Trump uses 9/11 memorial speech to justify Iran war as families commemorate victims of attack – live | US news

On September 10, 2001, America seemed unassailable. It had won the cold war and enjoyed a relatively peaceful 1990s as “the indispensable nation”, in secretary of state Madeleine Albright’s framing. From fiscal years 1998 to 2001, the federal government recorded four consecutive budget surpluses.

But what had been dubbed “the American century” came to an apocalyptic end on the next morning.

“9/11 is when things began to go wrong for the United States,” suggested Bill Galston, a former policy adviser to Bill Clinton.

The United States was at the apogee of its post-cold war power on September 10 and then, through a series of missteps and misjudgments on both the foreign and domestic front, we have thrown away a great deal of not only our power but our credibility.

In my judgment, 9/11 set off a quarter-century of misgovernment in the United States and we’ll pay the price for that for a very long time.

Did Osama Bin Laden, the al-Qaida leader who masterminded the attacks, win after all? If the metric of victory is measured by Bin Laden’s immediate, messianic desire to establish a global caliphate and expel all western presence from the Middle East, he evidently failed.

But if the terrorist’s success is measured by the magnitude of the self-inflicted wounds they provoke from their target, Bin Laden’s legacy is a slow, autoimmune decay within the US, it may have exceeded his darkest fantasies.

Ben Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser under Barack Obama, said: “Bin Laden in some ways failed in his intentions. He wanted the United States out of the Middle East. He wanted to topple certain governments in the Middle East. But in other ways 9/11 is the most successful terrorist attack in history insofar as it prompted such an overreach from the United States that we hastened our own decline, division and betrayal of our own story.”

He regards the cost of 25 years of “forever wars” as incalculable. They placed a huge burden on the Americans who fought them and had to deal with problems ranging from war wounds to the opioids crisis. They also contributed to the destruction of the rules-based order, paving the way for Russia’s Vladimir Putin and others to reject the rules and use the language of counter-terrorism to justify stringent crackdowns.

Then, there is the domestic sphere. Rhodes says the typical Fox News viewer during the Bush years was promised great victories over foreign enemies. “When nations don’t keep those types of promises, when you unleash that kind of nationalism and xenophobia and you don’t succeed on the battlefield, history tells you that people start to look for enemies within to blame,” he explained.

My experience in the Obama years is very much that ‘the other’ that had been constructed around terrorists morphed into the Black president or the immigrants crossing the southern border or LGBT people. The segments were the same but the enemy had changed to an enemy within.

Donald Trump launched his first bid for the presidency, a decade ago, against the backdrop of this search for blame. Promoting the lie that Obama is a Muslim, demonising immigrants, and promising to build a border wall, he cut through by railing – in a clear break from Bush and Republican orthodoxy – against political elites for waging forever wars that he claimed he would stop (he has called the invasion of Iraq “the single worst decision ever made” in US history).

“You’d never have Donald Trump as president without 9/11 because he basically stepped into that slipstream of othering people and captured the ugly xenophobia and nationalism that had been unleashed and the anger that people, particularly on the right, felt at being gaslit by the Bush administration for eight years,” said Rhodes.

“It’s no coincidence that Trump’s ascent was marked by the destruction of Jeb Bush, who symbolised all those broken promises.”

Now, Rhodes argues, the war on terror has come home. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are “basically running counter-insurgency strategies in American cities, with the same military equipment that we used to fight wars now in the hands of law enforcement”, he said. “Some of the same people have signed up to do it, and the same surveillance technologies that we use against terrorists abroad are now used against Americans. We are now living in the theatre of the war on terror and it’s obviously a source of growing discomfort to many Americans.”