Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 41 - Donkey Reading Series: Why Arabs Lose Wars By Norvell B. De Atkine

Episode Date: March 4, 2019

On this episode Joe and Travis read the famous history article "Why Arabs Lose Wars" by former US Naval Institute professor Norvell B. De Atkine and discover what happens when someone so racist they could have worked for the East India Trading Company ends up having an impact in American Foreign Policy. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Buy some Merchandise: https://teespring.com/stores/lions-led-by-donkeys-store follow us on twitter: @lions_by @jkass99 @haycraft_travis

I'm Henry from Fortress on a Hill. We're a leftist veteran podcast that aims to expose the reality of the U.S. military's many wars abroad, the horror that it puts on the people that live in those places, and the damage that military service does to Americans. role, giving oversight to the military, Fortress on a Hill aims to change that. Fortressonahill.com or wherever you get your podcast. Now, back to Lions Led by Donkeys. And now I'm about to drop a whole new world of knowledge on you. Aladdin was one of the most orientalist films of all time. And Professor Walter Denny, who's taught orientalist art for decades, agrees. Like those first three or four minutes of the Disney movie Aladdin are basically very prejudicial. They create a very very false and very very prejudicial view of the Islamic world. Before I upset you anymore, let me tell you why it's so bad by explaining what Orientalism is.

Historically, Orientalism refers to the study of the Arab and Muslim world, or what was for a long time referred to as the Orient, which included more than just Arab or predominant Muslim societies. And the discipline basically looked at those societies as though they were interchangeable, inferior, and well, mystical and savage. Just the fact we say there is an Arab or Muslim world is proof of how pervasive that way of thinking was and is. But now, Will Yeomans, a professor of media studies and public affairs, says the definition

has evolved. It's become to mean something else. A critique actually of a particular way of knowing about that part of the world. The late Palestinian American professor, author, and activist Edward Said wrote the book on Orientalism, making his Palestinian Arab identity central to his work. Fanaticism, violence, etc. always associated with the Arabs, with Islam, and so on and so forth. Arabs are always being killed, they're always associated publicly in the public. Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Lines Led by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe. And with me today, as always, seemingly the last couple weeks is our man in Kurdistan, Travis.

Hello. And so this episode is different because we're not doing like a history bit i guess um well i guess we are but we're not talking about an event in history as much as we are uh going over one of i guess travis's passions which is middle eastern history and um one of mine which is bullshit historical revisionism um but this all goes back to a concept known as orientalism and i'm gonna let travis explain that because i have never fucking heard of it before okay um yeah so orientalism um it's kind of a difficult concept to explain easily um for a number of reasons but uh the basic premise um is well the the term was kind of coined by um a palestinian american academic by the name of edward said who wrote

a book in the 1970s called uh orientalism and that's where the term comes from. And the concept is basically the idea of this sort of ideological construction of the quote unquote Orient or the East, which generally includes like North Africa, Middle East, and then Central, South and East Asia. So like everything from Moroccoocco to japan is the the east and this object of the east is somehow um a like a single knowable quantifiable object which is therefore opposed to and inherently separate from a simultaneously constructed body of the quote-unquote west um and if that's kind of difficult to understand like i'm with you i saw like i first read orientalism my sophomore year college and i didn't really get it until like my senior year of college um but the basic idea is it's creating these artificial limited limited constructs of knowledge.

Like, if you claim to know the Middle East or something like that, you are kind of buying into an Orientalist concept that the Middle East is somehow a tangible, quantifiable, knowable, single thing thing that somebody any one person can know like in its entirety it kind of sounds like what's a I'm the dumb guy here like like if a history or a philosophy is written about somewhere by like a colonial master who could basic who could it's like colonial thought like i yeah if the british east india company wrote a book no that's that's exactly right i'm glad you kind of said that because it jarred me out of trying to kind of confusing myself um so yeah like orientalism isn't necessarily prejudiced against the peoples and cultures of the East because there were – the idea – or Edward Said when he wrote it was basically talking about the body of knowledge regarding Asia, the Middle East and so on. And that stemmed from like basically colonial officers writing about the regions in which they were posted and helping colonize. And so this means that there were not

just like bad Orientalists who are, you know, super racist, murderous colonial officers. There were good Orientalists as well who were, you know, Arabophiles or Sinophiles or um the arabists of the 19th century early 20th century these people were you know they fell in love with um the the cultures that and places in which they were posted but the way they wrote about or discussed or thought they knew about the places in which they were post posted fell nonetheless fell into like an orientalist concept of the east as somehow inherently other and different from the west that uh that's something i ran into recently i know anybody who follows my stupid shit posting on twitter i wrote a paper a research paper on the sykes pico agreement which created the modern day middle

east and ruined everything uh in case you want to save yourself reading 10 pages that's what my paper boils down to but uh uh you know there was arabists who are deeply in love with with the culture and everything like you were talking about but they were just so wrong on so many things because you know they created the sykes pico agreement they're like no the arabs will love this let's just let's let's just cookie cutter this shit all apart and everything will be fine yeah so basically by the this ideological construct of the east in opposition to the west um it basically it allows for and it was essentially like designed around the

colonial imperial project that Europe was undertaking throughout the 19th century and early 20th century. So Orientalism as an idea was born in the European scramble to conquer the entire world. And as such, the idea of Orientalism carries with it all of the baggage of that time period, meaning that even the so-called good Orientalists are part and parcel of the imperial project. And Orientalism, like I said, is more than just racism. One can be a racist, but not necessarily Orientalist. And one can be Orientalist without necessarily being racist.

racist. And in fact, the whole episode that we're going to be talking about after I describe Orientalism is basically a demonstration of Orientalism. But also, you have to understand that who are we, two white guys who don't speak Arabic or Hindi or Chinese or Turkish to really discuss the idea of Middle Eastern history. And that very idea is itself, or the idea of middle eastern history and like that very idea is itself or the idea of like me even pretending to be like any sort of middle eastern expert is uh is kind of is very much like an orientalist concept like i i'm not fluent in arabic let alone you know any specific dialect of arabic um is it bad i always assumed you were you live in kurdistan i assume you speak kurdish or arabic i should have asked i mean i'm familiar like i've studied it but i would never even call myself even close to fluent um but uh yeah like i i'm never going to really be able to call myself

like an expert um in uh in the middle east in the Middle East or in Iraq or in anything, uh, with like a clear conscience, because it's not true. I mean, I can never really know all of Iraq or all of the Middle East. Um, I can, you know, I may know more than the average person, but I don't know it, you know, because there is no it to know and because it's a constant it's a dynamic constantly changing amorphous undefinable unquantifiable unqualifiable thing that's not even a thing like it's it's just so the you have but in order to learn you have to create these constructs and so the very idea that I am sitting here today trying to tell people about like the Middle East is in a sense Orientalist.

uh, constructs of knowledge exists so that going forward when you're doing research or when you're trying to learn about a topic, you, you understand where they come from. And I think like to understand where Orientalism comes from and to then apply that to reading things or learning things in the, in the present day, you have to understand that, um, like the legacy of colonialism is baked into every aspect of every society on earth um and like to say that again for the people in the back the legacy of colonialism is baked into every aspect of every society on earth would you say that like the the countries who were colonialized are are much more affected by it uh present day i mean that sounds stupid when i say it out loud but there's a lot of people uh shitty racists especially they're like well fuck africa's been free since like 1960 and they're they still can't get their shit together. Like there's a whole lot to unpack there, man.

