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Around my house the general thought at the time was that the Iraq War was good and will stop Saddam from threatening us (Israel) as he did in the Gulf War. Pretty sure we (the common people anywho) had no idea nobody was finding any WMDs over there and fell for the 'they'll be greeted as liberators!' line completely. Now opinions are much different, at least with the close family.
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Aug 1, 2016 19:48
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Mooseontheloose posted:The reason I start with that is because I think people have to realize what shock ran through the in the aftermath of 9/11. People were scared and willing to accept almost anything to feel safe and I was living in a fairly liberal place. I was one month from turning 16 when 9/11 happening, and I remembered being really confused about the people who were freaking out and worried. This is because we lived in Memphis, TN and the chance of some terrorist attacking here was (and is) slim to none. Even to this day I don't quite understand why people (who didn't have relatives working in NYC or something) were scared. I understand people being sad, and I remember being very shocked at the fact that I literally saw thousands of people die on live television as the towers fell, but I couldn't understand why people were afraid. My political views were against the war, but that can also be attributed to the fact that I basically just parroted what my parents believed at that age (which was basically everything mainstream liberal). I think that if my family had different views that I probably would have as well. I'm actually more left-wing now than I was then and I obviously still think the war was wrong, but I don't think I had any concrete rational reason for thinking so at the time aside from "my parents think it's bad."
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Aug 1, 2016 20:12
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Ytlaya posted:I couldn't understand why people were afraid. There's a line in Iron Man 2 where the bad guy says something to the effect of, "what happens when you make everyone see that God can bleed?" I think that's why people were afraid. American exceptionalism and power had been challenged on live television and four thousand people died, and there wasn't a thing we could do about it. Or at least that's how I've inferred people felt.
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Aug 1, 2016 20:16
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I was 13 when the planes hit on 9/11. Over here in Germany the shock was immense, as it was all over the world. The German government immediately offered its assistance, and - at least in my memory - noone really disputed that, even though scepticism against the US has a long tradition in Germany at least since the 60s, and even though the 2000 election was widely regarded as a sham unworthy of a nominally democratic nation. There were armed policemen making my parents in Munich afraid in a time before mobile phones on 9/11, there were tons of memorial services in parliaments, churches, on the street, and there were whispers of war, practically from the moment the planes hit (just look at the 9/11 thread on these very forums). I dismissed them at the time, following the old German proverb that "nothing is eaten as hot as it is cooked". This time it turned out that the others were right, and I wasn't. In many ways 9/11 was my personal political awakening as I saw the apparent stability of the post-Cold War world in which I grew up in crumble away. Germany was a part of OEF from 2002 on (maybe even late 2001?). While our government had pledged its support, I remember that the incredible speed with which the Bush administration went to war - the first missiles hit Afghan ground already in October, after all - was very disconcerting to a large part of the German population. It seemed like the Americans weren't out for just removing a danger/defeating an enemy that had attacked first. It seemed like they were out for retribution, and more. I remember that rumours of a planned war with Iraq began to circulate soon after that, and people began to speak of a charade, and of using the tragedy of 9/11 as a smokescreen to further American geopolitical and even imperialist goals.This would all have been during early 2002, maybe even a bit earlier. During 2002 Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld & Co. tried to gather as many allies as possible. They were very candid about their eventual goals of moving against Iraq, as it turned out. This was the time where the "Coalition of the Willing" was created, and I am infinitely grateful that our then-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder had the foresight and the political clout to keep Germany out of the war. Not that the Americans's didn't try; Rumsfeld spoke of a "New Europe" consisting of America-friendlier states especially in Eastern Europe, and indirectly threatened Germany with a loss of power and an end to American-German cooperation and support when we would continue opposing the looming Iraq War. We weren't alone, thankfully - France and the Holy See were outspoken opponents of this madness too, and I remember being aghast at the bile thrown against the French especially, in form of petty poo poo like "Freedom Fries" etc. This was a time where France and Germany would be as close as never before, and probably never since. There was even talk (in 2003) of fusing the German and French militaries and foreign offices together, though I doubt that even back then many people took that seriously. All the way during 2002, and especially during the later part of the year, war seemd to become inevitable, and resistance to and despair about it mounted as well. There were countless demonstrations, peace prayers, debate rounds, and I can't remember meeting a single person that was in any way for a war against Iraq. At least in my circles it seemed clear that the Bush administration was playing every dirty trick in the book to finally get the war it wanted. American tourists in Germany claimed to be from Canada to avoid questions about what madness seemed to have befallen their leaders, and maybe their whole country. Not everybody opposed the war, though, and even in Germany there were those who said that Saddam had to go, and that supporting the USA was more important than to defend a dictator, even if the charges brought against him were rather nebulous. Angela Merkel was one of those who said so, even though many in her own party (especially the religious wing) attacked her for that. I think it was only a couple of days before the eventual start of the war, I think, when my school even gave us the opportunity to skip the last two lessons of the day to attend a massive peace rally nearby. Not a few of my classmates went, but I didn't, thinking that the dice were already cast and that there was no point in going. This is something I regret a lot today - even if it probably won't change anything, it certainly won't when nobody bothers showing up. I know that now. The last few days or weeks before the war were like a Greek tragedy, with every day bringing new hope that the war might yet be averted, and also new despair in the form of news stating that the Coalition were amassing their forces even more. And then it began, like a videogame, with crosshairs and explosions in granular green-and-black. When it was all over after a couple of weeks, I thought to myself that it hadn't been too bad. I was wrong again, of course.
