“Damage done to our intelligence agencies isn’t systemic and permanent, but it isn’t a matter of replacing one President with another.“
Robert Draper is a Writer-at-Large at The New York Times Magazine, as well as a contributing writer to National Geographic. He is the author of several books, including the recently published To Start a War: How The Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq. Robert first became acquainted with the then-Governor of Texas, George W. Bush, when he was writing for the Texas Monthly. He then moved to Washington, D.C. to write a biography on President Bush after seeing existing ones fall short of capturing his full story.
“Before 9/11, President Bush intended to be a domestic President.” There was a focus on tax cuts and jobs creation, and a passive approach to potential international conflict. President Bush didn’t lean into the intelligence about 9/11 and, as a result, retaliated stronger than he needed to compensate for this shortcoming.
“One uncomfortable truth that this President has been unwilling or unable to abide is that Russia interfered with the 2016 election.” In 2016, the Russians assumed that Clinton was going to win and sought to delegitimize her Presidency and demoralize her electorate. However, once they saw that then-candidate Trump had the potential to win, they stepped up their disinformation campaign.
LISTEN AND SUBSCRIBE
SPEAKER
Robert Draper
Writer-at-Large
The New York Times Magazine
MODERATOR
Anthony Scaramucci
Founder & Managing Partner
SkyBridge
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
John Darsie: (00:08)
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to SALT Talks. My name is John Darsie. I'm the managing director of SALT, which is a global thought leadership forum at the intersection of finance, technology and public policy. SALT Talks are a digital interview series that we launched during this work from home period in which we try to really replicate the experience that we provide at our SALT conference series.
John Darsie: (00:29)
And what we're really trying to do is provide a window into the mind of subject matter experts, as well as provide a platform for what we think are important ideas that are shaping the future. And we're very excited today to welcome Robert Draper to SALT Talks. Robert is a writer at large for the New York Times Magazine and a contributing writer to National Geographic. He is the author of several acclaimed books. And one of which we'll talk about today, his most recent book, which is, To Start a War: How the Bush Administration Took America Into Iraq.
John Darsie: (00:57)
And Robert is really one of the preeminent writers talking about the Bush administration period. He wrote a previous book about the Bush administration as well, closer to the time that they were an office. Robert lives in Washington, D.C today. And a reminder, if you have any questions for Robert during today's SALT Talk, you can enter them in the Q&A box at the bottom of your video screen.
John Darsie: (01:16)
And conducting today's interview again will be Anthony Scaramucci, the founder, and managing partner of SkyBridge Capital, a global alternative investment firm. Anthony is also the chairman of SALT. And with that, I'll turn it over to Anthony for the interview.
Anthony Scaramucci: (01:29)
John, thank you. Robert, great to have you on. I've read several of your books and obviously I always try to read your articles in New York Times Magazine. Before we get into that though, tell us a little bit about your professional and personal background. How did you find this career arc and what was driving you as a kid to get you to where you are today?
Robert Draper: (01:50)
Sure. Anthony, thanks for having me on. And I'm kind of the black sheep of my family. I come from a family of lawyers, but I found at a very early age that I was basically incapable of doing anything other than writing. And so thank God. I mean, it's to figure out how to do it for a living. I'm from Houston, Texas originally. I became a staff writer in Texas Monthly. And while I was a staff writer there in the 1990s and became acquainted with the new governor of Texas George W. Bush, and got to know him. And so at around the time that he moved to Washington and became president, I sort of sat back and waited to see how his presidency would unwind. I had no aspirations of making in cottage industry out of Bush, like the way a lot of Texas journalists had.
Robert Draper: (02:38)
But then by the end of his first term I had frankly decided that none of the other biographies about Bush really captured the character of Bush as I knew it. And so I sought to make myself his biographer as it were. And I moved to Washington, D.C. I've been here ever since.
Anthony Scaramucci: (02:56)
And so one of the Bush books was Dead Certain, you sort of wrote that during the mid, not the middle, but the second term of the administration. And this is sort of the second book, is that correct? Would be the second one?
Robert Draper: (03:11)
Exactly, yeah.
Anthony Scaramucci: (03:12)
Right. And so I may just hold the book up. I love promoting fellow authors. Robert, in case you didn't know, I've written four New York Times internationally recognized bestsellers. And if you don't believe me, come into my basement, I'll show you every copy that I had to buy to make that happen.
