Security Theater

Adam Straus reviews Richard Beck’s “Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life.”

By Adam StrausSeptember 3, 2024

• Nonfiction

• Politics

EARLIER THIS YEAR, Iraq War veteran turned author Matt Gallagher quote-tweeted a picture of Rihanna crouching, holding her microphone to a fan’s mouth. The original tweet asked for replies: “What experience in the workplace radicalized you?” Gallagher’s answer was “Fighting in a war for fifteen months that the vast majority of my country had completely checked out from.” Another veteran replied that he wanted to get the sentiment made into a tattoo. It’s a common enough belief among my fellow veterans. After Iraq descended into insurgency and it became apparent that victory was neither ours nor close at hand, servicemen and women like myself have bitterly whispered some variation of “We’re at war, America’s at the mall.” And we’ve got a point: today, barely a third of Americans can even identify September 11 as the War on Terror’s starting point.

Call it a perverted sort of solace that Richard Beck finds the war’s long tendrils choking every aspect of American life. His new book Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life “starts out from two propositions. The first is that if September 11 had not occurred, Donald Trump could never have become president. […] The second proposition is that crises do not come out of nowhere.” The bulk of the text is concerned with the latter proposition, with identifying the war-fueled crises that have come to define what it means to be American today. Beck’s central argument is that our current moment, in all its horror, can best be explained by the militarism, xenophobia, and impunity that the War on Terror helped unleash, understood against the backdrop of the United States’ decline from economic hegemony.

It’s a fair point to make but a tougher one to support in detail. For one, the War on Terror is the most nebulous conflict ever fought. Americans have served from Cameroon to the Philippines under the same 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force. The war has doubled back on itself so many times that I was awarded the Operation Inherent Resolve Campaign Medal for service at the Baghdad Embassy during a time when nearly all our threat-stream reporting came from the same Shia militia groups the US helped establish to aid the counter-ISIS campaign. And though the Department of Defense stopped issuing the National Defense Service Medal at the end of 2022, signifying (in their eyes) that the nation was no longer at war, Americans remain deployed in Iraq, Syria, Africa, and elsewhere. Often described as “simultaneously everywhere and nowhere,” it is almost impossible to define the War on Terror, much less determine what its effects have been.

There’s also the mind-boggling scale of futility. Beginning with 9/11 itself, “the human toll would have been significantly lower had the firefighters never entered” the Twin Towers; the nature of the attacks was such that there was little search and rescue or firefighting that could have been done. Those in the impact zone or above were effectively dead the moment the planes struck. Those below who escaped did so almost entirely “by walking down the stairs under their own power or with the help of their colleagues.” There’s no denying the courage on display that day. But there’s also no denying that the only lives first responders were equipped to save were their own, and the only way to do so would have been avoiding Ground Zero entirely.

This well-intended impotence was a harbinger of things to come. In 2015, TSA internal testing agents found “a failure rate of 96 percent” in detecting weapons passing through security checkpoints. Controlling for bureaucratic manipulation and straight-up entrapment, the Department of Justice has successfully prosecuted almost no domestic terror convictions, despite a massive dragnet that has ensnared thousands of predominantly Muslim Americans. The Taliban control more territory today than they did in 2001. Iraq’s best-case-scenario future appears to be as an Iranian vassal state, its worst as a failed state like Libya, Syria, Somalia, or Yemen. Americans enjoy fewer civil liberties and less wealth than they did in 2001. We have more enemies across the globe now than we did when this shit show began.

And we have doubled down on these failures with a creeping militarism that has suffused post-9/11 America. Beck makes this clear by analyzing the proliferation of security zones, “urban area[s] in which governments have decided that security concerns take precedence over […] the hundreds of other uses to which city residents might want to put their public spaces.” Think pedestrian barriers and CCTV, omnipresent police and restrictions on what you can bring into a stadium. From Super Bowls to airports, these elaborate performances of “security theater” manifest the state of war they so hope to exclude.

