if. you think you can. follow me and welcome to cross talk i'm peter all about the nine eleven decade what has been accomplished what has been lost as america's so-called war on terror made the us in the world a safer place and what have the huge costs and loss of innocent life has it all been worth it. and. crosstalk america's war on terror i'm joined by david ignatius in washington he's a journalist and author in rochester we have john miller he is

a professor at ohio state university and in london we crossed the n.s.a. to critique he is c.e.o. of the cordoba foundation all right gentlemen this is crosstalk that means you can jump in anytime you want and it's i very much encourage it but first let's take a look at some of the questions facing america on this anniversary. this year marks a decade since al qaeda september eleventh attacks on the united states as america and the rest of the world commemorate the day it is the decade of the events that followed which poses the hardest questions and calls for a look back from the passing of the contentious patriot act to the war in afghanistan and iraq the answer to nine eleven has involved a vast effort to root out transnational extremism and chip with president george bush famously quote end the war on terror our war on terror begins without a car but it does not end there. it will not end until every

terrorist group of global reach has been found stopped and defeated a decade later the system set up to keep america safe involves more than one thousand government organizations and nearly two thousand private companies specializing in counterterrorism across the united states and this comes with a number will the price tag eighty billion dollars spent in total intelligence gathering last year alone and over one trillion dollars spent so far on the wars in iraq afghanistan and other war on terror operations given the staggering financial costs and america's steadily declining economic power all this makes the ultimate question has the u.s. achieved the goals that it sought the war on terror has the ability to allow the u.s. to carry out military operations that since two thousand and one have taken the lives of more than a million civilians in iraq and afghanistan now in libya and of course

that leads to an escalation of resistance of hatred of revenge and so in terms of keeping the american people safe that's a ridiculous notion but then again since nine eleven america has avoided any large scale attacks on its soil eliminate a top al qaeda leaders and enhanced its domestic security network whether these gains warrant the costs remains to be determined as america draws conclusions and learn some lessons come this anniversary miesha charney for cross-talk our team. if i'm going to end this in london first you know ten years on. fighting this war on terror and still the term is still used and it's what are you thinking about most ten years on is the world a safer place is america safer place. well before i answer that question or not wanting to put

a downer on this particular theme i think we ought to avoid falling into the you know the mistake of making out as though the events of ten years ago as tragic and as momentous as they were as being the most tragic events all the most important point of our more modern history or indeed the beginning of history as many politicians in particular within the american administration of past have made out to be nine eleven was indeed a very momentous events because of the implications and because of the implications carried out in the actions carried out. specifically by the american administration what i recall ten years ago peter and i'm sure that most people also recall this there was a particular moment immediately after the fall of the towers when i had the feeling that the entire world almost came together and shared

a moment of shock of horror and possibly even support and solidarity that was a moment that if it were captured i think that today would have been talking about an entirely different theme unfortunately a few hours only a few hours after the fall of those towers we went on i.e. the american administration went on a tangent a totally different approach and that moment of world solidarity was absolutely scuppered it's very interesting david if i go to you in washington robert fisk famously said in just to go from what we just heard is that the americans demand the world know our dates but we don't we don't know very dates and their tragic history and i'm looking at the new york colonial our experience that north africa has experienced for the last century and a half so i mean in reflecting upon you know. a tangent do you think that is actually a correct way of looking at it because it sounds like a huge strategic mistake. well i think you can think of nine eleven

as a shock to the unit united states into the global system that the u.s. was the dominant player in and the shock produced erratic policy that i think most people would conclude did a lot of damage to the united states to its alliances to certainly to the country's reputation as i look at president obama who inherited the bush years of reaction to nine eleven struck by two things first i think obama has tried since he became president to lower the rhetoric you do hear less talk about a war on terror an undifferentiated endless struggle against terrorists wherever they are and you do see an effort by obama to work to improve u.s. ally ally and says the effort to reset as the term is the relationship

with with russia i think is one of the significant policies that obama embarked on right at the beginning of his term he knew the u.s. need more friends than it had and he said that changed policy at so as to get them at the same time that obama has been using i think quieter rhetoric and has been trying to work better with allies he has been very aggressive in secret in his attempts to destroy. the raid on the compound of us osama bin laden that resulted in his death on may second is an example that was a very tough operation it's a decision that george bush might have taken but i'm told by people who were close advisors that he might not of obama sharply stepped up the pace of predator drone attacks not just over the tribal areas in pakistan but but in several other countries in addition so i think you have an interesting picture with obama.

