Safer But Not Yet Safe | GoodFellows: Conversations From The Hoover Institution

[Music] it's thursday september the 9th and welcome back to good fellows a hoover institution broadcast examining social economic political and geopolitical concerns i'm bill whelan i'm a distinguished policy fellow here at the hoover institution and i will be your moderator today that means that i have the honor of introducing the stars of our show the good fellows as we jokingly refer to them and right now we have one good fellow on the show john cochran who's the hoover institution senior fellow uh neil ferguson is supposed to be with us he may join us in a few minutes from europe we're trying to track him down we're also usually joined by hr mcmaster but the good general is on the road this week he couldn't make it he sends his regrets and he regrets not being here today because we have a very special guest that is the director of the hoover institution condoleezza rice connie welcome back to good fellows thank you great to be back with you bill and john look forward to it so this being september the ninth and two days before the 9 11 anniversary of the 20th anniversary of this year the attacks conde we would like to talk about the significance of that day and what it's meant to america in the 20 years since and then also look forward to what comes in the next 20 years and i thought we'd start by maybe you offering a few thoughts a few reflections on what happened that day uh from what i understand you were in uh you were holding a national security council meeting so you would be you would run i guess in the eisenhower building next door to the white house i believe you're handed notes that the attacks were going on i think your first reaction was this is kind of an odd thing a plane hit the world trade center but then the second plane hits and it's obvious that you know terrorism is afoot in new york city two questions conde first of all when was it apparent to you and your colleagues that this was the handiwork of al-qaeda and bin laden and then secondly take us through what it's like to process something like this in real time so much of washington is planning you know going through more scenarios foreign policy scenarios here is a real life crisis unfolding in front of you you have to process intelligence what you know you have all kinds of wild rumors of foot is the white house going to be hit is a capital going to be a hit what do we do take us back to september 11 2001 and just give us a little insight as to what happened well actually uh bill um i was actually in my office when this happened i would go later to uh meet with my staff and that's when i learned that a second plane hit the world trade center and right about that time we knew that it was a terrorist attack the first plane i think we all thought was some kind of weird accident i actually called president bush and you'll remember he was at that event in florida for kids and and he said well that's a strange accident but then when we learned that a second planet hit the world trade center and then uh really uh incredibly unnerving when we couldn't get a hold of secretary rumsfeld as they said his functions ringing ringing ringing and a plane hit the pentagon and they'd been evacuated and about that time the secret service came and they said you've got to get to a bunker because planes are flying into buildings all over washington the white house is probably next and uh when the secret service wants to escort you under those circumstances they'll actually escort you they sort of pick you up and i sort of remember being levitated toward the bunker getting there and the vice president was already there and to your point about the unexpected um he was on the phone with president bush and every plane in the air had become a missile and so the first the first most important thing was to get every plane out of the air and so um i'll never forget the scene of the vice president on with the president saying the air force wants to know should they shoot down any plane that's not squawking properly there were lawyers upstairs trying to figure out did we have the legal authority to do that the president gave the order uh you had norm mineta who was at the time the transportation secretary sitting there trying to on a legal path trying to figure out how many planes had to be grounded it was really quite remarkable but it was calm it was in a it was peritoneally calm under the circumstances everybody just trying to do their job but there was this one awful moment when um a plane went down in pennsylvania and we thought that perhaps we had shot it down and the pentagon could not confirm that it had uh encountered as they put it a civilian aircraft so it was surreal in many ways uh but in those circumstances you just have to work through uh what is surreal nobody had exercised for that specific scenario because what americans often forget and the world often forgets is we had not actually been attacked on our territory since the war of 1812 we had no internal security mechanisms whatsoever the military had a command for every continent in the world but not for north america and so we were actually protected in those first days by um by norad by nato flying combat air patrols uh to protect us and where this to happen again condi um does the white house the nsc the pentagon the state department do they have protocols in place now after 9 11 would it be a different reaction would still be again kind of flying by the seat of your pants i think it would be very very different now it was such a shock i think you just have to realize such a shock at that moment but now there's a generation of foreign policy specialists of people who've been in administrations who who know uh that that is the possibility we also have and i and i want people to understand this uh we are safer now we're not safe but we're safer and it's in large part because of something that you