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Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump
A New York Times Critics’ Top Book of 2021
"An impressive combination of diligence and verve, deploying Ackerman’s deep stores of knowledge as a national security journalist to full effect. The result is a narrative of the last 20 years that is upsetting, discerning and brilliantly argued." — The New York Times
"One of the most illuminating books to come out of the Trump era." — New York Magazine
An examination of the profound impact that the War on Terror had in pushing American politics and society in an authoritarian direction
For an entire generation, at home and abroad, the United States has waged an endless conflict known as the War on Terror. In addition to multiple ground wars, the era pioneered drone strikes and industrial-scale digital surveillance; weakened the rule of law through indefinite detentions; sanctioned torture; and manipulated the truth about it all. These conflicts have yielded neither peace nor victory, but they have transformed America. What began as the persecution of Muslims and immigrants has become a normalized feature of American politics and national security, expanding the possibilities for applying similar or worse measures against other targets at home, as the summer of 2020 showed. A politically divided and economically destabilized country turned the War on Terror into a cultural—and then a tribal—struggle. It began on the ideological frontiers of the Republican Party before expanding to conquer the GOP, often with the acquiescence of the Democratic Party. Today’s nativist resurgence walked through a door opened by the 9/11 era. And that door remains open.
Reign of Terror shows how these developments created an opportunity for American authoritarianism and gave rise to Donald Trump. It shows that Barack Obama squandered an opportunity to dismantle the War on Terror after killing Osama bin Laden. By the end of his tenure, the war had metastasized into a bitter, broader cultural struggle in search of a demagogue like Trump to lead it.
Reign of Terror is a pathbreaking and definitive union of journalism and intellectual history with the power to transform how America understands its national security policies and their catastrophic impact on civic life.
"An impressive combination of diligence and verve, deploying Ackerman’s deep stores of knowledge as a national security journalist to full effect. The result is a narrative of the last 20 years that is upsetting, discerning and brilliantly argued." — The New York Times
"One of the most illuminating books to come out of the Trump era." — New York Magazine
An examination of the profound impact that the War on Terror had in pushing American politics and society in an authoritarian direction
For an entire generation, at home and abroad, the United States has waged an endless conflict known as the War on Terror. In addition to multiple ground wars, the era pioneered drone strikes and industrial-scale digital surveillance; weakened the rule of law through indefinite detentions; sanctioned torture; and manipulated the truth about it all. These conflicts have yielded neither peace nor victory, but they have transformed America. What began as the persecution of Muslims and immigrants has become a normalized feature of American politics and national security, expanding the possibilities for applying similar or worse measures against other targets at home, as the summer of 2020 showed. A politically divided and economically destabilized country turned the War on Terror into a cultural—and then a tribal—struggle. It began on the ideological frontiers of the Republican Party before expanding to conquer the GOP, often with the acquiescence of the Democratic Party. Today’s nativist resurgence walked through a door opened by the 9/11 era. And that door remains open.
Reign of Terror shows how these developments created an opportunity for American authoritarianism and gave rise to Donald Trump. It shows that Barack Obama squandered an opportunity to dismantle the War on Terror after killing Osama bin Laden. By the end of his tenure, the war had metastasized into a bitter, broader cultural struggle in search of a demagogue like Trump to lead it.
Reign of Terror is a pathbreaking and definitive union of journalism and intellectual history with the power to transform how America understands its national security policies and their catastrophic impact on civic life.
448 pages, Hardcover
First published May 11, 2021
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August 25, 2021
Was really looking forward to reading this book and I definitely believe that it's a worthwhile read especially for younger people that didn't experience this history. However, this book needed a better editor as there were a number of errors. Two that come to the top of my head are Ackerman saying Black Lives Matter responded to the death of Mike Brown in Ferguson. As someone who was in Ferguson from day one I can tell you the Uprising was organic, not planned, and the BLM organization never had any real presence in St Louis. The Black Lives Matter chant wasn't even something that initially appeared in St. Louis as there were other preferred chants and when it was introduced it was largely by "white allies" and the progressive donor class that would go onto play a controversial role in Ferguson. Ackerman also referred to Huma Abedin, a Desi, as a Jordanian-American.
What did this book do well? I think it did a pretty good job in outlining America's fumbling of the Post Cold War Era, the beginning of the Endless War and "War on Terror", the Islamophobia industry, birtherism, anti-immigrant hysteria, the Rise of Trump, the COVID-19 reaction from the right, and how white grievance and fear (namely the "replacement theory") ties them all together. If you were a child when 9-11 occurred, or not even born yet, this book is a good historical primer for the catastrophically awful response the US had to that attack.
I have some other minor criticism of the book. Ackerman mentions the Oklahoma City bombing and Timothy McVeigh to begin the book and correctly points out that right-wing racist white terrorists aren't viewed as the same type of threat Muslims are. One thing he neglected to mention was that African-American Muslims living in Oklahoma City were the initial suspects. Why were they the initial suspects? Because non-Black Muslims when questioned pointed them out as being "radical" and "dangerous" due to their appearance and strict observance to Sunni Islam. One of those men suspected in OKC would go onto be imprisoned after 9-11 after being harassed due to the fact the alleged "20th hijacker of 9-11" was his roommate.
Ackerman also mentions the Countering Violent Extremism program launched under President Obama was designed as a smart War on Terror program, but that it's core was problematic from a civil liberties and constitutional perspective. I agree with this assessment. However, what Ackerman doesn't mention is there were a lot of Muslims not only helping to design and administer this program, but there were also numerous mosques and Muslim organizations gladly taking CVE grants. Many mosques gladly transformed themselves into intelligence gathering centers developing a cozy relationship with the FBI and most often Salafis, African-Americans, Deobandis, and converts became the target. CVE engaged in the most un-American of activities- government policing and monitoring of theology accompanied by the creation of state-approved theology. One of the reasons this was possible is many Muslim leaders and laypeople in America have relationships with clerics who themselves are in the service of corrupt monarchies and dictatorial regimes and the associated intelligence agencies and sanction these attitudes in America. In fact Ackerman quotes former CIA Director James Woolsey saying 80% of American mosques are controlled by extremists. That is a line Woolsey borrowed from California-based Sufi Cleric Hisham Qabbani who encouraged closing down mosques and a crackdown on American-Muslims in order to boost his brand of "moderate" Islam.
Overall this is a good read. Perhaps 3.5. For people of my generation who protested both the war in Afghanistan and invasion of Iraq and were the victims of both Islamophobia and law-enforcment harassment Ackerman will help us relive and remember some dark moments and shake our heads and just how idiotic and awful the American reaction to 9-11 was leading to everything we see today.
What did this book do well? I think it did a pretty good job in outlining America's fumbling of the Post Cold War Era, the beginning of the Endless War and "War on Terror", the Islamophobia industry, birtherism, anti-immigrant hysteria, the Rise of Trump, the COVID-19 reaction from the right, and how white grievance and fear (namely the "replacement theory") ties them all together. If you were a child when 9-11 occurred, or not even born yet, this book is a good historical primer for the catastrophically awful response the US had to that attack.
I have some other minor criticism of the book. Ackerman mentions the Oklahoma City bombing and Timothy McVeigh to begin the book and correctly points out that right-wing racist white terrorists aren't viewed as the same type of threat Muslims are. One thing he neglected to mention was that African-American Muslims living in Oklahoma City were the initial suspects. Why were they the initial suspects? Because non-Black Muslims when questioned pointed them out as being "radical" and "dangerous" due to their appearance and strict observance to Sunni Islam. One of those men suspected in OKC would go onto be imprisoned after 9-11 after being harassed due to the fact the alleged "20th hijacker of 9-11" was his roommate.
Ackerman also mentions the Countering Violent Extremism program launched under President Obama was designed as a smart War on Terror program, but that it's core was problematic from a civil liberties and constitutional perspective. I agree with this assessment. However, what Ackerman doesn't mention is there were a lot of Muslims not only helping to design and administer this program, but there were also numerous mosques and Muslim organizations gladly taking CVE grants. Many mosques gladly transformed themselves into intelligence gathering centers developing a cozy relationship with the FBI and most often Salafis, African-Americans, Deobandis, and converts became the target. CVE engaged in the most un-American of activities- government policing and monitoring of theology accompanied by the creation of state-approved theology. One of the reasons this was possible is many Muslim leaders and laypeople in America have relationships with clerics who themselves are in the service of corrupt monarchies and dictatorial regimes and the associated intelligence agencies and sanction these attitudes in America. In fact Ackerman quotes former CIA Director James Woolsey saying 80% of American mosques are controlled by extremists. That is a line Woolsey borrowed from California-based Sufi Cleric Hisham Qabbani who encouraged closing down mosques and a crackdown on American-Muslims in order to boost his brand of "moderate" Islam.
Overall this is a good read. Perhaps 3.5. For people of my generation who protested both the war in Afghanistan and invasion of Iraq and were the victims of both Islamophobia and law-enforcment harassment Ackerman will help us relive and remember some dark moments and shake our heads and just how idiotic and awful the American reaction to 9-11 was leading to everything we see today.
July 12, 2025
Might be a more helpful book now than when it was published because the analysis has only become more fleshed out with how to view the world passing into something distinctly different
November 12, 2022
Most probably my non-fiction book of the year (funny how I always make it sound like I was personally awarding the Nobel Prize in Literature 👸 🙄)
So the book: Ackerman, Spencer (10 August, 2021), Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump, Viking was published 5 days before the ‘fall of Kabul’ and 21 days before the last US soldier left Afghanistan, I guess 'timely' doesn't quite cut it.
I think what a lot of people don’t get about ‘imperialism’ (if you wish) is that this is not a one-way street. The violence, racism, and exploitation the US exerts in other parts of the world ‘overseas’ as part of its war on terror (looks like this has now moved on to Russia and China), changes things at home too. It’s the same way you cannot make sense of the ascent of fascism in Germany outside the context of German colonialism and imperialism. So, the book focuses precisely on what links the events of 9/11 in 2001 to the storm of the Capitol about 20 years later in January 2021. In essence, the war on terror ‘revitalized the most barbarous currents in American history, gave them renewed purpose, and set them on the march, an army in search of its general’. The threat to democracy comes not from terrorism but the apparatus of counterterrorism, at the level of the state and at the level of politics.
A few take-aways:
#1 – I think it is important to recall how the ‘war on terror’ has normalized outright barbarism and new normal practices that hardly align with what supporters of the war (which remains a bipartisan project) would call values of a liberal democracy, such as systematic torture (‘enhanced interrogation’), extra-judicial prisons and killings (remember how Trump just ‘took out’ Suleimani without any major public outcry in the west), drone warfare with endless civilian casualties (‘precision airstrikes’) plus the overall issue of illegal interventions, occupations and continued arming of various war factions (‘moderate rebels’).
#2 - The war on terror has also changed the domestic landscape and democracy in terms of unprecedented executive power (really created under Obama but then also used by Trump), state surveillance, political prisoners, carceral immigration politics, racist brutality of a newly militarized police - supplying military equipment and counterterrorism training to police also followed the economic logic of permanent war and defense contractors seeking new markets (more on this later in another book I just finished). The book provides a great account of how over the past twenty years the war on terror justified bit by bit the roll-back of basic democratic rights and values, across three Presidents.
