openDemocracy Weekly Newsletter 12 September 2026
Is the War on Terror finally over? Did it ever end?
Twenty five years after two commercial jets slammed into the World Trade Centre in New York, we continue to live in 9/11’s long shadow: a world of constant surveillance, secret courts, cross-border renditions, water-boarding, torture, autonomous drone warfare and the normalisation of foreign military interventions. Apparently anything is acceptable as long as it is conducted with the aim of “fighting terror”.
This weekend, Americans will look back to mourn those who lost their lives in twin towers. But if 9/11 was a tragedy for America, it was a crisis that continues to extract a price in Afghanistan and much of the Middle East. What little global legitimacy the West had gained after the collapse of the USSR in 1991 was vapourised a decade later in 2001.
Today, US gunships are back in the Persian Gulf and US “precision weapons” continue to slam into schools and wedding parties,except the victims are now in Iran, rather than Iraq. The US continues to seek foreign oil, except this time they are looking south, and it is Venezuelans who must pay for the privilege of being ruled from Washington.
