Is the US actually the bad guys in the war on terror?

[Outcast9428]

The war on terror I don't feel like can really be understood by placing its start in 2001 with the 9/11 attacks. Ironically, the first real combatants in the war on terror was not the United States but rather the Soviet Union with the invasion of Afghanistan. During the 70s, 80s, and 90s, America and the Soviet Union did everything they could to undermine the traditional culture of the Middle East and turn the Islamic world into something resembling the secularized, liberal world of Europe, Latin America, and the United States. The US forcibly imposed secular dictators like the shah in Iran. Similarly, the shah of Afghanistan during the 60s and 70s was trying to turn Afghanistan into a liberal, secular nation. Mirroring the revolution happening in the United States at that time. All across the Middle East during the 60s and 70s, traditional Islamic culture was under attack.

Now I don't personally agree with a lot of the ways that Muslims run their countries, but as a nationalist, I feel like we are honor bound to respect their traditions and culture and not attempt to impose our own system on them. They ought to be allowed to figure out a way to fix their own problems rather then having the US or Soviet Union invade the country, whether militarily or through NGOs and puppet regimes in order to say "this is how you are going to run things."

During the late 70s and early 80s, this started to change. The shah of Iran was thrown out of power and an Islamic theocracy was installed to take his place. In 1979, Islamic radicals took control over the grand mosque in Saudi Arabia and fought a pitched battle with the government as a result of being infuriated over the Saudi regime's tolerance towards liberalism in Saudi Arabia. The result of the grand mosque battle was that the Saudi government started imposing a strict version of sharia law, gave religious conservatives more power in the government and institutions of society, and Saudi Arabia developed the reputation it has today as a strict Islamic theocracy. In addition, after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, the Mujahideen fought partially to overthrow the Soviet Union but also to overthrow the previous government of Afghanistan and impose a more Islamist vision for the country.

During the 1980s, the US government was more concerned about communism then Islamism. So we supported the Mujahideen against the Soviets. Once the Mujahideen won and took control of Afghanistan, imposing an Islamic theocracy on the country, however, the US regreted its decision and started attempting to undermine the Taliban government. In addition to this, Osama Bin Laden took fighters he had fought with in Afghanistan to form Al-Qaeda which at first enjoyed popularity in Saudi Arabia but was eventually kicked out when the Saudi government chose to enlist the help of the United States to defeat Saddam's invasion of Kuwait instead of Al-Qaeda's fighters. Afterward, Al-Qaeda condemned the Saudi's government's ties with the US and started viewing the US as the primary enemy standing in the way of Islamist regimes forming across the Middle East.

Thus began the terror attacks. After the terror attacks, the United States declared war on Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups, invading Afghanistan in order to prevent the Taliban from harboring Al-Qaeda. One thing the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan taught Al-Qaeda, however, was that nothing seemed to drive Muslims into the arms of Islamist ideology and create a better opportunity for Islamists to install their own regime then a foreign power such as the US or the Soviet Union, kicking secular Arab dictators out of power.

The US government did not understand the differing motivations of each group. Americans view things through a very simplistic, black and white view. Simply democracy = good, dictatorship = bad. Thus, Americans cannot tell the difference between the Taliban and dictators like Saddam Hussein or Bashar Al Assad. Americans just think all dictators are the same and have the same motivations/ideology driving their behavior. Therefore, the US was easily goaded into invading Iraq and kicking Saddam Hussein out of power, giving Al-Qaeda the biggest opportunity ever to create an Islamic theocracy in Iraq. However, Al-Qaeda failed, partially because of US military presence but mostly because of Iraqi resistance to their power. Ten years after the invasion and the defeat of Al-Qaeda, ISIS once again tried to exploit the power vacuum formed by the Syrian Civil War to turn both Syria and Iraq into Islamic theocracies.

My personal conclusion is that the US should have stayed out of the Middle Eastern affairs from the beginning and respect Middle Easterners desire to preserve their cultural heritage, and that our interference in the Middle Eastern culture was not only misguided from the start but ended up resulting in a massive orgy of violence that did not need to happen.

However, the counterpoint to my conclusion, and ultimately the reason why Islamic terrorist organizations could not succeed in their mission of creating Islamic theocracies was because of their extreme brutality. Hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of innocent, Muslim civilians have been killed by Islamic terrorist organizations since the 1980s for following a different interpretation of Islam, whether it was a more liberal interpretation, being Shia instead of Sunni, or following the Yazidi religion in Iraq. Even in the 80s and 90s, hundreds of thousands of Afghani civilians were killed by the Mujahideen for their ties to the Soviet backed regime. This legacy of brutality followed Islamic terrorist organizations into the 2000s and 2010s with mass killing perpetrated in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria.

