The FRONTLINE Interviews
Bruce Hoffman
Counterterrorism Adviser
Bruce Hoffman is an expert on terrorism and counterterrorism. He is a professor at Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. He is also the author of Inside Terrorism.
The following interview was conducted by FRONTLINE’s Jim Gilmore on April 9, 2021. It has been edited for clarity and length.
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The Reaction to 9/11
OK, Bruce, I'm going to take you through the different events that we're going to be looking at and get your overview.Let's start with "God Bless America" on Capitol Hill.Republicans and Democrats come together on 9/11, and they spontaneously sing "God Bless America."Talk a little bit about that scene, how it defines that moment, what it says about America right then.
It's hard actually to imagine that a scene of that bipartisan spirit, of that kind of camaraderie, of that kind of unity that we saw on the steps of the U.S. Capitol on the evening of Sept. 11.I mean, bear in mind that it was the first time in nearly two centuries that Congress, that the U.S. Capitol itself had been under threat, and I think it was enormously uplifting for Americans, and perhaps for other people in the world, to see a country come together after such an enormous tragedy, just hours later, regain their footing and reassert their faith in democracy and American values, and join together really as a united front, that we would prosecute this war as one people, one government, together.
That night the president gets back to Washington, and he gives a speech, and he quotes the Bible, and he talks about the fact that this is going to be a war between good and evil.He will later talk about how widespread, worldwide that this battle was really going to be, that it was to spread democratic values.What did this say about Bush's understanding of what he was up against and what the stakes were in this coming war?
From the very start, we understood it would be a war unlike any other, really; that it wasn't only a war to hold those accountable for the tragedy that had unfolded on Sept. 11, but it was also to change the world, and to change the world for the better so this type of threat wouldn't arise again.And I think there was this almost unbridled optimism and faith, really, in American power, in American morals, in American unity that propelled that forward.
The Dark Side
Soon after that, the vice president, Mr. Cheney, starts talking about the fact that there was a need for a war on the "dark side."This would, of course, lead to the secret war with the CIA and black sites and interrogation, a 180-degree difference than the message that Bush had been sending about the fact that this was a moral fight for values, for democratic values, that they were going to spread around the world.
At the time, I think there was this very profound dichotomy between the lofty moral values, the justice of this cause, and then an admission that I think everyone recognized at the time, that this was going to be a very different kind of war, that it was against not an established state but a largely unseen enemy.And because of those dynamics, the types of methods and measures that we would have to use to combat it may be out of the ordinary.So there was certainly a hint that an extreme act like the 9/11 attacks necessitated an extreme response.
And the difference between what Cheney was saying and Bush was saying—was Bush being naïve?Was Cheney panicking?What was motivating these messages that they were sending out to the public?
That was America to me.I mean, America has always been a bastion of democracy and morality, and to assert those ideals, but also to recognize that sometimes in a very nasty, messy business like counterterrorism, we—Vice President Cheney was warning us, advising us: we may have to do things that we had never done before or had never contemplated to actually bring those responsible for these acts to justice—of which there was widespread support—to defeat our enemies, to ensure that another 9/11 attack could not be perpetrated, and, you know, almost harkening back a century before to another lofty idealistic time when President Wilson said "make the world safe for democracy."I mean, that was also very much the theme, that we could export democracy, we could bring freedom to people that had been deprived of these things, and therefore eradicate or eliminate the root causes that give rise to terrorism generally, and, more specifically, to the tragic events on Sept. 11.
So for those reasons, and for the reasons that the world was transfixed and horrified by what happened in the United States, there was this huge support for America, for Enduring Freedom as Afghanistan began.But talk a little bit about how that support is undercut by some of the tactics that are being used: Gitmo, the tactics of the dark side, the information that starts coming out about black sites and such.How is that huge support that we originally have, how does it start to be undercut?
Don't forget, at the time that both President Bush and Vice President Cheney were making those statements, we had no clue how many people had perished on Sept. 11.That was part of the problem.And every day, for instance, newspapers like The New York Times had literally pages of victims.And every day you looked at those faces of people who were missing, completely unaccounted for.This was very early days.So I think in the shock and in the horror there was on the one hand this idealism; on the other hand a recognition that things might get dirty and that we may need to resort to these measures.
I think what happened is, as we learned, as absolutely horrific and tragic as that death toll was at the twin towers, it wasn't as vast as some people had feared.There were reports, for instance, that New York state was gathering 20,000 body bags.So the body count was undeniably tragic, but turned out not to be as bad.
That, I think, began to reshape how many people in America looked at the conflict and saw it as this absolutely horrific act and began to think that there had to be some proportionality.And then you have to remember that things like the black sites and Guantanamo didn't all occur at once; there were almost dribs and drabs.They were a very slow accretion, a gradual process that in many cases, because of the clandestinity of many aspects of the war on terrorism, at the time really weren't widely understood, even if they were reported.It was only later that we began to understand the dimensions and the depths that America had plunged in waging this war on terrorism.
And what would that do to the worldview once this—some of this information was coming out?And we'll talk specifics in a second.
Certainly I think developments like Guantanamo, holding people indefinitely without trial, which is the kind of thing we once accused the Soviet Union of doing, the black sites, began to wear on the American public, began to raise questions about how we reconcile American values and idealism to the way this war is being fought.It may have been that we were saying in the immediate aftermath it had to be fought this way, but we were enormously successful in taking down the Taliban and routing Al Qaeda.It was becoming a different kind and a less desperate struggle.But in my view, then you had Iraq.And Iraq changes everything.
And we'll get there.But one other thing here is the fact that of course the invasion was hugely effectively using the Northern Alliance and the CIA's actions and the Marines, but they failed to get bin Laden.And you write a little bit about this.What are the consequences of not getting him, not going after him again immediately into Pakistan, the lessons not learned?
I think that the first scintilla of doubt was really raised by the failure of U.S. military forces that by November/December 2001 had arrived at larger numbers in Afghanistan, had followed in the slipstream of the Northern Alliance in routing and defeating the Taliban, were on the verge of cornering Al Qaeda, Tora Bora and in the White Mountains, and then this immense failure, this almost inexplicable opportunity that slips through our hands, not only to completely eliminate the remaining Al Qaeda fighters, but to capture and bring to justice the person actually responsible for Sept. 11.And I think that's where the first seeds of doubt of were raised in the American public's mind: firstly that what we were told may not exactly dovetail with reality; and secondly, that this was going to be a much more complex struggle than we would have imagined.
