More on Bill Moyers' "The Buying Of The War"

While watching Moyers' program I tried to think why I wasn't taken in by the call for war when it happened. It wasn't that I was so incredibly smart (though that helped, natch). It was that I was getting my news from all over the world and not just from Washington, D.C., and that I really saw the most important agenda for the U.S. international politics to be about bin Laden and his terrorism and what that reflected and not about starting a war against an essentially unrelated country, a country which was run by a nasty dictator (just like Zimbabwe is run today, by the way), true, but a country which had very little patience with Islamic fundamentalism of the bin Laden kind and was a very unlikely supporter of that. In those days, that is. Then there was the nationality of the 911 hijackers. They were mostly Saudis, and if the U.S. government had really wanted to go and clean out the places where terrorism seemed to have been nurtured, well, you see the obvious conclusion.

But probably the real cause for my great skepticism in 2002 was that I wasn't following the official news channels as closely as many fans of politics were.