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This is how you create terrorists. What do you think the children and friends feelings towards the US will be from now on? People get radicalized for much less

This is how you create terrorists. What do you think the children and friends feelings towards the US will be from now on? People get radicalized for much less than that.

draugadrotten 7y ago
Their feelings will be affected and rightly so, it is a tradegy. However the feelings of a few people about an error can not be the single parameter to decide if drone strikes are used. War have casualties. What about the feelings of the children and friends after 9.11, Charlie Hebdo, Bataclan, Nice, Stockholm, Trèbes, Paris, Liège and Strasbourg? I could go on. Of the 24 jihadist attacks in the EU in 2018, 10 occurred in France, four in the United Kingdom, four in the Netherlands, two in Germany and one each in Belgium, Italy, Spain and Sweden. In 2017, a total of 62 people were killed in ten completed jihadist attacks in the European Union, according to Europol figures. The number of attempted jihadist attacks reached 33 in 2017. If a single drone strike is how you create terrorists, what is being created in Europe?
- EliRivers 7y ago
  I think that there is an inherent difference between drone killings and atrocities committed by people. The drone killings are anonymous, out of the sky, with no idea who the guilty party is besides a nebulous "USA" or "the West"; a vacuum of information besides a robotic, faceless apology in a press release (that is itself just more insult, more humiliation), and the knowledge that a foreign country can reach out and murder people living next door to you without consequence. The humiliation and rage and sense of powerlessness and living every day knowing that they'll do it again and nobody will do anything about it simply festers. These are key ingredients in growing terrorists. This is how you make terrorists. Humilation and anger and a sense of powerlessness and that the perpetrator will face no justice. When some idiot boy shoots up an office in Paris there's a guilty party, a reckoning with a body (or an arrest), a name, an investigation and professional state employees actively going after someone, actively pursuing justice (very different to the state doing no more than shrugging and saying "yeah, that's the USA for you, they murder you and your neighbours, nothing we can do about it"). There is a qualitative difference; the key ingredients above aren't present. Even if the terrorist gets away, it's recognised that it was an individual(s) and that they are being pursued; someone is seeking justice on your behalf. If a single drone strike is how you create terrorists, what is being created in Europe? On the face of it, not terrorists.
  - luckylion 7y ago
    > Even if the terrorist gets away, it's recognised that it was an individual(s). That's a tough sell when (large) parts of communities are complicit, hiding, funding, supporting the individuals. It's my impression that the primary difference is that we expect better from advanced nations and their citizens, not that there's a large difference in behavior. Denmark officially murdering people because of their sexual identity would be a shock. Saudi Arabia doing the same isn't, because we don't see SA anywhere near the level of (cultural, social, civilizational) development of Denmark. A child throwing a temper tantrum is normal, an adult doing the same raises suspicion of delayed development.
    - EliRivers 7y ago
      That's a tough sell when (large) parts of communities are complicit, hiding, funding, supporting the individuals. I'm unconvinced; I believe it's not a tough sell. This is based on my observations of to whom people ascribe these crimes. They blame individuals first. Even if they should ascribe more blame to the organisations behind those individuals, those individuals are recognised (rightly or wrongly) as the primary culprits. When I see news reports of such things, it's individual people that are presented as the culprits. News articles and Wiki articles name the individuals involved. While they do have organisations and groups behind them, if you ask people "who did this" you don't get a nebulous set of organisations; you get a name.
      - luckylion 7y ago
        > They blame individuals first. That depends on who those individuals are though. The media reports and reactions do change very much if you exchange some words, like replacing "islamist radical" with "white supremacist" or "christian fundamentalist" and "mosque" with "website". You will certainly get individual names for each attack, the difference is whether having those names concludes the investigation or not. There are exceptions to this, of course, it's just my general expression.
    - black_puppydog 7y ago
      > when (large) parts of communities are complicit you put parentheses around the "large" but I'm still gonna pick on this. For my part, I have yet to hear of a major jihadist attack in the west in which the perpetrators and their supporters were not completely surrounded by police and intelligence personel. In Germany we're watching a parliamentary commission pick apart what happened in the "lone wolf" case where someone drove a truck into a christmas market in Berlin. "You can't do anything about these things!" people exclaim. They're lone wolves after all. BS. That guy, and his supporters, were in constant contact with embedded sources around their milieu. I'm not a big friend of the police state as it is, and especially of intelligence services. And this story and others like it make it really hard to still believe in incompetence and bad coordination as the sources for all the fuck-ups that lead to him succeeding in the first place, and then the crucial witnesses being conveniently deported days after. But my real point (sorry for digressing here for a bit) is that even in this in-depth investigation, the number of active supporters was tiny. And they were not even really organized. It was more like "I have a friend here ho will help me out, and one here, and one here." Your statement (even with parentheses) does not reflect how small these "parts" are.
