By William Rivers Pitt, Truthout | Op-Ed
President Barack Obama departs after delivering a televised address to the nation on his plans for military action against the Islamic State, from the Cross Hall of the White House in Washington, Sept. 10, 2014. (Photo: Saul Loeb / Pool via The New York Times)On the night before the thirteenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, President Obama delivered a prime-time press conference to discuss the new war in Iraq, which is really the old war, as it never actually ended. It dropped from the headlines here in the US a few years ago, except for an occasional heinous act that got brief ink - a marketplace massacre that killed 150, or a mosque bombing that killed 80 would get some ink and then fade - but people have been dying in Iraq every single day since we stuck our booted toe into their sand eighteen months after the Towers came down.
It has been thirteen years since the attacks of September 11, and this nation has spent every one of the 4,745 days between that morning and today in the grips of a media and politics and money-driven high panic. Millions upon millions have been killed, maimed, displaced or bankrupted in the process. The money we are going to spend bombing the problems we caused by bombing the problems we bombed can be better spent creating jobs, repairing infrastructure, and educating our children to know better when a politician comes calling with platitudes about the excellence of the United States before announcing his intention to blow more stuff up.
