The Dispatch Podcast - Did We Win the War on Terror?

Episode Date: September 11, 2026

Steve Hayes is joined by Jonah Goldberg, Mike Nelson, and David French to discuss former President George W. Bush’s response to the 9/11 attacks, how the tragedy shaped domestic policy today, and whether or not we won the war on terror.  The Agenda: —Remembering the events over the course of the day—How lives were changed after 9/11 —Journalism’s evolution after the attacks—Did we win the war on terror?—The enemy gets a vote Show notes: —President Bush’s address to Congress following the attacks —David French’s Atlantic article on why he served Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Steve Hayes. On today's roundtable, we discussed the Al-Qaeda attacks on America on September 11, 2001, and the 25 years of war in recovery since then. What was that day like? How did the 9-11 attacks change us? Did the U.S. win the war on terror? How did the attacks and America's response contribute to our politics today? I'm joined by dispatch editor-in-chief Jonah Goldberg, retired Special Forces Office, and dispatch contributor Mike Nelson, and retired JAG officer and New York Times columnist David French. Let's dive right in. Good morning, gentlemen.

Thank you for joining us on this 25th anniversary of the 9-11 attacks. I want to start with a pretty simple question. And David, I'll start with you. Where were you when the attacks occurred? And what were your thoughts that day? Yeah, I was at my law firm, just a normal day. I will remember, I came out of my office and I saw a couple of secretaries. This was before flat screen TV.

I mean, I think this is when people first started getting a plasma. You know, do you remember those things? Sure. And there was a couple of TVs in the parts of the firm where the secretaries worked and they were huddled around looking at something on a very small TV. And I looked over their shoulders. And one of the World Trade Centers was on fire. and it was live television and I was like, what happened?

And they said, nobody knows. It's just burning. And everyone was trying to figure it out. And then I watched the second plane hit just right there. And I could immediately tell that was a commercial airliner. Like everybody who know anything at all about aviation could tell immediately it was a commercial airliner. And that moment, just my mind just changed in a complete. different mode. It was, we're under attack. That's what's happening. And this is like my generation's

Pearl Harbor. And I remember immediately walking upstairs, there was a partner's meeting happening. I was a, and where were you? What city were you in Lexington, Kentucky? I was in Lexington, Kentucky. And I remember immediately walking up, there's a partners meeting underway. And I opened the door, and I said, hey, guys, y'all might not know this, but America's under attack right now. World Trade Centers have been hit by, I don't know what, but we're, like, actually under attack. And they let everybody go and leave. We were in a high-rise building, one of the taller buildings than the town. And I don't know if you guys remember this, but rumors were immediately flying around that the library tower in L.A. had been hit.

People forget how many rumors, Sears Tower. So even people in Lexington, Kentucky, were worried about this. And we were in a building that was part of a World Trade Center family building. And there was no reason in the universe to think that in Lexington, Kentucky, you know, somebody who's going to attack a building. But rumors were just flying everywhere. There was just a total fog of war. I don't know if you remember we heard the State Department was on fire. the first reports of fires coming from the Pentagon.

And so they just sent everybody home. They were just like, go home. And so I spent the rest of the day with my family. I had two kids at the time, not three. And we were just watching and just stunned disbelief. I think everybody has a 9-11 story, and that's super tame. Like the New York stories, you just can't even begin to grasp. David, you really get immediately.

to the point of how vulnerable we all felt. Oh. Whether we were in New York or Lexington, Kentucky, or somewhere else, I was in Washington, D.C. at the time, and my brother was working at the World Bank. And immediately, I thought World Trade Center is World Bank and, you know, scrambled to try to get in touch with him that morning unsuccessfully for many, many hours. Jonah, how about you? Where were you?

Oh, well, I mean, as one would expect from, I'm a suave urban cosmopolite named Goldberg. I was in Pendleton, Oregon. So I mean, we'll get to this more when we get to the How Did It Change Things for you? But I was back from my honeymoon for about 24 hours. Oh, wow. And my wife and I got married in the Pacific Northwest in the San Juan Islands, and we left

our dog Cosmo with my sister-in-law while we went to Europe on our honeymoon. My wife had to get back to the Justice Department where she was John Ashcroft's chief speechwriter and senior policy advisor. So that was a busy day for the Ashcroft team. And I had to drive my dog cross-country alone. And it was a column day for me. So I woke up crazy early West Coast time trying to figure out what to write about. And I had like, it was flipping channels between the new shows. and I'll keep the story very short.

I was watching, going back and forth, but I was watching an interview on Fox and Friends where this guy, David will be interested in this, this guy from Newsweek, the Ken Neber, the name of the reporter, was on, he had a new book out about the Bush v. Gore decision. And this is terrifying for anybody who's ever had a book about how events can completely screw you when you have a new book.

And he was talking about how he had, some new re-sporting about how Breyer wanted a couple more days or to get suitor or somebody to change them. Something that was like a huge friggin deal then. And just as they're like getting the conversation going, Edie Hill or whatever her name was, says, hey, can you hold on a second? We have reports of a small twin engine plane hitting the World Trade Center. And they cut away and they take a report for a second and they try to get back to the book

conversation. And they're like, I'm sorry. We're going to have to reschedule this. we'll have you back soon, I'm sure. And I think that was probably that dude's last TV book interview for 10 years, right? Yeah. So anyway, I saw a lot of this stuff play out in real time as I was flipping around. I remember listening to Brian Gumbull, grill.

I think it was Dave McCurdy. I can't remember exactly. Why would you say this is terrorism? That makes no sense. You know, we don't know that yet. We can't get ahead of the facts. We have to be responsible. And as he's saying it, they just have the camera fixed on the World Trade Centers.

The second plane hits. And everyone was like, all right, terrorism. Because like, that can't be a coincidence, right? So there are a bunch of people at National Review who found out about it because of me. Like, remember AOL Instant Messenger? I was DMing Catherine Lopez and Rich Lowry and a bunch of people saying,

just turn on your TV. I remember Rich said at one point, what channel? And I was like, it doesn't matter. And meanwhile, it was pretty terrifying because literally my wife was getting back to a job. She had just started in the Bush administration. I mean, she'd been there for a little bit,

but back from the honeymoon. And cell lines were going down. And, you know, my parents and my brother were in New York City, trying to figure out what the hell's going on with them. And, I mean, lots of people have these stories about how, like, David talks about the Pearl Harbor aspect of it. There are, I think we'll all agree. There are important differences between that and Pearl Harbor.

Like civilian targets are different. But that sort of World War II feeling of people gathering around TVs, the way they usually gather around radios and looking through the windows of TV stores and all that kind of stuff. And I remember I was listening to NPR on a walkman, walking my dog outside the Pendleton rodeo, which is one of the biggest, most important rodeos in the country, and the rodeo fairgrounds. And I'm listening to NPR, and also the NPR gets much louder. I'm like, what, what's going on?

