[next_xibalba]

Well said.

I was a sophomore in high school at the time. Sometime in the late morning, after both towers had been hit and it was clear that it was a terrorist attack, all the classroom TVs were turned on and tuned to the news. I distinctly recall the palpable fear and fury. A fellow student said to me, in a fit of gallows humor, "Get your gun, son. We're going to war."

It did feel as though there was some legitimacy to Afghanistan (of course, even that ended up being folly), but Iraq, which didn't happen until the Spring of '03, always felt tenuous.

Of course, all of it turned out to be a catastrophe, most especially for Iraqis and Afghans.

My personal pet conspiracy theory is that the U.S. leadership realized that the U.S. homeland was not defensible against asymmetric attacks of this nature. They needed to create an external beacon for the jihadists–a theater in which the U.S. military would be the target and the aggressor, not soft targets. And so they chose Iraq, with its dormant sectarian divisions being a perfect cauldron to which those enemies would be drawn.

[civilitty]

> My personal pet conspiracy theory is that the U.S. leadership realized that the U.S. homeland was not defensible against asymmetric attacks of this nature. They needed to create an external beacon for the jihadists–a theater in which the U.S. military would be the target and the aggressor, not soft targets. And so they chose Iraq, with its dormant sectarian divisions being a perfect cauldron to which those enemies would be drawn.

Interesting conspiracy theory! Especially considering that the resulting mess caused a massive refugee crisis and a spike of terrorism in Europe. Even if it didn't keep the terrorist mired in the Middle East, it redirected the violence towards our allies, thus maintaining the general casus beli.

[sanderjd]

I still think the initial campaign in Afghanistan was not a mistake.

But I think after that, we let the military continue running the show there for way too long and never took the diplomatic mission seriously enough.

[causi]

You can't change the soul of a people by force or even by diplomacy. If you look at every nation whose culture reformed after, say, losing in WW2, their behavior during and leading up to that war was relatively different from their norms. Germany's genocidal imperialism was a result of the first world war and the terms of the treaty which ended it. Japan turned imperialist because European colonialism made them decide it was either become an imperial power or get swallowed up. Both nations could revert to relative normalcy after the war.

Afghanistan has been a tyrannical theocracy that uses religion to treat its citizens like dirt while being repeatedly invaded by outsiders for damn near eight hundred years. There is no fixing that, especially not in a couple of decades.