The dark side of Iraq war cheerleader

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XPost from Editorials. Mr Ajami gets posted here from time to time, so commentary on his accuracy and credibility seemed relevant. The whole song and dance about the "clash of civilizations" gets play here too, and Mr Ajami is a big mouthpiece for that.

For the record, I don't believe in any clash of civilizations. That is a bunch of bigoted crap.

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.

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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".

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JA09Ak01.html

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1. A previous discussion:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=124&topic_id=173030

[Tom Joad]

2. Do you think for a moment their goal was "democracy"?

Could it be that they welcome the fragmentation of Iraq?

Chomsky says democracy is always the fig-leaf used to cover imposing the will of the US elite on other nations. What is really wanted least is democracy.

But for some reason, the US public still won't buy a war waged for "imperialism" so the word "democracy" is used to promote the endeavor.

But make no mistake, it really amounts to nothing more than organized crime. ask a marine. (specifically, someone like Smedley Butler)

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3. That would depend on who "they" is.

The perps have a variety of different motives, and usually any particular person will have multiple motives. It has been clear for a long time now that the US government, in general, puts democracy way far back behind obedience, and so that it's commitment to democracy is purely cosmetic, since democracy is not about obedience to authority.

WRT the Bushites and Iraq, there seem to be several clear motives, which without defending I would enumerate as: oil, obedience, economic hegemony, and somewheres way down there in the list, for certain Bushites, Israel's security.

I like Mr Chomsky, and value his contributions, but I don't always accept his view of things verbatim.