I watched the twin towers burn. Now the US is repeating its worst mistakes in Iran

I watched the twin towers burn.

Now the US is repeating its worst mistakes in Iran Submitted by Marco Carnelos on Sat, 09/12/2026 - 13:56 Twenty-five years of invasions and unconditional support for Israel have deepened the grievances behind 9/11 and left America less secure US and Israeli flags lie amid shattered glass at a school in Lamerd, Iran, damaged in a strike on 28 February 2026, pictured on 12 September (Majid Asgaripour/WANA via Reuters) Off Twenty-five years ago, I stood in my office on the 24th floor of the Italian mission to the UN in New York, watching smoke pour from the twin towers of the World Trade Center in southern Manhattan.

A quarter of a century later, the first question I ask myself is whether the country that suffered that heinous crime has changed - and the answer, unfortunately, is that it has: for the worse.

In the aftermath of 9/11, the United States stood at a crossroads. It could have chosen sober reflection, targeted justice and a long-overdue reckoning with the grievances that al-Qaeda's extremists exploited.

It chose instead the path of empire, invasion and endless war - a choice that has haunted the Middle East, and America itself, ever since. The evidence of Washington's failure to learn is now overwhelming.

The US is once again mired in a war of choice in the Middle East - this time against Iran - while the Palestinian question, the central unresolved wound of the region, continues to fester untreated, fuelling the very anger and resentment that it claims to fight.

The "global war on terror" that George W Bush launched in 2001 was supposed to be a decisive campaign against al-Qaeda and its Taliban hosts, but it metastasised into a generational project of regime change and nation-building that left Afghanistan and Iraq in ruins, destabilised the broader region and birthed new enemies.

The invasion of Iraq in 2003, based on fabricated intelligence about weapons of mass destruction, unleashed years of violence that created the conditions for the rise of the Islamic State (IS) group.

At least 200,000 Iraqi civilian deaths have been documented, and peer-reviewed studies put the true toll at half a million or more.

Forever wars Afghanistan, after two decades of blood and treasure, was handed back to the same Taliban in 2021.

The lesson seemed obvious: the United States could not bomb, invade or occupy its way to security in the Middle East.

Twenty-five years later, however, US President Donald Trump - who cast himself as a peacemaker and promised to end foreign wars - has launched what analysts are already calling his own forever war in Iran.

In February 2026, Trump announced "major combat operations" against Iran, launching massive joint US-Israeli strikes targeting military, government and infrastructure sites.

More than six months later, the war grinds on with no clear exit strategy, no congressional authorisation, no UN resolution and scant support from Nato allies or the American public.

The United States could not bomb, invade or occupy its way to security in the Middle East The parallels to the post-9/11 era are impossible to ignore.

Just as the Bush administration underestimated the challenges of occupying Iraq and Afghanistan, analysts warn that the Trump administration has miscalculated Iran's resilience and its capacity to disrupt a fifth of the world's energy shipments.

Sina Toossi, an analyst at the Center for International Policy, put it bluntly: "Trump has broken an important post-Iraq and Afghanistan constraint in Washington against launching another major, open-ended war in the Middle East.

That could leave his successor inheriting … an entrenched US-Iran confrontation.

" The Strait of Hormuz - and increasingly also the Bab al-Mandeb - has become a flashpoint, pushing US petrol prices higher, weakening Trump's approval ratings and undermining Washington's international standing.

As with Iraq, the regional spillover has caught Washington off guard, leaving Gulf allies feeling helpless in the face of a war launched on a whim. Some of them are now considering other options for their security.

The failure to plan for the "day after" - a mistake former US President Barack Obama later called the worst of his presidency, over Libya - has been repeated yet again.

An untreated wound For decades, the United States has claimed to be an "honest broker" between Israelis and Palestinians.

In reality, as veteran US peace negotiator Aaron David Miller admitted, Washington has acted as "Israel's lawyer" - a verdict the historian Rashid Khalidi has documented at length - guaranteeing that the so-called peace process would end in failure.

The Oslo Accords, the Camp David summit, the endless rounds of negotiations produced nothing but more settlements, more occupation and more Palestinian dispossession.

The settler population of the occupied West Bank, excluding East Jerusalem, has more than quadrupled since the accords were signed in 1993, with scant protest from Washington.

Today, the two-state solution - the supposed cornerstone of US and international policy for decades - seems a mirage.

The United States has claimed success even as its efforts have done more to destabilise and inflame the region than to contribute to lasting peace.

Trump's Gaza plan has been condemned by critics as a blueprint for entrenching colonial power, in which Palestinians are spoken about - not spoken with - their political representatives excluded and their rights deferred indefinitely.

Meanwhile, the Iran war has diverted diplomatic attention away from Israel-Palestine, allowing Israeli settlement expansion and settler violence to continue in the West Bank while the Israeli military continues to kill civilians in Gaza.

The 9/11 attacks were carried out by men who fed on the very grievances - US military presence in Muslim lands, support for repressive regimes and indifference to Palestinian suffering - that Washington has spent 25 years deepening rather than addressing.

Lessons unlearned The results of Washington's twin failures - the perpetual war and the perpetual neglect of Palestine - are measurable in the collapse of American standing across the Arab world.

Arab Barometer surveys conducted across eight Arab countries between August and November 2025, before Trump launched his war on Iran, found overwhelming majorities - 86 percent in Egypt and Jordan - saying Washington had sided with Israel over the Palestinians.

Nothing new here.

As far back as 2002, polling found that Arabs actually liked American people, products, education and values but strongly disliked US policies towards the Arab world, especially regarding the Palestinians.

Bush's famous claim that the attackers "hate our freedoms" was always a lie.

They hated what the US did, the policies it pursued: the unconditional support for Israeli occupation, the invasions, the drone strikes, the double standards.

Those attitudes plummeted further with Trump's first-term pro-Israel, anti-Muslim policies, and then with the Democrats' support, under former US President Joe Biden, for Israel's genocide in Gaza.

As polling analyst James Zogby has warned, Washington's "lack of attentiveness to Arab sensitivities and needs contributes to making a bad situation even worse - further embittering Arabs toward the USA, deepening fissures within the Arab World".

Trump's attacks on Iran, he has also written, are likely to make it "increasingly difficult for Arabs to like American values".

The war on terror was supposed to make America safer; instead, it has made the world more dangerous, more polarised and more resentful.

A quarter of a century later, the US is less trusted, less influential and less secure than it was on 10 September 2001. 9/11 at 25: Has the US learned anything from its 'war on terror'?

Read More » What would it mean to learn the lessons of 9/11?

It would mean recognising that military force cannot solve political problems; that occupations breed resistance, not stability; and that Palestinians are human beings with legitimate national aspirations, not a demographic problem or a piece of real estate to be managed.

It would also mean pursuing diplomacy with adversaries rather than regime change, and putting Washington's weight behind international law and human rights rather than behind the whims of whichever Israeli government happens to be in power.

None of this has happened.

The "lessons learned" industry that sprang up after 9/11 - the commissions, the reports, the think-tank panels - produced volumes of analysis but no fundamental change, and the United States remains trapped in a cycle of violence it helped create and refuses to break.

Twenty-five years after the towers fell, the fires still burn - in Gaza, in the West Bank, in Lebanon and in Iran, and in the hearts of millions who watched America's promise of justice turn into a licence for endless war and indiscriminate killing.

The tragedy of 11 September 2001 was not only the loss of nearly 3,000 lives but also what America chose to become in response.

Until Washington learns to see the Middle East through the eyes of those it has bombed, occupied and ignored, the cycle of anger and resentment will continue, generation after generation, with no end in sight.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

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