Gore Vidal frequently referred to America as the United States of Amnesia, where nothing is learned because nothing is remembered. Twenty-five years since the largest attack on American soil and the subsequent launch of the Global War on Terror, it is worth asking, despite the imperative on T-shirts and bumper stickers to ”never forget”, do we remember anything? Did we learn anything? 

Less than a month after the 9/11 attacks, the U.S.military invaded Afghanistan in pursuit of the alleged architect of the attack, Osama bin Laden. Less than two months after the invasion of Afghanistan, bin Laden evaded coalition forces through Tora Bora, the mountainous cave complex in eastern Afghanistan, and escaped into Pakistan. Bin Laden would live another decade before being killed by American forces, thereby completing one of the only clear goals of the War on Terror. The war in Afghanistan would meander on for almost twenty years, spanning four U.S. presidencies, all while never having a clear metric for what would count as a victory. What became the longest war in American history, however, was easily forgotten as the public was cajoled for over a year to invade another country that had not attacked them. 

Iraq, the public was told, had aided Osama bin Laden, had weapons of mass destruction, was oppressed by a tyrannical dictator and would ultimately greet coalition forces as liberators. The public was clubbed over the head with this message on all major media platforms for over a year before the invasion in March 2003. Historically unpopular, the largest anti-war protest recorded to date took place just a month before the invasion on February 15, 2003, when tens of millions of people in as many as 800 cities demonstrated in opposition to the ensuing war. Nonetheless, the American media parroted the Bush administration’s talking points and rationalized the excursion by arguing that it was better to fight the enemy abroad than at home, that they hated us for our freedom, and that they valued death more than life. Perhaps the most convincing argument, though, one that would be made throughout the War on Terror, was that to be opposed to the war was to want the terrorists to win. To oppose the War on Terror in effect made one just short of a terrorist themselves and certainly anti-American. 

In May 2003, just months into the Iraq War, President Bush made his infamous mission accomplished speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln in celebration of the military’s swift victory against conventional military forces and the fall of the Saddam Hussein regime. Unfortunately, this would mark the beginning of a brutal, years long sectarian counterinsurgency, which should have been easy to anticipate given a modest recollection of past conflicts. Dick Cheney, Vice President, had apparently forgotten why removing Saddam Hussein from power was a bad idea, as he clearly articulated in a 1994 interview. When an interviewer asked Cheney, who had been Secretary of Defense during the First Gulf war, if he thought the U.S. should have gone into Baghdad during that conflict, he responded, “once you…took down Saddam Hussein’s government, then what are you going to put in its place? That’s a very volatile part of the world and if you take down the central government in Iraq, you can easily end up seeing pieces of Iraq fly off, part of it to the Syrians…part of eastern Iraq, the Iranians would like to claim, fought over it for eight years. In the north…if the Kurds spin loose and join with the Kurds in Turkey, then you threaten territorial integrity of Turkey. It’s a quagmire if you go that far and try to take over Iraq.” Spoken like a clear-eyed critic would of the war nearly a decade later, Cheney simply listed matters of fact that would eventually be ignored. As the war dragged on and the rationalizations changed once no WMDs were found and the alleged link to bin Laden was proven to be bogus, the President insisted history would decide and commentators continued to label critics of the war as anti-American. 

Fast forward to the Republican primaries of 2016, and it’s like a scene from the Twilight Zone. Donald Trump famously and simply stated the Iraq War was a “big, fat mistake”. The comment was met with tepid applause by an audience that had been told for a decade that such thoughts were radical and anti-American. The once unthinkable position of being opposed to the Iraq war was now working its way into the official party position among the very party that began the war using the “with us or against us” rhetoric. 

Just five years later in January 2021, the very bedrock of the American political system, the peaceful transfer of power, was undermined as a sitting president claimed election fraud and his supporters stormed the Capital in an apparent effort to stop the certification of the election. The following year, at the CPAC conference in Dallas, conservatives displayed a banner that read, “We Are All Domestic Terrorists”, cheekily showing solidarity with those that attempted to overturn the election results.

Emboldened by a second term, Trump has recently taken a less restrained wrecking ball to foundational norms and the American constitutional system. While there are numerous examples of Trump’s disregard for the constitutional order, perhaps most alarming are his actions as Commander-in-Chief. Here too there are numerous examples, but possibly none more egregious than his 2025 speech to military leadership at Quantico. Here, with a fraction of his usual charisma, Trump directed military leadership to prepare for a new war against what he referred to as the “enemy from within”, a phrase Trump is fond of using to describe his political opposition. These remarks were prefaced at the opening of the speech with a casual, light-hearted threat when the President said, “If you don’t like what I’m saying, you can leave the room. Of course, there goes your rank, there goes your future.” 

With these comments, Trump disregarded the military’s legal and traditional apolitical nature and loyalty to upholding the Constitution rather than any politician or party. Instead, Trump made it clear that he ultimately desires to use the military as he does all other powers of his office, as a means to his personal ends. The long standing fear of Americans, from James Madison to Alex Jones, that their government would one day turn its military on the citizens, had taken a clumsy idiotic step forward. 

A free society requires political opposition. If American society continues to embrace the use of violence to satisfy political delusions, it appears the terrorists have destroyed freedom as it was once understood in America. Rather than standing with us or against, twenty-five years after 9/11, Americans have turned on themselves.