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The Shift: 25 years After 9/11, Our Country Is Still Dominated By The “War On Terror”

September 12, 2026, Mondoweiss,

This week marks the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

The United States has experienced much political and social upheaval since then, but the subsequent “War on Terror” paved the way for our current moment, and there are booming echoes of the era all around us.

Once again, the United States is waging a disastrous war in the Middle East with no discernible end in sight. Islamophobic rallies targeting NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani conjure up memories of the “Ground Zero Mosque” controversy. The government designates activist and advocacy organizations as terrorists. The Guantánamo Bay detention camp remains open. In fact, a legal immigrant was just sent there.

CBS reveals that the Taliban seized roughly $7 billion worth of American-purchased military hardware after the United States officially lost that war 5 years ago.

“Taliban fighters patrol in armored vehicles once supplied to Afghan forces, wearing American tactical gear and carrying American weapons,” reads the report. “CBS News saw one Humvee in the Afghan capital still adorned with a faded Green Bay Packers decal — a remnant from its past operators.”

The small number of Americans who opposed that war were either dismissed or attacked. So too were those who warned that the Bush administration’s overreach would result in disaster.

“The civil libertarians were mostly ignored, and as one new threat followed another — Iraq, ISIS, ‘lone wolves’ — the president’s reach continued to grow. Across the Bush and Obama administrations, the commander in chief was given, or simply took, new powers to prosecute, shut down and seize the assets of alleged terrorist groups and their supporters,” writes Radley Balko in the New York Times. “With the arrival of armed drones, the president assumed the right to remotely assassinate anyone, anywhere outside U.S. borders, at any time, including American citizens.”

“If the ratcheting diminishment of our liberties came slowly and sometimes without much outcry under Presidents Bush, Obama and Joe Biden, the consequences of all those years of expanded presidential power are plainly visible now,” he continues. “Mr. Trump is using every authority we have given the president since Sept. 11, 2001, and some we haven’t, in ways the civil libertarians had tried to warn us about at the start.”

One of the major differences between the current war on Iran and Bush’s war on Iraq is that a sizable chunk of the population fell for the administration’s lies back then. The polling shows that’s not the case this time around, and, despite information from the region being consistently repressed, there seems to be a growing understanding that the United States military is losing quite badly………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..https://mondoweiss.net/2026/09/the-shift-25-years-after-9-11-our-country-is-still-dominated-by-the-war-on-terror/

September 15, 2026 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | weapons and war