The FRONTLINE Interviews
Thomas Ricks
Author, Fiasco
Thomas Ricks reported extensively on the U.S. military and national security for The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. He is the author of multiple books, including Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq.
The following interview was conducted by FRONTLINE’s Jim Gilmore on April 7, 2021. It has been edited for clarity and length.
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Reaction to 9/11
Let's start on 9/11, when the congressmen and women were out on the steps of the Capitol building, and they start singing “God Bless America.” Take us to that moment, and what it said, what it represented to you when you saw that.
It seemed to represent a new unity among Americans, and especially among the American political leadership, that this was a clear challenge to the country, and a challenge to the political establishment, and they were going to come together to deal with it.
How exceptional was that moment, actually, when you think about it?
In retrospect to me, there was a real opportunity there that was lost.The opportunity was to come together in a serious way and deal with this genuine threat in a genuine way.And instead, I think leading from the top, President Bush and Vice President Cheney led a national panic.By that, I mean we did not react in an intelligent way.We reacted in a way that undermined the country's values.Torture always happens in war; I understand that.But in this case, torture became a matter of national policy.
The total mistake was invading Iraq, a huge act of panic.And it brings back to me, constantly, something that a Middle Easterner said at the time: “By invading Iraq, you people think you're going to transform the Middle East.The surprise is, the Middle East is going to transform America.” And I think, ultimately that's what happened to this country, is we wound up being more like the Middle East and less like America.
So on that night of 9/11, Bush gets back to Washington, and he gives his talk from the Oval Office.He quotes the Bible.He talks about the fact that this is a fight against good versus evil.From that very moment, did he understand the enemy?
George Bush, in his mind, I think, did understand that something very evil had happened.And it had happened.It was an evil act, 9/11.It killed thousands of civilians.But once you define yourself as good and the other side as bad, it's a slippery slope, because you start thinking anything you do for your cause is good, and anything the other side does for its cause is bad.And so we wound up doing some bad things in the name of goodness.We wound up doing some very evil things in the name of goodness.
I'm especially struck that the number of civilians who have been killed in our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq is a huge multiple of the number of American civilians who were killed on 9/11.But Americans don't talk about that much.And it makes me wonder about a certain moral callousness that somehow, through this panic led by the president and the vice president, we gave ourselves a free pass that we didn't deserve.
9/14, he goes up to New York.It's the bullhorn moment on top of the scrap heap.He vows revenge.He ties it into the patriotic fervor of the country at that moment.How does that empower him, that moment?I mean, what was the message, the lesson that he learned on 9/14?
So I think he correctly took away a couple of lessons.One was that the American people would follow him in whatever he did.Number two, there was a genuine American desire for revenge.And that's understandable.I remember standing on the battlefield in Afghanistan, and there were some dead Al Qaeda soldiers at our feet, and I turned to a soldier standing there, and I said, “Soldier, what do you think of all these dead Al Qaeda guys?” He said, “Sir, I'm from the Bronx.” And that was it.Enough said.He was there for the revenge of New York City.I think that's totally understandable.
But the job of leadership, both military and civilian, is to control that.That's why you don't want warriors as soldiers; you want disciplined soldiers, people who follow orders.Yet I think there was a moral indiscipline at the top of the U.S. government throughout this period, and it permeates across the country into odd things, like the militarization of the police.You see these small-town police departments that use their anti-terrorism money to buy armored vehicles.Well, first of all, they don't need the armored vehicles.Second of all, the most dangerous thing you can have is tactical weaponry without tactical training.
The Mission in Afghanistan
So in those early days, in the beginning of Afghanistan, the beginning of Enduring Freedom, he has the support of the world like we've never seen since World War II. He defines the fight as one for freedom and democratic values.Describe the long-term steps they take and some of the long-term effects.
They take a series of steps that, in the short term, seem to make sense but in the long run were strategically disastrous.For example, in Afghanistan, they kind of defined the mission as, “Let's take Afghanistan,” and like 19th-century soldiers, they defined “taking Afghanistan” as “Let's take the capital.” So Gen. Tommy R. Franks, commander of the Central Command, goes in and takes Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, late in 2001.And they kind of spike the ball and say, “Well, that's done,” not understanding that, in a war of that sort, your enemy sits back, lets you move in, waits to see your vulnerabilities, and then begins the attack.
