I was in a global meeting and someone from Dublin told us that we had been attacked and what happened. You could see everyone’s jaw tense and the room got deathly quiet until one of the people said in a quiet yet somehow menacing tone “well that’s it then…. We’re at war”
I have never understood the common refrain of "now we're at war" as if we weren't waging war in the Middle East for a conservative decade before 9/11 and bin Laden hadn't declared war on US military forces in 1996 and US civilians in 1998
We, Americans, felt invulnerable. Wars happened “over there”. Mostly it was dictators killing their own, and maybe the US was involved, maybe funding, maybe supplying weapons, but not openly, overtly at war. Most of the people in any country are just going about their daily lives, and have no control.
It's strange to me that nothing so big has happened in the 25 years since, considering how many wars that the United States has been involved in either directly or indirectly.
Is it because our national security really is that much better as a result of it, or maybe just that citizens aren't made aware of anything else, or has there really never been another attack on American soil?
Security has gotten a lot better. The TSA didn't exist until two months later in November 2001 and wasn't fully in place at all airports until late 2002. The 2005 UK bombings also forced even more security, which is how the UK became essentially a surveillance state.
Most of the responses to those wars happened to Europe instead. Post covid it's mostly been sporadic knife attacks though which don't make international news.
This is why as a non-american, I have a hard time taking all of these comments seriously. Everyone is talking about how much of a tragedy it was 25 later, when the US has caused similar tragedies many times over in the years before and after 9/11.
It was one of the largest American mass casualty tragedies that I can think of (at least in modern history). If you think about it, we hadn’t had many US civilians being killed in acts of war on our own soil since Pearl Harbor (that was like 70 civilians casualties, which paled in comparison). We might have had some sporadic small scale isolated terrorist attacks here and there throughout the decades, but nothing even close to 9/11. Before that it was probably the civil war over a century prior. We had thought that we were safe at home as non-combatants.
As Americans, we had the luxury of not having any combat fought on our home turf for a long time, so seeing that many innocent civilians killed (and in real-time on live tv) was absolutely shocking. We had felt safe here for so long that it was a huge wake up call that we were vulnerable, and it put everyone on edge. There was a thick blanket of paranoia, anxiety, sorrow, panic, and anger across the country. It was very reality breaking and disconcerting. It really changed everything for us here. The public had a deep trust in our institutions to safeguard us and keep anything like that from happening to us, but even these security apparatuses weren’t able to prevent it. It was a harrowing event.
I don’t believe that the terrorists imagined that they would be able to topple one of the skyscrapers, let alone both. Their plan ended up being much more effective and took way more lives than even they had ever expected.
We were not that far out from the Cold War at this point. And a lot of people had been raised with
the understanding that if strikes on American soil were on the table, then nuclear war was on the table. I feel like a lot of people forget, there was not just a fear of war after 9/11 there was a fear of nuclear war. Which is exactly why that “weapons of mass destruction” lie worked so well.
In Britain I distinctly remember someone saying the US was going to turn the Middle East to glass. There was definitely a feeling of “what are they going to do now..?” about it, and what cascade events would follow.
Then Blair supported his boy’s invasion of not one but two simultaneous conflicts, one of which was unrelated. I trained up and served in one of them, and 25 years later the US is less stable as an ally than ever and even Iran is telling it to do one.
Bin Laden was killed, but he basically got his strategic victory of weakening US global hegemony. Sad times for all involved.
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u/kurimiq 15h ago
I was in a global meeting and someone from Dublin told us that we had been attacked and what happened. You could see everyone’s jaw tense and the room got deathly quiet until one of the people said in a quiet yet somehow menacing tone “well that’s it then…. We’re at war”