9-11 was the first time I ever saw an authority figure get scared. It was the premature end to my childhood naivety, as it was for many. Suddenly I understood that events like Pearl Harbor and even the Oklahoma City Bombing weren't destructive events devoid of nameless and storyless casualties. Somehow it wasn't just the people that died in 9-11, but also the people from all of the similar events throughout history who's deaths I conceptualized for the first time. In typical childhood fashion this wave of grief and sudden understanding washed away quickly. I distinctly remember talking on bikes later that day with a friend about how we'd surely get school off the next day when Bush declared war on, somebody. Will there be a draft I thought, will it last until i'm 18. Surely not, we'll roll in on tanks and planes and they'll just surrender with only their one victory to cling to. In some ways my naivety ended that day, and in other ways it hadn't even been touched.

They deserved it

For those in favor of leaving Afghanistan, and maybe other countries where we're fighting extremist groups... do you believe there will be no consequences? Or do you accept that there's a tradeoff, that it will allow terrorist groups to have more free reign to plan attacks, and perhaps even seize more territory in those countries, but it's still worth it to pull out?

The populist opinion seems to be that the war on terror isn't really worth fighting anymore. I don't agree with that at all.

Ya know what I remember from that day.... I remember that some assholes from the middle east, flew planes into our world trade centers and the Pentagon.

Then again, I was long past my bike riding days, when it happened. I'm STILL surprised that the middle east even exists today.




/e There were more people killed on 9/11 than in the bombing of Pearl Harbor. And at least Pearl Harbor was a military target. 9/11 was nothing but civilians.







/ee





Not only shouldn't we "pull out" we should do what we didn't do in 2001. We should go into the middle east in force, and eradicate the problem.

P.S. This has nothing to do with skin color, either. This has to do with a group of people that are... insane. They have shown this over and over for at least 40 years on the world stage and a couple thousand years on their own local stage.

This post was edited by Ghot on Sep 11 2019 08:12am

The middle east is the modern day Hitler, only with far less technology. The middle east doesn't want peace...they want "their way".... everywhere. Same as Hitler did. If we or someone, doesn't stop them soon... it will be too late. In 500 years, the EU, the US etc., will look like the middle east... a wasteland with no semblance of civilization left.
We should, as I mentioned, go into the middle east, in force, and eradicate the problem. We should also put the SJW and diversity idiots on the front lines. Let themj see, up close and personal, why they are idiots who don't have a clue.


The UN is a joke. It gives leaders who can't manage to bring their own countries into civilized existence, a vote in world politics. IMO, this is exactly why Nikki Haley left the UN, when she did.



We, the world, are at a weird place in history. We are IN a world war, but it a war of beliefs and words, rather than with bullets. It's still just as deadly as a war with bullets, it's just not as obvious. The losses however, will be just as great, if not greater... if the civilized countries on this planet...lose.


/e Rant, mostly finished.

This post was edited by Ghot on Sep 11 2019 08:32am

An excellent example of fractal wrongness

Or we could put the same bullshit we have all bickered about endless times in endless threads aside for a day and a thread and just remember the lives lost and the sacrifice. Showing respect and appreciation and some form of compassion to those that have suffered. Today isn't about us it's about them

so we should kill people to stop a war of beliefs?

I think the error of the calculation is assuming that our presence is degrading the ability of terrorists to stage attacks more than the non-occupation scenario, and undervaluing our ability to degrade their forces with aerial bombing alone.
The vast majority of terrorist attacks over the past 20 years has been from home-grown terrorists, whether its long established white nationalists or second generation sons of muslim immigrants or whatever. 9/11 is an abberation to that, with foreign terrorists traveling just to get us. And frankly, our ability to stop foreign terrorists was never really influenced by afghanistan. So what if we can destroy a 'terrorist training camp'? A terrorist can train himself entirely online. We just got better security at airports and borders, and now we're a fortress of a country both in intercepting extremists and preventing them from flying here, as well as beefing up our vulnerable targets to stop the next hijacking. That's what has prevented a repeat of 9/11, not boots on the ground in afghanistan. But when we look at domestic terrorists and self-radicalization, the invasions have been either making it worse or doing nothing to help. Widespread support for ISIS exists among Sunni populations in the mideast and the emigrants overseas, and that's led to plenty of shootings, stabbings, bombings, truck ramming attacks, etc. Afghanistan was a backwater pisspot. For every person who learned to built bombs in Afghanistan, there were a dozen more across the rest of the developed mideast who would gladly use bombs against America if they got the chance, and could learn how to build them in 2 hours of google searching. Even if we left Afghanistan with no "keep Al Qaeda out" deal with the Taliban, and they set up camps again- we could simply bomb them with impunity, like how we just blew up an island held by ISIS literally called "Qanus", which I just want to post 5 more times: Qanus, Qanus, Qanus, Qanus, Qanus

The only real threat of a US pullout to Afghanistan/Iraq/Syria is their internal problems and whether extremists can take over control. Besides the threat posed by ISIS encouraging terrorism elsewhere, our stewardship of the globe doesn't let us simply abide a humanitarian crisis. Europe took that to the cucked level and let them all in as refugees which was fucking stupid, but even without slitting our own wrists to show our bleeding hearts, we're still going to be responsible for intervening in some fashion. So the real consequences we have to weigh is what will happen to the coalition government of Afghanistan and whether the country can be held together with diplomacy or devolve into civil war the moment we leave.

I think the war on terror is worth fighting but we are fighting it in a way that is, at best ineffective and at worst counterproductive. The only way to truly fight the terrorist groups is 2 make a tangible positive difference in the lives of the people they recruit from.