Also, in Afghanistan, the biggest single problem is, Gen. Tommy Franks defines getting rid of Al Qaeda as getting them out of Afghanistan.So at Tora Bora in the fall of 2001, American forces, military, CIA and local allies push Al Qaeda from Afghanistan across the mountains into Pakistan.So what you've done is taken this powerful group of armed Islamic extremists and pushed them from Afghanistan, a small poor country, into Pakistan, a large poor country, with a nuclear arsenal.Tactically, in very short terms, it might have made sense.In the long run, in strategic terms, that was insane.
The Dark Side
Then, speaking about the decisions, the "dark side" of the war, how does that battle the idea of what Bush was selling, which was that this was a fight to spread democratic values?There's a blatant fight between those two things.What was going on?
The biggest problem with panic is thinking clearly.And it makes you grab for what looks like solutions that may actually cause problems.I remember being in Afghanistan early in 2002, and I turned to an army officer.
And I said, “Carl, what's your biggest concern about this war?” And the colonel said, “My biggest concern about the war in Afghanistan is you can't win a war for your values by undermining your values.” And that's what you see happen in Afghanistan and in Guantanamo, and in the behavior of the CIA and other American agencies.They start violating the law.They start thinking there's a larger moral law.They start offending allies by the way they kidnap people.We start delivering prisoners to friendly governments we know will torture those prisoners.And it starts raising a series of questions, in our allies and among our own people.“Wait a minute. Why are we doing these things?Why are we fighting this war?
If we're the good people, why are we behaving in this way?” It takes me back to something a soldier in Iraq said to me.
He was explaining—he was basically from the mountains of Tennessee, and he said, “If a bunch of Iraqis came into my neighborhood and pointed weapons at me and my kids and my friends, I'd behave just like these Iraqis are behaving here today.”
Just to pause here for a second, one of the things we're doing is the accumulation of all these things that we're going to be talking about sort of leads us to where we are now.
Where we are now.
So we're connecting the dots.So in Iraq, when Bush begins talking about Iraq as part of the "axis of evil," looking back, how does that define how things will play out?How does that define a view towards other countries and expresses this idea that this is an expanding war, not defined earlier, when we first went into Afghanistan?What did that mean when he says that?
One of the definitions of craziness is when you start seeing patterns that aren't there, and the axis of evil is a very good example of a pattern that was not there.There were very few connections between North Korea, Al Qaeda and Afghanistan and Iraq—in many ways, more views that are fundamentally different.I think the biggest problem with defining Iraq as part of the axis of evil was it meant we were going to invade that country.
And that has two effects.First, we never should have invaded Iraq.It was a mistake.It was based on false premises.We lied ourselves into a war.The second problem with that is preparations for the war in Iraq undercut the war we were already in, in Afghanistan.Now, as I said, I think invading Afghanistan was the correct response to 9/11.I lived in Afghanistan.I love that country, and it didn't deserve to have Al Qaeda running it.
We went in, and we got rid of Al Qaeda, in a stupid manner, but we took Kabul.And at that point, we could have stood down and said, “We have restored this country to what it was before Al Qaeda.We will stabilize the capital.We'll help out the big provincial capitals.” And that's the way the country used to be.
Now, 20 years of fighting later, that's essentially where we're going to leave Kabul now, after 20 years of useless additional fighting and endless pain and grief for the Afghan people.So we make a big strategic mistake in how we handle Afghanistan, and then we make an even bigger one by invading Iraq, and killing tens of thousands of civilians, alienating allies who are really upset not only by our determination to invade Iraq, but by the way we do it.
The Mission in Iraq
In April of '03 Saddam's statue comes down.It's a very big moment.It's on all the front pages and all the networks.Take us to that moment and how and what you think about this perhaps misunderstanding that Saddam removal didn't equal eventual democracy.What did that moment, to you, mean, and how it was misunderstood?
I suspect that that moment of the statue coming down meant a lot more to Americans than it did to Iraqis.Iraqis were looking forward to saying, “What's going to happen when the lid comes off?” Sunnis were terrified that the Americans would empower the Shiites, the Shiites would ally themselves with Iran and basically take over the country and behave toward the Sunnis the way that Saddam had behaved toward the Shiites, violently suppressing them.
