America’s Dream Palace: Middle East Expertise and the Rise of the National Security State by Osamah F. Khalil (review)

During the 2008 presidential election, Barack Obama faced a barrage of attacks from conservative media pundits. Among the charges leveled at the Democratic candidate was that he had studied under Edward Said during his time as a student at Columbia University. On its face, the possibility that a future president had taken classes with one of the world’s leading intellectuals in Middle Eastern affairs would seem like an asset rather than a liability. But in the explosive presidential campaign, the possible association between Obama and Said became a weapon. When it came to Middle Eastern affairs, Obama’s critics cried, academics such as Said and his associates were suspect. Osamah Khalil’s America’s Dream Palace helps to explain some of the history behind this strange, decades-long campaign to sideline the United States’ leading experts on one of the most strategically vital regions in the world.

Khalil surveys a century of US efforts to develop “useful knowledge” of the Middle East. He argues that US foreign policy interests played a profound role in shaping American knowledge of the region. Khalil begins with American efforts to build upon the experience of missionaries and a handful of scholars to develop area studies expertise during the First World War. As Americans did so, they took cues from earlier generations of British orientalists both in academia and in government, most notably T. E. Lawrence. For the next several generations, American Middle East Studies patterned itself off of its British forbearer and, in doing so, imported much of the Orientalist knowledge the British had produced. In the process, American Orientalism embraced paternalistic views of Middle Eastern societies, cast cultures as fixed and unchanging, and dismissed local peoples as primitive and prone to violence.

With the start of the Cold War, the US government launched ambitious programs to expand area studies in American universities, leading to the creation of the field of modern Middle East Studies as we know it. At the beginning of the 1950s, Middle East experts were in short supply with Princeton and Michigan serving as the only major academic centers of US Middle East Studies. The emergence of the Middle East as a key Cold War battlefield generated a government campaign aimed at expanding the ranks of area studies specialists. The Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies pushed for the creation of area studies in Cold War America. The 1958 National Defense Education Act played an even larger role in propelling the rise of Middle East Studies in the United States.

But to policy-makers’ chagrin, professors proved to be ungrateful beneficiaries of government aid. As the American academy turned left in the 1960s, officials in Washington drifted away from many academics — who were derided as unpatriotic and entranced by the regions they studied — and looked to privately funded think tanks for “useful knowledge” that would help to validate Cold War policies. This split widened in the coming decades as a resurgent conservatism swept through the nation. Government officials found academics to be frustratingly sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians and their criticisms of Israel flew in the face of US policy toward the region. The attacks of September 11, 2001, and the so-called Global War on Terror exacerbated these rifts between area studies and Washington. The result, Khalil argues, was the creation of an enduring split in the field of Middle East Studies between academics and policy specialists, with the latter emerging as the prime intellectual drivers of US foreign policy in the region. By the end of the Cold War, US officials no longer faced any need to consult with academic specialists — an array of experts working at policy-oriented think tanks provided more than enough “useful knowledge” to justify national security priorities.

America’s Dream Palace contributes to a large and well-developed body...