- deleted 7y ago
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- jacquesm 7y ago
  1) Whataboutism 2) False equivalent, if you think the USA should be held to the same standards that we hold the terrorists to then effectively the USA have become terrorists as well. 3) The EU has taken its attacks so far quite well, no other countries were invaded, no mass deportations or murders of muslims or immigrants have happened. Unfortunately this bs has shifted the political climate. Please try to argue your case better.
- simplecomplex 7y ago
  Afghanistan never attacked the US. repeat that to yourself a couple times. Invading them isn’t defense or war it’s fucking murder you idiot.
  - mad_tortoise 7y ago
    Isn't it a funny coincidence that the invasion of Afghanistan coincided with the sharp increase in opioid addiction across the USA? I think not, and it wouldn't be the first time that the US government has caused drug addiction epidemics in it's own country. Just look at how the CIA caused the crack-cocaine problem in the African American community.
  - yakshaving_jgt 7y ago
    The Taliban (who the drone strikes were targeting) are at war with Afghanistan. The US is allied with Afghanistan’s government. Wars aren’t as simple as good guys vs bad guys fighting between their own respective countries.
    - simplecomplex 7y ago
      > The US is allied with Afghanistan’s government. The US allied with the Northern Alliance after invading Afghanistan, and they had no say in whether we invaded or not. The US asked the Taliban to extradite Osama Bin Laden, they refused, so the US invaded Afghanistan to bring him to justice and dismantle the Taliban. The US killed Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban is just as powerful today as they were then. The conflict has also killed over 100,000 civilians, and almost the same number of US citizens have been killed in battle as on 9/11 Oh and let's not talk about how the officially stated purpose of the Taliban was to kick US armed forces out of Somalia and Saudi Arabia... We chose to get involved in Saudi Arabia's war with Pakistan in the first place! If it's a "war" then US military leadership's decisions are directly responsible for 9/11. The US military leadership has been actively endangering national security with their reckless support for Saudi Arabia's wars for decades, and continue to do so to this day. US presidents and businessmen sold out their fellow citizens and soldiers to arm an absolute monarchy so Aramco could make money.
- Smithalicious 7y ago
  This post is wrong for obvious reasons, but it's a good point that it goes both ways: drone strikes create anti-western sentiment, and Muslim terrorist attacks create anti-Muslim sentiment.
  - smhost 7y ago
    yes, they're mutually reinforcing. in a perverse way, u.s. drone strikes are good for terrorist organizations, and terrorist attacks are good for major stakeholders of military capital. that's why you will see some perverts who will openly reminisce about the days after 9/11 and how we were all united, etc. at some point, cooler heads should intervene, but fear is just too easy to engineer, apparently.
    - Smithalicious 7y ago
      Reminds me of how two rappers (or youtubers or what will you) who have "beef" both benefit in the end (assuming they don't get shot)
- moksly 7y ago
  You seem to actually believe that and I think that deserves a serious answer, because the terror attacks are changing European society. It’s given us some of our only mass shootings from politically motivated right-wingers like Breviek and the recent would be mosque shooter. What’s worse though is that it’s given us a general apathy toward the bureaucratic abuse of immigrants that happens everywhere. I live in Denmark, we have a place called Sjælsmark, which is an internment camp for immigrants who weren’t granted asylum but refused to leave. I understand why some people would go “well they could just leave”, but there are children in that camp who’ve been there for years. That would have caused a public outcry throughout danish society 25 years ago. I know because that’s exactly what happened during the Balkan wars where society as a whole cake together and did what the government failed to do, and actually integrated the “unwanted” as the decent thing to do. After 18 years of anti-Islamic sentiment, however, we instead talked about putting the “unwanted” on a prison island to isolate them even further. That’s what 9/11, Charlie Hebdo, Batavian and so on has done to Europe.
  - draugadrotten 7y ago
    Thank you for the serious and interesting reply. You actually got my point, that these wars and terror attacks have a large effect on feelings and behaviours in Europe as well.
- mad_tortoise 7y ago
  How many "error's" does the US make? Far too many for them to be called "error's" anymore. How many kids were radicalised by the US going into Iraq and killing millions of their people? Tens of thousands of orphans, with an evil imperial army coming into their home, bombing their farms, raiding their homes, murdering civilians. Enough to create ISIS and radicalise thousands upon thousands more. How many families were put out by 9/11? About 3000. And you call that an excuse to invade Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Pakistan etc etc etc. So 3000 American lives, taken by Saudi Arabian citizens, cost the lives of millions across the world so that the American people can feel good about their hegemony? Al-Qaeda won that war before the US even left their own soil. They had one aim, bring about the end of the USA, and they did it by getting your own government to strip away civil liberties overnight, and you didn't even care.
  - golergka 7y ago
    > How many "error's" does the US make? Usually it's measured in the ratio of civilian casualties to combatants, and as far as I remember, US is keeping this ratio exceptionally low in comparison to other conflicts. That's the key point here: your criticism applies to any war at all. War is hell, everybody knows that. To be objective in your judgement about US though, you have to quantatively compare different conflicts to each other.
