The FRONTLINE Interviews

Philip Zelikow

Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission

Philip Zelikow is an attorney, diplomat and political adviser. He was the counselor of the State Department during the George W. Bush administration and also served as the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, which produced the official report on the events that led to the Sept. 11 attacks. He is currently a professor of history at the University of Virginia.

The following interview was conducted by FRONTLINE’s Jim Gilmore on April 12, 2021. It has been edited for clarity and length.

This interview appears in:

America After 9/11

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Philip Zelikow

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The Reaction to 9/11

The first thing I'm going to ask you to do is just give us a brief resume of your involvement in Washington.I mean, the fact that you were involved with the Intelligence Advisory Boards for both Bush and Obama, the fact that you ran or directed the 9/11 Commission, that you worked with State Department and [Secretary Condoleezza] Rice, of course.Just give us sort of that overview.And also, in '15-'17, you're on the Defense Policy Board.

Well, I used to be a trial lawyer in Texas and then went back to graduate school in foreign policy.And I taught for the Navy and then went to work in the government.And I've held international policy jobs of one kind or another in five administrations, from Reagan through Obama.I was a career diplomat, a foreign service officer, serving both overseas, back at the State Department, then went to work in the White House as a career diplomat during [the] Bush 41 administration, then went into—also went into teaching and history writing at Harvard and later Virginia, but also continued to help the government in various ways—advisory committees, other things.

I went back into government full time to direct the 9/11 Commission in '03 and '04.I then went back into the government full time again as the counselor of the Department of State and deputy to Secretary of State Condi Rice.I had also earlier worked on the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board for President Bush 43, and then was invited to do that again for President Barack Obama.And I also served President Obama and his defense secretary, Ash Carter, on the Defense Policy Board later in the Obama administration.So I've worked on international issues in the government from a number of different perspectives and over a number of years.

Thank you.We're starting the film with the first event I want to talk to you about. …Talk a little bit about the America that existed at that moment, when you think back on 9/11.

Well, the country had been attacked, and it was a tremendous shock.It's hard now, 20 years later, to remember what a shock it was.The country had not been attacked in this way since Pearl Harbor, December of 1941.And every American who lived through Pearl Harbor can remember what they were doing when they heard the news.Now remember that Pearl Harbor was much further away from most Americans than New York City and Washington, D.C., so this attack was much closer to home.It struck closer to home in every way.It wreaked a level of devastation that was only beginning to be understood.And there was a sense of shock, trauma and an extremely powerful reaction that the country had to come together in the face of such a terrible tragedy.

The immensity, the horrendous nature of the attack in some ways I think you've written about had a huge effect on us, on our government.And in fact, to some extent, we magnified the threat larger than it was, amazingly enough, because of the horrendous nature of the attack.

It wasn't just the tremendous nature of the attack itself.The country had been attacked by a terrorist group that was dimly understood.And the fear and the anxiety that followed was that any day now, another attack might come.This attack had caught us by surprise.Who knew what was next?Only a few weeks later, there was a scare because anthrax started getting deposited in mails and people were dying from anthrax.Where did that come from?Turned out it actually came from a source inside the United States.It didn't come from Al Qaeda, but we didn't know.

So meanwhile, now the intelligence agencies, which had been filtering the alerts that they give to the leadership of the government, now to be sure that nothing was—they could never be accused of having held something back, they simply gave the president, threw on his desk, every lead, every rumor, every story that poured into us from all over the world about a possible attack.

So every single morning, the president and the top leadership are waking up to a drumbeat of new possible threats, day in and day out, week in and week out, month in and month out, for months that followed—into 2001, 2002 and beyond.So it conditions a profound crisis and wartime atmosphere, especially concentrated among the top leadership of the government, who felt this extraordinary sense of personal responsibility to prevent the next attack.

It's that wartime feel, which the whole country felt for a little while, on 9/11, but which remained with the leadership of the government, that's now very hard for Americans to reach back and understand.

On 9/11, when President Bush got back into Washington, he sat before the camera to talk to Americans, and he talked about—it was a very dramatic moment.He quotes from the Bible.He talks about the fact that we are in a war against good versus evil.He talks about, soon after, that the fact that this was a worldwide fight to spread democratic values.What does that say about the way President Bush viewed this threat and who this enemy was?

