Twenty-five years ago this morning, 2,977 people were murdered in the space of 102 minutes. Most of them had gone to work. Some had boarded an airplane. Among them were 343 New York City firemen who climbed the stairs of the World Trade Center towers while everyone else came down, knowing what that act meant. Aboard a plane over Pennsylvania, 40 passengers and crew learned by telephone what was happening and took their plane back from the men who had seized it.

We memorialize them, as we should. But a quarter century is long enough that we owe them something more than memory. We owe them an accounting. The honest question on this anniversary is not whether we honored the dead. That we have done. It is whether we have ever understood what had been done to us and why—and whether the American people have been made safer or left exposed in ways their forefathers would have found unthinkable.

In Natural Right and History, the political philosopher Leo Strauss opens by asking whether the United States, having become the world’s most powerful and prosperous nation by adhering to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, still held those truths to be self-evident.

Strauss thought the answer was no, and he thought he knew where the rot had entered. American social science had absorbed from German thought the conviction that natural standards of right and wrong are not accessible to human reason—that all such standards are the products of history, culture, and will. As he wrote, “It would not be the first time that a nation, defeated on the battlefield and, as it were, annihilated as a political being, has deprived its conquerors of the most sublime fruit of victory by imposing on them the yoke of its own thought.”

If those who lead the United States reject the principles on which our country was established, we would not long remain a republic. To deny the idea that human beings can reason about right and wrong and are therefore fit to govern themselves is to deny what it means to be an American. And a people whose leaders have abandoned these premises will find, when the hour comes, that they cannot say why their civilization is worth defending—or what, exactly, is attacking it.

The hour came on a Tuesday morning in September.

Prelude to the Attack

America is said to have won the Cold War. But victory over the Soviet Union did not mean that all our enemies were defeated, nor that Russia and Communist China would abandon the instruments they had spent 70 years perfecting. Chief among them was the use of proxies to foment terrorism that they could publicly disavow. The Soviets cultivated the Palestinian Liberation Organization and the Baader-Meinhof Group in West Germany, while Communist China supplied the Palestinians with equipment and logistical support.

By the 1990s, however, the character of anti-Western terrorism was changing. Our adversaries discovered that the Islamic world’s hatred of the U.S. could be tapped indefinitely and at almost no cost. Whether through the rise of Wahhabist Islam and the growth of al-Qaeda or through the Iranian-sponsored terrorism of Hezbollah, the lesson was the same: one could strike the West, and the West would find it troublesome rather than intolerable. Moreover, the Islamic world had concluded that the West was morally bankrupt, and a morally bankrupt enemy is not to be feared.

It was only a matter of time before the escalation ran its course. The World Trade Center bombing of February 26, 1993, killed six people and injured more than 1,000. But it failed in its objective to topple one tower into the other. During the Clinton Administration, there were the simultaneous bombings of our embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, which killed 224 people, 12 of them Americans. And then there was the attack on the USS Cole in the port of Aden on October 12, 2000, which killed 17 American sailors.

Each was treated as a crime. Each was, in fact, an act of war.

The Conundrum of 9/11

Most Americans still carry the images of 9/11: two airplanes crashing into the World Trade Center towers, a third into the Pentagon, and a fourth into a Pennsylvania field. Nineteen hijackers—15 of them Saudi nationals—planned and executed the attack. Their object was to prove that the Great Satan, the defender of Western Christendom, could be struck.

America retaliated—not against Saudi Arabia, but against Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden was, and Iraq, a sponsor of terrorism that had not been involved in 9/11. America stayed in both countries for over two decades at an estimated cost of roughly $8 trillion. Some 7,050 American service members and an additional 8,200 contractors were killed in these operations. More than 50,000 were wounded. To date, over 30,000 post-9/11 service members and veterans have died by their own hand—more than twice as many as the enemy killed.

The central question for us 25 years later is simple: Is America more secure?

Al-Qaeda as an expeditionary organization was broken, a real achievement. There was no second attack of that kind on American soil in the decades since. But that does not mean we won.

There is a serious argument that a nation attacked in its own streets is right to carry the fight abroad, to tie the enemy down where he lives rather than where we live, to force him to change his way of life rather than change ours.

