COMMENT The dark side of Iraq war
cheerleader By Jacob Heilbrunn
Fouad Ajami's January 6 essay on Islam in
the New York Times Book Review brings to mind
again the question of accountability and
partisanship in the "war on terror". A highly
decorated scholar of the Middle East, the author
of several books on the region, including The
Dream Palace of the Arabs, and a professor at
Johns Hopkins' School of Advanced International
Studies, Ajami, who was born into a Shi'ite family
in southern Lebanon in 1945, has devoted his life
to chronicling the Arab world.
He has been
an adviser to both Vice President Dick Cheney and
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. During the
trial of Cheney's
former
chief of staff, I Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Ajami
pleaded with President George W Bush in the Wall
Street Journal to pardon him, hailing Libby as a
"fallen soldier" in the war against terrorism - as
though Libby had been battling on the front lines.
Ajami's praise for Libby should have come
as no surprise. A contributor to magazines such as
US News and World Report and the New Republic,
Ajami was one of the earliest and most fervent
proponents of war in Iraq. Writing in the New
Republic on February 23, 1998, Ajami berated the
Bill Clinton administration for failing to take
harsher military action to unseat Saddam Hussein.
The standoff with Saddam, he said, was
unacceptable, even "dreary" - a telling word, as
it epitomizes his impatience with sober policy,
which George Orwell diagnosed in the 1940s as a
characteristic affliction of intellectuals. The
criterion for Ajami, as for many other champions
of war, was that they were plain bored with
containing Saddam. Bolder action was needed.
America needed to prove its mettle in facing down
the Arab tyrant.
According to Ajami, "the
Clinton administration will have to accept a
burden dodged by those who waged Desert Storm: the
remaking of the Iraqi state and the unseating of
Saddam. We should be rid of the fears that
paralyzed us in the past - the rise of the
Shi'ites, the fragmentation of Iraq. These are
scarecrows." Nor was this all. The Majid Khadduri
professor of Middle Eastern Studies assured his
readers that "There is no likelihood that a regime
as brutal as Saddam's would emerge out of the
rubble of a military campaign. There is no iron
law of Shi'ite radicalism, and the belief that a
post-Saddam rule would be a satrapy of Iran
misreads Iraq's realities ..."
The problem
isn't simply that Ajami was wrong in every
particular - the Shi'ites did rise, Iraq did
fragment, and Iran has dramatically increased its
influence and power - though that is bad enough.
It is that he was dogmatically, arrogantly wrong,
dismissing his skeptics as benighted fools. No
less than the Soviet fellow-travelers of the 1930s
who were entranced by the prospect of utopia
abroad were Ajami and his ilk beguiled by the
prospect of freedom blooming in the Iraqi desert.
But unlike the fellow-travelers, who never
exercised power and ended up as an intellectual
curiosity, Ajami actually provided, or sought to
provide, a fig-leaf of justification for going to
war. It was, after all, Cheney who, in a fiery
speech that led directly to the Iraq debacle,
declared before the Veterans of Foreign Wars in
August 2002:
As for the reaction of the Arab
"street", the Middle East expert Professor Fouad
Ajami predicts that after liberation, the
streets in Basra and Baghdad are "sure to erupt
in joy in the same way the throngs in Kabul
greeted the Americans". Extremists in the region
would have to rethink their strategy of jihad.
Moderates throughout the region would take
heart. And our ability to advance the
Israeli-Palestinian peace process would be
enhanced, just as it was following the
liberation of Kuwait in 1991.
Why is
it worth recounting Ajami's prognostications? The
main reason is that, as Anatol Lieven has
perceptively pointed out, there has been almost no
accountability among pundits and policymakers for
the debacle in Iraq. Quite the contrary. Instead
of honestly facing up to their mistakes, the
prophets of war have glibly moved on. Nowhere is
this truer than in the case of Professor Ajami's
essay, which is called "The Clash".
It is
a revealing document not for what it says but for
what it doesn't. In it, Ajami admits to what he
believes, or, to put it another way, depicts, as
his principal error - underestimating the depth of
the collision between Islam and the West. Not a
word about his failed record on Iraq. Rather,
Ajami recounts that he questioned Samuel
Huntington's thesis of a clash of civilizations in
the 1990s, arguing at the time that Western
modernization would co-opt the Third World. Now
Ajami writes that "commerce has not delivered us
out of history's passions, the world wide web has
not cast aside blood and kin and faith". This is
true. That commerce hasn't displaced warfare was
and remains a truism of realist thought. Francis
Fukuyama was roundly attacked in 1989 for making a
similar argument in claiming that history had
come, or was coming, to an end.
The real
problem is this: in suddenly embracing Huntington,
Ajami embraces a Manichean view of the struggle
between East and West. The irony, I think, is that
in confessing to having mistakenly criticized
Huntington, Ajami compounds his original error
about the need for attacking Iraq. Huntington
implausibly claimed that Islam amounted to a
coherent civilization. It doesn't. This is the
very error initially committed by the Bush
administration in announcing a grandiose war on
terror, when it is actually battling disparate
groups that are independent of nation-states.
Ajami, in outlining a grimmer struggle
than he originally contemplated, isn't performing
a stock-taking of what he got wrong, but the
opposite. He's highlighting what's always been so
disturbing about his militarized view of how to
deal with the Arab world. The most that Ajami says
is that he still harbors some "doubts about
whether the radical Islamists knocking at the
gates of Europe, or assaulting it from within, are
the bearers of a whole civilization". But he
implies that the West may lack the willpower to
stand up to the jihadis: "It is no fault of Samuel
Huntington's that we have not heeded his darker,
and possibly truer, vision." Please. The last
thing the United States needs is an even "darker"
vision of how to deal with Muslim countries. That
approach has already been more than amply
discredited.
If Ajami were a doctor or a
lawyer, he would be accused of professional
malpractice and disbarred. His noisy cheerleading
for the Iraq war and woefully blinkered
assessments of the Arab world are the equivalent
of a lawyer perpetrating fraud on a client - or of
a doctor diagnosing cancer when heart disease is
the true malady. In Washington, DC, however,
different rules apply. Despite his myriad
shortcomings, Ajami's reputation has remained
largely intact, allowing him to continue living in
his own dream palace.
Jacob
Heilbrunn is a senior editor at The National
Interest.
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