9/11 Foreign Policy and Trump’s Doctrine to Prevent a Nuclear 9/11

This post is also available in:

The accusation on the 25th anniversary

Twenty-five years ago today, nineteen terrorists murdered 2,977 people on American soil, and the United States changed forever.

The 9/11 foreign policy that followed changed the world, mostly for the worse.

On this anniversary, the legacy media is marking the date in a peculiar way: by attacking the one president who actually absorbed its lessons.

This very week, a Reuters analysis circulating in hundreds of outlets carries the thesis that Trump’s Iran campaign “echoes the post-9/11 forever wars.”

The suggestion is that the strikes on Iran’s nuclear program are Afghanistan and Iraq all over again: another open-ended American entanglement in the Middle East.

It is a serious accusation. It deserves a serious answer, with numbers and statistics.

What 9/11 did to American foreign policy

The response began righteously. Al-Qaeda had a sanctuary in Afghanistan, and destroying it was justice.

But the establishment that ran Washington, the uniparty that controlled Democrats and Republicans alike before Trump, hijacked that justice and turned it into a project: preemptive wars, nation-building, exporting democracy at gunpoint.

Both presidents Bush belonged to that establishment, and this page will not defend them.

Iraq, a thorn in America’s side but in no way a party to the 9/11 attacks, was invaded in 2003 over weapons of mass destruction that did not exist.

Republican voters said what they thought of it before any pundit dared.

In a 2016 debate, standing next to Jeb Bush, candidate Trump said it plainly: “The war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake… They lied.”

The donor-class audience booed him. South Carolina, a military state, voted for him days later. The base had understood what the uniparty had not.

The bill

At the peak of the surge, about 170,000 American troops occupied Iraq; about 100,000 were deployed in Afghanistan; some two million Americans served in those theaters over two decades.

Roughly 7,000 US service members died, alongside about 8,000 US contractors. More than 53,000 came home wounded.

The total cost of the post-9/11 wars, counting future care for veterans, reaches about 8 trillion dollars, the estimate of Brown University’s Costs of War project.

Osama bin Laden infamously boasted that his strategy was “bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy.” A terrorist’s boast deserves no credit, but the dates deserve a look.

The last balanced federal budget was fiscal year 2001, the year the towers fell.

There has not been another since, and the national debt now races toward 40 trillion dollars.

The wars did not cause all of that debt, honesty requires saying so, and the current administration also runs deficits.

But the turn began there, and the establishment’s priorities never changed.

While some 26 million Americans still lack health insurance, Washington was spending 2 million dollars on sex-change procedures and LGBT activism in Guatemala, 47,000 dollars on a transgender opera in Colombia, and millions more on contraceptive programs around the globe.

All of it comes from the White House’s own review of USAID. At least that faucet is now closed.

The forgotten victims

One consequence of the 9/11 foreign policy is almost never mentioned, and it grieves this page deeply.

In 2003, Iraq had about 1.5 million Christians, heirs of churches founded in the first century.

Under the secular tyrant Saddam Hussein they were tolerated and relatively protected; his own foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, was a Chaldean Catholic.

The invasion that promised democracy delivered persecution: al-Qaeda in Iraq, then ISIS, bombed churches, seized homes, and drove the faithful out.

Today fewer than 250,000 Christians remain, a collapse of more than 80 percent. Syria’s ancient Christian communities suffered the same arithmetic after its war.

The establishment said it was exporting democracy. In practice, it presided over the near-extinction of Christianity in the lands where it was born.

The real winner of the war on terror

While Washington spent two decades and 8 trillion dollars chasing jihadists through mountains and deserts, Beijing was signing contracts.

The Belt and Road Initiative spread Chinese money, ports, and railways across roughly 150 countries.

Russia, meanwhile, tested the distracted superpower in Georgia in 2008 and took Crimea in 2014.

Even career diplomats now concede that nobody was minding the store.

The public relations damage compounded the strategic damage: America spent those years photographed at war while China was photographed building bridges.

We have documented that pattern across the Chomcho series on China’s expansion, and the war on terror is where it began.