just said uh we have now intelligence uh capabilities that we did not have before that i think might have allowed us to see something coming i'll just give you one example the controversial nsa program that was revealed by edward snowden where the united states government was using a bulk data analysis to track terrorist phone numbers so how would this work you'd find a phone number on a dead terrorist you would ping that number against all possible numbers and you would say who's that number calling and so uh if you weren't calling a terrorist you had nothing to be concerned about but if you were calling a terrorist there would then be a wiretap and you would know what's going why do i bring up that one we know that now that on september 8th um hamziel mitar who would become one of the hijackers actually made a phone call from san diego to afghanistan we don't know what he would say but i can tell you that if anybody had known that hamziel mitar was in the country the lights would have been blinking really red because he was a well-known uh terrorist and so that's just one example of some of the things that we put in place that i think would give us uh better insight into what was going on let me pick up on that a little um one of the things that i remember that day vividly as well i wasn't in the white house i was walking my kids to school uh and it's the day everybody will always remember where they were when they when they heard about it um we gotta sort of despair about america falling apart but this seems to be a case where things have been fixed now it's not in the news but uh i would once we realized it was a terrorist attack i don't think any of us thought we would go 20 years without another major terrorist attack in the u.s and it has not happened and i think this is because well this is what you're going to tell me but i get the impression this is because of the quiet determined work of a lot of people to fix things that were broke i mean we heard stories about the fire department didn't know the fbi didn't know the phone number of the fire department and vice versa fix things were broke fix our intelligence agencies every time we hear of a terrorist plot unfoiled it it's it sounds like a terrorist meeting now is half fbi agents uh they're really on top of it uh and not just federal uh you know the new york police's apparently it's been very so in one sense i hope you'll help us to celebrate um that here was something that america structurally fixed our bureaucracy was able to get it doing but that also raises the question uh you know after 20 years we tend to forget um i noticed in in studying the uh covid thing that there were dozens of pandemic plans uh put on and powerpoint presentations and put on sort of the the last scene of the raiders of lost ark shelf uh and i'm i'm despairing that we're going to learn anything from this one and get it right so um is that impression right uh to what extent did we actually fix something but in what extent is is that in danger of falling apart and being forgotten well we clearly fixed uh a number of things uh john and one one difference between the covet uh plans that were on the shelf and what happened on 9 11 is that you really you saw some institutionalization of important things so you mentioned uh who could talk to whom we realized that first responders in virginia couldn't talk to first responders in southern virginia let alone in maryland or washington dc but there's now a first responders network that is a national network where first responders can talk to one another there is a means for for tracking terrorist financing it turns out the best way to follow a terrorist is to follow the money and so we can now track these transactions and banks and across the world really are very much vigilant about what kinds of transfers are being made through banks and even through through ways that might go around the banking system we have ways to track if you walk into an airport today uh you see 9 11. before you walked into that airport you you know this bill john you know you could go up to the gate and meet your people coming in and and it was all very loose well now you do go through metal detectors and people are uh are aware of what can happen on an airplane so i think we've done a lot in the thing we did probably best um it's not perfect but because of our notions of civil liberties the fbi could basically not share information with the cia and vice versa the cia was external uh security and intelligence and the fbi was internal security and intelligence what people forgot was that that border so so to speak uh between our soil and the rest of the world was actually quite permeable and if the cia had known what the fbi knew about pilots training to go one way they might have thought that something was going on so we did i think close some of those seams in those gaps so yes i think we we've done a lot we have a homeland security department probably every state in the union now actually has a homeland security enviro advisor a word we hadn't actually even heard before 911 homeland security and so a lot has changed but i will say this memories do fade i teach kids who aren't born on 9 11. and uh we will eventually get to a point where there will be an administration where uh it will be kind of like world war ii was for us in the bush administration it was something our parents did and we have to therefore keep telling the story and reminding people how scary it was in those days immediately after 9 11 when we were getting terrorist threat plots about a small pox attack in the united states when the anthrax attacks did take place and we later learned they were not al-qaeda but we thought so at the time we have to keep telling the story and perhaps we'll get into this i am worried about leaving afghanistan for exactly this reason we have to have intelligence and intelligence can't be cannot be gleaned from satellites uh for this kind of