Now we can go in to various conspiracies from “Bush planned 9.11 as a false flag” to “Bush ignored intelligence reports so he could launch the war on terror,” but those are mostly just unproven conspiracies unrelated to what al-Qaeda wanted.
States can, have, and do engage in terrorism.
Do we have a word for "imperialist government uses violence against people to achieve political goals"?
Because "it's not terrorism because it's a state" is always gonna stink of trying to dodge the topic on a technicality.
Yes, we call this "war".
> Because "it's not terrorism because it's a state" is always gonna stink of trying to dodge the topic on a technicality.
No, it's not. Nobody is trying to dogde the bad aspects of the word, it's just that terrorism specifically is, by definition, not from a state.
There seems to be a trend of calling every terrifying event “terrorism.” People sometimes colloquially refer to even non-political mass shootings as terrorism.
I believe it’s important to separate different types of mass violence. For example a gang-related mass shooting might be de-escalated by a mediator engaging the belligerents, whereas a war crime should be sent to international criminal court and a terrorist should be dealt with in a manner to minimize the earned media attention.
Huh. Do we call operation condor a war crime?
Note that the word "terror" appears 34 times in that Wikipedia article.
How many Americans even know Bin Laden was hiding out in Pakistan for years after 11/9?
When I first seen 9/11 on TV as an 11 year old, I instantly thought that Ryadh will be turned into a crater within a few hours.
I dropped my jaw out of suprise, when I heard US going to declare war on Iraq — Saudis' biggest enemy. It made zero sense. I kept on watching the satellite TV at my neighbour's house, and was hoping that it was my knowledge of English failing me. It didn't.
You're being more than a little disingenuous ignoring the fact that we invaded Afghanistan specifically to go after the extremist group that was responsible for 9/11 about 2yr prior to invading Iraq, which was done for different reasons and "harboring terrorists" took a back seat to WMDs on that list of reasons.
There is a memo from Rumsfeld around then. [1]
The fact that all the terrorists were Saudi, that Bin Laden was Saudi, that Iraq was an enemy of the Saud regime, that Iraq was a "buffer" between the rest of the Middle East and Iran, all of that was ignored.
The war in Iraq was the US worst foreign affairs decision in the last 50 years.
All of the "WMD" and then "bringing democracy" was retconning the original desire to finish the first Iraq war, which had nothing to do with 9/11.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/plans-for-iraq-attack-began-on-...