Yup, it's just plain EASIER to make a westerner into an effective fighter (not necessarily a soldier, because those are VERY different things), because a lot of the basic muscle memory is just drilled into us from a ridiculously young age, because it's just what we do for fun.

It's kind of strange, because you would kind of figure they have this kind of tribal warrior culture thing going on, and they do, to a degree, they certainly are not AFRAID of combat. They just don't seem to have the same basic instincts drilled into them, related to the actual skills of fighting with firearms.

It makes them, generally (I've been told, I wasn't involved in training directly, though my squad leader was for a few months), much harder to train. Basic marksmanship, actually aiming and just hitting a stationary target, is like 1 week of basic training in the U.S. army iirc. Actual hands on, sitting on the firing line and shooting was maybe a few hours. And really, most of that was just bringing the small number of people who sucked, up to the standard of everyone else. You can hand the AVERAGE 18y/o male in the U.S. a rifle, and teach them enough to hit a 100m man-sized target 9/10 times. That would be a pipe dream in the middle east.