Marking 25 years since Sept. 11 with 'All the Presidents' Wars' and 'Scattered Steel'

NPR's Book of the Day

On the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, NPR's Book of the Day explores two books that examine the long-term consequences of 9/1

Key takeaways

• The post-9/11 era has seen a significant expansion of presidential war powers, often bypassing Congress and public oversight.
• Presidents since 2001 have increasingly waged wars without formal congressional authorization, citing national security needs.

Main topics

• Post-9/11 foreign policy and military interventions
• Expansion of executive power in national security

Notable quotes

"It's eroded over time. But, you know, President Bush obviously eroded it significantly with the Iraq War..."

Conclusion

As the nation reflects on the 25th anniversary of 9/11, these books underscore both the enduring security benefits and profound democratic

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:01) Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. All this week, I've been following along with the coverage marking the 25th anniversary of the 9-11 attacks. And there's this repeated idea that the image of the planes crashing and the buildings falling, all of that imagery was replayed over and over again on TV, that it's seared into our collective memory. But there's a lot that happened immediately after 9-11, in direct response to 9-11, that wasn't repeatedly televised. In a bit, we'll hear about how parts of the World Trade Center buildings were sent all across the country. But first, the expansion of executive branch powers at the federal government level was a direct result of September 11th. And over the past quarter century, presidents have been using those expanded powers to wage wars. In the new book, All the President's Wars, journalist Peter Bergen traces how presidents since 9-11 skirted Congress in the name of national security. He talks to NPR's Steve Inskeep after the break. Speaker 3 (0:58) This week on Consider This, the researcher who just resigned from Anthropic, why he believes AI is a threat to humanity. Speaker 6 (1:06) Very soon, these things are going to be so capable that if they decide to go rogue, it's not going to be good. Speaker 3 (1:12) Plus, his view of what guardrails could look like. This week on Consider This from NPR. Speaker 6 (1:20) I haven't seen my son since 2012. This is Deborah Tice. The disappearance of her son, Austin, is one of the biggest missing person cases in the world. What do you want from me? I should solve the mystery. I know that my son is somewhere alive. Listen to Where Is Austin Tice? from NPR's Embedded and BBC Radio 4 on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 7 (1:45) 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. Speaker 5 (1:57) 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. Speaker 7 (2:08) 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 President's Wars. Speaker 5 (2:31) 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. Speaker 7 (2:40) Bergen says the wars 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. Speaker 5 (2:53) 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 UN resolution, we don't have any of those. Speaker 7 (3:10) 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. Speaker 5 (3:22) 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. There were 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 UN resolution in favor. He didn't have NATO allies except the British, really. He Speaker 7 (3:56) did get some kind of a vote out of Congress. He got a vote. He got Speaker 5 (3:59) 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 because the war has not gone as promised. But I think also President Obama contributed to... This imperial presidency, if you think about the Libya war to overthrow Gaddafi, there was a UN 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. I Speaker 7 (4:40) feel we need