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

some wide gap between Americans and the leaders they elect became even more ludicrous after the American people showed exactly how far they were from the policies of the U.S. government by electing George W. Bush to a second term in 2004.
    Still, it’s not hard to see why tracking surges in anti-Americanism with hard numbers, even if they didn’t mean anything, became attractive to those who wanted to illustrate that the best way to keep Arab youth from killing Americans was to change American policiesin the Middle East. If it was only a matter of tweaking a few policies, then 9/11 could be written off as a misunderstanding of sorts, and there was no real conflict between Americans and Arabs. The problem, however, is that there is no real correlation between most U.S. policies and Arab anti-Americanism. Consider the two policies for which America is most famously hated throughout the region, and for which it was attacked by Nasser more than a half century ago—its support of Israel, and its backing of “corrupt” Arab regimes.
    While it’s true that Washington immediately recognized the Jewish state at its inception in May 1948, it was only after Israel’s victory in the 1967 war that the two nations consolidated an alliance when Washington came to see Israel as a potent counterforce to Soviet influence in the Middle East. Until 1967 it was France that supplied Israel with most of its weaponry, including Mirage fighter jets, a detail that did not stop Nasser from broadcasting the lie that American pilots had flown missions against Arab targets in the 1967 war. The Egyptian president could count on the outraged Arab response because he as much as anyone had seen to it that the United States was despised by the Arab masses.
    As for the second complaint, U.S. support of despotic Arab rulers, the premise is that Washington’s backing is the only thing that allows these regimes to stay in power, a notion so prevalent that it became a cornerstone of Al Qaeda strategy. It’s true of course that Egypt receives some two billion dollars in U.S. aid annually, but regime maintenance is a relatively inexpensive affair, where some of the most lavish expenditures are devoted to feathering the retirement nests of high-level military and security officers. And what it costs an Arab regime to defeat an Islamist insurgency—torture, murder, assassination, collective punishment—hardly requires the beneficence of the U.S. taxpayer. Two of the most repressive regimes in the region, Iran and Syria, terrorize their own populations quite competently without any American support at all, as did Saddam for the last two decades of his career. The “U.S. support for despots makes the Arabsangry” is a red herring: after 9/11, the Bush administration apologized for supporting Arab despots, and then it went out and deposed one, but all that happened was that Sunni Arabs across the region became outraged that the United States had taken down an Arab champion like Saddam.
    Regardless of what the United States does, or how Washington changes its policies, whether it targets Arab despots or supports them, anti-Americanism is an Arab constant. It’s so ubiquitous, in fact, that you can find it even at places like the American University in Cairo, one of the manifest strongholds of U.S. “soft” power in the Middle East.
    Opened by American Episcopal missionaries in 1919, the AUC intended to provide the Egyptian ruling classes with the intellectual foundations of democratic governance. Today, the school is a regime citadel, the alma mater of Egypt’s First Lady, Suzanne Mubarak, and her two sons, Alaa and Gamal, where the ruling classes pay close to ten times the average Egyptian’s annual salary to get their children an American-style education and imprimatur. Nonetheless, one warm winter afternoon I saw dozens of students demonstrating in the courtyard, heavily muscled boys in brand-new black T-shirts bearing the legend, in English, “Jihad