How the War on Terror Turned 9/11 Into a Permanently Open Wound
The government ensured that there would be no end to the public's fears—and no real justice for bin Laden's victims.
The first murder I witnessed was at age 3, on September 11, 2001. Although I was too young to fully grasp what the burning towers across the Hudson River meant, I soon came to understand that many families around us had lost someone forever. (I later learned that, like many other New Yorkers, my aunt barely missed becoming one of the victims by being late to work.) And I heard that a stranger from a strange land named "Osama bin Laden" was responsible.
A little under a decade later, the U.S. government announced that it had killed bin Laden, to the jubilation of my middle school classmates. But the end of bin Laden did not bring the relief that Americans were hoping for. President Barack Obama was quick to warn the public that "his death does not mark the end of our effort." In fact, the worst of the war on terror was yet to come.
The U.S. military continues to use Congress' authorization for war on Al Qaeda to go after a dizzying array of enemies. Despite several accused perpetrators sitting in the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, there has never been a "9/11 trial." A quarter century later, 9/11 still feels like an open, festering wound in American society, with neither closure nor justice served.
That is by design. Instead of treating the massacre of American civilians as a criminal matter, the U.S. government took it as an opportunity to radically expand its own power, imposing a permanent state of emergency at home and waging war to reshape the Middle East. Those wars were often against targets that had little or nothing to do with 9/11, requiring the government to confuse and misdirect the public.
For all the murderous sophistication of the plane hijackings, the network behind them was fairly easy to unmask and capture, partly because the U.S. government had already started to surveil Al Qaeda. But the administration of George W. Bush did not hand them over to law enforcement professionals who could secure swift convictions. Instead, the Bush administration experimented with new legal categories ("enemy combatants") to deprive the suspects of rights, a new infrastructure of secret prisons to hide them from view, and new torture tactics to test on them.
The system scrambled innocence and guilt. While bystanders like Murat Kurnaz and Mohamedou Ould Slahi were disappeared and permanently scarred through no fault of their own, admitted 9/11 conspirators like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) have gone decades without being judged by a court. When Obama tried in 2011 to put KSM before a civilian court near the scene of his crime, a process that might give New Yorkers some closure, hawks in Congress blocked the trial. Fifteen years later, the military tribunal trying KSM is still working to sort out genuine evidence from forced confessions under torture.
No wonder Obama's advisers worked from the assumption that they would kill, not capture, bin Laden. The raid on bin Laden was being planned at the same time as the legal headache around the planned KSM trial was unfolding, which clearly weighed on U.S. planners.
Sure, torture might have been incompatible with the peacetime justice system, proponents argue, but it was a necessary emergency measure to find further attackers. Congressional investigators with access to secret CIA records tested this argument and found that torture produced only "faulty intelligence." Perhaps another explanation is needed.
FBI agent Ali Soufan, who was one of the earliest agents sent to hunt Al Qaeda and later came out as an opponent of torture, writes that the CIA aimed to make a suspect "see his interrogator as a god who controls his suffering." The Bush administration exhibited the same megalomaniacal attitude toward the entire world. As an administration official infamously told The New York Times, "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
Although the mass murderers of Al Qaeda (and people unlucky enough to be mistaken for them) made for a politically palatable target, the appetite of the administration was bigger yet. Their real goal was, in the approving words of New York Times journalist Thomas Friedman, to tell the entire Muslim world to "suck on this." Or, in a turn of phrase that the National Review attributed to neoconservative scholar Michael Ledeen, "Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business."
The neoconservative moment was happy to provide a list of "crappy little countries" to pick on. The Project for the New American Century was already pushing to finish off Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, whom the U.S. had defeated and isolated in the Persian Gulf War of 1991. A Clean Break, a policy paper written by American neoconservatives for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 1999, suggested pairing Iraqi regime change with a containment campaign against Iran and Syria. Members of the Project for the New American Century and authors of A Clean Break ended up staffing the Bush administration.
There was a wrinkle: None of the neoconservatives' targets actually had anything to do with 9/11. So they just lied to the public. U.S. officials spread conspiracy theories about Iraq maintaining ties to Al Qaeda while hiding "weapons of mass destruction." National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice implied that the next 9/11 would come in the form of a "mushroom cloud." The greatest conspiracy theory of them all, cooked up by speechwriter David Frum, posited that a global "axis of evil" was plotting to build nuclear weapons and give them to terrorists.
Bush named Iraq, Iran, and North Korea as members of that axis. His adviser Douglas Feith, a former member of the Project for the New American Century and a co-author of A Clean Break, even wrote a memo suggesting that "an American attack in South America or Southeast Asia might be a surprise to the terrorists." Indeed it would be.
