The Dispatch Podcast - Ben Sasse on Afghanistan and Reflections on September 11
Episode Date: September 10, 2021In today's episode, Sarah and Steve talk with Sen. Ben Sasse about the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan and what to do next. For a longer summary of the interview, check out an article on The Dispa...tch website. Plus, Steve talks with Peter Wehner who was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush on September 11, 2001. They share reflections on that day at the White House and the last 20 years. Show Notes: -“The Vanishing American Adult” by Ben Sasse -“Them” by Ben Sasse -Peter Wehner at The Atlantic -Peter Wehner at The New York Times -“The Death of Politics” by Peter Wehner Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isgird, joined by Steve Hayes. And this week, we have a special episode for you. First, we are talking to Republican Senator from Nebraska, Ben Sasse, about his views on the future of Afghanistan, the Biden administration's handling of it. And in case you've never heard from Ben Sass before, he's a thinker. So I've got some questions, some bigger picture questions for him as well at the end.
And then Steve will have a special conversation with Peter Wainer.
He was a speechwriter during the Reagan administration, the H.W. Bush administration,
and the speechwriter for George W. Bush on September 11th.
Steve is going to talk to him about what that day was like inside the White House.
Let's dive right in. Senator, we are thrilled to have you on this podcast.
Let's start with Afghanistan at this moment. Looking forward, not what they could have done differently,
you know, yesterday, two weeks ago, six months ago. Moving, starting today, what do you think the Biden administration should do?
Well, I mean, there's kind of no way for them to build a forward-looking plan without explaining what they thought.
their plan was in the past because obviously in a world where the U.S. is not the world's beat
cop, but we sure as heck have been the world's detective, and that's been good for the world,
and that's been good for us. And if you want to even be a little more real politic about it,
economically, we're 4% of global population, and between 22 and 24% of global GDP,
the U.S. has benefited from an international system.
And it's really difficult to imagine any bigger, stupid move
to shoot yourself in the foot as a global leader
and demonstrates everybody you don't want to be a superpower
than what team Biden has done.
And so I think their claim is they were doing this, you know,
bumper sticker BS nonsense, the same as the last administration,
talking about Forever Wars, which is not what was actually happening there.
But they were claiming the best concerns,
you could put on it is this was to enable a pivot to Asia and to the long-term technology
and diplomatic race we face with the Chinese Communist Party, but it's clear that they've
radically weakened the U.S. and strengthened China by their move in Afghanistan. So if you want
to think either counterterrorism proper, if you want to think about the long-term existential threat
we face with the Chinese Communist Party over the next decade or so, or if you want to think
even slightly more theoretically about what the U.S. role in the world is, all of those
require the administration to offer an accounting for the just stupid, stupid set of moves they've
made in Afghanistan. And that's before you even get to the human angst and pain of our allies
and of all the Americans who've been left behind. So there's a lot that I would like to hear
us talking about as a nation about what American foreign policy and security strategy look like
over the next decade. But I can't speak to the Biden administration.
until they own some of, I mean, I'm never going to be able to see for the Biden administration,
but I mean, I can't hypothesize about what they should do from here until they offer some
accounting of what they thought they were doing, because this is like reverse gymnastics
scoring. At degree of difficulty and at level of execution, they're like zero times zero.
Does your political party have a position on Afghan refugees? I feel like it is a little all over
the place.
Well, first of all, we don't really have political parties in America.
All we have right now is, you know,
whoever the last guy in either party who won is
and whoever wants to grandstand with performative theater
on cable news and Twitter tonight, right?
So I don't think we really have operative political parties.
So I can speak a little more effectively
for what I think the American tradition is
or what conservatism should reasonably say
or what prudence about keeping your word would mean.
But I definitely can't speak for any coherent position
in the Republican Party. But as for me, it seems pretty clear that a nation that's to be
trusted has to be a nation that's trustworthy, and that means you keep your commitment. And there are
lots and lots of folks in Afghanistan who've been left behind. We should also obviously talk
about the Americans who've been left behind, but your question was about the refugees. And so there
are a lot of people and their families who've been left behind to whom we made very precise particular
the promises. And the promise was something like this. If you drive for U.S. troops and diplomats
in harm's way, if you're a translator for us in a battlefield situation, if you've been in a bunker
with us, know that we would never leave you behind. America made some stupid moves in 1974, 75 in
Saigon, but we would never do anything like that again, because when we give our word to someone
and you risk your life to fight for American's freedom to take the battle over there, so we don't
have to have another 9-11 like attack here, you can be sure that America will stand by its
word. That was the commitment that's been given over four consecutive presidential administrations
and frankly, more significantly than who was at the top of Article 2 during those times.
It was, who were our troops over the course of the last 19 and a half years as we held a whole
bunch of terrorist attacks at bay? Who were the troops who were making these kind of pledges?
And those people want to keep their word. I mean, I think the next.
national screaming version of media doesn't really understand how deeply troops believe that
it's essential to have kept our word. I've basically not heard from a single man or woman in
uniform or veteran man or woman in uniform who served in Afghanistan, who think that anything
that we've done in Afghanistan now, the last months, but especially the last weeks, makes any sense.
I mean, all of them think there's a real question about whether or not their sacrifices were in vain,
but also the fact that they themselves made pledges that they thought they were morally binding themselves to a nation
that was, of course, big and firm and resolute. And they don't see that now. And they're angry because they should be angry,
because we gave our word, and now we're not keeping our word. And that's the choice of cowardice and dishonor that President Biden is
chosen for us.
Steve?
Yeah, just to accentuate that point, I think it's hard sometimes for people to appreciate
just what level of a betrayal this is to go back on our promises like this and how long
it is likely to stick with us.
In the lead up to the war in Iraq, the fall of 2002, I went to Dearborn, Michigan, and
interviewed a number of Iraqi expatriates.
and was in the process of interviewing someone who was, I think, in his early mid-20s.
And I asked him about what he remembered from the first Gulf War,
which was when he was a boy of, I don't know, I'm forgetting the exact age seven or eight,
something like that.
And he answered my question by reciting word for word what George H.W. Bush had said
in encouraging the Kurds to rise up.
And then he said, and you left us stranded.
I mean, he recited the entire passage, word for word.
These things don't disappear overnight.
And while, you know, I think you have in the Biden administration an eagerness to kind of shrug
these things off, they're likely to stick around for a long time.
Beyond what happens with the individuals in Afghanistan that we've betrayed, I, I,
I'm interested in your assessment of what this means for our alliances, for our relationships.
And Joe Biden came to office and said he was going to be the one to restore American diplomacy to bring America back.
And it seems to me, we've heard them say this out loud, that not only is that not happening,
they're questioning relationships with the United States.
When we hear that from a prominent British politician or a senior member of the German government,
is that because we're hearing individual politicians making statements based on their own immediate political self-interest in their own political context?
Or are they speaking for a broader set of concerns from our allies?
Oh, definitely the latter.
I mean, it is incredibly broad.
That won't violate the confidence this year because obviously since I said on the intelligence,
committee, it's important that I'm able to consult with lots of people, both in the five
eyes and beyond in terms of who we share intel with and inside the U.S. military.
But I've had both of those kinds of conversations in the last 48 hours.
