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U.S. tanks appear during a military training exercise in May of 2016 in Vaziani, Georgia. (Photo: Artur Widak/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Twenty years ago, the United States sustained the first substantial attacks on the mainland since the War of 1812. It was a collective shock to all Americans who believed their country to be impregnable. The Cold War had produced the existential dread of a nuclear attack, but that always lurked in the realm of the maybe. On a day-to-day basis, Americans enjoyed the exceptional privilege of national security. No one would dare attack us for fear of massive retaliation.
Little did we imagine that someone would attack us in order to precipitate massive retaliation.
Osama bin Laden understood that American power was vulnerable when overextended. He knew that the greatest military power in the history of the world, deranged by a desire for vengeance, could be lured into taking a cakewalk into a quagmire. With the attacks of 9/11, al-Qaeda turned ordinary American airplanes into weapons to attack American targets. In the larger sense, bin Laden used the entire American army to destroy the foundations of American empire.
Even in our profound narcissism, Americans are slowly realizing, like the Brits so many years ago, that the imperial game is up.
The commentary on this twentieth anniversary of 9/11 has been predictably shallow: how the attacks changed travel, fiction, the arts in general. Consider this week's Washington Post magazine section in which 28 contributors reflect on the ways that the attacks changed the world.
"The attack would alter the lives of U.S. troops and their families, and millions of people in Afghanistan and Iraq," the editors write. "It would set the course of political parties and help to decide who would lead our country. In short, 9/11 changed the world in demonstrable, massive and heartbreaking ways. But the ripple effects altered our lives in subtle, often-overlooked ways as well."
The subsequent entries on art, fashion, architecture, policing, journalism, and so on attempt to describe these subtler effects. Yet it's difficult to read this special issue without concluding that 9/11 in fact didn't change the world much at all.
The demonization of American Muslims? That began long before the fateful day, cresting after the Iranian revolution in 1979. The paranoid retrenchment in American architecture? U.S. embassies were rebuilt not in response to 9/11 but the embassy bombings in Beirut in 1983-4 and Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. The impact of 9/11 on the arts can be can be traced through a handful of works like Spike Lee's 25th Hour or the TV series 24 or Don DeLillo's Falling Man, but it didn't produce a new artistic movement like Dada in the wake of World War I or cli-fi in response to the climate crisis. Even the experience of flying hasn't changed that much beyond beefed-up security measures. At this point, the introduction of personal in-flight entertainment systems has arguably altered the flying experience more profoundly.
And isn't the assertion that 9/11 changed everything exceptionally America-centric? Americans were deeply affected, as were the places invaded by American troops. But how much has life in Japan or Zimbabwe or Chile truly changed as a result of 9/11? Of course, Americans have always believed that, as the song goes, "we are the world."
More than a Mistake
In a more thoughtful Post consideration of 9/11, Carlos Lozado reviews many of the books that have come out in the last 20 years on what went wrong. In his summary, U.S. policy proceeds like a cascade of falling dominos, each one a mistake that follows from the previous and sets into motion the next.
Successive administrations underestimated al-Qaeda and failed to see signs of preparation for the 9/11 attacks. In the aftermath of the tragedy, the George W. Bush administration mistakenly followed the example of numerous empires in thinking that it could subdue Afghanistan and remake it in the image of the colonial overlord. It then compounded that error by invading Iraq with the justification that Saddam Hussein was in cahoots with al-Qaeda, was building up a nuclear program, or was otherwise part of an alliance of nations determined to take advantage of an America still reeling from the 9/11 attacks. Subsequent administrations made the mistake of doubling down in Afghanistan, expanding the war on terror to other battlefields, and failing to end U.S. operations at propitious moments like the killing of Osama bin Laden.
Lozado concludes by pointing out that Donald Trump is in many ways a product of the war on terror that followed 9/11. "Absent the war on terror, it harder to imagine a presidential candidate decrying a sitting commander in chief as foreign, Muslim, illegitimate--and using that lie as a successful political platform," he writes. "Absent the war on terror, it is harder to imagine a travel ban against people from Muslim-majority countries. Absent the war on terror, it is harder to imagine American protesters labeled terrorists, or a secretary of defense describing the nation's urban streets as a 'battle space' to be dominated."
But to understand the rise of Donald Trump, it's necessary to see 9/11 and its aftermath as more than just the product of a series of errors of perception and judgment. Implicit in Lozado's review is the notion that America somehow lost its way, that an otherwise robust intelligence community screwed the pooch, that some opportunistic politicians used the attacks to short-circuit democracy, public oversight, and even military logic. But this assumes that the war on terror represents a substantial rift in the American fabric.
The 9/11 attacks were a surprise. The response wasn't.
The United States had already launched a war against Iraq in 1991. It had already mistakenly identified Iran, Hamas, and jihadist forces like al-Qaeda as enemies linked by their broad religious identity. It had built a worldwide arsenal of bases and kept up extraordinarily high levels of military spending to maintain full-spectrum dominance. Few American politicians questioned the necessity of this hegemony, though liberals tended to prefer that U.S. allies shoulder some of the burden and neoconservatives favored a more aggressive effort to roll back the influence of Russia, China, and other regional hegemons.
