Bush's Address to Congress After 9/11

Nine days after the September 11 attacks killed nearly three thousand people, George W. Bush went before a joint session of Congress. He had spoken to the country from the Oval Office on the night of the attacks and from the rubble at Ground Zero three days later, bullhorn in hand. This address was meant to explain who had done it, what the country would do, and what it would ask of its people.

He named al Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin Laden, and described them as heirs of the murderous ideologies of the twentieth century. He then delivered an ultimatum to the Taliban government of Afghanistan, which sheltered them. It must hand over the leaders of al Qaeda, close the training camps, and give the United States full access, and these demands were not open to negotiation or discussion. "Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make," he said. "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists."

Bush took care to separate the enemy from the faith it claimed. The terrorists, he said, were traitors to their own faith, trying in effect to hijack Islam itself, and the enemy of America was not its many Muslim friends. He announced a new cabinet-level Office of Homeland Security under Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge and introduced Lisa Beamer, whose husband Todd had died fighting the hijackers of Flight 93.

His approval rating stood near ninety percent. American air strikes on Afghanistan began on October 7, and the doctrine laid out that night — that the United States would make no distinction between terrorists and the states that harbored them — became the framework for two decades of war. The address is remembered both for the unity of its moment and for the open-ended commitments it announced.