Mick Hartley

Michael J Totten interviews Lee Smith, author of The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations. It's not an easy piece to extract from or summarise, but here's a flavour:

[A]s a lifelong New Yorker, someone who was raised there, went to school and lived there, I took 9/11 personally, as an attack on my hometown, my family and friends. That’s the reason I went to the Middle East to find out what happened, because I took it personally. However, as I spent more time in the region I came to see 9/11 outside of the framework of Islam v the West, even as this conceit has great appeal across the American political spectrum. The right of center tends to argue that there is a war between Western civilization and the lands of Islam; the left of center typically contends that the problems of the Middle East are essentially the result of Western interference in the region, from colonialism to Zionism to American hegemony in the oil-rich Persian Gulf. After a while, I came to see that the issues in the region began in the region and belong to the region, and while Western influence has often been harmful, and more often beneficial, to the Arabs, it has been a very minor factor in shaping a region thousands of years old. There is indeed a clash, but it is between the inhabitants of the Arabic-speaking Middle East, and the 9/11 attacks were essentially an overflow of those issues that reached American shores.

It's interesting that, like Eli Khoury (and Christopher Hitchens), he sees the Iranian anti-Zionist bombast less as a direct threat to Israel (though of course it is that) and more as a continuation of the ancient Sunni-Shi'ite Middle Eastern power struggle:

The reason Iran has inserted itself in the Arab-Palestinian crisis is in order to project power in the region by shaming Sunni states, like Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. All of these states, US allies, either have peace treaties with Jerusalem or have opted out of any active participation in the war against Israel. The Iranians calculate that the Arab masses prefer resistance to reform, accommodation and compromise, and so Tehran has picked up the banners of war that the Sunni states have put down. Again, this is not to say that Iran’s rhetoric about destroying Israel is all a put-on, I don’t think it is. But the main reason they are ratcheting up the noise is because they see resistance ideology as a way to get a leg up, as you put it, on their real regional adversaries, the Sunni Arab states.