I spoke with BBC Coventry on Thursday on the 13th anniversary of the attacks of September 11, reflecting on their legacy for the US and the world.
Listen to discussion from 2:09.57
We were vulnerable. The Communists had never hit us. Now we had been hit. Thousands of people had died and it was like “What do we do now?”
Unfortunately, rather than deal with that fear and trauma, we had an Administration which exploited the event to pursue its own interests, and that led to an even greater tragedy with the invasion of Iraq….
You would hope that a tragedy like 9-11 would lead to a more peaceful, more settled world. In fact, the world in some respects is even more jumbled, more chaotic, and harder to understand 13 years later….
The real tragedy with the use of the term “War on Terror” is that, even before you get to the Islamic State, hundreds of thousands of people have died in Syria and Iraq — and most have not died at the hands of the Islamic State. They have died in Syria at the hands of President Assad; they have died in Iraq at the hands of a number of armed groups. Saying “it’s a War on Terror” doesn’t solve this.
