For years, the US executed Israel’s regional destabilization program using phantom terrorists as justification for the ‘War on Terror.’ But 7 October 2023 killed Washington’s never-ending war project – with a flip of the switch, US adversaries have now turned the ‘Long War’ on Israel.

Colonization … is the best affair of business in which the capital of an old and wealthy country can engage … the same rules of international morality do not apply … between civilized nations and barbarians.

– John Stuart Mill, quoted by Eileen Sullivan in “Liberalism and Imperialism: JS Mill’s Defense of the British Empire,” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 44, 1983.

The events of 11 September 2001 were intended to impose and enshrine a new Exceptionalist paradigm on the young 21st century. History, though, ruled otherwise.

Cast as an attack on the US Homeland, 11 September 2001, immediately generated the Global War on Terror (GWOT), launched at 11 pm on the same day. Initially christened “The Long War” by the Pentagon, the term was later sanitized by the administration of Barack Obama as “Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO).”

The US-manufactured War on Terror spent a notoriously un-trackable eight trillion dollars defeating a phantom enemy, killed over half a million people – overwhelmingly Muslims – and branched out into illegal wars against seven Muslim-majority states. All of this was relentlessly justified on “humanitarian grounds” and allegedly supported by the “international community” – before that term, too, was renamed as the “rules-based international order.”

Cui Bono? (who stands to gain) remains the paramount question related to all matters related to 11 September 2001. A tight network of fervently Israel-first neocons strategically positioned across the defense and national security establishments by Vice President Dick Cheney – who had served as secretary of defense in the administration of George W Bush’s father – sprang into action to impose the long-planned agenda of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). That far-reaching agenda had waited in the wings for the right trigger – a “new Pearl Harbor” – to justify a slew of regime-change operations and wars across much of West Asia and other Muslim states, reshaping global geopolitics for the benefit of Israel.

US General Wesley Clark’s notorious revelation of a secret Cheney regime plot to destroy seven major Islamic countries over five years, from Iraq, Syria, and Libya all the way to Iran, showed us that the planning had already been done in advance. These targeted nations had one thing in common: they were resolute enemies of the occupation state and firm supporters of Palestinian rights.

The sweet deal, from Tel Aviv’s perspective, was that the War on Terror would have the US and its western allies fighting all these serial Israeli-profiting wars on behalf of “civilization” and against the “barbarians.” The Israelis couldn’t have been more happy or smug about the direction this was going.

It’s no wonder that 7 October 2023 is a mirror image of 11 September 2001. The occupation state itself advertised this as Israel’s own “11 September.” Parallels abound in more ways than one, but certainly not in the way Israel-firsters and the cabal of extremists leading Tel Aviv expected.

Syria: the turning point

The western Hegemon excels in constructing narratives and is currently wallowing in the Russophobia, Iranophobia, and Sinophobia swamps of its own creation. Discrediting official, immutable narratives, such as the one about 11 September, remains the ultimate taboo.

But a false narrative construct cannot hold out forever. Three years ago, on the 20th anniversary of the Twin Towers collapsing and the onset of the War on Terror, we witnessed a great unraveling in the intersection of Central and South Asia: the Taliban were back in power, celebrating their victory over the Hegemon in a discombobulated Forever War.

By then, the “seven countries in five years” obsession – aiming to forge a “New Middle East” – was being derailed across the spectrum. Syria was the turning point, though some would argue that the tea leaves were already cast when the Lebanese resistance defeated Israel in 2000, then again in 2006.

But smashing independent Syria would have paved the way for the Hegemon – and Israel’s – Holy Grail: regime change in Iran.

US occupation forces entered Syria in late 2014 under the pretext of fighting “terror.” That was Obama’s OCO in action. In reality, though, Washington was using two key terror outfits – Daesh, aka ISIL, aka ISIS, and Al Qaeda, aka Jabhat al-Nusra, aka Hayat Tahrir al-Sham – to try to destroy Damascus.

That was conclusively proved by a declassified 2012 US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) document, later confirmed by General Michael Flynn, the DIA’s chief when the assessment was written: “I think it was a willful decision [by the Obama administration]” when it comes to helping, not fighting, terror.

ISIS was conceived to fight both the Iraqi and Syrian armies. The terror group was an offspring of Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), then renamed Islamic State in Iraq (ISI), then rebranded as ISIL, and finally ISIS, after it crossed the Syrian border in 2012.

The crucial point is that both ISIS and Nusra Front (later Hayat Tahrir al-Sham) were hardcore Salafi-jihadi Al-Qaeda offshoots.

Russia entering the Syrian theater at Damascus’ invitation in September 2015 was the real game-changer. Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to actually engage in a real war on terror in Syrian territory before that terror reached the Russian Federation’s borders. This was captured by the standard formulation in Moscow at the time: the distance from Aleppo to Grozny is only 900 kilometers.

The Russians, after all, had already been subjected to the same brand and modus operandi of terror in Chechnya in the 1990s. Afterward, many Chechen jihadis escaped, only to end up joining dodgy outfits in Syria financed by the Saudis.

