Twenty-five years ago, 2,977 people were killed when hijacked planes struck the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania. Five years ago, People’s World asked how to measure the two decades of war launched in response. The question still doesn’t have a clean answer, because those wars never really stopped. They simply kept moving to new battlefields.
Afghanistan and Iraq are the two wars that the George W. Bush administration initially justified by invoking 9/11 directly. The Authorization for Use of Military Force that Congress passed three days later gave the president standing power to pursue anyone tied to terrorism anywhere, a carte blanche later invoked for drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen and interventions in Libya and Syria.
Brown University’s Costs of War project puts the direct death toll in those war zones at more than 940,000 people, over 432,000 of them civilians. Adding in the indirect deaths from disease, displacement, and the destruction of health and water systems pushes the real total to between 4.5 and 4.7 million lives—more than 1,500 times the number killed on September 11 itself.
Rep. Barbara Lee cast the lone vote against that authorization. Standing on the floor of the House, she told lawmakers and the whole nation: “I am convinced that military action will not prevent further acts of international terrorism against the United States.” She closed with words she said she’d heard from a member of the clergy that morning: “As we act, let us not become the evil that we deplore.” The resolution passed 420 to 1.
Lee received death threats and needed round-the-clock security afterward; the right-wing Washington Times newspaper—today a major MAGA propaganda outlet—branded her a supporter of “America’s enemies.” She later called the bill that she’d voted against a “blank check for endless war.” Twenty-five years and millions of deaths later, the record backs her up.
Gaza and Iran may not be wars fought directly in the name of 9/11, but both fit the same pattern of unchecked U.S. military power. Since October 2023, Israel’s U.S.-armed and U.S.-funded assault on Gaza has killed more than 73,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza health officials, a toll the International Court of Justice and human rights groups have characterized as genocide. A ceasefire took effect in October 2025, but it hasn’t meant peace: Palestinian authorities report at least 1,344 people killed by Israeli fire since the truce began, as American weapons keep flowing.
Then, of course, there is Iran. In February, President Donald Trump launched what the Pentagon called “Operation Epic Fury,” a bombing campaign that killed Iran’s supreme leader and struck hundreds of targets in a single day without a vote in Congress. Seven months later, it still grinds on in fits and starts.
The House has twice passed war powers resolutions rebuking his unilateral war-making; Trump ignored both, once claiming the deadline to seek approval didn’t apply because he’d already decided hostilities were “terminated.” Oil prices again sit at over $100 a barrel, and other prices for everyday necessities continue to rise in a war Congress never approved.
All of this costs money. As of 2022, the post-9/11 wars had cost more than $8 trillion by Brown University’s accounting, a figure that predates the Iran war. For 2027, the Trump administration asked for a record-shattering $1.5 trillion military budget, on top of Iran war funding and continued aid to Israel.
Defense contractor stocks, meanwhile, have outpaced much of the rest of the stock market for most of the past 25 years. Weapons companies like Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, Raytheon (RTX), and others have been showered with government cash over this period—money that could have funded housing, health care, or climate resilience instead.
Add it all up, and the U.S. war waste spending has soared past $10 trillion since September 2001.
The department behind all of it isn’t even called the Department of Defense anymore. Last September, the Trump administration renamed it the Department of War, and Pete Hegseth had a new nameplate made for his office: Secretary of War. Supporters called it a branding update, but it’s actually an honest label for what the department does.
That kind of honesty has some precedent in the history of U.S. imperialism, and so do the methods now being deployed against countries including Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran. Regime change by force is the norm whenever a foreign government threatens U.S. corporate or strategic interests, but it’s often dressed up as self-defense, counterterrorism, or democracy promotion.
In this regard, September 11 carries a second, older meaning in the Americas: On that date in 1973, a U.S.-backed military coup overthrew Chile’s democratically-elected socialist president, Salvador Allende, who died in the presidential palace as it was bombed by his own air force. Declassified records show the U.S. spent years working to “make the economy scream,” in Henry Kissinger’s words, angered that Allende had nationalized copper and empowered workers and peasants.
Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship killed thousands of people in the years that followed the “other 9/11.” The shared date is coincidence, but it’s a reminder that the United States has long used political violence and regime change as tools of policy, not just responses to being attacked.
At home, the surveillance apparatus built after 2001, from warrantless wiretapping to the mass data collection that the Patriot Act normalized, never really went away. It has simply been redirected toward fresh targets, including immigrants and protesters.
Congress showed this year it can act when enough members get the courage. The midterm elections are voters’ next chance to elect more representatives and senators willing to use the power of the purse and rein in Hegseth’s Pentagon, end the war on Iran, and stop underwriting the killing in Palestine.
Restraint never comes from inside the war machine. A quarter-century ago, Barbara Lee spoke up, the lone voice in Congress against imperial violence. This November, millions more voices must be heard at the ballot box.
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