    - michaelmrose 7y ago
      Nobody whose family got blown up cares about one thing that you just typed.
      - chrshawkes 7y ago
        Unfortunately, neither do many Americans who have been affected by terrorism as well (majority most likely). I'm not saying that's how I feel, but I don't think it's going out on a limb to say that it's probably true.
    - input_sh 7y ago
      Your memory is wrong. You may want to look that up before making such a dumb claim: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_from_U.S._drone_strikes#Total_numbers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_from_U.S._... Ratio of 15-20% civilian deaths is not "exceptionally low" by any means.
- mola 7y ago
  But you are not really opposing his theory. The terrorists are counting on this effect. They want to trigger radicalization of the populous in their target countries. Their idea is to stir up war, because in chaos there's a potential of drastic radical changes. If you truly want to fight terror, you should focus on prevention and educating the masses to not get drawn to a blood thirsty revenge cycle. Because once you start thinking like a terrorist, i.e. justifying civilian bloodshed for ideology, demanding violent response, etc. they win.
- input_sh 7y ago
  If your argument starts with "what about", you may want to reconsider it.
- somebadguy 7y ago
  You are an ignorant coward. Pathetic uneducated loser
- kelnos 7y ago
  If the West (and USSR/Russia) hadn't been meddling in the political and social affairs of the Middle East for decades, it's completely possible that we wouldn't have any/many Middle Eastern terrorists with the funding and capabilities to do any damage outside their own countries. It's tempting to suggest, "or if we had done a better job with our meddling", but... no, it just doesn't work, empirically so, and we should stop doing it. Unfortunately, pushing diplomatic solutions hard would be political suicide in the US; the "us vs. them" mentality is strong here, and I don't think most Americans would be ok with what they'd see as giving in or giving up. And even if the politics at home could work, it's unclear if all that many on the other side are interested in a diplomatic solution, given how radicalized some of them have become due to our recklessness and hubris.
newguy1234 7y ago
Also stories like this will be passed down for generations to recruit new jihadists/terrorists. They use this stuff as proof that the USA is anti-muslim or to prove that there is a war against muslims going on. You simply cannot bomb your way out of resolving the terrorism issue. This will probably have the same effectiveness as the war on drugs: lots of money spent....little to no impact on drug smuggling/drug abuse etc.
- black_puppydog 7y ago
  > They use this stuff as proof that the USA is anti-muslim or to prove that there is a war against muslims going on. And the worst thing is: from a policy perspective (obviously not arguing about every single US citizen) that's really hard to argue with, given which countries the US has entered into armed conflicts with, which groups of people are most picked upon by politicians, etc.
  - simonh 7y ago
    I think 'entered into armed conflict with' is a judicious way to put it, given 9/11 and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Neither of these are fights the USA would have freely chosen. But for every confict in which the USA is fighting one group of Muslims, it's doing so to protect or ally with another group of Muslims. The Afghan government are Muslims, the elected Iraqi government are Muslims, the victims of IS and the Taliban are overwhelmingly Muslims. Saudi Arabia, the west's biggest ally in the region is Muslim. We are allying with tens of millions of Muslims against groups consisting of thousands of Muslims. The west has far, far more Muslim allies than Muslim enemies.
  - bakuninsbart 7y ago
    Luckily (for muslims), the focus of racism is slowly changing to Chinese people now. It is as if Americans (and most others) can't exist without an ethnicity to be mad about.
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  This seems to surprise everyone though, and I don't understand why. I remember in the early days of our being in Afghanistan, there were a few media pieces reporting that they remembered the last time the British were there, 100 or 150 years ago. The tone was very much that it was somehow surprising the Afghans brought this up again. Yet Britain and the US are built on national history, myths and memories. The US has a huge national story around independence and the push west into the frontier. The UK has our tales and myths of 1940 and 1066. Scots still remember "the 45" (that's 1745). Why wouldn't Afghanistan or Iraq?
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oh_sigh 7y ago
I hear this a lot but is there any basis for this? Were any of the 9/11 attackers widowed/orphaned by the US? Or were they just whipped up in religious fervor and an abstract idea of a cultural war with the US? And does it go the other way? Do you create violent anti-Islamists when Muslims commit terror attacks? Were the orphans of 9/11 more likely to sign up for the US military, or commit hate crimes against Muslims than their non-directly-affected peers?
- kristopolous 7y ago
  Well we have been bombing a Muslim majority country for 18 years. That probably counts.
  - oh_sigh 7y ago
    Counts for what? My question was about the basis for terrorism, not about the facts of bombing campaigns.
    - kristopolous 7y ago
      Terrorism is a label slapped on violence that breaks some arbitrary rules someone thinks ought to be followed. Were the founding fathers terrorists? The British sure thought so... You can be the gatekeeper of that word all you want, just know that you're playing that role.
      - oh_sigh 7y ago