So a top 10 U.S. General, one of the 10 most powerful people in DoD world, said to me a day
and a half ago, he said it would have been inconceivable to me six months ago that the U.S.
would be at the far left side of NATO.
And he says, out of NATO right now,
there are one or two, maybe three countries,
you could say, are with us or to the left of us.
But in terms of hawkishness,
everyone else in NATO is far, far to the right of us,
and they're disgusted by what we have done.
And they doubt NATO,
I mean, his framing on it was,
they doubt NATO more than in the last administration
where President Trump obviously wasn't a big defender of NATO.
this was something he and I thought about in private many, many times.
But they didn't think that he spoke, their NATO nation, didn't think that President Trump spoke
for the United States as a whole.
And now when these other countries see what the Biden administration has actually done to NATO,
there's a massive crisis of confidence inside the whole organization, both militarily and politically.
And I mean, maybe moving from the generals side to the problem.
politician side. I was in Ukraine a couple days ago, obviously some contra-putin conversations
that a number of we and our allies are having. And I had spoken with a bunch of European defense
and foreign ministers in the context of my trip headed toward Kiev. And I'll just read you
this because I just have it in my phone because I sent it back to my team talking with a
a very senior European official who, you know, American public opinion would assume that a person
with this profile would be way to the dovish side of the United States.
And the senior European official said to me, I only happen to have the quote because I was so,
you know, jaw dropped by it that I typed it up as soon as the meeting ended to send it back
to my team just to store it. He said, quote, most countries around the world are now agreeing
with China that the democracies might be at the end of our history.
Because democracies depend on shared values, and there aren't many shared values.
And it's obvious that in your country, meaning the U.S. specifically, you're not willing to fight for your values.
There's just not enough depth to anything shared.
Afghanistan proves it.
We, and he's meaning his country here, a different NATO country, we have invested a lot in the fight against the Taliban over the last 20 years.
But we're now going to go back to a world where we're going to have a stronger Taliban,
despite the fact that they haven't changed in any way whatsoever.
We democracies are simply not willing to fight against the Taliban
or really to fight for anything.
It sure looks like China might be right that democracies are weak.
It's obviously the case that China is rising across the globe.
Most countries are increasingly thinking they should bet on them,
and they believe, they being China,
they believe that they face only one genuine threat,
and that's their own digital giants.
And so what China will be focused on now is reigning in their digital giants because they recognize that American democracy is being ripped apart both by the companies themselves, he means the tech companies, but also by the habits they produce and the populace.
In our country, we want to resist China, but we now know after American leadership in Afghanistan that we clearly would not be willing to go to war to do it, close quote.
Well, that kind of sums it up.
That touches on so much that you're specifically interested in, the shared value question in particular.
Do you think that Americans have a shared value they would fight for?
Sure, but I don't know how that works its way through our politics right now.
I mean, I think we know that a lot of evening.
cable programming, which isn't really watched by very many people. I think there's such an
important thing for us to underscore. You know, the most watched cable news shows in America over the last
decade kind of bounce around between Hannity and Tucker on the one hand and on MSNBC. It's,
you know, Ben Rachel Matt out more than anything else over the last decade. But we're usually
talking about three and a half million people and two to two and a half million people at whatever
a high water MSNBC show is, which is another way.
it's saying 1.1% and like 7 tenths of 1% of a nation of 330 million people.
But it becomes the feedback loop on the people who work in politics.
So I think we're having a massive crowd out of the middle in terms of attention and
engagement, which is more fundamental than the crowd out of the middle ideologically.
Obviously, I'm on the right end of the political ideological spectrum and by voting record.
And that crowd out, we know well, right?
You can look at Pew and Gallup polling that in the mid-90s, 26-ish percent of Americans thought of themselves as moderates, and they were slightly higher propensity voters than people to the right and left of them. Today, 7 percent of Americans think of themselves as moderates and their lower propensity voters. So that crowd out is obvious, but I don't think that's the most important crowd out. I think the crowd out, the pinch that matters, is the middle brow crowd out. If you've got kind of a Y axis, if X was ideology from, you know, far left, center left.
center, center right, whatever the right is going to be called, that crowd out is on the
x-axis. But on the y-axis, if you've got political engagements, you've got addiction at the top
and kind of healthy middle-brow Eisenhowerian, you know, one share for politics stuff in the middle,
which is what a republic needs to live. And then you've got political disengagement at the
bottom. We've got an evaporation at the middle because of our media consumption habits.
And so only the addicts get served anything in politics. Normal people,
feel like they don't fit here, and so they check out. And so I certainly think there are things
Americans would fight for, but it's not exactly clear what the second and third term cycles and
loops are to get those people any representation in politics, because mostly politics is
performative for the very small share of people, you know, single digit percentage. Sometimes it
bumps up to 12 to 14 percent of Americans paying attention to politics. But in general, what's happening
is performance as substitute community and anger and tribe and religion. And those people are not
going to be a good bellwether for what the general median of the public thinks is worth investing
in. And right now, the Forever Wars BS, the bumper sticker of Forever Wars when we were not in
a Forever War, we haven't had 100,000 troops in Afghanistan for a decade plus. The choice wasn't
zero versus 150,000 troops. It was 8,000 that were successfully decapitating terror organizations
and preventing people who are bin Laden one of these
but don't have Ben Laden's name ID
because they never took down a World Trade Center.
We've been preventing those kind of attacks.
But right now, the Forever War bumper sticker
of the last administration,
and now this administration,
created a feedback loop to the 6% or 8%
of screaming Twitter types
who are not a good bellwether
for how a republic survives.
But do you think that getting beyond
the performative politics
and the people who respond to it, there is a, there would be support among the broader
U.S. populace for a longer term U.S. presence in Afghanistan along the lines of what you
described.
Well, it would have, it would, we would have needed to make the case for it, or we have to, you know,
bounce from curb to curb after the next terrorist attack.
So let's first just say something clear about Afghanistan's future focus, and then maybe
we can fight a little bit.
I don't know that the three of us are going to argue about it, but, um, over the,
the last 19 plus years, how we failed to explain to the American people what we were doing
in Afghanistan. We were stunningly successful in our mission in Afghanistan. We were calamitously
failing in terms of explaining to the American people what we were actually doing. But let's look
the future for just a second. So there are four or five terror groups who are planning to try to
get some territory in what we call Afghanistan, but it's not really a country that goes all the way
the perimeters of its borders the way healthy countries around the world do. We have a bunch
of terror organizations who are going to try to set up safe havens to do al-Qaeda-like 9-11-type
planning for future attacks. Now, there's obviously inside jihadist Islam. There's a divide between
near-enemy and far-enemy theories. And so some of these terror groups are mostly going to want to
hit their near neighbors. They're not going to try to cross the Atlantic Ocean. But there are
terror groups that aspire to kill innocents and to do cataclysmic attacks on behalf of their
caliphate aspirations. And lots of those groups are going to be successful in ways that have not
been undone over the course of the last couple of years. What they've been is sequentially
decapitated. And so we have left Americans in Afghanistan.
We have hostage-like situations developing right now.
We have a new administration rising in Kabul that includes people with seven and eight figure.
I think there's a $10 million bounty on one of them in the Haqani network.
Folks going into the government that have been involved in massive terror plotting in the past,
this is like just deciding to recreate 1998 to 2001.
ungoverned spaces on speed because you inject all this extra weaponry into it.