The late, great Lebanese analyst Anis Naqqash later confirmed that it was the legendary Iranian Quds Force Commander Qassem Soleimani who convinced Putin, in person, to enter the Syrian theater of war and help defeat the terrorism. This strategic masterplan, it transpires, was to fatally debilitate the US in West Asia.

The US security establishment, of course, would never forgive Putin, and especially Soleimani, for defeating their handy jihadist foot soldiers. On the orders of President Donald Trump, the anti-ISIS Iranian general was assassinated in Baghdad in January 2020, alongside Abu Mahdi al-Mohandes, deputy leader of Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Units (PMUs), a broad spectrum of Iraqi fighters who had coalesced to defeat ISIS in Iraq.

Burying the legacy of 11 September

Soleimani’s strategic tour de force of setting up and coordinating the Axis of Resistance against Israel and the US was years in the making. In Iraq, for instance, the PMUs were propelled to the forefront of the resistance because the Iraqi military – US-trained and US-controlled – simply could not fight ISIS.

The PMUs were created after a fatwa by Grand Ayatollah Sistani in June 2014 – when ISIS began its Iraqi rampage – by imploring “all Iraqi citizens” to “defend the country, its people, the honor of its citizens and its sacred sites.”

Several PMUs were backed by Soleimani’s Quds Force – who, ironically, for the rest of the decade would be invariably branded by Washington as a master “terrorist.” In parallel, crucially, the Iraqi government hosted an anti-ISIS intel center in Baghdad, led by Russia.

The credit for defeating ISIS in Iraq went mostly to the PMUs, complemented by its help to Damascus via the integration of PMU units into the Syrian Arab Army. That was what a real war on terror was all about, not that misnomered American construct called the “War on Terror.”

Best yet, the indigenously West Asian response to terror was and remains non-sectarian. Tehran supports secular, pluralist Syria and Sunni Palestine; Lebanon features a Hezbollah–Christian alliance; Iraq’s PMUs feature a Sunni–Shia–Christian alliance. Divide and Rule simply do not apply in a homegrown anti-terror strategy.

Then, what happened on 7 October 2023 propelled the regional resistance forces’ ethos to a whole new level.

In one swift move, it destroyed the myth of Israeli military invincibility and its much-lauded surveillance and intelligence primacy. Even as the horrifying genocide across Gaza proceeds unabated (with possibly as many as 200,000 civilian deaths, according to The Lancet), the Israeli economy is being eviscerated.

Yemen’s strategic blockade of the Bab al-Mandeb and the Red Sea to any Israel-linked or destined shipping vessel is a masterstroke of efficiency and simplicity. Not only has it already bankrupted Israel’s strategic Eilat Port, but also, as a bonus, has offered a spectacular humiliation of the thalassocratic Hegemon, with the Yemenis de facto defeating the US Navy.

In less than a year, the concerted strategies of the Axis of Resistance have essentially buried six feet under the fake War on Terror and its multi-trillion-dollar gravy train.

As much as Israel profited from events after 11 September, Tel Aviv’s actions after 7 October rapidly accelerated its unraveling. Today, amidst massive Global Majority condemnation of Israel’s Gaza genocide, the occupation state stands as a pariah – tainting its allies and exposing the Hegemon’s hypocrisy with each passing day.

For the Hegemon, it gets even more alarming. Recall the 1997 warning of Dr Zbigniew “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski: “It is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges capable of dominating Eurasia and thus of also challenging America.”

In the end, all the combined sound and fury of 11 September, the War on Terror, Long War, Operation This-And-That over two decades, metastasized into exactly what “Zbig” feared. Not only has a mere “challenger” emerged, but a full-fledged Russia–China strategic partnership that is setting a new tone for Eurasia.

Suddenly, Washington has forgotten all about terrorism. This is the real “enemy” – now considered the top two US “strategic threats.” Not Al-Qaeda and its many incarnations, a flimsy figment of the CIA’s imagination, rehabilitated and sanitized in the previous decade as those mythical “moderate rebels” in Syria.

What’s even more eerie is that the conceptually nonsensical War on Terror forged by the neocons immediately after 11 September is now morphing into a war of terror (italics mine), embodying the desperate Hail Mary pass by the CIA and MI6 to “confront Russian aggression” in Ukraine.

And that’s bound to be metastasized into the Sinophobia swamp because those same western intelligence agencies consider the rise of China to be “the greatest geopolitical and intelligence challenge” of the 21st century.

The War on Terror has been debunked; it is now dead. But get ready for serial wars of terror by a Hegemon unaccustomed to not owning the narrative, the seas, and the ground.

Pepe Escobar is a columnist at The Cradle, editor-at-large at Asia Times and an independent geopolitical analyst focused on Eurasia. Since the mid-1980s he has lived and worked as a foreign correspondent in London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Singapore and Bangkok. He is the author of countless books; his latest one is Raging Twenties.