This September 11 (2026) marked the 25-year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and, as usual, the time of year has become more than just an occasion for remembrance and commemoration.
It has also become an annual battleground of competing narratives.
Sadly, however, not much of it is about Israel’s involvement in the attacks. Instead, we see a retrospective triumphalism about the devastation inflicted upon Muslim-majority countries during the subsequent “War on Terror.”
In this telling, George W. Bush is sometimes treated almost paradoxically as an instrument of civilizational revenge. The argument goes that, whatever his other shortcomings might be, his administration unleashed American military power across the Middle East and Muslim world, leaving behind deaths, shattered states, and decades of instability.
But even judged exclusively according to white nationalism’s own ideological priorities, how coherent really is this triumphalism?
How the Bush Family Destroyed White-American Demographics
The movement’s central political anxiety is not American military restraint abroad but the declining demographic share of Whites at home… and on that question, the Bush dynasty is a remarkably strange object of admiration.
In the 2000 Census, 69% of Americans were non-Hispanic White alone, but that percentage has declined substantially since then (non-Hispanic Whites are now at 57%). Of course, the immigration policy forms an important part of such a political story… and this is where the Bush (both father and son) record becomes quite interesting.
George H. W. Bush, i.e., Bush senior, famously signed the Immigration Act of 1990. This substantially expanded legal immigration, increasing overall immigration from roughly 540,000 annually in 1989, to 700,000 annually during the fiscal years of 1992–94. Employment-based immigration also saw a significant rise from approximately 54,000 to 140,000 visas per year.
The Act also created the “Diversity Visa program” and established the modern H-1B framework, which was initially capped at 65,000 visas annually. This is all particularly ironic today, when H-1B has become a major point of conflict within the nationalist right, whose critics portray the program as importing foreign professional labor at the expense of American workers.
One of the immigration mechanisms that are now harshly attacked by parts of the American right was thus institutionalized in its modern form under a Republican president named Bush.
Then we have George W. Bush, i.e., Bush junior, who has been even worse for White-American demographics. In 2007, he strongly backed a comprehensive immigration reform addressing the roughly 12 million unauthorized or illegal immigrants that were then living in America. The proposal would have offered many of them provisional legal status and, after satisfying certain additional requirements, an eventual opportunity to pursue permanent residence and citizenship.
It’s true Bush did not legalize twelve million people, as the legislation ended up failing in the Senate. Ideologically, however, what Bush wanted is revealing enough.
His administration rejected mass deportation as unrealistic, argued that immigrants should be brought “out of the shadows,” emphasized immigration’s economic benefits, and repeatedly described America as a nation strengthened by immigration… quite a far cry from a White nationalist agenda!
Also, during the Bush decades, the long-term decay of American family and social life continued: marriage rates declined, divorce and single-parent households remained widespread, female participation in professional and institutional life was firmly normalized, mass consumer culture became increasingly sexualized, and the cultural authority of traditional Christianity continued to be eroded.
Somehow, the Bush family didn’t enact any so-called “socially conservative” agendas to address all of these issues. The result is that it had a direct impact on White-American demographics, through the declining TFR and the fact that hundreds of thousands of abortions were performed on White women.
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But What About the Muslim Death Toll?
Another argument underlying this triumphalism relates to numbers. Whatever Bush did domestically, the claim is that the “War on Terror” supposedly inflicted an enormous demographic loss upon the Muslim world.
This is where I depart from some (if not most) Muslim commentators, including our dear brother Daniel Haqiqatjou, because I am very skeptical of casually describing the wars as having directly “killed millions.”
Brown University’s famed Costs of War project distinguishes “direct deaths,” that is, people killed by bombs, bullets, and other immediate acts of war, from indirect deaths, such as excess mortality caused by malnutrition, disease, displacement, and the destruction of health, water, and economic infrastructure.
The latter are real consequences of war, but estimating them requires constructing a counterfactual: how many people would have died had the war never occurred? The answer depends heavily upon methodology, baseline mortality, the period examined, and how much subsequent social collapse can reasonably be attributed to the original conflict. For that reason, when discussing the literal body count of the wars, I prefer the narrower and more measurable category of “direct deaths.”
