This article is correct that there is blame for the war on terror and that the collateral damage was incurred almost entirely by citizens of other countries.
But if we are going to assign blame, we must point the finger at almost all Americans as a society.
> Not surprisingly, public support for responding militarily to the 9/11 attacks ran high in early fall 2001. A Washington Post/ABC News poll released two days after the Twin Towers fell found that 93 percent of Americans backed taking military action against whoever was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. More than eight in ten respondents said their support extended to going to war. [0]
It’s easy to throw stones in retrospect, but I hope we have the humility to wonder if we would’ve done any better in the same role as GWB. Americans live in a representative democracy and any decision which has 80%+ public support is the result and responsibility of our collective society, not just our leadership.
I hope we mourn the failures of the war and learn from these mistakes. One lesson I hope we learn is that we can’t expect our leaders to take the moral high road given their incentives under the current system. I don’t know what to do about this, but if we just chalk this up to one man’s failed administration it will happen again.
They didn't listen and the media aided and abetted their lies (looking at you NYT and Judith Miller). So many people knew it was bullshit and that was an acceleration of the disempowering turn the US took that's led us to where we are today (rising fascist populism, attacks on marginalized groups, govt shutdown due to a radical minority).
They knew they were lying. We knew they were lying. The media knew they were lying. And yet it all happened anyways. Nobody has ever really dug into Cheney's role in it all, but it's probably Nixonian in scope and undermining the meaning of the American image of itself.
As you enter the memorial the first kiosk can start with Daddy’s lies about the incubators and that can transition to Bush Light’s lies about WMDs. Each can list the estimates (1/2 million +) of dead innocents attributable to The Empire of Lies escapades in the region.
No, call it what it was called. It was silly. The US did try to fight a war against a noun. The sheer buffoonish evil of it all should be saved for posterity.
> the Memorial that will honor all those impacted by the Global War on Terrorism, including uniformed and non-uniformed military personnel, civilians, their families, and everyday men and women who have sacrificed to protect our freedom
The memorial is there to say how people "sacrificed" and hide that those millions "were sacrificed". That is wasn't as much a war on terror as a war of terror.
The day he clock off to afterlife I will be celebrating one of the modern most atrocious leader going hades and the beginning the fall of USA as expoused by Dalio.
But if we are going to assign blame, we must point the finger at almost all Americans as a society.
> Not surprisingly, public support for responding militarily to the 9/11 attacks ran high in early fall 2001. A Washington Post/ABC News poll released two days after the Twin Towers fell found that 93 percent of Americans backed taking military action against whoever was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. More than eight in ten respondents said their support extended to going to war. [0]
It’s easy to throw stones in retrospect, but I hope we have the humility to wonder if we would’ve done any better in the same role as GWB. Americans live in a representative democracy and any decision which has 80%+ public support is the result and responsibility of our collective society, not just our leadership.
I hope we mourn the failures of the war and learn from these mistakes. One lesson I hope we learn is that we can’t expect our leaders to take the moral high road given their incentives under the current system. I don’t know what to do about this, but if we just chalk this up to one man’s failed administration it will happen again.
[0] https://www.cfr.org/blog/us-war-afghanistan-twenty-years-pub...