Books About War

The Iraq War, Orientalism, and The Arab Mind

By Kathy G.

Not unexpectedly, what can I say? Henry has provided me with such a actually awesome intro that I can’t perchance hope to live up to it. But it does consign me an additional incentive to do my win out over, which is what I’ll have a go to do.

Yesterday, following up on something Spencer Ackerman had posted, Matthew Yglesias wrote the following:
It’s undeniably bizarre how, in the context of war, completely normal attributes of accommodating behavior become transformed into into uncanny cultural quirks of the tricky Arab. I recall having study in the past that because Arabs are horrified of opprobrium, it’s not a good aim to humiliate an innocent man by breaking down his door at evening and handcuffing him in front of his missus and children before hauling him off to jail. Now it seems that Arabs are also so invested in honor that they don’t like it when mercenaries murder their relatives.
I precisely agree, and this gives me an clearance to bust out an argument that has fancy been marinating in the recesses of the ol’ cranium. It’s this: that America, the Mideast, and the times a deliver would have been less ill off if “the single most everyday and widely read log on the Arabs in the US military,” Raphael Patai’s racist portion The Arab Mind, had been entranced off Pentagon reading lists, and...

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