United States

The United States occupies a changing but increasingly central place in Edward Said’s account of Orientalism: after the Second World War it succeeds Britain and France as the leading Western power in the Orient, while extending older habits of representation through policy institutions, universities, media, and economic exchange. Its importance is not simply that it acts abroad. The United States also helps produce the categories through which the region is understood, and those categories can make political intervention seem necessary while reducing complex societies to manageable abstractions.

From European Precedence to American Ascendancy

Said distinguishes the long British and French involvement in the Orient from that of other European and Atlantic powers. For centuries the Orient had a particular place in European Western experience: it was adjacent to Europe, associated with its oldest colonies and the sources of its civilizations and languages, and repeatedly made into an image of the Other against which Europe defined itself. Orientalism grew from this historical closeness and was expressed not only in scholarship and imaginative writing but also through institutions, colonial bureaucracies, and styles of rule.

The balance of power changes after the Second World War. From the beginning of the nineteenth century until the end of that war, Britain and France dominated the Orient and the associated Orientalist enterprise; afterward, the United States assumed a comparable position. Said describes American involvement as historically less dense than the older European tradition, but argues that the country's expanding political and economic role in the Near East makes understanding the region an increasingly urgent matter. The shift changes the leading power more than it dissolves the inherited framework: American engagement approaches the Orient in ways that recall the earlier British and French relationship between knowledge and dominance.

Policy Knowledge and Military Power

In Said’s account of the Iraq War, the connection between expertise and intervention becomes stark. He argues that influential advisers to George W. Bush’s Pentagon and National Security Council, including Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami, helped frame the Arab and Islamic worlds through claims about an Arab mind and a centuries-old Islamic decline supposedly reversible by American power. Such assumptions present broad, historically diverse populations as though they shared a single defining condition, then make outside intervention appear to be the remedy.

Said places this episode in a longer history of imperial justifications. American advisers, he argues, reuse the clichés and demeaning stereotypes once employed by European colonial powers, while the language of a special civilizing or democratic mission recurs across empires. In Iraq, that language accompanied not only military invasion but the arrival of private contractors and entrepreneurs entrusted with projects ranging from textbooks and a constitution to the refashioning of political life and the oil industry. The stated promise of enlightenment and order thus sits beside the practical transfer of authority over the country’s institutions and resources.

He challenges the claim that the war was chiefly about freedom by pointing to the disparity between the scale of the American deployment and the public’s limited knowledge of the country being invaded. In a counterfactual argument, he observes that a country exporting bananas or oranges rather than oil would not have prompted the same war and hysteria over allegedly vanished weapons of mass destruction. The premise that Iraqis were fundamentally unlike Americans, and therefore did not value what Americans valued, supplied what Said regards as a crucial element of the traditional Orientalist rationale for war.

American policy expertise also operates through a distinctive professional vocabulary. Said criticizes specialists who can pronounce on democracy, terrorism, liberalism, or Islamic fundamentalism without knowing Arabic, Persian, or French and whose experience is confined to Washington’s Beltway. Their arguments gain influence through their polished efficiency and policy appeal rather than through careful engagement with language, history, or lived experience. In this exchange, he argues, human suffering is displaced by abstractions, and historical memory is dismissed rather than examined.

Universities, Media, and the Reproduction of Authority

The United States’ influence is also institutional. Since the 1950s, Said observes, area-studies programs and institutes have made scholarly study of the Orient a branch of national policy. Public interest in the region combines its strategic and economic importance with older habits of exoticizing it. Electronic media make distant places more accessible to Western audiences, but accessibility does not necessarily mean understanding: television, film, and other media standardize information and reinforce the nineteenth-century image of a mysterious Orient, particularly in representations of Arabs and Islam.

Said describes the American Middle East studies establishment as a network connecting academic institutions with corporate business, foundations, oil companies, missions, the military, foreign service, and intelligence. It is not, he stresses, a wholly monolithic field: it includes established Orientalists, marginal specialists, counterinsurgency experts, policymakers, and a small minority of academic power brokers. Yet its complexity does not prevent the persistence of a core set of ideas about Islam, the Orient, and Arabs, maintained through institutions, professional hierarchies, grants, and other rewards. The authority of expertise therefore rests not only on individual scholars but also on the structures that determine which knowledge circulates and carries influence.

