What does it mean to “Never Forget,” as we’re often asked to do when it comes to the September 11 attacks that killed nearly three thousand people? After all, few people who witnessed the crime in real time could ever forget it or the horrors in its wake: the bodies falling, the survivors crushed beneath rubble and dust, the people riddled with disease years later.

Certainly, “Never Forget” means keeping alive the memory of those whose lives were tragically lost. It could also be to remember and hold accountable those who perpetrated the crime. Or maybe, it’s to remember how and why it happened and the immense suffering that followed, to avoid repeating the disastrous choices that led to it all.

One thing’s for certain, twenty-five years after the attacks: if we’re talking about the last two, we have forgotten.

Despite being the only government with direct complicity in the attacks, neither Saudi Arabia nor any of its officials have faced anything resembling justice for their role in the attacks. Instead, successive presidential administrations actively covered up the Saudi role in the attacks and coddled their leaders, even feeding that government vital US military support for the pitiless war it waged for seven years against the Yemeni people.

The Washington elite instead seized on the rage and anguish that billowed out with the soot from the fallen towers to wage a spree of premeditated wars and military interventions against what felt like every Middle Eastern country but the one whose government was directly implicated: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, countries like Pakistan and Somalia (where the military simply drone-bombed “supposed terrorists” from afar), and now Iran — all wars sold and justified to varying degrees as wars against terrorism, sometimes to avenge 9/11, sometimes to stop another 9/11 from happening.

The trauma of September 11 remains a potent weapon for war propagandists. Twenty years after using the pain of the American people to help engineer the Iraq War, former Bush administration speechwriter Marc Thiessen dipped back into this bottomless well, this time to sell the Iran war his former boss never got to launch, concocting the latest tortured connection between the World Trade Center attack and whatever country he wanted bombed.

If it was all meant to prevent more American bloodshed and end terrorism, it failed miserably. The wars waged in the name of 9/11 have taken five times more American lives than were lost that day, not to mention the at least 4.5 million other people in the region who were killed and the 38 million displaced. They created more terrorists, more crises, more reasons for the United States to spend more lives and money on the latest military adventure — most famously in Iraq, where the US invasion produced the bloody Islamic State (ISIS) insurgency a decade later, and years of more US bombing, special forces operations, and proxy battles to beat it back. It’s been an especially dismal failure in North Africa, where terrorism has, ironically, exploded 100,000 percent since the US military started “fighting terror” there.

Those who warned that the attacks themselves had been blowback for decades of elite-run US foreign policy in the first place were immediately shouted down, labeled traitors and terrorist-sympathizers. It took decades for this point to be metabolized and allowed to be uttered, as it is today even in the pages of conservative magazines. It was a shame that it did: closing off debate meant that, for years, US politicians responded to the attack by pursuing the exact same policies that made it more likely, further endangering innocent Americans.

Not surprisingly, the anti-Americanism that so horrifically manifested in the attack is now arguably worse than ever. Washington has firmly lost the Arab world, and dozens of countries view China more positively, with the United States seen increasingly as a threat. Just like twenty-five years ago, the future costs of this global resentment likely won’t be borne by the Washington officials who put this bloodshed and mayhem into motion but by the ordinary Americans in whose name it’s been carried out — almost always without their input, approval, or even knowledge.

Anti-American sentiment isn’t the only thing that’s gotten worse. Just as a chorus of Cassandras warned all those years ago, the war on terror that George W. Bush put into motion and every one of his predecessors escalated has become radically more lawless and extreme, while embedding itself menacingly deeper into Americans’ daily lives.

American manufacturing shows little sign of coming back, but the US government has reshored the airborne assassination program it once exclusively reserved for Africa and the Middle East. The US president now claims the right to blast random fishing boats in international waters off the coast of the Americas on a whim, killing more than two hundred people and counting. Bush once upon a time went to Congress to get constitutional sign-off for his preemptive Middle East war. If he was in the White House now, he wouldn’t have to bother; the president can simply start one at will by assassinating a foreign head of state in a sneak attack on his home.

Islamophobia has arguably never been more extreme in public life, even as the perpetrators of political violence are overwhelmingly right-wing American men. Members of Congress wallow in overt anti-Muslim bigotry that Bush and his class of Republicans never countenanced even as they waded waist-deep in Arab blood. Liberal and centrist commentators warn darkly of a sinister alliance between leftists and Muslims that threatens Western civilization, plundering the talking points of Weimar-era fascists who warned that communists were teaming up with a different religious minority. New York City commemorates today after a weeks-long controversy about its Muslim mayor attending, a racist narrative that seeped beyond the borders of right-wing media and into the pages of liberal outlets.

“Terrorist” no longer refers to someone who blows up buildings or kills to make a political point, but that doesn’t mean the term has become meaningless. Instead it’s become a catch-all political slur for various nonviolent domestic political enemies: someone who vandalizes a billionaire megadonor’s car; who criticizes capitalism; who protests government policies or videotapes law enforcement; who simply moves a box of political zines; who wields political power while Muslim.

The post–September 11 security state has turned firmly inward, with enormous public resources expended to root out, surveil, and prosecute political opponents as “terrorists.” The bloated Department of Homeland Security created in the attack’s aftermath sees itself explicitly as fighting a literal war against enemies within.

What’s remarkable is that this is happening at the exact time the original fears and threats that justified it all are apparently no longer relevant.

Firm evidence of Saudi complicity in 9/11 is only a few years old, but the US-Saudi relationship has somehow grown closer since: the president’s son-in-law inks multimillion-dollar deals with its government, the White House reflexively backs the country’s latest military adventures, and the president is now actively taking steps that would potentially help it acquire a nuke. A former al-Qaeda member once on the US terror list is now the US-backed ruler of Syria, warmly welcomed in Washington where the US commander who once fought him in Iraq gushed he was now a “fan.” And Washington is now flirting with normalizing relations with the Taliban, whose connections to that same al-Qaeda set the stage for two decades of war in Afghanistan that ended with the group back in charge of the country.

The war on terror has become a zombie, devoid of everything that gave it life in the first place but more dangerous than ever, marching endlessly, mindlessly on in search of new living flesh to devour. It turns out this is, tragically, the legacy of that terrible day. We’ve forgotten why 9/11 happened, who perpetrated it, what lessons we should have learned. But the monster we unleashed simply lumbers on and on, the power to stop it seemingly out of anyone’s hands.