Half of Americans think post-9/11 wars were worth it, poll shows

Half of Americans think post-9/11 wars were worth it, poll shows Submitted by Yasmine El-Sabawi on Wed, 09/02/2026 - 16:43 The same number of people seem to agree that Muslims are the worst-treated group in the United States Pedestrians standing on the Brooklyn waterfront look across the East River towards the burning twin towers of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan, New York on 11 September 2001 (Henny Ray Abrams/AFP) Off Nearly half of Americans believe their country's military operations and surveillance infrastructure that followed the 11 September 2001 attacks have been "worth it", according to a YouGov poll published on Wednesday. Nearly the same amount also believe that Muslims have been the most mistreated group since the attacks, the results showed. The questions come ahead of the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center buildings in New York City, after four planes were hijacked and two of them flown into the towers. The third plane crashed into the Pentagon in Washington, DC, and the fourth in a field in Pennsylvania. Asked if fighting "against the threat of terrorism through military operations abroad" and introducing "increased security and surveillance inside of the United States... have been worth the cost", 48 percent of respondents said yes, while another 27 percent said they weren't sure. The remaining 25 percent said no. Divided by political leaning, far more Republicans than Democrats said yes - nearly double the amount at 71 percent. Five years after the fall of Kabul, 'war on terror' ghosts have come home Read More » In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, then-President George W Bush created the Department of Homeland Security, ushering in the Transportation Security Administration, which is the body that makes travelers take off their shoes, separate their laptops from their bags and empty out their liquids before flying. Bush also signed the Patriot Act into law, which brought in sweeping authorisation to track phone calls and movements of American citizens. The 2001 Authorisation for the Use of Military Force, passed by Congress, remains active to this day and has been used for unlimited US military attacks on several sovereign nations, including Afghanistan, Somalia, Syria and Pakistan. YouGov surveyed 1,098 US citizens over the age of 18 through a web-based survey between 20-23 August. The margin of error is +/- 4.1 points. Islamophobia Just under half of respondents said the US is safer now than it was before 9/11. Among Republican respondents, that figure was 60 percent. Only 20 percent said the US is now less safe. "It stems from the propaganda," Maha Hilal, author of the book Innocent Until Proven Muslim, which documents the impact of the "war on terror" told Middle East Eye. "I think it's pretty easy to convince people that they're safer now because of their ability to maintain the same sort of lifestyle, especially as Americans tend to be quite apathetic anyway," she said. "Their ability to maintain the same sort of lifestyle post-9/11 and in the 'war on terror' has, I think, been relatively unchanged." When the pollsters asked if "Muslims in the United States have been treated better, about the same, or worse than people of other religions", 52 percent of respondents said Muslims have been treated worse. Among Democrats, that figure is 71 percent, whereas among Republicans it lands at 28 percent. Independents fell squarely in between. The figures largely reflect the current views and narratives coming from each side of the aisle, as Republicans ramp up the kind of anti-Muslim rhetoric that both elders and experts in the Muslim community have said is much worse than the immediate post-9/11 climate. Asked "which kind of perpetrator has committed the greatest number of violent attacks in the US", a quarter of all respondents pointed to right-wing extremists, while 19 percent said it's "Islamic extremists". Another 17 percent said it was "lone wolves who aren’t affiliated with any particular group or ideology", while 13 percent pointed to left-wing extremists. Old playbook Key to the "war on terror" narrative is longevity, Hilal told MEE. "It has been to reiterate over and over again how this war has been a success, and how it has stopped numerous acts of terrorism," she said. Even among "leftists and liberals", she noted, it has been difficult "to communicate the idea that Islamophobia has been a part and parcel to the war. "The targeting of Muslims is usually treated as an unintended consequence." This week, CBS News faced internal backlash over its coverage of Muslim US Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, with current and former staffers accusing the network of poor journalism and “overt” racism. The controversy erupted after CBS published a story highlighting old social media posts by El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee in Michigan for the US Senate, ahead of the 25th anniversary of 9/11. CBS staff accuse network of ‘overt racism’ over Abdul El-Sayed 9/11 story Read More » El-Sayed, who could become the first Muslim elected to the Senate this November, had deleted posts in which he compared the mounting Covid-19 death toll with the nearly 3,000 people killed on 11 September 2001 and called for Washington to mobilise against poverty and the pandemic as it had after the attacks. “We could save lives rather than take them,” he wrote. More than one million Americans died of Covid-19-related causes. Another post by Sayed mourned those killed on 9/11 as well as those killed during the wars that followed - and that figure is staggering. A research report from the Costs of War project at Brown University’s Watson Institute in 2023 estimated that 4.5 million people have died as a consequence of wars in the Middle East, North Africa and Asia since the 9/11 attacks. Of the 4.5 million fatalities, there were at least 3.6 to 3.7 million "indirect" deaths caused by a variety of factors. The categories in the report are economic collapse and food insecurity; public services and health infrastructure destruction; environmental contamination; reverberating trauma and violence; and other impacts. The US invaded Afghanistan and drove the Taliban from power in retaliation for the 9/11 attacks, which had been planned while al-Qaeda's leader, Osama bin Laden, was living in the country under Taliban protection. The Taliban, however, returned to power in Afghanistan as the US withdrew from the country in 2021. The number of deaths caused by post-9/11 conflicts has been a source of intense controversy, as politics and inexact science have intersected in heated debates of conflicting interests. In 2015, the Nobel Prize-winning Physicians for Social Responsibility estimated that more than one million people had been killed both directly and indirectly in the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan alone. According to the Cost of Wars report, which looks at the cost of war across conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia and Yemen, indirect deaths grew in scale over time. Though the US withdrew its military forces from Afghanistan in 2021, officially ending the war, Afghans are “suffering and dying from war-related causes at higher rates than ever”. “Indirect deaths are devastating, not least because so many of them could be prevented, were it not for war,” the report said. 9/11 Attacks Washington News Post Date Override 0 Update Date Mon, 05/04/2020 - 21:19 Update Date Override 0