information that we need to fight terrorism well let me let me put in a word for civil liberties i i don't want us to be on record saying it's wonderful if the government listens into all of our phone calls and every single part of the government can can listen there and leak it whenever somebody is disgruntled about uh our political opinions um john let me just look i'm a big i wanted that for the record i know right i believe in civil liberties too but let me be very clear what was not being violated by the it was simply not true that the nsa was listening to your conversation with your grandmother they they didn't care they didn't have time well the metadata the metadata could be uh if if the if if there's a government knows that you called a cancer center and you want to run for political office this is the kind of information that can be revealing but let's not i just wanted to put a marker in there but this is an important point right but the fact is nobody really had time to worry about whether you were calling the cancer center with all due respect uh and so the real issue was whether or not and and by the way i always said that the good thing about the united states is people say well how do you balance security and uh civil liberties well we actually don't balance it within the executive branch only the president is commander-in-chief the president is always going to err on the side of security if you don't believe that look at constitutional lawyer barack obama who still carried out many of george bush's patriot act it works uh we have congress that can decide whether something should be in legislation so we had to go back to get the patriot act uh authorized and reauthorized and reauthorized and ultimately we have the courts that decide whether something is constitutional and they decided uh siding with with john cochran they decided that bulk data collection was too dangerous and they said it's not constitutional so we don't do it anymore so i think it's really important for americans to realize that we safeguard civil liberties within a system of separation of powers that acknowledges that the president will always be more security oriented but that the courts will uphold uh the constitution i'd like to go back to afghanistan for a minute um you were saying before we got on the call that they are running out of food they're going to starve so you have a humanitarian crisis occurring uh preceding that as a human rights crisis the lord knows what happens to women in that country now all the progress they made in 20 years about to be erased if they return to old form and become an aircraft carrier again for terrorism training we're looking at a national security crisis at some point you have worked in government at the highest levels this ties into what you said about 9 11. i don't want you to throw anybody under the bus there's enough blame going on in washington as is but how can so many bright people people very educated in foreign policy worked in government for how can so many people collectively create such a bad situation i think bill that for for some reason uh people perhaps including the administration bought into a narrative that i think is actually a false narrative this is the narrative of endless war this is the narrative of our longest war afghanistan was an example of forward deployment we are ford deployed today in germany and japan because we believe that that's the best way for germany and japan to be protected we are forward deployed in korea in a war that actually never ended the korean war is an armistice it was a stalemate but we are deployed there because we don't believe that the 500 000 man highly sophisticated south korean army is enough to deter a radical regime to its north and so we have 28 500 troops deployed in korea and have been for 70 years so this narrative that we had to end the war and get out i think was a false narrative and it colored the way that people thought about the potential for a few thousand american forces staying in afghanistan to help the afghan army with air air power to help uh continue to train them to do intelligence operations to do special operations and to my mind one of the biggest assets that we gave up was bagram air force base bagram airfield i'll tell you a little story so when we got ready to go into war in afghanistan we realized we didn't have any airfields from which to fly close close air support so we paid a king's ransom to karimov the dictator of uzbekistan to let us use his airfields now we're told by the russians that they've told the central asians they should not us let us use their airfields and we've given up the only airfields that we have if we actually did have to fly close air support for some reason even those drones that everybody we now have to fly from qatar which is quite a long way away so i this notion of a false narrative and not understanding that what you were doing was forward deploying so that they didn't fight here we wanted to fight there i think that's what governed uh the way that folks thought about this and and while you've got me on a roll let me just say one more thing about it this uh false narrative of i think the president said we're going to stop trying to remake other people's countries now if you go to afghanistan because the attacks came out of afghanistan and you say we're just going to fight this war and get out the mess that you leave behind the failed estate that you leave behind that's actually where terrorism breeds is in failed states so the idea of a more stable afghanistan and then a more democratic afghanistan that could uh as you put it for women and for afghans uh that was also in our self-interest to help build a stable state so i think it's the way that the narrative was turned that led to i think some bad decisions let me i just i got about three questions i want to ask you on this uh exactly i mean on the narrative the war is the global war against radical