9/11 at 25: Has the US learned anything from its 'war on terror'? - Middle East Eye

A quarter century is enough time to separate history from hysteria, consequences from intentions and reality from propaganda.

On 11 September 2001, nearly 3,000 people were killed in horrific attacks that shocked the United States and the world.

The attacks of 9/11 could have been treated as a grave crime requiring an international effort to identify, apprehend and prosecute those responsible. They could also have triggered a serious national debate about why such intense hostility towards the US had developed in many parts of the Muslim-majority world. Instead, the US's political establishment chose a radically different path.

President George W Bush famously declared that the terrorists attacked the US because "they hate our freedoms". It was a convenient explanation because it absolved the American foreign policy establishment of any responsibility.

There would be no serious reckoning with decades of support for dictatorships across the Arab and Muslim-majority world, the devastating sanctions against Iraq during the 1990s, American military deployments throughout the region or Washington's unconditional support for Israel and its decades-long occupation and dispossession of the Palestinian people.

If they hated the US because of what the US was, rather than because of what the US did, then American policy did not have to change; it was they who had to change.

That premise became the ideological foundation of the so-called global "war on terror". What followed were wars, invasions, occupations, torture, rendition, secret prisons, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, drone assassinations, mass surveillance and the destruction of entire societies.

At home came the Patriot Act, watchlists, informants, the infiltration of mosques, racial and religious profiling, entrapment operations and a sweeping expansion of the national security state.

Twenty-five years later, what have we learned?

By the time the Soviet Union disappeared in 1991, no country could seriously challenge American military supremacy. Many American strategists believed the country had entered a unipolar moment that could last for generations. Francis Fukuyama had even famously proclaimed "the end of history".

The neoconservatives and their Zionist allies exploited 9/11 to turn that enormous power into an imperial project.

Afghanistan was invaded in 2001, and Iraq followed in 2003, based on false claims about weapons of mass destruction and insinuations linking Saddam Hussein to 9/11. The objective soon expanded far beyond defeating al-Qaeda: Washington would remake the Middle East, overthrowing governments and imposing a new regional order by force of arms.

The project failed spectacularly, and after 20 years of war the United States left Afghanistan in August 2021 in humiliation, while the Taliban, the very movement it had removed from power, returned to Kabul. Iraq was devastated: hundreds of thousands killed, millions displaced, sectarianism unleashed and a political order that remains deeply dysfunctional.

The failure was conceptual rather than a matter of execution, for political legitimacy cannot be bombed into existence or imposed at the barrel of foreign guns. People may fear overwhelming military power, but fear is not legitimacy and occupation inevitably generates resistance.

The US won many military confrontations but failed to achieve its larger political objectives, and the wars carried a price that was invisible only because no rival was yet strong enough to collect it.

The Costs of War project at Brown University puts the price tag at roughly $8 trillion - resources that could have been invested elsewhere. The wars also consumed political attention and distracted the United States from the era's profound transformations, particularly the rise of China.

Even more damaging was what happened to the philosophical foundations of American global leadership. During the Cold War, Washington justified its leadership not merely through power but through ideas: democracy, human rights, international law. After 9/11, the contradiction between those ideas and American practice became increasingly difficult to disguise.

The unipolar moment did not disappear in a single event; it was squandered over a quarter century, and many of the US's own decisions accelerated the world's shift towards multiple centres of power.

The "war on terror" was supposedly designed to make the US safer, yet the invasion of Iraq destroyed a state and created chaos that violent groups exploited.

Torture became a recruiting image, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo became symbols of the era, and drone strikes that killed innocent families generated anger far beyond their immediate targets.

Violence does not arise in a political vacuum. To recognise this is not to justify the killing of innocent people; it is to acknowledge that preventing political violence requires understanding the conditions in which it develops. For 25 years, however, attempts to discuss "root causes" were dismissed as somehow excusing violence.

The consequences were not confined to Afghanistan and Iraq. After 9/11, the language of counterterrorism gave authoritarian regimes across the region new tools and new legitimacy.

Political opponents could be branded extremists and emergency laws justified in the name of security, while Western governments that spoke publicly about democracy cooperated closely with the region's most repressive security establishments.

