Bush of Arabia

By FOUAD AJAMI
January 8, 2008; Page A21

It was fated, or "written," as the Arabs would say, that George W. Bush,
reared in Midland, Texas, so far away from the complications of the
foreign world, would be the leader to take America so deep into Arab and
Islamic affairs.

This is not a victory lap that President Bush is embarking upon this
week, a journey set to take him to Egypt, Israel, the Palestinian
territories, the Saudi Kingdom, Kuwait, Bahrain and the United Arab
Emirates. Mr. Bush by now knows the heartbreak and guile of that region.
After seven years and two big wars in that "Greater Middle East," after
a campaign against the terror and the malignancies of the Arab world,
there will be no American swagger or stridency.


But Mr. Bush is traveling into the landscape and setting of his own
legacy. He is arguably the most consequential leader in the long history
of America's encounter with those lands.

Baghdad isn't on Mr. Bush's itinerary, but it hangs over, and propels,
his passage. A year ago, this kind of journey would have been
unthinkable. The American project in Iraq was reeling, and there was
talk of America casting the Iraqis adrift. It was then that Mr. Bush
doubled down -- and, by all appearances, his brave wager has been
vindicated.

His war has given birth to a new Iraq. The shape of this new Iraq is
easy to discern, and it can be said with reasonable confidence that the
new order of things in Baghdad is irreversible. There is Shiite primacy,
Kurdish autonomy in the north, and a cushion for the Sunni Arabs -- in
fact a role for that community slightly bigger than its demographic
weight. It wasn't "regional diplomacy" that gave life to this new Iraq.
The neighboring Arabs had fought it all the way.

But there is a deep streak of Arab pragmatism, a grudging respect for
historical verdicts, and for the right of conquest. How else did the
ruling class in Arabia, in the Gulf and in Jordan beget their kingdoms?






In their animus toward the new order in Iraq, the purveyors of Arab
truth -- rulers and pundits alike -- said that they opposed this new
Iraq because it had been delivered by American power, and is now in the
American orbit. But from Egypt to Kuwait and Bahrain, a Pax Americana
anchors the order of the region. In Iraq, the Pax Americana, hitherto
based in Sunni Arab lands, has acquired a new footing in a Shiite-led
country, and this is the true source of Arab agitation.

To hear the broadcasts of Al Jazeera, the Iraqis have sinned against the
order of the universe for the American military presence in their midst.
But a vast American air base, Al Udeid, is a stone's throw away from Al
Jazeera's base in Qatar.

There is a standoff of sorts between the American project in Iraq on the
one side, and the order of Arab power on the other. The Arabs could not
thwart or overturn this new Iraq, but the autocrats -- battered,
unnerved by the fall of Saddam Hussein, worried about the whole
spectacle of free elections in Iraq -- survived Iraq's moment of
enthusiasm.

They hunkered down, they waited out the early euphoria of the Iraq war,
they played up the anarchy and violence of Iraq and fed that violence as
well. In every way they could they manipulated the nervousness of their
own people in the face of this new, alien wave of liberty. Better 60
years of tyranny than one day of anarchy, goes a (Sunni) Arab maxim.

Hosni Mubarak takes America's coin while second-guessing Washington at
every turn. He is the cop on the beat, suspicious of liberty. He faced a
fragile, democratic opposition in the Kifaya (Enough!) movement a few
years back. But the autocracy held on. Pharaoh made it clear that the
distant, foreign power was compelled to play on his terms. There was
never a serious proposal to cut off American aid to the Mubarak regime.

In the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf, a new oil windfall has rewritten
the terms of engagement between Pax Americana and the ruling regimes. It
is a supreme, and cruel, irony that Mr. Bush travels into countries now
awash with money: From 9/11 onwards, America has come to assume the
burden of a great military struggle -- and the financial costs of it all
-- while the oil lands were to experience a staggering transfusion of
wealth.






Saudi Arabia has taken in nearly $900 billion in oil revenues the last
six years; the sparsely populated emirate of Abu Dhabi is said to
dispose of a sovereign wealth fund approximating a trillion dollars. The
oil states have drawn down the public debt that had been a matter of no
small consequence to the disaffection of their populations. There had
been a time, in the lean 1990s, when debt had reached 120% of Saudi GDP;
today it is 5%. There is swagger in that desert world, a sly sense of
deliverance from the furies.


The battle against jihadism has been joined by the official religious
establishment, stripping the radicals of their religious cover. Consider
the following fatwa issued by Sheikh Abdulaziz bin Abdallah al-Sheikh,
the Mufti of the Kingdom -- the highest religious jurist in Saudi Arabia
-- last October. There is evasion in the fatwa, but a reckoning as well:

"It has been noted that over the last several years some of our sons
have left Saudi lands with the aim of pursuing jihad abroad in the path
of God. But these young men do not have enough knowledge to distinguish
between truth and falsehood, and this was one reason why they fell into
the trap of suspicious elements and organizations abroad that toyed with
them in the name of jihad."

