12 ms·

Why Arabs Lose Wars (1999)

37 points by severine 7y ago

severine 7y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10830172 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10830172 Jan 3, 2016 | 41 comments
devoply 7y ago
Mostly because there is no Arab or Muslim empire left after Europeans killed off the Ottoman empire and it's easy to beat down tyrants with few allies. What's the reasons for these tyrants, dictators, and terrorists. Insecurity. What's the reason for insecurity? Lack of empire... so you always end up becoming someone's bitch... which leads to feelings of insecurity and inferiority. The only way to deal with this is to become a vassal of an existing empire and good examples of this are Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, etc.
- leroy_masochist 7y ago
  If you were to actually read the article you might find it to be a thoughtful meditation on Arab military (and, more generally, male) culture by someone who has broad and deep firsthand knowledge of the topic. Having advised the Iraqi army, and having tried to prepare beforehand by reading Lawrence, Patai, Nydell, etc, I would say that this short essay was by far the best of the bunch. I think de Atkine also makes insightful points about how good people can create toxic organizations when they feel insecure about their status within the organization.
  - devoply 7y ago
    Well to me it reeks of Orientalism in that most of these countries are run by tribal syndicates which are more or less a result of social engineering and destruction of Arab nationalism. So obviously there are no stable power structures which would lead to some sort of successful organization of a military. And that's all by design. After you have created a disaster you can go in there point your finger at their culture and say see, this is why the native is stupid. And all the bigots buy it... because that's the situation you have created.
    - leroy_masochist 7y ago
      This comment has nothing to do with de Atkine's essay, which I recommend you actually read.
      - devoply 7y ago
        > Along these lines, Kenneth Pollack concludes his exhaustive study of Arab military effectiveness by noting that "certain patterns of behavior fostered by the dominant Arab culture were the most important factors contributing to the limited military effectiveness of Arab armies and air forces from 1945 to 1991."16 These attributes included over-centralization, discouraging initiative, lack of flexibility, manipulation of information, and the discouragement of leadership at the junior officer level. > The barrage of criticism leveled at Samuel Huntington's notion of a "clash of civilizations"17 in no way lessens the vital point he made—that however much the grouping of peoples by religion and culture rather than political or economic divisions offends academics who propound a world defined by class, race, and gender, it is a reality, one not diminished by modern communications. > But how does one integrate the study of culture into military training? At present, it has hardly any role. Paul M. Belbutowski, a scholar and former member of the U.S. Delta Force, succinctly stated a deficiency in our own military education system: "Culture, comprised of all that is vague and intangible, is not generally integrated into strategic planning except at the most superficial level." You don't. You change the culture by socially engineering it. That's how the West has always done things. But we must understand the savage and his culture... and understand his brute nature so that we may deal with him.
    - ryacko 7y ago
      When corruption is the norm, how do you think it would be expressed in society? I have no doubt as to the value of the social engineering, knowledge of American values and norms are spread by American media, for the price of an armored division and hiring from the Arab emigre population in the United States, an Arabic movie and TV studio could be created. More people throughout the world are familiar with Miranda rights than with the US constitution, partially because the US constitution is dead words, while what Hollywood produces are reenactments. I mostly agree with your point of view.
- markbnj 7y ago
  > Mostly because there is no Arab or Muslim empire left after Europeans killed off the Ottoman empire Can you describe the Ottoman's as Arabs? Without resorting to sources I seem to recall their origins were in Scythia. In any case, I do think there is some value in looking back at the history, even though it is pretty orthogonal to the analysis in the post (there may be some cultural touch points). Also, isn't it more accurate to say that the Ottomans chose the wrong (German) side in a war, and that this is the cause of their final dissolution?
  - jcranmer 7y ago
