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Gato posted: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. SedanChair posted: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. These are important points, for a lot of Americans the Iraq war was something they supported in an abstract sense without appreciating the inevitable human cost. At that time WWI + WWII veterans were either dead or senile and Vietnam veterans on the decline, so relatively few people had personal experience with the reality of war.The Gulf war caused very few American casualties, and in fact the major news network covered it almost like a video game. Americans had the luxury of supporting a war and not having to care much about what happened afterwards, aside for the minority of people who knew someone in the armed forces. I worry the same will happen again after the memory of Iraq fades. I'd point out that there were also very few repercussions for US politicians who'd voted for the war. I think only one Democrat senator (Lieberman) had a primary challenge due to his vote the Iraq resolution. You can't really blame moderate Democrats for supporting the Iraq war if party members wouldn't hold them accountable. Ideally all the war-supporting Democrats in safe seats should have been primaried, now the window for that has probably passed. To be fair, a lot of Democrats actually lost their seats to Republicans after the invasion, in part because they weren't sufficiently bloodthirsty or "tough on terror".
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Aug 2, 2016 16:30
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Wow, this thread makes me feel young in the worst possible way. I was 7 years old on 9/11. My parents both grew up in fairly poor parts of northeastern Ohio and were the first on both sides of the family to go to college. My mom managed in department stores until I was around, and my dad lapped most of the people he had ever known when he got his law degree and went into biglaw, which got them into the nicer suburbs around here. The reason I give that context is because it makes them perfected test-tube babies of the GOP's last decade and a half of lunacy. They have serious issues with the concepts of modern racism because they grew up as poor, rural whites who had watched all the jobs leave and felt left behind, just on the cusp of welfare-levels of poor but in an environment where taking government money was taboo. When my dad went to college and law school and was introduced to the concept, he thought it was despicable that academia could care so much about the concept of white privilege yet turn a blind eye to impoverished, rural Americans--a critique I can understand even if I don't agree with it. Neither of them had ever seen more than 3-4 black people before they were in college, and once they started to see them, they were already at a point where the minority presence in their lives largely consisted of the portion that had made it to the middle class and not the poorest among them living in the worst parts of the city. At the same time, you end up with a fairly church-heavy upbringing in rural America, and they were no different with my dad growing up as the son of an ex-Amish family and bouncing from church to church in the area as his parents dealt with the culture shock of going from conservative Amish culture to finding a Mennonite church that didn't alienate them by being too overt with things like pacifism and communitarianism, out of fear of having the same conflicts with Mennonites as they did with the Amish. My mom grew up bouncing between Lutheran and Baptist churches. Throw that church background in a blender with the fact that they were a lucky couple who made it through college into good-paying jobs at the tail end of Reagan and HW, and they ended up with the ultimate Just World fallacy. If people were just good Christians like they were growing up and constantly talking about Jesus and church, and people were willing to work hard, then anyone could do the same thing they did. Race didn't matter because they had never seen it benefit them relative to someone else with their own two eyes. Debt never mattered because they had to take out student loans and depend on grants and scholarships to gut it out. America was perfect because it was evidence that if they could come from the middle of nowhere in Ohio and make it, anyone could. My parents both actively campaigned for W because they saw him as the first real Evangelical president who spoke their language. He used compassionate, consistent language towards the poor whether talking to black, hispanic, or white voters, regardless of what his policies actively entailed. He was fiercely pro-life and anti-marriage equality which they saw as things that needed to be upheld under covenant theology to make sure America remained prosperous. He promised to cut taxes as they were finally getting hit by student loan debt, which they saw as an easy way to start paying off that debt. To them, he was a dream president who echoed their exact worldview. Then 9/11 actually happened, and I remember standing in my parent's bedroom with a glass of chocolate milk as my parents stared in actual shock as they realized America wasn't actually a bulletproof bubble. I was too young to really grasp what this actually represented, and it took me most of undergrad to actually develop my framework on this. To the evangelical/Christian Right, tragedies and disasters represent more than just the loss of life and malevolence of the perpetrator, they represent signs that God is displeased and is not offering his protection to the country. At that point, humble, conservative Christianity was no longer enough. God was calling Christians to war in their eyes, as atonement for all the other ills of America. The Covenant demanded blood for the blood God, and W justifying the war with his Gog and Magog rhetoric and making the stand into a matter of good against evil meant that they would buy into the war. The evidence didn't matter, since Sadaam was a dictator. It didn't matter that it would destabilize the region, because it was a chance to remove evil, regardless of what waited in the power vacuum between. Theoretically, the case to Christians was that if you removed Sadaam, God would take mercy on the United States and would also be willing to intervene in Iraq and help create a more just government there. It was a selfish Christian imperialism of the highest order, because it meant the US got mercy while Iraq had a so-called chance to turn its eyes towards supply-side Jesus. This is consequently why so many in the Christian Right remain ardent defenders of Iraq as operated like the Neocons (who often will dodge the question or say the approach but not the idea of intervention should change) and unlike libertarians (who openly will criticize it) or the nationalists (who take Trump-ish stances on it). The US lived up to its end of the covenant, but Iraq didn't suddenly Christanize/Americanize itself which meant that they broke the covenant and the ensuing turmoil was their fault. They don't see any of this as the fault of a zealous Christian America. They see it as a chance where the godless liberals of America and heretics in Iraq undermined a covenant with God and created this mess. That's why the strategy from Republicans on ISIS is the exact same as their stance was on Sadaam--they don't care about soldiers or collateral damage or liberation. They want to alleviate their own fears of a broken covenant by going after evil, and it's magnified by the number of so-called "cultural losses" they've endured with decisions like Obergefell or Roe which makes them feel like they have a lot to make up for on the ledger. They can't seem to win in America, so they need their to be some way they can appease the terms of their deal with God so that they and their families don't get blown up in some other tragedy or attack, hence further justification for extreme and proactive action on behalf of a Christian identity that meshes with the American Christian Right. They're fine with Trump's coziness with Putin because of all the lip service Putin pays to a Christian identity in Russia but see Syria in the same light as Iraq where it's another chance to demonstrate American morality, regardless of risk of destabilizing a region or losing American lives.The ones that are fine with Trump do so because he promises to hurt the groups that have made them "lose", and the ones that struggle with it often are the truest believers of the Christian Right who still believe in the actions of people like W. The danger inherent in this is that they don't care about learning from the mistakes of the past, rather the mistake was not forcing their values harder and only makes them double down on what's already been done. I say all of this because my ultimate razor of American politics as I've experienced it comes down to a simple truth: 9/11 irrevocably destroyed American politics for a generation. It took well-meaning Christians with some blind spots in life like my parents and sent them on the path to crazy town that we now find ourselves at. They have their heads firmly in the conservative media bubble, believing cable news and mainstream journalism to be biased. They see the American Left as the enemy who made them lose a war and who keeps beating them culturally rather than as well-meaning but differing opposition to their politics. They believe the last two Presidential elections were stolen from "real Americans" by immigrants, coastal elites, and people who hate their identity rather than people who come from a different America than the white, rural, Christian America they did. 9/11 turned the Christian