War on terror

The war on terror, officially the Global War on Terrorism, is a global military campaign begun by the United States after the September 11 attacks of 2001. It is better understood as a long conflict that spans several separate wars than as a single war, and some scholars have argued that it replaced the Cold War as the organizing struggle of world politics. Its main targets were militant Islamist movements such as al-Qaeda and the Taliban, and the campaign also reached the Ba'athist government of Iraq, which was overthrown in an invasion in 2003, and the insurgency that followed. The Islamic State later became a major adversary after its expansion in 2014. The first theater was Afghanistan and Pakistan. The phrase itself is a metaphor that stretches the usual meaning of war and was criticized early, including by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Bush administration moved toward more careful terms. The Costs of War Project estimates that the post-2001 wars displaced 38 million people and caused more than 4.5 million direct and indirect deaths. The campaign became deeply unpopular by the late 2000s over its morality, casualties and effects on civil liberties.