    The Ottomans start as one of the beyliks in the ruins of the Sultanate of Rum, which is Seljuk (Turkic) Anatolia wrested from the Byzantines. The Ottomans use the late Byzantine instability to expand Turkic control into Thrace, Macedonia, and the Balkans, as well as conquering the other remnant beyliks of Anatolia. Later, they expanded into other ruins of the Ilkhanate (modern-day Iraq, predominantly), and resoundingly defeated the Mamluk Sultanate, giving them control over Egypt, Palestine, and the Hejaz (including the holy cities). For much of its existence, the Ottoman Empire combined both Turkish and Arabian as prestige languages within its empire. It was only in the latter part of its existence, the last century or so, that the modernization effort focused on a narrow, Turkish identity that alienated the Arab populations within its borders. > Also, isn't it more accurate to say that the Ottomans chose the wrong (German) side in a war, and that this is the cause of their final dissolution? Ehh, picking the wrong side in WWI was only the coup de grace. It was the fourth war in 4 years that the Ottomans had fought--the Italian war for Libya, the First Balkan War (Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece team up to wrest Macedonia), the Second Balkan War (Serbia, Romania, the Ottomans, and Greece team up to force Bulgaria to give up the land it just won), followed by WWI. The Ottoman Empire was deeply unstable from the Greek independence through its final collapse, and the very start of WWI has its roots in the instability of the Ottoman Empire and the Christian states attempting to peel Christian statedoms out of the Muslim Ottoman Empire.
  - baud147258 7y ago
    I think the Ottoman empire was already failing at the time of WW1. Perhaps choosing the winning side would have allowed them to survive a little longer, but I think the empire was doomed at the time.
forkLding 7y ago
TLDR: Arab armies are ineffective because of the all the internal, external and ethnic politics which hinders all kinds of cooperation and unity at the battalion-level, otherwise on the unit and soldier-level they are comparable to Israeli units.
- jdm2212 7y ago
  The article is pretty clear that on the small unit and soldier level the Arab forces are less effective, too. Specialists horde information, soldiers don't train for multiple roles, junior officers mistreat their soldiers, no one shows initiative, etc. There are good reasons for all of this -- it's not an Arab character defect, but a rational response to soldiers' circumstances -- but the author states quite explicitly that an Israeli tank crew can better absorb casualties than an Arab tank crew can because the Israelis are encouraged to share information and train for multiple tasks.
ghbakir 7y ago
I was expecting a dull write-up but this essay is extremely insight full and deep. The problems and issues are probably not restricted to the military apparatus. Many organizational inefficiencies in e.g. Turkish political/private organizations are due same reasons.
stcredzero 7y ago
In every society information is a means of making a living or wielding power, but Arabs husband information and hold it especially tightly. U.S. trainers have often been surprised over the years by the fact that information provided to key personnel does not get much further than them. Having learned to perform some complicated procedure, an Arab technician knows that he is invaluable so long as he is the only one in a unit to have that knowledge; once he dispenses it to others he no longer is the only font of knowledge and his power dissipates. This information hoarding behavior also occurs in large enterprises. I know one programmer who got to sit in a cafe reading a book, because she was the only one who understood how a particular subsystem worked. (She had written it in a particularly diabolical way, and only she understood the underlying system of objects only existed as adjacent entries in long arrays, which then underwent merge sort-like "merge" operations involving 4 array indexes, of which there were dozens of variations which called each other recursively. The company that had produced the system was defunct, and no manuals for the format could be found.) One way to counteract this, is to require all groups within the company to provide a standardized API for accessing their systems, and to evaluate each group by how useful it is to the rest of the company.
- baud147258 7y ago
  Another variation of this behavior is information-based management, where business information is given (or not) to the various team members, usually because of internal politics/power struggles. (at least it's how my boss in my second internship explained it to me, I never directly witnessed it)
- FeloniousHam 7y ago
  "refucktering"
pasabagi 7y ago
A very interesting essay - but it works better if you substitute 'arabic nations' with 'dictatorships'. Most of what he's talking about has far more to do with the mechanics of maintaining a dictatorship than arabic culture. He probably missed this because he's both unwilling to acknowledge that he's been training the troops of dictatorships for his adult career, but also, that the US is generally involved in the propping-up of such dictatorships. US forces tend to spend a lot of time training extremely demoralized and unenthusiastic conscripts, surrounded by officers who see their own soldiers as the enemy, and don't trust eachother - and that's exactly what you expect of the army of a unpopular dictatorship, and it's exactly what such armies have looked like throughout most of history. The problems that mysteriously vanish when he talks about the 'elite units' are vanishing because the elites actually like the regimes they're in. They also seem to vanish when they worked with the Kurds, for instance.
- woodandsteel 7y ago
  >it works better if you substitute 'arabic nations' with 'dictatorships'. You are correct this applies to dictatorships in general, and in fact the article mentions the similarities to the Soviet military. But then you have to ask why the Arab nations are almost all dictatorships, and that brings you back to culture, at least considerably.
  - pasabagi 7y ago
