:dubious: I’m hoping that’s a joke.
Yeah so its more tongue in cheek.
You seem to have a highly idealistic view of how the world should be , so basically you want the cookie but you dont want to put out the nookie to get that result in real life.
Declan
:rolleyes: That’s just silly. If I want to prevent the devastation of nations, the way to accomplish that is to NOT to devastate them. Does the phrase “We had to destroy the village to save it” ring a bell ?
Yup , Vietnam war quote.
I never said you wanted the devasation of nations, what I based that comment on, was that you wanted america with someones boot on their neck. To get that you needed everyone else in the world to gang up on po little merica, to get that you needed world devastation.
You follow now, and please call me on it if what you actually wanted was something else entirely.
Declan
No, I said that the world would turn against America if we went around “glassing” nations like you suggested we do.
Okay thats where we differ, you think the world would do a coalition of the willing and economically subdue America and , and I would suggest other wise that they would actually roll over like puppies wanting their bellys tickled.
Declan
Oh, please. Just like the people of Iraq have ? That’s typical Ameriwank; “Everyone will just roll over and submit when we wave our Manly Manhood of Manliness at them !”
They’d react like actual people do, not like American ego fantasies.
Your also talking about world war two levels of casualties , in about 30 minutes, Like actual people they would be in shock for about ten years. Your looking at trees and missing the forest, its been almost ten years and now some countries like china are finally finding the stones to tweak the states,and thats with their coast guard , so as not to antagonize.
Declan
Garbage; they’d respond right away. THAT is the normal reaction of people. They’d embargo us; kick us out of NATO and turn it into an anti-American military organization; point any nukes they had at us, and do whatever they could to arm themselves with nukes if they had none. It would be a new Cold War, except America unlike the USSR wouldn’t have any significant allies. And with our much more trade oriented economy it wouldn’t last nearly as long before our collapse.
Do you have any evidence that a motivation for the war was Christian crusading? Just asking; I’m generally ignorant on all things regarding politics.
The point is that Al-Qaeda’s motivation is not particularly to kill Americans or harm the United States. That is just incidental. What they are trying to do is impress other Arabs and Muslims with how big their balls are. That is why they go for big symbolic targets like the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and for difficult targets like an American warship. (And why, in my opinion, there is little likelihood that they will try to spread smallpox or anything like that. However many died that way, it would not look cool to their audience.) I am not saying it is just vanity, mind you. They hope that the magnificence of their enormous balls will inspire a religious reformation of Islam and a renaissance of Islamic power. Probably they imagine that this would eventually lead to America and everyone else converting to their version of Islam.
Hey… never thought of it that way. Not saying its a correct or incorrect assumption, just interesting.
Except that it wasn’t the middle east, the rest of the world or ANY government organisation that were behind the attacks - so no mesage needed to be sent. In fact most of the world were as horrified as the US itself was.
The attack was commited by terrorists, who by definition are not government bodies representative of the general populace of any country in the world.
So who exactly were you sending a message to? People that didn’t deserve the label that was put on them - and yeah, people sure react well to unjust accusations right?
By the overblown reaction, America justified the attacks - because they sure did work! If I were a terrorist, and I saw the fantastic success of 9/11 I sure as hell would be trying to pull off something similiar. Where as if the US had just rebuilt and got on with life, without all the drama it reduces the success, and thus the motivation to try again.
This is a reply to a couple posts. The motivation to try again would be there regardless of whether we sent in massive amounts of troops. My opinion of course. They are trying to kill westerners in “dramatic” fashion, which is correct. They (the extremely small fraction of terrorists) want non-muslims out of the Middle East. Military or citizen. The “west” disturbs/decays their way of life. That’s probably true of course, yet possibly inevitable as the world shrinks. The reality is the west (business, entertainment, ect.) is not leaving the Middle East (whether the military leaves or not).
I said we should identify the people responsible and capture and punish them. This is one of the few things we didn’t do after 9/11. Executing bin Laden (or putting him in prison) would have done a lot more to stop al-Qaeda than rewriting the Constitution or passing tax cuts or invading Iraq did.
I think September 11 isn’t as important as we pretend. I think its priority should be much lower than we made it.
On the three days September 11, 12, and 13, 2001, about the same number of Americans were killed by terrorism and by cigarette smoking. Some just roll their eyes at the thought.
In September 2001, about as many Americcans were killed in the US by themselves as by terrorists, as happens to almost 3000 Americans every month.
In 2001, many more Americans were killed in our “homeland” by drowning in unfenced swimming pools than by terrorism, and it happens every year. Moreover, the deaths are predominantly little children. Surely one can consider 5000 American children dying every year a bigger priority than 3000 mostly adult Americans dying one year without it being an outrageous slight to the September 11 victims and their survivors.
The point of terrorism is that the broad group of people under attack are mostly effected by the upset they pass around to each other. In other words, our reaction is a primary ingredient, the critical ingredient, in the harmfulness of the mix.
While I am probably getting people mad at me, let me take one step further and say that calling it “9/11” is bizarrely unthinking on our part. The trouble is that, in much of the world, the date “9/11” is November 9th. To many, this is horrifying because it is the date of Kristallnacht, the night of the breaking glass. We did get the sympathy of much of the world, which is a good thing, but might it not surprise someone that we have sort of misappropriated the date the Holocaust started for our much smaller disaster?
Jihadist terrorism can be fatal to individual victims, but on a national scale it is no more than a pain in the ass. It is not an existential threat to America or the West, and it never was. Terrorism is a tactic factions sometimes turn to when they have no hope of winning their goals at the ballot box or on the battlefield; IOW, it is a tactic admission of weakness, and an effort to inflate the faction’s perceived strength. The Symbionese Liberation Army (Free Symbia!) inspired fear in Californians for years even though it never had more than 20 members.
Not exactly. Heart disease and cancer are end-of-life diseases, and we all have to die some day. In fact, I wouldn’t prioritize the issues strictly in terms of death. (Death gets attention because it is easily quantifiable, at the expense of other metrics.) But, yes. It’s very similar to how people worry about vanishingly small risks and ignore the very common ones. Except in the case of big issues like terrorism, there isn’t a group of people who are permitted to regularly point that out.
We trade the risk of car death for the benefit of moving around quickly and freely, and we mitigate it by wearing seatbelts, driving safe speeds, doing head-checks, etc. There’s no tradeoff for terrorism, and very little you can do to mitigate your risk. There’s also the psychological factor of murder being far more dreadful than accidental death. Another human being taking your life on purpose is infuriating and terrifying in a way a car wreck cannot be. Like I said when you started digging this hole, you’re not taking all factors into account.
The tradeoff for terrorism is what you’ll spend on security in terms of allowing government more power, actual money spent on security, etc. You have to weigh as a society how much government intrusion and budgetary increase is worth what rather small protection it provides. If the cost of terrorism is a few hundred people dying here or there, it probably isn’t worth the risk of big, intrusive government and huge security budgets. Some cost-effective security measures could be nice, but we’ve overreacted. That’s what this thread is about.