When Donald Trump said that the 9/11 attacks occurred on George W. Bush’s watch, George’s brother Jeb Bush defended his brother by saying, “He kept us safe?” Did he really? We weren’t very safe on 9/11. Neither President Bush nor President Clinton kept us safe.
Also, I’ve never understood the logic of our payback. We lost 2,996 innocent civilian lives on 9/11. So, we decided to attack Afghanistan and Iraq. In those wars, we suffered: 6,700 more American soldiers’ deaths (mostly from our finest young men who would otherwise had full lives ahead of them); 1,173 Civilian contractor deaths; 52,000 soldiers wounded; 68,000 civilian wounded; and, 300,000 troops returning with significant mental health problems. We managed to kill maybe 390,000 Iraqi and Afghan soldiers and innocent civilians.
So, to make up for the 2,996 people we lost, we were willing to sacrifice an additional 7,800 deaths and some 400,000 wounded. Somehow this is supposed to give us a feeling of victory since the other side lost more–390,000 deaths and countless wounded.
When I was a kid I watched to nightly news every night, and I actually thought that we were winning the war in Vietnam because our enemies’ casualties were always more than our own. Little did I know that we were actually losing the war and would surrender in the end.
Since when is it a victory to sustain the loss of an additional 400K casualties to avenge the loss of 2,996, and spend $1 trillion dollars in the process?