Richard Beck, Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life (Penguin, 2024).
Almost a quarter-century after 9/11, the War on Terror no longer dominates U.S. foreign policy and is less central to our politics and culture. While this conflict has few defenders today, the questions of why it was fought, how it went awry, and what this history means for the future of U.S. policy are still up in the air.
For the restraint movement, associated with organizations like the Quincy Institute, the Cato Institute, and Defense Priorities, the War on Terror was a string of unmitigated disasters. It caused geopolitical destabilization and unnecessary deaths, overextended U.S. resources, and eroded democracy and the rule of law. But while many might agree with this, restrainers go further. deeper faultiness of the idea that the United States can act as the fulcrum of world order. For them, the lessons of this conflict are that U.S. leaders should be more skeptical of military interventions, reduce the country’s defense spending and overseas presence, and limit commitments outside of vital strategic zones. The restrainers have formed an uneasy coalition of left-wing, realist, libertarian, and nationalist conservatives.
Enter journalist Richard Beck’s new book, Homeland, which depicts the War on Terror as a massive, counterproductive atrocity driven by the desire to preserve U.S. economic hegemony and maintained by racism. It has received effusive praise from Quincy Institute co-founder Andrew Bacevich, a conservative realist, and Greg Grandin, a left-wing historian also associated with Quincy.
Despite some fascinating cultural history, Beck gives a flawed account of U.S. foreign policy in this period, flattening the War on Terror into a morality tale. He rarely bases his claims about U.S. policy in hard evidence and seems unaware of much recent scholarly work. He makes little effort to understand decisionmakers’ motives and perspectives, preferring to fold them into his overarching framework.
Homeland is what historians call a “usable past,” which refers to a “retrospective reconstruction” of history designed “to serve the needs of the present.” Beck is open about this, asserting that “the writing of history is not only an attempt to make the past intelligible to the present; it is an effort to turn the present into something the future can use.” He issues strident calls for social justice, accountability for U.S. leaders, and a reduction of our global role. These may be worthy goals; the problem is that they guide Beck’s selective presentation of evidence, leading to tendentious arguments. The result is a politically useful book for restrainers but not a reliable history.
This review focuses on two core problems with Homeland that reflect deeper issues in how pro-restraint writers approach the War on Terror. The first is the superimposing of motives, often without strong documentary evidence, onto U.S. leaders, which creates oversimplified explanations of their behavior. The second is a preference for moralizing about history in ways that serve present-day agendas but capture neither the complexities of this conflict nor the challenges of leadership.
This essay also raises a larger question: Can we make good policy changes on the basis of flawed history? The short answer is no, and that we don’t have to. The restrainers are right in many ways about recent overseas disasters. The Iraq War was an unforced fiasco reflecting unrealistic ideas about the U.S. global role, Afghanistan dragged on without clear objectives, and detention and torture policies eroded the nation’s reputation. As a result, critics do not need to rely on biased, overheated histories to make their case. Moreover, if they fall back on morality tales disguised as history, they will be more likely to dismiss the many problems that leaders faced in the War on Terror and continue to face today, making their recommendations less persuasive to those they must sway if they ever hope to change policy.
Why Did We Fight the War on Terror?
Homeland would have been stronger if it had focused more on the subtitle: The War on Terror in American Life. Beck begins with an excellent account of the surreal horror of 9/11 itself. He then analyzes how this conflict altered culture and daily life, ranging from superhero movies to parenting habits to the nature of public space. He shows how movies like American Sniper or the Batman and Iron Man series helped sustain Americans’ consent for tough security policies and expansive wars without prompting much self-reflection from viewers.
For instance, in , one of the most popular films of the 21st century, Batman and his allies combat the Joker (essentially a nihilistic terrorist) by creating a computer program that can make any cell phone in Gotham a surveillance device. Once the threat is neutralized, he destroys this program. This is portrayed as a hard but justified choice by a responsible hero to defeat an existential threat. The underlying message, as Beck argues, is to trust the people using similar tools on behalf of U.S. security. This book should prompt reflection about the security culture that has distorted American life for the past two decades.
