This weekend marks the 25th anniversary of 9/11, one of the darkest days in American history. Nearly 3,000 people were killed in the unprecedented terrorist attacks, and Americans have been urged ever since to ‘Never Forget’. But according to Mike Bedenbaugh, it is vital they also remember what came next: the destabilising violence unleashed in their name

September 11 belongs to those who died, to the nearly 3,000 people who went to work, boarded airplanes, reported for duty or began an ordinary Tuesday morning and never came home: firefighters climbing upward while thousands fled downward, the passengers of Flight 93, those killed at the Pentagon and families who have lived for 25 years with an empty chair at the table.

On September 11, Americans should remember them, honour their courage and allow grief its rightful place.

But then comes September 12.

At the time, September 12 was the morning after, when a wounded nation began deciding what it would do with its grief, fear and anger. The wars that followed did not all begin that day, but the choices that led toward them did. 

If ‘Never Forget’ is to mean more than remembering the wound, September 12 should ask something harder of us: what America did in response and what those decisions ultimately meant for millions of other people.

Americans have long been good at remembering national trauma. ‘Remember the Alamo’ became a rallying cry after the battle that became a defining episode in the struggle for Texas independence from Mexico. Texas was later annexed by the United States, and the border dispute that followed helped set the stage for war with Mexico. Mexico eventually ceded more than half of its prewar territory. Americans remembered the Alamo; Mexicans had quite a bit to remember too.

Half a century later came ‘Remember the Maine’. When the USS Maine exploded in Havana harbour in 1898, killing 266 men. Though the cause is uncertain to modern historians, The disaster, fuelled by propagandizing newspaper articles, propelled the United States towards war with Spain and into a new era of overseas empire in Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines. An American trauma had again become a rallying cry whose consequences extended far beyond the original event.

Let’s now consider September 11, 2001. 

Nothing about American foreign policy justified what al-Qaeda did that morning, and nothing excuses the deliberate murder of civilians. Understanding why hatred develops does not condone what hatred produces. If ‘Never Forget’ is supposed to teach us something, we must be willing to remember history from more than one direction.

For decades before 9/11, the United States had involved itself deeply in the Middle East by supporting tyrannical governments, helping overthrow locally supported ones and stationing troops. Even the 9/11 Commission acknowledged that Osama bin Laden exploited grievances that resonated across the Muslim world, including intense anger toward wider U.S. policies in the region.

Those grievances did not justify terrorism, but pretending those grievances didn’t exist prevented us from asking a question Americans too rarely ask: What do other people remember about us?

After September 11, America had the sympathy of much of the world. NATO invoked Article 5, its collective-defence provision, for the first and only time in response to the 9/11 attacks. Allies stood with the U.S., and there was broad recognition that America had the right to pursue al-Qaeda and those who had sheltered it in Afghanistan.

On September 18, 2001, President George W. Bush signed the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), giving the president authority to use “all necessary and appropriate force” against those responsible for the attacks and those who had harboured them. That authorisation helped usher in an era of increasingly open-ended military action. Iraq would later be invaded under a separate authorisation, but the pattern had been established.

Afghanistan became America’s longest war. Then came Iraq, a country that had not attacked the U.S. on September 11. Saddam Hussein was a brutal dictator, yet from 1982 the Reagan administration supported Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War, providing essential assistance including intelligence. The 9/11 Commission found no evidence that contacts between Saddam’s government and al-Qaeda developed into a collaborative operational relationship.

The destruction of the Iraqi state, collapse of authority and ensuing sectarian conflict created conditions in which jihadist organisations could grow. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s organization expanded during the occupation, became al-Qaeda in Iraq and its successors eventually evolved into ISIS.

America had invaded Iraq partly within the wider political framework of fighting terrorism. The instability created by the invasion and occupation then helped produce conditions in which one of the most vicious terrorist movements of the modern age could flourish. Saddam’s removal also eliminated one of Iran’s principal enemies and increased Tehran’s influence in the region.

Some of America’s closest European allies had warned against invading Iraq. France opposed the U.S.-led military action, and many restaurants across the nation renamed French fries ‘Freedom Fries’ amid anger over that opposition.

