YouSaid · the spoken record

Robert Crews

lines on the record: 191
first: 2021-11-28
most recent: 2021-11-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Decades of training before one becomes authoritative to speak about issues like whether or not it's legitimate to take someone else's life.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some biographers claim that he was a playboy for much of his youth. But really, these ideas, and I think that's probably why they chose the Twin Towers, I mean, An imagination fueled by training and engineering. I mean, a lot of the sociology, if you do a kind of postbocation of a lot of these leading jihadists, their backgrounds are not in Islamic scholarship, but actually in engineering and kind of practical sciences and professions, medical doctors are among their ranks. And so there's long been a tension between Islamic scholars who devote their whole lives to study of texts and commentary and interpretation. And then what some scholars call kind of new intellectuals, new Muslim authorities who actually have secular university educations, often in the natural sciences or engineering in technical fields, who then bring that kind of mindset, if you will, to what Muslim scholars call the religious sciences, which are a field of kind of ambiguity and of gradation and of subtlety and nuance and really of”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the imagination. Bin Laden bounced around from country to country. And crucially, I think a dimension that I don't claim to know anything new about but has endured as a kind of doubt is the role of Saudi Arabia and the fact that the muscle in that operation of 9-11 was Saudi, right? I mean, this was a Saudi operation with, if one thinks, again, just on the basis of nationalities, Saudis, you know, an Egyptian or two, a Lebanese guy and the Egyptian guy had been studying in Germany. He was an urban planner, right? So if one thinks of the imagination of this, I mean, and in fact, if you look at the kind of typology of the figures who have led this radical movement, I mean, if you think of the global jihadists, they are mostly not religious scholars, right? Bin Laden was not a religious scholar. His training was an engineer.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To seemingly recapture American supremacy. And also, I think there was, in many quarters, there was a deep urge for revenge. And this was a place to have some casualties, have some explosions. And then I think restore the legitimacy of the Bush administration by showing that we're in charge. We'll pay. And I think it was a very old-fashioned punitive dimension, which rests upon the presumption that if we intimidate these people, they'll know not to try this again, right? All these I would suggest are all misreadings of an organization that was always global. It had no real center. I mean, called itself the center. That's one way to translate Al-Qaeda. But that center was really...”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Came into power with Georgio V. Bush, thinking that the foreign policy challenges of her era would be those of the past, right? Richard Clark and others within the administration warned that, in fact, there is this group that has declared war against the United States, and they are coming for us. The FBI had been following these people around for many months. And so, you know, by the time George W. Bush comes to power, lots of al-Qaeda activists are, well, not lots, but perhaps a dozen or so are already training in the United States, right? And what we knew immediately from the biographies of some of the characters of the attackers of 9-11, it was a hodgepodge of people from across the planet, but mostly that were Saudi, right? And that was known very early on, or presumed very early on. So again, if we go back to your big question about the geography, why Afghanistan, it didn't add up, right? It seemed to me that Afghanistan was a kind of soft target. It was a place to have explosives.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right, great point. Yeah, they're all awesome points. So, yeah, I mean, Russia was, I think many experts, I mean, my mentor at Princeton, Stephen Kockin, you know, was then writing great things about how if you look at Russia's economy, the scale of its GDP, you know, its capacity to actually act globally, it's all quite limited. But Connie Rice and the people around her”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Bears, Russia and Russia is this, I'm trying to characterize the imagination of some of these. This is an image formed in the Cold War. I mean, it has deeper seeds in European and Western intellectual thought that go back at least to the 1850s and the reign of Tsar Nicholas I. When we first get this language about the Russian Empire as this kind of evil polity, obviously this was a kind of pillar of Reaganism. But the Clinton folks kept that alive. They wanted to make sure that American power would be unmatched and they being creatures of the Cold War themselves, they look to Russia as a resurgent power well before Putin was even thought of.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of those who missed having Russia as the boogeyman, who spoke, the Clint administration repeated again and again the idea of making sure the bear stayed in his cage, which is why the United States threw a lifeline to the Central Asian states, hoping to have pipelines, hoping to shore up their national sovereignty as a way of containing Russia initially, but also Iran, which sits to the south and west. And then peripherally looking down the road to China to the east.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was a national security expert who was tasked with following Al-Qaeda, who had produced a dossier under the Clinton administration that he passed on to the George W. Bush administration. And if you look at the work of Connolly Serice, she wrote a very famous, I think, unpaywalled foreign affairs article that you can read announcing the George W. Bush foreign policy kind of outlook. And it was all about great powers. It's about the rise of China. It's about Russia. I mean, there's definitely a kind of”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At I know my colleague at Stanford Connolly Sarais would tell me this is above my pay grade. And she makes a point in her classes to talk about how difficult decision making is under such intense pressure. And I appreciate that. I am an historian who sits safely in my office. I don't like battlefields. I don't like taking risks. So I can seed all those limits. I'm not a military expert. I've been accused of being a spy wherever I've gone because of the way I look and because of my nationality and so on, but not a spy. So I defer, you know, I respect the expertise of all those communities. But I think they acted out of ignorance. They acted, I think, because, I mean, you think of the, in a way, there was a compensatory aspect of this decision making. I mean, Bush administration failed. This was an extraordinary failure, right? So if we start which way.