Wow, the date itself gave me the topic! How convenient.
At the time I was working as an attorney for an older, experienced
sole practitioner attorney in Fairfax, Virginia, hereinafter “Bill”. Bill was down in Richmond that day for a bar
meeting. One of the secretaries came in
my office and told me, “a plane hit the World Trade Center”. [North Tower, 8:46 a.m. EST] A reporter suggested this might be an
accident, but the footage showed the plane flying directly at the tower. Soon enough, the second plane hit the second
tower [South Tower, 9:03 a.m. EST], the third plane hit the Pentagon [9:37
a.m.], and the fourth plane crashed in western Pennsylvania [10:03 a.m.],
brought down by the passengers themselves storming the cockpit, one passenger
calling his wife to advise her the circumstances and to say goodbye to her.
My girlfriend at the time, Leila, lived in Pentagon City
and worked in Rosslyn, a commute which took her past that face of the Pentagon,
but she was at the office when the plane hit.
I think I speak for everyone who remembers that day that
we were ALL angry and upset. This
galvanized everyone, even Democrats who didn’t care much for President George
W. Bush. When he decided that we would
liberate Afghanistan from the Taliban and track down Osama Bin Laden, he had
pretty much unanimous support. That’s why I’m puzzled by some people on the
Book of Faces alleging protests in support of the people responsible for 9/11.
Where I live, Skyline at Bailey’s Crossroads, has a large
segment of Muslims. Whether they’re
Sunni or Shi’ite, I don’t know. None of
them have given me any problems.
Nationwide, Muslims are 1% of the US population, 3 million out of 330
million. The Fort Hood guy and the
Boston Marathon bombers were Muslim, but we have plenty of homegrown,
non-Muslim screwups blowing things up and shooting people.
The liberation of Afghanistan went fairly smoothly (October
7 to December 7, 2001), but the Taliban simply retreated to the hills, and in
parts of neighboring Pakistan, and continue to cause problems – helped by bounties
from their erstwhile opponents the Russians.
Osama Bin Laden himself was taken out in 2011 by US forces – under Barack
Obama’s administration.
Two years later, upon GWB’s insistence (later disproven)
that Saddam Hussein and his regime were involved in the 9/11 attacks, we invaded/liberated
Iraq. There, the much-vaunted Republican
Guards vanished into the hills and we took the country fairly quickly – March 1
to May 1, 2003. Then a protracted guerilla
war erupted, presumably those Republican Guards taking to the hills instead of
facing us directly. Saddam Hussein himself
was captured in December 2003, hiding in a bunker in the ground.
Aftermath. As
noted, 9/11 certainly unified the country behind GWB and public support for the
liberation of Afghanistan was fairly widespread, if not unanimous. Saddam Hussein’s connection with 9/11 was
somewhat more tenuous. Ironically, one
of the justifications for the invasion, that Saddam had “weapons of mass destruction”,
later turned out to be bogus, and Saddam’s own generals, when our invasion
began, asked him to deploy these alleged weapons – only to be told by him his
hints of having them were merely a bluff to prevent the US from invading. D’oh!
I do recall that support for the Iraq invasion was far less widespread
than the previous operation in Afghanistan.
Partly this was due to tempers calming down over the two year period between
9/11/2001 and 2003, and partly was a suspicion that GWB was overplaying his
hand on the matter. Much of the goodwill
we earned on 9/11 was squandered by our invasion of Iraq. Having said that, I’m not seeing any domestic
sympathy or support for the Taliban in 2020 or any time earlier – or for Al-Qaeda,
for that matter.
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