    Well, most countries are not particularly democratic, but countries with lucrative primary industries, especially strategically important ones, are often dictatorships. Which makes sense, because if you're a big nation, and you want to make sure your access to strategically vital resources is safe, you want to have a friendly government in charge - and a client dictatorship is dependably friendly, since they need you for the weapons they need to stay in power. I'd say there's also the compounding influence of the colonial legacy. A colony usually has no culture of the 'citizen', since the people of the colony are basically a resource exploited by the colonist. Without a deep culture of citizenship, it's kinda hard to get a robust democracy going.
jacobwilliamroy 7y ago
random thought: maybe if enough wars are lost, they'll stop practicing war and try to get their needs met by other means.</randomthought> I think Norvell B. De Atkine might have missed out on some key details due to his status as an outsider. Especially if every Arab with whom he interacted truly suspected he was a zionist spy. It's difficult to overcome that kind of paranoia and the skills for doing so are not taught in the U.S. military. Also, it sounds like a lot of these people are being forced to participate in the wars, and that's just a recipe for failure. Guns are scary it takes a lot more than a draft to convince someone to stick around for that shit. Another thing to consider is that the rituals used to build loyalty in the U.S. military are kind of a secret. Generally, only the ones participating in the rituals get to know what they are. The content is not entirely intuitive either: imagine being told to sleep in a 1-meter wooden cube in the woods; ants crawl into the cube and bite you; at bedtime, human chanting is played from speakers inside your cube, alternating between quiet and deafening over five minute intervals until the sun comes up. This is meant to build unit cohesion. It's weirdo shit devised by psychos to break human minds. Also, the article is called "Why Arabs Lose Wars" but half of the examples he initially cites are wars in which both sides were arab: Egypt v Yemen, Syria v Lebanon, Iraq v Kuwait. Arabs won those wars... but I guess that wasn't worth noting because the losing side was arab? Those were just some details which stuck out to me while I was reading the article. I acknowledge that about half of this article is objective, fact-based observation and those observations were genuinely interesting. I think that his evidence is inconclusive simply because of the context in which his observations were gathered.
- jki275 7y ago
  That's not really how the US military works. You're attempting to describe a training event that has nothing to do with a "loyalty ritual", it's not a good description and has nothing to do with unit cohesion, loyalty, or breaking anyone's mind.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
EliRivers 7y ago
An excellent and very readable book on this in the modern era is "Arabs at War" by Kenneth M. Pollack He examines a number of recent wars in the area of interest and discusses some of the common findings he makes. He also finds a number of situations in which armies in the region are effective; it's not just a hit piece.
aogaili 7y ago
I think the author is describing a symptoms of an ill organization structure rather than the root causes. The reason why there is no trust, sharing of information and centralized authority in modern Arab state armies because Arab societies never really transitioned successfully into a functional nationalistic countries. Arabs never really believed in nation state and in the absence of strong bonding narrative, there is no common ground for the group to collaborate and fight thus you end up with individuals seeking their self interest and subsequently the symptoms which the author observed. Modern nation state concepts were forced into a region that is predominantly tribal and religious in culture therefore the resulted states, governments, armies and other national institutions are merely a superficial layer on top of a largely religious, ethinic and tribal societies. The west had a long and painful (400 years plus and two major wars) transition from societies dominated by religion to a national secular societies and eventually a capitalistic global societies. That transition never really took place in the Arab region, instead what happened is that western society tried to force national borders and proxy presidents after the world wars on societies that didn’t have the cultural foundation for it and the region has not really managed to reconcile, unify and agree on it’s identity ever since. So why do arabs lose war? Because really there is no state or reason to fight for it. This was very clear in Iraq when fighting ISIS, the men of the country only mobilized after a religious greenlight from a senior clerk despite the fact that ISIS were at the border of the country's capital.
- baud147258 7y ago
  > 400 years plus and two major wars More like a dozen of major war. But what you are describing is close to the idea of nation-state, which has been blamed as the cause of the war of the XXth century.
  - aogaili 7y ago
    Yeah indeed it cauased a new set of global conflicts, but it also allowed western societies to raise above the tribal, relgious and ethinic devisions (for better or worst) something I'd argue no Arab nation managed to do so successfully. In fact it seems that western societies are currently undergrowing new trasnision beyond the nation and local bordres, which could be why they're having new make x great again movements and raise of local populist.

