172 ISLAM AT WAR
and Europe. These new states had many other significant liabilities as they
formed their military structures. Foremost of these was the fact that most
of the Muslim world was illiterate, and thus few Muslims had any of the
technical skills necessary to operate, let alone repair, maintain, or design
complex machinery and weaponry. Equally, none of the new Muslim na-
tions developed particularly successful governments. Frequently, and of-
ten for good reason, the loyalty of the officer corps and the soldiery was
frequently, and often for good reason, not strong. These problems were
compounded when new nations lacked the physical plant to manufacture
sophisticated arms and the skills to design them. This formidable list of
challenges could probably have been overcome with time, but the postwar
world would place immediate political and military challenges into the
paths of the Muslim states.
As early as 1947 the wartime alliance of the democratic West and the
dictatorial Soviet Union was breaking apart. Western Europe, exhausted
by the Nazi ordeal, shed its colonies as quickly as possible, and the new
nations found themselves with bad diplomatic choices. The Soviet Union
offered oppressive and atheistic dictatorship. The free states of the West
were still resented for their recent colonial overlordship. While neither
choice would normally appeal to the new Muslim nations, the Great Power
blocs—both east and west—offered generous assistance to those that be-
came their satellites. This assistance frequently came in the terms of weap-
ons, which were well received by the Muslims. Tanks, ships, guns, and
aircraft poured into the Middle East. Foreign troops came with them to
train the local forces, and some of the newly independent nations found
themselves host to military formations much more powerful than the co-
lonial occupiers had ever imposed on them. This sad picture was made
worse by the fact that the Soviet Union—the uglier by far of the foreign
powers—espoused atheism and practiced the worst sorts of racial and
religious intolerance. This was the price that the Muslim peoples paid to
equip their armies.
The new armies of these new nations found themselves at war almost
immediately. The first opponent of the Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian
governments was to be Israel—itself a new state. The key differences
between the sides would be repeatedly demonstrated, but obvious only
after the fact. The Jewish soldiers were literate and familiar with ma-
chinery and weapons. They were fighting for the survival of their biblical
homeland and their families. Their Muslim opponents were generally
illiterate and in larger part unsure of why they were leaving their own
homes to go kill people whom they did not know and who had done
them no harm. Over the course of the four Arab-Israeli wars the Muslim