I think everybody is missing the point: 9/11 wasNOT intended to terrify the American people, It was done for the benefit of the Arab/muslim masses…it was mainly for OBL to show the islamic world that America COULD be attacked. In effect, it was retribution for what the islamic fanatics saw as OUR attacks on them (US troops in Saudi Arabia, defiling the “holy places”, support of Israel, etc.). The whole point of OBL’s organization is to drive the US out of the Middle East, and eventually overthrow the SA monarchy.
My guess is that OBL would not want to repeat the 9/11 operation…his group is now looking at ways to foment revolution in SA (witness the recent attacks). And, by driving up the price of oil, he can also improve his resources.
Is he (OBL) being successful? If the US is forced to abandon Iraq, I would say he is.
Thank you, JJ and WoodCM. I’ve been meaning to post something like this, but being a Limey I figured I’d just get piled on.
Fewer than 3,000 people were killed in the 9/11 attacks. Tragic, yes, but to hear the media coverage for months, years, afterwards, you’d think the world had ended. Do we hear so much wailing about the thousands killed in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Sudan, in the Congo, in Angola, and so on, and so on.
No.
Americans are not worth more than other humans. Their deaths are not more important, and do not warrant unjust wars, unjust restrictions of freedom, and unjust arrests.
J.J.:
I don’t know about impeached…
Tough talk was appropriate in the aftermath of 9/11, and most people supported invading Afghanistan. But then we should have gotten out the carrot and concentrated on nation-building in that countryand then begun the complex process of addressing the problems in the Middle East that are at the root of the terrorist threat. We’d have already demonstrated our capacity for tough action and that we aren’t going to “appease” the terrorists. It’s just that the only tool Bush has is a hammer, so every problem is a nail and every nail is a problem.
Putting a good blackjack in each seat pocket next to the 300% markup catalog would do more for airline security than anything that has acutally been done, at a few orders of magnitude less cost.
I agree, except that Bush did have many, many other tools at his disposal, and chose not to use them. I think it’s clear BushCo. never had any intention but to invade Iraq, so of course diplomacy, sanctions, and inspections were quite useless.
One could argue the Taliban, by harboring OBL&Co., was complicit in 9/11, and bringing responsible Taliban leaders to justice is appropriate. One could further argue bringing down the Taliban govt. might be the only effective way to prevent OBL&Co. from committing further attrocities and bring them to justice, since the Taliban refused to hand them over. Hence some level of military action in Afghanistan was appropriate.
Iraq was a completely different issue, despite the specious claims of the Bush administration to the contrary. There was never any credible evidence supporting a connection, direct or otherwise, between Iraq and al Qaeda, beyond some tentative communications while OBL was in Sudan; and those overtures were spurned. There were no WMDs in Iraq, as the inspectors had indicated before we attacked, and nothing to indicate, despite some Iraqi recalcitrance, that the inspecters were incapable of doing the job they set out to do. They simply weren’t given time, and it became clear early on that BushCo. wasn’t interested in their findings regardless of what they might be. Renewed and robust inspections, though the appropriate tool for the job in Iraq, were nothing more than a pretense, as far as BushCo. was concerned. Surely Saddam knew the US was serious about military intervention if necessary to compel Iraq to comply with UN demands; our action in Afghanistan made this amply clear. Perhaps what Saddam did not know was that compliance didn’t matter; we would attack under any circumstances, because taking down Saddamn had little or nothing to do with terrorism, or al Qaeda.
I’d just like to pop in and say that I kind of agree. I think that people have a hard time differentiating between what the terrorists themselves actually did, and what the completely unexpected results were. They had no expectation or inkling that they would succeed so very spectacularly. Certainly, even if the towers had remained standing, it would have been a horrific act costing hundreds of lives and we would have been deeply shaken. But I really believe that simply because the towers came down, that drove up the reaction by several orders of magnitude. But the acts of the terrorists would have been the same in either case.
I guess it is “over-reacting” to squash that cockroach on your kitchen counter. And it is “over-reacting” to trap that rat in your basement.
Really, you are incredibly naive. When OBL renounces violence, and stops blowing up embassies, hijacking airplanes, and murdering innocent people, then we will cease our “over-reacting”.