I take off my headphones, and the rodeo had turned to NPR. for the news and was blasting it over the loud speakers of the Pendleton rodeo fairgrounds. And that had to have been the first and last time a major American rodeo blasted NPR. NPR. NPR. And so anyway, I worked the phones and I tried to talk to Jess. And then as David was saying, you know, the rumor stuff was really big. And I don't think there was any place it was bigger than Washington, D.C., in part because the son of

booms from the jets started really, really, really early. And there was actual real information coming out about targets and that kind of stuff. And you combine those things. And so there was talk about explosions. People saw the smoke from the Pentagon. They thought this was on fire. That was on fire. People just, you know, there was actual word coming forth about another plane that, you know, whatever. We still don't know, do we know whether it was targeting in the White House of the Capitol? I think it's still not confirmed, but I'm talking to my wife on the phone. I get her on the phone. And she's like, I'm okay.

And two seconds into the conversation, she's like, they're evacuating me. I have to get out of here. And then the line goes dead. And there was just a lot of that kind of, and it took forever to get my parents on the phone. So it was an interesting time. Hey, day. Mike, where were you? So I was on Normandy Drop Zone on Fort Bragg and some context for the timing of

That's a flex answer, dude. It is. It's also just factual. It's also just factual. So we had just come back a couple months earlier from Kosovo. We spent the first half of 2001 doing the peacekeeping mission as part of K-4, the UN operation there. And at the time, like, that was the show.

That was the deployment. The U.S. military was largely in the late 90s in the business of helping shepherd in the transitions that were taking place after the fall of the Cold War, particularly in the Balkans. And we came back in, I want to say May, went on leave, and then we returned to our traditional cycle. So at the time, the 82nd Airborne has three brigades. One is doing what's called support cycle. That's leave. That's all the extra support taskings that do stuff around post.

One is intensive training cycle, where you go to basically do eight weeks of training to prepare for the next cycle, which was mission. cycle, and that was two-hour recall, ready to respond if the nation calls, ready to deploy anywhere in the world within 18 hours. We were finishing up that ITC, that intensive training cycle. We were on the final field training exercise, the culminating exercise, the brigade FTC, which was supposed to be about 12 days long before we were taking mission cycle, getting ready to go on alert to deploy anywhere in the world if needed. We were about day 10 of a 12-day F-TX. I was an artilleryman at the time, so we were firing into the impact area as part of this

field training exercise, this portion of Normandy Drop Zone, for those familiar with Fort Bragg, it's this little dog leg called Falcon LZ. And I was in the fire direction center of my artillery battery, and specialist Uriostaggy, one of my soldiers, had smuggled in a watchman, if you remember those. They were like the portable TVs that were battery operated. Oh, yeah. And he had been sneaking TV shows, you know, when we had downtime. And it was largely dying, like the batteries were dying off. He didn't have any more. He wasn't getting a signal anymore. There was a lull in what we were doing. So he was listening to the morning news. He couldn't get a picture, but he could hear it. And he says, hey, sir, I just heard this weird report that a plane hit the World Trade Center.

And like everybody else said here, you know, I'm not sure if it was specified, but in our minds, it was a Sassana. It was some kind of single prop plane that had gotten lost in the fog or something. And then he slowly tells us there's a second plane. And then he tells us the Pentagon's been hit.

And because we can't visualize any of this, you know, for a lot of the people, the 40% of America that didn't live in this, they can't, you know, cell phones didn't have big screens. There was no pictures being distributed everywhere. So all of this was word of mouth so that in our minds,

the damage against the Pentagon was much more significant. and nobody told the brigade to stop the exercise. There was no call on the radio, cease tactical play, where tactical pause, just everything stopped. You know, people probably got notified or got rumors somehow, but everybody kind of just stopped participating. Like the exercise just ground to a halt.

As everyone was figuring out something was going on and we were under attack. I had my phone on me, but again, they weren't as pervasive in 2001 or the use of them. So I probably had like just a little bit of charge after 10 days. I wasn't using it calling home because I was in the field. And I got one call out after multiple times to my mom because my dad had retired from the army just a couple years earlier and become a government contractor. His primary site was not at the Pentagon, but I just wanted to call and make sure that my dad had not been at the Pentagon for any reason that morning. And that was the one call I was able to get out that morning. And my mom confirmed that my dad was not there.

Nobody knows what's going on. Eventually, after several hours, we get the call. Division Commander wants 100% accountability. We're just packing it up, coming in. Checkpoints have gone up all over Fort Bragg. There are MPs stopping us in our huge Humvees. We're obviously in the Army, and they're stopping us and asking us for ID because they don't know what else to do.

And this is like inside of Fort Bragg already. We get back to kind of our battalion headquarters. We're not released. Nobody knows what to do. so everyone just gathers in the chow hall. That's the only place where there were TVs. There was a TV in the chow hall, so everyone's just gathering around

watching the same footage play on a loop. And none of us know, you know, again, back to the confusion. We know we're under attack. We don't know from whom. We are under the belief that we are going to go because we're about to take that mission cycle in about two weeks.

But we did not realize, of course, how long, in our minds it was the Gulf War. It was Panama. It was we were going to go seek retribution for against those who did this and then come home. And it was going to be another limited war. We had no idea that it was going to define the next 20 years. Yeah. I mean, so many interesting things that you said there. One of the things that's really struck me as I've watched some of the shows about the 25th anniversary of 9-11 and I've gone back and watched some of the documentaries is when people were watching this near the World Trade Center, you know, the people had escaped from the, the towers and were a block or two away, it was obvious that there were no video, there was no video capability on their cell phones because nobody was holding up their cell phones. Everybody was just watching together, sort of collectively looking at what was happening and watching it unfold. Nobody was really taking video. And in fact, there are only a couple of different videos of the

second plane hitting the tower because there weren't more people recording. I was in D.C. I was just a couple blocks off of Capitol Hill. stayed the night before the 9-11 attacks at my girlfriend's house, my now wife, which was on Capitol Hill. I was living out in McLean, Virginia, and I didn't want to have to do the commute because I was scheduled to go cover an education hearing on Capitol Hill that morning featuring Laura Bush. And I'll be honest, I was not excited about the assignment and was thinking as I was going to do it, you know, there's got to be something more exciting to cover than this. stayed over, was up watching TV, getting ready, and David, like you, I watched as the second

tower hit. I was perplexed as they were talking about the first plane hitting. There was a lot of discussion about a lost Cessna or instruments failing or, you know, they were perplexed because the weather was so perfect. None of that actually made that much sense right away to me. And then the second plane hit in it was pretty obvious. I then made my way to the weekly standard office. I had only been at the Weekly Standard for a couple once there. But by the time I got in my car and drove to the Weekly Standard, this is only maybe a mile. The roads were totally gridlocked. There was nowhere to go.

