> I've not been aware of any war on US mainland in the past century.

FTFY

Pearl Harbor is very much on US soil.

This is a good thing, it means the defense is working.

Do you want to buy my anti-tigers rock? I've never been attacked by a tiger while carrying it!

What you and the other comment seem to miss is that there's nothing fake about the military which actively works for its citizens. But maybe it's all a big joke to you...

This is the same line of defense as the fake bomb detectors beeping randomly and sold a fortune.

It's not too much of a stretch to describe 9/11 as an act of war.

I think you'll find quite a few people would find it is quite a stretch.

The attack was planned by a group that wasn't the internationally recognized leadership of any country, and they hid in a war-torn country whose government was being violently contested. And the Taliban were also not recognized, at least not officially, as the leadership of Afghanistan.

So to call it an act of war is indeed a stretch.

I think the idea of "asymmetric warfare" is well established and it fits totally your description.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_warfare

Sure, there will always be people who think this not "real" war. But that's an irrelevant classification detail to the belligerents or the people caught up in the collateral damage.

It's not too much of a stretch to describe the Bush claims leading to the Irak war as completely fabricated.

Agreed.

But think of how much better off we'd be today if we hadn't treated it like one.

9/11 was not an act of war. It was the work of a few deranged cultists who got lucky, nothing more and nothing less. Our response was equivalent to reacting to the Branch Davidians by bombing the Vatican.

Perpetrated by which nation?

It was not a war. Al Qaida was actually created and funded by US government using your money. It was more or less CIA agent gone rogue.

An act of war by whom? Which nation? Osama Bin Laden was trained in the United States by Reagan's authority when he funded/supported the Mujahadeen in a proxy war against Russia.

Fast-forward 20 years to 9/11. Osama Bin Laden is funded by his family, and by other rich Saudis, which means the government of Saudi Arabia because all Saudi wealth is owned by the House of Saud.

But they're our allies, so instead, we attacked Iraq and Afghanistan, even though none of the 9/11 attackers were from either country. To get approval, we lied about Weapons of Mass Destruction, which we never found, because they didn't exist.

I'm not really following your war narrative, but I am finding a lot of cronyism and false flags.

I fully agree with your assessment of the reaction (or lack thereof, and its reasons) to 9/11 by the GWB administration. It is well supported by the testimony of Richard Clarke [1] and by the investigations of senator Bob Graham [2] [3] so I don't understand why your comment gets flagged.

My point was limited in scope to the 9/11 attack itself. I think terrorism on that scale can be classified as assymetric warfare.

Warfare predates nation states. Today, most of the world is parceled into nation states. But violent non-state actors never ceased to exist. And therefore we shouldn't limit our definition of warfare only to war between nation states.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_A._Clarke#9/11_Commiss...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/10/opinion/bob-graham-releas...

[3] https://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-Matters-Arabia-Failure-A...