Review: ‘All the Presidents’ Wars: Twenty-Five Years of America’s War on Terror’ by Peter Bergen

The era of 9/11 began with one misbegotten U.S. war of choice in the Middle East, in Iraq. We are marking its 25th anniversary with another misbegotten U.S. war of choice in the Middle East, in Iran. In between, we’re not quite sure what we have learned, other than Americans never seem to get regime change right, whether we send in troops or not. And Washington still finds itself mired in a region that successive presidents have said they want to distance themselves from.

The Middle East quagmire only seems to grow deeper, the march of U.S. folly more self-destructive. After the expenditure of trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of American and Iraqi lives and limbs, a U.S. Army study concluded that “the only victor” to come out of the 2003 Iraq war appeared to be “an emboldened and expansionist Iran.”

Now, in 2026, President Donald Trump’s latest war may have given Iran new advantages, at least for the moment. Though it has hit Tehran hard, the war has further weakened the U.S. role in the region while, once again, seriously draining its military firepower and piling on ever more debt. The prolonged conflict may also be reigniting the fading embers of al Qaeda.

Beyond that, the downstream effects of 9/11 in both political and geopolitical terms are still so far-reaching that scholars will likely be debating them for a long time.

How did a tiny, ragtag group of jihadists manage to provoke the world’s only superpower into a series of so-called forever wars—the post-9/11 global war on terror constitutes by far the longest war in U.S. history—that drained its power and prestige? What were the opportunity costs of this vast expenditure of blood and treasure over a quarter century—especially in terms of empowering China and, perhaps, encouraging Russia in its own bloody adventurism? As the military writer Elliot Ackerman has noted, “[W]hile Washington was repurposing the U.S. military to engage in massive counterinsurgency campaigns and precision counterterrorism operations, Beijing was busy building a military to fight and defeat a peer-level competitor.” Washington, suddenly alerted, is still trying to catch up to that strategic challenge after what one U.S. general described as the “era of the Great Distraction” following 9/11.

Some analysts have argued that the botched response to 9/11 also helped to upend domestic U.S. politics. Did the fumblings of the preceding Republican president, George W. Bush—especially his disastrous invasion of Iraq—so discredit the traditional party agenda that it opened the way to a reckless demagogue, Trump, who has since turned the Grand Old Party into his chew toy?

“Conservatism was never the same after the first improvised explosive device detonated in Baghdad,” Matthew Continetti wrote in his 2022 book, The Right: The Hundred-Year War for American Conservatism.

Then there’s the question of whether Americans really knew who they were fighting—if they ever mastered the “metrics” of the so-called war on terror, as Donald Rumsfeld, Bush’s hapless defense secretary, once put it.

Many strategic assessments conclude that, for all its costs, at least the war on terror prevented another large-scale attack on the U.S. homeland. But critical questions remain about how serious a threat that really was, and whether U.S. strategists mistook a marginal enemy—one that might have been quickly eliminated after 9/11—for an existential one.

Bergen, who famously produced the 1997 CNN interview in which Osama bin Laden declared war on the United States, writes that he is attempting a full history of what he says “is as much a consequential epoch in American life as the Cold War was” on some levels.

All the Presidents’ Wars: Twenty-Five Years of America’s War on Terror, Peter Bergen, W.W. Norton, 432 pp., $32.99, September 2026

He gets most of that history right. It’s all here in a tight 400 pages, the long, ugly, almost farcical saga we’ve become familiar with: the missed opportunity to kill or capture Osama bin Laden and destroy al Qaeda quickly at Tora Bora, perhaps ending the war on terror in mere months; the fraudulently justified diversion into Iraq; and how that mistake in turn facilitated the Taliban resurgence in Afghanistan.

Bergen recounts, in great detail, how the unnecessary invasion of Iraq—and the brutal U.S. occupation that ensued in the heart of the Arab world—dramatically inflated the number of jihadis Washington had to fight. This turned what should have been a narrowly targeted mission against “core” al Qaeda into the endless global war on terror—no doubt one of the flabbiest strategic concepts ever used to justify a major war.

That last mistake was, in some ways, the most consequential. If the U.S. presidency once produced a Great Emancipator (Abraham Lincoln), history should remember George W. Bush as the Great Conflater. His administration, populated by cold warriors who never understood the transnational nature of al Qaeda-type terrorism, was constantly lumping together Islamists who generally had little or nothing to do with each other. The Bushies turned a war against a single, small group of terrorists into a war against supposed “state sponsors” of terror who, in the end, drew more U.S. resources and attention than the terrorists themselves. (We’ve since learned that al Qaeda couldn’t even agree among themselves if it was wise to attack the U.S. homeland.)

