The terrorists were funded by Saudi Arabia. 19 of the terrorists were Saudi.
Petty secular dictators like Saddam (who was also a foil for Iran), Assad, Qaddafi, and others crushed fanatics for the most part.
Saudi Arabia wasn’t touched because they owned the Bushes.
Also, going in 200,000 men short, not being able to secure borders, having no law and order, all this did was have our men killed by ex Iraqi soldiers with explosives sent courtesy of Iran.
It was a complete and utter failure.
Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan.
And we let warlords take over the battle against the latter, which should have been the focus.
Michael Yon, by far the most acknoleged source on Iraq, and one of the few journalists to stay in the Anbar province, wrote a book on our success.
The "200,000 men shiort" was a Dem myth from the get go. Bush did a good job until Dem traitors completely undercut morale and the overall effort, snatching defeat from victory. But they cannot erase the reality of the fact that when we had a free hand we so thoroughly eradicated al-Qaeda that in seven years they couldn't stage a single minor attack in America and were reduced to begging for women and children volunteers.
The terrorists obtained much of their funding from drug sales- bin Laden, after all, did run a marijuana farm in Sudan. He also procured funding from honey sales of all things. And the UN aide to NGOs. And from a large network of "charities"... in addition to robbing the Saudi pension fund. might also point out it was the Saudis not the US government that went after one of the worst terror charities as a result of their findings in the pension fraud case. The charity they shut down was headquartered in the US. It took years for the US to shut down linked ones...perhaps because we had Comey's pal Fitzgerald on the terror charity cases in Chicago, and it was possibly slowed down due to those charities' connections to the Palestinian Hamas movement. Same Hamas movement that is supported by the US democratic party politicians like Ellison.
19 of the terrorists were Saudi.
Not true. 14 were Saudi, all of them the "muscle." The muscle bin Laden bragged in his post 9/11 video that he kept them in the dark about it being a suicide mission until the end. The pilots were not Saudis. In fact, the guy who led the hijackers, Atta, was an Egyptian Muslim brotherhood member, and the Egyptian Muslim brotherhood has tighter ties to Iran than the Saudis... as does al Qaeda's current head, the Egyptian Zawahiri, who was the brains to bin Laden's money in AQ. Zawahiri has ties through marriage to a least one Iranian mullah. The planner of the mission, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was also not a Saudi. And KSM was of the Baluchi tribe, and that would trace back to Iran and Pakistan's Baluchistan regions.
Petty secular dictators like Saddam
The same "secular" Saddam who built the world's largest mosque - the one with the funny minarets- and penned a Quran in his own blood? The one who gave stirring jihadi speeches published on iraq's domain in the years praising jihadists leading up to 9/11 at to appeal to jihadists at the behest of his Deodbandi Muslim general al Dhouri, who later was a cofounder of AQI and then ISIS with Zarqawi and whose men led the blitz back into Iraq to capture his base of Mosul after US withdrawal? The one whose son, through the state controlled newspaper, praised bin Laden and threatened to attack NY City? Saddam was a Baath socialist, socialists are worse than jihadis as socialists have no inhibitions of any kind, they will literally work with anyone.
(who was also a foil for Iran),
Well, sort of... at least during the dispute over the waterway between the two countries back in the 80s that turned into the Iran-Iraq war... a war the US very reasonably used to weaken BOTH rogue countries. This is the same Saddam who sent his air force to Iran in the Gulf War to protect it from allied bombs.
Assad, Qaddafi, and others crushed fanatics for the most part.
Actually Assad of Syria, along with Iran, fully supported Imad Mugniyeh head of Hezbollah and arguably a much more cunning terrorist than bin Laden. When Imad Mugniyeh finally received his dirt nap in Feb 2008, he had not long before just happened to have left a meeting with Syrian generals in Damascus and Iranian Quds Force commander Soleimani who at the time had been killing US soldiers in Iraq. Reports are he'd also just attended a celebration at the Iranian embassy on the anniversary of the Iranian revolution that installed the Mullahs. Isn't that interesting?
To make it more interesting it was Hezbollah which helped al Qaeda with the design for the shaped explosives to be used on the USS The Sullivans in Yemen... the failure of that plot didn't stave off the successful follow-up used against the USS Cole in Yemen some months later. Yemen is the same country Iran more recently jumped into to overthrow its government using Shiite rebels when Obama was asleep at the switch.
As for Qadaffi, Libya was a training ground for international terrorism for years - one can keep a lid on them at home if you give them plenty of work abroad, and Qadaffi's interest wasn't fighting terrorism so much as in keeping them from attacking him. So long as they were no threat to him he was quite accommodating, hosting everything from the Irish Repubican Army to the PFLP to ANO, etc. His preference was definitely for marxist terrorists over jihadists but terrorists they were. The choice location for those training camps was ... wait for it... Benghazi. Qadaffi not too long before his demise was involved in hiring a terrorist to assassinate a Saudi royal.... The terrorist who was caught was Alamoudi... and Alamoudi was an al Qaeda fundraiser ... same guy who was also a donor or bundler for Hillary Clinton.
Saudi Arabia wasn’t touched because they owned the Bushes.
They weren't touched because they didn't do it and would have no motive to do it in any case. In fact, AQ was supported largely by an Saudi opposition group known as al Mujahiroun which operated out of London's Finsbury Park Mosque. A group of Saudi exiles which was cozy with any enemy of the King... including Iraq. If they had done it, for darn sure none of the hijackers used would have been Saudis. Instead, ask yourself which notorious terrorist countries did NOT have any obvious terrorists among the hijackers and you might discover the actual culprits.
Also, going in 200,000 men short, not being able to secure borders, having no law and order, all this did was have our men killed by ex Iraqi soldiers with explosives sent courtesy of Iran. It was a complete and utter failure. I'll leave this since the other freeper answered this one. Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan. And we let warlords take over the battle against the latter, which should have been the focus.