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The Foreigner’s Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq by Fouad Ajami Free Press. 400 pp. $26.00 Reviewed by Victor Davis Hanson The last year or so has seen several insider histories of the American experience in Iraq. Written by generals (Bernard Trainor’s Cobra II, with Michael Wood), reporters (George Packer’s The Assassins’ Gate), or bureaucrats (Paul Bremer’s My Year in Iraq), each undertakes to explain how our enterprise in that country has, allegedly, gone astray; who is to blame for the failure; and why the author is right to have withdrawn, or at least to question,...

Somewhere in his book, Fouad Ajami describes the war in Iraq as "an orphan in the court of public opinion." The reason is that these days even some of those who had campaigned in favour of the war now sound apologetic or even critical. In January 2003 the war was enjoyed the support of 77 per cent of Americans and received enthusiastic endorsement in the US Congress and media. Today, that support is down to 29 per cent with both the Congress and the media tempted by a growingly critical posture. Ajami, however, has no doubt that the war was...

The Foreigner's Gift. The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq. By Fouad Ajami. Born to a Shiite family in Lebanon, Ajami has written several important books about Middle Eastern political culture, including a classic on the Lebanese Shiites, "The Vanished Imam." He supported the removal of Saddam Hussein, and his extraordinary level of access in Washington is reflected in "The Foreigner's Gift," which recounts many conversations he had in Iraq while shadowing American officials or traveling with close American allies like Chalabi ------------------------ For Ajami, the foreigner's gift is, in the first instance, the removal of dictatorial rule...

At a time when more than half of the American public believes the Iraq war has not made the United States safer, and nearly two-thirds says it is not worth fighting anymore, one needs a good deal of intellectual courage to describe the war as "noble." But then, Fouad Ajami, a professor of Middle East studies at Johns Hopkins University, has never shied away from speaking his mind, even if it meant digressing from the received wisdom. He did so for the first time some 25 years ago in "The Arab Predicament," a scathing indictment of pan-Arabism, and has been...