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The Esso cover-up
61 Plays4 years ago
Documents from the Glenbow Museum Archives show that Imperial Oil, a subsidiary of Exxon, knew about the catastrophic effects of climate change before anyone. Instead of telling the world and transforming their business they suppressed their research, started a climate denial PR war and started building dossiers and surveilling climate activists. We talk to Murtaza Hussain of the Intercept about his story on the Esso cover-up and on Iran and his investigative journalism on the Iran Cables.
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Transcript
Duncan's Return and Climate Discussion
00:00:15
Speaker
Friends and enemies, welcome to the Progress Report. I am your host, Duncan Kinney. Recording here in Amiscochi, Wisconsin, otherwise known as Edmonton, here in Treaty 6 territory, we're back! After a long and restful winter break, I went to Mexico with my family, I have to say. It is really nice to wear shorts and t-shirts at Christmas, but I do have to say I'm just not built.
00:00:36
Speaker
for the heat. I know Jim got some solid video game time in over the holidays while he was convalescing. And isn't there some magic the gathering thing that you do over Christmas that you always mark out for? Holiday Cube. Holiday Cube. Jim is a Holiday Cube man. It was also just nice to take a book and read it on the beach and take a break from the Alberta hellscape. But folks, we are right back in the shit again. And today we've got a story that could literally change Alberta as we know it.
00:01:06
Speaker
And this story was published January 8th in The Intercept, not a publication that usually Albertan political watchers are reading. And frankly, the Alberta political and media establishment didn't register at all. It was written by Murtaza Hussein. And quite frankly, his story is extremely important, and that's what we're talking about today.
Interview with Murtaza Hussein
00:01:27
Speaker
The headline was, Imperial Oil, Canada's Exxon subsidiary, ignored its own climate change research for decades, archive shows.
00:01:35
Speaker
But the story was far more than that, and I'd really argue that the details that Murtaza dug up in this story lay the building blocks for the kind of petro-nationalist province that Alberta has become. And to discuss this story, we're very lucky to have Murtaza with us on the line from New York City. Murtaza, welcome. Welcome to The Progress Report. Well, thank you for having me.
00:01:56
Speaker
Murtaza, you are a journalist. You mostly write about national security, foreign policy, human rights, but you have kind of dipped your toe into this kind of like climate change, oil and business story. But you've previously written for The New York Times, The Guardian, Al Jazeera English. We're so lucky to have you on the show. Yeah, I've started to segue into climate stuff the last few years, so I'm glad to discuss it as much as I can.
00:02:24
Speaker
So if you haven't read the story, it'll be in the show notes and I do recommend you read it. But let's just give it kind of a brief summary, right? Like it's come to late in the past decade or so that big fossil fuel companies knew what was coming when it came to climate change before anyone else and that they actively suppressed this information and also engaged in a deliberate PR war of climate denialism and obfuscation.
Legal and Environmental Implications
00:02:48
Speaker
Now, in the United States, we've got kind of multiple lawsuits wending their way through the courts, similar to the kind of big tobacco lawsuits where governments are trying to extract some measure of compensation from these fossil fuel companies who lied about the effects of climate change, who deliberately obfuscated about the effects of climate change before anyone else. And this story now has kind of reached into Canada with this imperial oil story. Am I characterizing your story fairly? Let's get into the details of this story.
00:03:17
Speaker
Yeah, that's definitely a fair characterization. Essentially, as you mentioned, Imperial is the Canadian subsidiary of ExxonMobil. And over the course of several decades, you know, they engaged in a pretty deliberate and brazen effort at clouding the reality of their environmental impact, including on the climate.
00:03:46
Speaker
It's something which is known generally, but what's different now is that thanks to a list of climate researchers, we have documentation internal to Imperial going back to the 60s, which essentially show not only how they developed this knowledge very systematically of how the impact was manifesting, but the steps they took
00:04:15
Speaker
uh, cloud public understanding and even, uh, so to speak, go on the offensive against people who they felt were scrutinizing their record and possibly holding its correct to their business model.
