George W. Bush and his agencies picked Iraq and Afghanistan. They would receive the fury. They would listen to the song of vengeance and listen good!
Going back to the kamikaze actors who boarded the four planes, there were nineteen in all. Fifteen were from Saudi Arabia, two were from The United Arab Emirates. One was from Egypt and one was from Lebanon. None of the hi-jackers were from Iraq or Afghanistan.
Thousands of British citizens remain ashamed and angry that our then prime minister, Tony Blair hung on to George W. Bush's shirt tails, helping to legitimise the so-called "War on Terror" in Iraq. To this day, Blair refuses to apologise for what he did even though there never were any "weapons of mass destruction" to be found in Baghdad or elsewhere in Saddam Hussein's homeland.
What good was achieved in either Iraq or Afghanistan during the War on Terror? Many died including innocent citizens and it is calculated that 7000 members of the US military were killed along with some 8000 "contractors". Since those "wars", hundreds of US military personnel have committed suicide and many others came back without limbs or were disabled in several other ways.
I would be interested to know how ordinary American citizens reflect upon The War on Terror. Was it worth it and was terrorism defeated? Perhaps the aggressive military response was counterproductive - stoking up terrorism instead of squashing it out of existence. Was this really the right way to respond to 9/11 which wasn't really about nation states anyway - but crazy extremists who could have come from just about anywhere?
Maybe there was more to all of this than I could possibly comprehend but standing here on the sidelines, it always seemed to me that the quest for vengeance was an impossible task. This "enemy" was elusive and as 9/11 proved, it did not play by the usual rules of engagement.
from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/ahUm9Fr