U.S. Department of Defense

The United States Department of Defense is presented as a powerful institution at the junction of military policy, political research, and public argument. In Edward Said’s analysis, its significance lies not only in its capacity to conduct war but also in its place within a knowledge system that makes intervention appear necessary: experts and media generalizations render diverse Arab and Muslim societies legible as a threatening, deficient, or uniform object of policy. Said sets that instrumental use of knowledge against patient historical study and humanistic understanding, which he regards as essential restraints on domination.

Policy, expertise, and the construction of an enemy

Said describes men influential in George W. Bush’s Pentagon and National Security Council, including Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami, as experts on the Arab and Islamic worlds whose ideas helped American hawks discuss supposedly enduring features such as the “Arab mind” and centuries-old Islamic decline. In this account, such broad claims do not simply describe societies: they suggest that only American power can reverse their condition. Expert authority thus helps translate an essentialized picture of the region into a rationale for action.

That rhetoric circulated well beyond government. Said points to United States bookstores filled with polemical books about Islam, terror, and an alleged Arab or Muslim menace, alongside CNN, Fox News Channels, radio hosts, tabloids, and journals that repeated sweeping generalizations. Media figures presented as experts lent those claims authority, while familiar images of a foreign enemy stirred public hostility. The Department of Defense belongs to this wider political environment: policy and military power are reinforced by forms of public knowledge that diminish differences among peoples and histories.

Military power and the Iraq debate

Said characterizes the war against Iraq as an imperialist war pursued by a small group of unelected United States officials on ideological grounds involving world dominance, security control, and scarce resources. He argues that its intent was disguised and its case hastened and reasoned for by Orientalists who, in his judgment, betrayed their scholarly calling. The institutional power to plan and conduct war was therefore bound to a prior struggle over how the region was understood and represented.

He challenges the stated rationale by asking the reader to imagine Iraq as a major exporter of bananas or oranges: in that counterfactual, he argues, there would have been no war, no public hysteria over weapons of mass destruction, and no deployment of an enormous force across 7,000 miles in the name of freedom. The claim is not that Iraq’s government had no failings; Said acknowledges its dictatorship and notes that United States policy had partly helped create it two decades earlier. His point is that a deeply rooted sense of difference—those people as unlike “us” and hostile to “our” values—helped make war politically conceivable.

In Said’s account of the post-September 11 period, a relative handful of civilian elites in the Pentagon formulated a simplified view that informed United States policy across the Arab and Islamic worlds. Terror, preemptive war, and unilateral regime change became the principal ideas in public debate, backed by what Said calls the most bloated military budget in history. He argues that the media often assigned itself the role of producing experts who validated the government’s general line, narrowing debate rather than testing the assumptions behind policy.

Knowledge, research, and political priorities

Said’s criticism reaches beyond immediate war planning to the political conditions under which scholarship is produced. He contrasts a study of long-term Soviet energy potential and military capacity, likely to be commissioned by the Department of Defense, with a study of Tolstoy’s early fiction financed partly by a foundation. Both belong to Russian studies, he observes, but the former acquires a greater political status because it can be translated directly into matters of state power. The example shows how political society can saturate fields of civil society, including the academy, with priorities drawn from government interests.

The contrast is not a claim that literary scholarship is automatically free of politics or that commissioned research is necessarily false. Rather, Said objects to the liberal presumption that true knowledge is fundamentally nonpolitical and that work openly connected to politics must therefore be untrue. What that distinction can conceal, he argues, are the often obscure political circumstances in which knowledge is funded, valued, and put to use. The Department of Defense figures as a source of such priority: its capacity to commission strategically useful work can confer a public and institutional authority not equally available to other kinds of inquiry.

Said also places contemporary military knowledge within a longer history of imperial scholarship. He describes Napoleon’s Egyptian expedition as an encounter in which a modern army of conquest backed the systematic labors of a corps of scholars responsible for the vast Description de l'Égypte. In contrast stands Abdal-Rahman al-Jabarti’s account of the French invasion, written from the position of the invaded. The monumental imperial record could appear to be objective science, but its scale and authority reflected the power of a force seeking to hold Egypt within the French imperial orbit; the local chronicler’s testimony revealed a different historical position. For Said, that imbalance helps explain how organized knowledge can serve power without being reducible to a simple collection of falsehoods.

The human cost concealed by technical language

Said warns that the language surrounding modern warfare can erase the density and interdependence of human life. He cites a congresswoman’s televised assurance that an attack could remove Saddam, destroy his army with “clean surgical strikes,” and win approval. The phrasing turns war into a technical operation and pushes its human consequences out of view. Similarly, mass-media images of distant electronic conflicts can suggest surgical precision even as they obscure suffering and destruction.

In a related criticism of the Iraq debate, Said notes that Vice President Cheney’s hard-line speech of August 26, 2002, advocating an attack on Iraq relied on a single Middle East expert: an Arab academic who, Said says, was a regular paid media consultant and publicly renounced his background while expressing hatred of his own people. Said further observes that military and Zionist lobbies in the United States supported this academic’s efforts. He treats this example as a symptom of humanistic scholarship degenerating into jingoism and false patriotism, not as proof that an individual’s origin alone determines the truth or value of an argument.

Said also sets the Iraq debate beside the history of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. He notes that General Sharon led that invasion to change the Lebanese government and that 17,000 civilians were killed; he then points to Sharon’s later partnership with George W. Bush in the language of peace. The comparison supports Said’s concern that military power is too readily treated as sufficient to redraw political realities, with inadequate dissent from that premise in the United States.

Humanistic resistance and the limits of command

Said’s answer to the dominance of military-policy expertise is neither a claim that scholarship stands outside power nor a retreat from political questions. Humanism, in his account, depends on individual judgment, subjective intuition, and reading texts as historical works that live within particular circumstances. Because power insinuates itself even into specialized study, inquiry must attend to those circumstances rather than claim an impossible immunity from them.

He presents sustained reflection, debate, rational argument, and moral principle as alternatives to exceptionalist abstractions that dismiss context and treat other cultures with contempt. Technical-policy experts may seem indispensable in a society equipped with extraordinary military power, the internet, and F-16 fighter jets; yet Said argues that what is at stake is the loss of any sense that human lives are dense, connected, and resistant to reduction by formula. Military capacity can command action, but it cannot by itself supply an adequate understanding of the societies on which that action falls.

In the conclusion to his argument, Said calls humanism the final resistance to inhuman practices and historical injustice. He points to the worldwide protests before the Iraq war, made possible by cyberspace, alternative communities, and alternative sources of news, as evidence that public opposition could cross national boundaries. The Department of Defense therefore appears within a conflict larger than state policy: the struggle between an instrumental, militarized account of the region and forms of inquiry and solidarity that keep human history and agency in view.