After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack that killed more than 3,000 people in the United States, there was much discussion about what role U.S. Middle Eastern policy had played in motivating the terrorists and those who supported them or at least sought to justify their deeds. American policy was said to be responsible for profound grievances on the part of Arabs and Muslims that required an apology for past behavior and a change in future U.S. policy, and that somehow justified or explained the attack.

But this argument misrepresented the history and nature of U.S. Middle Eastern policy to the point that it became a caricature of reality. Equally, such distortions made it far more difficult to understand the terrorists' true motives and the reasons why many Arabs and Muslims seemed to support or sympathize with them.

This basic worldview is well represented in a 1981 speech by Syrian President Hafiz al-Asad: “The United States wants us to be puppets so it can manipulate us the way it wants. It wants us to be slaves so it can exploit us the way it wants. It wants to occupy our territory and exploit our masses.… It wants us to be parrots repeating what is said to us.” The part chosen by Arab nationalist and Islamist ideology for the United States to play is that of the nineteenth-century imperialist state, seeking to build a Middle Eastern empire in which Arabs and Muslims are colonial subjects. Actual U.S. behavior is largely irrelevant, as it will always be reinterpreted to fit into this mold, a distortion that well serves the needs of both regimes and revolutionary movements in the region.