• Chetzemoka@startrek.website
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      1 year ago

      Yep, I very distinctly remember watching this speech on the TV in the breakroom at work, thinking, “Hold up, what the fuck do WMDs in Iraq have anything at all to do with the people who crashed those planes?” But the general vibe of people actually cheering as they listened to the beat of the war drums was terrifying. There were a lot of us who never bought that bs

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        So many people back then thought Saddam had something to do with 9/11. Poll after poll showed it. It was so damn depressing.

        • Wogi@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          They were pushing that narrative pretty fucking hard. At the same time some clown was sending anthrax letters around and they used that too. There were also protests at the white house before the invasion about no war for oil, so it’s not like support was universal and plenty of people saw through the ruse.

          But then there was that whole freedom fries thing… dear God.

          • PersnickityPenguin@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            There were protests nationwide, at many college campuses and federal courthouses.

            We had over 4,000 people protest at some podunk town. We even had a bunch of news cameras cover it.

        • FourPacketsOfPeanuts@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          He was easily the most identifiable “bad guy” in the middle east aside from Yasser Arafat in the public’s imagination. Probably contributed to it a bit…

      • winterayars@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        So many young people have no clue how fucking terrifying it was, and Bush’s image has been somewhat rehabilitated as well. People are afraid of Trump bringing about a fascist revolution, but he’s a clown compared to the Bush crowd. A lot of the shit we’re dealing with today got started or really accelerated under Bush. Reagan is in a similar position.

      • oatscoop@midwest.social
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        1 year ago

        I remember watching CNN and seeing “evidence” of WMDs found. It was some piece of shit flatbed truck with a load of pipes covered by a tarp: dirty, crudely cut, metal pipes. Apparently they were possibly raw materials for … missiles.

        Yeah.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      He maintained that he really brought anthrax to the UN that day. Which either means he was one of the most reckless people on the planet or that you can’t trust a word he said. We’ll probably never know now.

    • BigNote@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      And it was obvious that they’d already decided to invade Iraq long before Powell’s infamous UN presentation.

    • bobalot@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      His career really got started with covering up the May Lai massacre and got worse from there.