A culture war that cannot be won over there

Afghanistan settled an old question: whether military power can rebuild a nation against its own religious and cultural gravity.

Twenty years, 2.3 trillion dollars, and the Taliban walked back into Kabul in about a month.

Jeffersonian democracy cannot be installed where the culture rejects its premises.

The harder lesson is that the culture war came home.

This morning at Ground Zero, grieving families plan to turn their backs on the mayor of New York, a socialist who campaigned alongside imam Siraj Wahhaj. Federal prosecutors named Wahhaj as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and he served as a character witness for the Blind Sheikh.

The mayor also counts among his allies the streamer Hasan Piker, who once said America “deserved” 9/11.

More than 98,000 people signed a petition asking the mayor to stay away, but he is attending anyway.

A city that forgets why its towers fell has lost something no army can restore.

And the milieu that forgets is the same milieu writing the columns that call deterrence a forever war.

The point the critics miss: prevention

Now to the legacy media’s comparison itself: the claim that today’s Iran conflict is another Afghanistan or Iraq.

The Iran operation deployed about 40,000 American troops on ships and regional bases. Not one ground soldier invaded Iran; there is no occupation and no nation-building project.

Between 13 and 20 US service members have died, and several hundred were wounded, each one mourned. Direct military costs run about 42 billion dollars, with an 87 billion supplemental requested.

Set that against the post-9/11 wars: 350 times fewer American dead, roughly 70 times fewer wounded, about one-sixtieth of the cost, and zero years of occupation.

Calling these two things the same is not analysis. It is arithmetic illiteracy in service of a narrative.

But the deeper error is about purpose.

The post-9/11 wars REACTED to a catastrophe that had already happened.

Trump is acting to PREVENT one: a nuclear 9/11.

Before the strikes, the IAEA reported that Iran held more than 400 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 percent, a level with no civilian use, weeks away from weapons grade, feedstock for roughly nine or ten bombs; the agency’s own chief called the stockpile “unprecedented for a state without nuclear weapons.”

China had sold Iran, through a Hong Kong intermediary, enough missile fuel chemicals for up to 800 ballistic missiles, and Russia has been arming Iran and sharing missile technology, as we wrote on September 3.

This is the regime whose supreme leader calls Israel a “cancerous tumor” that will not survive the next 25 years, while crowds chant death to America.

Every recent president saw it.

Obama declared in 2012: “I do not have a policy of containment; I have a policy to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.”

Biden also promised Iran would never get a bomb on his watch.

Yet the uniparty’s actual record was talk, and worse than talk: in January 2016, an unmarked cargo plane landed in Tehran carrying 400 million dollars in cash on wooden pallets, the first installment of a 1.7 billion dollar settlement, money a terror-financing regime could route to its proxies in Gaza, Lebanon, and Yemen.

Tough words did not prevent 9/11 in 2001, and words alone would not prevent a nuclear 9/11 now.

Think of it as medicine. A successful screening program that removes a tumor early looks expensive and unpleasant, until it is compared with treating the cancer after it spreads.

The Bush-era establishment practiced the second kind of medicine, at a price of 7,000 soldiers and 8 trillion dollars.

Trump is practicing the first kind, and the same voices that cheered the reaction now condemn the prevention.

Venezuela shows the same doctrine in miniature: Maduro captured in a days-long operation, Panama style, with no occupation to follow.

Protect, not control

Ronald Reagan said it in March 1981: “Government’s first duty is to protect the people, not run their lives.”

A quarter century after 9/11, that sentence separates the two foreign policies before the American people.

One, the uniparty’s, spent trillions running other nations’ lives while failing to protect its own citizens’ future.

The other protects first: borders enforced, enemies deterred, a nuclear 9/11 prevented before it can be memorialized.

And while the legacy media works to run the public mind with false comparisons, the duty of remembrance remains.

Twenty-five years ago the churches of America overflowed with prayer for the 2,977 and for the firefighters who climbed the stairs.

May God keep their memory, and may this nation never again need a morning like that to remember Him.

Forgive in Christ, but never forget that it can happen again.