On the evening of September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush promised the nation to bring the perpetrators of the condemned terrorist attacks to justice and three days later Congress issued a joint resolution that gave authorization to the president to use all means necessary against the individuals, organizations, or nations responsible for the atrocity. This would prompt President Bush’s declaration on the War on Terror movement that would last for the unperceivable years to come. In the wake of resentment, anger, and fear after the attacks the War on Terror would provoke unintended consequences and highlight the brutality of the movement. The Bush Doctrine was the core of the War on Terror movement, this policy held the belief that the United States has the right to protect itself from terrorist acts by engaging in pre-emptive wars or ousting hostile governments in favor of friendly, preferably democratic, regimes. This new wave of foreign violent threats sparked anti-Muslim resentment throughout the nation and fueled the fear of the potential of more terrorist attacks on American soil. This fear pushed Bush to create the Office of Homeland Security, which would later create the Department of Homeland Security. This department would establish centralized control over a number of different government functions to control threats on the home front.
The War on Terror movement would succeed in eliminating deadly individuals such as Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, but it would never dissolve the terrorist organizations that follow their extremist views. Groups such as the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and ISIS would remain major threats to the U.S. and their allies despite the removal of their leaders. In the Bush administration, the CIA and FBI would find loopholes to detain and torture their prisoners that would not appear unconstitutional to authorities in the United States. The home front would also suffer under the Bush administration. The USA Patriot Act gave law enforcement the ability to monitor citizen’s e-mails and phone conversations without a warrant, the implementation of warrantless domestic wiretapping, applying a $1.35 trillion tax cut by lowering tax rates, the inept coordination of the Federal Emergency Management Agency during Hurricane Katrina, and the 2008 Great Recession. Although the cut tax rate, Hurricane Katrina, and The Great Recession were unintentional consequences of the War on Terror, it still links to its ineffectiveness. I hope this war will end because we need to focus on ourselves as a country and resolve this economic mess we’ve gotten ourselves into. I would hope we would stop assuming the role of the World Police, we need to stay away from foreign affairs and allow countries to resolve their own issues unless it escalates to world-threatening levels.