A mate of mine linked
an excellent thread on twitter about the post-9/11 insanity that happened and that I by-and-large remember happening. Here’s some highlights (emphasis mine):
-People thought Osama had an entire mountain hollowed out that he was using as his base and that’s why AQ was hard to find and that somehow a group of like 30 dudes arranged this.
-The CIA rehabbed Gaddafi very very fast because they needed a win and by having Gaddafi hand us a bunch of old chemical weapons we probably gave him we looked like we were doing something.
-We found out that the president interviewed dozens of military experts to find one who wouldn’t be such a downer about invading Iraq.
The vetting process for people running the iraq war was based entirely on how optimistic they were.
Several people, including die hard military hawks like Jim Webb, were ignored roundly because they accurately stated any war with Iraq would be a moronic boondoggle.
-Bill Maher was taken off air for saying the one smart thing he ever uttered:
“We have been the cowards, lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away…Staying in the airplane when it hits the building, say what you want about it, [it’s] not cowardly.”
-The guy put in charge of Iraqs economy thought the answer to dealing with widespread hunger and deprivation was the free market. He created investment firms to try and get capital to factories in a literal war zone and then got confused why no one was investing.
He then gave some money to lots of iraqis as a begrudging welfare program, but he did it through single use credit cards.
90% of Iraqs phone lines were down and accordingly no one could process payments from the cards.
-The
VP also shot a man in the face (and was rumored to be drunk out of his mind when he did it) and forced him to apologize for getting shot.
(I remember that being joked about a lot on early Youtube)
-Something like a third of all the white house appointees were graduates of unaccredited christian colleges and many of the HR issues that resulted from that nutty af atmosphere are still sealed.
(Bring this up when idiot liberals try to pretend that the Bush Whitehouse “was so much better organised” than the Trump Whitehouse)
-We ran the most expensive military exercise ever to show the world that the US could annihilate Iran.
In the exercise the US military leader who role played Iran absolutely destroyed billions of dollars worth of military hardware and 20,000 troops.
The game was then shut off, relaunched, but with new rules that rigged the game to show that we’re number one.
Oh also, a major goal with Iraq was to take it over as a staging ground for Iran. Iraq wasn’t even the fucking entree.
-It turned out years later that
the intelligence reports used by both the UK and US to invade Iraq were not only bogus, but many of them were sources literally just explaining a scene from the hit movie The Rock and pretending they were real.
-The largest international protest ever at that point was the protest against invading Iraq. The news pretended it was much much smaller than it was and said there couldn’t be that many unpatriotic Americans.
Chelsea Clinton counter protested it in England.
-This book which created the conspiracy theory that Iraq created 9/11. Somehow THIS never gets mentioned as a 9/11 conspiracy theory despite being the most consequential one of all.
-“Al Qaeda” turned out to basically be 20 guys, and not a whole army.
The videos Osama made, he literally had to hire extras for them because otherwise his operation would have looked so much less intimidating.
-On that note, the post 9/11 period rewarded everyone who was wrong pretty much across the board and punished everyone who dissented.
You kids wanna talk cancel culture?
The worst cancel culture in modern American history was being antiOIF/OEF in the 00s.
(This absolutely infuriates me, because if more people had been willing to take an unpopular stand, we could’ve possibly avoided the worst excesses of the national security/surveillance state that we’re still living with)
-One of our
foremost foreign policy experts argued we needed to fuck up muslim countries to take us seriously ie “suck on this”
For someone who bore witness to the second plane hitting the towers, and who knew in an instant that the world would be changed for the worse, I really do have to ask:
Was everything we did in the aftermath really worth it? We have more terrorism and less security than we did before 9/11, and the freedoms sacrificed (not to mention all the lives wasted) seem very much to have been in vain.