September 11: 20 Years Later

President Biden is having a no good, horrible, very bad summer. The gang, with Chris ...

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President Biden is having a no good, horrible, very bad summer. The gang, with Chris Stirewalt subbing in for David, discuss whether Biden can recover from the last few weeks. Is the only thing that can save Biden a reemergence of former President Trump? Trump is slated to visit Iowa and the group discusses what that means for 2024. And finally, Afghanistan is still in shambles and we’re coming up on the 20th anniversary of 9/11. Listen to hear what Sarah, Jonah, Steve, and Chris were doing 20 years ago and how it impacted the rest of their lives.

Show Notes:

–Amy Walter on Biden’s approval rating

–Jonah’s 9/11 piece

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Comments (26)
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  1. Avatar photo
    Ben Connelly

    Thank you for sharing your reflections on 9/11. Even my cold heart was moved.

    Sarah, to your point about the American people and Biden’s cynical play. You may be right. The media definitely moved on. There is a bit of Afghanistan-coverage fatigue. Even I feel it a bit. To that, thank you to the Dispatch for continuing to cover the issue. But, speaking for myself, as one American voter: I will not forget. Every member of Biden’s foreign policy/national security administration (including him and Kamala), has lost every shred of support I could have had for them. I will never vote for a single one of them for any elected office ever again. I do not need to read about Afghanistan daily (or even weekly) to hold him accountable. When the time comes, I will remember.

    (To be fair, I voted for the LP in 2020 and not for Biden, but still.)

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    Pboyd

    I would like to read the speech that never ran in the WEEKLY STANDARD please. Thank you

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      Ben Connelly

      I second that. Or third or fourth it since I think a lot of commenters have expressed the same.

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  3. Anonymous

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      James Spiller

      The Kurds in Iraq are doing fine (the only real abandonment of them was by Obama in the face of the ISIS invasion, and he coverage of that was intense until Obama sent sufficient forces to halt the flow).
      I think that you mean Kurds in Syria, but again that’s not particularly comparable. The withdrawal of US support was partial and the Kurds were less reliant on American support. Most importantly, there is still some Kurdish governance over most of the areas they held in 2018, albeit with considerable portions now having shared sovereignty with Assad (at least partially a voluntary reform in the face of Turkish threats).
      It was shameful and awful that America left, and there’s some superficial commonality in that Assad/ Russia gained some American property, but there was no radical change in the lives of Syrian Kurds.
      In 2070, it is unlikely that many students will learn about America’s trivial involvement in the Syrian Civil War, but everyone will learn about Afghanistan, just as kids today know about Vietnam.

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      1. Anonymous

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          James Spiller

          As Steve noted, with important events there tends to be a few months of coverage. 9/11, Watergate, the Iran hostage crisis, and the Fall of Saigon are examples that have been referenced. They haven’t mentioned, but could have mentioned, Trump’s call to Zelensky, Iran-Contra, the Tet Offensive, inflation under Ford, the Kavanaugh hearings, or any number of other things.

          An uncontested military defeat in a major war is something that has only happened one other time in our history, in Vietnam. The people we abandoned the Vietnamese to were bad, but not comparably bad to the Taliban and Al Qaeda and had not inflicted comparable harm on the American homeland.

          Sometimes the media moves on even from big things, but it kept focus on most of the really big things for a while.

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    2. DJ

      Yeah this is just reflexive conservative blame-the-media ism.

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  4. Anonymous

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      James Spiller

      They have mentioned a few things a few times. Popular examples include not withdrawing at the height of the fighting season, getting the paperwork processed for civilians leaving before you remove the military, and having a sufficient force remain for the duration of the retreat to cover that retreat.

      Others include coordinating with our European and Afghan allies on the ground, or at the very least not actively misleading them, engaging in more effort to get Afghan allies out, or at the very least engaging in fewer steps to exclude them, such as closing the embassy to interviews for most of the year, and engaging in less effort to slander Afghanistan and its population.

      I can list some others mentioned on the podcast, but I worry that doing so in print would cause you to glaze over even more than them saying them on the podcast did.

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      1. Anonymous

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          James Spiller

          They withdrew at the height of the fighting season. Withdrawing before the fighting started again was the Trump plan (to the extent that one can call it a plan), in which the bow was tied in May, some distance into the fighting season but with most of the evacuation being done before that. Biden delayed evacuation until September such that the assault on our Afghan allies at the point of our departure was maximized.

          I think Biden was right not to leave immediately on taking office because the US was not prepared to leave, and trivial amounts of notice are better than none, but imitating Trump’s designation of May as the date of surrender by delaying by 12 months rather than 4 would have led to the Afghans who did feel like it was worthwhile to die delaying an Afghan collapse getting a better delay out of it and to a less chaotic departure.

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  5. Laurie

    The discussion as whether Trump will run again seems to neglect the 2 key facets of his character: his pathological narcissism and, by his own admission his raison d'etre, revenge. (If you roll the 2 together into malignant narcissism, you have only one quality) He will keep playing this game to maximize his wealth, to get the attention he craves, and to harm every other Republican prospect. I predict as soon as it is clear to him he will lose, he'll pull out with some excuse. He does not want another Republican to win in 2024 and he will sabotage whoever gets the nomination.

