Thread by @hunterw

Maureen Dowd in 2021: "It is enraging to watch ... the same people whose cheerleading ensnared us in 20 years of quicksand in Iraq and Afghanistan."

Maureen Dowd in November 2001: "Give war a chance."

That second quote comes from this column "Talkin' Ain't Fightin'" where the fully retconned @maureendowd said Bush "should put down the bullhorn and tell Rummy to get moving." nytimes.com/2001/11/07/opi…

Later that same month, Maureen Dowd was writing about an America "lustily rooting" for war, mocking the nation for losing our John Wayne energy, and suggesting it came back through "pulverizing" the Taliban.

And by the end of November 2001, Maureen Dowd was essentially measuring the in a post-Taliban Afghanistan or, as she put it in this column, the "land of cavemen."

That gets to another theme in Maureen's early War On Terror columns, using degrading language to refer to the people of Afghanistan. In her first post 9/11 piece, she uncritically quoted Kipling referring to the Afghans as "utter brutes." nytimes.com/2001/09/16/opi…

She went on to quote Kipling again in the first months of the war to mock Afghans for not eating with forks, but I guess this is a whole other issue.

Anyway, I will give Maureen credit for being a little more clear-eyed about risk of a quagmire in Afghanistan and Iraq than many of her peers, but that's a low, low, low bar and her piece today sure glosses over that.