The only time Bernard Lewis can meet PW, his publicist says, is during a chauffeured drive from his home in Princeton to a friend's book party in Manhattan. Such a rock-star suggestion may seem unusual for an 88-year-old academic who retired from teaching in 1986, but Lewis is the eminent scholar of Middle Eastern affairs who's newest book, From Babel to Dragomans (Oxford), has just hit bookstore shelves following two bestsellers in the last three years. He also has the Pentagon's ear.
Not bad for a writer whose first book, The Origins of Ismailism (W. Heffer & Sons, 1940), had a printing of 500 copies and took 20 years to sell out. Lewis has been studying the Middle East for seven decades, since entering London University's School of Oriental Studies in 1933. But it was only after September 11, 2001, when Americans went looking for explanations, that he registered on the public's radar. Readers bought up copies of What Went Wrong? (Oxford, 2001), The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (Random House, 2003), and Lewis has been on a nonstop treadmill of writing columns, giving interviews and making public appearances ever since. "I have been busier than at any time since the 31st of August, 1945," he tells PW, after settling into his car's tan leather seat. "That was when I left His Majesty's Service and returned to the university." The London-born don, who finished his Ph.D. at the outbreak of World War II, returned to teach just as boys who had skipped university to fight were coming back in droves.
Today, Lewis's views are widely sought on the conflict in Iraq as well as on what he sees as the wider clash between the Muslim world and the West. Following Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, Dick Cheney, then secretary of defense, invited many Middle East scholars to the Pentagon. "I was rather fortunate in that on the major issues I turned out to be right while a lot of my colleagues turned out to be wrong," Lewis says. "I told them that I thought it would be quick and easy, and it turned out to be quick and easy." Lewis had learned informally from his friend Turgut Ozal, the president of Turkey, something most intelligence services had failed to uncover: Iraqi forces were deserting over the border at an unseemly rate. Lewis's prescience earned him a trip back to Washington immediately after 9/11, by which time Dick Cheney was vice president. Richard Perle, a former assistant secretary of defense, is among the professor's Pentagon admirers.
Lewis resists offering much comment on the current occupation of Iraq, pleading that as a historian he must wait for all the facts to come to light. He grumbles that things are "being messed up," but says he remains cautiously optimistic about Iraq's future. But he quickly comes to the defense of Ahmad Chalabi, the scandal-plagued leader of the Iraqi National Congress who strongly urged the U.S. to overthrow Saddam Hussein and was a favorite of the Bush administration. Chalabi's swift fall from grace was punctuated in May, when U.S. and Iraqi forces raided his Baghdad headquarters, and intelligence officials suggested he had passed U.S. secrets to Iran. "This spy story is utter nonsense," says Lewis, who knows Chalabi personally. In his view, it demonstrates only that the Iranians were trying to get Chalabi in trouble.
Lewis, while not quite fitting any political label himself—there is too much context and nuance in his writing for that—has provided the Bush administration with intellectual support for regime change in Iraq and for its policies in the Middle East in general. He was one of the first to draw a straight line from al-Qaeda to Saddam Hussein. In his column "We Must Be Clear," published in the Washington Post only days after 9/11 and included in From Babel to Dragomans, Lewis suggested that ending terrorist attacks emanating from the Middle East would require a firm stand against the region's dictators. The "dearest wish" of Iraq's neighbors, he wrote, "is certainly to see [Saddam Hussein] removed and replaced by a less menacing regime." But those neighbors would only support U.S. policy, Lewis went on, if the United States showed absolute certainty in its resolve.
As for the question of links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, Lewis pooh-poohs the often-repeated notion that Saddam the secularist and Osama the religious zealot would never have gotten together. "Even if there were differences between them, one overcomes these differences against a common enemy," he says. The clamor for evidence, he seems to suggest, is beside the point, since the strategic reasons for a U.S. invasion were clear.
Before the driver helps him out of the car on Manhattan's Upper East Side, Lewis asks PW if his snappy red necktie is straight. It is. Later tonight he will return to Princeton, and the next morning he has to catch an early flight to Chicago. He has two books still under contract, one to Random House/Modern Library and the other, on Islam and democracy, to Oxford. When asked whether he expects his pace to slow down in the near future, Lewis says he doubts it. "It's likely to continue because the struggle isn't over yet. There will be more."
