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

I t 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 Id 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.

I f that assertion sounds implausible, its 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 Bushs tenure: the intrastate Arab crises like Saddam Husseins 1990 invasion of Kuwait and Syrias occupation of Lebanon (19902005); the civil wars that wracked North Yemen (19621970) and Lebanon (19751990); wars between the state and non-state actors, like the Islamist insurgencies that ravaged Algeria (19912002), Egypt (19811997), and Syria (19791982), and the Palestine Liberation Organizations revolt against the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (19681971); the genocidal bouts of ethnic and sectarian cleansing, like Saddams campaigns against the Kurds and Shia, Hafez al-Assads mass slaughter of Sunnis in Hama in 1982, and the Sudanese governments campaigns against Christians and animists in the south (19812004) 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.