#3 – While the so-called ‘humanitarian interventions’ to defend the ‘rules based international order’ continue to enjoy bipartisan support and there was overall great continuity between Bush, Obama, and Trump, the book also provides a breakdown of the various phases and stages of the war on terror which also brings out the differences between the three administrations (for instance, while Obama institutionalized drone warfare, he rolled back the CIA torture apparatus etc). Spoiler: while Biden did indeed withdraw from Afghanistan, he did not break with the overall logic of US exceptionalism of a country that can intervene and strike when and where it wants outside any international law, as it still does in Afghanistan (and elsewhere).
#4 – Side note, I get a little nervous with our new Green Party foreign minister and her rhetoric of ‘human rights based foreign policy’ while firmly committing to NATO – honestly, I have just seen to much of this over the past 20 years. I claim that it is only a total lack of interest and willingness to engage substantively with the war on terror that continues to make ‘western progressive’ supportive of these endeavors (but then also realizing that it’s not so easy to get tough with China when your export oriented economy depends on it). Since the author of this book, Ackermann, is a ‘mainstream’ journalist with two decades of reporting on the forever wars and definitely not someone who can be accused of contributing to conspiracy theories, I would recommend to any of those ‘pro-NATO progressives’ to dig a little deeper into the western role in the ‘rules based international order’.
#5 - While the war on terror was not the only reason for Trumpism (I would focus also on neoliberalism and rising inequality especially post GFC), it created ways for the other factors, such as racism, to find powerful forms of expression. I think the link between the war on terror overseas and racialized state brutality at home became most obvious when in the late days of Trump, the far-right somehow declared the Black Lives Matter activists as ‘terrorists’ (while white proto-fascists stormed the Capitol with the police standing by). There are also many other great reads on this, such as ‘Race and America’s Long war’ by Nikhil Singh (2017). The whole relationship between imperialism, wars and ‘racism at home’ is not very intuitive but of utmost importance to also understand the dangers of fascism today.
#6 – There’s another quite underappreciated aspect of the forever wars, which is the war’s political economy in the sense of the wealth that was redistributed to the military and the defense industry, wealth and resources that would have been needed to address the growing precarity of working and even middle class life. There’s WAY more to say on this but suffice to say that this, of course, coupled with neoliberalism/ austerity also created the breeding ground for Trump.
#7 – The book also provided an excellent 500-page insight into the monster that is the ‘security state’, which is by no means a monolithic agency but a web of defense, intelligence, security etc. departments, agencies, think thanks, contractors, all with their own political leanings and agendas (we have seen some of this playing out where the Democrats/ liberal opposition to Trump sided with the Security State where Trump and the Security State clashed).
#8 – The book is quite dense at times but it’s a rare combination of very solid and detailed reporting on the forever wars plus an actually progressive framework of analysis (I can’t read this ‘international relations’ crap anymore). For those who think 500 pages is a little too much to ask, there is also a three-part The Dig podcast series with interviews with the author on the book ❤
So the book: Ackerman, Spencer (10 August, 2021), Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump, Viking was published 5 days before the ‘fall of Kabul’ and 21 days before the last US soldier left Afghanistan, I guess 'timely' doesn't quite cut it.
I think what a lot of people don’t get about ‘imperialism’ (if you wish) is that this is not a one-way street. The violence, racism, and exploitation the US exerts in other parts of the world ‘overseas’ as part of its war on terror (looks like this has now moved on to Russia and China), changes things at home too. It’s the same way you cannot make sense of the ascent of fascism in Germany outside the context of German colonialism and imperialism. So, the book focuses precisely on what links the events of 9/11 in 2001 to the storm of the Capitol about 20 years later in January 2021. In essence, the war on terror ‘revitalized the most barbarous currents in American history, gave them renewed purpose, and set them on the march, an army in search of its general’. The threat to democracy comes not from terrorism but the apparatus of counterterrorism, at the level of the state and at the level of politics.
A few take-aways:
#1 – I think it is important to recall how the ‘war on terror’ has normalized outright barbarism and new normal practices that hardly align with what supporters of the war (which remains a bipartisan project) would call values of a liberal democracy, such as systematic torture (‘enhanced interrogation’), extra-judicial prisons and killings (remember how Trump just ‘took out’ Suleimani without any major public outcry in the west), drone warfare with endless civilian casualties (‘precision airstrikes’) plus the overall issue of illegal interventions, occupations and continued arming of various war factions (‘moderate rebels’).
#2 - The war on terror has also changed the domestic landscape and democracy in terms of unprecedented executive power (really created under Obama but then also used by Trump), state surveillance, political prisoners, carceral immigration politics, racist brutality of a newly militarized police - supplying military equipment and counterterrorism training to police also followed the economic logic of permanent war and defense contractors seeking new markets (more on this later in another book I just finished). The book provides a great account of how over the past twenty years the war on terror justified bit by bit the roll-back of basic democratic rights and values, across three Presidents.
#3 – While the so-called ‘humanitarian interventions’ to defend the ‘rules based international order’ continue to enjoy bipartisan support and there was overall great continuity between Bush, Obama, and Trump, the book also provides a breakdown of the various phases and stages of the war on terror which also brings out the differences between the three administrations (for instance, while Obama institutionalized drone warfare, he rolled back the CIA torture apparatus etc). Spoiler: while Biden did indeed withdraw from Afghanistan, he did not break with the overall logic of US exceptionalism of a country that can intervene and strike when and where it wants outside any international law, as it still does in Afghanistan (and elsewhere).
#4 – Side note, I get a little nervous with our new Green Party foreign minister and her rhetoric of ‘human rights based foreign policy’ while firmly committing to NATO – honestly, I have just seen to much of this over the past 20 years. I claim that it is only a total lack of interest and willingness to engage substantively with the war on terror that continues to make ‘western progressive’ supportive of these endeavors (but then also realizing that it’s not so easy to get tough with China when your export oriented economy depends on it). Since the author of this book, Ackermann, is a ‘mainstream’ journalist with two decades of reporting on the forever wars and definitely not someone who can be accused of contributing to conspiracy theories, I would recommend to any of those ‘pro-NATO progressives’ to dig a little deeper into the western role in the ‘rules based international order’.
#5 - While the war on terror was not the only reason for Trumpism (I would focus also on neoliberalism and rising inequality especially post GFC), it created ways for the other factors, such as racism, to find powerful forms of expression. I think the link between the war on terror overseas and racialized state brutality at home became most obvious when in the late days of Trump, the far-right somehow declared the Black Lives Matter activists as ‘terrorists’ (while white proto-fascists stormed the Capitol with the police standing by). There are also many other great reads on this, such as ‘Race and America’s Long war’ by Nikhil Singh (2017). The whole relationship between imperialism, wars and ‘racism at home’ is not very intuitive but of utmost importance to also understand the dangers of fascism today.
#6 – There’s another quite underappreciated aspect of the forever wars, which is the war’s political economy in the sense of the wealth that was redistributed to the military and the defense industry, wealth and resources that would have been needed to address the growing precarity of working and even middle class life. There’s WAY more to say on this but suffice to say that this, of course, coupled with neoliberalism/ austerity also created the breeding ground for Trump.
#7 – The book also provided an excellent 500-page insight into the monster that is the ‘security state’, which is by no means a monolithic agency but a web of defense, intelligence, security etc. departments, agencies, think thanks, contractors, all with their own political leanings and agendas (we have seen some of this playing out where the Democrats/ liberal opposition to Trump sided with the Security State where Trump and the Security State clashed).
#8 – The book is quite dense at times but it’s a rare combination of very solid and detailed reporting on the forever wars plus an actually progressive framework of analysis (I can’t read this ‘international relations’ crap anymore). For those who think 500 pages is a little too much to ask, there is also a three-part The Dig podcast series with interviews with the author on the book ❤
August 20, 2021
Difficult and necessary. Difficult because it's painful revisiting the highlights of the Bush administration, now with added revelations of the extent and sheer malice of the torture and bloodshed. Necessary to see spelled out the path from Oklahoma City vs 9/11 to Lafayette Square and January 6. The last couple chapters, covering the Trump era, feel inadequate somehow, relying too much on the reader to share the author's politics and make the right connections. Yet, this should not dissuade anyone from rushing right out and buying this book! Especially helpful in giving context to the events of this week, as the US ends its presence in Afghanistan and the war comes full circle yet again.
January 19, 2024
How appropriate that Spencer Ackerman's Reign of Terror, an acid assessment of the cost and domestic legacy of America's "War on Terror," debuted just a few days before the fall of Kabul rendered twenty years of conflict moot. Ackerman shows how the 9/11 terror attacks devastated American politics and culture almost from the first moment; calls for patriotism curdled quickly into jingoism, an "us-versus-them" mentality that triggered violent xenophobia against American Muslims, McCarthyite denunciations of dissenters as "un-American" and a devastating expansion of the Security State. The Republican Party embraced the war as an excuse to advance their regressive agenda under the cover of patriotism; disagree with any of George Bush's policies, and you let the terrorists win. But Democratic leaders were hardly innocent; Obama, Hillary Clinton and other liberals preferred a "sustainable War on Terror" that tinkered with the war machine rather than fixing it, prolonging wars while cracking down even harder on whistleblowers. The perpetual war made it easy for demagogues to mobilize political resentment along jingoist lines; by the time Donald Trump came along, he found an angry, dissatisfied public all too eager to brand cultural and political foes as "terrorists" worthy of repression and violence. Thus, Ackerman draws a straight line between 9/11 and 1/6, with the amoral 45th President inciting followers to violence while openly subverting democracy. Far from merely an anti-Trump (or even anti-Republican) tract, though, Ackerman's book demonstrates how deeply our society has been corroded by the forever war; even as Afghanistan collapses, the legacy of 9/11 continues to poison our society.
August 12, 2021
Spencer Ackerman's Reign of Terror argues that with the end of the Cold War (officially in 1991, though, as Ackerman notes, unofficially ended in the late '80s under Reagan), America entered into the War on Terror period. Essentially, the book begins with the Oklahoma City Bombing and ends with the events of 1/6/21.
I would have been interested to see Ackerman speculate on the coming Security State period. We've already seen the groundwork laid with social media data collection, facial recognition, etc. That said, as a reporter, I can understand why he chose not to go there. There are enough facts to write about it, but in the context of this book, some material may be seen as overly speculative. Ackerman actually acknowledges that there was no way for him to include everything on the subject (not to mention a different subject, albeit one that is closely related). Also, he does briefly mention Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism for those who'd like to further explore the subject.
I was impressed with Ackerman's ability to connect the similarities of the OKC bombing and 9/11. Both involved the demolition of a significant building in a major American city and both were blamed on radical Muslims. That isn't to say that Ackerman implies the events were connected, but he skillfully connects the two events as two separate pieces within the War on Terror chapter. In fact, Ackerman shows parallels but also striking differences. Timothy McVeigh attempted to be a martyr, while Muslims across the world were vilified after 9/11.
Early in the book, Ackerman has a quote in which someone discusses the potentially huge setback of bending the Constitution to suit the War on Terror. Indeed, when one watches unmarked vans taking protestors away in the name of "security," the image is scary. This is the latest development. Ackerman goes into the prior history at length, including rather graphic detail of the CIA's tactics in Guantanamo and Afghanistan. This is not for the faint of heart.