Right into true believers that things like Katrina or 9/11 were God's vengeance, turning the Abrahamic God into the lovechild of He Who Walks Among the Rows and a volcano god constantly demanding sacrifices. It let a nation paralyzed by fear turn its brains off as the Christian Right joined forces with warhawks to tell us we were going to war with the very embodiment of evil because that felt good in the moment, regardless of the consequences or moral stance of the war. It told people concerned about civil liberties that we were letting the terrorists win by not immediately stripping the rights of Americans who looked like they were from the Middle East. It told Americans who were questioning the good of a large tax cut or federal spending cut that we were at war, and this was no time to debate economics when evil is at hand. It told us that war is okay as long as it's making us feel better. It equated patriotism with supporting a doomed military operation that we weren't allowed to question because feelings. Worst of all, it taught us that American strength was in bluster and force rather than strategy and resources. I would call it Millenial Vietnam with the way opinions are settling on it, but we went to war against a political movement there, not the abstract idea of evil and terror that we could ascribe to whatever we felt like. Boomers have spent the last decade and a half crowing about American identity and how we need to preserve it, ignoring that the identity they talk about wasn't current at the start of all of this and is less representative now. Rather than allowing the gradual decline of Boomers and the imaginary politics of Leave-it-to-beaver America into a more plural setting, Iraq gave them an opportunity to spend over a decade showboating and staying in the limelight because they successfully convinced America that white, upper-middle class Americans were the ones being threatened by terror attacks, rather than all Americans. When people finally woke up to this and called Bush on it, there were obviously some people who stuck around. My parents are both convinced that we actually found WMDs in Iraq but weren't told because the media was against Bush. They fall under the portion of the Christian Right that doesn't mind Trump's language on Iraq not because they agree with him, but because they think he's just taking that stance so that the media doesn't attack him. They rationalize Trump making GBS threads on Bush as him doing what's necessary to get elected and save the country for Godlessness. They firmly believe his fiction of people cheering on 9/11 because America beat itself in Iraq by letting American naysayers and liberals question the plan and interfere rather than admitting that it was a doomed policy. Until the generation that took us into Iraq is gone from the political limelight, we will never be rid of this lovely war, because it's become dogma to the Christian Right and Neocons and a badly executed symbol of the need for singular American identity to Nationalists. It marginalized the more libertarian elements of the GOP in favor of Republicans who didn't mind big government, leading to the current crisis between the establishment and the Tea Party. Its failure gave the Nationalists room to criticize the establishment and gain a foothold in the grassroots by promising the end goals of the policy (singular American identity and "safety") without having to go through the lovely wars and foreign conflict. It's been a loving fig leaf for the worst in American domestic politics for over a decade and will probably be here for another 50 years at this rate. You want to know why America will have issues negotiation defense and foreign policy for the next century, it's because we let religious moralizers, warhawks, and blood atoners make a decision to enter a war that we fought barbarically and for no logical reason.
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Aug 2, 2016 17:03
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I was ten or so, on 9/11. I was too self-absorbed at that age too feel much of an emotional impact from the attacks-- I distinctly remember being annoyed that the media coverage was blocking out The Simpsons re-runs. The coverage never stopped. And it was the best coverage of any disaster, ever. Clear, high definition imagery. I remember that, and I remember that we had goodwill across the world like we haven't really had in half a century. People wore 'I <3 NY' shirts around the world. I think what makes me most sad though is that while installing a democracy in Iraq was always going to be hard, it didn't have to fail so miserably. De-baathifcation, Paul Bremer, cronyism and trying to instill Reagan-era values on a socialist country made what was a hard situation impossible. I know I'm simplifying greatly, but from what little I've read, it didn't have to fail, but they put a lot of unqualified people in charge of something really loving delicate and difficult. The insurgency wasn't necessarily guaranteed to happen.
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Aug 2, 2016 17:52
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I was 13 when 9/11 happened. I was in Math class and our teacher brought in the TV and started explaining who was whom and stuff. I remember him saying something like "Thank God" when Yasser Arafat came out against the attack. I remember crying, because my grandfather had died only a few years earlier and all these deaths suddenly reminded me of him. I was 15 when the Iraq War started. As a french-canadian, I can say no one here liked it. My whole high school walked in peace marchs. No one could really believe this was really happening, we kept hoping that Bush and his team would listen to reason, see how bad they looked and decide not to do it. They did it. America-bashing became pretty common. Michael Moore movies got big premieres with all our celebrities and politicians (I remember saying our current super terrible provincial Prime Minister at the Farenheit 9/11 premiere, I had won tickets) and got standing ovations. I remember feeling a crushing sense of hopelessness when Bush got reelected. How could anyone vote for him? And then we got Harper in Canada and my province became a complete shitshow and I've learned that hope is a mistake.
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Aug 2, 2016 20:19
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MonsieurChoc posted:I remember feeling a crushing sense of hopelessness when Bush got reelected. How could anyone vote for him? And then we got Harper in Canada and my province became a complete shitshow and I've learned that hope is a mistake. Kerry ran a complete poo poo campaign and had the personality of a dead moth. If it'd have been Howard Dean, Al Gore, Joe Biden, Hillary or anybody else? Bush would have lost. Big time.
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Aug 2, 2016 21:32
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When it comes to looking at the Iraq War in retrospect, I really like this lecture by Mel Leffler that he did at UNC. I think this will be the academic reading of the war in the decades to follow. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNOYU37Ia8I
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Aug 4, 2016 03:06
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I was 17 at the time, just entering my last year of high school in France. I'd just started getting interested in American politics following the 2000 election (getting my head around the concept of EVs was an eye-opener) and I caught the breaking news on an American website before French TV was onto it. I distinctly remember telling my mom to turn on the TV because some serious poo poo was going down... only to find old-people daytime game shows for the first few minutes. After that it was like a watching a train wreck in slow motion for a few years. Pretty much everyone here was okay with the invasion of Afghanistan (or rather the idea of it, the execution is another matter), after all as Le Monde's headline put it "we were all Americans". But when it came to Iraq... oooooh boy. Seeing from a distance an allied country whip itself into a frenzy for a war that everyone here agreed was unjustified was scary, particularly the weirdass semi-religious rethoric (that's a big no-no in politics here) . What mostly stood out to me was the way your government and medias used nationalism as a blunt instrument to drown out any discenting voice. Oh and the lies of course, it's the thread title after all. Then there was this:   I mean we expect that poo poo from the English, not so much from you guys. I was in a strange position. I spent (and evidently still spend) a lot of time reading online about American politics so I had a pretty good idea what the public discourse was like in the US, but at the same time I hung out with lefty know-it-all students firmly persuaded that AMERIKKA was a country of oil-drinking bloodthirsty Jesus-freaks (coincidentally, Michael Moore was VERY popular in France at the time). So I regularly found myself playing devil's advocate to the more conspiracy-minded anti-imperialists in my social circle ("no guys, it's not as nefarious as you think, the neo-cons just want to topple every government in the Middle East and replace them with spontaneous democracies" ... "what do you mean it makes no loving sense?"). But goddamn, between the Patriot Act, Abu Ghraib, and the Bush & Cheney travelling act you fuckers didn't make it easy to defend you. I mean I pretty much gave up after 2004 when you re-elected the assholes. Still, glad our lying thief of a president kept us out of that poo poo show (until the poo poo show knocked on our door).