The "war on terror" effectively began in 1979 when the United States established its "state sponsors of terrorism" list. The Reagan administration used "counter-terrorism" as an organizing principle of U.S. foreign policy throughout the 1980s. In the post-Cold War era, the Clinton administration attempted to demonstrate its hawk credentials by launching counter-terrorism strikes in Sudan, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
What changed after 9/11 is that neoconservatives could push their regime-change agenda more successfully because the attacks had temporarily suppressed the Vietnam syndrome, a response to the negative consequences of extended overseas military engagements. Every liberal in Congress, with the exception of the indomitable Barbara Lee (D-Ca), supported the invasion of Afghanistan, as if they'd been born just the day before. That just happens to be one of those side effects of empire listed in fine print on the label: periodic and profound amnesia.
In this sense, Trump is not a product of the war on terror. His views on U.S. foreign policy have ranged across the spectrum from jingoistic to non-interventionist. His attitude toward protestors was positively Nixonian. And his recourse to conspiracy theories derived from his legendary disregard for truth. Regardless of 9/11, Trump's ego would have propelled him toward the White House.
The surge of popular support that placed him in the Oval Office, on the other hand, can only be understood in the post-9/11 context. Cyberspace was full of all sorts of nonsense prior to 9/11 (remember the Y2K predictions?). But the attacks gave birth to a new variety of "truthers" that insisted, against all contrary evidence, that nefarious forces had constructed a self-serving reality. The attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon were "inside jobs." The Newtown shootings had been staged by "crisis actors." Barack Obama was born in Kenya.
The shock of the United States being so dramatically and improbably attacked by a couple dozen foreigners was so great that some Americans, uncoupled from their bedrock assumptions about their own national security, were now willing to believe anything. Ultimately, they were even willing to believe someone who lied more consistently and more frequently than any other politician in U.S. history.
Trump effectively promised to erase 9/11 from the American consciousness and rewind the clock back to the golden moment of unipolar U.S. power. In offering such selective memory loss, Trump was a quintessentially imperial president.
The Real Legacy of 9/11
Even after the British formally began to withdraw from the empire business after World War II, they couldn't help but continue to act as if the sun didn't set on their domains. It was the British that masterminded the coup that deposed Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran in 1953. It was the British at the head of the invasion of Egypt in 1956 to recapture control of the Suez Canal. Between 1949 and 1970, Britain launched 34 military interventions in all.
The UK apparently never received the memo that it was no longer a dominant military power. It's hard for empires to retire gracefully. Just ask the French.
The final U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan last month was in many ways a courageous and successful action by the Biden administration, though it's hard to come to that conclusion by reading the media accounts. President Biden made the difficult political decision to stick to the terms that his predecessor negotiated with the Taliban last year. Despite being caught by surprise by the Taliban's rapid seizure of power over the summer, the administration was able to evacuate around 120,000 people, a number that virtually no one would have expected prior to the fall of Kabul. Sure, the administration should have been better prepared. Sure, it should have made a commitment to evacuating more Afghans who fear for their lives under the Taliban. But it made the right move to finally end U.S. presence in that country.
Biden has made clear that U.S. counterterrorism strikes in Afghanistan will continue, that the war on terror in the region is not over. Yet, U.S. operations in the Middle East now have the feel of those British interventions in the twilight of empire. America is retreating, slowly but surely and sometimes under a protective hail of bullets. The Islamic State and its various incarnations have become the problem of the Taliban--and the Syrian state, the Iraq state, the Libyan state (such that it is), and so on.
Meanwhile, the United States turns its attention toward China. But this is no Soviet Union. China is a powerhouse economy with a government that has skillfully used nationalism to bolster domestic support. With trade and investment, Beijing has recreated a Sinocentric tributary system in Asia. America really doesn't have the capabilities to roll back Chinese influence in its own backyard.
So that, in the end, is what 9/11 has changed. The impact on culture, on the daily lives of those not touched directly by the tragedies, has been minimal. The deeper changes--on perceptions of Muslims, on the war on terror--had been set in motion before the attacks happened.
But America's place in the world? In 2000, the United States was still riding high in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War. Today, despite the strains of MAGA that can be heard throughout America's political culture, the United States has become one major power among many. It can't dictate policy down the barrel of a gun. Economically it must reckon with China. In geopolitics, it has become the unreliable superpower.
Even in our profound narcissism, Americans are slowly realizing, like the Brits so many years ago, that the imperial game is up.
