Al Qaeda’s “9/11” terrorist attack on the United States doesn’t receive the debate it once did, given it happened two decades ago. But it was a momentous event that still deserves explanation. It touched off decades of war and armed nation-building, killing many thousands. It triggered the expansion of state power with everything from domestic surveillance to rendition and torture. It had a banal impact on everyday life, making airports and travel more tedious and humourless. Into new, sometimes grifting industries of terrorism and counterinsurgency expertise it drew scarce resources that could have been allocated elsewhere. And western disenchantment with the military campaigns fed into the rise of populist revolt and paved the road to Trump. So, why did it happen?

9/11 became a positive symptom of America’s moral excellence and an event of shock and necessary awakening

Acts of cold-blooded slaughter tend to attract hot-blooded explanations. Watching civilians leap out of burning buildings that have been torpedoed by hijackers is not conducive to dispassionate, clinical study. Mass-casualty terrorism of the Bin Ladenist variety is not carefully calibrated to induce sober cost-benefit analysis and policy change. Not surprisingly, the “takes” that 9/11 called forth varied wildly in their emphasis and in their quality.

One thing that united the different accounts of cause-and-effect was an overriding sense of moralism. That is, the urge to link causal logic with a sense of right and wrong. According to one school, the terrorists struck America because of its sins. Literally, in the case of some evangelists like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, for whom Al Qaeda were God’s instrument of retribution against a country fallen into corruption. 

Yet the suggestion that killers butchered thousands of Americans (and others) because of Madonna videos, abortion or the paganism of Harry Potter novels was only an overtly spiritual version of a more mainstream reaction, especially in leftist circles, that 9/11 was an historic judgement on the victim and its deficiencies. Only, for this group it was America’s misbehaviour abroad that attracted violent blowback. To hear the Noam Chomsky/John Pilger/Katha Pollitt set tell it, 9/11 happened not only because people hate America, but because that hatred is understandable or warranted. It was a punishment for imperialism and predatory globalisation, and the culmination of everything from Nagasaki to Chile to Nike factories to sanctions on Iraq, and above all the plight of Palestine. Moreover, this ought to be educational. As classicist Mary Beard put it, “however tactfully you dress it up, the United States had it coming…World bullies, even if their heart is in the right place, will in the end pay the price.” It was therefore time to “listen.” Not that this faction paid much attention to the politics or the pathologies of the assailants. To portray Al Qaeda and its ilk as forces of anti-imperialism and anti-bullying is odd, given their yearning to restore the Caliphate, a lost empire, and their vision of a coercive Islamist order. But that was the preachy tendency. 9/11 was an occasion primarily to reckon with America’s failings, rather than the details. 

This “judgmentalist”, at times indulgent account of mass terrorism, as a negative verdict on the society that suffered it, incensed those who had more sympathy with American power abroad. Yet, hawks in their many varieties (liberal, neoconservative, plain old nationalist) did a similar thing in their own way. They too often framed the massacre as part of a moral drama. To them, America attracted violence not because of its vices, but its virtues. Not because of its imperialism, but because of its democracy. “They hate our freedoms”, became a stock-standard framing, as well as an emotive political catch-cry spearheaded by President George W. Bush. The hijackers and their backers loathed their target for its openness and dynamism, for women being uncovered, for free elections and free inquiry. At least the leftist version included geopolitics, even if it was often a crude reading of it. In this version, geopolitics almost disappeared. If anti-globalisation prophets regarded the ensuing war in Afghanistan as the world’s richest society pounding the poorest, their opponents flipped this on its head. What about, “Afghanistan, where the world’s most open society confronts the world’s most closed one”? “Where American women pilots kill the men who enslave women”, asked Christopher Hitchens, socialist advocate of American power as the last revolutionary force. 

