The Dispatch Podcast - An Enduring Memory

Episode Date: September 11, 2020

It’s the 19th anniversary of September 11, 2001, one of the most harrowing historical events in living memory. Today, our podcast hosts reflect on their personal memories of the day as a launching point into a discussion about  the United States’ current understanding of al-Qaeda nearly two decades later. In reality, we don’t talk about al-Qaeda much anymore other than within the context of Trump’s “endless wars” rhetoric. Just this week, the Trump administration announced that troops  in Iraq will be reduced to 3,000. What’s more, peace negotiations are taking place with Taliban representatives, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and representatives of the Afghan government this weekend. So as Steve points out, “You’d be forgiven for thinking this is all over.” But as Dispatch Podcast guest Tom Joscelyn reminds us on today’s episode, “Al-Qaeda is still very much alive.” Though Tom concedes that there’s a lot you can criticize about U.S. military intervention post-9/11, “It’s much more common, in my experience, that people who are against the U.S. using military force or U.S. military action to play disconnect the dots than it is for some sort of a so-called hawk to overconnect the dots.” On today’s episode, Tom, Sarah, and Steve discuss American intelligence officials’ current misunderstanding of al-Qaeda, the UAE and Bahrain’s plans to normalize their relationship with Israel, and the real and imagined foreign threats to the upcoming election. Show Notes: -“Why ‘Outside-In’ Diplomacy Could Be the Key to Middle East Peace” by Jonathan Schanzer, “This 9/11 anniversary arrives with the end of the war on al-Qaeda well in sight” by Christopher Miller, director of the National Counterterrorism Center in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and “The Falling Man” by Thomas Junod. -Tom Joscelyn’s Vital Interests newsletter for The Dispatch. -30-day free trial of The Dispatch Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Friday Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isgir, joined by Steve Hayes and Tom Jocelyn, author of The Dispatch newsletter Vital Interest, which you can subscribe to on our website, thedispatch.com. He joins us today to talk about September 11th, 19 years later. let's dive right in tom it is the 19th anniversary of september 11th and you go on twitter or on any new site and it's interesting to re-remember remember not just what happened that day but some of the stories that came out after and just some of the emotion that happened that day for all of us. And, you know, maybe the easiest place to start is where were you? Actually, I was working as an economist, helping to run some very large research projects at the time.

And I, to be clear, I have no personal stake in the events of 9-11. I didn't know any of the victims or anything like that. But our sister company was, in fact, wiped out one of the World Trade Centers. And I ended up taking up some of the work of people who were lost that day very briefly. that, you know, I don't want to say that had any emotional impact on me. I don't think it really did, but I did absolutely after that day become obsessed with trying to understand sort of what happened and in particular Al Qaeda and how Al Qaeda operates and sort of an obsession that's stuck with me all these years. Steve, where were you? I was at my house on Capitol Hill and had, was preparing to go to Capitol Hill, Laura Bush was doing a hearing on Capitol Hill on education policy. And I was preparing to go cover that and heard about the first plane hitting

and flipped on the TV and watched the second plane hit. And then scrambled. Then it was a scramble. I had to get to the weekly standard offices. My brother was working at the World Bank at the time. And there was lots of early speculation that what was targeted were, you know, pillars of the world economy. So lots of people thought, at least in those first couple hours that the World Bank was a target or a possible target. So couldn't get a hold of my brother for the entire day, basically. And then finally met up with him late in the afternoon, and very frustrated that he hadn't gotten a hold of me in the meantime. And I think I, you know, punched him and then gave him a huge hug.

Where were you? So I was at home because I was in college and we were on the quarter system. So we hadn't started school yet. And so I was obviously sleeping in because I was, you know, college age. And I remember hearing my mother's voice and her saying, Sarah, you need to wake up and come downstairs. and the way she said it, I assume my grandmother had died. And, you know, it was like that tone, you know, your parents have a tone when, like,

basically when a grandparent has died, like, there's a very specific tone that your parents take. And so, you know, I got up without complaint and I came downstairs sort of, you know, I loved my grandmother very much. And the TV was on and she said, your dad told me I needed to call and wake you up and have you come down and watch this. And that was before the towers had flown. fallen, but after both planes had hit. And I just didn't move from the TV for 48 hours. I mean, they shut down Houston. They had F-15s flying over the oil refineries that you could hear

and stuff. But it was a interesting age, I think, for 9-11 to happen because as a college student, I had sort of just left the umbrella of my parents' protection, both sort of, you know, literally, but also metaphorically. And so, you know, your first time sort of out in the world to feel like the world is falling apart that day and that the world is a very scary place. I think for my generation, those sort of elder millennials, it had an enormous impact. And you see that in the people who signed up to serve. But I think you also see it in just our entire like cohort of that generation's attitude towards politics and nonprofit work and a whole bunch of things that we get made fun of for. But I do think it's a lot of it is due to that. I mean, it was life-changing.

That was the first major world-changing event of our lives. Challenger had happened, but that didn't change the world as tragic as it was. Right. And so, I mean, you know, Tom, this started really a whole different career for you. Yeah, I mean, it did. I, you know, and I think it eventually did. I'd sort of. It's one of these things where Steve knows. I started talking to Steve around 2003, sometime in 2003. And he knows I sort of had this habit on the side of doing my full-time, more than full-time work where I was doing all this research on al-Qaeda and jihadism and sort of building up my knowledge base on these issues. And without getting too far into the personal details on that, I just say one of the things that strikes me all these years later is, you know,

