The War on Terror Never Ended. Now It’s Spreading to Iran.

Another way in which we know the war on terror never ended is that its cheerleaders and practitioners remain in positions of power. Its architects have never faced any form of accountability, as Harvard professor Stephen Walt details in his 2019 book, The Hell of Good Intentions. Bad ideas continue to circulate, and discredited experts from the Iraq War days still have a say. One striking example is Brett McGurk, the Middle East’s coordinator under Biden who started his career by working as a legal adviser to America’s occupation force in Iraq in 2003. Now he is a regular presence on CNN as a global affairs analyst. On air, McGurk takes it as a given that the U.S. is going to get involved in Israel’s new war, even while conceding, “We cannot effectuate this in a way we can predict. We have learned that lesson.” That McGurk has served every president since Bush is part of how we got here. “Without the Biden admin’s Middle East choices―dominated by McGurk―it’s unlikely we would now be on the brink of potentially immense conflict,” writes HuffPost’s Akbar Ahmed.

Every president had a role in this meta–forever war. Bush passed the baton to Obama, Trump, and Biden, who each had the opportunity (and, one could argue, a mandate) to end the war on terror but didn’t, with consequences that go well beyond the Middle East. Obama never closed the prison camp at Guantánamo, and neither did Biden, and Trump is exploiting its liminality in his immigration crackdown, not to mention the enduring presence of the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, both of which emerged from the trauma of the September 11 attacks. Obama helped advance the illusion that counterterrorism operations had no costs to Americans at home by accelerating the use of unmanned aircraft to assassinate targets; though Biden set new rules that limited  drone strikes across the Middle East, in his first 100 days of this term, Trump has accelerated air strikes on Somalia and on Yemen and has continued his first-term policy of aggressively using drones abroad. None of them meaningfully broke with Bush—even as all have criticized his handling of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, often vociferously—and, in failing to do so, they continued his war in new forms.

Biden seemed to understand that there were lessons to be learned from the war on terror but couldn’t apply them beyond the narrowest sense. When he completed a Trump policy by fully withdrawing from Afghanistan, he was responding to public opinion, which had long since soured on the presence of American troops in the country. But the pullout was a disaster, leading to the deaths of 13 American service members. The Taliban regained power all but effortlessly. It was a boondoggle and tragedy of such dramatic proportions that Biden and his team undercut their own ability to criticize the forever war they had sought to end. Ultimately, it was also the beginning of the end of Biden’s presidency: The botched withdrawal was the moment when public opinion turned on him; a majority of Americans would not view him favorably—or, for that matter, believe he was up for the job of president—again. 

Still, Biden had a second opportunity to officially end the war on terror, when, a year later, he ordered a drone strike in Kabul that killed Ayman Al Zawahri, one of the last 9/11 planners still at large. But even that didn’t lead to a larger rethink of why tens of thousands American troops have been a constant presence in the Middle East.