25 Years After 9/11: How the Attacks Reshaped America and the World

After 25 years, the legacy of the September 11 terror attacks continues to shape America's politics and its place in the world.

A quarter-century on, what lingers in the mind from that world-upending day?

September 11, 2001. Or 9/11, as it quickly came to be labelled, a term previously known as the primary emergency number in North America but now forever associated with an Islamist terrorist attack that killed 2,977 people from more than 100 countries, not including the 19 hijackers.

Perhaps, initially, it was sheer confusion, as news channels interrupted regular programming to switch to images from Lower Manhattan. The North Tower of the World Trade Center was aflame. A billowing plume of charcoal grey smoke darkened what had been on that autumn morning almost cloudless blue skies.

Maybe it was the shock of seeing the second plane spearing into the South Tower, when it instantly became clear that terrorism, not pilot or mechanical error, was to blame.

Some will recall President George W Bush reading a book, The Pet Goat, to a group of schoolchildren in Sarasota, Florida, and the sight of his ashen-faced White House Chief of Staff, Andrew Card, whispering in his ear.

"A second plane hit the second tower," said Card. "America is under attack."

Not just America, but our world had changed with manic suddenness. The first plane hit the north face of the North Tower at 8:46am. The second plane crashed into the south face of the South Tower at 9:03am. Little more than 30 minutes later at 9:37am Washington DC was also under assault. American Airlines Flight 77 slammed into the Pentagon, like New York's Twin Towers, a symbol of US hegemony.

Shortly after 10am, a plane crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Passengers aboard United Airlines Flight 93, we found out later, had fought back against the al-Qaeda terrorists who had hijacked the plane with the intention of flying it into a government building in Washington DC, probably the United States Capitol building or the White House.

All these years on, it is traumatising to recall the towers collapsing in on themselves, those sturdy, seemingly indomitable skyscrapers disintegrating into columns of plunging ash. By 10:30am, the World Trade Center had ceased to exist.

So, too, the complacency of the post-Cold War world when America seemed so unassailable.

From a day of such momentous history, it is the smaller, personal details that evoke powerful memories. The recordings of workers trapped inside the burning towers telephoning loved ones, knowing they were uttering final farewells. The snapshots of people trapped on the upper floors of the Twin Towers, leaping through shattered windows to certain death. The "Missing" posters affixed to lampposts across Manhattan, a story behind each face.

Coming at the dawning of a new millennium, September 11 was the first major global event of the globalised age. Coming in the early years of our new online world, where the information flow was instantaneous, 9/11 became more of a shared, intimate and immediate experience. How did it change America and the watching world? What is its meaning in September 2026?

'God Bless America'

In the immediate aftermath of the attacks the United States of America was genuinely united. A nation already showing signs of its present-day polarity demonstrated shoulder-to-shoulder solidarity. Only the previous year, a disputed presidential election ultimately decided by a Supreme Court voting along ideological lines, had shown America to be a 50/50 nation. After the US television networks decided in 2000 to adopt the same colour scheme for their election night graphics, it became more common to split the country into Republican red and Democratic blue.

In the hours, days and weeks after 9/11, though, Americans came together at vigils, in long queues that formed outside blood donation centres and in singing of the national anthem ahead of baseball and gridiron matches.

That evening, about 150 Republican and Democrat lawmakers gathered on the East Steps of the US Capitol building, where they broke spontaneously into a rendition of "God Bless America".

A few weeks later, a poll conducted in early October indicated 79 per cent of Americans had displayed the Stars and Stripes, a burst of red, white and blue patriotism. Journalists from many of the US networks affixed flag pins to their lapels. As young Washington correspondent at the time of the 9/11 attacks, I saw all of this with my own eyes.

United in war

Since the end of the Cold War, America had lacked a common enemy. As the Russian intellectual Georgy Arbatov warned US diplomats as tensions abated between Moscow and Washington: "We are going to do a terrible thing to you. We are going to deprive you of an enemy."

Now, in Osama Bin Laden — the mastermind of 9/11 — and the al-Qaeda terror network he founded, America once again had a shared demon and as a result, a renewed sense of patriotic bipartisanship.

