10 years ago last week, I was sitting in my dorm room wondering what Washington was going to do with Baghdad. I sat there worrying that we'd be going to war and if Saddam Hussein really did have these things called weapons of mass destruction. Then my roommate turned to CNN and we saw an OutKast song come to life.
I wanted to immediately post an away message on AIM saying Bombs over Baghdad. But instead, I was scared. So was my roommate. I saw somebody post a message saying "Let us pray" so I went ahead and posted something more thoughtful like that. Because I knew that we were in for something and had no idea how it'd end.
At the time, I was thinking "Okay go ahead and get them before they get us". I didn't realize that there was already shaky logic leading us to Iraq and I remember Saddam expressing sorrow and condolences after 9/11. But fear is a powerful force and like Hermann Goering said at the Nuremburg trials, it can move people to do anything in the name of safety.
It's a sad anniversary that many have already spoken on but for me, I like to think about how in less than 18 months, that was a loud chorus of opposition that I had never seen before. Between March 2003 and the summer of 2004, we saw a lot more information that unraveled the story that Washington sold us.
