The Bush administration’s post-9/11 policies have done immeasurable harm to the U.S. and the world.

Even a lot of the domestic political polarization and social crackup we see in America today can be traced back to the divisions that be Iraq War created.

> The Bush administration’s post-9/11 policies have done immeasurable harm to the U.S. and the world.

True.

> Even a lot of the domestic political polarization and social crackup we see in America today can be traced back to the divisions that be Iraq War created.

Less true,IMO. There's a line through divisions over post-9/11 policy, but it doesn't really start there and there's not much specially about it; its pretty consistent with the trend of crystallization of the polar positions after the end of the long realignment period of the overlapping New Deal and Civil Rights partisan realignements in the early-mid-1990s.

If you look right around the gearing up for the Iraq War it may look like a big acceleration of divisions, but that's mostly unleashing what was deferred in the rally-around-the-flag effect in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.

It didn't start there, but I think it was the gateway into the modern (social) media bubble misinformation overload era. It was when Fox News and to a lesser degree MSNBC asserted themselves as the purveyors of journalism for one's ideology of choice, and when political discourse on the internet started to really sour.

By the time the post-war occupation had started to slog into a quagmire (the run-up to the 2004 presidential election), we had basically witnessed the dawn of our modern age.

> was when Fox News and to a lesser degree MSNBC asserted themselves as the purveyors of journalism for one's ideology of choice

No, it wasn't; Fox had done that before, and and MSNBC, to the extent it eventually did, didn't until much later (9/11 occurred during, and didn't end, the period where MSNBC and CNN were kinda trying to compete with Fox in the same ideological targeting even though CNN was consistently painted as the Left network by the Right, and MSNBC didn't acquire a fairly consistent “left”, or at least Democratic, editorial position until into Bush’s second term, as a gradual evolution from a mix of different editorial positions.

> and when political discourse on the internet started to really sour.

As someone who was online pretty continuously since when “political discourse on the internet” met Usenet, the idea that it started to sour only after 9/11 is silly. More people started interacting online around that time, but that was more driven by easy blogging platforms becoming available and internet access becoming more ubiquitous than 9/11 or any connected political actions.

Perhaps it's my own observer bias of growing up in that era, with San Francisco's KGO 810 and Air America on one dial, and Michael Savage on KNEW 910 on another, and flipping through Free Republic/Pajamas Media and Democratic Underground/DailyKos online, but I think I might have preprogrammed myself to think of the U.S. as an irreconcilable mess of feuding echo chambers.

> Even a lot of the domestic political polarization and social crackup we see in America today can be traced back to the divisions that be Iraq War created.

The polarization started during the Civil Rights era of the 1960s. Or rather, the parties started sorting themselves on various issues after that point.

Ezra Klein has a good US-perspective/history in his recent book:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_We%27re_Polarized

Humans were always polarized. The political parties in the US just didn't bother acting on that fact until the national Democrats turned their backs on the Dixiecrats, and the GOP then started their Southern Strategy.

> The polarization started in the 1960s started during the Civil Rights era of the 1960s.

No, the polarization on racial issues started before the founding. It came to a head numerous times, the Civil Rights Era of the 1950s-1960s being, while one of the more recent notable times, not anywhwere close to the most significant. (I mean, its quite obviously absolutely dwarfed by the time racial issues came to a head in the 1850s-1860s.)

> Or rather, the parties started sorting themselves on various issues after that point.

No, they’d been doing that since the Democratic New Deal Coalition of the 1930s broke the old partiaan alignment, what changed in the 1960s is that, unlike the similar split in the Democratic Party in the 1940s that broke off the Dixiecrats over racial issues, the Republicans sought to exploit the Democratic divisions and welcome disaffected racists via the Southern Strategy.

The current partisan polarization is largely because, since the long political realignment largely settled out in the 1990s, we’ve had the longest period in a century where the main ideological divides are aligned with the partisan divide between the two major parties.

A news story from September 2002:

> CBS News has learned that barely five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq — even though there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks.

* https://www.cbsnews.com/news/plans-for-iraq-attack-began-on-...

Ironic, considering that the day before, on Sep 10, Rumsfeld told a group at the Pentagon how wasteful it was. "According to some estimates, we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions."

[https://web.archive.org/web/20120103220058/https://www.defen...]

A statistic from the article:

"The Watson Institute at Brown University calculates that 184,382 to 207,156 Iraqi civilians were directly killed in war-related violence between the start of the American invasion in March 2003 through October 2019. But the researchers suggest the real figure may well be several times higher."

These numbers are really important, especially on a day like today. It's strange how much of a spectacle [1] 9/11 was, almost made for TV. Our 3000 victims of terror are thus acknowledged, depicted, and disseminated throughout the world. As a result, they're remembered in some sense too.

But the hundreds of thousands more whom we maim, torture, and kill across the globe are given no such status -- they're barely even admitted to exist! Simple efforts to just count these people etch them into the documentary record, and allow no one to say they couldn't have known. In this way they serve a similar purpose to Holocaust studies: by tallying the victims you make it harder to forget.

Another interesting statistic: more Americans died in the fighting in Iraq than died in the World Trade Center attacks.

Very topical satire from The Onion: https://youtu.be/vb5rHthCXoA

It’s probably because they’re our people. It’s normal to most acknowledge our own victims.

That can't explain it. Jews are a small % of the population and weren't "our own people", yet the holocaust is considered tragic and given a lot of empathy (far more than many other genocides). Also at that point you can't claim any moral high ground or claim the event is uniquely horrible, but the US and it's citizen do just that.

I always assumed GWB just wanted to invade Iraq and used whatever he could get his hands on as an excuse. There still would "be" WMDs in Iraq even regardless of 9/11.

He may well have believed the whispers in his ear from the war hawks. There was a systematic process of presenting him with distorted information.

Even if that's true, isn't that an even more damning statement about him as a president? That he wasn't even in control?

The way canadian and American intelligence came to different conclusions about the same data is suggestive though.

>Even if that's true, isn't that an even more damning statement about him as a president? That he wasn't even in control?

That just kind of fits the narrative pre-9/11. I think a lot of people forget what a lame duck President he was considered prior to and even just after 9/11. There’s 0 chance he would have won a second term if there were an election on 9/10/01 - I think it’s what gave a lot of the conspiracy theories legs.

It could also have been as simple as Saddam had once tried to assassinate GW's daddy and GW was ok with anything detrimental to Iraq's leadership.

In case younger readers are unaware, this really may have been a motive in itself — GWB was famously quoted saying “he tried to kill my Dad”.

Agreed. I believe (still) that GWB jr is and was a good person at heart.

> Agreed. I believe (still) that GWB jr is and was a good person at heart.

Who is GWB jr?

George Walker Bush, the 43rd President, is not a junior, and has no son of the same name.

His father, the 41st President, was George Herbert Walker Bush.

GWB Jr is George Walker Bush. I have heard him referred to as Jr many times. It seems that is indeed incorrect... thanks!

Probably, but who would have listened to him? He was well on his way to being a 1 term president who did nothing...

I assumed he wanted to get back at Saddam Hussein for trying to assassinate his father.

Likely they would have captured or killed Bin Laden at Tora Bora in the early part of the Afghan war, and wound it all up soon after that.

Instead they created a power vacuum in Iraq, and engendered ISIS as a result.