STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
This week, the nation marks the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the United States. The journalist Peter Bergen says that's long enough ago that for many people, it's not even a distant memory.
PETER BERGEN: Yeah. 9/11 was one of the hinge events of American history. And the kids that I teach at Arizona State, and I include graduate students, and they're not kids, were not born or were children on 9/11.
INSKEEP: Peter Bergen covered terrorism even before that attack. As a CNN producer, he was part of a team that interviewed Osama Bin Laden in the 1990s in Afghanistan. After 9/11, he followed the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq, anti-terror campaigns around the world, the raid to kill Bin Laden and more. He's written a book about that quarter-century called "All The Presidents' Wars."
BERGEN: It's sort of disappointing, I guess, that we haven't learned from some of the previous mistakes that we've made in the past. Hopefully we won't keep making them.
INSKEEP: Bergen says the war has changed American security and American politics. One change was the growth of presidential power, including the power of presidents to go to war, whether the public approves or not.
BERGEN: And the biggest example of that, of course, is the Iran war, which is if you were to do a checklist of all the things you'd want to have before you started a war, an imminent threat, public buy in, congressional authorization, NATO allies, a U.N. resolution. We don't have any of those.
INSKEEP: You're telling me there's all these things that should be necessary or traditionally would have been necessary for a president to take the country to war, and we have evolved into a situation where the president can ignore all that and just go to war.
BERGEN: It seems so. I mean, obviously, after 9/11, President George W. Bush ticked all those boxes. There was an imminent threat. There was a U.S. congressional authorization. There was a U.N. resolution in favor of the right to self-defense or a - the first and only time that all of our NATO allies have come to the collective self-defense under Article 5. So it's eroded over time, but, you know, President Bush obviously eroded it significantly with the Iraq War, where the imminent threat was not true. He didn't have a U.N. resolution in favor. He didn't have NATO allies, except the British, really.
INSKEEP: He did get some kind of a vote out of Congress, as I recall.
BERGEN: He got a vote - he got a big vote out of Congress. And also, very importantly, Steve, you know, congressional votes are partly based on public opinion. At the beginning of the war, the Iraq war was quite popular because 75% of Americans were in favor of the war. Now, in the case of the Iran war, at the beginning of the war, it was only 41% of Americans were in favor of the war, which is the lowest number since polling began.
And obviously, that number hasn't increased as - because the war has not gone as promised. So - but I think also President Obama contributed to this imperial presidency. If you think about the Libya war to overthrow Gadhafi. There was a U.N. resolution in favor of that. There were NATO allies. But he never went to Congress to get authorization, and he said publicly it was his worst mistake.
INSKEEP: I feel we need for even some adults listening to this...
BERGEN: Yeah.
INSKEEP: ...To recall this is 2011.
BERGEN: Yeah.
INSKEEP: It's in the Arab Spring. There are all these uprisings. Moammar Gadhafi, the leader of Libya, is under pressure, and the U.S. supported with Europeans this campaign to unseat him, right?
BERGEN: Yeah.
INSKEEP: That's what you're talking about.
BERGEN: And President Obama has publicly said that not planning for the day after the fall of Gadhafi was his biggest mistake. Now, you can argue whether or not that's true, but it certainly is his opinion. And there was no plan for the day after. And one of the themes in my book is, look, you've got to plan for the day after. Otherwise, the - you're going to lose the peace, even if you've won the war.
INSKEEP: Did President Trump in his first term also contribute to this gradual expansion of presidential power?
BERGEN: I think, you know, if you look at the anti-ISIS campaign, which by any standard was a success, you know, relatively small American fatalities, relatively small amounts of money that the United States spent on those wars.
INSKEEP: And they smashed ISIS in Syria and Iraq (ph).
BERGEN: They smashed ISIS in Syria and Iraq. Now, I call this strategy go light and go long, meaning it's a relatively small American footprint. In the case of the fight against Iraq, it was Iraqis and Syrians who were doing the fighting and the dying. When the ISIS areas were liberated, it was Syrians and Iraqis who liberated these areas, not Americans on Humvees.
INSKEEP: Peter Bergen says both Obama and Trump ordered acts of war around the world without engaging the public and without putting many U.S. troops at risk. Often it worked, though it cut the rest of us out of the discussion. Americans do not decide to go to war and are unlikely to be drafted to fight, leaving the job to an all-volunteer military.
BERGEN: I'm describing a situation where only 1% of the population really serves, and it's become increasingly cut off from the civilian population in a way that wasn't true during the Korean War or the Vietnam War, where there was a draft. And that allows a president, I think, you know, to do things that he or she otherwise might not have been able to do politically.
INSKEEP: The justification for a president to do what you're describing is, I must act quickly so that we are safe.
BERGEN: Yeah.
INSKEEP: After 25 years of this, are we safer?
BERGEN: Well, we are safer in the sense that we have spent a tremendous amount, not just on our offensive measures, but, I mean, the defensive measures we have are extraordinary. There was no TSA before 9/11. There was no Department of Homeland Security, which is the largest government agency outside the Pentagon. The number of FBI-led joint terrorism task forces has tripled since 9/11. The intelligence budget has quintupled. So, yeah, I think we're a lot safer. And that, you know, the - if you - on the positive side of the ledger, there hasn't been an attack on any scale by a foreign terrorist organization since 9/11, other than one attack in Pensacola, Florida, which killed three American soldiers in 2019 by a Saudi military officer.
INSKEEP: So you've concluded that we're safer. But, of course, what we want to do is be safe and free. Are we as free as we were before 9/11?
BERGEN: Well, no. Part of that is technology. I mean, when you or I walk out of this building, there are cameras observing our movements, whatever we...
INSKEEP: Facial recognition.
BERGEN: Yeah, yeah. So I...
INSKEEP: Somebody could probably follow all my movements or yours.
BERGEN: Yeah, yeah.
INSKEEP: Yeah.
BERGEN: I mean, a lot of these technologies may have been sped up by the war. Companies like Palantir basically came out of the counter terrorism war. But that said, some of these big technological changes were happening independently of what happened in the post-9/11 period.
INSKEEP: If we assume that it's supposed to be a democracy...
BERGEN: Yeah.
INSKEEP: ...And remain a democracy, and we should have some voice in foreign affairs and national security and try somehow to be thoughtful and participate while not getting in the way of what needs to be done.
BERGEN: Can you imagine some way that Americans could reengage in national security and have some meaningful voice in it?
BERGEN: Well, that would mean that Congress would have to take its responsibilities more seriously. I mean, I think the erosion of Congress' ability to kind of be involved in these national security decisions is an erosion of the public's ability to be involved in these national security decisions, and we need to go back to that. Certainly, the founders didn't intend - the whole point of the exercise was to make - ensure that a king-like figure just didn't take the nation to war on a personal whim.
INSKEEP: Peter Bergen's latest book is called "All the Presidents' Wars." Peter, thanks for coming by.
BERGEN: Thank you, Steve. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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