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Sept. 5, 2021 - The Ben Shapiro Show
41:26
Condoleezza Rice | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 117
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We were on Afghan territory fighting the counter-terrorism fight alongside Afghans, alongside allies from NATO, using intelligence assets that we had developed to find bin Laden and kill him in Pakistan.
That 20 years bought us a peace that I did not think possible on September 12th.
This week is the 20th anniversary of September 11th attacks.
20 years ago, 19 Al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four airliners, three of which hit their targets.
Tower 1 and Tower 2 of the World Trade Center, as well as the Pentagon.
Those attacks resulted in 2,997 deaths and 25,000 injuries, altering forever the fabric of American life.
The following day, in an address to the nation, President George W. Bush declared war on the terrorists who committed these acts.
This is an enemy that tries to hide.
But it won't be able to hide forever.
This is an enemy that thinks its harbors are safe.
But they won't be safe forever.
Closely involved with the decisions and operations to come was National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, who joins us today to discuss the anniversary and the latest developments we've witnessed the past few weeks in Afghanistan.
Condoleezza Rice went on to become the Secretary of State during President Bush's second term, and before this administration, Secretary Rice also served on the National Security Council for President H.W.
Bush.
Now, she is Director of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
In response to that dark moment in September 2001, Secretary Rice led the charge of transformational diplomacy, efforts by the United States to develop democratic systems of government throughout the Middle East.
With the incredibly fast fall of a democratic Afghan government that the United States co-developed, we'll get her reaction and thoughts on how the current administration could and should have handled the situation.
Plus, what Secretary Rice makes of the idea that Afghanistan was a so-called endless war, and what we have forgotten in America in these 20 years since that tragic day.
A hand welcome. This is the Ben Shapiro show Sunday special.
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Connelly Sirais, it's an honor to have you here.
Thanks so much for joining the show.
A pleasure to be with you.
So let's start with obviously what's in the news.
First, your reaction to the precipitous and catastrophic withdrawal, I think my feelings are pretty clear on this, from Afghanistan, which seemed to be not only poorly planned tactically, but has some pretty dramatic geostrategic consequences.
Well, I wrote about this, Ben, because I think the real issue here is that even if one believed that it was time to withdraw, which I actually don't believe it was time to withdraw, but if one believed that it was time to withdraw, this could have been done in a more orderly fashion.
For instance, we know that the Taliban don't fight in the winter.
There is a fighting season in Afghanistan.
It would have been perfectly logical to wait until they had gone back into the mountains of Pakistan.
I think it would have been wise to hang on to Bagram, maybe even some of our other seven airfields that we had there, so that transport of people out could have been slower, more orderly, could have taken place from more secure locations.
I've been to Hamid Karzai International Airport.
It's not a place that you would want to try and secure.
It's very, very close to the city.
Bagram is tens of miles away, and so I think that there were ways to do this in a fashion that we wouldn't have seen the precipitous fall of Kabul, and where we wouldn't have had the kind of chaos that we had at the airport.
We can perhaps get into later why I think it might have been better to stay in general, but just talking about the extraction itself, I do want to say The men and women of the American Armed Forces, as always, did heroic work to get as many people out as they did under extraordinarily difficult circumstances, chaotic circumstances, where there was no way for force protection.
We lost 13 brave people, but I just want to say the American military, again, covered itself in considerable excellence and glory.
As the Secretary writes, let's talk about the enormous amount of revisionist history that's now being put out there as a justification for this pullout, and there is some bipartisan stuff happening there, with people on both right and left talking about how Afghanistan was a nation-building exercise, a failed nation-building exercise, this is why we had to pull out, or that we were in the middle of America's endless war, our longest war, and therefore we had to pull out.
So why don't we start from the beginning?
You obviously were at the White House for September 11th.
Can you give us the Sort of timeline here.
What was the original justification?
Just to remind folks who may not remember since it's now been two decades.
What was the reason we went into Afghanistan in the first place?
What were the goals we were trying to achieve?
We went into Afghanistan because that had been the source of the planning, plotting, and indeed the ability to attack on September 11th.
That's why we went to Afghanistan.
