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We were told that we had to invade Iraq because the country’s WMD made it an imminent danger to the United States (or its allies), or perhaps that it might present a real danger in the future. To the continental United States or our allies.
At any rate, enough members of the United States Congress could be persuaded that there was imminent danger to this country to pass the legislation. It seems never to have entered the heads of our congresspersons that someone might lie to them. Might actually prevaricate. Twelve-year-olds understand that sometimes people lie, but Congress isn’t allowed to think that.
And we had to invade because it was harboring Al Qaeda, too, of course. We had to … get Al Qaeda because they were so evil and powerful that they had caused three World Trade Center Buildings to fall down in one day by crashing planes into two of them. Al Qaeda could strike at any time, any place, with any horrid weapon, and within this country, too, not just in foreign countries we had never been to, and no plans to go to.
It was never explained to us, of course, why the enormously expensive armed services and intelligence apparatus of the United States had failed so completely on that fateful day, 9/11/01. The CIA, and the NSA, and the FBI, and the other intelligent agencies had all failed to warn us, and once the attack was under way, the US Army, Marine Corps, Navy, and the Air Force failed to prevent damage to innocent buildings and their innocent occupants. This total failure was never explained. But it was clear that the solution to homeland insecurity was more spending on the armed services, the invasion of two foreign countries, and of course much better intelligence gathering on Americans who might, or might not, be calling conspirators overseas.
The first country we needed to invade was Afghanistan, because it was harboring Osama Bin Laden, and refused to turn him over.
Actually I read that the Taliban had not refused outright to turn Bin Laden over, but had said they would when we presented evidence that Bin Laden had committed the crimes he was accused of. And, of course, the FBI says it has no such evidence.
But no matter what the FBI says, everybody knew that Bin Laden was the culprit, without any further proof than the fact that the whole plot and 14 or 19 or so of the conspirators were described in the newspapers within a week of the attacks, with photos. (And nobody ever explained how we found out so much so quickly after the attacks.) So we invaded Afghanistan, and son-of-a-bitch, that evil bastard Bin Laden escaped to Pakistan the same year we invaded. We did not, of course, invade Pakistan, because they’re our ally. Nor did we pressure them too hard diplomatically. We continue to be very nice to Pakistan to this day. So nothing much happened for eight years after we invaded Afghanistan, especially because we removed some troops from there to send to Iraq, because they were needed Iraq. Nothing much except the slow bleeding of our forces in Afghanistan, and some complaints from Afghanis about civilians being killed by drones and stray shots and other little inconveniences of war. And the construction of two permanent bases, including Bagram, which has the reputation of being worse than Abu Ghraib. But we were still being protected from Al Qaeda by our occupation of Afghanistan, because that’s why we had gone there in the first place. To get Bin Laden. You understand that, don’t you?
Meanwhile, back in Iraq, there was a lot of sectarian violence which we had to try to stop, or watch carefully, or something. We could not leave the country, of course, because we had to try to put it back together again once we had broken it. The nine or so permanent military bases we established there have nothing to do with why we invaded in the first place.
It doesn’t worry me so much that I don’t know why we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, but it worries me a lot that the President of the country may not know either. We discuss the political ramifications of Iraq and Afghanistan all the time, but we don’t know what we’re doing there.
The American public literally doesn’t know why we are conducting, and paying for, two such enormous undertakings. Political personages and the press, of course, accuse individuals and groups of small immoralities all the time, like infidelity in the White House and driving dangerously in your own driveway. Some religious people accuse groups of what they believe to be serious sin, like homosexuality and abortion. (Other religious minded people would say that homosexuality isn’t a sin at all, and that abortion may be a sound moral decision, and that in any case, it’s none of our business.) But the political personages, the national press, and the loudest religious people have nothing to say about an endeavor that was created for the purpose of killing complete strangers, and that necessarily entails an unholy and tragic amount of collateral damage and casualties. This endeavor, war, would, if indulged in by individuals, be a collection of felonies. You would be arrested for committing these acts on the streets of Toledo or at Fort Hood. But if your country has determined that these wars are necessary, no discussion of their basic morality will happen. Not only are unexplained wars destroying our good name and our treasury, but they’re making us think insanely too.
To paraphrase Lincoln, a mind divided against itself cannot stand at all.
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