Rosner's Domain: Lee Smith on why the US should not "hazard its human and financial resources on democracy promotion in the Middle East"
Lee Smith
Shmuel Rosner
Rosner's Domain/JPost
07 April '10
Lee Smith's The Strong Horse is a "clear-eyed analysis" in which "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".
Smith is a Middle East correspondent for The Weekly Standard and also has written for Slate, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and a variety of Arab media outlets. I read his book (highly readable, entertaining, not too long, recommended!) and sent him a couple of questions:
1. You wrote that, "We took 9/11 too personally. The result is that we've come to see our multiple engagements in the Middle East - from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to our contentious relationship with Iran - in the framework of a clash between Western and Islamic civilization". Please explain to those readers who haven't yet read your book, how it is the "clash of Arab civilizations" that is the real cause for Middle East (and world) trouble?
Most of us are accustomed to looking at the region as a massive sea of some 300 million Arabs, and 9/11 suggested they were all squared off as one against the West. Thus, an Iraqi Shia and a Lebanese Christian presumably all share the same convictions, hopes and fears as a Sunni living in the Egyptian capital. This is not the case, a fact documented in the history of intra-Arab conflict: civil wars in Lebanon and Yemen; wars between regimes and their insurgent opponents in Egypt, Syria, Algeria, and Jordan; sectarian conflict in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. And yet despite all the bloodshed, the Arabs are not a warlike people, as the Lebanese historian Kamal Salibi told me, but are rather a feuding people. What keeps the Arabs from making total war against each other is in effect a tribal covenant: the purpose of Arab nationalism is to bind the Arabs as one in order to keep them from destroying themselves while projecting their enmity on an alien tribe. The two most popular targets, as we know, are Israel, and America. And so, as I write in the book, "What was extraordinary about the attacks on lower Manhattan and the Pentagon was not the carnage - certainly not compared to some of the most vicious intra-Arab campaigns over the last several decades - but that the Arabs had shifted the field of battle to the continental United States." 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 the Arabs to fight each other."
2. You write that "the Americans had taken the wrong side" in the Middle East "war of ideas". How so?
Since the Muslim reform movement of the 19th century, the central question in the Middle East's war of ideas has been whether or not Arabs and Muslims should accept the cultural values of the West.
(Read full post)
Rosner's Domain/JPost
07 April '10
Lee Smith's The Strong Horse is a "clear-eyed analysis" in which "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".
Smith is a Middle East correspondent for The Weekly Standard and also has written for Slate, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and a variety of Arab media outlets. I read his book (highly readable, entertaining, not too long, recommended!) and sent him a couple of questions:
1. You wrote that, "We took 9/11 too personally. The result is that we've come to see our multiple engagements in the Middle East - from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to our contentious relationship with Iran - in the framework of a clash between Western and Islamic civilization". Please explain to those readers who haven't yet read your book, how it is the "clash of Arab civilizations" that is the real cause for Middle East (and world) trouble?
Most of us are accustomed to looking at the region as a massive sea of some 300 million Arabs, and 9/11 suggested they were all squared off as one against the West. Thus, an Iraqi Shia and a Lebanese Christian presumably all share the same convictions, hopes and fears as a Sunni living in the Egyptian capital. This is not the case, a fact documented in the history of intra-Arab conflict: civil wars in Lebanon and Yemen; wars between regimes and their insurgent opponents in Egypt, Syria, Algeria, and Jordan; sectarian conflict in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Yemen. And yet despite all the bloodshed, the Arabs are not a warlike people, as the Lebanese historian Kamal Salibi told me, but are rather a feuding people. What keeps the Arabs from making total war against each other is in effect a tribal covenant: the purpose of Arab nationalism is to bind the Arabs as one in order to keep them from destroying themselves while projecting their enmity on an alien tribe. The two most popular targets, as we know, are Israel, and America. And so, as I write in the book, "What was extraordinary about the attacks on lower Manhattan and the Pentagon was not the carnage - certainly not compared to some of the most vicious intra-Arab campaigns over the last several decades - but that the Arabs had shifted the field of battle to the continental United States." 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 the Arabs to fight each other."
2. You write that "the Americans had taken the wrong side" in the Middle East "war of ideas". How so?
Since the Muslim reform movement of the 19th century, the central question in the Middle East's war of ideas has been whether or not Arabs and Muslims should accept the cultural values of the West.
(Read full post)
Love of the Land: Rosner's Domain: Lee Smith on why the US should not "hazard its human and financial resources on democracy promotion in the Middle East"
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