Ben Sasse on Afghanistan and Reflections on September 11

In today’s episode, Sarah and Steve talk with Sen. Ben Sasse about the botched withdrawal ...

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In today’s episode, Sarah and Steve talk with Sen. Ben Sasse about the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan and what to do next. For a longer summary of the interview, check out an article on The Dispatch website. Plus, Steve talks with Peter Wehner who was a speechwriter for President George W. Bush on September 11, 2001. They share reflections on that day at the White House and the last 20 years.

Show Notes:

-“The Vanishing American Adult” by Ben Sasse

-“Them” by Ben Sasse

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Comments (54)
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  1. Avatar photo
    Graham Slater

    Sarah and Steve, thanks so much. For me, this was the best interview podcast yet, thanks to your good work and both of your guests. Senator Sasse has a remarkable ability to combine his intellect, his experiences as a Senator, and aspects of his faith in a pleasant, non-confrontational manner. His response to Sarah's question about raising the 14-month-old was superb.

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    DonC

    I agree with Mr. Sasse about everything except his claim that the majority of us just want to play candy crush and get drunk: that's exactly who the majority of us we are. We've given up.
    With the conversation dominated by the lunatic fringe, and a media that does nothing to quell the idiocy of the lunatic fringe, those not in the fringe just say "eff it." The barbarians didn't end Rome, Roman complacency did.

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  3. Karl

    Senator Sasse's interview made me think of one of his guest appearances on the Remnant. Congress could've firmed up the U.S. commitment in Afghanistan by passing some budget bill outlining a specific strategy and/or objective. Instead, they deferred oversight and just passed the Overseas Contingency Operations Funding without supervision on an annual basis.

    IIRC, in a previous podcast, Senator Sasse said something to the effect that an Obama Administration official told him behind closed doors that most senators & representatives would rather grandstand about not getting 100% of what they want via legislation but privately push the executive branch behind the scene to get 80% via executive order. It seems to me that by the virtue of being in the U.S. Senate, Senator Sasse could've affected the Afghanistan policy via legislation during the previous two administrations.

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  4. DJ

    He says we were "incredibly successful" in Afghanistan, which flies in the face of a mountain of reporting in the 2019 Washington Post reporting. He then quotes a "top 10 general" to back up his case, as if the people who lied for us the last 20 years are the ones we should be listening to
    now.

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  5. Avatar photo
    Ben Connelly

    Ben Sasse for president. 2024.

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      Anne W (Raw5254)

      I keep wishing he would run. But then I wonder if people would actually listen to what he has to say, or would they be influenced by someone who talks about all the things he/she is going to *give* to the American people once elected. And, WHY, do we keep getting suckered by that line of BS anyway?

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        Ben Connelly

        Oh exactly. I share your feelings entirely. It saddens me that this is what we are reduced to: politicians who bribe us (so to speak) or buy our votes with promises of giving us more stuff and smacking our “enemies” on the other side around. To be honest, as much as I’d like to vote for Sasse, I’m not sure he’d stand a good chance of winning in this environment. The Remnant will stay on the fringes for a generation.

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          Anne W (Raw5254)

          I want someone who knows history, understands the Constitution, and knows how government is supposed to work. I want someone who will do his/her best to be honest and up front with us. And I want someone who cares about being a president to ALL of us. I have had little to no confidence in our leaders for too long. I’m tired of the egos, and the need for more and more power. Make Congress do its job. I could go on, but it starts feeling hopeless and depressing.

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            Ben Connelly

            I agree entirely!

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  6. Tom Coffman

    I do enjoy the podcasts, and on the whole, find some of the jokiness endearing and amusing. BUT YET AGAIN, a host gets all jokey at the end of the interview, and a serious one of that. The pod then shifts to the Wehner interview which is also great. PLEASE keep the jokey neediness to most topics; you diminish the excellence that precedes the joke.

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    The Bell Tower

    Sasse was great as usual but he said something that I think ties into the next conversation. He said the Biden administration would never speak to him.

    Later, Peter says we have a tendency to romanticize the past with Tip O’Neil getting beers with Regan. While humans always romanticize the past, I wonder if it was true that president Reagan or Clinton would not even have considered speaking with a Senator such as Sasse.

    And it reminds me of Olympia Snowe’s comments at the end of her career that I thought were rather startling. She said Barack Obama had not spoken to her in two years.

    Our politics have always had an undercurrent of rancor that borders absurdity. Hell, the 3rd Vice President of the United States shot and killed the 1st Secretary of the Treasury over a dinner party insult.

    Still, it seems to me that our politicians barely make an effort to work together even as they might have done just a few short years ago. How are we supposed to govern when this is the case?

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    Anthony Young-Garner

    Thank God for Ben Sasse. His plainspoken intelligence and even-keeled temperament are an example to us all. His explanation of the the appropriate (and working) light footprint strategy was clear, specific and concise. But for this very reason, I think his statements about political and thought leadership were most trenchant:

    "We would have needed to make the case for it… Over the last 19 plus years, we failed to explain to the American people what we were doing in Afghanistan. We were stunningly successful in our mission in Afghanistan; we were *calamitously failing in terms of explaining to the American people* what we were actually doing… The question is why didn’t we do the right thing to explain to the American people why an asset light, forward footprint was the most cost effective way to defend American interests?"

