What the hell does victory in Afghanistan look like?
We're trying to recall our mindset in the first few years after 9/11.
The attacks brushed up against the margins of our life. The phones were jammed. We spent much of the morning tracking down friends and relatives both in the NY region and back in DC, from where we had just moved that July. Our sister was on the subway when the planes hit. Our grandfather watched the second plane go in. From the Tappan Zee Bridge we saw the smoke cloud obscuring the mighty Hudson River. Four men in our town (Peapack, NJ) were killed.
We were filled with righteous anger. We listened to Bruce Springsteen's The Rising. We really dug Toby Keith.
Till that point our foreign policy thinking was usually, 'Rubble does not make trouble'.
We stand by that slogan.
Like W we figured, 'You're with us, or you're with the terrorists'. We felt that the Middle East was a sclerotic hell hole. Nations were at best one party socialist states run by dictators (Egypt, Syria, Iraq) or theocracies run by religious nutters (Saudi Arabia, Iran).
We stand by that analysis.
The Middle East was very stable, said the stability fetishists; the likes of Madeline Albright, Brent Scowcroft, Mika Berezniki's father, etc etc. They argued that liberating Iraq would destabilize the Middle East.
To which we said, 'Great! Let's destabilize the Middle East!'
We stand by that argument.
In the wake of 9/11 we felt the Middle East must be changed and Iraq was a great place to start. We thought if we could establish a democracy in the heart of the region, those ideas would spread and undermine the surrounding regimes.
To sum up, we thought the liberation of Iraq would begin the transformation of the Middle East.
We don't think that's happened.
We're with him
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