Robert Draper: (03:27)
Outstanding.
Anthony Scaramucci: (03:28)
But you on the other hand, actually sell books, which is very impressive. And this is a fantastic read and we're going to get into it in a second. But I want to talk to you first about a New York Times Magazine article that you wrote recently called Unwanted Truths: Inside President Trump's battle with the U.S. intelligence agencies. Tell our viewers and listeners, what are the unwanted truths that were in that article and how is the president trying to subvert them?
Robert Draper: (03:55)
Sure. Anthony, the story is basically about the collision course between a president who his counselor Kellyanne Conway, memorably described as embracing alternative facts. The collision between that kind of person and a community of government officials, whose job it is to actually lay out the facts to present the uncomfortable truth. And the one uncomfortable truth in particular that this president has been unwilling or unable to abide has been the manner that Russia interfered with the 2016 election to swing the election towards Trump. And it tends to do so yet again for the same purpose in 2020.
Robert Draper: (04:38)
To this president, and I think it's understandable why he would feel this way to suggest that Russia tried to make him president is to call into question the legitimacy of his presidency. But rather than recognize that reality for what it is and to own it and to say, "Therefore, we're going to make sure that this doesn't happen again." He has time and again, refused to acknowledge that, that's true. In fact, said the opposite that it's not true. And more to the point, and this is what my story really deals with Anthony, has punished those people in the intelligence community who have said what the intelligence community has plainly assessed, namely that Russia tried to swing the election in his favor.
Anthony Scaramucci: (05:20)
Okay. So there are many of our fellow Americans that did not believe that Russia tried to sway the election in his favor. So for the benefit of some of the people on this call, tell us what you learned from the intelligence agencies in terms of what Russia was doing in 2016, and then secondarily, what do you think they will be doing in 2020? What are they already doing in 2020?
Robert Draper: (05:44)
Sure. In 2016, the Russians assumed as did everyone, including I think candidate Donald Trump, that Hillary Clinton was going to win. And so their chief aim was to delegitimize her, to demoralize her electorate, to make her presidency a hobbled one at the outset. Sometime in the fall of 2016 it became apparent to the Russians that the Republican nominee could actually win. And so they began to step up their disinformation. They began to try unsuccessfully to hack into infrastructure, to use various trolls and bots on Facebook and elsewhere to amplifying negative messages relating to Hillary and to promote candidate Trump. And it's impossible to know Anthony, to what degree, if at all, that was determinative. It may well be that Trump would have won anyway, we'll never know. But what is clear is that, and the intelligence community assessed this, was that, that was what Russia did. And that's why Russia did it.
Robert Draper: (06:49)
They have sought again to do so in 2020. And what I write about in this story is a national intelligence estimate, which is this assessment that is made by the entire intelligence community on any particular subject. This one had to do with Russia attempting yet again to interfere this upcoming November. And once again, it assessed that Russia favored the current president. That Russia probably believed that under a new president there would be increased sanctions and it would just basically be much more of a slog for the Russians.
Robert Draper: (07:20)
And again, using I think I'll be at in a more sophisticated manner on trolls and bots through the Russian internet agency, through other means. They are also still trying to hack into our infrastructure. And the Department of Homeland Security has spearheaded what we hope will be a successful counter to them. But what is already clear, Anthony, is that if DHS and the rest of the government succeeds, it will not be because President Trump has encouraged them to succeed, really it will be the opposite since the president has now pushed out this message that no, no, it's not really Russia that's trying to interfere, it's China. And China's trying to interfere in Biden's behalf, not mine. So it's China, we should be concerned about.
Anthony Scaramucci: (08:05)
Yeah, no say, listen, and I appreciate that this information is out there. One last question on this, the damage done to our intelligence agencies, Robert, is it repairable? Is it something we can recover from? Or has he done systemic and permanent damage?
Robert Draper: (08:22)
I don't think it's systemic and permanent, Anthony, but it's also not simply a matter of replacing one president with another. I think that we have lost some credibility within the intelligence community among potential human assets who now aren't sure just whether we're on the level. There has been concern that information given that finds its way to this president could then be leaked to the Russians. And frankly, even if President Trump is defeated, Anthony, as you well know that does not mean that Trumpism will be. And it does not mean that there will suddenly be a wholehearted embrace of the intelligence community's findings of faith in government institutions far from it. And I suspect that we're in for a long haul here. And the intelligence community is going to be caught in the crossfire, just like a lot of other government institutions.