So I think we are going to be going back in some form into Afghanistan at some point
because we know what these groups aspire to do and we know that we've taken away our capacity
to hurt them and to decapitate them.
The over the horizon nonsense that the administration likes to use or all the crazy
pelagian worldview nonsense about how the Taliban wants to turn over a new leaf so they'll be
respected in a French restaurant somewhere. That nonsense isn't true. President Biden was fond
for a long time of saying, what was his phrase? Bin Laden is dead and GM is alive. Well,
what's actually happening right now is that al-Qaeda is alive and they're using our trucks to
drive around and hunt our allies. That's what's actually happening. The mission isn't over
in Afghanistan. American citizens aren't out. Our Afghan partners aren't out. The Taliban is not going
to root out the type of terror groups that want to plot from there. So we're going to have to
make a case to the American people, hopefully before the next giant terror attack. But after the
terror attack, the public's opinion will definitely be back. So the question is, why didn't we do the
right thing to explain to the American people why a asset-like forward footprint was
the most cost-effective way to defend American interests. I'm both an idealist and a realist on
this stuff, because at the end of the day, there is lots of positive synergy between civil
society that wants to root out some of this stuff and the fact that when we root out this stuff,
lots of humans can then go about living their lives. But I think idealism is American
foreign policy's best realist tool and vice versa, but just at a straight realist argument
for why we were doing what we were doing there. We were incredibly effective at preventing
people like bin Laden from being effective themselves and therefore for becoming a household name.
I'll pull up here, but 8,000 troops is what we add in late 2020 there. And by the way, even after
the last administration on their way out, negotiated to and then actually cut troop levels to 2,500,
it was simply not true what President Biden,
incoming President Biden got away with telling the media over and over again
and they just carry his water that there was no status quo around 2,500.
It is true that 2,500 was a little too few to be able to secure what we needed to secure
and to provide the kind of air cover we needed for our assets operating on the ground,
our intel officers and some of the drone capabilities we needed.
But it was also true that even if the U.S. number were only at 2,500 instead of 8,000,
There were a lot of NATO allies who were willing to flow in that 5,500 delta number of missing troops if the U.S. stayed down at 2,500.
The mission still could have had the same level of support because there was enough NATO willingness to do that until the Biden administration decided to pull the rug out from under those people.
We have 35, 45, 45, and 50,000 troops across South Korea, Japan, and Germany.
Are we today at forever wars in those places?
No, we're actually doing smart frickin' military planning.
That's what the administration decided not to do is have any smart military planning
and instead just cut off our own eyes and ears on the ground where our intelligence agents
were doing great, great work.
Why did we do this?
I mean, this started in the Obama administration with the bin Laden and dead GMs alive.
You had sort of a rewriting of the history of 9-11 and the, you know, the, you know,
decade that followed in the lead-up to Barack Obama's re-election campaign in 2012.
Then you had the Trump administration also, I mean, Barack Obama said, he was letting people
go from Guantanamo who had been assessed by JTF Gitmo, the Joint Task Force in Guantanamo Bay,
as high-risk detainees, some of them now serving at high levels in the new Taliban government
in Afghanistan.
But he was talking down the threat from jihadists.
Donald Trump came in, talked a big game, said he would, you know, bomb the expletive out of ISIS and the bad guys,
but ultimately made nice with the Taliban.
And, you know, eventually we wound up in a confused place where the Secretary of State was suggesting that the Taliban were going to work alongside U.S. troops to kill al-Qaeda, which was delusional.
And now you have the Biden administration saying, as we see Siraj Haqqqani, this Haqani network,
close al-Qaeda ally, senior Taliban official take over the Ministry of Interior in the new Taliban-led
government with a $10 million bounty on his head by the U.S. government. We see the Biden administration
suggesting that the Taliban could still be our new counterterrorism partners, even as they
install leading terrorists at the highest levels of their government. Why have we done this for the past
decade.
So all three of the administrations that you've named have been desperate to deny
human nature and the reality of jihadism, right?
So the truth is that there are people in the world who really do think they're going to
get their 72 virgins for a suicide bombing, and they want to root out people who believe
in freedom or just believe in things different than they do.
There are obviously lots of people in the movement and even some who are at the edge of willing to commit suicide attack for social psychological reasons that I can't fully understand.
I can read and come to some understanding of the theological arguments that some of them have, but there are obviously people who are not very religiously motivated and yet end up with a cause and a purpose as every 16 and 18 and 20-year-old testosterone laden male in the world typically yearns to be a
a part of a tribe and a community and a big quest.
So whether it's theological for many of them or only for some of them and for others that
it's not, it is just reality that there are a lot of people who believe this stuff right
now and in a world with modern air travel and modern telecommunications and modern
weaponry and the ability to travel and acquire some of these armaments, there are going to
be jihadi attacks and attempts on innocent people.
on civil society all over the world for decades.
And you can't just wish it out of existence.
But here's something we ought to say
on behalf of Barack Obama and Donald Trump
that you can't say on behalf of Joe Biden,
which is both of them had these anthropologically naive wishes
to just have it all go away,
but it wasn't gonna go away.
And ultimately reality basically mugged
the last two administrations.
And they listened to some of their advisors.
And so they walked away from doing really, really stupid things.
They both did stupid things.
And some of the people were talking about about the prisoner swap that Team Obama agreed to.
And now those people are back in their cabinet-level officials inside this administration.
There's a lot of blame to go around over the course of the last 13 years.
But both of the last two administration didn't ultimately pull the trigger to do something insanely stupid.
This guy did.
And right now, he won't and his administration won't even give an exact number of the Americans that are left on the ground.
They won't give the number for the green card holders.
They've just, Secretary Blinken, like President Biden, but Secretary Blinken has just lied again and again and again.
And after the last four years where the media thought it was their job to scream every time there was a lie from Article 2,
I don't understand why there isn't some sense of accountability for how often Blinken just
makes crap up. From one press hit to the next press it, to the next press it, to the next press it,
he went from saying there were 300 Americans left to 250 to 200 to 150. None of it was true.
The number was never as low as 300 when they started it. There was no basis for him changing it
every five minutes over the course of a half an hour. They excluded green card holders.
They won't take questions about it. A week and a half has gone by,
they said they were going to have a plan, and now they act surprised that not having any assets
on the ground make it difficult to try to support these Americans. And they keep talking about
things like diplomatic means to get our people back with the bloodthirsty terrorist names you just
mentioned. Aconi is a terrorist wanted by the FBI for a reason. It's because he's never going to
live up to any of his commitments except gutting young girl. That's their commitment. In the regional
provinces over the course of the last three and four weeks. Some of the stories we've gotten back
for those of us who work hard on the Intel side, again, I'm not crossing any line, but just
generically speaking here, this belief that a lot of these Taliban fighters have, that they
have right to any 12-year-old girl or above who's unmarried. She's theirs as a soldier wife.
If they want to take them as part of the harem, there have been cases of some of these Talibani,
you know, front wave warriors coming through a region telling people, you need to put a mark
on the sign over your doorway, letting people know whether there's a 12-year-old or above girl
that they can take as access to. And if you don't notify them that there's a 12-year-old girl
or above that's unmarried that they can take, they might behead you for having failed to volunteer
your little girls up to them. That is who the Taliban is. And the administration goes out
and again and again and again says things,
like we're going to partner with these people
to try to get the Americans out.
