Twenty-Five Years After 9/11: What Have We Learned?

A quarter of a century has passed since the attacks of September 11, 2001 — enough time to separate history from hysteria, outcomes from intentions, and truth from propaganda. That day was undoubtedly horrifying and tragic for many around the world; nearly three thousand people were killed in attacks that shocked the United States and the world. But twenty-five years later, the question is no longer what happened that morning. The question is: what did America do afterward? Why did it do it? What did those choices produce? And have we learned anything at all from this painful history?

The 9/11 attacks could have been treated as a serious crime requiring an international effort to identify those responsible, arrest them, and bring them to justice. They could also have sparked a serious debate within the United States about why such intense hostility toward it had developed in so many parts of the Islamic world. But instead, the American political establishment chose a radically different path.

President George W. Bush declared openly that the terrorists attacked America because they “hate our freedoms.” It was a convenient explanation because it absolved American institutions that shape foreign policy and ruling elites of any responsibility. There would be no serious review of decades of support for dictatorships and authoritarian regimes in the Arab and Islamic worlds, or of the devastating sanctions against Iraq during the 1990s, or of American military deployment throughout the region, or of Washington’s unconditional political, military, and economic support for the Zionist entity and its occupation and displacement of the Palestinian people for decades.

If they hated America because of the values and principles it stands for, and not because of its actions, then American policy did not need to change; they were the ones who had to change.

This preface is necessary to understand the ideological and philosophical foundation of what was called the “Global War on Terror.” What followed were wars, invasions, occupations, torture, extraordinary rendition, secret prisons, black sites, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Bagram, drone assassinations, mass surveillance, and the destruction of entire societies.

Domestically in America, there came the Patriot Act, watchlists, no-fly lists, informants, surveillance of mosques, racial and religious discrimination, deliberate entrapment of thousands of Muslims in American society, preemptive prosecutions, and an exceptional expansion of the national security apparatus to pursue Muslim American communities.

Twenty-five years later, what have we learned?

Lesson One: Military Power Cannot Solve Political Problems

By the time the Soviet Union collapsed and disappeared in 1991, no state could seriously challenge American military supremacy. At the dawn of the new century, the United States stood at the pinnacle of global power; Washington possessed enormous military, economic, technological, diplomatic, and cultural influence. Many American strategists believed the country had entered a moment of unipolarity that could last for generations. The renowned academic Francis Fukuyama even declared “the end of history.”

Then neoconservatives and their Zionist allies exploited the events of 9/11 to transform that enormous power into an imperial project. Afghanistan was invaded in 2001, followed by Iraq in 2003 on the basis of false claims about weapons of mass destruction and hints linking Saddam Hussein to 9/11. But the goal quickly expanded beyond defeating al-Qaeda; Washington wanted to reshape the Middle East, overthrow governments, rebuild societies, and impose a new regional order through American military power. The project failed disastrously.

After twenty years of war, the United States left Afghanistan in August 2021 in a moment of humiliation and disgrace, while the Taliban — the very movement it had removed from power — returned to Kabul. Iraq was destroyed, hundreds of thousands were killed, millions were displaced, sectarianism was unleashed, and the political system built under occupation became severely dysfunctional.

The fundamental error was not merely poor implementation. The failure was conceptual.

Political legitimacy cannot be extracted and brought into existence through bombing or imposed by the barrels of foreign guns. Societies cannot be socially engineered by foreign armies. People may fear overwhelming military force, but fear does not grant legitimacy. Occupation will inevitably generate resistance.

America may have won many military encounters, but it failed to achieve its major political objectives. This fact may be the most important strategic lesson of the past twenty-five years.

Lesson Two: Power Without a Balancer Commits Catastrophic Errors

There was another consequence of the unipolar moment, but it was less obvious at the time. Great powers usually operate within constraints; rivals watch their mistakes, exploit their weaknesses, challenge their alliances, and benefit when their resources dissipate or shrink. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States had no peer competitor capable of imposing such costs or immediately benefiting from such errors. That freedom, it turned out, was a curse.

Washington was able to invade Afghanistan, then Iraq, and expand the war on terror across dozens of countries, spending trillions of dollars, while remaining the dominant power in the world. But the absence of immediate geopolitical cost created the illusion that there was no cost. Yet there were enormous costs.

