The Righteous Community

Six weeks​ after President George W. Bush launched what the White House called a Global War on Terror, in October 2001, the journalist Bob Woodward asked the vice president, Dick Cheney, when the war would end. ‘Not in our lifetime,’ Cheney said. One can picture his barely suppressed smirk, a facial tic familiar from interviews. Cheney, and by implication ‘we’, had embarked on a war to outlast our lifetimes – an endless war. For a member of the ‘Vulcans’, Bush’s foreign policy circle, committed to expanding US hegemony through constant imperial adventure, what could be more exciting than perpetual war against an elusive, shapeshifting, often invisible enemy?

Now, nearly a quarter of a century on, the wet dream of an ageing militarist has become a fundamental force driving American foreign policy. This should come as no surprise, given Cheney’s central role in creating a permanent warfare state. The media cliché that 9/11 ‘changed everything’ offered a convenient excuse for unprecedented violations of fundamental constitutional principles – the unchecked expansion of executive power, the utter disregard for habeas corpus and defendants’ rights in general, the warrantless mass surveillance of millions of citizens and the legitimation of torture as a military tactic. To warriors against terror, the Bill of Rights had become ‘quaint’, as Bush’s attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, said of the Geneva Conventions.

The hysteria provoked by the attacks on the World Trade Center created an opportunity for Cheney and his ideological comrades to engineer what amounted to a coup d’état. In collaboration with the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party, they fashioned a Washington foreign policy consensus committed to armed intervention abroad, overt or covert, anywhere US intelligence agencies decided that American interests were somehow at stake. What had once been kept hidden was now paraded in public, as doctrines of regime change and preventive war received serious consideration in the New York Times and the Washington Post. ‘Everything has changed’ was the perfect mantra for a national security establishment that aimed to change everything – by unleashing executive power from constitutional constraints and defining its range as limitless.

The foundation for that agenda had been laid during the Cold War and built on in the 1990s, in that heady unipolar moment. Bush the younger’s Vulcan advisers, led by Cheney, had been plotting a more aggressive foreign policy ever since Bush the elder thwarted their hopes by stopping short of seizing Baghdad in 1991. Clinton Democrats, meanwhile, were itching for overseas involvement wherever they could find or invent a population threatened by tyranny. Once the US became the world’s only superpower, universalist fantasies proliferated. But after 9/11 they widened, intensified and solidified into a new consensus. Washington policymakers and their media stenographers came to view endless war as a normal condition, and the world as a battlefield where morally charged confrontations could be staged repeatedly, perhaps for ever.

This terrifying vision originated among a small group of intellectuals whose belief system would have been deemed reckless even at the nadir of the Cold War – indeed, it was the worldview that consigned Barry Goldwater to crushing defeat by Lyndon Johnson in 1964. But eventually it moved inside the charmed circle, becoming regarded as responsible opinion and engulfing the Democratic Party even more thoroughly than the Republicans.

During the weeks, months and years after the towers fell, as fear and anger spread through the body politic, disturbing habits of mind became embedded in policy debate. The most corrosive was the recoil from debate itself, which came to be seen as a betrayal of national unity. According to the official view, independent thought was the pathetic pastime of a few outliers like Susan Sontag, who had the temerity to ask: ‘Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a “cowardly” attack on “civilisation” or “liberty” or “humanity” or “the free world” but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions?’ Merely raising the question led to Sontag being denounced as an apologist for terrorism.

‘Terrorism’: the word acquired the magical power of stopping all discussion, indeed all thought, instantaneously. In the public imagination, terrorism was close to barbarism – a marriage sanctified by implicitly racist Islamophobia (the term is inadequate, since it focuses on fear to the exclusion of contempt and rage). The obsession with exterminating terrorists had calamitous consequences for US foreign policy. Diplomacy was out of the question when you were dealing with murderous savages – which is what terrorists were by definition – and any political interpretation of terrorist acts beyond ‘they hate our freedom’ betrayed the interpreter’s complicity.

The Bush team did their best to elevate their motives above plain revenge by making use of the rhetoric of ‘global leadership’. In this exalted idiom, eliminating terrorists and overthrowing governments suspected of harbouring them were the first steps in a grander project: the global spread of American-style democracy, which would ultimately mean the triumph of civilisation over barbarism all over the world. ‘Democracy promotion’ abroad became an avowed aim of US foreign policy.

This is the sensibility – a blend of visceral revulsion, righteous anger and sentimental moralism – that the war on terror bequeathed to American foreign policymakers on both sides of the aisle, shaping their perceptions of every enemy manufactured by the national security state since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The media have collaborated in this project by personalising projected threats, demonising foreign adversaries by turning them into comic-strip villains. Behind these monstrous figures are subhuman hordes, whose menace can be conjured by the magic words ‘Russia’ or ‘Hamas’. This cartoonish world picture has flourished in the decades since 9/11 – never more flagrantly than in the current American and Israeli attempt to justify Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. The great unpunished war crime of our time is a product of the war on terror; Israelis who descend from survivors of one holocaust are now creating another.

