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- Hello everyone, welcome to Northwest Newsmakers.

I'm your host Monica Guzman and today we're gonna focus on an issue that's affecting everyone, from our community here in Washington to the entire country and frankly the world.

Three days after the 20th anniversary of the attacks on 911, we're talking with two journalists who have chronicled the aftermath of that day, from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to the battles we've waged on ourselves.

As we ask what these 20 years have taught us about who we are and where we're headed.

I'll have lots of questions for our guests tonight, and I bet you will too.

If you've got something you'd like us to address or ask, type in your question in the chat area on the right of the screen anytime during our conversation, we'll make sure it's in the running for our Q and A segment at the end of the show.

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Waldron is proud to support Crosscut, a forum for dialogue that increases knowledge, understanding and compassion.

Waldron funds and volunteers to ensure strong, independent public media that informs and inspires our community.

With that, I'm thrilled to introduce our guests.

Michael Kirk is the director of the new PBS frontline documentary.

"America After 9/11" He has produced or directed dozens of documentary films.

Many of them about American politics and several earning top broadcast journalism awards since Frontline's launch in 1983.

Rajiv son, Shaun, excuse me, Rajiv Chandrasekaran is a former war correspondent and national editor for the Washington Post.

He served as Baghdad bureau chief during the first years of the war in Iraq and as a correspondent in Afghanistan during Obama's first term.

He's also the author of two books related to America's post 9/11 wars.

"Little America, The War Within, The War for Afghanistan" And.

"Imperial Life in the Emerald City" About the American effort to reconstruct Iraq.

Michael and Rajiv, welcome to Northwest Newsmakers.

- Great to be here, hi.

- Pleasure to be with you Monica.

- Hi, thank you both so much for joining us.

I've really been looking forward to this conversation with you two because we've just got such big questions to tackle as a nation.

Two teenagers played in the women's final of the US Open on Saturday in New York, that was on the 20th anniversary.

And they were both born after 9/11, which was just wild to me.

But many of us do carry memories of that day and of what it's been like to see our country wounded, provoked and then implicated in everything that's happened since.

So your new documentary, Michael, where you are one of the key voices featured, Rajiv, it presents a reckoning with all this fresh recent history.

And it tells a story not just about the events of the last two decades, but about the growing division and distrust that plagues us to this day and an evolving idea of what America even is in the first place.

So I'm gonna start with a question from one of our viewers that I think gets to the heart of something you explore in this film.

Betty Jane Schmidt asks, why did 9/11 pull the us apart instead of giving us the opportunity to pull together in unity?

She adds, I lived through world War II and we all came together to win that war.

world War II had clear winners and losers, right?

What were we fighting for after 9/11 and why haven't we won?

So Michael, I'll start with you.

- I think it's a very good question to draw, especially to look back at world War II, but you don't have to look that far back, the night of 9/11, art film begins with members of Congress standing on the steps of the building that was a target that day of Al Qaeda.

They spontaneously, the members of Congress sing, God bless America.

It's very hard to imagine such a thing happening now in America.

So that's how our film begins and it begins with that because we wanted to sort of set the stark marker for what it was once and what it might've been.

Rajiv and I can talk a lot about markers along the way, where we, where things happened that caused the division and distrust of the government and all the things that are the polarization that's happened in America since then.

But the idea that once we were, we had a kind of general view of what America believes in, what America stands for.

And maybe we had it that day.

Maybe people had it a lot more in world War II, but very quickly, Rajiv can probably help us figure out exactly what that moment was.

But very quickly, we began to separate, go to our opposite sides.

It didn't take years, it took months.

- Yeah, so Rajiv, where did you see that moment, witnessing it the way that you did?

- So I have to just acknowledge that I wasn't actually in the United States on 9/11, I was a foreign correspondent for the Washington Post, I actually wound up in Pakistan a few days after the attacks.

But even when I came back to the United States for the first time since the attacks in early 2002, it was amazing to me driving through the suburbs of Washington DC, seeing American flags on every home.

This amazing unity that had sprung up those who remember it.

And for those who didn't, you know, watching some of the opening scenes of the Frontline documentary and seeing, you know, those members of Congress on the steps of the Capitol, Republican and Democrat alike, singing in unison.

And I can't point to a single moment, but it really falls under the how we went about addressing the aftermath of 9/11 and the decisions made by our leaders and what the film shows in, for somebody who's lived through this and thought he knew everything about it, just the stitching together of the lies, the exaggerations, the other falsehoods that so came to dominate how our leaders communicated with the American public about so many aspects of the national security response to 9/11.

