Veteran's Day 2005

As a non-veteran civilian, I feel both grateful for those who are willing to lay down their lives to defend the American way of life and resentful that so often they're forced to do so based on falsehoods and poor leadership.

Today, I read Paul Krugman (via Atrios). This paragraph rang particularly true for me:

We finally reached a point where a lot of people are starting to acknowledge the obvious, which is that we were deliberately hyped into war, and a lot of defenses are coming up. People are still trying to pretend that nothing happened and it all made sense, and I felt that it was time to find a way to play how ridiculous that is.

People are starting to acknowledge the obvious. I want to know - what made them so afraid that they tried to hide their heads in the sand for so long? What did that to us?