The Americans come along and say, “No, no, no, we're going to have a democracy here.So we're going to have an election.” And I think Americans—this is another symbolic problem.An election does not necessarily mean a democracy.Hold an election early on, and often what you simply do is exacerbate existing differences and drive the wedge deeper between Sunni and Shiite, between regions, even between genders.
In retrospect, if you want a democracy in Iraq, what you would have done is a slow grassroots system in which you'd have neighborhood councils, and then perhaps six months later, elections for neighborhood councils, and then for city councils.And you would have new leaders emerge, slowly over the years, perhaps new political parties.You might hold provincial elections two years down the line and national elections five or seven years down the line.
But to do that, you would admit to yourself that you had invaded a country, occupied it, and now were engaged in nation building.And this is another lie the Americans told themselves: “We can go in quickly, invade, hold an election and get out.” It was not true then; it was never true.Yet we persuaded ourselves that that was the way to go.And it simply was a way—the American approach was a recipe for intensifying differences and increasing opposition to everything the Americans were doing.
So very early on, the Iraqi military is told, “No, we're not going to pay you.Go home. Get lost.”There actually had been plans made to enlist Iraqi—the Iraqi military, especially the lower levels, not so tainted by Saddam Hussein, and use them in construction projects and low-level security, like protecting a highway bridge at night so it's not blown up.
Instead, they were told to get lost.And everybody who had been a member of the Baath Party was told to get lost.What this did was create an insurgency.In my book Fiasco, there's actually a chapter called “How to Create an Insurgency.” And the sad thing is, some Americans knew it at the time.The CIA station chief in Baghdad, in the summer of '03, told the American civilian occupation authorities, “Yeah, you can ban the Baathist Party.You can tell the Iraqi military to go home and get lost.And six months from now, you're going to have a war on your hands.” Well, they pooh-poohed him, and he was right.
And the consequences of all these mistakes that you've been talking about, I mean, how it cast a shadow forward, creating problems down the line for this president, for the president that followed, and the president that followed after?
These are all problems that resonate for years, that have second- and third- and fourth-order consequences.The damage that we did to NATO, an essential alliance, that resonates, partly NATO is very skeptical of what we're up to.And NATO goes a bit distance about the United States.And then you have President Obama come in, and actually, I think, repeat some of the mistakes of the Bush administration.And then Donald Trump comes in and nearly fractures NATO. This is dangerous stuff.NATO is one big strategic example.Why is NATO important?Because with the existence of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Europe has been at peace now for 75 years.That's important, because Europe had two world wars.That's important, because Europe had two world wars in the last century, and other wars before that.Europe has had this very long peace.Yet this country doesn't appreciate NATO, especially under Trump, and didn't appreciate the damage it did to NATO before Trump.
But I want to go to a very small opposite example.When you lie to yourself about what you're doing and how you're doing it, which is what the Bush administration did early on in Iraq, you don't give your soldiers what they need, because you don't understand the war they're facing.And I wrote about the smallest of examples of this in the town of Baqubah northeast of Baghdad.
In the spring of '03, an officer was walking along, and he was shot, unfortunately, by another American, just in a mistake.And he's not wearing body armor, and the bullet goes through him and kills him.Why didn't he have body armor?Because the Bush administration had decided that we weren't in a war there, that it was a peaceful occupation, and you didn't need that sort of thing.
So when you don't understand the war you're in, at the smallest micro level of one soldier, that becomes a life or death situation.That soldier was killed by arrogance, ignorance, hubris and panic on the part of the Americans.
You started talking a little bit before I stopped you about the insurgency.So [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld ignores the insurgency, and he pushes it off as unimportant.What's important to understand about that period of time?
I'm on the ground in the summer of '03 in Iraq, and it's very clear to me that what I'm seeing is very different from what people at the Pentagon are seeing.And this comes through in a couple of Rumsfeld's press conferences, you know.
