Let me explain how I remember the aftermath of 9/11 and the months leading up to the Iraq war.

Everyone in Europe was absolutely shocked that the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon could happen. I had come home from work a bit early that day, and I was turning on the radio to find out who had won the election in Norway on 9/10. Instead there were all these frenzied reports from the United States. I turned on the television. Both towers had already been attacked, but none of them had fallen. As I watched, the towers fell, one after the other. I was numb. Reporters talked about the Pentagon and about a fourth plane that had been hijacked. It felt as if a war had started, and you didn't know when it was going to end.

After a while it appeared that the immediate attacks had stopped. Only the utter shock remained. I don't remember how soon after the attacks that Sweden's present - but back then, former - minister of foreign affairs, Carl Bildt, started explaining his views on the matter. I should add that Bildt is Sweden's most respected expert on foreign affairs, and he was deeply involved in trying to sort out the mess in former Yugoslavia in the nineties, since he had been appointed by the EU, the European Union, for the job. In other words, Bildt is respected in Sweden. He is also known as a man with right-wing sympathies.

Anyway, it didn't take Bildt many days to point his finger at Al Qeada. Bildt also confidently stated that Al Qeada's base of operation was in Afghanistan. He explained that the very fundamentalist Islamic Taliban government in Afghanistan had given Al Qeada a safe haven there.

I remember that Bildt's statement made a lot of sense to me. No, I hadn't actually heard the name "Al Qeada" before, but I had indeed heard of strange and scary attacks carried out by Muslim groups before. I did remember that the Twin Towers had been attacked before, and Bildt claimed that Al Qeada had been behind that attack, too. And I remembered a horrible attack on U.S. forces in Somalia(?), where more than two hundred Americans had been killed.

Also, I was very well aware that the Taliban government in Afghanistan seemed to be, in opinion, horrible. They practiced the most severe form of the Sharia law. They oppressed women horribly. I remembered very well that they had taken over Afghanistan a few years back, and I had followed reports of how they started oppressing women. It was horrible. It did seem reasonable to me that people who were so extreme would support a movement like Al Qeada.

Apart from Afghanistan, two other countries were mentioned in connection with Al Qeada and 9/11. They were Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Al Qeada was described as a Saudi invention, founded by Osama bin Laden of Saudi Arabia. It had its roots in an extreme Saudi Islamic movement known as Wahabism. The other country mentioned was Egypt, since most of the people who actually carried out the attacks on 9/11 were Egyptians.

Relatively soon, George W Bush demanded that Afghanistan must hand over the Al Qeada people it sheltered to the United States. If Afghanistan refused to comply, the United States would declare war on it. This seemed quite reasonable to me. The way I remember it, Bush's threat of war led to very few protests, and those who protested were widely regarded as crackpots. We thought that they were either incredibly naïve, or else they were militant Islamists themselves.

After a while the United States attacked Afghanistan. Again there were a few scattered protests that no one paid any attention to. The war went very well, the Taliban government was toppled - what a relief that was! - and Osama bin Laden was almost captured. I remember how disappointed I was when he got away. That was really frustrating. But apart from that, it seemed to me that the United States had dealt very properly with the enemy that was behind 9/11. Now, I thought, the United States would go home again and do other things than making war.

Imagine my shock when I read in my newspaper that George W. Bush wanted to attack Iraq, too. Believe me, I read newspapers. I listen to the news on radio and TV. I read British and American publications. But no one - no one - had suggested that Iraq had anything to do with 9/11 before Bush said that he would attack it.

Sure, I knew very well that Saddam was a horrible dictator. I remembered the unspeakably awful poison gas attack on the Kurds in northern Iraq back in the eighties, which left thousands of people dead. That was a genocidal attack. I believe that Bush Sr. was President of the United States back then, or else it was Reagan. If the United States had attacked Iraq after Saddam's gas attack on the Kurds, I would not have protested. And I certainly didn't protest when the United States and a lot of Arab nations attacked Iraq in the early nineties. I remember very well how shocked I was when I heard on the radio that Saddam had invaded Kuwait, just like that. I was glad that the United States and its allies drove him out of there.

Bill Clinton enforced a lot of sanctions on Iraq. I remembered that Carl Bildt, among others, claimed that Saddam tried to make a nuclear bomb. Also he definitely possessed poison gas, as his attack on the Kurds demonstrated. But Carl Bildt also said that the sanctions that were enfored on Iraq would make it hard or impossible for Saddam to make any more poison gas, or to make a nuclear bomb.

When 9/11 happened, nothing had been said about Saddam Hussein for a long time. He hadn't attacked another nation since Kuwait. He hadn't carried out any horrible attacks on the Kurds since the 1980s. No known international terrorist had ever come from Iraq. No one, certainly not Carl Bildt, had ever claimed that Saddam Hussein and Iraq was a dangerous international threat at the beginning of the 21st century that had to be dealt with urgently. And no one had ever said that he was behind 9/11.

I remember how utterly shocked I was that the United States would attack Iraq. The idea that Saddam was an immediate threat to the world seemed to come absolutely out of the blue. It seemed so totally unfair and unreasonable. And I was not the only one who didn't understand anything at all. There were big protests and demonstrations worldwide in February 2003:

Millions join global anti-war protests

Those who had protested against the war in Afghanistan had seemed like crackpots to me. Those who protested against the war against Iraq seemed like very reasonable people to me. What will the world be like if wars are started so easily, just because one nation doesn't like another nation?

TEEEJ, I have to comment on something you said. I'm not advocating the idea of spreading eveybody's money out absolutely equally, just spreading it out a bit more equally. And if you earned - and worked for - $29,000 last year, I wouldn't want you to have to pay very high taxes at all. But if you had earned $290,000 it would have been another matter. Or if you had earned $2,900,000... or $29,000,000... or $290,000,000....

I seem to have earned the reputation of being a communist among some people on these boards. So I can't resist telling you about when I studied sociology at the university in Lund in 1974. All the other people who took that course with me were communists, I'm not kidding you. They were nuts, some of them. Really. I remember that one day a whole bunch of them went on strike. And guess why? Because the Professor who taught us had decided that we all had to read a particular book on sociology. The book was written by a man who was an avowed communist. So why were all those communist students protesting? Why, because the author of that book was an American, of course!!! Imagine being forced to read a book that was written by someone from the United States!!!

I remember I spent hours and hours and hours arguing against those other students, trying to make them see that communism didn't really work. In the end, however, I gave up. That was when one guy said this to me:

"You can't compare the Soviet Union with the Capitalist world! Capitalism has had 200 years to perfect itself. But Communism has only existed since 1917. You must wait for a hundred years, and then you'll see that the Soviet Union will be a paradise!"

Can you believe it? The guy told me that I would see that he was right in a hundred years, when I would be dead. I would see that he was right when I was dead!

I realized two things. This guy was using the same argument that my Pentecostalist relatives would ultimately resort to if someone put pressure on them - those doubters would see that the Pentecostalists were right when the doubters were dead! And I would see that Communism was paradise when I was dead! Yeah, maybe. But it is a lousy argument.

People who claim to know the future are just too self-assured. People who claim to know that their God or their political movement will triumph when we all are dead... well... there's just no reasoning with them.

And if you ask me... no. I'm not a communist. And I never have been one.

Ann