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Aug 1, 2016 21:19
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TomViolence posted:You do realise that the US government has been extraterritorially torturing, maiming and mutilating people for decades, yes? The war on terror wasn't some watershed moment where the gloves came off and the US decided to start playing dirty, it was the continuation of an overreaching foreign policy that pervaded the entire cold war and only had a short breather throughout the 90s because the communist boogeyman fell apart and the US hadn't found a new enemy yet. This was a major annoyance to me at the time, but I understand what you're saying. When I would get all worked up about us admitting to torture, there was always an old leftie or such who'd bring this up. I understand what's being said, that it's not new that we had done these things. But in a post Iraq world, we started admitting it. We used to say that we would never do these things, but there were whispers that we were doing these things anyway. Not anymore. Torture used to be something only bad guys did, now heroes do it too. I have a hard time explaining how much despair that brings me. I don't know how to describe this any other way than moral decay. Grondoth fucked around with this message at 22:07 on Aug 1, 2016 |
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Aug 1, 2016 21:20
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Lightning Knight posted:Did you ever question what you were doing, or why you were there? Is your opinion on it now the same as it was then? This is very anecdotal and being in a commo unit you won't find as many true believers as you would in an infantry or other combat arms unit. However, I and many others I fought with thought the entire invasion was an escapade into finishing what daddy started (referencing Bush W. and Bush Sr.). But, you are in a foreign country, there are people who have weapons and wish to kill you for being in the military in their country. As a soldier, you have your views on what is right and wrong, but you mostly want to make sure that you go back home in one piece. There were a few soldiers who were very gung ho about going out and killing some ragheads, but most of my peers wanted survival more than the opportunity to kill. There is no way that bombing infrastructure to any country is going to be beneficial to its citizens and how much it hurt Iraqis didn't become clear to me until you see the hordes of children and adults begging for food when we first crossed the border. I really didn't help poo poo personally, my job was to make sure colonels and generals could communicate securely on the battlefield. There was no real battlefield in Iraq as most of the conflict itself was between the US military and guerrilla type groups which did not really require the specific skill set I was trained for by the army. I don't really have any stories about the Bush presidency after as when I got out Bush had just won his second term and I was wrapped up in getting a job and support for my family. The only anecdote I can relate is that I was able to take two weeks of leave during my deployment. I took my two weeks, and I was due back to arrive in Kuwait Thanksgiving Day 2003. So I get back to Doha in the early afternoon but was denied Thanksgiving dinner because Bush had arrived at the camp and the only people allowed to eat at the dining facility that night were not privates. It wasn't some huge injustice, but it did paint a picture of W that he didn't care about the men and women he put in harms way. b0ng fucked around with this message at 21:30 on Aug 1, 2016 |
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Aug 1, 2016 21:22
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When Bush gave Saddam 24 hours to leave the country, I walked over to the White House, which was near my dorm room at the time. I saw a drum circle for peace and met two counter-protesters who told me they had just left "double-deckers" in the bathrooms at the French Embassy.
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Aug 1, 2016 21:37
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System Metternich posted:I think it was only a couple of days before the eventual start of the war, I think, when my school even gave us the opportunity to skip the last two lessons of the day to attend a massive peace rally nearby. Not a few of my classmates went, but I didn't, thinking that the dice were already cast and that there was no point in going. This is something I regret a lot today - even if it probably won't change anything, it certainly won't when nobody bothers showing up. I know that now. We in the U.S. at the time really couldn't have cared less what the rest of the world thought. On top of that no amount of protests in Germany, the rest of Europe, or even the entire world were going to change Bush's mind. He was quite ready to go it alone. I attended an anti-war protest in the spring of 2003, I forget if it was just before or just after the invasion started. It wasn't so much a protest as a gathering in the middle of our college campus to listen to various people, including several veterans, give anti-war speeches. We were vastly outnumbered and surrounded by pro-war folks who were there to protest us for being weaklings and traitors. It was thankfully peaceful on both sides, but it was still quite intimidating to be surrounded by angry people holding up placards extolling the virtues of violence and war. It left quite an impression on me, and ever since I've had a bit of a complex about being in the political minority. I can't help but think people like that outnumber people like me, even when sometimes they don't.
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Aug 1, 2016 21:43
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I didn't know Merkel was in favor of Iraq. Honestly I know little about German politics at all. Has she walked back that support or otherwise said it was bad in retrospect? quote:It seemed like they were out for retribution, and more. Did that actually surprise people in Europe? Thank you for answering my inane questions. 
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Aug 1, 2016 21:45
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This movie isn't hard to find. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vINM0CAysc8
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Aug 1, 2016 21:48
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I was 12 when 9/11. 14 when the Iraq war happened. To put it in bizarre terms? The whole country was in this angry, patriotic haze at the time. In our defense? Anyone having to see people jump to their deaths on national television would have probably reacted in a similar manner. My father was flying that day of the attacks and looked the most stunned/upset I'd had seen him until that point. So our anger and hatred was very "blind" at the times. Sure YOU had people that were able to stop and go "WHAT THE gently caress? WAKE UP YOU IDIOTS!" to all of us. But they were drowned out because we all wanted some sort of revenge. That's how the Iraq war was being sold. A mixture of revenge and a mixture of praying upon one's fears of ANOTHER 9/11 happening because Saddam felt like it or something. I was for the war...I'm ashamed to admit that. My only defense was that I was a stupid kid that didn't have any idea about the world and just was angry about what I witnessed on television. I also remember finding the whole "ROCK AGAINST BUSH" crew to be loving annoying. The Green Day's and System's of the Down's of the world didn't no DICK, and their music was pure poo poo. Later on I discovered that there were actually talented people who were against the war, but at the time my access to information was limited. (being that this was the pre-you tube, pre-twitter, pre-facebook era of the web). I now enjoy listening to the likes of Jello Biafra, Patton Oswalt, David Cross and others ripping the Bush administration a new rear end in a top hat. (System of a Down still SUCKS big time. Dr. David Thorpe ripping them a new rear end in a top hat probably made me a goon) It was a mistake. Even hard core republicans like my father will admit that, and wonder why the gently caress we went in in the first place.
