Originally Posted by The Batlord

Well, you lived in Boston at the time if I remember correctly (and if not, I want to say that Philly is a pretty liberal city), so I can imagine that there was more ambivalence in places like that. I'm sure that if the attack hadn't happened in New York there would have been more conflicted feelings over there as well. I remember MoveOn.Org being vocal about restraint, but I also remember them being seen as more of a joke than anything else.

Originally Posted by The Batlord

But I think a combination of the Rally 'Round the Flag effect, constant media footage of the Twin Towers in ruins/being hit by the planes, jingoistic rhetoric from politicians, several subsequent terrorist plots being foiled, and a general lack of familiarity with all but the basics of the modern history of the Middle East allowed for a less nuanced view of the situation.

Before 9/11 almost no one had ever even heard of Afghanistan -- maybe not even myself, even though I have/had a much better understanding of geography than my the vast majority of mouthbreathing fellows. A smaller, but still comparable number of people probably didn't even know the Soviet-Afghan War even happened, let alone our role in it.

Originally Posted by The Batlord

We knew that Iran and Saudi Arabia existed, and that they were ultra-religious places that your average American probably wouldn't want to spend a vacation, but we had little idea of the tenuous power balance/competition between them, along with Iraq, and their influence over the Middle East in general. So, I don't think we really thought much about the consequences throughout the region of toppling Saddam.

It also didn't seem much of a stretch to believe that Saddam was pursuing WMDs. He'd already used chemical weapons on his own people, and I really forget if he actually ever pursued nuclear technology at any point, but it certainly wasn't difficult to paint the situation in a way that made it look like he was/had.

I may have been a high schooler at the time of 9/11, and therefore in an environment that didn't lend itself to intellectual nuance, and was in military school when we invaded Iraq -- I say that due to the bubble world we lived in that really didn't leave us very aware of or interested in the outside world, and not so much because we were a bunch of pro-military, ultra-conservative ignoramuses (quite the opposite, in fact) -- so it's hard to say if the adults around us were as mindlessly gung ho as we were, but I never saw much evidence that they weren't.

Again, this was all in Virginia, but in a much more metropolitan, non-redneck good ol' boy part of the South than many of you might imagine. We're definitely more conservative than liberal, but we're still a swing state to an extent. And while Fishburne Military School, which was in VA, may have had a relatively high percentage of VA students, we also had many kids from all over the country, and plenty from other countries (including more than a few from the Middle East itself).

Again, I partly disagree. We weren't as blood thirsty at that point, but I think we were still perfectly willing to buy into the government's rhetoric. It was pretty explicitly implied that Saddam had harbored terrorists (which obviously turned out to be nonsense), for the most part nobody really questioned Saddam's involvement in WMDs, and the decade-long history of him thumbing his nose at UN resolutions about his military buildup had left the country without much sympathy for him. So, convincing the American public to go into Iraq wasn't really that hard.