What America Forgot After 9/11: The Wars That Changed Everything

Jan de Vries · 2026-09-11

September 11, 2001, started as an ordinary Tuesday. By evening, nearly 3,000 people were dead, and America was a different country. What came next, though, is the part Mike Bedenbaugh wants us to sit with. He's not asking anyone to relive the grief. He's asking us to remember what we did with it. ### The Wars That Followed In the weeks after the attacks, Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force. It was 60 words long. Those 60 words became the legal backbone for two decades of war. - The invasion of Afghanistan began in October 2001 - The invasion of Iraq followed in March 2003 - At its peak, the U.S. had roughly 180,000 troops in Iraq alone - The total cost of the post-9/11 wars is estimated at $8 trillion Bedenbaugh's point isn't that we should have done nothing. It's that we moved fast, with enormous force, and rarely stopped to ask what we were building. We toppled governments. We stayed for years. We left. ### The Part Nobody Talks About Here's what gets lost in the anniversary coverage: the wars didn't stay in Iraq and Afghanistan. They came home. More than 7,000 U.S. service members died in post-9/11 conflicts. Hundreds of thousands came home with injuries, visible and invisible. And the wars reshaped how Americans think about security, surveillance, and who gets to decide when we go to war. > "We remember the day. Do we remember what we did next?" That's the question Bedenbaugh keeps circling. Not to shame anyone. To make sure the next time we're scared, we think before we act. ### Why This Matters Now We're living in the long tail of those decisions. Every debate about foreign aid, military spending, or intervention carries the fingerprints of 9/11. If we forget the cost, we're more likely to repeat it. Remembering isn't about staying stuck in grief. It's about being honest about what we did, and what it cost.