president who is trying to change the rhetoric but in terms of. hard nosed reality this battle against our credit it's it's it's tough for any of the able to thank god to john i mean if the rhetoric has changed but their actions have not so there is not a big difference between obama and bush and a lot of people would say the war on terror to date has not been successful it's been terribly expensive and it is only hurt the security interests of hundreds of millions of people around the world i mean i think we it's kind of generally accepted there's been some huge strategic mistakes made here but from what we just heard they just continue go ahead john. yes i basically agree with that it's been a massive misallocation of effort that the attacks on nine eleven cost perhaps two hundred billion dollars including the loss of life a lot of the buildings and the economic impact from it and that's a great tragedy but since that time the united states has spent increased

expenditures on home domestic homeland security expenditures about a trillion dollars and the bay and in and overseas that the wars are costing several trillion dollars so it's a speech and of course more americans have died in iraq and then died on nine eleven the main lesson that seems to come from this is the most important and most effective counterterrorism strategy is to not overreact some of the things that david talked about i think are quite useful namely going after the guys who actually did it with your own or without drones but much of the rest of the expenditure is basically simply thrown at the problem without any sensible analysis if you're dealing with the issue of are we safer the way to put it is this of course we're safer we hired some more security guards if you if you built a tsunami wall around moscow moscow would be safer from tsunamis or the question is is that a sensible form of expenditure in the case of the united states the american americans chance of being killed by and by

a terrorist of any form is about one in three point five million per year and the question then is not are we safer but how much more money do you want to throw at the problem to make that probability even lower and assuming go back to you in london but the way bush preceded and probably to some extent also obama isn't that it wasn't the the war on terror if we can say with that term always going to be perceived as anti muslim in the arab world because you know we have we have now we have three countries ok we have we have iraq we have afghanistan we have libya ok this is again it's this the perception coming out of washington western capitals is one thing but the perception has always been very different on the ground for the people experiencing these invasions. absolutely and if i may start by coming back toward john just said i absolutely concur with everything he said but on the question of whether we're safe or not i agree with him yes we may be safer because as he put it we hired more guards and more security cameras but actually if you go

around asking people individually they're more scared so it's quite an anomaly of the kind of world that we've created we've fought this war on terror but we've created even more terror for even more people on a far wider scale whilst the attack was in a particularly small geographical location we've managed to create an impact that is far reaching to every single inch practically of the world and that is i think where we have gone terribly wrong as i said the very beginning there was a moment when we could have actually fought this apparent ideology of al qaida in a totally different way what we managed to do unfortunately is to actually spread it is to actually recruit for of tide over the past over the past twenty years i've said this time and again peter possibly one time on your program in the past before nine eleven i frequented and prayed it's a mosque where after prayers people would on

a rag sell tapes for them for about fifty cents and no one would buy immediately after nine eleven he became a hero and though that same tape was going for ten dollars and people would be searching for more we're going to jump in right here we're going to a short break and after that short break we'll continue our discussion on nine eleven a decade on stay with heard. anything. if you want to. wealthy british style.

markets why not come to. find out what's really happening to the global economy with max concert for a no holds barred look at the global financial headlines tune into cars a report on r g. soon which brightened movements from fans to christians. who threw stones on team dot com. and you can. still.

