Maxwell School News and Commentary

Osamah Khalil's book, America's Dream Palace: Middle East Expertise and the Rise of the National Security State, was reviewed in Commonweal. "He [Khalil] is surely correct in arguing that the 'ideas' that emerged from the think-tank world to shape the U.S. response to 9/11 and that even today continue to influence U.S. actions in places like Iraq and Syria bear a remarkable similarity to the counsel that earnest missionaries and ivory-tower academics offered to Woodrow Wilson back in 1918: that the people of the Middle East are incapable of managing their own affairs and that providence summons America to tutor them," says Andrew J. Bacevich.