Trump and Musk are on an unconstitutional rampage, aiming for virtually every corner of the federal government. These two right-wing billionaires are targeting nurses, scientists, teachers, daycare providers, judges, veterans, air traffic controllers, and nuclear safety inspectors. No one is safe. The food stamps program, Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are next. It’s an unprecedented disaster and a five-alarm fire, but there will be a reckoning. The people did not vote for this. The American people do not want this dystopian hellscape that hides behind claims of “efficiency.” Still, in reality, it is all a giveaway to corporate interests and the libertarian dreams of far-right oligarchs like Musk. Common Dreams is playing a vital role by reporting day and night on this orgy of corruption and greed, as well as what everyday people can do to organize and fight back. As a people-powered nonprofit news outlet, we cover issues the corporate media never will, but we can only continue with our readers’ support. |
Twenty years ago, the United States sustained the first substantial attacks on the mainland since the War of 1812. It was a collective shock to all Americans who believed their country to be impregnable. The Cold War had produced the existential dread of a nuclear attack, but that always lurked in the realm of the maybe. On a day-to-day basis, Americans enjoyed the exceptional privilege of national security. No one would dare attack us for fear of massive retaliation.
Little did we imagine that someone would attack us in order to precipitate massive retaliation.
Osama bin Laden understood that American power was vulnerable when overextended. He knew that the greatest military power in the history of the world, deranged by a desire for vengeance, could be lured into taking a cakewalk into a quagmire. With the attacks of 9/11, al-Qaeda turned ordinary American airplanes into weapons to attack American targets. In the larger sense, bin Laden used the entire American army to destroy the foundations of American empire.
Even in our profound narcissism, Americans are slowly realizing, like the Brits so many years ago, that the imperial game is up.
The commentary on this twentieth anniversary of 9/11 has been predictably shallow: how the attacks changed travel, fiction, the arts in general. Consider this week's Washington Post magazine section in which 28 contributors reflect on the ways that the attacks changed the world.
"The attack would alter the lives of U.S. troops and their families, and millions of people in Afghanistan and Iraq," the editors write. "It would set the course of political parties and help to decide who would lead our country. In short, 9/11 changed the world in demonstrable, massive and heartbreaking ways. But the ripple effects altered our lives in subtle, often-overlooked ways as well."
The subsequent entries on art, fashion, architecture, policing, journalism, and so on attempt to describe these subtler effects. Yet it's difficult to read this special issue without concluding that 9/11 in fact didn't change the world much at all.
The demonization of American Muslims? That began long before the fateful day, cresting after the Iranian revolution in 1979. The paranoid retrenchment in American architecture? U.S. embassies were rebuilt not in response to 9/11 but the embassy bombings in Beirut in 1983-4 and Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. The impact of 9/11 on the arts can be can be traced through a handful of works like Spike Lee's 25th Hour or the TV series 24 or Don DeLillo's Falling Man, but it didn't produce a new artistic movement like Dada in the wake of World War I or cli-fi in response to the climate crisis. Even the experience of flying hasn't changed that much beyond beefed-up security measures. At this point, the introduction of personal in-flight entertainment systems has arguably altered the flying experience more profoundly.
And isn't the assertion that 9/11 changed everything exceptionally America-centric? Americans were deeply affected, as were the places invaded by American troops. But how much has life in Japan or Zimbabwe or Chile truly changed as a result of 9/11? Of course, Americans have always believed that, as the song goes, "we are the world."
More than a Mistake
In a more thoughtful Post consideration of 9/11, Carlos Lozado reviews many of the books that have come out in the last 20 years on what went wrong. In his summary, U.S. policy proceeds like a cascade of falling dominos, each one a mistake that follows from the previous and sets into motion the next.
Successive administrations underestimated al-Qaeda and failed to see signs of preparation for the 9/11 attacks. In the aftermath of the tragedy, the George W. Bush administration mistakenly followed the example of numerous empires in thinking that it could subdue Afghanistan and remake it in the image of the colonial overlord. It then compounded that error by invading Iraq with the justification that Saddam Hussein was in cahoots with al-Qaeda, was building up a nuclear program, or was otherwise part of an alliance of nations determined to take advantage of an America still reeling from the 9/11 attacks. Subsequent administrations made the mistake of doubling down in Afghanistan, expanding the war on terror to other battlefields, and failing to end U.S. operations at propitious moments like the killing of Osama bin Laden.
Lozado concludes by pointing out that Donald Trump is in many ways a product of the war on terror that followed 9/11. "Absent the war on terror, it harder to imagine a presidential candidate decrying a sitting commander in chief as foreign, Muslim, illegitimate--and using that lie as a successful political platform," he writes. "Absent the war on terror, it is harder to imagine a travel ban against people from Muslim-majority countries. Absent the war on terror, it is harder to imagine American protesters labeled terrorists, or a secretary of defense describing the nation's urban streets as a 'battle space' to be dominated."
But to understand the rise of Donald Trump, it's necessary to see 9/11 and its aftermath as more than just the product of a series of errors of perception and judgment. Implicit in Lozado's review is the notion that America somehow lost its way, that an otherwise robust intelligence community screwed the pooch, that some opportunistic politicians used the attacks to short-circuit democracy, public oversight, and even military logic. But this assumes that the war on terror represents a substantial rift in the American fabric.
