Love of the Land: The Trouble with Proxy Wars

The Trouble with Proxy Wars

Michael J. Totten
michaeltotten.com
02 May '10

My friend and colleague Lee Smith, author of the terrific new book The Strong Horse, is having a civil but important argument with our mutual acquaintance and colleague Andrew Exum at the Center for a New American Security. I've agreed to publish Lee's response here, not because I want to pick on Andrew—whom I like personally and whose work I appreciate even when we don't agree with each other—but because Lee presents a compelling and cogent argument in favor of fighting the Syrian and Iranian governments instead of their proxies in Iraq and Afghanistan. ....


Over at “Abu Muqawama,” Andrew Exum, whom Michael and I know from Beirut, has had some interesting things to say recently about my book, The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations. Andrew, as some readers will know, is an analyst and researcher at the Washington DC-based think-tank, Center for a New American Security, where he contributed to formulating the Obama administration’s counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan. Andrew writes that I chose not to do a Q&A with him because I knew he “would not endorse the book whole-heartedly,” but the truth is that I wrote the book in the hopes of having many arguments over the issues I discuss in it. Accordingly, I wanted to use some of the issues Andrew raises with my book, and some of the differences I have with his position, to illuminate larger concerns regarding the US’s role in the region and the current state of US regional strategy.

In his critical appraisal of my book, Andrew writes that the strong horse is not a uniquely Arab phenomenon. I do not disagree with him. Indeed the strong horse is a feature common across cultures and historical periods. However, this is not the case in the contemporary United States where, as I write in my introduction, “we are among the very few people in history who have been able to live our daily lives free, relatively speaking, from violence and the fear of violence…[I]t is difficult for us to see that our form of political organization makes us not the norm but a privileged exception, the beneficiaries of a historical anomaly.” The point I was making is that it is not the Arabs who are the exception, but Americans. I had thought I had made that point clear enough, but perhaps the problem is that Andrew is just plain uncomfortable with the idea of the strong horse, especially insofar as it requires punishing one’s enemies and rewarding one’s friends.

For instance, Andrew writes of how he had once asked my opinion concerning what sort of advice he might give to US policymakers in the event they were to solicit his recommendations on Lebanon. I suggested he tell them that we should bomb Syrian targets, including the Presidential Palace in Damascus. To me, the prospect of the gilded, gaudy residence of a man responsible for so much death, suffering and repression in ruins was a cheery one indeed, a prospect that apparently left Andrew flummoxed.

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Love of the Land: The Trouble with Proxy Wars