If you want to get a handle on how the War on Terror started and how everybody felt about it, I highly recommend listening to some of the live radio shows from that morning, such as the Howard Stern show. You look back now and question how we could've let it get so out of hand, but watching people react to it in real time takes you right back to the emotions it triggered. I don't think I've ever felt that degree of collective fury before. That week, many of the people I know would've been happy to launch nuclear weapons at every population center in Afghanistan and the capitals of every nation that'd so much as looked at the United States funny in the previous ten years.
It seemed like overreactions to me at the time, and it seems like overreactions to me now.
I was 18 at the time and I was already old enough to know that you don't make big decisions when tired, angry, or stressed.
What's the point of checks and balances and the rule of law if they all go out of the window as soon as an adversary does something bad enough to make enough of us sufficiently angry? Those aren't laws and rules or balances (or values) if they get tossed aside simply because of a spike in anger or fear or both.
Call me crazy, but if our entire machinery of government can't function well enough to control itself internally to preserve human rights better than Mike Tyson, maybe we should toss the whole thing out and start over.
We literally wrote a document explaining what the government is not allowed to do, for that reason. Yet they still do those things anyways. Not enough people care, either.
I remember the feeling extremely clearly. And I still remember that feeling extending to the beginning of the war in Afghanistan, which I thought seemed justified and right.
But I just as clearly remember how confused, frustrated, and just so disillusioned with the wisdom of my elders (I was still a teenager at this time) I felt when they were all so gung ho about invading Iraq, which clearly at the time had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11.
The debate nowadays always seems to hinge on this question of whether they lied about the WMD thing or were "just" mistaken about it. But from my perspective living through that time as a young person, that WMD thing was not the problem, the problem was this mass fearful hysteria that our leaders (either cynically or because they were themselves in the grips of that hysteria) were able to use to get overwhelming popular support for an unrelated invasion, essentially just out of peoples feelings of righteous anger and spite.
It isn't just ugly in hindsight, it was ugly ugly ugly then, in the moment.
Yeah like, is everyone forgetting how fucking insanely racist that moment was in the US. Brutal nasty racism, it was utterly foul and EVERYWHERE just completely normalized in every venue.
Unreal everyone is pretending to have been taken in by the "war on terror" kayfabe at the time. I knew 15-year-olds who clocked the whole thing as an opportunistic political scam. The correct stance is contrition and repentance. All these stories about what kinds of cereal people were eating that day disgust me. We killed tens of thousands, destabilized and destroyed entire countries, created millions of refugees with these stories as the excuse.
I know next to nothing about geopolitics, but I always figured the the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan had something Iran since it's sandwiched between them.
I encourage people to read about Project for the New American Century (PNAC). 9/11 gave PNAC and the neoconservatives the optimal opportunity to implement their stated objectives.
What makes you think I didn't know / read about it at the time?
All the comments here mentioning the neoconservative desire for regime change in Iraq predating 9/11 seem to imply that it was an obscure thing that people weren't very aware of at the time.
But that isn't true at all. It was broadly understood and frequently discussed. It's just that people were so generally scared, pissed off, and ready for vengeance against whoever, that nobody cared. (Not literally nobody, but I think I recall that the war had like 70% or 80% support, with strong majorities in both major parties.)
This is why I started out my adulthood libertarian-curious, because both parties and huge majorities of voters seemed insanely interventionist to me. But things have reordered a huge amount since then. (Basically everyone came around to my view of the war, in hindsight.)
Hi. I figured you did know / read about it at the time, actually. I think we have the same viewpoint. I was just using your insightful comment to encourage other folks to read about PNAC for historical context. I don't want anyone to pretend to forget, or younger folks not to know, what got us into the last 20 years of forever war.
I was a sophomore in high school at the time. Sometime in the late morning, after both towers had been hit and it was clear that it was a terrorist attack, all the classroom TVs were turned on and tuned to the news. I distinctly recall the palpable fear and fury. A fellow student said to me, in a fit of gallows humor, "Get your gun, son. We're going to war."
It did feel as though there was some legitimacy to Afghanistan (of course, even that ended up being folly), but Iraq, which didn't happen until the Spring of '03, always felt tenuous.
Of course, all of it turned out to be a catastrophe, most especially for Iraqis and Afghans.
My personal pet conspiracy theory is that the U.S. leadership realized that the U.S. homeland was not defensible against asymmetric attacks of this nature. They needed to create an external beacon for the jihadists–a theater in which the U.S. military would be the target and the aggressor, not soft targets. And so they chose Iraq, with its dormant sectarian divisions being a perfect cauldron to which those enemies would be drawn.
> My personal pet conspiracy theory is that the U.S. leadership realized that the U.S. homeland was not defensible against asymmetric attacks of this nature. They needed to create an external beacon for the jihadists–a theater in which the U.S. military would be the target and the aggressor, not soft targets. And so they chose Iraq, with its dormant sectarian divisions being a perfect cauldron to which those enemies would be drawn.
Interesting conspiracy theory! Especially considering that the resulting mess caused a massive refugee crisis and a spike of terrorism in Europe. Even if it didn't keep the terrorist mired in the Middle East, it redirected the violence towards our allies, thus maintaining the general casus beli.
You can't change the soul of a people by force or even by diplomacy. If you look at every nation whose culture reformed after, say, losing in WW2, their behavior during and leading up to that war was relatively different from their norms. Germany's genocidal imperialism was a result of the first world war and the terms of the treaty which ended it. Japan turned imperialist because European colonialism made them decide it was either become an imperial power or get swallowed up. Both nations could revert to relative normalcy after the war.
Afghanistan has been a tyrannical theocracy that uses religion to treat its citizens like dirt while being repeatedly invaded by outsiders for damn near eight hundred years. There is no fixing that, especially not in a couple of decades.
