The problem with the U.S. "War on Terror" is not that it is an irrational program that was trumped up to facilitate corruption.
The problem is that it is a program that was created rationally in response to a truly horrible set of terrorist attacks.
That is a problem because most U.S. citizens don't want to be corrupt. What they want is to serve a good cause, and be effective in doing so. The "War on Terror" gives them both. And that's a problem because it makes it much, much harder for people waging that "war" to perceive the tradeoffs they create, and the lines they cross.
The War on Terror is an irrational response. The attacks presented an existential threat to the country only so far as we overreacted to the threats. Even if we assume that invasions of countries were a justified and rational response, we still invaded the wrong countries. The fear of terrorism was itself irrational, 4k people is a rounding error in the grand scheme of things, but humans are awful at evaluating risk.
The problem is that it is a program that was created rationally in response to a truly horrible set of terrorist attacks.
That is a problem because most U.S. citizens don't want to be corrupt. What they want is to serve a good cause, and be effective in doing so. The "War on Terror" gives them both. And that's a problem because it makes it much, much harder for people waging that "war" to perceive the tradeoffs they create, and the lines they cross.