New Age Islam

Islam and the Media

12 Sep 2011, NewAgeIslam.Com

My Unfinished 9/11 Business: A Hard Look at Why I Wanted War

By Bill Keller

During the months of public argument about how to deal with Saddam Hussein, I christened an imaginary association of pundits the I-Can’t-Believe-I’m-a-Hawk Club, made up of liberals for whom 9/11 had stirred a fresh willingness to employ American might. It was a large and estimable group of writers and affiliations, including, among others, Thomas Friedman of The Times; Fareed Zakaria, of Newsweek; George Packer and Jeffrey Goldberg of The New Yorker; Richard Cohen of The Washington Post; the blogger Andrew Sullivan; Paul Berman of Dissent; Christopher Hitchens of just about everywhere; and Kenneth Pollack, the former C.I.A. analyst whose book, “The Threatening Storm,” became the liberal manual on the Iraqi threat. The question is really two questions: Knowing what we know now, with the glorious advantage of hindsight, was it a mistake to invade and occupy Iraq? And knowing what we knew then, were we wrong to support the war? American impotence left by Ho Chi Minh and “Black Hawk Down.” We were, as Andrew Sullivan put it, “enamored of [our] own morality.”--Bill Keller http://newageislam.com/NewAgeIslamMuslimMedia_1.aspx?ArticleID=5460