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February 06, 2005

Iraq, Democracy and Israel

Retired U.S. Army colonel Norvell De Atkine wrote a fascinating article called Why Arabs Lose Wars which was originally published in December 1999. De Atkine has long experience working with various Arab military establishments as an U.S. military attache, a security assistance officer and as an observer officer, along with some thirty years studying the Middle East. So, he speaks from no small amount of personal knowledge and experience.

The gist of what De Atkine wrote is that several traits inherent in the Arab culture and societies inhibits the effectiveness of their formal military forces because effective, competent military leadership is largely absent. He notes that while a "regular Jordanian army infantry company, for example is man-for-man as good as a comparable Israeli company; at battalion level, however, the coordination required for combined arms operations, with artillery, air, and logistics support, is simply absent. Indeed, the higher the echelon, the greater the disparity."

The culprit? De Atkine identifies three primary problems.

• First, the well-known lack of trust among Arabs in anyone outside their own families adversely affects offensive operations.


• Second, the complex mosaic system of peoples creates additional problems for training, as rulers in the Middle East make use of the sectarian and tribal loyalties to maintain power.


• Third, Middle Eastern rulers routinely rely on balance-of-power techniques to maintain their authority. They use competing organizations, duplicate agencies, and coercive structures dependent upon the ruler's whim. This makes building any form of personal power base difficult, if not impossible, and keeps the leadership apprehensive and off-balance, never secure in its careers or social position.

The end result, with few exceptions, is that Arab officers are not concerned about the welfare and safety of their men, and their men know it. Initiative on the part of junior officers, or any officers for that matter is not only not encouraged, but is highly risky and sometimes fatal. Responsibility is avoided and deflected, not sought and assumed. Career advancement and sometimes survival is based on political paranoia rather than openness and team effort in the Arab military establishments. And he notes that this is not genetic, but rather is due to "matters of historical and political culture."

De Atkine concludes,

Change is unlikely to come until it occurs in the larger Arab political culture, although the experience of other societies (including our own) suggests that the military can have a democratizing influence on the larger political culture, as officers bring the lessons of their training first into their professional environment, then into the larger society. It obviously makes a big difference, however, when the surrounding political culture is not only avowedly democratic (as was the Soviet Union’s), but functionally so.

Think about this for a moment. What is it that President Bush has said we are doing in Iraq that is so important? "Iraqi democracy."

The problems that De Atkine describes explain why Saddam's military couldn't defeat the Kurds despite fighting them for decades. They explain why his forces fared so badly against an Iranian military that was badly weakened by our embargo which denied them replacement parts for their U.S. made weapons... Why vast segments of his military performed incompetently and then surrendered in droves at the first opportunity during the Gulf War in 1991.

So then if functional democracy is even only a partial solution, and Bush is intent on Iraqi democracy, then one byproduct would be a superior, more capable Iraqi military. But, wouldn't that pose a direct national security threat to Israel? In fact, wouldn't the threat be directly proportional to how effectively Iraqis adopt and impliment democracy? The more thoroughly Iraqi democracy takes root, the more thoroughly the root problems plaguing their Arab military establishment would be eliminated, and the more capable the military would be as a direct result. No?

Would President Bush deliberately do something that could result in Israel's national security being threatened?

Surely nobody can honestly expect that Iraqi democracy will somehow equal a newfound love of Israel. There remain fundamental injustices which Israel thus far has resisted addressing with respect to Palestinian Arab civilians who lost their homes and lands to Israel when they fled from the fighting during the various Arab/Israeli Wars. Here we are, the world's greatest democracy and we used not entirely dissimilar provocation's to bomb the shit outta Serbia over Kosovo Albanians losing homes and property to Serbians. So, clearly there is nothing inherent in democracy which prevents said democracy's political leaders from dispatching their military to redress inequities in other nations.

Your thoughts?

Posted by Kevin at February 6, 2005 01:17 AM