It was a security concern, and I can remember the President's concern that another attack, a follow-on attack, might be imminent.
We waited some three weeks before we actually went into Afghanistan because we had a lot of work to do.
And I'll come back to one of those elements, which we've now given up.
But we had a lot of work to do to try to get forces in a position to take down the Taliban, which was harboring al-Qaeda.
That was the reason for going to Afghanistan.
What people don't understand about so-called nation building is that if you are going to prevent a place from returning to terrorism once you've killed the first wave of terrorists, it has to be something of a stable government.
You have to try and create circumstances under which you can work with partners, as we have been doing for 20 years, for counter-terrorism operations, where you can work with partners, as we have been doing for 20 years with our NATO allies, to try and stabilize the situation so that there isn't a swamp for the terrorists to be active in.
You have to work with our allies, as we have been, to continue to have intelligence assets on the ground.
And so, an Afghanistan in which we were present, I think, was good for the Afghan people.
It did do good things for women.
It did do good things for the Afghan people, having suffered under the horrors of the Taliban.
But, Ben, that wasn't the reason to use the American Armed Forces.
The reason to use the American Armed Forces was to secure a place Where we could fight the war on terror, where we could have counter-terrorism operations, where we could have intelligence operations, where we could have an air base from which to fly drones and close air support.
This was a strategic asset in Afghanistan.
It was not largesse and simply humanitarianism.
So Secretary Rice, there were a lot of early successes in the war, obviously the toppling of the Taliban inside of three weeks, and the establishment of a provisional government.
And there were early successes even in experiments with democracy in Afghanistan.
By 2005, 2006, 2007, there was a significant insurgence.
Maybe you can take us through sort of the history of the development of the war, because I think a lot of Americans are trapped in a mindset about what Afghanistan was that is circa 2009, 2010, and had nothing to do with where we were circa 2021.
We were after the overthrow of the Taliban.
Let me just say one other thing.
Nobody was in any way overly optimistic about Afghanistan.
We knew how hard it was going to be.
I remember on that Saturday morning at Camp David, after 9-11, looking at this rolled out map of Afghanistan and thinking, oh no, not Afghanistan.
This is a place that great powers go to die.
The British, the Soviet Union.
We knew that this was a tough place.
The first day that I flew into Afghanistan, some several months later, I remember thinking, these people have high mountains and dirt.
This is going to be a very difficult operation.
But we were succeeding, and by the way, talking about allies and friends, we had mobilized NATO under Article 5 to help us.
The Germans, the French, the Italians, the Canadians were all out in the field, the Dutch, trying to help build this Afghan army and this Afghan government.
They were having elections.
Women were going to school.
Girls were going to school.
Women were going into the professions.
And so, we had many successes in Afghanistan.
But the most important thing is that we were really making progress in terms of creating a stable foundation for counter-terrorism operations, for intelligence from which to carry out those operations.
And I mentioned, Ben, that it took us a while to start the war in Afghanistan.
We couldn't Find a place for our air assets to operate.
Close air support to the Afghan fighters, for instance.
And so I remember paying a king's ransom to Karimov, the then dictator of Uzbekistan, to let us use his airfields.
That's why it's so sad that we gave up this strategic asset in Bagram, because now we're back in a situation where our closest airfields are in the Middle East, in Qatar.
That's an own goal.
That's a mistake.
But we were making a lot of progress.
I will tell you that one of the things we were never able to really get a handle on was Pakistan.
Pakistani territory continued to be a haven for the Haqqani network and other terrorists to go back and forth across that border in the south of Afghanistan.
And I think that one of the big failures, one of the reasons that it was hard to defeat the Taliban was that they did have a safe haven in Pakistan.
So Secretary Rice, there had been a major mission shift under President Obama early on in his administration.
He made clear that he thought Iraq was the bad war and the useless war and Afghanistan was the good war.
And so he did a couple of troop surges, including a sort of half-hearted large troop surge.
I say half-hearted because he had been requested many more troops by General Petraeus than he actually gave him.
And then immediately upon putting the troops in, he said that we were going to start withdrawing and we were going to change the mission from essentially holding as much territory as possible under the national government to retrenching within certain more populated areas.