Anthony Scaramucci: (09:15)
Not a lot to say, I think it's well said. Do you think there's any Russian involvement in these protests that are being organized around the country? Particularly the one in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
Robert Draper: (09:26)
I don't know about Kenosha, Anthony, but the New York Times did report on, about a week ago that the intelligence community believed that there was evidence of Russian activity in the protest in Portland, and that they were doing what they could, Russians were actual live bodies on the ground to sort of fan the flames of that sense disorder. Basically, helps stoke the argument that what we need is law and order, and thus what we need is the president. For Kenosha, I'm not aware of any intelligence that indicates that. But it is not a very far leap of the imagination from Portland to Kenosha, to figure that at minimum, they are feeding disinformation that relates to the riots and that maximum were actually participants on it.
Anthony Scaramucci: (10:12)
Well, I mean, it's just curious, Kenosha, Wisconsin itself, if you look at the electoral map, it's going be very difficult for the president to win without Wisconsin.
Robert Draper: (10:21)
Right.
Anthony Scaramucci: (10:21)
If you just look at the way the map is shaping itself up. So it's something that is worrisome that you see the activity in Kenosha, certainly the tragedy that took place there and the exacerbation of that tragedy. So we'll have to see what happens. But this is Seminole book, how to start a war. It's a Seminole book. You say something in the introduction, which I loved, the elusive goal of trying to have peace by starting a war. And then you talk a lot about linkages or non-linkages to Saddam Hussein as it related to the trade center. But yet there seemed to be a determined discipline inside the administration that they were going to use 9/11 as a leveraging point to go to war with Iraq. And so tell us about your observations of that administration, what they were doing right, what they were doing wrong and what your conclusions were.
Robert Draper: (11:18)
Sure. I mean, start with this, Anthony, that before 9/11, I really do believe that George W. Bush intended to be a domestic-focused president. He didn't know much about foreign policy. He'd been a governor of a state that bordered Mexico. So he knew a bit about Mexico. And he knew from personal animists, from a family history, a bit about Saddam Hussein. But the evidence to me was pretty clear that Bush didn't want to spend his presidency hugging war widows.
Robert Draper: (11:44)
He wanted to pass tax cuts, education reform, immigration reform. And I mean, that's how he was as governor. He believed in executive should do three or four things, do them right and then let the government take away on its own. 9/11 happened. He wasn't prepared for it. He should have been, there were ample warnings that Al Qaeda was intending to attack the Homeland. And he just simply did not lean into that the way he should have.
Robert Draper: (12:09)
I think you can argue that he overcompensated as a result of that. That he began to look for the next way that he was certain would take place and began to imagine the next wave as being even worse than 9/11, because perhaps an Al Qaeda kind of group would use weapons of mass destruction. But where would they get those WMD from? He began then to imagine that they would perhaps come from this rogue foe of the United States, Saddam Hussein, the butcher of Baghdad, as it were.
Robert Draper: (12:38)
You've noticed that he used the word imagine two or three times. And I think that's the real problem and the thing that I uncovered in this saga. That where 9/11 arguably was a failure of the imagination. You could say the Iraq war was a failure of too much imagination, of imagination we're on a mock of. There were intelligence failures to be sure. But the real failure was that the president departed from intelligence altogether and began to think of what could happen.
Robert Draper: (13:04)
And part of what could happen and this goes to what you mentioned about the very beginning of my book, Anthony, is that there was a belief that all sorts of dire things could happen if we didn't go to war. And then alongside that I very sunny belief in all the wonderful things that would happen once we did go to war. That Iraq would erupt in this joyous display of democracy where something like that had never existed before. And this too was a feat of the imagination. And I think a tragic one.
Anthony Scaramucci: (13:35)
Well, I mean, you mentioned a Harvard professor's name that I haven't heard in a while, names are Laurie Mylroie.
Robert Draper: (13:42)
Laurie Mylroie.
Anthony Scaramucci: (13:43)
I think I pronounced right.
Robert Draper: (13:44)
Yeah.
Anthony Scaramucci: (13:44)
And she was a big believer that Saddam was part of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. And therefore it had to be linked to the 2001 tragedy. But you didn't find any real intelligence or any real evidence of that, is that correct?
