“All we have to do is send two mujahideen to the easternmost part of the country to hang a piece of cloth that says al-Qaeda. Then the generals rush there and cause human, economic and political losses in America without achieving anything significant in return except a few benefits for their private companies.” – Osama bin Laden, 2004
I wrote this post six years ago today for Paste Magazineand the evidence for this has only grown since then, as media outlets such as Foreign Affairs And New York Magazine wrote this headline too. Everything Osama bin Laden wanted to achieve with the attacks of September 11, he achieved. We suffered human, economic and political losses without gaining anything significant except some benefits for our private companies. We chased a piece of cloth across the entire Middle East, leaving a trail of blood. The war on terror is a failure of historic proportions, and bin Laden was able to pull it out of America because he understood us better than we did ourselves at the time.
9/11 is a solemn day, a day to remember those we have lost. But it is important to honor their memories properly and be honest about why they were killed. Terrorism is not a senseless, bloodthirsty fit of rage—by definition, it is a violent political attack on civilians that pursues political goals. There are clear explanations for Osama bin Laden’s plan to plunge the United States into a self-destructive rage, and “terrorists hate our freedoms” is a nice story we’ve told ourselves to keep the fairytale of American exceptionalism alive, but it has no basis in reality. Just listen to bin Laden explain his motivations in this 2004 speech.
I tell you: Allah knows that it never occurred to us to attack the towers. But when it became unbearable and we witnessed the oppression and tyranny of the American-Israeli coalition against our people in Palestine and Lebanon, it occurred to me.
The events that touched my soul directly began in 1982, when America allowed the Israelis to invade Lebanon and the American Sixth Fleet helped them. This bombardment began and many were killed and injured, others were terrorized and displaced.
I will never forget those poignant scenes: blood and severed limbs, women and children lying everywhere, destroyed houses and skyscrapers collapsing on their inhabitants, rockets raining down mercilessly on our home.
The situation was like that of a crocodile encountering a helpless child, rendered powerless only by its screams. Can the crocodile understand a conversation in which no weapon is involved? And the whole world saw and heard it, but it did not react.
When Israel invaded Lebanon, Ronald Reagan took a fundamental foreign policy move to rein in the Israeli army, something Joe Biden found difficult in Gaza. Reagan even referred to the Israeli bombing campaign as a “holocaust.” There is no propaganda strong enough to obscure the clear fact that Osama bin Laden and Ronald Reagan were allies in the horror of 1982. This speaks to obvious truths of American foreign policy that we ignored until that fateful September day when bin Laden violently changed the world and forced us to confront the many sins of our government around the world.
The 9/11 attacks were so successful in dividing the West that the dynamics they unleashed were repeated in Israel after Hamas’s terrorist attack on October 7 last year, where their massacre of civilians was also a response to an imperial occupation. The pressure point here is and has always been evident since the United States and the United Kingdom established their forward operating posts in Israel in the 20th century. One of the sick and twisted ironies of being Jewish and living in a rare age of the State of Israel is that this version of Israel was created expressly by and primarily for agents of empire after centuries of imperial immiseration, and that terrorists like Osama bin Laden now cite this as one of the main justifications for his attacks against the West.
The lesson of all empires throughout history is that empires inevitably come home to brutalize their own citizens. Usually, this term is used to describe the empire itself bringing imperial tactics it has used abroad to its own country, such as the hypermilitarized response to the Ferguson protests with weapons from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars in 2014. But the enormous hegemony of empire backfires in more ways than one, and the excesses of foreign conquest have spawned terrorist forces willing to massacre thousands of civilians to point out the hypocrisy of countries like the United States and Israel that do the same.
Osama bin Laden believed that if he could activate America’s most chauvinistic impulses, he could trap America in the graveyard of empires and loosen our grip on the Middle East. Ten years after the 9/11 attacks, as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq receded into the background, Americans could be forgiven for believing we had withstood bin Laden’s assault. One President Trump and a botched withdrawal from Afghanistan that sent President Joe Biden to a farm in the upstate later, it is clear that Osama bin Laden’s attacks continue to reverberate today.
And that’s before you even get to how Israel essentially trumped America’s depraved response to the 9/11 attacks after 10/7. All the jingoism, American flag-waving, and bloodthirsty violence we saw in the weeks, months, and years that followed was echoed by our main client state. Israel is in many ways an American creation, and their intemperate response to 10/7 is further proof that the supposed Jewish salvation of my people is first and foremost an echo of the American empire.
Osama bin Laden robbed us of two decades and more. He killed over 3,000 people in the hope that it would eventually divide us, and President Donald Trump was the fulfillment of his dreams. Every day, American soft power seems to grow weaker than the day before, and it is obvious that this century will not be an American century like the last. Twenty-three years ago, Osama bin Laden irrevocably changed America, and perhaps Israel, and proved that, given the right incentives, we willingly enter a self-destructive cycle from which we have not yet escaped.