Well, the enemy was hard to pin down for a long time, and what the enemy stood for was apocalyptic.When a president uses the word like "good versus evil," it's fashionable for people in universities like the one I teach at to kind of smile and roll their eyes perhaps a little.But these were people who thought that the only way they could attack the United States was to butcher thousands of people on a sunny Tuesday morning, and that that was their notion of war.

What were their warrings?Their warrings were to destroy the power and influence of the United States of America and the world by killing as many Americans as they could, wherever they could find them.Now, if you need kind of a working definition of "evil" in real life, that gets pretty close.So you were fighting an enemy that wants to kill Americans anyplace they can find them.It's a shadowy global organization.And so the president is responding in that way and in those terms.

In retrospect, people might judge that these were overreactions.And we can make these fine judgments from a distance, but it is important to understand how people were feeling at the time, if we want to understand this historically.

The Dark Side

Soon after the vice president, Vice President Cheney, comes out and starts talking about the fact that we are going to have to fight this war in a different way, that we have to go to the "dark side."This, of course, led to the CIA's black sites, enhanced interrogations.It seems there's a contrast here between that explanation of how we needed to fight this war and what Bush had defined as the idea that we needed to spread democratic values, moral values of America.What are the consequences of that divide, and why?

There were two powerful impulses that eventually collided.The first is that there was a clear moral difference between what separated us from the enemy, in that we stood for pluralism, for open societies, which is what they hated; that we stood for some kind of bedrock values about human rights, and they were in favor of killing anybody in favor of their ideas.

So we had the moral high ground, which is precious.In conflict, in potential conflict for that, is an understandable impulse in wartime to be as tough as you need to be to win the war.And this is inevitable in wartime.And then there are always people who then want to be tougher and who deride people who weren't willing to do what needs to be done to win the war.A lot of the Americans who were making these decisions weren't used to being at wartime.They weren't like, say, Israelis, who had been used to this kind of environment for a long time and had figured out how to make those tough moral calculations.

So instead, you have these clashing impulses of how do we hold the moral high ground and leverage them in this global struggle, versus the people who, at the price of being tough against the enemy, such a terrible enemy, were willing to do things that could end up sacrificing that moral high ground and fatefully compromise America's position in the world.That problem at first was entirely secret but would eventually become an enormous public problem by 2004–2005.And I became deeply involved in that.

And the consequences of it, long term, when you look back?

The consequences of the struggle between holding the moral high ground and the advocates of “do whatever it takes” toughness is that eventually, America ended up losing some of its moral high ground in the struggle, for not only for many Americans, but for a lot of people around the world, including a lot of people whom we need as allies in this global struggle, because mostly, these terrorists don't live in our country.They live in other countries, and we need their help.

That was unfortunate.I think it was a tragic error.And when I was in government, I and Secretary of State Rice and others worked pretty hard then to turn the corner on that problem and get the country into a better place during 2005, 2006, 2007, which I think was substantially accomplished.But the legacy of those debates hampered the war effort, frankly.

… Obviously, I've come to some conclusions about the military value of these techniques.Are you going to come back to that subject, or do you want me to get into that now?

We will in Iraq.But if you've got a point to make, make it now, so we don't lose it.

All right.It is very commonly believed that these sorts of extreme methods, like torturing detainees, are sad but effective.It's what you need to do.In fact, the effectiveness is relatively marginal in comparison to cost.This is the lesson that people who have used these methods, whether it's the French in Algeria, the British in Northern Ireland, the Israelis in the occupied territories, mostly, people who use these methods discover this lesson—marginal effectiveness, extreme cost, including the cost of what it does to the people wielding these methods and the way it corrupts their institutions.

Failure to Capture Osama bin Laden

With Afghanistan, … what's the long-term effects of the fact that we didn't catch bin Laden early?

The long-term effect of the failure to capture bin Laden in the initial war in Afghanistan in the winter of 2001–2002 was that Al Qaeda as an organization was not effectively decapitated at that stage.It was driven underground.It was scattered, and its effectiveness was reduced, but it wasn't broken.It wasn't broken decisively.It also created, therefore, this kind of lingering, shadowy enemy that we were still chasing.And it gave Al Qaeda the resilience to come back and pose a significant threat, again, in the mid-2000s, which was met and dealt with, more or less effectively.And then, eventually, when bin Laden was captured and killed, that did, I think, significantly degrade Al Qaeda's leadership and its effectiveness as an organization.His role personally in that organization was important.A lot of the other, lesser leaders, whom we've killed over the years, some were important, but none as important as bin Laden himself.