The 9/11 attacks were a surprise. The response wasn't.
The United States had already launched a war against Iraq in 1991. It had already mistakenly identified Iran, Hamas, and jihadist forces like al-Qaeda as enemies linked by their broad religious identity. It had built a worldwide arsenal of bases and kept up extraordinarily high levels of military spending to maintain full-spectrum dominance. Few American politicians questioned the necessity of this hegemony, though liberals tended to prefer that U.S. allies shoulder some of the burden and neoconservatives favored a more aggressive effort to roll back the influence of Russia, China, and other regional hegemons.
The "war on terror" effectively began in 1979 when the United States established its "state sponsors of terrorism" list. The Reagan administration used "counter-terrorism" as an organizing principle of U.S. foreign policy throughout the 1980s. In the post-Cold War era, the Clinton administration attempted to demonstrate its hawk credentials by launching counter-terrorism strikes in Sudan, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
What changed after 9/11 is that neoconservatives could push their regime-change agenda more successfully because the attacks had temporarily suppressed the Vietnam syndrome, a response to the negative consequences of extended overseas military engagements. Every liberal in Congress, with the exception of the indomitable Barbara Lee (D-Ca), supported the invasion of Afghanistan, as if they'd been born just the day before. That just happens to be one of those side effects of empire listed in fine print on the label: periodic and profound amnesia.
In this sense, Trump is not a product of the war on terror. His views on U.S. foreign policy have ranged across the spectrum from jingoistic to non-interventionist. His attitude toward protestors was positively Nixonian. And his recourse to conspiracy theories derived from his legendary disregard for truth. Regardless of 9/11, Trump's ego would have propelled him toward the White House.
The surge of popular support that placed him in the Oval Office, on the other hand, can only be understood in the post-9/11 context. Cyberspace was full of all sorts of nonsense prior to 9/11 (remember the Y2K predictions?). But the attacks gave birth to a new variety of "truthers" that insisted, against all contrary evidence, that nefarious forces had constructed a self-serving reality. The attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon were "inside jobs." The Newtown shootings had been staged by "crisis actors." Barack Obama was born in Kenya.
The shock of the United States being so dramatically and improbably attacked by a couple dozen foreigners was so great that some Americans, uncoupled from their bedrock assumptions about their own national security, were now willing to believe anything. Ultimately, they were even willing to believe someone who lied more consistently and more frequently than any other politician in U.S. history.
Trump effectively promised to erase 9/11 from the American consciousness and rewind the clock back to the golden moment of unipolar U.S. power. In offering such selective memory loss, Trump was a quintessentially imperial president.
The Real Legacy of 9/11
Even after the British formally began to withdraw from the empire business after World War II, they couldn't help but continue to act as if the sun didn't set on their domains. It was the British that masterminded the coup that deposed Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran in 1953. It was the British at the head of the invasion of Egypt in 1956 to recapture control of the Suez Canal. Between 1949 and 1970, Britain launched 34 military interventions in all.
The UK apparently never received the memo that it was no longer a dominant military power. It's hard for empires to retire gracefully. Just ask the French.
The final U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan last month was in many ways a courageous and successful action by the Biden administration, though it's hard to come to that conclusion by reading the media accounts. President Biden made the difficult political decision to stick to the terms that his predecessor negotiated with the Taliban last year. Despite being caught by surprise by the Taliban's rapid seizure of power over the summer, the administration was able to evacuate around 120,000 people, a number that virtually no one would have expected prior to the fall of Kabul. Sure, the administration should have been better prepared. Sure, it should have made a commitment to evacuating more Afghans who fear for their lives under the Taliban. But it made the right move to finally end U.S. presence in that country.
Biden has made clear that U.S. counterterrorism strikes in Afghanistan will continue, that the war on terror in the region is not over. Yet, U.S. operations in the Middle East now have the feel of those British interventions in the twilight of empire. America is retreating, slowly but surely and sometimes under a protective hail of bullets. The Islamic State and its various incarnations have become the problem of the Taliban--and the Syrian state, the Iraq state, the Libyan state (such that it is), and so on.
Meanwhile, the United States turns its attention toward China. But this is no Soviet Union. China is a powerhouse economy with a government that has skillfully used nationalism to bolster domestic support. With trade and investment, Beijing has recreated a Sinocentric tributary system in Asia. America really doesn't have the capabilities to roll back Chinese influence in its own backyard.
So that, in the end, is what 9/11 has changed. The impact on culture, on the daily lives of those not touched directly by the tragedies, has been minimal. The deeper changes--on perceptions of Muslims, on the war on terror--had been set in motion before the attacks happened.
But America's place in the world? In 2000, the United States was still riding high in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War. Today, despite the strains of MAGA that can be heard throughout America's political culture, the United States has become one major power among many. It can't dictate policy down the barrel of a gun. Economically it must reckon with China. In geopolitics, it has become the unreliable superpower.
Even in our profound narcissism, Americans are slowly realizing, like the Brits so many years ago, that the imperial game is up.