George W Bush, a Republican president who had reached the White House in such contested circumstances, saw his approval ratings soar to 90 per cent. After addressing a joint session of Congress on September 20 — a speech in which he announced the start of a "war on terror" — Bush was hugged by then-Senate Democratic leader, Tom Daschle, a gesture which signalled a partisan ceasefire.

Another poll, from the Washington Post and ABC News, found 93 per cent backed military action against those responsible for the 9/11 attacks. If that meant going to war then more than nine out of 10 Americans agreed. There was strong public support and near unanimous bipartisan backing for the first stage of the Bush administration's war on terror. Operation Enduring Freedom commenced in Afghanistan on October 7.

Less than two months later, with the Afghan capital Kabul already having fallen, the Taliban surrendered Kandahar, their final major stronghold. Osama Bin Laden was thought to be trapped in the Tora Bora cave complex close to the Pakistan border. US forces, however, made the mistake of entrusting his capture, or killing, to an Afghan militia. The al-Qaeda leader escaped on horseback with the help of local tribal networks and the former mujihadeen he fought beside during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan the 1980s.

The ongoing hunt for Bin Laden — along with the need to prevent Afghanistan from becoming once again a safe haven for terrorists — turned Operation Enduring Freedom into a "forever war". Only in 2021, five years ago last month, did that war finally come to an end, as US forces withdrew and the Taliban swept back into power.

National unity had shown early signs of fraying in January 2002, when the first group of detainees from the Afghan war were flown to the US base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. As these "unlawful enemy combatants" were brought off a US military cargo plane, many Americans were shocked to see them wearing fluorescent orange jumpsuits and turquoise blue face masks. The images looked dystopian.

Before a proper prison could be built, they were held in chain-link enclosures at a makeshift detention centre, Camp X-Ray, where the US flag on the wooden watchtower became a symbol of the America's new war.

"Gitmo", as Guantanamo Bay was nicknamed, was described by one government official as "the legal equivalent of outer space". That is precisely why it was chosen. Detainees had only limited protections under US law. Over time this Cuban outpost would be seen by critics, domestic and international, as an American gulag. The US Supreme Court, in a 2006 ruling, determined that the military commissions set up to try detainees violated the Geneva Conventions.

On a visit to Guantanamo Bay, I was told detainees were given Happy Meals from the McDonald's on the base in return for actionable intelligence. That, apparently, was true. But many of the 780 men and boys held there were also subjected to what were euphemistically called "enhanced interrogation techniques" such as sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation and waterboarding, the simulation of drowning.

Waterboarding became part of the new 9/11 vocabulary, alongside other phrases like "Ground Zero," "weapons of mass destruction" and "the Axis of Evil," George W Bush's controversial descriptor lumping together Iraq, Iran and North Korea.

Back in America, the passage of the Patriot USA Act, just 45 days after 9/11, sparked debate over how to balance national security with constitutional protections, and whether the legislative process had been rushed. Sweeping surveillance powers, which included the tapping of domestic and international phones, and greatly expanded detention powers, infringed civil liberties.

More controversial still was the decision of the Bush administration to target the Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. The move was first discussed by the US president's inner circle over the weekend after 9/11, despite no evidence linking Hussein to the attacks.

The war in Iraq began in March 2003 with the "shock and awe" bombardment of Baghdad. Ahead of the attacks the Bush administration justified military action using what turned out to be false and misleading claims about Iraq's supposed arsenal of weapons of mass of destruction.

The case for war, made most famously at the horseshoe table of the United Nations Security Council in New York by then-US Secretary of State Colin Powell, failed to convince much of the country. Whereas three-quarters of Americans backed military action in Afghanistan, only half supported Operation Iraqi Freedom, the invasion of Iraq.

Unravelling

The Pentagon expected the war to be over quickly.

"Five days or five weeks or five months," predicted then-Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, "but it certainly isn't going to last any longer than that."

Instead, it lasted eight years, nine months and 26 days, from March 2003 to December 2011. The war claimed the lives of at least 110,000 Iraqis and more than 4,000 Americans. A further 31,952 Americans were wounded in action. As well as the human cost of the war, there was a financial price tag, estimated to be between $US1.5 trillion ($2 trillion) and $US3 trillion ($4.2 trillion).