Instead, we degraded a terrorist organization while leaving its sponsors and financiers—and above all, its ideology—entirely untouched. The mission in Iraq and Afghanistan shifted from defeating an enemy capable of harming us to building democracies that would not. The foolish neoconservative premise that democratic institutions would render these nations peaceful gave way to governments prone to extremism, with Islamic law written into their constitutions.

All of this was evidence to a generation of Americans who believe, not without reason, that American military power cannot defeat our enemies. The perversion of American statecraft did more to discredit the use of American power than any enemy could have managed.

If that were not enough, consider that a substantial number of young Americans now believe that September 11 was a plot by our own intelligence services or by Israel’s, contrived to draw us into the Middle East. Others believe the towers could not have fallen from the airplanes’ impact alone and that explosives were planted, which Building 7’s collapse supposedly proves. This is what happens when a government cannot give a coherent account of the greatest attack in its history: the vacuum will be filled by whoever is willing to speak with confidence.

If there is a single source of the confusion, it is this: on September 17, 2001, six days after the attack, with the fires still burning in lower Manhattan and the dead still being recovered from the Pentagon and from Shanksville, President George W. Bush went to the Islamic Center of Washington and told the American people: “These acts of violence against innocents violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith. And it’s important for my fellow Americans to understand that…Islam is peace.”

Most Americans knew little of Islam beyond that it was one of the world’s largest religions. But to be told within the week of the 9/11 attacks that the faith in whose name the terrorists had acted was a religion of peace was morally and intellectually at odds with everything the American people had just witnessed.

Rather than tell the truth, George W. Bush offered Americans an excuse. Rather than initiate an inquiry into what the enemy believed and why, the president assured us that the religion of Muhammad had been hijacked by a handful of criminals flying a false flag.

Why did he say this? Partly because President Bush believed it. But more importantly, it was a view acceptable to Riyadh and to those inside and outside our own government who had spent two decades conditioning American policymakers to accommodate Islam rather than critically examine it.

The deeper reason, however, is Strauss’s. To say what Islam teaches about the infidel would have required our governing class to confront the possibility that some beliefs about man and God might be incompatible with life in a free republic. But a ruling elite that no longer believes reason can distinguish right from wrong, and that has been trained to regard every civilization’s claims as equally valid, cannot say what the enemy believes.

The yoke was already on our necks. September 11 merely revealed it.

What Should Have Been Done: The Case of Saudi Arabia

Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were Saudi nationals, and bin Laden came from a prominent Saudi family. Al-Qaeda’s money flowed overwhelmingly from Saudi and Gulf donors, and from charities the Saudi state was supposed to be policing. The hijackers’ religious doctrine was Wahhabism, which Saudi Arabia had spent four decades exporting through mosques, madrassas, textbooks, and salaried imams around the world, including America.

The 9/11 Commission found no evidence that the Saudi government ordered the attack. But it did find that al-Qaeda received a substantial portion of its funding from sources in Saudi Arabia, both before and after the attacks. The worst offender was the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, which the Commission’s investigators discovered was overseen by at least two Saudi government officials and received significant Saudi government sponsorship. So although Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud may not have directed the attack, his government certainly facilitated the lax environment in which al-Qaeda funding flourished.

Now consider what we did about it. Section 311 of the PATRIOT Act gave the Treasury Secretary the power to bar any foreign bank from the American financial system—a death sentence for an international bank and the most powerful nonmilitary weapon we possess.

Yet the U.S. has never once used this provision against a single Saudi bank. This was hardly retribution. It was nothing short of shameful.

Worse still, the House of Saud rules Saudi Arabia under U.S. protection. Since 1744, it has maintained power through a bargain with the Wahhabist clergy: the Al Saud govern, and the clerics pronounce that rule legitimate. That bargain was tested in 1979, when fanatics seized the Grand Mosque at Mecca. But the regime did not break the clerics who had bred such men. It bought them, vastly increasing the funds devoted to spreading their doctrine abroad. Nor could it defend itself: with Saddam’s army on its border in 1990, the kingdom asked the United States for protection, and half a million Americans came.

The idea that we lack leverage over the Saudis is absurd.

The demand should have been made to the Saudi government privately, precisely, and with a deadline: dissolve the apparatus that exported Islamic ideology, shut down the charities entirely, hand over the donor lists and the financiers, strip the ministries of the clerics who preach the killing of the infidel, and produce Osama bin Laden. And the consequence of refusal should have been stated with equal precision: any American security guarantee dissolves, Section 311 falls on the Saudi banks, and what our own intelligence services know about Saudi money and Saudi nationals is read aloud on the floor of the U.S. Senate.

