Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Twenty-Five Years Later, I’m Still Confused About Iraq

Twenty-five years after September 11, 2001, I find myself thinking about the things we were told, the things we believed, and the things that still don’t make much sense. And one of those things is how we went from being attacked by terrorists in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania to invading Iraq.

I’m still confused.

Well, I guess I’m not entirely confused. I understand what happened. I’m just still trying to understand how we got from point A to point B and why so many people accepted the explanation along the way.

September 11 was an attack on the United States by al-Qaeda, a terrorist organization led by Osama bin Laden. Nineteen hijackers murdered nearly 3,000 people, destroyed the World Trade Center, damaged the Pentagon, and sent a plane into a Pennsylvania field because ordinary Americans were apparently not allowed to have a normal Tuesday.

The United States responded by invading Afghanistan, where the Taliban had provided sanctuary to al-Qaeda. That war had a direct connection to the attacks. We were looking for the people responsible.

Then, somehow, the conversation shifted to Iraq.

Saddam Hussein.

Weapons of mass destruction.

Mushroom clouds.

A dictator who had nothing to do with planning the September 11 attacks suddenly became the central character in America’s response to them.

And I’m sitting here wondering, did we lose the plot somewhere between the Pentagon and Baghdad?

Because if the reason we went to war was the terrorist attack on September 11, then why was George W. Bush more focused on finding Saddam Hussein than finding Osama bin Laden?

That question has never really gone away for me.

Osama bin Laden was the man who organized the attacks. He was the one responsible for sending those planes into buildings and killing thousands of Americans. He was the person we were supposed to be hunting.

Instead, the Bush administration spent enormous political energy making the case that Iraq was an imminent threat to the United States. We were told Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. We were told he had connections to terrorists. We were told that invading Iraq was part of the broader war on terror.

Except the weapons weren’t there, and the supposed connection between Saddam Hussein and the September 11 attacks wasn’t there either.

The 9/11 Commission found no evidence that Saddam Hussein’s regime cooperated with al-Qaeda in carrying out attacks against the United States. Saddam was a brutal dictator, but being a brutal dictator isn’t the same thing as being responsible for every terrorist attack that happens to occur while you’re in power.

If it were, we’d need a much larger map.

And let’s not forget that Iraq had already been invaded by the United States in 1991. Saddam Hussein had invaded Kuwait, and the international community responded. There were legitimate reasons for that war. But in 2003, we weren’t responding to a new Iraqi invasion of another country. We were making the case for a preventive war based on intelligence that turned out to be disastrously wrong.

Meanwhile, Osama bin Laden remained alive.

He was eventually killed in Pakistan in 2011, nearly a decade after September 11. By then, the United States had spent years fighting in Iraq, lost thousands of military personnel, spent enormous amounts of money, and helped create conditions that would contribute to further instability and violence across the region.

All while the man responsible for the attacks was still out there.

I understand that history is complicated. I understand that governments make decisions based on intelligence, politics, national security, and a thousand other things that ordinary people don’t get to see. I understand that hindsight is a wonderful tool because it doesn’t require us to sit in a room in 2002 trying to decide whether the information in front of us is accurate.

But some things don’t require hindsight.

You don’t need twenty-five years of historical distance to ask why the man responsible for the attack wasn’t the primary target of the war we were told was about that attack.

You don’t need a PhD in international relations to understand that Iraq and al-Qaeda were not the same thing.

And you certainly don’t need to be a military strategist to recognize that invading a country because its leader might have weapons of mass destruction is a very different argument from invading a country because its government is directly responsible for attacking you.

Those are two different wars with two different justifications.

Yet somehow, after September 11, we were expected to accept them as part of the same story.

Twenty-five years later, I still think about the people who died that day. The passengers on the planes. The people working in the towers. The firefighters, police officers, and emergency workers who ran toward the buildings while everyone else was trying to get away. The families who never got to say goodbye.