I remember going up on a curb at one point to sort of get around somebody to get to the offices. And then at the Weekly Standard offices, we all too gathered around a television and watched what was unfolding. We were joined shortly thereafter by, I think for a while, most of the George W. Bush speech writing team came to the Weekly Standard offices with just a few blocks away from the White House, where they took a conference room and they went to work on what President Bush was going to say. But it was quite a day, as I said, I looked for my brother because I was worried that he was at the World Bank and couldn't reach him, couldn't reach him on his landline, couldn't reach him on our cell phones, didn't end up seeing him. until late, late that afternoon. And he never called me or reached out or send an email or anything. And I sort of, I think, gave him a hug and then also kind of punched him at the same time for not doing more to get in touch with me as things were unfolding.

And then the next day I went up to New York, I made my way up to New York City where I thought I was going to cover Hillary Clinton and didn't end up getting in touch with her. Let me ask you one other more personal question before we get to some broader policy questions and discussions. Mike, you were in the Army. You were going to be serving, but this changed what you would be doing in pretty profound ways. How did it change? How did the attacks of 9-11 change what was in front of you from that day forward?

Well, so I joked that, you know, I spent two years in a peacetime army and then the rest of my career, basically in a wartime army. Like I said, I had no idea that it was going to be that long. None of us did. none of us knew where it was going to go. Like I said, we believed we were immediately going to go. And we took mission cycle, I want to say, mid-September, and then we ended up relinquishing it on mid-November. And I remember we spent that whole time watching the Special Forces groups on Fort Bragg deploy,

the Special Mission Unit on Fort Bragg, deploy. A lot of the other brigades, independent, the MP brigade, the Engineer Brigade, all went over as part of the initial, tranche and part of our response. A good friend and classmate of mine had just left our unit, the 82nd airborne field artillery, division artillery, and gone to third range of battalion, and I sat and watched him parachute into Afghanistan on October 23rd, somewhere in there. And so we basically watched as the war started without us. And then I remember on, I believe it was November 15th, we were counting down the hours before we transitioned to Third Brigade,

82nd to the 505 and said, they can still call us. There's still time. There's still two hours left before they can make the call. And we ended up watching as it transitioned to other brigades, and they ended up sending part of their elements over to Afghanistan, and we sat it out. And I ultimately, I started preparing for my next career path. I went to Special Forces selection and was preparing to depart.

And then in December of 2002, we got our alert that we were going to go to Kuwait, in support of enduring freedom, but we all knew what we were going to do. And so that diverted my path. That was my first wartime deployment. I went to Kuwait to prepare for the invasion of Iraq and then invaded. And again, like inability to forecast how long this was going to go. I remember sitting on Red Falcon Field in February of 2003 saying goodbye to my then-wife.

And she asked, no kidding, how long are you really going to be gone? and I said six weeks, three months at the outside. And a year later, I came home. Wow. So a year later, I came home for my first of many of Iraq deployments. So I have something actually coming out. Well, I guess as this airs this morning probably, it's with Rachel right now, where I talk about, you know, we had no idea. You know, just two days before September 11th, Band of Brothers debuted on HBO.

And it starts with interviews with these old men who have lived first. lives and been business owners and grandparents and done all these great things with their lives. But they are talking about one year in their life that defined who they were. And what we did not know on September 11th is we were going to spend some of us, you know, a good friend of mine spent three months in combat and he's just as much as a veteran as I am. And some of us like David left their lives to go answer the country's call and take their lives in a different path. And some of us thought we were going to be in a peacetime army and then we're not. But we had no idea how much we were about to have our lives defined by the next 20 years.

And that was going to be the constant being at war, coming back and recovering and then preparing for the next deployment was going to become the standard for our lives for the next decades. All right. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back soon with more from the dispatch podcast. And we're back. You're listening to the dispatch podcast. Let's jump in. David, Mike made mention of the fact that your life changed pretty dramatically. How did your life change after 9-11?

What did you think you were going to be doing? And what did you end up doing? Well, so 9-11 happens. I'm 32 years old. I have two kids. I'm a lawyer. I'm a commercial litigator in Lexington, Kentucky. And I had this immediate impulse that I felt like I should join, that I should do something.

But then immediately a voice said, well, your window closed. right? You're 32, you've got two kids, you've got a full-time job, you can't really do this. And so I kind of shove that, I sort of stuffed that back inside, you know, like, it's just I miss my window. I just missed it. And then a couple of years later, I had supported the war in Iraq. I mean, I didn't have a public platform at all. I think I'd started a blog on blogspot.com, if you remember that, where I had written to my audience of dozens that I supported the Iraq War. And then I became president of fire, what is now called the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression,

but I was the president at that time were a foundation for individual rights and education. And I was sitting in our place in Philly. We had moved from Lexington to Philadelphia, and I saw two news items at once. One was that the Army was having difficulty recruiting and it raised its maximum age. 35. And it had been lower. I think 32 was over the maximum in 01. I can't remember exactly, but they raised it to 35 and indicated they were going to grant age waivers beyond that for healthy people.

And then at the same time, I read an article about a Marine in Anbar Province who had been wounded in action and borrowed a satellite phone from a reporter and called his family. He had a wife and two kids back home to say I'm wounded, I'm being medabacked, but I'm okay. And a couple of things just sort of hit me like a ton of bricks. One was, hey, I'm 36 now. I bet I could get an age waiver. And the other one was this guy, because one of the reasons why I chose not to go or try not to, didn't try to go. And right after 9-11 is I had wife and two kids. Well, he has a wife and two kids. and he's over there. And if all the people with spouses and children didn't deploy,

that'd be really bad for us. That would be some of the most mature people in America and responsible people in America would not be in the military. And so I absolutely just got convicted. In the evangelical world, we would say, I just felt like a deep and profound conviction from the Holy Spirit that this is what I should do. Like it was almost like a supernatural feeling.

Like, I just have to do this. So I turned to my wife and I said, you know, Nancy, I think I need to join. And her initial response was like super negative to that. Not the most positive. I can imagine. Yeah. But you know, you guys, you know Nancy. She is not a shrinking violet kind of person. Like she's not a home body type of person. She is sort of a person who's like, okay, if you feel like you're supposed to do something, you should do it. That's sort of like her ethos. It's our ethos. And so I said, can you just think about it? And the next day, she and my son, and my son was pre-kindergartenate at that point, were walking across from Independence Hall because we live right in the center of Philly. And if you've been near Independence Hall, the signers, the Declaration of Independence, their signatures are on the paved stones outside of Independence Hall. And my son is looking at those signatures and says, you know, who are these people? And she's trying to describe them.