So if you can, help us with the lessons from Iraq.During the debate about Iraq, we turn to the president's defining the "axis of evil."How does that redefine the war on terrorism at that point, when we turn to Iraq, and how do you look back at that debate and the actual turn to Iraq?

Well, there was a fundamental mistake in the estimation of the Iraqi threat, made really beginning in late 2001 and persisting all through 2002, which is, at first, a number of quite well-informed people sincerely believed that Iraq and the war on terror were part of the same danger, that Iraq might even have been involved directly in the 9/11 attacks.That belief was held by Vice President Cheney, people on his staff, and even by the CIA director up until about the spring of 2002.Then, at that time, the CIA fell away from that belief of the 9/11-Iraq connection, but Vice President Cheney and his staff did not give up on that belief.So there was a conflation of the terrifying war on terror and the Al Qaeda danger with the Iraq danger.And that was a fateful convergence.

The Iraq danger was serious, but it was not urgent.It was not an imminent threat, in my view, given a lot of the other things that we had going on, including an ongoing conflict in Afghanistan that was not yet conclusively settled.And that conflation was essential, I think, to driving the sense that we can no longer tolerate the risk in Iraq.

Invading Iraq

When you say fateful, how so?The fact of turning to Iraq, why fateful?What were the consequences?

Well, the handling of the Iraq issue was immensely tragic on every level.First, you had a united nation after 9/11, and a relatively united effort going after Al Qaeda.Then, first, you conflate the 9/11 threat with the Iraq threat, which turns out to be a mistake.Then that mistake, conflating the Al Qaeda threat and Iraq, you compound that mistake by then heightening the urgency of going after Iraq and then exaggerating poorly analyzed intelligence estimates about Iraq.

So then you now have added a second fateful mistake, which is that you've exaggerated the Iraq threat itself, the possibility that they had undiscovered weapons of mass destruction.And now you've got two mistakes: the conflation of Al Qaeda in Iraq, now adding in poorly analyzed and rushed intelligence estimates about Iraq itself.Then, on top of that, you add a third giant error, which is the huge failures in planning for what to do after an initial military conflict in Iraq.

And the result of these cumulative mistakes—of the first conflation, the exaggeration of the Iraqi threat, the poor planning for the Iraqi war—then create a war that becomes incredibly divisive, internationally and domestically.The war doesn't go well.The successful momentum the United States had acquired at first is dissipated and lost.So you've now lost your international unity.You've lost a lot of your domestic unity.You've lost the image and reputation of American effectiveness.

And it seems like the whole war effort has gone somehow off track, and meanwhile, you've distracted and diverted a lot of your effort against Al Qaeda and in Afghanistan to this effort in Iraq.So I think, from every perspective, this turns out to be a fateful and historic failure.

And the effect of how the post-invasion was handled by [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld and [Coalition Provisional Authority head L. Paul] Bremer, the mistakes made, the misunderstanding of the effect, the fact that we didn't have enough troops to begin with.I mean, you look back at that, and again, why?

Well, the mistake made in the planning for what would happen after you deposed the Iraqi tyrant, Saddam Hussein, was, in significant part, driven by wishful thinking.They had just had this experience in Afghanistan where they had deposed the Taliban, and Afghanistan looked like it was going great.They had put in a new government.It seemed to be doing fine.And they wishfully thought that they could replicate the same relatively easy success in Iraq.Rumsfeld actually thought and said that we could just go in and then get out.We weren't going to do nation building in Iraq.

Now, unfortunately for him, but in some ways honorably, he was working for a president who believed that if we broke Iraq, we had a moral responsibility to help put it back together.Rumsfeld himself, I think, felt no such moral responsibility whatsoever.So he had been prepared just to get in and get out, and if Iraq imploded, that was somebody else's problem.President Bush frankly took a larger view of America's responsibility and shouldered the very difficult burden of trying to somehow get Iraq back on track and make right these fateful mistakes.

