I can still remember exactly where I was when I heard about 9/11. I was on my way home from a school that no longer exists, in front of a building that is likewise gone, but even now, twenty-five years on, I can point out the spot, virtually down the paving stone,1 where I was standing when my mum said: “America’s been attacked.” Because of the time difference, this would have been barely an hour after the second plane hit the towers and confirmed what was happening.2 A few minutes later I was home, and the television channels had cleared their schedules to show rolling news.
A little over a decade later, most of my time and thoughts on any given day would in some way relate to the Middle East and jihadism. This was pursued briefly in an academic setting, then became my day job, and still is. I was asked so many times—as an ice-breaker at a conference or social event, and with more interest by colleagues and friends—why I got interested in this area, and it always stumped me. There was no obvious biographical explanation, for instance. I have no familial, ethnic, or religious connection to the region; nobody I knew was from there or worked there; and Middle East history and politics is not exactly part of the zeitgeist in Birkenhead.
It probably should not have taken so long to realise the answer, in however winding a way, went back to those images of death and destruction. There was, it turned out, no expiry date to the shock and horror of seeing people jump a thousand feet to their deaths since the only alternative was to be burned alive,3 and the Twin Towers being reduced in a few seconds to a heap of burning rubble and human remains. The release soon afterwards of the last telephone calls from those in the towers and on the planes added to our knowledge of the agony of that day.
Surveying an event as operatically horrific as 9/11, where the mass-murder of civilians was the means and ends, the moral calculus might seem relatively straightforward. But clarity was in shorter supply than one might imagine even in the immediate aftermath, and it was not just from the conspiracy theorists on the rapidly-expanding Internet. A standard theme in academic commentary, the Left-wing press, and among public intellectuals was that America had brought the attacks upon herself. Mary Beard, as herbivorous a specimen as one could hope to find, wrote a few weeks after the 9/11 massacre that “the United States had it coming”, and she was surely correct that “many people” in her circles “openly or privately” thought the same.
Blaming the victim was accomplished with many abstract nouns, prominently “imperialism” and “capitalism”, and the “foreign policy” explanations were a gallery of pet causes. American support for Israel in the dispute in former Mandate Palestine was a favourite (plus ça change).4 Others—determined to create a mystery where none existed and decrying the simplisme of President Bush, who spoke of men motivated by an “evil” ideology, a “radical and perverted vision of Islam”—set out in search of “root causes”, with poverty being to this day the most enduring candidate.
It was a shame that so few were prepared to take Beard’s advice to “listen to what the ‘terrorists’ have to say” because they were entirely plain that the root cause of Islamist terrorism is Islamist ideology.
By the end of September 2001, we knew what the death pilots’ state of mind was because their “spiritual manual” for their last night was in the public domain. Mohamed Atta and the other conspirators were “heading for a deed that God loves” with a sense of “optimism” for the “victory, control, and conquest” it would bring. They were dwelling on “all of the things God has promised for the martyrs”, above all “eternal bliss”.5 Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, the architect of what he called “Holy Tuesday”, told a journalist in April 2002 that the attack was part of a “jihad against the infidels” and was “designed to cause as many deaths as possible”. Usama bin Laden himself explained in public the way Al-Qaeda’s leadership “calculated in advance the number of casualties”, aiming to maximise them by hitting the towers with planes full of fuel at a point most likely to cause a collapse. The carnage was “all that we had hoped for”, Bin Laden said.
At this juncture, a quarter-century later, all of this seems quite remote. 9/11 has faded from public memory and discourse. Part of the reason is no doubt simply the life cycle of humanity. There are many adults alive now—indeed, everyone under-25—who not only did not watch 3,000 civilians murdered on live television, but could not have, since they were not even born on 11 September 2001, and basically nobody under-30 has memories of that day. That is to say, the bulk of our most vital and ambitious people, those who either hold the political and economic commanding heights or advise those who do, only know of 9/11. That is not the only reason, though.
