The real horror of 9/11 was not the few thousand deaths in the western hemisphere, but the few hundred thousand unnecessary ones executed in retaliation in the eastern hemisphere (none of which reduces the likelihood of a recurrence).
All we learned from the whole thing is that if you want to attack the USA, terrorism is the most effective way. A tiny investment will cause the entity to respond by working hard to abandon its own principles destroying itself, destroying thousands of others, and wasting unfathomable amounts of money.
> The real horror of 9/11 was not the few thousand deaths in the western hemisphere, but the few hundred thousand unnecessary ones executed in retaliation in the eastern hemisphere (none of which reduces the likelihood of a recurrence).
Not to mention the tens of thousands of illegally detained, usually on fake or wrong pretenses, and the many of them tortured. Every one of them, and everyone that knows them, has every reason to hate the guts of everything remotely American.
No, they aren’t - the difference is all about formalities; from the moral standpoint they are precisely the same. It doesn’t matter if you go killing innocent people because of religion, political interests, race, or money.
If that's true (which I doubt), the US military is fantastically bad at their job.
Low estimates of the cost of the Iraq war put it at 185k dead iraqi civilians.
I believe that it is much more likely that the US military simply doesn't care much about civilian deaths incurred whilst it seeks useless vengeance. This satisfies Occam's Razor, too.
All we learned from the whole thing is that if you want to attack the USA, terrorism is the most effective way. A tiny investment will cause the entity to respond by working hard to abandon its own principles destroying itself, destroying thousands of others, and wasting unfathomable amounts of money.
This is as true now as ever.