was able to catch his reaction to
finding out that America
was under attack, and
he looked completely
in shock and devastated.
(dramatic music)
Bush's kind of response is
kind of, it's almost a bit surreal.
It's a bit strange.
He just sits there very
calmly, just listening
to the kids, and then he's told about
the second hit on the second tower.
(dramatic music)
Please ensure all cell phones
and pages are off at this time.
Thank you.
(dramatic music)
(applause)
Ladies and gentlemen, this is
a difficult moment for America.
(dramatic music)
Today, we've had a national tragedy.
Two airplanes have crashed
into the World Trade Center
in an apparent terrorist
attack on our country.
One of its most famous
landmarks destroyed, thousands
dead, and America is under siege.
(dramatic music)
At the time of the attack, Dick Cheney
is the American Vice President,
and he's in the White House.
Now, he moves very, very quickly to the
secure underground bunker
beneath the White House, and
he is watching as the situation escalates.
The issue was that for an hour, from
9.30am to 10.30am, Cheney was not
able to really communicate with anybody.
He went into one of these deep bunkers
that had been built during the Cold War
that had been equipped with all kinds of
technology, and he was essentially
on his own to make decisions.
Many people felt that he
actually massively overstepped
the mark, giving an order for fighter jets
to shoot down any hijacked airliners.
I have spoken to the Vice President, and
to conduct a full-scale
investigation, to hunt
down and to find those
folks who committed this act.
Cheney had said that he had spoken to
Bush and that he had gotten his approval
but there is no official record of this.
So a lot of people feel that Cheney
is massively exceeding
his brief as Vice President.
The President is not
incapacitated, so there's no
reason why Cheney has to
assume the role of President.
They're trying to save your
life, that's what they thought.
I don't need no shade,
I don't need no shade.
You can't help nobody right now.
Terrorism against our
nation will not stand.
May God bless the victims,
their families and America.
Thank you very much.
So the neocons, that is
short for neoconservatives,
and they regard themselves as a new
form of right-wing politician, if you like.
And their key policies is that they're very
hawkish, they're very
pro-fighting wars overseas, and
they like intervening in
other countries' business.
The neocons believed in a much
more aggressive foreign policy.
They believed that the U.S. needed to
not just contain communism but actually
spread democracy around the world.
In particular, they were
focused on the Middle East.
Neocons tended to see the world in very
black and white thinking,
in evil versus good,
in sort of binary style of thinking.
And so you've got figures like Dick
Cheney, who's the American Vice President.
You've got the Defense
Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld.
Actually, the most fervent
neocon was Deputy Secretary
of Defense Paul Wolfowitz.
He had written a paper in 1992 outlining
a new American foreign policy that would be
much more aggressive in
the Middle East in particular.
He did not like the fact that the elder
Bush had left Saddam Hussein in power
after the Gulf War.
Now, you know, these individuals have
massive amounts of influence over Bush.
They make him look like
a kind of puppet president.
Bush may have a fairly good steer on
domestic policy, i.e. stuff
within the United States.
But when it comes to foreign policy, it's
these guys who look like they're in charge.
(dramatic music)
Make no mistake, the
United States will hunt
down and punish those
responsible for these cowardly acts.
In many ways, the 9-11 attack was
a kind of gift to the
neoconservatives because
this sort of provides an excuse for them
to push their agenda
for Middle East reform.
I mean, they've long
wanted to topple Saddam
Hussein, who is the dictator in Iraq.
Up until this point, Iraq was not an
ally of the US, certainly, but
there wasn't any reason to invade.
On the very day of the attack, on
9-11 itself, Donald Rumsfeld says to one
of his aides, you know,
let's go and hit Iraq as well.
Let's not just, you know,
concentrate on Bin Laden.
Let's concentrate on Saddam Hussein.
Donald Rumsfeld tells an aide, we need to
look for connections of how
Iraq was involved in 9-11.
You know, we can kill
as many birds as we like.
You know, the world's
sympathy is going to be with us.
And Rumsfeld very quickly
capitalizes on the situation.
This was an unprovoked
attack on absolutely innocent
people and thousands and thousands of them.
There is no justification for it.
It's a product of insanity.
It's the insanity of terrorism.
And we have to do something about it.
We have to do something about it as
a nation and we have to do something
about it as a city in
the way we react to it.
Do you feel you're sending
a message to the terrorists?
We are sending a message to the terrorists.
The message is a simple one.
You're not going to stop us.
We promoted 186 people from
the fire department yesterday.
Today the stock exchange opens.
Before you know it, while we're still in
sorrow, you're going to see
the buildings start rising again.
I'm going to fix you, I'll
confiscate the camera.
There was documentation of accounts
with millions of dollars and
highly confidential documents.
It looks as if you wouldn't think anything
like this could have happened
unless there was an agreement.
Oh, fantastic.
I want you all to know
that America today, America
today is on bended knee in prayer for
the people whose lives were lost here for
the workers who work here,
for the families who mourn.
This nation stands with the good people of
New York City and New
Jersey and Connecticut
as we mourn the loss of
thousands of our citizens.
So four days after 9-11 on September
15th, Bush and his team were meeting to
discuss their response.
Bush agreed that the U.S. needed to
invade Afghanistan, that
there was no doubt about this.
But what was also put on
the table was to invade Iraq.
At this point, Bush didn't shut it down,
essentially said that he was open
to discussing it more in the future.
Good afternoon.
On my orders, the
United States military has
begun strikes against
Al-Qaeda terrorist training camps
and military installations of the
Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
On October the 7th,
2001, you have President
Bush formally announcing
the start of what is
known as Operation Enduring Freedom.
Typically, the Americans give
these operations really literal names.
And that marks the U.S.'s
military intervention in Afghanistan.
That is a direct response to 9-11.
Today, we focus on Afghanistan,
but the battle is broader.
Every nation has a choice to make.
In this conflict, there
is no neutral ground.
If any government sponsors
the outlaws and killers
of innocents, they have become
outlaws and murderers themselves.
Bush is saying, listen, you know,
we're not just targeting the terrorists.
We're also going to target the
regime that is supporting them.
And we're going to go in and we're
going to turn things upside down.
We are going to
get rid of that regime.
And we're going to put in a new
government, basically, of our own making.
In other American wars,
enemy commanders have come
to doubt the wisdom of taking on the
strength and power of this nation and the
resolve of her people.
The Americans know that
the Taliban are providing
safe haven for Bin Laden, who had
organized the 9-11 attacks, and lots of his
followers.
I expect that somewhere in a cave in
Afghanistan, there's a
terrorist leader who is at
this moment considering
precisely the same thing.
(speaking foreign language)
Osama bin Laden was the
founder and leader of al-Qaeda.
And that's this very
sort of loosely arranged
militant Islamist group, which
were responsible for planning
and executing the 9-11 attacks,
and also many, many other attacks.
They were able to help the Taliban to
control 90% of Afghanistan as they were
taking over the vast
majority of the country.
Because he wants to
basically establish a kind
of global Islamic regime,
or a caliphate, as it's known.
And he sees the United States as the
primary enemy, the primary obstacle.
I don't blame anybody
other than Osama bin Laden.
He has brought nothing but
death and terror wherever he goes.
Now he's bringing it to
the people of Afghanistan.
Beautiful as they look from up here, the
snow-capped peaks of Afghanistan
present a problem for US forces.
Because this environment
is almost certainly hiding the
world's most wanted man.
Down there somewhere is Osama bin Laden.
America's decided on its enemy.
The wanted posters are out for Afghan-based
Osama bin Laden, and the people
here back military action to get him.
But I can assure the American
people, I am determined.
I'm not going to be distracted.
I will keep my focus to make sure
that not only are these brought to justice,
but anybody who's been
associated will be brought to justice.
Those who harbour terrorists
will be brought to justice.
This crusade, this war
on terrorism, is going
to take a while.
And the American people must be patient.
The US-led coalition that goes into
Afghanistan is tremendously successful.
Within three months of the US invasion of
Afghanistan, the Taliban had collapsed.
They have kicked the Taliban out.
They've installed Karzai
as the Afghan leader.
And they've done this through
airstrikes, a massive ground assault.
It is basically a tremendously
successful operation.
The Taliban was forced
to leave the country.
And they found a home in Pakistan.
The problem is, how
do you stay in power?
How can you keep this country stable?
And as the Americans are going
to find out, that is very difficult.
We've never let up on
Osama bin Laden from day one.
We've actively and
aggressively pursued him.
We've captured and killed
thousands of al-Qaeda,
various places around the world,
and especially in Afghanistan.
We'll continue to very
aggressively pursue him.
And I'm confident,
eventually, we'll get him.
The advantage seems to be his.
But before this year is out, the
Americans have vowed to find him.
The US defense secretary
said special forces were
hunting Osama bin Laden,
despite obvious difficulties.
It's not a bottle that you can cork.
It's a large country
with a lot of borders.
One has to be realistic.
I think we'll find him, either
there or in some other country.
But you don't know where
he is, and you can't find him.
We have not found him, but
we can find him, and we will.
And he and those who he leads will
be held accountable for
what happened last Tuesday.
He's on the run, if
he's running at all.
So we don't know whether he's in
a cave with the door shut, or a cave
with the door open.
We just don't know.
There's all kinds of reports
and all kinds of speculation.
But one thing we know is that he's
not in charge of Afghanistan anymore.
On the 28th of December 2001, you've got
President Bush giving a
speech at his Texas ranch.
And he's standing next
to General Tommy Franks,
who is the commander of US Central
Command for the whole Afghan invasion.
It's basically a speech
all about the frustration
the Americans are feeling that Osama
bin Laden has not yet been captured.
And he alluded to the fact that while he
hoped that the year would be peaceful,
he was realistic and he
didn't think that it would be.
And so while I hope that 2002
is a year of peace, I'm realistic.
But then he goes into the ranch with
Franks, and it's there that Bush then says
to Franks, OK, we're going to turn
our attention somewhere else now.
We're going to look
at going in to Iraq.
In November of 2001,
Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld was informing
General Tommy Franks that he
needed to start the
planning for the war in Iraq.
This took place during the Afghan
war and without the public knowledge.
