9 ms·

If you want to get a handle on how the War on Terror started and how everybody felt about it, I highly recommend listening to some of the live radio shows from

by causi 3y ago

If you want to get a handle on how the War on Terror started and how everybody felt about it, I highly recommend listening to some of the live radio shows from that morning, such as the Howard Stern show. You look back now and question how we could've let it get so out of hand, but watching people react to it in real time takes you right back to the emotions it triggered. I don't think I've ever felt that degree of collective fury before. That week, many of the people I know would've been happy to launch nuclear weapons at every population center in Afghanistan and the capitals of every nation that'd so much as looked at the United States funny in the previous ten years.

swozey 3y ago
I don't have the time to dig around for examples but reading IRC logs (which I mention in another comment) is really ... interesting. I haven't read them in years but I remember the vitriol toward Muslims being absolutely astonishing. But it was ye olde 2000s..
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  It never went away. The religious right in the US and others discovered a wellspring of motivational energy (for their regular causes) that they could get out of people by pointing fingers at Islam, and they have never really let it go. It comes and go in waves, but it's pretty crazy what an appeal to an old bogeyman can get you; at the time, George Bush talking about a "clash of civilizations" and appealing to old Crusades era mythos of east vs west, orient vs "western civilization" etc. was incredibly "successful" at accomplishing the goals that Rumsfeld and Cheney and others had set out for their regime. The Bush/Cheney regime inherited a largely liberal, tolerant, and centrist populous from the Clinton years. The general zeitgeist and political atmosphere from back then looks so civilized and calm compared to now. And they leverage 9/11 to stir up a whole different scenario afterwards that has never stopped accelerating. The xenophobic far right has been in steady ascendancy ever since. To this day, if there's a shooting in a mall or whatever, you'll hear people immediately jump to the jihadist explanation, even when it's clear that the bulk of terrorist type violence in North America doesn't actually take this form -- it's usually far right / white supremacist in inspiration, just as it was before 9/11 (e.g Timothy McVeigh, etc.) I'm an atheist and no lover of any organized religion, including Islam, but it was dark and depressing to watch at the time and it continues to be depressing to see people manipulated on these terms.
  - havblue 3y ago
    Many speculate that groups need a common enemy to maintain their identity. Obviously, communism and terrorism are recent examples. But what are our common enemies now? The New Atheists decried religion for years but frankly, I think the religious right is dead. Many consider new atheism movement to be dead as well. So we currently only have the other party to blame.
- civilitty 3y ago
  > I haven't read them in years but I remember the vitriol toward Muslims being absolutely astonishing. But it was ye olde 2000s.. Not only has the vitriol not gone away, the targets have vastly expanded. Go read the worldnews subreddit coverage of the war in Ukraine, for example: lots of talk about "Russian scum" and other dehumanization of the enemy upvoted to the top.
  - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    I also see it from the other line -- lots of people who've taken the bus so far to the right that they talk about Putin as a hero fighting against our "degenerate" western leaders. It's pretty dark out there in popular discourse right now.
sneak 3y ago
It seemed like overreactions to me at the time, and it seems like overreactions to me now. I was 18 at the time and I was already old enough to know that you don't make big decisions when tired, angry, or stressed. What's the point of checks and balances and the rule of law if they all go out of the window as soon as an adversary does something bad enough to make enough of us sufficiently angry? Those aren't laws and rules or balances (or values) if they get tossed aside simply because of a spike in anger or fear or both.
- ilaksh 3y ago
  The reasons we engaged in those extensive Middle East campaigns were strategic, just like they have always been for hundreds of years. The events of that day were (coincidentally) the perfect motivation for the campaigns. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Game https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Game
- bufordtwain 3y ago
  "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." -Mike Tyson
  - sneak 3y ago
    Call me crazy, but if our entire machinery of government can't function well enough to control itself internally to preserve human rights better than Mike Tyson, maybe we should toss the whole thing out and start over.
    - shepherdjerred 3y ago
      The purpose of a government has not historically been to preserve human rights
      - seanw444 3y ago
        We literally wrote a document explaining what the government is not allowed to do, for that reason. Yet they still do those things anyways. Not enough people care, either.
next_xibalba 3y ago
Well said. I was a sophomore in high school at the time. Sometime in the late morning, after both towers had been hit and it was clear that it was a terrorist attack, all the classroom TVs were turned on and tuned to the news. I distinctly recall the palpable fear and fury. A fellow student said to me, in a fit of gallows humor, "Get your gun, son. We're going to war." It did feel as though there was some legitimacy to Afghanistan (of course, even that ended up being folly), but Iraq, which didn't happen until the Spring of '03, always felt tenuous. Of course, all of it turned out to be a catastrophe, most especially for Iraqis and Afghans. My personal pet conspiracy theory is that the U.S. leadership realized that the U.S. homeland was not defensible against asymmetric attacks of this nature. They needed to create an external beacon for the jihadists–a theater in which the U.S. military would be the target and the aggressor, not soft targets. And so they chose Iraq, with its dormant sectarian divisions being a perfect cauldron to which those enemies would be drawn.
- civilitty 3y ago
  > My personal pet conspiracy theory is that the U.S. leadership realized that the U.S. homeland was not defensible against asymmetric attacks of this nature. They needed to create an external beacon for the jihadists–a theater in which the U.S. military would be the target and the aggressor, not soft targets. And so they chose Iraq, with its dormant sectarian divisions being a perfect cauldron to which those enemies would be drawn. Interesting conspiracy theory! Especially considering that the resulting mess caused a massive refugee crisis and a spike of terrorism in Europe. Even if it didn't keep the terrorist mired in the Middle East, it redirected the violence towards our allies, thus maintaining the general casus beli.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  I still think the initial campaign in Afghanistan was not a mistake. But I think after that, we let the military continue running the show there for way too long and never took the diplomatic mission seriously enough.
  - causi 3y ago