00:04:29
Speaker
And you've got an amazing quote in your story, and it's from Imperial Oil's own internal magazine. And I think it's worth just reading out. In a 1998 article published in Imperial's in-house magazine, former Imperial CEO Robert Peterson wrote that there is
00:04:45
Speaker
quote, absolutely no agreement among climatologists on whether or not the planet is getting warmer, or if it is, on whether the warming is the result of man-made factors or natural variations in the climate. He added that, quote, carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, but an essential ingredient of life on the planet. This is 1998. Yeah, this is 1998. And Mr. Peterson said, you know, he said that at a time where we know from the internal documents of imperial
00:05:16
Speaker
that his company knew very well that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. It's not rich in the environment. It was warping the climate even at that time in a very dangerous way. And it was actually highlighting that for a long time, the people in the world who had the best understanding of climate science were actually fossil fuel companies.
00:05:44
Speaker
because they felt it was very important to know specifically what was happening and how it was working because they wanted to ensure that they designed their own facilities in a manner which accommodated future developments like optic ice melt. Now, Imperial, for many, many years before that specific article written by Mr. Peterson, knew very intimately that the optic was melting.
Imperial Oil's Climate Controversies
00:06:11
Speaker
It was melting as a result of their operations
00:06:14
Speaker
emissions of carbon in the atmosphere and they were planning accordingly. They were already making plans not just to change the way they build facilities, but even to look at new shipping and construction and extraction opportunities in the Arctic. So essentially the CEO of this company was gaslighting the Canadian public and the world really, while privately he knew that
00:06:42
Speaker
what he was saying was diametrically opposite to his own expert findings on Imperial environmental impact. Yeah, and these folks were literally rubbing their hands together at the prospect of cracking open the Arctic to oil and gas exploration, that this would become possible under climate change, right? Yeah, exactly. And we've actually seen in the years since that Exxon, the parent company of Imperial, has acted upon
00:07:10
Speaker
these new, quote unquote, opportunities. They scoped them out, they understood the science, and now they are developing that infrastructure to explore the optics. And it's funny because these climate denialist talking points are still around, especially with us here in Alberta. You know, that quote, carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, but an essential ingredient of life on this planet. That was from 1998. That was from Imperial Oil CEO, Robert Peterson. In 2016, the premier of Alberta, Jason Kenney,
00:07:39
Speaker
A man who is a huge fan of the oil and gas industry, its number one booster, had a tweet which reads, CO2 is not pollution. Life would cease to exist without it. Our forests breathe CO2. 18 years later, we've got the premier of our province literally laundering the same tired, old oil and gas, climate denialism talking points that were being set back in 1998.
00:08:03
Speaker
Yeah, that's precisely it. And look, that was just one example of Mr. Peterson's statement. In the years before and after, he continued to make very outlandish statements about totally, you know, flying in the face of his own company's climate research, more or less the same effect that carbon dioxide is good, you know, nobody has any idea about what the reality of climate change is, and essentially leave us alone because
00:08:32
Speaker
you know, this is not a real problem or it's not as much of a problem as people are saying it is. And the most important thing to prioritize is our continued operation. So these are primary source documents that you're working off of, right? Like these were documents from the Imperial Oil Archive from the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, Alberta. Is that correct? That's correct. These are documents that Imperial had donated to this museum some time ago.
00:09:01
Speaker
perhaps not considering that there were things in there which would be very embarrassing or shed light on their role in the climate crisis. And from researchers on climate change, they consulted this archive independently once they learned that the Imperial documents were there and they surfaced these internal documents of the company showing their operations PR
00:09:28
Speaker
research and surveillance going back many decades. So what you're saying though is that, I mean, if you're a Calgary based researcher who wants to do more digging on this, these documents are available to anyone who wants to dig through them at the Glenbow Museum, right? Yeah, that's right. There's a lot of stuff in there. I think a lot of it has been capped, but certainly I would not imagine, you know, it depends on the angle you want to look at. If we're looking at the climate angle,
00:09:56
Speaker
Some of that's been covered, but this is a very large company, ExxonMobil, essentially. And there are a lot of things in there which may be of interest to people. Of course. There's also an image used in the story that's it's probably going to be the show art for the podcast that I just want to highlight for the people who haven't kind of read the story and click the link. The caption of the image is this, John Armstrong, then chair of Imperial Oil, photographed on April 20th, 1977, surrounded by 49 barrels of crude oil.
