The Rest Is History - 95. 9/11

Episode Date: September 9, 2021

On the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, four commercial airliners were hijacked above the US by the militant Islamist terrorist group al-Qaeda. What followed was the deadliest terrorist attack in history. Twenty years on, Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland look back at the events and discuss their impact. A Goalhanger Films & Left Peg Media production Produced by Jack Davenport Exec Producer Tony Pastor *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. On the evening of 11th September 1683, in the hills outside Vienna, the Polish King Jan Sobieski launched what remains the largest cavalry charge in history. Within the hour his hussars had smashed the morale of their Ottoman opponents and driven them from the field. The siege of Vienna was lifted, the tide of Ottoman imperialism was turned back, and in that moment, it's often said, the balance of power between Christendom and Islam changed forever. So when exactly 20 years ago Osama bin Laden chose the same date, the 11th of September,

to launch his attacks on New York and Washington DC, he did so very deliberately. This was his attempt to reverse what Jan Sobieski had done outside Vienna and to pull off a similarly spectacular world-changing victory that would be remembered for centuries to come. But will it? Tom Holland, will 9-11 be remembered as long as the siege of Vienna? That's a very good question. I suspect it will because it was filmed. Yeah. And I think that anything that's filmed is destined to last. And that was a key aspect of 9-11, was that it was designed to have an incredible visual impact. Yeah. Planned as a spectacle, wasn't it? It's planned as a spectacle. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, so we're doing this obviously because it's the 20th anniversary of 9-11,

which when it happened felt like the most seismic of global events. Yes. I mean, do you feel it's kind of maintained that status 20 years on? That's a really interesting question because I think it's a very good example of how the meaning of historical events changes over time, isn't it? I think it felt like, in my lifetime, I would say there are two global events that felt absolutely earth shattering. And one was the fall of the Berlin Wall wall and 9-11 was the other one.

But of course, 9-11 was more visceral because as you say, it was planned as a spectacle and it felt like something from, you know, it felt unimaginable, but it felt at the same time, like something you'd seen at the cinema. And the meaning of it now, 20 years on, particularly in the aftermath of the retreat from Afghanistan, feels different, doesn't it? Because we now know what happened next. So we know that it led to two wars. It led indirectly, anyway, to two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, both of which involved hundreds of thousands of casualties and didn't end well for the West. So I think it will always be remembered.

But a bit like, I mean mean this is such a hackneyed I feel ashamed of myself for even making it but it does feel a bit like the assassination of Franz Ferdinand as in 1914 the trigger for the First World War because it did trigger wars

that unfolded as the protagonists did not expect but I guess the difference is that 9-11 was also loaded with all kinds of cultural, kind of intellectual, ideological meanings, wasn't it? About the clash of civilizations and about Islam and the West and modernity against supposed medievalism and so on, which is kind of your territory really. Yes. I mean, I guess that was pretty much how I certainly saw it.

It was almost impossible not to see it through the prism of those East-West, Islam, all that kind of stuff. But I think now that my take on it would be that it was really about globalization. Right. I think. And I think that oddly, in that sense, Bin Laden and George Bush are kind of on the same side, almost. I mean, it sounds a kind of heretical thing to say. Because they're universalizers, do you think? Both of them are universalizers. So if we go back to the Islam-Christianity thing, the thing about Islam and Christianity is that they're both universalist, missionary faiths.

They both feel that they have a kind of a right, a duty to spread their understanding of the world for the good of humanity as far as they possibly can. And Bin Laden and Bush were both the heirs of those assumptions. But I think also they're both expressive of that very distinctive moment in the 90s and the early noughties that we talked about before on the 90s episode, where globalization is seen as as a positive yes but lots of people hate it and actually both bush and bin laden come a cropper because they overestimate people's readiness to embrace a kind of globalized world i think yeah i think i think there's a lot

of truth in that i mean i was thinking about this yesterday and reading up on the sort of 1990s context so that the 9-11 um is obviously much closer to the fall of the berlin wall than it is to us now i mean it's 10 years or so from the fall of the berlin wall 12 years and it's 20 years away from us um and i think it it kind of the way one way that i would make sense of it is in the back after all the stuff you know francis fukuyama and the end of history, his argument, the Western liberals. I mean, that's the classic universalizing argument. The Western liberal, that history is this sort of Hegelian struggle of ideologies. And the last one, the last man standing is liberal democracy. And that that is going to, you know, that is going to conquer. But there are also books like in 1990, I mean, so early, actually, in 1992, a guy called Benjamin Barber wrote an article in The Atlantic called Jihad versus McWorld.

