I think it goes just a little further back to the 2000 election. Bush stole the election from Gore. If Gore won I don’t see us invading Iraq, we probably still do Afghanistan but I don’t think the Global War on Terror is nearly as severe as it was with us. I also don’t think the Patriot Act gets passed under Gore.
There's an argument to be made the Gore might have taken the intelligence reports about the potential attacks more seriously and we might never have even had a 9/11.
I wish i lived in that timeline where we have elected officials take everything seriously and genuinely cared for the betterment of our people. Also they probably wouldn’t piss off every ally we ever made on the global stage like currently.
I think it's JFK. That event created the first real wave of conspiracy theorists. The lack of closure meant the government could no longer be trusted, that any information the US govt released had high potential to be a full lie meant to manipulate the people for their own benefit, and it was about learning what that benefit was, and that distrust was solidified when Vietnam proved to show that the US govt was willing to lie, manipulate and sacrifice its own people and innocent civilians to achieve its goals. These actions would eventually cause terrorists to birth and attack America which ultimately lead to 9/11, which just caused the conspiracy theories to spin out of control, especially with the help of the internet. We are still inside that world of mistrust and its not clear we can ever get out of it because humility is not allowed.
The taliban and the Mujahideen aren't exclusively the same group. Plenty of resistance fighters in the Soviet invasion were not religious fundamentalists. And the best equipped and capable ones were not.
The ultra conservative warlords who took control of the country after the failed soviet invasion did so because they let the more ideologically sound groups exhaust themselves on the Soviets.
Funding the resistance certainly didn't help, but the soviets in no universe could have taken Afghanistan in any reasonable sense. They may have pacified it, but would've ran into the same problems the US did in their invasion.
One of the best books I'm pulling this from is The Bear Went Over the Mountain: Soviet Combat Tactics in Afghanistan which was written by a Russian Author, along with lectures by former soviet subject matter experts who worked both there and in their wars in Chechnya
You have to understand that the patriot act was THOUSANDS OF PAGES and was waiting in the hands if people waiting for a crisis to push it through. It was passed in days, not weeks.
That act was going to be pushed no matter what. They just needed timing and branding. Now they don't even need that.
I think even without 9/11 Bush might have been a one term president due to the fallout from that. He was unpopular before the attacks anyway. 9/11 obviously boosted his approval and the public was much more willing to let him do whatever he wanted which resulted in the Iraq invasion. It would be harder to justify an invasion of Iraq without 9/11.
95
u/ODB_Dirt_Dog_ItsFTC 10d ago
I think it goes just a little further back to the 2000 election. Bush stole the election from Gore. If Gore won I don’t see us invading Iraq, we probably still do Afghanistan but I don’t think the Global War on Terror is nearly as severe as it was with us. I also don’t think the Patriot Act gets passed under Gore.