Product Description

Fouad Ajami, one of the world¹s foremost authorities on Middle Eastern

politics and the recipient of the 2006 Bradley Prize for Outstanding

Achievement and the National Humanities Medal of 2006, offers a brilliant,

illuminating, and lyrical portrait of the ongoing struggle for Iraq and of

the American encounter with that volatile Arab land. In a new introduction,

the author discusses the many major events that have taken place since the

publication of the hardcover, including the implications of Saddam¹s

execution, the Baker-Hamilton Commission, and the return to Iraq of General

David Petraeus. He renders unsparingly the growing American disillusionment

with the war and the struggle within Iraq between those keen to hold on to

the promise of the new country called up by America¹s war and others

determined to thwart that promise and overwhelm it with sectarian strife.

Ajami situates the current unrest within the context of Iraq¹s recent

history of dictatorship and its rich, diverse cultural heritage. He applies

his incisive political commentary, his broad and deep historical view, his

mastery of the Arabic language and Arabic sources, and his lustrous prose to

every aspect of his subject, wresting a coherent, fascinating, and textured

picture from the media storm of fragmented information. The Foreigner¹s

Gift is the book we all need to read in order to understand what is

happening in Iraq today and what the future might hold for all of us.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #78172 in Books
• Published on: 2007-06-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

Review
"Ajami draws on a variety of contemporary texts, mostly unknown or

inaccessible to Western authors.... The result, based on six extended visits

to Iraq and a lifetime of travel and experience, is the best and most

idiosyncratic recent treatment of the American presence there. A series of

firsthand portraits, often brilliantly subtle, of some fascinating players

in contemporary Iraq."

-- Victor Davis Hanson, Commentary

"The Foreigner's Gift stands in the tradition of Nobel Laureate

V. S. Naipaul.... A wide-ranging, brilliant investigation of Iraq and the

Arab world since the ouster of Saddam Hussein. Elegantly, Ajami interweaves

history, literature, philosophy, politics, and religion with a sensitive

grasp of politics in Iraq and the United States. A masterpiece."

-- Josef Joffe, Publisher-editor of Die Zeit

"Few have the requisite ability and courage to accurately diagnose the

Arab world's myriad political maladies.... Fouad Ajami, who has

performed the task admirably on more than one occasion, does not

disappoint with The Foreigner's Gift."

-- Rayyan al-Sharaf, San Francisco Chronicle

About the Author
Fouad Ajami is the Majid Khadduri Professor of Middle East Studies at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He is a contributing editor to U.S. News & World Report and a consultant to CBS News on Middle Eastern affairs. Ajami is a frequent contributor to Foreign Affairs, The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, and other periodicals and outlets worldwide. Born in Lebanon and raised in Beirut, he is based in New York City.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Preface

Those nineteen young Arabs who assaulted America on the morning of 9/11 had come into their own after the disappointments of modern Arab history. They were not exactly traditional men: they were the issue, the children, of disappointment and of the tearing asunder of modern Arab history. They were city people, newly urbanized, half educated. They had filled the faith with their anxieties and a belligerent piety. They hated the West but were drawn to its magnetic force and felt the power of its attraction; they sharpened their "tradition," but it could no longer contain their lives or truly answer their needs. I had set out to write a long narrative of these pitiless young men -- and the culture that had given rise to them. But the Iraq war, "embedded" in this cruel history, was to overtake the writing I was doing.

A war fated and "written," maktoob, as the Arabs would say, this Iraq war turned out to be. For the full length of a decade, in the 1990s, the anti-American subversion -- and the incitement feeding it -- knew no respite. Appeasement had not worked. The "moderns," with Bill Clinton as their standard-bearer, had been sure we would be delivered by the marketplace and the spread of the World Wide Web. History had mocked them, and us all. In Kabul, and then in Baghdad, America had taken up sword against these troubles.

"The justice of a cause is not a promise of its success," Leon Wieseltier wrote in the pages of The New Republic, in a reassessment of the Iraq war. For growing numbers of Americans, the prospects for "success" in Iraq look uncertain at best. Before success, though, some words about the justice of this war. Let me be forthright about the view that runs through these pages. For me this was a legitimate and, at the beginning, a popular war that issued out of a deep American frustration with the "road rage" of the Arab world and with the culture of terrorism that had put down roots in Arab lands. It was not an isolated band of misguided young men who came America's way on 9/11. They emerged out of the Arab world's dominant culture and malignancies. There were the financiers who subsidized the terrorism. There were the intellectuals who winked at the terrorism and justified it. There were the preachers -- from Arabia to Amsterdam and Finsbury Park -- who gave it religious sanction and cover. And there were the Arab rulers whose authoritarian orders produced the terrorism and who looked away from it so long as it targeted foreign shores.

