They promised to keep us safe. When they failed, they asked us to trust them with a war.
Twenty-five years after September 11, that bargain deserves more than another anniversary speech. Ordinary people paid in lives, military service, lost freedoms and public debt. Those in power acquired an extraordinary argument against scrutiny: the country was at war.
My accusation is that leaders can trade the public’s security for their own political security. A failure that should threaten a career becomes the emergency invoked to defend it. The question changes from “Why didn’t you protect us?” to “How dare you question our leader now?”
The warning came first
On August 6, 2001, Bush received a presidential briefing titled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US.” It was thirty-six days before the attacks. His presidential briefs contained more than forty Bin Laden-related intelligence articles between January 20 and September 10.
The 9/11 Commission’s account describes mounting warnings and a striking failure to mobilize domestic defenses. It records missed opportunities to pursue two future hijackers, Khalid al Mihdhar and Nawaf al Hazmi. Those were people who could have been investigated, not simply an abstract prediction that something terrible might happen.
Ignored actionable intelligence. That phrase belongs in the discussion. Here it means intelligence that offered concrete opportunities for investigation, watchlisting, or defensive action. It is an accusation grounded in missed opportunities.
A warning need not supply a flight number to justify action. The failure to act on warnings demands accountability. The war that followed cannot excuse it.
The record is clear enough: officials received repeated warnings and possessed concrete leads. They failed to connect them, pursue them, and act. Twenty-five years later, the unanswered question is why a failure of this magnitude brought so little accountability.
Instead, the catastrophe gave the leaders who failed a mandate for war, the Patriot Act, and a vastly expanded surveillance state. Their failure was buried beneath the wars that followed, and wartime became their protection from questions that should have ended careers.
The October 7 echo
Israel’s border communities were also promised protection. On October 7, 2023, that promise collapsed.
Reporting by Haaretz, summarized by AP, alleges that the UAE president personally warned Netanyahu of a major Hamas operation before the attack. Netanyahu denies receiving that warning. Whether it reached him, what it contained, and what he did are disputed factual questions. They demand an independent investigation.
Some of the devastated communities were centers of the Israeli left. Be’eri’s voting record showed strong support for Labour and Meretz. Nir Oz included peace activists who helped Palestinians obtain medical treatment.
People who opposed Netanyahu and worked for peace were among those left exposed by his government’s failure. Then the war that followed became a demand for loyalty to that same government. That sequence is suspicious and demands far more investigation: What warnings reached Netanyahu? Why were the border defenses unprepared? Did political interests affect the decisions made before or after the attack?
There is also a glaring conflict of interest. The government accused of ignoring actionable intelligence can influence the timing and scope of the investigation, while the war may help keep its leader in power. A government whose political survival may depend on delaying accountability cannot credibly investigate itself. The people who failed to provide security cannot be allowed to use the war to silence questions about their failure.
Al-Qaeda and Hamas bear responsibility for their crimes. Their guilt does not cancel the separate responsibilities of the governments entrusted with protecting the people they attacked.
“How dare you question him during the war?”
This is where failure can become political shelter. Citizens ask what their leaders knew. Loyalists tell them that asking weakens the war effort. The leader’s authority becomes confused with the country’s survival.
My criticism is directed at that excuse. A commander in chief is a public official. The title does not make his judgment gospel. Nor does a war erase what happened before it.
There is a political incentive worth confronting: ending a war can remove the emergency used to defer a reckoning. That does not prove why either man made every decision. It does mean that the leader’s interest in remaining powerful cannot be assumed to match the public’s interest in peace.
Netanyahu’s resistance to an independent state inquiry is especially relevant. A former aide, Eli Feldstein, also alleged that Netanyahu tasked him with finding a way to evade responsibility after October 7. Netanyahu’s office rejected that account. The allegation needs testing; the public should not have to accept either a denial or an accusation on faith.
Accountability should not wait for a leader to declare that the emergency is finally over. Otherwise, the official under scrutiny helps decide when scrutiny may begin.
The bill outlives the presidency
Brown University’s Costs of War overview, updated September 2, 2026, reports that through 2021 the United States had spent or incurred obligations exceeding $8 trillion for the post-9/11 wars. That figure includes obligations, not just money already paid, and is not a newly calculated 2026 total. The same overview reports counterterrorism operations and related programs in at least 78 countries as of 2023.
Those obligations compete with schools, infrastructure, research and the productive economy. Borrowing moves the bill forward. Veterans’ needs continue after the cameras leave. A president can retire; the public cannot retire the consequences so easily.
Some counterterrorism measures protect people. The existence of real threats does not justify every war, every surveillance power, or every dollar spent in their name. Security must be judged by results and constrained by rights, not measured by how much authority officials accumulate.
The danger is a government that becomes increasingly capable of watching its citizens while remaining unwilling to answer them. That is how a demand for protection can become an argument for permanent control.
The Wilsonian promise was bigger than Wilson
The alternative is not helplessness. It is a disciplined commitment to collective security: alliances, diplomacy, lawful defense, and institutions that constrain leaders as well as adversaries.
Woodrow Wilson did not start World War I; it began in 1914, and America entered in 1917. His own record includes racism and coercive interventions that violated the principles he proclaimed. We address those contradictions in When America Abandoned Self-Determination. Defending a principle does not require defending every act of its namesake.
Historian Frank Ninkovich’s The Wilsonian Century traces the influence of this tradition through later American policy. It is a historical interpretation, not proof that the last century was uniformly peaceful. World War II, colonial wars, Vietnam and many other conflicts rule out that comforting fiction.
What remains worth defending is the ambition: build arrangements that make peace more durable than any one ruler’s promises. Later generations carried parts of that project forward, even as they committed failures of their own. As The Peace Americans Inherited argues, preserving peace requires deterrence and restraint together.
My argument for Wilsonianism is therefore a standard against which to judge power. Does a policy make people safer together? Does it respect self-determination? Can its authors be questioned? Does it leave a credible path out of war?
A doctrine becomes an excuse when its language of freedom is used to demand obedience. We have already made that distinction in Pantone Patriots. Patriotism cannot require protecting a politician from the consequences of his decisions.
Never forget the questions
Twenty-five years after September 11, remembrance should include the warnings, the failures, and the choices that turned an attack into a generation of war.
Demand the records. Investigate credible allegations independently. Test emergency powers against necessity and results. Make the people asking for public trust answer for how they used it.
These demands do not weaken a free country. They are how a free country refuses to become the possession of its leaders.
They tell us the forever war keeps us safe.
After twenty-five years, we should ask: safe for whom?
Continue with What Went Wrong and A Golden Age Worth Building.