Re: Potty Trouble is
The Sept 11 attacks don't even count as a skirmish. A couple thousand people died. Minor infrastructure damage. The difference between that and a nuke is something you are obviously completely incapable of comprehending.
Yes, the Sept 11th attacks didn't catalyze the west to retribution, because they weren't that big a fucking deal. Americans were shocked out of their belief that their vaunted exceptionalism protected them from the consequences of their own foreign policy hitting them on their soil. That's unfortunate - and it really sucks for the families of those killed - but it is not even remotely, not even within several orders of magnitude - close to a nuclear attack.
America got pushed into the dirt by the nerd they were busy bullying. The rest of the world pretty much said "saw that coming" and went on their merry. American then killed one million people in Iraq in retribution - a nation that had nothing at all to do with the Sept 11 attacks - and got bogged downing in Afghanistan getting it's ass handed to it by a bunch of cave-dwelling lunatics. (To be fair, we ALL got our asses handed to us in Afghanistan, including Canada. Mind you, at least some of our war dead are because the Americans decided to bomb us.)
When America actually identified the people responsible - the whackos in Afghanistan - for Sept 11th, her allies rallied to her side and we marched on the people responsible. We did it according to the rules of war because the act in question - the Sept 11th incident - did not in any way warrant an abrogation of the various treaties that determine those rules of war. Put simple: Sept 11th wasn't a big enough deal to warrant tearing down hundreds of years of international agreements about conduct during a war. The threat was not big enough.
Nuke a city, and that changes. In an instant the threat moves into the realm of "absolutely must be terminated at all costs." With a nuclear attack - and only an attack of that scale - would western nations be willing to switch from "defensive aggression" to "conquer with an eye to eradication."
If you cannot see the difference between the two levels of incident, there is something very wrong with you.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
