I watched a couple of specials on 9/11 yesterday. Although it's been 9 years now, I can vividly remember what it felt like that day... the disbelief, the sadness, the worry at what our future held.
On that day 2,752 people died at the World Trade Center, over 400 of whom were firefighters and police officers. 184 people were killed at the Pentagon. 44 people were killed on Flight 93. That's a total of almost 3,000 people who lost their lives that day because of radical terrorists.
But I was thinking as I was watching the television specials how many of our troops have now died in the war in Iraq now that the combat operations are over. Counts I found online vary a little bit, but here's the numbers I'm going with: 4,418 of our own forces have died, and another 318 troops from coalition forces have also died. This doesn't count the tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians -- men, women and children -- who lost their lives in this war, the true count of which will never be known. It also does not count the over 30,000 wounded who have returned, many of them with bodies, minds and lives changed forever.
For what? Iraq had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks. As big a monster as Saddam Hussein was, and of all the horrific acts he has perpetrated, these attacks were not his doing. There were no weapons of mass destruction there (as the Bush administration had to know, considering officials sent there to look for them found no indication of any active WMD program). And yet Bush and Cheney sent over 4,000 of our troops to their deaths, more than the number of people who died in the attacks on 9/11. I think they did so for their own personal and political reasons. (Saddam did attempt, once upon a time, to assassinate Bush Sr., was the son seeking payback?) Bush was feeling pressure to do something to atone for the 9/11 attacks. Cheney flat made up the stories about WMD, Saddam and Osama bin Laden combining forces, secret meetings in Prague, etc. etc.... and yet they seem to have gotten off scot-free with the blame for the lives lost in an unnecessary and tragic war, the final toll of which was more than the number of people we lost on 9/11/2001.
So when you think about the 9/11 attacks and the tragedy on that day, don't forget to include the tragic loss of life in a war that should never have been. They are victims too.