Richard Beck’s Homeland supplies abundant matter for contemplation. He deftly reconstructs the coup d’état that unfolded in the corridors of power after 9/11, but also explores the darker reaches of the American psyche: the vicarious sadism; the Manichean moral certainty; and the belief, deeply rooted in American cultural history, that anything is justified in a war against barbarians. Congress’s carte blanche for Bush’s assault on the Bill of Rights was a step on the way to its standing ovation for Netanyahu’s ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Homeland is about the present historical moment too.

Beck recognises that understanding the war on terror requires a wider interpretive range than the conventional idiom of power politics can encompass. He uses literary sources to reconstruct the archetypal encounter with the dark-skinned other. His guide is Richard Slotkin, whose Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860, first published in 1973, illuminates the murderous rage long concealed in US history textbooks by anodyne phrases like ‘westward expansion’.

Yet the idea of the mythic frontier, important as it is, doesn’t capture every aspect of the war on terror: its religious intensity for example, or the resistance of the warriors to learning from their repeated failures. This kind of warmaking is not based on a reasonable assessment of the evidence: it is rooted in a faith-based belief system – an outlook fostered by evangelical Protestantism for much of US history, but now cut loose from its theological moorings and surviving, even flourishing, among all sorts of Americans, including many who have never been inside a church. Ever since evangelical revivals swept across the country in the 19th century, American history has been animated by efforts to imagine the local network of believers as a righteous community – one that will eventually expand to the entire nation, perhaps the world. At the same time, such communities are haunted by the fear of falling away from righteousness. Waves of worry about moral decline also periodically washed over the political class, rallying its members to rededicate themselves to their collective missionary purpose.

The ideal of a righteous community left little room for moral uncertainty: one was either included or excluded, saved or damned. Believers had an air of millenarian expectancy, excited but anxious, waiting for the Messiah to return – or, in the Jewish version, to come for the first time. In both Jewish and Christian traditions, the motif of waiting for the Messiah sets the moral stage for a range of possibilities: everything from withdrawing from the world to making the world a better place for the Messiah to inhabit, as in Social Gospel Protestantism and Reform Judaism. This tradition reinforced a powerful social democratic ethos, but it also led the way to emotional ground jointly occupied by hard-right Israeli and Christian Zionists. The mingling of hope and anxiety, the mood of tense expectancy, the endless (perhaps impatient) waiting, all intensified by the need to reaffirm communal righteousness through missionary commitment: this shared sensibility also intensified the craving for conquest within Israel’s leadership and among its American defenders. There are many reasons war fever has raged out of control, as Homeland brilliantly shows, but the millenarian worldview contributed to igniting the conflagration. How else can we explain the compulsion to repeat failed strategies time after time, still less the willingness to destroy the entire world, oneself included, to fulfil what one believes is a divinely ordained purpose?

Beck begins​ by noting that for most Americans, the primal experience of the 11 September attacks was watching the towers fall again and again on the television news. ‘The situation’s emotional truth,’ Beck writes, was ‘a feeling of total helplessness, that there was nothing anyone could do.’ It was like watching a Hollywood disaster movie. But it was real. The disquieting sense of impotence was profound. The desperate need to find examples of effective agency focused on first responders, firefighters especially. The TV audiences didn’t realise that the firefighters themselves were often helpless, and that most people who escaped did so under their own steam. The first responder became an instant cultural hero – one of many who emerged, literally or metaphorically, from the ruins of the World Trade Center.

As Beck recognises, post-9/11 politics and popular culture were both rooted in that mass trauma of impotent spectatorship. He quotes the question asked by Susan Faludi in The Terror Dream (2007): what if the ‘deepest psychological legacy’ of the war on terror was not ‘the pleasure we now take in dominance but the original shame that domination seeks desperately to conceal’? As Beck writes, people go to ‘extraordinary lengths’ to avoid experiencing shame. ‘They deflect, lash out, rationalise, or lose themselves in hysterics. They start fights they can’t win, search desperately for hidden enemies in their midst, and see the world that surrounds them as filled with potential threats.’ The last sentence captures the self-defeating, bipartisan sludge that is US national security policy in the 21st century.

Beck aims to explain where the shame originated. Following Slotkin, he explores the deepest roots of American warmaking in colonial captivity narratives and tales of heroic hunters. Most captivity narratives were written by female English colonists who had been taken prisoner by Indians, then rescued and brought back to ‘civilisation’; as Beck says, these tales ‘converted real, traumatic experiences into parables of trial and redemption’. The captives returned with a renewed (if sometimes ambivalent) commitment to their own righteous community and its superiority over the savages surrounding them. But some of them still lay awake at night, as Mary Rowlandson did, reflecting on her past torments and ‘the awful dispensation of the Lord towards us’.

A sanitised version of the captivity narrative, shorn of Rowlandson’s reflections, became the official story of post-9/11 America, as constructed by its leaders: the American people would be freed from their helpless vulnerability by enlisting in a Global War on Terror. The terrorists, like the indigenous inhabitants of North America, would be defeated by American hunter heroes, fictional and historical: figures like Daniel Boone, Natty Bumppo and Davy Crockett – white men who replaced female captives as protagonists in the developing frontier mythology. In hunter hero stories, ‘violence is the only remedy for humiliation, fear and trauma, and it will be administered in whatever quantities are required to wipe the enemy off the face of the earth,’ as Beck writes. Hunter heroes weren’t afraid to break rules: this made them especially appealing in the post-9/11 atmosphere, which was filled with portentous chatter about which rules it would be necessary to break in pursuit of revenge. In a world governed by frontier mythology, in order to triumph over barbarism it was necessary to fight like barbarians.

