The discourse surrounding capitalist innovation and its capacity to “save the world” is rooted in an ahistorical and Orientalist view of the world that ignores the US’s complicity in depriving many countries of resources and then invading them to “save” them with the “Western experience” that justifies further violence out of fear of these nations gaining technological superiority

When colonized countries shrugged off the yoke of colonialism after World War II, they found themselves ensnared in neocolonial arrangements that perpetuated their impoverishment and underdevelopment. The Cold War realignment of the world system dominated by the United States and its First World allies on the one hand, and the former Soviet Union and its allies on the other, produced the Third World, that is, countries caught in the crosshairs of the battle between the two camps. Concomitantly, colonial narratives of the inferiority of colonized people, their cultures, and their knowledge systems (i.e., science) evolved into Cold War narratives of modernization and development that presumed the racial and / or cultural deficiency of the Third World. These narratives promoted the ideology that the plight of the Third World was the product of internal deficiencies rather than ongoing colonial exploitation. The solution laid out in these narratives was for Third World scientists to follow a Western path reliant on advanced industrial technologies to prosper (Philip 2015; Bhuiyan 2008; Escobar 1995). Even though the article invoked the notion of “western experience” as the path to Third World advancement, careful attention to what the article denoted by “western experience” in the sentence that followed—Taha knew where the West housed its anthrax—reveals that “western experience” is quite overstated. Such a gloss reflects a deeply entrenched subtext—the assumption of Western superiority. It is a notion so taken for granted that the article need not even explicitly reference it—a vague gesture to “western experience” suffices. The quote also intimates that Iraqi acquisition of “western experience” poses a threat—it is linked to Iraqi superweapons. The end of the Cold War and the advent of U.S.-led global capitalism had produced a severe power asymmetry wherein the United States turned to subduing what were significantly smaller threats globally. Yet, U.S. national circles became concerned with these smaller threats in the backdrop of the vast interconnectedness and mobility wrought by global capitalism, which had made both weaponry and advanced technologies much more accessible to even the most disempowered nations and groups (Cecire 2009). Iraqi scientists like Taha embodied this threat to U.S. hegemony—she had accessed Western technology and could now use it against the United States. One Department of Defense–affiliated study on Taha from 1999 (Taha had been the subject of UK and U.S. surveillance since the mid1990s) quoted Andrew Koch, an analyst at the Center for Defense Information in Washington: “It is the scientists who are the key to this [weapons capacity].… As long as Iraq maintains the brainpower to do this … over the long term you can’t stop them” (Brian Anderson 1999, 21; emphasis added). As with the news quote above, connections with the West were depicted as a source of intellectual (and technological) power, leading to the image of Western-educated Iraqis who were both advanced and potentially dangerous. In suggesting that “western experience” and technologies can be dangerous in the hands of the non-Western Other, these quotes intimate an ambivalence toward educating and equipping Iraqis. This logic reflected the underlying reality of U.S. empire—that the United States had less of a problem with Iraqi possession of weapons of mass destruction (as the United States had after all helped develop and furnish these weapons to Iraq while it was an ally),27 and more of a problem with Iraqi ability to use them without direction from the United States or, worse, against the United States.