It's been 8 years or so since 9/11, and the world has changed quite a bit since then. New regimes in the Middle East, new political parties in power, new issues facing the world, and so on.

Whenever I look at the world today, I wonder what the world would be like if the United States had never been attacked on September 11, 2001. If we'd remained at peace, if Saddam Hussein still lead Iraq, and if the Twin Towers still stood.

So, I thought i'd bring this subject up for debate. What do you think the world would be like if 9/11 never happened? Would the U.S. have been attacked eventually? Would we still be at war?

Post your theories and opinions.

I wouldn't be able to laugh at America and there idiocy as much and America would have had to find a different reason to invade Iraq and steal there oil.

It would be easier to get on planes.

These "what if" questions are hard to answer. For all we know, we could have had the same result several years later.

If another terrorist attack replaced 9/11 at some point later on, the war on terror would simply be delayed. But if 9/11 never happened, we'd be in a much different world. The war in Iraq would've most likely not happened, or otherwise it would have been unpopular from the start. It was the "GO AMERICA! KILL THOSE TERRORIST love-childS!" mentality that got us into that war. The economy would still be functional, and people might've had good reasoning to say "Bush was a good president".

I think the US' Foreign policy would be dramatically different as well... Not so much Middle-East focus.
The price of oil wouldn't be so high either, which means oiler countries wouldn't be as powerful, and US' Borders would be less tight (not sure though).

I still think that, like Vera said, if 9/11 hadn't happened, something big would still have, sooner or later.

The oil theory is terrible, America has not taken oil, and they have lost trillions of dollars invading Iraq, if their plan was to take oil and proffit they failed. Please stop quoting rock band lyrics because they are filled with nonfactual information that sells cd's. System of Down are a prime example, condemning consumerism and there they are selling their albums £15 a pop.

On the other hand, I'm one of those who think that the 9/11 incident was planned by more than just a terrorist organization. I also believe it's blown way out of proportion and does not justify half the things that's followed after it.

That's funny in the fact that America aren't capable of remaining at peace

Amen, America is the biggest war machine on Earth.


Being myself, I have seen various movies about 9/11 (as this topic fascinates me alot. ) I still don't believe it was an attack.
I've heard theories that America did it just to invade Iraq, Bush is a 'gold digger' and he wanted money, money and more money. So he thought it out and blamed Iraq so he could go dig for Oil.
I don't believe this extreme theorie though.

Well, there'd be nothing to lol at

I dunno, I agree with Vera tbh

They may very well have failed thats probably why there trying to pull out.

Also i only quoted the one statistic from SOAD and as i said i checked a few other places to make sure it was semi-accurate, the rest comes from reading between the lines of various source materials.

And if there not in Iraq for oil then that's even worse! That means that America actually thinks there allowed to go into a country and fudge around with it whenever they feel like it and that legitimately scares me.

Like I said in the other thread there are plenty of possibilities, some of the more interesting and accurate one's are:
-Control of oil, so they aren't dependent on oil producing countries in result of a war (possibly with muslim world/iran/middle east.)
-To geographically surround Iran, they already have Afghanistan, maybe even Pakistan next.

Actually that makes sense i never even thought of those possibilities

Still neither of those justify flying into a country and blowing the crap out of it as they see fit.

Bah. Very little would have changed. By the mid-1990s we were already pouring a lot of foreign policy effort into the Middle East. Anyone who doesn't think that's true needs to go back and review what the focus of the news was at the time--if you weren't paying any mind, I saw more film of F-117s blowing the almighty shizzle out of a desert, and not much B-1s over Russia.

Point? 9/11 didn't really change shizzle. It just brought it out of the closet.

I hope you're not referring to Afghanistan.

Heh. Right. It's not as if Clinton didn't command a few bomb strikes here and there in Iraq from the Oral Office. (ba-DUM-pssssh)

As a country, no. Correct. How about the 'reconstruction' firms and projects, though?

Perhaps, however the government would have to be pretty corrupt to put so much money into something that only a handfull of firms would benefit.

Apart from the (unimportant for the sake of discussion) fact that such firms are not so few, the point is that they are economic powerhouses. Profit for them, more taxes coming in! It's - ahem - win-win!

I'm sure the government know more reasonable places to invest their money, especially when investing in another country for little or no profit, sure they may get taxes, but if they are spending the money that generates the taxes, then they are getting a very bad deal. And yeah it is pretty unimportant but I love to ramble on about a mildly unrelated topic heh.

It wouldn't take an hour to get through airport security. I also agree something would have happened between then and now.

Gah. Why would we start a whole war just to get a little oil? People like you also believe that the moon landings were hoaxed. Be careful someone doesn't punch you in the face like Buzz Aldrin did to some obnoxious "moon landing fake believer."


Democracy is the worst kind of government, except for all the others. --Winston Churchill.