Their deaths deserved a response. Their families deserved justice. The country deserved leadership that could distinguish between the people who attacked us and the people we decided we wanted to fight.

Instead, we got a war in Iraq that was sold to the American public using the fear and anger of September 11.

And that is the part that still bothers me.

Not because Saddam Hussein was a good guy. He wasn’t. Not because Iraq was a peaceful democracy before we showed up. It wasn’t. And not because the United States had no legitimate national security concerns.

But because the reasons we were given for going to war mattered.

They mattered when we sent young men and women into combat. They mattered when families received folded flags. They mattered when we spent trillions of dollars that could have been used for almost anything else. They mattered when we asked Americans to trust their government.

And they matter now, twenty-five years later, when we look back at the decisions that followed the worst terrorist attack in American history.

The question isn’t whether Saddam Hussein was a terrible person. He was.

The question is whether he was responsible for September 11.

He wasn’t.

The question isn’t whether Iraq was a country with problems. It was.

The question is whether invading Iraq was the necessary response to the terrorist attacks.

It wasn’t.

And the question isn’t whether Osama bin Laden deserved to be brought to justice.

He did.

So when I think about September 11, I think about the people we lost, the families who still carry that loss, and the men and women who served in the wars that followed.

But I also think about the decisions made in the aftermath.

Because remembering history isn’t just about remembering what happened. It’s about remembering what we were told, what we believed, and what we should have learned.

Twenty-five years later, I still don’t understand how the country that was attacked by Osama bin Laden ended up invading Iraq.

Well, I understand the history.

I’m just still trying to understand the logic.

And maybe that’s the point. Maybe the most important thing we can do on this anniversary is keep asking the questions that make us uncomfortable.

Because the next time somebody tells us that a war is necessary, that the intelligence is solid, that the threat is imminent, and that we just need to trust the people in charge, maybe we should remember what happened the last time we stopped asking questions.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Every once in a while, I find myself thinking about something so fundamental to human existence that I wonder how we all agreed to it without somebody standing up and asking a few questions.

Money, for example.

I’m still dumbfounded that we went from a barter system, where you traded something you had for something you needed, to a system where we hand each other small pieces of metal or paper and pretend they have value because somebody told us they do.

At least barter made sense.

You fixed my windows, I gave you some grain. You repaired my roof, I gave you a cow. You helped me survive the winter, I gave you something that helped you survive the winter. There was an actual connection between the work being done and the thing being exchanged.

Somewhere along the way, though, humanity decided that carrying around a cow every time we needed something was probably inconvenient. Fair enough. Cows are not particularly portable, and I imagine the early banking industry had some serious livestock-management issues.

So we invented money.

The earliest forms of money included things like grain, livestock, shells, and precious metals. Eventually, civilizations began producing standardized coins, often stamped with the image of a ruler. A king’s face on a piece of metal became a promise that this little disk was worth something.

Which, when you think about it, is a hell of a marketing strategy.

“Here is a picture of me on a piece of metal. I declare this valuable.”

And people said, “Sounds good.”

Granted, those early coins had some intrinsic value because they were made from gold, silver, or other useful metals. But even then, the value was largely based on agreement, trust, and the authority of whoever was stamping the king’s head onto the thing.

Then we moved to paper money.

Now, instead of carrying around a piece of metal that might actually be worth something, we carry pieces of paper that represent a promise. And eventually, we stopped even needing the paper. Most of the money we use today is just numbers in a bank account, moving from one computer screen to another.

I can work eight hours, receive a paycheck, deposit it into my bank account, and use a plastic card to buy groceries. No grain. No cattle. No silver. No gold. Just a series of numbers that everybody agrees means I can have food.

And the truly amazing part is that it works.

Most of the time.

We have built an entire global economy on the collective agreement that these little pieces of paper, these coins, and these electronic numbers are worth something. We use them to buy houses, pay medical bills, send our kids to college, and determine whether we can afford to retire.