But Homeland runs into serious issues when it pivots to foreign policy. Beck devises an omni-explanation for U.S. strategic decisions: it was all about capitalism. He eschews the crude “blood-for-oil” hypothesis in favor of the grander argument that the War on Terror was an attempt to preserve U.S. economic dominance by prying recalcitrant economies. The Iraq War, he contends, was “an attempt to force Iraq to join the twenty-first-century capitalism club, to make it subject to the same incentives and rules and pressures that structured the economics of all the other countries that had accepted the fact of America’s global leadership.”
Beck roots U.S. hegemony in “its ability to superintend the global economy as a whole,” extending capitalism and America’s favorable place in the economic order. But the capitalist machine, he contends, sputtered in the 1970s, leading to a slowdown of growth that sapped the foundations of U.S. power. 9/11 offered a pretext for replacing regimes that defied assimilation into this system. This is Beck’s explanation for the War on Terror’s sprawling nature: “At its foundation, that’s what the war on terror is: a potential solution to the problem of slowing global growth and America’s declining power.”
This is argument by insinuation: the United States seeks to defend an open capitalist order that serves its interests (an uncontroversial statement), therefore the Iraq War must be a product of this goal. Never mind that Iraq, the world’s 51st largest economy, and Afghanistan, now featuring a gross domestic product smaller than any U.S. state, were unlikely to change the course of economic history.
The bigger problem is that Beck provides no evidence that this was an actual motive for the Iraq War. Steve Coll, Melvyn Leffler, Robert Draper, Michael Mazarr, and others have scoured the available archival record, conducted hundreds of interviews, and found virtually nothing supporting this thesis. Beck seems unaware of this scholarship, failing to cite these and other prominent works on the War on Terror. This is not an academic book, but Beck does not even address the questions these scholars raise.
For example, in his section on other proposed reasons for the Iraq War, he cites unsubstantiated ideas like George W. Bush invading to finish his daddy’s business or to distract from domestic failures. This misrepresents an extensive literature on the war, which focuses on two primary motivations: security and hegemony. Unlike Beck’s hypothesis, there is documentary evidence to support both claims. The war’s architects were deeply concerned about national security in the post-9/11 atmosphere, and their fears were crucial in their drive to war. They were also strategic primacists who believed that U.S. power was the fundamental pillar of global order. They sought to remove what they perceived as a security threat and intimidate challengers to U.S. power by making an example of Iraq. Understanding the war’s origins requires synthesizing these motives. Moreover, that the United States imposed neoliberal reforms on Iraq during the occupation, as Beck relates, does not prove this was the war’s cause.
Beck dodges this complexity by dismissing Bush’s case for war out of hand as “laughably weak, ridiculous on its face” and based in “lies.”Indeed, Bush’s case was flawed and dishonest: He and his supporters exaggerated evidence about weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein’s support of al-Qaeda and conjured evidence from dubious sources. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t believe it.
Furthermore, Beck’s dismissal overlooks the context in which the Iraq War debate occurred. U.S. intelligence agencies and those of many allies as well as weapons inspections chiefs believed that Saddam had retained some capacity to build weapons of mass destruction or was reviving such programs. There were varying levels of perception, and allies like France and Germany correctly challenged the Bush administration’s claims.
But there were also numerous unanswered questions about what had happened to Saddam’s non-conventional weapons, and inspectors had left Iraq in 1998. Thanks to rigorous scholarship from Steve Coll and others, we know now that Saddam had unilaterally destroyed the vast majority of these weapons in 1991 but failed to document this in a way that could demonstrate his disarmament to inspectors. His regime then, for a variety of reasons, obstructed inspections for nearly a decade, creating the impression that he had somethingto hide. As Robert Jervis argues, the “inferences” that intelligence analysts made about the Iraq’s behavior “were very plausible, much more so than the alternatives,” even if we now understand the alternatives were true.
