A Q&A with Author Lee Smith Lee Smith, author of
The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations, discusses the ongoing protests in Egypt--from the causes to the implications for Egypt, the Middle East, and the United States
Q: What is happening on the streets of Cairo and other major Egyptian cities? A: In the wake of the Tunisian uprising that brought down president-for-life Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, Egyptians took to the streets to protest against their own regime. While the protesters have numerous grievances—a need for higher pay, more jobs, cheaper food, more freedom of speech, a freer political system—their chief demand was for Hosni Mubarak to step down after ruling Egypt for nearly thirty years. Now that Mubarak has done so, it’s important to note that the end result is less a product of a democratic revolution than a military coup. Mubarak, a former air force pilot and a hero of Egypt’s 1973 war with Israel, was the public face of the Egyptian army, which gets $1.3 billion in military aid annually from the United States (close to another billion goes to Egypt as financial aid.) Once the military decided it could no longer count on Mubarak to protect its interests, it took outright control of the country and compelled Mubarak to resign.
Q: Why is Egypt’s military so important? A: In spite of the trappings of a bicameral parliament, a judicial system and even a multiparty system, Egypt’s government is nothing but a military regime. Indeed throughout its many thousand years of history, the country has been ruled by military leaders more often than not—from Alexander the Great to Saladin up through Mohamed Ali, whose dynasty was finally overthrown in 1952 with the military coup that brought Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Free Officers to power. The Free Officers were a cadre of young military men headed by Nasser, and upon his death in 1970 a fellow Free Officer, Nasser’s vice president Anwar Sadat, succeeded him. Sadat’s 1981 assassination at the hands of Islamist militants brought Mubarak, a former air force commander, to power, thus ensuring the continued importance of the Egyptian military. Mubarak’s chosen successor, Omar Suleiman, is also a former military man and head of Egyptian intelligence; the newly named Prime Minister Ahmed Shafiq also comes from the military, another former member of the air force. The strange irony is that even as the Egyptian military is among the country’s most highly respected institutions, respected even by the protesters, it is also deeply corrupt—its senior officers are handsomely rewarded to ensure their loyalty to the regime.
Q: Why is Egypt important to the United States? A: Egypt is the largest Arab state, with some 80 million inhabitants and climbing. Long the cultural, intellectual, and media capital of the Arabic-speaking Middle East, Cairo sets many of the region’s intellectual and cultural trends. This alone would be enough to make it an important Middle Eastern ally. But Egypt has also been a political leader. For three decades (from 1948 to 1973) it was on the front lines in the fight against Israel, but when Egyptian president Anwar Sadat signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1979, he took Egypt out of the war and calmed a region of vital national interest to the United States. The peace treaty is the cornerstone of what many refer to as the Pax Americana in the Eastern Mediterranean, and also the pillar of American influence in the entire Middle East.
Q: Why was Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt a key American ally? A: Until 9/11, Mubarak’s primary importance to Washington was that he kept the peace with Israel. However, after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Mubarak has been one of the U.S.’s chief, albeit quiet, allies in the war on terror. Mubarak himself fought what was effectively a civil war against domestic Islamist groups throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and accordingly shares an interest with the U.S. in quelling Islamist militants throughout the region.
Q: Were all Egyptians opposed to Mubarak? A: No, and many Egyptians actually opposed the protesters. Some Egyptians believe that the recent unrest was a foreign plot, initiated by the United States or Israel, to destabilize Egypt. The tourist industry—one of the country’s top revenue earners, with Egyptian employees numbering in the thousands, if not millions—has already taken a substantial hit. Some experts believe it will take years for it to recover. Indeed, unemployment is high in Egypt and many of those who do have jobs earn money on a per diem basis—from cab drivers to construction workers. Their livelihoods have obviously been hurt over the last two weeks. And even among those Egyptians who are happy that Mubarak has retired, there are many who would like to see life get back to normal so they can get back to earning a living.
