In the latest edition of Human Events Online, Benjamin Van Horrick has a fascinating piece entitled, Why Are Arab Armies Always Defeated? In this piece he details that while the Arab fighter has long been lauded as a ferocious foe, Arab Armies have long been known for their inability to win. In every conflict of the modern era, the Armies of Middle Eastern countries have proven themselves unable to sustain combat. The Arab, or in the case of our battle against militant Islam, the Muslim fighter, is ill equipped in the modern world to wage war, better suited to the type of guerrilla warfare we see waged against us in Iraq. Perhaps, a better understanding of this inability of their armies to function, and their natural propensity toward clan warfare, might have made our present battles less costly.

Our military is geared toward battle against opposing armies, a holdover from the Cold War. Efforts on the part of this President and his advisors (read Donald Rumsfeld), have made gains in our abilities, but we still have much to learn. What we are fighting is centuries of culture…a culture that is inherently foreign to our understanding. We might as well be fighting Klingons, for all of our understanding of how the Middle Eastern mind works.

The Human Events article quotes from a piece in Mideast Quarterly. In “Why Arabs Lose Wars” from the Mideast Quarterly, Norvell B. De Atkine provides us some valuable insight into the war we fight today in our war against terrorist. In his article he points out that differences in culture and religion have a great influence on how they make war.

The Vietnamese communists did not fight the war the United States had trained for, nor did the Chechens and Afghans fight the war the Russians prepared for. This entails far more than simply retooling weaponry and retraining soldiers. It requires an understanding of the enemy's cultural mythology, history, attitude toward time, etc.—demanding a more substantial investment in time and money than a bureaucratic organization is likely to authorize.

One of the problems I see with American culture is our seeming inability to maintain focus for any length of time. I have often blamed this lack of focus on American television. We have come to believe that all conflicts can be settled within an hour of primetime…excluding commercials of course. If a conflict lasts beyond a single season (summers off for reruns) we lose interest.

Nothing demonstrates this more than our MSM coverage of  any  news story. For a period of several days, no other story intrudes upon the MSM wall-to-wall coverage, only to be completely dropped and never mentioned again, once a new  story has captured the attention of the media.

This myopic focus of the MSM would be almost comical were it not for the gravity of the situation, and the inability of the MSM to follow and stay with a story to its end. More often than not, a story of “great importance” such as Natalie Holloway consumes the MSM for weeks, only to be supplanted by another…with never a mention of the fact that the first story has not been concluded.

Another wonderfully ironic case in point is Cindy Sheehan. Mother Sheehan was once the darling of the media, and a purported possible Senate candidate against DiFi. Now she couldn’t get her face on primetime as a corpse!

This inability of the American public to maintain focus is obvious in relation to the Bush Administration’s War on Terror. On September 12, 2001, the United States were one people united, regardless of political affiliation against an enemy both seen and unseen. When the President told us in an address before Congress, nine days after the attack;

Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.

… By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions -- by abandoning every value except the will to power -- they follow in the path of fascism, and Nazism, and totalitarianism. And they will follow that path all the way, to where it ends: in history's unmarked grave of discarded lies.

Our response involves far more than instant retaliation and isolated strikes. Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen. It may include dramatic strikes, visible on TV, and covert operations, secret even in success. We will starve terrorists of funding, turn them one against another, drive them from place to place, until there is no refuge or no rest. And we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.(emphasis mine)

Those of us who heard those words and took them to heart, knew that the war would be long and hard and costly. Even then, the more cynical among us, questioned whether the American people had the heart to stay the course through the long years we knew it would take to prosecute the GWOT. Even then, I think, many of us knew the fickle nature of the American public…and the opportunistic nature of the President’s political enemies.  What most of us did not consider, I’m afraid, is the ability of our enemies to use their knowledge of the American nature…of the “cut and run” mentality of the American left.  Had we been paying attention to Osama bin Laden, we would have read his words in which he said

… that his forces expected the Americans to be tough like the Soviets but instead found that they were "paper tigers" who "after a few blows ran in defeat."

