Quote:
Originally Posted by Not Bob
Thanks again to leagleaze for saving these posts from Infirm from 17 years ago today. Every year I try to read them and every year I fail to get very far. |
All the loss, the global unity in its wake... That possibility we could have channeled all the energy in a direction many times more positive than the horror of that day... Instead, we attacked Iraq.
Seventeen years, hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, and thousands of dead Americans down the road, to what end? A few trillion pissed away, a balkanized Middle East, an avoidable Great Recession, a new Cold War, a trade war, and a polarized, incurious, and largely ignorant population. All the goodwill we accrued from that scarring event, domestically and globally, has been flushed, erased.
Reminds me of that line from Peter Fonda to Dennis Hopper near the end of
Easy Rider, just before they're murdered by mutant rednecks: "We blew it..."
I'd like to recall the emotional pull of that moment, the feeling we were all in something together. But what's come since has rendered consideration of the fear and pain of that morning near impossible. The following interregnum leaves you with nothing but regret at the seemingly endless lost possibilities. We seriously, irredeemably, fucked up the response.
