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

Zusatztext 40590030 Informationen zum Autor Lee Smith  is a senior editor at  The   Weekly Standard.  He has written for  Slate,  the New York Times,  the  Boston Globe,  the  New Republic,  as well as for a variety of major Arab media outlets. He is also a senior fellow of the Hudson Institute and the author of  The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations . A native of New York, he currently resides in Washington, DC. Klappentext In this provocative and timely book, Middle East expert Lee Smith overturns long-held Western myths and assumptions about the Arab world, offering advice for America's future success in the region. Seeking the motivation behind the September 11 attacks, Smith moved to Cairo, where he discovered that the standard explanation-a clash of East and West-was simply not the case. Middle East conflicts have little to do with Israel, the United States, or the West in general, but are endemic to the region. According to Smith's "Strong Horse Doctrine," the Arab world naturally aligns itself with strength, power, and violence. He argues that America must be the strong horse in order to reclaim its role there, and that only by understanding the nature of the region's ancient conflicts can we succeed. Smith details the three-decades-long relationship between Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and the United States, and gives a history of the Muslim Brotherhood, which would likely play an important role in the formation of a new government in Egypt. He also discusses Lebanon, where tipping the balance against Hezbollah in favor of pro-democracy, pro-US forces has become imperative, as a special tribunal investigates the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. Eye-opening and in-depth, The Strong Horse is much needed background and perspective on today's headlines. Leseprobe INTRODUCTION: The Clash of Arab Civilizations It was hard not to take 9/11 personally. I was raised in New York City, so when those planes ?ew into the World Trade Center, it felt like a direct attack on my family and friends and myself, on the neighborhoods where I’d 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 ?gure 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 ?nally 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 con?ict between the West and Islam than the con?ict 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 signi?cant part of the Middle East, including Osama bin Laden, is at war expressly with the United States. And there are genuine points of con?ict between the lands of Is...

Product details

• Authors: Lee Smith
• Publisher: Anchor Books USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 11.01.2011
• EAN: 9780767921800
• ISBN: 978-0-7679-2180-0
• No. of pages: 236
• Dimensions: 132 mm x 203 mm x 18 mm
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > History > Regional and national histories; Non-fiction book