The Costs of War Project at Brown University estimates that cost at approximately $8 trillion. These were resources that could have been invested elsewhere for American interests. The wars increased American debt, consumed political attention, depleted military resources, and distracted the United States from focusing on the deep economic and geopolitical transformations underway elsewhere, especially the rise of China. But most damaging was what happened to the philosophical foundations that justified and legitimized American global leadership.

During the Cold War, Washington justified its leadership not only through power but through the ideas and values it claimed for its civilization: democracy, human rights, international law, the rule of law, and international institutions. For decades, American practice contradicted these principles in many places around the world. But after 9/11, the contradiction became more difficult to disguise or ignore.

How can a state preach to others about the importance of adhering to human rights while running Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib? How can it defend international law after invading Iraq without a UN Security Council mandate?

How can it defend sovereignty while claiming the right to invade states, overthrow governments, carry out drone strikes, and assassinate people across borders?

Then came Gaza, where American support for the Zionist entity in destroying Gaza after October 2023 gathered many of these contradictions in one place and time. Washington armed, funded, diplomatically protected, and repeatedly defended “Israel” while Palestinians were killed, displaced, starved, and subjected to what much of the world considered a genocidal war. The unipolar moment may not have disappeared through a single event, but it dissipated over a quarter century.

The United States is certainly still enormously powerful. But the world of 2026 is no longer the world of 2001. The international system is moving toward multiple centers of power, and one of the great ironies is that many of America’s own choices and policies accelerated this shift.

Lesson Three: The War on Terror Produced Much of What It Claimed to Prevent

Wars have consequences that exceed the calculations of those who ignite them. The invasion of Iraq destroyed a state and produced enormous political and social vacuums that violent groups later exploited. Torture became a stereotype, while Abu Ghraib became a symbol of the era, just as Guantanamo became another global symbol. Drone strikes that killed hundreds of innocent families generated anger far beyond their immediate targets.

The war on terror was supposed to make America safer. But by treating huge populations and communities as potential enemies, destroying states, supporting authoritarian governments, and refusing to address legitimate grievances, it created new reservoirs of anger and resentment.

Violence does not emerge in a political vacuum. This certainly does not justify the killing of innocents, but it simply acknowledges a basic fact: if one wants to prevent political violence, one must understand the political conditions in which it forms and develops.

Yet for twenty-five years, attempts to discuss “root causes” were often rejected as justifying violence. Understanding was confused with justification. But one cannot intelligently confront any political phenomenon without first understanding it and revealing its complexities.

Lesson Four: The War on Terror Reshaped the Islamic World

The consequences of the war on terror were not limited to Afghanistan and Iraq. For decades, many governments in the Arab and Islamic worlds had maintained their regimes through a combination of internal repression and external support.

After 9/11, the language of counterterrorism gave authoritarian regimes new tools and new legitimacy, as political opponents were labeled extremists. Civil society was monitored and emergency laws were justified in these societies in the name of security, while Western governments that spoke publicly of democracy continued to cooperate closely with the most repressive security and intelligence agencies in the region.

But beneath the surface, anger was accumulating. By the end of 2010, millions of Arab youth had grown up under governments that offered their peoples neither meaningful political participation nor economic opportunity.

Corruption was widespread, dignity was regularly violated, and wealth was concentrated in the hands of ruling elites, while police and security agencies operated with immunity in stark absence of accountability.

Then came the “Arab Spring.” The uprisings were not created by the war on terror; their causes were certainly local and much deeper. But the post-9/11 system intensified many of the contradictions it produced. There was also a deep historical irony: for years, Americans were told that the main political choice in the Islamic world was between authoritarian regimes and violent extremism. Then millions of ordinary Arabs took to the streets demanding dignity, accountability, freedom, democracy, and governments that truly represent their peoples. That false choice collapsed, if only for a moment.

When those revolutionary movements and popular uprisings threatened the entrenched interests of ruling elites, counterrevolution followed. The democratic experiment in Egypt was crushed, Libya slid into fragmentation, Syria became one of the greatest catastrophes of the century, Yemen was destroyed by war, and even in Tunisia the democratic dream eventually collapsed. The failure was not merely a failure of the “Arab Spring,” but more importantly a failure of an international system that preached democracy but ultimately preferred authoritarianism it could control.

