On September 20, 2001, President George W. Bush spoke to a joint session of Congress and the country, nine days after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. He named Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, demanded that the Taliban hand over the group's leaders, close the training camps and release the foreigners held in Afghanistan, and said that if they did not, they would share the fate of the terrorists they harboured.
The speech was written in less than a week, mostly by Michael Gerson. It went through several drafts. Earlier versions had been more about domestic recovery. What made it land was a line that was not in the text as delivered: Bush had been advised that the Taliban could be separated from al-Qaeda. He rejected that. The sentence that carried most weight was the one about the demand being not open to negotiation or discussion.
It also did something the administration had been resisting, which was to distinguish Islam from the attackers. Bush said the terrorists were traitors to their own faith, trying to hijack Islam itself, and he quoted the Quran. That passage was in there partly because of the backlash: in the days after the attacks there had been about 300 incidents against Arab Americans and Muslims, including the shooting of a Sikh in Arizona two days after.
The machinery followed fast. The Authorization for Use of Military Force was passed on September 14 and signed on September 18, and it authorised force against those responsible for the attacks and those who harboured them. It has never been repealed and has been used to justify military action in at least 20 countries. The Patriot Act was passed on October 26. American and British forces began bombing Afghanistan on October 7, and Kabul fell on November 13.
What came out of it has been the subject of two decades of argument. The Afghanistan war ran almost 20 years and ended in August 2021 with the Taliban back in power. The Bush administration's case for invading Iraq in 2003 rested partly on claims about al-Qaeda links that were not true. The phrase war on terror has been criticised as a category mistake and as an open-ended grant of executive power, and the Obama administration stopped using it in 2009 while keeping most of the policies.