Brown’s 2021 study estimated roughly 900,000 direct deaths across the major post-9/11 war zones during the first twenty years, including approximately 387,000 civilians (with around two-thirds on that number being in Iraq alone):
Even if, for the sake of argument, we classify every civilian in the table as Muslim, which is obviously an overestimate, the demographic scale is very different from the rhetoric about “millions of Muslims killed.”
And this is where the arithmetic becomes uncomfortable for anyone attempting to interpret the “War on Terror” as some kind of demographic victory over Islam.
Afghanistan’s population was roughly 20 million in in the year 2000. By 2021, despite twenty years of war, that number had increased to approximately 40 million.
In other words, Afghanistan added roughly twenty million inhabitants during the same historical period in which it was supposedly devastated demographically by the “War on Terror.”
There’s an obvious contrast with America’s non-Hispanic White population. In 2000, there were approximately 194 million non-Hispanic White-alone Americans. However, the 2020 Census recorded approximately 191 million. Thus, Afghanistan’s population more than doubled, while America’s non-Hispanic White-alone population did not grow at all and, in fact, experienced a decline of around 3 million.
We see the same with Iraq. It suffered, by far, the largest civilian death toll in Brown’s table, roughly 185,000–209,000 direct civilian deaths by 2021, yet its population continued growing by millions during the war era. Its population was 25 million in 2001 and is now just shy of 50 million. It has thus almost doubled, not too dissimilar to what we saw with Afghanistan.
This is because American warfare isn’t uniformly exterminatory. Anyone familiar with Afghanistan’s modern history knows that the American intervention was not comparable in either its methods or intensity to the Soviet war of 1979–89.
Let us now take a look at the American costs.
Brown records just over 7,000 U.S. service members killed in the post-9/11 wars. However, combat deaths alone substantially understate the true burden carried by the people who fought them.
Studies generally estimate that approximately 30,000 post-9/11 service members and veterans had died by suicide, compared with 7,057 killed in post-9/11 military operations. Thus, it is indeed extremely misleading to account only for battlefield deaths when evaluating the domestic human cost of twenty years of warfare.
Then there are the contractors. Brown estimates that roughly 8,189 military contractors died in the post-9/11 wars. To clarify, “contractor” here does not exclusively refer to an American mercenary. The category includes civilians employed by private companies performing logistics, construction, transportation, security, maintenance, and numerous other functions for the U.S. military, and many were foreign nationals rather than Americans.
So even the crude “American soldier versus Muslim civilian” ratio so loved and celebrated by racial triumphalists starts to disintegrate under closer examination. American combat deaths are only one component of the human cost borne by the society that prosecuted the wars. Contractor deaths, lifelong disability, traumatic injury, and the postwar mental-health crisis belong somewhere in the accounting as well.
And from an explicitly white-nationalist perspective, there is an even deeper contradiction. This is because such an ideology assigns greater political and demographic importance to its own population than it does to foreign populations.
If that premise is accepted for the sake of argument, then sacrificing thousands of Americans, psychologically damaging many more veterans, spending trillions of dollars, and destabilizing American society in exchange for killing several hundred thousand civilians belonging to populations that subsequently continued growing rapidly hardly resembles a demographic triumph.
Finally, let’s push our cynicism further: “the Muslim world” should not be confused with the relatively limited number of countries that became major post-9/11 war zones.
The Muslim world stretches from Morocco and Senegal through North Africa and the Middle East to Central, South, and Southeast Asia. Hundreds of millions of Muslims in countries such as Morocco, Algeria, Turkey, Bangladesh, Malaysia, and Indonesia were never subjected to anything remotely resembling the wars experienced by Iraq or Afghanistan.
Indeed, Brown estimates that American counterterrorism activities eventually extended into dozens of countries, but counterterrorism activity is not equivalent to mass warfare or a substantial civilian death toll in every country involved.
So, if the claim is merely that the “War on Terror” killed an enormous number of people, then of course that is an indisputable fact. However, if the claim is that it somehow constituted some kind of “demographic victory” over the Muslim world, then the numbers tell a very different story.
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…All Losers?
