Wow. Probably should have throught this through before you posted it. Belittling 9/11 isn't a very popular or intelligent thing to do, even in Seattle.

The Bush Administration used 9/11 to consolidate its power and do favors for its cronies, which I agree is disgusting. I agree that it's been perverted, and I think the American public should be outraged by that.

On the other hand, I was there and saw the suffering, and I don't think that your characterization fits or is really anything more than an attempt to bait people into responding.

Anybody remember Pearl Harbor???????

@1 - get over it. More Americans have now died in Iraq than on 9/11, and even conservative estimates say that more than 25 times as many Iraqis have died due to postwar conflict. It's entirely fair at this point for Charles to argue that 9/11 is dwarfed by the disaster in Iraq.

I miss you more than Michael Bay missed the mark...

Don't listen to the whiners, Charles. You are correct.

The death toll of US soldiers exceeds the death toll of 9/11. The death toll of Iraqi civilians exceeded the death toll of 9/11 about a week into the war.

What stands out for me is the outpouring of goodwill from other countries to the US in the aftermath of 9/11. That goodwill was squandered by the Bush Administration with the unilateral invasion of Iraq to the point where a majority of the world's population now views the United States as the world's biggest terrorist threat.

@1: Sooooooo, you are a spokesman for the whole country now?????????

We don't count dead mercenaries (Blackwater) or the civilian innocents they kill in our statistics.

The number of Iraqis who have left continues to grow.

Meanwhile California burns as 90 percent of our fire-fighting equipment is in Iraq.

AWESOME!

"Meanwhile California burns as 90 percent of our fire-fighting equipment is in Iraq."

ddddddduuuuuummmmmmmbbbbbbbb

9/11 was a tragic crime carried out by 20 individuals. The war in Iraq is a much larger tragic crime carried out by the most powerful government on the planet. Quit trying to pretend that American lives are somehow more important than the lives of citizens of other countries.

Well yeah, if you're all into human rights & shit. Duh.

@11: That doesn't sound very patriotic to me!

Why are you connecting Iraq and 9/11?

The 9/11 terrorists flew planes into buildings purposefully killing thousands of innocent people. If they could have, they probably would have killed many more. Yes, more people have died in Iraq than on 9/11, but it's hard for me to understand how anyone, even if they are against the war (like I am) could compare the motivations of even Bush to the motivations of the people who planned or carried out the attack against America on 9/11. No matter how incompetent you feel the Bush administration has been in this war, does anyone honestly believe that our military wants innocent civilians to die? No matter how many mistakes our leaders have made in Iraq, Saddam Hussein is gone, and the ultimate goal is still the creation of democratic country. Not mass murder fueled by religious insanity.

9/11 was as much a spectacle as it was mass murder, a singular event we actually watched unfold from beginning to end.

iraq is much more complex than that, and despite the fact that more people have died / will die as a result, it simply will never have the impact of a singular event like 9/11. it's like a bunch of really, really small 9/11s happening day after day after day. all told, more destructive than 9/11, but not nearly as spectacular.

Negligence=Intent. At least in my book. Who's the real "Terra-ist" here anyway??????????

I agree, Charles (and Heather @ #11)

@15 -

No matter how incompetent you feel the Bush administration has been in this war, does anyone honestly believe that our military wants innocent civilians to die?

The military knows that innocent civilians will die. They don't like to talk about it, and that is why civilian casualties are called "collateral damage". Even conservative estimates PRIOR TO THE WAR predicted Iraqi civilian deaths in the tens of thousands.

Mass murder is mass murder, regardless of the motive. I don't see how we are any better than the 9/11 terrorists.

Even if you believe the "democratic country" bullshit (which apparently you do), the mass murder of Iraqi civilians was not justified. Of course, the REAL reason we are in Iraq is their oil, which makes it even worse.

peter, the people behind 9/11 are criminals, and nothing more. but to attack a whole country because of what a few criminals have done--and criminals who are not even from that country--that is a mockery of those who suffered and died on 9/11.

@15:

"does anyone honestly believe that our military wants innocent civilians to die?"

No, except for the odd psycho yahoo grunt in the army who gets a "rush" from killing anything that moves. Leaving that aside, they knew full well going in that civilians would die in job lots. It's a foregone conclusion that when you invade and hold a city against freedom fighters/terrorsts/whatever, that civilians will get caught in the crossfire. I don't care how smart your bombs are or how good the laser-guidance system is, blah blah surgical strike blah blah, they knew, *knew*, it would be a bloodbath. And went and did it anyway.

Feel better about that?

For once, Charles, I heartily agree with you.

Lying to the people you 'represent' is the mockery.

Trying to get away with the mushroom cloud lie twice after the debacle that Iraq is and as a lame duck w/ 25% support is simply Orwellian. It has nothing to do with 9/11, and everything to do with the corruption of democracy, an out-of-control military industrial complex and the promise of neverending war (to prevent WWIII of course, thx The Decider).

does anyone honestly believe that our military wants innocent civilians to die?

Yes, absolutely. The military isn't that incompetent -- they know they're killing brown people by the thousands. They just think that's killing civilians is worth it. (What is "it," though?)

The Iraqi civilian death toll has likely reached over a million now, by the way.

