Long estract from the WSJ on Bernard Lewis's imopact on US ME policy. What strikes me is the gullability of the US leaders to his viewpoint, indicating that they have no other in depth sources of ME social understanding, and are basically under informed about the region.
After me terror attacks, White House
staffers disagreed about how to frame the
enemy, says David Frum, who was a speech-
writer for President Bush. One group be-
lieved Muslim anger was all a misunder-
standing-that Muslims misperceived
America as decadent and godless. Their so-
lution: Launch a vast campaign to educate
Muslims about America's true virtue. Much
of that effort, widely belittled in the press
and overseas, was quietly abandoned.
A faction led by political strategist Karl
Rove believed soul-searching over "why
Muslims hate us" was misplaced, Mr.
Frum says. Mr. Rove summoned Mr.
Lewis to address some White House staff-
ers, military aides and staff members of
the National Security Council. The histo-
rian recited the modern failures of Arab
and Muslim societies and argued that anti-
Americanism stemmed from their own in-
adequacies, not America's. Mr. Lewis also
met privately with Mr. Bush's national se-
curity adviser, Condoleezza Rice. Mr.
Frum says he soon noticed Mr. Bush carry-
ing a marked-up article by Mr. Lewis
among his briefing papers. A White House
spokesman declined to comment.
Says Mr. Frum: "Bernard comes with
a very powerful explanation for why 9/11
happened. Once you understand it, the
policy presents itself afterward."
His exposition and the policies it
helped set in motion heralded a decisive
break with the doctrine that prevailed
during the Cold War. Containment, Mr.
Kennan said, had "nothing to do with
outward histrionics: with threats or blus-
tering or superfluous gestures of outward
'toughness. '" It rested on the somber
calculation that even the most aggressive
enemy wouldn't risk its own demise by
provoking war with a powerful U.S.
The Lewis Doctrine posits no such ratio-
nal foe. It envisions not a clash of interests
or even ideology, but of cultures. In the Mid-
east, the font of the terrorism threat, Amer-
ica has but two choices, "both disagree-
able, " Mr. Lewis has written: "Get tough
or get out. " His celebration, rather than
shunning, of toughness is shared by sev-
eral other influential U. S. Mideast experts,
including Fouad Ajami and Richard Perle.
A central Lewis theme is that Muslims
have had a chip on their shoulders since
1683, when the Ottomans failed for the sec-
ond time to sack Christian Vienna. "Islam
has been on the defensive" ever since, Mr.
Lewis wrote in a 1990 essay called "The
Roots of Muslim Rage, " where he de-
scribed a "clash of civilizations, " a con-
cept later popularized by Harvard political
scientist Samuel Huntington. For 300
years, Mr. Lewis says, Muslims have
watched in horror and humiliation as the
Christian civilizations of Europe and
North America have overshadowed them
militarily, economically and culturally.
"The question people are asking is why
they hate us. That's the wrong question, "
said Mr. Lewis on C-SPAN shortly after the
Sept. 11 attacks. "In a sense, they've been
hating us for centuries, and it's very natu-
ral that they should. You have this millen-
nial rivalry between two world religions,
and now, from their point of view, the
wrong one seems to be winning."
He continued: "More generally... you
can't be rich, strong, successful and loved,
particularly by those who are not rich, not
strong and not successful. So the hatred is
something almost axiomatic. The ques-
tion which we should be asking is why do
they neither fear nor respect us?"
For Mr. Lewis and officials influenced
by his thinking, instilling respect or at least
fear through force is essential for Ameri-
ca's security. In this formulation, the cur-
rent era of American dominance, some-
times called "Pax Americana, " echoes ele-
ments of Pax Britannica, imposed by the
British Empire Mr. Lewis served as a young
intelligence officer after graduate school.
Eight days after the Sept. 11 attacks,
with the Pentagon still smoldering, Mr.
Lewis addressed the U. S. Defense Policy
Board. Mr. Lewis and a friend, Iraqi ex-
ile leader Ahmad Chalabi-now a mem-
ber of the interim Iraqi Governing Coun-
cil-argued for a military takeover of
Iraq to avert still-worse terrorism in the
future, says Mr. Perle, who then headed
the policy board.