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Aug 4, 2016 04:37
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For me it was really just another normal day but I remember it very well up until the later afternoons. I was about 14 at the time. Just a random dumb idiot kid like everyone else. The morning started of normally enough, I was woken up by my mother at around 5:30 after only getting 4 or 5 hours of sleep, taking a shower still half asleep then drying off and eating some breakfast cereal while I prepared for school. My mom dropped me off at school and went to work and I went to my first period class half-awake again. I endured another boring class where I learned nothing, yet again and mostly yearned for my comfortable bed. It was really just a normal day just like the rest of them in a groundhog day loop up to that point. I still remember it fondly. There really was a before and after up to that point. My innocent childhood and adolescence and then my cynical adulthood. That's what really bothers me more about 9/11 than anything, that it was an event hundreds of miles away that nobody I was emotionally connected to was damaged in and it changed my life and my outlook on things without ever really effecting me. First world problems. I was lumbering out of class to my homeroom groggy and still tired, I really never got the sleep I wanted back then. Suddenly I hear a shout out "Nelson Mandingo!! Nelson Mandingo!!" and am utterly shocked someone is speaking to me until 2nd period. It's my buddy David, who ironically here I am almost two decades later talking to on steam right now as I type this out. I can tell he's excited about something and doing his "evil genius" cupping he does with his hands when he's excited, nervous, or just as a neutral thing. Bewildered I get my bearings and ask him whats going on. He informs me that two planes have hit the world trade center and the pentagon, and a plane might have hit the white house. It's at this point I am awake. After talking with him about it for a while I went to homeroom where at that point everyone had gotten the news and were busy chattering away about it. Then the bad news started trickling in. "Wait doesn't Colin's dad work at the Pentagon?" "What about so and so's mother she lives in New York?" and so on. People were worried. We had an announcement on the speaker about it and really no school work got done that day. It was all that anyone talked about. All the classes were devoted to watching CNN and talking about it. In hindsight as I'm writing this, it was enjoyable that everyone talked and was together for each other that day. Animosities, cliques, and adolescent bullshit was on hold that day. Much of my second period was divided between trying to alleviate the worries of a girl I had a crush on then that our city, even though it had a military base and probably had nuclear weapons, we would not be attacked, and joining the class in comforting another guy named Colin something or other who's father worked at the Pentagon. He was stone faced and scared. Internally he was clearly in a state of panic but kept it under control. My third period was forgettable and my fourth was joining the other people in the drumbeat to war. Being dumb kids, we relished the revenge. At the time I liked to think of myself a christian and didn't really have my own political views. The rest of the day was a blur, the only thing I really remember was getting on Counterstrike later around 7:00 PM and playing a few matches. People were talking about the days events more than they were playing. It was 15 hours later that I found out Colin's dad had thankfully decided to go to work late that day. It brightened me up, even though we weren't friends. At least there was some good news out of this. Through the whirlwind of the leadup to the iraq war I focused on school more than the news and didn't follow Afghanistan closely. I never was afraid of being a victim of a terrorist attack, and don't worry about it to this day. Fast forward a couple of years being around 16 I didn't think the Iraq War was the best idea. There was a lot of conflicting information toward the WMD's and protests against going into the Iraq war. At the time I probably would have given a different opinion of going to war or against it everyday, but I know deep down I was against it. Something felt off. Why were we getting into Iraq, when we were already in Afghanistan? What about Bin Laden and Al Qaeda? It's all a blur to me at this point. Just fragments of memories. Walking by the television in the living room when I stopped and listened to Bush give the ultimatum for Saddam to leave the country and knowing Saddam would not follow through. Then later it was in my history class with a history teacher when we saw the M1 tank pull down the statue and later the "Mission accomplished" speech. I started paying attention more and more to politics and the news after that point, and forming my own ideas and opinions. It became really clear to me very quickly in late 2003 that Bush and his cabinet were idiots who had no idea what they were doing, Fox News was a transparent right wing fundamentalist news network that to this day I'm amazed people a lot of people don't see the yellow journalism and bias confirmation for what it is, and that our nation's media had sold everyone a phony war that we didn't really stop and think through. Let alone plan through it. The years went on with the Bush administration and it felt like a liberal outrage machine to me. Every day news would come out about it's incompetency. Then Katrina hit. It was really just one disaster after another. Most of the Iraq war was really just a war out of sight and out of mind as an american civilian. There were people from school who went off to war and never came home, but for the most part friends and family who went into Iraq and Afghanistan came back with a few interesting stories to tell. It's been over 10 years since Bush has been relevant. I think a lot of people have just forgot how awful he really was. While I don't remember the specifics well, I remember my emotions and opinions well of the Bush years. Stuff like Scooter Libby and so on. It's pretty obvious why historians have already marked him down as one of the worst presidencies in history. He was truly the wrong man for the job. He should have stayed in Baseball. How on earth does he sleep at night? These days, I am pretty sure its because of George Bush that I am pretty solidly left wing, agnostic, and try to sweat the details. Differing opinions that can be argued from a place of internal consistency are something I crave to make me second guess my own opinions. While the aura of invincibility that I believe America had in my childhood was destroyed, I've come to appreciate the country more. It's why its so upsetting when people like Donald Trump or Rudy Guiliani or whoever seems to believe that America is this weak and pathetic nation, when we are really not. We do a lot of bad and terrible poo poo, and a lot of okay things too. It's a nation just like every other one on the planet. A lot of people are really broken by 9/11 and are now terrified of everything though. Its interesting how a persecution complex makes you feel like you're being attacked 24/7, rather than actually being in a place like Syria where you are actually under threat of death 24/7. Through it all it's something I literally reminded myself literally just again today. Bin Laden won. He really did. Nelson Mandingo fucked around with this message at 20:56 on Aug 4, 2016 |
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Aug 4, 2016 06:59
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FuzzySkinner posted:Kerry ran a complete poo poo campaign and had the personality of a dead moth. The Bush Administration's lies were so successful at drumming up support for the war that Democrats decided to run on a platform of "Bush was right to save the world from Saddam and his dangerous weapons programs, but we would have done it smarter and betterer and diplomaticallier" and a boring stuffed-shirt technocrat with a silver star seemed like he could pull off this cowardly strategy of scrubbing the Democrats' image of opposing the war and neutering Republican accusations that Democrats are terrorist sympathizers. Which totally backfired when the report came out exposing once and for all that there were no weapons, there was no yellowcake uranium, Saddam never was a threat, it was all bullshit, and the inspectors would have verified all this without a single American life lost if they'd been allowed to finish. This happened between the debates and a principled candidate could have taken advantage of it and hammered home every administration lie in the run-up to war. But we had John Kerry, who offered half-hearted criticisms of the war haste and then when Bush shot back "you said Saddam was a threat last week, should you have known too?", "you said Saddam hadn't disarmed, was your judgment too poor to lead?" Kerry crumpled and mumbled "yeah you were right to invade Iraq but I would have invaded Iraq better". Somehow this completely failed to inspire anyone on the left who opposed having a bumbling warmonger in office. The first 20 minutes or so of the second debate sums up the Kerry campaign pretty well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21fXfTmv-aQ E: My service in Iraq was boring and I don't like talking about it, you get to have my armchair campaign strategist opinions instead I hope you liked it.