Became a book a year later, very successful at the time, saying, you know, there were two, basically, that there were two forces that will decide the course of human affairs. One is globalization and the other is, I think, what he called tribalism. So he basically... But he's equating tribalism with jihad yeah but he's using jihad very he's using it loosely actually he doesn't just mean islamic fundamentalism he means i get i think he gets that spectacularly wrong because i think the whole point the whole point about bin laden is that he like bush is an internationalist yeah yeah and and that's And this is a sense that's been very much sharpened by what's going on in Afghanistan at the moment. Because the point about the Taliban,

where bin Laden took refuge, is that the Taliban regarded bin Laden with considerable suspicion when he took refuge there. I mean, they viewed him as a kind of a problem that had been left in Afghanistan by the warlords that bin Laden had been fighting with and who the Taliban had overthrown. And specifically, they were suspicious of bin Laden. They were suspicious of the fact that he appeared on TV, Taliban banned TV. They were suspicious of the kind of the rootless cosmopolitanism. Well, the modernity of Al-Qaeda, right? Of all the various people from the various Arab countries that had come to join bin Laden.

They were suspicious of this. Just as conversely, bin Laden regarded the Taliban with a kind of measure of contempt, a kind of, you know, a globalist contempt for bumpkins because they weren't interested in global jihad. Tom, let me just, our producer is saying we should remind people who Osama bin Laden was. Yes, we should. That seems an extraordinary thing to say,

but of course, he's quite right. Younger listeners, we assume, of course, that everyone is as steeped in this as we are, but it is 20 years ago. So give us a very quick sort of bio of Osama bin Laden, but very broad brush. So Osama, well, I think actually we should pull the camera out even further and we should try and just look at, just explain what built up to 9-11 and then the aftermath for people who may not be

particularly familiar with it. So the context that I think is provided by the way in which the West's universalism over the past two centuries has come to put in the shade Islam's claim to universalism. And in the Muslim world, there have been various responses to this. Accommodation, ranging from to outright opposition. In the 90s, when it looked, as you said, the end of history, the triumph of the West, liberal democracies prevailed everywhere. This sharpens and hardens a feeling among Islamic radicals that this Western triumphalism has to be opposed. a Saudi, Osama bin Laden, skin of a very, very kind of prosperous Saudi industrialist family, making concrete and all kinds of things like that. He's, I think, the 19th son or something like that. And he goes off, as romantic young men have always done, to go and fight for noble causes. And his cause is fighting the Soviets and then in Afghanistan.

The Soviets leave. Bin Laden comes to the conclusion that America, the great Satan, and Satan in Islam is a tempter. It's not quite the embodiment of evil that he is in the Western imagination. He's the tempter. So America is the great Satan. Bin Laden comes to think that rather than fight local wars, as the Taliban have been doing in Afghanistan, what is needed is to join Muslims across the world in a common battle against their common enemy, because bin Laden comes to see that all these kind of local battles, the fact that there is infidel influence in Afghanistan, the fact that after the first Iraq war, there are American troops in Arabia, and Mohammed had specifically said that there should be only one faith, only one deed, only one religion in Arabia, that this is an outrage that across the entire Muslim world, the West is kind of intruding and particularly America. And therefore, they need to take the fight to the Americans. And so he forms this group, Al-Qaeda, which basically means the foundation, the base, to launch the fight back.

And he comes to the conclusion that the best way to do this is to attack America in its homeland. And so he recruits various young men to embark on a martyrdom operation. They will go to America. They will learn to fly. And on 9-11 or the 11th of september as we call it yeah um they uh they fly the plan is that they will fly four planes into various icons of american financial military and governmental power so the twin towers of uh in uh in new york which comes off the pentagon which comes off and either the capital or the White House. This doesn't come off because the people on the hijacked planes realize what's happening,

force the patrols to crash the plane. I mean, unbelievably moving story, even now, 20 years on. When you read it, you kind of feel your eyeballs prickling at the storming that are coming down and everything yeah it's it's powerful stuff and all of this of course is being played out as you say on television um you know this is the first age where kind of messages can can bounce around the world um the internet is cranking up um and so it's it apart from anything else, it's an incredible spectacle. Yeah, it is. And it's devastating for Americans in particular, both for that reason, but also because they've been attacked on American soil. And America had come to see itself as being basically impregnable within its own homeland.

And so the question then becomes, well, what are they going to do? And President Bush, who's been flying all around America and various bases on 9-11 itself, decides that they're not going to treat this as a criminal operation. They're not going to treat it as a police matter. They're going to treat it as something altogether more existential. America is at war, and it is at war with terror. Well, let's come to that. Let's come to the reaction a little bit later. But let's unpack a couple of things there. So Osama bin Laden, it's often said that al-Qaeda and bin Laden and so on, they were mad, irrational, and so on. But actually, he published numerous statements explaining quite sort of specifically his goal, his objections and his goals. And the two things that come up again and again are obviously American support for Israel. But one of them is that thing that you mentioned about American troops in Saudi Arabia. And that's obviously a consequence of the Gulf War. And a little known fact is that

bin Laden had offered his mujahideen to the Saudi king to protect them against Saddam Hussein, when everybody thought that Saddam was going to go on from Kuwait and attack Saudi Arabia. And the king of Saudi Arabia said, no, thank you. I can live without your 50 ragtag men. I'd rather have the US military. And bin Laden is absolutely incensed by this. And my question to you, Tom, is how much do you think that's shared? I mean, how much is that personal peak in a way that his homeland has got American troops in it and he has this animus against America? And how much is that more widely shared, a sort of sense of outrage that American troops in particular, the embodiment of Western modernity, are guarding the holy places, as it were. I think it's a kind of... The embers are definitely hot and they can be blown on.

