Arab Culture

Anyone familiar with the history of the Middle East can't help but make this politically-incorrect observation: any Arab military engagement with a non-Arab military is nearly certain to result in the Arabs losing. The Israeli-Arab conflicts are legendary and consistent with this observation, but they are certainly not the only such conflicts. Most recently, of course, Western coalitions have twice demolished the Iraqi military; in both cases the Arab Iraqi military suffered defeats that would have been unthinkable (and unforgivable) in any other military.

What's behind this pattern?

StrategyPage (which is full of all sorts of interesting articles) recently posted a column on exactly this issue. Here's a sample:

At lot has been written about why Arab armies so consistently lose wars with non-Arabs. These reasons also explain why Arab nations, and many other Third World nations as well, also have trouble establishing democratic governments or prosperous economies. A lot of it has to do with culture, especially culture influenced by Islam. Some of the reasons for these failures are:

Most Arab countries are a patchwork of different tribes and groups, and Arab leaders survive by playing one group off against another. Loyalty is to one's group, not the nation. Most countries are dominated by a single group that is usually a minority (Bedouins in Jordan, Alawites in Syria, Sunnis in Iraq, Nejdis in Saudi Arabia). All of which means that officers are assigned not by merit but by loyalty and tribal affiliation.

Islamic schools favor rote memorization, especially of scripture. Most Islamic scholars are hostile to the concept of interpreting the Koran (considered the word of God as given to His prophet Mohammed). This has resulted in looking down on Western troops that will look something up that they don't know. Arabs prefer to fake it, and pretend it's all in their head. Improvisation and innovation is generally discouraged. Arab armies go by the book, Western armies rewrite the book and thus usually win.

There's much more food for thought in this interesting article. While it's not mentioned directly in the article, it's easy to extrapolate from its points that the al Qaeda organization seems almost designed to take advantage of those same Arab traits that make their conventional military forces so ineffective...

Not mentioned in this column, though widely documented elsewhere, is the pervasive corruption in every Arab culture. Commanding bribes and handing out favors are typically considered by Arabs to be natural (and rightful) perquisites of any office. The traits outlined in this post, plus the universal corruption, make enormous challenges for establishing a democracy.

I've noticed that Arabs who have close contact with the West (and most especially those who travel or live in the West) have no trouble understanding Western ideals. Some see the Western ideals as opportunity to be exploited; others (and more than a few) see them as something their cultures would benefit from. The latter viewpoint is loudly expressed on some of the most popular English-language Arab blogs, which gives me much hope for their future. I've read in many places (most especially Michael Yon and Michael Totten) how the Iraqis are watching and learning from Americans – they are most impressed by how much the Americans have been able to accomplish in such a short time, and also by the opportunities that ordinary Americans have. They'd like all that for themselves, of course.

The Iraqi experiment with democracy is (for me, at least) the single most hopeful development in the Middle East ever – and the only one with any hope whatsoever for lasting peace in the region. Some of my readers, I know, won't understand what I'm talking about there – what on earth does Iraq have to do with Israel? It's a big-picture thought, but here's a simplified version: if there is even a single successful, flourishing Arab democracy, there will enormous pressure on the tyrannical regimes (that would be all the other ones) to similarly reform – the example of a successful Iraq will be very difficult to ignore. And Iraq should be able to succeed – it has far more natural resources than Israel, it has a well-educated populace. The only significant obstacles are terrorism and culture, and terrorism is relatively low right now and declining rapidly. I believe the cultural issues are about to become the single major obstacle to the success of Iraqi democracy.

I'd sure like to see this democratic experiment continue. Obama's rhetoric (assuming he actually means what he's saying, which is by no means certain in an election campaign) makes it clear that he'd yank virtually all significant support from the Iraqis – and that would make it virtually certain that it would descend back into tyranny. What form that would take, I don't know; my intuition says we'd get an autonomous Kurdish region up north, and a terrible war between the Shiites and the Sunni, quite possibly involving Iran (on the side of the Shiites) and Saudi Arabia (on the side of the Sunnis). The only certainty is that it would be awful...