The Forever War, Illustrated: How a Graphic Novel Imagined An Even More Dystopian 2011

By Abe Riesman

As the Iraq War winds down and already begins to fade and fizzle from popular memory, spare a little pity for the educators who will have to teach future generations about it. It'll be hard enough to sort out its causes and its implications, but how to convey the dread, paranoia, and confusion that fell over the American psyche as the war spiraled out of control? More imaginative teachers might do well to supplement the history books with a bizarro, alternate history that, at the time at least, seemed very close to home.

Anthony Lappé and Dan Goldman's critically acclaimed 2006 graphic novel Shooting War fits the bill perfectly. It depicted a grim, dystopian vision of the Iraq War, played out in the then-far-off period of late 2011. President John McCain's poll numbers are at an all-time low. An oil embargo engineered by the Iranian mullahs, an Islamic junta in Nigeria, and Hugo Chávez has sent gas prices up to $8 a gallon. Tom Cruise and Mary-Kate Olsen have just gotten a divorce. And although the novel could not predict the arc of the actual war, it captures where it once seemed like it was going.

"I'm always sort of apocalyptic. But I was feeling much more apocalyptic then," says Lappé, the writer, who had produced a documentary on the ground right after the invasion, but had no real fiction-writing experience. He says he wrote the script in a fury over the way events were turning out in 2005 and 2006. "It was much more my imagination running wild than me being some RAND Institute analyst."

That wild imagination led to a plot that veers between vicious satire and brutal critque. Jimmy Burns, a Brooklynite political videoblogger, is delivering an anti-corporate rant via live video feed outside a Williamsburg Starbucks when a terrorist blows it up. A fearmongering cable news network broadcasts his footage, makes him a star, and sends him to cover the Iraq War. He finds a country wracked by horrific civil strife and hardly kept under control by the 10,000 American troops left there after a series of drawdowns — as Jimmy puts it, "the most battle-hardened, ruthless mothers the Pentagon could muster." Jimmy eventually runs afoul of Abu Adallah, a jihadist who preaches a modern spin on militant Islam and masterminds worldwide terrorist attacks before being shot to death.

From the standpoint of our own stranger-than-fiction 2011, many details ring hollow — that oil blockade, global warming-related floods in London, and the fact that Afghanistan is hardly mentioned, for example. But when Shooting War was serialized online in 2006 and released in hardcover in 2007 — a period when thousands of Iraqis and Americans were dying every month and the search for WMD had conclusively failed — the book was hailed by a wide array of critics, from New York magazine to Forbes, as seemingly prophetic. The Financial Times called it "terrifyingly plausible." Rolling Stone called it a "scary-smart take on what the horrors of the future may hold." The Los Angeles Times even took the satire seriously, saying, "The exaggerations in Shooting War feel scarily unlike exaggerations."

Then something changed. It's autumn of 2011, and not only are the details off — when it comes to American politics, the war itself has become, as Lappé puts it, "irrelevant."

"I think the big turning point that we didn't see coming was the entire economy going tits-up," Goldman, the book's artist, says with a sigh. "That really changed the conversation completely."

There are a few things they accurately foresaw. The book describes a process of integrating former Baathists that's not unlike the Sunni Awakening. More astonishingly, it depicts drone vehicles (albeit ground-based ones) doing much of the military's dirty work, a phenomenon that was nearly unheard-of in 2006. And Jimmy, our angry, counter-cultural, camera-toting protagonist, embodies the mainstream media's ever-growing reliance on citizen journalists to capture spontaneous violence as it happens.

But one portent stands chillingly above the others. As Adallah reveals his master plan to Jimmy, he talks about the rising tide of unemployed Muslim youth across the world. "They are waiting for a leader to bring them out of the dark ages," he exclaims. "And what do they get? Illiterate fairy boys who shriek at the sight of a woman's ankle. Mullahs who whip the educated and talented in the streets for minor trespasses." Adallah sees pent-up demand for a movement that embraces Islam without rejecting modern technology, education, or entertainment.

"The idea was that there would be a morphing of the Islamic message to get the kids who became the Arab Spring on their side," Lappé says. Although he says he doesn't see anyone as bloodthirsty as Adallah leading the movements in the Middle East and North Africa, Lappé thinks Adallah's message is all the more relevant and frightening as Islamist groups vie for control in newly "liberated" states. Even as Obama calls troops home, the Commander in Chief has begun shifting the military's focus to emerging radical threats out of Africa, which some worry could quickly turn the Arab Spring into winter.

But ultimately, Shooting War isn't about 2011. Goldman emphasizes how much the book and its reception stand as a document of our mid-decade anxiety about Iraq — an anxiety that's nearly been obliterated from memory by the din of everything that followed it.

"I always felt that there would be an existing presence there for a long time," he recalls of Iraq. "They built those military bases to last. They were not setting up temporary shop."

"It's a time capsule," Goldman says. "To me, Shooting War's 2011 is very much 2006."