The Long Road From 9/11

To reference America’s longstanding occupation of great portions of the Middle East, and our government’s support for bloodthirsty tyrants, from Riyadh to Tel Aviv, was considered close to treason. The writer Susan Sontag was pilloried for registering the mildest dissent: led by the Bush administration’s intellectual bully-boy-in-chief, the writer Andrew Sullivan, a campaign was unleashed against anyone who opposed the neoconservative project of “draining the swamp” of the Middle East. Sullivan, you’ll recall, even went after some obscure poet whose poem he claimed had blasphemed the memory of 9/11 – a misreading he later acknowledged, but only after the damage had been done and the heretic had been defamed.

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