Why We Need to Remember 9/11

National Review Online

Friday, September 11, 2026

 

On a perfectly clear morning 25 years ago, America changed forever.

 

At 8:46 a.m. on that day, a team of Islamic terrorists crashed American Airlines Flight 11, carrying 76 passengers and eleven crew members, into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. It was followed 17 minutes later by United Airlines Flight 175, carrying 51 passengers and nine crew members, which terrorists steered into the South Tower. Less than 90 minutes later, both of those towers had collapsed into a massive pile of rubble.

 

Meanwhile, as Americans’ televisions were tuned to live footage of the burning buildings, American Airlines Flight 77, carrying 53 passengers and six crew members, was slammed into the Pentagon. And shortly after, United Airlines Flight 93, with 33 passengers and seven crew members, crashed in a field in Shanksville, Pa.

 

Today, we remember the 2,977 innocent victims who were the first casualties in what would become known as the War on Terror. We also remember the extraordinary heroism displayed that day, without which the horrific losses would have been far worse.

 

One of the most miraculous facts about that day was that at the World Trade Center, which may have had an occupancy of 19,000 people between the two buildings at the time, 99 percent of those who were below the point of impact of the planes survived. This achievement is owed to the extraordinary evacuation efforts of first responders, who ran into burning buildings, no doubt knowing that there was a good chance they wouldn’t make it out. In the end, 441 firefighters, police officers, and paramedics did not.

 

Then there was the civilian heroism displayed by the passengers on Flight 93, who had heard about what happened at the World Trade Center, overtook the plane, and ensured that it crashed in an empty field rather than into the U.S. Capitol or White House, one of which was believed to be the potential target. Passenger Todd Beamer’s remark to his fellow passengers, “Let’s roll,” overheard from a phone call, became a rallying cry as the nation fought back.

 

At the time, everyone expected another attack in short order. There was a network of highly trained terrorists imbued with radical Islamic ideology and determined to cripple America and bring down the West. There have been a number of subsequent attacks throughout the world (such as the 2004 Madrid train bombings, the 2005 London bombings, the 2015 Charlie Hebdo shooting and other attacks in Paris, and of course, the October 7 attacks in 2023). There have also been smaller-scale jihadi-inspired attacks in the​ U.S., such as the 2009 Fort Hood shooting, the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, and the 2016 Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting. But none of these attacks on U.S. soil were anything close to what happened on September 11.

 

Some argue that the lack of major terrorist incidents in ensuing years proves that the nation overreacted after  September 11. Clearly, though, increasing domestic security, pursuing more aggressive intelligence gathering, killing rank-and-file jihadis as well as their leaders, and disrupting and dismantling terrorist networks made it much harder to pull off a second mass-casualty attack. We know, based on terrorist plots that were foiled, that the failure of Islamists to pull anything off akin to 9/11 was not for lack of trying.

 

On ​September 11, George W. Bush was out of sight most of the day, as he was being safely moved from an event in Florida back to Washington. At the time, it was New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani who filled the vacuum in an exemplary way, soberly conveying the scale of the tragedy, offering practical information on rescue efforts, and delivering a message of defiance. It wasn’t until Bush visited rescue workers at the site days later that he emerged as a wartime leader. In perhaps the most iconic moment of his presidency, the crowd struggled to hear him and he shouted back through a bullhorn, “I can hear you, the rest of the world hears you — and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.”

 

One thing worth stating about the initial response is that it defied Osama bin Laden’s impression of America when planning the attacks. The terrorist leader had often cited previous examples in which the U.S. had pulled back when dealing with losses, including after the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut and the 1993 Black Hawk Down incident in Somalia.

 

The invasion of Afghanistan almost surely would have happened in some form or other under any U.S. president and was a matter of near-universal consensus at the time. The Iraq War was more controversial at the outset, but Congress voted to authorize the conflict. The decision-making in the run-up to the war is impossible to understand absent the context of September 11, which made it seem intolerable that Saddam Hussein would have weapons of mass destruction (as we eventually learned, the intelligence on this question was desperately flawed).

 

In both Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. got entangled in long engagements in societies we didn’t fully understand. Joe Biden’s disastrous pullout from Afghanistan handed the country back to the Taliban, while Iraq — after the expenditure of much U.S. blood and treasure — has emerged as a flawed democracy and a flawed security partner of the United States. The disillusionment caused by the wars had a large hand in electing Barack Obama and then Donald Trump.

 

Twenty-five years later, Islamism is still a threat, and the moral clarity in the immediate aftermath of September 11 is long gone; in fact, the third-worldist ideology increasingly ascendant in the Democratic Party has significant overlap with the worldview of the anti-Western forces arrayed against us.

 

One antidote to this poison is to remember what happened on September 11, and who did it and why.