Public memory construction is a deliberate process. The State and cultural-intellectual power centres decide what to remember—and what to forget. That “9/11 changed everything” became a laugh line as early as 2007 is not just a symptom of this ironised age. It reflects an elite consensus, formed at that time and reinforced ever since, that the U.S. and broader West overreacted to 9/11, and that the Global War on Terror was a conceptual error compounded by a series of moral and tactical mistakes. On this view, GWOT made the problem worse, but jihadism was never that much of a threat to begin with, so handing Afghanistan back to the Taliban-Qaeda forces in 2021—however “messy” in the short-term—was a necessary step to finally course-correct and consign GWOT to history. The West did not need to be engaged out in the world. The answers were at home, in better security and intelligence methods.
The difficulty with this view is that it relies on there having been no repeat of 9/11, and on the belief that President Bush’s explicit strategy to prevent the next attack is incidental to this fact. Another view of current conditions—where Al-Qaeda is out of the global terrorism business and even the Islamic State is receding from the headlines—is that they result from sustained military action abroad. The internal evidence suggests the policy of global engagement continued by Bush’s successor both degraded Al-Qaeda’s capacity and pushed it into a strategic-theological reassessment that deprioritised anti-Western terrorism. And IS’s high-tempo foreign attacks campaign of the mid-2010s was terminated when the U.S.-led coalition demolished its “caliphate”. The recent resumption of IS “external operations” is on a much lower scale.
Perhaps it will be said this could have been accomplished some other way, and maybe it could have. Acknowledging uncertainty and avoiding “presentist” impositions on history is the point.
This applies retrospectively. There are two structural factors that debilitate the assessment of any security policy. First, we can never see what was down the road not taken: we can see all that went wrong with the options chosen; we never see the consequences of not choosing them. Second, when security policy works—when the threats and disasters are prevented—the experience is of nothing happening, and in that secure environment, where the benefit is invisible and the costs only too apparent, it becomes easy to contend that the measures in place are excessive, were probably never necessary, and should be removed.
It also applies when looking to the future. At the present time, with jihadism apparently on the wane, 9/11 seems on course to become in the public mind a much less salient Second World War, an episode from long ago that everybody knows something about, a source of “lessons” that become folk wisdom, and a symbol to be reacted against by younger generations, whether in the generic sense of the children of the Sixties who were fed up of hearing about “the war” from their parents or in the more provocative sense of kids on TikTok who think Bin Laden had a point.
But as 9/11 itself demonstrated, nothing is inevitable.6 Contingency is the human condition. The 1990s had been a decade of peace and prosperity, the holiday from history after the end of the long Cold War, where the only question seemed to be how much time it would take before the spread of democracy and the Internet completed the creation of a borderless world. Then one Tuesday morning it was all over amid fire and debris. The trendlines of vast impersonal forces had been overwhelmed by the determination of one man and the end of history was cancelled.
Fixing 9/11’s place in history is even more fraught because the war with jihadism is not over, however much it is wished otherwise. The enemy’s sleepless quest to visit upon us atrocities equivalent to the “Planes Operation” or worse continues, and the world is now awash in cyber capabilities, drones, and other deadly technologies unimaginable in 2001. All it would take is for them to succeed once for 9/11 to be remembered as the unheeded wake-up call, and the self-flagellation about our response would give way to bitter questions about why more was not done.
FOOTNOTES
The problem with literally pointing to the paving stone is that the “sidewalk” in question has been tarmacked in the intervening period.
The first plane hit the Twin Towers at 08:46 EDT (13:46 BST) and the initial coverage was very hesitant about describing it as deliberate. The World Trade Centre had been the target of an Al-Qaeda terrorist attack in 1993, but the only real precedent for what had happened was the plane hitting the Empire State Building in 1945 and that was an unintentional disaster caused by fog. Most of the early coverage described a “crash” or even an “accident”. The news networks were in the middle of discussing the possibilities, with cameras on the burning building, when the second plane hit live on television, at 09:03 (14:03), and resolved all doubt.
One of the strange bits of semi-viral nonsense this anniversary season has been a claim that footage of people jumping from the Twin Towers, often cited by those of us who lived through it as one of the most powerful memories of that day, is some kind of back-projected hallucination. This is an easily-checked falsehood.
