The 9/11 Wars: What America Chose to Forget

Jan de Vries · 2026-09-11

Mike Bedenbaugh wants Americans to remember something uncomfortable. Not the towers falling — we all remember that. He wants us to remember what came after. The wars. The drone strikes. The trillions spent. The lives lost. The question he keeps circling back to is simple: did we learn anything at all? ### The Wars That Never Ended In the weeks after September 11, 2001, the United States launched what would become the longest military engagement in its history. Afghanistan. Iraq. Then Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan. A map of conflict that kept expanding while the original mission kept shifting. Bedenbaugh's argument isn't about whether the initial response was justified. It's about what happened when that response turned into a permanent state of war. Twenty years later, the Taliban were back in Kabul. The same flags. The same checkpoints. The same people wondering why their country had been torn apart twice. ### What the Costs Actually Looked Like When you add it up, the numbers are staggering. According to Brown University's Costs of War project, the post-9/11 wars have cost American taxpayers over $8 trillion. That's $8,000,000,000,000. More than 900,000 people have died from direct war violence. Another 38 million have been displaced from their homes. Those aren't just statistics. They're families. Neighborhoods. Entire generations who grew up knowing nothing but occupation and airstrikes. > "We remember the day. We forget the decades that followed." — Mike Bedenbaugh ### The Memory Problem Here's what Bedenbaugh finds most troubling. Americans are quick to memorialize 9/11. The ceremonies. The moments of silence. The flags. And that's understandable — it was a national trauma. But the wars that followed? Those get folded into a blur of headlines and presidential speeches. We don't hold ceremonies for the Iraqi civilians killed at checkpoints. We don't have moments of silence for the Afghan interpreters left behind. We don't teach our kids about the drone program that operated in the shadows for years. That's the forgetting he's talking about. Not forgetting the attacks themselves, but forgetting what we did in response. ### Why It Still Matters The wars didn't really end. They just changed shape. The same military infrastructure is still there. The same contractors. The same surveillance programs. The same willingness to intervene when someone in Washington decides it's necessary. Bedenbaugh isn't asking for guilt. He's asking for awareness. Because if we don't remember what happened last time, we're going to do it again. And the next time, it might be even harder to see the consequences until it's too late. The real question isn't whether America should have responded to 9/11. It's whether America should have responded the way it did — and whether we're willing to be honest about what that response actually cost. That honesty starts with remembering. Not just the day, but everything that followed.