All in all, the bulk of Reign of Terror deals with 9/11 and how the government's dealing with the aftermath lead, inevitably, to the rise of Donald Trump as president. Ackerman skillfully demonstrates how George W. Bush and Donald Trump weren't so different in planting Islamophobia. Bush was just much more gifted in using subtle euphemisms, while Trump spouted outright hate. I can't say I agree with Ackerman's view that a journalist must take a side. I don't believe there is such a thing as pure objectivity, but I do believe attempting to be objective is a good goal. Despite the fact that one quickly picks up on Ackerman's political views, I didn't find it bothersome. Ackerman does an excellent job of finding extensive sources (and there is a lengthy citation of sources at the end).
I would have been interested to see Ackerman speculate on the coming Security State period. We've already seen the groundwork laid with social media data collection, facial recognition, etc. That said, as a reporter, I can understand why he chose not to go there. There are enough facts to write about it, but in the context of this book, some material may be seen as overly speculative. Ackerman actually acknowledges that there was no way for him to include everything on the subject (not to mention a different subject, albeit one that is closely related). Also, he does briefly mention Shoshana Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism for those who'd like to further explore the subject.
I was impressed with Ackerman's ability to connect the similarities of the OKC bombing and 9/11. Both involved the demolition of a significant building in a major American city and both were blamed on radical Muslims. That isn't to say that Ackerman implies the events were connected, but he skillfully connects the two events as two separate pieces within the War on Terror chapter. In fact, Ackerman shows parallels but also striking differences. Timothy McVeigh attempted to be a martyr, while Muslims across the world were vilified after 9/11.
Early in the book, Ackerman has a quote in which someone discusses the potentially huge setback of bending the Constitution to suit the War on Terror. Indeed, when one watches unmarked vans taking protestors away in the name of "security," the image is scary. This is the latest development. Ackerman goes into the prior history at length, including rather graphic detail of the CIA's tactics in Guantanamo and Afghanistan. This is not for the faint of heart.
All in all, the bulk of Reign of Terror deals with 9/11 and how the government's dealing with the aftermath lead, inevitably, to the rise of Donald Trump as president. Ackerman skillfully demonstrates how George W. Bush and Donald Trump weren't so different in planting Islamophobia. Bush was just much more gifted in using subtle euphemisms, while Trump spouted outright hate. I can't say I agree with Ackerman's view that a journalist must take a side. I don't believe there is such a thing as pure objectivity, but I do believe attempting to be objective is a good goal. Despite the fact that one quickly picks up on Ackerman's political views, I didn't find it bothersome. Ackerman does an excellent job of finding extensive sources (and there is a lengthy citation of sources at the end).
September 11, 2021
I reviewed this in Foreign Policy Magazine:
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/09/11/...
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/09/11/...
October 27, 2021
From 1945 to 1989 the United States saw itself in a global war against communism, and the Soviet Union was our mortal enemy throughout that period. Even with World War 2 over, defense budgets skyrocketed and the world was taken to the brink of nuclear annihilation in the cause of protecting the American Way. Proxy wars were fought in Korea, Vietnam, and other countries and millions of lives were destroyed by this 40 year standoff. And then the Soviet Union broke up and Americans were unsure who the "enemy" was anymore.
In comes Osama Bin Laden, a rich Saudi extremist who planned the fateful September 11th, 2001 attacks, and all of a sudden we knew we had a new enemy who could strike terror into our very heart. The problem was, we didn't understand who, where, or why we had such an enemy, and we wasted 20 years fighting a new war, the Global War on Terror, that made us worse off than we were before.
All of the depressing aspects of the War on Terror are detailed in Spencer Ackerman's new book, Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 era destabilized America and produced Trump. Ackerman is a journalist who specializes in security issues and has written for Wired, The New Republic, and The Daily Beast. The book tells the story from right before 9/11 through the Covid epidemic of 2020, and is a great recap of the lengths that the US went through to protect itself from a villain it couldn't completely understand or identify.
To summarize, the War on Terror resulted in two costly invasions, Iraq and Afghanistan, both of which have by now kicked out most Americans. Five other countries were bombed and/or had their citizens killed by drone strikes- Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, and Libya. An estimated 800,000 people were directly killed by these wars and over 20 million became refugees. Granted, some of this fighting would have gone on whether the US got involved or not, but the enormous amount of weaponry and money that the US added to this volatile area made things worse, not better.
Over six trillion dollars were spent on the War on Terror- money that could have made a huge difference had it been spent on schools, infrastructure, climate change, health care, or almost anything else that helps rather than kills people. Ackerman points to something he calls the Security State, an alliance of generals, defense contractors, and politicians who justified their existence by looking for bad guys and asking for more and more money. Money had a lot to do with the War on Terror, and it will continue to rule decisions on national security going forward.
The biggest problem in the entire War on Terror is how loosely it was defined. No one could exactly define who the enemy was, where they lived, or what they wanted. No one had any idea what victory would look like or when to declare it. Mostly Saudi citizens were among the hijackers who attacked the World Trade Center, but Saudi Arabia was never targeted. Osama Bin Laden, the organizer of the attacks, was targeted and eventually killed, but the war kept on going even after Bin Laden's death. Al Queda, Bin Laden's organization was targeted and scattered with the invasion of Afghanistan, but the war kept on going and Al Queda was able to live in the shadows only to take back the country in 2021. So who exactly was the enemy in the War on Terror, and how could we fight them?
The book details this ongoing struggle during four different presidencies. One side pretty much believed that Islam was the enemy and all Muslims had to be looked at with suspicion and/or hatred. Another side tried to delineate Islamic extremists from peaceful Muslims and go after only the worst organizers of global terrorist attacks. (There were also violent attacks in Europe during this period that confuses and scared people even further.) The reality ends up being that it isn't Islam that's the problem, it's extremism in all forms. Ackerman details events leading up to the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995. Initially Muslims were blamed for that too, but it soon turned out that an American extremist, Timothy McVeigh carried out the attack. The United States, it turns out, is home to many extremist groups who don't like where things are headed and are willing to kill to make their point. But because of a serious blind spot, we only look for Islamic extremism, (even where it doesn't pose a threat) as the source of many of our problems.
Reign of Terror chronicles many depressing episodes that we'd rather not have to recount, but the story of the War on Terror isn't complete without looking at them. Such as:
1- Torture was widely and illegally used on a variety of suspected terrorists. The techniques used are too grisly to recount here, but there is much debate about whether any good intelligence comes from physical and mental cruelty. The location of Bin Laden wasn't produced by torture according to this book, but by surveillance of key people in his inner circle.
2- The rights of American citizens were likely violated by a surveillance state that arose thanks to the Patriot act. Phones were tapped, emails were intercepted, and privacy rights were violated in many cases because of racial and religious profiling.
3- Immigration became a hot potato for both political parties, as a deal fell through to fix the broken system. Legal requests for asylum were met with resistance and small children were separated from their parents at the border in an attempt to use cruelty as a deterrent. Many valuable potential American citizens were turned away because of the fear drummed up by supporters of the War on Terror.
4- The US invaded Iraq on the justification that its leader had chemical weapons of mass destruction, which turned out not to be true. The Iraq invasion turned into a quagmire for years after its beginning, spawning a new group of terrorists, ISIS, and leading to global embarrassment when torture programs were discovered.
5- Unwanted junk was disposed of in burn pits, and US soldiers today still suffer from the toxins that were released in these poorly thought out trash fires.
6- Thousands of innocent people were likely detained in prisons, black sites, Guantanamo, and secret CIA locations without any rights or ability to prove their innocence. The book details one such victim, Adham Hassoun, who was taken prisoner in 2002 and convicted of supporting terrorism based on a broad statute that could implicate millions because of who they know or do business with. Hassoun spent 15 years in prison but was detained another 3 years after that for national security reasons that were unexplained. Only with support from the ACLU and other groups was he finally released in 2020.
This book blames both political parties, Republicans and Democrats for prolonging the war year after year. But it is the right wing of the spectrum that has particularly fanned the flames of fear and Islamophobia to win donations and elections, and the American public and press has followed along unquestioningly. Donald Trump rode into the presidency on the heels of fear of Muslims and anti-immigrant hatred (especially from Latin America), and he expertly manipulated the worst instincts of Americans to gain power.
One would hope that books like this would lead to some way overdue reflection on America's place in history and a more sober and realistic foreign policy. But if the disaster in Vietnam didn't change very much, it's hard to see how the Global War on Terror has produced many lessons for those who pull the strings and control the narrative. Sooner or later, you would think that the public has to get tired of the lies, deception, cruelty, and magical thinking.
There are plenty of things to fear these days. Climate change, crime, terrorism, and pandemics to name a few. What we've been doing hasn't been working, and I can't help but think of the wasted lives, money, and opportunities that the War on Terror has produced. I've met plenty of Muslims in my life and don't see them as any scarier than anybody else. Extremists of all colors scare me a lot more, because they see themselves as above the rest of us and the sole possessors of truth, which gives them the right to impose their views on the rest of us. The United States has a strong and powerful minority that sees the country as an arbiter of truth and goodness for the world, immune from consequences for any mistakes it might have made, and that needs to end.
This book made me mad, sad, and depressed at our inability to learn from our mistakes. Ackerman does a great job recounting the things we'd all rather forget, but I wish he would have had some suggestions at the end for how to improve things. Hate and fear are powerful tools. How do we protect people from those who would abuse those tools for their own profit? How can we feel safe in an insecure world? How is it possible for people of different races, religions, and traditions to share a planet that's more and more interconnected and fragile every day? And why do we keep falling for wasteful, stupid wars that lazily paint us as the good guys when much better, safer, and more productive options are out there?
In comes Osama Bin Laden, a rich Saudi extremist who planned the fateful September 11th, 2001 attacks, and all of a sudden we knew we had a new enemy who could strike terror into our very heart. The problem was, we didn't understand who, where, or why we had such an enemy, and we wasted 20 years fighting a new war, the Global War on Terror, that made us worse off than we were before.
All of the depressing aspects of the War on Terror are detailed in Spencer Ackerman's new book, Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 era destabilized America and produced Trump. Ackerman is a journalist who specializes in security issues and has written for Wired, The New Republic, and The Daily Beast. The book tells the story from right before 9/11 through the Covid epidemic of 2020, and is a great recap of the lengths that the US went through to protect itself from a villain it couldn't completely understand or identify.
To summarize, the War on Terror resulted in two costly invasions, Iraq and Afghanistan, both of which have by now kicked out most Americans. Five other countries were bombed and/or had their citizens killed by drone strikes- Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, and Libya. An estimated 800,000 people were directly killed by these wars and over 20 million became refugees. Granted, some of this fighting would have gone on whether the US got involved or not, but the enormous amount of weaponry and money that the US added to this volatile area made things worse, not better.
Over six trillion dollars were spent on the War on Terror- money that could have made a huge difference had it been spent on schools, infrastructure, climate change, health care, or almost anything else that helps rather than kills people. Ackerman points to something he calls the Security State, an alliance of generals, defense contractors, and politicians who justified their existence by looking for bad guys and asking for more and more money. Money had a lot to do with the War on Terror, and it will continue to rule decisions on national security going forward.
