The combatants in American War don't fight over land or resources or even survival.
They fight over the right to wear each other's skins — and in a total war economy, the only real commodity is identity itself.
El Akkad understands what most war fiction misses: the actual terror of perpetual conflict isn't death. It's the revelation that our side and their side were always the same market segment arguing over who gets to monetize the symbols of resistance.
in a total war economy, the only real commodity is identity itself
”Watch how the novel treats defection — characters don't switch sides for moral clarity or broken ideals. They switch because the clothes fit better, the food tastes right, the flag means something to their body before it means anything to their mind. This isn't poetic license; it's biological fact: we are creatures that absorb and adopt the material culture of our environments, and total war just removes the pretense that we're doing anything other than consuming identity.
The novel's real architecture lies in what it refuses to sentimentalize — there are only the specific textures of daily life in a forever-war economy, and the slow erosion of the distinction between occupier and occupied. In a world of infinite conflict, we become what we fight, and we become it through the grammar of purchase.
Read Omar El Akkad's essay 'What We Lost in Translation' (The Guardian, 2017) on how Arabic identity gets consumed and repackaged in Western conflict narratives—it's the theoretical spine of American War's central mechanism.
Find the 2019 interview where El Akkad discusses how he researched American Civil War profiteering accounts and realized the language of supply-chain optimization in 1860s letters was identical to 2010s defense contractor pitch decks—both reducing human allegiance to efficient resource allocation.