I was initially became focused or obsessed with this because I thought that there were some basic epistemological problems here in terms of understanding, you know, just what al-Qaeda is, how it functions, you know, how it's willing to create relationships with other entities, you know, sort of what its goals were. All those things were sort of not well understood in September 2001, and I don't think they were well-understood in the years immediately after it. And I think the main thing I've learned in my career is they're still not well-understood to this day. There are still issues about al-Qaeda, basic issues of definition, basic issues of who's who, how does it function, that sort of thing, that are still not understood. And it's sort of shocking to some

people when I say that. I want this to sink in because this is sort of the main thing I could say about all this, is that, you know, if there are 17 U.S. intelligence agencies or 16 U.S. intelligence, depending on how you count it, there are probably 22 different definitions of al-Qaeda. You know, nobody can agree on even what this thing totally looks like. You know, the last time the U.S. government put out an assessment of, and this matters, we're going to get to why this matters in a second, but the last time the U.S. government put out sort of just a basic assessment of the structure of al-Qaeda, here's how it operates, to my knowledge, publicly, was in 2004 in the 9-11 Commission report, and that was somewhat cursory. To my knowledge,

there hasn't been a similar public statement about what al-Qaeda looks like to this day. And what that has, what's happened is because these basic issues of definition are not, not been resolved. And a lot of my work has been to try and work to resolve them. You get things like yesterday, we're recording this on September 11th and on September 10th in the Washington Post. There was an op-ed by the new director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Christopher Miller. And I would say that there were, you know, he basically was saying that we're close to the end of the fight against al-Qaeda, which you can debate about, you can debate the merits of the argument. And we can certainly do that. what I want people to take away from this is that in that op-ed, there were a couple misstatements

of fact, material misstatements of fact. These are not sort of small points that he got wrong. I mean, these are big points that he got wrong. And, you know, that to me, this is a guy who's a national counterterrorism director, you know, and this is a national counterterrorism center. And we see this stuff all the time, you know, all the time. I see stuff that just people can't get basic things right about this. And it's sort of spooky, I would say, that the U.S. government has spent all this money and it's spent all these resources and we spent all this time fighting wars and launching drone strikes and shutting down terrorist operations. And yet you can't just get a simple, straightforward, you know, evidence-based definition of al-Qaeda straight from

a lot of U.S. officials. It's really something, actually. How much, Tom, how much of that is just sloppy, bad, bad work product? How much of it is this sort of natural outgrowth of bureaucracy? I mean, this is what bureaucracies do. And how much of that is, would you say, intentional? You know, that's a great question. I think it's actually a mix of everything you just said, you know? I mean, look, we have one of the ways I phrase is, and Steve, you know, I've used this phrase for a long time.

And General McMaster was the national security advisor to President Trump for a while. He's adopted this phrase, too, because I think he encountered the same thing. was there's definitely an analytic school which plays disconnected dots. So you remember after 9-11, the whole theory was we have to connect the dots and the 9-11 commission report. You have to figure out what's going on, you know, do the basic sort of investigative work about what Al-Qaeda is and what it's intentions are and what's doing. There's been a whole analytic school that's grown up both inside and outside of government that plays disconnected dots. So you could have a group that stands up and says, hey, you know, we're Al-Qaeda and we're loyal to Al-Qaeda's Amir and we've got, you know, a few thousand fighters who are waging this insurgency in Somalia. And you'll have people rush to say, well, it's not really al-Qaeda.

It's just a local group, blah, blah, blah, blah. Let me just jump in here because I think this is really, really important point. And I'd like to offer our listeners a basic understanding of why this is. I can imagine listening to this podcast and think, why in the world would people want to disconnect the dots? Right. The entire program, the entire objective here should be to connect the dots. Why have we seen? And by the way, I agree with your assessment. And I think, you know, we could point to literally probably hundreds of instances in which this has happened. Absolutely. You're talking about Shabab, whether you're talking about, you know, the groups involved with Benghadi, you can go on and on and on. And this has happened again and again and again. Why does it happen?

I think the root for this answer, there are, again, there are multiple answers to your original question. Why is sort of this misunderstanding? This one rude misunderstanding starts with, I think, a policy bias, an ideological bias against the use of U.S. military force and U.S. interventionism and U.S. activism. Now, look, there's a lot you can criticize about U.S. interventionism post-9-11, so I'm not offering a blanket defense by any means. But what I think, you know, what we've run into is there are a lot of times people say, oh, you're just saying that, you know, this party or that party is connected to Al-Qaeda or to ISIS now because you want to use military force. say no. You can debate what you want to do about all this. And I think the answer is probably different from theater to theater and from case to the case. I don't think there's one-size-fits-all answer to all this in terms of policy at all. But you have to bifurcate sort of what the analysis is and what's going on from what your policy recommendations are. And what I would say is

that it's much more common, in my experience, to have people who are against the U.S. using military force or U.S. action to play disconnected dots than it is for somebody who's sort of a so-called hawk to play to overconnect the dots um and i know it's a very it's a very weird thing but if you think back to the policy debates in washington part of the reason why it's so poisonous and steve you and i have dealt with this for years just think about the number of times people dismiss something you or i have said because they impute some motive to us for wanting to for military action or u.s. force or something like that and it's really pretty amazing to watch because the truth is in my my case the exact opposite you know um you know that basically it's a lot

times. Like, I'll give you one recent example. It's pretty clear that ISIS has made a move into Mozambique and to different remote places of Africa, right? Do I think the U.S. military should inject itself into these fights? No, actually, I don't, right? But does that mean that this isn't really ISIS or it isn't connected to the ISIS mothership? No. It could very well be tied to the ISIS mothership and outgrowth of their projects. Now, with ISIS, we've seen this disconnected dots stuff a lot less than we've seen with Al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda became sort of the heart of the disconnect the dots analysis because post 9-11, the use of U.S. military force in particular, especially with the Iraq war, became highly controversial. And so even when I think these people

have legitimate critiques or criticisms of the actual policies that have been courses of been taking by the U.S., again, you have to bifurcate your analysis of what you see going on with what you want to do about it. And I think that too often you see basically those two things conflated. Let me put your, Sarah, can I push one more question than I want to throw back to you to sort of broaden the discussion. Isn't there a second explanation here? And the second explanation is, if you disconnect the dots, the culpability on the intelligence operatives and analysts who miss things is far lower, right? And if, for instance, you've got a group that's operating out of northern Afghanistan that they can say, look, this is a local group. These are local people

with local interests. They have nothing to do with the, nothing to do with al-Qaeda, maybe occasionally overlapping with the Taliban. They're not a threat to the United States. We don't need to really pay attention to them. We don't need to include them into our broad threat analysis. If that's the case, it allows the intel analysts, whether you're talking about, you know, folks at the State Department, whether you're talking about folks in the Defense Intelligence Agency at the CIA, to sort of throw up their hands and say, this is not, this should not be our focus. This is not, this doesn't present a threat. Yeah, I think, I think it provides a convenient out for certain policymakers and certain analysts and certain people is for sure, you know. I'll give you one example

