"Writing in the New Republic on February 23, 1998, Ajami berated the Clinton Administration for failing to take harsher military action to unseat Saddam Hussein. The standoff with Saddam, he said, was unacceptable, even “dreary”—a telling word, as it epitomizes his impatience with sober policy, which George Orwell diagnosed in the 1940s as a characteristic affliction of intellectuals. The criterion for Ajami, as for many other champions of war, was that they were plain bored with containing Saddam. Bolder action was needed. America needed to prove its mettle in facing down the Arab tyrant. According to Ajami, “the Clinton administration will have to accept a burden dodged by those who waged Desert Storm: the remaking of the Iraqi state and the unseating of Saddam. We should be rid of the fears that paralyzed us in the past—the rise of the Shia, the fragmentation of Iraq. These are scarecrows.” Nor was this all. The Majid Khadduri Professor of Middle Eastern Studies assured his readers that “There is no likelihood that a regime as brutal as Saddam’s would emerge out of the rubble of a military campaign. There is no iron law of Shia radicalism, and the belief that a post-Saddam rule would be a satrapy of Iran misreads Iraq’s realities . . .” (thanks John)