Never Forget Why
The Global War on Terror was a righteous and just response to the atrocity of September 11. Don’t let its critics tell you otherwise.
Twenty-three years ago this week, radical Islamic terrorists under the banner of Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda murdered nearly three thousand Americans in New York City, Washington DC, and Pennsylvania. The attack was unprovoked and unprecedented. Never before in our history had American civilians been killed in such large numbers on American soil by a foreign enemy. Those who were so horrifically massacred simply for their citizenship were fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, sons, and daughters. They were bankers, lawyers, accountants, and government employees. They were transit workers, janitors, electricians, and secretaries. They were families going on vacation and business travelers. They were police officers, firefighters, paramedics, and bystanders. And, most importantly of all, they were our fellow Americans.
The phrase “Never Forget” has been associated with that fateful September morning ever since, and it is repeated annually in commemoration of those who died so tragically. But now, nearly a quarter-century later, it seems as though people do forget about 9/11, at least for the other 364 days of the year. And they especially seem to forget when discussing the response to that awful morning, the Global War on Terror (GWOT). Instead of seeing that series of linked conflicts as a righteous riposte to the devastating assault on innocent Americans, the widely-accepted narrative is exactly the opposite.
In just over 20 years, the left-wing narrative of the GWOT has become mainstream, even being adopted by a significant portion of the Republican party – namely, the MAGA populists of the New Right. In this telling, America overreacted to the attack, going off abroad in search of monsters to destroy and democracies to build from scratch. The trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives were lost for, at best, no reason whatsoever, and, at worst, because of rapacious, corrupt American officials. Each intervention overseas was counterproductive and made America less safe. The only beneficiaries were the Military-Industrial Complex, the Bush family, evil neoconservatives, and warmongering politicians. The critics see the whole process as being doomed from the start, with no purpose and no potential for success in any way. And to top it off, we lost in humiliating fashion.
This depiction of the last two decades has shades of the truth, but its fundamental conceit is entirely wrong. The GWOT had many flaws in execution, but it suffered primarily from a lack of political support and an unnecessary democracy-promotion mission that was redolent of the post-Cold War foreign policy euphoria across the political spectrum. The overall missions of the conflict – the degradation of the terrorist movement that attacked us on September 11, 2001, the deterrence of future large-scale terrorist atrocities, and the reduction of the overall terrorist threat to Western nations – were achieved in overwhelming fashion. Even the secondary missions of stabilizing the states in which we intervened and installing better, friendlier governments were initially successful and would have been effective in the long-term had we not made a few poor choices, notably during the Obama administration.
(As an aside, I consider the Iraq War an offshoot of the GWOT, not an integral part of it. That war had major divergences from the rest of the anti-terror operations, particularly in the early stages. It became a counterinsurgency operation as the years passed based on repeated American troop reductions, but the war was separate in most other ways. It was far more a continuation of the Gulf War of the 1990s than it was part of the novel GWOT framework. Still, I will address some of the criticism of the conflict as it relates to its intersections with the GWOT.)
The greatest success of the GWOT is in its primary objective: the reduction of the terror threat to the American homeland and the destruction of those who carried out the attack on our nation. Since 9/11, there has not been one single foreign terror attack against the US anywhere near that magnitude. Given hindsight, that may seem obvious, but it surely wasn’t at the time, or even for a few years afterward. Many Americans forget that there were several other major terror attacks against Westerners in the immediate years following 9/11 – a mass attack in Bali in 2002, the 2004 Madrid train bombing, and the 7/7 bombings in London in 2005, among others – and that the consensus was that there would be more such attempts made against the United States itself. That there were no such attacks is an incredible feat of American security.
That feat was largely due to the massive degradation of the capacity of al Qaeda and its offshoot organizations through the force of American military might. Al Qaeda was systematically reduced to a shell of itself, forced on the run by constant pressure and destroyed root and branch. Its leaders were killed or captured, including Osama bin Laden himself, and its subsidiaries throughout the world were siloed into exclusively local action, if any at all. Other terrorist groups, notably the Islamic State organization, were degraded one by one until they no longer proved to be the significant dangers to the West that they started as. Don’t get me wrong, the terror threat has not been eliminated entirely, but that was never going to be possible under anything less than an authoritarian regime.
What of the nations that we intervened in? The critics charge that they were never going to become stable, US-aligned countries given their histories of conflict, general anti-American attitudes, and their lack of experience with democracy. This is entirely wrong, but it does reach one of the main problems of the execution of the GWOT: its embrace of a flawed strategy of immediate democratic transition. Afghanistan and Iraq, the two major “regime change” missions that fall under the broad War on Terror umbrella, were hastily pushed into democracy, leading to instability, the rise of Islamist violence, and, ultimately, significant difficulties for our mission there. The whole idea to transition rapidly into democracy was entirely unnecessary and orthogonal to the actual purpose of the GWOT: retaliating for 9/11 and improving American security at home by crushing our enemies abroad, both of which we accomplished with vigor.