And when Rumsfeld basically ignored or downplayed the insurgency and the beginnings of the insurgency, and for quite a long time after the insurgency was growing, why the misjudgments, and what are the consequences?

Well, the fundamental problem with American strategy in Iraq, after you set up the American occupation, is the Defense Department never helped put together a strategy for what to do.And this went on, in effect, for years, because the fundamental view in the Defense Department is, we just need to get out.We just need to get out as fast as we can, with some sort of semblance of letting the Iraqis run things.

So they never really developed strategy for how to help solve the problems in Iraq.They didn't want to help develop such a strategy.And therefore, by underestimating the insurgency, underestimating the problem, these were all ways of escaping the dilemmas they had helped create, and just let's get out of there and leave it as somebody else's problem.And that, for President Bush, that was not the honorable course he thought America had the responsibility to pursue.

So here you've got President Bush, who believes the course of honor is to try to help fix Iraq and make it right.You've got a secretary of defense working for him who just wants to get out and leave the problem to others and will not, therefore, help develop the strategy for this.And unfortunately, the president himself doesn't fully resolve that problem until he fires Rumsfeld years after he should have done so, when he finally fires him in 2006.

The effect of all of this, of course, is that we're staying the course in Iraq, but doing so without an effective strategy.It looks more and more ineffective.It drains more and more of our energy and resources and talent and blood of our young men and women.It distracts from other things in Afghanistan, in the effort against Al Qaeda.And it further divides the country and effectively, I think, eats up Bush's presidency, sadly.

Abu Ghraib

In 2004, you've got the Abu Ghraib pictures that are released, and some people have said this is a real turning point.When you look back at Abu Ghraib, what was the effect, and how important is it to understand?

Well, it's very important to understand.Abu Ghraib is simply the result of what happens when you let people loose, you tell them to be tough and you give them almost no rules.This is the absolutely foreseeable, inevitable set of things that will happen.You turn overheated young men out in that environment and tell them to be tough, do what needs to be done, and you don't give them very clear lane markings.

Every police precinct captain, every Army officer will predict to you the kinds of things that are likely to happen.And then, finally, in Abu Ghraib, we simply discovered some of the things that were happening.They had already been going on for a while, in Iraq and Afghanistan and CIA black sites.And Abu Ghraib is just a place where some of these terrible practices, this basically lawlessness just began surfacing, the inability to control what soldiers were doing, because they thought they were being tough.

And of course, then you get this tremendous blowback.You get the sense that America had had the moral high ground fighting a deadly enemy, and we were squandering that moral high ground visibly, in these terrible ways, which was hurting us at home, and it hurts us in the Arab and Muslim world.Remember, of course, we are engaging in a war that is centered in the Arab and Muslim world in order to try to strengthen the values of civilized societies in the Arab and Muslim world, and we're trying to do that with images of Americans torturing Arabs and Muslims?The conundrum was obvious, and the Bush administration would eventually have to step up to that.

So to talk a little bit about a positive turn, as the surge that you were so much involved in begins and takes effect and brings stability, how does that help define—and in bigger terms, if you can, after eight years, seven-and-a-half years of the Bush post-9/11 wars on terrorism, where are we?As the Bush administration is closing down with—and also the fact that we have the surge, with the fact that, by the end, Iraq is stabilized, but of course there is dire potential out there, both with Al Qaeda still being around, ISIL looming at some point possibly, a very unstable Iraq government because of the hatreds that exist, talk a little bit about the legacy, but where we are during those final years.

Well, President Bush, in his second term, had to do two big things.First, he had to begin to recover some moral high ground for the United States by turning the corner on the torture issues.This was a prolonged battle.But finally, by opening up the black sites, bringing people to Guantanamo, closing down some of those techniques, which didn't happen until September of 2006, but by '06, '07, he's turning the corner on the torture issues and beginning to move that part of the war into reform.

Second, he had to turn the corner on Iraq.Again, years of struggle to turn the corner on Iraq, get a decent strategy going there—again, by late 2006, on into 2007, the United States begins adopting a more sustainable strategy on Iraq that does help begin bringing some semblance of stability to that divided country.And so he's moving there, too.He fires Rumsfeld, which made a huge difference and brings in a more respected secretary of defense.There is a sense of reckoning, of honesty, a sense that the corner is being turned and we're getting this into a more stable equilibrium.

