Bush urged us to keep travelling and shopping. Spend your money, the president said, because we are Americans and we will go on being Americans despite this attack.
Otherwise, he declared, the terrorists would win.
Unfortunately, the terrorists did win. The United States reacted just as we were expected to in response to the destruction of the World Trade Centre, the smoking remains of which became a symbol of 21st-century America.
Oh, we shopped. A few days later, we flew again.
However, our desire for revenge was intense and only loosely connected to the actual perpetrators of the 11 September attacks, who were few in number because they carried out suicide missions.
The terrorists won because, in our arrogance, fury, and ignorance, we didn’t understand the aims of the 11 September attacks.
It was never about making us change our lifestyle. Nor did al-Qaeda, or its leader Osama Bin Laden, believe the attacks would prompt a change in our foreign policy, either in Palestine or on the Arabian Peninsula.
It was about forcing the masks off.
Al-Qaeda aimed to provoke the United States into retaliating. They sought to demonstrate that the US is unqualified to serve as a global leader and a role model for many in the Muslim world and the Global South.
Before 11 September
The decade before the attacks presented the United States with a historic opportunity. The defeat of the Soviet Union left the US as the world’s sole superpower.
We had already squandered much of that so-called “peace dividend.” Our military spending dipped only slightly and briefly, and we made the fateful decision to pursue eastward NATO expansion despite a newfound positive relationship with Russian elites.
In the Middle East, the deeply flawed Oslo process was already fuelling resentment and frustration.
Palestinians faced rapidly expanding Israeli settlements and a harsh Palestinian Authority. At the same time, Israel intensified its control over Palestinian development and brought in more foreign workers to reduce its reliance on Palestinian labour, a vulnerability during the first intifada.
America’s military footprint was growing across the Persian Gulf and the Levant. At the same time, the policy of dual containment of Iran and Iraq fostered resistance, laying the groundwork for the insurgency that emerged after the problematic 2003 invasion of Iraq.
The warning signs were there, but direct conflict was rare. The United States appeared not only militarily invulnerable but also a leader promoting progress. Many had not yet seen neoliberalism’s failures, and dissenting voices were relatively easy to suppress.
American military adventurism was more selective and often presented as humanitarian, in places like Sudan, Somalia, and Serbia.
Bill Clinton presented the US as a triumphant force for good. Even the incoming neoconservative influence of the Bush Administration was wrapped in the ideology of “spreading democracy”.
After the Cold War, the United States could have chosen to bring Russia into a mutually beneficial partnership, settle its differences with Iran and Iraq, and encourage a global system of cooperation.
Washington could have backed a regime of international law, strengthened the role of the United Nations, and expanded humanitarian networks. It could have done so even within the constraints of capitalism, at least at first.
America chose a more selfish course, projecting a mirage of justice and freedom. Most people bought into it.
Al-Qaeda’s goal was to destroy that image, and they achieved it perfectly.
The Attacks
On the morning of 11 September 2001, I was asleep in California, a born-and-bred New Yorker, displaced but always attached to the city of my youth.
Just before 6 AM, my phone rang. It was my brother calling from northern New Jersey, just across the river from New York.
“Turn on your television,” he said. I asked which channel. He replied, “Just turn it on,” and hung up.
I switched on the television and saw one of the Twin Towers burning. Shortly after, I saw the second plane come in and hit the other tower.
Like everyone, I was in shock. The scene was unimaginable; so many lives had been lost. Others were badly injured and permanently traumatised. I also thought, “My role as an advocate for improved policies just became more challenging.”
That became clearer as we discovered that al-Qaeda and Bin Laden were behind it.
Within two days, my comrades and I at the then-growing Bay Area organisation, Jewish Voice for Peace, arranged a vigil. We mourned those lost in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania, while fervently calling for restraint and justice to prevent further casualties.
Even in liberal San Francisco, that message fell on ears deafened by rage and a zeal for revenge that too often went far beyond the direct perpetrators of the attack, targeting innocent brown people who were assaulted for the crime of “looking Muslim”.