@1 Charles isn't belittling 9/11, at least it doesn't sound that way to me. The point is that any remnant of Just War Theory and its tenet of proportionality have gone out the window. We're looking at 700,000 to 1 million dead civilians in Iraq. Charles is saying that Bush has belittled 9/11 by making it look trivial compared to the massacre he has wrought over there.

To say 9/11 will look and feel like a brief blaze of a few dry twigs is true - but only partially true. It will only look and feel that way to the ignorant. That's not to say that the war in Iraq isn't an utter failure of historic proportions. I think it is. But does that lessen the initial event? Not to me.

Charles the people behind Iraq are just as much crimminals. Al Qaeda wanted the US to change. The US adinistration wanted Iraq to change. Both were on a crusade. One wants a religious government the other wants a government religion. One uses fighter aircraft to bomb the other uses aircraft as bombs.

Charles @ 20 says it best. What we've wrought in Iraq is no way to honour the people who suffered and died on that day.

And @26, yes of course that day still retains its shock and horror. But what we have done in response is almost unfathomable.

Comparing tragedies is a fools errand. 9/11 was a horrific tragedy. Iraq war is a horrific tragedy. It serves no purpose to say my tragedy was worse than yours.

Body counts alone are not the measure of a tragedy. To assert that they are is to cheapen the tragedy.

"One Death is a tragedy, One million a Statistic"

#29 - I disagree wholeheartedly. Unfortunately for the world, even if it's universally deemed a failure, Iraq will still be remembered in 20 years as less shocking and horrific than 9/11.

The context in which people place tragedies is what gives them their tangible "value" or worseness.

...as well as body counts. What, you're arguing that 6 thousand unexpected American deaths are equally bad as a zillion anticipated Iraqi ones?

Peter @ 15, "does anyone honestly believe that our military wants innocent civilians to die?"

This is a willfully ignorant question. The military may not specifically INTEND to kill civilians. But in all wars fought since the invention of gunpowder, civilians have died in large numbers. The military is well aware of that, and shrugs aside collateral damage as acceptable consequences. Sure, hundreds of thousands of civilians have died. The military knew that would happen going in, and Bush decided that was acceptable. Regrettable, but ultimately not important.

Perhaps not intentional, but certainly not unexpected.

Knowing that there will likely be civilians killed is absolutely not the same thing as purposefully killing innocent civilians. Despite some egregious mistakes, I'm not sure if there's ever been a war in history where this much care has been taken not to kill innocent civilians (see Ken Burns' the War - civilian casualties were hardly considered in WWII). I actually agree with what Charles said about my post @20. We should not be in Iraq and it has nothing to do with 9/11. My take on the Iraq war is that it was designed by "Neocons" who arrogantly believed they could easily create a democratic country in the Middle East by toppling a brutal dictator. But to say the war was fought specifically for oil or to make money just doesn't make logical sense.

But in some sense these are all moot points. A better debate would be, what now? Leave and let Iraq descend in a civil war similar to what's happening now but exponentially magnified? What would the body count look like then?

But to say the war was fought specifically for oil or to make money just doesn't make logical sense.

Why not?

The idea: topple a brutal (but weak) dictatorship, spread democracy throughout the land, have no trouble securing oil contracts for the next 50 years. The war wasn't about Iraqi oil so much as Middle Eastern oil.

And Iraq has nothing to do with 911. We might as well have gone to war with Sweden over it.

Wellllllllllll Iraq had more to do with 9/11 than Turkmenistan, but only as part of the bigger picture. No WMDs or terrorist cells.

Actually, Turkmenistan had far more to do with 9-11 than Iraq did.

Just ask the Saudis who did and are financing and staffing al-Qaeda.

911 is an emergency phone number. It is pronounced "nine-one-one."

9-11 is the date of a massive terrorist attack on the US. It is pronounced "nine-eleven."

Link me, Will. I don't know anything about it.

I'm sorry, you're not cleared for that.

Last time I checked, "Saudis" didn't live in Turkmenistan. Any assistance on this matter would be appreciated.

"the people behind 9/11 are criminals, and nothing more"

Charles, I am STUNNED that you would say this, given that later the same day you say that politics "is the social space in which ideas of how a society should or should not distribute its wealth meet and compete for the prize of realization."

If the 9/11 attackers weren't competing for the prize of realization, then I don't know who is.

I can understand reflexive hostility towards Bush (me too!), and even reflexive hostility towards the war. But reflexive hostility and the need to minimize the events of 9/11 seems like the worst kind of pettiness and insular thinking.

@ #13 Billy Bob--My loyalty is to humanity as a whole. I do not believe in patroitism. So sue me.

Hey Heather: I was just being sarcastic. My apologies...

The military may not specifically INTEND to kill civilians. But in all wars fought since the invention of gunpowder, civilians have died in large numbers.

No, that's not true. The military does intend to kill civilians. Many officers are required to calculate how many civilians will die in an attack or bombing and get the appropriate level of approval based on that death count. They may even know the specific civilians they have to kill in order to also kill a suspected threat or destroy a targeted building.

When our military kills most of its foreign civilians it's not due to a freak accident or missed target like the ways most of our military members die. When the military kills civilians, it's often carefully planned and very intentional.