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Comment by dx87 | Hacker News Reader

I don't know if it's really fair to say that after 9/11 we were playing world police when we invaded Afghanistan. They were harboring Al Qaeda who had been carrying out smaller scale attacks on US assets for a while, culminating with 9/11. At that point you can't just ignore them and hope they stop; they'd been escalating violence for years.

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The Bush administration did let the mission in Afghanistan creep from crippling al Qaeda, to reconstructing Afghan society so that al Qaeda could not return. This is what pulled us in to trying to dismantle the Taliban as well. Remember that Taliban and al Qaeda are distinct.

What you describe sounds a lot like the police breaking into a house to arrest an alleged criminal.

>At that point you can't just ignore them and hope they stop; they'd been escalating violence for years.

If you can't ignore the problem, then drastically escalate the violence on your own?

Very much like this: https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/08/31/actor-steve...

We invaded Iraq because of 9/11, not Afghanistan. That came later.

What? The U.S. invaded Afghanistan first, in 2001. Iraq came in 2003.

We were always going to invade Iraq, as soon as GWB and Dick Cheney were elected it was inevitable. 9/11 just provided a convenient opportunity to manufacture the pretext by implying links between Iraq Intelligence and the hijackers.

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