Beck shows no signs that he has engaged with this literature. Indeed, doing so would be inconvenient for his argument. Dismissing the idea that widely held concerns about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction motivated the war bolsters his claim that it was really about capitalism. But it does not capture a messier truth.
Homeland’s all-consuming framework for understanding U.S. foreign policy also leads it to a dubious analysis of the nation’s foes, including al-Qaeda. If the War on Terror was driven by capitalist hegemony, then U.S. enemies must be foes of that order. Beck argues that “al-Qaeda hoped to strike at the America-led global economic order,” symbolized by the Twin Towers. Like everything bad in this story, terrorism is a product of capitalism, or of the “surplus population” suffering under the world’s imbalanced distribution of economic power and the regimes that uphold this system. Generalizing wildly about a complex phenomenon, he asserts terrorism is “a demand that all of this be made to stop,” committed by “people who are stuck” in dysfunctional societies.
Once again, Beck flattens a complex story into something convenient for his argument. Al-Qaeda of course objected to the neoliberal order; it objected to almost every facet of the modern world, including democracy. It protested specific U.S. foreign policies, but it was not seeking mere adjustments to the status quo, economic or otherwise. It sought a global revolution that would eradicate Western power in the Islamic world, topple apostate regimes like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and impose its belief systems. In an old-school Marxist turn, Beck treats the religious motives of transnational jihadists as something epiphenomenal to economics. These terrorists may couch their actions in a religious idiom, he asserts, but the roots of their behavior are economic. Again, this is useful for his argument, but it does not appreciate the true radicalism of al-Qaeda or the wide variety of Islamist terrorist groups.
Morality Tales
Homeland is a moral critique as well as a history. Those lines blur throughout the book, to its detriment. Beck is obviously right about the objectionable moral nature of much of the War on Terror. But this book is morally as well as historically simplistic. Beck portrays a binary of rapacious American imperialists oppressing Muslims at home and abroad, declaring: “Wars are sustained by rage and that rage seeks an object. In the War on Terror, that object was Muslims.” He contends that in the American imagination, Muslims were either “victims to be saved or barbarians to be eliminated.”
A true moral reckoning, however, requires wrestling with complexity and contradiction. There were successes in this conflict, albeit ones that could have been achieved without disasters like Iraq. There were no major, externally directed attacks on U.S. soil, al-Qaeda has been severely degraded as an operational organization, and, in Afghanistan at least, there were improvements to quality of life, women’s rights, and representative government. These were tenuous gains, as Beck argues elsewhere, but they are dead now with the Taliban’s victory.
As writers like Anand Gopal, Elliot Ackerman, and Carter Malkasian have demonstrated, these conflicts featured a bewildering array of behavior that defies simple moral boxes. Muslims played many roles: brutal Islamist extremists seeking domination, religious parties contesting for power, women, activists, and civic leaders for whom these wars meant both destabilization and opportunities for a better life. Literally millions of Muslims backed, if not led, efforts to prevent groups like the Taliban, al-Qaeda in Iraq, and the Islamic State from seizing power. Americans also ran the gamut from sincere believers in helping Muslims build free, stable societies to outright racists. Such ambiguity is nowhere in this book.
Moreover, in his moralizing argument, Beck rarely considers the uncertainty, pressures, and imperfect options that beset policymakers. This is most evident in his critique of President Barack Obama. Like other critics, Beck faults Obama for continuing the War on Terror and even expanding it, as in the 2009 Afghan surge. He excoriates Obama’s drone strike program, calling for the criminal prosecution of those who conducted this campaign.
Beck, however, makes little effort to consider the scale of the global terrorist threat when Obama took office. International terrorism had metastasized into groups ranging from the Afghan-Pakistani border to Yemen, Somalia, the Maghreb, and Iraq. Figures like Faisal Shahzad and Umar Farouq Abdulmutallab received training in Pakistan and Yemen before attempting mass casualty attacks on U.S. soil. The propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki was influencing dozens of jihadists while acting as a de facto member of al-Qaeda. Osama bin Laden was still at large. For Obama to ignore these threats would have been not only strategically irresponsible but also politically disastrous in the event of a successful attack.
