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June 18, 2014
“The trouble with Afghanistan is it is full Afghans. The trouble with Iraq is there are not enough Iraqis.”
Arab culture is not like Western culture so their way of making war is different from that of the West. “War without battle” is the preferred mode in the Arab world. That means insurgencies, terrorism and social disruption are where Arabs excel. This makes perfect sense for a culture where blood relations trump all else. Kin based societies are low-trust societies. It is trust and altruism that enable societies to engage in large scale projects like fielding large armies. Arab societies are low trust societies, which is why they have never been good at the civilization stuff that requires large scale organization. If you can only truly count on blood relatives, scaling beyond 100 or so hands is nearly impossible. Even when you expand the circle of trust beyond second cousins, you limit the number of people capable of working as a unit to a few hundred. It is why Arab countries are authoritarian. The people will never willingly go along with the leader, if he is not at least from their tribe. That means coercion is the only way to rule. You never hear Arab leaders talking about “their people” with any degree of pride, like you hear in the West. They don’t even have the concept down. Instead, “us” is almost always defined by blood. The other interesting thing is all of this was predictable. The American military spent billions designing and training a military for Iraq along western lines. The trouble is they left an Arab culture that is still an Arab culture. Eventually you end up with the same old half-assed Arab army with a bunch of American gear they can barely operate. A guy named Norvell B. De Atkine wrote about this 15 years ago in a paper called Why Arabs Lose Wars. While he tried hard to inoculate himself, the author can’t help but notice the reason Arab countries are as we find them is they are full of Arabs. The Z Blog › Ruminations on IraqPosted by gerardvanderleun at June 18, 2014 11:50 AM. This is an entry on the sideblog of American Digest: Check it out.