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Comment by spfzero | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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