Note from our Editor-in-Chief: Friday marks 25 years since the horrific attacks on September 11, 2001. While mainstream media – many of the same news organizations that amplified the post-9/11 lies that paved the way for the invasion of Iraq – will likely spend much of its coverage navel-gazing, Zeteo has planned a week full of thoughtful and honest essays and interviews that not only reflect on the tragedy that was 9/11, but also on the aftermath – in America, across the Middle East, and worldwide.
Watch your inbox this week for more insightful essays from Zeteo contributors, including Fatima Bhutto and Viet Thanh Nguyen. Plus, I will also be interviewing two mothers who lost their children on 9/11, a four-star U.S. general who became a leading critic of the Iraq invasion, and others. If you’re not already a paid subscriber, become one today to get full access to all of Zeteo’s 9/11 anniversary coverage and more. -Mehdi
Twenty-five years later, it is important to remember that the 9/11 catastrophe itself changed nothing. Regardless of the pabulum that politicians and journalists will intone for this sorrowful anniversary, what changed everything was not the attacks but the U.S. response to them.
What became known as the “Global War on Terror” was a choice, not an inevitability. As politically arduous as it would have been, there was a possible response in which the U.S. recognized that its decades-long extractive, exploitative approach to the Middle East, one that imported the region’s resource wealth and exported the means to subjugate its people, had been proven unviable and began unraveling it. Instead, the U.S. intensified its violent status quo. The War on Terror took the lives of what the Costs of War Project at Brown University tallies as between 4.5 and 4.7 million people.
But while the War on Terror was a choice – a choice made by American elites in both parties, after exploiting the post-9/11 fear and bloodlust to manufacture consent – and for the peoples of the Middle East and Southwest Asia a death sentence, it was also, for many rising powers around the world, an opportunity.
America loves to think of itself as a beacon of freedom to humanity. Its historical record of infamy will never disturb this self-conception. But after 9/11, ambitious architects of repression from Moscow to Beijing to Tel Aviv were inspired by the infamy. Never would there be a better opportunity than the War on Terror to unleash their visions for power unconstrained by justice. After all, they were doing what Washington said it wanted: following the example of the United States.