In the first chapter of the book, “The Scope of Orientalism,” Said illustrates this idea by looking at the case of British hegemony in Egypt. Specifically, he examines a speech Arthur Balfour gave to Members of Parliament in 1910, a speech in which he extolled the benefits of British rule in Egypt. Among other things, Balfour argued that:

We know the civilization of Egypt better than we know the civilization of any other country. We know it further back; we know it more intimately; we know more about it. (…) First of all, look at the facts of the case. Western nations as soon as they emerge into history show the beginnings of those capacities for self-government. You may look through the whole history of the Orientals in what is called, broadly speaking, the East, and you never find traces of self-government. (…) We are in Egypt not merely for the sake of the Egyptians, though we are there for their sake; we are there also for the sake of Europe at large.

At that time, Balfour had already served his term as Prime Minister, but he was still part of the British establishment, in his capacity as leader of the Unionist (Conservative) party.

Two years earlier, Balfour’s friend Evelyn Baring, Lord Cromer, published a short essay entitled “The Government of Subject Races” in The Edinburgh Review. Cromer had served for twenty-four years as consul-general in Egypt so he must have felt he spoke with some degree of authority when he wrote:

The European is a close reasoner; his statements of facts are devoid of any ambiguity; he is a natural logician, albeit he may not have studied logic; he is by nature skeptical and requires proof before he can accept the truth of any proposition; his trained intelligence works like a piece of mechanism. The mind of the Oriental, on the other hand, like his picturesque streets, is eminently wanting in symmetry. His reasoning is of the most slipshod description.

The reason that Cromer and Balfour felt so free to make these sorts of claims about the essential rightness of British rule in Egypt, Said made clear, is that they both had available to them a “reservoir of accredited knowledge” about the Oriental. "To say simply that Orientalism was a rationalization of colonial rule," Said writes, "is to ignore the extent to which colonial rule was justified in advance by Orientalism, rather than after the fact."

One likes to believe that human beings learn from the past, but to paraphrase Faulkner, the past is never dead, it is not even past yet. With this new century comes a new era of Western dominance in the Middle East, nowhere more brutally clear than with the American invasion of Iraq. Unsurprisingly, a whole new body of knowledge has been created to justify and explain this exercise of power. In Cromer and Balfour’s day, the “accredited knowledge” that Edward Said refers to came from the work of Orientalists like Ernest Renan or the Comte de Volney. Today, it comes from fellows at think-thanks such as the American Enterprise Institute or the Saban Center for Middle East policy ; pundits on television networks like Fox News; columnists for magazines like The New Republic or The Weekly Standard; editors for organizations like the Middle-East Media Research Institute, and occasionally also from supposedly progressive organizations or publications.

Prior to the American invasion of Iraq, for instance, these organizations and their resident experts lent their support to the claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Kenneth Pollack swiftly published a book with the title The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq. Charles Krauthammer, Stanley Kurtz, George Will, Jonah Goldberg, Thomas Friedman, Christopher Hitchens, Fareed Zakaria, and many others produced columns for major national publications in which they argued for the necessity of pre-emptive war on Iraq, the need to remove Saddam Hussein, and the responsibility of bestowing the gift of freedom on Iraqis. Kanan Makiya predicted that American soldiers would be greeted with “sweets and flowers.”

Together, these experts produced the “reservoir of knowledge,” which was necessary for the administration to proceed with its plans for the invasion. The sum of what “we knew” about “them” can be found in a speech George W. Bush gave on October 7, 2002, and which included this line:

We know that Iraq and al-Qaida have had high-level contacts that go back a decade. We’ve learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaida members in bomb making and poisons and deadly gases. Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraq regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints.

 In a January 2003 opinion piece titled “Why We Know Iraq is Lying,” Condoleeza Rice, who at that time was National Security Adviser, argued that:

“Instead of implementing national initiatives to disarm, Iraq maintains institutions whose sole purpose is to thwart the work of the inspectors. And instead of full cooperation and transparency, Iraq has filed a false declaration to the United Nations that amounts to a 12,200-page lie."

In his February 2003 address to the United Nations, Secretary of State Colin Powell told the assembled members:

“Let me take you inside that intelligence file and share with you what we know from eyewitness accounts. (…) Here you see both truck- and rail-car-mounted mobile factories. The description our sources gave us of the technical features required by such facilities are highly detailed and extremely accurate. As these drawings based on their descriptions show, we know what the fermenters look like. We know what the tanks, pumps, compressors and other parts look like. We know how they fit together, we know how they work, and we know a great deal about the platforms on which they are mounted. (…)We know that Iraq has at least seven of these mobile biological agent factories.”

 And in a 2006 interview with Tim Russert on “Meet the Press,” Vice-President Dick Cheney declared:

“We know that based on intelligence that he has been very, very good at hiding these kinds of efforts. He’s had years to get good at it and we know he has been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons. And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons .”

There was no need to verify the truth of what “we know” since, by definition, Western knowledge of the East is superior to any actual Eastern experience.

This brings me to one of the dangers of applying Said’s views in Orientalism too literally. Many scholars, historians, political scientists, journalists, writers, ordinary citizens—both from the East and from the West—saw clearly the relationship between, on the one hand, the ideas foisted on the world by the Bush administration and, on the other hand, his administration’s designs for invading Iraq and plundering its resources. And these people spoke up. One of the common misconceptions of Said’s work is the belief that Westerners are fundamentally incapable of writing or thinking about the East or that the only people who have any right to make any claims about the East are Easterners. In fact, there are plenty of Westerners and Easterners who write empirically sound works about the East and conversely there are plenty of Easterners and Westerners who engage in the vilest forms Orientalism. Edward Said saw this clearly when he wrote:

But like any set of durable ideas, Orientalist notions influenced the people who were called Orientals as well as those called Occidental, European, or Western; in short Orientalism is better grasped as a set of constraints upon and limitations of thought than it is simply as a positive doctrine.

It is these limitations of thought that are so frightening. Anyone who takes the pursuit of knowledge seriously ought to question, at every step, whether it is being limited by existing power structures.