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32. AFTERWORD
- West Virginia University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Afterword z have not commented herein concerning the events of September 11, 2001, or the war in Afghanistan which followed. That war against Al Qaeda began when the U.S. was attacked by hijacked planes, the Twin World Trade Center fell, the Pentagon was hit, and a fourth plane went down in a Pennsylvania field. All evidence suggests that either the U.S. Capitol building or the White House was the intended target of this fourth plane, but it failed in its mission because some of the passengers thereon, having learned by telephone about the earlier attacks upon the Pentagon and the Twin Towers, decided to attack the hijackers and thus forced the plane down. Interestingly, not one of the nineteen hijackers was an Iraqi, and the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden remains unknown as of January 2005. I have consistently supported the war in Afghanistan against an enemy that invaded U.S. air space, left people dead, destroyed areas of cities and properties worth billions of dollars, and changed our lives forever. The Bush administration has, however, attempted to establish the fiction that the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq are one and the same: the “war against terrorism.” The evidence is to the contrary: Al Qaeda, based in Afghanistan, attacked and invaded the United States; in Iraq, on the other hand, we, the U.S., attacked and invaded and occupied the country without provocation, essentially. This war in Iraq, which I see as “Bush’s War,” was planned and deliberately initiated under the Bush doctrine of preemptive strike. The U.S. was misled by a superhawk White House into the invasion of a sovereign country that posed no imminent or serious threat to the security of America—a colossal blunder that has become a catastrophe. I bitterly opposed the invasion of Iraq in speeches that appear elsewhere. I ...