(dramatic music)
I think those who
would anticipate that it's
sort of in quickly and out quickly in
Afghanistan would not be pleased.
Although the US have been focusing on the
war in Afghanistan, you
have got the neoconservatives,
men like Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz.
They've been pushing for
military action in Iraq for years.
The neocons wanted to
invade Iraq because they
wanted to completely
transform the Middle East into
a sea of liberal democracies that were
more pliant to the US administration.
Their desire to invade
Iraq is very controversial.
But if you were going to defend them,
they would say, look, we want to have
a democratic, stable Middle East.
We don't want these
dictators like Saddam Hussein
helping to run the show over there.
We want to get rid of these guys.
You know, we want to have
a world which is democratic.
It has equal rights for
women and so on and so forth.
So this is what they would say.
But in order to achieve that, they've got
to come up with some pretty remarkable
excuses as to why they really want to go
and invade Iraq as well as Afghanistan.
Now, the issue, of course, was that the
regimes in the Middle
East were fairly authoritarian
and there wasn't really
any movement domestically.
There wasn't any bottom-up
movement to change that.
So they did the best that they could
to try to pinpoint Iraq being involved in
the planning of 9-11, even though
there wasn't really any evidence of that.
Now, Afghanistan is sheltering terrorists.
It's a completely legitimate
place for the Americans
and their allies to go
and wage some war.
Iraq is not sheltering terrorists.
So what do the neocons do?
What's the excuse they come up with?
What they say is Saddam Hussein has
weapons of mass destruction or WMDs.
Our enemies are innovative and resourceful.
And so were we.
They never stop thinking about new ways to
harm our country and our
people, and neither do we.
(dramatic music)
So in January of 2002, Bush gave a
State of the Union address that is often
known as his access of evil speech.
Our second goal is to prevent regimes that
sponsor terror from threatening
America or our friends
and allies with weapons
of mass destruction.
And it's during that
speech where he introduces
this whole concept of the access of evil.
Now, those are three countries.
Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.
And the whole purpose of the speech is
to highlight the perceived
global threat by those nations.
The Iraqi regime has
plotted to develop anthrax
and nerve gas and nuclear
weapons for over a decade.
It was in this speech that he starts
using the words weapons
of mass destruction and
starts to warn the
American public that Iraq
is pursuing WMDs, and that Iraq poses
an enormous threat to U.S. security.
That they're destabilizing the
world, and they've got to be dealt with.
And so that speech is setting
the stage for an invasion of Iraq.
The United States of
America will not permit
the world's most dangerous
regimes to threaten us
with the world's most destructive weapons.
We have now no choice.
So we will act.
And our determination in acting is total.
We will not let up or rest until
our objectives are met in full.
At the time, the British government is led
by Prime Minister Tony Blair, and
he is a real key ally of George Bush's.
And he is fully supportive of Bush's stance
on Iraq, even though there was very
widespread public opposition in the UK.
So Prime Minister Tony Blair of the UK
was really in lockstep with the Bush
administration about invading Iraq.
He never really wavered
in his support, while
other European allies
were far more critical and
wanted more information,
wanted more proof, and were
really hesitant to support
any kind of invasion of Iraq.
What this latest terrorist outrage
shows us is that this is a war.
Its main battleground is Iraq.
We have got to make sure we defeat
these terrorists, the former
Saddam people in Iraq,
and we must do that because that is
an essential part of
defeating this fanaticism and
extremism that is killing innocent
people all over our world today.
So what the government in the UK
is trying to do is to say, Saddam is
a direct threat to British lives.
And this is a way of trying to justify
an invasion and trying to justify why
the British support Bush.
Here's why Iraq is important in this.
Because in the end, their case, which is
based on dividing
people, the Arab world and
the Western world, the Muslim world and the
Christian world and other
religions, their case is
that we are in Iraq to suppress Muslims,
steal their oil, to spoil the country.
Now, we know, you know,
that all those things are lies.
So there was a memo that was leaked
by the British that showed that the US
was actually planning
to invade Iraq well before,
and that they were using and cherry-picking
facts in ways that
could justify an invasion.
The joint press conference showed
their shared mission to eradicate evil.
But if President Bush has the power in
this relationship, Mr Blair showed
himself to be its most powerful advocate.
It will not be a war against Iraq.
It will be a war to liberate Iraq.
What we see now is this kind of process
of fear-mongering the public to make
them support the idea
of a war against Iraq.
The choice is not ours,
it is Saddam Hussein's.
If he will not disarm voluntarily,
we will do it for him by force, and his
regime will join the Taliban
in the dustbin of history.
So the Bush administration
engaged in a great
deal of fear-mongering to shape the view
of the American public that Iraq was
acquiring weapons of mass destruction.
This started with Vice
President Dick Cheney going
on television in August
of 2002 and basically
lying to the American
public that Saddam Hussein
had acquired weapons of mass destruction.
Simply stated, there is
no doubt that Saddam
Hussein now has weapons
of mass destruction.
There is no doubt that he is amassing
them to use them against our friends,
against our allies, and against us.
Even Condoleezza Rice
and others in the Bush
administration, you know, using
imagery of mushroom clouds
to say that, you know, there could be
a nuclear attack, and everyone
knows what a mushroom cloud signifies.
And then in February of 2003, Secretary of
State Colin Powell famously
spoke in front of the United Nations.
I remember him actually
bringing these cylinders that
supposedly were evidence
that Iraq had a nuclear
program, that this was ample
evidence that they posed a huge threat.
Indeed, the facts and
Iraq's behavior show that
Saddam Hussein and his
regime are concealing their
efforts to produce more
weapons of mass destruction.
The world's got to kind of
believe the Secretary of State.
Why wouldn't you believe him?
He's a kind of decorated
general, a very authoritative figure.
And unless we act, we are confronting
an even more frightening future.
Saddam Hussein is a
homicidal dictator who is
addicted to weapons of mass destruction.
You would hear the words weapons of mass
destruction, WMDs,
repeatedly used in the media.
The words weapons of mass destruction was a
key phrase to trigger Americans to be more
worried about Iraq than
they might normally be.
The government was going on and on and
on about them, saying this is the
primary justification for invading Iraq.
You know, Saddam has got these WMDs.
They could threaten the US.
They could threaten its allies.
We cannot wait for the final proof, the
smoking gun that could come in the form
of a mushroom cloud.
The world is going to be a lot,
lot safer if we get rid of Saddam,
because in doing so, we'll also get rid
of the threat posed by his supposed WMDs.
It is clear, however,
that if left unchecked,
Saddam Hussein will
continue to increase his capacity
to wage biological and
chemical warfare and will
keep trying to develop nuclear weapons.
You've got this constant
harping on that post
9-11, the world's completely changed.
It's much more dangerous.
And in order to protect US lives,
what we've got to do is go into the
Middle East, go in hard, take down these
regimes and install new
democratic cosy allies.
As dawn broke over the Arabian Sea, the
carrier Abraham Lincoln
was being replenished.
Helicopters winching aboard
supplies of bombs and ammunition,
food and fuel for a conflict
many on board believe is coming.
Which is why below deck,
President Bush's speech
was being followed intently by sailors
too young to have yet experienced war.
The terrorists know that the outcome in the
war on terror will depend
on the outcome in Iraq.
And so to protect our citizens,
the free world must succeed in Iraq.
(dramatic music)
Saddam, you know,
he's an evil, nasty dictator.
You know, he has people executed.
He has people tortured.
Those that worked with
Saddam said that he's
either going to make you a
millionaire or he's going to kill you.
There was just really no
middle ground with him.
He uses chemical weapons.
He wages war on his neighbour, Iran.
He either provided you with all kinds
of goods and luxury and co-opted you or
the next day he could chop your
body up, put it in a body bag and
deliver it to your wife.
He intimidates his population,
surveillance, secret police, you name it.
He famously held a series of trials where
he announced all of the traitors in the
room and then forced those that
were remaining to execute these traitors.
(dramatic music)
He is a classic dictator.
And he tended to want to surround himself
with those without expertise,
without bravery, without experience,
rather than surround
himself with people who he
viewed could threaten
his own political survival.
But he's also thinking, I don't just
want to be kind of head of Iraq, I
want to be head leader
of the whole Arab world.
I mean, he is nothing if
not completely ambitious.
And so this is why he
starts the Iran-Iraq war.
It goes on for eight years and ultimately
results in stalemate with hundreds
of thousands of deaths on both sides.
And this is why he invades Kuwait in
1990, which is why he becomes the kind
of public enemy number one for so many
in the United States, because
Kuwait is a friendly country.
And Saddam is wanting to take
Kuwait because he wants its oil.
He's literally just trying
to steal another country.
Saddam Hussein and his sons
must leave Iraq within 48 hours.
In March 2003, Bush
issues this public ultimatum
to Saddam Hussein,
right, you leave Iraq within
48 hours, two days, or we
are gonna go in with our forces.
You are gonna face military action.
Their refusal to do so will result in
military conflict commenced
at a time of our choosing.
The Americans are firm,
uncompromising, and they're not
gonna wait for more UN sanctions.
They're gonna go it alone.
They don't care about the UN anymore.
Seven days after the phone call,
parliament supported military action.
And the following day on March the 19th,
the Iraq war started.
You've got the US, you've got the UK,
you've got a whole coalition of allies, and
their goal is simply to remove
Saddam Hussein from power.
And you've got this intense
aerial bombardment of key targets.
And that is known as shock and awe.
And actually, you know,
it really is shock and awe.
They are absolutely decimating
all these military targets,
all these governmental targets
in Baghdad and elsewhere.
So the Iraq war was a
disaster for Saddam Hussein.
He had completely
neglected his army because he
had coup-proofed the regime
and created these parallel militaries.
These parallel militaries,
in turn, were smuggling their
weapons and sending
them off to Saudi Arabia.
I mean, you know, the Iraqis
don't put up any defense.
And frankly, why would
they really bother when
you've got the mightiest
nations in the world
turning up on your doorstep
and just kicking your door down?
There's nothing you can really do about it.
