A quarter-century on, the paper wrote, the US is caught in a mood that is "unreal and somewhat unsettling — between anger and nostalgia, general mistrust" and the deep splits of the Trump era.
That climate, it said, is "at least in part a distant consequence of the attacks".
Younger Americans never lived through the shock of that day or the images replayed endlessly on television before smartphones existed, Le Figaro noted.
Even so, it argued, it is "hard not to link" an attack that came from the sky with the unsettled mood gripping the country now.
Wars without end
The attacks dragged the US into what the paper called "distant and almost continuous wars", starting in Afghanistan and Iraq and later reaching Libya, Syria and Iran.
Nearly 3 million American service members were eventually deployed into these conflicts, which Le Figaro said dragged on so long they diverted Washington's attention from other priorities, including China's rise as a military rival.
At home, the war on terror built a sprawling security bureaucracy, opened the Guantanamo Bay prison, and saw terrorism suspects sent to third countries "to bypass American law", the paper wrote. Critics, it said, risked being "condemned for lacking a patriotic spirit, or even suspected of treason".
Allies drift, trust erodes
NATO members and even rivals such as Russia initially rallied behind Washington, Le Figaro said, but that unity "did not last long".
It frayed over the invasion of Iraq, a "brutal dictatorship" the paper said had no link to the attacks, as political and media pressure at home "left little room for dissenting opinions" and allies who balked were "mocked".
The toll extended to American society itself, Le Figaro argued: "Patriotic fervour turned into suppressed bitterness toward institutions".
The failed war in Iraq, and the falsehoods used to justify it, helped discredit political and media elites, the paper said, feeding distrust that has since fed new populism, a revival of isolationism, and conspiracy theories that have migrated from the fringes into mainstream political debate via social media.
It traced some of that backlash to Donald Trump, "a master of political communication" who benefited from public rejection of the elites tied to the wars, despite having backed the Iraq invasion himself early on. He later broke ranks to criticise the war publicly and won the Republican primary on the back of it.
Le Figaro placed the day alongside two other American ruptures: "Like Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, or the assassination of John F. Kennedy, September 11, 2001, became a turning point in history that marked the end of an era".
Where did al-Qaida come from?
The Polish Press Agency (PAP) traced the group's roots to the jihadist movement that formed during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, when Washington armed and funded mujahideen fighters through Pakistani intelligence.
Among the Arab volunteers who joined that fight was Osama bin Laden, a Saudi-born heir to a construction fortune, who later used his wealth to build the networks that became al-Qaida in 1988.
He turned against Washington after Saudi Arabia allowed US troops onto its soil during the 1991 Gulf War instead of accepting his offer to mobilise fighters. Al-Qaida went on to bomb US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000, killing 17 sailors, before September 11.
US-led forces toppled the Taliban within weeks of the attacks but spent two decades fighting an insurgency, PAP reported. Bin Laden was killed by American commandos in Pakistan in May 2011.
Al-Qaida is far smaller today than in 2001, but affiliates remain active, chiefly in Africa, according to PAP. Al-Shabab operates in Somalia, and allied groups fight across Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger — a coalition the United Nations calls the main driver of jihadist violence in the Sahel.
In Afghanistan, al-Qaida survives with only a few dozen members, according to UN estimates, and far less sway over the Taliban than bin Laden once held.
(jh)
Source: PAP