Twenty-five years ago, I flew into Nice, France, for a business meeting—and arrived early in the afternoon of September 11. Later, as I walked into the convention center, I looked up at the TVs attached to the walls. They were tuned in to CNN, and although the sound was so low I couldn’t hear the announcer, what I saw shocked and confused me. A plane was hitting the first of the World Trade Towers. What the fuck is going on? I breathed.

The news of what had happened spread rapidly, far and wide beyond that convention center. As I walked the streets of Nice, more than 4,000 miles away from the site of the disaster, strangers walked up with a hug once they recognized that I was American.

That global goodwill dissipated dramatically in the months that followed, as the U.S. government coined and rolled out the “War on Terror.” The campaign’s scope was much broader and deeper than its name implies, with virtually every administration since that day using the resulting laws and institutions to launch new hostilities on foreign soil, expand surveillance of even U.S. citizens, and root out perceived enemies in our midst.

Opening the Gates to Permanent War

Just three days after the attacks, Congress approved the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). The resolution authorized the president to use “all necessary and appropriate force” against those connected to 9/11. Representative Barbara Lee was the only lawmaker in either chamber to vote no, warning, “Let’s just pause, just for a minute, and think through the implications of our actions today so that this does not spiral out of control.”

She was prophetic. Although that AUMF was specific to 9/11, it remains enshrined in law today and has served as a metaphorical “gateway drug.” A 2021 Brown University analysis found that the same AUMF has been used to justify counterterrorism operations in 22 countries, though it was sometimes combined with other authorities.

The AUMF has served as a handy tool for President Donald Trump. During his second term, he has invoked it to justify his own military attacks on Syria and Somalia. (Since February 2025, the Trump administration has authorized over 100 strikes against ISIS and al-Shabaab in Somalia, explicitly justifying them with the 2001 AUMF.)

20 Years in Afghanistan

The United States invaded one of the poorest and most politically repressed countries in the world, with the resulting war killing at least 46,000 Afghan civilians and displacing an estimated 5.9 million. Then, in 2021, the U.S. military pulled out, leaving the country under the control of a more deeply entrenched version of the same regime we overthrew. The Taliban is once again the dominant force, but now it is not merely an insurgency in rural Afghanistan; it is a more experienced and consolidated authoritarian government, with no significant rival. Ostensibly meant to kick the Taliban out of power, the U.S. invasion ultimately ensured they would stay in power permanently.

One consequence is that the Taliban has imposed more than 100 decrees restricting the rights of women and girls, including access to education and jobs. Nearly eight in ten Afghan women ages 15–29 are not in education, employment, or training, and there are even prohibitions on women speaking out loud in public. So in a very real sense, the country is worse off than before the invasion; all that death and destruction really was for nothing.

Invading Iraq on False Premises

Iraq did not carry out the September 11 attacks. There was no evidence of an operational relationship between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, and the claimed weapons of mass destruction never materialized. Yet the climate of public fear created by 9/11 made the 2003 invasion—which members of the George W. Bush administration had advocated for years before—politically possible.

Yes, Iraq before the invasion was a dictatorship under the Ba’ath party, responsible for all manner of human rights abuses. But it was also a government the United States propped up when it was convenient. Both the Reagan and H.W. Bush administrations quietly backed Saddam Hussein during the brutal Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. It was only later that the U.S.’ one-time ally became an opponent.

When we forced Hussein’s government to fall, it was replaced by divided, sectarian parties, armed groups, and patronage networks. An estimated 500,000 people died in the ensuing conflict. And despite having some of the richest oil reserves on Earth, Iraq is described as a “failing state” by many experts, struggling to provide reliable electricity, water and employment.

But perhaps the most lasting legacy of our invasion of Iraq is the fertile ground it created for the birth and growth of the terrorist network we know as ISIS. In other words, we destroyed a state that had not attacked us—and then spent years fighting the forces unleashed by its destruction.

Brown University’s Costs of War project found that the post-9/11 wars ultimately caused the displacement of nearly 40 million people—the largest displacement since World War II.

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Torture and Indefinite Detention

The torture and indefinite detention documented at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo are now forever linked to the American reputation in the world. In fact, even today, 15 men remain interred in the fortress—including three who have never been charged. Why is it still open? George W. Bush expressed discomfort with keeping it open; Barack Obama formally promised to close it but fell short; and Joe Biden renewed that promise but also fell short. Trump, however, has committed to keeping it open. In fact, he is now using part of the facility for detention of immigrants seized by ICE, which was also created in the wake of 9/11 and the frenzy to defend “the homeland” by any means necessary. For example, Somalian residents of Minnesota—even those with valid work permits—have been shipped to Guantánamo.

Normalizing Surveillance of American Citizens 

Congress enacted the PATRIOT Act only 45 days after 9/11, in an atmosphere in which dissent was positioned as tantamount to disloyalty. Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and other whistleblowers later exposed the fact that the National Security Agency had collected telephone metadata for hundreds of millions of Americans and operated sweeping surveillance programs targeting emails and internet activity. And while some of these authorities were later curtailed, the post-9/11 presumption that almost any degree of internal surveillance is justified when officials invoke terrorism is still alive and well. This is especially ironic since the War on Terror was framed in terms of protecting us from those who “hate our freedoms.” In reality, it was George W. Bush’s own government—and the politicians that followed—who eroded our freedom and civil liberties.

