Fouad Ajami: Claims that he's shifted position on Iraq
Writing at his New Yorker blog, Interesting Times, George Packer takes note of an apparent shift in Fouad Ajami's thinking about the war in Iraq.
An early champion of the case for intervention, the Shiite Lebanese-born professor of Middle Eastern studies at Johns Hopkins University has come a long way from the memorably self-critical op-ed he wrote for The New York Times in May 2004. "Let's face it," he wrote at the time, "Iraq is not going to be America's showcase in the Arab-Muslim world .... 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."
Ajami is back from a recent trip to Iraq during which -- in Packer's words -- "the leading members of the country’s political class had told him that, appearances notwithstanding, Iraq is living out a glorious destiny."
To get a flavor of Ajami's reporting, here he is quoting Nouri al-Maliki, the Shiite prime minister of Iraq, in a recent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal (available to subscribers): "We may differ with our American friends about tactics, I might not see eye to eye with them on all matters. But my message to them is one of appreciation and gratitude ... you have liberated a people, brought them into the modern world. They used to live in fear and now they live in liberty. Iraqis were cut off from the modern world, and thanks to American intervention we now belong to the world around us. We used to be decimated and killed like locusts in Saddam's endless wars, and we have now come into the light."...
Read entire article at Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE)
An early champion of the case for intervention, the Shiite Lebanese-born professor of Middle Eastern studies at Johns Hopkins University has come a long way from the memorably self-critical op-ed he wrote for The New York Times in May 2004. "Let's face it," he wrote at the time, "Iraq is not going to be America's showcase in the Arab-Muslim world .... 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."
Ajami is back from a recent trip to Iraq during which -- in Packer's words -- "the leading members of the country’s political class had told him that, appearances notwithstanding, Iraq is living out a glorious destiny."
To get a flavor of Ajami's reporting, here he is quoting Nouri al-Maliki, the Shiite prime minister of Iraq, in a recent op-ed in The Wall Street Journal (available to subscribers): "We may differ with our American friends about tactics, I might not see eye to eye with them on all matters. But my message to them is one of appreciation and gratitude ... you have liberated a people, brought them into the modern world. They used to live in fear and now they live in liberty. Iraqis were cut off from the modern world, and thanks to American intervention we now belong to the world around us. We used to be decimated and killed like locusts in Saddam's endless wars, and we have now come into the light."...