Twenty-Five Years After 9/11: The Terror Is Past, Yet We’re Losing the War

Sharia supremacism is on the march, still.  

A fter nearly 3,000 of our fellow Americans were slaughtered on 9/11, that fateful horror now faded in the mists of memory — in a nation whose sense of history reaches back only to the last Truth Social rant — one of the major public debates surrounding our government’s response was: What do we call it?

The Bush administration adopted the “War on Terror,” taking its cues from the transnational progressive consensus that schoolmarms such debates. Some of us who knew better complained, though mutedly.

Now, when I say “knew better,” I do not pretend to superior intelligence; just hard-knocks wisdom. While the unprecedented level of carnage — more killed than at Pearl Harbor — made 9/11 a wake-up call for the nation’s political class, I’d already spent the prior eight years on the front lines, as it were: the courtroom, which had then been our government’s perception of the battlefield.

To Washington, we’d been dealing with crime, not war. Unwilling to closely examine the beliefs of the terrorists, much less to notice the literal, undeniable roots of their creed in Islamic scripture, the consensus portrayed terrorists as an outlaw fringe, motivated by poverty, alienation, or vague objections to American foreign policy — by no means to be deemed representative of Islam itself. How, after all, could the belief system of nearly 2 billion people, the global umma, be seen as hostile? The Soviet Union had just collapsed, and we’d triumphantly arrived at the end of history; a clock turned back to holy war seemed inconceivable.

There was, needless to say, ample evidence to the contrary. The Soviets had collapsed only after a decade-long quagmire in Afghanistan, ground down by the Muslim mujahideen (no small thanks to the CIA). There’d been a Shiite revolution in Iran, whose new “Death to America” regime featured a forward militia, Hezbollah, that specialized in killing Americans — including 1983 bombings in Lebanon of the U.S. embassy (63 killed) and a Marine Corps barracks (241 Americans killed, the Marines’ largest single-day loss of life since Iwo Jima, along with 58 French peacekeeping troops). The Palestinians, increasingly dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood’s fledgling jihadist branch, Hamas, were between intifadas against Israel. And the Balkans were aflame in ethnic and religious wars, in which veteran mujahids had flocked to Bosnia and Kosovo.

Nevertheless, I’d be lying if I told you that, in 1993, I stood headstrong against our Pollyannaish consensus.

In February of that year, when the World Trade Center was bombed (killing six adults, including a pregnant woman, but miraculously not more than that), I was the prosecutor assigned to take over the investigation of the terror “cell,” which was then plotting simultaneous strikes against New York City landmarks. The cell was led by Omar Abdel Rahman, the “Blind Sheikh,” who died while serving his life-imprisonment sentence in 2017.

At the time, I knew as much about Islam as any reasonably well-educated American — meaning, not much. As an American, moreover, I instinctively resisted the suggestion that incentive to commit mass murder could plausibly be tied to the tenets of a major religion. I was predisposed to what the Clinton administration was saying: the terrorists were a local, lunatic gang; they were perverters of Islam, not the vanguard of an authentic jihad against the West. The criminal justice system is tailor-made for managing such finite, local menaces, even when, like the Mafia or drug networks, they might have some overseas abettors.

Alas, life teaches nothing quite the way it teaches humility. The rubber-meets-the-road work of prosecuting terrorists required checking comfortable premises and shedding the haughty conceit — the Justice Department ethos — that we were there to teach the world a noble lesson: The shining city on a hill must be a juridical beacon where mass-murderers are presumed innocent and swaddled in the Bill of Rights. To prove guilt, to make a case sensible to a jury, it’s essential to establish what the perps were trying to accomplish and why. Doing my job, I learned that much of what I’d thought I knew was deeply wrong.

I’d mistaken barbarity for irrationality. The terrorists were not mad but ruthless. The Blind Sheikh was a renowned scholar of sharia and fiqh (respectively, Islamic law and jurisprudence) together, an all-purpose societal construct that brooks no separation between religious and secular realms. When he quoted scripture as a battle cry to strike terror into the hearts of the jihadists’ foes, he quoted it accurately. (See, e.g., Koran 8:12: “I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieved, so strike [them] upon the neck and strike from every fingertip.”)

His cell was no fringe. It had ties to highly capable foreign terrorist organizations and deep-pocketed foreign patrons. Many of what we liked to call “radical Muslims” were highly educated; indeed, despite a host of maladies that made him otherwise useless to a terror cell, the Blind Sheikh was its leader solely because of his mastery of Islamic doctrine. He had long-standing ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, the most successful Islamic ideological movement in modern history, with a mission to spread its construction of sharia throughout the West.

We’d describe the Brothers as “extremists,” but what they were “extreme” about was Islam, as classically understood. No, this fundamentalism, sharia supremacism, was not the only way to interpret the Muslim faith; we were deluding ourselves, however, to frame it as a “false” Islam. Backed by over a millennium of scholarship, it was influential even in places where most Muslims had embraced modernity and the West. It was the dominant Islam in the Muslim Middle East. (Did you know that the Saudi government still beheads hundreds of prisoners yearly? That apostasy and homosexuality are still punishable by death in about a dozen Muslim-majority countries?)