37 points by severine 7y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10830172 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10830172 Jan 3, 2016 | 41 comments

devoply 7y ago

Mostly because there is no Arab or Muslim empire left after Europeans killed off the Ottoman empire and it's easy to beat down tyrants with few allies. What's the reasons for these tyrants, dictators, and terrorists. Insecurity. What's the reason for insecurity? Lack of empire... so you always end up becoming someone's bitch... which leads to feelings of insecurity and inferiority. The only way to deal with this is to become a vassal of an existing empire and good examples of this are Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, etc.

leroy_masochist 7y ago
If you were to actually read the article you might find it to be a thoughtful meditation on Arab military (and, more generally, male) culture by someone who has broad and deep firsthand knowledge of the topic. Having advised the Iraqi army, and having tried to prepare beforehand by reading Lawrence, Patai, Nydell, etc, I would say that this short essay was by far the best of the bunch. I think de Atkine also makes insightful points about how good people can create toxic organizations when they feel insecure about their status within the organization.
- devoply 7y ago
  Well to me it reeks of Orientalism in that most of these countries are run by tribal syndicates which are more or less a result of social engineering and destruction of Arab nationalism. So obviously there are no stable power structures which would lead to some sort of successful organization of a military. And that's all by design. After you have created a disaster you can go in there point your finger at their culture and say see, this is why the native is stupid. And all the bigots buy it... because that's the situation you have created.
  - leroy_masochist 7y ago
    This comment has nothing to do with de Atkine's essay, which I recommend you actually read.
    - devoply 7y ago
      > Along these lines, Kenneth Pollack concludes his exhaustive study of Arab military effectiveness by noting that "certain patterns of behavior fostered by the dominant Arab culture were the most important factors contributing to the limited military effectiveness of Arab armies and air forces from 1945 to 1991."16 These attributes included over-centralization, discouraging initiative, lack of flexibility, manipulation of information, and the discouragement of leadership at the junior officer level. > The barrage of criticism leveled at Samuel Huntington's notion of a "clash of civilizations"17 in no way lessens the vital point he made—that however much the grouping of peoples by religion and culture rather than political or economic divisions offends academics who propound a world defined by class, race, and gender, it is a reality, one not diminished by modern communications. > But how does one integrate the study of culture into military training? At present, it has hardly any role. Paul M. Belbutowski, a scholar and former member of the U.S. Delta Force, succinctly stated a deficiency in our own military education system: "Culture, comprised of all that is vague and intangible, is not generally integrated into strategic planning except at the most superficial level." You don't. You change the culture by socially engineering it. That's how the West has always done things. But we must understand the savage and his culture... and understand his brute nature so that we may deal with him.
  - ryacko 7y ago
    When corruption is the norm, how do you think it would be expressed in society? I have no doubt as to the value of the social engineering, knowledge of American values and norms are spread by American media, for the price of an armored division and hiring from the Arab emigre population in the United States, an Arabic movie and TV studio could be created. More people throughout the world are familiar with Miranda rights than with the US constitution, partially because the US constitution is dead words, while what Hollywood produces are reenactments. I mostly agree with your point of view.
markbnj 7y ago
> Mostly because there is no Arab or Muslim empire left after Europeans killed off the Ottoman empire Can you describe the Ottoman's as Arabs? Without resorting to sources I seem to recall their origins were in Scythia. In any case, I do think there is some value in looking back at the history, even though it is pretty orthogonal to the analysis in the post (there may be some cultural touch points). Also, isn't it more accurate to say that the Ottomans chose the wrong (German) side in a war, and that this is the cause of their final dissolution?
- jcranmer 7y ago
  The Ottomans start as one of the beyliks in the ruins of the Sultanate of Rum, which is Seljuk (Turkic) Anatolia wrested from the Byzantines. The Ottomans use the late Byzantine instability to expand Turkic control into Thrace, Macedonia, and the Balkans, as well as conquering the other remnant beyliks of Anatolia. Later, they expanded into other ruins of the Ilkhanate (modern-day Iraq, predominantly), and resoundingly defeated the Mamluk Sultanate, giving them control over Egypt, Palestine, and the Hejaz (including the holy cities). For much of its existence, the Ottoman Empire combined both Turkish and Arabian as prestige languages within its empire. It was only in the latter part of its existence, the last century or so, that the modernization effort focused on a narrow, Turkish identity that alienated the Arab populations within its borders. > Also, isn't it more accurate to say that the Ottomans chose the wrong (German) side in a war, and that this is the cause of their final dissolution? Ehh, picking the wrong side in WWI was only the coup de grace. It was the fourth war in 4 years that the Ottomans had fought--the Italian war for Libya, the First Balkan War (Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece team up to wrest Macedonia), the Second Balkan War (Serbia, Romania, the Ottomans, and Greece team up to force Bulgaria to give up the land it just won), followed by WWI. The Ottoman Empire was deeply unstable from the Greek independence through its final collapse, and the very start of WWI has its roots in the instability of the Ottoman Empire and the Christian states attempting to peel Christian statedoms out of the Muslim Ottoman Empire.
- baud147258 7y ago
  I think the Ottoman empire was already failing at the time of WW1. Perhaps choosing the winning side would have allowed them to survive a little longer, but I think the empire was doomed at the time.

