Hubris, Amateurs Spell Tragedy in Middle East

Neoconservatives and the Bush administration now concede that misjudgments combined with hubris and ideological zeal ruined what could have been a liberating American project in Iraq.

Yet they keep doing it.

The current issue of the New Yorker magazine includes the disturbing example of one Jared Cohen, a member of the State Department policy planning staff who functions as a primary adviser to Secretary of State Rice on how to win the hearts and minds of young Muslims.

In tales shared more voluminously in his book, "Children of Jihad: A Young American's Travels Among the Youth of the Middle East," Mr. Cohen writes that in his travels to the region, he discovered that Arab youths share many traits with their American counterparts: boozing, beach parties, a predilection for McDonald's hamburgers, and a fraternity-like love of dope.

More ominously, Mr. Cohen has been tasked with supplying policy ideas, based on his discoveries, on how to build new alliances with Muslim youths in the Greater Middle East.

We've done this before — mistaking the Westernized fringes of Muslim societies, including the few who speak to their interlocutors in elegant English, for the foundation of soft, sandy alliances. Using similar scholarship, pundits have declared that Iran is ready to overthrow the mullahs. A few examples of how Mr. Cohen, the policy staff "expert," accumulated his many pearls of wisdom:

• In Iran, he evades his official escorts to sneak into underground parties where young Iranians "make alcohol in their bathtubs." He finds that the drug use is "really not different from a frat party" back home in America.

• In Lebanon, Mr. Cohen sees multi-sectarian beach parties as a sign of hope — if Christian, Muslim, Druze, and members of Hezbollah can party together in bikinis, 30-year-old civil wars could be sorted out through a kind of alliance of the scantily clad youth.

• In Syria, he is amazed to discover a 10-year-old phenomenon: Syrian youth frequent Internet cafes and use Bluetooth to flirt and date, and some of them even solicit gay rendezvous.

The foreign policy adviser plows on, dining with Hezbollah operatives at a McDonald's — the inference being that a McDonald's-loving terrorist is the ticket to an East-West dialogue.

At the Mia-Mia Palestinian Arab refugee camp, Mr. Cohen meets with Hamas operatives, daringly asking what they would do to a Jew. (They answer that they would cut off his head, whereupon he "reveals" that he is a Jew and is pleasantly surprised to find they are kind of gracious about it.) Palestinian Arabs have a number of shortcomings, but after 60 years of warring with the Jews, not knowing that Cohen is a Jewish surname is not one of them.

I don't mean to pick on a 26-year-old Middle East expert but to question the whole approach to making policy in the region.

To do the job that has to be done there, we need true Middle East experts, of the caliber of professor Bernard Lewis, and not self-obsessed adventurers.

Building on wishful thinking is how Iraq was misconfigured with the unlamented Paul Bremer III and his band of amateur nincompoops, who ran the reconstruction with plenty of hubris. The result was an insurgency, ethnic wars, and a bad rap for democracy.

These are old lessons of Western management in empires. Napoleon Bonaparte failed in his armed invasion of Egypt, but French education, culture, and laws have endured there and spread onto the wider Arab world ever since. Adventurers are another story. Another intrepid Middle East policy adviser, the British lieutenant-colonel T.E. Lawrence, roamed the Arabian Peninsula as a representative of the British Empire but ended up confusing his mission with making "better Arabs" in his own fantasy image.

"El Awrence," as the Arabs spun his name, lost control of his Arab revolt, which ended in an Ottoman jail in Damascus.

As she navigates her remaining service at the State Department and in the Middle East, Ms. Rice must remember where following the Bremers and Lawrences has taken us.

ymibrahim@gmail.com