improved somewhat, but alas, it really hasn't. For all kinds of reasons, the situation in Europe seems to be considerably better. In the US, the hardening of attitudes, the tightening of the grip of demeaning generalization and triumphalist cliche, he dominance of crude power allied with simplistic contempt of dissenters and"others "has found a fitting correlative in the looting, pillaging and destruction of Iraq s libraries and museums. What our leaders and their intellectual lackeys seem apable of understanding is that history cannot be swept clean like a blackboard, clean so that"we"might inscribe our own future there and our own forms of life for these lesser people to follow. It is quite common to hear high officials in Washington and elsewhere speak of changing the map of the middle east, as if ancient societies and myriad peoples can be shaken up like so many peanuts in a jar. But this has often happened with the"Orient, that semi-mythical construct hich since Napoleons invasion of Egypt in the late eighteenth century has been made and re-made countless times by power acting through an expedient form of knowledge to assert that this is the Orient's nature, and we must deal with it accordingly. In the process the uncountable sediments of history, which include innumerable histories and a dizzying variety of peoples swept aside or ignored, relegated to the sand heap taken out of Baghdad's libraries and museums. My a ith the treasures ground wingless fragments is that history is made women, Just as also be unmade and re-written, always with various silences and elisions, always with tolerated, so that"our"East, "our" Orient becomes"ours"to possess and direct. I should say again that I have no"real"Orient to argue for. I do, however, have a very high regard for the po gifts of the peoples of that region to struggle on for their vision of what they are and want to be. There has been so and calculatedly aggressive an attack on the contemporary societies of the arab and Muslim for their backwardness, democracy, and abrogation of womens rights that we simply forget that such notions as modernity, enlightenment and democracy are by no means simple and agreed-upon concepts that one either does or does not find, like Easter eggs in the living-room. The breathtaking insouciance of jejune publicists who speak in the name of foreign policy and who have no live notion(or any knowledge at all) of the language of what real people actually speak has fabricated an arid landscape ready for American power to construct there an ersatz model of free market"democracy, without even a trace of doubt understand, argue also is that there is a difference between know-ledge of other peoples and other times that is the result of what it is-that is part of an overall campaign of self-affirmation, belligerency and outright war. There is, after all,a profound difference between the will to understand for purposes of co-existence and humanistic enlargement of horizons, and the will to dominate for the purposes of control and extermal dominion. It is surely one of the intellectual catastrophes of history that an imperialist war confected by a small group of unelected US officials(they've been called chickenhawks since none of them ever served in the military) was waged against a devastated Third World dictatorship on thoroughly ideological grounds having to do with world dominance, security control, and scarce resources, but disguised for its true intent, hastened and ((xv) reasoned for by Orientalists who betrayed their calling as scholars. The major influences on George w. Bush,s Pentagon and National Security Council were men such as Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami, experts on the arab and Islamic world who helped the American hawks to think about such preposterous phenomena as the arab mind and centuries-old islamic decline that only American power could reverse. Today, bookstores in the US are filled with shabby screeds bearing headlines about Islam and terror, Islam exposed, the Arab threat and the Muslim menace, all of them written by polemicists pretending to knowledge imparted to them and others by experts who have supposedly penetrated to th nese strange Oriental peoples over there who have been such a terrible thorn in " our"flesh. Acimproved somewhat, but alas, it really hasn't. For all kinds of reasons, the situation in Europe seems to be considerably better. In the US, the hardening of attitudes, the tightening of the grip of demeaning generalization and triumphalist cliche, the dominance of crude power allied with simplistic contempt of dissenters and "others," has found a fitting correlative in the looting, pillaging and destruction of Iraq's libraries and museums. What our leaders and their intellectual lackeys seem incapable of understanding is that history cannot be swept clean like a blackboard, clean so that "we" might inscribe our own future there and impose our own forms of life for these lesser people to follow. It is quite common to hear high officials in Washington and elsewhere speak of changing the map of the Middle East, as if ancient societies and myriad peoples can be shaken up like so many peanuts in a jar. But this has often happened with the "Orient," that semi-mythical construct which since Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in the late eighteenth century has been made and re-made countless times by power acting through an expedient form of knowledge to assert that this is the Orient's nature, and we must deal with it accordingly. In the process the uncountable sediments of history, ((xlv)) which include innumerable histories and a dizzying variety of peoples, languages, experiences and cultures, all these are swept aside or ignored, relegated to the sand heap along with the treasures ground into meaningless fragments that were taken out of Baghdad's libraries and museums. My argument is that history is made by men and women, just as it can also be unmade and re-written, always with various silences and elisions, always with shapes imposed and disfigurements tolerated, so that "our" East, "our" Orient becomes "ours" to possess and direct. I should say again that I have no "real" Orient to argue for. I do, however, have a very high regard for the powers and gifts of the peoples of that region to struggle on for their vision of what they are and want to be. There has been so massive and calculatedly aggressive an attack on the contemporary societies of the Arab and Muslim for their backwardness, lack of democracy, and abrogation of women's rights that we simply forget that such notions as modernity, enlightenment and democracy are by no means simple and agreed-upon concepts that one either does or does not find, like Easter eggs in the living-room. The breathtaking insouciance of jejune publicists who speak in the name of foreign policy and who have no live notion (or any knowledge at all) of the language of what real people actually speak has fabricated an arid landscape ready for American power to construct there an ersatz model of free market "democracy," without even a trace of doubt that such projects don't exist outside of Swift's Academy of Lagado. What I do argue also is that there is a difference between know-ledge of other peoples and other times that is the result of understand-ing, compassion, careful study and analysis for their own sakes, and on the other hand knowledge— if that is what it is— that is part of an overall campaign of self-affirmation, belligerency and outright war. There is, after all, a profound difference between the will to understand for purposes of co-existence and humanistic enlargement of horizons, and the will to dominate for the purposes of control and external dominion. It is surely one of the intellectual catastrophes of history that an imperialist war confected by a small group of unelected US officials (they've been called chickenhawks, since none of them ever served in the military) was waged against a devastated Third World dictatorship on thoroughly ideological grounds having to do with world dominance, security control, and scarce resources, but disguised for its true intent, hastened and ((xv)) reasoned for by Orientalists who betrayed their calling as scholars. The major influences on George W. Bush's Pentagon and National Security Council were men such as Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami, experts on the Arab and Islamic world who helped the American hawks to think about such preposterous phenomena as the Arab mind and centuries-old Islamic decline that only American power could reverse. Today, bookstores in the US are filled with shabby screeds bearing screaming headlines about Islam and terror, Islam exposed, the Arab threat and the Muslim menace, all of them written by political polemicists pretending to knowledge imparted to them and others by experts who have supposedly penetrated to the heart of these strange Oriental peoples over there who have been such a terrible thorn in "our" flesh. Accompanying such