Robert Draper: (14:02)
That's correct. I mean, not only did I not even find any indication whatsoever that Saddam had any linkage to 9/11. But it's also a fallacious as to pursue as Laurie Mylroie did, this notion that he was involved in the 1993 World Trade Center attempted bombing. The FBI for a time was pursuing any and all leads of, if the perpetrator were Iraqi or Afghan or from Mars, they didn't care. They just wanted to get who did it.
Robert Draper: (14:30)
But all the leads died, that headed towards Iraq. They thought that, that was a foolish notion. And further, I should mention that Laurie Mylroie also thought that Saddam was behind the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing as well. So basically everything that was bad that had happened to the world, she believes Saddam was responsible for it. And we're talking about her, of course, because she's not just some character on the margins. She's someone that people at the Bush administration actually lent credence to most, especially the Deputy Secretary-
Anthony Scaramucci: (14:57)
Paul Wolfowitz.
Robert Draper: (14:57)
... of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, who in so many ways was the straw that stirs the drink on the whole Iraq saga.
Anthony Scaramucci: (15:04)
See that Reggie Jackson, that you brought up the Reggie Jackson metaphor.
Robert Draper: (15:08)
Yeah, exactly.
Anthony Scaramucci: (15:08)
Good for you. Yeah. I'm a met fan, Robert. Just take it easy therefore, was the worst loss in met history yesterday, okay? I'm still crying about.
Robert Draper: (15:17)
Oh, come on.
John Darsie: (15:17)
Help is coming Anthony. Help is coming.
Anthony Scaramucci: (15:19)
And then I told my brother, I'm not watching the doubleheader. By the third ending, I turned on the TV. When you're a met fan, you live in pain your whole life. But okay, you hurt my feelings about bringing up Reggie Jackson, but let me get back to the show here. The thing I guess I want to ask you about, there was a couple of failures, right? Obviously the weapons of mass destruction. You go into it in the book. Why was that such an epic fail? And then secondarily, there was an opportunity there to have the Republican Guard with Paul Bremer and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, to help contain the insurrection that was taking place or what ultimately became the Iraqi resistance and ISIS, talk about those two failures of ours. What did we miss in that process?
Robert Draper: (16:04)
Sure. One of them was an intelligence failure. The other was an ideological failure. The intelligence failure had to do with a supposition, the intelligence community. And by that, I mean, not just the CIA, but I mean, pretty much every intelligence agency in the world had that Saddam, Iraq, which once had weapons of mass destruction. And, which had used them in fact on the Iranians and on Saddam's own people, that they surely had them again owing largely to the fact that, well, I mean, he certainly behaving like a guy who has them, he hasn't denied, he's had them. And he's pushing around the weapons. The specters are on the ground there.
Robert Draper: (16:46)
And then the intelligence community from there began themselves to take imaginative leaps. They would see literally see trucks coming in and out of known chemical plants and assume that those were decontamination trucks spraying the floors of a chemical weapons facility. They were just water trucks, hosing things down. But this was, again, the manner that if you start with a dark conclusion then you find facts here and there that will conform to that, that's confirmation bias. And unfortunately, the CIA was very much in concert with government officials who also believed the same thing.
Robert Draper: (17:22)
Now, the second part that you mentioned had to do with the failure of the U.S. government to keep the peace in Iraq once we did invade by keeping the Iraq army intact. That actually had been the policy of the Bush administration. It was reversed on the ground by Paul Bremer, the head of our Coalition Provisional Authority. And he did so in concert with the under secretary of Defense for Policy, Doug Feith and an outside advisor named Walt Slocombe. They had this ideological notion that the Iraqi army was filled with bad dudes, with Baathist and that they needed to be basically torched. And rebuilt a new with true believers.
Robert Draper: (18:06)
And this was a kind of idiotic notion, frankly. I mean, to be anybody in the Iraqi regime, you had to be a member of the Ba'ath Party. If you want it to be an electrical engineer, if you wanted it to be a school teacher. And so, yes, you had to pledge fealty to the Ba'ath Party if you wanted to join the army. So the very notion that you could find an altogether different army, an altogether different group of government employees and disband the army as well as the Ba'ath Party in the meantime only meant that you were going to piss off a bunch of Iraqi men who are now unemployed and had guns. And that was really the makings of the insurgency.
