Twenty-five years after an atrocity, and the pattern it revealed.
Published today, not yesterday — out of respect for those still grieving.
Twenty-five years ago, nearly three thousand people went to work, boarded planes, or answered emergency calls, and did not come home. Anyone who remembers that day remembers where they were when they saw the towers fall. The shock was immediate, universal, and genuinely shared across the world. It was, and remains, one of the great atrocities in living memory.
I want to honour that grief before I move beyond it. What follows is not an attempt to diminish the loss of September 11, nor to relativise it out of existence with a spreadsheet. I want to propose the opposite: presenting an argument that the scale of feeling we attached to that day — the shock, the collective mourning, the sense that this absolutely mattered — is a measure we should be willing to apply consistently, not only when the dead are American and the cameras are rolling.
This is not a claim that grief is a competition, nor that any death matters more or less depending on where it happens, who commits it, or whether a government finds it convenient to notice. They are the same category of thing: a human life, ended, that someone loved and now grieves. The humanist premise beneath everything that follows is simple, and I think uncontroversial once it is actually said aloud: human suffering does not become more or less real depending on the day, the location, or who was watching.
Because if you are willing to look, the last eighty years supply case after case where a similar scale of death has occurred, sometimes as direct consequence of decisions made in Washington, and been met with silence rather than a international day of mourning. This is an essay about that pattern, and about what a superpower that once organised itself around expanding freedom ultimately did, over and over, when freedom proved to be inconvenient.
An Empire Built on Genuinely Good Ideas
It is worth being honest about the starting point, because a critique that pretends the United States has been nothing but harmful is not a serious critique; it’s a cartoon, and cartoons are easy to dismiss.
The postwar settlement the US built after 1945 was, in real ways, extraordinary. The United Nations, whatever its later dysfunctions, was a genuine attempt to make war illegal and put human rights on a universal footing. The Marshall Plan rebuilt a continent instead of looting it, an almost unprecedented act of victor’s restraint. Bretton Woods gave the postwar world a functioning international monetary order. For decades, the US underwrote the idea — imperfectly, unevenly, but sincerely — that trade, alliance and law were better instruments of power than raw conquest. Whatever the flaws in delivery, USAID and its predecessor programs went on to save an extraordinary number of lives; a 2025 peer-reviewed study in The Lancet estimated that USAID funding alone prevented roughly 90 million deaths in developing countries between 2001 and 2021.
That’s a noble history worthy of acknowledgement. The trouble is what ran alongside it, almost from the beginning.
The Template: 1953–1954
Barely eight years after founding the UN on the principle of self-determination, the US helped depose two elected governments for asserting exactly that principle over their own resources.
In 1953, a CIA-orchestrated coup removed Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, whose crime was nationalising his own country’s oil industry. The Shah was restored to the throne with US backing, and ruled with an increasingly repressive security apparatus for the next twenty-five years, until the 1979 revolution which many historians trace (at least in part) back to the resentments seeded in 1953.
A year later, in Guatemala, a CIA-backed coup toppled Jacobo Árbenz, whose land reforms had threatened the interests of the US-owned United Fruit Company. What followed was decades of military dictatorship and a civil war that killed an estimated 200,000 people, most of them Indigenous Maya.
Neither of these countries had attacked the United States. Neither posed it any military threat. Both had simply asserted control over their own economic destiny, in ways that inconvenienced US commercial and strategic interests — and in both cases, democracy was the casualty.
This is the template: intervention justified in the language of freedom and security, delivered in practice as regime change on behalf of narrower interests, with the resulting instability blamed later on the region itself rather than on the intervention that produced it.
The Cold War Pattern
For the next four decades, that template repeated with grim regularity, usually under the banner of anti-communism.