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Aug 1, 2016 22:01
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Lightning Knight posted:Did that actually surprise people in Europe? Yes. America being a well-intentioned bull in a China shop and riding roughshod over everyone who doesn't get out of the way fast enough while seeking some misguided version of justice or good would be expected, America blatantly lying and invading arbitrary countries just because they can wouldn't be.
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Aug 1, 2016 22:07
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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I had just turned eleven when the towers fell. I didn't understand a lot of what was going on, just that thousands of people had died, and everyone was really, really frightened. A few snapshots of that time, just from what I'm able to recall:
When you consider that kind of atmosphere, which took years to die down, it's easy to see why we allowed ourselves to be duped into Iraq. We had lost our chance at Osama and we needed some kind of direction for our anger, a tangible enemy we could massacre. We needed to feel powerful again. Anyone who expressed skepticism about the whole WMD thing got shut out as cowardly, unpatriotic. "You're either with us, or you're with the terrorists." The lack of evidence didn't matter. Bush took us for a ride, and we wanted it. I started to have my doubts around 2004-5ish. I had a teacher in high school I was very close with, and we often talked about current events, so I learned quickly that she was against the war, and about her reasons for that. She was a big influence in my political upbringing, and I essentially parroted her talking points throughout high school, arguing with other kids (including my sophomore year history teacher; a Republican - a nice guy, until he got accused of statutory rape,) not standing up for the pledge, etc. Since I still consider a lot of her ideas right-headed, I don't regret any of that, even if it made me a little insufferable as a teenager. I remember 2006 being when the switch flipped, when the war became really unpopular because of how long it was taking to get results. We had some foreplay when Saddam got executed, but no WMDs, no bin Laden (which is why people went nuts when we finally nailed him - 2011 felt like 2003 all over again, if only for a few days) and no catharsis. And that's really the character of this era in time, I think. Uncertainty, delayed satisfaction, a lingering sense of dread. We keep fighting a formless enemy that refuses to die. Not the fully formed adult recollections you were looking for, I'm afraid, but I hope it offers some additional context for why this all happened. Erwin the German fucked around with this message at 22:25 on Aug 1, 2016 |
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Aug 1, 2016 22:22
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I was barely 14 on 9-11 and the sum total of my political engagement up to that point was: --Sitting in the living room while my dad worked on a handle of rye and SHOUTED at the TV. You learn opinions and lingo very quickly when the dad in question is educated and does that. One of my first really clear memories is of dad waking me up doing that to HW bush in the '92 debates, and by '96 when I saw him on visitation he'd commandeer the TV for a two hour news block and, well, it was either talk politics or sports and physical activity is for the livestock imho. --Digging through a cupboard bored out of my wits in the study hall held by the history/social studies teacher when I was 12 and finding a book shoved in the back lableled Lies My Teacher Told Me. I was already a misanthropic lil' iconoclast by then and couldn't in good conscience NOT read a book like that, which in retrospect is probably what the teacher was hoping for. With that plus an appetite for ultra grognardy war history books cultured by one of my mom's military boyfriends I shortly became The Angry Politics/History Guy at school and wanted nothing more in life than to be a pilot (with hindsight i guess i'd go for drone operator) because of my veneration for late-80's US tech and the tactics of the Gulf War. Yeah I was and am a pretty cool guy.  I remember on 9-11 one of the kids walked up to me and was like "is it the communists?!?!" No, Tim, the communists wouldn't use airliners. The change was surreal. I had a pretty safe vantage point in hippy dippy Vermont but that just meant I could really spectate how from one day to the next the entire country lost its motherfucking mind. One day CNN is the news. Just news programs, but all day. And the next day 1/3rd of the screen is crawls and subtitles screeching fear and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibLhAii7g70 And it all seems so quaint now. By freak coincidence I'd been on a Soviet/Afghan war reading binge at the time and I remember the creeping vertiginous sense of unreality I'd feel again and again in the future as sirens and trumpets and motion graphics triumphantly declared 3 weeks after 9-11 we'd achieved air superiority over Afghanistan. The USA, gloating over flying a plane over fuckin' Afghanistan so relieved to fly too high for the MANPADS that got into the country ~~SOMEHOW~~. I remember very clearly this was the first time in my life I began to seriously consider that American news might not be the best source of factual information. So during the runup for the war proper I was involved in what would ultimately coalesce into the liberal blogosphere. Vintage DailyKos before he became a democratic operative, listening to Ezra Klein and Amanda Marcotte on vinyl at Pandagon, and contributed some stuff that I'd just as gladly let be forgotten by the memory hole. Likely because of this, I was outside the echo chamber so wonderfully demonstrated in the S-11 Redux and from that vantage point the fix on the Iraq War was like spotting the choreography in pro wrestling. I hesitate to call it a deception, even, the Bush admin and a disgraceful number of Democrats (Hillary Clinton and John Kerry foremost among them) just said provably wrong poo poo. It was provably wrong at the time but people wanted Gulf War 2: Electric Boogaloo. I lost a lot of respect for the American public around this time because I got to see firsthand how while on an individual level Americans are as good and likable as anyone else, when we get in groups--I suspect 7 or more to be the threshold but I have no proof of this--we begin performing for each other a character who just really loves killing because nothing proves how strong you are like striking someone who can't strike you back. I remember on the eve of war Bush gave the figleaf opportunity for Saddam's concession of WMDs which the whole world knew didn't exist, and he responded simply "an empty hand can give nothing." I don't know why that sticks out. I protested, I sat-in, I spoke out, I did all the things I read about that people did during Vietnam and surprise surprise it made no difference which dented my idealized perceptions of People PowerTM. Even during the invasion opinion of the war was fairly mixed because, again, hippy dippy Vermont, yet there was still a healthy war fever on especially among the students who idolized the upperclassmen who enlisted. Somewhere in the Burlington ABC affiliate there's video of me with my lovely hair and dress sense giving what I think to this day was a pretty loving good speech summarizing the helplessness of the situation, which got me into a little hot water with the kids who