The Taliban and Hussein were telling us repeatedly that they had nothing to do with 9-11, and we had no real intelligence that said otherwise.
No one is denying that Hamas went into Israel and kidnapped a bunch of people. Maybe Hamas was relying on American pacifists and isolationists to get away with it?
Here's one way to put it: Suppose people in the Northern US had, since the end of WWII, been using a mix of economic and military tactics to force Canadians near the border out of their homes, declaring the new territory part of a New England-centric ethnostate where only people of New England descent were welcome, to the point where the only remaining Canadian areas were completely surrounded by American settlements with militarized borders. Suppose between last January-October of last year alone, Canada lost 100-500 or so children directly due to military action and thousands more civilians due to inadequate healthcare and nutrition resulting from the military blockades.
And then, suppose that a militant group of, at most, 100-1000 of those Canadians, out of 5M or so total Canadians, did a parallel to Oct. 7.
By the time we'd killed 20,000 unrelated civilians, I'd be pretty upset. I would be upset at seeing rhetoric on TV saying that Canadians were "animals" or "grass that needed to be mowed." As a Southern American, I'd be upset that my tax dollars were funding this.
It's also worth noting that this really parallels 9/11 quite well. I was slower to be upset at our tactics in Afghanistan/Iraq then, but having seen it all now, Israel's attack is clearly the same fruitless-for-workers, military-industrial-complex-feeding meat grinder as it's evidently always been.
And to be more "objective" about that comparison: 9/11 killed more Americans than Oct. 7 killed Israelis. As of 2023, Afghan civilian deaths from our war on Al Quaeda (the entire period from 2001-2023) number [1] "more than 70,000." In half a year alone, 30-35,000 Palestinians have been killed.
But I'd say that measuring human lives against one another is kinda gross, focused on hindsight, and ineffective. To do the best thing we can in the present, we need to make the choices that maximally preserve human life. And selling/giving them weapons just ain't it.