    You can't change the soul of a people by force or even by diplomacy. If you look at every nation whose culture reformed after, say, losing in WW2, their behavior during and leading up to that war was relatively different from their norms. Germany's genocidal imperialism was a result of the first world war and the terms of the treaty which ended it. Japan turned imperialist because European colonialism made them decide it was either become an imperial power or get swallowed up. Both nations could revert to relative normalcy after the war. Afghanistan has been a tyrannical theocracy that uses religion to treat its citizens like dirt while being repeatedly invaded by outsiders for damn near eight hundred years. There is no fixing that, especially not in a couple of decades.
ilaksh 3y ago
That was the intended effect. This is the context: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda War is strategic. But soldiers won't kill for strategic reasons. They will fight when given an ethical basis. The objective truth never provides this.
- mc32 3y ago
  You can feed them hashish or whatever and turn people into berserkers. Also, in mercenaries people do it for other reasons. Anyhow, when you look at the elated reaction from people in some areas of the world when it happened, one can see why people might react to that reaction with seething vengeance in mind.
  - enterprise_cog 3y ago
    You can see the ignorance of the people in this country from that anger. Those people celebrating were on the receiving end of American terrorism abroad.
    - mc32 3y ago
      Sometimes —but in many cases people in areas unaffected directly by American policy were celebrating as if they felt a tribalistic attachment perhaps to the aggrieved. You're arguing that two wrongs make a right and in such argument the stronger party will win.
      - enterprise_cog 3y ago
        I’m not arguing that two wrongs make a right. I’m saying actions have consequences. And how could you possibly know those people celebrating we’re not affected by US policy and military exploits?
- adrianmonk 3y ago
  Intended by who? Are you saying the US government knew it meant war and had the foresight (and bandwidth) to arrange a coordinated propaganda campaign on the spot? People just being naturally angry seems like a simpler and perfectly sufficient explanation. We humans are pretty much hardwired to respond like that: when we believe we've been wronged, a special brain mode kicks in that pushes us toward taking action (ideally a constructive one, but brain hardware doesn't enforce that).
pjc50 3y ago
It was obvious to me, a Brit, that there would be massive American retaliation against whichever country was linked to this - and I said so in the office where we had all broken off work to crowd round the TV or refresh news websites. Then a second plane hit. (I incorrectly guessed it was the PLO responsible) > That week, many of the people I know would've been happy to launch nuclear weapons at every population center in Afghanistan and the capitals of every nation that'd so much as looked at the United States funny in the previous ten years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_C... There was (and still is in some quarters) a huge desire for revenge against Iran. A side effect of Republicans going full Qanon is that they no longer care about the middle east at all, and the PNAC lot fade into history.
- no_wizard 3y ago
  I remember talking about PNAC at a debate session of all things in high school. Our debate club was pretty big and well known in our school The teachers that ran it shut me down, saying I was peddling conspiracy theories about PNAC influence and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, this was 2008/2009. I'm still, based on research I've done since, convinced that PNAC had a huge influence on George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in particular, and the white house at the time more generally. Ultimately I believe this is why they pursued the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, was due to the ideas espoused by this group
  - pjc50 3y ago
    You were absolutely correct; it was as close as possible to publishing a manifesto saying "here's how we're going to launch a war in the middle east" and then doing it as you'll ever see. The same clearly identifiable people were involved all over the place.
    - peterleiser 3y ago
      Exactly. PNAC wasn't conspiracy theory at all. It wasn't even an "open secret": They had a website, the signatories were public, many of the signatories were in the Bush W. administration. PNAC was discussed often on all the talking head political shows. It became the plan after 9/11. I think some people a decade or so later thought it was a conspiracy theory because they thought it implied 9/11 was done, or allowed to happen, on purpose in order to begin the regime changes outlined in the plan. But with PNAC this was their world view and plan, and 9/11 allowed them to move forward. Wrong plan, right time.
havblue 3y ago
Howard Stern is definitely a cautionary tale for how an irreverent anti-establishment hero just becomes exactly what he would have hated starting off.
sanderjd 3y ago
I remember the feeling extremely clearly. And I still remember that feeling extending to the beginning of the war in Afghanistan, which I thought seemed justified and right. But I just as clearly remember how confused, frustrated, and just so disillusioned with the wisdom of my elders (I was still a teenager at this time) I felt when they were all so gung ho about invading Iraq, which clearly at the time had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11. The debate nowadays always seems to hinge on this question of whether they lied about the WMD thing or were "just" mistaken about it. But from my perspective living through that time as a young person, that WMD thing was not the problem, the problem was this mass fearful hysteria that our leaders (either cynically or because they were themselves in the grips of that hysteria) were able to use to get overwhelming popular support for an unrelated invasion, essentially just out of peoples feelings of righteous anger and spite. It isn't just ugly in hindsight, it was ugly ugly ugly then, in the moment.
- cout 3y ago
  I know next to nothing about geopolitics, but I always figured the the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan had something Iran since it's sandwiched between them.
  - peterleiser 3y ago
    Yes. Search for the phrase “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran” to see what folks were saying at the time .
- peterleiser 3y ago
  I encourage people to read about Project for the New American Century (PNAC). 9/11 gave PNAC and the neoconservatives the optimal opportunity to implement their stated objectives.
  - sanderjd 3y ago
    What makes you think I didn't know / read about it at the time? All the comments here mentioning the neoconservative desire for regime change in Iraq predating 9/11 seem to imply that it was an obscure thing that people weren't very aware of at the time. But that isn't true at all. It was broadly understood and frequently discussed. It's just that people were so generally scared, pissed off, and ready for vengeance against whoever, that nobody cared. (Not literally nobody, but I think I recall that the war had like 70% or 80% support, with strong majorities in both major parties.) This is why I started out my adulthood libertarian-curious, because both parties and huge majorities of voters seemed insanely interventionist to me. But things have reordered a huge amount since then. (Basically everyone came around to my view of the war, in hindsight.)