And, you know, using that territory is basically a base of operations.
We're also going to draw down American troop levels from the 2030 40,000 range all the way down to 10,000 and below.
What did you make of that move?
And and what did that mean for how sustainable situation was on the ground in Afghanistan?
Well, I was initially hardened by the idea of a troop surge, although the conditions in Iraq and the conditions in Afghanistan were very different.
We had had a successful troop surge in Iraq that essentially won that war.
We then, of course, gave up territory.
ISIS came back.
But I think you could say that in 2008-2009, Iraq was pretty stable.
So I was a fan of troop surges, and I thought, well, this is a good idea.
But then I started reading that we weren't going to do enough to really make a difference.
If you're going to do a troop search, do a troop search.
Don't put limitations on the numbers of troops that you're going to use.
The other thing is I've never understood this idea that you telegraph to your enemy.
We're only staying for this long and then we're going to start to withdraw and we're retreating to this place.
It's as if during World War II we started broadcasting to the Germans or the Japanese exactly what we planned to do with the battle plan.
And that tendency to want to talk about where we're moving to and how we're going to retrench and when we're going to withdraw, I think has been really one of the most pernicious elements of our military policy over the last several years.
So, Secretary Rice, in a second I want to ask you about some of the arguments that have been made in favor of the withdrawal.
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Okay, so let's talk about the various arguments that made in favor of withdrawal, some of which I think are just disconnected from reality, Secretary Rice.
So the one that you hear the most is that this was an endless war.
You heard President Biden say that repeatedly over the course of the last several months.
By the time we left, we had a troop level that was basically ranking number nine in terms of countries where we actually had troops.
We had under 3,000 troops in Afghanistan.
We had had zero combat casualties since February of 2020.
And yet there seemed to be this great urgent drive to remove all the troops as soon as possible under the rubric of endless war.
What did you make of that particular argument?
Well, when the American president keeps telling the American people that this is an endless war that we have to get out of, even if they're not paying a lot of attention because Afghanistan had gone quieter, as you noted, they're going to start to think it's an endless war and we have to get out of it.
And here I will say I don't think we had the best policies, and I've said this before, under the Trump administration either.
This notion that America couldn't sustain a few thousand troops in a strategically vital part of the world, where we were still fighting terrorist and terrorist resurgence, Where we had an air base that could help us keep an eye on both Pakistan, not that stable a place with nuclear weapons, and Iran, probably our pitched enemy in the Middle East.
The idea that we couldn't sustain that as a great power, as a superpower, was really extraordinary.
And here's the argument I would have hoped we would have said.
We are a country that benefited for a couple of centuries by our great oceans protecting us and peaceful neighbors to the north and the south.
We found out on September 11th that we weren't protected.
We decided we were going to take the war to them so we didn't have to fight it on our soil.
That means that we need to forward deploy our forces to fight them out there so we don't have to fight them in here.
That means that we may have to deploy small numbers, contingents of American forces, intelligence assets and military hardware forward in places like Afghanistan, where we can with allies from around the world, as well as with Afghan allies, Continue to prosecute the war on terror so we don't have to prosecute it at home.
I wish somebody had made that argument.
Maybe we should take responsibility, Ben, those of us in the Bush administration, for not making that argument forcefully enough.
We were pleased with the good we were doing for the Afghan people, but they did a lot of good for us, too, in letting us use their territory for our own protection.
I would also have said We've done this forward deployment before.
Our longest war is actually Korea.
It is an armistice, not a victory in war.
We have 28,000 American forces on the Korean peninsula because even a powerful South Korean army can't stand alone against the North.
And so, why do we think that a younger, weaker Afghan army can stand alone against an insurgency?
But I would have made the strategic argument, I wish we'd made it better.
So Secretary Rice, let's talk about the Afghan army for a second because this is another excuse that's been used lately is the incredibly quick collapse of the Afghan army.
President Biden himself has blamed the Afghan army.
He has suggested that they didn't have any will to fight, that basically if they weren't capable of holding up their own country at this point, there was nothing that five or 10 years would have done down the road.
He's literally said that.