Al Queda and OBL declared war on us. I want them ALL dead. Period
Naive, eh? But in finding and killing ALL of them, you end up killing thousands more innocent people, then are you really successful in reducing them in number? For each Al Qaeda member you kill, you may be creating 5 more. Is that what you want? While my numbers may be wrong, did anyone in our government even consider the possibility? By allowing our government to have more rights in tracking us and searching us and monitoring us, are we really progressing towards a freer world? Or are we naively giving away our rights? Our founding fathers fought for the concepts of freedom and democracy. Al Qaeda is fighting for exactly the opposite. Based on our actions over the past few years, whose vision of Utopia are we progressing towards?
it seems to me that you’re overreacting to the point of this thread. 
wanting to stop terrorists, to win this so-called war, and rendering those responsible either dead or impotent are all noble goals, i’m sure. the problem is that we as a nation have let it dominate our thoughts and our national consciousness, but if you think about it relatively, 3000 people dead is not a whole hell of a lot. we’re not being overrun by terrorists. al qaeda has had one successful attack on american soil in the last decade, hell ever if you’d agree that the first wtc bombing was unsuccessful. more people are killed by their own stupidity. we sit here as a nation cowering from this mysterious threat that never quite materializes, and half the country would gladly give up their own personal privacy to be protected from some amorphous entity that hit us once.
vigilance on the part of those whose job it is to be vigilant would’ve stopped the 911 attacks. there is absolutely no need for the entire nation to be so frenzied about it, and our ham-handed responses were by no means relative to actual attack, nor even remotely to the threat of another attack.
I am assuming that you are not just saying that the media coverage of the above named victims should be more evenly distributed. Is that correct? If some things have been done about 9/11 then shouldn’t more be done elsewhere? Are you complaining about what the Americans have done in Afghanistan and/or Iraq and what they have not done in the other places? Is the media the only one that is guilty or perhaps could the U.N. be just as guilty of ignoring Sudan, the Congo, Angola, and so on and so on? If the U.N. doesn’t do anything and the U.S. does everything wrong then who should be handling the problems in the rest of the world? Since Britain joined in to the “unjust war”, I guess we should call on a multinational group headed by France, Germany and Russia.
Yes there is. For us to never forget what happened. Why shouldn’t a country be really pissed off about what happened 3 years ago? The U.S people are actually pissed about the nature of the attacks not the amount dead IMO.
The problem is, instead of concentrating on Bin Laden and those directly responsible, we’ve gone all out, going after people with only the tiniest connection to Al Qaeda. (Someone who might have sold one of the hijackers a candybar, or something like that). And going into Iraq-while I hate Saddam and am glad he’s gone, we shouldn’t have done it as we did. And they had NOTHING to do with 9-11.
We’ve cast too wide a net, is what we’ve done.
And someday, we’re gonna pay for it.
It’s over reacting if you squash the roach with a sledge hammer and thereby smash the sink, the stove and the dishwasher. It’s over reacting if you try to catch the rat with a bear trap.
This post illustrates over reacting. It implies that if you favor anything but instant, balls-to-the-wall reaction you want to do nothing.
A step back after the WTC disaster, a deep breath and some though surely wouldn’t have been amiss. I don’t think we squashed a single cockroach or killed a single rat in the two weeks following 9/11. That time could have been used to explore alternative strategies and tactics to use and I’m sure some could be found that wouldn’t involve a needless war that was ill thought through. In fact it wasn’t ill thought through, it wasn’t though through at all. Instead our Dilletante in Chief relied on his “gut feelings” that once Saddam was deposed the Iraqis would strew rose petals in our path and we would all live happily ever after in the castle on the hill.
I fear you are correct. It’s really only a matter of time. While we’ve squandered lives and resources in Iraq, we’ve left the real hotbeds unwatched, and our own territory neglected. Our strongest military presence is now in Iraq, and the Islamist extremist presence there is increasing (during the reign of Saddam, it’s presence was about zero). So, are we supposed to feel reassured by this?
“Bring it on!”, Mr. President? Is the man out of his mind?
According to Suleiman Abu Gheith, Muslims are entitled to 4 million American lives. That’s based on an estimate of the number of Muslim dead due to American or Israeli assaults (I don’t think al Qaeda and its ilk view the USA and Israel as a functionally separate entity). I think they’re quite serious about this figure (which, I assume, since that estimate was floated in 2002, has increased somewhat). We do need to be protected, there’s no question.