- And many of us will remember no weapons of mass destruction.

What else is coming to mind as?

- Beyond the weapons of mass destruction, I mean, let's go even earlier to, as individuals were being rounded up as suspected Al Qaeda members in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, in other parts of the world and rendered to the Naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba or others take into CIA black site prisons first, to be tortured before they were sent to GTMO or kept in very harsh prisons run by the US military in Afghanistan, the Salt Pit at Bagram Airfield.

What our leaders said and didn't say about that.

The refusal to fully own up and acknowledge the extent to which the United States at that point was violating aspects of the Geneva Convention and really violating our own constitution.

This is not who we should have been as Americans in response to admittedly horrific attacks on our own soil.

So you have that, you have the claims of weapons of mass destruction of the run-up to the Iraq war.

You have events like the treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison.

You have rosy assessments of progress in both wars where, you know, we don't have much of an insurgency in Iraq, you know, or paraphrasing Donald Rumsfeld for months as the insurgency was kicking up or over the years and not, this is not just confined honestly, to Republican cabinet secretaries and political leaders but even even many Democrats who would tout very rosy reports of progress in building up Afghan security forces.

Security forces we know we're a sham and crumbled within days and weeks this, you know, earlier this summer as the United States was withdrawing forces in Afghanistan.

So it's really, it's a 20 year history that this film documents of untruths shared with the American people that that's so undermined trust and confidence in government and not just government, but other public institutions.

The role that the media played in parodying some of that in the Iraq war.

- Lets get to where that appears to have headed or taken us and the film makes this point, Ben Rhodes is a former top national security advisor to Obama.

And in the film, he called the January 6th, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol, the logical endpoint of the 9/11 era.

And he said that when you have people who can't trust institutions anymore, who are angry that the wars that they were promised great victories in, didn't turn out well, they start to look for people to blame.

And that's a quote from Ben Rhodes.

So Michael, you've made dozens of documentary films about America's political challenges in the last two decades, based on all that reporting.

Do you believe that the trust and division we're facing now was inevitable?

- Well, I don't know, I don't know, I don't at all.

I think it was a failure of leadership.

You had the president of the United States, George W. Bush knew untested, he'd only been in the office nine months when it happened.

They hadn't really paid attention to people who'd come to the White House to say from the CIA and other places, to say there's trouble that's flashing red, the warning lights in the world, there's a terrorist attack coming.

So that the ad institution hadn't paid attention when it happened, he was shocked.

The reaction to it is natural, 3000 people that died, what are we gonna do?

He was, he made statements that night that basically said, we're the good guys and they're the evil doers.

It's a kind of fundamental problem when a president says something like that, because he doesn't give him enough wiggle room to do things that you're gonna have to do in a war.

You're gonna have to do what the vice-president then started to say, which is to go to the dark side, to do things that the American people can't know about and aren't gonna like.

So suddenly you've got a sense of hypocrisy.

You've got a disconnect between what the vice-president is saying, what the president is saying.

And as Rajiv said, a lot of things start to happen that they don't, that they just don't portray accurately to the American people and it doesn't take very long, probably a year or less, for real division, real protests to be happening in the streets about why are we going to Iraq?

Why are we turning to Iraq of all places?

So there were plenty of early warnings and continued warnings all the way through the Trump administration.

We follow the presidencies of Bush, Obama and Trump, and a little bit of Biden and all the way along American presidents get deeper and deeper into that quagmire.

And for anybody who was old enough to remember Vietnam, there's a lot of echoes of that happening over there too, as much as the generals didn't want it to happen.

So I think it was, it was not yet, it should not have been a surprise but it was a surprise and how badly our politicians, Democrat and Republican handled these circumstances.

- Yeah, I'm picking up this tension between, you know, the impact of the event itself and the path that it sent us on, 9/11 and our reaction versus the decisions that our leaders made.

So Rajiv, you know, having witnessed those decisions, you know, in the course of war, in and all of these very high stakes situations, how much of this equation do you think does lean on the presidencies themselves and the decisions of the administration?

- Ultimately, the buck stops the president and in all these cases, these are wars, president's the Commander in Chief.

And of course, you know, president Bush has said that some of the decisions that were made, in terms of how detainees were treated, were not clearly communicated up to the White House, or at least not to him, that much of this was delegated to both vice-president Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, at the time, as well as those leading the CIA.

But ultimately, these presidents are to be held to account, need to be held to account for how these wars were prosecuted and more broadly, our overall national security response to the attacks.