00:10:23
Speaker
the average amount of oil consumed by each Canadian that year. And in this photograph, this kind of like old white dude in a kind of poorly fitting suit is kind of awkwardly sitting on a barrel of oil surrounded in the background by these stacks and stacks of barrels of oil. And it just has a very like MTV cribs opening up the fridge to show bottles of champagne kind of energy going on.
00:10:45
Speaker
And it really just kind of echoes a lot of the rhetoric that we're seeing from oil and gas, kind of like petro-nationalists these days, right? Like it's really cold in Edmonton right now. It's like minus 30, minus 35. And these folks are saying, well, like, oh, if you don't like oil and gas, like shut off your furnace and freeze to death. And it's like, this is literally the same flex that these people were saying, like back in 1977, you know? Yeah, exactly. Not much has changed. The only time the rhetoric really changes from this triumphalist default
00:11:16
Speaker
is when these companies come under public scrutiny. So now you see in recent years, with the climate crisis becoming so acute and so undeniable, they're changing their tune a little bit because they want to be in line with public perception or not wildly out of line with public perception. They don't want to sound crazy, even though if you look at their historical record, they've sounded crazy many times in the past and wildly responsible.
00:11:44
Speaker
probably criminally irresponsible. Um, but today, you know, they may tone it down a bit, but if the public pressure reliance, they'll go back to saying the same things they were saying before that. I'm a doctor is good that the climate was not warming up or climate science, uh, is not settled per se. Uh, you know, it's just, it's the advantage to continue doing the same thing that they want to do throughout this time, but certainly they've been flexible in their public posturing.
00:12:14
Speaker
depending on how much scrutiny they feel I'm supposed to be on. Capitalism is nothing if not flexible, but I think there's some info in your story that goes beyond the well-trothed ground of your usual fossil fuel companies denying climate change. That's really this idea of going on the offensive and putting their enemies under surveillance. There's a quote from your story that I'm just going to read out here.
00:12:40
Speaker
Despite going on the PR offensive, by the 1970s Imperial was becoming yet more alarmed by the growing public criticism of its activities. Its response to this perceived threat was typical of many powerful yet paranoid institutions, surveillance. As public pressure mounted, Imperial began putting together dossiers on organizations that had accused of politicization of the fossil fuel business.
00:13:01
Speaker
A 1976 report titled Canadian Pressure Groups, prepared by the company's public affairs department, offered detailed profiles of six Canadian NGOs alleged to have targeted the company over environmental or social issues. Among the information they gathered was financial data about the operations of these organizations, along with physical addresses and information about their key spokespeople. I mean, Jesus Christ.
00:13:30
Speaker
Yeah, so they started doing surveillance on some of the perceived public adversaries, really the small NGOs in Canada who were trying to shed light on their environmental record. And environmental record, which Imperial knew was negative, is having negative impacts on the Canadian environment, global environment. And their response was,
00:13:57
Speaker
And part of the response was to start building dossiers on some of these, what they described as pressure groups. So they were gathering information about their finances, about their key spokespeople, about their addresses. They were certainly going on the offensive because they were very paranoid about what may happen to them if a public outcry, you know, this is the 1970s, built up to the level that
00:14:24
Speaker
it starts putting curbs on their operations or stopping them from doing certain things they'd like to do in Canada. And there's a really mismatch in power here because NGOs, they're just very small. They're not multi-doing dollar companies like ExxonMobil and subsidiaries, but they treated them as though they were a serious threat to their business.
00:14:47
Speaker
So these organizations, these NGOs from the 70s wouldn't even be around anymore, right? Like these would be tiny organizations, kind of like pre-green piece. Do you remember the names of these organizations? Who are we talking about here? Yeah, some of the organizations are the Canadian Arctic Resources Committee, Committee for an Independent Canada, Consumers Association of Canada, Energy Probe. They're organizations which not even all will focus specifically on the environment. They're also focused on
00:15:16
Speaker
perceived predatory practices by the company in general. But they were looped in under the category of non-governmental adversaries. And certainly one of the things that Imperial was most concerned about was scrutiny of its environmental record, even as far back as the 1970s when it was becoming, even at that early stage, highly apparent to the company that they were doing serious harm to the Canadian environment.