US leaders cleared a path to that conclusion by saying from the outset that the war on terror would not be a conventional war. It would not even be a conventional guerrilla war, like the one fought against the Viet Cong, who had clear-cut grievances and aims. As Bush’s secretary of state, Colin Powell, said: ‘The enemy is in many places. The enemy is not looking to be found. The enemy is hidden. The enemy is, very often, right here within our own country.’ Such comments encouraged a nightmarish atmosphere of permanent and inescapable crisis, with mysterious enemies everywhere and nowhere.

The dominant tone and thrust of American foreign policy changed overnight. In debates with Al Gore during the 2000 presidential campaign, Bush had come across as a foreign policy moderate, disavowing ‘nation-building’ and expressing concern about overextended US forces abroad. All this was consistent with a moment when, in Beck’s words, ‘foreign policy grandees understood the country’s role as privileged but essentially managerial’: disciplining rogue states when they got out of line, as Saddam did when he invaded Kuwait; keeping the wheels of global capital spinning through institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation.

But when the younger Bush took office he appointed foreign policy advisers who took a less sanguine view of America’s situation in the world. Bush’s war cabinet and its support staff saw nothing but ‘growing threats to the American peace established at the end of the Cold War’, as Robert Kagan, a former State Department official under Reagan, and William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, wrote in an essay collection called Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defence Policy, published in 2000, the election year. Present Dangers was an ur-text of neoconservative thinking. For these fearful, truculent policymakers it was almost as if the towers had already fallen.

Their fearful truculence fundamentally shaped the Bush team’s ideology, which pundits were describing as ‘neoconservative’ well before 9/11. Chief among the neoconservative ideologues were Richard Perle (aide to Donald Rumsfeld), Paul Wolfowitz (deputy secretary of defence) and Elliott Abrams (National Security Council senior director). All of these men contributed to Present Dangers. The book was a blueprint for US foreign policy, which would be characterised by neoconservative fears and fantasies for the next quarter-century. As I write, we are facing the consequences of direct US involvement in Israel’s unprovoked invasion of Iran; a ceasefire is currently in place, but how hostilities play out remains to be seen. All the old arguments for regime change (or collapse into chaos) are being trundled out, as they were two decades ago in the run-up to the Iraq War. At this point, millenarian habits of mind seem unavoidably present. Doing God’s will often requires doing the same thing again and again, as the Millerite sect showed in the 1840s: when their predictions of the world’s end kept missing the mark, they just kept rescheduling.

The capture of US public discourse by a narrow millenarian sect deserves some explanation – especially since the sect’s commitment to forever war is sharply at odds with American public opinion and sectarian-backed imperial adventures have proved reliably calamitous. Despite this, a militant cast of mind has flourished in media and government circles. In Max Weber’s typology, the sect has become a church – at home with wealth and power and governed by Church Fathers who learned geopolitical casuistry as directors of US intelligence agencies, the neoconservatives’ institutional home.

In retrospect, this coup d’état, extended and expanded since the Bush years, is both predictable and puzzling. It is unsurprising that a millenarian cadre, animated by a rabidly militarist ideology reminiscent of reactionary Cold Warriors, could move from the fringes to the centre of the Republican party: Reagan had paved the way by domesticating militarism in his sunny Frank Capra vision of virtuous nationhood and manhood. What is remarkable is that this same ideology, tarted up with some identitarian cosmetics, would capture the Democratic Party as well. Under Clintonite rule, Democrats could get on board with imperial adventurism just as avidly as Republicans, especially if the adventure was conducted in a bracing atmosphere of moral urgency. This was the way the Washington foreign policy consensus reshaped itself to conform to the emerging orthodoxy. How did it happen so quickly and completely? The underexplored possibility remains the importance of the millenarian sensibility – impatient with waiting, anxious and fearful, but eager for apocalyptic conflict with a savage enemy.

Waiting for the Messiah turns out to be a lot like waiting for the barbarians. In J.M. Coetzee’s great novel, much time in the imperial outpost is spent waiting for an apocalyptic event, a showdown with the barbarians who must be obliterated by the advance of empire. For those in the frontier settlement, no other outcome is thought to be possible, until the pathetic remnants of the empire’s expeditionary force begin to straggle back. Like the imperial state in Waiting for the Barbarians, the US and Israel are convinced of their exalted status as Chosen Nations; their leaders are drunk on exceptionalist fantasies and committed to conquering populations they deem inferior.

