War on Terrorism

Origin and Foundations of the War on Terrorism

On September 11, 2001, 19 hijackers took over four U.S. domestic flights, successfully crashing two of the planes into the World Trade Center towers and one into the Pentagon building. The fourth flight, believed to be intended for another Washington, D.C., target, crashed in rural Pennsylvania after passengers overpowered the hijackers. The September 11 hijackings are unquestionably the most devastating terrorist attacks on the United States to date.

Before these attacks, although the United States maintained a list of terrorist organizations on whom it collected intelligence and had carried out several military operations against terrorist groups and terrorist sponsoring states in the past, in the main it responded to terrorist actions after the fact, and through the court system. For example, the terrorists responsible for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center were tried and sentenced in a New York Court in 1996, and the persons responsible for the Lockerbie bombing of 1988 were tried in Scotland in 1999. The sheer scale of the September 11 attacks prompted a different response from the U.S. government. On September 12, 2001, following a meeting with his national security team, U.S. president George W. Bush stated that he believed the attacks constituted an act of war. On September 20, 2001, in a speech before a joint session of Congress and several visiting dignitaries, the president elaborated on his earlier remarks and established several principles that would guide the actions of the United States in months to come:

• The defeat of terrorism worldwide would now become the most important goal of the United States.
• States that harbor terrorists would be subject to U.S. military action.
• Military action alone, while important, would not be the sole or even the primary means of fighting terrorism.
• The war on terrorism will be an extremely complex and lengthy battle, which may take many months or years to win, and which will not be over when those responsible for the September 11 attacks are stopped.
• The war on terrorism would bring many changes within the United States as well as outside it, especially in the areas of defense, national security, and intelligence gathering.

Perhaps the most important remark in the September 20 address was: “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” This sentence has come to be referred to by many commentators as the “Bush Doctrine”; its forceful simplicity precipitated political changes around the world, as countries that had supported terrorism in some form or another attempted to avoid reprisals, while countries that desired closer relations to the United States offered various forms of aid.

In his State of the Union address on January 29, 2002, Bush reported on the progress of the war on terrorism and suggested future areas for military action, naming Iraq, Iran, and North Korea an “Axis of Evil” whose production of weapons of mass destruction, that is, chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, must be stopped.

Effects of the War on Terrorism on U.S. Foreign Policy

In addition to the remarks outlined above, in his September 20 address President Bush presented several ultimatums to the Taliban government then ruling Afghanistan, most important, the handover of the Al Qaeda terrorists (led by Osama bin Laden) responsible for the September 11 attacks and several other attacks on U.S. targets. When these demands were not met, in October the United States commenced military operations in Afghanistan. U.S. involvement relied on Northern Alliance forces (a coalition of Afghan rebels that had been fighting the Taliban) for most of the ground fighting, deploying a small number of U.S. Army Special Forces troops to help direct air strikes and conduct raids. These tactics—the use of proxy forces backed up by air power—proved effective rapidly, and by mid-December most major Afghan cities had fallen to the Northern Alliance, and a civilian government was installed. These victories represented only a partial success for the U. S. war on terrorism, however.

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