They're now, at that time, as Bush is leaving, he's back to something, a legacy that he can feel better about.But he's also now back to a situation where we can refocus on Al Qaeda and refocus on what to do about Afghanistan, which were two issues that he would then leave to President Obama.

The Obama Years

So we turn the corner to a new administration.Where is America?Certainly frustrated enough that Obama is elected, due to probably mostly because of his stance against the decisions made by President Bush.Where are we as Obama is running for president and becoming the next president of the United States?

Well, fundamentally, Obama was—represented change.I think President Bush had substantially broken his credibility with the American people by 2005–2006, with the Iraq issue at the front of the list.Obama symbolized change on the Iraq issue and other things.And so Obama comes in, says, “That was the wrong war.I, however, am going to turn my attention properly to the right war in Afghanistan, and we'll be more effective in waging the war on terror.” See, that was part of his message, too.

And in general, change, candor, competence, those were all the kinds of messages that President Obama was bringing, as he himself, President Obama, then had to figure out, "What am I going to do about Afghanistan and Al Qaeda?"

And how, in those early years, how does he do?Did he understand the enemy?Did he understand the wars that he was getting involved in?Or was the situation such that sort of a quagmire, that no matter who the president is, it was a very difficult thing to deal with?

I think President Obama actually took each one of the major issues on its merits and ended up reaching different conclusions.So, three issues.One, Iraq."We're going to draw down.I ran on that.We're going to do that."Two, Afghanistan.At first he thinks, "I'm going to escalate," and then he basically changes his mind.He gets into the Afghanistan war.He escalates and then decides to put a short fuse on that escalation and starts to draw back in Afghanistan.

So actually, Iraq is clear: draw down.Afghanistan, he actually—his thinking evolves, and he changes his mind.On the third issue, though, Al Qaeda, he escalates and continues to escalate for years and makes that, in a way, the dynamic effort culminating in his decision to authorize the raid that killed bin Laden in May of 2011.

So he inherits a stable Iraq, as you have defined, because of the decisions made in the last couple of years of the administration.But a lot of people have told us that he disengaged militarily, and more importantly, in a lot of ways, politically he seemed to have disengaged, with the effect that there was a power vacuum that was left.

Well, President Obama had adopted a very clear stance on Iraq, which is basically to get out, and he overdid it.I don't blame him as much for that as some people do.The Bush administration had signed the deal to get out of Iraq, too.But they were just going to preserve a larger residual presence.And there was an argument, I think, that you could have handled the residual presence better than the Obama administration did.But Obama overdid it.

It did therefore leave a power vacuum in northern Iraq, which was then compounded by the implosion of Syria and the Syrian civil war.So then ISIS arises, and the Obama administration is paralyzed in the face of ISIS, and I think is—and the Syrian civil war, by the way.And I think the Obama administration's policies on both Syria and ISIS were almost completely ineffective in 2014 and in 2015.They lose at least a year, maybe two.But, to their credit, they do finally get their act together in Obama's last year.

In the winter of 2015–16, they realized that their policy was failing, and they pulled it up by its roots.They reviewed it.They adopted a better strategy against ISIS, and that strategy turned out—that strategy, which was devised in the Obama administration principally, did turn out to be an effective strategy in year 2016, and then carried on into the Trump administration.

So wrapping up this.Where is America at this point, after two administrations of trying to deal with these wars?What's the effect on America?

The key thing Americans should realize about Al Qaeda, 9/11 and the 20 years after is that this is not fundamentally America's war.It never was.This is a war of religion in the Arab and Muslim world.It is a war in which the Muslim world is having a civil war that is crossing the borders of a dozen countries about the fate of Muslim societies in the modern world.This is a war that, in that world, has been going on probably since at least 1980.In other words, it's been going on for more than 40 years.

And the question, why is America involved in their civil war?And the answer is because some of the extremists in their civil war wanted to pull America into it, for lots of different reasons.They wanted to make us the center of their war.What we've now realized: We don't want to be in the middle of their war.But then the question for Americans is, do you care how this Muslim war of religion comes out?Do you care how it comes out?Do you care whether civilized Islam defeats extremist Islam?I think, to a degree, Americans do care.And there are modest things that we can do at the margins to try to influence and strengthen the side of civilization in the Islamic world.

