REFORMATION, NOT WAR:

The Enemy Within: THE STRONG HORSE: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations By Lee Smith (WENDELL STEAVENSON, 2/21/10, NY Times Book Review)

Smith, a Middle East correspondent for The Weekly Standard, contends in this short, dense, nuanced polemic that the area suffers from endemic political violence. The ruling elites are caught in “a perpetual pincer movement” between regional concerns and the internal threat of overthrow. They are simply self-interested factions trying, by any measure possible, to retain their grip on power. Jihad, Smith argues, is an age-old byproduct of this struggle as the ruler pushes the energies of the young militant warrior class away from his ­capital. For Smith, the 9/11 attacks were less the result of a clash of civilizations than part of existing Middle East power struggles.

Smith wants the American left to stop blaming American foreign policy for the Middle East’s ills and concentrate instead on the structural deficiencies of the region’s societies. This is an enticing exoneration, but the United States is undeniably a player, and a certain amount of responsibility must surely go along with military hardware, troop deployments and subsidies to various regimes.

“The Strong Horse” threads its way through Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and the gulf states. Smith delves into history and pits his position against those of (among others) Edward Said, Naguib Mahfouz, the Muslim Brotherhood and Omar Sharif. I suspect that readers without a fair grounding in the region may get lost in Smith’s descriptions of Lebanese politics, Syrian interests and the complexities of Islamic reform movements. But from time to time he treats us to beautifully written portraits of his Arab friends, individuals who illustrate far better than finely wrought theory the difficulties of practical reform.

One is an Egyptian named Raouf who is 23 years old, has studied Kant and can argue the merits of Thomas L. Friedman’s work, but who is isolated among his companions — they have little interest in political philosophy. Raouf burns his own unpublishable articles. “Who am I writing for except myself, anyway?” he asks in a moment filled with pathos. In such a cauldron, Smith argues, idealistic American efforts to democratize the region are doomed: “Repressive violence and terror are two aspects of a political culture that has no mechanism for either sharing power or transmitting political authority from one governing body to another except through inheritance, coup or conquest.”