Rough ride in the Middle East: what is America's role in the Arab civil war?

• Author: Young, Michael
• Position: The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations, by Lee Smith - Book review

The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations, by Lee Smith, Doubleday, 256 pages, $26

FOR YEARS the tag Sine on Lee Smith's articles said he was writing a book on Arab culture. Instead, the longtime journalist has just published The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations, the title reflecting a less neutral, all-purpose approach toward a region he sought to discover after the 9/11 attacks.

Smith's book will not please those who view the Middle East's subtleties with uncritical sympathy. The author eschews the obligatory attempt to reconcile the region's values with the West's, and refuses to blame the United States for the Arab world's predicament. "September II is the day we woke up to find ourselves in the middle of a clash of Arab civilizations," Smith writes, "a war that used American cities as yet another venue for Arabs to fight each other."

Smith, a friend I first met in Beirut an 2003, has written a bold and significant book that refreshingly rejects the conventional wisdom about the Middle East. It is somewhat contradictory, but in an instructive way. Smith doesn't try to conceal his developing uncertainties as his narrative progresses, so that what may sometimes seem like inconsistency becomes an honest reflection of his growing realization that his initial hopefulness about the Middle East was unjustified. Ultimately he falls back on an unabashedly American reading of the Arab world that reflects well why the American public has soured on its government's involvement there.

Smith's thesis that the United States is caught up in an Arab civil war is not new, but it is substantially correct. Mainstream American thinking, he writes, has mistakenly regarded the Arab world as "a monolithic body, made up of people of similar backgrounds and similar opinions." This view, Smith believes, is disturbingly close to the Arab nationalist belief that "Arabs, by virtue of a shared language, constitute a separate and single people."

For Smith, Arab nationalism is a by-product of Sunni supremacy in the region, which the Sunni community has defended through violence "for close to fourteen hundred years." Violence, he writes, is "just the central motif in a pattern that existed before Islam and is imprinted on all of the region's social and political relations." The great Arab historian Ibn Khaldoun viewed history as "a matter of one tribe, nation, or civilization dominating the others by force...