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Comment by csb6 | Hacker News Reader

"Real excesses" is a bit of an understatement. There is the security theater instituted by the TSA, the militarization of police, normalized Islamophobia, mass surveillance of U.S. citizens, torture as an official military policy, indefinite detention of "unlawful combatants", a trillion dollars spent destroying Iraq and Afghanistan, a million killed and many more made refugees. The rise of ISIS and the refugee crises in Europe can be traced back to the War on Terror. The Middle East should not be the punching bag for America to take out its "crazy" feelings (where "craziness" appears to be a polite way of saying "bloodlust").

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With any luck the latest debacle is so clearly a fail, that future presidents may be reluctant to get involved again (at least for a while).

In the aftermath of Vietnam, the US was reluctant to get involved militarily (at least overtly.) That seemed to last until Kuwait. The success there seemed to embolden US hawks, and there were a couple long-term excursions after that.

The current dude apparently fell for the ever-present hawks, without the savy to ask the right questions. His total capitulation, after demonstrating the ineffectiveness of the military, while at the same time proving the effectiveness of asymmetric warfare, will (perhaps, hopefully) be an educational moment for future presidents.

Certainly it is a valuable educational moment to other defendents. You don't need to fight back. You just need to affect something else the world cares about. And, it turns out, global shipping is especially vulnerable.

I would point to the TSA as a key example of what I'm talking about. You say "security theater", but which of the things they do are security theater, and which are the ones that drove plane hijackings to near-zero? We can make reasonable guesses, but does another major skyscraper get blown up if we guess wrong? It's not so easy, and it was hard to the point of impossibility in the aftermath of 9/11.

> The Middle East should not be the punching bag for America to take out its "crazy" feelings (where "craziness" appears to be a polite way of saying "bloodlust").

Yes, this I agree with. The Iraq War in particular was clearly not justified.

My guess world be that the TSA had exactly nothing to do with any decline in hijackings. That is most likely due to new security protocols around cockpit access, as hijackings haven’t stopped but are committed mostly by pilots now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525

> which are the ones that drove plane hijackings to near-zero?

How many plane hijackings have occurred in other countries, which don't have the TSA?

Every country in the world responded to 9/11 with enhanced airport security. After the end of "shoes off" last year, I don't think the US is stricter in any meaningful way than the global norm.

Not all of them have the same kind of enhanced security, actually. For example, if you transfer from a flight from Africa to Europe to one from Europe to the USA you sometimes have to go through security again, as the African security didn't meet American standards.

I’m struggling to read your comment in good faith but I’m going to get there by saying that you don’t travel and are repeating hearsay as fact. If you have an international inbound flight which includes a transfer in Europe, it doesn’t matter where you embarked or what the security regime was like. Whether you have to recheck your bag depends exclusively on whether your transfer is at the same airport and your airline’s policy (eg Ryanair make you pay extra not to have to recheck). In general in Europe you only clear customs at your final destination and at tge airport you transfer to leave Europe but this wouldn’t apply if you need to transfer at a different airport or between two airlines that don’t have an agreement. It certainly never depends on the European transfer countries opinion of security at your country of embarkation.

https://www.trip.com/guide/info/check-through-baggage.html

> which are the ones that drove plane hijackings to near-zero

9/11 itself was. The general view before 9/11 was that a hijacking is an inconvenience: you get an unexpected detour via Cuba and have a nice story to tell at the next holiday party, but that's about it.

The second it became clear that the plane itself was the weapon and that there was a very real possibility you wouldn't walk away from it, hijacking became virtually impossible as every. single. passenger. would now be very much motivated to fight in order to prevent a certain death. United 93 already made this clear: they found out about what happened to the other planes, so they tried taking back the airplane. They didn't get it back, but the terrorist attack itself definitely failed.

Even without any kind of TSA future hijackings would almost certainly be closer to United 93, as American Airlines Flight 63 showed in practice.

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