In reality, the governments of Iraq, Iran, and Syria all considered Al Qaeda a menace. Bin Laden himself had offered to join the 1991 war against Iraq, which he then saw as an aggressor threatening his native Saudi Arabia. Iran, which had almost gone to war with bin Laden's hosts in Afghanistan in the 1990s, held public vigils for 9/11 victims. Iranian intelligence services later cooperated with the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. Syria became another covert partner in the war on terror. "If you want [suspects] to be tortured, you send them to Syria," former CIA officer Robert Baer once said.
In 2006, the sitcom It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia parodied Americans' confused understanding of the situation: "There's a war on terror, Charlie. Have you ever seen CNN? George Bush, right now. Saddam Hussein has the oil. We have decided to help the people of Israel to give our oil back to us by defeating Saddam Hussein." But for those of us living in the direct shadow of 9/11, it wasn't so funny.
At a time when U.S. leaders could and should have been reassuring a traumatized nation, and directing Americans' righteous anger at the proper targets, they instead mired the public in confusion, secrecy, and paranoia. By expanding the war on terror's enemy from Al Qaeda to an amorphous global conspiracy, the Bush administration made the public's fears impossible to ever satisfy. You can't conclusively defeat an enemy that doesn't exist.
The war in Iraq ultimately killed more Americans than 9/11 did, not to mention hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. It also empowered Al Qaeda, which settled in war-torn Iraq and metastasized like a cancer, hijacking the wave of 2011 revolutions across the Middle East. Meanwhile, the U.S. military inserted itself into conflicts throughout the world, labeling groups that didn't exist in 2001 as Al Qaeda's "associated forces," a tradition that Obama and his successors would continue.
These wars eventually led to neoconservatives winning their grand prize, a war with Iran. The U.S. occupation of Iraq and later campaign against the Islamic State group, a splinter from Al Qaeda, created plenty of friction with Iranian and Iranian-backed forces. In 2020, the first Trump administration assassinated an Iranian general in the name of protecting U.S. forces in Iraq, and in 2026, the second Trump administration attacked Iran in large part to avenge U.S. forces killed by Iraqi guerrillas backed by Iran.
The fight against Al Qaeda seems to have taken a back seat, and the U.S. government has even turned a blind eye to Al Qaeda in the name of fighting Iran. Saudi Arabia, a state whose intelligence services actually have unexplained ties to 9/11, invaded Yemen to put down an Iranian-backed revolution in 2015. The Saudi-led coalition fought alongside Al Qaeda, and received heavy U.S. support nonetheless.
During the Syrian civil war, Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador James Jeffrey flirted with the idea of fighting U.S. enemies with the help of Al Qaeda's Syrian branch, whose leader Ahmad Al-Sharaa celebrated 9/11 as revenge for "the injustice of the Americans." Improbably, that bet ended up paying off. Al-Sharaa forcefully split his forces from Al Qaeda, took over Syria in 2024, and installed a U.S.-friendly regime. Washington has so far reciprocated his outreach. The original sin of the war on terror—allying with 9/11's perpetrators—seems to be more forgivable than other vendettas in the eyes of the U.S. government.
Israel, once a minor actor in U.S. foreign policy, has become a new lodestar of the war on terror. Some politicians are trying to displace Americans' trauma from 9/11 onto Israelis' much older conflict with their Palestinian neighbors. President Joe Biden described the October 2023 attacks on Israel, which killed fewer people than 9/11, as the equivalent of "fifteen 9/11s." Netanyahu called it the equivalent of twenty 9/11s in a 2024 speech to Congress, to roaring applause.
Ambassador Mike Huckabee, the current U.S. envoy to Israel, gave an interview to Newsmax on Tuesday about the legacy of 9/11. "I hope we never forget what happened on that day, and I don't want us to forget who did it, because when people in America say what about Iran, we don't care—well, Iran didn't directly participate, but they're part of this jihadist system," he said.
The flippancy with which Biden and Huckabee talked about 9/11 and its victims is staggering. So is the lack of reaction to such rhetoric, which only shows how cheapened the memory of 9/11 has become in American political culture—by exactly the people who constantly invoke it. And the situation has been this way for a while. Confronted in 2014 with evidence that the CIA tortured innocent people, former Vice President Dick Cheney lashed out with a graphic description of a hypothetical worker burning to death in the Twin Towers.
When the younger generation cracks distasteful jokes about 9/11, they are reflecting the cynicism from politicians and talking heads that has become their only frame of reference for this event.
Could the war on terror have gone any other way? Hindsight, of course, is always 20/20, and some errors of the post-9/11 era were understandable excesses. (A former Baltimore deputy police commissioner reminded me that officials at the time had to assume "that 9/11 was the first of many [attacks] to come.") But the Bush administration actively chose to use 9/11 victims as fodder for its world-building project, and its successors chose to stay the course, on a bipartisan basis.
A quarter century later, I have met many people in the Middle East who saw parts of their own cities leveled by bombs. I cannot help thinking back to the smoke over the Hudson River. What is it like to grow up around a building blown up every day, instead of just once? And I cannot help wondering whether this whole mess could have been put to rest so much earlier.
