[Prefatory Note: this is a republication of Substack publication as an alternative way of remembering 9/11, essentially as a systemic tragedy legitimizing the state crime of state terror and demonizing political resistance to such criminality as validating retaliation under the rubrics of either counterterrrorism or a new revived species of pre-modern ‘just war.’ See <richardafalk5.substack.com]
25 years after 9/11 there continues to be well-evidenced doubts about the authenticity of the official version of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, and an aborted mission to attack the White House. Such doubts have been ignored or more commonly dismissed by the mainstream media, derided as ‘conspiracy theory.’ This controversy remains to be resolved, and accompanied by continuing empathy for those families that suffered losses in the course of the tragedy. Whether the identity of the 9/11 perpetrators and their motives were as officially alleged or were motivated by a variety of strategic goals that have been attributed by critics to both adversaries and allies of the West is a matter of great unresolved lingering historical significance.
Yet what tends to be overlooked is an evaluation of the response, how it was crafted as ‘war’ rather than ‘crime’ and given a globalizing twist by generalizing the acts as an assault on the professed values of liberal democracy in the West without a hint of responsibility for the record of civilizational dominance achieved by colonizing violence, exploitation of resources, and coercive intervention with non-Western aspirations for self-determination. With a consciousness of this background, my focus is how the call to arms in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks reshaped warmaking as a core feature of international relations and geopolitical behavior that subtly undermined the UN and the role of international law in the management of global security. The most concise formulation of the original retaliatory formulation can be found in a rereading of President George W. Bush’s address to a Joint Session of Congress on January 20, 2001. From these perspectives, it seems persuasive to view as regressive the transformation of war and the nature of global security that represented, at least in part, a flawed interpretation of the 9/11 phenomenon.
As the sitting president in 2001, George W. Bush, made clear in his address to Congress that there were immediate important alterations of U.S. foreign policy in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Perhaps none more fundamental than demeaning the perpetrators as terrorists outside the domain of constraining elements in the law of war that had evolved over the centuries and then linking their attack to a global terrorist network. Beyond this, Bush raised the stakes by in effect declaring war on the vaguely depict global network rather than limiting the response to rendering what he deemed as ‘justice’ to the perpetrators. Several points of interpretation follow:
—the emergence of 9/11 mega-terrorism that was not a matter of warmaking directly attributable to a foreign state that made it permissible for the target state to retaliate with or without the permission of the sovereign state from which the attack emanated. This became through time an unchallenged de facto modification of the UN Charter conception of state sovereignty and a greatly expanded idea of justifiable self-defense not rooted in international law;
—the broader implication of this expanded right of retaliation meant that such a permissible use of force was not restricted to the territorial limits of the state from which the perpetrators were given safe harbor, were trained, recruited, and sent abroad to carry out the 9/11 mission. In other words, any sovereign state to which the perpetrators retreated whether by stealth or invitation could not insulate the suspected perpetrators from an enlarged right of retaliation, in effect creating a geographically unlimited permissible scope of retaliation quite independent of international boundary. This meant that retaliation or engagement in counterterrorist warfare imposed no framework of legal, moral, or even geopolitical constraint. In Bush’s words, “This is civilization’s fight,” referring to the unity of liberal values shared across all ethnic boundaries, without any overt hint of Orientalism beyond an implicit hint of a new phase of Pax Americana: “Tonight we are a country awakened to danger and called upon to defend freedom. Our grief has turned to anger, and anger to resolution.” Such a message made clear that unlike past wars, this war against terror because of its boundaryless nature would be a long struggle without the defeat of an enemy government, it cannot be ended until the terrorist network is destroyed, requiring patience and the active support of foreign nations.
—the characterization of the perpetrators of 9/11 as ‘terrorists,’ given the accompanying legitimation of the right of retaliation that transformed counter-terrorism into a new kind of ‘just war’ that was unregulated by either the law of war or international humanitarian law. [See Richard Falk, The Great Terror War for early evaluation] It treated such transnational political violence as ‘terrorism’ even if undertaken as a reaction to prior unlawful behavior by the targeted state, and gave states a policy justification for violations of sovereign rights as well as individual human rights. Detained individuals suspected of participating or complicit in such attacks were not accorded the rights of ‘prisoners of war’ but subjected to abusive forms of detentions, including torture, as ‘terrorists’ without denials or apologies from U.S. leaders.
