Homeland effectively recreates the texture of the war as Americans lived it, and the book builds to a diagnosis: even as we move on to other crises and other fears, the “war on terror” persists like an infection that has spread through the body politic. Its two main symptoms, Beck argues, are a “degraded” notion of citizenship and the rise of what he calls “impunity culture.” Taken together, Beck ventures, this can also explain something less precise: “the intensifying feeling that something has gone wrong with life in the United States.”
Foreign policy has never been a particularly democratic aspect of government, but after September 11 it became even less so, through excessive secrecy, mass surveillance, and crackdowns on whistleblowing and other acts of dissent. The invasion of Iraq proceeded over the objection of millions of Americans. Congress completely abdicated its war powers duties, passing instead the open-ended Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), a paragraph-long law that only one representative—Barbara Lee of California—had the courage to vote against in September 2001. During the Bush and Obama administrations that law was invoked thirty-seven times to justify military actions. Beck points out that this amounts to thirty-seven missed opportunities to question the wisdom of those actions. Beck also ascribes the corrosion of citizenship to the policing of public space and online life, the repression of protest, and the provision of surplus military equipment to police, which resulted in tanks rolling through Ferguson, Missouri, after the police killing of Michael Brown in 2014. “Y’all are treating us like ISIS,” one protester told reporters. The war “fueled a social climate of overriding anxiety and dread,” Beck writes, “and it made a mockery of the idea that democratic governments use military violence only as a means of last resort.”
Impunity is part of this degradation, too. There has been “a systematic refusal,” Beck writes,
to pursue any measure of accountability for the crimes committed during a war that most people agree was detrimental to the country’s international reputation and its capacity for global leadership.
And while “accountability would have been very much in the larger national interest,” the chance was passed up. Here, as elsewhere in the book, the arc of disillusionment passes through Obama. His administration put a public emphasis on legality and process, presenting the image of cabinet-level Socratic dialogues about targeted killings and voluminous memos to defend them, in contrast to John Yoo’s ideological, legally sloppy opinions rationalizing torture and other executive power grabs under Bush. Obama withdrew Yoo’s memos but declined to investigate anyone involved with the torture program, and he supported the CIA in opposing the declassification of documents, out of concern that their disclosure would hurt morale at the agency. Apart from mass breaches via Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks, the Obama administration was so ruthlessly effective at keeping control of information that his promise to oversee the “most transparent administration in history” became a punch line among national security nerds.