They're not serious people.
There are a lot of people inside the Pentagon
who fought really, really hard
and ultimately a bunch of moron political addicts
at the White House decided they could just snuff out
the military advice by saying
the American people don't have any fortitude
and the attention spans will evaporate
and we'll be able to manage the media cycle.
This isn't about 24-hour media cycle.
This is about Americans.
I've been on the phone yesterday with some American missionaries who have some, you know,
SIV and P1, P2 folks who are converts to Christianity, who are going, you know, neighborhood to
house to house and room to room inside some of these larger complexes that they're in,
hiding from their Taliban pursuers.
That's what's actually happening on the ground.
And Secretary Blinken and Jen Taki, it seems like they really,
believe they can just call an emergency press conference to talk about wildfires in California
and Americans won't care. We'll just forget. We'll go back to playing candy crush and getting
drunk. That's this administration's view of the American Republic. That actually does lead to my
last question, which I save for last in the hopes that I, if I insult you and you hang up,
we at least got some good stuff beforehand. So I sort of think of you as,
David Brooks and Robert Putnam had a baby who turned out to be kind of a ugly baby.
A weirdo nerd who was the captain of the football team at Oxford, but keeps Budlight in his fridge and went to the U.S. Senate and now has three children of his own who he's raising and who I'm hoping, I'm assuming, frankly, are probably three like weirdo nerds.
also, and that you're just like, it's the evolutionary branch of the weirdo nerds,
which obviously I would like to raise a weirdo nerd. You've written a book that was the vanishing
American adult, our coming-of-age crisis, and how to rebuild a culture of self-reliance.
So I would like to ask, based on that fabulous book, New York Times bestseller, we'll put
it in the show note so people can see it, do you have advice for raising a 14-month-old son
who can also be a weirdo nerd like you?
you said some generous things there our kids first of all let's just give their first bullet of
their resume and they're wicked centers so we've got a 20 year old daughter 17 year old
daughter and a 10 year old son and they are you know long progeny of Adam so there's a lot
wrong in our parenting philosophy but my wife and I have also you know over the
course of two and a half decades, the marriage, and a couple of years of courtship, you know,
wrestled through ideas about what do you want for your kids? And it seems like one of the most
basic things every American should want for their kids is an understanding of universal human
dignity and the idea that humans are pretty dang fascinating and interesting, despite all
of our sinfulness, the potential for appreciation of truth and beauty and goodness and athletic, you
know, performance, but also repentance and redemption, it's a pretty amazing opportunity to get
to be a human and a nation that doesn't think that coercion and force and power are the center
of life. What the center of life is love and enthusiasm and entrepreneurialism and neighborliness
and friendship and, you know, building a better mousetrap and persuading people to buy it or
to join your Rotary Club, right? So it seems to me that what's at the heart of the American
experiment is the belief that government is just a framework for ordered liberty, freedom
from bad stuff. But most of the really interesting stuff in life happens because of freedom
to the things you pursue. And so I don't have a lot of advice about a 14-month-old. I do remember
what was it, something about sleep and eat versus snack and nap, the baby-wise stuff that my wife
was such as zealid for once upon a time. Sir, you don't sound like you have bags under your eyes.
So it must be working out for you.
But I think the single, I'll pull up here,
but I think the single weirdest thing about the way we're allowing our moment
in economic and technological history to warp us is that we don't do a good job
of reflecting together as a people.
I mean this as 330 million Americans,
but I really mean it in each of our peer groups in our neighborhood.
And I mean mostly people you break bread with,
not mostly people you share social media rage with.
And that is, we do live at the richest moment any time or any place in all of human history,
but we need to disaggregate the consumption implications and the production implications
because we get to consume more than anybody's ever consumed,
but it turns out there's almost no marginal consumption that's going to make the middle-class
American much happier.
Everybody's already got more than enough stuff.
What we don't have is enough purpose, enough productive cause,
enough pulling on ores in common with other people.
And it turns out the Mark Andresen software eats the world hypothesis
that we are really good as smart humans at routinizing repetitive tasks
means the software is eating the world.
And that in particular means it's eliminating productive opportunities for work.
We are going through an experiment where for the first time in all of human history,
the average 40 or 45 or 50-year-old isn't going to be able to just keep doing the same thing they've always done
until death or retirement. We're going to have to keep learning new ways to serve and to become gainfully employed and to do meaningful work
because most jobs are going to be consumed by software. And so I think we're going to have to get a lot better at thinking about what curious adults look like when we're good at lifelong learning. And there's no way you're going to do that primarily with peers when you're 12 or when you're 15 or when you're 17.
So I think Melissa and Melissa is my wife, our aphorism would be to start with huge skepticism of letting your kids be raised by peers and by the online world.
They need to be raised in an intergenerational context with a heck of a lot of work.
So if you're 14-month-old is sleeping right now, you're failing. Get him into the feel.
Wait a second. My 14-month-old would like the freedom, the liberty to jump off the back of the couch right now.
It sounds like Steve, I should probably just send him over to your house.
You're sort of, you know, camp haze over there.
That's intergenerational.
I mean, we've got a lot of kids running around.
They take care of each other.
It works out.
We've got a little compound with my brother and his wife and their kids living close, too.
So it's a fun family, fun family engagement.
Well, thank you, Senator, so much for joining us.
We know you're on the side of the road somewhere in Nebraska, which actually sounds like a beautiful place to be right now.
We're having gorgeous weather over here on the East.
coast. It's pretty gorgeous right here right now. So thanks for having me. Not long ago, I saw someone
go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting
the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and
give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is the consequences of not
having life insurance can be serious. That kind of financial strain on top of everything else is why
life insurance indeed matters. Ethos is an online platform that makes getting life insurance
fast and easy to protect your family's future in minutes, not months. Ethos keeps it simple. It's
100% online, no medical exam, just a few health questions. You can get a quote in as little
as 10 minutes, same-day coverage, and policies starting at about two bucks a day, build monthly,
with options up to $3 million in coverage. With a 4.8 out of five-star rating on trust pilot
that in thousands of families already applying through ethos, it builds trust.
Protect your family with life insurance from ethos.
Get your free quote at ethos.com slash dispatch.
That's ETHOS.com slash dispatch.
Application times may vary, rates may vary.
We're here with Pete Wainer, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.
A contributing opinion writer to the New York Times, a contributing editor with the
Atlantic, the author of The Death of Politics, How to Heel Our Fraud Republic After Trump.
Pete was a speechwriter in the Reagan, Bush 1, and Bush 2 White Houses.
And for my money, he's one of the most thoughtful observers of American politics today.
So we're very pleased to have you, Pete.
Welcome.
Thanks a lot, Steve.
It's great to be with you.
Thanks for the introduction.
Of course.
I wanted to talk to you because you were in the Bush administration at the White House on September 11th, 2001.
And we are recording this Friday morning, September 10th, 2021, so 20 years minus one day from the day of those attacks.
And you and I've talked about this in the past, but I thought it would be real.
useful to talk to you about what that day was like and what that day has led to.
So let's start at the beginning.
You woke up on September 11, 2001, went into work, and what happened?
