Free The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations by Lee Smith

president cultivated warm relations with the CIA throughout the 1950s. 2 President Eisenhower wondered why the Arabs loathed America when, after forcing France and England to stand down during the 1956 Suez crisis, it hadhanded Nasser his one success in a career of adventurist disasters. 3 But the reason is simple: with the eventual departure of America’s two Western rivals from the region, only the United States was left for Nasser to use as a fulcrum to enhance his prestige by leveraging popular opinion against his regional rivals Jordan and Saudi Arabia, the so-called conservative—that is, pro-American—regimes. And even in the 1950s, it was clear that one way to unite the Arab masses was to attack the West. One of the ways Arab nationalism became a powerful and popular ideology, in other words, was by becoming fused with another powerful current of feeling: anti-Americanism.
     I t may seem surprising that there was a deep wellspring of anti-Americanism in the region five decades ago, since it’s sometimes been made to seem as if Arab anger at the United States started with the Bush administration. The truth, of course, is that Arabs’ anger at America long predated the invasion of Iraq. This was obvious immediately after 9/11, for despite the general goodwill that the United States was supposed to have enjoyed in the region following the attacks, in reality the most vocal Arab spokesmen celebrated or justified 9/11, while others charged that Washington itself had engineered the attacks in order to hurt the image of the Arabs and destroy Islam. The U.S. ambassador to Egypt at the time, David Welch, wrote an editorial in one of the Egyptian papers politely asking the press to stop accusing the American government of slaughtering its own citizens, a request that didn’t go over too well with the Egyptian media, outraged that this self-styled proconsul had the nerve to try to dictate terms to them, a free press. 4
    As for the ostensibly sympathetic Arab opinion makers, they disguised their anti-Americanism by claiming that they felt bad for America until Bush’s post-9/11 wars made Arabs despise America, which, while self-serving, was not entirely false. Just about the only thing that could really make America hatred noticeably worse is ifWashington decided to confront the anti-American ideological and political agenda that leads to attacks on U.S. citizens, allies, and interests—which is exactly what the Bush administration did, through diplomatic, political, and military means. It was only natural that America’s image started to trend even farther down in the Arab world once all the post-9/11 crocodile tears had dried: fighting back never earned anyone the love of those who wish them harm.
    Nonetheless, an entire social science rose from the ashes of 9/11, a growth industry with public opinion polls and surveys, along with man-on-the-street interviews and consultations with Arab officials and intelligentsia, churning out data to explain why Arabs were angry with the United States—or, to be more precise, why Arabs hated U.S. policy since it was clear that they had a high regard for America itself and its people. Alas, it never dawned on those American researchers and journalists who reported back to the home front with their dire findings that separating a people from its leaders is one of political warfare’s oldest stratagems:
We have no quarrel with your great nation, only your bad government and its vile policies, so stand aside and let us finish our work, after which there will be a time of great understanding and comity.
    Liberal democracies should be immune to this kind of propaganda, but it never occurred even to those the White House tasked with public diplomacy and “re-branding” America to explain to the Arabs, and some Americans, that the essential feature of our republic, what distinguishes our form of governance from theirs, is that we
choose
our policy makers. The Arab conceit that there is