On September 11th, 22 years later, what are we to make of it all? Who even remembers that, as the Pentagon burned, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld picked up a scrap of hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 from the smoking ruins of that building. Soon after, he would tell his aides (as one of them scribbled down): “Near term target needs – go massive – sweep it all up, things related and not.” That “and not” meant, among other matters, Saddam Hussein, the autocratic ruler of Iraq who had been a Rumsfeld target before 9/11 ever happened.
Of course, the invasion of Afghanistan came first, but that “or not” arrived in the spring of 2003 and the rest is the worst and saddest sort of history imaginable. In a sense, so much should have been so obvious so fast. After all, within days of those suicide attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney was already swearing that al-Qaeda’s Osama bin Laden would face the “full wrath” of American military might and Rumsfeld was making it clear that such wrath could involve “a large multi-headed effort that probably spans 60 countries.”
Hellbound and Down 