Vietnam: cost an estimated two million Vietnamese civilian lives, alongside more than a million Vietnamese and Cambodian combatants, some 58,000 US service members, and roughly 200,000 Laotians killed during the CIA’s covert “Secret War” bombing campaign — a toll that dwarfs the 9/11 death count many times over, in a war whose strategic rationale (the “domino theory”) has been largely abandoned by historians.
Chile, 1973: A CIA-backed coup removed Salvador Allende, South America’s first democratically elected socialist president, and installed Augusto Pinochet, whose secret police killed or “disappeared” more than three thousand people and tortured tens of thousands more over the following seventeen years.
Indonesia, 1965–66: US intelligence agencies provided support — including, by some accounts, lists of suspected communists — to the Suharto regime during a massacre that killed between 500,000 and a million people, one of the twentieth century’s least-remembered atrocities precisely because the victims were on the “right” side of the Cold War ledger from Washington’s perspective.
Central America in the 1980s: El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala again — saw the US fund and train military and paramilitary forces responsible for mass killings of civilians, from the El Mozote massacre to the broader Guatemalan genocide against Maya communities, a campaign a UN-backed truth commission later concluded amounted to genocide.
In every one of these cases, the stated rationale was the defence of freedom. In every one, freedom was the first thing sacrificed.
The 1991 Gulf War was fought under clear UN mandate to reverse an actual invasion — but even this least-contested case had its own atrocity: retreating Iraqi forces fleeing Kuwait were bombed for hours on Highway 80, a stretch later known as the “Highway of Death,” killing several hundred to well over a thousand people and destroying up to 2,700 vehicles — an assault on a defeated, retreating force still debated as a possible violation of the Geneva Conventions. Somalia in 1993 showed the limits of humanitarian intervention without a coherent exit strategy. Throughout the 1990s, the US positioned itself as the world’s indispensable power without ever quite settling what, beyond its own primacy, that power was for.
How Many Interventions?
Before moving into the twenty-first century, it’s worth pausing on the scale of what’s been described so far, because the honest answer to “how many” is: it depends on who’s counting and what counts as an “intervention” — and pretending otherwise would undermine the rest of the argument. A few credible counts, each with its own methodology:
– The US Congressional Research Service — a US government body, not an outside critic — has documented at least 469 military interventions since 1798, with roughly 251 of those occurring between 1991 and 2022 alone. This is the broadest definition, including shows of force and evacuations alongside invasions.
– An academic dataset compiled by political scientists Sidita Kushi and Monica Duffy Toft counts 392–393 US military interventions since 1776, more than half of them since 1945 — and notes that 1974 was the last year the US did not launch at least one new intervention.
– The research database usprimacy.org, using a more restrictive definition that separates out sanctions and regime support as distinct categories, counts 83 direct military interventions since 1945 across 41 countries.
– Historian William Blum’s postwar survey counted more than 70 nations subject to serious US intervention during the Cold War period alone.
– The IBON Foundation puts the broader figure at 96 countries invaded or intervened in since 1945, combining direct and indirect action.
The range — from roughly 80 to over 250 — isn’t evidence of dishonesty on anyone’s part. It reflects a genuine definitional question: does arming a proxy count the same as an invasion? Does a coup carried out by local actors with CIA support count the same as a bombing campaign? Whichever end of that range you find most persuasive, even the most conservative, government-sourced count places the US in double digits per year across eight decades — a tempo of intervention no other nation on Earth has sustained.
September 11 as a Case Study
This is where this terrible anniversary earns its place in the historical record: not as the beginning of something new and peculiar, but as the clearest possible illustration of a pattern that was already eighty years old.
The attacks of September 11, 2001 were an atrocity by any definition: the deliberate murder of civilians, coordinated and premeditated, carried out by non-state actors with no legitimate claim to the violence they inflicted. Nothing in this article should be read as excusing that.
