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Comment by chmod600 | Hacker News Reader

Would you have opposed interfering in Europe during WW2?

Do you generally oppose any kind of alliance, like NATO?

In general, yes to both questions. There's a point where a large-scale conflict becomes a direct threat to the United States, and WWII might have been that by 1941, but I would at least initially have opposed interfering.

The majority in the US opposed entering the war until Pearl Harbor, even though the administration of the time strongly wanted to.

I think there is a big difference between the powers that committed those atrociticies. Japan was behind Pearl Harbor wheareas a scraggly fundamentalist group in the middle east was behind 9/11 attacks. The former was a full blown exercise of military power and neutralization of some half of our naval fleet in the Pacific. The latter was a targetted terrorist attack largely organized by one main guy. We got the guy, and we could have probably gotten him without 20 years of war.

Probably Afghanistan was also the wrong target, or at least not the only country in the region that should have been targeted. Bin Laden hid in Pakistan after all, and the Taliban often crossed the border to Pakistan to seek refuge.

> Afghanistan was also the wrong target, or at least not the only country in the region that should have been targeted.

Afghanistan wasn't the only country in the region (nor weas that the only region in the world) in which the US conducted campaigns against al-Qaeda and factions allied with them.

> Bin Laden hid in Pakistan after all, and the Taliban often crossed the border to Pakistan to seek refuge.

And the US conducted attacks against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan from very early in the war, and also against bin Laden himself there.

The population of many European countries overwhelmingly desperately wanted the US to intervene during WW2. This is not at all the case at all in Vietnam, Irak or Afghanistan

Not your parent comment, but the U.S didn't enter WW2 until Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, immediately after which Germany declared war on U.S. Right?

The planner of 9/11 was in Afghanistan and actually carried out an attack on the U.S. Presumably the parent comment didn't think he was a direct threat worth invading over.

One might make a similar argument about Europe during WW2 (I am not, but that's why I'm asking the question).

It's not entirely fair to blame Japan for its attack, as there was a lot of signaling by Washington that taking the strategic base at Hawaii would not be opposed. We might not have been attacked if we hadn't invited it, and there's reason to believe that implicit invitation was extended intending to give the U.S. an excuse to enter the war.

Notwithstanding some historians' claims that interventionists in the Roosevelt administration slyly baited Japan into attacking first, there is zero historical evidence that Japan would otherwise have avoided attacking us.

The escalating embargo and blockade of Japan meant their industrial output was facing collapse within months. The attack was a desperate attempt to protect their invasion of the resource-rich East Indies. They literally had no choice, and this is exactly the argument that won Tojo permission to go forward with the attack.

Plus, the spirit of the Japanese nation was very much in favor of total conquest. Hakko Ichiu was sort of the Japanese version of America's Manifest Destiny, except they explicitly applied it to everything from Russia to Australia and Burma to Alaska.

Those points are all excellent.

The “she was asking for it” excuse? Really?

So Iraq didn't ask for it with WMD? Afghanistan didn't ask for it with harboring Taliban?

"Asking for it" is an acceptable excuse for a war internationally.

> So Iraq didn't ask for it with WMD?

Did we finally find some?

> Afghanistan didn't ask for it with harboring Taliban?

The idea that responding to 9/11 is similar to some supposed "we thought you'd be cool with us taking Hawaii" in 1941 is a bit baffling.

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