islam uh and hr likes to remind us on this show that wars are over when the enemy says it's over not when you say it's over right exactly but this this is a a a a lost battle in a larger war and uh that that war is not about afghanistan it's about all over this part of the world continuing i do want to find out so there's a lot of on the ground bungling that happened here uh there's a lot of strategic bungling that happened out of the white house now there's something where you have particular so this is something we were talking about last couple weeks too this isn't just you know biden is not personally telling each sergeant where to go and also decisions like this get made in a process between a president national security adviser secretary of state everybody else who's in on it and then their staffs and all the rest of it so how did this go so wrong in the process uh this i mean i've seen articles this is like bay of pigs not like cuban missile crisis uh but this one seemed like that process went wrong and then there is tremendous bungling up and down the chain in the execution i'm sure it was not biden personally who said by the way leave bagram leave it in the middle of night and don't even tell the afghans that you're on your way out um so let me start with that as my question having seen process and character what what in the making of this catastrophic decision do you see that went wrong i would cite two things uh john the first is uh imagine that roosevelt or later truman had said world war one a world war ii is going to end on january 1st 1945 right boys will come home yeah the minute you set a deadline like that you have uh you've already lost let me add and we encourage hitler and company to join the negotiations with this process where there will be a power sharing agreement where we're power sharing arrangements all right that's gonna work so the first thing is don't set a deadline um and uh once you've set a deadline all kinds of things because you're right it's not like every unit is uh responding to exactly what the president said it's it's like you've got the pyramid at the top and now everything's cascading downward now they know they've got a deadline there's certain things that they have to get done by that deadline and they're going to get those things done by that deadline one way or another and so if it means uh that you close down bagram and for security reasons you leave in the dead of the night and the afghan commander finds out the next morning well that's one way to to be secure when there's a deadline and by the way uh they hear the trump administration does bear uh significant blame i mean you know they set the original deadline so uh the the first point i would make in any public policy class is don't set a deadline stuff will start to happen the minute you set a deadline why do these so the only reason i can see it is that a politician wants to get credit for the success now and so he promises anniversary that's why yeah yeah it's a i want a photo op on 9 11. and not just if you wait till 9 11 you'll get the photo op if you're successful but i want to get the the spike in the polls now for the photo op it's the only reason i can see first well let me be a little bit more charitable in the following way all right let me be a little bit more charitable i do think uh i think it was a mistake let me be very clear but i do think that the president president biden has believed that our presence in afghanistan needed to quote end for a very long time and by all accounts when president obama decided to expand the surge in afghanistan before bringing down numbers then vice president biden was apparently opposed to that so this has been in his dna for a long time he's wanted to get us out uh and maybe september 11th seemed like a natural time because it was the 20-year anniversary and so forth but for whatever reasons um it's just not a great idea to set a deadline like that the one the other thing is uh when you tell the military they're going to have to be out by a certain deadline and you forget that it might be better to have the civilians out before the military is out uh you've you've compounded the mistake of setting the deadline now can i ask a second question on on this topic you phrased this and i i hope you're going to agree here we freeze this a lot in the war on terror yeah in some sense that always seemed like a mistake and an increasingly bad one i mean is the only reason to think about afghanistan because they might be a place for repeating 911 no it seems like in some so first of all terror is just a weapon in a larger war and we're not having a we never had a war on terror but phrasing it that way when i think of everything going on in foreign policy syria libya iraq uh containing china containing russia where there's there's a geopolitical thing that's going on which we'll get into but it's not uh phrasing it as being all about terror seems very narrow-minded and very anachronistic almost yeah and it's really interesting you know in the moment it seemed like the right thing to say to be frank you know oh yeah and and because at that moment this was about uh not having another terrorist attack uh it's interesting that you say narrow many people think it was actually too broad because it quote dragged us into other people's terrorist fights so for instance um i remember when uh president bush was asked by then uh spanish president ethnar well what about the basque region and the terrorism coming from there and so suddenly we were talking about the basque and before long we were the the chechen were actually were actually many of them associated with al-qaeda and so we were talking about that and it was a sense that if you're going to ask everybody in the world to be concerned about your terrorism problem you had to be concerned about theirs too but it it it did stretch the uh the notion and the mission uh quite a bit so i didn't mean this about