I don't think there's any doubt that if we had gotten bin Laden by the end of 2001, the travails that we've seen for the following two decades would be completely different and far less severe.The fact that he was allowed to survive, almost able to survive, the fact that he could then claim to have escaped the most technologically advanced military in the history of mankind, fed into a defeated organization's narrative that served to breathe new life into them, enable them—and enable them to survive Operation Enduring Freedom, the defeat of the Taliban and the routing of Al Qaeda.
Let's talk about Iraq.In January of '02, you've got Bush giving the "axis of evil" speech with Iraq being a central target.Looking back now, how does that moment help to define how things will play out?They initiate the turn to Iraq.That speech, what did it say to you?What should we, looking back, think about that?
One of the distinguishing features of the global reaction to the 9/11 attacks was the expressions of support and sympathy of not necessarily from leaders throughout the world, but often from public.In the street, for example, in Tehran, many Iranians took to the streets to demonstrate their sympathy to the United States.In fact, Iran had been cooperative to an extent in the war on terrorism.
So I think that the "axis of evil" speech really underscored how little the United States government at the time understood about that region, because firstly, by going into Iraq, we were creating a vacuum that firstly Iran would fill, and even if we couldn't have seen it at the time, we were naïve in thinking that Iran would just simply sit by while there's this very prominent United States military presence right across its border installing—which was the anticipation—a new government that would be much more compliant and certainly sympathetic and cooperative with the United States in Iraq.And all this, of course, sent shock waves throughout the region.
I have to say, too, that it played exactly in to bin Laden's propaganda.From 1996, from his very first declaration of war against the United States, this is exactly what he prophesized would happen, exactly what he castigated the United States for.He said the U.S. is a predatory power that is waging a war against Islam and that will launch its forces to conquer and occupy Muslim lands.And of course, Afghanistan was already one.But then the second, the signal was the second would be Iraq, and bin Laden also in 1996 had said that the United States would be doing this, not because of its ideals or values or to spread democracy, but because it wanted to seize the Muslims' most precious natural resources, its oil and natural gas supply.So of course Iraq precisely fell right into that narrative.
And once again, that's not to say we shouldn't have invaded Iraq for this reason, because we enhanced bin Laden's narrative, but we were completely ignorant and aloof to that.We were handing Al Qaeda exactly the propaganda, exactly the narrative that it needed to reconfigure itself and regenerate itself as a terrorist threat.
Colin Powell and Weapons of Mass Destruction
So before we can invade, though, the sales pitch has to be made to Americans.So talk a little bit about looking back at the [Colin] Powell speech and what was being done and the consequences of it, the fact that he was chosen, the fact that WMD was the focus, that fact that they were going into a preemptive war based on what we now know was either outright lies or really bad understanding of the realities.Talk a little bit about all of that and how that affects the credibility once it comes out what the realities were.
I think it's very important to recall that there was never a consistent line about why the United States needed to invade Iraq.The threat of WMD, fears and suspicions in intelligence reports that Saddam Hussein was developing all kinds of weapons of mass destruction, was one of the driving forces.But then when, even in those early days when it was very different—difficult to marshal solid, empirical, unimpeachable proof, the terrorist card was often played, that Iraq and Saddam Hussein were somehow in league with Osama bin Laden, that Al Qaeda could never have pulled off an attack like the 9/11 strikes that were coordinated after all on four different targets.Well, of course, one of the planes crashed into a field in Pennsylvania, but the idea that a state—that a terrorist organization could do this, it had to have state backing.
So there was always these confusing messages.Neither of them really stuck.And then, I think, you have the climax, which is when, arguably, the most venerated, respected statesman in the United States, an individual who had made his career in the United States Army, who had faced down racial prejudice and racism, had been a distinguished combat officer in Vietnam, had risen through the ranks to become a national security adviser at the end of the Reagan administration, that was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the first Gulf War and was this model of probity, of sober assessment, who told Americans everything straight, he was the one, of course, not surprisingly, who was tapped to convey that final message at the United Nations.
So merely the fact that it was Secretary of State Colin Powell was enormously important, but especially in so an august setting as the United Nations, a citadel for peace, that he was making the case why we had to go to war, made it enormously compelling.It was literally game, set, match.I mean, here was proof positive.If Colin Powell was saying it, it had to be true.
And of course, we know now in retrospect that Secretary Powell himself had profound misgivings, that he insisted that the director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet, be sitting in back of him because even Secretary Powell wasn't 100% convinced of the intelligence.1
And the use, the focus on weapons of mass destruction that he provides the U.N. on that day, the specific use of weapons of mass destruction, what does that say?
It raises, really, just an unparalleled fear.I mean, you have to remember, the world had been knocked sideways, and especially the U.S. definitely had been knocked off balance by the Sept. 11 attacks.And of course, hanging over all of this was National Security Adviser Condoleezza's [sic] Rice's statement that "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
So given that there had been this recognized intelligence failure, this hesitancy, this lack of urgency that had failed to prevent and derail the 9/11 attacks, no one wanted the same thing to happen and all of a sudden, as National Security Adviser Rice had said, to discover the smoking gun was actually a nuclear weapon.And of course, the inference was, it was aimed at the United States.
Now, I mean, there's another important aspect to this.It wasn't just the American intelligence community that was convinced that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.I mean, it was of course some of our closest allies, like the United Kingdom, but it was even European countries that had already—had expressed some doubts about the conduct or the prosecution of the war on terrorism, like Germany, for instance, that also believed that the intelligence pointed to weapons of mass destruction.Unfortunately, there was this concatenation of data points that all convinced everyone that our greatest fears must be true.And that, I would say, is one of the legacies of the 9/11 attack, is that having been burned once and not taken these terrible fears seriously, U.S. government at the time, and particularly President Bush and Vice President Cheney, had resolved that we were going to do everything in our power, and we're going to err on the side of caution so that we're not surprised again and surprised by something that would be far more serious, like a weapon of mass destruction.
Setting us up in the long term, though, for potential catastrophe if what they're saying is not true, because then your country's credibility is in question.
I don't think anyone ever thought that it couldn't be true.There were so many—there were so many different intelligence factors.Again, information that was being substantiated by some of our closest allies, everybody believed it.2It was really, I think, a very dangerous kind of groupthink.It was also, I think, very much a repercussion or an aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, that people were very fearful.And probably there's two things that get populations enormously scared.One is suicide terrorist attacks, because the terrorists always say "We love death more than you love life," so there's no way to prevent it, and we saw that happen on 9/11.
