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

Jan de Vries · 2026-09-11

Mike Bedenbaugh has a message for Americans, and it's not an easy one to hear. He wants us to remember what happened after 9/11. Not just the towers, not just the Pentagon, not just that field in Pennsylvania. He wants us to remember the wars that followed. The ones we started. The ones we're still paying for. It's been more than two decades since those planes hit. Most of us have moved on. We've lived our lives, raised our kids, complained about gas prices. But the conflicts that came after 9/11? They never really ended. They just changed shape. ### The Wars That Never Really Ended Bedenbaugh isn't here to relitigate the past. He's asking something simpler. Remember. Remember the soldiers who came home with missing limbs and broken minds. Remember the families who got that knock on the door. Remember the civilians in faraway places who lost everything because of decisions made in Washington. We invaded Afghanistan in 2001. We invaded Iraq in 2003. We told ourselves it was about freedom, about safety, about revenge. Maybe some of it was. But the consequences? Those are still unfolding. Here's what we don't talk about enough: - Over 7,000 American service members died in post-9/11 conflicts. - More than 50,000 were wounded, many with injuries that will last a lifetime. - Hundreds of thousands of civilians died in Iraq and Afghanistan. - We spent over $8 trillion on these wars. That's trillion with a T. - Veterans are still waiting for healthcare and benefits they were promised. Those numbers are staggering. But numbers don't tell the whole story. They don't capture the grief, the trauma, the quiet desperation of people whose lives were shattered. ### Why Remembering Matters Now You might be thinking, why bring this up? It's been years. Can't we just move on? We could. But Bedenbaugh argues we shouldn't. Because forgetting means we're doomed to repeat the same mistakes. We're already seeing echoes of the same rhetoric. The same calls for intervention. The same promises that this time it'll be different. It won't be different. It never is. Remembering isn't about guilt. It's not about blaming individual soldiers or even individual presidents. It's about understanding that war has consequences. Real ones. Lasting ones. And those consequences don't stay in faraway lands. They come home. They sit at our dinner tables. They sleep in our beds. As Bedenbaugh puts it, we owe it to the dead to remember. We owe it to the living to do better. ### The Cost We're Still Paying There's another angle here too. The financial cost. We borrowed trillions to fight these wars. That money didn't come from nowhere. It came from our future. It came from infrastructure we didn't build, schools we didn't fund, healthcare we didn't provide. Every dollar spent on a bomb is a dollar not spent on a bridge. That's not a political statement. It's just math. And the human cost? That's harder to quantify. Veterans struggling with PTSD. Families torn apart. Communities left behind. These aren't abstract concepts. They're real people, real lives, real pain. Bedenbaugh isn't asking for a national day of mourning. He's asking for something more fundamental. Awareness. Honesty. A willingness to look at what we did and ask whether it was worth it. That's uncomfortable. It should be. ### What Comes Next The conflicts that followed 9/11 aren't just history. They're still happening. In different forms, in different places, but they're happening. And if we don't remember how we got here, we won't recognize when we're about to do it again. So take a moment. Think about the soldiers. Think about the civilians. Think about the trillions spent and the lives lost. Think about what we could have done with all that. Then ask yourself: are we ready to make different choices? Or are we just going to forget? Bedenbaugh hopes we don't. I hope we don't either.