Car dealers are notorious for upselling you on things you probably don’t need, like leather seats and rust protection. But what about bulletproof glass? A smoke screen to blind the driver tailing you? Electrified door handles to deter carjackers? A bomb-proof underbody (in case you drive over an IED)? Heck, they’ll throw in gas masks and bulletproof vests for free, if you opt for the vaunted “military package.”

These upgrades suit the world of Mario Kart, or, better yet, of Mad Max. But they’re made for ours. Anyone buying a Rezvani Vengeance, a luxury SUV that first came to market in the United States in 2022, can choose to equip their car with these features. “Vengeance is yours,” Rezvani ominously tells potential customers. But why would anyone need such a hulking, militarized vehicle for American streets?

The answer has a lot to do with the war on terror. Al-Qaeda’s attacks on the country punctured Americans’ sense of safety. If terrorists could hijack commercial airplanes and fly them into buildings, then everyone was vulnerable. Americans scrambled to protect themselves in their everyday life. Driving the biggest vehicle on the road provided some comfort.

There is a parallel too. The war on terror was an attempt to secure the United States. But this pursuit of security for the country came at the expense of the security of others. Around 408,000 civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia lost their lives directly as a result of the war on terror’s violence; more than 4.5 million have died indirectly. A further 38 million people in these war zones (along with the Philippines and Libya) have been displaced, either abroad or internally (Brown University’s Costs of War Project describes this as a “conservative estimate”). The war has made Americans less safe too. The Islamic State’s conquest of large swathes of Iraq and Syria in 2014, as well as the terrorism carried out in its name around the world, were outgrowths of the war on terror, especially the overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist government.

Similarly, American consumers’ decision to purchase SUVs en masse might have provided a sense of safety for their occupants. But SUVs—their size, blind spots, weight—have undermined the safety of everyone on the road, from pedestrians and cyclists to occupants of other vehicles. SUVs and pickup trucks account for most car sales in the United States today. Meanwhile, pedestrian deaths in recent years have reached record highs. It makes one wonder on whom Rezvani drivers are supposed to be taking revenge.

Of course, it’s not just SUVs. Launching a war of global dimensions shaped the United States from the inside out. The war on terror brought about the rise of militarized police squads, Marvel movies, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, unfettered Islamophobia, and, yes, tactical baby gear. These are just some of the consequences chronicled by Richard Beck in his profoundly illuminating book, Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life. It’s more than a book version of a “crazy ass moments in American history” social media account (though crazy-ass moments abound in Beck’s telling). It is a meditation on how exactly the United States lost its collective mind after September 11, 2001, and what this loss has meant for the world and especially for the United States. The war, Beck argues, has rotted American culture and politics.

But yet, despite the extensive impact of the war, it quickly slipped out of focus. It became background noise. And, today, it seems strangely forgotten. In 2018, for example, 42% of Americans weren’t even aware that their country was still at war in Afghanistan, a place that the US military wouldn’t vacate for another three years. Why has it been so hard to see the wreckage of a more-than-two-decades-long conflict? Beck’s book helps explain why.

Keeping Americans far from the country’s foreign policy has long been a goal of American policymakers. The national security state, built after the Second World War, is enveloped in secrecy. Similarly, politicians have sought to insulate Americans—or, at least, constituencies that mattered—from the consequences of foreign policy decisions. One such example is the 1973 elimination of the military draft: parents belonging to the upper- and middle classes no longer have to worry about the conscription of their children into war.

But that gap grew during the war on terror, almost immediately after it began. Within weeks, George Bush implored citizens to do their patriotic duty—as workers and consumers. “We must stand against terror by going back to work,” Bush urged. “Fly and enjoy America’s great destination spots” and “get down to Disney World in Florida.” Given these instructions, Beck asks, is it a surprise that so many Americans decided to “tune out the whole situation and hope for the best”?

As the war on terror expanded abroad, paradoxically, it faded further into the American background. It was Obama’s approach to the war on terror that sustained this paradox, as Samuel Moyn writes in his 2021 book, Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War. Months into office in 2009, the Obama administration launched the concept of a “global battlefield,” which removed any constraints on where the United States could project force. But, at the same, it cleaned up some of the less seemly elements of the war—forbidding torture, exiting Iraq—and also turned to remote-controlled drones, piloted by Americans in air-conditioned trailers in New Mexico, to do more of the fighting. The pilots were so distant, in fact, that the early drones were afflicted with latency, as the video signal had to travel from the skies of Africa, the Middle East, or Central Asia to a satellite and then back to the United States. The end result: fewer coffins sent back home, less bad press, and waning opposition to the war on terror. (Though the number of non-Americans killed by drones surged under Obama’s reign).