Paul M. Belbutowski writes in “Strategic Implications of Cultures in Conflict;”

The problem of time is nowhere more appropriate for discussion than in Asia, where the United States suffered its most traumatic decades in recent history, facing an enemy which appeared militarily inferior in almost every way. While American soldiers in Vietnam spoke of the enemy's apparent patience and willingness to sacrifice today's battle for tomorrow's victory, the factor of time was considered only superficially at the strategic level, to address the question of when the conflict could be brought to a close under conditions favorable to the United States.

Of course we also know from reading his memoirs, North Vietnamese General Giap stated that the North Vietnamese would have given up and sued for peace under the unrelenting load of American bombing of the north, were it not for the “Peace Movement” in this country.

Giap admitted in his memoirs that news media reporting of the war and the antiwar demonstrations that ensued in America surprised him. Instead of negotiating what he called a "conditional surrender," Giap said they would now go the limit because America's resolve was weakening and the possibility of complete victory was within Hanoi's grasp.

Bui Tin, who served on the general staff of the North Vietnamese army, received South Vietnam's unconditional surrender on April 30, 1975. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal after his retirement, he made clear that the antiwar movement in the United States (which led to the collapse of political will in Washington) was "essential to our strategy." 

Clearly it was not the US Military, the fighting soldiers on the ground who lost the Vietnam War, but the political will of the people. Well meaning individuals, lawfully protesting in the streets, unwittingly  provided aid and comfort to America’s enemies…not just prolonging the war, but in the end, losing that war, and bringing down not one, but two Presidents. (Johnson, a bitter and defeated man, chose not to run for reelection in 1968. Nixon, it can be argued, would not have been infused with his paranoia against his “enemies” were it not for the continuation of the Vietnam war protests.)

We often hear about the discredited Domino Theory in Southeast Asia. We have been told that the US policy was all wrong that Southeast Asia and all of that region did not fall to Communism, as our policy at the time stated would happen, and thus our policy was wrong and we should never have fought the Vietnam war. This is popular rhetoric today, and has become a KnownFact. However, in his autobiography, Lee Kuan Yew,  Prime Minister of Singapore from 1959 through 1990, tells a completely different story. In fact, I have never seen mention of his opinion anywhere in the MSM over the last three decades.

"Although American intervention failed in Vietnam, it bought time for the rest of Southeast Asia. In 1965, when the US military moved massively into South Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines faced internal threats from armed communist insurgencies . . . and the communist underground was still active in Singapore. . . America's action [in Vietnam] enabled non-communist Southeast Asia to put their own houses in order. By 1975, they were in better shape to stand up to the communists. Had there been no US intervention, the will of these countries to resist them would have melted and Southeast Asia would most likely have gone communist. The prosperous emerging market economies of ASEAN were nurtured during the Vietnam War years."

It would seem that Lee Kuan Yew would be in a much better position to see the effectiveness of our policy vis-à-vis Vietnam, Communism and Southeast Asia, than the leftists of this country that have written our history books for the last three decades.

So how, you might ask, does this all relate to our current conflict with radical Islam throughout the world in general and within the Middle East in particular? In what ways are our misunderstandings of the enemy we faces in Vietnam, and the way that enemy used and perceived the MSM then, and our enemies we face today similar?  Let me enumerate.

From the same article mentioned above we have this:

April 15, 2004 marked the return to an old strategy by a new enemy. If the democracies of the world could not be defeated in battle, al Qaeda would use the carrot and stick approach to bring down Western civilization using the fear of further megaterror while capitalizing on the anti-war sentiment in Europe and the United States to undermine popular support for America's war on terrorism.