And that's essentially what bin Laden sets himself to do. But I think that bin Laden is expressive of a whole trend within Islamic militancy, which sees a need to respond to Westernization, let's call it that, Westernization, by looking back to the example of the prophet and his companions, so the Salafists. And this Salafist tradition then fuses with a Jihadi tradition. And the Jihadi tradition is the idea that you best serve God by fighting to maintain the dignity,

indeed the power of his dispensation. So Salafi jihadism is a trend that has, you know, it's a kind of movement. It's a way of seeing the world that has been kind of bubbling away below the surface. And the thing is that the West is not looking at this. Its eye has been fixed on the Cold War for so long. And even after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it can't take this stuff seriously. Because people getting cross about

American troops being present in Arabia because the prophet had said that no Christians or Jews should be allowed into Arabia seems mad to Americans. Likewise, bin Laden is terribly upset about the end of the caliphate. So after 9-11, he issues a statement and he says, what America is tasting now is something insignificant compared to what we, i.e. Muslims, have tasted for scores of years. Our nation has been tasting this humiliation and degradation for more than 80 years. And he's talking there about the ending of the caliphate, which was the end of the Ottoman Empire. Now, this is not the kind of stuff that in Langley,

anyone in CIA is taking seriously at all, or in MI5 or in the French security services or anything like that. But Tom, there is a sense in America, though, that there has been a growing sense, I think, since the Iranian revolution and America's humiliation and the hostage crisis at the end of the 1970s into 1980, that there was a new enemy, as it were, awakening. So this is a very strange thing to talk about in a podcast about 9-11. But we watched The Naked Gun the other day, you know, the Leslie Nielsen film. And the beginning of that is a scene in which the hero,

Frank Drebin, he bursts in and all America's enemies are gathered in a room. Now, Gorbachev is there, but he's not the chairman. The chair of the meeting is the Ayatollah Khamenei. And the other people around the room are Yasser Arafat. I mean, Idi Amin is there, bizarrely. So Yasser Arafat is there. Saddam Hussein is there, bizarrely. So Yasser Arafat is there. Saddam Hussein is there? I'm not sure if Saddam Hussein is there.

Kind of Gaddafi is there. I think because when it was made, late 80s, Gaddafi was loomed larger in the Western consciousness as a hate figure than Saddam Hussein did, actually, because, of course, Libya had been involved in sponsoring terrorism and so on. And it happens in the Middle East as well. I think it happens in the scene set in Morocco or somewhere. Or Beirut, sorry. It's in Beirut, isn't it happens in the Middle East as well. I think it happens in, the scene is set in Morocco or somewhere,

or Beirut, sorry, it's in Beirut. It's Beirut, isn't it? Yeah. It is in Beirut. So there's already a sense there that the Cold War is being, I mean, it's such a strange thing to allude to, but the Cold War is being shuffled off stage

because Gorbachev says at one point, I have the Americans believing I'm a nice guy. Whereas the others are clearly out and out villains. And there's a sort of, I think there was a growing sense in the 1990s you see this in so many hollywood films that the neck the new threat was going to come from the middle east and from islamic fundamentalism don't you think so all that sort of samuel huntingdon stuff the clash of civilizations for example but not not not quite in the in the way that the salafi jihadists embody it because because the thing you know gaddafi is i mean his relationship to islam is very ambivalent

yes of course yeah there's this kind of bartist tradition which is basically kind of you know i mean it's bartism is fact which is the ideology of of saddam hussein and of the asads in syria well that's about modern modern, isn't it? Yeah. That's founded by a Christian. So that's a kind of sinister fascist... I mean, basically, there's more to fascism than it does to Islam. Ayatollah Khomeini, he's a Shiite. And so Shiism is not missionary in the way that Sunniism is. So these are kind of the two great traditions within Islam. What bin Laden brings to the imagination, and I think you're actually right to frame it in terms of Hollywood, because this is an influence on how the Americans understand 9-11. But it's also,

I mean, it's an influence on how Bin Laden comes to imagine attacking the trade center, because in the training camps, most of the people who are going there, they're kind of deracinated. They're people from often very westernized. They're kind of younger sons of wealthy families like Bin Laden himself. They're often English speaking. These are very, very kind of internationalist camps. And in the evenings after they've done their training and their indoctrination and everything, they will sit down and they will watch Hollywood films. They're kind of big fans of Schwarzenegger and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, it's fascinating.

