Edited for the good bits. Read the whole thing, as they say.
IF THE insularity of a police state breeds weakness, it can, however, also foster a peculiar kind of ephemeral strength—albeit one whose destructive force is more often turned inward in the guise of terror than outward in the form of real power. In the first Gulf war, a third of a million Iraqi soldiers either surrendered with little fighting or deserted before the shooting started. But the more startling fact may be that at least another quarter-million survived the war and returned home to train their rifles on their own unhappy people. Republican Guardsmen who had romped into Kuwait in the summer of 1990 to loot, rape, and murder, and who in late February 1991 were mauled in a few minutes by the 1st Armored Division at the Medina Ridge, had recouped sufficiently only days later to slaughter mostly unarmed Kurds and Shiites by the tens of thousands. (Twelve years later, some of these same Guardsmen or their younger brothers and cousins would themselves be annihilated in less than two weeks by American airpower, Marines, and the 3rd Mechanized Division.)
This dual tendency—to run before competent enemies and to murder innocents at home—is another reflection of a broader military and indeed societal pathology. As Pollack stresses, Arab societies do not produce indigenous sophisticated weaponry. Indeed, their militaries are almost entirely parasitic on Western or westernized arms industries. The need to import weaponry means that their systems are always a generation behind, and this institutionalized obsolescence inevitably portends defeat when fighting is not intramural but rather cross-cultural, against the societies that design and make such arms in the first place. |