- And that brings up a question about Joe Biden.

He's a president who shows up least in the film, obviously a newer administration, but a very consequential event.

Our departure from Afghanistan, you know, just happened and it's still quite fresh in the American psyche and we're still debating it.

So, Michael, if you had had more material, more time to say more about the Biden administration's accountability in all of this, what would you have said?

What story would you have told?

- You know, we had the time, we could have reacted, He's too new and what happened there is too fresh and what may happen is unknown right now.

And, you know, as much as I try to, I can't make my crystal ball work.

I don't really know what's gonna happen, you know, a month or a year from now.

So it's hard to peg Biden, but it's, but Biden's fingerprints are everywhere in this story.

Joe Biden was running for president clear back in the beginning when he and Hillary and John Kerry stood up in the United States Senate and supported the invasion of Iraq, endorsed president Bush's invasion.

So he was there for that.

And when president Obama gets elected, Joe Biden is the vice president, Joe Biden and Obama.

The last thing Joe Biden wants, Obama wants to do is deal with Iraq.

He wants to deal with Afghanistan, which she thinks of as the good war, when he first gets in, but Biden is given that after that doesn't work out so well.

Biden is the guy responsible for what America does in Iraq.

And he forms a kind of opinion himself, of what to do and how to act.

And I think that was part of why he moved.

He got us out of there.

He just did not want to have what he witnessed happened, continue to happen.

He didn't see a good way out, other than the way that he went and we'll see how that works out, but there's plenty of Joe Biden in the film and in his, and for us to know about what his actions were and why they were what were.

- So let's turn to that, to Biden's good war in Afghanistan, which I don't know many would give it that moniker for several reasons.

But we went into Afghanistan right after 9/11, we kicked out the Taliban, we stayed for two decades then we watched the Taliban return.

Rajiv, if you were on the ground there, tell us the years again, was it 2009?

- Well, I was there, I was there back in 2001.

That was the last ever Taliban visas issued in my old passport.

And then I was there, you know, back again in the mid 2000s and then the bulk of 2009 through 11.

- Right, so having been on the ground, you also wrote a book about Afghanistan and the efforts there.

And you say that in the book, you say that America never understood Afghanistan and probably never will.

Do you believe our efforts there, based on your reporting, we're doomed from the start, this attempt to turn a far away country that harbored a threat to some shining democracy that wouldn't?

- Well, if the goal was to turn it into a shining democracy, yes, that was doomed from the start, but that wasn't necessarily, didn't need to be the goal upfront.

Yes, very US forces and a very small number of them, but really the Afghan people, Afghan malicious rose up and over through the Taliban with some help from the US and we had a moment there, a moment to try to create a better future than what the Taliban had left them with and build upon the devastation of a Soviet occupation, of years of civil war and then the Taliban miss rule.

And at that time, the Taliban had largely melted away.

And if you remember, a lot of people who, in Afghan Afghanistan, who we see as Taliban fighters are really, they're peasants who are desperate for jobs and they simply want to align with the winning side.

And these were people who were willing to put down their weapons and try to build a better country, go back to farming, go back to their other jobs.

And so there was this window of opportunity.

Yet we squandered it.

We squandered it because we took our eye off the ball to just moderately help rebuild that country, not turn it into a Jeffersonian democracy, but to turn into something more stable.

We took our eye off the ball because we went to go invade Iraq and aloud, and it wasn't overnight that the Taliban rose up.

It was a slow building insurgency, over years.

And there were plenty of opportunities where we could have turned the tide, but we were so caught up in Iraq that ultimately by the time Obama takes office, even though to him, Afghanistan is the good war because Iraq was the bad war.

And he couldn't be seen as a young democratic candidate to be against both wars.

It's too late, it's too hard.

Even though they're surging troops in under his watch, it's just too hard to turn around.

Unless we want it to be there for years and years on end.

And the American people certainly didn't want that.

- So I'm very curious, Rajiv, as you watch the public conversation swirl around what's happening in Afghanistan, you know, lots of folks trying to recall how we got in there in the first place.

Like, what was this all about?

What happened, what went so wrong?

I mean, knowing that everything that, you know, what do you think the public conversation is sort of getting right and what is the biggest thing they're missing?

- Well, it's easy to go into a war.

The hardest part is how you end a war, how you get out and in the modern world, you know, wars don't end like they ended in the second world war.

That's a, you know, that's a sort of a historical anomaly.

And, you know, Biden is a president who wants to just rip the bandaid off.

That's what he did.