And so what 9-11 does is to cast Bin Laden actually as a kind of Bond villain. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. In his cave network, his base. I remember all those illustrations in the newspapers claiming that this was this incredibly sophisticated bunker. The Ayatollah or Gaddafi or Idi Amin or I suppose Kim Jong-un in, what was it, the puppet one? Team America. Team America. I mean, these are all baddies who are leaders of countries. Bin Laden is stateless. Bin Laden has had his Saudi passport taken away from him. And that's what makes him such a kind of ideal figure to play the role of a Bond villain. And you're right about that. So when after 9-11, the Americans and NATO attack Afghanistan and they move into the Tora Bora mountains, and Bin Laden and al-Qaeda are hiding out in caves.

And I remember there was a kind of picture in the Sunday Times of this cave complex. They didn't actually say it had swimming pools, but they might as well have done. It was entirely fabricated from someone who'd been watching James Bond films. It's Blofeld's base, basically, isn't it? Yes, absolutely. And there was all this kind of talk about how they were fighting their way through cave complexes and things. Absolute rubbish. You know, there were no cave complexes.

There was none of it. It was just a load of caves. But that kind of internationalism, you know, both sides saw the other as the embodiment of a kind of sinister and terrifying conspiracy to take over the world and destroy everything that was good. So Bin Laden is talking about good and evil. He's talking about God and Satan. And Bush, likewise, in the aftermath of 9-11, is talking about good and evil. Axis of evil.

Yes, exactly. Exactly. And I think you're absolutely right about the internationalism of the sort of al-Qaeda recruits. I mean, Mohammed Atta, for example, he was the chief hijacker. He was the oldest. He was, yeah, he'd studied urban planning. Egyptian from Hamburg.

Exactly. He'd studied urban planning in Hamburg. This extraordinary story, I'm not sure how true this is, that his parents or his father had overheard two Germans speaking on holiday in Egypt and had spoken to them and had talked to them. And they turned out to be running a sort of exchange scheme. And he said, oh, you know,

my son's really interested in urban planning. Can he come to? And he goes off to Germany. And it's that classic thing, which you also see with Said Qutub, who's one of the sort of, arguably the sort of founding father of modern Islamic militancy, isn't he?

That of the sort of the guy who's been uprorooted he's gone to the sort of modern western country and he's lonely miserable um people aren't you know friendly to him people are mean to him and he feels left out and that resentment grows and grows and builds and builds and you see that pattern don't you again and again um in the profiles of the of some of these people involved in the story. Well, I mean, I think it's interesting. So Atta is Egyptian. Zahiri, who is bin Laden's number two. I think he's still currently... He's still out there.

He's still out there. He's in Al-Qaeda, isn't he? Somewhere. He knows where he is. I mean, he's Egyptian. He was a surgeon, got involved in the assassination of President Sadat in 1981. Sadat, of course, having signed

the peace concord with Israel. So that was his crime. And you mentioned Saeed Khattoub, who was a kind of stoop-shouldered, balding, very shy Egyptian who goes in the aftermath of the, of the second world war to America, to New York, to Washington. And then to this town in, in Colorado, which was kind of temp founded by temperance. So it's, I mean,

it's very, very straight laced, but he regarded it as absolutely Solomon Gamora and was, was kind of obsessed by the, the lewdness of American women and all kinds of things. He wrote lots of weird stuff about their buttocks and stuff. Clearly, there's a lot going on in his subconscious. Yeah, and so I think that with Egypt,

so this is all coming off the backdrop. This is why I want to do Napoleon in Egypt, because, of course, Egypt is the first target, really, for the modern West. Napoleon conquers it, then the British inherit it. And I think that for Egyptians, Cairo, the great cultural centre of Islam in its golden ages, to go from the chaos of Cairo, the poverty of Cairo, to American cities in the 50s, to Hamburg in the 90s to study town planning. You feel a sense of kind of humiliation, I think. And that's evident in Kutub and I think it's evident in Atta.

And I think also, I mean, I don't want to kind of do cod psychology, but there is a kind of sexual dimension to it as well, because both Kutub and Atta are obsessed by the easy availability of sex in Western cities. And Mohammed Atta, in his will, leaves this kind of weird prescriptions that no pregnant women will attend his funeral procession and no women will be allowed to visit his grave or anything like that. Well, Atta had stayed in Hamburg before he goes to America to carry out the deed. He's been staying with a family who had a daughter who was unmarried but had a baby. And they kicked him out, I think, eventually because he treated her with such contempt.

And this girl and her baby, this young woman and her baby, played a massive part in his imagination as sort of symbols of Western decadence. And I don't think you have to go too deep into the world of court psychology to see that there is something kind of weird going on in his mind there. And so Kutub writes these texts that really kind of are the match that lights the kind of blaze that Bin Laden will then kind of really blow up. That's a terrible metaphor but yeah sometimes um and he he he is basically saying

we have to turn our backs on this and we have to to look back to the example of the prophet and islam is it is only islam that can save not just muslims but the whole of humanity so it it is you know the stakes could not be higher and in a way way, you know, in a sense, Bush is the same. And that's what makes, it's not 9-11 itself that is particularly important. Shocking though it is, you know, overwhelming, it's the reactions to it. Okay, well, that's a perfect point to take a break. And then we'll come back and we should talk about George W. Bush and the reaction to 9-11. See you in a minute.