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Aug 4, 2016 07:23
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one time i was in a hide and I SAW THESE GUYS GET OUT OF A VAN WEARING HAZMAT SUITS circa 2006 oh poo poo boys we found the wmds we're goin home wars over was just a couple of guys in beekeeper suits tending to the hives
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Aug 4, 2016 13:10
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Obligatory comic strip:
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Aug 4, 2016 17:11
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It's really great reading this thread and learning about the perspectives of other people. I'm shocked at how young so many of you were when this happened. So I figured I'd give my take on it as well: I was just barely 19 years old when 9/11 happened. I was going to be getting married in a few days. I lived in San Diego, so it all started going down while I was passed out. I got up for work, found out that the wedding rings had arrived, and joined the carpool to the office. No one spoke. The radio was playing, and it was talking about the world trade center being attacked. I am definitely not a morning person, so I wasn't even coherent at the time. I thought they were talking about the bombing back in the 90s. Everyone in the office was deathly quiet. The receptionists were crying. It still didn't occur to me that something seriously bad was going on, all I gave a poo poo about was getting some caffeine into me so I could get to coding. I started to catch on when I heard my cube-mates radio still talking about the WTC. That was probably around 8:00 AM local time, so the towers had just fallen. After that I was glued to the internet, looking at the devastation, the tears and outrage. And really, I didn't feel much of anything. There was unease, because at the time no-one knew what was going on, and maybe the Miramar MCAS (just about 20 minutes away) would be attacked, too. I told myself that was pretty goddamned unlikely, as they were undoubtedly on full alert by that time, and Miramar wasn't exactly a very appealing or important target. My Fiance was panicking, and I kept trying to keep her calm via IM as best I could. And yet, I still didn't really feel much of anything. I guess it was shock. I never really have felt angry about it, just a little sad. I was worried that maybe they'd institute the draft, having dutifully filled out my selective service card like every other 18 year old boy does, but again, I figured that probably wouldn't be the case. Turns out I was right, thankfully. We were married the next week. It was a very somber wedding. No one really felt like celebrating. My father in law managed to fly out the moment they started letting people back onto airplanes. No one else was willing to do it. Eventually fingers got pointed, and blame was assigned. And it was Afghanistan, a country I knew basically nothing about except Rambo went there once, and it was the Russian Vietnam. Like everyone else in the world, I felt it was justified to go there and stomp the everloving poo poo out of whoever the gently caress was responsible. Aside from that, life went on. I never feared any kind of terrorist attack. The 9/11 attack was a one-time thing only. There was no way a bunch of americans were going to sit back and let someone do that again. I never felt unsafe or in danger. Time passed, and we moved on to other things. I lived my life, and struggled to get by. Times were really tough for us during that period. And then Bush decides to start another loving war, this time in Iraq. It was transparently obvious to me that Iraq had absolutely gently caress-all to do with the 9/11 attacks, and that they obviously didn't have any WMDs, but I felt it was pointless to argue. Our country had lost its goddamned mind. One good sucker punch and we were blindly swinging and flailing at anything and everything. Any kind of objection was just going to be shouted down as unamerican, or cowardly, or whatever the talking points were, then. I watched the initial attack (Shock and Awe) and I was fairly impressed. I won't lie, I got a war boner at that stuff, because goddamn are we good at loving poo poo up when we have a tangible target. And then it promptly went to poo poo after the initial push because of course we weren't welcomed as liberators. And of course we couldn't keep poo poo together after all the tangible targets were eliminated. And of loving course there were no loving WMDs. Soldiers were dying, and many more were coming back maimed and mutilated. Billions upon Billions of dollars were being poured into a dumpster fire. Nobody I knew personally, at least, so it never really hit home, but I knew it was hosed up, that we had hosed up, and that now we were stuck with our dick in the hornet's nest with no end in sight. I figured maybe we'd be able to turn poo poo around if the Dems got in control again, but who do they loving nominate? Lurch. The guy seems decent, but he was just soooo loving uncharismatic. Kerry's loss in 2004 also showed me the direction things were going to go in. I didn't bother to vote (there was never any doubt what California's outcome was going to be) so I never cared enough to even register. But the campaign was eye-opening. The whole Swiftboating thing in particular. The woman with the purple heart bandaid. It's like they looked at the rule book, and decided to wipe their asses with it, because winning meant everything. We went from "I'll die to defend your right to say it" to "You are literally Hitler/Stalin/Satan and we will never compromise with you." I knew the trajectory was locked in at that point. And the subsequent years have confirmed it. Everything has gotten so nasty now, there is no compromise. There is only purity, and no one is pure. I never really felt unsafe even after 9/11, and I still don't feel like I'm in any kind of danger. I guess that's my privilege, being born in such a powerful country. And ultimately, I kind of feel like we deserve it. We had a golden opportunity to stamp this poo poo out, with the support of basically the entire world, and we pissed it away. And all so a dimwitted dude could avenge his daddy and line the pockets of his daddy's friends.
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Aug 4, 2016 20:24
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I was a high school student in San Francisco, and I remember the huge protests against the war. I have never seen so many people mobilized and on the streets before or since. It was incredible. And it didn't matter at all. Blind patriotism was far more important than facts or integrity. Does anyone else remember video of people pouring out French wine because they wouldn't back the invasion? Then, years later it became clear we tortured people, but nothing happened because we gotta support are troops even (especially!) when they're giving someone a rectal smoothie. Elections matter. Protests don't.
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Aug 4, 2016 20:51
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Well I graduated from High School in 2001, so 9/11 was a perfect kick in the rear end to remind me that worrying about people from homeroom not calling me back after grad was kind of insignificant in the grand scheme of life. I went to sleep at 1:45am (PST) the morning of Sept 11. I had stayed up all night downloading a Half-Life mod called MasterSword that promised an Action/RPG style game. I fiddled with it for about a half hour and resolved to just RTFM the next day. I was volunteering at my high school as a summer gig, but I didn't have to go in that morning. I woke up at 9 or 10 and flipped Fox 11 on while I waited for my computer to boot. I'm half-asleep and I see a building on TV sitting there, and all of a sudden a loving plane goes flying into it. I freak out because I think it's the Equitable building in Los Angeles and holy poo poo people I know live by that thing. So I start flipping to CNN because this looks like a god-drat movie not the news. By then I realize it was footage from CNN. My computer boots and I'm on AIM talking to friends saying WTF IS GOING ON. My buddy says he saw it happen live at 5something am because he was having breakfast after an all-night CounterStrike clan thing. I spend the rest of the day watching them reconstruct the timeline. By the time the second tower falls I still can't believe this happened. Then they say the Pentagon was struck, and that another plane is in a field somewhere that may have been headed to the White House. My parents get home and I gas up their cars because holy poo poo who knows what'll happen, and if they ration gas because it jumps to the ungodly price of like $2.50 we'll at least have a week's worth. I take digital photos of the CNN screen, random poo poo like Bush disembarking from Marine 1 looking driven, shots of Ground Zero, etc. For a moment I think drat, it's lucky Bush is in office and not Gore who knows what Gore would have done. Bush is an idiot but at least he'll use the military decisively. FM Talk radio is full of people saying they should Glass Palestine or turn the ME into cinders. One guy says clone Bin Laden so we can all kill him over and over and over. I'm wondering what the gently caress an Al Quaeda is and if it was like those guys from True Lies. I try to find a newspaper but they're sold out everywhere. I notice people have a sense of good will towards paramedics, firefighters and police and that's kind of cool, to know that we can still come together after such a crazy event. There is no air traffic in Los Angeles for 2 days. I'm sitting in my room at 11pm and the errant sound of a helicopter actually scares me for a moment. This is entirely surreal. I move into my college dorm Sept 16. The big fountain by the student store is peppered with post-its saying LOVE NOT WAR / WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER / and so on. I wonder how the gently caress these hippies can say that after what just happened. The Afghanistan invasion happens and goes off well. By now people on campus are warning against nation-building in the ME, reminding us that Reagan funded the Mujahadeen to fight the Soviets, reminding us that HW Bush mucked around in the region, painting Bush and Cheney as dumb warmongers. I watch a film about the 2000 election on campus. Holy poo poo Katherine Harris basically stole the drat election for Bush. Holy poo poo all these people of color were purged. What the gently caress. How can this happen in America? By the time the Iraq invasion is planned to go on, I