Middle East expert Fouad Ajami dies at 68

Former US Vice President Dick Cheney, quoted Ajami in a speech advocating the overthrow of Saddam saying he predicted the streets of Basra and Baghdad are “sure to erupt in joy in the same way the throngs in Kabul greeted the Americans.”

Fouad Ajami, controvesial scholar of Middle East history and politics, who advised war planners during the administration of George W Bush, died on June 22, 2014 at the age of 86. Photo by Ben Hider/Show more

NEW YORK // Fouad Ajami, a controversial academic and commentator on Middle East affairs who advised war planners during the administration of George W Bush, died on Sunday. He was 68.

The cause of death was cancer, according to a statement by the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where Ajami was a senior fellow.

In the months leading to the 2003 overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the occupation of Iraq by United States forces, Ajami was reported to have been brought into the Bush administration as an adviser by the national security adviser at the time, Condoleezza Rice.

In 2002, then US Vice President Dick Cheney, quoted Ajami in a speech advocating the overthrow of Saddam saying he predicted the streets of Basra and Baghdad are “sure to erupt in joy in the same way the throngs in Kabul greeted the Americans.”

Ajami was born in Lebanon and moved to the United States with his family in 1963.

He would become a prominent scholar of Middle East history and politics and produced hundreds of works, including books, essays and opinion columns.

Ajami taught at Princeton and American University. He also served as director of Middle East studies at the Paul H Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University for more than three decades.

He was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2006 and the MacArthur “genius” award in 1982.

Rather than placing blame for the lack of democracy and autocratic rule in much of the Arab world in colonial and Cold War history, Ajami claimed the causes stemmed from historic defeats by European empires and the rise of Western power.

The pathologies and attraction to despots were embedded “deep in the Arab psyche”, he once wrote. The September 11 attacks were the logical outcome of a “culture of terrorism” that had grown out of Arab rage and self-pity, he said.

Such analyses angered many who found his cultural analyses misleading and, at worst, basely racist.

But it endeared him to the newly-empowered American neoconservatives who wished to use Washington’s military power to reshape the societies of the Middle East.

Ajami shared their vision and became an outspoken supporter of Mr Bush in his appearances on news programmes and in op-eds.

Mr Bush had given Arabs “a chance to reclaim their world from zealots” and “[w]e needen’t apologise to the other Arabs about our presence there”, he wrote in 2003. “His was the gift of moral and political clarity,” he said.

Ajami later blamed president Barack Obama for squandering the opportunity to build a unified, democratic order in Iraq.

In his last column, published last week in the Wall Street Journal, he wrote that Iraqi prime minister Nouri Al Maliki had himself become a dictator and that Mr Obama "chose to look the other way" by bringing US troops home, and that both men share the blame for the current catastrophe.

While he was controversial, even Ajami’s many detractors praised his scholarly work as compelling and erudite.

"He was one of the best essayists in the English language anywhere," said Hisham Melhem, the Washington bureau chief of Al Arabiya news channel. "Agree or disagree with him, you had to read him."

* with additional reporting by Reuters