9-11, give me a break.

[abaris]

I think 9/11 happened because radical Islam inherently believes everyone who is not a radical muslim should die. I don't think their motives were purely out of some revenge or retaliation. 

And even if it was purely out of revenge, the people they killed in 9/11 were innocent people who had nothing to do with any sort of injustice that was done to the middle east.

That's why you have to detach yourself emotionally to get a picture of motivations. The victims were innocent, but the buildings being attacked on that day were symbolic. Symbols of economic as well as military power. The alleged third target being the White House. The very seat of power.

So there's never only one motivation involved. And as I said before, there's a lot to mourn, but that shouldn't prevent looking at what the attackers had in mind. It was a clear message of we can hit you on your very soil and where it hurts the most. A lot of planning and preparation went into this. Things a raving fanatic doesn't do. So, I'm aware this sounds callous. But the victims weren't the targets. The symbols were.

Sadly this went under in the ensuing propaganda battle. And sadly that led to a lot of wrong conclusions of how to launch a counter strike. Which had to happen in some way. I'm not denying that. Just not in the way it was done.

Right after the attacks. In the ensuing weeks before the invasion of Afghanistan started, there were a lot of discussions between analysts and - for lack of a better words - pundits. The analysts pointed all of the above out to the public. But it got burried in a shitstorm of you are only defending the terrorists. Which they didn't do. They only asked to take a breather and look at what had happened in detail before jumping to conclusions.

I said it right here and I say it for more than a decade. Right before 9/11 they killed Ahmad Shah Massoud. The most popular and secular warlord opposing the Taliban. So, this certainly wasn't a coincidence. It was part of a bigger strategy expecting an attack on Afghanistan and removing the one person making for a possible leader to rally behind for the Afghani people. Certainly more popular than Hamid Karzai who was always perceived as a puppet and basically became the corrupt mayor of Kabul.