The other thing that scares people, and it's just three letters, WMD, which of course is a highly reductionist interpretation of what is chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear weapons, all of which have very different fabrication requirements, all of which are dispersed or deployed very differently.But when you link it to those three words, it will have this enormous power to generate fear and anxiety that unfortunately the Bush administration manipulated to justify the invasion of Iraq.
Invading Iraq
We'll skip up a little bit, after the invasion, which is successful, to what happens after the invasion.… Talk a little bit about the way it was handled, why it was handled that way, and the consequences.You wrote very profoundly about the fact that instead of seeding democracy, which was the intention, we seeded misery, death and destruction.Talk a little bit about the aftermath and what was going on there.
Tragically, I think the certitude with which we believed Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction was only matched by the unbridled optimism that the United States believed we would be welcomed as liberators, that firstly, it would be a cakewalk to go into Iraq, and secondly, within a matter of weeks the country would be stabilized, the oil would be pumping again, and that in fact the invasion would pay for itself by getting Iraq back on its feet economically after a decade or more of sanctions.
So firstly, I think that was the biggest mistake, is that no one anticipated that there would be the resistance that eventually emerged.But also I think there was a complete underestimation of the damage and destruction that had been inflicted both militarily during Operation Iraqi Freedom, in terms of the bombing campaign of Iraqi infrastructure that had to be built up, but also, I think there was a complete underestimation of the toll that over a decade of sanctions had wrought on the Iraqi people.
So we were basically marching into a country that had been completely broken and that had to be rebuilt, not an existing infrastructure that had just suffered over the past few weeks because of the United States' quote/unquote "softening up" the bombing campaigns, but actually a country and a society that had really been broken.And that completely eclipsed, I think, our estimation of what needed to be done.
I mean, firstly, there was no—there was never a plan to have a Coalition Provisional Authority.The idea was to have a very small, civilian-led, reconstruction—humanitarian and reconstruction cell that would get Iraq back on its feet and return it to a new normality, a new normality that was now based on democracy and a capitalist economy.And I think that we were just completely shocked, firstly by the looting, the destruction of Iraqi governmental property that plunged a country that was already quite weak to begin with, that already had looted, destroyed infrastructure that was accentuated by the corruption of the Saddam regime.So whatever little was remaining was pretty much gone by the, you know, within days of us conquering Baghdad.
So there was this just total underestimation of what it would take to rebuild the country.And then the presumption had always been that the Iraqis would be passive, docile; they would welcome us as liberators.Why would they do anything against us?I think, though, for Al Qaeda, this was yet another opportunity to emerge from the shadows, to confront the United States invading yet another country, and I think invaluably from bin Laden's perspective deflect United States attention, energies and resources from South Asia to the Middle East, to Iraq.
And added to that, then, the insurgency starts up slowly to begin with, but then picking up steam very quickly, and [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld and a lot of the military leaders in the United States and the White House was ignoring the fact of what was going on while there were some military over there that were raising red flags; they were being ignored.Why the ignorance of the realities on the ground, and the consequences, again, of this and of all the mistakes that had already been made which had created a situation where the insurgency was more liable to grow?
Wishful thinking completely divorced from reality in that we thought it would be easy to invade.We thought we would be welcomed as liberators.We thought we could go in and get out because we could get Iraq, the Iraqi economy and the Iraqi people back on their feet.If you have those three key assumptions, the furthest thing from your mind is that you're going to meet any kind of resistance, especially terrorist resistance.
Also, there's another problem.If you admit there's an insurgency of a terrorist problem that didn't exist before, you're obviously the cause; you created it.So that also, I think, fed in to the denial; denial to the point that the word "insurgency" or the words "insurgency" and "insurgents" could be not used.You couldn't describe them like that.They were "dead-enders"; they were "thugs."And this was an enormous problem, because it's very clear in retrospect that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Tawhid wal-Jihad, [translated as] Monotheism and Holy War, the group that he led that eventually became Al Qaeda in Iraq, they had a plan; they had a strategy.And by June, within, you know, two months of the liberation or three months of the liberation of Baghdad, they were putting their plan into effect, which was suicide bombings.And we saw it crystallized that August with the destruction of the United Nations headquarters at the Canal Hotel, with the bombing of the International Red Cross offices, with the bombing of the Jordanian Embassy.
And what Zarqawi was trying to do was basically get rid of all the international organizations and humanitarian relief organizations, get rid of the United States' closest Middle Eastern allies, force them through these horrific suicide bombings to leave Iraq, which they did.And then he could portray the U.S. presence in Iraq as a military occupation.And indeed, as the terrorism and insurgency escalated, the U.S. military and coalition military forces become policemen.They basically were charged now with maintaining order.They had no intelligence, and they resorted to extreme means in some instances.
Looking back now, what's the effect on the American public as these, one after the other, mistakes are being made, misunderstandings—we haven't even talked about the fact that no weapons of mass destruction were found—the effect on the American public, the effect on the way the world was viewing our war against terrorism and how their support was lapsing.
Well, certainly, the 2004 presidential election underscored the doubts that many Americans were having about the wisdom of invading Iraq and, indeed, the competency of the Bush administration.And then Sen. [John] Kerry certainly gave President Bush a very, you know, a very strong—presented a very strong challenge to him.I mean, one could argue that had it not been for the seizure that September in [North] Ossetia, in Russia, [of] the schoolhouse that once again magnified on a global level the terrorist threat, how terrorism emerges from the shadows, strikes unseen, enmeshes ordinary civilians—in this case, children and their parents in this terrible seizure of a schoolhouse.I mean, that happened in the beginning of September.It gave President Bush and his security platform, the fact that we have to be tough in this war on terrorism, an enormous boost.I mean, there's, you know, public opinion polling that showed that that was like a huge, a huge boost.
And then, of course, you had only days before the two—November 2004 election, Osama bin Laden releases a videotape where he says, "We are bleeding America.We have America where we want it.We have enmeshed it in this protracted struggle.We are waging a war of attrition.We know that we cannot defeat the Americans militarily, but we're going to bleed them both economically and send their soldiers back in body bags."And bin Laden boasts, "This is exactly how we defeated the Red Army in Afghanistan, forced it to withdraw in 1989, and indeed set in motion the chain of events that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the demise of communism as an ideology."
Now, this may have been completely divorced from reality, but it didn't matter.Propaganda doesn't have to be true; it just has to be well timed and has to be believed.And bin Laden's message, the fact that the United States is now enmeshed in two theaters, in two protracted wars, neither of which at the time are going terribly well for the United States—although Afghanistan had become more of a back burner—was a very powerful message that also inflated Al Qaeda's capabilities.Once again, they are facing the most sophisticated military in the world and not losing.
