How does the prospect of endless war against a terrifying abstraction mobilize and perpetuate support for its cause? While the war on terror clearly trades in notions of fear, outrage, and horror it also mobilizes a whole set of feelings less obviously associated with terror – the condescending, intimate colonial desires associated with “soft” power and humanitarian tactics. Considering romance as a lens through which to understand popular narratives about the war on terror, this essay explores intimacy and desire – as well as their intersections with discourses of happiness and honor – as forms of affective capture that serve to perpetuate the war on terror. Though the war on terror is most often associated with a mood of fear, popular stories framed through liberal individualism suggest that it also cultivates an attachment to the affective assemblage of security-happiness-compassion, echoed in the tactics of humanitarian or “soft” power.