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Bernard Lewis, the renowned historian of the Middle East who celebrated his 90th birthday in 2006, has provided much of the ideological ammunition for the Bush administration policy of Middle East transformation and global war on terror. A favorite of neoconservatives, Lewis, born in England and a naturalized U.S. citizen since 1982, was bestowed in 2007 with the annual Irving Kristol award from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

Previous recipients of AEI's yearly award include Dick Cheney, Robert Bork, David Packard, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ronald Reagan, Michael Novak, Clarence Thomas, and Norman Podhoretz. According to a Wall Street Journal account of the awards ceremony, Lewis "described Muslim migration to Europe as an Islamic attack on the West and defended the Crusades as 'a late, limited and unsuccessful imitation of the jihad' that spread Islam across much of the globe." Lewis gave a "ringing endorsement of the ill-fated Crusades," and "he made the point that the Crusades, as atrocious as they were, were nonetheless an understandable response to the Islamic onslaught of the preceding centuries, and that it was ridiculous to apologize for them" (Wall Street Journal, March 8, 2007).

This was not the first time Lewis referred to the Crusades as a necessary but unsuccessful attempt to limit the power of Islamic civilization. Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, in a Wall Street Journal article, Lewis wrote: "The Crusades could more accurately be described as a limited, belated and, in the last analysis, ineffectual response to the jihad" (Wall Street Journal, September 27, 2001).

Writing in the Weekly Standard, AEI resident fellow Reuel Marc Gerecht, using a term from Shiite Muslim legal scholarship, described Lewis as "the marja-e-taqlid, 'the source of emulation,' the scholar to whom on the great questions one must make reference" (Weekly Standard, June 5, 2006). There's little doubt that his engagingly written books about Middle East history and politics have placed Lewis in the thick of scholarly and political debates about the Middle East. Unfortunately, because of the influence of the neoconservatives in the first George W. Bush term and the president's own ideological proclivities, Lewis' apocalyptic views not only entered the public debate, but also propped up a disastrous Middle East foreign policy.

An excellent analysis of the political relevance of Lewis in the post-9/11 period can be found in Ian Buruma's essay "Lost in Translation" published by the New Yorker in 2004. Buruma introduced his essay with this description of Lewis: "A mentor to Henry (Scoop) Jackson in the early nineteen-seventies, and a friend to several Israeli Prime Ministers, Lewis has been especially sought after in Washington since September 11. Karl Rove invited him to speak at the White House. Richard Perle and Dick Cheney are among his admirers. Lewis has championed his friend Ahmed Chalabi for a leading role in Iraq. And his best-selling book What Went Wrong?, about the decline of Muslim civilization, is regarded in some circles as a kind of handbook in the war against Islamist terrorism. Lewis, in short, is a thoroughly political don, and if anyone can be said to have provided the intellectual muscle for recent U.S. policy toward the Middle East it would have to be him" (New Yorker, June 14, 2004).

Echoing other critics, Buruma said that Lewis' "writings give the impression that British and French imperialism, U.S. interventions, and Israeli oppression of Palestinians are simply alibis for the region's political failures." Critics charge that Lewis, in his focus on precolonial history as a prism for interpreting Middle East affairs, downplays the role of recent foreign intervention in shaping current events.

Michael Hirsh, a senior editor at Newsweek, sharply critiqued Lewis in Washington Monthly(November 2004), saying, "America's misreading of the Arab world—and our current misadventure in Iraq—may have recently begun in 1950." That year Lewis went to Turkey and, while studying, had a "vision of a secularized Westernized Arab democracy that casts off the medieval shackles of Islam and enters modernity at last." As Hirsh noted, the administration's main rationale for its occupation of Iraq, after failing to find weapons of mass destruction, was what the Wall Street Journal called the "Lewis Doctrine." But instead of resulting in "a Western polity, reconstituted and imposed from above like [Ataturk] Kemal's Turkey, that is to become a bulwark of security for America and a model for the region," Hirsh observed that the so-called Lewis Doctrine, as applied to Iraq by the occupation, has been the "passing from a secular to an increasingly radicalized and Islamicized society."