Hello. Excuse the brief interruption. We'll soon have you back in the warm embrace of Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook. But first, we wanted to tell you about our new podcast, Tommy's and Jerry's, which explores the relationship between Britain and Germany through history to the present. It features me, Oliver Moody, a Briton based in Berlin, and Katja Hoyer, a German historian, mostly enjoying life in England. Here's a brief taster. Break out the beach towels and bag the best spot. Welcome to Tommies and Jerrys, a new podcast in which we plan to put the Realpolitik and the Eröffnungsdiskussionsorgien into the world of podcasting.

Each week we'll discuss the past and present of Anglo-German relations. What makes us different? And what makes us sometimes painfully similar? There's a very famous picture of Thatcher driving along in a Challenger tank with a British flag flying and she's got her goggles on and her scarf. She looks like the absolute warrior queen, almost like a Britannia-style nationalistic figure. But when you look at the zoomed-out version of that photo,

it was actually taken on a British military base in West Germany. And right next to her, there's Cole trundling along on his own Leopard 2 German battle tank with a German flag. And it was clearly some effort to try and give them like a fun day out together. And all that is remembered for is just this symbol of British nationalism. Yeah, and that's probably exactly how she would have liked it as well. Things have got so bad that there's this paper that turned up showing that Cole had made a formal request not to talk to Thatcher anymore, and to talk to the Foreign Secretary, Douglas Heard, instead. And Thatcher had just scribbled on it in massive capital letter handwriting, no! Because they made no effort to hide that either. Thatcher in particular was kind of

openly hostile. You see that on all of the photographs. I don't think they ever had as bad a relationship as people made it out to be, to be honest, Boris Johnson and Angela Merkel. You don't see Boris slapping Angie on the back, but you do get the sense from the last visit that there was a genuine effort. I'm not so sure. I've been told in Berlin that actually it's terrible. It's really, really bad. And she can't stand him.

That's it for this week. Thank you for listening to Tommies and Jerrys. Search for Tommies and Jerrys wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. podcasts. early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome back to The Rest Is History. We're talking about 9-11, the attacks on the World Trade Centre and on Washington DC That happened exactly 20 years ago. Tom, there was a documentary on the BBC a couple of nights ago, absolutely brilliant documentary about George W. Bush and sort of taking you through minute by minute his reaction as the day unfolded.

You saw it, didn't you? I did. The guy who made it, Adam Wishart. Friend of yours. Old friend. Everybody's a friend of Tom Holland. A fantastic film. Yeah.

And how charming they all seemed. Well, this is the extraordinary thing. These people who, I mean, if you move as we do in kind of literary media sort of circles in Britain. I mean, all these people are reviled, you know, to a degree that, I mean, this sounds like an absurd thing to say, but I've heard people slagging off George W. Bush far more often than I've heard them slagging off Osama bin Laden. But he came across as, in that documentary, as remarkably human.

But the reason for that is that we're judging him by our standards yeah of course and what i would say about bush is that what he did was far worse than anything that trump did right biden i i think i think he trashed the american brand and the western brand okay well let's come back to that in a sec i think there's i think as i think bin laden I think he trashed the American brand and the Western brand. Okay. Well, let's come back to that in a sec. As I think bin Laden trashed the Islamic brand. So one of the things that I think has come out of 9-11 is that the global reputation of both Islam and the West has been seriously damaged. Well, Islam and also specifically America, Tom.

I think Britain as well. There were, oh, I don't know, Britain. There were, you know, there's all this amazing footage after 9-11 of Vladimir Putin lighting candles, people around the world uniting in support, playing the American National Anthem, waving American flags. In the days after the event. Not everywhere, of course.

I mean, not in Ramallah, but worldwide, and obviously especially in Europe. And in a way, that seems odd now because the reaction against America was so quick after the invasion of Iraq, what, two years later, wasn't it? But the thing is watching that documentary. So George Bush had only been in office since January. And he'd come into office as, I mean, the documentary, he says this specifically, I came in as a domestic president, which I remember at

the time because I was in America during that election campaign. And he said again and again, the US is no longer going to be the world's policeman. So he wanted, you know, he was preaching an antidote to what he saw as Clinton's interventionism in Somalia and his drone and his airstrikes and these kinds of things. Bush said, we're not going to do that anymore. And then the documentary captures very well the fact that in just a few hours, Bush's whole sense of himself and his role in history changes.

You know, there's that famous footage. He's reading books, isn't he, with a kind of primary school class? About a goat, I think. Yeah, they're doing spelling. And the footage is amazing. You know, they go in on his eyes, and you see the flicker in his eyes when he's told. He doesn't rush off because he doesn't want to scare the children.