The fact that it becomes more and more apparent that they're not going to find the weapons of mass destruction, you call this the "original sin."Talk about what you mean by that and how much of a turning point this is and a blow to the confidence of Americans in their leadership.
I think looking back on that period, no one really believed that we would end up invading Iraq.We thought that somehow more could be averted, that Saddam Hussein would do something, but then once we went to war, there was an expectation, as the administration promised us, that it would be over quickly.The failure to find weapons of mass destruction, the widespread looting and destruction that we saw in Baghdad but then across the country, really began to cause very profound doubts.
And one has to say, in retrospect, that Iraq was the original sin in terms of dooming the war on terrorism, because when the war on terrorism is directed at those directly responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks, when it was geographically constrained, despite the rhetoric, but what was happening when it was focused on Afghanistan or on the borderland with Pakistan where Osama bin Laden, where Ayman al-Zawahiri were based, there was widespread support.
Once it spreads to Iraq, once we failed to discover weapons of mass destruction, once the ease with which this was supposed to unfold is completely negated, profound doubts creep in, not just profound doubts about whether we should have gone in the first place, but frankly, how we're going to get out.
Abu Ghraib
Then Abu Ghraib.The pictures come out in April of '04.They're released.How is that a turning point?How does that fuel the insurgency?How does that affect public trust in the military, in their leaders?Talk a little bit about the consequences of that and how that affects Americans and the world about what we're doing and how we're doing it and what these leaders are failing to accomplish.
From the very start, President Bush had said this would be a war unlike no other, in the sense that not only would it be fought kinetically with military forces, but it would also be a war of ideas, and that American values, America's faith in freedom and democracy, would triumph.And Abu Ghraib just completely destroyed any sort of belief in American exceptionalism, in American morality, in the fact that this was a quote/unquote "good war."
It was seen that the United States was resorting to the most heinous forms of incarceration, and that they could not be denied because you had the photographs there.This was a reflection, I think, on the one hand, of how poor our intelligence was in Iraq.And I was in Iraq, in the Coalition Provisional Authority, exactly around that time.And it's true; we did not have intelligence.I mean, militaries that don't have intelligence have to resort to extreme means to get information.They have to have at least some information that can direct their operations.And I think that accounts for the tragedy of Abu Ghraib, which of course not only undermined the confidence of the Iraqis in the Americans' good intentions to their country, but also undermined the confidence of some of our closest allies, but also, once again, almost obliviously fed in to Al Qaeda's narrative, gave Al Qaeda exactly the kind of boost that it needed to breathe new life into its campaign when it was already teetering on the verge of having become an anachronism because it had been so weakened by the first three years of the—of the war on terrorism.
How do events like this—can you expand it to actually say that it changes America?Is America changing because of this, and why?
Well, I think the invasion of Iraq was, firstly, the first challenge to, I think, the confidence that we had in our elected leadership.And then, when there was no weapon of mass destruction, that confidence just became a chasm.And then when you have things like Abu Ghraib, when the ideals with the lofty expectations, with the unity that once existed when we began this war is almost just completely being stripped away, it just further completely erodes confidence in our elected leadership; in the experts as well, in the military planners, in the intelligence community.It just undermines confidence in the United States government to an extent that hadn't occurred in decades, perhaps since the Great—before the Great Depression.
Legacy of the Bush Years
And lastly—and we'll turn to Obama in a second.So the war drags on between '04 and '08.The surge, of course, stabilizes things.But this is a war that, as you had stated, was a war that—we fought a war that we wanted to fight, not the war that was.Talk about your overview of the legacy of the wars under Bush, where we are at the point we're about to hand off to Obama.
Despite a lot of the lofty statements that this would be a different kind of war, in the end, America fought it exactly as we fought all our wars in the past: very conventionally; the exercise of airpower, boots on the ground, infantry, armor and artillery.Ironically, the armor and artillery became part of force protection to protect our forces, which it wasn't supposed to be necessary for in Iraq.It became a war that was predicated on the belief in the sophistication of American technology, that it would vanquish all enemies.I mean, after all, in the 1990s, it was claimed that the revolution in military affairs, that advances in training and doctrine, especially in precision-guided munitions, had facilitated the rapid defeat of Iraq.We had seen that that same combination of factors had basically engineered the defeat of the Taliban and the routing of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.It came into play again with—within five weeks, we had basically conquered Iraq after the invasion.
And there was this belief in American military power that we didn't have to really pay attention to the messier, non-technological dimensions: human intelligence, for instance, which was completely lacking in Iraq and gave rise to why that insurgency gained such traction, and we were powerless, really, to intervene and to stop it; the fact that the U.S. military were not, rightly so, were not trained to be policemen, and that's, in essence, what they found themselves doing in Iraq, because the infrastructure in that country had been hollowed out to a greater extent than we wanted to believe. …
The Obama Years
So when Obama is running, he wins the election really due to 9/11 to a large extent in some ways, and you can talk a little bit about that.He juxtaposed himself versus the way that Bush had handled the war, the war on the "dark side."Talk a little bit about what the expectations were of Obama and how 9/11 to some extent was the reason that he probably got elected.
I think President Obama was propelled into office on the one hand by frustrations with the way the war on terrorism was being waged and the fact that in 2008, the United States is, in essence, stuck in two different wars—in Afghanistan and Iraq—neither of which, despite the expectations, and indeed some of the promises at the beginning of the war, have been fulfilled.So that's one.
Secondly, I think the repercussions of the 2008 economic recession can't be underestimated, because that demonstrated the price of waging these wars without, for instance, tax increases, the damage that had been inflicted or at least the strain that had been imposed on the American economy.And in fact, as America was approaching the first decade of the war on terrorism, Americans were already exhausted.We weren't even at the decade mark, but a combination of being enmeshed in two theaters and the economic crisis, and indeed President Obama's message that there was a "good war" and a "bad war," and that we were going to find a way out of the bad war, which was in Iraq, and we were going to double down; we were going to win in Afghanistan, which was the good war, and wrap that up as well.
His approach to the war, how much was it dependent upon what Bush had done?How is he—he's sort of between a rock and a hard place.How does he define his direction due to what had taken place before?
It's interesting.Once in office, I believe that President Obama found that the challenges were much greater than he had imagined; that he had inherited two wars and that the messiness of getting out of them was much more complicated than he had imagined.