by causi 3y ago

swozey 3y ago

I don't have the time to dig around for examples but reading IRC logs (which I mention in another comment) is really ... interesting. I haven't read them in years but I remember the vitriol toward Muslims being absolutely astonishing. But it was ye olde 2000s..

cmrdporcupine 3y ago
It never went away. The religious right in the US and others discovered a wellspring of motivational energy (for their regular causes) that they could get out of people by pointing fingers at Islam, and they have never really let it go. It comes and go in waves, but it's pretty crazy what an appeal to an old bogeyman can get you; at the time, George Bush talking about a "clash of civilizations" and appealing to old Crusades era mythos of east vs west, orient vs "western civilization" etc. was incredibly "successful" at accomplishing the goals that Rumsfeld and Cheney and others had set out for their regime. The Bush/Cheney regime inherited a largely liberal, tolerant, and centrist populous from the Clinton years. The general zeitgeist and political atmosphere from back then looks so civilized and calm compared to now. And they leverage 9/11 to stir up a whole different scenario afterwards that has never stopped accelerating. The xenophobic far right has been in steady ascendancy ever since. To this day, if there's a shooting in a mall or whatever, you'll hear people immediately jump to the jihadist explanation, even when it's clear that the bulk of terrorist type violence in North America doesn't actually take this form -- it's usually far right / white supremacist in inspiration, just as it was before 9/11 (e.g Timothy McVeigh, etc.) I'm an atheist and no lover of any organized religion, including Islam, but it was dark and depressing to watch at the time and it continues to be depressing to see people manipulated on these terms.
- havblue 3y ago
  Many speculate that groups need a common enemy to maintain their identity. Obviously, communism and terrorism are recent examples. But what are our common enemies now? The New Atheists decried religion for years but frankly, I think the religious right is dead. Many consider new atheism movement to be dead as well. So we currently only have the other party to blame.
civilitty 3y ago
> I haven't read them in years but I remember the vitriol toward Muslims being absolutely astonishing. But it was ye olde 2000s.. Not only has the vitriol not gone away, the targets have vastly expanded. Go read the worldnews subreddit coverage of the war in Ukraine, for example: lots of talk about "Russian scum" and other dehumanization of the enemy upvoted to the top.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  I also see it from the other line -- lots of people who've taken the bus so far to the right that they talk about Putin as a hero fighting against our "degenerate" western leaders. It's pretty dark out there in popular discourse right now.

