Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2024
This paper analyzes the 2003 Iraq War's origins through the lens of orientalism and within the history of liberal empire. It argues that Edward Said correctly contended that an orientalist emphasis on essential difference helped justify the war. However, Said overlooked how liberal assertions of universal values also served as a basis for empire in this case and how many opponents of the war also drew on orientalist ideas. Simultaneously, opponents of the Iraq War often used orientalist binaries and stereotypes in their arguments for restraint. It concludes that in using cultural lenses in policy analysis, scholars should pay close attention to shifting contexts and appreciate the multidirectional potentialities of cultural factors for policy.
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170 Lewis, Notes on a Century, 328, 342.
171 Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf, “Open Letter to the President,” iraqwatch.org, 19 Feb. 1998, at www.iraqwatch.org/perspectives/rumsfeld/openletter.htm (accessed 13 March 2023).
172 Notes, National Security Council, Office of the National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, Box 342, folder: Future of Iraq [5], AEI Meeting Summary, “The Day After: Planning for a Post-Saddam Iraq,” 3 Oct. 2002, George W. Bush Presidential Library, 9. See also Lewis, Notes on a Century, 343–6.
173 Bernard Lewis, “The Revolt of Islam,” New Yorker, 19 Nov. 2001.
174 Lockman, Contending Visions, 251.
175 Said, “Imperial Continuity.”
176 Said, “Blind Imperial Arrogance.”
177 Said, Orientalism, 2–7; Morefield, Unsettling the World, 149–51; Little, American Orientalism, 3.
178 Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 43.
179 McAlister, Epic Encounters, 304.
180 Morefield, Unsettling the World, 176–77. For a representative text see Kagan, Robert, The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World (New York: Knopf, 2018)Google Scholar.
181 On US denial of its imperial past see Immerwahr, Daniel, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2019)Google Scholar.
182 Said, “Blind Imperial Arrogance.”
