Today We Must Finally Remember What The 9/11 Commemorations Ignore

Righteous victimhood fueled the War on Terror. 25 years later, we also have to remember all of those slain under its banner

Edited by Sam Thielman

THIS PICTURE SITS in my living room. It was taken on November 24, 2003 by the late war photographer Chris Hondros. I got it soon after from a colleague of Chris’s who happened to be dating a friend of mine. No matter how many times I moved over the years, I always took his photograph with me. 

For my five-year old daughter, it's been a fixture in her home her whole life. It's as unremarkable as the ceilings, as natural as the change of seasons, no different from the roster of pictures stuck to the fridge with magnets. This past weekend it caught her attention for the first time. What's that? she asked me.

That, I said, is the last amusement park still open in a city called Fallujah in a country far away called Iraq. At least that was what I was told the photo depicted when it was given to me. (Chris died covering the U.S.-supported regime change in Libya. I never got to ask him myself. RIP) 

Why the last? she asked.

I replied, Because of what the United States of America did to Fallujah, and to Iraq.

What did we do? she asked.

We'll talk about this a lot as you get older, I told her. 

I look at that photograph and think about the boy in the foreground. He's the only one not caught in blurry glee. He's looking out of frame forebodingly. Something is coming and he knows it. The other children can enjoy their childhood. He seems to know that it's one of the last chances any of them will have. 

I don't know that boy's name. I don't know the names of any of the children in the photograph. That's on me, not Chris. The ugly truth is that those of us who reported from the battlefields of the War on Terror rarely treated the fate of the children as the most important stories of the conflict, myself certainly included. Even during the counterinsurgency era, every savvy military officer, think-tanker and indeed journalist nodded sagely along to the COIN mantra that the center of gravity of the war is the population, and then miraculously found that the people supported their own preferred course of action. There is only so far an empire will go to see its victims, to say nothing of its enemies, as human. 

September 11, 2026 is not going to be an exception to that rule. 

THE HUMAN PURPOSE of commemorating the 25th anniversary of 9/11 is mourning. It's to keep in our hearts those who were killed because of forces they did not control. It's to provide comfort to the families and neighborhoods who couldn't ever be the same. For those of us who lived through it, it's to process the trauma of—well, it wasn't the first airstrike in a U.S. city in my lifetime, since that was the Philadelphia police department doing it to the black radicals of MOVE in 1985, killing five children among the eleven dead, but we were hardly encouraged to understand the MOVE bombing like that, certainly not after 9/11, and not today. Processing the trauma of 9/11 can prompt critical questions about how we were and weren't encouraged to understand 9/11.

None of that is the political purpose of commemorating 25 years after 9/11. 

The political purpose wears the human purpose like a suit of armor. The armor deflects critical questions—deflects, in other words, the reality of the War on Terror—in order to return the United States to the state of righteous victimhood we were encouraged to inhabit in the weeks after the attack. Righteous victimhood licenses persecution and violence. It's a gambit to consolidate power in the hands of reactionaries. It's why Rudy Guiliani sputters that Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York, who was made to grow up in the repressive shadow of the War on Terror, and who unlike Giuliani experienced the War on Terror as it truly was, has no place at this year's commemoration. It's all that Giuliani, who will one day die in disgrace, has left. 

For 25 years, even as the reality of the War on Terror has occasionally been so unbearable as to intercede in these commemorations, we've been encouraged to see 9/11 as the shattering of a national innocence, as if the United States were ever innocent. That posture of innocence requires starting the history of 9/11 the moment the planes hit the Towers, the way it is literally on display at the 9/11 Memorial Museum.

That in turn requires us, as Susan Sontag learned, to scandalize and denounce anyone who presents the violent, exploitative history of the United States in the Middle East as the reason that something like al-Qaeda existed in the first place. I remember The New Republic of the era, where I worked as a young journalist, straining to set the uncomfortable and unassailable truths of the blowback hypothesis outside the boundaries of respectable discourse. They did that while calling its exponents the ones taking a holiday from history. 

All that, I suspect, lurks in the background of what I gather to be some people's well-intentioned reluctance to remember 9/11. I was surprised to see Jennifer Szalai observe—in a review for which I will forever be grateful—that REIGN OF TERROR "isn’t one of those accounts that tries to play down the trauma" of 9/11. I was not aware there were such accounts. If there are, I suspect it's owing to their authors not wanting to stoke the flames of 9/11-justified violence. I share that (presumed) impulse. But 9/11 really was traumatic, especially for those who come from the cities that experienced it. A DC-native friend messaged me the other day that she watched the Netflix documentary I'm in. She said it alerted her to trauma she hadn't realized she carried. 

But trauma is not a license to inflict more. 

The horrors of 9/11—of one day of airstrikes—became a relentless, most often useless litany of airstrikes (and more) launched on a gigantic swath of the world for 25 years and counting. Those U.S. strikes became routine, and with only rare challenges to their basic legitimacy. Azmat Khan's reporting showed how the U.S. military lied just as relentlessly about the civilians those strikes killed. On the active battlefields, and during periods of the undeclared ones, the strikes were so frequent that they rarely merited more than an obligatory few lines in whatever The Day At War write-through was required. One of those periods is right now, in Somalia.