A few months later, in a private dinner
with Dick Cheney at the vice president's
residence, Mr. Lewis explained why he
was cautiously optimistic the U. S. could
gradually build democracy in Iraq, say oth-
ers who attended. Mr. Lewis also held
forth on the dangers of appearing weak in
the Muslim world, a lesson Mr. Cheney ap-
parently took to heart. Speaking on NEC's
"Meet the Press" just before the invasion
of Iraq, Mr. Cheney said: "I firmly believe,
along with men like Bernard Lewis, who is
one of the great students of that part of the
world, that strong, firm U. S. response to
terror and to threats to the United States
would go a long way, frankly, toward calm-
ing things in that part of the world."
The Lewis Doctrine, in effect, had be-
come U. S. policy.
"Bernard Lewis has been the single
most important intellectual influence
countering the conventional wisdom on
managing the conflict between radical Is-
lam and the West, " says Mr. Perle, who re-
mains a close adviser to Defense Secre-
tary Donald Rumsfeld. "The idea that a
big part of the problem is failed societies
on the Arab side is very important. That is
not the point of view of the diplomatic es-
tablishment."
Mr. Lewis declined to discuss his official
contacts in Washington. When told his polit-
ical influence was a focus of this article, he
turned down an interview request. "It's still
too early, " he said. "Let's see how things
turn out" in Iraq. In speeches and articles,
Mr. Lewis continues to advocate assertive
U. S. actions in the Mideast, but his long-
term influence is likely to turn on whether
his neoconservative acolytes retain their
power in Washington in years to come.
Born in London in 1916, Mr. Lewis was
drawn to the study of history and foreign
languages by a deep curiosity about "what
things looked like from the other side, " he
said on C-SPAN in April. He earned under-
graduate and doctoral degrees in Mideast
and Islamic history from the School of Ori-
ental and African Studies at the University
of London, then spent five years working on
Mideast issues for British intelligence
during World War II.
Among other things, his wartime ser-
vice taught him the dangers of appease-
ment, he told a seminar at the University
of Toronto last spring. He said speeches
• by foes of war in Iraq reminded him of
the arguments of peace activists in the
1930s. "All I can say is thank God they
didn't prevail then, " he said. "If they
had, Hitler would have won the war and
the Nazis would be ruling the world."
In 1945, Mr. Lewis returned to the Uni-
versity of London as a professor, where
he earned renown in Ottoman and Turk-
ish history. He was lured to Princeton in
1974 and soon became a mentor to many
of those now known as neoconservatives.
Mr. Perle recalls hearing Mr. Lewis
speak in the early 1970s and inviting him
lo lunch with Mr. Perle's then-boss, the
ate Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson of Washi-
ngton. "Lewis became Jackson's guru,
nore or less, " says Mr. Perle. Mr. Lewis
ilso was an adviser to another Democrat,
he late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, when
llr. Moynihan was ambassador to the
Inited Nations in the 1970s. He formed
asting ties with several young Jackson
ind Moynihan aides who went on to ap-
ily his views to Iraq. Among them were
kill Wolfowitz, now deputy defense sec-
tary; Elliott Abrams, now National Se-
urity Council Mideast chief: and Frank
Jaffney Jr., a former Pentagon official,
hiking with Mr. Lewis, Mr. Perle says,
ras "like going to Delphi to see the ora-
ie."
Mr. Lewis retired from teaching in
1986 but has maintained ties with many
former students in high posts. One, Pen-
tagon analyst Harold Rhode, has played
prominent roles as Mr. Wolfowitz's ad-
viser on Islamic affairs, as a planner of
the Iraq occupation and as an aide to
Pentagon strategist Andrew Marshall.
Mr. Lewis dedicated his latest book, "The
Crisis of Islam, " to Mr. Rhode-who says
Mr. Lewis is "like a father to me."
Mr. Lewis is also close to government
circles in Israel and Turkey-non-Arab
lands he describes as the only successful
modern states in the region. He warmly
praises Kemal Attaturk, who made Turkey
a secular republic after World War I by sup-
pressing Islam. (He has also said the Otto-
man Turks'killingof up to 1. 5 million Arme-
nians in 1915 wasn't genocide but the bru-
tal byproduct of war. It was a stance for
which a French court convicted Mr. Lewis
in 1995 under France's Holocaust-denial
statute, imposing a token penalty. ) Israeli
experts say Mr. Lewis's contacts with Turk-
ish generals and politicians helped cement
Israeli-Turkish military ties in the 1990s.
Mr. Lewis became politically involved
with Israel by the mid-1970s, when he
wrote an article for the American Jewish
Committee publication Commentary. At a
time when Israel was dead-set against a
Palestinian state, he recommended that Is-
rael "test the willingness" of the Palestine
Liberation Organization to negotiate a two-
state solution to the conflict.
