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

Jan de Vries · 2026-09-11

Mike Bedenbaugh has spent years thinking about what happened after the towers fell. Not just the day itself, but the long, messy decades that followed. And he's got a message for Americans: don't look away from the wars that came next. ### What We Actually Lost Most of us remember where we were on September 11, 2001. That part is burned into memory. What's easier to forget is everything that came after. The conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq stretched on for nearly two decades. More than 7,000 U.S. service members died in those wars. Hundreds of thousands of civilians lost their lives too. That's not a statistic. That's a generation of families changed forever. As Bedenbaugh puts it, remembering 9/11 means remembering the full story, not just the opening chapter. ### The Cost Nobody Talks About Here's the thing about military intervention. The bill comes due in ways you don't expect. - Over $8 trillion spent on post-9/11 wars, according to Brown University's Costs of War project - Thousands of veterans dealing with injuries and trauma that don't show up on any balance sheet - Communities across the Middle East still rebuilding from destruction that took years to create That money could have gone toward schools, healthcare, infrastructure. Instead, it went overseas. And the results? Mixed at best. ### Why This Matters Right Now You might wonder why we're still talking about this. It's been over twenty years. But the decisions made in the aftermath of 9/11 still shape how America engages with the world today. Every time a new conflict emerges, those old debates come back. Should we intervene? What's the exit strategy? Who pays the price? Bedenbaugh isn't arguing for isolationism. He's asking for something simpler: honesty. If we're going to send young people into harm's way, we owe it to them to remember what happened last time. ### The Real Lesson Forgetting is easy. It's comfortable. But it's also dangerous. When we forget the costs of past conflicts, we make it easier to stumble into new ones. When we forget the human toll, we reduce war to something abstract. Just numbers on a screen. So here's the ask. Take a moment this September to think about more than the towers. Think about the soldiers who came home different. Think about the families who never got closure. Think about what we could have done differently. That's not unpatriotic. That's the most patriotic thing you can do. Because a country that learns from its mistakes is a country worth fighting for. Bedenbaugh's point isn't to dwell in the past. It's to carry its lessons forward. America must never forget the conflicts that followed 9/11. Not because we should feel guilty, but because we should do better.