Um, exactly. There's always a lot more to unpack. And like, so as, um, as a West, as someone in the so-called West,

which is itself a construct, um, you know, at an American university or British university or something you have to, when you want to learn about the history or the current day or current, the present day of like the middle East or something like that, learning where these, where the knowledge that you are studying comes from and what the legacy of

the, of where that knowledge comes from is like super important to understanding, um, like how to avoid playing into the same problems and tropes and imperial projects of the past. Like, I mean, like imagine, um, you know, like some Saudi guy or like some Indian guy who doesn't speak any English, who's never been to the U S trying to claim to be like an American expert because he like, I don't know, like went to McDonald's once. Yeah. Like they went to McDonald's once or maybe like went to New York, um, for vacation for a week and, uh, know a few words of, of English. And then they go back to, you know, Saudi Arabia

or India or something like that. And then they, uh, teach a class called like America, a study or teach American studies in college and you know this i think one of the things that we can do uh to confront that is well to do just that and it's like uh confront it um historical revisionism and like colonial thought and all this other shit like just we have to attack it for a lack of a better word and i think that's why we're here today um exactly you can't really avoid it so much but you can understand what it is and where it comes from and especially because all right so to get to our point um this there's this article that was written by a guy named norville

b d atkin or atkeen i i'm probably saying'm going to call him fucking Norville because it's the worst name on earth. The article is called Why Arabs Lose Wars. And it was written in 1999. So this precludes the you know, this is before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. And this year, like all the major problems in the world today. This is before then. Yeah. Also, this article is really

fucking popular i uh when when travis brought it to me uh when you brought it to me i i'd seen it probably two or three dozen times floating through facebook it got turned to a youtube video which norville definitely did not do himself um and is really popular in the new wave. New wave colonialism. Is that a thing that you know, imperialism, I guess. Yeah. And it is something that has been shared. I've seen on Facebook from probably more military friends that I care to count because it speaks to the American experience in Iraq largely.

And we are going to read this article at length. And I'm going to get very upset while Travis tries to be an academic about it. Also get upset. Yeah. Before we get into the meat of this article, I'm going to do what I do, which is attack Norville's personality. So, I think this is important. Dick jokes aside, when we are reading this from a historical perspective, or when you're reading something that's supposed to be from an expert, like I'm never going to claim to be an expert about anything.

But when you look at his research methods and you look at the people he cites in the article and who he associates with, all these things are important to me, at least, because it damages his credibility. I once took a religions class probably a decade ago, and my professor said, you should always look at the authoritative voice of things when you're reading them. And that means like, you know, who they're targeting at the time and where that person comes from. So Norville is a retired officer from the Army. He was a colonel. And he taught at the U.S. Naval Institute, which according to the Naval Institute, quote, has taught Middle Eastern political military affairs in the special operations community for 17 years. He also wrote the foreword to a book called The Arab Mind by Raphael Patae. So, that book is interesting.

It is a long, strange tome that focuses on chapters, dozens of pages on the sexual habits of people within the Arab culture. Dude, one of the things I was reading a lot about when I was in college studying Orientalism was like this, the intense like sexual obsession of white people in Europe during, well, especially during like the colonial era, but with like the sexual behavior of Arab men and women. And it's like really fucking creepy. That's one of those weird things that colonialists always are obsessed with um there was i was reading about uh the british east india company in the adamant islands um and most people know about the adamant islands because the guy who got fucking shot to death with bow and arrows on the north sentinel island not that long ago but one of the things they liked uh the one of the um quote unquote adventure historian type people you know they didn't actually go to college but he had a fucking

one of those weird khaki hats and shorts and you know he he wrote a lot but um they he liked to take pictures of the adamantese people naked and like watch them fuck that was like that was their thing uh but the arab mind is is a book i i think it was written in the 70s um and it's a book that edward sayed attacks directly in orientalism but um seymour hirsch uh journalist for the new yorker said that the the arab mind book is uh just a giant tome of racism. And I don't know if this has anything to do with it, but Rafael Patae is a lifelong Zionist who grew up in the violence of the Palestinian mandate. So that may have impacted his work a bit.

Yeah, a lot of the kind of modern neo-imperialists or kind of neo-orientalists are very much um uh into the i mean i don't want to sound like this this might sound a little too like you know anti-semitic conspiracy theory but very much into like the zionist movement um like uh ephraim karsh is one of the big ones. He's a big Middle Eastern historian, but is also like super fucking racist because he's very much into the like, yeah, like Israel should just like fucking nuke Gaza kind of thing. I mean, that's not anti-Semitic to point out that people who,

like it would be like me being, I mean, I'm not an armenian nationalist but let's say an armenian nationalist and i write a fucking turkish history book it's gonna be stilted like exactly it's not wrong to point that out um it's like any fucking cavalry history book is is not gonna look good to native americans yeah that's true and. And this, so this book, The Arab Mind is even worse. Could you guess who picked it up and kind of treated it something like a Bible? I'm going to go with somebody like John Bolton or Mike Pompeo. Right on the ball.

It was snapped up by the ghouls of pro-war Washington the months before the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. of pro-war Washington the months before the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. It was considered an incredibly insightful way to figure out how the Arab mind worked. You can assume where this goes with all these chapters on sexual humiliation. It was used to justify, explain, and cited as a major contribution to prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison. Because according to Pitae,

the book, the only thing that Arabs understood was force and their biggest weakness was sexual humiliation. Whoops. Yeah, Jesus. Iraq is never going to forgive America for Abu Ghraib, and they never should. No, they absolutely should not. But don't worry that

one specialist was thrown in prison. So the real problem is taken care of. And so that is that that's the background of this of Norville. He wrote the forward to one of the most racist books I've ever heard of that is actually considered a history book.

Now in the year of our Lord 2019 is actually considered a history book now in the year of our Lord 2019 is largely considered a pile of shit and discredited but you know that took a little help you know it helped feed into what became probably the greatest crime of the 21st century namely the invasion of Iraq also Norville has not backed down from his forward. Of course not. As recently as 2004, when Seymour Hersh published his piece from The New Yorker,

which kind of laid out how this book was used to justify a lot of shit, Norville was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, you totally misunderstood, and then went on to explain why, why no everything in the book is still 100 right so he's he's a piece of shit yeah i guess we should get to the uh the article itself um uh oh also like just a real quick um aside here uh norville um is he has the the the resume of anyone who could consider themselves a quote-unquote expert on quote-unquote arab armies as like some singular concept he uh he taught at the american or it was a graduate of the american university of beirut so like he um he has the bona fides he helped teach or advise like the egyptian army the lebanese army i think the jordanian army for like a very long time so

you would think he would have all the bona fides but no he's still super fucking racist and wrong as hell which we will get into um so i guess to start out the article um well okay first of all the article is called why arabs lose wars it's like you know kind of from the start you're kind of like hmm all right uh, but then he starts out like his first sentence is relatively reasonable. Um, Arabic speaking armies have been generally ineffective in the modern era, which like, yeah, I mean, sure. I guess that's true. Um, and again, the problem with this article is not necessarily the idea that Arabic speaking armies have generally been ineffective in the modern era.