I mean, first and foremost, I don't think there's any president, ever, since 9/11 that will want to ever fall under any kind of suspicion that they ratcheted down some counterterrorism initiative and that this set the stage for another 9/11.So it's that sense of overcaution and a sense of not changing things enough that once again you make the homeland vulnerable.
There was also a belief that we could fight the good war and eliminate the, frankly, unappealing and morally difficult loose ends.President Obama said he was going to close Guantanamo from his first day in office, but at the same time, he discovered it was far more difficult to actually do that.
He also—fortunately, because of the surge, the situation in Iraq was far more stable than it had been almost since the immediate aftermath of the invasion, he could begin to shift away from having lots of boots on the ground to using and employing very effectively and with great dexterity high-tech developments like drones, unmanned aerial vehicles like the Reaper and the Predator that had precision-guided missiles that could engage in the quote/unquote "surgical strikes," that now U.S. Special Operations forces had the intelligence to carry out very precision and very precisely oriented operations, where we succeeded, for instance, in May 2006 in killing Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.But there were many operations like that that in fact were apprehending the terrorists, that were gaining more intelligence, and that were really taking down the Al Qaeda infrastructure in Iraq.
So there was this belief we could now wage a very different kind of war.
We'll continue on on that train in one second.One thing I wanted to ask you now before I forget is, the other thing that happened early on was that he receives the Nobel Peace Prize.Talk about the irony, the expectations of the world for this man.This is after he's already agreed to the surge and he is certainly going to fight the good war in Afghanistan.Talk about that moment and looking back at it now what it represents.
The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama was almost the collective global expression of opprobrium for the way the United States had been behaving the previous seven or eight years, and an endorsement of the expectations that President Obama would be a new broom, would be a new—would inject a new breath of life into U.S. counterterrorism and also U.S. foreign policy efforts that would avoid the excesses, that would avoid some of the tragedies, that would avoid things like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.It was almost like turning over a new leaf, and it was an endorsement, an encouragement of America to be different.
Does he live up to the expectations?
I think President Obama just found the entire situations far more challenging and far more complex than he may have believed they were ahead of time.The threat of terrorism, firstly, hadn't gone away.In some respects, Al Qaeda, I believe, had regrouped and reorganized.It certainly wasn't as strong as it was on September 10, 2001, but it also was a lot stronger than we were prepared to admit.So that was the first challenge.
The second challenge was in closing Guantanamo Bay.There were enormous, not just legal issues involved, but really political issues.I mean, there were members of Congress that were staunchly opposed to having Guantanamo detainees anywhere on American soil.
So even things that there was widespread support for nonetheless encountered formidable opposition and made, I think, achieving these ends much more difficult for President Obama than he had thought.I mean, he campaigned on a platform of extricating the United States from these wars and was only partially successful.
… To wrap this up, the effect of the tactics chosen by Obama, did it shorten the war?Did it prevent the war from spreading to new locations?
No, unfortunately, that's one of the tragedies I think in the war on terrorism, is we have a new administration with a new approach, and nothing really changes.The war drags on.It's not brought to a closure.There's the illusion that there's an ephemeral success in Iraq because, of course, under President Obama the United States withdraws its military forces from 2011 in Iraq, but only three years later, less than three years, we have the threat of an even more savage, more malignant force than Al Qaeda, which is the seed of Al Qaeda in Iraq that then flowers tragically into the Islamic State.
Killing Osama bin Laden
The eventual killing of Osama bin Laden, what's the effect of that at the late date that it was, the effect on Al Qaeda, but also the effect on Obama's views of these tactics being successful that he's been using?
Beyond any doubt, it was enormously important for American credibility that Osama bin Laden was brought to justice, whether he was captured and tried or whether he was killed, that this was enormously important and was a very important, I think, achievement that U.S. Navy SEALs were able to accomplish in Abbottabad.
At the same time, though, I think we had completely unrealistic expectations of what would follow from that.Before bin Laden was actually killed, the sort of conventional wisdom, the meme, was that he was hiding in a cave somewhere completely cut off from his followers, isolated, this, you know, really doddering old man.What we found from the Abbottabad files is that he was a micromanager, that he had his hand involved in everything, that he was still trying to run Al Qaeda, albeit not terribly effectively or efficiently because of the long gaps in his lines of communication, but nonetheless, he was still very much engaged.
But we rather wanted to believe that once bin Laden was eliminated that the threat was over; that we had achieved what we had set out to do a decade before; that now the architect of the 9/11 attacks, the mastermind behind them, the founder and leader of Al Qaeda was gone, the threat would end.And nothing, unfortunately, could have been further from the truth.The problem is that the movement had become larger than one man.Had we captured or killed bin Laden in Tora Bora in 2001, I think it would have been very different.But a decade on, every day that he survived was another thumb at the United States and another diminution of U.S. power, the world's greatest superpower, that we couldn't find bin Laden.And that when he was finally killed, it was—I mean, it was enormously significant, it was certainly important, but I think the effects of it, inconsequential, unfortunately.
Meanwhile, we've got this list of things that keep going wrong in these endless wars, but at home you've also got another thing that happens, which is the [Edward] Snowden revelations, leaks of the information about domestic surveillance.Talk a little bit about that effect in the United States, that you've got people that have seen no weapons of mass destruction, you've got lies told about going into Iraq, and then you have these revelations that come out through Snowden about the fact that after 9/11, it was felt that the need for all sorts of new surveillance tools, including looking into information domestically, how does that add to this distrust?How does this add to the mix that we've been talking about here?
To my mind, it's all part of a continuum.If confidence in elected leadership was undermined or compromised by the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, then by events like Abu Ghraib, this was just widening that—that doubt and those sorts of concerns, because there had already been considerable reporting about excesses involving the U.S. Patriot Act and that the United States was already going outside the bounds of the legal powers that it had gone to Congress after 9/11 to acquire for the intelligence community that were necessary to counter terrorism.So that was certainly out there and certainly had been generating a lot of attention and concern.
But then Snowden becomes the proof positive, firstly of the dimensions of it that go beyond the expectations, but secondly in undermining whether the American public can actually believe its elected political leaders, whether in the White House or in Congress.And this I think is enormously significant.At the time I don't think it was very well understood.
Similarly, one has to understand that the Snowden revelations harmed the United States in two respects, not only undermining our confidence and now creating this image that elected American officials were lying to the American public, or attempting to cover up information that Snowden then reveals, but also enormously facilitated terrorist operations throughout the world.I mean, we know for a fact that both Al Qaeda and the Islamic State followed his revelations very closely and made changes to their communications, procedures and techniques to take advantage of that information, to make themselves much more impervious to detection and their communications much more difficult to intercept.