Twenty years ago, the United States sustained the first substantial attacks on the mainland since the War of 1812. It was a collective shock to all Americans who believed their country to be impregnable. The Cold War had produced the existential dread of a nuclear attack, but that always lurked in the realm of the maybe. On a day-to-day basis, Americans enjoyed the exceptional privilege of national security. No one would dare attack us for fear of massive retaliation.
Little did we imagine that someone would attack us in order to precipitate massive retaliation.
Osama bin Laden understood that American power was vulnerable when overextended. He knew that the greatest military power in the history of the world, deranged by a desire for vengeance, could be lured into taking a cakewalk into a quagmire. With the attacks of 9/11, al-Qaeda turned ordinary American airplanes into weapons to attack American targets. In the larger sense, bin Laden used the entire American army to destroy the foundations of American empire.
Even in our profound narcissism, Americans are slowly realizing, like the Brits so many years ago, that the imperial game is up.
The commentary on this twentieth anniversary of 9/11 has been predictably shallow: how the attacks changed travel, fiction, the arts in general. Consider this week's Washington Post magazine section in which 28 contributors reflect on the ways that the attacks changed the world.
"The attack would alter the lives of U.S. troops and their families, and millions of people in Afghanistan and Iraq," the editors write. "It would set the course of political parties and help to decide who would lead our country. In short, 9/11 changed the world in demonstrable, massive and heartbreaking ways. But the ripple effects altered our lives in subtle, often-overlooked ways as well."
The subsequent entries on art, fashion, architecture, policing, journalism, and so on attempt to describe these subtler effects. Yet it's difficult to read this special issue without concluding that 9/11 in fact didn't change the world much at all.
The demonization of American Muslims? That began long before the fateful day, cresting after the Iranian revolution in 1979. The paranoid retrenchment in American architecture? U.S. embassies were rebuilt not in response to 9/11 but the embassy bombings in Beirut in 1983-4 and Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. The impact of 9/11 on the arts can be can be traced through a handful of works like Spike Lee's 25th Hour or the TV series 24 or Don DeLillo's Falling Man, but it didn't produce a new artistic movement like Dada in the wake of World War I or cli-fi in response to the climate crisis. Even the experience of flying hasn't changed that much beyond beefed-up security measures. At this point, the introduction of personal in-flight entertainment systems has arguably altered the flying experience more profoundly.
And isn't the assertion that 9/11 changed everything exceptionally America-centric? Americans were deeply affected, as were the places invaded by American troops. But how much has life in Japan or Zimbabwe or Chile truly changed as a result of 9/11? Of course, Americans have always believed that, as the song goes, "we are the world."
More than a Mistake
In a more thoughtful Post consideration of 9/11, Carlos Lozado reviews many of the books that have come out in the last 20 years on what went wrong. In his summary, U.S. policy proceeds like a cascade of falling dominos, each one a mistake that follows from the previous and sets into motion the next.
Successive administrations underestimated al-Qaeda and failed to see signs of preparation for the 9/11 attacks. In the aftermath of the tragedy, the George W. Bush administration mistakenly followed the example of numerous empires in thinking that it could subdue Afghanistan and remake it in the image of the colonial overlord. It then compounded that error by invading Iraq with the justification that Saddam Hussein was in cahoots with al-Qaeda, was building up a nuclear program, or was otherwise part of an alliance of nations determined to take advantage of an America still reeling from the 9/11 attacks. Subsequent administrations made the mistake of doubling down in Afghanistan, expanding the war on terror to other battlefields, and failing to end U.S. operations at propitious moments like the killing of Osama bin Laden.
Lozado concludes by pointing out that Donald Trump is in many ways a product of the war on terror that followed 9/11. "Absent the war on terror, it harder to imagine a presidential candidate decrying a sitting commander in chief as foreign, Muslim, illegitimate--and using that lie as a successful political platform," he writes. "Absent the war on terror, it is harder to imagine a travel ban against people from Muslim-majority countries. Absent the war on terror, it is harder to imagine American protesters labeled terrorists, or a secretary of defense describing the nation's urban streets as a 'battle space' to be dominated."
But to understand the rise of Donald Trump, it's necessary to see 9/11 and its aftermath as more than just the product of a series of errors of perception and judgment. Implicit in Lozado's review is the notion that America somehow lost its way, that an otherwise robust intelligence community screwed the pooch, that some opportunistic politicians used the attacks to short-circuit democracy, public oversight, and even military logic. But this assumes that the war on terror represents a substantial rift in the American fabric.
The 9/11 attacks were a surprise. The response wasn't.
The United States had already launched a war against Iraq in 1991. It had already mistakenly identified Iran, Hamas, and jihadist forces like al-Qaeda as enemies linked by their broad religious identity. It had built a worldwide arsenal of bases and kept up extraordinarily high levels of military spending to maintain full-spectrum dominance. Few American politicians questioned the necessity of this hegemony, though liberals tended to prefer that U.S. allies shoulder some of the burden and neoconservatives favored a more aggressive effort to roll back the influence of Russia, China, and other regional hegemons.
