Remembering 9/11

There is no way around it, today the world remembers the 5th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. What most people will dwell on on this day is the fact that the guy who did it, Osama bin Laden, is still at large. You would have thought that the most powerful nation on earth, given 5 years of time, would be able to catch a single man. And I honestly believe that if 300 billion dollars had been spent towards that purpose, not to talk of the loss of nearly 3,000 allied soldiers lives, Osama would certainly have been caught by now. Unfortunately George W. Bush chose to spend that money and cost in human lives for going after the wrong guy, Saddam Hussein. Now Saddam certainly was a nasty piece of dictator, but that is a characteristic he shares with a couple of other guys, from Robert Mugabe to Kim Jong-il. Saddam wasn't responsible at all for 9/11, which Bush knew, and he didn't even have weapons of mass destruction, which (I believe) Bush didn't know.

I am not generally opposed to kicking out dictators. And I salute the Americans that are in Iraq, risking their lives under difficult conditions. When I was recently in the USA I witnessed an American soldier coming home from the war. He arrived by plane, and his family was waiting for him at the gate of the airport. His wife was crying because she was so happy to have him back, causing quite a commotion. And when the people around them noticed what was going on, they all gave the soldier a round of applause, a hero's welcome. And he deserved it.

But on a higher level the war has been mismanaged. Rumsfeld gets no respect from me, because he only won the war, but then proceeded to lose the peace, by treating the Iraqians wrong, and not sending enough ground troops. Worse still, with actions like Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and outsourcing torture to third countries the Bush administration managed to create more new terrorists than they captured or killed. If a year ago 4 young British-born muslims exploded suicide bombs in London, that had very little to do with bin Laden, but was a direct result of the war on terror. Today the war on terror has degenerated into a Republican vote winning scheme. Meanwhile America is less powerful and much more hated than five years ago. The only one with reason to celebrate this anniversary is Osama bin Laden.