9/11/01 Anniversary

[Grouse]

It’s 20 years after 9/11, and you might be less safe than you were 20 years ago.

The Taliban—the people that really allowed 9/11 to happen, because they let al-Qaeda work in Afghanistan, they protected them—20 years later, they will be more powerful than when they started. That’s a gift, essentially, that President Joe Biden gave them by this chaotic withdrawal.

This is a new war on terror.  It could be every bit of a struggle as the past 20 years of war.

We were spending in Afghanistan, under Donald Trump, in a year, what we used to spend in a week. He didn’t think he was going to build a paradise in the Middle East. He just said, “Look, it is what it is. Let’s just make sure the Taliban can’t overrun it.”

I would be the last person to say that we did everything right. But I will say, we defeated transnational terrorism. And a month ago, it was actually the furthest thing from people’s mind as the global threat we have to worry about.

In six weeks, we let them back in the game. And that’s our fault. Our president made a really, really bad choice.  This is likely the most incompetent politician in modern history, backed by a team of experts who had eight years of almost unrelenting failure in foreign policy.  People voted for them. People trusted them. And what was that trust based on? They didn’t tweet mean. And you live with the consequences of the decisions that you make.  It does affect your pocketbook. It does affect your life. It does affect whether your children go to school. It does affect your neighborhood because it’s going to come back and it’s going to hurt you.

This is the lesson we learned on 9/11.

If we don’t think for ourselves and take these things seriously and just outsource it to somebody else, we have to live with the consequences. And if we get it wrong, the consequences are terrible.  You can look at where we are today and where we were 20 years ago and ask a very simple question: How could we squander everything that was done to make this country safer? 

We said we would never forget.