The ascendancy of neoconservative thought in Washington helps to explain why parts of Present Dangers seem consistent with what now passes for bold thinking among the wing-chair set at the Cosmos Club. In his contribution, for example, Elliott Abrams assaulted the ‘naive optimism’ of Bush I and Clinton’s search for a peace settlement in the Middle East. Abrams’s alternative was to reject diplomatic solutions and focus instead on pursuing security for Israel through military domination of actual and potential enemies throughout the region. This has now become a declared justification for Israel’s genocide in Gaza. What was once a reactionary Zionist fantasy (the ‘clean break’ with Oslo-style diplomacy) has become a respectable part of public discourse. Israel has played a major part in the neoconservative turn of American foreign policy. No one can discount the role of its lobbyists in building support for what would once have been considered extreme and dangerous foreign policy adventurism. But the Israel lobby could never have done the job alone.

What really put the neoconservatives over the top was 9/11. Who knows how they would have fared had the towers never fallen? They faced substantial opposition, including from within their own party. ‘But because September 11 did happen, they were able to realise their vision on the largest possible scale, all at once,’ as Beck observes. The neoconservatives’ strident bellicosity perfectly suited the post-9/11 mood, which infused America’s managerial role with messianic fury. The world would be cleansed of terrorists; there would be zero tolerance for such vermin – just like Reagan’s war on drugs. What war aims could better provide the moral certainties that Americans (or at least their political class) craved, after the ambiguities and mendacities of Vietnam?

Yet the neoconservatives knew that the American populace remained wary of overseas adventures and intolerant of mass-casualty foreign wars, and there was no longer a draft to force them into uniform. Fighting an overseas war required not only reliance on a compliant media to manufacture consent but also the use of a smaller, more mobile fighting force. Special Forces fitted that bill, adding the double-barrelled appeal of secrecy and hypermasculinity. They were the current reincarnations of the hunter heroes of frontier mythology – ‘awesome physical specimens’ (in Beck’s words), unbound by bourgeois convention, bold enough to break the rules when necessary (which, in a war on terror, was pretty much all the time). After the end of the draft they became ‘the closest thing the country has to a sanctified class’. Small wonder that when the Department of Defence signed on for consulting work with Hollywood filmmakers, the government contractors did more than provide expertise on weaponry, enthusiastically taking up the role of scriptwriters – and removing anything remotely resembling criticism of the US military.

Contradictory​ messages streamed from Washington in the days following the attacks. They ‘changed everything’ and changed nothing. From the outset, Bush and his staff advised Americans to go to work, go shopping, take the whole family to Disney World. If you alter your daily routine, especially if you stop having fun, then (the refrain went) ‘the terrorists will have already won.’ As late as 2015, Obama was still striking the same chord: ‘We cannot give them the victory of changing how we go about living our lives.’

An atmosphere of strain, a willed normality, pervaded everyday life. While it may have been ‘comforting to shop’, as Beck says, what was sold was also part of the story. Gun sales shot up, and so did sales of SUVs – people felt safer sitting up high. Time magazine, finger on the American pulse as always, noted the transformation of the soccer mom into the ‘security mom’: ‘Her civil liberties seem less important to her than they used to, especially compared with keeping her children safe.’ This sociological fantasy legitimated the false choice between abstract ‘civil liberties’ and the innocent bystanders strapped into the back seat of the Range Rover – the sort of choice that greenlit the coup that was unfolding in Washington.

The yoking together of faux normality and draconian security emerged with particular clarity at the 2002 Super Bowl in New Orleans. The normal part was present in what Beck calls the ‘militaristic bombast and apple-pie-sentimentality’ of the pre-game show, which included Paul McCartney singing ‘Freedom’ with ‘no hint of the naive peacenik of yore’, as one reporter noted. But the stadium and the surrounding neighbourhoods were cordoned off and swarming with armed police. McCartney sang his paean to freedom in ‘one of the least free areas in the United States’, as Beck writes. Never before had the nation seen such ‘an enormous, complex and intrusive security apparatus’ – which only intensified the anxieties it was meant to relieve by reminding everyone of all the bad things that could happen.

An ever expanding quest for a reified, fetishised feeling of security animated the logic of the Global War on Terror. Victory required more than hunkering down and sealing the borders: the US had to project power into the world. The National Football League’s collaboration with Homeland Security at the Super Bowl paved the way for the militarisation of public space. This was the fate of Ground Zero, which eventually became an obsessively monitored ‘security zone’. Individuals were also monitored by new surveillance tools and practices. The quest for security at the US border led to a preoccupation with preventing terrorism by profiling passengers according to facial expressions, body language and emotional demeanour. (Be careful about showing annoyance or any other ‘negative’ trait.) ‘It wasn’t just that the Transportation Security Authority was going to invade your privacy – you were going to behave as though you liked it, too,’ Beck writes. The new method was called SPOT – Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques. As a project manager at the Department of Homeland Security told Congress, he and his colleagues had been examining people’s mannerisms, modes of sitting or standing, staring or not staring, looking down and the like – all ‘to establish whether there is something to detect’. Apparently, SPOT didn’t result in a single arrest of a terrorist. But the new surveillance practices did help create a world of universal mistrust where everyone was spying on everyone else.

