Twenty-Five Years of Lies: From the Ashes of 9/11 to the Inferno in Iran
Twenty-five years. It has now been a quarter of a century since hijacked airplanes struck the World Trade Center, tore through the Pentagon, and crashed into a Pennsylvania field. Nearly 3,000 people were murdered, millions watched the towers fall, and an entire nation demanded justice. That anger was justified. What followed was not. The dead of September11 deserved truth, justice, and accountability; instead, their memory was converted into political currency by government officials, ideological fanatics, defense contractors, lobbyists, and foreign leaders who recognized an opportunity within America’s grief. Fear became policy, grief became permission, and justice became war.
On September 11, 2001, five young Israeli men were detained after witnesses reported seeing them photographing the burning World Trade Center and apparently behaving jubilantly. Their conduct was disturbing enough to trigger an extensive federal investigation into possible intelligence connections. But neither the New York Times nor ABCNews established that these men- or the Israeli government- possessed advance knowledge of the attacks.
Nevertheless, the strange and largely forgotten episode remains a haunting symbol of what followed- not because it proves that Israel engineered September 11, but because the attacks transformed the political world in ways that aligned with the strategic ambitions of Israel’s leadership. America was wounded, enraged, and ready to strike. Benjamin Netanyahu was ready with a list of targets.
Netanyahu had been warning about Iran since at least 1992, when he predicted that Tehran was only three to five years away from achieving an independent nuclear-weapons capability. That deadline came and went, but the prediction remained. Iran was always approaching the bomb, always on the verge, always only a few years, months, or weeks away. The calendar changed, the deadline moved, and the warning survived- endlessly renewed by the same politician who had already spent decades watching his previous forecasts expire.
Then came September 11. The attacks were organized and carried out by al-Qaeda. Saddam Hussein did not plan them, Iraq did not participate in them, and subsequent investigations found no operational partnership between Saddam’s government and al-Qaeda in carrying out attacks against the United States. Yet one year and one day after the towers fell, Netanyahu appeared before Congress to advocate removing Saddam Hussein.
“There is no question whatsoever” that Saddam was pursuing nuclear weapons, Netanyahu declared. Deposing him, he confidently promised, would produce “enormous positive reverberations” throughout the region. Congress listened, Washington marched, and the reverberations came- only they were not positive for America, Iraq, or the world.
The supposed stockpiles of WMDs which were used to sell the invasion did not exist. The operational alliance between Saddam and al-Qaeda did not exist. The connection between Iraq and September 11 did not exist. Yet the invasion happened anyway. The United States attacked a country that had not attacked it, without obtaining a new United Nations Security Council authorization. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan later said the invasion was incompatible with the UN Charter and, from that perspective, illegal.
Cities burned, families were destroyed, and American service members returned home in coffins- or carrying mental, physical, and emotional wounds that would follow them for the rest of their lives. Trillions of dollars disappeared into occupation, reconstruction, weapons contracts, private security companies, and the machinery of permanent war. The American public had been promised a swift victory and a transformed Middle East; what it received was torture, insurgency, sectarian bloodshed, terrorism, displacement, and another generation permanently scarred by a war built upon claims that collapsed almost as quickly as Baghdad.
And who was held accountable? Who stood trial for the false claims? Who lost a career for presenting speculation as certainty? Who apologized to the dead? Practically no one. The officials who failed moved onto corporate boards, consulting firms, book deals, television studios, lucrative speaking engagements, and comfortable retirements. The contractors collected their money. The architects of war congratulated themselves. The working class buried its children and received the bill.
The invasion did not weaken Iran; it liberated Iran from its greatest regional enemy. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had served as a brutal but powerful counterweight to Tehran. By destroying Saddam’s government, dismantling the Iraqi state, and creating an enormous political vacuum, Washington handed Iran an opportunity it could never have created for itself. The invasion empowered Iranian hardliners, expanded Tehran’s regional influence, and transformed Iraq into a strategic black hole that drained American resources while strengthening the very country Washington claimed it wanted to contain.
Simply put, America invaded Iraq partly in the name of transforming the Middle East- and the principal strategic beneficiary was Iran.
Netanyahu had promised “positive reverberations.” Instead, the war destroyed Iran’s most dangerous adversary, elevated political movements with longstanding ties to Tehran, and created new opportunities for Iranian influence throughout the region. But the people who promoted the war apparently learned nothing. Or perhaps they learned precisely the wrong lesson: that there is no punishment for being catastrophically wrong, provided the catastrophe enriches the right people and advances the right political interests.