Ever talk to the survivor of a U.S. airstrike? I've talked to people who've seen the United States incinerate their grandmothers before their nine-year-old eyes. I've talked to someone who was 13 when the U.S. military maimed him with a drone strike that left him unconscious for 40 days, and abandoned him to his fate, which would turn out to be providing for his family despite his disabilities now that his older male relatives had been killed. His name I know: Faheem Qureshi. You won't find it in Barack Obama's memoir, although Faheem survived Obama's very first drone strike. I doubt Obama thinks about Faheem at all. But I know for a fact that Faheem thinks about Obama. "If there is a list of tyrants in the world," he told me in 2016, "to me, Obama will be put on that list by his drone program."

Faheem's relatives were among what the Costs of War Project at Brown University tallies at between 4.5 and 4.7 million deaths attributable, both directly and indirectly, to the War on Terror. We commemorate the 3,000 Americans slain on 9/11. We do not commemorate the three orders of magnitude more who the U.S.' actions killed. There could be no righteous victimhood for us if we did. 

Then there are those who remain locked inside Guantanamo Bay. The many more who bear the wounds of torture at the hands of their American captors. The hundreds of people criminalized, entrapped and imprisoned by the FBI after its informants encouraged them to turn their anger and despair into crime. The tens of millions turned into refugees by the American wars. The hundreds of millions—billions? We don't actually know—whose privacy the National Security Agency violated. The communities terrorized and families broken up by ICE, an agency created and empowered by the War on Terror. The increasing numbers filling the for-profit ICE camps and deportation rendition planes, since the War on Terror was never going to stop at Muslims, even as it still makes time for them. The ones who don't yet know that NPSM-7 will turn them into targets of the War on Terror. 

Do you feel righteous? Do you feel like you were the victim? 

Or do you feel like the little boy in the photograph from Fallujah, unsure where the danger is coming from or when it will arrive, but certain that it will come from those who march under the banner of righteous victimhood? 

BUT THE DAWN is breaking through the darkness. 

The week of 9/11, I was stuck on the Rutgers University campus, unable to return home. It wasn't until Friday, three days post-attack, that NJ Transit could take me into Penn Station. I went immediately to the 8th Avenue staging ground for Ground Zero recovery assistance. There I met people who had driven all night from places like Kentucky and Massachusetts to help. I heard unfamiliar accents saying the same things. The focus there was not vengeance. It was about getting to work to redress a catastrophe and save whomever might be saved. The same sentiments animated the many more people across the tri-state area, and likely beyond, to give blood. The focus was solidarity. 

It's not that bloodlust and the righteous victimhood were absent. It's that, in those crucial early days after 9/11, the leaders of this country, in politics and in the media, encouraged responses that filtered out the solidarity. The bloodlust and the righteous victimhood were what remained. But I saw the solidarity with my own eyes. 

And 25 years later, I see it again. 

Over the past year and a half, regular people around the country have seen with frightening proximity what remains of the War on Terror, perhaps more than ever. The Trump administration took the War on Terror out of the shadows and beyond the margins of society when it launched its mass deportation crackdown. At every stage, in every city, it encountered popular resistance. When it responded with lethal force, it inspired more intense resistance, echoing both our government’s experience of the War on Terror's foreign occupations and its refusal to accept the bitter lessons of those experiences. Now support for abolishing ICE is a mainstream position, even if the Democratic Party is too timid and oligarch-beholden to champion it.

War on Terror politics, with all their Islamophobia and the bloodlust, are again on the march. Now, twenty-five years later, they march not out of strength but out of desperation. They were unable to stop the people of New York from electing the democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani. They were unable to keep regular people in Michigan from nominating Abdul El-Sayed for Senate, whatever comes of his general election in November. They were unable to stem the nationwide cross-partisan and class-based opposition to mass surveillance and artificial intelligence as represented by Flock cameras and data centers. Without being sanguine about the struggle ahead, the opponents of the War on Terror are stronger than ever, both inside and outside of state power. 

War on Terror politics are necessary for their practitioners to maintain their grips on power and gain new ones. They need those politics very badly in 2026. For the future they desire is on display, from the newest quagmire over Iran, to the skyrocketing energy prices, to the working class' lowest share of national wealth in 80 years. It's the effort to end birthright citizenship through judicial fiat, which will permit the machinery of the War on Terror to throw ever larger numbers of Americans into ICE camps and onto rendition flights, some never to return. It's the poisoned New York air emanating from Ground Zero that Giuliani and his successors lied about and covered up. For those who practice War on Terror politics, exploitable symbols matter, not people. People are expendable, no matter how sanctified they were during their phase of exploitation, and no matter how grotesque that expendability is.  

But today we remember them all. Tomorrow, fueled by that remembrance, we finally abolish the War on Terror.