“There was but a single act of evil that day, he pointed out. There were thousands upon thousands of acts of good, repeated in countless different ways all over the city.” #NeverForget https://t.co/fMzqOaeifT
— Rep. Anna V. Eskamani ?? (@AnnaForFlorida) September 11, 2021
Not maudlin, for a mercy. Sally Jenkins, (sportswriter) at the Washington Post:
After the shroud rolled over the day, I remember just one dash of color in the pall, a smear of bright yellow. It was an old Schwinn steel-frame racing bicycle, and it moved like a canary in the smoke. The bike, like all bikes, was an escape, the ability to get somewhere under your own power, fast, to carve turns and pick your own lane through obstacles. But it represented something else too, that bike, as indefinably sweet as a wildflower growing in the sidewalk.
The first tower was hit at 8:46 a.m., and had I not worn the spouse’s sandals and forgotten where I put them, we would have been near the foot of it. Instead, the shoe argument made us late coming back from a long weekend, and we hit heavy traffic on an expressway. We came around a curve, and I said, “What the hell are those chimneys burning?” Then my eyes adjusted to the unimaginable: the World Trade Center, smoldering. The spouse, a photographer for the New York Times, opened the sunroof and stood up, waist halfway out of the car, with a camera. When the first tower fell, it looked like God took his thumb and just rubbed it out of the picture. The inarticulate noises that came out of our throats were not screams exactly, just low exhalations of grieved astonishment…
At The Washington Post bureau, I said, “Where do I go?” and an editor said someone was needed to cover the hospitals, so I stuck my driver’s license, my press ID and a $20 bill in my running shoes and started jogging downtown. I was a runner in those days, so I ran all the way from 57th Street to St. Vincent’s Hospital on West 12th without stopping…
By late afternoon, the $20 bill was soaked with sweat and I had probably run six miles. Footsore, I headed to a bike shop on West 14th Street. Inside, it was deserted except for a guy at the counter. I flashed my Washington Post ID and said: “Hi, I’m a reporter, and I need to get back uptown. But all I’ve got is $20. Do you have anything I could rent for that just for today? And I’ll come back tomorrow with more money?”
He said: “I don’t got any rental bikes left. They took ‘em all.”
I said, “Listen, if you have any old junker I could use, I swear I will come back here tomorrow and buy the most expensive bike you have.”…
He disappeared in back and after a moment returned with that creaking 1970s steel 10-speed Schwinn. It was the bright yellow of a tropical fruit, “Kool Lemon,” as Schwinn advertised it in ‘74. It was so bright you practically had to throw a hand across your eyes to shade them. A tide of laughter rose up in my throat — in the middle of the worst day ever, I thought confusedly, how can you laugh? But that’s what the color summoned…
Zooming around on the bike, I tried to make some sense of the wrecked geography, the mangled tines of metal, the girder quivering in the wind stories high, and of the cold act that wrought such hot destruction, the smoldering pile that burned the boots off the feet of the first responders. In all of that, the bike was the color of a daisy chain and offered a small sense of consolation that I couldn’t identify, until Stephen Jay Gould identified it for me.
Two weeks after the cataclysm, Gould, the American paleontologist and evolutionary biologist, wrote an essay that somehow stanched the interior hemorrhage. There was but a single act of evil that day, he pointed out. There were thousands upon thousands of acts of good, repeated in countless different ways all over the city. “The tragedy of human history lies in the enormous potential for destruction in rare acts of evil, not in the high frequency of evil people,” he wrote in the New York Times. “Complex systems can only be built step by step, whereas destruction requires but an instant. Thus, in what I like to call the Great Asymmetry, every spectacular incident of evil will be balanced by 10,000 acts of kindness. … Good and kind people outnumber all others by thousands to one.”…
Gould’s assurance that historical evils are isolated and outnumbered is not a static truth. It does not have to remain true. If good and kind people are to “outnumber all others by thousands to one,” as he wrote, then we have to free-handedly do something small and good and kind every day because, hey, it’s not that kind of day. We have to make sure we are on the longer list. Make sure of it. That’s how we will know who and where we are and find our colorful ride out of the terrible smoke.
charluckles
This year I find myself embittered at the 9/11 remembrances and political circus. Nothing good has come from that horrible event. The attackers succeeded beyond their wildest dreams and our country may never recover. We chose to respond with vacuous patriotism, obscene violence and depravity, and by writing massive checks to the MIC. I wish we would leave 9/11 to the families of the victims.
rikyrah
Good Morning, Everyone???
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
Baud
@charluckles:
My hope is that by finally closing the chapter in Afghanistan, we can start moving toward that place. Beyond Afghanistan, the Biden people are affirmatively trying to deemphasize the Middle East.
Suzanne
@charluckles:
Agreed. I find myself especially angry with the military. The subsequent wars were a disaster, and should never have been fought, and people of conscience would never have been part of it. I do not “support our troops” in evil endeavors.
And to those who might say that the rank-and-file had no way of knowing, that they were young kids who needed the money…. I would point out that most of us clearly saw from Day One that this was wrong.
JPL
@Suzanne: When Bush started pointing out the true Patriots, it made me dislike him more, if possible.
He did redeem himself somewhat yesterday when he compared the home grown terrorists to the ones that attacked us on 9/11.
Baud
@JPL:
The one thing I’ll say about Bush that is somewhat conciliatory is that I think he was a follower rather than a leader when it came to his underlings, including his Veep. I don’t think he was the principal driver for how his administration responded to 9/11.
OzarkHillbilly
@Suzanne: I don’t blame the people in the military for going where their Commander in Chief sent them. That is on the politicians and the citizenry who were cheer leading it. For the illegal and immoral things that happened in fulfilling their lawful orders? To the extent that they are culpable for allowing those things to happen, yes I blame them. For the rose tinted prognostications and the willfully blinkered analyses? Yeah, I blame that on them too.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: Agreed, the “grown ups” weren’t really all that grown up.
Walker
We should be remembering 9/11 by the racist attacks this country embraced in the aftermath. Because that is who we became.
debbie
@Suzanne:
It wasn’t the military; it was the Bush-Cheney administration.
Suzanne
@OzarkHillbilly:
I have some blame for those who entered the military because of AMERICA FUCK YEAH sentiment. And those who joined because of anger and bloodlust and revenge. Michelle Goldberg’s piece this morning points out that in the 90s, we were bored, and many were too hungry for dramatics, for the sense of meaning that a civilizational battle provides. We need to stop pretending that military service is always honorable. If you enlisted after 9/11, you knew what you were getting into.
Baud
@Suzanne:
This also describes 2016 IMHO.
Morzer
If y’all wanted to know what the Creature from Mar-a-Lago was up to for 9/11 this year:
https://twitter.com/koryodynasty/status/1436342307486244872
Cermet
Yet the evil continued well after – by the US of A. We used this as a sorry excess to lay war upon so many innocents and they are still suffering thanks to us. I am tried of the 9-11 stories that fail to mention that for every innocent death we suffered, many hundreds of innocents in the world were killed in our name for this so-called ‘war on terror’. We have become the terror for the rest of the world and bush , the puppet of cheney (a puppet that makes bank off the military/industrial complex) led this oh so ig-noble crusade of death and injury upon the world’s children and other innocents
As for our soldiers, I don’t blame them at all – I hold the elite (0.001%) to account – those that not just demand this military/industrial complex gets the lion share of our tax money for their profit but control the media so it can enflame hatred and war fever always upon this country of ignorant.
stinger
We should have marked the 20th anniversary by shutting down Guantanamo. I know Biden has said he wants to by the end of his term.
Suzanne
@Baud: Absolutely. An exaggerated sense of threat was used to justify a lot of evil. But plenty of people — including, I’m sure, many commenters here — saw it coming, and knew that GUNZ BLAZING!!! was the wrong response. And we’re not special, we don’t have any secret access or informed insight. We’re just observant.
Too many Americans were bloodthirsty after 9/11, and that includes the enlisted cohort. I’m one of those people who only thinks the soldiers are honorable if the mission is honorable.
Trumpov’s army of MAGAts have the same mindset, and it is just as evil.
Baud
@Suzanne:
It’s really tough. A better president (cough, Gore, cough) goes in, gets Osama pretty quickly, and gets out, and we save a shitload of lives and wealth and preserve the immense international goodwill that we had after 9/11. Bush announces on the night of 9/11 that he has grander ambitions. Everything flows from that fateful decision.
germy
Solemn occasion, not politicized.
OzarkHillbilly
OK, fine. But those types are always going to be in the military. As I said, “For the illegal and immoral things that happened in fulfilling their lawful orders? To the extent that they are culpable for allowing those things to happen, yes I blame them.” The “for those doing those things” kinda goes w/o saying.
Nobody around here is pretending it is.
In the wake of 9/11 I was the only person I knew arguing against the Afghan invasion, loudly and often. Was it justified? Sure, to an extent and if one only looks as far as the blood and guts. My objection was always, “What comes after?” and nobody could give me an answer. If not all, most didn’t even try, just saying something along the lines of “We are the most powerful country in the world! We can do anything! What are you worried about?”
So, who is to blame? I put the lion’s share on the vengeful “politicians and citizenry” who wanted blood. And that was about 90% of America, maybe more.
SiubhanDuinne
@Morzer:
Also, someone on one of yesterday’s threads was wondering about America’s self-proclaimed Mayor and what he was up to on this a-noun-a-verb anniversary. Aaron Rupar has a (retweeted) clip of Ghouliani giving a really offensive and ? inebriated speech at a dinner last night.
(Sorry, I’m unable to link Rupar, but if you just Google Aaron Rupar Twitter it’ll take you there, and then just scroll down a few tweets.)