Anger was accumulating beneath the surface, and by the end of 2010 millions of young Arabs had grown up under governments that offered neither political participation nor economic opportunity.

The "war on terror" did not create the Arab Spring uprisings - their causes were indigenous and much deeper - but the post-9/11 order intensified the contradictions that produced them.

For years, Americans were told that the choice in the Muslim-majority world was between authoritarian regimes and violent extremism. Then millions of ordinary Arabs took to the streets demanding dignity, accountability and representative government, and for a brief moment they shattered that false choice.

When those movements threatened entrenched interests, the counterrevolution followed. Egypt's democratic experiment was crushed, Libya fragmented, Syria became one of the century's great catastrophes, Yemen was devastated and Tunisia's opening collapsed.

The Arab Spring did not fail alone, but was failed by an international order that preached democracy but preferred compliant authoritarianism.

Perhaps the most dangerous legacy of the past 25 years is the destruction of restraints. International law is not meaningful if it applies only to adversaries, and human rights cannot be universal when friends are exempt.

After 9/11, successive American administrations discarded restrictions that earlier generations had considered fundamental. Preventive war was legitimised, torture was redefined, indefinite detention without trial was normalised, extrajudicial assassination became government policy and entire countries became battlefields without declarations of war.

How could a state lecture others about human rights while operating Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib? How could it defend international law after invading Iraq without UN Security Council authorisation? How could it champion sovereignty while claiming the right to overthrow governments and assassinate people across borders?

Each exception created a precedent, and although a great power may believe that rules constrain only others, other states eventually invoke the same logic.

If preventive war is legitimate for one state, why not another? If perceived security threats justify attacking another country's territory, why should that principle belong only to Washington or Israel? If international courts can simply be ignored when their decisions become inconvenient, why should the US's adversaries respect them?

American support for Israel's destruction of Gaza after October 2023 brought these contradictions together in one place. Washington armed Israel, financed it and repeatedly shielded it while Palestinians were killed, displaced, starved and subjected to genocide.

Gaza pushed this crisis to another level. The destruction of international norms does not produce a world without power. It produces a world in which power replaces law - an extraordinarily dangerous prospect, particularly when nuclear weapons exist.

A government that claims extraordinary powers overseas will eventually employ extraordinary powers domestically - a lesson the American Muslim community learned very quickly.

Before 9/11, Arab and Muslim Americans were developing an increasingly confident civic and political presence. I witnessed and participated in that development firsthand.

During the late 1990s, we built a broad national coalition against the government's use of secret evidence in immigration proceedings, working with civil libertarians, lawyers, churches, human rights organisations and members of Congress.

The pressure worked. By 2000, victims of secret evidence had been released, and the House Judiciary Committee approved the Secret Evidence Repeal Act in September 2000 with overwhelming bipartisan support.

By September 2001, we expected the White House to finally announce a major policy change, and Muslim leaders had gathered in Washington for the announcement, scheduled for 3.05pm on 11 September.

Instead of entering a new period of political empowerment, American Muslims entered an era of suspicion and repression. The FBI developed vast networks of informants; mosques, community leaders and student organisations were monitored; and families were frightened.

FBI whistleblower Terry Albury later provided a rare insider account of this apparatus, confirming what Muslim communities had been saying for years: innocent people were targeted because of religion, ethnicity, associations or political activity.

This was the institutionalisation of Islamophobia - not merely offensive stereotyping, but a security infrastructure built around the proposition that Muslim religious identity itself constituted a potential threat.

Once a community is securitised, ordinary behaviour becomes suspicious. Growing a beard may attract attention, increased religious devotion may become a supposed sign of "radicalisation" and charitable giving may generate an investigation, while a political opinion about Palestine may be interpreted through a security lens rather than as protected political speech.

Such policies intimidated communities, discouraged political engagement and encouraged a compliant leadership willing to demonstrate its acceptability by distancing itself from causes considered politically dangerous. Islamophobia was never just personal bigotry; it became an instrument through which political behaviour could be disciplined.

Even so, Muslims should never imagine that this is only a Muslim problem. Powers created against unpopular minorities rarely remain confined to those minorities, which is why the defence of Muslim civil liberties was always a defence of American civil liberties.

