BEIRUT– It was a coincidence that I was reading Fouad Ajami’s new book on the American adventure in Iraq at the moment when the whole thing seemed to turn the corner from an enterprise of self-perceived righteous audacity — planting a virulent democracy in the heart of the Arab world — into an unfathomable mess from which Washington earnestly sought rapid but orderly separation.
Ajami’s book, The Foreigner’s Gift: the Americans, the Arabs and the Iraqis in Iraq (2006, Free Press, NY, 378 pp.), revolves around a central thesis that will remain worth pondering for years to come. The United States went into Iraq with the well-intentioned aim of breaking the tradition of Arab tyranny, by removing its worst despot and replacing him with a pluralistic democracy that would infect the entire Middle East. This was America’s “gift” to Iraq and all Arabs — the chance to live in freedom, democracy and real constitutionalism. Once in Iraq, though, the United States realized that it was the foreigner who did not understand the land or its people, and had an even weaker grip on the heavy traditions of modern Arab political history, tribalism, religion and ethnicity that simultaneously engulfed Iraq after the Baathist police state of Saddam Hussein had been removed.
The American “expedition” to Iraq, he notes, made Iraq “the battleground between Arab authoritarianism and participatory politics… for the first time in a very long stretch of history, Iraq was at the center of Arab political life. It was a statement on the political sterility of other Arab lands that an election held under the protection of a foreign power, right alongside a raging insurgency, had come to be viewed as the herald of a new Arab political way. …a new Iraq held out great attraction to the American imperium and its architects. The promise of Iraq was that of a new beginning — a base of American influence free of the toxic anti-Americanism at play in both Saudi Arabia and Egypt.”
The adventure seems ultimately to have misfired, though, probably because it responded more immediately to American than to Arab needs and priorities. Ajami is among the few American public figures who supported the war in Iraq and is honest enough to admit some of the central reasons for this calamity that now threatens Arabs more than it does Americans. Despite the many American and Iraqi characters he profiles in short, admiring vignettes, often in the context of what he sees as a noble, earnest, decent and heroic effort, Ajami also accepts that “the foreignness of the effort, and of the men and women doing the work, was impossible to shake off. “America could awe the people of the Arab-Muslim world, and that region could outwit and outwait American power.”
He dismisses with a sentence the original war rationale of rooting out weapons of mass destruction, and also admits that “it wasn’t democracy that was at stake in Iraq. It was something more limited but important and achievable in its own way: a state less lethal to it own people and to the lands and peoples around it.”
Ajami is very controversial and widely disliked in the Arab World, especially in his land of origin, which he calls “my ancestral Lebanon.” I have always made it a point to read his writings and hear him out when the opportunity arises — along with others who share his views, including real live neo-conservatives — for several good reasons.
I do a better job as a journalist an analyst when I hear all views on a topic, especially ones I disagree with, rather than absorb wisdom only from those whose opinions I share. And Ajami is a man who moves in powerful circles in commercial and official America, in and out of the White House and other impressive American places of power — like corporate media headquarters — where often amateurish policies are made and pursued, sometimes recklessly and destructively, occasionally flirting with moral or actual criminality. His thoughts therefore provide important insights into, and sometimes even help to shape, the worldview of those who have ruled America and directed its bizarre, bloody little imperial adventure in the Middle East since late 1991.
His analysis of the modern Arab condition is often brilliantly insightful, not to mention written with much grace, regardless of the fact that his prescriptive advice on what the United States should do in the Middle East is often wrong, and easy to challenge. Ajami analyzing the wasteful horrors of decades of modern Arab despotism and cruelty is rich if partisan reading; the same Ajami offering policy advice for the future is much less credible. Separating the successful professor from the misguided policy-maker is a useful and bountiful endeavor.
The ultimate lesson of the American mission to Iraq, he hints, is that neither the rule of native despots nor of foreign armies is going to bring about “the possibility of a decent, modern life” in the Arab world. “America rolled history’s dice” in most of Iraq, he writes, while noting correctly that the experience in the Kurdish areas also shows that “terrible histories can be remade.”
The balance sheet of Iraq will be clarified by history yet to come, and Ajami provides a useful outline of some of the key issues that will be weighed in the making of that verdict:
• Western armies who come and go with some regularity;
• Local Arab despots who hang around for decades at a time and pass on power to their sons;
• The decency of ordinary Arabs seeking a normal life;
• The mesh of indigenous identities rooted in religion, ethnicity, tribe and sect;
• Arab regimes and ordinary men and women who accept Washington’s money and wink at terrorists who attack it; and, ultimately,
• The heavy weight of this entire thick legacy on the possibility of change in Arab societies, power and governance.
“The foreign power that blew into Baghdad happened onto a tangled and pained history,” he concludes. Yet he never fully accepts that much of the mess was the consequence of other episodes, in other times, when other Western armies also “rolled the dice” and “blew into Baghdad.” He seems not to appreciate fully the indignant view of those tens of millions of ordinary Arabs in successive generations who do not take kindly, or quietly, to being treated like a bingo board for the pleasure of foreign politicians.
The role of Israel and Western powers in generating the freak show of modern Arab security state political culture is — as in the Anglo-American-Israeli analysis on TV these days — nowhere to be seen. Nor does Ajami sufficiently differentiate between the sick ways of the military rulers and the persistent decent humanity of ordinary Arabs. His own bitterness against the entire Sunni-dominated Arab order of the past half century permeates the entire book, sometimes in exaggerated ways, but, like this entire book’s menu of riches and gaps, always providing bountiful food for thought.
Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated columnist, the director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, and co-laureate of the 2006 Pax Christi International Peace Award.
Copyright ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 26 December 2006
Word Count: 1,148
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