In a largely unremarked interview with the Washington Examiner on 17 May 2012, before his selection as Romney's running-mate, Paul Ryan fielded a range of questions about the economy, the federal budget, the possibility of getting the nod from Romneyland, entitlements, tax reform et cetera. Of significance to me was a portion of his response to a query regarding his foreign-policy experience, a leading question intended to allow Ryan to present his qualifications for the office of Vice President. Here's the relevant portion:
Q: Among a VP’s duties, are being ready to be President, making decisions on foreign policy and so forth. You’ve been a member of the House for – your’re in your 14th year. You have to deal with this somewhat, but how do you keep up with what’s going on in Afghanistan and Syria and Mexico?
Ryan: I go there.
Q: What do you read?
Ryan: I go there. I read. I mean I’m a big Bernard Lewis fan. I’ve read all of Bernard Lewis’ books, and I read a lot of his books on this topic are. I formed the Middle East Caucus in early 2000s. On Ways and Means, which is a trade committee, I was point guy on the MEFTA. This is an arcane idea. We used to like doing trade agreements. And the MEFTA is the Middle East Free Trade Area Initiative, which is to create, we believe – and this was a good idea back in the Bush Administration. Get free trade agreements with these moderate Muslim countries, to integrate our economies. You have to require rule of law, women’s rights, you know, enforceable contracts. Yeah, but it’s been languishing, so I worked on the Moroccan Agreement, the Jordanian Agreement, the Omani Agreement, the Bahraini Agreement. I negotiated all the implementing legislation on that with the Democrats. So I spent a lot of my time over my career, traveling to the Middle East. That’s probably where most of my travels have gone. I was in Afghanistan last December; I’ve been there a few times. I spent a lot of time reading about the military, reading up on foreign policy.
Some thoughts, after the orange mesmeric device...
Now, there are any number of useful critiques one could apply to Ryan's remarks here. His highlighting of his involvement with MEFTA and bilateral trade agreements, for instance, could lead to a fecund discussion of the persistence of Modernization Theory in U.S. foreign policy, the form of which for Ryan, Romney and the GOP generally vis-à-vis North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia seems to me inextricably linked to the archaic view of modernization proffered by Daniel Lerner in The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East (1958). I'll save that theoretical discussion, I think, for a later diary...
What struck me immediately in Ryan's response was his invocation of Bernard Lewis and his claim, undoubtedly an exaggeration, to have read all of Lewis' books. In the historiography of twentieth-century Middle Eastern Studies, Lewis is a looming figure. Since the late 1960s, but especially in the wake of 9/11, Lewis has been the foremost "public intellectual" articulating the viewpoint that the tensions and conflicts between the West and the Islamic world is, at root, cultural and that Islam is maladapted if not antithetical to modernity. Lewis' What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response (2002) is in many ways a fundamental neoconservative / neoimperial text.
Lewis was Bush the Younger's court historian, and Bush was reported to tote a well-worn copy of What Went Wrong? gifted to him by Condoleezza Rice. He was friend, confidant, mentor and / or intellectual succor to the entire cast of Bush' misfit toys: Rove, Abrams, Ajami, Rice, Perle, Wolfowitz, Cheney and even Chalabi. Indeed, in an interview on Meet The Press (16 March 2003) three days prior to the invasion of Iraq, Cheney cited Lewis as an eminent authority:
I firmly believe, along with, you know, men like Bernard Lewis, who’s one of the great, I think, students of that part of the world, that strong, firm U.S. response to terror and to threats to the United States would go a long way, frankly, towards calming things in that part of the world.
(Lewis has in recent years attempted to rewrite his advocacy for the invasion of Iraq, but nobody is buying. He was at the forefront of the "they'll greet us as liberators" nonsense, and his publication record of pro-invasion op-eds belies his revisionism.)
Ryan's admitted passion for Lewis' take on the Middle East is a glimpse into the master narratives with which Ryan views the region. Lewis is the intellectual foundation for neoconservative attitudes toward and misadventurism in the Middle East.
And you thought that Ayn Rand was rubbish...