The name of the book comes from Fouad Ajami’s book The Foreigner's Gift: The Americans, the Arabs and the Iraqis in Iraq , where he promotes the occupation of Iraq by the United States. Ajami claims that it was now the United States’ moment in Iraq and its driving motivation should be ‘modernising the Arab world’. He refers to the occupation as a legitimate ‘imperial mission,’ ‘a foreigner’s gift to the Iraqi inhabitants. (p. 366). In Dangerous Gifts, Ozavci tells us how foreign power involvement in the Middle East in the 20th century is no different than that of the 19th century, when the self-defined Great Powers (Austria-Hungary, Britain, France, Prussia, and Russia) had assumed responsibility, either individually or collectively, for supplying security in the region even when the sovereign authority was opposed to their intervention.

The name of the book comes from Fouad Ajami’s book The Foreigner's Gift: The Americans, the Arabs and the Iraqis in Iraq , where he promotes the occupation of Iraq by the United States. Ajami claims that it was now the United States’ moment in Iraq and its driving motivation should be ‘modernising the Arab world’. He refers to the occupation as a legitimate ‘imperial mission,’ ‘a foreigner’s gift to the Iraqi inhabitants. (p. 366). In Dangerous Gifts, Ozavci tells us how foreign power involvement in the Middle East in the 20th century is no different than that of the 19th century, when the self-defined Great Powers (Austria-Hungary, Britain, France, Prussia, and Russia) had assumed responsibility, either individually or collectively, for supplying security in the region even when the sovereign authority was opposed to their intervention.