The 11th of September, 2026, marks a quarter-century since the “9/11” attacks that killed three thousand Americans and set into motion a generation of the “Global War on Terror”. The anniversary will no doubt bring with it the very human emotions of grief as well as the more cynical, arguably long-dominant, strain of cynical exploitation of that grief by both official and unofficial bad actors. The “Global War on Terror”’s campaign against an abstract, amorphous and inconsistently conception of “radical Islam”, labelled under an equally ill-defined and selective category of “terrorism”, seemed to be waged against any semblance of independent Muslim politics rather than terrorism per se. In the period since, the United States has waged war, usually undeclared, in close to a dozen Muslim countries, while laying the groundwork, justifications, and rubrics by which not only vassals but also its nominal rivals, such as Russia, have pursued their own Muslim opponents.
Three thousand people were killed in the September 2001 attacks on the United States, and in total several million have been killed during the wars since waged by the United States since, which have long since exceeded any reasonable scale of retribution or security against militants whose profile they only enhanced. Though the hundreds of thousands of lives lost were not exclusively at the United States’ hands, in most cases American involvement triggered the conflicts and in virtually every case American involvement only exacerbated and militarized them further. Internationally, not only in non-Muslim countries, notions of Islam beyond the shifting conveniences of officialdom were securitized: treated as a potential threat rather than a religion.
The September 2001 attacks cemented into policy an international, borderless conflict that has yet to end. (Photo: Encyclopaedia Britannica)
Geopolitical Shifts behind America’s War in the Muslim World
Much of this stemmed from the 1990s, where in the aftermath of the Cold War the United States increasingly saw “radical Islam” as a threat. Ironically, what was then branded “radical Islam” had been key to winning the Cold War: forty years ago, and fifteen years before 2001, the United States was enthusiastically supporting an internationalized Muslim jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan, one that helped bleed out its Cold War rival.
Nor was this the only case of American cooperation with Muslims during the Cold War. Apart from its now well-known alliance with the Gulf states and what might be termed “conservative” governments such as Turkiye, Jordan, and Pakistan, the United States also backed Muslim militants against China’s new communist regime in the 1950s. It also tended to take a less hostile stance toward Muslim independence than, for example, the colonial European powers Britain and France. Often in order to preempt a real or imagined Soviet threat, the United States took a more nuanced position on the independence of Algeria and Indonesia, the unity of Nigeria, and even provided key diplomatic support to Egypt against a British-French-Israeli axis in the 1956 war, seventy years ago this autumn. This may be weighed against American subversion of Iranian, Iraqi, and Indonesian governments that were seen as leftwing (with only occasional accuracy in these cases, however, American anticommunism often originally had the support of many Muslim circles who shared an antipathy toward communists. For all its many Cold War sins, the United States was not pointedly anti-Muslim in the way of many other powers.
It was in the 1970s and especially 1980s, by which time it established a major command in the region to cover for Israel’s destructive war in Lebanon, that the United States began to adopt traces of the Islamophobic hostility we know today. The link was not coincidental: much of American Islamophobia stems from pro-Israel agitation, whether from Christian, Jewish, or even atheist sources, that portrayed Islam as an “other” against whom Israel served as an emblem of Western civilization: the neoconservatives who would launch the war on terror hailed from these circles. Robert Kagan, a rare member of these circles who has since partially recanted, noted a link between American Islamophobia and support for Israel, but got it backward: it was not organic pressure from American Islamophobia that drove Washington to back Israel, as he presumed; but rather pro-Israel propaganda, often linked to the far-right Likud party that still dominates Tel Aviv, that incited Islamophobia within the United States.
Even as it began to earmark “radical Islam” as a threat in the 1990s – leading to hostile policies against a growing range of Muslim countries and actors, including former Cold War allies – the United States was still not averse to occasional cooperation with Muslims where it saw fit; its stance toward the Bosnian genocide was, if self-serving, preferable to that of European powers despite a considerable effort by Israel’s lobbyists to vilify Bosnia, and its definitely self-serving campaign in Kosovo did help countless Kosovars. But these were exceptions to a growing rule of anti-Islam hostility that crystallized in September 2001.
