Memes

Also objective: The so called "war on terror" actually led to way more terror and helped the larges terror organizations to grow and gain power and weapons.

Subjective thoughts about that: They knew and they wanted this to happen. The goal was never to fight terrorism, the goal was having some kind of long-term rival to justify constant war, to give billions of dollars to arms industry, to keep undifferentiated nationalism as high as possible, to distract the masses from their economical exploitation, to have a fake reason to overthrow governments (actual reasons being economic and imperialist of course), to keep undemocratic "exceptional" rules in place, etc. etc.