And she says, well, you know, they were farmers, they were lawyers, they were soldiers. they were pastors, they were all people who helped found the country. And my son was not particularly satisfied by the explanation. So she was just trying to search for a more unifying theme. And she said, but no matter what they did, they were all patriots. And so my son says to Nancy, what is a patriot? And Nancy comes up with probably the best short definition of patriotism that I've ever heard. And she said, a patriot is somebody who loves this country more than they love themselves. And then Austin asked the next question, are we patriots? And he has, of course, no idea that we'd had this whole big conversation the night before. And so she says, yes, we are. And it just really

hits her, like deep in her soul. And so I come home that day, that day, ready with my arguments. And she literally meets me at the door and says, you have to do this. This is what you're supposed to do. And I said, okay, if I do it, I'm going to volunteer to go to Iraq. And she said, well, you have to do this. So I turned around and I went to the local recruiting station in Center City, Philly. And they did not know what to do with me. I walked in. I'm 36 years old. I'm just as bald as I am now, like just as bald as I am now, except I'm about 25 to 30 pounds heavier than I am right now, all in my gut, which is not like the greatest look for a guy. So I come in, obviously, in the worst shape, bald, and I said, you know, I'm a lawyer.

I want to join the Army. I figure I do best as a JAG officer with all my legal training. How do I do that? They had no idea. They were like young guys who were recruiting guys into the airborne, you know, recruiting the young Mike that like the guy's Mike was leading. And so they just knew how to get me an Army physical, which I will tell you, I passed by these freaking skisks. end of my teeth. And then next thing I know, you know, I fill out all the applications for the JAG Corps. I do an interview. I do all of this. And I'm off to Fort Lee. This was November of 05.

So how long between when you walked into that recruiting office and you left? I walked into the recruiting office in November of 2005 and I left in October 31st of 07. So I got, I was trained all through 2006, I went to a Fort Lee Army base, the officer basic at Fort Lee. Then I had my JAG training. My JAG training finished in April of 2007. I volunteered to go to Iraq in June of 2007 and I left my home in October and then I was in Iraq in November. So it was pretty, like by government standards, I was a pretty fast. So let me put it this way. When I was in the back of that Chinook helicopter on the night of October 22nd, 2007, with the second squadron, third arm, Cavalry Regiment, heading to Ford Operating Base Caldwell in Eastern Diala. Mike was in

Western Diyala, I think, at maybe that exact time. Same time, yep. I was 99.3% civilian. And I was in the back of that helicopter looking over the shoulder of the door gunner at these distant firefights, like, you know, the tracer rounds rising up in the air, way in the distance. And I was like, what, what have I done? done. You know, like all the theory, yes, I'm going to serve my country. You know, I'm going to take my turn. It's been my family's done it since Valley Forge. You know, it's my turn. And then you're like, holy crap, where am I? It was a big, I mean, a shocking, shocking transition. But by the time I returned home, almost a year later, I was only 1% civilian. I had done the total flip. So, Jonah,

you did not make it to Diyala province, either east or west. Did 9-11 change your life, change what you had plans to be doing for these last 25 years? Well, I'm glad that you haven't answered your own question yet either because you've set both of us up to just look like giant freaking pansies here by going to them first. Just asking the questions, Jonah. I'm just asking the questions. It's funny. I'm not going to get into the doghouse for saying this. But it's funny. I'm not going to get in the doghouse for saying this. but it's funny, in some ways, until my daughter was born, 9-11 changed my life more than getting married did. Insofar as once I put a ring on her finger,

like we found an apartment together, we had been dating for years before we got married. And so getting married was great, it was fun, all that kind of stuff. But like, the relationship was pretty solid and settled already. But getting, it was very weird to a, have not been home from my wedding. Like when I left to go to get married, I left in pre-9-11.

I came home after 9-11. Yeah. That was just really weird. Yeah. You know, and it was particularly weird because I was at National Review. National Review Online and 9-11 were deeply symbiotic, you know, in terms of the journalism and the pace of it and all that.

And then my wife is working for the Bush administration. And so just it overturned all sorts of, I never came home to the same professional patterns again. And I think beyond that, it didn't change what I do for a living. It changed dramatically what I read. You know what I mean? Like there was an enormous number of us who probably didn't know who Sayyad Katub was, you know, prior to 9-11, hadn't read a lot of this stuff, hadn't thought about a lot of this stuff in those ways. and it changed Washington so much. It changed conservatism and right-wing journalism so much.

It changed all of that. So it changed my life in all sorts of specific, but it's almost non-specific ways, captures it more. It's like it changed the water in the tank in every way, right? And it's very difficult for me to try to replay the movie backwards. You know, I mean, I've thought about making David's decision and it just, I think, cooler heads prefer. Let's just put it that way.

But I have no reference point in some ways to talk about how it changed my life. It was just the new reality sort of in every facet of what I did for a living and in my private life. You're like, my wife would come home. I'm still convinced she knows about really cool stuff. She wouldn't tell me. And everybody I knew this was their thing now, not for 10 years, but for long enough that there was no going back to the status quo ante. And so really, I mean, the cleats. this will change everything. It kind of just materially did. I don't know if it changed everything in

Wichita, Kansas, or in Peoria in the way that it did for Washington, D.C. You know, for someone worked in journalism in Washington, D.C. with family in New York City, it was a new chapter. Yeah. In every way. I mean, if nothing else, it changed what the country was talking about for the next, I mean, in a profound way for years to come. Yeah. Well, as I said, I was relatively new to the weekly standard. I had come in May of 2001. There had been two departures of staff writers at the weekly standard. Matt Reese was one and Tucker Carlson was the other.

The weekly standard hired me and I was going to try to do a little of what each of them do. Matt Reese used to cover Capitol Hill and the White House and sort of Washington proper. And Tucker did these longer profiles and sort of long-form narrative reporting. And I was going to try to do a little bit of both. I was intimidated as hell. I had wanted to work at the Weekly Standard since it was launched in 1995. I went to grad school in journalism in part so that I could get a job at the weekly standard. And when I got there, you just had the sense that you were covering the most important stories of the day at any time.

I had written a piece, well, this was maybe not the most important story of the day, but I had done a bunch of writing on racial preferences and quotas, and I had done this sort of investigative piece in October of 2000. about racial preferences for tomato farmers in Florida. And I'd uncovered some stuff. And I thought it was, I mean, you name names. We do this. Yeah.

I mean, I think we all probably do this. The stuff that we're working on takes outsized importance. And I thought this was a really big, really important piece. And it just so happens that it was published in the same issue of the weekly standard that I was not yet a full-time employee then. I was hoping to become a full-time employee. So this was sort of a tryout piece. And I was very proud of it. it was published in the same issue of the weekly standard in which we covered the bombing of the USS Cole.