sneak 3y ago

It seemed like overreactions to me at the time, and it seems like overreactions to me now. I was 18 at the time and I was already old enough to know that you don't make big decisions when tired, angry, or stressed. What's the point of checks and balances and the rule of law if they all go out of the window as soon as an adversary does something bad enough to make enough of us sufficiently angry? Those aren't laws and rules or balances (or values) if they get tossed aside simply because of a spike in anger or fear or both.

ilaksh 3y ago
The reasons we engaged in those extensive Middle East campaigns were strategic, just like they have always been for hundreds of years. The events of that day were (coincidentally) the perfect motivation for the campaigns. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Game https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Game
bufordtwain 3y ago
"Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." -Mike Tyson
- sneak 3y ago
  Call me crazy, but if our entire machinery of government can't function well enough to control itself internally to preserve human rights better than Mike Tyson, maybe we should toss the whole thing out and start over.
  - shepherdjerred 3y ago
    The purpose of a government has not historically been to preserve human rights
    - seanw444 3y ago
      We literally wrote a document explaining what the government is not allowed to do, for that reason. Yet they still do those things anyways. Not enough people care, either.

next_xibalba 3y ago

Well said. I was a sophomore in high school at the time. Sometime in the late morning, after both towers had been hit and it was clear that it was a terrorist attack, all the classroom TVs were turned on and tuned to the news. I distinctly recall the palpable fear and fury. A fellow student said to me, in a fit of gallows humor, "Get your gun, son. We're going to war." It did feel as though there was some legitimacy to Afghanistan (of course, even that ended up being folly), but Iraq, which didn't happen until the Spring of '03, always felt tenuous. Of course, all of it turned out to be a catastrophe, most especially for Iraqis and Afghans. My personal pet conspiracy theory is that the U.S. leadership realized that the U.S. homeland was not defensible against asymmetric attacks of this nature. They needed to create an external beacon for the jihadists–a theater in which the U.S. military would be the target and the aggressor, not soft targets. And so they chose Iraq, with its dormant sectarian divisions being a perfect cauldron to which those enemies would be drawn.

civilitty 3y ago
> My personal pet conspiracy theory is that the U.S. leadership realized that the U.S. homeland was not defensible against asymmetric attacks of this nature. They needed to create an external beacon for the jihadists–a theater in which the U.S. military would be the target and the aggressor, not soft targets. And so they chose Iraq, with its dormant sectarian divisions being a perfect cauldron to which those enemies would be drawn. Interesting conspiracy theory! Especially considering that the resulting mess caused a massive refugee crisis and a spike of terrorism in Europe. Even if it didn't keep the terrorist mired in the Middle East, it redirected the violence towards our allies, thus maintaining the general casus beli.
sanderjd 3y ago
I still think the initial campaign in Afghanistan was not a mistake. But I think after that, we let the military continue running the show there for way too long and never took the diplomatic mission seriously enough.
- causi 3y ago
  You can't change the soul of a people by force or even by diplomacy. If you look at every nation whose culture reformed after, say, losing in WW2, their behavior during and leading up to that war was relatively different from their norms. Germany's genocidal imperialism was a result of the first world war and the terms of the treaty which ended it. Japan turned imperialist because European colonialism made them decide it was either become an imperial power or get swallowed up. Both nations could revert to relative normalcy after the war. Afghanistan has been a tyrannical theocracy that uses religion to treat its citizens like dirt while being repeatedly invaded by outsiders for damn near eight hundred years. There is no fixing that, especially not in a couple of decades.

ilaksh 3y ago

That was the intended effect. This is the context: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda War is strategic. But soldiers won't kill for strategic reasons. They will fight when given an ethical basis. The objective truth never provides this.