It seems to me that that is again utterly disconnected from the facts on the ground, namely the fact that we built the Afghan army so that they could explicitly work with us in specific ways and then we removed all of their support bases and told everyone in Afghanistan we were leaving.
Well, I've heard many people now say maybe we built the Afghan army too much in our own image.
We built them needing air power, for instance, and needing the support of our air power.
And then, of course, we took away the contractors that were maintaining the aircraft.
American pilots were no longer flying and training them and helping them to fly these air missions.
You make a good point about telling them that we were leaving.
I imagine the scene, you know, that the Taliban, which was making inroads, we have to be clear about that.
The Taliban goes into some area, encounters Afghan military personnel, says, you do know that the Americans are leaving.
You're going to be left here with us.
If you resist, we're going to kill your children.
So how about you come over to our side and lay down your weapons?
It's not hard to see why the morale of the Afghan army collapsed under those circumstances when we didn't even tell the new commander of Bagram Air Force Base to whom we were turning it over, the Afghan commander, that we were leaving.
We left in the middle of the night.
We did nothing really to shore up their sense of their ability to fight.
And if one thing really, really rankles me, this idea that they didn't fight.
And they chose to surrender to the Taliban.
They lost 66,000 people in this war.
I was talking with some of my colleagues, former military officers.
They talk about a general who we now think, an Afghan general, who we now think is trapped behind Taliban lines, who lost both his legs in a firefight that we were involved in.
And he can't get out, couldn't get to the airport.
I thought that if one thing really bothered me, it was the heartlessness of talking about Afghan fighters in that way when they'd given so much.
Yes, people surrendered.
They surrendered rather quickly, but I don't think we gave them a chance.
Secretary Rice, one of the other things that's been said is that the Afghan government was corrupt, that there were serious corruption issues going back all the way to the Karzai administration in Afghanistan, that the United States was never able to sort of wrap our arms around that.
And thus, you know, there was not any support for the interim government or for the current national government of Afghanistan in any real measure, that tribalism was eventually going to replace that anyway.
It seems to me that there's a bit of historical ignorance when it comes to comparative situations.
The South Korean government didn't hold an election until the 80s.
We were literally there for 30 to 40 years before they held a free and fair election.
So, you know, giving people a couple of decades to move from absolute tyranny and tribalism towards something remotely resembling a democracy actually takes a fair bit of time.
But what do you make of the development of Afghanistan's government?
Well, I'm glad you mentioned the South Korean government.
They were actually a military dictatorship for a while.
Yes, look, the Afghan government, and I fought this every day as National Security Advisor and then as Secretary, we were never able to get a hand on their corruption and we were never able to get a handle on the drug trade.
There's no doubt about that.
Full stop.
And it did undermine and erode confidence of the Afghan population in their government.
There's also no doubt about that.
But they aren't alone in being a government that had a problem with corruption.
And I thought that this last government was trying to deal with some of those problems.
It takes time sometimes to root out corruption.
But whatever you think about the Afghan government and their problems with corruption, their problems with the drug trade, their problems with tribalism, they were far cry from the Taliban Let's look at the comparative perspective here.
soccer stadium given to them by the United Nations.
And when they were asked about this, these Taliban leaders, they said, well, actually you need to give us another stadium so we can continue to execute people in this one and then we can play games in the other one.
So let's look at the comparative perspective here.
Yes, this was an Afghan government that was challenged, but it wasn't the Taliban.
And it was the Afghan government that tried to help us.
When I hear people say, well, you know, the Afghan people obviously didn't want us there.
You know, we see how many Afghans, hundreds of thousands of Afghans, were willing to sign on to the American effort to try to build their country in a better way, who were willing to give their lives to try to build their country in a better way, and who, oh by the way, were willing to help us To build counterterrorism capabilities that made us safer.
I hope when the history of this is written That we will remember that this 20 years that we bought, because we were on Afghan territory, fighting the counter-terrorism fight alongside Afghans, alongside allies from NATO, using intelligence assets that we had developed to find bin Laden and kill him in Pakistan.
That that 20 years bought us a peace that I did not think possible.
on September 12th.
If you had told me we weren't going to have a big attack like September 11th again, I would have told you you were out of your mind.