Not only were many Muslim civilians killed by these organizations, but some of them were executed with particularly sadistic methods. ISIS was known for crucifying children, burning people alive, publicly uploading videos of their executions onto the internet, and electrocuting them in cages. Whatever their stated goals might have been, many of the people ultimately attracted to joining ISIS were simply evil, sadistic psychopaths who seemed like they just wanted to kill people.

And this is why, following the destruction of ISIS, there hasn't been much motivation for creating a similar organization. Perhaps we are finally at a point where a long lasting conclusion to the war on terror can be reached? Ultimately, neither side in this conflict really had the purest intentions and both sides did some massive damage on Middle Eastern society. Which side was worse is what I'm interested in debating.

[flowerthief00]

This has to be the most intelligent post I've ever read on this board. Way too intelligent to be posted on a board like this. This is a board where even its owner thinks "9/11 was an inside job". So unfortunately, I sort of doubt you're going to get the reply that post deserves. Maybe not from me either, but I can try to give one perspective.

Simply put, I question the notion that the US would be able to stay out of Middle Eastern (or any region's) affairs for very long no matter how much it fancied it could. The US is the global hegemon. It *has* to be involved. It wouldn't be able to refrain from meddling any more than a father would be able to refrain from meddling when his two sons start beating each other with sticks, no matter that he might have said "You guys play amongst yourselves" five seconds ago.

You're probably familiar with Victor Davis Hanson? He's often talked/written about the myth of US isolationism. Isolationism is not our true national character. Never has been. Isolationism is a phase that we go through from time to time, such as in between world wars. Reality inevitably and invariably brings us out of it, and we would have been better off had we not fallen into it in the first place. Put another way, you can try to ignore shit going on in the world, but eventually shit comes washing up on your shore. That was one of the lessons from 9/11, right? (unless you're a conspiracy theorist, but I wouldn't bother typing a reply if I thought you were) For all the foreign policy blunders and simplistic black & white views ways of looking at things, I don't think "stay out of the affairs of others altogether" is the correct takeaway. Not when, as the world's superpower, you're going to come down off your chair to regulate sooner or later.

Looking back at it all, I mean. As for the present day, well... In the present day, with unprecedented levels of debt, corruption, absence of leadership, the waning of the liberal values we once championed, and a host of other frankly inexcusable ills, I would be a lot more hesitant to recommend US meddling in anything more meaningful than a game of UNO at a birthday party. But I assume we are talking about all this in a clinical, historian-kind-of way, far removed from the time and place we're discussing, being that today we have frankly other problems we ought to be facing.

What the US ought to have done then I don't claim to have the full answer to. However, "Democracy = good, dictatorship = bad", while only the very beginning of starting points, is not wrong as far as it goes. Democracy IS better (not direct democracy, but representative government). It's a pillar of fundamental liberty, albeit very frail and difficult to preserve let alone to establish in a foreign land. Don't forget that the US imposed its system on Japan after 1945. Instead of respecting their culture and traditions we said "You're gonna do things this way from now on. Suck it." I for one think it's a great thing that we did.

So with regards to the Middle East, I doubt whether a hands-in-your-lap-do-nothing policy would have necessarily been preferable. The Middle East has always been a massive orgy of violence with or without the US (and with or without the British). I was talking with a veteran one time who said that what the US policy towards the Middle East should be is to get a massive bulldozer and drive it across the entire region.

[Outcast9428]

@flowerthief00

I used to believe democracy was definitely superior to authoritarian governments but nowadays I feel increasingly like the distinctions are more blurry then we think. Extreme authoritarianism is obviously always bad. The style of authoritarianism that ISIS and Al-Qaeda were running was definitely evil. That being said, the events of the last two years have convinced me that a lot of "democracies" are a lot more authoritarian then they make themselves out to be, and a lot of authoritarian governments are not as bad as made out to be either.

Every single society tries to create some kind of consensus on who should be in charge because if you don't have any consensus you have complete chaos and nothing works. Imagine if the US had Christian theocrats competing with communists in congress to get bills passed? Nothing would ever get done because people's beliefs and philosophies are too different. Eventually you have to settle on someone being in charge, and typically whoever is in charge wants to remain in charge.