looked up to Mark, but I got to stand up to a kid twice my size wearing a jersey that read BOMB THE 'GHANIS and settled things at a collegial disagreement. Christ I shoulda been a lawyer, even if it meant I'd be a lawyer  Mark was killed two weeks into the invasion which ended the celebratory atmosphere all around. What stands out looking back is the surprise of it to folk. They never even thought that someone would get hurt in a war, let alone a friend and role model, but wanted it anyway. Maybe it was just teens being teeny, but then what's the adults' excuse? I cannot overstate the respect I lost for American so-called civil society at this point, and how it affected me later in life. Except when it doesn't, that life moved on as is its wont and out of the ashes of Iraq rode the Actual loving Islamic Caliphate driving stolen American vehicles and murdering smokers and unwed couples and Shia using looted American arms, which got blown up by American drones on the personal orders of a Secret-Muslim-Kenyan-American-Apologizer-In-Chief. A not-military-guy would eventually become my stepdad and insist we watch The Apprentice instead of the news and I'd relent because there'd be a part of me that didn't want to see that poo poo either. Today the host of that reality TV show is promising more bombs for the world, more torture, and more fear, and is running against Hillary loving loving loving Clinton, one of the Democratic whips responsible for the passage of the AUMF in Iraq. And hell, on a good day and provided the right polling company, she'll even be outside of the margin of error against him.  And what about the target of all of this? The despotic killer who stubbornly refused the wishes of American imperial power? quote:The dictator who was toppled in the 2003 US-led invasion of his country had plenty to say about President George W. Bush and his father former presdient, Bush senior. Turns out he's not much worse than us when you get down to it. Willie Tomg fucked around with this message at 23:41 on Aug 1, 2016 |
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Aug 1, 2016 23:38
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Back in May a family friend was deployed to Iraq and died about a week latter dude was 12 when we invaded Iraq and grew up got deployed and died over there, guys in my first grade class are now in the military looking are re-enlisting after they joined out of Highschool back in 2012. It's just weird to think about... don't really feel like telling to many stories, but yeah its a weird feeling realizing "WOW the USA has technically been involved in Wars in the Middle East for more than half my life and a couple people I know have grown up and died over there more than a decade after poo poo started". Jack2142 fucked around with this message at 00:16 on Aug 2, 2016 |
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Aug 2, 2016 00:10
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Bush was Right. WMD factories are extremely easy to move. Saddam was given multiple warnings prior to the invasion. enough warning for these factories to disappear into allied countries. We would have never found WMDs. the Surge worked. Iraq was lost due to the lack of resources dedicated to the occupation. The war was bait. we took it. we didnt commit 1,000,000 men like we should have.
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Aug 2, 2016 00:14
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9/11 happened when I was 15. Everyone was appalled and frightened, but I never really saw the groundswell of support for the president and the administration that polls at the time indicated. I’m sure this was because I grew up in the Bay Area of CA in one of the most liberal communities you’ll find in the US. 9/11, after all, was less than a year after the 2000 election, and the idea that Bush was an illegitimate president was still very much in the communal consciousness. Initially, there was certainly a patriotic reaction and broad support for our military intervention in Afghanistan; on the afternoon of 9/11 I told my mother I’d join the military as soon as I was 18 (this did not come to pass). As soon as the administration started pitching war with Iraq, however, a student-and-faculty “peace and justice coalition” was created and soon there were student marches in downtown during lunch. My experience was one of great dismay not only with Bush but with the liberal anti-war cause on campus. I thought the “no blood for oil” slogan was a facile understanding of why Bush et. al. actually wanted to go to war, and I didn’t like what I saw as the lazy categorization of all things patriotic as basically crypto-fascism (I went so far as to write a fellow student a letter, responding to his editorial in the school paper denouncing all things patriotic, as to the difference between patriotism and nationalism; I’m sure my response was just as insufferable as his editorial). I opposed the war from the start, just like essentially everyone else I knew, but I wasn’t an anti-war protestor. Maybe I was just a young contrarian rear end in a top hat, but I think part of it was that I had expected politics to be about rational discussion and truth-seeking, and what I found instead was a mendacious administration that perverted the truth and an uncurious opposition that simply didn’t care much about it. But in the defense of the latter, at least they did something, which is more than could be said for me. There was far more activism at my HS than my college, strangely enough, but perhaps that’s because I went to college in the middle of bumfuck nowhere in which the community outside the college was largely conservative. By the time I came to college, there was just sort of a feeling of resignation that the rest of the country was crazy (particularly after Bush was re-elected in 2004) and there was nothing to be done about it. Again, almost everyone I knew was against the war, but the impetus for taking any action to oppose the war was not strong because it did not touch me or anyone I knew, either at home or at college; I knew no military families, I had no friends that served. It was a dismal and despicable thing, horrible in the abstract, but we washed our hands of it; these were the deeds of Crazy America, Bush’s America, and we had neither responsibility for it nor the capability to stop them. It was that buried resentment, not charisma, that I felt to be behind Obama’s victory over Clinton in 2008. For people of my cohort, from my background – who were all Democratic primary voters – to have voted for the war was madness, an instant disqualification for basic human competence, let alone the presidency. Protests seemed futile, but elections gave us a chance to actualize our resentment, to make our government into something that we were no longer ashamed to be associated with. Any argument about Clinton’s experience, temperament, background, etc. you could come up with could be instantly deflated by the fact that she had voted for the war. It didn’t matter that she’d changed her mind since; nobody I knew had been a “late convert,” we’d all considered the war an obvious mistake from the start. Such people were either morons or criminal opportunists. To vote for Hillary in 2008 seemed like admitting the last five years of insanity was just an understandable mistake, like saying “that’s okay, you couldn’t have known better” when in fact we had all known better since we were children. I’d like to think I’ve developed more charitable views of people and a more nuanced understanding of politics since then.
