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Divided by Terror: American Patriotism after 9/11
Americans responded to the deadly terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, with an outpouring of patriotism, though all were not united in their expression. A war-based patriotism inspired millions of Americans to wave the flag and support a brutal War on Terror in Afghanistan and Iraq, while many other Americans demanded an empathic patriotism that would bear witness to the death and suffering surrounding the attack. Twenty years later, the war still simmers, and both forms of patriotism continue to shape historical understandings of 9/11's legacy and the political life of the nation.
John Bodnar's compelling history shifts the focus on America's War on Terror from the battlefield to the arena of political and cultural conflict, revealing how fierce debates over the war are inseparable from debates about the meaning of patriotism itself. Bodnar probes how honor, brutality, trauma, and suffering have become highly contested in commemorations, congressional correspondence, films, soldier memoirs, and works of art. He concludes that Americans continue to be deeply divided over the War on Terror and how to define the terms of their allegiance--a fissure that has deepened as American politics has become dangerously polarized over the first two decades of this new century.
John Bodnar's compelling history shifts the focus on America's War on Terror from the battlefield to the arena of political and cultural conflict, revealing how fierce debates over the war are inseparable from debates about the meaning of patriotism itself. Bodnar probes how honor, brutality, trauma, and suffering have become highly contested in commemorations, congressional correspondence, films, soldier memoirs, and works of art. He concludes that Americans continue to be deeply divided over the War on Terror and how to define the terms of their allegiance--a fissure that has deepened as American politics has become dangerously polarized over the first two decades of this new century.
320 pages, Hardcover
Published May 24, 2021
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April 22, 2025Eerder gescand dan uitvoerig gelezen. Gelukkig voorlopig het laatste boek over de amerikaanse geschiedenis. Voorlopig even geen behoefte meer aan
February 9, 2021
Blatantly Biased, But Well Written Within That Bias. I gotta admit: When I picked up this ARC, I was hoping for something as transcendental as 2020's Divided We Fall by David French, but focusing on the issue of terror and how it has divided America in the post 9/11 world. I'm someone that has been on "both" sides of that divide, growing from a conservative Evangelical Christian Republican 18yo college student born and raised between the two endpoints of the American Civil War's Great Train Robbery to a now 38 year old anarchist professional living even further South. So this book, based on its title and description, looked promising.
Its actual text though... didn't fulfill that promise. Not for me.
To be clear, this is a very well documented examination of much of the response to 9/11 and the War on Terror, from many divergent angles ranging from the personal and private to the governmental to the societal to the cultural. Bodnar does a tremendous job of highlighting facts that even as someone living through this history (though usually from several States away from the events he is describing at any given moment), I simply did not know and often had never heard of.
The problem is that this examination is very blatantly one sided, and even the language Bodnar chooses to use often reflects this blatant bias. Thus, for those that agree with this particular bias, this book will probably be much more well received than for those who disagree with it - and the level of one's beliefs either direction will likely reflect how such a person feels about this book in a similar manner.
In the end, there is nothing technically wrong with this text, other than the blatant bias - and therefore the bias itself is the basis for the removal of one star. Yet even there, the bias isn't *so* horrible as to rate the deduction of a second star, and there is a tremendous amount of needed history documented within these pages. Thus, I am satisfied at this time with the four stars I give the book. And yet, because of the bias, I cannot *highly* recommend the book and therefore it is...
Recommended.
Its actual text though... didn't fulfill that promise. Not for me.
To be clear, this is a very well documented examination of much of the response to 9/11 and the War on Terror, from many divergent angles ranging from the personal and private to the governmental to the societal to the cultural. Bodnar does a tremendous job of highlighting facts that even as someone living through this history (though usually from several States away from the events he is describing at any given moment), I simply did not know and often had never heard of.
The problem is that this examination is very blatantly one sided, and even the language Bodnar chooses to use often reflects this blatant bias. Thus, for those that agree with this particular bias, this book will probably be much more well received than for those who disagree with it - and the level of one's beliefs either direction will likely reflect how such a person feels about this book in a similar manner.
