Hacker News Reader

Comment by RUG3Y | Hacker News Reader

I asked the question ~2009. What never made sense to me is that with unsecured borders, what's the point of invaded a poor country of goat farmers? Ok yeah, so Al Qaeda supposedly attacked us and they were allegedly being harbored in Afghanistan. But the guys in the planes were Saudi. Why didn't we invade Saudi Arabia? (That's a rhetorical question). If someone wants to come here and hurt us, they can do it pretty easily. Invading Afghanistan doesn't solve that problem. The whole thing is a joke.

Now I'm aware of a host of reasons for us to be there, none of them good. Of course we're in Afghanistan for some purpose.

View on HN

Yeah, by '09 there was clearly no reason. When they originally sold the war they played up Al Qaeda's size, power, and level of infrastructure (specifically in Afghanistan) so, assuming you believed that[1] the original invasion kind of made sense.

[1] personally, my suspicions that the claims that this organization was so huge and capable and dangerous, yet had only just now managed anything so big and had totally failed to achieve any of the more obvious follow-on attacks, smelled a bit of BS (that is, its size and capabilities were being wildly exaggerated) were confirmed when IIRC Rumsfeld went on the news with a diagram of some GI Joe playset-style giant underground base thing that couldn't conceivably have been built in secret due to its scale and equipment, and claimed that Bin Laden had "not one, but several" of these obviously-fantasy supervillain lairs hidden in Afghanistan. That they were clearly lying about the popular war that was an easy sell definitely colored how I received their later pitch on Iraq. Not that it mattered.

Here's that interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGhGHxw0mSo

It's shocking now to watch. How did anyone ever buy this? I remember being 18 at the time and thinking it was completely ludicrous. I wonder if anyone seriously believed it or if it was just the story that the media needed to hear to feel less sheepish about acting like this war made any sense.

Heh, we must be around the same age.

Man, I went to Wikipedia because I was curious whether the timeline and events I had in my head for the early let-the-inspectors-back-in demands and the later, infamous leave-or-die "ultimatum" Bush leveled against Hussein right before Iraq invasion was correct (there's very little about all that, and I found some material on the ultimatum itself but never the actual word "ultimatum", which is weird since that's what everyone called it at the time and a big deal was made of it) and now I'm all pissed off again that Bush & Co. aren't in prison for life, from reading all the war lead-up material, including some of the suspected-at-the-time-and-now-confirmed stuff about how they were planning to invade no matter what. Wow, there are some emotions I hadn't felt in a while. Nostalgic, I guess.

There are a lot of things that are shocking to watch with the perspective of time.

Like this article, from 1993, about the 'Anti-Soviet warrior' Bin Laden:

http://www.businessinsider.com/1993-independent-article-abou...

I find it fascinating.

Karzai thinks AQ is a myth, has never seen or heard reports of them in Afghanistan :

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/sep/10/hamid-karzai...

> they were allegedly being harbored in Afghanistan

The Taliban never even attempted to hide the fact that they harbored Bin Laden. Not sure if that partially answers your question.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com