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"all the time?" Like what? Do you think Trump is going to invade Pennsylvania to get revenge for the assassination attempt?
Following a single terrorist attack, the US invaded two countries that had nothing to do with it. You might have also heard of a minor skirmish called World War I.
Not at all similar, for what I think should be obvious reasons.
I don't see any obvious reasons, and anything I can think of seems pretty superficial.
We invaded Afghanistan because they were sheltering Osama Bin Laden. We invaded Iraq as a result of a whole chain of events that didn't even start with 9/11. You can call the reasons bad and I wouldn't necessarily disagree, but it's not true that we just arbitrarily decided to attack a country because of one "unrelated" terrorist attack. That's like saying we went to war with Japan because a couple of ships got sunk. (And in fact Pearl Harbor was really only the proximate cause of a war that had been inevitable for a number of years.)
World War I might have been triggered by a single assassination, but it was basically a couple of countries who'd been waiting for an excuse to go to war, and then a bunch of other countries dragged in by a complicated web of treaties.
It really isn't comparable to claiming that North Korea up and decided to invade South Korea because a North Korean expat attempted an assassination.
Thank you for writing this! This is basically exactly what I would have written if I had more motivation to write a response.
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IIRC, the Taliban wasn't even particularly unreasonable, it's just that the US was in no mood to jump through the hoops of a bunch of mountain-dwelling goatherders.
I'm about 80% sure that 9/11 was one of the stated reasons for invading Iraq. If you want to say that, as in the case of WWI, it might have been the stated reason but it wasn't the real reason, than it is actually no different from NK stating they're invading SK over a terrorist attack. Like I said countries do this stuff all the time.
9/11 was a stated reason for invading Iraq, but only in an indirect way. 9/11 was treated as evidence that being reactive rather than proactive about terrorism risk was unacceptable, and from that premise even a small probability of Iraq developing serious functional WMDs was deemed to be unacceptable, because we couldn't afford to wait until "the smoking gun becomes a mushroom cloud", to quote the most memorable phrase.
But that's the stated reasons, and a vengeful public was not really listening closely.
"Neither Bush nor senior administration officials directly linked Iraq or its leader to the planning or execution of the 9/11 attacks. Yet a sizable majority of Americans believed that Hussein aided the terrorist attacks that took nearly 3,000 lives.
The same month that Congress approved the use of force resolution against Iraq, 66% of the public said that “Saddam Hussein helped the terrorists in the September 11th attacks”; just 21% said he was not involved in 9/11."
To expand on this, and IIRC, accusations of Iraq supporting, training and equipping terrorists was part of the explicit justification for the invasion in addition to their purported WMD.
To be clear, my memory is that those accusations panned out to be 'mostly false' at best?
(not rhetorical, I actually don't remember the specifics! but that is certainly the impression that I get.)
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We had already fought a war with Iraq in the 90s. When we invaded the second time, it was mostly about Iraq invading Kuwait, and claims about chemical weapons. Yeah, there was some talk also that Saddam sponsored terrorism, but the administration never tried to link him directly to 9/11 (though you probably did hear a lot of uninformed people making the connection at the time).
So I decided to see what I can find on this, and maaan...:
...fuck Dick Chaney...
I suppose you're right, and I have to concede, but his "we don't know, but *wink**wink**nudge**nudge**wink**nudge**wink**nudge**wink*... anyway as I was saying we just don't know *wink*", sure makes me feel dirty about it.
Then again the conversation started with OP saying "why the North Koreans felt like they 'needed' to start the Korean War", so maybe the analogy still holds.
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