Perversely, in more excited versions of this story, 9/11 became a positive symptom of America’s moral excellence and an event of shock and necessary awakening, the new Pearl Harbor moment that would rouse a giant to realise, once again, its historical mission and global responsibility. One strain of this school put it explicitly, that 9/11 was a lesson in the need for more American empire, not less. The attackers struck not because of the IMF’s restructuring programmes or illegal settlements on the West Bank, but because America had ignored Afghanistan and not been hard enough on everyone from Saddam Hussein to Somali warlords, relying on pinprick missile diplomacy. This faction emphasised America’s sins of omission, to the point of almost forgetting its vast, active presence in the world. America may not have been in Afghanistan before 9/11. But it had a garrison in Saudi Arabia, a more proximate cause of Al Qaeda’s antagonism in the first place.

In truth, both versions of the moralist story do a bad job at explanation. Sure, Salafi-jihadists abhor democracy as a heresy and want women subordinate. Sure, they dislike many U.S. policies, from supporting Israel to supporting the nationhood of East Timor. But they held those views, too, and an attraction-repulsion to American culture, when they were American clients. For long periods the U.S. aided and armed Islamists against the Soviet Union, against Arab nationalists, against unfriendly regimes, as it suited, a relationship of mutual convenience. That is a constant. And a constant doesn’t explain change. Neither cultural repulsion nor general moral outrage is central. There are plenty of debauched democracies to dislike if you like disliking that kind of thing. And if objecting to U.S. complicity in atrocities was the central motive of Islamists, they would have made America their number one enemy generations beforehand. Bin Laden himself raised the point: if hating democracy was their obsession, they would have launched assaults on Sweden. Not that Sweden has been spared Islamist depredations. But you see the point: the issue is not explaining general dislike, but the targeting and ranking of enemies. None of the virtue/vice fixation explains why a terrorist network selected and prioritised Washington at that time. 

There was not a “gentler, kinder” alternative posture available that somehow would have dodged jihadist hostility

Which takes us towards a more precise, though less gratifying explanation. Al Qaeda targeted America not because America was badly behaved, or because it was virtuous, or because it was too hard or too soft. Rather, it brought the fire against what it called the “far enemy”, as a deliberate strategy to weaken the enemies nearby, the “apostate regimes”, the Gulf monarchies. By terrorising and driving away (or exhausting) these regimes’ common patron, and by inspiring a general uprising, they could overthrow them. Now that the Soviet Union, the other main adversary was dead and buried, and now that since Gulf War One the U.S. had strengthened its presence in the region as an interloper, it was time to redirect their offence against it. This strategic calculation would likely have stayed the same, even if America had behaved “better” by the standards of critics at the time, if it had tried harder or differently for a peace settlement in Israel/Palestine, if America had used “smarter” sanctions against Iraq. Better-behaved hegemons that project power abroad will still likely encounter resistance. Besides, behaving well in the murky world of harsh trade-offs is difficult in the first place. Regardless, it was not the severity of America’s presence, but the fact of it, that drew Bin Laden’s hostility and choices. 

In other words, the “root cause” of 9/11 was America’s embroilment in the politics of the Middle East at the time, for better or worse. In the autumn of 2001, that politics then erupted, grievously and murderously, in New York and Washington. The U.S. operated as the mainstay of Israel, the backer of the Shah and the Emirs, and therefore stood as chief obstacle to the realisation of a different order, as dreamt of in the neo-medievalist nostalgia of the Bin Ladenists. There is nothing peculiarly American (or Arab) about this story. Attracting hostility – or indeed counter-balancing – is an occupational hazard of great powers. If we are still hunting for an explanation for 9/11, maybe its time to set aside the urge for judgement and a moralistic story.

Rather than an escalating rhetorical battle over the morality or immorality of the republic, what was needed was a more hard-nosed assessment about U.S. commitments and their costs and benefits. If embroilment in the Middle East as a patron and security-provider brought with it the risk of major terrorist attacks, was the region worth it? Perhaps it was (though I would disagree), in which case the hard conclusion was to stay in the region while trying harder to tighten the intelligence-security net around long-range terrorism, but without falling prey to crusading for transformation. Perhaps it was not, in which case abandonment was the responsible course. There was not a “gentler, kinder” alternative posture available that somehow would have dodged jihadist hostility. But neither of these two conclusions does what the virtue-vice school achieves, which is to offer a grand story, better suited for bed-time than the light of day.