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war on terror
Bush's Post-9/11 Policies Are Doing Further Damage in Trump's Hands
Because they were never decisively laid to rest by subsequent administrations, they formed the foundation for the excesses of the Trump administration’s foreign and domestic policies that we face today.
Sep 15, 2026
In response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the Bush administration rushed to implement domestic and foreign policies that had dramatic consequences for the US and the world.
They pushed through far-reaching legislation which, when combined with Executive Orders and “national security” memoranda, effectively gutted one-half of the rights guaranteed in the Bill of Rights and erased 50 years of work advancing civil rights and liberties here in the US. In addition, the steps they took to justify the invasions, occupations, and nation-building gambits in Afghanistan and Iraq contributed to degrading the roles of the United Nations and NATO and contributed to dismantling the architectures of diplomacy, rights, and law that had been created by the international community in the aftermath of World War II.
The assault on rights and freedoms had been brewing before 9/11. Beginning in the Reagan era and continuing through the Clinton administration, there’d been “secret” plans to round up, detain, or deport “aliens” without due process. Because of domestic opposition, earlier administrations had been hesitant to publicly implement them. But with the nation reeling in shock in the aftermath of the terror attacks, it became possible for the Bush administration to openly give law enforcement agencies a grab bag of repressive tools they had been seeking. They did so knowing that domestic or partisan opposition would be muted because 9/11 had taken such a traumatic toll. In the end, the Bush-endorsed legislation was easily passed in Congress, with only one senator voting against the bill. And there was only modest opposition to the administration’s measures to use racial and ethnic profiling, deny due process to immigrants, conduct warrantless searches and surveillance, make use of entrapment techniques against vulnerable individuals, and implement a range of costly and invasive measures at airports—all of which have been shown to be wholly ineffective in protecting national security.
If the shock of the attacks had made the public more willing to accept new laws and programs that sacrificed the rights of others, they also created a sense of dread about what might happen next. America had invaded, bombed, and fought wars in other countries around the world, but not since Pearl Harbor, more than a six decades earlier, had the American homeland been attacked. This resulted in feelings of vulnerability. People wanted to know: “Who are these people who committed these crimes?” “Why did they do this to us?” and “What should we do now to respond?”
As a result of the US unilaterally steamrolling its way into the war, insulting allies who refused to join them, and faring so poorly in its execution of both conflicts, respect for the US plummeted worldwide.
It was a short time after the attacks that I accepted an invitation from the Council on Foreign Relations to participate in a post-9/11 study group to discuss these troubling questions and offer recommendations to policymakers, specifically regarding what America’s message to the world should be in this moment. The group they assembled was mixed and bipartisan, including former lawmakers and diplomats, military and government officials, and Middle East “experts.” In the months that followed, we met several times, seated around a conference table in center city Washington DC.
While many of us had questions and concerns, it was striking that a core group of participants came with an obvious agenda. The dust hadn’t yet settled, nor had the embers cooled at the site of the burning towers, but a cohort of the “study group” already had answers. America, they argued, had been attacked because it was perceived as complacent and weak. The terrorists saw that weakness and took advantage of it. The solution, they posited, was for America to demonstrate strength by dealing with a devastating blow so that our enemies would know better than to strike at us again. They had already settled on their preferred target: Iraq. Saddam Hussein was a ruthless leader who’d committed crimes against his own people and his neighbors—and so he was deemed a worthy and non-controversial foe.
Interestingly, at this very early point, the “pro-war hawks” had not yet fabricated their later justifications for the war they so desperately sought. There was no case being made that Saddam sponsored al Qaeda, or that he had weapons of mass destruction. This was to come later. In the beginning, the only justification they advanced was that America needed a dramatic display of strength to put fear into the hearts of those who might be inclined to attack again.
The group who advanced these views in the study group was part of a much larger ideological movement of “neoconservatives” who were growing in influence in Republican circles. They were ideologues whose belief system had more in common with Christian fundamentalism than with traditional Republican thinking. They saw a worldwide cosmic struggle between good and evil. America, of course, was the force for good. The evil had been the Soviet Union but had now been replaced with Arab or Islamic extremism. It was imperative that the forces for good be relentless in its never-ending struggle against evil—to root it out and crush it. No compromise was possible.
While then-President George W. Bush did not initially share their world view, the shock of 9/11 catapulted the neoconservatives into a dominant force shaping his administration’s policies. In the months and years that followed, the Bush administration made decisions reflecting their influence. The repressive legislation and anti-Arab, anti-Muslim programs were part of this, as were the wars and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq.
The costs and consequences of these two ill-conceived wars have been immense in lost lives, treasure, and respect. In addition to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Afghanis who perished, 7,000 US military personnel died. While the Bush Pentagon tried to sell the war to Congress by saying it would cost just a few billion dollars, it is now estimated to have cost between $6 and 7 trillion. And as a result of the US unilaterally steamrolling its way into the war, insulting allies who refused to join them, and faring so poorly in its execution of both conflicts, respect for the US plummeted worldwide.
These post-9/11 policies inflicted tremendous damage during the Bush years, but their consequences are still with us. Because they were never decisively laid to rest by subsequent administrations, they formed the foundation for the excesses of the Trump administration’s foreign and domestic policies that we face today.
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Never Forget Is Bad Spiritual Advice
There is wisdom in honoring one’s pain and setting it aside, to live. I still believe that. I no longer know if it’s possible when the country doing the wounding has stopped bothering to hide it.
Sep 12, 2026
"The well-prepared heart has hope during adversity and fear during prosperity.”—Erica McAlpine
Twenty-five years, and the day keeps getting bigger instead of smaller. Three thousand dead in a single morning, then some multiple of that across the wars launched in its wake, then a shifting count out of Gaza that outpaces anyone’s will to keep totaling it. I did not expect grief to go on collecting interest this long. I did not expect to still be bitter, on a date this rehearsed, in a country this practiced at looking away.
I have written some version of this before. On some earlier September, I posted this: “#NeverForget is bad spiritual advice. Especially, when one has exacted revenge that far exceeds initial loss. To spell it out, honor your dead but remember, too, the 100,000+ Iraqi civilian noncombatants murdered in a vengeful, unjust ‘war.’ It is unseemly to keep one’s wounds open, while downplaying those of others that we’ve inflicted. There is wisdom, humility, and self preservation in honoring one’s pain & setting it aside, to Live.” Under it, I’d put a line from Friedrich Nietzsche, “Without forgetting it is quite impossible to live at all"; another, unattributed, “If the other person injures you, you may forget the injury, but if you injure him you will always remember"; and closed with Kahlil Gibran: “Hate is a dead thing. Who of you would be a tomb?”
This is not the only year I have said some version of it. Social media keeps a ledger I never asked for: one friend calling it the voice of reason, another admitting he’d learned the hard way that making this case got him nowhere with people he knew, a third telling me the 9/11 Memorial & Museum has a final section on the wars that followed, built into the same ground as the names of the dead. “We can always do better,” I wrote back to that last one, which was as much comfort as I had that day.
Then there is the exchange that still says more than anything I could add to it. A commenter, spoiling for a fight, wrote that we were lucky the whole Middle East hadn’t been leveled. “You’re a funny guy,” I wrote back, “and I’m too fond of you to take seriously your outrageous comment,” and sent him “a great big, virtual hug, until I can give you one in person.” Another commenter played along just long enough to ask what exactly had been won. Afghans and Iraqis, he answered himself: more Americans dead in the war on terror than in the towers, “them” and “us” collapsing into the same casualty list. “Yes,” I wrote back, “it’s always civilian casualties,” which is the whole essay in four words, if I am honest, and everything since has only been me finding 400 more ways to say it.
