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Apparently they're teaching gradeschoolers that George W. Bush went into Iraq because of 9/11.
(The Iraq war had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.)
Also the CIA torture program had nothing to do with gathering intelligence. But that came out when Trump was pro-extra-torture, and his fans loved him for it.
They were trying to say that at the time.
If you talk to most boomers and even a lot of Gen X they'll say they remember that's what happened. Saying anything else at the time would get you called a conspiracy theorist despite the obvious demonstrable proof that the Iraq war had nothing to do with 9/11.
Even mentioning Abu Grahib would get eye rolls and be meet with coruses of "you just hate America" or "you are one of those 'blame America first' people!"
I'm a young Gen Xer and IIRC it was clear to half the country that the whole WMD story was bullshit, but for a lot of people that bit of clarity came in hindsight after the initial invasion.
I used to joke that Dubya used 9/11 as an excuse to "finish Daddy's work", given that even after the Gulf War Hussein continued to reign for 10 more years. But when Halliberton suddenly started getting all these contract jobs securing oil wells, it was pretty obvious what was going on at that point.
Its strange because I remember there was initial talks about going to Afghanistan to search for Bin Laden, but then suddenly the discussion shifted to the whole bullshit WMD story. IIRC the assigned UN commission that was supposed to do their annual inspections for nuclear and chemical weapons, found nothing during their visit to Iraq just a few months prior, but those chucklefucks in the WH kept pushing the narrative anyway. The Whitehouse did such a half assed job of getting their stories straight, I was sure someone was going to fuck up at some point, but the media kept pushing the assigned narrative and the public bought it.
I think it's safe to say that he used the reactionary climate of the post 9/11 mentality as a vehicle to help jumpstart OIF. But if not a catalyst, it had nothing to do with OIF, you're 100% right. We were taking big steps toward conflict and nothing that was used at that time to justify invasion would have been prevented in the absence of 9/11.
This is how I feel whenever Zoomers are nostalgic for the year 2016. The only reason 2016 looks good when you look back on it is that 2016 hadn't finished doing its damage at the time.
Haven't had this happen yet, but I'm certainly old enough.
For some reason, the one that bugs me a lot is the number of people who can't spell Ronald Reagan's name correctly. Maybe because I remember his chief of staff, Donald Regan.