Hussein would surround
himself by really those who
were just completely incompetent,
who were sycophantic, who
were often using in their
communication about how
the military was performing
sort of this flowery
language that they were performing
so well with the spirit of a warrior.
And for Saddam, that was what mattered more
than actual genuine military strategy.
Then the ground invasion starts and
basically Baghdad falls within three weeks.
Together, coalition forces
are advancing day by day
in steady progress against the enemy.
Slowly but surely, the
grip of terror around
the throats of the Iraqi people is being
loosened and Saddam Hussein will
be removed no matter how long it takes.
The U.S. military was able to quickly
overwhelm the demoralized Iraqi forces.
At the same time, Saddam
Hussein's spokesman, Tariq
Aziz, was claiming
that the battle was going
well, that Iraqis were
doing better than ever.
But by April of 2003, Saddam
Hussein's statue was toppled.
Into the very heart of Baghdad, U.S.
tanks and troops finally arrive,
spelling the end for the Iraqi regime.
The stars and stripes have come to town.
Saddam Hussein's reign of terror is over.
So nearly three weeks after this war
began, U.S. forces are now coming into the
center of Baghdad.
This is what regime change looks like.
What's it like being in
the middle of Baghdad?
It's kind of crazy.
Pretty good warm welcome from everybody.
Good luck.
- Stay safe.
- Thank you.
The president's rule is no more.
Years of repression and brutality
have been brought to a close.
Will you bring his statue down?
(crowd cheers)
At first, they tried to knock it
down using a sledgehammer.
The Americans brought in a tank
recovery vehicle to finish the job.
Then, the moment of
history, the moment Saddam's
regime could finally
be said to be at an end.
(dramatic music)
Baghdad falls quickly.
Saddam Hussein's statue has toppled.
This is the beginning of
years and years of chaos.
And what's more, where is Saddam?
(dramatic music)
It's on May the 1st, 2003, that you
have President Bush delivering his now
notorious mission accomplished speech.
And he's on board this
massive aircraft carrier,
the Abraham Lincoln,
and Baghdad has fallen.
And behind him is this huge banner
that goes, mission accomplished.
Now, he actually didn't
use the words mission
accomplished, but that was what
a banner behind him was showing.
And during this speech, he claimed that all
combat operations in Iraq were complete.
Major combat operations in Iraq have ended.
In the battle of Iraq, the United
States and our allies have prevailed.
The war's been won.
We've done it in three weeks.
Job done.
We're in charge.
The world is safe.
We've won.
Because of you, the tyrant
has fallen and Iraq is free.
(dramatic music)
But of course, you know, this is
massively arrogant or hubristic.
You know, that banner becomes this kind of
symbol of irony and miscommunication.
Because he wanted a big photo op, he
was wearing a military bomber
jacket and he was on an aircraft carrier.
And he wanted to use this as a
sign that his administration
had been incredibly successful
in its conflict with Iraq.
While these are powerful images for his re
-election campaign next
year, Mr. Bush knows that
declaring victory would
be somewhat premature.
After all, Saddam
Hussein still has not been
captured and the weapons of mass
destruction still have not been found.
Mission accomplished
speech was one of his regrets.
Because the mission has
not been accomplished.
In fact, it's barely even been started.
It was ironic.
The war in Iraq was nowhere near over.
In fact, there would be years and years
and billions and billions
of money spent and
many troops would die in the aftermath.
We have got years of
bloodshed ahead of us.
(dramatic music)
(dramatic music)
One of the first things the Americans are
doing after they're now in control of Iraq
or they think they're in control of
Iraq is to go out looking for weapons of
mass destruction because
obviously that's the reason why
everybody's gone in and invaded it.
But by the time that Bush came to
power, Iraq was really a shell of its
former self and they really didn't have the
financial strength to build
or the technological ability
to really build an
effective nuclear program.
And they start turning
up every petal, every
stone going to every
factory and what do they find?
Nothing.
There are no weapons
of mass destruction in Iraq.
This is a huge, major embarrassment
for the US and our allies.
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is
about to come before the commission
and is certain to be questioned about the
Bush administration's alleged
fixation with attacking a country
with no Al-Qaeda connection, Iraq.
The Americans and the British kept
saying that Saddam has definitely got WMDs.
Okay, we haven't found them yet but what
are the chances of him not having them?
It was kind of relying on an
enormous amount of trust.
The public are going to trust what their
governments tell them and
their governments have also
got to create this atmosphere
of suspicion around Saddam.
US really didn't have
any concrete evidence that
Iraq was pursuing weapons
of mass destruction, that
it was pursuing nuclear weapons or that it
had the technological ability
to make much progress in this.
You would have to be, let's face facts,
pretty confident to have said in the build
-up to the Iraq war, Saddam
definitely does not have WMDs.
You know, the jury was still out
but the problem is that the US and the
British were saying
he's definitely got them.
David Kaye, the man America
sent to Iraq to find weapons
of mass destruction,
returns to Capitol Hill today
to deliver the news the
government didn't want to hear.
So in 2004, David Kaye, who was a part
of the Iraq survey group, famously noted
in front of the Senate that the US had
very poor intelligence, that they got it
all wrong.
It's clear we've got a problem now.
But the man who searched in vain for
those weapons told ITV News it would be
better to acknowledge a
huge intelligence failure.
To be honest, I don't think anyone thought,
I certainly didn't think, it would
take this long to find them.
I mean, this is a crucial moment.
This man knows what he's talking about and
it's now that the world
finally realises that
the pretext for war has
effectively been a lie.
It turns out we were all wrong,
probably, in my judgement.
And that is most disturbing.
Have you found any
weapons of mass destruction?
I've barely found lunch.
This report comes out in 2004 and that
even confirms that Saddam
had actually destroyed his
WMDs in the 1990s and there had
been no active programmes since then.
There were no weapons
of mass destruction, that
these were all lies, that these were all
mistruths that were peddled by the
neocons in the Bush administration.
So as a result, it was very easy
for critics to go, right, well there are
no WMDs, you had a pretty good idea
there weren't any WMDs, so why did you
go in?
Why were you manipulating intelligence?
Why were you exaggerating the threat?
Did you go in because you want
American control of the Middle East?
Did you go in because you want oil?
Is this part of a broader strategy
to reshape the Middle East?
Did you lie about WMDs?
To get your way.
(dramatic music)
Weapon of mass destruction
ain't never been found
Homeland Security, please
lay your weapons down
By 2007, public support for the
war in Iraq had really dwindled.
In fact, a vast majority of Americans
wanted US troops to come home and some 60
% were in agreement that the
war in Iraq was a huge failure.
This is George Bush and the Queen
as you will not see them in London this
week, riding in an open
carriage, surrounded and
protected by anti-war demonstrators.
This was the closest George Bush and his
entourage have come
so far to the protesters
who object to his state visit to Britain.
Anti-Bush activists were running
towards the Queen Victoria Memorial.
They hoped their cries would carry to the
apartments where the Bushes are staying.
The government told us
that there were weapons,
there were some weapons ready to be
used within 45 minutes and there was such a
threat that we not only had to
invade Iraq, we had to do it then.
Before dusk, there'd been
22 arrests according to
Scotland Yard, none
under anti-terrorism laws.
(people shout over each other)
The Prime Minister, he says, has until the
end of the summer holidays, just seven
weeks, to come up with proof of WMD or
he should resign.
The UK and US leaderships wanted to justify
military action on the basis of weapons of
mass destruction and
so they talked them up.
Now we hear them talking them
down because they haven't found them.
(dramatic music)
Information is what
the British public and the
United States public as well as the world
need with reference to why we went
into this war and where, if any, are the
weapons of mass destruction.
Well, I think the surprise about this
report is there really are no surprises.
We've taken virtually
another 12 months and about
800 million US dollars to come to the
conclusion where we were last October.
We're here to report to President Bush that
we found his weapons of mass destruction.
They weren't in Iraq.
They're located in Britain
and in the United States.
Saddam and his delusional
state had every intent
of recreating weapons of mass destruction.
The physical and social
infrastructure of Iraq had
so decayed into a vortex of corruption and
utter incapability of reproducing large
amounts of weapons of mass destruction.
So no, there was no imminent threat.
The anti-war movement
has taken to the streets.
These neocons like the American
Enterprise Institute believe
in freedom, the freedom to lie, the freedom
to cheat, the freedom to exploit a false
democracy of which our
country is foreign victim.
(dramatic music)
Once again, the Hawks
are back in the ascendancy.
Just a week ago, President Bush sought to
dampen the frenzy of speculation on Iraq.
So on November the 8th, 2006, US Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, he resigns.
There's been so much criticism
regarding what's been going on in Iraq.
This was at a time when public
support for the Iraq war was really low.
There was very low morale.
There was very little support
for the neocon policies.
Blame for poor planning,
mismanagement of the war,
lack of proper planning
for the post-Saddam phase.
Then you've got all the abuses carried out
by Americans on
prisoners at a prison called
Abu Ghraib in which prisoners are tortured.
A suitably somber Mr Bush engaged in what's
become an almost daily act of contrition.
People, there will be a full accounting
for the cruel and disgraceful
abuse of Iraqi detainees.
This isn't looking like, you know, the West
being a nice, democratic,
respecter of human rights.
This is just basically a complete cock-up.
The president reeling
from his first full-blown
scandal, though still
determined to stand by his man.
You're doing a superb job.
You are a strong secretary of defense and
our nation owes you a debt of gratitude.
Yet behind the show of
unity, divisions festering.
Dick Cheney pressing
for Rumsfeld to stay, an
aide to Condi Rice
claiming she wouldn't mind
if he went, though she's denied it.
I must say that it's been the highest
honor of my life to serve with the
talented men and women of
the Department of Defense.
They will remain in my prayers always.
Thank you.
Now, throughout all this
period, back in Afghanistan,
you've got bin Laden still in hiding.
The US invaded Afghanistan
with the aim of capturing bin Laden.
And though they were
able to control probably
about 90% of Afghanistan by December
of 2001, in a famous battle in Tora Bora,
which was bin Laden's stronghold,
he somehow mysteriously escaped.
And why haven't they found bin Laden?
