Expertise

A little glance back at the 2002-vintage thoughts of Bernard Lewis, every conservative's favorite Middle East expert. Speaking before the invasion of Iraq, he notes that "Parallels to the Iraq quandary can be found by looking at post-World War II Germany and Japan" which were turned into successful liberal democracies. And then:

I am particularly optimistic that the same can be done in Iraq, which has many positive features upon which it can build. For example, of all the oil-producing countries, Iraq made the best use of its oil revenues in terms of creating a real infrastructure, including a good secondary and university education system. Here I speak from personal knowledge. Earlier in my career, when I was teaching at the University of London, the overwhelming majority of my graduate students came from the Middle East. All of these Middle Eastern students were graduates of Arab universities and, before that, of Arab high school systems. I got to evaluate them well enough to know what sort of education and training they had received and, more particularly, whether their credentials really meant something. In the case of Iraqi students, their degrees were more reliable than those of students from other countries; the students from Iraq had received better training under more rigorous standards.

For this and other reasons, there is genuine hope. The main task is not creating opportunities, but removing obstacles.

Prescient!

Comments

Wouldn't a bombing campaign be bad for the infrastructural advantages Iraq had to build forth from?

Posted by A different Matt | October 8, 2007 4:11 PM

And don't forget that Bernard Lewis is also America's leading academic "Holocaust-Denier"...

The great hero of the neocons AND the top American Holocaust-Denier...who says you can't have it all!!

Posted by RKU | October 8, 2007 4:14 PM

This is part and parcel of the "universal longing for freedom" garbage. By "removing obstacles" I presume Bernard Lewis meant using our military to dismantle physical manifestations of despotism such as Hussein statues and Republican Guard units. Once we remove those obstacles, democracy will blossom like a wildflower -- naturally, effortlessly, as it has since time immemorial.

How do we let mush-brained hawks get away with the monopoly on foreign policy seriousness?

Posted by StJoe | October 8, 2007 4:28 PM

Wouldn't a bombing campaign be bad for the infrastructural advantages Iraq had to build forth from?

Our bombing the living bejeezus out of Germany and Japan, till they were utterly spent and defeated as a people, is at least as important an explanation as to why we were able to transform their societies. They had no will at all to fight back after the war.

We obviously weren't going to do anything even remotely similar in Iraq, and hence the analogy was completely, blatently ridiculous. Like so many other things about this stupid war, that seemed like a totally simple, obvious fact to me in 2002 when the idea of a transformational war first came up. And since at the time, I could barely find Iraq on a map, you'd think it might have at least crossed the minds of Renowned Scholors of Near East Studies.

Posted by Monad | October 8, 2007 4:32 PM

Gee, I thought the tyrant Saddam Hussein was stealing the oil royalties for himself and his coterie while leaving the common citizens to starve. You know --the way the oil dictators who are our allies do.

Actually, maybe Bernard Lewis would like to describe the adverse impact on the Iraqi people of US sanctions and the 2003 invasion? Or would looking at the quantitative evidence be too much to ask of this alleged scholar? See
http://www.casi.org.uk/info/undocs/sanct31.pdf

Posted by Don Williams | October 8, 2007 4:35 PM

As someone who is at the beginning stages of making a life in the Near Eastern studies zone of academia, I think it's worth saying that Bernard Lewis was widely considered to be antiquated and out-of-date even in the early 1960s. He's one of those people who seems to have had some kind of mind-melting experience when he was in his 20s and has ceased to learn anything since. I really wonder while he is still famous.

Probably because he says what people, long conditioned by the orientalism of popular culture, want to hear already.

Posted by CG | October 8, 2007 4:56 PM

Umm, okay - but when did he leave London for Princeton? In the 1970's, I think. A lot happened in between the time he made these assessments and 2002. I think these days the best universities in the Arab world are unquestionably AUI in Morocco, AUC in Egypt, and a number of Gulf schools like Zayed University.

Posted by Brian Ulrich | October 8, 2007 5:10 PM

I'm hardly an expert on Iraq, but my impression is that although he was a bloodthirsty tyrant, Saddam's rule was generally reasonably good for the Iraqi people, at least until he started his long series of wars by invading Iran (at our urging).

The debilitating corruption in most Third-World countries isn't so much caused by the dictator stealing as by the dictator and all the sub-dictators and sub-sub-dictators stealing, leaving almost nothing for the general population.

By contrast, my impression is that in Iraq each year Saddam would decide how much of the total national wealth he would take for himself, his family, and his inner circle, maybe 20% or so. Then the remaining 80% or whatever would be allocated for reasonable productive national purposes, like building universities and highways. And anyone who tried to lay even a finger on that remaining 80% or whatever was regarded as stealing from Saddam, which was not a very healthy thing to do.

Considering the vast fraction of America's national wealth confiscated each year by Bush, his circle of cronies, and all their endless successive rings of other corporative profiteers, I suspect that exchanging Bush for Saddam might have lessened the dead-weight burden on the productive sectors of the American economy.

Posted by RKU | October 8, 2007 5:13 PM

Umm...Saddam became President in 1978 and invaded Iran in 1980. That's not a lot of time for his period of goodness.