on this from history. So, you know, Al-Qaeda and Islamic Maghreb is the, one of the things, let's take one quick step back here for a second. So we're just sitting recording this on the anniversary 9-11. And of course, you know, if you told me on September 12th that we wouldn't have another big attack like 9-11 inside the U.S., I probably would have been surprised. You know, I think there were a lot of threats coming our way, and a lot of threats were stopped. And there's a whole new book that needs to be written about just that. Like, what actually, what were the serious plots that were thwarted? I think that that needs more scrutiny. Because I think a number of serious plots were thwarted. And so that's a major achievement for the national security bureaucracy and

and people involved, you know, although they're inefficiencies and all sorts of problems. By the same token, the jihadi insurgency is spread. And why is that? Well, I think what people don't realize is that, you know, we as Americans look at 9-11, through the lens of 9-11 itself through those attacks, and that's understandable. But that was not the, and what many Americans and many analysts assumed was that that was Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda's singular focus. Like, all they wanted to do is really strike the U.S.

And that's not true. they have their literature before 9-11, immediately after 9-11, and now this many years, 19 years later, sets forth their theory of the world. Their theory of the world was they needed to hit the U.S. as one step out of a number of steps in order to sort of slowly acquire power in the Muslim majority countries because they thought that the America was the thing that was propping up all these dictatorships and anti-Islamic sort of parties that basically were keeping them from seizing power, whether it be in Saudi Arabia or Egypt or anywhere else. Now, there's a lot a lot of reasons why that theory of the world doesn't make sense, by the way. It isn't true.

But that was their theory of the world. And the bottom line observation from that is what they were focused on, what Al-Qaeda was focused on right from the beginning, was seizing power in these countries and trying to wage insurgencies to topple these governments. That was always their focus. That's always what they wanted to do. And so people forget, for example, that immediately after 9-11, in the months after 9-11, al-Qaeda tried to launch an insurgency in Saudi Arabia. They wanted to overthrow the Saudi Royals. Now, I'm not holding any brief for the Saudi Royals, trust me. But that was part of what Osama bin Laden wanted to do. It wasn't just about attacking the U.S., like they wanted to actually take over parts of the Middle East. Now,

they've had setbacks in that regard, too, just as I've had setbacks and trying to launch another 9-11 style attack, they've had setbacks and trying to acquire power overseas. But their uncertainty footprint, that means the war fighting that they do to try and accomplish that goal has undoubtedly deepened and spread. And so whereas on September 10, 2001, you had al-Qaeda in just a smattering of countries, you know, small presence in Yemen, basically its hub was in Afghanistan, with logistical networks in Pakistan, and then, you know, smattering a presence in other places. You now have full-blown jihadian surgencies waged by either al-Qaeda or ISIS or both

in theaters everywhere from West Africa to South Asia. And that's not an accident, you know. The thing that I try and express when I explain us to people is that Osama bin Laden, in al-Qaeda circles and his admirers, they call him the reviving Sheikh or the reviving imam. What does that mean? Well, it means that they credit him, among others, with reviving jihad in Muslim majority countries, making jihad hip again for the Muslim youth and others. Because basically their theory of the world was that jihad wasn't really widespread, wasn't really acceptable

in a lot of these countries prior to 9-11. And bin Laden needed to do something to spark the jihadi revolution. And 9-11 was it. And I would say that if he were, if bin Laden has been dead now since 2011, so going on 10 years of that next year, a decade next year. But if he had to look at the world and he'd say, well, if you told him in 2001 that he'd be dead by 2011, but the jihadi revolution that he sought to spark would have started and would have spread out, I think he would have taken that. I think he would have said that's what this was all about. And, you know, that's my mission. And unfortunately, he succeeded. And so now, now the issue is for the U.S. government, as it seeks to disentangle itself from the 9-11 wars

and from all this other stuff, is that jihadi revolution is still raging across a number of countries. And what does that mean for a security interest going forward and our allies and everything else? And I think that's where we get into a lot of poisonous now rhetoric, domestic land and stuff. Big picture.

And I want you to be able to define some of the terms that I'm going to ask about here, but are we safer than we were on September 10th? 2001? Are we safer than we were on, you know, eight years ago and four years ago? That's tough to answer. And actually, you just hit on a major question, actually, Sarah, which is, so I mentioned this op-ed in the Washington Post from Christopher Miller, the new director of the National Counterterrorism Center. And he said that Al-Qaeda is incapable of waging a large-scale attack now. What I would say about that is, it means a large-scale attack in the West. They can certainly wage a large-scale attack in Syria or Somali or Afghanistan. or Pakistan or Mali, they do that all the time, right? So, you know, they're waging large-scale attacks in all these other countries.

The question is, can they wage a large-scale attack in America or somewhere in Europe? I'm not as confident in his assessment as he is. So the issue is, again, if you understand their thinking in the world, when's the last time that al-Qaeda took a big shot at us, right? It's been years, right? They had a small attack in Pensacola, and Naval Air Station, Pensacola last year, where a Saudi lieutenant who was acting as a sleeper agent for al-Qaeda actually infiltrated the airbase as part of a Saudi joint training program with the U.S. military, killed three U.S. service

members and wounded several others. Now, this guy, Maham al-Shimrani, you know, this was a very small-scale attack. You could say it's limited casualties, but why didn't he try and go to a mall and shoot up a bunch of people in a wall? Why didn't he try and do something bigger? You know, why didn't they use, have other guys involved? And I think part of the answer is they wanted to send a message, you know, sort of a message and extract U.S. military blood on American soil. Now, the question is, there are a lot of people like Miller at National County Terrorism Center would say, well, they did that because they couldn't do something bigger. I mean, maybe, maybe our defenses are so good that they couldn't do something bigger,