Still, some people have been more spied on than others. Profiling behavioural traits to identify potential terrorists could easily slide into identification by racial, cultural and political group. In the weeks after 9/11, much of the American population was caught up in racist and Islamophobic stereotypes; hate crimes proliferated against Arabs and Muslims, even imaginary ones, like the turbaned Sikh murdered outside his own gas station in Mesa, Arizona on 15 September 2001. Persons of interest were rounded up by the FBI after criticising US foreign policy or conducting even brief internet searches on jihad, weapons and combat training. Sometimes those arrested were simply unattached young Muslim men who had displayed no suspicious behaviour at all. Unable to find real threats, law enforcement was forced to imagine them and to engage in what Beck calls ‘pre-emptive prosecution’ – convictions wholly or partly concocted by law enforcement. To provide spurious evidence, police often resorted to entrapment. This systematic misconduct led to the arrest of thousands of innocent people. As Beck concludes, ‘the threat of domestic terrorism was largely a hysterical fiction.’

Meanwhile, the Patriot Act, passed in October 2001 with 66 dissenting votes in the House and one in the Senate, had granted expansive new powers to law enforcement: citizens and non-citizens alike could be jailed or deported on evidence that could be kept secret; those accused could be refused bail and access to lawyers; they could be subject to indefinite detention at newly constructed camps, where they were tried by military tribunals, not courts. The ‘post-9/11 dragnet’, Beck charges, was ‘one of the most shameful episodes in the country’s history’. To illustrate, he provides an account of Adama Bah, a 16-year-old Muslim girl who was brought to New York City from Guinea when she was a toddler. In March 2005, FBI agents burst into her family’s apartment at dawn, with her handcuffed father in tow (he had been arrested at the local mosque), claiming there were irregularities in his immigration papers and shouting: ‘We’re going to deport you and your whole family!’ Adama and her parents were dragged off to jail and interrogated. She was told that Tashnuba, a girl from her mosque, had written her name on a list of potential suicide bombers. She later learned that FBI agents told Tashnuba that Adama had written her name on a suicide bomber list. No such list was ever found.

Adama and Tashnuba spent six weeks at a federal detention centre in Pennsylvania, where they were strip-searched several times a day and told: ‘You no longer have rights.’ Adama’s family hired a lawyer and the government eventually granted her release on condition that she keep a 10 p.m. curfew and wear an ankle bracelet 24 hours a day. She wore it for two and a half years, until she was finally issued a green card. She was never given any justification for her treatment, which was common for Muslims regardless of gender, age or class. Together they supplied a steady stream of scapegoats to keep Americans believing they were in perpetual danger – and that only the security state could protect them.

The top-down effort to control the national mood was a direct result of the diffuse and boundless nature of the war Bush had declared. He could have focused on al-Qaida in Afghanistan, but instead his administration made the entire world its battlefield, beginning with the expansion of the war to Iraq in March 2003. Israelis became the overseas cheerleaders for the invasion. I remember sitting in a diner in Lambertville, New Jersey, across a table from Gadi Taub – then a PhD candidate at Rutgers, now a prominent Israeli journalist. He confidently predicted that, once Saddam Hussein was overthrown, the Iraqis would embrace American-style democracy, just as Germany and Japan had done after the Second World War. This preposterous belief passed for conventional wisdom on both sides of the Atlantic. Expectations ran high. ‘Iraq will be the first step’ towards ‘structurally changing the entire area’, an Israeli general announced after the invasion. American neoconservatives agreed: the war on terror required the transformation of the Middle East through toppling autocracies and replacing them with democracies – or what the CIA and Mossad considered democracies.

Despite all the talk about democracy, a crucial component of it – public debate – was missing in the run-up to the Iraq War. Only pro-war views got a fair hearing, or indeed any hearing at all. In the first two weeks of February 2003, 267 current or former government officials appeared on major US TV networks to discuss the coming war. Only one (Edward Kennedy) was opposed to it, and even he treated it as a foregone conclusion. As Beck says, the media – including the New York Times, CNN et al – ‘refused to stage a real debate’. Public officials assumed their task was ‘confidence-building and grief management’, as Sontag wrote. ‘Politics, the politics of a democracy – which entails disagreement, which promotes candour – has been replaced by psychotherapy.’ She was among those whom conservatives and centre-left liberals wanted to silence, Beck writes, just as they wanted to suppress ‘any deviations, no matter how minute, from the scripted morality play of mourning, national innocence and vengeance’.

Besotted with Bush’s militaristic posturing in the months and years after 9/11, the US media have remained infatuated by presidential displays of military might ever since. Fareed Zakaria of CNN went so far as to declare that Trump ‘became president of the United States’ only after he had launched Tomahawk missiles into Syria – ‘as though it were impossible to embody the full majesty of the office’, Beck writes, ‘without killing people over something of negligible strategic importance’. After 9/11, Congress passed a series of resolutions granting the president nearly absolute power over when, where and how to launch military action anywhere in the world. The stage was set for the enactment of the vision contained in Bush’s Second Inaugural Address in 2005, when he promised to lead a crusade to drive tyranny from the face of the earth.

