Anyone who lived through it will never forget where they were when they first heard the news, or what they were doing. I remember that my office shut down because as what had happened sunk in, people sort of went into a state of shock and just left.
It was, as Paul Krugman pointed out in his recent column, a great opportunity for Bush and the Republicans to use the occasion to take actions in no way related to the attack:
The Republican Party wasn’t yet full-on authoritarian, but it was willing to do whatever it took to get what it wanted, and disdainful of the legitimacy of its opposition. That is, we were well along on the road to the Jan. 6 putsch — and toward a G.O.P. that has, in effect, endorsed that putsch and seems all too likely to try one again.
It’s now a matter of public record that the immediate response of Bush administration officials to 9/11 was to use it as an excuse for an unrelated project, the invasion of Iraq. “Sweep it all up, things related and not,” said Donald Rumsfeld, the defense secretary, to his aides while the Pentagon was still burning.
Some of us saw it even then, but of course no one listened to us. We had, after all, just witnessed the Russians being humiliated when they tried to install a puppet government in Afghanistan, but somehow we (or a lot of us) convinced ourselves that somehow we could pull it off, ironically against the very people we had recruited, trained and supported to fight the Russians. If ever there was proof of the adage that those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it, it is the American experience in Afghanistan. We didn’t have to enter the Afghanistan quicksand as a response to 9-11, we chose to do so.
Joe BIden helped get us into it, or at least was not vocal about keeping us out, but give him credit for having the guts to get us out, knowing as he must have known that he’d face unrelenting criticism from a mass media that insists there was some better way to go about disentangling ourselves from a twenty year disaster, despite the fact that no one was ever able to verbalize one, particularly because, as none of them bothered to emphasize, Trump had already made any other course of action impossible.
So, we have something to sort of celebrate on the twentieth anniversary. We are no longer in the business of propping up that particular puppet government, and are no longer wasting American lives and killing Afghani civilians as we pursue the chimera of a democratic and secular Afghanistan. Unfortuantely, it took so long to do so that we are now faced with the fact that a democratic and secular United States may also be a chimera.
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