And Ruel Mark Correct, who writes, contributes to the dispatch, had the cover story. And the cover line, if I remember correctly, was at war. And the piece was about how we have to treat this as a war. These people are attacking us. They're going to come attack us more. We need to be serious about this. And I remember thinking at the time, I'm so frustrated that this magazine is sensationalizing. this attack and therefore, you know, discrediting my very important reporting on tomato farming preferences

in Florida. And that was actually my thought. So then the summer of 2001 comes and I leave to do, I'm on the road for a couple weeks doing a profile of Andrew Cuomo, who was then running for governor of New York. And again, thought, you know, he was a big legendary New York family, was running for governor. He had been HUD's secretary at the Clinton administration. I had done a bunch of investigative work, finding out the ways in which he had used his perch at HUD to run for office. I chased him around New York and got to the point where every time he saw me, he kind of rolled his eyes because I would just show up and shove a microphone in his face. And they put that story on the cover.

And I thought, again, this is, you know, this has to be some of the most important work that that someone could do. And then after 9-11, Jonah, as you say, yeah, we were all reading Said Khatoub and we were going back and... Bernard Lewis, sales went through the roof. Right. Mm-hmm. Almost everything I did and read over the next several years related in one way or another to the War on Terror and covering the War on Terror and the Bush administration and its approach to that war.

Let me ask you about that approach with the benefit of 25 years of hindsight. You know, in the immediate aftermath of those attacks, we're going to do this methodically. We're going to do this thoughtfully. this is not going to just be sort of a one-off retaliatory strike. Any later announced that the United States would be undertaking a global war on terrorism, where we would treat regimes that sponsored terrorists, regimes that funded terrorists in precisely the same way that we treat the terrorists themselves. I would say we didn't exactly practice that consistently across the board.

I'm thinking of Pakistan and others. but that was at least the intellectual construct of the war on terror. Mike, to you first, as you think about that and you look back on what the United States did in response to those attacks, was that the right way to think about that? And since it was a global war on terror, did we, in your mind, win that war? So I think there's a lot of hindsight being 2020. people can look at the ways in which we conducted the war in Iraq, the ultimate result of the war in Afghanistan, and look back and claim perfect knowledge of the decisions that were made in 2001 and 2003. There were a lot of mistakes that were made in the way the war in Afghanistan was conducted for 20 consecutive years.

Some of them were large, some of them were small, some of them were enduring, some of the more political, some were made by military leaders. But, you know, ultimately, the war in Afghanistan resulted in a catastrophic. defeat, you know, in 2021. That does not mean in 2001, after we suffered the loss of near 3,000 of our fellow citizens, civilians and military in the Pentagon, that we should not have approached this as though we were at war and under attack from a threat that, by the way, had been communicating to us, we intend to come and kill you ever since 1993. They had been communicating in their actions and twice in very specific words. Just giving you a heads up, we are coming. We are coming. for you and we consider ourselves at war with you. I think, you know, the decision to go to war in

Afghanistan was the right one, obviously. The Taliban was unwilling to root out the al-Qaeda network that they'd been giving safe haven to, and we had really no other choice at that time. Some of the tactical decisions that were made, largely to try to downplay some of the costs of war, and this is a recurring theme. We see it right now with the war in Iran. You know, famously, the Bush administration and decided not to deploy additional forces prior to Torah Bora, which may have allowed Osama bin Laden to escape to Pakistan and prolong the war. In theory, we could have, if we had captured him and killed him there, then we could have declared victory and gone home,

rather than doing so much of the reshaping of Afghanistan that we did badly that resulted in the ultimate boss. People also look back on Iraq and, you know, widely condemn it. And David and I were talking about this the other day that I think it's a mistake to look at Iraq as a failure. You know, it was, the U.S. military achieved what President Bush asked us to achieve, but we did it really badly and in a really inefficient way. And we conducted the war stupidly until about 2007 with the Sawa or the awakening, as it was referred to.

But people also forget what the world in 2002, 2003 was. Number one, we had just suffered this loss in 2001 based on a failure of imagination and a failure to anticipate threats. you said, George Bush said, we can no longer tolerate these lingering threats that may destabilize the region or American interests or threaten us at home, and we are going to deal with them once and for all. The world of Iraq in 2002 was also not just a calm and steady presence either. We had to maintain forces there as part of Operation Northern and Southern Watch. We were, you know, imposing and maintaining an oil embargo that was keeping oil off the international market.

we were dealing with the really corrupt and inefficient food for oil program that was not only lining the pockets of corrupt Iraqi bureaucrats, but also starving the Iraqi people or the economic pressures were. And people forget as well, by the way, that in that 1996 Declaration of War and the 98 Fatwa, one of the prime reasons that Osama bin Laden said he was at war with the United States was the presence of U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia that were there to maintain northern and southern watch. So all of this is connected. Everything goes back to our presence in the Middle East, which, by the way, I'm not a Tucker isolationist or anything like that. I think we should have a forward presence in the Middle East. But some of the things we were doing and maintaining had to be

altered, had to be changed. We had to deal with the problem of Iraq in some way, shape, or form. And we chose the most aggressive way to do it. So I think it's very cynical and very easy in hindsight for those who want to use some of the missteps that took place in the war on terror to try to bolster their claims of a U.S. dominion in the Western Hemisphere and only that. But, you know, there were a lot of missteps along the way. There was a failure in the war in Afghanistan. There was an ugly success in the war in Iraq. But larger, to the larger point, the global war on terror was much more than those two conflicts.

We've been fighting in Somalia. We've been fighting in Yemen. We've been fighting in, you know, these individual cells that spring up, including in Pakistan. And what we have not had since 2001 is a major large-scale attack against the U.S. homeland when there are numerous forces that are absolutely dedicated to doing so. And that should not be taken for granted. The things we know about, the plots that have been defeated and the ones we don't know about that are constantly emerging, those have not occurred. And so as a whole, the global war on terror has been a success and that it has kept America safe.

and it's still going on, and it can't be ignored. We can't ignore the threats from overseas. I just want to emphasize something Mike was talking about, about the global war and terror. There's an element of all this we haven't chatted about it all yet, and that was the anthrax attacks and scare that came right after. So if you're going to be thinking about the psychological state of the United States of America, we go through 9-11, shocking, beyond belief.

And for a very long time, you guys remember, we were thinking the death toll could be 10,000 or more. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I remember the estimates that were on the, just on the headlines. You had the posters of missing people just all over, you know, like Lower Manhattan. Have you seen this person?