Underestimating ISIS
And in Iraq, Obama's tactics, he pulled away militarily and politically from Iraq.The vacuum that it caused allows [Nouri al-]Maliki to come down on the Sunnis and eventually push them more into the hands of ISIS, and ISIS rises.So there's that effect, and I'd like to get your overview of that, but also how Obama underestimated ISIS in the beginning.He pooh-poohed the fact that these were just the "JV team."Talk about his actions towards Iraq and ISIS and the consequences, again, here of the choices that he made.
… Of course, there was this tremendous sense of accomplishment that President Obama was able to make good on his campaign pledge when U.S. troops left Iraq in 2011, and that was just seen as an enormous triumph and the fact that we had turned a corner in the war on terrorism.And I think it created this optimism that additional success would now immediately follow in Afghanistan, that we were finally on the right track.And that was, of course, the good war that Obama—President Obama had described.
The problem is, the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq created a vacuum.It created a vacuum where the stability of the country began to fracture once again, where Sunnis, who had come to have faith, firstly, in the government of Maliki, that a Shia leader could actually hold the country together and be a leader for all its people, began, unfortunately, to completely erode.The United States was not there to stabilize the situation, to influence, to prod Maliki, and then we see this steady escalation of the same kind of insurgency that had unfolded nearly a decade before, in many cases not by exactly the same people, but by a new generation that had learned and had been inspired by them, and in some cases had come of age as very young men fighting this type of war and had perfected the ability to wage insurgency.
Legacy of the Obama Years
And here you have the rise of ISIS.
So your overview, to finish up Obama and the legacy of Obama's war, wars, how he handles it after inheriting what he inherited from Bush and what he will pass down to Trump, what's your short overview of the legacy of Obama's wars?
On the positive side, there's certainly an upward trajectory from President Bush's second term, when we had the surge that brings stability to Iraq, that begins to reverse its slide into complete anarchy.You then have President Obama pivots, is not committing large, a large American footprint of ground forces, is able to use drones and Special Operations personnel in the intelligence community much more effectively.So there's certainly—not just the illusion—I think tangible progress, but progress that is, I would say, is very precious, that is something that if it's not cultivated and if it's not nurtured becomes threatened, withers.
And that's, I think, what President Trump now inherits is here, the war on terrorism has been going better.There had been the horrific rise of ISIS, but by the time President Trump takes office, it's already—ISIS is in decline.There's an international coalition, a global coalition of some 80 countries that is in the process of completely dismantling and defeating the Islamic State and routing ISIS. So all that is positive, but it requires continued attention.
The Election of Donald Trump
So let's talk about Trump.He understands the importance of the fact that the legacy of 9/11, the fear that still exists.He's at the anniversary in 2016, the 9/11 anniversary, in New York City.He uses the public lack of trust in the government.He understands that after these 15 years or whatever of lies, of endless wars, of the story of WMD, the incompetence that has been shown, as the seeds for his rise to a large extent.Talk about how that is, how Trump, to a large extent, is the natural culmination of the anger, the frustration of the American people in the last two presidents and the promises made and not delivered on.Talk a little bit about the rise of Trump and how all of this helps to define it.
As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump doubles down.I mean, don't forget, when President Obama came in to office, amongst his closest aides there was this perception of Washington as "the Blob," as these superannuated, you know, the old guard, the experts, the inside-the-Beltway crowd, that it steered us so wrong with the invasion of Iraq, for example, and the way the war on terrorism had been conducted, and that President Obama was supposed to be a new breath of fresh air.
Candidate Trump just doubles down on that and says, "We can't trust any of them.We can't trust any of the professional politicians, because, look, President Obama hasn't ended these wars either.We're still involved in Afghanistan."And candidate Trump begins to describe them as these "stupid, endless wars," and pushes it still further to undermine confidence not just in elected leadership, but in the entire Washington establishment; that they've all steered us wrong, that we're nearly a decade and a half into this and the situation's no better.That's why you need someone who's a businessman, who gets things done, who can make deals and who's going to come at this with the kind of pragmatism that's going to make everything right.
Then he turns his attention to, as he puts it, the enemy within.He talks about the need to lock Muslims out.He uses the fear of terrorism.He puts his opponents in league with the enemy, saying Obama is the founder of ISIS and such.What's he doing?
It's a simple message: Nothing else has worked, so we've got to get tough, and the way we're going to get tough is by isolating ourselves, by building a fortress that's going to wall out anyone who threatens us.And he plays on the failures, not just of his Democratic predecessor, but his Republican predecessor as well, and says they're all wrong:"That's why you need me, and that's why we're going to do things differently."
And he propagates a very populist message that resonates with people who are tired.They're tired of being economically depressed.They're tired of seeing jobs leave the United States.They're tired of believing politicians that supposedly have their best interests in mind.And in many cases, they're tired of these prolonged overseas engagements that are bankrupting the United States.And here you have a businessman that's going to invest, that's going to rebuild our infrastructure, that's going to do things right and, in candidate Trump's phrase, "Make America great again."
Talk about this reality that you write about, the fact that the fears of 9/11 go on till this day, this absolute fear of another terrorist attack, while something like Oklahoma City, a horribly grievous attack, but it seemed to have dissipated.The fear of what that was and who those people were kind of dissipated.Talk about the potency of this fear that Trump uses, ties into, that he got, where domestic terrorism doesn't seem to have the same effect.
I think for President Trump, having very much of a populist message painted very much of an "us against them," of a United States that was besieged and beleaguered from the outside, but where at least looking out, the only problems inside were things that his agenda posed.For instance, immigration became an issue.Again, that he was sort of defining an America for Americans and was defining Americans in a very exclusionist manner.So therefore, he was breathing life into lots of currents that had been beneath the surface, of racism, of xenophobia, of isolationism, that gained new momentum over the past decade and a half just because of our many frustrations overseas where Americans wanted to turn in, that they wanted to rebuild this country.They wanted an America for Americans, which was exactly the kind of sentiment that President Trump was so effective at tapping into and manipulating and exploiting to actually demonize anyone who he—who he saw was un-American or was a threat to Americans, which became much more of an external than an internal threat.
And how does that work for him?
Well, it creates enormous polarization and divisiveness in the United States.There's a hard core of a base of roughly a third of Americans who gravitate and fervently believe in that message.There's roughly another third that equally as fervently not only disagrees but looks at that with opprobrium.And then there's another third that just doesn't know what to think any longer after these—the tumultuous first two decades of this century.
