And so it begins.... and never ends

It's been five years since the Twin Towers in New York fell and the War on Terror began. Our nation has vowed to "never forget" the senseless death of 2, 996 people in fiery, violent, incomprehensibly abbhorent acts of hate.

The loss of so many people in mere minutes, infant and aged alike, is not to be forgotten easily, or willingly.

In his speech a few hours after the towers fell, President Bush vowed "The United States will hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts."

In five years time, Osama bin Laden is still at large. Instead of hunting down and punishing those responsible for the deaths of 2,996 innocent lives on the morning of September 11th, 2001, we have since been responsible for the deaths of nearly an equal amount of armed servicemen and women and over 41,000 Iraqi civilians while hunting down and punishing those who had nothing to do whatsoever with four planes, and the children on board, being used as missiles.

In Bush's own words, in regards to Osama bin Laden, "You know, I just don't spend that much time on him .... to be honest with you." He said that way back on March 13th, 2002, barely six months after he swore unending vengeance on the bastard. It's now been five years, and the person behind the smoking towers, the hole in a field in Pennsylvania, the burning Pentagon, the uncounted tears of billions of people as they learned of moms, dads, babies, grandparents, sisters, brothers, daughters and sons who died a most horrible death is forgotten, left to live his life whereas others will not..



Five years after Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, France was liberated and we were months away from the surrender of Germany and a little less than a year from the surrender of Japan. Five years after December 7th, 1941 when the battleship Arizona lay at the bottom of Pearl Harbor and the US had declared war on Japan and Germany, the War was over and the Baby Boom had begun. We had the good will of most of the world, we were rebuilding countries, we had our sons and daughters back home with us.

Five years after the Twin Towers fell, we have lost the respect of most nations, including most of our staunchest allies in NATO. We have given generations of people in the Middle East blood-earned reason to hate America even more, breeding reason for terrorist attacks across the globe on America and our allies. If we had "stayed the course" and gone after the people responsible for the flags at half-mast today, we might be closer to winning this ambiguous "war on terror." Instead, Bush went after a man who "tried to kill [his] dad!", still thumbed his nose at the Bush family from a war a decade earlier, and also happened to be sitting on a hell of a lot of oil.

This Iraq war was, and is, no hunt for terrorists. It was a family vendetta, with some war spoils thrown in, that has grown into a quagmire we can't get out of and prohibits us from doing what Bush vowed to do: hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts. We have squandered the untethered support from the world earned by the blood and fear and tears of those we lost five years ago for a few mens' personal values of pride and greed.

"I'll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him." - George Bush, March 13th, 2002.

And still, the children cry for Mom and Dad who went to work on September 11th, 2001, and never came home.