september i miss i've met about it now when people talk about it now it's part of the war on terror no it's part of the geopolitical struggle against rattle radical islam which is one of about three forces that we're fighting against china and russia probably being to the others externally and and terror is one battle in that war and and uh view it just seems silly to say well this was about the war on terrorism either that's the main problem with afghanistan becoming stronger again uh or well we won the war on terror so it's all over and we can pack up and leave i agree john my only point was that sometimes when you create something at that moment it sticks and i think it's stuck because of the way we responded to september 11th but i agree with you it's a part of a broader geostrategic you know one of the one of the issues that i have with abandoning bagram is um if you wanted a place from which to be concerned about another bad actor iran uh being in afghanistan with which it shares a 900 kilometer border uh might not have been a bad place from which to watch that problem too so um i think geostrategically i always thought that geostrategically afghanistan was more important than just uh because of terrorism but obviously that's the reason that we used military force there and i think that is a distinction that's worth making connie john good news we have found neil we're looking for him in berlin and guess what he's in budapest hey neil good to have you on the show i apologize for my late arrival uh i'm sure i i should offer an excuse but i'll just say work of national importance i i wanted to take advantage of the fact that we have uh condi with us to to look forward in time and and ask you condi what what do you think the next 911 will be by which i don't mean another terrorist attack on a on a major american site i mean the next big strategic surprise that will have the same quality as 9 11 in changing potentially changing the direction of of us foreign policy can you can you maybe give us some i know it's you can't predict black swans by definition but what are the things that might come along and have comparable impact in the near future do you think right uh well i have to say that uh the problem with one of the problems with 911 was a failure of imagination we could not imagine uh civilian aircraft being hijacked not to hijack the passengers but to hijack the plane and fly into a building and so it was a failure of imagination um i do think that i i won't try to get outside the lines of what i can imagine but i could see that the whole cyber world could produce the kind of dramatic life-changing event i think by the way there are reasons that states might not go after each other in this way but there have been crazy things done by people before and one could imagine a cyber attack that literally tries to bring the united states down in terms of infrastructure in terms of the grid we saw a little mini version of this when the russians shut down estonia which had fashioned itself in e-country and one day the russians just shut them down now would that be a very dangerous thing to do if you are an american adversary could i imagine it coming from a china or russia oddly enough probably too much to lose from an iran if they could have that kind of capability perhaps so i think the ubiquity and uh the potential for these uh kinds of cyber attacks uh would be the one that i would say and there i think we're not really uh very well prepared i think the central ingredient of a 911 is not just we hadn't thought about it but our systems for dealing with it are dysfunctional uh and uh i mean we just saw one a pandemic and our systems for dealing with the pandemic the fda the cdc the whole rest of it were completely dysfunctional and probably remain so to this day cyber strikes me it also has the feature of being deniable we know where a missile came from it's easy to hide a cyber attack and as a financial person i don't want to invite where to go but if you can spread the rumor that the citibank lost uh lost all its records of your deposits you've got a financial crisis flaming down the country right now and and i work i worry about it because we're not very well prepared and i think the reason we're not very well prepared is it's it's really about sharing information between the private and the public sector in ways that we've never had to do before terrorism was essentially a government problem yes you had this you know soft targets that you had to worry about hotels cruise ships etc but this is something where the uh battlefield is actually not owned by the government in their defense there's a whole bunch of people at the fed and other agencies who are thinking about i just didn't want us to leave it as if our government hasn't thought about they are thinking about it john but i think the the problem is and by the way i think the financial sector is the best prepared i think they have actually been better prepared we saw that perhaps the energy sector is not so well prepared so uh what i've been arguing to people to avoid neil's nightmare is sector by sector get prepared rather than trying to think of it as a large-scale national problem because the problems are different if you're talking about the energy infrastructure versus the financial infrastructure my nightmare is that there is a 36-page cyber war preparedness plan somewhere uh in the pentagon and it will work just as well as the 36-page pandemic preparedness plan that we had in 2018 uh one of the things that that i've i've learned from thinking about covert 19 is that it's one thing to have a 36-page plan it's another thing to have really done some drills and maybe really thought through how it might work in practice and it worries me that i haven't really at any point heard any organization that i'm involved with uh offer us some thoughts about how we'd cope in the event of a cyber attack so it feels like we don't have even the