And so let's not forget what this 20 years bought for us.
And oh, by the way, that it did buy a chance for the Afghan people at something better.
Secretary Rice, in just one second, I want to talk about that because I think that there's been a sort of willpower failure in the United States and certainly a failure of imagination that rivals the failures of imagination taking place in the pre-911 era.
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So let's talk for a second about where we are now in 2021.
I was, I believe, 17 years old in 2001.
It's been half a generation.
A huge number of Americans not only don't remember 9-11, they weren't alive for 9-11.
And so there seems to be this sort of counterfactual assumption that no matter what we did post 9-11, we were bound not to have another terror attack.
And because there was no further severe terror attack on American soil, a spectacular attack like 9-11, there's an assumption that no matter what we did, it was never going to happen.
And we may very well see the results of that sort of thinking in exactly the same way that we saw the results of that sort of thinking on 9-11, given the fact that you have the president of the United States right now saying that al-Qaeda was not in Afghanistan and we had routed them out.
They are right back in Afghanistan.
The Haqqani Network, which is al-Qaeda associated, was helping to, quote unquote, handle security.
at the Kabul International Airport.
And you have ISIS, which is obviously extraordinarily active over there.
Are we experiencing a similar national failure of imagination like we saw in the late 90s?
We certainly are experiencing some forgetfulness about what happened on September 11th and what transpired after it.
You know, I hear a lot about the mistakes that we made, that the Obama administration made, that the Trump administration made.
Yeah, in 20 years we made some mistakes.
But in an enterprise this tough, this difficult, you're going to make some mistakes.
What we did achieve, though, was a, despite all of the mistakes, besides missteps, maybe there were other ways to do things, but we achieved what I did not think possible on September 12th, which was not another attack.
It was so frightening after 9-11.
We had streams of intelligence talking about radiological attacks on Washington, D.C., smallpox attacks on the country.
constant threats of another attack.
It really wasn't until we captured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was the 9-11 planner, he was the sort of field general for North America, that we had a sense of what they might have been planning and were able to begin to act on it.
It wasn't until we were able to take out some of these nests to work with the world, actually, to trace their financing in ways that led us to some of their people.
And so what this bought us was an opportunity to really do the hard work of counterterrorism.
I remember, Ben, at the President's speech to the Congress, the joint session of Congress, He said that this fight on terrorism will be in place long after I'm gone and many of my successors.
And we lost patience because perhaps we forgot what it was like on September 12th and 13th and 14th, when it was terrifying to go onto an airplane, when it was terrifying to go into the center of New York City, When we worried that the anthrax attacks were actually foreign attacks.
Yes, I think we have a bit of amnesia and I can't blame, you know, my students here at Stanford who weren't even conscious on September 11th.
But I surely don't understand how those who were in the Congress, in the Senate, those who were in positions of authority at that time, how they've forgotten.
That I can't, that I can't forgive.
So Secretary Rice, let's talk about some of the other geostrategic implications of what just happened in Afghanistan.
Because obviously, one major geostrategic implication is the rise of jihadism basically everywhere.
Osama Bin Laden said in the run-up to 9-11 that he thought that America was a paper tiger.
Certainly, that impression seems to be taking root across the jihadist world.
The Iranians have been getting very aggressive in their talk about developing a nuclear weapon.
And obviously, terror groups have already seeped back into Afghanistan and they're There's a rally this week with members of jihadist groups holding a mock funeral for the United States, complete with fake coffins.
But there's also some major geostrategic implications for China and Russia.
Despite the State Department's newfound enthusiasm for large-scale letter sending to the Taliban, they said they've gotten over 100 countries to sign a letter to the Taliban urging them to allow people to leave.
China and Russia were not on that list of countries.
The UN Security Council resolution that called for freedom of movement from Afghanistan did not include China, did not include Russia.
Both abstained.
China is already obviously on the way toward recognizing the Taliban as the legitimate regime in Afghanistan, which by the way is a major shift from 96 to 2001 when only three countries on planet Earth actually recognized the Taliban as a regime.
Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Pakistan.
Now you have major regimes that are going to do so, probably including the United States, given that we have to bribe them to get people out.
