Sept. 11, 2001

Twenty-five years ago today, on Sept. 11, 2001, 3,000 people went to work, boarded planes, or simply went out for a normal day and never came home. The grief surrounding America’s worst terrorist attacks still lingers, as it does for the thousands of additional American lives lost during our years of conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq, ostensibly a response to the attacks.
As we reflect on that horrible day, now a quarter century ago, it’s time for honest consideration of what truly led to the attacks, and to consider how our actions in recent years are almost certainly laying the groundwork for future attacks. Doing so means retiring the comforting fiction our leaders reached for in the days after the attacks and have repeated ever since: that the hijackers came for our freedom, our democracy, and our way of life.
It’s a nice story— one that asks nothing of us. It requires no accounting of our government’s actions in the Middle East in the decades before 2001. And it is not what Osama bin Laden said motivated the attacks — not in 1996, not in his 1998 fatwa, and not in the letter he addressed directly to the American people in 2002.
Bin Laden’s grievances were specific, and they were about U.S. policy, not liberty. He cited the stationing of American troops in Saudi Arabia, home to Islam’s two holiest sites, following the Gulf War, as a primary motivator. He pointed to the sanctions regime the United States and its allies maintained against Iraq through the 1990s, which UN officials at the time estimated contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children. He cited unconditional American military and financial support for Israel amid the ongoing dispossession of Palestinians. And he pointed to Washington’s backing of authoritarian Arab governments — the Saudi royal family chief among them — that suppressed their own populations while aligning with U.S. interests. Twenty-five years later, virtually nothing has changed.
Understanding the motivations of the 9/11 terrorists is not a defense of mass murder. Bin Laden was a man who deliberately targeted civilians, and nothing in his stated grievances excuses the choice to fly airliners into office towers. But understanding why he had an audience — why his message found any traction at all across a region that had plenty of reasons to resent American policy — is not the same as excusing him. It is the bare minimum required of a country that wants to avoid manufacturing the next generation of terrorists.
We did not do that bare minimum in the wake of 9/11, and our leaders have never been willing to speak honestly about what took place, and why. Instead, we told ourselves a comforting myth that authorized everything that came next: a war in Afghanistan that stretched 20 years, a war in Iraq justified by weapons that were never found, a global detention and interrogation apparatus that operated outside the reach of law, and a permanent expansion of American military presence across the Middle East.
A quarter century on, it seems we have learned little from our experience. More American forces than ever are stationed across the region, as we wage an ill-considered war against Iran. Washington continues to back Israel’s brutal military campaigns with money and weapons even as the civilian toll in Gaza has drawn legitimate accusations of war crimes from international courts and human rights organizations. The United States still treats its relationships with autocratic Gulf governments as a matter of strategic necessity rather than principle. We have not reckoned with the 1990s sanctions or the civilian deaths of the post-9/11 wars with anything like the seriousness we bring to memorializing our own dead — and that asymmetry is noticed, everywhere, by the people living under it.
This is not a call for pacifism or an argument that policy alone explains terrorism. Ideology, opportunism, and cruelty matter, too. After all, plenty of people who share bin Laden’s professed grievances never picked up a weapon. But a country that refuses to examine its own role in the conditions that produce its opponents is a country doomed to keep meeting new versions of the same enemy. We have now had 25 years to ask the harder questions, but we have mostly relied on storytelling. We’re good. They’re evil. No need to look any further.
The dead of Sept. 11 deserve better than myth. They deserve a country honest enough to look at its own record in the Middle East and ask whether the policies that helped provoke that Tuesday morning are the same policies that guide our actions today. Twenty-five years is long enough to have found the courage to ask. It’s past time we did.