Lesson Five: When Rules Are Broken, They Are Difficult to Restore

Perhaps one of the most dangerous consequences of the past twenty-five years is the destruction of rules and norms. International law, for example, is meaningless if it is applied only to adversaries. Human rights cannot be universal if allies are exempt from application. Sovereignty cannot be sacred when adversaries violate it but optional when allies or friends violate it.

After 9/11, successive American administrations ignored or abandoned constraints that previous administrations considered essential. Preemptive wars were legitimized, torture was redefined. Indefinite detention without trial was accepted and considered necessary or normal.

Extrajudicial assassination became government policy, and the drone war allowed people thousands of miles away to be placed on kill lists. Entire countries became battlegrounds without a declaration of war.

Every exception to these violations created a precedent. This is the danger of exceeding constraints and strict laws — the genie cannot simply be put back in the bottle.

A great power may believe that rules constrain only others while its violations are exceptional to it. But in the end, other states may use the same logic.

If preventive war is legitimate for one state, why not for another? If imagined security threats justify attacking the territory of other states, why should this principle be permitted only for Washington or “Tel Aviv”?

If international courts and institutions can simply be ignored when their decisions become uncomfortable, why should America’s adversaries respect them?

Gaza paid the price of this contradiction and raised it to another level. The destruction of international norms does not produce a world without power; it produces a world in which power increasingly replaces law. This is an extremely dangerous world, especially when it comes to the potential use of tactical nuclear weapons.

In short, once the constraints or laws governing wars, conflicts, sovereignty, and the protection of civilians are weakened or ignored, restoring them later may become impossible. The danger peaks when political discourse reaches the point of threatening the use of tactical nuclear weapons, as is now being threatened in the Strait of Hormuz crisis. Therefore, the lesson of the past quarter century is not only that America violated the rules and tampered with laws, but that by undermining the rules it once claimed to defend, it helped create a world in which those rules may no longer be able to protect anyone.

Lesson Six: Empire Abroad Ultimately Threatens Freedoms at Home

Americans should have understood this lesson long before 9/11. A government that claims extraordinary powers beyond its borders will ultimately use extraordinary powers within its own country. The massive machinery of the police state created to monitor, classify, spy on, smear, detain, and punish foreign enemies does not usually remain confined abroad. The American Muslim community learned this very quickly.

Before 9/11, Arab and Muslim Americans had a growing and increasingly confident civic and political presence. I witnessed these developments myself and participated in them directly.

In the late 1990s, we built a remarkable national coalition against the government’s use of secret evidence in immigration courts.

Islamic organizations were active and worked with civil liberties advocates, lawyers, churches, political activists, human rights organizations, members of Congress, and diverse communities across the country. The campaign combined grassroots organizing, public education, media outreach, litigation, coalition building, and political engagement.

In the end, the campaign succeeded. By 2000, several prominent victims of secret evidence had been released, and legislation to ban the use of secret evidence in immigration courts attracted broad bipartisan support. The House Judiciary Committee approved the Secret Evidence Repeal Act in September 2000 by a vote of twenty-eight to two.

By September 2001, we expected the White House to finally announce a major policy change, under which leaders of the American Muslim community would gather in Washington to announce the repeal of secret evidence. That announcement was scheduled for 3:05 p.m. on September 11. Of course, it did not happen on that tragic day.

Instead of entering a new era of political empowerment, American Muslims entered an age of suspicion, surveillance, and repression. The FBI and other agencies developed vast networks of informants. Mosques, community leaders, and student organizations were monitored. People were placed on watchlists. Families were afraid, and communities were filled with suspicion toward their own members. Government programs presented as “outreach” between communities and government institutions often blurred the distinction between community engagement and intelligence gathering.

Former FBI agent Terry Albury later provided an exceptional insider account of this massive machinery and the enormous campaign to suppress American Muslim communities. His testimony confirmed what the American Muslim community and civil liberties organizations had been saying for years: that innocent members of the community were subjected to unjust campaigns and severe repression because of religion, ethnicity, relationships, connections, or political activity.

