The gift that keeps on spinning: Fouad Ajami predicted that American troops would be welcomed as liberators. You would never guess from his new book

The Foreigner's Gift By Fouad Ajami Free Press, $26.00

The promise and the predicament of Fouad Ajami's new book are eatly encapsulated in one of its opening scenes. It is the summer of 2005, and a friend of the author's, a minister in the transition government of Iraq, has invited Ajami along with him to an audience with the most influential man in the country: Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. Most Americans couldn't pick Sistani out of a police line-up, much less describe his role. And yet, as Ajami rightly argues, it is Sistani more than any terrorist, military commander, or elected politician in the country--who has used his power to decide the fate of Iraq at several critical junctures over the past three years.

Sistani is a jurist, an authority on Islamic law who runs the prestigious seminary in the holy city of Najaf. In his role as a maria al-taqlid, a "source of emulation," he is a living exemplar of the spiritual values that almost every Iraqi Shiite holds dear. That means that he commands the passionate loyalty of the majority of Iraq's population (most of whom, of course, are Shiites). And yet he has never sought out the media or courted the crowd. As Ajami writes, "I was not prepared for the simplicity of Sistani's house; it was a few steps removed from the shops, in the middle of an ordinary alleyway." Inside, the furniture seems to consist primarily of floor cushions; there is no air conditioning, quite a significant omission in those parts. Finally the Grand Ayatollah makes his appearance, strikingly affable in contrast to the severe public countenance that stares out of posters around the country. But he gets straight to the point with his visitors: "The country was in the throes of a decisive fight over a new constitution," writes Ajami, "and Sistani's message to the man of the government was unambiguous. 'I want you to do everything you can to bring our Sunni Arab brothers into the fold.'" Sistani then presses for a change in the election laws to ensure that the Sunnis are given a greater share of power. "'You are the elected government; the people voted for you; they went to the polls under mortar rounds.'"

It's a remarkable encounter, and Ajami's account of it shows him at his best the American public intellectual uniquely equipped, by background and learning, to explain the intricacies of Arab politics to American readers. The offspring of a prominent Lebanese Shiite family, Ajami is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the editorial board of Foreign Affairs, and the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies. He is also well-entrenched in the mainstream media, as a commentator for US. News & Worm Report and CBS, and as a frequent contributor to the op-ed pages. As for this book, The Foreigner's Gift is his account of six trips he has taken to Iraq since the beginning of the occupation. Ajami's aim here is to limn the ambiguities and contradictions of "American Iraq," that extraordinary experiment in "liberal imperialism" in the Middle East that began in the spring of 2003. It should be said that he often delivers. He has an enviable gift for charting those invisible lines of clan, tribe, and faction that structure the Arabic-speaking world. His chapter on the feuds and alliances among the great Shiite families of Iraq should be required reading for all American soldiers and policy-makers.

And yet, rather more importantly, this book reveals itself to be a remarkable study in schizophrenia, one that mingles blindness and acuity, clarity and obfuscation in almost equal measure. Ajami has the capacity to tell us some very important truths about Iraq because he is so intimately familiar with many of the political and cultural currents that lie beneath the country's bloody turmoil. But he also happens to be deeply and personally implicated in the policies he's describing--though you could easily read this entire book without ever figuring it out.

Just take that Iraqi government minister, the friend who brings Ajami along on the visit to Sistani. His name is Ahmad Chalabi. Yes, exactly, that Ahmad Chalabi. His is a persistent presence in this book, and at one point rather far into the narrative Ajami presents us with a long and eloquent defense of the man who made a name for himself as the Pentagon's favorite Iraqi. That Ajami feels such sympathy with the head of the Iraqi National Congress (INC) should not come entirely as a surprise. Chalabi, like Ajami, is the scion of Shia notables in his homeland who ended up making it big in America.

Still, if there's one thing that the story of the Iraq war should have made manifest by now, it's that Ahmad Chalabi is a deeply problematic figure on multiple levels---to the extent that it's a bit hard to know where to begin. When I was reporting from Iraq in 2003, the only name I heard locals use for Chalabi was "Ahmad the Thief." It was a nickname motivated by the speed with which his INC cronies moved to take over choice real estate and business concessions as soon as they were installed in Baghdad with the help of the American invaders. Various polls have determined that Chalabi has some of the lowest popularity ratings of any politician in Iraq, and he was not reelected to parliament in last year's elections.