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SAIS Review 26.2 (2006) 203-206


Timeo Americanos et dona ferentis
Reviewed by
Nikos E. Tsafos
The Foreigner's Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq, by Fouad Ajami. (New York: Free Press, 2006), 378 pages. $26.00 (hardcover).

A thousand days after American bombs turned on Baghdad, this almost seems an orphaned war, abandoned by many of its supporters and still derided by its critics. Escalating violence and a political process with mixed success have tired Americans of the adventure. For Fouad Ajami, though, the enterprise remains worthwhile. As Americans are growing weary of the war, Ajami seeks to restate the case for war, to remind Americans of what is at stake, and to explain why the Arab reaction to the war is often more a reflection of the political condition in the region than of the worthiness of America's efforts.

At first glance, Ajami appears an unlikely supporter of the war. Naiveté and idealism are not what define him. The Arab in him (he was born and raised in Lebanon before coming to America) connotes skepticism about revolutions and radicalism. Read his praise for King Abdullah of Jordan, whom he termed the "King of Realism" for making a bargain with the Jews in 1948, to see that this scholar is no idealist. 1 Or read his account of the Iranian Revolution, as Ajami quotes Victor Hugo: After a revolution "a nation asks for nothing but repose . . . it longs for tranquility. We have had enough of great happenings, great risks, great adventures, and more than enough, God save us, of great men. Now we are exhausted and each man seeks his bed." 2 Read too his take on Anwar Sadat, Egypt's ruler, who made peace with Israel. This time, Ajami turns to Leo Tolstoy for words: A king, wrote Tolstoy, "is the slave of history. History, that is, the unconscious common swarm of life of mankind uses every moment of the life of kings as an instrument for its own ends." 3 How, then, to excite over a war with so ambitious a purpose? As Ajami concedes, the Iraq war is "like a struggle between American will and the laws of gravity in the region." For decades, this man saw gravity prevail over many feeble adversaries. Why bet against the odds?

The answer lies less with Ajami the scholar than with Ajami the man. True, his scholarly pursuits would have sparked his interest in Iraq anyway. The Arab condition, which he chronicled lucidly in The Arab Predicament, was at the center of Sept. 11 and its aftermath in Baghdad. The emancipation of the Iraqi Shia, a demographic derivative of the fall of Saddam Hussein's Sunni regime, built on Ajami's fascination with Shi'ism, which he explored in The Vanished Imam. But it is probably an underlying fatigue with the promise of messianic salvation in the Arab world that made him receptive to a jolt from [End Page 203] outside. His articles spoke of the ills of the Arab world, but he could no longer find comfort in them. In Sept. 11 he saw an opportunity—not in a malign way that the war's opponents often imply—to bring America deep into the Middle East and shatter a sterile status quo. President Bush was "a slave of history" too, and Ajami could not sit idle as history promised a novel prospect for the Arab world. His stature and presence in the field of Middle East studies allowed him to sit alongside the leaders charged with Iraq's future. The Arab world had offered him almost nothing but pain and longing for many years. Now it could offer something different.

A War of Choice, A War of Necessity

"There is now the distinct thunder of war," wrote Ajami two months after Sept. 11, sensing that America would unleash the machinery of war to chase its wicked—and elusive—attackers. 4 Impatience with the Arab world would force America to move past Afghanistan and confront the ills that darkened its skies...

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