Within half-an-hour of the second plane hitting, both the BBC and ITV had interrupted normal programming and switched to live coverage of the catastrophe. The decision of ITV (the channel on in my house) to not only air the footage—some of it relayed from U.S. channels—of people jumping in real-time, but to repeat the airing, during the six o’clock roundup on 11 September and in a clip package the next day, became a source of contemporary controversy.
The idea American support for Israel motivated the 9/11 killers simply fails the test of the timeline.
Notably, it was in (p. 150) “late 1998 to early 1999 [that] planning for the 9/11 operation began in earnest”, i.e., in the period where America was applying considerable pressure on Israel and a two-State settlement appeared to be at hand. Al-Qaeda, of course, did not and does not want a peace agreement in former Mandate Palestine: it rejects the Jewish presence, as it does infidel presence in any land once ruled by Islam, and regards the whole area as future caliphal land, with any devotion to the land as a territorial unit being nationalist deviancy.
Usama bin Laden in his pre-9/11 statements never pretended to believe anything else and if Palestine was mentioned it was as part of a list of places—Afghanistan, Somalia, Bosnia, Kashmir, the Philippines—where infidels were supposedly committing crimes against Muslims. (In the Somali case, the outrages included American troops delivering food during a famine.)
The most important of Bin Laden’s statements, his 1998 declaration of war against the West, set out Al-Qaeda’s “grievances” very clearly. The first was “the United States is occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of its territories”, meaning the American troops left in Saudi Arabia after the first part of the Gulf War, and the second was the sanctions and subsequent military action against Saddam Husayn’s Iraq—which was also another charge against the House of Saud, as far as Bin Laden was concerned, since the planes patrolling the Iraqi no-fly zones “launched from Arabia”. There was a passing reference to “the petty state of the Jews”, but it was as a subdivision of the West’s malignancy towards Islam. The focus remained on the Islamic Holy Land in the Hijaz, the alleged violations of which were “a clear declaration of war by the Americans against God”, thus, “To kill Americans and their allies, both civil and military, is an individual duty of every Muslim”.
To a limited extent after the Second Intifada began and more consistently in the latter half of the 2000s, in response to the political damage the Islamic State movement (then-known as Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia) had done to Al-Qaeda’s image by massacring Muslims, Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda “Central” started trying to frame their own cause—primarily, revolution against the “near enemy” Arab governments—as a service to Palestine, therefore something Muslims should support and join (or at least not criticise). It is a well-worn populist gambit and method of politics, borrowed from the Muslim despotisms themselves, which use the Palestine Cause for domestic legitimacy and as a mechanism for intra-governmental competition, without much, if any, intention of affecting the lives of the people living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
The “Spiritual Manual” of the 9/11 killers was released publicly by the FBI on 28 September 2001. Arabic available here. English translations available here and here.
The “Last Night” document was found in three locations:
Atta’s misdirected luggage. Atta flew from Portland, Maine, to Boston, and got on a connecting flight to Los Angeles. It was the LA-bound American Airlines Flight 11 that Atta and his compatriots hijacked, about fifteen minutes after take-off at 08:15, and Atta smashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Centre half-an-hour later. The connection had been tight and Atta’s suitcase, containing a copy of the document, got misplaced, remaining at Boston’s Logan Airport.
Nawaf al-Hazmi’s car. Al-Hazmi, one of the two most experienced Al-Qaeda jihadists among the death pilots, drove to Washington Dulles Airport, where he boarded American Airlines Flight 77, which his team used to attack the Pentagon at 09:37. A copy of the document was among the evidence recovered by the FBI from the vehicle.
The wreckage of United Airlines Flight 93, which was crashed in a field in Pennsylvania just after 10:00 after the passengers rebelled. United 93 was piloted by Ziad Jarrah, the one Lebanese citizen among the killers, but it is unclear whose copy of the document was found.
As the 9/11 Commission Report (p. 339) put it, a failure of imagination was among the main deficiencies in the West revealed by the attack.