The problem is how he argues it. Um, and, uh, so like there's only a handful of statements that are like entirely true, but even how he presents those statements are like very, you know, problematic, I guess. It's like the, the clock is right right a broken clock is right twice a day or whatever like you know it's still okay that's a really broad brush to start with and you're like yeah okay and then you read further into it's like okay now read two lines down yeah well it's kind of funny because like soon after that he kind of realizes or like subconsciously realizes the whole idea is stupid because he says um quote when culture is considered in calculating the relative strengths and weaknesses of opposing forces,

it tends to lead to wild distortions, especially when it is a matter of understanding why states unprepared for war enter into combat flush with confidence. The temptation is to impute cultural attributes to the enemy state that negate its superior numbers or weaponry or the opposite to view the potential enemy through the prism of one's own cultural norms. However, I mean, he of course says this, except now that he's doing it about Arabs, it's okay to do that. And then he says, quote, culture is difficult to pin down. It is not synonymous with an individual's race,

nor ethnic identity end quote of course he then proceeds to write a very long article called why arabs lose wars cultural is culture is really hard to pin down anyway here's my uh ten thousand word thesis and why this culture sucks yeah exactly um so he then in the next paragraph he cites uh john keegan the quote imminent historian of warfare and i fucking hate john keegan um yeah so anybody who has taken uh more than uh one or two uh military history classes or even picks up military history books you've probably at least accidentally read one of his books um he is considered a preeminent military historian when it comes to world war ii more specifically the ss um uh to the extent that

people have accused him of um dipping into the the clean vermont theory uh kind of trying to say that the ss is they're totally elite troops and then they kind of did some war crimes but like that on the side that's not that's neither here nor there i travis will talk about that um john keegan is also a piece of shit and this is why um yeah john keegan once uh claimed another historian a guy named john or John Cawdwell Irving, a very British name here, was a good historian. Irving is famously known for being the guy who denied the Holocaust so much he got brought to court over it. Now, admittedly, to give Keegan at least one good point here keegan called irving out for being a holocaust denier but then he still said he was a good historian that is so fucking stupid i

literally can't even think straight like being a holocaust denier and a good historian is like saying that someone who can't multiply or add or subtract or some shit will still be a good mathematician it's totally fucking bullshit and yeah and just to go like how weird irving is a guy that keegan gave credit to he actually want irving went to court once to defend another holocaust denier a guy named ernst zundel who was put on trial for canada for uh for inciting racial hatred. But Irving needed help, like he needed a scientist, right, to prove that Zundel couldn't possibly be inciting racial hatred because the Holocaust totally didn't happen. So he got help

in the form of a guy named Fred Lutcher, who is a traveling electric chair salesman from Boston. Lutcher decided to break into Auschwitz-Birkenau and break off pieces of the concrete gas chamber wall to prove that gas is never used there again fuck you john keegan yeah fuck you john keegan and and fuck you norval for citing john keegan um but yeah like uh keegan absolutely like jerks off to the ss and so you know that norville also

probably jerks off to the ss um also and uh he probably it's one of those like well they look cool in their uniforms type thing exactly like completely ignoring like all the times that the ss was actually really bad at war um which i guess we'll kind of talk about a little bit later. Yeah. Okay, so Norville then proceeds to write some more racist shit. So he says, even the much-lauded Egyptian crossing of the Suez in 1973 at its core entailed a masterful deception plan.

Okay, fine, all right, fairful deception plan. Okay, fine. All right, fair. But then he says, yeah, everyone does it right. But then he says, it may well be that these seemingly permanent attributes result from a

culture that engenders subtlety and direction and dissimilation in personal relationships. Holy shit. Ooh. Yeah. I mean, he's, he's just attributing every fucking bad thing that's ever happened in military history to being part of Arab culture.

But he's also saying some of the best master strokes and modern Arab military history is also because of bad things in Arab culture. Exactly. So fucking stupid. And I love the fact that it's like he just kind of like makes up racial stereotypes about Arabs, too. Like you have the shifty Arab. Yeah, exactly. Because I think later on he talks about how like Arabs don't trust anybody outside of their family unit. But here he's like Arabs, like in personal relationships, they're always like being indirect and dissimulating and subtle in their personal relationships.

direct and dissimulating and subtle in their personal relationships. So it's like, which is it, Norville? Like, if you're going to be racist, like at least be consistently racist. Racists are just not known for their consistency these days. Exactly. And it's like using misdirection and like counterintelligence and military strategy is like day day one at the military academy is like oh like make sure your enemy doesn't know what you're gonna do next like that's day one and uh that's been part of military strategy since people started stabbing each other with fucking pointy sticks

exactly like even like not even you don't even have to be like the dumbest primate to use like misdirection and like their fights for mates or food or whatever. Every animal in the world uses misdirection. We do when we go fucking fishing. Exactly. Misdirection is basic strategy for literally every living creature. I mean, the fucking D-Day invasion was preempted by massive amounts of misdirection. The fucking Gallipoli invasion, massive amounts.

I mean, that's a great example of misdirection failing. The fucking, the whole SOM campaign was misdirection. This is fucking insane. Yeah, like it's misdirection isn't some like uniquely Arab thing and if it if it was like damn we should be taking notes it's a uniquely arab thing when we're trying to make them sound bad because now they're shit it's like it's like the fucking episode of the simpsons where homer isn't sure how to make the dog of the bad guy so he just makes it look shifty yeah exactly

okay but then he the next guy he cites he says blah blah blah along these lines kenneth pollack blah blah blah um so this guy kenneth pollack um he's a pretty famous neoconservative who was one of the most ardent supporters of the invasion of iraq in 2003 um why is this all one giant fucking circle yeah exactly uh he was pollock was convinced that iraq had an advanced nuclear weapons program which womp womp um and uh it's kind of funny so kenneth pollock before the invasion of iraq he wrote a book called threatening storm the case for invading iraq and then in i want to say 2006 or 2007 he wrote a book called things fall apart containing the spillover from an iraqi civil war and fit and then a couple

of years later he wrote a book called a path out of the desert a grand strategy for america and the middle east so it's like a story in three parts a story how i'm really bad at my job exactly like how do these people still get like you know books published or like places on tv if they're wrong this is like buying a fucking marriage advice book from scott peterson yeah exactly like what the fuck are you trying to do like you're wrong every single time you say fucking anything about the Middle East or like literally like they probably don't even know how to tie their own shoes. Like, they're wrong about everything. And yet they're still paid like $50,000 to be like a month to be a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute or something. Fucking think tanks are the devil. fucking think tanks are the devil and like yeah and the best part is like he wrote all i mean he wrote these books after this was after this article was written but i mean these he had the same fucking ideas and they all have the same and then they're fucking cited yeah exactly um okay

but then the next passage that i thought was funny was, quote, Vietnamese communists did not fight the war the United States had trained for, nor did the Chechens and Afghans fight the war the Russians had 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 towards time, etc., demanding a more substantial investment in time and money than a bureaucratic organization is likely to authorize, What? And I'm like, dude. What?

