Twenty-five years on, Jacobin asks what “Never Forget” was ever supposed to mean. Remembering the dead, yes — but also holding the perpetrators accountable and learning enough to avoid repeating the choices that followed. On the last two counts, the argument runs, we have forgotten almost everything.
The only government with direct complicity in the attacks was never made to answer for it:
- Saudi Arabia faced nothing resembling justice, and successive administrations actively covered up its role while arming its war in Yemen.
- Washington instead bombed and invaded almost every Middle Eastern country except the implicated one — Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, and now Iran.
- The costs ran far past the intended targets: roughly five times more American lives than were lost on 9/11, at least 4.5 million deaths across the region, and 38 million people displaced.
- In North Africa, terrorism reportedly exploded 100,000 percent after the US military arrived to “fight terror” there.
The essay’s sharper point is about what the war became domestically. “Terrorist” no longer describes someone who kills for political ends — it is a catch-all slur aimed at people who vandalize a billionaire’s car, criticize capitalism, protest, film law enforcement, or hold office while Muslim. The Department of Homeland Security, created in the aftermath, now describes its own mission as a literal war against enemies within.
Meanwhile the original pretexts evaporate without consequence: a former al-Qaeda member rules Syria as a US-backed head of state, Washington flirts with normalizing the Taliban, and the same government implicated in 9/11 is being helped toward a nuclear weapon.
The image the piece lands on is a zombie — the war marching on with nothing left that gave it life, still looking for flesh. Its closing note is the bleak one: the officials who started it won’t pay the costs, and the ordinary Americans whose name it was waged in never voted for it.