Now 20 years old, and with a fourth president at the helm, the U.S. war on terrorism has changed dramatically in important ways.
"What's happened is the expansive view we've taken of war powers, which we view as necessary in the aftermath of 9/11, has crept into the non-war powers," said Claire Finkelstein, a professor of law and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania who specializes in national security, ethics and democratic governance."The same trends have been passed from one administration to another, and it almost doesn't matter which one you look at. It's all the same.
"Prior to 9/11, there was gradual movement to relax our conception of the border and to have a more globalized perspective," said Joseph Margulies, a law professor at Cornell University and author of a book about how the attacks transformed American national identity."The idea of the border as a dangerous place expanded and also grew exponentially.
The rest of the discussion that day, in both chambers, resembled a chorus more than a debating society. Only a handful of lawmakers expressed any reservation at all, and the leading voices of both the Republican and the Democratic parties congratulated one another for their wisdom and bipartisanship. The country wanted blood, and, beyond some minor negotiation between the White House and the Democratic leadership, Congress was not going to parse the particulars of the death warrant.
At the time, a Republican was president. But his successors, both Republican and Democratic, would all come to find the authority useful in deploying military force around the globe — in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Niger, Cuba and at least a dozen other countries. Like its predecessors, the Biden administration continues tothe list of organizations and people the executive branch considers to be covered by the 2001 authorization of force.
It also emphasized rebuilding the nations ravaged by U.S. forces as an imperative to prevent U.S. enemies from gaining power. The costs were billed to taxpayers. While Americans remained in favor of the U.S. operations in Afghanistan in the mid- to late aughts, support for the Iraq War drained. Democrats swept the 2006 midterms, and they used their new power to signal their readiness to withdraw from Iraq by pushing for a timetable to end the war.
"We've got to ask hard questions as a democracy about whether we should be able to wage a war on the periphery for an entire generation," he said. President Barack Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and staff and national security team members get an update on the mission against Osama bin Laden in the Situation Room at the White House on May 1, 2011.In White House Situation Room meetings, Biden, the vice president, signaled his opposition to the Navy SEAL team raid that killed bin Laden in May 2011, according to people who participated in the discussions.
Ackerman argues that Obama and Trump shared a trait when it came to the war on terrorism: incoherence. Whereas Trump gave many Republican base voters an explanation for the failure of the Bush wars that was both illogical and well received — that elites did not believe strongly enough in the mission to do what it took to win — Obama talked a lot about ending the post-9/11 era while relying on many of the same tools Bush used.
"The amount of money that went into 'spot, listen and, if necessary, take out bad guys,' especially for that first 10 years after 9/11, was basically unlimited," said Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the chairman of the Intelligence Committee."We were so afraid of another attack that there was no budget request that wasn't met."
Obama was so reluctant to get bogged down in a third war on his own that he decided not to go to war against Bashar al-Assad's Syrian government in 2013 before asking for congressional authorization. Congress declined to act on his request. Foreign-policy makers at the White House and in Congress who often express their confidence in the ability of the U.S. to counter terrorist threats overseas point to the absence of another 9/11-like attack as evidence.
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