I could republish that old post today, and only the arithmetic would need updating. Ammiel Alcalay, writing this same week, names the habit outright: Keep what happens abroad in one room and what happens at home in another, so neither has to answer to the other. Brown University’s Costs of War project puts the toll of these 25 years, direct and indirect combined, at 4.5 to 4.7 million and still counting. Alcalay draws the line forward, to what he calls, correctly, “the genocide in Gaza and seizure of land in Palestine.” The number I gave my friends, a decade or more ago, was 100,000. It never got revised. It got buried under the next one, and the next. There is no exchange rate for human suffering. The afterlife of September 11 was not measured abroad alone. At home, Muslims remained available for suspicion: The Council on American-Islamic Relations recorded 8,683 complaints in 2025, its highest annual total. This week, Rudy Giuliani went on television to say the city’s current mayor, its first Muslim one, shouldn’t attend Friday’s ceremony, then said Muslims are taught from childhood that they want to “dominate us.” Twenty-five years on, and grief still comes with a loyalty test.
What has changed since is the camouflage. Richard Nixon needed Henry Kissinger to bomb Cambodia in the dark. Barack Obama needed kill lists and a “disposition matrix,” a targeting database mapping how terrorism suspects would be captured or killed, dressed up in the calm language of due process. Donald Trump needs none of it. He says the part that used to need a translator, calls it winning, and the bombs land anyway, in the same places they always did. He is the pattern finally caught without its coat on, a confession the country has been rehearsing since before I wrote that old post, only now said out loud.
It was a friend, in that same 2018 thread, who was already flagging the collusion with Saudi Arabia over Yemen: American weapons, sold for profit, into a war just as unjust as the ones carrying our own name. I hadn’t known. I said so. Eight years on, Britain has announced plans, not yet law, to ban imports from illegal settlements and create powers to sanction companies that support, facilitate, or profit from them. It is a small thing. It is also an acknowledgment, however belated, that complicity can carry a price.
I wrote, once, that there is wisdom in honoring one’s pain and setting it aside, to live, that what is spiritually true for us as individuals is also true for us as nations. I still believe that. I no longer know if it’s possible when the country doing the wounding has stopped bothering to hide it, or if honoring the dead, now, requires that we stop setting anything aside at all.
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Son of 9/11 Victim Says 'Please Stop' Exploiting Tragedy to Spread Anti-Muslim Bigotry
"You do my dad's legacy and the legacy of all these victims no honor by using this tragedy to spread hate."
Sep 11, 2026
Twenty-five years after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States that killed nearly 3,000 Americans and others and sparked a worldwide US-led war on terrorism that has left nearly one million people dead, some relatives of 9/11 victims pleaded that their grief must not be weaponized in the form of anti-Muslim bigotry.
Michael Massaroli Jr., whose father, Michael Massaroli, was killed in the attacks, made one such appeal during Friday’s 25th anniversary commemoration at the National September 11 Memorial at ground zero in Lower Manhattan.
"One parting thing I want to leave everyone with is that you do my dad's legacy and the legacy of all these victims no honor by using this tragedy to spread hate," Massaroli said. "We have seen a medley of people come up today of all races, all religions, all creeds, and this tragedy is just that—it's a tragedy."
"I've had to grow up and spend the past 25 years seeing people use it to hate on our Muslim brothers and sisters, to hate on people who don't look like them," he added. "And that's wrong. And that does no honor to the victims here. And I want to use the little platform I have to ask for that to please stop."
"My father Michael Massaroli...you do my dad's legacy and the legacy of all these victims no honor by using this tragedy to spread hate. We have seen a medley of people come up today, of all races, all religions, all creeds and this tragedy is just that, it's a tragedy. I've had… pic.twitter.com/xRtXgZZyYn
— CSPAN (@cspan) September 11, 2026
Massaroli wasn't the only one decrying Islamophobic exploitation of 9/11. Members of September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, including co-founder Colleen Kelly, have repeatedly denounced the violence and hatred perpetrated after the attacks.
On Friday, Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) national executive director Nihad Awad recalled how "the trauma we all felt after the attacks was exploited to erode civil liberties, justify torture, normalize illegal discrimination, empower hate groups, and launch forever wars across the Middle East that killed thousands of American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children in numerous countries."
Recently, Democratic New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani—the first Muslim elected to lead the city—has been subjected to a wave of Islamophobic vitriol. Critics have invoked his religion and 9/11 in questioning whether he should participate in the city’s September 11 commemoration. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and other Republicans have said that Mamdani should skip the ceremony, while broadly attacking Islam.
The Trump administration's immigration policies have also been called discriminatory against Muslims. CAIR said in a March report that it received a record 8,683 anti-Muslim and anti-Arab complaints in 2025, attributing part of the increase to the administration's immigration crackdown and its response to pro-Palestinian protests. The cases included immigration and travel discrimination, employment discrimination, and alleged targeting of Muslim and Arab communities.
“Today, bad actors are once again exploiting the 9/11 attacks to score political points, incite discrimination, and justify forever wars overseas," Awad said on Friday. "We cannot let these resurgent voices of division, hate, and violence succeed. We must instead embrace the spirit of unity that bonded all of us together 25 years ago and stand up for the universal value of human life, anywhere and everywhere."
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Exploiting Tragedy to Promote War, Hegseth Falsely Claims That Iran 'Cheered on 9/11'
"What haunts me," said one anti-war activist, "is how little accountability there has been for those who lied us into war—and how those same lies are now recycled to justify the attack on Iran."
Sep 11, 2026
Twenty-five years later, Republican politicians are still using 9/11 to justify war in the Middle East. And they're still lying shamelessly.
During remarks outside the Pentagon on Friday commemorating the 25th anniversary of the terrorist attack, President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth portrayed their deeply unpopular war in Iran as part of the lineage of the global War on Terror, which was marked by a pair of lengthy military engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan that cost well over $2 trillion and millions of lives.
Trump declared that he was prosecuting his new war with Iran to fulfill the "sacred oath" sworn in the names of the nearly 3,000 people whose lives were lost that day, that "we will never, ever forget."
Hegseth seems to have forgotten quite a lot. Attempting to draw a link between the ideology of the al-Qaeda hijackers who committed the attack and the current Iranian government, the defense secretary said, "Our warriors have fought an Islamic theocracy that has wished us death for nearly half a century, that cheered on 9/11."
However, the claim that Iran "cheered on 9/11" is at odds with the historical record of how the nation's government and people reacted.
On September 19, 2001, The Washington Post reported that:
Despite two decades of official hostility, the people and government of Iran have offered vivid messages of sympathy and condemnations of terrorism in the aftermath of last week's attacks on New York and Washington...
Hard-line conservative Iranians and moderate reformers, top government and religious officials, Friday prayer leaders, and citizens on the street have uniformly denounced the plane hijackings and suicide crashes of September 11. Some, including President Mohammad Khatami, have offered to join an international campaign against terrorism under certain circumstances, including United Nations sponsorship.
On the day of the attacks in 2001, Khatami issued a swift condemnation over Iranian state TV of what he called "the terrorist operations of hijacking and attacking public places in American cities, which have resulted in the death of a large number of defenseless American people."
Khatami later decried the attacks as “the ugliest form of terrorism ever seen." According to later congressional testimony by a State Department official, he also asked to visit ground zero to light a candle out of respect for the victims, a request that was denied by the administration of then-US President George W. Bush.