But American citizens should never have imagined that this was merely a problem for Muslims. Powers created against disliked or suspect minorities rarely remain confined to those minorities. Very quickly, surveillance expands, executive power grows, secrecy increases, and due process shrinks until practices once considered exceptional become normal and routine. Therefore, defending the civil liberties of Muslims was always a defense of American civil liberties in general.

Lesson Seven: Palestine Was Never Marginal

For decades, Washington tried to separate American policy toward Palestine from the anger generated by American policy in the Arab and Islamic world. It became increasingly difficult to maintain this illusion. The Palestinian cause was and always has been more than a regional conflict; it is about displacement, occupation, settler colonialism, racial supremacy, and the denial of the rights of an entire people. For generations, the United States presented itself as an honest broker while funding, arming, protecting, and providing immunity to the Zionist entity.

After 9/11, the war on terror gave the Zionist entity an exceptional political opportunity. Palestinian resistance could be placed in the global category of “terrorism,” while Israeli occupation and violence were repackaged as “counterterrorism.” The victims of occupation became the security threat, and the occupying aggressor became the victim defending itself.

Meanwhile, the occupation deepened, settlements expanded, and Gaza was placed under siege. Palestinians were repeatedly subjected to brutal military attacks. The West Bank became increasingly fragmented by settlements, checkpoints, military zones, and settler violence. Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa remained under constant pressure, and the suffering of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons increased. The political process that was supposed to pave the way for Palestinians toward statehood became a tool for managing occupation indefinitely.

October 7 did not emerge from a vacuum. One may debate the wisdom, methods, or consequences of the Palestinian attack on the Israeli occupier, but no serious analysis can ignore the conditions that produced it.

Decades of occupation, displacement, siege, settlement expansion, imprisonment, humiliation, and denial of political rights preceded that day. Then came the genocide in Gaza.

The genocide stripped away many of the claims that had supported American policy. For millions of people around the world, especially younger generations in Western societies, the contradiction became impossible to ignore. They saw a people imprisoned, displaced, starved, humiliated, and under constant bombardment, while the most powerful state in the world provided the Zionist entity with destructive weapons, political cover, economic support, and diplomatic protection.

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

Lesson Eight: Islamophobia Was Not Merely Prejudice

Islamophobia became a tool of control and domination. One of the most damaging consequences of 9/11 was the institutionalization of Islamophobia.

Muslims in the United States were not merely subjected to offensive stereotypes; an entire political and security infrastructure developed around the assumption that Islamic religious identity itself constitutes a potential security problem.

When a community is viewed through a security lens, normal behavior becomes suspect. A beard or hijab may attract attention, or strong religiosity may become an assumed sign of “extremism.” Political activity may lead to surveillance, or charitable giving may trigger investigation. Travel abroad may lead to interrogation, and a mosque may be treated as an intelligence environment. A student organization may be monitored, or political opinion about Palestine may be interpreted through a security lens rather than as constitutionally protected political speech.

Informants were sent into mosques and Islamic institutions. Islamic charities were investigated, monitored, smeared, or shut down. Many discovered that their relatives and acquaintances, out of fear, were reporting their conversations to security agencies. Some found themselves unable to travel without knowing why or how to challenge the secret evidence the government held against them. The government and its security institutions went beyond attempting to discover criminal activity to attempting to predict and prevent it in the future — an impossible task without falsely accusing many.

Such policies frightened Muslim communities in America, discouraged the political participation of Muslim citizens, fractured some social relationships within families, and encouraged the creation of new community leaders compliant with unjust government policies and willing to prove their acceptability by distancing themselves from issues that could be considered politically dangerous.

This is why Islamophobia should never be understood as merely personal bigotry; it became a tool through which political behavior could be regulated and disciplined. The lesson for American Muslim communities is clear: rights are not protected through submission. No minority in modern American history has preserved its dignity or maintained its rights by proving it will remain silent or submissive.

Lesson Nine: Arab and Muslim Communities Must Build Their Own Power, Not Seek Acceptance Through Submission

Perhaps this is the most important lesson for American Muslims themselves. Before 9/11, we learned through the struggle against the use of secret evidence in courts that an organized community can challenge unjust government policies. We learned that American Muslims did not have to choose between isolation and assimilation; they could remain faithful to their principles while building alliances with people and institutions of different faiths, ethnicities, ideologies, and political backgrounds around common causes. That experience remains useful.