And the failures of leadership and the failures, the lies and everything else?
Certainly the failures of leadership.What they see is that they'd been misled across a number of different issues, not least ones that centered on the war on terrorism, which was seen as really an external challenge, an external threat.So there's this desire to pull back into a fortress America that could somehow make itself impenetrable and safe from any other threats, and that would then also ruthlessly hunt down any—any threats that surfaced internally to prevent them from arising.
Trump and the Military
So the significance of his relationship with his secretary of defense, Gen. [James] Mattis, a very different point of view about the role of America in the world.There's this meeting in "The Tank" in July of 2017 that I mentioned to you in that letter.I don't know if you know anything about it, but talk a little bit about the clash in his administration between the globalists, I suppose you would see them, people that believed in, like Mattis and [Secretary of State Rex] Tillerson, in a strong United States as having an important role in leading the world, in having good relationships with his allies, and Trump, who has a very different kind of point of view that was defined in this meeting in The Tank.Talk a little bit about the realities of what was going on in that clash and what it meant.
Well, it was another example of this sort of serial wishful thinking—I mean, wishful thinking that the war on terrorism would be far more successful and be wrapped up in a much shorter time frame than we imagined; this wishful thinking that Iraq would be much easier.And then I think there also was wishful thinking that President Trump, once in office, could be tamed, could be persuaded by these very weighty arguments from people who knew about the world—Secretary of Defense Mattis as a career soldier, as a general, and Secretary of State Tillerson as a global businessman—that they would have the practical, real-world sensibilities and an outside-of-the-Beltway approach that would convince President Trump that the United States was still great and will always be great, but that part of our greatness depended upon our engagement in the world and our relationship with our closest allies.
And of course, in The Tank, at that fateful meeting in the Pentagon, and elsewhere, President Trump didn't believe any of it, and he wasn't going to be tamed.He has his own way of looking at things and believed what he believed and what he knew.
And also, that appeal to his base, President Trump prided himself on not taking the advice of the experts, because the experts had been wrong about everything.They had been wrong about the wisdom of invading Afghanistan, wrong about the WMD in Iraq, so why should we listen to them?And he used this to try to parlay this or solicit trust in his more serendipitous approach to foreign policy that completely overwhelmed even extraordinarily competent and accomplished and formidable individuals like Secretaries Mattis and Tillerson.
… With the consequences of basically a superpower giving up their leading role in the world, of pulling away from his allies, diminishing their world, what was he doing?Especially after he fires Mattis, afterwards, what is he doing, and why is it significant?
It's significant because it's a disengagement of America and the world.It's a discreditation, a diminution of expertise and of treaties and of patterns of foreign policy and national security behavior that have been in place for decades.It's this inward turning of, at least as President Trump would see it, as Americans for Americans and of creating this, again, American bastion that's now isolated and doesn't really need the world.
And as far as when Trump wants to pull out of Syria and Mattis resigns, is that a turning point where all of a sudden he feels freer to assert his point of view and go in the directions he's going in anyway?What does that moment in his presidency mean, and its significance?
I think that more than anything else, it sets off alarm bells about where he would stop.I mean, Syria being such an important crucible in the Middle East, in the war on terrorism, the stakes were enormously high, that just walking away from it, I think, sends a frisson of fear that what was next?That the United States could indeed actually leave NATO; could indeed break other treaties, other agreements; that President Trump was, indeed, setting a very different course.That was absolutely proof positive, and I think it alarmed many people.
And the legacy of Trump's wars?He is unable to disentangle from these endless wars.He goes back, and he's fighting ISIS. He's still in Afghanistan in the same situation that Obama was, and really Bush was, where they're trying to negotiate with the Taliban who will probably take back the country at some point.What's the legacy of Trump's wars?And how in some ways, is it somewhat similar to how Obama operated?
I think in terms of counterterrorism, the Trump administration was even more effective than its predecessors in systematically eroding the strength of terrorist organizations through targeted assassinations.I mean, there's a whole series of senior Al Qaeda leaders, including the supposed heir to Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden's son, Hamza bin Laden, under President Trump, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the founder and leader of ISIS, is killed; there's any number of senior lieutenants in both organizations that are eliminated.In theory, that should have done enormous damage to both terrorist organizations.It doesn't, because what we see is that in the five years or so that ISIS was able to emerge, it was able to plant deeper roots than anyone imagined and, much like Al Qaeda had become greater than one person, and much like Al Qaeda had been able to spread beyond its initial geographical locus in the Levant and in western Iraq to elsewhere in the Middle East, the Caucasus, to North Africa, to West Africa, to East Africa, to southern part of Africa, to Southeast Asia, to South Asia.
So in other words, President Trump, despite claiming and in fact having a very different approach to statecraft and to, indeed, warfare than either of his two predecessors, despite many tactical accomplishments, just as his two predecessors had, strategically, we're still enmeshed in this war on terrorism.Al Qaeda and ISIS are still there; they are still formidable opponents.And the United States is still in Afghanistan, despite President Trump's ardent efforts to extricate our—extricate American military forces from Afghanistan before the 2020 election.
The 2020 Election
So as the 2020 election is coming around, and the campaign has started up, Trump is focusing now on the war at home in a lot of ways.He's starting to equivalize, if that's a word, the terrorists with antifa; that antifa are the terrorists; that radical socialists are the terrorists; that this is an existential threat.Talk a little bit about the significance of this, turning his enemies, the people that he disagrees with, into his terrorists; in fact, using some of the powers of the DHS and making arrests and the military in dealing with demonstrators, using some of the tools of the terrorism trade.Talk about that direction that he took and the significance that you put to it.
President Trump found that if you're going to build a populist base, you have to feed it.And from the start, he began feeding it; he fed it firstly with his election campaign that he was going to build a "beautiful wall," for instance, along the southern United States border.He fed it immediately after taking office by imposing a ban on Muslims from overseas traveling to the United States.And then we see him feeding it on domestic issues.First and foremost was the aftermath of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where the president comes out and says that there were fine people on both sides, on the one hand the protesters against racism, antisemitism, and on the other hand members of the American Nazi Party in its various incarnations, the Ku Klux Klan and white supremacist groups.So that was the start.
Then you see that ratcheted up, where he's blaming the violence in the United States when we have incidents such as the shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh carried out by a white supremacist, tragic incident at a synagogue outside of San Diego, followed only two or three months later by a tragic shooting at a Walmart in El Paso.When we see that the violence is coming from far-right extremists and white supremacists, he's saying, President Trump is saying, no, the threat in the United States is from so-called socialists that he lumps into the Democratic Party and progressives, as well as from this very amorphous entity known as antifa, which is to say anti-fascist, which is not an organization itself, but, as they see themselves, a kind of collective of anarchists and others.
