Us millennials are getting older, and each day we are reminded of it. Will Ferrell is now a commercial actor while insurance companies make uncomfortably accurate jokes pinpointed directly at us about how we are becoming our parents. But of all the markers that we are slipping into an older age coveted by advertisers, nothing compares to the folks who were born too late to remember how profoundly stupid the Iraq War was. Nikki McCann Ramirez is a terrific journalist asking an earnest question here so do not dogpile her, just know that when I read this, I turned into a cloud of dust.
But on the whole, they still haven’t come close to the post-9/11 hysteria. If you are too young to remember it, consider yourself lucky, because it’s the Joker origin story of practically every elder millennial on the left. Being a high school freshman and realizing I knew more about the obvious lies leading into the Iraq War than the Very Serious establishment is the primary reason you are reading this right now, and I am far from alone in being radicalized in my early teens by older folks doing their best impersonation of the ignorant and reactive adults from South Park. Things were so, so stupid. France was public enemy number one simply because they opposed the Iraq War.
Congress officially renamed French fries to “freedom fries” for Pete’s sake. Freedom fries! Just say that phrase without feeling like a part of your brain just permanently shut off. You can’t do it. Americans gathered at the French consulate to protest their opposition to our war of choice, and they poured tons of expensive wine down the drain. Thousands if not millions of people genuinely thought that Osama bin Laden himself would show up at their local Walmart to declare a jihad on them personally, and ten years later, John Cena was the one to deliver us the news that bin Laden had been “compromised to a permanent end.” The abject fear coursing throughout society after 9/11 was unlike anything I have ever seen in my life, and you could not walk down the block or consume any kind of media without being reminded of how utterly terrified Americans were that their own personal 9/11 was just around the corner.
Fear is not something you associate with intelligence or reason, as it is directly related to the ignorance of something and the logical fear of that unpredictability. The problem is that America filled in the gaps in its knowledge, and boy howdy were they incredibly revealing of how dumb everything had become in our society still reeling from impeaching a president over getting a blowjob, as exhaustively detailed across 453 pages by Kenneth Starr.
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— Patrick Cosmos (@veryimportant.lawyer) June 19, 2025 at 3:10 PM
They reported on terrorism like it was the weather, man. We had a whole color-coded system and everything to communicate the supposed current threat level, and it never went below elevated. There was a wildly popular TV show that convinced us the only way to get terrorists to talk was to torture them. The basic thrust of the Bush Administration’s justification to go to war with a country who did not attack us on 9/11 was that Saddam and al-Qaeda were supposedly allies, when even the conservative Cato Institute could see how utterly shambolic this assertion was in 2003, because Osama bin Laden had long “considered Saddam Hussein an infidel enemy” due to his less religious regime and that bin Laden even “offered to assemble his mujahedeen to battle Hussein and protect the Arabian peninsula” when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. There is a sinister aspect to all this rank American stupidity, which is that the surveillance state exploited it to set up the most invasive and powerful spy apparatus in the history of mankind. Then we had the gall to be shocked when Edward Snowden revealed that yet again, history had repeated itself and that spy network had been turned on everyday Americans.
“But Jacob, our president is out here making colossally important foreign policy decisions on camera from the freaking golf course, making a mockery of the supposed seriousness of what he’s trying to do. Things could not have possibly been that dumb, right?”
I have four words for folks who think Trump is the first president to pull shit like this: “Now watch this drive.”
The President of the United States was nearly assassinated by a pretzel in the lead-up to the Iraq War! Three years into the invasion of Iraq, the Vice President of the United States shot his friend in the face while on a quail hunt in what both he and the victim called an accident. This happened around the same time that former CIA agent Valerie Wilson filed a lawsuit against Dick Cheney claiming that he intentionally blew her cover because her husband, the diplomat Joseph Wilson, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times detailing how he was sent to Niger to look for documentation of their supposed sale of uranium yellowcake to Iraq, and how he didn’t find anything. Colin Powell was sent to the UN to tell blatantly obvious lies about the supposed weapons of mass destruction that Iraq possessed, and the entire mainstream media treated his speech like a sermon from the Pope that only heretics would dare question. Mainstream media has largely degraded since the Bush years, but the leadup to the Iraq War was so utterly defined by braindead stenography and the antithesis of journalism that it makes Jake Tapper look like Edward R. Murrow.
9/11 permanently scarred the American psyche. In one sense, the hysteria that gripped the entire country was entirely logical because that is the goal of terrorism. I have written before about how Osama bin Laden won, and we are still dealing with the consequences of his overwhelming victory over America to this day. The hysteria never really ended with a significant portion of our society, it just spiraled.
On the other, less sympathetic hand, America is a very stupid country, and the Iraq War proved that beyond a shadow of a doubt. Capitalism has flattened our culture to such an extreme degree where our values can only be expressed through the simplistic and distorted lenses of consumerism and pop culture, and Iraq was proof of how detached from objective reality our very comfortable society had become. There is still a ways to go and no one should ever bet against Trump’s limitless potential for stupidity, but at least for now, until we start renaming fast food, the Iraq War era was still dumber than our current budding Iran War era.
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