Days after the attacks, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei—who was killed this past February during the opening salvo of the joint US-Israeli war against Iran—agreed at the time that “mass murder of human beings is condemned," though he also suggested that "expansionist" US foreign policy had played a role in provoking the attacks.
The US-funded Radio Free Europe reported that, far from celebrating in the streets, around 2,000 Iranians had gathered in Tehran for a candlelight vigil a week after the attacks, at which participants "chanted against terrorism and expressed their sympathy with America." Days earlier, the Post reported that about 50,000 spectators at a World Cup qualifying match in Tehran observed a minute of silence in recognition of the attacks.
Iran's support for the US following the attack also went beyond words. While still describing Iran as the world's leading "state sponsor of terrorism," a May 2002 State Department report emphasized Iran's cooperation with US operations against al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
This included offering search-and-rescue assistance for downed US air crews, diplomatic cooperation at the 2001 Bonn Conference to build Afghanistan's post-Taliban government, and promising border controls to prevent fleeing Taliban and al-Qaeda members from escaping.
Though Trump promised at the outset that it would last only a matter of weeks, his war with Iran has now lumbered into its sixth month with no sign of stopping. It has spilled out into a wider Middle Eastern conflict that has taken the lives of about 8,000 people, displaced millions, and wreaked financial chaos.
The war has included US attacks on civilians that have had a similar resonance with Iranians that 9/11 has for Americans, most infamously the bombing of an elementary school that killed at least 150 people, most of them children.
According to one economist's recent estimate, the war has conservatively cost the average American household about $1,200 over six months, combining the direct cost to taxpayers with the knock-on effects of spiking oil prices and broader inflation.
Though around two-thirds of Americans say they oppose the war and Congress has ordered Trump to bring it to an end, recent reports indicate that the administration is considering expanding it following this November's midterm elections.
Trump described the war as a grim necessity on Friday, in part to honor those who perished on September 11, 25 years earlier.
“That’s why we fight today," Trump said. "We don’t have a choice. There can only be victory. We fight hard. We fight to win.”
Medea Benjamin, the co-founder of the anti-war group CodePink, reflected earlier this week on how the tragedy is still being used to this day to justify endless wars overseas.
"What haunts me today is not only the devastation of the invasion, but how little accountability there has been for those who lied us into war—and how those same lies are now recycled to justify the attack on Iran," Benjamin said. "The War on Terror did not end."
"The same impunity that has shielded the architects of the global War on Terror," she added, "now emboldens the war criminals behind the genocide in Gaza and the Minab school massacre in Iran."
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On 25th Anniversary of 9/11 Attacks, Condemnation of Global 'War on Terror' That Has Killed Millions
"US officials who orchestrated post-9/11 abuses must also be held accountable, and their victims must receive meaningful remedy and reparation."
Sep 11, 2026
International human rights campaigners, United Nations experts, journalists, and anti-war activists marked the 25th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the US by paying tributes to the thousands of lives lost on that day while condemning what followed: an unparalleled expansion of state surveillance, crackdowns on dissent, arbitrary detention, torture, and catastrophic wars that cost trillions of dollars and millions of lives.
Mourning the lasting impact of "those horrific acts of violence" perpetrated in the US a quarter-century ago, a group of more than 40 UN experts said in a joint statement on Friday that "we equally acknowledge the millions of other victims worldwide of terrorist attacks, excessive counter-terrorism responses, and conflicts in the name of countering terrorism."
"Too many governments have adopted unnecessary and disproportionate responses that have seriously undermined human rights, civil society, civic space, democracy, and the rule of law," the experts continued. "Wars of aggression. Unlawful occupations. Countless war crimes and crimes against humanity, and plausible allegations of genocide. Assassinations dressed up as 'targeted killings.' Torture disguised as 'interrogation.' Transboundary abductions, extraordinary renditions, and transnational repression. Secret detention and enforced disappearances. Unfair military trials and special courts, including at Guantanamo Bay. Toxic residues from conflicts have severely harmed human health."
The experts argued that global "wars on terror" launched by the US and other nations in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks have "have stretched foundational rules of international law beyond their breaking point," "counterproductively fueled terrorism," and "entrenched cycles of violence."
Many of those grave abuses continue in the present, the US-based Center for Constitutional Rights emphasized in a statement marking the anniversary of the 9/11 atrocities.
"In the 25 years since September 11, 2001, the sweeping political project the US government undertook in its aftermath has shaped, shattered, or ended millions of lives," the group said. "Exploiting fear and suffering, the Bush administration launched a limitless 'war on terror,' whose stated purpose was all pretext to impose its will on other countries, expand its power beyond constitutional bounds, and target vulnerable communities."
"Today, because of the lack of accountability for these gross abuses of human rights, Trump can use 'counterterrorism' to pursue his authoritarian program," said CCR.
Nick Turse, a senior reporter at The Intercept, argued the attacks coordinated by Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in 2001 created a "swirl of toxic policies and governmental overreach" that "opened the door to something beyond bin Laden’s wildest dreams, the rise of an even more effective terrorist who has crippled the US in countless ways and sought to strangle the best of the country: President Donald Trump."
"Bin Laden’s attacks turned the US government into an engine for the destruction of America, inducing it to implement policies that have devastated the country and immiserated its people," Turse wrote in a column published Friday. "That includes unrestrained spending while cutting taxes on the rich, closer ties with despotic regimes, the sneak-and-peek warrants and roving wiretaps of the Patriot Act and other domestic surveillance programs, and the ruinous failed forever wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere."
Those wars, according to Brown University's Costs of War project, have cost the US federal government upwards of $8 trillion.
"The opportunity costs are staggering," the project noted. "Many of these funds could have been spent on public health or in sectors that create far more jobs than the defense sector, like education or green energy."
As for the human toll, the Costs of War project noted in a brief published last week that as of 2023, "an estimated 905,000-940,000 people—including US soldiers, allied security forces, civilians, and militants—have died due to war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria (in the fight against the Islamic State), Yemen, and elsewhere. At least 408,749—432,093 of those who have died were civilians."
"Many other people have died indirectly as a result of the wars," the brief observed. "An estimated 3.6-3.8 million indirect deaths have occurred in post-9/11 war zones."
Scott Roehm, Amnesty International USA's chief human rights strategy officer, said Friday that the US government could have responded to the 9/11 attacks "by upholding human rights and the rule of law while pursuing justice and accountability for victims’ families."
"Instead, it embarked on a campaign of widespread abuses against Muslim, Brown, and Black communities, including arbitrary detentions and mass surveillance in the US; unlawful lethal air strikes abroad; enforced disappearances and torture in Iraq, Afghanistan and at CIA black sites; and the opening of the notorious Guantanamo Bay detention center," said Roehm. "The choice to engage in torture, then build prosecutions against those alleged to be most responsible for 9/11 on the back of torture-derived evidence, is largely why, 25 years later, there has been neither justice nor finality for victims’ families."
"The US government must end the last 25 years of abuses," Roehm added. "US officials who orchestrated post-9/11 abuses must also be held accountable, and their victims must receive meaningful remedy and reparation.”
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Victims of Our Post-9/11 Wars Deserve Remembrance, Too
Similarities between Reflecting Absence and an earlier German Holocaust “Counter-Monument” prompt reflections on accepting responsibility.
Sep 11, 2026
Few who pay their respects today in the hallowed plaza where the Twin Towers once stood will be aware that the September 11 memorial echoes a 1987 Holocaust “counter-memorial” in Kassel, Germany. Like our memorial, the German monument consists of a hollow in the shape of what had once been there, into which water flows.