Explaining an atrocity is not the same as justifying it, and that distinction is doing real work in the next few sentences, so it is worth stating twice: nothing here transfers any culpability away from the people who planned and carried out the murder of nearly three thousand people. With that said as plainly as it can be said, it is a documented historical fact, not a theory, that Osama bin Laden claimed a specific point of origin for the idea. In a videotaped statement broadcast in October 2004 — released, it should be said, as wartime propaganda timed four days before a US presidential election, which limits how much weight any single line of it should carry — he stated that the idea of destroying towers in the USA first occurred to him while watching towers destroyed in Beirut during Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, an invasion the US backed with its own naval forces. This essay is not built on that claim, and does not need it to make its argument; the eighty years of documented US and allied intervention described elsewhere here stand on their own evidence. But it is worth naming as one data point among many: even from the perpetrator’s own mouth, the resentment that produced the worst atrocity in this pattern’s history did not arise from nothing.
But the US response did not emerge from a moral or strategic blank slate. It emerged from the same institutional reflexes that had produced Guatemala and Chile and Indonesia, this time deployed at far greater scale, and this time in full public view.
The invasion of Iraq in 2003 reused the same regime-change logic that had toppled Mossadegh in 1953, this time dressed up as counter-terrorism — despite Iraq having no connection to the September 11 attacks and no weapons of mass destruction, a fact confirmed by the postwar inspections. The Iraq War and its aftermath are estimated to have caused somewhere between 275,000 and half a million deaths; the low estimate alone is roughly a hundred times the toll of the 9/11 attack.
Guantanamo Bay held people without trial for years, some for over a decade, under conditions that violated the same human-rights norms the US had spent fifty years telling the rest of the world to uphold. The CIA’s rendition and “enhanced interrogation” programs (torture, under its plain meaning) were later confirmed by the US Senate’s own investigation. The drone campaigns that followed in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere killed thousands of people outside any battlefield or declared war, including a documented pattern of civilian casualties that rarely made front pages in the country doing the killing.
None of this was an aberration from US history; it is part of its ongoing story.
The Pattern Continues
Libya in 2011 showed the same instinct: intervention with no plan for what came after, leaving a state that has not fully recovered. Mass surveillance programs, revealed in 2013, extended the security logic of the War on Terror onto the US’s own citizens and allies alike. And now a newer instrument has entered the same toolkit: the withdrawal of aid as a form of policy, rather than its provision.
This is where the anniversary and the present moment meet directly. The same 2025 Lancet study that credited USAID with saving 90 million lives over two decades also modelled what happens when that funding is withdrawn. Its projection: more than 14 million additional deaths by 2030, a third of them children under five — over 700,000 child deaths a year, from diseases and malnutrition that development aid had been quietly preventing. A follow-up study in 2026 from the Barcelona Institute for Global Health, using more conservative assumptions, still projected 9.4 million deaths by 2030, rising to 22.6 million if the cuts deepen further. Independent trackers have already documented hundreds of thousands of deaths in the period since the cuts began — children who died of measles, malaria and diarrhoeal disease that a functioning clinic, a week earlier, would have treated.
Spread across the years to 2030, the 14-million projection works out to somewhere over seven thousand deaths a day — more than double the toll of September 11, every single day, for years, largely unmarked by memorial or headline.
I want to be careful here, because precision matters and false precision is its own kind of dishonesty. These are modelled projections, not a body count — built from decades of data on what aid funding demonstrably prevented, then run forward under the assumption that removing the funding removes the protection. Reasonable people can and do argue about the model’s assumptions. But even the most conservative published estimate — child deaths alone, at roughly 1,900 a day — sits close to the September 11 toll, repeating not once, but daily, indefinitely, for as long as the funding stays cut.
