9/11 Anniversary Highlights Just How Destructive Our Response Was

Even though yesterday's remembrance of 9/11 shouldn't be political, it always will be.  The big reason it will always be political is because Republicans will forever use it as a reason to justify Bush's invasion of Iraq.

Thankfully, there are some journalists in America willing to rightfully make the distinction that Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks.  Here's Fareed Zakaria on CNN setting madman Donald Rumsfeld straight on the facts behind the invasion.

"There's no question that al Qaeda and Zarqawi and people were in Iraq," Rumsfeld argued. "They aggregated there."  "If we hadn't invaded, they wouldn't have been there," Zakaria pointed out.  "We don't know that," Rumsfeld insisted. "You don't know that. I don't know that."  "But they went in to fight us. So since we weren't there, why would they have gone into Iraq?" Zakaria countered.  "Why have they gone into Yemen and Somalia?" Rumsfeld asked. "Why do al Qaeda go anywhere? They go where it's hospitable."  "Right, and Iraq hadn't been hospitable," Zakaria said.

And here's NBC's Brian Williams this morning calling Iraq an "elective" war delivered to us by a president with a "blank check."

“Having listened to a lot of discussions on the war in Iraq at a lot of gatherings, I’ve settled on the word elective,” Williams explained. “It was an elective war on the part of [President] George W. Bush because none of those pilots [who carried out the 9/11 attacks] were Iraqi, because none of the people in those planes were Iraqi, and because as a wounded nation, we gave a president, in effect, a blank check.”

As the whole world knows, 15 of the 19 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia.  None from Iraq.

We've spent a trillion dollars, thousands of lives and forced our country into a deep recession all for Bush's insistence someone who had nothing to do with 9/11 was more important than bin Laden.