It's the tenth anniversary of the atrocity of September 11 (I like this way of describing it). Nothing to add, except that Paul Krugman's sentiment seems (partially) right to me:
A lot of other people behaved badly. How many of our professional pundits — people who should have understood very well what was happening — took the easy way out, turning a blind eye to the corruption and lending their support to the hijacking of the atrocity?
Sure, they're just pundits. Here is Krugman's colleague Thomas Friedman (again, sorry to those who had mercifully forgotten these lines) on the relation between 9/11 and the invasion of Iraq:
I think it [the invasion of Iraq] was unquestionably worth doing, Charlie.
…
We needed to go over there, basically, um, and um, uh, take out a very big stick right in the heart of that world and burst that bubble, and there was only one way to do it.
…What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um and basically saying, "Which part of this sentence don't you understand?"
You don't think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we're just gonna let it grow?
Well Suck. On. This.
Okay.
That Charlie was what this war was about. We could've hit Saudi Arabia, it was part of that bubble. We coulda hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could. That's the real truth.
Suck.On.This. Indeed. Now we are all sucking on it.
The only factual reason why we invaded Iraq, and not any other middle-eastern country, is the central location of Iraq in relation to the rest of the area. Having a Democratically controlled state smack in the middle of the Arab nations gives us a much easier vantage point to strike all the other nations in the area. Plain and simple, it is an equation of logistics.
Now, how Americans were convinced this was the right thing to do, and the fallicies presented as factual evidence to support the invasion is a whole different ball of wax, and will be debated for many years to come.
Why Dick Cheney has not been sent to trial for all the mis-information he and his office fed to The New Your Times is beyond me.
"You don't think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we're just gonna let it grow?"
Uh, whose "bubble fantasy"? Friedman projects with the best of them.