The shock and trauma, I think we don't remember it because we block it in some ways, that we just don't like to go there. It's sort of similar how nobody likes to talk about the pandemic. Nobody likes to talk about the pandemic. the days after 9-11. And if I had pulled any of you aside and said, we're going to pursue a military strategy

that whatever its other merits or demerits is going to result in no more attacks like this for the next 25 years, you would say, where do I sign up for that? And the reason why I bring that back is that also the war on terror morphed from how do we destroy al-Qaeda as best we can and keep America safe,

into what you might call bigger reach goals. Like how do we fundamentally transform Iraq and Afghanistan so that they can never be homes of terror again? And so if you break things down by different objectives, the way I would put it is the global war on terrorism is an ongoing success, a costly success, but an ongoing success, and the proof is in the pudding. The worst terror attack we've had by far since 9-11

was the Pulse nightclub shooting. That was an American citizen radicalized here. That was not an al-Qaeda-trained terrorist operation like we faced on 9-11. It's been so successful that we've had many more deaths from homegrown right-and-left-wing extremists since 9-11 than we've had from jihadists in political violence. So that's an ongoing success.

I agree completely with Mike that the war in Iraq has been a costly victory. We won that. Saddam Hussein is gone. the follow-on al-Qaeda insurgency is defeated. The ISIS caliphate is in ruins. And now Iraq is a, I mean, I'm not going to say they're a Denmark-style ally, but they're roughly an ally in the Middle East, part of the solution more than they are part of the problem in many ways. And we unequivocally lost in our effort to fundamentally transform Afghanistan. No ifs, answer buts about that. But even now,

you don't have the kind of sustained al-Qaeda Taliban presence that existed in September 10th, 2001, and the kind of capabilities that existed on September 10th, 2001. And so I really do believe that in all this talk that we've seen rise on the right that was going on for a long time on the left about the forever wars and their futility, is just really missing the mark in a lot of ways. And one other thing about it, I also think that we were disproportionately shaped by the very unexpected early success. Because again, if you go back and you think about the run up to Afghanistan or the, as we were ramping up to go into Afghanistan, as we were going into Iraq, the comparisons to Vietnam are everywhere with thousands and thousands of casualties, I can remember saying casualty estimates of 20,000 for the Battle of Baghdad alone.

just that one, that there could be 20,000 losses. And all of a sudden, in weeks the Taliban fall, in weeks Saddam Hussein falls, and you had this sort of temporary honeymoon period before the insurgencies sort of ramped up that made us feel like we were on top of the world, which I then think made the insurgencies feel that much more sort of shocking, unexpected.

I thought we'd won already. when the reality was this was always going to be in many ways one of our most difficult conflicts. It was always because we were going to be fighting an enemy that wasn't in uniform that had no mechanism for surrendering

or giving up or anything like that that was deeply rooted in a fanatical religious ideology that had every interest in blending in with the civilian population as much as possible to harm as many civilians as possible to advance their cause. There's no circumstance

under where that is an easy fight. None. And I feel like by right after, you know, early 2002, much less mid-2003, Americans had enjoyed such success in both of the big theaters of operation that the follow-on insurgencies were almost like, what did we do wrong? When I think the proper answer was, this was always going to unfold like this. I just, I like Mike's optimism that had we cut off Osama bin Laden from Torobora that that might have changed the Ark Afghanistan. Maybe, maybe I tend to think that we've cut the head off of so many snakes, only to see various heads regrow to think that it would have been hard to ever escape the kind of grinding counterinsurgency operations that we dealt with. And so I just think it was always going to be very hard,

very long, very bloody, and in many ways very unsatisfying. Before we take an ad break, please consider becoming a member of the dispatch. You'll unlock access to bonus podcast episodes and all of our exclusive newsletters and articles. You can sign up at the dispatch.com slash join and if you use the promo code roundtable, you'll get a month for free. Speaking of ads, if they aren't your thing, you can upgrade to a premium membership. No ads, early access to all episodes, two free gift memberships to give away exclusive town halls with the founders and more. Okay, we'll be right back. Welcome back. Let's return. turn to our discussion. Yeah, Jonah, to what extent are we a victim of our own success here? I mean, I think David makes a very good point that in those days immediately following the attacks, and really, you know, months, longer than those days immediately following the attacks. There was this sort of collective sense of vulnerability that almost everybody felt. And I think it carried through up to and into the beginning of the Iraq War,

where there was this sense of resolve that we were not going to be hit like this again. This was a failure of imagination. We had failed to understand both what Al-Qaeda and fellow radical Islamists wanted to do and how they could do it. And that sense of vulnerability, I think, kept us together in a way that obviously no longer exists anymore. How, in your view, has what we've been through and the fact that these wars went on as long as they did with as many unexpected challenges. as we saw shaped our sense of collective vulnerability today. Yeah, it's an interesting way of asking the question. I want to back up for just a second and say that when you ask,

was this thing of a success, was the war on terror success, right? Which were folding in both Iraq and Afghanistan into and a lot of other things, right? The measuring stick, you know, the standard, the metric changes the question, right? And so I think what the folks here are saying that, like, the Dick Cheney metric of this thing is never going to happen again and we're going to do, you know, what we got to do, it's been a success, right? There were a lot of people who thought there would be more 9-11s. I mean, just a lot of people. David's entirely right about the anthrax thing. I think the anthrax thing is the most memory-hold aspect of that period.

You would not have the Department of Homeland Security, but for the anthrax threat. also a lot of dear friends and relatives would have thank you notes from my wedding but for the anthrax threat because they destroyed all of our thank you notes and it took years to find out how many people didn't never got a thank you note my wife is still very bitter about it that said i got to say i've been thinking about this a bit because there's been a lot of you know 25 years later discourse and whatnot i think the military more or less gets not not just passing grade, but high grades. I mean, I take the point about the first few years of the Iraq war was not ideal, but I think some of that has to do with more of the strategic planners

than the actual military, but, or the politicians. I got to say, America kind of failed in a lot of different ways and to a lot of different degrees. A lot of the American left, of the intellectual left, hated the whole conversation about the war, right? It violated all sorts of sort of tenants and and commitments that they had. I remember Sam Tannenhouse, who I have a lot of disagreements with, had a great piece in the New Republic very early, very early after 9-11

talking about how the left was determined to make the coming crackdown on free speech the real issue. There was a lot of Catholic-Palot had a thing about not flying the American flag. It is an amazing cultural fact that it was far, far, far, throwing a few more fars,

easier to depict Islamic terrorism in the 1990s in Hollywood than it was after 9-11. The depiction of Islamic terrorism was almost verboten after 9-11 in Hollywood. When they remade Tom Clancy's Some of All Fears, the idea of a bunch of radical Muslims terrorists wanting to get a nuclear weapon to blow up in American city was just too provocative or too far-fetched or something. thing. So they changed it to a secret cabal of Dick Cheney like CEOs in Europe who were trying to bring back the fourth Reich. Okay? So like

there was a lot of stupid stuff that people didn't want to have the arguments that mattered. They wanted to have the arguments that benefited their priors. The rush to create the discourse of the Islamophobic backlash. I'm not saying there wasn't backlash. There was. Like, it's not shocking

that there would be, and I'm not forgiving it or writing it off. But if memory serves, in every single year after 9-11 for a decade, there were more reported hate crimes against American Jews than there were against American Muslims. But the whole way, a lot of the media want to talk about it, a lot of mainstream media refused air images that they thought would be too provocative. And I guess the American people didn't handle in the long run, our institutions didn't handle too well. It's a lot of stupid stuff that endured in terms of security theater that came from it.