The "war on terror" effectively began in 1979 when the United States established its "state sponsors of terrorism" list. The Reagan administration used "counter-terrorism" as an organizing principle of U.S. foreign policy throughout the 1980s. In the post-Cold War era, the Clinton administration attempted to demonstrate its hawk credentials by launching counter-terrorism strikes in Sudan, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
What changed after 9/11 is that neoconservatives could push their regime-change agenda more successfully because the attacks had temporarily suppressed the Vietnam syndrome, a response to the negative consequences of extended overseas military engagements. Every liberal in Congress, with the exception of the indomitable Barbara Lee (D-Ca), supported the invasion of Afghanistan, as if they'd been born just the day before. That just happens to be one of those side effects of empire listed in fine print on the label: periodic and profound amnesia.
In this sense, Trump is not a product of the war on terror. His views on U.S. foreign policy have ranged across the spectrum from jingoistic to non-interventionist. His attitude toward protestors was positively Nixonian. And his recourse to conspiracy theories derived from his legendary disregard for truth. Regardless of 9/11, Trump's ego would have propelled him toward the White House.
The surge of popular support that placed him in the Oval Office, on the other hand, can only be understood in the post-9/11 context. Cyberspace was full of all sorts of nonsense prior to 9/11 (remember the Y2K predictions?). But the attacks gave birth to a new variety of "truthers" that insisted, against all contrary evidence, that nefarious forces had constructed a self-serving reality. The attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon were "inside jobs." The Newtown shootings had been staged by "crisis actors." Barack Obama was born in Kenya.
The shock of the United States being so dramatically and improbably attacked by a couple dozen foreigners was so great that some Americans, uncoupled from their bedrock assumptions about their own national security, were now willing to believe anything. Ultimately, they were even willing to believe someone who lied more consistently and more frequently than any other politician in U.S. history.
Trump effectively promised to erase 9/11 from the American consciousness and rewind the clock back to the golden moment of unipolar U.S. power. In offering such selective memory loss, Trump was a quintessentially imperial president.
The Real Legacy of 9/11
Even after the British formally began to withdraw from the empire business after World War II, they couldn't help but continue to act as if the sun didn't set on their domains. It was the British that masterminded the coup that deposed Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran in 1953. It was the British at the head of the invasion of Egypt in 1956 to recapture control of the Suez Canal. Between 1949 and 1970, Britain launched 34 military interventions in all.
The UK apparently never received the memo that it was no longer a dominant military power. It's hard for empires to retire gracefully. Just ask the French.
The final U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan last month was in many ways a courageous and successful action by the Biden administration, though it's hard to come to that conclusion by reading the media accounts. President Biden made the difficult political decision to stick to the terms that his predecessor negotiated with the Taliban last year. Despite being caught by surprise by the Taliban's rapid seizure of power over the summer, the administration was able to evacuate around 120,000 people, a number that virtually no one would have expected prior to the fall of Kabul. Sure, the administration should have been better prepared. Sure, it should have made a commitment to evacuating more Afghans who fear for their lives under the Taliban. But it made the right move to finally end U.S. presence in that country.
Biden has made clear that U.S. counterterrorism strikes in Afghanistan will continue, that the war on terror in the region is not over. Yet, U.S. operations in the Middle East now have the feel of those British interventions in the twilight of empire. America is retreating, slowly but surely and sometimes under a protective hail of bullets. The Islamic State and its various incarnations have become the problem of the Taliban--and the Syrian state, the Iraq state, the Libyan state (such that it is), and so on.
Meanwhile, the United States turns its attention toward China. But this is no Soviet Union. China is a powerhouse economy with a government that has skillfully used nationalism to bolster domestic support. With trade and investment, Beijing has recreated a Sinocentric tributary system in Asia. America really doesn't have the capabilities to roll back Chinese influence in its own backyard.
So that, in the end, is what 9/11 has changed. The impact on culture, on the daily lives of those not touched directly by the tragedies, has been minimal. The deeper changes--on perceptions of Muslims, on the war on terror--had been set in motion before the attacks happened.
But America's place in the world? In 2000, the United States was still riding high in the aftermath of the end of the Cold War. Today, despite the strains of MAGA that can be heard throughout America's political culture, the United States has become one major power among many. It can't dictate policy down the barrel of a gun. Economically it must reckon with China. In geopolitics, it has become the unreliable superpower.
Even in our profound narcissism, Americans are slowly realizing, like the Brits so many years ago, that the imperial game is up.
The new Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator joins "a team of snake oil salesmen and anti-science flunkies that have already shown disdain for the American people and their health," said one critic.
Echoing a party-line vote by the U.S. Senate Finance Committee last week, the chamber's Republicans on Thursday confirmed President Donald Trump's nominee to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, former televison host Dr. Mehmet Oz.
