American Warfare

On Richard Beck's 'Homeland'

The South Tower of the World Trade Center Collapses, 2001, Photograph, Getty Images

In the issue dated September 13, 2001, Newsweek magazine ran a photograph of a firefighter carrying a young girl to safety. “Horror at Home,” the caption read, a simple and stark evocation of the tragedy that had occurred two days earlier, when the Twin Towers were struck by two airplanes. The Towers collapsed entirely, blanketing Lower Manhattan in ash, smoke and dust. First responders from throughout the tri-state area raced to the scene, to assist in any way possible, answering the call when it was needed most. The photograph of the firefighter escorting the girl served as a synecdoche for the collective bravery displayed by all of the firefighters, medics and other rescue workers who showed up in droves on that Tuesday morning.

There was one problem, though. The photograph wasn’t taken on 9/11. It wasn’t even taken in New York City. It was taken six years earlier, during the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. Why the substitution? It’s not as if Newsweek lacked material. The site that would come to be known as Ground Zero was extensively photographed on the day of the attacks, and would continue to be for years afterward. Joel Meyerowitz, an award-winning photographer as well as a born-and-raised New Yorker, published a book called Aftermath in 2006, which collected his extensive coverage of the site. Such images were available, had Newsweek wanted them at the time. But it didn’t. Instead, it ran a six-year-old photograph of an entirely different act of terror because, according to Richard Beck’s Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life, that allowed Newsweek to tell the story it felt it needed to tell. Or not a story — this was deeper than that. Primal. A myth. A myth assuring America that, as in the earliest days of its history, before it was even a country, when danger came to town, a strong man would appear to defend the life, and the honor, of a helpless young girl.

This is the core of the story that Beck seeks to tell in his book: the continual struggle to shape the facts on the ground into the sort of myth handed down to the United States from its earliest history. It also, inadvertently, suggests some of the problems that arise in the book. For Beck, at times, struggles in the same way that Newsweek did, trying to impose a narrative onto the events of the War on Terror, whether or not it fits. The result is a book that is often illuminating, sometimes frustrating. That’s how it goes with events in the 21st century: while we know all about what happened, thanks to real-time updates from social media and the surveillance state, we still struggle to make sense of what it all means.

---

Homeland is a hefty book. Five hundred pages, not including notes. The broad remit enables Beck to consider the effects that 9/11, and the subsequent War on Terror, had on virtually every aspect of public life in the United States, from television to architecture to journalism. The book is divided into four sections. The first looks at 9/11 in light of frontier myths; the second recounts the racism and xenophobia that exploded after 2001; the third and longest section examines the economic underpinnings of the war; and the fourth charts the rise of what Beck calls “impunity culture,” as practiced by politicians, journalists, and other figures in public life attempting to capitalize on the opportunities presented by the War on Terror.

The first section is the best. After a bravura chapter detailing the morning of 9/11 through the lens of Good Morning America, Beck dwells extensively on the struggle encapsulated in the Newsweek photograph. The attacks on 9/11, Beck argues persuasively, triggered what could be called a trauma response, one buried deep in the American psyche. Everyone, everywhere, felt helpless. And that sense of helplessness resonated with a much earlier period of American history, one that is rarely spoken of, yet always present, like a prisoner in the basement of some Gothic novel.

In the 17th century, colonists living in New England were often cold, hungry and vulnerable. They were frequently at war with local Native American populations. Soldiers died at astonishing rates, while women struggled to keep their families. Sometimes, as battles swept through small settlements, women were captured by Native Americans. These events formed the basis for the first literary genre birthed in the New World: the captivity narrative.

Captivity narratives were first-person, nonfiction accounts of women who were captured by Native Americans during these wars. They were bestsellers; readers consumed them voraciously. Emblematic of the form was a book by Mary Rowlandson, titled The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, which recounts a period of eleven weeks when Rowlandson was captured by Native Americans, marched through the wilderness, and eventually ransomed. Afterward, she settled in Boston with her family. The captivity narrative, as suggested by the title of Rowlandson’s book, pivots on two points: the absolute danger she was in, and the absolute mercy of God that saw her through her ordeal. Out of trauma, meaning is made. As Beck writes, “It was a similar need for meaning, for a way of understanding the attacks as something other than a spectacle of brutality and victimization, that reactivated those myths on September 11.”

This is the most provocative idea in Homeland, and it’s not even original to Beck. The material on captivity narratives draws on The Terror Dream, the 2007 book from pioneering feminist journalist Susan Faludi. Perhaps it sounds like critique when I say that Beck’s most interesting idea comes from another book, but I do not mean it that way. Just the opposite: I applaud Beck for engaging in such a deep level of research, reading books that everyone else forgot about. I know Faludi, and I’ve followed the growing literature on the War on Terror reasonably closely over the last fifteen years, yet I completely overlooked The Terror Dream. I’m genuinely grateful to Beck for bringing the book to my attention.