        The British thought the founding fathers were rebels, which is not the same thing as terrorists(not that they had that word to use anyway)
        kristopolous 7y ago
        Nope, rebel is the positive (or at least neutral) version of terrorist, the terrorist for your side. This exact oratory slight of hand is used constantly in media, virtue signaling through word choice.
stevenjohns 7y ago
No it's not. These types of comments are extremely inappropriate. Your comment tries to suggest that: 1. Terrorists are people with legitimate grievances 2. Terrorists are representatives of oppressed people 3. Terrorists have genuine reasons for their actions All of these things are false. People do not turn into international, careless murderers just because they experience travesty. Terrorists exploit this concept to try to give themselves legitimacy, but the reality is that it's highly removed from the actual reality of what's happening. You know what does create terrorists though? 1. Sanctions and 2. Funding of militias. These are things that everyone - except for isolationists - stand behind and support. ---- Thanks for the 5 downvotes in 10 minutes! Feel free to help me (someone from the region who was directly caught up in not one but two American wars) understand why I should be a terrorist now. I'll also forward the comments to my cousin who was working inside a Red Cross clinic hit by a US airstrike so she also knows what to think. Thanks in advance HN!
- chmod775 7y ago
  Because your average farmer is obviously going to join up with a militia or terrorist group because of some abstract political thing like sanctions, which he probably has trouble even measuring in his day to life. As opposed to your elected politicians and your military having blown up his daughter at her wedding, scattering her remains over a wide enough area that it is hard even finding anything to bury. Makes sense. The only way you're going to get someone mad enough for that, is if the militia you equipped happens to inflict similar cruelties, or you otherwise mess with his nation in a way that is more than just an inconvenience. If the US imposed sanctions against my country, I'd just shrug. If the US killed my family members and I had no recourse...
  - hn23 7y ago
    > If the US imposed sanctions against my country, I'd just shrug. You obviously do not understand that sanctions are usually a way to prepare for war with weapons. Sanctions bring up the cracks in societies that are otherwise hidden under a thin layer of comfort we call civilized behavior. With sanctions you get a black market and all that is related to it. Sanctions are a trade war at another level.
ageofwant 7y ago
No, this is how you create market-share for Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman etc.
- ptah 7y ago
  yip, can't buy new weapons if you don't use the ones you already have
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    More like: you bomb them, they eventually find a way to strike back at you, and then you say you need more weapons and better weapons so "such tragedy never happens again".
divbyzer0 7y ago
Comparing the reactions between this (seemlingly little) reported incident, and the attack on Saudi oil facilites (zero fatalities) is an interesting exercise. edit: added word 'Saudi'
- kome 7y ago
  very good point, i didn't think about
- smcl 7y ago
  Yeh the difference in the press' reactions between the two is pretty stark. However the most interesting thing about the Saudi attack is the faux outrage at the idea that _Iranian_ arms were used in the attack. As if it's totally cool that British and American arms are used by the Saudis to flatten Yemen but the idea that the Houthis can strike back with Iranian-provided arms is somehow a despicable disgrace.
- zaroth 7y ago
  Do you think it might have something to do with one attack reducing the nut harvesting capacity of that town by 50%, versus the other reducing the oil output of Saudi Arabia by 50%? Or maybe because one was a tactical op gone horribly wrong based on bad intel from the ground, and the other was a well planned and highly coordinated strategic op designed to destabilize international markets?
alpb 7y ago
> This is how you create terrorists. Um no, you are wrong. _What USA does_ is terrorism. When you drop bombs on people out of nowhere, that's called terrorism. Sorry if you're an American but you've got some learning to do about the biggest terrorist organization in the world before calling others a terrorist. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRbnPA3fd5U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRbnPA3fd5U
- kmlx 7y ago
  > A U.S. drone strike intended to hit an Islamic State (IS) Then what does the IS represent to you? The good guys?
  - bananocurrency 7y ago
    ah yes. the perfect centrist. if you aren't black vs white, why are you playing chess?
    - V3ritas1337 7y ago
      Aristotelian logic is flawed.
      - igravious 7y ago
        Only in some situations. In a lot of situations it works as intended. The crucial point is being able to distinguish when it applies and when it doesn't.
        mapcars 7y ago
        This is not a small thing, it easily steers your life only to where it works. In other words your life becomes a slave of your limited logic, it makes you optimize your life for the logic to be a safe and working.
    - marliechiller 7y ago
      bit of a flawed response really. i cant think of many subject matters that are more nuanced than middle-eastern affairs. almost nothing is black and white in this area
dep_b 7y ago
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lawn 7y ago
With what the US had done, and continues to do, can you really blame them?
chooseaname 7y ago
> This is how you create terrorists. Which the war machine needs in order to grow. Which the politicians need in order to get elected (Some people want "strong" leaders, for this definition of strong).
benjaminbrodie2 7y ago
Why not just kill those children and friends then, since we have reasonable expectation that they will become radicalized? We already extensively kill the family and children of terrorists