00:15:46
Speaker
Yeah, and it just kind of gets worse, right? Like beyond the kind of paranoid surveillance of their perceived enemies, you've got a quote from a document in 1990 that I think is extremely damning from the story. The quote is, in the document, Imperial warned that stakeholders in government and private industry should be careful to not outgreen each other, which just seems like outright kind of collusion to kind of stop early climate action in the 90s. Yeah.
00:16:15
Speaker
This is the thing. Their number one priority at all times, no matter what, was stopping regulation. They did not want their activities to be regulated. Everything else, the environment, the climate, you know, the social impact of their operations was secondary at best. Their single-minded purpose was, let's not get out of hand and start passing laws to constrain the fuel industry. And, you know, this is,
00:16:44
Speaker
everything else has to be seen through that lens. They didn't want companies to start creating a cycle you could call maybe a virtuous cycle whereby they start competing to pass or improve their environmental practices or scale back certain destructive practices. They wanted to maintain status quo as long as possible.
00:17:12
Speaker
Quite frankly, that remains their position today. They are trying to this very day to extract as much as possible, keep their operating margins as broad as possible. And there's a very grim irony to this, that look at that document and some of the other documents in there. Imperial knew well before the rest of us that we need to switch to renewables. Society is not sustainable.
00:17:42
Speaker
This extractive fossil fuel energy system is not sustainable. It needs switch. And they were very well placed to make that switch a long time ago. They knew what needs to be done. They were gaming out how it could be done. But they didn't do it because they constantly, it constantly is in a very short-term attitude. The path of least resistance, the path of most immediate short-term profit is simply to keep pumping as much oil as you can.
00:18:11
Speaker
for as long as you can. Had they instead geared their company a few decades ago around the time of these documents towards renewables, they would have had the first mover advantage. They would have been able to capitalize on this wide open industry and all the benefits that were approved from that financially. But they didn't. They just continued fighting against any regulation, fighting against any change in what business is usual.
00:18:39
Speaker
And not only that, right, but but actually moving meaningfully moving on climate change in the 90s would have been far like an order of magnitude easier and an order of magnitude cheaper to actually address the problem as opposed to 20 to 30 years later, where we've just continued to stack up these these kind of carbon emissions in the atmosphere.
00:18:57
Speaker
I mean, you read the story, I read the story, you know, when you get angry, you get outraged. And then we say this evil shit out loud to each other over the course of this podcast, and I'm getting even angrier. Like, like, this is just straight up supervillain shit, right? Like, what's going through your head when you're writing this story? Well, you know, unfortunately, it's kind of become known that Exxon did know about the impact of climate change a very, very long time ago.
00:19:24
Speaker
And these shocking statements by Imperial CEO and additional documentation now which has come out showing the level of texture to which they knew and the very, very early dates at which they knew. It just compounds the level of outrage at these companies. And I think that at the very minimum, there should be financial institution, there should be
00:19:54
Speaker
like the legal restitution. Climate change, maybe to some people, for many years, it could be described as an abstraction. But there's a continent which is effectively on fire right now. There are record heat waves all over the world. This is the last decade. The course is the hottest decade on record. 2019 was the second hottest year on record. We're at the very preliminary stages of something very terrible. And if you look at these documents, you see how this happened.
00:20:23
Speaker
And even more infuriatingly, how easily it could have been avoided did not have to happen. It could have, a few decisions, a few people could have averted from all of us the catastrophe, which is now starting to unfold. Yeah. And so you reached out to Imperial for a comment, right? What did they have to say for themselves when you asked them about this story? Well, they said that we take climate science very seriously, you know, we investing in
00:20:52
Speaker
new goals and we're investing in research. They didn't really address the issue of this past simulation at the critical moment. And look, they're pumping more oil than ever. That's the reality. Whatever anyone says about anything else, their extractive operations have increased year over year. So anything else but that is just commentary. The reality is very stark.
00:21:22
Speaker
The obvious analog here is the lawsuits by several United States against the tobacco companies, where ultimately they were able to extract hundreds of billions of dollars from these tobacco companies for lying about the effects of cigarettes on people's health.
