
Why Arabs Lose Wars (1999) - severine
https://www.meforum.org/441/why-arabs-lose-wars
======
pasabagi
A very interesting essay - but it works better if you substitute 'arabic
nations' with 'dictatorships'. Most of what he's talking about has far more to
do with the mechanics of maintaining a dictatorship than arabic culture.

He probably missed this because he's both unwilling to acknowledge that he's
been training the troops of dictatorships for his adult career, but also, that
the US is generally involved in the propping-up of such dictatorships.

US forces tend to spend a lot of time training extremely demoralized and
unenthusiastic conscripts, surrounded by officers who see their own soldiers
as the enemy, and don't trust eachother - and that's exactly what you expect
of the army of a unpopular dictatorship, and it's exactly what such armies
have looked like throughout most of history. The problems that mysteriously
vanish when he talks about the 'elite units' are vanishing because the elites
actually like the regimes they're in.

They also seem to vanish when they worked with the Kurds, for instance.

~~~
woodandsteel
>it works better if you substitute 'arabic nations' with 'dictatorships'.

You are correct this applies to dictatorships in general, and in fact the
article mentions the similarities to the Soviet military.

But then you have to ask why the Arab nations are almost all dictatorships,
and that brings you back to culture, at least considerably.

~~~
pasabagi
Well, most countries are not particularly democratic, but countries with
lucrative primary industries, especially strategically important ones, are
often dictatorships. Which makes sense, because if you're a big nation, and
you want to make sure your access to strategically vital resources is safe,
you want to have a friendly government in charge - and a client dictatorship
is dependably friendly, since they need you for the weapons they need to stay
in power.

I'd say there's also the compounding influence of the colonial legacy. A
colony usually has no culture of the 'citizen', since the people of the colony
are basically a resource exploited by the colonist. Without a deep culture of
citizenship, it's kinda hard to get a robust democracy going.

~~~
woodandsteel
>Well, most countries are not particularly democratic

And that is due to a great extent to culture, which is what the article is
about

> A colony usually has no culture of the 'citizen', since the people of the
> colony are basically a resource exploited by the colonist.

But Arab culture prior to the relatively brief period of Western colonization
also did not have a concept of citizen, at least not in the democratic sense.

~~~
pasabagi
>But Arab culture prior to the relatively brief period of Western colonization
also did not have a concept of citizen, at least not in the democratic sense.

This sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole, and I found:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottomanism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottomanism),
which is kinda interesting. I'm thinking the Ottoman thinking is probably the
most relevant, since most of the middle east was part of the Ottoman empire.

------
stcredzero
_In every society information is a means of making a living or wielding power,
but Arabs husband information and hold it especially tightly. U.S. trainers
have often been surprised over the years by the fact that information provided
to key personnel does not get much further than them. Having learned to
perform some complicated procedure, an Arab technician knows that he is
invaluable so long as he is the only one in a unit to have that knowledge;
once he dispenses it to others he no longer is the only font of knowledge and
his power dissipates._

This information hoarding behavior also occurs in large enterprises. I know
one programmer who got to sit in a cafe reading a book, because she was the
only one who understood how a particular subsystem worked. (She had written it
in a particularly diabolical way, and only she understood the underlying
system of objects only existed as adjacent entries in long arrays, which then
underwent merge sort-like "merge" operations involving 4 array indexes, of
which there were dozens of variations which called each other recursively. The
company that had produced the system was defunct, and no manuals for the
format could be found.)

One way to counteract this, is to require all groups within the company to
provide a standardized API for accessing their systems, and to evaluate each
group by how useful it is to the rest of the company.

~~~
baud147258
Another variation of this behavior is information-based management, where
business information is given (or not) to the various team members, usually
because of internal politics/power struggles. (at least it's how my boss in my
second internship explained it to me, I never directly witnessed it)

------
jacobwilliamroy
random thought: maybe if enough wars are lost, they'll stop practicing war and
try to get their needs met by other means.</randomthought>

I think Norvell B. De Atkine might have missed out on some key details due to
his status as an outsider. Especially if every Arab with whom he interacted
truly suspected he was a zionist spy. It's difficult to overcome that kind of
paranoia and the skills for doing so are not taught in the U.S. military.
Also, it sounds like a lot of these people are being forced to participate in
the wars, and that's just a recipe for failure. Guns are scary it takes a lot
more than a draft to convince someone to stick around for that shit.

Another thing to consider is that the rituals used to build loyalty in the
U.S. military are kind of a secret. Generally, only the ones participating in
the rituals get to know what they are. The content is not entirely intuitive
either: imagine being told to sleep in a 1-meter wooden cube in the woods;
ants crawl into the cube and bite you; at bedtime, human chanting is played
from speakers inside your cube, alternating between quiet and deafening over
five minute intervals until the sun comes up. This is meant to build unit
cohesion. It's weirdo shit devised by psychos to break human minds.

Also, the article is called "Why Arabs Lose Wars" but half of the examples he
initially cites are wars in which both sides were arab: Egypt v Yemen, Syria v
Lebanon, Iraq v Kuwait. Arabs won those wars... but I guess that wasn't worth
noting because the losing side was arab?

Those were just some details which stuck out to me while I was reading the
article. I acknowledge that about half of this article is objective, fact-
based observation and those observations were genuinely interesting. I think
that his evidence is inconclusive simply because of the context in which his
observations were gathered.