But we are not at the center of that war, and Americans don't want to be at the center of that war.That's the conclusion we've reached after 20 years.We don't have to be at the center of that war.But that's not the same thing as shunning it and disengaging entirely from it, because it will affect us, depending on how it turns out.Our challenge is, how do we engage with it at a suitable distance and with suitable detachment and with suitable modesty because we recognize it's their war?

Right.It's also—it has come with political consequences.You know, when we started talking about Obama.He came in with a lot of hope.Did Obama fail to accomplish what he needed to do politically in sort of bringing America along with the directions he had taken?

I think Obama had trouble finding the right balance of how to develop a sustainable equilibrium of limited engagement; that we were overengaged in some ways, underengaged in other ways, and he found trouble finding a balance that seemed right and sustainable.And therefore, Americans simply threw up their hands and say, “We don't want to have anything to do with these foreigners.” There was that view on the right and that view on the left.“We shouldn't meddle in these foreign businesses.We always just make them worse.We don't care about those people anyway.Let them kill each other.” And instead, you need to develop a message that we do need to care.But it is fundamentally about their societies and their worlds, and we need to have a story about how we can be helpful at the margins in limited ways that safeguard our security.

And I think the Obama administration advanced that story but never quite got there, never quite got that story in the right balance.And the Trump administration, then, is a reaction to that.And the Biden administration is now trying to see if they can find a more durable balance, and I think that there's a chance.There's a chance.

The Trump Years

So then we come to Donald Trump, who had a story that sold pretty well, which is very different than what you've just defined.He knew the frustration of the public as well, with the decisions made, that what they felt perhaps were lie after lie—the fact that there's no WMD, the fact that the hope that was portrayed by Obama didn't turn out exactly as expected.He uses it to seed his rise.

Trump is a person who uses fear for his political ambitions.So he uses fear and disgust.And it's fear and disgust of the foreign.So anything that happens, that plays up foreign threats, he uses because he plays on fear of foreigners and fear of foreign stuff, foreign stuff of every kind, as something that—you know, "I'm the person who stands up for Americans.And we'll just clobber those foreigners.We'll keep them out and we'll clobber them.And what, above all, we'll keep them and their stuff at a distance."

So his criticism—you know, anything that happens that exaggerates a fear of foreign terrorism, you manipulate that and use that to just underscore your fear of all things foreign.And then anything that indicates that America cares about foreigners and tries to help them, you can mock.So the fact that America didn't do well in Iraq, didn't do well in Afghanistan: "You see?We cared about those foreigners."And then you mock them and ridicule them, because you haven't found a story of American engagement that is successful, that you can tell in contrast to that story.So you then just open yourself up to the fear of foreigners and the mockery for caring about them.That's his political shtick.

So the legacy for the Trump years, the Trump war legacy, he is unable to disentangle from the 9/11 endless wars.Where are we at the end of the Trump administration?

Actually, Trump's effects on the general trend lines and the war on terror and in the war in Afghanistan are very small, almost unnoticeable.All the trend lines, they were already set by the end of the Obama administration.And they've more or less just continued with, I think, very little change and very little change in the situation.

One of the things that he also does is, by 2020, as the elections are looming, he's turned his focus, his war focus, basically, on the war at home, which was the way we're relating to it.And his enemies here are antifa, the radical socialists.And he calls it an existential threat.He builds this up, and he uses the tools of anti-terrorism against them.He has DHS arresting people on the West Coast.He has the military involved in the D.C. demonstrations with helicopters, you know, looming above their heads.What's the significance of his war at home?

Well, the great irony of the Trump administration's use of the "war at home" danger is that they're using tools, some tools developed in the war on terror, to try to harass and persecute their political enemies at home, by exaggerating domestic threats that are very—are relatively small and meanwhile, however, ignoring the genuine terrorism threat that they are actually helping to foster and encourage.So there's a real white nationalist terrorism threat.This is not a new threat, by the way.This also has been percolating up and down for, oh, about 40 years.And I was actually involved in litigation against the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Texas at the beginning of the 1980s, long, long ago, when I was a trial lawyer in Texas.

