Even so, to attribute the responsibility for contemporary flashpoints—Afghanistan, Kashmir, and Iraq—to “the advancement of a small coterie’s concept of American interests” (178) is surely too short-sighted for the supposedly savvy political animal Changez has become by the end of the book. For one thing, it implies that these problems are all the fault of the George W. Bush administration and the neoconservatives who have hijacked the White House. Presumably, then, the solution is simply to remove this clique, and a more just world will result. Not only does this diagnosis militate against the attempt to provide a historical sense of injustice, but it is also willfully blind to the fact that such economic and political international meddling has been structural, intrinsic to U.S. domestic and international policies since at least the 1950s and the rise of Dwight Eisenhower’s famous military-industrial complex.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 468