 Next, I want to introduce someone who we're very lucky to be in her company, a Saul Rod who was a senior research fellow for the National Iranian American Council. Her writing can be seen in Newsweek, Independent, The National Interest, and Responsible Statecraft. She is a fierce advocate for peace and also an advocate against incredibly destructive economic sanctions. Saul, are you with us? Yes, right here. Okay, the floor is yours. Thank you so much, Brian, for that introduction and of course for giving me this platform to join you all today. You know, there have been so many incredible presentations, very really emotional ones, evoking a lot of the memories many of us share from this tragic event from 20 years ago. I just wanted to share today was sort of my experience as someone who was a teenager starting undergrad, right? Like a maybe a very particular kind of experience that for me and I think a lot of Americans of my generation, 9-11 shaped not only the world around us, right? It literally shaped the way that the world has come about in the last 20 years, but it shaped our own views of that world and it shaped our views of the U.S. role in that world. And as someone who was in a position, you know, the best position you could possibly be in if you wanted to learn at a university, I really took that opportunity to try and understand, you know, try to understand the tragedy of that event. And when you started to learn about the history, when you started to learn about the history of Afghanistan, the history of the United States in intervening in other countries, U.S. militarism. That's when, you know, on top of what was already an incredibly devastating tragedy to watch unfold, on top of that there was this new sort of layer of devastation. And that was the role that we actually played in bringing those events about, you know, when you learned about the fact that the U.S. trains and encouraged the jihadism that you saw transpire in 2001 in the 1980s in Afghanistan. You saw the fact that the U.S. trained the very people who came later to attack us. And the reaction to those events, right, we use words like blowback and collateral damage and leverage. And those are all really great terms to mask war, devastation, mass slaughter, destruction. Those are the things that we mask by using things like collateral damage. Hundreds of thousands of people have died. That's just the collateral damage of the war on terror. And the other interesting thing about being at that age at the time that it happened was to be in a position where you had, you know, I had older professors who had gone through their own experiences. He was a professor of sociology. His name is Chuck O'Connell, brilliant professor. And his area of expertise was Vietnam. And I'll never forget when he formulated a class called the war on terror, right as we were, you know, right as these events were happening. And he described his own experience with the Vietnam War. He said, you know, when the Vietnam War started, he went to college, he went to graduate school, he got a PhD, he got married, he had kids, the war was still going. And just then he said, what you're witnessing now, this will be your Vietnam. I don't want to say this to you, but you will experience the same thing and now for me, 20 years later, that's exactly what happened. Right here was my professor 20 years ago said these things to us. And, and, you know, I went through a very similar parallel experience as did, like I said many of my generation. There was another professor at the university who said, before the sort of rhetoric and the buildup to the Iraq War started, right after 911 was like, well, we're going to invade Iraq. And when I think back to those events to those things that these that my instructors had said, my instructors had said, it's not because they were psychic, right, it's not like they were fortune tellers. What I could very easily describe what was going to transpire in decades ahead was because they had studied its history they studied the history of US interventionism they studied the history of these other wars they studied the history of the Middle East. And so they didn't, you know, it was predictable for for those who were privy to that information. So for me it became so important to really learn everything I could to understand how we got to where we are. Because of some, you know, sort of academic exercise and wanting to understand but how we can actually change it moving forward. And it was so unfortunate that the anti war movement that was inspired in the lead up to Iraq was not able to actually prevent that invasion from taking place. The fact that our wars are not particularly popular wars. The fact that the US public, you know, poll after poll will show that we have no appetite for conflict and yet we still find ourselves in them constantly. And if anything really questions our own democracy right the notion of a democracy is that yes you have a representative government in in the United States, but the idea of a democracy is to carry out the will of its people and administration after administration Republican and Democrat will come in and use the catchphrases like yes ending endless war and fruitless war and all of that and yet we repeat the exact same scenarios and the same mistakes. And so while I think it's an incredibly important step that the Biden administration, it finally withdraw troops from Afghanistan. The reality of it is that is not the end of endless war. When you have 800 military bases around the world when you spend $2 billion a day on the military on warts, you're not ending endless war. You're shifting things into different directions. The reality of it is until we have a real conversation until we have an acknowledgement that our wars, you know, in recent weeks, obviously looking at what's happened in Afghanistan over the last several weeks has prompted these conversations even more beyond the anniversary that we're looking at today, the fact that we basically come full circle after 20 years it's almost as if our presence there for 20 years made absolutely no difference. And this really requires us to reflect on how we got there people keep talking about the failure in Afghanistan the debacle of Afghanistan. But