beginnings of drills for this but every organization in america would be impacted if if the internet would down if cell phones were down and i'm not sure quite how well we'd cope with that it seems to me that even if it were only for a relatively short period of time there would be quite a lot of chaos in the nation quite quickly and if there's one thing that i think we should have learned over the last 18 months it is that a 36 page plan is not enough you you have to drill for this thousands of pages of plant we actually had thousands of pages of plants 36-page plan was just one of one of dozens of plans well 36-page plan might have worked yeah yeah uh so i'm i'm thinking a lot about about that and whether we we really have the right approach to preparedness itself whatever form disaster might take but let me ask a a different question which is very specifically china focused on goodfellas ever since its inception we've debated the china challenge and the form it takes and i think it's fairly clear that one of the scenarios that we may have to deal with in the next uh perhaps three years let's just pick a number uh is a showdown over taiwan and i i'm very interested and and curious to hear your thoughts about this because i read bob blackwell's and phil zeliko's paper on the taiwan scenarios earlier this year and it's interesting to you john because one of the things they make clear is that this would have enormous financial implications in fact the us would certainly uh want to unleash financial pressure on on china so let's imagine that 9 11 the next 9 11 is actually uh that china invades taiwan or launches an invasion of taiwan something that that certainly is within the bounds of probability because we know xi jinping thinks a lot about this and this is really the thing that he most aspires to achieve during his leadership if that happened if instead of watching the world trade center burn and collapse we we we were suddenly watching uh chinese landing craft on the beaches of taiwan in a full-scale invasion scenario conde how do you think the uh how do you think the u.s government would react how do you think the u.s more broadly would react neil i and and i'm going to to say this in the following way to be a little bit provocative it doesn't matter what i think the us government would do it matters what xi jinping thinks the us government would do and so the advantage that we have in the taiwan scenario versus the 9 11 scenario is i don't know if there was a way to deter the al-qaeda in a 9 11 attack i can't think of a deterrent strategy but i can think of ways to deter a chinese attack on taiwan it would not have started by the way with a humiliating american retreat from afghanistan because credibility is indivisible and if i were sitting in the chinese power centers at this point i would think to myself they spent all that treasure in a place uh human and and physical treasure in a place that the attack on them took place and they left why would they defend why would they uh defend taiwan and so i think we have a credibility issue now there are some things that we have going for um one is that uh it's easy to underestimate the degree to which the last 20 years or so we've built up the taiwanese armed forces to the point that they couldn't defeat the chinese but they could exact the price and so making sure that they can exact the price is also very important and that we've sent the right you talk about exercises and and simulations that you know we're doing the right things with our with our uh fleet and our support for taiwan to show uh that we could support the taiwanese in defending themselves so i still think there is a potential to deter that awful day but it is really important that we send messages of credibility i i actually think that this would be a good time for a significant arms package to taiwan uh just to remind the chinese that we are are there i just want to say one thing about your your scenario of the importance of exercising you're absolutely right i was just telling you one little quick 911 story just to go back for a moment i had been a part of those teams that they used to send out to the middle of nowhere to exercise the uh continuity of government if the united states was attacked in a nuclear weapon nuclear war and the last one that i did was in the uh in august of 1989 i was the soviet specialist and i remember telling brent scowcroft i don't have time germany's unifying why am i going out for three days in the middle of nowhere for a nuclear war that's not going to happen but on that day two things that we had exercised 9 11 came back to me one was you've got to get a hold of the russians because their forces will be going up on alert you don't want our forces will be going up on alert you don't want theirs to go up on alert and we get into a spiral of alerts and so a conversation with putin was really important early the second was we do not want friend or foe to think that the united states of america has been decapitated the pictures are awful the president is trying to get to a safe location we're in a bunker nobody can speak we sent out a a cable to every post in the world the united states of america is functioning i learned that in those exercises uh for the nuclear war that was never going to come condu we need the will but we also need the means and what i'm reading about china leads me to and they're building nuclear weapons at an extraordinary rate they're building land-based missiles that can sink an aircraft carrier so i'll add to neil's uh you know just to warn us the chinese sink two of our aircraft carriers uh do we have the means actually so do we have the means to defend or the means and the will to take taiwan back it seems he doesn't even need to believe that we even if he believes we have the will to do it he may now be thinking well there's nothing they can do about it even if they want to well that's where you've got to make sure