In the end, there is nothing technically wrong with this text, other than the blatant bias - and therefore the bias itself is the basis for the removal of one star. Yet even there, the bias isn't *so* horrible as to rate the deduction of a second star, and there is a tremendous amount of needed history documented within these pages. Thus, I am satisfied at this time with the four stars I give the book. And yet, because of the bias, I cannot *highly* recommend the book and therefore it is...
Recommended.
June 26, 2023
I am quite interested with how Americans grappled with patriotism, identity, ethics, and strategy during the War on Terror, a period which now appears to have ended. However, this book doesn't shed much light on those dynamics because it is a simple morality tale. The good guys are the "empathetic patriots," or the mostly left/liberal people who opposed the GWOT, viewed the wars as a tragedy, focused on the human damage done by those wars, and registered their protests in art, film, politics, etc. The bad guys are the "war-based patriots" like Bush, the neocons, and Republicans who refused to look at the tragic human side of the war and instead launched far-ranging wars while treating any criticism of those conflicts as unpatriotic.
I appreciate the effort made in this book to frame dissent as patriotic; it is, and often can be. But this simplistic binary cannot account for the complexity of both the GWOT itself and Americans' reactions to it. Bodnar makes no effort to actually assess the seriousness of the terrorism threat, so his flippant dismissal of Bush and Obama's wars falls flat. He attributes to the Bush admin a desire to simply get revenge and kill lots of people, and his portrayals of the wars in IRaq and Afghanistan are totally one-sided. Anyone out there waving the flag, getting angry about terrorism, and supporting war was just a vengeful, mouth-breathing bigot who didn't want to deal with the trauma of war. Of course, Bush did wrestle with the trauma of war, visiting amputees and dead soldiers' families. Bush did not stoke Islamophobia, resisting powerful currents on the right in defense of the equal citizenship of Muslim-Americans. I don't defend Bush's GWOT policies, but as a historian I do actually try to understand where he was coming from and why he did what he did instead of just denouncing him as a vengeful war-monger imperialist.
What's frustrating about this book is that Bodnar is asking a lot of the right questions but failing to provide balanced historical answers. Why did the GWOT seem to divide Americans more than unite them? How did Americans understand terrorism and conceive of how to fight it? How did these things change over time as the wars in IQ and AF dragged on? Bodnar does provide useful chapters on portrayals of the GWOT in movies, books, and other pop culture, as well as an interesting account of the Ground Zero mosque. He's certainly right that a scary version of nativism and Islamophobia surged on the right in the United States, but he's incorrect that it came to dominate the right until Trump came along. The bigger problem, though, is that he pathologizes his subjects rather than really trying to understand them, making the argument more of a polemic than a study.
This book is basically what happens when scholars project their politics onto history. Instead of trying to understand historical actors' in their own terms and contextualize their decisions, emotions, and ideas, it just creates a simple morality tale that comforts those who don't like Bush, the neocons, and Republicans. Never mind that tons of Democrats supported these wars and that Obama actually continued most of Bush's policies. Yes, some of that was politics, and some of it the inertia of bureaucracy. But it was also that a real threat was out there and that many of our foreign policy actions actually helped ameliorate that threat (although in the Iraq case, we probably added more to the threat).
This book, unfortunately, has none of the wisdom and prudence of Obama's brilliant Nobel Peace Prize address from 2009. In that speech, Obama gave a defense of the just war tradition, in which war is sometimes a necessary evil designed to prevent or destroy even worse evils out there in the world. We really did face a network of ruthless fanatics determined to kill lots of Americans (they killed lots of Muslims too, something which goes unrecognized in this book). Obama drew on Augustine, Niebuhr, Walzer, and other brilliant thinkers to defend this tradition in advance of his Afghanistan surge. That complex speech captured the true moral dilemmas of the GWOT far more than this simplistic book, which seems to endorse the naive view that "war is never the answer."
