I'm going to eschew the 9/11 remembrance motif that's flitting through the blogosphere. Like all Americans, I found the day to be wrenching and horrific, the experience hallucinatory and unsettling. But I lived all the way out in California -- indeed, in the very same town where Duncan noticed a curious detachment from the event -- and to pretend that I can even start to understand the agony it caused the immediately affected would be nothing more than an opportunistic attempt to hijack a national tragedy to enhance my own moral credibility. So I won't. I'll leave that to those who were there, and who have more of a right to eulogize than I.
That said, the political aftermath of 9/11, the reprisals conducted in the name of America, belong to us all. I've only ever felt the Afghanistan War to be a legitimate response to the hijackings. The Iraq War was falsely sold under the same rubric, but Hussein, as the Senate Intelligence Committee recently reaffirmed, was not involved, and we knew that well before launching the war against Iraq. Our leaders betrayed the country and the memory of those who died by warping 9/11 into a debate point for a war they wanted to conduct for unrelated reasons.
As for Afghanistan, while Iraq has distracted from the "War on Terror," it's really forced coverage of Afghanistan onto the backburner. Which is why so few probably know that the country is deteriorating rapidly, governors are being murdered by suicide bombers, the Taliban is resurgent, and NATO is begging more troops to support renewed offensives.
