of this anti-Americanism as the "road rage" of a thwarted Arab world – the congenital condition of a culture yet to take full responsibility for its self-inflicted wounds. There is no need to pay excessive deference to the political pieties and givens of the region. Indeed, this is one of those settings where a reforming foreign power's simpler guidelines offer a better way than the region's age-old prohibitions and defects. Ajami retained a positive view of the war three years later. In a 2006 book on the invasion and its aftermath, he described it as a noble effort, and argued that despite many unhappy consequences, it was too soon to write it off as a failure. Vice President Cheney cited Ajami again in an October 21, 2007 speech to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, stating, "We have no illusions about the road ahead. As Fouad Ajami said recently, Iraq is not yet 'a country at peace, and all its furies have not burned out, but a measure of order has begun to stick on the ground.'" Eight days after U.S. President Barack Obama took office, a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece by Ajami called Obama a "messenger of the old, settled ways," claimed that the George W. Bush administration's diplomacy had had "revolutionary impact," and chided Obama for not praising the Iraq War. Ajami credited the Egyptian Revolution and Tunisian revolution to the Iraq War and Bush's advocacy of democracy: He also stated, however, that In June 2011, Ajami wrote an article for The New Republic arguing that the U.S. troops should remain in Iraq, writing that "the United States will have to be prepared for and accept the losses and adversity that are an integral part of staying on, rightly, in so tangled and difficult a setting." On June 13, 2011 he wrote in the Wall Street Journal about the unrest in Syria that "The mask of the Assad regime finally falls..." Death On June 22, 2014, Ajami died from prostate cancer at a summer home in Maine, aged 68. Awards Ajami was a 1982 winner of a five-year MacArthur Prize Fellowship in the arts and sciences. In 2006, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Bush, and the Bradley Prize, and in 2011 he earned the Benjamin Franklin Award for public service, and the Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Opinion Journalism. Memberships Ajami