On the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks (which seems to have lasted months rather than a single day) my trusty hometown newspaper published a jumbo-tron sized headline on the front page: NEVER FORGET.
They were, of course, referring to the terror attacks in New York, Washington D.C., and on the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania. That one moment in time — one morning in September that must remain seared into our collective memory for all time. A moment of supreme infamy, as horrific as they come. There are other moments, however, that our government would much prefer we forget. In fact, they are relying on us not to remember those particular moments.
Like the decade we spent sluicing money into what was the biggest CIA project in history up to that time — the war against the USSR in Afghanistan, when we created a virtual Ford Foundation for jihadists of the type our politicians now excoriate at every opportunity. Thanks to our largess, aspiring militants anywhere in the Muslim world could go to their local Pakistani embassy and pick up free tickets to Afghanistan on the CIA’s tab. I recall hearing about U.S. State Department officials pulling their hair out because the Reagan-era U.S. embassy in Saudi Arabia kept issuing visas to highly unsavory types on the insistence of our intelligence community. It was at that moment that the seeds of Bin Laden’s (then himself a CIA asset) organization were planted.
Of course, at the same moment (the 1980s) the U.S. was actively helping a certain Saddam Hussein prosecute the war he started against neighboring Iran. We supplied strategic intelligence, supplies, helicopters, and other aid as Saddam repeatedly used chemical weapons against the Iranians, 
starting as early as 1982 (fully six years before the Halabja massacre). When he gassed to death 5,000 residents of that Kurdish community, our State Department put the word out that Iran was somehow responsible. When Saddam started attacking ships in the Persian Gulf, we ran escorts to protect the safety of shipping allied with Iraq — not Iran’s ships. When Saddam’s air force shot up the U.S.S. Stark and killed 30+ sailors, our leaders cursed Iran. No one in the Reagan administration, from the “Gipper” on down, gave a damn for Saddam’s victims throughout that entire war. Meanwhile, these avowed enemies of terrorism were secretly selling arms to Iran (which they considered the center of terrorism), funneling the proceeds to the Contra terror army in Central America, so they could shoot up more undefended civilian targets, like farms and clinics and anywhere their U.S. sponsors told them the Nicaraguan army wouldn’t be.
That was before 9/11. Then, of course, there was all that stuff since the day of infamy — stuff like, oh I don’t know, lying us into a major war that has now cost nearly as many American lives as the 9/11 attacks. They run away from it now, but the Bush administration and its allies in congress (of both parties) played the terror card over and over in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, making claims and insinuations about Al Qaeda links and WMDs that were wholly unsubstantiated. No investigation is needed to work that one out — it’s a matter of public record, and a performance so transparent that any five-year-old could see through it. Now, because of their actions, Iraq is in worse shape than ever, and it’s well on the way to becoming a “failed state” on the magnitude of Afghanistan in the 1990s. Their boneheaded efforts at building a hillbilly empire (their own Mayberry on the Tiber) is probably beyond any hope of even a moderately benign outcome, and we will pay for their stupidity for many decades to come.
Yeah, well… you can forget all that.
luv u,
jp
