1. Iraq is hell on earth, and it’s never returning

2. I didn’t want the US to enter Iraq. But after they did I felt they should do the right thing and stay and “make things right”. But now the US is burning *with* Iraq.

9/11 is something in the past that people can sandbox, telecast, and hold hands over. Fair enough, I don’t blame them. But Iraq is now something more.

If people are “lost” in a “tragedy” then, as you point out, the event becomes a random natural disaster — an act of god. As such, it was inevitable, there was nothing we could have done to prevent it. “It’s not our fault.”

But a murder has murderers, and murderers have motives.

“Why did they do it?”, we might ask. That runs the risk of understanding the murderers’ point of view. We can’t have that, or we’ll start asking if the attack could be justified, or at least rationalised — and we might start calling the attackers “soldiers” instead of “murderers”.

Maybe we’d start asking why the attack wasn’t prevented, or why a modern building collapsed in such a catastrophic way. And then we’d start hearing phrases like “intelligence failure” and thinking about that war in Iraq again and how it all connects up — or not.

No, it’s all much, much safer politically to treat it as a natural disaster. Just let the death sit by itself, and don’t connect it back to anything.

Quick! Watch these bright and shiny things over here!

[A note to those who are hard of thinking: Just because I describe how a thought process works, it doesn't mean I agree with it.]