Remembering The 9-11 Attacks: Is America A Better Nation Twenty-Five Years Later?

By Viet Thanh Nguyen|Zeteo

Photos: Wikimedia Commons

When historians and storytellers look back on the decline and fall of the American empire, they might identify 9/11 as the beginning of the long end. The American empire did not collapse immediately, but 9/11 was the spectacular fulcrum, revealing the simultaneous power and vulnerability of it and its imperial citizens. Part of imperial privilege for average Americans is to deny that they are a part of empire. Another part of imperial privilege is to react with misguided fury and hubris, whether through demanding revenge for 9/11 or calling to make America great again today. A different kind of power can be found in renouncing empire and domination, but are Americans willing to embrace a power that acknowledges its own vulnerability?

It may feel impossible to do so after a tragedy like 9/11, a terrorist event and a human catastrophe so shocking that images of people waving from their windows or falling through the air are still deeply disturbing. The dead included the wealthy and the working-class, citizens and undocumented, drawn from the vast diversity of the country. Their deaths induced many reactions, including a solidarity that allowed Americans to forget, for a while, their differences and unite as a grieving country. In commemorating 9/11, we should remember not only the dead, but also that fleeting moment of possibility where we believed in ourselves as a country.

Unfortunately, that sense of solidarity, grievance, and vulnerability that provided a sense of community also led many to demand retribution. Speaking out against that impulse can still be difficult now, 25 years later, but was incredibly daunting back then. But not impossible.

A month after 9/11, when the United States had struck Afghanistan, Barbara Kingsolver wrote, “We’ve answered one terrorist act with another, raining death on the most war-scarred, terrified populace that ever crept to a doorway and looked out.” Kingsolver received hate mail and denunciations, which she foresaw because she had already been called “traitor, sinner, naive, liberal, peacenik, whiner.” Little has changed since 9/11, with the equivalent today being the will to name Israel’s U.S.-funded genocide in Gaza, also directed at those deemed to be terrorists. Indeed, the stories the United States likes to tell itself have changed little in some ways since the origins of the country, which involved not just noble visions of democracy and equality but also violence and conquest against a host of seemingly evil others, from Indigenous nations to individual outlaws.

Thus, then-President George W. Bush could say that he wanted those responsible for 9/11 “dead or alive,” as was announced on an “old poster out West,” and that he would “smoke them out” of their holes. President Donald Trump, steeped in the same mythologies of a Great and Greater America, with all its mythical enemies, targets Salvadorans, Venezuelans, Cubans, and Iranians as threats to the country. If Trump could simply kidnap Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro to face American justice, Bush likewise drew from an American narrative of outlaws and bandits in need of old-fashioned law and order, a story easily applied to anyone whom Americans have called terrorists. In the present, those are Muslims, Arabs, or Palestinians. But in the past, they were Indigenous peoples who fought back, or enslaved Africans who might one day rise against their masters.

“It all sounds too familiar. I’ve heard the thunder, seen the flash of his terrible swift sword before,” novelist John Edgar Wideman wrote five months after 9/11. “I’m an American of African descent, and I can’t applaud my president for doing unto foreign others what he’s inflicted on me and mine.” I taught Wideman’s essay to my university students six years after 9/11, and even with that passage of time, many found him too angry for their liking. A Black man calling himself “an heir to centuries of legal apartheid” disturbed them. But Wideman was writing in the radical tradition of other Black writers who saw that American violence overseas and American violence domestically each needed a frightening shadow to blame for America’s failures and fears, a dark silhouette at which Americans could take aim. “Is it truly news,” Wideman wrote, “that some people’s bad times (slavery, colonial subjugation, racial oppression, despair) have underwritten other people’s good times (prosperity, luxury, imperial domination, complacency).”

The twin towers embodied the good and explicitly symbolized the looming power of the United States, tied to the bad times elsewhere, beyond many Americans’ imaginations. Attacking these towers with Boeing 767s was horrific but also symbolically important, as the hijackers presumably understood. They came mostly from Saudi Arabia, with two more from the United Arab Emirates, one from Lebanon, and one from Egypt. The 767s helped to make the world smaller for business people and tourists, but also for terrorists. These passenger behemoths were related technologically to long-distance bombers like the B-52 Stratofortress, also manufactured by Boeing and deployed by the United States to intimidate other countries. When the hijackers appropriated the 767s and turned them into flying improvised explosive devices, they delivered the message that the technology which allowed domination by the strong also allowed subversion by the weak. Iran has learned the same lesson today, checking hyper-expensive American missiles, planes, and carriers with fleets of cheap drones.

