A quarter century is enough time to separate history from hysteria, consequences from intentions and reality from propaganda.
On 11 September 2001, nearly 3,000 people were killed in horrific attacks that shocked the United States and the world.
The attacks of 9/11 could have been treated as a grave crime requiring an international effort to identify, apprehend and prosecute those responsible. They could also have triggered a serious national debate about why such intense hostility towards the US had developed in many parts of the Muslim-majority world. Instead, the US's political establishment chose a radically different path.
President George W Bush famously declared that the terrorists attacked the US because "they hate our freedoms". It was a convenient explanation because it absolved the American foreign policy establishment of any responsibility.
There would be no serious reckoning with decades of support for dictatorships across the Arab and Muslim-majority world, the devastating sanctions against Iraq during the 1990s, American military deployments throughout the region or Washington's unconditional support for Israel and its decades-long occupation and dispossession of the Palestinian people.