Anthony Scaramucci: (18:52)
Well, no question. So when I visited Baghdad on a troop support mission in January, 2011, we've met with Lloyd Austin in one of Saddam's old palaces, I guess that was our NATO Headquarters. And he was lamenting that decision. And lamenting how the insurgency developed. But he also, that time we were in the Obama administration, he did not want troop force deployment to drop below 20,000. He said there would be a rise of ISIS. No, I'd never heard of that word or the IS before. And of course that happened. And so some of these decisions are made for political purposes.
Anthony Scaramucci: (19:30)
You do write in the book that Rove was sort of thinking we've got to get the war started before Labor Day, or at least get the rumblings going so that we could get the election cycle turned on. And wartime presidents don't get usually sent home, they usually get reelected. How much of these mistakes that we made in To Start a War, your book, were born from politics as opposed to policy?
Robert Draper: (19:57)
Yeah, well, I mean, that's a well phrased question, Anthony, because I do think that you have to kind of parse this and, or dis-aggregate it. And Bush's case again, for all of his many flaws I do not think that he went to war for political reasons. I don't think he went to war to get oil. I don't think he went to war to appease Israel. I think he truly went to war because he felt the need to protect America after he had failed to do so on September the 11th. And I do not think the political considerations factored into that.
Robert Draper: (20:27)
I do think though that for those people who gave a glide path to war that I should say people on Capitol Hill, it was rife with political considerations. Therefore, all these Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, including Joe Biden and certainly Hillary Clinton, who gave the president authorization to use military force. They were very aware of the fact, Anthony, that in 1991, when a vote for military force for a war last came up in the first Gulf War, all these Democrats voted against it because their memory of war was this intractable forever war of Vietnam. And they didn't want to be attached to that in any way.
Robert Draper: (21:05)
They voted against the first Gulf War. The first Gulf war ended up lasting all of 100 hours. It was a roaring success. And the presidential ambitions of Sam Nunn, one of the Democrats who voted against it were immediately squashed. And so there were a lot of Democrats who thought on that going that way again. And we hope war will be as tidy this time as it was last time. And so I do think that, you see among Democrats and certainly among Republicans who felt the need to stay with their wartime president, a number of considerations that don't look entirely fact-based, they do have the ring of politics to them.
Anthony Scaramucci: (21:45)
If you had a member of the policy establishment, Republican or Democrat read this book. And some of it reminded me actually, of Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman in terms of like the different scenarios that were coming up, what would you want a policy person to take away as a teachable moment from your book?
Robert Draper: (22:04)
Yeah, I think it's that, I mean, because war is so messy, because war invariably entails second and third order consequences that you don't foresee that tend not to be good, then you need to follow the truth. You need to have an earnest pursuit of precisely whether war is merited and precisely what will happen when you do go to war.
Robert Draper: (22:32)
And I think that the infuriating thing, and that's the word that I've heard most often ascribe to my narrative in this book is that there's so much of that any half serious inquisition of the truth would lead you to that Iraqis had no experience in self-governing. They had no experience in democracy, that there were these sectarian tensions. That there was in fact, no hard cold evidence of weapons of mass destruction, that there was no evidence whatsoever that Saddam, even if he did have weapons intended to use them against America.
Robert Draper: (23:11)
And if we had gotten out from under our biases and simply pursued where the truth had led, we would have been left with a conclusion that war was not only unnecessary, but undesirable. And it seems like so basic that just follow the facts would be the advice that this book offers policymakers, but it is a reminder of just what kinds of disasters can ensue if you don't follow the facts.
Anthony Scaramucci: (23:40)
And it's interesting. So then I would say in summary, To Start a War is basically the lesson here is how to not start a war, that's ultimately what it is. Because by not starting a war, you don't get all of these unintended consequences that take place. So I'm going to turn it over to John Darsie, who's in his new venue there in North Carolina. He's trying to pretend that he's a Southern now, instead of the rank wash that I know him to be. And he's got some questions from the audience. So go ahead, John.
Robert Draper: (24:11)
Okay.
Anthony Scaramucci: (24:12)
John is really-
John Darsie: (24:12)
Yeah, definitely, I've been trying to tell everybody-
Anthony Scaramucci: (24:14)
... this is just an image improvement for him. Draper-
John Darsie: (24:15)
... I'm just an [inaudible 00:24:16].
Anthony Scaramucci: (24:16)
... just so you know, this is an image improvement. Go ahead, John.
Robert Draper: (24:17)
Okay.
Anthony Scaramucci: (24:17)
But for myself I'm you John.
