Guessing cost-sharing wrong matters a lot
2 hours ago
Sunday, September 11, 2011
9/11
Ten years after the shocking events that plagued September 11, 2001, a nation gathered in tribute to a tragic day. Television, internet, and newspapers were filled with different ways of showing respect on a day of remembrance. "God bless America" was uttered in a variety places to pay thanks for what this country does for it's people. I am thankful for the freedom and opportunity given as a citizen of the United States. I only wish the United States could have retaliated differently to the attacks on 9/11. Whether or not to any extent the conspiracies relating to 9/11 were true, what was done by America as consequence of the attacks was wrong. Killing innocent individuals is never accepted, and killing innocent individuals to serve justice should not be accepted either. When former President Bush jr. announced the white house plans of attack I was in the second grade. Shocked by 9/11 I wanted there to be justice served to those who did wrong. But even at that young age I innately felt a sense of guilt and worry to see the first bombs from America land. When Seal team 6 assassinated Osama Bin Laden I felt purely proud to be an American. Justice was brought upon an individual with precision and low destruction. All other motives aside, bombing Afghanistan after 9/11 was over destructive. So today I want to mourn the all the innocent deaths as a result of the 9/11 attacks. Bless America, and bless the world.
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3 comments:
I completely agree that America acted poorly after the events of 9/11. I think that the loss of life on both sides are great and that none of them should be overlooked. However, I don't agree that attacking Afghanistan was totally wrong. On 9/11, MSNBC aired a program that explained the history leading up to and after 9/11. One of the covered topics was our incursion into Afghanistan. We managed to overthrow the Taliban government with very few casualties and in a (I hesitate to say) cost effective way. However, What I feel is the biggest mistake is how instead of pursuing what we had accomplished, we turned our attention to Iraq, even though the remaining remnants of the Taliban government fled to Pakistan. All we managed to really accomplish in Iraq was to convince a region of the world that already hated us that we were as bad as the believed us to be. I believe that 9/11 was a terrible tragedy and that we did need to respond to the immediate threat that we had been put under. I do not believe that we made the proper response. We should not have proven to them that we would stoop to their levels of warfare and instead, gotten out the minute we accomplished what we set out to do.
I agree with Patrick: Afghanistan was necessary, but Iraq was a bust. I don't think the Bush administration had an accurate picture of the nation (in terms of its (lack of) possession of WMDs and also its ethnic/historical background) going into the invasion. Those Westerners didn't realize the intense conflict that would arise between Shia and Sunni militants after Hussein's fall - if we had further studied past relations between these two groups of Islam, we might have acted more wisely in Iraq. Also, I believe Bush underestimated the strength of the Iraqi radicals; he thought that fixing up Iraq would be a piece of cake, given America's military might, but unfortunately he was wrong.
In regards to Osama's point about the killing of innocent individuals - I was watching the Republican Tea Party debate today and saw Ron Paul get booed after criticizing the Iraqi invasion for the consequent "deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis". Now I remember reading in unSpun that some body count projects erroneously calculated over 600,000 Iraqi deaths as of 2006. I feel like this number, as well as maybe even Ron Paul's "hundreds of thousands" figure", is slightly exaggerated, but I do think that Americans ought to stop being selfish and ignoring the fact that this war has cost the lives of at least tens of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians. After all, are American lives any more precious than Iraqi lives?
Whatever the outcome of all this is, Bless America and Bless the families of those whose lives were lost on that tragic morning ten years ago.
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