The Native Informant (Page 6)

Did Ajami really believe all this? In a stray but revealing comment on Sadat in The New Republic, he left room for doubt. Sadat, he said, was "a son of the soil, who had the fellah's ability to look into the soul of powerful outsiders, to divine how he could get around them even as he gave them what they desired." Writing on politics, the man from Arnoun gave them what they desired. Writing on literature and poetry, he gave expression to the aesthete, the soulful elegist, even, at times, to the Arab. In his 1998 book, The Dream Palace of the Arabs, one senses, for the first time in years, Ajami's sympathy for the world he left behind, although there is something furtive, something ghostly about his affection, as if he were writing about a lover he has taught himself to spurn. On rare occasions, Ajami revealed this side of himself to his students, whisking them into his office. Once the door was firmly shut, he would recite the poetry of Nizar Qabbani and Adonis in Arabic, caressing each and every line. As he read, Sayres Rudy told me, "I could swear his heart was breaking."

September 11 exposed a major intelligence failure on Ajami's part. With his obsessive focus on the menace of Saddam and the treachery of Arafat, he had missed the big story. Fifteen of the nineteen hijackers hailed from what he had repeatedly called the "benign political order" of Saudi Arabia; the "Saudi way" he had praised had come undone. Yet the few criticisms that Ajami directed at his patrons in the weeks and months after September 11 were curiously muted, particularly in contrast to the rage of most American commentators. Ajami's venues in the American media, however, were willing to forgive his softness toward the Saudis. America was going to war with Muslims, and a trusted native informant was needed.

Other forces were working in Ajami's favor. For George W. Bush and the hawks in his entourage, Afghanistan was merely a prelude to the war they really wanted to fight--the war against Saddam that Ajami had been spoiling for since the end of Gulf War I. As a publicist for Gulf War II, Ajami has abandoned his longstanding emphasis on the limits of American influence in that "tormented region." The war is being sold as the first step in an American plan to effect democratic regime change across the region, and Ajami has stayed on message. We now find him writing in Foreign Affairs that "the driving motivation of a new American endeavor in Iraq and in neighboring Arab lands should be modernizing the Arab world." The opinion of the Arab street, where Iraq is recruiting thousands of new jihadists, is of no concern to him. "We have to live with this anti-Americanism," he sighed recently on CBS. "It's the congenital condition of the Arab world, and we have to discount a good deal of it as we press on with the task of liberating the Iraqis."

In fairness, Ajami has not completely discarded his wariness about American intervention. For there remains one country where American pressure will come to naught, and that is Israel, where it would "be hubris" to ask anything more of the Israelis, victims of "Arafat's war." To those who suggest that the Iraq campaign is doomed without an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement, he says, "We can't hold our war hostage to Arafat's campaign of terror."

Fortunately, George W. Bush understands this. Ajami has commended Bush for staking out the "high moral ground" and for "putting Iran on notice" in his Axis of Evil speech. Above all, the President should not allow himself to be deterred by multilateralists like Secretary of State Colin Powell, "an unhappy, reluctant soldier, at heart a pessimist about American power." Unilateralism, Ajami says, is nothing to be ashamed of. It may make us hated in the "hostile landscape" of the Arab world, but, as he recently explained on the NewsHour, "it's the fate of a great power to stand sentry in that kind of a world."

It is no accident that the "sentry's solitude" has become the idée fixe of Ajami's writing in recent years. For it is a theme that resonates powerfully in his own life. Like the empire he serves, Ajami is more influential, and more isolated, than he has ever been. In recent years he has felt a need to defend this choice in heroic terms. "All a man can betray is his conscience," he solemnly writes in The Dream Palace of the Arabs, citing a passage from Conrad. "The solitude Conrad chose is loathed by politicized men and women."

It is a breathtakingly disingenuous remark. Ajami may be "a stranger in the Arab world," but he can hardly claim to be a stranger to its politics. That is why he is quoted, and courted, by Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz. What Ajami abhors in "politicized men and women" is conviction itself. A leftist in the 1970s, a Shiite nationalist in the 1980s, an apologist for the Saudis in the 1990s, a critic-turned-lover of Israel, a skeptic-turned-enthusiast of American empire, he has observed no consistent principle in his career other than deference to power. His vaunted intellectual independence is a clever fiction. The only thing that makes him worth reading is his prose style, and even that has suffered of late. As Ajami observed of Naipaul more than twenty years ago, "he has become more and more predictable, too, with serious cost to his great gift as a writer," blinded by the "assumption that only men who live in remote, dark places are 'denied a clear vision of the world.'" Like Naipaul, Ajami has forgotten that "darkness is not only there but here as well."

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