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      Ben Connelly

      Trump is also in his 70s and overweight. His health could play a role in whether or not he is able to run in 2024.

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      Aylene Wright

      Trump is also really lazy. He's really not put much thought into who he should endorse as primary challengers for Murkowski and Cheney, for example. I would be shocked if he actually travels to Alaska or even Wyoming to campaign against them.

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        MarqueG68

        >>I would be shocked if he actually travels to Alaska or even Wyoming to campaign against them.<<

        Interesting! My gut (which has a deplorable predictive track record) immediately told me that he'd go stump for them with bells on. I mean, he's already got the plane, and he loves appearing before adoring crowds in a rally that is really only about him. Unless he can't get someone to grift enough that it will cover the expenses, however.

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    Kyle Munyon

    Steve,

    If you still have your piece on the gentlemen that spoke at the protest, would love to read. Would be a nice reflection as we approach the 20th anniversary of September 11. I have enjoyed reading some of the old pieces from the New Yorker on 9/11.

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      Ben Connelly

      I’d also like to read that.

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    Sad Trombone

    One of the people that organized the anti-American protest on 9/12 that Steve witnessed was Van Jones of CNN.

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    Adicesa14

    Another enjoyable hour spent. Thank you

    Reluctantly, I cast a vote for Trump in 2016 and 2020 because I cannot vote for any Democrat at the National level. They’re (insert your favorite negative descriptor). However, Trump’s 2020 campaign was incompetent, and his conduct as ‘lame duck’ was horrific, if not criminal. He is clearly unfit. If he’s on the ballot in 2024, I shall not cast a vote for any Presidential candidate on my ballot. I suspect I’m not alone, which means Trump running again will be a benefit for Joe Biden, or some other Democrat.

    The Afghanistan situation is a moronic, colossal blunder. Earlier today, I saw a report that some Americans will be allowed to fly to safety. That’s good news, but my fear is that this Administration quietly made concessions (a ransom?) to the Taliban. I’d prefer to be wrong about that.

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    James Spiller

    Sarah says that when Donald Trump tells you who he is, you should trust him. It appears from the context that she means this literally. I am struggling to think of a worse heuristic put forward on the show, even as a straw man.

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      Aylene Wright

      That wasn't the best way to put it but I think her take was a very simple "Uh, Trump is obviously running! If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, etc." And I noticed that Chris didn't push back on that at all, though he had said before that he didn't think Trump would run.

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        James Spiller

        I guess I have less confidence than you in the ease with which one can predict what Trump will do next. It is my sense that even his closest allies have frequently defended x on the basis that they believed that Trump would stand for x, having to pivot sharply to explain that they were always opposed to x.

        But while “he certainly looks like he’s going to run” is a completely normal and reasonable opinion to hold, “Trump is a reliable narrator of facts about Trump” seemed like a wild enough argument to be worth calling out without disagreeing particularly about the conclusion.

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    Silvertide

    Steve I understand your viewpoint but I think you are in the minority in the US. Most of us were okay with going into Afghanistan but we were not okay with trying to change who the Afghans are and changing a tribal society run by religious folks into a US democracy. While I would have hoped this could happen the truth is that 20 years in the vast majority of Afghans do not see us in a positive light. I'm not saying none do but its mostly the city Afghans while the majority of the country is not in the cities and have never changed. What really upsets me is not once have the people who are hawks said upfront that what we are going to do is create a country in Afghanistan and support it for the next couple hundred years because if we leave they will fall apart. If this had been the option I would have said bomb the hell out of them but do not go in.

    With all of that said we are all exhausted here from Corona, fires, hurricanes, flooding, etc.. with that being said if one of the items on the list are going to drop off without me caring to much it's going to be Afghanistan.

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      James Spiller

      I don’t think that there was an effort to transform Afghanistan into a US democracy; one of the central problems with Afghan reconstruction has been the lack of similarity with American democracy, specifically the lack of federalism. Instead, the 2002 Afghan constitution was mostly taken from the 1962 Afghan constitution. Because Afghans associate centralization with a modern state, in part because of their legacy as the capital for empires, they afford far too little autonomy to their governors, mayors, and such and thus get less local buy in than they’d otherwise need.

      To be clear, for good and for ill, what America tried to restore and preserve in Afghanistan was Afghan democracy, not American.

      I’d be interested to see your source for the vast majority of Afghans seeing us in a negative light; I am not aware of a poll suggesting that a simple majority of Afghans do.

      If you look at the stats on female literacy, starvation, life expectancy, and such, you will find that life has changed meaningfully for rural Afghans, although it is true that the rural Afghans it has changed most radically for are those who moved to cities. There are plenty of rural Afghans who have developed appreciation for music today, who have gotten used to adequate calorific intake, or who have learned a skilled trade involving modernity. Whether that is a good thing for them is a more complex question.

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        Aylene Wright

        I appreciated that Steve was trying to make a nuanced point that there were more options on the table than the status quo of Taliban autocracy vs "Jeffersonian democracy".

        Interestingly, Ahmad Massoud (junior) was educated abroad, but actually proposing a much more decentralized government in his "talks" with the Taliban than what the Ghani-led government had been.

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