I admit it. There is a certain delicate pleasure to be had by parsing the terms in which one-time supporters of–and even cheerleaders for–Bush’s quite optional invasion of Iraq have started to try to wriggle off the hook of their own prior positions.
I wrote here in mid-March about Michael Ignatieff’s attempt in that direction.
But at least I have a good deal of respect for most of Ignatieff’s public work and argumentation.
Today, we have the public writhings –on the New York Times Op-Ed page, no less–of a quite different fish, Fouad Ajami.
Ajami–just like Ahmad Chalabi, as it happens–is a Shi-ite Arab who left his homeland while still young and ended up in the United States as a strong supporter of Israel and a darling of the neo-cons. Beyond that, Ajami is blessed (cursed?) with a delusion that he is Joseph Conrad reincarnate, a condition that manifests itself through the generation of prose of a staggeringly self-aggrandizing, mock-heroic grandeur.
(Actually, I think Edward Said had that delusion, too. Don’t know what the cause of it is/was in either case?)
So today, here is Ajami, bloviating as follows:
- It was high time President Bush spoke to the nation of the war in Iraq. A year or so ago, it was our war, and we claimed it proudly. To be sure, there was a minority that never bought into the expedition and genuinely believed that it would come to grief. But most of us recognized that a culture of terror had taken root in the Arab world. We struck, first at Afghanistan and then at the Iraqi regime, out of a broader determination to purge Arab radicalism.
No wonder President Bush, in the most intensely felt passage of Monday night’s speech, returned to Sept. 11 and its terrors. “In the last 32 months, history has placed great demands on our country,” he said. “We did not seek this war on terror. But this is the world as we find it.” Instinctively, an embattled leader fell back on a time of relative national consensus.
But gone is the hubris. Let’s face it: Iraq is not going to be America’s showcase in the Arab-Muslim world.
Don’t you just love it? First, that grandiose, all-encompassing use of “we” in the lede there (with just that dismissive, patronizing nod, “To be sure… ” to the “minority” who opposed the war.) And then, that stark, owner-less “Gone is the hubris”?
Excuse me, whose hubris is he talking about there? Could it, just possibly, be his own not inconsiderable earlier role in whipping up support for the war to which he is referring there?
Is this a true mea culpa?
No, it is not. Rather than admitting explicitly to any responsibility of his own, he leaves it to that grander, more amorphous historical force of unattributed “hubris”.
“Gone is the hubris”… I wish!
Anyway, for a little restrospective on Fouad (“every TV talk-show’s favorite ‘Arab'”) Ajami’s role in ramping up the war fever, you could check out this piece in the January-February 2003 Foreign Affairs. (It’s worth reading even if you only read the first 500 words that they give you free.) Or this piece in a November 2002 edition of the mag published by the odious turncoat David Horowitz.
That latter piece was a quasi-mystical celebration of the fact that, as Fouad saw it,
- America is coming into an unmistakable imperial hegemony in the Muslim world. And the acquisition of that imperial position is as striking as the reluctance–at times the innocence–with which America approaches this new calling.
War in Iraq, and a new role in that country in the aftermath of that war, would only confirm and deepen this American imperium…
Bla-bla-bla. Then this, about his close neocon buddies in the Bush administration:
- America’s political and military leaders are supremely sober and seasoned men and women. If war it be in Iraq, they will have come to it out of conviction that all other options have failed…
Oh, did I mention that the academic “cover” under which this failed ersatz Conrad operates is as head of the Middle East program at Paul Wolfowitz’s old stomping grounds, the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies?
There really IS something delicious about seeing Fouad try to regain a position of at least some minimal standing within the commentatoriat through his latest writhings in today’s NYT:
- If some of the war’s planners had thought that Iraq would be an ideal base for American primacy in the Persian Gulf, a beacon from which to spread democracy and reason throughout the Arab world, that notion has clearly been set aside.
We are strangers in Iraq, and we didn’t know the place. We had struggled against radical Shiism in Iran and Lebanon in recent decades, but we expected a fairly secular society in Iraq (I myself wrote in that vein at the time). Yet it turned out that the radical faith ? among the Sunnis as well as the Shiites ? rose to fill the void left by the collapse of the old despotism.
“We are strangers in Iraq, and we didn’t know the place”, indeed! I might just make that slogan up in needlepoint–along with the name of its author– and send it to every booker on every TV channel in the nation! Among them, of course, all the bookers on all the prestigious chat-shows who have “got” Ajami onto their shows precisely because he claimed, as an Arab, to be someone who really “understood” the Arab world.
As you may gather, I am far from being a fan of his. This goes back to the mid 1980s, the time when he published his second book, The Vanished Imam: Musa Al-Sadr and the Shia of Lebanon. This was a quasi-mystical exploration of the life, influence, and disappearance of Imam Musa Sadr, a leader in Ajami’s own birth community, that of the Lebanese Shi-ites.
