On October 17, 2006, the New York Times published an op-ed essay by Jeff Stein, the national security editor at Congressional Quarterly, entitled “Can You Tell a Sunni from a Shiite?” Sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing were convulsing Iraq, US military forces there were confronting a growing insurgency, and observers were voicing concerns about the prospect of rising tensions between Sunnis and Shi‘is across the Middle East. But Stein reported that many of the top counterterrorism officials he had been interviewing in Washington, along with many of the members of Congress supposedly overseeing their work, could not offer even a rudimentary explanation of the difference between Sunni and Shi‘i Islam or reliably identify whether Iran, Hizbullah or al-Qa'ida were Sunni or Shi‘i. “After all,” Stein asked, “wouldn't British counterterrorism officials responsible for Northern Ireland know the difference between Catholics and Protestants?” His conclusion: “Too many officials in charge of the war on terrorism just don't care to learn much, if anything, about the enemy we're fighting.”

In the Afterword to the first edition of this book, written half a year after the US invasion of Iraq, I noted some of the illusions and delusions that have frequently informed US policy in the Middle East, and the forms of knowledge and interpretive frameworks (some of them with long pedigrees) that have underpinned them. As I write these lines more than five years later, it would not seem that a great deal has changed.