The Victimization of America

The strong call the weapons and tactics of the weak “terrorism,” even if the weapons and tactics of the strong kill many more. The United States, like other colonial, imperial, and Western powers, always interprets violent resistance against it as acts of savagery and terrorism, and uses such acts to draw a symmetry between itself and those who resist it. While our moral compass should always lead us to condemn terrorism and the killing of innocent people, that moral compass should also be strong enough to compel us to resist the lure of symmetry. Even more than symmetry – a reversal of asymmetry, so that the suffering of the strong becomes greater than the suffering of the weak. Thus, the atrocity of 9/11 was cast by many Americans, from our leaders on down, as a radically asymmetrical act of terrorism inflicted on an innocent United States. But the United States has committed much more violence on other countries and peoples than has been done to it. How many innocents have died under B-52 strikes, versus how many have been killed by suicide bombers? While many Americans probably know that 3,000 Americans were killed in the twin towers, how many Americans know the number of Afghan or Iraqi civilian deaths due to the result of American invasions or sanctions?

A quarter century after 9/11, this sense of the United States as vulnerable and as the victim remains true. It justified an assertion of American invulnerability through invasions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and wars or preemptive strikes or sieges against Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela. The absurd position of the most powerful country in the world seeing itself as a victim finds an affirmative resonance with the domestic politics of the U.S. Even before 9/11, increasing numbers of men saw themselves as victims in a world of feminism, as did larger numbers of white people who believed themselves discriminated against by aggressive minorities and swamped by migrants. 9/11 exacerbated that sense of victimization. Thus, the Department of Homeland Security, created after 9/11, has predictably morphed into an institution aimed not only at terrorist threats but at immigrants and refugees, perceived by the Trump administration as an alien invasion whether documented or undocumented, whether outside the nation or inside of it. Excess military gear from the so-called “War on Terror” now supplies or inspires every branch of federal and local police, who often look more like paramilitaries, counterinsurgency specialists, or an American breed of stormtrooper or brownshirt, pumped up on steroids and yet scared of unarmed civilians. Domestic populations, oftentimes minorities, the poor, students, and liberals, are treated as potential insurgents, a fate that includes being shot to death, as in the cases of Alex Pretti and Renee Good.

Did the masked ICE agents who shot them see them as terrorists, or at least people who induced feelings of terror in them? Some of the police officers who shot and killed unarmed Black people apparently did see them as terrifying. The terror without mirrored the terror within, and thus a “War on Terror” could never win, for vanquishing terror would be like defeating the ocean or eradicating human nature. So terror seeped across the national borders into the homeland, radiated from the television screens and into our minds. The “War on Terror” grew into what the journalist Dexter Filkins called the “Forever War,” a correct name for the wrong war. Those post- 9/11 conflicts concerning Filkins in Iraq and Afghanistan were only episodes in a Forever War waged since the beginning of European settlement, when the original terrorists were the Indigenous peoples. The Forever War continued with many more wars, great and small, declared and undeclared, some remembered, many forgotten or poorly remembered. Some were not even considered a war from the American perspective, as when U.S. troops arrive uninvited in another country, like Haiti in 1915 or the Dominican Republic in 1916 (imagine uninvited Chinese or Soviet soldiers appearing on American shores and consider whether the United States would understand that to be war).

A Perpetual War Abroad, and Perpetual Pacification at Home

Even Filkins’s name for the Forever War alludes, deliberately or accidentally, to the 1974 science fiction novel The Forever War by Joe Haldeman. Haldeman was a veteran of the war in Vietnam, and turned the American soldier’s subjective experience of his war as lasting forever – even if it was only for a one-year tour of duty – into a futuristic forever war waged against terrifying and incomprehensible aliens who are eventually revealed to be not very terrifying at all. For many Americans, a war like the ones in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran – and undoubtedly unknown wars yet to come – often seems like a discrete event that appears almost out of nowhere, with few links to what went before or after. Wideman, the novelist, understood 9/11 and the ensuing disasters differently, for “the terrible September 11 attack as well as the present military incursion into Afghanistan are episodes in a long-standing vicious competition – buses bombed in Israel, helicopters strafing Palestinian homes, economic sanctions blocking the flow of food and medicine for Iraq, no-fly zones, Desert Storms, and embassy bombings – for oil and geopolitical leverage in the Middle East.”