As​ the promoters of the war on terror waxed grandiose, they orchestrated a propaganda campaign requiring Muslims to play two contradictory roles. First, they had to be defined as barbarians who understood only violent force. This was the war on terror’s foundational logic. If the US had acknowledged al-Qaida as a group with political grievances, no matter how abhorrent to Americans, conflict could have been confined to Afghanistan. But if terrorism had no rational explanation or causes, terrorists’ putative grievances were merely cover for irremediable barbarism. Confronted by ‘a group of people who were not only immune to reason but also believed that victory could be found only in domination and destruction’, Beck writes, ‘the US could claim that it had no choice but to pursue extremists to the ends of the earth, no matter the cost.’

Yet at the same time, to placate liberal imperialists like Hillary Clinton and win popular support for a distant conflict, the architects of the war on terror had to raise the moral ante by giving Muslims a dual status – not only must they be barbarians, but also ‘innocent victims in need of saving, people who longed for liberation at the hands of America’s armed forces’, in Beck’s words. The balancing of innocence and savagery among the enemy was difficult enough, but what really undermined the Americans’ pretence at humanitarian motives was the revelation of the torture they routinely inflicted on prisoners, most notoriously at Abu Ghraib.

Beck documents the role of torture as a titillating spectacle shared by soldiers on the ground and civilians back home. ‘Nothing communicated the viciousness and ghastly inventiveness of the American guards at Abu Ghraib more effectively than the fact that they wanted to photograph the torture,’ Beck writes. The vicious behaviour was not confined to prison guards. Military intelligence officers gave detailed instructions on torture methods including sleep deprivation and other means of weakening prisoners between interrogation sessions. Meanwhile, Americans at home became fond of watching torture in films and TV shows. Before 9/11, prime-time television showed fewer than four scenes of torture per year; after 9/11, it showed more than a hundred. TV shows like 24 made it look as if torture works. At one point the hero of 24, Jack Bauer, resigns from his counterterrorism unit before he illegally tortures someone, to make sure the unit won’t be held responsible. Sometimes Daniel Boone has to break the rules but he will always cover his bosses’ collective ass.

From top to bottom, American society became entangled with torture. Military intelligence officers were enablers of the prison guards and were in turn enabled by the White House lawyer John Yoo and Bush’s Office of Legal Counsel – whose decisions weren’t bound by congressional oversight or judicial review. This institutional support for torture changed people. Up and down the chain of command, Beck observes, Americans who saw the Afghan and Iraq wars as revenge missions were disposed towards sadism. Soldiers abused and tortured detainees without being ordered to do so by officers – ‘sadism was a part of the project from the very beginning,’ in Beck’s words. ‘The government’s legalisation of torture was not a deviation from the war’s purpose but an attempt to formalise an aspect of the war that had been present at the outset.’

Torture was deeply rooted in the history of North American encounters with the aboriginal other: frontier justice had stressed the necessity of moral flexibility. Soldiers ‘made out of suspected terrorists a new kind of Indian’, Beck says, ‘a people born and raised so far from the heart of real civilisation that violence and humiliation were the only languages they could be expected to understand’. But what happened after 9/11 was something new: the legitimation of torture at the highest levels of government.

The ethics of the political class had been sullied, and some of its leading members tried to clean up the mess without taking or assigning too much blame. ‘Even before I came into office,’ Obama said, ‘I was very clear that in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 we did some things that were wrong. We did a whole lot of things that were right, but we tortured some folks. We did some things that were contrary to our values.’ The painful locution ‘we tortured some folks’ revealed the usually nimble Obama striking a faux-populist note at the worst possible time. And his claim that torture was ‘contrary to our values’ was aspirational rather than factual. As Beck makes clear, when it came to fighting brown-skinned barbarians – whether in the Black Hills of Dakota, the Philippine jungle, or the Mekong Delta – torture was as American as cherry pie.

Many Americans (including myself) believed Obama would bring an end to the Bush administration’s coup; instead, the new president merely refined it. There were a few hopeful signs at first – he promised to ban torture and to close Guantánamo Bay – but he soon showed signs of being absorbed into the Washington consensus. He quickly embraced Washington’s double standard towards Israel; in a 2009 speech advocating the two-state solution he called for only one side, the Palestinians, to ‘abandon violence’. Ultimately, Obama’s main achievement was to recast the cultural style of the war on terror, not its substance. His administration’s attempt to rename the Global War on Terror as the ‘Overseas Contingency Operation’ failed for obvious reasons, although it did demonstrate his wish to establish a more technocratic, less melodramatic idiom for warmaking. In practice, ‘banning torture’ meant a shift from flagrantly violent abuse worthy of prime-time TV to psy-ops involving patience and cunning. Most important, Obama’s approach was torn by contradiction; at the same time as declaring an end to Bush’s Global War on Terror, he also said he had ‘no plans to diminish counterterrorism operations abroad’ – which could involve who knew what enhanced interrogation techniques at ‘black sites’ around the world. He vastly expanded CIA drone operations, and his administration’s lawyers decided that drone strikes did not require a congressional declaration of war. Reports of civilian casualties were minimised by the bureaucratic gambit of classifying all ‘military-age males’ who had been killed as ‘enemy combatants’. Unlike Bush’s invasions, Obama’s ‘surge’ in Afghanistan was preceded by what seemed to be thoughtfulness, but still ended with the war becoming the longest in US history. As Edward Snowden revealed, Obama authorised unprecedented surveillance of Americans’ private lives; the president later asserted without evidence that Americans really didn’t disapprove of mass surveillance without a warrant as much as they imagined they did.

