This is for paid subscribers: just a reminder that I will be pausing the substack for a couple of months starting later in September. Payments will automatically go on hold, so if you’re a paid subscriber, you will not pay anything during this period.
Twenty-five years ago the President of the United States issued his famous declaration that the country was at war. Following the murder of thousands of his countrymen, George W Bush announced that ‘this enemy attacked not just our people, but all freedom-loving people everywhere in the world. The United States of America will use all our resources to conquer this enemy. We will rally the world. We will be patient, we will be focused, and we will be steadfast in our determination.’
The ‘War on Terror’ had begun, an awkward name for what President Bush had accidentally called a ‘crusade’ five days after 9/11. It’s not ideal to embark on a mission without being able to name your enemy and the War on Terror - which everyone understood to be a War on Islamist Terror - did not turn out to be a great success.
What should have been a punishment raid on the Taliban turned out to be a nation-building exercise that defied history or anthropology. That was at least understandable, considering Afghanistan’s role in the murder of thousands of Americans. Less so was the adventure in Iraq, targeted at a regime unconnected to the atrocity, and which led to all sorts of unintended consequences: the replacement of a secular regime by sectarian gangs, the increasing power of theocratic Iran and the near destruction of the country’s Christian minority. The chaos in Iraq would also inspire a wave of suicide bombings in the West, including in London.
Unintended consequences occur because of the variety of actors and factors involved, but also because humans react in sometimes irrational ways. One of the now-well known unintended consequences of 9/11 was a sharp rise in passenger fatalities – among drivers.
This makes it very hard to predict future events, and journalists and commentators are notoriously bad at doing so. In the aftermath of 9/11, it was widely expected that American Muslims would suffer persecution, or at the very least unbearable stigma and isolation. That Americans would learn to hate Muslims. In fact, their opinion of Muslims improved, across the political spectrum, and immigration from that part of the world steadily increased - so that today the American Muslim population is more than twice as large as it was in 2001. The same thing happened in France after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, although in this case returning to its baseline not long after.
9/11 may have changed the world, but it didn’t change public opinion.