Since Trump nominated Oz—who previously ran as a Republican for a U.S. Senate seat in Pennsylvania—a wide range of critics have argued that the celebrity cardiothoracic surgeon "is profoundly unqualified to lead any part of our healthcare system, let alone an agency as important as CMS," in the words of Robert Weissman, co-president of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen.
After Thursday's 53-45 vote to confirm Oz, Weissman declared that "Republicans in the Senate continued to just be a rubber stamp for a dangerous agenda that threatens to turn back the clock on healthcare in America."
Weissman warned that "in addition to having significant conflicts of interest, Oz is now poised to help enact the Trump administration's dangerous agenda, which seeks to strip crucial healthcare services through Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act from hundreds of millions of Americans and to use that money to give tax breaks to billionaires."
"As he showed in his confirmation hearing, Oz will also seek to further privatize Medicare, increasing the risk that seniors will receive inferior care and further threatening the long-term health of the Medicare program. We already know that privatized Medicare costs taxpayers nearly $100 billion annually in excess costs," he continued, referring to Medicare Advantage plans.
CMS is part of the Department of Health and Human Services, now led by Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—who, like Oz, came under fire for his record of dubious claims during the confirmation process. Weissman said that "Dr. Oz is joining a team of snake oil salesmen and anti-science flunkies that have already shown disdain for the American people and their health. This is yet another dark day for healthcare in America under Trump."
In the middle of Trump's tariff disaster, the Senate is voting to confirm quack grifter Dr. Oz to lead the Centers for Medicaid & Medicare Services.
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— Jen Bendery (@jbendery.bsky.social) April 3, 2025 at 12:29 PM
Oz's confirmation came a day after Trump announced globally disruptive tariffs and Senate Republicans unveiled a budget plan that would give the wealthy trillions of dollars in tax cuts at the expense of federal food assistance and healthcare programs.
"While Dr. Oz would rather play coy, this is no hypothetical. Harmful cuts to Medicaid or Medicare are unavoidable in the Trump-Republican budget plan that prioritizes another giant tax break for the president's billionaire and corporate donors," Tony Carrk, executive director of the watchdog group Accountable.US, said ahead of the vote.
"None of Dr. Oz's 'miracle' cures that he's peddled over the years will help seniors when their fundamental health security is ripped away to make the rich richer," Carrk continued. "And while privatizing Medicare may enrich Dr. Oz's family and big insurance friends, it will cost taxpayers far more and leave millions of patients vulnerable to denials of care and higher out-of-pocket costs."
Lee Saunders, president of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), was similarly critical, saying after the vote that "at a time when our population is growing older and the need for access to home care, nursing homes, affordable prescription drugs, and quality medical care has never been greater, Americans deserve better than a snake oil salesman leading the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services."
"Dr. Mehmet Oz has been shilling pseudoscience to line his own pockets. He can't be trusted to defend Medicare and Medicaid from billionaires who want to dismantle and privatize the foundation of affordable healthcare in this country," the union leader added. "AFSCME members—including nurses, home care and childcare providers, social workers and more—will be watching and fighting back against any effort to weaken Medicare and Medicaid. The 147 million seniors, children, Americans with disabilities, and low-income workers who rely on these programs for affordable access to healthcare deserve nothing less."
"While your kids are getting ready for school, kids in Gaza were once against just massacred in one," said one observer.
Israeli airstrikes targeted at least three more school shelters in the Gaza Strip on Thursday, killing dozens of Palestinians and wounding scores of others on a day when local officials said that more than 100 people were slain by occupation forces.
Gaza's Government Media Office said that at least 29 people—including 14 children and five women—were killed and over 100 others were wounded when at least four missiles struck the Dar al-Arqam school complex in the Tuffah neighborhood of eastern Gaza City, where hundreds of Palestinians were sheltering after being forcibly displaced from other parts of the embattled coastal enclave by Israel's 535-day assault.
Al Jazeera reported that "when terrified men, women, and children fled from one school building to another, the bombs followed them," and "when bystanders rushed to help, they too became victims."
A first responder from the Palestine Red Crescent Society—which is reeling from this week's discovery of a mass grave containing the bodies of eight of its members, some of whom had allegedly been bound and executed by Israel Defense Forces (IDF) troops—told Al Jazeera that "we were absolutely shocked by the scale of this massacre," whose victims were "mostly women and children."
Warning: Video contains graphic images of death.
Horrifying scenes following the Dar Al-Arqam School Massacre!#Gaza pic.twitter.com/xOvuq3Zztx
— Dr. Zain Al-Abbadi (@ZainAbbadi11) April 3, 2025
An official from Gaza's Civil Defense, five of whose members were also found in the mass grave on Sunday, said: "What's going on here is a wake-up call to the entire world. This war and these massacres against women and children must stop immediately. The children are being killed in cold blood here in Gaza. Our teams cannot perform their duties properly.
Gaza Health Ministry spokesperson Zaher al-Wahidi said that the death toll was likely to rise, as some survivors were critically injured.
