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

Book by Smith Lee

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), and Syria (1979–1982), and the Palestine Liberation Orga­nization’s revolt against the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (1968–1971); the genocidal bouts of ethnic and sectarian cleansing, like Saddam’s campaigns against the Kurds and Shia, Hafez al­Assad’s mass slaughter of Sunnis in Hama in 1982, and the Sudanese government’s campaigns against Christians and animists in the south (1981–2004) and now against non-Arab Muslims in Darfur. In all of these, the United States played, at most, a secondary role, and was often little more than a bystander.

···Nor is this a new phenomenon. It’s true, of course, that outside actors—including the United States and the Soviet Union and, before them, the European colonial powers—have helped shape the history of the Middle East. But ultimately their actions and policies have been less important than we imagine. If we think differently—if we think that we are to blame for what is wrong with the Middle East— it’s because of two things: our own narcissism and the tendency of Arab nationalists to blame outside forces for the problems of their region. For decades now, the United States has been a convenient foil for those who believe that only the machinations of an evil outsider could keep the Arabs from becoming a formidable political, eco­nomic, and military bloc, just as we have become a convenient foil for Islamists seeking to explain why the Muslim world has fallen so far behind the West. But in both cases, focusing on the United States is a way of overlooking what’s really happening. In this book, I shift that focus back to where it belongs: on the conflicts and divisions within the Middle East itself.

···There are some, of course, who deny that these conflicts among Arabs and Muslims matter. For most of the past century, in fact, the mainstream American interpretation of the Middle East has seen it as a monolithic body, made up of people of similar backgrounds and similar opinions. (This misconception is frequently vented through the tidy journalistic cliché known as “the Arab street,” which pre­sumes that, say, a Lebanese Christian and an Iraqi Shia necessarily hold the same point of view as an Egyptian Sunni.) More important, this is how Arab nationalists also see the world. Arab nationalism is a political and cultural doctrine holding that the Arabs, by virtue of a shared language, constitute a separate and single people. It is a tribal pact raised to the supranational level: in projecting unity, it seeks to obscure local enmities and keep Arabs from making war against each other. Arab nationalists have hoped to coalesce the energies of dis­parate factions and concentrate their hostilities onto a common, dis­tant enemy.

···It is somewhat paradoxical that even while Arab nationalism, and then Islamism, has taken the United States to be its main foil for over half a century, all during that time the mainstream American interpretation of the Arabic-speaking Middle East has been Arab nationalist, from the American missionaries who first ventured into the Holy Land to the oil companies and the State Department, from the academy to editorial boardrooms and foreign bureaus. The United States has paid a steep price for misconstruing the region like this, but at one time our face-value acceptance of Arab nationalism had at least the advantage of being in line with American interests.

···Arab nationalism is a Sunni Arab viewpoint. The doctrine’s foundations are in a language considered holy by most Middle East­erners, and a history that holds the Prophet of Islam to be the great­est of all Arab heroes, and thus it is a sop to the status quo power of the Arabic-speaking Middle East that has ruled the region for more than a millennium, the Sunnis. Since the mid-1930s, the United States’ most vital interest in the Middle East has been energy, and as the world’s largest known reserves of oil are in Saudi Arabia, Wash­ington has been guided by its need to accommodate a Sunni regime whose influence is proportionate to its wealth. America’s Sunni­centrism has also been shaped by cultural and historical factors, but it is mostly the political and economic rationale that has given us our view of the region, a fact that allows us to derive a general principle: the Great Powers’ view of the Middle East is shaped by their own interests.

···Even before the discovery of oil, for instance, the British looked at the region much the same way as we have, as a Sunni fiefdom. With the British Empire comprising enormous numbers of Sunnis from Egypt and Palestine to Iraq and the Persian Gulf all the way to the crown’s prize holding in India, London tinkered little after World War I with the skeletal remains of the Ottoman Empire’s administra­tive structure. The Ottomans’ Sunni Arab deputies were left in charge to protect and advance British interests, even in Iraq, where the Sunnis were, and are, clearly a minority. The French, however, saw the Middle East differently, partly because they were in competition with the British, and also because their Middle Eastern holdings included significant minority populations in conflict with the Sun­nis, like the Maronites in Lebanon, the Alawis in Syria, and the Berbers in Algeria, communities that the French used to serve their own interests.

···In the wake of 9/11, Washington found that the Middle East looked more like the way the French had conceived of it than how the British had ruled it. The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq changed the balance of power by pushing aside a Sunni strongman and empower­ing a national majority, the Shia, which, since they are also a regional minority, altered the nature of U.S. strategy. As descriptions of the Middle East go hand in hand with national interests, we need a way to understand the region in line with the reality now exposed,...