Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton joins Morning Joe for a wide-ranging interview. The former first lady discusses the terror attacks on September 11, 2001, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that followed. Clinton also talked about the role of government and artificial intelligence and the current war in Iran; <\/p>\n
JOE SCARBOROUGH: So let me ask you about the wars that came out of 9\/11. There was Iraq. There was Afghanistan. I think the first, second, third sort of brush of history would suggest that both of those were were were disasters. That said, history in 20 years does funny things. The Iraq war, you know, we had Richard Engel on the 20th anniversary tearing up Richard, who was very critical of the Bush administration, saying, yes, there were terrible mistakes. And yet behind me, I’ve got a group of students. That are debating whether the war was a good thing or not. He said 20 years ago, they would have all been shot for even talking about it. Right. So we have that in Iraq and again, a war that made Iran more powerful. But at the same time, a war that took Saddam Hussein out of out of the Middle East. Afghanistan is far more difficult because it seemed like the better cause, the better war. You look at how women were being treated and then the freedoms that they were given, the freedoms Afghans were given. And now look where we are in 2026. Talk about the lessons of that, the wars that followed. What did we do right? What did we do wrong? What would you do differently if you could? FORMER SECRETARY OF STATE HILLARY CLINTON: That’s like an all day discussion. SCARBOROUGH: That’s it, by the way. That’s your three-volume book. CLINTON: That’s coming next. You know, I teach at Columbia and I teach a course called Inside the Situation Room. And the dean and I were on your show when we published a textbook called Inside the Situation Room. And we look at crisis decision making. And yesterday we had two panels about 9\/11. And the first one were two former officials from the Bush administration, Matt Waxman and Michael Chertoff and Jane Harman, who was at the time the head of the Intel Committee. The first decision that was made was very consequential. And Michael Chertoff talked about it. What was this thing that just happened to us? Was it the biggest crime in the history of our country or was it a war? And the conclusion was to treat it as a war. And it became labeled as the war on terror. And it was treated as a war because treating it as a crime would have been really difficult to track down people, make connections and all the rest of it. So we were on a war footing as of the day, you know, the day after 9\/11. That set a certain mentality in place. And I totally understand that and why that happened. And then with Afghanistan, you know, this was a decision that I think had to be made to go in and to try to track down not only bin Laden, but other al Qaeda operatives. And the Taliban had, as you remember, the opportunity to turn them over. And they wouldn’t for all the reasons having to do with their culture and having fought with them during the 80s against the Soviets and all that. So Afghanistan morphed into something much bigger. But I think it also represented an effort first by the Bush administration and by the Obama administration, which, as you know, I was a part of, to try to do not only the counterterrorism mission that was the primary goal, but to see what we could do to try to create a more stable nation so that we wouldn’t face any more problems coming out of it. You know, because we’d already seen what they’ve done with the Soviets and it goes way back to the 19th century. But to going forward, Iraq was different. And Iraq, you know, on the panel yesterday, both Jane Harman and I said, you know, we voted for it for reasons that we thought were rooted in, in my case, coercive diplomacy. I thought that the vote would be used to try to really force Saddam Hussein to come clean about whatever was there. And there were still, as you remember, U.N. weapons inspectors and others who were trying to get to the bottom. SCARBOROUGH: By the way, in 1992, people forget this. In 1992, actually, his son in law defected and said he’s developing a nuclear weapon. CLINTON: Well, and remember, the Israelis bombed a nuclear reactor. It wasn’t it wasn’t at all unfair for people like Jane and me to think that there was something that had to be rooted out, but to root it out in a smart way, not an invasion that wasn’t well enough planned. So we didn’t know what would happen after, you know, we got there. So there should be a lot of lessons learned from both the Afghan and the Iraq experience. But at the same time, you have to ask yourself, well, you know, where are we today? We are the ones that are strengthening Iran. Have we not learned anything from what we’ve done for the last 25 years? And Iran, I think with the not just encouragement, but with the assistance of both China and Russia, is playing a very clever game of diminishing our capacity to defend ourselves and our allies. You know, when Iran launches missiles and drones that we use, Patriot interceptors to stop, they’re going to keep doing that because we’re running out of them. We should be sending them to Ukraine, but we are being depleted and we have to look at our potential dangers, especially what she is thinking, you know, that they can’t defend anybody anymore because they don’t have the capacity to defend. Maybe we can coerce Taiwan into just giving up because there’s not going to be any support. I mean, if you look at the world map right now, it is not favorable to the United States. And in large measure, I would argue that’s because of very wrong headed decisions that are being made by this administration.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n