The United States had suffered the worst attack on its territory since Pearl Harbour. The violence shattered our sense of invulnerability. More importantly, it showed those who naively believed in American beneficence that our friendly face was only there as long as everything went well.
Until that moment, Americans had experienced war as something that happens elsewhere. How would we respond when we had to experience the death, destruction, injustice, and horror of warfare on our own lands?
As Bin Laden expected, we did not respond well.
A Twenty-Five-Year Decline Into Endless War
Less than a month after the 11 September attacks, the Bush Administration launched the War on Terror.
Rather than assembling evidence of al-Qaeda’s guilt and using existing international channels to apprehend those responsible, the US invaded Afghanistan. We would not leave for twenty years.
In addition to smaller operations in Africa, the US also conducted much larger-scale warfare in Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan, and Syria, as well as in Afghanistan.
Here’s what the Brown University Costs of War Project estimates, conservatively, was the result:
An estimated over 940,000 people were killed by direct post-9/11 war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan between 2001-2023. Of these, more than 432,000 were civilians. The number of people wounded or ill as a result of the conflicts is far higher, as is the number of civilians who died “indirectly,” as a result of wars’ destruction of economies, healthcare systems, infrastructure and the environment. An estimated 3.6-3.8 million people died indirectly in post-9/11 war zones, bringing the total death toll to at least 4.5-4.7 million and counting.
Such economic and physical devastation destroys lives well beyond those casualty figures.
The United States was never the same country again. One might argue that, having begun with the genocide of indigenous people and largely built on the slave labour of kidnapped Africans and their descendants, as well as other indentured servants, this was always America’s core.
But any hope the world had for America as a herald of better times for humanity after World War II, and any potential for positive change that might have emerged from the end of the Cold War, were forever extinguished.
That hope was not extinguished by Osama Bin Laden and the 9/11 attacks. Our response extinguished it. We responded to a monstrous act by becoming monsters greater than Bin Laden could ever have hoped to be.
Our bullying tendencies didn’t stop with the War on Terror.
In the years since 9/11, the United States has greatly expanded its use of financial dominance to threaten and often starve other countries through the rampant use of sanctions.
According to a Treasury Department report, “The use of one type of penalty, economic sanctions, has surged in recent decades, increasing over nine-fold between 2000 and 2021.”
Those measures have had an incalculable effect on countries worldwide. Nearly two dozen countries have faced US sanctions since 2001, affecting billions of people.
In most cases, sanctions fail to influence other countries’ policies and often have little impact on ruling elites, doing most of their damage to the general population.
Finally, the 11 September attacks, perhaps ironically, brought the United States and Israel closer together.
The relationship between the two was uncertain after the Cold War concluded, as much of the alliance’s reasoning was rooted in Cold War assumptions that had since become outdated.
The beginning of the Al-Aqsa Intifada in late 2000, and the wide promulgation of the false claim that the Palestinians had rejected a “generous offer” in favour of launching the uprising, provided an anti-terrorism rationale for strengthening that relationship.
As Benjamin Netanyahu said at the time, ”It’s very good…Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy… [it will] strengthen the bond between our two peoples, because we’ve experienced terror over so many decades, but the United States has now experienced a massive haemorrhaging of terror.”
Bibi was, naturally, correct. Until recent years, when Americans were shocked by Israel’s actions in Gaza, the outdated idea of Israel as a bastion of “western civilisation” confronting the “barbarous Muslim hordes” underpinned the US-Israel alliance, bridging party divides and ideological differences among Americans.
Twenty-five years later, that has finally dwindled. Much like Bin Laden in 2001, Donald Trump in 2026 has exposed the “anti-terror” ideology as the reckless and immoral crusade it always was.
The past quarter-century has hastened the decline of the American empire. We chose war instead of what could have been an opportunity for the US to use its resources to create a better world for all our children.
It’s not at all clear that any state will have such an opportunity again.
The terrorists succeeded. While Osama Bin Laden aimed to tarnish the positive image of the United States, it was our own actions that proved more destructive and harmful than Bin Laden could ever have been.
Twenty-five years later, it’s time to begin understanding the true lessons from that tragic day.
Photograph courtesy of Jamie Meunier. Published under a Creative Commons license.
