They recovered four, three of them AT the crash sites! How. The black boxes didn't even survive. 
this post was submitted on 05 May 2024
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So why didn't he invade Iraq first? Or further, why didn't he skip all that and just invade Iran?
Why Afghanistan? It has some strategic importance but it's certainly not that important.
That's what makes it look opportunistic. It's like no one really thought out how to best use 9/11 because it wasn't actually planned out. They just had a political opportunity fall in their laps and then blew it on lesser targets.
They did strike Iran to destabilize them around that time period and multiple times before and after the 2000s. Iran is also a much more difficult target than Iraq because they are (and were) much more powerful. Part of the point of the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan is not just to destabilize those countries, but to destabilize the entire region.
Iran is flanked on either side by Iraq and Afghanistan, having countries on two opposite borders collapse didn't leave Iran untouched. These actions are connected. Sure, I'm not saying they had everything planned out well beforehand, but they've had their targets planned for a long time and Iran wasn't even close to the same level of difficulty as Iraq and Afghanistan were. It makes more sense to go for the weaker targets and use these to weaken the tougher targets.
Iran was a much harder target than Iraq. More mountains, more unified populace, a whole bunch of factors. Iraq had been crushed by a decade of sanctions and as far as I know never really recovered from the destruction wrought in 91. I have no idea how smart anyone in the Bush admin was, whether they had any idea what they were actually up against. Their complete, buffoonish ignorance about Iraqi culture and politics was a constant topic of discussion back in the day. The whole yellow cake kayfabe.
It's hard for me, at least, to say how much of Iraq was planned and how much was a raft of fools stumbling from one disaster to another but always having unlimited funds and materiel to throw in to the chaos to keep things going. I've heard people who were there talk about the absolute clusterfuck at every level - From US soldiers who never really understood what they were doing, from people who worked in the "reconstruction" effort and described just mind-blowing levels of cultural ignorance and ideology. Views on the motive for the invasion have changed a lot over the years. It went form oil, to MIC grifting, to a large scale strategic plot to destabilize the region.
it was probably equal parts planned, plans going bad, culturally ignorant and incurious Americans, and the chaos of an inept state with an inpet military doing something really stupid with no clear objective. The US government isn't a monolith, it's neither helplessly foolish nor hyper competent. And probably a lot of cases where people's expertise in one area didn't translate to general competence.
Like I remember the absolute fiasco when un-armored Humvees that were never supposed to be anything but scout and utility vehicles started getting owned by IEDs. There was this whole period were the public found out that soldiers were welding scrap metal to their trucks to try to protect themselves from bombs. They found out there was really no defense against IEDs, the whole concept of an IED entered the public consciousness. I think the body armor thing was happening at the same time, where infantry didn't have worth while body armor. Just cheap flak vests from the 80s if they had anything. It was a huge public relations disaster for Bush. They had to dump a lot of resources in to procurring body armor and MRAPs (Mine resistant ambush protected, a kind of large truck looking APC). The MRAP thing was a fiasco, every firm in the US that knew how to weld was building these over-weight, badly engineered, barely functional monster trucks. The US Army's hardware is notoriously shit, from what I remember all they had at the time for infantry transport was unarmored trucks, bradley IFVs, and shitty old M113s. maybe a few of whatever the predessecor to the strykers was.
So they put in all these procurrement orders for any truck with armor and a V-hull, and they get tons of shitty overweight trucks that couldn't go off road due to their massive weight and being massive top heavy, they couldn't go on many roads in iraq for the same reason, they were all slapped together by MIC grifters so there were all kinds of parts problems, it was a huge mess on every level.
What happened there? Did the regime not anticipate the use of bombs and mines to ambush patrols? Did they think the Iraqis would just surrender and they wouldn't need armored vehicles or body armor? Did they anticipate those things but believe that the US public would accept the resulting casualties? I have no idea. There are probably documents somewhere. How much of it was ignorance, how much was foolishness, how much was poor planning, how much was calculated indifference?
Everything you said just makes it all seem opportunistic to me, like they were just going for low hanging fruit to try to score "easy" wins. The fact that they were too ignorant and uncoordinated to stand a chance against the insurgency in Iraq reveals how unplanned everything was. What that says, to me, is that 9/11 was a happy accident that the Bush administration wanted to use but that they had no actual long term plans.
My take is that the US political class was operating on the correct belief that their violence would lead to an event that would give them the excuse they needed to launch USAPATRIOT and the GWOT, or something like it. I guess you could compare it to, idk, flooding of a drained swamp. You know that a swamp will flood next time there's a big rain upstream. You don't have to destroy the dikes. You just wait for your moment. Like a predator employing an ambush hunting strategy. They know prey will come along and they're content to wait.
Analyzing the occupation and invasion is hard for me. If you assume their goal was to remove Saddam and create a stable regional "democratic" ally under US hegemony they clearly fucked up and were totally incompetent. If you assume their goal was to get filthy stinking rich, prop up the MIC, expand the US police state, and they didn't really give a shit about Iraq or about the US military, then they succeeded spectacularly. Idk how much of each is true.
They can get filthy stinking rich doing nothing, though. They're basically all insider trading and getting richer ever day no matter what, with or without a war. I'm sure there are some hungry ghosts who just yearn for an ever greater "more" and are not satisfied with just getting richer if they aren't also getting richer faster, but they don't have any plans bigger than that. Just more, forever.
If their goal was to expand US influence and dominance over the world, they failed. If their goal was to acquire cheap resources, they failed. If their goal was to assert US hegemony, they failed. If their goal was to stabilize trade and resource extraction, they failed.
I just don't think they planned any of this out. They just bumbled from event to event and tried to opportunistically profit on a case-by-case basis, in turn being unable to build a long-lasting project, and that's why it eventually became a debacle and had to be abandoned.
That also doesn't really answer my original question: why did they start with Afghanistan? If the goal was Iraq, why bother? Just start there!
From what I remember Afghanistan started out very small, with a very small number of troops on the ground allegedly looking for bin Laden, then... I think we started supporting the Northern Alliance warlords against the Taliban for some reason, and things snowballed? idk, I really haven't looked in to the history of Afghanistan in a long time.