or maybe they've made a decision that they're not even trying to do something bigger right now because, you know, they're invested in all these fights around the world and they're basically, you know, waiting for some other things to shake out. I don't know the answer for sure, to be honest with you. And I don't think Miller does either. I don't think OD&I, the Office of director international intelligence knows the answer for sure either. All I can say to you is that as I look at around the world, al-Qaeda and ISIS are carrying out a large amount of violence on a day-to-day basis. It sort of drifted a lot from the American consciousness because they're not attacking regularly in downtown New York or Washington right now and they haven't done a big attack like that

since 9-11. But they're carrying out an awful lot of violence elsewhere. And what does it mean to them? I mean, how easy it would be them to say take five guys from Somalia and repurpose them for an attack inside the U.S. if they could get them into the U.S. you know or do that from somewhere else i mean so it's it's a long winded way of answering your question that basically i would say our defenses have absolutely gotten better but i'm still worried that new holes are emerging our defenses and i think you have to look at our our adversaries as more strategic minded than a lot people do that you know basically once you understand that attacking us wasn't their end-all be-all and that they had other things going on and that there's a

calculation that they're making on that stuff you maybe won't be so confident that they can't do something more going forward. Are we still vulnerable? I mean, let's let's think about where we are right now. We don't talk about al-Qaeda much to the extent that we talk about jihadism at all. It's a one-off line in a speech. Or it's now it's all derided as part of the endless wars, which makes it sound like America's the only thing it's keeping these conflicts going, and it's all America's fault that this is going on in first place, you know? Well, and you have, you have President Trump making an argument that he's going to end the endless wars. He announced the other day, his administration announced the other day

that we were reducing our remaining troops in Iraq by not quite half, I think, from $5,200 to $3,000. He made repeated promises that American troops will continue to be withdrawn from Afghanistan with an April 20-21 end date for a full withdrawal. You have peace negotiations taking place this coming weekend in Afghanistan with Taliban representatives and representatives of the Afghan government with Mike Pompeo flying to Doha, Qatar to participate or help guide those potentially. Is this all over? I mean, you'd be forgiven for thinking that this is all over and that the threat to us

is really gone. And I think people can make a reasonable case that that's the reality now. So why do we need to care about this anymore? Well, that's all, all that is premised on sort of the perceptions of Trump and Pompeo and these people who want to get America out of the endless wars, right, the rhetoric. and it's all based on that framing of things. And what we always say is, okay, that's your framing of things, but the enemy gets a vote. So, you know, you want to say, you know, you want to say the U.S. is getting out of Afghanistan,

well, somebody just tried to kill the vice president of Afghanistan right on the eve of these so-called peace talks. Who is that? Right, who is that? Right, who is that? Probably the Taliban, probably the Kani Network. You know, there. Let me jump in. This is what the president and his defenders would say.

Look, that's horrible. We would rather not have leaders of other nations. particularly if their allies are nominal allies of the United States being targeted, why is that our business? That's not our business anymore. It's 20 years after the 9-11 attacks. Why do we care? We don't care. I mean, all I can say to that is go ahead and test the theory, right? I mean, we tested that with ISIS. You know, Obama tested that in 2011, 2011, all American forces would have Iraq. The theory was that al-Qaeda in Iraq, the predator of ISIS was just a local force, a local mafia that didn't pose international threat. That was the theory, right? Go for it.

test it again you know let's see you know i mean i know where my bet is you know i know what my bet is and where this is all going you know i know that you know for everybody wanting to declare this end and over i know that i think we're on the we're on the cusp another bump in jihadism globally and this is going to this is going to get another surge from this i look i was what i say about trump and all this and you've heard me say this step and this is i think a little hard for people understand i can't in good conscience advocate an ongoing you know effort in afghanistan because i think there have been multiple failures of leadership there both military leadership and political leadership. And so I think it's a mess. And I don't think there's been any real critical sort of

thinking on this or clear-eyed thinking on Afghanistan a long time. So people read some of my columns at the dispatch and elsewhere, and I think, oh, you just want to keep us in Afghanistan. If you actually listen to what I say, that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is, we've failed here. And you can get out. The difference is, what I'm saying is, you can get out, right? I think that's going to have a cost. I want to be clear. I know what that cost is. And the cost is because al-Qaeda is still very much alive and al-Qaeda is still very much allied with the Taliban. And this is where I draw a sharp disagreement with Trump and Pompeo. I think it's fine for Trump to say he doesn't trust the generals and they don't know what they're doing. And he uses words I wouldn't use and he says it in ways I

wouldn't say it. He's nasty in some of his language for sure. I just debunked some of what he said about the Pentagon in my most recent newsletter. But his criticism, I don't think he's wrong in his criticism. I mean, the generals have had a rose-colored glasses on when it comes to Afghanistan for a long time. Listen, I help run a website called Long Word Journal where every time we would point out that the military's assessments don't add up to what they claim they add up to. Like, you know, more territory was falling in the jihadists than they wanted to say or, you know, they're launching more tax than they wanted to say. They would suppress the data. They would then withhold the data. So I've been dealing with DOD's sort of incompetence on this stuff for a long time, I would say. So I would say Trump's

criticisms are very well placed in some ways, even if I don't agree with how he does it. But that doesn't mean you endorse the Taliban as your counterterrorism partner as you leave. It doesn't mean you claim that the terrorism issue is solved. If you really only care about American interests in protecting Americans and you don't really care about any of these countries, you don't really care of anything else, that you should understand that Taliban is still very closely allied with al-Qaeda in the state. That's not just me saying that. I mean, the Defense Department, just Inspector General's office, just came out with the report in August. And this is the Defense Department, which is signed on for the State Department's so-called peace talks and

withdrawal deal and everything else. And their Inspector General's office says, yeah, you know, our sources, U.S. officials in the U.N. say al-Qaeda and the Taliban are fighting on a day-to-day basis side-by-side against the Afghan government. They're working to overthrow the Afghan government. Right. Because in al-Qaeda's world, resurrecting the Islamic Emirates and the Taliban's machine is a big win for them. Big win. And so just to wrap this up, you know, the thing I, the thing I object to is, you could say the U.S. military effort is adrift. We've been there 19 years. We don't know where we're doing and I want to get out. I can understand that. I can't understand saying, hey, I'm going to endorse the Taliban on the way out the door. I can't understand

that because that's not rooted in any fact. I want to change the subject to some breaking news we've had this morning. You know, last week we saw the diplomatic accord between Israel and the UAE brokered by President Trump. This morning, they've announced that Bahrain is expected to normalize relations with Israel this morning. Both, how big a deal is this as, you know, the conservative media is, you know, heralding, this is a very big step for President Trump. There's discussion of him winning a Nobel Peace Prize over it. Is this the Middle East peace deal? Right. Is this the end of what has been going on for 60 years with Israel and Palestine and is just coming from a very different angle?