Afghanistan was the setting for the first battle against Arab radicalism. That desperate, impoverished land had been hijacked, rented if you will, by the Arab jihadists and their masters and financiers. Iraq followed: America wanted to get closer to the source of the troubles in the Arab world. It wasn't democracy that was at stake in Iraq. It was something more limited but important and achievable in its own way: a state less lethal to its own people and to the lands and peoples around it. Iraq's political culture had been poisoned by a crude theory of race and a racialist Arabism that had wrecked and unsettled Arab and Muslim life in the 1980s and 1990s. The Tikriti rulers had ignited a Sunni-Shia war within and over Islam. They had given Arabs a cruel view of history -- iron and fire and bigotry. They had, for all practical purposes, cut off the Arab world from the possibility of a decent, modern life.

It is easy to say that the expedition in Iraq is the product of American innocence. And it is easy to see that the American regent, L. Paul Bremer, didn't find his way to the deep recesses of Iraqi culture. Sure enough, it has proven virtually impossible to convince the people of Fallujah to take to more peaceful ways. It is painfully obvious that at the Abu Ghraib prison some of America's soldiers and military police and reservists broke the codes of war and of military justice. But there can be no doubting the nobility of the effort, for Abu Ghraib isn't the U.S. war. With support for the war hanging in the balance, Abu Ghraib has been an unmitigated disaster. But for all the terribleness of Abu Ghraib and its stain, this war has not been some "rogue operation" willed by the White House and by the Department of Defense. It isn't Paul Wolfowitz's war. It has been a war waged with congressional authorization and fought in the shadow of a terrible calamity visited upon America on 9/11. Sure enough, the United States didn't have the support of Kofi Annan or of Jacques Chirac. But Americans can be forgiven a touch of raw pride: the American rescue of Bosnia, in 1995, didn't have the approval of Boutros Boutros-Ghali (or of the head of his peacekeeping operations at the time, the same Kofi Annan) or of François Mitterrand either.

My sense of Iraq, and of the U.S. expedition, is indelibly marked by the images and thoughts that came to me on six trips that I made to that country in the aftermath of the destruction of the regime of Saddam Hussein. A sense of America's power alternated with thoughts of its solitude and isolation in an alien world. The armies and machines -- and earnestness -- of a great foreign power against the background of a big, impenetrable region: America could awe the people of the Arab-Muslim world, and that region could outwit and outwait American power. The foreign power could repair the infrastructure of Iraq, and the insurgents could wreck it. America could "stand up" and train civil defense and police units, and they could disappear just when needed. In its desire to redeem its work, America could entertain for Iraqis hopes of a decent political culture, and the enemies of this project could fall back on a bigotry sharpened for combat and intolerance. Beyond the prison of the old despotism, the Iraqis have found the hazards and uncertainties -- and promise -- of freedom. An old order of dominion and primacy was shattered in Iraq. The rage against this American war, in Iraq itself and in the wider Arab world, was the anger of a culture that America had given power to the Shia stepchildren of the Arab world -- and to the Kurds. This proud sense of violation stretched from the embittered towns of the Sunni Triangle in western Iraq to the chat rooms of Arabia and to jihadists as far away from Iraq as North Africa and the Muslim enclaves of Western Europe.

In the way of people familiar with modern canons of expression -- of things that can and cannot be said -- the Arab elites were not about to own up in public to the real source of their animus toward this American project. The great Arab silence that greeted the terrors inflicted on Iraq by the brigades of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi gave away the wider Arab unease with the rise of the Shia in Iraq. For nearly three years, that Jordanian-born terrorist brought death and ruin to Iraq. There was barely concealed admiration for him in his native land and in Arab countries beyond. Jordan, in particular, showed remarkable sympathy for deeds of terror masquerading as Islamic acts. In one Pew survey, in the summer of 2005, 57 percent of Jordanians expressed support for suicide bombings and attacks on civilians. It was only when the chickens came home to roost and Zarqawi's pitiless warriors struck three hotels in Amman on November 9, 2005, killing sixty people, that Jordanians drew back in horror. In one survey, conducted a week after these attacks by a public opinion firm, Ipsos Jordan, 94 percent of the people surveyed now said that Al Qaeda's activities were detrimental to the interests of Arabs and Muslims; nearly three out of four Jordanians said that they had not expected "at all" such terrorist attacks in Jordan. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's own tribe now disowned him and broke ties with him. He had "shamed" them at home and placed in jeopardy their access to the state and its patronage. But even as they mourned their loss, the old habits persisted. "Zionist terror in Palestine = American terror in Iraq = Terror in Amman," read a banner held aloft by the leaders of the Engineers' Syndicate of Jordan who had come together to protest the hotel bombings. A country with this kind of political culture is in need of repair; the bureaucratic-military elite who run this realm have their work cut out for them. The Iraqi Shia were staking a claim to their country in the face of a stubborn Arab refusal to admit the sectarian bias at the heart of modern Arab life.