The Pattern Today
None of this is safely confined to history. In the year leading up to this anniversary alone, the same reflexes have been on full public display, across multiple continents at once:
Venezuela: Beginning in September 2025, the US conducted dozens of strikes on boats in Caribbean and Pacific waters it accused of drug trafficking — more than 35 strikes killing at least 115 people before the campaign escalated further. In January 2026, a US military raid captured President Nicolás Maduro and forcibly removed him to face trial in New York. The UN’s human rights chief called for an investigation into the strikes, describing them as extrajudicial killings; legal analysts have concluded the strikes were unlawful under both domestic and international law. Some of those killed were reportedly headed away from the US, not toward it, when they were hit.
Iran: In February 2026, US and Israeli strikes on Iran included one that hit a girls’ elementary school in Minab, killing well over a hundred students — the deadliest single US-linked strike on civilians in recent memory. Months later, human rights organisations were still reporting that no accountability had been provided to the victims’ families, amid what Amnesty International described as stonewalling from the Pentagon.
Iraq: The same 2026 conflict spilled into Iraq, where US and allied strikes on Iran-backed militias killed dozens of fighters and a number of Iraqi civilians and soldiers, including a senior Iraqi military commander — a reminder that “precision” campaigns routinely kill people who are neither the intended target nor combatants.
Yemen: A Pentagon review admitted that US strikes against Houthi rebels killed at least 153 civilians in 2025, including a strike on a fuel port that killed 80 people in a single night, an attack Human Rights Watch said should be investigated as a war crime.
Sudan: Not a direct US intervention, but a case study in what withdrawal costs: as famine spread across Darfur and the death toll from the civil war climbed past 150,000 by some estimates, the same US aid cuts that inform the projections above hit a country the US State Department had already determined was experiencing genocide — a determination followed, for the most part, by silence rather than sustained action.
Gaza: Here the record is genuinely mixed, and worth stating plainly: US diplomatic pressure helped broker a ceasefire in October 2025 that stopped the worst of an active war. But nine months on, most of the peace plan’s substantive commitments — full humanitarian access, Israeli withdrawal, a genuine path to Palestinian self-determination — remain unfulfilled, and hundreds of Palestinians have been killed by continued strikes during the supposed truce. That ceasefire, moreover, came only after the US had vetoed at least six separate UN Security Council resolutions calling for a Gaza ceasefire between February 2024 and September 2025, on each occasion the sole vote against, opposing 13 or 14 other Council members including close allies. The same period saw the US approve tens of billions of dollars in new arms sales to Israel, including a $20 billion package in 2024 and roughly $12 billion more in the first weeks of the current administration; continued material support running in parallel with, not despite, the diplomatic isolation.
Mexico, Canada, and Greenland: And alongside actual strikes, 2025 and 2026 produced open threats of force against three of the US’s own neighbours and allies: repeated refusals to rule out military action to seize Greenland from Denmark, talk of annexing Canada as a “51st state,” and a President publicly announcing plans to conduct “land” strikes inside Mexican territory against cartels — each threat met with the target nation’s own leaders publicly reasserting a sovereignty that, eighty years after World War 2, should not need reasserting to the country that helped write the UN Charter.
Individually, any one of these might be argued away as an isolated decision, a hard case, a war fought against a genuine bad actor. Together, in a single twelve-month window, they are not an aberration. They are the pattern this essay has traced since 1953, simply running at its normal speed, in real time, while the anniversary was being observed.
What the Multiplication Means
If you lost someone on September 11, I am not asking you to feel that grief any less. As a fellow human being with empathy and decency, I respectfully stand with you in feeling your loss and sharing your sense of injustice. However, I also ask you to imagine it happening to someone else, today, in a clinic in Malawi or a refugee settlement in Kenya, to a parent who will get no memorial service, no name on a wall, no US President visiting to lay a wreath, and no TV programs 25 years later to revisit the tragedy.
The child who dies of malaria because of cuts to a USAID-funded program did not choose that risk any more than did an office worker who went to the World Trade Center that Tuesday morning. Neither death is more or less real. Neither person is more or less important than the other. The difference is not in the weight of the loss; it’s in whether the world is willing to look.
