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This article analyses the complex relationship between Islam and American imperial assertions in the Middle East. While a variety of Islamic movements and governments have historically been enlisted as friends of the American project, Islam today is most useful as the enemy of choice in the so-called global war on terror. Today, when the logic of US withdrawal from Iraq gains support daily in America, only the Islamist imaginary provides arguments still found credible by a frightened American populace to sustain the occupation. The Islamist imaginary and the diffuse fears it evokes, unconstrained by logic or realism and quite unrelated to facts on the ground, is now more essential to empire than ever before. It is only reasonable to expect that the Islam imagined by empire will be with us for some time to come.