Instead of ineffective airport security and wars that only added to the body count, what if we had just gone back to business as usual? The War on Terror has killed well over a million people, and is still not over. It has also added trillions of dollars to the national debt. I am starting to think that doing nothing at all would have been better.
We should have treated it like a natural disaster. Just rebuild and move on. I know that it was a horrible tragedy. That doesn’t give us the right to kill several hundred people for every one that we lost. The worst part of all this is we are giving the terrorists exactly what they want. They want to cause disruption, which they got when we starting taking away rights from our own citizens. They also want to become matryrs. Al-Qaeda and ISIS only got bigger as the war went on. War against the USA was a recruiting tool for them.
Drunk drivers cause far more deaths than Al-Qaeda did, and we don’t blow them up. To put things in better perspective, more people die every month in car crashes than died on 9/11.
An interesting question to bring up on memorial day.
Short answer: because if we’d have ignored the first one, we’d have had a second one.
And you could have asked the same question about Pearl Harbor. Maybe if we’d have just ignored it…
(Edited to add) I may be a bit oversensitive to this because for twelve hours I thought I’d lost my wife on 9/11. Fortunately, that turned out not to be the case.
Ignoring it would not have been good. However, not overreacting to it (with a diffuse and ill-defined ‘War on Terror’ that largely serves as an excuse to attack anyone we’re sufficiently suspicious of…like, say, allowing a President with a grudge to declare war on the country that didn’t get sufficiently trounced by his father) would have been nice.
Why not apply the same logic to drunk drivers? Just ignore it. Why bother trying to decrease drunk driving by arresting people who do it and taking away their licenses? That costs money.
Well, leaving aside the fact that it would have been impossible for ANY US president to have ignored such an attack and carried on with business as usual, if we’d have turned isolationist then it probably would have been bad for both the middle east and Europe since that would have meant an unencumbered AQ with secure bases in Afghanistan and the cred to take down the US would be free to operate anywhere it wanted, and with huge influxes of funding and volunteers.
We wouldn’t have invaded Afghanistan or Iraq. Other than that, I’m unsure if the body count would be less…I guess there would be some comfort in thinking it wasn’t our fault that we let the region go up in flames, and certainly it wouldn’t have been our military getting killed our our money getting spent. I don’t think doing nothing at all would have been better except in a purely short term and purely American point of view though. Long term you can look at ISIS and expand that by several times, since that’s what AQ wanted to do and be in the region…and unlike ISIS they would have pretty much had a free hand with no one to oppose them at all.
What gave them the ‘right’ to come over here and destroy billions of dollars worth of stuff, kill thousands of our people and cause us hundreds of billions in economic downturn? And why do you suppose that, having carried out such an attack directly in the US that they would have patted themselves on the back and said ‘well, we are done now, let’s do some peaceful stuff. Perhaps pet these puppies and kittens…’? Especially since you are suggesting we literally do nothing in response?
Many things cause more deaths than 9/11 did in the US. I bet you advocate gun control even though a lot more people die from cheese burgers in the US than from guns…and I bet you are all for pulling over drunk drivers and arresting them or at least getting them off the road. Relatively few people died from the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor…should we have just turned the other cheek and allowed the Japanese to do what they like? When and where would you draw the line? This wasn’t the first attack AQ did against the US after all, and it doesn’t seem likely that, having hit us hard, killed thousands of Americans AND destroyed billions of dollars worth of buildings and infrastructure and causing us 100’s of billions of dollars in economic damage that they would have stopped. So, we just keep turning the other cheek? And the French should just do the same when terrorists go in and blow away cartoonists because, you know, cartoons are deadly serious. And the Spanish should do the same when they bomb their subway? And the English…and…and…and…?
I’d argue that we essentially DID ignore the East African embassy bombings and the USS Cole bombing, and it got us 9/11.
THIS.
Does OP even realize that 9/11 wasn’t the first time Al-Qaeda tried to destroy the World Trade Center? They tried it in 1993, but the explosive wasn’t powerful enough. The US took a measured, restrained response to the incident… And you see what happened.
I get incredibly angry when I see people who think the whole history of terrorism begins on 9/11. The US has spent over a decade exercising restraint and patience with Al-Qaeda, and the problem just got worse. This is the fundamental truth about American terrorism policy: We tried peace, we tried law enforcement, we tried ignoring it, and we tried measured responses. IT DIDN’T WORK. The War on Terror had to happen because - and this is important - WE TRIED EVERYTHING ELSE AND IT DIDN’T. FUCKING. WORK.