But the scope of the remembrances evoked by the two memorials are revealingly different.
We Americans want only to recall our innocent dead and to honor them. Unlike the Germans, we spurn acknowledging the evils done in their name that came to be intertwined with our losses, the catastrophe we inflicted on an innocent nation, Iraq.
What We Can Learn From Kassel’s Holocaust Counter-Memorial
In 1939, the Nazis destroyed a 40-foot pyramidal fountain in Kassel, Germany because it had been built by a Jew, the entrepreneur Sigmund Aschrott. The elimination of “the Jews’ Fountain” was soon followed by the elimination of Kassel’s 3,000 Jews themselves.
The Aschrott Fountain (1908–1939) is shown.
Forty-five years later it was proposed to rebuild the fountain. But simply rebuilding the original fountain would have erased the memory of its destruction. So artist Horst Hoheisel designed a new fountain: “a mirror image of the old one, sunk beneath the old place in order to rescue the history of this place as a wound and an open question.”
The Memorial to the Aschrottbrunnen Fountain is shown. (Photo by Eistreter, CC BY-SA 4.0)
The September 11 memorial, which is called Reflecting Absence, evokes the missing Twin Towers by revealing their empty foundations. Hoheisel’s earlier Kassel counter-monument is, similarly, an emptiness in the shape of the missing original. “The pyramid will be turned into a funnel into whose darkness water runs down,” Hoheisel says.
“The sunken fountain is an invitation to passersby who stand upon it to search for the memorial in their own heads. For only there is the memorial to be found.”
The underground portion of the Aschrottbrunnen Fountain is shown. (Photo by Horst Hoheisel)
Kassel’s Holocaust memorial is one of many throughout Germany, part of the way the Germans have accepted responsibility for the crimes of the Nazi era. This small, local memorial compels us to think of those who were murdered, but also of those who murdered and those who stood by.
The installation of the Aschrottbrunnen Fountain is shown. (Photo by Horst Hoheisel)
We reflect on the small viciousness of destroying “the Jew’s fountain,” and the monstrous barbarity to which this was prelude. The small monument conjures the sadness of loss, and the responsibility of a people for acts that can never be made right.
Can America Accept Responsibility for the Mass Deaths Inflicted in the Name of Our “War on Terrorism”
The murder of thousands of Americans, the crime of September 11, 2001, spawned a larger tragedy for another people. Using the false suggestion of Iraq complicity as one of its pretexts, and treating the 9/11 “war on terrorism” as license for war on Baghdad as well as on Kabul, our government invaded Iraq, overthrew its government, and occupied the country.
In reality, as Bush White House anti-terrorism adviser Richard Clarke confirmed, Iraq was not responsible for 9/11 and our government knew it. “In the weeks immediately after 9/11,” Clarke explained, “the president… instruct[ed] the Pentagon to prepare for the invasion of Iraq... Even though they knew at the time from me, from the FBI, from the CIA, that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.”
Knowing that Iraq had nothing to do with the al Qaeda attack did not matter because President George W. Bush’s government had begun targeting Iraq for invasion long before September 11. The very first meeting of Bush’s national security team on January 20, 2001 included a discussion of “military options” for Iraq and overthrowing its government.
It would represent no insult to the memory of the innocents murdered in America, 25 Septembers ago, were we to acknowledge and memorialize the carnage and catastrophe we unleashed in Iraq.
As a delegation from our British allies secretly reported to their government before the invasion, “The intelligence and facts were being fixed around the [Bush] policy” of going to war. “The case [for war] was thin.”
The American invasion, and the resistance and chaotic civil war triggered by the US occupation, likely took between 500,000 and 1 million Iraqi lives. It made refugees of millions more, and inflicted malnutrition, birth defects, and other health disasters on a generation of Iraqi children.
It would represent no insult to the memory of the innocents murdered in America, 25 Septembers ago, were we to acknowledge and memorialize the carnage and catastrophe we unleashed in Iraq.
To America’s 9/11 memorial we should add a wall on which we engrave, in a necessarily small font, the names of however many can be identified of the million Iraqi men, women, and children slain in the wars and sectarian strife our invasion precipitated. And since President Donald Trump has ensnared our nation in another pointless war, another war of aggression based on the excuse of “terrorism,” a Middle East war he has no plan to end, we should inscribe as well the names of the Iranian civilians killed in Trump’s war. The 100 children slain at the beginning of the bombing campaign. The wedding guests bombed in a small Iran town last week. They deserve remembrance, too.
Of course, this is unthinkable and will never happen.
It would be “too political” to acknowledge any connection between the horrors we suffered and the horrors we inflicted. In fact, even the suggestion will be said to “disrespect” our honored dead—as though their memories could be further sullied than they already have been by the evil perpetrated in their names.
Nonetheless, the proposal may be useful. As Hoheisel says: “That’s how a counter-monument works. People get angry, they write letters, but you have a discussion. Out of this void, the history begins to come out.” In America, such a provocation may be the only kind of counter-monument that is permitted.
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9/11 Began a US Reign of Terror in the Middle East—Now It's Come Home
The so-called “War on Terror” has revealed itself to be a war OF terror, one that is being waged by our own government on foreign soil as well as here in the United States.
Sep 11, 2026
On September 11, 2001, the world watched as the World Trade Center, the twin towers that represented US global dominance, were struck by hijacked US commercial jetliners and came crashing to the ground. Nearly 3,000 people were killed, from high-powered executive to clerical workers and immigrant kitchen workers. The hijackers were Middle Eastern men, primarily from Saudi Arabia.
Twenty-five years later, many questions remain about how the US military and security establishment could have allowed this to happen. Hardly anybody believes the official 9/11 story, which raises more questions than it answers, and there are many competing theories about who was behind this tragedy. Was this an incredible US security lapse or a highly coordinated false flag? Whatever the case, the neocons in George W. Bush’s administration immediately declared a “war on terrorism,” and put into motion their longstanding designs to conquer seven Muslim countries in the Middle East (as revealed by General Wesley Clark)—Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan. Over the last 25 years, the US has initiated wars against all of these countries, as well as Afghanistan.
US administrations under Presidents George W. Bush, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump (again) are responsible for creating a hell on Earth throughout the Middle East, resulting in millions of deaths and millions more homeless refugees. Thousands of US soldiers also died in Iraq and Afghanistan, any thousands more carry the physical, mental, and spiritual wounds to this day.
These nations may never fully recover, but Iran still stands. It may be the only Middle Eastern country still strong enough to resist domination by Israel, the US, and the former European colonial powers. That is why it is being frantically targeted by militarists in Israel and the US And that is why the US peace movement must do all we can to end the escalating US on Iran.
Who Are the Real Terrorists?
Under the slogan of “the war on terror,” the US government has carried out an increasing campaign of terror worldwide and against its own people. Torture has been normalized as represented by the extralegal Guantánamo torture prison on occupied Cuban land. The US and NATO provoked Russia into a catastrophic war in Ukraine which they continue to fuel with billions of dollars, arms, and military advisers. Democratic and Republican administrations and Congresses have enabled an ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza and the West Bank. In January of this year, the US made a brazen attack on Venezuela, kidnapped its president and first lady, and are holding the Venezuelan government hostage while they steal Venezuelan oil. The US has blocked all oil shipments to Cuba, greatly exacerbating the damage done by the 64-year-old US blockade of Cuba, even as they threaten to invade. President Trump and “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth post “snuff videos” of their blatantly illegal bombing of boats in South American waters, where they have murdered hundreds of fisherman and alleged “narco-terrorists” without any evidence or judicial proceeding.