You know, Michael was talking about Iraq when he was vice-president.

There were a lot of individuals saying in the military, in the intelligence community, arguing that the US should have kept a small follow on force there to prevent the growth of ISIS and Biden really just wanted to rip the bandaid off and get out.

And that's what he wanted to do in Afghanistan too.

And look, this was something that was punted by administration after administration.

And so on one hand, it's sort of a remarkable act of courage, but even so, in ripping off that bandaid, there were a number of assumptions that factored into it, about the strength of the Afghan security forces, the ability of the Afghan government to hold the line that I believe, were fundamentally misplaced.

If Joe Biden knew that scenes like what unfolded at Hamid Karzai Airport in Kabul would have unfolded.

He wouldn't have done it this way.

So, you know, 20 years on, even though we've made such advancements in our intelligence gathering apparatus and the national security community is very different than it was on September 10th, 2001, we still get a lot of things wrong.

And the US government fundamentally misread.

And some of this was wishful thinking, thinking that we put in so much, we invested $80 billion in building the security forces.

We trained all these people.

You think that inputs need to equate to outputs, but when individuals don't know what they're fighting for, when there isn't that spirit of national unity, when you have malevolent political leadership, you have to factor that into your expectations, what will happen when you start to head to the exits.

- Right, it's not a simple equation of inputs and outputs.

That's, yeah.

So, switching gears, Michael, you had brought up before the moral terms that George W. Bush used the night of 9/11, and then continued.

He said that night, "today our nation saw evil" In the film author, Thomas Ricks points out that framing this fight as being against evil assumes that we are fighting for good, maybe unquestionably.

He asks early in the film, a very interesting question.

He says, "who are we and what do we want to do as a nation?"

And he claims, "we answered that question too simply on 9/11, that we're the good guys" So Michael, this seems to set up the idea that we are not good guys, but you don't necessarily provide an answer in the documentary as to who we are instead, why not?

- Well, I think it's there, I think it's, I think we're a very divided country.

I think we don't have any common, there's no unanimity about who we are.

Some of us are extremely angry.

We don't believe in our government, the battle between both sides as it got more and more obvious during the Black Lives Matter protests and other events.

President Trump was making sure there was, using it all as a kind of wedge issue.

It was pretty clear what had happened across the 20 years by then, that we were dividing, we were pulling apart.

We were, there were many, many, many Americans who were against the war.

There were many Americans who didn't think about the war for a long time.

Their children were not dying there.

You know, the blood and treasure that usually wars exact had not happened to the largely white middle class and upper middle class.

The soldiers and the people who were dying over there were not us, they were other people.

And they were angry when they came home.

And there were people, there families were angry, but they'd been lied to.

And it took a little while for the country to kind of pull apart.

Other things happen too, economic dislocation in 2008.

Race issues were just inflamed by it.

The feelings of misogyny and mistrust about middle Eastern people.

It was just a, I mean, it was all happening.

So are we the good guys or the bad guys?

Well, it depends on what side your on.

- We're something else, yeah.

- But there was a lot of good guy, bad guy, a lot of finger pointing, a lot of, suddenly on January 6th, the democracy is in peril and a large number of Americans have decided that democracy and the election was not fair.

They've believed a lie from the president of the United States and they have attacked the Capitol building and they've done something that Al Qaeda wanted to do on 9/11 and couldn't, and successfully did it.

And as Rajiv says in the film, if we can't take time to stop and think through the meaning of all of that, to go back and ask ourselves what happened and why are we where we are?

We're really doomed to, you know, as a nation and I believe that.

So I think it is fairly clear, when you go back and you look at it, what side everybody's on and kind of how it happened.

- So Rajiv, you wanted to say something, I'm sure you have lots of thoughts here.

- I wanted to do well, several, but built on something that Michael was saying, about the individuals who fought and two things here.

We owe them enormous respect.

This generation of Americans who all put up their hand to serve all volunteers who went, and, so many of them went because they headed a call to defend America in the wake of 9/11.

They headed calls from their political leaders, that these wars were right and noble missions.

And so, I have what we should all have, an enormous degree of respect for their service.

And so many of them came home, grievously wounded, and thousands never came home, but the truth is, if there was a draft, if any American young person could have been sent over to fight one of these wars, there's no way we would've been in Afghanistan for 20 years.

And we likely would not have been in Iraq for as long as we were.

- Those are three more, I'm definitely interested in more.

Yeah, why?

- We allowed the fighting to be conducted by a very small number of Americans.