something to keep in mind is that that wasn't a failure for everybody. It wasn't a failure for the people who made lots and lots and lots of money. We talked about the cost of war that have been presentations here that have talked about how many trillions of dollars have been spent. And, you know, you can talk about the fact that those resources those US tax dollars could have been spent on maybe Americans and doing things that were actually beneficial to our own population. And if we actually wanted to do something benevolent something moral for the rest of the world, then we could have used those dollars for that as well but instead. We could have used them to to certainly not bring democracy right now the Taliban has taken over Afghanistan we didn't bring human rights we didn't bring those things because the reality that we have to face is that that was never our intention. We never intended to bring peace and stability, we never intended to to fulfill these promises that we talk about these lofty promises that we always talk about the reality of it is, we are mired in hypocrisy. We talk about a world based order and international rules based order and yet we violate those very rules and that very order. We talk about the fact that everybody has to be held accountable under under international law, and yet we selectively hold people accountable we sanction Iran into starvation under the guise of this idea of terrorism and yet we arm with billions and billions of dollars of advanced and sophisticated arms Saudi Arabia to commit war crimes in Yemen. There is a problem in the way that we are communicating things. Now, I don't want to say all this to believe that we don't have hope. I've, I've, I always try to stay hope, hopefully optimistic. And that is that we do have an alternative. The things that we say are great. It's just that we don't do them. If we actually upheld the idea of an international rules based system that would be great that is anti imperialism. I have to say that when people think anti imperialism is some kind of, you know, obscure idea, it is the rules based order anti imperialism is the idea that we should not have empires it's the belief in sovereignty it's the belief in borders and respecting them it's the belief that we resolve issues without going to war. That's what anti imperialism is. That's what we espouse, but we just don't do it. And as long as we use international institutions as tools of empire. They will never work. We are the most powerful country in the world. We are arguably the most powerful entity in human history. And so as Americans we have a special role people. Sometimes, you know criticize me because like why are you so critical of the United States will number one because it's my country seems like a logical leap to be critical of your own government, especially when that government claims to be democratic and therefore has to answer to me and to all of us as citizens, but also on top of that, because there is no comparable power in the world. And so the role that we play, the role that we could play, could be something positive but we don't. The role that we play is war profiteering. The role that we play is to talk about this idea of ending, ending endless wars, and, you know, holding a country like Iran accountable for a new civilian nuclear program. Whilst we have thousands of nuclear weapons and plan to spend trillions of dollars to build more. These are the questions that we have to start asking ourselves why is this the way that we're spending our resources, why do we continue to spend our resources in this way. And you know, this idea of never forget is incredibly important, we should never forget the victims of 911 because, you know, I will never forget the images of that day. I watched it live early in the morning for me I mean I was in California I'm still in California. And the images of that day are seared into my mind just like they're seared into anyone's mind who is watching that day. And we should never forget that but we should also never forget the other victims of the war on terror across this world if we believe in human rights and there's no differentiation between a human life, whether it's an American life whether it's an Iraqi life whether it's an Afghan life, a human being is a human being. And so, never forget should never have been a call for revenge. It could be a rallying cry to bring people together to fulfill the very promises that generations before us had when they created something like the United Nations in the wake of the devastation of World War Two. Never forget has not been just used for 911 never forget has been used for other massive human tragedies. And so what we should be learning from that we should we should be taking from it is how to avoid those tragedies, not worsen them by inflicting even more devastation on innocent populations which unfortunately we have done. And while, you know this particular quote from President Biden has been thrown around a lot when he said, nothing will fundamentally change. Maybe something should. Wow. Thank you so much so incredible assault. Thank you. You know, you're, you make me think because you're talking about your time as a young person when 911 happened and how that affected your generation and professors saying this will be your Vietnam. I was in high school during wrong Reagan, and so Central America was our Vietnam of my era. And so maybe we need to start thinking about this generally generationally. And when we think about who we talked to, to and how we talked to them. What did you miss out on. I'm going to not read this piece but I want to give a shout out to Eric of great activists with code pink here in Los Angeles. And one of the reasons we're kind of focusing towards youth right now is, is a conversation he and I had it and I just thought wow you really need to be talked to about this. He was in between high school and college and 911 happened. And it just really, I must say messed up is college career, he believes that a lot of people who a lot of young people went to drugs at that time that a lot of kind of the social ills that we have in our generation come from the trauma of that time so I would ask us to maybe think about generationally when we talk to people.