John Darsie: (24:18)
I'm just [inaudible 00:24:18] trying to convince everybody that I'm a Northeastern WASP by having those paintings and everything in the background, but I'm back to my roots now. So I can talk in my Southern accent and feel comfortable. I don't know, Robert's a Houston guy. So he sympathizes with me a little bit.
Robert Draper: (24:33)
I can understand what you're saying, yeah.
John Darsie: (24:34)
There you go. You wrote another great book in 2012 called Do Not Ask What Good We Do. It was later republished under the title When the Tea Party Came to Town. And this is switching gears a little bit. The book was about the actions of both Democrats and Republicans in Congress during President Obama's first term. And in basically the gist of a lot of what you talk about is how Republicans got together after Obama was elected and vowed to do everything they could to fight his agenda at all costs. Was that different and more hyper-partisan than other periods in history? And what do you think now if Biden is to win the election and he sets out his agenda in his first term, what do you think politicians in the Democratic Party have learned from that period of time? And how do you think it's affected governance and the periods since President Obama's first term?
Robert Draper: (25:25)
Yeah, sure, John. I mean, I do think that the period that my book begins with, so right after Obama's election or right after his inauguration is not dissimilar to what happened when Newt Gingrich's revolution led the Republicans to take over the house in January of 1995. At least the intention was to grind Democratic Party policies to a screeching hall and to overrun a conservative revolution. But in practice, what you'll recall is that Gingrich actually worked with then President Clinton quite successfully on a number of measures. And this really teed off a lot of Republican house members who thought that he was being a little too acquiescent of Clinton, maybe falling prey to the president's a silver tongue. But the fact is that it was not a time of nonstop gridlock.
Robert Draper: (26:28)
What you described as the prologue to my book, Do Not Ask What Good We Do, is that hours after Obama's inauguration all these Republicans are gathered in a steakhouse kind of licking their wounds. And by the end of the evening, they've come up with a battle plan to thwart anything, and everything that this new president does. So rather than it being, let's figure out a way to work together, but to move things towards our side, it's basically, we're going to find this president on everything.
Robert Draper: (26:56)
That's a kind of fight club mentality that I think we have come to see all the way till now. I mean, it's kind of reached its apotheosis right now where the president of the United States, has basically said, I'm going to have as little to do with Capitol Hill as possible. I'm going to bend that institution as well as practically any other institution to my will. And it does kind of beg a question, will we ever get back to a moment where there are not only checks and balances between the legislative and executive branch, but also a kind of inter-party commonality between the two parties on Capitol Hill such that there won't be this constant kneecapping or thwarting of any objectives, but instead a working together? I honestly don't see any evidence that we will easily come back to that.
Robert Draper: (27:53)
I mean, John, I think that the axiom had always been that while in times of crisis Americans come together. Coronavirus constitutes a crisis where anything but a come together nation at this point.
John Darsie: (28:08)
So you think Donald Trump is more of a symptom of greater division than necessarily the disease and something that we can overcome with someone like Joe Biden, who actually been criticized in democratic circles for talking about his history of working across the aisle.
Robert Draper: (28:23)
Yeah. Well, I think you're right.
John Darsie: (28:24)
So, I-
Robert Draper: (28:26)
Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, no, I'm just going to say that. Yeah, I do think that, that's the case, yeah.
John Darsie: (28:30)
Yeah. You can elaborate on it, and then I'm going to switch gears to another audience question.
Robert Draper: (28:33)
No problem. Yeah. So I do think that Trump is symptomatic, but he's also an accelerant of it. I mean, he exacerbated something that already existed.
John Darsie: (28:47)
So as I was researching this SALT Talk, I found interesting the juxtaposition between your article about Trump's battles with the U.S. intelligence community and your book about how members of the Bush administration, which is, you could call an established administration sort of gain the intelligence system to reach an outcome that they wanted. Is Trump right in some ways to question intelligence at face value and take a more skeptical view of the intelligence community? Or is this something that's very dangerous and leads us into sort of a post truth world that you think is going to be hard to get the horses back in the barn?
Robert Draper: (29:19)
Well, he would be right to question the intelligence at face value, or rather not to accept it at face value, to be a skeptic. I think one should always be. So one should always ask the next question. Well, who's your sourcing on this? Are you sure about this? Could it be XYZ? That's unfortunately not what the president's doing. Instead, the president is first of all using the WMD fiasco, something that I think that the intelligence community has learned a great deal from as an excuse to say, "We don't ever need to trust these guys because look how badly they bungled it before."