Well, there’s a lot of speculation. But one thing I know is that Bush would have lost to an ocelot in the 2004 election.
Do you mean business as usual like maintain bases in their holy land and starve thousands of Iraqi children with sanctions, etc? Yes another attack would have happened.
If you mean business as usual and stop antagonizing, starving, and meddling while learning some things about airline security? Who knows what would happen, we never tried it.
We wouldn’t have invaded Afghanistan. But there’s a good argument that our invasion of Iraq was an example of us ignoring 9/11. Instead of staying focused on the people who had attacked America, the Bush administration went back to its pre-9/11 obsession with Saddam and Iraq.
I disagree. Cheney would have lost to an ocelot in the 2004 election after Bush’s impeachment.
Maggie had my vote :2cents:
It’s an interesting question. From outside the USA, the reaction to 9/11 looks fearful and out of proportion. The establishment of Homeland Security, long waits at airports, troops on the ground in Afghanistan, holding prisoners for over a decade at Guantanamo, rendition etc etc.
By contrast the Spanish, French, and British people have experienced terrorism - and got on with life. Yes their governments have taken increased security measures but generally the Europeans shrug and move forward. Anarchists and bombs might be rare but they have existed since the mid-19th century in Europe so that tiny risk is accepted. Fought against and largely prevented.
Certainly the USA should have reacted to 9/11 and it should be remembered. But it could have been much lower key and with the benefits of modern technology, just as effective.
I think the response to 9/11 should have been to treat it as a crime and involve police tactics and the intelligence community to identify those responsible and bring them to justice. Invading Iraq and Afghanistan in response was clearly a mistake.
Well by this logic, the United States shouldn’t have gotten involved in World War II after Pearl Harbor. Maybe Jeannette Rankin could have had a vote co-supporter.
Anyway, to answer the question:
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Bush’s approval rating would have plummeted to something like 3% and the Republicans would be absolutely smashed in the 2002 midterms and 2004 election. So a complete political nonstarter to begin with.
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The “fighting terrorism is giving terrorists what they want!” argument is nonsensical. So by this logic, if a serial killer wants to be imprisoned and/or executed by the government in order to make him a “martyr,” then the FBI should just ignore the serial killer and let him keep on doing his thing?
First of all, Iraq was unrelated to 9/11.
Second, how do you “bring them to justice” without some form of action in Afghanistan? This isn’t like arresting criminals in Chicago, which is US soil. Al-Qaeda was located largely in the Middle East. The Taliban wasn’t going to hand bin Laden over to the United States. “Identifying those responsible” is one thing. How do you actually get those terrorists in American custody? There was going to be zero cooperation from the Taliban.
The best thing to do for our soldiers is to bring them home alive. How many people today put flowers on the grave of a father, or a brother, or a son, who might still be alive if we hadn’t gone to war in Iraq?
I have a lot of respect for the military. The Congress that sends them to die unnecessarily, not so much.
The response to 9/11 was massively out of proportion to the number of deaths. The war against Al-Qaeda was done in a way that didn’t make sense. They were more like an alliance of criminal gangs than a government.
Imagine if Norway decided to bomb the USA to stop white supremacists after the attacks by Breivik. It would be absurd, but it isn’t all that different from what we did to Iraq.
OK, hold on here.
Breivik was a lone wolf, and America wasn’t in the picture at all. White supremacy is hardly an American-only thing (you *have *heard of the Third Reich haven’t you?)
If a white supremacist terrorist organization intentionally harbored by the US government launched a sophisticated hijacked-airliners attack on Norway - not the first attack, by the way, but had also attacked Norwegian skyscrapers in 1993, bombed two Norwegian embassies in Africa in 1998, bombed a Norwegian warship in 2000, and Norway demanded that the US government hand over the culprits responsible for planning and the US government willfully didn’t, *then *your analogy would make more sense.
**Edit: ** Sorry, I was referring to Afghanistan, not Iraq.
Nitpick: It wasn’t unrealated in that the public support from the war derived from post-9/11 sentiment. Also, I suppose, you can make a case that there are deeper connections between the situations. But yeah, a response involving military action in Afghanistan but not in Iraq would have been cheaper and more effective and probably meant that ISIS would not be nearly as much of a presence as it is.