What American journalists call the “Forever War” did not even begin at the moment of 9/11 but had already begun well before, at least since 1991 and Desert Storm and most likely before that, as the United States began to see the advantages of supporting Israel as an allied base to dominate Southwest Asia. U.S. support for Israel, and the perception of many Arabs and Muslims that the U.S. and Israel are partners in a campaign to dominate the Middle East or Southwest Asia, played no small part in 9/11. The planes flying into the towers embodied Aimé Césaire’s imperial boomerang – the delayed effect of imperial intervention on someone else’s homeland returning to our imperial homeland. The United States seemingly recovered from the strike, but the attack accelerated its worst instincts, which fuse together beliefs in the perpetual profit machine of capitalism and the perpetual power of the American war machine.

Together, this leads to perpetual war overseas and increasingly to perpetual pacification aimed inwardly, both efforts requiring ever newer enemies. Thus, the U.S., the greatest country on Earth, which has the largest prisoner population in the world, turns to ever greater surveillance of its own people, sometimes using technology, weapons, and tactics developed by Israel and tested on Palestinians. In reverse, Israel responded to Oct. 7 with even greater and even more misguided violence than the United States. The genocidal Israeli response projected terror onto Palestinians, generated from the terror within the Israeli psyche that has been fed by its own perpetual war against Palestinians. A “War on Terror,” by that name or any other, suits the elites, who profit regardless of turmoil overseas or domestically. A “War on Terror” that cannot be won also suits the American military, which no longer even needs to win individual wars. Defeat in Iran would most likely lead to an even larger budget for war, because the larger goal is not defeating an undefeatable enemy that always changes its masks but instead maintaining a global hegemony for capitalism, run by the United States.

The Reality Show of an Empire

But the United States, an aging empire, has lost some of its imperial will. The decline is due to increasing decadence and corruption but also, positively, to an increasing willingness among some Americans to contest imperialism and to live up to the principles and values of genuine democracy, such as inclusiveness, real equality, and recognition of the diversity of Americans. Pete Hegseth, the so-called Secretary of War, is therefore not totally wrong in his desire for a more macho military, if by macho one means a retro imperialism harkening back to the 19th century, with the United States even less restrained in killing people. He intuitively knows that the fall of the twin towers was a symbolic castration of the United States, which possessed not only one phallic symbol but two, befitting a superpower. Hegseth’s campaign to keep propping up this superpower is an effort to stave off the decadence of an American people, which he interprets as being manifest through unqualified Black and women generals. The real problem is that too many Americans are unwilling to fight imperial wars to maintain an imperial privilege that increasingly does not benefit them. Hegseth is thus doomed to failure because his retro imperialism is no match for the huckster imperialism of his boss, one of the most decadent of all Americans.

Under Trump, the United States is no longer really an empire so much as the reality show of an empire. But Trump would not have been possible without the failures of other American presidents after 9/11, who could not or would not find a way to distribute the benefits of American empire equally to all Americans. The hollowing out of the empire took place through increasing class inequality and the subsequent demoralization of the average imperial citizen, but also through the increasing cynicism of the elites of both parties, unwilling or unable to restrain the machinery of perpetual capitalism and perpetual war. The reality show of global American power continued after 9/11, but with increasingly hysterical drama on the domestic stage and decreasing international clout, as evidenced by a dreadful decline in audience ratings as spectators all over the world became disenchanted with the American story. The cancellation will come, but long after the story lost its popular appeal.

Hope remains for the United States, but not in a renewed empire. The burning towers foreshadowed a burning world, set on fire by imperial wars and imperial consumption of the world’s resources. To quench that fire, a majority of the American citizenry has to acknowledge their imperial privilege, even with only a meager portion of the imperial gains, and find the will to renounce that privilege and profit. But, as Jesus said, and as America’s Christian nationalists, white supremacists, and oligarchical elites will pretend not to have heard, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” The same could be said of imperial Americans. Letting go of empire is hard, but being forced to relinquish empire will be even harder. No one ever said grace came easily.

Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Viet Thanh Nguyen is the author of several books. His latest includes To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other. He is also the co-editor of the anthology The Cleaving: Vietnamese Writers in the Diaspora.