The Iraq War was the conflict of my generation. I was a junior in high school when the Twin Towers were attacked. I watched in numbing horror as the tThe Iraq War was the conflict of my generation. I was a junior in high school when the Twin Towers were attacked. I watched in numbing horror as the towers collapsed in clouds of smoke and dust. Friends of mine enlisted after graduation and some saw combat (I would’ve signed up if i hadn’t been scared off by the over aggressiveness of the recruiter). At the time, youth and worldly inexperience clouded my understanding of the reasoning behind the conflict.
“We’ve been attacked, and we must take out the evildoers of the world!” was the war cry in the streets.
The Bush Administration sold the populace on the necessity of toppling Hussein. He was a cog in the “axis of evil” and needed to be removed from power; the Iraqis deserved both freedom from tyranny and democracy. We were told that he held weapons of mass destruction and that he wouldn’t hesitate to use them against us.
Anger and fear were the precursors of war. Americans desired vengeance. Cooler heads did not prevail in this case, and not wanting to seem weak, President Bush needed to take someone out. Months and years after Operation Iraqi Freedom had commenced, it began to dawn on everyone that there were no weapons to be found. No plan to obliterate America. No chemical weapon storages. In fact, Hussein had devolved power to his closest generals and chose to pursue writing fiction and poetry instead of ruling Iraq.
Essentially, Bush surrounded himself with yes-men. His advisors simply stated what they assumed he wanted to hear. Intelligence, even information considered faulty or unreliable, was stretched and molded to fit the narrative. They needed Americans to be on board with the invasion.
At the wars end came the finger-pointing and the passing of blame, and from the ashes of Hussein’s regime arose the terrorist group ISIS. The book doesn’t go into detail on how Iraq is doing today, but if I recall from the news over the years, it isn’t doing well.
It never bloomed into the desert flower of democracy that Bush had hoped for....more
On the morning of September 11th, 2001, I was sitting in the classroom of my PC Networking class after having come back from morning break. My teacherOn the morning of September 11th, 2001, I was sitting in the classroom of my PC Networking class after having come back from morning break. My teacher wheeled in a television set and said that the principal felt it was important we watch the events that was unfolding in NYC. The images of the Twin Towers burning and pouring black smoke played on the screen, and all of us were gripped with shock. The news kept replaying the images of the planes slamming into the buildings, and already there was mention of this being an act of terrorism. As we kept watching, I watched the South Tower collapse live. Little did we know how much the world would change.
Twenty years have passed since that day. The United States and other participating countries have been in Afghanistan for two decades. As I watched the chaos unfold in Kabul with the withdrawal of the armed forces and Afghan civilians, I wondered how we even got to this point. The fact that the Taliban had regained territory in most of the country was baffling. The organization we had been at war with for twenty years came back with a vengeance and speed that left my head spinning. How did we get here? Why did Al-Qaeda attack the U.S.?
The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 by Lawrence Wright is a superb place to start if you’re looking for answers. Wright excellently guides the reader through the labyrinth of characters and events that lead to that fateful day. His writing is clear and concise, making it easy to follow. The story follows a timeline, beginning in the 1950s with an Egyptian intellectual named Sayyid Qutb who lived in the U.S. for some time after fleeing political instability that was gripping Egypt at the time. He began to see the West as corrupt and immoral and eventually made his way back to his homeland. Qutb found the West’s worship of sex and wealth and the embracement of materialism and secularism to be an outrage. This radicalized him and in turn his writings radicalized the disenfranchised youth of the Middle East.
From this point Wright weaves a narrative of a growing extremism in Muslim countries based on an interpretation of the Quran where its words call for every Muslim to protect the holy lands against infidels, which includes foreign armies or governments that don’t adhere to Sharia or Islamic Law; some interpreted this to include civilians living under those governments who did not rebel against this rule.
This book shows the dangers literalism presents when it comes to religious text. Words can be twisted by devious minds to do horrendous things. Poverty and a lack of education can be a volatile mix; sly rhetoric can mold those who feel angry and betrayed, and that resentment can be directed to a certain group or place, in this case the West. Osama bin Laden and his next in command Ayman Al-Zawahiri were able to do just that thanks to their Quranic exegesis.
What made me most upset was the many near misses of the U.S. government to prevent the attacks, primarily the CIA and the FBI. Both agencies had intelligence on many of the men responsible – of high-level meetings and telephone calls and photos of the suspects. At some point the CIA had knowledge that some of the hijackers of 9/11 were living in the United States but failed to divulge any information to the FBI team. All this because of a decades-long animosity that had existed between these agencies.
Altogether it was a very educational read albeit depressing. Such a horrendous day that might have been avoided had these branches of the government worked together. Many more questions linger though: What if America never occupied Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War? What if the CIA/FBI had taken bin Laden as a serious threat earlier? Did bin Laden have a right to wage jihad (holy war) against a country that had occupied his country? Would you do the same if a foreign army came onto your lands? Twenty years later I find myself asking these questions. A lot more reading is required.
Loading...