He said, “There's one little riot in the street or something, and people say Henny Penny, the sky is falling.” And actually, at one point, in a press conference that summer, Jamie McIntyre of CNN reads aloud, at a press conference, reads aloud to Rumsfeld the definition of an insurgency and says, “Sir, isn't that what's going on there?” And Rumsfeld says, “No.” Well, it is what was going on there, and it took the American government months to face up to the fact that it was facing a widespread insurgency across Iraq.And it's caught on the hind foot in that and many other ways.It never really catches up.And it takes the U.S. government, really, three years, until the fall of '06 and the spring of '07, to start understanding the war and to start dealing with the realities on the ground in Baghdad.
Abu Ghraib
Abu Ghraib in April '04.The pictures come out.Talk about this and the turning point that it was, what it did, the consequences.I think you've written, other people have talked about the fueling of the insurgency, the demoralizing of soldiers, of U.S. soldiers, of how it contributes to a loss of faith in America and institutions and our leadership.
Abu Ghraib comes out that spring in '04.I mean, it's not the words; it's the images.The images, the photographs are so powerful.They have huge effects in several different communities.First, they smear the American image.They make America look bad, that American soldiers are behaving this way.They raise questions about the discipline of American soldiers and the leadership they're getting.
Second, they antagonize the Iraqi public.There are people, we know, who joined the insurgency because of those images, which means that American soldiers torturing Iraqis and photographing it helped get other American soldiers and Iraqis killed.Third, on the other side of the planet, once more, it makes Americans confront the question, why are we doing this?If we are a beacon of democracy in the Middle East, how do you get that by rigging up wires to people, pretending that you're going to electrify them by humiliating them and by making them simulate homosexual acts upon each other as a way of entertaining yourself?All of that, once more, calls into question the premise of the war and the conduct of the war and the character of American leadership and American soldiers.
Legacy of the Bush Years
Sum up the legacy of Bush's war, Bush's war that will become Obama's war, that will become Trump's war, that becomes Biden's war.
Bush's war, I think, becomes essentially the Iraq War.The Afghanistan war is forgotten in the background.And Bush's Iraq War is a war that begins on false premises, continues through inability to confront the realities on the ground, and finally, in the small act of redemption, ends with Bush in '06 changing his approach to the war and the way he interacts with his generals.But it's too little, too late.And it doesn't end the war.
When we talked about how the legacy of the war or the decisions made previously affected coming administrations, you talked a little bit about that they would continue the wars without being able to explain why.
President Obama comes into office having called Afghanistan the "good war" and indicating that he will get us out of Iraq.Unfortunately, he never really seems to have a serious coming together with his generals about how to do that.There's a hubris in Obama as well, that in some ways reminds me of the Bush people.And it's odd to say that, because they're such different people in so many ways.Yet when people question Obama and the people around him, you started getting responses, “Well, that's the way 'The Blob' talks.
That's the foreign policy Blob.” Saying the foreign Blob was the Obama administration's way of dismissing the conventional wisdom and saying, “You people are mired in the past.” Well, I had heard that same team a few years earlier from the Bush administration.After 9/11, they said, “This erases history.That's all irrelevant.This is a new era.You people lack the imagination to understand the situation.” Well, the Obama administration's dismissal of the conventional wisdom of The Blob, especially done by Ben Rhodes, his foreign policy speechwriter, to me, was a very unpleasant reminder of the Bush administration—the same sort of hubris, I thought, the same belief that you could make a speech and that changed the world.
But in Obama, especially, there's this huge gap between words and action.You see this again and again in Obama.He thinks, if I say something, it makes it so.He establishes a red line in Syria, but then it's crossed, and nothing happens.He thinks you can just say something about Iraq, and that will make it happen.Oddly enough, and I don't know if this fits in with what you're thinking about at all, I found an odd similarity between David Petraeus and Barack Obama.There's a photograph of them, actually, in my book The Gamble, the two of them riding in a helicopter together in Iraq, in the summer of '08.Obama is the Democratic nominee for the presidency.Petraeus is the American commander in Iraq.
And the people around Petraeus referred to Obama as the "presumptuous nominee," not the "presumptive nominee."And I just thought, these guys are so similar, Petraeus and Obama.They are both really smart, and they both assume that they're the smartest guy in the room when sometimes they're not, and they should find out who is.
The Obama Years
He got elected, juxtaposing himself versus Bush, versus Bush's "dark side" war.What were America's hopes?Why Obama?