Trump’s War of Terror Comes Home
The stepped-up US aggression abroad is now being mirrored by state-sponsored terror in these United States. Armed gangs of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents routinely carry out racist attacks on immigrant communities and people of color, no matter their immigration or citizenship status. The mass incarceration of Black men is now matched by mass incarceration of brown men, women, and children in for-profit prisons, where abusive conditions have led to many deaths. White supremacism is out in the open as cruel fascist practices are being normalized. US peace activists and immigrant rights activists are being labeled as terrorists and prosecuted as terrorists for nonviolent resistance to the terror of the state.
Even as the US war on Iran continues and escalates, the Trump administration and Republican Party are openly seeking to undermine the midterm US elections by blatant last-minute gerrymandering of congressional districts, by trying to prevent mail-in voting, by reducing the number of polling places, by threatening to deploy intimidating ICE agents at polling places and even “joking” about canceling the elections altogether. Veterans For Peace has joined with other veterans’ groups and military families in the Veteran Against Fascism coalition to do all we can to defend the elections, for example by providing safe accompaniment to the polls.
The Terror of Nuclear War
Adding to the atmosphere of global terror is the ever-growing threat of nuclear war. Multiple sources have confirmed that the Trump administration has been discussing the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons in its war on Iran. Pentagon war-gaming of the US use of tactical nuclear weapons has consistently resulted in global nuclear war that leads to a nuclear winter in which billions of people would starve to death—those that survived the initial nuclear blasts and radiation illnesses. Seventy-five countries have ratified the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which outlaws possessing sharing, transporting, using, or threatening to use nuclear weapons. Nonetheless, the Trump administration has ditched the last remaining nuclear arms treaty with Russia, while it carries out a series of wars that—if not checked—will inevitably lead to nuclear war. In fact, the US is actively planning to wage a war against China that would start with a US nuclear first strike on China. These policies only lead more countries to seek nuclear weapons, directly the opposite of the stated US policy and treaty obligations to seek nuclear non-proliferation and good-faith negotiations to eliminate all nuclear weapons.
The so-called “War on Terror” has revealed itself to be a war OF terror, one that is being waged by our own government on foreign soil as well as here in the United States. On the 25th anniversary of 9/11, we must rededicate ourselves to resisting US wars at home and abroad.
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Report Details 500+ Yemeni Civilian Casualties From 2023-25 US Airstrikes
"The so-called 'War on Terror' never ended in Yemen," said Costs of War Project director Stephanie Savell. "This report will allow people to hold the US government accountable for the deaths and destruction it has caused."
Sep 10, 2026
A report released Thursday examines the more than 500 Yemeni civilians its authors said were killed or wounded by US airstrikes in the Middle East nation during a recent 17-month period amid the open-ended so-called "War on Terror" that has left nearly one million people dead in around half a dozen nations over the past 25 years.
The report—authored by the Yemen-based group Mwatana for Human Rights and published by the Costs of War Project at Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs—documents 46 US airstrikes that took place between December 2023 and May 2025 that caused at least 576 civilian casualties, including 213 deaths and 363 injuries. Among the casualties were at least 50 children and 25 women.
"The so-called 'War on Terror' never ended in Yemen," Costs of War Project director Stephanie Savell contended.
"It's important that we continue to account for the civilian lives lost, harmed, and disrupted in Yemen and other US war zones," she added. "This report will allow people to hold the US government accountable for the deaths and destruction it has caused in Yemen in support of the Israeli government's wars since 2023."
The overwhelming majority of the casualties covered by the publication occurred during President Donald Trump’s 2025 "Operation Rough Rider" campaign. Mwatana estimates that the operation killed 208 civilians and wounded 341, while the Pentagon has acknowledged a smaller toll of 153 killed and 243 wounded.
Seven of the 46 strikes took place between December of 2023 and January of 2025 during former President Joe Biden's "Operation Prosperity Guardian," a military campaign that came amid Houthi rebel attacks on shipping lanes in the Red Sea and the Bab al-Mandab Strait during Israel's genocidal war on Gaza.
Among the deadliest attacks covered by the report was the April 2025 bombardment of Ras Isa oil port ordered by Trump, in which US strikes killed scores of people and wounded more than 150 others. Human Rights Watch called the bombing an “apparent war crime,” saying the destruction of the civilian oil facility also threatened vital fuel supplies in a country already devastated by years of war and humanitarian crisis.
The campaign also included the April 28 bombing of a detention center in Saada while jailed African migrants were sleeping. Amnesty International has called for a war crimes investigation into that attack, in which scores of migrants were killed.
Mwatana researchers conducted site visits and 59 interviews with survivors, relatives, eyewitnesses, first responders, and other sources for the new report.
"The first strike hit while we were in deep sleep. I could not believe what I saw—30 of my fellow detainees died; their bodies were charred, and the smell of burned flesh filled the air," one 25-year-old Ethiopian survivor of the Saada attack recounted. "The place was crowded with bodies, while others were screaming and calling for help and rescue... we could do nothing for them."
In addition to physical harm, survivors described the deep psychological trauma suffered by victims. One mother said her 8-year-old son Taha "saw his father after he was hit by shrapnel—how he was bleeding, and how his intestines were coming out."
"His father was screaming: ‘Run… leave me and run before the American aircraft strikes again and finishes me off,'" she continued. "Taha still cannot sleep; when he does, he wakes up terrified. Whenever he hears thunder or any loud noise, he runs in fear, his whole body trembling."
Overall, US strikes covered by the report "hit civilian structures such as homes, shops, farms, residential neighborhoods, and infrastructure," the publication notes, adding that airstrikes "also caused severe damage to infrastructure and critical facilities, compounding the humanitarian suffering of local populations by striking essential service facilities, particularly in rural areas that already face acute shortages of clean water, electricity, and health services."
"Given Yemen’s economic deterioration and the catastrophic humanitarian situation produced by the armed conflict that has been ongoing since September 2014, it is likely that the US strikes expanded the cycle of poverty in Yemen by increasing unemployment and multiplying the number of households that lost breadwinners and sources of income," the report adds.
Hundreds of thousands of Yemenis have died during the civil war that began in 2014, with international experts attributing more than 150,000 Yemeni deaths to a US-backed, Saudi-led bombing campaign and blockade. According to the UK-based casualty monitor Airwars, an estimated 445-643 Yemeni civilians have been killed by US forces during the George W. Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations.
The Costs of War Project says that in the first two decades following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, "between 363,939 and 387,072 civilians were killed by multiple warring parties in post-9/11 war zones, including 12,690 civilians in Yemen."
Mwatana for Human Rights chair Radhya Al-Mutawakel said Thursday that "the losses caused by US airstrikes against civilians cannot be regarded as temporary harm that ends when military operations cease. Civilians who have lost loved ones, homes, or sources of income continue to bear the consequences of these attacks, amid economic and humanitarian conditions that do not provide them with even the minimum capacity to recover.”
"Protecting civilians is not limited to avoiding killing or injuring them; it also includes respecting civilian objects and livelihoods," Al-Mutawakel added. "The United States must assume its legal and moral responsibility to recognize the civilian victims of its military operations in Yemen, provide them with redress and reparation, and hold accountable those responsible for the violations inflicted upon them.”
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After 9/11, the 'War on Terror' Was a War of Terror
The crusade that George W. Bush launched 25 years ago to “rid the world of evil” only compounded it.
