"Arabs fight with their mouths":
Empty boasts and bluster
April 9, 2003
Jack Kelly
DOHA, Qatar.
The war with Iraq has made Arabs really, really mad. Egypt's top Muslim cleric has endorsed jihad against the United States, Reuters reports, and hundreds of Egyptians have signed up to fight for Saddam Hussein.
Don't count me among the terrified.
Arabs fight with their mouths. Arabs are big on symbolic victories, because real ones are hard to come by. The last time an Arab army defeated a Western army was when Salah al-Din recaptured Jerusalem from the Crusaders. But that was 1,000 years ago. And Salah al-Din was a Kurd, not an Arab. The Arab record of being 0 for the last millennium is not going to improve in Iraq.
The fighting, such as it's been, in Iraq pretty much illustrates the Arab way of war for the last 10 centuries: treachery, brutality toward the helpless, cowardice in the face of the enemy and constant empty boasting. Arabs bluster, then retreat.
A good example of this came last Saturday. A battalion of the 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanized) launched a lightning raid into the heart of Baghdad, driving up the main road from the south into the center of the city, then leaving town on the main road coming in from the west. The battalion killed between 2,000 and 3,000 Iraqi soldiers and irregulars in the course of that raid, at a cost of one U.S. soldier killed, three wounded and one Abrams tank destroyed. After the raid, Iraqi irregulars crowded around the disabled tank, mugging for the cameras of Arab TV. They shook their fists in the air, fired off their Kalashnikovs and acted as if they had won a great victory. In their minds, they had.
Arabs have a low threshold for what they consider courage. They think abusing prisoners of war is brave. They think ambushing people under a flag of truce is brave. But with Republican Guard units more likely to park their tanks and walk away than to face American armor, I guess you have to take your examples of Arab "courage" where you can get them.
One of the few failures of the Coalition so far has been an inability to shut down Iraqi TV. I kind of hope the efforts continue to fail. I enjoy the comic relief. In the unlikely event that Information Minister Mohammed Said Sahhaf survives this war, he has a future as a guest host on "Saturday Night Live."
Just hours before U.S. forces seized Saddam International Airport, Sahhaf declared there were no Coalition forces within 100 kilometers of Baghdad. As the 3rd Infantry was conducting its raid on the center of Baghdad, Sahhaf was declaring that the U.S. troops at the airport had been wiped out by the Republican Guard.
The amazing thing is that there are millions of Arabs who still take Sahhaf seriously. According to Al Jazeera and other Arab networks, Saddam's forces have been moving from triumph to triumph. When it comes to anti-American propaganda, you can sell Arabs the Brooklyn bridge not just once, but over and over again.
But there is a limit to the gullibility of even the most gullible. Iraqis who live in Baghdad have to feel the way Dorothy must have felt when she pulled down the curtain concealing the Wizard of Oz. The Americans are 100 kilometers away, or wiped out, or running for their lives. So who are those guys in the tanks around the presidential palace in the heart of Baghdad?
Some in the Arab world are starting to smell the coffee:
"As in earlier wars, the Iraq war is expected to leave the Arab world weaker than it ever was," said the Riyadh Times of Saudi Arabia. "The rejoicing over the handful of Anglo-American casualties and deifying of Saddam Hussein are all clear reflections of Arab weakness in the face of the crisis."
Jack Kelly, a former Marine and Green Beret, was a deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration and is national security writer for the Pittsburgh (Pa.) Post-Gazette.
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