Obama was an intelligent, fresh new voice who indicated that we would behave differently in the world, and the world wanted that.The world applauded it.The world gives him the Nobel Peace Prize simply for getting elected.I thought—and that was actually the first moment in which I really doubted Obama.When he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, I thought, if he had more character, he would have turned down that prize and said, “I haven't earned this.Come back to me at the end of my presidency, and if you still think I've earned it, give it to me then.” Instead, he goes to Oslo and accepts the Nobel Peace Prize.I thought that was a huge misstep, and it made me begin wondering about Obama and foreign policy.
Again, here, there's a hubris, a very American hubris in the way he handles a lot of his foreign policy: the dismissal of the conventional wisdom, the confusing rhetoric with action and not understanding that a lot of these problems are a lot tougher than they look.And you can't just get in and get out quickly.They really liked the way they intervened in Libya.Yet for my money, I'm not sure, ultimately, that it really did much.
And his unwillingness to get involved.He hands off Iraq to Biden.He turns supposedly to the "good war" in Afghanistan.But to the large extent, neither of them were his main interests.It's not what he wanted to do.What's the effect?
It's a good question.And I think it's exactly right, that Obama didn't become president to be a foreign policy president.He was very focused, and in his whole life had been focused on domestic issues.And the effect of that is he kind of farms out foreign policy, and especially his wars, to Joe Biden.And the effect of that is nothing much happens.The wars just continue along without resolution.Obama doesn't like them, but is not going to spend his presidency focusing on them.
It always struck me that Obama wouldn't even touch the issues of torture and Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, that at the very least a truth and reconciliation commission that established, "This is what the American intelligence agencies did; this is what was illegal; this is the thing—these are the things that should not happen again."I'm not talking necessarily about a grand jury, but a truth and reconciliation commission that says, “Everybody come forward and tell us what you did, and there will be an amnesty until a certain point.” He didn't invest himself in those sort of questions, of even cleaning up some of what had happened.He simply wasn't going to deal with it.
Obama’s Use of Drones
The options he chose to fight the terrorist war, I mean, we'll talk about Iraq in a second, but in Afghanistan and Pakistan and other countries, he turns to the surge in Afghanistan; he embraces drones.You have some strong opinions about what that did or did not do.Targeted assassinations was a more precise way of beating the enemy.Just give us an overview of what that means about what he thought of the war and a way to get out, when in fact, the realities were that they didn't seem to shorten any wars.
There was an author named David Morris, who wrote probably the best book on post-traumatic stress disorder, called The Evil Hours.
David Morris talks about coming back from Iraq and talking to Americans about the war there.And he says he found it wasn't that Americans resented him telling them about the war; they resented that he even thought they should understand it.And to me, Barack Obama, as president, embodied the modern American way of war.We used to fight wars of attrition—the Civil War, World War II. Nowadays, we fight wars of inattention.And Barack Obama's wars were wars of inattention.
By that, I mean we found ways to distance ourselves from our wars.We no longer have a draft, which means that Johnny next door is not going to go to war unless he volunteers.We use lots of corporate employees, contractors, mercenaries, as many as possible, to reduce our troop numbers, again, another way to have an insulator between us and the war.And finally, we start using weapons that distance ourselves from our wars.If you have a drone, then you no longer have a pilot at risk of being shot down and taken prisoner.
I remember an Air Force general saying to me once, he said, “Yeah, I lost a drone in that fight, and that drone was willing to die for its country.” And he laughed, because it's a laughing matter.Who cares?To me, Barack Obama embodies that approach.It's the natural outcome of that American approach to war, wars of inattention.Find yourself ways of distancing yourself with the war of not expending your energies on it, and make it someone else's problem.
And the effects of such decisions on the Muslim world, on how people, the world sees America, or even if the Americans are ignoring it, what, again, what's the long-term effects of decisions like this?
It sends—the staffs of inattention sends messages to two groups, both very important.One group is foreigners on which the war is occurring.It says that Americans don't much care about the people here dying on the ground.The second group is the American soldiers, who in very small numbers, are still there.And it says, guess what?The American people don't care very much about you dying on the ground either.
But one thing I forgot to ask you before, the effect on the American soldier of Abu Ghraib.You had talked to soldiers over there about it.What's important to understand about that?