~~~
jki275
That's not really how the US military works.

You're attempting to describe a training event that has nothing to do with a
"loyalty ritual", it's not a good description and has nothing to do with unit
cohesion, loyalty, or breaking anyone's mind.

------
EliRivers
An excellent and very readable book on this in the modern era is "Arabs at
War" by Kenneth M. Pollack

He examines a number of recent wars in the area of interest and discusses some
of the common findings he makes. He also finds a number of situations in which
armies in the region are effective; it's not just a hit piece.

------
ghbakir
I was expecting a dull write-up but this essay is extremely insight full and
deep.

The problems and issues are probably not restricted to the military apparatus.
Many organizational inefficiencies in e.g. Turkish political/private
organizations are due same reasons.

------
forkLding
TLDR: Arab armies are ineffective because of the all the internal, external
and ethnic politics which hinders all kinds of cooperation and unity at the
battalion-level, otherwise on the unit and soldier-level they are comparable
to Israeli units.

~~~
jdm2212
The article is pretty clear that on the small unit and soldier level the Arab
forces are less effective, too. Specialists horde information, soldiers don't
train for multiple roles, junior officers mistreat their soldiers, no one
shows initiative, etc. There are good reasons for all of this -- it's not an
Arab character defect, but a rational response to soldiers' circumstances --
but the author states quite explicitly that an Israeli tank crew can better
absorb casualties than an Arab tank crew can because the Israelis are
encouraged to share information and train for multiple tasks.

------
severine
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10830172](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10830172)

Jan 3, 2016 | 41 comments

------
aogaili
I think the author is describing a symptoms of an ill organization structure
rather than the root causes. The reason why there is no trust, sharing of
information and centralized authority in modern Arab state armies because Arab
societies never really transitioned successfully into a functional
nationalistic countries. Arabs never really believed in nation state and in
the absence of strong bonding narrative, there is no common ground for the
group to collaborate and fight thus you end up with individuals seeking their
self interest and subsequently the symptoms which the author observed.

Modern nation state concepts were forced into a region that is predominantly
tribal and religious in culture therefore the resulted states, governments,
armies and other national institutions are merely a superficial layer on top
of a largely religious, ethinic and tribal societies. The west had a long and
painful (400 years plus and two major wars) transition from societies
dominated by religion to a national secular societies and eventually a
capitalistic global societies. That transition never really took place in the
Arab region, instead what happened is that western society tried to force
national borders and proxy presidents after the world wars on societies that
didn’t have the cultural foundation for it and the region has not really
managed to reconcile, unify and agree on it’s identity ever since.

So why do arabs lose war? Because really there is no state or reason to fight
for it. This was very clear in Iraq when fighting ISIS, the men of the country
only mobilized after a religious greenlight from a senior clerk despite the
fact that ISIS were at the border of the country's capital.

~~~
baud147258
> 400 years plus and two major wars

More like a dozen of major war.

But what you are describing is close to the idea of nation-state, which has
been blamed as the cause of the war of the XXth century.

~~~
aogaili
Yeah indeed it cauased a new set of global conflicts, but it also allowed
western societies to raise above the tribal, relgious and ethinic devisions
(for better or worst) something I'd argue no Arab nation managed to do so
successfully.

In fact it seems that western societies are currently undergrowing new
trasnision beyond the nation and local bordres, which could be why they're
having new make x great again movements and raise of local populist.

------
devoply
Mostly because there is no Arab or Muslim empire left after Europeans killed
off the Ottoman empire and it's easy to beat down tyrants with few allies.
What's the reasons for these tyrants, dictators, and terrorists. Insecurity.
What's the reason for insecurity? Lack of empire... so you always end up
becoming someone's bitch... which leads to feelings of insecurity and
inferiority.

The only way to deal with this is to become a vassal of an existing empire and
good examples of this are Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, etc.