Recently released politician Lindsey Graham was one of countless influential figures who sought to keep the United States at perpetual war with the Muslim world (Photo: CommonDreams)
International Islamophobia
Despite official claims that the war targeted “radical Islam” rather than Islam per se, American military, security, and policy officialdom often internalized or projected flatly anti-Muslim attitudes and propaganda from various circles, perhaps none so influential as pro-Israel, often rightwing but also in many cases “liberal hawk” circles who gleefully exported Tel Aviv’s prejudices about Arabs and Muslims to the United States, and – given enormous American international influence – and beyond.
Even after the dust cleared in some of these wars, the process of securitization and systematic polarization has continued not only abroad but, like a boomerang, in Western countries. Politicians like Lindsay Graham and Ted Cruz; oligarchs like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and Larry Ellison; leading officials like Pete Hegseth and Sebastian Gorka; public blowhards like Douglas Murray and Mark Levin; and rabblerousers like Stephen “Tommy Robinson” Yaxley-Lennon and Laura Loomer have all drunk at the well of the “War on Terror”: many of them cut their teeth there. They have frequently traded in propaganda, outright lies, and incitement in league with anti-Muslim circles in other countries, from India and Myanmar to Ethiopia and South Sudan, from Russia and China to France and Britain. While these Islamophobic circles may not agree on everything else, their talking points and deliberate myopia are often so coordinated on (invariably inaccurate) minutiae, often copy-pasting the same phrases and expressions to repurpose to their own context, that there is no doubt as to a wide-scale exchange of material over the course of decades.
Western Muslims Found Wanting
With the eager support of the abovementioned circles, the war on terror at its peak targeted not only Muslim countries but also the “homeland” in the United States, and in the case of its European allies their own turfs. To varying degrees, without exception it produced a hyperactive, paranoid scrutiny of Muslim citizenry of whom proof of loyalty and condemnation of others was frequently demanded. Among other things, this has produced an unfortunately reactionary, defensive mechanism among many Western Muslims, who by and large have failed to take advantage of their relatively privileged position in the heart of the world’s most influential country.
Having lived myself in the West during much of the War on Terror’s peak, it would be hard to overstate the blanket hostility, usually pushed top-down by government or media circles and then diffused into society, that targeted Muslims during the period. Some went so far as to turn opportunistic “native informant” and pander to the worst paranoia against Muslims as a career move. The result was either outright victimization , or at least intimidation into sullen silence. While some Muslims did push back, whether in defending their religion against a barrage of calumnies or in undermining the hypocrisy of claims of Muslim aggression at a time when the United States itself was invading numerous Muslim countries, they have been far too few and, with a couple of exceptions, far too disorganized to make the sort of difference that was required.
When an Islamophobe supporting a blatantly contrived war or a genocide abroad challenges a Muslim to condemn his enemies or spouts lies about Muslims, the response has often stayed along the defensive lines divorced from the political context of the attack. The Iraq war, for instance, was roundly condemned internationally as a grave violation of every conceivable law, conducted on blatantly false premises, and is now recognized widely by the American public as a historic mistake. Some of the insurgency were undoubtedly brutes; many, however, were recognized even by their opponents as honorable men with legitimate grievances such as the destruction of their homes or the abuse of their families. At the time, however, American Muslims would frequently be challenged about “Islamic terrorism” in Iraq, and rather than situate it within the context of a brutal foreign invasion respond with a mealy-mouthed response along the lines of “Islam means peace and condemns terrorism”. In that confused response a key point, the idea that resistance to an illegal invasion automatically means terrorism, is already conceded. Yet such cases abounded, and have in fact continue, in one country or other, to the current day.
