9/3/2021

Listened to a re-broadcast of an Intelligence Squared debate in 9/2011 posing the question of whether the war in Afghanistan was worth it. After the debate, those who had voted against it added even more votes against it. The former Bush official voting for the motion made a good point that the Iraq war was one of convenience: We were in the neighborhood so why not finish off Saddam? He was in fact a terrorist against the Kurds. The Pottery Barn metaphor expressed by Colin Powell back in the aughts is still valid. 

Then listened to an interview with Sarah Chayes on Marianne Williamson’s podcast. I remember her from the post-9/11 years as the NPR correspondent. I like what she said about how to stay if you decide to stay, and how you leave if you decide to leave. I think you have to nation-build because that’s what the Afghans thought we’d do. But are we supposed to and is it even possible in an ancient tribal society?

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A common comment that was made on 9/11 was that it was something that we saw in a movie and people are still making that comment. Yesterday, I was watching a video about the flooding in the New York subway and someone made that exact comment. Perception is very influenced by visual inputs from photography and film and can become “pornographic”.

At the time of the Clinton scandal in August 1998, I was talking about the movie that would be made about it, and that Oliver Stone would make it. Apparently, there’s a series about it with Clive Owen that’s been recently released. 

I was pretty spot-on about how things eventually turned out, especially with Afghanistan. On the day of the invasion, I thought it was a terrible idea and was screaming at the TV. They had been deliberating on it for weeks at that point and I just thought that there’s nothing that we can do to eliminate ideologies. 

9/3/2021

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[9/3/2024: The 25th anniversary of the attacks will happen in the 2026 midterms, so it will probably become a political wedge issue. It’s also interesting how major historical events only become interesting to people in anniversary years (5, 10, 20, 25)]

[9/3/2026: The Iran War demonstrates how the military industrial complex still influences geopolitics and now identity politics. As much as Clinton was effective in balancing the budget, the 1994 midterms were when the Clinton witch-hunts started. The 1993 WTC bombing and the attack on the USS Cole were the first 2 dots that probably had been connected in Clinton’s CIA, but the ball got dropped or fell through the cracks].