that uh that calculation never enters his mind uh the you know it's a big idea to sink an american aircraft carrier that's a really big idea and uh probably that's something you if you're the chinese leadership that's probably i don't care how uh humoristic and how full you are of yourself at this particular point in time that's maybe a risk you don't want to take and so i've always thought of it this way you want the chief of the general staff of the chinese armed forces to go in and xi jinping to ask what are the chances that i can win this and they say ninety percent but the ten percent so awful that you don't take the chance that's the formula for deterrence and the reason i keep emphasizing deterrence is that uh the moment that something happens we are an american president whoever it is at the time is going to be faced with a really hobson choice and so you want to avoid that moment to the way that you can now the pentagon i don't like cuts in the defense budget when we're affecting uh when we and and squeezing out defense spending with uh you know runaway social spending when we face these kinds of scenarios the chinese are putting enormous resources into their military buildup they're not doing it for show and so we had better uh make sure that we're capable of of deterring anything perhaps the advice is remember general yamamoto's advice on the eve of pearl harbor america is complacent it's disorganized you will win this little battle but america america discovers its will after an attack and let me let me pick up on pearl harbor for a second condi um december 1941 um we're attacked we're attacked not on the but not on the mainland were attacked in hawaii a territory at the time most americans could not find pearl harbor hawaii was just exotic location people didn't go to yet that attack was fuel for war people signed up people enlisted for the war there's a song let's let's let's remember pearl harbor used to raise money and we fought we fought a global war for the next four years fueled in part by pearl harbor 911 condi was a much more personal attack i think in this regard it struck the pentagon it struck the brain of our military it struck the financial heart of our country the financial district of manhattan and yet this unifying mood of the country it seemed to go away rather fast what what happened connie and if we get struck again in a similar fashion how long will this how long could this country stay together before we fray again well the the unifying uh the feeling of unity uh for the several even years after uh afghanistan or after after 9 11. i i think we shouldn't underestimate it uh bill i i think you look at the numbers of young people who joined the armed forces uh you know we talk about the greatest generation with world war ii and it was and we lost our own george schultz and george h.w bush for whom i was these they were great but there's a new greatest greatest generation they're the people who signed up to go to unknown places like afghanistan and iraq after the war many of them are now in congress you may know that if hoover we're starting a veterans program and we're going to draw in people who are in business and in local government because this was an extraordinary response by those people and so i actually do think we had a remarkable response and then we went back to squabbling uh just as we do and the reasons for those divisions um i think are you know we can have a full show on the reasons for those divisions but i i wouldn't underestimate the degree to which when america is attacked in that way uh americans come together and uh and did really extraordinary things in the way that they volunteered uh to go to far away places that most of them had probably never heard of at 18 or 19 years old also world war ii was only five years and 20 years after 1941 was 1961 when we were back neil it's sort of your turn to ask a big question unless you don't want to in which case i will i i do have a big question and it has to do with historical analogies and and how they how they work how they play a part in a crisis my uh readings about what happened immediately after 9 11 suggested that the pearl harbor analogy was the one that was most often mentioned and and i i'd love to get your take on this how how much history was going through your mind and and the minds of other people and and were there other analogies besides pearl harbor and and world war ii uh that were discussed in those in those extraordinary hours and days after the attack it's it's interesting i you know people don't sit around and discuss the analogies but they grab on to them in little snippets because your brain needs some way to organize what's happening to you and that's why i think you grab on to historical analogies and pearl harbor seemed most uh appropriate because it was a surprise attack uh because we were unprepared all of those uh elements seem to have been repeating themselves uh or rhyming as it's often said and so yes i think that was the one very interesting though that one of the things that came out of that was a comment that i'll never forget from colin powell because there was a question of whether or not we should declare war whether or not we should give the taliban an opportunity a i think it turned out to be 72 hours to turn over al qaeda and there were those who said no we should just just attack and uh colin powell said decent countries don't do that and he did use pearl harbor as an example of an indecent uh attack because it was not uh a declaration of war from the from imperial japan so that's how people grab on to little pieces the other analogy that floated around ironically given what we've just seen was vietnam and i remember president bush saying i'm not going to be lyndon johnson standing in the basement choosing targets he wanted to give the military free or reign to fight the war the way that they felt it necessary as i was writing an essay about uh all of this