But democracies do everything authoritarian governments do, they just do it with a little more subtlety. The ruling party in democracies buy up all the media and inundate their citizenry with propaganda in order to convince them to do whatever they want them to do. Our elected representatives are theoretically supposed to be representing us but they don't. Most of them just use their position to elicit bribes from rich donors and then create the laws that their rich donors want them to.

Obviously this happens a lot in authoritarian regimes as well, but at least in authoritarian regimes you only have one guy that you really need to get out of power. In democracies, you have hundreds of corrupt oligarchs to remove from power and every time you think you've gotten them out they just get replaced with a different face but similar motivations.

I've also spoken to enough people who live in actual authoritarian regimes to know that authoritarian governments typically don't run around putting everybody in prison who doesn't agree with them. I've definitely seen Russians online who are anti-Putin, and people from various Middle Eastern and Asian governments who didn't like their government. Its true that these people don't have any actual power to change things. But it doesn't feel all that different from the system we have.

Of course, I'm not saying that our system is anything like a system such as North Korea's or China's when it comes to authoritarianism. Obviously extreme authoritarianism can turn life into a living nightmare. But at the same time, I've started wondering if you sometimes need mild authoritarianism in order to defeat extreme authoritarianism. Some of the communists in our country today would love to turn us into an extremely authoritarian society. Would it be bad to use authoritarian powers ourselves to make sure these people cannot gain a foothold in our government and institutions? I don't feel anymore that such a thing is morally wrong.

As for isolationism, I don't see how one can claim that America in the 19th century or the first half of the 20th for that matter was a globalist entity. America has not always been the world's leading superpower. For most of our history, Britain was the world's main superpower. We completely stayed out of the Napoleonic wars and did not build colonial empires the same way Britain, France, Spain, and Portugal did. America was pretty isolationist up until WW2.

As for what we did regarding Japan. I don't think we were anywhere near as disrespectful to Japan's culture following WW2 as we have been to the Middle Eastern culture. We did impose democracy rather then allowing the emperor to continue ruling, but we did allow the Japanese to keep their emperor as a figurehead, and we really did not meddle with their culture much. We mostly told them they weren't allowed to build a military that could fight us and they could not let their emperor rule as a dictator. With the Middle East, however, we've essentially been trying to tell them how they ought to interpret their own religion which we never did with the Japanese.

[flowerthief00]

What would be the mild authoritarianism you have in mind? Do you mean curtailing of liberal protections that a bill of rights is intended to guarantee?

Democracy without liberal protections--freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, etc, all that good stuff--is meaningless to my mind. So when we said "democracy = good", we are, I hope, speaking about liberal democracy. Once the liberal part of the equation is gone, it hardly matters whether you call yourself a democracy any more. You're no better than the next totalitarian regime with its own sham elections calling itself the People's Republic of Whatever.

Well, I'll admit myself that the last two years the distinction between a democracy and totalitarianism seemingly has grown blurrier that I would have thought and has made me ask the same questions you have. But as I was saying, democracy is a fragile thing and what I think we're seeing in the US is a democracy that its citizenry has allowed to become corrupt.

"Democracy is a device that insures we shall be governed no better than we deserve." --Bernard Shaw.

Possibly we don't deserve to be governed better than the subjects of a totalitarian government do any more. Implied is that democracy can swing from utopia to dystopia or anything in between. The mechanism allows either, all depending on what the people will allow.

Regarding isolationism... It was that same Jefferson presidency which sought to stay out of the Napoleonic wars that proved that isolationism was ultimately doomed to fail. Jefferson's policies paved the way for another war with the British, and arguably expansion of the military, even putting aside the question of whether you can forcibly remove Indian tribes from lands you want to own and still call yourself "isolationist". America was not a superpower for most of its history, but over and over again it has swung back to playing a role on the world stage as much as it was able to. It couldn't help itself. (Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam constituted what you could call a stem of an empire) If it's hard to accept the claim that isolationism was not our national character, is it easier to accept the claim that American Exceptionalism was? That the latter makes the former all but a foregone conclusion is the point Hanson was making.

Regarding telling the Middle East how to interpret their religion... I don't think we cared about that beyond the favoring of moderate religious leaders out of expedience, because when one interpretation of a religion is that finding god means doing death-cult shit in order to get to an afterlife you kind of need to oppose that.

I am not categorically against cultural imperialism, anyhow. Culture is not all equally good.

