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Emma Sky
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Emma Sky
Military Adviser
Emma Sky advises on conflict and reconciliation in the Middle East. She advised both U.S. Gen. Raymond Odierno and Gen. David Petraeus in Iraq. Sky is the author of The Unraveling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq and In a Time of Monsters: Travels Through a Middle East in Revolt.
The following interview was conducted by Jim Gilmore on April 15, 2021. It has been edited for clarity and length.
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Global Reaction to 9/11
So this film is starting with 9/11.The world is very supportive of the United States and the endeavors that will come.Talk a little bit about those days, looking back.What was America like at that point?
Well, 9/11, I remember 9/11, because I happened to be in Cairo that day.I was doing some work to support human rights organizations, and there was this tremendous excitement in the streets of Cairo that the superpower had had its comeuppance.And I remember just taking a boat on the Nile, a Felucca, that night, thinking, Our world is never going to be the same.I’m watching on TV; I could see President Bush coming out and basically pledging to hunt down the terrorists and those that harbor them.And the world rallied around America.NATO invoked Article 5 for the first time in its history: An attack on one is an attack on all.
That speech that Bush gives, he talks—he quotes from the Bible.He talks about the fact that this is a war [of] good against evil.He will also talk about the need to spread democratic values and that we are responsible to do that because of our values, our American values.
U.S. Understanding of the Middle East
When you heard him give that speech and the speeches afterwards, what did you think?
Well, the attacks were not from Afghanistan, but Iraq soon came under the crosshairs.I think in the early days after 9/11, [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld and [Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul] Wolfowitz kept saying that Iraq must be included in the U.S. response.1And I think that was quite surprising.President Bush said, you know, “Show me the evidence between Saddam and 9/11.”And I think anyone who knew a little bit about Saddam and a little bit about Al Qaeda thought there was no way could there be some connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda.But the president said, “Show me the evidence.”
1
And so you had Iraqi exiles, fantasists and Iranian agents coming forward with all different bits of information or packs of lies, basically, which they fed into the U.S. system and which confirmed the bias of those U.S. officials who were adamant about removing Saddam Hussein.
So give me your review of the depth of the understanding of what we were getting into, of the Mideast, of Al Qaeda in those early, early days.
Well, the architects of the Iraq War promulgated this idea that the removal of Saddam would lead to a regional democratic order and peace with Israel.And I think, for President Bush, he believed that America’s liberty depended on the liberty of others, because repressive states, repressive regimes create terrorism.And so spreading democracy became, if you like, a national security imperative, to change the conditions that create terrorism, and that the cornerstone of, you know, Bush’s freedom agenda was to be this transformation of Iraq into democracy, with, you know, it’s supposed to have a knock-on effect, a demonstrative effect, that if you change Iraq into a democracy, then that would spread democracy throughout the region and would bring peace with Israel.
And your review of that belief?Naive or correct?
Well, it was incredibly naive.It was tremendously naive.And I think to try and understand this, you really have to reflect back on the end of the Cold War.When the Cold War ended, it really did seem a triumph, if you like, of liberal democracy.You had Francis Fukuyama declaring the “end of history.”It was liberal democracy from here on out, and all the problems of the world were going to be resolved.
And it was in that period that you saw the rise of the neoconservatives that felt this unipolar moment needed a strong, muscular foreign policy to recreate the world in America’s image.I think you can only understand the decision to attack Iraq in the context of 9/11.I think after the first attack, President Bush was terrified that there could be further attacks.He had failed to prevent the first.So he was looking around, you know: Who were enemies of America?Who might want to do America harm?
And Saddam, you know, had been an ally of America in the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s.But then, when he had invaded Kuwait, he had miscalculated then, and you saw President Bush Sr. pull together a large coalition to go and liberate Kuwait and expel Saddam’s forces.So you really have to see this in the context of 9/11.
When President Bush became president, a lot of the neoconservatives got posts in his government, particularly in the Department of Defense.But it needed an event such as 9/11 for them to really put Iraq in the crosshairs.
The Dark Side
Soon after Bush defines this need to spread democratic values, and that was part of the fight we were about to endeavor, the vice president, Vice President Cheney, comes out on a Sunday morning show and starts talking about the fact that we also have to fight a secret war on the “dark side.”Talk a little bit about that and the effects of what the dark side—why, number one, we go that direction, and number two, the long-term blowback effects of it, eventually.
Three thousand people were killed on 9/11, and the U.S. response to that event included invading Iraq and Afghanistan, holding people without due process, torturing detainees in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, kidnapping suspects in one country and transporting them to another through extraordinary rendition, and assassinating people in countries where the U.S. wasn’t even at war.Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans died.
And the U.S., in this excessive hunt to eradicate terrorists, undermined the very rules-based international order that it had set up and led for 70 years.And so this did great harm to America’s reputation.And through all of this, inadequate attention was paid to the rise of China.
And how does it affect the impression or the vision of America and how Europe sees it, how the Muslim world sees America?What’s the effect on what America is or seen as?
Well, America remains strong militarily and economically, but its reputation as the model and standard-bearer of democracy has been greatly tarnished by these wars in the Middle East and by its political dysfunction back at home.So it’s no longer seen, if you like, as the—you know, this country, this city on the hill, this country which was better than other countries; that despite its problems, there was always a sense that America did offer the opportunities of freedom, did stand for something better than other countries.
Invasion of Iraq and the Aftermath
I’m going to go through the Iraqi war.The post-invasion strategy that [L. Paul] Bremer was involved in designing, and that certainly Rumsfeld was involved in, the CPA 1 and 2 [Coalition Provisional Authority], the firing of the Iraqi military, and the rules and regulations about those in the Baathist Party, so what were the consequences of how post-invasion was handled?2And why did that happen?
2
Washington Post: 15 Fateful Months
When President Bush appeared aboard the <i>USS Abraham Lincoln</i> in, I think it was May 2003, with “Mission Accomplished.”And you might ask, what mission?3Because when Iraq was found not to have weapons of mass destruction, the mission then morphed to installing democracy.Now we should never have invaded Iraq in the first place, because it was based on the belief that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, which he didn’t have.But nothing that happened afterwards was inevitable.
3
Associated Press: Bush was haunted by his own ‘Mission Accomplished’
And in this great hope to create a new Iraq, there was this sense that Iraq had to be put on new foundations.So Ambassador Bremer spoke about, you know, “We’re going to rebuild Iraq like we did Germany and Japan after World War II.”And to do that, we couldn’t build from the old foundations; we had to create new foundations.And so the security forces were dismissed, and members of the Baath Party, up to Level 4, were also dismissed.4
4
ICTJ: A Bitter Legacy:
But in Iraq, the party and the states were kind of one and the same, and so by removing all of these people from their posts, it broke down the sinews that held the state together.And in this political vacuum and this security vacuum, Iraqis feared, were fearful.They formed militias to protect themselves.Foreign fighters came in to fight against the occupation.Those who were dismissed from their jobs formed insurgent groups.
And so within a matter of a few months, there were all these different types of insurgent groups trying to bring down the new regime that we had put in place and were attacking the coalition forces.
And the effect of Rumsfeld and our government, except for some in the military who were sending up red flags, that the insurgency was not important, would go away, the discounting of the insurgency, what were the effects and consequences of that?
I think at the beginning, there was almost ignoring Iraqis.So by September 2003 was the first time that the coalition actually came up with a plan.I remember going down to Baghdad with Gen. [Raymond] Odierno, Gen. [David] Petraeus.It was a meeting of the coordinators and the commanders.And there, Ambassador Bremer announced, “Here is seven steps to sovereignty.”And we were all a bit surprised because we hadn’t really been consulted on the plan.But suddenly there was a plan for what we were supposed to be doing in Iraq.
That plan didn’t last very long, because by November there was a new plan, the November 15th agreement, and even that came into trouble very quickly, because Ayatollah [Ali al-]Sistani in the south of the country really wanted to have Iraqis write a constitution, Iraqis have elections and for the occupation to end.
So I think at the beginning, there was a denial about the population rejecting the coalition, because Iraqi exiles were the ones who had advised the coalition on the war, and they had told the coalition: “You’re going to be welcomed.You’re going to be—you know, people are going to be so relieved to be rid of Saddam.”And that was partly true.Iraqis were very relieved to be rid of Saddam, and many of them hoped that we would rebuild their country within six months.They kind of wanted to live in something that looked like Dubai.
But when the coalition started dismissing people from their jobs, they then lost confidence and started to view the coalition not as their liberators, but as their occupiers.And I think, initially, senior officials thought anyone who was anti the coalition must mean that they were pro-Saddam.Well, the truth was, when we invaded, there really wasn’t much of a fight, because the Iraqi army just dissolved itself.We had dropped fliers across the country saying, “Do not fight us, and we will treat you with dignity.”
And it was only a few units of the Republican Guards that actually did fight.Most soldiers just went home, took their weapons with them and waited for us to call them back to barracks.But that never happened.And so you can watch how the population that, at the beginning was really, you know, waiting to see what would happen, and then started to turn against the coalition.And because all the security forces had been dismissed, there was nobody to guard the borders, and so these, you know, foreign fighters, jihadis, could enter the country.
In the way that you’ve defined nicely the way Iraqi leaders viewed what was going on, how did our allies, how did European countries, how did the average Iraqi on the streets view America at that point and the decisions that were being made in the post-invasion, and in the beginnings of the fight against this insurgency?
Well, I think people held, you know, America in high regard.When you think of shock and awe, when you think of the firepower that America has, it’s hugely impressive.So the coalition that invaded was the coalition of the willing, primarily the U.S. and the U.K.And I remember, in all the new gadgets that the Americans had, the talk of government in a box, feeling, you know: “Wow, you know, this is the sole superpower.Gosh. What’s going to happen?”None of us kind of knew.
And I think Iraqis felt the same, waiting to think—you know, this is the country that put a man on the moon; imagine what it’s going to do for us.There were these very high expectations.And at the beginning, I think the coalition really ovepromised and underdelivered.And so when anything went wrong, Iraqis assumed it was a conspiracy.So when the electricity went down, they believed it was because America was stealing it, not because insurgents had blown up the pipelines, blown up the wires.So there was always this misunderstanding which led to, you know, the promulgation of more and more conspiracy theories.
Abu Ghraib
So then, another thing that we’ll be talking about in the film, as we have in the past, is that of course, in April of ’04, when Abu Ghraib becomes public, the pictures are published, talk a little bit about how—was this a turning point in some ways?Did it fuel the insurgency, how Iraqis saw this, how our allies saw this, how the American people saw it?I mean, what was the effect of the pictures being released of Abu Ghraib?
I think among the Americans, it was truly shocking.To those in uniform, it was shameful.They very much felt that is not who we are; that those soldiers who did that, they do not represent us.So I think for Americans in general, this was really—this was horrible, really, really horrible.I think for coalition partners, it was shocking.What happens when you have soldiers who are not under proper command and control?What happens when you have a command climate that demonizes Iraqis, that looks at them as subhumans?
Among Iraqis, I think there were very mixed views.For some, they believed that those people in jail were terrible humans who had tortured Iraqis; that these were criminals; that these were Saddam followers.And so some had no sympathy whatsoever for them.But obviously, those who were from the same community as those who’d been tortured, they were disgusted by what had happened.And for them, this was another reason to join the insurgency.
And the effect of when it became quite clear that there were no weapons of mass destruction on the confidence of other nations and the American people about the U.S.?
I think it has made people question the reports that the intelligence community does put out; that perhaps, at times, people wonder and worry that the intelligence community is exaggerating the threat, that it is not as big as they make out or perhaps it doesn’t exist at all.So I think there was a lack of trust or a decrease in trust in the intelligence community.
Legacy of the Bush Years
Summing up the [George W.] Bush years, though, and the Bush wars post-9/11, what’s his overall legacy, do you believe?
So Bush made a big mistake in invading Iraq and then in the way in which the occupation was conducted.But he did take a decision, a brave decision, to surge extra forces into Iraq in 2007, and that was against the advice of many of those around him.He calculated, you know, if you think back to 2006, Iraq was in a dreadful situation.It had descended into civil war.There were dead bodies in the streets every day, and you could tell whether they were Sunni or Shia depending whether they had a bullet through the head or a drill.
Baghdad had been ethnically cleansed.There was only a few hours of electricity every day, and it looked a disaster.And President Bush believed that if he withdrew all U.S. forces in these circumstances, the civil war in Iraq would spread into the region, and it would be terribly humiliating for U.S. forces.So he took the gamble to surge extra forces into Iraq, an extra 20,000 forces.
And I think during that period, from 2007, 2008, was the only time during the whole war that the U.S. had the right strategy, the right resources and the right leadership.And it wasn’t just the extra forces that made the difference; it was how those forces were used.And so these forces were pushed back out to live among the Iraqi people and to guard the Iraqi people from the insurgents.Protecting the Iraqi people became the prime objective of the U.S. forces.
And living among the people, protecting the people, they started to receive good information from the Iraqi people about who the insurgents were.By this stage in the war, the Iraqis now regarded each other with far greater suspicion and looked to the U.S. forces as their protectors.And the U.S. forces started to mediate agreements between insurgent groups, and the government started to reach out to them, started to understand who was fighting and why.No longer were they all just called the enemy or anti-coalition forces or anti-Iraqi forces.They started to understand more who these groups were, and why they were fighting, and so reached out to them.
And brokering cease-fires, brokering reconciliation agreements, really became the main efforts of the forces.And the violence started to come down, very largely helped by the Sunni Awakening, which started in Anbar.So Sunnis started to realize that Al Qaeda was taking them to certain defeat, and they’d had enough of Al Qaeda that had been chopping off fingers for smoking; banning cucumbers and tomatoes from being sold together in veggie—you know, vegetable stores—go figure; taking women as their wives.They’d had enough of this, and they decided to flip against Al Qaeda, to realign with the U.S. military and to fight alongside the U.S. military to push back against the Shia militias.And so this really helped bring the violence down.And then you started to see that the Shia population felt they were not under such threat anymore, and they no longer wanted the Shia militias, and so the Shia militias lost support from the population, and they began to disband.And the Iraqi security forces, working side by side with the U.S. military, they grew in capacity, and the states became stronger, and we started to see the civil war end and all groups come into the political process.
So by the time President Bush ended his time in office, the civil war in Iraq had come to an end.All different groups had been brought into the physical process.Al Qaeda in Iraq was defeated, and there was optimism that Iraq was now on the pathway to stability.
The Obama Years
Let’s turn to Obama.Obama wins the election, partially because of juxtaposing himself against Bush’s wars.He was going to fix the problem.He was going to not use the dark site tactics.He provided hope.This is the way people viewed it.In fact, of the international community seemed to view it that way.Even after agreeing to the surge to begin with, he gets the Nobel Peace Prize.Obama walking in the door, define him, define his goals, the way the international community viewed him.And let’s start there, and then we’ll talk about what in fact his real views are in the war and what happens.But what’s the hope in the beginning?
So when Obama was elected, it was a day of great hope, I think, for America and for the world.Obama’s story was a story that was really an American story, again, this idea that only in America can such a guy become president.And he got the Nobel Peace Prize even before he’d done anything, just for not being President Bush.President Obama was somebody who was internationalist in outlook.He was somebody who had been abroad, somebody who related to people all around the world and who people all around the world related to.
So he had come to notice in America because of his opposition as a senator to the Iraq War.So if not for the Iraq War, there would never have been a President Obama.So it was his vociferous opposition to this war that brought him to notice.And when he campaigned on that, he won the presidency.So I think there was great hope that this dark time under President Bush, a line would be drawn.There would be no more torturing going on.There would be support for human rights, that America would revert back to the old America, the Statue of Liberty, of Ellis Island or this romantic idea of a country that took in refugees, a country that upheld the rules-based liberal order.
What was his view of the Afghanistan War?And then, what happened?How his policies end up, as you say, resolving to “mow the lawn”?And that was basically what he was ended up able to accomplish.Talk a little bit about Afghanistan, the views coming in, and sort of how that changed over a period of time.
… So I think for President Obama, there was justification for us being in Afghanistan, because the attacks on 9/11 had come from Afghanistan.So for him, Afghanistan was the good war, Iraq was the bad war.And I think there was a sense that much more could have been achieved in Afghanistan if we hadn't taken the eye off the ball and put all the effort into Iraq.
But he was also nervous about dealing with the U.S. military.He didn't really have much experience of dealing with the U.S. military.And the U.S. military was asking for more resources, a surge in Afghanistan, to really give the Afghan government the upper hand, in order to create the conditions for troops to be withdrawn from the country.So I think at the beginning, there was a willingness to go along with this Afghan strategy.But there was always a sense of not really knowing when would the job be done.
And his deep fear is being dragged deeper and deeper into a quagmire which he didn't understand how to get out of, and he had seen—he had learned lessons, things that had happened under Bush haunted him to some extent.Is that indeed the case?I mean, the fears of being dragged deeper into the quagmire, and really not wanting to deal with them in great depth over a period of years, was what was motivating him?
I think he felt that, with all the goodwill in the world, America couldn't bring democracy to Afghanistan.That it was beyond the ability, beyond the capability of U.S. forces.That the conditions for democracy just weren't there in Afghanistan.And the best that you could probably do is just mow the lawn, keep terrorism under control and stop Afghanistan becoming a sanctuary for terrorists.
Obama’s Use of Drones
… One of the major moves he made was the embracing of drones and targeted assassinations.What were his goals, his attitude about the use of drones, the intense increase in numbers after the Bush years?And what were the results and the consequences of the use of this strategy?
So assassinations were authorized in countries where the U.S. was not at war, whether this was in Yemen or whether it was in parts of Africa.And at the end of the day, it hasn’t been long before other countries have acquired drones and have acquired armed drones.And so there was a period where America could set the international norms for the use of drones, and that didn’t happen.So again, it’s another weakening of the international rules-based order.
And how is it viewed?How is it viewed by the Muslim populations?How is it viewed by the allies, and how it was being used, and the success or lack of success?What’s your overview of the consequences, long-term consequences of the use of it, or the effectiveness of it, which certainly didn’t shorten the wars?
I honestly don’t know.I don’t know whether assassinating people by drone led to their relatives picking up weapons and promising to avenge their deaths.At the end of the day, there’s not a finite number of bad guys in the world.And the attitude that all it takes, all that we need to do is kill the bad guys until there are no more bad guys just is—just not effective.At the end of the day, people will take up arms to avenge the deaths of their loved ones.Kids will be born without fathers who will take some sense of pride in taking forward the struggle of their parents.So has it been effective or not?I’m not able to judge that.
Disengagement From Iraq
In Iraq, it’s this idea that Obama was disengaged.I mean, when he came in, he sort of gave over the war to Vice President Biden.He wanted to pay his attention to Afghanistan.Really what he wanted to pay his attention to was China Pacific and domestic issues.But he disengaged militarily and, more importantly, politically, in a lot of ways, from Iraq.
Well, Obama had campaigned on a platform to end the war on Iraq.And when he became president, the next day, he issued the orders to end the war in Iraq responsibly.And so the U.S. military came forward with these plans for drawing down all the troops, so different plans for drawdown and the timing of the drawdown.And President Obama went with drawdown to 50,000 by the summer and then all troops to be removed from Iraq by the end of 2011.And that was in keeping with the security agreement that had been negotiated by President Bush.
Now, the civil war in Iraq had come to an end, thanks to the surge, and Iraqis went into the 2010 national elections with great optimism that the civil war was behind them.And a new bloc came together called Iraqiya, and it campaigned on a platform of Iraq for all Iraq, and no to sectarianism.Iraqis were sick to death of sectarianism.It had brought them such terrible violence and war.And this bloc, Iraqiya, went on to win the most seats in the election.It won 91 seats, as opposed to Nouri al-Maliki’s State of Law bloc, which won 89 seats.
And Nouri al-Maliki just couldn’t believe the election results.You know, it’s the Middle East; people don’t lose elections in the Middle East.And he sat in his seat and said, “Nope, I’m not moving.”And he tried to use de-Baathification against Iraqiya, to annul the votes of some of the members who had been elected.And that didn’t change the result.And so he pressured the U.N. to do a vote count again, and they went through a recount of the vote, and again, that didn’t change the result.
And there were differences in the U.S. system over what to do.On one side, you had my old boss, Gen. Odierno, who believed that the U.S. should uphold the right of the winning bloc, Iraqiya, to have first go at trying to form the government, consistent with the Iraqi Constitution and consistent with normal practices in a parliamentary system.But the U.S. ambassador, he had a different view.He was new to the country, new to the region, and he said: “Iraq is not ready for democracy.Iraq needs a Shia strongman, and Nouri al-Maliki is our man.”So two very different reports were going back to Washington.
And President Obama, you know, he had appointed Vice President Biden to be his point man on Iraq.He didn’t want to be closely engaged.So Vice President Biden came out.He listened to the general’s view; he listened to the ambassador’s view.And in the end, he decided: “Look, Nouri al-Maliki is our guy.He’s an Iraqi nationalist.He’ll let us keep a contingent of troops in Iraq after the security agreement expires.And keeping Maliki in place is the surest way of having a government of Iraq formed ahead of the U.S. midterm elections that November.”So it was Joe Biden who decided to ignore the election results in Iraq and just keep the incumbent, Nouri al-Maliki, in power.
And what were the consequences?
Well, the consequences were that Iraqis just couldn’t believe this, because they had been trying to remove Nouri al-Maliki through a vote of no confidence in Parliament for years.And every time they tried to do this, U.S. officials stepped in and said: “Look, don’t do this now.Wait for a general election.Iraq is too unstable at the moment.Wait for a general election and allow it to be by the popular vote.”
Iraqi politicians were scared that Maliki was turning into a dictator.He was threatening them.He was collecting information on them.So they were scared that what was happening was a repeat of what had happened under Saddam. They were scared he was turning into a dictator.So the Iraqi politicians adamantly refused to accept a second Maliki term.They just said, “No way.”Iraqiya kept saying: “We won the election.We have to show our population that, you know, change can come about through elections.”Iraqiya had won the votes of Sunnis, of secular Shia, of minorities, people who wanted to be Iraqi, and they had to show them something from the elections.
The Rise of ISIS
And how does ISIS come out of all this, though?
Well, basically, in the end, the Iranians stepped in, and they decided that they would also keep Nouri al-Maliki as prime minister for a second term, but for different reasons from the Americans.They believed that Nouri al-Maliki would ensure that all U.S. forces left Iraq at the end of 2011 and that Nouri al-Maliki would ensure that Iraq is not integrated into the Arab world, because everybody loathed him.They thought he was a sectarian leader.
So Maliki gets his second term as prime minister, thanks to the Iranians, and U.S. forces leave.And in his second term as prime minister, Maliki accused the Sunni politicians of being terrorists, forcing them to flee the country, forcing them out of politics.He reneged on his promises to those Sunni Awakening leaders who had fought with us against Al Qaeda.So some of the leaders were assassinated, some were jailed, and others were forced to leave the country.
And when there were Sunni protests, he crushed them with violence.And what this did was create the conditions for the Islamic State to rise up out of the ashes of Al Qaeda in Iraq and proclaim itself as the defender of the Sunnis against the Iranian-backed Shia militia’s sectarian government of Nouri al-Maliki.And it was only by the time that ISIS had taken over a third of Iraq in 2014 that President Obama finally withdrew U.S. support for Nouri al-Maliki and said, “We’re not going to help you defeat ISIS until Maliki has been replaced as prime minister.”
Legacy of the Obama Years
What’s the legacy of Obama overall?
Obama believed that the primary national security concern for America was and is the rise of China, great-power competition, and he believed that the wars in the Middle East were diversion.So he prioritized gaining an agreement with Iran to curb its nuclear program, the JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action].That was his priority.Now, because he prioritized getting that agreement, he didn’t push back on Iranian expansionism in Iraq and inside Syria.So during the war against ISIS, Iran, with Shia militias, was able to expand its influence, expand the territory that it controlled, and formed land corridors across Iraq, across Syria, to Lebanon and to Israel’s borders.
And you had a situation where America’s traditional allies, such as Saudi and Israel, campaigned furiously against the nuclear agreement, and it pushed Saudi and Israel together, and Israel with the United Arab Emirates.So they started sharing a lot of intelligence.They started sharing security coordination, because for them, the primary enemy was Iran, and they were fearful that America wasn’t just going to do this deal; they were fearful that America didn’t really understand the nature of the Iranian regime.
So we started to see a situation that, in the way in which America left Iraq, under Obama, really changed the balance of power in the region in Iran’s favor, leading to Iran, on the one hand, Saudi, United Arab Emirates, the Turks on the other, supporting extremists, sectarian extremists, in these different countries, turning what were local grievances against bad government into these regional proxy wars that played out in Iraq and Syria and Yemen.
And so what is the legacy?The legacy: There was the Arab Spring, which at one moment was a hope that democracy was coming to the region and then quickly turned into an Arab Winter, and the counterrevolutions hit back, and regimes proved incapable of reforming.They either collapsed into civil wars, or they just oppressed people worse than ever.
And the legacy in the United States on how people had viewed this inability to get out of the quagmire of the Middle East, that the way that the institutions had lied to them from the beginning, that Iraq was with weapons of mass destruction, the tactics used of torture and all?What’s the legacy of these wars to this point, as Obama is leaving?
The legacy of these wars is immense.When you look at the Iraq War, the rise of ISIS, the Syrian civil war, it led to a flood of refugees into Europe.It led to rising nationalism, far-right extremism.It was a major contributor to the vote in the U.K. to leave the European Union, Brexit, this demand to regain control of borders of sovereignty.And part of that was to stop all the immigrants, the refugees flooding into the U.K.Government was seen to have taken people into these wars based on what were lies.Then came the financial crisis in 2007-2008, when ordinary people lost their homes, and the banks were bailed out.Europe has become increasingly marginal in the world.China has been rising.And the rivalry between the U.S. and China is essentially over which country provides a better model for progress.And even though America remains strong militarily and politically, it doesn’t look a great model anymore, dysfunctional at home and its reputation soured and tarnished by the wars in the Middle East.
And in China, President Xi Jinping is offering an alternative model, one of authoritarian capitalism.And this China model is attractive to authoritarians everywhere.So we’re seeing the rise of [India’s Narendra] Modi, the rise of [Brazil’s Jair] Bolsonaro.We are seeing a world in which this liberal hegemony that had peaked in the 1990s, at the end of the Cold War, is receding, and this new model that has been put on offer is appealing.We’re seeing a rise of illiberal democracies, a rise in authoritarianism.And this era is also the era of social media, which has had another profound effect on us.It allows people to mobilize.We saw that a lot in the Arab Spring.We see it in America.We saw it with the takeover of the Capitol on January the 6th.
So a rising distrust in government and government’s ability to protect people, to provide public services to people, to govern properly.So the world looks very, very different today than it did before 9/11.
The Trump Years
Let’s go through the Trump years. … You say he’s a symptom of 9/11.Explain.
Trump is not the root cause of the problems in America.I see him as much more of a symptom.He’s a symptom of loss of trust in elites, elites on the left and elites on the right.You know, Trump came along, campaigns on a pack of lies, said he never supported the Iraq War, when he did.You know, he promised to defend America, to defeat ISIS, to kill terrorists.And his amateurism, his anti-intellectualism, his shooting from the hip, it was almost putting a finger up to the establishment, if you like, in the U.S.
And there were millions of people who voted for that.They had had enough of not being taken seriously.They didn’t think that the country was working for them.You see a small group of people who have been getting wealthier and wealthier and a large group of people who feel being left behind, that things are changing rapidly.Demographics are changing rapidly.Automation is taking jobs away from people.And they don’t understand this.
And Trump came along with a very simple explanation.It’s China; it’s elites, when really, we’re facing a very complex situation.The world is changing rapidly.It’s very hard to keep up with what is happening.We have a climate emergency.We have automation taking away people’s jobs.We have lack of faith in politics as bringing about change.We have large amounts of people in America with weapons.We have militias in America.So it’s a difficult time.
Describe that difference between the establishment military and the secretary of state and others in government and what they found in their new president and his view towards these wars, towards foreign affairs in general, and the consequences of that type of direction that he was taking the country in.
The establishment view is that America’s strength in the world comes from its democracy, its system of government and from its allies, that it has amazing amounts of allies all around the world.If you look at America’s competitor, China, you don’t see refugees trying to get into China.You don’t see China having all of these allies.North Korea, Iran—not the sort of allies that you would want.
So America’s strength comes from its democratic system.That makes it attractive; that makes refugees want to come into America; that makes countries want to be an American ally.President Trump didn’t understand this at all.All he saw was free riders.Why should America be spending all of this money on Afghanistan and Iraq?Stupid wars.Get out of those wars.Why should it be spending this money on NATO and Europe?Why aren’t European countries spending more?
He wasn’t somebody who valued allies.Now, President Obama had said Europe needs to pay more for its security.So yes, Europe should be paying more for its security, shouldn’t just be relying on America all the time.But that relationship between America and Europe, NATO, EU, is essential.It’s one of the main pillars of what we call the West.Without that, America goes it alone.And President Trump just saw everything in transactional terms.
I think it was very hard for those around him to explain these things to him, because it’s something that people just took for granted.Whether you were Democrat, Republican or Independent, you kind of understood how America was in the world, what Pax Americana meant.It wasn’t America alone in the world.It was America with allies in the world.
In America, Trump is rebranding the war in a way and turning it into a domestic war against his enemies.He’s saying that the existential threat against us, as Bush had said Al Qaeda was, was actually groups like antifa and liberal radical socialists.And he’s using [the Department of Homeland Security] and military against them in demonstrations.He’s turning the tools of the antiterrorism war against his enemies.What’s going on?
In a way, it seems to be the wars came home.You can look at police in America, and you can see all the kitsch that they’ve got.They’ve taken all the surplus from Iraq and Afghanistan; it’s come back.And a lot of these weapons, a lot of the vehicles are now being used by law enforcement.And the language that is being used, that President Trump was using, was again portraying things in terms of enemies.These are people you might have disagreements with, you might have a different view with, but they’re not the enemy.
So I think stoking up cultural wars, stoking up people’s fears, is something that went on under President Trump.He didn’t try and bring people together.He didn’t try and allay fears.He didn’t try to build bridges.He did the opposite.So he made people more fearful.Instead of going through a normal policy process, he issued policies via tweet.So the special forces in Syria found out that their war was over when they got the tweet.That’s not how government should happen.
And Jan. 6, how do we get to this point?And who are those people?And why [do] they feel so strongly that they were patriots and that they were doing something which they were called to do by this president?
Well, President Trump had sown doubt in the elections months and months before the elections.He kept saying that he has the majority support, that he is going to win, and if he doesn’t win, then it has to be because of massive fraud.He kept going on about the ballots.And when you think that every state in America seems to have a different method for counting, it doesn’t look right in many ways.If you are suspicious, and you start to see votes at one moment are saying Trump is winning, and then after the postal votes come in he’s losing, it just builds on the sense of conspiracy.
So I think by the time you get to January the 6th, so much doubt has been sown in the system, so much fear, that how this opposition is described by Trump and Trump supporters, it looks terrifying.So they are portrayed in such a fearful way that it’s made to seem some existential threat to the livelihoods of Trump supporters, to the future of America, to the future of people’s world.
What Biden Inherits
Describe the country that President Biden inherits.Are we a weaker country today than before 9/11?
I think America today is a much weaker country than it was before 9/11, much weaker because in its self-perception, you can look and think how America has dealt with COVID.Half a million Americans have died from COVID.It was unable to make people stay at home with a lockdown.It was unable to come up with policies.It showed the shambles of the American health system, the federal government versus states.It looked shambolic.
In previous times, you could have imagined an America would have been bringing the world together, to come up with some communique that would be making sure there were enough vaccines not only for Americans, but for the rest of the world.That was what a world with America’s leadership would have looked like pre-9/11.
So I think today there is that loss of confidence in the country.But, you know, America may be down, and down on itself, but it’s certainly not out.America’s history has been one of incredible ability of self-renewal.So when you look at the economy, when you look at the technology, there is still amazing ability for America to shoot up from this low period that it is in, and really renew itself again.
You say that we lost faith in our myths, and that when a country loses faith in its myth, it weakens, it breaks into tribes, and that doesn’t end well.Explain that.
America had a strong sense of self, a strong sense of American exceptionalism, that America was like no other country.And yet, that sense seems to be eroding.We went over to Iraq and Afghanistan to change those societies, to make them more like us.We had great faith in democracy.It’s the best form of government.We’re going to bring you democracy in a box.We’re going to build up your legal system, your justice system.We’re going to give rights to women.We’re going to build up civil society.We had great faith at the beginning of our wars that we could do this.
And yet, 20 years later, when you look at where America is today, it’s almost as if America has become more like them in the way that tribalism is increasing.Everything now here seems to be about identity—Sunni or Shia in Iraq; it seems to be Sunni or Shia in America.So this sense of tribalism has grown, and that sense that America is something different, that America is post-racial, that America is better than other societies, those myths seem to be dissipating.And a country that loses sight of its myths or loses faith in its myths, what’s going to happen to that country?
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