And that white nationalist terrorism threat has been around for a long time, and he's made that threat much, much worse, yet is meanwhile ignoring that threat, pretending it doesn't exist, and using some of the post-9/11 tools against an exaggerated threat that he claims exists at home that is mostly imaginary.It's not completely imaginary, but it's mostly imaginary.

There are leftist extremists.It's just I think an objective analysis of the leftist extremist threat and the right and the white nationalist extremist threat is the white nationalist extremists are much more numerous and more dangerous and have probably actually killed more people in the last 10 years.Probably killed more people in the last 10 years than Islamist extremists have killed in the United States.And it's not even close.

But the fear is, for whatever reason, is the 9/11 fear remains to this day.But Oklahoma City, the fear of the folks that were involved in that kind of action, don't seem to have any lasting power.Why is that?

Actually, I think the white nationalist danger was correct, was perceived as quite serious after the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995.That threat had been building for 15 years, largely ignored.But by the early '90s it was getting a lot more attention, and did get a lot of attention in the mid '90s.It then—and then it faded, and people ignored it again.Trump basically fostered and encouraged that threat to rise exponentially.

It exploded in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, of all places.And now I think it is moving back into the foreground of American attention.There are going to be trials now of hundreds of people who have been accused.And a lot of stuff is going to come out during those trials about the scale of the white nationalist terrorist movement, which is scattered all over the United States.And I think that threat now is going to get a lot more attention in the early 2020s, and deservedly so.

And in that territory, I mean, his rhetoric against the socialist left in alliance with Muslim extremists, his constant calls for his base to participate in defending their country, leading up to the lies he told about the election and the fact that it was stolen, and the belief by his followers that they believed his statements and they were ready to do what he said, which was to defend—be patriots and be ready to act.

Can I speak a little bit about the way the 9/11 menace has worked its way into the culture of the United States more deeply?At the height of the communist threat and the stories of communist subversion, all these monster movies emerged in the 1950s in which, you know, like Night of the Living Dead, and so on, in which, you know, the threat is right next to you, and it looks like a normal person.

Post-apocalyptic fear has become a big part of American popular culture since 9/11.You see it in shows like The Walking Dead, but in many, many other things.And so what you've now got is a significant public movement in the United States that is defending itself against the apocalypse.The active white nationalist terrorist threat that joined to attack the Capitol is actually the minority part of that large movement.The majority part of that large movement is actually forting up in their homes with automatic weapons and survivalist gear in the belief—many people sincerely believe that someday, their home is going to come under attack by domestic marauders.

I think this is all part of a post-9/11 culture in which there are imagined foreign enemies that dissipated, perhaps, but we see these enemies at home, and there's a survivalist mentality.So this huge sense of "We need to prepare for the apocalypse," the majority of it defensive, so to speak, but an active minority that actually wants to go on the offensive in revolutionary movements to overthrow the established government.

So let's talk about Jan. 6.The irony of the fact that Al Qaeda on 9/11 tried to destroy the Capitol building; they were stopped by a group of patriots that were willing to give their lives to take down Flight 93.Then you've got Jan. 6, where you've got another group of Americans who consider themselves patriots in the likeness of those on Flight 93, and they succeed at taking over the Capitol building.Talk about that, and talk about what sort of facilitated that.

It is remarkable these bookends of 20 years, where the Islamist enemy that feels weak wants to bring down the United States by [the] gigantic symbolic act of attacking our Capitol.And 20 years later, another enemy of the United States that feels very weak, but this time made up of American citizens, want to bring down the established United States, by again attacking the very same United States Capitol.On 9/11, members of Congress are fleeing, and on Jan. 6, members of Congress are fleeing once again as they are under attack, only this time under attack by their own citizens.

In the first case, ordinary Americans, not committed, frenzied zealots, but ordinary Americans, rose up to defend the America they believed in and their own lives and to protect others on Flight 93.On Jan. 6, of course, the enemies are the fanatics, rather ordinary Americans.Some of them were Capitol Police officers.Some of them were people in the news media.Others who were doing what they could to limit the damage and recover.If America recovers from the first threat, it was because of the strength of ordinary commonsense Americans who want to solve daily problems working with others.And if America recovers from the modern threat, it will again be because ordinary Americans rise to the occasion to come together with others, to solve the problems in front of them as best they can.

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