All the Arab horses

All the Arab horses

Max Rodenbeck

To Smith the Iraq war was a stroke of genius: “it wrecked a framework that had relied on jihadist terrorism to bolster Sunni Arab power”. Jassim Mohammed / AP

A new diagnosis of Arab maladies buries the region’s true problems under a pile of oversimplified generalisations, writes Max Rodenbeck.


The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations
Lee Smith
Doubleday Books
Dh92

The Middle East is a troubled place, a prickly zone whose propensity for conflict fuels much noisy punditry. Yet, amid the racket of clashing opinions, agreement seems to have emerged about at least one source of regional woe. From left, right and centre, all concur that Arab governments are bad. Dim-witted, dictatorial and frustratingly durable, not to mention frequently venal and brutal, they are universally seen as a cause of the Middle East’s relative backwardness.

Many have tried to explain this generalised shortcoming. Economists point to Arab governments’ reliance on rentier income rather than taxes as a reason for their lack of accountability. Sociologists cite traditions of deference to patriarchal authority, reinforced by Islam, as a reason for the failure of mass protests to shake regimes, as in Eastern Europe. Historians say the fragility of post-imperialist borders and polities has prompted insecure governments to pursue state-building at the expense of citizens’ needs.

For Lee Smith, none of this really counts. The Arabs, in his view, simply have the misfortune to be guided by something he identifies as the “strong horse principle”: an apparently unique, ancient system whereby one tribe, nation, or civilisation dominates the others by force, until it too is overthrown by force. The “strong horse”, he says, represents the fundamental character of the Arabic-speaking Middle East. This is a perennially violent, xenophobic place where, in his words: “Bin Ladenism is not drawn from the extremist fringe, but represents the social norm.”

Smith believes he has much to teach us about this corner of the world, a patch he covered, from Cairo and Beirut, for the Weekly Standard, the small-circulation flag-bearer for American neoconservativism, before landing his current perch at the right-wing Hudson Institute in Washington. His book, a mix of citations from primers on Arab history, bald assertions, and anecdotage populated by a parade of mournful natives that Smith seems to have attracted in his travels, purports to be an expose of the true nature of the Arabs. It is meant as a corrective to the misty eyed romanticism of other journalists, scholars of the region, and such pitiable types as “Americans too young, confused or rich to love or respect their own country”.

Yet despite the jarring apparition of occasional perspicacity, his 200-page effort at myth-busting is potholed with mistakes, misjudgements and lapses in logic. Right up front, for instance, Smith asserts that Sunni Arabs have crushed minority challengers and ruled “by violence, repression and coercion” for 1,400 years. Yet one might have assumed that Sunni rule would be natural here, considering that nine-tenths of Arabs happen to be Sunni Muslims. (And not the 70 per cent that Smith strangely proposes, a figure quite unattainable even if one throws in not just religious minorities, but ethnic ones such as Kurds in Iraq or Berbers in North Africa.)

More inconvenient still to this theory of an endless Sunni Arab reign of terror is the simple fact that during most of the years since the birth of Islam, the region’s rulers have not been Sunni Arabs. Some have been Shia by sect, such as the Fatimid caliphs who ruled Egypt, the Hijaz and much of the Levant from 969 to 1171. Since that time most of the region’s rulers have been ethnically Turkish, such as the Mamluk and Ottoman sultans who controlled the Arab heartlands uninterruptedly from 1260-1918.

If basic historical errors damage Smith’s argument, so too does his shrillness. In one passage, he declares that there are only two rules of Arab politics: to seize power, and to maintain it. This is a system, he says, where survival is the sole objective. But surely, one cannot help thinking, such has been the main goal of politics everywhere since the dawn of time. It is hard to avoid the impression that in ascribing uniqueness to Arab approaches to power, Smith’s real intent, despite his protestations to the contrary, is to convey a subtext, the essence of which is that the only language Arabs understand is force – and that force, therefore, should be America’s policy as well.

Based on such skewed premises, Smith certainly draws some cockeyed conclusions. In one peculiarly acrobatic section, he attempts to show that it is Sunni Arab regimes themselves, and not social factors, nor claims of injustice, nor unhappiness with policy, that lie behind the phenomenon of jihadist terrorism. Thus, in his view, America could justifiably have attacked any number of Arab countries in retaliation for September 11 – when, he writes, “19 Arabs had struck the United States on behalf of Arab causes – Palestine, US sanctions on Iraq, US troops in Saudi Arabia, and so forth – supported by Arab rulers and the Arab masses alike.” The necessary response, Smith writes, was “a punitive war against the Arabs” – and Saddam Hussein simply “drew the short stick”.