    70 - 80 percent of the American people have not supported this war for at least the last decade and it seems a majority of the public still viewed it as a "forever war". Suddenly there is a chorus of political leaders and thought leaders maligning the forever war "bumper sticker" and performing righteous anger over our betrayal of our allies. None of these "leaders" can claim ignorance of the where the American public was on this issue for the last decade. And very few of these "leaders" deemed it important enough to attempt to meaningfully change public opinion on this matter.

    "Democracies depend on shared values and there aren't many shared values."

    How can we have shared values when our leaders lie (particularly by omission) to us about foreign policy?

    I do think Sasse (and our David French) have at least made attempts over the last few years, but most of the hawkish political and intellectual class has been either silent or much more muted than they are now on the matter. Also, both Sasse and French have expressed their disappointment with a certain level of humility and personal responsibility. Some other leaders with platforms have not, and their self-indulgent, unaccountable anger reflects poorly on their character.

    God bless America. God bless us all. #neverforget

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    1. Brooks Prouty

      Excellent interview and important content. However, Sasse lost cred when he failed to impeach Trump. That was then and this is now. Still, I for one lost respect for him. However, it's an important interview. Too bad Sasse sullied his reputation earlier.

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        Anne W (Raw5254)

        He seems to be a pretty smart person, and he certainly was open about his dislike of Trump. There must be some reasoning for his not impeaching Trump. Now, I need to find out more.

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        1. Brooks Prouty

          There’s always a reason, but it needn’t be good. He was up for re-election. He didn’t want to lose support. However, he knew that Romney was right.

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            Anne W (Raw5254)

            Wait, what am I missing? Here’s a link (and there are more) saying he even voted to convict. (Sorry for the pop up garbage).
            https://journalstar.com/news/state-and-regional/govt-and-politics/sasse-defends-vote-to-convict-trump-in-impeachment-trial/article_af82fc0e-30e3-5971-80d5-5a5a94026c4f.html

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  9. Marie

    Two excellent interviews - thanks to all involved.

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    Matmos

    Enjoyed listening to this. Ben Sasse is always a joy to hear and Peter Wehner’s recollections were eye-opening and perceptive.

    Like everyone else old enough, I remember well where I was on Sept 11 and that shaped the lens of everything I saw afterwards. I was wrapping up a few years of living in Germany and getting ready to move back to the US in October.

    The attacks happened in the afternoon for us. My colleagues came in and told me something was happening that I needed to see. We were all in shock. An American colleague and I went to a pub for dinner together and tried to process what was happening. People around us, hearing us speak English, came up to us to offer their condolences.

    That was my sense of what it was like immediately after the attack- most of the world was on ours size. That sense that we were unfairly attacked meant that other countries were on our side and ready to help.

    When I returned to the US in mid October I couldn’t believe my eyes. There were flags literally everywhere. Seeing the overwhelming US paraphernalia everywhere - I know that felt to many people like a wonderful moment of unity. But it felt different coming out of the German context, where the legacy of Nazism made people very nervous about any “Mein Land Über Alles“ (my country over everything) type attitudes. In Germany at that time only Fascists flew the flag. The US felt like it had turned Fascist.

    My own sense in the months after that is that while there was a lot of lip service to freedom, human rights, rule of law in the months after 9/11 as being the special defining factors of the US (“they hate us for our freedom”), those were the first things that went onto the trash pile in the desire for revenge. Pervasive surveillance, torture, destroying national governments on a pretext - all pursued in the name of our moral leadership as the bastion of “freedom.”

    This also meant that the international respect and sympathy I had felt those first days abroad changed significantly the more jingoistic the American government got. In our “we’ll squash you like a bug” stance, in my eyes, we lost a lot of our legitimacy abroad. Remember when the Capitol was serving “freedom fries” because our long time allies, the French, were deemed too unsupportive of our wars to even speak their names? Cancellation didn’t start with the woke.

    I know all this feels very different to conservatives. I am very grateful to this publication to give opportunities to hear and understand how things felt to people who experienced it very differently from the way I did. Hopefully this can be a bastion against the polarization this podcast talked about.

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      MarqueG68

      I was a translator and lecturer in English at the Fachhochschule Köln at the time. As you say, the lens of political inclinations provide different perceptions. And I was already annoyed at the German media's tendentious coverage of the Bush-Gore electoral mess.

      But I can agree with you that the frivolousness of popular American symbolism after the attacks was, to say the least, intellectually unsatisfying, if not a bit embarrassing. Then again, German media coverage of America had already tended to grab whatever was superficially most embarrassing.

      It didn't help that at the end of the Cold War, American public diplomacy had already become something of a ghost of its former self. I remember toward the end of the 1990s, "Amerika Haus" in Cologne, which was a public library of American literature and culture, had seen its budget cut back until its services were very limited: short hours and restrictive lending policies.

      After the attacks, it finally reached the point of no return when friends and colleagues jumped on the anti-American bandwagon by saying, "Well, to be honest, you have to admit the Americans were just asking for this type of thing," with the undertone that in a just world, more attacks should follow.

      The chancellor at the time was Gerhard Schröder, who at first proclaimed "we are all Americans," but then went on to scrub his chancellory's website of photos of him together with Dubya, and not long after getting voted out, wound up on the Russian Gasprom board, where he still sits today, still overseeing Nordstream, rarely criticized in the German press for such flagrant corruption.

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        Matmos

        Wow, we were practically neighbors. I was living in Bonn. I did not know that about Schröder and Nordstream - thanks for that tidbit!

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