This road to disaster began, Bergen writes, with the administration’s conflation of the Taliban with al Qaeda “even though the Taliban had no record of international terrorism.”

Tragically, misunderstanding the Taliban—who were always uneasy about hosting al Qaeda—kept the United States from negotiating a stability deal with the insurgent group before it was too late. (By the time the Obama administration began seriously considering this approach more than a decade after 9/11, the Taliban had already recaptured large parts of Afghanistan and didn’t take negotiations seriously.)

That was only the start of a tragicomedy of errors. Month by month, year by year, the Bush administration broadened the war on terror to include ever more peoples and countries—especially Saddam Hussein’s Iraq—relying on thinner and thinner evidence to do so. And what began as a hunt for a relatively contained group of self-declared murderers became a feckless global dragnet of tens of thousands of often innocent Arab and Muslim victims.

Not only did Bush let bin Laden escape for another 10 years (he was finally killed during Barack Obama’s presidency in 2011), but by invading a major Muslim nation in the Middle East, Bush also managed to vindicate bin Laden’s warnings that the real threat was the “crusaders” of the “far enemy,” his term for the United States. Up until 9/11, many al Qaeda followers had argued that they should continue their traditional strategy of targeting the “near enemy,” the autocratic regimes of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and other Arab nations. By occupying Iraq, the United States displaced these regimes as the main target for radical Islamists.

Thousands of Taliban supporters rally in the town of Quetta, Pakistan, near the Afghanistan border, on Oct. 1, 2001.Paula Bronstein/Getty Images

Thus Bush inadvertently turned bin Laden into a revered prophet of jihad, even after his death.

Bergen notes that Bush’s own National Intelligence Estimate from 2006 “concluded that the ‘Iraq conflict has become the “cause célèbre” for jihadists’” and was “shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives.”

As Bush made the trumped-up case for his Iraq invasion, he declared in September 2002, in a typically muddled piece of rhetoric, that “you can’t distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror.”

The truth was quite the contrary: Not only could one distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam, it was imperative that any responsible U.S. leader do so, and that he identify the enemy with precision of analysis as much as he targeted him with precision weaponry. Wars are won or lost on such issues of imprecision. Washington could not afford to let its soldiers see all Arab men as potential jihadis, all military-age male Iraqis as potential insurgents, and all post-9/11 enemies as “unlawful combatants” who did not even deserve the protection of the Geneva Conventions.

Yet that’s exactly what happened—and it led directly to Abu Ghraib, Camp Bucca, and the nightmarish legal limbo that is Guantánamo today, where even the conviction of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is in doubt because of the torture used on him. As the late James Dobbins, the first U.S. envoy to post-Taliban Afghanistan and later the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, put it to me on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 five years ago, the current era should be known as “the lost generation in American foreign policy.” That was because every president since Bush, he said, has been forced to spend most of his time trying to clean up Bush’s post-9/11 mess.

But Obama, Trump, and Joe Biden didn’t do much better, Bergen writes.

Obama improved the tactics against terror somewhat. But even as he denounced Bush’s “dumb war” in Iraq, Obama failed to plan for the “day after” when launching the ouster of Muammar al-Qaddafi in Libya. He also fumbled his Afghanistan surge, dooming it to failure by publicly committing to a withdrawal deadline. Then Biden blatantly lied about the withdrawal, denying that he’d received warnings from his military advisors (he had, multiple times) that the Taliban would swiftly reconquer Afghanistan if he removed the last 2,500 troops from the country.

As for Trump, his justification for launching a new war with Iran in February was as flimsy as Bush’s had been for Iraq, writes Bergen, since “there was no evidence that the Iranian regime posed any pressing threat to the United States.”

Pakistanis, along with international and local media, gather outside Osama bin Laden’s compound, where he was killed during a raid by U.S. special forces a day prior, seen in Abottabad, Pakistan, on May 3, 2011. Getty Images

Instead, Bergen concludes that at least “the central aim of the war on terror was achieved: there were no large-scale lethal attacks in the United States carried out by foreign terrorist groups in the quarter century after 9/11.”

