Trump used the Pentagon ceremony to market a war on Iran

By Nikhil Raghavan · Reporting from San Francisco · September 11, 2026

If you want to understand how a government attempts to "hack" the national psyche, look no further than the Pentagon on September 11, 2026.

If you want to understand how a government attempts to "hack" the national psyche, look no further than the Pentagon on September 11, 2026. As the United States marked the 25th anniversary of the attacks that killed 2,977 people, President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth didn't treat the day as a somber reflection on a specific failure of intelligence and security. Instead, they treated it as a marketing opportunity for a current, vastly unpopular war.

By framing the ongoing US-Israel war on Iran as the direct successor to the "war on terror," the administration is attempting a rhetorical sleight of hand: they are trying to map the visceral, unifying grief of 2001 onto a 2026 geopolitical objective that lacks a clear exit strategy or broad public consent. It is a cynical implementation of a well-worn playbook, and it is an insult to the people who actually paid the price for the first iteration of this strategy.

The Pentagon Ceremony as a Marketing Deck for the Iran War

The divide in the day’s commemorations was as much about geography as it was about intent. According to The Guardian, while Vice President JD Vance traveled to Ground Zero, President Trump remained in Washington, turning the Pentagon ceremony into a rally for escalation. Trump didn't just salute the fallen; he pivoted immediately to the present, stating, “We salute the service members working right now to ensure the world’s number one sponsor of terror, the Islamic Republic of Iran, will never ever have a nuclear weapon.”

Secretary Pete Hegseth leaned even harder into the apocalyptic framing, claiming the struggle against evil "will continue until judgment day" and that the only answer is "eternal vigilance." As Euronews reported, this was a deliberate effort to link the post-9/11 era to the current conflict. Hegseth’s rhetoric—sending tankers "to the bottom of the ocean where they belong"—isn't a strategy; it's a press release.

The administration's strongest argument is that the threat is continuous. They would argue that the "Islamic theocracy" in Tehran provided the ideological and material scaffolding for the Al-Qaida militants who hijacked those four planes, and that failing to stop a nuclear-armed Iran is a dereliction of the "sacred oath" sworn in 2001. They claim that "eternal vigilance" requires preemptive action to prevent another 9/11.

But this argument fails because it ignores the technical reality of the last quarter-century. The Al-Qaida attacks were a failure of horizontal communication between the FBI and CIA—a systemic latency issue in intelligence sharing. The current war on Iran is a choice of foreign policy, not a response to a systemic security breach. To conflate the two is to pretend that the "war on terror" is a single, monolithic event rather than a series of disconnected interventions.

The Afghanistan Mechanism of Instrumentalized Grief

We have seen this mechanism before. The central precedent is the War in Afghanistan (2001–2021). In 2001, the U.S. government instrumentalized a domestic tragedy to mobilize public support for a military campaign that began with a focused goal—destroying Al-Qaida—and devolved into a twenty-year exercise in nation-building that ended in a chaotic withdrawal. The mechanism was simple: use the emotional shock of the attack to bypass the usual scrutiny of the "spec" (the actual goals, costs, and timelines of the war).

This same pattern emerged during the Invasion of Iraq (2003), where the ghost of 9/11 was used to justify a preemptive strike based on flawed intelligence about weapons of mass destruction. We saw it again during the United States withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (2017-2021), where the rhetoric of nuclear proliferation was used to escalate tensions. Now, we are seeing it in the US-Israel war on Iran (2023-2024), where the administration is attempting to reuse the 2001 emotional engine to power a 2026 war.

The historical record predicts the outcome: when you launch a war based on a "struggle against evil" rather than a defined set of achievable milestones, you don't get "victory"—you get a forever war. The administration says "we don't have a choice," but the choice is always there. They are simply choosing the most expensive and volatile path because it is the easiest to sell to a frightened public.

The Gap Between "Eternal Vigilance" and Toxic Air

While the President spoke of "victory" at the Pentagon, the actual victims of 9/11 were reminding the world that the state’s "vigilance" is often reserved for enemies abroad, not citizens at home. Terry Strada, a leader of victims' families, called the administration's approach "one betrayal after another," urging Trump to stop protecting the Saudis and force them to stop lying about their role in the attacks.

Then there is the matter of the "toxic air" in Lower Manhattan. Mayor Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s first Muslim mayor, attended the Ground Zero ceremony despite a campaign by 100,000 people—backed by Rudy Giuliani—to keep him away. Mamdani didn't just show up; he released documents showing that city officials knew about the toxic air that has since caused cancers in thousands of New Yorkers.

This is the implementation gap. The administration is happy to use the image of the 9/11 first responder to justify sinking Iranian tankers, but they are indifferent to the actual health of those responders or the truth about the Saudi connection. They want the emotional capital of the tragedy without the accountability that comes with it.

The trajectory is clear. We can expect the administration to escalate military operations against Iranian naval assets and nuclear facilities, using the "eternal vigilance" mantra as a shield against criticism. Simultaneously, they will likely clash with Mayor Mamdani over federal funding and the administration of memorial sites, treating a Muslim mayor's presence at Ground Zero as a provocation rather than a reflection of the city he leads.

The administration is not honoring the dead; they are conscripting them into a new war. By attempting to merge the memory of 9/11 with the ambitions of 2026, they are proving that they have learned nothing from the last twenty-five years. They are treating the American public like a legacy system that can be tricked by a familiar interface, but the cost of this "hack" will be paid in the same currency as the War in Afghanistan (2001–2021): lives, trillions of dollars, and a permanent loss of strategic credibility.

Trump used the Pentagon ceremony to market a war on Iran

The Pentagon Ceremony as a Marketing Deck for the Iran War

The Afghanistan Mechanism of Instrumentalized Grief

The Gap Between "Eternal Vigilance" and Toxic Air

Sources