The Vietnam War lasted more than 10 years, and the French had been fighting it since like the 1940s. So by the time the United States got involved, but by the time the the u.s got involved in any significant way in vietnam we knew exactly what kind of war it was going to be yeah because we're just like dumb as shit and the u.s military is institutionally incapable of changing doctrine we spent a decade fucking up over and over again and we lost the war we thought we lost vietnam because we're stupid and didn't understand what the kind of war we were getting into this is the dumbest fucking argument i've ever heard in my life we didn't fight the war they trained that's fucking war like are you supposed to exchange notes beforehand like so how are we gonna do this you're gonna fucking

meet at the playground at five like it wasn't like the shifty vietnamese or the shifty arabs that tricked us into fighting a war that we were unprepared for we started these fucking wars we started vietnam we started afghanistan the soviets invaded chechnya yeah like and this again the soviets invaded chechnya colonized vietnam and that's complete bullshit like the the Chechens fought the Russians in the first Chechen war and a conventional war and won using Soviet trained military officers. You stupid fuck. There are literally fucking teammates two years before. Like we started all of these wars knowing exactly what we were getting into and we still lost. So I guess to quote the guy who was influenced by these idiots fool

me once shame on you fool me twice uh can't uh can't can't get fooled again and be set to quote these fucking assholes i think it was donald rumsfeld that says you go to war with the army that you have not the army that you want so don't go to war dipshit yeah fuck you norville yeah um okay so then he says uh let's see um arabs husband information and hold it especially tight u.s trainers have often been surprised over the years by the fact that information provided to key personnel does not get much farther 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. It's called fucking job security! Exactly. Everyone does that shit. Like, I do that. Actually, I plead the fifth. I'm not gonna continue on.

I did that all the fucking time! But, yeah, exactly. It's a basic principle of job security. Everyone does that. It's not some uniquely Arab thing. And then he says, thinking outside the box is not encouraged. And I'm like, dude, have you ever talked to like an American military officer? Like when has thinking outside the box ever been rewarded in the U S military?

And this is not an Arab thing whatsoever. The fucking, so I'm balls deep researching this, the Soviet Afghan war, but that was, they were so locked into terrible fucking doctrine. Entire battalions sat on roads and got murdered without running away or driving away or even getting other vehicles to fight because it was not encouraged to do anything without orders from above. He's just giving every negative attribute that anybody could think.

If you were to make the worst combat unit of all time and you'd pick out all the things they would do terribly he's just attributing them all to arab culture this is fucking insane anything else yeah it's because of arab culture not because of like a billion different complex and dynamic other reasons that would lead to like for example the failure of the the Syrian army in the 1967 Arab Israel war. No, it's because of Arab culture. Yeah. But yeah, okay. So then he goes on to say, quote, this is a bit of a long paragraph, so bear with me.

Quote, most Arab officers treat enlisted soldiers like subhumans. When the winds in Egypt one day carried biting sand particles from the desert during a demonstration for visiting U.S. dignitaries, I watched as a contingent of soldiers marched in and formed a single rank to shield the Americans. Egyptian soldiers, in other words, are used on occasion as nothing more than a windbreak. The idea of taking care of one's men is found only among the most elite units in the Egyptian military. On a typical weekend, officers in unit stations outside Cairo will get in their cars and drive off to their homes, leaving the enlisted men to fend for themselves by trekking across the desert to a highway and flagging down buses or trucks to get

to the Cairo rail system. Garrison cantonments have no amenities for soldiers. The same situation in various degrees exists elsewhere in the Arabic-speaking countries, less so in Jordan, even more so in Iraq and Syria, end quote. That's so dumb. My first impression is like, whoa, Cairo has a rail system? I guess they're more advanced than fucking all of America.

You know, and the concept of taking, quote-unquote, taking care of soldiers is new. It's very new. Exceptional, so. And it's only really a thing in Western militaries with fucking fountains of money that never end. Like all these movie theaters and fucking nice places to live on military posts which aren't even universal in the united states mind you i i lived in a barracks building that was so overgrown with fucking black mold

that like they went i was pregnant women in it yeah like if a woman was pregnant they had to sign a fucking document saying they would not sue for a hood if they stayed in it yeah i was just thinking like what what does he think american soldiers do when they got a weekend off at like fort polk louisiana yeah like i i wasn't stationed in fort polk because i wasn't in the army but i am from louisiana and i know that there's jack shit to do there like and also i know the base is garbage because i have plenty of friends who have been there i've heard it's complete hell and And this concept that they're treating their soldiers like shit because they're not giving them rides or whatever, that's more emblematic of their military isn't paid anything. Exactly.

Even an E-1 in the Army, the U.S. Army now can afford a car. Not a new one. They'll go get a new one anyway. They can't afford it. Yeah, with 27% interest. But you still make you know 25 000 a year give or take that's probably more than an egyptian captain makes oh i'm sure i'm certain i'm pulling that number out of my ass but i'm gonna assume it is like probably like

yeah exactly um this is economic not cultural you asshole exactly uh So then he goes on to say, the young draftees who make up the bulk of the Egyptian army hate military service for good reason and will do almost anything, including self-mutilation, to avoid it. And Syria, the wealthy by exemptions or failing that, are assigned to noncombatant organizations. And I'm like, ah, yes. Draftees in the United States military were well known for loving military service and doing everything in their power to stay in the army. And also, the American draft system was famously egalitarian. You know, it drafted rich, white, suburban college students on a level equivalent to poor black people from urban centers. In fact, the American draft system was so egalitarian that there were massive protests from poor minority minority populations just begging to be drafted in order to take the burden off of the rich white kids. Yeah, that whole con like this, this idea that Arab armies are so terrible that people are mutilating themselves to get out of it. Sure, that's probably true. Conscription terrible. But that's not Arab either.

conscription terrible um but that's not arab either um i mean dodging the draft is so um so active in russia that there's like uh almost an unspoken rule that you're never going to meet any conscripts from like saint petersburg or moscow because they just buy their way out people were shooting themselves cutting their their fucking toes off going awol uh like they just not reporting at the local conscription office but the bribes were almost like on the wall to get out like this anywhere with conscription has i mean and that shit happened in the u.s like during the vietnam war like yeah rich kid just got into the national guard so they wouldn't deploy yeah or went to college or like got some bullshit medical exemption like exactly like there's a reason why the Bush family spent the Vietnam war on the air

guard. Yeah, exactly. And, uh, so like the, uh, in,

in, in, in Vietnam, like also the, the draft system was notorious for like over targeting, um, particularly black, uh,

young black men from like urban centers um for the draft because it was basically impossible for them to get out of it yeah um and there were particular and since like those communities were over policed they were also more likely to be like you know rounded up by the cops for like dodging the draft and stuff like that or like unable to afford leaving the country or something like that and the the the the vietnam draft is so easy to get out at first all you do is be fucking married so people would just go get married and like mooney style mass fucking ceremonies and shit just to not get drafted like nobody wanted to get drafted from vietnam and so like this idea that like you know egyptians or syrians or whatever are like so uniquely opposed to the draft and like hate the army service so

much it's like ridiculous every country with conscription with a handful of exceptions like i would say probably turkey um israel and maybe like singapore like everyone hates conscription um pretty much everywhere be it arab be it white uh even in israel the the orthodox jews uh don't have to get conscripted and they fucking hate uh being drafted uh so there's not a single country on earth that people don't dodge the draft if the draft existed and yeah it's fucking slavery yeah like nobody likes that shit um but yeah so to move on to the next point, he says, quote, in general, the militaries of the Fertile Crescent enforce discipline by fear. In countries where a tribal system still is enforced, such as Saudi Arabia, the innate egalitarianism of the society mitigates against fear as the prime minister or prime motivators, motivator. So a general lack of discipline pervades, end quote.

