Crown Center forum looks at how 9/11 shaped the Middle East

Brandeis Stories

Crown Center forum looks at how 9/11 shaped the Middle East

By Steve Foskett
Photography by Agbarakwe Chukwuemeka
September 10, 2026 • General

The Crown Center for Middle East Studies this week marked the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks with an expert panel examining whether and how the events of that day and the U.S. response have shaped the Middle East today.

The program, "Did 9/11 Make Today's Middle East?," considered the history of U.S. involvement in the region before 2001, explored whether wars launched in Afghanistan and Iraq achieved their stated goals, and noted that history could be repeating itself in the current U.S. war with Iran.

The event was organized by Ramyar Rossoukh, associate director for research and Naghmeh Sohrabi, the Charles (Corky) Goodman Professor of Middle East History and the director for research at the Crown Center, who also moderated the panel.

Held at Rapaporte Treasure Hall, the panel featured opening remarks by Gary Samore, Crown Family Director and professor of the practice of politics at the center.

Samore said he remembers exactly where he was on that day, when hijacked planes killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania. He had just moved to London, and was passing by an electronics store with televisions in the window, broadcasting footage of the World Trade Center buildings being struck by hijacked airplanes.

"I said to my wife, 'this is going to change the world.'"

It certainly did. Sohrabi noted that the direct post-9/11 war violence, including Afghanistan and Iraq, claimed more than 900,000 lives, and the world is still dealing with the broader consequences of those conflicts.

The panel included Sina Azodi, assistant professor of Middle East politics, and the director of Middle East Studies program at George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs; Osamah F. Khalil, professor of history and chair of the International Relations Undergraduate Program at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs; Shamiran Mako, associate professor of international relations and political science at the Pardee School of Global Studies, and a faculty leave fellow with the Crown Center; and Mejgan Massoumi, assistant professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University.

Aggressive interventionists, echoes of 1945

Khalil explained that prior to 9/11, the U.S. enjoyed unparalleled hegemony over the Middle East going back to after World War II. Closer ties with Gulf states led to improved relations and expansion of U.S. bases in the region.

That dominance was affirmed in the first Gulf War in 1990 after a U.S.-led coalition intervened when Iraq invaded Kuwait. Emboldened, the burgeoning neoconservative movement in the U.S. pushed for a more aggressive foreign policy that argued it was vital to America's interests in the region to prevent the emergence of a rival power. That thinking persisted and took root in U.S. foreign policy through the 1990s. Khalil said that may explain why in the wake of the attacks, after the decision was made to invade Afghanistan - where the al-Qaeda forces who planned 9/11 trained - plans were very quickly drawn up to go after Iraq, a country with no real connection to the terrorist attacks.

When World War II ended in 1945, the U.S. became the foundation of a new international order, built with a set of alliances and institutions, Khalil said. But after 9/11, the U.S. did not wait for consensus.

"This was going to be an American empire, and they're quite explicit in that term," he said.

Post-Soviet invasion vacuum

Massoumi said it's important to examine the conditions, infrastructure, and alliances left behind by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 to understand where it was in 2001. After the invasion, the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan built human and financial infrastructure to recruit fighters from Egypt, Yemen, Algeria and Jordan.

When the U.S. withdrew its support after the Soviets exited Afghanistan in 1989, that infrastructure remained. Groups like al-Qaeda, led by Saudi national Osama bin Laden, who had supported the anti-Soviet mujahideen, filled the vacuum.

"Did 9/11 make today's Middle East?" Massoumi asked. "Through Afghanistan, I'd say the more accurate story is that the Middle East's own cold war entanglements made the Afghanistan that then remade the Middle East."

Iraq a target long before 9/11

Mako pushed back against the idea that nobody could have foreseen that the Iraq war would turn into a long, costly conflict.

She described Seminar Desert Crossing, a U.S. Central Command war game and seminar that looked at what would happen if the U.S. invaded Iraq to unseat Saddam Hussein. Conducted in 1999, it proved prescient, predicting a collapse of an Iraqi state that had been hollowed out by years of dictatorship. The three-day exercise also predicted that Iran would play an outsized role, expanding into Iraqi economic and military spheres, she said.

"There's this kind of idea that these things happen in isolation, when there's a much longer history that has shaped this level of interventionism," Mako said.

Parallels, history with Iran

Azodi said prior to 9/11, the U.S. and Iran had been making progress in improving relations and re-establishing economic ties, and that carried over into the early days of the invasion of Afghanistan, when credible reports indicated Iran shared some intelligence with the U.S., and committed to returning any downed pilots who ejected over Iranian airspace.

He said that progress was all but wiped away when Iran was included in then-President George W. Bush's "Axis of Evil" speech that called out Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as state sponsors of terrorism that sought nuclear weapons. He said one Iranian official called it the "final nail in the coffin" of relations with the U.S.

Azodi added that as the U.S. invaded Iraq and quickly toppled its government and military, Iranian leaders realized they could never defeat the U.S. with a conventional military response. Rather, they learned that in a confrontation with the American military, asymmetrical warfare, including the use of drones and ballistic missiles, would be key.

Women's rights, democracy: issues of convenience?

Massoumi said the issue of women's rights under Taliban rule in Afghanistan was a critical rationale to build public support for the U.S. invasion, and endured as an issue even longer than the notion that invading Afghanistan was crucial to U.S. national security. But when the U.S. signed the peace agreement with Afghanistan in 2021 that officially ended two decades of war, there was no mention of protections for women.

"Nobody asked Afghan women what they wanted in 2001, and nobody asked them what they wanted in 2021," Massoumi said.

Mako acknowledged that out of war in Iraq came the only country in the Middle East to have regular, free and fair elections. But she said strong voter turnout might indicate something more than healthy participation: undercurrents of deep dissatisfaction with the government persist, driven by economic conditions and corruption. And she said there have been signs of a certain nostalgia for the time before the invasion, when economic conditions were better.

First in a series of Crown Center events

Two additional Crown Center forums will look at different aspects of the long-term consequences of the Sept. 11 attacks. On Oct. 15, "Reporting the Middle East after 9/11" will consider how that era changed journalism - and how it continues to shape the way the Middle East is reported on and understood today. And on Dec. 2, "Yazidis on the Margins of Humanity: Internally Displaced in Iraqi Kurdistan" will welcome author Houman Oliaei, a Brandeis alum, to explore what it means to remain displaced within the borders of a state transformed by war.