At 8:46 in the morning on September 11, 2001, an American Airlines Boeing 767 crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center, in the heart of Manhattan’s financial district. This is how 9/11 began, the worst attack in history, in which 2,977 people were killed. Two planes were launched against the Twin Towers, which collapsed. Another, against the Pentagon. And a fourth, in a field in Pennsylvania after its passengers confronted the hijackers. Thus, with those hardly forgettable images for all who lived through them, the period in which, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the “end of History” had been certified came to an end. History started moving again. The consequences reverberate to the present.
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It was an attack against the US and all democracies. Against humanity. But the pain of everyone on that date, 25 years ago, and the memory of the victims of the Islamist terrorists of Al Qaeda do not justify the mistakes the George W. Bush Administration made afterward. Each decision was more damaging than the previous one: the disaster culminated with the invasion of Iraq, driven by lies about Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. The Bush Administration also launched the so-called war on terror, which included massive human rights violations, arbitrary detentions, and disappearances. The prison at the Guantanamo base in Cuba has never been able to close and remains a legal aberration. Bush’s mistakes, which no president has corrected since, made the world more insecure and weakened the democracies they intended to defend. And we still pay the consequences. Today Al Qaeda survives in the Sahel, East Africa, and the Arabian Peninsula, and the Islamic State, after its defeat in Syria and Iraq, maintains branches in the African continent and Central Asia, and remains a powerful lure for lone wolves in Europe.
From Paris to London and Brussels, 9/11 inaugurated an era of Islamist attacks against Western cities, including the March 11, 2004 attack in Madrid, in which 193 people died. The government at the time, which had supported the Iraq war, deployed an arsenal of hoaxes to confuse public opinion about the authorship. As happened with the weapons of mass destruction invoked by Bush, something also changed at that moment: the world of post-truth and the so-called alternative facts began to take shape.
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Terrorism did not win, but neither did the United States, which acted after the attacks as a hyperpower that did not need allies nor the support of multilateral organizations or international law. And it entered with those decisions on a trajectory it has not abandoned and in which it has lost influence and global power in the face of China’s rise. After 9/11 came the 2008 financial crisis, Trump, the 2020 pandemic, Russia’s war in Ukraine, Hamas’s attack on Israel, and the destruction of Gaza: a global disorder that, after the new international order proclaimed by Bush Sr. in the early nineties, began 25 years ago and has not stopped worsening. Our century began in 2001, but 25 years later it is already different, almost unrecognizable.
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