motivator so a general lack of discipline pervades in quote and so i'm like all right just thinking of like you know famous military leaders who've talked about fear with their enlisted men like when i think of them i think of the great arab leader frederick the great who was famous for saying that soldiers should fear their own officers more than the enemy and focus so strongly on drill and discipline that the army lost all initiative and individual inspiration and he was famous for micromanaging generals so closely that they cannot be trusted to perform independently and or effectively and this is why the arab republic of prussia lost its war against israel in 1767 that whole fucking thing is stupid um for it like frederick the great um was so brutal that he actually had you know outrunners like he he changed the way his army

marched so he'd catch deserters because he had so many of them jesus um all right What's the next bit? OK, so he says a dramatic example of like the gap between officers and enlisted occurred during the Gulf War when a severe windstorm blew down the tents of Iraqi officer prisoners of war. For three days, they stayed in the wind and rain rather than be observed by enlisted prisoners in a nearby camp working with their hands, end quote. So I looked this up and I didn't find any other source for this story and to be honest it sounds like bullshit that sounds totally fucking uh made up like there's no there's no one on earth that like you could fucking drop saudi nobility out in the desert and they're gonna be like fuck this i'm putting a tent up yeah i mean like on it like maybe it happened like i'll give him a benefit

of the doubt maybe it happened i wasn't there whatever but it's certainly if it did it's certainly not indicative of some like wider trend of the arab mind and that story is got it like i have a hard time picturing it because this is the same army that was surrendering by the tens of thousands at once yeah and they didn't want to be dishonored by having their soldiers watch them work bitch you just surrendered like that that doesn't make any fucking sense yeah and like again and you know maybe he'll you know come into our twitter dms or something and be like no it totally happened like here's a picture or whatever and like sure whatever norville if you dm me a picture of this happening like thank you i'll accept the picture

and i'll agree that it happened i'm gonna fucking dm a picture of my asshole fuck him yeah me too um but like seriously like norville that's not some like arab thing like if that if that truly did happen like that's just some weird shit not like some arab thing um and okay so he goes on and he i'd say his most valid point in the whole thing is uh he talks about how a lot of arab armies had a small or weak uh nco or non-commissioned officer corps which were insufficient to maintain unit cohesion between and like maintain the divide between enlisted and officers and like honestly that that's a fair criticism. I don't know enough about the Egyptian or the Syrian armies during the time period he's talking about to say that he's necessarily wrong about it.

However, I will say that the problem with this is claiming that this is somehow unique to Arabs or a result of Arab culture. Yeah, that's not at all true. Yeah, that's not at all true. The weak NCO Corps and the lack of the unit cohesion there between officers and enlisted, that's kind of a hallmark between armies ran by strongmen or dictators. Because nobody wants to be the nail that sticks out. Yeah. That's not Arab culture. That's just shitty strongman culture i mean that you saw you saw that a lot during the iran-iraq war on the iraqi side where um uh officers and ncos simply did not act without orders and exactly and i mean if officers aren't going to act without orders

nco sure the fuck aren't going to engender any kind of fucking morale boosting anything you saw that significantly more on the iranian side which is interesting because they're also a dictatorship in the middle of purges but whatever yeah well also like um interestingly like a lot of the blame for kind of an aristocratic officer corps with a weak NCO corps, I think you can honestly place a lot of that blame on the British and French colonial rule. Because they had a habit of having their NCOs and officers be either white or from a higher tier of colony. So I know the Iraqi army under British rule had a lot of Indian N ncos and officers as well as like white um like staff officers and stuff oh yeah and so and so when the when iraq gained independence basically all they

had left was like a handful of iraqi ncos and uh officers who had been trained under the british system and like a bunch of like peasant troops with no training um or education because you know the british love to divide and conquer and uh keep their uh colonial uh basically their colonial slaves unable to actually rise up yeah that was that was definitely part part and parcel of how they did things i mean like uh not in the middle east but in the congo that's what the belgians did i mean the the white people were officers and uh black people could possibly be ncos um and that was it like so when you when you strip away the like the entire leadership system like that's that's a millet that's actually a fucking military tactic to defeat your enemy is

to decapitate them from their leadership and so you're and so what you're left with in these countries uh that have been devastated by colonial rule um is you're left with a military that is kind of bereft of any significant military culture or tradition and uh so i for so I, for a brief period, my freshman year of college, I was like, I read a shitload of books about like Indian military history, um, after, uh, after independence. And it was super interesting. So India fought a border war with China in 1963. And one of the, the, um, the, the main topics that we're talking about in the book I was reading was this divide between the kind of old guard in the Indian army who were extremely British in culture and doctrine and affectation. They had been trained at Sandhurst and had fought in World War II in the Indian army and stuff like that.

And then you had the new guard who wanted to create a uniquely Indian military tradition. The old guard in 1963 was in charge charge and India lost the war against China. But by 1971, with the war against Pakistan, the kind of tables have turned and the kind of new Indian military tradition had become much stronger with like a unique way of like the having Indian officers and like an Indian officer tradition, Indian NCOs and an Indian NCO tradition and so on. And they won the war with Pakistan. They had like high quality leadership and a well-developed NCO corps by that point. I mean, like relative to similarly developed countries.

And so the idea that like the Arabs in the like 1967 war against Israel, that their NCO corps was so bad because of some like uniquely arab trait is not true I mean, that's just a post-colonial Problem combined with the similar problems in like pretty much every autocratic dictator, uh Dictatorship that exists is you don't want a strong nco core um, right And you don't want officers to be anything more than loyalists to you right that's one of the things that dictators around the the world love is they don't want talent they want loyalty

that was a hallmark of saddam's army that was a hallmark of the fucking soviet command that was a hallmark of nazi germany this this is an arab i mean shit even now uh in the in the u.s that hurts your career i mean you won't get shot in the back of the head like some countries but it'll definitely dent your fucking resume yeah no exactly um so then the next the next bit that i really thought was funny was um he says quote u.s trainers can find it very frustrating when they repeatedly encounter arab officers placing blame for unsuccessful operations or programs on the U.S. equipment or some other outside source. Blah, blah, blah. General Khalid bin Sultan, the Saudi ground forces commander, requested a letter from General Norman Schwarzkopf stating it was the U.S. general who ordered an evacuation from

the Saudi town of Khafji, I believe. In his account of the battle, General bin Sultan predictably blames the Americans for the Iraqi occupation of the town, when in reality, the problem was that the light Saudi forces in the area left the battlefield. The Saudis were, in fact, outgunned and outnumbered by the Iraqi unit approaching unit approaching hafji but the saudi pride required that foreigners be blamed like i read this and i was like holy shit dude americans literally blame losing the entire vietnam war on like hippies smoking too much weed that was an entire prager you video exactly and like somehow these hippies convinced that you know the famous peacenikenik Richard Nixon to withdraw from Vietnam because he was, I guess, too much of a pussy or something. And then again, like the the failed occupation of Iraq after 2003 is often blamed on like not having enough soldiers because apparently 150,000 was enough.