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Aug 2, 2016 00:40
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Willie Tomg posted:I remember on the eve of war Bush gave the figleaf opportunity for Saddam's concession of WMDs which the whole world knew didn't exist, and he responded simply "an empty hand can give nothing." I don't know why that sticks out. I don't know if it's the same instance you're referring to but I remember the position of Iraq pretty clearly being "An empty hand has nothing to give". It's a fantastic quote. From the outside looking in the entire runup was incredibly frustrating, and the jingoistic bullshit surrounding the debate was infuriating. I recall Dr. Phil having a special episode on Iraq War Protesters where he invited some on and made it pretty clear they were bad people who needed to shut the hell up and support America because their speech was emboldening the enemy. I’d love to hatewatch it now to examine in hindsight how full of poo poo everyone was. That’s not even going into all the spin that happened afterwards (Pat Tillman/Jessica Lynch). If you want to test your gag reflex there's a very special episode of Scrubs out there for you. It’s hard to emphasize today the air of inevitability that the war had right from late 2002. Political leaders said multiple times intelligence proved Iraq was manufacturing chemical and biological weapons, but could not go into specifics as it would endanger their sources, nor could they share this information with UN inspectors for the same reason. My opinion at the time was that so long as UN inspections continued one of two things would happen: 1. Any theoretical weapon development would be halted and hidden, which would bring about the stated objective of any war for Iraq disarmament, at a fraction the cost and manpower of a full scale invasion. For a Republican, fiscally conservative president this would be a win-win. 2. If weapons inspectors were able to dig up something damning, it would be a perfect excuse to go in and do something about it, and most domestic and international opposition would be muted. So yeah, at the end of the day the entire exercise right from the start felt lovely, pointless and incredibly avoidable.
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Aug 2, 2016 01:30
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This thread is racist. There was plenty of enthusiasm for the war in Iraq within African American and Latino Americans. People need to get out of their all white bubbles and realize that retroactive opposition to the War is just white privilege. Hillary did nothing wrong.
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Aug 2, 2016 01:52
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Shbobdb posted:This thread is racist. There was plenty of enthusiasm for the war in Iraq within African American and Latino Americans. People need to get out of their all white bubbles and realize that retroactive opposition to the War is just white privilege. Are you being sarcastic or serious? Honest question.
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Aug 2, 2016 02:00
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I was 25 when 9/11 happened, teaching ESL to recent immigrants in Minneapolis. The first thing i thought was "We're going to war, and it's under the wrong president." My students, mostly Somalian, were very nervous about it all. I watched the buildup to the Iraq invasion from Indonesia, where the population was staunchly opposed. The Bali bombing late in 2002 distracted things somewhat - there were instances of Balinese lynching Javanese on Bali in retaliation - but things got weird in March when the invasion kicked off. Crowds of angry protesters gathered outside the US embassy in Jakarta, and the consulate in Surabaya. I split for the safety of Hindu Bali and eventually Singapore, as Java wasn't really a good place for Americans or Brits in March of 2003. I thought the invasion was a terrible mistake at the time, and I'm sad to see that I was right. This is an animation from 2002 that's fascinating to watch in retrospect. http://www.idleworm.com/animation/gulf_war_game.shtml
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Aug 2, 2016 02:05
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Let me properly respond to the OP, since I was definitely an adult at the time of the Iraq war. I got my BA in 2001, and 9/11 happened right as I was getting ready to move out and start my first post-college job. I ended up working in a staffed home caring for adults with cerebral palsy; my co-workers were working class, immigrants and people with HS diplomas and kids who had just finished community and state college like me. What strikes me in retrospect is just how irrelevant Afghanistan and Iraq were to my daily life. I was reading the news actively as had always been my habit, but there was just no sense that anything I did would affect the glitzy war juggernaut. I remember being persuaded by the argument that the United States could, in anger, simply take over the world if it wanted to; maybe I didn't understand what "taking over" meant, that it had already happened. So I continued all through the Bush years, the years I had helped to usher in by voting for Bush over a wedge issue. I worked in schools, delivered pizzas and newspapers, engaged in the most self-destructive forms of working-class recreation available in the city of Tacoma. And all throughout, nobody really cared about the war. That's what I think people miss a lot; the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and terrorism itself, was not something that normal Americans really worried about. I don't have any way to prove this, I just have a strong feeling that the reason people rated terrorism as a high concern during that time is that they felt like they were supposed to. But the truth is, fears of terrorism were always a joke compared to fears of getting taken out by medical bills, or outsourcing or being upside-down on your mortgage. Just getting killed by a terrorist isn't so bad. Getting hit by a personal financial crisis in America means your entire family's prosperity is ruined, with decades to try and climb out again. So people said that terrorism was a real concern even though it wasn't, and politicians tailored their messaging, and the media acted like all we cared about was terrorism and added this odd formulaic reverent undertone to everything. Did you know people used to not wear flag pins? Like, that wasn't really a thing that people did. And in the real world people generally continued not to wear them, after 2002 or so. Millions died for political beliefs which, for most Americans, were no more deeply felt than a fashion.