Obama institutionalised and expanded the war he had promised to end. Like other liberal Democrats, he wanted to elevate it above revenge and racism. Yet his desire to cultivate nobler aims only prolonged the fighting. Osama bin Laden’s death could have ended the war on terror, as Beck observes, but Obama vowed to keep it going: ‘having accomplished the war’s only goal that was both concrete and achievable, Obama decided the country would continue to pour money and blood into a project whose only remaining function was to fuel bigotry and anger.’

As the war on terror began to seem genuinely endless, it became increasingly unpopular. Why did it continue? The bottom line, Beck believes, was that it seemed to be a solution to secular stagnation (that is, stagnation unconnected to the business cycle). The ‘war for oil’ conducted by the military-industrial complex was only part of a larger economic project, the attempt to speed up the slowing growth that had bedevilled Western capitalism since the 1970s – an effort begun by Reagan and Thatcher which quickly spread across the ideological landscape and was labelled ‘neoliberalism’. This ideology revived all the 19th-century liberal pieties sanctifying unregulated markets and the free flow of capital; what was ‘neo’ about it was its veneer of technocratic expertise, its overt transfer of authority from big government to big business, and its commitment to policing the shambles left by capitalism’s ‘creative destruction’ by means of an increasingly militarised carceral state.

Paul Bremer’s spell as leader of the C0alition Provisional Authority in Iraq epitomised the imperial reach of the neoliberal project. The Bremer regime sought to hollow out Iraqi society and transform it into an exemplar of free-market liberalism. To be part of the world economic order, Bremer & Co. assumed, Iraq must be more like the US, and place few or no constraints on entrepreneurs. Foreign businessmen could parachute in, pay nominal taxes on phenomenal profits, and ignore any legal strictures that might involve investment in the future wellbeing of the country. In Bremer’s belief system, installing a democracy in Iraq meant implementing economic ‘reforms’. Whose ends those reforms served remained an open question. When $8.8 billion in reconstruction funds disappeared in Iraq, Bremer’s financial adviser responded dismissively. ‘Yeah, I understand,’ he told an interviewer. ‘I’m saying what difference does it make?’

Neoliberal policies, wherever they were implemented, spelled insecurity for working people. Beginning in the 1970s, the global economy had witnessed the gradual disappearance of stable, full-time employment and of the safety nets meant to cushion the unemployed. Laid-off workers needed to find a new job (or jobs) quickly. The result was what Beck calls a ‘surge in informal work’ and a dramatic increase in the global ‘surplus population’ – workers without skills, resources or luck enough to land a steady job, who were driven to migrate. But regional politics played its part. After 1967, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza turned Palestinians in one fell swoop into part of the world’s surplus population. The rise of the Palestine Liberation Organisation was a response to this forced economic marginality. Yet since 11 September 2001, attempting to suggest that terrorist acts have anything to do with economic exploitation or inequality has been met with reactions that range from incredulity to howling condemnation.

The war on terror, Beck argues, ‘is a tool for managing the very surplus populations that the end of American-led economic prosperity helped to create, people whom the US now finds itself unable and unwilling to help’. Strategists recognised the centrality of this task even before 9/11. The 1990s were a golden age for think tanks that focused on ‘how the military might reorient itself towards prolonged, sporadic, low-intensity urban conflict’, Beck writes, noting that the armed services considered constructing training sites in rundown urban housing developments – where the US’s own surplus population lives and needs to be managed.

Whatever domestic agendas such conflict promotes, the most striking feature of endless war is its futility. Any honest appraisal of America’s military performance since 9/11 would have to acknowledge a record of consistently catastrophic interventions abroad. The invasion of Iraq produced explosive instability, not democracy, throughout the region. Policymakers’ return to the cold porridge of regime change in Libya and humanitarian intervention in Syria ‘produced only chaos and destruction’, Beck writes. Under Obama, Hillary Clinton used her tenure as secretary of state as a springboard for clumsy meddling – scuttling peace talks in Syria by her demand for Assad’s removal, for example, and plotting the overthrow and murder of Gaddafi, which turned Libya into a failed state and chief arms supplier to jihadists and other ‘moderate rebels’ in Syria. Failure followed failure – unless the interventions were intended to create conditions for permanent war.

None​ of the architects of the continuing disaster in the Middle East has ever been called to account. This ‘impunity culture’, as Beck calls it, has enveloped the war on terror since its inception, forbidding efforts to place any blame on powerful individuals or institutions for war crimes or strategic blunders. Apart from the blank cheque the US has issued to Israel, the most egregious grant of impunity occurred when Obama refused to prosecute Bush, his war cabinet and his Office of Legal Counsel for complicity in torture. In a January 2009 interview on ABC, Obama said that ‘we need to look forward as opposed to looking backward.’ There would be no reckoning, no coming to terms with torture and the people who condoned it. This blanket pardon came from a man who fashioned his own ‘kill list’ and became assassin-in-chief; who authorised more secret drone strikes than any of his predecessors; and who pursued Snowden and other whistleblowers with what Beck calls ‘a frightening intensity’. Obama has been a beneficiary of impunity culture too.