American soldiers on the ground in Iraq knew that Abu Ghraib was very bad, that it was not typical of how American soldiers do behave, that it was wrong morally and wrong tactically and wrong strategically.[Secretary of Defense] James Mattis once told me about walking across a mess hall in Iraq, and he said usually a bunch of soldiers were focused on the TV news.And he said, “What's going on, Marine?” The Marine looked up and said, “A bunch of assholes just lost us the war.” It was Abu Ghraib.They knew the cost of that, and it would cost them.It would mean extra snipers at night, extra bombs in the road, extra rocks thrown by kids.
Obama had a dark side war as well.The use of drones, the use of assassinations, the domestic surveillance as well, that took place in America—the effect of these decisions, these secret plans, these secret ways of warfare?
The best single study of the Vietnam war was written by a man named Robert Komer, who had run part of the secret war in Vietnam, which actually was a very effective secret war, much more effective than our post-9/11 secret wars.And what Robert Komer wrote in his study was that in the absence of leadership, the American military establishment will not fight the war it needs to fight.It will fight the war it knows how to fight.
And in the absence of leadership during the Obama administration, the U.S. military and intelligence establishment simply went on fighting the war it knows how to fight, not necessarily the wars that would resolve it or the wars that would take the risk needed to come to some kind of victory or good outcome.They simply hum-hummed along, fighting the war they knew how to fight.And that leads to the outcome, I think, we're going to see in Afghanistan, which is the Taliban are going to be half back in power, which is where it would have been had you arrived at a peace settlement in the fall of 2001.But it would have been a peace settlement the Taliban were grateful to get, instead of one that they're going to reluctantly accept, and take as their point of departure for a future takeover.
The significance of the killing of Osama bin Laden, long-term?One thing I guess is it reinforces Obama's view on his decision, on the way to do war.But your view, the overview of the lessons that we should understand, and what happened?
Personally, I was glad to see Osama bin Laden killed.Strategically, I think it was meaningless.It didn't mean anything.And I think that's probably more true in the Middle East than it is for Americans.
Meaning what, more true?
Meaning it's another one of those symbols that seemed to mean a lot, and it meant a lot to America, like Saddam's statue coming down.The killing of Osama bin Laden gave Americans a sense of closure, but it really didn't close anything.It didn't resolve Iraq or Afghanistan.
The Election of Donald Trump
So looking back, by 2016, 2015, Donald Trump uses the anger over past decisions on the war.He capitalizes on Americans' distrust of leadership in Washington, of the 15 years of war that had already taken place.How was what had taken place before the seeds of Donald Trump's rise?
In retrospect, Donald Trump was very good at taking advantage of the enormous erosion in American faith in government.Now, in foreign policy—you see this clearly since 9/11—that again and again, the American people come away saying, “This isn't what we thought we were getting into.This isn't what we were promised.” It's pretty clear to the American people, by '06, '07, and even more later, that the war in Afghanistan has been bungled.The war in Iraq was probably wrong to begin with.
The funny thing about Trump is there's a huge disconnect between his words and his actions.He says all sorts of things, but he doesn't really do much as president.It's hard to look back and say, really, he fundamentally changed this or fundamentally changed that in the way our foreign policy and national security operates.He made huge mistakes.He stubbed his toe in a lot of things.But it's hard to see him really—that he got anything done.
In summation of Trump's war legacy, what's your sort of overview?He seems unable to disentangle the United States from endless wars that we've been in.The Taliban, as we talked about, seems to be coming back.He did do a good job finishing up the war on ISIS, but ISIS is still a reality.He, in some ways, some people say he approached the wars similar to how Obama had.What's his legacy and how the world and Americans viewed it?
To me, the foreign policy legacy of Trump is not much.He didn't do much, and one day he was gone.To me, the overwhelmingly important legacy of Trump is his encouragement of the reactionary violent right in America.And we really didn't see the full effects of Trump until after he lost the election, until Jan. 6.And that's when Trumpism comes home to the U.S. Capitol with a vengeance.