believe the administration saying Saddam has WMDs. Colin loving Powell vouched for it. The United States Government and it's goddamn President wouldn't lie to the american public! (I believe this despite reading about the VietNam quagmire a semester earlier). My World Lit professor allows students to exit class to attend the anti-war march, reminding everyone he has to be apolitical but had no actual power to stop them. I'm wondering why anyone would waste their time on a rally that's so disorganized and nebulous. Fuckin hippies. We're not greeted as liberators. We don't win hearts and minds. By then Jon Stewart moves the Daily Show into a more political machine, the news is much less gung-ho, there's no giant gently caress You Taliban Freedom Tower at Ground Zero, and I start lurking in D&D while trying to learn the logical fallacies that are thrown about discussions. I'm sick of seeing yellow ribbons everywhere. Bush is an idiot but people lap up what he says. His administration is a terrible regressive clownshow. Cheney is a cartoon villain. Rumsfeld is smug as gently caress despite being terrible. Rice is their token deflection shield. Ashcroft wants to cover up statue titties and his replacement, Gonzalez, can't recall worth a poo poo. The absurd dysfunction of America's leaders is unbelievable and I begin to pine for the days of Slick Willy. And holy poo poo what happened to the concept of separation of church and state. So many boneheaded policies and actions built on the back of "well the bible" or "my beliefs say". I'm appalled at how Kerry is treated during the 2004 election. The faux purple hearts, swift boats, people's hate and xenophobia on full display. I'm getting boba the night of the election and I can't believe they're re-electing that idiot. Then Katrina happens, George Bush Doesn't Care About Black People, Heckuba Job, Brownie. NOW people believe the emperor has no clothes. A few months late there, guys. By the end of college, I have a great professor, a Vietnam vet, talk about the similarities between Iraq and VN. Great documentaries and readings. He brings in a speaker whose son was KIA. Initially it was reported as a casualty of a firefight with insurgents... he pushes and finds out it was due to friendly fire, and I'm sickened that the kind of information manipulation from Vietnam happens again. I read about the rampant cultural insensitivity, destruction of artifacts from the birth of civilization, eradication of infrastructure and I realize that we're terrorizing a goddamn country we were supposed to be building up. D&D is a bit less RahRahConservative by then and a lot more information about the administration and our policies abroad are talked about. I learn just how much Halliburton made off of this adventure and I basically lose any respect for the rich I may have ever had. Eventually I watch No End in Sight and every little thing I every critiqued the hippes about turns out to be true. It's Heckuva Job Brownie x 1000000000. I realize it's me. People like me that didn't question the administration helped this poo poo happen. Through fear or indifference, we let the best of the country get pissed away, threw away the goodwill of the world on a cowboy jaunt in a region we had no business being in, and actively made the country worse. FilthyImp fucked around with this message at 21:08 on Aug 4, 2016 |
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Aug 4, 2016 21:04
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I was in college on 9/11 (wow, I'm old), and like many in the Bay Area, I was a Bush hater before it was cool, and his conduct post 9/11 didn't raise my opinion of him one bit. I remember his speech on the evening of 9/11 that he intended to make no distinction between the terrorists and those who harbor them, and I knew immediately from that that we were going to invade someone (and I thought it was poor form that he wouldn't at least wait until tomorrow to make such a statement). But Iraq was a surprise, even though one of Bush's first acts as commander in chief was to order airstrikes on Iraq in February of 2001. The occupation of Iraq never seemed real to me; I knew it was a colossal waste of time and money, but no one I knew was deployed there, and I just added it to the long list of reasons why Republicans shouldn't be left in charge of anything. It was a little surprising to me how most of the mess in Iraq was forgotten as soon as the subprime crisis accelerated. I wish Americans would learn to pay attention to two things at the same time.
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Aug 4, 2016 22:01
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FilthyImp posted:Then Katrina happens, George Bush Doesn't Care About Black People, Heckuba Job, Brownie. NOW people believe the emperor has no clothes. A few months late there, guys. Yeah, it's really frustrating that the Bush admin waited until after the election to totally poo poo the bed. If Katrina and some other things in 2005 had happened in 2004 instead the outcome of the election probably would have been different.
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Aug 5, 2016 00:28
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Mountaineer posted:Yeah, it's really frustrating that the Bush admin waited until after the election to totally poo poo the bed. If Katrina and some other things in 2005 had happened in 2004 instead the outcome of the election probably would have been different. If Kerry had a spine against Swiftboating, I think it would of shifted the election. People learned pretty quickly the President had no clue what he was doing in Iraq.
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Aug 5, 2016 03:10
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I was in 7th grade when we invaded Iraq. I don't really remember how I felt about it. I was a kid, so my opinion probably wasn't all that valid anyway - I'm from the South and my dad was changed for the worse by 9/11(a pretty stark shift right, anti-Muslim rhetoric). I caught a bit of that until I grew up some and realized how dumb it was. Anyways, I was at home suspended from school for punching a kid in the face(hooray puberty) so I got to watch all the sweet night vision coverage of the USAF bombing the gently caress out of Baghdad. Pretty sweet  Then I joined the Marines and didn't get to go, I got sent to Afghanistan instead. And then they didn't send us all home when Bin Laden was killed in Pakistan. Hmm.
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Aug 5, 2016 03:31
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i was 10 at the time of 9/11. i didn't get it. i knew that people were upset, and that upset me, but in my childish naivete, i simply didn't understand why people were so incredibly beside themselves. it was just one attack, right? from some fringe extremists? people were comparing it to pearl harbor, and i knew just enough about american history to feel like that was an odd comparison. the united republic of osama bin laden hadn't declared war on us and no military assets had been destroyed. my parents were ardent clintonites, and thus despised anything that bush did on general principle (a good policy, in retrospect). let me be real for a minute. a year before, at 9, i had witnessed a united states general election stolen away. a year after 9/11, we start bombing afghanistan. then we invade iraq. i felt so frustrated! i, a lowly eleven year old with the political power of a dehydrated goldfish, was convinced that if i had been able to participate in these events as an adult, i could have set things to rights. i had a somewhat inflated sense of self-worth back then. but things just kept deteriorating. everything, literally everything, was based on a lie, cherrypicked evidence, or willful disregard for reality and international law. often all three at once. 2004 was deeply depressing. kerry was not a good candidate, but even then, it was horrifying to see the right wing slander his military service and seemingly invent an alternate history where bush was not a drunken delinquent of a draft-dodger and people got purple hearts for looking weak-kneed within 5 miles of a military installation. i did not have a lot of faith in much of anything going into bush's 2nd term, and then katrina hit and i was just like "whyyyyyy". i was against the iraq war from the beginning, ardently and vocally, in the way only a middleschooler with delusions of mastery could. i was against it all, the war of aggression, the torture, the destruction, the xenophobia and racism at home. nobody really cared. i got awfully bitter for a teenager and i developed a real disdain for the military and everybody in it. this war was obviously a sham. if i could see that at 14, you would either have to be an idiot or totally evil to go volunteer to participate in that hot mess. it's not like the draft was in effect. the years dragged on. more troops were deployed. more people died. more war crimes were committed. the economy collapsed at some point in there? largely unrelated to the iraq war, but nonetheless the fault of the current administration. it's finally 2008 and i am JUST shy of 18, so i can't vote for obama, who had rekindled my belief in the inherent goodness of the american apparatus. smooth talker, that guy. at least this time, my favored candidate won without my precious vote. unfortunately for me, president obama never really was much more than a smooth talker. we remained in iraq for some time. most of our extrajudicial torture islands remain open to this day. the institutions that ruined the economy and allowed the iraq war to happen continued to go merrily along. climate change continued to worsen. it wasn't just that obama wasn't all he was cracked up to be - i knew that much going in that nobody keeps all their campaign promises. what really dismayed me was that even if the obama administration felt like they should do something, they couldn't. and as time went on, it became more apparent that they didn't feel much like doing things anyway. "we tortured some folks," indeed. what was the point? i lost faith in it all. whatever good this country had achieved in its history was far before my time. i'm older now, though i would hesitate to be so bold as to say that i'm wiser. more resigned to it all, maybe. i guess i did become the right-wing stereotype of the hipster lefty bitch which is kind of funny for a lot of reasons. ask me about my triggered glasses, or something. remember when bin laden got killed finally and people held, like, parties about it? unreal. god bless america and semper games, motherfuckers.