ETA: Ha! And while I was typing, @Germy #19 linked to the clip.
OzarkHillbilly
Maybe, but I have my doubts. Making war has been a bipartisan enterprise of America since it’s birth. Once we went in, it was always going to be easier and more politically feasible to stay in, than to get out.
Suzanne
@Baud: Agreed.
2000 was my first presidential election. It is still an unbelievable tragedy that Gore didn’t win.
Another thing to consider: I’d argue that consistent and unquestioning support for “the troops”, no matter the relative merit of the mission, helps fuel the fire for the next war. It makes young people hungry for respect and esteem look for it in the wrong places.
lowtechcyclist
@Suzanne:
We were??
I’m hardly in touch with how the mass of Americans are feeling, but I remember the late 1990s as a period that was far from boring. The economy was, for once, booming in a way that helped people at nearly all income levels, with a big assist from the dot-com boom.
Speaking of which, the Internet was this new and really neat thing, hell, just being able to send emails back and forth with friends anywhere in the world, however much we take it for granted now, was still a new and fresh thing.
Maybe media elites were bored; there were only so many dot-com stories you could write. But I’d have to see some evidence that the rest of us were feeling bored in the late 1990s. There’s nothing boring about making more money, having more to spend on doing fun stuff, and having a great new toy to play with.
NotMax
@SiubhanDuinne
Project In Vino Veritas.
//
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly:
Sure. No guarantees. But Gore wouldn’t have had a grand plan to start with.
Baud
@SiubhanDuinne:
That was me. Figures it would be offensive.
Baud
@germy:
Why can’t people who are not politically oriented stand up to Republicans when they behave like this?
Ken
@germy: Well if I’d known getting drunk and mocking allies was how you were supposed to commemorate 9/11… I took my model from elsewhere, and sat on my balcony muttering incoherent comments on the couple muttering in the parking lot.
Baud
@Suzanne:
I don’t believe anyone is above questioning or automatically entitled to support in a truly free and democratic society.
ETA: The harder question is how to go about it. There are certainly wrong or improductive ways to do it.
debbie
@Suzanne:
The administration was telegraphing war, war, war on 9/11. Had they not done that, people wouldn’t have enlisted.
Suzanne
@lowtechcyclist: Her perspective about late-90s-boredom felt pretty accurate to me. 9/11 was my senior year of college, which I only got to attend because I earned a full scholarship. My high school cohort was mostly poor and working class. There was definitely a sense of low-level discontent, and I know my friends and I talked about a sense of a lack of meaning, that we would just go into subsistence service jobs after finishing school, and that we had nothing really to look forward to, and that nothing would ever change. (Now, of course, I look back and wonder WTF we were so sad about.) Relatively few of my classmates went to college, many went into the military, some went to trade programs.
Chief Oshkosh
There are many people and groups, easily identified, who accelerated the decline of the US following 9/11 — the GOP, the MSM, the rich fuck 0.001%ers, the rah-rah fuck-brain goobers. None of these people were subtle and the records still exist; all anyone interested in justice has to do is go read or watch them.
I see glimmers, but just glimmers, in the Democratic leadership and others that suggest to me that we are on a slow path to finally calling out the guilty. Of course, this path will only be followed to the extent that Democrats hold the House, Senate, and White House. As Jenghazi and others have finally figgered out, there this a direct line from 9/11 to 1/6, though she and her ilk still seem to be hiding from their roles in getting us into two disastrous wars of choice.
Nora
@Baud: 100% agree. The whole “support the troops” thing has creeped me out my whole life; to me it always felt fascist.
And for those whose first presidential election was 2000, I feel for you. MY first presidential election was 1980. I will never forget how horrified I was to discover that Reagan won, and won so substantially. It was my first revelation about how out of step I am with so many of my fellow Americans.
Suzanne
@debbie: Sure. But people fell for the Bush Administration’s lies because they fucking wanted to. Motivated reasoning. And anger. And vengeance. Some of us saw it for what it was. But others got taken in, and they deserve some responsibility for that.
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
If it even comes to that. Unlike Bush and Cheney, Clinton and Gore took the threat of non-state terrorism seriously, and a President Gore wouldn’t have been ignoring all the intel warnings.
The way he organized the response to the threat of the millennium attacks, which made sure that all the different parts of the Executive Branch shared what they knew with each other, would have almost surely turned the reports that some suspicious-looking characters were more interested in learning to fly planes than to land them into tickets for bonuses and promotions for the guy who reported it, and his boss and his boss’s boss, right up the ladder. And that’s all it would have taken to prevent 9/11: rounding up those guys and detaining them.
Baud
@lowtechcyclist:
Agreed. Imagine a world where the planned attack is a p.5 story in the NYT because Gore’s people arrested the hijackers before they could get off the ground.
randy khan
Adding to Jenkins and Gould – the reason so few people died on 9/11 was that a bunch of faceless bureaucrats took steps to protect people in the Trade Center and the Pentagon from those kinds of disasters. At the Trade Center, they changed how evacuations would work after the 1993 bombing when it took forever to get people out; as a result, nearly everyone who was below where the planes hit was able to escape. At the Pentagon, they were in the process of reinforcing the outside walls and, as it happened, the plane hit on the side where they’d started the project, which meant that it did much less damage than it would have. Those two things saved thousands of lives.
Baud
@randy khan:
I actually didn’t know this. Thanks.
debbie
@Suzanne:
No argument with that.
I remember Democrats being called “traitors” right to their faces. I wish they had stood strong against that, but politicians being what they are, I wasn’t surprised they went along. It’s not like bullying is a new thing in this country.
A couple of days ago, I listened to an hourlong interview with Barbara Lee, the lone vote against war. If only our reps had had her courage!
germy
germy
debbie
@lowtechcyclist:
Paying attention would have caught them out for sure. Don’t forget the 1993 WTC bomber was caught because he was stupid enough to try and get a refund of his deposit for the rental truck he used for the bomb.
OzarkHillbilly
Maybe but again I doubt it. The political pressure to “do something” would have been on him from 9/12 and only gotten worse with each passing day. Grand plans take a lot of time to research, draw up, and execute. A lot longer than the one month Bush gave it.
Wapiti
@Suzanne: And to those who might say that the rank-and-file had no way of knowing, that they were young kids who needed the money…. I would point out that most of us clearly saw from Day One that this was wrong.
I sometimes remember the person who might have taken one of the bravest acts of the war: Ehren Watata, a lieutenant from Fort Lewis who refused to deploy to Iraq on the grounds that it was an illegal war. (He offer to go to Afghanistan instead). The court martial ended in a mistrial. The Army eventually allowed him out.
The prosecution of the case made it abundantly clear that the military justice system will not rule on the legality of a given war.
germy
Another Scott
Lots of normal people became less trusting of government during Nixon’s time. And lots more under W, but it took much longer because too few of the press were willing to be skeptical and do their jobs. I was naive enough to believe that he had evidence that we couldn’t see and deserved some trust. W took the country’s (and the Congress’s) trust that we would get bin Laden and squandered it. And then he lied to us about WMDs and into a disastrous war in Iraq. He tore up the ABM treaty with Russia. He tore up containment policies with the DPRK. He enabled monsters at home and abroad.
He was and remains a disaster for the USA and the world. Where were his mea culpas? Where were speeches when TFG was running, when he was ripping up the constitution, when he was inciting violence and jingoism and racism, when he was killing hundreds of thousands of Americans and trying to set himself up as dictator?
Yeah, no kudos from me. Grr…
Cheers,
Scott.
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly:
I still think it’s different. The Bush people saw their opportunity on the first night. Bush announced it to the nation when he said he was not going to focus only on Osama or al Qaeda. I don’t think that would have happened with Gore.
germy
WaterGirl
@Baud:
Agree. that absolutely would not have happened with Gore. Bush’s team knew where they wanted to go to war even before Sept 11. The attacks on Sept 11 just gave them the excuse they were waiting for.
Suzanne
@debbie: I hate — HATE — unquestioned military support in this country. Covid has made me even more hateful about it. Fuck the military. Who’s essential? Who maintains our American way of life? Who sacrifices? Who’s in danger? Grocery cashiers and shelf stockers and truckers and schoolteachers and construction workers and doctors and nurses and office workers and parents staying at home and etc etc etc. And no one’s thanking them for their service, no one’s got a national holiday in their honor, they don’t get four years of free college and great home loans. It is a distinctly toxic, murderous, and masculine vision of who is worthy of honor and respect. And since I can’t help but view 9/11 in the context of Corona and Afghanistan this year, I am feeling extra pissed.
Morzer
Trump’s speech to the Moonies was… quite something:
https://twitter.com/jimstewartson/status/1436870827677417473
And then there was the gibbering of the Moonie matriarch her own delusional self:
https://twitter.com/jimstewartson/status/1436902634275819525
MomSense
@lowtechcyclist:
For months the news was obsessing about Chandra Levy. The cable news channels were running speculation about it non-stop.
I remember that day vividly. It was horrible for me personally. I also remember the feeling of dread that it would be used to launch a war in Iraq because Bush was always going to go to war in Iraq.
I told everyone who would listen before the 2000 election that Bush would go to war in Iraq. Even that god awful treasury Secretary O’Neill revealed that the planning for Iraq started before 9/11.
People turned into monsters. With the encouragement of politicians and the media constantly beating the war drums. The manipulative content was off the charts and it was very lonely being against both wars. You’re either with us or you support the terrorists was an accepted slogan.
I don’t even know how we would go about holding the media accountable. Nothing seems to work.
