Arabs on Pan-Arabism

American interests in Iraq, including the affair over prisoner abuses, require us to understand the difference in Iraqis, Egyptians, Jordanians, Algerians, and other Arab states according to the indispensable Fouad Ajami. Writing in this morning's WSJ ($), Ajami calls our difficulty in interpreting political realities in the Middle East the "curse of pan-Arabism."

His account of our reaction to Abu Ghraib is sobering, though not alarmist. But he's emphatic that taking the Alan Alda approach to manhood -- always having to say you're sorry -- places us on the road to self-defeat. Here are a few of the best paragraphs, as the piece is available only for a charge.

Of President Bush's apology to Jordan's King Abdullah II, Ajami writes:

"Peculiar, that apology -- owed to Iraq's people, yet forwarded to Jordan. We are still held captive by Pan-Arab politics. We struck into Iraq to free that country from the curse of the Arabism that played havoc with its politics from its very inception as a nation-state. We had thought, or implied, or let Iraqis think, that a new political order would emerge, that the Pan-Arab vocation that had been Iraq's poison would be no more."

He also condemns our inexplicable dispatch of the Algerian UN lackey Lakhdar Brahimi to Iraq:

"It stood to reason (American reason, uninformed as to the terrible complications of Arab life) that Mr. Brahimi, 'an Arab,' would better understand Iraq's ways than Paul Bremer. But nothing in Mr. Brahimi's curriculum vitae gives him the tools, or the sympathy, to understand the life of Iraq's Shiite seminaries; nothing he did in his years of service in the Arab league exhibited concern for the cruelties visited on the Kurds in the 1980s. Mr. Brahimi hails from the very same political class that has wrecked the Arab world. He has partaken of the ways of that class: populism, anti-Americanism, anti-Zionism, and a preference for the centralized state. . . . No messenger more inappropriate could have been found if the aim was to introduce Iraqis to the ways of pluralism."

Finally, Ajami sheds light on the so-called Arab mind, which (he charges) we consistently misread:

"[T]here is cunning aplenty in [the Arab] world, and an unerring eye for the follies of great foreign powers. The Arabs can read through President Bush's stepping back from his support for Ariel Sharon's plan for withdrawal from Gaza. There are amends to be made for Abu Ghraib, and those are owed the people of Iraq. Yet here we are paying the Palestinians with Iraqi coin. The Palestinians will not be grateful for our concessions; and they are to be forgiven the only conclusion they will draw. Those concessions have already been taken as the compromises of an America now in the throes of self-flagellation."

Prof. Ajami teaches at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, located in Washington, D.C. That's only a short drive from the White House, and I'll bet he'd be willing to pay for the gas.