Twenty Years Later
Let's go to that right now, because you brought it up.So 9/11, Al Qaeda tried to attack the Capitol, to try to take the Capitol building down.They failed.On Jan. 6, a domestic mob, Trump supporters, did the job.How has 20 years since 9/11, the wars, the decisions by three presidents that tried to deal with it, how are these two things connected?What happened during those 20 years that created a situation that led to Jan. 6?
It's such a huge question, I can only bite off a chunk at a time.For me, though, the beginning of strategy is not what they teach at the Army War Colleges, and ways and means, how do I—what do I want to achieve?How am I going to do it?To me, the beginning of strategy is asking, who am I? Who are we?And what do we want to do as a nation?
We answered that question too simply on 9/11: "We're the good guys."And 20 years later, on 1/6, we found out that we are the enemy, that the biggest national security threat facing the United States is internal.And it has grown, partly as a result of American leadership failures over the last 20 years since 9/11.
We went to bring democratic values to the world, American values to the world.And then, on Jan. 6, we see democratic values crumbling in the Capitol of the United States.What's going on?
It turns out that a lot of Americans are not into democratic values, that a lot of Americans don't want equality for all and resent the loss of prestige and status that they feel.That mob on 1/6 was overwhelmingly old, white men from the middle class who, to a surprising degree, have had financial difficulties.They're not poor, though.They had business failures or bankruptcies.And, according to recent studies, they live in areas that are rapidly becoming less white.And so when they say they want to take back their country, what they really want is the country that they thought they had of white people being in control, essentially white supremacist America.And that's what that mob was about.
What it really brought home to me, what really brought this home to me, was the Confederate flag being carried through the U.S. Capitol, to my knowledge the first time the Confederate flag was ever flown in that building.
How do you think the world views the way the Capitol was after Jan. 6, the Capitol basically becoming a green zone, like in Baghdad?
I think it was humiliating for the world to see America in that way, because you have this clown sitting up in the—on the rostrum of the U.S. Senate.It's hard for me to sort of get that perspective, though.I have spent so much time in the U.S. Capitol building as a reporter.I love that building.It's a beautiful building.The floors amaze me, all these tiles.There's stuff everywhere to look at.There's some interesting paintings.There are some amazing people in that building.And it was designed by Thomas Jefferson to be a temple of liberty, the people's temple.And to me, it was a desecration of what this country is supposed to be and stand for.
With Biden, the country that he inherits, how different is this country that he inherits from the country that existed before 9/11?
To me, this country is vastly different than America before 9/11.It's a less confident country.It's a country with much less faith in its government, and a country with much less faith in the democratic system.The basic building block of America is the vote, and right now, our American system of voting is being challenged repeatedly by the Republican Party seeking to suppress the vote, to discourage people from voting.I think it is a very weak approach and doomed approach for the Republican Party to take.But it's also, I think, un-American.You want people to vote because that's the system, and if you don't want people to vote, it means you don't trust the system, the American system.
And worldwide, how America is viewed today, the moral authority diminished, the idea U.S. power is completely different in America, that institutions and tenets that always were valued, how has that changed?
I don't think the world has come to a conclusion yet.I think the world sees a question mark hanging over the United States.How will we deal with this?It reminds me of the civil rights movement for this reason.And right now I'm writing a book about the civil rights movement.The civil rights movement posed a challenge to America.Can you change?Can you deal with a discrepancy between your laws and the way they're enforced on the streets?And America did.And that redeemed America in a way the Soviet Union never issued redemption in the eyes of the world.
I think the civil rights movement was a major factor in America winning the Cold War.In the same way, we are in a position now where a giant question mark hangs over the strength of our system and the strength of our belief in our system.And what we do over the next five to 10 years, how we answer that question, is the key.
Can Biden move America beyond this 9/11 era of these last 20 years, despite the fact that a lot of the remnant still exists?The wars, really in Iraq and Afghanistan, are not settled.The wars against terrorism and ISIS are not settled.Gitmo is not closed.
I see Biden as an interim figure.I don't see him as the Franklin Delano Roosevelt of our time.I see him as a transitional person, who has done a good job, so far, in putting out the flames, in calming people down.Biden is like the cop who arrives at a big family fight that involves not just the husband and wife, but Uncle Festus and Junior, and they're all clubbing each other, and Biden sits everybody down and says, “Calm down.” Biden has got people calmed down a bit.
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