Well, I would say, look, I think President Trump and Secretary of State Pompeo deserve some credit here for sure. I don't want to knock them down right off the get-go. I think there's some credit for what's going on in some of these deals and taking place. And their vision of the Middle East was very different from the Obama administration's vision. They saw that there was something to be made of the fact that all these parties were opposed to Iran's aggression and growing influence and that they could sort of stitch together sort of new sort of partnerships or even alliances based on that common threat and take advantage of that.

And I think they did. I think they have had some success in that regard. I think these are sort of the tectonic plates behind this were moving before the Trump administration. if you know what was going on. This wasn't something that just came out of the blue, that basically Israel was already brokering sort of behind closed doors and sort of opening itself up to try and get these relationships moving well before President Trump came into office.

But, you know, you can make an argument that if you had a President Obama was still in office, for example, and was sort of focused on, you know, his vision of Iran as not necessarily our enemy and, you know, dayton and that sort of thing, that that vision would have gotten the way of this. That's plausible. It's a plausible counterfactual.

you can't guarantee it um but you know look i think it's i think it's a big deal i mean you want to see more of this you want to see you know i mean there's there's rumblings even other countries maybe come to the table but i think listen here's the here's the bottom line for me um people have tried to make israel the center of the middle east problems right the center of the basically the israel-palistine conflict is sort of central to everything else that is just not true i mean you you just look throughout the region and that's just not true and and if you start from that premise that this is the central thing that's driving violence in the Middle East or driving jihadism or driving any of this stuff. It's just saying true. You know, I mean, we, you know, we started off talking

about al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda likes to throw a rhetorical sort of flourish about Israel and Palestinian issues constantly. And Osama bin Laden used to like that, but they've done absolutely nothing when it comes to the Israeli issue in terms of operations or anything else. So it becomes a talking point that people use to justify their own sort of stuff and their own worldview. So, well, I think it's a great thing that this has happened. I think the term administration deserves some credit for it. I think it was also underway beforehand. And I would just say that the Israeli-Palestinian issue, which is sort of also part of this, but not the whole thing, is not as central to Middle Eastern affairs as people that made out there. Yeah, we had a good, we had a really good

piece from Tom's colleague, Jonathan Schanzer, on our, on the dispatch website the other day as part of our Biden agenda series where we're looking at specific issues under a prospective Biden administration. And Jonathan made the case, sort of similar, lines up similar to what Tom said, which was, you know, previous administrations had looked at everything through the prism of Israeli-Palestinian peace. And the strength of what the Trump administration has done here is not be bound by that, to be more creative.

I think Tom is right that this was. John's a smart guy and read his peace, so I feel good. I feel vindicated out of that. Yeah, I feel vindicated now. Yeah, very smart. I mean, you know, he calls it the inside out and the outside in approach. And in effect, what he said was, you know, administration after administration after administration bought the kind of hardened, I would say, brittle foreign policy conventional wisdom that everything was about Israel-Palestinian accord to Israel-Palestinian peace. And until unless you address that, none of this other stuff was possible.

And you did have people, I would say mostly on the innovative foreign policy right, saying, no, no, no, that's not the case. There are many different ways that we can get at that. Some of them have found jobs in the Trump administration have been making this case internally. And it happens to coincide, A, with what Israel wanted to do under Benjamin Netanyahu, and B, a compliment to the policy of isolating Iran. So this, this, I think, was a smart sort of, I don't even know what the proper analogy would be. The Trump administration was smart not to try to redirect these discussions back into the old paradigm and kind of a paradigm and kind of embrace what we've seen. How far will it go?

It's hard to know, but I do think they deserve credit for not, you know, going along with the foreign policy conventional wisdom on this and being willing to be open and innovate. Steve, I'm curious what you think are the percentage chances that Trump gets the Nobel Prize. Slim, I would say slim. Should he? Maybe anybody can look. I mean, honestly, I'm not an expert on how the Nobel Prize Committee

makes its determinations. And certainly I think there are lots of other ways in which he has disrupted peace rather than advanced. piece. I do think in a narrow way he deserves credit for this. I don't think, you know, none of the accounts of how this came about had Donald Trump rolling up his sleeves and really getting into the nitty gritty. But that's not necessarily the job of the president. Nobody was more involved in the details of this than, you know, Jimmy Carter was. He wanted to do this decades ago. And Donald Trump is not a details guy. He didn't want to do this. But I do think, look,

the Palestinian authority, I mean, the Palestinians broadly, we had seen kind of growing and unavoidable corruption. And the United States, in trying to forge these peace deals, had to make all of these accommodations again and again and again for corrupt Palestinians. And then you had further, sort of deeper schisms between the various factions among Palestinians that we tried to navigate. and none of it worked, none of it worked. It always went, went backwards. I do think he deserves credit for, again, not being stuck in that old paradigm. Remember, people were sort of doing the Chicken Little Act on moving the embassy to Jerusalem under Donald Trump.

You can't do any of that. You can't do that. People will, the streets will be aflame and whatnot, and none of it happened. And I think that's, again, Donald Trump is sort of stubborn. He can be dogmatic. He's not going to be sort of bullied by people who are making those claims. I don't think that the success that we've seen comes from his deep and long thought about how to advance peace in the Middle East.