It does strike me that we spent twenty years turning tragedy into becoming even more xenophobic, Islamophobic, and ignorant. The foiled fourth attack on 9/11 was the Capitol. We attacked it ourselves and tried to overthrow our own damned election 20 years later.
The first instinct was to help. First responders rushed in to save people. The lines to donate blood were long and full of people wanting to help. I wish we had stayed in that path. Helping.
lowtechcyclist
@randy khan:
The ‘faceless bureaucrat’ at the WTC was Rick Rescorla, who was a true hero.
Baud
@MomSense:
I don’t. I think what happened is that the country split in two. The right half got a lot worse, and the left half got a lot better. The net is probably very similar, however.
zhena gogolia
@Baud: With President Gore, I doubt 9/11 would have happened.
debbie
@Morzer:
Google’s of no help. Where was this “conference” taking place?
MomSense
@Baud:
I don’t think Gore would have dismissed the PDB “Bin Laden Determined to Strike” with an ok you’ve covered your ass.
debbie
O/T but still very awesome.
OzarkHillbilly
On that, you and I agree. I think Gore would have maintained focus.
Some members of the Bush Admin were pushing for an invasion of Iraq on 9/12. I think the only reason they didn’t get their way is because the politics would have been horrible. They spent the next 2 years building up a case for it, making it politically feasible.
I still think the invasion of Afghanistan was the original sin, and I think Gore would have committed it as well. We opened up Pandora’s box with that.
MomSense
@Baud:
Didn’t Bush’s approval go up to almost 70%? Support for the war in Iraq was way up there, too. It was like an inverse crazification factor there for awhile.
germy
Baud
@MomSense:
It was like 90% for Bush. I actually don’t blame people in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 who didn’t realize what Bush was planning.
topclimber
@Suzanne: I for one wasn’t taken in by the original war in Afghanistan. I wanted revenge against Bin Laden and if that meant taking out the Taliban who were sheltering him, so be it. Why do we have a military if we never use it to protect ourselves? This was in the days before drone warfare on steroids, before Bush blew the early takeout of Bin Laden and turned both Afghanistan and Iraq into neocon dystopias.
But I was also not taken in by the Bush BS about establishing democracy in the Mid East, starting with Iraq–not when the architects were the same ones who gave us fascist private militias in Nicaragua and El Salvador.
Once the inspectors confirmed no WMD is Iraq we had no national or even global interest that could not have been pursued by diplomatic means. We had a chance to combine worldwide sympathy for 9/11 and an unmatched example of military restraint. They (Bush-Cheney, the mercenary armies of Erik Prince, the cheerleaders in the media and the orthodox dictators of foreign policy) were the ones who blew it. Not me and not anyone on this site that I know of.
Suzanne
@MomSense: Yes, Bush and war were very popular post-9/11. And now… why, it’s incredible, you can’t find anybody who will admit to supporting them! Simply astonishing!
Fuck these people.
Wag
@Nora: 1980 was my first election as well. I too was disgusted by Reagan and the GOP, and disappointed in the outcome. Carter had installed solar panels on the White House roof, only to have them removed by Reagan. History might have turned out very differently had Reagan lost.
mali muso
@Suzanne: You won’t hear much argument from me. We are pretty close in age I think (I had just graduated college in 2001). Joined the Peace Corps in the aftermath of 9/11 even though being the face of America abroad at that time, alone and without any protection, felt pretty scary. We didn’t get any bonuses or parades or thanks for our service.
Baud
@Wag:
Something that might be said for every GOP win since 1964.
Another Scott
@Baud: My recollection it was 91% for GHWB after kicking Saddam out of Kuwait. I don’t think Jr got that high, but he got close – for a time…
Grrr…
Cheers,
Scott.
Baud
@Another Scott:
ETA: In some ways, it’s remarkable he came within a hair’s breadth of losing in 2024, although he’s still the only GOP president since his father to actually win the popular vote in a single election.
Suzanne
@topclimber: I bet most commenters here were always against the wars. That’s my point: if we could see that Bush and Co. were full of shit, then anyone could have seen it….. because we saw it and we had no special insight or intelligence. And I am not going to pretend that those who supported them were simply blameless fools who got lied to. People supported Bush and the wars in part because it felt good to do so, because they were angry and scared and wanted to blow stuff up.
RandomMonster
Not sure I’d say that recognizing that Shrub was intellectually uncurious, lazy, and a pushover is conciliatory…
Another Scott
@Baud: Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Baud
@RandomMonster:
It ranks higher on the scale that intentionally duplicitous warmonger. But YMMV.
patrick II
I often think of Gould’s principle when I think of Vladimir Putin. He doesn’t knowhow to coordinate the thousands of acts it would take to build a thriving country – – so instead he takes the simpler course of destroying the work of others.
OzarkHillbilly
The intelligence failures to connect the dots happened well below the Presidential level. Would Gore have taken the threat much more seriously? Yes. As a member of the Clinton admin he would have been well aware of the intel around the African embassy attacks and Al Qaeda in general and possibly on a first name basis with Clark who was the loudest on the threat from AQ.
But the fact is, most if not all the 9/11 hijackers arrived here before Bush was sworn in. The communication problems between the various agencies and their people who were reporting strange behaviors was a long time in the making.
RandomMonster
@Baud: Except that he was still intentionally duplicitous as he sold the war to the American people. I’m not going to cut him any slack, or Colin Powell for that matter either. They’re liars.
debbie
@Another Scott:
It was also that damn Plan for a New Century, where the goal was the ability to wage two wars simultaneously. Yeah, that one worked out…
Baud
@RandomMonster: I’m not cutting him any slack. I’m just trying to properly describe what I think his role was in the disaster. I don’t think he was the mastermind driving the response. I think he accepted what his top lieutenants told him his response should be. It was more of a failure of leadership than an exercise of leadership in that regard.
In the end, however, the buck stops where it stops.
MomSense
@Baud:
He was absolutely the driver of the war in Iraq. He blamed his dad’s failure to capture Saddam Hussein at the end of the war for his loss. And he had wicked issues with his dad and Iraq was going to be his moment to prove himself.
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly: Alternative histories are hard. That’s true even when we think our people would have done a better job. It is hard, however, imagining how Gore could have done worse.
Baud
@MomSense: Interesting. Although that’s not my impression, I’ll admit I never had any interest in reading in depth about the awfulness of the Bush years.
debbie
@MomSense:
Cheney drove that bus; Bush had plenty of motivation to jump on board.
lowtechcyclist
@germy:
Biden’s opening the books on 9/11, but he needs to do the same with the Iraq war as well. Rumsfeld may be dead, but there’s still time to try the rest of that crew as war criminals.
@MomSense:
Obviously, nobody knows except Bush himself, but I’ve long believed that Bush’s underlying motivation was to one-up his father.
MomSense
@Baud:
I had years of experience with that family. Just because W was incurious doesn’t mean he wasn’t confident and arrogant AF. He was the worst type of frat boy ringleader.
MomSense
@debbie:
I totally disagree. Cheney knew how to work the levers but W absolutely wanted that war and was determined to get it.
Benw
@charluckles: well said, thanks.
debbie
@MomSense:
Which is why, as Puppetmaster, he signed himself on as VP.
Geminid
@WaterGirl: Early on in their book about the Iraq war, Cobra II, New York Times military correspondent Michael Gordon and retired Marine Corps General Bernard Trainor give a telling anecdote: at a transition meeting between the two Presidents, Clinton cautioned Bush that Al Queda was a more immediate threat than Iraq.
Gordon and Trainor did not source this story, just as they did not identify many of the sources they drew upon for their history of the planning and execution of the Iraq invasion. But they seem to be very serious and responsible reporters, and I think they got this story right. If they did get it right, one could conclude that the 9/11 attacks would have been foiled had Al Gore been President.
Cheney and Rumsfeld were rivals when they served under President Ford. They became allies in the Bush administration. They had deeply held convictions that a “robust” American Presidency and a violent foreign policy were virtues. They drove our interventionism. Bush was a relative lightweight compared to his Vice President and Defense Secretary, but that is an explaination for his failures, not an excuse.
Suzanne
@MomSense: Agree five thousand percent.
The thing is, with a failure so massive, there’s enough blame to go around.
JPL
@debbie: Bush was going to finish the war in Iraq even without the events of 9/11. He willingly jumped on board.
You’re definitely right.
Another Scott
@debbie: I would phrase that a little differently.
The Pentagon’s goal for ages has been to be able to fight 2 quasi-major wars simultaneously. They didn’t want to have Far East Asia II and then the USSR/Russia to have a green light in Europe because they were stretched too thin.
The PNAC Neocons used that doctrine to argue that we could do Afghanistan and Iraq at the same time and it would be no big deal. We’d get the oil, show them who’s boss, make Putin quake in his boots, and the GQP perpetual majority would naturally follow. Easy, peasy!!
Grr…
Cheers,
Scott.
eclare
@lowtechcyclist: I agree. In one interview, W was asked if he had asked his father for advice about war. His response was that he answered to a higher father.
OzarkHillbilly
He’d have done better, that’s for sure. The question is, how much of a difference would it have made? I suspect the attacks would have occurred anyway. Once that happened the invasion of Afghanistan was probably inevitable. I’d like to think otherwise, but as I said before, making war has been a bipartisan enterprise for this country since it’s beginning. We are a bull in a china shop. Once we did that a lot of the consequences were baked in.