[Outcast9428]

Mild authoritarianism I would say is a government that does believe it has a duty to change or orient the social values of its citizenry in a certain direction... For example, through propaganda and teaching them certain values in the education system. In a mildly authoritarian system, teachers attempting to teach children the perverse things they are attempting to teach today would be instantly fired from their position. Freedom of speech would be respected, however, take the journalists right now who are literally baiting us into a war with Russia. In a mildly authoritarian society, I'd suggest that such journalists should also lose their jobs because their speech is no longer a matter of opinion but rather legitimately dangerous as it is creating a risk of us getting involved in a nuclear conflict.

A mildly authoritarian government would also reject political pluralism as not being conductive to a stable society. By this I do not necessarily mean that there will be no opposition parties. But I do mean that the opposition parties ought to have similar ideological values. The United States has become a poignant example of what happens when a country's ideological views and lifestyles become too polarized and different from one another. The only thing stopping the United States right now from crumbling into a vicious civil war is our powerful police and military. If we were like an African country with a weak central government, this country would probably turn into Rwanda or the India partition tomorrow.

Even my dad who is the most gentle, peaceful, "respect other people's opinions and views" kind of guy I've ever known watches the news these days, sees what the ultra progressive journalists are saying on CNN and MSNBC and says "these people need to just be taken out and beaten." If that's how my dad feels, I can't even imagine how angry the rest of the country is. I know how angry I am though.

So I do believe the government has a legitimate interest in shaping the ideological views of its citizenry, that does not mean that mass imprisonment or killings are justified measures for achieving that change though.

[flowerthief00]

So who decides what ideology the public will have propagandized on them? For every view you believe in strongly there are people on the other side who believe in the opposite view just as strongly.

Wouldn't separation (a peaceful one if at all possible) be better than one half using force to make the other comply with its ideology? Were the US to break into parts, it would be weaker than the sum of those parts once was, which would be a tragedy, but at least each part could have that high degree of uniformity that we want.

[WilliamSmith]

Holocaust is a word that Zionist propagandists have reserved for Jewish experience. However, in a new book, US-Imposed Post-9/11 Muslim Holocaust & Muslim Genocide (Korsgaard Publishing, 2020), Dr. Gideon Polya documents that three to four times more Muslims have been killed by Washington’s 21st century wars than there are Jews in Israel. Polya concludes that Washington’s holocaust of Muslims is a multiple of the claimed Jewish holocaust number of 6 million.

The cost in dollars to the United States of the gratuitous murder of 32 million Muslims is in the many trillions along with thousands of dead and maimed US soldiers and 88,000 US veteran suicides since September 11, 2001. Americans have paid dearly for the hoax “war on terror” imposed on them by lies and deception.

Polya acquaints the reader with a number of holocausts: the Bengali holocaust, Somali holocaust, opiate holocaust, and the Yemeni, Palestinian, Rohingya and other genocides. In Chapter 20 Polya speaks of the American Holocaust, which consists of untimely and unnecessary American deaths from the diversion of billions of dollars from American needs to Israel.

https://www.unz.com/proberts/the-muslin-holocaust/

In other words, yes, obviously the "US" is the bad guy in the war on terror in the henchman/underling sense, because the US is the degenerate wardog for the jews.

[Winston]

Sorry @flowerthief00 but everyone here knows that 9/11 was not what we were told and that the official story is impossible. You can deny it if you want, but that's your problem. Anyone can deny anything, you can deny that 2+2=4 but that doesn't change the fact. Any smart freethinker knows the official 9/11 story is bollocks in many ways. This has been conclusively proven already long ago. If you are not up to date on that, that's your problem, not ours. Most guys here know better. Sorry, but that's a bad example if you wanna demonstrate the idiocy of people here. Find a better example. Even flat earth is a better example than that. Already 40 percent of Americans doubt the official story, which contains many impossibilities. If you believe that four large airliners can vaporize completely and leave no large significant debris, or that steel skyscrapers can completely turn to dust midair from normal office fires, then I got a bridge to sell you. No thinking person believes those things. So the ridicule is on YOU. The 9/11 thread in the forum contains more than enough proof to demonstrate all this. We figured this out in 2006, so you are way behind. Your fault, not ours. If someone wants to be stupid, that's their choice and their problem, doesn't make them right of course.

[flowerthief00]

^ Half a dozen instances of the bandwagon fallacy in a single paragraph? It's one of his favorite logical fallacies to commit, second only to argument from repetition. In fact roughly every other sentence there was a logical fallacy. This is why I do not bother to engage with Winston.