Through the secret evidence struggle, we learned that an organised community could challenge government policy. American Muslims did not have to choose between isolation and assimilation; they could remain faithful to their principles while building alliances with people of different religions, races and political backgrounds around common causes.

Political power does not mean access to officials. A photograph at the White House is not power. Invitations to government receptions or Ramadan iftars are not power. Having Muslim faces defending disastrous policies that harm Muslims is certainly not power.

Power means the ability to organise people around principles. It means building institutions that survive individuals, developing principled leaders, building independent media and legal capacity and forging alliances with other communities struggling for justice.

Our earlier campaign succeeded because it worked at many levels at once: locally and nationally, legally and politically. Communities must never trade principles for access - political engagement requires compromise over tactics, never the surrender of fundamental values.

Rights are not protected through submission, and no minority in American history secured its dignity by proving that it would remain silent.

The post-9/11 period was intended in part to intimidate Muslims into political passivity; instead, it produced a wiser and bolder generation.

Young American Muslims who grew up under surveillance and demonisation have developed a political consciousness far more sophisticated than that of earlier generations. They have joined coalitions for racial justice, immigrant rights, civil liberties and Palestine, supported by remarkable solidarity from young Jews, Christians, African Americans, Latinos and people of conscience across American society.

This is where hope lies, for history teaches that power is not invincible, but that it appears invincible until organised people challenge it. Outrage alone is not sufficient - successful movements require vision, strategy, organisation, leadership and the ability to sustain struggle over many years.

For decades, Washington attempted to separate American policy towards Palestine from the anger generated by American policy in the Middle East - a fiction that has become impossible to maintain.

The Palestinian question has always been about much more than a territorial dispute. It is about dispossession, settler colonialism and the denial of an entire people's national and human rights.

After 9/11, the "war on terror" gave Israel an extraordinary political opportunity. Palestinian resistance could be incorporated into the global category of "terrorism", while occupation and state violence were repackaged as "counterterrorism". The occupied became the security threat. The occupier became the victim defending itself.

The occupation, meanwhile, only deepened, with Gaza placed under siege and the West Bank increasingly fragmented by expanding settlements, checkpoints and settler violence.

The political process that supposedly offered Palestinians a path towards statehood became a mechanism for indefinitely managing occupation.

The events of 7 October did not emerge from a vacuum. One may debate the wisdom, methods or consequences of Palestinian resistance, but no serious analysis can erase the conditions that produced it.

Then came Gaza, and the genocide stripped away the pretences that had sustained American policy. For millions of people around the world, particularly younger generations, the contradiction became impossible to ignore: a people imprisoned, starved and bombarded while the world's most powerful country supplied the weapons and the diplomatic cover.

Twenty-five years after 9/11, Palestine remains central to understanding both the failure of American Middle East policy and the erosion of America's claim to moral leadership.

What is the verdict on the post-9/11 era? The United States responded to the 9/11 attacks with a quarter-century of wars that destabilised whole regions, damaged constitutional protections at home, normalised surveillance and torture and wasted enormous wealth and goodwill.

The Costs of War project now estimates more than 940,000 direct deaths in post-9/11 war zones, 3.6 to 3.8 million indirect deaths and 38 million people displaced.

Moreover, these 25 years taught another lesson that no political order is permanent, no empire remains dominant forever, and no oppressed people surrender their claim to justice merely because the forces arrayed against them appear overwhelming.

The world of 2026 is not the world of September 2001. American power remains formidable, but the unipolar moment is fading, and societies across the Global South increasingly reject a system in which one power decides which countries may be invaded, which peoples may resist occupation, and whose lives are worthy of protection.

For American Muslims, the choice should be clearer after 25 years. We should neither withdraw from society nor surrender our principles in exchange for acceptance. We must organise, educate, build coalitions, defend civil liberties and speak truthfully about American foreign policy even when doing so carries a price.

Twenty-five years ago, fear changed the United States. Our task now is not simply to remember what happened on 11 September 2001 but to understand what was done in its name.

History's most important lessons are not learned by commemorating the past; they are learned when societies refuse to repeat it.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.