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Aug 5, 2016 04:09
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Trump's presidential campaign has given a lot of flashbacks from 2003. Like Bush and Iraq war, it's clear that everything he says is based on a lie. And I'm sure most of his biggest supporters (if they have any clue about world) know that it's based on a lie. Yet they don't care. In fact it makes them support Trump even harder. Much like in 2003, the more evidence came out that Saddam didn't in fact have given support to Al Qaida or Osama, or that he didn't have any weapons of mass destruction, the more fierce and loud the war supporters became. And like people have reminisced in this thread, during the 2004 elections lies were spread about Kerry's wartime accomplishments and Bush's draft dodging. After Iraq it seems that it somehow became expected that people are being lie to. And people accepted that they are being lie to, it doesn't matter anymore. They will vote you anyway. To me this is the legacy of 9/11 and Iraq.
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Aug 5, 2016 10:34
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I was 21 on 9/11, living in Vancouver and very into US politics for a non-American. I had CNN on all the time and watched live as the second tower fell. I didn't sleep for over 24 hours that day, glued to the TV. I remember trying to tell a Norwegian friend on ICQ about the importance of the attack, and how it could lead to World War 3. He had never heard of the WTC and didn't understand/didn't believe how earth-shattering it was. I was very upset when Jeb Bush decided that his brother won the 2000 election (how does this poo poo happen in first world nations?!) and saw 9/11 as expected blowback for decades of US meddling in the middle east - as visually/emotionally upsetting as it was. I was dismayed by how many friends saw it as an attack on "us" and were in favour of nuking the whole region. Canadian kids who didn't pay any attention to politics on either side of the border and poo poo on Americans their whole life (as is Canadian tradition) suddenly saw themselves as brothers in arms and wanted to fight the evil muslims. I got in a lot of heated arguments in the weeks and months following. The Iraq war of course was just more meddling for control of oil and regional power. I was confused that Americans saw it as retaliation rather than further provocation. All the 9/11 attackers were Saudi, after all. I was very proud that my government decided not to be part of the "coalition of the willing." I was more shocked by Bush getting re-elected in 2004 than I was by 9/11. I just couldn't understand it. He was so dumb, so insincere, and he was re-eelected by a larger margin than last time. I've learned to never underestimate the stupidity of the general populace on either side of the border since. We elected a similar hawkish conservative for Prime Minister (Stephen Harper), and both countries lost a whole decade+ of prosperity as a result. Now, while the US finally seems to be recovering by the damage done by Bush, my city is in a tailspin, with a real estate bubble that makes 2008 in America look like nothing. Houses average $3,000,000, two bedroom condos are $1,000,000, and the provincial government just panicked and put a 15% tax on foreigner home purchases - even applying it retroactively - which has caused people to back out of deals, causing a chain reaction that may have popped the bubble. We're in for a world of pain either way. I've grown extremely bitter towards anti-regulation, free market conservatives. A whole generation is hosed. No one can afford to live, jobs are disappearing, the economy and culture of the city is disintegrating, and it's too late to do anything now.
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Aug 5, 2016 11:33
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I was 18 when Bush was elected and I used to stay up late at night watching American news and late shows from Australia. I couldn't believe how unbelievably dumb Americans were to vote in Bush considering what a fundie clown he was (and then my country went and elected our own fundie clown Abbott not too long ago). I saw 9/11 happen in real time and then saw America lose its loving mind over the whole thing. All the news switched to 9/11 related poo poo like office parachutes, inflatable slides for office windows, all manner of security gadgets and people talking like the world was coming to an end. Notably absent was any reflection on why a group of people on the other side of the world would suicide into 2 buildings to kill thousands. The very idea that this was a result of American interference in the Middle East was shouted down because of course the real reason they did it was because they hated you for your freedoms. The lead up to the Iraq war was the most blatant misdirection and deceit I had ever seen in politics. It wasn't even close to believable and I still can't believe you guys bought it. They were talking about Saddam constantly moving semi-trailer trucks loaded with WMD labs Christ's sake. They were saying Saddam was not co-operating with inspections WHILE inspections were going on and the UN inspectors specifically told the world that no they were in the country and no there was no evidence of WMDs. Then the Freedom Fries and all the traitor talk. The whole thing basically soured me to the very idea of patriotism. And America. I grew up watching American shows, movies, and cartoons that might as well have been propaganda and thought you guys were the bees knees. Now I think your state is run by a bunch of rabid clowns and we'd all be better off if you were taken out back and shot if not for Russia and/or China taking your place as king bully of the world. You guys remember all the sabre rattling and Axis of Evil stuff against Iran (and North Korea) right around that time too even though Iran had essentially been minding its own business for years? You guys were already in Afghanistan and gearing up for a second war in Iraq while agitating for 2 more wars at the same time! It's hard to describe just how insane you guys looked. And then you voted Bush back in! I don't care if Kerry was a charisma vacuum; re-electing Bush was just shameful. If it was Trump vs Bush then sure. Short of that you just pick whoever is not GWB. If the Democrats nominated a house cat you elect the drat cat and rest assured that at the very least the cat can't do a worse job. EDIT: Oh as for Australia and the Iraq war I wasn't paying much attention. We just seemed to want to suck up to you guys by joining the Coalition of the Willing and I actually didn't disagree with us joining you for diplomatic reasons, even though the war itself was a dumb idea. I think our politicians were also happy just to pretend to be important and Doing Things in the world. Futuresight fucked around with this message at 11:58 on Aug 5, 2016 |
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Aug 5, 2016 11:51
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Protesting the Iraq was the first bit of direct political action I had participated in. Some friends of mine organized a walk out, which ended up being far more successful than we anticipated since our 450 student alt ed HS was across the street from Central HS with 2000 or so kids and they decided to join us on our endeavor. We lead this protest of several hundred kids down the main streets of Flint with our no blood for oil signs and our anti war chants cribbed from Vietnam protests. When we got to the city courthouse a bunch of lawyers came out to see what the ruckus was and promptly got into a screaming match with a few of my friends. The cops showed up, informed us that we were breaking many laws regarding truancy and marching in the streets without a permit and escorted the lot of us back to our schools. School administration wanted to kick all the organizers out for the rest of the year but luckily I had some really dedicated teachers who threatened to resign en masse if they punished us for participating in democracy and exercising our first amendment rights. I expected my parents to flip their lid over the whole thing because they are insane and would do poo poo like grounding my brother and I for 2 weeks because one of us left the toilet seat up, but they were strangely OK with the whole thing. Realizing that no one gave a poo poo about us, or anyone else protesting the war really opened my eyes to what it takes to get things done either through the political process or through direct action. 10 million souls marching in February couldn't stop poo poo because 1) it was already too late by then, and 2) they felt like they did their duties by protesting and nothing else needed to be done, or someone else would do it.