Yeah, it was a very, very bifurcated day, as you can imagine, and I'll tell you why it was.
Mike Gerson, who was a senior speechwriter, would go to the senior staff meetings at the White House, which began at 7.30, and that was always overseen by the chief of staff if he was in town. And then people representing various departments, vice president's staff of legislative outreach, press office, and so forth and so on. And Mike would represent the speech writing office. Mike had actually stayed home that morning to work on a speech of communities of care.
character speech. And the reason that he had done that is that we had gotten through
two of our main legislative achievements earlier in the year, no child left behind in education
and tax cuts. So we were thinking about themes for the fall, and one of them was going to be
this idea of communities, which was a theme in President Bush's inaugural address. So Mike was
there. I went to the senior staff meeting. And I remember as the senior staff meeting was
unfolding, thinking this is one of the most uneventful days.
of the White House up to that, up to that point.
And we, I remember having conversations about one of the big topics of the day was the
congressional barbecue that we were supposed to host at 5 p.m., I think, of the East Lawn
of the White House and other cats and dogs that we spoke about.
And I would always send Mike an email summarizing the senior staff meeting and what it unfolded.
And the first sentence of the email that I sent him on September 11th was very little of note happened.
And I sent that precisely five minutes before the first tray tower was hit.
When that happened, my office is in the Eisenhower Executive Office building.
It was on the fourth floor.
Which is just to orient our readers, which is right next to the White House.
It's a big office building.
Most of the people who, quote, unquote, work at the White House actually have offices next door in what they call the EEOB right on Pennsylvania Avenue next to the White House.
Yeah, that's exactly right. It's a beautiful, ornate building. And the West Wing itself is relatively smaller than most people think when they go in.
So mine was on the fourth floor. And so when the first plane hit, like everybody else, I had assumed that, you know, it was a terrible accident.
I had gone down, actually, and gotten a coffee basement came up, and then I think at 903 a.m., the second plane hit the tower.
And so, of course, I knew immediately that something was terribly wrong.
So I called Mike, and Mike was jammed in traffic on, I think it was up to 395.
I think he lived in Alexandria at the time.
He later reported, he left a voicemail message, I think, with Dan Bartlett was in the communications department.
and he had observed how he had seen a plane fly so low.
It turned out that was a plane that hit the Pentagon.
So what happened then is that, so this is a few minutes after nine,
and it's clear what's beginning to unfold.
9.45 a.m., the White House was evacuated.
And I remember the people coming in, people running down the hallways,
just trying to get out.
You know, you knew where you were on the totem pole in the White House.
If you were significant, you ended up in what they call the Piaf, the Presidential Emergency Operation Center.
This is a bunker underneath the east wing of the White House.
If you were me, you ended up on the corner of Pennsylvania, 17th Avenue, northwest.
And I remember looking up the sky and how piercingly blue the sky was.
That's just a kind of vivid memory for me.
It was a beautiful sort of fall day.
And I remember looking up at the sky and thinking, I felt like I was in a movie,
but in a movie, there's a script, and you already know the outcome.
I thought we don't know the outcome of this.
Because by the time they evacuated us, there became known as the fog of war.
So there were reports that the Capitol had been hit.
Right.
And that the State Department had been hit.
And so to make a long story a little bit shorter, I mean, I ended up hailing a, well, actually, I went in at a, I think it was a phone store on K Street.
And I called my wife, Cindy, just let her know the cellular transmission was not good.
And so we were listening to WMAL, which is a local station here.
And I was hearing all of these reports, State Department, supposedly there was a fire on the mall, the Capitol had been hit.
And remember thinking, this feels like I'm in a shooting gallery.
It wasn't a sense of panic.
How do you get out?
How do you?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
Exactly.
It was just like trying to make sense of it all.
I ended up hailing a cab, getting home.
I saw as I crossed one of the bridges to live in McLean, Virginia, seeing the smoke in the Pentagon rising.
So, you know, that morning was somewhat disorienting because at that point, it was a feeling
that you knew that our enemies, whoever our enemies were, they knew what they were doing
to us, but we didn't know what they were doing to us. We didn't know when these attacks would
stop, how many more there were. We were scattered. I came home. Mike went home. Several of
speechwriters ended up at a building at the American Enterprise Institute, which is a think
tank, well known in Washington.
So we were all scattered, and then we began to sort of, you know, collect our, communicate.
President Bush, as you may recall, he took, he was in Florida that morning.
He took off once it was clear that second attacks on Air Force One.
And he was sort of flying all around the country.
First, they landed him at the suggestion of the Secret Service at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana,
Anna then moved him to Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska.
He was getting agitated.
He wanted to return very, very much.
Cheney and the Secret Service and pretty much everybody else said,
look, until we know what's going on here, intelligence agencies,
we've got to keep you away.
We don't want to lose you as well as the people were losing in New York.
But finally, he gave the order to come back.
He arrived at Andrews Air Force Base at 630,
and he gave a speech at 8.30 that night, which was fine.
It was not particularly memorable speech.
It wasn't a particularly good speech, but it was, I think, good enough.
But it was...
Probably in that moment, as important as anything, just to see him, right?
Yes, exactly, right, to see him.
And his earlier remarks that were said, they were through kind of grainy photographs
at these Air Force bases, I think the one in Nebraska.
And so it sort of calmed things down at that point to have him back and to sort of put in perspective or the beginning of putting a frame around what was what was happening.
But there was just the whole sheer shock of the day, this kind of uncoiling horror, as you saw.
First, the planes hit the buildings and then the buildings fall and people jump to their death.
So it was a very difficult day.
And, of course, when you're in the White House, there's the added feeling of a sense of, I guess, duty or responsibility, which is, you know, you have to try and figure out what to do in light of this.
And you're sort of walking around almost in the dark at first.
Let me ask you this question.
You said at 903, the second plane hits, and you sort of had this realization that, oh, wow, we are under attack.
and then a 945, the White House compound, is evacuated.
At what point in that intervening period did you first think, not only are we under a, as a country,
did you think I am personally potentially sitting in one of the biggest targets?
Yeah, you know, it didn't go through my mind too much other than when I was at 17th,
Pennsylvania Avenue, interestingly. And that was, that was when I was just looking up at the
sky. And I was just wondering, what's, you know, what's next? Obviously, I knew because they
evacuated us and because of all the other chatter that we were, that we were hearing, that there
were targets. And the White House was an obvious target. But, but I, I didn't really think
too much about it.
It was, as I said, it was more, it was a slightly detached feeling, a little bit of
of kind of wonder at what, what is it exactly that's, that's unfolding and trying to get
a hold of it, trying to put it within a frame to think it through, it's just a way I'm
sort of hardwired in terms of as a personality, which is what are the next steps that
you have to do, given what one is facing, you know, what do you have to do in the immediate
term and the middle term and the longer term.
And there, of course, it was very much in the immediate term.
It is interesting when I called my mom later and told her, and I was sort of unmoved later
by it when it turned out that the plane that went down in Hanksville, Pennsylvania,
the flight 93, at that point, they didn't know if it was a weapon for the White House or
the Capitol.
And I had mentioned that to my mom.
And she began to weep because she thought that that, you know,
that plane could have if it, if those people, courageous people have not brought it down,
it would have hit the White House.
I think that they later thought, now from Taliban sources,
that it would have struck the capital if possible.
