By admin 
Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate for Senate from Michigan, was always going to be controversial. If elected, he would be the first Muslim to hold a U.S. Senate seat in a country where Muslims make up just over 1 percent of the population and remain an often-discriminated-against and vilified minority. He’s a progressive whose policy positions put him firmly in the camp of the Democratic Party’s leftmost flank, running in a swing state that went for Donald Trump in 2016 and again in 2024. His decision to campaign with the divisive podcaster Hasan Piker has been the subject of seemingly endless takes and tweets (including from supporters who question why Piker is so toxic to El-Sayed even as Trump and the rest of the GOP aren’t forced to answer for the likes of vitriolic racist Laura Loomer, but I digress). And in what is now a predictable election-cycle ritual, El-Sayed’s old tweets are being republished, some badly out of context, in an effort to reveal who the candidate “really” is.
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Of course, one of the most controversial tweets is about 9/11.
“Today, I mourn the 3K lives, 6K injuries, & infrastructural devastation in NYC, perpetrated ignorantly in the name of my faith,” El-Sayed posted on Sept. 11, 2021, 20 years after the attack. “Tomorrow, I’ll mourn the ~1M lives, millions of injuries, & infrastructural devastation in 3 countries, perpetrated ignorantly in the name of my country.”
This is, to put it mildly, not exactly a typical politician’s 9/11 tweet. Sept. 11, 2001 was a trauma for the United States, most particularly for those who died, who lost loved ones, or who feared for their lives on that day, but also for the many of us who woke up on a sunny Tuesday morning to an entirely new world—one in which the veil of safety seemingly guaranteed by our citizenship crumpled down onto the sidewalks of lower Manhattan. I watched the carnage from an NYU dorm room, having just moved to the city to start my freshman year of college. I will never forget the confusion, and then the sheer terror, of that day.
Mostly, though, I remember the immediate aftermath. New Yorkers famously went out to the bars that very night, refusing to sit scared in our apartments. Another vivid recollection is the silence: For days (or was it weeks?), the notoriously aggressive drivers of America’s biggest cities collectively stopped honking their horns. Everyone knew their fellow New Yorkers needed a bit of a break, and for a short period, the usual din of the city calmed to a whisper.
Eventually, the noise came back, and the national sense of shared shock and grief morphed into something uglier, hardier, and less focused. The U.S. invaded Afghanistan on the hunt of the mastermind of the attacks, a career terrorist who was being shielded by the Taliban. This seemed like a reasonable enough response at the time, but then the Bush administration turned its attention to Iraq, and we began hearing about weapons of mass destruction, Nigerien yellowcake, and the president’s unfinished business with Saddam Hussein (“the guy who tried to kill my dad”). I marched down Fifth Avenue with thousands of others in opposition to the Iraq war, but it didn’t matter. America invaded, and while we did depose a brutal dictator, we did so on the basis of faulty intelligence and flat-out lies fed to a grieving and credulous public. The war in Iraq devastated that country and was a cataclysm that sent shockwaves of violence undulating through the Middle East for decades—all, it turns out, for nothing at all, aside from the American contractors and mercenary groups that profited handsomely. The Iraq war pulled attention and resources from Afghanistan, which became a quagmire; Osama bin Laden escaped into Pakistan and wasn’t killed until nearly a decade after the initial attacks. By the time President Joe Biden pulled American forces out of Afghanistan, 20 years had passed. More than 2,000 U.S. troops had been killed in Afghanistan, and more than 20,000 injured. Nearly half of the dead were young people under the age of 25.
Exact numbers of Afghan civilian deaths are harder to come by, but we know they are in the tens of thousands. And 4 million people were pushed out of their homes and internally displaced. Another 2.7 million fled across the borders into neighboring nations. Then, when the U.S. pulled out, scores of Afghans who risked their lives to help U.S. troops were left to the brutal whims of the Taliban, which quickly retook power. Girls were pushed out of school. Women were re-shrouded in burkas and denied the most basic of human rights: To work, to get health care, to learn, to move, to so much as speak. The country that had promised to fight for their freedoms swiftly abandoned them.
