Chihuahuas can have issues with Great Danes but if they have any brains they don’t pick fights with them. It was the US that declared war and promptly got its butt kicked. It’s hard for me to see how declaring war and losing it can be viewed as anything but a mistake.
Uh huh. Well, certain Chihuahuas in the Mideast are picking a big fight with a Great Dane right now. Would you describe them as smart?
In any case, the outcome of the War of 1812 was that Great Britain stopped impressing American sailors, and in the future negotiated any boundary dispute directly by negotiation with the United States, which they now recognized as a sovereign state. For our part, we gave up the foolish notion of invading Canada, and general peace has prevailed between our three countries ever since.
Win-win, which seldom happens in a war, and I don’t know how these things might have been settled otherwise.
How anyone regardless of their position on Iraq could think that 9/11 was more damaging to America than the clusterfuck we have now is beyond me.
Perhaps this is a tangent, but I learned in grade school that negotiation settled the issues before the declaration of war was printed up and put on the boat to Blighty, and that had virtually instantaneous communication of the settlement been available, we could have skipped the entire war. Has this been debunked by more recent scholarship?
The sad truth is that for Bush and for anyone connected with Haliburton, and their ilk… it was not a wasted opportunity.
Maybe I’m not a regular Merkin, living in a county where only 15% of the folks are “white”, but the Iraqis are white, aren’t they? Caucausians with olive skin? I have Italian friends darker than many Iraqis. And I have a lot of pro-war relatives and not even the most jingoistic has used racial terms describing the enemy.
Only true for the Battle of New Orleans, fought after the signing of the Treaty of Ghent. The British got word of the treaty at the end of the battle, and decided not to continue fighting. Well enough for them, as the battle for them was a loss.
9/11 was more damaging in that it made the Iraqi invasion possible.
Well, I had known about the close of the war, but I had been given to understand that the beginning of the war was also a case of “letters crossing in the mail,” so to speak.
9/11 was certainly not wasted, but maybe mis-used?
9/11 was worse, because it changed our whole culture in a negative, fundamental way.
The Iraq war was bad, but we’re still pretty much the same people now as we were before.
If you want to talk about “what’s worse for the cause of world peace” or “what’s worse for the Middle East?” then the Iraq war is a no brainer winner there. Or maybe not, on second thought. America’s invasion and occupation of Iraq is directly leading to the swelling of Iran’s influence in the region, which might turn out to be a stabilizing factor after we finally leave. No matter how much we don’t like them, Iran’s government is the most stable in the Middle East, and the citizens of Iran are “free” by most definitions of the word
That is a REALLY good point.
Thanks.
9/11 was a horrific series of events, but they were pretty much isolated, and needn’t directly affect the daily lives of every American.
But we bought into a culture of fear, eagerly casting away freedoms in the hopes of some security. A definite shift.
Mr. Moto, any response to the actual OP?
I believe that the invasion of Iraq was by far much, much more harmful to the US than the attacks of September 11th.
Mosier does have a point that 9/11 gave Bush and the Republicans license to wreak havoc on a great deal of our civil liberties and an easy rallying point for his Manichean mentality.
However, I’d still say that the negative effects for America, both directly and secondarily as a member of the world at large, are far more dire as a result of Bush’s war than the terrorists attack.
Good point. Bigotry against Muslims is acceptable by far too many in the US. Surrendering civil liberties should be unthinkable, but too many don’t care. The pre 9/11 US was a better nation than it is now.
Well, yes and no. It certainly made it easier to get the public behind invading Iraq, but seeing as how this bunch was hot to trot into Iraq from the get-go, they likely would have done it anyway.
A bit-off-the-topic stray thought: maybe the only thing keeping these clowns from invading Iran is the military saying to them, “I you wanna do that, you’ll have to do it with two Jeeps and a refurbished Gatling gun; this well is dry.”
No, I’d disagree with that. The attack didn’t change the culture; our leaders’ response to the attack - including their decision to include Iraq in into the 9/11 response - did as much to create the cultural climate as the attack did.