My first mistake was to watch this thing on terrestrial TV. Big mistake. Breaking my usual policy of waiting for the box sets to arrive, I was severely punished by Channel 4, who made their viewers suffer a commercial break what seemed to be every five minutes. It very nearly destroyed any of the pleasure the second series had to offer, but not quite. With just one final episode to go in this second series, I have to confess it was, despite the wall to wall advertising, worth the effort. This is the first attempt by mainstream US TV to explore, albeit very tentatively, the notion that the US ‘war on terror’ is a complex and multi-faceted beast, and that the terrorists might not all be from far away Muslim countries.

In fact, the viewer is left with the distinct impression that Uncle Sam may well be as much perpetrator as victim. This of course is obvious to anyone that has even the remotest knowledge of US imperialism, but to see this proposition tentatively explored in mainstream TV is a healthy, if tiny, step forward.

Central to the plot is a US drone attack that wipes out an Iraqi school, and ensuing from that piece of barbarism comes a natural desire for revenge. The suspect loyalties of a US marine, who had spent some three years in dire captivity in Iraq, and was possibly turned by his captors, gives the story its gripping tension. The additional fact that one of the CIA operatives detailed to unravel the revenge plot, gets emotionally involved with said US marine, adds to the sense of divided loyalties. The fact that this CIA operative also has some sort of bi-polar condition also contributes nicely to the sense of unpredictability. Perhaps she is meant to be a metaphor for the US itself.

But there are serious weaknesses to the storyline. Firstly, the murky role of US imperialism in Iraq and Afghanistan is only very lightly touched upon. We do hear some compelling testimony from Iraq of the US policy of extra-judicial assassinations via its barrage of automated drones, but this is not developed nearly sufficiently enough. It is well known that British and US machinations in the Middle East have been in full swing throughout the 20th century and show no signs of letting up in this century, quite the opposite, but the Homeland script fails to draw on this in any meaningful way.

Today, as in the past, the grubby hands of British and US imperialism are everywhere, from Egypt to Libya, from to Iran to Saudi Arabia, from Iraq to Kuwait and now into Syria and the Lebanon. The name of the game is who will control the strategic oil supplies of the MIddle East, and successive US administrations have made damn sure it will be the United States. In order to achieve this central foreign policy aim they have overthrown any incipient progressive regime and propped up instead all manner of brutal dictatorships, the most influential being the Saudis. This long and sordid history is barely hinted at. The viewer is left to fill in the background history for themselves, but if that history is unknown then the story becomes largely unintelligible. Islamic extremism and the use of terror did not drop from the sky; it is a direct response to the bullying, barbarism and state sponsored terror of Western Imperialism and the US corporations that drive it.

The second fundamental weakness of Homeland is the virtual airbrushing out of the colonial ambitions of Uncle Sam’s favourite puppet state the Zionist state of Israel. Kept afloat by massive US subsidies, Israel under its Zionist leadership, has been left free to develop its obscurantist dream of a Greater Israel. This of course has been at the direct expense of the wholly legitimate Palestinian aspiration for their own secure homeland. If any people on the planet should understand this desire it is the Jewish nation, yet in a sick and twisted historical irony, some of the world’s most oppressed people have become some of the world’s most oppressive. The failure to weave this all- consuming fact into the Homeland narrative once again renders the story seriously devoid of historical context.

Israel’s aggressive land grab, unchallenged by the US, is always and inevitably the elephant in the room that the West refuses to acknowledge. We should remember that Hamas and Hezbollah and other similar militant Islamist groups did not exist during the fifties and sixties. It was only Israel’s intransigence in negotiating a permanent peace that gave rise to Islamic extremism. Had Israel been prepared to negotiate in good faith with the secular forces around the PLO, Hamas would likely never have materialised. But as the old proverb goes; you reap what you sow. Of course, the Zionists probably never had any real intentions of accepting a partitioned, two state solution. Their game was and is a Greater Israel with a government sanctioned policy of Palestinian ethnic cleansing at its heart.

Without incorporating some of this into the Homeland story it all becomes a little trite, a little superficial, a little bit too comfortable. It could be argued that Homeland represents a hesitant, faltering start to a long overdue process of self-examination, by American writers, of US foreign policy, but based on the first two series of Homeland, they still have a long, long way to go. Perhaps series three will be bolder and a little more explorative but don’t hold your breath. Either way, I’ll wait for the box set to appear.