Why is it worthwhile to meet Homeland?
In 2012, in his first season, Homeland won the Emmy for best drama series, preventing Mad Men ‘s fifth championship. This year, after a second unstable season, it was overcome by Breaking Bad. The defeat should not detract from the work of the producers and the cast. Despite some major mistakes, Homeland is, in addition to high-quality entertainment, capable of making the masses reflect on an issue today only addressed in specialized circles: Do US actions contribute to terrorism?
Homeland, whose third season premiered on Sunday 29 in the USA, is centered on an unusual story. After eight years kidnapped by al-Qaeda members in Iraq, sergeant Nicholas Brody (Damien Lewis) is rescued. The reappearance of the marine puts CIA agent Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes) on alert, who is investigating the suspicion that an American military man may have been co-opted by the terrorist network and would return to the United States to attack his own country. The plot unfolds (and sometimes twists) based on the intense relationship between Carrie and Brody and the hard work of the intelligence agency to dismantle a terrorist plan.
There are, as specialized magazines such as Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy have shown, a series of problems in Homeland’s verisimilitude. They range from the way the CIA acts to the representation of terrorists. The most serious seems to be the unlikely alliance between Al-Qaeda, a global terrorist network whose matrix is Sunni, and the Lebanese Shiite group Hezbollah, which is formed at a certain point in the second season. Okay, the series is about a development that could turn the Middle East upside down — an Israeli attack on Iran — and yet it is difficult to imagine such a union, especially since, as you read this text, al-Qaeda militants and Hezbollah are killing each other in Syria.
Even with mistakes, Homeland has an asset. As several critics have already noted, the series is extremely courageous and seeks to debate key issues of post-9/11, such as the tension between moralism and pragmatism in American foreign policy, prejudice against Muslims, the role of the press and the contradictions of politics. More than that, Homeland provides tools for ordinary people, whether in the United States or elsewhere, to reflect on the impact of Washington’s actions on the Arab-Muslim world.
In Homeland, the possibility exists that the terrorist is not “the other”, but “one of us”, affected by the same problems that “our government” imposes on the “other”. In this case (and here we ask for venom for the possible spoiler) it is the murder of a loved one, which provokes a feeling of revenge in those who stay. In fact, it is a reductionism to attribute the transformation of a person into a terrorist based on a single fact, now the aim of the series here is not to develop a treatise on the subject. It is to show that the actions of the United States do have an important degree of influence in the creation of terrorists.
As stated by Lawrence Wright, author of The Vulture of the Towers, a book about 9/11, al-Qaeda’s strength stems from an environment full of political repression, poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, sexism and a feeling of cultural insignificance, which are enhanced by the actions of the United States in that region. This is not about demonizing the government of the Americans. As Barack Obama stated in a UN speech, a Middle East with less United States presence is a worse Middle East, not a better one. If there were no USA, another power, possibly Russia or China, would take its place in the region and the results would be even more disastrous. What is needed is that the United States’ presence in the Middle East is better qualified.
The first step was taken in 2005, when the White House, still under George W. Bush, recognized the disaster caused by its policy in the Middle East. “For 60 years, the United States has sought stability at the expense of democracy in the Middle East — and we have achieved neither,” said then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in a historic speech in Cairo. From there, she said, the United States would support democratization in the region. The momentum ended quickly, with an expressive result by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt’s legislatures (still under the Hosni Mubarak dictatorship) in 2005, and Hamas’s victory in the elections in the Occupied Palestinian Territories in 2006. It was clear there that Democratization in the Middle East would be a very difficult process, which would involve reconciling democratic values with fundamentalist views present in the region.
That bomb went off in the hands of Barack Obama. After an attempt to resume the commitment to support democracy made and later set aside by W. Bush, Obama found himself in the midst of the so-called Arab Spring. The months passed and the hypocrisy of American foreign policy, caused by the tension between interests and ideals, was exposed in a brutal way. In Egypt, Obama supported the fall of Mubarak and was silent in the face of the coup that brought down Mohamed Morsi. In Libya, he participated in armed intervention. In Bahrain, he closed his eyes to repression. In Syria, it is unable to influence a conflict that has already killed more than 100,000 people. It is no coincidence that the USA has such a strong negative image in the Middle East (reaching 81% of the population in Egypt and 85% in Jordan). Local people know that Washington’s actions help to keep alive the environment where terrorism proliferates, that of political repression, poverty, unemployment, etc. It is important that the American population also has this type of understanding and realizes that the actions of its government contribute to foment a threat that, ultimately, turns against itself. It is at this point that Homeland extrapolates from TV and plays a political and social role in the United States.