That was one of the primary reasons for
going into Afghanistan,
was to not only dismantle
the country being used as a safe haven
for terrorists like al-Qaeda, but also
you've got to capture the head guy.
You've got to capture bin Laden.
It was definitely a source
of embarrassment for
the Bush administration
that they were never able
to capture bin Laden, given that that was
one of the main objectives
of the invasion of Afghanistan.
Now, you could say that this is a
complete failure of the Bush
administration to find him.
But the truth is, it is very, very
difficult trying to find one man in a
country like Afghanistan,
which is chaotic, it's mountainous,
and besides, bin Laden may
not even be in Afghanistan at all.
I believe the proper use of power by
America will make the
world more peaceful, America
more secure, and as
importantly, people more free.
I call upon all nations to do everything
they can to stop these terrorist killers.
Thank you.
Now watch this drive.
It's obviously very
easy to be cynical about
why the Americans went into Iraq,
but they weren't the only nation going in.
The British and other nations
also supported the American forces.
The U.S. wanted to go to war with
Iraq because there was all kinds of
business potential deals
to be made, there was
all kinds of lucrative economic
opportunities, and because
Iraq had oil, and it was one of
the big oil producers in the world.
We flew up to the Ramallah oil field
this morning, west of
Bashar, where about 60
% of Iraq's oil is produced.
The army cares about its PR and the
story they wanted
reported was the speed with
which this oil field was
secured, with very little damage.
They felt that it would be better to
have a more pliant
democratic style leader in
power than Saddam Hussein, who
they viewed as a menace to U.S. stability.
I genuinely feel that
the motivation for going
in was a sincere
neoconservative belief that the
way to make the world safer is to
go into these countries,
invade them, and install
democratic, friendly governments.
The neocons were
accused of wanting to rebuild
Iraq because this would
be profitable for them,
profitable for their relationship
with oil companies, and
profitable for the reconstruction
company Halliburton, which Dick
Cheney had been on the board of, but
was no longer officially on the board of
once he became vice president.
The facts are the vice
president's company that
he was CEO of, that did business with
sworn enemies of the
United States, paid millions
of dollars in fines for providing
false financial information.
It's under investigation
for bribing foreign officials.
The same company that got a $7.5
billion no-bid contract.
Halliburton was accused
of overcharging the U.S.
for these contracts.
Some $60 billion or so was the amount
that they overcharged the U.S. The rule
is that part of their money is supposed
to be withheld when they're
under investigation, as
they are now, for having
overcharged the American taxpayer.
But they're getting every
dime of their money.
And at the same time, other companies that
were engaged in private
security were earning, I
mean, billions, billions
and billions of dollars.
So for the neocons, this was
this one big business venture.
Who could have possibly
envisioned an election in
Iraq at this point in history?
Even if we're going to be kind to
the neocons, this is just simply a very,
very flawed way of trying to
conduct international politics.
What we've learned from
Iraq, and what happened
afterwards, is that actually what you do by
trying to, you know, get rid of these
dictators is that you end up
destabilizing these countries even more.
And you create an even more deadly and
evil kind of breeding
ground for violence and
terrorism and extremism than you did
under even someone like Saddam Hussein.
So you're getting rid of a bad guy,
but you're replacing him with
hundreds of thousands of bad guys.
To most people, there was really only one
response, which would have
been to invade Afghanistan
and to deal with al-Qaeda.
But instead, the U.S.
got distracted by Iraq.
And this came at a really critical
time when the U.S. was starting to really
gain headway in
Afghanistan, when there was a
chance for stability in
Afghanistan, when there was
a lot of troop deployment there.
At this very critical time, the U.S.
is diverted.
Its military, both troops
and just attention, is
diverted into Iraq, which
then created a hotbed
for terrorism, which had
not even existed before.
And this is the problem.
So I think that the
neoconservatives were arrogant.
I think they were naive.
I think they genuinely
believed that regime change
was the way to make the world safer.
They were wrong.
But given the situation in Iraq right
now, achievements will be a hard sell.
This week alone, at least 300 people
were killed in attacks by insurgents.
Most recent figures show an average of 87
attacks each day, the
highest number so far.
And then there's the
growing hostage problem.
More than 100 foreigners
have been taken hostage
in the last six months,
and 30 have been killed.
At the moment, at least 26 foreigners are
still being held, including a
Briton and two Americans.
(dramatic music)
So there was a huge
cost of the war on terror.
Financially, it cost $8 trillion.
That is a big number.
And that's including all those
military operations, reconstruction
and aid, and also care
for veterans afterwards.
But it also led to some 4.5
million deaths indirectly, if you
look at all the conflicts that took place.
900,000 people died in the direct
conflicts in Afghanistan and in Iraq.
38 million people were displaced.
You've got huge displacements
of millions of people.
Something like 4 million Iraqis
were displaced in that war alone.
And so this sparks this
kind of global refugee crisis.
And because of poor policies
concerning nation-building
in these countries in
which the Americans and
our allies went into,
what you are fomenting
is instability, and an instability
which can be exploited by terrorists.
The war on terror was
aiming to eliminate terrorism.
But what it really did was help generate
more terrorist groups than
ever before in the Middle East.
An immoral war was thus waged.
And the world is a great deal
less safe place than before.
The invasion of Iraq
instigated the formation of
al-Qaeda in Iraq, which was the
most brutal of the al-Qaeda franchise.
And from that would
emerge the Islamic State.
And so as a result, you get, you
know, organizations like
ISIS starting to come to
prominence in places like Iraq.
Which would then be wrecking havoc in not
just Iraq, but also in Syria and
would prolong the Syrian civil war.
Because, you know, they have got a
chaotic system which they can feed off.
So the war on terror
is partially successful,
but ultimately, in the long term, it
also creates lots more terrorism.
So if you're trying to
weigh it up, it's very difficult.
(dramatic music)
You clearly argue, which is now quite a
familiar argument, that the
Bush administration was intent
on going after Iraq, regardless of what
the truth was about the 9-11 attacks.
What do you believe was
the right response to 9-11?
What should they have done?
I would have responded in the same way
that it was a highly
devastating criminal attack,
but it's a terrorist attack
at the end of the day.
We have a very good means.
We have good intelligence.
There was no need to build up and
militarize this planet in response to 9-11
and call it a huge, as Bush did,
what was the words he used?
A tremendous battle, monumental
struggle between good and evil.
I mean, come on.
The United States chose
a different path with Bush.
It decided that the laws and the treaties
that exist between countries
did not exist for them.
And that we had the right to arrest or
go after anybody who was a terrorist.
But the definition of terrorism
has been extremely clouded.
And as we know, there's
a lot of lawsuits out there.
So the United States essentially
behaved like an outlaw.
Weak and insecure
people hardly ever say sorry.
It is large-hearted and
courageous people who
are not diminished by
saying, I made a mistake.
President Bush and Mr. Blair
would recover considerable
credibility and respect if they were
able to say, yes, we made a mistake.
If you ask who won the war on
terror, there's no simple answer.
I'm sorry.
I mean, on one level, you could say,
yes, the Americans did get rid of some
bad guys.
They did get rid of the regime in
Afghanistan, the Taliban regime.
You know, they did get
rid of Osama bin Laden.
They did really denude
al-Qaeda's capability for
creating more terrorist
plots on United States soil.
Getting rid of Saddam
Hussein, he wasn't a nice guy.
Maybe it was good
that he was got rid of.
But when you start looking
beyond those immediate
kind of wins, you look at Afghanistan now.
It's now ruled by the Taliban.
Hold on. I thought we
got rid of those guys.
Iraq feels a bit more stable.
But there were years and years and years
of insurgency and instability
and hundreds of thousands
of deaths and displacement
of civilian populations.
So I think you have to say there
were some short-term victories.
But in the long run, yeah, it's hard to say
that the Americans won the war on terror.
And in fact, it's still being fought
and will be fought for decades.
So who won the war on terror, a war
that lasted decades, cost $8 trillion, saw
almost 1 million people
die in direct conflict?
No one.
(dramatic music)
(dramatic music)
It was 7am and I was on a
run and I got a call from my
mom and she said,
you got to turn on the TV.
There are planes flying into buildings.
It's complete chaos.
All I can remember was just looking
at the TV set in complete shock.
(dramatic music)
We couldn't figure out
in the beginning what
was happening, whether or not it was an
actual terrorist attack,
whether it was an accident.
But as more planes
were flying into buildings,
crashing into the Pentagon, it became
clear that the US was under attack.
(dramatic music)
So we're going to
see what we can do.
We're going to do our best.
This is only a few weeks after both
of us retired after 20 years of service.
But still in our hearts,
we're firefighters.
Now nothing like this had ever happened on
American soil and the scale
was absolutely unprecedented.
And so you've got this sense of
fear and confusion and vulnerability.
You know, not only in New
York, but all over the country.
Every American was
scared for their own safety
at that point, because
it wasn't clear whether
or not there were going to be more
planes flying into buildings,
whether or not there
was going to be some
use of biological weapons.
The terrorists did exactly
what they wanted to
do and that was to create terror.
And you've got to remember
those attacks happened
right in the heart of
the financial district
of New York, which some people regard
as basically the capital of the world.
And that world changed in an
instant when those planes hit.
Another plane come in and all you hear
was this rumbling, people was crying,
people was jumping out the window.
They was waving, like trying to like
say, help me, like you see their arms.
And then you saw the man jump down
and he just, everybody was jumping.
It was crazy.
I remember one of my family members
said that she could see a man and a
woman holding hands,
jumping out of the building.
She could even see his tie.
(dramatic music)
It's terrible.
Unbelievable.
I didn't think something
like this could happen,
especially in New York.
I'm sorry for all the people
that lost their lives there today.
It's very sad.
Makes you wonder what
our intelligence community is
doing, you know, to have
something like this happen.
How can this happen?
What do you think
it'll do for the psyche of
New Yorkers and the
psyche of America too?
I think it's more important the psyche of
America than the psyche of New
York, because this is world-reaching.
It's not just the city,
it's around the world.
It's going to, I don't think anything
will ever be the same again.
(dramatic music)
Americans have many questions tonight.
(dramatic music)
Americans are asking,
who attacked our country?