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Aug 5, 2016 13:04
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I opposed Afghanistan on the basis that Michael Moore said so and I was a kid, realising that the things michael moore said were different to my dad's politics and I could use them to argue with him more effectively. By the time Iraq came around it seemed a pretty basic thing to oppose it, I mean also in the UK at the time the only history we learnt was WW1 and WW2 and the take-home message was that war was poo poo and pointless, with the possible exception of when faced by a neighbouring, psychotic power. It was slightly strange to see this message essentially ignored or reversed and it was also strange to see my teachers straight up not understand what was going on. (My history teacher explained to the class we had to go to Iraq because Saddam did 9/11, when I explained this wasn't the case she just insisted it had to be otherwise why would we be there, checkmate?) It was the start of where I began reading between the lines and distrusting the news and government, an instinct that serves me well today. It was also the first debate with my dad I actually won and I've had him on the run ever since. What nearly everyone learnt from Iraq was that bombing the poo poo out of the middle east doesn't make the world safer, in fact the opposite, unfortunately the security apparatus of the world has not taken home the same message yet. e: Oh yeah and like the aussie above said, this was the period over here where America shifted from "that place all the TV shows are set in that everyone wants to someday move to" to "that violent and stupid place all the TV is set in that you might want to visit on holiday in a bulletproof vest" Communist Thoughts fucked around with this message at 13:19 on Aug 5, 2016 |
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Aug 5, 2016 13:15
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DeadlyMuffin posted:Elections matter. Protests don't. Really, the Iraq War protests were sort of the nail in the coffin of the idea that peaceful protests can accomplish much of anything in the modern era.
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Aug 5, 2016 19:36
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Ytlaya posted:Really, the Iraq War protests were sort of the nail in the coffin of the idea that peaceful protests can accomplish much of anything in the modern era. I imagine protests can accomplish things on a smaller scale, but the United States is so huge, has so much power, and has so much vested interests from both within and without that the relative fraction of the population willing and able to protest for long periods isn't going to make a difference. Plus it's my understanding the anti-war movement for Iraq was minuscule compared to, say, Vietnam.
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Aug 5, 2016 19:39
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Ytlaya posted:Really, the Iraq War protests were sort of the nail in the coffin of the idea that peaceful protests can accomplish much of anything in the modern era. I remember the Iraq war protests as a 1 day event after which everyone went home and laughed it up because by golly Bush is just so dumb look he even looks like a monkey. Maybe if people could've been bothered to stay in the streets as long as was necessary, but only a literal handful was, and so Iraq happened. What blew my mind even more than Bush getting reelected is that the 2004 election and the debates were almost entirely about domestic issues. The Iraq war was a loving afterthought. America put people in torture camps for over a decade and a half not because Americans just love torturing, but because they don't give enough of a poo poo about non-Americans, especially Arab Muslims, to make any kind of effort to put a stop to it. It's been almost 4 terms now. Guantanamo is still open. Orange Devil fucked around with this message at 20:42 on Aug 5, 2016 |
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Aug 5, 2016 20:39
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The Iraq War was also not covered all that well by the  press.Fox News REALLY came of age during 9/11. That was the moment they overtook CNN as the de facto cable news network for most americans. Let's face it. The news media here has been a joke with a few lone exceptions. You've had Reagan and Nixon do a lot of damage via their destruction of how the media was run in this country. The repeal of the "fairness doctrine" has especially hurt us. So what you had out there was a lot of ill informed people that had no loving clue what was going on. It's not so much that every american was gung ho about the concept of torture, etc, rather it was they barely had any idea it was happening during their day to day lives. Not to mention that we're discussing this during a pre-recession era. People had money, jobs and other things to worry about. As disgusting as that is to say, one could easily drown out a lot of the bad stuff they had going on because they had other things they could focus on. With the economic collapse occurring and the rise of new media? It really woke a lot of people up. Sadly things like gitmo are going on, but I don't ever think the perfect storm of poo poo we saw post-9/11 will ever catch people that off guard.
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Aug 5, 2016 21:02
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Lightning Knight posted:I imagine protests can accomplish things on a smaller scale, but the United States is so huge, has so much power, and has so much vested interests from both within and without that the relative fraction of the population willing and able to protest for long periods isn't going to make a difference. I should clarify that by "peaceful protests" i mean protests that are organized and legal and don't consist of civil disobedience. Basically, if the protests aren't at the very least inconveniencing those in power, it's doubtful that they're going to accomplish much.
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Aug 5, 2016 21:07
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Ytlaya posted:I should clarify that by "peaceful protests" i mean protests that are organized and legal and don't consist of civil disobedience. Basically, if the protests aren't at the very least inconveniencing those in power, it's doubtful that they're going to accomplish much. It helps if the protests are pushing a viewpoint that is supported by the majority.
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Aug 5, 2016 21:11
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Orange Devil posted:What blew my mind even more than Bush getting reelected is that the 2004 election and the debates were almost entirely about domestic issues. The Iraq war was a loving afterthought. America put people in torture camps for over a decade and a half not because Americans just love torturing, but because they don't give enough of a poo poo about non-Americans, especially Arab Muslims, to make any kind of effort to put a stop to it. It's no coincidence that they waited until just after the 2004 election to launch the battle of Fallujah.
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Aug 5, 2016 22:56
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As an American teenager what I remember most about the invasion of Iraq was the sense of inevitability. Everybody knew Bush wanted to go to war and nobody really wanted to stop him. I remember in our high school we had an optional meeting about the invasion of Iraq led by our goony drama teacher, who unsurprisingly was a military history buff. I remember saying that Iraq would be easy to take but hard to hold. I was not and am not an expert on the military by any means, but I think if that was obvious to a 16 year old with no expertise it says a lot about the subsequent catastrophe. Later Fiasco was assigned reading in college as I got my political science degree, and it became clear that high level military officials had said the same as I did and been fired for it. Bush was a bad president. About 9/11, I remember watching it happen on television. I didn't cry like the people on TV, because I had never been to New York and never knew anyone who lived there. Maybe it's true that when you're young everything seems normal, because 9/11 just seemed like another one of those things that happened in the world. I wasn't aware of a time when America was invulnerable, and I didn't understand why people were so traumatized, if they hadn't been personally affected. It was just the sort of thing that happened in the world.
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Aug 5, 2016 23:19
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Orange Devil posted:I remember the Iraq war protests as a 1 day event after which everyone went home and laughed it up because by golly Bush is just so dumb look he even looks like a monkey. Maybe if people could've been bothered to stay in the streets as long as was necessary, but only a literal handful was, and so Iraq happened. Then you weren't where I was. Civic center was solid protests for what seemed like weeks and weeks. Months maybe? Certainly a very long time.
