The Trouble with Proxy Wars

Michael J. Totten
michaeltotten.com
02 May '10

My friend and colleague Lee Smith, author of the terrific new book The Strong Horse, is having a civil but important argument with our mutual acquaintance and colleague Andrew Exum at the Center for a New American Security. I've agreed to publish Lee's response here, not because I want to pick on Andrew—whom I like personally and whose work I appreciate even when we don't agree with each other—but because Lee presents a compelling and cogent argument in favor of fighting the Syrian and Iranian governments instead of their proxies in Iraq and Afghanistan. ....


Over at “Abu Muqawama,” Andrew Exum, whom Michael and I know from Beirut, has had some interesting things to say recently about my book, The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations. Andrew, as some readers will know, is an analyst and researcher at the Washington DC-based think-tank, Center for a New American Security, where he contributed to formulating the Obama administration’s counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan. Andrew writes that I chose not to do a Q&A with him because I knew he “would not endorse the book whole-heartedly,” but the truth is that I wrote the book in the hopes of having many arguments over the issues I discuss in it. Accordingly, I wanted to use some of the issues Andrew raises with my book, and some of the differences I have with his position, to illuminate larger concerns regarding the US’s role in the region and the current state of US regional strategy.

In his critical appraisal of my book, Andrew writes that the strong horse is not a uniquely Arab phenomenon. I do not disagree with him. Indeed the strong horse is a feature common across cultures and historical periods. However, this is not the case in the contemporary United States where, as I write in my introduction, “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…[I]t 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.” The point I was making is that it is not the Arabs who are the exception, but Americans. I had thought I had made that point clear enough, but perhaps the problem is that Andrew is just plain uncomfortable with the idea of the strong horse, especially insofar as it requires punishing one’s enemies and rewarding one’s friends.

For instance, Andrew writes of how he had once asked my opinion concerning what sort of advice he might give to US policymakers in the event they were to solicit his recommendations on Lebanon. I suggested he tell them that we should bomb Syrian targets, including the Presidential Palace in Damascus. To me, the prospect of the gilded, gaudy residence of a man responsible for so much death, suffering and repression in ruins was a cheery one indeed, a prospect that apparently left Andrew flummoxed.

(Read full article)

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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

Shmuel Rosner
Rosner's Domain/JPost
07 April '10

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.

(Read full post)
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Middle East Scorecard

An Interview with Lee Smith


Matthew RJ Brodsky
inFocus
Spring '10

Posted before Shabbat

On February 28, inFOCUS Editor Matthew RJ Brodsky interviewed Lee Smith, author of the new book, The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations. Smith writes a weekly column called "Agents of Influence" for Tablet Magazine, and is a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute. He has worked at a number of journals, magazines, and publishers, including GQ Magazine, the Hudson Review, and Talk Magazine. He was also editor-in-chief of the Voice Literary Supplement, the Village Voice's national monthly literary magazine. Smith has been a frequent guest on radio and television, including Fox News and National Public Radio, and has contributed articles on Arab and Islamic affairs to, among other publications, the Weekly Standard, the New York Times, the New Republic, and the Boston Globe.

iF: What inspired the title of your new book, The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations ?

LS: The title comes from Osama Bin Laden's observation, "when people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse."

iF: What is your book's central thesis and why did you decide to write it?

LS: I was raised in New York City and wanted to understand and explain why almost 3,000 of my neighbors were killed on 9/11. So I sought to explain the centrality of violence in Middle Eastern politics and society to an American audience that is freakishly lucky insofar as we are able, unlike the majority of human beings throughout history, to conduct our political lives free of bloodshed, repression and coercion. Because we have inherited this system we tend to assume that most of the world's other political cultures are similar to ours. Some are but many more are not; the political culture of the Arabic-speaking Middle East is one that has no mechanism for sharing power, or transmitting political authority from one governing body to another except through inheritance, coup or conquest.

iF: A cornerstone of Obama's foreign policy has been engagement based on the idea of "resetting" our relations with certain countries. Does such a metaphorical reset button exist and how does it work in the Middle East?

LS: Such a button could only exist, even metaphorically, if American interests and policies were subject to change every time a new president came to office. Since they are not, all the "reset" button did was to inadvertently make explicit what everyone already knows about the United States: new administrations typically ignore the lessons of their predecessors and have to make their own mistakes before they are capable of dealing with the reality that is, rather than the reality they promised on the campaign trail.

Let's hope the administration has learned from its errors over the past year. Among others, they should have discovered that: 1) despite the counsel of academic experts and media pundits, there is a point past which you cannot "strong-arm" an Israeli government; 2) the Saudis do not offer confidence-building gestures toward Jerusalem and it is unwise to push them on this in public; 3) the Iranians do not wish to have normal bilateral relations with Washington, a preference they have made clear to five different U.S. administrations over the last 30 years.

(Read full interview)
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