There is no way to know that the new America will have very little interest in learning anything accurate about the Middle East—that instead there are powerful interests that will need Americans to think of the Middle East as a homogeneous region full of terrorists. That Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia and Iraq and Iran are all the same. An acidic current of anti-intellectualism and prowar sentiment will corrode nuance, subtlety, and complexity into a dull, generalized fear.
