The 9/11 Wars America Can't Afford to Forget

Jan de Vries · 2026-09-11

### The Wars That Started With a Promise When the towers fell on September 11, 2001, America made a promise to itself. Never again. But two decades later, Mike Bedenbaugh wants us to sit with a harder question: did we keep that promise, or did we trade it for something we never signed up for? Bedenbaugh's essay isn't about the day itself. It's about everything that came after. The wars. The drone strikes. The bases. The endless news cycles that turned distant conflicts into background noise. And he's asking Americans to actually look at what those years cost. ### What Happened After the Dust Settled Here's the thing nobody wants to say out loud: the conflicts that followed 9/11 didn't end when the headlines moved on. They kept going. They're still going in some places. - Roughly 900,000 people have died in post-9/11 war zones, according to Brown University's Costs of War project - The U.S. has spent over $8 trillion on these conflicts since 2001 - More than 7,000 American service members have been killed, with tens of thousands more wounded - Millions of civilians across Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and beyond have been displaced from their homes Those aren't just numbers. They're the reason Bedenbaugh says we can't just move on. ### The Real Cost of Forgetting "We remember the falling towers," Bedenbaugh writes, "but we forget the falling cities." That line hits hard because it's true. Americans have built entire cultural rituals around 9/11. We have memorials, moments of silence, documentaries. But when it comes to the wars that followed, the memory gets fuzzy. Why? Because it's easier. It's easier to remember the victims than to reckon with what was done in their name. Bedenbaugh isn't arguing that America shouldn't have responded. He's arguing that we should be honest about what that response became. A war on terror that turned into a war on anyone in the wrong place at the wrong time. A mission that shifted from justice to occupation to something nobody can quite define. ### Why This Matters Now You might be thinking: this is old news. Why bring it up? Because the same patterns are showing up again. Military budgets keep climbing. New conflicts keep pulling at the edges of the map. And the public still isn't being asked to pay attention in any real way. Bedenbaugh's point is simple. If Americans forget what happened after 9/11, they'll let it happen again. Not the same war, but the same silence. The same willingness to look away while someone else's country burns. ### A Memory Worth Keeping Remembering isn't about guilt. It's about clarity. It's about knowing that when a nation goes to war, the consequences don't stay in the war zone. They come home. They live in families. They live in budgets. They live in the way we see ourselves. Bedenbaugh ends his piece with a quiet challenge. Don't just remember the day. Remember the years. Remember the decisions. Remember the people who never got a memorial. Because if we don't, we're not honoring anyone. We're just moving on. And moving on, in this case, means forgetting what we promised never to forget.