NEW YORK — Fouad Ajami — an academic, author, and broadcast commentator on Middle East affairs who helped rally support for the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, partly by personally advising policy makers — died Sunday. He was 68.
The cause was cancer, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where Dr. Ajami was a senior fellow, said in a statement.
An Arab born in Lebanon, Dr. Ajami despaired of autocratic Arab governments finding their own way to democracy, and he believed that the United States must confront what he called a “culture of terrorism” after the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. He likened the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to Hitler.
Misapplied analogies suck!
Dr. Ajami strove to put Arab history into a larger perspective. He often referred to Muslim rage over losing power to the West in 1683, when a Turkish siege of Vienna failed. He said this memory had led to Arab self-pity and self-delusion as they blamed the rest of the world for their troubles. Terrorism, he said, was one result.
Looks more like a Zionist Jew thing.
It was a view that had been propounded by Bernard Lewis, the eminent Middle East historian at Princeton and a public intellectual, who also urged the United States to invade Iraq and advised President George W. Bush.
When do the war crimes trials start?
Most Americans became familiar with Dr. Ajami’s views on CBS News, CNN, and the PBS programs “Charlie Rose” and “NewsHour,” where his distinctive beard and polished manner lent force to his authoritative-sounding opinions.
I saw him, and after a few minutes I would turn the channel.
He wrote more than 400 articles for magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times, as well as a half-dozen books on the Middle East, some of which included his experiences as a Shi’ite Muslim in majority Sunni societies.
Condoleezza Rice summoned him to the Bush White House when she was national security adviser, and he advised Paul Wolfowitz, then the deputy secretary of defense. In a speech in 2002, Vice President Dick Cheney invoked Dr. Ajami as predicting that Iraqis would greet liberation by the US military with joy.
Good thing he is dead; otherwise, we would be looking to kill him.
In the years following the Iraqi invasion, Dr. Ajami continued to support the action as stabilizing. But he said this month that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had squandered an opportunity to unify the country after American intervention and become a dictator. More recently, he favored more aggressive policies toward Iran and Syria.
Then good riddance.
Dr. Ajami’s harshest criticism was leveled at Arab autocrats, who by definition lacked popular support. But his use of words like “tribal,” “atavistic,” and “clannish” to describe Arab peoples rankled some. So did his belief that Western nations should intervene in the region to correct wrongs. Edward Said, the Palestinian cultural critic who died in 2003, accused him of having “unmistakably racist prescriptions.”
Others praised him for balance. Daniel Pipes, a scholar who specializes in the Middle East, said in Commentary magazine in 2006 Dr. Ajami had avoided “the common Arab fixation on the perfidy of Israel.”
Pipes is a Zionist agenda pusher and apologist.
Fouad Ajami was born at the foot of a castle built by Crusaders in Arnoun, Lebanon.
As a boy, he was taunted by Sunni Muslim children for being Shi’ite and short, he wrote in “The Dream Palace of the Arabs: A Generation’s Odyssey” (1998), an examination of Arab intellectuals of the last two generations.
Oh, he had a short man's complex, 'eh?
As a teenager, he was enthusiastic about Arab nationalism, a cause he would later criticize. He also fell in love with American culture, particularly Hollywood movies. In 1963, his family moved to the United States.
That explains everything!
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