At some point in the morning, you say that the speechwriting team was spread out around the city and beyond.
and you understood that you had a job due.
You knew the president was going to have to speak.
You know that his words either that day or in the coming days were likely to be very important.
How did that process begin?
And how quickly did you know that there would be a big speech?
Yeah, it's a good question.
The process didn't unfold particularly smoothly.
on 9-11, just because of the logistics, if you will, because everybody was scattered.
Karen Hughes had, who was at that point the director of communications, she took the lead
on the speech at that time. So the way it worked, at least from my perspective, as Mike was the chief
speechwriter, I would feed him through the conversations that we had. Thoughts, right? So we would
just have these conversations. I don't even recall that the speech writing team
in general got together. I was just dealing with Mike. And, you know, the first thing that the
conversations was, I remember, which is, is present coming back or not? When's he coming back? And
you know, does he need to come back or not? So there were those early, those conversations sort of late
in the morning, I guess early in the afternoon. Then when it was clear that he was going to make
his way back, it was that he's going to give a speech. And then, you know, I think Mike probably
funneled some stuff, maybe even a draft to Karen, but we were on such a tight timeline that
Karen took it and I'm not even sure how her speech looked compared to whatever draft that we
sent, probably somewhat different. And so that was, that was kind of chaotic. And I should say
just as a backdrop, chaos was not something that was known within the, the George
W. Bush White House. He's a very organized person and certainly from the speech writing side of
things, you know, you would normally, for important speeches, have everything buttoned down
and done much in advance of the speech. He did not like changes at the end. And if you were going to
make a change, you had a high bar to clear. So this was very unlike that. But the next day when we
came in, so this then is September 12th, there it's just a sense of everything begins anew. I mean,
everything, of course, is wiped off the schedule and the calendar. And then you've got so many
different elements of what has to be done, right? There's the rhetorical side, which obviously
concerned us within our bailiwick as speech riders, but there's the military side. And then
there's trying to get the entire government on a war footing. And that's not just defense
and physical defense of the country, which was the first priority, but there's the legal
side and the financial side and the intelligence tools. There was a sense of who is it that did this
to us. We've got to find that out. When does the president speak? Who does he reach out to?
Members of Capitol Hill, Giuliani was mayor of New York. Taki was governor of New York. That was the main
target, of course, but not the only one. You had the Pentagon. Where does the president go? What point
does he go? How does he address the country? And in what forms? The way it turned out for
us. Steve is, you know, I felt like we were a little off balance. President didn't quite
have his footing, I would say, you know, Monday, Tuesday. I recall actually having a conversation
with a wonderful academic Gene Beth Gayelstein, who was at the University of Chicago. And it had
been that Thursday when President Bush had a conversation with, he had just gotten off the phone
with Governor Pataki and Mayor Giuliani, and he was asked by, I may have been a Reuters reporter,
but I don't recall exactly, about what he was feeling and his emotions at that moment.
And his eyes began to fill up with tears, and he spoke about the duties that he had.
And remember, Gene wrote me and said that something changed for her kind of in that moment.
And then, of course, Friday, September 14th was a really important day.
There were two things that happened that day.
He gave a speech at the National Cathedral, which was a relatively short speech, about 15 minutes.
It had an audience of former presidents and dignitaries.
It was an important set of remarks.
And what President Bush wanted to do in those remarks was several things.
He wanted to express grief for the morning.
He wanted to talk about the compassion of God, even in the midst of sorrow and grief,
and a signal to the country that we would respond to what had happened.
And that speech was both the setting, and I think the language of the speech was important.
Then he went to New York that afternoon, and that was where he had his,
famous moment on the bullhorn where he was standing in the rubble with the NYFD fire department
person and they couldn't hear him and he said i can hear you i can hear you the rest of the world
hears you and the people and the people who knocked these buildings down
We'll hear all of us soon.
That, I think, was a kind of important moment for us and the country where it was a sense that we're very much in control and we're beginning to find the right pitch in terms of how to deal with them.
And then the following morning, President Bush up at Camp David had basically a war cabinet meeting with Powell, Rumsfeld, you know, Condi, Steve Hadley, and George Tennant and others.
When you're somebody who has a deep appreciation of American history, as you're living these moments from that moment on the morning of September 11th at 903 when the second plane hit and there was realization that we were under attack, through that first week that you've guided us through here, when did you recognize on a personal level that this was a hinge moment?
in American history, that this was not a, you know, sort of a day that we would move on from
and then we would be back to talking about education in three months.
Like, when was it obvious that this was not only something that would shape, you know,
this period, you know, that fall, that not only shaped the Bush presidency, but really
would shape the American Republic?
Yeah, that's a good question.
I mean, I think pretty soon that day, the president,
believed that day, almost in that moment, actually, the moment that the second plane hit,
you know, people may or may not remember, but it was an incredible sort of 77 minutes
because it was not just the two tray towers, but it was four planes that hit three targets,
the Pentagon, the two tray towers, and then the one that went down in eastern Pennsylvania.
So that kind of 77 minutes was so.
vivid and so violent and almost so unprecedented and just in its nature that you kind of knew
that day, but the president had conveyed to us. I don't think he declared, I'd have to go back
actually and read the speech on September 11th. I think he didn't, he decided not to declare
we were at war officially or rhetorically, but certainly he knew that and we knew that. And when you go,
Oh, you'll remember this, Steve, when President Bush took the, he ran as a domestic policy president, and very much his inaugural speech was focused on sort of the character of the country unity because of the controversy over the 2000 election of Florida, how close that was. So we had all understood that he was going to be a domestic policy president. And when you go from that in particular to knowing
It's a wartime president.
It's a wartime president in the context of having been attacked, not a war of your own choosing.
You just know that everything has, you know, everything has changed, at least for us.
And as I said, that morning, that Wednesday morning when we came in, you know, everything was wiped out.
And there was this beginning of, this is almost sort of de novo, it was just beginning anew.
Yeah, yeah. Well, that, from that moment, from those early moments, obviously, there were many decisions that the president made to put the country on world footing. Many of them later proved controversial. And I've been struck as I've spent the better part of this week and last week looking back on 9-11 and what followed at the, the, the
The sense in which history or those writing the history, at least at this moment, don't necessarily
have an appreciation for, it's hard to capture the context for the decisions at the time.
And this may be because I'm broadly sympathetic to the decisions that the president made.
but it seems to me that the kind of revisionist history that we've seen that's becoming seems
to me conventional wisdom almost now is this was all an overreaction you know you look back and
boy we didn't need to do this and we didn't need to do this and look we haven't been attacked
for 20 years so so things are are fine there's a piece from garret graph in in the Atlantic and I
want to just read you a short passage of it because I think it kind of captures this
critique. He writes, the United States, as both a government and a nation, got nearly everything
about our response wrong on the big issues and the little ones. The global war on terror
yielded two crucial triumphs. The core al-Qaeda group never again attacked the American
homeland and bin Laden, its leader, was hunted down and killed in a stunningly successful
secret mission a decade after the attacks. But the U.S. defined its goals far more expansively.
And by almost any other measure, the war on terror has weakened the nation, leaving Americans more afraid, less free, more morally compromised, and more alone in the world.
A day that initially created an unparalleled sense of unity among Americans has become the backdrop for ever-widening polarization.