Would this strategy have worked? We cannot know with any certainty. But when al-Qaeda bombed three residential compounds in Riyadh in May 2003, the regime decisively targeted terrorist financing, passing an anti-money-laundering statute, banning cash boxes from mosques, dismissing clerics, making 600 arrests, and dissolving Al-Haramain. Measures that were well within its power on September 12, 2001, were taken only when its own princes were in danger.

The objection is that if we pressed the Saudi government, the regime might have fallen and something worse might have followed. That was a risk. But it was heavily outweighed by the reckless course we chose instead: failing to force the House of Saud’s hand.

No one saw this more clearly at the time than Angelo Codevilla. In “Victory: What It Will Take to Win,” published in the Claremont Review of Books in the fall of 2001, he wrote:

Common sense does not mistake the difference between victory and defeat: the losers weep and cower, while the winners strut and rejoice. The losers have to change their ways, the winners feel more secure than ever in theirs. On September 12, retiring Texas Senator Phil Gramm encapsulated this common sense: “I don’t want to change the way I live. I want to change the way they live.” Common sense says that victory means living without worry that some foreigners might kill us on behalf of their causes, but also without having to bow to domestic bureaucrats and cops, especially useless ones. It means not changing the tradition by which the government of the United States treats citizens as its masters rather than as potential enemies. Victory requires killing our enemies, or making them live in debilitating fear.

The object of a war is to change the lives of those who attacked you. We changed ours instead. Twenty-five years on, the TSA makes an American grandmother remove her shoes in Des Moines while the ideological apparatus that produced the hijackers operates unmolested.

Mark Helprin saw the same problem and named the target with more precision than anyone before or since. Also writing for the Claremont Review of Books, he argued:

The enemy has embarked upon a particular form of warfare with the intent of shielding his center of mass from counterattack, but he must not be allowed such a baseless privilege. For as much as he is the terrorist who executes the strategy, he is the intelligence service in aid of it, the nation that harbors his training camps, the country that finances him, the press filled with adulation, the people who dance in the streets when there is a slaughter, and the regime that turns a blind eye.

There was nothing hawkish about these proposals. It was American common sense: find out who was paying, find out who was making war against us, and make them stop so there would be no further attacks. And, more importantly, do so in a way that justice was served.

Why Were We Attacked?

Osama bin Laden did not leave his reason for attacking America a mystery. In a statement broadcast on October 7, 2001, he forthrightly stated the immediate cause: “I swear by Almighty God who raised the heavens without pillars that neither the United States nor he who lives in the United States will enjoy security before we can see it as a reality in Palestine and before all the infidel armies leave the land of Mohammed.”

That much is intelligible to any Westerner, and it is the part our commentators seized upon, because it can be discussed without confronting religion.

The permanent cause for the 9/11 attacks, however, is the one we have refused to acknowledge for the last 25 years. The commonsensical question is never asked: On what authority did the terrorists act?

The authority is not hidden—it is published in the Koran. Surah 9:29 commands:

Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.

And Surah 5:51 states:

O you who have believed, do not take the Jews and the Christians as allies. They are [in fact] allies of one another. And whoever is an ally to them among you—then indeed, he is [one] of them. Indeed, Allah guides not the wrongdoing people.

This is authoritative Islam, not subject to interpretation and punishable by death for any Muslim who would try to change its meaning.

This matters because we in the West have projected our own lack of religious faith onto Muslims, assuming that they do not actually believe what the Koran teaches. But if we are to understand them as they understand themselves, we must take Islam with deadly seriousness.

Nor is this a matter of inference from scripture alone. In “An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America,” dated May 22, 1991, and written by Mohamed Akram, the Muslim Brotherhood set down its goals in its own hand:

The Ikhwan must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.

The Brotherhood is describing its own purpose in a document it never intended us to read, appended to a list of the American organizations it regarded as its own. We have had it for over 20 years. Yet it has changed nothing.

What Is to Be Done?

To win, the United States must aim with precision at the organizations and states still making war on us—and at the ideology behind them.