Not all, not by any means. Iraq never would have happened because Saddam had nothing to do with it and as far as I know no NatSec DEMs had a hard on for him. But there still would have been some unforeseen fallout, a lot of which just can’t be fixed.
shrug
Citizen Alan
@Baud: It wouldn’t have even made page 5. My personal belief is that president Gore and his administration would have indeed stopped 911 before it happened. And the response of the GOP and the media would be to dismiss the entire thing as Gore “wagging the dog” to distract from his imminent impeachment over that 1 time he called a Chinese donor and used the wrong phone. No one would have ever believed that 911 was possible had it not actually happened.
geg6
@charluckles:
You articulated my feelings exactly. Thank you.
MomSense
@debbie:
We are just going to have to disagree on this one. I think people are confusing competence with agency. W was always the decider. His dad asked Cheney to help pick his VP because he thought Cheney would temper W.
And for a really scary thought, the extended family consider Jeb! To be the “hothead” in the family.
JPL
@Citizen Alan: Imagine the uproar, if Gore had ordered pilots to lock the doors of the cockpits. If Gore had stopped private companies from teaching foreigners to fly, the republicans would have storment the White House.
Immanentize
@Another Scott:
Agree. The military sufficient for two land wars at once was a post-WWII plan, mostly anti-Soviet, cold war stuff. It predates even Vietnam and domino intervention theory by more than a decade. But we kept the thinking even after that version of threat faded.
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly:
Iraq not happening would have made a huge difference with respect to Afghanistan. Not sure how exactly, but it would have been a completely different timeline.
Baud
@JPL:
Or mandated vaccines!
Another Scott
@Baud:
repost.
Few things animated W as much as getting Saddam. He had, after all, tried to kill HW in Kuwait. Of course, Clinton had an actual sensible response to that in 1993 and didn’t think the answer was to invade.
W appointed the monsters in his administration. He wanted their input, and wanted Iraq/Saddam. He wasn’t a bumbling bystander (and I note that you didn’t say he was). Up until 9/11 he had no way to do it because he couldn’t even get the country enthusiastic about No Child Left Behind. He was looking at a 1-term administration, like Pappy’s.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
Baud
@Another Scott: Thanks. Not that I question Nixon, but I wish he had cited his source.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: Agreed, but the invasion of Afghanistan put us in direct conflict with a significant segment of Pakistan’s NatSec establishment. The Taliban were their boys. It didn’t help us with regard to Iran either, tho other than heightening their paranoia, I doubt it made things much worse. I can’t say how the other Stans felt about it.
I don’t like linking Iraq and Afghanistan too closely. We see them as connected because one followed the other so quickly and the rhetoric from the Bush admin put them in the same basket but that was pure politics. The reality was they were 2 distinctly separate issues, one of them a wholly made up bogeyman.
patrick II
@MomSense:
I think of the Bush presidencY as the Oedipal presidency – Bush JR. doing the opposite of his father for the love of his mother. Bush Jr cut taxes where his father raised them, he loved to “the Decider”, acting alone where his father was known for Coalition building, and finally, ” finishing” the war in Iraq his father had started.
War with Iraq was a forgone conclusion the day Dick Cheney became Vice- President. Cheney, Rumsfeld, and most of the other appointees dealing with foreign affairs had signed a letter to Clinton urging him to go _back to war with Irag and finish the job Bush I had abandoned. Surrounded by these people, and with strong (unlike his weak real dad) father figure Cheney as the real top dog, Bush was not going to stop that train.
Bush did not stand up and wrest control of his Presidency from Cheney until his Second term or we would had war with Iran as well.
Chief Oshkosh
@Baud: Amen. That little shitkicker and his evil cabal still need to be investigated. It’ll never happen because we’re not truly a nation of laws.
JPL
@Baud: If Biden had used tax payer money to encourage pharms to come up with a vaccine, he would have been impeached.
MomSense
@Another Scott:
Bush told his own fucking cabinet months before September 11 that he wanted to invade Iraq. I realize I am harping on this but W should not get a pass as a hapless follower. He wanted this war and he got what he wanted. He is used to getting what he wants.
OzarkHillbilly
@JPL: Only if he did it while wearing a tan suit.
Lyrebird
@OzarkHillbilly:
I was not quite the only person in my state capital city, and I argued timidly, but same. Think of all the contempt heaped on Kerry for even suggesting we talk with other countries before invading one.
@Suzanne:
Those folks sure merit concern. That does not describe any of the several people I know who joined after 9/11. People joining out of love of NYC. Haven’t re-checked Lucas Kunce’s bio, but he wasn’t just heck yeah kill em all. Certainly heard a lot of that in the 80s.
Another Scott
@Baud: Don’t know if he’s mixing up his dates, but there’s a Lawfare post from someone in the room:
MoJo timeline:
Saddam/Iraq was W’s white whale, and his administration was filled with people overjoyed at his obsession.
HTH.
Cheers,
Scott.
MomSense
@patrick II:
I agree except that W was actually the top dog and if he hadn’t wanted Cheney to do his bidding he would have let him go.
Chief Oshkosh
@OzarkHillbilly:
I don’t it was never that high a percentage. An large percentage of US citizens were simply ignored. The corporate press drove the war narrative relentlessly.
Chief Oshkosh
@debbie:
Part of the problem there was that Bushco and the Thugs presented it as all-or-nothing. You were either in favor of full-on war, or you were in favor of doing nothing at all. With a huge assist from the NYTimes and other media, it was a done deal.
Baud
@Another Scott: Thank you!
Suzanne
@Lyrebird: As I mentioned upthread, a lot of my classmates and my social cohort joined the military. A few seemed to do so out of a desire to contribute to something greater than themselves. Most seemed to join because it was a way to get paid while using guns. Some tried civilian jobs first, and couldn’t keep them or couldn’t make much money. One dude in my high school friend group joined up when we were 30, in 2010, because he couldn’t keep a job. Some joined because they had student loans or other financial issues and the signing benefits were huge because the recruiters were desperate. I heard plenty of slurs like “sand n”. My cousin was in the USAF at the time and he said most of the enlisted people he worked with were pretty eager to use military might. None of this reflects especially well on anyone who volunteered for this.
Baud
@Chief Oshkosh: The GOP controlled Congress so war was a fait accompli even if every Dem had Barbara Lee’s foresight.
ETA: Nevermind. We had a one-vote edge in the Senate because Jeffords switched to caucusing with the Dems.
Another Scott
@Baud: Note that those clips don’t say “invade”. So, I’m still not quite sure what dick_nixon is citing.
The MoJo timeline has more receipts. W’s people were planning during the transition for ways to topple Saddam. (The Congress-passed and Clinton-signed 1998 Iraq Liberation Act gave them a figleaf.)
Cheers,
Scott.
Chief Oshkosh
@OzarkHillbilly:
Some of those people were pushing for it years earlier. PNAC was all about it, at least as early as the mid-90s.
Baud
@Another Scott:
I know that Richard Perle was on it as of December 2001.
OzarkHillbilly
@Chief Oshkosh: I was pulling that number out of my ass, based on the 100% around me had to be balanced by others around the country who felt as I did, and the fact that the punditry of the time was 100% behind it. I have no idea what it actually was. It was not a percentage to be taken seriously.
bemused senior
@Suzanne: my father was a career Air Force officer, a pilot and a lawyer. He served in WWII, and went back into the military after getting his law degree. He was still serving during the Vietnam war, when I was in college. We had many unfriendly discussions about that war. He was a very smart man, later heading the national defense section of the congressional research service after his retirement. But he was adamant that it was not the role of military officers to publicly express opinions about military policy, because a fundamental tenet of our democracy was civilian control of the military. So I stopped taking money from him for my expenses for college, and did what I could to oppose the war. I realize now how right he was to be outspoken within the military and silent outside.
OzarkHillbilly
@Chief Oshkosh: My memory is that Rumsfeld was banging that drum on 9/11but memories are fallible. So I gave the ghoul credit for waiting at least until the bodies were cold. Probably unwarranted credit.
Suzanne
@bemused senior: I also think it is right to NOT ENLIST. The people I know who enlisted because of the benefits and they were broke?! Get the fuck out of here.
Subsole
@Another Scott: And then they found the Reality-Based Community waiting at the end of that particular rainbow, holding a benailed baseball bat inscribed with the Old Sidhe for “Told ya so”.
lowtechcyclist
@MomSense:
And shark attacks. That was the other big story of the summer of 2001.
So yeah, I expect the big names in the media were bored, and were more than ready to go, “Yippee! A war!!”
And like you, I have no fucking clue what to do about it.
OzarkHillbilly
@Suzanne: People enlist for a lot of different reasons. It appears none of them are good enough for you.
Chief Oshkosh
@Baud:
I still have a political cartoon on my wall about Jefford’s “betrayal.”
Chief Oshkosh
@OzarkHillbilly: Understood. I’m equally ass-pulling numbers. My experience was opposite to yours. Not one of my family, friends, or acquaintances was for the war(s), except for my then-mechanic. I fired him. I bump into him every once in a while (it’s a small town). He’s still an asshole.
Suzanne
@OzarkHillbilly: Enlisting after you KNOW that you’re going to be sent off to engage in immoral wars?! Jesus H Christ, what reason is possibly good enough for that?! For fuck’s sake.
OzarkHillbilly
@Chief Oshkosh: In my case it was liberals and conservatives. Even the few who expressed reservations felt like “We have to do it.”
Another Scott
@lowtechcyclist: And what to do with the windfall everyone was getting from the Bush tax cuts #1.
(groucho-roll-eyes.gif)
That reminds me – lots of people say that we should lift the cap on the payroll taxes so that the wealthy pay more. I agree! But it needs to be done sensibly. AFAIK, FICA taxes are dedicated to SS/Medicare. Raising the limit without any other changes may result in another “Social Security surplus” (which actually increases the national debt, believe it or not, because of the way the accounting is done.) So, either the increased revenue would need to (sensibly) go to the general revenue accounts, or some other mechanism would be needed so that it doesn’t become yet another cudgel in the OMG! Teh Debt Will Kill Us All In Our Beds battles…
Cheers,
Scott.