It’s this distance that distinguishes the United States’s experience of the war from the states it targeted. Distance—that is, distance from violence—provided Americans with the luxury of tuning the war out. Needless to say, this was a luxury not afforded to Afghans, Iraqis, Pakistanis, and many others caught in the cross-hairs of the American military machine. “No country has been changed more dramatically by the fallout of the 9/11 attacks than Afghanistan,” argues Sune Engel Rasmussen in Twenty Years: Hope, War, and the Betrayal of an Afghan Generation. The Iraq of the late 2010s, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad claims in A Stranger in Your Own City: Travels in the Middle East’s Long War, was “born out of an illegal occupation, two decades of civil wars, savage militancy, car bombs, beheadings and torture.” Finally, according to Hugh Gusterson’s anthropological work on the drone war in the poor, tribal region of Waziristan, the drones lurking above Pakistan have delivered death to many and never-ending fear of death to many more. The drone’s pilots, meanwhile, return to their suburban subdivisions after work.

The foreign policy establishment that led the country into a global crusade against terrorism drew on a repertoire of tactics tried and tested in earlier decades, from regime change to mass surveillance. 

The war on terror may have been fought over there, but it defined American life over here. Of particular note for Beck is the war’s effects on American democracy. The war, it could be argued, began as an assertion of popular will. The public overwhelmingly supported a war against both al-Qaeda and its Afghan host, the Taliban. Regime change had broad appeal. But by mid-2003, when the White House turned its attention to Iraq, support for the broader war on terror began to dwindle. In the years that followed, it would plummet. Yet, against the growing objections of Americans, the war continued. What Americans wanted and what their country did increasingly went in different directions.

How is the public theoretically able to shape the doings of the state? One way is through the ballot box. But the war on terror did not come to a close in 2009, when a Democratic president with a historically broad mandate took back the presidency. The press—what Alexis de Tocqueville described, after his tour of the United States in the 1830s, as “the democratic instrument of liberty”—provides another avenue. It is here where public opinion is supposed to be aired out and turned into political force. But that’s not what happened during the war on terror. Instead, as mainstream news outlets fed the public almost invariably the White House’s perspective that Saddam Hussein possessed WMDs, it became an instrument of the state. The few journalists and pundits who questioned this elite consensus faced professional consequences. When Phil Donahue, a veteran media personality, dissented, MSNBC canceled his show in February 2003. Which program filled that cherished 8:00 p.m. slot? Countdown: Iraq.

Another way is protest. But the public needs space to do so. And since 9/11, public space—places in which people have the freedom to do what they want, anything from hanging out to exercising their democratic right to protest—have been sacrificed for security. Guards and surveillance cameras increasingly honeycomb them, while police officers, outfitted with military surplus from the Pentagon, have come to resemble “occupying armies.” Access to those spaces have been downgraded from a right to a mere privilege. Just ask the participants of Occupy Wall Street or Black Lives Matter whom the state expelled from parks and streets across the country over the last decade and a half.

The public has thus been unable to impose consequences on the people who waged and campaigned for the war on terror. Consider the journalists and bloggers who, after revving up the war machine, collected nothing but garlands. Or the restoration of George Bush’s image in the 2010s (a video from Ellen DeGeneres’s YouTube channel includes a 2019 video titled, “This Photo of Ellen & George W. Bush Will Give You Faith in America Again”: 1.2 million views). Or the countless atrocities committed by American soldiers that have been met with slaps on the wrist, if at all. Or the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance of Americans, ruled by courts in 2020 to have been both illegal and useless, and yet, whose directors have gone unpunished. Or the rise of national politicians who had almost uniformly favored the war in Iraq: every single presidential and vice-presidential nominee since 2016 supported the invasion—with the exception of Kamala Harris. And yet her campaign last year, maddeningly, still paraded an endorsement from Dick Cheney—the war on terror’s most direct architect—in what certainly didn’t help her chances of winning the fateful election.

Despite handwringing over cancel culture, elites over the past two and a half decades have luxuriated in what Beck calls “impunity culture.” Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that every major political movement since 2003, namely Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter, has targeted impunity itself, whether it was that of the bankers who crashed the economy in 2008 or of the police officers who killed unarmed Black Americans. The lack of accountability in the American political system was distilled by Obama in a memorable interview he gave in 2009: “I don’t believe anybody is above the law. On the other hand, I also have a belief that we need to look forward.” But looking forward is also looking away.

No one can doubt that the war on terror was transformative for the United States. But we should be careful not to treat it as a complete rupture from the past. This kind of thinking could imply that the United States was in decent shape on September 10, 2001. Just as the election of Trump signalled the country’s pre-existing troubles—a point that Beck makes emphatically—doesn’t the United States’s aggressive, counterproductive, and often barbaric response to the 9/11 attacks indicate that the country was already in crisis?

Beck isn’t oblivious to the war on terror’s pre-history—he devotes pages to everything from settler colonialism to the decline of economic growth since the 1970s. But Homeland regrettably plays down other, more obvious continuities from the past. The foreign policy establishment that led the country into a global crusade against terrorism drew on a repertoire of tactics tried and tested in earlier decades, from regime change to mass surveillance. So too did Americans in their pursuit of security in their everyday life.