Someone might reasonably object here: surely there’s a moral difference between deliberate murder and a policy decision with unintended consequences? I don’t think the distinction survives close examination. A government that is shown credible, peer-reviewed projections of millions of deaths from a funding decision, and proceeds with that decision anyway, is not acting by accident. Indifference to foreseeable death is its own moral category: not identical to murder, exactly, but not innocent of it either. This is precisely the reasoning the postwar order itself was built on: that the deliberate infliction of preventable suffering, at scale, is a crime against humanity regardless of the paperwork used to justify it.
Holding Both Things At Once
None of this cancels out the other half of the story. The UN Charter, the Marshall Plan, the eradication of smallpox with US funding, the ninety million lives that USAID’s own programs are credited with saving before this year — these are also part of what the United States has been since 1945. A serious reckoning holds both halves at once: a country capable of building genuinely humane institutions, and the same country capable of dismantling elected governments, torturing prisoners, and — most recently — walking away from millions of preventable deaths because the funding line was easier to cut than to defend.
The humanist case here isn’t anti-American. It’s a demand for consistency: that a nation which built its identity on the language of universal rights be judged by whether it extends those rights universally — to the Guatemalan farmer, the Chilean student, the Iraqi civilian, the Malawian child — or only to the people whose deaths make the news.
Why This Isn’t An Utterance of Despair
Here is the thing worth holding onto, and it is not a small thing: almost every fact in this essay came from a US source.
It was a US Senate committee that investigated and published the CIA’s torture program in exhaustive, damning detail, over the CIA’s own objections. It was the Pentagon’s own review that admitted to 153 civilian deaths in Yemen and named the strikes that caused them. It was the US Congressional Research Service — an arm of Congress — that compiled the most comprehensive public count of American military interventions in existence. It was American courts, American legal scholars, and American human rights lawyers who concluded the Venezuela boat strikes were unlawful, and said so publicly, without being imprisoned for it. It was the US State Department that formally determined a genocide was occurring in Sudan, on the record. A country that hides its crimes does not produce this volume of self-documentation. A country capable of self-correction does.
That capacity is not automatic and it is not guaranteed. Guatemala waited forty years for its Truth Commission, and some of the dead in this essay have waited far longer than that for any accounting at all. But it is real, and it has worked before. Public revulsion at Vietnam produced the War Powers Act. The Church Committee’s investigations into CIA abuses in the 1970s produced the oversight structures, however imperfect, that made the 2014 torture report possible in the first place. Sustained public pressure — American public pressure — has, again and again, been the thing that turned secret policy into public scandal into eventual reform.
This is, in the end, the same humanist wager that runs through everything else in this piece: that people, given the facts, tend toward decency more often than not, and that the work of naming a pattern honestly is not an act of despair but the necessary first step toward interrupting it. The child in Malawi and the office worker in the World Trade Center were both worth more than the silence that so often surrounds distant or inconvenient death. Every one of the reports, investigations, and reckonings cited in this essay exists because someone — usually an American, often working inside American institutions — refused to accept that silence as the final word.
Twenty-five years on, the honest way to mark September 11 may not be a moment of silence once a year. It may be the harder, more hopeful discipline of noticing, every day, who else is dying in numbers we’ve decided not to count, and trusting that the same open society capable of producing the evidence in this essay is also capable, eventually, of acting on it. I honestly believe that if we could ask the victims of September 11 what they would want us to do about it, many of them would ask us to stop someone else from dying needlessly. Surely our responses and efforts should honour the dead, and to take a moral and practical stand. We could not stop those deaths from happening 25 years ago, but we can stop other deaths today… and tomorrow.
Related Bibliography
USAID / aid-cuts mortality studies
– Macinko, J. et al. (2025). Study on USAID’s mortality impact 2001–2021 and projected effects of defunding through 2030, published in The Lancet. Reported via NPR Study: 14 million lives could be lost due to Trump’s USAID cuts.