I actually knew quite a lot about the Lebanese Shi-ites at the time, having spent many more years of my adult life in the country than Fouad, and having recently (1985) published a book about the country’s internal politics that was one of the first English-language works to signal the rise of Shi-ite political power there.
Fouad, of course, had the advantage of being able to present himself as “a native”. He also had a thesis that people in the U.S. power elite were happy to lap up: namely, that the Shia of Lebanon were somehow “different” from the Sunnis in that they were less “arab”. Indeed, he even argued that the Shia of Lebanon had a lot in common with the Jews of Israel, as embattled communities of minorities within a broader Sunni-Arab sea.
I disagreed strongly with that analysis.
Of course, the rise of the staunchly anti-Israeli Hizbollah among the Lebanese Shi-ites in those very same years revealed the total idiocy of Fouad’s thesis (and my own superior skills of observation/analysis). But no matter, he brushed that little faulty prediction aside as if it were irrelevant and carried on on his march to further influence in the salons of New York and Washington DC.
Sort of what we see him trying to do now, with regard to his earlier predictions about the Shia of Iraq, eh?
Anyway, I value my time too much to expend much of it sitting around writing about this elegant but deeply flawed con-man. If you want to find out more about him, check out Adam Shatz’s well-researched piece on him, published in The Nation in April 2003.
Shatz’s bottom line?
- A leftist in the 1970s, a Shiite nationalist in the 1980s, an apologist for the Saudis in the 1990s, a critic-turned-lover of Israel, a skeptic-turned-enthusiast of American empire, he has observed no consistent principle in his career other than deference to power. His vaunted intellectual independence is a clever fiction.
I’ve always thought of Ajami as one of those strange ex-pats who left their native country while young, who grew into adulthood in this country and who is seen as an authority on the country he left years ago. It would be analagous to me leaving for Japan at age 18, living in that country for the past 40 years but passing myself off as an expert on contemporary American affairs.
It’s an easy act to pull off when you look like the people you’re commenting on, are articulate and know what the rubes want to hear. You don’t really need to know what you’re talking about because no one else is going to really know. Ajami got an early start on this career so he’s the “Arab” expert all the networks call on for presenting the “Arab” perspective.
Call me paranoid if you like, but I am sure one reason they love Ajami so much is that he has only negative and stereotype-affirming things to say about Arabs.
Self-hating Arab, anyone?
I wish I could call you paranoid, Shirin.
Because of a mention at Juan Cole’s website, I just found this blog today and did some perusing.
Mushinronsha wrote: “It would be analagous to me leaving for Japan at age 18, living in that country for the past 40 years but passing myself off as an expert on contemporary American affairs.”
Comment: As a 10-plus-year resident of Japan, my opinion is that it’s not that difficult to acquire significant expertise, PROVIDED one: pays attention to the massive reporting on the US that is a staple of Japanese media, regularly reads US-related English language publications, has American family/friends to stay in touch with, and occasionally visits the US for extended stays. The latter two are necessary for soaking up cultural/social developments that wouldn’t be possible by merely reading, say, five leading US newspapers per day.
Fouad Ajami, without really apologizing, at least appears to bow out of the debate. Other more influential war protagonists have utterly unreconstructed views. The WSJ editorial “Saddam’s Files” (27-May-04) proclaims troves of documents connecting Iraq to 9/11. Richard Perle adamantly defends Chalabi and the National Review argues to up the ante and fire away. Bernard Lewis, the renowned Big Fish of Middle East studies, warned on CNBC’s Kudlow & Crammer this month that the US had to stay the course, that the US attack on Iraq was surely the main reason why there has been no new al Qauda attack on the US, and that any sign of weakness would invite a new massive terror event. Why pick on the humbled Ajami when, week by week, Lewis makes bold assertions and predictions, based on his presumed unsurpassed knowledge. No one challenges him or points out how his past predictions about Iraq turned out mostly wrong. Witness: Bernard Lewis Advocates War, Predicts Iraq Future (2002).
I hate to admit that I was completely taken in by Ajami when he began to make regular appearances on the McNeil-Lehrer Newshour in the early 1980s.Those were the halcyon years of PBS when millions of liberals like me watched McNeil-Lehrer daily.
I remember particularly Fouad’s frequent use of the catch-phrase “the Arab street” which became his trademark. It was as if he were speaking for the Arab street himself, and he looked the part of course. Combine that with the fact that there were very few other faces on TV claiming to give the Arab point of view in those days, and it adds up to Ajami being a crucial force in turning the opinions of the many PBS viewers who may have been slightly inclined to be sympathetic to the Arabs in those days of daily Israeli atrocities in Lebanon around to an alternate Arab view of the situation which we could adopt without having to condemn Israeli actions.
