That documentary describes the event as “the day the world changed forever.”
It’s the sort of platitude that such retrospectives often use. The standard where-we-you-on-that-day anecdotes are featured in the DW documentary, as well. It’s understandable that media retrospectives would use those freely, because it engages personal memories among those who were old enough to remember where they were that day. (I was also somewhere. I won’t bore anyone with the story here.)
Osama bin Laden’s grandiose plan didn’t play out exactly as he hoped: to the extent we know what he was actually hoping. It seems clear that he expected the US to overreact and do a lot of damage to itself and its position in the world. And that did happen. From today’s perspective, he could have done much more to achieve that goal by pouring lots of Saudi oil money into making Donald Trump a Presidential candidate. But it was difficult in 2001 to know what the self-destruction of a unipolar superpower might look like. We have a much better idea now.
As the documentary notes, a huge increase in Western hostility toward Islam in general was one of the subsequent results, with the enthusiastic encouragement of US neoconservatives and the US’ close ally Israel. Now, 25 years later we’re in yet another Forever War with Iran. Which almost certainly will to even much more damage to the US and the Middle East than it already has.
I’m tempted to use the phrase “chickens coming home to roost,” just because it drives rightwingers crazy. But the term “blowback” popularized by Chalmers Johnson seems more useful. As Johnson himself wrote the month after the 9/11 attacks:
The suicidal assassins of September 11, 2001, did not “attack America,” as our political leaders and the news media like to maintain; they attacked American foreign policy. Employing the strategy of the weak, they killed innocent bystanders who then became enemies only because they had already become victims. Terrorism by definition strikes at the innocent in order to draw attention to the sins of the invulnerable. The United States deploys such overwhelming military force globally that for its militarized opponents only an “asymmetric strategy,” in the jargon of the Pentagon, has any chance of success. When it does succeed, as it did spectacularly on September 11, it renders our massive military machine worthless: The terrorists offer it no targets. On the day of the disaster, President George W. Bush told the American people that we were attacked because we are “a beacon for freedom” and because the attackers were “evil.” In his address to Congress on September 20, he said, “This is civilization’s fight.” This attempt to define difficult-to-grasp events as only a conflict over abstract values–as a “clash of civilizations,” in current post-cold war American jargon–is not only disingenuous but also a way of evading responsibility for the “blowback” that America’s imperial projects have generated.Johnson’s concept of blowback was not about karma or morality. It was about taking a practical understanding of possible negative consequences of foreign policy action. It’s about be realistic about cause-and-effect much more so than it is about passing legal or moral judgments on particular actions taken – though such judgements also need to be made.
“Blowback” is a CIA term first used in March 1954 in a recently declassified report on the 1953 operation to overthrow the government of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran. It is a metaphor for the unintended consequences of the US government’s international activities that have been kept secret from the American people. The CIA’s fears that there might ultimately be some blowback from its egregious interference in the affairs of Iran were well founded. Installing the Shah in power brought twenty-five years of tyranny and repression to the Iranian people and elicited the Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution. The staff of the American embassy in Teheran was held hostage for more than a year. This misguided “covert operation” of the US government helped convince many capable people throughout the Islamic world that the United States was an implacable enemy. [emphasis added] (2)
Important related event sequences
Johnson relates that a big part of this sequence of events was the installation of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in Iraq in 1953 by supporting the overthrown of the more democratic government headed by Mohammad Mossadeq (1882-1967). Operationally that coup was a success that benefitted US and British foreign policy at the time and made international oil corporations very happy – particularly the American ones. (3)
That worked out well from Washington’s official point of view for 27 years, until the Islamic Revolution of 1979. In the 47 years since then, the US has been dealing with the blowback. The 1979 Revolution and the taking of American hostages became a turning point for the view of Islam in general which many policymakers adopted, and which led them to think that actively supporting the Muslim rebels against the Soviet Union and the government in Afghanistan that it backed was a splendid idea. Neocons to this day still cherish the idea that US support for the “brave mujahedeen freedom fighters,” as they were described by the American press was the fatal blow to the existence of the Soviet Union.
Juan Cole wrote in 2018 (during the Trump 1.0 Presidency):
It’s hard today even to imagine that, in the late 1980s, the rightwing Christian Voice Magazine published a “candidate’s biblical scoreboard,” urging its readers (and potential voters) to rate their politicians by how “biblically” they cast their ballots in Congress. One key measure of this: Did that legislator support the anti-Communist Muslim jihadis in Afghanistan, a cause warmly supported by evangelist Pat Robertson in his 1988 presidential campaign? Now, attempting to appeal to twenty-first-century evangelicals, President Trump has announced that “Islam hates us.”The most famous of those brave mujahedeen freedom fighters was the son of a wealthy Saudi businessman, a guy named Osama bin Laden, who was to become America’s Enemy Number One after “Nine Eleven.”
