Reign of Terror

 Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump by Spencer Ackerman is a vital, if depressing, read. Most of the book is a horrific litany of American overreaction to the 9/11 attacks, at home and abroad. Hauntingly, the prologue documents the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995 and the responses the government did not take: no expanded surveillance, no torture, no mass suspicion of an entire group of people. Ackerman claims the difference in blunt--and convincing--terms, arguing that Timothy McVeigh was white. The "Forever War" that we're still living in, decades since 9/11, is coldly described in chapter after heartbreaking chapter. No president escapes blame, especially not the last two who've been publicly critical of the War on Terror. I've lived in this reality my entire adult life, and I remember much of the events described in Reign of Terror, but it's sobering to read them in an unsparing historical account.

The "thesis" of Reign of Terror is explained in the subtitle, but I don't know how clearly the line from 9/11 to Trump is presented. It's more a quietly outraged critique of a global war against a vague concept, "terror," and how destructive that lack of clarity can be. Late in the book, Ackerman describes the "endless nightmare" of the war. "In response to 9/11," he writes, "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 or 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."