Another piece in the Iraq puzzle

In a review of books about the Iraq war (New York Post, April 16), Richard Lowry writes: “Iraq was much more primitive than advertised. [Italics added.] In all the talk of how talented and urbanized the population was, there was very little made of the sheiks and imams, the truly important power brokers.”

Ok, let’s have a memory test. Does everyone remember how, in the lead-up to the war, it was constantly reiterated in the media how the Iraqis were a modern, secular, highly educated, middle-class, technically adept people, and therefore would readily take to democracy? Where did this false picture come from?

Think: Who is the great Islam expert who is known for getting his perspective on Islam from the secular, educated Muslim elites with whom he socializes and by whom his ego is constantly stroked? Who is the great Islam expert who, based on his conversations with those elites, assured the Bush administration that the whole Islamic world was eagerly desirous to adopt democracy?

Answer: The brilliant, but vain and deluded, Bernard Lewis. The most overrated scholar in history. The man who has gotten it wrong—catastrophically wrong—on every issue that has mattered.

I’ll bet he was the source of the universally disseminated false report prior to the war that the Iraqis were a modern, technically sophisticated people.

And it’s not just I (who am no Islam scholar) who say this. In the November 2004 Washington Monthly, Michael Hirsch wrote:

Iraq, of course, does not seem to be heading in that direction. Quite the contrary: Iraq is passing from a secular to an increasingly radicalized and Islamicized society, and should it actually turn into a functioning polity, it is one for the present defined more by bullets than by ballots. All of which raises some important questions. What if the mistakes made in Iraq were not merely tactical missteps but stem from a fundamental misreading of the Arab mindset? What if, in other words, the doyen of Middle Eastern studies got it all wrong?

A growing number of Middle Eastern scholars who in the past have quietly stewed over Lewis’s outsized influence say this is exactly what happened. To them, it is no surprise that Lewis and his acolytes in Washington botched the war on terror. In a new book, provocatively titled The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization, one of those critics, Columbia scholar Richard Bulliet, argues that Lewis has been getting his “master narrative” about the Islamic world wrong since his early epiphanic days in Turkey—and he’s still getting it wrong today.

According to Georgie Anne Geyer writing in The American Conservative, Lewis quite literally made his personal aquaintances with middle-class Muslims the basis of his support for democratization. In a conference at the American Enterprise Institute in October 2002, she writes:

[A]sked why he thought Iraq could be democratized, Princeton Islamic scholar Bernard Lewis repeated what he said at each of these meetings: “I had four graduate students from Iraq and they were very impressive.”

As much as I disrespect Lewis, I find it impossible to believe that that is a full and fair quote of him. It’s simply too ridiculous that in response to the question, why did he think Iraqi democratization would work, he simply answered, “I had four Iraqi graduate students and they were very impressive.” I think that Geyer, who is in the camp of the neocon- and Israel-haters centered at The American Conservative, is making the quote look worse than it really was, in order to make Lewis look even worse than he deserves.

(For a detailed examination of how Geyer has misrepresented statements by Israeli leaders, see this article. Three additional critiques of her anti-Israel journalism are linked here.)

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 20, 2006 12:14 PM | Send