Fouad A. Ajami (; September 18, 1945 – June 22, 2014) was a MacArthur Fellowship winning, Lebanese-born American university professor and writer on Middle Eastern issues. He was a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Ajami was an outspoken supporter of the Bush Doctrine and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which he believed to have been a "noble war" and a "gift" to the people of Iraq. Early life and education Ajami was born in Arnoun, a rocky hamlet in the south of Lebanon into a Shia Muslim family. His Shia great-grandfather had immigrated to Arnoun from Tabriz, Iran in the 1850s. In Arabic, the word "Ajam" means "non-Arab" or "non-Arabic-speaker"; specifically in this context, it means "Persian" or "Persian-speaker." Ajami arrived in the United States in the fall of 1963, just before he turned 18. He did some of his undergraduate work at Eastern Oregon State College (now Eastern Oregon University) in La Grande, Oregon. He did his graduate work at the University of Washington, where he wrote his thesis on international relations and world government, and earned a PhD. Career Academia In 1973 Ajami joined the politics department of Princeton University. He made a name for himself there as a vocal supporter of Palestinian self-determination. In 1980, the School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins University named him director of Middle East Studies. He joined the Hoover Institution in 2011. Government Ajami was an advisor to United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as well as a friend and colleague of Paul Wolfowitz. Journalism Ajami was a frequent contributor on Middle Eastern issues and contemporary international history to The New York Times Book Review, Foreign Affairs, The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, as well as other journals and periodicals. He was also a contributor and close friend to Anderson Cooper of CNN. He was also a frequent guest on Fox News Channel's "America's News Headquarters w/ Uma Pemmaraju" Television Ajami frequently appeared on PBS, CBS, CNN and Fox News. Books In "The Fate of Nonalignment," an essay in the Winter 1980/81 issue of the journal Foreign Affairs, Ajami outlined how the third world has fared in a context of nonalignment in post Cold war politics. In 1980, he accepted an offer from Johns Hopkins University to become director of Middle East Studies at their international relations graduate program in Washington, D.C.: the Paul H. Nitze