This is how you create terrorists. What do you think the children and friends feelings towards the US will be from now on? People get radicalized for much less than that.

draugadrotten 7y ago

Their feelings will be affected and rightly so, it is a tradegy. However the feelings of a few people about an error can not be the single parameter to decide if drone strikes are used. War have casualties. What about the feelings of the children and friends after 9.11, Charlie Hebdo, Bataclan, Nice, Stockholm, Trèbes, Paris, Liège and Strasbourg? I could go on. Of the 24 jihadist attacks in the EU in 2018, 10 occurred in France, four in the United Kingdom, four in the Netherlands, two in Germany and one each in Belgium, Italy, Spain and Sweden. In 2017, a total of 62 people were killed in ten completed jihadist attacks in the European Union, according to Europol figures. The number of attempted jihadist attacks reached 33 in 2017. If a single drone strike is how you create terrorists, what is being created in Europe?

EliRivers 7y ago
I think that there is an inherent difference between drone killings and atrocities committed by people. The drone killings are anonymous, out of the sky, with no idea who the guilty party is besides a nebulous "USA" or "the West"; a vacuum of information besides a robotic, faceless apology in a press release (that is itself just more insult, more humiliation), and the knowledge that a foreign country can reach out and murder people living next door to you without consequence. The humiliation and rage and sense of powerlessness and living every day knowing that they'll do it again and nobody will do anything about it simply festers. These are key ingredients in growing terrorists. This is how you make terrorists. Humilation and anger and a sense of powerlessness and that the perpetrator will face no justice. When some idiot boy shoots up an office in Paris there's a guilty party, a reckoning with a body (or an arrest), a name, an investigation and professional state employees actively going after someone, actively pursuing justice (very different to the state doing no more than shrugging and saying "yeah, that's the USA for you, they murder you and your neighbours, nothing we can do about it"). There is a qualitative difference; the key ingredients above aren't present. Even if the terrorist gets away, it's recognised that it was an individual(s) and that they are being pursued; someone is seeking justice on your behalf. If a single drone strike is how you create terrorists, what is being created in Europe? On the face of it, not terrorists.
- luckylion 7y ago
  > Even if the terrorist gets away, it's recognised that it was an individual(s). That's a tough sell when (large) parts of communities are complicit, hiding, funding, supporting the individuals. It's my impression that the primary difference is that we expect better from advanced nations and their citizens, not that there's a large difference in behavior. Denmark officially murdering people because of their sexual identity would be a shock. Saudi Arabia doing the same isn't, because we don't see SA anywhere near the level of (cultural, social, civilizational) development of Denmark. A child throwing a temper tantrum is normal, an adult doing the same raises suspicion of delayed development.
  - EliRivers 7y ago
    That's a tough sell when (large) parts of communities are complicit, hiding, funding, supporting the individuals. I'm unconvinced; I believe it's not a tough sell. This is based on my observations of to whom people ascribe these crimes. They blame individuals first. Even if they should ascribe more blame to the organisations behind those individuals, those individuals are recognised (rightly or wrongly) as the primary culprits. When I see news reports of such things, it's individual people that are presented as the culprits. News articles and Wiki articles name the individuals involved. While they do have organisations and groups behind them, if you ask people "who did this" you don't get a nebulous set of organisations; you get a name.
    - luckylion 7y ago
      > They blame individuals first. That depends on who those individuals are though. The media reports and reactions do change very much if you exchange some words, like replacing "islamist radical" with "white supremacist" or "christian fundamentalist" and "mosque" with "website". You will certainly get individual names for each attack, the difference is whether having those names concludes the investigation or not. There are exceptions to this, of course, it's just my general expression.
  - black_puppydog 7y ago
    > when (large) parts of communities are complicit you put parentheses around the "large" but I'm still gonna pick on this. For my part, I have yet to hear of a major jihadist attack in the west in which the perpetrators and their supporters were not completely surrounded by police and intelligence personel. In Germany we're watching a parliamentary commission pick apart what happened in the "lone wolf" case where someone drove a truck into a christmas market in Berlin. "You can't do anything about these things!" people exclaim. They're lone wolves after all. BS. That guy, and his supporters, were in constant contact with embedded sources around their milieu. I'm not a big friend of the police state as it is, and especially of intelligence services. And this story and others like it make it really hard to still believe in incompetence and bad coordination as the sources for all the fuck-ups that lead to him succeeding in the first place, and then the crucial witnesses being conveniently deported days after. But my real point (sorry for digressing here for a bit) is that even in this in-depth investigation, the number of active supporters was tiny. And they were not even really organized. It was more like "I have a friend here ho will help me out, and one here, and one here." Your statement (even with parentheses) does not reflect how small these "parts" are.
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jacquesm 7y ago
1) Whataboutism 2) False equivalent, if you think the USA should be held to the same standards that we hold the terrorists to then effectively the USA have become terrorists as well. 3) The EU has taken its attacks so far quite well, no other countries were invaded, no mass deportations or murders of muslims or immigrants have happened. Unfortunately this bs has shifted the political climate. Please try to argue your case better.
simplecomplex 7y ago
Afghanistan never attacked the US. repeat that to yourself a couple times. Invading them isn’t defense or war it’s fucking murder you idiot.
- mad_tortoise 7y ago
  Isn't it a funny coincidence that the invasion of Afghanistan coincided with the sharp increase in opioid addiction across the USA? I think not, and it wouldn't be the first time that the US government has caused drug addiction epidemics in it's own country. Just look at how the CIA caused the crack-cocaine problem in the African American community.
- yakshaving_jgt 7y ago
  The Taliban (who the drone strikes were targeting) are at war with Afghanistan. The US is allied with Afghanistan’s government. Wars aren’t as simple as good guys vs bad guys fighting between their own respective countries.
