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Funny how large parts of the world have no muslim extremists whatsoever. It isn't a problem in places that don't have large scale immigration or a historic muslim population. The endless war on terror combined with mass immigration was a fiasco.
9/11 was a valuable lesson. Due to immigration policy, people living in a cave in Afghanistan were let into the US. After predictable results the US decides to invade Iraq, a country with no connection to 9/11. The result is massive waves of refugees in to Europe and more terrorism, crime and social issues. Islamic terrorism exploded as a problem post neo con wars in the middle east. Young people have grown up seeing the 20-year fiasco of nation building in the Middle East.
If there is anything learned from dealing with muslims it is that the best outcome is stable arab states with no wars in the middle east. Interventionism in the middle east has been a resounding failure. Bombing Libya let a million muslims into Europe while creating a terrorist bastion on our boarder. Arming moderate jihadists in Syria led to waves of terrorism across Europe along with waves of refugees.
As for social media I remember the days before the invasion of Iraq when the entire media and population were against the war in almost the entire world. The exception was the US which was in a frenzy over wanting to invade a country that had done nothing to deserve it. The difference was the media in the US promoting the war while media in most other countries the media wasn't in a pro war frenzy. The US has a more pro Israel media than Israel itself and it is one of few countries in which Israel is popular. Americans being pro Israel is largely caused by the US mainstream media heavily pushing a pro Israel agenda. WIthout an extreme pro israel bias in the information space the opinions on the conflict would normalize to what it is in most of the rest of the world.
History didn't start on 9/11. The US has been meddling in various Middle Eastern countries since at least World War II, and arguably earlier. How do you resolve the dilemma of having popular governments who want to have good relations with you, but which relations are contingent on selling them weapons they explicitly intend to use against a country you're a strong supporter of, if not exactly allied with? What if the alternative to selling them weapons is that they'll end up buying them from your biggest geopolitical rival instead? The US tried to walk a fine line on this policy throughout the postwar era, and it's easy to criticize them for it now but hard to state confidently what a better path would have been. You can say the same of a hundred other foreign policy decisions the US made in the region between WWII and 9/11.
I agree that the Iraq invasion was a mistake, and said so at the time, but it's kind of a "you had to be there" sort of thing. The feeling—if not the explicit argument being made—was that Islamic terrorism was only able to reach into the United States because of the support of anti-American dictatorial governments that tolerated their presence. The 9/11 hijackers may have been Saudi, but the Taliban let them operate with impunity in Afghanistan. Sadaam was an old enemy and a convenient target, so even if his actual connection to terrorism was tenuous, it wasn't difficult to imagine him harboring terrorists. Plus, these people were universally despised by their own populations, who would be glad to get them out of the way.
It's also worth pointing out that Cold War-era stereotypes about third world countries "not being ready for democracy" were seen as increasingly old-fashioned. Much had been written by that point about how America's insistence on keeping dictators and emirs in power over democratically elected governments that might be too leftist led directly the predicament we were in. At best, some would find an outlet for their dissatisfaction with the current government in religious fanaticism. At worst, the fanatics would take over the government entirely, and use America's support of the previous regime as license to engage in terrorism at the state level, as in Iran. If these long-suffering people were only finally given the chance to determine their own futures, they'd find a better path forward. Everyone forgets the cheering in the streets the day Baghdad fell and the statue of Saddam was toppled. Of course, it didn't exactly work out like that, and one could have easily predicted that at the time, but the argument was there.
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Immigration policy didn’t have anything to do with 9/11, and neither did afghanis(the people involved in 9/11 were Saudi nationals).
were they operating out of saudia, or somewhere else?
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