We have assigned value to something that, in and of itself, has very little practical value.

A dollar bill is not particularly useful as a piece of paper. You can’t eat it. You can’t build a house with it. You can’t fix a broken window with it. You could probably use it to start a fire, but that seems like a poor financial decision.

Yet we have decided that it is legal tender for all debts, public and private.

Which is a fancy way of saying, “This piece of paper is worthless unless everybody agrees it isn’t.”

And somehow, we have all agreed.

Of course, money isn’t entirely worthless. It represents the value of goods, services, labor, and the economic activity that produces them. The dollar is useful because people trust that it can be exchanged for things they need. But the paper itself isn’t what makes it valuable. The agreement is.

And that agreement can change.

Inflation is what happens when the purchasing power of money declines. You can have the same amount of money in your pocket and discover that it buys less than it did yesterday. The paper hasn’t changed. The number hasn’t changed. The value has.

Which brings us to the part that really fascinates me.

We have created an economic system where the thing we use to measure value can itself lose value. We work for money, save money, invest money, and plan our futures around money. But money is not a fixed thing. It is a human invention that depends on trust, stability, and the continued willingness of people to accept it.

And yet we treat it like some immutable law of nature.

Like gravity.

Like the sun rising.

Like the fact that the government will eventually find another way to tax us.

I understand why we moved away from barter. Barter has limitations. What if I need a doctor but the doctor doesn’t need my windows fixed? What if I have a cow but the person selling me a car doesn’t want a cow? Money solves those problems by providing a common medium of exchange.

But I still find it fascinating that we went from trading things we actually needed to trading things that represent the value of things we need.

We don’t trade windows for grain anymore. We trade the value of fixing windows for the value of grain, which is represented by money, which is represented by paper, metal, or numbers in a computer.

And then we spend our lives trying to acquire more of it.

The whole system works because we agree that it works. And because it works, we rarely stop to think about how strange it actually is.

Humanity has spent thousands of years refining the process of exchanging goods and services, only to arrive at a system where the most important thing in the transaction is something that has no inherent value of its own.

We have built civilization around a shared belief.

Not unlike religion, I suppose, except money actually does require you to pay for things.

And unlike religion, you can’t just pray that your mortgage company will accept your good intentions as payment.

The next time I hand somebody a piece of paper with a dead president’s face on it, I’m going to try to remember how remarkable the whole thing is.

Somewhere along the way, we decided that this was better than trading cattle.

And the rest of us just went along with it.

Because apparently, once you get enough people to agree that something is valuable, it becomes valuable.

Even if it’s just a piece of paper.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Point, Counterpoint: The Genealogy Problem

Every once in a while, you have to actually stop reading the Bible as a collection of things you were told it says and start reading it as a collection of things it actually says.

And Matthew gives us one of those wonderfully inconvenient little moments.

Matthew begins his Gospel with something that, at first glance, seems almost painfully unnecessary:

A genealogy.

Not just a casual mention of who begat whom, but a carefully constructed lineage tracing Jesus all the way back through Joseph, through David, and ultimately to Abraham.

Matthew is making a point.

Jesus isn’t just some guy who showed up in Bethlehem. Matthew wants his readers to understand that Jesus belongs to the lineage promised to Israel. He is connected to Abraham. He is connected to David. He is part of the historical line from which the Messiah was expected to come.

And then Matthew introduces the problem.

Joseph isn’t supposed to be Jesus’s biological father.

That’s not some modern reinterpretation of the story. That’s the whole point of the virgin-birth narrative that immediately follows the genealogy.

Matthew spends an entire chapter establishing Joseph’s ancestry and establishing Jesus’s connection to Joseph.

Then, essentially, he says:

“Except Joseph didn’t actually father him.”

Well…

Point. Counterpoint.

