The Lore and the Loss: How We Forfeited the War on Terror

​By Christopher M. Peeks January 31, 2026

​The lore of the American fighting force began before the birth of the Republic. From the icy waters of the Delaware to the malaria-filled swamps of South Carolina, the Revolution forged the indomitable tenacity of our regiments.

​Through the years, this legend of the combative will grew. From fighting positions behind cotton bales in the city of New Orleans—a battle that would propel Old Hickory to the presidency—to overwhelming a better-trained Mexican Army, the union began to have a sense of invincibility. (This was the former—the land's forgotten first clash, where U.S. schoolchildren are falsely taught they defeated the British a second time, when in reality American sovereignty almost ceased to exist).

​After a brutal four-year conflict between the states, this idea only grew. After besting a European power in the 1898 Spanish-American hostilities and crushing Imperial Germany in the First World War, the international community understood our might. Winning a two-front struggle that devastated multiple landmasses and killed hundreds of millions, the U.S. Armed Forces stood as the unrivaled masters of the battlefield.

​Although a second confrontation that we no longer remember ended in an armistice in the Koreas in 1953, our supremacy still remained. The myth that no one homeland could bear the brunt of the United States military, shattered in the jungles of Vietnam, rebounded after subduing the global fourth-largest army in the deserts of Kuwait in 100 hours during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

​When Islamic extremists took down the Twin Towers with airplanes on September 11th, 2001, an enraged nation watched as President Bush stood atop a pile of rubble and famously declared that the people who committed this atrocity would soon "hear from the American people." Our resolve, unbreakable, thirsted for blood to avenge the 3,000 deaths inflicted by Al-Qaeda, and so the War on Terror began.

​What transpired over the next two decades turned into the largest military debacle in recorded history. No—not Napoleon, Caesar, or Alexander the Great experienced a failure as profound as we did.

​Bush—sidetracked for reasons known only to him and his inner circle, but left for historians to ponder—took the United States military from its main objective and detoured into Iraq, drawing our units and its ally Britain into a quagmire costing a fortune in treasure and blood for both sides, birthing new insurgent groups and destabilizing the region for the next century.

​With every priority shifted toward Iraqi Freedom—a territory not under occupation until the U.S. invasion—and diverting from the original mission of Operation Enduring Freedom, retribution escaped the aggressors. Yes, Al-Qaeda was dismantled and bin Laden got a more humane death than he merited, but does that equate to victory? Absolutely not.

​As a vet who served in Afghanistan, watching the Taliban take control as the remnants of our personnel fled Kandahar in 2021, I'm sickened by what I witnessed. Was it all for naught? Did the victims of 9/11 receive the accountability they deserved? No. Our surrender in the War on Terror, although not at the cost of Vietnam, is by far a more total collapse, and people do not even realize the depth of it. Vietnam, unlike Islamic extremism, never posed a threat to the United States.

​With fanaticism alive and well, we are more exposed than we were at any juncture before 9/11, and it is only a matter of time before we are struck again. The problem is we did not handle this campaign the way we did on the global stage in the 1940s. Our leaders should have inflicted the carnage throughout the Middle East like the damage incurred by the Germans and Japanese. As long as we continue to wage surgical wars where no one dies, we will continue to falter. In the coming days, we will forfeit another engagement against zealots; only this will come at a higher price to American civilians because they have not stopped their planning and we have grown complacent in a false sense of security.

​The day we were told to never forget is a distant memory, and in its place lies a deep scar, forever visible in the annals of history.

​ABOUT THE AUTHOR

​Christopher M. Peeks is an Afghanistan war veteran and a dedicated political commentator. He is the creator and lead contributor for The Alabama Political Contributor, where he provides deep-dive analysis on foreign policy, national security, and American veteran affairs. Through his website and YouTube channel, Christopher leverages his firsthand military experience to challenge modern political narratives and advocate for strategic accountability.

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