An atrocity which America insists
tonight will soon be avenged.
The evidence we have gathered all points to
a collection of loosely affiliated
terrorist organizations known as al-Qaeda.
Bush agreed that the US needed to invade
Afghanistan, that there
was no doubt about this.
But what was also put on
the table was to invade Iraq.
So this is what the neocons do.
They look at 9-11 and they go,
great, we can use this as an opportunity
to get what we want done.
The United States of
America will not permit
the world's most dangerous
regimes to threaten us
with the world's most destructive weapons.
It turns out we were all wrong,
probably, in my judgment.
And that is most disturbing.
You know, why were you
manipulating intelligence?
Why were you exaggerating the threat?
Is this part of a broader strategy
to reshape the Middle East?
Did you lie about
WMDs to get your way?
And I think they adopted a lot of
information that was at the time viewed as
very weak and they viewed it as fat.
The terrorists know that the outcome in the
war on terror will depend
on the outcome in Iraq.
And so to protect our citizens,
the free world must succeed in Iraq.
The public are going to trust what their
governments tell them, and
their governments have also
got to create this atmosphere
of suspicion around Saddam.
You would have to be, let's face facts,
pretty confident to have said in the build
-up to the Iraq war, Saddam
definitely does not have WMDs.
The jury was still out.
But the problem is that the US and
the British were saying,
he's definitely got them.
There were no weapons
of mass destruction, that
these were all lies, that these were all
mistruths that were peddled by the
neocons in the Bush administration.
Get ready to read
these words the fast way.
Get ready.
- May.
- Yes, May.
- Get ready.
- Cape.
Yes, Cape.
- Get ready.
- Cane.
Yes, Cane.
- Get ready.
- Pain.
Yes, Pain.
Boys and girls, you're going
to read these words again.
So at the very moment of the attacks,
the American President George W.
Bush was in Florida, in Sarasota, and he
was at this little elementary
school listening to
the kids, you know, do some
sort of reading or performance.
Okay, get ready to read the words
on this page without making a mistake.
Everybody tell me what
this part of the word says.
Rob.
Yes, Rob.
When Bush was reading
to these young children
this book, he was
actually being filmed, and
it was able to catch his reaction to
finding out that America
was under attack, and
he looked completely
in shock and devastated.
(dramatic music)
Bush's kind of response is
kind of, it's almost a bit surreal.
It's a bit strange.
He just sits there very
calmly, just listening
to the kids, and then he's told about
the second hit on the second tower.
(dramatic music)
Please ensure all cell phones
and pages are off at this time.
Thank you.
(dramatic music)
(applause)
Ladies and gentlemen, this is
a difficult moment for America.
(dramatic music)
Today, we've had a national tragedy.
Two airplanes have crashed
into the World Trade Center
in an apparent terrorist
attack on our country.
One of its most famous
landmarks destroyed, thousands
dead, and America is under siege.
(dramatic music)
At the time of the attack, Dick Cheney
is the American Vice President,
and he's in the White House.
Now, he moves very, very quickly to the
secure underground bunker
beneath the White House, and
he is watching as the situation escalates.
The issue was that for an hour, from
9.30am to 10.30am, Cheney was not
able to really communicate with anybody.
He went into one of these deep bunkers
that had been built during the Cold War
that had been equipped with all kinds of
technology, and he was essentially
on his own to make decisions.
Many people felt that he
actually massively overstepped
the mark, giving an order for fighter jets
to shoot down any hijacked airliners.
I have spoken to the Vice President, and
to conduct a full-scale
investigation, to hunt
down and to find those
folks who committed this act.
Cheney had said that he had spoken to
Bush and that he had gotten his approval
but there is no official record of this.
So a lot of people feel that Cheney
is massively exceeding
his brief as Vice President.
The President is not
incapacitated, so there's no
reason why Cheney has to
assume the role of President.
They're trying to save your
life, that's what they thought.
I don't need no shade,
I don't need no shade.
You can't help nobody right now.
Terrorism against our
nation will not stand.
May God bless the victims,
their families and America.
Thank you very much.
So the neocons, that is
short for neoconservatives,
and they regard themselves as a new
form of right-wing politician, if you like.
And their key policies is that they're very
hawkish, they're very
pro-fighting wars overseas, and
they like intervening in
other countries' business.
The neocons believed in a much
more aggressive foreign policy.
They believed that the U.S. needed to
not just contain communism but actually
spread democracy around the world.
In particular, they were
focused on the Middle East.
Neocons tended to see the world in very
black and white thinking,
in evil versus good,
in sort of binary style of thinking.
And so you've got figures like Dick
Cheney, who's the American Vice President.
You've got the Defense
Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld.
Actually, the most fervent
neocon was Deputy Secretary
of Defense Paul Wolfowitz.
He had written a paper in 1992 outlining
a new American foreign policy that would be
much more aggressive in
the Middle East in particular.
He did not like the fact that the elder
Bush had left Saddam Hussein in power
after the Gulf War.
Now, you know, these individuals have
massive amounts of influence over Bush.
They make him look like
a kind of puppet president.
Bush may have a fairly good steer on
domestic policy, i.e. stuff
within the United States.
But when it comes to foreign policy, it's
these guys who look like they're in charge.
(dramatic music)
Make no mistake, the
United States will hunt
down and punish those
responsible for these cowardly acts.
In many ways, the 9-11 attack was
a kind of gift to the
neoconservatives because
this sort of provides an excuse for them
to push their agenda
for Middle East reform.
I mean, they've long
wanted to topple Saddam
Hussein, who is the dictator in Iraq.
Up until this point, Iraq was not an
ally of the US, certainly, but
there wasn't any reason to invade.
On the very day of the attack, on
9-11 itself, Donald Rumsfeld says to one
of his aides, you know,
let's go and hit Iraq as well.
Let's not just, you know,
concentrate on Bin Laden.
Let's concentrate on Saddam Hussein.
Donald Rumsfeld tells an aide, we need to
look for connections of how
Iraq was involved in 9-11.
You know, we can kill
as many birds as we like.
You know, the world's
sympathy is going to be with us.
And Rumsfeld very quickly
capitalizes on the situation.
This was an unprovoked
attack on absolutely innocent
people and thousands and thousands of them.
There is no justification for it.
It's a product of insanity.
It's the insanity of terrorism.
And we have to do something about it.
We have to do something about it as
a nation and we have to do something
about it as a city in
the way we react to it.
Do you feel you're sending
a message to the terrorists?
We are sending a message to the terrorists.
The message is a simple one.
You're not going to stop us.
We promoted 186 people from
the fire department yesterday.
Today the stock exchange opens.
Before you know it, while we're still in
sorrow, you're going to see
the buildings start rising again.
I'm going to fix you, I'll
confiscate the camera.
There was documentation of accounts
with millions of dollars and
highly confidential documents.
It looks as if you wouldn't think anything
like this could have happened
unless there was an agreement.
Oh, fantastic.
I want you all to know
that America today, America
today is on bended knee in prayer for
the people whose lives were lost here for
the workers who work here,
for the families who mourn.
This nation stands with the good people of
New York City and New
Jersey and Connecticut
as we mourn the loss of
thousands of our citizens.
So four days after 9-11 on September
15th, Bush and his team were meeting to
discuss their response.
Bush agreed that the U.S. needed to
invade Afghanistan, that
there was no doubt about this.
But what was also put on
the table was to invade Iraq.
At this point, Bush didn't shut it down,
essentially said that he was open
to discussing it more in the future.
Good afternoon.
On my orders, the
United States military has
begun strikes against
Al-Qaeda terrorist training camps
and military installations of the
Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
On October the 7th,
2001, you have President
Bush formally announcing
the start of what is
known as Operation Enduring Freedom.
Typically, the Americans give
these operations really literal names.
And that marks the U.S.'s
military intervention in Afghanistan.
That is a direct response to 9-11.
Today, we focus on Afghanistan,
but the battle is broader.
Every nation has a choice to make.
In this conflict, there
is no neutral ground.
If any government sponsors
the outlaws and killers
of innocents, they have become
outlaws and murderers themselves.
Bush is saying, listen, you know,
we're not just targeting the terrorists.
We're also going to target the
regime that is supporting them.
And we're going to go in and we're
going to turn things upside down.
We are going to
get rid of that regime.
And we're going to put in a new
government, basically, of our own making.
In other American wars,
enemy commanders have come
to doubt the wisdom of taking on the
strength and power of this nation and the
resolve of her people.
The Americans know that
the Taliban are providing
safe haven for Bin Laden, who had
organized the 9-11 attacks, and lots of his
followers.
I expect that somewhere in a cave in
Afghanistan, there's a
terrorist leader who is at
this moment considering
precisely the same thing.
(speaking foreign language)
Osama bin Laden was the
founder and leader of al-Qaeda.
And that's this very
sort of loosely arranged
militant Islamist group, which
were responsible for planning
and executing the 9-11 attacks,
and also many, many other attacks.
They were able to help the Taliban to
control 90% of Afghanistan as they were
taking over the vast
majority of the country.
Because he wants to
basically establish a kind
of global Islamic regime,
or a caliphate, as it's known.
And he sees the United States as the
primary enemy, the primary obstacle.
I don't blame anybody
other than Osama bin Laden.
He has brought nothing but
death and terror wherever he goes.
Now he's bringing it to
the people of Afghanistan.
Beautiful as they look from up here, the
snow-capped peaks of Afghanistan
present a problem for US forces.
Because this environment
is almost certainly hiding the
world's most wanted man.
Down there somewhere is Osama bin Laden.
America's decided on its enemy.
The wanted posters are out for Afghan-based
Osama bin Laden, and the people
here back military action to get him.
But I can assure the American
people, I am determined.
I'm not going to be distracted.
I will keep my focus to make sure
that not only are these brought to justice,
but anybody who's been
associated will be brought to justice.
Those who harbour terrorists
will be brought to justice.
This crusade, this war
on terrorism, is going
to take a while.
And the American people must be patient.
The US-led coalition that goes into
Afghanistan is tremendously successful.
Within three months of the US invasion of
Afghanistan, the Taliban had collapsed.
They have kicked the Taliban out.