The biggest problem in the entire War on Terror is how loosely it was defined. No one could exactly define who the enemy was, where they lived, or what they wanted. No one had any idea what victory would look like or when to declare it. Mostly Saudi citizens were among the hijackers who attacked the World Trade Center, but Saudi Arabia was never targeted. Osama Bin Laden, the organizer of the attacks, was targeted and eventually killed, but the war kept on going even after Bin Laden's death. Al Queda, Bin Laden's organization was targeted and scattered with the invasion of Afghanistan, but the war kept on going and Al Queda was able to live in the shadows only to take back the country in 2021. So who exactly was the enemy in the War on Terror, and how could we fight them?
The book details this ongoing struggle during four different presidencies. One side pretty much believed that Islam was the enemy and all Muslims had to be looked at with suspicion and/or hatred. Another side tried to delineate Islamic extremists from peaceful Muslims and go after only the worst organizers of global terrorist attacks. (There were also violent attacks in Europe during this period that confuses and scared people even further.) The reality ends up being that it isn't Islam that's the problem, it's extremism in all forms. Ackerman details events leading up to the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995. Initially Muslims were blamed for that too, but it soon turned out that an American extremist, Timothy McVeigh carried out the attack. The United States, it turns out, is home to many extremist groups who don't like where things are headed and are willing to kill to make their point. But because of a serious blind spot, we only look for Islamic extremism, (even where it doesn't pose a threat) as the source of many of our problems.
Reign of Terror chronicles many depressing episodes that we'd rather not have to recount, but the story of the War on Terror isn't complete without looking at them. Such as:
1- Torture was widely and illegally used on a variety of suspected terrorists. The techniques used are too grisly to recount here, but there is much debate about whether any good intelligence comes from physical and mental cruelty. The location of Bin Laden wasn't produced by torture according to this book, but by surveillance of key people in his inner circle.
2- The rights of American citizens were likely violated by a surveillance state that arose thanks to the Patriot act. Phones were tapped, emails were intercepted, and privacy rights were violated in many cases because of racial and religious profiling.
3- Immigration became a hot potato for both political parties, as a deal fell through to fix the broken system. Legal requests for asylum were met with resistance and small children were separated from their parents at the border in an attempt to use cruelty as a deterrent. Many valuable potential American citizens were turned away because of the fear drummed up by supporters of the War on Terror.
4- The US invaded Iraq on the justification that its leader had chemical weapons of mass destruction, which turned out not to be true. The Iraq invasion turned into a quagmire for years after its beginning, spawning a new group of terrorists, ISIS, and leading to global embarrassment when torture programs were discovered.
5- Unwanted junk was disposed of in burn pits, and US soldiers today still suffer from the toxins that were released in these poorly thought out trash fires.
6- Thousands of innocent people were likely detained in prisons, black sites, Guantanamo, and secret CIA locations without any rights or ability to prove their innocence. The book details one such victim, Adham Hassoun, who was taken prisoner in 2002 and convicted of supporting terrorism based on a broad statute that could implicate millions because of who they know or do business with. Hassoun spent 15 years in prison but was detained another 3 years after that for national security reasons that were unexplained. Only with support from the ACLU and other groups was he finally released in 2020.
This book blames both political parties, Republicans and Democrats for prolonging the war year after year. But it is the right wing of the spectrum that has particularly fanned the flames of fear and Islamophobia to win donations and elections, and the American public and press has followed along unquestioningly. Donald Trump rode into the presidency on the heels of fear of Muslims and anti-immigrant hatred (especially from Latin America), and he expertly manipulated the worst instincts of Americans to gain power.
One would hope that books like this would lead to some way overdue reflection on America's place in history and a more sober and realistic foreign policy. But if the disaster in Vietnam didn't change very much, it's hard to see how the Global War on Terror has produced many lessons for those who pull the strings and control the narrative. Sooner or later, you would think that the public has to get tired of the lies, deception, cruelty, and magical thinking.
There are plenty of things to fear these days. Climate change, crime, terrorism, and pandemics to name a few. What we've been doing hasn't been working, and I can't help but think of the wasted lives, money, and opportunities that the War on Terror has produced. I've met plenty of Muslims in my life and don't see them as any scarier than anybody else. Extremists of all colors scare me a lot more, because they see themselves as above the rest of us and the sole possessors of truth, which gives them the right to impose their views on the rest of us. The United States has a strong and powerful minority that sees the country as an arbiter of truth and goodness for the world, immune from consequences for any mistakes it might have made, and that needs to end.
This book made me mad, sad, and depressed at our inability to learn from our mistakes. Ackerman does a great job recounting the things we'd all rather forget, but I wish he would have had some suggestions at the end for how to improve things. Hate and fear are powerful tools. How do we protect people from those who would abuse those tools for their own profit? How can we feel safe in an insecure world? How is it possible for people of different races, religions, and traditions to share a planet that's more and more interconnected and fragile every day? And why do we keep falling for wasteful, stupid wars that lazily paint us as the good guys when much better, safer, and more productive options are out there?
August 26, 2021
A disjointed, yet exhaustive accounting of a dysfunctional, confused war for vengeance on Islamic extremism. The connection to Trump is a bit of a stretch.
August 28, 2025
I read Nathan (@schizophrenicreads)’s review before picking this up, which noted that this is an especially great book with the context of a second Trump presidency. I’d agree — now is definitely the time to read this.
This book is detailed, deeply researched, and well-structured. For anyone else who went to high school in the late 2010s, I would also recommend this as a substitute for the 2000s American history that your classes never got to🙃
This book is detailed, deeply researched, and well-structured. For anyone else who went to high school in the late 2010s, I would also recommend this as a substitute for the 2000s American history that your classes never got to🙃
November 3, 2021
For those of us old enough to remember what life in this country was like before 9-11, this book is a reminder of how much we have lost...as well as how it happened.
For those of us too young to remember pre 9-11 days, this readable -- if discouraging -- history of the past 20 years will serve as a record of how things went wrong.
It is also vital to remember that all about which Mr. Ackerman writes occurred against the backdrop of a country already badly off-balanced for, by 9-11-01, the United States had already for decades been locked in political policies intended to shift wealth even further towards the already wealthy, while the average member of the working class had to worker harder and longer just to hold they purchasing power even. And the rise of the ideological Right -- with its no compromise at any cost and shoot the enemy (their opponents) focus -- was already undermining the functioning of this nominally democratic republic. Events after 9-11 just solidified and re-energized these already existing dangerous trends that, left unaddressed as they still are today, mean the destruction of this democratic republic.
Mr. Ackerman shows how badly we blew the incredible surge of good-will from around the world that followed the monstrous attacks of 9-11. Even Iran expressed sympathy for and solidarity with the American people!
But we first misidentified the problem -- by deciding to invade Iraq -- and then sank into the unsolvable task of winning the "war on terror," unwindable because there was no locus for "terror" and because it was open-ended, easily allowing entry into its terms by all everywhere who resented and/or resisted American interests around the world.
It is a difficult book to read -- at least it was for me -- because I kept mentally shouting warnings against taking "just another step" which, inevitably, broadened the quagmire and made retreat to sanity and appropriate perspective even more difficult.
For future historians -- provided that there are such, given our collective rush towards global warming -- this work will furnish a record of how this happened, as well as how it was allowed to.
For those of us too young to remember pre 9-11 days, this readable -- if discouraging -- history of the past 20 years will serve as a record of how things went wrong.
It is also vital to remember that all about which Mr. Ackerman writes occurred against the backdrop of a country already badly off-balanced for, by 9-11-01, the United States had already for decades been locked in political policies intended to shift wealth even further towards the already wealthy, while the average member of the working class had to worker harder and longer just to hold they purchasing power even. And the rise of the ideological Right -- with its no compromise at any cost and shoot the enemy (their opponents) focus -- was already undermining the functioning of this nominally democratic republic. Events after 9-11 just solidified and re-energized these already existing dangerous trends that, left unaddressed as they still are today, mean the destruction of this democratic republic.
Mr. Ackerman shows how badly we blew the incredible surge of good-will from around the world that followed the monstrous attacks of 9-11. Even Iran expressed sympathy for and solidarity with the American people!
But we first misidentified the problem -- by deciding to invade Iraq -- and then sank into the unsolvable task of winning the "war on terror," unwindable because there was no locus for "terror" and because it was open-ended, easily allowing entry into its terms by all everywhere who resented and/or resisted American interests around the world.
It is a difficult book to read -- at least it was for me -- because I kept mentally shouting warnings against taking "just another step" which, inevitably, broadened the quagmire and made retreat to sanity and appropriate perspective even more difficult.
For future historians -- provided that there are such, given our collective rush towards global warming -- this work will furnish a record of how this happened, as well as how it was allowed to.
August 25, 2021
Spencer "Attackerman" Ackerman is a powerhouse journalist. Any time you research a national security event from the past decade, you'll come across one of his investigative reports. So it was very exciting to hear he was writing a book. Ackerman himself is a delightfully unsubtle person; on Twitter, he would comment "REIGN OF TERROR // AUGUST 10 2021 // VIKING // PREORDER" under every news item that would make it into his book.
The book argues exactly what its subtitle describes: "How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump." Instead of targeting al-Qaeda in the wake of 9/11, the Bush administration waged a "War on Terror" without borders or a clear enemy. Americans could not experience victory or defeat, only the frustration of endless war. Conservatives constantly tried to expand the vague definition of the enemy to suit their agenda. Liberals refused to confront the war head-on, instead focusing on shoring up institutions that could make the war respectable, quiet, and "sustainable."
All of that energy built up to the Trump era. Donald Trump rode to power promising to unleash the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security, and the military against an ever-expanding list of un-American enemies. His opponents, meanwhile, whitewashed any official from those institutions who joined the #resistance to Trump. “It was as if the id of the War on Terror endorsed Trump even as its superego opposed him,” Ackerman writes.
In a lot of ways, Russiagate was an explosion of tensions between the id and superego that had existed since 9/11. Conservatives long suspected the Security State — the intelligence agencies, top military officers, the State Department, and federal law enforcement — of being too soft on the enemy. At the same time, conservatives needed those agencies to carry out the kind of War on Terror brutality they wanted. And many leaders of the National Security State loathed the lowbrow politics of fear that powered the conversative movement, even as they needed those same politics to keep their agencies funded and protected from scrutiny.
Barack Obama is the most interesting character in all of this. He was willing to question the Iraq War itself and the politics of fear behind it at a time when mainstream Democrats were unwilling to, as Ackerman points out. People like Hillary Clinton and John Kerry only promised to run the war better than Republicans did. But once in power, Obama did the same thing. Instead of ending the War on Terror, he tried to make it more efficient and respectable.
Obama replaced Iraq-style occupations with airstrikes and special forces operations. He ended the torture program, but blocked any investigation into or accountability for its perpetrators. He withdrew from Iraq, but doubled down on the “good war” in Afghanistan. When U.S. forces finally killed Osama bin Laden, Obama did not take the opportunity to declare the war over, but instead warned about the continuing threat of terror. The war would be efficient and quiet, something that could continue forever because Americans would not have to think about it too much either way.
