This piece provides a detailed engagement with Don DeLillo's depiction of the 2003 Iraq war in his latest novel, Point Omega. Framed through both formal aesthetic signposting of the interrelations between modernist and postmodernist practice and also through explicit thematic comparison between the conflicts, I trace DeLillo's treatment of Iraq in Point Omega back to his earlier writing on the Cold War in Underworld and focus upon the ways in which this comparative historical metaphor can be read with particular emphasis upon its implications for the nation state