In the post-9/11 period, Said sees this relationship sharpened by mass media. Images of distant warfare can suggest surgical precision while concealing destruction and suffering. A small group of civilian officials, he argues, formulated simplified assumptions for policy toward the Arab and Islamic worlds, while media outlets supplied experts who repeatedly validated the government’s general line. The resulting debate revolved around terror, preemptive war, unilateral regime change, and an enormous military budget, leaving little room for historical context or sustained dissent. His criticism is not that technical knowledge has no place, but that technical authority and media repetition cannot substitute for reflection, moral argument, and attention to the density of human life.

Unequal Intellectual Exchange and Self-Orientalizing

Said describes the modern Arab world as an intellectual, political, and cultural satellite of the United States, while emphasizing the particular form that dependence takes. Arab universities generally retain patterns inherited from former colonial powers, but Said’s account of their contemporary conditions is more specific: crowded classes, poorly supported and overworked faculty, political appointments, limited advanced research, and the absence of a decent library anywhere in the region. Against this institutional background, promising students are encouraged to pursue advanced study in the United States. Students from both radical and conservative states make this journey, and the numerical predominance of those going to the United States reflects its position as the principal source of scholarly authority.

That authority shapes what scholars can study and whose work receives attention. Said notes that Arab and Islamic scholars cannot afford to ignore American and European journals, institutes, and universities, whereas the reverse is not true. He points to the absence of a major journal of Arab studies published in the Arab world and of an Arab educational institution able to challenge Oxford, Harvard, or UCLA in studying the Arab world. In this unequal exchange, scholars trained in the United States may return home and repeat Orientalist clichés, feeling able to manage the system while remaining subordinate to its Western authorities. In American universities, some teach introductory Oriental languages as native informants even though power in universities and foundations remains overwhelmingly in non-Oriental hands.

Economic relations reinforce the intellectual imbalance. Said argues that oil and oil revenues are deeply absorbed into the American economic system, and that Arab states—including states he characterizes as radical—buy a diverse range of American goods while the United States selectively purchases a narrow range of products, chiefly oil and cheap manpower. The imbalance is visible in material consumption, from transistors, blue jeans, and Coca-Cola to images of the Orient supplied by American mass media. It also shapes education: market demand favors engineering, business, and economics, while an educated class is directed toward a modernizing role that gives authority to ideas of progress and culture received largely from the United States. In this sense, Orientalist images can be reproduced within the societies they describe; Said calls this participation in the Orient’s own Orientalizing.

Critique, Historical Memory, and Alternatives

Said does not claim that only an insider can write about a society, nor does he posit a single, authentic Orient that correct scholarship could simply recover. His criticism is directed at an essentialist system that treats heterogeneous and changing human realities as fixed, and at the power relations that enable one side to describe and govern the other. He contrasts the massive French Description de l'Égypte, produced by a corps of scholars backed by a colonial army, with Abdal-Rahman al-Jabarti’s three-volume account of the invasion from the perspective of the invaded. The disparity between these works is not merely a contest between two descriptions: it reveals how imperial power can make one account appear universal and objective while leaving another unknown or ignored.

That attention to unequal historical records informs Said’s broader account of imperial continuity. Twenty-five years after Orientalism was first published, he asks whether modern imperialism ever ended, tracing a line from Napoleon’s entry into Egypt through the development of Oriental studies and the seizure of North Africa, then onward through conflicts and interventions in Vietnam, Egypt, Palestine, and the struggle for oil and strategic control in the Gulf, Iraq, Syria, Palestine, and Afghanistan. He sets this history alongside anticolonial nationalism, periods of liberal independence, coups, insurgency, civil war, and later violence. Each phase produces its own distorted knowledge and reductive images. Treating the past as irrelevant, he argues, obscures the continuing effects of empire on Palestinians, Congolese, Algerians, and Iraqis.

His proposed alternative is a humanistic criticism that restores historical sequence and intellectual exchange to debates too often trapped in antagonistic labels. For Said, humanism means using the mind historically and rationally, and recognizing a community among interpreters, societies, and periods. He insists that criticism of injustice must be situated in history, culture, and socioeconomic reality rather than converted into an abstract clash between Islam and the West. His own advocacy of Palestinian national self-determination, he says, has been joined to attention to Jewish persecution and genocide; the goal for equality in Palestine and Israel should be coexistence rather than further suppression and denial. The United States is therefore significant in his analysis not as a simple opposite to the Orient, but as the contemporary center of an unequal system of political power and knowledge—one that can be challenged only by making its histories, institutions, and exclusions visible.