But, you know, within hours, his sense of who he is and what he is for has changed and I actually thought what that documentary captured and this is why the assassination of Franz Ferdinand seems to me a reasonable parallel is the extent to which he's the prisoner of events as well as their master

so he says he knew what the American people expected and there's a moment at the end of the documentary when he's talking to firefighters and made the wreckage of the World Trade Center. And what people forget is that he, and he says this himself, is he starts off talking about praying and sort of sorrow and coming together and stuff.

And he says in the documentary, I could see they didn't want to hear that. You know, I was an experienced politician. I could read the crowd. What they wanted to hear was, we're going to go and, you know, kick their ass, which is basically what he says at the end. And what he did. And what he did, he changes his tone. But the question, I suppose, is, would any American president have behaved differently at the end of this period of when they thought their top nation of great, buoyant American

exceptionalism? I mean, the gap between them and the rest of the world militarily is probably greater in 2001 than ever before or since, because China has yet to fully rearm as it has now. Could anybody have resisted that, Tom? I mean, they were always going to go into Afghanistan, weren't they? I think going into Afghanistan was inevitable. I think I don't see any way in which, I agree, no American president could not have done that.

I think the wrong turn was what happened after afghanistan which essentially is is iraq yeah and you know there are two i guess there are kind of two takes on iraq as why the americans go into iraq one one is the kind of bleakly cynical one that it's all about oil or israel or vengeance for you know saddam hussein being horrid to George Bush's dad or whatever. And the other is that it was a necessary step in the war on terror and that it was a welcome chance to overthrow a kind of horrible tyrant in the form of Saddam Hussein. And of course, I mean, it could be both and probably was both,

all kinds of different interests kind of mixing and merging. And we know, we talked about this dawning sense on his face that he is someone who has been put at a pivotal moment in history and his decisions are going to count. I think he feels that he's been put there by God. He is a deeply, deeply believing Christian. And I think that he believes when he talks about good and evil, that the war on terror, you know, it could have been a police operation, but it isn't. And, you know, the operations, you know, it's kind of operation enduring freedom. The original name for war on terror is going to be Operation Infinite Justice. This is a crusade. You know, he used the word crusade and then got kind of told off by his advisors because this wasn't advisable.

But it was a crusade in exactly the same way as bin Laden, likewise, sees himself as embroiled in a fight for good and evil. And the thing that complicates it with Bush, and of course with Blair as well, is that they never frame it in overtly Christian terms, even though everyone knows that this is where they're coming from. Instead, what they do, and again, I think this is entirely, you know, I don't think they're lying about this, but Bush repeatedly says about bin Laden and Al-Qaeda that they're corrupting

Islam, that they don't really understand Islam, that they haven't got it right. And that basically Islam is entirely compatible with Western liberal democracy. Blair said that. I mean, every Western leader said that in the aftermath of 9-11 for very understandable reasons, because they didn't want to provoke kind of anti-Muslim feeling within the West itself or indeed beyond. But I think the problem with that was that it was a kind of cultural arrogance because it suggested everything that bin Laden was terrified about. It was suggesting precisely that yes, Islam, this ancient sophisticated civilization can absolutely just be folded into the more of Hamburg town planning or sex clubs or whatever, that it's just another kind of interesting local detail. and that essentially the morals and

the values of humanity are equivalent to those of Westerners at the beginning of the 21st century. Well, that's all that sort of stuff about fighting for enlightenment values, isn't it? Absolutely. We should export enlightenment values and that Islam can somehow be easily be folded into it, as you say. But that's not really... Bush isn't talking about enlightenment values.

He's talking about rights. He's talking about freedoms. He's talking about freedoms. You know, he's saying, why do they hate us? They hate us for our freedom. Yeah. But these are very, very culturally specific American perspectives. See, I take on Bush would be slightly different in that I think straight away Bush transforms himself into an unashamed American nationalist. And, you know, I think of things like, you know, the Patriot Act, which is the act that enshrines surveillance.

The Department of Homeland Security. I always found that such a jarring name because I always thought when people talk about the homeland, I mean, something that we in Britain would never do. I mean, it's impossible to, isn't it? Well, at least, I mean, maybe they've got one, God almighty. I mean, it's impossible to. Isn't it? Well, he's did. I mean, maybe they've got one, God almighty. But, you know, that sort of rhetoric.

And I think, well, to me, one of his great mistakes, apart from Iraq, obviously, was in speaking purely to a domestic American audience. And I can completely understand why he did that. I don't think he was, though. Because he's endlessly sending messages. Actually, when you look at them, how many messages, how often he talks about Islam, how often he addresses the Muslim world,

there's a lot of it. And it's all kind of character. He says, when it comes to the common rights and needs of men and women, there is no clash of civilizations. Essentially, he's saying that his understanding of what the rights and needs of men and women are are equivalent to all of humanities. And he's saying that his understanding of what the rights and needs of men and women are equivalent to all of humanities.

I think that he does have this kind of universalist mission, as Blair did as well. It was really, really vital part of what they were about, is why they're waging a war on terror. But I think at the same time, there is incredibly chauvinist nationalist figures in his administration and you know bush is obviously a very smart astute politician but i don't think he's as smart as dick say say as dick cheney or donald rumsfeld you know vice president donald rumsfeld that the defence... You know, what do they have?