“One of the paradoxes of post-9/11 security zones,” Beck writes, “is that everyone secretly knows they don’t work.” The same could be said of the wars themselves. A 2019 Pew survey found that a solid majority of both the public and veterans believed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were not worth fighting; these numbers would almost certainly be higher today, after the Iraqi parliament’s attempts to expel US troops and after Afghanistan’s disastrous end.

In other words, Americans know that our security measures are ineffective at home. And they know that our interventions aren’t worthwhile abroad. Why does the United States remain so steadfastly committed to both? Part of the answer lies in the intended targets of these actions. A central contradiction of the War on Terror is its need to establish “Muslims as both victims to be saved and barbarians to be eliminated.” Without the former, there would have been no popular support for extended wars of occupation; without the latter, no justification for anything more than a limited revenge mission against al-Qaeda itself. The result has been an unrelenting torrent of violence both at home and abroad. In the six years following 9/11, there were over eight times as many anti-Muslim hate crimes as in the preceding six years, constituting “a national, slow-moving pogrom.” These numbers obviously fail to account for the FBI’s own Islamophobic campaigns of surveillance and harassment. And these numbers pale in comparison to the millions of primarily Muslim civilians dead in American war zones across the globe.

Beck also ties our post-9/11 thirst for revenge to early settler myths. First, men like Natty Bumppo, Daniel Boone, George Armstrong Custer, and Davy Crockett taught us that “violence is the only remedy for humiliation, fear, and trauma.” Then, in places as infamous as Abu Ghraib in Iraq and black sites whose names will never be known, soldiers “slowly made out of suspected terrorists a new kind of Indian” for whom “violence and humiliation were the only languages they could be expected to understand.” These connections between contemporary war and genocide against Native Americans are hardly a reach: Osama bin Laden’s code name during Operation Neptune Spear was literally “Geronimo.”

There’s more driving the War on Terror than racist nostalgia, though. As the Venetians, the Dutch, and the British all found in their own times, capitalist hegemony, like the growth it depends upon, doesn’t last forever. More problematically for the rest of the world, “slow growth turns the global economy into a zero-sum game […] rather than growing the pie quickly enough for most people to do well.” In this way, the United States is dragging down with it a whole network of nations, trapping billions in the “informal economy” where it’s essentially impossible to make more than a subsistence wage. Viewed through this lens, the “kind of terrorism that America mobilized to fight […] expresses a version of the emerging world’s anger and hopelessness in the most brutal way available.” This recasts the War on Terror as a conflict motivated by economics rather than by ideology alone. Even if the war couldn’t “solve the problems facing a low-growth world, […] it could at least tolerably insulate the United States from their effects.” So-called victory, then, means minimizing the homeland’s experience of violent blowback from the United States’ economic decline.

A “logical” corollary to these trends is that “for at least the next ten years, the U.S. foreign policy establishment’s highest priority will be to prevent China from replacing the United States as the world’s primary superpower.” As part of these efforts, I spent several months in and around Okinawa, Japan, on my second deployment. We had near-unlimited access to alcohol, which was different from our time in the Middle East; we spent most of our time bored senseless, which was the same. Around the midpoint of that deployment, I watched the January 6 insurrection unfold on a laptop in my barracks room. A week later, we were on ship, endlessly circling the oceans around Palau and Guam, serving as “a credible deterrent to adversary aggression in the Pacific.” Per Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III, “The $842 billion fiscal year 2024 budget request for the Defense Department is driven in large part by strategic competition with China.” In the empty weeks before our flight home, Radiohead’s song “Creep” became a kind of anthem: “What the hell am I doing here?”

In related news, I got out of the Marine Corps three years ago. Now, I teach high school English. I enjoy exercising a modicum of control over my life, less so the fact that my students sometimes don’t do exactly what I tell them the moment I tell them to do it. But they did, at my behest, read “False Star” by Sterling HolyWhiteMountain, a story that centers around a Blackfoot teenager getting his first car. After discussing the piece, students wrote creative reflections about their own first days with their own first cars. Unanimously, they mentioned the extreme sense of freedom they felt alone behind the wheel for the first time. Then they began comparing notes on the software their parents use to track them. They recounted getting calls telling them to slow down, of having to explain why they drove somewhere by a certain route. They seemed annoyed by this, sure, but it didn’t strike them as a terrible affront. It’s just how things are, they explained. And all I could think was that there was a time when a teenager’s idea of freedom was incompatible with being tracked by their parents.