They've installed Karzai
as the Afghan leader.
And they've done this through
airstrikes, a massive ground assault.
It is basically a tremendously
successful operation.
The Taliban was forced
to leave the country.
And they found a home in Pakistan.
The problem is, how
do you stay in power?
How can you keep this country stable?
And as the Americans are going
to find out, that is very difficult.
We've never let up on
Osama bin Laden from day one.
We've actively and
aggressively pursued him.
We've captured and killed
thousands of al-Qaeda,
various places around the world,
and especially in Afghanistan.
We'll continue to very
aggressively pursue him.
And I'm confident,
eventually, we'll get him.
The advantage seems to be his.
But before this year is out, the
Americans have vowed to find him.
The US defense secretary
said special forces were
hunting Osama bin Laden,
despite obvious difficulties.
It's not a bottle that you can cork.
It's a large country
with a lot of borders.
One has to be realistic.
I think we'll find him, either
there or in some other country.
But you don't know where
he is, and you can't find him.
We have not found him, but
we can find him, and we will.
And he and those who he leads will
be held accountable for
what happened last Tuesday.
He's on the run, if
he's running at all.
So we don't know whether he's in
a cave with the door shut, or a cave
with the door open.
We just don't know.
There's all kinds of reports
and all kinds of speculation.
But one thing we know is that he's
not in charge of Afghanistan anymore.
On the 28th of December 2001, you've got
President Bush giving a
speech at his Texas ranch.
And he's standing next
to General Tommy Franks,
who is the commander of US Central
Command for the whole Afghan invasion.
It's basically a speech
all about the frustration
the Americans are feeling that Osama
bin Laden has not yet been captured.
And he alluded to the fact that while he
hoped that the year would be peaceful,
he was realistic and he
didn't think that it would be.
And so while I hope that 2002
is a year of peace, I'm realistic.
But then he goes into the ranch with
Franks, and it's there that Bush then says
to Franks, OK, we're going to turn
our attention somewhere else now.
We're going to look
at going in to Iraq.
In November of 2001,
Secretary of Defense Donald
Rumsfeld was informing
General Tommy Franks that he
needed to start the
planning for the war in Iraq.
This took place during the Afghan
war and without the public knowledge.
(dramatic music)
I think those who
would anticipate that it's
sort of in quickly and out quickly in
Afghanistan would not be pleased.
Although the US have been focusing on the
war in Afghanistan, you
have got the neoconservatives,
men like Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz.
They've been pushing for
military action in Iraq for years.
The neocons wanted to
invade Iraq because they
wanted to completely
transform the Middle East into
a sea of liberal democracies that were
more pliant to the US administration.
Their desire to invade
Iraq is very controversial.
But if you were going to defend them,
they would say, look, we want to have
a democratic, stable Middle East.
We don't want these
dictators like Saddam Hussein
helping to run the show over there.
We want to get rid of these guys.
You know, we want to have
a world which is democratic.
It has equal rights for
women and so on and so forth.
So this is what they would say.
But in order to achieve that, they've got
to come up with some pretty remarkable
excuses as to why they really want to go
and invade Iraq as well as Afghanistan.
Now, the issue, of course, was that the
regimes in the Middle
East were fairly authoritarian
and there wasn't really
any movement domestically.
There wasn't any bottom-up
movement to change that.
So they did the best that they could
to try to pinpoint Iraq being involved in
the planning of 9-11, even though
there wasn't really any evidence of that.
Now, Afghanistan is sheltering terrorists.
It's a completely legitimate
place for the Americans
and their allies to go
and wage some war.
Iraq is not sheltering terrorists.
So what do the neocons do?
What's the excuse they come up with?
What they say is Saddam Hussein has
weapons of mass destruction or WMDs.
Our enemies are innovative and resourceful.
And so were we.
They never stop thinking about new ways to
harm our country and our
people, and neither do we.
(dramatic music)
So in January of 2002, Bush gave a
State of the Union address that is often
known as his access of evil speech.
Our second goal is to prevent regimes that
sponsor terror from threatening
America or our friends
and allies with weapons
of mass destruction.
And it's during that
speech where he introduces
this whole concept of the access of evil.
Now, those are three countries.
Iraq, Iran, and North Korea.
And the whole purpose of the speech is
to highlight the perceived
global threat by those nations.
The Iraqi regime has
plotted to develop anthrax
and nerve gas and nuclear
weapons for over a decade.
It was in this speech that he starts
using the words weapons
of mass destruction and
starts to warn the
American public that Iraq
is pursuing WMDs, and that Iraq poses
an enormous threat to U.S. security.
That they're destabilizing the
world, and they've got to be dealt with.
And so that speech is setting
the stage for an invasion of Iraq.
The United States of
America will not permit
the world's most dangerous
regimes to threaten us
with the world's most destructive weapons.
We have now no choice.
So we will act.
And our determination in acting is total.
We will not let up or rest until
our objectives are met in full.
At the time, the British government is led
by Prime Minister Tony Blair, and
he is a real key ally of George Bush's.
And he is fully supportive of Bush's stance
on Iraq, even though there was very
widespread public opposition in the UK.
So Prime Minister Tony Blair of the UK
was really in lockstep with the Bush
administration about invading Iraq.
He never really wavered
in his support, while
other European allies
were far more critical and
wanted more information,
wanted more proof, and were
really hesitant to support
any kind of invasion of Iraq.
What this latest terrorist outrage
shows us is that this is a war.
Its main battleground is Iraq.
We have got to make sure we defeat
these terrorists, the former
Saddam people in Iraq,
and we must do that because that is
an essential part of
defeating this fanaticism and
extremism that is killing innocent
people all over our world today.
So what the government in the UK
is trying to do is to say, Saddam is
a direct threat to British lives.
And this is a way of trying to justify
an invasion and trying to justify why
the British support Bush.
Here's why Iraq is important in this.
Because in the end, their case, which is
based on dividing
people, the Arab world and
the Western world, the Muslim world and the
Christian world and other
religions, their case is
that we are in Iraq to suppress Muslims,
steal their oil, to spoil the country.
Now, we know, you know,
that all those things are lies.
So there was a memo that was leaked
by the British that showed that the US
was actually planning
to invade Iraq well before,
and that they were using and cherry-picking
facts in ways that
could justify an invasion.
The joint press conference showed
their shared mission to eradicate evil.
But if President Bush has the power in
this relationship, Mr Blair showed
himself to be its most powerful advocate.
It will not be a war against Iraq.
It will be a war to liberate Iraq.
What we see now is this kind of process
of fear-mongering the public to make
them support the idea
of a war against Iraq.
The choice is not ours,
it is Saddam Hussein's.
If he will not disarm voluntarily,
we will do it for him by force, and his
regime will join the Taliban
in the dustbin of history.
So the Bush administration
engaged in a great
deal of fear-mongering to shape the view
of the American public that Iraq was
acquiring weapons of mass destruction.
This started with Vice
President Dick Cheney going
on television in August
of 2002 and basically
lying to the American
public that Saddam Hussein
had acquired weapons of mass destruction.
Simply stated, there is
no doubt that Saddam
Hussein now has weapons
of mass destruction.
There is no doubt that he is amassing
them to use them against our friends,
against our allies, and against us.
Even Condoleezza Rice
and others in the Bush
administration, you know, using
imagery of mushroom clouds
to say that, you know, there could be
a nuclear attack, and everyone
knows what a mushroom cloud signifies.
And then in February of 2003, Secretary of
State Colin Powell famously
spoke in front of the United Nations.
I remember him actually
bringing these cylinders that
supposedly were evidence
that Iraq had a nuclear
program, that this was ample
evidence that they posed a huge threat.
Indeed, the facts and
Iraq's behavior show that
Saddam Hussein and his
regime are concealing their
efforts to produce more
weapons of mass destruction.
The world's got to kind of
believe the Secretary of State.
Why wouldn't you believe him?
He's a kind of decorated
general, a very authoritative figure.
And unless we act, we are confronting
an even more frightening future.
Saddam Hussein is a
homicidal dictator who is
addicted to weapons of mass destruction.
You would hear the words weapons of mass
destruction, WMDs,
repeatedly used in the media.
The words weapons of mass destruction was a
key phrase to trigger Americans to be more
worried about Iraq than
they might normally be.
The government was going on and on and
on about them, saying this is the
primary justification for invading Iraq.
You know, Saddam has got these WMDs.
They could threaten the US.
They could threaten its allies.
We cannot wait for the final proof, the
smoking gun that could come in the form
of a mushroom cloud.
The world is going to be a lot,
lot safer if we get rid of Saddam,
because in doing so, we'll also get rid
of the threat posed by his supposed WMDs.
It is clear, however,
that if left unchecked,
Saddam Hussein will
continue to increase his capacity
to wage biological and
chemical warfare and will
keep trying to develop nuclear weapons.
You've got this constant
harping on that post
9-11, the world's completely changed.
It's much more dangerous.
And in order to protect US lives,
what we've got to do is go into the
Middle East, go in hard, take down these
regimes and install new
democratic cosy allies.
As dawn broke over the Arabian Sea, the
carrier Abraham Lincoln
was being replenished.
Helicopters winching aboard
supplies of bombs and ammunition,
food and fuel for a conflict
many on board believe is coming.
Which is why below deck,
President Bush's speech
was being followed intently by sailors
too young to have yet experienced war.
The terrorists know that the outcome in the
war on terror will depend
on the outcome in Iraq.
And so to protect our citizens,
the free world must succeed in Iraq.
(dramatic music)
Saddam, you know,
he's an evil, nasty dictator.
You know, he has people executed.
He has people tortured.
Those that worked with
Saddam said that he's
either going to make you a
millionaire or he's going to kill you.
There was just really no
middle ground with him.
He uses chemical weapons.
He wages war on his neighbour, Iran.
He either provided you with all kinds
of goods and luxury and co-opted you or
the next day he could chop your
body up, put it in a body bag and
deliver it to your wife.
He intimidates his population,
surveillance, secret police, you name it.
He famously held a series of trials where
he announced all of the traitors in the
room and then forced those that
were remaining to execute these traitors.