Geminid
@patrick II: The war with Iran may have been prevented by the quagmire that Iraq became. Rumsfeld’s plans were to withdraw most of our military forces in Iraq by 2004. The insurgency by Baathist diehards and radical Shiites prevented this. Had it not, I think Chensy and Rumsfeld would have targeted the second part of the “axis of evil,” Iran. With the fraught proximity of U.S. and Iranian warships in the Gulf of Hormuz, a war would have been easy to start.
The Iranians gave a lot of material support to their Shiite allies in Iraq, and there is a lot of American and Iraqi blood on their hands. But on the principle of, “we have to fight them (the Americans) over there or we’ll have to fight them here,” they were justified in terms of their own self-interest.
Suzanne
@lowtechcyclist:
Left/right bias gets a lot of attention in the media, but what gets relatively little attention is the bias toward dramatics and histrionics and narrative. As the media exists to sell itself, none of it has any incentive to eliminate this bias. I thought that the rise of blogging around this time would act as a counter, and it probably did to an extent, but if you are incentivized financially or socially to gain reader- or viewership, I don’t know how to avoid this, either.
Keeping calm and carrying on doesn’t feel emotionally satisfying, it doesn’t feel like it meets the moment, and it sure doesn’t make anyone any money.
OzarkHillbilly
You’d be surprised at the questionable things one is capable of when pushed into a no-win corner. I know, I’ve done a few. Not proud of them, but I own my sins. I guess most of us just aren’t gifted with your vision, moral clarity, and infallible judgement.
Baud
@Geminid: Good point.
@Suzanne: Good point.
Another Scott
@Suzanne: +eleventy billion
It’s a huge problem that immediate thrills and whatever gets our hearts pumping faster has been monetized and AI-ized and driven without limits into our daily lives. I don’t know how to combat it either, but it’s a huge problem, and it’s killing and maiming far too many people (the fight against masks, vaccines, LED lightbulbs, low-flush toilets, hybrid cars, etc., etc.)…
Cheers,
Scott.
Suzanne
@OzarkHillbilly:
Oh what the fuck ever. A sizable cohort, though a minority, of Americans opposed the wars and they were correct to do so. Sometimes at risk of career, friends, esteem. No one — including those who voluntarily enlisted to participate in the shitshow — is giving them an apology.
Sure Lurkalot
I was in France on 9/11. When I returned 10 days later, I went from the sympathy and compassion of the French to Bush the Uniter and the war drums being dusted off.
An attorney with whom I had worked for many years, who had fumed with me about Bush v Gore, an anti-war activist in the 60’s, was suddenly praising Bush. I realized then I was going to be on the other side of whatever was going to ensue.
I don’t profess to knowing that Cheney had mapped out the oil fields of Iraq but I did know that he was evil, GWB was a tool and 9/11 was the opportunity the PNAC crowd was waiting for.
Kathleen
@Baud: In fact there was a report issued during Clinton’s presidency that predicted 9-11 type attack was imminent and outlined a series of measures that should have been taken to prevent it. It was shelved when Bush took office. I wish I could remember the name of that report (I think 2 senators were behind it).
Suzanne
@Another Scott: Honestly, I don’t have any great ideas, either. I think social consequences are really important in changing behavior, and I think another important bias that we have is a bias to be nice and nonconfrontational, and this means that people get away with more than they should because people only disagree with them privately. What we call “the media” are actually just people, but they don’t experience consequences for their bullshit, and they should.
Geminid
@Geminid: Correction: that’s the Straights (not the Gulf) of Hormuz. The Gulf is the Persian Gulf.
I read recently that now 20% of the world’s oil supply transits the Straights of Hormuz. I think the figure was closer to 40% in 2001. I guess that’s progress, of some kind.
bemused senior
@Suzanne: I assume you are a pacifist. I was at the time of the Vietnam War .. I became a Quaker. But if you are not, you assume omnipotence on the part of 20 year olds to be able to discern the underlying politics and decision making of the leaders who get us into wars, so that these very young people can sort out the justified from the unjustified wars. I think most people who enlisted were motivated by a jumble of personal motives with patriotism, even if the patriotism was misguided.
Anoniminous
Watching the politicians and media turn the country into a lynch mob was the most depressing episode of my life and I lived through the Viet Nam War.
Kathleen
@zhena gogolia: I agree with you. Gore really won the presidency. Had the Brooks Brothers riot not occurred during the recount I believe the truth would have come out. I also remember how the media collectively shrugged its shoulders about how that riot and the Supreme Court decision denied Gore the Presidency.
OzarkHillbilly
@Suzanne: I know. You are perfect and neither I nor any of the other sinners on this planet can measure up to your impeccable standards.
Yes, I am entirely done with your holier than thou bullshit.
Baud
@Suzanne:
I agree with his. I think the other problem we have us that when we are are confrontational, we deem it a failure if it’s not instantly successful. Most confrontations of this sort will change the culture slowly, but if we give up on it because we don’t see quick results, we don’t even get that.
Mike E
@germy:
Jeff Tiedrich
@itsJeffTiedrich
Replying to
@BeschlossDC
and
@CheriJacobus
imagine the bar for “the America that I know” being lowered to the extent that the torture-enthusiast who lied our country into two pointless wars and crashed the world’s economy is hailed as a statesman only for being somewhat better than Trump
MagdaInBlack
@OzarkHillbilly: You and I both know that a lot of young people join the military for economic reasons. That is, to get out of the dead end in their rural or economically depressed areas, and get some educations, and a career. They can’t control what decisions are being made with regard to “war” and they don’t have the luxury of waiting til the political climate is better.
In other words, they’re doing what some here keep saying they should do: Get the fuck out and better yourself.
Suzanne
@bemused senior: I believe in just war theory. I also believe there hasn’t been a just war for this country since 1945.
I was 21 on 9/11. Seeing that we were going to be drawn into immoral war required zero omnipotence. Absolutely none. Plenty of people were warning against it!
I agree that people enlisted post-9/11 for “personal motives” and a misguided sense of patriotism. But, like, those people get to be held accountable for actions taken because of their misguided patriotism. And they get to be called out for their motivated reasoning. They get some of the blame. Just like I don’t honor Confederate soldiers, even if their personal motives were to protect their homes.
debbie
@Chief Oshkosh:
That, and lots of name calling.
debbie
@lowtechcyclist:
I miss those quiet, boring Augusts, don’t you?
Baud
@Mike E:
I don’t think I heard anyone call him a statesman. People are just acknowledging that he told the truth on this one thing, which happens to be a present danger facing the country.
Mike E
@Baud: there’s no middle ground between the arsonist and the fireman, sorry…I guess I’m just bitter that way!
Kathleen
@Kathleen: Found it. The report was the Hart Rudman Report. Here is a link:
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADA387277
Baud
@Mike E:
History suggests he will go back to his post-presidential obscurity after this.
debbie
@Kathleen:
In 1998, the GOP chose to mock Clinton after he bombed Sudan to kill OBL rather than uniting and working together to rid the world of a known terrorist and financier of terrorists.
Blithershout
Interesting. Rob Dreher’s column of the day over on American Conservative describes his experiences on 9/11. He wrote
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
I don’t blame people for enlisting. I don’t blame the troops for going where they were sent. The Taliban were providing safe haven for people who literally attacked us. That could not be permitted. That doesn’t mean we should have been their for 20 years, but that could not be allowed to stand.
I blame the Bush administration for taking advantage of them, for half-assing nation building, instituting torture, and going into Iraq. Many of the soldiers paid with their health or their lives. Patriotism per se isn’t an evil thing. It can cause people to band together and get through difficult things. The right wing has weaponized it, but I reject their framing.
zhena gogolia
Church was unbearable this morning. People were invited to come up to the front and share their experiences on 9/11. They kept saying, “I remember so clearly that Monday morning.” I kept furiously whispering to my husband, “IT WAS TUESDAY”
You might wonder if in his tirade about the “rush to war” the great peace activist made any mention of President Biden’s ending Afghanistan. Nope. Not one word.
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
That is disappointing.
Suzanne
@Baud:
Agree. Most people go with the flow, they do and support what most of their cohort does and supports. When we are visibly counter to that, it gives other people a bit more steel in their backbones. Here’s an example: recently, Jennifer Aniston made a statement in an interview about how she’s severed some professional and personal relationships with people who aren’t vaccinated. That kind of thing is incredibly helpful, because it normalizes it. It makes other people who are considering it feel less afraid of being fringe, it shifts that Overton window so that it is mainstream.
Post-9/11, the mood was so angry that the “flow” position was the “blow them all up!” position. I think the anti-war contingent was rightfully really afraid of being called anti-American and lots of people who may have silently agreed didn’t want to be seen. But the more vocal we are, hopefully we will help shift that mainstream the next time there is a huge push to get engaged in another dumb war.
ETA: I think those “Love is love, no humans are illegal” signs that I see in some of my neighbors’ front yards serve a similar function.
zhena gogolia
@Baud: To be clear, this is a congregation member, not the minister.
lowtechcyclist
@bemused senior:
This. Most people are raised to assume their country is right and good, most people also don’t pay as much attention to the news as people like us do, and your average kid of enlistment age who might consider signing up probably has no clue that there might be any reason why not to.
One fairly obvious but important thing about the military is that, at least at the level that your grunts are at, it has to run pretty much like a machine: when someone gives you an order, your obey it: the bar for not doing so is very very high.