[gsjackson]

Sorry @flowerthief00 but everyone here knows that 9/11 was not what we were told and that the official story is impossible. You can deny it if you want, but that's your problem. Anyone can deny anything, you can deny that 2+2=4 but that doesn't change the fact. Any smart freethinker knows the official 9/11 story is bollocks in many ways. This has been conclusively proven already long ago. If you are not up to date on that, that's your problem, not ours. Most guys here know better. Sorry, but that's a bad example if you wanna demonstrate the idiocy of people here. Find a better example. Even flat earth is a better example than that. Already 40 percent of Americans doubt the official story, which contains many impossibilities. If you believe that four large airliners can vaporize completely and leave no large significant debris, or that steel skyscrapers can completely turn to dust midair from normal office fires, then I got a bridge to sell you. No thinking person believes those things. So the ridicule is on YOU. The 9/11 thread in the forum contains more than enough proof to demonstrate all this. We figured this out in 2006, so you are way behind. Your fault, not ours. If someone wants to be stupid, that's their choice and their problem, doesn't make them right of course.

We don't know what was in the 9-11 debris because an Israeli firm was dispatched to remove it all and ship it out of the country before the crime scene could be investigated.

[Winston]

^ Half a dozen instances of the bandwagon fallacy in a single paragraph? It's one of his favorite logical fallacies to commit, second only to argument from repetition. In fact roughly every other sentence there was a logical fallacy. This is why I do not bother to engage with Winston.

You calling them fallacies doesn't make them so. As usual you don't make any valid arguments other than argument from authority. I can call everything you say a fallacy too, but what would that prove? Unless you have valid reasons or arguments, you calling everything a "fallacy" says nothing. Are you playing games here? Surely you know this right? Surely you know that ridicule is NOT a valid argument. If I made a fallacy, then point it out. But you can't right? Because you cannot find any real fallacies, you are just using cheap lazy dismissals because you are unable to think or refute anything I said. What a waste of friggin time.

Btw, FYI, intelligence has nothing to do with the guys on this forum. It's all about being AWAKE and HONEST enough to see the obvious, which most are not. Lots of high IQ people like academics believe in false things, like macro-evolution or atheism or that we all arose here by chance and random accidents, which is ridiculous because even a simple machine like a calculator can never be created by random forces, no matter how many billions or trillions of years you add to the equation. Yet adult professors and academics and computer geeks with high IQs believe it, because they are on the system academic wavelength so they will believe their lies even if debunked or never proven. Go figure. We've been over all this before. Our motto is to think for yourself and wake up. IQ and intelligence have nothing to do with it. So please don't call the posters here unintelligent.

Look if you have no valid points, don't bother. You waste posting space and lower the quality of the thread when you make nonsense posts with no valid points. We should make a new rule called "no ridicule without valid points please". Otherwise you and Gali will keep doing that and filling the threads with nonsense. Why aren't you smart enough to make valid points or arguments? No offense, but this is a valid question. Or offer logical arguments or evidence to support your thesis? I can provide a long list of arguments to support everything I say. So why can't you?

Again, you will ignore this post and I will have wasted my time again. Next time don't bother.

[galileo2333]

The war on terror I don't feel like can really be understood by placing its start in 2001 with the 9/11 attacks. Ironically, the first real combatants in the war on terror was not the United States but rather the Soviet Union with the invasion of Afghanistan. During the 70s, 80s, and 90s, America and the Soviet Union did everything they could to undermine the traditional culture of the Middle East and turn the Islamic world into something resembling the secularized, liberal world of Europe, Latin America, and the United States. The US forcibly imposed secular dictators like the shah in Iran. Similarly, the shah of Afghanistan during the 60s and 70s was trying to turn Afghanistan into a liberal, secular nation. Mirroring the revolution happening in the United States at that time. All across the Middle East during the 60s and 70s, traditional Islamic culture was under attack.

Now I don't personally agree with a lot of the ways that Muslims run their countries, but as a nationalist, I feel like we are honor bound to respect their traditions and culture and not attempt to impose our own system on them. They ought to be allowed to figure out a way to fix their own problems rather then having the US or Soviet Union invade the country, whether militarily or through NGOs and puppet regimes in order to say "this is how you are going to run things."

