It is a political culture, Smith argues, in which violence has always played a central role. "Of course, it was not America's hand that blew up mosques in Iraq. It was not the Bush administration that conducted a campaign of terror in Beirut, assassinating Lebanese politicians, journalists and civil society activists," says Smith. "And the U.S. State Department sentenced no opposition figures, intellectuals, journalists or bloggers to prisons in Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere around the Middle East, where they were subject to torture, rape and murder. It was Arabs who did this to other Arabs."

Smith believes that is the main lesson American policymakers should learn: that Arabs today are divided against themselves.

"A clash of Arab civilizations; clashes between Arab regimes and their own people, the regimes and their domestic rivals and insurgencies, clashes between Arab regimes themselves," says Smith. Perhaps most importantly, there is the clash between world views, where on the one hand, there is the democratic and progressive trend embodied in the venerable and still extant tradition of Arab liberalism, and on the other hand, the bloody and violent current represented by far too many of the region's seminal figures."

Strong Horse

Smith is an Arabic speaker who moved to Cairo after 9/11 determined to find out what motivated the al-Qaeda attackers. He has spent the past nine years crisscrossing the Middle East in search of the answer. Smith took the title of his book, "The Strong Horse," from a quote by Osama bin Laden, who said, "When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse."