The FRONTLINE Interviews

Peter Baker

Journalist, The New York Times

Peter Baker is chief White House correspondent for The New York Times. He has covered five administrations, beginning with Bill Clinton’s second term. He is the co-author of Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin's Russia and the End of Revolution and The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III.

The following interview was conducted by FRONTLINE's Jim Gilmore on June 30, 2021. It has been edited for clarity and length.

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America After 9/11

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Failure to Capture Osama bin Laden

Post-9/11 Afghanistan, the CIA was asking for some help with the military out of Tora Bora because bin Laden was up in the mountains, but they didn't send any.Why?

Well, the theory of the case was, they didn't want a heavy footprint in Afghanistan.They didn't want a lot of military, American military in Afghanistan, because that was the recipe for failure, they thought, of past interventions, whether it be the British or the Soviets or whatnot.And they thought that they could do a better job coordinating with local forces on the ground, that they would be our surrogates in effect if we could manage them, and they could actually take out bin Laden in Tora Bora, places like that.But it was a mistake, because these guys had their own interests, and they had their own motives, and they were busy selling out the Americans and each other.And the one best opportunity we had to get Osama bin Laden after 9/11 just slipped away.

So the consequences of not getting him and not getting him till years later until the Obama administration, what were the consequences of that decision?

Well, I think the consequences of that decision were that for the next decade, bin Laden hung out there as this unresolved, haunting menace.Whether he actually did all that much or not wasn't the point; the point was that we couldn't catch him.The point was that we were not able to deliver justice after the most horrific attack on our homeland that we've ever had.And it was humiliating in its own way for the greatest power in the world to be, you know, incapable, impotent in the face of a single guy, it felt like, hiding in a cave somewhere or in some mysterious house that we couldn't track down.And he thumbed his nose at us, and I think it invigorated his supporters and people who agreed with him that America was a paper tiger, that we could still be hurt, and they could get away with it.

And he still ran Al Qaeda.Al Qaeda changed from an organization of 400 people to thousands and thousands, and he was continuously putting out messages to his supporters, egging them on and really running Al Qaeda.The reality was perhaps an organization that would have faded away because America came in, showed their might and destroyed them turned into something much more dangerous.

Well, it's unclear how hands-on bin Laden was in running the organization in the years after 9/11.There's some debate about that.But clearly he was still providing an important inspirational role, an important instigating role in the sense of driving his followers to take action on their own.And, you know, he was seen as the—as the man who would stand up, the man who had stood up against the great power and proof positive that there was a way to do it with impunity.

So, you know, his—the cache of information they found when they finally tracked him down and killed him indicated obviously that he was still in communication, still had very strong feelings about the way operations should be managed and so forth, but it's not clear how much he was directing the traffic.But he absolutely was a powerful force in the mind of this metastasizing organization that has spread not just from the hills of Afghanistan, but to various corners around the world, all with America as its main target.

The Mission in Afghanistan

Did America have a clear plan in Afghanistan that we stuck to during the Bush years?

Well, America had a plan at first, but it just didn't work out.I mean, you know, the plan was to avoid a substantial ground war by American troops, to use airpower to supplement local allies and to help them set up a new government once we had pushed out the Taliban and hunted down Al Qaeda elements.The problem was that we were too overconfident about our ability to influence events there because we toppled the Taliban so easily, because they were driven out of Kabul relatively quickly.

There was, I think, this premature celebration that we had actually won when in fact we hadn't.The country hadn't changed; the landscape hadn't changed.The people we were after simply melted into the countryside because—not because they were alien to the countryside, because they were actually part of it.You know, they are part of the fabric of Afghanistan, so you can't simply root them out.They are what Afghanistan is, and I don't think we fully understood that at the time.

At home, during these years, what was happening slowly?… The loss of faith, especially throughout Iraq, the loss of faith that the government was telling the truth because weapons of mass destruction was wrong.Abu Ghraib showed we were acting in ways people were very surprised about, and the black sites and other issues that came up and the fact of not winning the war quickly as was expected, how was this affecting support and the feelings of people back home?

There's a lot of public patience for the war in Afghanistan for a long time, and in large part because nobody questioned the initial decision to go in.It was unquestionable that bin Laden and Al Qaeda were there; it was unquestionable the Taliban had been harboring them; it was unquestionable that the attacks on America had their origin in Afghanistan.So that was never the issue.… I mean, you know, what started off as strong support for the government, strong support for the Bush administration and the war on terror as it were, you know, began to erode with Iraq, first, of course, the obvious discovery that there weren't weapons of mass destruction as we had been told that there were, and then just sort of the continuing devastation of a war that turned out to be much, much harder and much more bloody than we had expected.And people grew fatigued and tired and exhausted, and they thought that the government wasn't telling the full truth.And then you add on top of that torture and detention and scandals, Abu Ghraib, all of that, you know, served to tear away at the credibility of Washington and the government about how it's handling our security overseas.

Legacy of the Bush Years

By the end of the Bush administration, some people believed that Bush was disgraced, that he certainly was unpopular by the polls because the war that was promised after 9/11 indeed did not take place.Talk a little bit about Bush upon leaving and the legacy that he left.

Well, Bush left office, of course, as one of the most unpopular presidents in modern times.His numbers were down into the 30s, even 20s in some polls.People had lost faith in him.It didn't help that in addition to the Iraq War, you know, he was ending his tenure in the midst of the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression.And people lost faith in him.His legacy will always be centered at least partly on Iraq and what most Americans consider to be a great mistake.

What Bush would tell you is that—or at least people who admire Bush would tell you is, he also protected the country, that he left office feeling that he had at least accomplished something that people did not expect on September 12, 2001, which is that there were no more 9/11s after that on American soil.There were no more attacks, which people thought were going to almost inevitably follow; that he had built an architecture of homeland security that had helped to defend the country.

But the absence of an attack is hardly, you know, in history's eyes, a way of overshadowing what did happen in Iraq, because that's so much more tangible.What doesn't happen never gets you a page in the history book; what does happen does.And that's, I think, where Bush will end up being remembered.And it's—for him, it was obviously not the way he wanted to be seen, not the way he wanted to end his presidency.But for him, the most important thing going out of office was to do as much as he could to fix Iraq before he left, to get the war under control and even to have an agreement with the Iraqis about how to end it.And he did leave a successor there for a blueprint.And a much calmer, much more stable situation than he had had in the middle of his second term.And for that, at least, he felt he had accomplished something by the end.

Leaving office and handing off to Obama, what was he handing off?

Bush ends up leaving his successor two ongoing wars and a broader struggle against terrorism across many borders that were still unresolved and that he left, you know, a situation where the next president was going to have to make big decisions about how we institutionalize the changes that Bush had made in our own defense, what was going to last and what wasn't.And he tried to prepare for that.He tried to, in fact, resolve a lot of the big debates that had been happening on surveillance, on interrogation techniques, on military tribunals, on a lot of the things that had been done ad hoc in the early days and months after 9/11 and in the midst of the Iraq War, so that by the time his successor took office, these things would be more or less settled, that there would be some settled issues over this.And in fact, there were.By the time he left office, there was a consensus on a lot of the surveillance and detention issues.There was in fact an agreement that, you know, that we were on the way out from Iraq in the next three years.There was some sense that he had begun to, you know, find a permanent or sustainable basis for this war on terror rather than just sort of a complete chaotic, ad hoc situation.

But of course, he had a successor coming in who had promised—who'd run against him and in fact promised to overhaul everything.And so, in effect, Obama comes in and undoes in some ways what Bush had done.But it was actually more symbolic in some ways than it had been advertised.You know, Obama signs a piece of paper saying we end these torture techniques.Well, they hadn't been used in actual several years.Obama signs an order saying we're going to close Guantanamo.Well, Bush had actually emptied a lot of prisoners out of Guantanamo, but had been unable to close it.Obama ends up sending more prisoners out of Guantanamo, still unable to empty it.

Obama basically adopts the drone warfare that Bush institutes before he leaves, which is sort of a substitute in some ways for the big, you know, ground forces that we had been using in Iraq as a way to defend ourselves.

So there was more continuity by the end of Bush and the beginning of Obama than people would have expected.

But some other people might say what he passed off was a quagmire, that as much as he had adjusted the policies and had brought down the heat in Iraq, the reality was is that nothing was solved and all of them were almost impossible to disentangle from.What's your opinion about the fact that what he left really became a quagmire for the next two presidents?

Well, what he left was certainly an unsettled situation, no question, for the next president and the president that would follow.Certainly in Afghanistan, where people had basically turned away from, weren't paying attention to, obviously became and continued to become, you know, a problem that we were unable to solve.Iraq looked much better than it had at the worst of the war, no question, by the time Obama came in, but it hadn't been made into a Jeffersonian democracy either.And there was still obviously great threats to security there and an unresolved war.

So while Bush tried very hard to put things on a better, more even keel before leaving office, he certainly gave his successor an enormous national security challenge, the likes of which very few presidents come into office inheriting on day one.

The Obama Years

So Obama comes in, and he's got some very different ideas about how he will fight the war on terror.He's certainly not a dove.Talk about what his expectations are and what he has defined as the direction he will take.

Obama comes in saying, "Look, I'm not against all wars; I'm just against stupid wars," which is why he said he was against Iraq.But it didn't mean he was going to pull everything back entirely.He does keep a lot of what Bush had left him in terms of specifically the drone war being the biggest example.He expands the drone war to larger scales, and even eventually to including American citizens as targets.But he also wants to make a point to the rest of the world that he's going to be different; that this is a new team, a new administration and a new philosophy, one that's more wedded to allies, one that's more wedded to international law, one that's not going to play fast and loose with terms like "torture," that's going to in fact be more restrained and more strategic in the way it uses force around the world.

He wins due to the fact that he spoke against the war; that the post-9/11 situation that occurred, the realities, he planned to avoid the same forces that had caused the problems for Bush.What is his plan, and why doesn't it work?Does he understand the complexities of withdrawing from the quagmire that he's stepping into?

Well, Obama the candidate, of course, eventually becomes Obama the president, and these are not the same thing.It's one thing to be out there on the campaign trail and, you know, assail your predecessor and say he made all these big mistakes.It's another thing to actually get in there, sit down in the Situation Room, and having intelligence guys come in every day and tell you all the different ways that people are trying to kill Americans today, and you're the one who has to stop it.

So I think Obama, for him, the first year in particular was a real wakeup call on a lot of things; that his presumptions, his desires, his ambitions became tailored to a reality he had not seen in the same way because he wasn't sitting in the chair.It wasn't his responsibility.Now it was.

So he comes in, and suddenly the idea of, you know, pulling back involves trade-offs, because he also doesn't want to leave anybody exposed.He knows a devastating terrorist attack on his watch will be not just damaging to the country, but damaging to his presidency and damaging to his policy, and he—any policy he puts in place will be blamed for anything that happens.So he's trying to modulate it in a way that doesn't expose the country to egregious damage, at least not in a significant way, while also sending the signal that we're changing, that we're not going to simply be the big rampaging, go-it-alone superpower that the world had in its—as an impression over the previous few years.

But it's a real—it's a real adjustment for him.The very first day he comes into office, on his Inauguration Day, there's a threat against the ceremony.There is this intelligence saying that these Somali terrorists are coming over the border from Canada and they're going to try to do something that will disrupt the inauguration—maybe plant a bomb, maybe kill people who are there to celebrate the inauguration of a new president.Talk about a baptism of fire.This is a new president coming in, literally from the minute he takes the oath, from the second he has put his hand on the Bible, in which he is literally being threatened with the potential of a great catastrophe.And that now is on his shoulders.It's now on his shoulders for the next eight years, and he knows it.

Now, that turned out, thank goodness, to be a false-flag kind of thing.It didn't turn out to be a real threat, but they didn't know that at the time.And I think that just brings to light for this new president and his team just how serious things are and how complicated the situation is.

Along with inheriting all the problems that he was inheriting, he seems to have inherited the same post-9/11 fear of what the realities might become if there's another attack under his presidency.

Absolutely.Now, he absolutely believes that, as every president would, presumably, but he absolutely believes that an attack on American soil, particularly a devastating one on the level of a 9/11, is just unthinkable, and he has to do whatever has to be done to make sure that doesn't happen again.It's one thing to say, "I think Bush went too far"; it's another thing to say, "I think Bush went too far, and I'm going to, you know, change things to the point where it leaves the country vulnerable."He doesn't want to do that.He knows that would be the end of his presidency and the end of, you know, for a long time of the policies he wants to put in place.

… So talk a little bit about that point when all of a sudden Obama realizes that this is basically an unwinnable war, and the way they move forward there is, the way it's been defined to us, is a war of inattention.Explain that very important turning point.

Yeah.I mean, I think Obama had gone along with the surge in Afghanistan pretty reluctantly.I mean, he just oozed it; you could just see it.Even as he's giving the speech announcing he's going to send 30,000 more troops, you could just feel how much he's saying to the country in an unspoken way, "Yeah, I don't believe it either."And that, you know, manifested itself in the months to come in the offensive that you see in Marjah, is a lesson for the Obama White House.This is not a winnable war.This is just one more piece of, at this point, eight years of failed assumptions about a country that we just don't really understand.

And I think at that point, Obama does sort of basically say, "OK, enough.This is just not working.The surge is not going to go anywhere.We're going to start to unravel it.We're going to start thinking about how we can get out.We've got to think about how we can extricate ourselves"—not in a dangerous way; he doesn't do it abruptly or precipitously, but his goal at that point becomes how do we disentangle ourselves from Afghanistan before we leave office, because this is an unwinnable quagmire, and we'll be there for the rest of our lives if we don't get out.

… When he made the speech and he said that 30,000 troops are going into Afghanistan, he also gives a deadline.Was that a mistake?

Well, the deadline he sets on the surge troops, you know, was seen by a lot of people as a mistake because he basically says, "I'm not committed to this; I don't think this is going to work; I'm only going to commit two years to it."And if you're the Taliban, then—and they've been there forever—all you know you need to do is wait two years, and they'll be gone.And I think that the signal he sent, whether he meant to or not, was one of lack of determination.

Now, his argument would be, hey, if it's not going to work in two years, it isn't going to work in three or four either, so let's just use this as a test period to see if this strategy worked.And if not, we should change it after two years; we shouldn't just keep pursuing a bad strategy just because we have no other strategy.

But the signal he sent, whether he meant to or not, was one of, you know, wait it out; this will be over in two years.

Obama’s Use of Drones

You talked about the drones, but talk a little bit more.Why does he embrace drones?Does he really feel that it's a much better way to win the war? …

Well, you could see why drones are so appealing for a president, right, because it has the illusion at least of doing something to go after bad guys without creating the kind of giant mess that sending an army of 200,000 troops in to do.It is, of course, you know, a limited technique.There [is] only so much you can do with it.But it has this appeal because it feels like, I've got that third guy in Al Qaeda; I'm going to be able to take him off the battlefield.And while there are civilian casualties, clearly there are fewer than there would be in sort of the indiscriminate bombing that other presidents have tried in the past in various wartime situations.

And so Obama embraces it.It has this feel of, you know, to him, precision.He's a precise guy.That's what appealed to him: precision.It has the feel of proportionate, right?We're not going to invade another country and take over the country; we're simply going to get rid of the people who are the threats.So it feels proportionate.And to Obama, who's a lawyer and who's precise and who believes in proportionality, drones are very appealing.

What, of course, is the result is not as satisfying as anybody would want, because in the end, you take out that third guy from Al Qaeda, and guess what?There's another third guy from Al Qaeda, and another, and another.And so there's only so much you can do with this.Maybe over time you're able to whittle that down, over time you're able to chip away at that foundation of radicalism, but there's never going to be a day of victory.There's never going to be, you know, as both Bush and Obama said, there's never going to be a ceremony on the decks of the Missouri saying, "Aha, we won."

And the consequences of that type of warfare?Certainly people on the left had some problems with the idea that a Nobel Prize-winning president has a "kill list."

Right, yeah.I mean, the thing about it is that people on the left, a lot of people on the left were disappointed with Obama.They thought he was more in agreement with them than he really was.And they thought that, you know, death machines hovering over, you know a pretty oppressive way of doing warfare.We're not even involved ourselves; we're just simply delivering death to anybody we decide deserves it based on imperfect intelligence, to say the least.And in some cases, obviously, we were wrong.In some cases, drones hit the wrong people or hit the right people, but also hit other people along the way, including obvious innocents, children and others, not in the numbers necessarily that were, you know, in previous wars, and that's what you would hear from defenders of the program: Yeah, there were some mistakes, but not nearly as many as we used to have.Any mistakes, of course, though, are held against the United States and used by our enemies as evidence of our, you know, our own shortcomings and our own—in some cases, the way they would present us is as an evil interloper.

So I think, you know, Obama was not the peacenik that some imagined he would be, and that the drone war, the idea of a kill list by a Nobel Peace Prize winner seemed so incongruous.But even when he took the prize, he explained, "I'm not against war."He says, "I'm not Martin Luther King.Martin Luther King could be for nonviolence because that's who he was, what he was, you know, leading a movement like that.I'm a president, a president of the United States.A commander in chief has a different obligation.I have to protect the country, and I have to do things that a Mahatma Gandhi and a Martin Luther King wouldn't do."

And so, even as he explained that to the world, that he saw his obligations differently, there was still the sense of disenchantment from some of the people who had supported him.

Pulling Out of Iraq

So why does he pull out of Iraq?And how, when you look at how he did it and why he did it, is it motivated by Bush's legacy in Iraq?

Yeah.Obama negotiated to keep a residual force in Iraq past the deadline of 2011 that had been set in the agreement that Bush had signed with the Iraqis.But he didn't do it with a great deal of enthusiasm.It was a really half-hearted negotiation.And when there arose a dispute over liability protection, Obama basically took that and said, "Fine, we're out; we're just going to leave altogether."And the truth is, the Iraqis were more than happy for us to leave, too.They were tired of us being there.

So this kind of like, even though both sides says, "Well, gosh, we'd like to keep some Americans here for stability purposes," both sides were more or less happy to let the, you know, let all that end.Obama wanted to be able to say he ended the Iraq War.You cannot say you ended the Iraq War if you still have troops fighting.And so the cleanest, easiest way to say we are done is to pull all the troops out, to say, "We are out of here; we're done."

And he used it to great effect in his campaign for reelection in 2012: "I'm the president who ended the Iraq War.I promised I would end it; I did end it."What of course he didn't foresee was that taking the troops out didn't end the war; it just ended our part in it temporarily.The situation was not over; it was not resolved.And by pulling out, there were unintended consequences that then eventually would drag us back in.

How much of the mistake was not specifically taking the troops out, but also withdrawing politically?

Well, I think that's part of it.These things are not unrelated.If you pull the troops out, invariably you have less political influence.So we were no longer playing nearly as big a role in helping to push the government there, to follow the policies we thought they should.The government in Baghdad, seeing Americans heading for the exit doors, turn increasingly to their neighbors, the Iranians, and give them increased influence there, which then becomes a problem for us.

When we think the Iraqis have gone too far in promoting sectarian differences, that a Shiite government is targeting Sunni minorities in a way that's only going to make things worse there, we don't have much leg to stand on because we're no longer a player on the ground the way we had been.The Iraqi government feels much freer to ignore our advice, let's say, and do their own thing, all of which creates a combustible situation on the ground.

Why did he underestimate ISIS?

You know, like with so many of these things, a failure of imagination, right?ISIS felt like a small-time group, in his view. He called it, of course, the junior varsity, the JV team.It was a big miscalculation, because obviously they turned out to be in some ways one of the most successful, you know, radical groups of our time.They seized a swath of land that was as large as a country.And Obama's failure to see that early on would cost him, would cost his presidency and cost the country because we would then have to come in and do something about it.

So at the end of his term, two terms, he's got detractors on both sides in the United States.This is the homeland story.Describe why first the left and then the right, but the left certainly had their problems with Obama.They blamed him for not closing down Gitmo.They blamed him for the way that drones were used.They blamed him for the domestic spying that was going on that he didn't end after the Bush years.And of course, this is the drip, drip, drip of what's been going on in the United States over the last 20 years.What's going on in the way his detractors saw this and were becoming angry and were becoming dispirited on the left?

Right, yeah.I mean, Obama here is trying to straddle a line that is very hard to straddle.He's inevitably going to be attacked from the right for being too weak, too soft; anything he does to reorient the war on terror is going to be a sign of appeasement or, you know, weakness.But it's his own party that is almost just as tough on him as the other party because they thought he was going to be more of a radical break from Bush.They thought he was going to get us out of this endless war.He did say he was going to.And yet he was more cautious about the way he went about it than a lot of his supporters would have liked him.They wanted him to make a clean break on surveillance.They wanted him to close Guantanamo.They wanted him to just pull out of Afghanistan.And he didn't end up doing those things because he did end up trying to modulate to some extent in his own way, his own way of looking at it, trying to find the reasonable middle between the excesses of Bush as he saw them and, you know, laying down arms and leaving ourselves exposed.

And he gets more frustrated, I think, from his friends than he does his enemies.He has no expectations that Republicans are going to support him, but he becomes exasperated that the liberals are so down on him.And I think that bothers him as he heads toward the end of his presidency.

And on the right, spurred on by conservative media, basically they're calling him an American apologist and someone who helped ISIS, that he himself is a Muslim, almost anything to show their anger and how they despised who this man was.And also, of course, this leads to where we're going under Trump.What was the effect of what the right—how the right felt about Obama and what it spurred on?

Well, what's interesting is there's the criticism from the right, and then there's the criticism from the Trump populists, which is a different part of the party, right?The traditional Republicans, the neoconservatives, the people who have been veterans the Bush-Cheney era, thought that Obama basically laid down our weapons and left us vulnerable, that he, you know, wasn't serious enough about ISIS, that he didn't understand the threat and so on.

The Trump populist side of things, of course, is far more visceral in its hatred of Obama.It does play to this birther conspiracy and he's a secret Muslim and he's some sort of Manchurian candidate; he was out to sabotage our own country.And then there's this other side of the Trump populist movement that is thoroughly antiwar, which is at variance with the other part of the Republican Party.This is the part of the movement that agrees with Trump when he says Iraq was a mistake, Afghanistan's a mistake, we need to get out, we need to pull our people home.It's a much more isolationist viewpoint.

I'll just say he's being buffeted from the other side of the aisle for both being too much of a warmonger and too much of a peacenik at the same time, that he is both a perpetuator of the endless wars and somebody who doesn't take our security seriously enough.And it all leads up to this very, you know, volatile and, you know, kind of confusing political environment heading into the 2016 election in which Donald Trump emerges as the leader of the Republican Party.

The Election of Donald Trump

So leading into the election, discuss exactly where we were—the distrust, the anger, the post-9/11 fear, all in a mix.How does that set up the politics to come, and how is it the perfect petri dish for someone like Donald Trump to walk in and succeed?

I think by the time Obama leaves office, a lot of the people who thought they had voted for change when they supported him felt like he had let them down.Rightly or wrongly, they felt that he wasn't what they thought he was, and so they were looking for somebody who was going to be that change agent.And as incongruous as it sounds that Donald Trump would be the agent of change that Obama wasn't, there was a significant part of the populace that drifted toward Trump because he was what Obama said he would be but didn't turn out to be; that he would come to Washington and shake things up; that he would—you know, that he would take on the establishment; that he would bring our boys home; that he would, you know, end our involvement in these foreign wars and stop spending all of our money on people overseas; that he would, you know, put government back in its place.

And it, you know, the fear that Americans felt after 9/11 in which they were willing to support very tough, vigorous and even sometimes radical policy prescriptions had faded into an exhaustion with America being the policeman of the world, an exhaustion with our constantly being concerned with what was happening on the other side of the planet and not being concerned with what was happening at home.People who felt that they had been left behind, who had been somehow ripped off, looked at America's involvement in these wars, looked at America's continuing obsession with terrorism as a way to shaft Americans.And nobody seemed to tap into that more viscerally than Donald Trump.

Talk a little bit about the frustration that Obama must have felt.He came in; his interests really were on the domestic side.His accomplishments, of course, include the Iranian deal and the Paris Accords and a lot of other things on the domestic side, certainly health care and stuff.But that's not what he's remembered for, it seems. …

Yeah.I think Obama wanted to be a transformative president.That was the word he used, "transformative."Reagan had been transformative, he told us in 2008, and Clinton had not.He didn't want to be a transitional figure.He didn't want to be an incremental figure.He wanted to change American society.In so many ways, both at home and abroad, he was frustrated in that ambition.He only brought us part of the way there.

And so, rather than the guy who in 2008 told us that he would begin to heal the oceans, by the end he was talking about being just one more person in a baton race, just making whatever progress he could in order to help the next person make whatever progress he or she could.And it was a much more restrained view of the presidency, restrained view of his own role than he had espoused when he first came to office.You know, he'd been mugged by reality, if you will.

And so, while he would have preferred to focus on domestic policies, he would have preferred to be remembered as the health care president, as the immigration reform president, as the climate change president, instead he's also at least remembered as the president who couldn't get Iraq quite right, who left behind Afghanistan still a big mess, who had other issues overseas like Libya and other places where we were, you know, had failed to find a clean and easy success.

And I think that definitely frustrated him.He didn't just want to be one bridge from one president to the next.He wanted to solve some of these things so America could move on and do bigger and better things.

… So let's talk about Donald Trump.How much of his victory can be attributed to the aftershocks of 9/11?

That's interesting.Trump's victory was such a sui generis moment that it's hard to try to explain it to any one dynamic.But it is certainly true that by the time 2016 rolls around, there is an exhaustion with the wars overseas, an exhaustion with the post-9/11 mentality that had governed us at that point for so long, and a desire to move radically away from it.

And so you had a guy come in, running as a Republican, mind you, saying, we never should have been over there in the first place.Let's get all our people home.Let's focus on America first.We've had enough of this, you know, nation building.We've had enough of throwing a trillion dollars—that's the phrase he liked to use—down ratholes overseas.And that appealed to this exhaustion in American society with what we had been through over the 15 years prior to that.

Did he win because of that?I don't know.I mean, it was certainly part of it.It was part of his appeal.It was part of the message that he carried.And it was certainly a driving factor once he became president, because, you know, he saw that as one of the reasons he won, and he set about pursuing policies that he thought were in keeping with that.

He was very good at using fear to motivate his base, and he turned fear inward.He talked from the very beginning, he wanted a Muslim ban.He talked from the very beginning about Muslims dancing on rooftops of Jersey City in celebration of 9/11.What was he doing?How good was he?And how did it mobilize his base?

Yeah, I mean, Trump played to fear and hatred in a way that we have not seen from a major party nominee for president in a generation.Whether it be Mexicans, whether it be Muslims, whether it be—you know, he was appealing to the resentment and grievances that a lot of Americans felt.Talking—the Muslim ban, the idea that we're going to simply cut off the country to foreigners in effect is what he was saying, to Muslims in particular, would have been unthinkable for a president to say, you know.And yet it resonated with at least the people who supported him.There was a "Heck, yeah" kind of reaction among people: Let's just keep them out; let's, you know, focus on us.

And, you know, Obama obviously didn't play to that kind of fear.Bush didn't play to that kind of fear.People forget that three days after 9/11, three or four days after 9/11, President Bush goes to a mosque in Washington, D.C., to make the point that we're not at war with Islam.We're not against Muslims; Muslims are our friends.We're against radicals.We're against terrorists.We're against people who use violence to achieve political purposes.

That's not Trump.He's not trying to make a distinction between good Muslims and bad Muslims.In the way he's presenting it, basically all Muslims are a threat, so let's just keep them out.And that's the big change, a big change, because not only is it—not only does he say it; it becomes somehow normal.And it was, again, unthinkable.Even if other people have thought it, it was unthinkable, really, that a major candidate for president would say something.

And it follows after that when he's president, he's all about—he's not about policy.He's about politics.As you stated to some extent, what Obama and Bush were about were always trying to figure to the policies and what policies will work and such, but he operated in a different way.How did he operate?

He operated in a very different way.Trump is all about emotion and anger and grievance.Like, the core of his appeal is grievance.Somebody's out to get you.And he links himself to them: They're out to get me; therefore they're out to get you.And there's always a "they," you know, whether the they is the Democrats, the they are the Muslims, the they might be Republicans, establishment Republicans who he views as the enemy just almost as much as he views the other party.

And you know, he governs by appealing to that part of America that feels that they have been shafted, that people are out to get them, and that—it is not a policy.A lot of policies advocated would have not been beneficial to the people who are his biggest supporters.That wasn't the point.The point was, you know, a very emotional appeal, a very visceral appeal.You go to those rallies—I'd go to those rallies all the time.You go to those rallies, and it's just, there's this energy there.There's this pent-up defiance and this sense that we are finally taking back our country, that Trump is the vehicle for this resentment.And again, the resentment can be against anybody, but in his case he obviously directed it, to a large extent, against Muslims and against foreigners and against anybody who was seen as somehow anti-American.

So what does he inherit from Obama as far as the Middle East is concerned?

Well, I mean, Trump inherits—you know, just like Obama inherited an unsettled situation in the Middle East, so did Trump.I mean, Obama left him an ongoing war in Iraq and Syria against ISIS; you know, ongoing war in Afghanistan; you know, a continuing terrorist threat.Now, Obama would say that he had put them on a better track and that they were on a way toward victory against ISIS and that Trump came along and just finished the job as Obama had started it.

But what Trump would tell you is that, you know, until he came along, it was a mess, and he's the one who actually set loose the commanders on the ground to finally stamp out at least the physical manifestation of the Islamic State, take back all the territory.And he had no interest in Afghanistan.His only interest was to get out.It didn't matter to him what the conditions were practically; he was willing to do almost anything to say Americans should be out.Only because he was pushed by members of his own party and his own advisers did he not actually end up completely leaving Afghanistan before the end of his term.

Trump and the Military

Talk a little bit about the dichotomy of Trump.He wants to be the powerful man.He pushes the military.He has generals all over around him.He takes on the harshest avenues to accomplish things.He's for torture.He backs the drone war that Bush and Obama had used, but triples it.But at the same point he's arguing with his generals and [Defense Secretary James] Mattis, and he keeps on wanting just to pull troops out without many considerations.And he just wants to really get out of the wars.What is going on? ...

Well, it is, you know, a jaw-dropping dichotomy, right?He is the most macho peacenik ever.He loves to talk tough, beat his chest, talk about how he can destroy anybody; he's going to rain terror, "fire and fury"—his words—on North Korea.He literally promises, or at least threatens, the notion of a nuclear exchange.He tells, you know, bad guys in the Middle East that he will pound them if they do anything bad.And yet what he wants to do more than anything else is pull American troops out, not just from hot wars like Afghanistan, but even troops in places like South Korea and Germany that are perfectly safe and not, you know, not in any danger whatsoever.

He brags about investing billions and billions in the military and building up the best military in the world, and then at the same time makes clear he has zero interest in using it.And he doesn't want to actually send troops anywhere or to use American force to achieve overseas goals.

And it is this kind of head-scratching contrast at times.Now, the argument would be peace through strength, right?It's the old Regan line: Yes, I want to build a military not because I want to use it, because I don't want to use it.And if we have a strong military, people won't threaten us.OK. But, you know, he just—he had an allergy in a lot of ways to the use of force even as bombastic as he was about talking about it.

Because it might come back to bite him in the butt, or why?

I don't know.I mean—I think, I mean, I think he had—genuinely was a product of the last 15 years where it looked like, you know, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya and so forth, you know, didn't work.And so, you know, let's not do that again.And any other president might have come to a similar conclusion in that sense.But I think with him also there was this—[sighs]—he really, when push came to shove, when it came to actually giving an order to do it, he just—he shied away from it a number of times.And I think he just, you know, this is one part of being president that he—that he did take seriously, the idea that people would die; that if he gave an order, people would die.

And he's such a showman and such a carnival figure at times, and he talks such a ludicrous game at times that you wonder how seriously he takes it.But there are these moments where it seems to dawn on him that he's actually responsible for life and death.

So at one point, Iran shoots down an American drone.Trump orders a retaliation.And at the last minute, he's told they're going to be 100, 200 people in these buildings you're going to hit, and they will die.And he calls it off.Literally as planes are in the air, you know, as ships are moving into position to launch the strike, he calls it off.He just—he can't fathom the idea of being responsible for 200 deaths, for, as he puts it, shooting down an unmanned drone.In his mind, that's just not proportional.

Now, he does take military action at times during his presidency.He orders a couple strikes on Syria.But, you know—and he's proud of going after ISIS. Brags about it all the time.He uses remarkably blustery language when he talks about killing individual terrorists; at one point makes up a story about how [Abu Bakr] al-Baghdadi is whimpering and screaming at the end when they kill him when there's absolutely no evidence of that whatsoever, but because it just sounds good; it sounds macho; it sounds tough.