Sep 09, 2026
Three days after terrorists killed almost 3,000 people in the United States on September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush stood behind a pulpit at the Washington National Cathedral and spoke to a nation in shock. “Our responsibility to history is already clear,” he proclaimed, “to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.” The vow was, of course, preposterous. Yet the “war on terror” that followed was scarcely more realistic.
“Terrorism is not an enemy. It cannot be defeated. It’s a tactic,” retired US Army General William Odom told C-SPAN viewers in 2002. “It’s about as sensible to say we declare war on night attacks and expect we’re going to win that war. We’re not going to win the war on terrorism.” But the American military crusade became more about persisting than winning. The ultraviolent momentum became its own reason. The destructive search for enemies created more. As years went by and the “war on terror” label faded, US warfare was so normal in so many places that it no longer needed a name or much of a rationale.
But 25 years ago, the impulse to avenge the horrors of 9/11 was instant. Fear and rage blended into high octane for war machinery. Suddenly, overwhelming public emotions were fully in sync with the psychology of a military-industrial complex set for large-scale killing.
Even as the trauma of the terrible day eased for the general public, 9/11 continued to serve as a political license to kill without an expiration date.
None of the 19 hijackers were Afghan, and Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s ties were much tighter with Saudi Arabia, but his presence in Afghanistan put that country in the Pentagon’s gunsights. The question in US media was not about whether, but when, to attack. The answer came on October 7 when American missiles began to explode in Afghanistan. Hours later, a Gallup poll found that “90 percent of Americans approve of the United States taking such military action, while just 5 percent are opposed, and another 5 percent are unsure.”
The air war remained quite popular in the United States. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld held daily live televised briefings that catapulted him to national adulation. A pattern set in, taking for granted that American warfare was beneficent in intent and benign in meaningful impact. People dying under American bombs and less directly didn’t count for much. “The targeting capabilities, and the care that goes into targeting, to see that the precise targets are struck, and that other targets are not struck, is as impressive as anything anyone could see,” Rumsfeld asserted. And he added, “The weapons that are being used today have a degree of precision that no one ever dreamt of.”
Rumsfeld’s style went over big. “Everyone is genuflecting before the Pentagon powerhouse,” exclaimed the Washington Post’s media reporter, Howard Kurtz, who called Rumsfeld “America’s new rock star.” That winter, after the Taliban government fell, the host of NBC’s Meet the Press program congratulated Rumsfeld on the air: “Sixty-nine years old and you’re America’s stud.”
The war in Iraq, launched with a March 2003 invasion, relied on massive air power and more than 150,000 US ground troops. The Saddam Hussein dictatorship fell quickly, but the promised “cakewalk” turned into year after year of combat and slaughter. Mainstream US media outlets were more than comfortable with above-it-all bombing that signified American air prowess. But the toll of American deaths and severe injuries gradually depleted enthusiasm as soldiers were called back for two, three or even more tours of duty. For many, the images of glory days turned into real-life nightmares.
The ongoing war effort that began in autumn 2001 had an implicit throughline in dominant media and politics: while American lives really matter, the victims of American firepower really don’t.
President Bush could not accept defeat in Iraq, and later Barack Obama could not countenance defeat in Afghanistan. Early in his presidency, Obama—in deed and word—made the “war on terror” expressly bipartisan. Less than a year after he received the Nobel Peace Prize in late 2009, the American troop level in Afghanistan reached 100,000, triple the number when he had entered the White House. During a visit to Bagram Air Base near Kabul, Obama provided the service members with star-spangled oratory that could be heard as uplifting or perhaps macabre: “I’ve been humbled by your sacrifice in the solemn homecoming of flag-draped coffins at Dover, to the headstones in section 60 at Arlington, where the fallen from this war rest in peace alongside the fellow heroes of America’s story.”
In effect, even as the trauma of the terrible day eased for the general public, 9/11 continued to serve as a political license to kill without an expiration date. Through it all, the ongoing war effort that began in autumn 2001 had an implicit throughline in dominant media and politics: while American lives really matter, the victims of American firepower really don’t.
* * *
Faraway uses of Pentagon air power had human consequences that hardly registered on political scales back home. For officialdom, tech innovations like drones were unalloyed marvels. The people who experienced terror had no voices, no faces, no names. On the rare occasions when that wasn’t the case, general interest was scant. After seven months in Taliban captivity, New York Times reporter David Rohde escaped from rugged terrain in Pakistan and later recounted what it was like to have US drones constantly hovering overhead: “The drones were terrifying. From the ground, it is impossible to determine who or what they are tracking as they circle overhead. The buzz of a distant propeller is a constant reminder of imminent death.”
The proclaimed war on terror had also become a war of terror.
A few days into his presidency, Obama sent Predator drones into Pakistan, killing three children and a dozen adults. A week later, a former “whiz kid” at the Pentagon during escalation of the Vietnam War in the 1960s, Pierre Sprey, appeared on the PBS program hosted by Bill Moyers. Sprey saw where US officials were headed with their air war. “I’d be astonished if one in five people they kill or wound is in fact a militant,” he said. “You can’t tell with a camera or an infrared sensor or something whether somebody’s a Taliban…. Most likely, you’re relying on some Afghani of unknown veracity and unknown motivation and who may, may very well be trying to settle a blood feud rather than give you good information.” But, Sprey added, “bombing is always politically popular, relative to sending infantry and killing our boys.”
Obama officials were enamored with the American air war, in spite of evidence that it was routinely killing many bystanders. In 2022, Phyllis Bennis at the Institute for Policy Studies offered this assessment: “The so-called ‘global war on terror’ has, from its origins, been characterized by attacks by US Special Forces, by airstrikes, by armed drones, and more, that routinely kill far more civilians than the targets identified on the ‘kill lists’ prepared by presidents and top White House officials. The routine recitation of ‘there is no military solution to terrorism’ has always been an anodyne rhetorical ploy, never an actual guide to what actions might actually work to change the conditions that give rise to terrorism.”
Ironically and tragically, the conditions giving rise to terrorism included the US war waged in the name of ending it. The process was foreseeable. In 1998, the Pakistani-American political scientist Eqbal Ahmad wrote: “A superpower cannot promote terror in one place and reasonably expect to discourage terrorism in another place. It won’t work in this shrunken world.”
Killing from the skies fueled desires for retribution. "For every 10 to 15 people killed, maybe they get one militant," Pakistani photographer Noor Behram said in 2011. For three years, he had been documenting the immediate aftermath of drone attacks in the mountainous Waziristan region near the Afghan border. "There are just pieces of flesh lying around after a strike. You can't find bodies. So the locals pick up the flesh and curse America. They say that America is killing us inside our own country, inside our own homes, and only because we are Muslims.” As a result, Behram said, “The youth in the area surrounding a strike gets crazed. Hatred builds up inside those who have seen a drone attack."
Many thousands of miles away, military personnel in the US were peering at blurry images on computer screens and firing the drone missiles. “The truth is that we could not differentiate between armed fighters and farmers, women or children,” former tech sergeant Lisa Ling recalled. For several years, she had trained Air National Guard members on how to operate Air Force drones. Ling was among the drone whistleblowers who went public during the terror war’s second decade. One of them, the young intelligence analyst Daniel Hale, spent nearly three years in prison because he disclosed facts about the drone program’s human toll. “With drone warfare, sometimes nine out of ten people killed are innocent,” he said. “You have to kill part of your conscience to do your job. But what possibly could I have done to cope with the undeniable cruelties that I perpetuated? The thing I feared most was the temptation not to question it. So I contacted an investigative reporter… and told him I had something the American people needed to know.”