And, you know, I think that it's a weird thing. I remember a lot of our people, speaking broadly, having mild disdain, resentment or some other forms of grievances or second-guessing about George H.W. Bush and Colin Powell deciding not to go in to Iraq after liberating Kuwait. And what's interesting to me about the question of victims of success is, or misled by success, as David put it, we keep doing that, right? Like, though not going into Iraq, it turns out in retrospect, was the last time we didn't get misled by our own success. Look at what Trump, you know, misinterpreted out.

of Venezuela or out of the first 10, 20 days of Iran. Military performs wonderfully. It does great things. It liberates Kabul. It topples Saddam. And we think, oh, well, it's just going to be a straight line projection from here. And so in some ways, it's the civilian leadership that screwed up a lot of these things. By not being judicious, prudential, belts and suspenders kinds of people, you also created a vast apparatus of,

of domestic surveillance that is now, as a lot of libertarian friends that we mocked, or at least National Review crowd, mocked a lot in the early days after 9-11, although I was always against the Department of Homeland Security, is now being turned towards Trump's political opponents.

The piece in the Washington Post about this just the other day. And so there's a lot of hangover from this that creates a lot of regret on my part. The weird thing is that the regrets I don't have is like, I remember getting into huge fights with Juan Cole, remember that guy? And I was like, well, let's make a bet about where Iraq is and, you know, pick the timeline, 20 years or something like that.

And how dare you? I'll do you bet on lives and blah, blah, blah, blah. And we got a big early blogosphere fight about all of it. I would have won my bet. Because, like, Iraq, it's not the best. It's not Jeffersonian democracy. But we just had this guy, this elected guy in the White House. Like, it's stable.

We have to, there's some work to be done on some of the Shia militia stuff. but like it's better now than anyone, than, you know, anyone would have predicted in 2010. But where we failed is just sort of how we talk about this stuff, how we think about this stuff. We now have all of these apologists for Osama bin Laden and for al-Qaeda and for the 9-11 attacks running for office and surrounded by people

who were like unapologetically, you know, on al-Qaeda side. The whole Hassan Piker stuff, Abdul-Said, Tucker Carlson, the idiotic need in our culture to be transgressive and to take pieties and turn them into, it's a very Nietzschean thing. You take what's considered sacred and holy and you step on it to get attention and to undermine values. That has seeped into our culture since 9-11 in ways that I never would have imagined.

You just have, you know, there's this lawyer who works for Zoramundali who represented one of the 9-11 guys. Like, it's, it's appalling in a lot of ways. And I think it's like, it's, like, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, kind of thing that's very difficult to talk about 25 years later because you don't want to seem anti-Islamic and you don't want to like make it that really kind of issue but the cultural relevance of and frisson that you get from defending the attacks on america and the chickens coming home to roost argument that it has such purchase on both the fringe right and the dsa which is not that fringe

anymore left is really depressing and it's a sign of a lack of sort of civilization confidence on our part that I think was exposed over the long haul by 9-11, and it's depressing to me. David, pick up on that point. In what ways we, Jonah mentioned the Department of Homeland Security, talked about the sort of changing shape of our national debates. In what ways did what happened on that day, 9-11, and the U.S. response to it shaped the politics of today. What are we seeing today that we can point to that we say, but for the 9-11 attacks, we wouldn't be seeing this.

Oh, I mean, it's so many parts of our politics today are but for the 9-11 attacks, we wouldn't dot, dot, dot, that it's almost impossible to untangle and unwind. And I think, again, you know, with the benefit of 25 years of hindsight, if I had a theme that I was going to use to sort of describe why everything seemed to go south, in a relatively short span of time

between the unity of 9-11, the Congress singing on the steps of the Capitol, the 90% Bush approval rating, something I never thought I'd ever seen my life, images of like good liberals from Manhattan cheering B-52 strikes in Afghanistan. Like, these things happened. It sounds weird to say that,

but literally you would see gatherings of people in New York City looking at the TV footage of the airstrikes outside of Kabul and other places in Afghanistan, and they were cheering like it was a football game. This was the anger, the fury, the sense of overwhelming national unity. But what happened next? The more I think about it, the more I think it was,

I'm not going to say there weren't mistakes. There were definite mistakes. But in many ways, the nature of the mistakes that we made were almost inevitable given the nature of the challenge that we faced. And let me just, I mentioned COVID earlier. Let me pull it back a little bit and compare it to COVID. What is one of the key reasons why COVID did not pull us together in a national unified response? Well, there's a couple of reasons.

One is in a pandemic, your neighbor is a threat. Your neighbor isn't an ally. Your neighbor can become a threat. They can make you sick. A pandemic, we don't really understand. We don't know exactly how to combat it. So you have a lot of fog of war and confusion that when somebody's wrong, it undermines trust. And when somebody's right and not believed, it undermines trust.

Now let's put that post-9-11. What were we fighting? We were fighting an enemy who, by its very nature, was trying its best to be deceptive, to blend into the population. Remember, if you see something, say something. And so all of a sudden, it's not like, you know, we are. are sitting there thinking, okay, we're now all united together. Almost immediately you start thinking, okay, is this person a threat or is that person a threat? And sadly, some of it was related

to do they look Arab or do they look Muslim? And I'm incredibly proud of the American public. We did not succumb. We really did not succumb to that wave of Islamophobia that so many people in the media and academia expected us to succumb to. But the very nature of what we were fighting was not conducive to the kind of unified, sustained public response because it was so shadowy, because it was so intentionally deceptive, because there was never any possibility of a surrender. So we started to have this view that, well, to the extent we're still fighting,

we're fighting because we choose to, and which makes it all the more contentious. And so I think a lot of our problems that we suffered, yes, I'm going to agree with Jonah. I can point to one, two, three things that I wish very clearly were done differently. I wish we had twice as many troops. Was it General McCaffrey, Mike, who was saying, and the run-up, we needed $300,000 plus, and Rumsfeld was like, get him away from me.

I can see his face. He was later Secretary of Veterans Affairs. He was chief of staff of the Army at the time, the Black Barre guy. I'm flanking on his name, though, at the time. Yeah, so there were some mistakes. We should have gone in with more people. I do not believe we should have dissolved the Iraqi Army. Debatification turned out to be kind of a disaster

because it stripped out the entire Iraqi civil service. All of these things I can point to and I can say we made a mistake. I agree with Mike, there was a mistake outside of Tora Bora. We made mistakes, there's no question about it. But I do think that we underestimate. We always underestimate the extent to which the enemy gets a vote. We're so hubristic. We believe in our power so much.