So there's a side of him that wants to be the biggest guy on the block, but he also has this aversion to using force.And it's a really interesting side of him.

At one point he makes the claim that he's beaten ISIS; ISIS is completely beaten.And it seemed to be the same claim that at one point or another—"Mission Accomplished" by Bush; Obama made similar things when he pulled out of Iraq.What is it about these presidents that they overpromise, they over-define circumstances when it comes to victory?

I think presidents are desperate to declare victory.They're desperate to say, "We did it; we won; we accomplished our goal; we did what we set out to do.We are the good guys in the world again."It's this World War II complex of, you know, desire for, you know, Missouri, deck of the Missouri peace, you know, surrender ceremony.And every time a president declares victory in this sort of shadow world post-9/11, they discover how much more complicated it is.There isn't an enemy who can simply, you know, lay down a sword and say, "I'm now surrendered; it's over."And they seem to learn that lesson again and again in a very hard way.

The first two years Mattis, his generals, Mattis, [H. R.] McMaster, even [National Security Adviser John] Bolton act as a check on his impulses.How true is that?What was going on there?

Well, he appointed a number of people to the national security realm when he took office who ended up trying to either restrain him or at least channel him in what they perceived to be a safer direction.You know, it wasn't that they necessarily disagreed with him on some of the policies, but even just the way he was going to take action struck them as recklessly dangerous and un-thought through, you know.OK, fine, you want to pull out troops, but don't just do it like that tomorrow.

You know, when he wanted to pull troops out of Syria, it was only a few hundred troops, but he gets on the phone with [Recep Tayyip] Erdogan, the head of Turkey, and says, "Yeah, OK, fine, I'll pull them out," without thinking through what pulling them out would mean.And Mattis and these other figures are aghast: "Wait a second; you can't just do that.We have allies there, and when you do that you're abandoning them.""I had just promised them," Mattis says, "that we were going to be there for them, and now you're completely, on a dime, saying, you know, 'Sorry, you're on your own.'"That's what causes Mattis to quit.Mattis decides at the end of two years, he can no longer keep Trump from making what he sees as dangerous decisions.

You know, in some ways, they did steer him in ways they thought were responsible.But ultimately, Trump is Trump, and nobody can steer him for long.

So when they're gone, does that unleash him?

It empowers him to some extent.But, you know, the next crew that comes in is a little bit more of the "Let Trump be Trump" school of thought, and he's a little bit feeling more confident in his own judgments.He's been president for now a little bit longer.He no longer feels quite so much the imposter syndrome that people feel in a new job like that.And so he is making more of his decisions at that point.He is resisting advice more.He is, you know, telling them to buzz off; he's going to do it the way he wants to do it.

And you see repeatedly throughout his tenure people in the administration trying to, you know, constrain him.And if they can't, they start seeking allies: You know, can they find somebody on the Hill who can get to Trump?Can they find a retired general he might listen to?Can they get Ivanka or Jared to step in?At all times, they're looking for ways to influence him.And the problem for Trump is that he may be subject to influence at times, but he doesn't stay subject to influence.

And one of the decisions he makes is the negotiations with the Taliban.He's desperate to leave Afghanistan, and he finally comes to the point where he sees his opportunity.Was this an admission of defeat by the United States?

Trump would never admit that leaving Afghanistan and making a deal with the Taliban is an admission of defeat.But of course it is on some level.What he wanted to do was make an agreement with our enemy to leave with no commitment by them for what happened next.

We didn't even involve the government of Afghanistan in the talks that we were having with the Taliban.We were negotiating behind their backs, in effect, and then telling them what we wanted to tell them afterwards so that they are completely the ones who are going to be held, you know, holding the ball while we just leave with an agreement they didn't sign on to.And everybody understood that if we made an agreement with the Taliban and simply left, what we were saying to them is, "Have at it; do what you're going to do."

Trump literally was ready to have the Taliban come to Camp David.To Camp David.To do this.He was so eager to have this big, grand signing ceremony, to be, you know, Jimmy Carter, you know, or Bill Clinton with Middle East peace or something like that.He was willing to have the Taliban come to Camp David, and it just astonished most the people in the national security realm.Even if you made a deal with the Taliban, a lot of them would say, first of all, it ought to be a better deal, but second of all, if you're going to make a deal, you don't invite them to Camp David as if they're an honorable adversary or something like that, much less an ally.Camp David is sort of a very special, symbolic place.To have the people who were responsible for killing Americans staying at Aspen Lodge or, you know, it was just mind-bending.

And then people tried to stop it.And eventually it stopped in effect on its own because there was an attack in Afghanistan at that particular moment that made it politically untenable for Trump to actually bring them to the mountain retreat.

… I cannot imagine a single person in Washington other than Trump who thought that was a good idea.There were people who thought maybe a deal with the Taliban was an OK thing, a necessary evil maybe, even.But bringing them to Camp David?

The 2020 Election

The 2020 election is around the corner, and Trump's new existential war is the war at home.His enemies now are the existential threat, the Socialist Democrats, Black Lives Matter.And he uses the weapons of the terrorist war against them.He has DHS involved in arrests in the West Coast antifa.He's using the military.He wants to use the military even more than he did, but the National Guard is having helicopters flying over the heads of demonstrators in Washington, D.C. Talk a little bit about what he was doing and what that says about him.

