Osama Bin Laden

[LittleFuzzy]

Okay, so you were just a teenager then. But your university education and considerate thought since then should tell you how utterly futile Bush's goals were. There is no way to combat international terrorism by deploying military troops. Guns, bullets, and tanks can kill Bin Laden or destroy people pledging alliance to Al Qaeda, or Taliban, or any other extremist group, but military force can't destroy an ideology.

But combat and destroy are two different things. You certainly can combat international terrorism militarily. Terrorism is not an ideology, it's a behavior and a process, a tactical and operational tool to achieve a set of ends *which may or may not be ideological* and it is entirely apropos to use military force to disrupt or spoil such activity. Many countries use military or paramilitary forces to counter or respond to large-scale terrorism campaigns. It is somewhat less common in the 1st world which heavily utilize police in an environment predicated on the rule of law, but isn't really all that rare even there. Such campaigns involving the US prior to 9/11 always involved military deployments overseas so you may not consider them relevant analogs, but the French used military conscripts to combat the insurgency and terrorism in Algeria when it was a colony, Britain made use of the SAS in Northern Ireland and I know they participated in a counter-terrorism operation in Gibraltar.