But the war could never really remain quiet. Americans grew confused by the constant low-level violence their country was dishing out and receiving in strange-sounding places like Benghazi and Raqqa. Things got even more confusing when ISIS rose out of the convoluted Game of Thrones style violence of the Syrian civil war. For America, there was no possibility of either victory or defeat, and the enemy seemed more shadowy than ever. Meanwhile, the war continued to come home, as police with armored vehicles and tactical gear became a normal sight on American soil.
The far right’s fantasy of a civilizational war against Islam at least offered a specific enemy and the possibility of a satisfying ending.
Ackerman argues that Trump-style America First politics are not a turn away from the War on Terror, but its latest and highest form. The enemy is so vague that it is not just al-Qaeda, or Radical Islam, or even Islam. It is all the dangerous foreigners, the liberals who sympathize with them, and the Security State leaders who refuse to crack down. It is BLM, antifa, and (sometimes) interdimensional pedophile vampires. The solution is to finally unleash the Security State to do the things liberals couldn’t stomach.
I do wish Ackerman had spent less time on Russiagate and more time on QAnon, because that conspiracy theory illustrates his thesis perfectly. QAnon believers love military jargon and the aesthetic of post-9/11 shows like 24. Their fantasy is that the good elements of the Security State will finally wake up and crush the internal enemy in a coup known as The Storm. And, as Ackerman points out, some of the most prominent QAnon believers are frustrated Security State veterans like former military intelligence chief Michael Flynn and former CIA officer Michael Scheuer.
It remains to be seen what will happen to the War on Terror moving forward. Joe Biden is finally ending the war in Afghanistan, but all while warning of ongoing threats from Syria and Somalia. His “America First” opposition, after briefly flirting with “ending endless wars,” is now calling the President weak and calling for more aggressive action. Ackerman strikes a pessimistic tone: “As the Forever War persisted, with Trump handing off to Biden a perpetual-motion engine of death powered by the worst of American history, its targets increasingly domestic and its final form still unachieved, it became increasingly difficult to see America as anything more than its War on Terror.”
The book argues exactly what its subtitle describes: "How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump." Instead of targeting al-Qaeda in the wake of 9/11, the Bush administration waged a "War on Terror" without borders or a clear enemy. Americans could not experience victory or defeat, only the frustration of endless war. Conservatives constantly tried to expand the vague definition of the enemy to suit their agenda. Liberals refused to confront the war head-on, instead focusing on shoring up institutions that could make the war respectable, quiet, and "sustainable."
All of that energy built up to the Trump era. Donald Trump rode to power promising to unleash the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security, and the military against an ever-expanding list of un-American enemies. His opponents, meanwhile, whitewashed any official from those institutions who joined the #resistance to Trump. “It was as if the id of the War on Terror endorsed Trump even as its superego opposed him,” Ackerman writes.
In a lot of ways, Russiagate was an explosion of tensions between the id and superego that had existed since 9/11. Conservatives long suspected the Security State — the intelligence agencies, top military officers, the State Department, and federal law enforcement — of being too soft on the enemy. At the same time, conservatives needed those agencies to carry out the kind of War on Terror brutality they wanted. And many leaders of the National Security State loathed the lowbrow politics of fear that powered the conversative movement, even as they needed those same politics to keep their agencies funded and protected from scrutiny.
Barack Obama is the most interesting character in all of this. He was willing to question the Iraq War itself and the politics of fear behind it at a time when mainstream Democrats were unwilling to, as Ackerman points out. People like Hillary Clinton and John Kerry only promised to run the war better than Republicans did. But once in power, Obama did the same thing. Instead of ending the War on Terror, he tried to make it more efficient and respectable.
Obama replaced Iraq-style occupations with airstrikes and special forces operations. He ended the torture program, but blocked any investigation into or accountability for its perpetrators. He withdrew from Iraq, but doubled down on the “good war” in Afghanistan. When U.S. forces finally killed Osama bin Laden, Obama did not take the opportunity to declare the war over, but instead warned about the continuing threat of terror. The war would be efficient and quiet, something that could continue forever because Americans would not have to think about it too much either way.
But the war could never really remain quiet. Americans grew confused by the constant low-level violence their country was dishing out and receiving in strange-sounding places like Benghazi and Raqqa. Things got even more confusing when ISIS rose out of the convoluted Game of Thrones style violence of the Syrian civil war. For America, there was no possibility of either victory or defeat, and the enemy seemed more shadowy than ever. Meanwhile, the war continued to come home, as police with armored vehicles and tactical gear became a normal sight on American soil.
The far right’s fantasy of a civilizational war against Islam at least offered a specific enemy and the possibility of a satisfying ending.
Ackerman argues that Trump-style America First politics are not a turn away from the War on Terror, but its latest and highest form. The enemy is so vague that it is not just al-Qaeda, or Radical Islam, or even Islam. It is all the dangerous foreigners, the liberals who sympathize with them, and the Security State leaders who refuse to crack down. It is BLM, antifa, and (sometimes) interdimensional pedophile vampires. The solution is to finally unleash the Security State to do the things liberals couldn’t stomach.
I do wish Ackerman had spent less time on Russiagate and more time on QAnon, because that conspiracy theory illustrates his thesis perfectly. QAnon believers love military jargon and the aesthetic of post-9/11 shows like 24. Their fantasy is that the good elements of the Security State will finally wake up and crush the internal enemy in a coup known as The Storm. And, as Ackerman points out, some of the most prominent QAnon believers are frustrated Security State veterans like former military intelligence chief Michael Flynn and former CIA officer Michael Scheuer.
It remains to be seen what will happen to the War on Terror moving forward. Joe Biden is finally ending the war in Afghanistan, but all while warning of ongoing threats from Syria and Somalia. His “America First” opposition, after briefly flirting with “ending endless wars,” is now calling the President weak and calling for more aggressive action. Ackerman strikes a pessimistic tone: “As the Forever War persisted, with Trump handing off to Biden a perpetual-motion engine of death powered by the worst of American history, its targets increasingly domestic and its final form still unachieved, it became increasingly difficult to see America as anything more than its War on Terror.”
July 29, 2022
Seriously? Another book another misleading title(I don't read subtitles, I'm not a nerd). At no point does this book mention the hit CW show 'Reign' and the terror that Torrance Coombs caused on set. It just talked about Dick Cheney and a bunch of other stuff that is not as interesting as Torrance Coombs. Good book despite it all.
August 16, 2021
“A measure called the material-witness statute was originally created to stop, in extraordinary circumstances, criminal witnesses from fleeing the country. During the weeks after 9/11, the Justice Department used it as one of several roundup tools. It remains unknown, nearly twenty years later, exactly how many people were subject to the roundups; one estimate pegs the number at ten thousand. A San Antonio radiologist from Saudi Arabia, al-Badr al-Hazmi, emerged from thirteen days in material-witness detention to ask a reporter, “Who is this Kafka that people keep mentioning?”
Notes: A vital, compulsively readable, and unnerving piece of narrative history that will only grow in importance and impact as time passes. So many gutting and infuriating details; damning for practically anyone with power or authority from 2001 to the present, and uncomfortable reading for those, like me, who are or have been professionally dedicated to electing Democrats. The War on Terror elements of the closing two chapters (covering the Trump admin, COVID-19, and the start of the Biden admin) were fascinating, but I felt the book ran out of steam just a bit in the final pages. I suspect it’s largely a matter of timing and context; I’ve read so much recently (and over the past few years) going into every detail of the Trump disaster that the non-natsec narrative just felt overlong and somewhat tertiary. I imagine that won’t be the case upon rereading in a few years!
Notes: A vital, compulsively readable, and unnerving piece of narrative history that will only grow in importance and impact as time passes. So many gutting and infuriating details; damning for practically anyone with power or authority from 2001 to the present, and uncomfortable reading for those, like me, who are or have been professionally dedicated to electing Democrats. The War on Terror elements of the closing two chapters (covering the Trump admin, COVID-19, and the start of the Biden admin) were fascinating, but I felt the book ran out of steam just a bit in the final pages. I suspect it’s largely a matter of timing and context; I’ve read so much recently (and over the past few years) going into every detail of the Trump disaster that the non-natsec narrative just felt overlong and somewhat tertiary. I imagine that won’t be the case upon rereading in a few years!
November 23, 2022
Informative perspective on the general doomgress that is the War on Terror. Racism + surveillance + massively weaponized violence. Overall, War on Terror is a broken narrative. People do not want to let go of their stuff, and even when they say they're letting go of War on Terror, they're still perpetrating it. I pulled out some ideas that interested me (Medium).
May 2, 2022
Because Spencer Ackerman perfectly anticipated my "problems" with "Reign of Terror" in his kind of hilarious acknowledgements section (i.e. it might cover too much ground it too little space-- it definitely plays as a kind of "NOW! That's What I Call Fascism (Vols 1-66)" greatest hits), I'm going to concede that this insanely ambitious, horribly depressing book is a five star endeavor. I was alive for all of this stuff, and I remember some of it well (even as a relatively astute liberal (that's what I thought I was, anyway), I accepted a lot of the propaganda hook-line-and-sinker), but I don't remember it as part of a larger tapestry of white supremacist terror. But the way Ackerman weaves together all the threads of his narrative-- from Timothy McVeigh to the Patriot Act; from Obama's drone strikes to Trump's... continued drone strikes; from 9/11 Islamophobia to the "Muslim Ban" and COVID restrictions on immigrants-- is totally convincing. The War on Terror was never going to work, because it's premise never made any sense... unless your goal was to torture, humiliate, imprison, and kill people of color. By the time I got the Ackerman's section on the George Floyd protests-- and its insane counterinsurgency, brought about by hyperzealous, over-militarized police departments and gun-toting wannabe Jack Bauers emboldened by the presidnet himself-- I was sort of chilled. The point Ackerman is making is even bigger than "the War on Terror and Trump's rise are connected"; it's something like "racist violence has always been the connective tissue of American society, and the War on Terror and Trump were just slightly different takes on a terrible old theme."
No one is spared here. If you want to retain whatever good thoughts you had about any American in a position of power in the federal government in the last thirty years (Bush, Obama, Clinton, James Comey, Colin Powell, Biden... whoever)... umm... don't read "Reign of Terror." Not even Bernie Sanders is allowed to escape unscathed! (He still looks better than just about everyone else, of course.)
Also: this is a sad and maddening book but it must be said that it has a lot of great zingers. Trump is "an amalgam of no less than four of the worse kinds of New Yorkers-- Outerborough White Racist, Wealth Vampire, Dignity-Free Media Striver, and Landlord." Perfect.
No one is spared here. If you want to retain whatever good thoughts you had about any American in a position of power in the federal government in the last thirty years (Bush, Obama, Clinton, James Comey, Colin Powell, Biden... whoever)... umm... don't read "Reign of Terror." Not even Bernie Sanders is allowed to escape unscathed! (He still looks better than just about everyone else, of course.)
Also: this is a sad and maddening book but it must be said that it has a lot of great zingers. Trump is "an amalgam of no less than four of the worse kinds of New Yorkers-- Outerborough White Racist, Wealth Vampire, Dignity-Free Media Striver, and Landlord." Perfect.
April 27, 2024
It’s a clever and plausible thesis, but I just don’t think it’s argued very well. I give Ackerman credit, because as a work of journalism, this is fairly well done. I’ve read widely on the relevant topics here and I still came across quite a bit I hadn’t seen before.