Yeah.By his last year in office, as he's trying to win a second term, Trump turns increasingly inward.Obviously there's the COVID pandemic, but there's also the people in the streets protesting racial injustice after the George Floyd murder, you know, protesting the existing order on some level.And Trump wants to respond in a very, you know, violent way.In some ways he wants to use the instruments of the war on terror here at home.He sends the DHS, Department of Homeland Security, which is invented to defend us against terrorists, to the streets of Portland.He wants to activate the active-duty military through the Insurrection Act and order troops into the street in Minnesota and Chicago and Washington.The National Guard already is out in some of these places.

And, you know, it's this very volatile moment at home, very reminiscent of 1968.He even uses the terminology of that time saying, if—"When the looting begins, the shooting begins," you know.And he's serious about that.It's not a joke.He's very worked up about it, and he wants to use, you know, what turned out—what could be very violent means in order to suppress these protests—he would say riots; in some cases they were riots—in the streets.

And it's a very divisive moment.It's pitting American against American.It's not just—he's not looking for a middle ground where he says, "I'm against racial injustice, but we also need to have order in the streets."It is all "law and order"—that's the phrase.And by law and order what he means is, "Look at these people who are in the streets who are out there doing this damage to the cities; they need a guy like me to reestablish order."

And so the enemy is no longer overseas.The enemy is at home.

The election fraud lie and how he sells it to his base that believes him.… Talk about the reality of why that story that Trump told after the election was believed by his base.

Yeah.I mean, after 9/11 and Iraq, after torture and the financial crisis, after all of these things have happened, there's a part of America that doesn't trust its leadership.And Trump has tapped into them in a way that they believe, that he has told them, "Don't trust any of them; trust me."When he uses phrases like "fake news," he's telling them, "I am the only one telling you the truth.You can trust what I'm telling you because everybody else is part of this deep state conspiracy."

So when he tells them that the vote was stolen, when he tells [them] the election was a fraud, they're already conditioned to listen to him and to agree with him and to see him as the truth teller.It's ironic, of course, because it's been documented how many times he has used falsehoods and lies and misleading statements.Our friends at <i>The Washington Post</i> catalogued it I think around 30,000.¹

Washington Post: Trump's false or misleading claims total 30,573 over 4 years

But to many people who support him, he is a truth teller in a political environment in which everybody else is lying.And if he said it's so, then it must be so.

And it's not an inconsiderable piece of the electorate.It's a sizable share of the American public is ready to trust him and believe him, no matter who tells them otherwise, even other Republicans.It can be a Republican governor, a Republican election official, a Republican town clerk, any of these people, and they're willing to say, "Well, they must be part of the conspiracy; they're part of the big lie; they're part of the fraud, the stolen election."

Anybody who goes against Trump is, by definition, part of this conspiracy.

What Biden Inherits

… Let's wrap it up with Biden.We might end the film there anyway, but in case we continue, the big question is the significance of the decision to pull out of Afghanistan to follow through on the agreement that Trump made with the Taliban, but just push it a little bit, even despite the fact that many people in the government feel that the Taliban will eventually take over.It might lead to a civil war, bloody civil war like it did in '90.But there are consequences.There are consequences for certainly our allies, the government of Afghanistan now.There are consequences for women losing what they've gained in the last 20 years.What is the significance of that decision?

I mean, I think the significance of Biden's decision to pull out of Afghanistan is that we have given up.We have given up.We do not believe that we can make it better.We do not believe that we can win there.We do not believe that we can have an impact there, and we don't believe we should try; that the last 20 years has been an exercise in failure.

And I think we've forgotten that a lot of things were actually accomplished in those 20 years.We did set free a country in some ways from a brutal, repressive regime.I was there; I spent eight months in Afghanistan.I saw it.… I think there were a lot of things that were done in Afghanistan that were important, but there's a big question.And the question is, why are we still there?

If we couldn't win in 20 years, what is it going to make a difference if we're there another five years or 10 years?We don't want to be there forever.There's an exhaustion factor, and it's one that is shared by Donald Trump and Joe Biden, which says something, right?It says something.

Now, Biden has taken Trump's plan in effect and put it into a, you know, into action, changed the date a little bit.Basically what Biden is doing is what Trump agreed to do, just say, "We're out; we're gone."You know, "Afghanistan, you're on your own."They're going to try to find ways to support the government without troops on the ground, politically, economically, through some sort of off-horizon force in some other country.

But in effect what we're saying is, to Ashraf Ghani and the Afghan government, "It's your war now.We've done what we can.We're no longer part of it.And there are going to be consequences.And you're going to have to live with them."I think we should expect the Taliban will make a comeback and that we should expect that there will be a bloody civil war, and we ought to be ready for that, because that will be the consequences.And maybe that's fine.Maybe the American people are going to be perfectly fine with that, but don't be surprised when it happens.

And the consequences for the United States as far as our security and how the world sees us?

It's a good question, right?Does Afghanistan without us there become a haven once again for the kind of forces that unleashed 9/11?That's certainly the argument that people who wanted to stay made.And there's, you know, reasons to think that that makes sense if the Taliban were to get back in power.

On the other hand, you know, what some of the people would say is, look, the Taliban was never about international terrorism; what they were about was their own country.And it's very possible that even if they did come back to power, they would not see it in their interest to allow the same kind of thing to happen again, that they would want to focus on their own country and not be a threat to us.It's a gamble.We don't know.

As to what it says to the world, I mean, some people in the world will say it's a sign that America, you know, has a limit.And we know that limit now is 20 years, and that, you know, if you're prepared to wait them out, you can wait them out.But there's a lot of the world that sees Afghanistan as a mistake by America, like Vietnam, like when the Soviets were in Afghanistan.And they will say that our getting out is a good sign of America, a more modest and more humble America.And there will be people who think that's a good thing.

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