So this book isn't terribly well-written, and it's so biased and simplistic that it's hard to take seriously as a historical interpretation of the GWOT. It also gets some basic facts wrong. For example, the Project for a New American Century, formed in the 1990s, was not "neoliberal" but "neoconservative." The Iraq War, quite simply, was not about oil. We didn't invade because of oil, and we did not "take the oil" when occupying the country. Iraq quickly regained control of its oil resources , and the vast majority of IRaq's oil today goes to China and INdia, not the US. These frustrating mistakes add to a morality-tale argument that unfortunately does little to help us understand the GWOT period as history.
I appreciate the effort made in this book to frame dissent as patriotic; it is, and often can be. But this simplistic binary cannot account for the complexity of both the GWOT itself and Americans' reactions to it. Bodnar makes no effort to actually assess the seriousness of the terrorism threat, so his flippant dismissal of Bush and Obama's wars falls flat. He attributes to the Bush admin a desire to simply get revenge and kill lots of people, and his portrayals of the wars in IRaq and Afghanistan are totally one-sided. Anyone out there waving the flag, getting angry about terrorism, and supporting war was just a vengeful, mouth-breathing bigot who didn't want to deal with the trauma of war. Of course, Bush did wrestle with the trauma of war, visiting amputees and dead soldiers' families. Bush did not stoke Islamophobia, resisting powerful currents on the right in defense of the equal citizenship of Muslim-Americans. I don't defend Bush's GWOT policies, but as a historian I do actually try to understand where he was coming from and why he did what he did instead of just denouncing him as a vengeful war-monger imperialist.
What's frustrating about this book is that Bodnar is asking a lot of the right questions but failing to provide balanced historical answers. Why did the GWOT seem to divide Americans more than unite them? How did Americans understand terrorism and conceive of how to fight it? How did these things change over time as the wars in IQ and AF dragged on? Bodnar does provide useful chapters on portrayals of the GWOT in movies, books, and other pop culture, as well as an interesting account of the Ground Zero mosque. He's certainly right that a scary version of nativism and Islamophobia surged on the right in the United States, but he's incorrect that it came to dominate the right until Trump came along. The bigger problem, though, is that he pathologizes his subjects rather than really trying to understand them, making the argument more of a polemic than a study.
This book is basically what happens when scholars project their politics onto history. Instead of trying to understand historical actors' in their own terms and contextualize their decisions, emotions, and ideas, it just creates a simple morality tale that comforts those who don't like Bush, the neocons, and Republicans. Never mind that tons of Democrats supported these wars and that Obama actually continued most of Bush's policies. Yes, some of that was politics, and some of it the inertia of bureaucracy. But it was also that a real threat was out there and that many of our foreign policy actions actually helped ameliorate that threat (although in the Iraq case, we probably added more to the threat).
This book, unfortunately, has none of the wisdom and prudence of Obama's brilliant Nobel Peace Prize address from 2009. In that speech, Obama gave a defense of the just war tradition, in which war is sometimes a necessary evil designed to prevent or destroy even worse evils out there in the world. We really did face a network of ruthless fanatics determined to kill lots of Americans (they killed lots of Muslims too, something which goes unrecognized in this book). Obama drew on Augustine, Niebuhr, Walzer, and other brilliant thinkers to defend this tradition in advance of his Afghanistan surge. That complex speech captured the true moral dilemmas of the GWOT far more than this simplistic book, which seems to endorse the naive view that "war is never the answer."
So this book isn't terribly well-written, and it's so biased and simplistic that it's hard to take seriously as a historical interpretation of the GWOT. It also gets some basic facts wrong. For example, the Project for a New American Century, formed in the 1990s, was not "neoliberal" but "neoconservative." The Iraq War, quite simply, was not about oil. We didn't invade because of oil, and we did not "take the oil" when occupying the country. Iraq quickly regained control of its oil resources , and the vast majority of IRaq's oil today goes to China and INdia, not the US. These frustrating mistakes add to a morality-tale argument that unfortunately does little to help us understand the GWOT period as history.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews