Like many news shows this past week, the latest episode of “CBS News Sunday Morning” was devoted almost exclusively to the 25th anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001. Watching the show with my husband, Juan, I grumbled that it seemed to be following the general pattern of acknowledging the terror that many of us felt in the United States, without acknowledging the terror that our country unleashed in response. Then, as if in reaction to my complaint, former Jimmy Carter White House speechwriter James Fallows offered his concluding thoughts on the legacy of Sept. 11 and how American daily life and civic culture changed after the attack. Fallows began by discussing the horror of the attacks, but shifted to talking about the ways the U.S. squandered the goodwill of much of the world. First, by starting a war against Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with the attacks. Next, by further transforming the U.S. into a war machine. Fallows pointed out: “Before 9/11, there was no Department of Homeland Security, no TSA, no ICE. Those functions were carried out more modestly with less overreach. … Nothing like the ‘forever wars’ that have followed.”This reminded me of my own response to Sept. 11. Almost 25 years before Juan and I were watching the CBS news program, we turned the television to a different news channel just in time to see the second plane hit the south tower. This confirmed what we had suspected: that this was a deliberate terror attack on the United States. We were, in fact, terrified. It was horrific. We went into the street in our Brooklyn neighborhood and could see the smoke rising. When we returned to the TV and saw the south tower fall, we went into a kind of shock, thinking about the senseless loss of life and the fact that Juan’s life might have been one of those lost. He was supposed to meet a friend for lunch at the twin towers later that day. What snapped me out of my shock was a realization that we might soon face a different kind of horror: that the George W. Bush administration’s response to this tragedy would likely be misdirected and disproportionate, and lead to much more suffering and death. In the days that followed, I reached out to fellow professors where I taught at Long Island University, Brooklyn, who shared my fears and concerns. We eventually brought together a group of professors, students and administrators that became known as the Progressive Network. We began with a series of rallies to acknowledge and mourn what had happened. We then arranged teach-ins that tried to explain what had happened and why, and what might happen in response, which eventually became a free one-credit course called Critically Reading the War on Terror. We also held several rallies and protests to try to prevent what we feared would happen — what Fallows called “forever wars” that would escalate and spread desolation. We did not succeed in stopping the cycle of violence. Despite the facts that we discussed with our students — that none of the Sept. 11 hijackers or terror masterminds came from Iraq and that there were no weapons of mass destruction there — the Bush administration launched an invasion of Iraq. And then Afghanistan and other countries also not responsible for Sept. 11 were drawn in — entanglements that have had disastrous consequences for the U.S. and the world.Eventually, according to “Costs of War,” a report from Brown University, U.S. military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen and Pakistan led to a death toll of at least 4.5 million to 4.7 million as of 2023, and counting. Roughly 3,000 people died in the U.S. due to the Sept. 11 attacks, with at least 9,000 losing their lives due to the toxic aftereffects. All of this is tragic. But how does this tragedy justify the deaths of millions? The only possible answer is that it is justified by xenophobia — the combination of nationalism and racism. The United States government decided that our lives are many thousands of times more valuable than the lives of others. Worse still, the overwhelming majority of these millions of people were civilians who died as a result of wars’ destruction of economies, healthcare systems, infrastructure and the environment.This same logic devalues certain lives domestically as well. According to Human Rights Watch, there was a roughly 1,600% increase in anti-Muslim hate crime incidents from 2000 to 2001. And now, 25 years later, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani is comfortable saying that current New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani should not attend memorial ceremonies this week to mark the anniversary of the attacks because Mamdani is supposedly a supporter of a Muslim plot aimed at “taking over certain parts of America and certain parts of Europe” (a right-wing conspiracy theory Giuliani has endorsed previously). Meanwhile, Mamdani balanced his discussion of how important it is “to honor the memories of those that were killed” with acknowledgment that Islamophobic backlash to the attacks had made anti-Muslim prejudice “a fact of life” for Muslim Americans. This is exactly the balance that is needed to understand the twin terrors when victims turn into victimizers.Otherwise, much of U.S. foreign policy will remain a tale of twin terrors. In a public forum at the University of Virginia, I once asked Elliott Abrams (who, at the time, was an architect of the Ronald Reagan administration’s foreign policy in Central America) why all those he referred to as “terrorists” were brown-skinned people resisting U.S. control in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and Nicaragua. Yet, we weren’t terrorists when we established authoritarian puppet regimes, mined these countries’ harbors, and took other actions that led to the deaths of tens of thousands of people? He had no coherent answer because there is no answer. As with Sept. 11 and the response to Sept. 11, these are twin terrors that can only stop being terrors with mutual understanding. Relatedislamophobiaseptember 11Voices