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Dojan comments on When None Dare Urge Restraint - Less Wrong
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Despite your post being entirely correct, if for a moment we ignore the welfare of humanity and consider the welfare of the United States alone, there is a good chance that this irrational overreaction will be remembered, and that it will serve as deterrence to any aspiring attackers for a hundred years to come.
Sometimes irrational wrath pays, especially if you can inflict pain much more effectively than you need to endure it.
The cost to humanity is probably dominated by some 1,000,000 deaths in Iraq, but the cost to the U.S. at least in terms of deaths is comparatively smaller. The Iraq deaths are an externality.
If Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not have that effect...
As a non-US citizen, I estimate that the net effect for the US is quite negative, even internally as you put it, for the reason of other people and nations seeing the US in a negative light. Most of US commerce is international after all.
Also I don't see how the viewpoint of ignoring-the-humanitarian-and-welfare-cost-of-everyone-not-in-the-US is in any way an interesting one; Either people suffer and die, or they don't, their physical location and country of birth don't really change anything.
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