Less than 1% of our fellow countrymen served in uniform in the military in support of these wars, post 9/11, when you add their family members, it's less than 5% of the American population at any skin in the game.

Most Americans were blissfully disconnected from this.

And remember, George W. Bush in that offhand comment, right after 9/11, asked what people could do.

He said, go shopping.

We reinforced the sort of civilian military divide in our society.

But for those people, for those people whose lives were defined by this, who served their or their family members, as they came to grasp the reality of what was really playing out and what they were told by their leaders versus reality.

It started to, among them as well as many others, to Michael's point, it really started to, to deeply undermine trust.

But we, the trust in institutions, trust in political leaders in the wake of 9/11 was at an enormous high.

It's not a point made explicitly in the film, but you know, the American people had enormous trust in government post 9/11.

- We were ready to act together.

- Yes, despite the massive intelligence failures, the public trusted the government and that been, you know, so deeply eroded over the past 20 years and in no small measure to how our government leaders responded.

- Wow, do you see a connection, Rajiv, between the disconnection that you're observing in the American public with these wars and the division, the arc of division through these 20 years, is there some connection you see between that sort of lack of skin in the game and the ability to divide and to lose so much trust to begin with?

I'm wondering if there's dots to connect there.

- Well, I think that for those who have skin in the game, in many cases, their discontent began earlier.

Their lack of faith in the system was present sooner perhaps than with others.

But before long, this starts to transcend that division and that, you know, ordinary Americans, even for those who didn't serve, start to ask themselves, wait, why were we lied to about WMD?

Why were we not told the truth about how detainees were treated?

Why are we told that things are going so much better than they really are?

Why are we spending trillions of dollars there, when we have such pressing needs here at home?

- Well, gee, we can go a couple of directions from there, but I wanna ask, turn to you Michael, you both are journalists.

And so your job is to try to explain what's happening, right, to the country, at the same time, as we've talked about, there's all these moments where things suddenly, weren't what they seemed.

Where wait a minute, what was the government saying?

Are we the good guys really, is this, does this makes sense?

There's no weapons of mass destruction, Guantanamo bay.

All of these things start to switch.

So for you as a journalist, was there a moment where you yourself had to almost change tactics, where you said, oh, wait, I don't know what, I don't know that I can trust the same assumptions I might've had.

Now I need almost new tactics, this a new realm where there is less trust and we need to be even more skeptical?

And a lot of folks remember the media and you mentioned in the film, mainstream media at the time seem to really support the war in Iraq and the theory of weapons of mass destruction is being there because of faulty intelligence, sure.

But the media had a kind of reckoning.

Did you have that reckoning?

- I don't, I mean, I made 19 films in there.

You know, and most of the films were following the really obvious, to us, Shakespearian drama going on inside the American government, at the very upper reaches between the defense secretary and the vice president, the vice president's office, the secretary of state and the president of the United States over and the head of the CIA.

And the battles were unbelievable.

If you could get inside and find out about them.

And you understood almost from the very beginning, how fundamental the internal politics of the relationships were for the power of what to do, knowing that the nation was embarking on leaving Afghanistan.

Osama bin Laden had vanished and gone to Pakistan.

America in some ways, its initial objective wasn't there.

So somehow, things get roiling inside the White House, the Defense Department, the CIA that turns us toward Iraq.

Why are we going to Iraq?

And if you're a trained observer and you're paying attention and you're in Washington and you have sources and you have the wonderful luxury of big budgets so that you can be there and make big documentary films about it.

You are hearing about it, your watching your government morph and you're watching truth begin to get tarnished and people beginning to say, well, what am I hearing?

And you watch the actions of somebody like secretary of state, Colin Powell and you watch what happens with him and the drama, why he decides to do it.

Then he does something that he doesn't really believe and.

- When he goes to the UN and defends the intelligence.

- Yes, he couldn't really, I mean, he told many people, I'm not sure about this.

And everybody was sort of hearing about it and feeling it, and then there he is and he gives this performance, but he makes George Tennant, the head of the CIA, sit right behind him on camera.

So, for those of us who were inside there, watching it all the time, it was pretty clear things were unraveling, there were real political struggles going on between the Defense Department and the Central Intelligence Agency, the vice president, the vice president's office, which was massive.

He personally was doing lots of things.

And the president, you know, not really understanding there were legal things going on.

So there was a tremendous amount of stuff that was happening over those years that we got to see and it didn't really change my opinion, because in the first place, my opinion doesn't really matter.

What really mattered was, what we were getting, what we were hearing and could we get it all sorted out and on television for people see.