It would have been heady and right had Iraqis brought about their own liberty, had they demolished the prisons and the statues on their own. And it would have been easier and more comforting had America not redeemed their liberty with such heartbreaking American losses. There might have been greater American support for the war had the Iraqis not been too proud to admit that they needed the stranger's gift and had the United States come to a decent relationship with them. But the harvest of the war has been what it has been. In Kurdistan, Anglo-American power has provided protection to a people who have made good use of this new order. There is no excessive or contrived religious zeal in Kurdistan, and the nationalism that blows there seems free of chauvinism and delirium. There's a fight for the city of Kirkuk, where the Kurds will have to show greater restraint in the face of competing claims by the Turkomans, and by the Arabs who were pushed into Kirkuk by the old regime. But on balance Kurdistan shows that terrible histories can be remade. In the rest of the country, America rolled history's dice. There is a view that sees Shia theocracy stalking this new Iraq, but this view, as these pages will make clear, is not mine. Iraq may not provide the Pax Americana with a base of power in the Persian Gulf that some architects and proponents of the war hoped for. America can live without that strategic gain. It is the Iraqis who will need the saving graces of moderate politics.

I am keenly aware that for many Baghdad was not the right return address for a war against terror. But the Iraq war inexorably unfolded out of the American reading of the Arab-Muslim world in the after...

Customer Reviews

Fair-minded and Courageous
The thing I appreciate most about Ajami's book is that it's based on research he gathered during six trips to Iraq. He's interviewed, listened to, and spoken with people from every conceivable position of influence. As a result, he's writing from and commenting on a collection of feelings, hopes, and fears prevailing in Iraq.

Ajami has a deep love for the Middle Eastern culture, which combined with scholarly insight produces a book of beautiful and revealing sketches of the ongoing struggle for Iraq and of the American encounter with the Arab culture. If that sounds like a contradiction, it almost is.

While Ajami is careful to avoid generalizations he ends up painting a portrait using both black and white - hope and despair. In fact, he believes both are living together side-by-side in Iraq. It is through this haze that he peers in order to bring some clarity and insight regarding the daily life of various Arab perspectives on the current state of Iraq. One way he does that is by focusing on how Iraq's particular history led to its present circumstance.

In addition to the historical emphasis of the book I wish Ajami had asked questions of Islam itself and how the foundational tenants of the religion contribute to the feelings, tensions, and state of the region. Of course that might require a level of fearlessness that even Ajami would prefer to avoid.

A Chance For a New Beginning
For many Americans - myself included - the war in Iraq was not entirely about oil, weapons of mass destruction, nor links between al-Qaeda and the regime of Saddam Hussein. Although all of these reasons were given for going to war, it was ultimately about something else. The nineteen young Arabs that attacked America on 9/11 were products of Arab history and culture. They were products of the "anger" of the Arab world were terrorism had taken root. Of all the Arab lands, the most tortured and merciless was Iraq. The Baath regime in Baghdad had poisoned the atmosphere in the Middle East for many years. The American overthrow of the regime was meant to give Iraqis and other peoples of the region the possiblity of liberating themselves and building a decent future, and in the process eliminating the root causes of terrorism.

To my knowledge no one has articulated this view better than Fouad Ajami. I have been a fan of his for many years, finding his assessments of the Middle East to be very accurate. He was born of a Shiite family in Lebanon and he is currently professor of Middle Eastern studies at Johns Hopkins. His new book is based on six trips he made to Iraq since the American invasion. He has been granted access to many government officials in Iraq as well as Washington.

The overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the ruling Sunni minority in Baghdad caused an upheaval in the Arab world that at first was met with silence. The Sunni Arab elites were reticent about the rise of the Shiite majority and were secretly hoping that the Sunnis would remain in power. They rarely criticized the Jordanian born Sunni al-Zarqawi during his three year reign of terror when he brought death and destruction to Iraqi civilians. Officially it was the fight against American occupation, unofficially it was to stop the rise of the Iraqi Shiites. It was not until al-Zarqawi's brigades bombed three hotels in Jordan that he lost the support of the Jordanians.