Still, to Smith the invasion of Iraq was a stroke of genius, because it wrecked a regional framework that had relied on jihadist terrorism to bolster Sunni Arab power against such rivals as Shia Iran. According to this bizarre reconstruction, “The Sunnis’ other way to deter Tehran was to back the same militant organisation that threatened to topple Arab regimes, al Qa’eda. Once the Americans deposed Saddam and dealt a withering blow to al Qa’eda in Iraq, the Arabs had lost both their local security pillars.”

This is nonsense, and not simply due to the plain fact that al Qa’eda had never gained a foothold in Iraq before America’s intervention. Whatever the complicity of some Arab governments, such as Syria’s, in stoking violent resistance by Sunni Iraqis, it was the occupation itself that facilitated al Qa’eda’s arrival, and which briefly boosted its popularity. Across the wider region, far from being a “security pillar” of Arab regimes, jihadists have devoted much of their energy to attacking them. Smith fails even to mention the deadly jihadist bombings that have struck a dozen Arab cities and which have, by and large, now united regimes and their citizens in disgust with Bin Ladenism.

Smith explains elsewhere that although Arabs constantly bicker, “Perhaps the more serious concern is that the Arabs will not fight each other, and choose instead to bind together… in order to focus their energies elsewhere, like against the United States, again.” That last word is what really gives pause. To what past event exactly is Smith referring? Might he mean that dark day when the joint Arab high command sent veiled storm troopers on black helicopters into Wyoming? Or is he just subtly reasserting his sweeping charge that the Arabs as a whole were responsible for September 11 – and hinting that they might do the same again unless America spanks them regularly?

This disregard for reality appears to be prompted by two things. One is an attitude towards Arabs that may be delicately described as anachronistic and patronising. How else can one explain lapses into what sound like 19th-century depictions of barbarians? In one departure from constant praise of Bush-administration policy, for instance, Smith sneers at its naivety in thinking democracy might have flourished here when this great American gift was presented, “like an iPhone left out for the Arabs to figure out on their own.”

Elsewhere Smith informs us sagely that Arab women “hold men in contempt if they are not willing to kill and die for Arab honour.” Arabs, we discover, regard any man who says he wants peace with his neighbour, “not a peace that comes through destruction and elimination, but a real peace,” as a traitor. No wonder, for this is a people so tribally ferocious, he insists, that they hate Americans, “Not because of what we do or who we are but because of what we are not: Arabs.”

Such pseudo-anthropological hokum would be bad enough, had Smith not ridiculed other writers, such as that perpetual bugbear for America’s right wing, Edward Said, for his very own sin of using too broad a brush to paint his subject. “Said’s work, inadvertently or not, lent itself to a monolithic definition of Arab culture,” is Smith’s deadpan dismissal of the author of Orientalism. One wonders if Smith may have succumbed to a malady he terms the default condition of the Middle East; namely, schizophrenia. This might explain why, rather like some Victorian voyeur, he admits to having found Beirut’s Gemmayze district, with its bars and saucy girls, many times more alluring than New York’s East Village, “because it was in an Arab city pulsing with eros.”

The other motive for Smith’s smearing of the Arabs appears, predictably enough, to be political. From early in the book he sets out to prove that American policy, and in particular its support for Israel, has absolutely no correlation with America’s unpopularity in the region. On the contrary, enthuses Smith, the Jewish State is not merely a great strategic asset, but a regional strong horse that the Arabs have grown to fear and therefore to follow. Suffice it to say that his resort to obfuscation, insinuation and cant reflects the extreme difficulty of making such assertions persuasive. As Smith seems unable to appreciate through the smoke of his own rhetoric, the Arabs’ weakness is not so much the result of the instability that cripples their states and societies, but its cause. Whatever America’s intent, its hapless indulgence of Israel does nothing to address this, and much to weaken even its closest Arab friends.

This book is saddening, and not only because unwary readers may swallow some of this Kool-Aid and conclude that America’s proper role is to cudgel unruly Arabs. That certainly appears to be the author’s purpose. It is saddening also because Smith, like the imperialists of old, is not completely wrong in his critique of Arab society. Yet to picture Arab faults as both sui generis and hopelessly beyond repair is no help at all. Had Smith argued with sympathy rather than contempt, and sought to understand rather than smugly condemn, he might have been worth listening to.

Max Rodenbeck is the Middle East correspondent for The Economist.