  - simplecomplex 7y ago
    > The US is allied with Afghanistan’s government. The US allied with the Northern Alliance after invading Afghanistan, and they had no say in whether we invaded or not. The US asked the Taliban to extradite Osama Bin Laden, they refused, so the US invaded Afghanistan to bring him to justice and dismantle the Taliban. The US killed Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban is just as powerful today as they were then. The conflict has also killed over 100,000 civilians, and almost the same number of US citizens have been killed in battle as on 9/11 Oh and let's not talk about how the officially stated purpose of the Taliban was to kick US armed forces out of Somalia and Saudi Arabia... We chose to get involved in Saudi Arabia's war with Pakistan in the first place! If it's a "war" then US military leadership's decisions are directly responsible for 9/11. The US military leadership has been actively endangering national security with their reckless support for Saudi Arabia's wars for decades, and continue to do so to this day. US presidents and businessmen sold out their fellow citizens and soldiers to arm an absolute monarchy so Aramco could make money.
Smithalicious 7y ago
This post is wrong for obvious reasons, but it's a good point that it goes both ways: drone strikes create anti-western sentiment, and Muslim terrorist attacks create anti-Muslim sentiment.
- smhost 7y ago
  yes, they're mutually reinforcing. in a perverse way, u.s. drone strikes are good for terrorist organizations, and terrorist attacks are good for major stakeholders of military capital. that's why you will see some perverts who will openly reminisce about the days after 9/11 and how we were all united, etc. at some point, cooler heads should intervene, but fear is just too easy to engineer, apparently.
  - Smithalicious 7y ago
    Reminds me of how two rappers (or youtubers or what will you) who have "beef" both benefit in the end (assuming they don't get shot)
moksly 7y ago
You seem to actually believe that and I think that deserves a serious answer, because the terror attacks are changing European society. It’s given us some of our only mass shootings from politically motivated right-wingers like Breviek and the recent would be mosque shooter. What’s worse though is that it’s given us a general apathy toward the bureaucratic abuse of immigrants that happens everywhere. I live in Denmark, we have a place called Sjælsmark, which is an internment camp for immigrants who weren’t granted asylum but refused to leave. I understand why some people would go “well they could just leave”, but there are children in that camp who’ve been there for years. That would have caused a public outcry throughout danish society 25 years ago. I know because that’s exactly what happened during the Balkan wars where society as a whole cake together and did what the government failed to do, and actually integrated the “unwanted” as the decent thing to do. After 18 years of anti-Islamic sentiment, however, we instead talked about putting the “unwanted” on a prison island to isolate them even further. That’s what 9/11, Charlie Hebdo, Batavian and so on has done to Europe.
- draugadrotten 7y ago
  Thank you for the serious and interesting reply. You actually got my point, that these wars and terror attacks have a large effect on feelings and behaviours in Europe as well.
mad_tortoise 7y ago
How many "error's" does the US make? Far too many for them to be called "error's" anymore. How many kids were radicalised by the US going into Iraq and killing millions of their people? Tens of thousands of orphans, with an evil imperial army coming into their home, bombing their farms, raiding their homes, murdering civilians. Enough to create ISIS and radicalise thousands upon thousands more. How many families were put out by 9/11? About 3000. And you call that an excuse to invade Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Pakistan etc etc etc. So 3000 American lives, taken by Saudi Arabian citizens, cost the lives of millions across the world so that the American people can feel good about their hegemony? Al-Qaeda won that war before the US even left their own soil. They had one aim, bring about the end of the USA, and they did it by getting your own government to strip away civil liberties overnight, and you didn't even care.
- golergka 7y ago
  > How many "error's" does the US make? Usually it's measured in the ratio of civilian casualties to combatants, and as far as I remember, US is keeping this ratio exceptionally low in comparison to other conflicts. That's the key point here: your criticism applies to any war at all. War is hell, everybody knows that. To be objective in your judgement about US though, you have to quantatively compare different conflicts to each other.
  - michaelmrose 7y ago
    Nobody whose family got blown up cares about one thing that you just typed.
    - chrshawkes 7y ago
      Unfortunately, neither do many Americans who have been affected by terrorism as well (majority most likely). I'm not saying that's how I feel, but I don't think it's going out on a limb to say that it's probably true.
  - input_sh 7y ago
    Your memory is wrong. You may want to look that up before making such a dumb claim: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_from_U.S._drone_strikes#Total_numbers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_from_U.S._... Ratio of 15-20% civilian deaths is not "exceptionally low" by any means.
mola 7y ago
But you are not really opposing his theory. The terrorists are counting on this effect. They want to trigger radicalization of the populous in their target countries. Their idea is to stir up war, because in chaos there's a potential of drastic radical changes. If you truly want to fight terror, you should focus on prevention and educating the masses to not get drawn to a blood thirsty revenge cycle. Because once you start thinking like a terrorist, i.e. justifying civilian bloodshed for ideology, demanding violent response, etc. they win.
input_sh 7y ago
If your argument starts with "what about", you may want to reconsider it.
somebadguy 7y ago
You are an ignorant coward. Pathetic uneducated loser
kelnos 7y ago
If the West (and USSR/Russia) hadn't been meddling in the political and social affairs of the Middle East for decades, it's completely possible that we wouldn't have any/many Middle Eastern terrorists with the funding and capabilities to do any damage outside their own countries. It's tempting to suggest, "or if we had done a better job with our meddling", but... no, it just doesn't work, empirically so, and we should stop doing it. Unfortunately, pushing diplomatic solutions hard would be political suicide in the US; the "us vs. them" mentality is strong here, and I don't think most Americans would be ok with what they'd see as giving in or giving up. And even if the politics at home could work, it's unclear if all that many on the other side are interested in a diplomatic solution, given how radicalized some of them have become due to our recklessness and hubris.

