How we forgot about the war on terror
Ibrahim Rayintakath
Remember the flypaper theory?
Even in the blood-flush days of 2001, it seemed a bit naïve as a counterterrorist military strategy — that the United States could simply choose to “fight them over there” rather than enduring an ongoing series of attacks “over here.”.
But from the vantage of most Americans, this is more or less how the global war on terror actually played out: a growing map of elective and sometimes disastrous military engagements abroad, accompanied by pretty quiet years for terrorism on U.S. soil, at least to judge by the horrific standards set by Sept. 11 itself.
You might’ve been thinking about this distressing chapter of our imperial history a few weeks ago, around the anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001, with your social media feed briefly taken over by recollections and reflections of the attacks themselves. I was thinking about it while reading Richard Beck’s rich and memorable new history, “Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life.” Dick Cheney had just publicly endorsed Kamala Harris for president and rebuked Donald Trump, a once unthinkable development that seemed to mark a few tectonic shifts — perhaps the most partisan figure of the war on terror era suggesting that the greater threat to the Republic was now internal rather than external and on the right rather than the left. Cheney’s endorsement was quickly followed by one from former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who authorized the use of torture by the U.S. military and helped design and defend a domestic surveillance program, as well, and was now all in for the Democratic ticket.
Not that long ago, endorsements like these would have been rebuffed by Democrats as valentines from warmongers. But today it’s common for Americans to worry more about the so-called security theater of airport check-ins than about the acts of terrorism that inspired it, while the forever war that once seemed to extend so ominously into the future and intrude so conspicuously into our private lives has already faded from cultural memory, like a fever dream. For many years, American policymakers and intellectuals seemed excited to treat the new conflict as the closest thing their generation was likely to get to World War II, with all its existential clarity. But corner people on the street these days and ask them whatever happened to the war on terror, and they’re liable to respond with a shrug and a comment like, “I guess we won, huh?”
Globally, the costs have been immense. In total, the wars launched and led by the United States in the years since Sept. 11, 2001, have either directly or indirectly lead to the deaths of between 4.5 million and 4.7 million people, according to a remarkable database maintained by Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Of those, more than 940,000 were killed directly in the wars. And of those direct military deaths, more than 402,000 were civilians — nearly 140 times as many noncombatants abroad as died in the initial attacks. Another 38 million were displaced or made into refugees. In just Iraq and Afghanistan, The New Yorker recently estimated, American troops may have been responsible for as many as 800 incidents of alleged war crimes.
The fervor of the war on terror faded long before the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan marked its effective end. But the renewed militarism that kicked off in 2001 has generally proceeded — perhaps in anticipation of a successor confrontation, this time with China, to follow the one we’ve now moved past, focused on radical Islam and Islamic fundamentalism. Both are terms Americans hardly even hear anymore, though violent extremism has lately exploded across Africa’s Sahel, where the United States has lately been withdrawing its troops.
Just since 2015, the United States has added more than $300 billion to its annual defense budget. That’s about enough additional money each year, the Watson Institute calculated in 2023, to pay the full cost of universal pre-K, two years of community college for all students and health insurance for every single uninsured American.