Instead, we should have taken the historically-successful approach of a longer-term transition, aligning with a friendly autocrat atop these nations and working to pressure them over time to grant more political and civil rights. This process worked during the 20th century in South Korea, Chile, Taiwan, Spain, and Indonesia, to name a few, and it avoided communist control of these countries. Similarly, working with such figures in Afghanistan – a nation only ever held together by an autocratic regime – and Iraq would have been far more beneficial for our interests and for those societies in the long run. A strong leader in Iraq could have stood up to Islamist terror and Iranian influence, while not forcibly alienating the previous regime’s tepid supporters. In Afghanistan, such a leader could have provided a level of legitimacy that would have been a bulwark against a return of the Taliban as well as exerting greater control of the chaotic Afghan periphery.
Another critique of the War on Terror is the claim that it constituted a “forever war,” one where American troops would be in permanent combat for as long as we remained in theater, with little to no progress made. I’ve written about this false claim at length in Providence, but I’ll address it with some more brevity here. The actual warfighting stages of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq were relatively short, evolving into policing operations after the rapid defeats of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein. Those operations still resulted in lives lost and dollars spent, but both dropped to relatively minute numbers by 2020 – and they would have reached those lows far quicker if not for the poor decision-making by the Obama administration in withdrawing from Iraq and undermining our position in Afghanistan. Retaining troops in a nation over the course of decades is not abnormal or novel; we have had troops in Japan, South Korea, and Germany for nearly 80 years, helping to stabilize those societies and advance American interests. Positions in Iraq and Afghanistan, strategic locations in the Middle East and Central Asia, respectively, would have done the same and served as a deterrent for Iran, China, and Russia. We should never have left either, and certainly not in the manner in which we did.
If anything, the GWOT didn’t go far enough in attacking the sources of terrorism in an aggressive manner. We were far too kind to tacit supporters of our terrorist foes, including Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. In the case of the former, we should have pushed the regime to crack down hard on terrorist funding, punish support for al Qaeda, and turn over those citizens who participated in or advanced the 9/11 attacks. We have leverage over the Saudis and a long relationship with them; we should have used this to our advantage in late 2001. With respect to Pakistan, we should have never accepted them as an ally against the terrorism emanating from Afghanistan; in reality, they were one of its biggest supporters, harboring Osama bin Laden, aiding the Taliban, and providing a safe refuge for our enemies to regroup and rearm. Bush should’ve delivered an ultimatum to then-president Pervez Musharraf: stop your aid of our enemies or be treated as one. If you remember the days after 9/11, you will know how seriously that ultimatum would have been taken.
The greatest failure of the initial Bush phase of the conflict was our choice not to go hard against Tehran, one of the world’s primary terror sponsors. We were rhetorically tough on Iran during the Bush administration and worked to curtail its ability to push terror abroad through sanctions, but stopped short of military action intended to degrade its capabilities and proxies. That decision has had serious ramifications for the region, including our key regional ally, Israel. But most of the current problem was caused by the Obama policy of realignment, which empowered the mullahs to exert major regional influence and gave them the funds with which to do it. The choice by the Obama team to prioritize aiding Iran in its quest to supplant Saudi Arabia as the key Islamic state was but one of its poor choices with respect to the GWOT. They also withdrew entirely from Iraq, allowing for the flourishing of the Islamic State, and pushed for a withdrawal from Afghanistan, boosting the Taliban.
But these failures to go farther in the conflict do not make the GWOT a failure altogether. Indeed, one cannot in good conscience suggest that it is when you take the time to remember why we began that war in the first place. That reason is exactly what we commemorate every year on September 11: the 2,977 innocent Americans who were callously murdered by Islamic radicals in an unparalleled act of terrorism. Despite all the high-minded rhetoric, the GWOT was about one thing and one thing only: avenging the blood of our countrymen. This was clear from the outset. Just look at the iconic impromptu speech President George W. Bush gave, standing on the rubble of the World Trade Center just three days after the attack.
We will #NeverForget. pic.twitter.com/lfqEFpQ8CI
— The RGA (@GOPGovs) September 11, 2024
This incredible feat of American rhetoric – perhaps the best of my lifetime (I was born after Reagan’s “Tear down this wall” speech) – lays out the rationale behind the War on Terror better than anything else I know. Bush’s explosive lines, “I can hear you! The whole world hears you! And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!” resonate throughout history as a righteous promise of revenge against those who assaulted our nation on that balmy September morning. America kept that promise. The men who knocked those twin towers down did indeed hear from all of us shortly thereafter. And that sound – the sound of resolve against Islamic terrorism – has resonated across the world ever since.
Just like those powerful words from George W. Bush, “Never Forget” is a promise made by America to those who were so tragically lost 23 years ago. But we cannot live up to our word if we ignore the success of our response to those deaths. If we remember why we engaged in the Global War on Terror in the first place, we will properly honor their memories and commemorate not only the profound loss of 9/11, but the subsequent victory against those who perpetrated the atrocity. And that is surely worth remembering.