1. It Sparked The War on Terror
When then-President George W. Bush stood in front of Congress and addressed the nation on September 20, 2001, he called for a new kind of warfare. Not a war with surgical strikes on specific targets, but a wide-ranging global War on Terror. Less than a month after nearly 3000 people lost their lives in the attacks, American troops invaded Afghanistan.
With the backing of the American people and Congress and the support from our NATO allies, American forces would set out to crush al Qaeda and bring its leader Osama bin Laden to justice for his role in the most significant attack on America in the history of our nation.
What the American people didn’t know at the time was that this invasion would become the longest sustained military campaign in U.S. history. It wouldn’t be long before the cracks started to show in the support for the War on Terror as more and more troops lost their lives or returned home with physical and psychological wounds.
Despite the misgivings of the public for a war that never seemed to have an endpoint, there was still an underlying need to stay in the Middle East and root out any and all terrorist cells or rogue regimes that could be capable of hitting the continental U.S. We were NEVER going to allow that to happen again.