Iraq faced even greater devastation. Operation Iraqi Freedom took the lives of nearly 4,500 U.S. service men and women, and wounded roughly 32,000 more. An estimated 200,000 Iraqi civilians were killed.
This all came at a cost of $1.6 trillion dollars. And it’s difficult to quantify the cost of the violence that ripped across the region. In Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, and Pakistan, nearly half a million civilians lost their lives as a direct result of America’s post-9/11 conflicts—as in, they were killed in bombings, shootings, and other acts of war. An additional 3.5 million died from disease, malnutrition, or other problems caused by the wars’ destruction of national economies and critical infrastructure, including hospitals, roads, and health systems.
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These outcomes, too, are horrific tragedies. When considered in full, it seems almost stranger to not recognize them, as El-Sayed did in his tweet five years ago. Recognizing the bloody result of America’s post-9/11 conflicts, and especially its shambolic war of choice in Iraq, does not take away from the grief and respect owed to those who were killed. I would argue, in fact, that the Iraq war especially is a stain on the legacies of innocent people murdered by terrorists—their lives, and Americans’ collective grief over their loss, was cynically manipulated to attack a nation and a people who had nothing to do with 9/11. Recognizing that 9/11’s horrors compounded over the years does not degrade the memory of its initial victims.
Nor does it give the 9/11 terrorists a pass. It is often the goal of terrorist groups to invite blowback—to target powerful nations or institutions in order to elicit a harsh and excessive response so that they may then position themselves as the victims in propaganda warfare. That the U.S. would respond to a terrorist attack on our soil with swift and harsh retribution that would also harm civilians was an entirely predictable outcome. The 9/11 terrorists waged a war in the name of Islam knowing that thousands of innocent Muslims would pay the price. But by shifting our focus from Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida toward Saddam Hussein and Iraq, the Bush administration squandered global post-9/11 sympathy and the moral high ground. They played right into narratives of the U.S. as ignorant might-makes-right global bullies.
Sept. 11, 2001, was a rare moment of national unity in the face of tragedy. On that day and in the immediate aftermath, Americans and those who admired America spoke about what made our country good: Our constitutionally protected and culturally lauded freedoms, including of speech, religion, and the press. Our creativity and innovation, how we made music and movies and clothes and vaccines and lifesaving drugs and consumer goods revered the world over. Our global public works, from USAID to the Peace Corps to the Marshall Plan. It really was true that the fanatics who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks hated not just American power and the ways in which America had manipulated, sometimes violently, the affairs of other nations, but many of the things that actually do make America great: Our diversity of thought and religion, and, yes, our expansive freedoms.
Those are the values Americans clung to when 9/11 sent us reeling. But as our collective shock turned to a desire for vengeance, our government engaged in a series of truly unconscionable acts in addition to its long wars, including torture programs, detention without charge or trial, and unconstitutional surveillance of American citizens, that undermined those very values. That, too, is a tragedy of the post-9/11 era.
None of this has to be the focus on the anniversary of Sept. 11, which should be a day for grief and memory. But it should absolutely be said on Sept. 10 and on Sept. 12—with much of the blame laid at the feet of George W. Bush and his administration, which have somehow almost totally escaped any consequence for their lies, their recklessness, and what that all wrought.
Twenty-five years after Sept. 11, 2001, scores of innocent people are dead, revolutions have risen up and been squashed down, and millions live in the ruins of war—in poverty, in sickness, in nations left in shambles. Most of the blame for that lies at the feet of the 9/11 terrorists and those who supported and financed them. But part of the blame lies at the feet of some of the most powerful people in the world, who made spectacularly bad decisions, repeatedly misled the public, and behaved in ways that should always be described as shamefully un-American. I’d prefer it if our current politicians could acknowledge that.
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