i think we we've all been forced to write our 20 years on essays i i suddenly thought of a completely different analogy which was with with the assassination of john f kennedy uh and although that never really sort of came up at the time in some ways with the benefit of hindsight it might make more sense than perhaps in the sense that this was a domestic act of we would now say terrorism it was extraordinarily traumatic for contemporaries and and it wasn't long after that that that linda johnson escalated in vietnam not not because they were causally connected but but in a strange kind of way that that the the terrorist attack the shocking event seemed to lead in some strange inexorable way to to what proved to be an enormous quagmire in vietnam and i look back on on 9 11 and i thought you know maybe it was more like that and maybe the sequence of events ended up being much more like the 1960s than like the 1940s even although the 1940s analogies were much more commonly used back back in in 2001 now now i i find myself wondering if if we did unwittingly uh end up with a version of vietnam i mean i asked this question with a sense of oh i don't know despondency really because i remember at the time thinking a lot about that and writing a very pessimistic book uh entitled colossus which was published in 2004 i think essentially saying this this isn't going to work out well because because the us doesn't have a great track record on sustained interventions in countries like afghanistan and iraq now like 20 years later i think actually the surprising thing was that we stayed in afghanistan as long as we did if you'd asked me in 2001 i would have said oh maybe 10 years but i definitely wouldn't have expected 20 years of engagement this is where i talked about the false narrative though neil i don't think this was at all vietnam i think this could have been korea yeah because korea was a stalemate that we then remained to keep the place stable and to keep the north koreans from attacking the south that's how we should have thought about afghanistan and oh by the way does anybody think that we're in worse shape in northeast asia because we have twenty eight thousand forces there uh intelligence capabilities uh capabilities to watch the region as a whole uh afghanistan with a few thousand american forces air bases and uh intelligence assets and the like becomes a foothold in a very dangerous region and so i think you're right many people may have thought of it as the vietnam analogy i would have said it was the wrong analogy and it got us what we got a few weeks ago when we precipitously left the analogy should have been korea i do we have about three minutes left on the show here so why don't you close out for us and just give us some final thoughts as we approach 911 well as we approach 911 um i first want to say that for those of us who were in positions of authority on that day every day after was september 12th and um i want you to know and i want everyone who who lost family members and the people who went to fight first of all that i personally have great remorse for the fact that we didn't see it coming i think we did everything that we knew how to do but by definition we didn't do enough and that's something i think that all of us will always live with is that sense of remorse that we couldn't prevent it um i also would say to all those who gave their lives and those who came back maimed from afghanistan and other places even those who who experienced effects many many years after rushing into the twin towers it really wasn't in vain we are safer today than we were on september 11th though we're not safe and the decision to take the fight to the terrorists rather than have them fight on our territory i think was the right decision and i hope that 20 years from now we're still sitting here recognizing and experiencing the benefit of what came out of that terrible time which was a sense that the united states of america had to be vigilant because despite our fortunate history of um two vast oceans on either side and peaceful neighbors to the north and south um it turned out that our homeland was vulnerable in ways that we did not know and i think we've reacted to that uh in ways that have made us safer and so all who say that because of the way that afghanistan ended this was all in vain just ask yourself this if on september 12 you would have taken a bet that we wouldn't have another 911 on our territory i don't think it's a bet that most of us would have taken well said connie thanks for coming on the show today as a fascinating conversation john neal great job as always that's it for this episode of good fellows but fear not we'll be back next week with a new topic and new conversation on behalf of my hoover colleagues neil ferguson john cochran our boss condoleezza rice we wish you and yours the very best please by all means stay safe stay healthy and we'll do our best here at the hoover institution to help you stay informed thanks for watching [Music] if you enjoyed this show and are interested in watching more content featuring h.r mcmaster watch battlegrounds also available at hoover.org

Channel: Hoover Institution

Views: 22,310

Rating: 4.7214699 out of 5

Keywords: Condoleezza Rice, 9/11, homeland, Afghanistan, Bagram, cyberattack, black swan, Iran, China, Taiwan, Xi Jinping, credibility, Vietnam, Pearl Harbor, false narrative, Colin Powell

Id: BgVUAlqEjXY

Length: 52min 12sec (3132 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 10 2021

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[u/GoldwaterLiberal]

Really good listen. At around 13:30 she makes a point that I think is missed a lot today- we balance civil liberties across the entirety of government, not within the executive branch. The executive branch is always going to choose security, and we have a separation of powers to acknowledge this dynamic. The courts will uphold civil liberties and the constitution.