00:21:41
Speaker
And I think when we kind of examine why this story really just flew over everyone's head here in Alberta, the kind of like home of oil and gas, corporate power in Canada, it was because this is the long-term play, right? Like the long-term play is for states to sue these fossil fuel companies for the damages of climate change. And we're talking an order of magnitude more money than when it comes to cigarettes, right? Yeah.
00:22:10
Speaker
The tobacco example is very apt in the sense that the type of flying was quite similar, but the scope of this is something completely on another level. It will affect every human being, every living thing on the planet. It will call into question the very existence of human civilization as we currently are familiar with it. This is not a hyperbolic
00:22:38
Speaker
interpretation of it. This is an existential threat to human beings living in an industrial, post-industrial society. We may not be able to live the way we've lived before because of this. People have lived in places for thousands of years and they have to leave those places. Crop failures, disease, the deaths of other species, the eradication of habitats, the
00:23:08
Speaker
unlitability of entire continents, whole vast swaths of the world, like Australia as we're seeing at the moment. We're talking about something which is on the scale of Nuremberg as opposed to necessarily tobacco cases, which were also very great, something we've never really encountered before. And that's why, you know, there will be some legal accountability, there will be some civil accountability for this.
00:23:33
Speaker
It's very hard to actually gain justice for a crime which underscale. It is. And when we examine why Alberta's political media lead ignored this story, it's because Alberta's political and media lead are so intertwined with the oil and gas industry here and that they're essentially one and the same. But this is why it's so important to have you on kind of talking about this story.
00:24:00
Speaker
The very hard and awkward segue that I'm going to make is there's another kind of big Alberta story that's happened recently that crosses over with the work that you do for The Intercept.
Edmonton's Connection to Iran Incident
00:24:10
Speaker
And you know, we're based out of Edmonton and the tragedy of kind of Ukraine International Airlines flight 752 has kind of hit this city hard, right? This is a flight that was accidentally shot down by Iran shortly after takeoff, killing all 176 people on board.
00:24:25
Speaker
Amongst them, many Canadians and immigrants who are making their lives in Canada, 27 of whom were from Edmonton. We recently had a memorial ceremony here, thousands of people packed in a room that was at capacity to kind of grieve publicly. It's touched a lot of lives. It's just a tremendously sad story, just needless death.
00:24:49
Speaker
And I know you've written a lot about Iran and Iraq and the kind of situation on the ground there. And in the context of this horrible tragedy, we also had the United States and Iran kind of going right up to the precipice of aggressive war, right? And thankfully, it seems like Iran and the US seem to have stepped back from their aggressive postures. Is that a fair kind of characterization? You're paying attention to this more than I am. Yeah. Well, the Trump administration at its bare minimum has about
00:25:18
Speaker
a year left in office. And they've shown themselves absolutely committed to one foreign policy goal, which is a confrontation with Iran. Not for any real good reason. The Obama administration had gone the opposite direction. It seems like Mr. Trump is simply committed to taking a contrarian position to whatever Mr. Obama did. And, you know, I think that Justin Trudeau said about this shooting down of the plane is quite apt.
00:25:48
Speaker
It's not that it's the United States' fault, but this entire standoff is unnecessary. And if it were not for the standoff, that plane would not have been shot down unless people would have been in their lives. There's no need for this confrontation because there was already a negotiation which had been complete successfully and offered at the bare minimum an off-ramp for this 40 years of tension between the United States and Iran. It's just a great tragedy. And unfortunately, when this war, when this confrontation
00:26:18
Speaker
do outcome of that can be quite unpredictable and more often than not innocent people suffer. Yeah, and when it comes to the investigation around the flight, it sounds like Canadian experts are kind of slowly getting their visas worked out and getting on the ground and starting up their investigation now, a process that's actually taken longer than it otherwise would because
00:26:41
Speaker
Canada and Iran don't have any formal diplomatic relations. The thing that I've been keeping half an eye on is essentially the situation on the ground in Iran right now. The killing of Qasim Soleimani by the Americans on Iraqi soil seems to have galvanized a huge portion of the Iranian populace to be like, fuck you, you're just going to murder one of our top leaders. But then simultaneously, this
00:27:06
Speaker
this, um, this shooting down of the, you know, flight seven five two has also galvanized, you know, another section of Iranian society to be like, well, fuck the regime. Like this is awful. Right. What's, what's your sense of the kind of situation on the ground in Iran right now? Well, you know, Iran is a very big country and even the small country, people, even town, people can be very divided and talking about 80 million people, um,
00:27:34
Speaker
you know, views are divided but also there's no contradiction necessarily between protesting against the killing of Qasem Soleimani and protesting against the shooting down of a plane because they're both wedded essentially under the framework of national pride. People who don't like the government still could be offended by a foreign government killing one of their own leaders, people who
00:28:02
Speaker
were, went out of those protests, could still be offended by their own government failing to defend their people instead of harming them in an inept attempt to manage or stand out for the United States. And it's some very important. A lot of people who went to the first protest also went to the second protest.
