@Terra I'll never forget what Hunter S Thompson said the day after the attack. He called it.
@Tweetfiction @Terra@chaosfem.tw This is what happens when you slap America, it lashes out, striking at whatever looks like it might be responsible. Not really effecitve? How many effective terrorist attacks since 9/11???
@Pjcoyle That’s spurious at best. How many effective attacks were there in the 20 years before 2001?
@standev Fair enough, the problem is too complex for 'simple' solutions. But maybe if you compared pre- post- 9/11 attacks in Europe with those in US it might provide some support for the idea. Again, almost certainly not conculsive. A better counter arguement may be the cost of the response vs the lives lost in US in the 9/11 attacks, or the number of civilian collateral casualties compared to the number of citizens cilled in US. The response was ugly from a lot of views. The unanswerable question is how many more people would have been killed in US without the excessive response?
@Pjcoyle The cost of the response was about $1T, 7000 US military deaths, several hundred coalition military deaths, 19K Iraqi security forces deaths, 46K Afghan civilian deaths, 66K Afghan security forces deaths, and >100K Iraqi civilian deaths. That feels like not great ROI to me, but I am admittedly close to the issue.
@standev As you can probably tell from my responses, I am of mixed opinions. One thing is absolutely clear, it was a knee-jerk reaction to a complex problem. Those seldom end well....
@Pjcoyle Two of those were domestic and unlikely to be deterred by us invading countries. I suspect that a variance of one in the before vs after period is not sufficient data to definitively state that invading countries is an effective deterrent to international terrorism.