So when someone signs up for the military, they’re signing on in advance for whatever the military might do during their period of enlistment.
So while it’s quite understandable to me that your average potential recruit doesn’t see any reason not to sign on, speaking as an old Jesus freak, I am disturbed by that tendency among evangelicals.
Because the military is in the business of killing people, and ours has certainly killed its share of people that, if one believes in the Christian version of God, God surely didn’t want to be killed. And it will undoubtedly continue to do so. But if you sign on to the military, you’re part of the machine that kills them.
That should, at the very least, give to any potential enlistee who considers him or herself a Christian (which is probably most of them, come to think of it) to have at least a moment of doubt about whether joining the military is something they ought to be doing.
Unfortunately, American evangelicalism sells a toxic belief that America is God’s chosen country, and God and America (or at least America as it would be if not for all those liberals who, in their minds, hate God) are inseparably linked, and what’s good for America is good for God, and vice versa. So of course they don’t question it in the least.
smith
@bemused senior: I also remember Vietnam, having been a moderately active antiwar and student rights participant then (and also became a Quaker for a time). One thing I particularly recall is that, contra the Right wing myth that has since been widely accepted in this country, there was huge and deep sympathy among antiwar activitists toward the guys who were actually serving there. They were our own age cohort, and there was a lot of communication between them and those of us at home.
Some of this sympathy was undoubtedly due to the draft, but there also was a feeling that even those who had volunteered could not be personally blamed for being misled into thinking that cannon fodder = heroes. These were very young kids, for heavens sake, who’d been raised to believe this, and if they hadn’t yet developed enough knowledge or sophisticated understanding of what war actually entails, it was hardly their burden to set the world straight. And of course, many of them did learn from bitter experience, and their letters back to us helped clarify the thinking of those still at home.
Mike E
@Baud: no matter where
weW goes here we are, sadly….any whitewashing going on here is by those opportunists who made their bones under the cover of this egregious and criminal gambit knowing full well that Iraq had zero to do with it, the fcukers. Truth and reconciliation ain’t the American Way apparentlyRuckus
@charluckles:
@Baud:
It is a day, not like any other. It placed a massive, horrible pall over the US. It created more damage for both sides, and the rest of the world. And we over reacted, as we as a nation have been want to do for much of our existence. We attacked nations, we did this for almost 2 decades, and accomplished what? Thousands of people dead, likely far more mangled and broken and accomplished what?
President Biden has finally ended the worst of it, but the repercussions will last for a hell of a lot longer time. What good has come out of our malevolent misadventure in the Middle East? On our side our politics are far worse, our military is used up, our countries psyche is not really in any way better, and the unnecessary death count is appalling.
All in all I’d rate this mal misadventure an absolute minus. My hope is that at least we learn something – but I doubt the right parties will, humans take their revenge in many ways but sweet is almost always never one of them and the bigger the revenge, the less sweet it always actually is.
bemused senior
@Suzanne: “People were warning against it.” Yes, and people were advocating for it. Just War Theory simply kicks the can down the road. How do you discern what is just? Your description of your circle of friends doesn’t leave me with a picture of intellectuals studying the background of Middle East diplomacy and Bush family dynamics. Equating military enlistees with Confederate soldiers is not a convincing analogy.
Cacti
Gotta be real here. I’ll always give a side eye to 9/11 porn because of all the terrible things it was used to justify. The loss of life on 9/11 was terrible. What we did in response to it was far worse.
And the country will never have an honest conversation about that, or what brought about the 9/11 attacks in the first place.
lowtechcyclist
@zhena gogolia:
I’m going, WTF does that have to do with worship? What spiritual lesson of a Christian sort can be drawn from these recollections?
Meanwhile, we’re having three 9/11s each week right now, in real time, thanks in no small part to alleged Christians’ refusal to love their neighbor enough to get a shot, or wear a mask while they’re at the damned grocery store. There might be fodder for some lessons there.
And yes, it was definitely a Tuesday.
Baud
FWIW, my guess is this will be the last major mainstream commemoration of 9/11, and that future years will be more low key.
Baud
@lowtechcyclist:
I’m not a churchgoer, but my impression is that most mainstream churches don’t have just purely theological services.
brantl
@Baud: How is that conciliatory? The son-of-a-stupid-bitch let himself be the man in charge, when he clearly knew he didn’t have a fucking clue what to do, or how to do it! He knew he was a useless dry-drunk, and he pursued the presidency, ANYWAY.
Citizen Alan
@OzarkHillbilly:
This is one reason why it enrages me to see pious hypocrites claim that America is a “Christian nation.” Real Christians would have turned the other cheek and focused on “loving them that hate you.” Our Fake Christians went for shock and awe instead.
Ruckus
@Suzanne:
This is the result of being a nation of revenge and rationalization.
And a lot of our nation are people who are exactly that. Hell a lot of humans are exactly that. It takes a leader to change that and not one republican leader is conscious or capable of it. They are about the guiding of the people to get what their paymasters want. If we want that to change we have to change the culture of this nation. We have to recognize what many consider to be governing to be, and it’s not to be better humans, it’s to be richer humans. Rich to the extent that money is the guidance, never humanity.
Suzanne
@bemused senior: No, most of my high school friend group were not intellectual. A few of us were very academically inclined, but most of them were not. One dude died of Covid a few weeks ago because he was unvaccinated. But again, they (and he) bear some responsibility for that. I am not going to pretend that the military enlistees were just totally innocent patriots thoroughly hoodwinked by evil Bush and Cheney and a credulous media. I’m not going to pretend that Garrett carefully performed a risk-benefit analysis that just happened to coincide with the conservative bent of the area we lived in. All of them exhibited bad judgment because they wanted something: money, the respect of the social cohort, or something else. If we don’t call it bad judgment, we increase the chances of it happening the next time we want to do dumb shit.
VOR
My wife yelled to me to turn on the TV, that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. I figured it was a Cessna lost in the fog or something. Then they showed the video of a big plane, a 737 I figured, hitting with a sunny, clear sky. I was stunned. Then when the second plane hit the other tower live on TV, I turned to my wife and said that’s no accident, someone just declared war on us.
Some elements in the US military did resist the invasion of Iraq. General Shinseki, the Army Chief of Staff, testified to Congress that “something in the order of several hundred thousand soldiers” would be needed to maintain a post-war Iraq. Meanwhile Rumsfeld was ordering planners to create scenarios where we captured the country with 10-20k troops. General Shinseki retired June 2003.
I always thought their excuses for invading Iraq were crap. The WMD inspectors found nothing. The much-vaunted Powell presentation to the UN Security Council was all circumstantial. But I figured we couldn’t contain Saddam forever so eventually something had to be done. I knew the people in the Bush Administration had wanted to attack for years so I made the fatal mistake of assuming they had thought about it and had an actual plan. Nope.
Geminid
@Suzanne: A lot of those Confederate soldiers were drafted. Some of the resisters took refuge in the mountains near me. A common refrain in the Confederate army was: “rich man’s war, poor mans fight.”
After the Confederate armies in the East surrendered, North Carolina Governor Zebulon Vance wrote in his diary, “Thus ends the Rebellion. The people were never for it. Only the politicians and the newspapers.”
Omnes Omnibus
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony:
All of this, Sister. I will stay away fro commenting on some of the other takes here lest I become intemperate.
Oh, and my other take on 9/11’s anniversary was summed up with this.
Matt
The response to 9/11 demonstrates that, at best, that ratio is about 1:1. We saw a majority of folks in this country decide that FUCKING TORTURE was somehow OK – that’s not something a “good person” does.
See also last November – if this was a country where good people outnumbered bad by 1000x, Trump wouldn’t have almost won. We have a massive reservoir of evil in this country, and it’s rooted in the fundamentalist churches.
debbie
@Matt:
In this country, maybe, but not in the world. Something else we have squandered.
ETA: Example.
Cacti
@Matt: What you said.
In the 20 years since 9/11, the greatest lesson I’ve taken away is that I gravely overestimated the basic human decency of Americans as a whole.
Suzanne
@Matt: Co-signed. You’re absolutely correct.
It’s the fundamentalist churches, which completely uncoincidentally overlaps significantly with gun nuts. It’s amazing how they always seem to think that the solution to every problem requires bullets and Jesus.
smith
I am much more willing to condemn bad judgment in a 40 year old than an 18 year old. Bad judgment is almost a defining characteristic of the latter.
Citizen Alan
@Matt: Hell, the last presidential election proved conclusively to me that approximately half the country is a literal death cult. 80 million people belong to the fucking Manson Family.
Pappenheimer
@Suzanne: I was USAF long before 9/11. On 9/12 I told a younger airman, “we are going to kill a lot of people over this. But most of the people we will kill had nothing to do with this”
He replied, “I don’t care.”
Suzanne
@Matt:
I will also note that a lot of these people supported torture because they said they are patriotic. America has a lot of average-at-best people.
Kathleen
@debbie: The GQP has been seditious far longer than I care to realize.
bemused senior
@Suzanne: we called it bad judgement during the Vietnam War, we demonstrated at the enlistment centers, antiwar veterans (paging Raven) organized and demonstrated, and we demonstrated against going into Iraq with many of us reminding about the lessons of Vietnam. It didn’t stop our political leaders and media pundits from advocating for the war. So were there voices advocating against the war? Yes. Would a unanimous rejection of enlistment have helped change the decision to invade Iraq? Probably. Is it reasonable to blame that decision on the 20 year olds? You don’t convince me.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
WaPo click: Great summary of books on 9/11 and it’s aftermath
I found this well worth reading.