Drone and special operations forces provided a way to pursue these morphing threats at less cost to U.S. troops and civilians than conventional operations. This approach kept al-Qaeda and other groups off-balance and was reasonably accurate in terms of civilian versus combatant casualties. Obama’s use of drones also declined significantly in his second term, which Beck ignores. Moreover, the idea that this program’s personnel should be prosecuted for killing civilians effectively criminalizes any use of force that might hurt civilians.
Simply put, there was no clean way to fight this war, and Obama developed a more restrained and sustainable approach than Bush’s regime change strategy. He also had to react to events, as in his re-surging of U.S. forces to combat the Islamic State, a threat to security and human rights if there ever was one. Obama deserves criticism for much of his foreign policy, especially in Libya, but Beck’s critique is unmeasured.
The War on Terror and the Future of U.S. Grand Strategy
Beck’s conclusions are stark. He sees the United States as “an empire … that clawed its way to the top of the global power hierarchy and is now determined to imprison and kill as many people as it needs in order to stay there.” He arbitrarily calls for the halving of U.S. defense spending. Even in cases like Ukraine, he faults the United States “escalating the conflict at every opportunity” and using diplomacy “almost exclusively to expand the ranks of those countries fueling the war.” More morality tales, with the United States as the eternal villain.
While it would be unfair to describe Homeland as representative of restrainers’ views, it highlights two problems with how they use recent history. First, they exhibit a “magic key” syndrome, or a tendency to pinpoint one variable as the driving, essential cause of U.S. behavior. Their magic keys include strategic primacy, liberal or capitalist hegemony, racial hierarchy, or American consumerism. These factors are all at play in this history, but mono-causal arguments do not capture how the attitudes, emotions, calculations, and justifications of policymakers shifted as contexts changed. Grand narratives are useful for recommending policy reforms, but that does not mean they are good history.
Second, Homeland presents a radical version of the restrainers’ habit of proposing major changes that policymakers may be unable to enact. It is hardly useful, for example, to tell the next president-elect that they should transform the foundational assumptions of U.S. grand strategy. That would not help the 47th president deal with the many active crises of the world today, from Gaza to Sudan to Ukraine, or the simmering challenge of China, not to mention the political and bureaucratic obstacles to change. Homeland exemplifies this shortcoming. For instance, it fails to consider how Obama, when he inherited the War on Terror, also had to balance a desire for long-term strategic change with the demands of the moment: a still-unstable Iraq, a declining situation in Afghanistan, and a significant terrorist threat. Strategic restraint could minimize the number of situations that the United States sees as its responsibility, but it cannot wish this problem away. Beck simply pays no heed to these issues, but other restrainers should if they hope to persuade policymakers.
What, then is the role of the historian this conversation? Politicians, strategists, and public intellectuals use history to justify their preferred set of actions. This will always be so. But historians should not create usable pasts to support those agendas. We exist, in part, to poke holes in the way these actors use history. We should seek to inform but also inconvenience them by sinking them into the complexities, contingencies, and evolving contexts of the past.
In this task, Homeland falls short. It is a one-dimensional book that serves the needs of the present rather than illuminating the past. It is fueled by moral outrage, but its fire consumes more than it clarifies. The real history of the War on Terror will be much harder to squeeze into such convenient packages.
Joseph Stieb is an assistant professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College. He is the author of The Regime Change Consensus: Iraq in American Politics, 1990–2003.
The views expressed here are those of the author alone and do not necessarily represent the views, policies, or positions of the U.S. Department of Defense or its components, to include the Department of the Navy or the U.S. Naval War College.
Image: Eric Draper via Wikimedia Commons
Comments are closed.