NEW YORK — Bernard Lewis, a noted Princeton scholar on the Middle East, said that prolonging an attack on Iraq would only make matters more dangerous for the United States.
"There is greater danger in inaction," he said Saturday at the New Yorker magazine festival.
Lewis said Saddam Hussein is more dangerous now than he was five years ago and more dangerous than he was in the Persian Gulf war, referring to Iraq's attempts to acquire weapons of mass destruction.
In response to whether the United States should go it alone and attack Iraq with or without an international coalition of support, Lewis said the United Nations was an inadequate organization.
"I don't share your respect for the UN," he said. "It is totally inept to solve major problems."
More than 200 people crowded a lounge at the Princeton Club to listen to Lewis, a professor emeritus in Near Eastern studies.
After Sept. 11, Lewis was consulted by the Bush administration and found himself on the best-seller list for "What Went Wrong," a book that looks at how the Middle East has confronted Western dominance during the past several centuries.
The Islamic world is a society with a great sense of history and one that does not think ethnically or territorially, Lewis said.
"Islam is a religion; West is a compass point," he said.
After its supremacy in the Middle Ages, Lewis said something went wrong with Islamic society and it began to fall behind the West. It lost external and internal battles, and many Muslims eventually became "pupils of the West," he said.
Lewis said the Islamic world tried to understand what went wrong. Islamic countries like Turkey and Iran first tried to answer the question by looking inward, but they failed to come up with a sufficient explanation so they began to look to the rest of the world for an antagonist.
"This is the prevalent mood in much of the Islamic world," Lewis said. "Multiply the feeling in Europe by about a factor of 1,000."
Economic disparities have affected the Middle East on the most basic familial, regional and societal levels, he said. Turkey was successful at modernizing itself, but Turkey, along with Iran, never came under Western imperialism.
In the rest of the Middle East, Lewis said there are two groups of countries. The first maintains friendly relations with the United States, but its population blames the United States for installing corrupt political regimes. The second group of countries is led by passionately anti-American statesmen while their masses look to the United States for liberation.
Former President George Bush Sr. called on the Iraqi people to rise against Hussein, but after the swift U.S. attack in 1991, Lewis said the United States cut a deal that shortchanged Iraqis.
"We sat and watched as he destroyed the rebel groups," which left a bitter taste with many Iraqis, Lewis said.
Though Iraqis may be more reluctant now to a call to arms, Lewis said he still believes there is popular support within the country.
"All I get from my talks with Iraqis," Lewis said, "is they are ready and willing . . . to rise against Saddam."
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