Did Al-Qaeda lose?

Ravi Gupta (0:00)

Welcome to the Lost Debate, a show for political eclectics. I'm Ravi Gupta, and we are approaching later this week, the 25th anniversary of 9-11. And in that spirit, I am about to welcome on Graeme Wood, who is a writer for The Atlantic, and also teaches political science at Yale.

And he wrote this sweeping piece about the legacy of Al-Qaeda, obviously the people who carried out the 9-11 attacks. So stick around for that. Also, we are about two weeks out from my book coming out. So if you haven't pre-ordered it yet, it's The Invisible List. It's a book all about how after I was running schools, I decided I would pick a new hobby or passion every single year and try to go from total novice to intermediate or expert in that thing each year. And so I take you on a ride through learning surfing, powerlifting, tennis, biochemistry, Italian cooking, and teach you how to tackle your passions and hobbies. And so it's coming out. You can pre-order it now. We have audiobook, e-book, hardcover, and we'll be doing some book events. So on the 22nd in New York City on Tuesday, we're going to be having an event at PT Knitwear with AJ Jacobs, author of The Year of Living Biblically. Awesome guy. We're going to be in Nashville. We're going to be in Chattanooga, Tennessee and Kansas City. So if you go to readinvisibilelist.com/events, that's readinvisibilelist.com/events.

We'll also link to that in the show notes. You can check those out and get a ticket for any one of those events. But with that, without further ado, let's get into this interview with Graeme Wood.

Graeme, welcome to the podcast.

Graeme Wood (1:49)

Very good to be here.

Ravi Gupta (1:50)

You know, I was down in New Orleans about a year ago reporting on the 20th anniversary of Katrina. And I was in a high school, and I was asking kids about how they have experienced the story of Katrina. And what was amazing is they really didn't. Like, a lot of them just didn't think about it a lot. It was, to the way they think about it, was kind of how I, as somebody who grew up in the 90s, thought about Vietnam or something like that. It's this thing that our parents talked about, and you read about in history books.

And I start there because with something in your piece, I think it was something like half of people on the planet are basically too young to have remembered 9-11. Is that roughly right?

Graeme Wood (2:33)

Yeah, that's about right.

Ravi Gupta (2:34)

And so I think a good starting point might be, assuming maybe half our listeners are not old enough to remember 9-11, let's start with Al-Qaeda as an organization in the lead up to 9-11. Like, who were they?

Graeme Wood (2:50)

So Al-Qaeda goes back to the 1980s, actually. So there was this period when the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan, and there were lots of Afghans, and then eventually lots of others who were trying to fight against the Soviets and push them out. And Al-Qaeda was one faction in that group, mostly made up of Arabs who had gone to travel to Afghanistan to fight against the Soviets. So if you go back far enough, it goes back to the United States in that sense. But Osama bin Laden, one of the founders of the group, he was one of the financial backers of that faction of Arabs. And once the Soviets did get pushed out, he was the one who guided the organization through the 1990s into figuring out what it wanted, what it wanted to do next with all this organization that it had behind it. And Al-Qaeda, the word in Arabic means the base. So, it's supposed to be the place from which other, not other movements, but from which operations spring. And in the 1990s, bin Laden from Sudan and later in Afghanistan itself started to say exactly what they wanted. So, if we're looking at the movement right before 9-11, what we get is a group that was sort of hitting the United States here and there, the USS Cole bombing, for example, the embassy bombings in Kenya, Tanzania. These are moments in the 1990s that, in the case of the embassy bombing, has killed a lot of people, but that were largely ignored by the American public. It was a far away story. But if we want to know exactly what they were trying to do, bin Laden was pretty clear about it.

He said, look, number one, we want you, America, to get out of the Arabian Peninsula, chiefly his native country, Saudi Arabia. Number two, we want you to stop supporting Arab dictators and in that implicitly included the king of Saudi Arabia.