Intended by who? Are you saying the US government knew it meant war and had the foresight (and bandwidth) to arrange a coordinated propaganda campaign on the spot?
People just being naturally angry seems like a simpler and perfectly sufficient explanation. We humans are pretty much hardwired to respond like that: when we believe we've been wronged, a special brain mode kicks in that pushes us toward taking action (ideally a constructive one, but brain hardware doesn't enforce that).
Someone suggested that Americans got angry after 9/11 because of propaganda. I'm saying they got angry because that happens naturally when your country is attacked.
You can feed them hashish or whatever and turn people into berserkers. Also, in mercenaries people do it for other reasons.
Anyhow, when you look at the elated reaction from people in some areas of the world when it happened, one can see why people might react to that reaction with seething vengeance in mind.
You can see the ignorance of the people in this country from that anger. Those people celebrating were on the receiving end of American terrorism abroad.
Sometimes —but in many cases people in areas unaffected directly by American policy were celebrating as if they felt a tribalistic attachment perhaps to the aggrieved.
You're arguing that two wrongs make a right and in such argument the stronger party will win.
I’m not arguing that two wrongs make a right. I’m saying actions have consequences. And how could you possibly know those people celebrating we’re not affected by US policy and military exploits?
I don't have the time to dig around for examples but reading IRC logs (which I mention in another comment) is really ... interesting. I haven't read them in years but I remember the vitriol toward Muslims being absolutely astonishing. But it was ye olde 2000s..
It never went away. The religious right in the US and others discovered a wellspring of motivational energy (for their regular causes) that they could get out of people by pointing fingers at Islam, and they have never really let it go.
It comes and go in waves, but it's pretty crazy what an appeal to an old bogeyman can get you; at the time, George Bush talking about a "clash of civilizations" and appealing to old Crusades era mythos of east vs west, orient vs "western civilization" etc. was incredibly "successful" at accomplishing the goals that Rumsfeld and Cheney and others had set out for their regime.
The Bush/Cheney regime inherited a largely liberal, tolerant, and centrist populous from the Clinton years. The general zeitgeist and political atmosphere from back then looks so civilized and calm compared to now. And they leverage 9/11 to stir up a whole different scenario afterwards that has never stopped accelerating. The xenophobic far right has been in steady ascendancy ever since.
To this day, if there's a shooting in a mall or whatever, you'll hear people immediately jump to the jihadist explanation, even when it's clear that the bulk of terrorist type violence in North America doesn't actually take this form -- it's usually far right / white supremacist in inspiration, just as it was before 9/11 (e.g Timothy McVeigh, etc.)
I'm an atheist and no lover of any organized religion, including Islam, but it was dark and depressing to watch at the time and it continues to be depressing to see people manipulated on these terms.
Many speculate that groups need a common enemy to maintain their identity. Obviously, communism and terrorism are recent examples. But what are our common enemies now? The New Atheists decried religion for years but frankly, I think the religious right is dead. Many consider new atheism movement to be dead as well. So we currently only have the other party to blame.
> I haven't read them in years but I remember the vitriol toward Muslims being absolutely astonishing. But it was ye olde 2000s..
Not only has the vitriol not gone away, the targets have vastly expanded. Go read the worldnews subreddit coverage of the war in Ukraine, for example: lots of talk about "Russian scum" and other dehumanization of the enemy upvoted to the top.
I also see it from the other line -- lots of people who've taken the bus so far to the right that they talk about Putin as a hero fighting against our "degenerate" western leaders.
It's pretty dark out there in popular discourse right now.
It was obvious to me, a Brit, that there would be massive American retaliation against whichever country was linked to this - and I said so in the office where we had all broken off work to crowd round the TV or refresh news websites. Then a second plane hit.
(I incorrectly guessed it was the PLO responsible)
> That week, many of the people I know would've been happy to launch nuclear weapons at every population center in Afghanistan and the capitals of every nation that'd so much as looked at the United States funny in the previous ten years.
There was (and still is in some quarters) a huge desire for revenge against Iran. A side effect of Republicans going full Qanon is that they no longer care about the middle east at all, and the PNAC lot fade into history.
I remember talking about PNAC at a debate session of all things in high school. Our debate club was pretty big and well known in our school
The teachers that ran it shut me down, saying I was peddling conspiracy theories about PNAC influence and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, this was 2008/2009.
I'm still, based on research I've done since, convinced that PNAC had a huge influence on George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in particular, and the white house at the time more generally. Ultimately I believe this is why they pursued the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, was due to the ideas espoused by this group
You were absolutely correct; it was as close as possible to publishing a manifesto saying "here's how we're going to launch a war in the middle east" and then doing it as you'll ever see. The same clearly identifiable people were involved all over the place.
Exactly. PNAC wasn't conspiracy theory at all. It wasn't even an "open secret": They had a website, the signatories were public, many of the signatories were in the Bush W. administration. PNAC was discussed often on all the talking head political shows. It became the plan after 9/11.
I think some people a decade or so later thought it was a conspiracy theory because they thought it implied 9/11 was done, or allowed to happen, on purpose in order to begin the regime changes outlined in the plan.
But with PNAC this was their world view and plan, and 9/11 allowed them to move forward. Wrong plan, right time.
In retrospect, what I think was happening was teachers were afraid of other parents (many, many of which would be classified as conservative republicans) getting upset at them. The debate club was a big deal in my school and parents were actively involved with many aspects.
I think they saw headache and shut me down the easiest way possible.
Its really unfortunate, however I do think this was the main driver
I still remember the short period of time when it wasn't clear someone had done it on purpose, or the slightly longer period of time when it wasn't clear who had done it.
Sadly, it would have been much better for the country and the world, if it had been a domestic group of some kind. Still really bad, but not as bad.