(dramatic music)
He is a classic dictator.
And he tended to want to surround himself
with those without expertise,
without bravery, without experience,
rather than surround
himself with people who he
viewed could threaten
his own political survival.
But he's also thinking, I don't just
want to be kind of head of Iraq, I
want to be head leader
of the whole Arab world.
I mean, he is nothing if
not completely ambitious.
And so this is why he
starts the Iran-Iraq war.
It goes on for eight years and ultimately
results in stalemate with hundreds
of thousands of deaths on both sides.
And this is why he invades Kuwait in
1990, which is why he becomes the kind
of public enemy number one for so many
in the United States, because
Kuwait is a friendly country.
And Saddam is wanting to take
Kuwait because he wants its oil.
He's literally just trying
to steal another country.
Saddam Hussein and his sons
must leave Iraq within 48 hours.
In March 2003, Bush
issues this public ultimatum
to Saddam Hussein,
right, you leave Iraq within
48 hours, two days, or we
are gonna go in with our forces.
You are gonna face military action.
Their refusal to do so will result in
military conflict commenced
at a time of our choosing.
The Americans are firm,
uncompromising, and they're not
gonna wait for more UN sanctions.
They're gonna go it alone.
They don't care about the UN anymore.
Seven days after the phone call,
parliament supported military action.
And the following day on March the 19th,
the Iraq war started.
You've got the US, you've got the UK,
you've got a whole coalition of allies, and
their goal is simply to remove
Saddam Hussein from power.
And you've got this intense
aerial bombardment of key targets.
And that is known as shock and awe.
And actually, you know,
it really is shock and awe.
They are absolutely decimating
all these military targets,
all these governmental targets
in Baghdad and elsewhere.
So the Iraq war was a
disaster for Saddam Hussein.
He had completely
neglected his army because he
had coup-proofed the regime
and created these parallel militaries.
These parallel militaries,
in turn, were smuggling their
weapons and sending
them off to Saudi Arabia.
I mean, you know, the Iraqis
don't put up any defense.
And frankly, why would
they really bother when
you've got the mightiest
nations in the world
turning up on your doorstep
and just kicking your door down?
There's nothing you can really do about it.
Hussein would surround
himself by really those who
were just completely incompetent,
who were sycophantic, who
were often using in their
communication about how
the military was performing
sort of this flowery
language that they were performing
so well with the spirit of a warrior.
And for Saddam, that was what mattered more
than actual genuine military strategy.
Then the ground invasion starts and
basically Baghdad falls within three weeks.
Together, coalition forces
are advancing day by day
in steady progress against the enemy.
Slowly but surely, the
grip of terror around
the throats of the Iraqi people is being
loosened and Saddam Hussein will
be removed no matter how long it takes.
The U.S. military was able to quickly
overwhelm the demoralized Iraqi forces.
At the same time, Saddam
Hussein's spokesman, Tariq
Aziz, was claiming
that the battle was going
well, that Iraqis were
doing better than ever.
But by April of 2003, Saddam
Hussein's statue was toppled.
Into the very heart of Baghdad, U.S.
tanks and troops finally arrive,
spelling the end for the Iraqi regime.
The stars and stripes have come to town.
Saddam Hussein's reign of terror is over.
So nearly three weeks after this war
began, U.S. forces are now coming into the
center of Baghdad.
This is what regime change looks like.
What's it like being in
the middle of Baghdad?
It's kind of crazy.
Pretty good warm welcome from everybody.
Good luck.
- Stay safe.
- Thank you.
The president's rule is no more.
Years of repression and brutality
have been brought to a close.
Will you bring his statue down?
(crowd cheers)
At first, they tried to knock it
down using a sledgehammer.
The Americans brought in a tank
recovery vehicle to finish the job.
Then, the moment of
history, the moment Saddam's
regime could finally
be said to be at an end.
(dramatic music)
Baghdad falls quickly.
Saddam Hussein's statue has toppled.
This is the beginning of
years and years of chaos.
And what's more, where is Saddam?
(dramatic music)
It's on May the 1st, 2003, that you
have President Bush delivering his now
notorious mission accomplished speech.
And he's on board this
massive aircraft carrier,
the Abraham Lincoln,
and Baghdad has fallen.
And behind him is this huge banner
that goes, mission accomplished.
Now, he actually didn't
use the words mission
accomplished, but that was what
a banner behind him was showing.
And during this speech, he claimed that all
combat operations in Iraq were complete.
Major combat operations in Iraq have ended.
In the battle of Iraq, the United
States and our allies have prevailed.
The war's been won.
We've done it in three weeks.
Job done.
We're in charge.
The world is safe.
We've won.
Because of you, the tyrant
has fallen and Iraq is free.
(dramatic music)
But of course, you know, this is
massively arrogant or hubristic.
You know, that banner becomes this kind of
symbol of irony and miscommunication.
Because he wanted a big photo op, he
was wearing a military bomber
jacket and he was on an aircraft carrier.
And he wanted to use this as a
sign that his administration
had been incredibly successful
in its conflict with Iraq.
While these are powerful images for his re
-election campaign next
year, Mr. Bush knows that
declaring victory would
be somewhat premature.
After all, Saddam
Hussein still has not been
captured and the weapons of mass
destruction still have not been found.
Mission accomplished
speech was one of his regrets.
Because the mission has
not been accomplished.
In fact, it's barely even been started.
It was ironic.
The war in Iraq was nowhere near over.
In fact, there would be years and years
and billions and billions
of money spent and
many troops would die in the aftermath.
We have got years of
bloodshed ahead of us.
(dramatic music)
(dramatic music)
One of the first things the Americans are
doing after they're now in control of Iraq
or they think they're in control of
Iraq is to go out looking for weapons of
mass destruction because
obviously that's the reason why
everybody's gone in and invaded it.
But by the time that Bush came to
power, Iraq was really a shell of its
former self and they really didn't have the
financial strength to build
or the technological ability
to really build an
effective nuclear program.
And they start turning
up every petal, every
stone going to every
factory and what do they find?
Nothing.
There are no weapons
of mass destruction in Iraq.
This is a huge, major embarrassment
for the US and our allies.
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is
about to come before the commission
and is certain to be questioned about the
Bush administration's alleged
fixation with attacking a country
with no Al-Qaeda connection, Iraq.
The Americans and the British kept
saying that Saddam has definitely got WMDs.
Okay, we haven't found them yet but what
are the chances of him not having them?
It was kind of relying on an
enormous amount of trust.
The public are going to trust what their
governments tell them and
their governments have also
got to create this atmosphere
of suspicion around Saddam.
US really didn't have
any concrete evidence that
Iraq was pursuing weapons
of mass destruction, that
it was pursuing nuclear weapons or that it
had the technological ability
to make much progress in this.
You would have to be, let's face facts,
pretty confident to have said in the build
-up to the Iraq war, Saddam
definitely does not have WMDs.
You know, the jury was still out
but the problem is that the US and the
British were saying
he's definitely got them.
David Kaye, the man America
sent to Iraq to find weapons
of mass destruction,
returns to Capitol Hill today
to deliver the news the
government didn't want to hear.
So in 2004, David Kaye, who was a part
of the Iraq survey group, famously noted
in front of the Senate that the US had
very poor intelligence, that they got it
all wrong.
It's clear we've got a problem now.
But the man who searched in vain for
those weapons told ITV News it would be
better to acknowledge a
huge intelligence failure.
To be honest, I don't think anyone thought,
I certainly didn't think, it would
take this long to find them.
I mean, this is a crucial moment.
This man knows what he's talking about and
it's now that the world
finally realises that
the pretext for war has
effectively been a lie.
It turns out we were all wrong,
probably, in my judgement.
And that is most disturbing.
Have you found any
weapons of mass destruction?
I've barely found lunch.
This report comes out in 2004 and that
even confirms that Saddam
had actually destroyed his
WMDs in the 1990s and there had
been no active programmes since then.
There were no weapons
of mass destruction, that
these were all lies, that these were all
mistruths that were peddled by the
neocons in the Bush administration.
So as a result, it was very easy
for critics to go, right, well there are
no WMDs, you had a pretty good idea
there weren't any WMDs, so why did you
go in?
Why were you manipulating intelligence?
Why were you exaggerating the threat?
Did you go in because you want
American control of the Middle East?
Did you go in because you want oil?
Is this part of a broader strategy
to reshape the Middle East?
Did you lie about WMDs?
To get your way.
(dramatic music)
Weapon of mass destruction
ain't never been found
Homeland Security, please
lay your weapons down
By 2007, public support for the
war in Iraq had really dwindled.
In fact, a vast majority of Americans
wanted US troops to come home and some 60
% were in agreement that the
war in Iraq was a huge failure.
This is George Bush and the Queen
as you will not see them in London this
week, riding in an open
carriage, surrounded and
protected by anti-war demonstrators.
This was the closest George Bush and his
entourage have come
so far to the protesters
who object to his state visit to Britain.
Anti-Bush activists were running
towards the Queen Victoria Memorial.
They hoped their cries would carry to the
apartments where the Bushes are staying.
The government told us
that there were weapons,
there were some weapons ready to be
used within 45 minutes and there was such a
threat that we not only had to
invade Iraq, we had to do it then.
Before dusk, there'd been
22 arrests according to
Scotland Yard, none
under anti-terrorism laws.
(people shout over each other)
The Prime Minister, he says, has until the
end of the summer holidays, just seven
weeks, to come up with proof of WMD or
he should resign.
The UK and US leaderships wanted to justify
military action on the basis of weapons of
mass destruction and
so they talked them up.
Now we hear them talking them
down because they haven't found them.
(dramatic music)
Information is what
the British public and the
United States public as well as the world
need with reference to why we went
into this war and where, if any, are the
weapons of mass destruction.
Well, I think the surprise about this
report is there really are no surprises.
We've taken virtually
another 12 months and about
800 million US dollars to come to the
conclusion where we were last October.
We're here to report to President Bush that
we found his weapons of mass destruction.
They weren't in Iraq.
They're located in Britain
and in the United States.
Saddam and his delusional
state had every intent
of recreating weapons of mass destruction.