Really, would you rather us be mobilized and ready to fight to defend ourselves, or complacent, fat, lazy, pacifist, sitting ducks? I'd choose the former. To all people shouting about "world peace:" the only country we can completely demilitarize is ours. I'd like to see you try to take the weapons from a violent terrorist wannabe. Or what about Iran and North Korea's nukes? Even if they don't have any yet, they're going to obtain one quite soon, if they haven't already. Missile tests, nuclear programs, it's all on the news as we speak. Just like Nazi Germany's rise to power, except Hitler kept it all a secret.

We need our military, and we definitely don't need to be pacifists, because we probably should defend ourselves. If I punched you in the face, would you hit back? Or would you not respond, for fear of "incurring more violence?" What if I hit you again? Took a chainsaw to you? Maybe not a chainsaw, but the point is, making war is sometimes necessary. Peace, heck--tell that to the Taliban.

Why would you start a war over some brown guy with a mustache? It wasn't really your problem nor your responsibility to "fix" the "problems" in Iraq but you felt like you should anyways? As I've said if you really flew in there because you thought Iraq wanted/needed all mighty America then you (your country) is the utter embodiment of retardation and pig-headedness. There wasn't any terrorist threat in Iraq either, if you hadn't rushed as soon as you could get the planes ready then you'd have known that and wouldn't have needed to bother with that. Sorry America the world doesn't need or want your help, atleast not if you give it in the form of an unsubstantiated invasion.
So heres my question: Why would America waste taxpayers money on a war if they wern't recieving some kind of profit from it (whether it be direct or indirect).
Do you praise Bush as a saint? Because if you believe he's in Iraq to help the country why not?

[/Mild-Rambling]

Oh and i don't think the moon landings were faked however i think it was kind of pointless for you to go up there in the first place.

Hitler had a mustache Franz Ferdinand had a mustache (Seriously, look it up.), Emperor Showa had a mustache, wars are started over mustaches.

Actually, we flew in there because we believed Saddam had WMD's and was prepared to use them against us. We acted on bad intelligence, but that's not an excuse to leave a country without any leaders, without any government at all, hanging.

We didn't invade because there were terrorists, we invaded because we believed Saddam was a credible threat. Even if he wasn't, isn't taking out a dictator that killed so many hundreds of people kind-of sort-of a good thing? Maybe?

Not when it requires bombing the crap out of a country and spending trillions of tax dollars. Saddam wasn't a good guy but he's far from being worth all the trouble that this war has caused.



America has WMD's what would you say if i somehow amassed an army and tried to liberate you? Whether Saddam had WMD's or not he wasn't Irans leader Saddam was a tyrant, Tyrant =/= Psychopathic Threat to America that needs to be killed and if your country acted on that then you people really need to consider who's running that land mass of yours.

Maybe not, but I still think it's good we accomplished at least one good thing after rushing into war like we did.

If you believed that we were prepared to nuke you, go ahead. We were going against someone who had demonstrated he is willing to use WMD's against people, and in the post 9/11 tension it was easy to make the jump from "Has used these weapons in the pass" to "Has them and is going to use them against America."

George Bush?

One of their albums is called 'Steal This Album' for a reason

'What if?' questions are a nightmare to try and comprehend. We could say that the world would have carried on as a happy bunny existence with flowers and unicorns but there would be no chance of that. Terrorism would still exist. It wasn't thought up for 9/11 the 'Muslim' Terrorists existed for years before hand, and would have carried on afterwards. Maybe there cause would've died out though as America wouldn't have been able to jump the gun into Iraq (which is still a bit confusing as Sadam had nothing to do with 9/11) and then the move to the war against terror. With no fighting in Iraq there'd have been no movement to Afghanistan so less insurgents on the ground. With no one to fight they'd have to make the first attack, which would have to be something like 9/11.

So whatever had happened and 9/11 didn't happen something similar would have happened. It may have been smaller and had brough a small counter attack but some attack would still happen on the US.

And what the hell does it have to do with anything, unless you assume that the only democratic country in the world is the US? -- Everybody Else

How about Israeli ones? Pakistani ones? Indian ones? Formerly-USSR ones? Why are those two an issue and the rest are not?

Bullshizzle radar overwhelming. Hitler's rise to power was nowhere near being a secret or anything. In fact, the NSDAP (= Nationalsocialist Party) took part in elections since 1924, until they finally won them on January 1933, and Hitler was nominated Kanzler (~= Prime Minister) on January 30, 1933. A secret vote involving one entire nation wouldn't be secret in its own right!

Defend yourself from what? Iraq? How and why? When did Iraq "punch America to the face"?

Believed? The US sold Iraq WMDs throughout the whole Eighties, at the time of the Iran-Iraq war, and made them destroy those same WMDs in 1991 via the first Gulf War (Much like a greengrocer selling you four pumpkins, and then coming to your house to destroy the pumpkins with a sledgehammer). UN and NATO inspectors didn't find anything despite (almost) full co-operation from the Iraqi regime.