During the late 70s and early 80s, this started to change. The shah of Iran was thrown out of power and an Islamic theocracy was installed to take his place. In 1979, Islamic radicals took control over the grand mosque in Saudi Arabia and fought a pitched battle with the government as a result of being infuriated over the Saudi regime's tolerance towards liberalism in Saudi Arabia. The result of the grand mosque battle was that the Saudi government started imposing a strict version of sharia law, gave religious conservatives more power in the government and institutions of society, and Saudi Arabia developed the reputation it has today as a strict Islamic theocracy. In addition, after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, the Mujahideen fought partially to overthrow the Soviet Union but also to overthrow the previous government of Afghanistan and impose a more Islamist vision for the country.

During the 1980s, the US government was more concerned about communism then Islamism. So we supported the Mujahideen against the Soviets. Once the Mujahideen won and took control of Afghanistan, imposing an Islamic theocracy on the country, however, the US regreted its decision and started attempting to undermine the Taliban government. In addition to this, Osama Bin Laden took fighters he had fought with in Afghanistan to form Al-Qaeda which at first enjoyed popularity in Saudi Arabia but was eventually kicked out when the Saudi government chose to enlist the help of the United States to defeat Saddam's invasion of Kuwait instead of Al-Qaeda's fighters. Afterward, Al-Qaeda condemned the Saudi's government's ties with the US and started viewing the US as the primary enemy standing in the way of Islamist regimes forming across the Middle East.

Thus began the terror attacks. After the terror attacks, the United States declared war on Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups, invading Afghanistan in order to prevent the Taliban from harboring Al-Qaeda. One thing the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan taught Al-Qaeda, however, was that nothing seemed to drive Muslims into the arms of Islamist ideology and create a better opportunity for Islamists to install their own regime then a foreign power such as the US or the Soviet Union, kicking secular Arab dictators out of power.

The US government did not understand the differing motivations of each group. Americans view things through a very simplistic, black and white view. Simply democracy = good, dictatorship = bad. Thus, Americans cannot tell the difference between the Taliban and dictators like Saddam Hussein or Bashar Al Assad. Americans just think all dictators are the same and have the same motivations/ideology driving their behavior. Therefore, the US was easily goaded into invading Iraq and kicking Saddam Hussein out of power, giving Al-Qaeda the biggest opportunity ever to create an Islamic theocracy in Iraq. However, Al-Qaeda failed, partially because of US military presence but mostly because of Iraqi resistance to their power. Ten years after the invasion and the defeat of Al-Qaeda, ISIS once again tried to exploit the power vacuum formed by the Syrian Civil War to turn both Syria and Iraq into Islamic theocracies.

My personal conclusion is that the US should have stayed out of the Middle Eastern affairs from the beginning and respect Middle Easterners desire to preserve their cultural heritage, and that our interference in the Middle Eastern culture was not only misguided from the start but ended up resulting in a massive orgy of violence that did not need to happen.

However, the counterpoint to my conclusion, and ultimately the reason why Islamic terrorist organizations could not succeed in their mission of creating Islamic theocracies was because of their extreme brutality. Hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of innocent, Muslim civilians have been killed by Islamic terrorist organizations since the 1980s for following a different interpretation of Islam, whether it was a more liberal interpretation, being Shia instead of Sunni, or following the Yazidi religion in Iraq. Even in the 80s and 90s, hundreds of thousands of Afghani civilians were killed by the Mujahideen for their ties to the Soviet backed regime. This legacy of brutality followed Islamic terrorist organizations into the 2000s and 2010s with mass killing perpetrated in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria.

Not only were many Muslim civilians killed by these organizations, but some of them were executed with particularly sadistic methods. ISIS was known for crucifying children, burning people alive, publicly uploading videos of their executions onto the internet, and electrocuting them in cages. Whatever their stated goals might have been, many of the people ultimately attracted to joining ISIS were simply evil, sadistic psychopaths who seemed like they just wanted to kill people.

And this is why, following the destruction of ISIS, there hasn't been much motivation for creating a similar organization. Perhaps we are finally at a point where a long lasting conclusion to the war on terror can be reached? Ultimately, neither side in this conflict really had the purest intentions and both sides did some massive damage on Middle Eastern society. Which side was worse is what I'm interested in debating.

Terrorists can be the good guys sometimes

[josephty2]

The ... debating.

Perhaps. Then whos the good guys?

[Pixel--Dude]

In most cases America ARE the terrorists! They were the ones who placed Saddam in power in the first place so they could get cheaper oil and then they took him out because he wasn't "playing the game". America are the bad guys in this story and unfortunately there are no good guys. Funny how anyone who aligns with the agenda of the world police is a freedom fighter while anyone else is a terrorist. I also believe they were responsible for the twin towers. Set of evil bastards.