TigerHawk

Fouad Ajami's book on Iraq precisely reveals itself in the title and subtitle: The Foreigner's Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq. More than any of the many books I have read on post-war Iraq, Ajami's book -- really a long, poetic essay -- sketches the relationships among all the many ethnic and religious groups that are shaping the new Iraq, including particularly Arabs who are not Iraqis and Iraqis who are not Arabs.

Fouad Ajami is a Shiite born in Lebanon and today a professor at Johns Hopkins. With the death of Edward Said, he is perhaps the most well-known Arab American writing about the Middle East from a perch in a great university. He was also a supporter of the war to remove Saddam, and even though his heart is broken over "incompetence and amateurism of the Coalition Provisional Authority" -- a theme that runs through virtually every book on the occupation not written by Paul Bremer -- he remains hopeful for the future of this great Arab country.

If there is a defining theme in The Foreigner's Gift, it is its insistent deconstruction of the savage political, cultural and military war waged by the Sunni Arabs of Iraq and throughout the region against the political rise of the Shia. From the preface:

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 terrori 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 real 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.

Indeed, Ajami argues that the Arab opposition to the Shia has twisted even American policy, in that it has been heard and reflected in the bureaucratic infighting that has plagued the Bush administration's foreign policy and the eruptions of Western critics of both the left and right who raise the spectre of Iranian dominance of post-Ba'athist Iraq.

There are reports, exaggerated by the telling, that Iranian charities and political-religious operatives from the larger Persian state next door are running away with Iraq, that they will recast it in their image, that they are training Shia activists in media and political work designed to impose an edifice of power akin to Iran's. There is an Iranian television channel, Al-Alaam, that airs in Arabic, and those worried about theocratic politics point to it as evidence of Iran's reach into its neighbor. Those keen to see that "Shia crescent" conjured up by King Abdullah of Jordan rise over Iraq speak of Iranian money flooding Iraq, of book fairs that bring to Iraq the literature and religious books of Iran. On the eve of Iraq's first national elections of January 30, 2005, there were charges -- unsubstantiated but nevertheless uttered with great confidence -- of huge numbers of Iranians crossing into Iraq to participate in the elections and to tilt the balance in favor of the Shia parties. These fears had going for them the widespread view of Iranians as people of guile and mystery and concealment -- the double burden, in Arab eyes, of their Shiism and their Persianness. Etelaat agents (Iranian intelligence) were everywhere in Iraq, it was asserted by the Sunni Arabs within and outside Iraq. And the Sunni Arabs were not the only purveyors of this view. For the Americans and European critics of the war, this was an irresistible rebuke to the war -- an American project that had "delivered" Iraq into Iranian hands. It was in this vein that the foreign policy writer and activist Peter Galbraith wrote of Iraq when he described it as George W. Bush's Islamic republic. And it was in a similar vein that a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, taking leave of Iraq in early 2006 -- she herself of Iranian ancestry -- spoke of a country where Iran was now everywhere.

Ajami, suffice it to say, does not believe that a democratic Iraq, even one dominated by the Shia, will be "Finlandized" to Iran. Far from it. In Ajami's view, Iraqi Arab pride will be at least as powerful a barrier as Saddam's army:

Iran is not about to run away with Iraq. This is not Lebanon, where a small investment of Iranian money would secure for the Islamic republic a presence by the Mediterranean. Iraq is a big country with wealth and resources of its own. Najaf is a proud Shia city, the sacred city of Shiism, the sun around which all Shia planets turn, the influential and shrewd jurist of Najaf, Sayyid Muhammad al-Ghurayfi, was keen to remind me in a visit described earlier in this book. Granted, geography could not be annulled, and that nine-hundred-mile border between Iran and Iraq would make its impact felt on both sides of the frontier. But the barriers of langauge, and the pride of an Iraqi political class that made its home in Baghdad -- not down in the south -- were a better bet as to the shape of things to come in Iraq. Few Iraqis watch Al-Alaam. It is too clumsy and repetitive; there is more glitzy fare from Dubai and Doha and Beirut and Cairo, Arabic material more congenial to the taste of Iraqis. The country was never the secular, modern haven of the exiles' imagination. And it was not about to take to sudden, excessive piety.

Theocracy was a scarecrow, breakdown the more serious nemesis. "I am worried about Iran and I am not worried," the shrewd president of Iraq, Jalal Talabani, observed to me on the shores of Lake Duqan, not so far from Iraq's northeastern border with Iran. "It depends on us Iraqis. We can have decent relations with the Iranians as sovereign states if we order our own house. If we don't, then the bets are off." Talabani knew Iran and its politics and its language. He treasured an exchange he had had with the "Supreme Leader" of Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, where the Iranian cleric said that both of his parents had been born in Najaf. "Then you are an Iraqi," Talabani had said with his customary good humor and relish. Talabani then supplied the ironic twist on this story: he told Khamenei that his own tribe traced its descent to Iran. "So there you have it, an Iranian leader with Iraqi connections, an Iraqi leader with roots in Iran." There was no complacency in Talabani's view of this matter. He had an Iraqi patriot's calling; he had come into his role now, in his early seventies, as the standard-bearer of Iraq's nationalism. He was sure that once peace came, Iraq would hold its own in the contest of nations around it.

Finally, there is the inherent conflict between the ambitions of Iran's radicals and the Shia clergy of Najaf. In the aforementioned interview with Sayyid Muhammad Reda al-Ghurayfi, "the influential overseer of the shrine of Imam Ali," there is this discussion of a nasty exchange with Iran's proxy Hezbollah:

I [Ajami] threw him a predictable remark about the influence of Iran, in the form of a question about Iran's weight in the affairs of the Shia of Iraq. The questiton was less weighty than his reflections, and he fielded it with an edge of impatience. "We have nothing to do with Iran. We share the same faith, but we are different. We don't want Iran to rule us." He beheld the world beyond Najaf with a sense of confident superiority. "Najaf is the sun, it transcends all, and all the other cities of the Shia world revolve around it, life of its illumination." He did not like political Islamists, whether Shia or Sunni. He told me that an envoy had come to Najaf from Beirut on behalf of the leader of the Party of God, Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah. A breach had opened between the Party of God, with its virulent anti-Americanism, and the Shia clerical institution in Najaf; the Shia of Lebanon had not supported the coming of this new order in Iraq. "We told them to go back and to tell his leader that we are constantly praying for his undoing and his eternal damnation. We used to respect him as a resister to Israel's occupation of his land; Najaf always stood with Lebanon. But we are through with the likes of Nasrallah."

But what of radicalism within the Shia of Iraq? Ajami devotes a lot of space to the rise of Moqtada al-Sadr, who he portrays as primarily, or at least originally, motivated by a desire for vengeance against the senior clerics of Najaf, who he believed had "abandoned his father in his hour of need." That history is alone worth the price of admission.

The Foreigner's Gift is a rich and deeply textured study of post-invasion Iraq, deeply sympathetic to the morality of the American mission, almost romantic in its portrayal of American soldiers, subtle in its examination of Iraqi ethnic, religious and political dynamics, and highly ambivalent about the possiblities for ultimate success, given all that has happened. Intellectually honest people who have read The Assassins' Gate and Fiasco and the raft of lesser books that flyspeck American screw-ups -- and there have been plenty (of both books and screwups) -- owe it to themselves to read The Foreigners' Gift. Ajami makes no attempt to persuade his reader that the war and occupation could not have been handled better, but he relentlessly upholds the original and persistent morality of the invasion to remove the Ba'athists from power.