Driven by such a limited sense of possibility, these same teenagers, according to Beck, have “turned to the internet as a public space of last resort.” This pushes them deeper into surveillability, into a world where everything they say and do is recorded. You don’t have to be a developmental psychologist to imagine the impact this is having on today’s youth. Undergirding every interaction they have is an infrastructure designed with security in mind: more security theater, and a heightened sense of the dangers that may or may not be lurking all around them. Silicon Valley and the US government generally want the same thing (as much data as possible), and when that much money and power come together, it gets what it wants. The intent is to create a net so fine that it will catch anyone who hopes to harm us. In reality, “Washington has refused to abandon large-scale, tech-driven surveillance despite the growing pile of evidence that it doesn’t catch terrorists after all.”

Mass surveillance might be relatively invisible, but the war has come home in more obvious ways. “More than thirty states mobilized some thirty-two thousand National Guard reservists” to suppress the George Floyd protests; by way of comparison, there were roughly 38,000 Americans in Afghanistan in 2008. Not only that; through the 1033 Program, police have come to rely on gear originally intended to be “used by Marines patrolling in Mosul or Special Forces teams carrying out nighttime raids in rural Afghanistan.” The resulting visuals are shocking: unarmed college students facing down the full might of the militarized state, 19 year-olds protesting for peace and being met with a painfully literal manifestation of the violence they decry. As a veteran, you watch, and obscured behind the riot helmets is a face that could be your own, because the rest of the kit is the same. The last time I felt that sort of uncanny shock was after the fall of Kabul, when I saw the Taliban driving around in our vehicles, brandishing our weapons, and wearing the plate carriers and high-cut helmets we gave the deposed government for protection.

Those images from August 2021 offered brutal clarity: we lost the War in Afghanistan. The analogous image for the War on Terror as a whole might be of Trump’s inauguration, celebrating an election in which he lost the popular vote, months after the Access Hollywood tapes had leaked. Trump is the embodiment of one of the most disturbing and damaging trends to emerge in post-9/11 America: “Powerful people really [can] get away with almost anything.” This could mean the police, or the CIA operatives who oversaw rampant black site torture, or the members of the Bush administration who knowingly prosecuted a war of aggression against Iraq, or the members of the media who blindly supported that war in direct contradiction to their supposed professional integrity. It’s impunity on a mass scale, impunity that serves to sever the American people from the institutions meant to serve their interests. Of course, impunity has always marked government conduct, not just in the US but across the globe as well. But “impunity culture flourished during the war on terror because the war itself was impunity culture on a global scale.” The United States was accountable to no one and nothing, not even the interests of its own citizens.

This fundamentally doesn’t make sense, but it’s not meant to. Borrowing from Freud’s writing on trauma response, Beck describes the war on terror as “repetition compulsion carried out on a national scale.” The US is reliving and reenacting collective traumas again and again, hoping to somehow master our circumstances through the sheer power of repetition, irrevocably worsening those circumstances in the process. Perhaps that’s the only way to understand a war in which parent/child pairs deployed. In the span of three months, my platoon stood as a quick reaction force for multiple iterations of the same raid in the same sliver of hamlets along Afghanistan’s Kandahar/Helmand border, pursuing the same cluster of mid-level Taliban operatives. Over the course of 20 years, how many times did those villagers awake to find Americans at their doors? After 20 years, what difference did it make, besides more dead bodies?

That might be a simplistic way to “bottom line” such a complex conflict. But beneath the theater, beneath the headlines, beneath the outrage and the 10th-order effects and the convoluted economic motivations, beneath it all is a war. For everything the War on Terror is to Americans, and for everything the War on Terror isn’t, it’s still our war, somewhere deep in our national soul. Perhaps that’s what Gallagher meant in his tweet; perhaps that’s why it resonated so deeply. We have lost sight of what this thing even is, and in doing so, we have lost ourselves.