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Aug 2, 2016 02:07
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Lightning Knight posted:Are you being sarcastic or serious? Honest question. How many black friends do you have now and how many black friends did you have in high school? Just in case you try to internet short circuit me, I do not care if you yourself are black or if you have an asian wife so you can't be racist.
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Aug 2, 2016 03:31
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Cmon man
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Aug 2, 2016 03:42
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Shbobdb posted:How many black friends do you have now and how many black friends did you have in high school? Just in case you try to internet short circuit me, I do not care if you yourself are black or if you have an asian wife so you can't be racist. Aw man, ya got me. I only thought the war was a bad idea because I'm a huge racist. I used to get all my pasty white friends together and protest the war just because we knew it would really cheese off the blacks.
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Aug 2, 2016 05:46
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Shbobdb posted:How many black friends do you have now and how many black friends did you have in high school? Just in case you try to internet short circuit me, I do not care if you yourself are black or if you have an asian wife so you can't be racist. All my friends are dead. They died after reading your lovely race baiting posts.
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Aug 2, 2016 05:48
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Shbobdb posted:How many black friends do you have now and how many black friends did you have in high school? Just in case you try to internet short circuit me, I do not care if you yourself are black or if you have an asian wife so you can't be racist. You appear to be having an episode across multiple threads at the moment.
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Aug 2, 2016 05:53
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I remember how PBS would show the names and photos of soldiers that had died on the Newshour. Maybe if every network did that on the nightly news America wouldn't start so many wars.
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Aug 2, 2016 06:58
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I lived in Canada during the run-up to the Iraq war. For people not living in the American cable news bubble it was easy to see the Bush administration wanted war for ideological or opportunistic reasons. The administration's claims regarding WMDs were obviously exaggerated or outright false, and their rejection of the findings of UN weapons inspectors made it clear that the truth wasn't actually relevant to the case for war. I have little patience for people who say support for the war was justified at the time given the claims regarding WMDs, as the evidence was always just so feeble. I followed the news and watched the war start with annoyed resignation. I lived in a part of Canada where there was very little support for the war, it was just accepted the Americans were going to do what they wanted. I don't like Jean Chretien (the PM at the time), but he did Canadians a great service by keeping Canada out of the war. It wasn't a very hard move politically, as something like 70% of the public didn't support the war. The Conservative party (then called the Alliance) of course supported the invasion, and their leader Stephen Harper even wrote a letter to the Wall Street Journal to let Americans know they didn't support the government or public consensus on this issue. Of course he then went on to become Prime Minister for 10 years, proving that Canadians can elect jingoistic war-mongerers too.
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Aug 2, 2016 07:30
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I was pretty convinced the UN inspectors would find WMD. I thought that once it turned out there weren't any, Bush would hail this as a triumph of American soft power. What a dummy I was.
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Aug 2, 2016 07:49
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I'm not too interested in dating myself here but 9/11 was of course a formative experience. Seeing people run around not knowing if their parents who worked in the WTC were alive was a bad time. The run-up to the war was transparent bullshit. The phrase "weapons of mass destruction" still sticks in my craw. There was never any chance that Saddam had nuclear weapons. Chemical and biological weapons maybe, but if that's what you mean, you just say that. But chemical and biological weapons aren't worth getting into a war over unless they're part of a massacre that's currently occurring. You need the fear of a mushroom cloud to get the go ahead for America to invade a country halfway across the world when there are no battles occurring. So weapons of mass destruction it was. It's amazing to see media from the 90s now. There was an awful lot of "Don't you see? Both parties are just the same, man!" Even Nader liked to say that a Bush presidency would be a good thing for the environmental movement because the American people would see how bad things would get. Things did get bad for the environmental movement but most people don't notice because of Isis (who more or less exist only because of the Iraq war) and because of all the vets who came back short a limb or two and unsure of how to put their lives back together.
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Aug 2, 2016 08:18
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Lightning Knight posted:I didn't know Merkel was in favor of Iraq. Honestly I know little about German politics at all. Has she walked back that support or otherwise said it was bad in retrospect? Not that I know of, she just kind of silently buried it. I actually had forgotten all about it until an op-ed by two prominent Catholics in her party urging her to admit that in respect to the war the Pope was right and she wasn't. quote:Did that actually surprise people in Europe? Lying and cheating to get yourself into a pointless war while everyone else is telling you that you've gone mad for that? Yes, that was quite surprising to me and to many others as well. Don't forget that (at least to me as a boy) the US was a kind of "mythical" place as shown daily on my TV screen, and warmongering was (to me, at least) not a part of the equation before. I mean, we know now that we only saw the tip of the iceberg. One of the most important "sources" to American intelligence was an informant to the German BND who was seen by his handlers as unreliable, even prone to lies, but when they told that to the Americans the CIA dismissed it. And not to forget that it seems that Bush literally thought that by invading Iraq he was fulfilling a Biblical prophecy. No wonder that Chirac stayed out of that shitshow; when somebody tried to sell me on a war with this poo poo I'd get the gently caress away too.