That may be true. But what kind of achievement was this really, especially given the enormous costs? A great deal of evidence has been amassed suggesting that al Qaeda had one very lucky day on 9/11. This was in addition to two previous minor successes, when the terrorist group bombed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, killing 224 people (including 12 Americans but mostly locals); and in 2000, when al Qaeda rammed the USS Cole with a small boat filled with explosives, killing 17 U.S. Navy personnel.

Al Qaeda, in other words, had only one A-team, and only enough resources for one big roll of the dice. That was the 9/11 attacks, which took years to plan. As Nelly Lahoud, an al Qaeda expert at the U.S. Army War College, wrote in her 2022 book, The Bin Laden Papers: How the Abbottabad Raid Revealed the Truth About al-Qaeda, Its Leader and His Family, bin Laden’s “post-9/11 goals did not go beyond empty threats, unexecuted plans, and more than a little wishful thinking.”

As a strategist, bin Laden “was sophomoric at best,” Lahoud told me in a recent interview. The thousands of documents left behind in bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound, which Lahoud pored over, “make it clear that bin Laden and his associates did not have a plan in place for what followed 9/11. By their own account, they were in ‘disarray’ and ‘afflicted.’ They never recovered.”

Mary McHugh mourns her slain fiancé, Sgt. James Regan, at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, United States, on May 27, 2007.John Moore/Getty Images

That is why Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni—the former Centcom commander who also served as a Bush envoy to the Middle East—has called the expansion of the war on terror beyond Afghanistan perhaps the worst strategic mistake ever made by a U.S. president. Bush mistook a singular if horribly tragic event, 9/11, for an existential threat, Zinni told me. And he mistook a nonstate actor that was in fact fairly small and weak for a huge state-sponsored terrorist menace.

“This was not an existential threat,” Zinni said. “It was a band of maybe a thousand radicals. Yet we created an investment in this that was on a level of what we do for existential threats. … But this was not communism or fascism.”

Indeed, the post-9/11 period was not even remotely comparable to the Cold War. Bergen argues that there was a persistent threat from al Qaeda after 9/11—for example the July 7, 2005, London bombings that killed 52 commuters—and he suggests that U.S. success can be measured by Washington’s dramatic improvement of its tactics against jihadists in the field, especially the Islamic State.

“Politicians across the political spectrum often railed against the ‘forever wars,’ yet the war against ISIS ended the group’s territorial caliphate” with only a small force of 5,000 U.S. soldiers, compared to 150,000 a decade earlier, Bergen writes. He adds that U.S. officials also grew much more effective at detecting terrorist plots.

All true. These were genuine tactical successes. But it’s hardly much of an achievement if Washington’s failed policies created most of the new jihadists the U.S. military was fighting, including those in the Islamic State—or if it was Washington’s errant strategy (in abandoning Afghanistan prematurely) that enabled those jihadists to operate in London and elsewhere in the first place.

U.S. Army soldiers offload from a helicopter during a combat mission in Eastern Afghanistan on March 5, 2002. Keith D. McGrew/US Army via Getty Images

People watch as a U.S. Marine walks by, seen in the Anbar province near Fallujah, Iraq, on May 9, 2007.Joe Raedle/Getty Images

In his book, Bergen does capture some of this absurdity. He notes that Bush—in another nonsensical bit of rhetoric—once declared: “If we were not fighting these al-Qaeda terrorists in Iraq most would be trying to kill Americans and other civilians elsewhere.” This assertion, he writes, “was based on the faulty premise that the world contained a finite number of jihadist terrorists. … In fact, the pool of potential terrorists expanded quite dramatically because of the Iraq War,” leading to the rise of the Islamic State and new affiliated groups.

Unfortunately, however, Bergen then returns to one of the familiar conclusions we’ve heard from him in previous work: that overall success should be measured by the fact that bin Laden failed in his main goal of pushing the U.S. out of the Middle East.

Bergen is right to say that this was the original aim of al Qaeda laid down in its 1996 declaration of jihad. And he is right that bin Laden badly miscalculated what the U.S. response to an attack on its own soil might be. The terror chieftain saw the United States as a “paper tiger” because it withdrew from Lebanon in 1983 after a Hezbollah attack in Beirut killed 241 U.S. service personnel, and from Somalia in 1993 following the Black Hawk Down attack that killed 18 soldiers. But bin Laden failed to understand that Americans would respond to an attack on New York and Washington very differently.