While few close observers of Middle East affairs dispute the notion that a secularized, democratic Middle East is desirable, critics note that the circumstances of the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire were sui generis to Turkey, and that factors such as the creation of Israel, post-World War II foreign intervention in Middle East affairs (especially regarding oil), Cold War politics, and the failings of Middle East nationalist governments, have greatly complicated Middle Eastern political evolution. Moreover, critics take broad exception to arguments by Lewis and his neoconservative admirers that outside forces, mainly the United States with its democratization and regime-change strategies, can be effective, credible agents of democratic political transformation.

The term "clash of civilizations" is usually associated with conservative scholar Samuel Huntington, author of The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order. However, Lewis initially introduced the phrase into the public discourse. In Huntington's 1996 book, which has been widely read as a lens for analyzing the 9/11 attacks, the author refers to a key passage in a 1990 essay by Lewis entitled "The Roots of Muslim Rage": "This is no less than a clash of civilizations—that perhaps irrational but surely historic reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both."

By interpreting the 9/11 attacks as part of a clash of civilization that dates a thousand years or more, Lewis helped shape the war on terrorism as a war against Islamists. Hirsh asks, "Did Lewis' misconceptions lead the Bush administration to make a terrible strategic error?... If Bernard Lewis's view of the Arab problem was in error, then America missed a chance to round up and destroy a threat—al Qaida—that in reality existed only on the sick margins of the Islamic world."

Lewis has developed close ties with the neoconservative political camp in the United States since the 1970s. AEI's Gerecht observed that Lewis "has been for years a man of public affairs. In 1970, Richard Perle, as a young staffer for Washington Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson, observed Lewis giving a speech, and was astonished by his eloquence and historical reach."

Lewis has advised the administrations of both Bush Senior and Bush Junior. On May 1, 2006, Cheney delivered a speech honoring Lewis at the World Affairs Council in Philadelphia. Cheney recalled that Lewis had come to Washington to advise the then-defense secretary on a "way forward in the Middle East" soon after Iraq had invaded Kuwait. "I decided that day that this was a man I wanted to keep in touch with, and whose work I should follow carefully in the years ahead," said Cheney. "Since then we have met often, particularly during the last four-and-a-half years, and Bernard has always had some very good meetings with President Bush" (Office of the Vice President, May 1, 2006).

In 1998, Lewis signed a letter sent by the Committee for Peace and Security in the Middle East (which was organized by the Center for Security Policy) to President Bill Clinton that called for a "comprehensive political and military strategy for bringing down Saddam and his regime." Other signatories, most of whom also supported the then-newly created Project for the New American Century, included such figures as Perle, John Bolton, Donald Rumsfeld, Frank Gaffney, Paul Wolfowitz, William Kristol, Robert Kagan, Elliott Abrams, Douglas Feith, and Zalmay Khalizad.

On September 19-20, 2001, the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, an advisory board, met in closed session to consider military action against Iraq. Chairman Richard Perle invited Lewis to attend the meeting along with Ahmed Chalabi, president of the U.S.-funded Iraqi National Congress, the key Iraqi exile group that for years had advocated Saddam Hussein's ouster and that had cozy ties with Perle and other high-profile neoconservatives. Lewis told the board that the United States should support democratic reformers in the Middle East, "such as my friend here, Ahmed Chalabi" (Vanity Fair, May 2004.)

Lewis, an emeritus professor at Princeton University, has written 20 books on the Middle East, including TheArabs in History, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, The Muslim Discovery of Europe, What Went Wrong?, The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Modern Middle East, and The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and the Unholy Terror.

In addition to his recent books, Lewis also publishes op-eds in conservative publications, notably the Wall Street Journal, where he has made the case for war against Iraq and for a hardline approach to Iran. After 9/11, he wrote a series of Wall Street Journal op-ed pieces, including "A War of Resolve" and "Time for Toppling," which called for a regime-change strategy in Iraq,