Matt Kennard

The book has a simple premise: the war on terror broke the US military in a way it had not since the Vietnam era. On September 10, 2001, Donald Rumsfeld gave a speech called “Bureaucracy to Battlefield,” all about transforming the Pentagon, slimming it down and privatizing many of its operations. When September 11 happened the next day, he suddenly had the perfect excuse to push that program through, as well as a surge in personal popularity after being photographed helping victims into ambulances.

A major part of his vision was fighting wars with small numbers of troops, using special forces missions that would remove leaders and overthrow regimes without large land armies. We saw versions of that later under Donald Trump in places like Venezuela. At the time it was presented as quite revolutionary. In reality, nothing in the war on terror went to plan, especially in Iraq.

They had not planned on needing hundreds of thousands of troops in Iraq for years on end, or for a civil war. Planning documents from the 1990s that gamed out an invasion of Iraq projected over four hundred thousand troops. Rumsfeld dismissed that and sidelined Pentagon officials who insisted they would still need hundreds of thousands of soldiers. He believed they could replicate Afghanistan, where the United States used special forces, bribed warlords and worked with the Northern Alliance to take Kabul within two months. That also did not unfold as they hoped.

Once the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan were in full swing, the United States had a huge army in Iraq and a smaller but still significant one in Afghanistan, and it could not recruit or retain enough troops to staff both. Rather than reinstate the draft as in Vietnam, they looked for another solution.

There was serious discussion in 2005 and 2006 about bringing back conscription. A “Reinstate the Draft” bill went into Congress because there was broad recognition that the military was breaking and needed more bodies. Rumsfeld dismissed that option. George W. Bush said he would have vetoed it if it passed, and in the end it didn’t. They were haunted by the memory of Vietnam and the role the draft played in turning the US public against that war and forcing withdrawal in 1973.

With the Iraq war already unpopular, they feared a draft would be the final straw. So, rather than conscription, they dismantled regulations built up since Vietnam. Some of this was public. They raised the enlistment age from thirty-five to forty-two. They loosened rules on body weight so heavier people could sign up.

What I wanted to investigate was the groups they were not advertising, the ones being quietly enfranchised by this new free-for-all that the Pentagon was embarrassed about and trying to hide. The first and most obvious were neo-Nazis and white supremacists. Over three decades, the military had put in place specific rules to keep such people out. The reasons were straightforward. Sending neo-Nazis and white supremacists into a country of mostly brown people with automatic weapons is not going to end well. Those same people then come back to the United States or serve on domestic bases. They are often highly violent, with an accelerationist, sometimes openly terroristic outlook, and they can turn US-funded training into a resource for what they call a “racial holy war” at home.

Those protective regulations were effectively switched off. When I started talking to neo-Nazis and their organizations, they all told me the same thing: “We have never had it this good in the US military. We can get in with swastikas, we can get in with SS bolts.” That was the starting point for a yearslong investigation.

I found they were not just being tolerated; some were promoted. One of the central figures in the book is Forrest Fogarty, who served in Iraq in 2004–5. He is an American History X–style neo-Nazi, completely open about his politics. When I met him, he told me that his commanders all knew he was a Nazi and liked it. They sent him on the hardest missions because they thought he was “hardcore.”

From there I realized there were other groups being brought in. Investigators and even some neo-Nazis told me, “Yes, Nazis are a problem, but an even bigger problem is gangs,” simply in terms of numbers. There had been long-standing regulations on gang members joining the military. As with neo-Nazis, you could often identify them by tattoos — Bloods, Crips, MS-13, and others.

Military investigators I spoke to told me that at the height of the war on terror as many as 10 percent of soldiers might have been gang members. That is tens of thousands of people. It got to the point where the US military’s basic ability to move troops between domestic bases was being hampered. In one case, they wanted to transfer a unit from one base to another but realized both units contained high numbers of rival gangs, so they could not safely put them together.

Whistleblowers inside the military showed me photographs of gang graffiti all over Iraq, on blast walls outside Baghdad and in places like Fallujah. It was everywhere.

