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Teaching About 9/11 [1]
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Date: 2025-09-07
Thursday, September 11, 2025 is the twenty-fourth anniversary of the aerial attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Almost 3,000 people died on the day of the attack and an estimated 7,000 people including first responders have died since then from cancers and respiratory illnesses. Over 100,000 other people who were exposed to contaminants have medical risks. The 2010 James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, since reauthorized, is supposed to provide health care coverage for impacted people, but the Trump Administration’s budget cuts to the WTC Health Program forcing the firing of 25% of the staff and funding cuts for the Centers for Disease Control have interfered with the delivery of health benefits. At the same time that the Trump administration is neglecting the health care of surviving 9-11 victims, the President says he wants a federal takeover of the 9/11 Memorial & Museum in Downtown Manhattan.
Teachers have an important role to play because of our skill in addressing sensitive and controversial issues in the classroom and because for students the events of September 11, 2001 are part of the past rather than lived experience. Thursday is an opportunity for students to discuss the attack on the United States, but also to consider a U.S. response that led to discredited wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The 9/11 attacks provide an opportunity to engage students in an evaluation of U.S. policies that may have contributed to the attacks and potentially make the U.S. vulnerable again. The United States is currently supporting an Israeli war on Gaza that has been labeled a genocide and may make this country subject to retribution. The Trump administration’s tariff wars have driven opposing countries close together and at the same time Trump policies have weakened ties to traditional American allies. Few high school students are ever exposed to critical analyses of United States foreign policy, which leaves them completely unable to evaluate the standard narrative presented in school and the media that somehow the United States is different from other nations, a shining democratic “city on the hill” for others to emulate and the defender of freedom around the world.
Chalmers Johnson, author of Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Best Hope (NY: Metropolitan Books, 2010), argued that the United States has frequently been a disruptive force in world affairs and was especially concerned that it cannot long survive as both a domestic democracy and a foreign imperialist power (28). Rather than exporting democracy, he believes the U.S. exports dictatorship and ruin.
Johnson was far from being a radical, which makes it difficult to dismiss his arguments. He was an expert on East Asian affairs and a professor at the University of California, San Diego until he died in 2010. From 1968 until 1972, Johnson was a consultant for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency Office of National Estimates. Johnson’s books and articles initially focused on China and Japan, but starting in the late 1990s he analyzed and commented on U.S. military and foreign policy. One of his goals was to explain why so many other countries seemed to hate the United States. He argued that in many cases the hatred was justified. Johnson also took the very unpopular stance of explaining the attacks of 9/11 as “blowback,” a CIA term that he uses to refer to unanticipated consequences of U.S. imperialist policies in the Islamic world.
Johnson dated the underlying causes of the 9/11 attacks on the United States to a decision by President Jimmy Carter and his national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski in July 1979 to provide secret aid to insurgents opposing the pro-Soviet government of Afghanistan. This decision triggered a Soviet invasion and led to an expanded civil war, the emergence of U.S. financed and armed Islamic fundamentalist military forces, including thousands of soldiers under the command of Osama Bin Laden, and Taliban control over Afghanistan. In addition to U.S. aid, the Islamic fighters received as much as $25 million a month from Saudi Arabia and military training from the Pakistani army, two countries that were supposedly coordinating their activities with the United States. The money provided by the U.S. and its allies helped Bin Laden build his military base of operations in Khost, Afghanistan.
Johnson argued that U.S. intervention in the Islamic world is just one example of its post-World War II imperialist policies. Since 1953, the United States CIA and military have overthrown, attempted to overthrow, or interfered with legitimate governments in Iran, Guatemala, Cuba, Congo, Brazil, Indonesia, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Greece, Chile, Afghanistan, Grenada, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Iraq. According to the Tufts University Military Intervention Project the United States was involved in more than 200 interventions between 1945 and 2019 with over 114 since 1989. As of March 2024, the United States maintains an estimated 750 military sites in over 80 countries with approximately 170,000 active-duty troops.
Trump now wants the Department of Defense renamed the Department of War. This is a very different picture of the United States and of 9/11. Whether you agree or disagree with this interpretation of events, it is an interpretation that students have a right to hear, analyze, and reject if they find it inadequate or misguided.
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