List of accomplishments in the war on terror that have made Americans safer:
- Cockpit doors now have locks that prevent unauthorized entry.
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Well, that’s about it.
In the 15 years since the war on Terror started there have been 130 Americans killed by Islamic terrorism. In the 15 years before the war on Terror started there were 2,915 Americans killed by Islamic terrorism.
It seems that by reducing the number of Americans killed form 194 per year to 9 per year the war of Terror could be said to be a success.
This seems statistically faulty in some way.
Well…yeah. To show something you’d need to look at the previous 15 years, and the previous before that and so on, then graph the results to see if there was an upward trend that has now sharply decreased. AFAIK, there is no such trend. 9/11 was a pretty one off event.
That said, I think anyone who can say this…:
…with a straight face and in all seriousness (hopefully it was tongue in cheek) is in the same sort of boat.
It’s possible to have truth on both sides. It’s also possible to win battles and lose wars. So it’s possible that relatively minor measures, such as intelligence coordination and taking warnings/security threats seriously, and locking cockpits, has broken up attacks that would have proceeded otherwise, lessening the death toll of domestic incidents.
At the same time, the number of lives saved pales in comparison to lives lost in Iraq and Afghanistan, so those parts may have been costly failures both of lives and money, with the net effect being failure.
Wouldn’t the same calculus go for the terrorists, though? I mean, the number of lives lost on the terrorist side, especially in the top echelon, has been vastly more in the last 15 years than most likely at any time in the history of ME terror against the US. Seems to me that, using your logic, the terrorists have failed a hell of a lot more than the US has in this ridiculous conflict.
But is that actually decreasing the number of terrorists, potential terrorists, and people who in general just don’t much like us?
I mean, yeah, we’ve killed more people over there than they have killed people over here, but that’s a pretty depressing metric.
Apples to apples, our losses in Iraq and Afghanistan haven’t noticeably decreased the number of US troops either. They are still losses, however. In the terrorist’s case, they have lost a number of very key leadership people while the US hasn’t lost any. Well, except for Trump taking over, which is certainly a ‘loss’ for us, but wasn’t a result of terrorist actions.
Well said. Everything else IMO shows miniscule benefits for the money, time, lives, and loss of liberty/privacy spent.
Ultimately it is unknowable because we don’t know if terrorism would have gone down , stayed at the same level or increased to a higher level without the war on Terror. At the time it seemed like Terrorism had taken a permanent step up because the had taken over a country and engineered such sophisticated attack and that if nothing were done the attacks were likely to escalate.
Except for that time where a pilot locked his copilot out and deliberately crashed the plane as part of his suicide plan.
Again, absolutely false. The most powerful armed group in Syria is the Syrian Army, with it’s Russian allies.
This is not an all-or-nothing subject area, OP. That’s the point. This thread is based on the idea that fighting terrorism is either all good or all bad, and it just aint that way.
Your assessment is entirely mistaken. The OP does not say “should we or should not fight terrorists”, it asks, essentially, whether it is being handled appropriately. Some among us feel that the USA PATRIOT Act was actually a victory for the terrorists. Bush claimed that they hate us for our freedom – he solved that problem by taking a bunch of it away from us so that they would have less to hate.
This may be unpopular opinion but because of the 3000 people who died on 9/11, the chances that any of my family members or even the family members of some dopers will die in a hijacked airline are virtually non-existent; along with the high resistance of passengers on planes.
As bad as 9/11 was, it was great in the sense that it forced governments to wake up to the reality that ‘only a fringe minority’ of radical extremists among millions of law abiding citizens could cause devastation of an enormous magnitude. No one would have ever believed that 19 suicidal men could kill thousands of civilians in a single hour.
The War on Terror has been and is stupid, but the security measures that have resulted from 9/11 weren’t.
I think this is the one part open for dispute.
I think if some militia is on its way to massacre a village, and you can stop it, then I’m all for doing that. I’ve never reserved my shits for people born within the same state.
I just hope the various fuck ups in the ME doesn’t make us even less likely to do something when the next Rwanda comes 
If I had 19 non-suicidal men, I suspect that I could take out more than a few thousand people, and it wouldn’t be a one-time event.
The US is a good boogeyman for terrorism. It’s not a particularly interesting military target. We’re too far away, the melting pot culture makes it too difficult for native Islamics to turn rogue, and there’s no chance of actually winning against us. One ventures to guess that Osama Bin Laden approved the airplane attacks more because the leader of the expedition was either so gung-ho crazy about doing it that it was an annoyance, or because he was a rival for leadership and a suicide mission was a good way to get rid of him. You’ll note that there were no real attacks on the US in the 40 years preceding 9/11 and there haven’t been any since, either.
Consider the advantages that the police have in tracking down murderers. The crime has already happened, there’s no ambiguity; everyone is local; almost everyone speaks English; almost everyone is willing to cooperate in the investigation; there’s one police man to every thousand civilians; etc. And yet, 1/3rds of homicide cases go completely unsolved.
Protecting against foreign terrorism means surveilling the many billions of non-Americans, who speak a wide variety of languages, have no interest in being helpful, might not be using any technologies that would allow for surveillance, and there’s a good chance that when people are talking about shooting, killing, etc. that they’re just talking smack, not actually plotting a terrorist act, yet you have to waste time tracking it down.
It would be completely unreasonable to expect our defenses to be anywhere up to the task of protecting us against foreign terrorism at anything like the rate at which police are able to track down murderers. If we can only achieve a 2 in 3 victory there, we would expect something like a 1 in 100 or worse success rate at defending against terrorism.
The fact that there are so few terrorist acts is not a matter of great defense. It’s a matter that no one is trying very hard to attack us.
“Lone wolf”? I realize neither 3/11 nor the Paris attacks were on the scale of 9/11, but they’re definitely not “lone wolf” things.
Two things:
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They’ve also vastly increased recruitment as a result of the War on Terror. Increasing rates of dead terrorists does not, by itself, mean that there are less terrorists.
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The number of killed is a horrible metric to judge war on. You judge based on how well you accomplish your goals. Our goal is to preserve or advance US safety and power in the world. The goal of the terrorists is to decrease US power. I think this is pretty clearly tilted in their favor.
If you just count the dead, the US won Vietnam, and I think even McNamara would disagree with that.
A “waste” is something with zero value. The U.S. war on terror has been worse than a waste, fomenting the very terrorism it was supposedly intended to thwart.
U.S. misbehavior in Iraq has been the best recruitment tool that the radical Islamic terrorists could hope for.
There is so much wrong with your calculus, I’ll mention just one of the more blatant oversights:
There have been at least 9000 deaths of American soldiers and American contractors in the Afghan and Iraq wars. Is 2915 still bigger than 194+9000 ?