The fear of bioterror attacks cannot be severed from Anti-Middle Eastern sentiments that justify imperial acts of aggression – empirics prove.

The focus on Al Qaeda and Iraq during the anthrax investigation highlights the role of the racial Other in dominant national security discourse. The end of the Cold War saw the U.S.-USSR axis, and the concomitant capitalism-communism binary,9 give way to the geopolitical and military supremacy of the United States, and the unprecedented acceleration of neoliberal capitalism and U.S.- led globalization (Masco 1999). The new lone superpower shifted its attention from the Soviet Union and nuclear stalemate to an increasingly visible number of smaller enemies—“terrorists”10 and “rogue states”—and their possible acquisition of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), which include weapons of chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear warfare. Foreswearing de-escalation and disarmament, the United States turned to the platform of counterterrorism, most notably intervening in the Middle East. U.S. involvement in the Middle East resulted in the targeting of Arabs and Muslims in the region as well as domestically. The United States passed the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 (AEDPA) in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing perpetrated by U.S. white male Timothy McVeigh and two others, resulting in the deaths of 168 people and injuring over 800 in April 1995. Despite the domestic origins of the perpetrators, AEDPA focused heavily on “international terrorism” and “alien terrorists,” and in practice was used to apprehend Arabs and Muslims. It authorized the secretary of state to designate “foreign terrorist organizations” that the United States could sanction. About half were Muslim or Arab groups (Whidden 2001).11 As Arab American studies scholars have demonstrated, the U.S. state justified these actions by mobilizing trenchant U.S. racial discourses villainizing Arabs and Muslims as uncivilized, violent Others12 (Cainkar 2008; Naber 2000). By the time of the September 11 incident, the specter of Arab/ Muslim13 terror had been firmly entrenched, serving as the lynchpin for a new iteration of U.S. empire. The war on terror entailed Introduction 5 the brutal invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq to maintain U.S. oil interests and a foothold in the Middle East.14 In President George W. Bush’s address to a joint session of Congress on September 20, 2001, he called for military action that would begin with Al Qaeda and continue “until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated” (Bush 2001a). The war’s boundless scope was in part enabled through the larger shift in governmental power during the war on terror—what social theorist Brian Massumi (2010) has called “preemptive power.” This anticipatory mode of governance enhanced the U.S. state’s ability to act upon security threats of indeterminate potential in the name of preserving life. Preemptive state power was, moreover, yoked to the language of freedom and civilization. In his September 20 speech, Bush justified military action as necessary to “defend freedom” and invoked “civilization” as the war’s protagonist: “This is civilization’s fight” (Bush 2001a). Narratives of the United States as freedom-loving, democratic, just, and other markers of “civilized” can be traced to long-standing Orientalist discourse that positions the West as beacon of progress and opposes it to the Arab /Muslim Other. These discursive practices began in the late eighteenth century, when European narratives of the “East” extolled the superiority of the “West” in order to rationalize colonial endeavors in the Middle East (Said 1978). Critical race and ethnic studies scholar Sylvia Chan-Malik discusses how this Orientalist narrative has functioned in relation to U.S. aggression in the Middle East: as “the liberal vision of a free, feminist, and multicultural nation as a fundamental necessary counterpart to the decidedly unfree, antifeminist, and antidemocratic ideology of Islamic Terror” (2011, 134). In other words, the construction of Arabs and Muslims as a racialized enemy Other helped inculcate a national imaginary of the United States as progressive vis-à-vis feminism and multiculturalism.15 Bush’s speech on September 20 included numerous nods to multicultural tolerance, such as “The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends; it is not our many Arab friends” (Bush 2001a). This rhetoric belied the fact that the war clearly targeted Arabs, Muslims, and the Middle East. Bush’s speech also touched on the plight of women in Afghanistan: “Women are not allowed to attend school” (Bush 2001a). Arab American feminist studies scholars have thoroughly described the construction of Arab and Muslim women as always and everywhere oppressed, wherein regional distinctions are flattened, and women are seen solely as victims of a patriarchal culture. These scholars have demonstrated how this image has propped up the war on terror—the war’s proponents articulate the war as an attempt to liberate oppressed Arab and Muslim women (Moallem 2002; Nayak 2006). In fact, Chan-Malik’s discussion of the role feminism has played in exceptionalist constructions of the United States illustrates a dialectic in which the oppressed Arab /Muslim woman is the counterpoint to the liberated Western woman, further bolstering an image of U.S. progressivism despite U.S. imperial aggression. Gender has in fact served as a nimble tool in the narratives of the war on terror. U.S. political theorist Alyson Cole (2007) describes, for example, the metaphor of sexual conquest that many public commentators used to describe the September 11 attacks: September 11 as the day the United States lost its virginity, or the attacks on the United States as akin to sexual assault. The metaphor of womanhood reinforced the notion of the United States as innocent victim of the violent masculine Arab /Muslim Other. Queer theorist Jasbir Puar dissects U.S. popular culture depictions of Osama bin Laden that pathologized him through the theme of deviant sexuality—images of bin Laden being penetrated anally or descriptions of him as possessing a kind of queer vanity (2007a, 38). These queer overtones in the portrayals of bin Laden served to construct him as what Puar calls “monster-terrorist-fag,” the ultimate reviled, dangerous Other to justify the war on terror. In the war’s turn to bioterrorism, popular narratives similarly mobilized gendered discourses of an Arab/Muslim Other. Alongside investigator focus on Al Qaeda and Iraq during the anthrax Introduction 7 case, mass culture producers depicted the anthrax perpetrator as a crazed, violent Arab /Muslim male—even though this image was totally unmoored from any basis in a real person or suspect. In chapter 1, I examine more closely the trope of the masculine Arab/ Muslim Other in discourses on bioterrorism; further, I explore a notable departure from the ubiquitous trope of the oppressed Arab/ Muslim woman: U.S. depictions of Iraqi female scientists apprehended by the United States during the Iraq War as devious and dangerous Arab /Muslim female terrorists.