But that doesn't take away from the fact that I think these are very positive developments. If I were voting to give him the Nobel Peace Prize and I were looking at the broad landscape and, you know, taking into account where we are elsewhere in the world, thinking of North Korea, thinking of Russia, thinking of, no, he would not get my vote for the Nobel Peace Prize. But I think on this narrow issue, he and his administration deserve credit. Tom, any additional thoughts on the Nobel? You know, I don't put much stock in the Nobel one way or the other. I, you know, I, if you heard me through the years, I have a very dim view of Western elite.

you know, it's just sort of another example that. I would say that if President Trump were lefty, if he were a Democrat and not Republican and had sort of the left wing sort of establishment behind him, then his chance to gain a Nobel Prize would probably be pretty high. Well, Barack Obama got a number of political from being Barack. Rhetoric. We've got Barack Obama got it for rhetoric. Yeah. I mean, basically, you know, I mean, so yeah, I mean, I think that's, that's essentially what, what you would see here. And that's actually that, that's sort of, you know, that's part of what's driving Trumpism, my view, was sort of reaction to sort of all. all that sort of, you know, establishmentarianism, which I agree with some of that rejection of it,

by the way. All right. Last topic, election security. We're, you know, roughly 50 days out from the election. Mail ballots have already gone out in North Carolina. What are the biggest threats? What are the fakesest threats, if you will, Tom? For interference-wise, obviously.

Yeah, I don't know. I think, you know, I've heard something similar to I think Steve has heard about this. that some of the actors that are out there could potentially do more to disrupt our elections. And it's basically a choice of whether or not they will or not, in particular, the Chinese Communist Party. I think the Russians could do more to harm us than they have. I'm a little skeptical, probably more skeptical than a lot of people about the efficacy of what Russia's done. You know, I try and think in terms of not because I have any precinctly bias one way or another on, I don't really care what the answer is.

But I think that, you know, you look at the sort of breathless coverage on Russia, Russia, Russia, over the last several years. And it's been so much overreporting on this that it sort of makes me skeptical now. Anytime I hear it brought up like, well, it doesn't mean that there isn't a story there. I think there is a story there. But I want to hear specifically what in particular Russia is accused of doing. And then what's the chain of evidence to showing an impact that something actually came about from it? Because I think that those steps are oftentimes sort of overlooked. You know, like I did a piece in a newsletter. I was just very narrowly looking at these websites that were brought up in a State Department report on Russian disinformation.

And basically, my conclusion was, look, I think that the stuff that was cited in that report, which wasn't specific to the election, which was just sort of in general, disinformation online, I think that basically those websites catered to cranks and conspiracy theorists that are going to exist whether or not Russia is sponsoring their websites or not. How effective is that stuff in terms of tilting American opinion? I find it dubious to say it's having a big impact. I don't think the New York Times is running an aisle of a truth or story on the front page tomorrow and a lot of that stuff is 9-11 truth orism. But does that mean that

it's not having zero impact? No, I wouldn't say it's not having any impact. That's just one example. Like overall, you know, I don't think, I think the media is so sort of focused on now anything that comes from the Russian sphere that there'll be more criticism and skepticism of anything that even has a even has a mild Russian taint to it now that it won't make much of impact in the mainstream media. There's probably more reporting about how bad it is that Russia try to do this, then Russia actually getting away with something. But I think to tie up this long-winded answer, I think there probably is more that China and other actors can do, maybe even Russia in terms of technology and other things going forward here in the remaining weeks

and the question is, well, not they choose to do so. I don't know if that's right with what you hear we heard, Steve. I think some similar, right? Yeah, two big developments overnight. I mean, I think. And pretty significant. One, the Treasury designated. mandre dirketch as a Russian agent. This is somebody who was working with Rudy Giuliani to distribute, disseminate, expand. So disinformation about Ukraine and particularly Hunter and Joe Biden, the guy is a bullshit artist and Giuliani and others were amplifying his claims hoping to have them catch on in the U.S. media. And by the way, by the way, I am the, I was a senior counterterrorism

advisors of Mayor Giuliani in the 2008 presidential campaign, and I disclaim all this. So I have absolutely zero due with any of this. I've zero due with him since 2008. So, but yeah, exactly. It's a great, I mean, it's a great irony given, I think the incredible leadership he showed on 9-11, 19 years ago, today and in the days and weeks that followed and what sort of an unhinged conspiracy mongery he's

become since then. I think that's a significant designation. You had senior Trump administration officials commending Treasury. Steve Mnuchin, Treasury Secretary, went out and made a statement about how important this was. There were other designations as well. The Mike Pompeo, Secretary of State, talked about how significant it was. that Terkatch was designated and that his attempts to medal were thwarted or publicly acknowledged. And I think you sort of can't put too fine a point on this. This guy, the designation said he has been, in effect, a Russian asset for the past decade. So what Treasury is saying is while Rudy Giuliani is meeting with this guy, and doing so openly, by the way,

they're photographed together. He's talking about Rudy Giuliani. He's tweeting about all the good information. He learned, what have you. He was doing this with somebody who Treasury is saying was a Russian asset. That's a significant development in my mind. The second significant... It doesn't take much connecting of the dots there, right?

Like you say, it's right on your face. It's right on your face, yeah, exactly. Yeah, I agree with that. The second significant development, I think, really, to China, you had Microsoft come out with a statement about what they've seen from foreign actors attempting to infiltrate the accounts of a variety of institutions and individuals here in the United States connected to our politics, think tanks and state-based organizations, senior leaders, government officials, campaign officials, what have you. And the headline, the New York Times

today focused on the Russia attempts to meddle there. I think the more significant story in this one is China. And Tom is right. I mean, the way that this has been described to me in the past is China has capabilities that far outstrip what Russia can do. Russia has been much more willing to be aggressive about it. Russia doesn't really shy away from the fact that it's meddling or attempting to meddle and it likes to be seen as someone giving the United States fits. China would much prefer to do this in the dark and not be called on it, not have fingerprints, not be obvious, avoid attribution, particularly from the U.S. If I can add one just to further distinction there, I think the way I understand it,

and maybe this is only a partial understand, Russia is willing to basically meddle in terms of spreading disinformation, misinformation, misinformation, having bad actors sort of whisper in people's ears, that kind of thing, and do some meddling online with social media and that sort of thing, but seems to not, have drawn a line, not gone for sort of a direct attack on the election system, like electronics, voting machines, that sort of thing. I'm not sure the same can be said with the Chinese in terms of capacity and capability. I think they have the capability, I'm not saying they made a decision to it, but they have the capability of more directly interfering in the election in a way that really screws things up.

