The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations (2 page)

It is a common misconception that Islamism is a deviant, radical ideology bearing little resemblance to the “real” or “traditional” Islam. I argue instead that Islamism represents the modern, progressive, and rationalist effort of Muslims to come to terms with the forces of modernity heralded by Napoleon’s arrival. The terror and violence that mark what we’ve come to call Islamic radicalism are the products of the mixture of Salafism with traditional Arab politics, which has no mechanism for peaceful transitions of authority or power sharing, and therefore sees political conflict as a fight to the death between strong horses. Far from being deviant, the Islamists’ reliance on violence is all too characteristic, not of Islam, but of the region. Consider the struggles we see played out today across the Middle East, with insurgents and oppositionists waging terror campaigns to win power, while the regimes use torture and collective punishment to defeat their domestic competition. Aside from the venue, September 11 was just the business of Arab politics as usual.

The second part begins by connecting the problem of Arab politics to the Bush administration’s response to 9/11. When the Americans turned to the region and touched down in force, they found that the problem wasn’t just bin Laden but bin Ladenism. The issue
wasn’t a shadowy network of rogue terrorists, or Arab regimes that jailed, tortured, and murdered their own people, but a political culture where insurgent terror and state repression were two sides of the same bloody coin. Indeed, as the Americans discovered, the most pressing strategic concern was less Al Qaeda than the collaboration between states and so-called stateless terrorist outfits. In particular, it became clear that the biggest threat to stability in the region was not bin Laden. It was instead a confederation led not by a Sunni Arab regime but by a Shia Persian power, Iran, alongside Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas, and various Iraqi groups. This confederation, which I call the resistance bloc, fought the United States and its allies on several fronts—Iraq, the Persian Gulf, the Palestinian territories and Israel, and Lebanon. At this point, the Middle East cold war, as it has come to be called, becomes a significant theme in the book, as Iran and the resistance bloc compete with the United States and its allies to impose regional order as the strong horse.

In the sixth and seventh chapters, I discuss the White House’s program to change the nature of the Middle East, a program built around the top-down imposition of democracy or, more specifically, free elections. The Americans believed that giving Arabs a say in governing their own political, economic, and social lives was an antidote to bin Ladenism and the strong horse. What they discovered was that, as one Arab commentator noted, the problem with Arab democracy was not a lack of supply but a lack of demand. In failing to grasp that Arab political pathologies were organic—that is, the absence of democracy in the region is the result of Arab societies’ conception of what politics requires—the White House’s democracy promotion left the Americans pushing a set of ideas and values that most Arabs had no interest in. The trappings of democracy do not create democratic polities; free societies need to be built by men and women with a stake in their own futures. And so, in the eighth chapter, I look at the only indigenous cultural and intellectual idea in the Middle East that is capable of producing such people, namely, Arab
liberalism. After 9/11, one major question in the Middle East was to what extent the American intervention in the region would empower the Arab liberals, or expose them to more danger.

In the final part of the book, I look more closely at the problem of democracy in the Middle East. My case study in the ninth chapter deals with Lebanon, the one Arab society where many of the ingredients for a democratic polity already existed. In 2005, Lebanon was the site of a remarkable, and in many ways unprecedented, upsurge of democratic sentiment, as Lebanese citizens of different faiths joined together in what became known as the March 14 movement. They mounted massive public demonstrations in favor of real democracy and brought about, for a time, what was labeled the Cedar Revolution. Yet even as it gave birth to this hopeful development, Lebanon was also home to one of the purest specimens of violence and strong horse tactics in the region, the Shia group Hezbollah, which was supported by Syria and Iran. The clash between the March 14 movement and the Hezbollah/Syria alliance offers an object lesson in the obstacles to making the Middle East democratic.

In
chapter 10
, I deal more directly with Syria, and show how successful it has been in its efforts to prove that democracy cannot work in Lebanon and that there is no serious alternative to strong horse politics. I argue that the only way to have stopped the Syrians from stamping out real democracy was for the United States to have played the role of strong horse itself. Once it refused to do so in Lebanon, the Cedar Revolution was doomed. Paradoxically, violence may be the only way to ensure that nonviolent politics can thrive in the region. Along those lines, I argue in the final chapter that Israel’s two most recent wars—those with Hezbollah and Hamas—must be seen outside of the narrow focus of the Arab-Israeli arena and in the context of the power politics of the region. In effect, I suggest, Israel has been a proxy strong horse not just for the United States but also for Sunni Arab regimes like Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

The conclusion considers what may be in store for the Arabs and
what is the way forward for the United States in the region. The Arabs are weak, and this frailty in turn reflects on their patron, the United States. Since the political nature of the region abhors a vacuum, I describe how Arab weakness may affect American regional interests, and how it has invited in other actors, like Iran, and may invite in more, like the Turks. If we lack resolve, others will force their own order on the region, an order in which American interests, and Arab ambitions, will matter little. One way or another, I argue, this is a future that should be avoided, for it would be disastrous, not for the United States so much as for the Arabs themselves.

