The war against terrorism used to include a battle against poverty. The "war on terror" seems to have dumped that creditable cause.
When leaders of the institutions that guide global economic development set 2015 as a target date for reducing by half the number of people who live in extreme poverty, they did not anticipate 11 September 2001. The subsequent war on terrorism has altered the character of the campaign against poverty more dramatically than might appear at first sight, however. After 9/11, military men certainly did become more prominent in the project of protecting globalisation against its enemies, but reducing poverty had previously gained support in rich countries as a means to combat terrorism. Major new funding for a global campaign against poverty now seems hostage to military campaigns to pacify a world of insecurities aggravated by globalisation.
In the US, particularly, the stage was set for current military campaigns well before 9/11. Military security already topped the global agenda in the 1990s, when real US military expenditure remained as high as it was in the 1960s at the height of the global war on communism. In the 1990s, as the world's rich became rapidly richer and extreme poverty increased along with global inequality, American anxieties about the instability attending globalisation also increased. Robert D Kaplan detailed this anxiety in his influential 1994 essay in the Atlantic Monthly, entitled "The Coming Anarchy: How Scarcity, Crime, Overpopulation, Tribalism, and Disease Are Rapidly Destroying the Social Fabric of Our Planet". Bill Clinton's presidency saw numerous attacks on US military installations that foreshadowed the attack on the Pentagon, and car bombers had attacked the Twin Towers once before 9/11.
American popular anxiety about foreign threats increased in the context of new immigration, some of it critical for the economic boom in America in the 1990s, especially of Asians in the hi-tech sector. Public suspicion of foreigners lurks in multi-cultural America, where the long war against communism promoted hatred for un-American aliens. The internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II suggests a tendency to conflate foreign and domestic enemies, as do purges of Marxists and "communist fellow travellers" during the Cold War. The fear of foreigners has historically tended to peak in times of high immigration. As immigration boomed again, the Iranian Revolution produced a new alien menace, Islam. By 1990 and the war on Iraq, fanatic Muslims had replaced rabid communists in American demonology.