—sovereign states were no longer free to proclaim their neutrality in relation to a sustained conflict between a violent transnational political movement and counterterrorist operations this was a unilateral revision of the right to remain neutral in relation to international warfare. Even during the two world wars and the Cold War the countries of the Global South were more or less respected if their governments opted for neutrality although subject to taunts by the John Foster Dulles, as U.S. Secretary of State that being neutral in the struggle against Soviet Communism was ‘immoral.’ Bush went further in the unipolar atmosphere of 2001 a decade after the Soviet collapse, declaring that “[E]very nation, in every region has a decision to make: Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.” This is a grandiose demand that ends the option of occupying the neutral political space separating war and peace. Besides, it overlooks the obvious contradiction. The U.S. has long given support and asylum to ‘terrorists’ who support American foreign policy, most notoriously with respect to Cuba since the Castro-led revolution of 1959.
What is not evident in the U.S. response to 9/11 even after 25 years was the degree to which this pattern of transnational violence and counterterrorism represented a partial unconscious retreat to the pre-Westphalian idea of international relations as an anarchic domain where all pressures, including those derived from morality and religion, to constrain warmaking, protest POWs against abuse, and encourage peaceful resolution of conflict by diplomacy and judicial settlement procedures are abandoned when confronted by non-state political violence simply by calling such actors as ‘terrorists.’ Over time, rather than leading this unrestrained retaliatory violence, the U.S. has followed the Israeli lead that treats every act of resistance against oppressive occupation of the Palestinian homeland as ‘terrorism,’ sanitizing retaliatory violence as a deserving recipient of impunity regardless of policy context.
With the passage of time this counterterrorism paradigm for warmaking outside the limits of international law has been carried to genocidal extremes by the behavior of Israel toward the Palestinian people, characterizing recourse to violent struggle in their resistance to Israel’s lawless occupation as ‘terrorism,’ most unambiguously after the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, the word alone the issuance of a license not only to Israel for its genocidal response but also to validate the complicity of leading liberal democracies of the West. Indeed, any violence, whether by assassination of designated individuals or military assaults are described in the language of anti-terrorism as protective shields for lawlessness, immorality, and cruelty stripping away any pretensions of accountability.
The United States has also followed this Israeli path leading to the pre-Westphalian legitimacy of unprovoked wars of aggression best illustrated by the ‘wars’ against Iran in 2025 and more intensely in 2026. Although the justifications for recourse to war is tinged with the delegitimation of the Tehran government as ‘a terrorist regime’ reinforcing the closely related rationale of disrupting Iran’s supposed challenge to the Nonproliferation Treaty, which contains no enforcement measure against violators of NPT, and in relation to which the U.S. and Israel are the most blatant violating governments refusing the treaty obligation to pursue nuclear disarmament, and in Israel’s case the stealth acquisition of the weaponry through the connivance of Western liberal democracies.
In the decade about the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ending of the Cold War it seemed as if the territoriality of war as sustained political violence among antagonistic states would be restored. In this sense the 9/11 attacks ruptured such expectations, which were under pressure in any event due to Euro-American resolve to engage in aggressive uses of violence to prevent unwanted proliferation of nuclear weaponry as in Iraq, Libya, and of course, Iran. In important respects the war plans of nuclear weapons states are committed to engage in state terror of a planetary magnitude.
In conclusion, the U.S. response to the 9/11 attacks led to an irresponsible conflation of war with terrorism that has been applied in a manner that justifies Western acts of state terror while claiming to be engaged in counterterroristic ill-defined struggles civil society movements of resistance and resilience. This selective use of the language of ‘terrorism’ is what has greenlighted the violent practice and policies of governments of sovereign states while demonizing all acts or resilience, resistance, and liberation. Rather than restoring justice, as Bush claimed, it has spread injustice and personal tragedy a far greater number of victims that resulted from the 9/11 attacks, as well as discrediting the international procedures in place to promote justice. In this respect, it would be a mistake to discount the relevance of the U.S. Government’s hostility to the work of the International Criminal Court by the unprecedented behavior of imposing sanctions on its prosecutor, chief judge, and a number of its officials. This too is an aspect of ‘world order 25 years after 9/11.’
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Global Justice in the 21st Century 