The kaleidoscope of geopolitics and Islamophobia is now spinning so fast that it should make our heads spin, too. At times, it seems as if Donald Trump is the anti-Ronald Reagan of the twenty-first century, idolizing former KGB operative Vladimir Putin, but seeing former U.S. allies in the Muslim world like Pakistan as purveyors of “nothing but lies and deceit” — until, that is, with bewildering rapidity, he suddenly gives us the “good” (that is, oil-rich) Muslims again, willingly performing a sword dance with the Saudi royals, seemingly entirely comfortable with the scimitar of the Saracen. [empjasis added] (4)
The ties of the US intelligence agencies and in particular those of one-time CIA Director George H.W. Bush and his two-generation Presidential family to the Sunni fundamentalist Saudi monarch were a key element in the process that gave rise to US support of the brave mujahedeen freedom fighters in Afghanistan. (5)
In the 1980s while the US was gleefully assistance the anti-Soviet brave mujahedeen freedom fighters, it didn’t forget Iran in the meantime. St. Ronald Reagan as President managed to do friendly arms-for-hostages deals with Iran to help covertly the pro-dictatorship Contra guerrillas in Nicaragua. But from 1980 to 1988, the US was also actively helping our loyal Iraqi ally Saddam Hussein wage war against Iran, including providing him with chemical weapons and nerve gas for that remarkably bloody war.
But then our solid ally Saddam decided to seize some of the territory of Kuwait, an oil-rich company friendly to Saudi Arabia, so President Bush Sr. invaded in 1991 to push Iraq out of Kuwait. This was an intervention sanctioned by the United Nations Security Council, a conventional war to push out the forces of an illegal invader. But what the generals call “war termination” has often proved to be very tricky for the US. And so it was with this war.
Having accomplished its main mission, Bush Sr. and his Defense Secretary, Dark Lord Dick Cheney, decided to go for regime change in Baghdad. They encouraged Iraqi Kurds to stage an uprising, which Saddam’s government crushed without the US doing much to support our Kurdish allies. So the US imposed a drastic economic sanctions regime against Iraq that basically led to the Iraq War of 2003-on, whose results are now well known.
And when the collapse of Yugoslavia led to a round of Balkan Wars, the Clinton Administration engaged in the Kosovo War, whose ambiguous results are still a major headache for the foreign policies of European countries. The Clinton Administration also engaged in the intensive four-day bombing campaign against Iraq that was bizarrely designated Operation Desert Fox. (Desert Fox was the nickname of the German general Erwin Rommel of World War II renown.)
In retrospect, the Forever Wars were already underway.
The US invaded Afghanistan after the 9/11 attack and quickly dispersed the Al Quida forces there, although the Bush II Administration held back from a concentrated strike against their forces when they had withdrawn into the Tora Bora mountains. The Shrub Bush Administration was addicted to a neocon obsession that terrorism was always some form of state-sponsored terrorism, and so continued a war against the Taliban government that lasted until 2021, when the US left with the Taliban once again in control of Afghanistan. (6)
And now we’re in the current Forever War with Iraq. Led by a chowder-headed President who has no idea how to get out of it.
Notes:
(1) 9/11 - The day that changed the world. DW Documentary YouTube channel 09/10/2026. <https://youtu.be/ppUSZlntc7M?si=SfD5nlvQcjFwBUh4> (Accessed: 2026-11-09).
(2) Johnson, Chalmers (2001): Blowback: US actions abroad have repeatedly led to unintended, indefensible consequences. The Nation 09/27/2026/2001. <https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/blowback/> (Accessed: 2026-11-09).
(3) Lindsay, James (2026): The 1953 Overthrow of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq. Council on Foreign Relations 08/19/2026. <https://www.cfr.org/articles/the-1953-overthrow-of-iranian-prime-minister-mohammad-mosaddeq> (Accessed: 2026-11-09).
(4) Cole, Juan (2018): Hating Muslims in the age of Trump: The new Islamophobia looks like the old McCarthyism. Le Monde diplomatique English 10/10/2018. <https://mondediplo.com/openpage/hating-muslims-in-the-age-of-trump> (Accessed: 2026-11-09).
(5) See Craig Unger’s books House of Bush, House of Saud (2004) and The Fall of the House of Bush (2007).
(6) The U.S. War in Afghanistan. Council on Foreign Relations 09/27/2022. <https://www.cfr.org/articles/us-war-afghanistan> (Accessed: 2026-11-09).