Now, indeed, many of these far-left groups, on occasion, are sliding into violence.And we saw this very prominently the summer of 2020 with the torching of the Minneapolis police department's 3rd District headquarters with other acts of vandalism and looting.But at the same time, it pales in comparison, for instance, with the murder of a federal protection officer in Oakland and then of a sheriff's deputy nearby in Northern California by... an anti-government extremist who belongs to the so-called Boogaloo movement that seeks to promote a second civil war and is actually a serving noncommissioned officer in the United States Air Force.There's also a plot that's disrupted to carry out a false flag attack in Las Vegas by military veterans and reservists who are also part of this Boogaloo movement.
So you see almost two different manifestations of violence that President Trump is equating as the same, and demonizing one end of the spectrum while completely ignoring the actual far more serious homicidal acts of violence on the far right.
We're leading up to Jan. 6 here.How does this affect his supporters, this message?These supporters who have turned against institutions, have agreed with his fanning of the flames on how bad leadership has been, how they've been misled and lied to and such, how do these claims that he's making affect his supporters?
I think there's a problem also with the American polity who are listening to President Trump and thinking that we should be focusing equal attention on these completely unequal threats, which certainly isn't the case.But secondly, I think it's empowering and infusing that base in the most extreme elements of that base with the very important presidential imprimatur.The White House seal is on their types of activities.And I think this was incontrovertibly demonstrated with the first presidential debate in September 2020, when President Trump, when asked about the Proud Boys said, "Proud Boys, stand back [and] stand by."In other words, they took that, regardless of what President Trump's words, the message that they were intended to convey, they took this as a green light.They took this as an endorsement.
And I would argue the same thing happened in Charlottesville in the aftermath of the Unite the Right rally.Whatever President Trump may or may not have intended by those words, saying that there are a few fine people on both sides, that was taken as a green light or a rubber stamp that extremism would not only be tolerated, but was in fact being endorsed.
And when he urges his followers to participate in defending this country, to be patriots, and when he claims that the election was stolen from him, they do.Talk about how we get to the point where he can make the claims, despite what's happening in the courts, despite what Republican leaders in states are saying, he can make these claims and he can rev them up to the point where they understand, they think that in fact their government is being taken away from them by the same people who gave them Iraq, who gave them lies about WMD. What's going on here?
Well, it was—it was—it was, not to use a cliché, it really was kind of the perfect storm, because President Trump had long been setting this up.He had been portraying himself as the outsider who's cleaning up Washington, who's draining the swamp, who's the one force that his base can trust, who will never be diverted from this sacred mission.And of course, now that they're trying to deprive him of being reelected, this is all part of a massive plot to undo all the good things that he has achieved, not predicated or built upon now nearly two decades of Americans losing trust, losing faith in elected leadership, being constantly told that the experts in the Washington establishment and the Beltway are wrong.This just played into a theme that has been prevalent for a long period of time.I mean, it was a familiar musical sound; it was a note that was played, that resonated with the public that of course they accepted.If you believe that President Trump is the outsider and that he's withstanding these powerful forces arrayed against him, well, now they're trying to deprive him of the election that he won.
I mean, there's unfortunately a compelling logic that's part of a broader continuum that we really didn't understand until it was too late.And when it was too late, that was the afternoon of Jan. 6, 2021.
So talk about Jan. 6.This is the same building that Al Qaeda had tried to take down on 9/11, and a group of Americans, patriotic Americans, gave their lives to prevent it from happening.And now on Jan. 6, you've got another group of Americans in a mob who break in and take down the Capitol and are searching for the vice president to hang.How did we get here?How did 20 years of 9/11 wars, how did decisions by three presidents in some way—connect the dots here.How did some of all of that bring us to this moment?
Unfortunately, this is one of the tragic consequences or repercussions of the war on terrorism, whereas 20 years earlier you can have this bipartisan evocation of unity, of friendship, of cooperation, of a common purpose, a common mission that we saw depicted with Democratic and Republican members of Congress singing "God Bless America" on the steps of the Capitol, and then 20 years later having Americans assaulting and desecrating their own sacred citadel of democracy and freedom, and not only that, braying for the deaths of their elected leaders, going from the sort of mistrust and suspicions that had been sown and that had been built upon, unfortunately, since the beginning of the war on terrorism, that just crystallizes or culminates now not just in suspicion or mistrust, but actually wanting to kill our elected representatives, even members of one's own party.That we had gone from that extreme to the other is just, you know, undeniably tragic.
And also, looking back on Sept. 11, I mean, that seems like not just two decades ago but a completely different era, a totally different America.And I think the challenge today is how we get back to that old America, how we find our way there again.
But clearly I think what happens, popular discontent and mistrust of government was weaponized and activated and deployed on Jan. 6 in ways that were unimaginable.
And here's another tragedy: The 9/11 Commission, of course, described the 9/11 attacks as a failure of imagination.And those are exactly the phases that are used to describe the failure to anticipate that Americans would actually storm and gain entrance violently to the United States Capitol and go on a headhunting expedition to try to find members of Congress, as well as the vice president, to do bodily harm to.
… Who were these people?There were a lot of soldiers; there were a lot of businesspeople involved in that group.What was the motivations of these people?Some people say it was soldiers who felt misused and their sacrifices were not understood.I mean, in your point of view, who were these people, and why were they susceptible?
Well, they were neither monolithic nor homogeneous.I think that at the core it was people who distrusted Washington, not President Trump's Washington, but everybody else's Washington, and believed nothing that they heard from the traditional mainstream media, that got all their information not even from established news sources but from social media that was completely unfiltered, unvetted, unedited.They were an assortment of people that believed the election had been stolen, that adhered to every word that President Trump said, even to follow his marching orders against President Trump's own vice president.They reflected, I think, a diversity of frustrated, alienated Americans who don't believe in their government, some of whom may be military veterans, who may have been serving in the military, and also didn't believe this; some who believed that they were doing the right thing because President Trump had—and his acolytes, as attorney Rudy Giuliani and others had weaponized this crowd had told them they were doing the right thing, that they were preserving the United States; they were meting out justice and preventing a stolen election.So they were persuaded to be mobilized and weaponized in the manner that they were.
But I think, you know, all forms of terrorism never occur in a vacuum.They always reflect the tensions, the divisions, the polarizations of society.And that's exactly what we saw on Jan. 6.
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