Secretary of State for Defence? What do they call it? Yeah, Secretary of Defence. Yeah. And immense Washington veterans. I mean, they've been around since the Nixon administration. They are all about,

you know, America first. Yes. And that kind of... That sense of a moral mission that Bush and Blair had, and that's why, you know, the Jeremy Paxman question to Blair, did he pray together, was such a... You know, I mean, it was kind of that sense of a moral mission that Bush and Blair had. And that's why, you know, the Jeremy Paxman question to Blair, did he pray together was such a, you know, I mean, it was kind of probing this absolutely neuralgics because you had no doubt that they were praying together. But the problem was that the moment they cast it as a war on terror and felt that therefore this legitimated basically kind of, you know, invading and overthrowing anybody that they wanted to. They were brought up against the fact that actually lots of people didn't want the kind of freedom that they were bringing, didn't want the kind of understanding of what was right and proper that Bush and Blair believed in.

And therefore were going to fight back and the moment they started fighting back you know every imperial force has to has a choice do you you know do you cut and run or do you fight and the americans chose to fight and so therefore inevitably the corollary of that is that you start killing people and of course you start torturing people. And the kind of the trashing of the rule of law, the rule of international law, which is a completely Western structure. I mean, Bin Laden's right about that. Al-Zarqawi, this kind of terrifying murderous figure known as the Sheikh of Slaughterers in Iraq, who blows up weddings, slits windpipes. I mean, terrifying figure. He's absolutely committed to the idea that international law is a Western scam. It's a Christian scam. And therefore, Azekawi blows up the United Nations

in Baghdad for that reason. But this is why things like Guantanamo, the camp at Guantanamo. It's so lethal. Those horrendous pictures, Lindy, England. That was the war's name, wasn't it? The prison in Iraq that was the name, wasn't it? And the prison in Iraq, that was Iraq, wasn't it? Yes.

I mean, they are so damaging to the American brand. Because, you know, if you're claiming to, if you frame it in ideological, cultural terms, there's a war on terror. In other words, what you're offering is kind of virtue, peace and so on. And if you just trash that with your own activities, then it's hardly surprising that you're going to inflame people against you. But actually, Tom, before you go back, you re-embark on your fascinating lecture. I wanted to say moral mission.

That sense of moral mission, I think a lot of that comes from the Cold War. So it is quite close to the Cold War in time, this. It's only 10 years since the... 12 years, anyway, since the end of the Cold War. And those people that you mentioned, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, they'd been Cold War hawks. And so many of the neoconservative intellectuals around them, and even people who haven't previously been neoconservatives, so people like Christopher Hitchens, they're kind of steeped in that idea of cold war good versus evil you know we are on the side of of progress modernity reason they're on the side of barbarism and i think that plays a huge part that this is almost the last generation i think who you know it's the sort of last, they're a sort of pre-postmodernist generation.

They absolutely believe in good versus evil, right versus wrong. And, you know, it's not about competing narratives. It's about genuine, absolute moral truths. Absolutely. But it leads, it ends up with figures in Baghdad jails, you know, being electroded and being carried around, you know, being leashed like dogs. And it leads to the West trampling on the law, you know, the frameworks of international law,

the understanding of human rights that supposedly they're going to war to defend. And the mirror image of that is what bin Laden is doing to the reputation of Islam. Because for lots of people who are now who are not Muslim, thanks to bin Laden and thanks to the cycle of terrorism that he helped to inspire, Islam is now synonymous with jihad, which is synonymous with bombs on tube trains. Yes. And so I think that, and that's why we began, I said, I think it's actually about globalization. I think it's about these two great globalizing forces, Islam and Christendom, the West, whatever you want to call it. They've both been fighting a proxy war over the past 20 years.

They've both completely trashed their brands. And, of course, you know, we emerge, you know, the Americans are leaving Afghanistan. It's not even as though, you know, the Taliban or indeed ISIS, you know, they're now left to fight each other. So they're, I mean, it's kind of squalid fight over the spoils there. So it's not like they've won any great victory either. And lurking on the eastern borders is China, which it does not have a kind of universalizing mission or vision. It's pure nationalist vision. Yeah, and all the smoke was kind of civilizational, perhaps you might say,

but all the smoke that's lifted from 9-11 is fading away. And what we see is a world where America in pursuit of a kind of universalizing mission has trashed its brand, massively overloaded its credit card. And China has gone through, you know, leaps and bounds. So actually, you know, Bin Laden wanted to bleed America to death. that was his ambition he wanted to provoke america to to do exactly what it did um but but but it's not islam that's benefited from it it's china but tom does that do you think then that um in the grand scheme in the grand sweep of history in the in the very grand scheme of things do you think 9-11 really matters i mean china was going to rise anyway american power was arguably at its peak in the 1990s and bound to

then decline um islam the tension between islam and the west was already there do you think that it it is it a turning point does it change history in a really grand sort of big picture way do you think i i think that um so jason burke um observer yeah very good fabulous taliban the 9-11 wars uh i think that's as good of a phrase for them as as any i mean i think if you, yeah, 9-11 really mattered. I mean, it rubbed up close against me personally on a couple of occasions. So when my younger daughter was, she must have been only about six months or something, maybe a bit older. Maybe she was three. I can't remember.

