Going to War with the Other: A Study of U.S. Foreign Policies of Violence

The objective of this book was to use Edward Said's theory Orientalism in order to increase our understanding of such how and why the United States goes to war in the manner in which it has and does. I examined all cases of United States foreign policies of overt violence, bounded by and including, Vietnam (1964-1969) and Iraq (2003-2007). What this research showed was quite contrary to Orientalism’s expectations (as well as my own). Analyzing the discursive record for the “trigger words” that should be present if Orientalist frames were used in the making/applying of US foreign policy resulted in conclusions that are not only largely unsupportive, but in some cases detrimental to the theory. While I cannot categorically deny the existence of any supportive evidence for Orientalism, there is clearly no extant pattern of such ideological discourse in any examined cases. The only exception to this is germane to the last case study, Afghanistan (2001-2003). In this case, I argued that what we are seeing is an outlier, created by a sui generis action, viz., a traumatizing terrorist attack on US soil. Instead of Orientalism, what the record shows are examples of what I’ve termed “neutral-Orientalism” and “anti-Orientalism.” The former are cases where Orientalist trigger words are present in the discourse, but they do only prosaic duty. Such lexical choices are a-ideological, often providing definitional work in the contexts considered. “Anti-Orientalism,” which is actually more common than Orientalism, is when the trigger words work in precisely the opposite way from which the theory would suggest. The evidence uncovered in this book suggests a renewed caution when dealing with questions of Orientalism, and a more robust consideration of the empirical record.