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| Baghdad 2003, erupting. Photo by Robert Gauthier/AP. |
Fouad Ajami, the scholar of Middle Eastern studies who explained Arabs and Muslims to the Bush administration, famously informing Vice President Cheney in 2002 that if American troops were to liberate Iraq from the rule of Saddam Hussein, Baghdad and Basra would "erupt in joy", died yesterday after a battle with cancer, at 68.
He quickly realized after the invasion that something was not quite right: Iraqis, he was saying in November 2003, were just too contradictory, longing for modernization and rejecting it at the same time:
