25 years later: Two views on the lessons of 9/11

Edmund Fitton-Brown: We overlooked festering geostrategic issues

OPINION — As we approach the 25th anniversary of 9/11, it is important to reflect on the historic significance of that atrocity and on the lessons we have drawn and should draw from it.

The 20 years that followed al-Qaeda’s massive attack on the United States were anything but typical in the history of international affairs. Indeed, until the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan and, even more, the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, we were living through an exceptional period of international consensus and counterterrorism cooperation.

Before 1990 we had the Cold War; before 2001, we had state sponsorship of terror and weak international cooperation against it. Since 2022, we have been living with a new Cold War; and state sponsorship — or, at least, tolerance — of terrorism is increasingly common.

 During the two decades in between, the United Nations increasingly organized itself around counterterrorism principles that were as universally welcomed as motherhood and apple pie. The Security Council passed binding resolution after resolution on counterterrorism, established new structures, and inspected and appraised U.N. member states’ compliance with it all.

However, the Taliban challenged this consensus, Vladimir Putin damaged it and the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, accelerated its demise. The Gaza conflict drew battle lines between the U.S. and Israel on one side and Iran’s “Axis of Resistance” on the other.

Islamist propaganda has since been heavily focused on opposing Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. Organizational and sectarian affiliation — Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthi, al-Qaeda — have become less important than attacking Israel, the U.S. and the wider West.

An important but often overlooked factor in this is that the U.S. — when it killed Ayman al-Zawahiri in Kabul in 2022 — unintentionally moved al-Qaeda’s headquarters to Tehran, where Zawahiri’s deputy Sayf al-Adl resides. Over the past four years, Sayf’s pragmatism in the face of Iranian moral and practical authority over him has been to integrate al-Qaeda into Iran’s axis.

Sayf’s now-deceased son was deployed in Yemen, where he brokered a truce between Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and the Houthis. AQAP in turn helped the Houthis to develop what is now a load-bearing partnership with al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Somalia, al-Shabaab.

The recent spike in instances of Somali piracy in the Arabian Sea is not just coincidental with Houthi aggression in the Red Sea and Iranian in the Strait of Hormuz.

Meanwhile, another axis has emerged in opposition to the United States, and that is a mutual support system between Iran, Russia, China and North Korea, sometimes described as the “Axis of Aggressors.” This links Russia and China, indirectly, with Iranian proxies like the Houthis, who have received weapons from Russia and protection money from China to allow its ships to transit the Red Sea unmolested.

The ideological contradictions within this broad grouping of nations and substate actors are extensive, as is true of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Indonesia) grouping.

It is not what they are for that unites them; it is what they are against. The United States (and Israel) provide an adversary that they want to harm more than they want to quarrel among themselves.

Finally, we have the emergence of Hamas as a cause celebre in parts of the Muslim world, with Turkey, supported by Qatar, building its own front against Israel and openly supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, which the United States is just starting to treat as a terrorist organization.

So, if the international situation is as difficult as it was in the 1980s, perhaps more so, what are the lessons of 9/11? First, the counterterrorism laws and structures put in place are still there, so the time wasn’t entirely wasted. Large numbers of terrorist plots have been disrupted, thousands of terrorists killed, ISIS has risen and fallen in that time, and few successful jihadi terrorist attacks have occurred outside areas of conflict in the developing world over the past decade.

However, in our preoccupation with the terrorist threat, we overlooked festering geostrategic issues like Chinese expansionism and Putin’s rejection of the finality of the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Many Western intelligence services and other departments underinvested in training Russian and Chinese linguists for a quarter of a century. We also overlooked Islamist entryism, as embodied primarily by the Muslim Brotherhood, which has now manifested in unprecedented strength on our streets and university campuses in protests against the war in Gaza.

The main lesson is not to overinvest or underinvest in the many complex policy challenges we face. The U.S. is big enough and wealthy enough to manage them. We must walk, chew gum and carry a big stick all at the same time.

Edmund Fitton-Brown is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies; he focuses on Arabian Peninsula issues as well as terrorism and its enablers. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.

Simon Hankinson: Reform immigration, end perpetual wars

OPINION — Remember where you were 25 years ago, on Sept. 11? I was driving back from a nice day at the beach in France when I heard that 19 terrorists had hijacked jet planes and flown them into the twin towers in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.

For every generation, there’s a date people remember. For the Greatest Generation, it’s probably the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. For boomers, the day of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Maybe for millennials it was the day COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic.

For Generation X, it surely was 9/11.

In February 2000, I took my wife to Windows on the World, the restaurant on top of the north tower. A year and a half later, it was a smoking pile of rubble, along with its twin.

What did we learn from this horror?

First, we learned that the continental United States, isolated from foreign wars since 1812, was no longer immune. World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam and the Gulf War were all fought “over there.” The U.S. faced economic, political and social fallout at home, but little enemy action. However, 9/11 brought the ancient blood feuds of the Middle East home to our capital and biggest city.  

The 9/11 Commission Report’s 428 pages detailed how the terrorists got here and were able to commit their vile acts. It concluded there had been a failure to share information across law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

In the following years, the U.S. reorganized, most notably by forming the Department of Homeland Security, which absorbed other agencies that failed to share information. Today, federal agencies share security-related intelligence on foreign nationals through linked databases. Consular officers overseas issued visas to all the hijackers, all of whom qualified under our immigration laws.

Today, we take fingerprints and photos, and we screen every applicant through all U.S. government data before issuing a visa. If an immigrant commits a crime or becomes a threat once they are here, our security agencies are more likely to know it. The system isn’t foolproof. Combined with the irritating, time-consuming, but necessary screening at airports, the chances of another successful hijacking are much lower than they were 25 years ago.

We also learned on 9/11 that American heroism, the kind exemplified by explorers Lewis and Clark, frontiersman Daniel Boone and soldier Audie Murphy, was still alive. When Todd Beamer said, “Let’s roll,” a bunch of regular guys tried to retake United Flight 93. They died in the attempt but brought the plane down in a Pennsylvania field and not on the U.S. Capitol or White House.

Most important, we learned that Islamist ideology is categorically opposed to and incompatible with Western civilization. Put simply: al-Qaeda, ISIS and others of that persuasion want us dead. They want our families dead. They want our civilization dead.

That has implications. We cannot allow people to visit or stay here who wish our destruction. Weeding them out at the visa line is hard. Deporting them once they are already here is even harder. We learned on 9/11 that it was a fight we could not dodge, or wage remotely.

Today, we are polarized between those who want our borders strong and enforced, and those who want them open; between those who want to deport the undocumented, and those who want to grant them amnesty and ultimately, citizenship.

We can argue about who to let in and on what terms. However, America must demand that all visitors accept our basic constitutional freedoms and that all immigrants assimilate to our way of life. A multi-ethnic society can survive. A multi-cultural one, when some cultures are anathema to our founding principles, cannot endure.

Finally, we should have learned from 9/11 that we should not fight perpetual wars, and certainly not on borrowed money. Dwight Eisenhower’s administration and Congress raised taxes to pay off the massive war debts and loans. Lyndon Johnson, however, decided to build his Great Society welfare programs while simultaneously fighting North Vietnam, beginning a cycle of borrowing that endures to the present day.

Coincidentally, the last time the federal budget had a surplus was in 2001. Not only did we have a rare surplus of money then, but we had reserves of patriotism and national unity. All those currencies are thoroughly debased today. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and now the conflict with Iran, are fought with borrowed money and shrinking public support.

Simon Hankinson is a senior research fellow in The Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.

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