Robert Draper: (29:54)
And then situationally to take the intelligence that he likes while any intelligence that happens to be politically inconvenient to him, for example, the notion that Russia interfered in the election to sway the election to his favor as something that is baloney. I mean, he didn't decide and locate Soleimani himself. I mean, he did that with the help of the intel community. Now he's taking credit for it. Fine. That's what presidents do.
Robert Draper: (30:23)
But Al-Baghdadi's assassination, Soleimani's assassination came because the intelligence community means to pinpoint their locations. He approved it, signed off on it, and those are clear intelligence triumphs. So you cannot say even if you're Donald Trump, that we should never listen to these guys. The question is, do you only listen to them when they succeeded at something and then you blame them when something doesn't succeed? And I'm afraid, that's what we've been seeing most recently.
John Darsie: (30:54)
Right. I had to play devil's advocate a little bit just to get the answer out of you, but I think we all know the answer to that question. So I want to switch gears again a little bit back to the Middle East. So we recently had our SALT Conference in Abu Dhabi in the UAE. We've also had a lot of Israeli entrepreneurs at our SALT Conferences, including actually at SALT Abu Dhabi. So I'm not going to say we take credit for the Abraham Accord between the UAE and Israel. But it's definitely a step in the right direction in terms of fostering economic cooperation, which leads to geopolitical cooperation in the region. Do you think that's a template and sort of a precursor to a greater stability and understanding within the region? Do you think it's an outlier? Or what do you think the future of the region is? And do we have hope to empower some of these countries economically and hopefully lead to a dialing down of some of the extremism and hate that exists between different countries in the region?
Robert Draper: (31:48)
Sure. I mean, I don't want to short sell that achievement. Anything that leads to more cooperation between Israel and the Arab countries is something to be applauded. And I'll also caveat that I'm by no means an expert on this. It does seem to me, however, to be an accord that kind of amounts to low hanging fruit. It's not exactly one that benefits say the Palestinians or brings them to the table. It's one that has a lot of economic and actual arms implications to it. Again, I think it's an important first step as long as you recognize that, that's what it is. That it is an area that both sides are likely as to agree on. And then from there you get to the harder part. But I would not assume as the Trump administration has been kind of advertising this as anything that is greater and more encompassing a victory than it is. It's a start, is what it is.
John Darsie: (32:55)
So again switching gears back to U.S. politics a little bit. So, there's this idea that, Trump has the anti-establishment candidate, right? After years that we had one Bush, we had a Clinton, we had another Bush, and then we had president Obama as the only non-Bush or Clinton president, or then candidate against Donald Trump in 2016. How much do you think people like George W. Bush and the so-called establishment is to blame for the rise of someone like Donald Trump, who again, he's an avatar for people's hate of sort of the upper classes of America in some ways as Anthony has written and spoken about in the past. How much do you assign, blame or do you owe the rise of a figure like him to failures of the Bush administration and others like him in the American establishment?
Robert Draper: (33:46)
Yeah, I think I'll pass on the word blame and go with your amended version of the question, which is-
John Darsie: (33:52)
There you go.
Robert Draper: (33:55)
... how much is can be traced back to, because I do think that the whole generation of Americans has grown up now with a view that the U.S. government is not on the level. And that goes back to Iraq. That goes back to Bush, a man in a White House, in the Oval Office telling us we need to go to war against this guy, because he's going to kill us. And it turns out not to be the case at all. And it's for the case that anti-establishment had been building up for quite a while. I think on both sides we had seen establishment presidencies not deliver, but of course it's always much more complicated than that.
Robert Draper: (34:35)
It's not as if that Barack Obama was himself the ultimate insider when he came to Washington and he did however, have a kind of insight or a view that we should work with both parties. And if there's one major failure, at least according to Obama, as he's saying it these days, that one can lay at the doorstep of this presidency is that he was willing to trust the establishment, trust the institutions too much. So you can argue, I guess that Donald Trump came in basically saying it's time to blow everything up.
Robert Draper: (35:07)
But I lend less credence to that given the fact that so many members of his cabinet have essentially used Washington as their personal piggy bank that the swamp far from being drained, it's hardly a populous swamp. It's more like a swamp that he has bent to his will. But one in which there is every bit as much lavish profiteering as there was before. So what he has framed as kind of anti-establishment presidency is really only anti-establishment and so far as the establishment has shrunk to the size of a bathtub. And the person in the bathtub is Donald Trump.
