Reply #123: I was tottering around the edge of it [View All]

And mainly for the reason you suggest - the idea that the response against the Taliban was a legitimate and right, a case of bellum justum et pium. (I still think that it was, and to a minimum extent is, though the implementation naturally wound up seven different kinds of fucked up. Right now I wouldn't mind if the US pulled out of Afghanistan and let the rest of the coalition countries in there do their damn jobs of rebuilding the place.)

The actual, fundamental reason I got off the fence and started staying way the hell away from Bush was based on how folks responded (not specifically, but in general) to those attacks. On September 12 or 13 or whatever, 2001, you had to search long and hard to find a single nation on the planet that wasn't ready to back the United States in any appropriate response it decided on. You'd have to look a bit to find many that weren't ready to back it on any inappropriate responses, for that matter. For awhile, the US, Europe, Russia, China, and large swathes of the Middle East were on the exact same page, and that page said "people were horribly, horribly wronged, and we think Something Should Be Done About It." It's impossible to overstate the kind of potential, the kind of power, that kind of mindset can have if you just channel it towards something good.

Bush had that. He had a potential that, very possibly, no other human being in the history of life on this planet had. I can't imagine what I or anybody else would be able to accomplish if we'd wanted to turn that towards something beneficial in the long term. He alternately squandered it with incompetence, or actively discarded it so he could play the big man to the home crowd.

That, I cannot forgive.