The physical and social
infrastructure of Iraq had
so decayed into a vortex of corruption and
utter incapability of reproducing large
amounts of weapons of mass destruction.
So no, there was no imminent threat.
The anti-war movement
has taken to the streets.
These neocons like the American
Enterprise Institute believe
in freedom, the freedom to lie, the freedom
to cheat, the freedom to exploit a false
democracy of which our
country is foreign victim.
(dramatic music)
Once again, the Hawks
are back in the ascendancy.
Just a week ago, President Bush sought to
dampen the frenzy of speculation on Iraq.
So on November the 8th, 2006, US Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, he resigns.
There's been so much criticism
regarding what's been going on in Iraq.
This was at a time when public
support for the Iraq war was really low.
There was very low morale.
There was very little support
for the neocon policies.
Blame for poor planning,
mismanagement of the war,
lack of proper planning
for the post-Saddam phase.
Then you've got all the abuses carried out
by Americans on
prisoners at a prison called
Abu Ghraib in which prisoners are tortured.
A suitably somber Mr Bush engaged in what's
become an almost daily act of contrition.
People, there will be a full accounting
for the cruel and disgraceful
abuse of Iraqi detainees.
This isn't looking like, you know, the West
being a nice, democratic,
respecter of human rights.
This is just basically a complete cock-up.
The president reeling
from his first full-blown
scandal, though still
determined to stand by his man.
You're doing a superb job.
You are a strong secretary of defense and
our nation owes you a debt of gratitude.
Yet behind the show of
unity, divisions festering.
Dick Cheney pressing
for Rumsfeld to stay, an
aide to Condi Rice
claiming she wouldn't mind
if he went, though she's denied it.
I must say that it's been the highest
honor of my life to serve with the
talented men and women of
the Department of Defense.
They will remain in my prayers always.
Thank you.
Now, throughout all this
period, back in Afghanistan,
you've got bin Laden still in hiding.
The US invaded Afghanistan
with the aim of capturing bin Laden.
And though they were
able to control probably
about 90% of Afghanistan by December
of 2001, in a famous battle in Tora Bora,
which was bin Laden's stronghold,
he somehow mysteriously escaped.
And why haven't they found bin Laden?
That was one of the primary reasons for
going into Afghanistan,
was to not only dismantle
the country being used as a safe haven
for terrorists like al-Qaeda, but also
you've got to capture the head guy.
You've got to capture bin Laden.
It was definitely a source
of embarrassment for
the Bush administration
that they were never able
to capture bin Laden, given that that was
one of the main objectives
of the invasion of Afghanistan.
Now, you could say that this is a
complete failure of the Bush
administration to find him.
But the truth is, it is very, very
difficult trying to find one man in a
country like Afghanistan,
which is chaotic, it's mountainous,
and besides, bin Laden may
not even be in Afghanistan at all.
I believe the proper use of power by
America will make the
world more peaceful, America
more secure, and as
importantly, people more free.
I call upon all nations to do everything
they can to stop these terrorist killers.
Thank you.
Now watch this drive.
It's obviously very
easy to be cynical about
why the Americans went into Iraq,
but they weren't the only nation going in.
The British and other nations
also supported the American forces.
The U.S. wanted to go to war with
Iraq because there was all kinds of
business potential deals
to be made, there was
all kinds of lucrative economic
opportunities, and because
Iraq had oil, and it was one of
the big oil producers in the world.
We flew up to the Ramallah oil field
this morning, west of
Bashar, where about 60
% of Iraq's oil is produced.
The army cares about its PR and the
story they wanted
reported was the speed with
which this oil field was
secured, with very little damage.
They felt that it would be better to
have a more pliant
democratic style leader in
power than Saddam Hussein, who
they viewed as a menace to U.S. stability.
I genuinely feel that
the motivation for going
in was a sincere
neoconservative belief that the
way to make the world safer is to
go into these countries,
invade them, and install
democratic, friendly governments.
The neocons were
accused of wanting to rebuild
Iraq because this would
be profitable for them,
profitable for their relationship
with oil companies, and
profitable for the reconstruction
company Halliburton, which Dick
Cheney had been on the board of, but
was no longer officially on the board of
once he became vice president.
The facts are the vice
president's company that
he was CEO of, that did business with
sworn enemies of the
United States, paid millions
of dollars in fines for providing
false financial information.
It's under investigation
for bribing foreign officials.
The same company that got a $7.5
billion no-bid contract.
Halliburton was accused
of overcharging the U.S.
for these contracts.
Some $60 billion or so was the amount
that they overcharged the U.S. The rule
is that part of their money is supposed
to be withheld when they're
under investigation, as
they are now, for having
overcharged the American taxpayer.
But they're getting every
dime of their money.
And at the same time, other companies that
were engaged in private
security were earning, I
mean, billions, billions
and billions of dollars.
So for the neocons, this was
this one big business venture.
Who could have possibly
envisioned an election in
Iraq at this point in history?
Even if we're going to be kind to
the neocons, this is just simply a very,
very flawed way of trying to
conduct international politics.
What we've learned from
Iraq, and what happened
afterwards, is that actually what you do by
trying to, you know, get rid of these
dictators is that you end up
destabilizing these countries even more.
And you create an even more deadly and
evil kind of breeding
ground for violence and
terrorism and extremism than you did
under even someone like Saddam Hussein.
So you're getting rid of a bad guy,
but you're replacing him with
hundreds of thousands of bad guys.
To most people, there was really only one
response, which would have
been to invade Afghanistan
and to deal with al-Qaeda.
But instead, the U.S.
got distracted by Iraq.
And this came at a really critical
time when the U.S. was starting to really
gain headway in
Afghanistan, when there was a
chance for stability in
Afghanistan, when there was
a lot of troop deployment there.
At this very critical time, the U.S.
is diverted.
Its military, both troops
and just attention, is
diverted into Iraq, which
then created a hotbed
for terrorism, which had
not even existed before.
And this is the problem.
So I think that the
neoconservatives were arrogant.
I think they were naive.
I think they genuinely
believed that regime change
was the way to make the world safer.
They were wrong.
But given the situation in Iraq right
now, achievements will be a hard sell.
This week alone, at least 300 people
were killed in attacks by insurgents.
Most recent figures show an average of 87
attacks each day, the
highest number so far.
And then there's the
growing hostage problem.
More than 100 foreigners
have been taken hostage
in the last six months,
and 30 have been killed.
At the moment, at least 26 foreigners are
still being held, including a
Briton and two Americans.
(dramatic music)
So there was a huge
cost of the war on terror.
Financially, it cost $8 trillion.
That is a big number.
And that's including all those
military operations, reconstruction
and aid, and also care
for veterans afterwards.
But it also led to some 4.5
million deaths indirectly, if you
look at all the conflicts that took place.
900,000 people died in the direct
conflicts in Afghanistan and in Iraq.
38 million people were displaced.
You've got huge displacements
of millions of people.
Something like 4 million Iraqis
were displaced in that war alone.
And so this sparks this
kind of global refugee crisis.
And because of poor policies
concerning nation-building
in these countries in
which the Americans and
our allies went into,
what you are fomenting
is instability, and an instability
which can be exploited by terrorists.
The war on terror was
aiming to eliminate terrorism.
But what it really did was help generate
more terrorist groups than
ever before in the Middle East.
An immoral war was thus waged.
And the world is a great deal
less safe place than before.
The invasion of Iraq
instigated the formation of
al-Qaeda in Iraq, which was the
most brutal of the al-Qaeda franchise.
And from that would
emerge the Islamic State.
And so as a result, you get, you
know, organizations like
ISIS starting to come to
prominence in places like Iraq.
Which would then be wrecking havoc in not
just Iraq, but also in Syria and
would prolong the Syrian civil war.
Because, you know, they have got a
chaotic system which they can feed off.
So the war on terror
is partially successful,
but ultimately, in the long term, it
also creates lots more terrorism.
So if you're trying to
weigh it up, it's very difficult.
(dramatic music)
You clearly argue, which is now quite a
familiar argument, that the
Bush administration was intent
on going after Iraq, regardless of what
the truth was about the 9-11 attacks.
What do you believe was
the right response to 9-11?
What should they have done?
I would have responded in the same way
that it was a highly
devastating criminal attack,
but it's a terrorist attack
at the end of the day.
We have a very good means.
We have good intelligence.
There was no need to build up and
militarize this planet in response to 9-11
and call it a huge, as Bush did,
what was the words he used?
A tremendous battle, monumental
struggle between good and evil.
I mean, come on.
The United States chose
a different path with Bush.
It decided that the laws and the treaties
that exist between countries
did not exist for them.
And that we had the right to arrest or
go after anybody who was a terrorist.
But the definition of terrorism
has been extremely clouded.
And as we know, there's
a lot of lawsuits out there.
So the United States essentially
behaved like an outlaw.
Weak and insecure
people hardly ever say sorry.
It is large-hearted and
courageous people who
are not diminished by
saying, I made a mistake.
President Bush and Mr. Blair
would recover considerable
credibility and respect if they were
able to say, yes, we made a mistake.
If you ask who won the war on
terror, there's no simple answer.
I'm sorry.
I mean, on one level, you could say,
yes, the Americans did get rid of some
bad guys.
They did get rid of the regime in
Afghanistan, the Taliban regime.
You know, they did get
rid of Osama bin Laden.
They did really denude
al-Qaeda's capability for
creating more terrorist
plots on United States soil.
Getting rid of Saddam
Hussein, he wasn't a nice guy.
Maybe it was good
that he was got rid of.
But when you start looking
beyond those immediate
kind of wins, you look at Afghanistan now.
It's now ruled by the Taliban.
Hold on. I thought we
got rid of those guys.
Iraq feels a bit more stable.
But there were years and years and years
of insurgency and instability
and hundreds of thousands
of deaths and displacement
of civilian populations.
So I think you have to say there
were some short-term victories.
But in the long run, yeah, it's hard to say
that the Americans won the war on terror.
And in fact, it's still being fought
and will be fought for decades.
So who won the war on terror, a war
that lasted decades, cost $8 trillion, saw
almost 1 million people
die in direct conflict?
No one.
(dramatic music)