The cascading consequences of 9/11 for America and the Middle East

“This will devastate America and the region!” I howled as I watched the second plane slam into the Twin Towers in New York from my distant Beirut living room.

Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011, a decade after the September 11th attacks, and al-Qaeda’s core leadership was dismantled. But my fears were not misplaced. Bin Laden achieved something more consequential than survival: he provoked the United States into a series of self-inflicted wounds that reshaped the Middle East for the worse — and eroded America’s own standing in it.

The US-led invasion of Iraq is the starkest example. Launched on a since-discredited premise linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda, it removed a ruthless dictator without a coherent plan for what came after. The resulting vacuum produced sectarian civil war, empowered Iran, and ultimately incubated ISIS, a movement more brutal and expansive than al-Qaeda. Rather than containing extremism, the war multiplied it.

Afghanistan followed a similar arc. What began as a justified response to remove the Taliban stretched into America’s longest war, costing trillions of dollars and vast numbers of lives. It ended in 2021 with the Taliban back in power, as though two decades of intervention had rearranged the furniture rather than changed the outcome. Bin Laden had reportedly hoped to lure Washington into precisely this kind of prolonged, bleeding entanglement, modeled on the Soviet experience in Afghanistan.

The war on terror also carried costs at home and abroad. Mass surveillance, indefinite detention, and profiling of Muslim communities damaged America’s moral authority and its relationships with Muslim populations worldwide, feeding the narrative of Western hostility toward Islam that extremist groups relied on for recruitment. Authoritarian governments across the Middle East and North Africa, meanwhile, borrowed the language of counterterrorism to justify their own repression, often with tacit American support.

In this light, the “victory” over al-Qaeda looks pyrrhic: bin Laden died, but the strategic overreach he helped provoke left the region less stable, and the United States’ global standing measurably diminished.