Strong Horse : Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations

by Smith, Lee

• ISBN13: 9780385516112
• ISBN10: 0385516118
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-01-12
• Publisher: Doubleday

Summary

Wanting to know why September 11 happened, journalist Lee Smith moved to Cairo. There, he discovered that the standard explanation-a clash of East and West led to the attacks-was simply not the case. As Smith outlines in The Strong Horse, the problems of the Middle East have little to do with Israel, the United States, or the West in general. The strife exists within the Arab world itself. Through clear-eyed analysis, Smith explodes the many myths permeating Americans' understanding of the Arab world: colonialism spurred the region's ongoing turmoil; Arab liberalism is waiting for U.S. intervention; technology and democracy can be transforming. In response to these untruths, Smith offers what he terms the Strong Horse Doctrine-that Arabs want to align themselves with strength, power, and violence. Given America's ongoing interest in the Middle East, Smith says America needs to be the strong horse in order to reclaim its role there, and only by understanding the nature of the region's ancient conflict can we succeed.

Author Biography

LEE SMITH is a Middle East correspondent for The Weekly Standard. He has written for Slate, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and a variety of Arab media outlets. He is also a visiting fellow of the Hudson Institute. A native of New York, he lives in Beirut.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. xi
Introduction: The Clash of Arab Civilizations	p. 1
The Strong Horse: Tribes	p. 17
"An Arab Regardless of His Own Wishes": The Idols of Arab Nationalism	p. 28
"No Voice Louder Than the Cry of Battle": Arab Nationalism and Anti-Americanism	p. 44
The Muslim Reformation	p. 63
"The Regime Made Us Violent": The Islamists' War Against the Muslims	p. 82
Bin Laden, the Father of Arab Democracy	p. 103
The Schizophrenic Gulf	p. 121
The Battle of Ideas: The Conqueror of Darkness and the Arab Voltaires	p. 141
"Your Children or Your Guns": The Cedar Revolution and the Fight for the Future of Lebanon	p. 161
The Capital of Arab Resistance: Damascus's Regime of Terror	p. 183
Middle East Cold War and the Israeli Strong Horse	p. 201
Conclusion	p. 217
Notes	p. 225
Index	p. 231
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

INTRODUCTION: The Clash of Arab Civilizations


It was hard not to take 9/11 personally. I was raised in New York City, so when those planes flew into the World Trade Center, it felt like a direct attack on my family and friends and myself, on the neighborhoods where I’d gone to school, played, and worked, and on the Brooklyn block where I was living that beautiful summer day when the sky darkened with the ashes of other New Yorkers. It occurred to me more than once during the time I spent living and traveling in the Middle East after 9/11 that had I lived most of my life in some other American city or village, had New York not been my hometown, I might not have moved to the region some few months after to try to figure out what had happened. This book is an account of my time in the Middle East since then, and my understanding of it. My conclusion, without racing too far ahead, is that we all took 9/11 too personally.

···The spectacular nature of the event was cause enough to see it as a declaration of war on America, so it is hardly surprising that Amer­icans across the political spectrum came to think of it in the context of a “clash of civilizations.” Even those on the left who disdained the phrase nonetheless employed a version of the conceit when explain­ing that the death and destruction were by-products of the legiti­mate grievances that Arabs had with the United States, which was finally just a way of delivering a verdict for the other side in the same civilizational war.

···I see it a little differently. I believe that 9/11 was evidence of a clash all right, but the clash that led to 9/11 was less the conflict between the West and Islam than the conflict between the Arabs themselves. In that sense, strange as it sounds, the attacks on New York and Washington were not really about us.

···To be sure, a significant part of the Middle East, including Osama bin Laden, is at war expressly with the United States. And there are genuine points of conflict between the lands of Islam and the West, including a religious rivalry that dates back to the appear­ance of the Quran and myriad regional confrontations to which the United States’ strategic interests make us party. But these conflicts are just part of a system of wars that involves the entire Middle East. We are now incontrovertibly a part of these wars, but their causes and sources are to be found in the region itself, and not at the lower end of Manhattan, or even in the halls of the Pentagon. September 11 is the day we woke up to find ourselves in the middle of a clash of Arab civilizations, a war that used American cities as yet another venue for Arabs to fight each other.



···If that assertion sounds implausible, it’s because Americans are accustomed to thinking of themselves, in one way or another, as the source of the tumult in the Middle East. And that feeling was magnified after 9/11, when the continued eruptions of violence in the region made it hard for observers, from ordinary Americans to inter­national affairs specialists, not to assume that the Bush administra­tion was mostly, if not wholly, responsible for what was happening. But the problems of the region will not fade now that Barack Obama is in the White House, because they did not start when George W. Bush arrived there. Consider just a few of the clashes that preceded Bush’s tenure: the intrastate Arab crises like Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait and Syria’s occupation of Lebanon (1990–2005); the civil wars that wracked North Yemen (1962–1970) and Lebanon (1975–1990); wars between the state and non-state actors, like the Islamist insurgencies that ravaged Algeria (1991–2002), Egypt (1981–1997), an

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Excerpted from The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations by Lee Smith
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