Hale provided The Intercept with classified documents that led to a landmark expose in October 2015. It reported, “Documents detailing a special operations campaign in northeastern Afghanistan, Operation Haymaker, show that between January 2012 and February 2013, US special operations airstrikes killed more than 200 people. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets. During one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets. In Yemen and Somalia, where the US has far more limited intelligence capabilities to confirm the people killed are the intended targets, the equivalent ratios may well be much worse.”
Early in his second term, at the National Defense University, Obama gave a much-ballyhooed speech that addressed downsides of the terror war, then in its twelfth year. “Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue,” he said. “But this war, like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises. That’s what our democracy demands.” Unlike the men who immediately preceded and followed him in the Oval Office, Obama seemed aware that perpetual war had negative effects on US society. Yet he didn’t proceed to do much about it. During the 44 months that followed his speech, through his last year in office, Obama maintained bombing of Afghanistan at about half the rate of his first term while drastically escalating the attacks in Iraq and Syria, with 30,743 bombs and missiles dropped on those two countries in 2016 alone.
* * *
Like Obama, both Donald Trump and Joe Biden ordered air strikes on Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Syria and Yemen. In his second term, Trump has widened US bombing missions to also include Iran, Nigeria and Venezuela along with targeting nonmilitary boats and killing more than 225 civilians during the last year in international waters.
The withdrawal of all US troops from Afghanistan in the late summer of 2021 seemed to mark a turn away from nonstop warfare. “I stand here today, for the first time in 20 years, with the United States not at war,” President Biden declared weeks later at the United Nations. He added, “We’ve turned the page.” But actually, America was bound into a high volume of war. The “war on terror” was morphing and continuing on several continents. In fact, during the same month as Biden’s UN speech, the Costs of War Project at Brown University released a new report documenting that “counterterrorism operations have become more widespread in recent years.” The project’s co-director, Catherine Lutz, said: “The war has been long and complex and horrific and unsuccessful… and the war continues in over 80 countries.”
Throughout the last 25 years, since the first missiles struck Afghanistan, a racial aspect of the terror war has been hidden in plain sight.
The day after the Hamas-led attack in Israel on October 7, 2023, the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations stood outside the Security Council chambers and said, “This is Israel’s 9/11. This is Israel’s 9/11.” During the next six weeks, the New York Times later revealed, Israel “routinely” used 2,000-pound bombs in Gaza “in areas it designated safe for civilians.” Within nine months, Reuters reported, the large quantities of munitions supplied to Israel by the Biden administration included “more than 10,000 highly destructive 2,000-pound bombs.” Speaking to the UN General Assembly as the war in Gaza neared the end of its second year, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said: “We’re wiping out the terror regime of Hamas and ensuring that its savagery will never threaten Israel again.” By then, the US government had provided more than $21 billion in military aid to Israel since October 7. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Israeli organizations Physicians for Human Rights—Israel and B’Tselem unequivocally concluded that what has happened in Gaza is genocide. It was enabled by the United States.
Throughout the last 25 years, since the first missiles struck Afghanistan, a racial aspect of the terror war has been hidden in plain sight. While institutional racism is widely understood to exist inside the United States, an unexamined assumption is that its pernicious aspects stop at the water’s edge. But public discourse about the “war on terror” has eluded a fact well worth pondering: virtually every man, woman and child killed by Pentagon firepower in this century has been a person of color. This is not to say that they were attacked because of their racial identity. But racial biases in the US, unconscious and otherwise, have made it politically easier to launch and sustain wars bringing horrors to their lives.
Current findings from the Costs of War Project include: “An estimated over 940,000 people were killed by direct post-9/11 war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan between 2001-2023. Of these, more than 432,000 were civilians. The number of people wounded or ill as a result of the conflicts is far higher, as is the number of civilians who died ‘indirectly,’ as a result of wars’ destruction of economies, healthcare systems, infrastructure and the environment. An estimated 3.6-3.8 million people died indirectly in post-9/11 war zones, bringing the total death toll to at least 4.5-4.7 million and counting.”
In foreign countries, the overall “reverberating effects” have crushed countless lives. However, the only casualties of the “war on terror” that have really resonated in US politics are American losses. Yet many of the casualties are far from obvious. While “over 7,053 US service members died in the post-9/11 wars,” the Costs of War Project notes, “at least four times as many US service members and veterans of the post-9/11 wars died by suicide than in combat.” In addition, “An estimated 8,189 contractors for the US military died during the post-9/11 wars. Foreign workers for US contracting firms often do not have their deaths recorded or compensated.”
Such figures don’t include the Iraq and Afghanistan veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder. The Veterans Administration now says that 15 percent of those wars’ veterans were suffering from PTSD “in the last year” and 29 percent “at some point in life.” Meanwhile, traumatic brain injury (TBI) from the two wars often afflicts veterans who were violently jolted by explosions and other wartime events. Analyzing Pentagon data, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention concluded that “more than 450,000 US service members were diagnosed with a TBI from 2000 to 2021.” Four years ago, the American Medical Association’s journal JAMA published an in-depth study of TBI among Iraq and Afghanistan veterans. “Our study suggests that post-9/11 military veterans face a higher mortality burden across multiple causes of death than the total US population,” the study said. “We also found that exposure to moderate to severe TBI was associated with even higher mortality rates and excess mortality from accident, suicide, cancer, CVD [cardiovascular disease], homicide, and other causes.”
* * *
One day in mid-December 2002, three months before the “shock and awe” bombardment of the city began, I sat at a picnic table in a Baghdad park with the middle-aged Iraqi man who was my driver. There was no one around, no walls or fixtures that might conceal listening devices. He said that he wished Iraq had no oil, because then there would be no reason to fear an invasion.
Whatever people’s beliefs about the goals behind US warfare during the last quarter-century, there can be no doubt of its immense profitability.
During the last 25 years, while plenty of public discourse has faulted policymakers for tactical mistakes and dubious judgment in war policies, more nefarious motives have received little attention. The rallying cry “No blood for oil” was common among those actively opposing war in Iraq but a nonstarter in mainstream media and politics. “The slogan is neither intelligent nor honorable,” Washington Post columnist George Will said in a commentary for ABC News shortly before the Iraq invasion began. “Intelligent people can honorably differ about the wisdom and morality of war against Iraq. But we should be able to agree that oil, an economic motive, is not driving US policy.”
Four years later, General John Abizaid, former head of US Central Command and military operations in Iraq, said: “Of course it’s about oil, we can’t really deny that.”
In his memoir, former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan wrote: “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.”
Before becoming Defense secretary, Senator Chuck Hagel said in 2007: “People say we’re not fighting for oil. Of course we are.”
Whatever people’s beliefs about the goals behind US warfare during the last quarter-century, there can be no doubt of its immense profitability. The start of the Afghanistan War in October 2001 began supercharged bonanzas for Pentagon contractors. The 20 years of that war overlapped with upward of $2 trillion in government funds going to the biggest contractors—Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Boeing and Northrop Grumman—an increase of 188 percent. “Those five firms spent over $1.1 billion on lobbying between 2001 and 2021,” Quincy Institute senior advisor Eli Clifton wrote. “That number seems like a staggering sum to spend on influencing policymakers but it may have been the most financially prudent decision these companies have made in the past 20 years.”
Investing in war stocks was likewise prudent for stock-market players. As the war in Afghanistan came to a close, journalist Jon Schwarz did the math: “If you purchased $10,000 of stock evenly divided among America’s top five defense contractors on September 18, 2001—the day President George W. Bush signed the Authorization for Use of Military Force in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks—and faithfully reinvested all dividends, it would now be worth $97,295. This is a far greater return than was available in the overall stock market over the same period. $10,000 invested in an S&P 500 index fund on September 18, 2001, would now be worth $61,613. That is, defense stocks outperformed the stock market overall by 58 percent during the Afghanistan War.”
