United Airlines flight 175 hitting the South Tower
Last Friday, the US commemorated the 25th anniversary of 9/11. “Images from that fateful day” – of the planes smashing into New York’s World Trade Centre, the shell-shocked office workers, the enormous dust cloud spreading through Manhattan – flooded news sites, said Guy Chazan in the Financial Times. Relatives of the dead gathered at the memorial pools that sit in the footprints of the former Twin Towers, along with all living presidents except Donald Trump – who honoured those killed at the Pentagon in Virginia. The country tried, for a day at least, to rekindle the “sense of unity” that marked the days after the response to the catastrophe: in New York, Rudy Giuliani, the city’s Republican mayor on 9/11, shook hands with its current incumbent, the socialist Democrat Zohran Mamdani.
To look back is, unfortunately, to make “a painful judgement”, said Gerard Baker in The Times. The hijackers and their masters inflicted “not merely the worst foreign attack on American citizens in the nation’s history”, killing 2,977 people. Their savagery set in train a series of events “that have dragged America down from its position of unrivalled global supremacy”, diminished its power and prestige in the world and left the country fragile and divided. “The principal legacy of America’s response to that horrible day is not a stronger, more resilient nation,” agreed The New York Times. “It is instead two long, bloody wars – one of which, in Iraq, was started on false pretences – that mostly weakened the United States, at home and abroad.” More than 7,000 US service members were killed, along with perhaps 900,000 civilians. An estimated $8trn was spent. The war against the Taliban was justified and necessary, but early successes were lost in “mission creep”, as a limited attack on a small terrorist group morphed into the “global war on terror”. The trauma of 9/11 obscured “the foolishness of the plan” to attack Iraq, and the “betrayal of American values” as US agents imprisoned suspects without charge and tortured detainees in sites across the world.
The cost of the “forever wars” is incalculable, said David Smith in The Guardian. They distracted the US from the rise of China. The “rules-based order” was undermined, emboldening Putin’s Russia. Osama bin Laden’s legacy is “a slow, autoimmune decay” within US politics, which became more xenophobic and divisive. The counterterror apparatus that President Bush and Congress enacted in the wake of 9/11 remain largely in place, said The Economist: from the Department of Homeland Security to “hastily drafted legal authorities to wage war” and enhanced surveillance powers. Since returning to office, President Trump has “cynically repurposed these tools” to empower his “imperial presidency”.
“The principal legacy of America’s response to that horrible day is not a stronger, more resilient nation”
If you heard all this “after 25 years on Mars, you might think bin Laden had won”, said The Wall Street Journal. “Don’t believe it.” It’s easy, with hindsight, to forget the panic that prevailed after the attacks. “Would there be another one?” What about a dirty bomb? The US response was designed “to take the war to the terrorists overseas rather than play defence here”, and to hold nations that harboured them responsible. This approach was successful. “The salient fact is that the US has prevented, or deterred, another 9/11.” There has been nothing on remotely its scale in America since. “That wasn’t guaranteed 25 years ago.” The US and its allies crippled al-Qa’eda, sent bin Laden into hiding, and eventually killed him in 2011, at his compound in Pakistan, said David French in The New York Times. It defeated the insurgency in Iraq – which, albeit at a high cost, now faces a future better than it had under Saddam Hussein. And when the Isis caliphate grew out of the remnants of the insurgency, that too was defeated.
It’s clear, at any rate, that bin Laden’s plan failed utterly, said Jason Burke in The Guardian. His aims were to weaken the US economically, and to force a withdrawal from the Middle East. He got, on the contrary, an invasion, and when US troops arrived in Afghanistan, he had “no plan” at all: al-Qa’eda members described it as a “disaster”. Today, US forces remain a powerful presence in the Middle East, for better or worse. And despite a wave of enthusiasm for violent Islamism, support has now “ebbed more or less everywhere” – because the Islamic world realised that “it was responsible for killing large numbers of Muslims”. Both al-Qa’eda and Isis are now shadows of their former selves. Bin Laden had two main adversaries: the “far enemy”, as he called the US, and the “near enemy”, Saudi Arabia, said Janan Ganesh in the FT. He wanted to sweep away the house of Saud and restore the caliphate. Saudi today, under Mohammed bin Salman, is more Western-aligned and liberal than ever. It is often said that America has “lost” the quarter of a century since 9/11. “That its attacker did much the same is the truth, if not even the beginnings of a consolation.”