If Joseph is Jesus’s legal or adoptive father, then perhaps the genealogy is intended to establish Jesus’s legal connection to David.

That’s certainly a theological possibility.

But notice what that means.

Matthew has gone to extraordinary lengths to establish Jesus’s earthly credentials through a man who, according to the very story Matthew is telling, isn’t his biological father.

And that raises a rather obvious question:

Why is Joseph’s bloodline so important if Jesus’s significance doesn’t come from Joseph’s bloodline?

If Jesus is literally the Son of God, conceived by divine intervention, then his connection to Abraham and David isn’t biological through Joseph.

And if the Davidic lineage is important because prophecy requires the Messiah to descend from David, then we’ve suddenly got a theological bookkeeping problem.

Because the genealogy is telling us:

“Here’s how Jesus connects to David.”

And the virgin birth is telling us:

“Except not through Joseph.”

Point.

Counterpoint.

And here’s where things get even more interesting.

Matthew doesn’t begin with:

“Jesus, the Son of God, has arrived.”

He begins with:

“The book of the genealogy of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham.”

That’s not an incidental introduction.

That’s the thesis statement.

Matthew wants to establish Jesus as son of David and son of Abraham before he tells us about the miraculous conception.

Why?

Because those earthly genealogical credentials mattered enormously to the people Matthew was writing for.

Jesus needed to be connected to the Jewish story.

He needed to belong to the story of Abraham.

He needed to belong to the royal line of David.

He needed to fulfill the expectations surrounding the Messiah.

And Joseph is the mechanism Matthew uses to establish that connection.

Which leaves us with an uncomfortable possibility:

Maybe the genealogy itself tells us something about how early Christians understood Jesus that doesn’t perfectly fit the theology that developed later.

Maybe Jesus’s connection to David mattered precisely because his connection to humanity mattered.

Maybe the earliest arguments about Jesus weren’t simply, “He’s God, therefore none of this earthly lineage matters.”

Maybe they were, “This is the Messiah we’ve been waiting for, and here’s how he fits into the story.”

And that’s an important distinction.

Because Christianity eventually developed a very sophisticated theology surrounding Jesus’s divine nature, human nature, virgin birth, incarnation, and relationship to God.

But the Gospel texts weren’t written as a single theological textbook.

They were written by different authors, for different audiences, with different emphases.

And sometimes those emphases don’t fit together as neatly as the Sunday-school version would have us believe.

Matthew says:

Look at his lineage.

Then Matthew says:

Joseph wasn’t his biological father.

Point.

Counterpoint.

And maybe that’s not a problem that needs to be solved.

Maybe it’s a question that needs to be asked.

Because if we’re going to call something sacred, shouldn’t we be willing to actually read it closely enough to notice when the text itself makes us stop and scratch our heads?

Faith shouldn’t require us to pretend contradictions aren’t interesting.

In fact, maybe that’s where faith gets interesting.

Because if the answer to every difficult question is simply, “Don’t ask that,” then we’re not really studying scripture.

We’re protecting an interpretation of scripture.

And those are two very different things.

So I’ll leave you with the question Matthew seems to accidentally—or perhaps deliberately—put on the table:

If Joseph’s genealogy is important enough for Matthew to spend seventeen verses establishing it, and that genealogy is supposed to prove Jesus’s connection to Abraham and David, what exactly is Matthew trying to prove through Joseph if Joseph isn’t Jesus’s biological father?

Point.

Counterpoint.

And somewhere between the two is where the real conversation begins.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

It’s midterm election season again, which is an interesting name for something that is still, in fact, an election. I suppose calling it a midterm makes it sound like we’re taking a break from democracy to check our progress, like a teacher handing out a report card halfway through the semester. Except instead of grades, we get campaign ads, attack commercials, and politicians promising to fix the exact problems they’ve been in charge of creating.

And nowhere is this more entertaining than Texas.

