Did America Deserve 9/11?

Operation Iraqi Freedom | Wikimedia Commons

Sorry y’all, but we’re going to hear about 9/11 at least until November. Why? Islamophobia.

Because a Muslim, Abdul El-Sayed, just became the Democratic nominee for Senate in Michigan, and because a Muslim, Zohran Mamdani, is the mayor of New York City. Because Muslims are participating in our society and our democracy.

Fox will remind us to never forget. You will hear the name Hasan Piker over and over . You will hear that he said America deserved 9/11. I think it’s a good time to reflect. Did the people in the towers deserve to die? No. Obviously not.

But who shares the responsibility for those deaths? I think we’ve failed to accept that some of the blame belongs to America’s leaders. Leaders who, for decades, made choices that made us vulnerable to that attack. They made decisions knowing they were putting Americans in danger. Our security forces have a term for the costs of our violent foreign policy. Blowback.

The blowback has been part of the planning for decades. It came from the CIA’s own internal documents on the coup we ran in Iran in 1953. A six-year CIA consultant named Chalmers Johnson wrote a whole book called Blowback warning that our covert wars were coming home.

The CIA’s own bin Laden unit chief wrote that they attack us for what we do, not who we are, and listed bin Laden’s grievances straight from the man’s own writings. The Pentagon’s advisory board put it in writing three years after the attacks: “Muslims do not ‘hate our freedom,’ but rather, they hate our policies.” The 9/11 Commission’s report tied Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s hatred to our foreign policy, and the commission’s own senior adviser admitted afterward that the report skirted the question. And just this week Robert Kagan, Brookings fellow, co-founder of the Project for the New American Century, said 9/11 was “at least in part a response to the American presence in the Middle East.” He said that Pearl Harbor worked the same way. The real question, he said, is whether a country acts anyway, knowing the blowback’s coming. Our leaders know. They’ve always known.

One of the darkest ironies of 9/11 is that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi Arabian. Bin Laden was a Saudi. Our investigations found at least low-level ties to the Saudi government. When FBI files were finally declassified, they showed a Saudi intelligence operative and a Saudi consular official giving the first hijackers significant logistical support.

Now, if you don’t know much about the Saudi government, I’ll tell you this. They chopped a journalist into pieces with a bone saw, dissolved him in acid, and poured him down a drain because they didn’t like what he wrote. The crown prince himself approved it according to our own intelligence. So I have a hard time believing a group of low level officials would go rogue and help plan the 9/11 attacks. I just have a suspicion that the fear of being chopped up and put in a vat of acid then poured down a drain might give a little pause.

Our response? Free pass for Saudi Arabia and war for Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed by American forces. Thousands of dead American soldiers. All under the cover of NEVER FORGET!

Skip to 2026. America has just signed a nuclear cooperation agreement with Saudi Arabia that could let them produce enriched uranium and even a bomb. We’re allowing that to happen right now.

Now compare that to Iran. The Director of National Intelligence testified to Congress that Iran was not building a nuclear weapon. Trump said, “I don’t care what she said,” he bombed ‘em anyway. We killed their supreme leader on day one. Trump’s own counterterrorism chief resigned over it, saying Iran posed no imminent threat. We’ve disrupted the entire global economy, killed and maimed thousands of people, risked a bigger regional war. For what?

I was going to say we didn’t do it for the reasons they claimed. But we did it for exactly the reasons they claimed. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said what we were all thinking, we did it for Israel. We knew Israel was going to strike and that Iran would retaliate against our forces for it, so we hit first.

When the Iranian regime mentions assassinating an American official, we gasp. We assassinated one of their top and most respected generals with a drone. We killed their supreme leader. We bombed their scientists along with their children in their beds. We killed civilians. One of our strikes incinerated a hundred-some-odd girls at an elementary school. We went on a killing spree. Not only that, but we gave cover and keep giving cover to the Israeli regime that bombed six countries in 2025, that’s been committing a genocide in Gaza and killing thousands, burning farms, and stealing homes in the West Bank. This is not new. We’ve been covering ethnic cleansing in Palestine for a very long time.

We feel like we can do all this killing, this destruction, with impunity. We think we can leave carnage across the globe without it rearing its head back home. It will and it has and instead of taking responsibility, we say those are evil acts done by evil people who hate freedom. We blame an entire religion. At some point we have to answer this question: Are our own leaders and our own foreign policy doing evil things?

To ask that we have to wrestle with our own feelings. Admitting what our government has done doesn’t make America evil. If we acknowledge that our government made decisions that brought violence back to our shores, we aren’t saying 9/11 wasn’t terrorism. It was illegal and horrible and needed a response. No, instead what we’re saying is that we should learn from our mistakes. Security is possible without bombing, maiming and torturing our way through half the globe. In fact, those actions undermine our security.

What I find insidious is that our leaders in the military, our government, and our intelligence services know our policies bring blowback. They know aggression makes Americans less safe, and they do it anyway. For oil, or money, or power. The leaders who sat in those rooms, politicians, military leaders, the heads of the CIA and the NSA and the FBI, conducted foreign policy in a deadly, aggressive, villainous way for decades, knowing they were risking the lives of Americans at home, and not just abroad. They chose that instead of doing the hard work of securing our futures and our resources. Then they told us how dangerous the world is and convinced us to give up some freedoms for safety.

Not only have our leaders been spreading death and carnage across the globe for resources and power. They’ve brought it back home. So when they spend the next year waving 9/11 at a Muslim doctor in Michigan and a Muslim mayor in New York, remember who put us in that position. It wasn’t Abdul El-Sayed and it wasn’t Zohran Mamdani.

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