Diplomatically, the collateral damage was immense. The attacks of 9/11 had presented the United States with an opportunity to reaffirm its global leadership of the post-Cold War world. George W Bush became the recipient of enormous global goodwill. "Nous sommes tous Americains," said a headline published by the French newspaper Le Monde, two days after the attacks: "We are all Americans."

NATO allies, for the first time, triggered the Article 5 collective defence clause, meaning that an armed attack against one member is an attack against all.

Australia invoked Article IV of the ANZUS Treaty to convey support for the United States, and the military action that would come next. Then-prime minister John Howard had been in Washington on September 11 and could see from his hotel window smoke rising from the Pentagon.

In the lead-up to the Iraq war, however, the Bush administration squandered the unity of the West. It rejected multilateralism in favour of unilateralism and derided longtime allies, most notably the French who opposed the Iraq war. On Air Force One, French fries were banished from the menu, and replaced by "Freedom Fries".

The overthrow of thuggish Saddam Hussein and the collapse of his Ba'athist regime led to chaos throughout Iraq, and sparked a sectarian civil war in which Shiite Muslim, Sunni Muslim and Kurdish separatists struggled for control and fought for self-governance. The eventual withdrawal of US forces in 2011 created a security vacuum in which jihadist groups prospered. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS as it was better known, started as an affiliate of al-Qaeda. In 2013 it went out on its own.

By 2014, capitalising on the weakness of the Iraqi state and the civil war being waged in Syria, ISIS succeeded in setting up a caliphate in the east of Iraq, which included Mosul, Iraq's second largest city. ISIS inspired the Paris terrorist attacks in 2015, in which 130 people were killed, a bombing in the heart of Istanbul, the Brussels bombing in 2016, which killed 32, the Nice truck attack which killed 86. In Sydney, in December 2014, the Lindt cafe siege was carried out by a gunman who told hostages he was an operative of Islamic State.

China's rise

The aftermath of September 11 resulted in power shifts that are still being felt today. Iran benefited enormously from the war in Iraq, because it led to the ouster of its chief enemy, Saddam Hussein, who was also the architect and wartime commander of the Iran-Iraq war that raged throughout the 1980s.

The Iraqi dictator had protected the Sunni elite. The new government in Iraq was Shia-dominated and more favourably disposed towards Tehran. Now the most powerful Muslim country in the Middle East, Iran looked to expand its proxy network in Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, Syria and Gaza. Thereafter, containing Iran, and preventing it from becoming a nuclear-armed power, became a key foreign policy objective of successive US presidents, from Barack Obama through to Donald Trump. Much of the opposition domestically to Donald Trump's Iran war stems from memories of the Iraq war, and the fear of another lengthy foreign entanglement.

As the United States got bogged down in two lengthy wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, China became a more assertive power in the Indo-Pacific. Beijing simultaneously expanded its sphere of influence in Africa, South America, Central and South Asia and Europe.

The 20th century had been the American century. By 2008, when Beijing hosted the summer Olympics, it looked like the 21st century could become the Chinese century. No longer did we live in a unipolar world, where American pre-eminence was a given.

The impact on US politics

By the end of his presidency, George W Bush was frequently compared with Roman emperors and accused of being the author of America's imperial decline. The failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq blasted American credibility.

Images from Abu Ghraib, a prison complex inside Iraq, showing US military personnel subjecting Iraqi detainees to physical, psychological, and sexual abuse made a mockery of America's claim to moral leadership. So, too, CIA "black sites" situated in friendly nations and rendition programmes that human rights groups complained violated the UN Convention Against Torture.

After Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States became more wary of projecting its military power. Obama's strategy during the 2011 Libyan war, as a senior advisor explained to the New Yorker magazine, was "leading from behind," with France and the United Kingdom taking the military lead.

In 2013, Obama decided against launching an attack on Syria, even though its then dictator Bashar al-Assad had crossed the US president's "red line" by murdering his own people with chemical weapons.