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And hurt and pain. So that day I vividly remember I sat with. Other PhD historians in different fields, we oddly enough had lunch that day in a kind of deserted Washington. Some place was open. We went. And we just thought, you know, this is going to kind of open up like a great mall of destruction. And the American state is going to Destroy and it's going to destroy in this geography. And I thought that was misplaced for lots of reasons. And then I think if one, you know, I Been doing some research on Afghanistan then. I was kind of shifting to the south and I'd been looking at the Taliban from afar. Clear now that in respect there were opportunities for alternative policies at that moment.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it doesn't violate, as I understand Islam. So even it's kind of a silly example, but it's just an illustration of the ways in which different communities, different generations, different people can comment at this very complex tradition in so many different ways. So obviously whatever kind of scholar you are, any kind of expert, whatever, it's always disconcerting to see your field of specialization be flattened, right? And then be flattened and then be turned to arguments for violence.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because then, going back to, I mean, there are other friends and encounters and so on, but just thinking about Afghanistan and Tajki for a moment. I mean, just thought about my friends who had been, who had suffered a great deal in their short lives, who had been cast aside from country to country, but had found a place in Tashkent with some relative stability. And they wanted to go out every night. And they explained one friend, we talked about it with the alcohol and all that. And he didn't get crazy, but he was like, you can drink, but just don't get drunk. That's permissible within Islam, right? And he was, you know, ethnic Pashtun. I think Uzbeks had a different view. Often the more vodka, the better, you know?”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly where. It's not the center of this. And invading that country isn't going to fix the toxic milestrom of politics that produced 9-11, right? Again, thinking of some of the personalities, just thinking about going back to the Tachikin story, which I'll end with. I mean, just observing real Muslims doing things and then asking questions about it and trying to understand through their eyes what tradition means to them. And then, you know, you have a We had a very narrow conversation about what Islam is that, you know, generated immediately exploded on the day of 9-11, right? And then, of course, I think the antipathy toward Islam and Muslims was informed by racism, informed by xenophobia. So it became a perfect storm, I think, of demonization that didn't sit with, you know, what I knew about the tradition and with actual people that I had known.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your brilliant writing. No, no, thank you. No, I think moving toward more kind of open source. Formatting stuff, I think is what a lot of journals are thinking about now, and I think it's definitely for the kind of democratization of knowledge and scholarship, that's definitely an important thing that we should all think about. And I think we need to exert pressure on these publishers to do that. So I appreciate that.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But intellectually, so the thing, I mean, the fascinating thing there was that just as a whole, you know, I'm a historian, right? But there are... Great contributions by anthropologists and ethnographers who've gone across the planet and tried to understand how Muslims understand the tradition a different context. So many Uzbeks will say, you know, this is part of our national culture to drink and eat as we please, right? And yet I'm a very devout Muslim. And so, of course, you can encounter other Muslim communities who won't touch alcohol, right? But it's become kind of, I think it's very much, you know, Soviet culture left a deep impression in each of these places. And so there are ways of thinking, ways of performing, ways of enjoying oneself that are shared across Soviet and former Soviet space to this day, right?”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just observing. That's right. Studying. Yeah. And then you get the Somagon degrass vodka. You get, you know, I've had some long nights on the Kazakhstani frontier that I'm not proud of. But you got to know that.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm a non-Russian. This is all culturally. To me, and I'm a student of all that, right? As a graduate student doing my work there.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wait, so Yeah, I mean Uzbekistan has incorporated vodka as the choice. It informs, you know, and the fascinating thing as a student is what you're observing as a non-Muslim.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Blow to American power. And I was drawn by the symbolism of it. If you think of it as an act, it was a kind of an act of speech, if you will, kind of a way of speaking to a position of relative weakness, speaking to an imperial power. And I saw it as a kind of symbolic speech act of that with horrific real world consequences for all those innocent victims, for the firemen, for the police, and just the horror of the moment. So I did see it as transcending the United States, but I did not see it as really having anything necessarily to do fundamentally about Afghanistan and the history of the region that I'd been studying and the community people that I knew who were not particularly religious, right? The guys I hung out with actually wore me out because they wanted to go out every night. They wanted to party every night.