09/10/26

9/10/2026

This week the United States and its people are soberly remembering the stunning terrorist attacks that weaponized jetliners to kill thousands of people in the American homeland on September 11, 2001. Their deaths constitute the most tragic effect of the episode, and they continue as open wounds for family and friends of the victims.

The attacks also generated a number of other consequences for American leaders at the time and in the following months and years, as well as for U.S. government agencies and their practices, American attitudes, and our relations with other nations. It’s hard to underestimate the importance of the 9/11 effects, many of which continue to drive our thinking and actions yet today.

September 11 dominated U.S. government policy decisions in its immediate aftermath, and has forever colored public opinion about several key players who steered the direction of the American response.

The nation’s war on terrorism, which had simmered for years prior to 2001, burst into full flame after the attack. But it immediately took a puzzling direction: concentration on Iraq as a state sponsor of terrorism and a likely developer of weapons of mass destruction.

The invasion of Iraq, to which the Bush Administration had steered the U.S. since shortly after 9/11, opened officially in March 2003 under the designation Operation Iraqi Freedom. The invasion involved thousands of military personnel as well as some from other nations, and a huge commitment of equipment and munitions worth billions of dollars.

But Navy SEALS didn’t kill bin Laden until May 2011, a decade after 9/11, in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The reasons it took so long to exact retribution on the founder of al-Qaeda, the attack’s mastermind, bring little credit to the American effort to seek out bin Laden immediately after the jetliner attacks.

One reason the initial attempt to capture or kill bin Laden failed was that even though the CIA very soon had tracked him to the Tora Bora cave complex in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, the Bush leadership relied strongly, and wrongly, on local anti-Taliban Afghan fighters to provide needed help to American CIA operatives and special forces. 

The Battle of Tora Bora, fought for about 2 1/2 weeks in November and December 2001, took place during the Muslim holy observance of Ramadan, and America’s Afghan allies returned to their homes every night to break their fast. In addition, President Bush mistakenly thought that Pakistan would arrest bin Laden if he tried to escape the mountains into that neighboring nation.

But maybe the gravest American error was the Army’s refusal to send Army Rangers, fewer than 1,000, to block the mountain passes that led into Pakistan, relying instead on the assumption that Pakistan would prevent bin Laden’s escape. That opinion proved faulty, and the 9/11 mastermind and a number of al-Qaeda colleagues found their way southeastward out of Tora Bora and into what turned out to be sanctuary in Pakistan.

The CIA for several years denied any knowledge that bin Laden had been at Tora Bora during the siege. It wasn’t until 2005, after George W. Bush was reelected President and more than three years after the Battle of Tora Bora, that the CIA released a document that revealed it had been well aware of bin Laden’s presence in the Afghan mountain caves but preventing his escape had failed.

Lessons from Tora Bora: don’t commit to a foreign adventure with inadequate understanding of the culture and orientation of your supposed allies, and eliminate your adversary’s options for escape. Failure can significantly complicate your goals and lengthen the time and cost of achieving them.

  After a long, expensive, and largely ineffective American military presence in Afghanistan, U.S. troops nearly two decades later finally pulled up stakes and left in 2021, whereupon the Taliban promptly regained control of Afghanistan’s government and reimposed strict requirements on Afghan society, in particular restraining the rights of women and girls. American armaments and other military materiel left behind, worth about $7 billion in today’s dollars, are in Taliban possession.

And al-Qaeda continued to operate on the offensive in various locations throughout the world. Early capture of Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora through a more effective American effort would likely have hamstrung terrorist activity against the West in the ensuing years.

That’s the Afghan and bin Laden piece of 9/11’s aftermath. It doesn’t explain why the Bush administration pivoted immediately to Iraq instead.

Those reasons remain somewhat murky yet today. President Bush, caught by surprise on September 11, determined not to let something like that happen again. For years he had wondered if Iraq might be trying to develop chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons of mass destruction (WMD) for use against its neighbors or even the United States. September 11 showed what failure to prepare for such a catastrophe could bring.

Spurred on by Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld, Bush decided to invade Iraq, with an immediate goal of forestalling WMD and related goals of ousting Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and creating a peace-minded democratic Iraqi government. 

Another stimulus might have been Iraq’s strongly suspected role in a failed plot to assassinate Bush’s father, former President George H.W. Bush, with a car bomb on the elder Bush’s trip to Kuwait in April 1993 following the American and Allied victory over Iraq in Kuwait in the Persian Gulf War.

A cloud has persisted ever since 9/11 over the role that American interest in Iraqi oil might have played in the decision to invade Iraq. Both Rumsfeld and Cheney, particularly Cheney, had strong corporate and strategic ties to oil production and distribution. Along with other top administration leaders, they trumpeted the message that Saddam Hussein was developing WMD, especially the danger of a nuclear Iraq. Together with Bush, they loudly proclaimed that Iraq had assisted Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda’s terrorist activities.

But American intelligence, including the CIA, continually warned the Bush leadership that there was no firm evidence of either Iraqi WMD development or an Iraq-bin Laden tie. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld refused to make that information public, maintaining the falsehood until Congress and the United Nations gave Bush the go-ahead to invade Iraq.

One of the tragedies of post-9/11 was the public humiliation of Secretary of State Colin Powell, whose stellar career of military and diplomatic service was permanently tarnished by the speech he gave at the United Nations in February 2003. 

Powell had resisted joining the call for war, unconvinced that the government’s claims about Iraq were solid. But he finally, as a loyal member of the government leadership, told the U.N. that firm evidence proved beyond doubt that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction. The speech was key to final public acceptance of the war decision. Powell regretted it the rest of his life, after postwar discoveries that Hussein was not developing WMD and had no ties to al-Qaeda.

September 11 initiated other major changes for the United States. It heightened domestic security efforts, such as closer scrutiny of passengers in airports. The military, led by the CIA, for several years employed “enhanced interrogation” procedures (translation: torture) on some al-Qaeda and Iraqi prisoners for several years before disclosure finally brought a halt. And Islamophobia, including violence against Muslims in the United States, rose dramatically.

Today not much is heard about “The War on Terror.” But the nation—its attitudes, its institutions, and its outlook—remain permanently altered by September 11. Whether we’re prepared for another such attack remains unknown.