Instead of like the whole idea of invading and occupying iraq just being dumb as fuck from the beginning it's like it's like a it's a not a it's not a bug it's a feature in every military operation that you lose nobody's like my bad like it doesn't exist it never fucking exists like even people who are considered decent historians of world war two, they're like, uh, yeah, Germany would have won except for this one thing. Like,

that's not how this fucking works. Oh, and it's like this little one thing usually ends up being like the whole ideology of Nazism. Yeah. The whole like starting the war thing. And like, then this whole thing,

like, Oh, uh, you know, they, their pride requires them to blame foreigners. No, their pride requires them to blame foreigners no their career requires them to blame someone else for their failures that's a feature in every so like i guess you could say a military military careers are a um they they require you to be good at your

job most of the time and when you lose that's bad for you unless you can find a way out yeah and that way out usually involves blaming anything anything and everything i i have been blamed by so many people for shit i had no control of and i have also done it like when you're a fucking team leader and you don't complete the mission it's not because you're a bad team leader it's because you have bad soldiers i've literally heard that conversation from i'm gonna say at least a hundred people and there's veterans who are will listen to this podcast like yep i've definitely said that yeah that's not fucking general ben sultan being uh being arab that's him not wanting to get fucking killed he works for the king

yeah exactly or like demoted or fired or like he's trying to keep his job like that's what everyone does i mean is it shitty yeah but it's it's how the world works that's how that's how fucking corporate works i mean there is an entire office episode about this where they pass the blame of the saber store and fire somebody yeah exactly and i think it's particularly funny that this uh anecdote is about the battle of uh of hafji because i actually talked about this battle in my uh um my thesis that i wrote about the iran-iraq war and like the iraqi military industry because it was iraq's pretty much only military victory and it's funny because um and the counterattack, which was successful in repelling Iraqi forces, the American military succeeded in killing dozens of its own people.

Was it with an airstrike or something like that? Yeah, it was like an AC-130 combined with airstrikes just like massacred the shit out of marines yeah i think it was like two dozen marines got killed um by friendly fire and i think it's like really hilarious because i want to write a book called like the hawaii mind and uh and say like you know whites are like you know predisposed to friendly fire incidents because they're too stupid to uh to like understand the difference between the iraqi army and the american army that was like a a fucking hallmark of the gulf war is like they they gave a ton of people uh like this advanced technology and i

don't think anybody trained on it beforehand because they just started murking this shit out of each other yeah exactly like so much friendly fire and i mean i i ended up reading like a wikipedia article like list of friendly fire incidents of like the afghan war and like it is extensive and it's mostly like a a tens like just murdering british soldiers like in canada time you know we just like murder the shit out of canadian and british soldiers there was a incident i think outside of either kandahar airfield or camp nathan smith in kandahar i'm in both places i've been i honestly don't remember where the fuck it happened at but um uh it was like the air national guard unit swore they're taking fire and engaged the ground

target with some 500 pound bombs or something. I don't remember. And it was Canadian soldiers at a range. They killed a lot of them and nobody ever got in trouble for it. But no, clearly the known

Arab pilots from the Air National Guard, part of their culture you can't understand it yeah yeah no exactly um okay so then he talks about how um in the 1967 war the jordanian egyptian and syrian armies failed at combined arms warfare and were in ultimately as a result of that ineffective at defeating uh the israeli army and uh that's and he talks about how it's because of you know because of uh and like that's fine but then he's like it's because of the well-known last lack of trust among arabs for anyone outside their own family adversely affects offensive operations. Woof.

Woof. That's going to be a fucking yikes for me, bro. I award one yike to this. I'm not even in the army and I know combined arms operations are just hard as fuck. They are really, really hard. I was never an really hard um and i was

never an officer or anything and exactly it was hard from just being a soldier and that's like the least you do is just run around with a gun yeah exactly like failing to adequately coordinate a modern division level combined arms offensive is not particularly surprising like the u.s only barely pulled it off in 1991 and in 2003 and in the process we killed like so many of our own dudes that like I think we can only barely quantify it as a success so like I don't really think we can blame Syria's failure and their combined arms assault against Israel on some like uniquely Arab cultural trait and I mean yeah and they're fighting too i mean look who we were fighting yeah and they were fighting

a peer they were fighting a peer enemy like we have not fought a peer since arguably the korean war yeah and and exactly like you could you could you could argue that syrian and egyptian army officers have more experience in combined arms near peer warfare than any american officer absolutely i mean assuming that they're still around but like you know the the u.s fought uh combined arms like several times like in panama grenada uh gulf war gulf war two electric boogaloo shit like that um but the the reason why we were able to trip over our own dicks into success is because we were fighting someone that was 30 years behind the time and in the case of golf war one which he is obviously writing about because golf war two hadn't happened yet they just got done fighting one of the most brutal wars of the 20th century exactly yeah and like even if that is like, but like your average American soldier in terms of training,

they probably cost like a million dollars. At least. Yeah. I probably, I probably cost the American taxpayer over a million dollars within the eight years I was in. Yeah. Easily. Um, and training alone, like training and equipment alone.

Um, but meanwhile, like we're supposed to look down on the Syrian army, which like maybe, maybe spends $10,000 per soldier on like training and equipment. And then we're going to say that they failed because they're Arab. No, they feel because they're poor. They feel because they're poor and they failed because combined arms warfare is fucking hard. And especially when you're fighting. I mean, I would say fighting Israel at that point. They're the near peer to Israel rather than the other way around. Israel had

better weapons, better tactics, and better training by that point. Much better funding as well. Yeah, the pipeline had been... This isn't the War of Independence. The pipeline had been opened at this point. They had unlimited supplies from the United States, which the Syrians and Egyptians did not. They had a lot of support

from the Soviet Union, but that... I mean, say what you will, that normally at this point of the Cold War, the U.S. weapons were significantly better, assuming you could keep them running. And they weren't fighting. This wasn't a fuck up like the War of Independence was, which was arguably a massive fuck up on the Arabs' part. They definitely should have won that war yeah like 67 and 73 were not some like arab cultural fuck up it was it was just the fact that they that war was gonna be hard from the start right and uh there were lots of other problems and also like the quote well-known lack of trust among arabs for anyone outside their own family like dude what the fuck it's not even a real racist stereotype i think he just made one up racist shit like

what come on man and also during those wars he's blaming a lot of us on arab culture but i mean like during this during those wars there was a lot of british ncos and officers in the jordanian army i mean yeah exactly at independence yeah the. At independence, the Jordanians actually offered a lot of money if they resigned their commission, the British Army and stayed and they stayed. That wasn't a uniquely Arab fuck up as much as it was like a collective fuck up. Yeah, exactly. So then he says, sorry. Oh, no, go ahead. So then he says, sorry.

Oh, no, go ahead. So then he says, the complex mosaic system of peoples creates additional problems for training as rulers in the Middle East make use of sectarian and tribal loyalties to main power. This has direct implications for the military where sectarian considerations affect assignments and promotions. All right, two points. That's stupid. First, the British started this shit. Divide and conquer was like their M.O. And it's not like militaries outside of the Middle East have never had issues with ethnic, religious or racial divides. The U.S. military was segregated until after the Second World War. And like we mentioned, combat units were extremely disproportionately made up of young black or other minority populations as they were seen as more expendable than like, you know, the white boys from the suburbs.

The whole Soviet doctrine was based on sectarianism. Yeah, exactly. And that was supposed to be like the workers paradise of the world. Yeah. And so like the I decided, OK, so, like, sectarian considerations affect assignments and promotions. And, like, yeah, that was true. But, like, also, like, how many black officers, like, general officers do we have in the U.S.? Not many.

Like, not many. A handful. Now, compare that to how many black enlisted personnel there are. A lot. There was, like, in the U.S.s army that's still pretty rife and in like the soviet army if you were uh like from the caucuses which is ironic because you know one of their premieres was from the caucuses or or like central asia um like if you if you're from the central asian republics they called you a black ass and you were not allowed to do anything other than be

motor rifles because they and even then you weren't allowed to drive the motor vehicles because they thought you're too fucking stupid to learn Russian. Like they thought they were too dumb to handle technical jobs. And there's only very few officers from the Central Asian Republic. Like, yeah, exactly. Racism is not a fucking part of, isn't a unique part of Arab culture. Racism is a human problem. Exactly, yeah.