Posted by Brian Ulrich | October 8, 2007 5:24 PM

Uh, not to belabor the obvious, but can we, for the sake of comparison, look at the kinds of societies Germany and Japan were before the war, and contrast them with that of Iraq?

Not much to build on there, even before you bomb the crap out of it.

Posted by Jamey | October 8, 2007 5:47 PM

The Iraqis simply do not want democracy and are too stupid for it.. their inherited culture does not allow for democracy and will never change. the left has known this all along.

The Germans wanted democracy badly and this is why so many revolved against Hitler and brought him down to his knees from within.

Or think of the people in former Yugoslavia. They all wanted democracy and this is why they started with genocide.. etc.

Serbs, Croats, Slovenians - they were all ready for democracy compared to the Iraqis - this is why democracy happened so peacefully there...

Think of the Civil War. Most Southerners were not
racists. Most Southerners really wanted to give up slavery and allow blacks to vote.. Only a handful powerful people in the South were pro-slavery and anti-democracy. Most whites wanted blacks to vote!!!! Once they lost - they could finally express their ethical feeling openly. What wonderful people. Like the Nazis - once Hitler died - they all turned moral over night.

Right? Eh.. I mean... left, right?

Come on - everybody on this planet knows that either democracy happens without bloodshed within less than 12 months or not and never at all...

PS: There is only one exception. Ancient Greece... otherwise it was always peaceful and fast: America, France, Germany, Russia, Yugoslavia, etc etc...

Posted by Hugo Pottisch | October 8, 2007 5:56 PM

Didn't France and Russia have rather bloody revolutions along the way? The U.S. just inherited British democracy, which took a few centuries to evolve.

Posted by Brian Ulrich | October 8, 2007 6:16 PM

Brian Ulrich:

Umm...Saddam became President in 1978 and invaded Iran in 1980. That's not a lot of time for his period of goodness.

Yes, that's a fair point. But Saddam had actually been the de facto ruler of Iraq for something like the previous decade as well. And although the Iran-Iraq war was horrendously costly in lives much like WWII, Iraqi society continued to be reasonably prosperous during that decade, partly because of the heavy financial subsidies from their Gulf Arab allies.

So under Saddam, the Iraqis had (I think) two economically good decades prior to the invasion of Kuwait.

Posted by RKU | October 8, 2007 7:41 PM

The main task is not creating opportunities, but removing obstacles.

Pity the Bush administration considered the infrastructure Lewis' praised as one of the obstacles to be removed...

Posted by Peter Bautista | October 8, 2007 9:56 PM

Umm, Saddam invaded Iran in September 1980. This was done at the urging of the Carter administration? Whatever you say.

Posted by y81 | October 8, 2007 10:04 PM

As predictions by Bernard Lewis go, this one's my favourite (full article at http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008768):

"In Islam, as in Judaism and Christianity, there are certain beliefs concerning the cosmic struggle at the end of time--Gog and Magog, anti-Christ, Armageddon, and for Shiite Muslims, the long awaited return of the Hidden Imam, ending in the final victory of the forces of good over evil, however these may be defined. Mr. Ahmadinejad and his followers clearly believe that this time is now, and that the terminal struggle has already begun and is indeed well advanced. It may even have a date, indicated by several references by the Iranian president to giving his final answer to the U.S. about nuclear development by Aug. 22. This was at first reported as "by the end of August," but Mr. Ahmadinejad's statement was more precise.

What is the significance of Aug. 22? This year, Aug. 22 corresponds, in the Islamic calendar, to the 27th day of the month of Rajab of the year 1427. This, by tradition, is the night when many Muslims commemorate the night flight of the prophet Muhammad on the winged horse Buraq, first to "the farthest mosque," usually identified with Jerusalem, and then to heaven and back (cf Koran XVII.1). This might well be deemed an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and if necessary of the world. It is far from certain that Mr. Ahmadinejad plans any such cataclysmic events precisely for Aug. 22. But it would be wise to bear the possibility in mind."

Posted by Khaled | October 8, 2007 10:40 PM

"As someone who is at the beginning stages of making a life in the Near Eastern studies zone of academia, I think it's worth saying that Bernard Lewis was widely considered to be antiquated and out-of-date even in the early 1960s. He's one of those people who seems to have had some kind of mind-melting experience when he was in his 20s and has ceased to learn anything since. I really wonder while he is still famous."

I always thought it was nothing more than trying to find the smart conservative in Middle Eastern Studies. Coming more from a an Asian Studies background, I'm rather surprised how much of a dearth of good writing by conservative specialists on the Middle East that exists. There are good conservative writers on Chinese history and politics in the US, for example. I think a big reason is that Americans really never inherited with real lasting power the idea that we should be the imperial successors in China to Britain (in part because Britain never controlled most of China) like we did in the Middle East. After all, Lewis is a British conservative.

Posted by Reality Man | October 9, 2007 12:37 AM

That the last chapter on the Iraq war is yet to be written is something most would agree regardless of political persuasion. Whether that will result in an outcome Lewis and others envisaged or not is a different matter but maybe we can wait a while before writing its history.

Posted by Lionel | October 9, 2007 8:55 AM