"The United States is less safe than it was when it began its ill-considered military campaigns in Asia and Africa," Freeman stated. "The discredit this has brought to American democracy has greatly diminished its appeal abroad."
The attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York’s World Trade Center, at the Pentagon near Washington, DC, and on four hijacked airliners early in the 21st century have been its most transformative event to date, Freeman said.
"It kicked off an American-led war on militant Islam that has spawned contempt for the US Constitution and the rule of law both at home and abroad, and justified the curtailment of the freedoms and the erosion of the personal security of Americans that it is ostensibly directed at protecting," he said.
"The panicky belligerence of voters was reflected in the George W. Bush administration's human-rights abuses, and popular bigotry and xenophobia continues to discredit American pretensions to moral leadership in world affairs," he stated.
The Bush administration reacted to the attacks by unleashing invasions and the destabilization of other countries, particularly Afghanistan and Iraq, and US President Barack Obama has followed the same damaging course, creating millions of additional refugees, according to Freeman. He was the US ambassador to Saudi Arabia between 1989 and 1992, under Bush’s father, President George H.W. Bush.
"The current refugee crisis in West Asia, North Africa and Europe, and the threat this poses to European unity and stability, are a direct result of the disastrous US interventions and seemingly endless wars that followed 9/11," he said.
Washington's growing use of drone warfare has made matters even worse, in Freeman’s view. It has "spread anti-Western terrorism with global reach to new corners of the globe," he said.
The American people have also suffered from the era of perpetual war and foreign intervention since 9/11, Freeman maintained.
"The diversion of American resources to foreign adventures rather than to meeting domestic human and infrastructure needs has made America a shabbier, less competitive society," he remarked.
Policies presented as a means of protecting the United States after September 11, 2001 and preventing further attacks have instead made them more likely, Freeman warned.
"There can be no question that the American response to 9/11 has been not just counterproductive but self-destructive," the former diplomat concluded.
