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Lest any of us ever forget, I'm reminded again by reading those Friedman excerpts ("they must be held accountable," etc.) how prevalent the conflation of the Iraq War and 9/11 was in the public consciousness at the time. Accountable for what? To whom? Repeating the Bush administration's sleazy insinuations was an enterprise most of the pundit class was engaged in in some fashion or another. You'd think they'd be embarrassed nowadays, but then that would be asking a great deal of pundit psychology.
It's a lot like the experience of looking through newspapers from the early 1950s and seeing all the commentary obsessing about communism and how any means are justified to deal with the menace. (The subsequent horrifying record of people like John Foster Dulles would, I doubt, have been possible without the intensity of fear-mongering that occurred earlier.) But of course in this case we don't even have the comfort of historical distance to make ourselves feel better.
Most disturbingly, these comments are also a reminder of how, if there were any justice in the world, the entire Bush administration would be defending itself against war crimes charges.