For more than three decades, Netanyahu has continued to insist that Iran is on the verge of obtaining nuclear weapons. In 1992, the deadline was three to five years. In 2009, it was reportedly one or two years. In 2012, Netanyahu stood before the United Nations with his infamous cartoon bomb and warned that Iran was approaching the final stage. By 2025, the danger was again described as a matter of months or weeks. The deadline has moved so many times that urgency itself has become a renewable political resource.
This does not mean that Iran’s nuclear activities were harmless. Iran enriched uranium far beyond the level ordinarily required for civilian nuclear power and obstructed international efforts to account fully for its stockpile. Those actions deserved serious scrutiny, international pressure, inspections, and relentless diplomacy. But suspicion is not a blank check for war. Enrichment is not the same as possessing a nuclear weapon. A potential future capability is not an armed attack. And warnings repeatedly presented as imminent cannot remain immune from examination simply because questioning them is politically inconvenient.
For decades, Netanyahu’s clock has remained permanently set at five minutes to midnight- and every time America checks the time, another missile is launched.
Now the United States is at war with Iran. Once again, Americans were told that force was necessary. Once again, military action was presented as urgent, unavoidable, and limited. Once again, Washington adopted the strategic priorities of the Israeli government as though they were automatically the interests of the American people. And once again, the promise of a short, decisive operation has given way to the possibility of another open-ended Middle Eastern conflict that American officials reportedly fear could continue for years.
Thousands are dead, millions have been displaced, oil routes have been disrupted, and energy prices have climbed. Average working American men and women are once again paying more for gasoline, food, transportation, and electricity while weapons manufacturers count their profits. Washington canal ways find billions for bombs, warplanes, military deployments, and foreign wars, even as Americans are told that affordable housing, healthcare, education, infrastructure, and economic security are simply too expensive.
Was Washington deceived? Was it pressured by lobbying, ideological loyalty, political cowardice, domestic calculation, or the fear that opposing Netanyahu would carry an unbearable political (or even legal) cost? Whatever the mixture, allegations of literal blackmail are not required to explain what happened. American leaders largely made their own decisions. They surrendered their own judgment. They embraced worst-case predictions, disregarded the lessons of Iraq, and again treated diplomacy as weakness and war as strength.
Israel’s government applied the pressure. Washington pulled the trigger. Both must now be held accountable.
The Israeli state sought the destruction of perceived regional enemies, and American leaders repeatedly supplied the bombs, bodies, diplomatic protection, and money. Political leaders gained power from fear. Defense contractors converted death into quarterly earnings. Lobbyists transformed the priorities of a foreign government into Washington consensus. Ideologues treated the Middle East like a chessboard on which other people’s children could be sacrificed.
And who paid? American troops, Iraqi families, Iranian civilians, and working people struggling to afford another trip to the grocery store or gas station. The same people always pay. The powerful manufacture urgency; the poor manufacture coffins.
September 11 should have taught America to reject fanaticism, protect human life, and demand unimpeachable evidence before unleashing war. Instead, it taught the political establishment that terror could be used to silence questions. Ask for evidence- and you are naïve. Question the intelligence- and you are disloyal. Oppose another war- and you are helping the enemy.
Twenty-five years of manipulated fear is enough. Twenty-five years of shifting rationales is enough. Twenty-five years of sending working people to kill and die for ambitions conceived in government offices, foreign capitals, lobbying suites, and corporate boardrooms is enough.
The lesson is not that Israel secretly controls America. The truth is more damning: America’s own leaders repeatedly chose submission to militarism. They chose foreign-policy orthodoxy over independent judgment, bombs over diplomacy, propaganda over scrutiny, and alliance politics over the interests of their own people. They were not powerless victims of deception; they were willing participants in the construction of permanent war.
Five men were accused of celebrating while the towers burned. Their behavior was investigated, but foreknowledge was never established. Today, however, the people celebrating the profits of endless war are easier to identify. They are the executives whose stock prices rise with every escalation, the politicians whose careers thrive upon fear, and the strategists who destroy entire societies before describing the wreckage as “security”. They dance in Washington and Tel Aviv- not as nations or peoples, but as a protected political class insulated from the bloodshed it creates.
Meanwhile, the rest of us pay in blood and gold.
Twenty-five years after September 11, the American people must finally demand an end to the cycle. No more wars built upon predictions that never come true. No more blank checks for foreign governments. No more unquestioning loyalty to alliances that demand sacrifice without accountability. No more sending the working class to fight wars that the ruling class will never personally experience.
This is not isolationism. It is self-preservation. It is a demand that American foreign policy serve the American people rather than arms manufacturers, foreign governments, political extremists, and the architects of perpetual conflict. It is a refusal to allow another generation to be terrorized into surrendering its judgment.
Honor the dead with truth. Defend the living through peace. And never forget: when leadership and institutions fail, the pursuit of justice itself becomes an open act of revolution!