I mean, can you imagine, and again, I'm not saying they made the decision, but can you imagine in a closely, close contest where all of a sudden, the machine, like the computers and accounting boats in Florida, let's say, or somewhere where the election may be close, are all screwy and they're misreporting stuff and they're all over the place and there's real big-time hacking going on. I mean, that would send us this country into a tailspin, you know? I can't imagine that. Yes, well, I do that. You do, but you may remember, you may remember something along the lines of history along those lines, you know. But the difference is that was a little bit of incompetence, really, in terms

of how to count votes where this would be more a direct, you know, direct. The other interesting development as it relates to China. And I think the New York Times, there's just tremendous respect for David Sanger's work on cyber attacks, cyber as a weapon generally. I think he's done good, good work. I think I mentioned on this podcast a couple weeks ago that I was reading his very scary book, the perfect weapon. I highly recommend it. He wrote a piece overnight for the New York Times that described some of this. And what Microsoft reported is in tension with what we had gotten publicly in our public discussion about what the three main actors in this space have been doing and why they've been doing it. Remember, there was a briefing on August 7th from William Evanina,

who's the lead on this for the U.S. government. And he said, in effect, it's Iran, Russia, China, who are attempting to mess with us. And basically, Russia would like to see Donald Trump reelected in Iran, and China would like to see Joe Biden reelected. And their attempts to meddle roughly follow those objectives. Interestingly, what Microsoft saw, I didn't know, look, I don't.

I don't, I was, I didn't buy that analysis initially. And the people I talked to right away about it, I asked them. I said, why is it that China would so prefer to have Joe Biden elected to serve as the next president? When I think China's made some pretty great headway. And if you look at some, from a geopolitical perspective, where the United States is, the instability that we're seeing, the challenges that we're seeing the dissolving alliances that we're seeing, wouldn't there be a case that China would rather see Donald Trump for another four years if they thought that they could continue some of these worrying trends? And the answer I got back was China wants the United States to be weaker.

They don't want something to happen quickly. They don't want something to happen overnight. They need to preserve the United States as a market. If there's too much instability, that that would be bad for China. I guess I never entirely bought that, and I've had several back and forth with people who are a lot smarter about this than I am. What's interesting in what Microsoft is reporting is that China was actually attempting

to mess with Biden-related officials, Biden campaign people, and there was only one former Trump administration official who Microsoft could trace coming, being attacked or being harassed by the Chinese. The way that the New York Times wrote the story was the Trump administration has been amplifying the case that, you know, China wants Joe Biden reelected, Iran wants Joe Biden reelected, and they sort of don't talk about Russia. And certainly it's the case that the Trump administration has done that. They have blown that up. They've tried to

make it a campaign issue. But the origin of that reporting, I think it's important to make out, and this is a, I think it's just an important distinction, was with the U.S. intelligence community. So this is not the Trump administration making up out of a whole cloth that China wanted Joe Biden to win. Now, as I say, they've hyped that, they've amplified it, they've tried to make a campaign issue about it. But this was the assessment from the U.S. intelligence. community that the Chinese seemed to prefer Biden. So it's not something that you can say the Trump administration has just invented out of whole cloth. I think it'll be very interesting to follow that. These are very early reports. There's a lot more we need to learn. But I think it'll be

very interesting to see exactly what China is doing. Do they have a preference? Are they just trying to sow discord? And I think most disturbingly, if China has the the capabilities that our intelligence community believes that China has, which is to say could blow up our elections. Do they use it? And I think Tom is right to imagine an incredibly, incredibly scary scenario in which they're in our electoral systems. There's a lot that they can do short of that.

There's a lot that they can do short of that probably without attribution. There's a lot that the Chinese could do short of that without attribution. attribution back to China and potentially posing as other actors. So China makes it look like Russia is doing these things to further confuse the situation. And there's a lot to be concerned about over the next two months. On that, unfortunately not very cheerful note. Last question. So Steve, I am closer to the Kennedy assassination than my son will be to 9-11. And you have kids that range from just above his age, all the way up to teenagers. Do you talk to them today and have you talked to them in the past?

What do you say? How do you explain something that they didn't live through? Yeah, that's a good question. We do talk about it. I haven't yet today because they jumped on their virtual school right away this morning. We've talked about it in the past. And, you know, I think with younger kids, you have to, you can't really get into the nuances, right? You say, basically, there are good guys and bad guys here.

We're the good guys and this bad guy that are trying to kill us. And while that's not a very nuanced view of this thing, as it relates to the United States and al-Qaeda, it's also a very accurate thing. And as they've gotten older, we've talked more about it. I've done a fair amount of reporting on these issues, so they'll hear me. on the phone with Tom, you know, going through a list of unpronounceable names, and they'll ask me sort of, who, what were you talking about? Who are all those people? Is there any piece of journalism that you point to or a video that you've had them watch?

I mean, there's the, maybe to me the most famous. I don't know if it's nationally the most famous. The falling man piece. Yes. All about that picture of the man falling. The town of the piece. Yeah, it was an incredible piece. It's incredible piece of journalism.

It's an interesting entry to remember the day because it's on the one hand such a small moment and such a big moment. It's so, it's such a poignant photograph. It's so heavy. We linked in today's morning dispatch to a four-minute video interviewing the photographer who took that piece, Richard Drew, and he calls it a very quiet photograph. And that, just listening to him talk about it, it's just sort of leapt out at me. That's exactly what it is. In the chaos of that day, as you're watching, you know, cars blown up and buildings come down, everything that we saw, that is a very quiet photograph of a very quiet moment. But as Drew says in this video, it's one of the only times you saw somebody dying. captured dying. And it's a heavy thing to share with kids. I haven't shared that with them or

talked to them about it. But I think, you know, when you get kids who are in their in their upper teens, it's worth wrestling with those issues. And that's probably as good a way to get into it as any. And the Tom Juneau piece is really incredible reporting. I always read Ari Fleischer's tweets from today he you know on the minute that everything happened will tweet what was happening um for them and it's um you start to relive it you don't at first each year i don't and then by the time we get to about now and reading those tweets and seeing all the stories i start to have an emotional memory not just a you know mental memory it is amazing i've seen people um as they've talked about this and reflected on what they experienced say that, you know, there's a certain point,

just as you're saying, Sarah, where it becomes real all over again for you. It's no longer just this distant, you know, memory, like the Kennedy assassination. It is, I get to a certain point. I can remember exactly where I was when the first tower fell. And what's crazy is I usually I'm pretty quick to think of the implications of big moments. I think it took me a beat to figure out like, oh, my God, that means the thousands of people or hundreds of people just died. I didn't get it right away.