And so he talks about how, again, like, you know, Egypt, Syria, and Jordan didn't work together great in 67 and 73 because they didn't trust each other. And again, fair criticism. Sure. There's plenty of reasons that Egypt, Syria, and Jordan lost the 67 and 73 wars. But again, like acting like this is specific to Arab states or Arab culture is stupid. I mean, the Nazis, the Nazis, the Axis powers in World War Two were inf especially were extremely resentful of the germans because german man kind of ran the show but they use hungarian romanian and italian troops

as cannon fodder in order to spare german lives that was the whole reason my stalingrad fucking fell like uh when the soviets launched operation uranus there uh to to relieve the or to counter-attack and surround the German 6th Army. The only reason it really succeeded is because the Germans left the Romanian 3rd Army guarding their flanks, and the Romanian 3rd Army was a light infantry unit that only had rifles because they considered them only a few steps above Jews in their stupid racial hierarchy and only gave them fucking rifles and hand grenades. Yeah, exactly. fucking rifles and hand grenades yeah exactly like the the like the the the whitest army in

the world so the nazi army has the exact same problems except way worse than these like arab armies that he's speaking of failing due to some uniquely arab trait like no it's not some uniquely arab trait the fucking nazis had the same problem but worse um and uh is he just attributing racism as being arab like basically he talks about how these arab countries they balance various like factions within the military and different services off of each other in order to like maintain a balance of power and maintain the like supremacy of the dictator um that's not arab again like look at the nazis again uh which is like this look at that like okay with the with the nazis like the ss was outside of the hierarchy of the regular military and poached resources and personnel

from the regular military and vice versa and even within the the the normal german army military so like the air force the navy and the wehrm, the Army, they all poach resources and personnel from each other. And there were actually times where they literally fought each other, like shooting at each other and killing each other for resources and stuff. Before even fighting the French or the Soviets or the Americans or whatever, they were fighting each other. Again, the Nazis, the widestest army had the exact same problem and the most one of the most homogeneous armies in the entire fucking world the japanese imperial army did the same fucking thing the japanese imperial army and the navy fucking hate each other to the point of killing one another and like exactly uh separating uh different directorates and

ministries and shit like that was part of Soviet doctrine. Like the VDV had its own command. This unit had its own command. The fucking border guards had their own command. Everybody had tens of thousands of soldiers. That's not an Arab thing. That's just what dictators do to make sure they're not going to get killed in a coup. And then he titles an entire lengthy section called Indifference to Safety.

And I didn't even read it because like, come on, man. Like I was in ROTC and in ROTC, like I almost got shot by a couple of general officers. Like indifference to safety applies to every military in the world. Like some may be slightly worse than others others but like it happens all the time i mean in that episode uh where we're talking about the the like the mercenary death squads there was that like special forces officer who like shot himself during training or shot his friend during training yeah yeah um yeah like the u.s army may be a little bit safer on average than like the iraqi army i'm sure for sure but like again like this is a question not so much of like the arab culture as of just like funding and education yeah money it all boils down to

money like the iraqi army has way less money the iraq iraq as a country has way less money to spend on things like education um starting from like kindergarten all the way through college so like by the time you've got a guy operating heavy machinery maybe they don't have the same level of education or familiarity with that machinery as uh an equivalent in the united states and of course they also don't have the same amount of money and time to spend on training that soldier because they only have you know 50 000 dollars per soldier instead of a million dollars per soldier and the safety thing is fucking stupid because like the u.s the British I think the French all had their soldiers like run around within fallout range

of nuclear weapons at one point like the British have you ever seen the video of the British giving their soldiers acid and loaded weapons yeah to have them run around in the woods and shit it's fucking absurd but yeah let's worry about safety y'all yeah and then he says

some would point to the inherent fatalism within Islam and blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa. What? Whoa. He doesn't like provide any context to the supposed inherent fatalism within Islam. And then he says, and certainly anyone who has spent considerable time in Arab taxis would lend credence to that theory namely that arabs are like less safety conscious and i'm like dude come on yes like uh really just equate taxis to culture yeah like i've spent enough time in uh taxis driven by arabs or

middle easterners or north africans or whatever and it's like pretty normal i don't know like they're pretty much like taxi drivers are notoriously bad everywhere and they're not like substantially worse here in like iraqi kurdistan versus like turkey versus azerbaijan versus london versus new york like honestly i felt less safe on like the freeway in los angeles than i do here in iraqi kurdistan jesus like yeah me me and nick got a taxi in seattle uh we were going i forget what we were doing we get with a free we got into a taxi in seattle literally the first thing it did was leap into trap traffic and hit a guy on a scooter like within 15 seconds yeah exactly like arab taxis are they're just taxis dude like taxis taxi drivers are bad

everywhere are we really using taxis as a scope in the culture because if so we got some fucking problems here guys yeah exactly um and then okay so i think i've got like one or like two more main points that i thought were pretty funny so this this one is uh here we go um quote it would be difficult to exaggerate the cultural gulf separating american and arab military cultures in every significant area area american military advisors find students who enthusiastically take in their lessons and then resolutely fail to apply them the culture they return return to the culture of their own armies and their own countries, defeats the intentions with which they took leave of their American instructors, end quote. And here I find it particularly telling that the onus of failure is placed on Arab troops

and their respective militaries and cultures rather than American military advisors constantly and routinely failing to adjust their training styles to fit their supposed audience. So if this idea of Arab soldiers in American training failing consistently to apply the training lessons that they learn, why haven't American trainers changed the way that they teach and this isn't an arab army thing i mean what one of the largest uh students of um eastern european aid uh for the military was the republic of georgia how'd that war in 2008 go guys a fucking disaster yeah yeah and like another one ukraine that didn't end well like it is it's like the american mind too stupid to realize when their training techniques fail

like after all like americans have been using the same strategy in afghanistan for 17 years and it's been failing the entire time yeah so like our american is just incapable of change in any way whatsoever? Is this a problem with the American mind? As an expert on American culture, I'm going to say another 20 years we might have this figured out. America's entire military idea is like one giant example of the sunk cost fallacy. Yeah, exactly. idea is like one giant example of the sunk cost fallacy yeah exactly um okay so the last point uh so he says quote arab political culture is based on a high degree of social stratification very much like that of the defunct soviet union and very much unlike the upwardly mobile

meritocratic meritocratic meritocratic and democratic United States. And I'm like, there it is. Excuse me while I laugh for 20 minutes straight. I mean, Jesus fucking Christ. This article is such dog shit. Like the famously meritocratic United States between my toes,

my friend. Yeah. The American president is a senile reality show host. Who's lead advisor on the middle East is a rich New York fail son who hasn't done a single goddamn thing in his entire life except fail to sell real estate in fucking New York City where you can rent a cardboard box under an overpass for $1,200 a month. Like, the United States is like the least meritocratic country in the fucking world. And I mean, that's exaggeration but like we have the fucking new york version of the hapsburg family in fucking dc right now i mean honestly like how do you possibly look at the united states military united states corporate

culture the united like the u.s government state governments city governments county governments like just any potential hierarchy in the United States and assume that this is like some perfect meritocratic democratic society. And then you go to like, you know, Egypt or something. And when the Egyptian army loses in a war against Israel, it's like, ah, it's because of the deeply hierarchical nature of the Arab mind. It's ridiculous. I mean the the whole article is is

