If you read only one book about the Middle East this year--aside from mine, of course, after it's finished--read The Strong Horse by my friend and colleague Lee Smith. It is, as far as I am concerned, required reading for everyone who is interested in this topic. If you enjoy my work, you really need to pick up a copy.

Lee and I met in Lebanon in 2005, and have been friends ever since. We've spent I-don't-know-how-many evenings in Beirut and Jerusalem discussing Middle Eastern politics and conflict, sometimes expanding each others' knowledge and other times arguing. We don't argue so much anymore, except around the edges once in a while. I should say he won some of our arguments in the end, partly because he relocated to the Middle East before I did and was farther along on the learning curve, but he also claims I shaped some of the way he came to think about the region in that he believes the issues are largely Arab rather than Islamic per se. Whether he's right about that, or if I am, it's certainly an argument worth thinking about. Sometimes his prognosis is gloomy--the Middle East is the kind of place where it's extremely difficult, if not impossible, to remain optimistic and hopeful for long--but we both have a lot still invested in the region, including mutual friendships in several Middle Eastern countries on both sides of the front lines.

The Strong Horse is the product of Lee's on-the-ground experience there as a traveler and a resident since the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. He was drawn to the region for the same principle reason I was--he wanted to figure out what on earth compelled suicidal hijackers to ram airplanes into our buildings. He stayed on for additional reasons, of course, as did I, and his book is about so much more than Osama bin Laden's murderous gang, but that was his starting point as it was mine.

His book is not so easy to summarize, so I invited him to speak for himself and go over some of the main points.

MJT: The title of your book is The Strong Horse. Can you tell us exactly what that concept means?

Lee Smith: It comes from Osama Bin Laden's observation that when people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse. I know this idea will be confused with the notion that Arabs understand only force, an idea often, and incorrectly, attributed to the Bush administration. It is useful to recall that throughout history most of mankind has "understood" force. Those lucky few who are fortunate enough to be able to live their political lives free of the fear of violence are largely concentrated in the capitals of contemporary Western Europe and along the east and west coasts of the United States, who not coincidentally happen to make up the primary audience I was writing for, so I wanted to explain that the inhabitants of the Arabic-speaking Middle East are not as fortunate as we are. To say that Lebanon is held at gunpoint by an armed gang, or that Lebanese journalists are assassinated for their work, Syrian intellectuals and Egyptian rights activists are typically thrown in prison and tortured, and regional minorities like the Shia, Druze, Alawi, Christians, Kurds and Jews have often been the target of purges and political violence all in the name of Arab nationalism, a corporatist ideology that seeks to erase communal as well as individual difference, is not to say that Arabs only understand force, but that violence is a central factor in Arab political life and it is impossible to understand the region without taking this into account.

Read the rest at MichaelTotten.com»