Susan Sontag Was Right

And so were Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, and the former head of British intelligence

By Justin Raimondo

"The former head of Britain's intelligence agency, M15, says the U.S. response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks – specifically the invasion of Iraq – and the launching of a worldwide "war on terrorism" was "a huge overreaction." Those words would've gotten her in big trouble back in the bad old days, when the "warbloggers" were on the loose, Andy Sullivan was taking names, and the Susan Sontag-Noam Chomsky-Michael Moore Axis of Evil was the object of near-universal opprobrium. These days, however, her diagnosis of post-9/11 derangement syndrome is well nigh universally held to be the conventional wisdom. A new president will likely take office in the U.S. largely because of this sea-change in public opinion.

The problem is that the lessons of the post-9/11 hysteria, an emotional tsunami generated in large part by opportunistic politicians, have still not been fully absorbed, either by the public or by elite opinion. Presidential frontrunner Barack Obama, after all, has pledged to escalate our endless "war on terrorism" on at least two fronts: Afghanistan, where he is eager to send tens of thousands more U.S. troops, and Pakistan, which – in a troubling, albeit unacknowledged reiteration of the Bushian doctrine of "preemption" – he has repeatedly threatened to invade......"