The episode captured a mood in which caution could be treated as cowardice, disagreement as disloyalty and military action as proof of patriotism. Perhaps France wasn’t betraying us but warning us.

The human consequences were enormous. Brown University’s Costs of War project estimates more than 940,000 direct deaths from post-9/11 war violence, with 3.6–3.8 million indirect deaths and more than 38 million people displaced.

Numbers alone do not capture what violence leaves behind. War creates memories and grievances, and those memories can sometimes become the raw material from which later radicalisation grows.

The men who flew airplanes into the World Trade Center had convinced themselves that the ordinary people inside were the enemy. They did not distinguish between a banker and a secretary, a Republican and a Democrat or someone who supported American foreign policy and someone who opposed it. Americans had become one guilty people in their eyes, erasing the individual behind the idea of an enemy.

America’s response carried its own danger of seeing people in similarly collective terms. In the fear that followed September 11, too many Americans spoke of Muslims, Arabs and the Middle East as though whole peoples shared responsibility for the actions of 19 hijackers. The overwhelming majority had nothing to do with 9/11 yet wars fought in response placed millions of ordinary people amid bombing, economic destruction and displacement.

There is no moral equivalence between deliberately flying an airliner into civilians and a nation responding to an attack. But both show the danger of what happens when people stop seeing individuals and begin seeing only an enemy.

Consider a child in Iraq or Afghanistan who watches a father die, a home collapse or a family flee. He may know nothing about September 11 but he does know what happened to his family and who he believes caused it. Most people who experience such loss do not become terrorists but only a fraction need to be radicalised for violence to continue. Personal grief can become political grievance and be exploited by extremist movements until innocent strangers are once again treated as legitimate targets.

Ordinary Americans also paid a heavy price. Young soldiers were sent repeatedly into distant wars, spouses waited at home, veterans returned with wounds both visible and unseen and taxpayers financed conflicts that seemed to acquire lives of their own.

The most important decisions, however, were made far above them. Political leaders, military planners, intelligence agencies and the wider defence establishment suddenly possessed enormous freedom to act. No conspiracy is required to understand that. Institutions respond to opportunity. For policymakers, war could be discussed in briefing rooms but for those sent to fight it, the price was measured in deployments, amputations, funerals and names carved into stone. The burden flowed downward while the authority remained at the top.

Twenty-five years later, as America is fighting Iran in an ongoing conflict that continues to threaten wider regional escalation, leaders again speak of necessity, deterrence and resolve while ordinary people will bear the consequences if the conflict expands.

That’s why September 12 should also belong to remembrance. It should remind Americans what fear can make a nation do, how much easier military power finds it to destroy a government than to rebuild a society and how intervention can create grievances that endure long after the intervention itself.

People beyond our borders possess memories just as enduring as ours. If we expect the world to understand why Americans will forever remember September 11, we should also understand that other people remember their dead. Bombs leave survivors, dead children leave families and shattered cities become part of someone else’s history. Continue the cycle for long enough and millions elsewhere will make their own solemn promise to ‘Never Forget’.

In their story, America may be the nation they are remembering.

So on September 11, bow your head and remember those who died. On September 12, raise it again and look honestly at the 25 years that followed.

Never forget what was done to us, and never forget what we did afterward. Then ask the question Americans should never be afraid to ask: What did we do in their name?

American author, political thinker and U.S. Navy veteran Michael Bedenbaugh is a respected voice in constitutional principles and American governance. Based in South Carolina, he contributes to national discussions on American politics, historic preservation and civic reform. He is the author of Reviving Our Republic: 95 Theses for the Future of America and host of the podcast Reviving Our Republic. He previously ran as an independent candidate for Congress.

READ MORE: ‘America at 250 is a republic squandering its inheritance‘. As America marks the 250th anniversary of its independence, The European’s U.S Political Analyst Mike Bedenbaugh argues that the nation’s future prosperity depends on reclaiming its inheritance – the confidence and openness that made it successful in the first place.

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