When President Barack …show more content…
George W. Bush decided to find the people responsible for the attacks, but in the process, he not only sent troops to Afghanistan to look for the leader of Al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, but he also sent troops to Iraq to finish what Bush’s father never finished back in the Gulf War which was to catch Saddam Hussein. Bush achieved that but there were still American troops there even after the capture of Hussein. When Obama was elected president, one of his goals was to remove troops out Iraq and to also end the war on terror. The first troops to withdraw were the ones in Iraq, when he was was first elected in 2009, he wanted 30,000 to 50,000 troops withdrawn from Iraq by 2010 (“Withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq”). By 2011 though, all troops were withdrawn from a war that was extremely unpopular. The war on terror was still a factor that concerned American citizens, as a result when Obama became president, he sent 30,000 troops to fight in the war in Afghanistan. In May of 2011, Osama bin Laden was killed in his compound in Pakistan. After the killing, bin Laden was thrown into the Arabian Sea within 24 hours (“Death of Osama bin Laden Fast Facts”). President Obama called it “the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s effort to defeat al Qaeda. Of course after the murder of bin Laden, he withdrew troops from Afghanistan. It did of course make that group significantly weaker, but three years later, a new group started to rise, ISIS. Late in Obama’s presidency, ISIS became a powerful extremist group in the Middle East through videotaped executions and even Terrorist Attacks like the Paris, Nice, and Brussels Attacks. The United States and other countries have targeted ISIS with 8,216 airstrikes since November 16, 2015 according to the Pentagon (Fantz). The responsibility of what to do with ISIS should be up to the next president’s job due to the fact that Obama’s