~~~
markbnj
> Mostly because there is no Arab or Muslim empire left after Europeans killed
> off the Ottoman empire

Can you describe the Ottoman's as Arabs? Without resorting to sources I seem
to recall their origins were in Scythia. In any case, I do think there is some
value in looking back at the history, even though it is pretty orthogonal to
the analysis in the post (there may be some cultural touch points). Also,
isn't it more accurate to say that the Ottomans chose the wrong (German) side
in a war, and that this is the cause of their final dissolution?

~~~
omer_balyali
Ottomans were not Arab by any-means. Ottoman State is founded by Osman Bey,
leader of the Kayi Tribe which is a sub-tribe of Oghuz Turks, who migrated
from Khorasan. The official language in Ottoman empire was Ottoman Turkish,
which is basically Turkish with many many Persian and Arabic words, while the
structure and grammer was Turkish. Ottoman Turkish mainly used in Istanbul by
a limited-number of people who are closed to state affairs or some educated
people like poets or government officials in the federal states. Common people
was speaking plan Turkish, which don't have much Persian and Arabic influence,
and this language was the language of the Ottoman Army. Ottoman state and army
culture, discipline and structure was a classical Turkish state structure, of
course with differences from previous Turkish states.

The problem Arabs faced after dissolution of Ottoman Empire is similar in a
sense to Turkish people faced, in regards to the national awareness.

Ottoman Empire didn't dissolved because they chose the wrong side, instead it
was huge empire consisting of many nation and spans over an enourmous area
(East Europe, Anatolia, Syria-Iraq, Egypt, Arabia, North Africa), while the
army and many government offices couldn't keep up with the developments of the
time. Basically, Ottoman Empire dissolved because of the wrong politics and
failure to renew itself. After the French Revolution, nationalism started to
spread over whole Europe and this affected the Ottoman Empire most, not only
consisting of different nations, but also different religions. Being a
religious state (Islamic), main subjects were Muslims and non-Muslims,
separated by Millet system according to religious affiliation. Government
officials were either Turkish or Devshirmes (Christian boys converted to Islam
and trained to be gov. officials), being Muslim even wasn't a qualification to
be an official.

When nationalism sweeps Europe, Christian Balkan nations like Greeks,
Serbians, Bulgars etc. started to rebel against the empire to found their own
independent nation states, feeling comfortable as the empire was loosing power
every day. In that situation, Ottoman government was trying to cope with "the
problem" by supporting the empire-identity of Ottomanism, and only small
number of educated people were following the idea of Turkish nationalism and
to create a Turkish nation-state. This was all happening at the last decades
of 1800s, and Ottomans lost Balkan region, latery Ottomans also lost Middle
East, Egypt, Iraq, Arabia, North Africa. British Empire also supported Arab
nations to rebel against Ottoman Empire, promising their own land (British
Mandates).

Empire was already dissolved when most of the nations declared their
independence. WW1 was just nail in the coffin, that officially surrendered
Ottoman Empire and Istanbul to British Empire. After the end of WW2, Allied
forces (British, Greek, French, Italian, Armenian) shared the remnants of the
empire with Treaty of Sevres, but Ottoman Army generals and irregular Turkish
armed forces rebelled against the invading forces and this resulted in the
victory for the Turkish side in the War of Independence, and ultimately
resulted in the foundation of the Turkish national state.

TL;DR: Empire didn't dissolved because of choosing the German side. And also
Arab nations didn't share "ottoman" ideals as Turkish and even many non-Muslim
millet did and finally rebelled against Ottomans with the British support.
Saying Ottoman Empire was an Arab Empire is simply ignoring the historical
facts. This is not so different than saying all the Christian nations in
Europe are descending of the Jews because Jesus was one. Having words from a
language and having the same religious affiliation doesn't make two different
states, nations or cultures one.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_and_modernization_of_t...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_and_modernization_of_the_Ottoman_Empire)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rise_of_nationalism_in_the_Ott...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rise_of_nationalism_in_the_Ottoman_Empire)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_War_of_Independence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_War_of_Independence)

~~~
markbnj
Thanks so much for the insights.

> Ottoman Empire didn't dissolved because they chose the wrong side, instead
> it was huge empire consisting of many nation and spans over an enourmous
> area (East Europe, Anatolia, Syria-Iraq, Egypt, Arabia, North Africa), while
> the army and many government offices couldn't keep up with the developments
> of the time.

Not an uncommon pattern.

~~~
jcranmer
Multicultural empires couldn't survive the onslaught of nationalism that came
in the 19th century. The modernization attempts of the Ottoman Empire (unlike
Austria-Hungary or Russia, the other two major multicultural empires of
Europe) rested very heavily on a very narrow Turkish nationalism movement that
alienated the Armenian, Arab, and Balkan peoples in the country. But Austria-
Hungary, which was somewhat successfully trying to force an inclusive,
multicultural modernization process still imploded, as did Russia, which was
somewhat in the middle between Austria-Hungary and the Ottomans.

Even the multicultural aspects of the British Empire would come flying apart
in the 20th century--Irish nationalism was successful in splitting from
Britain in the inter-war period, and Indian nationalism would end the British
Raj shortly after WW2. And Britain was consistently the most modern, liberal,
and inclusive country in this period. The only countries that could
successfully survive multiculturally were those that received multiple
countries from the sheer immigration of the period and channeled them into a
melting pot of immigrant cultures (most notably the US, but many of the large
American countries went through similar experiences).

