It seems to me that each Arab man sees himself as an emir or maneuvering to become one
Another of the problems may be that this also a more common trait to many of us than we might like to admit, and that has come back to haunt us on many an occasion
No argument with your comment, but I think most westerners (and Asians for that matter) are much more at peace with being in the middle of a hierarchy than Arabs. I've heard the Koranic lines about not bowing down to false gods and false idols applied to political leaders (that didn't agree with the quoter of script). But I don't want to hijack this thread into a discussion of Arab and Persian psychology.

if we look at the current stage of the wars we are in it might be reasonable to look at the possibility that we are in a current TET offensive by some of our enemies which has been focused in arenas not normally considered "Battle".
Concur. We have to be very wary of mirror-imaging. We also have to be careful how we try to fit their actions into our schema. It's kind of a corallary of the adage about "when your only tool is a hammer", but when you're a scholar of Economics (for example), every problem stems from economics, and if your education in military history is focused on Viet Nam, everything will look like an episode from Viet Nam.

As Ken and others have stated on several occasion's those in other parts of the world have been playing the manipulation and behind the scenes positioning game a lot longer than us.
Over-estimating your opponent is equally fallacious as under-estimating your opponent. The issues of 'face' and honor require our opponents to explain to us how ignorant we are and how learned and experienced they are, but we're fools to take these assertions at face value.

once it's all together pretty much count on the fact that I'm still missing something.
"Everything is going according to plan! [Stearcus] what have I missed?" Yeah, no argument here.