Political power does not mean flattering officials. Taking photos at the White House is not power. Invitations to government receptions or Ramadan iftars are not power. The presence of Muslim leaders defending catastrophic government policies that harm Muslims is certainly not power.

Power means the ability to organize people around noble principles, values, and great goals. It means building institutions that survive the departure of individuals. It means educating communities and the broader society in which they live. It means developing new and inspiring leaders. It means building independent media, legal capabilities, intellectual resources, political organizing, and forging alliances with other communities in society struggling for justice.

Our previous campaign at the beginning of this century succeeded because it worked simultaneously on many levels: locally and nationally, legally and politically, through media, direct grassroots organizing, and effective coalition building.

There is another indispensable lesson: the Muslim community in the United States must not trade principles for access to officials or decision-makers.

Political engagement may require tactical compromises, but it should never require abandoning core values or crossing red lines, especially on major fundamental issues.

Lesson Ten: Resistance Requires Patience, Organization, and Moral Clarity

The post-9/11 period was partly intended to intimidate Muslims and push them toward political passivity. While it succeeded in some ways, it also produced a generation more wise, bold, and courageous.

American Muslim youth who grew up after 9/11 lived under constant surveillance, harassment, pursuit, Islamophobia, and demonization of their identities, and in an atmosphere of endless foreign wars.

Yet many of them developed a political consciousness far more sophisticated than previous generations.

We have seen Muslim youth participating in alliances for racial justice, immigrant rights, civil liberties, Palestine, anti-Zionist and anti-war movements, and many other social and rights struggles. We have also seen remarkable solidarity with Palestine among young Jewish, Christian, African American, Latino, student, labor, and conscience-driven activists throughout American society.

Here lies hope. The lesson of history is not that power is invincible, but that power appears invincible until it is confronted by organized, resisting people. Anger is not enough, protests are not enough, and social media alone is not enough. Participation in political life and elections alone does not achieve long-term results.

Successful social movements and political campaigns require vision, strategy, organization, leadership, will, determination, resources, alliances, perseverance, and the ability to sustain the struggle for many years. As was true before and after 9/11, it remains essential today.

Twenty-five years later, what then is the final verdict on the post-9/11 era?

The United States responded to one day of horrific violence by unleashing a quarter century of wars and policies that killed and displaced millions of innocents, destabilized entire regions, harmed constitutional protections within its own society, made surveillance, spying, and torture accepted and routine practices, deepened the culture and practice of Islamophobia, and squandered enormous amounts of its wealth and resources while losing enormous amounts of its international standing and reputation.

The Costs of War Project at Brown University estimates direct deaths in post-9/11 war zones at approximately 940,000, in addition to millions of indirect deaths and 38 million displaced.

These policies demonstrated the limits of military superiority. They also revealed the dangers of fear when manipulated by political elites. They showed how easily constitutional and legal rights can be abandoned when an unwanted minority is classified and viewed as a threat to society. These clumsy policies also proved that foreign policy must ultimately reverberate domestically.

But these twenty-five years taught another lesson as well: no political system is permanent, no empire remains dominant forever, and oppressed peoples do not abandon their demand for justice merely because their adversaries appear overwhelmingly powerful.

The world of 2026 is not the world of September 2001. Yes, American power remains immense, but the moment of unipolarity is fading. New centers of global power have emerged. Societies of the Global South are increasingly rejecting a system in which one power claims the right to determine which states may be invaded, which governments may be overthrown, which peoples have the right to resist occupation, and which lives are worthy of protection and respect.

For American Muslims, the choice should also be clearer after twenty-five years. They should neither withdraw from society nor abandon principles for acceptance in society. We must participate, organize, educate, build alliances, defend civil liberties, challenge injustice, and speak honestly about the injustice and unfairness of American foreign policy, even if that carries a heavy price. This is the requirement of great struggles.

Twenty-five years ago, fear and the arrogance of power changed America. Twenty-five years later, our task is not merely to remember what happened on September 11, 2001, but to understand what was done in the name of that day.

The most important lessons of history are not learned by merely commemorating the past, but when living societies refuse to repeat it.

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Author’s Bio:

Sami Al-Arian is a Palestinian-American academic and activist who was prosecuted by the U.S. government in a case that became emblematic of post-9/11 civil liberties violations.