Note from our Editor-in-Chief: Friday marks 25 years since the horrific attacks on September 11, 2001. Zeteo is running a series of thoughtful and honest essays and interviews that not only reflect on the tragedy that was 9/11, but also on the aftermath – in America, across the Middle East and worldwide. We thought you might find these a worthwhile read, so we are republishing a small selection at Zeteo UK, starting with this piece by Spencer Ackerman.
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Twenty-five years later, it is important to remember that the 9/11 catastrophe itself changed nothing. Regardless of the pabulum that politicians and journalists will intone for this sorrowful anniversary, what changed everything was not the attacks but the U.S. response to them.
What became known as the “Global War on Terror” was a choice, not an inevitability. As politically arduous as it would have been, there was a possible response in which the U.S. recognized that its decades-long extractive, exploitative approach to the Middle East, one that imported the region’s resource wealth and exported the means to subjugate its people, had been proven unviable and began unraveling it. Instead, the U.S. intensified its violent status quo. The War on Terror took the lives of what the Costs of War Project at Brown University tallies as between 4.5 and 4.7 million people.
But while the War on Terror was a choice – a choice made by American elites in both parties, after exploiting the post-9/11 fear and bloodlust to manufacture consent – and for the peoples of the Middle East and Southwest Asia a death sentence, it was also, for many rising powers around the world, an opportunity.