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Aug 5, 2016 23:59
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I remember reading in 2002 about all the stupid things the Bush administration was doing and feeling kind of positive, because I didn't see how they could get away with it for very long before everyone wised up. Well, it took a lot longer than I thought. And even if people changed it doesn't seem to make much of a difference since the same horrible sort of politicians still tend to be in charge. Looking back the war was really well planned, at least as it applied to the administration's interests. During 2002 they talked more and more about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein (it was almost always "Saddam," not Iraq), and the country was still in "agree with Bush or you're a terrorist" mode so Democrats had to go along with them to have a chance in the November elections, but of course they still lost big. That election was the source of this Tim Kreider cartoon:  Then the war started in 2003 and they must've known the US would still be in Iraq by 2004, so that helped them with that election. I remember people saying they were voting for Bush because he was the only one with a plan to exit Iraq and get the troops out of harm's way. Never mind that Bush himself said he didn't want to leave Iraq. I don't know if the administration cared that it would become a quagmire; they won the election and they were able to give lots of money to their friends in the military-industrial complex, which I think were the important things. Also they knew nothing bad would happen to them personally. I remember how disturbingly pro-war so many people were, including many here on SA. I just didn't understand how people could so desperately want to attack a place that hadn't attacked anyone else and wasn't a threat. A lot of people knew the stories of terror links and weapons were untrue but said war was still necessary because Saddam was such a bad guy. He was a bad guy but the problem, as many predicted before the war, was that removing him and the aftermath of doing so made the world worse off. And no one seemed to have a problem with the fact that the US has good relationships with other bad guys. Early 2005 was one of the high points of the insanity about Bush as a great leader. I remember reading an article that suggested congress was unnecessary as long as there was a good president like him. People say things went bad with Hurricane Katrina but I think it started to fall apart with Terri Schiavo. Republicans were acting like she wasn't nearly as bad as she was, and Bush dramatically flew from Texas to Washington to sign some legislation about her. But most people seemed to think she should've been allowed to die and saw what was going on as blatant pandering.
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Aug 6, 2016 02:33
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Ytlaya posted:Really, the Iraq War protests were sort of the nail in the coffin of the idea that peaceful protests can accomplish much of anything in the modern era. Also, the protesters will relying on the Vietnam protests/War for Profit slogan didn't help.
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Aug 6, 2016 03:01
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i wrote a paper on why the anti-war protests failed so miserably recently, actually. my research revealed that the climate in the 2000s was just uniquely miserable for demonstrators and activists. the patriot act made it actively harder and more dangerous to organize, a lot of prominent anti-war organizations got into backbiting against one another, and nobody could really form an effective coalition stateside. a lot of the really heavy anti-war sentiment was in non-american countries and we all saw how that went down with fuckin freedom fries and other such garbage. honestly, the really big thing was that bush wanted his loving war so god damned badly nothing short of an impeachment could have stopped him and good luck drumming up support for that when everyone has gone mental about imaginary iraqi terrorists and aluminum tubes.
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Aug 6, 2016 03:24
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It's important to note, over and over again, the Iraq war led to the theft of all Iraq's oil. Before the war, Iraq's oil was nationalized. Now it is privatized, and owned mainly by multinational oil companies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_industry_in_Iraq#Service_contracts_licensing_results Knowing what we know about climate change, the right thing would've been to shut off every oil well. Instead, carbon extraction increased 50% from 2011 to 2016:  (This graph is also a short history of us loving up the country. You can see the 1991 Gulf War, the sanction regime, oil-for-food, and then the big one) This carbon extraction increase was planned and executed by the Clinton State Department, because she truly doesn't give a gently caress about climate change: https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/5984 You can see that their plan was to increase production from 2.6 mbd in 2011 to 4 mbd in 2016, which is exactly what happened, accelerating emissions and accelerating climate change. A horrible little war. Mofabio fucked around with this message at 03:25 on Aug 8, 2016 |
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Aug 6, 2016 04:05
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I don't think the Iraqi people would have been in favour of the US systematically shutting down every oil well in the country.
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Aug 6, 2016 13:24
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I was 11 and german when 9/11 happened so it really didn't affect me that much, it was more like the catastrophes you hear about in the news in really far away countries. Sure it is bad that this happened but it is so far away and so removed from your own life that it hardly matters. The Afghanistan war was reasonably easy to understand, the Taliban were painted as the de facto rulers in Afghanistan and they attacked a friendly nation, so it wasn't hard to rationalize, especially with the huge international support, that we had to go there as part of an international military offensive/occupation and stop them from doing such an attack from happening again. There was even really hope that by doing so we could improve the life of ordinary citizens in Afghanistan and change the country for the better. The Iraq war on the other hand felt wrong from the beginning. Rhetoric of revenge, the very real fear that the war only happened so that the USA can get the oil in the Iraq (again different from Afghanistan, there wasn't really much there that the 'west' coveted), the bogus claims of WMDs and Al Qaeda and in addition the warnings that a war could lit the entire Middle East on fire made it very hard to even think of supporting any such war. Of course there wasn't really any illusions that we could stop the USA from going in there guns blazing but the least we could try to do was denying any support and speaking publically against it. I remember leaving school in the middle of a class with friends to go to Berlin for a peace protest where you could find yourself walking besides members of parliament of every party, speaking out against the war and our involvement in it. While my school couldn't legally endorse leaving school to protest we never had any disciplinary measures taken against us. As another poster said we can be eternally grateful that our government under Gerhard Schröder kept us out of the war. While historically Germany and France were rivals for most of our history it was good to see that in this we stood together and it arguably brought us closer for the years to come. Angela Merkel famously wrote to the USA that Gerhad Schröder didn't speak for all of Germany in this matter and supported the Bush administration. It wasn't so much that she wanted to go to war but she didn't want to damage the USA-Germany diplomatic relations. Thankfully she wasn't in the position of power to do anything about it but it is questionable if she would really had Germany take military action against the wishes of most of the public and parliament. It also irreversibly changed the perception of the USA for most people here. From a great country full of open-minded people which protected western Europe against the very real threat of the soviet union to a country full of warmongering, gun crazy, uneducated religious fanatics. When Bush was re-elected in 2004 it was almost unbelievable. How could you willingly want 4 more years of that president? Obviously a lot of that is hyperbole/stereotypes but it is a little said to see that it wasn't really all that surprising to see the rise of Trump during the primaries until he finally got declared presidential candidate. "US-Americans are crazy, of course they would vote for that caricature of a man" was the sentiment and that viewpoint pretty much began in the early 2000s.
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Aug 6, 2016 14:01
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HorseLord posted:It's self evident that the foreign policy of the US Government barely changes along with the President. Socialist Afghanistan fuckery was first under a democrat, then a republican. Iraq fuckery started under a republican, continued low key under a democrat, and then erupted again under a republican, (with bonus Afghanistan part II). That then carried on under a Democrat. This is because your childish worldview doesn't let you discriminate between vast difference in material outcome. The U.S., say, bombing iraq versus invading it and overthrowing the government are completely different things but in your mind either would get the "U.S. aggression" checkbox so they're the same. In regards to foreign policy and defense the president is uniquely powerful and very much in a position to directly shape outcomes. Gore would not have followed the same path. When it comes to 911 I the U.S. response was cowardly. There is no other word for it. When you startle and over-react to something that isn't actually a threat it proves to everyone you're weak and fearful. That was the U.S. reaction to 911. Such is the contradiction of the "patriot". If you truly think America is great and powerful then terrorism can't be a threat, it's weak by definition. My response to 911 would have been to pull the world trade tower blueprints from wherever they were and rebuilt the towers exactly as they stood. Instead our reaction was in every way exactly what the terrorists wanted. Mofabio posted:It's important to note, over and over again, the Iraq war led to the theft of all Iraq's oil. It's one of the greatest resource thefts in human history. Also sound economic policy for a struggling country. asdf32 fucked around with this message at 16:31 on Aug 6, 2016 |
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Aug 6, 2016 16:13
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