come back to cross talk on can't really go to mind you were talking about the nine eleven decade. and you can see. david if i can go to you george bush he pushed his war on terror and it's become very much part of the american political and military establishment is that the war on terror was a another way of promoting democracy we could have a different discussion about it can you invade a country and force democracy out of that's that's one thing but i think the arab spring or the arab awakening release says a lot because you don't need outsiders to invade your country. get rid of dictators if west would stop promoting dictator dictators in that part of the world people will rise up and they will have their own democracy and so this whole effort of democratization really the people on the ground pour cold water on what george bush and and others tried to do. well i think george bush is a pretty easy whipping boy he's no longer president barack obama faced with

a difficult strategic decision about whether to abandon those to mubarak had been a loyal and useful ally for united states decided that it was appropriate to abandon him that the egyptian people want to change and that any american effort to resist that would be inappropriate he got strenuous arguments from close u.s. allies from israel from saudi arabia saying for goodness sakes what he doing don't do that and he want to head because he thought it was the right policy so i think you need to be a little bit careful about about about the way you're setting up the question here our conversation in general reminds me of a something we all know which is the use the famous line of character cards history is best understood backwards but has to be lived forwards in other words. in the immediate aftermath of two thousand and one which analysis as reminded us was

a moment of hope and consolidation nobody really knew what was what was happening and the it is clear now that the information that the bush white house was receiving was terrified it was the information about chemical or biological attacks attacks on subways this and that and i think it's clear that they overreacted but it is important i think to remember the context in which they were making decisions which was the fog of the uncertainty of this war in which they suddenly found themselves i think it's taken the united states years now to begin to get a better perspective and to get some balance in this policy and i i do think that's returning. some of the covers the subject of wada i find people with more clarity about about the importance of not going out making enemies of not doing the traditional american style of leadership charging up the hill shouting about

a war on terror you don't hear that from president obama for a reason so i guess i would say that. with the with the perspective of ten years if we learned nothing if we really were just you know plodding along the same direction. deeply well i think maybe a lot of people of pakistan would probably disagree with that but if i go to you john what do you think it was the united states and its allies just wanted to remake the world in its own image it's almost like a messianic vision of the world we can change we change an entire region with the invasion of one country to have this domino effect and in retrospect and you know i'm used to i was trained as a historian ok i know what history is i mean in retrospect it was just a fool's errand in a lot of people lost their lives and the us is more or less bankrupt itself through this kind of messianic vision and it's still elements of it are still there go ahead john. you know they're still there though i certainly agree with david that the rhetoric has been toned substantially. in general in terms of promotion of

democracy the best thing the united states could as ever done is simply be an example when the revolutions took place in eastern europe after nine hundred eighty nine united states cheered them on and they mostly took place by themselves in latin america became democratic after one thousand nine hundred seventy five the united states again was just sort of a in a cheering position and also the it made the chain changes in east europe and in east asia such as in south korea and in taiwan with respect to david's point which i think is a very good one about the sort of hysteria that gripped the country right after nine eleven i think is absolutely right there were intelligence estimates at the time that were that there were five thousand al qaeda agents running around loose within the united states you know that was basically off by about five thousand in addition people are explorer expecting additional. reactions in terms of many nine eleventh's so the initial concern was quite reasonable but after

a couple of years you'd think they'd start to be some reevaluation and after five years of this with nothing happening essentially even more so and when but obama came in and i really hope that now that was almost as eight years after that there would be some initial reevaluation but we still got basically the same policies continuing on i just finished a coauthored book with a risk analysts and engineer named mark stuart called terror security and money and we tried to look at these homeland security expenditures and what is coming out of the department homeland security at both before and after the obama administration is continued hype of the threat let me just give you one quick example six months ago the secretary of homeland security janet napolitano held a press conference and she said we now think that the likelihood of a major attack a major coordinated attack like al qaeda like a dying. eleven years lower however we still have to worry about small disorganized

attacks therefore we are more in more danger than we've ever been before that is a we got rid of a big thing we continue to a small thing and somehow that makes us more dangerous that's a kind of irresponsible hype that continues to come out of the white house and come and come out of the administration there's still people in the obama administration who are saying that the pathetic ridiculous al qaida presents an axis then chael threat to the united states that it will it could potentially destroy a country of three hundred million with a massive g.d.p. and cetera and no one ever basically still known as challenging that preposterous assertion look and ok and i said you know i think it's really interesting i mean i would agree with you i remember the the the hours and days after the attacks in new york and washington i agree on that point here but nonetheless i mean you can go before that and you can see this neal kahn perception of the world about what america's role in the world is and that was in there pearl harbor