The Russians continue to nurture their relationship with the Taliban.
And as far as other countries, it would be astonishing to me if the Russians don't look with envious eyes at Latvia and Estonia, and the Chinese don't look at Taiwan and say to themselves, what exactly are our limits here?
Well, credibility is not divisible.
You can't lose credibility in one place and maintain it in other places, because people look at the totality of what you've become.
I think we should remember that in the run-up to 9-11, al-Qaeda got Bolder and bolder.
First there was the attack on the World Trade Center in New York, and then there was the attack on our embassies in 1998 in Tanzania and Kenya.
Then there was the attack on the coal, and then there was the attack of 9-11.
Each time we didn't respond, they got bolder.
And so I expect that the jihadist movement will be now quite bold.
One thing that we used to think was that we had to have an alternative.
We had to show people that this wasn't the only way.
Now they're going to be able to crow for some time that they've defeated a major power, and they will attract and they will recruit on that basis.
So that's the first problem.
The second problem is actually with our allies.
I'll come to China and Russia, but I'm as concerned that our allies, who apparently weren't really consulted properly, but most importantly had signed on to this 20-year war, are now wondering about us.
And it's going to take some work to rebuild those relationships.
And you can't just do it with words.
I'm a former diplomat.
I believe in diplomacy, but when it comes to some of the challenges out there where we have bad actors that might try to exploit it's going to require a
Some action too, so I hope that we're thinking of ways to send a strong message about Taiwan because the Chinese will wonder if we weren't willing to sustain a presence in Afghanistan given all of the blood and treasure given the fact that that was where the attack came from in 9-11 are we really going to to help Taiwan defend itself as we have said under the Taiwan Relations Act and
If you're in Ukraine today, are you really believing that if Vladimir Putin decides he's going to be more aggressive in eastern Ukraine, or maybe even start to move that line westward, is the United States really going to respond when it wouldn't stay in Afghanistan, given all that Afghanistan meant to us?
And for Iran, what will it mean to them about what we're willing to do to defend our friends and allies from Iranian groups in Iraq or Yemen or other places?
So we need some action.
I would probably start with Taiwan, and that probably means maybe another robust arms package to Taiwan or some demonstration that the United States is good to its word, because our credibility has taken a hit.
And we just have to understand that and move on from there.
Secretary Rice, you mentioned our allies, and I really do wonder if our allies are going to start to pretty quickly triangulate and try to make nice with China and Russia, given the weakness of the United States.
You've seen that sort of thing from Germany with regard to Russia because they're reliant in at least large part on Russian oil.
But I wouldn't be surprised at all if you see erstwhile allies in the Middle East starting to make moves toward China, which is perfectly happy to do military arms deals with a lot of our allies in the Middle East simply because A lot of our allies are feeling like the United States can't be trusted.
In some ways, it's almost easier to be an enemy of the United States, just wait them out long enough, than it is to be an ally who might get undercut.
I think that they will ultimately recognize that the United States is a better partner than the Chinese are in the Middle East.
But I will say that for a while they're going to hedge their bets.
Look for some visits from our friends in the Middle East to China.
Look for some visits from our friends in the Middle East to Russia.
They're going to want to lay down a marker.
that they are prepared to deal with anyone, because frankly I think a number of them are a bit frightened about what we really are willing to do, you know, and for even our allies in Europe.
I don't see them abandoning NATO. I've heard some really kind of apocalyptic scenarios.
I don't see that happening.
But I will tell you this.
They had thought that maybe some of the things that had happened with Europe under the Trump administration were a kind of aberration because you know that they thought that it was because President Trump didn't know how to do diplomacy.
Well, they thought in President Biden, they had somebody who was an experienced hand.
And so maybe this isn't about the president.
Maybe this is about America and how America now reads her role in the world some 75, 80 plus years after the end of World War II.
And so that's going to, for a while, Make them take a step back and wonder whether they can trust us.
It's going to take some really hard work to rebuild it.
I don't think it's beyond the realm of the possible that we can, but we aren't going to do that if we just keep saying, no, our credibility hasn't been damaged.
Our credibility's been damaged.
Final question for you.
