The Dream Palace of the Empire: Is Iraq a "Noble Failure"?

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Author Fouad Ajami

Publisher Free Press

Year 2006

Pages 378 pp.

ISBN 74323667

Price $26.00

Fouad Ajami is inescapably part of the story of the American adventure in Iraq. In the run-up to the March 2003 invasion, he was one of the most influential intellectual proponents of war, frequently appearing on talk shows and writing in publications including The Wall Street Journal, U.S. News and World Report, and Foreign Affairs. Vice President Dick Cheney even cited Ajami in his August 2002 speech to the annual meeting of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. A few lines after proclaiming, 'Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction,' the vice president announced :"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 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."

Now, with the U.S. stay in Iraq exceeding three years and approaching the total time of U.S. combat engagement in World War II, what does Ajami have to say about it all?

The Foreigner's Gift is not a "what went wrong" account, although Ajami does not skip over any of the major mishaps. Nor is it an "if we had known then what we know now" rendition. Rather, in his short introduction and conclusion, Ajami claims that the U.S. intervention in Iraq was the right thing to do -- a "foreigner's gift" to the Iraqis and the Arabs. "The Saddam regime," he writes, "would have lasted a thousand years, had the Americans not come in and decapitated it." And the despotic, sclerotic Arab regimes needed just such a jolt to pave the way for reform or even their replacement. Nor does Ajami argue that since that statue of Saddam was brought tumbling down (with American help), developments in Iraq and the region have not been as bleak as they have seemed or that the invasion will ultimately prove a success. On the very last page of the book, he offers an extraordinary judgment. Countering Bernard-Henri Lévy's assertion that the whole endeavor was "morally right and politically wrong," Ajami affirms, "It is a noble war ... and the outcome of it will determine whether it will be a noble success or a noble failure. Hard-headed realists might say that failure can never be noble ... but history surely has more ambiguity than that stark unsentimentalism."

The Foreigner's Gift is the work of a scholar committed to -- and to some extent embedded in -- the American enterprise in Iraq. That distinctive role, along with Ajami's status as one of a handful of recognized public intellectuals on matters Middle Eastern, ensures that the book will both inform and provoke.

VINTAGE AJAMI

In style and substance, this book is vintage Ajami. He crisply presents characters and anecdotes, using them as springboards for musings on larger issues before moving on to different details that in turn lead him to address other big issues. Bold historical and cross-cultural comparisons -- as well as a number of caustic asides -- are woven into the text. Two examples will suffice. "The Iraq war," Ajami writes, "seemed to present the odd spectacle -- a veritable reversal of intellectual galaxies -- of a conservative American president proclaiming the gospel of liberty with liberals falling back on a surly belief that liberty can't be spread to Muslim lands." (A more prudent writer would have deleted "surly.") Contrasting Kuwait, liberated by foreign armies soon after the 1990 Iraqi invasion, and Lebanon, long occupied by Syria, he wryly observes, "Pity the Lebanese: they had cedars, Kuwait had oil."

The Foreigner's Gift is the fruit of six trips to Iraq since 2003, interviews with the great and the not so great but representative (both American and Iraqi), and a scouring of available sources -- including the Arab media, so important for capturing contemporary history. But what Ajami presents is not so much a history of these years as it is a discursive text framed by a thesis: win or lose, the United States' invasion of Iraq was a noble cause.

Ajami's basic story line can be distilled into the following: After the horror of 9/11 and the rapid overthrow of the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan, the Bush administration came to realize that Saddam had to go. He was almost certainly on the road to producing weapons of mass destruction, his regime would never have been overthrown from within, and the United States was the only power able and disposed to take on the task. Removing Saddam could also set in motion healthy reforms -- or other regime changes -- throughout the region, an argument prefigured in Cheney's August 2002 speech. Although the Bush administration managed to get congressional approval for the war, the UN Security Council balked. So with only limited support from its allies (essentially just the United Kingdom), the United States attacked in March 2003, shattering and scattering the Baathist regime within a month.

Occupation began. The U.S. military proved to be dedicated and competent (the tortures at Abu Ghraib prison were tragic and damaging but not characteristic), the civil administration headed by L. Paul Bremer less so. In any case, it was perhaps, in Ajami's words, "too late in the annals of nations to pull off a foreign domination and have it accepted by a suspicious population with a difficult national history. Perhaps the world of Muslim Arabs was the wrong setting for an experiment in benevolent alien rule."