What is Reddit's opinion of First In: An Insider's Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan?

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> We got some shitty information and went into the first country we could.

The neocon warhawks concocted some shitty information and invaded the first country on the Worldwide Attack Matrix.

FTFY

In truth, the first country we invaded was Afghanistan using CIA and SOCOM assets to fund and lead the Northern Alliance resistance fighters. The plan was extremely effective at targeting and eliminating those pesky Taliban crazies. Short story here or the fascinating recollections of Gary Schroen, the CIA operative who led the plan concocted by then Director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet.

Sadly, Donald Runsfeld, Paul Wolfowitcz and all the other PNAC'ers wanted to use the emotional tide of American anger over 9/11 to enact the grand designs of their 2000 position paper Rebuilding America's Defenses (an 80 page read which should be required reading for every American concerned about the welfare of America, pointless wars, the proliferation of drone warfare and surveilance and/or Snowden's revelations of the emerging surveillance state we now live in. Short story here.) The PNAC'ers couldn't have the success of an extremely limited covert team with a relatively tiny budget beating down the Taliban and al-Qa'ida and thus taking away their chance to open the can of whoop-ass in Iraq so they ceased the covert CIA operations and locked Tenet out of the war room. When the Iraq war started to become the shit-show it turned into around 2004, Tenet became a liability and they politely acquired his resignation, gave him a medal and installed their man Porter in his place.

Impulsive behavior did not lead us into the Iraq War. It was a calculated and maneuvered effort that was going to happen regardless of 9/11. Kevin Fenton's Disconnecting the Dots is the definitive telling of how the American people (and the rest of the world for that matter) were duped by these assholes. Peter Dale Scott's version here with over 100 excellent citations and references to further your reading.

Great to see that you feel shame over supporting the war. All I can recommend for you is to continue into adulthood with eyes wide open, question everything and read, read, read. That will lower the chance that some of the stupid is still sticking around.

edit: Removed unnecessary link. Also, before anyone gets tight undies, I'd have used a less tinfoil hat-ish source for the RAD paper but it appears to be the only one left. And because the summary from the site hits all the highlights minus the parts about mass reduction of world population, Dick Cheney's contribution. Seriously, read the whole paper.

edit2: Forgot to add the part of Tenet's demise and corrected his position in the CIA