TWENTY-FIVE years can change anything. This Friday when the US marked the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, it was a remarkably different country from when the attacks took place. For much of the quarter century following the attack, the occasion was used to showcase patriotic zealotry, renew calls for attacking yet another Muslim country and spew the usual variety of slurs and insults against American Muslims. While the last persists, the former two have all but disappeared.
In its September/October 2026 issue, Foreign Affairs, the leading journal in Washington’s foreign policy circles, notes: “After 25 years, the United States may finally be closing a chapter that began with the attacks on September 11, 2001, and President George W. Bush’s declaration of a ‘war on terror’ days later.” Authors contributing to the issue sound a similar note, a remarkable departure from the war-mongering diatribes that featured in the magazine over the decades.
These included essays by former defence secretary William Perry who argued in 2001 that the US should fight terrorism with a global campaign rather than just a single military effort directed at one country. Similarly, former secretary of state Colin Powell in 2004 defended the Bush administration’s policies — which included torture and the deadly bombing of tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis — while pursuing non-existent weapons of mass destruction.
For these reasons, it is no small thing to see Foreign Affairs author Audrey Kurth Cronin argue that if Al Qaeda perished, it was owing to its own dysfunctions and follies rather than the multi-trillion-dollar global wars that the US unleashed on the rest of the world.
The years since 9/11 have done their damage.
There are many reasons for this shift in US foreign policy. President Donald Trump’s ill-advised war on Iran does not use the same rhetoric as that deployed by neoconservative Republicans for much of the so-called war on terror. There are political calculations behind this. A huge section of the ‘new right’ (isolationist, nationalist Republicans) is far more interested in shutting down borders than in the war on terror, whose ‘foreign war’ expenditures they see as directly responsible for the lack of resources at home.
One example of this shifting political view can be seen in the positions of Tucker Carlson —a far-right former Fox TV personality who now runs his own media network and has millions of subscribers and loyal fans. In his 9/11 documentary series, which is available on YouTube, Carlson says the ‘official account’ is a lie and the 9/11 Commission was a cover-up. He questions aspects of the established account that 19 Al Qaeda hijackers carried out the attacks planned by figures including Osama bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, and raises allegations that the CIA knew more about some of the hijackers before the attacks. He further questions why Israeli intelligence knew about the possibility of the attacks and whether it warned the US, pointing to how the wars in the Middle East have benefited that country.
All this is to say that whether it is foreign policy establishment journals like Foreign Affairs or far right commentators like Tucker Carlson, the possibility that the war on terror was motivated by incentives other than those stated for decades is becoming an increasingly common perspective. The far left, which was a small bastion of American political thought that opposed the global war, cannot help but be smug about these developments. The Nation, for instance, used the occasion to publish an article that noted how, after 25 years,
it became alright to make jokes about 9/11. More than 100 million Americans alive today were born after the attacks, which it notes cynically, helped the shift.
Sadly, realising that bombing Muslim countries in pursuit of terrorists does not add up is not the same as realising that demonising religion is similarly self-serving and misinformed.
The two and a half decades in which ‘Islamic’ and ‘terror’ were said as one word have done their damage. Indeed, the chunk of diehards that support the war on Iran are mostly happy that the bombing ensures Muslims are being killed.
Nothing is a bigger face-palm to the neoconservative Islamophobes who oversaw the torture and killing of Muslims and the destruction of countless homes than the fact that the city that saw the attacks now has a Muslim mayor. This 9/11, Zohran Mamdani attended a memorial to the victims — his presence and leadership becoming the best testimony against the American-led war on terror and the delusions that promoted it.
The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
Published in Dawn, September 12th, 2026
