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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’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. The region’s liberals, who were smitten with the West, said they should, but others said no. Men like the famous Muslim intellectual and activist Muhammad ‘Abduh, at one time the Sheikh of al-Azhar and the Mufti of Egypt, counseled Muslims to make use of the scientific and technological innovations of the West, but to reject the ideas and values underlying those products in order to preserve Islamic mores. So over the last hundred years, the Arabs have availed themselves of Western goods, from consumer electronics to military hardware, while disdaining the Western values that made the manufacture of those products possible. Many onlookers are curious as to why in the Arab world there are doctors who organize suicide bombings, and engineers who use machines to plot mass death and destruction. It is simply because the Arabs availed themselves of the science and technology associated with these professions, without also accepting the values that made these professions noble, values that Arabs associated with the West. And so the Bush administration, in pushing democracy on a society that is not now amenable to it, effectively argued that the Arabs did not need the cultural values that gave rise to the liberal democracies of the West. They asserted instead that all the Arabs needed were the techniques of “democracy” and its institutions – the ballot, parties, etc. – without any of the foundations that organically give rise to democracy. To pick the fruits of Western culture without nurturing its roots is not the Arab liberal position, but the Islamist one.
3. You write about the case of Lebanon in order to answer a very important question: is it possible “to revive Arab Liberalism”? Well – is it?
I think most people who study the Middle East cannot help but be deeply moved by the courageous example of Arab liberals like Taha Hussein, the Arab writer and activist to whom I devote part of a chapter. The Arab liberals, like all of us liberals everywhere, believe that there must be better ways to settle differences with your neighbors than through violence. As admirable as this principle is, it leaves liberals at a great disadvantage in the Middle East where liberalism is hung on a paradox: to get to that stage where it is possible to settle differences without immediate recourse to violence, someone has to kill the men who believe only in violence. Many in the region figured that the Americans might do it for them, and in Iraq, thousands of US soldiers gave their lives for this purpose. However, as is now obvious, that is not going to be enough. Throughout the region, it is still the men with guns – whether they are regimes like Syria or so-called non-state actors like Hezbollah – who set the tone and tempo of Arab political culture.
4. You write: “I give no credence to the idea that the Arab-Israel crisis is the region’s central issue”. But will Arab-Israeli peace make a difference?
Sure it would make a difference, but much less of a difference than, say, a resolution to the 1400-year-old conflict between Sunnis and Shia, or even a peaceful compromise between the Islamic Republic of Iran and its Sunni Arab rivals. Here is how I see the issue: it is part of the received opinion of policymakers around the world, especially in Washington and the capitals of Europe and sometimes Jerusalem as well, that a resolution to the Arab-Israeli conflict will empower Arab moderates and weaken radicals. Bizarrely, it never seems to have occurred to our political elites to look at the situation from the opposite end of the telescope: precisely because the conflict is an important instrument in the hands of radical forces, the men who are most willing to use violence have both the motive and the means to prevent the conflict from being resolved. Accordingly, I don’t see a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace anywhere on the near; or I’ll put it like this – first resolve all the outstanding issues between the Arabs themselves and achieving Arab-Israeli peace will seem like child’s play.
5. Here’s a set of short questions on the minds on most people dealing with Middle East affairs. Please answer briefly:
– Will Iran’s nuclear program be stopped?
Israel’s chief strategic concern is stopping Iran’s nuclear program, and while this should be Washington’s as well, we are more worried about Iraq and Afghanistan. Since US officials believe Iran would retaliate against our troops in the event of an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities and want to avoid such a scenario at all costs, the national interests of Israel and the US are in direct conflict. So, unless Israel is willing to run through the Obama administration’s red light – and I hope not only for the sake of Israel but also long-term US strategic interests that you are – I do not see anything else that will stop Iran from going nuclear.
– Will Iraq remain democratic after American withdrawal?
If Iran has the ability to hurt US troops in Iraq, they therefore have the ability to shape Iraq after our withdrawal, and they will. Presumably, Iran’s idea of Iraqi democracy means simply that the majority Shia rule, and that Tehran has many different Iraqi assets to choose from in order to secure Iranian interests.
– Will Afghanistan stabilize?
No. Not even the Taliban, or Pakistan’s intelligence services, can impose their will on the entirety of this strategically irrelevant pile of rocks that is Afghanistan.
– Is al-Qaeda still important?
Al Qaeda is the brand name that since 9/11 American officials and analysts have foolishly used to describe any Sunni militant with a gun and without a uniform. Bin Laden may be dead, and in any case he himself is not important. What remains important is what the Bush administration identified as the nexus where transnational terror groups like Al Qaeda, state sponsors of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction intersect.
– Can Israel and Syria make peace?
No. Syria’s grandiose historical self-image – the beating heart of Arabism, the heir to the Umayyad dynasty, etc. – requires the prestige that a peace process entails. However, were Damascus to really make peace with Jerusalem, it would forfeit the very cards (Hamas and Hezbollah, and its alliance with its terror-sponsoring peer, Iran) that compel the US and Europe to take it seriously. Without the ability to make war against Israel through proxies, Syria must accommodate itself to a regional position very much like Jordan’s, which given Damascus’ self-image, is not possible.
– Is a Palestinian state viable?
If you mean, is one of the best educated of all Arab societies capable of tapping its own human resources and skills while putting the munificence of the international community to productive use in order to create a flourishing, albeit small, nation-state that having resolved its civil war and made peace with its Israeli neighbors can serve as an example to other Arab states, then the answer is yes. Whether or not the Palestinians are now desirous of making that choice is a different question and one about which I am much less optimistic.
6. Here’s a question I couldn’t quite answer: is this an optimistic book or a pessimistic one?
I’m optimistic but this book is not. I still work with friends in Lebanon’s pro-democracy movement and have a deep emotional stake in that particular issue, and more generally I am hopeful for a better life for all my friends in the Arabic-speaking states. That’s all on a personal level; on the professional level, however, because I see the region the way I do, I cannot honestly advocate that the US government hazard its human and financial resources on democracy promotion in the Middle East in the belief that the region as a whole is on the verge of a liberal revolution. The reason is not just because Arab culture is not now, and may never be, ripe for such a social and political revolution that starts from the ground up, but also because I know that Washington is not prepared to do what it takes to protect our friends in a violent part of the world. I wish it were otherwise; I wish, for instance, both that Walid Jumblatt had not essentially surrendered to the Syrians, and that the Americans had taken Jumblatt’s advice seriously and sent car bombs to Damascus for every Lebanese pro-democracy activist killed by the Syrian regime and its Lebanese allies. But this is not the case, so perhaps it would be most accurate to say that The Strong Horse in neither optimistic nor pessimistic, but rather a description of how things are rather than how we, including myself, might wish they were.
Reprinted with permission by Shmuel Rosner
Shmuel Rosner is an editor and a writer based in Tel Aviv. In summer 2008 he ended a three year term as Chief US Correspondent for the Israeli daily Haaretz and as the writer of the influential blog Rosner?s Domain. He is also a regular contributor to the online magazine Slate and to Commentary and writes for The New Republic and for the online magazine Jewcy. Rosner was raised and educated in Jerusalem, and he now lives in Tel Aviv with his wife and their four children.