I'm guessing that doesn't quite track with your recollection of the decision-making
and your understanding of what followed.
Do you have a response to that?
Yeah, yeah, I think that's hyperbolic and too melodramatic, among other things,
and I think it's wrong in key respects.
I mean, I think it attributes both too much and too little to the so-called war on
on terror too much in the sense that saying that sort of everything that that we have now
we're you know we're we're less free and more polarized and so it goes back to to the to the war
on terror as if almost everything that that's gone wrong between now and 20 years ago is
somehow can be ascribed it sounds a little bit like you know if you're if you're a hammer
every problem is a nail it's a bit reductionist I'd say yeah I'd say yeah I
I would say so, too.
And I think it dramatically understates what was actually achieved.
I mean, it wasn't an accident that we weren't attacked for 20 years.
And as I said earlier, the entire country went on a war footing, which kept that from happening.
And just to your earlier point, Steve, it's really true.
I mean, you go back, and I'd do this too, if I'm not part of the history of a
particular time, things get reduced to single sentences and the nuances and the subtleties
and the texture of any given moment in time is lost. But when you're actually there, it's slightly
different. And if you were in the White House after 9-11, you know, you would have known that there was
incredible chatter from the intelligence agencies. I don't think that there's a single person
in a responsible position, either the Department of Defense or the intelligence agencies,
that would have thought that we weren't going to be hit and hit much harder. And that was
what the chatter was. I think there was more chatter about a very bad attack. Worse than what happened
in 9-11. There was more of that after 9-11 than before.
And, you know, if you listen to people like George Tenant and others, there was an almost certainty that we were going to be hit.
And then you're in the White House and other branches of government, and you don't really know what hits you.
You don't quite know what you don't know.
All you do know is that you've 3,000, almost 3,000 of your fellow citizens have died and buildings were hit and we were extremely vulnerable.
And you have to try and put the entire federal government on a war footing.
with no runway, and with no real textbook that you can pull off the shelf and say,
you know, this is exactly what you have to do. That's a huge undertaking. You don't get everything
right. You don't calibrate everything perfectly. You never do in any event, in any area of life.
You certainly don't do it in government. But I found in government that, you know, well,
one thing is that my IQ was 50 points higher the day before I went into government.
government. It was 50 points higher the day I left government because decisions are a lot easier to
make when you're in the peanut gallery and you're watching how things unfold. And then if they go
poorly, you know, all of these really smart people sit around and say, how could they have been
so foolish? But often when those very smart people go into government themselves of any
administration, they find out that life is a theater of vicissitudes, as John Adams says. There's a lot
that you can't contain or control or predict. And when you're in the White House,
I mean, I was struck by this.
I was there for seven years, which is you're asked to make often extremely consequential
decisions, very often on limited information, in many circumstances on a timeline that you
wouldn't prefer, without knowing what all of the contingencies are.
But you have to act.
You don't have the luxury of waiting as a commentator, which I have now, and seeing
how these things unfold, and then when it becomes obvious to try and see.
say in elegant words, what's completely obvious. So it's just a different, it's a different
cast of mind. But look, I think the achievements of President Bush, one of them, is that we
weren't attacked when everybody thought we would. And I think for whatever problems that there
might have been or imperfections there were that he protected the country and protected it in all
of these different areas. And, you know, the other thing I'll say is, is that at the time,
if you go back, Democrats were almost universal in their support for Bush at the time,
whether it was the enhanced interrogation techniques and waterboarding, which the Democratic
leadership knew and supported at the time, or certainly the war in Afghanistan, in which
every member of Congress, all 535, with the exception of one person, supported that war.
Or Joe Biden, who in the aftermath of 2001, talked about how important nation building was.
And, you know, was quite, you know, the martial warrior at that time in terms of what we should do.
Now, present Biden's forgotten what Senator Biden said and believed and voted and acted at that time.
But it's important.
That doesn't mean, by the way, that you don't go back and critique what was wrong or pretend that you got everything right.
It just means that those things, you know, have to happen, you know, within a context.
So, yeah, I obviously would have some disagreements with that essay.
So if you and I had had a conversation in the middle of that national unity that you just described, on a policy level, and I think on, in sort of a heartfelt way, it's kind of an intangible, non-intellectual way, there was this kind of national unity with some notable exceptions, if we had had a conversation then and I were to describe to you.
the extreme polarization that we're living through today, 20 years on, would that have seemed
unlikely to you?
That's the first part of my question.
The second part of my question, if the kind of conventional wisdom, as expressed in the
Garrett Graf piece is reductionist, there can be a little question that those attacks and
the response to them played some role in.
this polarization.
How do you think about that today looking back 20 years?
Yeah, on your first question, I would be surprised and dismayed and probably a little bit
shot by the divisions in the country.
I mean, I think they go deeper even than polarization.
I mean, there's a level of antipathy and hatred for fellow citizens right now.
that's really unlike anything that I've seen in my life time.
I think it's pretty rare in American history.
Now, people have to be careful about romanticizing history,
and often you'll hear people talk about the good old days
of when Tip O'Neill and Ronald Reagan would go out and have a beer after 5, 5 p.m.
That is a little romanticized.
I mean, if you go back and read what Tip O'Neill said about Ronald Reagan,
I was some pretty nasty stuff.
Right, right.
So, and, you know, politics by its nature,
nature is divisive. I mean, that's what it's about. It's about people with competing ideas on
important issues who have differences. And so what you try and do in a country is debate those
differences within certain parameters of, you know, hopefully some degree of civility
and respect, but it can be intense and it always has been. But the degree to which the
polarization has happened now and the divisions and as I said, the hatred.
trade and the rage for people is extraordinary.
And that has, I think, a whole set of complicated issues that led to that moment.
A lot of, I guess, sort of tributaries feeding into this roiling river.
And those things happen, I think, quite apart from any individual president or any individual
action, although various presidents and actions contributed to them.
But I think there were also some deeper currents that happened.
And I think Donald Trump was a key moment because he, in a sense, sort of validated a certain kind of style in politics, which I think is deeply harmful that always existed but was on the fringe.
But when Trump became first nominee, and then particularly when he became president, and my own view is that he's a sociopath.
And so when you have a sociopath as president, a lot of bad things happen to the fabric of a country, to the ethos of a country.
And I think that's happened.
In terms of whether the decisions that happened are not, you know, a 9-11 and flowed from the Bush presidency as a contributing force factor in the differences and disagreements and polarization in the country, sure, they they did.
I think Afghanistan less than Iraq, because in Afghanistan, we, we, we, we.
we were attacked.
And they contributed.
I don't think individual decisions, if they're polarizing, are per se wrong.
I've never believed that.
I've never even been against polarization in general.
It depends on what the cause of the polarization is.
I mean, Lincoln was a polarizing figure.
The Civil Rights Movement, Martha and Luther King was a polarizing figure.