Q: What is Egypt’s relationship to its neighbor Israel? A: Since Sadat signed the 1979 treaty with Israel, the peace between the two countries has been cold. While Israeli tourists visit Egypt—predominantly beachside resorts in the Sinai and to a lesser extent Cairo—Egyptians rarely make their way to Israel. There is a very strong security relationship between the two countries—both fear Hamas, the Palestinian outfit that the U.S. State Department labels a terrorist organization—as well as relatively strong diplomatic ties. It’s a cold peace, to be sure, but preferable to war.
Q: Who is in the Egyptian opposition? A: The opposition right now seems to be composed of the young political activists who initiated the protests, largely through social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter. For a time, Mohamed ElBaradei, former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), was also part of the opposition, but since he has very little support inside Egypt itself, he seems to have been passed over. The most organized part of the opposition, although probably not the largest, is the Muslim Brotherhood.
Q: What is the Muslim Brotherhood? A: Founded in 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood is an Islamist organization that has been consistently opposed to the country’s secular leadership, including Mubarak. In its earliest years, the Muslim Brotherhood used terror against its opponents, killing many including government ministers. After Nasser incarcerated thousands of its members in the 1950s and 1960s, and executed some of its leadership—like the famous writer Sayyid Qutb—the outfit publicly renounced violence. While the party is still officially illegal, today its members serve in Parliament, but not under the party’s name. Even as the Brotherhood has renounced violence, its critics inside and outside Egypt fear that an Egypt controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood would come to look something like Iran’s Islamic Republic, or fundamentalist Saudi Arabia; invariably a Brotherhood-governed Egypt would make good on its promise to abrogate the peace treaty with Israel. Moreover, the Brotherhood’s history of anti-American rhetoric suggests that it would be hostile toward U.S. interests throughout the Middle East.
Q: What is the connection between the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda? A: As the oldest and most influential Islamist organization, the Muslim Brotherhood can rightly be said to be the progenitor of Al Qaeda. The difference of course is that it has renounced violence while Al Qaeda is an armed organization. Moreover, there are a number of ideological differences between the two groups as they compete for support in their activities; yet they both share hostility toward the American presence in the Middle East, and enmity toward Washington’s chief regional ally, Israel.
Q: Is Egypt ready for democracy? A: While the Egyptian uprising has often been described as prodemocratic, the evidence is mixed. (Among other things, no liberal or democratic leaders have stepped up in the last two weeks.) Egypt has a long tradition of liberal intellectuals and activists, dating back to the nineteenth century. However, in the last half century or so that democratic current has largely been thwarted, partly through the efforts of Egypt’s rulers—from Nasser to Mubarak—and those of the Islamists. There are still liberal intellectuals and activists in Egypt, but they have very small popular constituencies right now, and hence very little power. Perhaps the uprising will give rise to liberal centers of power in Egypt’s political system, but it is still too early to tell.