And look, the way to fight us is the way that al-Qaeda and ISIS have fought us. That is the way to fight a power like us. And, you know, it is, from that standpoint, I feel like I have a lot more grace, I think, maybe, for some of the challenges that we faced because we underestimate the extent to which the very nature of the enemy itself

drove us into sometimes impossible seeming choices. And I think as a general matter, we underestimate the extent to which evil leaves good with very few good options to address it. And that's where we were then, that's where we are now. And I can say that without in any way excusing the fact that we did make some pretty big mistakes. I think that we did.

But I also do not think there was a scenario where this was going to be anything other than extraordinarily difficult and messy. I mean, ask the IDF after October 7th. I mean, this is hard, hard, hard, and it's dehumanizing to everybody who participates in it. Do you have to cling to your humanity with both hands when you're dealing with an enemy like we dealt with?

I could tell you stories. I'm sure you might could tell you stories a hundred times worse than my stories, but the stories I could tell are not suitable for a family podcast with kids maybe listening in the car. as to what our enemy was like and how they behaved. And so I just wanna put that out there to note that in our deeply human institutions,

we made mistakes, but a vicious evil enemy exploited our humanity relentlessly and turned it against us and ultimately turned us against each other and ourselves. I agree with all of that, but I do think it's worth pointing out, or at least putting a pin in an idea. The way our enemies behaved was absolutely,

barbaric, but I think one of the lessons that a lot of people took, rightly or wrongly, correctly or incorrectly, which are not necessarily the same thing, is that a lot of our friends weren't the kinds of people that we wanted to spend about it and treasure on. Yeah. And what I mean by it is, like, I remember a friend of mine talking about a Marine buddy of his who was on Overwatch on, or I don't know if that's the right term, but he was on a rooftop, you know, in a safe part of Baghdad. And he was watching just normal people doing what they were doing.

And some of the things that he saw, which I won't get gross here, were sufficiently gross. He's like, why am I risking my life to protect these people? And I think the Bush rhetoric, which had its Wilsonian strains of freedom is a desire that rests beneath every beating heart, a lot of people were like, you know, like, I do think Osama bin Laden hated us for our freedom. I mean, I really do. I mean, I think that's a fair, you know, way of putting it. That said, there are a whole bunch of people that a lot of Americans looked at and said, you know, this is not us coming to the aid of the British. And then you have waves of immigration where people, you know, one of the reasons,

one of the things that just incites irrational or rational rage in a lot of people is when you get new immigrants who come to America and they just trash talk America in our system and all that. And I just think that some of the demons that came out of the Pandora's box, because of 9-11, are still really, really with us on both sides of lots of arguments in ways that I think just a lot of people didn't appreciate at the time. And ideological anti-Americanism of the sort of red-green alliance, which we see much more in Europe than we see here, but is a real thing. You know, the people around Abdul-Sayed have a very serious idiot. theological disagreement with the United States of America and its premises in our culture.

And the number of people who think, oh, it's just ha ha, isn't it funny? Let's burn a Quran, who I, let me be clear, are jackasses. That strain has been turbocharged in American life as well. And I just don't think we ever had the leadership from the right or the left to be able to navigate this stuff. There were just too many people invested in narratives rather than invested in the reality of what this was going to do to the culture, what this could do to the culture, what our friends and enemies were really like, and it's still unfolding today. Well, I think there were a lot of pie-in-the-sky ideas that we could transform Afghanistan, not only transform it in wholesale ways that it is not susceptible to change, but also that we could do it

very quickly, as opposed to some kind of incremental changes that were required. One of the things we really did is we confused democracy. with legitimacy and tried to impose a system that was foreign to them, where they were more suitable to a kind of pseudo feudalism that was done through regions and provinces and villages, all basically with a loose control from Kabul as opposed to something that looked like American democracy. And that translated as well to our mistakes in trying to make the Afghan army look like the United States Army and make it relying on capabilities that we provided that when we withdrew, they had developed a dependency on, and that led to the all.

ultimate fall of 2021. I think one of the things, you know, it's hard in hindsight to remember the immediate days, but I believe the first time I felt like there was a direction that someone was telling us what was going on and that this was going to be okay was George Bush's joint session on September 20th, where he delivered a speech that was written by the same people that were hanging out with you, Steve, at the weekly standard office just a few days early. earlier. And I think it's funny because I think it's been forgotten, but it is a truly great speech. It is a great speech. And there is a line in there that I carried with me all through to this. We will not tire. We will not falter. We will not fail. And in that moment, I believed that.

And to Jonas' point, I think we did definitely two of those. We definitely tired and we definitely faltered. And in the case of Afghanistan, specifically, we definitely failed. I think the problem is both sides, to Jonah's point, will claim some kind of panacea for the problem. We either need to transform Afghanistan and make it Western democracy immediately, or we just need to kill more Muslims because they all deserve it. And there is no real appreciation for the problem at hand. And I think we like your point as well, Jonah, the failure to appreciate why our early successes were successes and where we demonstrated restraint, you know, President Trump rightly decided to conduct Midnight Hammer, and that was, there was a bookend on that story.

We achieved something, and we could walk away. And if he had stopped his military engagement with Iran there, he would deserve all the credit for it. Instead, he took that and wanted to build on that, and we have this unresolved situation where he doesn't know whether to be more aggressive or less aggressive. Well, thank you all for joining us for this conversation. Thank you to Mike, Jonah, and David, we have to leave it there. We have gone long yet again. I'm bad in the timekeeping role.

But I appreciate your taking the time to have this conversation. I've found it very interesting in the past few weeks as we've approached this 25th anniversary of 9-11 to try to talk to my own kids about what the attack meant. I haven't spent a lot of time doing that to this point. And I've found it a challenge to get them to appreciate and understand just how significant. this was in modern American history, and I think the three of you really helped provide that important context. So the kids, the Hayes kids are going to be assigned listening to this dispatch podcast so that they understand it better. Thanks, and we'll talk to you next time.

Finally, if you want to support what we're doing here, you can rate review and subscribe to the show on your podcast player of choice to help new listeners find us. And speaking of support, here's a shout out to a few folks who recently joined as founding lifetime members. Michael Patterson, Scott Hooker, and Jay Fisher. Glad to have you aboard. As always, if you've got questions, comments, concerns, or corrections, you can email us at Roundtable at the dispatch.com. We read everything.

That's going to do it for today's show. Thanks so much for tuning in, and thank you to the folks behind the scenes who made this episode possible. Noah Hickey and Peter Bonaventure. Thanks again for listening. Please join us next time.