Dozens of victims were reportedly trapped beneath rubble of Thursday's airstrikes, but they could not be rescued due to a lack of equipment.
The IDF claimed that "key Hamas terrorists" were targeted in a strike on what it called a "command center." Israeli officials routinely claim—often with little or no evidence—that Palestinian civilians it kills are members of Hamas or other militant resistance groups.
Israel also bombed the nearby al-Sabah school, killing four people, as well as the Fahd School in Gaza City, with three reported fatalities.
Some of the deadliest bombings in the war have been carried out against refugees sheltering in schools, many of them run by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA)—at least 280 of whose staff members have been killed by Israeli forces during the war.
The United Nations Children's Fund has called Gaza "the world's most dangerous place to be a child." Last year, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres for the first time added Israel to his so-called "List of Shame" of countries that kill and injure children during wars and other armed conflicts. More than 17,500 Palestinian children have been killed in Gaza since October 2023, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
Thursday's school bombings sparked worldwide outrage and calls to hold Israel accountable.
"While your kids are getting ready for school, kids in Gaza were once against just massacred in one," Australian journalist, activist, and progressive politician Sophie McNeill wrote on social media. "We must sanction Israel now!"
There were other IDF massacres on Thursday, with local officials reporting that more than 100 people were killed in Israeli attacks since dawn. Al-Wahidi said more than 30 people were killed in strikes on homes in Gaza City's Shejaya neighborhood, citing records at al-Ahli Arab Baptist Hospital in Gaza.
Al Jazeera reported that al-Ahli's emergency room "is overwhelmed with casualties and, as is so often the case over the past 18 months, the victims are Gaza's youngest."
Thursday's intensified airstrikes came as Israeli forces pushed into the ruins of the southern city of Rafah. Local and international media reported that hundreds of thousands of Palestinian families fled from the area, which Israel said it will seize as part of a new "security zone."
Human rights defenders around the world condemned U.S.-backed killing and mass displacement, with U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)—whose bid to block some sAmerican arms sales to Israel was rejected by the Senate on Thursday—saying: "There is a name and a term for forcibly expelling people from where they live. It is called ethnic cleansing. It is illegal. It is a war crime."
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, his former defense minister, are fugitives from the International Criminal Court, which last year issued arrest warrants for the pair over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity. Israel is also facing a genocide case at the International Court of Justice.
According to Gaza officials, Israeli forces have killed or wounded at least 175,000 Palestinians in Gaza, including upward of 14,000 people who are missing and presumed dead and buried beneath rubble. Almost everyone in Gaza has been forcibly displaced at least once, and the "complete siege" imposed by Israel has fueled widespread and sometimes deadly starvation and disease.
"Working-class candidate v. billionaire political race. I'm here for it," wrote one longtime progressive strategist.
Dan Osborn, an Independent U.S. Senate candidate who struck a chord with working-class voters in Nebraska and came within striking distance of unseating his Republican opponent last year, announced Thursday that he's considering another run, this time challenging GOP Sen. Pete GOP Ricketts, who is up for election in 2026.
"We could replace a billionaire with a mechanic," Osborn wrote in a thread on X on Thursday. "I'll run against Pete Ricketts—if the support is there." Osborn said that he's launching an exploratory committee and would run as Independent, as he did in 2024.
Ricketts has served as a senator since 2023, and prior to that was the governor of Nebraska from 2015-2023. By one estimate, Ricketts has a net worth of over $165 million—though the wealth of his father, brokerage founder Joe Ricketts, and family is estimated to be worth $4.1 billion, according to Forbes.
A mechanic and unionist who helped lead a strike against Kellogg's cereal company, Osborn lost to Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) by less than 7 points in November 2024 in what became an unexpectedly close race.
Although he didn't win, he overperformed the national Democratic ticket by a higher percentage than other candidates running against Republicans in competitive Senate races, according to The Nation.
"Billionaires have bought up the country and are carving it up day by day," said Osborn Thursday. "The economy they've built is good for them, bad for us. Good for huge multinationals and multibillionaires. Bad for workers. Bad for small businesses, bad for family farmers. Bad for anyone who wants Social Security to survive. Bad for your PAYCHECK."
Osborn cast the potential race as between "someone who's spent his life working for a living and will never take an order from a corporation or a party boss" and "someone who's never worked a day in his life and is entirely beholden to corporations and party."
"We could take on this illness, the billionaire class, directly," he said.
Osborn, who campaigned on issues like Right to Repair and lowering taxes on overtime payments, earned praise from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who told The Nation in late November that Osborn's bid should be viewed as a "model for the future."
Osborn "took on both political parties. He took on the corporate world. He ran as a strong trade unionist. Without party support, getting heavily outspent, he got through to working-class people all over Nebraska. It was an extraordinary campaign," Sanders said.
In reaction to the news that Osborn is exploring a second run, a former Sanders campaign manager and longtime progressive Democratic strategist Faiz Shakir, wrote: "working-class candidate v. billionaire political race. I'm here for it."