* * *
The “war on terror” brand has gone out of fashion, but underlying military boosterism remains intact. Midway through Trump’s first term, the Democratic Party’s leaders in the House and Senate saluted when the commander in chief proposed an 11 percent Pentagon budget increase over two years. “In our negotiations, Congressional Democrats have been fighting for increases in funding for defense,” Representative Nancy Pelosi boasted. “We fully support President Trump’s Defense Department’s request,” Senator Chuck Schumer proclaimed. “US taxpayers spend far more on the military and war than most people realize,” says a recent report from the Project on Government Oversight, which documents that “there are several ways to calculate the true cost of our military” and “all add up to at least $1.5 trillion.” A two-year 11 percent military spending increase now looks almost dovish in comparison to the outlays on the near horizon. Even without enactment of Trump’s proposed half-a-trillion-dollar increase for the 2027 fiscal year military budget, the status quo is deeply mired in what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the madness of militarism.” If budgets are moral documents, America has been plunging into one moral abyss after another.
The “war on terror” brand has gone out of fashion, but underlying military boosterism remains intact.
With a very different style, Donald Trump’s basic lawless approach to international conflict is akin to Bush’s “war on terror” approach. Rhetoric aside, the actions have been clear: if the USA wants to attack another country, it will. This year’s unprovoked bombings of Iran signify how America’s foreign policy comes full spiral.
The crusade that George W. Bush launched to “rid the world of evil” only compounded it. Now, as the nation’s military juggernaut advances, the mindsets that propel it are in dire need of direct challenge.
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25 Years of War Was the Exact Wrong Response to 9/11
Stop throwing money at a broken, destructive war machine. Stop threatening and blockading our neighbors. Close overseas bases and bring our troops home. Tax the wealthy and start rebuilding our country.
Sep 09, 2026
The lesson of 9/11 should be that war is not the answer to any of the problems facing the United States. After inflicting violence and chaos on country after country for twenty-five years in a “global war on terror” that has evolved into a Zionist genocide and a revived Cold War against Russia and China, the widespread public opposition to Trump’s war on Iran suggests that most Americans have finally learned that lesson.
Unfortunately, powerful sections of our corrupt business and political elites have not.
Most Americans old enough to remember September 11, 2001, can still recall the horrifying images played endlessly on our TV screens as the scale of the mass murder became clear. But we also remember something else: the sinking feeling that the hopes and dreams of billions of people, in the US and around the world, would be pushed to the back-burner for the foreseeable future, as our leaders and corporate media all too predictably embraced a new agenda of revenge, fear-mongering, jingoism and military violence.
As Rumsfeld made clear to his subordinates from the outset, the 9/11 crisis provided an open-ended pretext for endless wars against enemies who had nothing to do with the attacks...
We found out later that only hours after the attacks—less than six hours after the first plane struck the World Trade Center and barely five hours after the Pentagon was hit—the planning for America’s military response to the 9/11 massacre was already under way.
At 2:40 pm, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld convened a meeting at the Pentagon. Notes taken by Undersecretary Stephen Cambone, later obtained by CBS News, recorded Rumsfeld demanding the “best info fast. Judge whether good enough hit S.H.”—meaning Saddam Hussein—“at the same time” as Osama bin Laden. Then came the chilling instruction: “Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not.”
Twenty-five years later, we can look back and see how the US government used September 11 to unleash a crusade of violence, war crimes and chaos across the world. Experts like Nuremberg prosecutor Ben Ferencz and military historian Michael Howard warned from the beginning that declaring a “war on terror” made no sense and would make matters worse.
They were right, of course. But when the State Department’s annual Patterns of Global Terrorism report for 2004 showed an unprecedented increase in global terrorism following the US invasion of Iraq, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice simply cancelled and discontinued the report, replacing it with a new one with different criteria to prevent comparison with previous years.
But, as Rumsfeld made clear to his subordinates from the outset, the 9/11 crisis provided an open-ended pretext for endless wars against enemies who had nothing to do with the attacks, and for the remilitarization of the United States after the small reduction in its military spending after the end of the Cold War.
Total US military spending for the past 25 years has exceeded $21 trillion (in 2024 dollars), surpassing the combined spending of the other 18 largest military powers in the world. During that time, China has built a whole new civilization and infrastructure, and leapfrogged the US economy to become the world leader in clean energy, high-speed rail and technological sectors in which the US was once preeminent.
Both Democrats and Republicans are responsible for these counter-productive choices, and the appalling human costs of these wars on the countries the United States has attacked, bombed or invaded make this an especially atrocious way to squander our nation’s wealth.
The history of the United States during this period calls to mind an old Greek myth. Croesus, the famously wealthy king of Lydia, asked the Oracle at Delphi what would happen if he invaded Persia. The Oracle told him, “If you cross the Halys river, a great empire will fall.” Encouraged, Croesus launched the invasion. But he lost the war, and the empire that fell was his own.
In pursuing their global imperial ambitions, our leaders and ruling classes have discounted and betrayed the real sources of America’s prosperity and security: the well-being of the American people and peaceful relations with our neighbors around the world.
They have led us into war, poverty and extreme inequality, and hollowed out a system of government that was slowly becoming more democratic. At home, decades of political struggle by labor, civil rights and other social movements produced enormous advances, including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, major investments in public infrastructure and education, and a highly progressive tax system—with the top income tax rate at 91% until 1963—that helped finance those public goods and narrow the gap between rich and poor.
Contrary to the “End of History” theory embraced by many policymakers after the Cold War, and Margaret Thatcher’s famous insistence that “there is no alternative” to the extreme neoliberal capitalism that she and Ronald Reagan ushered in, societies always have political and economic alternatives. It is only a transparently self-serving choice by America’s corrupt ruling classes that saddles us with a system that keeps all decision-making power in their own hands in order to build their own wealth to the detriment of the country we all share.
We can see one alternative today in New York City, where Mayor Zohran Mamdani is pursuing a different set of priorities: expanding free childcare, making major investments in affordable housing, improving public transportation, and freezing rents for tenants in rent-stabilized apartments. Electoral politics can be part of the solution, but only if it reflects what ordinary people really want, instead of limited choices between oligarchic “lesser evils.”
Americans are demanding a renewal of social progress, with universal healthcare, quality public education, and all the things we need but can’t afford as long as this bloated, destructive war machine remains our government’s top priority. As Martin Luther King lamented in 1967, “I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube.”
Twenty-five years is a long time to keep moving in the wrong direction, especially when that direction involves endless war and the destruction of other countries. We are a long way from where most Americans would like our country to be. But we have a pretty good idea of what is wrong and what we need to do:
Stop throwing money at a broken, destructive war machine. Stop threatening and blockading our neighbors. Close overseas bases and bring our troops home. Tax the wealthy. Start rebuilding our country, and replace war and militarism with cooperation and problem solving. Take public ownership and responsibility for things we all need and use, like education, healthcare, housing, infrastructure, and utilities. Abolish ICE, and other militarized institutions that waste our national resources and do not serve the public good. Insist that the military be scaled back to its legitimate role of defending the United States against a possible, but very unlikely, foreign military attack.
If we have truly learned the lesson of the past twenty-five years, then we must translate it into policies that reflect that. The real test is not whether we can finally see what went wrong after 9/11. It is whether we are able to change course.
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