# War on Terror The **War on Terror** (or Global War on Terror, GWOT) is the open-ended, globe-spanning campaign launched by [[George W. Bush]] after the September 11, 2001 attacks. Under its banner the United States invaded Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003), authorized the use of military force in broad and durable terms, and built a permanent apparatus of mass surveillance, indefinite detention, extraordinary rendition, enhanced interrogation (torture), and targeted drone killing that has outlived every administration since. ## The frame and why it mattered The defining feature of the War on Terror is rhetorical: by naming the enemy a *tactic* (terrorism) rather than a state or a defined adversary, the framing created a conflict with no possible victory condition and therefore no end — the root of the [[Forever Wars]] critique. This open-endedness was not incidental; it justified the indefinite expansion of executive power. The 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force became a near-permanent grant of war-making authority stretched across successive presidencies and theaters, and the [[Unitary Executive Theory]] found in the "wartime president" its most expansive application. Domestically, the USA PATRIOT Act and the warrantless-surveillance programs revealed by Edward Snowden in 2013 normalized civil-liberties intrusions that the right and left have alternately decried and defended depending on who held power. ## The neoconservative project The War on Terror was the central project of [[Neoconservatism]]. The neoconservative network — organized through the [[Project for the New American Century]] and staffed across the Bush administration (Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith) — had argued through the 1990s for regime change in Iraq and an assertive, democracy-exporting American primacy. September 11 supplied the political opening. The [[Axis of Evil]] framing of the 2002 State of the Union (Iraq, Iran, North Korea) generalized the campaign beyond Al-Qaeda, and the [[Iraq War]] — sold on false claims of weapons of mass destruction and a fabricated Saddam–Al-Qaeda link — became its defining and most discrediting act. ## The realignment backlash Two decades on, the War on Terror became the grievance the realignment right mobilized *against* the establishment that launched it. The wars' staggering costs (trillions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of deaths, the chaotic 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal), their failure to produce stable democracies, and the sense of an elite that paid no price for catastrophic error fed directly into the "America First" critique of "endless wars," foreign aid, and the neoconservative foreign-policy class (see [[Neoconservatism]]). Donald Trump's 2016 attacks on the Iraq War and the Bush record marked the moment the GOP base repudiated the consensus its own party had built — even as the underlying surveillance and war-powers machinery remained largely intact. The KB's chronological spine for this period is the [[War on Terror Timeline]], with the institutional buildout tracked in the [[War on Terror Intelligence Architecture]]. ## See Also - [[George W. Bush]] — launched and defined the campaign - [[Iraq War]] — its defining and most discrediting act - [[Neoconservatism]] — the ideological engine - [[Forever Wars]] — the open-endedness critique - [[Axis of Evil]] — the generalizing frame - [[September 11 Attacks]] — the precipitating event - [[War on Terror Timeline]] — the chronological spine - [[Costs of War Project]] — the independent cost accounting - [[Forever Wars]] — the structural condition the framing produces