The year 2025 has come to an end, marking the end of the first quarter of the 21st century. Looking back over the past 25 years, it is difficult to underestimate the extent to which global events have been shaped by U.S. military excesses. Not that the same can’t be said for the 20th century.
Shortly after the new millennium began, the United States, under the wise leadership of President George W. Bush, launched the so-called “Global War on Terror.” President Bush officially declared war after the 9/11 attacks in 2001: “We have marching orders. My fellow Americans, let’s go.”
According to Bush, the United States promised to “wage war to save civilization itself,” ultimately crushing parts of the world and killing millions of people.
On September 11, 2001, I enrolled as a third-year student at Columbia University in New York City, the site of the World Trade Center attacks. However, I was scheduled to study abroad in Italy that fall, so I was not in New York at the time, but in Austin, Texas, where my family was living at the time.
I spent the day in the office where I was employed over the summer, watching apocalyptic replays of incoming planes on a large projector screen that a colleague had set up specifically for this purpose.
Outside the country, the American flag began to spread everywhere, and the country was about to be designated the number one victim of terrorism in world history. And never mind the quite literal horrors America has inflicted on other countries for decades, from Vietnam and Laos to Nicaragua and Panama.
That night I visited my boyfriend. Three of his housemates were grumpily munching away on the living room floor, surrounded by huge buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken. They say it was “comfort food” meant to ease the pain of a national tragedy.
Suffice it to say, for the countless civilians who would soon be bombed by the United States, bulk orders of fast food to-go were not a commonly available antidote.
I flew from Austin to New York to Rome, where I watched on Italian television as my country tried to “save civilization itself” with daytime airstrikes from Afghanistan. This genocidal exercise paved the way for the 2003 Iraq War, a country that was already well aware of this phenomenon. By 1996, it is estimated that 500,000 Iraqi children had lost their lives to US sanctions.
In a rare and perhaps unintentional moment of clarity, Bush said: “You know, one of the most difficult parts of my job is connecting Iraq to the war on terror.”
And while General Bush may ultimately have been better known for his grammatical incompetence than for his ability to instill existential fear in the hearts of Americans, he was flanked by other, more formidable figures, such as the recently resigned Dick Cheney (a.k.a. the “Darth Vader of the administration”) and Vice President George W. Bush, who were much more serious about fabricating threats to permanently justify war.
Barack Obama, a premature Nobel Peace Prize winner, succeeded President Bush as the leader of the world’s superpower. Obama managed to drop over 26,172 bombs on seven countries in his final year in office alone.
One of these countries is Yemen, made famous by President Obama’s illegal drone strike that killed Yemeni wedding attendees. When Donald Trump took over from Obama in 2017, the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported that the United States had attacked Yemen more in his first 100 days than in the previous two years combined, and Trump changed rules to allow the military to “authorize attacks without going through the White House security bureaucracy.”
Joe Biden, who served as president during two Trump administrations, distinguished himself in office by expanding Washington’s traditionally egregious support for Israel’s genocide of Palestinians to undertake an all-out massacre in the Gaza Strip using billions of dollars of U.S. taxpayer funds.
After 9/11, Israel, which jumped on the bandwagon of the “war on terror” from the beginning, is currently continuing to massacre Palestinians left and right in the Gaza Strip under the guise of a ceasefire brokered by Trump.
Meanwhile, President Trump has resumed control over imperial “counterterrorism” operations, this time with even less restraint, as his newly rebranded War Department brutally blows up boats off the coast of Venezuela and extrajudicially kills those on board.
Whereas in the old Bush-Cheney era, the United States was at least interested in presenting a semi-coherent narrative to justify foreign invasions, Trump has not bothered to spend too much time building a veneer of legitimacy, preferring instead to throw around absurd allegations of Venezuelan “narco-terrorism” and oil “theft.”
Today, America’s military power is increasingly being harnessed to the whims of a man whose spontaneous, haphazard bombing of Iran, Yemen, Syria, and elsewhere emulates his pathological stream-of-consciousness style of discourse.
And as we enter the second quarter of the 21st century, already defined by the devastating legacy of American militarism, we can’t help but remember the unfortunate “marching orders” that started it all: “My fellow Americans, let’s go.”
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.
