Trouble Area

AMERICAN intervention in the Middle East will cause “massive unrest throughout the Arab world.” The international coalition built to support it won’t hold, because the U.S. declines to condemn Israel—and Muslim countries can’t “withstand this sort of double standard.” The actual war won’t go well, either: “It won’t be easy to force them out without resorting to bloody hand-to-hand combat. It’s my guess that they’ll fight and fight hard, even if you bomb them with B-52s.”

These dire warnings ought to give President Bush pause, as they come not from ordinary scholars of the Middle East but from men who would seem to be scholars among scholars: the current president of the Middle East Studies Association (R. Stephen Humphreys of the University of California at Santa Barbara) and a former one (Rashid Khalidi of the University of Chicago). Yet they were talking to a different President Bush, and their ten-year-old alarms dealt specifically with the Gulf War. They were, as it happens, wrong on each count: There was no anti- American revolution throughout the Arab world, the coalition against Saddam Hussein stood strong, and Iraqi soldiers presented little resistance to Operation Desert Storm.

About the Author

John J. Miller

John J. Miller, a former national correspondent for National Review, is the director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College. He is the author of A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America.

Featured Tags

AMERICAN intervention in the Middle East will cause “massive unrest throughout the Arab world.” The international coalition built to support it won’t hold, because the U.S. declines to condemn Israel—and Muslim countries can’t “withstand this sort of double standard.” The actual war won’t go well, either: “It won’t be easy to force them out without resorting to bloody hand-to-hand combat. It’s my guess that they’ll fight and fight hard, even if you bomb them with B-52s.”

These dire warnings ought to give President Bush pause, as they come not from ordinary scholars of the Middle East but from men who would seem to be scholars among scholars: the current president of the Middle East Studies Association (R. Stephen Humphreys of the University of California at Santa Barbara) and a former one (Rashid Khalidi of the University of Chicago). Yet they were talking to a different President Bush, and their ten-year-old alarms dealt specifically with the Gulf War. They were, as it happens, wrong on each count: There was no anti- American revolution throughout the Arab world, the coalition against Saddam Hussein stood strong, and Iraqi soldiers presented little resistance to Operation Desert Storm.

About the Author

John J. Miller

John J. Miller, a former national correspondent for National Review, is the director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College. He is the author of A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America.