That being said, the basic thesis is that the politics/policies of the immediate aftermath of 9/11 set forth a series of trends that ultimately resulted in Trump being elected and the associated turmoil that resulted. It seems plausible enough, but my biggest gripe with the whole thing is that all of the evidence Ackerman puts forth seems to come from total outliers on the distribution of reasonable beliefs that exists in America. By analogy, one COULD write a book with the thesis of “belief that the earth is flat is growing”, but if you only cite Kyrie Irving as your evidence, people aren’t going to think of your argument as being particularly persuasive. This book is a lot like that. It seems like Ackerman tries to weave a bunch of narratives about detached lunatics into a thesis of how destabilized we became as a country after 9/11, but it just doesn’t land for me. I just have a hard time considering the people/events that Ackerman puts forward as being causal mechanisms in the chain of events he describes.
You can dismiss the last 1/4 of it out of hand. It’s just the author’s contribution to the “Trump was bad” chorus, entirely detached from the thesis put forward in the rest of the book.
That being said, the basic thesis is that the politics/policies of the immediate aftermath of 9/11 set forth a series of trends that ultimately resulted in Trump being elected and the associated turmoil that resulted. It seems plausible enough, but my biggest gripe with the whole thing is that all of the evidence Ackerman puts forth seems to come from total outliers on the distribution of reasonable beliefs that exists in America. By analogy, one COULD write a book with the thesis of “belief that the earth is flat is growing”, but if you only cite Kyrie Irving as your evidence, people aren’t going to think of your argument as being particularly persuasive. This book is a lot like that. It seems like Ackerman tries to weave a bunch of narratives about detached lunatics into a thesis of how destabilized we became as a country after 9/11, but it just doesn’t land for me. I just have a hard time considering the people/events that Ackerman puts forward as being causal mechanisms in the chain of events he describes.
You can dismiss the last 1/4 of it out of hand. It’s just the author’s contribution to the “Trump was bad” chorus, entirely detached from the thesis put forward in the rest of the book.
Read
July 25, 2024The United States’ war on terror has spanned a generation while getting us nowhere in the direction of peace or “victory.” These war on terror policies, however, laid the groundwork for American authoritarianism. Ackerman details how America turned the war on terror into a tribal struggle, progressing cultural polarization. Twenty years later, the country ends up at war with itself.
Put simply, there seemed to be a widespread ignorance plaguing the country both before and certainly after 9/11. The Bush administration resorted to “deliberate indecision” instead of clearly defining the enemy as the specific terrorist network responsible for the attacks. This of course only aggravated the “atmosphere of paranoia that frequently turned conspiratorial.”
Ackerman also discusses how Obama questioned the war and criticized the politics of fear; yet once in office, he focused on making the war more efficient rather than ending it. Failure to end the war helped develop the foundation for Trump’s rise to power.
“In response to 9/11, America had invaded and occupied two countries, bombed four others for years, killed at least 801,000 people — a full total may never be known — terrified millions more, tortured hundreds, detained thousands, reserved unto itself the right to create a global surveillance dragnet, disposed of its veterans with cruel indifference, called an entire global religion criminal or treated it that way, made migration into a crime, and declared most of its actions to be legal and constitutional. It created at least 21 million refugees and spent as much as $6 trillion on its operations. Through it all, America said other people, the ones staring down the barrel of the War on Terror, were the barbarians.”
Put simply, there seemed to be a widespread ignorance plaguing the country both before and certainly after 9/11. The Bush administration resorted to “deliberate indecision” instead of clearly defining the enemy as the specific terrorist network responsible for the attacks. This of course only aggravated the “atmosphere of paranoia that frequently turned conspiratorial.”
Ackerman also discusses how Obama questioned the war and criticized the politics of fear; yet once in office, he focused on making the war more efficient rather than ending it. Failure to end the war helped develop the foundation for Trump’s rise to power.
“In response to 9/11, America had invaded and occupied two countries, bombed four others for years, killed at least 801,000 people — a full total may never be known — terrified millions more, tortured hundreds, detained thousands, reserved unto itself the right to create a global surveillance dragnet, disposed of its veterans with cruel indifference, called an entire global religion criminal or treated it that way, made migration into a crime, and declared most of its actions to be legal and constitutional. It created at least 21 million refugees and spent as much as $6 trillion on its operations. Through it all, America said other people, the ones staring down the barrel of the War on Terror, were the barbarians.”
February 14, 2025
3.5 stars. I think that his overall narrative is fair and makes a lot of sense but I have some mild gripes
-Some parts of this were a little too influenced by Twitter discourse. Ackerman makes convincing criticisms of liberals and centrists but occasionally it seems like he throws in an aside just out of spite without really taking it anywhere (resist libs didn’t need to be invariably referred to as #TheResistance for instance)
-The overall structure could’ve been cleaned up a little bit. There’s a fair amount of backtracking and repeating details from before that sometimes obscures cause and effect
-The discussion of COVID like a missed opportunity for a broader criticism of the security state’s obsession with terrorism at the expense of other public safety threats like disease. The COVID discussion we got in this book felt rushed and superficial
-As detailed as this book was, I felt like there were still some topics that deserved more time. Discussion of U.S. involvement in Yemen, U.S. support for Israel and Saudi Arabia, and U.S. hawkishness against Iran and China would’ve been welcome editions.
Overall though, this book is a good reminder of how morally bankrupt and incompetent the U.S. security state is, which is especially necessary after the whitewashing they recited during the Trump era.
-Some parts of this were a little too influenced by Twitter discourse. Ackerman makes convincing criticisms of liberals and centrists but occasionally it seems like he throws in an aside just out of spite without really taking it anywhere (resist libs didn’t need to be invariably referred to as #TheResistance for instance)
-The overall structure could’ve been cleaned up a little bit. There’s a fair amount of backtracking and repeating details from before that sometimes obscures cause and effect
-The discussion of COVID like a missed opportunity for a broader criticism of the security state’s obsession with terrorism at the expense of other public safety threats like disease. The COVID discussion we got in this book felt rushed and superficial
-As detailed as this book was, I felt like there were still some topics that deserved more time. Discussion of U.S. involvement in Yemen, U.S. support for Israel and Saudi Arabia, and U.S. hawkishness against Iran and China would’ve been welcome editions.
Overall though, this book is a good reminder of how morally bankrupt and incompetent the U.S. security state is, which is especially necessary after the whitewashing they recited during the Trump era.
November 29, 2021
I wanted to like this book. Reign of Terror received critical acclaim from respected authors like Rick Perlstein, who wrote Nixonland, and many other award winning writers of history. Unfortunately, I found Reign of Terror to be, like the "Forever War" it criticizes, a long slog that is more a recitation of events than a compelling narrative.
In Reign of Terror, Spencer Ackerman, national security correspondent for publications like The Daily Beast and The Guardian, attempts to demonstrate how the 9/11 era created the environment for Donald Trump to become President and the extremism of his administration, including the January 6th insurrection. Ackerman begins not with 9/11, but with America's response to the Oklahoma City bombing years earlier and how political leaders and members of the media pointed to Muslim extremists before it was shown to be white supremacist Timothy McVeigh.
This book recounts many major events in the years since the 9/11 attacks, from the justifications for war with Iraq in 2002/2003 to drone strikes under President Obama to President Trump's use of the expanded surveillance state. Ackerman shows how leaders of both political parties acquiesced to the so-called security state and barely pushed back on intrusions in personal privacy.
However, the arguments that Ackerman makes are not as well supported as one would think and not as ambitious as they should be, even in a book covering 20 years of war and politics. Too often, there is a list of major events in foreign policy or political extremism and Ackerman points to it as if to say "See? Doesn't this prove my point?"
There are actually many good points that could be flushed out in this topic. He isn't necessarily wrong, just often not substantiated and not researched fully enough. The growing surveillance and security apparatus from 9/11 did and does pose significant threats to personal freedoms and privacy in the hands of a very powerful government, no matter who is in charge.
There are many problems in this book though. First, Ackerman seems to attribute motives without really delving into the motivations of any of the players. He shows that politicians voiced unending support for the military efforts without showing why and how they worked. He doesn't explain how many politicians even remotely left of center lost elections after 2001 and how the American voters supported jingoistic campaigns. Put more simply, on a political level, support for "forever war" worked, it just worked at getting people elected.
Ackerman also doesn't make clear whether he thinks the actions of anyone involved in growing the security state were done maliciously, cynically, or out of genuine belief that it was worth it. Any of those rationales deserves more attention. There seems to be a thought on the political left that any liberal politician who supports military action must be doing so against their own beliefs. But is that true? It isn't delved into enough.
There is far too little attention given to the effects of the media too. There are some teases at Fox News, but not nearly enough and also not nearly enough about CNN or network news. Who was booked on shows? Who benefits from pro-war content? Did it work for ratings? That last question may be cynical, but it's important.
In the sections on President Obama, Ackerman opines about how Obama got away with drone strikes and not improving detentions for detainees. But he doesn't even really attempt to show that the American public was far more focused on healthcare and the economy and how other matters allowed the security state to grow unimpeded because so many people just didn't care.
In later sections, Ackerman talks about how Donald Trump created a cult like atmosphere and demanded forceful actions against any enemies. However, there is very little given to how the Republican primary electorate chose Trump, why his bellicosity was successful at uniting the party, or how more "mainstream" Republicans were caught off guard by his base of support, like they had unwittingly created a monster through years of rhetoric and policies.
There is little attention given to the portrayal of national security toughness in media either, though it is touched on early in the book. While Ackerman touts the TV show 24 as an example, he misses things like The Dark Knight and other movies and programs that amplify these messages. There is also not enough attention paid to how cable TV promotes breaking news and lives off of emergencies.
I also feel like this book should have explained the political primary process and how gerrymandering enhances extremism and rewards more fringe characters and how that moves the window further for acceptability, showing how Trump could eventually get away with so much, both in actions and words, and how so many could not believe it simply because it hadn't been tried.
It is very easy to start a war, but very hard to end one. Ackerman doesn't explain this simple idea enough. He seems to say that any President or Congress or a massive uprising of the American citizens could have called off the expansion of the "forever war" at any given time. But when exactly? Is there evidence that President Obama could have called off all drone strikes and everyone would have just let it go? Could Trump have won over people by undoing these expanded powers? Would there be no political price to pay?
There should have been more interviews with people at all levels of government, media, veterans, and those affected by the wars overseas in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other predominately Muslim countries to truly get into the psyches of trauma, humiliation, revenge, and uncertainty. Was all of this bound to transpire? Were the wars and the expansions of the security state inevitable? Were the intentions by political leaders and those in the military, FBI, and CIA cynical, naive, or malicious? None of that is really explored enough.
An exploration of the 20+years since 9/11 needs far more context than just a rehash of news events. Reign of Terror has a lot of promise, but misses a lot of crucial depth.
In Reign of Terror, Spencer Ackerman, national security correspondent for publications like The Daily Beast and The Guardian, attempts to demonstrate how the 9/11 era created the environment for Donald Trump to become President and the extremism of his administration, including the January 6th insurrection. Ackerman begins not with 9/11, but with America's response to the Oklahoma City bombing years earlier and how political leaders and members of the media pointed to Muslim extremists before it was shown to be white supremacist Timothy McVeigh.