Traditional Wahhabism has always stipulated obedience to the ruler, and
this Wahhabi jurist was to re-assert it in the face of freelance
preachers: "The men of religion are in agreement that there can be no
jihad, except under the banner of wali al-amr [the monarch] and under
his command. The journey abroad without his permission is a violation,
and a disobedience, of the faith."

Iraq is not directly mentioned in this fatwa, but it stalks it: This is
the new destination of the jihadists, and the jurist wanted to cap the
volcano.

The reform of Arabia is not a courtesy owed an American leader on a
quick passage, and one worried about the turmoil in the oil markets at
that. It is an imperative of the realm, something owed Arabia's young
people clamoring for a more "normal" world. The brave bloggers, and the
women and young professionals of the realm, have taken up the cause of
reform. What American power owes them is the message given them over the
last few years -- that they don't dwell alone.





True to the promise, and to the integrity, of his campaign against
terror, Mr. Bush will not lay a wreath at the burial place of Yasser
Arafat in Ramallah. This is as it should be. Little more than five years
ago, Mr. Bush held out to the Palestinians the promise of statehood, and
of American support for that goal, but he made that support contingent
on a Palestinian break with the cult of violence. He would not grant
Arafat any of the indulgence that Bill Clinton had given him for eight
long years. It was the morally and strategically correct call.

The cult of the gun had wrecked the political life of the Palestinians.
They desperately needed an accommodation with Israel, but voted, in
early 2006, for Hamas.


The promise of Palestinian statehood still stood, but the force, and the
ambition, of Mr. Bush's project in Iraq, and the concern over Iran's bid
for power, had shifted the balance of things in the Arab world toward
the Persian Gulf, and away from the Palestinians. The Palestinians had
been reduced to their proper scale in the Arab constellation. It was
then, and when the American position in Iraq had been repaired, that Mr.
Bush picked up the question of Palestine again, perhaps as a courtesy to
his secretary of state.

The Annapolis Conference should be seen in that light: There was some
authority to spare. It is to Mr. Bush's singular credit that he was the
first American president to recognize that Palestine was not the central
concern of the Arabs, or the principal source of the political maladies.

The realists have always doubted this Bush campaign for freedom in Arab
and Muslim lands. It was like ploughing the sea, they insisted. Natan
Sharansky may be right that in battling for that freedom, Mr. Bush was a
man alone, even within the councils of his own administration.

He had taken up the cause of Lebanon. The Cedar Revolution that erupted
in 2005 was a child of his campaign for freedom. A Syrian dominion built
methodically over three decades was abandoned in a hurry, so worried
were the Syrians that American power might target their regime as well.
In the intervening three years, Lebanon and its fractious ways were to
test America's patience, with the Syrians doing their best to return
Lebanon to its old captivity.






But for all the debilitating ways of Lebanon's sectarianism, Mr. Bush
was right to back democracy. For decades, politically conscious Arabs
had lamented America's tolerance for the ways of Arab autocracy, its
resigned acceptance that such are the ways of "the East." There would
come their way, in the Bush decade, an American leader willing to bet on
their freedom.



"Those thankless deserts" was the way Winston Churchill, who knew a
thing or two about this region, described those difficult lands. This is
a region that aches for the foreigner's protection while feigning horror
at the presence of strangers.

As is their habit, the holders of Arab power will speak behind closed
doors to their American guest about the menace of the Persian power next
door. But the Arabs have the demography, and the wealth, to balance the
power of the Persians. If their world is now a battleground between Pax
Americana and Iran, that is a stark statement on their weakness, and on
the defects of the social contract between the Sunnis and the Shiites of
the Arab world. America can provide the order that underpins the
security of the Arabs, but there are questions of political and cultural
reform which are tasks for the Arabs themselves.

Suffice it for them that George W. Bush was at the helm of the dominant
imperial power when the world of Islam and of the Arabs was in the wind,
played upon by ruinous temptations, and when the regimes in the saddle
were ducking for cover, and the broad middle classes in the Arab world
were in the grip of historical denial of what their radical children had
wrought. His was the gift of moral and political clarity.

In America and elsewhere, those given reprieve by that clarity, and
single-mindedness, have been taking this protection while complaining
all the same of his zeal and solitude. In his stoic acceptance of the
burdens after 9/11, we were offered a reminder of how nations shelter
behind leaders willing to take on great challenges.

We scoffed, in polite, jaded company when George W. Bush spoke of the
"axis of evil" several years back. The people he now journeys amidst
didn't: It is precisely through those categories of good and evil that
they describe their world, and their condition. Mr. Bush could not
redeem the modern culture of the Arabs, and of Islam, but he held the
line when it truly mattered. He gave them a chance to reclaim their
world from zealots and enemies of order who would have otherwise run
away with it.


Mr. Ajami teaches at Johns Hopkins University. He is author of "The
Foreigner's Gift: The Americans, the Arabs, and the Iraqis in Iraq,"
(Free Press, 2006), and a recipient of the Bradley Prize.