Considering the Indian Wars and their resonance in the 21st century, Faludi writes, “What if the deepest psychological legacy of our original war on terror wasn’t the pleasure we now take in dominance, but the original shame that domination seeks desperately to conceal?” Shame — that was the operating emotion that gripped the country. And that was the emotion that compelled the editors of Newsweek to run a six-year-old photo of a different tragedy. At least that photo showed a man rescuing a child — the very image of the rugged frontiersman that would become enshrined in American myth a century after the Indian Wars, as with figures like Daniel Boone. That is how Americans manage their shame: by telling stories about strong men saving helpless women.

---

The second part of Homeland chronicles the process by which the War on Terror operated as a recapitulation of the country’s worst fears. Arab Muslims were cast as enemies of the West, indeed of all civilization, and part of that involved portraying them as the “savages” of Wild West myth. This is familiar territory, the demonization of an entire religion for political gain, but it is still difficult to convey, to readers who may not have witnessed it in real time, just how widespread and all-encompassing it became. Everyone got involved, from New York media figures to Hollywood celebrities, and all points in between. Hate crimes directed at Arabs spiked, and never really descended back to pre-9/11 levels. Jack Bauer tortured women on TV, and superheroes swept into the multiplex to defend American ideals and hack citizens’ private messages. And calls for war grew louder and louder — any war, anywhere.

In a telling historical detail, the sort that critics would accuse of being too obvious were it included in a novel, the connection to the earlier Indian Wars is literally spelled out by the military. When a team of Navy SEALs killed Obama Bin Laden on May 2, 2011, in Abbottabad, Pakistan, they radioed the following words to the White House Situation Room: “Geronimo EKIA.” The acronym stands for “enemy killed in action.” As often happens with military operations, the target in question was given a code name, and that name just so happened to be the name of an Apache warrior who conducted countless raids against colonizers in northern Mexico and the southwestern United States. If the military wanted to prove Faludi’s thesis, they couldn’t have done a better job.

Beck’s coverage of this phase is thorough, if a bit rote. I found myself wishing for the kind of grand theorizing on display in part one. You sure do get more theorizing in part three, though. Beck calls upon an impressive range of thought, and sketches out a history of economic development that spans centuries, to set the stage for the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March of 2003. Beck says in the introduction that part three was his favorite part to write. I must admit, however, that I don’t quite share his enthusiasm.

If Susan Faludi is the guiding thinker of part one, then the guiding thinker of part three is Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci was a Marxist philosopher and writer who lived and worked in his native Italy during the interwar period. Imprisoned by Mussolini for criticizing fascism, he wrote the famous Prison Notebooks while incarcerated, hundreds of notebooks containing his thoughts on culture and political economy, which were edited and disseminated widely in the postwar era, after he had died. (Among the editors who brought his work to the public was Joseph Buttigieg, father of Pete Buttigieg, former mayor of South Bend and the Secretary of Transportation under the Biden Administration.) Gramsci was wont to describe capitalistic empires in seasonal terms, with spring and summer seeing the rise of industry and production, followed by the autumn and winter of credit and financialization. Reading recent history in Gramscian terms, Beck posits that the U.S. is currently in its autumnal phase, with financialization outpacing material production. Which is true enough, I guess. I may not have read much Gramsci myself, but I have watched Margin Call seven times. But what does this have to do with the War on Terror?

During the buildup to the Iraq War, protests erupted around the globe. One message in particular was repeated endlessly: NO BLOOD FOR OIL, commonly written on a sign and held aloft in the city streets. I personally recall seeing such signs myself, during those protests. The message was that the U.S. sought to conquer Iraq in the hopes of gaining access to its vast oil fields, thus supplying the country for decades to come. Yet Beck makes the point that U.S. oil reserves were rather high at the time, as the domestic oil industry was coming up with new ways, namely fracking, to harvest oil on American soil. But the war did serve another economic interest, a financial one. It opened a potential market for U.S. capital to enter and diversify.

There is evidence for such a claim. L. Paul “Jerry” Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority during the early Iraq War and thus the most powerful figure in the country, explicitly saw the nation-building project in economic terms as well as political ones. Iraqi leaders were schooled in the basics of free market economics at the same time as they were instructed in how to conduct polling locations for national elections. The vote went hand in glove with the dollar. Yet the way Beck tells this story, doing so from the great height typical of this sort of grand Marxist-Gramscian thinking, makes the invasion of Iraq seem inevitable. Capital had nowhere else to go, and so it went to Baghdad.