mc32 3y ago
You can feed them hashish or whatever and turn people into berserkers. Also, in mercenaries people do it for other reasons. Anyhow, when you look at the elated reaction from people in some areas of the world when it happened, one can see why people might react to that reaction with seething vengeance in mind.
- enterprise_cog 3y ago
  You can see the ignorance of the people in this country from that anger. Those people celebrating were on the receiving end of American terrorism abroad.
  - mc32 3y ago
    Sometimes —but in many cases people in areas unaffected directly by American policy were celebrating as if they felt a tribalistic attachment perhaps to the aggrieved. You're arguing that two wrongs make a right and in such argument the stronger party will win.
    - enterprise_cog 3y ago
      I’m not arguing that two wrongs make a right. I’m saying actions have consequences. And how could you possibly know those people celebrating we’re not affected by US policy and military exploits?
adrianmonk 3y ago
Intended by who? Are you saying the US government knew it meant war and had the foresight (and bandwidth) to arrange a coordinated propaganda campaign on the spot? People just being naturally angry seems like a simpler and perfectly sufficient explanation. We humans are pretty much hardwired to respond like that: when we believe we've been wronged, a special brain mode kicks in that pushes us toward taking action (ideally a constructive one, but brain hardware doesn't enforce that).

pjc50 3y ago

It was obvious to me, a Brit, that there would be massive American retaliation against whichever country was linked to this - and I said so in the office where we had all broken off work to crowd round the TV or refresh news websites. Then a second plane hit. (I incorrectly guessed it was the PLO responsible) > That week, many of the people I know would've been happy to launch nuclear weapons at every population center in Afghanistan and the capitals of every nation that'd so much as looked at the United States funny in the previous ten years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_C... There was (and still is in some quarters) a huge desire for revenge against Iran. A side effect of Republicans going full Qanon is that they no longer care about the middle east at all, and the PNAC lot fade into history.

no_wizard 3y ago
I remember talking about PNAC at a debate session of all things in high school. Our debate club was pretty big and well known in our school The teachers that ran it shut me down, saying I was peddling conspiracy theories about PNAC influence and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, this was 2008/2009. I'm still, based on research I've done since, convinced that PNAC had a huge influence on George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in particular, and the white house at the time more generally. Ultimately I believe this is why they pursued the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, was due to the ideas espoused by this group
- pjc50 3y ago
  You were absolutely correct; it was as close as possible to publishing a manifesto saying "here's how we're going to launch a war in the middle east" and then doing it as you'll ever see. The same clearly identifiable people were involved all over the place.
  - peterleiser 3y ago
    Exactly. PNAC wasn't conspiracy theory at all. It wasn't even an "open secret": They had a website, the signatories were public, many of the signatories were in the Bush W. administration. PNAC was discussed often on all the talking head political shows. It became the plan after 9/11. I think some people a decade or so later thought it was a conspiracy theory because they thought it implied 9/11 was done, or allowed to happen, on purpose in order to begin the regime changes outlined in the plan. But with PNAC this was their world view and plan, and 9/11 allowed them to move forward. Wrong plan, right time.

havblue 3y ago

Howard Stern is definitely a cautionary tale for how an irreverent anti-establishment hero just becomes exactly what he would have hated starting off.

sanderjd 3y ago

I remember the feeling extremely clearly. And I still remember that feeling extending to the beginning of the war in Afghanistan, which I thought seemed justified and right. But I just as clearly remember how confused, frustrated, and just so disillusioned with the wisdom of my elders (I was still a teenager at this time) I felt when they were all so gung ho about invading Iraq, which clearly at the time had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11. The debate nowadays always seems to hinge on this question of whether they lied about the WMD thing or were "just" mistaken about it. But from my perspective living through that time as a young person, that WMD thing was not the problem, the problem was this mass fearful hysteria that our leaders (either cynically or because they were themselves in the grips of that hysteria) were able to use to get overwhelming popular support for an unrelated invasion, essentially just out of peoples feelings of righteous anger and spite. It isn't just ugly in hindsight, it was ugly ugly ugly then, in the moment.

cout 3y ago
I know next to nothing about geopolitics, but I always figured the the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan had something Iran since it's sandwiched between them.
- peterleiser 3y ago
  Yes. Search for the phrase “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran” to see what folks were saying at the time .
peterleiser 3y ago
I encourage people to read about Project for the New American Century (PNAC). 9/11 gave PNAC and the neoconservatives the optimal opportunity to implement their stated objectives.
- sanderjd 3y ago
  What makes you think I didn't know / read about it at the time? All the comments here mentioning the neoconservative desire for regime change in Iraq predating 9/11 seem to imply that it was an obscure thing that people weren't very aware of at the time. But that isn't true at all. It was broadly understood and frequently discussed. It's just that people were so generally scared, pissed off, and ready for vengeance against whoever, that nobody cared. (Not literally nobody, but I think I recall that the war had like 70% or 80% support, with strong majorities in both major parties.) This is why I started out my adulthood libertarian-curious, because both parties and huge majorities of voters seemed insanely interventionist to me. But things have reordered a huge amount since then. (Basically everyone came around to my view of the war, in hindsight.)