This book recounts many major events in the years since the 9/11 attacks, from the justifications for war with Iraq in 2002/2003 to drone strikes under President Obama to President Trump's use of the expanded surveillance state. Ackerman shows how leaders of both political parties acquiesced to the so-called security state and barely pushed back on intrusions in personal privacy.
However, the arguments that Ackerman makes are not as well supported as one would think and not as ambitious as they should be, even in a book covering 20 years of war and politics. Too often, there is a list of major events in foreign policy or political extremism and Ackerman points to it as if to say "See? Doesn't this prove my point?"
There are actually many good points that could be flushed out in this topic. He isn't necessarily wrong, just often not substantiated and not researched fully enough. The growing surveillance and security apparatus from 9/11 did and does pose significant threats to personal freedoms and privacy in the hands of a very powerful government, no matter who is in charge.
There are many problems in this book though. First, Ackerman seems to attribute motives without really delving into the motivations of any of the players. He shows that politicians voiced unending support for the military efforts without showing why and how they worked. He doesn't explain how many politicians even remotely left of center lost elections after 2001 and how the American voters supported jingoistic campaigns. Put more simply, on a political level, support for "forever war" worked, it just worked at getting people elected.
Ackerman also doesn't make clear whether he thinks the actions of anyone involved in growing the security state were done maliciously, cynically, or out of genuine belief that it was worth it. Any of those rationales deserves more attention. There seems to be a thought on the political left that any liberal politician who supports military action must be doing so against their own beliefs. But is that true? It isn't delved into enough.
There is far too little attention given to the effects of the media too. There are some teases at Fox News, but not nearly enough and also not nearly enough about CNN or network news. Who was booked on shows? Who benefits from pro-war content? Did it work for ratings? That last question may be cynical, but it's important.
In the sections on President Obama, Ackerman opines about how Obama got away with drone strikes and not improving detentions for detainees. But he doesn't even really attempt to show that the American public was far more focused on healthcare and the economy and how other matters allowed the security state to grow unimpeded because so many people just didn't care.
In later sections, Ackerman talks about how Donald Trump created a cult like atmosphere and demanded forceful actions against any enemies. However, there is very little given to how the Republican primary electorate chose Trump, why his bellicosity was successful at uniting the party, or how more "mainstream" Republicans were caught off guard by his base of support, like they had unwittingly created a monster through years of rhetoric and policies.
There is little attention given to the portrayal of national security toughness in media either, though it is touched on early in the book. While Ackerman touts the TV show 24 as an example, he misses things like The Dark Knight and other movies and programs that amplify these messages. There is also not enough attention paid to how cable TV promotes breaking news and lives off of emergencies.
I also feel like this book should have explained the political primary process and how gerrymandering enhances extremism and rewards more fringe characters and how that moves the window further for acceptability, showing how Trump could eventually get away with so much, both in actions and words, and how so many could not believe it simply because it hadn't been tried.
It is very easy to start a war, but very hard to end one. Ackerman doesn't explain this simple idea enough. He seems to say that any President or Congress or a massive uprising of the American citizens could have called off the expansion of the "forever war" at any given time. But when exactly? Is there evidence that President Obama could have called off all drone strikes and everyone would have just let it go? Could Trump have won over people by undoing these expanded powers? Would there be no political price to pay?
There should have been more interviews with people at all levels of government, media, veterans, and those affected by the wars overseas in Iraq, Afghanistan, and other predominately Muslim countries to truly get into the psyches of trauma, humiliation, revenge, and uncertainty. Was all of this bound to transpire? Were the wars and the expansions of the security state inevitable? Were the intentions by political leaders and those in the military, FBI, and CIA cynical, naive, or malicious? None of that is really explored enough.
An exploration of the 20+years since 9/11 needs far more context than just a rehash of news events. Reign of Terror has a lot of promise, but misses a lot of crucial depth.
July 11, 2023
Mr. Ackerman tries to draw a straight line between the American response to the 9/11 attacks and the rise of Donald Trump and White Nationalism in America. Ironically, I agree with a lot of Mr. Ackerman's conclusions and his characterization of the War on Terror. However, this book reads like a mirror image of a Tucker Carlson show. It's a rant, uninterested in subtlety, complexity or persuasion of anyone without an exactly identical viewpoint. Mr. Ackerman even believes in something called the "Security State" which is suspiciously similar to the alleged Deep State controlling American government somehow against the wishes of the citizens. Paradoxically, Mr. Ackerman objects to the "Security State" making American policy and he objects to elected officials making American policy. Mr. Ackerman simply notes how the actions of America are wrong. He does not analyze the cost/benefit of other policy routes, nor does he consider any offsetting facts. Much like his rhetorical twin, Tucker Carlson, Mr. Ackerman simply wants to show you that only he knows the true motives and the right way to do things, regardless of any other considerations. We should just accept Mr. Ackerman's view without debate. (One glaring example, Mr. Ackerman believes that so many deaths could have been avoided if more lockdown measures were taken in the pandemic. He completely ignores any global outcomes (Sweeden, China) that would have perhaps caused him to rethink). Very little is new hear to anyone who kept up with the news over the last 20 years. Mr. Ackerman basically strings together news headlines with no real analysis. Indeed, he cites to many of his own stories as evidence, which is suspicious to me. Mr. Ackerman also just wants to dismiss half the US as White Nationalists, not a great starting point for making anything better.
August 25, 2021
The best, simplest review I can give it is to quote from political operative Robert Wheel (@bobbybigwheel on Twitter): You know it’s a good book because every page pisses you off.
I was 17 years old when we invaded Iraq. At the time, I was a champion for the war because I believed our government. Why would our government lie? Even as I began to question things in 2003 and 2004, I still voted for George W. Bush in my first presidential election. I was proud to do so.
Eight years later, I pulled the lever for the first time for Barack Obama, in part but not limited to his notions on solving the Forever Wars.
Yet even he couldn’t do it. Nor could the tyrant who followed him.
In a mere 337 dense pages, Spencer Ackerman traces a straight line from the War on Terror rhetoric to America today. Only he doesn’t start with 9/11. He starts with Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bombing, and THEN goes to 9/11.
It’s an interesting choice but it pays off. Ackerman’s whole case is not just the Forever Wars themselves but the way we prosecuted them on the home front. The widespread detentions, the shameless Islamphobia, the denigration of Black and brown persons. He threads the needle from Bush to Obama to Trump and even, slightly to Biden. No one is exculpated, either the presidents or the parties.
But then he closes with the 1/6 Insurrection. And thus, the lightbulb goes off and you see Ackerman’s thesis revealed. His overarching point becomes clear: that we became so consumed with the War on Terror that the US body politic, Democrat and Republican alike, basically cannibalized itself.
As angry as I was reading it, finishing it took me to a new level of rage. Ackerman isn’t being wonky here. He’s not proposing solutions. He’s simply diagnosing the problem.
I’m so glad that despite his own perpetuation of the Forever Wars, Joe Biden has the sense to withdraw troops from Afghanistan. It’s messy because it was always going to be messy. But Ackerman doesn’t let Biden, or America off the hook. Most of us are complicit in how we got here.
I’ve read a lot of non-fiction this year and while this may not be the best, it will definitely be the one that sticks with me.
I was 17 years old when we invaded Iraq. At the time, I was a champion for the war because I believed our government. Why would our government lie? Even as I began to question things in 2003 and 2004, I still voted for George W. Bush in my first presidential election. I was proud to do so.
Eight years later, I pulled the lever for the first time for Barack Obama, in part but not limited to his notions on solving the Forever Wars.
Yet even he couldn’t do it. Nor could the tyrant who followed him.
In a mere 337 dense pages, Spencer Ackerman traces a straight line from the War on Terror rhetoric to America today. Only he doesn’t start with 9/11. He starts with Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bombing, and THEN goes to 9/11.
It’s an interesting choice but it pays off. Ackerman’s whole case is not just the Forever Wars themselves but the way we prosecuted them on the home front. The widespread detentions, the shameless Islamphobia, the denigration of Black and brown persons. He threads the needle from Bush to Obama to Trump and even, slightly to Biden. No one is exculpated, either the presidents or the parties.
But then he closes with the 1/6 Insurrection. And thus, the lightbulb goes off and you see Ackerman’s thesis revealed. His overarching point becomes clear: that we became so consumed with the War on Terror that the US body politic, Democrat and Republican alike, basically cannibalized itself.
As angry as I was reading it, finishing it took me to a new level of rage. Ackerman isn’t being wonky here. He’s not proposing solutions. He’s simply diagnosing the problem.
I’m so glad that despite his own perpetuation of the Forever Wars, Joe Biden has the sense to withdraw troops from Afghanistan. It’s messy because it was always going to be messy. But Ackerman doesn’t let Biden, or America off the hook. Most of us are complicit in how we got here.
I’ve read a lot of non-fiction this year and while this may not be the best, it will definitely be the one that sticks with me.
August 21, 2022
Listened to this on audiobook which I recommend since the author narrates. Very detailed (not everything stuck), but I thought this book did a really good job of showing me how practically my entire life has been lived during the “war on terror” and the implications that has on how I view the world and the society I live in. Would recommend!
September 22, 2023
I think this will prove to be a very important book. It provides a critical look back at a time period that I was alive during but too young to be cognizant of. It has changed the way I view many of the events that I thought I understood. It can get confusing at times because there are a lot of names to keep track of, but that is just the reality of the situation.
Read
December 29, 2021Ignore the (publisher-mandated I’m sure) “destabilized America and” in the subtitle.
This book does not pretend that 9/11 came out of a clear blue sky or that the American response to it was an aberration. Instead, Ackerman cogently lays out the licence the 9/11 attacks gave to deeply American, white supremacist reactionary politics of the imperialist and nativist varieties.
This book does not pretend that 9/11 came out of a clear blue sky or that the American response to it was an aberration. Instead, Ackerman cogently lays out the licence the 9/11 attacks gave to deeply American, white supremacist reactionary politics of the imperialist and nativist varieties.
November 17, 2025
Very good. The author's depiction of the roots and evolution of the 9/11 era is well argued and well documented. Great use of the quote from Bernie Sanders: "There is a straight line from the decision to reorient U.S. national-security strategy around terrorism after 9/11 to placing migrant children in cages on our southern border." To me the argument loses focus towards the end of the book, but I think that's because the rise of MAGA/Trump is complex and due to more than just the war on terror. I would say it "contributed to" and not "led to" those events, but the book does a great job at making a case for how that contribution took place.
January 17, 2022
Ackerman believes that 9/11 and the declaration of the War on Terror which followed, including the torture of Islamic prisoners, the war against Iraq to locate Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, the general development of “The Security State” within the US government, and similar pseudo-paranoid reactions to terror in general and anxiety over illegal immigration opened a period of “forever war” and nationwide fear and angst that begged for a hero savior which Trump fulfilled.
It’s an interesting observation that can be covered as above in one long sentence and doesn’t really require 344 pages plus another 72 of notes, in my humble opinion. Most serious folks agree that Trump isn’t (or hopefully wasn’t) our real problem, but only the manifestation of something larger and deeper and meaner within ourselves.
Ackerman acknowledges that he’s given too little attention to the media’s role in this transition to our “forever war” and hopes to cover that later plus maybe another book to be called “Capitalism and Terrorism” or even one on the US-Saudi relationship.
