To justify an invasion? We could have invaded anywhere we wanted any time we wanted
This makes it sound like you were born after 2001
Yes, in theory, the US could have invaded Iraq and Afghanistan any time they wanted, but wars in the US always require an excuse of some kind for The International Community ™, and inevitably are unpopular with one party
The revanchist fury that soaked into the West right after 9/11 is hard to describe if you weren’t there. That shit was bipartisan, every liberal went full overnight. News was 24/7 bloodlust, with the initial sucker punch on Baghdad playing live on every news outlet
What followed was 20 years of the biggest MIC grifting the world had ever seen. Billions in failed Future Soldier shit, billions in new weapons. Contractors selling pens valued at a thousand times their worth just to grift a few million more. And then came the PATRIOT Act and other surveillance methods which were accepted to wide acclaim because of 9/11, with no mainstream pushback. It further solidified the vassal relationship of the rest of NATO/the EU to the US as the US dragged others in and began militarily grifting them as well.The pre-9/11 world would be just unrecognizable to anyone born afterwards
Nobody is legitimately arguing that Bush personally contacted the Saudis and asked for Bin Laden. The usual argument is that the Bush regime had intel that they chose not to act on
This makes it sound like you were born after 2001
Yes, in theory, the US could have invaded Iraq and Afghanistan any time they wanted, but wars in the US always require an excuse of some kind for The International Community ™, and inevitably are unpopular with one party
The revanchist fury that soaked into the West right after 9/11 is hard to describe if you weren’t there. That shit was bipartisan, every liberal went full
overnight. News was 24/7 bloodlust, with the initial sucker punch on Baghdad playing live on every news outlet
What followed was 20 years of the biggest MIC grifting the world had ever seen. Billions in failed Future Soldier shit, billions in new weapons. Contractors selling pens valued at a thousand times their worth just to grift a few million more. And then came the PATRIOT Act and other surveillance methods which were accepted to wide acclaim because of 9/11, with no mainstream pushback. It further solidified the vassal relationship of the rest of NATO/the EU to the US as the US dragged others in and began militarily grifting them as well.The pre-9/11 world would be just unrecognizable to anyone born afterwards
Nobody is legitimately arguing that Bush personally contacted the Saudis and asked for Bin Laden. The usual argument is that the Bush regime had intel that they chose not to act on