On that day, Osama Bin Laden released a high quality 7-minute videotape through al Jazeera TV that offered a truce with America's European allies provided that they refrained from attacking "Muslim countries" including "intervening in their affairs." The tape attempted to make the case that Israel's assassination of the spiritual leader of Hamas (Sheik Ahmed Yassin) on March 22, 2004 and America's attempt to "make billions of dollars in profit" in Iraq through major corporations like Halliburton, demonstrated a "narrow personal interest and subservience to the White House gang...What happened on September 11 and March 11 was your goods delivered back to you," he said.

Unable to win against the American Military, he hoped to undermine the effort by appealing to the anti-war left. If his words sound amazingly like Democratic talking points, one has to wonder…exactly who is quoting whom?

Using a similar tactic today against Israel, Hezbollah manufactures public opinion against the IDF by situating their rockets in civilian populated areas, preventing those civilians from escaping to safe areas, and then staging incidents for the world media to “prove” that Israel is “targeting” civilians.

From the original Human Events article, De Atkine points out several cultural deficiencies in the Arab psyche that cause their Armies to fail.

A key deficiency De Atkine observed in the Arab military is the concentration of information. De Atkine saw that Arabs rarely share information with each other. Having a particular expertise in the military makes an Arab “invaluable” and he obtains a level of “prestige and attention,” so long as he is the only one with the information.

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Arab education places a high premium on memorization. Students fill their notebooks with information and then regurgitate what they learned on tests. This method of learning has its advantages, allowing students to recall facts with astounding accuracy and speed.

But the emphasis on disgorging facts leaves other facilities lacking, like original thought and analytical skills. Arabs look to conform, rather than innovate, like their Western counterparts

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Communication and decision-making is limited to a small number of individuals at a high level of authority. Information is not distributed from the top on down. And once a decision is made, it cannot be altered in any way.

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Noncommissioned officers (NCO) provide a link for the officers and enlisted personnel in Western militaries, while Arabs have no (or an undeveloped) NCO corps. NCOs are not trusted to instruct enlisted personnel and thus instruction becomes the responsibility of the officers. However, the cultural gap between the enlisted and officers makes the education system a failure.

Arab officers fail to lead by example because they are tied to notion of societal prestige. Rather than leading by example, officers prefer to “save face” in front of enlisted men.

American efforts to forge an effective Army in Iraq, an army able to defend itself, have been thwarted by these inherent cultural problems. It makes the hopes of complete withdrawal seem problematical. We might well find ourselves there for a very long time.

While these shortcoming of the Arab culture have made American and Israeli victories against Arab nation states ridiculously easy…it also helps to explain the difficulties we have both encountered in wiping out the guerrilla wars against Hamas, Hezbollah, the Taliban and the Iraqi “insurgency.” The culture of clan warfare so prevalent in their society makes this type of conflict nearly impossible to wipe out…without demonstrating a level of savagery foreign to our own culture.

In concluding the Human Events piece, the author states:

The Middle East hangs in the balance, as Israeli and Arab armies face off. But Arab armies must fight their cultural limitation along with their determined Israeli foe. When they meet their defeat at the hands of Israel, Arabs will continue to blame weapons and money for their loses, rather than looking at their own failures. They can reform their culture, which are the seeds of their defeats, or continue their life on the run from Western forces bent on destroying Islamic fascism.

Those nation states that remain our enemies; Syria and Iran, continue to support terrorist who attack Americans and Israelis. Aware as they are that they cannot hope to defeat either nation face to face, they wage war through surrogates…terrorist willing to strap bombs on their children and sending them off to die…or who fire rockets into civilian areas, from civilian areas, hoping to win through attrition and world opinion, the battle they cannot win on the battlefield.

The only way to defeat these people is to make war so terrible for them that they give up. We must support Israel in wiping out Hezbollah. We must be willing to do the same to their sponsors in Syria and Iran.

The question is will the American people have the heart to see the war against terrorists through to the end. We will get our first answer to that question on November 7th of this year.  We await the answer of the American people.

Cross Posted at www.honzsight.blogspot.com