It was many years before I realized that most of Ajami’s predictions about the course of the war in Lebanon, US intervention there, and the limited future of Islamic extremism in the Arab world and Iran were totally wrong.
Now I see him as the point man of a very sophisticated and sustained disinformation campaign which has led the US into this dead end neo-neo-imperial strategy.
There’s my ‘mea culpa’.
As by bones ache when I try to get out of bed and my lungs explode as I try to keep up with my daughter dancing together at her wedding, I invariably might find myself cursing old age. Ah, my dear Helena, as I read your wonderful stuff uf Faud, I keep thinking of what a flip-flopper has has proven to be. No longer is he chastizing American imperial over-reach as he did during the Iran-Iraq War, now he is a BUSHIT, advocating all the Bushit, and upholding the Zionazis in Jerusalem. Why?
I don’t know. But I sure know that Bernard Lewis is anything but a clear headed scholar. His advocacy for Chalabi as recently as two weeks ago on Charley Rose suggests to me that the “scholars” of Zion who pretend authority and understanding in order to do their Arab-bashing (not all Jewish Orientalists, many are probably the Arabs’ best psychoanalysts)in the Western media in sevice of Likud, still think that the media faithful have cleared the path for them and all-weathered it so they can leisurly walk on it, squashing Islamics like helpless ants underfoot.
As an octogenarian, Lewis sometimes gives himself away glaringly, as when in the NEWYORKER he said that binLaden is to Islam as Hitler is to Christianity. Not bad for one of those who thinks he’s dealing only with “dumb goyim” whom God chose to be mental cannon fodder for giants such as himself. But good old Charlie, with that Southern politeness, let Mr. Lewis hang himself with his own absurd assertions. I’ll try to get the transcript and post it. At $7 a pop, I spent more on Charlie’s web site than at Barnes and Noble’s. But it’s worth it. Whatever you think of him, in a mixture of the probing prosecutor and the attentive student, he gets a lot of people to say things that make every show worth at least $7.
So, my dear, when you get bashed as a Jew-hating Armenian trying to steal some of the guit-ridden glow from the Holocaust with a massacre not too convenient to Israeli-Turkish relations, think of Charlie, the good (nay,great) Jew that gets all the slimes to ooze their stuff on his show, telling us, “dear goyim brethren, be not dumb and lsiten well, I’m a member of the bar and I’ll make sure you, the jury, get to the bottom of all these intellect-for-hire switcheroos and subtext agents of influence.
As my bones ache when I try to get out of bed and my lungs explode as I try to keep up with my daughter dancing together at her wedding, I invariably might find myself cursing old age. But, ah, my dear Helena, as I read your wonderful stuff on Faud, I keep thinking of what a flip-flopper has has proven to be. Age and memory make me able to see that. No longer is he chastizing American imperial over-reach as he did during the Iran-Iraq War, now he is a BUSHITE, advocating all the Bushit, and upholding the Zionazi Likudniks ruling Jerusalem. Why?
I don’t know. But I sure know that Bernard Lewis is anything but a clear headed open-minded scholar. His advocacy for Chalabi as recently as two weeks ago on Charley Rose’s PBS program suggests to me that the “scholars” of Zion who pretend authority and understanding in order to do their Arab-bashing (not all Jewish Orientalists, many are probably the Arabs’ best psychoanalysts and thus friends)in the Western media in sevice of Likud, still think that the media faithful have cleared the path for them and layed down an all-weather road so they can leisurly walk on it, squashing Islamic scholars like helpless ants underfoot. Yes, Mr. Pipes et al have done their job together with the king of Congress, the exterminator from Texas, in their vetting fear inflicted on Federal grants dependent Orientalist scholars. So, assumedly, no more learned debunking of Lewis’s gagaisms.
As an octogenarian, Lewis sometimes gives himself away glaringly, as when in the NEWYORKER he said that binLaden is to Islam as Hitler is to Christianity. Not bad for one of those who thinks he’s dealing only with “dumb goyim” whom God chose to be campus mental cannon fodder for giants such as himself. But good old Charlie, with that Southern politeness, let Mr. Lewis hang himself with his own absurd assertions. I’ll try to get the transcript and post it. At $7 a pop, I spent more on Charlie’s web site for transcripts than at Barnes and Nobles. But it’s worth it. Whatever you think of Chalie, in a mixture of the probing prosecutor and the attentive student, he gets a lot of people to say things that make every show worth at least $7.
So, my dear, when you get bashed as a Jew-hating Armenian trying to steal some of the guilt-ridden glow from the Holocaust invoking a massacre not too convenient to current Israeli-Turkish relations, think of Charlie, the good (nay,great) Jew that gets all the slimes to ooze their stuff on his show, telling us, “dear goyim brethren, be not dumb and lsiten well, I’m a member of the bar and I’ll make sure you, the jury, get to the bottom of all these intellect-for-hire switcheroos and subtext agents of influence.”