- So it sounds like you sort of found in some ways, the heart of the story about what, you know, thousands of armed service members are doing, and, you know, millions of us in the country really came down to a few individuals in power and the sort of dramas and decisions among them.

Rajiv, is that where you would have found kind of the core of the story.

You know, you were more aware of the consequences were bearing out, internationally.

- Well, the consequences were bearing out, but they had their roots in the decisions that were made in the White House.

And the, those rivalries had disastrous consequences for US forces.

It meant at times troop levels, pardon me, were too low.

It meant that forces weren't properly equipped.

It meant that we didn't have a plan to try to stabilize, from a civilian point of view, Iraq, when US troops arrived.

There was no post-war or no kind of occupation governance plan.

And then when we sent people in, they did disastrous things like disbanding the Iraqi army and banning low level members of the Ba'ath Party from ever working in government again, which had the combined effect of just creating thousands upon thousands of enemies.

We essentially built the insurgency with decisions that we made and decisions that were never thoughtfully debated or discussed in Washington, but the result of a slap dash plan to try to stabilize the country because none of that was properly factored in the planning process back at the White House, the Pentagon, the state department.

- So a quick reminder to our viewers, we're gonna go to audience Q and A pretty soon.

So do get your questions in.

And it's 20 years of material here folks, lots to cover.

So for the two of you, American history covers a lot of periods, where we've had to reckon with, if you'll forgive more moral language, our sins against ourselves.

Top of mind, these days, Michael, you brought this up, racism, xenophobia, and now, you know, hatred bordering on violence between the political left and the right.

So Michael, how much of all of that can we lay at the feet of 9/11?

- Well, I mean, I think a fair amount, you know, so I've made a lot of films about racism in America.

I made films about economic dislocation, especially around 2008.

Those were, in both of those things, caused tremendous division in the society.

America was already roiling through all of that.

9/11 comes along, it's the next piece.

It's not the only piece, it's not maybe not the big driver, but I think it was.

And when you add that to what else was happening in the society and you find yourself in rolling into a president in, president Trump who saw the war and all of these things as wedge issues, opportunity to get people riled up.

That's where his power and strength came from.

The fuse got lit and it was really lit and everybody was ready to rise up, certainly his base, to keep them active and moving.

He knew how to punch the buttons.

And I think it is a combination of all of those things that were coming in America.

And I think 9/11 and most of the things that happened in 9/11, underscored it.

But the thing that really, really has happened, is that truth is not, and there's not an agreed upon truth about America or what is true, what the government says to you.

And if you need any evidence for that, somebody asked me about a week ago, what do I think it would take for everybody to kind of come back together, like singing on the steps of the Capitol building on the evening of 9/11?

And do I think it's in the near future?

And I said, no, we're in another war right now.

We, look how we've handled.

There's a poison killing us in America door to door, house to house, city to city.

And yet we are deeply divided about getting vaccinated.

You know, there was no question that we would all get vaccinated for polio.

There's no question that we get vaccinated, were very little, for measles, mumps, anything else, but this is something that is killed more than half a million of us and it's coming.

And we can't agree on that.

Did 9/11 caused this?

Well it certainly, whatever was happening between race, economic dislocation and what happened because of those wars and the failure of American presidencies, three American presidency.

Here we are, where we can't even agree to go get vaccinated and stop a scar that threatens to kill tens and tens of thousands of us, more of us, many more.

I just, that's the proof if you need it, that we are a deeply divided nation.

- Well, I wouldn't lay it all on the feet of 9/11.

I know Michael doesn't, not by any stretch of the imagination, but that, and the kind of overriding point of the film, the erosion of trust by the actions and statements of our leaders had this cumulative pernicious effect that just snowballs.

And so then it allows, it allows political leaders that wanna traffic in untruths to find an opening.

This is further kind of fueled by the advent of social media and the ability for Americans to propagate untruths at scale.

And these things all build on each other to get us to where we are today, and there are other factors as well.

But in some ways, one of the biggest openings here, or one of the biggest, you know, initial kind of sparks to all of this was certainly the response to 9/11.

You know, it wasn't in and of itself, but it plays a tremendous role.

- It started a thread and here we are.

So Obama ran against our wars with a call for change.

Trump ran against our wars with a call for strength.

Both those messages resonated with a post 9/11 America that was trying to renew itself.

What do you ultimately think it's gonna take to not repeat, to get out of these vicious cycles we're talking about?

