Terrorism

Ok so some shitty ass obscure tyranny pisses off some of it's citizens and we happen to buy oil from them so they decide to murder some of our civilians.

We retaliate and the terrorists say "THEY ARE AT WAR WITH US NOW".

We do nothing and the terrorists say "THEY ARE WEAK, WE CAN DO WHATEVER WE WANT!".

If you hate america and love terrorists, even by taking the terrorist's side it is obvious that there is nothing we can do to stop them attacking us. So we must retaliate. Therefore the war to defend Iraqi and Afghanistani civilians from terrorism was the correct course of action.

>>8
Saddam was not a terrorist and has no record on using terrorists to my knowledge. Since he was secular the militant jihadists was not to keen on him. And shouldn't the US then retaliate against pakistan and saudi arabia? Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is pakistani while bin Laden is saudi. If the retaliation against iraq is meant  to work as a deterrent then maybe you should make clear what exactly provoked this retaliation (if you say human rights abuses then that begs the question why the US is not retaliating against Sudan, Israel, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, China, Russia etc). As it stands i dont think the message is especially clear, rather its like: "If you attack us then we will topple a weak dictator who had nothing to do with the attack and get entrenched in a perpetual civil war!".