[sanderjd]

I remember the feeling extremely clearly. And I still remember that feeling extending to the beginning of the war in Afghanistan, which I thought seemed justified and right.

But I just as clearly remember how confused, frustrated, and just so disillusioned with the wisdom of my elders (I was still a teenager at this time) I felt when they were all so gung ho about invading Iraq, which clearly at the time had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11.

The debate nowadays always seems to hinge on this question of whether they lied about the WMD thing or were "just" mistaken about it. But from my perspective living through that time as a young person, that WMD thing was not the problem, the problem was this mass fearful hysteria that our leaders (either cynically or because they were themselves in the grips of that hysteria) were able to use to get overwhelming popular support for an unrelated invasion, essentially just out of peoples feelings of righteous anger and spite.

It isn't just ugly in hindsight, it was ugly ugly ugly then, in the moment.

[jrmg]

The BBC has an excellent series about this time, available as a podcast: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001k0ch/episodes/downloads

[giraffe_lady]

Yeah like, is everyone forgetting how fucking insanely racist that moment was in the US. Brutal nasty racism, it was utterly foul and EVERYWHERE just completely normalized in every venue.

Unreal everyone is pretending to have been taken in by the "war on terror" kayfabe at the time. I knew 15-year-olds who clocked the whole thing as an opportunistic political scam. The correct stance is contrition and repentance. All these stories about what kinds of cereal people were eating that day disgust me. We killed tens of thousands, destabilized and destroyed entire countries, created millions of refugees with these stories as the excuse.

[cout]

I know next to nothing about geopolitics, but I always figured the the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan had something Iran since it's sandwiched between them.

[peterleiser]

Yes. Search for the phrase “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran” to see what folks were saying at the time .

[peterleiser]

I encourage people to read about Project for the New American Century (PNAC). 9/11 gave PNAC and the neoconservatives the optimal opportunity to implement their stated objectives.

[sanderjd]

What makes you think I didn't know / read about it at the time?

All the comments here mentioning the neoconservative desire for regime change in Iraq predating 9/11 seem to imply that it was an obscure thing that people weren't very aware of at the time.

But that isn't true at all. It was broadly understood and frequently discussed. It's just that people were so generally scared, pissed off, and ready for vengeance against whoever, that nobody cared. (Not literally nobody, but I think I recall that the war had like 70% or 80% support, with strong majorities in both major parties.)

This is why I started out my adulthood libertarian-curious, because both parties and huge majorities of voters seemed insanely interventionist to me. But things have reordered a huge amount since then. (Basically everyone came around to my view of the war, in hindsight.)

[peterleiser]

Hi. I figured you did know / read about it at the time, actually. I think we have the same viewpoint. I was just using your insightful comment to encourage other folks to read about PNAC for historical context. I don't want anyone to pretend to forget, or younger folks not to know, what got us into the last 20 years of forever war.

[sanderjd]

Fair!