newguy1234 7y ago

Also stories like this will be passed down for generations to recruit new jihadists/terrorists. They use this stuff as proof that the USA is anti-muslim or to prove that there is a war against muslims going on. You simply cannot bomb your way out of resolving the terrorism issue. This will probably have the same effectiveness as the war on drugs: lots of money spent....little to no impact on drug smuggling/drug abuse etc.

black_puppydog 7y ago
> They use this stuff as proof that the USA is anti-muslim or to prove that there is a war against muslims going on. And the worst thing is: from a policy perspective (obviously not arguing about every single US citizen) that's really hard to argue with, given which countries the US has entered into armed conflicts with, which groups of people are most picked upon by politicians, etc.
- simonh 7y ago
  I think 'entered into armed conflict with' is a judicious way to put it, given 9/11 and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Neither of these are fights the USA would have freely chosen. But for every confict in which the USA is fighting one group of Muslims, it's doing so to protect or ally with another group of Muslims. The Afghan government are Muslims, the elected Iraqi government are Muslims, the victims of IS and the Taliban are overwhelmingly Muslims. Saudi Arabia, the west's biggest ally in the region is Muslim. We are allying with tens of millions of Muslims against groups consisting of thousands of Muslims. The west has far, far more Muslim allies than Muslim enemies.
- bakuninsbart 7y ago
  Luckily (for muslims), the focus of racism is slowly changing to Chinese people now. It is as if Americans (and most others) can't exist without an ethnicity to be mad about.
NeedMoreTea 7y ago
This seems to surprise everyone though, and I don't understand why. I remember in the early days of our being in Afghanistan, there were a few media pieces reporting that they remembered the last time the British were there, 100 or 150 years ago. The tone was very much that it was somehow surprising the Afghans brought this up again. Yet Britain and the US are built on national history, myths and memories. The US has a huge national story around independence and the push west into the frontier. The UK has our tales and myths of 1940 and 1066. Scots still remember "the 45" (that's 1745). Why wouldn't Afghanistan or Iraq?

deleted 7y ago

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oh_sigh 7y ago

I hear this a lot but is there any basis for this? Were any of the 9/11 attackers widowed/orphaned by the US? Or were they just whipped up in religious fervor and an abstract idea of a cultural war with the US? And does it go the other way? Do you create violent anti-Islamists when Muslims commit terror attacks? Were the orphans of 9/11 more likely to sign up for the US military, or commit hate crimes against Muslims than their non-directly-affected peers?

kristopolous 7y ago
Well we have been bombing a Muslim majority country for 18 years. That probably counts.
- oh_sigh 7y ago
  Counts for what? My question was about the basis for terrorism, not about the facts of bombing campaigns.
  - kristopolous 7y ago
    Terrorism is a label slapped on violence that breaks some arbitrary rules someone thinks ought to be followed. Were the founding fathers terrorists? The British sure thought so... You can be the gatekeeper of that word all you want, just know that you're playing that role.
    - oh_sigh 7y ago
      The British thought the founding fathers were rebels, which is not the same thing as terrorists(not that they had that word to use anyway)
      - kristopolous 7y ago
        Nope, rebel is the positive (or at least neutral) version of terrorist, the terrorist for your side. This exact oratory slight of hand is used constantly in media, virtue signaling through word choice.