Ajami is well aware of the difficulty and the heavy burden of the task America has undertaken, the outcome of which looks more dismal by the day. He correctly notes that the mess in Iraq was not entirely of America's making. The Iraqis have been given a chance to build a new government and a new future. He sees Sunni intransigence and sectarian bias as the main source of failure thus far. It remains to be seen whether a political solution can be reached, since a military solution is no longer possible short of civil war.

One criticism I would have of this book is that Ajami does not fully recognize the Shia inclination toward Iranian-style theocracy. One of the most powerful and malignant forces waiting in the wings is Moktada al-Sadr and the Mahdi army. Even if they are independent of the Iranians, they still have the potential of creating a society that will be worse than the one that was there before.

As the future of Iraq hangs in the balance, Ajami makes a powerful and eloquent plea for supporting the current fragile, but democratically elected government that is trying desperately to hold the country together.

Bright light in a dark region
In a recent review for a best-selling book "America Alone," one of Amazon's top 30 reviewers had just one "major complaint."

"(Author) Mark Steyn does a great job describing where we're at NOW, and where we might be in thirty years, but offers almost nothing about what could happen in the middle. A lot of events will occur between now and then" (for instance) "radical Islam could implode --- simultaneously squeezed from the outside by the United States and from within by substantial . . . differences among the branches of Islam."

For all of us asking the same question, "What's going to happen there next?" I believe the most enlightening answers are available right here -- in this beautifully written, deeply insightful book by Fouad Ajami: "The Foreigner's Gift: Americans, Arabs and Iraqis in Iraq."

A teacher at Johns Hopkins University ("2006 recipient of the Bradley Prize") Ajami enlightens us on why things will get better in Iraq - eventually. But in the meantime he says,

"Pity those men now hunkered down in Baghdad . . . as they walk a fine, thin line between the yearning for justice and retribution in their land, and the scrutiny of the outside world."

"In the fullness of time," the author says, "the Arab world's order of power will come to a grudging acceptance of the order that is sure to take hold in Baghdad." This is after all, a region which "respects the prerogatives of power." Of all Arab lands, "Iraq is the most checkered -- a frontier country at the crossroads of Arabia, Turkey and Persia" . . . and "Sunni Arabs in Iraq and beyond have never accepted (such) diversity."

The author quotes one of Iraq's "most respected scholar-diplomats" as saying "It is proper now, to speak of an `American Iraq' as once we spoke, in turn, of a Sumerian, Babylonian, Ottoman, and British (Sunni) Iraq."

The new reality is "American-SHIA." As a result, the author says, militant preachers railing against `American crusaders' and `Shiite heretics' cannot prevail.

Another good sign: Sunni regimes are not of one mind on Iraq: "Curiously," says the author, "the Arab state most likely to make peace with the new reality of Iraq is Saudi Arabia (whose) King Abdullah has read the wind with accuracy: He has a Shia minority in his domain (in the oil-rich eastern province) and he seems eager to cap the Wahhabi (SUNNI) volcano in the heartland of his kingdom."

"There is a pragmatism there," says the author, "that should give us cause for hope: a pragmatism "that lives by its own coin." In contrast "Jordan and Egypt present the odd spectacle of countries in the forefront of the anti-Shiite drive - but which have "no Shia citizenry in their midst." Regimes that "derive a good measure of their revenues from foreign powers -- the subsidies of Pax Americana to be exact." So the threat of Shiism is "a good, and lucrative, scarecrow for the rulers in Cairo and Amman: and the promise of standing sentry in defense of the Sunni order is what these two regimes have to offer both America and the oil states."

After his sure-footed assessment of why the current Malaki government in Iraq can succeed in its "marriage of convenience" with America, the author states that, with Saddam's execution, this prime minister "made himself a power in the vast Shia mainstream, America's success in Iraq now depends on him."

And with a "balance of terror" between Sunni and Shia, the "Sunni Arabs know that their old dominion is lost," (that) "they had better take the offer on the table . . . a share of oil revenues and access to political power -- in return for reining-in the violence and banishing the Arab jihadists."

This is the country "midwifed by American power," says the author. "We were never meant to stay there long. Iraq will never approximate the expectations we projected onto it in more innocent times. But we should be able to grant it the gift of acceptance, and yet another dose of patience - as it works its way out of its current torments.

"It's said that much of the war's `nobility' has been drained out of it - that we now fight not to lose, and to keep intact our larger position in the oil lands of the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf." Maybe "not the stuff of glory," Ajami says "but it has power and legitimacy all its own."