- It's a, you know, I've been around, sorry to say long enough, or maybe happy to say, long enough to remember that for years before 9/11, Vietnam used to, I had lots of people who told me this, in the oval office, the specter Vietnam hung on the wall on every decision, every president, every Joint Chiefs of Staff meeting, every meeting they had.

The Vietnam, Vietnam, like with the military, the US military who thought about it, planned for it.

Now I think, might be interested in whether Rajiv thinks this, but I think so, in the Oval Office, no matter who the president is, for quite a while, this is gonna hang in the wall, this, what happened, what terrible things happened and in lots of directions.

The mistakes that three presidents have made must be on Joe Biden every day.

He must be thinking about everything that's in that film and what happened, 'cause he was there for every moment of it and participated in a lot of it.

And I have a feeling, like Vietnam drove Bill Clinton's presidency, George H.W Bush's presidency, Reagan's presidency, that it was just there.

And I think now, 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, lies about weapons of mass destruction, the torture, the Abu Ghraib humiliations, the whole long list of what happened.

All the deaths, it's in the air over there, the Oval Office and it's driving every president.

- In the interest of time, Rajiv, I'm gonna ask you our first reader question, which comes from Dan Saltzman, it's a tough one.

He asks, because we, as a society are so afraid now, did the 9/11 terrorists achieve their goals?

- Well, I think there are ways in which what Osama bin Ladin and the Al-Qaeda leadership wanted to accomplish.

And I'm being articulate here, but elements of what they wanted to accomplish, perhaps in ways that they could not have foreseen, way back when, have actually, in some fashion, come to pass.

The amount of money we've spent.

The bankrupting of America, fiscally through these wars.

The number of people that would wind up dying and being grievously injured, both United States and around the world.

The diminution in our standing around the world.

You know, the wake of 9/11, you know, every newspaper in the world was essentially proclaiming we were all Americans as laman did.

That political capital was long squandered.

But the divisions that have been sown in American society through this and the low esteem in which we, in some cases, rankly hold our political leaders, the fracturing of our society, the fact that we are, you know, in some ways, in a cold civil war in our country today.

This has caused a level of damage to our country that in some ways, you know, far exceeds the destruction of two skyscrapers in our most iconic city and far exceeds, perhaps what, you know was even in the wildest dreams of, you know, a lunatic who was in the caves of Afghanistan as this was planned.

- So Michael, Lorene France asked, along the same vein.

It seems like the lack of trust in government has been well-earned, she says, how do we get back from that?

How do we actually claw our way back to some kind of trust, to some lack of huge division?

- I think it's gotta be the thing that Joe Biden thought about from the moment he won.

And every day, everybody who works in government, you wish everybody who'd been elected to Congress and sitting in Washington was saying, how can I tell the truth?

Let me try to tell the truth, but I don't think that's happening at all.

I think it's about, it's the great defeat of the democracy.

It relies on truth, it relies on trust.

You have to be able to know that when an election is held, it's over and there was a winner, and you believe the count, you have to believe that in order for democracy to exist and democracy rests on truth and some shared truths.

It's very hard to imagine.

I mean, I'm optimistic as a person, believe it or not given all the things I've seen in the world, but I don't know.

I'm a little, I despair a little bit about that thing.

The truth, especially since it's the business I'm in, is to try to tell it and find it out and discover it and bring it forward.

- I was gonna follow up with you on this 'cause I think it's a very important point.

You know, you're talking about, there's folks who don't believe what appears to be quite clear, on whom rests the burden to persuade?

You know, we've talked about political leaders, we've talked about journalists, we've talked about American citizens.

There's all kinds of groups.

I mean, to you, who has to work the hardest to make sure people can believe what ought to be believed?

- I think it rests with leadership and of course the people like me and Rajiv in an earlier life, and maybe in a future life, we have to convey it and find it and dig it out and bring it forward, if we can.

We have to have the courage to do it in the face of people who don't want us to do it.

And in the face of economic pressures that may not let us do it, we have to do that.

But really, really, this is a thing of leadership and people have a right to demand it.

And I'm not, that's a tall order right now.

- So Rajiv, a question from Sue from New Jersey, is the war on terror over or is it just taking a different shape?

- Oh, it's by no means over, not by any stretch of the imagination.

We have special operations forces that are active or not say active, but have been, that have a presence at some point in the year in upwards of a hundred countries, we will likely, our military special ops forces and our intelligence community and paramilitary teams will likely be conducting operations to address fringe ISIS elements and other radical extremist elements in South Asia, parts of the middle east and North Africa.

It's worth noting that, you know, under the Obama administration.

