de Atkine | Why Arabs Lose Wars
Thanks to an Alert Reader for posting this in the comments section: de Atkine | Why Arabs Lose Wars. Haven't read yet, but looks promising.
posted by Chester at 12/23/2004 05:23:00 AM
Thursday, December 23, 2004
About Me
- Name: Chester
Former Marine officer who participated in the Iraqi campaign. BA in Int'l Relations from Duke. terrier_manchester at yahoo.com
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2 Comments:
Great link!
The article is spot-on, and applies not only to military issues, but commercial/industrial/scientific practices as well. I worked for several years in Saudi Arabia, and I saw all of these cultural roadblocks at work in their petrochemiocal sector. They want the best industrial processes in the world, but seem to care little about really knowing how they work.
The ones who get their hands dirty are virtually all the imported labor workers. Western engineers are commonly employed as senior "expert" technicians, simply because nobody local can do the job. Graduates of Saudi universities are ill-prepared for industrial work and often have to be retrained (by foreigners) in order to be effective employees. And when you send someone away for special training, especially a long and costly program, you are not likely to see any of the knowledge from that training spread to others.
And, yes, the attitude about safety and maintenance is, frankly, awful. Stupid accidents happen, and are then repeated. The most basic safety procedures are commonly ignored. No Saudi manager wants to let it be known that there might be a serious safety problem in his organization, so the problems are ignored or buried. It really gives you pause when you think about the aging infrastructure when you live downwind of huge petrochemical facilities.
I could go on...
DRK
Arab regimes classify virtually everything vaguely military. Information the U.S. military routinely publishes (about promotions, transfers, names of unit commanders, and unit designations) is top secret in Arabic-speaking countries.Perhaps persisting attitudes like this are contributing to the lack of information about Iraqi forces? More generally, do you have an opinion about how successful US/UK/Western trainers can be (or are being) at changing things in the present Iraqi situation?
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