Take Greg Abbott. The man has been governor of Texas since 2015. That’s going on twelve years of executive authority by the time the next election rolls around. Twelve years. Long enough for a child to enter kindergarten, graduate high school, and develop a strong opinion about whether the state’s government is doing a good job.

And yet here we are, listening to Abbott campaign on the promise that he’s going to fix things.

Fix what?

That’s the part I’m having trouble with.

Texas has had Republican leadership in the governor’s mansion for decades. The state legislature has been controlled by Republicans for decades. The House and Senate have had plenty of time to pass the policies they wanted, fund the programs they supported, and address the problems they claimed were important.

This isn’t a situation where the opposition party has been secretly running the state from a basement somewhere. Republicans have been in charge. They have controlled the agenda, the budgets, the appointments, and the direction of state government.

So when the governor stands up and says, “I’m going to fix Texas,” I have to wonder whether he’s talking about the same Texas he’s been governing.

Because if the state is broken, who exactly has been holding the wrench?

And if everything is going great, as politicians always seem to tell us when they’re defending their record, then what needs fixing?

Apparently, the answer is whatever the next campaign commercial says needs fixing.

This is the political equivalent of a contractor showing up at your house after twelve years, looking at the leaking roof, and saying, “Don’t worry. I’ve got a plan.”

You might reasonably ask why the roof is still leaking.

He might explain that the previous contractor was difficult, the weather was unpredictable, and the tools were expensive. He might point out that the roof would have been worse if he hadn’t been there.

And then he’d ask you to hire him again.

That’s the part of politics that continues to amaze me. We have somehow accepted the idea that the person in charge of a problem is the best person to solve it, even when the problem has been sitting there for years.

Not because they have demonstrated that they can solve it, but because they have demonstrated that they can talk about solving it.

And voters seem willing to believe that the next four years will be different from the last twelve, even when the person making that promise has been in the same office the entire time.

Maybe that’s the real meaning of a midterm election. It’s not halfway through a term of office. It’s halfway through the voters’ attention span.

We forget who was responsible. We forget who controlled the legislature. We forget which party had the votes. We forget which policies were passed and which ones were blocked. Then somebody puts up a new campaign sign, says “fixing Texas,” and suddenly we’re all supposed to believe the past twelve years were just a rough draft.

I’m not saying voters have to vote against Republicans. I’m saying voters should at least make them explain their record.

If you’ve been in power for twelve years and the state is still facing the same problems you promised to solve when you first took office, maybe the question isn’t whether you need more time.

Maybe the question is whether you’ve earned it.

And if your answer is that you need another term to fix what’s broken, I have one simple question:

Fix what?

Because if you broke it, you should probably start there.

Dwain Northey (Gen X)

Will September 11 Just Become a Number?

Every September 11, we say the same thing:

Never forget.

And I understand why.

For those of us who lived through September 11, 2001, it isn’t really history. It’s memory. We remember where we were. We remember the confusion. We remember the television coverage. We remember the towers falling. We remember the Pentagon. We remember the field in Pennsylvania. We remember the sudden realization that the world we thought we understood had changed before breakfast.

But this year, something else occurred to me.

Something that made me feel very, very old.

The generation being born today is roughly as far removed from September 11, 2001, as my generation was from December 7, 1941.

Think about that for a second.

As a Gen X kid, World War II felt like ancient history. It was black-and-white photographs, grainy newsreels, stories from grandparents, old military uniforms hanging in closets, and movies where everybody somehow had the same square jaw.

Pearl Harbor was something that happened before my parents were even adults.

It was history.

Not memory.

And now September 11 is becoming that same kind of distance for an entire generation.

That’s a little difficult for those of us who remember it to wrap our heads around.

Because I can remember September 11.

And eventually there will be adults walking around who weren’t merely too young to remember it.

They won’t have existed yet.

That’s the part that gets me.

My son is Gen Z. If you say “December 7,” there’s a good chance you’re going to get a blank stare.