Suzanne
@smith:
Then perhaps we should praise those who display good judgment instead?
eclare
@Omnes Omnibus: That other take is exactly where I was yesterday. I watched my Alma mater play football and was grateful that the fans were decked out in typical fan attire, not that red, white, and blue crap.
Baud
@Suzanne:
Agree. We don’t do nearly enough of that. It’s all too heavily weighted toward criticism.
trollhattan
Man, and I thought politics sucked here.
A decade of life under BoJo is going to seem geological. Sucks to be you, you Brexit-voting, Tory-electing gits.
Another Scott
@Kathleen: Thanks for the pointer. Lots of it seems to be obvious, especially in retrospect, but it’s good that these exercises are done occasionally. Of course, they usually just end up collecting dust… :-/
Cheers,
Scott.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Baud: Re: Bush the follower. From the Post book review I linked to above…
Ruckus
@Wapiti:
That is not in the purview of the military justice system. The military serves at the pleasure of the president. That is the system. That it gets abused is the part that is wrong. But in this country we specifically do not give the military the power to set policy outside of doing it’s job. Countries that allow that, or don’t take steps to not allow the military to have a political opinion often end up being called dictatorships.
It actually is a good thing that they do not have that power. The military justice system is there because military justice, to be effective, has to be about keeping the military on the job, not on setting the terms of the job. It is there to make sure that the military is capable of doing it’s job, nothing more. That is why the military has it’s own set of laws, it is a different animal than the government as a whole, has to be run different and is not supposed to be political.
Suzanne
@Baud: One example: it is very common for candidates for public office to tout their military service, even when it has nothing to do with what they’re running for. Like…. what if we interrogated that? What if we didn’t automatically assume that military service was a proxy for being a good person or a qualification for public office? Because it isn’t.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Baud: If you offer praise for someone, aren’t you implicitly endorsing everything they have ever said and done? Much safer to offer criticism. //
Ruckus
@Another Scott:
This.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Suzanne: Seems better to elevate other heroic professions, vs putting the military down.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Another Scott: I see Frankenstein is starting to publicly question the virtue of the monster he created.
smith
@Suzanne: I’d go further and say it’s fundamentalist thinking that underlies the pathology in American politics. People with a Goober mindset belive that there are immutable truths that have existed from the beginning of time that cannot be contradicted, adjusted, or diminished. Many of these people may wear crosses and self-identify as Christians, but never go to church and couldn’t accurately produce a Bible quote if you offered them a million dollars. But they hold the same truths to be self-evident:
America, fuck yeah!
Guns good, moar guns better
XY is always superior to XX
Low melanin is always superior to higher melanin
Might always makes right
Among others. This mindset is why they can’t deal with scientific findings, for instance, because those damn scientists are always using qualifiers and changing their minds.
Suzanne
@Formerly disgruntled in Oregon: It’s all relative, though. Why is the military sacrosanct? Teachers come under plenty of criticism, for example. Yet the average American schoolteacher has done more public service than ten soldiers, I’d submit. If it’s “okay” to enlist in the military because you want to get out of your shitty town or earn enough money to go to college, then let’s acknowledge that it is a job like any other.
Omnes Omnibus
I don’t. I also don’t assume that a degree or set of degrees automatically indicates that a person is intelligent or educated. Both get used as heuristics for more than they actually indicate. What both really show is that a person has a certain capacity for responding to external and internal discipline and then accomplishing tasks.
Suzanne
@Omnes Omnibus: You’re smarter than most. My grandfather thought being in the military was the most honorable, self-sacrificing thing a person could do.
smith
I am in no way advocating praising 18 year olds for their poor judgment, or more broadly praising people just because they served in the military. And I agree that praise is due to people who take on hard jobs that actually benefit other people. I just think that in apportioning blame for getting the US into morally indefensible wars, there are a raft of people much higher on my list than very young enlistees.
Ruckus
@zhena gogolia:
I actually think it likely would have. I know that you might be right, but the concept that someone should fly a plane into the world trade center was likely hatched long before 9/11, long before bush took office and as likely before the election that actually shouldn’t have put him there, as Gore actually ended up with more votes, after he conceded.
Suzanne
@smith: Just once, I would like to see something like, “Vote for Steve, he always opposed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he didn’t enlist! He tended bar while he went to state school instead. He plays the cello and enjoys microbrews!”.
ETA: Maybe Steve even speaks French…..
debbie
@Kathleen:
Absolutely, and they are among us. I still can’t get over my brothers’ support for TFG. At this point, it wouldn’t even surprise me if they spouted some sort of Q nonsense.
Another Scott
@bemused senior: I think a very big part of the public response was that too few people were willing to fully accept that the President would actually lie to us about the motivations for war. (Even after seeing Wag the Dog in 1997!) I know, even though I was almost in my 40s, I was one of those people. I believed that W and his people had secret evidence that they couldn’t share with us.
I felt unease about expanding the response against al Qaeda and bin Laden to anyone who wasn’t “with us”. I felt unease about going to war against “terrorism” – there’s no end to a war against a tactic. I felt unease about blowing the actions of 19-20 people into a global military response.
The scales finally fell from my eyes when I saw Powell use grainy pictures from the 1970s-1980s be used as a justification for attacking Iraq now. But even then, I expected them to find something that they could tout as WMDs…
:-/
I should have read d-squaredat the time (originally from May 2004), but I’m a huge fan now:
(repost)
tl;dr – though you should – Never give known liars the benefit of a doubt. Never.
Cheers,
Scott.
debbie
@Suzanne:
In the late 90s, some local candidate around here was called out for bogus military service. Actual veterans ratted him out; they were mightily pissed off.
Omnes Omnibus
@Suzanne: My being smarter than most is entirely beside the point.
Uncle Cosmo
9/11 broke a lot of stuff inside a lot of heads, particularly the upper-middle-class leftish intelligentsia. All of a sudden Middle Eastern terrorists weren’t just vague nasties you sent your “all-volunteer” armed forces half a world away to target with massive amounts of firepower while you (and everyone you actually cared about) stayed comfortably home sipping your pricey wine and frequenting trendy ethnic restaurants. All of a sudden they could come to kill you where you worked or lived or flew or played.
I’d guess** that a considerable number of them watched as people trapped at the tops of the Twin Towers chose to jump to their deaths rather than wait for the flames licking inexorably upward, and thought in abject terror, That could have been me! and, That might be me next time! And they were prepared, if not insistent, to have done whatever had to be done to remove that threat from their daily lives. Including, for more than a handful of them, turning Tora Bora, if not all of Afghanistan, if not all the freaking Middle East, into a radioactive sea of melted greenish glass, if that’s what it took. (Why do we have thermonuclear weapons anyway if they can’t be used, amirite?//)
BTW, I’d like to pose a question to those of you who are prepared to walk away from anyone who wasn’t toot-sweet opposed to immediate retribution or war:
Because, IIRC, our genial host was only persuaded to evolve a more enlightened view of the political situation by the craziness surrounding the Terri Schiavo affair. IOW, in 2003 at the earliest, i.e., several years later.
Demanding “right-from-the-start” purity will disqualify a lot of potential allies and eventual comrades – and with a nation this torn, and the stakes so high, that might not be a good strategy. People can learn, and grow – and though it might be a hard and slow process to flake fascist-enablers free from the brownshirt bloc, we probably need to keep trying, it in order to shrink that percentage down to where those attitudes are no longer acceptable in anything approaching acceptable discourse. Y’think mebbe?
** “Guess,” because I spent 9/11/2001 in Lithuania – when the first plane hit I was going through the Devils’ Museum in the city of Kaunas – and had heard nothing (in fact never spoke to a soul, a lot of pointing and paying, even for a cafeteria lunch) until 9 PM (3 PM Eastern time) when I fired up a PC in an Internet cafe to find out how the Ravens had fared the Sunday before. I have a CD somewhere from (I think) CBS with a detailed roundup of the day’s events but I have yet to watch it. (Many years ago I posted a more detailed account of my day and subsequent days on the Great Orange Santa, but I have been unable to retrieve it.)
mrmoshpotato
Forever and ever, Amen.
Goddamn, fucking thieving, war criminal, sons of bitches!
Amir Khalid
Damn that Joe Manchin.
Another Scott
@Amir Khalid: It’s nothing new. Chuck and the Senate will get on board with something that will get S&M’s vote, and more bills will follow eventually.
Hang in there.
Cheers,
Scott.
Omnes Omnibus
Who the fuck are those people? Go blow your strawman out of your ass.
brantl
@bemused senior: It didn’t require a pacifist to be against the Iraq War, even as it happened, the McKatchey newspapers debunked Cheney’s horseshit IN REAL TIME, AS IT HAPPENED, anybody reasonably well-read could have easily known for a fact, that Cheney was lying, just as easily as I did, and I did.
Omnes Omnibus
@Another Scott: Sausage is good. Let’s wait for the sausage.
debbie
@Amir Khalid:
Let’s lower the cost of the bill by zeroing out anything that would go to his state. ?
One of the Many Jens
1. Wanting to protect your country, your community, and your loved ones is a praiseworthy instinct. I am grateful for those who decide to serve our country through our armed services. I am also grateful to those who decide to serve our country through the myriad other callings, including but not limited to teachers, doctors/nurses, firefighters. Hell, those who drive garbage trucks, our land/resource managers, and many, many more.
2. Where our armed services fail, it is in large measure due to civilian leadership failures. Not because of sainthood within the services, but because the buck stops at the top. And what is acceptable and not acceptable emanates from the top.
