It depends on where you look.

Anyone over 40 remembers the Global War on Terror. As announced by President George W. Bush, it was a multipronged effort on five continents to eradicate the networks that had inspired and supported the attacks of September 11, 2001, along with the jihadi Muslim extremist movement that had murdered not only nearly 3,000 people that day but thousands more around the world, including in Europe and Israel, over five decades.

By one (admittedly biased) estimate, calculated 20 years after the attacks, the war on terror had cost $8 trillion, including hundreds of billions spent to bring about regime change in Iraq and Afghanistan, where over 7,000 American military personnel lost their lives and 52,143 were maimed and injured.

The war on terror also led to a radical restructuring of government under the Patriot Act, which enabled unprecedented cooperation among federal intelligence agencies and expanded federal powers of electronic surveillance to uncover terrorist networks and their supporters. It gave the Treasury Department a new global reach to find and shut down the financial networks that paid for terror.

Here we are, 25 years later, though, and some would argue that, far from having eliminated support for Islamist terrorism, we see its sympathizers embedded in our politics.

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