So obviously we are about to commemorate the 20th anniversary of 9-11.
That was a very odd date for Joe Biden originally to pick to pull out of Afghanistan completely.
Having been there at the White House on 9-11, what message would you give to Americans as a reminder of what 9-11 meant and what it still means?
I would say to Americans, particularly those of you who were alive that day, don't ever forget both the fear that we were going to be attacked and attacked again and attacked again.
Don't ever forget what it felt like to try to get on an airplane for the first time.
Don't ever forget how you felt when you heard that an airplane went down a few weeks later that actually was not a terrorist attack.
And remember that a lot of brave men and women gave their lives to make sure that you wouldn't have to fear.
They gave their lives to make sure that your government and your military were doing what they could to protect you despite the challenges of being in a place like Afghanistan.
And never again take for granted that America is safe.
America's safety is a daily proposition that has to be worked at Constantly through vigilance and through hard work.
And we've made it harder now with the exit from Afghanistan, but it's going to be necessary work that has to continue.
And I just want to say, Ben, if I may, to the men and women who served, many of whom were maimed.
Others, families whose loved ones lost their lives.
You gave us 20 years of peace.
After the most horrific attack on our territory since the War of 1812.
And that's not going to be forgotten, and it wasn't for nothing.
And thank you for that service.
Secretary Rice, it's an honor and a pleasure to speak with you, even though it has to be during a very dark time in American history.
I really appreciate your time.
Colonel Lisa Rice, thanks so much for joining The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special.
Thank you.
Well, as we mark the 20th anniversary of 9-11, I think it's important to remember what we learned from 9-11.
In number one, we did learn that America is capable of coming together in the face of a common foe.
I think we all remember, if we are old enough to remember, how Americans saw each other as brothers and sisters as opposed to enemies and opponents.
It's something we need to regain.
I think we also learned on 9-11 that the world will come to our shores, that the attempt to run from the world to hide behind our borders, to hide behind oceans, that that inevitably fails, and that the policies undertaken by prior administrations, which largely involved ignoring foreign problems as they fomented, downplaying those problems as they manifested against American interests, whether we're talking about the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania or the USS Cole, how all of that inevitably leads to worse and worse crises.
And if we forget these lessons, if we forget that there are foes out there who want to destroy the American way of life, who are seeking to destroy our interests and fight us at every turn, if instead we start to see our enemies not in our actual enemies, but in the people who live next door to us, if we start saying that the people who share a country with us are worse enemies than the people who live overseas, who hate our way of life, who wish to see the United States ground down into the dust, then we are a country that is ripe for a fall, and we only make attacks like 9-11 more inevitable.
The reality is that 9-11 could have been prevented.
The next 9-11 can be prevented, but only if the United States believes in itself, believes in its own values, believes in the virtue of its citizenry, and only if we are willing to fight on behalf of those values.
If not, we are doomed to suffer many more attacks like 9-11.
For 20 years, our brave men and women staved those attacks off.
For 20 years, we remembered the sacrifices of the people who ran into the burning towers on 9-11 to save their fellow Americans.
For 20 years, those images were ingrained in our brains.
Now, as they fade, the lessons that we learned on 9-11 may be fading along with them.
Memories fade over time.
I was only 17 when 9-11 happened.
A lot of my listeners weren't even born when 9-11 happened.
And it's easy to forget what 9-11 was, what it meant, and how vulnerable the United States remains, even today, in the face of the fact that 9-11 happened a very, very long time ago.
But the reality is that the period between World War I and II is about the same as the period between 9-11 and now.
Catastrophe can repeat itself.
Evil acts can continue to occur.
The weaker America is on the world stage, the more America turns inward on itself rather than orienting outward to spread its virtues and values on behalf, again, of its natural interests, the greater the risk that we repeat some of the tragedies of the past.
And so it's important to remind ourselves of that on the 20th anniversary of September 11th.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is produced by Mathis Glover, executive producer Jeremy Boring.
Our technical director is Austin Stevens, and our assistant director is Pavel Lydowsky.
Our guests are booked by Caitlin Maynard.
Editing is by Jim Nicol.
Audio is mixed by Mike Coromina.
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The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.
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