Designate the Muslim Brotherhood. The Trump Administration has already moved against chapters in Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, and Sudan. This is progress, but it is inadequate because the Brotherhood is a transnational organization with a written strategy. President Trump must designate the entire Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization, and the Senate must pass the Muslim Brotherhood Terrorist Designation Act now.

Suspend nearly all immigration and restore ideological screening of aliens. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 barred from entry members and affiliates of totalitarian parties, and we screened for Communists for four decades without any serious person suggesting we had established a religious test. The Supreme Court has never questioned the plenary authority of the political branches to exclude aliens on ideological grounds. A man who holds that the unbeliever must be subdued, that apostasy warrants death, and that the law of his faith supersedes the Constitution of the United States has told us that he does not intend to become an American. We are entitled to believe him. Immigration from states that sponsor jihadist movements should be ended, and every applicant should be asked, plainly and on the record, what he believes about these things.

Cut the foreign money. Saudi, Qatari, Turkish, and Emirati funding of American mosques, Islamic centers, university chairs, and campus organizations should be treated as foreign political influence operations and prosecuted under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Section 117 of the Higher Education Act already requires universities to report foreign gifts. Enforce it, publish the results, and let Americans see who has been paying for what.

Begin a national debate over the role of Islam in American life. Islam, properly understood, is a political, ideological, and military tool for uniting the Islamic world. It has been designated a religion and afforded accordant legal protections. Although Americans believe in freedom of religion, that freedom extends only to religions that recognize human freedom. Islam does not. It should not be taboo for Americans to take seriously the possibility that Islamic doctrine, rightly interpreted, is fundamentally incompatible with the American way of life.

Rebuild the military. Twenty-five years after September 11, having fought wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we do not have a military sized and configured for the central challenge posed by Communist China. We have failed to build the national missile defense necessary to protect the American homeland from the threats we have spent years trying to deny—ballistic missiles, including those launched from ships off our coasts. A nation that spent $8 trillion in misguided wars and cannot defend its homeland from ballistic missile attack is fundamentally unserious.

The Yoke of Our Own Thought

Let us return to where we began.

The men who attacked us on September 11, 2001, did not conquer the United States. They destroyed the World Trade Center, tore open the Pentagon, and murdered nearly 3,000 people in a single morning—the deadliest attack ever perpetrated on American soil. But they took no territory, deposed no government, and put no army in the field. Within two months they had lost their sanctuary; within ten years their leader was dead in a compound in Abbottabad. By any military reckoning, they were defeated.

And yet look at our broader response.

We took up war and fought it in the wrong countries. We built a domestic apparatus that scrutinizes the lives of Americans instead of our enemies. We spent $8 trillion and left the ideological center of mass untouched—all while telling ourselves that the religious doctrine that motivated the hijackers was one of peace.

Strauss’s formulation was that a nation annihilated as a political being may still deprive its conquerors of the fruit of victory by imposing on them the yoke of its own thought. That is very nearly what has happened in America, and that is crucial—because the yoke we are wearing is not theirs. It is ours. It was fitted long before the towers fell. Our American intellectual class had concluded that no civilization is any better than any other, that reason cannot reach the truth about right and wrong, and that what we call judgment is only prejudice.

As such, our enemies understand us more accurately than we understand ourselves. They concluded that a people who will not say that their civilization is good will not fight very hard to keep it. Twenty-five years of evidence has not disproved them.

But the American people are not fools. They never doubted. On the morning of September 11, 2001, they understood what they had seen, whatever their betters told them. The failure has been one of the governing class, but governing classes can be replaced. Indeed, the election of President Trump was partly a rejection of how the governing class handled September 11.

But the city that was attacked on September 11 is now governed by an Islamist and Marxist, Mayor Zohran Mamdani. The great state of Michigan may soon be represented in the U.S. Senate by Abdul El-Sayed, whose Islamic views are not merely anti-Semitic but anti-Christian and therefore opposed to the American way of life. The Muslim population in the United States is approaching five million people. To believe that Islam is a benign part of American life is to deny what is obvious, namely, the radical beliefs many Muslims hold.

What is required now is not complicated. We must defend American civilization. We owe that to the American people. We also owe that to the 343 who went up the stairs and the 40 who stormed the cockpit over Pennsylvania. They did not need a seminar to know what was worth dying for. Let us pray for the clarity they had, and for the courage to act on it while there is time.