On March 20, 2003, a "coalition of the willing," made up of the U.S. and its allies, entered Iraq. They knew who their enemy was: Saddam Hussein and his Ba'athist army. The coalition made short work of defeating the Iraqi military, but, as everyone knows, the worst was yet to come. The Iraqi insurgency took many forms and made a common cause with Sunni jihadist groups, connected to al-Qaeda. While the U.S. was distracted, fighting the Sunni insurgency, Iran made its move. A Shiite militia, known as the Badr Corps, established itself through Shiite political leaders like Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, to allow Iran to eventually control Iraq. Today, twenty years later, the Islamic Republic of Iran is the main political force in Baghdad and pro-Tehran militias operate in Iraq with impunity.

No one knows more about how America's intelligence failures in Iraq played into the hands of Iran - than Michael Pregent - a former US Army Signals Intelligence Operator, who, as a civilian advisor, was embedded into the extra-constitutional Office of the Commander-in-Chief led by then Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in Baghdad. Michael not only saw firsthand how an Iranian-backed Shia militia party was set up to control Iraq's security and political process, but he also warned US policymakers about Qods Force General Qassem Soleimani's rise to prominence in Iraq, well before the rest of the world learned about this terrorist mastermind when he was killed by a US drone strike in Baghdad in 2020.

For Episode 18 of the Border Wars Podcast, two combat veterans of the Iraq War, sit down to discuss the lessons learned from the last twenty years. Joseph Humire is joined by Michael Pregent who is now a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute and an expert on intelligence and Middle Eastern affairs.
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