00:28:21
Speaker
Just the other day, a story came out by CBC of Stephen Harper speaking to a crowd of presumably conservative psychopaths at this conference in New Delhi called the Raizina Dialogue, an event that seems to be connected to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, himself a war criminal and extremely problematic figure, where Stephen Harper said, quote, without a change in the nature of the government of Tehran, the Middle East will continue to be in turmoil. How would you interpret that quote?
00:28:50
Speaker
Well, Stephen Harper is very ideologically aligned with his neoconservatives in the United States and elsewhere. And they're obsessed with Iran. They're obsessed with changing the government in Iran. It's just going to become like a fixation. And Mr. Harper, I think an interesting thing about his presence at this dialogue is that he still wants to be a public figure.
00:29:16
Speaker
a sort of an elder statesman to a certain strand of the conservative movement in western countries. They'd like to see a change in the government. It's very unlikely it's going to happen outside of some sort of external intervention. At the same time, such an intervention is very difficult to accomplish because it's a very cruel society and I think there's not much appetite in the US or elsewhere for another war on the scale of the Iraq war. They may try to bomb
00:29:44
Speaker
certain government sites inside Iran and hope that results in enough chaos that the government itself falls. But even that, I find it to be very a slim chance they're going to change the government because it's not just one or two people. There's an entire system. They have a monopoly on force inside the country. They have the weapons with the military and the revolutionary guards. They've been trying to change the Iranian government since the Iranian government came into power.
00:30:13
Speaker
It's not to say that it can never happen, but we've been hearing the same thing for many, many decades, and even protests. There's been big protests going on in the past. They haven't resulted in a change in the government. So I find Mr. Harper and others, their message is consistent, and yet it's not something I haven't heard before.
00:30:34
Speaker
I don't think you can look at this statement as anything but Stephen Harper openly stumping for regime change, even though he doesn't use those exact words. That's just such a psychopathic approach to take, given the history of the country that we're talking about and the region. The reason why Iran is so fucked up is because the CIA overthrew
00:30:56
Speaker
Mohammed Mossadig in 1953 at British Petroleum's request, right? Like we have two invasions of Iraq by the Americans just in the past 30 years that it just killed tremendous amounts of Iraqis. We have two invasions of Afghanistan, one by Russia, one by the United States and the UK. Again, tremendous amounts of casualties of innocent people and no actual effective nation building or like results on the ground, right? Just death and destruction.
00:31:25
Speaker
No, there's a lot of tremendous harmonies in these societies. And the idea that you're going to start another war is just mind-boggling. I guess this should just be honest and say this is not trying to make anything better. Just be frank about what you're trying to accomplish with this and why you're doing it. Because the idea is it's going to benefit anybody's survival.
00:31:46
Speaker
Finally, I think it's important to kind of end off this podcast and this interview with some of the work, interesting work that you've been doing on a project called The Iran Cables and really the insight that you've been gaining into kind of Iran-y, Iraqi politics. Describe The Iran Cables to our audience and kind of what's been the biggest thing that you've learned from doing this project.
Insights from The Iran Cables
00:32:07
Speaker
Well, The Iran Cables, a project by The Intercept, The New York Times,
00:32:12
Speaker
to report on a cache of 700 pages of documents from the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence. And it basically outlined the Ministry of Intelligence operations in Iraq during a period of 2013, 2015. And so the true audience was operating in Iraq. This is the time of ISIS and how war was going and their relationship with Iraqi politicians.
