The People vs. the Elites
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While Fouad Ajami criticizes Obama for his “detached tone” when discussing the Islamic world, for signaling a “fatigue” with Iraq and the Middle East, and for adopting a more Realpolitik approach towards the region, a new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds that nearly two-thirds of Americans continue to believe the Iraq war is not worth fighting and 70 percent say Obama should fulfill his campaign promise to withdraw U.S. forces from the country within 16 months.
So it’s the American people who are experiencing a fatigue with the Middle East, starting with Iraq, just as Obama seems to be turning to those who supported the decision to go to war to manage his Middle East policy. But I still remain hopeful that Ajami is right in his criticism of Obama.
Filed under: Foreign policy
1. Never trust the polls
2. The American people aren’t always right. That’s why we elect leaders.
3. I don’t have any confidence any the electorate that gave us a choice of McCain vs Obama (bad or worse).
http://rightklik.blogspot.com/
Having admired your writings for some time now Leon I sure hope that by you “remain[ing] hopeful that Ajami is right in his criticism of Obama” you mean that you hope Ajami is right that Obama really *is* more detached from the Mideast and/or wants to be moreso.
But at any rate you miss how much of a hoot Ajami’s piece is otherwise, with one absolute pearl of a sentence coming from good old Iraq-war-supporting Fouad:
“Detailed ‘knowledge’ can be overrated in the choices that history opens up.”
!!
!!!!
This!! Coming from a guy who in the run-up to the Iraq War clearly just tried to ooze “detailed knowledge” of the situation while endorsing the neo-cons, is so bloody hilarious one doesn’t know what to say. Maybe … laugh until you cry or fall off your barstool at the hitherto unknown comedic talents of Ajami.
And then of course at the end of what might seem his casual little piece what does good old Fouad do? Go right back to making his typically sly little tendentious comments, draped once again with a claim of “detailed knowledge,” of what seems astonishingly counter-intuitive if not outright dumb factual comments. To wit:
“To its surprise, the new administration could yet discover that our adversaries do not wish to see our withdrawal from their midst. The Iranians thrive on the American presence in the Persian Gulf and feed off it.”
I.e., While every scrap of evidence and commonsense tells us that no, the Iranians would move heaven and earth to see us get the hell out of the Mideast, there’s good old Detailed Knowledge Fouad singing his same old song telling us how dumb it would be for us to disengage because even the Iranians really really want us to stay.
(And of course not even following up on his own logic which is that if our adversaries really really do want us there that just seems to argue all the more that we should get the hell out.)
Good old Fouad: Not just a man to watch while remembering that we should always consider the history of a person’s past spectacularly wrong prognostications before believing in him. But indeed maybe *THE* man to watch to be reminded that apparent gravitas and “detailed knowledge” can be deceptive.
Cheers,
Yes. You’re right. From my perspective:
Ajami’s criticism of Obama=Hadar’s praise of Obama
I think that Ajami’s early writings on the Mideast was quite original and provocative. But the end of the Cold War and the first Gulf War he he has become a proponent of an American hegemony/imperial role in the Middle East very much along the neocon line and promoting the idea that the Shiites (he himself is a Shiite) would benefit from American intervention in the region. In any case, some the stuff he has been writing recently sounds sometimes like a parody. Re the Iranians want us to stay in the Middle East. Well, in fact the Iranians have benefited from the ousting of the Taliban in Afganistan and Saddam Hussein in Iraq and the mess we’ve made in Lebanon. So if you’re a conspiracy theorist you could speculate that there is some sort of covert cooperation between Washington and Tehran…On a more serious note, you could argue that the neocons needs Iran as a “threat” justifying intervention in the region, defense spending, etc. and that the ayatollahs need the U.S. as a “threat” to justify their policies, kind of a rerun of U.S.-Soviet cold war confrontation.
Leon Hadar wrote:
“Yes. You’re right. From my perspective:
Ajami’s criticism of Obama=Hadar’s praise of Obama.”
Yeah I figured that’s where you were coming from.
What kills me is how Ajami and so many others who got things so wrong only seem to fall upwards with ever greater appointments, respect shown them by the media and etc. It’s like you’ve got some strange physics there in Washington where the normal rules of gravity apply backwards: You’re a so-called “foreign policy” expert but called what very possibly was THE biggest foreign affairs issue of your life wrong— namely the sensibility of invading Iraq? Oh that’s okay, we’ll just book you *more* on the NewsHour, and give you ever more exalted chairs at the Universities or thinktanks, or ever more prestigious columns at the New York Times or etc., etc.”
Perhaps funniest thing about this that I saw occurred during a Charlie Rose show after the Iraq War had clearly turned South. He had a panel of guests on including Holbrooke and Fareed Zakaria who just got done bloviating in that oh-so-superior tone about how Bush was screwing up this or that over there. And a somewhat distracted Rose got a little confused and so without his usual soft-ball pitch kind of scratched his head and blurted out at ‘em “But wait a minute isn’t that really the only thing he could have done given the logic of the invasion and didn’t both of you support that?”
Boy oh boy was the look on their faces just absolutely perfect. From oh-so-august-and-superior bloviators to shocked, silent, embarrassed little boys in an instant.
You just wish the embarrassment was enough for even one of these kind of folks to have at least knocked a little of that all-knowing tone out of them. But no, we still have all ‘em all with us now just as before. Waxing gravely about this or that with the mien of a middle ages’ pope issuing an ex cathedra bull.
Shameless. Not to mention culpable for simply horrendous damage done to this country. Wish someone would throw a couple of shoes at them.
Cheers,