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Aug 2, 2016 09:00
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The whole experience of the first six years of the 2000's were surreal, but so were the end of the 90's to a large extent. I recently finished watching the History Channel's documentary series on the Presidents, which came out in 2005. It's interesting to see how the office has changed over time, and even then the consensus amongst historians then that Bush's administration would be seen in a negative light. The man is practically a compilation of the worst presidents' worst qualities. The late 90's were a silly, decadent time, and the idea of the president as a meaningful figure in the broader scope of the nation seemed to be almost a joke in the wake of Clinton's near-impeachment circus while compared to the rest of the country's economic success. There was a sense that while things weren't going to be great forever, that the major hardships of the 20th century had passed, and the world's problems couldn't touch us anymore. That thinking is really what got W. into the White House in the first place: he was seen as someone likeable, well-connected, and probably harmless. The notion at the time of his candidacy was that he would act as a spokesperson for conservative policy makers that would actually run things, his weakness as a leader didn't really matter, there would probably be a recession, he would cut taxes, and be done in one term as the good times kept rolling. I was a senior in high school on 9/11, and was working full-time when Iraq really began to fall apart in 2005. After 9/11, the frenzy people got worked into at that time was the work of both the media and government in collaboration as well as independently. Looking back at the anti-communist paranoia of the 50's as a precedent, it becomes understandable. The strong feelings that built up around the threat of terrorism stem from the ideas that we needed a 'real' threat to unite us as a country and keep us from going soft. That nostalgic sentiment in the 90's only made the appeal to reclaim something of the Greatest Generation stronger. The War on Terror was framed as being 'Our Generation's WW2,' and people readily embraced that mythology. I have grown to believe that had Bush simply stated the truth - that instability in the Middle East would be worsening as the post-colonial governments fell apart, and that action would be needed to control the transition - he could have attained a broader consensus. Instead, he went the 'Cowboy Idiot' route and this is what we got. chefvinny fucked around with this message at 10:23 on Aug 2, 2016 |
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Aug 2, 2016 10:09
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Reading this thread is really cathartic (as was writing this post). I don't have much to offer except a partial British perspective: I was 8 on 9/11, and I don't really remember much except my mother being sick with worry because her brother sometimes worked in the WTC. (He wasn''t there, thankfully.) The only thing that sticks in my mind from the months that followed is some cutesy flash animation I saw at a friend's house with a cartoon Bin Laden being bombed by caricatures of Bush and Rumsfeld. It ended with a view of the Earth with the Middle East replaced by a giant crater. There was an undeniable sense that vengeance was demanded. By 2003, I was at least intelligent enough to watch the news. It was a deeply surreal time, though it's obviously impossible to say how much of my view has been coloured by looking backwards. It was the first clear evidence of a gaping divide between the British political and media establishment and the general public, one that you can probably follow all the way to Brexit. On TV, serious men were lining up to tell us that Iraq could launch their WMDs within 45 minutes. There were graphic stories about the tortures Saddam inflicted on political prisoners. (I remember literally swapping these in the playground.) There was a knowing elision of Bin Laden et al. and Saddam, such that it took me 5+ years to realize that Saddam had repressed the poo poo out of fundamentalist Islam like any other secular Middle Eastern dictator. The anti-French stuff never really took off, but there was a lot of talk about the Special Relationship with the US and I think a sense of implicit pride that we were stepping up to the plate when the rest of the world wouldn't. And yet it never really seemed to take. As I said, this is obviously coloured by hindsight, but I remember a lot of cynicism about oil, a lot of scepticism about the WMDs and a lot of confusion generally. There were the largest demonstrations in a generation, in a country that doesn't really do mass protest. I want to say that this was the point at which the establishment realized that mindlessly repeating soundbites was easier than actually engaging. And of course, in the end it turns out that Blair had inherited Bush's messiah complex and had promised to support him no matter what. Even now, it hangs over our entire political establishment, but we still can't really talk about it. The Chilcott Inquiry (as we call the Iraq Inquiry) was talked about solemnly for a few days then quietly forgotten. Too many politicians from all parties were invested in it to ever really confront it. Having voted against the war has become a badge of honour for politicians like Jeremy Corbyn, a poo poo-test failed by so many other MPs that it's destroyed the legitimacy of the entire political class for a generation. And look where that's got us now. SedanChair posted:So I continued all through the Bush years, the years I had helped to usher in by voting for Bush over a wedge issue. I worked in schools, delivered pizzas and newspapers, engaged in the most self-destructive forms of working-class recreation available in the city of Tacoma. And all throughout, nobody really cared about the war. That's what I think people miss a lot; the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and terrorism itself, was not something that normal Americans really worried about. I don't have any way to prove this, I just have a strong feeling that the reason people rated terrorism as a high concern during that time is that they felt like they were supposed to. But the truth is, fears of terrorism were always a joke compared to fears of getting taken out by medical bills, or outsourcing or being upside-down on your mortgage. Just getting killed by a terrorist isn't so bad. Getting hit by a personal financial crisis in America means your entire family's prosperity is ruined, with decades to try and climb out again. I think this is a really important point. Once the war was underway, it was out of sight, and for the most part out of mind. The press dutifully reported every British soldier killed in action, but there was almost never any discussion. They sometimes reported civilian casualties of 'insurgent' attacks but presented them as the chaos we were there to control, rather than the chaos we'd unleashed. We'd hear about 'heroes' coming back without legs, but you'd only know about how spectacularly ill-equipped the army was for IED attacks if you were very tuned-in. (On the plus side, we know a hell of a lot more about managing major haemorrhage now.) But for the most part there was just a vague sense of something terrible going on in the Middle East. Even after the 2005 London bombings, there was a conscious attempt to downplay any connection to what was going on in our names. Never mind that the fact that we had invaded a Muslim country for no reason was a consistent theme in the propaganda those bombers were soaking in. Support the troops, wear your poppy, pray for the day when mankind will no longer be at war, but don't bother asking why we're at war right now. It's just politics. What can you do about it, anyway? (Every morning for 5 years, I'd walk past this guy on my way to school. I never had the courage to speak to him.) My father is American, and a liberal. He supported the war in 2003 - he didn't believe the WMD crap, but he thought Saddam was evil and it was high time we got rid of him. In the decade that followed, he'd watch the reports of bombings and massacres and shocking incompetence in Iraq, and in he'd shrug and say words to the effect that the Middle East was always hosed up, and we were never going to make much difference anyway. I feel like that's where public discourse in the UK is at right now - we can admit that it was hosed up, but we can't admit that we hosed it up. And we certainly can't admit that we personally hosed it up - when I ask him about it now, my father denies ever having supported the invasion. That's progress, I guess.
