The two main 9/11 ceremonies on Friday marking 25 years since the terror attacks were held at Ground Zero in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington DC. President Trump attended the latter while VP JD Vance was present at the former.
War Secretary Pete Hegseth also helped lead remembrance events at the Pentagon, but at the annual NYC commemoration, Vance appeared to keep a lower profile while listening from the audience to names being read out.
Trump and Hegseth in their respective addresses tried to tie the ongoing Iran war to Sept. 11, 2001. They both sough to frame current Iran action as a continuation of the Global War on Terror.
"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," Trump said at the Pentagon.
As for Hegseth, he spoke just ahead of the president and said that US forces remain "vigilant" against the "Islamic theocracy" in Iran.
"Our warriors have fought an Islamic theocracy that has wished us death for nearly half a century, that cheered on 9/11," he said.
"A regime that has sponsored terrorist attacks against Americans for decades, killing thousands, including our comrades in Iraq and Afghanistan. But they did not factor in this president," the Pentagon chief continued.
"We’re still sending terrorists where they belong — to hell — and tankers to the bottom of the ocean, where they belong," Hegseth added. "And we are ensuring that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon."
Ironically it was close American ally Saudi Arabia which actually factors in most directly to the 9/11 tragedy, and family members of victims have filed a lawsuit against the kingdom for state-level and intelligence complicity in the terror attacks.
The majority of the 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, and each and every one of them was a Sunni Muslim. As for Iran, it is a historic enemy of the Sunni Saudi kingdom and practices Shia Islam, which Riyadh considers 'heretical'.
Trying to link Iran to 9/11 also has a whiff of Bush-era propaganda to it. Not only did some NeoCon pundits at the time try to link Tehran to it, but a major talking point was also a far-fetched 'Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda alliance'.
Of course, Saddam was a secular Ba'athist autocrat and historically sought to persecute radical fundamentalist sects. Still, Iraq got invaded on the heels of Afghanistan and Saddam was overthrown by US forces.
More recently, in the last decade of the Syria proxy war, Iranian officers and Shia militias were typically the ones along the front lines fighting ISIS and other Sunni jihad movements. The latter were often sponsored by the Gulf states as well as US intelligence. When it comes to the Middle East and Washington policy, nothing is ever as it seems.