Root Causes, is from Policy Review, No. 112, a review of Bernard Lewis's book What Went Wrong?.

I sent them the following comments:

I have just read Mark Bowden's article about Saddam Hussein in the May 2002 edition of The Atlantic Monthly. One of the central explanations of Saddam was given by a defected Iraqi journalist was the difference between the village culture and the city culture of Iraq. The hallmarks of the village were tribal loyalty and power maintained through violence.

What struck me in reading Lewis' book and his earlier work, The Middle East, was that what we think of as Islamic Civilization was not the product of the Arabs, but of Turks, who conquered the Arabs and then were converted to Islam. The Arabs are still tied to their nomadic, tribal roots, with the same attitudes and impulses as those ascribed to Iraqi villages. I can see no other way to deal with these people other than by defeating them militarily and forcing Kemalism upon them, and even then, I doubt it would work without directly interfering with their religious beliefs, which Americans, especially, would be reluctant to do.