The Shift: 25 years after 9/11, our country is still dominated by the “War on Terror”

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.

They say Americans don’t vote based on foreign policy, but that isn’t exactly true. Many people voted for Obama over Hillary Clinton in the 2008 primary because he opposed the Iraq War. People voted for Trump because he claimed he wouldn’t launch any new wars. It’s quite obvious that Kamala Harris’s connection to Israel’s genocide hurt her at the polls.

Whether or not this typically translates into policy shifts is a separate debate.

Obama’s election effectively killed the domestic antiwar movement, and he launched the largest assassination campaign in world history. Trump’s rhetoric predictably turned out to be nonsense. The Democratic Party’s establishment certainly didn’t rethink its Israel policy as a result of the Harris loss.

This is all to say that the war in Iran, which the administration now says might last through 2029, could help propel the Democrats back into power during the midterms, but will that actually result in a foreign policy reset?

In recent weeks, Democratic leaders and presidential hopefuls have directed their anger toward Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, hoping to quash the party’s left flank before the 2028 nomination process. For them, it’s an existential battle that transcends the question of which party may or may not control Congress at any given time and there’s no broader discussion about reversing our current course beyond removing Trump from office.

Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee, Abdul El-Sayed, was recently attacked for an old 9/11 tweet in which he expressed sympathy for those who died on that day and those who were killed in the wars after.

“Today, I mourn the 3K lives, 6K injuries, & infrastructural devastation in NYC, perpetrated ignorantly in the name of my faith,” it read. “Tomorrow, I’ll mourn ~1M lives, millions of injuries, & infrastructural devastation in 3 countries, perpetrated ignorantly in the name of my country.”

According to Brown University’s Costs of War project, an additional 3.6-3.8 million people have died indirectly in post-9/11 war zones, which brings the overall death toll to at least 4.5-4.7 million and counting.

25 years after 9/11, the American Empire is undoubtedly in decline, but its demise seemingly remains far off, and we’ve yet to collectively reckon with its ongoing crimes.

The Adidas ad

The German sportswear company Adidas is facing boycott calls over an ad featuring an IDF soldier who lost a limb during Israel’s 2021 attacks on Gaza.

Israeli Shalev Biton was one of the people featured in the company’s Single Shoe Service, a new campaign that allows amputees to buy a single shoe for half the cost of a full pair.

The World Health Organization estimates that over 5,000 Palestinians have undergone limb amputations as a result of the genocide.

The Spanish actor Javier Bardem boosted the #BoycottAdidas hashtag in a series of social media posts.

“This isn’t Adidas being tone-deaf or insensitive; it is an absolute affront to the Palestinians who have lost their loved ones, killed by Israel, and who have lost their limbs,” Stephanie Westbrook, a coordinator at the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), told Al Jazeera.

“Here we have an Adidas campaign featuring an Israeli soldier, whose whole identity is centred around his being a soldier, who lost his leg while participating in one of the repeated Israeli assaults on Gaza, serving in an army of a state that is currently committing genocide, has carried out an illegal military occupation of the Palestinian territory, and that has been imposing a decades-long apartheid rule over Palestinians,” she continued.

The company has released a statement in response to the boycott calls.

“Across the Middle East, Adidas has a long-standing commitment to the communities we serve, working alongside athletes, teams and sporting communities throughout the region as well as supporting people and communities in need through product donations,” it reads. “We will continue to listen, learn and work to ensure that our actions reflect the inclusive values we stand for.”