While at sea, I managed to get access to this op-ed in the WSJ, written by Fouad Ajami
- a writer whose clarity of thought i greatly admire.
In it, he notes that W has unleashed great
powers of creative destruction in the Arab middle
east:
To venture into the
Arab world, as I did recently over four weeks in Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan and Iraq,
is to travel into Bush Country. I was to encounter people from practically all
Arab lands, to listen in on a great debate about the possibility of freedom and
liberty. I met Lebanese giddy with the Cedar Revolution that liberated their
country from the Syrian prison that had seemed an unalterable curse. They were
under no illusions about the change that had come their way. They knew that this
new history was the gift of an American president who had put the Syrian rulers
on notice. The speed with which Syria quit Lebanon was astonishing, a race to
the border to forestall an American strike that the regime could not discount. I
met Syrians in the know who admitted that the fear of American power, and the
example of American forces flushing Saddam Hussein out of his spider hole, now
drive Syrian policy. They hang on George Bush's words in Damascus, I was told:
the rulers wondering if Iraq was a crystal ball in which they could glimpse
their future.
The weight of
American power, historically on the side of the dominant order, now drives this
new quest among the Arabs. For decades, the intellectual classes in the Arab
world bemoaned the indifference of American power to the cause of their liberty.
Now a conservative American president had come bearing the gift of Wilsonian
redemption. For a quarter century the Pax Americana had sustained the autocracy
of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak: He had posed as America's man on the Nile,
a bulwark against the Islamists. He was sly and cunning, running afoul of our
purposes in Iraq and over Israeli-Palestinian matters. He had nurtured a culture
of antimodernism and anti-Americanism, and had gotten away with it. Now the wind
from Washington brought tidings: America had wearied of Mr. Mubarak, and was
willing to bet on an open political process, with all its attendant risks and
possibilities. The brave oppositional movement in Cairo that stepped forth under
the banner of
Kifaya
("Enough!") wanted the end of his reign: It had had enough of his mediocrity,
enough of the despotism of an aging officer who had risen out of the military
bureaucracy to entertain dynastic dreams of succession for his son. Egyptians
challenging the quiescence of an old land may have had no kind words to say
about America in the past. But they were sure that the play between them and the
regime was unfolding under Mr. Bush's
eyes.
Unmistakably, there is
in the air of the Arab world a new contest about the possibility and the meaning
of freedom. This world had been given over to a dark nationalism, and to the
atavisms of a terrible history. For decades, it was divided between rulers who
monopolized political power and intellectual classes shut out of genuine power,
forever prey to the temptations of radicalism. Americans may not have cared for
those rulers, but we judged them as better than the alternative. We feared the
"Shia bogeyman" in Iraq and the Islamists in Algeria, Egypt and Tunisia; we
bought the legend that Syria's dominion in Lebanon kept the lid on anarchy. We
feared tinkering with the Saudi realm; it was terra incognita to us, and the
House of Saud seemed a surer bet than the "wrath and virtue" of the zealots.
Even Yasser Arafat, a retailer of terror, made it into our good graces as a man
who would tame the furies of the masked men of Hamas. That bargain with
authoritarianism did not work, and begot us the terrors of
9/11.
All well and good, certainly -
certainly nothing there that I could find to disagree with. Especially
this:
It was Iraq of course
that gave impetus to this new Arab history. And it is in Iraq that the nobility
of this American quest comes into focus. This was my fourth trip to Iraq since
the fall of the despotism, and my most hopeful
yet.
But then something in the back
of my mind was nagging me: Hadn't I taken issue with Ajami before? Yes:
He
wrote then (the link has vanished into the bowels of the NYT's
archives):
Let's face
it: Iraq is not going to be America's showcase in the Arab-Muslim world. The
president's insistence that he had sent American troops to Iraq to make its
people free, "not to make them American" is now — painfully — beside
the point...
The gains
already accomplished in Iraq, and the gains yet to be secured, are increasingly
abstract and hard to pin down. The costs are visible to us, and heartbreaking.
The subdued, somber tone with which the war is now described is the beginning of
wisdom. In its modern history, Iraq has not been kind or gentle to its people.
Perhaps it was folly to think that it was under any obligation to be kinder to
strangers.
I suppose there's no
compelling reason for a professor and op-ed writer to remain consistent from
year to year, writing on so difficult a topic as the war in Iraq. Certainly not
when writing for two publications that, it's fair to say, see the world at large
in very different ways. But as much as I found his pessimism unwarranted a year
ago, so also do I find his optimism now somewhat unsettling. We could still lose
this.
We could lose this by
comforting ourselves that it's almost over, that democracy has taken root and
that the path leads only forward, closing our minds to the thought of the path
that lies behind us, and the dangers of backsliding. We could lose this by
forgetting that the brutal tyrants of the region all have their own lives to
protect, as well as their own cards to play. That the kind of men who killed
25,000 of their own countrymen in Hama , as Ajami points out in his most recent
article, would not quiver with dread at the thought of sending a few of their
citizens across the border to blow up Iraqi citizens - secularist ba'athists
cruelly exploiting the besotted hyper-religious - to try and keep the American
military behemoth preoccupied. We could lose this by convincing ourselves that
the insurgency is "on its last legs," just as once we saw "the light at the end
of the tunnel."
As much as this is a
must-win for our civilization, and for the aspirations of hundreds of millions
of Arabs who also seek to shape the course of their own destiny through
democratic access to the levers of power, so also is it a must-win for the
forces of tyranny and reaction. The nationalist enemy in Iraq we can hope to
co-opt, in time. The jihadis must be hunted
down.
It is too soon, alas, to
congratulate ourselves. Far too soon to declare victory and leave the field.
Much remains to be done.
Posted @
07:03 AM
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Posted in
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Sendit
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Credo
"Sign on, young man, and sail with me. The stature of our homeland is no more than the measure of ourselves. Our job is to keep her free. Our will is to keep the torch of freedom burning for all. To this solemn purpose we call on the young, the brave, the strong, and the free. Heed my call, Come to the sea. Come Sail with me." - John Paul Jones
"Pardon him, Theodotus; he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature" --George Bernard Shaw, "Ceasar and Cleopatra"
"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."--Friederich Nietzsche