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I suppose I was taken by the narrative that this was international. I mean, I'd also lived in New York during one of the first bombings in 94 of the World Trade Center. So it was clear to me that a radical community had really fixed New York as part of their imagination of, and I immediately thought it was a kind of...”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, right. So, yeah, if we go back to that day and the weeks that followed, my mind went to the community I knew in Touchkent, which was interesting. So Islam was the focal point of our conversation in the US about 9-11, right? Everyone wanted to know what was the relationship between the terrific violence and that religious tradition with its 1 billion plus followers across the globe, right? That became the issue, of course, for American security institutions, for local, state, and police institutions, right? I mean, it became the, I think it was the question that most Americans had on their mind. So again, I didn't imagine myself as someone who had all the answers, of course, but given my background and coming at this from Russian history, coming at this from studying empire and trying to think about the region broadly.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I would emphasize that people are quite open and it's a whole region of incredible diversity and respect for linguistic pluralism, actually. So I think that, you know, but I also appreciate that in this context, when there's a lot of pain in the Afghan diaspora community in particular, being called the wrong name after 20 years when they already feel so betrayed at this moment, just kind of if one follows this on social media, that is one kind of hotwire, right?”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The term Afghani is a kind of term of offense because that's the name of the currency. And so lots of people ask, you know, why having, especially again, it's more addicted to Americans because we've been so deeply involved in that country, obviously for the last 20 years, right? So Afghans ask why after 20 years are you still calling us the wrong name?”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think when I hear Iraq and Iran, I mean, I think it, yeah, is it intentional in the case of a Democrat or is it just a, you know, and it's a whatever? I think, again, I think most Iranians and Afghans people I know have been very cool about that. What annoys Afghans now, I can say, I think it's fair to say, I don't mean to speak for millions of people, but I can just share with our non-Afghan friends.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, right, right. The French are not forgiving. No, no, no. Yeah, exactly. No, I think people are very, very forgiving. And I think that Iranians are a bit more instructive in suggesting Iran rather than Iran, right? Iraq, Iraq. I think there's come to be a fit between certain ways of pronouncing these places and the position that Americans take about them. So it's more jarring when people say Iraq and it comes with A claim that a certain kind of person should be the victim of violence or”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fascinating question. I defer to the people from those countries to, of course, sort out those politics. I think one of the fascinating things about this, the region broadly is that it is a place of so many cultures and is really quite cosmopolitan. So I think people are mostly quite forgiving about how you say Afghanistan, Afghanistan”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As a fantastic window onto the American view of the war, right? But for us Afghans, there are people who fought against the Soviet army, but of a certain generation, the guys I knew, you know, their mission was to survive. And so they fled in waves by the millions to Pakistan, to Iran. Some went north into Central Asia later in the 1990s, and some were displaced across the planet. So California, where we're sitting today, has a large community that came in the 80s and 90s in the East Bay.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Decades have been tied to Afghanistan in a variety of ways, but it became much more connected in the 1980s when the Soviet Red Army occupied Afghanistan for 10 years. And here I refer your listeners and viewers to Rainbow 3 as the guide to”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In Central Asia. That's right. And they've been independent since 1991, but they have struggled to disentangle themselves from Moscow, from one another, and now they face very serious pressure from China to form a kind of periphery of the great machine that is the Chinese economy and its ambitions to stretch across Asia. For Afghanistan, where my roommates, my friends hailed from Afghanistan had fallen into civil war in the late 1970s when leftists tried to seize power there in 1978. The Soviet Union then extended from Uzbekistan, crossing the border with its forces in 1979 to try to shore up this leftist government that has seized power in 1978. And so for Central Asians and the wider region, their fate had for some”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm sure, sure. So, Tashkent, you know, is the capital of Uzbekistan, it was a hub of Russian imperial power in the 19th century. The Russians take the city from a local kind of Muslim dynasty, an ATC-55. It becomes the city, the kind of hub of Soviet power in Central Asia after 1917. It becomes the center of the Soviet Republic of Uzbekistan, which becomes independent finally in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapses.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He told stories of escaping death in Afghanistan during the civil war, going to Uzbekistan, escaping death there. And these were very real stories.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Push their shoes and they would sit around offices, drink tea, pistachios, then they'd feast at lunch, and then at night we would go out. So part of my research, because I also had a bottleneck at my research, I was going to the state archives in Tashkent. And because of the state of Uzbekistan, that was a very kind of suspicious thing to do. So it took a while to get in. So I had downtime in Tushkin, just like these guys. So I got to know them pretty well. And it was really just a an accidental kind of thing, but grew quite close to them. And I developed an appreciation of, which now I think, again, thinking of the seeds of all this, these people had already lived, young guys, you know, in the 20s that already lived in six or seven countries. They all spoke half a dozen languages. One of my best friends there had been a kickboxer and breakdancer trained in Tehran. His father was a theater person in Afghanistan.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, in Tashkent, doing decision research. Yeah. Because it was hub of the Russian Empire in Central Asia. So, just by accident, end up with these young Afghans who took me in as roommates. And that, I think, the sense of that community shaped my idea of what Afghanistan is. It was my first exposure to them. They were part of a trading diaspora. They brought, they had brought matches from Riga, Latvia. They had somehow brought Blauer and some agricultural products from Egypt. And they were sitting in closed containers in Tashkent waiting for the Uzbekistani state to permit them to trade. So these guys are mostly hanging out during the day. They'll get dressed up. They put on suits and ties like you're wearing.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But in doing that research, which took me across Russia and Central Asia, purely by accident, I had developed an interest in Afghanistan because just, again, a series of coincidences, I found myself in Tushkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, without housing through an American friend who was like the king of the market in Tushkent. He knew everyone. He run into some Afghan merchants there. They found out I didn't have a place to live. I didn't know where Afghanistan was, honestly. This was 1997. I had a vague idea it was next door.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, just at the moment, of course, it was, you know, that's the sense of. The suffering and the tragedy of the moment of the death. And that was, I think I was preoccupied by the violence of the moment. But as the conversation turned to Afghanistan, as a kind of theater, does not respond to this moment. I think immediately what came to mind was that little I knew about Al-Qaeda the Times Todessa that the geography was inaccurate, that this was a global network, a global threat, that this was a kind of a movement that went beyond borders. And I think the It felt early on that Afghanistan was going to be used as a scapegoat. And just intellectually at the time, you know, I was teaching at American University. My courses touched on a range of subjects, but I was trying to complete a book on Islam in the Russian Empire, actually.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, I was no Al Qaeda expert then, and I'm not now, but I think my immediate thought went to war. And because my background had been with at that point, mostly Afghans who had been displaced from decades of war whom I encountered in Uzbekistan, who were refugees and so on, I thought immediately my mind went to the suffering of Afghan people, that this war was going to sweep up, of course, the defenseless people who have nothing to do with these politics.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“News, yeah, the news and the visuals that were coming that were not shown on American television. I don't know how they had it, but they were not filtering anything in the way that the major networks and cable televisions were doing here. So it was a very unvarnished view of the violence of the moment in New York City of people diving from the towers or being, you know, and it was really, they didn't hold back on that, which was quite fascinating. I think much of the world saw much more than actually the American public saw. But to your question, amid that feeling of imminent doom, I watch commentators start to talk about Al-Qaeda and then talk about Afghanistan. And one of the experts was Barnett Rubin, who's at NYU, who's a kind of long, very learned Afghanistan hand, and he's brought on Peter Jennings on ABC News to kind of lay this out for everyone. And I thought, you know, he did a fine job, but I think it was formative in cementing the view that somehow Al-Qaeda was synonymous with this space, Afghanistan. And I think”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was in DC. I was on the way to American University hearing on NPR what had happened. And I thought of the... American University logo, which is red, white, and blue. It's an eagle. And I thought Washington is under attack and symbols of American power are under attack. And so, you know, I was quite concerned. And at the time lived just a few miles from the capital. And so I felt that it was real. So I appreciate the sense of anxiety and fear and panic. And for two, three years later in DC, we were constantly getting reports, you know, mostly rumors and confirmed about all kinds of attacks that befall the city. So I definitely appreciate the sense of being undersalt. But in watching television, including Russian television that day, because I just, it just installed a satellite thing. So I was trying to watch world news and get different points of view. And that was quite useful to have an alternative set of eyes.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“George W. Bush administration acted in a state of panic, and I think they wanted to show kind of toughness. They wanted to show some kind of resolve. This was a horrific act that played out on everyone's television screens. And I think it was really fundamentally a crisis of legitimacy within the White House, within the Oval Office. And I think they felt like they had to do something and something dramatic. I think they didn't really think through who they were fighting, who the enemy was, what this geography had to do with 9-11. I think looking back at it, I mean, some of us, not to say I was clairvoyant or could see into the future, but I think many of us were from that morning skeptical about the connections that people were drawing between Afghanistan as a state, as a place, and the actions of Al-Qaeda in Washington and New York and Pennsylvania.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A story, and so I say this with some humility about what we can know. I think I'd still like to know much more about what was going on in the White House, in the hours, days, weeks after 9-11. But I think.”
2021-11-28 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #244 – Robert Crews: Afghanistan, Taliban, Bin Laden, and War in the Middle East · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source