But Mr. Lewis also wrote that Palestin-
ian Arabs didn't have a historical claim
to a state, because Palestine hadn't ex-
isted as a country prior to British rule in
1918. Israeli leaders jumped on that part
of his thesis. The late Prime Minister
Golda Meir required her cabinet to read
the article, says Amnon Cohen of Hebrew
University in Jerusalem, who worked for
the West Bank military government. He
says Mrs. Meir summoned Mr. Lewis and
"they spoke for hours. Her aides tried to
end it, but Golda kept going and Bernard
didn't want to be rude. She was very
much in favor of his point" that Palestine
as a nation had never existed.
Mr. Lewis began spending months at
a time at the Dayan Center at Tel Aviv
University in the 1980s. He became the
confidant of successive Israeli prime min-
isters, including Ariel Sharon. Mr. Cohen
organizes an annual conference at He-
brew University in honor of Mr. Lewis's
birthday.
Mr. Wolfowitz took part by videocon-
ference in 2002. Signalling the adminis-
tration's acceptance of Mr. Lewis's pre-
scription for Iraq. Mr. Wolfowitz said:
"Bernard has taught how to understand
the complex and important history of the
Middle East, and use it to guide us where
we will go next to build a better world for
generations to come."
Mr. Lewis's work has many critics.
Some academics say Mr. Lewis's descrip-
tions of Arab and Muslim failures epito-
mize what the late Edward Said of Colum-
bia University dubbed "Oriental-
ism"-the shading of history to justify
Western conquest. Mideast historian
Juan Cole of the University of Michigan
praises Mr. Lewis's scholarly works ear-
lier in his career but says his more-popu-
lar writings of recent years tend to cari-
cature Muslims as poor losers, helpless
and enraged.
Mr. Cole is among those who say Mr.
Lewis's call for military intervention to
transform failed Muslim states risks mak-
ing the culture clash between Islamic
lands and the West worse. So far, they
say, Iraq looks more like a breeding
ground for terrorism than a showcase of
democracy-not surprising, they say,
given that the U. S. invaded an old and
proud civilization.
"Lewis has lived so long, he's man-
aged to live into an era when some peo-
ple in Washington are reviving empire
thinking, " says Mr. Cole. "He's never un-
derstood the realities of political and so-
cial mobilization and the ways they make
empire untenable."
Ilan Pappe of Haifa University says
Mr. Lewis's view that political cultures
can be remade through force contributed
to Israel's decision to invade Lebanon in
1982. "It took the Israelis 18 years, and
1, 000 soldiers killed, to abandon that
strategy, " Mr. Pappe says. "If the Ameri-
cans operate under the same assump-
tions in Iraq, they'll fail the way the Is-
raelis failed."
After Sept. 11, a book by Mr. Lewis
called "What Went Wrong?" was a best-
seller that launched the historian, at age
85, as an unlikely celebrity. Witty and a
colorful storyteller, he hit the talk-show
and lecture circuits, arguing in favor of
U. S. intervention in Iraq as a first step
toward democratic transformation in the
Mideast. Historically, tyranny was for-
eign to Islam, Mr. Lewis told audiences,
while consensual government, if not elec-
tions, has deep roots in the Mideast. He
said Iraq, with its oil wealth, prior Brit-
ish tutelage and long repression under
Saddam Hussein, was the right place to
start moving the Mideast toward an open
political system.
Audiences lapped it up. At the Har-
vard Club in New York last spring, guests
crowded the main hall beneath a huge
elephant head, sipping cocktails and wait-
ing for a word with the historian before
his speech. On a day when Baghdad was
falling to U. S. forces, one woman wanted
to know if the American victory would
make Arabs more violent. Mr. Lewis po-
litely deflected the question.
When the throng shifted, another in-
terrogator pushed forward, this one
clearly intent on the possible next phase
of America's remolding of the Mideast.
"Should we negotiate with Iran's ayatol-
lahs?" asked Henry Kissinger, drink in
hand.
"Certainly not!" Mr. Lewis re-
sponded.
Up on the podium, Mr. Lewis lam-
basted the belief of some Mideast experts
at the State Department and elsewhere
that Arabs weren't ready for democracy-
that a "friendly tyrant" was the best the
U. S. could hope for in Iraq. "That policy, "
he quipped, "is called 'pro-Arab.'"
Others, like himself, believe Iraqis
are heirs to a great civilization, one fully
capable, "with some guidance, " of demo-
cratic rule, he said. "That policy, " he
added with a rueful smile, "is called 'im-
perialism.'"