When the current genocide by Israel in Palestine began, far too many Muslims in the West instinctively moved to condemn blatantly invented Palestinian crimes rather than adequately confront the impending, openly advertised bloodbath. In fairness, Western Muslims’ objections might not have made much difference: the reservations of even Western public officials years later have not eroded Tel Aviv’s sadistic sense of impunity. But when it came to action that cleared their consciences from the oncoming annihilation of Palestine, it was left to the younger generation , often students on campuses , to demonstrate, under severe institutional and personal pressure , before the pressure told and the protest too flickered out, like a lonely candle in a gale.
The wreckage in the Gaza Strip, one of many regions pounded under the label of counterterrorism and the site of a genocide (Photo: The Japan Times)
The Failure of Muslim Governments
In one sense it is hard to blame Muslims in the West when so many Muslim governments speedily, often either in panic or for their own self-serving purposes, yielded the same ground. While the Iraq invasion was widely condemned, few Muslim governments offered anything more. Iraq at least made a splash; the war in Afghanistan drew almost no official condemnation despite the numerous fallacies and abuses that led to its eventual defeat , and the war in Somalia, swiftly catching up to Afghanistan as America’s longest war, is barely even noticed.
Worse yet was the tendency of many Muslim countries to copy-paste the securitization of Islam and repurpose it to their own purposes , usually to fight off some Muslim dissident and almost invariably, from the Sahel to Waziristan, leading to prolonged wars without clear direction or strategy. Terrorism is a serious problem wherever it occurs, but its definition has been so expanded that virtually any armed rebel is framed as a terrorist: some Muslim regimes go further and label any dissident, let alone militant, as a “khariji” in an attempt to give their sweeping securitization Islamic legitimacy. The fact that khawarij exist and the fact that a war on terror exists has been taken by too many Muslim countries as an excuse to paint every dissident as a rebel, every rebel as a terrorist, and every terrorist as a khariji.
When Muslim governments so easily accept securitization, it is hardly surprising that non-Muslim governments with Muslim opponents have done so. Perhaps the most notorious case is, of course, the genocide of Palestinians, wherein Israel has put on full, appallingly bloody, blast the most sadistic, destructive tunes of the same war on terror it cheerled. Whether Rohingya by Myanmar, Uyghurs by China, Chechens by Russia, Somalis by Ethiopia, or Kashmiris by India, anti-Muslim securitization has justified incredibly oppressive, bloody crackdowns under the generic label of countering terrorism.
A Forever War
So amorphous and adaptable is the label of fighting terrorism that to some extent the excuse is no longer needed. The networks, rhetorical tools, and propaganda produced and sharpened over the war on terror have taken on a life of their own, and are periodically cranked up by bad-faith actors for distinct purposes: whether by assaults on Somalis in the United States or Israeli provocateurs’ unpunished assaults on Muslims in the Netherlands. They have long since gone from mere security circles into distinct culture wars with serious human consequences: Hindutva fascists in India and white supremacists in Britain will fire the same unsubstantiated accusations and invective at Muslims, even using one another’s lies as proof that these are internationally shared concerns, and proceed onto lynchings and riots.
Meanwhile, the war on terror’s steady erasure of international boundaries and norms in the service of a securitization of Islam and a steady militarization has seen most of the Middle East erupt in flames, with the United States, faithful handmaiden to brutal Israeli misadventures across the region , once again up to its knees in a costly, unpopular, and destructive war . Twenty-five years after it began, and long after the lessons should have been learnt, the “war on terror” is as destructive and as confused as it ever has been. Most people are aware of that. Millions have paid the cost. But nobody will bell the cat.
Related:
The Continuing Relevance of the Bosnian Genocide
Fallujah Aflame: Remembering the Bloodiest Battle of the Iraq War
Rising to the Moment: What Muslim American Activists Today can Learn from Successful Community Movements during the Bosnian Genocide
The post Long War without End: A Quarter-Century since the War on Terror appeared first on MuslimMatters.org .
Long War without End: A Quarter-Century since the War on Terror
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