a wonderful opportunity often off the back of a tragedy and i still see it and maybe you know maybe i'm just seeing it in into narrow form here but i still see that mindset there with the arab spring going on now too i mean picking and choosing who you're going to support to mold the geopolitical situation of the region. i agree. ok let us first and then he's going to. if i may i mean i agree entirely i i personally believe and please forgive me for being a cynic here but i personally believe that nine eleven the attack and once again as horrific and tragic as it was it was used it was manipulated by those who in their minds had some sort of map it was used justification and till now till now and forgive me every time i mean as i said that moment could have been a unifying moment for the entire world at this moment of time i travel throughout the world and i travel extensively throughout the middle east nine eleven and

fourteen that moment of sympathy has gone and now it's a very divisive moment and the reason is because the new cons use it as a justification for whatever happened. afterwards but allow me to just comment on what david and john said in terms of toning down the rhetoric on the war on terror during the obama era i welcome that and i hope and pray for the demise of the neo con ideology the brought the world and brought particularly america to where we are today however we haven't really departed from that moment where still using the very same tactics these ten years we have not only the million lives who we lost but we have countless possibly tens of millions of lives that have been destroyed the thing is someone who's dead may they rest in peace they're dead but whose remains are those who are alive still and now see us as enemies and now see seek retribution and revenge for what we did to their loved ones you see we now live in a world that is far more scared form far more of fear from its neighbors than we

were ten years ago i'm quite intrigued by you know the what david said in terms of the kind of his syria the follow that i understand that i absolutely understand that but how is it we we made this seismic movement from the moments where we allowed those seventeen people to carry out those attacks totally oblivion from the security forces to absolute understanding and awareness of the security. a threat not only in america but the entire world it was a huge huge huge mistake the first ten years of the millennium unfortunately will always be a very very dark era in human history hopefully with the arab spring the second decade of this millennium will be far better ok david you want to jump in there go right ahead well i. i think it's certainly true that the last ten years been dark painful in ways that nobody least of all the united states could have anticipated i think the big mistake and it's it's not

a necessary consequence of the policies that followed by eleven was the invasion of iraq the invasion of iraq. people tried to link it to the events of september eleventh but the truth as i wrote at the time was that the intelligence was clear there was no operational link between saddam hussein and al qaeda so this this was a war of choice that was conducted as a loss because of a. notion that if you knock down the biggest scariest arab dictator saddam hussein positive change would follow everywhere you know you could make that argument but the bigger problem is that the united states proved incompetent in iraq and in stabilizing the country and achieving what it talked about so i think that's been a terrible terrible mistake with consequences that will will last destabilize the region as i look at the arab spring i'm reminded that the story of what's happening to that part of the world is so much bigger it's just on

a canvas whose dimensions we forget about and i've been writing about the arab world for thirty years now and i was surveyed of the story is going to have a happy ending it may not have a happy ending the next ten years it certainly hasn't in the last ten years but it's a process that i think people could take heart we're almost out of time john i'd like to i've been almost out of time and i want to ask john john do you think the united states will go to war out of choice again in the name of fighting terrorism no. no i think when i disagree with some of the things you comment you made earlier i think it's over there is probably going to be an iraq syndrome in afghanistan syndrome because people realize that david is right about what he's been saying and that means emphasis on this is let's not do that again the present in polls repeatedly over the last few years the percentage of people saying we should let the world go away and not all right john i'm going to have to jump in here we have right now in time or gentlemen many thanks to my guest today in washington rochester and in london and thanks to our viewers for watching us here r.t.

see you next time and remember cross talk rules. and.

paul to the small libyan rebels start storming some of the last stronghold.

celebration of the residents of. the place and. the deaths which the u.k.'s national says a funeral procession people are still questioning whether he was a victim of police brutality. also tonight. that's because you're a former neighbor heard about the world as america's decade long war in afghanistan . published for the atrocities of september eleventh two thousand i still. want nine eleven it was beautiful. if you just joined us surround the world a very good evening from.