Orientalist assumptions about Otherness enabled the Iraq invasion

Evidence

Even with all its terrible failings and its appalling dictator (who was partly created by U.S. policy two decades ago), were Iraq to have been the world’s largest exporter of bananas or oranges, surely there would have been no war, no hysteria over mysteriously vanished weapons of mass destruction, no transporting of an enormous army, navy, and air force 7000 miles away to destroy a country scarcely known even to the educated American, all in the name of “freedom.” Without a well-organized sense that these people over there were not like “us” and didn’t appreciate “our” values—the very core of traditional Orientalist dogma as I describe its creation and circulation in this book—there would have been no war. — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 33

Categorization

• XREF: This is the loaded mechanism the reader needs: how the ‘us/them’ binary concretely produces policy outcomes — carries directly into Islamophobia case studies. — connects to: Genuine alterity is reciprocal, whereas mythic Otherness denies reciprocity — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 652
• QUESTION: Note the counterfactual framing: worth chasing the specific causal chain from ‘unlike us’ perceptions to military action.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Edward W. Said, Orientalism, 33