– UCLA Newsroom summary of the same study: USAID cuts may lead to more than 14 million deaths globally.
– Rasella, D. et al. (2026), ISGlobal/Barcelona Institute for Global Health, published in The Lancet Global Health. Reported by Lauren Kent via CNN: One year on from dismantling of USAID, study projects that global aid cuts could lead to 9.4 million deaths by 2030.
– Boston University aid-cuts mortality tracker, reported via AFP/Courthouse News: Over 14 million people could die from US foreign aid cuts.
– WBUR/NPR field reporting on documented individual deaths: Some studies show tens of thousands have died from USAID cuts.
Counts of US military interventions since 1945
– Congressional Research Service data, reported via Toward Freedom: U.S. Launched 251 Military Interventions Since 1991, and 469 Since 1798.
– Kushi, S. & Toft, M.D., academic dataset, reported via Antiwar.com: Empire by Numbers: 392 U.S. Military Interventions.
– Tufts Now summary of the same Kushi-Toft dataset: U.S. Foreign Policy Increasingly Relies on Military Interventions.
– usprimacy.org interactive database: US Military Interventions Since 1945.
– IBON Foundation: Global victims of US military aggression.
– Blum, W., Killing Hope (survey of Cold War-era interventions): U.S. Interventions – 1945 to the Present.
Torture / Detention Program
– US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (2014). Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program (executive summary). Available via ACLU: The Senate Torture Report.
2025–2026 events
– Venezuela boat strikes and Maduro capture, timeline via PBS NewsHour: A timeline of U.S. military escalation against Venezuela and Timeline of the U.S. military’s buildup and strikes against Venezuela.
– Legal assessment of the strikes: Just Security, Expert Q&A on U.S. Military Actions on Venezuela and Boat Strikes.
– Iran/Minab school strike: Amnesty International, USA: Four months after horrific Minab school airstrike, accountability delayed.
– Chile: National Security Archive, CIA Cover-Up on Chile, 9 September 2016; Peter Kornbluh, Chile and the United States: Declassified Documents Relating to the Military Coup, September 11, 1973; Amnesty International, Chile: 40 years on from Pinochet’s coup, impunity must end, 10 September 2013.
– Indonesia 1965–66 massacre and US support: National Security Archive at George Washington University, U.S. Embassy Tracked Indonesia Mass Murder, 1965.
– Iraq militia strikes, 2026: Wikipedia summary with sourced citations, 2026 United States–Israeli strikes on Iraq.
– Yemen civilian casualties: Al Jazeera, US strikes in Yemen killed 153 civilians in 2025, says Pentagon review.
– Sudan famine and death toll: NPR, ‘Humiliated, broken, powerless’: Sudan enters fourth year of war.
– Gaza ceasefire status: Al Jazeera, US declares phase two of Gaza ceasefire, but what did phase one deliver? and J Street, Nine Months In: Assessing the Status of the Gaza Ceasefire.
– US Security Council vetoes on Gaza ceasefire resolutions: Al Jazeera, US vetoes UNSC Gaza ceasefire resolution as Israeli strikes kill 95; UN press release, Security Council Fails to Adopt Resolution on Gaza Ceasefire.
– US arms sales to Israel during the war: SIPRI, How top arms exporters have responded to the war in Gaza: 2025 update; Military.com, US Approves Major New Arms Sales to Israel Worth $6.67 Billion.
– Greenland/Canada annexation threats: CNN, Trump renews threat of military force to annex Greenland; Global News, Military action against Canada is ‘highly unlikely,’ Trump says.
– Mexico strike threats: Newsweek, Mexico map shows “cartel dominant areas” as Trump threatens strikes.
©2026 Geoff Allshorn. I acknowledge the Wurundjeri-Willam people, the Traditional Custodians of the land on which this blog was prepared, and show my respect for Elders past and present. Research assistance supplied by AI.