"Bad intelligence"? Would you call a twelve-year-old thesis by an American doctoral student (his name is Ibrahim al-Marashi) "bad intelligence"? Even grammatical mistakes where copied in wholesale fashion by the UK government and passed to the US one. That's not bad intelligence, that's a deliberate forging. I mean, al-Marashi had written "Saddam appointed, Sabir 'Abd al-'Aziz al-Duri as head[...]". Notice the comma which definitely does not belong there in any way. Take page 13 of the UK dossier: "Saddam appointed, Sabir 'Abd al-'Aziz al-Duri as head[...]".

I mean, come on.

If so, why did the US sustain him throughout the '80s? Why did the US support the Noriega dictatorship? Videla? The Argentinian generals? Pinochet? Ngo Dinh Diem? Nguyen Van Thieu? The Talibans until the mid-90s, when they were opposing the USSR-backed regime in Afghanistan? Why them and not Saddam?

"Hey look, I burned down your house but I was able to salvage these marshmallows! They're even already roasted!"

Ah, and regarding the OP's question: we'd probably remember Madrid and London a bit more instead.

Why do all the topics I make get hijacked? O_o

It's a curse, I tell you! A hex!

Eventually, there would have been another sort of similar attack on U.S soil, and thus war would still have come. Although, hopefully it wouldn't have been the public trainwreck that it was this time around. We still would be hunting down Al Queada operatives, still fighting terrorists, etc. Tensions between areas of the Middle East and the rest of Western civilization would still be where they are now, just not under the same exact circumstances, just under as equally conflicting ones.

~Sgt.Pepper

Conflictual threads are bound to derail sometime or later. Make less controversial threads! (Joking, of course.)

I know millions of Americans wouldn't have lost someone they knew, over 3,000 people would still be alive, we probably wouldn't have invaded Iraq, we would have saved over $12B ($12,000,000,000)/Month and things would be a lot more peaceful.

And my grandfather's lifelong friends would not have lost their son, whom I also knew.

So, what could have been saved? So, incredibly much.
~Vincent

I'll probably be flamed for saying this but America would have invaded Iraq sooner or later whether 9/11 happened or not. 9/11 simply made it easier and more convenient to invade Iraq it would just be alot less popular, but it's lack of popularity isn't stopping it now is it?

Well, yes and no.

This is the debate on Iraq/Afghanistan:
1. We are losing all of these soldiers, pull out, save lives.
2. Yes, I agree with above, but if we pull out now, the governments may collapse and all of that work will have gone to waste...

I agree with #2, as yes, we need to pull out ASAP, but we've spent so much in money and lives, if the government and people can't hold the government, then what was the point of the last six years?

We should pull out when the Iraqis can completely defend themselves. They are beginning to show that, because they have taken control of the major cities. We are just there if they need any assistance.

~Vincent

George Bush was the president at the time of the the attacks. From what I understand, George Bush was a little hesitant to pull out. Barack Obama is pulling out (reasonably) quickly as he disagrees with Bush's decision. I know the US president isn't the only member of the US government, but he/she is the commander in chief.

If it wasn't for 9/11 we would be in Iran now and not Iraq or Afghanistan.

If 9/11 hadn't happened something much worst probably would have later.

If 9/11 hadn't happened gas prices would be cheaper.

If 9/11 hadn't happened it is possible the suicide bombing rate in the east would be far higher as right now most wackos are too busy traveling across the border to aid the freedom fighters.

If 9/11 hadn't happened Europeans and Leftists with their ridiculous claims wouldn't be so laughable. (Where is all that oil we are stealing? Gas prices sure haven't gotten cheaper. I want some of that oil!)

If 9/11 hadn't happened there wouldn't be so many righteous and patriotic tirades from righties to laugh at.

Easy, we were trying to get our alliance with them. They could't get gas to us with them being attacked, so we came and helped.

Its more like we really don't care what the rest of the world thinks, we are going to do things our way like we've always done and right then we felt like going into Iraq, crushing their army and making a hostile government slightly more friendly, and the potential for nukes was just the straw breaking the camel's back.

Its nothing new, we've been doing it since Tripoli. Things would be so much easier without the U.N. making our little wars more political then necessary.

Obama would probably lose the election.

Ha.

Actually, that's possible. Bush wouldn't have had his "justification" for Afghanistan and Iraq...

Without the anti-muslim sentiment caused by 9/11, people wouldn't have a problem with "Barack Hussein Obama".

They also wouldn't have a problem with another Republican president seeing as...

• ...the recession...
• ...the A-stan war...
• ... the Iraq war...
• ...the PATRIOT act...
• ...Guantanamo Bay controversy...

...wouldn't exist.

I wouldn't have had a problem if Obama was a Muslim, so long as he was conservative.

The recession would have happened. It was caused by ninja loans (should have gone for pirate loans clearly) where the debt was spread among so many that they lost their real ability to make money.

Not really to do with 9/11's consequences.