Then there were recruits with serious criminal records, which historically had been another reason to keep people out. The US military actively sought out that group too. Through the “moral waiver” program, commanders could grant exceptions for applicants with felony convictions or serious misdemeanors, including rape and murder. During the war on terror, the use of moral waivers exploded. They were handed out like sweets, and all kinds of violent offenders were brought into the ranks.

If you combine open racists and extremists, gang members, and violent criminals, it is not hard to see what that means for occupied populations. In the book, I connect this policy to some of the worst atrocities in Iraq. One example is the 2006 Mahmudiyah massacre, just south of Baghdad, where US troops went to an Iraqi family’s home after fantasizing about raping the fourteen-year-old daughter. They separated her from her family, shot the family dead in one room, then gang-raped and murdered her in another before burning the house. They initially blamed it on insurgents, which was a familiar pattern — burn the crime scene, attribute it to “the enemy.”

In this case, they were exposed because one soldier had a crisis of conscience and came forward. The ringleader, Steven D. Green, turned out to have serious mental health issues and an obsessive desire to kill Iraqis. He was only in the army because he had been granted a moral waiver. That is a direct line from policy to atrocity.

We should be clear that we know only a small portion of what happened. The US military’s default position is to suppress evidence of wrongdoing until that becomes impossible. They deny and cover up for as long as they can. The cases that have surfaced are the tip of the iceberg, but together they show that opening the doors to extremists and criminals was profoundly damaging for the people living under occupation.

Now, many of those people are back in the United States. There are millions of war on terror veterans. The extremists I spoke to — from gangs, white supremacist groups, and other currents — often said they signed up not because they believed the rhetoric about “freedom and democracy” but because they wanted weapons training and tactical skills to use at home. Among white supremacists and neo-Nazis that feeds into accelerationism — the idea that a large-scale terrorist attack can trigger a racial civil war and usher in a white supremacist regime in Washington.

We have not yet seen a successful attack on that scale in the war on terror era, but there is a steady flow of lower-level violence linked to veterans and even active-duty soldiers. In the preface, I map a series of recent plots in which serving soldiers and veterans were planning mass-casualty neo-Nazi attacks. So far, the FBI has stopped most of them. But it only takes a single missed case to produce another Oklahoma City.

The Oklahoma City bombing was the largest act of domestic terrorism in US history before 9/11. It was carried out by Timothy McVeigh, a veteran of the first Gulf War. That is the kind of danger we are talking about, and it flows directly from decisions made during the war on terror.

Matt Kennard

I think both things are true. You do not need neo-Nazis or gang members to produce regular atrocities. Vietnam shows that clearly. But gutting the safeguards and bringing in people who are already committed racists or violent offenders adds fuel to a fire that is already burning.

When I spoke to US veterans now active in antiwar organizing, they all said racism was embedded in the Iraq War. Commanders routinely called Iraqis “hajis,” a racist slur for Iraqis and other Middle Eastern people. That language came from the top and gave a license for abuse.

There was also a deep culture of impunity. Atrocities were routine because soldiers knew they would almost always get away with them. Look at the assaults on Fallujah. In the first attack, the order was that civilians could leave, and anyone who stayed was treated as a target. The city was effectively razed. That did not come from a private on the ground; it came from the Bush administration.

So I completely reject the “bad apples” story that the Pentagon and political class reach for every time something surfaces. They say one soldier snapped, or one unit went rogue, and then bury the structural reasons why these crimes keep happening. The point of the book is not to pathologize a few individual soldiers. It is to show that senior officials made a conscious decision to open the doors to extremists, gangs, and serious criminals, knowing full-well how that would play out, and then wrapped the whole project in the language of human rights and democracy.

That also explains the silence around the book in the United States. If I had written a narrow attack on the Bush administration, liberal media might have embraced it as a partisan weapon. But every major policy I describe, including the recruitment rules, was continued under Barack Obama, and some aspects of the war on terror were intensified on his watch. It is a bipartisan catastrophe, which is exactly what makes it useful soil for someone like Trump.

Matt Kennard

Trump’s pitch in 2016 was that he would end “nation-building,” stop trying to export democracy and put “America first.” A lot of that was nonsense, but it resonated because there was real anger at what the war on terror had done to US society and to the military itself. He presented himself as the first figure in decades willing to break with the Washington consensus.