3. I do not remember these paeons to the omniscience of the left re staying out of Afghanistan in 2008, when Obama was running on it being the Just War vs Iraq. Personally, I think we did have to respond within Afghanistan – go in, do it right, and get out. We evidently had that chance in December 2001, when the Taliban offered to surrender. (I literally had never heard that before last month – I was living on top of a mountain with no internet at that point of my life. Two and a half hour round trips to get to an online computer did not leave much time for browsing. And, in the story of the Afghanistan War’s life, much of what I was reading later, when I did have access, was about Iraq.) Sadly, the Bush administration did not accept. Fortunately, Biden realized the second step was no longer possible, if it ever was, and took the hit to get the third step done.
Suzanne
@Uncle Cosmo: John Cole has made a pretty honest and thorough reckoning for his former position on the wars. More people should.
Another Scott
Relatedly, …
Ooof. ;-)
Cheers,
Scott.
Gin & Tonic
The Czechs today arrested a Russian citizen wanted on a Ukrainian arrest warrant for his role in the invasion of Crimea. If more EU countries started honoring those warrants maybe we’d get somewhere.
Sorry, can’t link from phone.
Amir Khalid
Sportsball news: In the English Premier League’s one match this Sunday, Liverpool are leading hosts Leeds United 0-2. Correction, 0-3: after missing the target all day, Sadio Mane has finally scored in stoppage time. Of which eight whole minutes were given, after Leeds’ Pascal Struijk got sent off for injuring Red starlet Harvey Elliott with a clumsy challenge.
Repatriated
@Matt:
That was manufactured. I remember looking into the polling on that, and it turned out that the question was loaded.
It was phrased as, “the CIA says it’s necessary to protect America from terrorists (who will kill us all in our beds)”, versus “some politicians say it’s wrong.” That is, on a matter most people never give much thought, it was given the context of choosing based on the relative credibility of “CIA” versus “some politicians”, rather than an evaluation of the morality/effectiveness of torture itself.
The result was inevitable.
Ruckus
@Suzanne:
I can not tell what goes on in other people’s minds, even mine some of the time. I enlisted during a time of war (Vietnam) and no I did not support that war at all. But there was a draft on and people were going to war or jail. I met a man that used to post here who told us at a meet up that he was in Vietnam a very short time after enlisting in the navy, a forward machine gunner on a river patrol boat. A young man at that time had little control over their life. Young, almost adult people often find themselves in that position.
The concept of serving is more than a simple question. It isn’t just is this a good idea of should I or shouldn’t I, even without the draft. And remember that system still exists, we just haven’t drafted anyone in decades, but we still could.
I don’t have any easy answers, there aren’t any. I know you are correct for some percentage of the military, I’d bet good money from my experience that you aren’t correct about some other percentage. Also that is part of the job of warmongers, convince those who have to do the actual fighting that it is all worth it. They had a perfect thing to use as an inducement, 9/11. And they did use that. You are also correct that some are bloodthirsty and desire war, such is humanity. I’d just venture that the percentage is smaller than one might imagine.
lowtechcyclist
@Amir Khalid:
He really needs to be put on the spot about all this shit. OK, Joe, if you don’t like this bill, what’s your plan for addressing climate change? What’s your secret plan for making sure every American can vote, and have it count, given your support for the filibuster?
Life has put him in the position of being the Decider* as long as the Senate is 50-50. It’s time to deny him the luxury of simply criticizing other people’s plans. Since he gets to call the shots, the Dems should corner him to presenting his plans, and let everyone else shoot them down. It’s time to end this governing-by-sniping.
*Yeah, I know about Sinema. But I honestly don’t believe she’s got the gumption to kill a Dem bill on her own. She’ll go along with Manchin, but she won’t go it alone.
Another Scott
@Gin & Tonic: Interesting, and you’re right. Thanks for the pointer.
https://www.rferl.org/a/russian-wanted-ukraine-franchetti/31456517.html
Cheers,
Scott.
germy
@Another Scott:
brantl
@Omnes Omnibus: Besides being untrue, as well….
Omnes Omnibus
@brantl: Patent nonsense on your part.
Geminid
@Amir Khalid: Senator Manchin seems to be the pain in the ass felt ’round the world!
On (hopefully) a better note, how is Malaysia’s new Prime Minister, Mr. Yacoob, doing so far?
germy
@lowtechcyclist:
Lobbyists gave him a good talking to. There’s really no mystery.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Another Scott: I thought Dan Pfeiffer– senior Obama aide and the smartest IMHO of the podcasting O’Bros– made a good suggestions: Dems need to start emphasizing that this is a ten year spending bill. If $3.5T spooks the moderate horses, hit hard on the long term nature of the investment and what $350B/yr means in relation to the economy as a whole
Mike in Pasadena
@germy: To paraphrase Julie Annie: 9/11 9/11 9/11 9/11
Really tired of the annual 9/11 celebrations.
Ruckus
@brantl:
Have to uphold the family!
Is there anyone in the Bush family that isn’t in the “Bush family way?” These are people of wealth and politics. And their politics, as shown so far, suck. They are conservatives with money and seemingly think that it’s OK to use any means to remain in that position. They don’t seem to be the only ones in this grouping that think that way.
Gin & Tonic
@Another Scott: Thanks for the link.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@germy: I can’t find the tweet right now, but somebody pointed out yesterday that in his most recent presidential campaign, Giuliani solicited donations in the amount of $9.11
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Suzanne:
In our new contract that’s being voted on, Veterans Day was added as a paid holiday (but only for veterans ?). As far as I know, to my surprise, union negotiators didn’t push for Juneteenth even though it’s a federal holiday now
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Ruckus: in 2016 Barbara Bush The Younger very visibly attended a couple of Clinton fund-raisers, but I’ve never seen any other news indicating interest in a public career. But Jeb’s boy sure seems to want to subject us to another long display of their unique brand of Daddy issues
Another Scott
Relatedly, …
(via dsquareddigest on Twitter)
Cheers,
Scott.
Ruckus
@VOR:
I was a passenger on an airline on 9/11, in flight at the time of the attacks. The pilot told us about the first plane and then the second. The girl sitting next to me worked for a company based in the WTC. She worked at a different location but had friends that worked there. They were OK because they were heading to the same company meeting in Atlanta. We were one of the last planes to land at Atlanta after all planes were ordered to land. We spent nearly 3 hrs between the attack and getting off the planes, to see the National Guard walking around with loaded M16s and lots of extra ammo and rushing us out of the terminal and into cabs taking us off the airport property.
The feelings of everyone were raw and out in the open. And Bush and his underlings now had their excuse to war. The last 20 yrs have been a political disaster in this country because of him and his underlings. Conservatives want to protect what they had more than anything else. To them losing to liberals is akin to losing a war, the war of maintaining the conservative dogma/position with/by whatever means necessary. The WTC attack was to them an opportunity to do that. They don’t look to the future for guidance, they look to the past. It is a fatal flaw in their concept of governance, because it allows no change, while the world changes all the time. They look back to see what they want, we look back to see what to fix and make better.
Amir Khalid
@Geminid:
First of all Ismail Sabri Yaakob is just Ismail in subsequent mention; too many western journalists are too ignorant/lazy to keep in mind that Malay names end in a patronymic, not a surname. But I will forgive you this time.
Now, about his performance: it’s not been great. As I expected, his position is not strong. He seems to be going for a steady-as-she-goes, Muhyiddin Yassin 2.0 approach to governing, keeping a number of Muhyiddin’s Cabinet ministers in place. And he dropped a clanger by proposing to name digraced ex-PM Najib as an adviser.
Soprano2
In the book he wrote after 9-11, Richard Clarke said the Bush administration started trying to figure out how to justify invading Iraq almost as soon as Bush was sworn in. Clarke argued against it, but Bush and all the people around him were for it. I’m firmly convinced that even without 9-11 the Bush administration would have invaded Iraq.
Geminid
@Amir Khalid: Thank you for the correction. I will be more careful with Malaysian names.
Sorry to hear that the new Prime Minister is not a strong performer. How are the public health authorities doing now with Covid? They seemed to be very much on the job in the first months of the pandemic.
J R in WV
@smith:
I’m a vet, and I’m usually embarrassed when a youngster thanks me for my service. We were drafted back then, into an illegal war, just as immoral as Iraq invasions for no good reason.
Fortunately that opportunity to say “Thanks” is pretty rare as I don’t wear a vet baseball cap.
lowtechcyclist
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Noun, verb…
lowtechcyclist
Sure, they were chomping at the bit to invade, but coming up with a plausible justification might’ve been a challenge, absent an attack. My recollection is that there wasn’t all that big a pro-war majority in this country even in early 2003.
Uncle Cosmo
And most all of us on the blog are very happy he did. Cole is a classic example of incorporating new/additional information leading to a change of beliefs. John seems a pretty modest, down-to-earth guy, and he would probably agree that if he could do it, others can and will as well.
My hypothetical question was only to point out that applying “right-from-the-start” tests to prospective allies is likely to leave any future John Coles on the outside. Doesn’t sound like a good plan. Let’s save American democracy and argue the issues later.
If you’re not someone like that, then my question doesn’t apply to you, wasn’t addressed to you, and you have no reason to respond to it. Why are you?
I’m not sure whether you deep down know my comment
is correcthas some merit, or you think I’m talking about you (I wasn’t) and chose to take umbrage, or you just jumped at the chance to verbally abuse me. Probably a bit of all three.Y’know, the more you shit on me personally and my posts in general, the more you draw attention to them, and the more folks might decide I have a point. But you know that, you’re wicked smaht. Sometimes blind fury gets the best of anyone…
Omnes Omnibus
@Uncle Cosmo: Given that no one was proposing such a test, you warning against it was simply a strawman.