nonsense um and uh it kind of when when discussing orientalism at the beginning like uh you know this this author norville b to atkeen or whatever the fuck his name is i feel like they should have esquire at the end of it too he his fucking name is just the embodiment of a top hat and a monocle yeah exactly like if his name was like colonel norville b to atkin the third esquire of his majesty's east india company in india or like he traveled across uh arabia to learn the arab mind he's the person that would be like the jameson whiskey guy who bought a girl to be eaten by uh the cannibal so he could study it and then that makes him a fucking that's something that actually happened in case anybody was wondering uh yeah jameson whiskey guy bought a human being and then watched her be eaten but uh yeah and then he would write a long fucking book about how he's a tribal expert he's fucking uh uh goddamn l ron hubbard and his fucking video about how he wrote about fucking 10

goddamn tribes so he's a he's a goddamn expert this dude upsets me to the point that it is way too early for me to be this angry. No, I mean like claiming that Arab armies failed due to Arab culture it's a ridiculous assertion deeply and inextricably rooted in Orientalist and racist assumptions about Arabs, Muslims, and the countries that make up what we call

the modern Middle East. I'll use another smarter author's words to describe Atkins article. So in doing the research, I ended up reading about this guy, Bernard Lewis, who he's worth a whole another episode, but he's one of those classic shitty ass Orientalist racist pieces of shit who loved the Iraq war. So this Iranian American scholar, Hamid Dabashi wrote a scathing obituary of Bernard Lewis when he died about a year ago. And he says – well, I'm going to paraphrase it to fit the article. He says, why Arabs lose wars is not a work of scholarship.

It is a manual of style, an indoctrination pamphlet for teaching security, military, and intelligence officers in the U.S. and Europe as to why they must seek to control the Muslim world. Oof. Yeah, so going back to Orientalism, Orientalism and the United States military and governmental apparatus has meant that unprivileged voices, usually people of color, both inside and outside the borders of the United States, you know, black Americans or citizens of impoverished Muslim countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, which themselves have been ravaged by centuries of

imperialist cruelty from the UK, France, and others. These people are disproportionately targeted by American state terrorism. In the 1960s, COINTELPRO led to the assassination of black American leaders like Malcolm X, Fred Hampton, Martin Luther King. And today, the Patriot Act allows the state security apparatus to target Muslims within the United States. And then meanwhile, the American military wages an unceasing multi-generational war against the very concept of, quote unquote, Islamic terror, which is itself a construction of the american orientalist imperial project and largely inspired by um the orientalist narratives espoused by people like norville bead atkeen and other people bernard lewis uh keegan um yeah patai samuel huntington's another big one you'll probably read about if you're taking like a political science course in college and many other of these kind of people.

So the government, the United States government, the United States military, they have bought into this narrative. And it is a self-fulfilling prophecy in many ways because American bombs kill Arabs and Muslims by the tens of thousands overseas. ways because american bombs kill arabs and muslims by the tens of thousands overseas and arabs and muslims in the united states are considered anti-american due to their cultural and racial identity and rather than a result of any political opinion or actions that they take yeah this is this isn't even new like this is um the soviets went through the same shit like the soviet union is one of the largest uh to use a really bad term rainbow nations have ever existed um and when they invaded afghanistan they looked at their own uh muslim supposed comrades in the central asian republics and refused to fucking deploy them because they

were afraid that they would join the mujahideen like that's the same thing like the i don't understand how time is such a flat circle yeah so like again orientalism and its racial and cultural extensions manifested through people who believe in its underlying ideology and hold positions of power it kills people it destabilizes the world and it helps further and expand the American imperial project, which to this day has killed over a million Iraqis, a quarter of a million Afghans, tens of thousands of Syrians, hundreds of thousands of Yemenis, untold thousands more in Libya, Somalia, Lebanon, Palestine, Iran, and half a hundred other places. kills people by uh by the hundreds of thousands and it may seem like a harmless article that you're like your weird second lieutenant friend shared on facebook uh but like this shit is really bad um it engenders a bad thinking and like diseased brains and like weird like neo-colonialism i mean when i said i was when when you brought this up one of the things i wanted to do is see how much this spread and i mean this guy's a colonel and he was a colonel

whatever and he was training and teaching people in the special operations community for almost two decades and this is before the forever war started since the forever war started um there's this thing called rally point um it's not like an official dod thing it's kind of like a weird forum for military type people you have to validate who you are to get in shit like that um i found it on there and i found it as being posted as recently as this year and being commented by full on by full bird colonels sergeant majors first sergeants things like that like yep this is exactly how I saw things too. And that's why one of the things that struck me about this article is it is an article

that looks like I could have written it with my deep understanding of the Afghan National Army. And it's absurd. And this kind of historical revisionism to fit colonial narratives is one of the biggest reasons that we make episodes like this. I know our audience isn't fucking huge. And our audience is already coming here expecting to hear shit like this from us anyway. You're not going to hear us supporting wars pretty much ever and we just make fun of people um yeah but i mean even planting that that seed of um of this is a cultural thing and and it it makes you have to believe that um

this is not a war as much as it's like a war against an entire people in an entire culture because this culture is subhuman and subservient to ours. It's it's being a colonialist on Facebook, which is weird, but it's a thing that exists now. Yeah. I mean, we laugh at the ridiculous racism of like the old school colonialists when they were colonizing africa in like the 1880s or something like that but like articles like this um are basically the same shit just in 2019 or 1999 um it looks it looks a little bit different but the core ideology the the basic idea remains the same and it serves the same purpose um so yeah i mean it's important to you know not everyone may study post-colonial theory um it's it can be pretty confusing and boring but like understanding where uh where these problems come from and when people write articles like why Arabs lose wars, where their basic assumptions are wrong, um, is really important. Like you have to understand

you basically, you can't apply, um, an Orientalist or a racist or a culturally deterministic viewpoint, um, to other people or other groups and expect to get a really good answer um and or if you do get an answer it's going to be racist shit like this article and you know one of the things that we will always do is confront historical visionism and colonial stupid thinking in the most vulgar offensive way possible and that's why i'm sending Norville a picture of my asshole. Fuck yeah. So, Travis, thank you for inflicting this article on me once again. And I don't even credit you as a guest anymore.

You're just the third host. But everybody, thank you for dealing with us for the last hour and a half as we got angry about an old white guy. Thank you for letting me rant about Orientalism for an hour and a half. It lets me do that. I'm just happy. I accidentally stumbled upon a traveling electric chair salesman. I wasn't aware that was a thing.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's the electrical salesman, electrical chair salesman. What's that's the electrical salesman electrical chair salesman what's funny is a a footnote to that guy is he lost his job when people found out he wasn't an engineer uh he was he was just some guy that set up fucking electric chairs and uh when everybody moved to uh the lethal injection he moved to that too but he had no idea how medicine worked so that's why uh and uh so anyway

thank you for uh joining us um you can follow travis on twitter at uh travis underscore sorry haycraft underscore travis you can follow me at jcas99 you can follow the show at lines underscore bye um thank you everybody and we'll see you next week hi this is nate bethea and i'm the producer You can follow the show at lions underscore by. Thank you, everybody. And we'll see you next week. Hi, this is Nate Bethea, and I'm the producer of the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. This show is brought to you by Audible. And as it just so happens, Audible is offering our listeners a free audio book with a 30 day trial membership.

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