If Iraq and Afganistan could have entirely justifiably target enemy combatants on USA soil, those illegal and immoral invasions might not have happened. Thus ISIS might not have gone like it did.
Chemical weapons made in Germany If I remember correctly.
There is an easy fix for that. Don't sell chemical weapons to dictators so you don't need to lament later that "Oh, but, but, they used our product against people!".
Yup, what do you expected? killing people is the only purpose for that stuff.
Iraq invasion happened because the US (and UK) governments convinced themselves that Saddam Hussein had "weapons of mass destruction" that could launch in "45 minutes".
Afganistan invasion happened when everyone was so enraged by 9/11 they weren't thinking straight. "Never forget" was a thing for around a decade.
Indeed. To be clear, I'm a UK citizen, I lived through those protests, and to me all the events of 9/11 bore the same sense of unreality as a blockbuster film — I didn't even know about the specific existence of the Twin Towers until seeing pictures of them on fire, and my first trip to the USA wouldn't happen until the end of 2014.
However: in this context, the USA's opinion was sufficient even in isolation, as they are both a nuclear power and were the main force involved in the invasion — if the American government wanted to use nukes, they'd have used nukes, with or without the rest of us. And I don't think the threat of possible Afghan nukes would have slowed them down, rather I think it would have turned the tragic failure to nation build after the invasion, into a real life (though probably geographically limited) equivalent to Fallout.
Or maybe they would have just nuked a random enemy of theirs that was in that local area of the world. Of which, I am sure there are many.
The game theory of nukes doesn't work if irrational actor have control of them.
There are also lot of examples of authoritarian dictators committing warcrimes in that part of the world. And all it takes it one to cause large amounts of damage, if they have a nuke.
