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Notes -
9/11 was carried out by (mainly) Saudi nationals based from Afghanistan. The Beirut bombing would be a better example.
I remember reading about these guying learning to fly in USA. I do not remember reading anything about them visiting Afghanistan. Bin Laden did but he wasn't carrying the attack.
Still, @yunyun333's overall point stands: most of the Islamic terrorism which reaches outside the ME is in fact Sunni terrorism (though funded and committed by citizens of allied gulf states rather than Afghans) rather than Shiite terrorism.
Blaming Iran for 9/11 (which was at least implied) is as absurd as blaming Saddam.
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I'm not singling out Iran specifically here, I am talking about the mindset that "if there's no shooting/bombing right now, right this second, then there's no war". It doesn't work this way, and it had been proven over and over that you can't just ignore things like aggressive death cults because they aren't bothering you right now, because they will bother you later. When it's quiet for a while, people start thinking "oh, it's ok, it's not happening anymore" and they get complacent and relax - and then it starts happening again, because the underlying reason is still there. And yes, Iran is not the only reason, but it's a very major one.
There are such things as frozen conflicts, where the arms fall silent despite both sides maintaining competing claims.
Are you saying that it is right and proper to thaw any frozen conflicts, such as Cyprus, China, Kashmir, Korea?
Or take the Cold War. In a way, Iran was following the Cold War etiquette when it enabled Hamas to commit Oct 7 -- enabling local freedom fighters/terrorists to blow up your enemy was a pretty standard move both for the US and the USSR. (Though I will grant you that in the cold war, you normally had your terrorists slaughter civilians of some state which did not matter rather than your peer competitor.) Of course, they found that the cold war etiquette does not really apply to non-nuclear states.
Both the US and the USSR considered each other to epitomize everything what was wrong with the world, used terms such as 'Empire of Evil' etc. Would the world be better if the conflict had gone hot?
Often, the correct move when faced with a conflict which is not in a shooting stage is to not start shooting and hope the conflict goes away. Sometimes it does. Sometimes your enemy will turn it into a shooting war eventually, e.g. in Ukraine or Nagorno-Karabakh. But sometimes, it really works out, the world is a lot better for the USSR collapsing instead of nuking it out with the West.
Yes, of course, frozen conflicts exist. But Iran had been in no way "frozen" - it was actively seeking to establish long-range strike and nuclear capability. While at the same time engaging in a proxy war with the US.
You can't compare Iran with USSR though - US could not get into a hot war with USSR that it could have any hope of winning (at least if your definition of winning does not include nuclear wasteland). In fact, it can't even do this with Russia, which is much smaller and weaker than USSR. With Iran, there is a possibility of direct kinetic action that can be successful in removing the threat. But that window would be closed forever once Iran gets nukes and long-range strike capabilities. The latter he had already possessed, and reportedly was within months of the former. So the choice was a potentially short hot war now (I mean didn't have to be February 28, but sometime within 2024-2028), or 50-year-long cold war later. And given as US pretty much lost the capability to wage long cold wars anyway (the first Democratic president would immediately roll back any gains made by preceding Republican administrations), I don't think "it will eventually work out" was really a viable option. There are a lot of nations that hate America, and that's fine, as long as their hate is, as you noted, "frozen". But then there is Iran, who does not want to remain frozen. They want to arm themselves for the battle with Great Satan. That's the whole underpinning of their ideology - coexistence with Great Satan is not something that you intend to do long term, it's something that you do while you gather your forces for destroying it. Well, they got their final battle a bit sooner than they expected, hopefully it would be final enough.
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