stevenjohns 7y ago

No it's not. These types of comments are extremely inappropriate. Your comment tries to suggest that: 1. Terrorists are people with legitimate grievances 2. Terrorists are representatives of oppressed people 3. Terrorists have genuine reasons for their actions All of these things are false. People do not turn into international, careless murderers just because they experience travesty. Terrorists exploit this concept to try to give themselves legitimacy, but the reality is that it's highly removed from the actual reality of what's happening. You know what does create terrorists though? 1. Sanctions and 2. Funding of militias. These are things that everyone - except for isolationists - stand behind and support. ---- Thanks for the 5 downvotes in 10 minutes! Feel free to help me (someone from the region who was directly caught up in not one but two American wars) understand why I should be a terrorist now. I'll also forward the comments to my cousin who was working inside a Red Cross clinic hit by a US airstrike so she also knows what to think. Thanks in advance HN!

chmod775 7y ago
Because your average farmer is obviously going to join up with a militia or terrorist group because of some abstract political thing like sanctions, which he probably has trouble even measuring in his day to life. As opposed to your elected politicians and your military having blown up his daughter at her wedding, scattering her remains over a wide enough area that it is hard even finding anything to bury. Makes sense. The only way you're going to get someone mad enough for that, is if the militia you equipped happens to inflict similar cruelties, or you otherwise mess with his nation in a way that is more than just an inconvenience. If the US imposed sanctions against my country, I'd just shrug. If the US killed my family members and I had no recourse...
- hn23 7y ago
  > If the US imposed sanctions against my country, I'd just shrug. You obviously do not understand that sanctions are usually a way to prepare for war with weapons. Sanctions bring up the cracks in societies that are otherwise hidden under a thin layer of comfort we call civilized behavior. With sanctions you get a black market and all that is related to it. Sanctions are a trade war at another level.

ageofwant 7y ago

No, this is how you create market-share for Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman etc.

ptah 7y ago
yip, can't buy new weapons if you don't use the ones you already have
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  More like: you bomb them, they eventually find a way to strike back at you, and then you say you need more weapons and better weapons so "such tragedy never happens again".

divbyzer0 7y ago

Comparing the reactions between this (seemlingly little) reported incident, and the attack on Saudi oil facilites (zero fatalities) is an interesting exercise. edit: added word 'Saudi'

kome 7y ago
very good point, i didn't think about
smcl 7y ago
Yeh the difference in the press' reactions between the two is pretty stark. However the most interesting thing about the Saudi attack is the faux outrage at the idea that _Iranian_ arms were used in the attack. As if it's totally cool that British and American arms are used by the Saudis to flatten Yemen but the idea that the Houthis can strike back with Iranian-provided arms is somehow a despicable disgrace.
zaroth 7y ago
Do you think it might have something to do with one attack reducing the nut harvesting capacity of that town by 50%, versus the other reducing the oil output of Saudi Arabia by 50%? Or maybe because one was a tactical op gone horribly wrong based on bad intel from the ground, and the other was a well planned and highly coordinated strategic op designed to destabilize international markets?

alpb 7y ago

> This is how you create terrorists. Um no, you are wrong. _What USA does_ is terrorism. When you drop bombs on people out of nowhere, that's called terrorism. Sorry if you're an American but you've got some learning to do about the biggest terrorist organization in the world before calling others a terrorist. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRbnPA3fd5U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRbnPA3fd5U

kmlx 7y ago
> A U.S. drone strike intended to hit an Islamic State (IS) Then what does the IS represent to you? The good guys?
- bananocurrency 7y ago
  ah yes. the perfect centrist. if you aren't black vs white, why are you playing chess?
  - V3ritas1337 7y ago
    Aristotelian logic is flawed.
    - igravious 7y ago
      Only in some situations. In a lot of situations it works as intended. The crucial point is being able to distinguish when it applies and when it doesn't.
      - mapcars 7y ago
        This is not a small thing, it easily steers your life only to where it works. In other words your life becomes a slave of your limited logic, it makes you optimize your life for the logic to be a safe and working.
  - marliechiller 7y ago
    bit of a flawed response really. i cant think of many subject matters that are more nuanced than middle-eastern affairs. almost nothing is black and white in this area

dep_b 7y ago

-- deleted --

lawn 7y ago

With what the US had done, and continues to do, can you really blame them?

chooseaname 7y ago

> This is how you create terrorists. Which the war machine needs in order to grow. Which the politicians need in order to get elected (Some people want "strong" leaders, for this definition of strong).

benjaminbrodie2 7y ago

Why not just kill those children and friends then, since we have reasonable expectation that they will become radicalized? We already extensively kill the family and children of terrorists