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Aug 2, 2016 13:36
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System Metternich posted:Not that I know of, she just kind of silently buried it. I actually had forgotten all about it until an op-ed by two prominent Catholics in her party urging her to admit that in respect to the war the Pope was right and she wasn't. That's pretty atrocious. I really don't like Merkel. I guess I had meant, not so much on the part of the government, but on the part of the American people. I'm surprised it surprised Europeans that we were so ready and willing to accept any and all justifications to find revenge. But I suppose that perception - that Europeans think little of us - might come in part from the Iraq War in the first place. quote:Reading this thread is really cathartic (as was writing this post). I suspected it would be. I was inspired by the "where were you on 9/11?" style threads I've seen on other forums in the past, but I realized that when you frame the narrative that way people tend to say something like "well the bad thing happened, something, something, then Obama got elected and started trying to fix it." Like we all just kind of blank our memory to Bush existing.
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Aug 2, 2016 13:53
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Our wannabe-Blair social-democratic PM visited Washington and made promises of Finnish co-operation in the aftermath of the Iraq War, plus arms sales to the coalition, in exchange for a NATO membership. The main, centrist-agrarian opposition party used the visit as a campaign weapon and won the election (though they had to form a coalition government with the Social Democrats). Not long after the election, it became known that the leader of the Centre party had learned of the details of the Washington discussions from confidential documents leaked to her by a presidential aide. Thus, the first female prime minister in our country's history had to resign just a couple of months after the election for blowing the whistle on some really shady dealings. Quite ironic for someone from the Hilariously Corrupt Garbage Party, but I digress. Personally, on 9/11 our family had just got our first broadband connection and I spent my days reading American forums, including SA, and got exposed to the viewpoints of the Christian Right for the first time. It was quite another world in the eyes of a Nordic citizen -- the fact that something so completely batshit would be considered mainstream anywhere in the West was so hard to grasp that the 'Bush is dumb lol' tent was filled with people from all over the political spectrum in this part of the world. Naturally, some right-wing people reflexively rooted for the U.S. just to spite the leftists who they thought were against the Iraq War just by force of a Cold War anti-American habit. The whole affair also exposed me to the grim reality of geopolitics, and the gloom and doom and general insanity of the time period probably contributed both to a later nervous breakdown and to my decision to not serve in the armed forces, spending a year in community service helping elementary school kids to learn instead. generative grammer fucked around with this message at 14:43 on Aug 2, 2016 |
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Aug 2, 2016 14:39
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Skeesix posted:You need the fear of a mushroom cloud to get the go ahead for America to invade a country halfway across the world when there are no battles occurring. So weapons of mass destruction it was. Ugh, you just reminded me that the administration sold the war with phrases like "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." I remember once it was clear that Iraq had no nuclear program, pro-war folks would cling to the hope that we still might find chemical or biological weapons. IIRC there were times when US forces would dig up decades-old canisters of sarin or something* and some smug Republicans would crow about how we found the WMD. And I'd say "Where's the nukes? We were promised nukes." but they'd just deny that the war was sold to us on the threat of nuclear weapons. *Did this actually happen? My impression now is that we didn't find any WMD at all.
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Aug 2, 2016 15:16
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Mountaineer posted:
There was a disclosure a few years ago that there were some remaining stockpiles of chemical weapons that had been left behind as Saddam's government collapsed. [url] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middleeast/us-casualties-of-iraq-chemical-weapons.html?_r=0 [/url] There wasn't enough to cause mass havoc, but enough to be potentially utilized to some effect. I can't find the article, but there was an incident where a small cache of chemical weapons fell into the hands of a local strongman. He was on the fence about who he wanted to sell the weapons to, and it was the efforts of the various intelligence agencies involved that got him to sell them to the Allies instead of to an insurgent group. It was actually kept quiet to secure that the deal had taken place.
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Aug 2, 2016 15:33
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Thank you. If all that was kept secret, then now I don't know what I'm remembering.
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Aug 2, 2016 15:41
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| # ? May 5, 2024 12:47 |
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The WMDs found in Iraq were chemical weapons that we had given Saddam to murder Iranians with. That's why the news of finding them got buried.
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Aug 2, 2016 15:53
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