forkLding 7y ago

TLDR: Arab armies are ineffective because of the all the internal, external and ethnic politics which hinders all kinds of cooperation and unity at the battalion-level, otherwise on the unit and soldier-level they are comparable to Israeli units.

jdm2212 7y ago
The article is pretty clear that on the small unit and soldier level the Arab forces are less effective, too. Specialists horde information, soldiers don't train for multiple roles, junior officers mistreat their soldiers, no one shows initiative, etc. There are good reasons for all of this -- it's not an Arab character defect, but a rational response to soldiers' circumstances -- but the author states quite explicitly that an Israeli tank crew can better absorb casualties than an Arab tank crew can because the Israelis are encouraged to share information and train for multiple tasks.

ghbakir 7y ago

I was expecting a dull write-up but this essay is extremely insight full and deep. The problems and issues are probably not restricted to the military apparatus. Many organizational inefficiencies in e.g. Turkish political/private organizations are due same reasons.

stcredzero 7y ago

In every society information is a means of making a living or wielding power, but Arabs husband information and hold it especially tightly. U.S. trainers have often been surprised over the years by the fact that information provided to key personnel does not get much further than them. Having learned to perform some complicated procedure, an Arab technician knows that he is invaluable so long as he is the only one in a unit to have that knowledge; once he dispenses it to others he no longer is the only font of knowledge and his power dissipates. This information hoarding behavior also occurs in large enterprises. I know one programmer who got to sit in a cafe reading a book, because she was the only one who understood how a particular subsystem worked. (She had written it in a particularly diabolical way, and only she understood the underlying system of objects only existed as adjacent entries in long arrays, which then underwent merge sort-like "merge" operations involving 4 array indexes, of which there were dozens of variations which called each other recursively. The company that had produced the system was defunct, and no manuals for the format could be found.) One way to counteract this, is to require all groups within the company to provide a standardized API for accessing their systems, and to evaluate each group by how useful it is to the rest of the company.

baud147258 7y ago
Another variation of this behavior is information-based management, where business information is given (or not) to the various team members, usually because of internal politics/power struggles. (at least it's how my boss in my second internship explained it to me, I never directly witnessed it)
FeloniousHam 7y ago
"refucktering"

pasabagi 7y ago

A very interesting essay - but it works better if you substitute 'arabic nations' with 'dictatorships'. Most of what he's talking about has far more to do with the mechanics of maintaining a dictatorship than arabic culture. He probably missed this because he's both unwilling to acknowledge that he's been training the troops of dictatorships for his adult career, but also, that the US is generally involved in the propping-up of such dictatorships. US forces tend to spend a lot of time training extremely demoralized and unenthusiastic conscripts, surrounded by officers who see their own soldiers as the enemy, and don't trust eachother - and that's exactly what you expect of the army of a unpopular dictatorship, and it's exactly what such armies have looked like throughout most of history. The problems that mysteriously vanish when he talks about the 'elite units' are vanishing because the elites actually like the regimes they're in. They also seem to vanish when they worked with the Kurds, for instance.