What may also be in order is a book about pundit journalists and their contribution to our love of political mayhem.
It’s an interesting observation that can be covered as above in one long sentence and doesn’t really require 344 pages plus another 72 of notes, in my humble opinion. Most serious folks agree that Trump isn’t (or hopefully wasn’t) our real problem, but only the manifestation of something larger and deeper and meaner within ourselves.
Ackerman acknowledges that he’s given too little attention to the media’s role in this transition to our “forever war” and hopes to cover that later plus maybe another book to be called “Capitalism and Terrorism” or even one on the US-Saudi relationship.
What may also be in order is a book about pundit journalists and their contribution to our love of political mayhem.
November 3, 2025
A chronicle of some of the worst sins of my country during my lifetime. It's not a pleasant read, of course, and it didn't reveal much I didn't already know, but it does an excellent job of living up to its subtitle's promise and showing how inexorably connected so much of what's happening now in America stems from the decisions and mindsets of the War on Terror. An infuriating read.
February 17, 2022
A dizzying book, unpleasantly so. Ackerman runs quickly through a vast muddle of American contemporary history, shifting quickly from weighty issues like American foreign policy in Iraq and Afghanistan and surveillance policy to the political squabbles of the 2016 election. But there's too much of the wearying I'm weary "no one's talking about this" variety of reporting (everyone's already talking about it on twitter), or the kind that takes aim, bootlessly, at another side's real or imagined hypocrisy (ok I'm never *totally* weary of hypocrisy reporting. but you gotta do it well!).
Not to get into the business of “the deep state” and whether or not there is one (idk??), this book starts with the basic throughline of American leftistish politics that you’ll find on twitter: the impression that rather than 9/11 “producing” Trump, that 9/11 had bloated the existing overlarge security state into a massive apparatus of national security and borderless wars that no president can control. To be honest, I am generally convinced of this, even though I am largely a foreign policy ignoramus, and I picked this book up because I was interested to learn more.
And I did learn more! There is some very important information and reporting in here. Take the following example (p. 268):
“In August 2017 U.S. special operators in command of their Somali protégés raided the farming village of Bariire and killed 10 civilians, including a child, whom the U.S.-backed government falsely labeled as members of Al-Shabaab. Witnesses said the Americans instructed the Somali soldiers to plant AK-47s on the corpses - sloppily; most of the shell cases found on the scene by a reporter were NATO-issue 5.56 mm - which outraged villagers kept unburied until Somali leaders recanted the Al-Shabaab accusation.”
This is obviously a significant story, worthy of far more public attention than it received. Now, sure, I picked up this book also because I disliked Trump, and obviously as Commander in Chief at the time Trump bears responsibility. But I doubt Trump personally ordered this, and I suspect it could have just as easily happened during an Obama or Biden presidency. But then Ackerman shifts, inexplicably, into a long litany of the scandals of the Trump administration. What is the connection? Why go from what is ( to me) he heart of the issue to all the political wheeling and dealing of the Trump presidency? If you’re an American reader, you either remember the impeachment hearings or you’ve chosen to forget. If you're not an American reader, probably no need to bother reading this book (unless you're one of those political internet troll pages, in which case it might be very helpful).
My other gripe is that the book is messy, and occasionally he'll cite cases that look more like an impression created by twitter than an actual fact. Here’s one: "While [Manning, Jones, and Snowden]'s ideological affiliation ight have been idiosyncratic, and divergent from one another's, it was the left that embraced and championed them, not liberals, with the exception of Jones."
Ackerman doesn't cite his evidence for this, and I couldn't find any. All I found was that was that views on Snowden differ by age, but not meaningfully by political affiliation (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank..., https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/...). I suppose younger people are more supportive of Snowden generally, and, as far as I know, more likely to identify as progressives? Although those young people in the first poll are now ... older people. Anyway, maybe there is good evidence, but I wish Ackerman had been neater about it.
To be fair, part of my choler is thanks to the footnote-free citing system Ackerman and others are using these days. Why no more footnotes?? I hate paging back to the appendix to find out you either haven't cited anything, or you've cited yourself. (Needless to say, if you are citing yourself: make this clear to me in the main text. I like it when writers say, "in my interview with ..." etc.) Do not, I would ask, cite your own opinion piece in the Daily Beast.
Not to get into the business of “the deep state” and whether or not there is one (idk??), this book starts with the basic throughline of American leftistish politics that you’ll find on twitter: the impression that rather than 9/11 “producing” Trump, that 9/11 had bloated the existing overlarge security state into a massive apparatus of national security and borderless wars that no president can control. To be honest, I am generally convinced of this, even though I am largely a foreign policy ignoramus, and I picked this book up because I was interested to learn more.
And I did learn more! There is some very important information and reporting in here. Take the following example (p. 268):
“In August 2017 U.S. special operators in command of their Somali protégés raided the farming village of Bariire and killed 10 civilians, including a child, whom the U.S.-backed government falsely labeled as members of Al-Shabaab. Witnesses said the Americans instructed the Somali soldiers to plant AK-47s on the corpses - sloppily; most of the shell cases found on the scene by a reporter were NATO-issue 5.56 mm - which outraged villagers kept unburied until Somali leaders recanted the Al-Shabaab accusation.”
This is obviously a significant story, worthy of far more public attention than it received. Now, sure, I picked up this book also because I disliked Trump, and obviously as Commander in Chief at the time Trump bears responsibility. But I doubt Trump personally ordered this, and I suspect it could have just as easily happened during an Obama or Biden presidency. But then Ackerman shifts, inexplicably, into a long litany of the scandals of the Trump administration. What is the connection? Why go from what is ( to me) he heart of the issue to all the political wheeling and dealing of the Trump presidency? If you’re an American reader, you either remember the impeachment hearings or you’ve chosen to forget. If you're not an American reader, probably no need to bother reading this book (unless you're one of those political internet troll pages, in which case it might be very helpful).
My other gripe is that the book is messy, and occasionally he'll cite cases that look more like an impression created by twitter than an actual fact. Here’s one: "While [Manning, Jones, and Snowden]'s ideological affiliation ight have been idiosyncratic, and divergent from one another's, it was the left that embraced and championed them, not liberals, with the exception of Jones."
Ackerman doesn't cite his evidence for this, and I couldn't find any. All I found was that was that views on Snowden differ by age, but not meaningfully by political affiliation (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank..., https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/...). I suppose younger people are more supportive of Snowden generally, and, as far as I know, more likely to identify as progressives? Although those young people in the first poll are now ... older people. Anyway, maybe there is good evidence, but I wish Ackerman had been neater about it.
To be fair, part of my choler is thanks to the footnote-free citing system Ackerman and others are using these days. Why no more footnotes?? I hate paging back to the appendix to find out you either haven't cited anything, or you've cited yourself. (Needless to say, if you are citing yourself: make this clear to me in the main text. I like it when writers say, "in my interview with ..." etc.) Do not, I would ask, cite your own opinion piece in the Daily Beast.
September 1, 2022
This is an important book for people to read. Ackerman thoroughly documents the banality, stupidity, brutality and tyrannical origins and nature of the war on terror and the inevitable turning of those tools against the larger polity of America.
His larger thesis attempting to tie the war on terror directly to the rise of Trump and MAGA Republicansis much more tenuous. While it is undoubtedly true that anything as pervasive and all encompassing as the war on terror must be a component of the American political mixture, I’d hesitate to label it as necessary. Personally, I believe the through line runs more neatly back to the political beliefs of the antebellum south. The war on terror is neither sufficient nor necessary to explain the rise of nativist and white supremacist sentiment which have always been potent parts of America’s political mixture. Was the war on terror animating? Certainly. However, I view these modern movements as simple continuations of the old ones. Ackerman also under cuts his thesis by noting how isolated most Americans were from the everyday brutality of the security apparatus. That being said the war on terror constructed the framework and vehicle for unchecked executive authority easily repurposed to pursue political goals domestically—to the extent that wasn’t already happening.
Additionally, I found Ackerman to at times dodge clearly stating what he believes on issues such as the US intervention against ISIS. He spoke eloquently about the rise of ISIS exposing the farcical and self defeating nature of the war in terror. But stops short of calling the intervention bad. Now it is not necessary that Ackerman solve the morally self-defeating puzzles the US places itself in but he does not hesitate to layout alternatives or clearly opine on the moral soundness of other actions so this is a notable exception.
I found the argument relating the war on terror to the Covid response to be especially muddled. In the case of the war on terror Ackerman decries over indulgence of the security state by politicians. Here he seemingly decries the lack of deference shown to public health officials. If he wanted to argue the war had desensitized government cronies from boldly lying to the public than perhaps this argument would make more sense, even if I don’t believe it. (government officials have lied to the American public all the time. Perhaps what is novel is the failure to suffer any political consequences for it).
Where I think Ackerman is on firmer ground is connecting the police violence directed at Black Lives Matter protestors to the war in terror. The war on terror certainly shaped the nature the reactionary violence took on. But I don’t find the existence of the war on terror necessary to explain the existence of the violent reaction (perhaps I am wrongly overstating the case Ackerman intends to make). Older call backs to slave patrols, post-confederate militias and the long shadow of Jim Crow are more than sufficient.
His larger thesis attempting to tie the war on terror directly to the rise of Trump and MAGA Republicansis much more tenuous. While it is undoubtedly true that anything as pervasive and all encompassing as the war on terror must be a component of the American political mixture, I’d hesitate to label it as necessary. Personally, I believe the through line runs more neatly back to the political beliefs of the antebellum south. The war on terror is neither sufficient nor necessary to explain the rise of nativist and white supremacist sentiment which have always been potent parts of America’s political mixture. Was the war on terror animating? Certainly. However, I view these modern movements as simple continuations of the old ones. Ackerman also under cuts his thesis by noting how isolated most Americans were from the everyday brutality of the security apparatus. That being said the war on terror constructed the framework and vehicle for unchecked executive authority easily repurposed to pursue political goals domestically—to the extent that wasn’t already happening.
Additionally, I found Ackerman to at times dodge clearly stating what he believes on issues such as the US intervention against ISIS. He spoke eloquently about the rise of ISIS exposing the farcical and self defeating nature of the war in terror. But stops short of calling the intervention bad. Now it is not necessary that Ackerman solve the morally self-defeating puzzles the US places itself in but he does not hesitate to layout alternatives or clearly opine on the moral soundness of other actions so this is a notable exception.
I found the argument relating the war on terror to the Covid response to be especially muddled. In the case of the war on terror Ackerman decries over indulgence of the security state by politicians. Here he seemingly decries the lack of deference shown to public health officials. If he wanted to argue the war had desensitized government cronies from boldly lying to the public than perhaps this argument would make more sense, even if I don’t believe it. (government officials have lied to the American public all the time. Perhaps what is novel is the failure to suffer any political consequences for it).
Where I think Ackerman is on firmer ground is connecting the police violence directed at Black Lives Matter protestors to the war in terror. The war on terror certainly shaped the nature the reactionary violence took on. But I don’t find the existence of the war on terror necessary to explain the existence of the violent reaction (perhaps I am wrongly overstating the case Ackerman intends to make). Older call backs to slave patrols, post-confederate militias and the long shadow of Jim Crow are more than sufficient.
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