from Hacker News

George W. Bush is building a memorial to the War on Terror, wants your feedback

by lehi on 9/30/23, 11:29 AM with 15 comments

• by iambateman on 9/30/23, 1:14 PM

  This article is correct that there is blame for the war on terror and that the collateral damage was incurred almost entirely by citizens of other countries.

  But if we are going to assign blame, we must point the finger at almost all Americans as a society.

  > Not surprisingly, public support for responding militarily to the 9/11 attacks ran high in early fall 2001. A Washington Post/ABC News poll released two days after the Twin Towers fell found that 93 percent of Americans backed taking military action against whoever was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. More than eight in ten respondents said their support extended to going to war. [0]

  It’s easy to throw stones in retrospect, but I hope we have the humility to wonder if we would’ve done any better in the same role as GWB. Americans live in a representative democracy and any decision which has 80%+ public support is the result and responsibility of our collective society, not just our leadership.

  I hope we mourn the failures of the war and learn from these mistakes. One lesson I hope we learn is that we can’t expect our leaders to take the moral high road given their incentives under the current system. I don’t know what to do about this, but if we just chalk this up to one man’s failed administration it will happen again.

  [0] https://www.cfr.org/blog/us-war-afghanistan-twenty-years-pub...

• by 0x445442 on 9/30/23, 1:07 PM

  As you enter the memorial the first kiosk can start with Daddy’s lies about the incubators and that can transition to Bush Light’s lies about WMDs. Each can list the estimates (1/2 million +) of dead innocents attributable to The Empire of Lies escapades in the region.

• by amanaplanacanal on 9/30/23, 1:03 PM

  I wonder if any of them are ashamed of what they did?

• by master_crab on 9/30/23, 1:04 PM

  Great, already starting on the wrong foot by naming it “War on Terror.”

  Just call it “Post 9/11 conflicts”. That’s at least more accurate and sounds less silly than fighting a noun.

• by 34679 on 9/30/23, 1:09 PM

  They should enshrine the pallets of $100 bills unloaded from C-130's.

  Or make a glistening, golden pile of 100,000 Iraqi women and children.

  Or maybe just a big, yellow cake.

• by uoaei on 9/30/23, 1:01 PM

  Is this the best he can do to repent?

• by danseop08 on 9/30/23, 3:23 PM

  The day he clock off to afterlife I will be celebrating one of the modern most atrocious leader going hades and the beginning the fall of USA as expoused by Dalio.