If you're a fan of Bobby Kennedy, you know, he was a
a polarizing figure. FDR was a lot of the most important figures in American history, indeed
in world history. It turned out that Jesus was a polarizing figure too. So it depends on what is,
is it polarization in the cause of justice, or is it polarization in the cause of injustice,
or is it polarization, you know, unnecessarily so for small issues? You know, the wars that we
were a part of did lead to the divisions of the country because the wars didn't go particularly
well. And I'm happy to go through in where they did go well and didn't. The short version of
Iraq, if I'll give you my sort of 62nd arc of it, is that we wouldn't, I certainly would not
have supported war. I don't think most people would have supported war if we knew that Saddam Hussein
didn't have weapons of mass destruction. It was a massive intelligence.
failure, which has been looked into by various bipartisan commissions. It was our responsibility
because we believe the intelligence, but the reality is that Democrats that got the same intelligence
believed it, and even countries throughout the world that didn't agree with the war in Iraq,
the German intelligence agencies, French and others, believed he had weapons of mass destruction.
But the war itself was based on a false premise, so it wouldn't have gone to war.
having gone to war, the actual major combat operations went extremely well, and Saddam Hussein
was deposed in a matter of several weeks. But then the so-called face four period of the war,
where things dissolved into chaos, was a horrible period, and we bear a significant responsibility
for having had the wrong strategy. We had what they kind of referred to as a light footprint strategy.
It wasn't an insane approach, but it was a wrong one. And we were,
We were much too late in making the adjustment.
But the adjustment was made in 2007, led by David Petraeus on the military side and
Ryan Crocker as the ambassador.
And the war turned around in the so-called surge, which was not just a surge in troops,
but it was a new counterinsurgency strategy, turned around Iraq in a stunningly short
period of time.
I mean, by the time you got to, the surge was announced in January, I think January 10th of
2007, by the time you got to September, Iraq was much more pacified as a country, it's to the point
that by the time that Biden and Obama withdrew our troops in 2011, they were stating that Iraq was,
you know, a stable country. So I think by the time that that we left, you know, Iraq was
certainly fragile, but we had reversed the worst errors of the war.
But by that time, the public was just sick and tired of the war.
And, you know, the hopes of Afghanistan and Iraq certainly weren't met.
And it turned out to be much more difficult.
And that led to the polarization of the country.
But it certainly wasn't the only reason.
And I think if those wars had never happened, we would probably be more or less where we are as a nation right now.
Looking forward to tomorrow, September 11th, 2021, the Taliban is back in control in Afghanistan.
They're planning to formally announce or formally impose a new government that not only includes but is led by several figures who were prominent,
in the Taliban in 2001, who worked with al-Qaeda
to lay the groundwork for the 9-11 attacks,
who are responsible for the deaths of Americans
after the 9-11 attacks.
The campaign in Afghanistan, Pakistan,
did successfully eliminate Osama bin Laden.
But I think by virtually any measure,
al-Qaeda and the global jihadist movement is stronger today as i say the taliban is is in control
almost certainly the u.s will face a greater national security threat from the afpac region
in the months and years to come than we have over the past 20 years
Is there any way to look at the original 9-11 war, the war in Afghanistan, and conclude anything other than that it was lost?
No, I don't think so.
I mean, the war was lost.
I think it was lost by the decision by President Biden to withdraw and essentially to decide to intentionally.
take actions to lose the war to pull us out of of afghanistan um i think it's a terrible legacy for him
i think it's a terrible mistake i think it's bad for the national security of the united states for the
reasons that you articulated i think just as a humane matter um as a matter of human rights
um it was it was a big big mistake um and there's going to be a lot of human wreckage that resulted from it
And it's painful.
It's painful because it didn't have to be this way.
I understand the argument that America can't solve every problem in the world.
But when you say you can't solve every problem in the world,
it doesn't mean you can't solve any problem in the world.
And Afghanistan, for the reasons we talked about,
was a war that we got involved with.
And we had to respond, after all,
they were giving sanctuary to the terrorists that hit us.
So the question became at that point,
Do we just hit Afghanistan, smash the Taliban, and leave, or do we try and stay for national security reasons to keep our intelligence and a military presence, but also to help those people?
You know, one of the things that I find frustrating and unfortunate is this notion that the sacrifices that were made by the people in particular in uniform who served in Afghanistan, that it was for nothing.
It actually wasn't for nothing.
Afghanistan and went in Switzerland, that's for sure.
And it had a lot of struggles and a lot of problems.
And it underscored, I suppose, you know, a Burkean understanding that all of us should have had,
that I should have had more, which is the capacity to change cultures and nations,
is a massive undertaking and very, very difficult.
having said that by any metric of human development and human rights, Afghanistan is better
after 20 years than it was at the time that we went to war.
You know, 40% of the people in Afghanistan colleges were women, 25% of the parliament.
The Taliban, as you know, and have written and eloquently spoken about, is just a awful
brutal, savage regime. And they hurt people and they delight in hurting people and they delight
in hurting and killing a lot of people. And they're going to do it again. I was on a call
yesterday with somebody with a woman who has a lot of, done a lot of work in Afghanistan.
And I said, what is most heartbreaking to you about what's unfolding? And she spoke about
several things that had been utterly wiped away. One was two hospitals that were created
in which the doctors in Afghanistan have been trained by Americans. And that these people
stayed there through all of the hard and difficult years to try and save lives. The infant mortality
rate in Afghanistan got much better because of efforts by these people. And that hospital's
now been shuttered. And then she talked about a French couple who had opened schools for girls
in Afghanistan and that that's now been, you know, been wiped away and about the people who are
left behind. Now, I understand the argument if people say, look, you know, we weren't going to
win this war and, you know, it's the forever war and we want to leave. I get that argument. It's not a,
It's not a crazy argument.
The question, of course, in these things is always, is the cost higher, of leaving higher
than the cost of staying?
You know, what's the cost-benefit analysis?
And I think, given the situation that we had, clearly it was worthwhile.
It was in our security interest, human rights interests, to stay there, the capacity that we did.
But even if you don't agree with that, people, particularly people on the left who pride themselves on their dedication to human rights and care for the vulnerable and the dispossessed, the people living in the shadows of society, they shouldn't look the other way in knowing what is now coming.
if you were a liberal who was deeply pained by the separation of children from their parents on the southern border during the Trump years, as you and I were,
then you should see what's happening in Afghanistan and understand that that is a lot worse just in terms of the sheer human misery that's about to unfold.
And the fact that it's unfolding on the people of Afghanistan primarily, but not exclusively.
because there's still Americans there,
doesn't make it any less of a human tragedy.
And, you know, too often in politics,
people become, and human lives become sort of chest pieces
on a board that are used in these political and partisan wars.
So it's not really, you know, empathy or sympathy for people who are suffering.
It's empathy and sympathy for people who the other people,
side is making suffer so you can use them to make a broader, you know, a broader point.
So, you know, it's difficult to see. Obviously, I wish the Afghanistan war had ended differently.
I wish that more progress had been made. I'm certain that we made errors. You know, 2006 was a
key moment when I think because of our attention to Iraq that Pakistan began to give safe
haven to the Taliban. And that helped revivify them.
So we made our share of mistakes.
And, you know, you always do that in war, but nonetheless, they shouldn't happen and
there are costs to it.
But I do think that the decision by President Biden to leave was unnecessary, and I think
it's one for reasons you articulated that we're going to come to regret.
But the sacrifices that the people made were not made in vain.
They actually did make a difference.
Pete, thanks for taking the time to help.
put this all in context to help remember that awful day 20 years ago. And thanks for your
candor. Thanks a lot, Stephen. It's been applied to be with you.
You know,