woodandsteel 7y ago
>it works better if you substitute 'arabic nations' with 'dictatorships'. You are correct this applies to dictatorships in general, and in fact the article mentions the similarities to the Soviet military. But then you have to ask why the Arab nations are almost all dictatorships, and that brings you back to culture, at least considerably.
- pasabagi 7y ago
  Well, most countries are not particularly democratic, but countries with lucrative primary industries, especially strategically important ones, are often dictatorships. Which makes sense, because if you're a big nation, and you want to make sure your access to strategically vital resources is safe, you want to have a friendly government in charge - and a client dictatorship is dependably friendly, since they need you for the weapons they need to stay in power. I'd say there's also the compounding influence of the colonial legacy. A colony usually has no culture of the 'citizen', since the people of the colony are basically a resource exploited by the colonist. Without a deep culture of citizenship, it's kinda hard to get a robust democracy going.

jacobwilliamroy 7y ago

random thought: maybe if enough wars are lost, they'll stop practicing war and try to get their needs met by other means.</randomthought> I think Norvell B. De Atkine might have missed out on some key details due to his status as an outsider. Especially if every Arab with whom he interacted truly suspected he was a zionist spy. It's difficult to overcome that kind of paranoia and the skills for doing so are not taught in the U.S. military. Also, it sounds like a lot of these people are being forced to participate in the wars, and that's just a recipe for failure. Guns are scary it takes a lot more than a draft to convince someone to stick around for that shit. Another thing to consider is that the rituals used to build loyalty in the U.S. military are kind of a secret. Generally, only the ones participating in the rituals get to know what they are. The content is not entirely intuitive either: imagine being told to sleep in a 1-meter wooden cube in the woods; ants crawl into the cube and bite you; at bedtime, human chanting is played from speakers inside your cube, alternating between quiet and deafening over five minute intervals until the sun comes up. This is meant to build unit cohesion. It's weirdo shit devised by psychos to break human minds. Also, the article is called "Why Arabs Lose Wars" but half of the examples he initially cites are wars in which both sides were arab: Egypt v Yemen, Syria v Lebanon, Iraq v Kuwait. Arabs won those wars... but I guess that wasn't worth noting because the losing side was arab? Those were just some details which stuck out to me while I was reading the article. I acknowledge that about half of this article is objective, fact-based observation and those observations were genuinely interesting. I think that his evidence is inconclusive simply because of the context in which his observations were gathered.

jki275 7y ago
That's not really how the US military works. You're attempting to describe a training event that has nothing to do with a "loyalty ritual", it's not a good description and has nothing to do with unit cohesion, loyalty, or breaking anyone's mind.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

EliRivers 7y ago

An excellent and very readable book on this in the modern era is "Arabs at War" by Kenneth M. Pollack He examines a number of recent wars in the area of interest and discusses some of the common findings he makes. He also finds a number of situations in which armies in the region are effective; it's not just a hit piece.

aogaili 7y ago

I think the author is describing a symptoms of an ill organization structure rather than the root causes. The reason why there is no trust, sharing of information and centralized authority in modern Arab state armies because Arab societies never really transitioned successfully into a functional nationalistic countries. Arabs never really believed in nation state and in the absence of strong bonding narrative, there is no common ground for the group to collaborate and fight thus you end up with individuals seeking their self interest and subsequently the symptoms which the author observed. Modern nation state concepts were forced into a region that is predominantly tribal and religious in culture therefore the resulted states, governments, armies and other national institutions are merely a superficial layer on top of a largely religious, ethinic and tribal societies. The west had a long and painful (400 years plus and two major wars) transition from societies dominated by religion to a national secular societies and eventually a capitalistic global societies. That transition never really took place in the Arab region, instead what happened is that western society tried to force national borders and proxy presidents after the world wars on societies that didn’t have the cultural foundation for it and the region has not really managed to reconcile, unify and agree on it’s identity ever since. So why do arabs lose war? Because really there is no state or reason to fight for it. This was very clear in Iraq when fighting ISIS, the men of the country only mobilized after a religious greenlight from a senior clerk despite the fact that ISIS were at the border of the country's capital.

baud147258 7y ago
> 400 years plus and two major wars More like a dozen of major war. But what you are describing is close to the idea of nation-state, which has been blamed as the cause of the war of the XXth century.
- aogaili 7y ago
  Yeah indeed it cauased a new set of global conflicts, but it also allowed western societies to raise above the tribal, relgious and ethinic devisions (for better or worst) something I'd argue no Arab nation managed to do so successfully. In fact it seems that western societies are currently undergrowing new trasnision beyond the nation and local bordres, which could be why they're having new make x great again movements and raise of local populist.