In the years prior to 9/11, it became increasingly obvious, to those willing to confront the evidence, that jihadist attacks were the leading, forcible edge of ideological warfare. It was not wanton violence; it had a remorseless logic. Jihadist terrorism was not killing for killing’s sake; it was always to advance the acceptance and spread of sharia, as fundamentalist Muslims construed it. Our challenge was not a crime wave. We could not turn it into a mere legal problem by responding with subpoenas and indictments when the jihadists were deploying bombs, conducting political assassinations, and turning their attention to planes. (By 1994, the Bojinka plot — also known as “Manila air,” the conspiracy to blow Western airliners out of the sky — was already the germ that became the 9/11 suicide-hijacking operation.) And if it was a war, then to borrow from the legendary Justice Robert Jackson, it would effectively “convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact” to insist that its due process mandates meant the government had to provide vital intelligence to our enemies — no, they were not just “defendants” — while they were actively at war with us, trying to destroy us.

Yet this had been pre-9/11 American counterterrorism. By prosecuting terrorists, I had no alternative but to see, to wrestle daily with, the folly of our law enforcement paradigm. If you were doing what I was doing in those years, the folly became only more manifest. When al-Qaeda struck American embassies in East Africa in August 1998 (killing over 220 people) and nearly sank an American destroyer, the USS Cole, in October 2000 (killing 17 American sailors), it became painfully apparent that Osama bin Laden’s organized terror network was orchestrating attacks from substantially ungoverned Asian and African sanctuaries — badlands inaccessible to American police agencies and contemptuous of American justice. For the most part, we caught only a few small fry; the terrorist leaders and their battalions were free to choreograph attack after attack. To repeat what I contended in a 1999 essay for the Weekly Standard, this was a national security crisis calling for a military and intelligence response, not more futile arrest warrants.

On September 11, 2001, when jihadists converted jumbo jets into missiles that obliterated the World Trade Center and struck the Pentagon (and would probably have destroyed the Capitol if not for the valor of Flight 93’s doomed passengers and crew), President Bush was right to shift the nation to a law-of-war counterterrorism model. This is why, as I said earlier, any protest against the “War on Terror” framing was muted. A change in strategy was desperately needed, no matter what it was called. Now, the government’s military, intelligence, and Treasury agencies would drive the response; law enforcement would be subordinated, though it could never be fully supplanted since prosecution would remain a vital tool domestically.

A quarter century later, the War part of the War on Terror has proved a counterterrorism success. Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were successes — they were not. I mean that we have not had a reprise of 9/11, even though our enemies have never stopped striving to repeat and exceed their atrocity.

Today’s defense of the homeland is superior by leaps and bounds to our parlous pre-9/11 state. We’ve gotten there in fits and starts. Because everything in America, it seems, is bitterly politicized, counterterrorism caromed for over a decade between partisans committed to the law enforcement approach and their antagonists who wanted indefinite law-of-war detention, forcible interrogations, and military commissions but failed to think through the procedural details and ramifications. (Two decades ago, I proposed that Congress create a “national security court,” combining elements of civilian due process and some military tribunal procedures, particularly the protection of vital intelligence; the idea prompted some interesting commentary but did not gain much traction in Washington.) The infuriating failure to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his 9/11 co-conspirators after all this time is the most glaring fallout.

That said, to protect the nation from another attack of 9/11 dimension, to fend off the enduring threats of al-Qaeda and its ilk (including its breakaway faction, ISIS), has required a hybrid. Jihadist terrorism is more war than crime, but it does not present as a conventional war, either. Our defense strategy weaves together offensive intelligence operations, occasional military strikes (that rely ever more tenuously on a congressional authorization of military force that also turns 25 this year), aggressive Treasury sanctions that map terrorist network nodes and choke off funding, and Justice Department prosecutions that target jihadist recruitment and other material support. Critically, our law enforcement and intelligence agencies cooperate effectively today; by contrast, in the five years prior to 9/11, a “wall” erected by internal Justice Department regulations — finally razed after the suicide hijackings — effectively barred them from sharing intelligence.

It is the terror part of the “War on Terror” that was, and stubbornly remains, wayward. It has frequently been observed that terrorism is a tactic, not an enemy; people were already grumbling about that in October 2001, when U.S. forces commenced the invasion of al-Qaeda havens in Afghanistan. Too little attention, though, has been paid to the consequences of the “War on Terror” framing, of this well-intentioned misnomer, devised to avoid being misunderstood, or smeared, as at war with Islam — a war in which some of our most essential operatives were American Muslim soldiers, intelligence analysts, investigators, undercover operatives, and translators.

Such delicacy could never alter the blunt fact that our enemies were (and are) a dynamic political movement within Islam that is implacably anti-American, anti-Western, and antisemitic. The movement’s ideology is counter-constitutional: a discriminatory creed that rejects free speech, freedom of conscience, privacy, and economic liberty while imposing a caste system fortified by brutal punishments. The terrorists are just the point of the spear; the violence is fueled by this ideology. And the leaders of the movement, who have gone to school on us while we blinded ourselves to them, see jihadist violence as only one feature of a broad, aggressive menu. For them, terrorism simply stokes an atmosphere of intimidation that helps them advance their agenda in our politics and law, on campus, in popular culture, and through every influential institution. While we fail to defend our liberties, our enemies turn those liberties against us — liberties they would never abide in their own jurisdictions.

What we call things can seamlessly become how we understand them. The War on Terror focused on the violence, not the movement on whose behalf the violence is waged. Twenty-five years later, American universities are cauldrons of Jew-hatred (under the camouflage of anti-Zionism or mere opposition to the Israeli government), and the base of one of our two major political parties — the one closely aligned with Muslim Brotherhood–inspired Islamists — advocates a governmental overhaul that would render our republic unrecognizable.

There has been no second 9/11. Given our dread at the thought of a recurrence, we must be grateful for that achievement. But sharia supremacism is on the march.