# Why 9/11 Still Baffles Us, 25 Years On > A small band of jihadists baited the world's only superpower into a quarter century of self-inflicted strategic ruin. - Title: Why 9/11 Still Baffles Us, 25 Years On · Foreign Policy - Summary: A small band of jihadists baited the world's only superpower into a quarter century of self-inflicted strategic ruin. Bush mistook a weak nonstate group for… - Keywords: 9/11, war on terror, iraq war, al qaeda, us foreign policy, Still, Baffles, Years, Foreign Policy - Source: Foreign Policy — https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/09/11/911-attacks-war-on-terror-bergen-review - Author: Michael Hirsh - Read time: 4 min - Topics: 9/11, war on terror, iraq war, al qaeda, us foreign policy ## A wound that keeps moving Twenty-five years on, 9/11 is still hard to size up because its consequences have never stopped arriving. The ripples out of that day have not even slowed. > The repercussions rippling out of that terrible day never seem to stop, or even slow down. ## Bookended by wars of choice The era opened with a war of choice in Iraq. Its 25th anniversary is being marked with another one, in Iran. Washington is still stuck in the region every president has promised to leave. ## The only winner was Tehran After trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of American and Iraqi casualties, a U.S. Army study named the sole victor of the 2003 invasion. > the only victor... an emboldened and expansionist Iran ## The Great Distraction While Washington rebuilt its military for counterinsurgency and drone strikes, Beijing built one to beat a peer. One U.S. general called the post-9/11 years the era of the Great Distraction. > Beijing was busy building a military to fight and defeat a peer-level competitor. ## It broke the Republicans too Some analysts trace Trump's rise to the wreckage of Bush's agenda. Baghdad, not the primaries, is where the old conservatism died. > Conservatism was never the same after the first improvised explosive device detonated in Baghdad. ## Bergen's verdict, and its gap Peter Bergen's new book calls al Qaeda a real strategic threat and credits the U.S. with blunting it, while shredding four presidents for how they handled it. ## Bush the Great Conflater His administration lumped together Islamists who had nothing to do with each other, turning a hunt for one small group into a war on supposed state sponsors who ate up more attention than the terrorists. ## The Taliban were not al Qaeda The road to disaster started by merging the two, though the Taliban had no record of international terrorism and were always uneasy about hosting bin Laden. > even though the Taliban had no record of international terrorism ## A deal never attempted Misreading the Taliban blocked any stability bargain early on. By the time Obama got serious more than a decade later, they had retaken much of Afghanistan and saw no reason to talk. ## Bin Laden's argument, proved Jihadists had long debated whether to hit the 'near enemy' Arab regimes or the American 'far enemy.' Occupying Iraq settled it, and made the United States the target. ## His own estimate said so Bush's 2006 National Intelligence Estimate found that Iraq had become the cause célèbre for jihadists and was breeding the next generation of operatives. > shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives ## Imprecision has a price Treating every Arab man as a potential jihadi led straight to Abu Ghraib, Camp Bucca, and Guantánamo, where torture has left even Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's conviction in doubt. > the lost generation in American foreign policy ## One lucky day Al Qaeda had two small prior wins, the 1998 embassy bombings and the USS Cole. It had one A-team and enough for a single roll of the dice, which took years to plan. ## No plan for the morning after The Abbottabad documents show bin Laden and his circle in disarray after 9/11, with no follow-up strategy. Scholar Nelly Lahoud calls him sophomoric at best as a strategist. > empty threats, unexecuted plans, and more than a little wishful thinking ## A thousand radicals, not communism Gen. Anthony Zinni says expanding the war beyond Afghanistan may be the worst strategic mistake a U.S. president has ever made, because the threat was never existential. > It was a band of maybe a thousand radicals... But this was not communism or fascism. ## Tactical wins, strategic loss The U.S. did get better at killing jihadists and detecting plots. That counts for less when its own policies manufactured most of the enemies it was fighting, the Islamic State included. ## Bleed America to bankruptcy Bin Laden's later goal, stated on tape in 2004, was a long draining war like the one that broke the Soviets. He found the administration easy to provoke and bait. > easy for us to provoke and bait this administration ## They let them walk At Tora Bora, the kill-or-capture operation was working. The senior Bush team ignored CIA officers and Gen. Mattis, then shifted special forces and drones to Iraq. > We could have had the entire al Qaeda command structure had we done that. ## Bombing caves doesn't count No cabinet meeting ever asked whether invading Iraq was wise. The likeliest explanation is hubris: hawks who wanted a war that felt big enough to matter. > There's a feeling we've got to do something that counts, and bombing some caves is not something that counts ## The sympathy we burned Le Monde ran 'We are all Americans,' and even Iran sent condolences. That goodwill, and the chance to bind the world's states closer together, was squandered to a mind-boggling degree. ## Key takeaway Bush mistook a weak nonstate group for an existential enemy, and every president since has been cleaning up the wreckage of that one category error.