She was in a pram. She was in a pram and got stuck on a tube at Stockwell, gave up, went up the escalators. As I was going through the escalators, the police were jumping over the escalators, herring down the tracks. And, of course, that was where a suspected suicide bomber was shot. But he turned out not to have been a suicide bomber.

John Charles de Menezes. Yeah. And, you know, to have been there with my daughter in a pram with all this going on. I mean, it was, you know, living in London, you're kind of privileged. You know, you're not living in the heart of these awful wars. But that was a kind of unsettling experience.

And then I went to Iraq. I went to Sinjar city that had been where Yazidis, religious minority, had kind of been protected under Saddam Hussein, lived. And they'd been brutally targeted by the Islamic State, who were the kind of inheritor apparatus of both the Ba'atists and of al-Zarqawi, who'd absolutely kind of brutally treated them, crucified lots of men, slaughtered them, enslaved women and girls. I mean, kind of horrible. And to stand there with the Islamic State kind of a couple of miles away across this flat land was a really frightening experience.

I felt my nose was brought up close to the kind of horror that Bin Laden had unleashed, but also the American response to it had unleashed. But having said that, of course, I mean, what's the alternative? The alternative in which Saddam Hussein is still in power? Well, this is the thing about history, isn't it? There are no, there's no magic wand and there's no, you know,

there's no utopian. But I'm not, I haven't answered your question. I mean, all of this of course is local. I think, I think that the, I think that it's done long-term damage to the, to the moral reputation and the economic stability of the West. And yet when you watch 20 years, and I think that it's done terrible damage

to the name and the reputation of Islam. Well, I think that's definitely true. And the extraordinary thing is when you watch that documentary, so it's minute by minute, and you see it, you watch the crisis unfolding through the US administration's eyes, that sense of that looming terrible damage seems a world away, doesn't it? Because they're, you know, they're reacting in such human terms to this appalling tragedy.

And they think far more people died than actually did die. I mean, the general sense, wasn't it, on September 11th was that tens of thousands of people would probably be killed. And even now, that footage, Tom, of the buildings coming down and the smoke rolling through the streets of New York City and the sound of those recordings of the sort of air traffic controllers and so on, I mean, it's heartbreaking, isn't it? It's heartbreaking, but it's also, as the French philosopher Jean baudrillard notoriously i wondered if we would get to him exciting yes people found it exciting i mean it's kind of awful thing to say

of course i mean it was terrible particularly you know people in New York or Washington, of course, I mean, completely terrible. But also it could not help but evoke images of Independence Day where aliens destroy Washington or Godzilla, where a giant monster roams through the concrete canyons and that kind of dust swirling down. I mean, it looked like a Hollywood film. And Baudrillard's point was that, in a way, that was Bin Laden's great triumph,

was that he had attacked America in the kind of dimension of the imagination. Yeah, I mean, Baudrillard said basically he gave... It's a bit like that thing about people who watch Formula One races. There's part of them always that's hoping for a massive pileup. And Baudrillard says, you know,

haven't we dreamt of this event? Hasn't the entire world, without exception, dreamt of it? No one could not dream of the destruction of a power that had become hegemonic to such a point. In essence, it was the terrorists who committed the deed,

but it is we who wished for it. I mean, I don't think... A lot of people were horrified by that at the In essence, it was the terrorists who committed the deed, but it is we who wished for it. I mean, I don't think, a lot of people were horrified by that at the time, and it was an incredibly controversial essay. But I suppose you could argue Hollywood had created the image of New York being destroyed many times before, you know, bin Laden tried to carry it off. Although, I guess, again, a kind of counterpoint to that would be that perhaps it actually doesn't Although, I guess, again, a kind of counterpoint to that would be that perhaps

it actually doesn't show, you know, bin Laden didn't triumph over American control of the imagination. He showed that he was yet another kind of person, you know, enslaved by it because, you know, as you said,

they were absolutely conditioned by Hollywood films themselves. So perhaps in a way, bin Laden's, you Laden's great spectacle of terror was the greatest tribute that's ever been paid to America's control of the global imagination.

That's a very good note on which to end. And you know what, Tom, we've done this without once mentioning Rudolph Giuliani, which I think is a great achievement on our part, given that of all the stories that came out of 9-11,

the rise before Giuliani's reputation is by far the most bizarre and surely worthy of a podcast series in itself. Who would have thought then that, you know, with his baseball cap channeling Churchill, he'd end up outside that garden centre with a die running down his face defending Donald Trump. Okay, so I have mentioned him now. You have mentioned him.

Thank you very much for listening. And we will be back next time with more historical meanderings. Goodbye. Goodbye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community,

please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com.