In practice his presidency did the opposite. He used US military power in unprecedented ways, including the attempt to overthrow the Venezuelan government and the kidnapping of its officials. But the conditions that made his rise possible were laid down during the war on terror.

If you look at the history of fascism in Europe, there is a clear pattern. Benito Mussolini’s Blackshirts in Italy after World War I were largely made up of veterans who felt betrayed by their own state, who believed their sacrifices had not been rewarded. In Germany, many of Adolf Hitler’s early stormtroopers were also World War I veterans. His appeal was built around the humiliation of defeat and the terms imposed at Versailles.

We now have something similar in the United States. There are millions of war on terror veterans, many of whom feel abandoned. Veterans are celebrated in rhetoric but denied health care, employment, and basic support in practice. They are an alienated, often angry layer of society, and they have combat skills. That is fertile ground for a protofascist movement.

You saw it starkly on January 6, 2021. Veterans make up about 7 percent of the US population, yet analyses of those charged over the Capitol attack suggest veterans formed roughly double that share of participants. If you look at recent domestic terror plots, a striking number involve veterans or active-duty soldiers linked to neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups.

On top of that, you have the scale and centrality of the US military itself. It is the most important institution in American life. Around half of federal discretionary spending goes on the military, with vast sums flowing to private contractors in the arms industry. You cannot have an institution of that size without its internal dynamics spilling into the wider society. The racism, authoritarianism, and violence sharpened in Iraq and Afghanistan now shape US politics more broadly, from organized far-right movements to MAGA.

Matt Kennard

Militaries everywhere are based on hierarchy, obedience, and a cult of force. In a settler society like the United States, that sits on top of a founding project of white supremacy. The country was built through the genocide of Native Americans and the elevation of a white frontier as the carrier of the nation. That worldview never really disappeared. It has adapted, but the idea that the white settler is the core of “America” is still powerful.

When you put heavily armed US troops behind blast walls in Iraq, looking out at a besieged population of brown Muslims, the old colonial logic reasserts itself. It becomes natural, almost necessary, for the institution to treat those people as subhuman in order to sustain occupation. That is precisely why the armed forces are so attractive to white nationalists and neo-Nazis, and why some of them rise through the ranks.

One of the most alarming developments in recent years is how open this has become. The current Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, embodies a lot of what I was trying to expose. He has the Crusader slogan “Deus vult” tattooed on his arm, Jerusalem crosses on his chest, and the word “kafir” in Arabic, meaning “infidel,” also on his arm. These are the same motifs we were trying to warn about when we found them on enlisted soldiers during the war on terror. Now they are worn by the man running the Pentagon.

In his confirmation hearing he said the military would no longer “focus on extremism” because it was a political witch hunt. That is a direct invitation to neo-Nazis and white supremacists to sign up. He also ridiculed existing rules of engagement, signaling to hundreds of thousands of troops that war crimes will not be seriously policed. Everything that was festering in the shadows during the height of the war on terror has been brought into the open and institutionalized at the very top.

Matt Kennard

It is messy, and it is changing fast. There is a section of the Right that is openly fascist and antisemitic. People like Nick Fuentes are promoting Hitler and Nazism. There is no question of aligning with that.

But there are others, like Tucker Carlson, who come from the conservative movement, supported Trump and so on, yet have become very strong on Palestine. I think it would be self-defeating for the Left to refuse any kind of cooperation with people like that on specific issues. You do not have to endorse their whole politics to recognize that they have enormous platforms and that their break with the bipartisan consensus on Israel is significant.

The Zionist lobby in the United States has relied for decades on having almost the entire right, as well as the liberal center, locked in. The genocide in Gaza and the scale of Israeli influence over Washington have started to fracture that. A lot of people on the right who never questioned US support for Israel are now shocked by what they are seeing and by what it says about US power. That is an opportunity.

We also need to avoid writing off everyone who has historically identified with the Republicans. Not all Republicans are evil. Many simply grew up inside a media bubble that told them a certain story about their country and its role in the world. The images from Gaza, from Lebanon, from the wider region have punctured that “hyperreality” for some of them. Plenty of ordinary conservatives do not want to see their children or anyone else’s children killed in endless wars.