But invading Iraq, and stretching our military to the point we’re in danger of a draft (there already appears to be a “back-door draft” in effect, in the form of manditory stop-loss re-ups), seems like a piss-poor way of going about assuring national security. Our National Guard, who, I always thought, are around to guard the nation, are being shipped to Iraq; soldiers are being moved from the Korean peninsula, where, last I heard, a real nuclear threat now exists. We’ve spent tens of billions already, and tens of billions more will be spent. How could that vast sum of money have been better allocated?
Our borders are swiss cheese. Our ports are wide open. Our homeland security system is a joke (Yellow!..er, no Orange!..eh, ok, Green! Hell, I don’t know, this intel is two years old…). Our nuclear waste is unsecured. Russia seems to have actually gotten some of its fissionable material stolen (recovered, thankfully), and can’t account for some smaller nuclear weapons in their inventory (they have tens of thousands to keep track of…guarded by soldiers who still often don’t even get paid). Nuclear bomb technology, while sophisticated, is not so complicated to be beyond the reach of our most dangerous enemies. If these guys get one, and there’s no reason to believe they can’t, they’ll use it.
So I agree with anyone who says we must do a better job of defending ourselves. I agree 100% that might require the use of force on occasion. I think terrorist leaders do need to be aprehended, and I think the threat of force must be an option against those nations known to harbor and foster the kinds of groups who would use weapons of mass destruction to kill innocents in any nation.
Invading Iraq and destroying it was NOT the way to accomplish this goal! Not at all! It was such a massive act of stupidity I simply cannot fathom what it must be that our bozo in chief could be afflicted by, that would make him believe that toppling Saddam, at this juncture, in the post 9/11 world, with all the other shit we have to worry about, was in any way even remotely a sane thing to do.
Overreact? We parareacted. We had a rat in the house, so, instead of trapping it, we shot the neighbor’s dog.
Ya know, I really tire of this line.
Explain to me how you can prove this negative? Saddam clearly, CLEARLY supported terrorism. It was announced to the world when he upped the stipend he was paying to palestinian suicide bombers’ families to $25,000, he towed the Arab line that Israel had no right to exist, he payed for and put into action a plan to try and assasinate Bush the elder, and he had billions of oil dollars at his disposal (thank you Kofi).
So you can say, beyond the tiniest shadow of a doubt, with absolute, metaphysical certaintude, that he did not contribute in absolutely any way what-so-ever, not even one penny to al-Qaida?
If it quacks like a duck shoot it, because its a terrorist…
Oh, and for some reading on how the US being in Iraq is seriously hurting al-Qaida:
Can you say with equal certitude that he did? As it is, I find it quite unlikely he had any dealings with OBL beyond the brief overtures we’ve all heard about while OBL hid out in Sudan. Later on, OBL went on to publically deride Saddam and label him an apostate. Saddam gave money to the families of suicide bombers, it’s true; but Syria lets Hamas, et al. hide out in Lebanon, and is essentially fighting a proxy-war with Israel via this arrangement.
Saddam’s only loyalty was to Saddam. His funding suicide bomber’s families was a PR stunt. He would have killed anybody, or turned on anybody, if they so much as sniffed at him within his borders. He shared power with nobody. Osama’s vision of a pan-Arab Islamist state was NOT what Saddam had in mind for Iraq. Saddam is exactly the kind of person Osama wanted out, and it’s somewhat confusing to me why OBL even bothered to contact the Iraqis, except perhaps because he knew his time in Sudan was likely to be ending soon and he needed somewhere to flee quickly. Saddam wouldn’t have hesitated to kill him if he tried to vie with him for power; he’d killed everyone else who had done the same.
No, Afghanistan under the Taliban was the kind of place OBL wanted to be. I think Iraq would have been too hostile under any circumstances. Except maybe right now.
With two planes down in Russia, and indications that hijackers were aboard, I think my point has been proved. Hijacking a plane is no longer a zero-sum game, instead it’s become something where everyone aboard loses.
If you want to fight terrorists, figure out why people are becoming terrorists. Authorities in the west have yet to do that.
That’s a beautiful analogy. It would be even funnier if it weren’t so sickeningly true. If Bush is re-elected and doesn’t seriously rethink his foreign policy, I’d back at odds on that there will be a nuclear attack on the US within 10 years. Seriously.
Do you always use a blog shilling books as a reference?