But what this misses is just how radically contingent the Iraq War truly was. Many wars are, in some sense, inevitable, the result of long-simmering battles and structural antagonisms. But the Iraq War as perpetrated by the Bush Administration was the least inevitable war of the last 50 years. Outside forces did not compel the U.S. to invade the country. Even the war in Afghanistan was forced, as the U.S. was compelled to go there in search of Bin Laden. But why Iraq, in 2003?

As a good Gramscian, Beck clearly wants to favor materialist concerns over psychological ones. But I simply do not believe that a materialist analysis offers a complete explanation. One must follow Faludi’s claims of shame, and the attempted projection of strength as a means of erasing that shame, to get a hold on the forces at play.

As is clear today, Bush sought to invade Iraq shortly after 9/11, as a means of winning the victory that his own father failed to win in the Gulf War of 1991. He had the broad support of the country, Republican and Democrat, and did as he pleased. This is why the justification for the war was so sloppy: it was made after the fact, long after the decision to go to war was made, as a kind of formality. This has mostly been forgotten, but the original justification for the war was suspected collusion between Iraq and Al-Qaeda, Saddam Hussein and Bin Laden. That would have been more justifiable, in a way. But the focus quickly shifted to the possible presence of weapons of mass destruction once it was clear that a suspected Al Qaeda connection would never pass muster with the international community.

As anyone with a working knowledge of the region could have told you, Hussein and Bin Laden hated each other. They were sworn enemies. Hussein was a nationalist authoritarian, and a fairly secular one at that, who believed that the brutal power of the state was the only tool that could bring stability to the region. Bin Laden was an omni-national fundamentalist who wished to do away with the trappings of the modern state and install a religious order in its place. Bin Laden actually attempted to declare war on Hussein himself, back in 1991, during Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. Furious at the notion of Western forces setting foot in the Middle East, Bin Laden approached various backers in the region and proceeded, like a kind of jihadist Kendall Roy, to promise that he could personally repel Iraqi forces if he were provided with money, men and resources. He was laughed out of the room, of course. Who would choose to side with a bratty billionaire’s son rather than the most powerful military in the world?

But that knowledge was more or less public in 2003, and would have derailed the plans for war. The grim beauty of making WMDs the centerpiece of the war’s justification was that the very lack of evidence made the case all the more convincing. Of course we haven’t found any WMDs! He’s hiding them! And for a nation that desperately needed to overcome the sense of shame, it was the ideal path.

---

The fourth and final section of the book details what Beck calls “impunity culture,” an accurate if slightly awkward term. While the American public, along with virtually every journalistic institution, was all too happy to go along with Bush’s plans during the run-up to the war, its patience was tested as the war lasted far, far longer than the promised six months. Voters grew frustrated. Journalists did their jobs for once and asked tough questions. Yet those in power continued waging war and surveilling the public, a process that has continued up to the present, regardless of whoever occupied the White House. I suppose I have to give Beck credit here, as he points out that the systems we’ve built over the last two decades have reached a level of such ubiquity that everyone, Republican and Democrat, private and public, assumes their continuance. The system is, well, systemic.

Yet the shame is systemic as well, I believe. The shame of 9/11 gets renewed with each new system upgrade of the security state, trained upon some new target, whether domestic or foreign. As long as that shame remains unexpurgated, it will compel the edifice erected in its name to carry out ever greater injustices.

One sees this cycle of shame reflected in what many view as the genocide in Gaza, presently being carried out by the Israeli government with the aid of the United States. Though the attacks of October 7, 2023 are mentioned only briefly in Beck’s book, as they occurred late in its writing, they can’t help but resonate with the same themes of shame and violence. It is grimly ironic how easily Israel has been cast as Puritan homesteaders, and Palestine as the invading natives, whose attack on the homestead summons unquenchable shame that bequeaths an endless parade of vengeance. Perhaps, aside from geopolitical concerns, the U.S. senses, at an unconscious level, that it can take revenge upon the Native Americans at last, by assisting in the killing of Palestinians. Regeneration through violence indeed.

Though it may not have been Beck’s intention, it is possible that Homeland, by summarizing the last quarter-century so exhaustively, effectively signals the end of an era. From the vantage of the present day, whatever comes next feels likely to be worse. But as the book amply demonstrates, the world can change in an instant. For the worse, generally, but perhaps, just for once, for the better.

Adam Fleming Petty is a writer living in Michigan. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Commonweal, Gawker, and many other venues.