December 7, 1941.

Pearl Harbor.

The date that pulled the United States into World War II.

For his generation, it is already possible for that date to exist primarily as a number.

And then there is another date.

November 22, 1963.

You can say the date and get another blank stare.

John F. Kennedy.

Assassination.

For people my age, that date still carries weight. For younger generations, it is increasingly something they learn because a history teacher tells them it happened.

That’s how history works.

The people who experienced an event eventually disappear.

The people who remember the people who experienced it eventually disappear.

And eventually all that’s left is the date.

December 7.

November 22.

June 6.

August 6.

August 9.

Numbers that once represented moments that changed the world.

So what happens to September 11?

Will it eventually become just another number?

Will a teacher someday say, “On September 11, 2001, terrorists attacked the United States,” and a room full of teenagers will dutifully write it down before moving on to the next chapter?

Will there be some kid in 2076 who knows that 9/11 happened but has absolutely no emotional connection to it?

Will September 11 become something like December 7 is today?

Or will it become something different?

Because I wonder if September 11 has an advantage that Pearl Harbor never had.

We named it.

We turned it into something more than a date.

9/11.

Not September 11.

Nine-eleven.

A number that became a noun.

A number that became a verb.

A number that became an entire era.

We don’t simply say that something happened on September 11, 2001.

We say 9/11 happened.

And everybody who was alive knows what that means.

It changed airport security.

It changed immigration debates.

It changed American foreign policy.

It changed the military.

It changed the way we looked at skyscrapers.

It changed the way we looked at airplanes.

It changed the way we looked at strangers.

It changed the way we looked at the word “terrorism.”

It changed the way an entire generation understood the idea that America was somehow protected by oceans and geography.

It even changed our vocabulary.

Before September 11, “homeland security” wasn’t part of everyday American conversation.

Afterward, it was everywhere.

That’s a remarkable amount of cultural weight for four numbers.

But eventually, even that weight will fade.

Not because people don’t care.

Because that’s what time does.

There will be no one left who remembers watching the second tower fall in real time.

No one left who remembers the skies being strangely empty because commercial aviation had been grounded.

No one left who remembers the smoke.

No one left who remembers wondering whether another attack was coming.

No one left who remembers calling somebody just to make sure they were alive.

No one left who can say:

“I remember where I was.”

And perhaps that is the real meaning behind “Never Forget.”

It doesn’t mean we can prevent history from becoming history.

We can’t.

It means that while we are still here, we have a responsibility to tell the story.

Not just the story of the buildings.

Not just the story of terrorism.

Not just the story of war.

The story of the people.

The firefighters.

The police officers.

The paramedics.

The office workers.

The passengers.

The people who ran toward the danger while everybody else was running away from it.

The people who made phone calls they knew might be their last.

The people who waited for someone who never came home.

Because someday, September 11 will belong to history.

That’s inevitable.

And maybe someday a kid will hear “9/11” and think of it the same way my generation heard “Pearl Harbor.”

A date.

An event.

A chapter in a textbook.

Something that happened a long time ago.

And honestly, I hope they never understand it the way we did.

I hope they never have to.

Because the goal of remembering history isn’t to keep the pain alive forever.

It’s to keep the lessons alive long enough that we don’t have to repeat it.

So tomorrow, September 11 will come around again.

For some people, it will be a memorial.

For some, a painful anniversary.

For some, a day of service.

For others, simply another Thursday.

But for those of us who remember, it will still be 9/11.

And perhaps that is the strange thing about getting older.

You eventually realize that some of the things you thought would always be living memory are slowly becoming history.

December 7 became Pearl Harbor.

November 22 became Kennedy.

And one day, September 11 will become just another entry in a history book.

I just hope that before it becomes merely a number, we have taught the next generation why those numbers mattered.

Because history isn’t really about remembering dates.

It’s about remembering what happened to the people behind them.