A WAR ON TERROR

On September 11th, 2001, militants of the Islamic extremist group al-Qaeda hijacked four planes. Two of them crashed on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, causing their collapse, a third one hit the Pentagon near Washington, and the last one crashed in a field, but it was supposed to crash in Washington. It has been the worst attack the United States of America has ever seen, the whole world was shocked. The country got support from the international community. They decided to hit back, but quickly it became a war on terror. We are going to explain this war led by the United States after the attacks on September 2001. The first document we're going to use is the president Obama's speech told at the White House in Washington on May 2, 2011, ten years after the terrorist attacks, and the second one is an artwork called « The Hydra of Terrorism » drawn by Miel, a Singaporrean cartoonist, in 2005.

As a response to the 9/11 attacks, themselves considered as an answer to the presence of the USA in the Middle East, the USA led a coalition to attack the Taliban regime hosting al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. President G.W. Bush launched the operation Enduring Freedom in october 2001, and listed what he called the « rogue states » : the states he suspected to host or support terrorists, including Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan. In 2003, the USA engaged a new war in Iraq, on the suspicion that Iraq held weapons of massive destruction and that it supported al-Qaeda, but in reality no evidences were found. The UN did not approve this invasion, but the government adopted a unilateralist strategy, sending troups in Iraq without their permission. The conflict became more and more violent, the number of deaths is estimated about half a million. A lot of soldiers died but civilians were also killed, as Obama says in the first document. Torture occured and dishonoured the USA. Terror was present in the invaded people but also in western countries who feared a retaliation from the organisation led by Bin Laden. This war have been a failure on all levels : first of all because it didn't stop islamist terrorism but also because it destroyed the image of th USA around the world.

Since 2008, President Obama's fereing policy has been lessing the US involvment in the Middle East. He came back to a multilateralist strategy, favors the soft power, and organized the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq in 2011. During his speech on May 2, 2011, the President of the USA announces that the government launched a targeted operation in Pakistan, aiming to stop this war. This time, no american soldiers were harmed, and Obama says in the first document that they tried to avoid civilian casualities, to not reproduce Bush's error. He affirms that they finally killed Osama Bin Laden, the founder and leader of al-Qaeda, and he recalls that this enemy was only a murderer and not a representant of the Muslim community.

Nowadays, terrorism is still a thing. Attacks are more and more frenquent. In Miel's cartoon entitled « The Hydra of Terrorism », we can see a dead, decapitated snake labeled « terrorism », with a group a vipers escaping from his headless body. The enemy is represented as a snake metaphor : even if the leader has been killed, his babies are still here and they're gonna be harmless. In fact, even is the US forces killed Bin Laden in 2011, islamist terrorism is still revelant. His death, celebrated as a victory by Obama, did'nt stop the terrorist organisation al-Qaeda that is still active. Leaders are ready to die, and the group survives when one of its leaders dies. Actually, Charli Hebdo's attack in 2015 in France was claimed by one of the branches of al-Qaeda.

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