And then we were at the Weekly Standard Offices, and we were watching this together as a group, and I watched it happen. And people were, you know, everybody would sort of have their heads. and their hands and oh my gosh. And I went back in my office. I think it took two full minutes. And then it just, you know, then it hits you like a two by four in the face.

Like, holy cow. That's what I just watched. That is absolutely, you know, incredible. And we had, you know, the weekly standard offices were sort of a buzz that day because we had some of the people who were at the White House who, you know, immediately began working on President Bush's speech. What do you say in a moment like this? I mean, Ari was traveling with the president chronicle that, but you have other people who were immediately working on how the president should think about this, what the president should say about this.

And some of them came to our offices. They didn't have anywhere to work. I think they started out at the Chamber of Commerce and then maybe went to the American Enterprise Institute. Some of them ended up at the weekly standard. And they just sat in an office and started, you know, kept observing and started writing. And pretty soon downtown, you know, emptied out. You were walking around downtown Washington, D.C., and people were either sort of panicked and trying to get out of downtown B.C. And we had people driving up on curbs to get around the traffic.

And it was, you know, there was this obvious moment of panic. But by late afternoon, early evening, it was people were in almost, they were walking around like they were almost in a train. Nobody could quite process the enormity of what was happening. And that is an enduring memory. I mean, that is, as you say, I think that's a lot of people experience it like you just described, Sarah, where, you know, you're sort of intellectually aware of it and you think about it in terms of its impact on the course of the nation and how people reacted and what's happened since, the stuff that we've been talking about, you know, for the first 45 minutes here. But then as you pay attention as this day proceeds, you do live it again. and it's it's jarring one of the conversations online today and it's been going on for the last several months and it's bothered me but not it's bothered me because it's become this like

culture war thing about comparing deaths of 9-11 to COVID yeah I just don't want any part of that conversation no no but but what I do think will be interesting as I mentioned like for me 9-11 and heading to college, it was a, I think for that generational age, it was just incredibly impactful. And I do think for these kids, you know, I teach college and when they sent them all home, I told them. I was like, you know, I was your age when 9-11 happened. There's going to be similarities. There's going to be a ton of differences to how this affects your generation. But this will be generation defining, I think, for them. And I'm fascinated. to see what that will mean for their generation. Your oldest, I think, will be part of that

generation. Yeah, yeah, no question about it. I mean, it's interesting. We really haven't forced these conversations. We've made a point to talk about them because, you know, they talk about these things at school. I think it's important that they begin to appreciate, you know, the world around them and just how big the world is. You don't, on the one hand, want to kind of shatter the innocence of younger kids. On the other hand, they've got to figure these things out at one time or another. And we lived overseas in Europe for a year. So I think our kids are kind of particularly aware of how big the world is and all that

it has to offer, but also I think it's important to let them know that not everybody loves us, which is a hard lesson to teach. All right, Tom, thank you so much for joining us today and for remembering this day with us and where we have been, where we have come, where we are now. Yeah, I'll leave you with, if I can say one quick thing on your way out. Of course. So I have a 10 and 8-year-old daughters, and they sometimes stumble upon me looking at Al-Qaeda's websites, you know, in my home office, whatever else, because I monitor about 200 to 300 Al-Qaeda

ISIS channels and websites every day. and what I tell them they've been they've gotten exposed to 9-11 at school and I I don't actually like the version of what they've been taught but I I give them some pointers about it I say you know a lot of what people will talk about is how bad 9-11 was was all these years ago all these people were killed what I explained to them is and they get it right away is that what you need to understand is that well yeah that happened on 9-11 al-Qaeda kills people every day around the globe every day so does ISIS so does ISIS and a lot of people the daddy deals with assumes that they can't kill Americans in America anymore.

And I would say, I don't make that assumption. How does a 10- and 8-year-old, what are you think they're absorbing from that? They're pretty tough little girls. They get it. I mean, they bring the questions to me. So they want to know, like this morning, my 10-year-old got up and she said, today's 9-11, I got an idea, Daddy, what if the FBI, you know, she knows I talked to the FBI and, you know, I've done some teaching some counterterrorism classes with the FBI in the past.

and she said what if the FBI put somebody on every plane so if the bad guys come on the plane then the FBI has a guy there my wife quickly said well actually you know after pretty close at air marshals they did that and you're like it's a great idea you know and so they they like to come up with different ideas and the little one eight my eight year old who I who I think has the potential to become the tyrant who takes over the American Republic after it falls and turns it into her own little empire the little empress she uh she's uh she has has her own has her own creative ideas for dispatching with the bad guys that she comes up with, some of which are a little shocking here come out of a little eight-year-old girl's mouth. But one of the, one of the tamer ones

was she said, well, why don't you or have somebody be a double agent, you know, basically be a spy, pretend to be one of the bad guys and learn what they're doing, and then, you know, you can find out and then you can tell the good guys. I said, well, we had a couple people like that, the U.S. and I've had a few people like that. It's a good idea, too. She goes, well, why aren't we doing that right now? It's like, well, we probably, you know, there probably are some countries that are doing that right now. She goes, well, how many of them are there? we don't know. If they wouldn't be good spies,

but if we know who they are, she goes, good point, good point. Good point. So it sounds like she's ready to watch the Americans and we'll just get her trained up on our side. It sounds like it's important to keep her on our side.

Yeah, I think she could have imperialistic ambitions if no parents didn't attend to her sort of emotions, you know, so. Good thing has you. All right, listeners. Thank you for joining us.

We will see you again. next week. You know, Oh,