Starred Review. Smith, Middle East correspondent for the Weekly Standard, argues that it was tensions within the Middle East—not a clash of civilizations, American policies in the region or the creation of Israel—that prompted the attacks on September 11. He writes, In believing that 300 million Arabs had really lined up as one against America, we had been taken in by a mirage, and he takes to task Edward Said and others he feels homogenize Arabs into a monolithic group. In the book's strongest sections, Smith looks at continuities from the pre-Islamic Arab world to the present to trace mores and differences that seep into the modern day, adding a fascinating historical angle. While he undermines his argument with a penchant for proclaiming the condition of the region to be immutable (In the Middle East, political violence is not an anomaly. It is the normal state of affairs), he should be lauded for his commitment and careful research. The book is compelling, well written and worth a read even—or perhaps especially—by those who would disagree with the author. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Smith, the Middle East correspondent for the Weekly Standard, offers a new (and unsettling) take on the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the sociopolitical situation that led to them. The attacks, the author asserts, were not so much about a war between the West and Islam as they were about conflicts among the various Arab factions. The book, which gets its title from an Osama bin Laden quote (“When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will take the strong horse”), not only explores just the political events that led up to 9/11 but also argues the position that the attacks were not really about the U.S. but, rather, were an expression of political strength in a war on the other side of the world. This notion may be a bitter pill for some to swallow, but Smith marshals his evidence carefully and convincingly. The book might not be for the casual reader—it’s rather dry and requires considerable knowledge of world politics to follow—but for those with an interest in the subject, it makes for eye-opening, thought-provoking, and perhaps even controversial reading. --David Pitt
Review
From Publishers Weekly:
Starred Review: Smith, Middle East correspondent for the Weekly Standard, argues that it was tensions within the Middle East—not a clash of civilizations, American policies in the region or the creation of Israel—that prompted the attacks on September 11. He writes, “In believing that 300 million Arabs had really lined up as one against America, we had been taken in by a mirage,” and he takes to task Edward Said and others he feels homogenize Arabs into a monolithic group. In the book's strongest sections, Smith looks at continuities from the pre-Islamic Arab world to the present to trace mores and differences that seep into the modern day, adding a fascinating historical angle. While he undermines his argument with a penchant for proclaiming the condition of the region to be immutable (“In the Middle East, political violence is not an anomaly. It is the normal state of affairs”), he should be lauded for his commitment and careful research. The book is compelling, well written and worth a read even—or perhaps especially—by those who would disagree with the author. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Praise for The Strong Horse
“The Strong Horse is hard to describe and even harder to put down. Lee Smith has concocted an addictive and original brew of reportage, memoir, and political analysis that casts the Middle East and its relations with the ‘Great Satan’ in a fresh and fascinating light. Writing about his meetings with everyone from Omar Sharif to Natan Sharansky, he delivers one shrewd insight after another. Anyone seeking to understand the world’s most volatile region should read this timely and entertaining book.”
—Max Boot, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow for National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power and War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History, 1500 to Today
"Lee Smith is a free-thinker in an age of herd mentalities. The Strong Horse is a powerful book—trenchant, shrewd, informed, vivid, provocative, and full of a wisdom that is not the conventional wisdom."
—Paul Berman, author of Terror and Liberalism
“In The Strong Horse, Lee Smith lets readers see beyond the stereotypes by which Western academics have misunderstood, and Western governments have mishandled, the Middle East. Based on wide-ranging conversations in the Arab world as well as on a dispassionate understanding of its intellectual and political history, he shows how the tribal nature of Arab societies combines with Islam to produce a way of life in which force is the ultimate argument. The Strong Horse is a fascinating journey from Cairo’s cafes to the Gulf’s business offices, to Lebanon and Syria’s countryside, and into the region’s seminal literature.”
—Angelo M. Codevilla, Professor emeritus of international relations, Boston University
“Lee Smith is the rarest of Middle East commentators, an observer without any ax to grind, whose book is a hammer shattering many of the blithe pieties about the Middle East that prevail in academia, government, and the media.”
—Peter Theroux, former Director of Persian Gulf Affairs, National Security Council, and author of Sandstorms: Days and Nights in Arabia
“A chronicle of one American’s journey to the Middle East in search of an answer to the question “why 9/11?”, The Strong Horse offers a fascinating depiction of a culture so different from our own that it is a challenge for us to understand just how great this difference is. Lee Smith has faced this challenge, and the insights he offers require nothing less than a radical paradigm shift in American thinking about the Middle East. If we wish to shape history, and not be run over by it, there is no better place to start than by reading Lee Smith’s beautifully crafted and deeply moving journey of discovery.”
—Lee Harris, author of Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam’s Threat to the West and Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History
About the Author
Lee Smith is a Middle East correspondent for the Weekly Standard. He has written for Slate.com, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, the New Republic, and major Arab media outlets. He is also a visiting fellow of the Hudson Institute. A native of New York City, he currently resides in Washington, D.C.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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, and this book proposes one. The Arabic-speaking Middle East is not a sea of some 300 million Arabs who all have common interests but a region with a 70 percent Sunni population and dozens of minorities. The size of the Sunni majority, and its concomitan...
