CALGARY -There are countless stories in Iraq that Fouad Ajami considers "heartbreaking." They are the product of the dozen years that preceded this war. It was then, not now, he reminds us, when people suffered most cruelly.
"Ask Iraqis what were their darkest years -- read Iraqi fiction, Iraqi memoirs -- [it was] the '90s, under the sanctions, after we left Saddam in place in 1991." He has no tolerance for those "great realists" who argue that more years of miserable sanctions was preferable to invasion: Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright ... Barack Obama. "Liberal Americans opted for a sanctions regime which was nearly criminal in its cruelty toward Iraq," says Mr. Ajami. "The Iraqi middle class was destroyed and shattered during the sanctions regime. That's when people sold their books, that's when people sold their belongings, that's when women turned to prostitution, that's when the [Hussein] regime had the run of the country." From Saddam Hussein's era, "Iraq may have something like, for all we know, well over two million widows. There are several million orphans." Once the dust settles on this war, Mr. Ajami predicts, we will regain clarity on the genuine "monumental tragedy" that was Iraq, before. And why, he insists, "history will be kind" to this "noble war." Unlike those before him who preferred the convenience of their suffering, George W. Bush, he says, "gave the Iraqis a chance."
Mr. Ajami, in Calgary this week, addressing the Teatro Speakers Series, is not unique for being a supporter of the U. S. invasion of Iraq -- though such creatures are harder to come by these days. What makes Mr. Ajami exceptional is that he is an Arab. He is a Muslim. He is considered, both within the Middle East and without, among the most authoritative and gifted chroniclers of Arab consciousness. He has been granted a rare audience with the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's supreme Shia cleric. He counts among his friends Iraqi prime ministers and cabinet ministers.
At home, at Johns Hopkins University, where he is Majid Khadduri Professor of Middle East Studies, Mr. Ajami worked with Paul Wolfowitz, later considered a key architect of the 2003 Iraqi invasion. He has consulted to the U. S. vice-president and secretary of state. In his latest work, The Foreigner's Gift: The Americans, the Arabs and the Iraqis in Iraq, he befriends General David Petraeus, the commander of Iraq's multinational force, about whom Mr. Ajami seems unable to say enough good things. In a world where the official voices broadcast by Al Jazeera vent spleen, allegedly on behalf of the so-called Arab Street, over American imperialism in Arabia, Mr. Ajami is an astonishing rarity. He calls the invasion a "gift that Bush brought to the Arabs."
The roots of Mr. Ajami's perspective can be found in The Dream Palace of the Arabs, his critically adored book written three years before 9/11. There, he chronicles the tragic wreckage of the Arab world's postwar aspirations to modernity -- a project hijacked across the region, from Egypt to Lebanon, by the terror of tyrants and Islamists. It is a tale of heartbreak and shame over failed ambitions. Born to a Shia family that emigrated from Iran to Lebanon in the 1940s, Mr. Ajami's outlook on the forsaken dream emanates from the hope that comes with cultural disadvantage. In his youth, Lebanon's Shia were "the peasants of the south and the peasants of the Bekaa Valley"; the Arab world, a kingdom ruled by Sunnis. Since then, in Damascus, Beirut and Baghdad, Sunnis have lost their grip on their once three greatest cities. Look carefully at the anti-American rage in the Middle East, he advises. It is the fury of the privileged over the destruction of entrenched order. "The Sunni Arab consciousness is coping with this sea change in the distribution of power, and it's a trauma to them," Mr. Ajami says. Though not entirely unsympathetic, he is galled at the venom from countries that have themselves long been within the American orbit.
"Here is the irony: the Arabs begrudge the Iraqis. They say Iraq is an occupied country. The American presence in Iraq is illegitimate. What about the American presence in Egypt, in Saudi Arabia, in Kuwait? Much of Kuwait is ceded to the American military. Yet when you hear the broadcasts of Al Jazeera from Qatar, about the vast American presence in Iraq, what I love is, remember Al Udeid Air Base, the air base from which the American army launches this war, is in Doha. It's a stone's throw from Al Jazeera [headquarters]. But does Al Jazeera ever dwell on the Al Udeid Air base? ... If Al Jazeera were to say 'we are now going to do a report on the Al Udeid Air Base,' the emir of Qatar would shut them down."
Mr. Ajami moved to America in his college years. Those who remain in the region of his birth, he acknowledges, often cannot afford, or are incapable of such candour. Arabia is a land that "aches for the foreigner's protection while feigning horror at the presence of strangers," is how he put it recently in his Wall Street Journal column.
And yet, as unusual as it is to hear a Muslim Arab speak so positively, so hawkishly of U. S. Mideast policy, behind closed doors in Baghdad and Najaf, "I don't feel so isolated," Mr. Ajami assures. "Most people that I meet pretty much partake of this sense that the war was noble, whatever mistakes were committed in execution ... there is overwhelming support and there is panic that America would leave Iraq." Sunnis, now soured on al-Qaeda and having given up hope on outside saviours restoring their reign, are "holding onto American power for dear life."
Mr. Bush, after all, may have smashed their structural entitlements. But he has, Mr. Ajami maintains, created in its place one that all can tolerate: the Arab world's first inclusive, democratic government. Not democratic in the Canadian mold, but a kind of pluralist government that rests on all the three big communities of Iraq: the Sunnis, the Shia and the Kurds" Mr. Ajami says. Significantly, it is unbeholden to Muslim clerics. And if it can hold, and Mr. Ajami believes it will, it may finally deliver the Middle East its best shot yet at the modernism of which he and so many other Arab intellectuals of his generation have long been dreaming.