00:32:38
Speaker
You know, we knew that Iran had a deep footprint in Iraq. The thing's interesting about the documents is that we've never actually seen from the inside how they think and how they operate, or at least, you know, one faction of the government and how it operates. And, you know, they're quite professional. They have a very professional intelligence operation. They really did have a deep control over Iraq, much deeper than the Americans.
00:33:03
Speaker
because they kind of knew everybody. They kind of spoke the language a lot more. They had deep relationships going back with individual figures for decades. They really won that war, not because they're more powerful or because they have more resources. It's that they were playing on a totally different level. They would be deeply, deeply embedded in that society. And, you know, they were trying to destroy it or to kill everybody in Iraq.
00:33:30
Speaker
trying to stabilize it in a way which preserved their privileged economic and political access to the Iraqi system. And, of course, that's still antagonistic to many Iraqis. Nobody wants a foreign country, even a country next door, to be having more of a say in the government than they do.
00:33:50
Speaker
And it is really interesting to see, you know, how Iraqis respond to this Iranian influence in their politics and in their country's operations. But it's like, yeah, like your analysis of why Iran won the Iraq war is like, they live there, man. Like at the end of the day, the United States is flying in, they're flying out, they don't speak the language, they don't know the culture. Iran is next door, they have, you know, the co-religionists and it's, and ultimately they live there.
00:34:18
Speaker
And and you know, you have the deep dive on on kasim suleimani and these iran cable stories and I think it's interesting too, right like Like a lot of people I read that 2013 new yorker profile on suleimani and the biggest thing that jumped out at me from that story was Canada's own, you know war criminal fuck up david frume and
00:34:42
Speaker
And just how much damage his axis of evil speech did to the rapprochement that was happening between Iran and the United States in the early stages of the Iraq war. And just how fucked up that this one fucking idiot, you know, with one speech was able, was, was ultimately responsible for the deaths of like thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people. Because ultimately after that, it was Iran was just like, well, fuck the United States. If there, if we're the enemy, then we're the enemy.
00:35:13
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, he's not even very smart. He just got in the position he could do that. And, you know, I don't think that, you know, maybe hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people could still be alive had he not inserted this ideological bent into that speech and tanked the U.S. relationship with Iran and thereby ramped up the Iraq war and also the Afghanistan war in the long term. It's very unfortunate.
00:35:43
Speaker
the small quirks of history by people who, you know, you think you know better. Yeah. Well, Mataza, thank you so much for coming on the show and for your time and talking about your work. Where can people follow your work? How can people keep track of what you're doing online? Do you have a Twitter account? You know, what's the best place? Yeah, you can see my articles on theintercept.com. And if you're on Twitter, you can follow me at mazm.com.
00:36:12
Speaker
H-U-S-S-A-I-N. That's my Twitter handle.
00:36:17
Speaker
Awesome. Well, yeah, follow his Twitter account. It's amazing. I have recently started following Mortaza. It's great. And if you like this podcast and you want to keep hearing interesting interviews like this, original content here in Alberta that you cannot get anywhere else, there's a couple of things you can do. You can obviously share this content. I don't care how you do it, whether it's through your social media platform, whether you're creating tapes and sharing them.
00:36:44
Speaker
Share this content, get it in front of as many people as you can. Obviously, like our content, interact with it on social media. That's also very helpful. One thing that we are looking for more of is reviews, especially on Apple Podcasts, but there's all sorts of places where you can leave podcast reviews. If you're able to take 30 seconds out of your day to do that, we'd also really appreciate that. Finally, ultimately, the biggest thing you can do to help this podcast is give us money.
00:37:08
Speaker
If you want to join the 250 other folks who regularly donate to us, you will be doing incredible amounts of help for us as we keep this little independent media project going. So go to theprogressreport.ca slash patrons and put in your credit card and contribute. We would really appreciate it. If you have any notes, thoughts, comments, things you think I need to hear, you can reach me on Twitter at Duncan Kinney. You can reach me by email at DuncanK at ProgressAberta.ca. Thanks so much to Cosmic Family Communist for the theme. Thank you for listening and goodbye.