[HN Gopher] 'The world 9/11 created: What if the U.S. had not in...
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'The world 9/11 created: What if the U.S. had not invaded Iraq?'
Author : MilnerRoute
Score : 31 points
Date : 2021-09-11 16:52 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.washingtonpost.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.washingtonpost.com)
| Apocryphon wrote:
| The Bush administration's post-9/11 policies have done
| immeasurable harm to the U.S. and the world.
|
| Even a lot of the domestic political polarization and social
| crackup we see in America today can be traced back to the
| divisions that be Iraq War created.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| I always assumed GWB just wanted to invade Iraq and used whatever
| he could get his hands on as an excuse. There still would "be"
| WMDs in Iraq even regardless of 9/11.
| redis_mlc wrote:
| I wish ignorant commenters like yourself would do even 5
| minutes research before commenting.
|
| - Iraq made and used chemical weapons in both the Iraq-Iran war
| and against Kurds. ie. WMD. There's plenty of fotos online.
|
| - the Iraqi army was #4 in the world before the first US-Iraq
| war, with SH's stated goal of taking over the entire Middle
| East ("becoming the next Suleiman.")
|
| - KSA and Kuwait paid the US to defend them. KSA also
| contributed $2 billion to the Clinton Foundation, stopping only
| when Hillary "retired." That makes the Clintons some of the
| most corrupt politicians in world history, along with the Biden
| family.)
| LatteLazy wrote:
| Probably, but who would have listened to him? He was well on
| his way to being a 1 term president who did nothing...
| vondur wrote:
| I assumed he wanted to get back at Saddam Hussein for trying to
| assassinate his father.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| He may well have believed the whispers in his ear from the war
| hawks. There was a systematic process of presenting him with
| distorted information.
| [deleted]
| bawolff wrote:
| Even if that's true, isn't that an even more damning
| statement about him as a president? That he wasn't even in
| control?
|
| The way canadian and American intelligence came to different
| conclusions about the same data is suggestive though.
| epoxyhockey wrote:
| It could also have been as simple as Saddam had once tried to
| assassinate GW's daddy and GW was ok with anything
| detrimental to Iraq's leadership.
| 3r3rni9 wrote:
| In case younger readers are unaware, this really may have
| been a motive in itself -- GWB was famously quoted saying
| "he tried to kill my Dad".
| sgt wrote:
| Agreed. I believe (still) that GWB jr is and was a good
| person at heart.
| [deleted]
| throw0101a wrote:
| A news story from September 2002:
|
| > _CBS News has learned that barely five hours after American
| Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon, Defense Secretary
| Donald H. Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans
| for striking Iraq -- even though there was no evidence linking
| Saddam Hussein to the attacks._
|
| * https://www.cbsnews.com/news/plans-for-iraq-attack-began-on-...
| [deleted]
| MilnerRoute wrote:
| A statistic from the article:
|
| _" The Watson Institute at Brown University calculates that
| 184,382 to 207,156 Iraqi civilians were directly killed in war-
| related violence between the start of the American invasion in
| March 2003 through October 2019. But the researchers suggest the
| real figure may well be several times higher."_
| ScaryBashGhost wrote:
| These numbers are really important, especially on a day like
| today. It's strange how much of a _spectacle_ [1] 9 /11 was,
| almost made for TV. _Our_ 3000 victims of terror are thus
| acknowledged, depicted, and disseminated throughout the world.
| As a result, they 're remembered in some sense too.
|
| But the hundreds of thousands more whom we maim, torture, and
| kill across the globe are given no such status -- they're
| barely even admitted to exist! Simple efforts to just _count_
| these people etch them into the documentary record, and allow
| no one to say they couldn 't have known. In this way they serve
| a similar purpose to Holocaust studies: by tallying the victims
| you make it harder to forget.
| MilnerRoute wrote:
| Another interesting statistic: more Americans died in the
| fighting in Iraq than died in the World Trade Center attacks.
| datameta wrote:
| Very topical satire from The Onion:
| https://youtu.be/vb5rHthCXoA
| rejectedandsad wrote:
| It's probably because they're _our_ people. It's normal to
| most acknowledge our own victims.
| throwawayfji wrote:
| That can't explain it. Jews are a small % of the population
| and weren't "our own people", yet the holocaust is
| considered tragic and given a lot of empathy (far more than
| many other genocides). Also at that point you can't claim
| any moral high ground or claim the event is uniquely
| horrible, but the US and it's citizen do just that.
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(page generated 2021-09-11 23:03 UTC)