Trump would put his own personal stamp on the concept of impunity, but what made it a systemic feature of US political culture was the Global War on Terror – a conflict conducted by war criminals who have remained unaccountable; ‘a war’, in Beck’s words, ‘that most people agree was detrimental to the country’s international reputation and its capacity for global leadership’. But, at first, the war revived the myth of America’s unique virtue, reinforced by Bush’s ultimatum: ‘Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.’ There would be no diplomacy, even among allies. ‘America demanded allegiance from the rest of the world and offered nothing in return in 2001,’ Beck notes, ‘because America no longer felt it owed the rest of the world anything.’ One of the war’s fundamental (if unarticulated) goals was to confirm that the rest of the world would automatically defer to America, simply because of its overwhelming strength.

Homeland is an indispensable account of how we got to the terrible place we are in. It is also a reminder of how hard it is to tell who ‘we’ are, especially when the government that acts in our name makes its decisions in secret and without public assent or even discussion. The most catastrophic harm inflicted by the war on terror has been the triumph of militarism in foreign policy – the commitment to endless war that tickled Cheney’s fancy a quarter of a century ago. This default setting originated in the deep history of North American settler colonialism. As Beck says, ‘those who launched and supported the war have carried out a series of failed attempts to exorcise the country’s founding trauma of victimisation by setting out into the wilderness in search of savages to dominate.’ Along with these historical roots, there is a millenarian compulsion at work in the recurring clamour for war, one rooted in the righteous community’s need for periodic regeneration through violence, as shown most recently in the aura of déjà vu surrounding the frantic effort to bring the US formally into Israel’s war on Iran, using the same claims deployed two decades ago to justify the invasion of Iraq. It didn’t work the first time, but we must try it again. Beck wrote Homeland before this particular hysteria had resurfaced, but he knew the region was on the brink.

He also knew that the militarist mind-set could shape American perceptions of any alleged adversary, not just Muslims. The legacy of the war on terror ‘flourishes in America’s refusal to see the world as something other than a battlefield’, he writes. This aggressive stance promoted the eastward expansion of Nato, provoking Putin’s actions in Ukraine. As in the war on terror, the US was determined to take the offensive against the alleged aggressors – the Russians – who, despite their pretensions to civilisation, were in the popular imagination barbarians too. As Beck writes, ‘during the first two years of the [Ukraine] war, America’s response has been to escalate the conflict at every opportunity.’ The rhetoric of neoconservative ideologues – Anne Applebaum, Jeffrey Goldberg, Timothy Snyder – recalled the posturing after 9/11: America’s support for Ukraine was described as a ‘transhistorical defence of “civilisation”’ and it was claimed that ‘Vladimir Putin, like Osama bin Laden, is motivated solely by a hatred of freedom.’

The ideology justifying the Ukraine war has been as moralistic and insistent on conformity as the rhetoric surrounding the war on terror. In October 2022, progressive members of Congress were bullied by the party leadership into backing off from even mild criticism of Biden’s war in Ukraine. While the US and Nato settled into what Beck calls ‘militarised intransigence’ in Ukraine, parts of the Washington consensus sought to escalate rivalry with China into armed conflict. Endless war was threatening to become everywhere war.

Nowhere has the continuity with the war on terror been more obvious than in Israel’s war on Gaza. Israel’s strategy, which lay ‘between ethnic cleansing and genocide’ (as Beck says) or combined the two, was ‘exactly the kind of war crime that international courts were established to prosecute’. But as Cheney and his comrades assumed from the beginning, a righteous war to exterminate terrorists rendered older prohibitions obsolete. The Israel-Palestine conflict shows how easily the social and political dynamics at work in the war on terror can come rushing back. The hundreds of Israeli civilians killed on 7 October 2023 were the excuse for the inevitable retaliation by the IDF. But the Israeli government was not interested in retaliation; it wanted to build public support for a war of extermination. So Israeli propagandists manufactured false information about atrocities committed by Hamas on 7 October – beheaded infants, foetuses ripped from their mother’s wombs. Like the Americans who embraced an annihilationist agenda after 9/11, Beck observes, ‘the people cheering on the slaughter drape their bloodlust in a hysterical rhetoric of civilisational defence against a horde of savages.’ Those who object to Israel’s mass murder of Palestinians, like those who have suggested that terrorist acts might have political motives, ‘are accused of being apologists for rape, murder and torture’. If we succumb to the mind-numbing power of words like ‘terrorism’, Beck writes, we enact ‘a morality play in which the only path to “peace” is the total displacement or annihilation of an ancient enemy’.

The situation seems close to hopeless. Simone Weil, quoted by Beck on the Iliad, cuts to the heart of the matter: ‘To be outside a situation so violent as this is to find it inconceivable; to be inside it is to be unable to conceive its end.’ Those of us who seek to conceive an end to endless war must somehow learn to challenge embedded American fixations and fantasies, as well as habits of mind and heart. Success is a long shot, but the stakes are too high not to risk it.