And this is something that comes through a little bit in the film, in response to the, some of the controversies around interrogation and the controversy around holding individuals at Guantanamo, the Obama administration moved to very significantly escalate the drone war against members of Al Qaeda offshoots in the Arabian peninsula and elsewhere.

And that continues to this day.

We don't have all our headlines about it.

It's all done in the shadows, but this war continues and will continue for some years to come.

There's no clean end date, but this is also, is the sort of war that Biden is comfortable conducting.

You know, Joe Biden doesn't want large conventional forces doing counter-insurgency operations, doing nation building, but he's very comfortable letting the intelligence community and the special operations community target individuals who wanna do very bad things to the United States and our Western allies.

- So here's another reader question that actually tags right onto that.

Pue said that 54% of us adults supported Biden's decision to withdraw troops from Afghanistan and 42% said it was wrong.

What impact do you think this will have on Biden's presidential legacy?

In other words, are people with him, what's happening there?

- Maybe too early to tell, in the heat of it and in the, and it was an odd moment for those 11 days or so.

And justifiably, it was a mess.

I don't know that presidencies rest on such a thing.

If things happen, if an attack grows out of Afghanistan and there's an impulse to go back or whatever else, there will be other things that could happen.

If those happen, we'll see.

But it's a, I mean, he had to go, he had to get it out.

He had to under whatever circumstances, as Rajiv said, it wouldn't have been under the circumstances.

He did it, if he would've known apparently what was going on, but it's a little early to call it yet on Biden, other than the fact that, almost anything he does is gonna get about 40% of the people 'cause they know because we're so divided.

- We're so divided.

- They believe that he wasn't legally elected president.

So what are they gonna think about him pulling out of Afghanistan, even though Trump was the guy who signed the treaty, so.

- You still remember, the politics is a very wacky because you have many Republicans who have been supportive of ending the war and pulling out.

Now, of course, any excuse they have to go and attack by them, they'll take, you know, just like you see, for instance, Republican governors who are once pro-vaccine, now being very anti-vaccine, but with the electorate, this may play an interesting way.

So it's not at all clear.

And to Michael's point, you know, there's an initial reaction.

Nobody likes the look of America losing on TV and the chaos and so forth.

But with the passage of some time, of course, Republican candidates will seek to, you know, attack Democrats because of this.

But it may play out in more complex ways to whatever extent it still is an issue that voters will care anything about come the 22 midterms or the 24 general election.

- Yep, Tom from Spokane, and this I think can be our last question.

We've been talking about America after 9/11 from the American perspective.

What about the perspective from the Middle East?

What kind of reckoning has been happening with the idea of America in these countries where we have fought these wars?

- Well, if you look at the, if you watch the film, I think you'll get a hint, you'll get more than a hint.

If you think about it, as Rajiv said a little earlier, our prestige in the world, our sway, our anything is so dramatically diminished.

And there are all those moments, those Abu Ghraib, the Guantanamo, there's so many moments of American failure over there that it's hard to believe that the people there in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Syria, I mean, we, you know, I think our, as I, the only word is our ability to be kind of convincing as a reliable ally or representative of something different is very dramatically diminished.

I mean, what do you think Rajiv?

- Yeah, it's easy to come to the view in this country that, oh, they never wanted us there.

They just want us out.

And the truth is far more complex.

Many, many Afghan people wanted the international community to help them and they didn't necessarily want us to act the way we did all the time.

They didn't necessarily want as many troops and us to employ some of the strategies we did, but they wanted our assistance in helping to rebuild.

They wanted security help, same with the Iraqi people and by extension, countries in that broader region.

So there's a desire for American engagement.

It's just that that desire is not commensurate with how the American people want to engage in the world today - Well, and how we acted when we got there.

- That's right.

We didn't act in the way that they were hoping.

- Exactly, I think that's right.

- Well, Michael and Rajiv, this has been an absolutely fascinating conversation.

Like I said, 20 years of material, all of these, you know, decisions, leadership, trust, exaggerations, pain, it's hard to put into words, right?

We, the three of us were there, 9/11.

We felt it, we felt that wound.

We felt the immediate unity.

We saw our members of Congress on the steps of the Capitol, which to our viewers, by the way, it's a very powerful moment in this film.

Definitely encourage you to watch it.

It's almost beyond imagining that that level of unity or at least, you know, acting together is even possible.

And of course, today we dream, is it possible again?

Thank you so, so much for this conversation and for sharing some time with us tonight.

- Thank you.

- You bet.

- Thank you.

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