 T
his is a book about Arab politics, society, and culture, which is to say this is a book about some Arab ideas and the force they have on how people live from day to day in the region. I have tried to discuss those ideas as dispassionately as possible, although I recognize that the main thesis—that violence is central to the politics, society, and culture of the Arabic-speaking Middle East—is likely to cause unease. Nonetheless, the idea that people naturally prefer the strong horse to the weak one in this part of the world seems to me unassailable; it is impossible to understand the region without recognizing the significance of violence, coercion, and repression. That doesn’t mean that I think the Arabs
only
understand force—a charge frequently leveled by many critics against, for instance, the Bush administration. It just means, I think, that force is at the core of the way most Arabs understand politics, and that therefore there is no way to understand how the Middle East works without understanding the concept of the strong horse. It is not a moral judgment but a description.

This is, to be sure, not a concept that comes naturally to Americans, because 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. The various protections and liberties
afforded us in our society have their roots in man’s fear of violent death,
²
but we have come so far from that point that it 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. We are so predisposed to ignore our freakish luck, as well as the blood spilled by our ancestors, that we imagine all men must have inherited essentially the same world that we have and are thus motivated by the same hopes and fears and ideas. In short, they are not.

Indirectly, then, this book is also about American ideas, or some American ideas, especially those about the best form of government and the possibility and desirability of bringing our political ideas and practices to societies and cultures that are vastly different from our own. It is also a book about my ideas and how they changed over time, what I had invested in certain ideas, and certain people, and why I was compelled to modify some and abandon others outright.

A few words about the style of this book are also in order. Like the Arabic-speaking Middle East, it is a heterogeneous affair, a book combining travelogue and policy, memoir and history, literature and revealed religion in an effort to give as full and dense a picture of a complex part of the world as possible in a tight space. I have limited the scope of this book by excluding the Maghreb (Mauritania, Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia), as well as other African states (Libya, Sudan, and Somalia), to focus on the Mashreq, a region stretching from the eastern Mediterranean states—Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, the Palestinian territories, and Israel—to the shores of the Persian Gulf. Several chapters are set in Egypt, the largest Arab state and the cultural and intellectual capital of the region where every major political and cultural trend of the last century has either its origins or its golden age, from Nasserism to the Islamist movement to Arab liberalism. Other chapters move on to the Arab Gulf states, and the Levant, especially Syria and Lebanon. This last I take to be the most beautiful country in the Arabic-speaking Middle East, as well as the most open and tolerant, most hopeful and tragic. Beirut, in contrast
to Cairo (a Sunni-dominated society that offers mostly one perspective on the region), is a perfect crow’s nest from which to watch the Middle East as the rest of the world comes into contact with it, a geographical, strategic, and historical vantage point. Almost every state in the region has a stake in Lebanon, from Shiite Iran to Sunni powers like Saudi Arabia, as do international actors like France and the United States, which for better or worse now represents the legacy of Western Christendom and its sustained interest in the Holy Land. Over the last millennium and a half, every imaginable crisis and conflict—sectarian, ideological, political, and civilizational—has had its day in Lebanon, most recently during the country’s fifteen-year-long civil wars, which in summoning the region’s historical furies also presaged everything we are now seeing in the Middle East.

I recognize that from an American perspective, the most prominent Arab state at present is still Iraq, and while this book discusses some of the ways in which the war and its aftermath reverberated throughout the Middle East, Iraq in this telling is something like the ghost of Hamlet’s father. It is a significant presence that set certain events in motion, and motivates the behavior of significant players, but it is almost entirely offstage. So much of our attention and energy is consumed right now with Iraq that the sharp focus has dulled our ability to take in the Middle East as a whole; likewise, our knowledge of Iraq is incomplete without seeing it in the context of the rest of the region.

That other well-known center of conflict, Israel, I reach at the very end, for reasons that I hope will become increasingly clear. Unlike many in both the Middle East and the West, I give no credence to the idea that the Arab-Israeli crisis is the region’s central issue. That a broad consensus of prominent policy makers, academics, analysts, and journalists so relentlessly advertise this conviction does not mean that they are correct, only that their obstinacy retards our understanding of the region, where the Arab-Israeli arena is merely one among many conflicts featuring the same problems that plague
the entire Middle East. Regardless of what else one can say about America’s post-9/11 policy, the one undeniable success of the Bush White House was to return the problems of the Middle East to the region itself, and it is there rather than in the southern end of Manhattan that the clash of Arab civilizations will be solved or managed or settled, in one way or another.