Indeed, as historian Elaine Tyler May argues in Fortress America: How We Embraced Fear and Abandoned Democracy, it was in the second half of the 20^th century—not the beginning of the 21^st—that a “new consensus” formed in the United States, one organized around a novel fear-laden definition of “security” that “both major parties adopted and most Americans across the political spectrum accepted.” It led to the creation of the national security state, as well as Americans’ retreat into the home to find safety amid threats of nuclear Armageddon and communist subversion.

“During the first decade of the war on terror,” Beck argues, “the United States built up internal fortifications the likes of which the country had never seen.” Again, there is more of a throughline here than Beck lets on. In the early Cold War, Americans became gripped by what Elaine Tyler May calls a “bunker mentality,” in some cases transforming their homes into actual bunkers (“Now,” the Portland Cement Association advertised in the 1950s, “you can protect precious lives with an all-concrete blast-resistance house”). The panic around urban unrest and rising crime rates in the 1960s and ’70s intensified these fortifications. Home security systems flourished; gated communities became the fastest growing form of housing in the 1990s. Meanwhile, the militarization of cities themselves, chillingly catalogued by Mike Davis in City of Quartz in 1990, was decades in the making.

The war on terror certainly cranked up the volume of fear and conjured new bogeymen, substituting terrorist for communist. But it only seemed natural to do so after more than half a century of fear and security organizing American policy at home and abroad. Even the rise of the SUV—one of the continuities that Beck does trace adeptly—was a part of this broader story: Consumer data from the year 2000 suggests that the car’s popularity was, in part, motivated by a fear of crime.

If the fears of the war on terror began decades before 9/11, then, it’s also worth asking, when did the war on terror end? Could it, perhaps, be continuing?

Americans have been treated to regular messaging that it was about to wrap up. There was George Bush’s infamous speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, in front of a banner blaring “Mission Accomplished,” in 2003; there was also Barack Obama’s reforms in 2009. (“With the stroke of his pen,” the Washington Post announced, Obama “effectively declared an end to the ‘war on terror,’ as President George W. Bush had defined it.”) More recently, the United States’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 seemed to signal the end. “I was not going to extend this forever war,” Joe Biden told the country.

As the last of American troops left in 2021, crowds of Afghans—clinging to what meager personal belongings they could carry—desperately tried to escape the Taliban takeover. The chaotic scenes from the Kabul airport harkened back to the fall of Saigon in 1975. But just as concluding one local conflict did not spell the end of the Cold War, neither did concluding another bring the war on terror to a close.

The two conflicts do make for intriguing comparison in Homeland. At first glance, it’s their resemblance that one notices. In both Vietnam and Afghanistan, after more than a decade of trying and failing to replace a hostile government with one more pliable, the United States left. But, taking a step back, the differences are even more illuminating. In response to the blood and treasure spilled in Vietnam—conscription was in effect until the final years of the war—an anti-war movement filled the streets. The media adopted a more critical mode. And Congress clawed back its powers over war from the presidency. American militarism itself fell into disrepute.

In contrast, the American occupation of Afghanistan—along with the broader war on terror—has generated a comparatively paltry opposition, especially after the initial wave of protest in the early years. But it’s difficult to protest what one doesn’t know. It seems that the country had moved on—or, to use Obama’s words, was looking forward—before the fighting ended.

But the war on terror does continue. Many of the tools that the Bush administration introduced are still on the books, finding new uses, more than two decades later. The 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF)—the broadly written and even more broadly interpreted piece of legislation that empowered George Bush to pursue the 9/11 attackers—has since been invoked in military operations in at least 22 countries, most recently by Joe Biden in a bombing campaign against Iran-aligned militia in Iraq. It’s not just the 2001 AUMF. In that same operation last year, Biden also cited the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq, the 2002 resolution that enabled the Bush administration to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Let that sink in: More than a decade after “ending” the Iraq War, the US president still retains the right to bomb the country, without congressional debate, whenever he wants. What is that, if not a forever war?

The war on terror also continues to haunt American society. National security reigns supreme. Democrats and Republicans have stretched the category “terrorist” to include more and more people. Last year, Manhattan’s District Attorney charged Luigi Mangione, who stands accused of killing a health insurance CEO, with an act of terrorism. Trump and his allies, once again in power, apply the category with abandon. Dealing drugs? Terrorism. Opposing deportation efforts? Terrorism.  Vandalizing Tesla cars and infrastructure? Terrorism. Protesting genocide? Terrorism (or, rather, “activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organization,” an entirely novel and seemingly infinite charge). And regime change, this time in Iran, has re-entered the political mainstream.

The war on terror, as Beck illustrates, has been a tragically bipartisan project, supported by Republicans and Democrats alike. Grumbling about the war can be heard across the aisle. But actually bringing it to an end and all that would entail—from restoring civil rights at home to resetting the United States’s relations abroad? To do so would require reckoning with the past. That’s a project in search of a political coalition.