Fouad Ajami, a Middle East scholar who rallied support for the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 and advised policy-makers in the Bush administration, has died at the age of 68.
The Hoover Institution at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, where Mr Ajami was a senior fellow, said in a statement that he died of cancer yesterday.
In the period leading up to the Iraqi invasion, The New York Times reported that Mr Ajami advised national security adviser Condoleeza Rice and Paul Wolfowitz, then the deputy secretary of defence.
In a 2002 speech, Vice President Dick Cheney invoked him as predicting that, after liberation, Iraqis would greet the American military with joy.
Mr Ajami's writings include some 400 essays on Arab and Islamic politics and US foreign policy.
He is survived by his wife.