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Comment by catlover76 | Hacker News Reader

Not to mention a lot of us are in the US, and the international perception of deliberately bombing a civilian population, turning off its water supply, etc., in retaliation for a terrorist attack (however brutal and big) is much more dim than most American media outlets and power-holders want people to believe. I think the rest of the world is looking at the situation a lot more realistically, and is fully aware that a lot of the civilian deaths in Gaza are part of the point, and not mere collateral damage.

By American standards, thinking that the life of a Palestinian child has equal moral worth to that of an Israeli child is a non-mainstream opinion.

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It probably doesn't hurt that this is basically exactly what America did following the 9/11 attacks, which while certainly horrific, brutal, and warranted a response, launched us straight into an armed conflict that afflicted somewhere between 200 and 600 thousand deaths on a completely unrelated populace while plunging an entire middle eastern state into near total anarchy that it has yet to entirely recover from, and we did eventually get the man most responsible for the attacks... in Pakistan, years later, a country we did not invade, that is in fact, an ally.

Fighting terrorism is difficult. Encouraging it in foreign nations with boondoggling military action is easy. Far too often the west engages in the latter.

And I know hindsight 20/20 etc. but it isn't like the fact that going to war with another nation on shit intelligence was going to create metric assloads of anti-American and anti-Western sentiment and stoke further growth of terrorist groups was a fringe view at the time. Tons of people came out against Operation Iraqi Freedom and basically ALL of their predictions have come true.

Arguably Bin Laden got a great ROI on 9/11, what was his budget to train 20 terrorists, and the Dubya/Cheney/Rumsfeld response was lots of trillions of dollars, sending a lot of young Americans to death and disability, and a world that grew to hate the US even more (not just the Muslim world; Europe too, remember "Freedom Fries"?). And damn, 20 years later who runs Afghanistan? Taliban, with surplus Humvees.

So yeah, Hamas is probably happy right now with the IDF response, they don't care about the Palestinian civilians...

> Arguably Bin Laden got a great ROI on 9/11

Arguably? If anyone argues against that they're wrong. Bin Laden accomplished his objectives and beyond.

The US objectives weren't to deny Bin Laden his though, they were to kill Bin Laden (and topple Sadam, for some reason). Both of which we also accomplished.

The half hearted nation building was a facade and led to the quagmire and chaos that ensued.

> The US objectives weren't to deny Bin Laden his though, they were to kill Bin Laden (and topple Sadam, for some reason).

That's true, the Cheney admin didn't want to waste a crisis and they thought they'd bring a new century of American dominance[1]. It's kind of sad they didn't dare to do nation-building, unlike the Marshall Plan, although it was probably politically indefensible. (Wait until Americans hear that Iraq has universal healthcare.) I must admit I've read more than I care about the topic, like "Imperial Life in the Emerald City"[2] or Sarah Chayes' chapter about Afghanistan in her book about corruption, discussed in length in this article[3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_C... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Life_in_the_Emerald_C... [3] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/19/corruption-rev...

Don't forget the massive domestic government spending on defense projects and general war materiel. Wars are expensive, and the fossil fuel industry, the military industrial complex, etc. made BANK off of it.

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