What America Forgot About the Wars After 9/11

Jan de Vries · 2026-09-11

### The Wars That Came After Mike Bedenbaugh has a message for Americans, and it's not an easy one to hear. He wants people to remember what happened after September 11, 2001. Not just the towers, not just the shock, but the two decades of war that followed. It's strange how memory works. We hold onto the pain of that morning with incredible clarity. But the years that came after? Those blur together for a lot of people. ### The Cost We Don't Talk About Think about the numbers for a second. Over 7,000 American service members died in Iraq and Afghanistan. That's not counting the tens of thousands wounded, or the hundreds of thousands of civilians who lost their lives overseas. The financial cost? Some estimates put it above $8 trillion. That's trillion with a T. Money that could have built schools, fixed roads, or funded healthcare for a generation. But Bedenbaugh isn't just throwing statistics at us. He's asking something deeper. He wants us to sit with the consequences of military intervention, not push them aside. ### Why This Matters Now Here's the thing. We're still living with the aftermath. Veterans are still dealing with injuries and trauma. Families are still grieving. And the political landscape shifted in ways nobody could have predicted. > "The conflicts which followed 9/11 shaped everything that came after. We can't understand our world today without understanding them." That's the heart of it, really. You can't skip over the hard parts of history and expect to understand the present. ### What Remembering Actually Means Bedenbaugh isn't asking for guilt. He's not asking for blame. He's asking for honesty. - Acknowledge the human cost on all sides - Recognize how decisions made in fear can echo for decades - Understand that military action is never simple or clean - Remember that the people who fought were real, with real lives This isn't about politics. It's about paying attention to what actually happened, not the version that's easier to live with. ### The Conversation We Keep Avoiding Americans are good at moving forward. It's part of the national character, this idea that you don't dwell on the past. But sometimes moving forward means looking back first. The wars after 9/11 are still shaping our world. Every time we debate foreign policy, every time we talk about veterans' care, every time we wonder why certain regions are unstable, we're dealing with the aftermath. Bedenbaugh's point is simple but uncomfortable. If we forget what happened, we risk repeating it. And that's a risk nobody should be willing to take. So maybe the question isn't whether we remember. It's whether we're willing to remember honestly, with all the complexity and pain that comes with it.