Nine days after the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks, President Bush laid out a roadmap for a new kind of war.

Our response involves far more than instant retaliation and isolated strikes.

Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen.

The enemy was not a nation state, but rather an armed group. And more than that, it was an idea.

Our war on terror begins with Al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group

of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated. And as the decades have gone by, that

open-endedness has become a defining feature of the war on terror.

Last month, I ordered our military to take targeted action against ISIL to stop its advances.

More than a decade after 9-11, President Obama used some of the same legal reasoning

and the same congressional authorization to justify attacks on the Islamic State or ISIL,

a sworn enemy of al-Qaeda,

and also a drone strike that targeted and killed an American citizen.

In 2020, in President Trump's first term, it was yet another enemy, Iran.

Last night of my direction, the United States military successfully executed a flawless, strike that killed the number one terrorist anywhere in the world, Qasem Soleimani.

Trump, too, cited Bush-era legal authority.

Today, nearly a quarter century after the September 11th attacks,

the Trump administration is using the language of terrorism to target a new enemy,

Latin American drug cartels.

The president has designated these as terrorist organizations, which is what they are.

When you flood American streets with drugs, you are terrorizing America, and that's going to end.

That is Secretary of State Marco Rubio in September after the first of several U.S.

military strikes on boats in the Caribbean that the administration says we're trafficking

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