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Driftglass in What this liberal sees looks back at 9/11 and draws this comparison:

So you want to know how this Liberal views Iraq?

Take a look at the sickening image that came roaring out of our collective unconscious and onto our televisions on 9/11: a human being confronted with two choices too terrible to contemplate — leap into oblivion or be roasted alive.

And once in the air, whatever intentions or dreams or hopes or beliefs this poor bastard might have had became irrelevant. Flapping their arms didn’t matter. Prayer didn’t matter.

Once in the air, the Cold Equations were all that mattered. Once in the air, my fellow human being became a physics demonstration; an object on a downward arc governed by the Laws of Science that the Republicans hate so very much.

That, you despicable little stooge, is EXACTLY how Iraq looks to me.

On the heels of our greatest modern national trauma, the President and his minions shrieked and bellowed, roared and raged that there was a conflagration at our backs. That we were all in immediate, lethal danger from a massive, murderous attack by Saddam Hussein and that if we didn’t act right now we were fucked.

Mushroom-cloud fucked.

And that the ONLY alternative was to jump. He was advised by wise men of the costs of jumping, of the dangers, of the number of troops necessary, of the extremely complex situation into which he would be dropping. He was warned that beating Iraq militarily would be easy…but that securing the Peace would be hard.

He told us that the fall would be simple. That we would alight in a land where we would be greeted as Liberators. The costs would be negligible. The gains would be high. Virtually painless.

There is a meme currently making its way around the blogosphere which begins with, “My uncle once…”

The first email I got that day was from a friend at the time. he had just heard from his family. Didn’t have confirmation on it yet. But it was believed his great-uncle was a co-pilot on the first plane that spun off into oblivion, hitting the towers. That was about all the email consisted of. “My great-uncle…”

It had been his great-uncle.

“My uncle once…”

He was one of those, afterwards, with an intimate connection to 9/11, who was enraged by Bush. As he had been beforehand. 9/11 didn’t change his mind.

But, of course, we have all an intimate connection with 9/11. I knew that as I watched the first tower collapse to the ground and as it fell, my body commanded some empathetic harmony, my knees bending, the tower going down, so did my knees bend and down I went with it to sit upon my heels, thinking here it is, the future, this will be Ground Zero for this generation, all that they will be told and know is that History began today, they will be told today is the center of their universe and all the reason for what will follow. Looking at my son who was only three-years-old, I thought this is the moment that will bind your generation together, they are sewing it as a shadow to your feet even now, and it will accompany you relentless throughout your life, for you to eat with it sleep with it, they will contrive for it to be your measure of all that is, what they will have to tell you about it.

So that day it became my future to daily, as they bound that shadow to his feet, clip it and place it where it belongs. So that instead of them pushing him from behind with that shadow, it would be set across from him, so that he might be able to view it face-to-face when he came of age.

I didn’t then know about the Patriot Act, Afghanistan, Iraq. But I knew they were coming. And that my job would be to cut 9/11 away from my son and their thousands daily missions to make it his parent, he its child, which they would plan to be such an intrinsic and understood history that he would never question its reality, unconscious of any other life force. Yes, he would be intimately connected with 9/11, as are we all, but I could follow behind him daily cutting the strings they would spin between he and that shadow in their attempt to make it the puppet master, and he its doll, they infusing that shadow with the dead and daily acting as false mediums planting oracles. Set that shadow before my son and remove the mask of those dead so he could understand it was the instead the living whose voices rattled the death gourds.

My son doesn’t know I daily follow him about unthreading that shadow from his feet. When an adult, he will have no idea. Sitting across from that shadow, he will think why did I inherit this, why is this my business, why must it be at my table, why didn’t your generation kill this, why did you let it happen, I don’t want it. He won’t know the difference between facing that shadow and having it tied to his heels, behind him. What he’ll know is he didn’t make the mess but it will be his to live with and he will wonder why he has to follow around cleaning up after that shadow which sits across from him. But at least it won’t be behind him, owning him. He’ll be able to talk to it face-to-face, instead of it using him and he thinking its voice is his own.

At least that is my hope, as I daily cut what I can of that shadow and set it in the corner. I would put it out on the street, if I could, away from him entirely, but that is impossible. I berate myself, guilty, setting that shadow in the corner, that it exists at all. And in the meanwhile, I do what I can to soften its presence, to distance it. In the process of his seven-year-old’s work of growing himself, he sometimes looks up from the world he’s building and asks what the shadow is, I tell him, he says it ought not to be there and returns to his work. And I return to mine, failing even as I gather up the clippings of those threads. In the future, he will say where were you for me, why weren’t you wholly there the days I needed you and you weren’t wholly present, what shadows were you living with when you should have been living with me. He will feel me as a shadow tugging at his heels and begin his business of cutting that shadow away. Will hand it back to me and say here is the world you made. At least that is my hope, that he’ll be able to hand that world back to me and move into his better own that he is dreaming and building today.