This pervasive, intrusive surveillance of ordinary civilians has shape-shifted in many ways. The Department of Homeland Security was created in 2002 by combining all or part of 22 different agencies—the largest federal reorganization in decades. Today’s DHS is charged with determining when protest and other political activity becomes a threat, forming a powerful apparatus for repression.

In the last few years, Donald Trump has wielded that apparatus to harass his opponents, real and perceived. A 2025 presidential directive called NSPM-7 ordered investigations of nonprofit organizations and their funders for their “anti-Americanism” and “anti-capitalism”—which the administration considers “indicia” of political violence. DHS agents have infiltrated anti-ICE organizing groups, planted spies in private Signal chats, followed protesters, and obtained financial records belonging to unions and progressive nonprofits that have not been charged with crimes. Even the anti-war group CODEPINK, where I work, was publicly accused by Sen. Tom Cotton of “providing material support to foreign terrorist organizations.” The evidence? It wasn’t shared.

Immigrants Became Public Enemy No. 1

After immigration was transferred into the new Department of Homeland Security, the issues of migration and asylum were filtered through the lens of terrorism and security threats. The fact that immigrants and refugees have made major contributions, economic and otherwise, in cities hollowed out by factory closures and decades of population loss has been ignored. Instead, a xenophobic mindset has taken over. The United States’ counter-terrorism efforts and crackdown on immigration intersect constantly. As Matthew Petti has written for Reason magazine, the Obama administration justified its drone strikes against young Syrian and Pakistani men by describing them as “military-aged males”; years later, the Trump administration adopted the same language to justify brutalizing “military-aged males” from what it called “adversarial nations” at the border. More recently, the racist panic over Somali Americans in Minnesota, who were baselessly accused of stealing “millions of taxpayer dollars” and sending them to the militant group Al-Shabaab, similarly conflated immigrants with “terror.” Since July 2025, Congress has funneled roughly $240 billion into immigration and border enforcement—over and above the agencies’ regular annual budgets.

The Seeds of Dictatorial Power

While President Trump did not cite the AUMF as his basis for joining Israel in the assault on Iran, that authority and the abuses it allowed created the political atmosphere in which efforts to stop the hostilities have failed miserably. While Congress formally directed the president to end the unauthorized war in June, decades of accumulated executive power—and an unresolved constitutional weakness in the War Powers Resolution process—allowed him to defy the vote without apparent consequences.

Congress could have done more, however, if more members dared to push back against the post-9/11 fear of being perceived as failing to “support our troops.” And it could have used the appropriations process to specifically prohibit the use of funds for unauthorized hostilities against Iran. Unlike the concurrent war powers resolution, such a restriction would be binding law—assuming, that is, enough votes existed to override a veto.

Instead, Congress seems poised to continue supplying the military with more money than it can ethically spend. (The president’s rebranded “Department of War” has failed every single one of its department-wide financial audits since department-wide audits began in 2018.) President Trump is now asking Congress for approximately $1.5 trillion in military spending for fiscal year 2027, along with a $67.1 billion supplemental—much of it for the war in Iran. Think about that for a minute: That’s $4.1 billion every day, $171 million for every hour, over the next year.

And meanwhile, 27 million Americans lack health insurance, nearly 48 million live in food-insecure households, 22.7 million renter households spend more than a third of their income on housing, and three-quarters of a million people are homeless on any given night. These are not hypothetical dangers. They are harming Americans now. Yet this administration and Congress treat them as social problems to be means-tested, rationed, and balanced against the deficit. A government that tells its citizens that they face permanent, existential threats finds money for weapons systems, border walls, surveillance and detention of those it perceives as “trespassers.” But it invokes austerity and restraint when its citizens ask for health care, housing and food assistance.

Barbara Lee had it right. In our self-righteous fear following 9/11, the United States became the threat to the world’s peace and security that we deplored. In the years since, we did far more than strike back. We institutionalized the rage and distrust, as if to bake it into our national DNA. Lee’s warning was clear: "As we act, let us not become the evil that we deplore." Looking back at 25 years of war and abuses of power, it is hard to escape the conclusion that we became exactly that.

The 2001 AUMF has outlived nearly nine out of every 10 lawmakers who voted for it, despite dozens of attempts to repeal or replace it. And in just September of 2025, the government officially renewed the national emergency, first declared 25 years ago, for another year.

Barbara Lee left Congress in 2025. Yet the authority she warned could become a blank check remains available to presidents and continues to define who we are as Americans. And when I go abroad now, no one wants to hug me, except in sympathy.

Pam Bailey is Washington DC coordinator for CODEPINK, as well as co-editor of We Are Not Numbers, a book about a youth storytelling project she co-founded while living in the Gaza Strip. Her firsthand experience in Gaza shaped her view of the United States and its increasingly contentious relationship with much of the world.