The 9/11 Attacks: A Brief Origin and Cost Summary

Origin

Some of the origin story is bitterly contested. Bin Laden explained why he attacked the US in an open letter. Several main reasons are given. They are US support for Israel (an assertion that Israel and many or most of its supporters bitterly reject), aggression against Muslims and Palestinians (also contested), support of aggression against Muslims in Somalia, Russia and elsewhere, sanctions against Iraq, and bad morals, e.g., fornication, debauchery and lies. Bin Laden also mentions other reasons, e.g., America spreads diseases and created AIDS as a “Satanic American Invention.”

The US military presence in Saudi Arabia may also be part of the motivation behind the attacks.

Cost

The 9/11 attacks arguably led to two wars, Afghanistan and Iraq. It is unlikely that the US would have attacked Iraq if the 9/11 attacks had not provided some justification for it. The rationale for Iraq included an illusory threat from weapons of mass destruction and a false belief that Iraq harbored and supported terrorists that were somehow related to 9/11. Costs of wars since 9/11 and in the future are estimated to amount to about $6 trillion, with the bulk of that going to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, which were significantly or mostly funded with added federal debt.

A close personal acquaintance is a senior federal bank regulator. He pointed out that the 9/11 attacks caused a major shift in the focus of his agency's effort from ordinary financial crimes to tracking terrorist funding. Much federal attention in multiple agencies turned from business as usual to anti-terrorism. One consequence of the attention shift in bank regulation was decreased pressure on ordinary crime. That, plus ideology-driven anti-regulation politics, were factors in the financial and housing crises of 2007-2009. Costs of those disasters are hard to pin down, but some individuals paid a high price, e.g., job loss causing loss of home. Economic cost estimates of the financial crisis run as high as $22 trillion (original GAO report). Not all of that loss can be attributed to 9/11, but some of it arguably can. My acquaintance believes that some of the loss should be attributed to 9/11.

There are other costs, including social disruption over the wars and exacerbation of the 2001 recession. Economic losses and costs from impaired ability of wounded veterans to work and for health care will be incurred over their lifetimes. America will be paying for the consequences of the 9/11 attacks for decades.