Yet bin Laden wasn’t a complete fool. He also sought to use the 9/11 attack to “destroy the myth of American invincibility,” Lahoud says. In that he calculated quite well. As bin Laden watched Washington fumble its response, one of his evolving goals was to pursue a policy of “bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy”—as he said in a 2004 video aired by Al Jazeera—through a long and draining conflict, just as his mujahadeen fighters did to the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. He added that he found it “easy for us to provoke and bait this administration.”

If the Iraq war was a titanic mistake from the U.S. point of view, it was “a lifeline for al Qaeda and other jihadi groups, which were able to position themselves as the defenders of the Sunnis,” Lahoud later wrote. And bin Laden achieved this success by fooling the Americans into thinking he was much more threatening—much bigger and better-resourced—than he really was.

Bush speaks to volunteers and firefighters as he surveys the damage at the site of the World Trade Center in New York City on Sept. 14, 2001. Paul J. Richards/AFP via Getty Images

Speaking through a megaphone at Ground Zero in New York two days after the attacks, when someone shouted, “I can’t hear you,” Bush responded spontaneously, “I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.” Bush followed that up by authorizing a devastatingly swift U.S. campaign that toppled the Taliban in eight weeks.

That sent bin Laden and his lieutenants scurrying to their mountain hideout at Tora Bora, where the al Qaeda chief apologized to his followers for getting caught, as Gary Berntsen, the CIA officer in charge of the U.S. operation, recorded in his 2005 book, Jawbreaker.

The kill-or-capture operation was going quite well. Vengeance for the deaths of nearly 3,000 people on U.S. soil was nigh. Then, in one of the most bizarre, inexplicable strategic diversions ever, the senior Bush team let “the people” who’d knocked down the buildings go. The Bushies ignored pleas from CIA officers and commanders such as Marine Gen. James Mattis to surround bin Laden and his lieutenants. “We could have had the entire al Qaeda command structure had we done that,” Berntsen told me in a 2016 interview. “The war could have been over pretty quickly.”

Instead, Bin Laden and his group escaped. The Bush administration then went after someone who had nothing to do with knocking down those buildings, Saddam Hussein. Bush swiftly diverted to Iraq the Special Forces troops, Predator drones, and other resources involved in the hunt for bin Laden.

The reasons for the turn to Iraq remain murky. All we really know for sure is that Bush never once held a cabinet meeting to ask whether it was a good idea. The best explanation may be hubris: Rumsfeld and other administration hawks (like his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz) were eager to reassert U.S. power. They didn’t consider Afghanistan to be much of a real war; in their view, bin Laden was a secondary target next to Saddam. “There’s a feeling we’ve got to do something that counts—and bombing some caves is not something that counts,” as Newt Gingrich, then a member of Rumsfeld’s Defense Policy Board, put it to me in late 2001.

All they accomplished was to expose the vulnerabilities of U.S. power, an outcome that will rank Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and company among the biggest bunglers ever to hold high U.S. office.

Twenty-five years later, what stands out is the missed opportunity posed by that horrible day. The silver lining of 9/11 was a wave of international sympathy for the lone superpower. (“We are all Americans,” France’s Le Monde newspaper memorably proclaimed on its front page; even U.S. adversaries like Iran gave condolences.) Washington also enjoyed almost unlimited support around the world in pursuit of its mission to hunt the murderers down.

A mourner holds a small American flag during a memorial service for 9/11 victims, seen in London on Sept. 14, 2001. Sion Touhig/Getty Images

This was no “clash of civilizations,” nothing like it. It was a straightforward task: Wipe out a vicious—and really fairly minor—insurgency against our civilization and the U.S.-led postwar world order. This sort of terrorism provided, as the Yale scholar Charles Hill wrote at the time, a “natural bonding agent” for melding “the international system of states” ever closer. Consider the fact that, even as Washington found little support for its incursion into Iraq, it gathered more than 40 countries together to help try to stabilize Afghanistan as part of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force.

Oddly, pop psychology may explain the whole post-9/11 strategic catastrophe better than anything else. Bush’s father, President George H.W. Bush, had once deftly used the United Nations and the careful invocation of international law to build a coalition against Saddam in the Gulf War. For his son, 9/11 was an opportunity to build on that legacy. But George W. Bush, insecure and eager to do his father one better, openly defied advice from his father’s close aide, Brent Scowcroft, not to invade Iraq.

Bush squandered that opportunity to a mind-boggling degree. Too many Republicans and Democrats (as well as many media pundits) endorsed his actions. No president has recovered since. Nor has the nation.