A visit to almost any college bookstore reveals countless titles indicating the scope of the spotlight directed at the Middle East in America. In the religion section, the word Islam appears with the frequency of a prayer chant. Any textbook on international relations not devoting extensive discussion to Middle East politics has turned a blind eye to one of the most volatile regions of the world. Courses exploring the art, literature and music from Morocco to Iran have rising enrollments. It was not always this way.
Even through the rise of Arab nationalism, the Middle East was seen primarily through the prism of cold war competition, of interest in its own right to anthropologists and archaeologists but few others. Knowledge was gained about countries researchers had access to Egypt, Turkey, Iraq, and Libya was therefore aimed at uncovering the past, while assessment of present social and political conditions was limited to a cold war framework.
The latest US ambition is to strengthen its grip on Middle Eastern oil wealth and markets and extend its network of military bases and facilities, all in the name of democratization. The Bush administration justified the invasion of Iraq on three pretexts. The first was the war on terror declared after 11 September 2001; against all the evidence, Saddam Hussein was presented in the United States as an accomplice, if not a sponsor, of Osama bin Laden. The second argument was the threat of weapons of mass destruction. We now know that the information the US and the United Kingdom provided about this subject was untruthful. As the first two faded, a third grew in importance: Washington promised to make Iraq so attractive a democratic model that it would set an example to the entire Middle East.
In contrast to this idealistic praise from liberals “liberal in the US sense of progressive” (Web 1), the Bush administration’s hubristic aim of bringing democracy to the Muslim world, and to Iraq in particular, has aroused fierce criticism from conservative realists..................