Let us push the cynicism one step further and ask a question that is rarely encountered in white-nationalist celebrations of the “War on Terror”: what did the wars actually destroy within the Muslim world, and what did they inadvertently strengthen?
Let’s start with Iraq. Bush did not overthrow an Islamist government. He destroyed the strongest surviving Ba’athist regime in the Arab world: an authoritarian but fundamentally secular-nationalist state. Of course, Saddam had increasingly instrumentalized Islam after the Gulf War (most visibly through his “Faith Campaign” of the 1990s), but Iraq remained institutionally distinct from an Islamist state.
The American invasion smashed that order. De-Ba’athification and the dissolution of the Iraqi army subsequently dismantled much of the old secular-dominated state apparatus. The political system that emerged after 2003 empowered Shi’ah Islamist parties, strengthened sectarian politics, and dramatically expanded Iranian influence in Iraq.
Thus, Washington destroyed one of Iran’s principal regional enemies and created conditions in which Tehran became vastly more influential in Baghdad.
The story with Afghanistan is markedly worse. America removed the Taliban government in 2001, occupied the country for twenty years, spent enormous sums attempting to construct a replacement political order… and in August 2021, the Taliban returned to power.
The Islamic Emirate that had been overthrown was, in effect, just replaced twenty years later by another Islamic Emirate.
Then there’s the matter of Christianity. The destruction of Iraqi Christianity after 2003 was catastrophic. Iraq was home to perhaps 1–1.5 million Christians around the time of the invasion. Subsequent estimates place the remaining Christian community at only a few hundred thousand.
Thus, the most “self-consciously Christian” American president invaded Iraq partly under the banner of defeating terrorism, yet the political order that followed witnessed one of the most dramatic collapses of an ancient Christian population in modern Middle Eastern history.
There is yet another irony, i.e, that of “moderate Islam.” Conservative Muslims have spent decades criticizing the Western project of cultivating a deformed so-called “moderate Islam”: the attempt by governments, think tanks, and institutions, including the well-known RAND studies, to identify, encourage, and partner with Muslim tendencies deemed compatible with Western liberal-democratic society.
But viewed from a white-nationalist perspective, the problem should be almost the reverse.
Bush explicitly rejected the proposition that America was at war with Islam. Days after 9/11, he visited a mosque and declared in no ambiguous terms that Islam was not the enemy. His administration instead divided Muslims conceptually into extremists who had hijacked a religion and peaceful Muslims who could be incorporated into the American civic nation.
This was obviously all a show, for good optics, but its domestic implication was clear: Muslims as Muslims were not to be excluded from American society. That is, Bush’s answer to “Islamist terrorism” was not to redefine America as an exclusively Christian or European civilization. It was to insist that Muslim Americans belonged inside the national community, while particular ideological and terrorist movements were the enemy.
So what exactly was the civilizational victory?
From a Muslim perspective, there is plenty to condemn in the “War on Terror”: occupation, death, torture, political interference, and Western attempts to reshape Islamic discourse. From a consistent white-nationalist perspective, however, the outcome may be even more difficult to celebrate, as it clearly didn’t destroy Muslim demography, nor did it help White demography in the United States or the West as a whole.
Also, the “War on Terror” did not merely fail to eliminate political Islam. In important respects, it helped create the conditions for a renewed Islamic consciousness among parts of the global Muslim population.
Afghanistan, Iraq, Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, drone warfare, and the language surrounding the “War on Terror” could all be incorporated into a single narrative: Muslims, regardless of nationality, were confronting a common geopolitical adversary. Conflicts that might otherwise have remained Iraqi, Afghan, Palestinian, or Somali acquired a broader ummah-wide significance, and the “War on Terror” became a “forced Pan-Islamist pill.”
Even the Western Muslim experience changed dramatically: post-9/11 scrutiny forced questions of Muslim identity, integration, foreign policy, and religious belonging into everyday political life.
While for some Muslims this encouraged secularization or assimilation, for others (myself included), far greater in number, it produced precisely the opposite response, that is, a more self-conscious attachment and devotion to Islam.
Baghdad fell. Kabul fell. A generation was buried beneath the rubble. Yet, 25 years later, Islam remains… and the empire has returned home to a broken country.