John Darsie: (35:49)
Right. We have a question from our audience, sort of a followup, I think from a UK based participant about given the United Kingdom and its experiences in the past in the Middle East, negative experiences, and even in Iraq, how do you think George W. Bush despite having sort of flimsy intelligence that drove the decision to invade Iraq, how was he able to get Tony Blair and another massive country like the United Kingdom to join the Iraq War?
Robert Draper: (36:16)
Well, partly because Blair was in a sense already there. Had been giving major speeches about Saddam being a threat to the Middle East and someone who ought to be deposed. So part of it's that. And all of that precedes Bush's presidency. Part of it also was that Blair really did believe in the importance of the UK as the indispensable ally to the U.S. and he did not want to forfeit that. He believed in particular after September 11th, that global coalitions were going to form and UK needed to be by the U.S. side.
Robert Draper: (36:58)
He also believed, Blair, that he could curb Bush's potentially reckless appetite and make sure that he was staying within the guardrails and being mindful and respectful of international institutions, such as the United Nations. And so that he would not go it alone. But what is clear is that, Blair was going to stick with him no matter what. And indeed there is a memo that has since been declassified of Tony Blair in the summer of 2002, or maybe even spring of 2002, writing to Bush saying, "George, I will be with you, whatever." So, it didn't take much. Blair saw the stakes and figured he'd better be by Bush aside.
John Darsie: (37:39)
Right. This is a last question that I'll leave our audience with. You've been analyzing U.S. politics for over many eras, you wrote about the Tea Party movement, and you've even seen some Tea Party insurgents in Congress now become the establishment. So this whole thing runs in cycles. You wrote about the Bush administration. You've written at length about the Trump administration. And most recently in that great article in New York Times Magazine about his battles with the intelligence community. If you look out in 10 years from now in your expert opinion, where do you see the state of U.S. politics? Is it going to continue to remain in such turmoil in a way that anytime we have a shift in power that the other side just employs dirty tricks that trying to prevent that side's agenda from being prosecuted? Or do you think there is some path to bipartisanship and a little bit more patriotism in terms of trying to address issues that are facing the country?
Robert Draper: (38:34)
Well, I guess, what I'd say is that the next really couple of years will tell the tale on that and how we manage. I mean, we're now at 180,000 casualties as a result of the coronavirus. And if within a year's time, this continues unabated then I really do think we will see a kind of civil war. I don't mean that necessarily literally, but certainly, a country that has essentially been cloven into and a country that, because it has been cloven to diminishes in stature both economically and geopolitically. And it will experience a real and perhaps permanent decline. That's if we don't get our arms around this. Getting our arms around the coronavirus will entail I think working together. And the working together may not take place immediately. And whether this is under a suddenly enlightened Trump administration or under a Biden and Harris administration it will require strong leadership one way or another.
Robert Draper: (39:40)
And one hopes that, that kind of success will be in elixir, the begets more success than it actually awakens an appetite for bipartisanship. But even as I say this, it's hard not to kind of descend into gloominess and wonder just how that will happen if it hasn't happened already. And in particular, how it will happen. The second term of a president who now realizes that there are absolutely no checks on his behavior. I guess, theoretically, that could make him more unlined, this could make him think now I have nothing to prove anymore, and I'm willing to actually make Infrastructure Week happen. But I wouldn't place all my money on that.
John Darsie: (40:28)
Right. Well, thanks so much for joining us, Robert. You've written on a very diverse set of very interesting topics. We look forward to your next feature article in New York Times Magazine, as well as your next book. I'll let Anthony have a final word.
Robert Draper: (40:40)
Alright, thanks, John.
Anthony Scaramucci: (40:42)
Well, listen, we don't say this lightly. This was an amazing book, Robert. I really enjoyed it. I think it'll be a Seminole study. People will look at this 25 years from now in terms of understanding the era and the direction that we went in. And hopefully it'll teach people to avoid some of the mistakes that were made. But in any event I want to personally thank you for coming on. I hope we get a chance to get you back after the election so that we can talk a little bit about where the future is. Not only for the intelligence community, but for the United States. So thank you, Robert. Appreciate you being here.
Robert Draper: (41:13)
Thanks so much for having me, Anthony, and I'd be delighted to come back.