This tendency became more pronounced over the ensuing decades. Henry Kissinger, President Nixon’s Secretary of State, saw Arabists new and old as too attached to the Arab world and not close enough to the realpolitik of the Cold War. Then, with the Reagan administration continuing to centralize policy-making throughout the 1980s, Arabists had less and less influence. As Bodine explains, there are three kinds of diplomatic appointments: first, career State Department diplomats; second, non-career diplomats and academics who act as policy planners; and third, political ambassadors—ideologically correct appointees parachuted into foreign postings from outside the State Department. Within the State Department there exists an internal think tank called Policy Planning, which the Reagan and Bush Senior administrations used as a Trojan Horse into which they put non-career operatives and political ambassadors. From the Policy Planning springboard, such political appointees often received top-tier diplomatic assignments.
By the end of the 1980s, almost all of the old-style Arabists were history. Foreign officers in the Middle East assumed increasingly technical jobs—involving drugs, terrorism, famine relief, etc.—and were often under suspicion merely for speaking Arabic. Francis Fukuyama, then a member of Policy Planning, condescendingly maintained that “Arabists not only take on the cause of the Arabs but also the Arabs’ tendency for self-delusion.” Years later, reflecting on the current situation and its historical policy origins, Edward Said, the influential Palestinian-American critic of US Middle East policy, identified the missed opportunity. Writing in the Egyptian English weekly Al Ahram, Said took aim at Fukuyama’s legendary statement: “The idea that Arabists and Arab speakers, by learning the language, also learned the delusions of the Arabs...is a hallucinatory Orientalist delusion.”
If the charge that America’s Arabist diplomats are too well informed to be trusted seems absurd, the contention that their views are blinkered by the local elites with whom they associate does hold some water. But perhaps a greater problem is the middle-class culture and careerism of the US foreign service. Kaplan quotes an Arabist describing “the kind of guys who crammed for their Arabic exam in order to get a high point-rating but who couldn’t utter a phrase in the street.” These are the yes-men and women who parrot Washington’s views and who rarely leave the embassy. They serve the purposes of an adminstration that doesn’t want facts on the ground to interfere with foreign policy.
After the first Gulf War, complacency was only abetted by the temper of the times. Islamic fundamentalists, the mujahedeen, were aligned with the United States against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda was not yet a global threat and Arabists, Policy Planning, and even Kaplan (writing in 1993) foretold an era of relative harmony with a quiescent “Arab street.” No one predicted 9/11. After the destruction of the World Trade Center, suspicion of the Arab world, which had begun in 1948 and accelerated in 1967, went full throttle. The monolithic enemy to replace Communism was now Islamic fundamentalism and its “safe house” was the Arab world.
Early in 2003, during the preparations for the invasion of Iraq, the US Department of Defense seized control of post-conflict and reconstruction matters through its Office of Special Plans. Working separately, the State Department prepared “The Future of Iraq Project—“a detailed prospectus created by the best Arabists and area experts available. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was given the authority to reject the blueprint and he did, relying instead on the fraudulent Ahmad Chalabi and his group of exiles, who told the White House what it wanted to hear. When Secretary of State Colin Powell tried to place Arabists in Iraq, Rumsfeld vetoed the moves. In the end, Powell got only fifteen Arabists into Iraq, and Bodine was one of them.
It was a pyrrhic victory. Bodine told me that her job, Coordinator for Post-Conflict Reconstruction for Central Governates in Iraq, was the hardest she had ever had. Her boss, Jay Garner, had to accept the few resources Rumsfeld granted him. Bodine had only two Arabists working for her. The Iraqi engineers she had assembled to get Baghdad’s electricity, sewage system, and roads in shape were not acknowledged by her Washington bosses. Her authorizations for engineers had to be sent to Washington for approval, and in many cases she never heard back. Bodine said that the few highly qualified State Department experts she knew of had been replaced by Pentagon-appointed neo-conservative loyalists.
On May 11, 2003, Bodine’s turn came. Though she was a seasoned Arabist who had served in Baghdad in the early 1980s and had directed an embassy under seige by Iraqi troops in Kuwait during the first Gulf War, she was dismissed. She has never received any explanation other than that she was needed back in Washington.
Little in Baghdad improved after Bodine’s departure. With the arrival of Paul Bremer, who replaced Jay Garner as head of the newly named civilian Coalition Provisional Authority (cpa), things got worse. According to Bodine, Bremer had “been out of State for fifteen years, had political links with the adminstration, and had no Middle East experience.” While it is now generally acknowledged that Bremer failed, little has changed. Journalist Nir Rosen, writing for the Asia Times, observed that in Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone, “congressional staffers put in six months to spice up their resumés, former military or State Department officials fish for contracts with General Electric or kbr after they finish their stint.” So much for Hogarth’s “dedicated men of special knowledge, in it neither for pay nor honours.”
Amid loud protests, Bremer’s non-Arabic-speaking administrators attempted to set up democratic local governments by selecting names from lists put forward by cpa-approved Iraqis. Bremer also tried to set up national elections in the same way, but the powerful Shia cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani forced him to back down. The political consultants were American, the research groups were American, the model of democracy was American. And it was all to be done fast, the American way. The Arabists had been replaced by suburban, corporate America, and the results were disastrous.
Bodine has never believed, as the State Department is often accused of believing, that democracy is not suited to the Arab world simply because radical Islamists would use it to seize power. She says that democracy has to be brought in slowly, not force-fed under pressure (as it is currently), so that new parties can compete with the radicals. Secondly, she emphasizes that there are indigenous traditions that operate on consensus—not the majority-rules approach of western electoral politics—that can be used as foundation stones for democracy.
